Awe-Struck Preview

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Strangers

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 1

The air smelled of ozone and burned flesh even in C-Med where backup systems should keep the air fresh. Air should smell of paint and metal and sometimes bodies close together if you were in the clone barracks. C-med usually had a chemical tang. The smell meant the ship was under attack. He was supposed to defend the ship. He twitched in his restraints.

A doctor in a red smock held a scanner over the scar where the shoulder of the new arm joined to his body. She was short and fine-boned with dark skin. Her long, arched nose was sharp as a weapon.

The couch rocked under his back, and a dull thud compressed the air. That meant weapons striking the ship. Enemies were coming. He tried to rise again.

The doctor said, "He's trying to get up."

Another doctor, a male, said, "Conditioning. Probably drools when it hears the dinner bell, too." He laughed.

There were other humans in the infirmary, interns in red uniforms with grey stripes. He liked the female doctor human better than the other humans. Her face was hard and intent like a clone.

The infirmary bucked. A deep boom resonated through the bulkheads, and the lights dimmed to yellow. The female doctor human grabbed the bed restraints for balance.

The male doctor's eyes opened wide. "That was the clone barracks. C&C can't have got the soldiers out in time."

The interns huddled together.

The male doctor human said, "They're going to board the ship before the fleet gets here. Flush that one and get ready to evac." He pushed the interns out the door. Coming back inside, he palmed the board beside the first medi-couch in the row. The occupant, an XY659R with a damaged leg, twitched and tried to sit up against his restraints. The gel-pad and the clone on it slid into the disposal and disappeared.

That made him nervous. He tried to sit up. The female doctor said, "It's foolish to flush this one. His arm is fully functional."

The other doctor flushed the half-healed clone on the next couch. "Not our decision."

The female doctor human pulled a nutrient tube out of the crook of his elbow. She covered the vein with a dab of gel. The catheter pinched as it came out. He accessed his data crystal, found only instructions for C-med -- obey doctors. Doctors are lieutenants in C-med. Nothing about fighting or what to do when the air smelled bad and doctors started flushing clones.

The female doctor released the restraints that held him against the bed.

He sat up. His movement startled the doctor. She stepped back with her eyebrows raised.

The male doctor said, "You're lucky he doesn't run amuck. All that adrenaline and nothing to do with it."

He didn't like the male doctor human. He looked around for an enemy to fight, accessed his crystal for information. Nothing there to tell him how to identify enemies. Red smocks mean doctors. Doctors are lieutenants in C-med.

The female doctor human said. "Flex your left arm."

The new arm came from an XY972S, very close to his own series, but not identical. The skin was a shade darker, the muscles shaped a little differently. A white scar crossed the back of the hand.

The evacuation klaxon made the female doctor human jump. "Evacuation," she said.

"That's it," the other doctor said. "Get to your life ship assignment."

The female doctor human slipped her scanner under her belt. She did not go to the door.

He swung his feet to the floor and took the female doctor human's arm. Evacuation meant get all humans to life ships. He didn't need his data crystal for that. He had simulations for evacuation.

The other doctor stripped off his red smock. "What are you waiting for, Annia? Evacuate."

The female doctor human said, "Go without me."

"Big bang, it's just a clone."

The female doctor human's face was hard. "You can wait with me if you want."

The male doctor human said, "Just make sure you get to a life ship before it's too late." He backed out the door.

The deck rocked again under his feet, and he adjusted his stance. The female doctor human should go to the life-ships now, but she did not. She left him standing by the med-couch. That was not how evacuation was supposed to be. The human should go to the life ships.

The human shoved a watery-pure crystal in the data 'corder. "Access data file Annia 4424. Download to crystal." She waited. The information field flashed. She said, "Password: century plague." The 'corder rattled.

He didn't know what the female doctor human was doing. She should evacuate. He was supposed to fight or evacuate humans. He went to the door and stepped into the corridor outside C-med. There was smoke in the air and a strong, bitter smell. He felt light-headed.

He wanted to go to the life-ships. Clones could go to life-ships when humans were evacuated. He wanted the human to leave so that he could go. He squatted outside the door of C-med near the deck where the air smelled better and didn't burn his throat. He picked with his fingers at his eyebrow. He didn't know what to do. He needed a lieutenant. Not a doctor who was only a lieutenant in C-med, but a real lieutenant who wore a clip on her ear and could hear orders from Command.

The clip on her ear was silent. That was bad. Bad like the burning metal smell in the corridors. It meant maybe the ship was dead, but worse, it meant she had no orders.

She did not know what to do. Fight? No enemies. She didn't know where enemies were. She didn't know what had happened. She remembered violence ripping through the decks of the ship. She remembered trying to go to the barracks for her soldiers, but an emergency bulkhead had blocked the corridor. She could not get to her soldiers. She remembered pacing back and forth in front of the bulkhead for a while, worrying about her soldiers. Then she had turned around and come this way.

The evacuation klaxon startled her, coming from the speakers around her and from the clip itself. The klaxon meant find all the humans and take them to life ships. No one came out of the doors nearby. This part of the ship was mostly for clones. No humans except in C-med. She was near C-med. She would go to C-med and evacuate humans.

The air was better near C-med. Her eyes did not burn so much, and the raw feeling in her chest was better. She saw the doors to the clone infirmary through the haze. A soldier squatted there beside the door plucking at his close-cropped, olive-blond hair the way the XY97 series did when they were distressed or confused.

* * *

He heard her before he saw her through the haze and the yellow lights in the corridor: light, quick footfalls, not the tramp of enemy boots. She trotted up the corridor coughing with the bad air. Her grey uniform was wrinkled, the white stripe stained and scorched.

There were no soldiers behind her. Soldiers would be good to see when the ship was full of smoke and there were enemies coming, but a lieutenant was good enough. He was glad to see her.

"Where are humans?" she demanded.

"Evacuated," he said. That was good. "Not one. Doctor won't leave."

She frowned. "Humans first."

He knew what she meant; it was the clones' job to evacuate humans when the klaxon sounded. "Doctor is a lieutenant in C-med," he answered. He had conflicting orders: humans must evacuate, but his crystal said that he must obey doctors.

The lieutenant said, "Evacuation is primary."

He did not understand how lieutenants knew what orders to give. Soldiers didn't know. Without a lieutenant, they could not decide what to do. Now the lieutenant was here; she could decide. Bad feelings went away.

* * *

Annia had waited seven years-hiding, moving her data from one coded bank to another, hiding it among innocuous backup files, becoming adept at manipulating the data banks while she waited for an opportunity to escape. Then the Commonwealth sneak ships broke out of null-space and fired on the Federation enforcer Guardian on which she served her indenture. Evacuation and the nearly repaired clone had given Annia her excuse to be alone with a data access port for the minutes she needed.

How long had it been since she last felt the jolt and shudder of explosive missiles and disrupter bolts? Several minutes, surely. There would be Commonwealth boarding parties at the locks -- maybe already on the ship, maybe outside her door.

The door behind her opened.

She clutched at the data crystal hidden inside her jumpsuit.

The XX222A in the doorway carried a rifle tucked competently under her arm. A swag of soot-dark hair hung across her cheek. She must have been outside the blast area when the barracks were destroyed, perhaps in Simulation & Conditioning -- close enough to be knocked around by the concussion. Her grey-and-white uniform was streaked and scorched. She dropped the rifle's muzzle toward the floor. "Evacuate humans first," she said.

"I'm almost ready."

"Evacuate now," the female clone said.

She had erased most of the evidence of her data out of the bank. If the remains were found, she would just have to hope she was too far away for the government to find her. Annia slung a portable sequencer by its carry-strap over one shoulder and a field kit over the other. The female clone tossed the rifle into the male's hands and hustled Annia out the door into the corridor.

The evacuation klaxon stopped battering Annia's ears. There was something sinister about the ringing silence. "They're inside the ship," Annia said.

The XX touched the clip at her left ear, and her eyes unfocused briefly. "No data," she said.

If the XX222 wasn't getting orders, the attackers must have disabled Command & Control as well as the clone barracks. If any clones had survived the destruction of the barracks, they would be at a loss for orders.

The male clone, still wearing only hospital trousers, halted at a T-junction, set his back to the wall and glanced around the corner. He recoiled. "Enemy," he said.

The XX said, "How many?"

"Twenty-two. Projectile rifles."

He was an XY972-248B. While the tinkers were slicing away at his series' initiative and decision-making capacity, they had inadvertently exposed an inhuman facility for numbers and patterns.

The female slitted her eyes. "Too many to kill. Save ourselves. Protect humans. Evacuate humans first." Her head twitched.

The clone was trying to process contradictory orders. She couldn't get Annia to the life-ships without fighting, but she couldn't fight without being killed and perhaps getting Annia killed as well. After a few minutes of that kind of conflict she would be completely unresponsive.

Annia had other plans anyway. "I can evacuate on a shuttle. You can save yourself. Shuttles are mid-ship. Enemy may not have come there yet."

The XX shuddered in the grip of indecision. "Humans evacuate on life ships."

"I can't get to a life ship. Enemy have the life ships. I have to evacuate on a shuttle."

The XX ground her teeth and twitched her head, but she adapted. "Shuttle," she said. "Evacuate on a shuttle." The XX222s were a good series. Another series, the XY779 lieutenants, for example, would have completely frozen up.

Without clone soldiers to defend the airlocks, Commonwealth troops had entered the ship unopposed. Annia and her clone escort were forced to detour several times to avoid reconnaissance parties. Each time the tramp of boots on the decking sent them down a side corridor, Annia fought a panicky compulsion to give herself up to the enemy. Annia knew plenty of indentured personnel who had spent time in Commonwealth prison camps. They were decent places from all accounts: bigger than IP quarters on the ship and better food. Rumor said there were underground groups that would help Federation indentured personnel to defect. Each time the temptation gripped her, she clenched her fingers around the data crystal in her pocket until the urge passed.

The female clone halted at the doors of a lift capsule. She jerked her head.

Annia set her emergency field kit on the deck and scrubbed a sweat-soaked palm on her jumpsuit. "What are you stopping for?"

The clone tightened her brows. "Enemy on ship; stay away from lifts. Enemy on both sides. Ladders too slow."

They were surrounded. The lift was the only way out of the enemy's reach, but the clone's conditioning told her she shouldn't use the lifts when there were enemies on the ship. Annia snapped, "Use the lift, for the well's sake."

The clone twitched. "Enemy on ship; stay away from lifts."

Annia palmed the lock panel. "They're catching up behind us."

She stepped into the lift and the clones followed her reluctantly. The male clone braced his shoulders against the back of the car and aimed the rifle at the doors. The lift hydraulics heaved and moaned -- a lateral glide between sections and down a level.

The lift stopped with a clank, and the XX pulled Annia to one side.

The doors opened.

A projectile weapon thundered in the corridor.

The XY slammed against the back of the lift and dropped his pulse rifle.

Annia shouted, "Don't fire. I'm unarmed. Indentured personnel." In a battle situation with adrenaline high, you couldn't count on Commonwealth troops to keep their heads. She had to give them a moment to calm down.

Silence for a long moment. Good news as far as it went. A shaky voice said, "Step out with your hands where I can see them."

Only the one, she thought. He sounded young. The Commonwealth fleet accepted volunteers as young as fourteen. She raised her hands and stepped slowly into the open.

He was older than she had thought from his voice, but still young enough to turn white and sick about the mouth at the sight of the XX behind her. Annia said, "Calm down. I got separated from my evacuation group. The clones were taking me to the life ships."

He squeezed the microphone on the collar of his red and gold uniform. "Commander, I've captured a human -- indentured personnel -- and two clones. What do I do?"

Annia couldn't make out the answer, but it didn't seem to reassure the soldier. She'd have been better off dealing with someone more experienced.

Annia took a few steps toward the boy. "I'm indentured. I don't want to fight you."

The XX followed close behind her and edged to one side of the lift doors. The XY lay against the back of the lift pressing his left shoulder with the opposite palm. Blood ran down his arm and soaked his hand.

The Commonwealth soldier blinked sweat out of his eyes. "Just stand over there."

Annia moved to the side as directed, and the boy turned his projectile rifle toward the XX.

Annia stiffened. "Don't point the gun at her."

He swallowed. "My orders are to put the clones down."

Inside the lift, the XY stirred. The boy ignored the fallen clone, focused on the standing XX, the obvious threat. The clone stood with a curiously serene expression.

Annia had seen that look before. "No," Annia said.

The XY rolled to his feet faster than a human could move. The boy, watching the XX clone, never saw him. The XY jerked the gun out of the boy's hands. The gun boomed, and the projectile sang off the ceiling with a tinny sound. The lieutenant never moved.

The soldier twisted the boy in a hard grip and broke his neck before Annia could think of stopping him. He dropped the body on the deck.

The boy didn't know anything about clones; got the human out of harm's way before turning his weapon on them. No more protect humans, just save yourself, and he'd forgotten about the one on the deck, assumed he was down with just a shoulder wound when it took a clean shot with a pulse rifle to kill a clone. An experienced soldier would have known that.

Annia bent over the boy and checked for a heartbeat. Nothing.

The impassive clone stood bleeding onto his handiwork with a satisfied expression.

"Big bang, you didn't have to kill him."

The clone looked puzzled, tried to access his data crystal.

The invaders knew where she was, and when the boy failed to respond to hails, they would guess there was at least one clone still loose on the ship. Annia hesitated. She weighed the value of the century plague data in her pocket against one soldier killed in combat. She risked too much with her research to waste time here trying to restore life-functions to the soldier whose own ignorance had got him killed. He had known what he was getting into when he volunteered.

"Misbegotten sib of a bad brood." She laid her emergency kit open on the deck and found the sealed packet of cardio-pulmonary stimulators. She opened one, yanked the young soldier's uniform open and planted the CPS unit on his chest. Its hair-thin probes burrowed into his flesh. A moment later, his chest heaved, and Annia felt the pulse of blood through the artery in his neck. The artificial heartbeat and respiration would keep his brain alive until help arrived. That was as much as she owed him. His own medics would have to repair the crushed vertebrae and patch the severed spinal column.

She made no effort to be gentle as she examined the XY's bleeding shoulder. She wanted to hurt him, break past the innocence in his face, as if by hurting him, she could make him human. He didn't seem to notice. The spinning projectile had torn newly attached ligaments all to well. A pulse rifle would have burned and cauterized if it didn't kill outright.

The female paced back and forth in the narrow corridor. "Evacuate now."

"Just a minute." Annia peeled open a gel bandage from her field kit and pressed it over the wound to slow the bleeding. It needed surgery, but she didn't have time.

The XX snorted anxiously through her nose. "Damaged." Meaning leave him.

Annia said, "Minor damage. You carry the rifle." The soldier series could take a lot of punishment. They'd be on a shuttle or captured before the male lost enough blood to go into shock. She finished adhering the bandage to his flesh. "Let's go."

The XX accessed her crystal, hugged the rifle to her side and set off at a light, predatory stride.

* * *

In simulations, she would get pain for using a lift when enemy was in the ship, but good feelings for getting out and killing the enemy. She went toward the shuttles thinking about good feelings. Already, she began to forget. The human was still safe. The soldier was damaged but functional. They would evacuate the human and save themselves.

She heard a strange sound from her clip, and a white space opened in her mind. She shook her head and checked her crystal. The crystal always made everything sharp and plain. This time, the crystal made pain. Her head throbbed. She stopped and shook her head hard. A black tunnel closed around her eyes. Colored lights blinked and floated in the air. An irregular, black shadow blocked out the corridor in front of her.

A human touched her face. She recoiled. She did not like humans to touch her.

The human said, "What did you stop for?"

The clip on her ear made strange sounds that were not commands. The sounds made her head hurt. She couldn't feel her legs. She fell down and pulled at the clip.

The human said, "Stop that. You're damaging yourself."

Sticky heat flowed down her neck and into the collar of her coverall. The clip sputtered again. She reached up to pull it out of her ear and remembered the doctor human had told her not to do that. But the doctor was only a lieutenant in C-med. They were not in C-med now, and the sounds from the clip were hurting her. She tried to access her crystal to find out what to do about the noises and the pain. It hurt. She struck her head with her fist.

The human said, "They're sending a disruption signal through the clip." The human was close again. The human held a tool in her hand.

She tried to pull away. She didn't like unfamiliar instruments near her head.

The human pushed her against the bulkhead and pressed an arm against the side of her face. She did not like to be confined or held. She tried to break free, but she did not know where her hands were. The human said, "Hold still."

Something whined softly near her ear. The sound did not hurt like the sound of the clip. She listened to it. Then she felt a sharp pain like fire or a projectile wound on the outside of her head. She wanted to recoil. It hurt from the top of her head down to her fingertips and the pit of her belly. She shuddered. She smelled burned hair and flesh, but the pain was different from the pain inside her head. She concentrated on the new pain, and the inside pain went away.

The human held something in her hand, threw it hard down the corridor back the way they had come.

The black cloud was not in front of her eyes anymore. She blinked. Bright-colored spots went away. The lights overhead were very bright.

The doctor human held up a spray and made it hiss. There was a feeling of cold. The pain on the outside of her head went away. There wasn't any pain except a prickling feeling all over her scalp that was already fading. She tried to access her crystal and got only empty.

"The big bang premature decants can't access you now," the human said. "Is there anything left in your crystal?"

"Empty," she answered.

"Doesn't matter. I can get us to the shuttles from here, and they can't get at your conditioning. You remember simulations?"

"Simulations, yes."

The human pointed down the corridor. "Shuttles that way. You go in front. Watch for enemy. Avoid enemy."

She reached for the clip, felt only bare neck, part of her ear. There was no clip. She stood upright and hugged the rifle to her side.

Shuttle bays were near the outside of the ship where gravity made her body feel heavy and solid as a rifle. They sheltered where the access tube met the cross- passage. She looked carefully around the corner. The doctor human said the door at the end of the corridor was the shuttle.

She counted two enemies at the door. The corridor curved up a little on both sides of the shuttle door, and there were many doors on that corridor. She thought the enemy at each door could see the others on each side. That meant two would fire projectile weapons right away when they saw her. Four more would fire when she reached the door. Projectile weapons were not as accurate as pulse guns. They didn't follow their targets, but they fired many painful, damaging projectiles. Also, they were very loud. Soon, others would hear the weapons and come. She must be very fast. The human was too slow, and the soldier was damaged. He was still faster than humans, but too slow to surprise the human enemies. She would have to go first, surprise the enemies and secure the door.

She signaled the soldier to stay with the doctor and carry the rifle. She calculated the distance to the first door, the reactions of the enemy, how long to make them die. When she had a clear picture in her mind, she left cover.

The enemies heard her feet on the deck. They stared. Their eyes widened. Human- slowly, they started to raise their rifles. She ignored the weapons. Projectiles were damaging, but usually not immediately fatal. She struck the enemy on the left with her fist in his throat. She gripped the enemy's slack body by the front of the uniform and thrust him at the right-hand enemy. With her free arm, she gripped the second enemy's head and twisted hard. Then both enemies were on the floor. They had not fired their loud weapons. She had been very fast.

The door was of a kind that she did not know how to open. There was no motion- sensor, only a hand-lock with colored lights. Clones did not go through this door without a human.

Projectile guns roared. Projectiles pounded the walls from both sides. She dropped to the floor, scrabbled up a rifle and pointed it to the left. Enemies knelt beside the next gate, half hidden by the upward curve of the ship's hull. They sprayed the corridor with projectiles. Bullets spanged off the floor and ceiling and thumped into the dead enemy beside her. The enemy's body protected her a little, but the curve of the corridor put the enemies on both sides a little above her. She was badly exposed. She found the trigger, smaller than the trigger on a pulse rifle and squeezed it. The weapon kicked her shoulder. She wanted to drop it, but she could not.

At the sound of weapons firing, the soldier left the doctor human and came down the corridor in a lithe run. He dropped to the deck, skidded to the corner where the access corridor opened on the curving shuttle deck. He landed half on his back and fired at the enemy on her right. One enemy fell on the floor. Another backed away past the curve of the corridor. The crack of gunfire faltered, and projectiles stopped singing overhead.

The doctor human ran crouching down the corridor. She hesitated, and Tora had only a moment to spray the left hand corridor with projectiles, driving the enemies back behind the curve of the ceiling, before the human threw herself across the gap and flattened against the wall.

She was annoyed that the human had not waited. It was not safe for humans yet, but humans knew how to work hand-lock panels. It was better to get inside the shuttle than to wait until more enemies came.

The doors opened. The human went inside, safe from enemies. With the human safe, it was time for clones to follow. There were enemies massing around the curve of the corridor. Soon, they would start to shoot again. She raised her head. "Save yourself," she told the soldier.

He fired once down the corridor, turned and fired over her head at the enemy crowding in the curve of the hallway. Then he crossed the open deck and went through the gate behind the human.

She fired one more round, dropped the projectile weapon. She rocked on her tailbones, tucked her feet under her and rolled into the access corridor. The gate closed behind her. Enemies would come, maybe get through the gate and corner them in the shuttle. She wanted the rapidly-draining pulse rifle back from the soldier.

The short, narrow boarding tube of milky plastine turned a corner and ended at a tightly-closed airlock. She stopped, confused. The human and the soldier had gone this way. This was not a door that clones could go through without a human. Maybe the human did not want her to go in the shuttle. Perhaps the human wanted her to guard the rear. There were many enemies, too many for her to save herself, but she could stop the enemies from coming through the airlock and hurting the human. Thumps came from the gate behind her, and from the other side of the airlock, she heard a rising whine.

* * *

Annia kept half an eye on the sensor camera mounted above the shuttle door. She was trying to coax the shuttle automatics to accept an emergency coldstart. The male clone already sat strapped into a seat in the passenger compartment. Outside, the female clone navigated the flimsy boarding tube and halted at the shuttle doors. Commonwealth soldiers outside the bay were trying to hotcode their way into the access tube.

She had the shuttle almost through an emergency preflight, all systems on automatic, and she didn't understand half the information on the boards. The engines warmed up to a satisfying throb.

A warning light indicated that the loading gate had been opened. Commonwealth soldiers were inside the tube. She should launch now, burn hard and break the docking clamps, get away with her skin and her data intact, but the female clone was still out there.

The XX on the sensor viewer turned to face the enemy. She was a clone. She couldn't care about anything or anyone. She had no life beyond her genes, her programming, her conditioning. She wasn't human.

Annia cursed and hit the lock cycle key. The doors opened.

The clone fell backward into the shuttle. A projectile pinged and cut a spark from the closing edge of the door. Then Annia hit the reverse thrust rockets. The shuttle rocked and heaved. The hull squealed. The docking clamps snapped, and the boarding tube ruptured. Annia's eye fixed for a moment on the red-uniformed body that bounced off the shuttle's forward view plate. She imagined she heard the scrape of fingernails against the hull. The shuttle shook off its restraints and plunged backward toward open space.

The clone tumbled, caught herself in a roll and came to her feet only to stagger again when the shuttle banged on something and slewed the other way.

"Go back and strap in," Annia said.

Computer-simulated display showed the shuttle wallowing in open space outside the ship. Annia had a moment to enjoy a silly wash of relief before a second vessel swung into range of the display.

A sneakship -- light, engine-heavy and over-armed -- turned its drooping nose in her direction. She hurriedly increased the range of the display. The shuttle shrank to a point, the Guardian to a thick cylinder. A swelling on Guardian's flank would be a Commonwealth troop transport. A vague shimmer to one side of the display would be the nearby heavy star that had masked the Commonwealth attack force, and all around Guardian darted the escorting sneakships, ten at least. She picked a vector at random and hit execute. The shuttle slewed and rolled. Engines fired, and she struggled to stay upright in her seat. She hadn't crossed the restraint webbing over her chest. She struggled into the straps.

The display showed two Commonwealth missile traces converging on her former position. No detonation. She scanned and found the missiles already swinging around to converge on her new vector. She'd foolishly imagined herself streaking away unmolested like the departed life ships. Of course the Commonwealth attackers would focus on the shuttle, assuming it carried command staff.

A shuttle didn't have the engine capacity to generate a null-space shift. She could manage maybe three quarters light in this little vessel. The missiles tracking her exhaust particles could accelerate to .9 of light in seconds.

She swung the shuttle toward the heavy star less than a light-minute away. It's emissions had kept the command staff of the Guardian from detecting the energy surge when the attackers shifted into real-space. She could use the radiation from the dark mass to mask her engine trails. She programmed a course that skated the horizon of the gravity well. The navigation computer beeped a warning. She said, "Override. Execute course."

Engines whined and the hull groaned. The shuttle accelerated at a sickening angle. This time, she actually saw the missiles overfly her position. Right in her viewport, they swung around and retargeted on her.

The internal navigator chattered and beeped, but it stuck to its programmed course. The missiles missed their curve around the dark mass and shot straight ahead. This time, they didn't correct. The shuttle would be invisible to instruments this close to the dark mass. The shuttle balanced itself on the edge of the well, expending energy to hold position. She had a reprieve, at least until she ran out of fuel and plunged into the heavy star.

What she needed was null-space capacity on this little vessel. Those sneakships had enough engine to generate a shift if she could piggyback on one of them. "Bang chance of that," she said aloud.

She stared at the display looking for another option. The dark mass shimmered on the other side of her field now, and deep in the well...she bent closer: a bubble in the well? Annia had a schoolgirl's understanding of the phenomenon. The enemy had shifted out of null-space right inside the well itself, and the energies of shift had started a cascade in the dark mass. The cycling feedback loop had sustained a null-space bubble inside the gravity well.

She targeted the bubble. The navigator quarreled noisily. She overrode its protests, muttered an apology to the clones in the passenger compartment in case she was the biggest fool in the Federation, and hit execute.

The navigator squealed. The shuttle banked and accelerated. The well sucked weakly at Annia's limbs, then harder. The bubble roiled on the display. Then it appeared in the viewport: a vaguely spherical distortion that warped the stars in the space-field behind it. A moment later, automatic shields dropped over the heavy vitrine of the viewport. The navigator had its course. If it failed, they'd all be blown to bang by the sneakships before they climbed out of the well.

She had a fraction of a second to register the cessation of pull from the well and inertia from the engines and wonder where this bubble came out before the universe turned inside out on itself.

Chapter 2

The bubble led nowhere. The dark mass far below the shuttle jets doubled, then doubled again and continued to multiply until the universe sagged under its weight. Planets whirled among nesting stars: red-gold gas giants ringed in glittering skirts, bare- skinned hulks seared by the touch of suns, frozen rogues hurtling around the rims of lonely systems. They cluttered Annia's perceptions, overlapping one another indifferent to technicalities of mass and space.

Annia groped frantically through the planets doubling themselves at every moment. Three in seven G-type stars had at least one planet that fell within the tolerances for human occupation. The throbbing gas giants and scorched planetoids disappeared. Dainty planets in shades of blue and green and brown and white piled over each other. One in a hundred-thousand of those supported an ecosystem based on human- compatible protein chains. The mass depleted slightly.

Annia wanted a human-inhabited planet.

More marbled spheres winked out of perception.

She must have begun to hallucinate, because she heard voices.

"Hello. I didn't expect to find anyone out there. Come and look at this."

A pair of voices in tandem said, "Whoo isss that?" One had a human inflection. The other had an artificial tang like the icy tones of tiny bells.

"No one we're related to on either side, I shouldn't think. She seems to be stuck."

Annia tried to enunciate, but she didn't know where to find her mouth and she slurred as she said, "Wwwha you?"

Puzzlement. "Did you get that?"

Something like a shrug, and the tandem voices hissed, "Sssshee isss confusssed."

"Do you need help getting out?"

Annia toyed with pride and distrust, then simply gave up. "Yes."

"Hang onto your jets, then. We'll see you on the other side."

The universe gave a bump and squeezed itself right side out through its own end. Annia's head hurt, and she wanted badly to vomit. She locked her throat. The flight capsule of the little shuttle looked just as it had the last time she saw it. The navigator chattered and squealed in a fair imitation of mechanical temper as it scanned for astronomical landmarks.

The display showed no dark mass, no Federation ship, no Commonwealth sneakships and no missiles.

They'd come out right on the rim of a G-type star system as close to the human- habitable planet as was possible to get without disrupting the system and creating null- space bubbles within the star's gravity well -- a well of a coincidence.

Out-system satellites offered navigational data to the computer, and the navigator shrilled a long complaint. Shuttles weren't designed to cover interplanetary distances. They generally carried enough fuel for a single drop and climb back out of the gravity well of a human-compatible planet. Their dive into the well of the heavy star back on the other side of null-space had used more than half their fuel.

The satellite fed back an in-system course. Their own fuel would get them to the nearest booster station circling the system outside the orbit of the seventh planet. The station would grab their shuttle in a gravity beam and fire it in-system on a course toward the fourth planet. The navigator confirmed their course. They were seventy-five minutes from the booster station with a six-hour flight in-system at sub-light speeds.

Annia unbelted. She found the clones at the front of the passenger compartment. The XX had already unbelted. She prowled the compartment scanning for enemies.

The male remained shivering in his seat. Blood leaked out around the gel bandage on his shoulder. He was going to need surgery soon, but she didn't have time before they reached the booster station. He was tough. He would survive a little longer.

The female paced the aisle eyeing the viewports and trying to access her blank crystal. Annia gave up trying to explain their situation to them. They stared at her with vague eyes and tried to access their crystals. The female got nothing at all, and the male kept muttering, "Doctor is lieutenant in C-med."

Annia finally sequestered herself in the flight capsule with the rifle under her feet to keep it out of the clones' hands in case they became confused enough to attack her.

She had never seen a booster station before. The visible apparatus was a dull, metallic ring easily big enough to swallow the Guardian. Marker buoys arrayed with delicate solar wings outlined a cylindrical tunnel of empty space on either side of the ring.

The shuttle took navigational information from the marker buoys and adjusted its approach until it was poised dead center in the mouth of the tunnel. Annia opened the intercom and told the clones to strap themselves in.

The shuttle cut engines and drifted toward the waiting circle of buoys on its own inertia. Annia gripped the arms of her chair.

Far away, the dull ring of the station began to light up. In pairs, generators flicked silently to life. The shuttle began to move faster, and Annia felt the shuttle lurch. Suddenly, instead of looking forward into a tunnel, she was hanging in her seat staring down into a pit through which the shuttle was about to drop nose-first. She didn't dare let go of the armrests to check her restraint straps.

The shuttle began to move faster now, and the motion was unnerving without the vibration of engines in the bulkheads. The first set of marker buoys slid past the viewport, then the second. The third set came faster, and the ring was almost too big to fit in the viewport. The fourth ring of markers flicked past the shuttle, and then the shuttle wasn't falling, it was being thrown. The station ring blurred. Annia's stomach churned. She had a confused vision of the ring swallowing her. Then space twisted again, and she was riding a gravity wave up and out of the tunnel on the other side at near-light speed. The pull of the gravity net ceased, internal gravity was restored, and the final insult to her inner ear made Annia's stomach let go.

Fortunately, she hadn't eaten recently, and she finished in a matter of minutes. She found an emergency kit under the control console and cleaned her face and hands. Mopping up the mess that had spilled down the side of the chair and onto the floor took longer. She was almost afraid to look in on the clones, but they were in their seats. The female looked a little queasy and tense, but didn't attack when Annia opened the door.

The male was pale and shaking. The tidal stresses of their passage through the booster station had been too much for his system to absorb. She gave him a synthetic blood pack and a stimulant to counter the shock. When the shaking eased, she went to work patching the projectile wound. She used surgical adhesive to reattach muscles and ligaments. Patches restored damaged blood vessels, and a coat of gel would keep the wound clean until the skin closed over it. The clone would regain full use of the torn muscles and tendons in a few days.

Annia returned to the cockpit and watched the viewport for several minutes as the shuttle, engines dead except for the hiss of attitude jets, rode the inertia of the gravity net insystem. She finally fell asleep in the pilot's chair with the faint residue of vomit still in the air.

She woke when the engines grumbled to life. The shuttle had fallen into a low-fuel orbit around a blue and white world with a number of small landmasses. Navigational data told her she was about to land on the United Worlds planet Yetfurther. That puzzled her. She had expected to emerge in Commonwealth space -- the system from which the attacking sneakships had come. This planet was a long way from either Commonwealth or Federation territory.

Communication boards indicated an incoming voice message. Annia opened the com channel. A voice: human, male and only a little abrupt said, "Federated Systems shuttle, this is Cyrion ground control on Yetfurther. Please respond."

Annia answered. "Annia 4424 here. Do you have a flight plan for me?"

"You requested a low-fuel landing. We have a trajectory."

The graphic fuel indicator on Annia's board hovered just above the yellow zone. There might be enough fuel. There might not. "Patch it through my navigator. Ground control, as a Federated Systems indentured citizen, I'm required to request that you notify the nearest FS vessel of my arrival."

The voice replied formally. "Yetfurther is not a Federated Systems planet. We provide a single telefax free of charge to any FS citizen who needs to contact his or her government."

Legally, any government was obliged to return indentured citizens to the Federation, but planets and individuals differed in their enthusiasm for the practice. Probably this was a frontier world, not heavily populated enough to be picky about the origin of its citizens. That solved one very serious problem for Annia. She didn't have to worry about the Federation finding her. "Thank you, ground control. The trajectory is laid in, and my navigator approves it."

"Confirmed."

Annia told the clones to strap in and waited until she was sure they were secure. Finally, she hit execute.

The little vessel dropped into the gravity well. The wing extensions cupped atmosphere, and the shields closed over the viewport. Annia's stomach churned in protest. It was a long, long drop. Something had gone wrong. The engines should have fired minutes ago and slowed their fall. She'd been given a bad trajectory, or the navigator had been scrambled in their strange null-space shift. Annia fought the buck and buffet of the shuttle and tried to override the shielding over the viewplate. She wanted to see the ground. The environmental control adamantly refused to accept her override. Hull temperatures showed ninety-five percent of tolerance.

And then the engines did fire, hard. Annia's chin struck her chest and she bit her tongue. Double human-standard gravity compressed her spine and squeezed her ribs down over her lungs. The engines faltered, sputtered, roared, and the backup rockets kicked from below. Finally, she was no longer falling. The descent was still fast, but more like a controlled glide, and gravity dropped to human-standard range.

The engines fired once more, and the shuttle jerked with a crash that threw Annia against her restraints. The engines rumbled for a moment, then sputtered and died.

Annia sat for a minute while the shuttle groaned and squealed around her. The rough landing had strained its superstructure, but she didn't hear the hiss of cracked bulkheads, so the vessel must have survived the impact. The shields rolled back. The viewport framed the grey and dun spires of a minor city. The line of a tram ran down the forested mountainside, and beyond the city lay a floodplain runnelled with rivers and oxbow lakes. Further still, blue-grey fog sketched a straight line below the horizon.

Flashing lights on the communications board attracted her attention. "This is Ground Control. You are cleared to disembark. Payment can be arranged with Administration."

They expected her to pay for her berth. Well, she didn't intend to have the shuttle long on her hands. She'd sell it off planet at the first opportunity.

She left the clones on board with strict instructions to touch nothing and kill no one. The ground staff directed her to the administration building set into the vertical cliff over the landing bay. Black scars from rocket fires streaked the rough stone underfoot. Pale, violet sky overhead gave Annia a sense of vertigo as if she might fall off the ground at any moment. She fixed her eyes on the cliff, granite full of igneous crystals polished and sealed to reflect rocket heat. Its human-constructed angles eased her vertigo. No telling how the clones were going to cope with the open spaces and unfamiliar shapes and colors of a planetary surface.

Heat-resistant double doors, configured airlock style, passed her through two meters of rock to the inner offices. They'd carved the administration complex right into the mountain which made for some interesting colors and striations in the polished walls. The ground staff wore green uniforms with open-collared shirts. Short trousers buckled at the knee. A young man waved a datapad at her in the hallway. "Ms. 4424?"

"'Annia."

He made a notation on his pad. "I beg your pardon, Ms. Annia. I'm Mr. Dolman. You'll want to arrange payment for your berth. I'll show you to the right department."

She read Spaceport Administration, on the door. Mr. Dolman used his databoard to ease her through. "Mr. Fosby will be with you in a moment."

Mr. Dolman crossed his legs at the ankle and bobbed with both knees. He left her in the waiting room. Five chairs cut from the same striated granite as the walls stood empty. A man slouched in the sixth. The silver buckles on his shoes matched those on the knees of his black breeches. Over a frilled shirt, he wore an old, brown jacket made from some kind of animal skin. A black cap lay beside him on a stone table.

He evidently used depilatories only irregularly on his face and legs, which he didn't cover with stockings. He crossed his ankles, and Annia wondered if she should return the compliment. She didn't think she'd manage to do the bob gracefully. Instead, she took the chair furthest from the stranger.

The man watched her for several minutes.

She hoped he was not waiting for Mr. Fosby.

He cleared his throat. "Mine's Hollin."

Annia said, "Excuse me?"

"Hollin. My name's Hollin." He placed his cap on his thin hair. "I figure you're the one brought down that FS shuttle out there."

Was he threatening to turn her over to Federated Systems? There were finders' fees for returning indentured citizens.

He wiped his mouth with his fingertips. "If you were, I might be in the market to take it off your hands."

This was far beyond coincidence. "What are you doing here?" Annia asked.

He slouched back in his chair again. "Got a call from a friend who says I might have a shuttle berthed somewhere along here."

He had a pleasant face, lined and softened and square, and he had obviously never been handsome. Annia wondered how many stolen FS shuttles turned up in a tiny port like this one. Probably, he handled a broad range of dubious goods. "I'm not sure mine's for sale." It bang-in-a-well was, but she didn't know what it was worth on the local market, or what the currency was.

He wiped his mouth again. "Could be if you wanted to sell it, I could be of help to you."

"What kind of help?"

"You got lodgings?"

"I can sleep on the shuttle until I find something."

"I can get you a nice piece of real estate near the city, near public transportation, nice neighbors. A little extra credit to tide you over until you find work."

"I don't want to attract attention," Annia said.

He spread his hands and cocked her a sideways smile. "Can't I see that just looking at you? What do you say?"

He'd caught her in a bind. She needed to unload that shuttle. She nodded reluctantly.

"Then let's have a word with Mr. Fosby." He strode to the door at the other end of the waiting room and opened it. "Come along in, Ms. 4424."

A thickening, middle-aged man with a round face and an outrageously frilled green blouse crossed his ankles and bobbed at Annia as she entered his office. "Have you made your deal, Mr. Hollin?"

"I have done, Mr. Fosby."

Mr. Fosby clapped his hands together with a wet smack. "Good. Then we'll settle the matter of the berthing fees, and Ms. 4424 can be on her way. I simply need to verify that Mr. Hollin here is in fact the owner of the vessel in question."

She could see how they benefited. Mr. Hollin would have the sale of the shuttle. Mr. Fosby would undoubtedly receive a portion of the proceeds from the sale as well as getting the shuttle's berthing fees paid -- which Annia was in no way able to do anyway. She couldn't see how she could lose by the deal, and that made her nervous.

Mr. Hollin eyed Annia sideways. "If you'll witness, Mr. Fosby, I'm offering a fair-sized plot in Murrayville along with three hundred credits."

Mr. Fosby turned to Annia.

She had the uncomfortable feeling that something was expected of her. "I've accepted."

Mr. Fosby looked alarmed. "Oh no, Ms. Annia, you don't understand. That won't do at all."

Mr. Hollin said, "Maybe you should do the honors, Mr. Fosby."

"Indeed." Mr. Fosby gave Annia a reproachful glance and said, "Mr. Hollin, your offer is entirely unacceptable. What kind of a plot are you offering? Precisely where is it located? One of your swamps, I suppose, swarming with mudrimples and sneakdillies and brewing with fever."

That's why they had been horrified when she accepted the first offer. They used a dickering system. He'd opened with a ludicrously low bid and expected her to counter with a high one.

Mr. Hollin protested. "True it's on the lakefront, and there's a bit of a tramp through the mud to get to the lake, but the best part is set up above flood level, and you'd share a boardwalk and fishing dock with your neighbors. They're nice people, easy to get on with. There's some as would pay big prices for a lot like this."

"In Murrayville?" Mr. Fosby said disdainfully.

"Well, not in Murrayville, but that's why you get it cheap."

"I want the lot number."

Mr. Hollin removed a datapad from inside his animal skin jacket and tapped its board. He passed it to Mr. Fosby.

Fosby peered at it. He grunted. "Well, that looks all right. It's a pleasant enough lot, Ms. Annia." He glowered at Mr. Hollin. "She'll take it along with two thousand credits."

"Two thousand? Mother's milk, Mr. Fosby, you'll ruin me."

In the end, Mr. Fosby agreed that Mr. Hollin would pay berthing and refueling fees for the shuttle until he removed it from the spaceport. Annia would accept the lot along with eight-hundred credits in a numbered account held by the Bank of Firstep, Yetfurther branch, and an emergency shelter and camp kit for three. Mr. Hollin would escort her in person to her new home.

Mr. Fosby required Annia to put her DNAprint on a datapad and assured her that she was now the legal owner of a double-size, waterfront property in the village of Murrayville.

Mr. Hollin gave her a deep bob with ankles crossed. "I'll show you to your domain, Ms. Annia."

"I've some personal things in the shuttle."

"We'll stop on our way."

When Annia entered the passenger compartment, the clones stiffened, and the female dropped into a fighting stance

Annia froze. "Stop. At rest."

The female tried to access her data crystal.

"Your crystal was erased, remember?" Clones didn't remember anything for more than ten minutes. That was what conditioning and crystal implants were for.

The male fumbled one-handed with his restraints. "Doctor is lieutenant in C-med." He looked puzzled. "Not in C-med."

"I am a doctor. You protect me. Protect humans."

Clone handlers used simulations and repeated pain/pleasure feedback to get past the chemical blocks that prevented clones from storing long-term memory, but the method was limited to very simple stimulation/response patterns. It didn't adapt. In a strange environment, with no programming to access in the crystals, the clones might identify her as an enemy.

She took care to make no sudden moves. "You know protect humans?"

The female tried to access her crystal.

"Protect humans?" Annia repeated.

The clone nodded. "Protect humans. Protect you."

Annia tried to remember how the simulations worked. "That's good. You get good feelings when you protect humans. You can have good feelings now."

The female looked happier.

Annia thought she could relax.

Mr. Hollin stuck his head into the passenger compartment and said, "Ms. Annia, how much baggage do you have to collect?"

The female clone stiffened and lunged at the door.

"Mother's milk." Mr. Hollin yanked a tiny stun weapon out of his jacket.

Annia threw out her hands between Mr. Hollin and the clone. "Stop. At rest."

The clone halted, panting and trying to access her crystal.

Mr. Hollin slowly put his weapon out of sight. "Ms. Annia, I had no idea I was dealing with a wealthy woman. Maybe you'd like a husband?"

"Move back from the door. They're unsettled from being in a strange place, and I don't want to have an accident with them."

"I agree. I will be the gentleman hiding behind the forward landing strut."

Which was exactly where she found him when she finally got the clones calm enough to leave the shuttle without killing anyone.

Mr. Hollin took no chances. He peered around the landing strut with his hand tucked into his jacket. "Everybody happy now?"

"At rest. No enemies," Annia reminded the clones. "We're fine, Mr. Hollin. Take your hand out of your jacket. You're making them nervous."

Mr. Hollin raised his hands and joined them with a wary eye on the clones. "See, everybody's friends. What do you want with these fellows? Those are soldier types if I know anything. More trouble than they're worth. You want them off your shoulders? Those two are each worth more than the shuttle in some quarters."

That would be the black market. Unlike the Federated Systems, UW charter made it illegal to own clones from human stock, but that didn't mean it didn't happen. She shook her head. "They're not for sale. Maybe you could help me with something else." She had already entrusted him and the station ground crew with her freedom. "I want a domestic virus. Two of them."

He said, "You're not going to alter them. They'll be worthless."

They were heading toward the tram terminal at the far side of the landing field.

"They're a danger to themselves and everyone around them, and they're no use to me anyway," she said.

"So sell them." Mr. Hollin glanced back at the clones with a covetous expression.

"They're not for sale."

"You'd be wealthy."

She knew she was being illogical. The clones did not care about her. They had saved her life, yes, because they were programmed to protect humans. Then again, Annia never had been interested in clone medicine before her indenture, and so had never really developed the objectivity of the other clone medics on Guardian. "I won't sell them."

He shook his head regretfully. "You can't afford a domestic virus, either, not one and definitely not two. The penalty for handling a thing like that...I don't run that kind of risk."

"Who does?"

"Nobody you want to deal with."

"What about you?"

"I don't deal with him, either." He hesitated and added reluctantly. "But I know people who do."

"Who?"

He shook his head. "You can't afford it anyway. Maybe I could get you a reader. Something that would imprint their crystals."

"How much?"

He looked unhappy. "At cost. Not more than you can afford. Don't go asking around for domestic viruses. Don't deal with anybody but me."

"I need the virus."

"So maybe I ask a few people. I don't promise anything." He signaled the railhead to load a car.

* * *

He did not like the new place he was in. Objects did not match those he knew from simulations. The horizon was upside down. The ceiling was too far away. The air moved all around him, first one way then another. The air was warmer than it should be, too, and smelled strange. He tried to process images that made no sense to him. He found no matches except for the lieutenant.

He followed the lieutenant who followed the doctor human and the other human into a box that was silver like a shuttle. Inside, he accessed his crystal for data about the new place. His crystal told him nothing. He didn't know what to do.

The doctor human pushed him toward a padded seat. "Sit down, both of you." The sharpness of her voice made him think of bad feelings. He tried to access his crystal for information that would tell him what he had done wrong.

"Sit. Good feelings. You can have good feelings. You sit here."

Good feelings. He had not done wrong. He didn't deserve bad feelings. He felt better.

The lieutenant did not sit down. She paced back and forth in the little box, looking for enemies. There might be enemies. He started to get up and look for enemies, too.

"Sit," the doctor human told him. "Have good feelings."

He remembered to sit. The lieutenant sat down beside him tense and shaking. The doctor human laid her hand on his damaged shoulder and said to them both, "You deserve good feelings. Have good feelings."

He felt good.

The doctor human and the other human sat down on a blue bench opposite him. The box jolted and began to move. The movement felt like the lifts in his simulations. In simulations, he got good feelings for riding quietly in lifts. The lift box hummed on the rails. He looked out the window and saw bright objects blur past the vitrine. Everything in this place was green. He checked his crystal. No data on green places. Only grey like the barracks, or white and red like C-med, but the lift box hummed, so he felt good.

The doctor human said, "What are you going to do with the shuttle?"

The other human shrugged. "I know someone who carries goods across the zone from the Federation. He'll refit your shuttle, change the registration.

The doctor human said, "A smuggler."

He spread his hands in a human gesture. "Just because governments don't get along is no reason people can't do a little business between themselves."

The doctor human withdrew from the discussion. "It's your business."

The other human stretched out his legs and folded his arms behind his head. "I arranged for an associate to ship your camp kit and emergency shelter to the rail terminal. Just as well you brought your friends. They can carry your equipment. It's a six-kil walk to Murrayville. Bus only runs twice a day, so you walk the rest of the time."

"You said it was near public transportation."

The other human shrugged. "Is. Twice a day."

The lift box went down for a long time. He forgot where he had come from. His arm hurt. The doctor human was familiar in her red smock. That was reassuring because he didn't know where he was. The lift car slowed and finally stopped with a bump just like the lifts he knew from simulations, so that was all right, and it meant he should get out.

The other human got out first, then the doctor human. He waited for the lieutenant. The air outside smelled different from the places he knew. He smelled sweetness, pleasant smells that made him nervous because he did not know what they meant. Smells should be familiar and tell you where you were and what was happening: smell of bodies in barracks during sleep cycle, smell of chemicals in C-med, of ozone and burned flesh in battle. Then he smelled something he did know, a sweet, greasy smell, heavy on the air. Food. He felt hungry. He looked at the lieutenant to see if she would order him to eat. He didn't see a barracks or a cafeteria, but the lift had been familiar, and food smelled good, so he had good feelings.

He followed the humans across the platform. The humans would tell him if he could eat. They would get the food for him.

The doctor human put a hand on his chest and pushed him away from her. "Stand back. Good feelings."

The lieutenant smelled the air, too. She said, "Soldiers must eat."

The other human picked up two big, silver bags and slung them over his back. "Haven't you fed those two?"

The doctor human said, "I haven't eaten in at least ten hours -- since before the ship was attacked. It's probably been longer for them."

The other human threw a silver bag at him. He caught it in his good arm.

The human said, "We'll stop for food on our way out of town. You hear that, clone? Food. You carry the bag. You know 'carry'?"

He knew 'food'. He went to the other human.

"Now he wants to be friends. Bag over the shoulder like so." The human pushed the straps of the bag over his undamaged shoulder. He often carried things in simulations. That was fine. They would go to a barracks and get food. He had good feelings.

* * *

She had felt better on the lift. That was like simulations, but although the doctor human said 'eat' and 'food,' they didn't go to a barracks. She smelled the food, but for a long time, they walked on a long corridor with dirt and no walls, so it was not a corridor, but something else for which she had no simulations. She wanted to eat. She had a soldier with her. That was reassuring. Soldiers gave her good feelings. She should tell the soldier to eat, but first a human must give her the food.

They passed large boxes jumbled together so that they made bulkheads on either side of the dirt corridor. The boxes had humans inside them. Finally, the doctor human went to one of the boxes and got food from the human in the box and brought it to her and the soldier.

She knew it was food by the smell, but it didn't look or taste like food from simulations. It was sweet and tender on the outside. It flaked on her hands, and she licked the flakes from her skin. The inside dripped oily and brown, full of firm chunks. She ate fast.

The doctor human watched until she finished the food, then gave her more. She took it and ate it eagerly.

The doctor human said, "They're not fussy eaters."

The other human grinned. "You don't like eel pie? Could be you'll grow a taste for it. Eel is cheap in Murrayville."

They were walking as they ate. Soon she smelled water and more plants. She remembered those smells from simulations. She smelled people, too, a smell like the clone barracks when it was full of bodies. These people smelled like soldiers who had fought for a long time and not gone to the barracks for showers.

"This is it," the other human said.

The doctor human said, "What do you mean, 'this is it'?"

He waved his arm. "Murrayville. Not exactly a throbbing metropolis, but it's free, and you're a landowner, so there's worse places you could find yourself."

The doctor human sounded angry. "This isn't a city; it's a shanty town. Half these people need medical care and the other half need social relief."

The other human winced. "Now, it's not so bad as it looks. Anybody can get those things in the city if they're willing to fill out the forms and repay the social debt. These are the people who prefer to live under Yetfurther's camp charter: no police, no social relief, but no taxes either. They keep what they earn and get what they're willing to work for. Most of these you see here are Procreationists. They don't want to limit family size under Cyrion law, so they live out here. Most of them are too poor to own property, so they rent from bigger landowners. It gets better inside. You follow me to your plot. You'll see. Keep those two close."

The other human talked quickly as he led the way through the first maze of corridors. "Your neighbors are nice sorts, come from a good family. They're cousins. I sold them their lot not quite a year ago, do some odds and ends for them. There are some very good people here if you don't look too close at the outsides."

She looked around her. There were people, not clones like in the barracks, but humans, all different. She knew humans from simulations. She wondered if some were enemies. She thought about fighting, and her muscles tightened.

The doctor human turned around quickly and said, "At rest. No enemies." The doctor human's voice made her think about bad feelings.

No enemies. All were humans. They did not wear uniforms or coveralls. Their trousers stopped at the knees. Some of the humans wore no clothing at all, very small humans who stopped to watch them walk by. She had never seen anything like them in simulations.

The other human opened a door in a grey-brown wall. He bowed. "Welcome, Ms. Annia, to your new home."

Chapter 3

Thick moss just a shade more blue than emerald carpeted the ground down to the trees. The silver-blue of water showed through the twisted limbs and knobbed root masses of the trees at the waterline. Someone had planted a garden along the south- facing line of the fence. The plants didn't conform exactly to anything Annia remembered from childhood farm tours with her peer group, but from their shapes; she guessed herbs and fruits, and the tangled vines climbing the fence would be legumes of some kind.

Photon harvesters stood atop the fence. Each square, black panel in the row faced slightly west. They would follow the sun across the sky from morning to night.

Mr. Hollin said, "Didn't I tell you? One of my best properties. You there, Mr. Clone, just put that bag over there on the deck. That's right. Put it down."

To Annia's right, a wooden deck stood not quite a meter off the ground on permocrete foundations. It was five meters square, more than ample for the modest emergency shelter included in their kit. Annia's anxieties returned at the sight of it. "Does the lake flood that high?"

Mr. Hollin sounded offended. "Certainly not. The water's never risen this high that I ever heard of. During flood season, the trees sort of make a dam out of their roots if you see what I mean. The trouble is mudrimples."

"What are mudrimples?"

He made a creeping motion with his hand. "Venomous. Not very aggressive on dry land, and the catpils keep them down, but it's best you don't walk around in the mud under the trees. If you have to go down to the water, use the boardwalk."

Halfway down the slope, the fence gave way to a wooden walkway mounted on logs that ran down the last of the slope and between the trees toward the water.

A scream and a thump of something heavy striking flesh made Annia's skin go cold. The male clone's head jerked up. He bolted, suddenly inhuman in his speed and grace, to the gap in the fence where Annia saw another campsite alongside theirs.

She followed him, shouting, "Stop, at rest."

On the other side of the fence, the male clone had already halted, distracted by the sight of a two-meter-tall saurian with eyes like gold plates. The creature sat on the female clone with one clawed foot tucked up beneath it and the other planted on one of the clone's wrists. A stiff crest of coarse, pale hair flipped up then down again as it turned its head toward Annia.

Annia approached it cautiously. "At rest," she said to the XX. The clone turned her head to watch Annia. She looked puzzled as though she could not understand how she came to be flat on her back.

A slender woman with shockingly pale skin and sleek, dark hair stood behind the big alien brushing bits of moss and dirt from her trousers. Her right forearm was covered in black and silver scales. An irregular patch of similar scales surrounded her left eye, which was a light, iridescent grey in contrast to its vividly green mate. She was a flutter addict, Annia realized with a flicker of revulsion. Tiny bells, clipped into the scaled skin, circled the woman's left eye and lined the back of her right arm, and she wore a delicate filigree of wires and bells on each ear from the lobes to the top of the cartilage.

The stranger resettled her rumpled clothing. She cocked her head at Annia, and smiled with delight. "You found us. We should have known you would."

The big saurian flicked its wrists. It wore bells clipped into its thick, bronze skin from nose to tail. They rang softly with its movements.

Annia edged toward the big alien, wary lest she startle it or the clone into violence. "Was anyone hurt?"

The human woman said, "I'm all right. Cho knocked me down coming between me and your friend."

Annia said, "She won't attack again. You can let her up." The alien rose from its crouch. Beneath its slender neck, long, muscular arms on ball socket joints ended in disconcertingly human hands. As Annia approached more closely, she saw a pair of light-green, very human-looking eyes below the alien plates. The alien stepped away from the XX clone and waved its tail in a susurration of bells.

"At rest," Annia said to the clone. "No enemies."

The clone rocked to her feet so quickly that Annia stepped back, and the alien flattened its crest.

Mr. Hollin cleared his throat. "Beg your pardons, ladies. Ought to have made introductions right off. Ms. Annia, these are the neighbors I was telling you about. Ms. Maycee Charmmes," he bobbed at the fair-skinned human, "and her cousin Ms. Cho'en Charmmes. Ms. Annia and her friends just bought the other lot."

Maycee Charmmes, the human of the pair, held out her hand to Annia. "We should have known Mr. Hollin would take you under his wing."

Annia took the other woman's hand gingerly. The gesture was unfamiliar to her.

The dark-skinned alien flicked her skin and shifted her feet. Bells rang up and down her body. She finished with a decisive flip of her nose.

Maycee grinned. "Cho'en says I'm being cryptic and inconsiderate. She wants to apologize about the garden."

"The garden." Annia said.

"Gaeans, you know; they all consider themselves amateur gardeners. Your lot was unoccupied, so we planted a garden. It's your lot, of course. You should consider the garden yours, too."

"Gaeans?" Annia felt herself lagging further and further behind the conversation.

Maycee jerked her head at her alien cousin. "Like Cho. Except she's half human."

The alien flicked her bells again, and Maycee pursed her lips. "I'm sorry. Cho says you're dropping from weariness and I shouldn't keep you talking. Can we help you set up your shelter? Then you ought to eat dinner with us. Cho'en is cooking tonight, so it's safe."

The shelter was a silvery cube two meters high. A sheet of photon-absorbent material peaked over the top of the cube to shed rain and feed energy to the battery that ran the stove, refrigerator and heaters inside the shelter. Thin, white plastine coated the inside of the shelter and diffused light from the windows. Dim photon emitters lit the walls.

Annia wanted to collapse under a plastine blanket as soon as the shelter was up, but Maycee Charmmes said, "Cho'en has dinner ready. If you miss it, you'll have to eat dehydrated rations from your own kit. You'll stay, won't you, Mr. Hollin? You won't be putting us out."

Mr. Hollin accepted the invitation with a casualness that told Annia he was used to dining with Maycee and Cho'en. Annia wanted on the one hand to set the right precedent by keeping herself and the clones to their own camp. On the other hand, the clones were reacting to the words "eat" and "rations" and Annia herself was hungry, and she was too tired to prepare anything, and if the cousins already had something cooked, it seemed petty to refuse.

The clones trod on Maycee's heels getting to the other camp where the alien Cho'en stooped over a lidded pot on a grate over an open fire and used a wooden spoon to scoop the contents of the pot into mismatched plates. Maycee served Annia and the clones at a rough, plank table. Mr. Hollin served himself. The big alien ignored the benches and settled on her haunches at the head of the table. Even seated on the ground, her head was level with Maycee's.

Cho'en's concoction was a stew of vegetables and chunks of fishy eel covered with a thick, porous crust. At first look, it reminded Annia of the nutritional gruel served in the juvenile peer dorms on Ifni, but growing up in the dorms had taught her to eat when food was offered or go hungry, so she raised a forkful and tried to conceal her suspicion.

It was actually very good. The slightly muddy flavor of eels was not something she admired, but she supposed she would get used to it. The alien Cho'en jingled softly and flipped her crest.

"It's good," Annia said.

The crest rose to its full upright position. Cho'en stretched her neck slightly, and puffed through the wide nostrils under her chin. "Iss kind you ssay sso," she hissed. She possessed neither lips nor vocal chords, and her speech was hard to follow.

Something pricked Annia's leg, and she felt a dry finger stroke her exposed arm below the elbow. She jumped in her seat and dropped her fork. Her hand struck something rubbery that squealed and clicked.

"I'm sorry." Maycee scrambled out of her seat and picked up the meter-long animal that swayed on its hindquarters with its long, pink proboscis waving in Annia's direction. She shook her finger at its face -- or what Annia supposed was its face. It had a short, pink trunk and no visible mouth. Three round, black eyes peered back at Annia.

"No, Puffy. No begging. I'm sorry, Annia. They're not hungry, just opportunists. Bad Puffy."

"They" referred to the handful or so of parti-colored vermiforms that followed Maycee back to her seat and stood up to beg. Their segmented bodies averaged fifty or sixty centimeters in length with a pair of hooked toes for each segment. The number of segments varied from one animal to another. Annia could identify no general pattern in their coloring. Apart from Puffy, who was a universal light grey like the drifting pollen carriers from the trees, they were improbably colored in bright blues, pinks, greens, reds, yellows, blacks and browns. They were striped, spotted and harlequined. She saw one small, blue animal with vivid, green markings like the leaves on the trees. Their coats varied from Puffy's cloud-like down to the spiky whorles and cowlicks on a medium, red-and-white striped animal that seemed content to dig its first pair of toe-feet into the bench by Annia's hip and stretch its soft, pink proboscis toward her plate.

Maycee said, "At least half of these are rightly yours -- that is, they came from your camp -- but they all do everything together. Most likely, when you go to bed tonight, the ones that consider your camp their territory will attach themselves to you. If you feed them some table scraps and scratch around their lung-vents now and then, they can be quite loyal. Even affectionate." Maycee was trying to detach Puffy's toe-feet from the front of her shirt and keep its proboscis out of her plate as she spoke.

After dinner, the red-and-white catpil left the clutch fighting for position over the dinner plates and followed Annia back to the shelter. Three more of the brightly colored animals rippled across the lot and climbed the foundation supports to the platform while Annia watched to make sure that the clones got themselves into their sleeping cabinets. She convinced three of the four to stay outside, but the white-and-red catpil was more persistent than the others. It waited until Annia had both hands full pushing the blue- and-green animal out of the doorway and simply swarmed over its fellow, past Annia's arm and into the empty sleeping cabinet before Annia could stop it.

It allowed Annia to clasp it around the middle, but it dug its toe-feet into the gel pad and the plastine blanket, and Annia couldn't extract it without damaging her bed. In the end, she let it stay. It kept her awake for a while, clicking softly and twisting around to groom its toe-feet. She finally fell asleep with the catpil jostling gently against her back and the edges of her hard-won data crystal digging into her palm.

The clones woke her in the morning with calisthenics in the tiny walkway between the sleeping cabinets. Annia took the precaution of pulling her red medical smock over her underwear before she squeezed out of the cabinet. The female stiffened at the sight of her, but didn't attack. The male merely murmured, "Doctor is lieutenant in C-med," and continued to pick at the foil wrapper of a food bar.

Annia took it away from him, broke the seal and handed it back. He ate half in one bite. Annia rummaged up a second bar for the female before she opened the front door. The red-and-white catpil rippled out between her feet.

The air was chilly and smelled of burning cellulose fibers and food. The food smell must have drifted into the shelter while Annia held the door open because the clones crowded out behind her, sniffing.

"At rest," Annia said. "No enemies. No fighting." Obviously, the clones weren't going to be satisfied with emergency rations so long as the Charmmes cousins continued to cook in the open.

The female descended the steps and crossed the moss. The male followed her with his head up and his nostrils flared.

Annia followed quickly saying, "Stop. At rest."

As Annia passed through the gap in the fence, Maycee looked up from the outdoor hearth in front of the cousins' shelter. "Good morning. Cho'en cooked for five before she left." She handed a plate of food to the female clone. The female passed the plate to the soldier.

"We won't impose. We have our own food."

Maycee made a careless gesture with her head, and the bells in her ears jingled. "It's half from your garden anyway. Whoops, come back here." The female clone evidently didn't see anything that looked like a suitable barracks, so she took her plate and turned back toward the black and silver cube of the emergency shelter, which would still be in her short-term memory as a familiar place. Maycee cut her off and steered her back toward the plank table in front of the shack that Maycee and Cho'en used as a shelter. "Sit here. Come here, you." She waggled her hand at the male, and he walked toward her with his plate in front of him. Maycee sat him at the table and waited until both clones began to eat.

"They're not dreadfully bright, are they?" Her lips twitched humorously.

Annia felt defensive. "They have no long-term memory except what has been implanted. It works very well in consistent surroundings."

"Which this isn't." Maycee handed Annia a filled plate of vegetables and some kind of seasoned meat -- probably eel. "It's a problem, isn't it?"

Annia poked with her fork at the chunks of whitish-brown eel. "They'd have been destroyed if I had left them behind."

"You'll have to support them until we can find some kind of work that they can do, and they're not going to be cheap to feed." Maycee sat down with her own plate beside the male clone. "Will you be looking for work in Murrayville?"

"Cyrion. I hoped I could trade lab work or teaching for research facilities at a hospital or university."

Maycee's eyes widened. "You're a doctor? That's the most remarkable coincidence. Cho'en's been jingling for months about wanting a human-trained doctor to supplement gaean healing disciplines. I know she'd be glad to have you help out at the clinic.

"Cho'en?" Annia said.

"She opened the clinic when we saw how hard it was for people to get medical treatment in Murrayville. They had to cure themselves or go to Cyrion if they could afford it."

"I'm looking for a fully-equipped research facility. I'm working on an important project."

Maycee's face fell. "Well, there are three large hospitals in Cyrion, and several smaller clinics and research labs. I know. We looked into all of them when Cho was setting up her clinic. I still have the codes for most of them. You could apply from the tele-fax station outside town."

Maycee set her empty plate on the ground for the catpils. "I hope you find what you're looking for, but in case you don't, would you take a suggestion? It's just that medical jobs are hard to find on Yetfurther since the pharmaceutical expansion stopped expanding, if you know what I mean. If you can't find a place in Cyrion, you'd still be welcome at Cho's clinic. It's primitive, but you'd have more control of your schedule, and Mr. Hollin and Cho'en could help you scrounge whatever equipment you needed."

"I'd like to try the city first," Annia said stiffly.

"Of course," Maycee said. "I hope you'll find something there." She had a nictitating eyelid on the left eye. It closed, leaving a milky film over the silver iris. "I'll get you those satellite codes."

Maycee provided a list of hospital and medical research codes. She included directions to the nearest sub-atmospheric tele-fax station and offered to watch the clones while Annia was away from the camp.

Annia didn't like the idea. "They are dangerous and unpredictable if you don't know the right commands."

A hint of sharpness tightened Maycee's voice. "I'm generally more competent than people suppose. I can handle them."

Annia really didn't want to bring two dangerous and unpredictable clones with her to a public telefax station. They would be less likely to hurt someone at the camp, so Annia left the medical smock with Maycee. In case the clones failed to recognize Maycee as a human to protect, they would see the smock and treat her as a doctor.

The public tele-fax stood just outside the boundary of Murrayville, a plastine and permocrete dome colored in shades of pale and dirt. The individual stations inside were worn and grimy despite the autoclean cycle that ran nightly.

Maycee had not exaggerated the shortage of positions available for medical staff on Yetfurther. Her list didn't just open the auto-fax sites of the more-than-thirty facilities in the city. It opened direct tele-fax lines to the directors of personnel, and, in some cases, the private lines to high-level administrators in the department of Planetary Health. Annia had never liked the face-to-face intimacy of tele-fax, but she had to concede the logic of Maycee's list. No auto-minder would be able to reach Annia in Murrayville where there was evidently no such thing as private tele-fax, much less the more powerful satellite bounce stations.

So she spoke to bureaucrat after bored bureaucrat, begging for any entry-level position from instructor of anatomy to capsule sterilizer in exchange for a corner in which to conduct her own research. The answers were numbingly similar. The head of field studies for the department of planetary health said, "I'm sorry, Ms. Annia, but assuming we can verify your experience and expertise without contacting Federated Systems citizen data, we hardly have the resources to employ the people we have on staff at present."

The chief programmer for employment systems at Elwinna S. Bombay research hospital said, "It just wouldn't be fair to the people we have currently on staff or those on the waiting list ahead of you. Of course, if you had any interest in nursing..."

Annia cut the connection. She wasn't going to sit in a booth programming life-pods. The smaller research and pharmaceutical groups had been kinder. The head of one such enterprise had brightened when Annia described her background in domestic virus technology. "You've actually worked with those systems?" she'd asked.

"It was the basis of my university research."

The middle-aged woman had leaned into the fax pick-up. "We're very excited about that kind of work -- trying to establish a line of domestic viruses to treat polaxis syndrome and related disorders that persistently resist drug treatment. I'll tell you frankly, though, we're grossly under-funded right now. I can't think of a way to squeeze you in."

Annia said, "I'm primarily interested in having a place to pursue my own research. I can barter service."

The woman spread her hands, and made a rueful face. "I don't know what I can tell you. We haven't enough space or equipment ourselves, but I'm very interested in your work. Please do keep in touch."

Annia wasted more than an hour sorting directories in the hope of turning up something that wasn't on Maycee's list. She became excited about two possibilities only to find that they were subsidiaries of companies she'd already contacted, and their hiring was all done through the parent corporations. She gave up when the credit counter rolled over the one-hundred-credit mark. She'd spent almost an eighth of her small nest egg and accomplished nothing -- just as Maycee Charmmes had predicted.

The irony bit at her. She had risked her life to escape captivity on Guardian. Her Data belonged to her again, and there was nothing to stop her from proving that the most catastrophic plague in human history was due to recur in less than twenty years. Except that she had no equipment and very little credit to her name. She might as well have left the data behind for all the good it did her here.

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