“What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked.
“We had the cocktail party in Luna station as the final passengers were entering cryo and getting loaded. We came aboard. We were given some hours to move into our quarters. Then we had the tour, which ended in the cloning bay, getting our updated mindmaps.”
“Same here,” he said.
“Are you scared?” Maria said, stopping and looking at him.
She hadn’t scrutinized him since waking up in the cloning bay. She was used to the way that clones with the experience of hundreds of years could look like they had just stepped out of university. Their bodies woke up at peak age, twenty years old, designed to be built with muscle. What the clones did with that muscle once they woke up was their challenge.
Akihiro Sato was a thin Pan Pacific United man of Japanese descent with short black hair that was drying in stiff cowlicks. He had lean muscles, and high cheekbones. His eyes were black, and they met hers with a level gaze. She didn’t look too closely at the rest of him; she wasn’t rude.
He pulled at a cowlick, then tried to smooth it down. “I’ve woken up in worse places.”
“Like where?” she asked, pointing down the hall from where they had come. “What’s worse than that horror movie scene?”
He raised his hands in supplication. “I don’t mean literally. I mean I’ve lost time before. You have to learn to adapt sometimes. Fast. I wake up. I assess the immediate threat. I try to figure out where I was last time I uploaded a mindmap. This time I woke up in the middle of a bunch of dead bodies, but there was no threat that I could tell.” He cocked his head, curious. “Haven’t you ever lost time before? Not even a week? Surely you’ve died between backups.”
“Yes,” she admitted. “But I’ve never woken up in danger, or in the wake of danger.”
“You’re still not in danger,” he said. “That we know of.”
She stared at him.
“Immediate danger,” he amended. “I’m not going to stab you right here in the hall. All of our danger right now consists of problems that we can likely fix. Lost memories, broken computer, finding a murderer. Just a little work and we’ll be back on track.”
“You are the strangest kind of optimist,” she said. “All the same, I’d like to continue to freak out if you don’t mind.”
“Try to keep it together. You don’t want to devolve into whatever Paul has become,” he suggested as he continued down the hall.
Maria followed, glad that he wasn’t behind her. “I’m keeping it together. I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You’ll probably feel better when you’ve had a shower and some food,” he said. “Not to mention clothes.”
They were both covered only in the tacky, drying synth-amneo fluid. Maria had never wanted a shower more in her life. “Aren’t you a little worried about what we’re going to find when we find your body?” she asked.
Hiro looked back at her. “I learned a while back not to mourn the old shells. If we did, we’d get more and more dour with each life. In fact, I think that may be Wolfgang’s problem.” He frowned. “Have you ever had to clean up the old body by yourself?”
Maria shook her head. “No. It was disorienting; she was looking at me, like she was blaming me. It’s still not as bad as not knowing what happened, though.”
“Or who happened,” said Hiro. “It did have a knife.”
“And it was violent,” Maria said. “It could be one of us.”
“Probably was, or else we should get excited about a first-contact situation. Or second contact, if the first one went so poorly…” Hiro said, then sobered. “But truly anything could have gone wrong. Someone could have woken up from cryo and gone mad, even. Computer glitch messed with the mindmap. But it’s probably easily explained, like someone got caught cheating at poker. Heat of the moment, someone hid an ace, the doctor flipped the table—”
“It’s not funny,” Maria said softly. “It wasn’t madness and it wasn’t an off-the-cuff crime. If that had happened, we wouldn’t have the grav drive offline. We wouldn’t be missing decades of memories. IAN would be able to tell us what’s going on. But someone—one of us—wanted us dead, and they also messed with the personality backups. Why?”
“Is that rhetorical? Or do you really expect me to know?” he asked.
“Rhetorical,” grumbled Maria. She shook her head to clear it. A strand of stiff black hair smacked her in the face, and she winced. “It could have been two people. One killed us, one messed with the memories.”
“True,” he said. “We can probably be sure it was premeditated. Anyway, the captain was right. Let’s be cautious. And let’s make a pact. I’ll promise not to kill you and you promise not to kill me. Deal?”
Maria smiled in spite of herself. She shook his hand. “I promise. Let’s get going before the captain sends someone after us.”
The door to medbay was rimmed in red lights, making it easy to find if ill or injured. With the alert, the lights were blinking, alternating between red and yellow. Hiro stopped abruptly at the entrance. Maria smacked into the back of him in a collision that sent them spinning gently like gears in a clock, making him turn to face the hall while she swung around to see what had stopped him so suddenly.
The contact could have been awkward except for the shock of the scene before them.
In the medbay, a battered, older version of Captain Katrina de la Cruz lay in a bed. She was unconscious but very much alive, hooked up to life support, complete with IV, breathing tubes, and monitors. Her face was a mess of bruises, and her right arm was in a cast. She was strapped to the bed, which was held to the floor magnetically.
“I thought we all died,” Hiro said, his voice soft with wonder.
“For us all to wake up, we should have. I guess I hit the emergency resurrection switch anyway,” Maria said, pushing herself off the doorjamb to float into the room closer to the captain.
“Too bad you can’t ask yourself,” Hiro said drily.
Penalties for creating a duplicate clone were stiff, usually resulting in the extermination of the older clone. Although with several murders to investigate, and now an assault, Wolfgang would probably not consider this particular crime a priority to punish.
“No one is going to be happy about this,” Hiro said, pointing at the unconscious body of the captain. “Least of all Katrina. What are we going to do with two captains?”
“But this could be good,” Maria said. “If we can wake her up, we might find out what happened.”
“I can’t see her agreeing with you,” he said.
A silver sheet covered the body and drifted lazily where the straps weren’t holding it down. The captain’s clone was still, the breathing tube the only sound.