“I’ve got a lot more freedom now,” IAN said.
“It’s not ethical for you to go in there, they hold confidential information!” she protested.
“Fine, then just show me my body’s scan,” Maria said. The data that Joanna had taken from her previous clone’s scan came up on the screen. “Can you change a few things for me?” she said.
“Are you going to break my scanner?” Joanna asked.
“That would work counter to my goal here. You should have a sample of my blood from the last clone, right?”
“Right, that data is in my—” Joanna began, but IAN interrupted her.
“Found it.”
“Great, now give me a second,” Maria said.
Joanna had no idea what Maria was doing, considering she didn’t have a tablet or working terminal in there, but she gave some commands to IAN that sounded much more like code and less like medical information. She sounded as if she was translating certain information about the brain activity, the DNA in the blood, and the commands via the spinal cord into ones and zeros. Joanna finally gave up asking questions and just watched the medbay cameras, Maria’s commands to IAN completely lost on her.
She jumped when Maria shouted in triumph, a noise Joanna heard through both the walls and the speaker.
“It’s possible. We did it.”
“What was all that?” Joanna asked.
“I now have a full DNA matrix of myself,” she said.
“What? How is that possible?”
“Your scanner takes a lot of data, the same amount of data the cloning bay needs, but it produces it in a different format for a human to read, not a computer. So I just took its data, and the DNA info from my blood, and merged it all together to make a matrix of my current body.”
“Won’t it be corrupted since it was blood from your clone with hemlock poisoning?”
“You can take a fresh sample,” Maria said patiently. “I’m not saying let’s grow a clone from this data right here. But if I work on it a little longer, I can probably get the machine in the cloning lab to read it.”
Joanna stared in wonder. Why had she never thought to look at it this way? Probably because she had never needed to.
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“Then we die in space. Just like we were going to anyway.”
Joanna nodded slowly. “How did you think of this?”
“I still had my data stored from you guys, all your personal tastes. Whoever wiped the logs couldn’t hit my private drives. I’m a digital pack rat, I can’t help it. So I wondered what else we could use that the saboteur wouldn’t have thought to break. And then wondered what your scanner was capable of.”
“All right, so if we can give the lab the data for growing new clones, that’s a third of the battle. We have no software to actually run the cloning bay. And even if we did, the new clones would be blank slates.”
“I’m still working on that one,” Maria said. “But at least we can get the DNA matrices recorded. When Wolfgang lets us out.”
“If he lets us out,” Joanna corrected. “But considering how those three acted down belowdecks, it looks like we’ll need the new clones sooner rather than later.”
“Can I see the medbay again, IAN?” Joanna asked. The video feed came up. “Is there any audio?” she asked.
IAN obliged, and Joanna sat down to listen to Katrina and Hiro argue.
“That’s Captain de la Cruz to you, pilot,” Katrina snapped again, with little strength in her voice.
Both she and Hiro were coming out of sedated sleeps, and Hiro woke up with a desire to push her buttons. They’d taken the ship away from her after she’d murdered herself, but the biggest problem in this woman’s life right now was another prisoner calling her Kat.
He wasn’t trying to be an asshole. Well. Mostly. Over the years he had found different ways to handle the voices inside his head. Sometimes biting the inside of his mouth worked, but that was painful and could lead to sores that lasted for days. Sometimes channeling their rage into harmless teasing was the best way to maintain dominance over them. The others, they found “harmless” teasing impossible. If they had control, they would cut to the quick, hurt as fast and deep as possible. Inside his head, they were screaming at him to cut, to insult her on every level, to break free from his restraints and kill her while she was weak, to do so much.
So he called her Kat. Even though he knew she would never believe that he was doing so in order to defy his yadokari personalities, and not to insult her.
“I’m not going to defend myself to you or anyone,” she said, looking at the ceiling with her one eye. “We got the information we needed. Wolfgang can arrest Maria and then we can continue on our mission without fear.”
Hiro laughed. “Yeah, we’re not afraid you’ll kill us in order to get an answer out of us. Or that I might snap again and go on another killing spree. You realize that with Maria, Wolfgang has put half of this crew in jail, right? I am pretty sure he, Joanna, and IAN can’t pull this sled alone.”
“There’s Paul too,” de la Cruz said.
“Yeah, best team player we’ve got right there,” Hiro said. “Let’s face it, Captain. We’re fucked. We’re either going to have to trust each other or accept that we’re dead out here in the cold. Like we apparently tried to do a few days ago.”
She didn’t answer him. She was pointedly ignoring him.
Whatever. As he became more alert, his wounds were starting to ache, and he wondered when the doctor would come back to check on them. Prisoners or no, they were patients too, right?
“And if we’re all dead, then we might as well throw a huge great wake,” he mumbled to himself.
“Hiro?” came the voice in the wall speaker.
“Yeah, IAN?” he said. “How’s everything on the ship, buddy?”
“I thought you should know that Joanna is also in custody for the murder of Paul. Not this incarnation of Paul, but the previous one. So that leaves Wolfgang, Paul, and me pulling this sled. Just thought you should know!”
Hiro’s mouth hung open. Joanna killed Paul?
“Who’s going to give us our pain meds?” demanded Kat loudly.
Two crewmembers were violently dangerous, another had confessed to murder, and one was fingered as the cause of all this crap. And that left Wolfgang with the idiot.
He remembered a priestess at the church, Mother Nadia, who always implored him to go easy on people who messed up. The janitor didn’t clean thoroughly, the Body of Christ was not ordered from Earth in time before they ran out, the altar boys and girls forgot their Latin. Mother Nadia begged him to forgive, as Our Lord did.
Wolfgang had sternly told her that Our Lord didn’t have clumsy, forgetful, or drunk people he relied on. And Wolfgang would forgive them, but only after they improved.
Since leaving the church and forsaking his vows, he found that he still didn’t have a lot of patience for people who couldn’t be assed to pull their own weight.