“Did you correct the course?” Katrina interrupted.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “It will take a while to get back, of course, but I righted our direction.”
As Hiro was letting the captain know their situation, Maria quietly passed out jumpsuits. Wolfgang snatched two without looking at her, thrusting one at Paul—who had grabbed instead for Joanna’s wheelchair and was steadying himself with one hand on his vat and the chair in the other, shielding himself. Joanna took Paul’s suit from Wolfgang and traded it to him for her chair with a kind smile. Dr. Glass accepted her suit with a smile, slid into it with practiced ease, and climbed into her new wheelchair. She steadied herself against a cloning vat until the gravity increased to keep her stable on the ground. The legs of her jumpsuit drifted lazily from her tiny legs.
“Want something to tie those up so they don’t drag?” Maria asked, pointing at the dangling cuffs.
“Thanks, but no,” Dr. Glass said, pulling them in and tucking them neatly under her. “I’ll go and get my other prosthetics from my room later. Or my crutches. When this calms down.” She waved her hand at the horror show around them.
Maria followed her gesture, at the bouncing bodies, the splattered gore, the frazzled crew. “I’m not sure when this is going to calm down. There’s a lot of stuff going on.”
Joanna quirked an eyebrow. “You mean there’s more?”
Maria grimaced and pointed to the captain, who was hearing the story about them discovering Hiro’s body. She moved to stand beside him. The gravity was improving, bit by bit, as the drive got the ship turning fast enough.
“It looks like suicide,” Hiro said, avoiding the captain’s eyes.
“But we don’t know anything for sure right now,” Maria added. “He’s also younger than all of our clones.”
Joanna held up a finger. “That on the surface means nothing worrisome; he could have died recently for any number of reasons.”
“We won’t know if it’s suicide without examining the body,” Wolfgang said.
Hiro looked at him, surprised. Maria hadn’t expected Wolfgang to give him the benefit of the doubt either.
“There’s one more thing,“ Hiro said, looking at Maria.
So it was her turn to deliver the bad news. She sighed and squared her shoulders. “The big news,” she said to Katrina, “is your previous clone isn’t dead. She’s in medbay in a coma.”
The captain said nothing, but the color drained from her face and her lips pursed tightly together. She looked at Paul as if this whole thing was his fault. “Enough. You get to work. Hiro, Joanna, with me to the medbay. Wolfgang, you’re in charge here.”
Paul stood, now fully clothed, staring at Katrina. He had stopped sobbing, but he still shook slightly. The thick synth-amneo drained off his hair as the gravity slowly returned. He didn’t move.
“Doc, that’s not normal, is it?” Maria asked, jabbing her thumb at the frightened man.
“On rare occasions, a clone can have a bad reaction to waking up,” Joanna said. “It’s not unlike waking from a nightmare, being disoriented and not knowing what is real.”
“Only this time he woke up to a nightmare. Poor guy,” Maria said.
“Captain, a moment, please,” Joanna said, and pushed her chair carefully toward Paul.
One of the best things about cloning was that, even if there were no modifications done to the genes, each clone came out in the best possible shape at peak physical age. Maria remembered Paul as a mid-forties white man with a large belly and poorly cut blond hair. His arms were covered with dark spots like mosquito bites that he scratched nervously so they never healed. He wore a full beard and greatly disliked the tight (to him) jumpsuits that they were forced to wear as uniforms.
None of that Paul was here now. The only resemblance was the wide, watery blue eyes that stared out from a strong face, clean skin with a few moles and freckles, and a toned body. Not bodybuilder-toned but certainly not someone Maria would kick out of bed. If he were not looking on the verge of a breakdown.
“Paul, we need you to step up and do your job,” Joanna said calmly. “If there’s a problem with this current body or mindmap, you need to let me know right now. Otherwise we need you to get IAN online.”
Wolfgang raised a white eyebrow. “You think I didn’t tell him that already?”
“You used different wording,” Joanna said, not looking at him. She gently reached out and touched Paul’s hand.
He jerked it away from her. “Y’all could have given me a little privacy,” he said hoarsely.
“Privacy?” snorted Wolfgang.
“That’s ridiculous. If you ever want a checkup, you’ll have to get used to getting treated by me,” Joanna said.
Paul looked at his corpse, his face turning a bit green. The body that lay tethered to the others on the cold floor; the one with multiple bruises in his neck was more like the one Maria remembered, only older. He looked worn; space and time had not been kind to him, as he weighed even more than her memory. He wore a ratty T-shirt of a band long dead, and his jumpsuit was zipped only to his waist. The top half of the suit draped behind him as if his ass had its own cape.
The living Paul gulped and looked up. “What—”
“Happened? You know as much as we do. That’s what we’re trying to figure out, and that’s why you need to figure out what’s wrong with our AI.”
He nodded once and focused on the console across the bay. “I can do that.” Stumbling, he walked past them and gave the dead bodies a wide berth to get to the terminal where they could access IAN.
Wolfgang bent to examine the corpses.
Joanna nodded. “Ready, Captain.”
Katrina led the way down the corridor, Hiro pushing Joanna’s clumsily bouncing wheelchair down the hall behind her. Hiro thought that the doctor would have preferred to wait for the ship to achieve full gravity before they moved, but she didn’t complain.
When they took the turn in the corridor toward the medbay, Joanna called out for Katrina to stop. “Take a moment before you go in there. This kind of thing can be quite upsetting.”
“What of the many kinds of things we’ve seen today are you referring to?” Katrina asked with a touch of acid in her voice.
“Encountering your previous clone,” Joanna said.
“How many times has it happened before? Unless I didn’t hear of new codicils, having a second clone is highly illegal, right?”
“Well, so’s murder, but that doesn’t stop people,” Hiro said, forcing lightness into his voice.
The captain’s body was stiff as she forced herself to slow down for Hiro and Joanna to catch up. In another situation, Hiro would have been amused to watch her internal struggle, but he was busy wondering how he would feel in this situation. This specific one, anyway.