Abomination? It?
One shock after another rolled over Lena, making it impossible to do anything but gape at Dax. She didn’t even try to resist when someone seized her arm and led her away.
* * * *
An unaccustomed sense of doubt plagued Dax as he watched the guards escort Lena below. The problem was that reason and instinct were in conflict where she was concerned. Statistically speaking, they’d discovered that the gov had a 1-0 batting average when it came to replacing people with their cloned copies, which made it highly unlikely that Lena had escaped the fate planned for her.
On a gut level, everything in him was telling him she was the Lena, the one and only.
Tamping the vague sense of uneasiness plaguing him, he strode briskly along the gangway and climbed the tube to the bridge.
“Captain on deck!” an enthusiastic recruit announced the moment he appeared through the opening, clicking his heels smartly and saluting.
Discipline was necessary to form an army that was worth its salt, but Dax wasn’t particularly enthused about the rigid ceremony of the traditional army, partly because it made him uncomfortable since he wasn’t regular army, and partly because it reminded him too much of the people he’d come to despise.
Nevertheless, he returned the salute.
“Captain! It’s good to have you back in one piece--sir!” Rodriguez said as he spied Dax.
“It’s good to be back in one piece,” Dax responded somewhat dryly.
Rodriguez grinned, relaxing when he saw that Dax didn’t mean to stand on ceremony, but shook his head. “We’d begun to worry you wouldn’t be able to pull it off.”
Dax glanced at his pilot speculatively a moment before he turned his attention to the map the navigator had pulled up. “How much did you lose?” he asked, his voice tinged with amusement.
Rodriguez chuckled. “Naw, man! I won! I told them you’d have her out by the end of the week.”
Dax nodded, but his amusement vanished as he focused on the screen. “Plot an evasive course to this point.”
The navigator glanced at him sharply. “She’s carrying?”
“We have to assume she is. Either that was the most incompetent sons-of-bitches ever brought together in one place, or we’ve been set up.”
* * * *
Lena was scarcely aware of the sights and sounds of moving along a narrow corridor and through one air lock after another, climbing down a tube, traversing yet another corridor. Throughout most of it, her mind was pure chaos.
It wasn’t until she’d been shoved down on a gurney and strapped to it that she even began to emerge from the shock and by then it was too late. A woman approached her, stabbed a needle into her arm and almost at once she began to drift away.
Light was flicked into her eyes. Someone grabbed her eyelid, turned it inside out.
“This isn’t the clone,” a woman’s voice said sharply.
‘Abomination’ suddenly made sense, but Lena didn’t have the chance to muddle through why it made sense or what difference it might make to her. Her sight dimmed and the sounds around her dulled and finally flickered out.
“She’s out,” Mel muttered. “Let’s get her cleaned up. She’s such a mess, poor thing, I can’t tell where she’s hurt. Wait! The Captain said to scan her first for a locator.”
A tech moved a scanner into position and keyed in the command. Slowly, so slowly it was hard to detect the movement of the thing, the machine began its trek down her body. Mel moved to the screen, frowning. “Her vitals look a little shaky. I’m seeing borderline malnutrition and dehydration. Tom! Get a needle in her and start a drip. Let’s see if we can’t get her plumped up a bit.”
When she saw him swipe her arm and insert the needle, she returned her attention to the scan read out. “Somebody beat the hell out of her, and more than once from the looks of it. Looks like she’s got fractures everywhere. We’d better take care of those first--assuming we don’t find anything internal that takes priority--bath next and then we’ll have a look at the cuts and see if any of them need sealing.”
They would’ve missed the locator if it had been left to the human eye to catch. The scanner paused, however, when it reached her chest, setting off an alarm as it pinpointed what looked like little more than a black speck near her spine. Drawing the scanner back, they released the restraints and rolled her over. Using a micro-viewer, Mel removed the tiny sensor carefully and used a laser to close the wound.
Dropping the locator into a metal receptacle, she left her assistants to turn Lena over again and moved to the com. “We got one, Captain.”
“Make sure it’s only one, and not just a decoy.”
“Sneaky bastards. We’ll start another scan.”
