The Clones of Mawcett (26 page)

As the dig site members whooped, hollered, whistled, and applauded, Jenetta and Gavin, with the pilots and Marines following, made their way to the surface via an access shaft located and cleared by one of the Marine patrols.

The area outside the facility was now covered with fighters from the Prometheus. Twenty-five fighter ships, plus two MATs were parked in and around the area that had originally been appropriated for the base. The wings of the fighters, always extended outwards for flight in a planetary atmosphere, where more responsive flight characteristics were achieved by pushing off from and redirecting the air flow, had been refolded flat against their bodies once the ships were down. The large, phased array laser, mounted in a swiveling nose turret, clearly established the lethality of the fighter craft. The squat, boxy-looking utilitarian MATs, not very much more aerodynamically sound than shipping containers, contrasted sharply with the sleek, narrow designs of the fighter ships.

The Tsgardi had picked the area clean, carting away anything and everything of any value that was removable. It was almost as if the Tsgardi had been trying to wipe away all trace of the scientific effort. They had even taken the stacks of packing crates used to hold the valuable artifacts, dug up during months of effort, after first dumping the contents out onto the ground. Of course the simple truth was that the Tsgardi were the biggest scavengers in the known galaxy. Little more than trash, and the excavated artifacts, remained at the archeological camp.

Kanes was closely examining the door to the facility when Jenetta and Gavin arrived outside the entrance in the tunnel. The area immediately outside the facility had been blasted to rubble, and it was incredible that the arched roof of the access tunnel hadn't collapsed.

“Commander, welcome back to the land of the living,” Kanes said as they approached.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Space Command has you listed as missing-in-action and presumed lost, by the way.”

“I hope they weren't too quick to notify my parents of that. They've been through enough with my last missing and presumed lost.”

“Standard procedure is to notify the family as soon as a determination is made. When our fighter squadrons made contact with your Marine patrols, and we learned that you were okay, we sent that information on to Space Command. I'm sure they'll notify your parents right away that you're safe and sound. How did you manage to keep the Raiders out? It looks like they threw everything they had at this door.”

“All I did was close and lock the door, sir. We have the inhabitants from twenty thousand years ago to thank for our lives. Too bad the Prometheus isn't covered with this material. We wouldn't need three layers of outer skin and self-sealing membranes.”

"I was thinking that myself. I suspect this base will remain under the authority of Space Command for a little longer than originally planned.

“If we can't use it for ships that must travel in the cold of outer space, I hope that we can at least use it for armored personnel carriers and body armor for our marines. It saved our bacon, and I know it can save a lot more lives.”

“I'll pass on your recommendations, Commander. I assume that the cloning equipment was destroyed as a preventative measure against falling into enemy hands?”

“No sir. I sent a good deal of it to Vinnia in two of our shuttles after the third acted as a decoy to lure the Raiders away from the planet so the two could make their escape undetected. Part of the equipment is still here, rigged with explosives and motion detonators so it will blow if it's moved. You need all three parts to make it work.”

“Do you know if the shuttle pilot survived?” Gavin asked.

“It was piloted by my sister. According to the Tsgardi captain, she was taken alive.”

“Your sister?” Kanes said. “What are you talking about, Commander?”

“Commander Carver was cloned,” Gavin said nonchalantly, watching Kanes closely to see his reaction.

“Cloned?” Kanes said, his eyes wide. “You were cloned? How many times?”

“Twice. We named them Two and Three, temporarily.”

“We?”

“The clones and me. We agreed on the simple names until we figured out how to classify them.”

“What ever compelled you to clone yourself?” Kanes asked, then grinned and said, “Ah, the Raider attack.”

“No sir. Someone drugged me and the process was started without my permission. As soon as we figured out how to shut down the machine, we did so. But by then there were seven clones of each of the eleven scientists and two clones of me.”

“Have you discovered who drugged you and started the process?”

“No sir, and I don't think that we ever will. I think the person acted impulsively and without malice, only later realizing the seriousness of the charges that would be preferred against them if his or her identity was discovered. The drug is a commonly available sleeping aid and could have easily been stolen by someone in the archeology camp. I don't think there would be anything to gain by pursuing the issue.”

“Where's Three?” Gavin asked. “You did say that the second clone was named Three?”

“Yes sir. Three piloted one of the shuttles to Vinnia. I don't know her status.”

“We can find out easily enough,” Kanes said, “once the jamming satellites have been collected and disabled. Three tugs have been dispatched to round them up. We'll send a message to Vinnia as soon as we can.”

“Yes sir. I'd also like to know if Lieutenant Crocker is okay. He took the third shuttle. We can move into the facility to continue the debriefing, if you like. We'll have to use the sewer tunnel entrance, but the way is almost dry.”

Finding the nearest entrance into the sewer system, Jenetta led the way to the tunnel that led up into the facility. The marines were already clearing the pumping station and moving the remaining supplies back into the facility. Marine Lieutenant Taggert had to momentarily clear his people from the final ten meters leading to the facility so that the three officers could pass through the narrow tunnel ingress.

Kanes took a few minutes to examine the inside of the main door after they arrived inside the facility. “Amazing, absolutely amazing. A month of effort and they only managed to open enough of a crack to get a fiberoptic probe through.”

“They probably gave up after finding the facility dark, and with life support disabled,” Jenetta said. “I'd hoped they would assume that we'd never been there at all, and that we'd had weeks to escape through the forest. They knew by then that we'd had a shuttle and I hoped they would think that we had already moved the cloning equipment to a different location on the planet. They certainly didn't have time to begin assaults on warehouses scattered around this world. My engineers believe that the entire door frame can be removed from the inside, sir. We can replace it with one of the others. The doors in the corridor are all about the same size.”

“If that's possible, then do it by all means,” Gavin said. “We'll take the damaged door with us. The engineers can rig something up to replace the missing interior door.”

“Yes sir. I'll get Commander Cameron on it as soon as we're done here. Shall we adjourn to the mess hall for some coffee?”

“Mess hall?” Kanes said in surprise. “You have a mess hall?”

“Yes sir. We have a mess hall capable of accommodating a hundred-fifty, and sleeping accommodations for a hundred-twenty-four. We also have a fully equipped sick bay, although I ordered that all unidentified equipment be packed up for shipment to Space Command.”

Moving down the brightly illuminated corridor, with Jenetta leading, they stopped in front of the mess hall doors. Jenetta casually said, “Dwuthathsei” to open the doors and then “Summatah” to turn the lights on.

“Isn't that Dakis?” Kanes asked.

“Yes sir,” Jenetta said as she stood out of the way so the two senior officers could enter the room first. “I discovered that the Nordakians were the original inhabitants of this planet, and that it was originally named Dakistee, meaning 'homeland.' Nordakia means 'new home.' Almost twenty thousand years ago a huge group of emigrants, seeking freedom of expression for their radical religious doctrine, left this planet. Some time after that, a plague infected the entire population here, leaving them sterile and unable to reproduce. They were able to completely eradiate the plague, but the damage had already been done. As they faced the demise of their species on this planet, they tried to find the people that had gone, but the ones who'd left didn't want to be found.  They didn't answer hails and it was later learned that they hadn't followed the flight plan they'd filed. The Dakistee people tried cloning to rebuild the population but the equipment was too precise and sterility was replicated into the clones. The scientists finally announced that they could never restore reproductive capability. With no one except sterile originals to use as cloning prototypes, the population died out in little more than a century. I guess the people just gave up. Perhaps if their equipment created children, instead of fully mature adults, they might have had more incentive to go on searching for an answer.”

“How did you learn all this?” Gavin asked as they took seats at a table.

“While attempting to shut off the cloning equipment without damaging it or harming any of the clones, Two and I discovered the computer in the facility had auditory sensors and speech ability.”

“You're saying that the Nordakian language hasn't changed in twenty thousand years?” Captain Kanes asked.

“Colloquialisms, technical terminology, and slang have naturally crept in, while others have disappeared, as with any language, but the basic language has endured amazingly well, in spite of numerous phonetic aberrations. Still, we had a strong foundation on which to build and bridge the gaps. The computer adjusted quickly to the newer pronunciations and nuances.”

“If you went back twenty thousand years on Earth,” Gavin said, “it's doubtful that you could even begin to communicate with any of the inhabitants.”

“But Earth didn't have a single language twenty thousand years ago. I believe that the Almuth is responsible for keeping the spoken language from straying too far from the original. Someone changed the language's written symbols at some point, so it's like comparing the Roman numeral five, with the Arabic symbol for five, or the Chinese symbol for five. They represent the same integer value, but look nothing alike. Once we could interface with the computer, we reviewed as much of the historical data as we could. And once I'd downloaded everything into my personal computer, we could view the vid broadcasts from twenty-thousand years ago, with subtitles. It's fascinating. The Nordakian ancestors weren't nearly as tall as their descendents. In fact, they looked much more Terran-like than they do now. They still had no external ear parts, but the males had full heads of hair, and their skin color varied between puce and rose. Unfortunately, the Raiders interrupted our research, but we learned that the Nordakians didn't have the ability to change their skin color back then.”

 “Have you told the scientists about any of this?” Kanes asked.

“No sir. I did give Dr. Peterson a full list of the symbols used for numerical values and weights and measures, but I haven't given them a complete briefing and I've withheld a full translation of the language. So far they don't seem to have made the connection to Dakis. You now know much, much more than they do. This is startling news and may have great repercussions.”

“Such as?” Gavin asked.

“The Nordakians may lay claim to the planet.”

“They have no claim,” Gavin said. “If what you say is accurate, their ancestors voluntarily abandoned the planet twenty thousand years ago, with no intention of returning.”

“It must have taken them hundreds of years to reach Nordakia,” Jenetta said, “because they only had rudimentary space flight capability with sub-light speeds back then. I imagine many generations must have been born, lived, and died aboard the ships before they found Nordakia. I've wondered if perhaps inadequate radiation shielding caused mutations that were responsible for the hair loss and skin coloration differences. We do know their leaders were extreme religious fundamentalists who wanted their followers to renounce all technological advances and return to the land. From what I learned in my studies on Nordakia, they probably destroyed their spacecraft once they reached the new planet and used the materials for plows or something.”