A Science Fiction Adventure Told in Episodes
Captain Clone: The Third: A Science Fiction Story
I’m Sorry for Being Sick, Captain.
First officer, Mikaa, wakes with a headache after drinking too much wine the night before. She’d turned to the bottle after failing to find a cure for her infected clone sisters.
Reluctantly, she has told the Captain about her failure. The Captain immediately decides to visit the sick room.
This is a serial retro space adventure. Find the first episode here, and the next part will be published soon.
Disposable Bodies
We entered sick room together, with me still a few paces behind the captain. The captain looked at the rows of women lying in the beds.
“What a waste. How long did you say that it take to treat them?”
“A week, maybe five days.”
“Hardly worth it, is it?”
I looked at the rows of identical faces in the sick room — the captain’s face — my face. Only the captain was real. The rest of us were copies, ship-bred and ship-raised. All the crew were clones of the captain. Only the captain was real, had attained citizenship, was born from a woman and not brought to life in the green, glazed cloning tubules filled with simple, sucking nutrients.
“Didn’t you fight back, eh?” said the captain to Verna.
“We tried, Captain.”
Verna’s face was webbed with grey micro-tentacles which pulsed to the beat of her blood. They wove through the capillaries of her body, using her own network against her.
“What’s your report?”
“I’m sorry, Captain.” Verna winced as she eased herself higher in the bed. “It just kind of happened. One minute we were walking, cutting our way through the jungle, and the next thing, the entity jumped us. We only caught a glimpse of it, before the tentacles engulfed us.”
“The entity? Can’t you even give it a name? Names are important. That’s why you haven’t got names.”
I shuddered. The captain was so cruel. The crew didn’t seem to mind. They were too young, only two years old, though they wore the bodies of adult women. They didn’t know any better. Names were important, that’s why I’d named every one of my sisters.
“We’re allocating it the name of Grey Cut, Captain,” I said.
“That’s better.” The captain moved along the sick room to another bed. To Saleen’s bed. I recognised her by a small scar in her eyebrow, still visible below the grey web. Saleen looked at the captain with a look of devotion on her disfigured face. “Describe Grey Cut to me,” said the captain.
“A spherical body, maybe ten metres in diameter. It was covered in tentacles which narrowed to a small spike. If you get cut by one of the spikes, you become infected. The infection spreads quickly. We all became infected.”
“I can see that,” said the captain. She turned to me and said, “Delete them all, and clone up a new batch.” Without a backward glance at the crew, the captain walked out of the sick room. “We’ll meet Grey Cut ourselves this afternoon, Mikar.”
There wasn’t even a murmur of protest from the crew. They’d been taught to live and die at the captain’s command. They accepted their fate, in fact, one or two of the crew members tried to struggle out of bed, to assist me.
“No, that’s all right. Go back to bed, rest awhile.”
“I wish . . .” said Saleen.
“Yes?”
“I wish that we could have done a better job for the captain.”
“Rest now,” I said.
