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  "A duplicate?" Eliza said.

  "The slain convict recognized the undercover Space Command operative that had arrested him and drew his weapon. Our man had no choice but to draw and fire. The question remains though. How can an incarcerated killer be in two places at the same time?"

  "Has to be a clone," Christa said.

  "We accounted for all the clones made on Dakistee," Jenetta said confidently.

  "Did we?" Christa asked.

  "We know exactly who was made on the equipment that made us. Are you suggesting that there might be another machine that we don't know about?" Eliza asked.

  "It's possible," Christa responded. "One machine wouldn't have been able to reproduce the entire population of the planet if the original inhabitants had succeeded in neutralizing the cause of their sterility."

  "You're suggesting that a Tsgardi found another site on the planet, learned to operate the equipment, and cloned himself?" Jenetta said, half as a question and half as a statement.

  "Why not? The cloning process where Eliza and I were created, was initiated when a laborer innocently placed a lamp on what appeared to be a table."

  "If your hypothesis is correct, there could be a couple of hundred copies of that criminal running around by now," Jenetta said.

  "Not a happy thought if he's as dangerous as you say."

  "I think that I should give Captain Kanes a call, and relate what we've discussed. Excuse me." Jenetta touched the SC ring on her right hand with her left forefinger and said, "Captain Kanes." Touching the ring signaled the base communications computer to establish a link to her cranial transducer. The vibrations produced by her vocal cords traveled through her skull and were picked up by the CT before being transmitted on the carrier wave emitted by the base's computer. After a few seconds, she heard a reply in the tiny CT. Sent out only on her assigned frequency, neither Eliza or Christa could hear the response, but to Jenetta it sounded as if Kanes was speaking directly into her left ear.

  "Yes sir. Sorry to bother you, but are you available for a private meeting. Something has come up that I think you should hear. I can't speak about it on an open line." Jenetta paused for a reply, then, "Yes sir. Fifteen minutes in your office. Carver, out." The sign off instructed the computer to stop emitting the carrier wave.

  Twelve minutes later, Jenetta arrived at the Intelligence Section and waited in Kanes outer office until he got there. She stood up quickly as he entered and motioned her to follow. He unlocked his office doors with his handprint and she followed him in.

  "What's so urgent, Jen?"

  "My sisters and I were speaking earlier, and I mentioned the possibility that the Tsgardi criminal might have been cloned. Christa suggested that he might have been cloned using Dakistee equipment."

  "No, that's impossible. We have all that equipment here at Higgins. I can assure you that no Tsgardi has been cloned at this base."

  "Yes sir. We discussed the possibility that there might be additional facilities on the planet, and that somehow the Tsgardi found one, and managed to activate it. One cloning location would not have been adequate to clone the entire population since it took almost seven days to make a clone and there were only twenty-five artificial wombs. One facility could only make thirteen-hundred clones each year."

  Kanes looked intently at her for a few moments, then walked around his office for a few minutes as he thought. Jenetta just stood in silence, waiting for him to speak.

  "It's possible," he said finally. "Unlikely, but possible. Not unlikely that there couldn't be more facilities, but that a Tsgardi could locate one and manage to initiate the process. They're not exactly intellectuals. A light destroyer has been stationed in orbit around the planet since the cloning incident occurred, but a small shuttle could possibly sneak in and out if they knew the ship's orbital path and schedule, and that could be easily determined by someone on the surface with basic equipment. The facility where our cloning equipment was found has been continually occupied as an outpost, even though the equipment was transported here two and a half years ago, but as you suggest, there could be additional locations. By the way, the criminal at the penal colony has been conclusively identified as Recozzi by every test that we have, so a clone appears to be more a possibility then ever."

  "Then it seems that you have to decide if a complete search of Dakistee should be commenced."

  "Yes, but we're talking about an entire planet. It could take an army of investigators years to cover the surface, and it still might not be found. There may be nothing to find."

  "Normally I'd suggest just searching for emanations from power sources, but we know that the material used in the construction of the facility that housed the cloning lab we dismantled, totally shielded the entire installation, making it invisible to sensors."

  "True. We could be looking at it with sensors from two meters away and never identify it."

  "There's another related topic that we discussed, sir."

  "Yes?"

  "We talked about the difficulty of identifying the clones on Dakistee since they're all identical, right down to their retinal images, fingerprints, and DNA. Unlike my sisters, they don't have CT's to identify them."

  "That was taken care of long ago, Jen. When the clones were given their physicals here at Higgins, a laser was used to slightly alter their retinal images and fingerprints. The alterations took a fraction of an instant, didn't cause any discomfort, and didn't affect their eyesight or sensation of touch. Each clone has a unique identity now."

  "I see. Why wasn't that done to Eliza?"

  "It was. Twice. But the unique physiology that she inherited from you immediately reversed the changes both times. The process that the Raiders subjected you to while you were their prisoner, the one that keeps you looking like a twenty-one-year-old and makes your body heal ten times faster than regular humans, defeated all our attempts to create unique identities for Eliza and Christa. You know that your recuperative abilities have erased any signs of changes such as broken bones, including the one that occurred when you were seven and fell out of the tree. Even the tiny scar on the outside of your left leg, which you've carried for most of your life, completely disappeared when your DNA was altered. The scar where you were shot by the Raider officer just before the Battle for Higgins, disappeared in just a couple of weeks. Your body seems to have a programmed image and won't allow even the slightest deviation. It immediately begins to restore that programmed image as part of its healing process whenever any alterations are attempted."

  "Yes, I've tried to have the SLAVE imprint that the Raiders put on my chest removed or covered up, but it's resisted all my attempts. Skin grafts fleck off as dead skin in a few days."

  "It's part of the programmed image in the DNA that the Raiders created for you. By now, it would be difficult to find any trace of your original DNA. We'd have to take a sample from deep inside a bone, and even that won't be possible in another five or six years. By then every cell in your body will contain the new DNA."

  "So there's nothing that can be done to make us appear unique?"

  "With changes disappearing in a few days as the body reverts to the original image, it doesn't make sense to continue making them. We'll have to rely on the identification signal from their CT's."

  "Yes sir. I understand. I assure you that you have nothing to fear from our sharing a single identity."

  "We know that, Commander," he said smiling. "If we had even the slightest concern, none of you would ever have been allowed inside this highly secure area."

  * * *

  Chapter Three

  ~ June 13th, 2269 ~

  Vyx awoke with a start. He immediately reached for the pistol on the nightstand in an automatic reaction. Someone was outside the door of his hotel room! He pointed his laser pistol towards the door and waited, hardly even breathing. A white envelope slid almost noiselessly into the room from under the door and he heard footsteps move away and trail off down the corridor. He waited for several minutes
before getting out of bed in case it was merely a ploy to get him over near the door. The room's draperies were closed over the bulletproof glass, but anyone with a decent thermal imager could place his position in the room. A bomb placed against the outside of the door could be detonated by the watcher, and kill him when he retrieved the envelope. For that matter, the envelope itself could be a weapon. It could explode and blow his hands off, leaving him to bleed to death, or it could have been dipped in a poison that will kill him on contact.

  Opening his suitcase, he slipped on a pair of impermeable gloves before picking up the envelope. An innocuous looking viewpad placed on the envelope tested the paper and contents for poisons and explosives. No traces were found. Vyx supposed that if they wanted him badly enough to resort to sophisticated means of assassination, they would probably have just put a rocket into his bedroom from across the street. The bulletproof glass wouldn't stop that, and he knew that they had the necessary weapons.

  Ripping open the envelope, he found the note to be from Shev Rivemwilth. In it, Rivemwilth apologized for any misunderstandings. He explained that his associates believed Vyx responsible for the attack on his person. He said that the hunters had been called off once Rivemwilth regained consciousness and could talk. It was only afterwards that they pieced together what happened. They'd found Vyx's pistol inside the room and discovered that it was set for a narrow beam, accounting for the separated skull portion of the Tsgardi who had started the fight. Rivemwilth and his two bodyguards had been shot with a lattice pistol, the sort preferred by the Tsgardi.

  Lattice weapons had long ago been outlawed by the Galactic Alliance, but they remained the favored personal weapon of Raiders and other criminals because they could be fired aboard ship with the certain knowledge that they wouldn't puncture the hull. Like laser pistols, they used energy in place of chemical propellants, but they fired an actual projectile rather than an energy beam. Each fifty-millimeter long projectile consisted of four narrow pieces of flat spring-steel. It was shaped like a circular latticework tube. Loaded under great pressure into hundred-round magazines, the projectiles were stored in compressed form. When pulled into the chamber, it instantly expanded to its full twelve-millimeter diameter. Spun by an electronically rifled chamber, the fired projectile bored through whatever it struck, like a hollow drill bit with a leading edge as sharp as any straightedge razor. Since it wasn't attempting to push its way through the material, as a lead projectile would, it didn't require nearly the mass. Rather, it cut its way through, like the narrow blade of a filleting knife. Where a laser pistol sealed the wound as it made it, the lattice pistol left large gapping holes that allowed a person's life force to bleed out in minutes from wounds in what were normally considered non-vital areas.

  Rivemwilth went on to say that he would rather have been shot by the laser. His second heart would simply have taken over immediately for the destroyed one. The lattice weapon opened a large hole and Rivemwilth almost expired from the loss of blood. The note said that he was still willing to proceed with the arms deal if Vyx was interested, and invited him to return to the building where they had talked, as soon as Rivemwilth was well enough.

  Tossing the note on the dresser, Vyx thought about the offer. It might be a trap to lure him out of the hotel, but if it was genuine, he might be able to salvage his mission. His goal had only been to purchase the weapons, not attempt an arrest of anyone here in the colony. Since the colony was located deep in the Frontier Zone, he wasn't supposed to perform arrests here anyway, except under specific order.

  * * *

  Jenetta concluded her second week of work in the Intelligence Section without any greater sense of job satisfaction than that of the first week. The only consolation in being stationed at the Higgins Space Station was Lieutenant Commander Zane Spence. They'd dated off and on since the handsome young attorney, posted to the Judge Advocate General's office at Higgins, had defended her during her court-martial.

  On this night, she and Zane visited Gregory's, a favorite restaurant on the civilian concourse. The food was always delicious and the retro look of the restaurant appealed to Jenetta's sense of aesthetics. Real wood had been brought to the station for the construction of the interior, and then stained a red walnut color, giving the restaurant the subdued but elegant look of expensive restaurants from the twentieth century. The earth tones of red, yellow, and brown were pervasive throughout, and the interior was warm and inviting, with none the glitzy chrome and bright neon used elsewhere throughout the concourse. Gregory, always the most gregarious and congenial of hosts, welcomed them warmly.

  "Commander Carver, Commander Spence," he said effusively, when he spotted the tall couple entering the waiting area, "come in, come in. I have your table all ready for you."

  Jenetta and Zane looked at one another, then walked past other patrons waiting to be seated, as they followed Gregory to a table that bore a 'reserved' sign. Gregory held the chair for Jenetta, while Zane settled his six-foot one-inch frame into the chair opposite. Being escorted to a reserved table might have been confusing once, since they hadn't made reservations, but Jenetta and Zane knew that Gregory always kept one or two tables in reserved status, even when the restaurant was fully booked, so that he would never have to turn away favored or important patrons. Having important persons dine in your establishment was a recommendation in itself, and well worth the cost of leaving a table unused and ready at all times. Commander Jenetta Carver was both a favored and important patron. Neither Jenetta nor Zane complained as Gregory picked up the sign and slipped it beneath his arm.

  "I'm pleased to welcome you tonight. My chefs have prepared a wonderful selection of entrees. Would you like to start with a bottle of wine from the Sebastian colony? We just received a shipment of '58 Pink Channay. It's most excellent."

  Zane nodded. "That sounds wonderful."

  Gregory smiled. "Your waiter will be with you momentarily. I'll get the wine."

  "You seem preoccupied, Jen," Zane said, after Gregory had brought the wine and the waiter had taken their food order.

  Jenetta looked into the piercing blue-green eyes of the handsome JAG officer, and smiled. "I'm sorry. I was thinking about work."

  "Anything that you can share?"

  "No, I'm sorry."

  "I understand. Forget I said anything. Say, I picked up a copy of the second book about Dakistee today. I only had time to read a few chapters, but what I read is wonderful."

  "Eliza did a fantastic job with it," Jenetta said. "It could turn out to be another best seller."

  "I wouldn't be surprised. People are fascinated that such an advanced culture existed twenty-thousand years ago, and hunger for any information about it. Several other books have been published by the archeologists and the clones, but nobody has shown the insight and depth of knowledge about those former inhabitants that you and your sisters have exhibited."

  "And yet," Jenetta said, "for all of their technology, they couldn't stop their race from going the way of the large dinosaurs on Earth."

  "The answer appears to lie in diversification. The Dakistee people live on in their descendants who colonized Nordakia and Obotymot. As we expand our presence in the universe, there's little chance that a single cataclysmic event, or even multiple events, can totally wipe out our race."

  "Universe? Zane, we have yet to even explore five percent of our galaxy. At a hundred-thousand light-years across, it would take our fastest ships two hundred seventy-five years to reach the furthest solar systems, and that's if we don't stop to visit along the way— which sort of totally defeats the idea of exploration. Although we've found hundreds of sentient life forms living within Galactic Alliance space, only a few dozen have the intelligence to one day begin venturing into space, and only a third of those are currently capable of extra-world travel."

  "I heard some scuttlebutt," Zane said in a lowered voice, "that the Galactic Alliance is planning to move the Frontier further out."

  "Really? How much furth
er out?"

  "A hundred parsecs, extending across the entire length of the current Galactic Alliance border with open space."

  "A hundred parsecs? Oh, no. A three-hundred-twenty-six light-year swath of additional frontier along our entire border with open space. That will more than double the current Frontier Zone."

  "No, it won't. The old Frontier Zone will convert to regulated Galactic Alliance space."

  "My God," Jenetta said in a hushed, yet appalled tone, "they can't be serious."

  "My friend on Earth tells me they're very serious. The hope is that it will push the vermin further back. Once the current Frontier Zone is re-designated, Space Command will immediately assume complete authority over all ships in that space and enforce interdiction laws. In the Frontier Zone we normally only answer distress calls, not stop ships and search their cargo for slaves, illegal weapons, substances, and other illegal contraband. As soon as a criminal crosses over the Zone border, they've essentially safe from pursuit."

  "That guideline was only established because we didn't have adequate ships or people to cover the hundred parsecs of Frontier Zone space along the entire Galactic Alliance border. An expansion like you're talking about would add tens of thousands of stars, planets, and moons in this quadrant of the galaxy. We're stretched far too thin as it is. We've only just begun to get a handle on the Raider problem in our present space."

  "They're addressing that. The Space Command budget will be increased dramatically as part of the expansion because assessments to planets now permitted to join the Galactic Alliance will provide substantially increased funds for law enforcement efforts. The annual appropriation for the construction of new ships is being doubled, and a brand new GSC Space Academy is being planned for construction on Nordakia. The first ten Nordakians were commissioned as officers of Space Command after their graduation on Earth last year, and there are presently over two hundred Nordakian cadets in the two academies. Class size, at the beginning of the new school term, was increased from three hundred fifty to six hundred at each school. The GAC knows that the expansion means we're going to need new officers, and plenty of them."