Duplicate
Alex Feinman

(c) 2009 by Alexander Feinman
Text Version is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA-3.0 License
See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
Cover art by Ethan Feuer
v1.2.9 TEXT


This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, places, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, and downright weird if you think about it.

Acknowledgements:
For my story champion, Kate, and to all the faithful members of my reading group. Know that it was your encouragement that kept me writing.
Thanks to Dan and Lisa, and to many others, for helping me refine the story.
Here's to more great stories ahead.




CHAPTER ONE

"T-minus-30 seconds to impact. Twenty-seven. Twenty-four."
Listening to the computer do differences made me edgy in the face of crisis; I wasn't sure who had programmed the damn thing to count down in threes, but I made a mental note to track him down and strangle him. If I managed to survive.
"Fifteen. Twelve seconds."
I yanked on the controls, hard; the ship leaned sharply in to the turn, but the asteroid was simply too long and I had too much speed relative to it. At best I was going to skim the surface and rip the belly of the craft open; at worst, I'd splash on the surface like a Christmas ornament dropped on pavement.
"Six seconds. Brace for impact."
I jumped for the Duplipod, slamming my limbs down into the slots. My right knee caught awkwardly on the lip of the device, making me tumble in heavily. The padding caught me and inflated; the door slammed shut automatically as the asteroid's pocked surface flashed beneath my mining vessel.
"Zero s--"

#

I could see the shattered remnants of my ship's tail above me, floating against the darkness. The entire aft section of the craft, from cargo to thrusters, had been grated off as I skidded along the asteroid's surface. Just beyond the sealed windows lay nothingness--an open floor into the gulf of space. My Duplipod was cracked, too: crazed panes of Duraplast were all that separated me from vacuum.
My ears were still ringing from the concussion; even through the padding around me it had been quite an impact. But I was awake, which meant I was alive, and the Duplipod appeared to be holding air and ringing its beacon. So all I really needed to do was sit back and relax, and I'd wake up to a rescue. I just hoped it didn't take too long--last time I'd missed an entire season of Iceball, including my spot in the betting pool. It was somewhat disconcerting to come out of a 'pod and discover that the junior officer you'd been lording it over now had a year of seniority on you. But it was better than being dead.
I sat back, easing into the comfortable cushions, and waited. 
The Duplipod, however, didn't seem to be killing me. I checked its status monitor:

FUNCTIONAL
(Some errors occurred: please see logs.)

I'd never really learned much about the damn things--they worked great, were pretty much fool-proof, and since the Corp paid for them, I'd never even bothered to read the manual. Well, there was a first time for everything. I reached into the small access panel below the monitor and pulled out the info pad.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE:
1. Enter the Duplipod. Ensure all extremities are completely within the 'pod, and close the door.
2. Relax. The Duplipod operates automatically and silently.
3. When help arrives, you will be regenerated automatically and will awaken refreshed.
4. Please exit the Duplipod at this time so it can reset for the next user. Remember to take all of your personal belongings with you.

Well, that wasn't much help. We seemed to be stuck on step 2, so I thumbed the pad there. It expanded into a little animation of a Space Tower pulling up and hauling in a beat-up looking Duplipod, complete with flashing red light on the outside--no doubt because flashing red lights are extra cool. A voiceover droned on about how safe and effective the process was. I slammed the pad back into the slit in disgust.
The monitor blipped again.

SYSTEM SCAN COMPLETED and VERIFIED

System damaged.
Estimated remaining life support:
 81 hours 14 minutes at current consumption rate
	
Self-termination advised. Please see Section 4.6

Self-termination, eh? I guess the poor 'pod had gotten a little rattled in the crash. Its needle might be broken--heck, the whole tank of poison might have been scraped off the bottom. But it seemed pretty confident in its read, so I flipped over to Section 4.6, which turned out to be a list of humane ways to off yourself. Number fifteen--pithing by projective energy--seemed relevant, so I pulled out my lasgun and--
Wait a minute. What if the 'pod was so badly damaged it couldn't regenerate me? That'd be a laugh. Dead in a Duplipod. Ha ha, very funny. I brought the pistol up again.
Now stop that! Turns out it's hard to kill yourself. I put the pistol away for a minute while I thought things through.
I was stuck in a Duplipod of unknown condition. According to its readouts, I had a bit over eighty hours of life left, the last few of which would be spent in an asphyxiating coma. I had no food or water, so most of that would be hungry-time. In comparison--if it worked right--the Duplipod had a 100% chance of regenerating me, and without all this needless worrying; I'd never heard of the things failing.
But this wasn't an intact Duplipod--it was pretty beat up from the asteroid impact. It claimed it had a good read on me--but what if its diagnostics were broken? What if it only had a partial read? What if I came back as a vegetable, only able to use words that started with the letter L or something like that? I just didn't have the data.
But still--no need to worry about it now. I had 70 hours to think it over, right? I could just lie back and die like a man, or I could keep after the thing. Who knows--maybe I could even fix it.


CHAPTER TWO

Hour sixteen.
I've decided to keep a journal. It'll be amusing to read if I make it out of here. Also to keep my mind off the solid wall of uselessness I've encountered when reading the stupid thing's help system.
It's obviously meant to be diagnosed with a Duplipod Brand Debugging System, and isn't letting me get ANYWHERE with it. I can tell there is a simple system under there--it looks like it's running the same OS as my ship, underneath it all--but they have it locked down but good. All I've managed is to weasel my way into the user diagnosis page, filled with cryptic messages meant to be comm'd to tech support. The logs start with the physical damage:

...
BIOLOGICAL RESERVOIR DAMAGED
BIOLOGICAL RESERVOIR EMPTY
CATALYTIC RESERVOIR BELOW 10%
MATTER JAM IN VENTRAL FEED
...

Ya think? The 'matter jam', I would guess, is a giant rock, stuck underneath my butt. I can feel the dent with my derriere, if I squeeze it against the seat.

...
AFT POWER PLANT SHUT DOWN
FORWARD POWER PLANT AT 82% OF MAX OUTPUT
  RECOMMEND ALTERNATE POWER SOURCE
BIO/LOGIC RESERVOIR DAMAGED
BIO/LOGIC RESERVOIR BELOW THRESHOLD
  AUXILIARY STORAGE RECOMMENDED
AUXILIARY DATA FEED INOPERABLE
...

It goes on like that for a while. But then it picks up:

...
INTERNAL LIFE SUPPORT NOMINAL
INTERNAL CONTROLS ACTIVE
BEACON ACTIVATED
INTERNAL DIAGNOSTICS SUCCEEDED
RECORDING SYSTEMS INITIALIZED
RECORDING SYSTEMS ENGAGED
...

And then finally there's this beauty:

...
DATA STORAGE ATTEMPT COMPLETE 
WITH SOME ERRORS (see log for details)

Some errors? Some? Nor does it say where to find this new log.
And: 'attempt' complete? Does that mean successful, or just finished? The help systems are giving me no clue as to what could have gone wrong. It's making me downright leery.
Seventy-four--no, sixty-four hours of air left. That should be plenty of time to figure this out, right?


Hour forty-four.
After sleeping fitfully for a while, I gave up, and now I'm back on it. I did some calculations. My mining trawl only took me about ninety mega-clicks off base. Corp should know approximately where I was, and the beacon would take them the rest of the way here, once they know to look for me. The 'pod is sending out high-strength pulses in sets of three every half hour, with lower-power targeting chirps every five minutes; plenty of signal for a team.
So assume a worst-case of half an hour between when I crashed and when the pulses started; a few hours, give or take, to scramble a rescue boat. They wouldn't hurry to get here--if operational, the Duplipod should keep me afloat for decades. So call it a one-gee burn so the crew doesn't have to deal with stress fractures and compressed discs. They'll keep that up for twelve hours, to keep fuel consumption down, then coast the rest of the way. That makes it about sixteen hours for them to get to turn-around, and twelve more hours to slow down; add in the launch time, and you could call it thirty hours total.
So where in the vastness of space are they? A day late, a dollar short?
Well, what if they only kicked in for a half-gee burn--after all, what's the hurry? I'd just jump in the 'pod. At a half-gee, they could keep accelerating longer--a full twenty-four hours. But...hmm. One day to speed up, one to slow down, but a good thirty-four hours coasting. That leaves it right at about eighty hours. 
Much too close for comfort. If someone stopped for a piss break I could drown in my own carbon dioxide.
I devoured the remnants of a candy bar I found in my jumpsuit some time ago, but the sugar rush is wearing off--even licking my fingers isn't helping much. The air in the 'pod is getting stuffy and humid with sweat, which is making the vinyl cushions slick. I guess the system is tuning air circulation for conservation and not comfort. It makes my world small and creepy; I can no longer see the stars, unless I squeak clean the porthole and peer out. But watching stars whiz by--I appeared to be in a steady, slow spin--is making my empty stomach that much more rebellious. Better to keep poking at the data pad.
I've given up on above-board methods. Am wasting some time trying to hack root login/password combinations. That old standby, test/test, didn't work--thankfully! I'd have been scared if it did. Likewise field/service, or any of the other hoary chestnuts I can dredge up. I'm not quite bored enough to start a brute-force dictionary attack. Besides, it would likely take way more than the fifty or so hours I have left.



Hour fifty-eight
Success! I'm in! Just a few minutes ago. The elation was making it hard to thumb the data pad accurately, so I spent a few minutes calming down. The air is damn thick in here, and if I'm not careful my body wants to hyperventilate to make up for it. I had to breath through my sleeve for a moment until my heart quieted down to rapid pattering.
The shoddy error messages made me think back to my stint at community college, scamming free Feed from central and using it to play BioChess. After hours of mindless hacking, and letting the login screen cool off from the repeated intrusion attempts, I'd suddenly zenned into "games / fun4u". It has to be left over from an old system, but these backdoors have a way of being passed down through the generations. I'm in--it's a limited account, but a starting place.
Starting there I've found an old debug utility, and wedged it into the boot sequence. Like most ground-breaking inventions, the Duplipod is based on a loose agglutination of building blocks stretching back many decades, and it shows when you peek underneath the thin layer of marketing glitz on the outside. I was able to force the main computer into a hard reboot. It picked up my utility program straightaway. I thumbed in a temp password for the root account; when the 'pod came entirely online I was able to access everything.
Including the deep logs. These are a bit of a worry. The recording apparatus is spitting back errors on every self-check. My eyes are crossing a bit trying to track down the source. I'd rather be underneath the console plugging wires back together--solder and crimp-tools are more my speed--but this soft engineering is where it's at right now. 
Moisture dripping off the 'pod canopy isn't making it any easier to concentrate; but there's no help for that. I've tried mopping it up with my sleeve, but all that netted me was a damp elbow.
Poking around also told me that the biological reservoir is empty. This is the pool of polymorphic goo that the machine used to print a new body, or to make repairs to the old one. So even if the scan of my brain was fine, they'd have to plug this machine into a working Duplipod and download me. They'd probably figure that one out; not a big concern.
What has me worried is the next few lines in the log file. I found an old header file detailing the bio/logic system. It had been fairly new technology, fifteen years ago when these had come on the market, and it doesn't look like they've bothered updating it. Typical Corp logic; the old beaters are still (mostly) working, so replace them only on failure. Except here, failure could be a bit more serious.
The bio/logic system is for long-term storage of the brain pattern. In the hot spots where we miners work, solar radiation is a real concern. Our ships are well shielded; a large chunk of the extra mass on board ship goes toward protecting the pilot during solar flares. And we all take anti-ox pills to help offset damage from the constant bombardment of high-energy photons. That--plus our limited exposure time--helps a great deal.
But the Duplipod was built to last for a long, long time--decades, if need be. And to fit in the smaller vessels the manufacturers had to keep the mass and volume down to a svelte, and more importantly, cheap, amount. Shielding the storage core on that kind of a space budget is tricky.
And so the clever designers had decided to pick up the new tech, and weave it in; heck, marketing the buzzword-enabled bio/logic storage subsystem probably helped them move some investment capital. It'd taken ten years, but the fundamental technology had become commodity--the newer systems on my ship used the stuff, too.
The original idea was fairly straightforward. Biological material--usually artificial blood plasma, since it's dirt cheap and had a good protein density--is stored in a reservoir, and pumped past the info exchanger. Write heads acted on the fluid as it goes by, tweaking spare links in the proteins to store information. Massively redundant encoding and continuous mixing provide resistance against data loss: microscopic samples containing millions of protein molecules are taken continuously. Faulty data is repaired based on a consensus arrived at by majority vote among the dense array of read heads. It's safe, effective, and lasts basically forever, provided the system doesn't dry out.
Or, provided your 'pod doesn't get bounced off an asteroid. I'd finally gotten the system to fess up, and it seems like that's what had happened; a near-splash event. The reservoir--if I twist around I can actually reach it over my right shoulder--has a hairline crack in it, and voided to vacuum some time in the last twenty hours. That means no memory, and no backup--the system had dutifully recorded me, everything that was me, to plasma, but then lost that recording right out the crack.
I've put the gun away for now.


Hour sixty-four
Slept again. Or zoned out. Console time stamp claims I've been idle, so I must have slept. My mouth is so dry it's a good thing I'm not dictating this. The water's run out--I should have eked it along better. I can't quite bring myself to lick the ice off the canopy. Oh, yeah--and it's getting cold.
I did get the crack fixed. The bio/logic reservoir--it was simple. Didn't even seem that hard. A bit of insulation from some spare wires (who needs the alarm buzzer right now?), a piece from the candy wrapper, plus heat from the lasgun to weld it shut. The diagnostics claim perfect pressure. Spit and bailing wire. Of course it's still empty. But I have a plan.
Someone hailed me about ten minutes ago. Hunh. The Duplipod auto-responded; they're on their way. They'll be here in only two hundred and eighteen hours. I'll be meat popsicle by then.
I don't know where Corp is--still no answer from them. The new arrivals say they're some sort of deep-space survey vessel; I'm not sure what they're doing on our claim, but two hundred hours is a goodly distance. Too much time, though. Hard to keep thinking. I have got to get this thing working. Maybe they're coming from the next sector over.
It's cold enough I can see my breath, and the steam from my hands when I warm them makes it hard to see the screen. I think I have the thing convinced it's in repair mode, and I'm working on filling up the bio/logic reservoir. I tried using the piss bottle but the system claimed it was too low in proteins. I guess my kidneys are still working. Nasty smell though. Luckily, it has a purge button. Afterwards I thought about whether it was wise, throwing away all that water, but, damn. Two hundred hours. A few pints of foul water aren't going to help.
I've worked it out though. My pocket knife is plenty clean. (Not that it matters.) I figure I can get about five pints out before I become useless. My damn duplicate better appreciate this.
The blood's kind of purple. I bet I'm low on oxygen. Got it all over the keyboard too. Maybe I should have cut my leg or something but that seems really weird. Typing one-handed is slow. Hang on, I have to bind this off.


Hour sixty-six
SPEnt the past twenty minutes or something phasing in adn out of consionsness. Just going to keep on typign as fast as I can until the system kicks in. It's booting up now--the reservoir's low but it thinks it has enough. It relaly wants to take all of what I have bu tI just can't bleed myself to tdeath even though it's going to kill me in a minute anyway when it's done scanning...weird thought. Of course it'll be this scan, me, so I won't loose too much time. I thought abut that, if the originla scan worked then I'dlose thes days a bit of time I never remember.
Actually it turns out it had a backup scan of me deep in mem, it was just losing fidelity steadil yover time, stuck in hardcore mem without the bio reservoir. 10^38th bits or something, way too much to keep track of in volitile memory. I don't want to have parity errors in my conscious. I set up the 'pod to accept anything at this point--help's still too far away.
So i'm just sitting here bleeding. The binding isn' holding really good--I should have cut my leg or something. Too hard to get a tight torniquett with one hand. It's all mostly dripping into the reservoir--I hope. I set it to just kind of auto-kill me after it's got a good scan. The needle's all prepared anyway. But I thought it would be cool, like a joke or something, to see my last minutes on paper. The last will and testament of a condemned man. Or maybe not, I mean, I remember everthing from my last dup. I think. Anyway when I wake up I'm really curious if I will remember this part. Sort of like when you wake up fro
--RECORD ENDS--


CHAPTER THREE

Dry, dry cotton-mouth. I peeled my eyes open--drunk? No, dead. Or, I had been. I remembered the asteroid, looming hard ahead, and the sickening feeling of impending impact as I leapt into the safety of the 'pod.
I was in a shiny, clean Duplipod--and it sure wasn't on my ship. Still no gravity; I wasn't planet-side, nor were we going anywhere in a hurry. A ship, then, between destinations. The area outside the bubble was a cargo deck, filled with rough-looking men. The ring-leader: I could tell, because he had his foot hooked aggressively under the 'pod frame rail, and was yelling at the others--was gesturing at the inside escape handle. He was pointing at me through the glass.
I shook my foggy head cautiously. All felt well enough--I just didn't know any of these people. Groggily, I thought back on what I remembered; something about an asteroid, slamming into the ship. Then--well, surely I must have gotten to a 'pod. Except this wasn't my 'pod at all.
His lips were easy to read. 'Hey, you in there! Open the damn 'pod!' 
I nodded again, and stalled for more time. There was something...else...I'd remember it later. I pushed the auto-clothe button, and it released the gown it had grown around me to serve as a temporary covering; it'd eaten my clothes for source material. Then I yanked on the release lever, and the lid cracked open.
"Well, then, Mister--good thing we found you in time. How are you feeling?" the boss asked. 
One of the others snickered; the boss cuffed him one. He scowled at the subordinate. "Friendly now, remember?"
"I feel--ah--duped," I said, and shrugged my shoulders. "Everything okay? Where's my ship?" I was in a ship's hold, with piles of crates in disarray all around us. Smugglers, most likely or--the thought just occurred to me--scavengers.
"Yer ship? Well, in one word, toast." He pantomimed a splash-down, one hand curled before it slammed into his open palm; then he mouthed an explosion.
He pointed at what had started life as a smooth curve of metal, but was now a ripped and perforated fragment about the size of a car. After a minute of staring at it I realize it was the dorsal plating of a PA-108. A mining vessel. My mining vessel. Sticking up out of it was another Duplipod, this one battered and cracked.
"Yep, that's where we found you," he said. "Stuck in there like a cork. Your 'pod was so damaged we had to hook this one up...seems you managed to get a copy stored alright." He grunted, and gestured with his chin. "Good thing, too."
I looked where he pointed--I could see the frozen remains of a body in there, gaunt and pale. I'd never seen a corpse in a Duplipod before--they usually reused all that lovely organic matter to remake a new, healthy you. This one must have been severely damaged. "Well, thanks, I guess," I said. I resisted the urge to shudder; it's not every man who gets to spit on his own corpse. Not that I had that much saliva right now.
"Yeah, sure, uh, look," the boss said, putting one beefy hand on my shoulder. "We come a long way to rescue you. And a good thing too--that 'pod was pretty mixed up. I didn't think it would've last much longer."
"How long was I out?" I asked.
"About a w--two, maybe three weeks," he said. He scowled again. "But that don't matter. What I was wondering is, well, we don't usually do this strictly humanitarian, you understand?"
I nodded and blinked slowly. "I understand. That's very easy. I'm working for Corp, and if you give them a call, they will give you a form to fill out and then recompense you for fuel and your time. The standard rates are very generous."
He cracked a smile at that. "I'm sure they are--if I wanted to talk to Corp." The grin turned more toothy. "But I don't. Now, maybe you can think of something else you have that I might want, while we grab some food."
I nodded. "I might, at that. Let's see what you have, and talk it over." My stomach had started doing flip-flops, but I sure wasn't going to let him know that.

#

The cornmeal was grainy, the soyprot flaky and undercooked, and the tea tepid. Definitely not the best grub I'd scrounged here in the Belts. It sure wasn't helping to settle down my nervous stomach.
The captain ate sparingly, just picking at the small portion he'd snagged for himself, and watched me impatiently. I ate carefully, never taking my eyes from him. Something about the angle of his hips on the chair, and the forward thrust of his torso, made me recoil and pin myself to the chair back.
To his credit he waited until I was clearly on my last bite. I'd woke up starved, of course--the Duplipod didn't bother replicating you with any food in your system, so you were ravenous. And the first trip to the head after a duplication was always a special experience. We both knew I needed to eat if I was going to be any use to him at all.
"So, you're a miner," he said.
I nodded, mouth still full of mushy, tea-soaked soyprot flakes. "Yup, for Corp. Fifteen years. Used to be independent, got tired of the slow times."
"And you've been out here looking for plat/ruth ore."
I quirked an eyebrow, mind racing. "Well...." I leaned back, burped, and ruminated.
Yes--but not what I'd expected his first guess to be. Perhaps he'd found some of my stores. Ruthenium wasn't the universe's most stable element--it tended to explode on contact with oxygen--and finding natural caches of it were problematic at best. Expensive stuff.
But the Belts had some of everything. The best guess was they were the cooled remnants of a mid-stage sun that had been blown or ripped apart by a stellar encounter. The long-term fusion had built a wide spectrum of elements, which were slowly coalescing into asteroids and planets. In the meantime--we had billions of years before that happened--it meant there was something for everyone, if you looked hard enough.
The ruthenium was nestling in thin quantities of platinum, which itself was surrounded by less interesting compounds like pyroxenite, rife with useless aluminum and even more useless silicates. My sensors were tuned to find faint traces of beta particles, harbingers of technetium decaying into ruthenium. The high-energy electrons whizzing outward at a precise speed and were harvested by my ship's sensor grids--well, had been, when those grids had been more than a spaghetti of crisscrossing mono-filament on the surface of some asteroid.
It was a slow, boring business. Sort of like fishing--days of mindless boredom, waiting for a strike, followed by a brisk exercise reeling in an asteroid chunk and fitting rockets to it for the trip home, or marking it for future mining. Most mineral signs were faint--measuring the desired velocities of incoming beta particles required calculating trajectories in a millisecond, back-tracing the source, and doing some quick calculations involving angles and the difference between the ship's speed and the source's speed.
Of course, that means keeping track of the trajectories of all the local rock chunks, which in turn means you know pretty much where to fly to avoid a collision. My ship was supposed to do it all automatically, mapping the asteroids around me as a matter of course as we flew through that ever-changing maze. Still, unforeseen collisions between chunks of unnoticed debris sometimes snuck up on a fellow.
At least I was pretty sure that's what had happened. I'd have to pick over the computer logs from my ship to find out for sure. I'd felt a jolt before that big one had headed for me, so perhaps I'd lost an engine or a processor or something.
"So, what did you have in mind for payment, then, eh, mister?" The guy grinned as he glared at me.
It was gruesome. I decided to meet it head-on. "Gary. Gary Rossey," I said, and reached across the table to put out a hand.
He reached for it instinctively, though I noticed his back hand ducked toward his knife. "McClelland. James." His grip was tentative but rough, a bit squirmy. I got the impression he didn't want to be quite that close to me. And me without my calluses--the 'pod brings you back bare as a newborn, and with skin as smooth.
"I just like knowing who I'm doing business with. Now, then, you say you're looking for some...fuel?"
"Whatever you got. Yeah, fuel, sure, we used up a bit dipping further into the gravity well." He frowned again. "Not that you got any to offer."
"No...but I do have a pass on the Giant. I could top you up for free, and charge it back to Corp. The whole thing would sit on my account--your name would never get on their rolls."
He shook his head. "Except for that part where the gas guards scan my ship as we come in. No deal."
"Okay, then, not money and not fuel. What do you want from me? Wine, women? Song? I'm afraid my stores are scattered in orbit around a fairly possessive asteroid."
He paused, chewing on the inside of his lip. His manner of speech was beginning to tick me off...a big show of thinking before every word. It made me wonder why this crew put up with him. Or perhaps he was the smartest of the bunch--just not all at once. "Yeah. So. Back to the mining part."
I'd been avoiding the topic; I guess he'd finally noticed. "Ah, yeah."
"Platinum, ruthenium. Good take."
"If you can find them. I'm afraid the sensor grid's shot."
"We got your computer," he said, and waggled a thumb over his shoulder, back toward the remnants of my ship. "I'm sure it knows where you were."
Enlightenment arrived quickly. "Ah! Passwords. You want passwords." I grimaced. And once they had them, why did they need me?
He smiled. It wasn't a particularly nice smile. "Maybe we can come to an understanding."

#

It was definitely the short end of the stick. They'd let me back to my ship--what was left of it--but it was a Devil's deal, at best. They were still keeping up a pretense of civility, but I could feel their hot breath on the back of my neck.
Literally. Three of them--I guess the most literate--sat in a tight semi-circle behind me, watching every command I typed. They'd given me access to my old computer, but sure weren't trusting me. At one stage I pointedly elbowed the one on my right reaching for the keypad; he grunted, but didn't back off. The smell of unwashed miner-sweat was bringing back memories of working on the Long Cruisers, three to a bunk and hot-swapped twice a day. A familiar, but never welcome, funk.
Getting into the system was not trivial. The computer was in bad, bad shape. Only about a fifth of its processor core was still operational. The asymmetrical multiprocess coordinator couldn't keep up--it wasn't designed to this kind of damage run while still providing a smiling happy interface for its user.
But even with major chunks of the distributed processor missing, it was running. The darn thing was designed for durability, and it endured. I poked around at a quarter speed, waiting ages for it to get back to me with a prompt after I entered each command. During these long pauses all I could hear was the breathing behind me, slowly synchronizing, then abruptly broken by a cough or an inhale from a self-conscious ruffian. I tried to relax my clenched shoulders, but the impingement allowed no such release.
It took me a while to wend my way in. The standard interfaces were disabled--the damage was too much for that entryway. The entire graphical interface had been scrapped, and we were back to the textual underbelly of the system. But it was more than that--some of my steps felt constrained. Privileges had been changed; files moved, dates altered. Someone else had been in here, mucking about. In a very particular way.
Finally it became clear--whoever it was had removed all potential for core access from the base terminal. The best I could do was put the system into data access target mode, and hook up an external machine to it--read off its data core, and decrypt it elsewhere.
I sat back, clashing heads with the incautious fellow behind me. Rubbing my noggin--he'd got the worst of it, on the nose, but was wincing in silence--I said, "Well, that's it. I can't do any more from here."
"Whut's dat?" the smartest of them said.
"I can't get in. The system's too badly damaged, and it's locked down tight. I'm going to need to use another computer to try to get at the data," I said.
He rolled his eyes. "Lemme aysk Jimmy," he said, and pushed off to float aft.
I stared at the other two, who stared back. One started to pick at his nails; the other sniffled and sneezed. "Mind showing me to the head, while we're waiting?" I asked.
"De hyead. Syuah. De ol ways want de hyead," he said. His accent was even thicker than the other. This group must not hit port too often. Linguistic drift in the deep reaches isn't uncommon; crews often formed their own patois of working languages and native dialects. But they usually retained the ability to speak Corp Standard when the situation called for it. These guys--it made me wonder how long they'd been floating out here.
We floated to the bow of the ship, where ship's heads are traditionally kept. In space it didn't matter as much--there was no point in keeping the scent downwind when you got your thrust from fusion, and the feces got recycled--but the convention had hung around since the days of sails and masts anyway. 
The goon thought about going in with me--hesitating on the threshold for a minute--but obviously decided against it, bowed elaborately, and waved me in.
The facilities were typical--a dirty suction hose, a crusty nozzle. Water pressure was minimal, but I did what I could with the remaining soap to try to avoid infection. It was a wonder the whole crew didn't spend all day scratching. 
"Awwwl syet?" he asked when I popped out again.
"Awwwl set," I said. He didn't seem to catch the mockery.
"Goodyan, caw Jimmy wan' ta seeyuh," he drawled, and pushed himself toward the captain's cabin. I nodded, grim-faced, and followed him quickly. I wasn't sure how much trouble I was worth to this ragged crew, but I didn't care to press my luck by dawdling.

#

A few dozen more "hyeah" and "syuah"s later, and Jimmy and I were sitting in front of the remains of my shattered 'pod negotiating.
"Now, sure, I'm not likely to let you at my ship's computer," he said. "But yer 'pod...well..." He seemed pretty uncomfortable with the whole idea; I wasn't sure what his problem was, given all the cards he was holding.
"Look--I just need a console. Whatever. A matter-mat, or a high-end power tool, circuit tester, what have you."
"We don't have any of those fancy tools. This ain't a Corp ship with a fat credit line." He spit, and cleaned out his sinuses noisily. I tried to avoid grimacing as the globule floated off.
"Well, then, the Duplipod. I can probably rig up some sort of data read-out...they're based on a similar operating system, I'm sure of it."
"You ain't using our Duplipod," he said sharply. Then he caught himself, and scratched his beard. I tried not to stare at the cloud of flakey dead skin this produced near his face.
"Well, then, what about mine?" I asked.
McClelland grimaced. "You're sure you can't get into the main computer?"
I shook my head. "Not a chance. The thing's secured really tight. I think--" I stopped. Something in the way he cocked his head made me leave out the bit about someone else locking down the system. "We're going to need to get in with an auxiliary machine. So unless you want me mucking around with your ship computers, or your 'pod, you'll let me use mine."
"Well, okay. But don't try anything funny."
"What could I do? I'm just opening doors," I said.
"Erasing things. You start typun a delete command and my boy will break both your wrists." He cocked a thumb over his shoulder at one of the literate goons, who was currently limbering up his wrist-breaking arm.
I nodded slowly and tried to calm my stomach. "Yeah, okay. Look--this might not have occurred to you--but if I cheat you, what chance do I have of making it out of here alive? I'd think you'd think--" I stopped again. "Look, if I did--when I do lead you to the ore, you're going to drop me, right? Otherwise, why am I helping you at all?"
"Sure, sure. You give us the ore, we'll pop back close enough for you to make it and space you in the 'pod. It's still air-tight." He leaned back and sighed. "Sure, sure--you can use it to talk to your paranoid computer. We'll just have to get that old body of yours outta there." He smiled hungrily. "No sense wasting all that protein. Boys?"
The boys made short work of my erstwhile remains. I tried not to think about it too much.

#

Over the complaints of my increasingly upset stomach, I slotted into the newly vacated seat of my old, busted Duplipod. The place smelled strongly of old blood, urine, sweat, and--oddly--chocolate. It really didn't improve things any. As before, I had a trio of watchers surrounding me; the one on the right, old wrist-breaker himself, had a long slab of flattened iron at the ready. This made it rather hard to type--my fingers kept shaking, and doubling on the keys.
It took me the better part of ten minutes to get in to the computer at all. They'd done some real meatball surgery, cutting open the panel and yanking out the main data feed to slave their 'pod to this one. It was pretty tricky to undo that without also sending my 'pod into a self-test--which would surely have reset the whole damn thing. Finally I got the connection shut down and the 'pod unplugged, and sent the goon over my left shoulder to patch it into my ship's central feed. Hilarity briefly ensued when he tried to plug it into a maneuvering thruster, but we got that sorted out quick enough.
Meanwhile I started trying to hack my way into the Duplipod's own computer. The thing was a wreck. Stuck in console mode--no graphical interface at all. Luckily, it was running the same OS as my ship or I'd have been completely lost.
Error logs a mile long. System files scattered about. Multiple amateurish intrusion attempts showing up in the security logs: "test/test", "field/service", that kind of nonsense. Most serious of all--though, really rather convenient for me--was that the system had been left wide open: root permissions for everything were always granted, for every user. No wonder they'd been able to slave it up like that. I seemed to be logged into the account "games", which was pretty bloody ironic given the stressful surroundings.
Steady as she goes...I poked around a bit more, being careful to gauge the ill intent of the clubber to my right. He was eyeing my typing carefully, scrutinizing everything he didn't recognize (he seemed to have never heard of control flags, and I had to give a brief discourse on this basic feature of command-line systems), and tensing up every time it looked like I might hit Enter. That iron bar looked heavy, so I kept at it, slowly, patiently, making sure to get my bearings thoroughly. My old ship's main computer was easy enough to get into, now that I wasn't frozen out of the main inputs, and I took my time poking around in the file system. And that's where I found the note.
It was in an invisible subdirectory at the top level; hidden in plain sight. The file name was innocuous enough--syslog.0316.dddDDDddd--unless you realized that March 16th was my birthday, and the crude Morse code afterwards spelled out a very recognizable distress signal.
But there was no way to look at this file without the lovely, smelly trio behind me getting a peek as well. Or--was there? I thought for a bit, took a stretch break, and pulled myself down into the seat again. 
It had been a while since Lab, but I thought I could still puzzle out cryptograms on the fly. I coded up a quick script to scramble the letters--B for A, C for B, that sort of thing--and fed the log through it, a bit at a time, folding it into other commands while I poked around idly. And so the story unfolded slowly, short as the file was.
It was a letter from myself. I was--I shivered, making the goon behind me tense up. My breathing was out of control, so I spent a minute calming myself. Because what I read was pretty hard to comprehend.
They were--repeating me. Bringing me back, repeatedly. Trying to get me to give up the passwords, or so the note indicated. The author wasn't even the one that had scrambled the main computer; that must have cost a previous duplicate his life. This one had been logged in through the crew's Duplipod, long enough to leave this note and scramble a few more systems--enough so that they must have yanked him from that, too. McClelland's reaction was getting easier to understand.
It wouldn't have been possible with a properly functioning 'pod. Usually, they clear the 'pod memory during the write process; a safeguard. No one wants illegal copies of themselves floating around; heck, that's what the law is there for. Every so often it happens, and the resulting property battles discourage copy-cat Dupers--bitterly divided identity battles, usually ending with each Dupe stuck with half of their lawsuit-depleted finances.
But in this case, with all the safeguards removed, and a spare, working 'pod to provide the body, they'd managed to create an endless stream of me. I guess they just fed my corpse back in as raw material and pushed the reset button. Neat trick.
The trio of goons were all still staring at me. I realized I had to give this group more than my predecessors: some series of prizes to string them along, while I figured out a way to end the cycle and get the hell off this ship.

#

They let me out on the hull. It had taken some doing--I'd explained that if they wanted the sensors rigged correctly, and so forth, but it had still been an hour of slow-motion negotiating. 
In the end they relented. I guess they figured, if I tried anything, they could always just kill me again and start over.
The borrowed suit smelled strongly of unwashed pirate, and half the controls were sticky or corroded. I'd spent some time cleaning the gunk off the air hoses and major panel switches, to the annoyance of McClelland, but there were limits to my squeamishness. I also deigned to utilize the catheter.
My comm clicked and buzzed. "You syuah it's gun ta fit deah?" the jackal on my right said, his voice distorted by the decrepit speaker. McClelland had sent two of his own boys out here with me, to the butt end of their ship, far away from the engines and their noise. It was the best place to affix the back-up sensor reels, but I'd be damned if I was going to let any of them screw it up.
"Oh, I'm syuah," I said. Ah, hell. It was catching.
I clicked my comm over to the Soothing Music channel, and clomped my mag boots around to the forward hook-ups. They were crusted over with old corrosion and had a rough beaten texture from micro-meteor impacts. They probably hadn't been used since this ship was last in dry dock--meaning, in this case, years. 
I waved at the goons. "Hell. One of you hand me a scraper, will you?"
"Syuah. Dis one?" Lunkhead number two waved a giant flathead screwdriver at me.
"That'll do. Of course this is a tool meant for driving screws, but that's probably immaterial at this point." I grudgingly took it--a melted bite out of the front told me it'd been used to ground a few high-voltage arcs, too--and started to chip away at the corrosion surrounding the leads. Electrical imbalances had caused metal migration in the sensor boots, and it took some time for me to carefully remove the material without shorting the whole apparatus.
"Ahn'tya done yet?" the first one asked, for about the fourth time in five minutes. I ignored him for about the fourth time in five minutes.
"I tink he's a gownna, too," the other said.
"Eh, shatyagap!" the first one said.
"Jimmy's gunna space 'em fo syuah..." the second replied.
"You two, shut the hell up! Let me work!" I shouted over the comm. 
The two turned ponderously in their suits to look at me.
"Uhh. Yeaah. We kin do dat."
"Yeah, syuah. If you need eny ting ledus know." They shambled back toward the airlock.
Oh, right. Leadership through gratuitous displays of dominance. Perhaps I'd been too passive before.
I purposely turned my back on them and squatted down next to the sensor package. It deployed using electrostatics--the filaments were so flexible that a controlled surface charge was enough to cause them to spread them out evenly. So all I really needed to do was unlock the case, flip the deployment switch, and hook the leads up to the sensor feed.
But I was relishing the moment of quiet solitude; it was the first time since the impact with the asteroid that I'd really gotten a moment alone. I liked the quiet. People got into my head sometimes, made me do bad things.
They say your career chooses you. I guess mining isn't for everyone--I'd sure met my fair share of washouts. The work itself was nothing; it consisted mainly of checking routine sensor logs for a glimmer, or overseeing automated navigation and retrieval systems. Really, the only thing the human was there for was in-flight maintenance repairs, which is why so many miners came out of the military motor pool or transportation industry.
But the isolation was a job in itself; it takes real discipline to stay on top of your game with no boss, no fellow workers, no checks and balances, just a distant destination point for your data and your rocks. The multi-hour delay in transmission makes a phone call into a video postcard, little more engaging than watching a vid show about yourself.
So, you amuse yourself. At least, that was how I played it. I knew the stars out here by heart; double-checked the nav systems by hand and eye, sighted off M35 and the great faint band of the Milky Way. Right now I could tell we were headed the wrong way, away from the outer planets and against the orbital current of the asteroid belt, tilted a bit north of the solar plane. Headed further into the Deep Belts, then, where most miners fear to tread--and where my ship had been when I splashed.
The reverie was interrupted by a faint but persistent buzzing in my right ear. I hadn't really noticed it underneath the music, but between songs it became apparent. I whacked the side of my helmet, and the speaker popped into a penetrating squeal. Radiation alert! My god, how old was this suit? I clambered quickly toward the airlock, frantically paging through the suit menus.
My thoughts raced. Solar flare? Engine leak? Had I strayed into a containment area on the hull they'd "forgotten" to tell me about. Finally I found an exposure readout--0.8 TBq, and rising. Of course, it was in useless units, but I poked at it until it brought up an estimated cumulative exposure: twelve grays.
Twelve.
I was a walking dead man. If it'd been six, maybe, maybe I'd live, if I could get back to Corp and they could shoot me full of fresh new bacteria for my intestines, and a fleet of free radical scavengers. Out here, maybe I could vomit my own way back to health from a third of that dose, bleed from the mouth for a while until I could get back to civilization.
But twelve grays? A couple of hours of puking, a few short days of lucidity, then total circulatory system shutdown. As it was I only had a few minutes before the inside of this suit would get pretty messy.
The radiation readings said it was mostly protons. So, probably a solar flare; this young sun was well known for fierce ones. If the captain had bothered to leave his comms on, he probably would have picked up the warnings from Corp observatories. But what did he care, sitting in his well-shielded ship? This would be little more than a blip to them, something that lights up their fancy new sensory grid for a moment. Out here, a death sentence.
McClelland's two yahoos were, of course, nowhere to be found. I had to begin the slow process of externally cycling the airlock manually--they weren't even waiting for me in the atrium. It was hard to avoid throwing up, but it wasn't the radiation sickness just yet. Probably best just to end it here, space myself--faster, easier. And there was a dup of me waiting back in the 'pod. I grabbed for the emergency helmet release.
Turns out it's hard to kill yourself. I brought my hand down soberly. If I was dead anyway, I could risk a lot more with this damn crew. Maybe buy the next me a little more time, more space.
I slid into the airlock and palmed the cycle switch. The bile was rising for real, coupled with a ringing in my ears. I sluggishly grabbed the helmet release when the air sensor went green, just before I left my soyprot lunch all over the inside of the airlock.



CHAPTER FOUR

Back in my old, stinking Duplipod, I felt a certain sense of glee. My fingers clicked quickly over the old keyboard, hardly noticing the traces of old blood around the console. I had a few minutes worth of work to do--aligning and calibrating the new sensor array--and a few hours to do it in, since the watchful overseers on my left and right were woefully unable to keep up with my progress. I just nodded to them occasionally, brought up a display showing calibration progress, and made sure they looked happy. I had real work to do, and didn't need them getting antsy.
The first step was information gathering. I piped most of the work through my cipher filter; it was slowly coming back to me. After about an hour I could read it pretty much at full speed--which was good, because there was a lot of data to search through.
I looked back in the ship's records for location clusters and ore hits. I couldn't quite remember, but I thought I had tagged a particularly juicy cluster of asteroids a few weeks ago. It wasn't too far from where we were--maybe a few days dodging rocks in this ship--and was a find big enough to be a real payoff for these guys. I'd skipped it because it was on the edge of profitable space, too deep in the Belts to be worth the bother for current operations. My report had been filed against a future when stocks got lean and Corp had to start pushing for every credit.
This all made it a perfect lure. What I needed to do was to gimmick the computers to think the sensors had detected it--freeing up the sensor array to act as a high-theta broadcast antenna for my simultaneous distress call. McClelland would give chase, buying me some time while we travelled there for my message to reach Corp and be received. I'd die--well, that was happening no matter what I did. They'd dup a new me to figure out why the sensors were acting wonky when we arrived, and that duplicate could be rescued when the Corp cavalry arrived. It would work.
Fighting through the thin pipe of the Duplipod's text interface was wearying. Attempting to visualize three-space out of a bunch of ciphered text was dizzying. On top of that the interface kept shutting down, warning about "data retention failure" or some such. It seemed to think there was still a pattern in the buffer. Finally I flipped over to the console to see what was up.
The 'pod was in bad shape. Data failures were stacking up; the poor thing wouldn't be able to hold the pattern in the buffer for much longer without repairs. But the darn, durable machine was still keeping a hold of a copy of me, the original copy, made when I'd hit the button on initial entry. The problem was that the auxiliary biological reservoir was slowly failing.
Auxiliary biological reservoir? Never heard of it. I started poking around the file system of the 'pod itself, looking for docs. 
That's when I found my log.
Well, not my log. That wasn't me, trapped in this 'pod for so many desperate hours. It was chilling reading nonetheless. Four days, trapped in this little space? I shuddered at the thought.
After a careful search I found the old candy bar wrapper stashed under the seat, a small square neatly cut out of the middle. It was totally clean; I must have licked every bit of chocolate out of it.
I looked down at the bloodstains next to the keyboard and carefully matched my fingers against them. Then I peered under the console to check the level gauge on the biological reservoir; it was crusted over with old blood. My old blood.
I remembered none of it. The duplication that occurred when I got in the Duplipod must have been saved, rescued in the make-shift biological reservoir. The poor, heroic person trapped in here had ended up giving his life for me; no trace of him remained in the ship's computers. A life for a life; fair trade, I guess. 
I reverently restored the candy bar wrapper to its resting place.
My escorts were downright perplexed by my behavior, but thankfully didn't seem to think it club-worthy. After a moment of panic, my feeling of calm returned. How many times would it take--how many deaths to save this, my only life?
No matter; I would see it through. I was a dead man anyway, myself; any snapshot taken of me now would surely perish after recall, recreated with the systemic damage my body had sustained. Better to work to save the pattern of the older me, there in the computer. Slowly, I hatched a plan for escape.
I futzed with the computer a bit longer, checking relays, making sure my honeypot was set up correctly. Then I stretched. "All set, boys. The sensor grid should be coming online in a few minutes, and then it's payday for everyone."
"Suyeah, whadeva you say," the goon on my right drawled. "Time ta see Jimmy."
"An excellent idea. Lead on." I limbered up a bit, just in case I felt like taking a swing at him. What were they going to do--kill me? They'd find out the problems with the sensors eventually and be forced bring a dup back. Some sort of Gary Rossey would survive, and that's what mattered.
Right?

#

"Are you crappin' me?" Jimmy bellowed as I approached. I tensed--my clamoring, empty stomach shriveled in on itself, and the henchman escorting me casually ducked back half an arm's length to a position of advantage behind me.
But then Jimmy broke out in a grin. "This stuff is amazing!" he shouted; his cracked voice rang off the rear of the cargo bay behind me, past the wrecked remnants of the other ships these pirates had captured and stripped. "I can see clear down the solar well, all dolled up and duded out on the display."
I smiled. I could only imagine flying as blind as this ship had been--no grav sensors, little in the way of photon sampling, and a complete lack of analysis tools that would help them understand the rocks around them. What was clear was that I'd just given their little free enterprise a big boost; they'd likely become the most successful raiders in this section of the belt, unless I did something about it. Good thing I intended to.
I walked him through the new sensors--I'd set them to work normally until I "flipped the switch" by targeting the deep belt. I had to take a few puke breaks--my body was still ejecting dead matter, but I was sliding into the euphoria my distance-learning courses had taught me preceded radiation death. So I agreed to join him for a few drinks afterwards, nasty as they tasted. After the third--it was thin, thin potato wine--my head started to feel light and buzzy. I kicked back and reveled with the crew in the face of their imagined future riches, laughing inwardly at my deception.
Some time later I awoke, drool floating from my lips and soaking my face, feeling even more wrung out than normal. I scared up some water--grey, but drinkable--from their mess hall, and half a packet of salted peanuts from some old stash. The other crew members seemed a little happier with me around, now, but I felt much worse for the camaraderie.
The stories they told last night had confirmed my suspicions: these weren't itinerant do-gooders, they were raiders, plain and simple. Over thirty ships had fallen to their assaults. Once stripped down and rebuilt, old victims became attack ships for catching new victims, sacrificial missiles, or even bait. They'd picked me up on a lark, hoping for an easy vessel nab, and now that I'd set up the only prize I had to offer--the sensor grid--I felt sure they'd space me.
Or make me one of the crew.
That thought sat with me a while. While it would save my life, it just wasn't worth it. For one thing, I had no desire to be a pirate; murder and mayhem are a lot less romantic when seen close up. I didn't think I could condemn a man to death just to profit from his demise. And my life wasn't much to speak of as is; I felt weaker by the hour, and in only a day or two would likely lapse into a coma I would not reawaken from. Sure, they could try to hire my duplicate--but was there any guarantee that he'd say yes? I needed to get him the facts, bring him up to speed.
I spend the next few hours, with Jimmy's permission, "realigning the sensors". I pointed out the sensor drift from solar wind--an unavoidable complication, but one they weren't familiar with--and said I thought I could fix it. 
What I was really doing, in between carefully chosen swear words and impressive-looking statistical calculations, was documenting. A write-up like the man in the 'pod had left me, a journal for my next self to read. I put it all in--the events, my fears, my process of discovery; it was cathartic, in a way, to record these memories that no dup of mine would ever share. When I was done I packaged it, along with the two other notes, in a file buried deep in the ship's Duplipod, and flagged the Pod for a level three pre-diagnostic--something my dup would have to run before leaving the unit. It was the best I could do on short notice.
My hands stopped shaking as I closed it all up; a great peace fell over me, and I felt my shoulders descend from their tense perch by my ears. They'd only put two watchers on me, this time--Lou and Donny, who I'd found out last night were best buds and usually worked missions together. And even their tight surveillance relaxed greatly as time went on.
I tweaked the sensors a little to give better long-range sensing; the better to find my bait, and check if my message had gone out. A few taps, a few pretty graphics to satisfy Lou's bored gaze, and I was back into the sensor grid, checking for any sign of message receipt.
It was there. It was unmistakable. Help was eighty hours out. A small craft, a miner like me, had picked up the retrieval subcontract and was boosting to grab me and land the bounty. But he wasn't going to be a match for the pirates, not in a standard deep miner; he'd end up as dead as I had been, and Jimmy and his crew would have another high-value computer to hack into. All I'd done was double my mistake.

#

I made the last entry in my message in a bottle, included an outline of my plan, and stood up out of the Pod. I tapped the self-seal, then left the Duplipod for the last time to go suit up. I'd set it to "eject" mode: if it detected an impact it would detach from the deck plating and slide free--and I intended to make an impact.
It was easy enough convincing them to let me back out on the hull. The dry heaves were completely gone; I'd spent the last while gaining their trust, Jimmy and Danno and Lou and Roger and Donny and Jackie, and even quiet Jon. I played poker and drank more of the awful potato wine, plastering a grin to my face as I shared songs with and stared into the eyes of the men I was about to kill.
I hadn't wanted to do it this way. But they'd left me no choice; I spent two days trying to convince them to divert, trying to get a message to the incoming miner through my hacked up transceiver. But it was all going wrong, and my continuous attempts at transmission had been noticed--Jimmy dragged me up to the bridge and showed me the sensor "drop-outs". Of course I told him I'd go out and check the connections, make sure it all was working right; we were getting closer to the big payday, and everyone was eager for the operation to go smoothly. All I needed was a good screwdriver and a plasma cutter.
You'd think space would be quiet with no suit radio on; I'd shut it off, not wanting to chance hearing any cries from my fellow ship-mates as they were vented into deep space. But the suit seemed full, noisy with my short breaths and my beating heart. It pounded in my chest as I worked toward the pistons for the main cargo bay release. It wasn't even remotely close to the sensor grid. But Jimmy had sent me out with only one helper. It'd be easy enough to send him off to tickle the dorsal grid so I could "get a signal" as I circumnavigated the hull. I'd also told him he'd have to release his tether and float near the grid; some bull about ground loop effects and wiring, which he bought with a grumble. His suit jets would keep him close to the ship in normal maneuvering, but I wanted him gone when the fireworks started.
The first order of business was ejecting the newer Pod; I had to survive. Well, the older Gary: the one stored in its frame buffer, still looping after being copied from the wreck of my own Pod. I'd left him everything I could, but these fleeting moments would go unrecorded. My actions here would be without observation or memory: if all went smoothly, everyone here would be dead in a few minutes.
I unslung the plasma cutter and severed the safeties for the main hull release, then began ratcheting the big doors ajar. A small crack formed between the doors, followed quickly by a frosting of air. Alarms would be going inside the ship, now, but all I could hear was my ragged breathing. I spun the ratchet quickly, stopping only when the doors were a good three meters apart.
Second step was to head forward and short the main control for the starboard engine; I'd noticed they had rigged up external control lines for their hulk. Over half their engine capacity came from pirated engines welded to the hull. These mammoth beasts made the ship quite fast when it needed to be. But the crew had been too lazy to run the control wires correctly; instead they laid physical cable out through the firewall and along the exterior of the hull. I spliced the wires into a power feed; it was as if the helm were sending a continuous, full-on message. The engines responded, and the ship skewed suddenly, spinning and jetting forward.
We moved.
From aft, I could see the Duplipod, jolted free by the strong acceleration, tumbling out the gaping main doors, followed by a few crew members unlucky enough to be caught in mid-flight when the maneuver started. They weren't even in suits--I was looking on the dead, or those who shortly would be. But the 'pod was away, and I was safe!
Now, to make sure the rest of these pirates didn't harm anyone else. Ever.
I jammed the port engine control lines, too, a calculated dose of power from my suit bringing it up to half-strength. We veered, and picked up steam. I'd done the calculations on my old ship's computer; the asteroid was big, a good 10 km across, but it still would have been easy to miss. I guided her by count and by eye, got our path straight, and then brought on the port engine full speed.
Across the hull, I could see three suited figures leap out of the ventral airlock. The lead one opened up with a bolt-thrower. I swung myself down to the hull. He forgot to account for acceleration and missed wildly to aft. After a moment of silently swearing the fellow adjusted his aim--I had to think it was Jimmy himself--and the rounds got closer, spanking off the hull around me.
Turns out it's hard to think under fire. I scrambled for what cover I could find, blindly firing the plasma cutter in their general direction--not that it would do anything at that range. I felt a sharp pain in my right shoulder and down through my chest; a bolt had caught me and tumbled, tearing apart my side.
The suit's puncture alarms broke in, intermittent chirping, and I snapped limply at the end of my tether, skittering along the hull before being dragged behind the still-accelerating ship. Above me loomed the bulk of the asteroid.
Another bolt hit my legs, causing me to spin wildly. My breathing was bubbly. I couldn't see for the blood on the inside of my visor. Something yanked hard on my tether, and I slammed--



CHAPTER FIVE

"Good morning, Mr. Rossey," a calm, feminine voice said. "It's good to see you're awake after your ordeal."
I blinked--no impact? Six seconds--three--where was I? We had gravity, a half-gee; my arms felt heavy. It was bright--white, like the inside of the Duplipod, but far too well-lit.
Slowly, my eyes adjusted. It was indeed a 'pod, but positioned inside a large room full of lights. I was still sealed in, and a console was blinking at me.
My attention was diverted by someone rapping on the wall of the 'pod. The dark shape just outside the Duraplast viewport resolved into a photogenic Corp drone, a plastic smile on her silicone lips. The grungy wall of the 'pod made sharp contrasting frame around that hyper-perfect face.
I'd been duped. But I wasn't on the ship--the whole 'pod had been moved to a press room. Cameras were everywhere, at least a dozen live feeds. I was big news.
The photogene leaned forward, a hover-mic tracking her mouth, and smiled even harder at me. "How do you...feel?"
"Thirsty," I choked out. "Let me get some water?" Stupid people should know these things never re-hydrate you right.
"Of course," she said sourly. "Could you give us a statement on your stand against the pirates?"
What on earth?--"Water first. And--" I hesitated "--is there a Corp Rep here? I might have a labor issue."
She furrowed her brow and turned her head jauntily. "We'll be right back with Gary Rossey, hero of the Deep Belt, after this brief diversion."
The cameras stayed on--no point in chancing missing anything--but the "staged" aspect of her persona dropped away. "I am qualified as a Corp Rep. What's your problem?"
"Well--I've just been duped. I remember going in for closer look at a meteor before getting on a collision course with it. The damn thing crept up on my computer. I remember jumping into a Duplipod. Then this. And what's this about pirates?"
"You're a big hero, Mr. Rossey. Corp is grateful for the work you did, eliminating the notorious McClelland crew."
"Which?" I punched buttons on the console, searching for the hydration feature, but the thing kept flashing some idiotic message about a Level 3 diagnostic. The interior was a mess, too--I was standing on a crushed food can, of the sort you find on scout ships or bulk freighters out for long hauls, and the seat felt unpleasantly squishy.
"The McClellands--could you please state the nature of your Union Complaint?" She was getting a bit exasperated; the commercials were probably winding down.
I fumbled a bit; it'd been a while since I'd read the regulations. But I thought I could figure out an applicable situation. "Inhospitable working conditions, denial of patient rights. Immediate tribunal, please." I flicked an eye at the cameras; with this much publicity on tap, she was in a tight spot if I started a labor dispute.
She flushed slightly, under layers of artificial skin. "Very well. And your demand?"
"I request a half-day of personal time, effective immediately, so I can work out what the heck just happened." It would go against my yearly allotment, but--well, if I'd been out for any length of time, perhaps I'd accrued some extra. Unless they didn't count hibernation time. I didn't know the contract language that well, but I could just see that kind of bullshit from Corp regulations.
She sighed. "Granted. You are free to go. Please exit the Duplipod."
"I...ah...can't. The system is telling me I need to run a diagnostic first." I shrugged. "Must be something wrong with the system."
"Very well. You may take your personal hours here." A nod, then she leaned in toward me. "Gary--can I call you Gary? Would you care to have dinner in an hour or two? I'd be really interested to hear about your adventures. And your problems with the Corp." Her second sigh was more of a heave; young women and their mammary glands.
Not that I could see much out the porthole. But her transparency was irritating. "I'll consider it," I said, in a voice that was as ambiguous as I could manage.
She smiled blankly and stood up. She then quickly and efficiently went about getting the cameras and lights out of the room. The union still had a lot of pull, and if I couldn't leave the 'pod, having them there was a violation of privacy--at least, during personal time.
The console message was fairly clear: something (or someone? interesting thought...) had triggered a self-diagnostic, then paused it halfway through. I had to complete the sequence before the 'pod would declare me living and let me out. Damn nuisance, but straightforward; a few clicks, and the testing continued. Lines of text scrolled up the console:

DIAGNOSTIC COMPLETE
VFR NOMINAL
AFT DISPENSER NOMINAL
VENTRAL FEED NOMINAL
NOTIFICATION SYSTEM HEYGARY (see log for details)

I blinked. The message faded out, replaced by a text prompt. The room had gone dark around me; the light from inside the 'pod cast long, sharp shadows into the bare chamber. I reached tentatively for the keyboard and punched up the notification system log.

#

Pages and pages. Notes from my dead past.
It took a while to read. I had to use the facilities in the middle, but--loathe to leave the screen--I opted for the built-in toilet, and the emergency water tube.
It took even longer to digest the info. I was glad I'd asked for four hours--by the time I thought to check the clock again, half my time had passed, and I was still no closer to knowing what to do. I'd--let's sum up. My dups had jury-rigged a spaceship; lied, cheated, and stole. Killed themselves--twice! And let's not forget, murdered over two dozen men, in cold blood.
My mouth felt dry, but sucking on the hose wasn't helping. Surely I could not have done all that--and yet I couldn't fault any of the decisions. Given the same circumstances, wouldn't I have done the same? Hadn't I done the same?
I killed the lights and set a timer for 45 minutes. I needed some sack time, some time to think this over. A cat-nap would help settle the brain. Settling back into the cushions, I felt the tense muscles in my forehead sag a bit and my pulse start to slow down. The room was dark, and still; only a bit of light seeping out from the running lights on the outside of the 'pod served to remind me I was in a small hangar, and not out in the peaceful blanket of night between the planets.
"Psst! Gary!" a voice stage-whispered. From outside the 'pod? Had I left the outside mic on? A silly mistake--but no. I peered into the darkness, but couldn't see--
"Below you! The access hatch. I don't want the vidcams catching this."
I squirmed around, and realized that the emergency exit--just a square hole in the floor of the 'pod, under the seat--was open. A grime-swaddled face stared up at me. My face.
He nodded. "Yeah, you're on round two. Maybe three or four, I'm not sure. Good thinking on that personal-time gambit; I spent three hours fencing her questions before escaping. Figures they'd just dup you again--they're no better than McClelland. Now sit tight for a minute."
"Alright, then," I said, ostensibly to myself. "What on earth should I do now?"
"Okay, linkages are away. The 'pod should recycle the minute it detects no life inside, and re-dup us."
"What? Whatever for? I'm pretty sure I can get full employee status out of this!" I forgot to whisper, but then caught it, and stabbed at a console, pretending to act busy. While I couldn't see them, and it was theoretically against regulations, I was sure the cameras outside were spying in, and it made it quite hard to act natural.
"Maybe--but more likely they'll space you, after finding out where you smashed the pirate ship. Do you have any idea what they were carrying?" he asked.
"Of course not! Good grief. I just found out I was a mass murderer and you're keeping things from me? If we're going to work together, you have to be a little less secretive."
"Sorry," he said. "I'm having a hard time trusting--well, anyone." 
We nodded grimly at each other: understood. He continued. "McClelland was working for some wayward VP, lugging a load of monopoles back from the Deep Belts. The crew didn't know, but they were sitting on a real gold mine--so to speak."
"But monopoles are illegal," I protested. Sure, the monopole micro-wormholes were incredibly useful. They provided a steady, if limited, supply of energy by leeching off potential energy differences between distant locations. But they were also dangerous, and rare. Hard to find, hard to hold on to, rather finicky in a gravity well, and desperately valuable.
"Of course they're illegal!" he said. "So is hiring pirates to transport cargo. If that gets out the backlash will be pretty fierce. That's why I need you down here, with me. I can't do it alone this time--too many guards."
He looked haggard; I imagine he'd been awake, and away from food, for some time. He also had the light pink of a close encounter with a security laser, a brilliant mark on the right side of his neck. Corp ships were a lot harder to sneak around in than rickety pirate vessels.
"Alright," I said, "I'm with you--we can leave the backup here. One of us'll probably survive, right?"
"That's the spirit. Now c'mon--just fold your arms and dive in; the crawl space is just wide enough for two. And hurry up--we've got work to do."

#

"Did we really kill a whole shipload of people?" I asked my dup. We were wiggling our way upwards between a pair of bulkheads, sidling around high-voltage connects and vacuum system lines. It was tense, slow going.
He shrugged; I felt it more than saw it in the dim cramped space. "I guess so. I can't imagine." He paused for a long while, long enough to make me wonder if he'd found something. "But--wouldn't you? They'd killed us, over and over--we were just rats, at their mercy."
"Yeah," I said, and shivered.
"That's why we're getting out of here," he said. "Before Ms. Smile and her horde do the same thing."
The light from the survival kit I'd grabbed was barely sufficient: we'd agreed it should be kept at the lowest setting, both for longevity and to reduce chance of detection. On the other side of these walls were state rooms and crew compartments: one glowing power outlet could reveal our presence. 
It was slow going. After a deck or two of careful motion I whispered up again. "Have you given any thought to where we're actually going?"
"Oh, yes."
"Care to share?"
"Engineering first. We need to steal some parts. Then, off to the shuttle bay."
"We're stealing a ship?"
"You are. I'm going to go jettison the 'pod straight out of the hangar. Can't leave any of us behind or they'll be on our tail." He paused, then ducked under a particularly large waste tube.
It took me a moment to figure out how to get my shoulders under without stepping on a power conduit. A squirm and a twist? No--maybe a quick step and a tight pinch against the wall? "Why? Are we going somewhere?"
"You do remember where the monopoles are, right?" He smirked.
"I...guess? There were some notes about position in the logs. I didn't read it too closely."
"No matter. We'll have the logs with us."
I nodded, then kicked out the dryer cover.

#

We bulled our way past a pair of unsuspecting cleaning drones. It was somewhat outside the realm of their programming, a pair of identical humans erupting from the laundry flues. Like the rest of their ilk, they reacted to the unexpected with a complete lack of interest. Other-me put a hand on my shoulder as he popped open the chute connector. Our eyes met; I nodded, and we both put on brave smiles. Then it was out into the stinging light of the laundry.
It was a good plan--I wished I'd thought of it. Given a few more hours in the hungry dark, I probably would have. Like any asymmetric assailant, our advantages lay primarily in surprise, deception, and commitment. Stealth was crucial for the first; the second two hinged on cleverness and courage. My stomach had its own opinions of my supposed bravery, but I was damned if I'd let Corp duplicate me for another go-round.
Surprise would serve to get us outfitted, at least enough to move on to deception. The laundry was just a first step. A few moments of sorting through dirty clothes netted me a complete crew-sock, from trimmed collar down to treaded booties. I grabbed a Corp-branded hooded sweatshirt, too, of the sort middle management used when heading to the exercise rooms.
My dup grabbed a similar outfit. "Well--" he paused, and put a hand on my shoulder. "Good luck. See you in the hangar." 
"Thanks," I said. "Good luck yourself." By comparison, I had the easy job.
Pulling on the sock and hoodie I squared my shoulders. Without an Employee badge, I'd have to sell my status through pure chutzpah. Luckily there was no shortage of Corp stereotypes for me to emulate--I settled on "world-weary manager hiding from work", and adjusted the angle of my hood accordingly.
I sauntered out of the damp heat onto the aft causeway, doing my best imitation of the insufferable Employee Swagger. Branded in Corp-wear, walking in firm footsteps toward the weapons lockers by the aft muster point, I almost fooled myself.
The grid-work bridge, spanning the length of the enormous assembly chamber, was firm under my feet but slightly slick; condensation from hot water pipes up above had dripped down on the chill metal. It seemed Corp Clean (can't forget that trademark!) didn't apply in the bowels of the ship.
Down below, a few Servicers--probably contractors, from their outfits--loitered below, making busywork for themselves as soon as they caught a glimpse of me. That was fine--the more they poked at their machines, the less chance they had of making me. I'd been there: keep your head down, hope no one's having a bad day as they pass by. Hope to avoid attention for one more empty shift.
The rear corridor was empty--though I hadn't thought to check, I was guessing the ship was into sixth watch. It'd be running on a skeleton crew for the overnight before stationfall. This made the Stage Two distraction we'd planned unnecessary, so I moved on to Stage Three: misdirection.
We--my dup and I--had jury rigged a card shim from the backup circuitry in a wall-walker, plus some tools from the Pod's dorsal bay toolkit. Some creative engineering had been required--condoms for electrical insulation, a used toothbrush for the feeler gauge. But I had high hopes for at least a temporary unlock.
I pulled the sweatshirt's hood tighter around my face as I approached the secure area. Automated cameras above turned inquisitively to watch, but at this time of night it was unlikely that some sleepy security guard would care about me. I paused at the door, mentally preparing myself before springing into action. A quick stab at the main light control brought up the master lights in the assembly chamber--enormous flood lamps meant to fill the cavernous chamber for maximal wakefulness during interminable All Hands meetings, or to prep PR troops for parade presentation.
Fighting back a blink I slipped the card shim into the weapons locker door and the toothbrush/feeler into the door's auxiliary reader, an old-style card swipe device. The shim sent a billion incorrect pass codes at the reader, each rejected. As its tiny battery wound down the shim varied the retry rate, hunting for a resonant frequency in the circuitry of the reader. Coupled with my accomplice's sabotage of very specific power couplings in D block, and the need to supply the power drain of the floods, the reader circuit couldn't draw the power it needed to dispatch the shim's denial attack.
I heard a whine as the power transistor within the lock started to overload and quickly yanked the condom off the body of the shim, allowing it full electrical contact with the reader. Fail-overs elsewhere in the ship finally clicked, and power rang back into the sensor's circuits. The shim arced voltage between its two probes, surging the circuitry of the lock, scanning until it found the signal voltage. The solenoid fired, and the bolt slid back.
I yanked hard on the heavy door before the lock could change its mind--right in the nick of time. The bolt shot out again as the shim burned up, sparks flying around my hand. I dragged the door the rest of the way open, scraping bolt against doorjamb as I did so.
The dead shim became a door stop as alarms lit around me. Security would be coming on the run, but I didn't intend to stay long. Our plan only called on me to bring them here, far from the hanger. Still, I paused to pocket a few things: Taser, a few flash-bangs, a survival pack. A rifle.
I emptied the rifle into the inside door lock. Lacking any need to armor it, designers had instead opted to make it pretty. The pretty plastic bezel covering the keypad melted beautifully, revealing a gorgeous nest of wires. I melted those too, holding down the trigger until a small fire started in the in-wall insulation. The smoke reeked; but I needed the cover.
I left the door jammed open--they'd waste time checking out the smoky room. Two steps past the weapons locker was an access chute; I pulled off the grate and threw it clumsily to one side, then set a flash-bang for thirty seconds and chucked it in as I ran to the aft airlock.
Behind me I could hear the shouts of the security guards. With any luck they'd look down the chute and get a nice surprise.
Phase Three was well underway; I could only hope Phase Four was going as smoothly.

#

But of course, Phase Four had not gone smoothly. 
If I'd know that back at the locker, I would have slung a few extra rifles over my shoulder and stuffed my pockets with grenades--weight be damned. Hindsight, twenty-twenty, all that. As it was, I was running out of reloads.
"Two--keep your head down! I can see you from here!" the other me yelled from across the flight deck.
We were at opposite ends of the huge room, a half-dozen ships between us. We were both hiding behind blocks of console, separated and pinned down by the trio of better-armed soldiers in the middle of the room. My other self, One--I wasn't sure why he was One and I was Two, but he started it, and the middle of the fire-fight seemed a poor time to argue about precedence--had managed to shout out a warning as I'd moseyed in, just in time for me to avoid a nasty ambush from some overachieving security guards.
I thought I was hidden, but I hunched down anyway. A scorching ray from a rifle burst through the console and melted the wall right about where my crew cut had been a moment earlier. Time for a change of scenery--I was running out of hiding room.
"One, can you cover?" I yelled. It was kind of weird, shouting plans into the air where I knew full well the enemy could hear, but I didn't have a communicator with me.
"Hang tight and wait for the backup--they're doing a pincer on you!" he shouted back. I heard some wild firing from the right, and chanced a quick look--one of the trio was concentrating fire on where One was, trying to flush him. I wasn't sure what he meant by backup, so tossed the last of my grenades at the lone gunman to distract his aim.
It fell short, but rolled between the guard's legs. True to his training, he didn't bother to try to retrieve it, just kept his chin up and leapt for the nearest cover. In this case it landed him behind the same console where One was. I spun behind my cover and breathed deep, summoning strength for a quick run to help him out. I tensed my legs--and got grabbed from behind by four rough hands.
Oldest mistake in the book--caught admiring one's handiwork. The other two had taken advantage of the lull in fire to circle my console and tackle me.
They worked fast, plastic ties binding my hands to my feet, a constrictor gag cutting off any hope of sight or speech and leaving precious little air. The world got very small; I could hear bumping and banging, heavy footsteps as they sprinted across the room to help their coworker. More banging, and a few shots, then a thump.
It got quiet.
I struggled a bit, but I was well and truly trussed. I'd seen the squat-and-bind in Entertainments, of course, but never really understood how effective it was. I couldn't see, nor scream for help; at best I might be able to roll myself painfully by flexing elbows and knees, but with no clear plan nor sense of direction this seemed a losing game. I was left with stewing and listening.
I counted out five hundred heartbeats without much change. By now the action hero would have freed himself, slicing the bonds with a clever knife hidden in his sleeve, or by summoning his loyal ButlerBot with a quick nudge of a fingernail transceiver. I had neither. And more was the pity, they didn't seem to be bothering to come round and throw me in the back of their transport, or whatever they did to shipboard criminals.
On top of it all, I had to pee.
A few thousand heartbeats later, I ended up going down my leg. I rolled painfully a little bit in some direction--away from the console, I imagined--so I wouldn't have to lie in the puddle. The whole thing made me quite sick; but I didn't want to imagine what that would be like with the gag in, so I didn't.
I was pretty sure One was dead; or perhaps trussed up like me. We could be side by side, with no way to communicate unless we happened to bang into each other. The thought amused me momentarily; a game of terrible Blind Man's Bluff, with everyone "it" and no kiss at the end.
I tried making as much noise as I could around the gag, which mostly came out like a strangled moan. No response; just a faint reverberation off the cold walls of the hangar. No way out.



CHAPTER SIX

I must have slept.
The gag came off fast, taking bits of stubble on my upper lip with it. The sudden influx of light blinded me. There was a snap, and circulation returned to my hands with a painful burst sensation. My knees kinked and popped as I unbent them.
"Ooh, err. You couldn't have held it in?" a voice asked.
"Sorry," I said. My voice was raspy and not responding properly. "Just left me there too long."
"It's okay. Can you move? We brought a spare suit. But you'll need to get it on quick--Seven and Twelve aren't going to be able to hold the door for long."
I peered at the security guard in front of me--no, not security. Another Gary? Yes. And no stubble. Newer than me. "Where'd you come from?" I choked out.
"Same place you did. Five set it up to auto-gen; we were getting outfoxed, so he made sure we rabbits outnumbered them."
"You can *do* that?" I asked. I stripped out of the wet crew sock. My limbs were creaky and pale from lack of blood flow, and I fumbled indelicately at seals as I got into the space suit. Pale green--maintenance. I wondered which laundry they'd stolen it from.
"You can do it when Corp puts the 'pod in override and hooks it into their matter feed just so they can keep duping us." His smile was grim and thin-lipped. "Of course, Five didn't make it either."
"How long was I out? Never mind. What's the plan? We getting out of here?" Looking around, I could see another half-dozen duplicates milling around. My eyes still refused to focus on anything past arm's length, and everything was hazy and red.
"Yeah, as many as we have left. We jettisoned the 'pod after they depressurized the room it was in; the plan now is to catch up with it and get the hell out of here."
"That's a terrible plan. What's to keep them from shooting us down on the way out?"
"Look around you," he said, smiling.
I did. The hangar lights were out--the redness I'd attributed to my eyes was the emergency lighting. A slow crawl of indicators up the alarm tubes told the story. "You took out main engineering?"
He nodded. "Hard vacuum out in the hall. Look--you're not up to speed. I've been assigned to getting the stragglers out of here, so now that you're on your feet you can help me get the rest."
"Okay. Say, did you find another guy trussed up behind those controls?" I pointed to where I'd tossed the grenade, then saw the hole in the deck. The front of the console was gone, as well as a divot from the flight deck; a ragged sphere of demolition, about where One and the guards had been. I could see their remains; a pair of shattered corpses, and most of One. The body, still clad in workman's blues, ended at about mid-torso; he must have been partially shielded by the console. The grenade--a disintegrator? I must have grabbed it instead of a flash-bang--and then One--
I swallowed. "Never mind. Who else is out here?"
"Just a few of us. Now, zip up and follow me closely--we're still outnumbered ten-to-one in the main corridors. I don't want you getting hit by friendly fire." He handed me a rifle and smiled. "Still remember how to use one of these things?"
I nodded. "Don't know if I can shoot anyone, though."
"You already killed three people this morning," he said grimly. "Get over it."
We pushed toward the bow of the ship, moving quickly down service corridors. Occasionally we'd see another dup in the corridors; my guide (Eighteen, as it turned out) passed the word to the stragglers, telling them to get aft. Occasionally we'd run into real crew, but at this point we'd taken over the remains of the aft weapons lockers and spiked the life support. Between asphyxiation and firefights our tiny band of saboteurs had turned the tide. Anyone not in a suit was pretty much out cold; anyone in a suit shouted something intelligible real fast, or ended up holed.

#

After a big circle around the bowels of the ship we headed aft ourselves. Eighteen popped a pair of guards before I even saw them, and I yanked him out of the way of a scissor-mine, but otherwise it was a pretty uneventful circuit. The ship was a throbbing mess, lights occasionally flickering on line before getting sabotaged again.
It was a grim war, our escape, fought in the walls and the edges of the ship. I did end up shooting a few people. It didn't get any easier. These weren't like the pirate guy, the one who trapped my other selves and killed them over and over; these were simple Corp employees between us and the door. I was pretty nauseous by the time we made it back to the hangar.
A pair of duplicates were directing traffic--two grav trucks pulling in supplies. We followed them up the ship's ramp and into the belly of the craft, where a gaggle of familiar faces greeted me.
"That it?" the guy by the door asked. My guide nodded and grabbed a seat on one of the double-wide benches along the walls of the hold. I did the same, squeezing between a pair of duplicates. The two of them were smiling a bit more than I was--I guess they weren't pushing through a night of stiff, dark self-reflection. My head lolled back and banged into the bulkhead.
"You alright, buddy?" one of them asked.
"Nice beard--how long since you were duped?" the other said. This close, hearing my own voice in stereo sent shivers up my arms.
"Not sure--two days? We spent the night in the walls, and then I was trussed up for a long time..."
"Well, go hit sick-bay and grab a nap. The rest of us can take care of it," the one on my right said.
"Yeah, I can take you there--Twelve and I mapped out this ship before we took it," the other said. "I'm Fourteen, by the way."
"Alright. Uh, Two, I guess." I was pretty darn tired, and achy from hours hog-tied. On top of it, I kept seeing the shattered corpse of One; a decent night of drugged sleep sounded like an excellent prescription.
"Two, really? Wow. I wonder where One is..." he mused.
"One is dead," I said. I left out the bit about me being the one who killed him.
We arrived at the med-bay, little more than a closet with two beds and a medical freezer. He palmed the door lock, but as the door slid open, the ship shifted. A triple clank signaled the release of grounding clamps holding the little ship fast. We floated free, left behind by the big vessel. Fourteen and I grabbed hand-holds instinctively and hugged the aft wall, waiting.
Our ship's engines fired, dragging us down to the deck at about double-weight. I fell a little awkwardly. One ankle buckled, and slammed my right knee into the bulkhead.
"Sorry about that--if I'd known we were so close to main burn I would have held off." He looked concerned. They were all so nice. It was creeping me out. No matter how polite I acted, no one had ever been all that nice to me. It was one of the reasons I'd found myself a job where no one would bother me--they always screwed it up, sooner or later. A wrong word, a stupid look, a nasty little jab to let me know how much they really disliked me.
"S'ok--just my ankle." He offered me a shoulder, and together we hobbled in the twice-weight toward the beds. I fell backwards, hitting my head on the edge of the bed frame, and saw his look of concern again. It hurt tremendously, but my fingers didn't come back bloody when I checked it, so I just settled in to the padding and tried to give him a lopsided smile.
We lay for a while, in quiet companionship. There were a series of small maneuvering jerks, then a loud clang as the main hold doors opened. We heard an impact--that should be the Duplipod, ejected from the hangar where it had been--and a series of bangs as it tumbled to rest in the hold. All my past, wrapped up in that device.
Fourteen grinned at me, and I nodded in reply, too tired to share his enthusiasm. The sick bed served pretty well as an acceleration couch; I soon found myself dozing off.

#

I woke suddenly when the acceleration lessened--we had gained enough relative speed on the crippled Corp ship to cease sprinting. Fourteen was gone, so I stumbled my way toward the bridge after a brief stop at the head.
The bridge was a room of mirrors: a dozen duplicates filling the basic functions of the ship, offering needless advice to each other, and generally milling around. There was even a quartet playing cards on the auxiliary Nav console. This was definitely the place to be.
Judging from the displays, we were in low Corp space, diving fast through the outer belts into the star's gravity well. No doubt on an intercept with the wreckage of the pirate ship and its precious cargo of monopoles.
A dozen heads swung up to watch me as I staggered in. They were all starting to look a little scruffy--no one had bothered to shave yet, or shower. I usually waited on such rituals until after I slept, but no one else looked especially well-rested.
The one by the sensor chair spoke up. "Hi. Number?"
"Sorry--Two, I guess."
"Eight. Glad to hear you're up and about."
"What've we got? Pay dirt?"
The trio hovering around the sensor suite looked at each other grimly. Eight tapped a few keys to pull up a picture on the console. It showed a thousand tiny bits of space debris, glinting in reflected sunlight as they spun in slow orbit around a large asteroid. "Not much left of McClelland's craft, I'm afraid."
I whistled lowly. "Man. Must have broken and spun after impact. We did a real number on that." I stared at the screen, out into the empty darkness. Somewhere out there was a tiny rag-doll body with my face on it, flipping end over end. He'd done a good job, given the tools he had. I felt like I wanted to shake his hand, wherever he'd gotten to.
"Preliminary modeling indicates it was an offset impact, with the ship plowing into a counter-rotating mountain on the asteroid and getting sheared apart. The debris field is pretty large by now--it's had about six weeks to spread out. Best estimate is a spread of about seventy thousand kilometers for the faster chunks."
Well, that was that: no way we were searching trillions of cubic kilometers of space, especially in a asteroid field. But--"Six weeks? How long were they duping us?" I asked.
"Most of that was in the 'pod." He cocked his head for a minute. "At least, assuming they didn't rig its records. Looks like it was only a day at most before you were generated." He pursed his lips, then stopped.
"So what are we going to do? It'd take us years to sweep that space, with the monopoles drifting the whole time. And we'll run out of food in, what, a week?" My stomach was beginning to act up; I was reminded that other than a suck on the nutrient hose, I hadn't really eaten anything decent since, well, lunch before the first impact. Probably two months without food--I wondered if that was a new record. "So now what--go running back to Corp? That's a stupid idea."
They all were looking at me by now. Finally, Eight piped up. "Well--we were sort of hoping you'd tell us."
I glanced around the room. A couple of them nodded. They all looked young somehow; something subtle in the brow and mouth. Trusting. Willing.
"What's going on?" I asked.
"You know how Five rewired the Duplipod to keep churning out dups?" Eight asked.
I nodded. "Smart move, too; we sure needed the numbers."
Eight's mouth turned down. "It wasn't just that. He did it because...well, he found out they were messing with the pattern. Our pattern. Making us more pliable, more willing to answer their questions. Less prone to escape. More willing to help."
I gulped. "How? I thought the units were read-only--body in, body out...mens sana in corporo sano..."
Eight stared at his hands, turning them over as if checking them for wounds. "You know that ship that picked us up? Forty crew, a dozen workers, and like a hundred scientists...we figure it's a research vessel." He thrust his chin at one of the others. "Sixteen here got a glimpse into the aft--more med equipment than you've ever seen. Even this piddling supply ship we're on has a full facility--everything you could want for putting yourself back together again. Outside of a reverse brain-washing machine, of course."
He looked up at me. "Except--you were duped before they made the modifications. It was your little firefight that prompted the change. The rest of us...well, we're okay with following through on a plan, but coming up with new ones..." He shrugged again. "If Three hadn't left detailed instructions about his plan I don't think any of us would have even made it out of the 'pod."
"That's nonsense. You're just as smart as I am. But I don't understand--if they can--"
"Hey! Check this out!" One of the others jabbed at the passive radar display. "A signal hit from someone's transponder--looks like a PA-108." He stopped. "Looks like our PA-108."
"Our old ship? Really? I thought the letter said McClelland had scooped the thing up," I said.
"Evidently he didn't get all of it." The discoverer's hands moved quickly on the controls, bringing up a more focused view. Visual was nearly useless at this range, but computer-enhanced data of the spinning fragment sketched an outline of the aft half of our old craft. The dorsal fin was still intact, but the craft seemed to end about a meter forward of it. That would leave the backup bridge and secondary sensors intact, along with major propulsion--though not fuel. That was stored in the nose, to provide additional shielding during travel.
"Strap a fuel tank and a seat to it, and you could probably still fly the damn thing," I said, after a minute. "Let's get there. How far out is it?"
Three sets of fingers leapt to keyboards; a race to calculate closing speeds. To win my approval? The idea was abhorrent, but I couldn't ignore their ingratiating smiles. A moment later, the one on my right said, "About eighteen hours, sir- ah, Two. That's under standard acceleration. Uh, I'm Nine."
Sir? I hadn't been in the service in twenty years. Just what had they put in these minds? "Right. Thanks. What about a full g? We should have fuel to burn. No pun intended. Food's the constraint here."
"Of course. Yeah. Umm, about twelve hours. Give or take."
"That sounds good to me. In the meantime, everybody should cycle through the food banks, eat something, have a shower, grab some sleep, y'know, as if we were human beings."
Eight narrowed his eyes at me. "We're not stupid, Two. Just...it's hard to explain. Uninventive. You wouldn't understand."
I grumbled quietly. "Alright. Didn't mean to imply anything. But right now, you're all--we're all starting to look like pirates, so how about we clean up a bit and have some food. Grub's on me!"

#

Chow was frozen blocks of NutraSoy coupled with a gorgeous spread of fresh fruit. This last was from a cargo bin--the craft we stole had been originally intended to be a supply ship to a mining colony on Femtos, a miner's hub in the outer Belts. Someone had the bright idea to break into the crates, and found a cache. The fruit wouldn't keep--it had been sterilized to keep the germs out, but there was only so long before the cell walls broke down--so we chowed down with a vengeance.
Roll call found fifteen of us on board: numbers Two, Six, and Eight through Twenty-One excepting Eleven. Seven had died holding a door; no one seemed to know where Eleven was. He'd gone out on the hull in an attempt to cut a main power feed. Twelve didn't want to talk about it. I was the only early one left; Six said he hadn't even met Five, let alone the earlier dups.
There was also the corpse in the 'pod, which was fastened down in the bay, but none of us felt like reviving it. It'd keep, and if we woke it up would just be another mouth to feed. Rations would last for at least three months even on good feed. The supply ship had been half-packed when we'd taken it. One had had a good plan, and the rest of us had made it happen.
Since I'd just had a rest, I grabbed a shift on console up in the bridge after dinner, chatting with the others as they cycled in and out. We didn't have a whole lot to talk about--shared experiences and shared viewpoints making for pretty dull conversation. After everyone had told their own individual story of escape it became a pretty dull conversation. We settled into quiet company.
After a day or more acclimatizing to standard acceleration on board the Corp ship, doubling to full terrestrial levels wasn't pleasant, but it wasn't crushing, either. It amused me to think that planet-bound folks preferred this weight dragging at them all the time. My neck kept protesting my head's new-found pull, and it was impossible to get comfortable leaning over the console.
Finally I broke down and adjusted the chair to support me--and discovered what all the levers on it were for. A bit of tinkering, and I had a much better set-up: a head-rest to support that colossal weight, arm rests so I wasn't dragged forward by my upper body, and a chair pushed all the way down so my feet were resting on the floor the whole time. It was an odd feeling, being supported in five places. Almost like lying on a med-bed. Or in a Duplipod.
I dropped that thought. Just what had they done to us, in there? Was there some "loyalty" circuit they'd cranked up? My duplicates were somewhat naff; could they have tinkered with some neurochemistry, or was it simply a matter of brainwashing? Only a medical scan would tell, and I wouldn't have the sophistication to understand its results in any case.
Just after second watch had chimed, I noticed a fast-moving fragment on an intercept--probably just debris, but its eventual proximity to our projected course made me suspicious. It was coming from behind us: someone or something had given that hunk of space rock a bit of serious velocity.
I tapped Fourteen, who was acting as Nav, and pointed. "Doppler's picking up something fast-moving, and the computer seems to think it'll come close."
He nodded. "Should we change course? We can dodge that easy."
"Sure, just try to stay on schedule and out of the marbles." This was no mean task. We were on the edge of the Inner Belts, and the gravity fields were complex and shifting. My old ship had an armload of sensors and programs to track the scree, but this supply ship had never been intended for such a jaunt. Its collision prediction software was somewhat sluggish, and late notices of impact meant we had to burn extra fuel to steer clear. Still, Fourteen had a steady hand on the stick, as we all did, and he coaxed a good line out of the computer.
At the speeds we were traveling currently--a bit after mid-point inversion, and slowing for intercept at a full g--we could be easily holed by minor debris coming at us from outside the rocket cone. The sensors picked up the larger rocks, and we could annihilate the smaller ones if they came singly, but the system was poor at predicting clusters of small stuff in the complex gravity fields of the belt. It needed a human touch on the controls. I let Fourteen sink into the task, eyes wide and hands twitching on the keyboard, periodically sending hints to the navigation system.
A few minutes later, it became apparent the missile was changing course to intercept: decelerating to match speeds and increase the chance of impact. Corp wasn't fooling around.

#

I had no experience dodging missiles. And that meant neither did my crew-mates, unless one of them had snuck in a correspondence course in the last twenty hours. Time to do some quick reading.
I popped open a frame into the ship's Omnicyc, and searched through it for pages on shipboard combat. There was a brief pause, and the system regurgitated an avalanche of hits. 
Right, then. Time to parallel-process. I tapped in the code for ship-wide comms.
"All, this is Two. We have a missile inbound, estimated time of impact in"--I checked Fourteen's display--"six hours. That means we've got that much time to figure out how to dodge or destroy this thing. Unless you have a better idea, I want teams reading through the Omnicyc and coming up with possible courses. Study groups of three; nominate a leader, and leaders should cycle through the groups every hour or something." I did the math in my head; that left a group of two. Guess that meant me. "Oh, uh, and one of you meet me on the bridge."
A minute later Eight showed up. I was sure it was eight, because he'd drawn a crude numeral eight on the chest of his crew sock. "The others are getting organized downstairs...what do you need me for?" he asked.
"We're going to do some reading, some brainstorming, and some coordination. And I want you to trade with Fourteen on console, there...he looks tired."
"I'm good," Fourteen said, brows furrowed in concentration. He took a moment to wring his hands together. "Maybe another hour."
"Maybe now. Why don't you help me with these charts, instead?" I said.
Fourteen had gotten used to taking my orders over the past few hours; we made a good team. He had started to do the thing any good aide does: learn your intent, and ready the tools to make it happen. In this case, he'd already cleared a chair for me next to him. I could get used to this.
We hopped on dual consoles, pulling up charts of the local rocks. The primer I'd found had recommended three basic courses of action: high relative velocity, jamming, or blocking. Interception wasn't much of an option for a small missile traveling at high relative speed, and in any case we didn't have a missile of our own to throw at it.
We couldn't out-run it, not in this junker. Jamming was a real option--a team led by Six was looking into it. We had enough radio gear on board to fake a signature; we just needed a really big antenna. Still, it was a long shot.
Fourteen and I were looking into blocking. As we plunged down through the outer edge of the Belt, rocks were still plentiful. But the further we strayed out of the blazed trails, the higher the risk of something big making us into another Christmas ornament.
What we really needed was a scissor or two--a few big rocks crossing near each other that we could duck behind. The missile's guidance system, though capable of tracking the small stuff and dodging, probably wasn't sophisticated enough to run predictive dynamics on the whole Belt--same problem we were having, really. But that meant we'd have to fly through the eye of a stone needle, slowing just enough to let the missile catch up.
I let him run solutions on the computer for a while; my brain was spinning, but my hands were busy on the stick. The small ship felt mushy, as if every minute course adjustment set its hollow frame wobbling. My mining craft was small and hard, built for durability and longevity--in contrast, this blimp was built to move cargo cheaply. I could feel the foreshortening of the craft under the constant decel. It'd be a wonder if it would survive our final juke. We would need a two or three gee burst to get the missile to slow down, followed by a quick flip and a sprint away from the confluence.
It seemed like only a few moments before Fourteen tapped my shoulder. "I think I found one. About four hours away; we'll have to decel first to let it develop, and jink early to put the missile on the right track behind us, but it might work."
I blinked. My hands were nearly numb on the stick and throttle, and my shoulders hurt. How long had I been flying, really? "How much--does that give us enough time?"
"It should. Six came up with a scheme to use the hull as a transceiver, too; we've got folks outside setting up wires."
"On the hull? Under acceleration?" I almost added, 'brave men', then remembered exactly who I was speaking of. My heart swelled a bit with a weird feeling something like pride.
"Yeah, they're all strapped down. Another hour or so and we'll know what effect the jamming is having."
I nodded. "Alright. Why don't you take the stick, since you know where and when we're going; I think I need a drink."

#

My boys had set up a tiny cantina in a supply closet next to sick bay, in the heart of the ship. It was only a short jaunt from the bridge; I figured to have a quick cocktail and be back before those two got into any serious trouble. There wasn't much booze to be had--a little medicinal ethanol--but someone had added some flavor esters and a nip of fruit juice, and mixed up a beaker of nasty screwdrivers. I gulped, winced, and had another munch of the wet ration pack I'd heated. It was old oatmeal--pre-sterilized, guaranteed to taste the same for the next hundred years. Which is to say, I needed the screwdriver to wash it down.
After the first gulp came a second. It'd been a long, hot day, even given the few hours of sleep I'd managed to grab, and I really wasn't feeling myself. The oatmeal was warm in my stomach, and the tangy drink made it almost pleasant. I closed my eyes and leaned against a filing cabinet, trying to relax, but asteroid impact paths kept swimming behind my eyes.
I was putting the plastic dishes in the recycler when the jolt hit. It threw me to the floor; leftover oatmeal splattered all over my 'sock and face. Dishes scattered. I spent a moment trying to dodge the debris, but a second jolt slammed me upwards.
Then I heard the sound every spacer fears--hull breach alarms.
The closet was just about as far from the hull as you could get; unless we'd been torn in two I probably had the air inside the local bulkheads. Outside of that? The ship had a handful of space suits--maybe eight, with the ones we'd brought in. And two 'pods. That left a few of me hung out to dry--assuming everyone had survived the impact. Not a nice thought; and surely they'd look to me to choose. I found myself wishing I didn't secretly wish a few more of us had bitten the dust.
Underneath my feet the ship was creaking with the strain of acceleration; evidently the bridge crew hadn't thought to cut engines after impact, or perhaps they were incapacitated. Getting the ship shut down was the most important course of action. If we'd taken as much structural damage as I figured, the constant thrust could rip the engines from their mounts, or bend the upper decks over, or sunder the fuel tanks. The bridge, built deep in the ship for maximal protection, was just down the hall. I grabbed a pack of ice cream for the sugar and wished fervently I'd had slightly less alcohol.
The bulkhead between the closet and the bridge was, mercifully, still open. The scene inside the bridge wasn't pretty. The damage we'd taken had bent a support girder over the front consoles, and acceleration had ripped it free to crash down on Fourteen and Eight. Both were pinned underneath--the former clearly dead, with most of his torso flattened. Eight looked like he was breathing but in shock; he had no legs, nor a right arm. But his stomach fluttered and his eyes tracked me as I entered.
I threw him what I hoped was a reassuring grimace--if I could get him out, I could throw him in the 'pod. But first I needed to get the girder off, and that meant cutting acceleration.
I found an intact auxiliary console, stuffed out of the way under a supply cabinet. The interface was terrible--old command line prompts, again--but that primitive nature gave it a greater resilience. The keyboard was dinged up and the tiny text view a bit scratched, but working. I plugged it into the data port on the main console, hoping that the main computers in the bowels of the ship hadn't been too badly damaged.
HULL BREACH FORWARD SECTIONS 3, 7, 8, 11A
SYSTEM FAILURE(S)--SEE LOG FOR DETAILS
 SUBSYSTEM FAILURE--SEE LIFE SUPPORT LOG FOR DETAILS
 SUBSYSTEM FAILURE--SEE MANEUVER LOG FOR DETAILS
 SUBSYSTEM ERRORS--REFER TO COOLANT/PLUMBING LOG
 SUBSYSTEM ERRORS--REFER TO COMMUNICATIONS LOG

Story of my life. I punched in an override code and pulled up some queries.
SYSTEM OVERRIDE
LIFE SUPPORT 23% EST 8h24m REMAIN
MAIN DRIVE ENGAGED 1.0G NOMINAL (0.97G ACTUAL)
  EST 292h43m REMAIN
PORT FUEL TANK: 57%
STARBOARD FUEL TANK: [[SENSOR ERROR]]
	
Nothing better there. I typed out a command to drop thrust; we needed that fuel! My finger hovered over the Execute key, but something stopped me. I grabbed the ship's comm off the wall. "Now heer this--this is Two. I am cutting power to the engines. Prepare for freefall." I paused for a moment to let that sink in. I repeated, "Repeat, prepare for freefall." Then I hooked my foot under the guardrail and hit enter.
The bridge room bloomed. That was the only good word for it. The wreckage gently floated upward, propelled by the compressed springs of the deck chairs and the bent guard rail. I scooted over to Eight, and started firmly and steadily supplying force to the main beam. After a moment of effort it started to move--then wedged, caught at the back on something I couldn't see. Eight looked up at me, a young, vulnerable man. Was I really that young? He closed his eyes. I could see his shoulders slump. No time to waste. I grabbed him by his good arm, and pulled him cautiously.
His eyes snapped open, and he screamed. I kept pulling, aided suddenly by a lubricating gout of blood from his arm. His body came free with a snap. We flew backwards toward the door through a shower of bloody droplets. The auxiliary console hit me in the back of the head--I'd stupidly forgotten to clamp it down. I clawed my way past, and shot down the corridor toward medical.
Eight had gone still. His eyes were closed, but he was sweating and damp. I ducked under a partly-closed supply cabinet, his limp body flapping against me as I scooted from spar to spar. The ship wasn't built for daily living in the absence of acceleration, but like all Corp ships had to pass CISTA standards for emergency preparedness; the handholds weren't what I'd prefer, but they were enough to get around, and the padding on junction walls meant I could careen around corners with some impunity.
In mid-bounce I nearly bowled over someone. "Twelve," he said as we untangled, by way of introduction. "We have to get the engines running again--there's still that missile on the way. We need maneuver!"
"Two. Great, look--I need to get Eight to med-bay. I left an auxiliary console plugged in--you can hack it from there. Just--uh--we might break apart, so go gentle."
"Will do."
He started to go, but I called after him. "What was it? An asteroid? A missile we missed?"
He shook his head grimly. "Sabotage."
Sabotage?
The word rang in my ears. "One of us?"
He nodded slowly. "Thirteen. Or rather, the dup claiming to be Thirteen - for all we know he could be anyone."
I hustled toward sick bay. "Lucky thirteen. Did we get him?"
He shouted back flatly: "Yep."
Sick bay was a flurry of activity. Twenty and twenty-one--our youngsters, with numbers neatly printed on their chests--were dancing anxiously around the 'pod while it regenerated someone. I couldn't read who the body was.
"Uh, I'm Two," I said. "Crap. Is the 'pod full? Eight is really bad off," I said, gesturing vaguely with the floating near-corpse in my right hand.
"Yeah, yeah, one sec--just have to cycle this one out...Nine got caught by a bulkhead." He stabbed at the outside console.
Eight was deep into shock, his flesh an ashen color. His brain was dying. I thought I could feel his brain cells starving for oxygen as we waited for the machine to painstakingly reconstruct Nine. I'd lost enough dups already, darn it.
We watched through the porthole as the mist swirled and condensed into skin slowly forming on muscle and bone. Finally the light came on and the door handle unlocked. Twenty yanked the door open, Twenty-One grabbed the confused jumble that was Nine, and I threw Eight--or what was left of him--into the machine. Twenty slammed the door as another shudder ran through the ship.
The comm rang out. "Now hear this--this is Twelve. We will be accelerating in five seconds, one half gee."
I counted the seconds off as I grabbed for a handhold to get my feet on the deck.
"Mark."
We sagged under the sudden weight. Nine's newly formed skull rang off the deck as he fell through the grip of the Twenties. He yelped, which was good--it meant he was still alive.
The ship shuddered as the engines put strain on its weakened substructure. Twenty looked at me questioningly. "Why are we underway? Sabotage--were you there for that?"
I shook my head. "No, but Twelve told me."
"Twelve's dead," the other said.
I could feel my shoulders clamp up. "What do you mean, dead? He's in the bridge, making that missile miss us."
"Twelve's dead," Twenty-One repeated.
"Right," I said, a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. "You stay here and take care of these two--Twenty, come with me. We're getting to the bottom of this." I paused, thinking. "And grab that spanner, will you?"

#

The two of us crept forward cautiously while the ship shook around us. Twelve, or whoever it was at the helm, was maneuvering as sharply as he could without tearing the ship apart. To my experienced feet, it felt like the ship was hinged: two pieces connected loosely and twisting under acceleration. We must have been wounded amidship, and the fore half of the ship--fuel and cargo--were likely to snap off, leaving the bridge and engines stranded. It would be a delicate balancing act, keeping the front half perched on the engines thrusting from behind.
"He's going to be busy on an auxiliary console, unless he's dug through some debris," I whispered. "So he should be on the left side of the door, plugged into an outlet there. Do you know the bridge layout?"
Twenty shook his head. "Never made it up there--I was on food duty."
"Well, then, thanks for the screwdrivers set up. I'll take lead--you come in late if he gets the upper hand, okay?"
He nodded, and grinned. "Cavalry. Check."
I swung through the bulkhead opening onto the bridge. The dup was at the aux console, typing furious commands--tiny course corrections, a balancing act played out one jolt per second. I tried to sound friendly. "Hey, Twelve--we doing okay?"
His teeth were clenched. "Yeah. Sure. Tricky to maneuver."
"I'm going to try to dig up a sensor view, see where we are and where that missile is. Maybe we can make it to Fourteen's confluence anyway..." I said.
"What's that?"
"A confluence. We were aiming to shoot the gap between a trio of rocks, lose the missile behind us. It's still about two hours off."
"Okay." He spared a glance at me and jutted his chin leftward. "Over there."
I nodded and tried to float casually that way while keeping an eye on him. It was impossible to tell what he was up to from here--I needed to get into the system myself. Hence the sensor dodge; if I could find another aux console I might be able to suss our path. Rummaging through the debris I found a spiral-wound cord and started tracing it back into the pile.
"Two, look out!" I heard, and spun in time to see Twenty come flying across the bridge. Twelve, or whoever he was, had a pistol out and trained on me. He scowled, and yanked on the trigger--I could see the gun buck from here--but Twenty twisted in mid-flight and managed to grab his gun arm. The two balled up, a pair of twins in blue crewsocks twisting, one holding the gun, the other holding the one. I threw myself at the pile--eliminate the gun, and we could work this out non-lethally.
One of them kicked off the deck--in half a gee, a five-meter broad jump was doable. I landed beside the two as they squared off. The traitor got off another shot, searing the flesh of Twenty's upper arm but taking a spanner across the temple for his troubles. Both teetered, one stunned, one in shock, and I leapt for the traitor's gun arm once more.
The ship creaked, a horrible screech of rending metal coming from the walls. Acceleration jumped dramatically, sending the three of us crashing to the floor. The hull breach alarm sounded again. I could feel, rather than see, the front half of the ship bend over on itself and detach, peeling away the side of the ship as it fell past us. The engines were still thrusting at the same power, but with less than half as much mass to propel they threw us forward fiercely.
The traitor squirmed around on the deck, gun still in hand, and sunk a killing shot into Twenty. I was similarly pinned--at least until the engines burned out the fuel left in their intakes--and struggled sideways as the traitor leveled the gun at me.
"What did they offer you? Why?" I shouted at him, struggling to make myself heard over the roar of the engines, the creak of shredding metal, and the gut-wrenching whistle of escaping atmosphere. "Was it worth it?"
He glared at me. "You make it sound like I had a choice! You think you control your actions? They do! They do!" 
He was crying, I could see.
The lasgun's tip glowed red--



CHAPTER SEVEN

For the second time in a week I woke in a 'pod, feeling dry. And fuzzy. I wasn't quite sure what to do, but the pleasant automated voice convinced me to grab the water tube and take a series of short drinks. I blinked--it was dark, other than the glow from the screen, and the view outside the 'pod seemed still.
Where were Fourteen and Two? We'd been on the bridge. Something flashed in my memory; a quick glimpse of Fourteen, his body pinned under tons of machinery. And pain-shocked memories of Two yanking me free, bullying me along: forcing me to live.
Someone else must have triggered the release mechanism, or I wouldn't be here. But who had summoned me? I flipped on the external speakers. "Anyone out there? What hit us?" I said.
No answer, just a quiet echo. Well, that meant atmosphere--which the Duplipod sensors confirmed. A little thin, but present. I grabbed the emergency rebreather from under the seat, strapped it on, and popped the door.
Sick bay. I was in sick bay, in a bloody Duplipod. There were a pair corpses adrift, tongues and faces blue--asphyxiation. Every spacer's nightmare. The air drop must have been sudden, and massive--twenty seconds to find a source of oxygen before your brain shuts down and you glaze into unconsciousness, brain fighting to pull life from empty lungs. They were all me, of course, but I didn't want to waste my own air corralling the bodies. At least, that made a good excuse to get the hell out of there.
The door to sickbay was wedged; it had tried to seal closed, but the utility cart had gotten in the way. I pulled myself past its bent frame and into the hall--more blood, floating free. It came back to me--faint memories of a panicked Two dragging half of me down the hall, my missing legs burning fiercely. The bridge--I should get to the bridge. I should find Two.
But that door was closed, and faint red lights warned of hard vacuum beyond. The bridge was gone, or open to space. A spacesuit. It was so hard to focus--this is why we had turned to Two; he'd known what to do. When that missile showed up, I thought we had no choice but to jump ship. But to dodge it! Such a great plan. And Fourteen had found that confluence for us to fly through--but I thought I remembered watching the girder that crushed me bisect him. Was anyone left alive?
I headed forward to the cargo hold and the spare space suits, but every route was blocked off. The whole front of the ship must have been breached. That left Engineering--there were usually a pair of suits hung back there in case engine maintenance was necessary. I passed three more bodies on my way aft, two dead from air, but the third a burned corpse. Laser burns? No time to check. The air in the rebreather already stank of CO2 and sweat, and the thin air wasn't getting any warmer.
The suits were still there. I pulled one on, holding my breath for the tense seconds between pulling off the rebreather and pressurizing the suit helmet. I nabbed spare air cylinders off the other suit and stuffed the pouches full of injectable rations. I wasn't sure what to do, but dying of asphyxiation or starvation wasn't high on my list. The suit had a full battery and reserves; with recycling, that'd give me about four days before I had to crawl back to the 'pod and wait an eternity for help.
I started searching the ship carefully for help, room by room. I only found a few more bodies--Sixteen, wedged under the fuel feed evidently attempting to shut off the engines, and Nineteen, bisected by a patch plate in the port living quarters.
I held out slim hope on finding allies until I got a security feed from the bridge--more dead there, including Two with his full beard. I swiveled the camera around, taking it all in. No ceiling--a roof of stars. Most of the front of the ship was gone.
Four dead on the bridge. Adding the three on the hull and probably gone, that left--me. I threw up in the suit, yanking the emergency faceplate release just before the thin liquid left my mouth. I choked on the inhale, thin air lancing my lungs, quickly wiped my mouth, and sucked hard on the water tube while the atmosphere filled in around me. Like a little kid sucking a water bag I gasped finally, and sucked in the air along with a dribble of the water. Alone? In a fading suit, on a broken ship?
I couldn't do it.
I didn't know what to do. We were the broken ones. I'd tried to tell him; I don't think he'd really understood. Oh, I could've helped him with the solutions, chasing down all the details. We'd been a good team. But it was all him.
I kept trying to think of a way to turn this around. I'd been clever before. I'd gotten out of scrapes. But my mind skittered off the problem into a whirlpool of fears. I could go aft and try to cobble together something--but what if the suit ran out of air? I'd suffocate before I could get back to the Pod. I could go out on the hull, see what was left to work with, and end up freezing in the vacuum. The Pod itself might not even be working; I could sit down in it and never wake up. I needed help. I needed allies. But everyone was dead, gone. Cold.
I sighed, sucking on the nutrient tube in a desperate effort to settle my stomach. The sensors on the tube end had noticed vomit on my breath, and cycled the mixture through to a re-hydrant/anti-emetic mixture that tasted tangy and only slightly sweet; I needed the sugar. It cleared the burning in my throat as I paced back toward sick bay. The 'pod was still there, still intact: my salvation, or limbo. But it was better than exhausting the suit's resources with no answer.
The door was still jammed open, but a little work with a crowbar fixed that. The door slid shut, and a positive light came on indicating compartment seal. The ship, sensing pressure, started to feed atmosphere preferentially to this room; the suit's sensors showed me the steady climb in pressure and O2 levels. I corralled the pair of corpses while I waited, pushing them into the still-cold walk-in freezer; no need to wake up to that horror again, and their condition was only going to get worse with a real atmosphere in here. 
A few minutes brought things into a tolerable range. I shucked the suit and laid it out carefully outside the 'pod, ready for a quick donning. The rebreather I recharged off the suit's supply, and folded back into its storage compartment in the 'pod.
The cushions inside the Duplipod felt familiar and warm on my back. I leaned back, hand hovering over the button. A press, and--
No. Wait. There was still the old pattern. The old me, from before the Corp guys went tinkering. There might still be a copy, somewhere in the memories of the 'pod we'd liberated from the Corp ship. I snatched my hand away from the kill button, and popped the top.
Fear or no, I had a plan.

#

The hold wasn't far, but had no pressure at all. The ship had diverted all remaining life support to the primary habitable areas. I lugged two suits down there: one for me, and one for Zero, the fellow I planned to wake up. I'd push the communicator, and greet him in a friendly voice, and proudly help him into his suit in record time. He'd know what to do, and we'd get out of this shattered hulk. We'd get back to civ, have to pull a couple of legal fast ones, but no big problem. I was looking forward to a long, quiet stint, maybe mining for one of the Confederates.
The Duplipod itself was wedged in the corner, over on its side, hatch trapped underneath. The Duraplast shell lived up to its reputation, though: the jolt it took when we snagged it mid-flight had done little more than scratch it. I got a crowbar from the packing area and stuck it under the 'pod, levering it out until I could get a grip and start pulling.
It took some muscle to free it from the metal strut it had hung up on. If we'd been under gravity I'd probably have crushed myself when it finally came free. There was a harrowing moment as it floated toward the busted outer doors with me chasing futilely after it. I did a few braking loops, frantically whizzing ahead of it before launching myself at it, crashing into it to slow its progress. Finally I got a cable around it, and cinched it to a tie-down.
One of the others said the Corp boys left the 'pod in self-test. That was not entirely accurate. They'd yanked the standard exterior interface entirely off the aft panel, and stuck on a plastic cube with a few hundred loops of conduit in it, coils of processing logic all wrapped in a rubber bumper. The device looked like a toy for a child cyborg, a shiny and colorful shell protecting some serious tech.
I pulled off the cover and peered inside. Angel-hair spaghetti, in a dozen colors.
I waved at the receptor, and a screen on the side activated--a holographic interface, morphing as I approached into the standard Corp paradigm: a secretary, seated at a desk. She was blandly attractive, in a non-offensive way. It reminded me eerily of the reporter from the Corp Ship. Same plastic smile.
"May I help you?" the simulated lady asked. A quick software handshake had ensured her voice was broadcast to my suit's ears, and that my responses would be heard. The sim dithered, examining her nails, while I fumbled for a response.
"Sure. Uh. State all primary functions?" I said.
"Primary functions? What is this, a robot convention?"
"Answer the question," I growled. "Minimal friendly response, please; can the chit-chat." Talky interfaces irritated me.
"Primary function is restricted. Perhaps you could provide some authorization?" She smiled coldly, complex logic circuits reflecting my irritation at me.
I'd think terrible things about someone who smiled at me like that for real. Corp had subtle ways to enforce politeness in its employees, and moody interfaces were high on the list.
"Corp ID one-one-seven-two-one-four, Gary Rossey, employee in good standing. Check your records."
"Checking, Mr. Rossey." She mimed flipping through a set of paper files; a needless gesture, clearly something an internal employee had spent my hard-earned corp dues to program in. A rubbish routine to impress the higher-ups. "Rossey, Gary E. Here you are. No access to primary functions."
"No access? Check again," I said, grabbing the frame of the device for support as I glared at the screen.
She pantomimed the same routine. There was something there--a tick. Her right hand skipped a frame, from back to front as the animation looped, and it was getting worse. "No access to primary functions."
"Can you list those functions for me?" I fiddled with one of the wires--the screen warped slightly as I bent it back and forth. They were using cheap optic cables for the logic sending unit, and they just weren't up to the strain they'd been put through.
"Primary functions. First, Duplipod interfacing. Second, Duplipod repair. Third, Duplipod reprogramming," she said. 
I pushed on the cable--RPT ANN BAYES IN, it was labeled--as she spoke, and the picture fuzzed slightly.
She continued blithely, her head blurring as I twisted the cable. "Fourth, Duplipod memory replacement. Fifth, Duplipod memory reconstruction. Sixth, psychological profile assessment. Seventh, shop demonstration." She paused, looking up at me with a pair of green eyes that now hung in the midst of a blob of color.
"Shop demonstration, please," I said. "And hurry--the boss is coming."
"Shop demonstra-tra-tr-tr-" she stuttered, logic loops mistiming as I screwed with her hardware. The screen began flickering, showing a movie of a man entering a Pod. A voice nattered on about psychological archetypes and behavior modification, but I wasn't really paying attention.
I spliced two feeds together, trying to trip up the logic circuits. The cable, if it was labeled right, should be feeding data from a reasoning submodule, and interrupting it was disturbing the inherent logic of the system in a way simple defense mechanisms within the system wouldn't handle right. It was only a matter of time before something--

NTPE ERROR ON LINE 28,585,343--Missing required
  loopback in solipsistic inferencing module
  (This never happens, but we should patch it
  anyway - Frank).
>> _

Ah, bless their lazy hearts. The machine crashed right to console. Some programmer had found this bug--marked it, even--but had skipped out on fixing it, no doubt under some ridiculous deadline. If these people had ever learned how to debug I'd--well, my frozen corpse might still end up floating in space. But there was some work yet to be done.

#

After some rummaging I found a remote console halfway across the hold, plugged into a loader/lifter. It was sized for suit fingers; if you were stuck typing instead of giving voice commands, something had already gone wrong, and assuming the presence of oxygen probably wasn't a good bet.
The gizmo they'd stuck on the 'pod was built on a standard breadboard, and after a bit of digging I found the keyboard connector. Thank goodness for old standards. I stabbed away at the keyboard, getting my bearings. It was an older system version underneath--not as old as the archaic platform the 'pods had been based on, but certainly not as new as this ship's computers. The account they'd installed was limited, but not at all secure; it was a quick trip from there to total system access. 
The place was a madhouse.
Routines for resetting 'pod memories, backing up minds, deleting records. Implanting thoughts. Altering minds. This went way beyond the simple backup-and-restore paradigm of the Pods; this was mind warfare.
I thumbed through the docs quickly--terse, programmer-oriented pages giving lists of options and expected outputs, some of it half-implemented, some of it only a prototype. If I was reading it right, Corp could produce a never-ending stream of passive clones with this, a mindless army slavishly loyal to the profit motive and with no thought of rebellion. Literally, no thought; no concept for it in their head. And it wasn't just theoretical--the software was built on prototypes. They'd tested this on people, even before me.
I wondered if the Confederates knew about it; doubtful, or even on the censored feeds there would have been some evidence. We had to see them twice a year at the Trans Corporate Iceball tournament; and people talked.
No wonder Corp had slung a missile after us. We had accidentally sprung their miracle, stolen their magic sword, leaked their secret. They weren't going to stop coming just because we'd ripped our ship in two dodging a little missile.
I needed that guy in the 'pod. I needed Zero. Maybe together we could make it out of Corp space, deeper into the Belts. Maybe meet up with some foreigns, establish some sort of trade. I could help him patch this ship up.
It was going to be a lot of work. The interface was clunky, but straightforward. The 'pod could duplicate a copy of him--I could set that up. His pattern--his unaltered pattern, copied over from the Duplipod that Corp had retrieved from the depths of space--was still in this 'pod, in someone's private space. It looked like they'd been studying it before modification--there were a number of files with notes on the shape of mental resonance fields and motivation feedback loops and other stuff I didn't quite get. Deep cognitive engineering; beyond my experience. But the elements that made him him, and not me.
The real problem was the biological source. The 'pod still needed source material for a clone; that desiccated corpse in the 'pod wasn't going to do it. Usually the 'pod reused the carefully suspended near-corpse that was thrown into it, but a biofeed would do, like the one Corp had hooked to this 'pod. But on a broken ship, with life support blown and only the rudiments of atmosphere, I didn't have anything to feed it.
Well, maybe. I hunted around for a more recently-deceased corpse--the ones in engineering seemed pretty fresh when I'd gone by them, as that area had held a viable, if low-oxygen, atmosphere when the scrubbers blew.
I won't say that pulling a floating, puffy version of yourself through the corridors of a ghost ship is easy, but at least it wasn't too hard. Other than a tight moment with a jammed airlock the body came easy enough. I settled it into the 'pod, closed the lid, wiped my hands off, and grabbed the console. A few stabs at the command syntax, and I'd figured out which flags to set on the redup process.
The machine whirred to life briefly, then shut down. Debugging messages scrolled up the console.

READING BIOFEED
  WARNING NO BIOFEED AVAILABLE

FALLING BACK TO SPECIMEN
  NO VIABLE CELLS DETECTED

STOP

*** PLEASE ATTACH A VALID BIOFEED TO PORT A.

Well, so much for that idea.
Plan B, then. I yanked the corpse out of the 'pod, tied it in the corner, and sunk into the seat. The inside console was still exposed, so I transferred control of the 'pod internally and wrote up a long note summarizing what I'd done, what needed to be done, and everything else I could remember since the last note. I even included a link to Five's instructions, amazingly still in the machine.
I carefully shucked the suit, stowed the rebreather on the dashboard, and left a subroutine in the system to flash a "See Console" message upon recycle.
Then, with some trepidation, and after a few attempts, I pressed the cycle button.



CHAPTER EIGHT

It was cold; very cold. I pulled my eyes open slowly--they were stuck shut with the gum of sleep and a thin layer of rime. My hands felt stiff, knuckles cracking as I tried to bend my fingers.
I blinked--no impact? Six seconds--three--where was I?
A Duplipod, still; well, that made sense. No gravity. But why was it fifty below? The window panes were covered in a hard layer of frost, crazed ice crystals making it impossible to see outside.
The console was flashing. I poked at it.

ZERO:
THERE IS A SUIT WAITING FOR YOU OUTSIDE
  AHEAD AND TO THE LEFT
YOU HAVE BEEN DEAD FOR TWO MONTHS
YOU WERE DUPLICATED MANY TIMES BUT WE SAVED US

YOU ARE ON A SHIP HURTLING TOWARD THE INNER BELTS
  ENGINES HAVE SHEARED OFF OF CREW COMPARTMENT
THERE IS MORE DETAIL IN THE LOGS

PLEASE SAVE YOURSELF - GOOD LUCK
--EIGHT

That gave me a chill. I looked at the logs--the system was wide open, and appeared to be running the same OS as my ship--but there was too much info to parse there, especially if the situation was as dire as was indicated by 'Eight', whoever that was.
The 'pod didn't want to let me out--there was precious little air outside. I wasn't too keen on the idea of putting on a suit in near-vacuum, but every miner knew the drill. I just had to trust this mysterious person that there was, in fact, a suit waiting for me;
Well, perhaps not. If there weren't, I could fall back into the 'pod, suffocating, and either let it kill me or live off its internals for a few days, at least, while I came up with a better idea.
I reached for the manual override, then paused. It turns out it's hard to put yourself in a lethal situation like that. What if this were all a trick of some sort? Get me to open the 'pod, then--what? Didn't hold water.
With a deep breath, and a gurgling stomach, I yanked the release. The hatch sprang open, powered by the positive pressure within. Right beside the hatch sat two suits, one carefully laid out in Corp Approved Storage Disposition. I threw on the bevor and helmet first--top priority was protection for my eyes and ears. The microbladder of emergency air puffed its contents into the small space, providing enough pressure for me to see clearly. Then it was the stocking, both legs at once, then a wriggle to get both arms in, then a stab at the self-sealing chest zipper. By this point my hands were already beginning to shake with the cold, but I forced them into claws to yank on the gloves and boots. The exoshell could wait for now; unless I needed to do work on the hull I didn't need that kind of protection. Last came the backpack, with its store of precious oxygen and power; I felt the hiss as tubes connected and seals mated. Full pressure surged through the suit, which inflated gently in response.
Much better. The panicky voice at the back of my brain, suppressed until now, took over; I spasmed, a full-body ripple that flung me to drift toward the ceiling, before I tried very hard to puke--but there was nothing in my stomach. Ah, the pleasures of being duplicated. I'd never looked forward to it.
The seals at my neck were buzzing--a minor malfunction on one side making the two layers of rubbery garment flap against each other. The suit had stepped up air flow to compensate, but I was losing oxygen at about twice the rate I should. More great news--the suit's power reserves were low. Ten hours of power, about twenty of oxygen, even with the recyclers working at full power, and then it was back in the 'pod or lights-out.
It's funny how deadlines sharpen your mind.
After a few moments of taking stock of the ship it was apparent that Eight hadn't been exaggerating. I found the corpses; that took a few minutes to get over. It's not every day you find ten copies of yourself, dead, in various states of disrepair, slowly bloating in vacuum. I shoved the sight out of mind for now.
I was in what was effectively a fractured, shattered rock, in a decaying orbit taking it into some of the roughest parts of the inner system. Someone had blasted the ship slightly out of the plane of the ecliptic, so we weren't in the marbles at this exact moment, but we were coming around. In about six hours we'd start hitting the apogee, and then the gravity of the rocks below would begin to drag me back down. In twelve I'd start impacting small stuff; in twenty, I was almost guaranteed to be toast.
To make things even better, I had half a ship. The front half, to be exact; the engines, aft shielding, bridge, and crew quarters had all been torn off. There was a big bite taken out of the craft amid-ships, where my predecessor's log told of a missile impact. Missile? What could I have done to piss off Corp Security? There was a long story here.
This meant I had fuel, docking thrusters, and one of the three redundant computer systems. And a sick bay full of globules of orange-colored vodka--more mysteries for another day.
I also had a destination: a speck, lazily approaching. My old PA-108, or half of it, in a similar orbit to my own. It was spinning slowly, occasionally weathering a small impact as it barreled its way through the dust of the belts, but unlike me it wasn't hurtling forward with enough speed to do much damage.
And it had engines.
It took a while for the plan to come together. I had a few hours before I could really make it happen; but then, I needed to eat something, and hit the head a few times, and figure out how to manufacture a conjunction between two things with massively varying velocities.
After a quick nap--no sense wasting energy I was sure to need--I started assembling supplies in the storage bay. The Duplipod was the key: I needed a durable hull. A little additional protection for the pilot was a nice bonus.
To this I welded four of the maneuvering thrusters; tiny little things, just meant to nudge the ship around so that the docking clamps could engage. They probably put out a few Newtons each; but when coupled to the miniscule mass of a 'pod, I was expecting some serious acceleration. The best part was they were ion drives; all they needed for fuel was a bit of atmosphere. And I had that, though the oxygen scrubbers were K.O.'ed. Sure, they'd last longer if I stuck with the argon they were designed for--but they'd run just fine, at reduced output, on nitrogen. And nitrogen I had plenty of.
Lacking a better way to store it, I took the second suit and assembled it. It was still pressure-tight. Some rummaging in the ship's HVAC system netted me a pump and valve; I used these to pump the suit full to ten atmospheres with nitrogen. Controlling the release of the atmosphere was a problem, until I found a valved airway tool in the sick bay; some tape and a pliers and I had a crude way to adjust the flow of propellant to the thrusters.
That left power. The ion drives sucked power, a lot of it. I was estimating I'd need about a half hour of burn to kill my relative speed; at about a kilowatt each for three thrusters, I was looking at lugging around something small and dense and energetic. The ship still had plenty of power--but I needed some way to transport a big chunk of it. A battery. A capacitor. Something. 
I lay back in the storage bay, my head banging against the drive I'd just finished installing. My head was throbbing from staring into the weld arc; the helmet's optics were good enough to protect my eyes, but nothing could help the headache behind them. I stared to my right, where a pair of bloated corpses floated from a guy line. They had numbers chalked on their chest, I realized; sixteen and seventeen. I wondered who they'd been, what they had hoped for. Surely not to end up as ghastly blimps in a doomed ship.
Shaking my head to clear it, I got back to work. Sick bay, my go-to place for supplies, paid off again: a diagnostic tool which included, among other fancy features, a defibrillator. And the batteries to charge it. About three kilowatt-hours worth of power; twice what I should need, give or take, which was good because I sure wasn't going to be drawing it at the most efficient rate for that storage cell.
The power converters I bummed from the welding unit, once I was sure everything was on good and tight. This was happy work, soldering and checking and double-checking connections; it reminded me of the dozen daily chores needed to keep a mining ship up and running. I almost forgot my predicament--until my stomach reminded me forcefully that it was time to eat again, and I had to pick my way past the ghastly reminders of a violent past floating around me.
The last piece of the puzzle was fuel. The wreckage of my old ship needed it; this hurtling derelict had plenty. But it was going to fly by my ship at dozens of meters per second. I needed to carry it from one to the other; but I couldn't just strap a couple of tons of hydrogen-bearing compound to my back.
The ship designers, in their infinite wisdom, had designed the fuel tanks to be modular. If I could've gone back in time to shake their hands, I would have. This meant I could pull out each of the half-meter cubes individually, as many as I needed. I just needed a way to slow them down--something my tiny ion thrusters weren't going to do.
Six hours in, the first specks of dust from the belt began to patter down on the ship; micro-impacts, juddering the ship. I could feel it through my hip, through the hull, where I'd wedged in beside the circuits I was fusing. Time to get a move on.
I strapped the exosuit on, and lashed myself to the pod where I could get to both the fuel regulator and the control circuits for the thrusters, then gave an experimental twitch of power. Faint blue streaks flickered out from the engines: an almost imperceptible stream of fast-moving nitrogen ions, ripped free from their happy couplings to be flung rearward. The pod lifted, slowly, gradually, until it was tugging gently at the lashes holding it to the deck. It all looked so perfect I almost cried.
The storage bay hatch was a cinch to get open; the only problem was, it was facing the wrong direction. I could see the rock fields in front of me. This was not going to work, not without some serious effort.
After a moment's whining it became pretty clear: I was going to have to hump my makeshift escape tender out the door and laterally along the hull. I could provide much more thrust manually than the ion jets, provided I had a place to stand or a rope to pull on, and I did--at least until I was free of the hull.
It was sweaty work. First I clambered outside and lassoed a handhold near the fuel bay release door. Then I lashed that rope to my tender, and threw it out the bay. 'Threw' being a euphemistic term for "strained until my quads and glutes ached", but once it was on its way it probably had a meter per second or so of relative velocity; plenty for my purposes. Then I threw myself after it.
And missed. The ship took a hit just as I sprang, and it kicked me to the side. I was floating free, scrambling to get a hand out as I drifted past the lip of the bay doors. Stupid, stupid; should have lashed myself to the craft, too, but I was in a hurry, and hungry, and made a rookie mistake. I tumbled, a slow-motion flight as I watched the ship drift away from me. Time for desperate measures.
Every suit has a final backup for maneuvering: atmospheric jets. Last-chance, and not good for much. But for floating six inches past your target, they were ideal. I braced my elbow into my stomach, and fingered the jet release along my forearm. A squirt of atmosphere, and I was nudged ever so slightly backward. Slowly. Slowly, I could see the handle of the ship approach over my shoulder. Four inches out of reach; three; two. One inch away.
Finally I got a fingertip on it, and, careful not to fling myself backward, pulled. Shuddering, I clamped a hand around it, threw a carabiner on it, and curled up in a ball for a moment. That'd been close.
Around me the dust was getting worse. My suit registered a number of impacts, none serious to pose a threat through the exosuit, but enough to wake me up. It sounded like popcorn popping in the empty silence of my helmet.
I scrambled toward the bow of the ship, where the fuel tank access was, and ripped off the control panel. Heedless in my haste I shredded the control wiring and yanked at the manual release. The door slid open smoothly--astonishing! Something still functioning properly on this doomed ship! Inside, the half-meter cubes were held together with small clamps; one by one I unplugged them, tying the first to float near the hull, and then creating a long snake of cubes behind. 
When I was done assembling, the impacts were severe enough that I was hiding behind the cubes most of the time to avoid being concussed. But I had a dozen cubic meters of highly compressed fuel laid out, enough to get me into a stable orbit clear of the belts, where I could call for help--if I could get the fuel to my ship.
It was risky. I'd built the cubes into a square pyramid, with four sacrificial cubes positioned at the corners of the base. I didn't have enough thrust in my ion jets to slow down the mass of the fuel; that was what the sacrificials were for.
I rigged the inter-cube valves of my four sacrificial cubes--soon to be engines, really, but noisy and dangerous ones. I didn't want to stay anywhere near them when they opened up; hence my escape craft. In the absence of oxygen, the fuel wouldn't react flammably; but if it contacted the rubbery gaskets of my suit linings, or the exposed control circuitry of the 'pod, corrosion would begin to disrupt the things almost immediately. Fuel was stuff to be downwind of.
A big rock came in, dangerously close to my head and traveling at a relative speed of about five meters per second: plenty fast enough to knock me out. It was time to say goodbye to the ruined ship, to my brothers entombed within.
I flung loose the mooring lines for cubes and craft, saying a brief goodbye to the dozen or so corpses I was leaving behind. Burial in space; a tradition since the Corp decided retrieval of the dead was antithetical to the profit motive. I felt a pang as I left the ship behind: what stories were wrapped up in the desperate struggle there?
I fired the ion thrusters, beginning the long, slow, steady decline in speed. Ahead, a few dozen kilometers away. was a large yellowish rock; I was on a dead course for it. All I had to do was keep on slowing down, at my prodigious twentieth of a gee, and I'd be on track for a smooth landing. Miscalculate, and I'd overshoot, wasting time and energy turning and burning. Or undershoot, requiring a double-turn. Or slam into it, which would just be all kinds of fun.
The 'pod picked up speed relative to the ship; or rather, from my perspective, the ship began to fall away from us. I rappelled from my pod to the fuel cubes, attached together with a hundred-meter lifeline. It was a matter of quick hands and sharp timing, now; with a yank, I pulled the valves of the front cubes open, releasing a thin stream of pressurized fuel.
The cubes fell behind; they were decelerating too fast. That was bad. I risked dabbing my hand into the stream four times, to close the valves a fraction of the way. Eyeballing it with the deceleration of my craft until the two were balanced. Barely.
My suit started reporting corrosion effects on the glove. I flailed around for the spare suit, throwing the hard-iris switch on its right wrist. Small knives whirled momentarily inside the sleeve, and closed to a flat plane. It was an emergency maneuver when a limb was irrevocably caught: the suits were built for amputation, followed by direct pressure. I hoped it didn't get that far. But this was still going to suck. I pulled off the spare glove. and held it under my arm.
Gritting my teeth, I pushed the button for soft-iris on my own left wrist. A firm seal clamped down around the bones in my forearm, cutting off air to my hand. With a twist and a pull the damaged glove came free; almost immediately I could feel my fingers swell. I stabbed the spare glove in place, fumbling for a moment to get the magnetic catches aligned; then, mercifully, the suit recognized the spare part and gave it power. I stabbed repeatedly at the iris-retract button, clenching and unclenching my hand in the agony of vacuum. Finally the suit decided there was pressure, and retracted the soft-iris. My hand was tingling.
It was harrowing. I'd built the 'pod to be a maneuverable little tender, and it was; but the controls were finicky. Asking for full thrust meant fiddling with the fuel regulator on the suit full of nitrogen. The effects of my inputs were slow to be revealed; at a twentieth of a gee, it took a dozen seconds for me to even notice the beginning of a course change.
The sacrificial cubes, clamped together with their brothers, provided a powerful but uni-directional thruster. To navigate, I threw my little craft around, yanking at the central stack of cubes. A yank to the left meant the thrusters went right, pushing the entire stack off to the left; but to provide that yank I had to navigate my craft to the left side of the stack, robbing me of some of my own deceleration.
I worked hard to damp my reactions, heart beating loudly in my suit as my hands made microscopic adjustments to fuel and bearing. To make things even more exciting, I had to dodge increasingly-large--but increasingly-slow--bits of rock as I fell by them.
After a lifetime of fiddling--less than thirty minutes, by the suit clock--I could see my destination: a pair of rocks, grinding away at one another, with a tiny wreck spinning beside. My ship. The remnants of the Corp ship had long since blown by us; it was collecting a column of rock fragments as it bullied its way through the belt. That'd be a mystery for another miner to find, some day.
With ten minutes of ion thrust left, I could see I was going to undershoot the target; my old ship wasn't approaching fast enough. I could shut the thrusters on the pod down, but I wasn't going to risk more corrosion to my suit to adjust the fuel cubes. Instead I put the two in opposition, alternately yawing left and right to waste thrust that would have gone to slowing us down. It worked; we crept up on my ship, ever so slowly.
As we approached at a serene clip, slower than walking pace. I scrambled back to the fuel cubes. This was the riskiest part; I was drenched in ejected fuel, diffusing in an enormous cloud around the cubes. But there was no help for it. I unfastened the clips between my sacrificial cubes and the rest, and kicked them hard. Once free of their brethren they spun away, spewing a spiral of noxious fuel as they scattered. My suit flashed warnings of the caustic environment; but there was work to be done before it failed. I needed atmosphere.
The big hulk drifted towards us, slowly. At ten meter's distance I couldn't take the suspense, and flung myself at my old ship's hull. This time, I made sure to clip on a lifeline.
My old ship--it was like coming home. Except that half my home was missing: the front half, with my own fuel subsystem, and the forward observatory, and my rec room. The engines themselves looked to be in decent condition; some of the supports were bent, but the hoses were intact, the control circuits flashed green at me when I thumbed them on, and the engineering compartment was, amazingly, still intact.
I reeled in the 'pod, wrestling it slowly around to connect its ventral airlock to the matching fixture on the dorsal side of engineering. Standing in the airlock gap, I pulled down on the 'pod until it sealed against the outer lock. Thank goodness for standards. The two mated with a clank; lights went green. Pressure from my old ship filled the space.
Gasping, I pulled off my suit. I'd used up almost all of my time in the slow deceleration; that tiny hole had spread, and I'd only had a few more hours of time before oxygen deprivation would have become a problem. My ship's air, by comparison, seemed clear and clean.
Engineering was a bit of a mess--just the way I'd left it, plus the scattering of tools caused by impact. I threw myself into my backup suit, and went out on the hull to connect up my makeshift fuel tank. A little tune-up and this jalopy would be good to go. Some hoses, and a bit of welding to build a cage around the cubes--now reconfigured into a solid pack, the better to withstand acceleration in any direction--and I had fuel running to my engine.
I sunk back into the folding chair I'd long ago set up in engineering. My hands were shaking, now that I was safe. I had power; I had engines; I had enough fuel to get me far enough into Corp space to land an easy ride. Time to find out what had happened.
While I nosed the craft out of the plane of the Belt--carefully, given it was held together with hasty welds and good intentions--I downloaded the Duplipod logs into my computer, and started reading.
And kept reading. Halfway through, I threw up in the overflow sink. Then I got some whisky from the aft locker and sat down to finish the story.
By the time I was done, there was no way I was heading back to Corp space. Not with what I knew. Not with what so many other selves had been through. 
And not with what I had. My dups had given me two prizes: the medical technology represented by that experimental 'pod control panel, and the location of the monopoles.
Time to take matters in my hands. Time for Gary Rossey to win a few rounds.



CHAPTER NINE

There was too much light. Also, I wasn't dead. It was very disconcerting. I was quite sure I'd be dead now: I had set the 'pod to recycle me, make a new Zero, and get us out of here. Instead--
"Hello!" a voice said, through the 'pod's tiny speakers. "Guten Morgen! I'm Karl. Ve're very sorry about the temperature--ve got everything vehrking but your heaters." The speaker made the voice on the outside nearly incomprehensible. The accent was throwing me, too.
"Uh, thanks, Karl," I stuttered. I scraped a little frost off the window. The face outside was pale, much thinner than I was used to, and wore a stylized beard. A Renter Trader, then--dangerous for him to be this deep in Corp space.
The Renters were little more than serfs, serving without contract on the bones of the near Belt. Though nearly picked clean of valuables by the waves of Corp expansion, the older rocks still held plenty of good commodity material; it just wasn't worth Corp wages to aggregate it. The Renters hovered between sufficiency mining and self-governance; theirs was a loose alliance, just beginning to rival Corp dominance in the area. There was even talk of them fielding an Iceball team.
I could have done worse. At least I wouldn't die here, in the cold decaying corpse of a broken ship.
My rescuer pointed to the release, inside the 'pod. "You've locked yourself in. That's oonderstandable. Ven you feel comfortable, join us outside--ve velcome you on our ship."
I nodded, lips tight. "Thanks. How'd you find me?"
"Oh, you found yourself. Ve just came along for the ride." He grinned. "Veel vree to read vatever you want. Ve'll wait for you."
I poked long and hard at the 'pod logs, fully expecting to find another woeful tale of forced regeneration, but there was nothing there but my angst-filled recounting of the sabotage. This was legit, then--or, perhaps, the Renters were a little smarter about wiping clean their fingerprints. I decided not to think about that.
Instead I got myself in shape. They'd hooked my 'pod up to their biofeed, giving me plenty of food and water to recover with. I took my time; an hour, or more. I wrote another small note and stitched it into my past logs. I worked my muscles, stretching out in familiar luxury of zero gee.
Enough dawdling. I punched the comm. "Okay, Karl; I'm coming out now."
I cycled the lock on the DupliPod. A pair of men on either side quickly handed me a warmsuit. With shaking hands I put it on. I wasn't quite sure if I was shaking from the cold or from the shock of the whole thing; maybe both.
Around me was a smiling knot of Renters, decked in furs and grinning through generous beards. I stared at them. I was, of course, clean-shaven and bald; the 'pod didn't waste time regenerating the complex structures of hair. Here, that seemed like more of a liability than normal.
"Ve are very excited to meet you," Karl said after a minute.
"I'm happy to be here too," I said cautiously. "Can I ask what I'm doing here?"
"Vell..." he said. "How about vee let you explain to yourself?"

Over his shoulder, a familiar face grinned at me. He'd grown a rich full beard, in the style of the traders, but he was still me. An older me. A much older me.
"How long have I been out?" I asked, querulously.
"Let's just say you missed a few seasons of Iceball," my duplicate said. "Look, come on out, hero. I have a lot I want to say to you."
That was enough. It's hard to argue with yourself, sometimes.
The moment I was dressed my dup grabbed me in a bear hug. "Thanks. I don't know if I could have done what you did," he said. "That took some guts."
"But--but you did what I did! In the 'pod. With the candy bar!" I stammered.
"That wasn't me." He shook his head tiredly. "I don't know how that guy managed to hang on so long, either. All I did was mine some rocks, jump in the 'pod, and then wake up on a sabotaged ship. Oh, there was the small matter of cannibalizing half our old craft to make an escape vessel." He patted me on the back, smiling. "But the story can wait--let's get you out of here."
He led me down to the commissary. It was extensive--one might almost say luxurious, next to the utilitarian kitchens of Corp ships. We got waved at a few times: more Renters, their bushy beards bristling in the low gravity.
I still wasn't really comfortable. Everyone was acting so...friendly. After the day's events--however many years ago that day might have happened--my nerves were quite frayed. 
Ahead, the two fellows who had handed me the suit stood, casually, leaning up against the wall of the hangar. "How'd you get in with these guys?" I asked as we ducked past them, through an airlock and into the main body of the ship. The temperature picked up as humid air was pumped in.
Zero, or whoever he was, nodded. "You left a really complete set of documentation--that was helpful. Including enough data for me to pinpoint the impact crater of the pirates' ship, with that stash of monopoles, once I figured out where they'd bounced to. I didn't have any way to pick them up--but you, or maybe it was one of the older dups, mentioned the Confederates. And you'd rigged up the hull as a giant broadcast antenna. Or someone--" 
"I read that log," I said. "I guess he never made it back in the ship." We'd made it through the airlock; I shucked the warmsuit and wormed my way into a crewsock that he handed me. "So many pieces. So many dead."
He shook his head. "Yeah. So many dead, just to save me. And you! I had to come back for you. I wanted to come back for all of you--all the patterns! But you were all that was left, other than myself. That and the notes."
"So you called the Renters and they took you in on commission?" I asked. My eyes were stinging, but I wasn't going to let these bearded fools see me cry.
"Yep. Took some negotiating! It helped that I got a bit shaggy in the weeks it took them to arrive." He scratched his chin.
I'd never really let my beard grow out, even on long stays in space, but I had to admit it made him look...serious. "Think I could grow one like that?" I asked.
He smiled. "You better! It's something of a sign of manhood around here." He half-rolled his eyes. "They have some strange ideas about gender roles, but you get used to it. Anyway, I had the rear half of the ship almost working--missing fuel, of course, but still ticking over on the rad source--by the time they got in. I gave them the ship as salvage, with the understanding that I'd lead them back to the monopoles."
"And to me," I said.
"Well, that was a nice bonus."
"But what the hell do you need me for? I'm dead weight."
He grinned at me. "I need a copilot! These guys are miracle workers when it comes to repair, but not a one is as good a pilot as I am. Or you are."
"A pilot. You brought me back because you needed a pilot?" I quirked an eyebrow at him. His mustache was twitching--he was hiding something.
"Well...I was getting a bit lonely." He shrugged. "The new season of Iceball is starting up, and these guys are all National League fans. Hard to get a bet. Heck, I'll give you the whole Outer Belts against the Lions."
"No way," I said. "Not unless the rules have changed while I was out."
"What--you don't trust me?" he said, holding the innocent look as long as he could before cracking up.
We worked it out. And turned Corp on its ear, but that's a tale for another day.