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CHAPTER 9


Talinn stood in the middle of a giant line in the dirt of an alien planet she’d always hated, and rather wished it was still the most boring place she’d ever been.

The woman in front of her lounged in the dirt—her tank had been closer to the big ditch than Talinn’s own—legs stretched out, hands upraised, chin tilted up toward the hazy sunlight.

Squinting in the wind, because she had no helmet, no face cover, no goggles, only her skin.

Talinn’s skin, seen through cloudy water and a couple of decades. Talinn’s face, with extra lines and more of a smirk than she usually—

No. That’s about the right amount of smirk.

“Are you the one who’s been blowing us up?” Talinn stood at the edge of the ditch and crossed her arms as though this were all entirely normal.

“You seem awfully in one piece for having been blown up.”

Talinn wriggled one foot back and forth, testing the traction and also perhaps grinding out some frustration. “Don’t be cute. Is it you behind the attacks?”

“That’s not the question I thought you’d ask.”

“Uh, really? Do you get blown up so often it’s not really important to you when someone tries to herd you somewhere with artillery?”

“It wasn’t artillery.”

“Bee,” Talinn asked subvocally. “Please tell me I’m not this frustrating all the time?”

Focus.

“Fine. What did you expect me to ask first?”

“Why I’m in an IDC tank.”

“I figured it’s because you’re part of the IDC and that’s why you were trying to blow us up.”

“That . . .” The other woman—other Talinn—other whatever, cocked her head to the side, her smirk pulling into a grin. “I mean, sure. But then why’d you get out of your tank?”

“There’s still a tank behind me. Figured it was mutually assured everybody dies, so a solid bet. Plus, we launched drones before we got here. They’ll back us up, and at worse record and confirm back to base what’s going on if this goes sideways.”

“Do you really think they’re recording?” The woman said it kindly, but it landed like a blow all the same. Talinn had used that same gentle voice once or twice herself, usually when a friend was doing something incredibly stupid.

“I think Bee figured out a frequency to use so that she can see what they see, and she has backups and fail-safes that you haven’t glitched up, so it’s good enough.”

It was also a bluff, but such was life.

“All right.” The IDC Talinn shrugged and gestured for Talinn to sit. Talinn did not sit, and the other woman lifted a shoulder again. “So, you’re a clone.”

“Of you?” Talinn crossed her arms, mostly to keep from dropping her hands closer to any weapons. If the other woman were a Talinn, then the tank behind her was likely a Bee, and Talinn knew her Bee wouldn’t take kindly to such a gesture.

“Rude. And no—we’re both clones, same line. That check out with your world view?”

“I mean, I know the UCF designed me, same as they coded Bee. I know if we exceeded expectations, we’d get enormous bonuses and they’d clone us, so . . .” She rolled the idea over in her head. “So it makes sense enough that might have happened before. Good for that Talinn, getting the bonus.”

“Yeah, so . . . not so sure there are actual bonuses. You and I are clones, and there were at least a handful before me.”

“Before you?” Talinn knew it was more rudeness, repeating the pronoun with such disbelief, but it kept popping out of her mouth like that. She wasn’t trying to offend.

A little. You’re trying to offend a little.

“Stop assuming you know what I’m thinking, Bee.”

In my defense, that one was obvious.

Other Talinn’s jaw moved slightly—subvocalizing to her Bee, more than likely. Probably about what shits they were.

Now who’s assuming?

“I’m not ancient, you know—”

“No, that’s not what I meant.” It was partly what she meant. “The war’s only been going on eighty odd cycles . . . how many versions of us could they have out here at once?” Sudden heat coiled in her chest and climbed her throat. “Is that why I got sent out here? Because some other Talinn and Bee—”

“Dock that up a sec, little Talinn.” The older woman held up a hand and kept talking while indignation kept words from coming together in Talinn’s open mouth—little Talinn?—though that infuriating smile of hers seemed to broaden somehow. “Did you say the war’s been going on eighty odd cycles?”

“I haven’t been paying super close attention to galactic standard time since we’ve been on this ass-end of a planet, but—”

“Eighty, though. Eight decades.”

“Is math different in old clone cycles?”

“Girl.” The other woman took a visibly deep breath and pulled her legs in, wincing as she folded them closer to her body. “IDC and UCF have been fighting a lot longer than eighty cycles, however many cycles you forgot collecting dust out here.”

“I know that. But after the peace in the Govlic system stalled it out, the attack on the AU ship Termina, it’s been considered a new—”

The other one muttered something that sounded disgusting. “Listen to me. The war’s been a hot war, not stalled out, not peace treatied, for well over a century. Maybe two. Since people went to space and found the transit points and the UCF broke away from the IDC—”

“You went through all this effort to give me a history lesson? Let me guess how the IDC version goes—the Interstellar Defense Corps sent people out to the stars and protected them as civilization took root, but they overreached, and the colonial forces rebelled against them, uniting and—”

“Bee, are you sure you don’t want to just break into—no? Fine.” The other Talinn pressed her palms against her eyes and made a show of sitting up, putting on an expression so reminiscent of one of Talinn’s early trainers she nearly asked if they’d shared instructors.

But that was impossible. All Talinn clones couldn’t have been taught by the same people. That didn’t make sense. Not logical or chronological sense. “Bee, what the actual—”

Let her talk. I’m filtering through interference, but I think I can almost—almost—get a handle on her supposed Bee.

“So it’s like this. The war’s been going on for a long, long time. They make clones to keep it fighting, protect the civilians. This part you know. But the weird part—at least, we thought it was the weird part, maybe your brain won’t—is that they make the same clones. Over and over.”

“That makes a kind of sense, and I suppose if it works—”

“On both sides.”

“Wait.” The uncomfortable heat in her chest shifted to burning, and the edges of her fingers tingled. Was she having a heart attack? Was this dying? Did this other Talinn drug her somehow—

Take off the helmet.

“No, I’m—”

You’re not having a heart attack, but about half your system is adrenaline and bile right now. You’re breathing too fast. Take it off.

“It’s dusty out—”

Talinn, by all that makes sense in the endless chaos of this universe, TAKE IT OFF. Breathe. Look her eye to eye.

Talinn pulled off her goggles, then her helmet, then the face cover. She gasped in a breath, choked on the ever-swirling dust of this idiot planet, and ended up squatting, arms on her thighs, staring at the dirt between her and her impossible older self.

The other Talinn hadn’t moved, but her expression had shifted again. More like understanding than mocking. Talinn didn’t like it any more than the rest.

Why?” The word crackled, dust and coughing warping her voice into something unrecognizable.

“We only have hypotheses for that one.” The other Talinn had made her way over, and knelt in front of her. “It’s predictable, for one. You get this group of clones here, this happens. That group there, then that happens instead.”

“Predictable is controllable.” Talinn’s words still caught on her uneven breath, but her heart was no longer slamming against its cage.

“And controllable is profitable.”

“But a stalemate . . .”

“Is better than the other side winning—as long as the money keeps flowing.” Other Talinn patted her hands, then pushed herself up. Talinn heard the older woman’s knees crackle, but couldn’t bring herself to look up or follow.

“So they just fight the same war, over and over? Does everyone . . . does everyone but us know?”

“No.” The older woman’s hand thrust itself into Talinn’s eyeline, and after another set of deep breaths, she took it and stood. “They know there’s a clone program, and AI program, thank the brave soldiers so they don’t have to fight . . . but they can’t know the details. Too much chance you—the broader you, the Eights—would find out.”

“We’re just a . . . a controlled system. Like those little terrariums they had us make in early care.”

“Huh, we didn’t do that project.” The other Talinn frowned then shook her head slightly. “It’s not a perfect system, any more than I imagine the terrariums were.”

“Because somehow you found out?”

“Not just me. Things are glitching. That’s why you’re out here—”

“I knew we didn’t do anything wrong—”

“No, but it could be . . . there’s a chance they know I’m out there. And Sammer. Caytil. Tiernan—”

“Tiernan?” Sammer and Caytil’s names landed like blows in the other Talinn’s voice, but she didn’t know the last one.

“You didn’t have a Tiernan?” She huffed a laugh, maybe said something to her Bee. “Not sure if that’s a loss or not.”

Talinn had a follow-up question—she had enough next questions to make a tech proud—but her thoughts belatedly caught onto something else Other Talinn had said. “It’s your fault I’m out here?”

“Not as directly as all that. But . . .” She paced away, pivoted, paced back. “We’ve been gathering information, and trying to gather Eights, too. As you can imagine . . . it’s a little easier to believe all of this when it comes from something very like your own face, so we’re limited a bit that way.”

“I would have thought that made it harder,” Talinn muttered, because no matter how she tried to keep her head on a swivel, her gaze snagged back on the other woman’s familiar—but also weirdly not—face.

“You think it’d be easy to buy you’re a clone, sure. You’re right, it’s logical, if you could leave clones behind, there could be clones ahead of you, absolutely. But would you believe that it’s . . . clones, all the way down, both sides? The whole war? Without seeing your own face stroll up from an IDC tank?”

I wouldn’t have let you out to talk to a stranger from the IDC. Especially another Eight, after all this sensor interruption—I’d assume it was an intricate trap. Bee’s voice, pert and helpful, muffled around the edges, like someone had a cloth over a microphone. Impossible—more impossible than Old Talinn, in front of her—but it didn’t seem to bother the AI. So she’s got a point. This could be an intricate trap too, but seems a wasteful effort, where a stranger would just be . . . trappy.

“Why do you sound—” One string of questions at a time. Talinn rubbed her face until the thin skin around her eyes protested, then dropped her hands, deciding to concede Bee and the other Talinn’s point and return to the original conversation.

“Do . . . do all Talinns have Bees?”

“I haven’t actually made contact with many, but yeah. For as far as we know, all Talinns have Bees.”

“And are we always tanks?”

“Mostly.”

“Mostly?” Talinn cut herself off, and scrubbed a new layer of dust from her scalp. “Are Bees all the same, too?”

“What do you mean?” Other Talinn drew out the words, studying her with a hint more wariness than before. Talinn was suddenly, uncomfortably aware of how her own inner tension became tells from the outside—the slightly elevated shoulder. The eyebrow lift. A small narrowing of the eyes.

Talinn did not have as neutral an expression as she’d thought, if Other Talinn were anything to go by. Bug-eaten hoses in life support.

“Like . . .” Talinn hadn’t meant to ask the question, but it had fallen out, and she fumbled for something that wasn’t “a tech told me today there’s something wrong with Bee’s code and I need to know if it’s a feature or a bug.” “The laugh—that metal being twisted and torn sound. Does your Bee do that too?”

The shoulder relaxed, and the eyebrows dropped a little. Other Talinn’s smile was a warmer version of her previous expression. Did Talinn look so delightedly soft when she talked about her Bee?

“Bee—my Bee—yeah. She does that. No one ever knows what I’m talking about. Although . . .”

“Although?”

“No. Later.”

Too much pressed against the inside of Talinn’s skull for her to push the issue. “You said they might know you’re out there, and that’s why we’ve been relegated to this forgotten dust planet in a far corner of nothing. Who’s ‘they’ and what are you expecting to come out of my knowing all this?”

“They is Command—not your Base Command, but IDC War Command, and UCF’s as well. As far as we can tell, only the top suits know the details—”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“That Command—”

“No, that no one else would know. Command isn’t . . . I’ve seen some of them in action, you know. Met one of the big guns at graduation. Better, I’ve taken their orders my entire life. They’re not some kind of brilliant masterminds who—it seems like an awfully big secret to be reliably kept for a century or two.”

“But it’s a boring one.” The other woman’s lips quirked. “It doesn’t affect anyone else—Eights are elite soldiers, sure, but consider.” She spread one of her hands and tapped her palm with each point. Talinn was reminded so strongly of Bee’s flickering screens she bit down hard on her cheek—but even she couldn’t have said if it were to keep from smiling or wincing.

“We’re decanted and trained in isolated areas. Citizens don’t see us. The nonadapted staff that come into contact with us never go to another base or program and raise another batch—best I can tell, they have a few generations they rotate, based on how the front is or isn’t moving. Different groups of us are meant to do different things.”

Talinn muttered that to Bee to make sure they came back to the topic when the conversation allowed. Different groupings how? Of who?

“Once we’re out and active, we’re usually suited up, or in our rigs. No one—even maybe especially the techs—looks too closely at Eights. You have to have noticed. They don’t meet our eyes.”

“They see us more as interchangeable parts than actual people.”

Not that Jeena Jeebo one.

Talinn spent as little time as possible around unadapted soldiers, and up until today with Sammer, she would have said that was true for all the Eights. Maybe there were other exceptions out there beyond Jeena, but who would notice?

“Right. And have you ever once heard of your UCF capturing an IDC Eight—alive or otherwise?”

“No, of course not, we’re . . .” The rejection leapt automatically to her mouth. They were elite for a reason—they couldn’t be captured. They’d blow themselves up before letting that become even a remote possibility, because the chance of their AI, and the secrets of their side’s development program of their Artificial Intelligence Troops, getting to the other side’s development scientists was too dangerous to risk . . . 

“Suck on a shitstick . . . They train us to flame out to keep the other side from finding out we’re all the same?”

“To keep anyone from finding out. And to be fair, I’m not even sure IDC top suits know that the UCF is rumbling through the same building blocks to make their toys. It’s not something they talk about, and it’s possible someone worked for both sides at some point, or successful pairings narrowed down over time, or it was all the same program at one point before the war . . .” The older Talinn stopped tapping her palm and dropped her hands. “We can only poke into things so hard, and only so many people know the answers. If anyone did know, they’re probably long dead. And as for storing it—where would they keep the information? Somewhere an AI could see it?”

“So Command plots out the curves of the war fronts and grows us or sends us out accordingly, and the other Command does the same, and we’re all just little dolls playing out a game identical little dolls have mapped out a thousand different times?”

That sounds a little reductive—

“A bit reductive, sure, but . . . essentially, yes.”

“And so now . . . what? I know, and now I go back and play war like a good self-aware little toy?” Talinn’s voice wobbled, and she curled her fingers tight against her palms. She wasn’t upset, only looking for clarification. No reason for her words to get all trembly.

“Really? That’s what you think we did all this elaborate rigamarole for? A nice chat? I would have brought snacks if that was all—”

“Tal—” Talinn’s throat locked halfway through snapping her own name, and she forced herself to breathe again, stretch out her hands, and start over. “This is a lot. You, of all people should know this is a lot. It’s so much Bee is barely saying anything—”

Bee is trying to finagle her way into another Bee’s channel, thank you very much—

“—and it would be super, super great if you would just tell me what this is all for.” Her voice betrayed her again, but this time it went loud and rough, so she rolled with it.

“Come on, little Talinn. You can’t guess? I want to bring it all down. Don’t you?”


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