Awakened by the Giant Read online

  Unbidden, her fingers crept up to her own neck. But no…surely not. She pulled her hand away quickly, resisting the impulse. It couldn’t be—Calden would have told her. He loved her—he wouldn’t hide something so awful from her.

  Would he?

  Yet the half-formed fear wouldn’t leave her mind—the shape looming in the gloom of her subconscious was trying to come forward. But Maddy didn’t want it to. Didn’t want to see…to know…

  Her fingers found their way to her neck again. Sliding under the nape, just where her skull met the back of her neck, she found it—a tiny lump, no bigger than a grain of rice.

  It was tiny but it was definitely there.

  “No!” Maddy said out loud. “No, it’s not possible! It’s probably just some kind of tracking device that goes into every creature that goes into the nutrient bath. Calden put me in there to heal me so I got one too—that’s all. That must be all!”

  Are you sure, Maddy? whispered an insidious little voice in her head. Are you absolutely positive about that?

  “Yes—yes, I’m sure!” she said aloud but her voice came out sounding weak and uncertain, even to her own ears. She looked around frantically, wanting to take her mind off the awful possibility looming in her brain. What did she want to do? There was something she needed to do—what was it?

  The sour, rotten taste in her mouth answered her question. God, of course—she had to rinse her mouth out! She’d just bitten the tip of an alien’s dick off—she’d never needed oral hygiene more in her life!

  Running to the more technical part of the lab where Calden kept his equipment, she used the hose he’d first washed her off with when she got out of the slime to rinse her mouth very thoroughly. But still the foul taste lingered. She wished she had a toothbrush and toothpaste and mouthwash and everything else, but all of her tooth-cleaning stuff was back in Calden’s quarters and she didn’t dare go outside right now—not when Grack-lor might be out there mad as hell and looking for revenge.

  She looked around the room, wondering if there was anything else in here she could use to scrub her tongue. The alien equivalent of a Brillo pad would have suited her just fine. Anything to finally scrub the taste of the Mentat’s tokk out of her mouth.

  Her eyes fell on the cold storage unit—the big silver rectangle that looked a little like a huge filing system because of its pull-out drawers. She knew that Calden kept his DNA samples in there, as well as various other supplies that had to be kept cold. In fact, he had showed her what was in all of them…all but one. That one, he had explained, contained very delicate specimens which should never be exposed to any kind of temperature change. He had asked her to never open it. Maddy had, of course, agreed not to.

  But now, almost involuntarily, her eyes drifted up to the top, left-hand drawer in the massive unit. At the same time, her fingers slid under her hair and caressed that rice-grain-sized bump again.

  Before she knew what she was doing, Maddy was dragging the step-stool Calden had gotten for her, so she could reach things in the lab, and straining to pull open that unknown drawer. Her fingers were too weak but the handles were big so she hooked a forearm through the drawer’s silver metal handle and yanked with all her might.

  At first the drawer stuck. Then, as though in slow motion, it slid slowly but smoothly out.

  Maddy looked down…and saw her own face staring back at her—a face with wide, glassy green eyes that still had freckles.

  The face of her real self.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered, her stomach squeezing and her heart pounding. “I’m a clone.”

  Fourteen

  “Twenty-five solar hours? You’ve shortened Madeline’s life to twenty-five solar hours?”Calden realized he was shouting but he couldn’t help himself. A death sentence—that was what FATHER had given to the woman he loved—a death sentence. And not a very long one either.

  “Calden, please be calm,” FATHER said in its most soothing voice. “Twenty-five solar hours should be more than enough time to wrap up your study of this specimen and make your farewells.”

  “Take it back.”

  Calden’s hands were clenched into fists at his sides, his lungs heaving for breath. He had to fight the red haze of Rage that tried to drop over his eyes, occluding his vision and impairing his judgment. Now, more than ever, he needed to keep his wits about him.

  “Take it back,” he said again. “Just deactivate Madeline’s self-termination unit and we’ll leave the station together. I don’t know where we’ll go but it doesn’t matter—we’ll leave and never come back. You and the Mentats will never have to see us again. Just take it back, FATHER. Take it back!”

  “I cannot.” The AI still spoke in that maddeningly calm tone. “I am sorry, Calden, but your specimen’s self-termination unit has been permanently locked. I can neither restore the time which was subtracted from her life-span, nor deactivate it so that the unit can be removed. She will terminate in twenty-five hours. Actually, twenty-four hours and forty minutes. Rather than spend her remaining time arguing with me, it might be better for you to try and wrap up your study.”

  “Wrap up my study?” Calden wanted to pull his hair out by the roots. “It’s not about the study, you stupid AI son of a bitch!” he cried. “I love her! I love her and you’ve killed her!”

  He wanted to roar with rage—wanted to rant and rave and punch the AI’s central processor until FATHER was no more than a twisted pile of junk.

  But he didn’t have time for any of that. He had to get Madeline out of here now. Where he would take her and how he would save her, he had no idea. There was supposedly no way to remove a still-active self-termination unit. The device would act like a miniature bomb and blow off her head if he tried to take it out without deactivation. He would probably be taking her out into space to die in his arms, the way the littlest brantha—the one Madeline had dubbed “Snuffy” had died in his arms the last time.

  But I can’t just sit here and do nothing! Just wait for the end, he thought wildly. I have to try, damn it! I’ll get clear of the station and put out another call to the Mother Ship—maybe they’ll hear me this time. Kindred technology might be able to deactivate the device—it’s my only hope!

  A small chance—probably less than one in a trillion considering the vast reaches of space that separated him from his Kindred brothers. But he had to take it—he had to try.

  He jumped up suddenly, knocking over the too small stool.

  “Calden,” FATHER said calmly. “Where are you going? This interview is not yet at an end.”

  “I’m leaving here,” Calden growled, wishing he had the blaster he kept locked in a drawer of his desk so he could shoot the maddening AI’s interface unit. “I’m leaving and I’m taking Madeline with me. There must be something I can do—some way I can save her!”

  “You cannot—” FATHER began but Calden was already gone, rushing out of the scanning booth and down the curving metal corridor, looking for Madeline.

  “I’m a clone,” Maddy said again and this time the words stuck. They were true—they were real. As real as the real Madeline who was lying in the top drawer of Calden’s handy-dandy portable lab morgue.The real Madeline staring up at her with lifeless green eyes that looked like cloudy glass marbles some careless child had rolled in the dust.

  But what had happened to her? How had she died?

  The drawer slid smoothly now, rolling on its tracks when she tugged on it, revealing more of her lifeless body to Maddy’s disbelieving eyes.

  She was wearing—correction, her original, real body was wearing—the light blue jumpsuit with the US flag sewn over the pocket and her last name, Harris, stitched in gold thread. But below the waist, the suit was strangely flattened—as though a giant foot had stomped down on her, neatly smashing her flat from her hips all the way down to her feet. The light blue jumpsuit was maroonish-purple there—the dark, ominous color of a fresh bruise.

  A blinding pain suddenly knifed through Maddy’s gut
s. She gasped and put an arm to her waist, nearly falling off the step-stool. In one agonizing flash, everything came back to her…

  She had caught Pierce with Ana—the head biologist—a woman she’d thought was her friend. Ana, always inviting her to share a cup of tea and a chat…Ana, drawing her out, inviting her to talk about Pierce, about the troubles with her marriage and all the while she’d been doing nothing but trying to find Maddy’s weaknesses…trying to find a way to get Pierce for herself.

  They hadn’t even hid it very well, Maddy remembered now. They’d been kissing in a public corridor—not that there was much privacy aboard the Kennedy but still, they could have at least tried to hide it. She remembered now, rounding a corner and being shocked—the sight of Pierce kissing the other woman like a sharp slap in the face.

  “She doesn’t understand you,” Ana had been whispering between kisses. “Not like I do, Pierce. She’ll never love you like I do. Once we find a planet, we need to be together permanently. We’ll have to populate a whole new world and you’re the one I want as the father of my babies—only you.”

  Maddy had made some low, incredulous noise in the back of her throat at that point and the two of them had whirled around and seen her standing there, wide-eyed and disbelieving. All she could think of, Maddy remembered now, was how hard she’d been working to make things work with Pierce. Hell, she’d left a thriving animal practice and her entire family to come on this mission with him! True, the Earth had been under threat of invasion but she still would have stayed with the people she loved if she hadn’t been trying so damn hard to make things work with Pierce.

  The ungrateful, cheating bastard.

  “Maddy!” Pierce’s eyes had gone wide and she could already see him formulating some kind of excuse. “Maddy, please. It’s not—”

  “Not what it looks like?” Maddy asked, feeling sick to her stomach. “How could you, Pierce? I left my family for you! All those months of marriage counseling, all the things we tried—”

  “Maybe it’s time to stop trying and just admit that you’ve lost—that the two of you don’t belong together anymore.” Ana’s face had the smug look of a cat with canary feathers sticking out of its mouth. “Maybe it’s time to let Pierce follow his heart—to me.”

  The heart in question had felt sore and bruised—as though Maddy had rounded the corner and Pierce had kicked her in the chest or maybe stuck a knife in her. It hurt so much that for a minute she was sure she would be sick.

  “You can have him,” she told Ana shortly. “I never want to speak to either of you again.”

  Then she turned and fled—ran to the back of the ship where she knew she could be alone. She had to go back there to check on the seed vault and embryo storage every twelve hours anyway. Back there among the huge terraformers on their giant tires, fixed to the Kennedy’s inner walls with their clanking chains.

  Maddy had run blindly among them, feeling sick, feeling sorry for what her life had become. Wishing she was back on Earth with her sisters and mother and her dogs, which she’d had to leave behind. Wishing she was dead…

  And then Captain Judith’s strong voice came over the intercom, advising everyone to strap in.

  “We have a Scourge vessel after us,” she’d said. “They’re gaining fast. But there is a small spatial anomaly ahead—I believe it’s a wormhole. We’re going into it—the only other option is capture or death.”

  “Oh my God,” Maddy had whispered to herself. She’d started to go to the front part of the ship, looking for a place to strap down but just then she’d felt a jarring moment of disorientation that made her too dizzy to do anything but crouch where she was, feeling sick. Then the ship had lurched—and then lurched again, bouncing violently in space as though a huge hand had grabbed it and shaken it.

  It was then that she had heard the screaming sound of tearing metal, the clank of chains, and had looked up to see the nearest huge terraformer bearing down on her. She had tried to scramble out of the way but it was coming so fast and…

  “And I didn’t make it. I died,” Maddy whispered, looking down at her body once more. “I died before the Kennedy was even torn in two by the asteroid. I wasn’t the only survivor—I died.”

  But why had Calden let her believe otherwise? Why hadn’t he just told her the truth? And why had he cloned her in the first place?

  A new, awful thought came into her mind as she remembered him telling her that he had cloned some specimens over and over, until he felt that he’d gotten everything he needed from them.

  How many times has he cloned you, Maddy? whispered a dark little voice in her head. How many times has Calden done this little act—pretending to be a virgin—a scientist only interested in research who has no idea what to do with a woman. How much “data” has he collected from you over the days or months or years he’s been cloning you?

  Then the little voice whispered an even worse thought: And how does he dispose of the Madeline clones once he’s done with them? Are you going to die? Going to drop dead like all the cloned animals in his lab? Will there be any warning or will you just stop breathing and then he can grow a new you in the slime bath and have his fun all over again?

  “Madeline? Madeline!”

  Suddenly the lab door burst open and Calden himself came striding in. His topaz eyes were wild and when he saw her, he heaved a great breath of relief.

  “There you are! I went by my quarters and couldn’t find you and I thought…”

  He trailed off when he saw the drawer open…saw what she was looking at.

  “Madeline,” he said, “I can explain all this but we don’t have time right now. We have to leave the station.”

  He reached for her but she evaded his hand and climbed off the stool herself.

  “Leave the station? What are you talking about? Is it because of what I did to Grack-lor?”

  God, that seemed about a thousand years ago now. The way the big Mentat had cornered her…her teeth sinking into his tokk…his cawing screams of rage and pain…it all seemed like a dream.

  But it wasn’t a dream—it happened. Just like all of it happened. I died…I was cloned—who knows how many times—I fell in love with a giant alien and then found out he was a lying bastard, as bad as Pierce. No—worse than Pierce! He only cheated on me. Calden cloned me and lied about it!

  “What did you do to Grack-lor? What are you talking about?” Calden demanded, dragging her out of her angry, hurt thoughts.

  “Never mind.” Maddy shook her head. “It doesn’t matter—nothing matters now that I know what you did.”

  “We can talk about it later,” he insisted. “Right now we have to go!”

  He reached for her again but Maddy skittered away from him, back to the specimen part of the lab. But now she was surrounded by dead animals—dead clones.

  Is this going to happen to me too? Am I going to die like all of them, with no warning?

  “I’m going to make sure it doesn’t—I’m going to make sure you live, Madeline.”

  She looked up to see Calden standing there, staring at her from across the room. She must have spoken her thought out loud. God, she was so freaked-out and upset by all this, she didn’t know what to do!

  “It’s the thing in the back of my neck, isn’t it?” she asked in a low, trembling voice. “It’s going to kill me.”

  Calden took a deep breath.

  “If we don’t get you somewhere it can be safely removed, then yes, I’m afraid so. But I swear to you, Madeline—I’m not going to let that happen. If we go now, maybe I can contact the Kindred Mother Ship. I’m sure we have technology aboard that can help but we need to go now—we don’t have a lot of time.”

  “How much?” she demanded, standing her ground when he reached for her again, tugging at her arm to get her moving. “How much time do we have?”

  Calden sighed heavily and rubbed a hand over his face.

  “A little over twenty-four standard hours,” he said shortly. “We don’t—�
��

  He was interrupted by an insistent burbling, trumpeting sound.

  Maddy looked down in amazement and saw that she was standing right by the brantha enclosure. Though most of the furry little animals were still lying in a motionless heap, there was one—a little one—struggling to get out from underneath the rest.

  “Snuffy?” Quickly she climbed over the enclosure and pushed the dead branthas aside. “How did you escape, boy? How are you still alive?” she demanded.

  “FATHER terminated all of my Earth animals but he didn’t have anything to do with the branthas. I put a slightly longer time limit on the littlest one’s self-termination unit than I did on the others,” Calden said. “I…didn’t wish to see him die so quickly again.”

  “Self-termination unit? Is that what you call this thing?” She fingered the deadly grain of rice at the back of her neck with one hand as she cupped the little brantha to her body with the other. “Is that what killed the other animals, all except for Snuffy?”

  “Yes,” Calden said shortly. “FATHER activated all the units at once—except for the branthas. Those were simply on a week-long timer. But, Madeline—that little one doesn’t have much more time than you do.” He put a hand on her arm again and again Maddy shook him off. “We have to leave the station right away—we have to try and find some help.”

  “Why bother?” she asked, glaring up at him coldly. “Why not just let me die and clone me again, the way you cloned Snuffy? Why not clone me over and over and have me new and eager for you every time? Or have you already done that? How many times have you cloned me, Calden? How many times have you watched me die and brought me back to do it all again?”

  “What?” He looked genuinely disturbed at her accusation. “Madeline, what are you talking about? No—never mind.” He shook his head. “We don’t have time—every minute we waste arguing is a minute we ought to be spending finding help.”