Wolfgang woke up when Joanna slid his bed away from the two captains and Hiro.
“What are you doing?” he asked, voice thick with exhaustion.
“Giving you each space. Go back to sleep.”
He groaned slightly. “I’d rather vomit.”
Joanna had been prepared with a metal basin at his feet, and she handed it to him and continued pushing. He grasped it tightly but wasn’t sick. His upper lip beaded with sweat.
“You should sleep. Don’t talk, or think, or move. Brain injuries are nothing to sneeze at. Especially in our current state.” She got him situated against the far wall and then put a small table beside him with a cup of water.
He put his basin beside the water and leaned back and closed his eyes. “I’m doing better, I think.” He was lying. His jaw ached, and his head hurt. “How am I not supposed to think? We’re trying to solve a murder and figure out what went wrong with Hiro.”
“We know what went wrong with Hiro. He has implanted personalities that are fighting for dominance. It’s not proof that he was behind the slaughter, despite what Paul thinks.”
“Paul and myself. It’s very possible for Hiro to have killed us and then hanged himself.”
“A lot of things are possible. Get some rest.”
“No, we need to talk. Now’s as good a time as any,” he said, sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the cot.
“Now is the worst time,” Joanna said, collapsing onto a stool.
“Don’t we still have to get rid of those bodies?” Wolfgang asked.
Joanna groaned. She had forgotten the biohazard nightmare they’d left in the side hallway when Hiro had attacked Maria.
“Let’s go,” he said.
The bodies were where they had dropped them earlier just inside the large recycler door. Had it only been a few hours? Even in body bags, the bodies had already begun fill the hall with a fetid odor.
As per the matter-of-fact practice of hundreds of years, she and Wolfgang carried each naked body into the lock, dumped it without ceremony, and returned for the next one. They didn’t include the body bags; no reason to waste them.
Wolfgang winced a bit at the smell. “If I could go back in time and slap whoever thought this ship didn’t need a proper morgue…” He left the threat hanging there as they dropped Hiro’s body, the last one, beside the rest.
They left the lock, shut the interior door, and opened the chute to the recycler. The floor dropped away and the bodies tumbled down a chute to the outermost ring.
Joanna turned and started to walk toward the medbay.
Wolfgang stayed behind, looking through the window in the door, which now showed an empty lock, complete with floor. His lips were moving.
“Wolfgang? You all right?” Joanna asked.
“Fine,” he said, walking to catch up to her.
“You looked like you were praying,” she said.
He flushed, extremely obvious on his pale skin, and said, “They’re the first clone deaths that I mourn. They’re strangers to us all. It’s an odd feeling.”
Wolfgang, mourn? “What do you mean?” she asked.
“It feels like a real death. And it seems disrespectful to dump them in the recycler.”
Joanna frowned. He was right about it feeling like death. “We’re a closed system, Wolfgang. We can’t afford to lose resources for sentimentality.”
“Yes, and sentimentality brought on by stress, probably,” he said, picking up the remaining body bags. “We’re going to have to clean these out.”
“Dump them in the cloning bay and we’ll just add that to Maria’s cleaning list. Along with an apology.”
“It is her job,” he reminded her.
“I really doubt biohazard cleanup was part of the job description.”
“I think Katrina was intending cleanup to be a punishment,” Wolfgang said, catching up with her. “But she got tired of waiting for someone to make her angry.”
“Haven’t we all fallen under that category at some point or other in the past couple of days?” Joanna asked. “Except maybe me.”
“You won’t let her kill her predecessor,” Wolfgang reminded her.
“Fair enough.” She put her key card against the medbay door sensor and the door slid open for them. Hiro, the new captain, and the old captain lay unchanged. Joanna took their vitals and nodded, satisfied.
Their next stop was the cloning bay to drop the body bags, waving to let Maria know they were there. She waved halfheartedly at them.
They trudged to the theater, a recreation room they hadn’t had a chance to even consider enjoying since they woke up. They sank into the soft chairs and sat in silence.
Joanna was wondering if he had fallen asleep when he spoke, his eyes closed. “How many lives have you had?”
“I am on my sixth life,” Joanna said. “I was born in 2147 and went to med school as my first line of study.”
“Did you never want to get your legs hacked for your next clone?”
Joanna sighed. This always came up. “I was born with a rare form of tetra-amelia, which causes babies to be born with missing or deformed limbs. Sometimes it’s caused by trauma during pregnancy, but mine is genetic. Before the Codicils passed, I had one life with modified legs, but my next clone reverted to my original one.”
“Why?”
“The Codicils had passed. And the legs didn’t feel like they were mine.” she said. “What’s with the questions?”
“I realized I don’t know much about you,” he said. “You’re older than I thought. Older than me, even. Did you ever learn any hacking yourself in your dupliactric studies?”
“No,” she said.
“So six lives of living, and you were a doctor the whole time?” Wolfgang said.
She sat back. “Well, as far as I know, number five was a doctor, but I’ve lost most of her life. I have only had this one for a few days, but it’s safe to say, yes. Off and on.” Joanna was relieved to be free of one uncomfortable line of questioning, but unhappy to go straight into another one.
“And when you were off? What did you do?”
“I did some public service, some volunteer work, took cloning technology to some poorer countries. Traveled a bit.”
“Did you ever spend any time on Luna?” Wolfgang asked, opening his eyes.
Joanna frowned. “Er, no, the trip to board the Dormire was the first time I had been there.”
“Before you became a clone, did you have any reason to dislike, or resent, them?”
Joanna smiled slightly. “You’re not paying attention to your dates. I was born in 2147—cloning humans was still new and exciting when I was a young woman. No riots, no excommunication, none of that had come yet.”
He stared at her. “You’re from the first years? I thought those had all gone to the hills to live as wealthy hermits, bored with the relative children of Earth.”
“Not all of us. Some of us wanted to help.”
“So you knew all the famous clones of that era? The doctors Grindstaff and Kelly, and Sallie Mignon?”
Joanna laughed. “It wasn’t like I was buddies with Nobel Prize–winning cloning scientists in high school. I met Dr. Grindstaff once, at a conference. She was speaking, so she didn’t have a lot of time to chat. Kelly I never got a chance to meet before she went underground. Mignon, I knew.”
“Did you know any of the Dormire crew before this mission?”
“This is starting to sound a little less like you’re getting to know me and more like an interrogation,” she said. “I didn’t know the crew.”
Something dawned on her. “You want to know what my crime was,” she said. “You’re trying to piece together all of our pasts.”
“Can you blame me?”
“After I patched up half the crew, you’re wondering if I killed us all?”
He remained silent. She sighed. “My crimes are political, not violent. I’ve harmed no one. Like you all, this post is my way out. As a favor, Sallie Mignon helped me get this job.”
“Really. Sallie Mignon.” It wasn’t a question. He was thoughtful.
“Is it my turn?” she asked.
“For what?”
“Questions. It’s only fair.”
He sighed and leaned back in the chair. “Go ahead. The captain says I’m an open book.”
“Start with your first life, your experiences as a clone, and where you stand politically. Let’s expedite this.”
“That’s to the point,” said Wolfgang. “All right. As you know I was born on Luna. Became a clone as an old man.”
“Several generations of the family were on Luna, correct?”
“How did you know?”
“The fact that you wake up needing lunar gravity. Also your height and skin tone. But your story skips a bit,” she said. “If your records are right, you became a clone in 2282, right in the middle of the clone riots in the days before the Codicils. What made you decide to become a clone during that time specifically?”
Wolfgang looked past her, unfocused. “I didn’t decide. The decision was made for me. I was cloned against my will, and then escaped my captors. I joined the Luna military, piloting crew shuttled between the Earth and Luna.” He shrugged. “I did some stints as a personal guard, some more as a pilot, studied when I could, made it to head of a private security firm on Luna, and then got hired for the Dormire. Is that what you wanted to know?”
“You’re leaving something out. Something big?” she asked, rubbing her chin. “You’re officially on, what, five lifetimes?”
“I’ve had many more than five,” he said softly. “Most of them during the first day of my cloned life.”