Trang Read online

  Chapter 4

  The next day, Philippe sat, most uncomfortably, in one of the Titan station’s briefing rooms. He was tired—the station was supposed to be on Beijing time, but while the clocks on the station agreed with those in Beijing, the truth was Titan was on its own time, or perhaps on no time at all. People slept in staggered eight-hour shifts to maximize sleeping space and work time, so whatever the hour, there was never any discernible change in the station’s level of activity.

  Because of the time it had taken for Philippe’s earplant and transponder to be implanted, he hadn’t gone to sleep until about midnight. At 4 a.m. his cubby had woken him up, turning on lights and sounding an alarm because “his” sleep shift was over. He had sat awake for a while after that, trying without success to figure out how to get the machine to wake him up before noon and wondering if someone on the 4-to-noon sleep shift was going to try to get into the cubby.

  Fortunately he had woken up naturally at about 7 a.m. Breakfast had been a ration bar, which would be all he’d be eating for the duration of his mission. While the bars provided the necessary calories and nutrients, plus caffeine if you wanted it, it took a while to get used to the reduced portion size.

  Philippe’s stomach had been grumbling when he entered the conference room, but the noise had been easily drowned out by the roar of the SFers. There were more than a dozen of them in the room, greeting each other with riotous enthusiasm, bellowing across the room, and occasionally plowing into each other.

  It was an excess of high spirits that did not sit well with Philippe, who had quietly slipped into a chair. There was the lack of sleep and real food, plus his ear was itching and felt swollen—was swollen, distended anyway, because of the earplant. And thanks to the transponder—which had indeed been implanted “someplace else,” namely his left buttock—he had to sit with his weight shifted far to the right, a position that was already beginning to bother his back.

  Philippe was the only person in the room not in a camouflage uniform and the only person not sporting an angry feline embroidered over the heart. He also, to put it bluntly, felt very small. He was not a big man, and right now, he was surrounded by bruisers. Almost everyone was at least a head taller than Philippe, and they were all easily over 70 kilograms, maybe over 80—even the women.

  There were only two of those, Shanti and a shorter woman who was extraordinarily pale with white-blue eyes. She had straight black hair that lay flat against her scalp despite her short crop. With the exception of Philippe, Shanti, and the doctor, George, no one in the room looked over 30, or even over 25.

  Shanti was chatting in the back of the room with a man who was fully two meters tall. She stopped, checked the clock, looked around, and yelled, “Everybody here?” There was a murmur of agreement, and she said, “So, sit!”

  Those who were standing sat, while she remained standing in the back. “OK, I want you all to meet our ambassador, Philippe Trang. Philippe, stand up please.” He stood, smiled and waved, wondering if he was expected to give a speech.

  “He’s what we’re here to protect,” she continued, so Philippe sat down. “Got it? Introduce yourselves after the briefing. Patch here is back from the other side to tell us about our situation. For those of you who just got here, Patch has been overseeing the outfitting of our living quarters on the alien station. He’s my second, so do what he says or we break your fucking legs.”

  Everyone around Philippe seemed to find the prospect of broken bones simply hilarious. Patch walked up to the front of the room. His sleeves were rolled up, and his bare forearms immediately resolved any questions as to why he had the same name as a popular delivery system for recreational drugs: There was a large cannabis leaf tattooed in bright green on each arm.

  He began to speak. “OK, guys, so I guess some of you just got here and don’t know this? But we’ve been outfitting our little human area for a while now.” Patch waved his hand, and the wall behind him sprang to life, showing the familiar station.

  “So, you’ve all seen this. You see how it’s shaped like a starburst or something, with this big cylinder in the middle and these big, like, prong things sticking out of the cylinder.” Patch pointed to the cylinder and “prong things” as he talked.

  “So, this big cylinder, it’s, like, the common area, where all the aliens can hang out together and talk and shit. And these prongs, see? Those are, like, where each alien species lives. There’s, like, a docking bay at the end of each prong, for ships.”

  He waved his hand again, and one of the prongs turned red.

  “This is our prong,” he said. He waved his hand again, and it detached from the cylinder, turned, and enlarged. The outer layer stripped away, showing a cross-section of the prong.

  “Everything in our prong is, like, ours—atmosphere, power, defense, it was all built here or on Earth, you know, by humans. We can seal our prong off from the common area, and pretty much do whatever we want with it. The only rule the aliens have for our prong is that we can’t have any weapons in it that will fire into the common area.”

  One of the SFers raised his hand.

  “Yeah,” said Patch, pointing at him.

  “Is the common area demilitarized?”

  “Sorta,” Patch said. “No visible weapons.”

  That caused an immediate sensation, with the soldiers gasping and gabbling to each other. Now I know how to shock an SFer, thought Philippe.

  “We knew that, we knew that,” Shanti yelled, quieting the din. “We got extra concealables and uniforms that hold them.”

  “We’ve set up the first quarter of the prong as a no man’s zone,” said Patch, launching into a lengthy explanation of the various autofire weapons and explosives that lay in wait for the unwelcome visitor. The presentation seemed to calm everyone in the room except Philippe, who just tensed up more and more as Patch explained how the explosives in the floor had detectors that enabled them to launch up to the height of the mass moving overhead before blowing up, and how there were heavy airtight doors on either side of the no man’s zone, and how the zone had packed around it a ring of explosives that were powerful enough to blow their living area away from the station entirely.

  “We installed all that using robots, so yesterday, Gingko and I were, like, the first humans to actually go in and hang out. It all checked out; we turned the air on and were able to open our suits and walk around without, you know, dying,” Patch concluded, nodding.

  “How’s the common area?” asked Shanti.

  “The common area was OK—it smells a bit funky, and it’s a little weird, but you can deal.”

  “What’s weird about it?” she asked.

  “Well, it kinda makes you fly,” he said with a laugh. A few of the SFers laughed, too. “I mean, the oxygen’s a little less than we’re used to, and the gravity’s a little less too—it’s kinda weird. The lighting is flippy too because too much blue is, like, really bad for some of the aliens’ eyes, so things are real orange and look strange. And, of course, there are all the aliens. And I got something to tell you about that, too.”

  He waved his hands again, and a picture appeared of two of the aliens usually referred to as the Builders or the Founders—the species that first built the station. It was debatable whether they looked more like giant insects or giant crustaceans: They had segmented bodies, were about the size of a cow, and were covered in some sort of hard shell that ranged in color from deep orange to bright red, with dark spots.

  They also had six limbs that they used both as arms and legs, each ending with seven long fingers. While they usually walked on all six feet/hands, they had a good sense of balance: Philippe had watched the many videos the Builders had made of themselves and sent through the portal, and he remembered a shot of a Builder standing on only one limb, using the other five to manipulate what he assumed was a piece of machinery. The Builders lacked any visible head; instead, each segment ended in a fringe of “fur.” Some people thought the fur was some sort of s
ense organ, although others argued that their limbs contained whatever sense organs they had.

  “So you know these guys, right? They’re smiling right there,” said Patch, indicating the picture. “They kinda run things, and since I was trying out the translators, too, one of them asked me if I would help out with something. The Union already gave them, you know, all our words, our English, but they still needed the terms we use to describe the different aliens.”

  Philippe raised his hand, and Patch nodded. “Couldn’t we use the names they use for themselves?”

  “That’s what I told them, you know, that we hadn’t really chosen names for the aliens because we thought it would be, like, rude. But they said not to worry about it, that nobody aside from that one guy can even, like, pronounce the words different aliens use for themselves. They said to just come up with something that would be easy for us to remember.” Patch looked slightly guilty. “They, like, really wanted to have the names before we all got there. They looked really worried about it, so I figured I’d better do it.”

  He turned back to the video. “So, here are the names. These guys, since they’re hosting us, I called them Hosts. And these two in this picture? They’re, like, our guys—they’re assigned to us. So I called them Max and Moritz—he’s Max and he’s Moritz.”

  He waved his hand, and the video of the two Builders—Hosts now, apparently—was replaced by one of a group of about a dozen aliens of another species. They were about a meter long and half as high, covered in spikes of various thickness, and they reminded Philippe of sea urchins. Some of their spikes ended in multicolored blobs. They were sitting close together, and Philippe could see that the aliens had all linked their spikes together.

  “OK, these guys I called Pincushions,” said Patch. “Although I was thinking about calling them Cluster Fuck, because that’s what they’re doing right there when I took that, just right on out in the common area.”

  “Awesome,” said a freckled man sitting to Philippe’s right.

  “Yeah, I asked Moritz, ‘What are they all gathered together for, guy?’ And he said, ‘They’re exchanging genetic material.’” Patch pointed to where the aliens were touching each other and laughed. “And those blobs? Those are like clothes. They’re, like, doing it in public with their clothes on.”

  Everyone around Philippe expressed their appreciation, while he massaged his temples with his forefingers.

  Patch waved his hand, and the next image appeared. Oh, great, thought Philippe. He’s named these the Vacuum Cleaners.

  It was, after all, what they looked like—small, round, flat, and brown, they whipped silently around on the walls and floor in the background of any video.

  In fact, Philippe, realized, that’s what he had been told they were—simple maintenance drones. Why is Patch—?

  “OK, these guys are complicated, because they’re basically machines,” Patch began. “But they’re not just machines. They’re the eyes and ears of these other aliens, who like, live in water and can’t leave their prong. They’re, like, connected remotely to their machines. I called them the Swimmers.”

  Everyone murmured, and Philippe started in surprise. There had been nothing about any of that in his briefings—no suspicion that the drones were anything but drones, and certainly no mention of an aquatic species of alien. God, if this idiot can make a discovery like that in one day. . . .

  “So I didn’t see them, but I’m told that there are actually two Swimmer species that live on the same planet and came to the station together. One’s big and one’s small, so I called them Big Swimmers and Little Swimmers.”

  The freckled man snorted with laughter.

  Patch waved his hand, revealing a picture of an alien with an elongated body that stood on four legs and had four arms. “These I called the Cyclopes.”

  Philippe raised his hand, and Patch pointed at him. “Why did you call them the Cyclopes?” he asked.

  Patch turned and looked at the picture. “Oh, you know, they kind of look like a Cyclopes because of the way they’re built—you know, half-guy, half-horse?”

  Philippe tried to keep his voice calm. “You mean a centaur?”

  Patch stared at him a minute. “Is that what they’re called? No, like a Cyclopes, you know, like in mythology?”

  “A centaur is half-man, half-horse,” said Philippe. “A Cyclops has only one eye.”

  “Oh,” said Patch, looking at the picture. The alien, Philippe knew, had four visible eyes—or eye spots, anyway—one on each side of each shoulder. “Oh, I totally fucked my sister on that one. Sorry about that, guys—just try to remember Cyclopes, OK?

  “So this one I didn’t fuck up,” Patch continued, changing the image. “This is the Magic Man.”

  The Magic Man? thought Philippe, as he saw the familiar image of the Communicator—the only alien who could speak English, as well as every other alien language. But of course Patch would call him the Magic Man: That was the name for the Communicator that was popular among the sorts of people who had psychotropic plant parts tattooed on their bodies.

  He raised his hand again. Patch looked apprehensive as he called on him.

  But Philippe didn’t intend to ream him out. “Did you get to meet the—the Magic Man?” he asked, with genuine curiosity.

  “Aw, no, I didn’t—I was bummed about that, too,” Patch replied. “He was off doing something else. I didn’t get to see him at all—this isn’t even my picture.”

  Patch continued with his list of names, making Philippe suddenly grateful that he hadn’t met the Communicator—hopefully the alien’s first contact with a human would be with someone a little less likely to offend.

  Patch named off the White Spiders, the Blobbos (“They, like, drive little cars around the station, ’cuz they’re small, and they steer with their foot.”), and the Snake Boys, and then thank the Lord he ran out of species before Philippe’s blood pressure made his head explode.

  I can fix this, he thought. When we get there, I’ll just ask them to change the names.

  “So obviously you spoke quite a bit with the aliens,” said Shanti.

  “Just with Max and Moritz,” said Patch. “Nice guys.”

  “How did the translators work?”

  “Pretty well, yeah. Just, like, watch the slang, you know? Like, I asked them, ‘What’s up?’ and they, like, totally couldn’t understand that.”

  “OK, thanks. Vip, you’re up.”

  Patch waved his hand, the wall went blank behind him, and he sat down.

  A somewhat less gigantic and considerably tenser-looking South Asian man took his place. He began speaking in a rapid-fire cadence, with no pauses for questions, nor, apparently, for breath.

  “You’re all outfitted with modified earplants, and your uniforms will have two patch mikes—one on the left that’s your normal com, one on the right that enables your translator mike. I know this is important to some of you—you are wearing no alien technology, it’s all built on Earth.

  “The translator doesn’t work that differently from the one you use with non-Union-English-speaking populations: Every word you speak is translated into a universal code, and that code is translated into an alien language by a receiver the alien wears. When an alien wearing a translator speaks, it’s put into code, and the code is picked up by a receiver and translated into Union English by your earplant. Everyone uses the same code, so you only need the one translator.

  “The earplant’s wired directly into the auditory nerve like always, so no one else hears what you hear. One thing to remember: If you or the alien aren’t wearing your equipment, or it’s not on, the doctor tells me that there’s a good chance that you probably cannot even hear each other, because a lot of what they say isn’t within the range of human hearing. Also, the aliens know only Union English—any other Earth language will not translate and possibly cannot even be heard. So keep that in mind. Got it?”

  “Are there questions? No? Thanks, Vip,” said Shanti. “Doc?”


  George walked up to the front.

  “Obviously, if Patch and Gingko survived,” he said, “it can’t be that hard.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “So what are my concerns?” George continued. “My concerns are allergens and disease. From what the aliens tell us, no pathogen—no germ—has been able to make the jump from one alien species to another, but there’s always a first time. You could also develop allergies to anything—alien dander, alien bad breath, anything—and they could be severe. So: You wear lonjons all the time. These have been modified so that if you start to have an allergic reaction, you get pumped full of drugs and I get alerted so that maybe we can save your life and keep your mom happy. The aliens say they keep the atmosphere and the surfaces in the common area very clean, but don’t be stupid—don’t touch what you don’t need to touch, and don’t eat anything that’s not a ration bar.

  “You must wear the lonjons at all times, even in quarters, that’s an order from your MO. There’s also biohazard gloves, which you should probably wear in the common area. But I’m not going to make that an order.”

  “I am,” Shanti interjected. “If you don’t have your biohazard gloves on and your hood ready, you don’t leave quarters.”

  George looked annoyed. “You’re hampering the progress of science, you know.”

  “I’m not having my people make medical history just to keep you happy, you sick fuck,” she said. “Get out of here.”

  George sat down with a grin on his face.

  Shanti walked up to the front of the room. “OK, I want to focus everyone’s attention on the first part of Patch’s presentation.” She waved her arm and Patch’s first slide appeared, then she flicked her hand until she reached the cross-section of the prong.

  “You see here our worst-case scenario. We shut this airlock, we blow ourselves off from the station. We’re not going to have a ship sitting at the alien station, because the Union considers that a security threat to Earth, so that means we fucking float in space until the Union decides to come find us. Of course, the aliens have ships, so in the worst-case scenario, either they’ll be attacking us, or they’ll be attacking the ship that comes to rescue us, or they’ll just be heading on through the portal to attack Titan and Earth.”

  She stopped and looked at the soldiers.

  “Anybody here want to be in that position? Because trust me, if we wind up in the shit, and it’s the fault of anybody here—someone was stupid, someone started a fight, someone fucked up—it won’t matter to you if we get rescued. You, personally, will be dead. I will fucking kill you myself. Do you hear that? I will kill you myself. And I’ll fucking take my time about it, too.”

  She looked across the room, and she caught Philippe’s eye, she winked. Oh, my God, thought Philippe. This is supposed to reassure me.

  “Everybody got that? Now, let’s prep. Lonjons and new unis are in the back.”

  She clapped, and everyone stood up and began to introduce themselves to Philippe. He caught a few names—Ofay, Mo, Vijay, Cut—and exchanged a few pleasantries, then realized with a start that the large, burly man shaking his hand was not wearing a shirt. He looked around and realized that all the soldiers were pulling their clothes off, picking up new clothes from the back of the room, and changing, right out in the open. He held back an exclamation: They were not wearing undergarments, not at all, not of any sort. And at least four of them had the SF cranky kitty logo seared into their flesh, right above the heart.

  “Hey, doc!” Shanti’s voice boomed out again.

  “Yeah!” came George’s voice.

  “You wanna take Philippe’s lonjons and take him to your office? I don’t think he’s worn them before, and we’re just gonna be talking weapons. The medics can make sure everything’s working.”

  “Sure,” said George, who handed a small device to a large, pantless Asian man standing next to him and grabbed two suits from Shanti. “Let’s go,” he said to Philippe.

  “Glad to,” said Philippe, and eagerly escaped.

  Philippe lay in the cubby, trying to fall asleep. He had gone to bed early, right at the start of the 8 p.m. sleep shift, in hopes of both getting a good rest and reducing the number of people he was forcing to sleep on the floor.

  But his mind kept going back over what had happened that day. The Union Police he had worked with in the past had a certain hard-bitten quality to them, and at times they could be blunt. But they were always aware that they were representing the Union—its authority, its historic role in binding countries together and improving people’s lives. They were, in a sense, diplomats themselves, so they bore themselves with a certain gravitas.

  The SFers—oh, God. Philippe had never heard such casual threats tossed around: I’ll break your arm, I’ll snap your neck, I’ll shove this [random object] into your [specific orifice]. Not to mention the constant and casual references to sibling incest to mean that someone had made, might make, or was going to make a mistake. He could only pray that such obscenities wouldn’t translate very well where they were going.

  He shifted and touched his chest, feeling the lonjons’ slightly clammy exterior. It was supposed to be his second skin while he was on the alien station.

  It was an impressive piece of technology, albeit one whose wonders had been described in rather too much detail by George. Even though the suit could handle it “without even giving you a rash,” Philippe fervently hoped that he would never have to empty his full bladder into the lonjons. And the fact that the female SFers were on menstrual suppressors so that their monthly bleeding wouldn’t “trigger” the suit was something that he simply had not wanted to know.

  But the suit itself? He was certainly falling prey to what his parents called Nifty Toy Syndrome. It was like a bodysuit, with short sleeves, a turtleneck, and stocking feet. It was made out of God-only-knows-what—it certainly wasn’t ordinary fabric. Whatever it was made of was so stretchy that the lonjons had no fasteners: You could literally stretch out the turtleneck far enough to step into the suit.

  This stretch helped make the lonjons such an effective form of protection. If you got stabbed or shot. and the weapon got through the tough outer layer, the super-stretchy underlayer of the lonjons’ fabric would get pulled into the wound by the force of whatever was going into you. Then it would operate as a bandage, releasing coagulants and antibiotics. You could put the outer layer into “hard” mode (or it would do so itself if you were injured), which made every part of the lonjons that wasn’t covering a joint nearly impenetrable. You could put on a hood that would filter out any poisons in the air, and if the suit was in hard mode, you could put on the hood and it would get hard, too, becoming a helmet. There were also medical sensors and medical patches embedded into the suit, powered by your own body’s heat, so if you accidentally came across something that turned out to be toxic, your lonjons could perform immediate triage. And if anything at all bad happened, the lonjons would instantly send out a distress call.

  Definitely nifty.

  Of course, at dinner the SFers had a long debate over the best ways to kill people who were wearing lonjons. Philippe had gone to pick up his ration bar after he had had a second meeting with the still-obdurate Wouter Hoopen and had sent a memo to Beijing strongly recommending that the SFers be replaced by Union Police personnel as soon as possible. About a dozen thankfully fully clothed SFers, including Shanti, had been sitting near the bar dispenser, munching on their ration bars together just like they were eating a proper meal. They had hailed Philippe as he walked in.

  It wasn’t like a trained diplomat like Philippe was going to refuse to sit and have a meal with someone, even if that meal consisted of a 100-gram rectangle. But the experience didn’t exactly put his mind at ease concerning the impression the SFers were going to make on the alien station.

  Patch had thought that Philippe’s last name was Thai and mentioned wanting to go to Bangkok. Philippe had told him that his father was actually ethnically Vie
tnamese, but said that he would love to go Bangkok and see the many temples and historical sites. It was obvious from Patch’s replies, however, that if the SFer ever made it to Bangkok, he’d never leave the koffie shops. Philippe had toyed briefly with the idea of breaking the news to Patch that there was no such thing as Thai cannabis anymore, since all the legal THC was synthesized at a laboratory outside Calgary, but he had decided that he’d rather not.

  Philippe had tried to learn everyone’s name, but the use of nicknames was a bit confusing. The woman who was not Shanti was always referred to as “Baby,” which Philippe thought was probably a nickname. Patch’s real name was Pieter, but Philippe got the feeling that most of the unit didn’t know that. Raoul Kim was one of the medics. Like Philippe, he had a Western first name and Eastern last name—in his case because he was a full-blooded Korean from Peru.

  Philippe also met a Bi Zui, a Paco, a Rojy, a Bubba, a T.R., a Thorpe, a Feo, and a Cheep, who along with someone named Pinky would be piloting their ship to the alien station and (hopefully) back again. The freckled man even had a nickname for his nickname—he was called Five-Eighths, or Five, for short.

  Five-Eighths had asked Philippe where he was from, and upon hearing Alberta immediately said, “So you’re Amish?”

  Philippe had sighed. “Amish” was a slang term that people sometimes used for individuals like his parents—back-to-the-land types who had come to Alberta from various cities (Paris, in his parents’ case) in the 70s. Apparently no one bothered to fact-check news reports these days, because several of the profiles published about Philippe had reported that he was an actual, bearded, horse-and-buggy-driving Amish person. Such reports frequently included laughably somber speculation on what it meant for the Amish that one of their own was going into space.

  “I know people use that term, but the Amish are actually a religious group—” he began.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, I know what the real Amish are,” said Five-Eighths. “I’m from fucking Pennsylvania.”

  That sparked a discussion of the real Amish versus the faux Amish, which then spun off into a discussion of high-tech ways to kill people versus low-tech ways to kill people, and how the use of lonjons affected that calculation. Patch’s contribution to the discussion was a tale, told with evident nostalgia, of how as a child he had blown up an abandoned warehouse using humble explosives he had devised entirely on his own out of common household materials.

  This defense of the old apparently inflamed Baby, who suddenly turned to Philippe and said, “Do you know about these lonjons? Look here.”

  She pulled open her uniform shirt—they all, like Philippe, were now wearing the lonjons under their clothes—whipped out a knife from God knows where, and sliced the blade along her collarbone.

  “See, no cut, no nothing—that didn’t even hurt none,” she said, pulling at the lonjons to better display their wholeness. “That ain’t even hard mode. And this blade is sharp, too, see.” Holding the knife in her right hand, Baby suddenly put out her bare left palm, ready to slice it open in order to demonstrate the knife’s keenness.

  “I believe you! You don’t have to show me!” yelped Philippe.

  Baby looked up at him, puzzled by his agitation, and then pulled up the collar of her unfastened uniform toward her mouth.

  “No, no, no, I’m fine,” she said, looking guilty. “No, there ain’t no emergency, it ain’t nothing—I was just showing the diplomat guy how the lonjons work. I’m sorry. OK, I’m sorry about that, doc, I didn’t mean to set off nothing. Next time I’ll be sure to tell you first. OK, OK, I am sorry.”

  “So,” said Five-Eighths to Philippe. “Did you live in a tepee and grow crops and shit?”

  “A yurt,” said Philippe. “It’s warmer.”

  “What the fuck’s a yurt?” asked Five-Eighths.

  “Did you raise livestock?” asked Baby, before Philippe could answer.

  He nodded. “My parents still have the farm, although they have a regular house now. They grow some crops and have some animals.”

  “But since you’re, you know, not about technology, you breed the livestock yourself, right?” asked Baby.

  “Yes, we did, and they still do,” said Philippe, wondering where this was going.

  Everyone at the table went “Ooooh!” except for Shanti, who rolled her eyes.

  Patch pointed playfully at him with a bit of a ration bar. “You know, when you don’t buy the cloned animals, you take food out of our MC’s mouth.”

  “I’m eating fine, asshole,” said Shanti. “Shut up.”

  That night as he lay in his borrowed cubby, Philippe pondered those words. The Pax sisters had been discovered years ago when he was an undergraduate at McGill, and although it had been one of those unavoidable media sensations, Philippe had been a little too preoccupied by his coursework to follow the story closely.

  He remembered that the man who cloned them was very wealthy, a brilliant scientist, and completely mad—they were part of some nonsensical plot to take over the world, but eventually the girls got old enough to realize that their “father” was utterly insane and poisoned him. There was much hysterical debate in the media about what to do with “the clones” and whether or not they could be rehabilitated, and it was all very tiresome to a young man more interested in passing his finals.

  But Philippe did remember the video. There was a white sand beach—they were found on some private island in the South Pacific or maybe the Caribbean—and the girls, who had signaled their unconditional surrender to a completely unaware Union Police, were standing ramrod-straight and in formation. They were big, Philippe remembered being surprised to hear that they were just 14, and they were trying to be disciplined, but their faces were those of frightened children.

  So were they connected to the livestock cloners? Philippe supposed it was possible. There were something like 50 Paxes, which certainly suggested the use of mass-cloning techniques like those used on cattle and pigs. It would make sense that the man who mass-cloned 50 apparently functional and healthy human beings would have a lot of experience doing it, since even mass-producing cloned livestock was tricky—they tended to have neurological disorders and a shorter life span, not that the average farmer cared.

  If the Paxes’ “father” had been the man who had perfected livestock cloning, he would have been very wealthy indeed. Everyone used cloned livestock these days: It was cheaper for a farmer to buy cloned livestock than to pay the stud fees and vet bills to get cows and sheep the old-fashioned way. Only hobbyists and people with certain political convictions, like Philippe’s parents, still did their own breeding.

  Funny, thought Philippe, as he drifted off to sleep. I’ve known Kelly for three years, and I’ve learned more about the Paxes from her sister in two days.