Justine and the Duchess were in the castle, on a side lounge. She'd remembered she kept some first aid supplies behind the throne, just...in case...so brought her in. She frowned, dabbing at yet another claw mark--or was it a knife wound?
"Tell me again what happened," she said slowly. Justine sighed. "I didn't kill the clone. STAN sent the security drones to 'subdue' the clone after it tried to space me. They 'subdued' it all right."
She blinked. *Hiro??* she thought. *Hiro tried to space Justine?? She shook her head, mystified.
"Go back. What happened after the clone woke up? I'd left him in the garden..."
"We came back to Tannhäuser. He was confused and disoriented and wanted to find the med lab, I got turned around, and didn't realise where we were going until we ended up in a disused warehousing section of the station. OH! Eggs ... there's a pod full of ... alien egg things. We should really load them into a cryopod and jettison them into the nearest sun before they hatch and, I dunno, eat our spleens or something. After I get one into the fringe lab for study, of course."
"Okay..." She moved from her shoulders down one arm, then the other one.
"We found the clone labs. I thought at first we were good, screen said 100% capacity, but...it changed. So there's a virus apparently?" Emilly's eyebrows shot up. "A--what?"
"I knew we weren't heading for the med lab at that point, and he was acting really erratically, but I followed him anyway, into the next storage pod. There was ... a chair there. And that's when he turned on me."
Emilly nodded. "And then...? Because it sounds like it got..." She'd tugged up the synthtunic Justine was wearing, and hissed softly. "Intense," she finally whispered, seeing the deep bruise coloring under the skin, and the clear stab wound in her side. She placed her hand over it, eyes closing, pouring healing energy down her arm. That one would take more than some antiseptic and tape.
"It was," Justine said grimly. "He wanted to know who "Hiro Prime" was, and who sent me. He ... beat me. He had a knife. Choked me. I grayed out for a minute and when I came to he was..." The Duchess nodded, eyes closed, feeling the edges of the wound close. Shallow, but...deep. Miracle it missed a major organ.
"I thought that was the end." Emilly opened her eyes wide, staring at Justine. "But he was crying. He dragged me to an airlock. Threw me in and told STAN to auto open the doors in one minute."
"I managed to get STAN to voiceprint recognize me and accept my authority as station commander. He closed the airlock door and sent the security drones after the clone while I ran to lock myself in the nearest secure area I could find.
"And that's why the clone had to die."
She looked away from the Duchess. "It was my fault for letting on it was a replicant. I was thrown by that too, and I don't hide my feelings well. I know now. I'll be able to handle it better next time. But still..."
Emilly sighed. "Oh, Justine. You should never have told him. He's already carrying a fair amount of paranoia from day to day existence..."
Justine looked up, frowning. "It wasn't Hiro."
She nodded, handwaving it away, and Justine shook her head. "It was an unstable replicant, and it's dead now."
She nodded. Closed her eyes. Remembering the texture of his hair. "Right," she finally whispered. "So...how do we make the next replicant more stable? I've been gathering axolotls, but...they're all from the fae lands, so I'm not sure how well they'll work?"
"I've been thinking," Justine said. "It may be safer to mount the uploaded instance of his consciousness on a virtual neural net and communicate with it that way. Tell it...there's been an accident, and it's in an isolation tank, and not to worry. Then get any information about what the Duke was doing out there in the first place...Or anything else it might be able to reveal."
She checked the girl over for any other wounds, finding only abrasions, and they'd heal on their own. Bit worried over the head blows, she could freely admit, at least to herself. She might try suggesting she stop by the medbay, when next on Tannhäuser.
"That's a genius idea, though," she said finally. "Let's try that. What do we need to retrieve the personality imprint?"
(Continued in part XV.)
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