“Of course,” I murmur. I wonder if I’m going to have to kill him and pluck out his eye to leave this place. Now I’m thinking like Helen. Or is it that Helen has always just thought like a corsair? Who can say?
The doors slide open and Arluz waddles forward. “Follow, please.”
Helen sucks in a breath.
This is obviously the lab. Beyond the doors, there is tube after tube after tube lining the walkway. Above us, crossing the ceiling of what used to be a large hangar bay, are a maze of hoses of all different colors, attached to the rows of tubes. The tubes aren’t empty, either. They’re filled with a viscous sort of greenish-blue liquid, and each is plugged into a control panel with blinking lights, most green, some flashing other alerts. Vitals. Heartbeats. Nutrients.
I pause in front of one section, reading the screen as Helen wanders forward after Arluz. Specimen 32, Batch 12.3. Status: Regrowth. Completion: 10%. Errors: None.
Ten percent? Ten percent what? I squint up at the tube, seeing nothing but liquid. The tube itself is large enough to house a person, though—they all are. I lean in closer, practically pressing my face to the thick, clear plas, and then I see it. There’s a blob of pink tissue hanging from a clamp. I can’t tell what it is, just that it looks like raw meat. As I stare at it, it pulses, and I jerk back.
“Matty?” Helen calls from up ahead. There’s a worried note in her voice.
I move ahead to catch up with her, my protective instincts flaring. She sounds worried, and when I go to join her, I can see why.
Not all of the tubes are empty. The farther along we get into the room, it’s like the farther along the tubes are in their “process.” In this next group, I can see a larger slug of “flesh,” and farther down, something that’s starting to look humanoid. I move toward her and Helen is staring up at one of the tubes. There’s a face in it. Well, it’ll be a face soon enough, and it’s attached to a half-formed body.
“That looks like Dora,” she whispers to me, alarm in her gaze.
Does it? I can’t tell. It’s not formed enough for me to make out features. But it doesn’t matter. We knew they were cloning here. This just confirms it. I put a comforting arm around her shoulders, drawing her close.
Arluz pauses, glancing back at us. “Is there a problem?”
“No problem,” I say. “This is just a little disturbing for her to see.”
The ooli chuckles. “Well, it’s not as if she’ll remember it soon enough.”
Helen’s eyes go wide and she looks over at me in a panic.
“What do you mean?” I ask, curious.
“Oh, nothing.” He smiles at me. “We’ll talk privately once we discuss terms, I’m sure.”
Even though I’m supposed to be playing the part of the corsair looking to get rich off his qura’aki, it’s hard not to react when we’re led to a lift, and as we ride up it, we see rows upon rows of tubes. There’s hundreds of them stuffed into this hangar. This is a major cloning operation, all of it unlicensed. The lift chugs along, and I glance over at Arluz, who seems completely unconcerned with all of this. “This is fascinating,” I force myself to say. “Exactly how many clones do you make here?”
“We’re constrained only by the materials,” he says brightly, gazing down at the rows of tubes with what can only be fondness. “As long as we have enough starter materials, we can clone up to a hundred based off of a single batch.”
“Batch?”
“Batch of genetic material, of course. We keep a library of different batches and try to vary it up so as not to flood the market, of course. Variety is the spice of life.”
He laughs.
I laugh too, though I want to strangle him. “How do you get so much genetic material? I thought it was all regulated by the planetary governments.”
“We’re more interested in providing that variety than obeying the absolute letter of the law,” he says. “Come, I’ll show you our batch library and we can go over different modifications you might enjoy in order to sway you.”
“Sway me?”
He just smiles. “I’m sure we can come to some sort of agreement. You allow me to clone her, and in exchange, I’ll give you several of her cloned copies to sell.”
“I don’t know,” I say, pretending to consider. “Helen is a rather jealous sort.”
“We can work that out of the next batch,” Arluz tells me in all sincerity. “You won’t have to worry about it anymore.”
I cross my arms over my chest, because he’s dancing around the topic without going into detail, but if what I suspect is true about their cloning operation, it’s not pretty. “Exactly how does your cloning work? Since you’re not using licensed genetic materials?”