A film blinks over his frog-like eyes. “Why, you donate her, of course. We use her genetic materials to grow duplicates. You know, asexual reproduction of a sort. We take one piece and regrow the whole from that piece.”
“You can do that?”
“We can as long as we use the brain,” he says with a chuckle. “But you don’t buy a clone for their brain anyhow, right?”
That does it. I’m going to murder him.
CHAPTER 87
HELEN
I don’t like this. I don’t like that this man talks as if I’m not here. As if it’s perfectly normal to talk about taking me apart to use bits of my brain. Is that what they did to everyone else in the tubes? They’re being made up from spare parts?
“I still need to see more before I decide anything,” Mathiras says, playing the part of the pirate. “I’m not just handing over my qura’aki without any sort of guarantee.”
“Of course not,” the ooli says. “Let me show you a bit more.” He waves us on.
Mathiras pulls me closer to him, putting a hand on the back of my neck. He gives me a comforting squeeze, and I feel a little better. He’s here with me.
The ooli turns down another hall, and this time we walk into another large chamber, this one full of pods with people sleeping in them. Goosebumps prickle up my arms, because I recognize this. The people in the pods look just like the ones back on the Buoyant Star. “Here we have our completed cargo ready for another shipment. They’re fine-looking specimens, if I do say so myself.” He beams at us and gestures at one of the pods. “You can open one and pull her out if you’re wanting to see what the end result is like. I assure you that she is a hundred percent functional.”
“Does she have memories?” Mathiras asks, moving toward one of the pods and gazing up at the window. I’m relieved to see that it’s not a face I recognize. He taps the glass. “How does she know how to function?”
The ooli makes a burbling noise that sounds a bit like laughter. “Due to the slice of the hippocampus portion of the brain she gets from the initial host, she’ll have a cross-section of that host’s memories, enough to make her feel comfortable that she’s the original. To handle motor skills and general knowledge, we have a learning program that all of our newly completed clones go through. You’ll find she’s adult in every way, and the only thing she knows is that she has a few gaps in her memory. It’s all very seamless.”
Mathiras taps on the pod again and then turns to our host. “How many clones do you send out at once? All of these have the same faces and no one has the red clone-marker skin. Surely you’re going to get caught?”
“We handle special orders based on the customer’s needs,” the ooli tells us. “This particular batch is for a lord that has a gladiator with a particular affection for this model, but he’s also rough with his toys. We provide the duplicates so the lord can keep his prize fighter in line. Other than that, we stagger our clones to ensure that duplicates are not sent out to our sales personnel.”
I bite back my frown, because that’s not true. The half-metal mesakkah back on Three Nebulas said that some of the slavers were selling females with the same faces over and over again. He’s lying. I gesture at the girls in the pods. “Are these women ready? Like can they wake up if we open the doors to their pods?”
The ooli looks at me, blinks, and then looks back at Mathiras. “We can also modify personality. If you find that your particular slave is a bit too reluctant, we can tweak things and make her far more amenable.”
Well that is just rude. I’m not even going to feel bad when I break this guy’s neck.
Mathiras just nods, glancing around the room. “Do you clone anything other than humans? I’ve heard I can buy gladiators from you as well.”
“Oh, those are handled by another one of my colleagues,” Arluz says, clasping his small green hands in front of him. “And we make them to special order to ensure that the requestor’s needs are met. Speed, size, fighting requirements, things of that nature.” He smiles at us. “You don’t need to see those.”
Something about his wording makes my skin prickle.
“I don’t?” But Mathiras chuckles as if this is amusing to him. “You’ve got quite a set-up here, I have to admit. It’s far more advanced than I thought it would be.” He pretends to glance down the hall back where we came. “Do you and the rest of your team live on this ship, too? And people just come here to pick up batches to sell?”