Hunting Dog Read online

  “I can offer you one bit of advice. As you make new memories, you become a new person. Maybe you aren’t that person who woke up in your bed yesterday… but you are a person, nonetheless. Every sentient being has fundamental rights to life and the pursuit of happiness. That goes for clones as well as the natural born.”

  I leaned back and looked at each of their faces one more time. I needed my leaders to hold it together so that my crew would, in turn, hold it together. In general, I was satisfied with what I saw. There would be hard days ahead for everybody. I wish it wasn’t so, but there was no avoiding it.

  “Commanders Shelby, McGraw, Sa’Mi, Riker, Mitty, and Jowls, please stay. Everyone else… dismissed.”

  As the room emptied, my wife shifted her seat to the one next to mine. I appreciated the gesture. I loved this woman with the same intensity as her doppelganger. That said, I knew I had technically not known her for even an hour. And the same was, of course, true for her knowing me. Who was to say some stray misaligned neuron didn’t change her feeling for me?

  I couldn’t help but wonder how well the mind transfer worked. If it was like a photocopy, then each generation would be slightly inferior to the previous. Was I the same as before?

  In the corner of my eye, I saw movement as the holographic image of the Jabesh AI moved.

  I turned to Arty. I had met him briefly right after I woke up in this new body. At that time, he said that he would provide my senior staff and me with a complete briefing once the preliminaries were taken care of.

  “Mister Arquat,” I began. “We have a lot to discuss.”

  The Ancestor AI nodded. “I imagine we do. Let me anticipate several of your concerns. First, some of you are wondering about the fidelity of the mind transfer process.”

  I began to wonder if the holographic ghost was telepathic. That had been exactly what I was thinking.

  He continued, and I shifted my attention back to him. “As you suspect, it is not perfect.”

  There was an inhalation of breath throughout the room, especially among the first-time clones. It was soft, but it was there all the same. I had not expected such a blunt admission. In some way, I was glad. It helped to eliminate the ‘what aren’t we being told’ kinds of questions.

  Choosing to ignore the hushed whispers, the AI continued.

  “You need not worry. The human memory is not a perfect vessel for memories. The variances are within the normal scope of a human’s normal ability to recall past events.”

  “So what you are saying,” Lori interjected, “is that the inherent flaws in our ability to remember what we had for breakfast masks any anagrammatic typos that may have occurred.”

  “Indeed. The gaps or slight misalignment of memories will self-correct over time. As new memories are laid down, your sense of self will evolve to match those memories. In every way that matters, you are the same people.”

  I nodded. I had wrestled with these issues long ago… and come to many of the same conclusions. I wasn’t the same person as the original Jeremy Riker, but my life was just as valid.

  Having dealt with the cloned elephant in the room, Arty change the direction of the conversation.

  He swept his hand over the surface of the conference room table. A holographic image shimmered into existence and appeared to float just above the surface of the table. It was to be a representation of the solar system we currently occupied.

  “This is the Mutara system. As you can see, it has four major planets and two significant asteroid belts.”

  Suddenly the view expanded out.

  “At 0.68 light years, there is an object that straddles the line between what you call a brown dwarf and a red dwarf. It is 87 times the mass of your Jupiter. Around that protostar is a single planetoid. The dwarf’s designation in your stellar charts is Beta Mutara, and the planetoid is Beta Mutara Prime.”

  Arty paused. I suspected he was waiting for one of us to ask the obvious question. Assuming he hadn’t decided we suddenly had a fascination with stellar cartography, he had some other point in sharing this fascinating bit of trivia with us. He was waiting for us to ask what that point was.

  The contrarian in me wanted to make him wait but responsibility reared its ugly head, and I went ahead and indulged him.

  “I take it Beta Mutara Prime is a world we should be interested in?”

  The Ancestor AI smiled. Bingo. I had just won some points with our resident almost-Jebesh AI.

  “Beta Mutara Prime is the homeworld of the Mahanaim AI known as Eshbaal. It is this entity that directs the Defilers. It is this entity that wishes to reassemble the lost Mahanaim genetic code.”

  Whiskers leaned forward to get a better look at the holographic simulation.

  “Laddi, are ya telling me da wee bugger has been tear’n up worlds and kill’n folk willy-nilly in order ta clone his DNA?”

  Arty paused for a second. It was possible his cognitive circuits were trying to make sense of what my chief engineer had just said. More likely, he had captured the gist of it immediately and was simply giving us dimwitted organics in the room a chance to digest what Whiskers had said.

  “In part, yes,” Arty eventually responded. “The technology and data recovered from the various dig sites allowed Eshbaal to construct his cloning complex. In addition, a large number of memory engrams were retrieved. There is, however, one critical piece that Eshbaal has yet to fully recover.”

  I looked at Arquat. I had a sudden insight into the Defiler’s interest in Earth or more to the point, humanity.

  “In order to reconstitute an entire race,” I began, “you would need a large and varied sample of genetic material. It wouldn’t be enough to have a single individual’s genome.”

  “That is correct,” the Jabesh AI confirmed.

  “Humanity is a living repository for the Defiler’s DNA, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Again, correct. However, the repository was actually created by my ancestors. We augmented the race you call the Neanderthals. Our motivations were not to preserve our race but to share our very existence with other life. Our ancestor DNA is a gift given to us and now shared freely with others.”

  I shook my head. “From what you’ve told me in the past, the Jabesh claim to love and cherish all life. Why would you seek impede or redirect the natural development of the dominant sentient lifeform on Earth?

  Arquat looked down at the table for a moment before answering.

  “Some lifeforms, especially ones with a high capacity for intellectual development, are not capable of maturing as a species. They are too aggressive, amoral, and self-destructive. Had the Neanderthals been allowed to evolve without intervention, they would eventually have destroyed your planet and themselves.

  “Intellect must be tempered with other attributes like altruism, humility, a social conscience and an ability to love one’s neighbor as much as one’s self. Such emotive elements were not a part of the Neanderthal original genetic makeup.”

  Jowls shifted on his rear four legs. He made a slight barking noise that was quickly suppressed.

  “My human pack mates are the Ancestors? The Defilers are intending to place the freeze-dried memories of their creators in the heads of the Terrians?”

  Not exactly,” Arty answered. “The human genome is filled with what geneticists call ‘junk DNA.’ It is that DNA that when recovered, will allow for the resurrection of the Mahanaim.”

  Lori leaned back and took a sip of her coffee.

  “Twelve billion people.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Twelve billion people, give or take a few dozen. That’s the population of the world. That’s a lot of junk DNA to scan.”

  Arty changed the display. It now showed a diverse mixture of humanity.

  “There is a vast difference in the expression of the human genome. Average heights, body mass, skin pigmentation, and eye and hair color all vary widely. At the same time, certain attributes are consistent across all population groups. Intellig
ence is one such example. For all its diversity, the human genome only varies by 3% across population groups.”

  I knew where Arty was going with this. The Defilers would not need to scan the genetic code of twelve billion. All they needed was a large enough sample to weed out the noise created by genetic drift.

  “How many,” I asked.

  “How many what,” Whiskers said with a blank look on his face.

  “How many people will need to be scanned in order to establish an error-free representation of the archived Ancestor DNA?”

  The Jebesh AI flicked away the holographic display.

  “Several billion individuals from as many diverse ethnic groups as possible would yield a degree of confidence approaching fives nines of accuracy.”

  “How likely are they to want to reach that five nines of accuracy?” I asked. I had a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  I wasn’t sure that the others had connected all the dots yet. When they did, I suspected they would have the terrible feeling in the pits of their stomachs. When that last dot was connected… humanity became redundant.

  2100.1289.8845 Galactic Normalized Time

  RC1015 adjusted the course of his flyer. He and his squadron of identical clones had been chasing a false trail for the better part of two weeks. That meant that the real quarry had likely gone to ground, or Skip jumped out of the system entirely. Sadly for all the RCs involved in this exhaustive search, there would be no rest until every nook of every cranny had been thoroughly scoured by several teams. He might well die of old age, without a name, before such a task was completed.

  Chapter 17: Hound Dog…

  The corridor leading to the gym was cold. At least it seemed that way. It might just have been me. Ever since I had discovered my homeworld had an expiration date, I had been in a funk. In point of fact, I was heading to the gym in the hopes that a good workout would clear my head. I had found over the course of my life that running offered a great time to think.

  Once Eshbaal had harvested all of the genetic sequences it felt it needed, it would undoubtedly seek to destroy the Ancestor DNA repository. Translation, Eshbaal would wipe humanity off the face of the universe.

  Arty’s best guess was we had maybe six months to shut down the Defiler operation. Six months to accomplish what the Jabesh had failed to accomplish over the course of several millennia. Should be a piece of cake.

  Less than half an hour later (and several miles around the track) I was no longer cold. It’s amazing what four miles can do for you! Even better, I had the beginnings of a plan.

  Lori was just entering the gym as I was getting ready to exit. I went to give her a hug and a kiss. The kiss I managed to pull off. The hug was met with a ‘you stink’ and ‘go hop in a shower.’ I almost asked her to join me in said shower, but I had all of humanity to save and little time for personal indulgences… even of the sexy blond wife type. Ah, the things we sacrifice for God and country!

  ***

  “You want to do what?” my good buddy, Mike Morrison, asked for about the umpteenth time.

  I sat back in my recliner. The planning meeting for my little adventure was being held in my quarters.

  I decided to take a different track with my friend. “You’re a soldier. You know what I’m saying is true. At the end of the day, war comes down to math. Brutal, unadorned, uncaring, and unrelenting math. That math dehumanizes war, and it turns it into something ugly… but war should be ugly.”

  I looked over at my friend as he sipped his scotch and water. “Equal training, equal equipment… and everything comes down to a numerical advantage.”

  “The side with the most guns wins. I get that,” Mike agreed. “But we don’t have the most guns.”

  “Exactly. So, we need to change up the math. We need to bring in a force multiplier. Force multipliers, by their very nature, involve risk. The more you are willing to risk… smartly,” I added, “the greater the force multiplier brought into play.”

  Mike slammed down his glass a little harder than perhaps was necessary. Mitty and Whiskers moved to protect their glasses. Spilling a good scotch, especially when it was completely conceivable that the last bottles to ever be distilled had already been distilled… spilling such a scotch would be a sin against both God and nature.

  “You said ‘smart risk.’ This is anything but!” Mike looked over at Lori in an effort to gain and leverage her support.

  My wife, bless her heart, nodded and said simply in a sad voice, “He has to do this. You and I both know it. It’s not a smart play but is our only play.”

  I loved that woman!

  The look of betrayal on Mike’s face was too much. I began to laugh. Mike shook his head and began to share in a defeated soft chuckle. In a few moments, the others joined us… except for Mitty. He was doing his nose-wrinkling thing. What can I say? You have to make allowances for alien otter-looking thingies… it’s in the ‘How to Care for and Love Your Alien Otter Thingy Handbook.”

  The plan, such as it was, was to infiltrate the facilities on Beta Mutara Prime. We needed a way to change the math. What better way to accomplish this than by taking one of the major players out of the equation? Remove Eshbaal, and the war would come to an abrupt end. At least that was the theory.

  The problem was, we had no idea where on Beta Mutara Prime we were going to find this ancient AI. And if we did know where to find it, we didn’t know what vulnerabilities it might have.

  Now before you ask… we did raise these very questions with Arty, but the Jabesh AI, for reasons known only to him, refused to answer. This left us effectively on our own.

  Planets may look small from space but, trust me on this one, they are not. You know how in those sci-fi shows, they just scan the surface and beam down to where they need to go? Well, spoiler alert: it actually never works that way.

  To make matters worse, we weren’t going to be able fly the Gilboa II into a low orbit and start actively scanning anyway. We needed to do whatever it was we were going to do… covertly.

  First on our list of ‘must haves’ was better intel. That meant having a set of mark-one optics on the ground. Now understand, any time you infiltrate an enemy’s stronghold, there is going to be a certain element of risk. Trying to infiltrate the nest of a maniacal alien AI… well, that just added to the fun.

  It turns out that walking around in the open was actually going to be more practical then skulking around in the shadows. That is if we picked our reconnaissance team carefully. The Eshbaal AI cabal used a number of cloned workers including, as it turns out, a model based on yours truly. That meant an extra Riker walking around would not be immediately identified as a persona non grata.

  Eshbaal also had a number of Merab Q’Tar clones which meant our version of the good doctor could also travel about the surface with impunity.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking. Having just two people searching an entire planet to gather intel was equivalent to placing a single drop of water in a very large bucket and hoping for a flood.

  As I might have mentioned this earlier, things the size of a planet are very large places to search. In point of fact, impossibly large. That said, I was counting on three things to help us snatch victory from the jaws of ignoble defeat.

  First, the bad guys didn’t know we were coming.

  Second, on Beta Mutara Prime, all things must lead to Eshbaal. This meant all we really needed to do was follow the flow of data. We had been amazed when we brought up the first long-range of the planet. The dayside looked like Earth, except the continents were the wrong shape. The night side was lit up with yellow-orange blobs of lights congregated around major cities with spindly fibers connecting the blobs. The planet was home to a thriving population. As the planet rotated, we saw one city that dwarfed the others. The number of roads connecting with it was staggering. I have to believe that this is where we were going to find Eshbaal.

  I mentioned before that I had three reasons to expect we would succeed on
our quest.

  The third, and perhaps most important reason was that the bad guys had no idea they were dealing with a hound dog… a hound dog that went by the name of Jeremy David Riker.

  ***

  Now, as a point of general interest, intelligence gathering is great, but not if all it is is a hobby.

  The only way intel is useful is if you have a way to use that intel once it has been gathered. After all, as my dear departed mother used to say… What’s the point of counting the sheep if you don’t plan on gathering the wool?

  I was under no illusion. No matter what we learned, Merab and I were not going to be taking down the Eshbaal AI on our own. Any intel we gathered would only be useful if we succeeded in sharing it with the people who could put it to use. That most certainly was not going to be us. At least not by ourselves.

  I fully expected that, if we were going to pull off this insane plan, we would probably need the other ships in my fleet: the Faqua, the Ticonderoga and the Yorktown.

  It was this last piece that caused the most consternation among my senior staff… at least until we hit upon a solution. The problem was, we had no idea where the fleet was. This meant we actually had two problems to deal with. OK, in fairness, we likely had more than two problems, but these were the two I was currently focused on.

  The first was how to get myself and the good doctor down to the planet’s surface undetected. The second was to locate and bring the cavalry, in the form of the rest of the aforementioned fleet, to the party. I wanted to tackle both at once. The others not so much. This is where being the highest-ranking officer in the room had its advantages.

  It turns out that the two objectives could be handled synergistically. I shared my thoughts with my command staff.

  The Gilboa II making a splashy exit from this binary star system would provide a distraction. In theory, this should make it easier for the infiltration team to covertly HALO jump to the surface of Beta Mutara Prime.

  Meanwhile, the Gilboa II, having fled the system, would travel to Wolf 359. Here is where things would get a little sticky. The fleet was only to wait at Wolf 359 for seventy-two hours. By my estimation, we missed that rendezvous by about a month.