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Once more, there was a pause, before she said slowly, almost formally.
‘Yes, I am, sir. All the way.'

‘I'm glad you said that, more than I can say. OK… Preliminary instructions. I'll get more detailed information to you one way or another over the next twenty four hours, but, basically, what I'd like you to do for the moment is to concentrate on what we'd need to do to regain control of the ship.'

‘Staging our own coup, you mean?'

‘Exactly.'

‘With respect, sir, how can we do that? He's got a hundred troops under his command. Even if we can arm our UNSEC people, we're going to be outnumbered three to one.'

‘Assume the troops have been neutralised.'

‘How?'

‘Leave that for the moment. Assume for the moment they've been taken out of the equation. We're talking about taking over key positions and holding them, so we'll need to have UNSEC personnel armed and ready to act. You'll need to brief your officers beforehand – those you think you can trust, anyway. But it'll have to be
you
doing the briefing, because it'll look suspicious if I suddenly start consulting with them again, so you need to think about how you can keep them up to speed without Ferreira catching on. I'm afraid you're going to be on your own in that respect – the further away I am from them, the better.'

‘Understood. I'll work something out.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Let's face it, if I can't set up a secure network, what am I doing in this job anyway?'

Vinter grinned. ‘True.'

‘I'm assuming you've worked out how to get the info to me, one way or another, but the big question is how do we get our people armed? Ferreira won't stand for that.'

‘If EarthCorp attacks, I'll be able to talk him around. You'll have at least an hour to issue the weapons.'

‘If EarthCorp…
' She broke off.
‘Right. So you're assuming they will?'

‘I don't think they have any choice.'

‘So you want us to move during the attack?'

‘Not during the attack, no. More a case of being ready to do so immediately afterwards. Assuming we beat off EarthCorp, that is. If we don't, then all bets are off anyway.'

‘And if they don't attack?'

‘Then we're back to square one, but we won't have done anything to show our hand. But they
will
attack.'

‘You're certain about that?'

‘I can't honestly see them doing anything else in the present circumstances.'

‘But if they do, we… OK, sir, I'm assuming you've taken that into account.'

‘I'm aware of the risks, put it that way. Anyway, that's
my
side of the problem, the bit that I'll have to deal with. I'll have to leave the specifics of the UNSEC role to you, but, as I've said, only those you can trust.'

‘OK… do I involve any members of the Senior Team? None of them have a military background, so do they need to be in the loop?'

Vinter nodded in approval; clearly, she was already thinking this through. ‘Adebayo and Mendis will have to be – we might need some computer wizardry to slow things up that won't show up on the system. Unless we have anyone else who can do it?'

‘Not as good as them, no. So I leave the others out of it? Need to know, is that it?'

‘That's exactly it.'
That, and the fact that I'm not entirely convinced about Simunic or Naragama – they're good at what they do because they see them as intellectual challenges rather than as a result of any deep loyalty to the UN and I wonder if either of them would take much persuading to switch sides. Maybe I'm being unfair, but we're not going to need them – or Moreira – for this and it's just as well not to take chances.

‘OK, sir. I'll keep them at a distance.'

‘Right – that's all I've got for now. Any questions?'

‘Not at the moment, no. I'll get back to you if I think of any.'

‘OK. Choose your subordinates and get them alerted. I'll get back to you once I've passed on the more detailed stuff.'

‘I'll be ready, sir.'
Still the formal tone – but understandable, in the circumstances.

‘Good. And thanks.'

‘Pleasure, sir.'

‘Out. Proserpina.'

Vinter leaned back, taking a second, longer drink from the canister, smiling to himself in relief.
OK, that's Step One. Time for Step Two.

Whatever the hell Step Two actually was…

*****

‘Chris? Are you there?'

The voice had Vinter instantly awake, leaping from his bunk and halfway across the room to his sidearm before he realised that there was nobody in his quarters with him – it had been in his head, that was all…

‘Chris? There's not much point in expecting a reply at the moment, because you don't have the protocols to do it, but this is your other self speaking.'

Shit… It was his embedded comm speaking, for Christ's sake – the network that only UNSEC personnel could access. And it was his own voice he could hear… What the hell?

‘I'm speaking to you from the good ship
Atlantis
, which is the name of the starship that has almost caught up with you
.
Like you, I'm a clone of the original Chris Vinter, the second successful outcome of the same project that produced you, but, by the time I came along, it had been taken over by EarthCorp. I'm your alter ego, I'm afraid. Now I'll give you a few moments to digest all that before I continue.'

Vinter found himself in front of the mirror, staring intently at it, only dimly aware of the significance of the reaction. Another Vinter…
Shit.
Unless he really was going round the bend, after all, some unpredictable side effect of the cloning process that had him hearing voices in his head… For a moment, he wondered if the Livvy Vinter were trying to resume control again, but then recalled the content of the message; the other Vinter was aboard Stalker.

Terrific. That's all we bloody need – another one of me.

But it made sense, unfortunately – if they could do it once, they could do it again. And again…
How many of me are there, for fuck's sake? And how the hell was this other one talking to him through the most heavily protected comms system on
Terra Nova?

‘To answer the question I know you'd ask if you could – yes, I've hacked into your comms systems and I'm speaking to you through it. Nobody else can hear us – it's routed exclusively to you as sole recipient. Now, if you want to reply, you need to accept a burst message I'm going to send in a few seconds – your nano systems should be able to handle it and convert it into a format you can feed into your comp. Obviously, you're going to be concerned that it's simply a virus that will cripple your system, one way or another, but then you're going to realise that if I've hacked into your comms sufficiently well to talk to you at all, then I'm already in a position to release a virus anyway by using the protocol – right? So… I'm sending the message now.'

It was as if there was a brief explosion of white noise in his head, then, somehow, he knew exactly what instructions to type into his comp. He hesitated for a moment –
he's right; if he has got a virus ready to run, then he'd have implanted it by now –
then typed in the sequence he had been given.

‘OK,' he subvocalised. ‘I hear you, Chris.'

There was a delay of about ten seconds before the voice in his head said,
‘That was quick. Are you on your own?'

OK, so the time lag was about right for Stalker's present distance; maybe he wasn't going round the bend after all… Vinter waited a couple of seconds to see if there was anything else, then said ‘Yeah. You bloody well woke me up though. I take it you're alone as well?' He went over to the drinks dispenser and dialled a coffee; with a ten second delay for the message to reach the other ship and for a reply to come back, he might as well wake himself up during the gaps.

‘Yeah – although you'll have to take my word for it. This is just between the two of us – we'll just have to live with the time lag, I suppose.'

‘Yeah, I think I can cope with that. OK, What did you want to talk about that you don't want our bosses to hear?' Again, he waited for the response, but when it came, it took him by surprise.

‘Is that really what
you
want to talk about?'

Vinter pursed his lips ruefully. ‘You know the answer to that, don't you?'

‘I suspect the main problem we're both having is that we already know what the other one's going to say, isn't it? What you really want to know is whether there are any differences between us, and if so, what are they? Right?'

‘Right. OK… which one do you remember – Anji or Livvy?' He took a sip from his cup and grimaced; now that he had the Anji memories, the shipboard coffee seemed to taste even worse…

‘Livvy. I don't know any Anji – or Angela. Well, there was a girl at school called… OK, so you've got two sets of memories, is that it?'

‘Right.'
Bloody hell – he's quick. But then we both are…

‘And, at a guess, the Anji set is the original.'

‘I think it is, yes. They gave you the simpler version.'

‘Figures. They've given me just about enough to keep me sane – I'm only a fucking cyborg, after all, so who cares what effect it has on me?'
There was a pause, but before Vinter could reply, the other voice said,
‘You know your trigger phrase, don't you.'
It was a statement, not a question.

‘Yes, I do.'

‘Shit… so you're under your own control?'

Vinter nodded, a split second before he realised the futility of the gesture. ‘The original trigger's been disabled.'

‘So you're not under New Dawn control?'

‘Not as far as I can tell.'

‘That's something, anyway.'

Vinter hesitated for a few seconds, then said quietly, ‘In held ‘twas in I.'

This time, there was a longer delay than before.
‘That was the nonsense phrase used to release you?'

‘Yes. Did it have any effect on you?'

‘Nope. I certainly still don't know what
my
trigger phrase is.'

‘Procol Harum? Pink Floyd?'

‘Haven't a clue what you're talking about. Looks like it doesn't work for me.'

‘It
was
a bit of a long shot, to be honest.'

‘Thanks for trying… So you're more like the real Vinter than I am, by the look of it.'

‘Who knows? I haven't been given all his memories, after all – I know that. Does it bother you?'

‘What, that you're more like the template than me? I suppose it does, in a purely intellectual sense, but not in any visceral way. The way I look at it is this – I'm lucky to be here at all and so are you, because the failure rate in the programme that produced us was catastrophic. We're not exactly easy to create, apparently – it's the augmentations that are the problem. You were Number One Eighty Seven, I was Two Ninety Three and we're the only two successful augmented clones out of nearly four hundred attempts. The process needs a little working on, put it that way.'

‘Bloody hell… I never knew. What happened to the others? Never mind – I can guess.'

‘Most of them didn't last beyond the embryo stage. Those that did mostly had genetic defects that would have led to mutations or the kind of disabilities that the researchers didn't want, bearing in mind that the whole project was funded by the military, so they were only interested in super-warriors – us, in other words. Some had inadequate or non-existent immune systems, so they would have died of the common cold if they were ever exposed to it… and so on. There were simply too many things that could go wrong that normally would have been dealt with by Mother Nature, but not by Genetic Engineering. The last one in the sequence apparently did survive to maturity, but the minute he was awoken, he went berserk and killed everyone in the med lab. They had to take him out with automatic weapons and he still killed three armed soldiers… They cancelled the project after that.'

‘I'm not surprised… So there were nearly four hundred of us who were simply disposed of?'
Bastards…

‘Incinerated, apparently. But yes, round about that.'

‘There's nothing at all about any of this in our data bank.'

‘Now why doesn't that surprise me? Not many people did know about it, actually. It wasn't exactly something that anyone on Earth was interested in making public, so I doubt that even the orginal Vinter ever found out, either. Once it was cancelled, the UN took the decision to bury the whole project, you know, destroy the equipment and the files, but before they could do a proper job, EarthCorp moved in and captured the facility. I was still in the tank then, put on indefinite hold, and so EarthCorp had me to work on right from the start. They found the Livvy memories that New Dawn had succeeded in giving to you in the databanks and adapted them to suit EarthCorp. So, as far as I'm concerned it was EarthCorp who sponsored me through University and then recruited me into their military wing.'

‘Why didn't they simply use one of their own people? That would save having to rewrite any memories – again.'

‘Like I said, we're difficult to create. They tried, but enough of the equipment had been destroyed to make it impossible without re-developing the entire technology, which, I gather, you have on board your ship. By the time we had to launch from Earth, they still hadn't managed to grow a viable second clone, so they were stuck with me.'