“There’s only three,” I muttered.

  “‘There’s only three,’” Tynan mocked in a high-pitched voice. “Well, there would’ve been more,” he pointed at Zavis, “if you hadn’t shot one!” Tynan directed his finger towards me next. “And if you hadn’t stabbed one!” He spun back to the men in the wheelchair. “And if one more hadn’t died of old fucking age!” his conclusion was yelled at the three advisors.

  “Apologies, Your Grace. We’ll try to be younger next time,” said one advisor sarcastically.

  Tynan narrowed his eyes as if considering how much impudence he was prepared to overlook. But then he shrugged and carried on with his tirade, “Anyway … Phobus, Anwir, and Lorcan had the good sense to implement several of my contingency plans. They began mass cloning and soon had a military and labour force. Then they manufactured fleets and weapons, and then they cloned me. Now, can anyone explain to me what a clone is missing?”

  “A consciousness,” said Ichirō.

  Every head in the room pivoted to gaze at the conversation’s newest participant, but no heads swivelled faster than Amorina’s and my own.

  “Ichirō! What are you doing?” Amorina hissed, but Ichirō ignored her.

  Tynan rotated on the spot and stared intently at my son. “Very good, my boy.”

  “Thank you, Your Grace.”

  “Remind me … what was your name again?” Tynan asked with a snap of his fingers.

  “Ichirō, Your Grace.”

  “That’s right. As Ichirō correctly noted, a clone has no consciousness – it’s simply hardware without any programming. So, it was easy to create the clone army and workforce; we had a mass conversion device that we could load up with a brain scan or two and program multiple people at once.”

  Tynan turned towards the advisors. “But me, well, I was a special case, wasn’t I?” he said with a devilish smirk. “So, how’d we do it, lads?”

  “We realised the answer was inside your head,” said Phobus, pointing at me.

  Lorcan continued, “Because a precursor mass conversion device rewrote the majority of your brain, there are a lot of scars in your brain tissue, areas where one personality died and another was born.”

  “So, we designed a procedure to allow us to decipher the scar tissue and reconstruct a copy of the mind that previously existed. It was the last puzzle piece needed to bring back our emperor, the one true emperor,” finished Anwir.

  So that’s what they did to me earlier – ripped my skull open and probed my brain, scanning all the scar tissue within it. Tynan really was an echo – ashes glued together to make wood.

  “With that answered, you must be curious as to why you’re alive?” Tynan looked at me, his face expectant, awaiting my question.

  “Why are we alive, Tynan?” I almost smiled at the sight of his eye twitching again at the use of his name.

  “Well, you lot down this end,” Tynan gestured towards the Stardove crew. “We’ll be putting you to work; the factories and pleasure rooms can’t run themselves, after all.”

  Tynan turned towards Zavis. “You I intend to keep alive. I will make you watch as we hunt down all the Insurgency members and kill them, one by one, until they’re all gone!”

  Tynan skipped me as he turned to Amorina next. “You, well, I need a new concubine, so I suppose you’ll do in a pinch,” he said with a dismissive shrug.

  “Touch me and I’ll rip your fucking dick off and shove it up your arse!” Amorina snarled, her voice laced with acid.

  Tynan glanced at me. “She’s a feisty one – I get why you’d tap that.”

  “Fuck off,” I rasped, my damaged voice not able to convey the malice surging through me.

  Tynan focused on Amorina again. “We’ll soon teach you to look at me with reverence,” he added, then moved onto Ichirō.

  “You, my son, don’t belong with these traitorous bastards. Come, stand at my side and together, we will take back our Empire.”

  Ichirō’s eyes darted sideways and briefly looked at Amorina and me.

  “Yes, Your Grace. I would be honoured to.”

  “Ichirō, don’t do this!” Amorina pleaded.

  “Silence, bitch!” Tynan growled menacingly.

  “No, you shut the fuck up!” I shouted angrily in her defence. “Ichirō, listen to me – Tynan is not a good person!”

  “Strike them! And separate the girl from her mother.”

  On Tynan’s command, I saw the soldier behind Amorina lunge forward, his rifle butt pointed straight at Amorina’s head. I felt the crack of the rifle butt against the back of my skull and watched helplessly as Amorina suffered the same fate. Both of us bent forward from the strength of the impact and the intensity of the pain that raced through us.

  My stomach rolled with nausea, and bile filled my mouth. Red-hot agony engulfed my surgical wound, like a ring of fire that burned the surrounding nerves, sending a burning anguish surging through my body in relentless waves. As the heat waned, I lifted my head to find Amorina already sitting upright. She was focused on Emma, who’d been moved back to her original position. I carefully looked up to find Tynan’s cruel expression sneering down at us.

  “Good – some submission at last,” he said before turning back towards Ichirō. “Come now. Stand up, boy.”

  Ichirō jumped to his feet.

  “Good. Now, stand by the throne.”

  Ichirō bowed his head and said, “Yes, Your Grace,” then marched towards the throne.

  As the pain continued to subside, all I could do was watch as my son crossed the floor.

  Oh, what have you done, my son?

  Tynan shifted his attention to Emma. “I see your daddy has been busy. How old are you, little one?”

  Emma tilted her head to look up at Tynan, her expression one of confusion. “Daddy, why are there two of you?”

  “I said,” Tynan’s voice rose, sharp and hostile as he spoke. “How old are you!”

  Emma’s face paled as she recoiled from this intimidating doppelgänger.

  “I’m four and one quarters.”

  “Right, let’s just make it an even four, okay? Such an impressionable age, at four years old, so easily influenced,” Tynan shifted his gaze down the line towards Amorina and me. “I’m sure I could mould her into a daughter of my liking.”

  “Don’t you fucking dare!” Amorina’s voice reverberated through the room with a furious scream.

  Tynan clicked his fingers, and the soldier behind Amorina struck her in the head again, more forcefully this time, and she dropped to the ground, rendered unconscious.

  Tynan bent down, seized Emma’s arm, pulled her up, and dragged her towards the advisors.

  “Stop! You’re hurting me!” she cried out.

  “Shut up, or I’ll show you what pain is.”

  “Stop! Please!”

  Tynan abruptly spun and wrapped his hands around Emma’s throat, easily hoisting her into the air. Her eyes widened in terror as he squeezed, cutting off her air.

  “When I tell you to do something, you do it!”

  He kept walking, his vice-like grip still around my daughter’s neck.

  “Let her go, Tynan!”

  I ducked to the side, avoiding another strike and watched as Tynan deposited Emma in Phobus’s lap. Released from Tynan’s grip, I heard her gasp for air.

  Without pause, Tynan spun around, walked directly to me, and then dropped to one knee before me. He took a moment to scrutinize me, first looking at the left side of my face and then the right.

  “You know, it really is an uncanny resemblance.”

  “Cut to the chase, Tynan. What do you intend to do with me?”

  Tynan’s eye twitched, and his hand shot forward, grabbing me by the throat and squeezing.

  “I intend to make you suffer. Kept alive and treated like an animal – always by my side, like a pet,” Tynan explained slowly, his eyes gleaming with anticipation.

  “You’ll be helpless, forced to watch as I fuck your wife, as I twist your children, as I tear down the Republic! You will spend the rest of your life rotting away, watching everything you love become mine.”

  He kept a tight grip on my throat, and I could feel my chest tightening with fear, my lungs desperately trying to breathe in air.

  “I want you to live the rest of your life struggling to breathe, feeling trapped, suffocated, frantically searching for air, and never finding any. And just when you lose hope, I’ll let you take a breath.”

  Tynan released his grip, and I gasped, trying to take a deep breath, but before I could finish, his hand was back around my throat.

  “And then you’ll find yourself cut off once more. This will repeat until I break you, and then it will continue.”

  Tynan released me and stood up, then strode back to his throne while I fell forward onto my hands and gasped for air. After a minute or two, my breathing finally regulated, and when I looked up, I saw Tynan watching me intently from his throne.

  A soldier approached the throne. “Your Grace. You asked to be notified of this,” the soldier said, offering Tynan a tablet.

  Tynan studied the device intently, his eyes scanning its contents. After a few minutes, a satisfied smile spread across his face, and he returned the tablet to the soldier.

  “Ready the ships. We’re all going on a journey.”

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “You’ll see soon enough,” Tynan said with a flick of his hand.

  Moments later, I felt a needle stabbed into my neck.

  Ugh! Not this again …

  Chapter 4

  A Show of Force

  2159, Common Era – Frontier Space, the Republic of Humanity

  Unlike the last time I awoke, I was surprised to discover that we hadn’t reached our destination. Instead, I’d found myself engulfed in a darkness my eyes couldn’t adjust to. I navigated around the space by touch alone and determined it was a small, padded cell. My head still ached, both where the rifle butt had struck me and around the circular surgical incision, which told me that little time had elapsed since my sedation. I assumed they wouldn’t leave me here for too long, but panic set in as my hunger pangs intensified and the eerily quiet room closed in on me.

  “Hello! Can anyone hear me?” I yelled, but the cell walls seemed to swallow up the sound and stifle it within seconds.

  I called out repeatedly, my strained voice becoming weaker with each cry, but no one came. Bitsy wasn’t with me, I couldn’t remember when or where I had misplaced my Arachnobot, but without it, I had no way to tell the time. My voice utterly spent, I laid back and tried to count the seconds, trying to work out how much time was going by. Time seemed to stand still as seconds felt like minutes and minutes like hours, going on for eternity.

  Suddenly, I heard metal sliding against metal, and a door opened up in front of me, flooding the cell with searing light. My eyes burned in the sudden illumination, and I groaned, immediately closing my eyes and shielding them with my arms.

  “Here’s ya food ya fuckin’ traitor!” an unseen person said, their voice sounding like booming thunder.

  I heard a thump of something hitting the cell floor, presumably my food. Then just as quickly as the light and sound had appeared, they were gone again, suffocating me in silence and darkness. I scrambled forward, locating the plate and the scattered food, shoving the unidentified meal into my mouth, swallowing each mouthful as soon as I could. The food passed through me quickly, and when the urge came to expel my digested meal, I discovered my next predicament: there were no toiletry facilities in the cell.

  The puzzle pieces fell into place at that moment, and I realised what was in store for me as Tynan’s words echoed through my mind.

  “I intend to make you suffer. Kept alive and treated like an animal.”

  The isolation, the darkness, the hunger, and the silence were all tools to make me suffer, to make me pay for the transgressions Tynan thought I’d committed. As I squatted in a corner and defecated, I realised Tynan had been mistaken; I wasn’t being treated like an animal, but something worse – something that didn’t even warrant supplying the necessities.

  [)
  Despite the inhumanities of my confinement, the lack of hygiene facilities became the least of my worries. As my body healed, my mind fractured – isolated and alone in the darkness. My cell was so quiet that I could hear my blood pumping through my veins. I hallucinated sights and sounds – anything to distract myself from the unnerving environment. I closed my eyes and could see Gaia’s lush green landscape or the warm smiles of Amorina, Zavis, my father, and my children.

  I thought about them often and hoped that they were being spared from this hellish existence. I hoped Tynan had put Amorina, Emma, and Zavis into cryo. I assumed Ichirō would do as Tynan did; if Tynan had gone into cryo or stayed awake, Ichirō would do the same. I didn’t know how much time was passing. The notion of time vanished in the midst of the everlasting darkness – with no indication of when one day stopped and the next began. Despite this, my best estimates told me more rather than less time had passed, and I worried about Adanna, Winona, and my father – they’d expected us back after a year. Had more than a year passed? Had they heard of the Stardove’s destruction? Were they worried sick, thinking we were dead, or alive and mysteriously vanished?

  The hallucinations during the day became a source of comfort, for when I slept, nightmares plagued me. Strange visions of my body splitting in two like a dividing cell, giving rise to more and more copies of Tynan, or my skull cut open and Tynan climbing out of my head. I would wake screaming, clutching my stomach as the hunger pains threatened to consume me from the inside out.

  Even in my waking moments, I couldn’t escape Tynan. He was out there, on the ship, doing who knew what. He was my personal shame, a phantom of the past brought into the present and made corporeal. Occasionally, the fear of the darkness’s return had kept me up at night, but I’d never expected that fear to physically come true. He was a forgotten evil that ought to have remained that way. Now, I was afraid of what atrocities he would commit – humanity didn’t know what was coming, and thanks to my efforts with the mass conversion device, they didn’t really understand what Tynan was capable of either.

  Processing it all was a lot for me, and I often found it too much; my mind spun out of control until I was in the throes of a full-blown panic attack. The room would feel suffocatingly small, and I would struggle to breathe as if there literally wasn’t enough oxygen in the cell. My heart would pound in my chest whilst a powerful sense of vertigo would hit me, and all the while, Tynan would flash through my mind; his face, his voice, laughing and jeering at me, taunting me as he wrought misery and destruction upon the universe.

  When the attack passed, and I could finally think clearly again, the prospect of going through it all again filled me with dread. This endless waiting was torturous, and even then I was afraid of what state I would be in when the wait was over. Would I be in any shape to stop Tynan? I felt my physical strength diminishing more and more each day, and not that violence solves every problem, but if push came to shove, would I have the strength to deliver a knockout punch?

  With no answers today, I comforted myself with the thought that tomorrow might be different, as I did every day.

  [)
  Something was different. There was a sensation … no, a mechanical shift – something had changed with the ship. It was like … slowing down.

  Deceleration.

  That was it! The ship had decelerated – more specifically, it’d exited warp. That probably meant we’d arrived at our destination, and with any luck, Tynan would require my presence, and I could finally get out of this godforsaken cell.

  As hoped, I soon heard the tell-tale sound of the deadlock being slid across, and I shielded my eyes in anticipation of the door opening. Light flooded in, and I heard the usual cry of disgust as the smell of the cell launched an offensive against the nostrils of the soldiers who’d opened it. Moments later, they’d entered the cell, and each of them grabbed an arm and a leg and carried my weakened body out of the cell. After spending so long in the darkness and quiet of my thoughts, the ship's bright and clamorous interior was overwhelming, making me feel nearly deaf and blind.

  “…” I opened my mouth to say something, but it seemed like my vocal cords had forgotten how – it had been such a long time since I had spoken to anyone. I cleared my throat, then tried once more.

  “My … family … friends … where are … they?” I had to stop and swallow between each word, but at least I was able to get it out.

  The soldiers remained silent.

  “Please! Are … they safe? Are they … alright?”

  “They’re fine. They’re in cryo aboard the ship. Now shut up!” one soldier replied, a woman from the sound of the voice.

  An immense feeling of relief washed over me. After all the anguish of not knowing, I now knew that Tynan had spared them from my torment, and that was invaluable information. As my vision and hearing slowly and painfully acclimatised, I realised they’d brought me to the ship's bridge.

  “Holy fucking shit!” Tynan’s voice rose in a tone of utter disgust. “You smell like shit, and you look fucking awful!”

  I cautiously looked up and saw him seated in the captain’s chair. As soon as our eyes met, Tynan couldn’t contain his laughter. I felt my cheeks burn with shame as I bowed my head and stared at the floor, hearing the mocking laughter ringing in my ears. He’d promised to break me – was this what it felt like?

  “This is better than I thought,” Tynan said, letting out a few last laughs. “Alright, I think it’s time to see if my pet knows how to listen to commands.”