Mike Stackpole - Ghost Book One - The Earth Transformed

Floating.

Lighter than a feather on a warm spring breeze. Just hanging there.

Blue and green. The colors of life.

Peaceful.

Then, clouds. Terrible clouds.

I didn’t see them — didn’t hear any thunder — but they had to be there. There could be no other explanation for the lightning that shot through me. One bolt, straight down from the top of my skull and out through my soles, splintering as it went, stabbing out through every neuron, every pore.

My body tensed, muscles spasming, back arching almost to the breaking point. My bones burned. I tried to breathe, but something sour filled my mouth. Nettles dragged across my tongue. I jackknifed up, liquid splashing around me, metallic air cold on my skin.

It didn’t quench the fire in my cells.

I flailed for balance as the world moved under me, then I fell to a freezing floor, all metal and slippery with viscous glop. I tried to get up, but my hands slid away. I coughed up a throatful of something foul, then swiped a hand over my face, clearing thick gel from my eyes. I had to squeeze it out of my hair.

That exhausted me, so I lay there for a bit, just breathing, eyes closed against the bright light. My mouth tasted like I’d drunk from a spittoon. I couldn’t remember how I knew to make that comparison.

Finally I opened my eyes. One at a time. For a few unfocused moments everything was green, a glowing pond–scum green. I lay in a puddle of it. A stronger, deeper green rimmed a glass door just past my head. A green button pulsed, set waist–high in the wall beside that door. The glass tank I’d fallen from glowed green too. It was about the size of a casket, and had green fluid in it — a shade never seen in nature. A curved glass lid had split in the middle and fallen back on each side. The fluid had stopped sloshing and the conveyor belt that had risen and dumped me out of there had sunk back beneath the surface.

I had no idea what the tank was, but I didn’t like it.

I didn’t like that I was buck naked and unarmed either.

That unarmed part really bothered me.

Being naked made taking a survey easier, though. I appeared to have all my parts. Fingers, toes, other extremities, all in the right places, and in the right number. Nothing missing, and no spares either.

Why would I have expected otherwise?

Vague memories were starting to form in the back of my head, but I couldn’t bring them into focus. It was like the two halves of my brain were trying to talk to each other in the middle of a noisy bar.

Being careful not to slide around, I got to my feet and pressed my back to the cold steel wall. It was a wonder to behold. No rust. No dents. No grime. Like no human had ever touched it.

It creeped me out.

I hit the green button.

The glass door retracted. Hot air rushed in at me like an assault team, drying my skin. I stayed where I was, listened for trouble. Didn’t hear anything — nor see, nor smell. The door closed again with a whoosh of air. I waited, listening. Still nothing.

Time to make a move.

I hit the button and dodged out and left.

And tripped over my own feet.

Literally.

No, not the feet at the ends of my legs. The feet at the end of the legs of a body that looked just like the guy I usually saw in the mirror. He lay stretched out in the dark corridor just out of sight of the doorway. He’d been shot, chopped up, and gnawed on. Even so, I recognized the face.

My knees took a time out and I slid down the opposite wall. Pieces of things started to come back, but not many. That dent in the dead guy’s skull, the one that had been bound up with soiled rags, might have been the reason why.

I knew I was in some place called Sleeper Base One, and I knew somebody had told me and my… my friends? gang? squad? to find it for a very important reason, but I couldn’t remember the reason. I also knew that something had gone wrong for us — maybe not here, but somewhere — and I had hurried back here to clone myself so I could finish the mission. Whatever the mission was supposed to—

Wait.

Quick rewind.

Clone myself?

I looked back through the glass door into the room with the glass tank.

Cloning chamber.

I’d cloned myself.

How did I know how to do that?

More memory lost to that dent in my head.

Er, my former head.

I — I mean he — must have died while waiting for my current self to decant out of the green goo.

Poor bastard.

Still, he had clothes and I didn’t, so…

I peeled him, starting with his boots. Can’t go anywhere without boots. Then the jeans and shirt. I didn’t take his socks or shorts. I think I was more uneasy about leaving him utterly naked than I was about corpse cooties. His body armor was worse for wear but better than nothing.

I wondered why he didn’t have anything more lethal than a combat knife on him. Wasn’t like he’d been looted. Everything would have been gone if he had. A few choice cuts of meat likely would have been gone too. Maybe I’d shucked all that stuff on the way here from wherever I’d come from. Maybe I’d been too weak to carry it all.

He still wore a battered star–shaped badge on the sheath of his knife. The star of a Desert Ranger. My star. I flicked dried blood off it as I slid the sheath onto my belt, then I froze.

I didn’t know who I was.

My mind could see a man with sergeant’s stripes shouting my name, but I couldn’t hear him. I could feel the lips of a redheaded woman whispering it in my ear, but I couldn’t hear her.

I looked at the back of the star. That’s where Desert Rangers usually scratched their names. Nothing but the pin. It was blank.

I fought down panic. I told myself my name didn’t matter. Who I was didn’t matter. The badge told me what I was, and that’s what mattered.

I was a Desert Ranger.

Now all I had to do was figure out what my mission had been, and how to complete it.

Then a woman screamed, and I moved “figuring out my mission” down to number two on the list.

The metal corridors of the base made tracking the shouts and crashes a bit tricky, but I got there in the end. Four mutants had the woman surrounded. They looked like shaggy dogs wearing ragged clothes — growled a lot too — but no dog in the world ever smelled that bad.

First one I reached had ten fingers, seven on one hand, three on the other. Lots of space where the spares had been manicured down to the knuckle. Maybe he needed the extra fingers for picking all three of his nostrils. They ran like a sewer all down into his beard.

I grabbed a handful of matted hair and yanked back, then pulled the combat knife across his throat. Apparently old me was diligent about honing his knife to a razor’s edge. Blood jetted and his head almost came clean off. Well, I say clean, but nothing about that lice rancher was anything but foul.

The spray of blood turned the second one toward me. I wished it hadn’t. He had skin like a shedding rattlesnake and something had taken his right eye, leaving just a tangle of scars. He’d wired a bayonet to the open end of a sawed–off shotgun. It was swinging in my direction.

I stepped into him. Caught the muzzle on my left hip. He stumbled back, trying to buy himself enough room to stab me. I got there first. Eight inches of steel right between ribs. Hot backsplash told me I’d found one of the big arteries. He was out before he fell, dead before the second bounce.

The third guy charged me empty–handed. He’d been making grabs at the woman. Apparently he had plans for her that required her to have a pulse. Big man with bigger fists. Each one was the size of a small–block engine.