I'd sparred with Nicky myself a lot in the last week, teaching her how to handle an opponent who also had a weapon. It was kinda like fencing, except instead of trying to poke each other with spindly metal foils, we were trying to hit each other with reasonably-beefy rattan sticks.

Was she a master of swordsmanship? Or, well, hammerswomanship, in this case. No, she absolutely was not. Mastery of a martial art takes like a decade of fairly dedicated and consistent practice to achieve. I wasn't a judo master, and I'd been practicing that pretty consistently, even on the job, for five years.

But that wasn't the right question to ask. The right question to ask was...

...is Nicky tough enough and good enough to fight like a hundred clones of her mother who were trained, during their freshly-hatched neuroplasticity, to be Pretty Decent with the blade, and still come out in one piece?

So far...

I sidestepped a mangled chunk of bloody gore that had once been part of a clone's hand, which landed wetly where my foot used to be.

...I'd say she was doing alright.

"It's like that lawnmower scene from that one zombie movie," Red Fox murmured.

"I think I'm gonna be sick," Akane said, eyes closed and ears plugged.

"You know, we didn't even turn on the wolfsbane," I said, a bit louder, so Doctor Skinner could hear us. "These clones still have their powers at as full strength as they can manage, and it is not enough to stop Lady Venus from literally dismantling them with a hammer."

"This is why ideas are tested by experiment," Doctor Skinner mused. "I take it you've already nullified my self-destruct mechanisms?"

"Eyup," I said.

"Oh well. You can keep this base. It was worth a shot. I'll still conquer America by Valentine's Day without it."

"How gracious of you," I said, before disabling the intercoms. Could I have traced the line she was using to talk to this base? Honestly, probably not. She was, for the most part, pretty good at information security. So, there really was pretty much no reason, at this point, to let her keep talking. All she'd do at this point is annoy me. "Jesus, she is tearing through them."

"She is distressingly okay with killing a bunch of people who look like her mother," Red Fox added.

"I mean, considering who her mom is, I'm not exactly surprised," I said. "Personally, right now I'm trying to run the math on how long this must've taken her to set up. Usually it takes about a month to grow an adult human in a vat, see? So if Skinner has 32 vats- which she probably does, I know her- then this army, divided by 32, is how many batches there've been, and times... oh, four weeks, with Skinner's method, to get the time she's been at this. I counted 88 clones; more than 64 but less than 96, so let's round up to three batches, with the last eight probably being somewhere else. Maybe special operations or something. And that means, at a minimum, she's been doing this for... twelve weeks. About three months. Almost as long as I've been here, actually. She must've gotten started early."

"Huh," Red Fox said. "So, that tell us anything?"

"Honestly, not really," I said. "I mean, she probably doesn't have another army like this in her back pocket, this sorta thing is expensive to maintain in terms of demiurgic headspace, in ways that can't be fobbed off on a minion. And she probably can't build another one anytime soon- nor will she try, because she's witnessed firsthand how useless it is. But aside from that... nope, nothin'."

"Damn."

"We'll keep sniffing. We'll find her."

Finally, at long last, Venus splattered the last clone's brains all over the floor with a strike that did not resemble Kali so much as it resembled Happy Gilmore.

"I'm done," she said, the blood and gore sliding off of her like water off a duck's back as she straightened up, casually resting her hammer on her shoulder. "What's next?"

"We should look around, figure out what else is here," I said. "And, uh. Maybe find a room that isn't lovingly-painted with the insides of your cloned mother."

"Probably. Akane, you'll want to start hovering about three feet above the ground."

Akane wailed quietly.

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"I'm beginning to piece together a picture of what's happening, here," I said, examining the big rows of cloning vats. "This here is a row of eight vats, split down the middle by an aisle. There's three more rows behind it. And since Skinner's cloning process takes precisely 28 days from start to finish, when she does it like this, she can have a fresh batch of eight being spat out every week, with another batch never more than a week away, and the benefit that she only has to on-board eight clones at a time, provided that process only takes a week at the most."

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

"Wouldn't that also make the process of making whole batches of thirty two clones take three weeks longer than it needs to?" Fox asked.

"Oh, for sure there's downsides," I said. "And hell, sometimes you want a big batch of clones hatching at the same time."

"Don't call it hatching," Venus pleaded.

"They can socialize with each other, keep each other occupied. Makes some things easier. Buuuut, it also makes some things harder. Mostly, keeping them tightly controlled, which... well, Skinner wanted. Because she craves control more than anything."

"Very healthy, this Skinner lady," Fox remarked.

The room was full of the hum of machinery already, but some new noises began, signaling that something was starting up.

"Of fucking course," I said as an overhead gantry started to move over the last row of vats, which should be the closest to being done. I shot it, but in the time it'd taken me to line up my shot and break the damn thing, it'd already crossed the room, getting overhead the second-to-last vat before I completely befuckened it, managing to hit both the power cable and the motor moving it. "We're not finding out what that does. Bad enough these vats are apparently ready for hatching. We don't need to let them actually ha-" The sound of eight watertight seals breaking filled the room, along with primordial goo spilling through the floor grates, and hurried footsteps.

"I got this," Venus said, stepping forward and pulping the eight fresh- and uncomfortably naked- clones with her hammer, spilling their blood into the floor grates. "...That's seven. Where's the eighth one?"

I blinked, then checked the scanner. The last one...

...was cowering in her tube.

The only tube that the gantry hadn't passed over.

Oh fuck me running that gantry had been the mind control device that made the clones loyal to Skinner, and my lack of haste meant only one of these clones survived it.

"It's okay, you can come out now," I called. "You're not controlled by Skinner; we aren't enemies."

Nobody was sure why, but for whatever reason, unless one specifically tried to avoid it, freshly-hatched human clones would speak the very basics of the mother tongue of the demiurge who made their vat. This was the only pre-natal mental influence that these clones had; this was why Skinner needed to mind-control them at the moment of completion, instead of throughout their development.

This clone, I could tell, didn't have any of Skinner's conditioning. Just some rudimentary English and a wholly reasonable fear of strangers and very loud noises.

And, we were reminded as she cautiously leaned around the corner, no clothes.

"Here," I said, unbuttoning my coat and shrugging it off. "Put this on."

She approached me nervously, and I draped the coat over her shoulders.

"Put your arms through the sleeves, and fasten the buttons," I instructed.

"The hell do we do with her?" Venus asked, quite uncomfortably aware that "Nicky Smash!" wasn't an appropriate answer right now.

"We'll figure something out," I said. "She's got ten weeks of neuroplasticity to impart maximal skills on her. At that point... she learns just like the rest of us."

"Are we keeping her?" Akane asked.

"If she wants us to," I said with a shrug, as the clone finished buttoning up the coat. "Now c'mon. Let's get out of here."

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"Your existence brings me great pain," Silas said, after dinner.

"Look, I talked to Haruna and-" I made a fake retching noise. "-Princess Vega. They both signed off on this plan, and so did little Violet."

We'd named the clone, of course. She was now Violet Vega-Sakurai, and tomorrow, Friday afternoon, she'd be leaving with the matronly polycule to be raised by them in Houston. I'd never wanted kids, and while this clone was physically fully-grown, mentally was another story. I wasn't equipped to handle this. But Haruna, Tanya, and Samina? They'd raised one weird-ass science fiction baby. Why not another one?

"Come the nearest Shabbat, we'll be able to forget she exists and move on with our next venture," I continued.

"Which will be starting from square one, because our princess is in another windmill," Silas muttered. "Do you have any leads?"

"A few, but none of them are very solid," I said. "I just don't know what Doctor Skinner's main plan is. I know what her goal is- conquer America before Valentine's Day- just... not how she plans to achieve it."

"Fuck a duck," Silas muttered. "Shit."

"Yeah, you're tellin' me, big guy," I said, patting him on the shoulder. "We'll make it through this. And in the meantime, Akane and I have cooked up some stuff you can benefit from, if you're interested."

"...What kind of stuff?"

"I'm a fully-accredited Research Fellow of the Institute for Applied Transhumanism," I said.

"I've got my own implants already," Silas said.

"And we can talk shop, and you might find a way to make them better and more maintainable," I said. "But besides that, between me and Akane is a wide spread of specialties and knowledges. I bet you that most of what you would want, we can make. Provided, of course, that we haven't already made it. So... what're you doing tomorrow?"

Silas sighed. "Talking shop with you, and drowning the sorrows of an escaped quarry with machine oil and blood."

"That's the spirit," I said, grinning.