A long, snaking metal corridor linked the Nest’s central courtyard with the Cloning facility. There was no point Gonzal could see for the aisle not being just damn straight; no reason other than twisting it for twist’s sake. Rumor among the Corvids was that Doc Kourailen, being born and raised on an orbital station, was a bit of an agoraphobic and had the entrance to the vats’ room built that way because he felt at home surrounded by confined, narrow spaces.

Gonzal knew it was bull on all counts.

Doc Kourailen hadn’t been their Doc when the Corvids Chapter had hit dirt and Cloning had been erected; he had shown up months later, after Doc Zopel had monstrously screwed things up during the Kuok Hel debacle.

Not entirely Zopel’s fault, Gonzal thought, but then again, it never is.

The Jays had fed the Corvids with crappy Intel. The “just a scouting outpost” on Kuok Hel had turned out to be the synths’ main base in that island. By the time the Magpie platoon was half-torn by the AIs’ heavy turrets, the Grey Ravens decided to launch an overhead assault.

Yeah… like that was gonna work.

You don’t use aircrafts against the synths, or any fancy electronic equipment for that matter: their EMPs had fried the hover’s electronics before the Grey Ravens had time to squeak “Oh, shit!”, and sent the squad crash-landing against a nearby hill.

It had been a massacre.

The Crows had deployed the Browns, the Morrigans, and Gonzal’s Wing squads; they had managed to provide suppressive fire while the Raven Talon and Claw teams managed to pull the few surviving Magpies out, but all the Chapter’s squads suffered heavy casualties. The Wings had lost Vitor and Welki that day, two of the best snipers Gonzal had ever had under his command.

Lost them for good, fuck that Zopel idiot…

When the mangled Corvids managed to limp back to the Nest, they found that Doc Zopel had also acted according to the Jays botched Intel: considering the Op to be “just another trivial mopping up”, the imbecile had indulged himself in a drinking binge and had even forgotten to set the Cloning reps in auto. They found him snoring loudly and obliviously, in the deepest bottom of alcoholic stupor, with every alarm going mad as the plexers couldn’t cope with the huge traffic of incoming brainscans.

And surrounded by a huge batch of botched, half-baked clones.

They should have bundled him Up to HiComm for trial, that was the standard protocol. Instead, the surviving Magpies dragged the drunken and now violently awaken idiot, shrieking and sobbing, to the center of the Nest’s courtyard, near Squirrel’s Tree, where they patiently and methodically proceeded to break every single one of the idiot’s large bones.

Sarge Tejaru, the only Magpie Sergeant to make it back alive and herself a field Med, took care of administering Zopal the needed booster for the idiot to be fully awake the whole time. She finally beat him into a bloody, wailing pulp, while the rest of the Corvid Chapter encircled the scene like silent, patient vultures.

At dusk, the Crow Wing took the lifeless, malformed clones that should have been Vitor’s and Welki’s new flesh suits to a nearby grove right outside the Nest. Bigfoot, sobbing like an overgrown child, carried Vitor in his arms; Haiko and Chinkx, both out of smart-ass jokes, ferried Welki on a stretcher.

Squirrel lead the way to the middle of the grove, which he knew like the back of his hand. There they dug two man-sized trenches, in the old Terran style, and put the deformed bodies down to sleep, blanketing them afterwards with soft soil. The Wing’s survivors then gathered in a small circle, staring at the two scars they had just inflicted on Dari Cal’s surface.

For once, Gonzal had been out of words. Thas was real death; no recloning, no respawning. The end of things, gone for good.

Permanent.

Forever.

What can words do against so much silence?

Noui hummed a sad, soft tune in her native NovBahía tongue. She was not much better singer than Gonzal, and none of the other Wings understood her words. Still, the language of loss and sorrow was sharp and clear.

Once loved, now gone;

gone for ever,

and ever

and evermore.

***

By the time they had returned from the grove, the courtyard was again spotlessly clean, as if nothing had happened.

Captain Luthz had stood arms crossed and stone-faced outside the Corvids’ circle while Tejaru and her surviving Magpies turned Zopel into a broken, wailing red mass. When they withdrew, Captain Luthz had stepped inside the ring and, with one precise thrust of his knife, put Zopel out of his misery. He then took care of all the paperwork and administrative bullshit: mountains of reports, condolences, excuses, and the request for more manpower and, above all, a new Doctor. Although several of the field Meds, and Sarge Tejaru in particular, were qualified to operate the cloning reps, after the Kuok Hel fiasco the Captain wanted no more screw-ups.

The Corvids, their numbers diminished and none of their grunts too eager to test Sarge Tejaru cloning skills, were forced to stay inside the Nest and keep a defensive position for weeks. As Lady Luck would have it, the synths just kept turtling with their turrets and left the Nest alone; it had been, no doubt, the best possible scenario after the Kuok Hel mess, but the Corvids were to that day struggling to regain the territory they had lost during their forced retreat.

The arrival of Doc Kourailen and the new recruits, their dropship weaving through the synths’ blockade, had been the proverbial Cavalry coming just in time to change the tide of battle. Minds had been one of the recruits in that dropship, and the young Gnarus had become the Wings’ new rookie at the time.

As soon as he had relieved Sergeant Tejaru from cloning duties and had taken command of the Nest’s facility, Doc Kourailen had re-scanned every single one of the Corvids. Everybody. Vets and rookies, from Luthz to Kooks, all of them, no exceptions.

If you want everything in your skull to be in your next clone’s skull then all your memories have to go through your Doc’s scanners and bet stored in his databases. On top of that, Doc duties include regular psycho tests and informal chit-chat after every cloning session, to make sure the person inside your new flesh suit is in fact you and not some typo from the axon weavers.

Their brains and minds picked so thoroughly, soldiers of every Chapter tended to regard Cloning Doctors as a sort of de facto confessor, and the Corvids were no exception to this rule: most of them naturally, and even relievedly, assumed that they had no secrets for their Doc, and were ready to unburden upon him all their miseries and misfortunes.

Gonzal was not like most.

During their first meeting, after they had finished all the routine checks and after he had told Gonzal all the latest news and gossips, Doc Kourailen had confirmed—in a hushed, confidential whisper—that Captain Luthz had indeed squarely accepted all the blame from the Kuok Hel fiasco, from screwed-up Intel to botched clones.

And then Doc Kourailen had leaned back in his chair and had asked, “Anything else I can do for you, Sarge?”

“Nothing I can think of, Captain.”

“Captain’s awful,” Doc said, wrinkling his nose while smiling. “Sounds like you want me to think for you and tell you what you need to do. That’s Luthz job; it ain’t mine. Sir’s fine, if you feel you need to hog rank, but Doc’s much better.”

“Nothing I can think of, Doc.” I know what you are doing, and I ain’t your sucker for it.

To his credit, Doc had caught that immediately. “Your thoughts are yours, Sarge,” he said smiling pleasantly. “I’m no stazi, if that’s what’s troubling you.”

“Excuse me, Sir? I mean, Doc?”

“Mental sniff? Thought police? Mind cop?”

Gonzal nodded.

“Me, I’m none of the above,” Doc said. “I’m just an errand boy here; a mere mailman. You give me your letter”—he pointed at Gonzal’s head—“and I deliver it to your next you.” His finger aimed at the Cloning room. “Closed envelope all the time. Corp NDA prohibits me to look at what’s inside. Unless, or course, that you want me to for some reason.”

“I’d rather not, Doc.”

“Sure?”

“Yes, Captain.”

Doc leaned over his desk. “As you wish, Sarge. We’ll play it by the book. Corp protocols require me to inform you that, should I breach our patient-doctor confidentiality, you are allowed to report my misconduct to your direct superior. Just allow me to formally remind you that the door swings both ways: as per said cloning protocols, anything that happens in here is NDA for you too; should you communicate anything about our mutual interaction while inside the cloning facilities, to anybody, or should you in any way or form require your men to communicate such things to you, without written requirement to do so by this base’s commanding officer, I can, and will, report you. Short version: out there, your grunts are yours; in here, they belong to me. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Captain.”

Doc sighed. “I’m just a doctor, Sarge. It’s not like I can bark “on the double” to your next flesh suit to make you grow any faster. I don’t pull rank in here; I just push some buttons. I am a good Doc, mind you, but Captain is something that they glued on top of that, because apparently your grunts like to be under a string of periods.”

Gonzal stood silent.

“Or was it a shackle of colons?” Doc scratched his head, thinking. “No, wait: it was something about a chain of commas. Yeah, that: ‘soldiers only have respect for the chain of commas’, that’s what they told me, and that’s why they made me a Captain.”

He smiled.

Gonzal didn’t.

“Okay!” Doc had said Doc, rubbing his hands. “Anything else you’d like me to know, Sarge?”

“Actually there is, Doc,” Gonzal had said as he stood up. "Please don’t fall asleep while we’re out there. Like your predecessor did." He had then turned around and left, not saluting or asking for leave; if Doc wanted to play no-rank-all-friends, Gonzal was not going to complain.

***

In the following months, even though their relationship had become no warmer and he hadn’t visited the vats himself, Gonzal had been forced to agree that Doc Kourailen was probably the best Cloning expert he had seen on the field. The smug bastard was somehow permawake: he didn’t seem to require sleep, was always fully alert whenever someone went for a swim in his vats, and had yet to botch or mindlock anyone. Most Corvids had nothing but good words about him.

But now the Good Doc show’s over, and the bastard’s showing his true colors, testing some new happy dope on us.

Gonzal’s footsteps echoed against the steel walls as he winded through the lengthy, twisting metal corridor.

Played Nice Doc for a few months until we lowered our guard, and now he’s playing mind tricks with my men.

Was not gonna happen; not under Gonzal’s watch. His steps became slower and heavier as he reached the door to Doc Kourailen’s office.

###