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"Get the hell off me!" snapped Luke.

Turning his head as best as he could, he stared into the featureless helmet of the trooper, a reflective visor shining the fox's panicked expression right back at him.

The trooper's gloved hand clenched tighter around Luke's ankle, pulling him. The fox clutched as best he could against the vertical stepladder, the weight of gravity adding to the soldier's strength.

Luke's upper arms ached, one had already come loose from the ladder and flailed for balance wildly. The boy's eyes were drawn to a heavy serrated knife that hung from a holster on the trooper's upper arm, and he realised that he could very likely die today.

He aimed a kick at the trooper's helmet. His heel collided with a heftiness that surprised the boy. The trooper's head jerked backwards, but he remained grimly in place. Atop the forehead of the trooper's helmet, like a haunting emblem, sat a corporate logo. Not CyberaTech, Luke thought, but no doubt the corporation had paid highly for the manufacture and dispatch of these soldiers.

The soldier pulled, and Luke's body was yanked downwards. Down, clasping precariously to the ladder, above a stretch of empty air high above the dirt-pocked ashen land below. Desperately, the boy wrapped one arm around the rungs of the ladder, trying desperately to regain his balance with his one free heel.

His heel slipped, and the fox felt the air around him whistle as he slid down. The joints and muscles of his arm screamed in unison. Below him, the soldier slid free his knife.

A sense of panic filled the fox, realisation that should his jumpsuit be punctured, the radiation of the wasteland would kill him. Perhaps not as fast as the fall would, though. His heart slammed in his chest.

He had been so close to the top of the ladder. So close.

Inhaling sharply, he kicked at the trooper. Missed. The dark armoured figure lashed out with the blade. A sharp clang of metal upon metal filled the air as the knife crashed against the ladder. Another kick, more desperate this time, and Luke could barely believe the power in his leg as it struck against the soldier's arm. This time, the knife spun free from the soldier's grip. It hurtled off into the distance, down, down.

Without expression, without any revealed emotion, the trooper clasped his gloved fist around the boy's offending ankle again. It was clear to Luke that if the soldier was going to die, he intended to take the fox with him.

"Get off me!" he cried out again, kicking. This time he aimed for the soldier's gloved hand, striking hard. Another, second kick, and the trooper's grip came free. Wildly, frantic, the boy kicked out again and again, pushing his whole strength into each blow. Not simply his strength, but his anger - anger at what the company had done to him, anger at the life they had lied to him about, he brought it all down with a resounding crash against the blank, emotionless helmeted face of the trooper.

With a final, triumphant strike that landed against the soldier's head, the trooper came free from the ladder. He slid back, arms writhing in the air, clasping desperately for leverage. Then he was gone, hurtling into the distance towards the ground.

Luke clung to the ladder, his breath heaving in his lungs, watching as the solder crashed to the rocks below.

Nausea filled him. Turning back, he looked up to realise that he had lost all purchase on the ladder. His feet swayed, scrambling, trying to grasp ahold of the rungs. His grip on the ladder was held by only his fingers, which were loosening, straining, ready to come free.

He felt the world around him spin. His body started to sway, moving involuntarily downwards.

And then, a tightness clasped around his wrist.

He looked up. The sunlight burned his eyes, obscuring his sight. Gradually it dimmed, although the haze remained. As did the image of the android wolf that held him, almost effortlessly, by the wrist.

"I advise not falling" said Cybe as he hung from the upper rungs of the ladder above the fox, clutching him securely, "and would recommend that you use my grip to regain your stability upon the ladder."

Throwing his other arm up to wrap his hand around Cybe's, Luke panted. "Good idea" he exhaled, his head spinning. Together the pair stumbled, a little unevenly and off-balance, across the vast roof of the truck. "Marvelous suggestion, in fact."

* * *

A sensation of swimming. Awareness mixed with numbness. For a moment, a whistling breeze caught through the hairs that stood around the back of his neck. Movement slowed.

As light began to penetrate the darkness that surrounded him, he found his sensations becoming progressively more gelatinous. A shimmering blue surrounded and embraced him for a moment, and as he gradually eased open his murky eyes he found himself staring up at the fluorescent bulbs of the diving chamber.

Gradually, he sat up, his motion making a wet sloshing sound. He reached up a damp hand, wiping at the viscous syrup that wrapped him. In doing so, his arm caught on the myriad networking cables that were plugged into every large muscle of his body, and he shook them away with an annoyed grunt.

"Careful" said a voice that emanated somewhere to his left.

Pulling a chunk of bio-memetic amniosis gel from around his eyes, he splashed it forcefully back into the pod that he sat in with a wet splash. "Fuck" he grumbled. He looked down, surveying between his legs, noting that he was once again in an equine body.

"Check in" said the voice again. It was dull, monotone, without heavy expression.

Pulling himself into a fully seated position, he grumbled "Piss off."

"Check in" repeated the voice, without any hint of emotion.

"Graves, Johnson. Second lieutenant" muttered the horse, "six three seven nine two." He turned his head to look in the direction of the voice. Without even looking in Graves' direction, the speaker - a tall bespectacled badger wearing a laboratory coat, with a shaved head that bore the number '37' as a large marking across the top and back of his cranium - busied himself at a computer. "Didn't want to bother with a house visit in person, doc?" he asked.

"Leave the clone alone" said a female voice. For a moment, Graves' disorientation made it difficult for him to recognise her. He looked over, pushing back his urge to pluck the cables from around his slick torso. Ashley sat in a fold-out metal chair by the side of a series of pods, each of which was identical to his own. She tapped away at her palmtop computer. "We require your report."

The horse's lips pursed in annoyance. He hadn't liked her from the moment that she had walked in - walked in and damn near taken over their briefing. She had the tight, calculated refinement that he had come to expect from a CyberaTech executive. "Mission was unsuccessful" he grumbled.

The badger looked over to Ashley. "We have playback of his last few moments before his sleeve died" he said. "Looks like the secondary target took him down."

The woman smiled, as though stifling a chuckle. That annoyed Graves, infuriating him in a way that made him feel deeply insulted. "Your briefing didn't cover his training" he snapped at her.

Her face straightened to a sombre expression. "The fox doesn't have any training" she said. "We removed all relevant experience as a runner from his long-term memory."

The horse reached up and plucked a handful of cables from his bicep, letting them slosh into the bath of fluid around him with a splash. "That fox took down another operative before he knocked me off that ladder" he responded. "Looks like your wipe didn't take."

It was the woman's turn to bristle at the words now. "Then brace yourself back in, soldier boy" she replied, "you're going in for another dive."

The badger lowered his papers, glancing over at Ashley. "Now wait one moment" he said. "Your corporation paid for one extraction."

"One failed extraction" Ashley pointed out. "The mission parameters are simple; recover the android and terminate the bait.

"The android's head" interjected the horse.

The clone glanced over at the Graves. For a moment, the horse couldn't tell quite what manner of expression that the badger was attempting to convey. That emotional emptiness, the slight blankness to the expression and delayed responsiveness when speaking to them, was one of the reasons that he disliked dealing with clones so much.

There was little that he could do about it in his line of work, though. His employer, Bioroid Ltd, was at the forefront of cloning technology and it was their very own research in creating batch-grown clones that allowed for aging veteran soldiers such as himself to remain in the field even after the ravages of age had begun to play on his body. In truth, he hated the process - hated sleeving himself into a new vat-grown, designed and processed body. But more than that, he hated staying at headquarters, surrounded by the Bioroid Ltd clones that worked the facility.

"Yes" said the clone, eventually. "The head. We will recover the head of the android. However, the cost for the contract will require a partial uplift in funds."

Ashley sighed. "Is the CEO on the line?"

"I always am" said the clone.

The horse sighed. "Can someone give me a blanket? I'm freezing my nuts off here."

From the far side of the laboratory, another clone hurried over, handing Graves a towel. The clone, like the one that was debating funding with the CyberaTech woman and every other damn person in the facility, was identical but for the number marked on them. How generous, thought Graves, for Bioroid to lower itself to handing out a towel.

In the early days of cloning research, the technology was hampered by a significant hurdle, that being the ever-present fear of rebellion from one's clones. Theorists had posited that those who created clones of themselves and imbued those clones with all of their original personality and intelligence would eventually grow to be fearful of the clones - often because those who created such lifeforms did so out of an urge to place them into work at their creator's behalf. The clones, meanwhile, possessing all of their originator's intellect and thirst for individual freedoms, chafed at the idea of being subservient to someone who was no better than themselves. Graves remembered fighting in the ensuing conflicts that had erupted, putting down insurgent clones in harsh and often brutal military strikes.

Since then, there had been extensive works in ensuring that clones would remain subservient to their creators. Corporations had attempted to breed clones that were emotionally lobotomized, or were modified via eugenic processes to retain a genetic imprint of submissiveness to their overlords. Ultimately, however, it was the people that owned clones that had been unable and unwilling to invest in the process of having clones of themselves created - the fear of uprising was too great, giving form to the ancient anxiety of the doppleganger.

It had been Hans Blumer, a Eurasian scientist and innovator, who came across the solution. He had posited that the flaw with cloning as a principal means of creating a workforce lay not in the cloning process itself, but in the reasoning that the duplication and copying of the original's mind was the source of the problem. Working on the concept that the human mind was capable of controlling and coordinating multiple limbs or hands at one time, Hans began to experiment with methods that would allow him to control multiple bodies at the same time. The process was a long and challenging one, requiring the inventor to master entirely new skills, but after several years work he proved the principal a success. In an interview given to CBN, Blumer had described the process as "much like learning to effectively use and operate a third hand, or a fourth hand - if you can imagine that the hand in question was actually an entirely new body that has been grown just for you."

His company, Bioroid Ltd, was very much a one-man operation. Hans Blumer existed not only as the CEO, but as every member of staff present at the company at the same time. Unlike previous generations of clones, each Bioroid Ltd clone has no personality or intellect - it is a puppet. Every movement, action and word that they speak is that of the company's founder, Hans Blumer. His eyes were, quite literally, everywhere - and it was this take on the process of bio-engineering that had allowed Bioroid Ltd to rocket to a position as one of the most profitable independent cloning manufacturers in the world.

"In light of the new information that our team recovered while they were in the field" explained Blumer to Ashley, "we will need to adjust the cost calculations. However, due to our past operations undertaken on behalf of CyberaTech, we will be happy to apply a considerable discount."

As he finished wrapping the towel around his hefty waist and emerged from the pod, dripping onto the floor, Graves mumbled "Am I going back in or not?" He lowered his gaze at Blumer. "If I have to dive twice in one day, I'm expecting to get paid for it."

"Get your towel off" retorted Ashley, "you're going back in. And I'm going with you."

The horse balked. "No" he replied, loudly. "My squad aren't here to baby-sit a civilian. Leave this to..."

"I'm going in" she replied, her voice growing icy. "Seeing as you boys don't seem capable of shooting one fox and cutting the head off a damn robot on your own."

Lowering his eyebrows in annoyance, Graves continued. "You have no experience. You don't know what you're doing in a combat situation."

"I've played video games" she replied. "This is no different."

The words cut right to him. "This isn't a fucking game, sweetheart" he began. In his mind, though, he had never been able to shake the feeling that there was something entirely unreal about his missions. Ever since he his employment had been retained by Bioroid Ltd, his task of uploading his mind into cloned bodies and riding them out into the battlefield had always left Graves feeling more than a little depersonalised. He was well aware that, without the potential risk of immediate death, it was entirely possible for the up-and-coming generation to be deployed into the field just as he was, and in turn treat it as nothing more than a video game.

"Graves" replied the badger, glancing down at his screen, "I'm getting some response signals from you. Are all of your bodies accounted for?"

The horse gave a snort, turning to glance away from the woman. "I think so" he replied. He closed his eyes, and began to count the number of deaths that he had experienced in the last dive. "Wait" he replied. "Shit. No, I think there's one left in the field."

"Is this what we're paying you for?" interjected Ashley, rising from her seat finally to step over towards the badger. "It's no wonder that the mission was such a screw up."

"I swear," began the horse, "speak like that to me again and..."

"Shut up" snapped the clone. "You still have a chance to finish this mission. Plug yourself back in."

Graves gave a heavy sigh. "I'm going to talk to my union about this."

"You don't have a union" retorted the clone. He turned back to Ashley. "I'll have number twelve come and see you to the prep room."

* * *

Graves opened his eyes.

He took a moment, without allowing his body to move, to quickly check his surroundings. They were, at once, familiar and entirely different. It took only a few seconds of the cloned body's slightly delayed reaction time for him to recognise the helmeted visor that was obscuring his point of view.

A soft rumble under him. He looked around, and determined that the body was still where he had stashed it. Glancing down, he noted that the cloaking tech that lined his suit was still functioning correctly. Reflecting light around his armoured military-grade thermal tech suit, it seemed to bend light around him, twisting it in such a way that so long as he remained in one place he would be extremely difficult to see with the naked eye.

Another rumble. The truck was jolting slightly. He turned his gaze up. The hold inside the truck's cabin was small, but the vehicle was evidently in motion. Perhaps the pair, the targets, hadn't thought to check in the storage cupboard.

Lightly, he pushed against the cupboard door. It swung open, slowly. Peering out, he found that he could see the inside of the cabin even better now. The targets were seated at the vehicle's controls, not less than ten yards away.

"Where to next?" asked one target. Graves listened closer. It was the fox that was speaking - Luke, designated as the bait. "We can't head back to the depot, can we?"

The second target - the wolf-shaped android - did not seem to know how to answer. "We may be best served with contacting Rowan" he commented. "You are correct that returning to the depot may place more innocent lives in jeopardy." Graves looked closer. The android was plugged into the vehicle, connected by a thin cable that ran from the truck's dashboard into the back of the android's neck. Obviously the driver, he thought.

Rowan? The horse scanned his memory for reference to that, and came up blank. Perhaps it was another of these terrorist's allies. He considered for a moment, wondering if there would be any value to attempting to bring in another of their co-conspirators. That, he thought, would require additional manpower and risk.

"Oh man" exhaled Luke, still catching his breath. "I can't believe all of this. I just can't. Today's been crazy, and..."

The horse checked his equipment. His knife was still stashed in his holster. A stealth take-down of one of the pair may be best. But, then, they were both seated so close together that taking out one of them would surely alert the other, no matter how silently he did so. The pulse pistol, he thought. It was loud, but easy enough to hold in one hand in the cabin's confines, and the plasma rounds would burn enough of the impact would to ensure a one-shot death. He unfastened his holder and retrieved the pistol.

"We will be fine" explained Cybe, calmly. "It is clear that CyberaTech are planning to move in to recover their property..."

You ain't joking, thought Graves.

"So how do we convince them not to kill us?" asked the fox.

"Our best course of action" said the android, "will be to recover the data that we stole and deliver it to the buyer."

"How will that help?" asked Luke. "And it's been weeks since the job. Are they still waiting?"

"I contacted them yesterday" said Cybe in reply, "the deal is still on. Now that I have recovered you, we simply need to deliver them to our buyer before CyberaTech kill us."

The irony of the openness of the wolf's words brought a grin to the old soldier's face.

Luke reached back, turning his head slightly. The soldier slid back, pressing further against the wall of the cabin, holding tightly to the shadows, ensuring he kept out of the fox's line of sight. "How will that help us?" asked the fox. "Surely they could just kill us anyway if they still wanted to."

"The buyer has offered an additional bonus to the sale" explained the wolf. "As well as a cash sum for completion of the deal, they are trading some compromising data on CyberaTech. Data that we can use for leverage, threaten to leak to the press unless the corp call off the hunt."

Luke whistled. "We're screwed."

Graves checked the ammo on his pistol, displayed by a tiny holographic gauge on the side of the gun. Fucking runners, he thought. It always came down to fucking runners nowadays, with their backstage deals.

The fox leaned closer to the wolf. "The files. It's something to do with you, isn't it? What is it? Schematics? Design protocols?"

The android nodded. "I'm a prototype. Every CyberaTech android in the current generation is built to my design specs. That means that any exploits that exist in me, exist in every other android of the same generation - be they service droids, military, pleasure models. Such data is valuable to those with a vested interest in getting a step up over CyberaTech. However this data is not a design spec. We stole information on a new type of AI that CyberaTech were behind."

Luke stared at his companion, blinking slightly. "I didn't think CyberaTech made AIs?" he asked. "I thought that they focused on robotics."

"They funded the research and development" explained Cybe, "through another company, namely the Shinjeki Consortium. The idea was to develop an intelligence developed specifically for their new line of androids."

"Your intelligence?" he asked. "The data you stole, it's about your own mind and personality?"

Cybe nodded. "Potentially. It's one of the avenues of investigation that I am following, yes."

"And where is that data now?" asked the fox.

The wolf reached his hand back, checking the cable that was connected into the vehicle. "Hidden" he explained. "I stored it in..."

The android never got to finish his sentence. With one single, smooth movement, Graves slid across the cabin, moving as silently as a ghost. With all the efficiency of a decades old trained killer, he placed the plasma pistol against the back of the wolf's head and pulled the trigger. For a moment, the entire cabin illuminated in a hot electric blue shade as blistering plasma filled the air, leaving behind only the faint smell of ozone and charred, incinerated circuitry.