Now, would Sun Liu still have access to this archive? How up to date would it be?

“Welcome, Minister Sun Liu,” said the silky, feminine voice.

Titanium alloy doors parted.

The archive was a maze of store rooms with contents ranging from the familiar to the bizarre. A mishmash of things the nation had created that it now wanted locked away, but not yet destroyed.

There were shelves of files. Ammunition cases. Data banks. Ancient electronics. Chemical tanks. Biological material cases, with bright yellow biohazard stickers and triple seals.

They came into a room full of cryo tubes, vertically oriented. They were occupied, faces showing on the nude bodies behind the glass. Men. Women. Faces he’d never seen.

Famous faces.

“Clones,” one of his brothers said. “Like us.”

Tao looked at these bodies, frozen, trapped, and shook his head.

“Not like us.”

But at the end of the room, there was one. One who looked too much like him. Too much like his brothers. Not the same. Not quite.

But too close.

Tao shook his head and moved on.

“Here,” Sun Liu said. “This is it.” His voice was calm. His mind was horrified.

The politician lifted a metal case from a rack of metal cases. The label below it gave a date, an ID number.

Sun Liu held his thumbs to the reader pads on the case, fear leaking out into the space around him.

The locks opened.

Inside, in the midst of thick foam padding, gleamed a diamondoid data cube.

“Test it,” Tao said.

His brother Xuan stepped up with the portable cube reader and gingerly moved the cube into it, closed the reader door, and slid his finger across a series of controls.

They waited, and waited, and waited.

Then green lights appeared.

“Basic check is good,” Xuan said. “Data looks like a neural map.”

Sun Liu stared ahead. Dread leaked out from his mind. Despair for what he’d done to his world and his species.

Tao looked down on the site as they lifted off, freshly fueled, en route to Shanghai. He could see the burning wreckage of Griffon Two down there. Sung was dead in that wreckage. Jialu was dead. Zhaoguo was dead. Jin was dead. Hui was dead. A dozen brothers dead. And the pilot they’d had. The pilot they’d made one of them by the rewriting of his neural circuitry.

By making him a slave.

Tao looked down at the metal case, sitting on the floor, now secured to his own body until he could deliver it in Shanghai.

I’d die for you, Su-Yong, he thought. Any of us would. You freed us from slavery.

Then he felt another jolt of agony escape from Sun Liu. The man’s torture had resumed.

Tao shook his head.

There were worse fates than death.

108
Wings

Monday 2041.01.20