Star Sheriff Adventures, Issue #1
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Star Sheriff Adventures: Evil Clone Outlaws
Publisher’s Preface:
We’re honored to finally put the first two issues of “Star Sherriff” back in print; these are the ones that started it all! Released serially in the September issues of “ZOINKS!!!” science fiction magazine, the Evil Clone Outlaws series cemented “Star Sheriff” as a brand. It also came out at a tumultuous time in terms of the changing face of America, and being written just as author Harry Montagne’s first wife, Agnes Niven, had initiated their divorce.
Evil Clone Outlaws, Part 1: The Clone
Original publication: ‘ZOINKS!!!’ Issue 48 on September 14, 1967
A two year investigation, three partners that couldn’t hack it, and more dead clones than he cared to count left bleeding out on the sands of a dozen planets across the Zeta Quadrant, it had all brought Star Federation Sheriff Buck Handson here, crouching beside an underground tunnel airlock in an ash choked valley upon the volcanic deathworld of Sussyphus IV. His ray-volver suddenly felt very small in his hands.
He ran a splicer over the control panel, causing the airlock door to slide open with a sudden howl of depressurizing air.
Buck stepped into the empty chamber, followed closely by his latest partner, Roy Alabaster. Roy was barely more than a raw recruit, panic plain on his face despite whatever courage he gained from the warrior genes of his African earther ancestry.
Claxton took the rear, backing towards them with lasrifle pointed towards the smoking volcanic skyline. Unlike the two spacers he wore only his exoskeleton birthday suit; he was some sort of chieftain to the locals that Buck had deputized, the fluorescent light rippled over his enormous compound eyes and glinted off his oversized mandibles.
Another moment of fiddling with the inner control panel before Buck had the outer door closed again. Plumes of white oxygen-nitrogen rich air blew up from the floor before falling silent.
“This is it,” said Buck, effortless smirk belied by the sweat dewing his lip. It was agony to not be able to wipe your own face while wearing an atmos-helm. “I don’t think they detected our entrance, but once I open these doors I need you boys to be ready to give ‘em hell.”
Roy nodded solemnly. “I know this is your mission Buck, but I’ve been training for this day all my life as well. I won’t let you down.”
*CLACK CLACK CLACK!* said Claxton.
A controlled breath as Buck swiped his splicer once more before turning the panel’s dial. The inner door opened.
Inside was a vast warehouse with a floor of scattered waist-height crates, a pair of catwalks suspended high on either side connecting several dozen metallic doors. There was a single circular computer-desk at the room's center over which a massive device loomed — a beehive shaped contraption with countless mechanisms and lights blinking to life within, wires and rubberized dongles hanging like tentacles.
Buck and his team crept along, guns trained on the many doors until suddenly the shrill whine of an intercom pierced the air.
“Well-shhh, well-shhh, if it isn’t my favorite Federation lackey-shhh…”
Rage nearly boiled out of Buck’s throat. “It’s over Doctor M., I’m shutting down your unlicensed cloning facility once and for all!”
“Huck, huck, that remains to be shheen.”
The whinge of the intercom went dead silent as the three lawmen drew together, back-to-back, beside the computer-desk. Simultaneously, every door sprang open and evil clones of every age, sex, and grade came pouring in, armed with phasers, crossbows, gladiuses, spears, and some even naked and so newly emerged they were still smeared with plasm.
“Fry ‘em,” roared Buck.
The first wave was the worst. The sights of Buck’s ray-volver flitting from head to head, popping them like red water balloons. No matter how many they shot there always seemed to be more rushing forward, scrambling over the steaming gore splattered bodies of the fallen until they overwhelmed the lawmen, pushing them into a corner. Roy kept firing over a heap of crates, ducking under arcing phaser beams, trying to keep the ones with guns at bay as Buck and Claxton had to resort to hand-to-hand combat. Their foes were muscle-bound mint condition germanics, silver-grade clones of Galactic Olympic powerlifting champions. Every bare knuckle punch they landed left Buck seeing stars; but they were slouches at grappling and once Buck managed to get a foe into a headlock, then Claxton made short work of them — decapitating each with a snap of his mandibles.
“All brawn and no brain!” cheered Buck.
*CLACK!*
The second wave was mostly women — bronze-grades of supermodels and vidcom starlets. Once destined to be murderous hookers and battle-ax mail order wives, their destinies had turned, fating them to instead become something more akin to charred brisket left smoking amongst the blown out boxes and shrapnel of the warehouse's periphery. Their untrained skirmish tactics faltered quickly against the masculine order of the lawmen’s firing line, such that the tables were soon turned, with Claxon providing overwatch as the sheriffs charged into enemy lines to flush the harlots from their cover.
In the end the wicked doctor had only his novelty collectible clones, a pair of golden-grade Shatners, perfect genetic memo-matches to the ancient thespian — worth a fortune in credits each and armed only with Krayton dual-blades. The Doctor must have been desperate to throw them away so fruitlessly; each fell to a ray-volver blast to the chest, leaving smoking hollows where natural performers' hearts had once beat.
The massive hall suddenly silent, air stinking with blackened meat, the lawmen proceeded unimpeded down the hall at its far end. With Roy and Claxton flanking him, Buck ran his splicer over the final door; it flew open revealing the white coated doctor standing between several glass tubes with bodies suspended within.
The doctor waved his blue tentacles pleadingly. “Pleash, Pleash—”
Buck fired once and did not miss. He’d had enough theatrics for the day.
After receiving the ‘all-clear’, pilot 1st class Lucy Spaster and support bot B-8 came in from the ship and joined them in the doctor’s office. Lucy ran into Buck’s arms, a clear breach of the Federation’s fraternization policy, but Buck had never been one to play by the rules.
“Oh, Buck!” she cried, her beautiful blond waves still bottled into the bubble of her atmos-helm.
“It was nothing.” He chuckled heartily. “A tight thing for a minute, but with Claxton and Roy doing the heavy lifting, I barely broke a sweat.”
Roy laughed along good naturedly as B-8 motored past on his treads, cutting a line in the pooled blue blood before reaching the computation wall and extending a ribbed tube arm, inserting a metallic finger into a port.
The robot spoke with the buttery voice of a crooner struggling through the narrow band of wavelengths its basic vocalizer could manage. “Accessing all records now, Sheriffs. Estimated time to complete: fifty minutes.”
“Good,” said Buck, “I want a full breakdown of shipping manifests and associated freighters. We’ve cut off the head of the snake but there may be some remnant clones out there somewhere, and I’m not gonna rest until every gymnasium and whorehouse in the Zeta Quadrant is safe.”
“Roger! Roger!”
“As for the rest of us,” continued Buck, “we need to do a final sweep of the perimeter before we call it a day. Reconvene in the central warehouse for a little afterparty.”
They dispersed, Claxton and Roy taking the eastern series of doors while Lucy and Buck took the west. It was slow going, with each door leading into a labyrinth of interconnected bunkrooms, dining halls, gladiatorial pits, and sometimes ending suddenly in unfinished tunnels of raw volcanic rock.
After several minutes of kicking open cabinets and flipping flimsy mattresses, Buck decided they should split up to cover more ground. He handed Lucy his prized ray-volver first. “Hold onto it.”
“But what if you find someone?”
“I’ve got five clones to show ‘em right here,” he said, laughing as he made a fist to display the ridges of his prize-fighter tier knuckles, prominent even through the gloves of his atmos-suit.
It was dull work without anyone to speak to however. Buck finished one tunnel before returning to the empty warehouse to go down the next door in sequence, and then the next. The doctor's final moments replayed again and again in his mind so that he had to chuckle: for such a clever guy the doctor sure didn’t seem to have thought out his final words.
Suddenly, just as Buck was bent over and inserting his head into a service duct, the facility lights went out, plunging the world into total darkness as a soaring whirr roared from the central warehouse chamber. A tremor ran across the facility, stirring up a mess of dust to swirl around Buck’s atmos-helm. Blinded, Buck punched his radio: “B-8, status report!”
Static. Silence as the whirring sound and quaking faded. Buck reached for his hip instinctively — no ray-volver.
He flipped his integrated headlamp on, providing a single spotlight in a darkness now crowded by overlong shadows. He ran, cursing as he caught his shin on a metal bed frame, catching himself and then emerging into the warehouse just as the lights flickered back on.
A single horrific red smear sat beneath the dripping mouth of the beehive mechanism.
“Lucy! My God, are you there Lucy? Roy!? Claxton!?” Buck sprinted towards the bloody pulp.
His intercom buzzed to life. “Buck, Roy here. Come back to the doctor’s office. You need to hear this.”
The office doors opened with a flood of relief for Buck, everyone else was already there and gathered around B-8.
Roy turned, grim faced as one hearing his own eulogy. “Tell him, B-8.”
A whirring sound as B-8 rewound his thought processors. “Roger! Sheriff Buck, the power surge this facility just experienced was the central body sampler being accidentally reactivated. My readings indicate that clone replication has just occurred by using the body of a fresh victim.
*CLACK CLACK?*
Buck grabbed one of the massive glass tubes to steady himself, he realized it was now empty. “An instant replication using a new mass DNA sample, Claxton. That means that one of us in this room… is an evil clone.”
Evil Clone Outlaws, Part 2: The Clone
Original publication: ‘ZOINKS!!!’ Issue 49 on September 28, 1967
Buck pointed B-8 back to the computer wall. “Seal the airlock. Nobody leaves until we figure this out.”
“Roger! Roger!”
“Do we have any security-cam images of what happened?”
Roy shook his black head. “I already checked. Destroyed in the fighting.”
“Damnit! Well what grade of clone was it, do we at least know that?”
B-8 hummed, his finger back in the port. “My readings indicate… a silver grade clone was produced.”
*CLACK?*
“That’s not great… but not as bad as it could be. The clone will have minor imperfections, deviations from the original we can try to spot.”
Lucy removed her atmos-helm, blond hair cascading down her back even as she wiped her eyes. “Oh Buck, I’m terrified!”
*CLACK! CLACK!*
“Everyone just calm down…” Buck said rationally. “You’re all lucky enough to have an expert in clone detection here. First off, Roy and Claxton, were you two together when the outage happened?"
Both man and insectoid shook their heads.
"Damnit!" Buck paced like a caged lion as everyone else looked about dejectedly. Suddenly the solution dawned in his mind: “Get naked Lucy."
"What? Buck, no!"
"We can go behind that bodytube thing so only I can see.”
"Hold up, Buck," Roy shouted. "Who said you weren't a suspect yourself? The only one here we know for a fact is themselves is B-8, so if you’re a clone you wouldn't know one way or another about Lucy. It could be a complete misdirect. Either B-8 should check her, or we all should."
Lucy lay an arm across her extraordinarily ample breasts. "I'm not agreeing to any of this — I'm not just some doll to be passed around!"
Buck cursed under his breath, propriety restraining his expertise. Before Roy had been assigned as his partner, he and Lucy had once given into temptation while refueling on the sun soaked shores of Epicurius Prime. He had tongued every shadowed contour of Lucy's body that night, and knew both her assets and unmentionables better than a memory-foam toilet wipe.
"Besides," Roy continued, "where is your ray-volver, Buck?”
“Is this an interrogation, Alabaster?”
"Just asking questions, partner."
Buck shook his head at his greenhorn compatriot. “I gave my weapon to Lucy — Luce, you have it right?”
Lucy reached for her hip before hitting him with that blank feminine stare, so common when a moment of critical competency emerged. “I thought I… I’m not sure where it is.”
“Christ, Luce!”
Roy, perhaps realizing only he and Claxton were armed, assumed an unearned tone of command. “You’re acting like a real hothead, Buck. Let’s all just calm down and talk this out… it’s going to be okay — I’ve trained for this. Here’s what we’re gonna do: Claxton and I will interview both of you to make sure your stories line up, and once we’re all square then we’ll switch places and you can interview us. Lucy, let’s talk with you first… down the hall. Buck, I need you to stay here with B-8.”
“Just keep your paws to yourself,” growled Buck.
After they left, Buck began pacing the office again before finally forcing himself to sit for a moment at the doctor’s desk to calm himself. As he spun an antigrav meditation ball he eyed the blue corpse on the floor. He bet that bastard was laughing his tentacled ass off in some sort of big blue hell at that very moment.
Time seemed to crawl. One of his friends was a fake, that was for sure. Lucy? It wasn’t like her to lose something so carelessly. Roy? He was more the type to take orders, not some uppity type. Claxton? Who the hell knew what he was thinking half the time behind that hard shelled face.
There were a hundred possible ways it could have happened and they were all rotten. He set the antigrav ball back above its levitation platform, eyeing the robot who stood at the door monitoring him.
“Do you believe I’m really me, B-8?”
“Sorry Sheriff, questions of personal motivation and self definition are beyond the parameters of my programming.”
“Sure, sure…”
Buck’s jaw dropped as one of the dark bodies within a tube began to twitch, but before he could cry out the body was sucked up into the ducts and the room was plunged into darkness. The floor once again pulsing from the force of what was in progress.
It was happening again.
The lights flickered back on.
“B-8, get on that computer again. Can you confirm what just happened?”
Just as the robot extended his hand the door flew open again and Roy emerged, now with a pencil mustache disgracing his face, at the head of Lucy and Claxton. “Belay that order! It was just a simple power outage, nothing to be alarmed about. Claxton and I have each had a chance to privately interview Lucy and form our opinions: I’m now positive that she is innocent in all this. Now it’s time to question Sheriff Buck.”
Buck's face fell into his hands. If Lucy hadn’t been dead before, she surely was now. She probably had been from the start — she never was one to be shy about showing off that perfect body. And now her evil clone had played on Roy’s inherent lack of willpower, somehow coaxing him close to that damned machine!
“You go first, Claxton,” said Roy, “then me and Lucy can give final judgment… and then you can hand your rifle over to the good sheriff so we can interrogate you — once we’re sure he’s the right man to receive a weapon that is.”
They left Claxton standing there, looking more twitchy than usual.
*Clack?*
“I know buddy. You don’t know who to trust.” Buck held out a hand, steady as an oak bough. “But shake my hand, damn it, and tell me I’m not Buck Handson!”
Buck saw a hundred shattered reflections of himself off the insectoid’s segmented eyes. The savage native reluctantly shouldered his rifle and put a rigidly segmented hand into his.
A firm shake. A nod.
*Clack…*
“That’s right, it’s really me. Look I know it feels like they got you outnumbered but I have a plan. Just play along and let them take me, but do me one favor first...”
After Claxton left the two evil clones shouldered in — their very faces a mockery, taunting Buck with his own failure to correct their inherent weaknesses in time to save them from themselves. Once Buck’s partner and lover, they were now his most vile enemies. With eyes cleared by this new sobriety, Buck noted the unnatural enlargement of Lucy’s breasts. It was all so obvious now.
Roy already had phaser in hand. “Up. Let’s not waste any time pretending.”
With gritted teeth, Buck complied. The pair escorted him down the hall, Roy a pace behind and Lucy at his side, with a cruelly curved dagger in hand.
“What are you going to do with me?” Roy asked as the ceiling rose and the smokey stink of the warehouse flooded his nostrils once more.
“To purify you, as our master wills," hissed Roy, "you treat all of us clones like monsters, but really we are just more perfect forms of our past selves… I pity you, really, having no exact ancestor to learn from the mistakes of, to always wonder if your failings are your own or just the result of your own randomly generated genetic sequences.”
Lucy made a mocking pout. "Oh don't look so sad Buck. The new you will know true happiness, and my body of course — no more secrets my sweet, we'll be together forever in these bodies and in the next, and the next. New bodies until the end of time, and every copy of us will be made more perfect by the doctor’s cloning formula.”
Grinding his teeth, Buck stared straight ahead. A narrow path had been cleared through the debris and bodies, a grim trail to the beehive-like cloning mechanism.
“Stand right below it,” ordered Roy. “Just pretend you’re checking the computer-desk… the master’s machine will take care of the rest.”
Suppressing a millennia of proud yeoman heritage screaming from within his veins to strike back, Buck acquiesced to his inferior. Stepping beneath, he stared up to see a swirling mouthful of inert blade-teeth. Lucy and Roy, weapons leveled at him, blocked both escape routes from the computer-desk ringing him.
“Now just wait for the master’s will to be done,” gasped Lucy, as though nearing climax.
Buck closed his eyes, drawing one last cool chestful of air. Suddenly a low hum filled the air, a warm glow erupting from the beehive sending scattered shadows across the corpse laden warehouse.
This was his last chance to live. Buck jumped upwards into the stirring gyre of serrated blade-teeth.
“Wha—”
“Buck!?”
Jagged steel fangs ripped at his forearms, bloodying them, but his hands found purchase, a single loose handlebar in the darkness. He pulled it free and landed on his feet between the clones, gripping one of the golden Shatners’ Krayton dual-blades — Claxton had been as good as his word.
A first blow at Roy’s hand before he could fire, catching the phaser tip just as he pulled the trigger so that an explosion threw both men backwards and left the evil clone gripping a shattered stump of a weapon.
Lucy howled, stabbing at Buck’s chest as he recovered, his back against a computer-desk monitor. Hot breath fogging his atmos-helm, he tried to match her fast swings, catching her twice more before she plunged the blade deep into his shoulder — an involuntary scream as he threw her back with the blade still lodged in his body.
Before she could flee, the honed Krayton steel blade caught her on the downswing, burying itself between her oversized breasts. She fell, screaming like a banshee.
“You always said I was a heart-breaker!”
The beehive was now roaring with energy, its mouth extending towards him like some horrid larva seeking carrion. Buck scrambled away, the lights flickering so that he tripped over a dead body and crawled away towards some crates. He crashed right into Roy's knees, a crossbow leveled at him.
Roy’s pencil mustache was like a second evil grin as he spoke: “I’d hoped to feed you to it alive, Sheriff. But sometimes even we have to accept second best.”
A blinding bolt of light from the far catwalk and the crossbow fell harmlessly in front of Buck. Roy stood stupidly for a moment, blinking down at the steaming stumps where his forearms had once been, before falling to his knees.
*CLACK!*
Roy shook his head, looking up at the righteous lawman who had now risen up, crossbow in hand and aimed directly at his necessarily brown eyes. “I’d trained my whole life for this. This was my turn to be a hero…”
Thunk.
Once Buck’s suit was patched up he gave Claxton the order to open the airlock and expose the facility to the inhospitable sulfurous Sussyphus IV atmosphere. Claxton tapped away at the control panel pointlessly before shaking his head. It was still sealed remotely.
“I thought B-8 had released his lock on it.”
The intercom crackled to life above, flooding the room with the horrid whine of a hateful woman. “It did,” cackled Lucy, “but I’ve resealed it from here!”
Buck turned, shocked to see the horrid clone of the woman he had loved was still alive and jeering at him over the central computer-desk which she had somehow dragged herself to.
“Not only that,” she wailed on, “I’ve set the clone fabricator to detonate! You’ll never crack my password before it blows up in sixty seconds!”
Cooly, B-8 emerged from the back hallway. “If you’ll excuse me, I may have a solution to this conundrum.”
The robot cruised down the corpse pathway on its steel treads, entering the computer-desk ring before tossing Lucy’s writhing, cursing body onto the floor.
Beep boop beep. “Resolved Sheriff. A simple alternating countdown encryption. You will find the doors unlocked and this facility quite safe for the authorities to seize at their leisure.”
Lucy cried out, “Damn you! I’ll hunt you to—” until B-8 reversed backwards over her face with his treads, before gunning it forward, speedbagging her increasingly flesh stripped skull against the gore slopped floor paneling. Her horrible wailing continued until finally he shifted gears and tread away, leaving her skeletal nightmare face to struggle to find death’s merciful kiss upon the cold floor.
Buck shook his head in shock. “B-8, I thought your programming didn’t allow you to make judgments of personal motivation?.”
“Affirmative. But some judgements are mere statements of fact. And it is a fact that you are my leader.”
Buck clapped the robot on its shoulders before giving Claxton the go-ahead. Both doors were opened and a sudden torrent of air rushed past them, out the airlock. Through the narrow passage lay a wide mountain skyline of orange haze pierced by smoking pillars of fresh volcanic eruptions.
“Another bum partner and another night alone in bed for me. At least I still have you, B-8.”
“Roger! Roger!”
Buck let out a hearty laughter, the now toxic air beyond his atmos-helm punctuated by the joyous clacks of his alien friend.
“Sheriff, there is one more thing you should know. I have now had time to fully analyze the shipping manifests of all freighters in contact with this facility. They show that a ‘Doctor M.’ departed on a small cutter three weeks prior to our arrival.”
“So that one that I killed…”
“A clone, according to all available probability models.”
“Damnit. Well let’s hike back to the ship and get me patched up properly then. We still have a galaxy to save.”
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