Tyr caressed his spikes down Raa’s face. "Very well. Captain," Tyr pressed the implant. "It’s only Raa, he’s putting together a packet of information to send below."

"And you couldn’t have told me this before, Raa?"

"No, I didn’t come up with it, Caeilla did. Once we realized that Onnika doesn’t care that’s she’s up here... Dylan she’s insane and the worst part of it, I don’t think it’s natural. As heir, Caeilla reviews recordings of previous meetings and examines why and how her mother makes decisions. According to her interpretation, Onnika started acting erratically some three, four years ago.

"Trance ‘found’ a sheet of paper. She found it in a abandoned cloning lab. It’s not much but it has at the bottom of it a small incomplete list of files. Before we left, I made sure to do my final break-in of Onnika’s computer system. I downloaded a mass of files. Some of which are listed here. So I opened them.

"Of all the things I found on Onnika’s drive, my birth certificate wasn’t the one I was looking for. Another file... told of another clone created, Caeilla is a clone of Denalie. Onnika is barren. It’s also why she doesn’t care if Caeilla is killed, she can always make another one. Later she tried cloning agin, in fact a couple of clones. She was trying to clone you and Gaheris.

"After several failed attempts to clone you, she gave it up. Then she started again. This is right about the time Caeilla noticed her mother changing. Then you showed up, it was obvious she only needed to create one clone. Me." Raa turned back to the console and opened a new file. Highlighting the date of ‘birth’ on the clone certificate.

" Why would she do this. She gave up on the plan to plant two ‘ancestor’ clones. She got a new councilor about then. Name of Graha. Only problem is that the only recent Graha I have found went missing some ten years or so ago.

"Now that we know this, what does this mean. I’ll tell you." Raa leaned back and sighed. "Graha is not who he says he is. We are in much more trouble than I thought. And... this is not her fault. She was only as greedy as any other Nietzschean Matriarch. In fact, she in her own way provided for her people. When she discovered that her ovaries had been damaged by intense radiation when she was younger, she chose to clone her own progenitor, a woman of great strength and character to lead her people.

"The madness? What do you expect when a Nietzschean is forced to destroy her own pride and she can not stop it? It’s Graha who did this to her. And who knows what Graha is?"

* * *

Checking to make sure Trance wasn’t coming back; he started checking the files. Slowly he searched for tissue and blood samples. Finding the location of the last samples taken, he cleared the screen and got up. Walking over to the storage bin, he retrieved two of each. Pulling a small cold case, he slipped them in. Placing them in a small pouch on the inside of his vest, he walked off.

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