The Pandora Sequence: The Jesus Incident, the Lazarus Effect, the Ascension Factor by Frank Herbert

personas are My impersonations. We melt into ONE at the touch of infinity.
    —Raja Flattery, The Book of Ship

    FROM THE instant the Redoubt’s first hatchway exploded, Jesus Lewis stayed within arm’s length of his bodyguard, Illuyank. It was partly a conscious decision. Even in the worst of times, Illuyank inspired a certain confidence. He was a heavily muscled man, dark-skinned, with black wavy hair and a stone-cut face accented by three blue chevrons tattooed above his left eyebrow. Three chevrons—Illuyank had run outside around the Colony Perimeter three times, naked, armed only with his wits and endurance, “running the P” for a bet or a dare.
    Testing their luck, some called it. When the hatch blew, they all needed luck. Some of them were barely awake and had not yet eaten their first dayside meal.
    “The clones got a lasgun!” Illuyank shouted. His clear, dark eyes worked the area. “Dangerous. They don’t know how to use it.”
    The two men stood in a passage between the clones’ quarters and a random huddle of survivors who waited behind them near a half-circle of hatches leading to the core of the Redoubt. Even in this moment of peril, Lewis knew how he must appear to the others. He was a short man, thin all the way—thin straw-colored hair, thin mouth, thin chin made even more so by a deep cleft, a thin nose, and oddly dark eyes which never seemed to reflect light in the thin compression of his lids. Beside him, Illuyank was everything Lewis was not.
    Both stared toward the core of the Redoubt.
    There was a real question in their minds whether the core of the Redoubt remained secure.
    Knowing this, Lewis had deactivated the communications pellet buried in the flesh of his neck and refused to answer it even when insistent calls from Oakes tempted him.
    No telling who might be able to listen!
    There had been some disquieting indications lately that their private communications channel might not be as private as he had hoped. By now, Oakes would have received word about the new Ceepee. Discussion of that and the possible breach of their private communications system would have to wait.
    Oakes would have to be patient.
    At the first sign of trouble, Lewis had hit an emergency signal switch to alert Murdoch at Colony. There was no certainty, though, that the signal had gone through. He had not been allowed time for a retransmit-check. And the whole Redoubt had gone onto emergency power then. Lewis had no way of knowing which systems might be working and which not.
    The damned clones!
    A loud whirr sounded from the direction of the clones’ quarters. Illuyank flattened himself on the floor and the others were showered with shards of passage wall.
    “I thought they didn’t know how to use that lasgun!” Lewis shouted. He pointed at a gaping hole in the wall as Illuyank leaped up and spun him around toward the others at the hatch circle.
    “Downshaft!” Illuyank called.
    One of the waiting group whirled the downshaft hatchdogs and opened the way into a passage lighted only by the blue flickering of emergency illumination.
    Lewis sprinted blindly behind Illuyank, heard the others scrambling after them. Illuyank shouted back at him as he ran: “They don’t know how to use it and that’s what makes it dangerous!” Illuyank tucked and rolled across an open side passage as he spoke, firing a quick burst down the passage from his gushgun. “They could hit anything anywhere!”
    Lewis glanced down the open passage as he ran past, glimpsed a scattering of bodies blazing there.
    It soon became apparent where Illuyank was leading them and Lewis admired the wisdom of it. They took a left turn into a new passage, then a right turn and found themselves in the Redoubt’s unfinished back corridors, skirting the native rock of the cliffside into the small Facilities Room on the beach side. One plasma-glass window overlooked the sea, the courtyard and the corner where the clones’ quarters joined the Redoubt