by neetha Napew
In the flurry of parting, Sassinak rather hoped she knew what might be coming. After all, Varian would have her animals to study; Kai would have his minerals to mine . . . what would Lunzie have? Nothing. She’d be picked up by the ARCT-10; she’d try to find a recertification course to bring her up to date in medicine, and then she’d hire out for something else. Not the sort of life Sassinak would want. Even if she’d been a doctor.
“Let’s eat here,” she said, as Kai and Varian, escorted by Ford, went off down the corridor. “It’s an awkward time for them in the messhall, right between shifts.”
“Oh. Fine.” Lunzie wandered around the office as Sassinak ordered the meal, looking at the pictures and the crystal fish. “That’s my favorite,” said Sassinak of the fish. “After the desk. This thing is my great hunk of self-indulgence.”
“Doesn’t seem to have hurt you much,” said Lunzie, with a bite to it.
Sassinak laughed. “I saw it fifteen years ago, saved for seven years. The place makes them one at a time and won’t start one on credit. They spent two years building it, and then for five years it sat in storage until I had a place to put it.”
“Umm.” Lunzie’s eyes slid across hers, then came back.
“As near as I can make it, that Thek conference lasted four and a half hours,” Sassinak said, running her finger around her damp collar. She’d loosen it once lunch had been served. Right now she had to loosen up Lunzie. She held up the bottle. “Wouldn’t you recommend another shot. Doctor Mespil. Purely medicinal, of course.”
“If this old fool can prescribe a similar dose for herself?” Lunzie’s smile was little more natural as Sassinak filled both their glasses with a generous tot.
“Thanks.”
Before they’d finished savoring the brandy, two stewards brought trays heaped with food: thinly sliced sandwiches, two bowls of soup, bowls of fried delicacies, fresh fruit obviously bartered from the Iretans.
Lunzie shook her head. “You Fleet people! And I always thought a military life in space was austere!”
“It can be.” Sassinak tasted her soup and nodded. Another one of her favorite cook’s creative successes. The stewards smiled and withdrew. Now Sassinak loosened her tunic. “There are certain . . . mmm . . . perks that come with rank and age.”
“Mostly rank, I’d guess. I’m happy for you, Sass, you seem to have earned a lot of respect, and you’re clearly suited to your life.”
For some reason this made Sassinak vaguely uneasy. “Well ... I like it. Always have. It’s not all this pleasant, of course.”
“No? Have you seen combat often?”
“Often enough. Cruise before this one, we were boarded. Someone even took a potshot at me.”
That caught Lunzie with her spoon stopped halfway to her mouth, and she put it down safely in the soup before asking more.
“Boarded? I didn’t know that happened in ... I mean, a Fleet cruiser?”
“That’s exactly the reaction of the Board of Inquiry. It seemed like a good idea at the time, though, Lunzie.” Far from being upset by her great-great-great as a listener, Sassinak discovered a certain catharsis easing tension, almost as beneficial as medication. And just the thread of a new thought, bearing on the information the Thek had extracted. “My Exec had a shipload of slaves to get out of that system ASAP.” She told Lunzie the whole story, backing and filling as necessary.
“And you’d been a slave . . . you knew ...” Lunzie murmured softly.
There was more understanding in that tone than Sassinak could well stand; she changed the subject again, surprised to find herself mentioning another problem.
“Yes, and as for crew loyalty, by and large you’re right. But not entirely. For instance,” and Sassinak leaned back in her chair, regarding her guest with a measuring glance, “right now, I’m fairly sure that we have an informer aboard: someone in the pay of any one of those prestigious names we’ve been made privy to. Dupaynil and I have scanned and dissected the records of everyone on board and it hasn’t done us a bit of good. We can’t find tampering or inconsistencies or service lapses. But we have got a saboteur. My crew ‘re all starting to suspect each other. You can imagine what that does to morale!” Lunzie nodded, eyes sharpening. “The timid ones came to me, wanting me, of all things, to arrest our heavyworlders. As if heavyworlders were the Jonahs.” She noticed Lunzie’s startled expression. “And the next thing will be some political movement or other. There has to be a way to find the rotter, but I confess I’m stymied. And I particularly want the bugger found before any hint of what we’ve discovered here on Ireta can possibly leak.”
Lunzie began peeling a fruit, letting the rind curl below her fingers. “Would you like me to look through the files - the unclassified stuff, I mean? Maybe an outside eye? Sort of singing for my lunch, as it were?”
“Singing for your lunch?”
“Never mind. If you don’t trust an outsider ...”
“Oh, I trust you - gods below, my own great-great-great-grandmother.” Sassinak caught herself on the rim of a hiccup, and decided that she was the least bit cozy from the brandy. “You could look through my bottom drawers if you wanted. But what can you find that Dupaynil and I haven’t found?”
“I dunno. But being older ought to do some good, if being younger can’t.”
At this, they locked glances and giggled. Fresh eyes, Lunzie’s eyes, made no sense, and very good sense, and they were both more relaxed than necessary. Two hours later, poring over the personnel files, they had sobered but were no nearer solving Sassinak’s problem.
“I didn’t think you needed this many people to run a cruiser,” said Lunzie severely. “It would be easier to check a smaller crew.”
“Part of that great life I have as a cruiser captain.”
“Right. One more engineering technician, grade E-4, and I’m going to ...” Suddenly she paused, and frowned. “Hold it! Who’s this?”
Sassinak called up the same record on her own screen. “Prosser, V. Tagin. He’s all right; I’ve checked him out, and so has Dupaynil.” She glanced again at the now-familiar file. Planet of origin: Colony Makstein-VII, so - matotype: height range 1.7 - 2 meters, weight range 60 - 100 kg, eye color: blue/gray, skin: red/yellow/black ratio 1:1:1, type fair, hair type: straight, fine, light-brown to yellow to gray. Longheaded, narrow pelvis, 80% chance missing upper outer incisors. She screened Prosser’s holo, and saw a 1.9 meter, 75-kilogram male with gray eyes in a longish pale face under straight fine, fair hair. By his dental chart, he was missing the upper outer incisors, and his blood type matched. “There’s nothing off in his file, and he’s well-within the genetic index description. His eyes are too close together, but that’s not a breach of Security. What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s impossible, that’s what.”
“Why?”
Lunzie looked across at her, a completely serious look. “Did you ever hear of clone colonies?”
“Clone colonies?” Sassinak stared at her blankly. She had neither heard of such a thing nor seen a reference to it. “What’s a clone colony?”
“What databases do you have onboard? Medical, I mean? I want to check something.” Lunzie had gone tense suddenly, alert, almost vibrating with what she wouldn’t explain - yet.
“Medical? Ask Mayerd. If that’s not enough, I can even get you access to Fleet HQ by FTL link.”
“I’ll ask Mayerd. They were talking about covering it up, and if they did - “ Lunzie didn’t go on; Sassinak didn’t push her. Time enough.
Lunzie was on the internal corn, talking to Mayerd about medical databases, literature searches, and specific medical journals, in a slang Sassinak could hardly follow. “What do you mean. Essentials of Cell Reference isn’t publishing? Oh - well, that’s a stupid reason to change titles . . . Well, try Bioethics Quarterly, out of Amperan University Press, probably volume 73 to 77 . . . nothing? Ceiver and Petruss were the authors . . . Old Mackelsey was the editor then, a real demon on stuff like this. Of cours
e I’m sure of my reference: as far as I’m concerned it was maybe two years ago.” Finally she clicked off and looked at Sass, a combination of smugness and concern. “You’ve got a big problem, great-great-great-granddaughter, bigger than you thought.”
“Oh? I need any more?”
“Worse than one saboteur. Someone’s been wiping files. Not just your files. All files.”
“What exactly do you mean?” It was the first time she’d used her command voice in Lunzie’s presence and she was glad to see that it was effective. It didn’t, she noticed, scare Lunzie, but it did get a straight answer out of her.
“You never heard of clone colonies, nor has Mayerd who ought to have. I was a student on an Ethics Board concerning such a colony.” Lunzie paused just a moment before continuing. “Some bright researchers had decided that it would be a possibility to have an entire colony sharing one genome: one colony made up exclusively of clones.”
“But that can’t work,” Sassinak said, recalling what she knew of human genetics. “They’d inbreed, and besides you need different abilities, mixtures ...”
Lunzie nodded. “Humans are generalists. Early human societies had no specialization except sexual. You can’t build a large, complicated society that way, but a specialized colony, maybe. They thought they could. Anyway, in terms of the genetic engineering needed for certain environments, it would be a lot cheaper to engineer one, and then clone, even given the expense of cloning. And once they’d cleared the generation-limit problem, and figured out how to insert the other sex without changing anything else, it would be stable. If you know there are no dangerous recessives, then inbreeding won’t cause trouble. Inbreeding merely raises the probability that, if such harmful genes exist, they will combine. If they don’t exist, they can’t combine.”
“I see. But I’m not sure I believe.”
“Wise. The Ethics team didn’t either. Because I’d been around, so to speak, when that first colony was set up and because I’d worked in occupational fields, I had the chance to give an opinion on the ethical and practical implications. One of a panel of two hundred or so. We saw the clones, well, holos of them, and the research reports. I thought the project was dangerous, to both the clones and to everyone else. For one thing, in the kind of environment the clones were designed for, I thought random mutations would be far more frequent than the project suggested. Others thought the clones should be protected: the project had a fierce security rating anyway, but apparently it went a step further and all references were wiped.”
“What does that have to do with Prosser, V. Tagin?”
Lunzie looked almost disgusted, then relented. “Sassinak, that colony was on Makstein VII. Everyone in it - everyone had the same genome and the same appearance. Exactly the same appearance. I saw holos of members of that colony. Your Mr. Prosser is not one of the clones, though he’s been given the somatypes.”
“Given?”
“The Index entries were written to cover the appearance of the clones should any of them travel, while indicating a range of values as if they were from a limited but normal colonial gene pool. His somatype has been faked, Sassinak. That’s why you didn’t catch it. No one would, who didn’t know about clone colonies in general and Makstein VII in particular. And you couldn’t find out because it’s not in the files anymore.”
“But someone knows,” said Sassinak, hardly breathing for the thought of it. “Someone knew to fake his ID that way. ...”
“I wonder if your clever Lieutenant Commander Dupaynil could ask Mr. Prosser where he actually does come from?” Lunzie said in a drawl as she examined her fingertips, a mannerism which made Sassinak blink for it was much her own.
She keyed in Dupaynil’s office and when he acknowledged, she sent him the spurious ID they’d uncovered. “Detain,” was all she said but she knew Dupaynil would understand. “Great-great-great-grandmother,” she said silkily, well pleased, “you’re far too smart to stay in civilian medicine.”
“Are you offering me a job?” The tone was meek, but the sharp glance belied it.
“Not a job exactly,” Sassinak began. “A new career, a mid-life change, just right for fresh eyes that see with old knowledge that has somehow got lost for us who need it.” Lunzie raised an inquiring eyebrow but her expression was alert, not skeptical. Sassinak went on with mounting enthusiasm, building on that little inkling she’d had before lunch. “Listen up, great-great. Do you realize what you have, to replace what you think you’ve lost? Files in your head, accessible facts that weren’t wiped . . . and who knows how many more than just references to a prohibited colony!”
The old clone colony trick works only once, great-great.”
“Let’s not put arbitrary limits to what you have in your skull, revered ancestress. The old clone colony trick may not be all you’ve saved behind your fresh old eyes. You’ve got an immediate access to things forty-three and even a hundred and five years old which to me are either lost in datafiles or completely unknown. And this planetary piracy’s been going on a long, long time by either of our standards.” She saw the leap of interest in Lunzie’s eyes and then the filming of old, sadder memories before the new hope replaced them. “I’m not offering you a job, old dear, I’m declaring you a team member, a refined intelligence that those planet hungry moneygrubbing ratguts could never expect to have ranged against them. How could they? A family team with almost the same time-in-service of say, the Paradens ...”
“Yes, the Paradens,” and Lunzie sounded very grim. Then her thin lips curved into a smile that lit up her eyes. “A team? A planet pirate breaking team. I probably do know more than one useful thing. You’re a commander, with a ship at your disposal...”
“Which is supposed to be hunting these planet pirates ...”
“You’re Fleet and you can ask certain questions and get certain information. But I’m,” and Lunzie swelled with self-pride, “a nobody, no big family, no fortune, no connections - bar my present elegant company - and they don’t need to know that. Yes, esteemed descendant, I accept your offer of a team action.”
Sassinak had just picked up the brandy bottle to charge their glasses when a loud thump on the bulkhead and raised voices indicated some disturbance. Sassinak rolled her eyes at Lunzie and went to see what it was.
Aygar was poised on the balls of his feet just outside her office, with two marines denying him entry.
“Sorry about the noise, captain,” said one of them. “He wants to speak to you and we told him ...”
“You said,” Aygar burst out to Sassinak, “that as members of FSP, we had privileges ...”
“Interrupting my work isn’t one of them,” said Sassinak crisply. She felt a discreet tug on her sleeve. “However, I’ve a few moments to spare right now,” and she dismissed the marines.
Aygar came into her office with slightly less swagger than usual. If he ever dropped that halfsulk of his, Sassinak thought he’d be extremely presentable. He didn’t have the gross heavyworlder appearance. He could, in fact if he mended his attitude, be taken as just a very well developed normal human type. He’d fill out a marine uniform very well indeed. And fill in other places.
“Did Major Currald recruit you?”
“He’s trying,” and that unexpected humor of Aygar flashed through again.
“I thought you intended to remain on Ireta, to protect all your hard work,” Lunzie said in the mild sort of voice that Sassinak would use to elicit information. But she had a gleam in her eye as she regarded the handsome young Iretan that Sassinak also instantly recognized. It surprised her for a moment.
“I ... I thought I wanted to stay,” he said slowly, “if Ireta was going to remain our world. But it’s not. And there are hundreds of worlds out there ...”
“Which you could certainly visit as a marine.” Sassinak sweetened her tone and added a smile. Two could play this game and she wasn’t about to let her great-great- great-grandmother outmaneuver her in her own office.
Aygar regarded
her through narrowed eyes. “I’ve also had an earful of the sort of prejudice heavyworlders face.”
“My friend, if you act friendly and well behaved, people will like a young man as well favored as you,” Sassinak said, ignoring Lunzie. “Life on Ireta and out of high-g environment has done you a favor. You look normal, although I’d wager that you’d withstand high-g stress better than most. Act friendly and most people will accept you with no qualms. Swagger around threatening them with your strength or size, and people will react with fear and hatred.” Sassinak shrugged. “You’re smart enough to catch on to that. You’d make an admirable marine.”
Aygar cocked an eyebrow in challenge. “I think I can do better than that. Commander. I’m not about to settle for second best. Not again. I want the chance to learn. That’s a privilege in the FSP, too, I understand. I want to learn what they didn’t and wouldn’t teach us. They consistently lied to us.” Anger flashed in his eyes, a carefully contained anger that fascinated Sassinak for she hadn’t expected such depths to this young man. “And they kept us ignorant!” That rankled the deepest. Sassinak could almost bless the cautious, paranoid mutineers for that blunder. “Because we,” and when Aygar jabbed, his thumb into his chest he meant all of his generations, “were not meant to have a part of this planet at all!”
“No,” Sassinak said, suddenly recalling another snippet of information gleaned from the cathedral’s Thekian homily, “you weren’t.”
“In fact,” Lunzie began, in a voice as sweet as her descendant’s, “you’ve a score to settle with the planet pirates, too. With the heavyworlders who sent Cruss and that transport ship.”
