Starbase Human

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “What’s your interest in her?” Nuuyoma said.

  The man folded his hands together. “She’s the survivor.”

  “Of what?” Nuuyoma asked.

  “Of the starbase explosion, what we’ve just been discussing,” the man said.

  “I thought you didn’t know if anyone survived.”

  “My cohorts told me she had escaped. Then their ship blew up away from the base.”

  “So you say,” Nuuyoma said.

  “I know. I was speaking to them when it blew.”

  “But they could have been on the docking ring,” Nuuyoma said.

  “Then why would they tell me they were going after her?” the man asked.

  “Why were they going after her?” Nuuyoma asked.

  The man leaned back. He let out a long sigh, as if he were contemplating the question.

  “Because,” he said quietly. “Back then, we didn’t want anyone to know we existed.”

  “We?” Nuuyoma asked. “By ‘we’ do you mean the theft ring you had put together or the clones of PierLuigi Frémont?”

  The man’s smile was small. “Both.”

  “You’re clearly not fast-grow,” Nuuyoma said. “Why were you created?”

  The man’s cheeks became even ruddier. “One thing at a time.”

  “You want to trade information,” Nuuyoma said. “You can’t be coy with me and expect my cooperation.”

  The man set his plate on top of Verstraete’s. One of the waiters came by and whisked them both away.

  “If you want to trade, you need to tell me a few things,” Nuuyoma said. He felt like he was talking to a wall.

  The man watched him.

  “You need to tell me why you want to find this woman,” Nuuyoma said.

  “She killed my cohorts,” the man said.

  “Whom you disagreed with and might not have liked,” Nuuyoma said.

  “That’s beside the point,” the man said. “You will want to speak to her as well.”

  That was true. If she was the sole survivor of the explosions, Nuuyoma would want to talk with her.

  “If she’s in the Alliance, she’s out of your reach,” Nuuyoma said.

  The man shrugged. “It would be nice to know that.”

  “This happened thirty-five years ago,” Nuuyoma said.

  “Indeed,” the man said.

  Nuuyoma sighed. He looked over at Verstraete. She would tell him to ignore this, that it was blackmail and that it wouldn’t help anything. But if he could get the information and protect the woman (if she was still alive), then he would help solve the Anniversary Day bombings.

  “What do I get if I find this information for you?” Nuuyoma asked.

  “You will know several things,” the man said. “You will know who created us. You will know who manages the DNA now. And you will be able to find the criminals who tried to destroy your Moon.”

  The echo of Nuuyoma’s thoughts almost unnerved him. “Why would you tell me that?”

  “It costs me nothing,” the man said.

  “And why won’t you tell me now?” Nuuyoma said.

  “Because it’s time I handle the final details of my life.” The man swept a hand over his body. “I am decaying. My cells are breaking down. The technique used to make me wasn’t that sophisticated, and enhancements don’t work as you can tell from my face. I would like to settle my accounts.”

  “By getting revenge on a woman who may or may not have killed two people you didn’t like?”

  “They weren’t just people,” the man said. “They were, as some clones call it, my siblings.”

  Nuuyoma nodded. That detail didn’t surprise him. “But you didn’t care about them.”

  “I didn’t say that,” the man said. “I didn’t agree with them.”

  “And all those fast-grows? Were they your siblings as well?”

  The man’s smile was even smaller than before. “They were made from the same DNA,” he said. “But they were not from my unit. They were failures.”

  The word failure made Nuuyoma start. That was the word Gomez had repeated, the word the clones from Epriccom had used to justify the murder of their other “siblings.”

  Did that usage go all the way back to PierLuigi Frémont, the original? Nuuyoma didn’t know.

  “I won’t be able to get you real-time information,” Nuuyoma said. “I can only search through our databases as they existed about a year ago.”

  “I know that,” the man said. “Death records will exist. Tax records. Addresses, all of that stuff your Alliance does for its members. You will get me close.”

  “You’ll be going into the Alliance to get your revenge?” Nuuyoma asked.

  “I didn’t say that,” the man said. “But what I do want are the actual documents. I do not want you to lie to me about her existence.”

  “I would like the same from you,” Nuuyoma said.

  The man nodded, once. Nuuyoma had the odd sense that he had just finalized the deal.

  “You never told me your name,” Nuuyoma said.

  “It’s not relevant,” the man said.

  “Ah, but it is,” Nuuyoma said.

  The man folded his hands together again. “Here, they call me Luis. I do not use a surname.”

  “What do you call yourself?” Nuuyoma asked.

  “I,” the man said.

  Nuuyoma shook his head. “If you want to work with me, then you will tell me your name. Your real name. Your given name.”

  “I have no given name,” the man said. “But my peers knew me as One Of One Direct.”

  “One Of One Direct?” Nuuyoma asked. “What does that mean?”

  “The first from the direct line created from the DNA of the original. I am the first made from that line.” The man spoke quietly.

  “How do I confirm that?” Nuuyoma asked.

  “You cannot,” the man said. “On some things, you’ll have to take my word.”

  “And on some things, you’ll have to take mine,” Nuuyoma said.

  “Find Takara Hamasaki for me,” the man said. “And I will make sure you have everything you need for your investigation.”

  He stood up. He was taller than Nuuyoma had expected.

  “I will meet you here, at this table, tomorrow night. I will only talk with you. You may bring as many friends as you like, but only you will sit at this table. Are we clear?”

  “Yes,” Nuuyoma said.

  The man nodded once. Then he left. Verstraete stood. As she walked over, Nuuyoma leaned back in his chair. He watched the man thread his way through the throng of people.

  If what that man said was true—if he was the first clone from the original—then he might not be as old as Nuuyoma thought. PierLuigi Frémont died fifty-five years ago. If he was cloned after death, then that man was only a decade older than Nuuyoma.

  The man looked ancient in comparison.

  Either that, or clones of Frémont had been made long before the man died.

  “Well?” Verstraete asked as she sat down.

  “Well,” Nuuyoma said. “We have some digging to do.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  GOMEZ CLOSED THE door to the little information room and stood in the corridor for a moment.

  Superficially, her choices seemed easy. She could let Apaza search the database. She could let him search all the available databases, which would call attention to the Green Dragon and to them.

  She could do some more research herself in that database.

  Or she could go to the surface as herself, get a tour of the facility, and tell them she was thinking of permanent retirement, and wanted to have a good, secured position inside the Alliance. In other words, she would be asking them for a job.

  If she did that, if she went below and identified herself while telling a lie, she put everything at risk. But she had no idea if anyone would investigate her or her story. After all, she had a marshal’s badge and she had taken a leave of absence, something high-ranking officials in any
secret service did when they were investigating a new position.

  She had enough credibility to make this work—if she did it right.

  If she did it wrong, then she jeopardized everything she had already done.

  She decided to walk while she thought about this.

  She used to walk the ship when on the EAFS Stanley, but that ship was the size of some cities. The Green Dragon was small, lean, and fast, able to pivot in seconds instead of minutes or hours, great in a fight and even better at escaping from a bad situation.

  But it meant that walking the ship took her a little over an hour instead of several. Often, she wouldn’t make it around the Stanley at all, stopping to talk to crew or someone who needed help with a problem or a discovery.

  On the Green Dragon, the crew stayed out of her way. They let her walk. They understood that she wanted to keep a hard line between them and the four former members of the Stanley.

  The problem, she realized as she moved, was that she was risking a lot, and yet she wasn’t risking as much as she had initially thought she would.

  The Green Dragon had three distinct levels, with a fourth and fifth that mostly contained equipment. A dummy bubble covered a fake cockpit on the top of the ship. According to the seller (and the material Simiaar researched on the ship), almost every single time a ship in the Dragon’s class would get attacked, the bubble would get hit first.

  That enabled the Dragon to target the weapons systems on the attacking ship without receiving a damaging hit.

  Gomez liked that feature. Sometimes, when she walked the ship, she walked up to the dummy cockpit and stared at the models inside. It wasn’t secure enough to hold environment, and going inside the dummy cockpit wasn’t recommended in transit, so she would just look, wishing ships could be designed like this in actuality, because riding in an open-windowed cockpit seemed to combine the best parts of space with that moment of increased adrenaline that she always used to get when she walked into a situation in an unknown culture.

  She missed her job. She would love to return to it, if she could.

  The upper level housed the quarters. Crew quarters were actually below decks, but since she had hired such a minimal crew, she had given them the larger guest quarters on this level.

  She had the captain’s suite at one end of the corridor. Simiaar had the second largest suite on the other side of the corridor. Even though Gomez had offered Apaza the third largest suite, he had opted for a room in the actual below decks crew quarters, with a built-in bunk and barely enough room to move.

  I’ll be spending all my time in the information room anyway, he had said. I just need a place to shower.

  It had taken her two days to realize that he hadn’t said he would sleep down below. He just stored his clothes there, and cleaned up there.

  Besides clothing, the only things he had brought on board were equipment (some of it self-designed) and that amazing chair like none she had ever seen. It bolted into the floor, like all regulation chairs did on this ship, but the nanofibers the chair was composed of transformed into a hard wood-like chair if he wanted it or the most comfortable bed she had ever touched.

  Apaza had let her examine the chair before she allowed it onto her ship; after it had been bolted in, she hadn’t touched it—although she had walked in on Apaza sleeping on it more than once.

  She preferred her four-room suite, although she didn’t enter it at the moment. She needed the walk. The exercise room on the crew level simply didn’t help her think as much as the changing scenery on the ship did.

  Her anger at the Alliance wasn’t just because no one had paid attention to her reports and requests concerning the events on Epriccom. She figured that things went awry often within all parts of the Earth Alliance. There was simply too much information and not enough people to process it.

  Plus, as Apaza told her, much of the information wasn’t easily available through links and the usual nets. It took computer specialists with incredible skills and the ability to open some back doors that should have remained locked just to find some of the information that Gomez needed for this (and other) investigations.

  After Anniversary Day, she had initially blamed herself for the fact that the information about the Frémont enclave hadn’t gone through the proper channels and prevented the attack on Earth’s Moon.

  And then she started to investigate what went wrong. She decided to start with the injured clones. She was able to confirm that one clone, named TwoZero, had died just after she had seen him. So had the other surviving clones.

  They were deliberately erased, as if they had never been.

  Other things she had discovered in her early investigation led back to the Alliance, and that was when she realized that she had to investigate off-books, because someone—or many someones—were preventing this information from getting out.

  But most of this trip hadn’t panned out the way she expected. Gathering information, never easy, was proving terribly elusive—and she couldn’t blame Simiaar or Apaza for that.

  Some of it was her own fear.

  She tried to investigate how TwoZero died, but stopped the moment she realized she would need to use her position as a marshal in the Frontier Security Service to get inside any system.

  Apaza was able to get some information, but nothing they needed. Gomez knew if she went back to the prison system in her capacity as the arresting officer for TwoZero, she might set off every possible red flag.

  She felt that she had done that before she took the leave. Simiaar believed that the leave of absence actually protected Gomez from the idea that she was investigating anything.

  The moment Gomez showed up in any Earth Alliance facility in any kind of official capacity, someone—or those someones—would notice her, and would probably try to kill her.

  Her stomach clenched.

  She wandered down the corridor, then took the steps to below decks, skipping two entire decks so that she could walk past the cargo area, the crew quarters, and the exercise area. Simiaar’s lab was one deck above her, and Gomez didn’t want to stop there.

  Even Peyla—the Peyti home world—had brought its own share of disappointments. She had tried to talk with Uzven, the Peyti-Eaufasse translator who had mistranslated the initial request from the clone on Epriccom.

  Uzven had been deliberately obtuse about the clone’s request, later claiming that all clones should have asylum from humans. Uzven had even tried to contact the clone once it was imprisoned.

  Gomez had thought fifteen years ago that Uzven was involved in something nefarious. After she had seen the Anniversary Day clones, she believed Uzven was involved.

  But Uzven remained cagey to the end, claiming that Eaufasse to Peytin to Standard translations were bound to create errors, that Gomez had been wrong in trying to read any more into the mistakes.

  She had disliked Uzven fifteen years before, and she had disliked it again when she saw it on Peyla.

  Nothing had changed—not even the amount of information it would share.

  The way she saw it, this cloning facility was her last chance to get additional information before she arrived at the Moon.

  Either she went into this cloning facility in her capacity as a marshal with the Security Service, or she let Apaza investigate it.

  And that was what she needed to decide.

  Because if she went in, alone, she might not come out. If she did come out, and then an order came through to stop her, the Green Dragon had to escape this area and head to Earth’s Moon so fast that no one could catch them.

  At some point, she would have to take another risk.

  She stopped in the exercise area. Small, built-in holochambers for running and rowing and all sorts of Good-For-You exercises. One small holochamber that could be filled with water so that someone could swim if they wanted to.

  She had tried it just once, and decided that it wasn’t for her. Simiaar had laughed at her for even trying, and Apaza thought exercise was something
the human race should have banned by now. None of the crew used that chamber either, so near Peyla they had drained the chamber, so they wouldn’t be carrying the extra weight.

  She put a hand on the door to her favorite holochamber. Maybe she should run on the program set up for the mountains of Edgiofor. It was a tough workout and always blocked out her thoughts.

  But she didn’t need them blocked out.

  She needed to figure out if she was taking that last step.

  She took her hand off the chamber door and stood for a moment in the small exercise room.

  Her tiny team had done a lot of work already. They had found out about the enclave of clones, they had traced the ship that left Epriccom fifteen years ago to Ohksmyte, and they had taken a lot of trace from that ship.

  On Ohksmyte they had learned that clones had flown the ship away from the enclave as the enclave was destroying itself, and the ship had been left behind. They learned that the ship was made in the Alliance to distribute to criminals, and instead had been flown directly to the enclave.

  They had traced it to the building facility, found other ships that had left and gone into the Frontier, and by all appearances had never been abandoned as they were supposed to have been.

  They had even, through Apaza’s wizardry and some of the information they had gathered off that abandoned ship, found the registration for the ship that had colonized the enclave and traced that ship’s path throughout the Alliance.

  Because of that ship, they were orbiting Hétique. All of the information they had found had led them here.

  Gomez clasped her hands behind her back and paced the room itself, going around the holochambers and using them like an obstacle course.

  It took time to get to the Moon from Epriccom. Months. Traveling in the Frontier took even longer.

  She hadn’t gathered nearly enough information, but she would wager that the authorities on the Moon—those not involved with the Earth Alliance—did not know anything about the enclave or the fact that there were other clones.

  They didn’t know about the clone factory here at Hétique.

  Maybe all of that would be enough to get their investigation on the right track.