“I didn’t mean to mislead you, Marshal. There are opportunities. The timetable is ours, however, not yours. I’m sure there are other jobs inside the Alliance which might serve your desire to settle down and your need for the occasional risk.”
“I’m sure,” she said drily. “I don’t suppose you could point me in that direction?”
He swept a hand toward one of the tables. “You could apply—”
“I don’t have years,” she said. “I would like to settle when I retire, and I was hoping I could do that when I returned to my ship.”
He rose to his feet without uncrossing his legs, the sign of someone quite limber. Then he extended a hand so that she could rise.
She remembered his comment on DNA. She smiled at the extended palm, and shook her head slightly.
“Thank you,” she said, “but I doubt I’ll ever look at such casual contact in the same way again.”
He smiled, and let his hand drop to his side. She stood exactly as he had, using her thighs to lift her without bracing herself on anything. She almost felt like slapping out the pillow—or taking it with her. She was suddenly very conscious of the DNA she had left behind.
She looked wistfully around the room. It had no windows and didn’t reveal anything. Not even a map of the facility.
She wished she could ask for a tour, but that would seem presumptuous, especially now that she had turned down any possibility of working in this field.
“I thank you for your time,” she said.
“If you change your mind, Marshal…” Guan let his voice trail off without promising anything. It was an effective way to leave someone with a good feeling.
She smiled. “I’ll remember what you said.”
Then she let herself out of this room. The map reappeared under her vision, and she silently cursed it. She couldn’t pretend to walk in the wrong direction and see the rest of the facility.
She had a hunch a variety of alarms would go off if she did so.
She contemplated it, though, as she walked out of Building Fourteen. But she wasn’t sure what it would gain her.
Right now, she knew, she hadn’t attracted anyone’s attention. Her cover story could easily pass as truth if she did nothing else, like pretend to get lost.
All that worry about risk, about exposing herself and this little mission, and nothing had come of it.
She felt vaguely disappointed.
Unless Apaza found something while she was here, she had the same amount of information to bring to the Moon as she had had when she left the Frontier.
She had traveled this way with such hope, seeing the possibility of bringing more than news of the enclave to the Moon.
Instead, all she had to offer the authorities there were the bits of information she had gathered in the Frontier, and her ability to investigate.
She suspected that she and Simiaar would be very busy once they got to the Moon. They would be investigating, while others were probably still cleaning up the mess.
She had to be content with that.
But it wasn’t the atonement she had been looking for.
She guessed she would have to find that somewhere else.
THIRTY-TWO
PIPPA LANDAU OPENED the door of her centuries’ old house and stepped onto the lawn. The air smelled faintly of cut grass and Mississippi River mud. Davenport had just experienced the annual spring flood. Back in the day, the people who lived here had sandbagged the riverbanks to prevent the brown Mississippi water from overrunning the city.
And it didn’t always work. Much of Davenport had been built based on the knowledge that the Mississippi would flood periodically. So most of the city was up high, on the bluffs.
Now, the houses had stilts that lifted the buildings above any known waterline. Her house, built above the traditional flood stage, had only used its stilts once in the decades she had lived here. That flood, which happened when her children were small, had been epic, a disaster that would have wiped out the city if modern technology hadn’t made city protection possible.
She thought of that flood every time the smell of the Mississippi became overpowering.
And she was thinking of it now.
The grass was wet. She probably shouldn’t have had the bots cut it so soon after the heavy rains, but she had. The ground was still squishy, and water soaked into her favorite slippers, making her feet cold.
She wrapped her robe around her waist, hoping the neighbors wouldn’t see, and then realized that worrying about her neighbors meant she had become an Iowan.
Tears pooled in her eyes. She wanted to remain an Iowan. A Midwestern teacher of uncertain origin, who raised her family here and put down roots, like she had never thought possible.
When she first arrived on Earth, she had felt like a plant in a hydroponic garden: roots visible in her little glass container, taking in nutrients, but movable—constantly on the alert for the best conditions, the best life, the safest place.
She had found it. Right here. Davenport, Iowa, Midwest, Earth, the center of the Earth Alliance, the place most people ran from.
And she loved it.
Now she was like the garden she planted every spring. Her roots had sunk deep into the rich loam that had kept generations of humans alive in this very spot for hundreds and hundreds of years.
She wiped the back of her hand over her eyes, felt the wet, and made herself take a deep breath.
Then she walked deeper into her yard and looked up.
As she had thought after Anniversary Day, her backyard was not the ideal place to gaze at the moon. The lights of the city were up tonight, which they hadn’t been when she went to Prospect Park six months before, unsettled because she had seen the clones that haunted her nightmares.
Only on Anniversary Day, those clones had been alive and entering the Moon’s main port in Armstrong, on their way to committing mass murder.
Just like they had done on Starbase Human, over thirty-five years ago.
She wrapped her robe even tighter and looked up again.
When she had stood in Prospect Park, the Moon had been full and the night sky clear. The damage to some of the domes had been visible to the naked eye.
On this night, gray clouds skated across the dark sky, threatening even more rain. The weather maps showed thunderstorms that would form over her house by six a.m., which was why she’d had the bots clip the grass.
The Moon was a fingernail, peeking through the clouds at the oddest moment. Even if the damage from the latest attack were visible, she wouldn’t have been able to see it, which was why she avoided Prospect Park this evening.
She had a hunch a crowd was gathering again.
The people of Earth—or maybe just the people of Davenport—loved their Moon.
She shivered in the humid air, her neck aching from looking up. She had told herself before she got ready for bed that she wouldn’t think about this new set of attacks.
It wasn’t human clones this time. This time, the clones were Peyti, and some news sources reported that they, too, were based on a mass murderer—although that hadn’t been confirmed yet.
The destruction was less, but there was a lot of collateral damage, and that was what she found herself thinking about, alone in her comfortable bed, window open. Wind shushing through the nearby trees usually lulled her to sleep. She liked the quiet here.
But every time she closed her eyes, she heard the stomp-stomp-stomp of boots overlaid with screams of her friends. She dozed off briefly and the screams became the screams of her children.
She wiped her eyes again.
She wanted to contact them. They were all grown now, with their own families, and their own schedules. She would probably wake them up if she contacted them—and what would she say? That the new attacks on the Moon brought back old memories—memories they didn’t even know about?
They had no idea their mom was a Disappeared. They knew she had grown up elsewhere and that her parents were dead, but
that had just been part of their lives. Parent stuff. When they questioned her—and they all had—she gave vague answers or told them about going to school at the University of Iowa, how it had felt so different to study in a place that had existed for so long it seemed a part of the Earth itself.
Her children had accepted that.
They had no idea that she had been someone else.
They would feel betrayed when they learned it.
If they learned it.
She wiped her eyes again, wishing they would stop leaking, wishing to whatever god she could locate in the heavens—the made-up heavens—that she had been able to sleep this night. Really and truly sleep.
Because if she had slept, it would have meant that she had put the attacks away, had remained Pippa Landau, whom she had been for so much longer than she had been Takara Hamasaki.
In her life here, she had hardly ever thought of Takara Hamasaki.
Except when she named her children. She had told them she liked the names, but in truth, she had named them for the family she had lost. Takumi had her father’s name; Toshie her mother’s. And Tenkou was named for the brother she had lost before she had ever ventured to Starbase Human.
She had redefined the names so that she could redefine the memories. And, for the most part, it had worked. For more than thirty years, after her travels and her life settled down, she had lived as Pippa Landau.
Eventually, just like the woman in the Disappearance service had promised, Takara had become Pippa Landau. Or she thought she had.
But Takara’s memories were breaking through. The fears she had held at bay for decades were rising to the surface.
The clouds glided over the Moon. It peeked down at her like a sideways smile, as if it had a secret that she couldn’t know.
What if something she knew—something buried deep in her memories—would help the Moon?
Because if there had been a second attempt, there would be a third. And maybe a fourth.
Until they succeeded—whoever they were. Until they completely destroyed the Moon.
What if she could have saved the lives lost this day just by revealing herself?
What if she could save more lives?
She wiped at her eyes. She didn’t want to leave this life.
She didn’t want to reveal herself.
She didn’t want to be someone else.
Again.
THIRTY-THREE
THE SHUTTLE HAD an encrypted, protected version of the same database that Nuuyoma had back on the Stanley. If anyone tried to hack into the shuttle’s database, it would destroy itself. It took layers and layers of security codes, DNA links, and other protections just to access the database.
The problem was that the database, just like the one on the Stanley, was almost a year old.
To get updated information, the Stanley would have to ping the Alliance, then schedule time for a data download. Updating the database was standard for FSS ships near the border, but those deep in the Frontier often didn’t update for months, sometimes years. It was risky, and often irrelevant.
Yes, that meant they missed some of the important Alliance news, but what seemed important inside the Alliance often wasn’t important outside the Alliance. Particularly when he and the crew were dealing with cultures that had never heard of the Alliance.
Nuuyoma decided to do his search on the old database inside his quarters. He had assigned some information to Verstraete, but she didn’t seem as willing as he was. He would search, then have her double-check his information.
His quarters on the shuttle were much smaller than the quarters he had on the Stanley. Yet in some ways, he preferred the room here. It was well designed, with a bed in one corner, a work table in another, and a state-of-the-art (well, as of last year) entertainment package that could make him believe he was in New Orleans getting laid if he felt so inclined. (He didn’t.)
He had been sitting so long that he decided to use a floating screen to get the information he needed. Normally, he would have used voice commands, but he still had that strange feeling that he might have been hacked. He didn’t even feel comfortable using the encrypted link because he felt that the link could be back-traced.
So he did things the old-fashioned way, tapping the holographic screen and occasionally calling up a floating keyboard. Typing things slowed him down, but he didn’t mind.
He walked and searched and grew in turns frustrated and relieved. Frustrated that he couldn’t find a lot of information on Takara Hamasaki, and relieved that he couldn’t at the same time.
After hours of searching, he found a lot of references to a young Takara Hamasaki. She’d had an old ship that had broken down a lot before she arrived at the first Starbase Human. She had stopped there for repairs, and hadn’t left.
Over the years she was on the starbase, she had worked her way into administration, so her name and her image were on thousands of reports and files. Her DNA, encrypted, was also on some files. He used his marshal’s identification to download the DNA comparison information.
There was no record of a Takara Hamasaki after Starbase Human exploded, except notations in some official records that she had probably died on the starbase, along with everyone else.
However, that ancient and dilapidated ship of hers turned up on sales records on the moon of a planet just inside the Frontier. The ship had broken down (again) and needed repair. Instead of paying for it, the owner had vanished, and the ship got scrapped for parts.
As much as Nuuyoma searched, he couldn’t find any more references to Takara Hamasaki. However, he found an internal border security notation that the DNA profile he had found matched a DNA profile of one Suzette Hamdi, who crossed the border into the Alliance shortly after Takara’s ship was abandoned.
Hamdi’s internal file showed she had gone to Raaala, a city just inside Alliance space. Raaala had just one claim to fame: it had more Disappearance services per square kilometer than any other human-centric city inside the Alliance.
Takara/Hamdi’s trail died right there. He could find no more information on her, no matter how hard he looked.
He waved the screen away and stopped walking for a moment. He sat on the edge of the bed and ran a hand through his hair.
Takara Hamasaki had escaped the Frontier and then had Disappeared. That seemed backwards. Most of the Disappeared he had known about or helped track down had either gone to the Frontier when they Disappeared or had gone to the edges of the Alliance.
Maybe his information—his personal experience—was very Frontier-oriented, given his job. He had to take that into account.
The fact remained, though, that someone with Takara’s DNA profile and with her ship had gone back to the Alliance, and then had vanished. She had gone to a place that had a mountain of Disappearance services.
But someone who used a decrepit ship like hers couldn’t afford a Disappearance service. He wondered how she had paid for it, if indeed, she had used one.
It might be another way to track her down. But he wasn’t going to search for her. He would wager that One Of One Direct did not have the information from inside the Alliance, because One Of One Direct wouldn’t have access to the border and DNA records. So, Nuuyoma could trade that little bit of information for whatever One Of One Direct was withholding.
That relieved Nuuyoma a little. Because he felt as if he wasn’t putting Takara in any danger.
Although, he knew, this information could enable One Of One Direct to hire a shady Retrieval Artist to find Takara.
If a Retrieval Artist existed this far out, and if one would work for someone who looked like One Of One Direct.
Nuuyoma sighed, then stood. He had one more task to complete before he had Verstraete retrace his steps.
He opened the floating screen again and started pacing, seeing if he could find information on designer criminal clones that looked like PierLuigi Frémont. Old information, stuff that predated Anniversary Day by decades.
He
didn’t find anything. He wasn’t sure he expected to. Criminal activity, even high-end expensive activity, was hard to find through established networks. He wasn’t good enough to search criminal sites to see what he could find, nor did he want to.
He would see what One Of One Direct told him. And then Nuuyoma would send what he could find to Gomez. After that, Nuuyoma would consider this particular quixotic task complete.
He’d found something. He hoped that would be good enough.
It was all he could do.
THIRTY-FOUR
NO ONE GREETED Gomez as her shuttle docked on the Green Dragon. Her interactions with the ship, from the moment she left Hétique, had all been automated.
At first, she hadn’t thought anything of it, but as she stepped out of the shuttle into the docking bay, she was stunned to find herself alone.
She had at least expected to see Simiaar. And no one was in the bay’s reception area at all.
The Green Dragon had three shuttles, all of them big enough for a crew of four if the crew were crowded into each other. Otherwise, the Dragon had to land in an official port, something that Gomez hadn’t wanted to do on this trip.
She had thought the shuttle practical, and it had felt that way, until she was faced with the emptiness of the docking bay.
The other shuttles were clamped into place. The lights were on low, as they always were when a shuttle came in to dock. Bots scurried to the side of the shuttle she had just left, securing it, and making certain that it had brought nothing on its hull.
She had to go through a cursory decontamination. If Simiaar or Apaza or anyone had been waiting for her, they would have been just outside the actual bay itself, in a little reception area.
But she would have been able to see them from the moment she stepped off the shuttle.
And she didn’t.
In fact, that little reception area was dark.
Her stomach clenched.
Maybe her visit to the surface hadn’t been as harmless as she had thought it had been.
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