Some of the news announcers on various feeds kept showing that as a warning: here’s what would happen to anyone who tried to cross a sectioning dome.
Zhu had seen it as an example of bad timing, which was where his brain had gotten stuck. Bad timing—he’d suffered from it with anything to do with the Moon, including Berhane.
And he didn’t want to think about her.
He stepped around the grouping he had once called the Most Comfortable Chairs in the Universe. He’d actually gone to all kinds of nearby furniture stores, tried all kinds of specialty chairs, and even some that claimed to have nanotech that would redesign the chairs to fit whoever sat in them. He’d seen the choice of chair for his office as an important moment in his life.
Now that quest seemed so damn ridiculous.
It all did.
He walked to his precious window, saw his own reflection superimposed over the unusually well-lit part of space around Athena Base. The largest space station in the sector. All the important people in his profession seemed to gravitate here. They had the ritziest clients, both personal and corporate. And the ratio of human to alien defendants was stunningly low.
His face was drawn, shadows under his eyes so deep that no short-term enhancements could make him look healthy. He hadn’t slept much since Anniversary Day, and some of that was his own fault.
When it became clear that Berhane had untold reserves of strength, and she went off on some volunteer mission, she’d left Zhu at complete loose ends. He hadn’t expected it. He had, before consulting with her, got an extension on his time in Armstrong, pleading Anniversary Day, and everyone at Schnable, Shishani, & Salehi understood.
In fact, the senior partners at S3 had made it clear that they wanted him to stay in Armstrong. They wanted him to represent the firm in any way possible, so that it would appear to S3’s most important clients that the firm was doing everything it could in this time of crisis. The firm had even offered his services to some corporate defendants who looked like they might have liability in building collapses in the surviving sections of the ruined domes—buildings that had been built before the codes had changed to accommodate sectioning domes.
Zhu had done preliminary work, stomach churning—the churn so bad that sometimes he got physically ill—then handed the cases off to some of the associates that S3 had sent to the Moon to handle the upcoming caseload.
He couldn’t bear to defend people who had caused even more deaths through their negligence. Not after what he’d seen.
Not with Berhane—scholarly, intellectual Berhane—in hospitals and morgues, helping to identify the dead.
He’d never thought he’d feel admiration for Berhane. He’d always felt a bit of contempt for her, or at least, he had after he graduated from law school and she went back for yet another degree, living off the money her father made, not really contributing anything to any type of society (even though she thought her great scholarly work—whatever that would be—would contribute some day).
Then, just after Anniversary Day, after Berhane’s announcement that everything would change, her words came true. He was defending venal idiots, and she was doing her best to make lives better.
It helped that her father had survived. He hadn’t even been hurt. He’d just been detained by the authorities, like everyone else at that speech the governor-general was giving when she collapsed.
Her father wasn’t sure he approved of his daughter’s newfound work, and for once she didn’t listen to him. She had stood up to him, told him that the Alliance was in crisis, and he needed to do all he could to help.
Her father had listened.
So had Zhu, even though he hadn’t wanted to. He hadn’t had time to help with the injured or the wounded. He didn’t have the skills to help with the rebuilding. He was supposed to prevent the plaintiffs from getting any money from the companies who had built the shoddy homes in various domes, so that those people would have even less money. They had lost loved ones, and they would now get no compensation for something that clearly was the fault of the corporations involved.
Zhu leaned his head against the warm window. Temperature controlled, like everything else on this station. He could set the temperature in his office for each item of furniture, have a warm chair if he wanted it, a cool window, a hot expanse of carpet. He could scent the air with chocolate if it suited his fancy, or he could tint the oxygen mix with a bit of purple to match the walls.
He’d worked for such luxury, believing it mattered, believing that people needed a defense in this universe.
And they did.
They did.
The problem was that the people who needed it the most couldn’t pay for it, and those who were actually guilty, those who had offended everyone, including that strange thing called human dignity, could afford to buy their way out of most crimes.
You’ll hit a point, said Rafael Salehi, the great-great-great grandson of one of the founders of this firm, and the partner who had championed Zhu, when you’ll wonder what’s the point of defense. You’ll feel tainted. You’ll think you’ve sold your soul for a bit of wealth and privilege. That’s why you do pro bono work. Or you volunteer for a few months back at the Impossibles. You’ll see the need for defense then. You’ll remember it’s not just about the guilty. It’s also about what’s right.
Zhu had thought that conversation a bit pretentious at the time. The speech he gives everyone, he’d said to the other new hires over drinks after hours. He’d promised himself he would forget it.
But he hadn’t. Apparently, it had gone in on some deep level. Apparently, he had stored it away for the times when he needed it.
And one of those times was now.
He sighed and turned away from the window, not liking the look of his face any longer. It was just a reminder of the fact that he hadn’t been sleeping.
He sat behind his desk and scrolled through the private firm files to see what had come up on his docket while he was away.
He did need to do some pro bono work, but it couldn’t be just any work. It had to be work that would have real value, work that would be the legal equivalent of the work Berhane was doing on the Moon.
Zhu needed to clean up some kind of major mess, to be on the side of good for a change.
He also needed a case he could win.
Maybe he should return to the Impossibles, because that was what he was looking for. Something completely impossible in the Earth Alliance’s legal system. A defense case that had a worthy defendant, and something worth winning.
Everyone broke the law these days, and most people claimed they had a good reason for doing so. But those reasons were usually ignorance or a desire to get away with violating an “unjust” law.
The Earth Alliance legal system was deeply flawed. The laws were primarily local—if a human broke a law on some alien planet, even if that law made something like singing completely illegal, that human would be subject to the legal system of the native culture. And by human standards, those laws were often barbaric.
The disappearance systems had arisen so that humans could escape the reach of non-human justice, and so many corporations encouraged just that kind of behavior. There was an entire division in this law firm dedicated to Disappearance Theory and Practice, trying to find legal loopholes that would enable human corporations to operate their own disappearance services. Right now, most of them operated illegally, paying disappearance services under the table to squire away employees who ran afoul with local laws.
As a young lawyer, he’d thought defending those people fun and worthwhile. Until he saw how many people actually went off to alien justice systems and how most of those people were simply too poor to pay for a disappearance service.
Worse, how many of them had to send their children to serve time for their crimes, because aliens like the Wygnin believed that punishment for crimes went through entire generations.
Zhu tilted his head back. He would search for the right pro bono case
. He didn’t need more frustration at the moment, which ruled out the Impossibles. Most cases brought before a judge there were decided long before the attorneys made their pleas.
No, he’d take a case he could actually win.
Something that would make a difference.
He just didn’t know what that was.
TWENTY
GOMEZ AND SIMIAAR went to the forensic lab on the Stanley only because Simiaar insisted. Gomez still considered the lab the most important part of the large ship. When the Stanley had been retrofitted ten years before, she’d demanded that the lab increase in size and that Simiaar get more staff. The lab was one reason that Simiaar stayed on the Stanley, even though there were nicer berths for a woman of her age and experience.
Simiaar had two offices—a small one that no one entered, no exceptions, and a larger one where she held small meetings. That office had two extremely comfortable chairs that could re-form into one uncomfortable couch, a built-in desk with an elaborate computer system, and a small testing area.
It also had a rectangular space that Simiaar set aside for holoviewing, mostly because she hated having imagery superimposed on her existing furniture. Since most of what she viewed concerned dead bodies and/or some kind of alien goo, no one really blamed her for being unwilling to watch that on her desk.
Simiaar indicated the chairs. “You can sit if you want, but I’m going to stand.”
Gomez had heard that before, and it never boded well. “What am I watching? A new case?”
“No.” Simiaar put her hands on the back of the overstuffed chair. Her fingers dug into the fabric. “While you guys were onsite, negotiating your sex deal—”
“It’s not a sex deal,” Gomez said.
“I don’t know what else you’d call it,” Simiaar said.
“An apology,” Gomez said, “and I don’t want to hear you call it anything else.”
“I’d love to have someone apologize to me like that someday,” Simiaar muttered.
Gomez resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She’d already had this discussion with Simiaar. They’d talked about the impropriety, the level of coercion involved, the discomfort and the religious side, and still Simiaar joked about it.
Of course, both she and Simiaar had learned over the years that sometimes an inappropriate joke was the only way to deal with a difficult situation. Usually they joked together.
“You wouldn’t find this one funny if it were you,” Gomez said, simply because she couldn’t keep quiet.
“If it were me, I wouldn’t have camped on that godforsaken lake in the first place.” Simiaar raised a hand to stop Gomez from speaking, as if she knew that Gomez was going to say she missed the point. “If I had been stupid enough to come this far out to camp on some stupid lake that looks like one of a hundred-thousand lakes on Earth, except for the dueling sunsets, I would have apologized the minute I realized I screwed up. Don’t these people know what can happen when you cross another culture?”
That was a question Gomez asked herself almost every day. With all of the troubles constantly in the news about people charged with crimes in the Earth Alliance for doing things in alien cultures that were everyday human activities in human-centered cities, she would have thought that sane people would be careful when they traveled to a non-human environment.
But most humans never researched where they were traveling to, expecting someone—maybe someone like Gomez—to take care of them. They were always shocked when she informed them that, legally, she was obligated to abide by local laws and customs, just like she would be inside of the Alliance.
Maybe more than she would be inside of the Alliance, since no treaties governed the interactions humans had with others outside of Alliance space.
Gomez didn’t want to think about this anymore. She actually wanted to plan some time off. But she wouldn’t get that until she was done with whatever Simiaar wanted her to see.
“What are we going to watch?” Gomez asked.
Simiaar sighed.
Gomez then realized that Simiaar had instigated the old argument about the Ceanese situation because what they were about to watch made her extremely uncomfortable.
Simiaar glanced at the rectangular space, even though nothing was happening in it.
“While you guys were dealing with the apology, I decided to catch up on the news. I hadn’t paid any attention to what’s been going on in the Alliance for nearly two months now—”
“Me, either,” Gomez said, not liking where this was heading.
“—and I selected for human stuff only, the biggest stories, just so that I could—you know—converse about current events when we got back into Alliance space.”
Simiaar’s fingers were still digging into the top of that chair.
“We missed…” her voice trailed off. She raised her head, her eyes red-rimmed. In all their years together, Gomez couldn’t remember seeing that before. “We nearly lost the Moon, Judita.”
Gomez didn’t understand. What moon? When? How could someone lose a moon? “What do you mean, nearly lost the moon?”
“I’m not staying for this part,” Simiaar said. “I’ll get us something to drink. You want tea or something? If it weren’t for the damn apology, I’d offer you something stronger.”
“What part?” Gomez asked.
“I found an overview. It compressed a few days of information into an hour. I’ll be back.”
She toggled the program on, then left the office before Gomez could complain.
A flat, gender-neutral voice recited the facts of something everyone was now calling Anniversary Day, which confused Gomez enough right there. She knew about Anniversary Day because she had family on the Moon. Anniversary Day commemorated the deaths in a bombing in Armstrong four years ago that could have destroyed the entire city, but didn’t.
It took her a few moments to reconcile the images that she saw with what happened. And that whatever happened had happened recently, not four years ago.
The voice narrated as the images bled from one scene of destruction to another. Apparently someone or someones hijacked this year’s anniversary commemorations. Out of nineteen major domed cities on the Moon—Earth’s Moon, the Moon to most human-centered societies—out of those nineteen domes, twelve had holes blown through them.
The destruction when a dome blew open was extreme. Buildings fell apart, people died horribly—and that was only in the outer areas. Nearer to the bombs themselves, actual craters appeared. The destruction was the worst that Gomez had ever seen.
She leaned into the chair, glad that Simiaar had warned her not to sit down. Gomez wanted to pace, but she also didn’t want to take her eyes off the imagery playing out on the floor in front of her. Bombings, destroyed cityscapes, blackened and broken domes, people lurching through rubble searching for loved ones—devastation on a scale she couldn’t quite comprehend, on a scale she couldn’t entirely ignore.
She couldn’t recognize most of the places involved, although she’d visited several of them. And even though everything happened weeks ago, she felt panic rise within her.
Surely someone would have contacted her if she lost family. Surely she would have known by now.
But she didn’t know. She checked her links as she watched, and found nothing.
That wasn’t unusual. Sometimes it took forever for information to reach the Frontier.
Her mouth was dry. She wanted to look up her family, but she also wanted detail, and this overview was not about detail.
Instead, it gave her statistics.
Hundreds of thousands—maybe a million—people died that day. More would have died if it weren’t for the quick thinking of the Moon’s chief of security, Noelle DeRicci. She had ordered the domes to be sectioned, limiting the damage to the areas where bombs went off.
Among the hundreds of thousands dead were most of the influential mayors of those cities, and Celia Alfreda, the visionary leader who had been trying to unite the domes into a single gov
ernment.
Important people and people whose names never would have registered on any news site. More people than anyone could count. Hundreds of thousands, the gender-neutral voice had said, maybe a million or more.
Maybe.
Because no one knew.
Sometimes in bombings, bodies evaporated. They became tiny pieces of blood and bone and brain matter, so small that it would take years of painstaking searches with nanobots to separate one drop of blood from another, to run the DNA, to identify the lost people.
Gomez leaned against the chair, hand to her mouth. She thought her job had trained her to accept bad news with relative calm, but this—this was nothing like anything she had ever faced.
Her family was in Armstrong, one of the only domes that wasn’t attacked. Apparently the bombing there got thwarted; something—she didn’t quite process how it all happened—interfered, got solved, got noticed.
Too much information, too much shocking information for her to understand all of it.
She wasn’t sure she moved a muscle through the whole summary. And as it wound down, she realized that what she saw only covered the first three days of the disaster.
The overview ended. It had been compiled a month before, a week after the disaster—or the disasters.
The imagery froze on the remains of the Top of the Dome, a restaurant/hotel complex in Tycho Crater, a place she had actually visited on vacation the last time she had gone to the Moon—which had to be maybe twenty-five years ago now.
She leaned against the chair—wishing, hoping that this was all an elaborate ruse. But she’d been watching closely. She had seen familiar faces among the people interviewed, people she knew by name if not reputation, and she knew, she knew, it wasn’t faked.
Still, she would double-check. Mostly because she didn’t want to believe destruction on this scale was possible.
Not in a modern society. Not in the heart of the Earth Alliance, around 384,000 kilometers from the Earth herself. Earth’s doorstep, the Alliance called the Moon. So close that they were often considered inseparable.
A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel Page 12
