Simiaar pulled the door open, balancing a tray precariously on one hand. Two steaming mugs slid one way and then another, stopping only when they encountered bowls of finger food.
Gomez wasn’t sure she could eat, but she’d known Simiaar long enough to understand that Simiaar thought food the solution to any serious problem.
“Need a break?” Simiaar asked.
Gomez needed to go back one hour and remain ignorant of the Anniversary Day bombings. Actually, she needed the entire universe to go back a month and stop the bombings before they happened.
“There’s more?” Gomez asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Simiaar said.
“They come back, do more damage? If so, why didn’t you just show me the complete footage and not let me—”
“It’s not that bad,” Simiaar said, then corrected herself. “Afterward anyway. It’s cleanup and stuff. But what I have to show you, it’s upsetting. To us.”
“To us,” Gomez repeated. “You and me?”
“Yeah.” Simiaar set the tray down on the built-in desk.
Gomez took her mug of tea, not because she wanted something to drink, but because she needed to warm her hands. They had grown cold. She had grown cold.
“Just show me.” She couldn’t handle the suspense. And she was usually the most patient person on the Stanley.
Simiaar shut off the imagery of the Top of the Dome. She flipped through several other stored images, things that she had clearly followed as she tried to piece together what occurred.
“I’m going to show you the raw footage,” she said, “because the commentary is—well—let’s say it’s ignorant.”
Gomez leaned over the chair, gripping the hot mug of tea. It smelled faintly of perfume. Not Earl Grey, which she found too strong, but less pungent Lady Grey, which usually soothed her. She hoped that she wouldn’t come to associate her favorite tea with this moment.
She concentrated, so that the smell wouldn’t become linked.
Suddenly security footage appeared on the floor. The security footage was less condensed than the overview, easier to manipulate. She immediately recognized Armstrong’s port. She’d arrived at it dozens of times. Armstrong’s port, judging by the footage, hadn’t updated its interior in nearly twenty years.
But she stopped looking at the structure of the port. Armstrong hadn’t been bombed—at least on what they were calling Anniversary Day.
She frowned, not sure what she should be looking at. All she saw was a group of passengers leaving the arrivals area and laughing as they made their way into the wider crowds. She started scanning the crowds, and then stopped, gasped, and nearly dropped her tea.
“Go back and zoom in,” she said.
Simiaar did.
The twenty faces—laughing faces—seemed so innocent. A group of family men, traveling together, cousins maybe, who looked a lot alike.
At least to the casual eye.
But Gomez’s eye wasn’t casual, and neither was Simiaar’s. They’d seen these faces before, these exact faces.
The men, walking through Armstrong’s ports, were clones.
“So what’s the ignorance?” Gomez asked, not because she wanted to know so much as she wanted to think. She needed a moment to get rid of the spinning sensation the last hour or so had started within her.
“The stupid announcers all seem to believe that because these men are clones of PierLuigi Frémont, they’re automatically mass murderers.”
Gomez looked directly at Simiaar. Simiaar was staring at the tiny three-dimensional forms in front of her.
“But they are mass murderers,” Gomez said. “They’re the ones who bombed all the domes, right?”
“Yeah,” Simiaar said. “But not because they’re made from the same stuff as PierLuigi Frémont. They bombed the domes because they were designed for it. You know that. We know that.”
Gomez did know it. She took a deep breath, remembering those faces—that whole incident. It had been—what?—fifteen, maybe sixteen years ago when the Stanley was called to Epriccom because of a problem that the Eaufasse couldn’t handle.
“You mean to tell me that no one has any idea that someone cloned PierLuigi Frémont?” she asked.
Simiaar looked at the frozen image. She sighed. “Who knows what the press has been told and what the governments actually know.”
Gomez recognized that tone. “You have a guess.”
“Yeah,” Simiaar said. “My guess is that someone wrote up the Epriccom incident, it got filed, and no one even noticed the link to Frémont. Or knows it now.”
“What about Thirds?” Gomez asked.
“I don’t know,” Simiaar said. “We handed him to the lawyers, remember.”
Gomez did remember, but that wasn’t what she was asking. Thirds was supposed to talk with authorities about everything he knew. Then they would decide what to do with him.
“Did you look up Thirds?” Gomez asked Simiaar.
“I don’t research well,” Simiaar said. It was a bold-faced lie. She researched brilliantly, but only for cases that she had in front of her.
“You want me to do this,” Gomez asked.
Simiaar grabbed a lemon cookie off the tray. She broke the cookie in half before taking a bite from it.
Simiaar clearly wasn’t going to say a thing. Gomez didn’t like that.
“So,” Gomez said, “we just assume that the Alliance has known about the clones of PierLuigi Frémont for more than a decade and has chosen to ignore it, even now after some of those clones bombed the entire Moon. We’ll just let the Alliance handle it.”
“Dammit, Judita,” Simiaar said around a mouthful of cookie. “You know no one in the Alliance has put Epriccom and the Moon bombings together.”
“I don’t know anything.” Gomez glanced at those faces. Laughing. Apparently they arrived together. Why would that happen? It would make the attack obvious.
“You’re curious,” Simiaar said.
Gomez glanced at her. The cookie was gone.
“Yeah,” Gomez said. “I am. And that doesn’t surprise you.”
Because they knew each other so well. They had become the best of friends partly because they both reacted the same way to something disturbing. They wanted to know why that something happened and how to resolve it.
But they also trusted that they were the first responders to some problem outside of the Alliance. They had to believe—they had to—that the Alliance would then take the information they had provided, and make sure everything would work out.
Gomez closed her eyes and leaned on that chair. Her legs were tired from standing in the same position for so long, but she didn’t want to settle.
She didn’t dare.
If she didn’t find out how the information about the PierLuigi Frémont clones failed to get to the right people in the Alliance, then she would never trust the Alliance again.
TWENTY-ONE
THEY STARED AT him, everyone in the recreation yard of the prison. Only it wasn’t a yard—not in the sense that he had known as a child. The prison was a space station, not planetside. He hadn’t seen anything growing outside of the greenhouses in nearly fifteen years.
Trey wanted something to cover his face, a hood, a scarf, something to shield him. But of course, he had nothing here. So he kept his expression impassive. He stared at the holographic images playing out in the center of the recreation yard as if they had nothing to do with him.
And technically, they did have nothing to do with him.
He’d been in this prison longer than anyone else in the yard—almost half his life. He knew the system; he had been king of the cell block since he was twenty years old. He was thirty-one now, trapped here, forgotten.
But now the other inmates—all male, all human—stared at him, as if he had caused the explosions on Earth’s Moon. Twelve explosions or more, hundreds of thousands dead, and the people who had committed the crimes, the men who had committed the crimes, the clones who had committed
the crimes, all had his face.
Because, like them, he had been created from DNA provided by PierLuigi Frémont.
He wasn’t the only one here who was a clone of PierLuigi Frémont, but he was the only one who was of an age with the Anniversary Day attackers, and he was the only one in this cell block.
And for the first time in a long time, the fact that he was the only one made him afraid.
The prison had been on edge since word of the bombings trickled in a month before. But the imagery didn’t show up until two days ago, and even then it had only been of explosions. Those caused cheers throughout the block, but the new images, the ones that started running today, were the ones that unnerved him.
Because those images showing the faces of the bombers as they passed through the port on the Moon’s largest city felt like something else.
Something new. Something that shoved the emotions building for the past month off that edge.
Those images finally gave the inmates something to do.
Trey realized that maybe a half second before they did. He managed to shout, “Lawyer!” just before the nearest inmate shoved Trey so hard that he stumbled backwards into two other inmates.
They pulled his arms back and held him tightly as the first inmate, his friends, and men who had wanted Trey dead—or at least, no longer in control—for a long time, punched that pretty face of his. Or what they used to call his pretty face.
His unusual face. Pale-skinned, blue-eyed. Rare and memorable, just like his progenitor, PierLuigi Frémont. Only Frémont had founded colonies with that face, claimed a special relationship with the people who followed him because of his unusual coloring, claimed he had descended as a pure example of the first men who left the Earth.
Trey wasn’t pure and he technically hadn’t descended from anyone. He hadn’t even realized that there were people who looked different from him until he was sixteen years old. He hadn’t even met a woman until that year, not that it had done him any good. The women he had met since had either run the prison or were upper-level guards.
His entire life was about being locked up somewhere—at first in a place he considered the entire world, which was just a small domed community, and then in ships, and finally here, the one place he’d believed he had conquered.
Until right now.
Fists in his face, knuckles against his skin. His nose shattered. His teeth bit through his cheeks. Blood filled his mouth. Someone punched him in the stomach, knocking whatever air he had left in his lungs out.
He gagged, then choked.
All of this happened in a kind of silence—the men didn’t scream at him. They just hit him, the only sound flesh against flesh. Or the shattering of bones.
Something should have broken this fight up right away. There were androids on the yard, equipment that sensed a fight and stopped it.
The beating continued, not because the equipment failed, but because someone wanted it to continue.
And then the hold on his arms ceased. He toppled to his knees. Somehow he managed to put out his hands before he fell on his face.
He coughed up blood, spit blood, tried to wipe at his nose but nearly fell over, his balance gone. A door slammed, then another.
His eyes had swollen shut. He had to breathe through his mouth. He couldn’t have asked for help if he tried.
Hands grabbed him and he flinched.
“Don’t fight me, laddie,” said a soft voice, a male voice, a vaguely familiar voice. It took him a moment to realize he heard the voice of the prison’s doctor, someone he had barely interacted with, someone who had warned him once that the violence he had used to survive would swing back on him one day.
That day was now, apparently.
“You let me take you to the infirmary. We’ll put a guard on you. A real one this time, not that you deserve it. You knew about those foul doings?”
Of course he hadn’t known anything about the attack on the Moon. Because that was what the doctor was asking about, wasn’t it? Hadn’t the doctor thought this through?
Trey had been locked up here. He had had no visitors, he hadn’t contacted anyone, not that there had been anyone to contact. Everyone he had known (everyone he had loved) was dead. No one even knew he was alive.
But he couldn’t say that. He couldn’t say anything from that injured mouth of his.
They had tested him after he arrived, found an intelligence so high they couldn’t comfortably measure it. They figured he’d been artificially enhanced, but in his reading, he’d learned that PierLuigi Frémont had been unusually mentally gifted, apparently something encoded in his DNA.
Or so Trey had liked to believe.
Not that he had told anyone that, either. He hadn’t wanted to call attention to his manufacture, or the fact that he had come from the DNA of a man who had murdered millions.
But that man, that DNA, had given Trey a prodigious brain, and Trey had trained that brain to anticipate things. (Not that he had foreseen this beating. How could he have known?)
He knew now that he would go from king of the cell block to the biggest pariah.
Everyone would try to hurt him, except maybe the damn doctor, who seemed to believe there was something redeemable in everyone.
Trey wasn’t sure there was anything redeemable about himself. But he wanted to live, and that might not be possible here.
Unless he proved himself worthy of survival.
He couldn’t just claim that he was innocent.
No one believed in innocence here.
He had to claim that he knew something. And maybe, deep down, he did. That shout for a lawyer might be what would save his life.
He let the doctor drag him out of the yard and into an enclosed plastic gurney with its own lock, its own air, and its own security shield. He would probably live in that damn thing until the lawyer arrived.
But that was okay. Because he would live.
Moment to moment, day to day, he would live.
And maybe, just maybe, they would move him from here. And maybe, just maybe, those damn prisoners had screwed up his face enough that no one else would gaze on him and see the Moon murderers.
Or PierLuigi Frémont.
Maybe, just maybe, this moment was the second luckiest moment of his life.
Maybe this moment would actually set him free.
TWENTY-TWO
IT TOOK A lot to shake up Gomez. She’d seen aliens die in front of her. She’d seen humans murdered in horrible ways. She’d seen negotiations that involved practices she didn’t believe possible.
She’d had to eat foods that weren’t really food for humans, sit in rooms that smelled so bad that she could barely breathe, touch furniture made from substances that made her stomach turn.
To do her job, she had become hardened. She was proud of that. She loved her work, and she was good at it. Part of being good came from being unflappable.
The attacks on the Moon—which happened more than a month ago—upset her. Not just because so many died. Not just because she never expected to see domes in the most settled part of the human universe shatter, but because she felt like she had a small hand in the attacks.
She hadn’t followed up on the clones of PierLuigi Frémont. She had encountered sixteen of them, had an inkling there were many more, and she hadn’t followed up.
Sure, she had reported it all to her superiors. She had flagged the incident as unusual. But she had done so because of the interactions with the Eaufasse and the Peyti, not because of the clones.
She sat in the office part of her suite on the Stanley. Early in her career, she had divided up the captain’s quarters, feeling she had too much space. When the ship got retrofitted years ago, she’d had the captain’s quarters reassembled and enlarged.
Part of her ability to survive in this job, part of her ability to do well, came because she had a quiet place to go, to think, and to recover.
She had designed an office in the very front of the cabin, where she
met with staff or strangers who needed some kind of privacy. Two doors led to the living quarters: one door went directly into the small galley that the ship’s chef used to prepare special meals for her dining room (another affectation she had initially removed and then later reinstated on the ship).
The second door went directly into the main relaxation area, away from the dining room, away from the kitchen, and away from the noise. She was the only one who could enter this area and the attached bedroom. She kept both spotless. She didn’t even want help cleaning, although technically, she could have had some of the human staff scrub her quarters to complete perfection.
She didn’t even use robot- or nano-cleaners. She wanted no one to see her when she relaxed. Usually she shut off everything except her emergency links. She didn’t want recording, she didn’t want tracking, she didn’t want any record of what she did in her off time, not that she was doing anything wrong.
She just needed to be completely alone.
She valued the privacy more than she valued the assistance.
After seeing the holoimages of the Moon’s destruction, she went to the private area and paced. She had to shake the unsettled feeling that she had. She couldn’t think clearly when she was unnerved.
Emotions hurt her work; they didn’t help it.
And the emotions rising inside her made her shake.
She needed answers.
She went into her small office and sat down. Here she had a dedicated computer that was networked with the EAFSS system. All the records, all the court cases, and all kinds of legal information about various species—aligned and non-aligned—filled this database. It grew by vast amounts of information every second, with reports from non-human marshals to interactions with non-aligned species to discoveries of yet another culture no one had interacted with.
Just sitting down and logging in made her hands stop shaking. She knew that five clones had survived the attack on Epriccom, although they’d been in terrible shape when they left the planet. And of course, Thirds had survived. He had disappeared into the system, and she had never checked up on him.
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