A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  “Do you think that’ll happen?” Zhu asked.

  Salehi smiled. “I think anything’s possible,” he said. “That’s why I build deserts in outer space.”

  Zhu grinned. “And I thought you built them to keep warm.”

  Salehi’s smile faded. “That too, my friend,” he said. “That too.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE PRISON BASE was actually dark. Gomez had been to a dozen different prison bases throughout the Alliance, and most were unbelievably well-lit places, so well lit, in fact, that she had always thought they would drive her crazy. She liked a bit of darkness, particularly at night. She had trouble sleeping in the light.

  But the lights on 8596 were dim at best. All the prison bases inside the Alliance had numerical designations, but they also had nicknames that developed over time. This one was called Clone Hell, and she was beginning to understand why.

  No outside ships could dock on 8596 because it was a maximum-security prison for the very worst offenders. The ships had to dock on the habitat base, where the guards and administrators lived. Guests could stay there as well. Theoretically, guests would stay while waiting for approval to visit the prisoners.

  Only, this place had almost no guests. The prison administration had responded with surprise when she requested a visit.

  It had taken longer to get here than she expected. Not because of travel time, but because she had to finish the apology with the Cean. The humans did apologize, and theoretically all was well, but she had debrief interviews to conduct. She hated doing so while she had Anniversary Day on her mind.

  Then she felt free to travel to Clone Hell.

  She hadn’t brought the Stanley to the habitat base. She had taken a shuttle, leaving the Stanley at a resort base so her crew could get some needed time off. She had docked at the habitat base, and she had stayed in a nearly empty hotel, courtesy of the Alliance, while she awaited the proper documentation.

  The documentation had come through quickly, partly because she was listed as the arresting officer in the clone’s file. It was impossible for her to distinguish which clone she was seeing. He was identified in the files only by his case and prisoner numbers.

  Even if he had been called by his name, she wouldn’t have known that either. The clones who had attacked Thirds hadn’t identified themselves to her, and as far as she knew, Thirds hadn’t identified them later.

  All she knew was that this clone was one of the two who hadn’t been near death when they were taken off Epriccom. His file—at least the one she could access—was very short on details. She had no idea how bad his injuries had been, if he had spoken to anyone, or even what exactly he had been charged with.

  After all, he had killed clones on a non-affiliated planet. Epriccom or the Eaufasse might have had a law against clone murders, but she doubted it or the clone wouldn’t have been here. In various places in the Alliance, clone murders were treated as major felonies, but in most places, human clone murders—governed by human law—were simply property crimes. Felonious property crimes, but property crimes nonetheless.

  She had to take a prison shuttle to 8596. The shuttle was for guests and administration. 8596, like most places in the Alliance, ran by a 24-hour Earth clock. She was arriving in the middle of 8596’s day, too early for shift-change. There were no other guests, and the shuttle was an automatic run.

  She had been alone on the shuttle, which she found a bit unsettling, particularly when she realized that the cockpit wasn’t just locked, it had been sealed closed. Even if there were a problem with the shuttle, she wouldn’t have been able to resolve it. She had no access to the controls at all.

  The docking port was relatively well lit, but she had entered on the administration side. After she had gone through all of the scans and decontamination units, she was allowed into the visitor center. It actually had windows that overlooked the prison proper. She saw rows and rows of units, some with tiny windows, and some with none at all.

  About ten stories down, she saw what the guard who had led her into the visitor center called “the yard.” There was no “yard”; they weren’t on a planet, and the bare patch below her had no plants.

  It was just a box with a more open skyline, a box that could probably fit fifty inmates. If the “yard” were anything like the other places she had visited around the Alliance, it could become whatever the administrators wanted it to be, from a sports arena to a garden-like spot to an uncomfortable vista that might punish the inmates more than give them a place for recreation.

  Most of these places were standard holochambers with the controls in a completely different part of the base, so that the inmates couldn’t break in and control the imagery they were seeing.

  She shivered. She spent most of her life confined to a ship, but she was in control. She had freedom of movement; she could even choose many of the cases she worked on. She got to see entire parts of the universe that no one else did.

  The idea of being in this dark and dingy place for the rest of her life unnerved her, just like it was supposed to do.

  Clanging caught her attention. She turned. She expected a guard to get her from the visitor’s center and take her to see the clone in a different part of the facility. Instead, clear walls dropped around various tables. A glowing arrow appeared on the floor, pointing toward a table and chair unit on the opposite side of the room from the window.

  Four android guards entered. They were taller than the average human and made of a burnished black material. They didn’t catch any light at all, which made them very difficult to see. They were lower-level androids—two arms, two legs, two eyes, but no nose and no mouth. They probably had built-in weapons as well, and some kind of recording device.

  In the human part of the Alliance system, android guards worked in areas deemed too dangerous to risk an actual human presence. These androids were built with extra materials so that the inmates could not kidnap an android for its parts. It would be impossible to disassemble, at least with anything available to the inmates themselves.

  And the androids were controlled through an off-site hub—what control they needed anyway. One reason to use androids instead of robots wasn’t just the pseudo-human form, but also because of the androids’ limited decision-making ability. While no one had yet perfected the art of human thought in an android system (or, if they had, someone or something had quashed the marketing), androids could make low-level decisions based on a set of parameters all on their own.

  Each one looked at her as it entered. They had silver eyes. She studied the androids as they moved. In the dingy atmosphere of this particular prison, the android guards would be almost impossible to see. They could hide in plain sight.

  An instruction menu dropped down over her left eye. It asked her if she wanted audio instructions or written instructions. Before she chose, it warned her, all emergency instructions would come in both forms.

  She chose written instructions. She didn’t want another voice coming through her links when she was going to concentrate on the clone.

  After she chose, the instructions scrolled across her vision.

  You will sit in the chair now glowing yellow.

  As she looked, one of the chairs in the unit near the arrow lit up dimly. Obviously, the system was old. Only the back and legs of the chair were illuminated. The seat glowed faintly, as if it tried to light up, but couldn’t.

  A protective screen will drop around you. You will be able to see, hear, and speak through the screen, but you will not be able to touch the inmate. Nor will you be able to pass anything through the screen. Even gaseous and/or airborne matter will not penetrate the screen without going through nanofilters first. The screen will remain as long as you are in the chair and/or the inmate is in the room.

  If these terms are acceptable to you, please take your seat.

  This was a lower-class facility. Most places she had gone in recent years allowed her to have a private protective bubble that moved with her. She hadn
’t been in a prison that restricted her to a single chair in more than a decade.

  She walked to the seat and touched the back. It was cool to her fingertips, which was good. She’d once sat in something like this when it was malfunctioning and had burned her skin.

  She lowered herself slowly, and then heard more protective walls fall around her.

  The inmate you requested will arrive in 2 minutes, 45 seconds….

  The information over her left eye continued a countdown. She tried to shut it off, and found that she couldn’t. But she could move the image to the side of her vision, so that she didn’t see everything through the numbers.

  Two more android guards arrived and took positions on the opposite side of the room from her. Then, precisely 2 minutes and 45 seconds from the notification, the inmate arrived.

  He wore a bright yellow jumpsuit that stood out even in the dim lighting. He was smaller than she remembered. The clones who had bombed Armstrong had looked bigger, full-grown adults who had spent time working on their muscles and their athletic ability, not boys running through a wilderness with laser rifles.

  As she studied the clone, though, she realized he walked with a limp. One arm was shorter than the other. He leaned toward his left, and something was off about his face.

  He had received no reconstruction after the weapons’ attack on Epriccom. The scars from those plantlike things remained visible on his body.

  She should have been prepared for that, but she wasn’t. Whenever she had sent injured human criminals into the system, they had received proper medical treatment, including enhancements that made the effects of the injury completely disappear.

  She had never seen anyone this damaged before.

  His gaze met hers directly, almost like a challenge. Had he seen her dismay? Had he pegged it to the more accurate term—disgust? She wasn’t sure.

  As he got closer, she realized what was wrong with his face. It was uneven. His right side had a large pucker, as if the skin had been pulled toward the ear. His mouth twisted slightly and his nostril was wider on that side. Ironically, his right eye was narrower, and his forehead smoother.

  PierLuigi Frémont had been a handsome man, for all his paleness. This clone of him was not.

  The clone sat down, slowly, not like he was worried that the chair would burn him the way that Gomez had been worried, but as if the movement hurt him.

  The jumpsuit covered everything except his hands, neck, and head. His neck had scars all the way around, ropy indentations that looked like something was still strangling him. His right hand curled slightly, the fingers turned inward.

  The right side was the one that had been truncated. He watched her assess his injuries—or what his injuries had wrought.

  Still, she wasn’t going to discuss them if she could at all avoid it.

  “Did they tell you who I am?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “You know, I never saw your face, but you changed my life.”

  She frowned slightly. She hadn’t changed his life. She had saved it, by ordering him off the moon.

  She wasn’t going to correct him, though. She needed information from him, and she didn’t want to have to threaten him to get it.

  She let his comment slide. She would return to it when and if the time came.

  “What do I call you?” she asked.

  “You don’t like the number system they have in the prison?” His smile only reached the left side of his face. “Or can’t you choose between my case number and my prisoner number?”

  “What do you call yourself?” she asked.

  “One unlucky bastard,” he said, the smile fading.

  He wasn’t going to make anything easy. Although, to be fair, she wasn’t sure why he should.

  “What did they call you back in that enclave on Eaufasse?”

  He froze. Then he blinked, as if the question had surprised him. After a moment, he inclined his head toward her as if he were conceding a point.

  She just wasn’t sure what point he was conceding.

  “They called me Twentieth of the Second,” he said.

  And the one who had escaped that day, the one who had brought her to Eaufasse in the first place, had been called Third of the Second, but he had also had a nickname.

  “And your nickname was?”

  He let out a small sound, almost like a laugh. This time, she suspected, the half smile on his face was intentional.

  “TwoZero,” he said. “Twenties was too confusing.”

  These questions made him relax; she wasn’t sure why. His expression didn’t soften—she wasn’t sure it could—but his gaze seemed less challenging than it had before.

  Before she had come, she had gone over the interview in her head several times. She wasn’t certain how to approach it; she wasn’t sure what, if anything, he knew about the event the Alliance was now calling Anniversary Day.

  Now that she was here, she decided to mix honesty with a soft interrogation. If it looked like he was going to bolt, she’d push harder.

  “Your case file is maddeningly empty,” she said. “I was surprised to find you here.”

  He leaned back just a little. “Why? You put me here.”

  “Technically, I didn’t,” she said. “You left my custody on the hospital ship. From then on, the courts decided your fate.”

  “Really?” he asked. “Because that’s not what I was told.”

  The chill in his tone made her wonder if she had taken the wrong tack. She didn’t want as much current information from him as she did information about his childhood and life on Epriccom.

  “What were you told?” she asked.

  “That you claimed I was a murderer, that you put me here.”

  She frowned. “I barely saw you on Epriccom. I never spoke to you directly, and I had to send you to medical attention immediately. After you left, I wrote up the entire case, but did not testify in any court.”

  He blinked again. She was wondering if it was a nervous tick, or caused by his injuries. Or if he was simply reassessing her.

  “I never went to court,” he said.

  “But you’re here,” she said.

  “In Clone Hell,” he said.

  “Maximum security,” she said, and because she couldn’t help herself, she added this question. “For a murder of clones?”

  “Those two words don’t go together,” he said. “Didn’t they teach that to you in marshal’s school?”

  “‘Murder’ and ‘clones’?” she asked, when it became clear that he wasn’t going to elaborate.

  He touched his left forefinger to his nose, then pointed at her. “You got it in one. Maybe you did go to marshal school.”

  “But you’re in a maximum security prison,” she said.

  He tilted his head. The frown made his forehead red on the left side, but the right side remained pale, as if blood couldn’t touch it. “You really don’t know why?”

  “I suppose I could ask the warden,” she said. “I did research your case. As I said, there’s very little in it.”

  “I’m here,” he said with some heat, “because I’m illegal. And you said that I was dangerous. Therefore, I’m here for life.”

  She was holding her breath. She made herself exhale as she thought. He was illegal. And dangerous? Well, of course he was dangerous. He’d been trained in murder as a young man.

  “You’re not an authorized clone,” she said slowly, as she figured out what he meant.

  “Oh, you are brilliant, Marshal. They should put you in charge of a frontier ship or something.” This time, his sarcasm was evident.

  She ignored the sarcasm. “None of this is in your file.”

  “Does it have to be?” he asked.

  “It should be, yes,” she said. “And for the record, whatever that means, I did not recommend anything for you except hospitalization. I figured the system would treat you fairly.”

  “How can it treat me fairly?” he asked. “I’m not human.”

/>   She knew what he meant, but she believed him to be human. But to say that now would sound like she was pandering to him. And she wasn’t.

  “Please,” she said. “Clarify for me. You’ve never been to court.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “You sent me to a hospital ship along with the other injured from the Second, and they could see that we were clones. Then we were sent various places for treatment. My treatment included a search for a valid clone mark. There was none, and when I came to, I couldn’t tell them where I was made or by whom, so I was stamped illegal. And because of your incident report, I was deemed violent, and unredeemable, and so I was sent here. For the rest of my natural—or unnatural—life.”

  Healed, but not repaired. Warehoused, because he was violent. And he had been violent. He had tried to kill Thirds. He had tracked down the other three to kill them as well, and had fired at them, at least according to the Eaufasse security records. Whether he had fired the deadly shot would never be determined.

  Had anyone explained that part to him? Or had he simply rotted in here, stewing in his own resentment.

  Oddly, she felt like she should apologize to him, primarily because she hadn’t been aware of what happened. If someone had asked her what she thought would happen to him—if she had given it any thought at all, which she hadn’t—she would have said that as a juvenile offender, he would have had extensive rehabilitation work, and maybe some nanotreatments to counteract the aggression trained into him from childhood.

  He might never have been allowed free—he was the descendant of a mass murderer, and had been raised to kill—but he might have gone to a nicer place, somewhere that would have kept him on the fringes of society, using whatever skills he had and giving him a better life than he clearly enjoyed here, and maybe giving him a chance to contribute, in some small way, to the society that paid for his incarceration.

  Plus, she would have thought that medical treatment would have included full repair.

  “You should have had time in court,” she said.

  “As what?” he asked. “An illegal clone?”