A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  “As a person,” she said, and meant it. Even the worst alien offenders got time in court. The fact that a clone of a human being—who was, biologically, human as well—didn’t have that automatic right seemed wrong to her.

  His left eye narrowed, so that it was as slitted as his right eye. “Why didn’t you say that fifteen years ago?”

  “I had no idea what would happen to you,” she said.

  “As an officer of the law?” His question was snide.

  “As an officer of frontier law,” she said, “I go from crisis to crisis, resolving what I can and then moving to the next place, assuming that the system would work as intended.”

  “Well, it worked as intended for me,” he said bitterly.

  She sighed. “I had no idea you were an illegal clone.”

  That narrow-eyed look again. She could feel his disbelief.

  “How could I?” she asked, and hoped it didn’t sound too defensive. “I knew you were a clone. I didn’t have time to look for a clone mark.”

  She almost added, I saved your life by getting you out of there, but she didn’t. She knew that would sound defensive.

  “Did they tell you what happened on Epriccom after you left?” she asked.

  “Why would they do that?” he asked. “There was no trial.”

  “You didn’t ask for one?”

  “I didn’t have the right to answers. I’m not anything, remember? Besides, who would I ask? You? I haven’t seen anyone from the Frontier Security Service in fifteen years. I don’t have a lawyer—I’m not entitled. And the prison officials believe that I’m just an inadequate laborer.” He held up his bent hand. “They aren’t even allowed to spend money to fix me. I’m surprised they can feed and clothe me, considering the fact that I can’t really work at the level they want.”

  One of the androids disappeared out the door TwoZero had come in through. Gomez didn’t see any instructions along her vision, so her time wasn’t up yet. But she wondered if that movement marked the beginning of the end of this interview.

  “So,” TwoZero said, “what happened on Epriccom?”

  “A couple of things,” she said. “Five of you survived initially, but three died.”

  “I knew that,” he said. “It happened fairly quickly. The others needed a full rebuild, which they weren’t entitled to as clones. And the authorized medical treatment wasn’t enough to save their lives. Thirty-Five of the Second, he survived too. And where he is, I have no idea.”

  She knew, but decided not to tell him. That clone—who also didn’t have a name (at least according to the system)—was in a non-aligned prison on the Frontier, which probably made Clone Hell look like an upscale club.

  TwoZero hadn’t stopped talking in that bitter tone of his. “And Thirds, he disappeared into the system because you championed him.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t champion him. If anything, I failed him, at least from his perspective. He wanted asylum from humans, to stay with the Eaufasse, and we didn’t allow that.”

  Thirds was in a different prison, and it was not maximum security. She had been relieved to discover that he was still imprisoned; she would have thought he would have gotten out by now, but maybe his illegal clone status had prevented him from leaving the system as well.

  “It looks like I know everything, then,” TwoZero said.

  “Except what happened to the dome you were raised in,” she said.

  He froze again. That seemed to be his response when deeply startled. This time, he held the position only for a few seconds.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said snidely. “You blew it up.”

  “I didn’t,” she said.

  “The Frontier Security Service did,” he said.

  “No.” She had to be careful here. He was just about to discover that everything he grew up with, everyone he grew up with, was gone. “We observed laser fire inside, and then an explosion. Whoever ran the dome destroyed it from the inside.”

  He was frozen again, all except for his eyes. They had teared up, which surprised her. She somehow hadn’t believed him capable of that kind of deep emotion.

  Maybe she had been judging him by the same standards she had judged Thirds.

  “You lie,” TwoZero whispered.

  “I can show you the images. I’ll have to get them approved by the warden, but I can show them to you,” she said.

  TwoZero was silent. She could actually see him thinking about all she had said. Then he turned his head slowly, blinking, and raising his clawed hand to his cheek. Getting rid of the tears.

  He believed her; she knew it. She wondered if that had been a part of the plan from the beginning—if all the clones inside that dome knew some would die there.

  “Did you examine the wreckage then?” he asked, his voice wobbling a little.

  “I didn’t,” she said. “The FSS did. No one survived.”

  He nodded almost dismissively, as if he didn’t want her to tell him any more.

  “Failures then,” he said. “We were all failures.”

  That was a childish voice. A lost voice.

  Thirds had emphasized failure too. He had sounded like failure was the worst thing of all. She had asked if everyone who failed died, at least according to the rules he grew up with.

  She had never forgotten what he had said. You can’t have a failure in a unit.

  You can’t have a failure.

  Everyone died.

  Like they had inside that dome.

  TwoZero took a deep breath, wiped at his cheek on more time, and then faced her again. His eyes were red, but dry.

  “You came all this way to tell me that?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I came all this way when I realized no one had ever talked to you.”

  He shook his head slightly. The movement seemed awkward. The skin on his neck didn’t quite move right. “And you’re going to—what? Heal me from within?”

  She ignored that. “I want to find out what you know.”

  His gaze became sharp, and she saw Thirds in him. “You think I was trained to assassinate people on the Moon?”

  So he knew about Anniversary Day. She hadn’t been certain. She didn’t know how much information prisoners got about the outside world.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Were you?”

  “I don’t know either,” he said. “But I suppose I can help you find out.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE TRIP FROM Athena Base to the prison where Zhu’s potential client resided took three days. Zhu did not take public transport. He opted for a private ship, with the approval of Salehi, and loaded the ship with the legal library and files from S3.

  Zhu decided to take the time to research potential problems with this client—real research, not AutoLearn. He wanted depth of knowledge, not a facile access to information.

  Even though he had answered the request for an attorney, he still couldn’t get information on the client. All he received was a summons to EAP 77743.

  The first thing he did, after settling into the ship, was investigate that particular prison base. It was at the far reaches of the sector, medium security, and filled with human and clone prisoners, most of whom either did hard time at one point or who were classified as “unusual.”

  Even after three days of research, he still wasn’t sure what “unusual” meant. There wasn’t even anything listed on the various legal gossip sites, not even a nickname for this particular prison base, which he also found unusual.

  His requests for information came back denied, which also told him something. He mentioned that to Salehi, who looked concerned.

  They bury prisoners there, Salehi said. You sure you want to go? Could be even worse than you think.

  Zhu wasn’t sure how it could be worse: he already figured he was dealing with a clone who was probably an exact replica of the assassins on Anniversary Day. Which meant he was going to see someone with the same genetic makeup as PierLuigi Frémont, something that mad
e him really nervous.

  Apparently, it—or the lack of information—made Salehi nervous too, because that was when he offered one of his company space yachts, complete with pilot, copilot, and security detail. Zhu didn’t really want that many people traveling with him, but they all came as a package. And one perk—or so Salehi claimed—was that the head of the security detail doubled as a chef.

  It turned out that the yacht was huge and Zhu rarely saw the others, except during meals. Even then, he would have skipped the visiting, but he realized he wasn’t changing positions enough. He was reading, listening, and watching information, buried in research, and if he didn’t move around occasionally, he got so sore that his body made strange cracking noises whenever he stood.

  On the second day, he had taken to using the exercise equipment in the captain’s suite, continuing his research as he did so.

  He learned next to nothing about EAP 77743, and of course he couldn’t get information on his client, so he spent most of his time digging into clone law and the biography of PierLuigi Frémont.

  The only place those two things intersected was the first place that had unnerved Zhu. Alliance law prevented the cloning of criminals, particularly criminals like PierLuigi Frémont. If the criminal was not rehabilitated or was deemed impossible to rehabilitate, the law clearly stated that he or his heirs could not sell his DNA or create clones. Any previously existing clones had to be destroyed upon conviction of the original.

  Since clones had to be registered, tracking down the clones was easy. Theoretically. Unless the clones were made outside of the system. There were a lot of designer criminal clones, used as weapons, information, and most often as thieves. Those clones were unregistered and impossible to trace.

  Zhu couldn’t tell, from the information he had, where the clones of PierLuigi Frémont had come from. At this juncture, he wasn’t sure if anyone knew. He had no idea if one of the coroners on the Moon had had a chance to examine the telomeres of the dead clones; that would at least reveal if they were clones of clones. Telomeres shortened with each replication, unless they were replaced through some kind of gene splicing thing he didn’t understand. What he did understand, from his research, was that the gene splicing thing left a trace of itself no matter who was doing it.

  So the secret of those clones—or at least one of the secrets—should have been in the clones’ DNA.

  From everything Zhu could tell about PierLuigi Frémont, the man wouldn’t have tolerated being cloned. He was grandiose beyond belief, a cult leader who founded three different colonies, and destroyed two of them completely before starting the third. Every person—man, woman, and child—had died in those first two colonies, all at the command of Frémont.

  The only reason the man got caught was that the people of Abbondiado, the third colony, staged an uprising and were smart enough to call in the Earth Alliance to help them. The Alliance arrested Frémont and destroyed anything he had touched. They called it “doing a full wipe,” and they were, theoretically, good at it.

  Zhu had even discussed the full-wipe technique one night over a spectacular dinner. He’d asked if the security detail he was traveling with had heard of PierLuigi Frémont. Of course they had—most humans had to study the bastard in school, mostly to see how both politics and biology could go wrong—but none of them had met him or anyone associated with him.

  Still, one member of the security detail, a woman named Olivia, had been involved in more than one full wipe during her years in the Earth Alliance Police Force. She was of the belief that a full wipe worked.

  Zhu had challenged her in his best courtroom manner. He’d been sitting across from her in the dining area, a small table surrounded by built-in bench seating. He had taken the corner with a view of both the doorway to the galley and a porthole looking out into space.

  Olivia, a tiny woman with large eyes, downturned lips, and muscles that looked both strong and unenhanced, had sat directly across from him, tearing into the steak that the chef had served. Where he had gotten real beef this far out, Zhu had no idea, and he wasn’t about to question it, because that meant he was also questioning his belief that what he was eating was real beef.

  “I’m shedding DNA everywhere,” Zhu had said to her. “A strand of hair here, skin cells there, and I can’t keep track of them. You go to my cabin, you’ll be able to get DNA off my unwashed clothes or the bed or the chair I sat in. It’s impossible to wipe it all out.”

  She had smiled at him, a motion that, until that moment, he hadn’t believed those lips capable of.

  “A couple of points,” she had said. “It doesn’t take long for DNA to get contaminated. The skin cells in this room, for example, are going to be hard to isolate. They float, and they’ll mix—yours and mine along with cells from everyone else who’s been in this room since the last time it was cleaned.”

  “But they can be separated,” Zhu said.

  “Yes, they can,” she said, “except that someone like you would complain about it in court. And scientists would worry that the cells were contaminated.”

  “Which reminds me,” Zhu said. “Cleaning bots collect DNA all the time. It would be easy to get those cells. I’m sure the cleaning bots on this ship already have some of mine.”

  “And the bots’ systems, if they are built to the Earth Alliance specifications, which have existed for centuries, automatically break up the tiniest cells. Instant contamination. Your bed is self-cleaning, at least on this ship, and in most places in the Alliance. Your clothing is also self-cleaning up to a point, though if you choose to wear it for five days straight you’ll thwart that system. Pretty much anything you touch cannot store your DNA for long, by Alliance law.”

  “And outside the Alliance?” Zhu asked.

  “Is like anything outside the Alliance. You’re taking a huge risk any time you leave.” She waved her fork around as she spoke. “When these criminals like your Frémont get arrested—”

  “He’s not my Frémont,” Zhu said, offended even though he didn’t want to be.

  “You know what I mean,” Olivia said. “When these criminals get arrested, not only is their DNA destroyed, but their whereabouts get tracked back decades. Mostly, we’re looking to see if they lived or traveled outside of the Alliance. That’s what you have to watch for. I’d look for it with your buddy Frémont.”

  That time she had done it to annoy him, and he realized it, so he didn’t take the bait.

  “What’s to stop some Earth Alliance official from stealing the DNA?” Zhu asked.

  “Besides the strict and somewhat nasty penalties for doing that?” Olivia asked. “Everything gets destroyed, usually by something really powerful. The preferred system is always fire, at a temperature high enough to melt bone. It’s easiest in space, of course. We could destroy this yacht like that with the touch of a button.”

  That made him shiver. He tried not to think about those details. He hated realizing how vulnerable being in space made him.

  “But domes or planetside,” she said, “fire gets used a lot. No one wants these bad guys replicated, so we work hard to make sure it’s impossible. Why else would the law call for preexisting clones to be destroyed?”

  That detail had disturbed him the most. He’d already done a lot of research at that point, and knew that the science showed the clones were human in all ways except their creation. The fact that the law allowed them to be destroyed because the original had proven both criminal and irredeemable seemed wrong on a variety of levels.

  “I don’t understand that,” Zhu said. “Why not destroy the legal biological children, then? And the killer’s parents. After all, they passed on the DNA. All the relatives should be destroyed.”

  “Some cultures do that.” Olivia didn’t seem concerned. She had continued eating, while the conversation had destroyed Zhu’s appetite. “Just not human ones. This is as close as we get to the ‘sins of the fathers’ thing that the Wygnin do.”

  Zhu hated it. He was also g
aining an understanding of why Salehi thought clone law the next frontier in the legal system.

  “Besides,” Olivia had said, still focusing on her steak, “the parents, the children, their DNA isn’t entirely from the original. The original is a combination in the case of the parents and a contributor in the case of the children.”

  “Can’t you pull apart that DNA to get the original?” Zhu asked.

  “All I know is that we were told it’s been tried and hasn’t worked.” She set her utensils down and pushed her plate aside. “Hell, there’s not even proof that the clones will have the same predilections as the original. In fact, the science says that they’ll be different just due to how they’re raised. But the science also postulates that with the right set of circumstances the clones will show the same tendencies as the original, and in the case of guys like Frémont, the Alliance thinks that risk of recreating a monster is too great to allow people like Frémont to reproduce in any way, once they’re incarcerated. No biological children and certainly no clones. Hence the full wipe.”

  “Well, somehow Frémont got cloned anyway,” Zhu had said.

  “At least twenty times,” Olivia said. “And if I were still in the Earth Alliance criminal justice system, I’d be making sure I knew how that happened to ensure that it wouldn’t happen again.”

  “You don’t think they’re doing that?” Zhu asked.

  “Haven’t heard,” she said.

  “Do you expect to?” he asked.

  She shrugged and got up, not even bothering to end the conversation. That had unnerved him almost as much as the discussion had. She had left him alone with his thoughts, which was where he had been too much these days.

  Human systems were imperfect. Alliance systems were filled with cracks and mistakes. He knew: he manipulated them all the time to his clients’ advantage.

  So he went back to work, digging deep into clone law, and still looking up information about PierLuigi Frémont, who, so far as Zhu could tell, had never once left the Alliance.

  Which was even more disturbing.