She had asked them to return early from their off time, and they had all gotten back to the Stanley within the hour. Even though the ship only had a skeleton crew, she had darkened the conference area and shut off all access to it.
If anyone condemned her for making these plans, she would lie. She would say this meeting never took place.
The very idea of lying about this shook her. A few days ago, she had not been that kind of woman.
“You gonna tell us what this is about?” Simiaar asked. She sat at the head of the table, as if she had called the meeting. She was chewing on a long, hard strand of some kind of thin, pink, stick candy, something she tried to buy every time she had leave off the ship. Her diet was usually stringent—no sugar, no additives, as healthy as healthy could be on the Frontier—but she had a weakness for these things, and binged on them during her off time.
Apparently, she still considered herself off.
“Lashante,” Gomez said, using her most no-nonsense voice, “you’re the only one who remembers what happened on Epriccom. Can you tell the others?”
Simiaar narrowed her eyes at the tone, then broke the candy in half. She set most of it on the table in front of her, and sighed.
Gomez braced herself for Simiaar’s next question—why didn’t Gomez just assign the others the overall incident report, not the one she had written, but the official one that had gotten stored in the history of the Frontier network? Gomez had actually debated doing that, but she had decided she didn’t even want that much information available to the rest of the crew.
She was so focused on her answer to the hypothetical question that she almost missed Simiaar’s actual question. “How deep into detail do you want me to go?”
Gomez hadn’t expected Simiaar to acquiesce so easily.
“Just the high points,” Gomez said, “with this year’s surprise as your ending.”
Simiaar bit the end off the half-candy, crunching it loudly. Then she took a swig of water from the glass she had brought into the room and set the rest of the candy stick down.
She was now officially back to work.
She looked at the others in the room.
“Okay, kids,” she said. “Back in the dark ages, long before you were baby deputies…”
She launched into the story of Epriccom as if it were a grand adventure. The others listened. Gomez watched them, assessing.
Nuuyoma’s face remained impassive, but his eyes widened at some of the telling. Gomez was glad it distressed him. She wanted him on this team. She trusted him more than anyone on the ship with the exception of Simiaar, and Gomez wasn’t sure she could go forward without him.
Chepi Verstraete listened with one hand over her mouth, her elbow braced on the table. She was small and slender, her tiny form disarming. Most humans—most aliens for that matter—saw her as ineffectual, but she was both strong and intelligent.
The researcher, Neil Apaza, could find anything quickly. He also had enough basic knowledge of various scientific techniques that he could be a hands-on assistant to Simiaar.
He was the only one that Gomez couldn’t entirely read. He was chewing on his thumbnail, a frown between his eyes, but as the story progressed, he didn’t look shocked. He looked confused.
Was he already familiar with this material? If so, why?
Gomez made herself look away. Apaza was the only person in the room she didn’t know very well. Whenever she saw him, he was hunched over a screen, tapping it, or mixing chemicals for Simiaar. He was heavy where Verstraete was slight, barely meeting the standard requirements for shipboard life and, Gomez would wager, no one had tested his fitness level since he qualified for the job two years ago.
He caught her looking at him, and then she remembered that he was the one who had tracked down TwoZero. He had known much of this material, just not why it had concerned Gomez.
Simiaar finished with her own reactions to the twenty clone assassins on Anniversary Day. Her tone had changed by then. The whole idea of a grand adventure was gone. Now, she admitted to something that even Gomez didn’t know: Simiaar felt like the entire Stanley team had screwed up somehow.
That revelation relaxed Gomez a bit. Underneath everything, she felt the same way. She knew that she wasn’t in charge of the others in the FSS nor did she have control over the things that others in the Alliance did, even in law enforcement.
Still, if she had followed up…
Her gaze met Simiaar’s and she was surprised to see her old friend’s eyes were just a bit moist. Simiaar tilted her head toward Gomez, and said, “All yours.”
Gomez nodded, and gave Simiaar a small smile of thanks before taking over the meeting again.
“As Lashante and Neil know,” she said, “I just visited one of the injured clones. He calls himself TwoZero, and he gave me a lot of information about his upbringing, the expectations he lived with, and what had led up to the incident on Epriccom. Since he’s in Clone Hell and has been since he got out of the hospital, he has no direct knowledge of and no direct connection to Anniversary Day.”
Verstraete kept her hand over her mouth. Apaza still chewed on his thumbnail. Nuuyoma leaned forward.
“But?” he asked.
Gomez could already see from his expression that the entire story disturbed him. He knew that someone had screwed up somewhere; he just didn’t know where.
“But,” Gomez said, trying to keep her voice level, “no one has ever spoken to him. No one has debriefed him. No one has investigated anything he had to say. No one even listened.”
Apaza stopped biting his thumbnail and put his hand down. Verstraete frowned.
“The more I look, the more I wonder if this information was deliberately buried.” It sounded dramatic, said like that, but Gomez didn’t know how else to reveal what she knew.
Apaza nodded. “Makes sense. The information was awfully hard to find. Even this clone, this TwoZero, took a more-than-standard search to locate. He doesn’t have a name, not an official one, and he’s registered in the system under two different numbers, neither of which are linked together. And, for the record, neither of them have both a two and a zero.”
Gomez wanted to thank him. She felt a stronger thread of relief than she should have, given how much she had already investigated. But she had been feeling paranoid, and the other side of that feeling was a sense of doubt, wondering if she had made everything up.
She gave him a small smile. “Normally, I would flag all the reports, send them through the chain of command, and insist that someone follow up on all of this. The problem is that I did so fifteen years ago, and the reports got buried, along with the clones. And then there’s the difficulty we had finding TwoZero, not to mention the other two survivors. Something is off here.”
Verstraete’s hand formed a fist, then fell away from her face. “What are you saying? That the Alliance has something to do with Anniversary Day? That’s crazy. Why would they do that?”
Nuuyoma shifted in his chair so that he faced Verstraete.
“The Alliance is composed of individuals,” he said. “Some good, some bad.”
“There are systems to weed out the bad ones,” Verstraete said.
Simiaar snorted. “You’re sure of that? Because I’d like to know those systems. Some of the deputy coroners I got assigned to the Stanley back in the day certainly needed weeding.”
“But you’re talking about incompetence,” Verstraete said. “The marshal here is talking about something deliberate, something anti-Alliance.”
“You’ve never encountered anyone who’s anti-Alliance?” Nuuyoma asked.
“Not who works for the Alliance,” Verstraete said.
“And youth triumphs over brains,” Simiaar muttered.
For once, Gomez didn’t chastise Simiaar for speaking her mind in a meeting. Gomez let that statement stand.
But she did add, “I’m not saying that the Alliance is connected at all. However, we’re dealing with some delicate things in this inst
ance. Illegal clones, who may or may not be related to PierLuigi Frémont—”
“How can you doubt that?” Simiaar asked.
“Lashante,” Gomez said in her shut-up-now voice. “These could be some kind of designer criminal clone grouping made to look like Frémont for effect.”
“I suppose,” Simiaar said in a tone that actually meant are you kidding?
Nuuyoma was looking directly at Gomez. “Designer criminal clones can be weapons.”
“Yes,” Gomez said. “And we’re already dealing with another kind of weapon. Those plant-like things the Eaufasse developed. Thirds proved that humans could control them.”
No one in this group denied that Thirds was human, which she saw as a good thing.
“Then there’s Uzven’s behavior. I checked its records,” Gomez said. “That incident on Epriccom is the only black mark in its file. The only one, and it didn’t let the incident go for a long time. After the last time it tried to contact Thirds, Uzven went back to Peyla to teach Standard translators how to survive in human environments.”
“If I were the paranoid type,” Simiaar said, “I’d say that annoying Peyti got buried too.”
Gomez nodded. She was convinced that Uzven had been forced into other work. But she didn’t say that quite as bluntly as Simiaar. Instead, Gomez said, “For a translator with such a stellar record, the change in its career path is a bit sudden and unusual.”
Apaza was biting his thumbnail again. Verstraete folded her hands together, then tapped her forefingers against her lips.
“If you’re right,” she said, “you’re talking about some kind of conspiracy that extends from the Frontier to Peyla. With what kind of goal? Why go after the Moon?”
“You mean besides the fact that for most it’s the only way to travel to Earth?” Simiaar asked. So she had thought of that as well.
“It makes no sense,” Verstraete said. “The Earth Alliance is what keeps stability in the known universe. It prevents us from going to war.”
“Yeah,” Nuuyoma said. “And we’re talking about weapons.”
“So?” Apaza asked.
The pace of Verstraete’s tapping increased. Then she swore. “They wouldn’t do that.”
“Do what?” Apaza asked. “What am I missing?”
“The Alliance wouldn’t provoke an all-out war to jack up weapons prices,” Verstraete said. “They wouldn’t.”
“That’s your heart speaking, not your head,” Simiaar said.
Gomez sank into a chair. She was suddenly exhausted.
“If that’s what you’re thinking,” Apaza said, “then they’re not trying to jack up prices.”
“Oh?” Nuuyoma’s tone was dismissive. “What are they trying to do?”
“Increase market share,” Verstraete said softly. Then she looked at Simiaar. “Am I using my head now?”
“Yeah,” Simiaar said softly.
“What do you mean?” Apaza said. He was clearly smart enough to understand this, but he seemed to have a block against it as well.
Gomez let Verstraete explain it. Gomez would correct Verstraete if she had to, but it was best for Verstraete to speak. That way she could think through the argument.
Besides, Gomez wanted to hear someone articulate this idea. She’d been batting it around inside her own head for too long.
“I just said that the Alliance stabilizes the known sector of space. Every group that joins has to agree to certain conditions,” Verstraete said. “And one of them is to follow the Alliance’s rules for warfare, which are, to be honest, pretty damn stringent. If you want to attack someone, you actually need Alliance approval. Then the entire Alliance will act with you or at least will be behind you.”
Nuuyoma nodded. “That rule alone is why so many cultures never join the Alliance in the first place.”
Simiaar made a disagreeing noise. “Eventually they do. The benefits outweigh the war rule. They make so much more money when they’re allowed into the universe’s biggest trading organization.”
Gomez felt like the discussion was getting off-track. She raised a tired hand. “Let’s not talk politics. It’s—”
“Why not?” Verstraete said. “That’s what we’re facing here, isn’t it? If this threat comes from the outside, it’s because the market share for weapons makers, the ones that specialize in the truly nasty stuff, is decreasing, am I right?”
“They’re probably buying administrators or lower-level bureaucrats,” Apaza said. “Folks who can hide information easily and remove names from files, and lose the documentation so that these people stay in prison a long time.”
“Let’s not forget ‘these people’ are illegal clones,” Simiaar said.
Gomez looked at her, unable to hide her shock. She thought Simiaar had no issues with clones.
Simiaar shrugged. “Illegal clones have no rights unless they’re adopted and actually declared human. It takes nothing to hide illegal clones. Nothing, because the law doesn’t consider them human.”
She spoke with great passion, which was what Gomez would have expected from her. Gomez felt something akin to relief. For a moment, she had actually doubted her closest friend.
“Illegal clones…” Nuuyoma was musing aloud. “Aren’t they generally used for identity theft and those kinds of crimes? They’ve never been considered weapons before.”
“We don’t know that,” Gomez said.
“Even if they weren’t,” Verstraete said, “they will be now. That image of those twenty clones coming into Armstrong is pretty blatant, and nutcases around the universe are going to use that as inspiration.”
“Wonderful,” Apaza muttered.
Time to stop this part of the conversation.
“We have no idea what’s actually going on,” Gomez said. “Everything you’ve mentioned is speculation. But we actually can do the investigating that the Alliance refused to do. I have hours of interviews with TwoZero, and I think from those we can track down his originators, and maybe the reason for his existence.”
“If he didn’t lie to you,” Simiaar said.
“If,” Gomez agreed. “But he didn’t have any reason to. And he holds the slim hope that things I find will be able to help him.”
“That’s why you brought us here?” Verstraete said. “You think we’re going to be able to investigate the background of a group of clones made thirty years ago by some criminal organizations? We’re not set up for that kind of investigation.”
Gomez had had enough negativity. “You don’t have to be on the team, Chepi.”
Verstraete sighed, then leaned back in her chair. “I ask a lot of questions when I’m scared.”
Gomez had noted that before, but she had forgotten it until now. “I won’t put any black mark in your record or harm your career in any way—”
“What if we find something horrible?” Verstraete said. “I mean, we’ve got problems inside the Alliance, if what you’re saying is true. What if those problems go way up?”
“You want us to ignore them?” Simiaar broke the candy into even smaller pieces, then piled the pieces on the edge of the table. “Just go on with our jobs like we haven’t stumbled on anything here?”
Everyone looked at Gomez. She looked first at Nuuyoma. His eyes were narrower than usual, and his lips thin. He was clearly as worried about this as Verstraete. Apparently, he was just letting her run with the questioning.
He looked away before Gomez did. Then she looked at Apaza. He rubbed one thumb over the one he’d been chewing. He was studying the broken skin as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world.
Verstraete met Gomez’s gaze. She sat up straight and her look was challenging.
“We’re not going to be representing the FSS, are we?” she asked. “We will be completely on our own.”
“Yes,” Gomez said. “We’re not even going to tell anyone what we’re doing. I’m going to send the team on an extended leave, and hope we can gather information in a relatively short time.”
/>
“What do we do with that information?” Simiaar asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” Gomez said. “Let’s find out first if we’re imagining this connection to the Alliance. What we’re seeing might simply be apathy relating to illegal clones.”
“You don’t believe that,” Verstraete said.
Gomez looked back at her. Verstraete might end up being her greatest ally or the biggest pain in the ass Gomez had ever worked with. She couldn’t tell which it would be at the moment.
“What I believe doesn’t matter,” Gomez said. “All that matters is what I can prove.”
“We might not find anything,” Nuuyoma said. “The trail’s thirty years old.”
“Or fifteen, anyway,” Simiaar said, using her left hand to push all of the candy into her cupped right palm.
“If that’s the case, we’ve done what we can, and I, at least, will do my best to be satisfied with that,” Gomez said.
Simiaar tossed the candy in the nearest recycler. “You’re not satisfied with anything.”
“Then let’s try to solve this thing,” Gomez said. “What can it hurt?”
“Besides our careers and maybe the Alliance,” Verstraete said. “Not one whole hell of a lot.”
Gomez liked the sarcasm. She smiled. “Are you all going to join me?”
They looked at each other. Finally, Nuuyoma nodded for all of them. “I guess you have a team, Marshal.”
“Good,” she said. “Now, let’s get to work.”
TWENTY-NINE
THE LIFER PART of EAP 77743 did not have a proper lawyer-client interview room. Instead, Zhu suspected he had been led to an interrogation room, and one that had been used for things not legal in the human part of the Alliance.
The room smelled faintly of urine and sweat, the kind of ground-in scent that not even nanobots could clean. Or maybe the prison actually piped in the stench of fear, just to make people who had to use this room uncomfortable.
The proportions were off as well. Not quite a box, barely a rectangle, it felt like the walls were at odd angles with each other. He supposed if he stepped it off, he would find that the measurements weren’t the precise shapes he was used to.
A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel Page 18
