She turned to Mir Munshi. “You have assisted us greatly. I cannot speak for the Alliance, but I can speak for myself. I am in your debt.”
Mir Munshi made that peeping sound again. Then he said, “No, me debt you,” shook his head, and said something rapidly to Oaupheau.
“Mir Munshi says that without you, your help, and your discretion, the Eaufasse would not be part of the Alliance. The Alliance has been extremely beneficial to us. It has changed life here on Epriccom. Mir Munshi says that we are in your debt and we cannot ever repay you. He is honored to assist.”
Gomez actually felt moved. “Thank you,” she said, thinking that the words—even doubly translated—were extremely inadequate. “Thank you so much.”
FORTY-ONE
TREY’S HEART POUNDED, but he tried not to look frightened. For the first time since he’d come to this horrible place, he had been summoned to the warden’s office unexpectedly.
Trey had gone to see the warden before, usually after some incident that Trey had stopped or to corroborate some problem that someone else caused. Trey had worked hard not to be considered a suck-up, and he’d worked hard to keep himself clean.
He hadn’t quite kept his head down, but he hadn’t voluntarily raised it either.
All he had managed to do was get himself a cushy job within the system and a single cell. It had taken years to get both.
And now, for some reason, they were probably threatened. No one got called to the warden’s office for a good reason.
The stupid android guards had their fake hands on his shoulders. Four of those gigantic things surrounded him, with small robot units patching the holes.
Someone was afraid that Trey would die on the way. Trey had seen this kind of protection before, usually for some prisoner that everyone hated or who was going to rat out someone else in court. A lot of times, those prisoners never returned.
The ones who did return often didn’t make it through the week.
Trey tried to make himself small. He kept his face hidden behind the android guard in front of him, and hoped no one could see the number on his jumpsuit in the back. For the first time in years, he felt happy about the fact he looked like a few of the other inmates.
The farther he got away from his cell block, the more likely it was that someone would mistake him for them.
The administrators had sent the android guards that had no mouths. They were probably linked to the system, but he’d never been able to break in. He’d always felt that trying was probably stupid on his part, and would call attention to himself.
Now he wished he had. He wanted to know what the hell was going on.
All he’d received was a message through his prison-installed links: Warden’s Office, and the time he was due there.
The guards had shown up exactly thirty minutes before his appointment, and now they led him at a leisurely pace through the corridors. The inmates all got silent when they saw the little troupe. They wanted to know what was going on too.
All Trey could hear were murmurs, and he didn’t even have to hear the words to know what the murmurs were: Who is that? What’s he done? Who’s he ratting out?
If they didn’t know, the inmates would make something up, and in some ways, that was worse.
His skin prickled, almost as if it had received some kind of charge. His throat had closed up. He hadn’t been this terrified in years.
Usually because he had a plan. Hell, even getting beat up in the yard hadn’t been a surprise, not after he saw those images. He’d known some of the other clones would get him in trouble one day, and he’d had a plan.
Not that it had worked. He felt a twinge of anger, which he’d tried to bury. Damn lawyer. Trey had never heard from the bastard again.
Of course.
Finally their little marching unit swerved into the administration corridors. The lighting was better here, the air fresher, the temperature just about perfect. It was always cold in the cellblocks—apparently to keep the inmates a little on edge. Heat somehow made them angrier, or so the theories went.
Most of the doors in the corridor were closed and dark, but a bright orange light surrounded the doors to the warden’s office.
Trey’s stomach clenched. He wasn’t just going to some assistant’s office so that he could be told what the warden thought. He was going to see the warden proper.
That never happened.
At least that he knew of. He had no idea what had happened to all of those other prisoners who never came back.
What had he done? How had he gotten this kind of attention?
He hated it here, but he wasn’t ready to die for some reason he didn’t understand. And he also didn’t want to go to another prison. He’d learned the systems here.
He knew what every sound meant, what every gesture could do.
He knew everything about this prison except what happened to prisoners in the position he was in now.
The robot guards peeled off and wheeled their way down a side corridor.
Three other androids joined the grouping. These androids had mouths. Their coloring was dark gray, their bodies sleeker than the androids that had led him out of the cell block.
The warden’s special guards.
Trey didn’t think his heart could pound harder, but it did. He probably stank of fear. He was sweating, and he couldn’t stop it.
Those damn machines around him probably picked up every nuance— the increased heart rate, the shallow breathing. They had probably already informed the warden—or whoever Trey was meeting—just how terrified he was.
He wasn’t sure he could bluff through any of it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.
The door slid back, and the androids led him through the orange light. It coated him, and that was when he realized it was searching him for hidden weapons and probably other things he hadn’t even thought about. Someone clearly had thought about those things, once upon a time, and probably used them on a warden somewhere, so the protections were in place.
For all he knew, this orange light was a small decontamination unit too.
His mouth tasted metallic, and he wasn’t sure if that was because he had bit his lip and drawn blood without realizing it, or if the very thought of a decontamination unit made him react like he always did when he went through one.
Then he was on the other side of the light. The android guards in front of him moved to the left and right of him. The guards with their hands on his shoulders tightened their grip.
The door swooshed shut behind him.
He’d never been in this room before. It was smaller than he expected. Then he blinked, his vision cleared, and he realized he was in some kind of antechamber. The warden didn’t work here; she met with prisoners and/or undesirables here, and didn’t let them go any farther.
The room was probably well defended. Circles and squares jutted out of the walls, and there were small shadowy circles on the floor as well. He didn’t know if he wasn’t allowed to see some of the items in the room—he had no real links, except those the prison system installed—or if each circle and square marked some kind of hidden camera or weapon.
He expected there were a lot of ways to control an angry prisoner in this small room. He also guessed that some part of the room might be able to kill him.
The warden stood in the very center of the room. She had a lined face, grayish in color, and her hair, tied back in a bun, was as black as the walls. He knew that was not exactly what she looked like. Wardens never allowed an inmate to know precisely what they looked like; too many inmates got out and might go after the wardens.
It would be easy to track the face, the eyes, the look, on a simple link. A lot of the inmates here had illegal links. A few of those inmates had even offered some to Trey. He hadn’t taken anyone up on it; he didn’t want to be beholden to anyone—and he didn’t want a possibility of them in his head.
“99373,” the warden said, using Trey’s prison number. Her voice had been altered a
s well. He wasn’t even sure if it was her voice. It sounded as metallic as the taste in his mouth. “Judge Bruchac ruled on your petition. You are being released in ninety minutes into the custody of your attorney’s representative. You may return to your cell to collect your things or you may go through the orientation we have prepared for you.”
Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t that. He felt his mouth drop open.
“Forgive me, sir,” he said. “I—my attorney? I didn’t know I had one.”
“According to the record, your attorney is Torkild Zhu. He visited you here three weeks ago.”
So the bastard had become his attorney. “No one notified me that he had taken my case,” Trey said.
As that sentence was halfway out of his mouth, he realized he sounded ungrateful.
“Would you like to return to your cell?” the warden asked.
He thought for a moment. He was leaving? Had she said released?
“Forgive me, sir,” Trey said, “this is surprising me. Does this mean that I’m in my attorney’s custody? That I’m going to another prison?”
“No, 99373. Judge Bruchac has invalidated your imprisonment. Apparently you are not an illegal under Alliance law. You are free to go, provided you leave the Alliance immediately. Since inmates rarely have the resources to hire a ship to take them anywhere, it is the Earth Alliance Prison System’s policy to have the attorney of record take responsibility for the client upon release. The attorney will be in charge of getting you to your destination. After that, you will be on your own. A free…creature…without any notice of this imprisonment on your record. As far as the Alliance is concerned, you have not been here.”
All those years did not exist? He felt dizzy. What had Zhu done?
“Am I supposed to talk to some Alliance representative?” Trey asked.
“You are to leave the Alliance, and you are not to return unless you have the proper documentation, including a Day of Creation Document and other information proving you are who you say you are. If you return to the Alliance without those documents, you will be subject to imprisonment again as a possible illegal. Do you understand this?”
He understood her words, but he could barely process them.
“You now have eighty-five minutes. Would you like to return to your cell to collect your possessions?”
His possessions. All of them acquired after long and hard negotiations with other prisoners, with difficult work through the system, with a lot of saved money from his tiny allowance given to him through the EAPS regulations.
Everything he had in that room, that cell, he had acquired to ease his life inside.
“No, sir,” he said. “I don’t need anything. Except maybe real clothes.”
“Those are the responsibility of your attorney’s representative,” the warden said.
“My attorney—” and he was startled to think he had one “—he’s not coming?”
“Most attorneys do not handle this phase of client release. They hire a service. I can give you the name of the service if you like,” the warden said. Her voice sounded eerily formal.
It finally dawned on Trey that the person standing in front of him wasn’t in this room at all. It was some kind of projection.
The warden was probably somewhere else in this office suite, talking with him via some network or something.
“For the record,” the warden said, “I do not approve of this release. We know who you are here, and what created you. We know how deeply evil your kind can be.”
He felt a chill. He couldn’t really see her eyes. Was she going to do something to him? Was that really the purpose behind his visit here?
“In my opinion, you should remain locked up. But the court does not share in that opinion, and I do the court’s bidding. Still, I will make sure that you leave this place. If I discover that you’re in the Alliance, I will ensure that you are confined for the rest of your unnatural life. Is that clear?”
He had to swallow hard. “Yes, sir, it is.”
“Good,” she said. “Now, get out of my sight. I have trouble looking at your face.”
He felt his cheeks warm. He wanted to say that he had nothing to do with the bombings, but he knew it would make no difference.
The guards spun him around and led him to the door.
“Where are we going now?” he asked.
One of the androids with a mouth actually answered him. “There is a holding area,” it said. “You will wait there until your representative appears in…seventy-three-point-two… minutes Earth time.”
“Thank you,” Trey said, then bit his lower lip. He was shaken enough that he was thanking a nonliving guard.
He was getting out of here in a little more than an hour. Then he would leave the Alliance with people he had never met before. People he had to trust.
Without a plan, without even an idea of what to do next.
He had always imagined getting out of this prison—it had been his goal for years. But he had doubted he would ever achieve it.
Even if he had achieved it, he’d thought he would have weeks, maybe months, maybe even a year to prepare. He would research where he could comfortably live, what kind of work he might get, how he would survive.
He hadn’t done any of that. He knew nothing of the worlds outside of the Alliance. He had always thought he would remain within the Alliance.
He had no friends, no family, no one to help him. He didn’t even know who this representative was.
And it sounded like he wasn’t needed to testify on the Anniversary Day bombings. Apparently, Zhu had gotten him out without even mentioning that.
Which was weird, since he never heard from Zhu.
Trey rubbed his palms against the jumpsuit. He was terrified. He didn’t want to be terrified, but he was. What if this was a plot to kill him? What if it was all a ruse?
What if it wasn’t?
How would he live? What could he do? He had no formal education, no training in any sort of real job, no active skills. And, in the Alliance at least, he wasn’t a person. He had no idea what the worlds outside of the Alliance thought of people like him.
They couldn’t have thought too kindly of him. Could they? He’d talked to others in the prison, some of whom were known as designer criminal clones. They too had been made outside the Alliance, usually for an express purpose. Most of them wanted to get back to that purpose.
Very few of them wanted to become something else.
He had about an hour to figure out how he would live the next few years of his life. He had no weapons, no money, no possessions, no real identity.
He had nothing.
Except, apparently, something he had never had before in his entire life.
He would have freedom.
And he had no idea what to do with it.
FORTY-TWO
THE INFORMATION ON Ohksmyte was sparse. Before Gomez left, she had Charlie, the pilot, check other star maps for outside-of-the-Alliance specs on Ohksmyte. She also had Apaza find what information he could in the data that Mir Munshi had sent.
There wasn’t much, and what existed differed from Alliance information only in the rules and regulations for arrivals. Apparently Eaufasse, with the proper clearance, could visit the mining site, but it took months, sometimes years, to get that clearance.
The mining site had heavy security and could not be approached from the ground or from space, at least by unknown outsiders. Since the corporation running the site was registered in the Alliance, Gomez could approach the site without difficulty.
Not that she planned to.
She was going to one spot on the farthest side of Ohksmyte from Epriccom. She had had Charlie double-check the coordinates that Mir Munshi had given her, and see what was nearby.
Apparently nothing was. No cities, no settlements, no outsiders, and most importantly, no domed communities, like the enclave that had been built on Epriccom.
Gomez had half expected to find one or the remains of o
ne.
But the remains should have been visible to the Stanley’s sensors. And there was nothing—at least in the non-mining side of the moon.
Ohksmyte wasn’t as big as Epriccom, and its atmosphere was thin. It had no real plant life, and very little water. Part of the area secured by the mining operation included some ice fields that went thirty meters deep into Ohksmyte’s soil. The ice fields were probably providing some of the operation’s water supply. And, Gomez suspected, might also be the source of some of the moon’s mineral richness.
The area she was going to was often used by smugglers back in the day, at least according to some of the information Apaza had found. The smugglers would land, change ships, and leave before anyone could catch them.
Apaza had found that information in Mir Munshi’s records. It wasn’t hard, Apaza had said, almost like he wanted us to find this.
Mir Munshi was good at making his suspicions known without saying a word.
Gomez did not notify the mining operation that she was coming. She had taken a fully loaded security shuttle, which everyone in the EAFSS called a “gunboat.” It was sleek and maneuverable. It would allow her to pursue anyone who tried to take off in a fast-moving ship—at least until the Stanley could take over the pursuit.
It also had every weapon known to the service, and more security protocols than any other ship outside of the military arms of the Alliance. She could start a war herself with this thing, or at least fight a serious and prolonged battle.
Not that she wanted to. She’d done that before, and it hadn’t ended well.
The gunboat, named Stanley Security One, was the top-of-the-line model. She had had dozens of gunboats named Stanley Security One over the years. The Security One was always the best gunboat on the Stanley. This particular Security One would be replaced when she took the Stanley in at the end of this sojourn, or at least demoted to a lower-level security ship. It saddened her to lose this one; she liked this incarnation.
It was easy to pilot, so she didn’t need to bring anyone with specialized skills. She could handle everything in the cockpit herself, from the weaponry to the cells to the flight.
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