Trey looked at the seat, swallowed hard, and then nodded. He made his way around the table as if movement hurt him.
Fujita’s gaze met Tamberlane’s. He all right? he sent on a secure link.
I think he’s terrified and not willing to admit it, she sent. This is more free space than he’s seen in decades.
Fujita swept an arm over the table, indicating the other empty seats. “Sit down, everyone. Let’s get started.”
There were no wine glasses on the table. In fact, there was no alcohol on the Alus 15 at all. His staff didn’t need it, and early on, Fujita had learned that former prisoners had a great instinct for finding the mood-altering substances on board any ship. The best thing to do was to make sure there were no mood-altering substances at all.
At the moment, the only liquid on the table was water. There were two gigantic plates of cured meats from all over the Alliance, and another gigantic plate of sliced breads and crackers.
Nothing that would be served tonight would take a knife to make the portion size correct, and all of it could be eaten with spoons or weakly constructed forks.
Fujita wasn’t sure Trey even noticed. He ran his finger around the edge of the unbreakable plate, then touched the glass as Tamberlane filled it with water.
“Thank you,” Trey said. “Forgive me if I seem…odd. I’ve never eaten like this.”
“This kind of food?” one of the security staff asked.
They had all been instructed to talk to him like he was a friend, to try to relax him.
“At a table. Formal, you know. Not after someone served some slop and you sat down, but where people converse. I’ve seen vids, though.” Trey sounded both nervous and eager at the same time.
He’s good at vulnerable, Tamberlane sent Fujita.
Yeah, I noticed that earlier, Fujita sent back. He sat down. “Just ask. We’ll help you figure out what to do. Mostly, though, it’s common sense.”
Trey nodded. He waited until someone else started a plate of meat, then watched as each person selected their favorite slices. He took exactly the median number of slices that everyone else had taken so far.
Smart. He had a gift for observation.
Fujita would remember that.
“Is it okay if I ask questions?” Trey said to Fujita. “Or do I have to meet alone with you?”
“The team is briefed on everything,” Fujita said. “I have no secrets from them.”
And they were very practiced at pretending not to hear things—and at recalling it should it become important.
“I…don’t mean to be rude,” Trey said as he handed the dish of cured meats to Tamberlane. “I was only told everything this morning.”
Then he looked around the table, looked at the tray of breads going around, looked at the various condiments available to spread on the breads, and paused.
Everyone knew what he was thinking. To him, this level of food—which was just the first course—was a luxury. Fujita had planned this meal so that the courses came out slowly, giving Trey’s stomach time to adjust.
“I didn’t even know that…” Trey shook his head, as if censoring himself. “Sorry. Um, I was just wondering. Where’s Torkild Zhu? He’s the one who got me off, right? You guys aren’t lawyers, right?”
Fujita had expected this question sooner. “We work for the firm,” he said. “This is our job.”
“You’ve done it before?” Trey asked. “Taken people out of the Alliance?”
“We pick up newly released clients and take them to their destinations,” Fujita said.
Trey made a small sandwich out of his bread and ham, just like Tamberlane had done beside him.
“What is my destination?” Trey asked, clearly trying to make the question sound casual.
“You’re heading to a small city in the Irr Sector. It’s at the edge of the Frontier.” Fujita wasn’t sure how to make this place sound palatable to Trey. He had no idea who Trey really was, what he would like, what he wanted.
“I don’t have any money or job skills or—”
“We’re taking you to an organization that trains people for jobs in return for some work. You’ll do things like cook and clean, and they’ll provide you with a room, food, and training. The law firm has a fund for this sort of thing. Your stay is paid for the next six months, but you can extend that through work and good behavior.”
“Good behavior,” Trey repeated, and Fujita knew why. It sounded like a prison term. It was a prison term. “So I’m trapped there?”
“You can leave at any time,” Fujita said. “But you won’t have any money. You can’t get a refund if you refuse to stay for the entire six months.”
Trey nodded. Then he took a bite out of the small sandwich.
Fujita placed some salami on rye bread. He’d brought a lot of his favorites for the first part of this trip. They’d be out of the fresh food in a few days, so he planned to enjoy all of it now.
He was about to take a bite when the Alus 15 shuddered. The lights dimmed.
“What the hell?” Tamberlane asked.
Trey wrapped his arms around his torso and hunched in his chair.
Fujita’s links lit up with emergency warnings. Some blared inside his head. Others coated his vision red.
Someone had fired on the Alus 15.
They were under attack.
Fujita remained calm. Attacks on private prisoner transport ships happened at least fifty percent of the time. The attacks were annoying, but they were little more than that with a ship as prepared as this one was.
He stood, pointed at Trey, and said, “Secure him. Angela, you stay here. The rest of you, stations.”
Every single member of his crew had been through this before. They stood and moved as a unit. They each had a job to do and they were all ready to do it.
Fujita let himself out of the dining room and hurried down the corridor. He needed to be on the bridge. He took the most direct route, up a service elevator two levels to command center.
Had Trey lied to him? Had Trey somehow contacted someone on the outside to rescue him from Fujita’s ship?
Because rescues like that were the most common form of attack on transports like Fujita’s. That, or someone did not want Trey to go free. Those things happened too.
Even that, though, required contact with the outside, and according to Trey’s file, he had no friends, no family, no contacts at all. And no one had visited him, except for Zhu, in the entire time he was imprisoned.
So what the hell?
What have we got? Fujita sent as he ran through the upper level corridor.
Something big, sent this evening’s pilot, Abid Stone. We’ve got two battle cruisers.
Fujita nearly tripped. He’d never been attacked by battle cruisers. Ever. Big prisoners, political prisoners, folks who required battle cruisers, they never got out of prison. Or if they did, they had a military escort.
Battleships? He sent.
Yeah, Stone sent. These things are huge. And good God, do they have firepower.
Fujita couldn’t run any faster. He was having trouble drawing breath, not because he was out of shape, but because he was worried. Startled.
Frightened.
The only thing he could hope for was that Stone was wrong.
Shields okay? Fujita sent.
For now, Stone sent. We’ve never been up against anything like this, though. It looks like they might be getting reinforcements, and if they do, we’re screwed.
The few bites Fujita had taken of his food threatened to come back up. Are we firing back?
Um, no, Stone sent. We don’t know who these things belong to.
You said they were old, Fujita sent. I thought that meant you recognized them.
I do, Stone sent. They’re Alliance made. But that doesn’t mean they’re Alliance owned. They’re old.
Fujita wanted to ask how old, if they dated from the days of PierLuigi Frémont. But he didn’t. He needed to get to the bridge.
&n
bsp; He hurried through a tight corridor, and wished he could somehow levitate himself up to the most protected part of the ship.
So they’re just randomly firing on us? He sent.
It’s not random. They’re targeting engines, shields, and weapons.
Tell me you’re not firing back, Fujita sent. He didn’t want these things pissed off at him worse than they already were. Besides, the shields worked better when they devoured most of the ship’s energy.
I’m not stupid, Stone sent. I gotta tell you. I’m not sure firing is an option. I don’t think anything we use on those cruisers would make a difference.
Fujita felt chilled. His ship was one of the most powerful private ships he’d ever seen inside the Alliance. But Stone did say battle cruiser. That implied big. Huge. Able to take on warships, not dinky private vessels like his.
He turned a corner, and ran up the half level to the bridge.
He palmed the controls to the bridge entrance, let the system do its DNA and retinal scans, and watched as the doors slid open.
The bridge wasn’t huge, but it seemed big. Fujita had designed it himself, so that everything was within reach. It was shaped like a triangle. Screens and holographic information appeared in the point.
At the moment, Abid Stone stood at the controls, and his co-pilot, Kavi Maddix, hunched over the navigation system. In the triangle, two gigantic ships menaced a ship the size of Fujita’s thumb. It took him a moment to realize that tiny ship was his.
“They’re firing on us.” Maddix sounded breathless. She also sounded panicked. She tucked a strand of her long, copper hair behind one ear, her hand shaking. “And I’m seeing two more ships on the edge of my screen—this is awful.”
“Whose are they?” Fujita asked as he went to the third console. He called up every bit of information he could in a 3-D screen—their location, the cruisers, the fire power, and the status of his shields.
“I have no idea,” Stone said.
“What do they want?” Fujita asked.
“Like I said, no idea.”
One of the battle cruisers fired again, and the Alus 15 shuddered. The shields cut out for less than a second, but if the battle cruisers noticed that flaw, then this ship wasn’t just screwed.
It—and everyone on it—was dead.
Fujita hit the command override and sent his ship careening out of the area. The only thing he had was speed, especially against behemoths like that.
He used it.
“You didn’t chart a course,” Maddix screamed at him.
“Chart one now.” He didn’t defend himself. He didn’t have to defend himself. This was his crew.
Besides, when she calmed down, Maddix would realize that had he charted, the behemoths would have anticipated his arrival somewhere. At the moment, they had no idea where he was going or what he was going to do.
“To the Irr Sector?” Maddix asked.
“I don’t know,” Fujita snapped. “Just make sure we don’t run into something.”
He ran his hands through his hair, and looked at the navigation screen. The behemoths were turning, even as they faded from his ability to track them. In a moment, they’d be hot on his trail.
“Find out what the hell those ships are,” he said to Stone. “And figure out what they want from us.”
“How the hell am I supposed to do that?” Stone asked.
“I don’t know,” Fujita snapped. “That’s your job.”
“What’s yours?” Stone asked.
“Keeping us alive,” Fujita said, and went to work.
FORTY-SIX
GOMEZ STOOD INSIDE Simiaar’s lab on the Stanley. The evidence spread before her. The packages that Simiaar had collected on Ohksmyte ranged from miniscule to huge, but they weren’t sorted that way. In fact, Gomez couldn’t tell how Simiaar was sorting them. It all looked haphazard, as if someone had thrown pieces of junk throughout the room.
Simiaar leaned against one of the tables. Behind her, screens reported information in multi-colored charts and graphs. Some moved so fast that Gomez couldn’t even tell what they were measuring. Of course, on the ones that Gomez could read, she couldn’t quite understand what the measurements meant.
She was tired. She’d gone through decontamination, had something to eat, and even took a short nap, but it didn’t get rid of the feeling of sheer exhaustion that walking on Ohksmyte had given her. The wind, the dust, the lifting, all left her drained.
Simiaar didn’t look exhausted at all. She seemed energized, if serious. She’d apparently worked steadily since they came back.
“We got decisions to make,” she said to Gomez, which was exactly what she had sent on Gomez’s links not half an hour ago.
“That’s why I’m here in the middle of the night,” Gomez said. The others had bunked down hours ago. She had told them she’d let them know the next day’s plans as soon as she knew what they would be.
She didn’t have to go back to Epriccom, and she needed to get the Stanley away from Ohksmyte. She really only had two choices: she could take the Stanley in for its scheduled maintenance or she could continue to pursue this investigation.
And right now, it looked like the investigation was all in Simiaar’s hands.
“I take it you found something,” Gomez said.
“I found a lot of somethings,” Simiaar said. “None of it conclusive.”
Gomez suppressed a sigh. She needed conclusive.
“Remember what I told you on Ohksmyte? That the ship had one owner?”
Gomez nodded.
“The first thing I did was double-check that.” Simiaar paused, her gaze meeting Gomez’s. “It’s worse than I thought.”
“How can it be worse?” Gomez asked. Simiaar had already made a link to the Alliance.
Simiaar tapped the screen on the table behind her. A navigation panel rose between them. It was clear. Gomez could still see Simiaar standing on the other side.
“I found the back-up of the distances traveled by this little craft,” Simiaar said. “It includes navigation logs, and time to transverse one area to the next, and a lot more.”
“Okay,” Gomez said, not sure she believed something that old would hold up on those conditions. But she was saving her questions until Simiaar was done.
“This ship hardly went anywhere,” Simiaar said. “It went from the Alliance to Epriccom to Ohksmyte.”
Gomez couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “So it went from a fringe place in the Alliance to the Frontier. That’s not a surprise is it?”
“It wasn’t a fringe part of the Alliance,” Simiaar said. “It left the factory and went directly to Epriccom.”
“The factory—where it was made?” Gomez asked, because she honestly wasn’t certain if Simiaar was talking about a clone factory or not.
“Yeah,” Simiaar said. “These ships get pilots who then dump the ships somewhere so that they appear stolen or abandoned. And I would have thought that’s what happened except for two things.”
Gomez braced herself, and waited.
“First, the ship went directly to the enclave,” Simiaar said. “And second, the only people who ever piloted this thing were clones of PierLuigi Frémont.”
Gomez put up her hands as if she could physically block the information. “That’s not possible. There’s something wrong with the data.”
“That’s what I thought, and I’ll check again,” Simiaar said, “but there’s a lot of information that the system tracks, including DNA from pilots. The pilot’s DNA came from a clone of PierLuigi Frémont.”
Gomez sat down. Her legs wouldn’t hold her any longer.
“So here’s the thing we have to decide,” Simiaar said. “We have to decide if it’s worth our careers to keep looking at this.”
Gomez studied her. “We made that decision already. What’s different?”
“Judita,” Simiaar said, leaning forward. “Assume I’m right here, because I am. But you don’t think so yet, so just assume I am. This ship
came from the Alliance. The ship had clones in it, and those clones went to the enclave. Then, as the enclave was about to be invaded by law enforcement from the Alliance, the ship left. One of the clones died, and the other went somewhere else.”
“That makes no sense,” Gomez said. “Why flee the Alliance if you’re part of it?”
Simiaar stared at her.
Gomez felt a flush building. Simiaar only used that look if Gomez was missing something obvious.
“The Alliance wouldn’t try to destroy the Alliance,” Gomez said.
“No,” Simiaar said. “It wouldn’t. But a faction inside the Alliance might. How better to destroy something than attack it from within?”
Gomez bit her lower lip. It made a curious kind of sense. The attacks on the Moon were inside the Alliance, deep inside the Alliance, as close to Earth as possible. Without the Moon, the Earth would either have to change its access policies or it would no longer be the center of the Alliance.
And then there was the part that had bothered her the most—cloning a known villain to make the attacks obvious. Humans inside the Alliance knew who PierLuigi Frémont was. Maybe people from Abbondiado did as well. But people on the Frontier? Not at all. And most aliens didn’t know either, which spoke to a human connection for all of this.
Simiaar was talking about a vast conspiracy, and that was where Gomez had her problem. She didn’t believe in conspiracies. They were hard; they were complicated; they fell apart before long-term plans became viable.
“You’re guessing,” Gomez said, even though she knew it sounded weak.
“Informed guesses,” Simiaar said.
“Based on ancient information on an old spaceship that could have been planted just for an event like this.”
“Don’t you remember Thirds?” Simiaar asked. “He said he’d never seen anyone like us. The Eaufasse thought all humans looked the same. Because the humans in the enclave—adult and child—were the same.”
Gomez sighed. She wasn’t going to get Simiaar off this without evidence of her own.
“So what do you want to do?” Gomez asked.
“Pretend we never found this. Go back to doing our jobs. Let someone else worry about it all.”
A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel Page 30
