A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (13 page)

Hours after the battle outside the outpost, if anyone could call that a battle, Washington called her into one of the conference rooms. There, on the table, he had visuals of what was happening on the planet below.

The dome glowed from within.

“What is that?” she asked him.

“Laser rifle fire,” he said. “I think they’re killing each other.”

She wanted to order him to bring a team in, but both of them knew they couldn’t. They had no idea how many people were there, or what kind of weapons they had.

With the help of Okani, she contacted the Eaufasse ambassador.

“They’re killing each other inside the dome,” she said. “Can you stop them?”

“They are yours,” the ambassador said. “We can do nothing.”

As they spoke, the dome’s glow increased.

“We have to do something,” she said.

“You must,” the ambassador said. “We leave it to you.”

Then it severed the connection.

She watched as the glowing dome grew brighter. “That’s a fire,” she said to Washington.

“Or worse,” he said.

They’d seen images of this before. Domes were vulnerable to internal attack.

The dome had turned bright red.

Washington looked away. He knew, as she did, what was happening inside. The people in there were actually cooking. Burning up. Disintegrating.

She didn’t have the equipment to stop this.

She couldn’t turn away. She watched as the dome grew brighter and brighter, until it blew.

She couldn’t hear it, but she knew that on Epriccom, it must have sounded like a million bombs went off. The ground would shake; there would be other damage throughout the various settlements.

If the Eaufasse blamed her, she would use that contact she made with the ambassador as proof that she had done all she could.

“Why would they do that?” Washington asked.

The air was black with smoke. Bits of the dome flew like shards into the trees. She shut off the hologram. She couldn’t look any more.

“They knew we were here,” she said.

“So?” he asked. “We’d been here for days. Why now?”

She stared at the empty tabletop. Then shook her head. “The experiment failed. They lost all sixteen boys.”

“I still don’t understand.”

She raised her gaze to his. “Success or failure,” she said, “what do you do at the end of an experiment?”

“I’m not a scientist,” he snapped.

“You disassemble it. You take it apart. You make your notes and you start over.”

“No one left,” he said. “No one made notes. No one survived.”

“No one survived in the dome,” she said. “But you don’t know if they sent their results elsewhere. You don’t know what kind of recordings they made.”

“We’ve been monitoring communications,” he said. “We would know.”

“Would we?” she asked. “We didn’t even know those things were weapons. We thought they were plants.”

He stared at her, his skin gray and bloodless. “How have you done this for so long?” he asked.

The question so many of her deputies had asked over the years. The way that the deputy answered for himself determined his career.

She took a deep breath. She had answered this one for herself a long time ago.

She had to believe in what she was doing, believe that the Alliance was important, that the groups it finally accepted into the Alliance would be worthy of that Alliance.

Some wouldn’t be. Some would.

And tragedies would happen along the way.

Even—especially?—tragedies caused by humans.

Gomez gave Washington a small smile. “You have to realize when you’ve done your job well.”

“What?” he asked. “We didn’t do this well. People died.”

“Yes, they did,” she said. “And people will always die. We can’t stop that.”

His eyes widened. He looked at her as if she had just said something horrible. Maybe, to him, she had.

She put a hand on his arm. “Our mission—our
job
—was to remove the enclave,” she said. “We did that, and found out something along the way. And we’ve managed to keep a good relationship with the Eaufasse. All in all, we’ve done well.”

He shook his head. “We just watched hundreds of people die.”

“Did we?” she asked. “For all we know, there had been no one but sixteen clones in that enclave.”

“You don’t believe that,” he said, and let himself out of the room.

He was right; she didn’t believe that there had been only sixteen clones in that enclave. She did believe that her team had done their job.

She also believed that they had stumbled on something big, something the diplomats and the Military Guard would have to deal with, something she no longer had to concern herself with.

She was glad of that. The boy, Thirds, unnerved her. The other five probably would as well.

She ran a hand along the tabletop. One mission done. She would go talk to the assistants next, make sure they were again focused on possible future missions.

She didn’t want to think about this one any more.

She had a hunch no one else did either.

ANNIVERSARY DAY

FIFTEEN

TORKILD ZHU ADJUSTED his seat in the first class suite on the midweek shuttle heading to Athena Base. He’d charged the suite to Schnable, Shishani, & Salehi, even though the bulk of the work he’d been doing on the Moon had been personal. Still, he was a junior partner at S
3
, as everyone called the firm, and they liked their partners to impress wherever they went.

He was new enough to the partner business that he almost felt like he was stealing from his employer to travel in such luxury.

The suite had two rooms—a living/office area, and a sleeping area barely big enough for his lanky, six-foot frame. The real thing that recommended this suite was the private bathroom, complete with private shower. Sure, he had to cram himself into it, but he didn’t have to share it with his floor-mates, like he’d had to do on every shuttle to the Moon before his promotion.

The trip took more than three days, even on the fastest shuttle, and by the end of it, he would always know the bathroom habits of strangers, something he absolutely hated.

At least he was cleared to ride human-only shuttles. He’d taken shuttles that had mixed species; those were a real eye-opener—and not in a way that he wanted.

Maybe someday he would rate one of the corporate space yachts, although he’d been told when he became partner that he would only be able to use those to go to court outside of the Tenth District.

Most of the cases he handled were inside Earth Alliance IntraSpecies Court Human Division for the Tenth District, although he hoped to handle some larger cases in front of the Multicultural Tribunal for the Tenth District soon. Or for any district. He was licensed for all of them, just like every lawyer working in the Earth Alliance court system.

He was doing well, but he could do better.

He had surrounded his seat with a dozen holoscreens, building a circle of information around him. He would have to sit here while the shuttle awaited takeoff from Armstrong’s port. The actual amount of time he needed to be strapped in would be about three minutes, but the space around Armstrong was so crowded that the port required every commercial ship to harness its passengers until the ship traveled outside of the Moon’s space.

He hated this part of the trip. The shuttles were sophisticated enough to maintain gravity and attitude controls, so that no passenger ever felt the differences between being on the Moon proper and being in space, yet some of these old-fashioned rules still applied.

Although he’d once been irritated enough to see if the precaution was completely stupid, and that was when he learned that the accident rate inside the Moon’s space traffic area, particularly around the major port of Armstrong, was twenty-five times higher than it was anywhere else in the Earth Alliance.

The Moon, which was a relatively small body in comparison to most other populated places in this solar system, was the gateway to Earth. Most ships weren’t cleared for direct Earth travel, so passengers heading to Earth stopped on the Moon and got an Earth transport. If, of course, they could get through Earth Alliance customs.

Many, many, many people—alien and human—never made it to Earth, and had to be sent back to wherever they were from.

The system wasn’t perfect—if it were, the gateway to Earth would be a lot bigger—but it was better than other places Zhu had been in the Alliance. Many major planets, filled with diverse cultures, had no gateway at all and were subject to all kinds of attacks, terror or otherwise.

Earth had not suffered a direct attack from outside its borders in centuries. Somehow the Earth had made herself both the center of the Alliance and the safest place inside the Alliance.

Given Earth’s history, he would never have predicted that.

So while he was trapped in one spot, he would catch up on some entertainment—anything to keep his mind off what had just happened inside the port.

He’d been an idiot. A
cowardly
idiot. He’d assumed intelligence, which, one of his law professors had told him, would always get him in trouble.

He had volunteered to conduct some continuing education classes for the Armstrong bar, so that they would know which criminal cases belonged in the Alliance systems and which cases remained strictly local. He loved the intricacies of Earth Alliance law, as big as it was, and if he didn’t like going to court so much, he might have become a legal scholar. Instead, he hoped he was on the track toward a judgeship—even though most of the Alliance judges were chosen from the prosecutor’s bench, not the defense bench.

He was making enough political connections that he might become one of the token defense nominees. They always went through the Alliance system faster than the prosecutorial nominees, only because so few defense attorneys ever had success records that put them in the public eye.

The classes had kept him busier than he expected or, if he were honest with himself, as busy as he wanted to be. He had managed to avoid Berhane most of the time.

Berhane Magalhães, his now-former fiancée. Whom he had just left sobbing outside of Terminal 20.

Zhu rubbed a hand over his face. He could have handled the breakup better. He could have handled it
years
ago, when he knew a marriage wouldn’t work. He had never expected her to wait for him. He stopped setting dates for the wedding a long time ago. She’d set the first two, and he’d missed them, mostly by failing to tell her that one date was the bar exam that would license him for Interspecies Court, and the other was the date he had to report to work at the Impossibles, which was where all defense attorneys got their start, just so they could see how hopeless the Earth Alliance court system truly was. At least he hadn’t been indentured there, like some lawyers who couldn’t afford law school. He’d paid for his own schooling, so he only had to serve six months in that hell.

Then he went on to S
3
and his real career. He kept telling Berhane she didn’t have to wait for him, that she
shouldn’t
wait for him, and she never seemed to get the hint. One drunken evening, he’d even confessed to sleeping with other women, and still Berhane had held on.

He had no idea why, which he had just screamed at her an hour ago. Then she’d threatened to contact Daddy, just like she always did. Daddy—or Bernard Magalhães, one of the richest men on the Moon, who somehow managed to maintain all his wealth through investments that seemed shady to Zhu.

Not that Zhu knew much about financial crimes. They mostly fell outside his jurisdiction. He specialized in human-on-human crimes—the violent, nasty kind—that occurred in the darker regions of the Earth Alliance, often in places that preferred humans take their interpersonal problems outside of the non-human jurisdiction.

The moment Berhane had told him she had let Daddy listen in on her links was the moment that Zhu was done. Completely, totally, irrevocably done.

Instead of reminding her that his shuttle was about to leave, which was what he would have done in the past, he had shaken his head and said for both of their benefits, “
This
is why I’m walking away.
This
. I’m not going to marry your father, Berhane. And it seems like you two are a package deal. I’ve been running from the package for years. Let’s just make it official, shall we?”

And then he walked away, actually resisting the urge to run in his dress shoes and suit. He felt free. He felt guilty. He felt stupid—because he should have done this years ago.

And he should have, for both of their sakes.

Then he smiled to himself. For
all three
of their sakes.

He was having trouble choosing what kind of entertainment he wanted for his thirty-minute confinement. Most everything had touches of romance in it, and the last thing he wanted was even a hint of romance. He had just settled on some virtual battlefield game, which seemed to be all about killing and scoring points from mayhem—something he usually avoided—when the imagery cut out.