A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (15 page)

He felt relieved he had broken off the engagement before all of this started, and then he felt guilty for the relief. He had a hunch his timing was going to be awful, as usual. He had a hunch her father wouldn’t be answering his links again.

“Barry,” Zhu said as he got closer.

Pliska looked up, his expression as close to terrified as a man’s expression could be. He held up one finger, then subvocalized something while maintaining eye contact with Zhu.

Then Pliska let his hand drop away from his ear. He wasn’t on links anymore. He said, “Brace yourself—”

And then the entire Port shook. Disty fell off the tables. The Revs’ extra arms came out, bracing the creatures against the wall. Humans staggered on their feet.

Zhu grabbed a nearby chair, which skittered under the force of whatever was happening. He heard the same words repeated in Standard and the other languages he half understood.

“Sectioning…”

“Dome…”

“Protection…?”

And then cursing, lots of cursing. The shaking lasted only a few minutes, maybe not even that, but half of the officials in the room had either fallen or lost their balance. Dust rained from the ceiling. Chairs had toppled, tables had bounced away from their usual positions, and on the screens—

On the screens, images of explosions. Blood against Dome sections, burning buildings, black air.

Zhu thought he could hear screaming, but he knew it didn’t come from anyone in the room. Everyone in the room was trying to get up, making sure someone else was all right, or mesmerized by those images. The screaming seemed to come from his links.

His public links. Voices rode over the screams. Those were reporters—not screaming, trying to make sense of it. The screams were like a music bed beneath the news.

“What the hell?” he said. The question was rhetorical, or maybe it wasn’t even a question, maybe it was just a statement, or a curse, but Pliska responded.

“We sectioned the domes,” he said. “All of them.”

Zhu frowned at him. “Everywhere?”

There were millions of domes in the Alliance.
Millions
.

“On the Moon.” Pliska didn’t seem to think Zhu’s question was out of line. Pliska didn’t seem to be thinking about Zhu at all. “There’re explosions everywhere, but we might have gotten them contained.”

“We?” Zhu asked.

“They were asking—the security office was asking—if the Alliance had the authority to order a dome sectioning because the Moon is, you know, city states, and I was trying to answer it when the order just came through. It just came through, and God, what if they destroyed Armstrong Dome again?”

Again. Zhu blinked, suddenly remembering Berhane. He scanned for her. She was standing in the middle of the room, arms wrapped around her torso, staring blinding at the screens.

This was worse, this was a thousand times worse than her mother. It brought everything back, and it might actually destroy her. He did care about her, maybe even loved her still, and he couldn’t watch that happening; he didn’t want it to happen.

He made his way through the half-standing people, the Disty trying to pull themselves up, the Peyti holding their masks, and somehow got to Berhane’s side. He was about to pull her close, hide her face in his shoulder, when he actually looked at her.

She was calm.

“My God,” she said, speaking a truth that he would only later realize was prescient. “Nothing will ever be the same again.”

ONE MONTH AFTER ANNIVERSARY DAY

EIGHTEEN

GOMEZ STOOD NEAR the door for High Functionaries in the perfectly round room, hands clasped behind her back. Five of her deputy marshals were scattered around the large room, one in front of each of the remaining doors. The room was a neutral brown, with a brownish skylight open to Thaaraenegra’s two distant suns.

The room’s color came from the six Cean. They stood in a perfect semi-circle, facing the six human campers who had caused this mess. The campers were having a hell of a time maintaining their semi-circle, but at least they were trying.

They knew the importance of the next hour.

The Cean liked doing everything in sixes or twelves. They also worked in perfect circles, and any deviation from that caused all kinds of problems. The Cean were in full battle garb: hair teased and colored bright blue and pink, matching paint along their naked bodies, genitals deliberately dyed an angry red.

The human campers didn’t know where to look, partly because the Cean were built similarly to humans. The Cean had brow ridges, beaks instead of mouths, hands on wings instead of arms, and birdlike legs that curved downward into three-toed feet. But their torsos looked just like a human’s. And the Cean never wore clothes. They did not believe in covering any part of their bodies with something artificial. Even their dye was made from raw materials found on Thaaraenegra.

Their reluctance to wear anything prevented space travel, even though they had the technology for it. Other cultures on Thaaraenegra used space travel, but the Cean did not, and probably never would.

Still, they were fairly tolerant of aliens unless the aliens violated a major cultural norm.

Which the campers had done by, of all things, placing their tents in a triangle near a beautiful lake on the far end of Ceanese land. The lake, apparently, was sacred, and the triangle called bad gods. Or maybe it invoked bad luck. Or possibly it was as offensive to the Cean as what the Cean wanted the humans to do to atone was to the humans.

Gomez felt a giggle threaten. She suppressed it. The giggle was a sign of sheer exhaustion. She rarely giggled—at least when she was working. Even when she wasn’t. She always viewed an impending giggle as a sign that she needed to rest for a few hours. Not that she’d get the chance for a while.

She’d been on Thaaraenegra for three full weeks, handling negotiations after she arrested the human campers. She’d explained to the humans that the arrest was mostly for the Cean, although not entirely.

The campers—all Earth Alliance citizens—needed special permits to travel this far out into the Frontier. Not that the permits had anything to do with non-Alliance cultures like the Cean. The permits were more accurately termed “waivers,” but the Frontier Security Service had learned that most people would not sign a waiver to travel outside the Alliance.

They would, however, fill out permits.

Most of the time, anyway.

These six had been traveling for nearly a year, stopping at all kinds of beautiful non-Alliance worlds, somehow avoiding trouble—until now. Probably because their destinations had been so remote that even the locals didn’t notice them.

The Cean did. The Cean took affront to almost everything the campers did.

Gomez shifted slightly, almost imperceptibly. In her many years with the FSS, she had learned how to move without seeming to move at all. It was better that way, since even the smallest thing could be offensive to an unknown culture.

She was now watching the head of the Ceanese warriors. When he was ready, he would spread the feathers on his left wing to signal her.

Part of the agreement with the campers and the Ceanese was that the campers had to perform their apology without assistance from the FSS. This was the only part that worried her. The apology had been the sticking point from the beginning, and the reason she’d lost three weeks of her life dealing with the Ceanese and the campers.

The apology had to be performed in the Ceanese method, miming Ceanese rituals. And just thinking about it made that giggle threaten again.

Gomez would have performed the apology reluctantly but quickly, and then gotten the hell off Thaaraenegra. The campers balked from the beginning.

Because this was one of those instances where the apology performance, while respectful in Ceanese culture, was considered obscene in almost every single human culture—at least when performed in public. The FSS had verified the ritual as an apology, after working with nearly a dozen other native species to confirm. Then the FSS had urged the campers to perform their apology from the beginning. Gomez figured the apology should be relatively easy, since the campers were three different couples. Gomez had assumed they did such things in private.

Only she later learned that they did not (or at least, they did not at admit to it in a group of their peers). These six campers refused, not just because the requested performance was sexual in nature, but also because it was something that the religion of this group of humans had banned.

Gomez wasn’t that familiar with the religion, a sect of a sect of a traditional religion, and she really didn’t care that the ritual made the campers uncomfortable.

As she explained to them, their choices were to perform the ritual and then ask their god (and each other) for forgiveness, or spend the next twenty years in some prison-like place that specialized in indoctrination, run by the Cean for Cean. Who knew if the procedures they used worked on humans?

It wasn’t something Gomez would have wanted to find out, especially since the indoctrination process messed with the mind and what the Cean called “the soul.” Or, at least, that was what the translators, working with several different locals, had termed the thing that needed to be changed. One translator had translated it as an
anima
, another as a
soul
, a third as
the subconscious
. Whatever it was—and whether or not it existed in humans—was subject to debate.

The campers shifted and tried hard not to look at each other. She had instructed them to maintain eye contact with their Ceanese delegate, and the campers were struggling with that.

Gomez hoped that the struggle would end inside this room. Because the Cean, who lived at the known edge of the Earth Alliance Frontier, had so far refused to join the Alliance—and this little incident had nearly destroyed any hope that the Cean would ever join.

Humans could be so dumb sometimes.

The leader of the Cean lifted his left wing and spread the feathers. The campers didn’t notice, or if they did, they didn’t understand. She hadn’t explained the signal to them, although she had said her people would leave at some point.

She nodded to her staff. They all pivoted, as they had practiced, and let themselves out the doors. She left with a sense of relief. She really didn’t want to watch the campers debase themselves just so that they wouldn’t go to prison.

The urge to giggle faded, and she wiped a hand over her face. The circular room was inside yet another gigantic circle. The Cean designed everything as a series of concentric rings. She walked around the outer ring to the one set of stairs. The Cean had designed the stairs for the other species on Thaaraenegra, because the other species couldn’t fly.

Even the stairs were circular, although not the way that humans would design them. They were wide circles with small declines, and would take forever to walk down. In the center was an open space, wide enough for a Cean to float down to a lower level.

Gomez waited outside the door to the stairway. Two of her marshals had already arrived, with the remaining three on the way. Elián Nuuyoma stood closest to the door. He was shaking his hands and shoulders, probably stiff from the awkward position he’d been standing in.

He was tall and slender, his skin dark brown and deliberately scarred from some childhood ceremony. The scarification always made his eyes look bigger than they actually were.

“Think they’ll do it?” he asked.

She shrugged. “If they don’t, then let’s hope we get to arrest them, not the Cean.”

“I’d like to be done with this,” he said. “We could use the break.”

He’d been with her the longest, which meant that the FSS would probably take him from her soon. In the last seven years, the FSS had sent the best young human marshals to her for training, partly because she saw so much, but mostly because she settled most of her cases to the satisfaction of the humans and the natives that they encountered.

“To this day, I don’t understand what their problem is,” said Jenna Baans, one of the other deputies. She was as tall and slender as Nuuyoma. Her eyes were a vivid, startling green, which had unnerved more than one alien species that the FSS had encountered in the last year.

She was the newest deputy on Gomez’s team. Initially, Gomez had given her the task of convincing the campers to apologize to the Cean. When it became clear that Baans had no empathy for the campers at all, Gomez had given the task to Nuuyoma. He, at least, could get it done.

“Logic doesn’t play a part as much as we’d like,” Nuuyoma said to Baans. He wasn’t really looking at her, instead peering down the hall so that he could see the others as they arrived.

In the beginning, he had treated Baans warmly, thinking her new and untested. Over time, he told Gomez that he thought Baans lacked the compassion needed for the job.

Gomez wasn’t sure if more was going on than a disagreement over style. At the start, Nuuyoma would hover close to Baans. But as their tour got longer, they stood farther apart, rarely even glancing at each other.