A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (16 page)

Fraternizing wasn’t forbidden on FSS ships—if so, the crew would never have relationships—but it wasn’t always a good idea either. Gomez didn’t know if the two of them had had a relationship, but if she had to guess, she would have said that they had.

The other three marshals approached, all looking tired.

“Do we wait?” Baans asked, glancing at the closed doors.

“I don’t want to,” Nuuyoma said.

Gomez smiled at him. “We’re not supposed to coach them in any way. Both the campers and the Cean know how to reach us.”

“Oh, you’re too trusting,” Nuuyoma said, his smile matching hers.

“No,” said a new voice, “she’s just as tired as the rest of us.”

Gomez turned, and felt a half second of panic before she quelled it. Simiaar stood in the open doorway. She was breathing hard from climbing all those stairs.

Simiaar wasn’t young any more, and she’d let herself get out of shape. She didn’t like nano-enhancements, having seen too many of them gone wrong, and so she had to make the effort on her own to stay healthy. Because she worked as hard, if not harder, than Gomez, Simiaar had lost the battle with weight and exercise over the past fifteen years.

“You can’t be here,” Gomez said and glanced at the doors. If the Cean saw her, they’d believe the balance was off, and they’d find some kind of offense.

“Relax,” Simiaar said. “That so-called ceremony is going to take a while.”

Her eyes should have twinkled when she said that, but they didn’t. Something was bothering her.

“You need to see something,” Simiaar said softly.

“You couldn’t send it to me on the links?” Gomez asked.

“No,” Simiaar said. “Something just for you and me.”

Gomez frowned. Simiaar only spoke like this when they had a case together. And right now, if they didn’t count the Cean situation, they had no case.

“What’s going on?” Gomez asked.

“Can you come with me?” Simiaar asked.

“Yeah, I guess,” Gomez said. They were all going to leave anyway. But the presence of a seventh was going to create problems, just like reducing the squad to five would.

“What do you want us to do?” Baans asked.

“Stay at the restaurant on the lower floor, just like we planned,” Gomez said. “I’ll send a sixth.”

If she told the truth, she was happy to skip the restaurant. It smelled like dying flowers and didn’t serve anything that humans could eat. But it had tables that suited both humans and Cean, provided everyone fit into the circular pits dug into the floor around the tables.

“You’re not going to join us, are you?” Nuuyoma said quietly, as if he hoped no one would hear him.

“Do you think I’ll be missed?” she asked, only half-seriously.

“I hope not,” Nuuyoma said. “They like working with you.”

“I’m not sure they know who I am exactly,” Gomez said. “You handle anything that comes up,
if
something comes up. I’m trusting the apology is going to happen.”

“You just don’t want to deal with the campers when this is all over,” Nuuyoma said.

Gomez grinned at him. “That’s right.”

Then she headed toward the stairs, walking as fast as she could. She could hear Simiaar struggling to keep up behind her.

“Hurry,” Gomez said, “before the Cean come out and force me to stay.”

“You think they’ll do that?” Simiaar asked, looking over her shoulder.

“No,” Gomez said, “but it sounded good.”

She couldn’t run down the stairs because Simiaar couldn’t keep up. Still, she kept a good pace. Simiaar managed to match it so far.

Gomez waited until they were down one floor before asking, “What’s really going on?”

“Remember Epriccom?” Simiaar asked.

Gomez frowned. Epriccom. She hadn’t thought of it in years, although sometimes the dead bodies turned up in her nightmares.

“Are we having trouble with the Eaufasse? I thought they joined the Alliance.”

“They did,” Simiaar said. “They’re not the problem.”

Gomez stopped. They had dealt with three things on Epriccom. The Eaufasse, who wanted nothing more than to join the Earth Alliance, a dysfunctional Peyti translator, and a human colony that had destroyed itself.

“Don’t tell me,” Gomez said. “The clones showed back up.”

“Yeah,” Simiaar said softly. “And it’s a lot worse than we ever could have imagined.”

NINETEEN

HIS OFFICE FELT strange.

Zhu stood in the door to his inner sanctum, as he called the office he’d received after he’d been promoted to junior partner, and stared at the room. The multicolored art, constantly revolving images that showed Old Earth oil paintings, covered the purple and black walls. The gray carpet accented the black furniture, and the actual window—which he’d been so proud of when he first got the office—showed a never-ending view of the glimmering lights of incoming starships.

When he’d left, more than a month ago, he’d believed this office to be the pinnacle of his achievements so far.

Right now, he felt like a stranger.

He tugged the sleeves of his white silk shirt over his wrists, the cufflinks Berhane had given him when he graduated from law school glimmering in the grayish-gold light. The light always took some getting used to, particularly when he returned from the Moon, where everything was set according to Earth sunlight levels.

This far out, nothing resembled Earth, not even when something was advertised as Earth-like. It was almost as if the designers made up an Earth that could be anything they wanted it to be.

Zhu stepped inside the office before one of his clerks saw him hesitate.
He who hesitates is dead
, or whatever that ancient quote was. It had been a favorite of one of his law professors, and it had been stuck in Zhu’s head since Anniversary Day.

He’d seen so many horrible images since then, including an image of some man trying to decide if he would jump the barrier as Moscow Dome started to section. The man had waited a half-second too long before starting his jump, and had gotten crushed.

Some of the news announcers on various feeds kept showing that as a warning: here’s what would happen to anyone who tried to cross a sectioning dome.

Zhu had seen it as an example of bad timing, which was where his brain had gotten stuck. Bad timing—he’d suffered from it with anything to do with the Moon, including Berhane.

And he didn’t want to think about her.

He stepped around the grouping he had once called the Most Comfortable Chairs in the Universe. He’d actually gone to all kinds of nearby furniture stores, tried all kinds of specialty chairs, and even some that claimed to have nanotech that would redesign the chairs to fit whoever sat in them. He’d seen the choice of chair for his office as an important moment in his life.

Now that quest seemed so damn ridiculous.

It all did.

He walked to his precious window, saw his own reflection superimposed over the unusually well-lit part of space around Athena Base. The largest space station in the sector. All the important people in his profession seemed to gravitate here. They had the ritziest clients, both personal and corporate. And the ratio of human to alien defendants was stunningly low.

His face was drawn, shadows under his eyes so deep that no short-term enhancements could make him look healthy. He hadn’t slept much since Anniversary Day, and some of that was his own fault.

When it became clear that Berhane had untold reserves of strength, and she went off on some volunteer mission, she’d left Zhu at complete loose ends. He hadn’t expected it. He had, before consulting with her, got an extension on his time in Armstrong, pleading Anniversary Day, and everyone at Schnable, Shishani, & Salehi understood.

In fact, the senior partners at S
3
had made it clear that they wanted him to stay in Armstrong. They wanted him to represent the firm in any way possible, so that it would appear to S
3
’s most important clients that the firm was doing everything it could in this time of crisis. The firm had even offered his services to some corporate defendants who looked like they might have liability in building collapses in the surviving sections of the ruined domes—buildings that had been built before the codes had changed to accommodate sectioning domes.

Zhu had done preliminary work, stomach churning—the churn so bad that sometimes he got physically ill—then handed the cases off to some of the associates that S
3
had sent to the Moon to handle the upcoming caseload.

He couldn’t bear to defend people who had caused even more deaths through their negligence. Not after what he’d seen.

Not with Berhane—scholarly, intellectual Berhane—in hospitals and morgues, helping to identify the dead.

He’d never thought he’d feel admiration for Berhane. He’d always felt a bit of contempt for her, or at least, he had after he graduated from law school and she went back for yet another degree, living off the money her father made, not really contributing anything to any type of society (even though she thought her great scholarly work—whatever that would be—would contribute some day).

Then, just after Anniversary Day, after Berhane’s announcement that everything would change, her words came true. He was defending venal idiots, and she was doing her best to make lives better.

It helped that her father had survived. He hadn’t even been hurt. He’d just been detained by the authorities, like everyone else at that speech the governor-general was giving when she collapsed.

Her father wasn’t sure he approved of his daughter’s newfound work, and for once she didn’t listen to him. She had stood up to him, told him that the Alliance was in crisis, and he needed to do all he could to help.

Her father had listened.

So had Zhu, even though he hadn’t wanted to. He hadn’t had time to help with the injured or the wounded. He didn’t have the skills to help with the rebuilding. He was supposed to prevent the plaintiffs from getting any money from the companies who had built the shoddy homes in various domes, so that those people would have even less money. They had lost loved ones, and they would now get no compensation for something that clearly was the fault of the corporations involved.

Zhu leaned his head against the warm window. Temperature controlled, like everything else on this station. He could set the temperature in his office for each item of furniture, have a warm chair if he wanted it, a cool window, a hot expanse of carpet. He could scent the air with chocolate if it suited his fancy, or he could tint the oxygen mix with a bit of purple to match the walls.

He’d worked for such luxury, believing it mattered, believing that people needed a defense in this universe.

And they did.

They did.

The problem was that the people who needed it the most couldn’t pay for it, and those who were actually guilty, those who had offended
everyone,
including that strange thing called
human dignity
, could afford to buy their way out of most crimes.

You’ll hit a point
, said Rafael Salehi, the great-great-great grandson of one of the founders of this firm, and the partner who had championed Zhu,
when you’ll wonder what’s the point of defense. You’ll feel tainted. You’ll think you’ve sold your soul for a bit of wealth and privilege. That’s why you do pro bono work. Or you volunteer for a few months back at the Impossibles. You’ll see the need for defense then. You’ll remember it’s not just about the guilty. It’s also about what’s right.

Zhu had thought that conversation a bit pretentious at the time.
The speech he gives everyone
, he’d said to the other new hires over drinks after hours. He’d promised himself he would forget it.

But he hadn’t. Apparently, it had gone in on some deep level. Apparently, he had stored it away for the times when he needed it.

And one of those times was now.

He sighed and turned away from the window, not liking the look of his face any longer. It was just a reminder of the fact that he hadn’t been sleeping.

He sat behind his desk and scrolled through the private firm files to see what had come up on his docket while he was away.

He did need to do some pro bono work, but it couldn’t be just any work. It had to be work that would have real value, work that would be the legal equivalent of the work Berhane was doing on the Moon.

Zhu needed to clean up some kind of major mess, to be on the side of good for a change.

He also needed a case he could win.

Maybe he should return to the Impossibles, because that was what he was looking for. Something completely impossible in the Earth Alliance’s legal system. A defense case that had a worthy defendant, and something worth winning.

Everyone broke the law these days, and most people claimed they had a good reason for doing so. But those reasons were usually ignorance or a desire to get away with violating an “unjust” law.