A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (19 page)

IT TOOK A lot to shake up Gomez. She’d seen aliens die in front of her. She’d seen humans murdered in horrible ways. She’d seen negotiations that involved practices she didn’t believe possible.

She’d had to eat foods that weren’t really food for humans, sit in rooms that smelled so bad that she could barely breathe, touch furniture made from substances that made her stomach turn.

To do her job, she had become hardened. She was proud of that. She loved her work, and she was good at it. Part of being good came from being unflappable.

The attacks on the Moon—which happened more than a month ago—upset her. Not just because so many died. Not just because she never expected to see domes in the most settled part of the human universe shatter, but because she felt like she had a small hand in the attacks.

She hadn’t followed up on the clones of PierLuigi Frémont. She had encountered sixteen of them, had an inkling there were many more, and she hadn’t followed up.

Sure, she had reported it all to her superiors. She had flagged the incident as unusual. But she had done so because of the interactions with the Eaufasse and the Peyti, not because of the clones.

She sat in the office part of her suite on the
Stanley
. Early in her career, she had divided up the captain’s quarters, feeling she had too much space. When the ship got retrofitted years ago, she’d had the captain’s quarters reassembled and enlarged.

Part of her ability to survive in this job, part of her ability to do well, came because she had a quiet place to go, to think, and to recover.

She had designed an office in the very front of the cabin, where she met with staff or strangers who needed some kind of privacy. Two doors led to the living quarters: one door went directly into the small galley that the ship’s chef used to prepare special meals for her dining room (another affectation she had initially removed and then later reinstated on the ship).

The second door went directly into the main relaxation area, away from the dining room, away from the kitchen, and away from the noise. She was the only one who could enter this area and the attached bedroom. She kept both spotless. She didn’t even want help cleaning, although technically, she could have had some of the human staff scrub her quarters to complete perfection.

She didn’t even use robot- or nano-cleaners. She wanted no one to see her when she relaxed. Usually she shut off everything except her emergency links. She didn’t want recording, she didn’t want tracking, she didn’t want any record of what she did in her off time, not that she was doing anything wrong.

She just needed to be completely alone.

She valued the privacy more than she valued the assistance.

After seeing the holoimages of the Moon’s destruction, she went to the private area and paced. She had to shake the unsettled feeling that she had. She couldn’t think clearly when she was unnerved.

Emotions hurt her work; they didn’t help it.

And the emotions rising inside her made her shake.

She needed answers.

She went into her small office and sat down. Here she had a dedicated computer that was networked with the EAFSS system. All the records, all the court cases, and all kinds of legal information about various species—aligned and non-aligned—filled this database. It grew by vast amounts of information every second, with reports from non-human marshals to interactions with non-aligned species to discoveries of yet another culture no one had interacted with.

Just sitting down and logging in made her hands stop shaking. She knew that five clones had survived the attack on Epriccom, although they’d been in terrible shape when they left the planet. And of course, Thirds had survived. He had disappeared into the system, and she had never checked up on him.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to now.

First, she would find out what had happened to the five. Three had been hurt so badly no one thought they would live. The other two might have pulled through.

It took a while to dig through the database on a case this old. She found lots of legal jargon and lots of codes she didn’t entirely recognize.

Each of the injured clones was treated separately, and each went to medical centers in different parts of the sector. She would trace them first, and figure out what happened to them. If all else failed, she could go to Thirds.

But she really didn’t want to see him again. He hadn’t lied to her, per se, but he had played her. And in her entire career, almost no one had played her.

Even now, just remembering him unnerved her.

This whole thing unnerved her.

She knew she was missing something. But for the life of her, she couldn’t tell what it was.

She needed answers. She needed to know if, with a little more diligence, she could have stopped the attacks on the Moon. She also needed to know if she could help resolve those attacks—find the perpetrators, and maybe prevent another such attack.

Mostly, though, she needed to know what had gone wrong in the Alliance system of justice.

She needed to know that when she completed her job, other people in the system would do theirs.

Otherwise, there was no point in all the risks she took, all the meticulous care she used.

Otherwise, she had wasted not just her entire career, but her life as well.

TWENTY-THREE

ZHU MIGHT HAVE missed the case, if he hadn’t flagged everything to do with Anniversary Day. Even then, he might still have missed it because the language was odd:
injured prisoner, beaten because of resemblance to Moon assassins, claims unfair imprisonment. Claim rejected. Will trade information for freedom. Requests attorney.

Requests attorney.

Those weren’t the words that Zhu stared at the longest. He stared at “resemblance to Moon assassins.” No mention of Anniversary Day, no real mention of the attacks. The only reason his system flagged the case at all was because of the link between “Moon” and “assassins.”

No other reason.

Yet the entire thing made his heart rate speed up.

Will trade information for freedom.

Zhu poked around the edges of the notice on the pro bono information board, but he couldn’t find out any more about the case. Nor could he find where it hailed from.

He searched for “Moon assassin” “resemblance” “clone of PierLuigi Frémont.” He found a lot on the latter listing, all of it inaccessible—case sensitive, and only available to an attorney with a legal interest in the subject.

In other words, the files were closed, and only an attorney certified by a court could get the proper information.

He spent two days doing his due diligence while working on other cases. Most of his caseload at the moment was light, partly because he had been gone so long. No one had known when he would get back, so his court cases were pushed back—not that he had many. He tried to settle whenever he could.

He had several negotiations this week between interested parties, but nothing that prevented the level of work he needed to do to figure out what was happening here.

He could have given the work to one of his clerks, but he hadn’t. He wanted to handle this himself. It all felt…personal.

He didn’t know any other word for it. This was the first case he had ever had that had real meaning to him. Not that he had this case. He didn’t. He was just snooping around the edges of it.

He finally understood a few moments he’d experienced when he was serving in the Impossibles, where some family members in court cried when a client got remanded or his not-guilty plea was denied. It didn’t matter how much Zhu had warned them such things could happen: they were still heartbroken when the worst occurred.

He would be heartbroken if no one was ever brought to justice in the Anniversary Day cases. He would be devastated, and he hadn’t even lost anyone.

For the first time in his life, he truly understood Berhane. No one had been brought to justice in the first Moon bombing, in Armstrong. No one had even been accused of the crime.

Berhane’s mother had died, and no one had ever gotten punished for it.

Maybe there was a reason his former fiancée had lost herself in scholarship. Maybe she preferred the life of the mind to what was actually happening in her real life.

Maybe he had been the worst kind of partner, the kind who hadn’t even tried to understand.

These thoughts haunted him continually. He kept turning them over and over again in his head, unable to shake them free. A few times, he’d tried to contact Berhane, only to get a block on her links, saying that she didn’t want to talk to him; he could leave a message.

He never did. He had nothing of importance to say.

Except maybe
I’m sorry
. And he should have said that—and acted on it—a long time ago.

Finally, after the second frustrating day in which he tried to find out more about the case, he realized the only way he would learn about it would be to actually become one of the attorneys involved.

A note in the file mentioned that the client would want a meet. Which meant that if Zhu took the case, he would have to leave Athena Base and go to whatever prison housed this particular criminal.

He couldn’t just disappear from his practice, no matter how much he wanted to do this. Plus, any case that involved the Anniversary Day attacks would have to be approved through the partners. There were so many potential conflicts from so many different clients that everything needed approval.

He asked for a meeting with Rafael Salehi. Zhu figured Salehi would understand. After all, he was the one who had advised Zhu that at some point he would have to reconnect with his own personal sense of justice.

Although Zhu was wondering if he’d ever really had a personal sense of justice at all.

He expected to get his meeting with Salehi in a few days, but oddly, Salehi could see him within the hour.

Their offices were one floor apart, but they rarely saw each other. Once in a while they spoke in the firm’s cafeteria—if, indeed, a restaurant of that quality could be called a cafeteria. Usually both men had been on the way to something else when they were grabbing a bite for lunch. After Zhu had become a full partner, neither man had time to talk with the other except for some cursory checking in.

Zhu took the stairs to Salehi’s office rather than the elevator. Ever since Anniversary Day, Zhu had done a lot more exercising. He told himself he did it to keep in shape, but if he were honest with himself, he really did it because he had realized that day that he might need to run for his life at some point, and he was in no condition to do so.

He didn’t want to use enhancements to improve his physical condition. He felt a deep-seated need to do it himself.

Salehi had half of the fifteenth floor for his office. The other half served some older partners, who weren’t name partners. Salehi had promised Zhu an office on this floor when one of those partners retired.

The fifteenth floor had a hush that Zhu’s floor did not. Many of Zhu’s floor-mates liked music, and they liked sharing that music. He could close the door to his office, which sound-proofed it, but as he walked to that office every day, he heard a cacophony of sounds, from ancient Uscri tribal chants to modern Scree music, both of which sounded like screaming to Zhu. He preferred the melodic music of Old Earth, which fortunately many of his colleagues did as well.

No music played on Salehi’s floor, not even overhead to “relax” clients. Salehi’s office area had an almost religious hush.

He had no human assistant, preferring to use a data-based system that he claimed had a more personal touch. He monitored everything, because, he said, he was a control freak.

Zhu believed him; the desire for control was so strong that Salehi once admitted the real reason he didn’t want a human assistant was because he couldn’t control another person’s expressions and tone every hour of every day.

As Zhu walked down the brown carpeted hallway, a door opened in the back. Salehi leaned against the door jamb. He was a slight man, with close-cropped dark hair and eyes that always seemed a bit too big for his face.

“You look too serious, Torkild,” Salehi said. “The universe hasn’t ended.”

“Not yet,” Zhu said.

He always felt overdressed when he went into Salehi’s office. Salehi spent his days in white linen shirts, khaki pants, and sandals, unless he was going to court. Then he wore shiny brown suits that looked both expensive and tacky. His purpose, one of the other name partners said, was to stand out, and he certainly did that.

“Anniversary Day?” Salehi asked.

He didn’t have to say more. He clearly understood that Zhu’s response had come directly from his Anniversary Day experience.

“Yeah.” Just answering the question made Zhu feel even heavier. It was as if he had gained twenty pounds since he had come back, even though his actual weight hadn’t changed.

Salehi tilted his head toward the room behind him. “C’mon in.”

He didn’t wait for Zhu’s response. Instead, Salehi went deep into the room, pulling back curtains to reveal a sunny desert covering the wall. The sunlight made Zhu’s eyes hurt. He had forgotten that while everyone else in the firm seemed to prefer views of Athena Base and the space beyond, Salehi liked manipulating his wall screens so that it looked like he was anywhere but here.