A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (25 page)

Chepi Verstraete listened with one hand over her mouth, her elbow braced on the table. She was small and slender, her tiny form disarming. Most humans—most aliens for that matter—saw her as ineffectual, but she was both strong and intelligent.

The researcher, Neil Apaza, could find anything quickly. He also had enough basic knowledge of various scientific techniques that he could be a hands-on assistant to Simiaar.

He was the only one that Gomez couldn’t entirely read. He was chewing on his thumbnail, a frown between his eyes, but as the story progressed, he didn’t look shocked. He looked confused.

Was he already familiar with this material? If so, why?

Gomez made herself look away. Apaza was the only person in the room she didn’t know very well. Whenever she saw him, he was hunched over a screen, tapping it, or mixing chemicals for Simiaar. He was heavy where Verstraete was slight, barely meeting the standard requirements for shipboard life and, Gomez would wager, no one had tested his fitness level since he qualified for the job two years ago.

He caught her looking at him, and then she remembered that he was the one who had tracked down TwoZero. He
had
known much of this material, just not why it had concerned Gomez.

Simiaar finished with her own reactions to the twenty clone assassins on Anniversary Day. Her tone had changed by then. The whole idea of a grand adventure was gone. Now, she admitted to something that even Gomez didn’t know: Simiaar felt like the entire
Stanley
team had screwed up somehow.

That revelation relaxed Gomez a bit. Underneath everything, she felt the same way. She knew that she wasn’t in charge of the others in the FSS nor did she have control over the things that others in the Alliance did, even in law enforcement.

Still, if she had followed up…

Her gaze met Simiaar’s and she was surprised to see her old friend’s eyes were just a bit moist. Simiaar tilted her head toward Gomez, and said, “All yours.”

Gomez nodded, and gave Simiaar a small smile of thanks before taking over the meeting again.

“As Lashante and Neil know,” she said, “I just visited one of the injured clones. He calls himself TwoZero, and he gave me a lot of information about his upbringing, the expectations he lived with, and what had led up to the incident on Epriccom. Since he’s in Clone Hell and has been since he got out of the hospital, he has no direct knowledge of and no direct connection to Anniversary Day.”

Verstraete kept her hand over her mouth. Apaza still chewed on his thumbnail. Nuuyoma leaned forward.

“But?” he asked.

Gomez could already see from his expression that the entire story disturbed him. He knew that someone had screwed up somewhere; he just didn’t know where.

“But,” Gomez said, trying to keep her voice level, “no one has ever spoken to him. No one has debriefed him. No one has investigated anything he had to say. No one even listened.”

Apaza stopped biting his thumbnail and put his hand down. Verstraete frowned.

“The more I look, the more I wonder if this information was deliberately buried.” It sounded dramatic, said like that, but Gomez didn’t know how else to reveal what she knew.

Apaza nodded. “Makes sense. The information was awfully hard to find. Even this clone, this TwoZero, took a more-than-standard search to locate. He doesn’t have a name, not an official one, and he’s registered in the system under two different numbers, neither of which are linked together. And, for the record, neither of them have both a two and a zero.”

Gomez wanted to thank him. She felt a stronger thread of relief than she should have, given how much she had already investigated. But she had been feeling paranoid, and the other side of that feeling was a sense of doubt, wondering if she had made everything up.

She gave him a small smile. “Normally, I would flag all the reports, send them through the chain of command, and insist that someone follow up on all of this. The problem is that I did so fifteen years ago, and the reports got buried, along with the clones. And then there’s the difficulty we had finding TwoZero, not to mention the other two survivors. Something is off here.”

Verstraete’s hand formed a fist, then fell away from her face. “What are you saying? That the
Alliance
has something to do with Anniversary Day? That’s crazy. Why would they do that?”

Nuuyoma shifted in his chair so that he faced Verstraete.

“The Alliance is composed of individuals,” he said. “Some good, some bad.”

“There are systems to weed out the bad ones,” Verstraete said.

Simiaar snorted. “You’re sure of that? Because I’d like to know those systems. Some of the deputy coroners I got assigned to the
Stanley
back in the day certainly needed weeding.”

“But you’re talking about incompetence,” Verstraete said. “The marshal here is talking about something deliberate, something anti-Alliance.”

“You’ve never encountered anyone who’s anti-Alliance?” Nuuyoma asked.

“Not who works
for
the Alliance,” Verstraete said.

“And youth triumphs over brains,” Simiaar muttered.

For once, Gomez didn’t chastise Simiaar for speaking her mind in a meeting. Gomez let that statement stand.

But she did add, “I’m not saying that the Alliance is connected at all. However, we’re dealing with some delicate things in this instance. Illegal clones, who may or may not be related to PierLuigi Frémont—”

“How can you doubt that?” Simiaar asked.

“Lashante,” Gomez said in her
shut-up-now
voice. “These could be some kind of designer criminal clone grouping made to look like Frémont for effect.”

“I suppose,” Simiaar said in a tone that actually meant
are you kidding?

Nuuyoma was looking directly at Gomez. “Designer criminal clones can be weapons.”

“Yes,” Gomez said. “And we’re already dealing with another kind of weapon. Those plant-like things the Eaufasse developed. Thirds proved that humans could control them.”

No one in this group denied that Thirds was human, which she saw as a good thing.

“Then there’s Uzven’s behavior. I checked its records,” Gomez said. “That incident on Epriccom is the only black mark in its file. The
only
one, and it didn’t let the incident go for a long time. After the last time it tried to contact Thirds, Uzven went back to Peyla to teach Standard translators how to survive in human environments.”

“If I were the paranoid type,” Simiaar said, “I’d say that annoying Peyti got buried too.”

Gomez nodded. She was convinced that Uzven had been forced into other work. But she didn’t say that quite as bluntly as Simiaar. Instead, Gomez said, “For a translator with such a stellar record, the change in its career path
is
a bit sudden and unusual.”

Apaza was biting his thumbnail again. Verstraete folded her hands together, then tapped her forefingers against her lips.

“If you’re right,” she said, “you’re talking about some kind of conspiracy that extends from the Frontier to Peyla. With what kind of goal? Why go after the Moon?”

“You mean besides the fact that for most it’s the only way to travel to Earth?” Simiaar asked. So she had thought of that as well.

“It makes no sense,” Verstraete said. “The Earth Alliance is what keeps stability in the known universe. It prevents us from going to war.”

“Yeah,” Nuuyoma said. “And we’re talking about weapons.”

“So?” Apaza asked.

The pace of Verstraete’s tapping increased. Then she swore. “They wouldn’t do that.”

“Do what?” Apaza asked. “What am I missing?”

“The Alliance wouldn’t provoke an all-out war to jack up weapons prices,” Verstraete said. “They wouldn’t.”

“That’s your heart speaking, not your head,” Simiaar said.

Gomez sank into a chair. She was suddenly exhausted.

“If that’s what you’re thinking,” Apaza said, “then they’re not trying to jack up prices.”

“Oh?” Nuuyoma’s tone was dismissive. “What are
they
trying to do?”

“Increase market share,” Verstraete said softly. Then she looked at Simiaar. “Am I using my head now?”

“Yeah,” Simiaar said softly.

“What do you mean?” Apaza said. He was clearly smart enough to understand this, but he seemed to have a block against it as well.

Gomez let Verstraete explain it. Gomez would correct Verstraete if she had to, but it was best for Verstraete to speak. That way she could think through the argument.

Besides, Gomez wanted to hear someone articulate this idea. She’d been batting it around inside her own head for too long.

“I just said that the Alliance stabilizes the known sector of space. Every group that joins has to agree to certain conditions,” Verstraete said. “And one of them is to follow the Alliance’s rules for warfare, which are, to be honest, pretty damn stringent. If you want to attack someone, you actually need Alliance approval. Then the entire Alliance will act with you or at least will be behind you.”

Nuuyoma nodded. “That rule alone is why so many cultures never join the Alliance in the first place.”

Simiaar made a disagreeing noise. “Eventually they do. The benefits outweigh the war rule. They make so much more money when they’re allowed into the universe’s biggest trading organization.”

Gomez felt like the discussion was getting off-track. She raised a tired hand. “Let’s not talk politics. It’s—”

“Why not?” Verstraete said. “That’s what we’re facing here, isn’t it? If this threat comes from the outside, it’s because the market share for weapons makers, the ones that specialize in the truly nasty stuff, is decreasing, am I right?”

“They’re probably buying administrators or lower-level bureaucrats,” Apaza said. “Folks who can hide information easily and remove names from files, and lose the documentation so that these people stay in prison a long time.”

“Let’s not forget ‘these people’ are illegal clones,” Simiaar said.

Gomez looked at her, unable to hide her shock. She thought Simiaar had no issues with clones.

Simiaar shrugged. “Illegal clones have no rights unless they’re adopted and actually declared human. It takes
nothing
to hide illegal clones. Nothing, because the law doesn’t consider them human.”

She spoke with great passion, which was what Gomez would have expected from her. Gomez felt something akin to relief. For a moment, she had actually doubted her closest friend.

“Illegal clones…” Nuuyoma was musing aloud. “Aren’t they generally used for identity theft and those kinds of crimes? They’ve never been considered weapons before.”

“We don’t know that,” Gomez said.

“Even if they weren’t,” Verstraete said, “they will be now. That image of those twenty clones coming into Armstrong is pretty blatant, and nutcases around the universe are going to use that as inspiration.”

“Wonderful,” Apaza muttered.

Time to stop this part of the conversation.

“We have no idea what’s actually going on,” Gomez said. “Everything you’ve mentioned is speculation. But we actually can do the investigating that the Alliance refused to do. I have hours of interviews with TwoZero, and I think from those we can track down his originators, and maybe the reason for his existence.”

“If he didn’t lie to you,” Simiaar said.

“If,” Gomez agreed. “But he didn’t have any reason to. And he holds the slim hope that things I find will be able to help him.”

“That’s why you brought us here?” Verstraete said. “You think we’re going to be able to investigate the background of a group of clones made thirty years ago by some criminal organizations? We’re not set up for that kind of investigation.”

Gomez had had enough negativity. “You don’t have to be on the team, Chepi.”

Verstraete sighed, then leaned back in her chair. “I ask a lot of questions when I’m scared.”

Gomez had noted that before, but she had forgotten it until now. “I won’t put any black mark in your record or harm your career in any way—”

“What if we find something horrible?” Verstraete said. “I mean, we’ve got problems
inside
the Alliance, if what you’re saying is true. What if those problems go way up?”

“You want us to ignore them?” Simiaar broke the candy into even smaller pieces, then piled the pieces on the edge of the table. “Just go on with our jobs like we haven’t stumbled on anything here?”

Everyone looked at Gomez. She looked first at Nuuyoma. His eyes were narrower than usual, and his lips thin. He was clearly as worried about this as Verstraete. Apparently, he was just letting her run with the questioning.

He looked away before Gomez did. Then she looked at Apaza. He rubbed one thumb over the one he’d been chewing. He was studying the broken skin as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world.

Verstraete met Gomez’s gaze. She sat up straight and her look was challenging.

“We’re not going to be representing the FSS, are we?” she asked. “We will be completely on our own.”