A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (32 page)

There was still a lot of good food on that plate. Gomez took the plate back. “Most likely, the enclave tapped into the communications between the Eaufasse and the Alliance.”

“It wouldn’t have been hard,” Apaza said. “Particularly if the Eaufasse weren’t aware that they needed to encode messages.”

“So someone or someones fled before you arrived,” Verstraete said.

“It looks that way.” Gomez hated this feeling of the floor slipping away beneath her, and yet she had chosen a job where that feeling happened all the time. It was almost like she was someone who loathed zero-g and decided to go into space anyway.

“So…what…? If the twelve didn’t come back, the colony would destroy itself?” Simiaar returned to her chair. She had lost the protection of sarcasm. She was clearly disturbed by this, and didn’t know how to comprehend it.

“I don’t think so,” Gomez said. “I would wager the colony was supposed to destroy itself at a specific time. If what you surmise is correct, Elián, then the most pliable and the most deadly clones were the ones who were left. And they were following orders.”

“There’s no way to know,” Verstraete said.

“No, there isn’t,” Gomez said, “not without catching the initial perpetrators. And they fled Epriccom fifteen years ago.”

“Yes,” Nuuyoma said. “But I identified the ship.”

Everyone looked at him. Simiaar leaned forward. “You
found
it?”

“Nope,” he said. “I just have the name and the registration. I was tracking all of that when the marshal here called the meeting.”

“Well, let’s send you back to it,” Simiaar said.

“Not yet,” Gomez said, “because we have two other ships to deal with as well.”

Nuuyoma took another slice of bread. Verstraete picked up her coffee mug. It looked like they were settling in.

“Another ship?” Apaza asked. “Like some other alien or something?”

“As in the ship that first established the enclave and the ship that brought its inhabitants,” Gomez said. “Neither ship, by the way, stayed on Epriccom.”

“You have the registrations for the ships?” Apaza asked.

“I do,” Gomez said, “but remember, the information I have is thirty-one years old. I have no idea what’s happened to those ships since.”

“This information was in the files you examined from the Eaufasse?” Simiaar asked.

“The reports had everything detailed,” Gomez said. “The Eaufasse had to provide information, after we showed up, to the Alliance teams working on the Alliance application. The Eaufasse provided a lot of information, most of it useless. But I’m hoping that the ships and their registrations aren’t useless at all.”

“You want me to trace them?” Apaza asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Gomez said, then looked at Verstraete. “Did you bring your map and timeline?”

“I did,” she said, “but I need a clear table to show it to you.”

Apaza and Nuuyoma took their plates off the table. Simiaar grabbed the food bowls. Gomez ate a few more bites of pasta, which tasted just as delicious at room temperature as it had hot, then set the plate on the table behind her.

Verstraete tapped the table’s screen, which blinked into life. “Flat or hologram?” she asked Gomez.

“Flat at the moment,” Gomez said. She wanted to see if the surviving clones had been anywhere near the part of space where the ships had originally been registered.

The map was multicolored, with each clone a different color and line. The timelines were detailed out. Verstraete tapped on one, and information rose in three dimensions.

“I had to ask Neil to help me set up the search,” she said. “But once I had it, I was able to get a lot done. Thirds, for instance—”

“Let’s not discuss Thirds yet,” Gomez said, studying everything. She felt a surge of disappointment. She had hoped to see places she recognized from her investigation of the ships, but she didn’t. There didn’t seem to be any overlap between the travel the clones had done after they were captured and the ships that brought them (or the people who cloned them) to Epriccom.

She had hoped for that. Sometimes investigations were easy in that way. No one believed that anyone would take the time to trace information over the vast distances in Alliance space. In fact, she found those kinds of errors in her investigations more often than not.

But not this time. This time, either the arrest and imprisonment of the surviving clones were separate from the registration of those ships—meaning that someone else had taken the time to hide the clones—or the information was so old as to be meaningless. It could have been either thing, and she wouldn’t know which—or if it was a third thing—without more investigation.

She studied the map for a long moment, knowing that there was information here she couldn’t yet comprehend. She lifted her head slightly, and looked at Nuuyoma.

“Is there anything on this map that ties to the ship you found?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. “I wish there was.”

Probably not as much as she did. She could feel the clock ticking. She knew that she only had so much time to look for this before she had to report back to the Frontier. She wanted this investigation to go quickly—and it wasn’t going to be quick or easy.

“All right then.” She stood up and stretched, realizing in that movement that she had overeaten. She felt a little stuffed. “I want one more cross-comparison, and I want Neil to do it.”

Apaza sat up as if she had told him to salute her.

“Neil, cross-check the registrations on these ships with places known to harbor companies that specialize in Designer Criminal Clones. It’s going to require some digging in the legal archives, but you should find what I mean.”

He nodded.

“I think he should look for suspected locations as well,” Verstraete said.

“Good thought,” Gomez said. “Let me know immediately if there’s crossover.”

She tried not to sigh. She didn’t want the others to know how disappointed she was.

“You all did good work,” she said. “Let’s keep digging. I think we’re on the right track.”

They picked up their plates and their tablets, and slowly filed out of the cafeteria.

She watched them go. Then she watched the cleaning bots slide into place. The cleaning bots would obliterate any trace of this meal and this meeting.

Her heart skipped a beat. There was one more thing she needed to investigate.

Maybe the answers she was seeking were in the mess left by the destroyed enclave. The Alliance would have insisted on an orderly gathering of the data and materials from the remains of that enclave, and all that information had to be filed somewhere, probably in codes that Gomez wouldn’t entirely understand.

But Simiaar would.

THIRTY-FIVE

THREE DAYS. Three damn days since that stinking lawyer had talked to him. Trey sat in the prison library, where he’d managed to find work, such as it was, and tapped at the computer screen on the wall beside him.

All information here was restricted. Each prisoner had to submit to a fingerprint and eyeball scan every time he tried to access information. In the case of Trey, who apparently shared a fingerprint and a retina pattern with at least two other prisoners in different cell blocks, he also had to type in his prisoner identification number.

Correctly. On the first try, or he’d be locked out for two days. He’d gotten to the point that he could type that information in his sleep.

As one of the librarians, he had access to most of the files here. But he couldn’t hack his way into the message system. He didn’t have the education, the training, or the willingness to spend time in solitary for disobeying the rules. He’d been in this prison—this cell block—long enough to appreciate all he’d earned.

It was, apparently, all he would ever earn.

He sighed. He checked the court records, but they still hadn’t been updated. It was all last month’s information. He couldn’t find out if the lawyer had even registered with this particular court system. Without that, Trey couldn’t even find out if someone named Torkild Zhu had tried to access information about Trey himself.

A month ago, Trey hadn’t even contacted attorneys.

Not that he’d heard from any others either.

Not that he would know if he had heard.

The only reason he knew about Torkild Zhu from the very famous law firm with the stupid name was because the man had come to visit him. If others had just sent a message or something, Trey wasn’t even sure it would reach him.

Sometimes the laws in the Alliance really defeated him. He wasn’t anything, not property, not an existing being. Just a number, and a bunch of different numbers at that.

He had been trying for years to send a request to an attorney, and it had taken bombings on a massive scale and a threat to his life in the yard before anyone allowed him to send a message.

Mostly, he got to send that message so that the prison’s legal ass was covered if he ended up dead in his cell after the whole airing of the Anniversary Day footage.

Or so he had believed at the time.

Now, he was beginning to wonder if the doctor had actually assisted him in sending that message. The doc was there when he’d cried out for a lawyer, and much as the doc hated the prisoners, he hated the rules here almost as much as Trey did.

The doc wanted to repair people like he could on the outside. Trey kinda suspected the doc wanted to do it to improve his medical skills, not because he actually cared about his patients, but it didn’t really matter. The result would have been the same.

The doc couldn’t really practice his craft on clones. He could patch them up, but he couldn’t make them pretty. He couldn’t use extraordinary measures to save their lives. He couldn’t do a lot of things, and that frustrated him.

Maybe in the middle of that frustration, he had tried to help Trey.

Not that Trey would ever find that out either. It wasn’t like the doc respected him or anything. The doc was probably just doing his job.

Or maybe some idiot in the prison administration was new, and was doing his job the way he would have done it at a “human” prison. Maybe Trey slipped through those proverbial cracks.

He rubbed a hand over his eyes. He tried not to feel discouraged, but it was hard. Because he was.

And he was angry and frustrated and sad.

Damn that lawyer, giving him hope.

Trey had survived for years without hope. He didn’t know how to survive with it.

And he knew how it felt to have hope taken away.

He stood up, trying not to look too agitated. Becoming agitated might cause someone to take his privileges away.

He took a deep breath, then made himself sit back down.

He couldn’t give up. Giving up would turn him into one of the pathetic prisoners he dealt with each and every day.

Maybe he should try finding those other clones. Maybe if the three of them banded together and pooled what information they had about their origins, they could try to get an attorney who wanted to help with the whole Anniversary Day investigation.

Or maybe Trey would be better off contacting some investigator on the Moon, someone who actually
wanted
his information rather than going through an attorney first.

Maybe Trey’s links to the Moon, which was in the Alliance, wouldn’t be blocked.

He had no idea, of course, but it might be worth pursuing.

He had resisted contacting the other clones of PierLuigi Frémont before. Trey had felt they had nothing in common. They weren’t from the same batch—he had checked that much at least. Two of them had been in the system longer than Trey had. Their knowledge was even older than Trey’s.

But maybe they were raised similarly. Maybe they had gone through similar training. Maybe they, as a group, had something to offer the investigation.

Maybe, if Trey figured all that out, he would be able to talk some law enforcement idiot into getting him a lawyer, rather than starting with the lawyer first.

He needed something. Because clearly that Zhu guy turned out to be a bust.

Trey couldn’t even figure out why such a big name lawyer had contacted him in the first place—except maybe the Anniversary Day connection. When the Zhu guy found out that Trey knew nothing of true value, the guy just vanished.

Trey sighed and called up the prison records.

He would see what he could find about the others—if the system even let him search for them. If he could figure out who they were.

It would take him time.

Which, apparently, was something he still had a lot of.

THIRTY-SIX

THE MAP FLOATING before Gomez had six different color lines and many different color dots. Apaza stood beside her, hands in his pockets, slouching. They were in her office, although they could have been anywhere on the ship for all she noticed.

Her gaze was focused on those lines. A bright red line ran from a starbase in a sector that Gomez had never seen before to Epriccom. A bright blue line ran from Epriccom to another moon near Epriccom, orbiting the same huge planet. A pale pink line ran from another starbase deeper in the sector where Epriccom was.