A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (43 page)

Simiaar was talking about a vast conspiracy, and that was where Gomez had her problem. She didn’t believe in conspiracies. They were hard; they were complicated; they fell apart before long-term plans became viable.

“You’re guessing,” Gomez said, even though she knew it sounded weak.

“Informed guesses,” Simiaar said.

“Based on ancient information on an old spaceship that could have been planted just for an event like this.”

“Don’t you remember Thirds?” Simiaar asked. “He said he’d never seen anyone like us. The Eaufasse thought all humans looked the same. Because the humans in the enclave—adult and child—were the same.”

Gomez sighed. She wasn’t going to get Simiaar off this without evidence of her own.

“So what do you want to do?” Gomez asked.

“Pretend we never found this. Go back to doing our jobs. Let someone else worry about it all.”

Gomez raised her eyebrows. “You’re usually not one to give up.”

“I don’t fight wars,” Simiaar said. “I capture criminals.”

“You think this is a war?” Gomez asked.

“You don’t?” Simiaar said.

Gomez threaded her fingers together. The attacks were seen as an act of terrorism, but often when historians revisited the events leading up to a major war, the initial act of terrorism became the first volley in a protracted conflict.

She needed to think. She stood.

“Get me all the information you can from this stuff,” Gomez said.

“And then what?” Simiaar asked.

Gomez looked at her. Simiaar was frightened. Gomez wasn’t sure she’d ever seen her friend this terrified.

“Then we’ll take the
Stanley
in for its maintenance,” Gomez said.

“And nothing else?” Simiaar asked.

“And nothing else,” Gomez lied.

FORTY-SEVEN

MADDIX MANAGED TO get them away from the battle cruisers without hitting anything. Fujita had no idea how; the
Alus 15
didn’t have the best remote guidance system at its top speeds. But she’d managed, and he blessed her for it.

They hadn’t followed a pre-plotted course either. Fujita had never done that before, just hit some buttons that basically mean
Get The Hell Out Of Here!
, but he was relieved to know it worked.

At least it had worked kinda. The
Alus 15
did have escape modes programmed in, and theoretically, those modes plotted random courses that were harder to follow and track.

He would find out if the theory now actually worked in practice.

The problem was that the
Alus 15
was now light years away from the course it had planned to take.

He wasn’t even sure he could go to the Irr Sector now. What did the people on those battle cruisers know? How had they found him? Were they searching for Trey or was this about something else?

The image of those gigantic ships menacing the
Alus 15
still hovered in the point of the triangle. Star maps that Fujita didn’t recognize floated on flat holoscreens above it all. The one star map he did recognize had to keep readjusting itself as the
Alus 15
flew farther from its desired path.

Behind him, Stone swore.

“What?” Fujita asked.

“You should thank me, Rafik,” Stone said.

“Thank you,” Fujita snapped. “Now tell me what’s going on.”

“If we’d fired on those things, we would have become enemies of the Alliance.”

Fujita craned his head sideways and looked at Stone. Stone had gone gray. “What the hell?”

“I told you before, those were old Alliance battle cruisers. But I figured they were so old they’d been decommissioned.”

That chill that Fujita had been fighting got worse. “They weren’t?”

“No,” Stone said. “According to what I’ve got from their names and registration numbers, they’re still active. They’re used to patrol the far reaches of Alliance territory.”

“We were attacked by the
Alliance
?” Maddix’s voice shivered. “But we’re an Alliance vessel.”

With all the documentation, all the notifications and warnings and everything that Alliance vessels were required to carry. The
Alus 15
broadcast all of that stuff to nearby Alliance ships all the time. That information essentially said,
We’re on the same side; leave us alone
.

“Did the prison somehow shut off our notifications?” Fujita asked Stone.

“No,” Stone said. “It was the first thing I checked.”

Fujita’s hands were shaking. If those were Alliance vessels, then they knew what his mission was. They knew who he had on board.

“Any word that these ships were rogue?” he asked, hoping against hope that some captains had taken it on themselves to get rid of someone with the Anniversary Day assassins’ DNA.

“Not from a cursory search,” Stone said. “And you’d think if someone stole battle cruisers or was misusing them or something, there’d be notifications.”

There would be.

Fujita felt like an idiot. He’d never taken political jobs before, and somehow Zhu had convinced him this one wasn’t political. Zhu hadn’t thought so, and Fujita really hadn’t either. After all, Trey just shared DNA with the assassins. He wasn’t one of them.

“What do we do now?” Maddix asked.

Good question. Because they were screwed. If they left the Alliance, then it would actually be easier to attack them and kill them. They could be considered hostile and not be subject to Alliance law.

But if they remained here, they’d be easy to find.

“I need you to shut down all our identifiers,” Fujita said to Maddix. “
All
of them.”

“But then we can’t—”

“We’re being targeted by the damn
Alliance
,” he said. “We’re constantly sending our identification throughout the Alliance.”

She swore. Usually Fujita liked her long creative curses, but right now, she was just being annoying.

“I’ve shut down the identifiers,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. “Get us out of here, fast, like you did before.”

“But—”

“Stop arguing with me!” he snapped. “
Get us out of here
.”

She nodded, slammed her hands on the controls, and the ship lurched. For one brief moment, Fujita worried that they’d been disabled. Then the systems engaged and the ship moved quickly.

“How bad’s the damage?” he asked Stone.

“Worse than I thought,” Stone said. “And I was just monitoring our former position. You got us out just in time. Two more battle cruisers were on the way.”

“Not the ones that found us earlier?”

“No,” Stone said.

Fujita felt his heart sink. That meant they were truly being targeted.

He turned toward Maddix. “I want you to have the ship chart some random courses. In between, you chart something, in case this is a program and it’s not as random as we thought. I want to zigzag all over the sector for the next few hours.”

She nodded, subdued after he had yelled at her.

“And for the next ten minutes, you guys are not to talk unless I ask you to. You got that?”

Stone frowned at him, and didn’t say anything. Maddix didn’t raise her head, but she nodded.

Fujita activated a private encoded link, and hoped to hell that no one from the Alliance was monitoring it.

A tiny holographic image of Rafael Salehi appeared in front of Fujita’s right eye.

“Rafik?” Salehi asked, his voice sounding tinny through the faint connection. “You’re not supposed to use this except in an emergency.”

“Yeah,” Fujita said aloud. He didn’t care if the team heard him. “I think it’s an emergency when Alliance battle cruisers are trying to destroy my ship, don’t you?”

“What?” Salehi asked.

“You heard me,” Fujita said. “You call them off, now. I don’t care what you threaten, but do something. Because I can’t. Even if I kill this passenger you saddled us with or turn him over, the Alliance is going to target my ship for years.”

Maddix looked up, startled. Stone ran a hand over his mouth.

“What passenger?” Salehi asked.

“The clone that Zhu set free,” Fujita said. “Do something. Or I swear every member of my family will come gunning for you. Because I will make sure that they know the person responsible for my death is you.”

He severed the connection, then fell into the command chair.

“Is that true?” Maddix asked. “We’re going to be targeted?”

“That’s true,” Fujita said.

“Then get me off this thing. No job’s worth this.”

“I’d love to kick you free,” Fujita said. “I’d love to return this clone to the Alliance. But we can’t stop anywhere without being blown up. And our life pods are all stamped with information from the
Alus 15
. We’re stuck.”

“What are we going to do?” Maddix asked.

“Hope to hell that S-three
has the kinds of connections they say they do,” Fujita said. “Because if they don’t, we’re not getting out of this one alive.”

FORTY-EIGHT

GOMEZ COULDN’T SLEEP.

She sat in the office in her suite on the
Stanley
, going over everything. She watched the Anniversary Day explosions again, the footage of the clones in Armstrong’s port, the images she had of the clones she’d discovered on Eaufasse, and the destruction of that faraway base.

She made a list of all the contradictions: the clones buried in the penal system; the incorrect maps; the ship that went from the Alliance to Epriccom; the use of PierLuigi Frémont’s DNA in the first place.

Then she got up and paced. Conspiracies were easy to believe. The evidence built on itself, provided the investigator took a paranoid view. Rather than believing in coincidences, the investigator always linked pieces that shouldn’t have been linked.

And yet, pieces nagged at her.

Simiaar’s fear nagged at her.

Gomez had asked a lot of her team. She didn’t dare ask them to investigate a trail that could lead into the Alliance.

She sat at the computer where she had stored most of the information that her team had collated. She searched through her discussions with TwoZero. She knew he hadn’t mentioned the ship, but had he mentioned the people running the enclave?

She didn’t remember it. And no matter how hard she searched, she couldn’t find it.

Maybe if she talked with him one more time, then she would be able to put this all to rest.

She ran a hand through her hair, and started the process that would take her back to Clone Hell. She would ask just a few questions, and then she would leave.

She was figuring out the travel schedule when her links got pinged.

She looked up at the screen, startled. Why had someone from the prison system pinged her links when she was working through the net?

With her right hand, she touched a chip on the back of her hand. A small holoimage rose. A standard avatar—genderless, but human-looking—stared forward with an expression that someone considered emotionally neutral.

We are sorry to inform you that the party you seek is no longer incarcerated in the Earth Alliance Prison System. The prisoner you seek is deceased. If you feel that you are entitled to an explanation of the death and/or entitled to benefits that might accrue to you under the Alliance Familial Leave and Benefits Act, then please use Release Form 3241025. We will respond to your request within the next six weeks.

The avatar vanished.

Gomez stared at the spot on the back of her hand where the avatar had stood. Deceased? But she had just seen TwoZero. Granted, he wasn’t in the best of health, but…

Then she took a deep breath. She decided to be the paranoid investigator.

She looked for information on the other clone. She got no response. She started to look for news when her links pinged.

She swallowed hard. That same avatar appeared, and gave the same speech.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. Had she done this? Had her inquiries brought the Epriccom clones to the attention of the Alliance? Or to the attention of those inside the Alliance who were trying to bring down the Alliance?

That couldn’t be possible. Could it?

She opened the files that Apaza had given her, and scanned them. She found the prisoner numbers for the other PierLuigi Frémont clones and she inputted them one by one.

Fifteen minutes after each input, the avatar appeared, reciting the death of the clones.

The only one that came back differently was Thirds.

When she inputted his prisoner number, she was told that particular number did not exist.