A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (45 page)

The shots hit. For a moment, the
Alus 15
lit up, exterior, interior, all blurred into red light, before evaporating. Fujita had one moment to notice how beautiful it was, and then he stopped noticing anything at all.

FIFTY-ONE

RAFIK?
SALEHI SENT along his links.
Rafik?

He looked at Zhu, who seemed panicked. Shishani hadn’t even returned to the room yet.

“Get her,” Salehi said to Zhu.

Then Salehi put a hand to his ear, even though he knew it meant nothing. He stared at the screens, at the useless map.

Rafik, answer me. You got cut off—

LINK CONNECTION SEVERED. IMPOSSIBLE TO RE-ESTABLISH. LINKS EITHER NO LONGER EXIST OR NETWORK NO LONGER EXISTS.

Salehi played the message a second time. He’d never seen anything like that before. His heart was pounding.

He walked around the screens, leaned out the door, saw Shishani waving Zhu off.

Salehi pushed past Zhu.

“You want to tell me what’s going on, Debra?” Salehi said. “Because your damn delay just cost us our best transport captain.”

“What?” Zhu asked.

Shishani frowned at Salehi. “I just told the head of the Earth Alliance Military Human Unit that there was some mistake. He promised me he’d stop this. I was double-checking with one of our councilors.”

“He’s gone,” Salehi said to her. “Fujita’s gone. I got a severed link notice.”

“Try some other channel,” Zhu said. “He’s got to be there.”

“Yes, try,” Shishani said.

Salehi swallowed hard. He tried every link he could think of. He finally tried Fujita again.

LINK CONNECTION SEVERED. IMPOSSIBLE TO RE-ESTABLISH. LINKS EITHER NO LONGER EXIST OR NETWORK NO LONGER EXISTS.

“He’s gone,” Salehi said. “
They’re
gone. They killed your clone, Zhu.”

Zhu turned even grayer. He put a hand to his mouth and stumbled off.

Shishani watched him go. “Are we in trouble?”

“If we fight this, yes, we probably are,” Salehi said. “Something’s happening here. Something bigger than us.”

“You’re usually our idealist,” Shishani said. “You’re the one who fights for lost causes.”

Salehi nodded. A clone that looked like the Anniversary Day killers. An Alliance connection to his death.

“We should never have gotten involved in this one,” Salehi said.

Their involvement cost them a great working relationship. Hell, he needed to be honest. It had cost him Fujita.

A friend.

Salehi didn’t have a lot of friends.

“Hold on,” Shishani said, and turned away from him. Her body hunched forward, the way some people did when they were conducting a private conversation on a link.

He watched her. His entire body felt jittery, as if he were about to bounce out of the corridor and into another wing of the law firm.

She turned, hand down, expression bleak.

“They’d been told that Fujita was transporting terrorists,” she said. “They scanned his ship, and found the clone’s signature. Standard procedure is to destroy any ship transporting designer criminal clones. Particularly those with mass murderer DNA.”

“Who told them?” Salehi said.

She shook her head. “That’s classified.”

“That’s convenient,” Salehi said.

“Yeah.” She reached up, as if she were going to run a hand through her hair, and then remembered that she wore it up. “He warned me away. They warned me away. They said we shouldn’t have done anything.”

Salehi nodded. He got that message loud and clear.

“He sounded shaken,” Shishani said. “Like he was surprised by all of this.”

“Does he know who classified this operation?” Salehi said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t ask. We have to let go, Rafael.”

Easy for her to say. She hadn’t lost a friend.

But he understood.

She was scared.

He was too.

“It was a clone,” she said. “Of a mass murderer.”

“And a group we had hired to transport him,” Salehi said.

“We didn’t hire them,” she said. “Zhu did.”

Salehi’s stomach clenched. Zhu. His career was over now, even if he didn’t realize it.

“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” Salehi said.

“I wasn’t trying to make you feel better,” Shishani said. “I was just telling you the truth.”

She didn’t know the truth. Neither did he.

But he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

He needed to go sit down. He needed to think.

He needed to apologize to Fujita’s family.

Sometimes the law was so simple.

And sometimes, it was so very hard.

FIFTY-TWO

THE SHIP WAS fast, especially for something of its size. It was larger than the main crew quarters on the
Stanley
. But it felt small to Gomez. She was used to commanding a ship the size of a small battle cruiser.

Still, this one would be hers. Just hers.

She stood inside the model, looking at the traditional galley. It had replicated food, like so many ships, but it also had a space for a personal chef. She had walked through, stunned at the ship’s three levels: a large cargo area below, the main floor for cabins, food, and recreation, and the upper level for ship administration.

“You don’t want it.” The voice was familiar.

Gomez turned. Simiaar stood behind her, arms crossed.

“You’d be a damn sitting duck in that cockpit. Besides, the kind of weapons that come with this thing
I
could dismantle, and I know nothing about dismantling weapons.”

Gomez’s mouth opened. She hadn’t expected to see Simiaar here. Gomez had told her crew to take the weekend off when they arrived at Jezzen Base. She hadn’t told them she would be taking a leave of absence, even though she had put in for it. She would be gone at least a year.

Gomez knew why she was leaving the
Stanley
. She just wasn’t sure it would add up if she explained it to someone else.

She didn’t believe in a conspiracy, but she didn’t believe that there
wasn’t
one either. She needed to know. Because if someone was conspiring to bring down the Alliance, she couldn’t sit back and let it happen.

She wasn’t sure how to stop it, but in the long sleepless nights that she’d had on the way to this Jezzen Base, she had realized one thing: she had a particular skill.

She could investigate. Maybe she wasn’t as good with data retrieval as Apaza or as good at forensics as Simiaar, but she was good at putting things together. She was also good at reading people, and dealing with aliens. She was uniquely suited to asking stupid questions for all the right reasons, and leaving those she questioned without any suspicion of her motives at all.

And she couldn’t ignore all that she’d learned. Anniversary Day happened on the Moon in part because she hadn’t followed up on the clones she’d found at Epriccom. It didn’t matter what anyone else said; if she had done more than flag the file, then maybe hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people would still be alive.

She couldn’t live with that, particularly after discovering there might be something bad going on in the Alliance. She needed to resolve it.

“I thought you needed beer,” she said to Simiaar. Simiaar had said that when they arrived:
I need good beer and bad food
, she’d said as she toddled off the
Stanley
.

Simiaar shrugged. “I was on my way to getting a great buzz when Apaza showed up. The bastard asked me why you were taking a leave. I didn’t know you were taking a leave, and then I thought about it. I decided I was wrong. Still, I tried to locate you and I found you were in a dealership, looking at fast, weaponized vessels. Turns out I wasn’t wrong after all.”

Gomez’s back and shoulders were so stiff they ached. “Wrong about what?”

“You’re going off to find out what happened with the damn clones. You’re going to do the investigation the Alliance was going to do, and you somehow think you can do it alone.”

“I can’t take the
Stanley
,” Gomez said.

Simiaar crossed her arms. “And those are your only choices? Good God, woman, I thought you had an imagination.”

Gomez’s cheeks warmed. “You said you didn’t want anything to do with a war.”

“And yet, somehow, I’m part of the precipitating event. Imagine if you could have prevented—wait! You know how that feels. You need me, Judita. I find out things, and I’m smarter than you.”

She just said that to anger Gomez. Gomez shook her head slightly.

“I
am
,” Simiaar said. “I know that anyone who pilots a ship with its controls on the outer edges of that ship is asking for someone to attack them—whether that’s pirates or personal enemies or, gosh, maybe someone who wants secrets to remain secret.”

“I was just looking,” Gomez said defensively.

“You moved money from your stash,” Simiaar said.

“You
looked
at my accounts?” Gomez asked.

“To be fair,” Simiaar said, “Apaza did. He’s worried about you. And me. And us. He thinks this isn’t over. I think he’s right. Is he right?”

Gomez let out a sigh. She leaned against a wall and felt it give a little in the pressure. The wall was awfully cheaply made, considering how much this ship cost.

“I can’t keep doing my job if I think no one follows up on the important stuff,” she said quietly.

“So you think this is an isolated incident,” Simiaar said.

Gomez shrugged. “I don’t know. And because I don’t know, I can’t head back to the Frontier as someone who works for the Alliance. I really believe all that—”

“Truth and justice crap. I know,” Simiaar said. “Sometimes enjoying the purity of science is so much better. I get to do work I wouldn’t normally do. I don’t need to believe in right and wrong.”

“But you do,” Gomez said softly.

“Sadly,” Simiaar said. “Which is why I’m willing to pool my resources with yours. We buy a ship—a good one, not an expensive piece of hype like this thing—and we replicate my lab in it, get a few crew members who can help out, and ask Apaza what he wants—”

“He’s leaving?”

“He’s got qualifying tests coming up, Judita. He’s not willing to get enhancements, nor is he willing to lose weight. He’s going to physical out of the service, and he knows it.”

“So he’d come because he has nowhere else to go?”

“He’d come because he’s scared, like you are. Judita, there might be hundreds of those clones—”

“I know,” she said, cutting off Simiaar. Gomez didn’t want to have the discussion in the middle of some model in a dealership.

“We find a couple of other people who can help and who aren’t afraid of what you want to do, and we head off into the unknown. Unless you know what you want to do.”

Gomez let out a sigh. She looked at the area around them, and knew they were being watched. They had to be, because they could just walk off with some of the expensive doodads that would lull people into thinking the ship was well made. (Like they had almost lulled her.)

There are three things I need to investigate,
Gomez sent on an encoded link.
I need to find out where those clones came from. I need to find out what happened to that starbase in the Frontier, and I need to find out who got rid of TwoZero and the others
.

All by your lonesome you were planning to do that?
Simiaar sent back.

I was thinking I’d go to the Moon first, visit that security chief, see if she had some people who could help me.

Simiaar shook her head.
And spend half your year off getting there and back. Seems relatively worthless to me. Do it my way.

I usually do,
Gomez thought but didn’t send. Or maybe she did, given the sideways glance Simiaar suddenly gave her.

Better to go to her with information in hand. Besides, they’re probably overwhelmed on the Moon at the moment anyway. Think of that level of destruction. No one’s investigating anything.

What Simiaar didn’t send, and what Gomez suddenly realized, was that some of the natural investigators from the Moon were probably dead. Or in mourning. Or injured.

Her plan had been flawed. She’d been reacting out of guilt, not because she was thinking clearly.

She needed to investigate, yes, and she had to do it outside of the aegis of the Alliance. But she couldn’t do it alone.

She needed Simiaar. Apaza would make things so much easier as well. With the right pilot (or pilots), and a few others, she would be able to travel much more safely.