by MJ Blehart
“In my experience, that was more true of the Dahl clones. I don’t know about the abilities of the NECC clones,” Jace said. “The original Rojas was infantry by choice, I believe. But he also worked as a sniper from time to time because he was such a good shot.”
“And you, Jace?” Kara asked. “Are you a good shot?”
“Yes,” he said. “I was fortunate to suffer no defects in the cloning process, so I got all of the original Rojas’s best qualities.”
“‘Defects’?” Kara asked.
“When you create several thousand clones at a time, because of the nature of organic material, imperfections occur,” Jace said. “Most of these are minor. You still get excellent cloned troops, but there may be a clone who, as a sniper, is an 80 percent effective shot when the template was 90 percent effective. Or the eidetic memory inherent in our engineered DNA is imperfect. Not something that the clone scientists, nor those creating and using us, made terribly public.”
They reached the MBCC. Before they could get to Feroz’s station, another agent stopped Onima. Since she oversaw them all, she paused to speak with them.
Jace and Kara found Feroz in his usual position, fingers flying over various screens and holographic 3D monitors projecting data and information.
“How many monitors can you focus on at a time?” Kara asked Jace.
“One,” Jace replied honestly. “I mean, maybe two, since in full battle armor, the heads-up display creates that effect.”
“I thought clones had improved vision over non-clones,” Kara said, “hence, the eye color.”
“We do, in certain respects,” Jace said. “Our night vision and light-level adaptability reaction time vastly surpass normal human adjustments. That’s why clones never need sunglasses. Our eyes are also less susceptible to damage from exposure to UV, infrared, and other radiations. I guess we see a broader spectrum, but I’ve no frame of reference.”
“You do,” Feroz stated. “Clones can see further into UV and infrared than non-clones. Clones also have engineered clearer vision, and their eyes won’t suffer the same degradation as non-clone eyes. I suspect, were it not for the stigma attached to them, more people who get augmentations to their bodies would have clone eyes made.”
Onima joined them. “Sorry, had to approve of something for another case under my directive. Feroz, have you made anything of the data Ms. Varma gave us?”
“Yes,” Feroz replied. A 3D holographic screen appeared before Jace, Onima, and Kara. “There are currently twenty-five top-level company directors. These are the members of the board who make all the decisions about Gray and Chuang’s overall activities. Beneath them are local directors, who manage individual offices, as well as deputy directors like the late Mr. Cadoret and Ms. Varma. Though all of them aren’t listed here, there are hundreds of deputy directors.”
“That’s a lot of people,” Jace said.
“Actually, with a company the size of Gray and Chuang, which employs millions across the galaxy, a few hundred deputy directors and local directors isn’t so many,” Kara commented.
“Feroz,” Onima said, “can you tell which of these twenty-five directors have been with the company longest? Disregard anyone added after the war.”
“One moment,” Feroz said. His fingers flew across the screens, but a moment later, new data popped up on the projected monitor. “There.”
The list was now ten names.
“That’s better,” Onima said. “Can you pull up a list of known NEEA and NECC officials who were never arrested or tried after the war?”
“Why?” Feroz asked.
Jace spoke up. “Because when Onima referenced ‘Former officials who got away because they were believed to be low-level bureaucrats,’ Ms. Varma agreed with her.”
“Exactly,” Onima said.
“That could take some time,” Feroz remarked. “There were dozens of officials deemed too trivial to warrant arrest or trial in both the NECC and NEEA.”
“Let’s split the director’s list,” Onima suggested. “I’ll take three, and Kara will take three. You and Jace each take two.”
“Shouldn’t I take three?” Feroz asked, feigning hurt.
“No; we may need to toss info to you,” Onima said by way of a pseudo-apology.
Jace was perfectly happy to take only two.
There were fifty-three total former NEEA and NECC officials on the list. Jace ran searches for any connections between the two Gray and Chuang directors he’d been assigned and those fifty-three individuals.
It took three hours total. That was relatively fast, when you accounted for dozens of planets across a vast swath of space.
And it was not without a result. One of the two directors Jace had been looking into produced a connection to one of the former officials.
“I think I have something here,” Jace announced.
“I do too,” Kara added.
“What have you got?” asked Onima.
Jace passed his information to Onima’s screen. “A connection to a man named Vladimir Bettani.”
“Huh,” Kara said. “I have made a similar connection between one these directors and Vladimir Bettani, too.”
“Interesting indeed,” Onima remarked, “because I also have found connections to one Vladimir Bettani with two of these directors.”
“Vladimir Bettani....” Feroz said, his fingers flying across his screens. “Well, it appears he was a minister in the NEEA’s Alliance Council Committee. While all five members of the committee had equal power and had been elected to their position, their concerns were quite specific: defense, finance and commerce, education, foreign policy, and interior and agriculture.”
“Right,” Onima said. “And after the war, following the arrest of the prime minister and their two deputies, they also arrested the foreign policy and finance committee members, as well as most of their deputies.”
“What about defense?” asked Kara. “I don’t recall the specifics of the end of the war.”
“Killed when the IHCF and canutus launched their strike,” Jace said.
“How did a minister of the council committee, one of the five most powerful leaders of the NEEA, not get arrested?” asked Kara.
Feroz quickly looked something up. “Actually, he was arrested. But while his service and role at the end was not terribly clear, he claimed he was the minister of education. Despite his being arrested by the IHCF, when the new Confederation courts of the AECC took over, they felt they did not have sufficient evidence to put him on trial.”
“But here he is now,” Onima mused, “with ties to multiple Gray and Chuang company directors. Does anyone else find this as suspicious as I do?”
“To be certain,” Jace said.
“Feroz,” Kara began, “what else can you find on Vladimir Bettani during and before the war?”
“Records are spotty at best,” Feroz said, searching.
“What are your thoughts?” Onima asked Kara.
“While there is no direct evidence to be applied in a court of law, that doesn’t mean there isn’t information that allows some speculation. Despite being the minister of education on the council committee, that doesn’t mean Bettani wouldn’t be interested in reclaiming his lost position.”
“That does offer a motive,” Jace said, “and evidence of the connection we’ve speculated exists between Gray and Chuang and former members of the defunct governments. It offers a ‘who’ in answer to the ‘why’ of the virus.”
“Interesting,” Feroz said softly, most likely to himself. Still, he passed information to their screens. “A couple of fragmented speculative reports from just after the start of the war where Bettani, according to IHCF intelligence, was not the education minister but, rather, treasury or defense.”
Onima said, “And with the defense minister having presumably been killed when the IHCF intervened, it would be easy to take on a different role, and create minimal records to back the claim prior to the full collapse of the Alliance.”
“Those offices would certainly have gotten him tried,” Kara said.
“Can you get information about where he is now?” asked Jace.
Again, Feroz was tapping away at his screens. “Yes. He currently resides on Aarde, in the Kapteyn’s Star solar system.”
11
Onima had requested that Captain Barr warp the Aquila to Aarde in the Kapteyn’s Star solar system.
Feroz was going over what the team had discovered thus far. Between Dr. Steingarten’s notes, the information from Clones Remembered, Jun Varma’s material, and the datadrive info from Gray and Chuang, there were a lot of different pieces to consider.
While the ship was in the warp bubble, they had no contact with the rest of the galaxy. Between time distortion and the way that the ship contracted space in front of it while expanding space behind it, communications were impossible. Though Jace’s understanding of faster-than-light travel was extremely limited, what he did get was that it took the Aquila outside normal space-time parameters.
Kara had gone to her station to write up a report. Onima was seeing to other cases her team were working on that were lower priority. Though he could have assisted Feroz, Jace could tell that the cryptanalyst was in his own world.
Jace left the MBCC and made his way to the ship’s gym. Though he had done naught but physical labor since the end of the war, being aboard the starship meant he was less active overall. He lifted weights and ran around the track for a bit.
Though Jace had limited understanding of the shipboard’s artificial gravity, he knew it was less than most planetary bodies’ force. But it was also adjustable, and en route between worlds, the level of gravity would alter so that the crew could visit a given planet without needing to readjust too much or for a long time.
The same system that produced artificial gravity, in reverse, was how vehicles hovered. Cars, trucks, vans, and civilian and military craft had employed that technology rather than wheels for centuries. Jace didn’t know the history, but he knew a little about the tech.
He suspected that the knowledge he had on the subject was just the kind of common knowledge most people possessed.
Learning that clones had been given inhibitions to prevent ambition had not shocked Jace. It made a lot of sense. You didn’t want to create a soldier who might decide that they had enough ambition to take you down. But learning that it was intended to go further, and to prevent free will—to all intents and purposes—was somewhat unsettling.
Jace was content to exist. He didn’t fear death. In fact, as a clone, Jace only felt fear in the interest of avoiding death. It was a useful combat tool.
He was enjoying his present circumstances more than his previous life on Raven. Maybe Jace wasn’t an active infantry soldier anymore, but the work he was doing on Onima’s team produced a similar sense of satisfaction.
After the gym, Jace went to his quarters and cleaned up. He had gotten used to the vast amount of personal space he called his own on the Aquila, although it still surprised him from time to time. A private washroom and the size of his quarters were more or less the height of luxury for a clone, and not something most would ever experience.
Though he was not hungry, Jace knew that Onima, Dr. Patel, Kara, and Yael tended to get supper at the present hour. He decided to head to the galley and see if they were there.
When Jace arrived in the lounge, he found Kara and Onima seated at different tables. Neither Feroz, Dr. Patel, nor Yael were present.
“Jace,” Kara called, gesturing.
Jace approached her table. “Let me grab something, and I’ll join you.”
“Please,” Kara said.
Jace walked toward Onima’s table. “I’m going to sit with Kara. Care to join us?”
“Sure,” Onima said.
Jace acquired coffee and pondered food. He had eaten the day before and wasn’t hungry, but decided it was a good idea to get something.
Jace selected a sandwich and joined Kara and Onima.
“How many cases is this team handling?” Kara asked Onima.
“Nine or ten,” Onima replied, “in addition to the Cadoret murder investigation. Six are oversight on long-term investigations, and two are follow-ups on previous investigations we’re wrapping. One or two are in various degrees of information gathering and the like.”
Kara nodded as Jace took his seat. “Am I right that your team was involved in the Wakim investigation?”
“Yes,” Onima said. “He’s about to go to court.”
“He’s got no real defense, has he?” asked Kara.
“No. He was careful when it came to the embezzling and other corruption, but he got sloppy when he hired those thugs to start beating people who owed him ESCA. And the murder, of course, ties right back to him. It was only a major challenge because his thugs didn’t want to also go to prison.”
“I’m surprised you and the members of your team aren’t testifying,” Kara said.
“We were deposed and made statements,” Onima said. “The prosecution felt pulling us from duty was unnecessary.”
“I’ve only had to testify once,” Kara said. “But that was because I lost my team during the arrest, and the prosecution felt the case was stronger if I testified. Director Rand agreed.”
Onima nodded. Jace took a bite of his sandwich as his companions also ate their meals.
Something Kara had said before occurred to Jace. “Kara, didn’t you tell us you’re from Aarde, originally?”
Kara grinned. “I am.”
“What can you tell us about it?” Jace asked.
Kara took a drink. “Aarde is an enormous planet. Two main continents. One has an east-west coastal divide, and the other a north-south divide. Lots of cities—it was one of the first planets settled when colonization began.”
“You mentioned that the war robbed you of your home,” Onima remarked.
“It did,” Kara said. “My mom was a nurse, and my dad was a teacher. We lived in a small town called Ejnardorp, about three hundred kilometers from Gerritwereldstad. It was in the plains, surrounded by farms, except for the manufacturing plant to the west. Though they used to make cars and trucks there, when the war started, they switched to war machines. Personnel carriers, hovertanks, and other armored vehicles.”
Kara paused and ate some more of her dinner. “Well, the NECC found out about the plant and bombed it. In the process, they took out the town. We lost about half our residents to that bombing. Like I said, I joined Aarde planetary security rather than go to university.”
“Aarde saw a lot of the war,” Jace said. “I never went there. My squad received an assignment to Aarde once, but it was rescinded, and we were sent to Tee-Erde.”
“I left Aarde once during the war,” Kara said. “NEEA command called a summit at coordinates in space, to keep the info from NECC command. We were there for about twenty hours total. I saw none of it because I was on guard duty for the senior officials. Which made no sense, since we were on a starship in the middle of nowhere.”
“I remember that,” Jace remarked. “All the non-clone officers left for a week or so. Came back touting a bunch of new plans and going to the various NECC planets on the offensive. But honestly, I never knew what planet belonged to who.”
“Really?” Onima asked. “You had no idea if you were on a world that belonged to the NEEA or NECC?”
Jace chuckled. “In hindsight, that does seem kind of ludicrous, but, yeah—overall, when we were told to board a transport and leave a planet, we did. Then we’d spend time on a starship going to another planet. Board another transport, head to the surface, and continue fighting. I knew what my job was. There were always slight variations, depending on terrain, if the battle was urban or in the open, and so on. Other than that, it was time between combat.”
“Funny,” Kara mused, “After that summit, most of the people at my level were exclusive to planetary security. I carried information between clone units and various commanders. Sometimes I
was put on guard duty and backup to protect a town or city, and often I was the main point of contact for the civilians.”
Jace nodded. “Every planet I ever visited during the war had non-clones doing that. We had non-clone commanders who took charge of our platoons, companies, and so on. Clones never held authority in any of the hierarchy above a platoon, in fact. Almost every world, when there were important messages that command didn’t want broadcast, brought us a local courier, or section of them, that would join us briefly.”
“Interesting,” Kara said. “More than once, a new company would arrive, and that’s exactly how we got used. And, of course, we also joined combat that way a few times.”