Starbase Human

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  One Of One Direct flushed. “You promised—”

  “At least by name,” Nuuyoma said. Then he frowned. “You’re very interested for a man who claims he waited decades to find out this information.”

  “I’ve been trying to find her for a long time,” One Of One Direct said. “Your arrival gave me an opportunity.”

  Nuuyoma nodded. He wondered if he could use that volatility.

  Then One Of One Direct frowned. “You said, ‘at least by name.’ Does that mean you found her another way?”

  “Yes,” Nuuyoma said. “Now you give me more information.”

  “That’s not enough,” One Of One Direct said.

  “It’s what you get,” Nuuyoma said. “You didn’t give me much either.”

  One Of One Direct pushed his plate aside. His fingers brushed the pineapple juice glass, but he didn’t pick it up.

  “After the spectacular failure of the fast-grow clones on the first Starbase Human,” he said, “Cloni got bought out.”

  “I know that much from my partner’s quick research,” Nuuyoma said. “It probably won’t take her long to find out who bought out Cloni.”

  “Oh, but it will,” One Of One Direct said. “Because there are dozens of shell companies between the buyer and the corporation that bought Cloni.”

  Nuuyoma dipped more fufu. He didn’t even look at One Of One Direct. Nuuyoma just continued to eat until One Of One Direct sighed heavily.

  “All right,” One Of One Direct said. “The buyer is your precious Earth Alliance.”

  Nuuyoma’s stomach clenched. He made himself move slowly so that he didn’t seem surprised. “You know that how?”

  “I have tracked all the shell companies,” One Of One Direct said. “I will give you that documentation if you tell me what happened to Takara Hamasaki.”

  That sounded like a fair trade. Still, Nuuyoma sent another message to Verstraete. Are you finding who bought Cloni?

  He didn’t look up as he sent it. He just continued to eat.

  I’m finding a lot of corporate family trees, she sent back. I’m not sure how much work I should do while I’m sitting here.

  That was probably as much confirmation as he would get. Nuuyoma took the last of the fufu and sopped up the remaining soup. After he’d eaten it, he said, “I found Takara’s DNA signature. I cannot give that to you because it was on classified documents only available to Security inside the Alliance. But the signature appeared more than once.”

  One Of One Direct’s blue eyes seemed even brighter than they had been when Nuuyoma met him. “Tell me where she went.”

  “You told me that you could point out who manages PierLuigi Frémont’s DNA now, and I’m not settling for ‘the Alliance,’” Nuuyoma said.

  “You’ll have to,” One Of One Direct said. “There is no direct line Frémont DNA on the market.”

  “What about clones of clones?” Nuuyoma asked. “You’re leaving a lot of DNA here right now. I could scoop it up and sell it.”

  “You could,” One Of One Direct said. “And I guarantee that the buyer would be a front for the Alliance.”

  Nuuyoma felt his face heat. “You’re telling me the Alliance tried to destroy Earth’s Moon.”

  “I’m telling you that the only place you can buy Frémont DNA and therefore make Frémont clones is inside the Alliance. Through the Alliance.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Nuuyoma said, even though it sounded true. It was the same circular information that had led Gomez to take a leave of absence from the Stanley.

  “Cloni still exists,” One Of One Direct said. “Last I heard, all of the Frémont DNA goes through that company. Figure out what they do with the Frémont DNA and you will find your killers.”

  Nuuyoma’s heart was pounding. Would it be that easy? Of course not. If someone inside the Alliance had turned this cloning company into an assassin mill, they would protect it.

  “You make it sound so simple,” Nuuyoma said.

  “It is simple,” One Of One Direct said. “Cloni has stayed small, and no one pays attention to it. It pays its taxes and reports what it needs to.”

  “How do you know this?” Nuuyoma asked.

  “Because, unlike personal records, business records are easily available in the open net. The benefits of free trade.” One Of One Direct sounded sarcastic. “Still, I’ll give you all of the documentation. And there is a lot of it. Now, tell me about Takara.”

  Nuuyoma took a deep breath. He had to play this right to get the documentation, because he didn’t have nearly as much information as One Of One Direct did.

  “The DNA signature appeared on the border between the Frontier and the Alliance two months after the destruction of Starbase Human,” Nuuyoma said. “The name attached to the signature was different, but the DNA matched on all levels.”

  “She went back inside the Alliance?” One Of One Direct asked.

  “Yes,” Nuuyoma said.

  “I want to see the documentation,” One Of One Direct said.

  “I can give you the name she used and the information she publically declared going through customs,” Nuuyoma said. “I cannot give you the DNA.”

  One Of One Direct’s eyes narrowed. Something in them made Nuuyoma want to slide his chair away from the table.

  “You said you could help me,” One Of One Direct said.

  “I did,” Nuuyoma said. “I also said I would give you everything that I could legally give you. I cannot give you information that can be easily traced to me. Her DNA signature could be traced to me.”

  One Of One Direct cursed. “Give me what you have.”

  Nuuyoma sent the documentation he had prepared through the public links. It didn’t matter who saw it; anyone could get public border-crossing information.

  One Of One Direct put his chair down on all four legs. His eyes glazed over as he stared at the information. For once, he didn’t seem to be playing coy.

  Nuuyoma pushed his own plate aside. This time, One Of One Direct’s plate was the one that held congealed food. That was a good sign.

  “All right,” One Of One Direct said after a moment. “I will send you all of my documentation if you swear to me you will tell me where she went inside the Alliance.”

  “I can do that,” Nuuyoma said.

  One Of One Direct tilted his head. “You’re being awfully agreeable for a lawman.”

  “I am,” Nuuyoma said. “Lucky for you you’re dealing with a marshal and not someone who works inside the Alliance.”

  One Of One Direct snorted a third time, then shook his head. “I’d heard that the Frontier Security Service had its own rules. I hadn’t believed that until now.”

  Nuuyoma’s private links pinged. He wasn’t really surprised. He had had a feeling all along that One Of One Direct had hacked most of his links.

  Nuuyoma opened the message and found thousands of pages of documentation, all of it corporate security trees, sales documents, and business histories. He forwarded it all to Verstraete.

  Confirm that this concerns Cloni, he sent along with the download. I know you can’t go through all of it now, but let me know I’m dealing with what One of One Direct promised.

  Okay, she sent back.

  One Of One Direct looked over at her, then back at Nuuyoma. “Does this mean we should order dessert?”

  The sarcasm would have worked if One Of One Direct had eaten his meal. He hadn’t.

  Nuuyoma smiled. “Just give it a minute.”

  He expected One Of One Direct to say that he didn’t have a minute, which would have let Nuuyoma know that the information was false. But One Of One Direct waited, just like Nuuyoma did.

  They sat in silence for more than ten minutes. Finally, Verstraete sent, This all looks legit to me.

  “All right,” Nuuyoma said.

  One Of One Direct started. He had clearly been thinking of something else.

  “Here’s what I know about Takara Hamasaki. It seems like very little, but give this
some thought before you respond,” Nuuyoma said.

  One Of One Direct’s expression hardened.

  “Takara went to Raaala as soon as she entered the Alliance. The name she was using was Suzette Hamdi. Both Takara Hamasaki and Suzette Hamdi never appear again on any records. Anywhere. Nor does the DNA signature that I had been tracking.”

  “So,” One Of One Direct snapped. “You have no information.”

  “I asked you to think about this,” Nuuyoma said. “No one’s DNA signature vanishes, particularly if they must travel throughout the Alliance or get medical care or even if they die. Unless…”

  “You can’t change your DNA signature,” One Of One Direct said. Then he frowned. “At least, not without help. And then only on the materials you use for identification. She Disappeared?”

  “Raaala is known throughout the Alliance as the place most non-corporate humans go to Disappear. There are more Disappearance services per capita there than anywhere else in the known universe.”

  He might have exaggerated just a little. He wasn’t sure about the known universe. He was certain about the Alliance itself, though.

  One Of One Direct whistled. He ran cramped fingers over his blotchy forehead.

  “I checked with every Disappearance service on the Frontier,” he said softly, as if he were speaking more to himself than to Nuuyoma. “I never found her.”

  That was a lot of searching for something One Of One Direct claimed to be doing on a whim. That tightening in Nuuyoma’s stomach had grown worse. He was lucky that she had successfully Disappeared. Because One Of One Direct had been very serious about finding her.

  “Tell me where she is now,” One Of One Direct said.

  “I don’t know,” Nuuyoma said. “I’m not a Tracker or a Retrieval Artist. I don’t have the tools to trace a Disappeared, particularly one who Disappeared successfully. Plus, she’s inside the Alliance, and I’m not.”

  And fortunately, neither was One Of One Direct.

  “Now I at least know where to start.” One Of One Direct pushed his chair back. He started to stand, but Nuuyoma caught his wrist.

  “Not so fast,” Nuuyoma said. “You know who created the original clones. You’re one of them. Tell me who did this.”

  One Of One Direct looked at Nuuyoma’s hand, but Nuuyoma didn’t let go of One Of One Direct’s wrist. One Of One Direct sighed.

  “The direct line was created with DNA given to Cloni by PierLuigi Frémont before he founded Abbondiado,” One Of One Direct said. “The clones who attacked the Moon are not from my line at all. They were created from a different line, one that came from an Alliance source. Apparently, the clones from the direct line are failures, at least according to everything I’ve heard. Fast-grow clones from this line do not have the capability to work within instructions, and the slow-grow clones…”

  He shook his head.

  Nuuyoma tightened his grip. “What about the slow-grow clones?”

  One Of One Direct smiled. “We’re more concerned with building our own lives than doing the bidding of some mighty master.”

  Nuuyoma frowned. One Of One Direct sounded awfully certain.

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because,” he said, “my line originally supervised the Frontier clone colonies that trained the slow-grows that eventually attacked your Moon. My siblings quit when ordered to destroy any clone that did not follow the rules exactly. Or rather, some of my siblings quit. After many of them were slaughtered along with their charges.”

  One Of One Direct shook his hand free. His face was flushed bright red.

  “The propaganda coming from the Alliance states that the Frémont clones have a natural tendency toward murder. I can say categorically that we do not. The tendency toward murder was trained into clones by non-clones, people who have some kind of horrid agenda. They don’t see us as human, so we can be destroyed at will.”

  His voice was shaking.

  Nuuyoma was barely breathing. This man, angry, captured the attention of everyone around him. They were all staring at him, and One Of One Direct didn’t seem to care.

  “We are human,” One Of One Direct said. “We are living beings. We do not deserve to be treated this way. My siblings objected. They saved many of the clones—whom I will not help you find, because they’ve gone on to real lives here on the Frontier. Find whoever owns and is running Cloni. Those people are your monsters.”

  Nuuyoma let out a breath. “Yet you want to get revenge on Takara Hamasaki.”

  “I want to find her,” One Of One Direct said. “She is the only one who knows what happened on that base. She has answers. And I’ll admit, there’s a part of me that wants her to pay for all the lives lost. But I have never killed anyone. That’s why I pulled out of that mission in the first place. I doubt I will harm her.”

  “Doubt is a weak word,” Nuuyoma said.

  “Yes,” One Of One Direct said. “I never claimed to be strong. You assumed it, because of who my original was.”

  He spun and stalked away. The restaurant’s patrons watched him go.

  Nuuyoma did too.

  He let out another breath. He wasn’t sure he believed One Of One Direct, on any of it. Nuuyoma knew he didn’t believe One Of One Direct about the man’s lack of desire for revenge.

  But it didn’t matter.

  What mattered was the information Nuuyoma had received. Information he would look through. Information that he would send, through encrypted messages, to Gomez.

  Information he would never, ever, send to the Alliance.

  Not just because One Of One Direct had implicated the Alliance again. But because Nuuyoma no longer knew who to trust inside the government he worked for.

  He could trust Gomez.

  He knew she would use the information correctly.

  And he was glad.

  Because he wanted nothing more to do with this.

  He wanted to return to patrolling the Frontier, just like he had been trained to do.

  THIRTY-SIX

  INIKO ZAGRANDO HAD been traveling for nearly ten days when he finally heard about the attacks the human media had started calling the Peyti Crisis (and oh, boy, did he hate that name. He thought it completely misrepresented what had happened on the Moon just a few days ago).

  Zagrando had allowed himself a single, short download of information as he went deeper into the Alliance itself. One download, just to make certain he wasn’t heading into some kind of disaster—only to discover that his trip was even more important than it had been when he fled into the Alliance.

  Zagrando stood inside his space yacht’s entertainment room. This yacht, which he’d bought just before he went AWOL from the Earth Alliance Intelligence Service, had every bell, every whistle, every single luxury known to human kind.

  It had been built outside the Alliance so it didn’t fit Alliance specs at all. The doors were in the wrong places; the corridors were less than 1.5 meters high and curved, so that humans of normal height had to crouch as they walked; and the amenities—the amenities startled him every moment of every day.

  Including the unnecessary rooms, like the entertainment room. He could just as easily have watched the news he had missed from the Alliance inside the captain’s suite—which also had its own entertainment room, galley kitchen, and a bathroom like none he’d ever seen before—but he didn’t.

  He had to keep himself in shape, because he knew at some point, he would probably be fleeing for his life—maybe even on this ship.

  A month ago, he’d been an undercover operative for the Intelligence Service. He’d worked for the service most of his adult life, primarily undercover as a police officer, then as a detective in Valhalla Basin. He’d been in Valhalla Basin on a long and dirty operation, collecting information on Aleyd Corporation, when his handler, Ike Jarvis, had pulled him away.

  Not really pulled Zagrando away so much as forced him out of the job. Jarvis had used a fast-grow clone of Zagrando to fake Zagrando The Detective�
��s death so that the real Zagrando could do all kinds of jobs outside of the Alliance.

  Only, in the last ten days, Zagrando had been mentally reviewing those jobs, wondering if he had been working for the Intelligence Service or if he’d been working for Ike Jarvis.

  Zagrando suspected he’d been working directly for Jarvis. In fact, Zagrando believed the last operation he’d been on had had a different mission than what he’d been told.

  Zagrando had been told he was trying to find the source of the PierLuigi Frémont clones that had bombed the Moon six months before. He’d tracked down suppliers of designer criminal clones, and even set up a buy with another operative two weeks ago.

  The other operative had blown the operation in such a way that if Zagrando hadn’t given her to the criminals they were meeting with, he would have been murdered.

  He fled with the millions in buy money and his life. Then, when he informed Jarvis that the operative had blown the operation, Jarvis had panicked, demanding Zagrando go back for her.

  That had been the last straw. At that moment, Zagrando had known that Jarvis had set him up. Zagrando resigned, severed his connection with Jarvis (who never knew about this space yacht), kept the money as payment for all that retirement and back pay he would never receive, and then headed into the Alliance.

  Not to get his job back. Not even to report Jarvis.

  But to let the people on the Moon know Zagrando’s suspicions. He guessed that Jarvis hadn’t wanted him to find who made the clones of PierLuigi Frémont, but to discover if tracking the source of those clones was easy.

  Zagrando could categorically say it had not been easy, and he was pretty convinced he hadn’t found the source at all—at least, not until Jarvis and the other operative had tried to kill him.

  Then Zagrando rethought everything. He had time on this trip to review every single mission he’d been on—and Jarvis’s bizarre insistence that Zagrando not inform anyone in the Intelligence Service what he was doing.

  In fact, Jarvis had told Zagrando that his cover was so very deep, he didn’t dare report in to the service at all.

  Good little soldier that Zagrando was, he had followed the instructions to the letter.