A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  The boy just wanted to make sure he wasn’t assassinated like his three compatriots.

  She paced the room for another moment, gathering herself before she contacted Mishra. She’d listen to what research he had finished—it wouldn’t hurt to know asylum rules on the Frontier—but she would also tell him how Uzven had interfered.

  She needed a good interpreter. She wasn’t sure how to find one. But she would have to ask.

  She could never trust Uzven again.

  EIGHT

  THE EAUFASSE WOULD not let her see the boy for another twelve hours. Apparently there were private rituals she did not understand, Eaufasse traditions that happened after Epriccom moved into a position opposite one of the other moons.

  She discovered, to her dismay, that she was not allowed to fire translators, so she sent Uzven back to its superiors with a reprimand. She requested two more translators qualified to work with the Eaufasse, and was told they wouldn’t be available for a week. So, she found her own off-site translator from a group she had worked with before. She chose the only one who claimed he was fluent in Fasse. He swore he would be here shortly.

  He was not Peyti. He was human, and of questionable character. He’d been arrested by the Earth Alliance for trafficking in stolen goods, but for once, the charge didn’t entirely stick. He was doing community service, and that service entailed putting his sizeable linguistic talent to use.

  His name was Ragnar Okani. He did not allow accurate visuals on a link, which she suspected was an old habit from his criminal days. Still, others had worked with him and found him to be excellent. And she had no choice. Even so she tested him through the link.

  She had made a snippet of that early conversation between the Eaufasse and the boy. Okani confirmed what Uzven had told her: the boy would not answer anything until he had a guarantee of protection and safety from “other humans.”

  “Not all humans,” she said.

  “That’s where it gets difficult.” Okani’s face was in shadow, his voice masked. “The Eaufasse believe that there is no distinction among humans.”

  “I don’t care what the Eaufasse believe,” she said. “I care what the boy believes. He should know the difference between ‘all humans’ and ‘other humans.’”

  “He should also not be fluent in Fasse,” Okani said. “You are splitting hairs here.”

  “I am not,” she said, “because he did not ask for asylum.”

  “To my knowledge,” Okani said, “the Eaufasse do not have that word in their language.”

  “What about a comparable word?”

  Okani sighed. “I know Fasse pretty well, but not that well. Let me listen to everything you have. I’ll tell you the context when I arrive.”

  “I need context,” she said, “but I can’t send you the rest of the footage through an open link. We’ll do the work after you arrive.”

  He agreed, and they signed off.

  He wouldn’t arrive for another ten hours. That gave her two hours to show him the rest of the interrogation footage. Even if she didn’t like him after he arrived, his initial answers calmed some of her fears.

  She had received two interpretations of the boy’s words, and in both cases, she was told he wanted protection and safety. She understood why he would want that, given what she had seen on the other surveillance footage.

  In fact, the surveillance footage had calmed even more of her concerns. She would have asked for “protection and safety” as well, after what happened.

  While she waited, she went back to the footage.

  The surveillance footage tracked all four boys from the moment they left the enclave. She assumed that tiny individual cameras followed all of the boys, but she did not know that for certain. She did know that a single camera had followed the surviving boy to an Eaufasse outpost. When the boy reached the outpost, he had stood as plants grew around him, rising upward, touching the door itself. He didn’t seem to mind. Then the door opened and he went inside.

  The other boys did not go with him. Nor did the plants help them like they seemed to help the first boy. The other boys ran in a group, slowing as the plants grabbed at them. She was convinced now that those plants were actual creatures, convinced that they were somehow impeding the boys’ progress for reasons she didn’t understand.

  When the twelve other boys appeared outside the enclave hours later, she froze their images and enlarged them.

  Her breath caught. Those boys, all twelve of them, looked the same as the four.

  The only difference was the twelve had laser rifles.

  They stalked the path left by the four boys, not noticing where the single boy had split off. The path left by the three was obvious. The same plants grabbed at the twelve, holding them and pushing them at the same time. But the twelve had weaponry, and when they reached the top of the ridge, she knew without looking that they could see the three.

  And then all twelve shot at the same time, then shot again. She knew the pattern. She could even count it down.

  It was an execution; all twelve shot together so none of them would get credit for the actual kill.

  She was glad she had watched the footage alone; it had left her shaken.

  She had met clones before. If they knew the other clones with whom they shared DNA, they called themselves siblings. The word was a little off. The clones she had met were closer than most siblings, often completing each other’s thoughts. The only time she had ever seen clones raised together that didn’t get along, the clones had been victims of a poor cloning process.

  She was making assumptions here, and she knew it: she didn’t know if these sixteen clones were raised together or even if they were from the same batch. Clearly, they had come from the same original, but how they were created was a mystery—and she couldn’t assume anything yet. She couldn’t even assume human involvement outside of the clones themselves.

  One phrase that continued to go through her mind came from the Eaufasse ambassador. Your appearance is quite different, it had said (or at least, that was how Uzven translated its words). Or are you in a different clan?

  It might have meant how she was dressed, but it had belabored this point. Initially, she had thought that she and her people weren’t what the Eaufasse had expected. Now, though, she wondered if the only humans the Eaufasse had seen had been clones of the same man.

  And she had no way to understand why the twelve had murdered the other three.

  Genetic predisposition? Some kind of ritual? A hazing gone wrong?

  She was beginning to think the Eaufasse were the least of her problems.

  She needed to focus on the clones.

  She needed to identify their original, and she needed to know who was running the enclave.

  Fortunately, she had come to Epriccom fully staffed. That meant five deputy marshals and ten assistants, not counting the three-person team staffing the forensic lab. Usually the assistants didn’t work a case like this, because it was too difficult. The assistants either handled the documentation on past cases, filing everything with the FSS, or they handled the incoming information on future cases.

  She decided to take the three assistants monitoring future cases as well as two others, and have them work on the surveillance data. She wanted it broken down: she needed to know how the enclave got established; how many ships had come in and out of the enclave over the years; how many times the members of the enclave had left the enclave; and if anything like this killing had happened before. She assigned one assistant to each question.

  The fifth assistant would view the footage in chronological order, with the assistance of a computer program designed to digest large chunks of data like this, seeing if there was anything she or the four missed.

  It wasn’t really enough, and she knew that, but it would have to do.

  While they were working, she contacted the lab for word on the original. She had sent Simiaar footage of the clones in motion, hoping that she could use those to trace imagery of the
original. Simiaar was also doing a DNA scan to see if anything came up.

  So far, Simiaar had nothing.

  It was beginning to look like Gomez would face the sole survivor on her own, with very little actual information. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not: she might ask the right questions; she might miss the important stuff entirely.

  She knew she would be making mistakes—they were inevitable when she was operating on so little information—but she wanted to avoid making the obvious mistakes.

  If only she could figure out what the obvious mistakes were.

  NINE

  OKANI ARRIVED HALF an hour early. Washington greeted him for Gomez, and set Okani up with the feed of the interview between the boy and the Eaufasse. When Okani finished, he went to a conference room on the forensic wing of the Stanley. Gomez met him there.

  He stood as she stepped into the room. He was broad-shouldered and a bit soft around the middle. His thick, black hair fell across his forehead and accented his dark brown eyes. His features were as broad as his shoulders, and his skin was an unusual golden brown. The entire package was even more attractive in person, and yet he managed to seem unassuming; two things that, in her experience, rarely went together.

  He nodded his head in greeting. She smiled and extended her hand. He gripped her hand lightly, his skin warm and dry.

  “I don’t envy you,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  He raised his eyebrows, and she could suddenly see a fierce intelligence behind his eyes. “There are many issues in this one interview.”

  She let out a small sigh. He pulled a chair out for her, as if the room were his. She could have made a big deal about the fact that he was doing community service, was under her legal supervision, and could, in fact, imprison him at any time.

  But she decided not to make any power plays and, at the moment, to ignore any he pulled—if he was pulling any right now. He could also simply be polite.

  She sat.

  “Here is my problem,” Okani said. “I have done business with one Eaufasse clan which operates outside of Epriccom. I’ve always had the impression that this particular group of Eaufasse were exiles, but I could never confirm it.”

  She didn’t want to hear about him, but she had learned long ago that people often prefaced what she wanted to hear about with something important; she ignored his words at her own peril.

  “I speak Fasse,” he said. “I’m good at it.”

  She tensed.

  “But I speak a formal version of the language. I just want you to know that.”

  “Why is it important?” she asked.

  “Because, at times,” he said, “in this interview, your group lapsed into a dialect that I think I understand. I can’t guarantee that I do understand it.”

  “Oh, great,” she said. “Just great.”

  She tried not to be too upset. She already believed Okani was a better translator than Uzven. Okani told her his limitations. Uzven placed his own interpretation on everything.

  “The other thing you need to know,” Okani said, “is that the kid here, he’s fluent.”

  “In Fasse?”

  Okani nodded. “His Fasse is better than mine. Much better. I don’t have the accent and I don’t have his gift for idiom.”

  She let out another sigh. Every time she thought she had a handle on this case, the ground shifted beneath her. “I’ve got to meet with him in less than an hour. Tell me what you can.”

  Okani folded his hands. “First, the asylum question. The Eaufasse don’t appear to have a word for ‘asylum’ because, as far as I can tell, they don’t understand the concept, at least not in the sense of protection from a foreign government and immunity from extradition.”

  She folded her own hands together, mirroring Okani’s posture. She did that on purpose to make sure he relaxed.

  He didn’t seem to notice. “Apparently, the Eaufasse don’t understand extradition. I couldn’t find it in a quick search of their laws.”

  “You found a database of their laws?” She’d been unable to find anything like that; it was the first thing she had checked for. It was always the first thing she checked for whenever she was encountering a new culture. The laws told her more than any cultural representative would.

  Okani slipped his hands apart. One hand gripped the arm of his chair.

  “Um, I have a database,” he said. “It’s not official. It’s the things I and my old friends learned about that little clan of Eaufasse we’d encountered.”

  “Do you know of anything official?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Believe me, I’ve looked. There’s nothing easily accessible. Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It just means that we can’t find it.”

  She brought her hands up and tapped her chin with her thumbs. She was going to have to document Okani’s claims, so that if (when) she did misstep, she could show that she had tried to do things the Eaufasse way.

  “All right,” she said. “The Eaufasse don’t have a concept of extradition, so far as we know, which means that they don’t have a concept of asylum or protection from prosecution from the outside.”

  “Prosecution or persecution,” he said pointedly. She wondered if that was a reference to his own legal troubles. She decided to ignore that.

  “So he couldn’t have been asking for asylum,” she said.

  “Not in their language, no,” Okani said. “Your previous translator got that wrong.”

  He seemed to speak with a great deal of relish about that. Had she told him Uzven’s name? Or just that it was Peyti? Or had she simply said she hadn’t trusted it?

  She couldn’t remember. Not that it mattered. Okani’s reaction might have had nothing to do with Uzven and everything to do with his own ego.

  “My earlier translation was correct,” Okani said. “This boy asked for protection from the humans. Even though that is part of the cultural definition of asylum, it would be a stretch to think he was saying asylum here. From what he says, his life was in danger. Someone was actively trying to kill him, and he wanted to be safe from that.”

  “Someone was trying to kill him,” she said. “Someone managed to kill three of his companions.”

  Okani’s mouth thinned. He nodded. “This boy is scared. That much is clear.”

  “What else is clear?”

  “This is his first encounter with the Eaufasse,” Okani said.

  “Even though he speaks their language?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “He must have learned it through vids or holographic representation or something, because he seems alarmed when they move, as if he doesn’t expect that.”

  “Could that simply be a reaction to his circumstances?” she asked. “After all, someone did just try to kill him.”

  Okani shrugged. “I can’t speak to someone’s state of mind, particularly someone I’ve never met. He just seemed uncomfortable with them, more than you’d expect from someone who was used to the culture.”

  She had other questions along this line, but she decided to hold on to them for a moment. “You said you didn’t envy me, that there were many issues. Then you tell me that he isn’t asking for asylum, which changes my legal position for the better. So I don’t understand. What problems are you foreseeing here?”

  Okani sat up straighter, like a man who was about to face trouble of his own making. He clearly thought for a moment, as if he were choosing his words carefully. Then he said,

  “The Eaufasse have strict ideas about property. Essentially, they believe that if they have something in hand, it’s theirs. Their idea of ownership is similar to that of a three-year-old child’s.”

  She had a hunch she knew where he was going with this, but she wanted him to get there on his own.

  “It’s pretty clear to me from what the boy said in that room that he’s a clone of some kind. I don’t think the Eaufasse understood that. I don’t know for certain however.”

  She frowned.
She didn’t know where Okani was going with this part of the analysis. “And the fact that he might be a clone is important why?”

  “Because of his legal status,” Okani said. “If he personally hasn’t been declared human under Earth Alliance law, then he’s property, and if he’s property, the Eaufasse will claim him.”

  The Earth Alliance was very clear in its laws about clones. Clones were not considered human under the law. That was why clones could be bought and sold. Clones were only considered human if someone with human legal status adopted them and then went through the long process to get the clone declared human.

  “Are the Eaufasse familiar with clones?” Gomez had encountered some cultures that had no understanding of cloning at all.

  “I don’t know,” Okani said.

  She nodded. “Did he tell them he was a clone?”

  “Not in so many words,” Okani said. “They kept asking him for his name. He kept repeating that he had no name. That if someone had to distinguish him from the others, they called him The Third.”

  She let out a small breath. Humans would think of that as a possible clone tag. But it could also be cultural. The Disty only allowed themselves to be referred to by number as well, at least by outsiders.

  “He didn’t call himself a clone, though, did he?”

  “No,” Okani said. “He just kept asking them to keep him safe, and they made no promises. If I were that boy, I’d be terrified.”

  “What will they do with him if we don’t take him?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Okani said. “Kill him, keep him, trade him, sell him. It’s all possible, and so are probably a hundred things we haven’t even thought of.”

  She pushed herself up, then extended her hand. “Thank you,” she said. “You’ve been invaluable.”

  “Am I dismissed?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I might need you again.”