A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  She remembered now. Something about one of humanity’s worst offenders. Lots of discussion in school about ways that naturally bred humans could go wrong. Whether such creatures as Frémont were human at all, even though they looked and sounded human. Even though he was born rather than grown.

  And he left no orders for clones? Gomez asked, feeling a little unsettled.

  I’d have to research it, Simiaar sent. I’m guessing not.

  Damn. That meant they were dealing with True Believers in that enclave, True Believers who—it looked like—were trying to recreate a mass murderer.

  Gomez shivered. She would wait to contact the enclave until the Military Guards arrived. This wasn’t something she would handle on her own.

  She thanked Simiaar and contacted Rainger. Backup land yet?

  Yeah. They’re not far from you, he sent.

  Good. The sooner she got off this planet, the better. This boy was going to be a wealth of knowledge about something the Earth Alliance clearly needed to know. Why breed clones from someone like Frémont? There had to be a reason, and the boy might hold the key.

  She made her way back down the hall. The boy had been talking with the Eaufasse. It looked at her, and she thought she saw guilt. She had no idea how she would know that.

  Everything all right? she sent Okani.

  Thirds is still trying to make sure the Eaufasse don’t want him.

  Do they want him? She sent.

  Not at all, Okani sent.

  Good. She smiled at the boy. “We’re leaving.”

  He swallowed. She knew what his reaction was. It was fear.

  “We’ll protect you,” she said, emphasizing the word “protect.”

  Washington looked at her.

  The others are nearly here, she sent.

  I think we should have weapons out just in case, he sent.

  I think we should keep as much of an eye on this boy as we have on the area around us, she sent, but she didn’t dissuade him.

  She arranged the group. First the Eaufasse. Then Washington. Then the boy and Okani. She would follow, along with Norling and the last Eaufasse. It wasn’t quite the perfect formation, but it would do until the backup arrived.

  The Eaufasse led them down yet another corridor she hadn’t seen before. This outpost was much bigger than she had expected.

  Finally, the Eaufasse reached the main door. Using both hands, it pushed the door open. Washington peered out, made certain the area was clear, and then signaled the others to follow.

  The boy stepped out, hand over his visor as the light changed. Apparently, he hadn’t yet figured out how to handle the visuals.

  She stepped out as well. The plants were rustling. They gave off a stinkweed stench, very different from the vanilla and sweat from earlier. She wondered what caused the things to change. She wished she understood them better.

  The final Eaufasse closed the doors behind them. The first Eaufasse headed toward the path as the rustling got louder.

  Then twelve boys popped up out of the plants.

  Twelve boys who looked just like the boy she had in custody.

  That boy—Thirds—reached for Washington’s pistol, but Washington elbowed him backward. Gomez had her pistol out as well.

  Need backup now, she sent on all FSS channels. Double-time.

  She got chatter in response. The boys all had laser rifles, and they were all aimed at the boy behind Washington.

  “Let him go,” one of the boys said. “He belongs to us.”

  Thirds was silent. Okani had moved back toward Gomez, nearly knocking her aside. She pushed him against the outpost’s exterior.

  The plants waved.

  “We’re taking him with us,” Gomez said. “Why don’t you join us?”

  “Forbidden ones,” the first boy sneered. “We would never go with you.”

  He waved his laser rifle at Thirds. Thirds grabbed his helmet and yanked it off.

  Idiot. He would die if they shot him now.

  He made a chittering sound as she overrode his removal command. The gloves of his suit forced his arms upward and replaced the helmet. He chittered loudly, until the helmet went on. Then the sound got blocked.

  “Fire,” the first boy said to the others.

  Washington pivoted so that he could shoot the boys’ leader, and Gomez leaned to one side so that she had a clear shot of the others.

  But before the boys could shoot, their laser rifles bent sideways. The plants wrapped around them and pulled the laser rifles aside. Then the plants enveloped the boys.

  The Eaufasse were chittering as well. The boys started screaming. The tips of those plants were burrowing into their skin.

  “Are they doing that?” she asked Okani.

  “How the hell should I know?” he said.

  “Make them stop. We need those boys alive.”

  Not that they would live much longer. The tips of the plants were burrowing deep.

  Okani spoke quickly in Fasse. Washington kept pivoting, moving his pistol as if he were looking for a target. She pivoted as well.

  Boy command. Boy command, the translator Eaufasse sent through the joint foreign-marshal link.

  What does that mean? She sent.

  Boy must no say, the translator sent.

  Somehow the words connected. The boy sent the command?

  Yes, the translator sent. Boy must no say.

  She got that too. She cursed, then overrode the command for the helmet. She kept her pistol in one hand, but with the other, she yanked off the boy’s helmet.

  “You started this,” she said. “You stop it.”

  “They must die,” he said calmly. How could he be so calm? “They tried to kill me.”

  “And now they won’t,” she said. “I need them alive.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  She couldn’t answer that in less than five seconds. “Stop it or I’ll make your damn suit strangle you just like they’re being strangled.”

  Now, she saw fear. He knew she could do it.

  He chittered. The plants stopped moving.

  “Tell the plants to listen to the Eaufasse,” she said.

  He frowned.

  “Tell them, or I will hurt you,” she said.

  “They’re not plants,” he said, confirming what she had suspected.

  “Do it anyway,” she said.

  He chittered again. The plants—or whatever they were—turned some of their tips toward the Eaufasse.

  “Okani,” she snapped. “You tell the Eaufasse to tell these plants or creatures or whatever the hell they are to hold the boys, but not burrow into them. And give the rifles to Washington.”

  Okani began to speak rapidly in Fasse. He looked terrified, the color on his cheeks high. The Eaufasse bobbed, then chittered. The plants pulled their tips out of the boys and wrapped them gently like loose ropes.

  The boys did not move.

  Blood flowed along the dry ground and past Washington, running into Thirds’ feet. He just looked down at it, as if it didn’t bother him.

  Gomez shuddered.

  The rustling had stopped, but she still heard something. She finally realized what it was. The backup had arrived.

  I need medics and restraints, she sent. Quickly.

  She knew what was happening down that trail. Those assistants with medical training would move to the front of the lines. The rest would pull out their restraints as they moved.

  She took the boy’s hands and pulled them behind him. She put him in restraints, even though she had his suit on lock-down. He wouldn’t get any more control of the suit.

  “You planned this,” she said to him.

  He looked at her sideways. “Not this,” he said.

  “Yes, you did,” she said. “You taught yourself Fasse, you learned how to control the plants. You planned to kill them.”

  “That is true,” he said. “I planned to kill them. All of them. When I became part of the twelve. I never expected to be the hunted. Now I can
go back. I am still the victor.”

  His blue eyes were flat, his expression calm. All that empathy she had felt for him, all of that concern. Gone, in an instant.

  “You’re never going back,” she said. “I can promise you that.”

  FOURTEEN

  IT TOOK MOST of her team to clean up the mess. Seven boys died, and the other five were so badly injured that no one was certain if they would survive. She had placed Thirds in the most powerful holding cell she had, and she kept the sound off.

  The Eaufasse were relieved she had handled him. They had no idea he had learned how to manipulate the plants. Which weren’t plants, but weaponry that the Eaufasse had created. They looked like undergrowth, but they weren’t. They operated as protective shields throughout Eaufasse territory.

  Somehow Thirds had taught himself to override them.

  Thirds would not tell her what happened in the dome. He wouldn’t talk to her at all. The only way he would speak to her was if she allowed him to return, the triumphant warrior, to his home.

  So they had a stalemate.

  Hours after the battle outside the outpost, if anyone could call that a battle, Washington called her into one of the conference rooms. There, on the table, he had visuals of what was happening on the planet below.

  The dome glowed from within.

  “What is that?” she asked him.

  “Laser rifle fire,” he said. “I think they’re killing each other.”

  She wanted to order him to bring a team in, but both of them knew they couldn’t. They had no idea how many people were there, or what kind of weapons they had.

  With the help of Okani, she contacted the Eaufasse ambassador.

  “They’re killing each other inside the dome,” she said. “Can you stop them?”

  “They are yours,” the ambassador said. “We can do nothing.”

  As they spoke, the dome’s glow increased.

  “We have to do something,” she said.

  “You must,” the ambassador said. “We leave it to you.”

  Then it severed the connection.

  She watched as the glowing dome grew brighter. “That’s a fire,” she said to Washington.

  “Or worse,” he said.

  They’d seen images of this before. Domes were vulnerable to internal attack.

  The dome had turned bright red.

  Washington looked away. He knew, as she did, what was happening inside. The people in there were actually cooking. Burning up. Disintegrating.

  She didn’t have the equipment to stop this.

  She couldn’t turn away. She watched as the dome grew brighter and brighter, until it blew.

  She couldn’t hear it, but she knew that on Epriccom, it must have sounded like a million bombs went off. The ground would shake; there would be other damage throughout the various settlements.

  If the Eaufasse blamed her, she would use that contact she made with the ambassador as proof that she had done all she could.

  “Why would they do that?” Washington asked.

  The air was black with smoke. Bits of the dome flew like shards into the trees. She shut off the hologram. She couldn’t look any more.

  “They knew we were here,” she said.

  “So?” he asked. “We’d been here for days. Why now?”

  She stared at the empty tabletop. Then shook her head. “The experiment failed. They lost all sixteen boys.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  She raised her gaze to his. “Success or failure,” she said, “what do you do at the end of an experiment?”

  “I’m not a scientist,” he snapped.

  “You disassemble it. You take it apart. You make your notes and you start over.”

  “No one left,” he said. “No one made notes. No one survived.”

  “No one survived in the dome,” she said. “But you don’t know if they sent their results elsewhere. You don’t know what kind of recordings they made.”

  “We’ve been monitoring communications,” he said. “We would know.”

  “Would we?” she asked. “We didn’t even know those things were weapons. We thought they were plants.”

  He stared at her, his skin gray and bloodless. “How have you done this for so long?” he asked.

  The question so many of her deputies had asked over the years. The way that the deputy answered for himself determined his career.

  She took a deep breath. She had answered this one for herself a long time ago.

  She had to believe in what she was doing, believe that the Alliance was important, that the groups it finally accepted into the Alliance would be worthy of that Alliance.

  Some wouldn’t be. Some would.

  And tragedies would happen along the way.

  Even—especially?—tragedies caused by humans.

  Gomez gave Washington a small smile. “You have to realize when you’ve done your job well.”

  “What?” he asked. “We didn’t do this well. People died.”

  “Yes, they did,” she said. “And people will always die. We can’t stop that.”

  His eyes widened. He looked at her as if she had just said something horrible. Maybe, to him, she had.

  She put a hand on his arm. “Our mission—our job—was to remove the enclave,” she said. “We did that, and found out something along the way. And we’ve managed to keep a good relationship with the Eaufasse. All in all, we’ve done well.”

  He shook his head. “We just watched hundreds of people die.”

  “Did we?” she asked. “For all we know, there had been no one but sixteen clones in that enclave.”

  “You don’t believe that,” he said, and let himself out of the room.

  He was right; she didn’t believe that there had been only sixteen clones in that enclave. She did believe that her team had done their job.

  She also believed that they had stumbled on something big, something the diplomats and the Military Guard would have to deal with, something she no longer had to concern herself with.

  She was glad of that. The boy, Thirds, unnerved her. The other five probably would as well.

  She ran a hand along the tabletop. One mission done. She would go talk to the assistants next, make sure they were again focused on possible future missions.

  She didn’t want to think about this one any more.

  She had a hunch no one else did either.

  ANNIVERSARY DAY

  FIFTEEN

  TORKILD ZHU ADJUSTED his seat in the first class suite on the midweek shuttle heading to Athena Base. He’d charged the suite to Schnable, Shishani, & Salehi, even though the bulk of the work he’d been doing on the Moon had been personal. Still, he was a junior partner at S3, as everyone called the firm, and they liked their partners to impress wherever they went.

  He was new enough to the partner business that he almost felt like he was stealing from his employer to travel in such luxury.

  The suite had two rooms—a living/office area, and a sleeping area barely big enough for his lanky, six-foot frame. The real thing that recommended this suite was the private bathroom, complete with private shower. Sure, he had to cram himself into it, but he didn’t have to share it with his floor-mates, like he’d had to do on every shuttle to the Moon before his promotion.

  The trip took more than three days, even on the fastest shuttle, and by the end of it, he would always know the bathroom habits of strangers, something he absolutely hated.

  At least he was cleared to ride human-only shuttles. He’d taken shuttles that had mixed species; those were a real eye-opener—and not in a way that he wanted.

  Maybe someday he would rate one of the corporate space yachts, although he’d been told when he became partner that he would only be able to use those to go to court outside of the Tenth District.

  Most of the cases he handled were inside Earth Alliance IntraSpecies Court Human Division for the Tenth District, although he hoped to handle some larger cases in front of the Mult
icultural Tribunal for the Tenth District soon. Or for any district. He was licensed for all of them, just like every lawyer working in the Earth Alliance court system.

  He was doing well, but he could do better.

  He had surrounded his seat with a dozen holoscreens, building a circle of information around him. He would have to sit here while the shuttle awaited takeoff from Armstrong’s port. The actual amount of time he needed to be strapped in would be about three minutes, but the space around Armstrong was so crowded that the port required every commercial ship to harness its passengers until the ship traveled outside of the Moon’s space.

  He hated this part of the trip. The shuttles were sophisticated enough to maintain gravity and attitude controls, so that no passenger ever felt the differences between being on the Moon proper and being in space, yet some of these old-fashioned rules still applied.

  Although he’d once been irritated enough to see if the precaution was completely stupid, and that was when he learned that the accident rate inside the Moon’s space traffic area, particularly around the major port of Armstrong, was twenty-five times higher than it was anywhere else in the Earth Alliance.

  The Moon, which was a relatively small body in comparison to most other populated places in this solar system, was the gateway to Earth. Most ships weren’t cleared for direct Earth travel, so passengers heading to Earth stopped on the Moon and got an Earth transport. If, of course, they could get through Earth Alliance customs.

  Many, many, many people—alien and human—never made it to Earth, and had to be sent back to wherever they were from.

  The system wasn’t perfect—if it were, the gateway to Earth would be a lot bigger—but it was better than other places Zhu had been in the Alliance. Many major planets, filled with diverse cultures, had no gateway at all and were subject to all kinds of attacks, terror or otherwise.

  Earth had not suffered a direct attack from outside its borders in centuries. Somehow the Earth had made herself both the center of the Alliance and the safest place inside the Alliance.

  Given Earth’s history, he would never have predicted that.

  So while he was trapped in one spot, he would catch up on some entertainment—anything to keep his mind off what had just happened inside the port.