“Like the Anniversary Day killers?” Shishani asked, sarcasm gone.
“Yeah,” Salehi said.
“And he had nothing to do with the killings,” Zhu said. “He’s had no visitors, no nothing the entire time he’s been in prison. He wasn’t even made in the Alliance—”
Shishani turned away from Zhu as if he didn’t matter at all. Maybe he didn’t. “So the clone’s been released, he’s heading—?”
“To the Irr Sector, that halfway house we use.”
“And now there’s an attack?” Shishani glanced at the screens as if they had an answer. “From the Alliance? Why didn’t they just kill this guy in prison?”
“I’m not sure they knew what they had,” Zhu said.
Despite himself Salehi felt a bit of admiration for Zhu, standing up for himself however he could.
“And then you pointed right to him.” Shishani shook her head. “Did anyone stop to consider this was a stupid idea?”
“Initially Torkild went to find out what the clone knew about other Frémont clones,” Salehi said. “I have no idea how it evolved into a release.”
Zhu started to say something, but Salehi wouldn’t let him.
“The problem is that we’re about to lose one of our best transport operatives. He can’t leave the Alliance, but he can’t stay, not with this clone on his ship. I don’t know anyone who can stop this attack. Do you? And if you don’t, do you think Schnable does?”
“Yeah, I got someone,” Shishani said. “Let me handle this. Where are they?”
“I don’t know exactly. I think that’s by design. They started here.” Salehi went to the screen with Fujita’s route on it. “He sent me the registration of the initial attacking ships. I’ll send that on your links.”
“Thanks.” Shishani waggled her fingers at him, and left the room.
Zhu watched her go. Then he turned to Salehi. “What went wrong?”
“You tell me,” Salehi said.
“I don’t know,” Zhu said. “It took weeks for this to go through. It would’ve been easier to kill Trey in prison.”
Salehi stared at the screens. They told him nothing. But he played Zhu’s words over and over in his head.
They could have killed the clone in prison.
But they hadn’t.
They were killing him in a visible and dramatic fashion.
As a lesson to S3?
To all lawyers who wanted to represent the Anniversary Day clones?
Or was something else going on here?
“Did you ever find out what this clone knew?” Salehi asked.
“I don’t think he knew anything,” Zhu said. “He was in prison long before the attacks. I checked all of his documentation. He went from wherever he was created to some enclave on Epriccom to prison after some other clones tried to kill him. He killed them in self-defense.”
“He committed murder.”
“No,” Zhu said. “It wasn’t murder. It was self-defense.”
Salehi cursed. “This is all tied together somehow.”
“They should have killed him in prison,” Zhu repeated.
“And we wouldn’t have noticed,” Salehi snapped. “But we’re paying attention now, aren’t we?”
Zhu looked terrified. “Are they going to come after us?”
Salehi rolled his eyes. He couldn’t help it.
“Don’t you get it, Torkild?” he said. “They already have.”
FIFTY
TWENTY MANEUVERS LATER, Fujita wondered if he could simply hide the Alus 15. Go behind a moon, mirror the ship against an asteroid. Something.
But he didn’t know how to do any of that.
He’d fought off pirate ships, criminal vessels, a few stolen law enforcement vehicles, but never in his entire career had he faced battle cruisers.
Certainly not Alliance battle cruisers.
“Maybe we should give him up,” Stone said.
It was too late for that. They’d been running. Besides, Fujita hadn’t given up any prisoner, ever. It wouldn’t help his reputation, although in this instance, he wasn’t sure what would help him.
Maddix looked at him over her console. She seemed to think that giving up Trey was a good idea as well.
Five ships suddenly appeared in the holoimage at the tip of the triangle.
Five ships, surrounding the dot that was Alus 15.
Fujita tapped the screen in front of him. It showed the same image. Somehow it seemed more alarming to him when he saw the ships displayed as numbers and dots.
He tapped his encoded secure link to S3 on. You got something for me, Rafael?
Shishani’s in touch with someone in the Alliance. She thinks they’ll stop this.
Thinks? Fujita sent. We don’t have time for thinks. We’re surrounded. They’re going to fire on us.
What have they said?
Nothing, Fujita sent. They don’t answer our hails.
“They’re firing,” Maddix said.
The ship shuddered as the shots hit.
All five ships had fired at the same time.
We’re not going to survive this, Fujita sent. They hit us a few more times, and we’re done. Make them stop, Salehi.
We’re doing what we can, Salehi sent.
“Screw it,” Fujita said to Stone. “Tell them they can have Trey. Tell them that now.”
“I’m doing it,” Stone said. “I already had the message ready. I’m sending it to all of them on all channels. I hope—”
The ship shuddered again, then the power blinked down.
“Shields are gone,” Maddix said. Her gaze met Fujita’s. “Do you think they’ll listen? I mean, we’re willing to give him up.”
“I know,” Fujita said, because he couldn’t say anything else. He looked at Stone. “Keep sending the message.”
“Yeah,” Stone said, but he was staring at his screen.
Fujita was staring at his too. Five points of light. Shots, coming from all five battle cruisers. Not small weapons fire either. Big laser weapons. Weapons of war.
I don’t know what the hell you got us into, Fujita sent to Salehi, but it’s bad. We’re—
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 th
e 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.
A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel Page 32