Vigilantes

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “The ones in charge,” Uzvaan said.

  “Who are they?” Nyquist asked.

  Uzvaan closed his eyes again, then tilted his head. “I do not exactly know.”

  “Someone ran you around,” Nyquist said, and instantly regretted the word choice. “Ran you around” was antagonistic.

  “Yes.” Uzvaan opened his eyes. Their expression seemed more distant. “Many someones. They never told me who they worked for and I never asked. They were simply The Ones In Charge.”

  “How did you recognize them?” Nyquist asked.

  Uzvaan’s head tilt grew more pronounced. “What do you mean?”

  “Could any Peyti come up to you and tell you that he was in charge of you? Would you have believed that?”

  “No,” Uzvaan said. “They had to call me by my number.”

  That stopped Nyquist for a moment. “Your…number?”

  “We did not have names for the first ten years of our lives. Some did not have names until we left for school. We were numbered.”

  “What’s your number?” Nyquist asked.

  “Private,” Uzvaan said.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Nyquist reminded him. “That person no longer exists.”

  Another shudder ran through Uzvaan. “I am…” and then he let out a sigh. “I cannot tell you. You could use it to control me.”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed,” Nyquist said, “we already control you.”

  Uzvaan nodded. “I am….” And again, a sigh. “I am not to tell anyone.”

  “You weren’t supposed to live this long either,” Nyquist said. He wanted to add, Overcome the damn training. Get on with this.

  “True enough.” Uzvaan shifted. It almost looked as if he were about to stand. Movement reflected in the bubble around Nyquist.

  He glanced over his shoulder.

  The android guards had also shifted position. Apparently, Uzvaan wasn’t supposed to move out of that chair.

  “I am,” Uzvaan said, not noticing that Nyquist wasn’t looking at him. “I am Eighty-Five of Three Hundred.”

  Nyquist turned, wanted to say, See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? But the words stuck in his throat as he realized what Uzvaan had said.

  Eighty-five of Three Hundred.

  It was a clone name, meant to mark the run. Three hundred clones, and Uzvaan was 85th. Or, the three hundredth branch from the Uzvekmt DNA.

  “Do you know what that means?” Nyquist asked.

  “No,” Uzvaan said.

  “Were there any others in your group who were ‘of Three Hundred’?” Nyquist asked.

  “Originally,” Uzvaan said. For a moment, Nyquist thought he would continue and give a number. But he said nothing else.

  “How many?” Nyquist asked.

  “Twenty-five,” Uzvaan said.

  “And how many survived?” Nyquist asked.

  “Survived what?” Uzvaan asked, clearly reverting to lawyer-speak.

  “Your childhood,” Nyquist said, if what Uzvaan had gone through as a young clone could be called a childhood.

  Uzvaan took a deep breath. He shifted for a third time. Finally, he said, “Me.”

  “Out of twenty-five?” Nyquist asked.

  “There were two hundred of us in the compound who received our assignments,” Uzvaan said.

  Which meant that two hundred of them made it to the age of 10.

  “How many of those two hundred went on to school?” Nyquist asked.

  “Fifty,” Uzvaan said.

  Nyquist felt the chill get worse. He couldn’t remember exactly how many Peyti clone lawyers had tried to destroy the Moon. That number never stuck in his head. But it wouldn’t be hard to find out.

  He forced himself to focus.

  “Did they all get mask upgrades like you did?” Nyquist asked.

  “I do not know,” Uzvaan said. “I was not allowed to communicate with them.”

  And he wasn’t going to assume. But Nyquist would.

  “Who sent you the upgrade packets?” Nyquist asked.

  “They came from Legal Fiction,” Uzvaan said. “A different branch of it. I had contact information in case the masks were late.”

  “Do you know what that information is?” Nyquist asked.

  “I never had to use it, so I do not have it memorized,” Uzvaan said. “I can no longer access my chips or any of my links. If those contacts have not been destroyed, then the information is there.”

  Nyquist had a hunch the information had been destroyed. It was short-sighted for an investigation, but not as a response to an on-going threat.

  “How did the mask upgrade packets reach you?” he asked.

  “Through one of the Moon’s delivery services. It varied as to which one,” Uzvaan said.

  “Where did the packet arrive?” Nyquist asked.

  Uzvaan nodded. He understood why Nyquist was asking this. “My office,” Uzvaan said. “When I was hired, I gave that as my permanent address. If I lost that job, I would have failed.”

  “And if you joined a different law firm?” Nyquist asked. “Was that a failure?”

  “It was not,” Uzvaan said. “I would have had to change my delivery information at the address I had. But I never had to do that.”

  Still, it was a lead. And like the one from Legal Fiction, it was a good lead. It also probably applied to all of the Peyti lawyer clones.

  Nyquist finally felt like he had gotten important information, things that would move the investigation forward. Things that would have died with Uzvaan if Uzvaan had succeeded.

  Nyquist allowed himself a few seconds of triumph. Then he continued the interrogation, hoping he could stay at least one day ahead of S3.

  He was going to find that mastermind, if it was the last thing he ever did.

  EIGHT

  THE MESSAGE THAT came through Melcia Seng’s links was garbled. Something about S3 and a conflict of interest. She thought maybe the message came from Zhu.

  Seng stood in the center of the Armstrong Offices of Schnable, Shishani & Salehi, one of the most respected law firms in the known universe. They were opening a branch on the Moon, right after the Peyti Crisis, and, as one of their first cases, they were representing the Peyti government in regard to the Peyti clones who had tried to destroy the Moon.

  Yesterday, when she had learned that, her breath had caught, but it hadn’t stopped her from taking the job. She wanted work—prestigious work, work that would take her to the upper levels of her profession—and she wasn’t finding that kind of work anywhere on Earth.

  There were millions of human lawyers on Earth, and outside of the major cultural centers, very few of them were working in human-alien relations. She had majored in human-alien relations in college, then had gone to law school with an eye to interspecies law. She had served at the Impossibles—who hadn’t?—and then had returned home to Toronto because her mother had taken ill.

  Her mother died last year, and Seng spent six months cleaning up the house, taking her inheritance, and investing it “wisely,” as everyone said. That allowed her the time to find the right job, the one that might eventually take her on a road to the Multicultural Tribunals. She wanted to be certified to argue in front of them, and she couldn’t get that as a prosecutor, not without a whole new form of training—and more years of school.

  She needed to work as a defense attorney, and what better place than at S3, one of the most famous firms in the Alliance. When she heard about this job opportunity, she took the first shuttle from Earth she could find. She didn’t even care when the headhunter warned her that representing a Peyti on the Moon would be a dicey proposition.

  Defense attorneys handled bad characters all the time; that was something she learned in the Impossibles. There, she discovered that sometimes what seemed like evil was, in actuality, ignorance. Not that she would say that about these clones.

  But she knew there was more to S3’s defense of them than altruism. She had a hunch S3 had a plan, and she was willi
ng to help with that plan.

  Even though the office itself was mostly unfinished.

  The furniture had been delivered just before she and the other two dozen potential lawyers arrived. They were interviewed one by one by the only guy in the entire firm at that time, a man named Torkild Zhu.

  He looked a little slick in his silk suit. He wore too much cologne. He had broken capillaries on his nose, which made her wonder if he drank too much. Alcoholics often used clearers to remove the alcohol from their system, but it took years for them to realize that they needed enhancements to repair the damage the alcohol had done to their skin and blood vessels.

  She’d worked with a lot of alcoholics on Earth, and she would wager that Zhu was one.

  But he had seemed pretty together in the interview. And afterwards, he had hired her. He’d even given her an office. It was directly across from the elevator, but the office had a window that overlooked the dome itself. He had apologized, saying the offices were in a part of Armstrong that was being gentrified. He said that was how S3 managed to get so much space so quickly. He’d even apologized for the view—something about the dome being yellow and scratchy.

  She didn’t see that. All she saw was the moonscape, gray and bleak, covered with actual sunshine, not the dome-manufactured stuff she had seen since she arrived here.

  Of the two dozen people the headhunter had brought, nearly half had walked out when they realized what their first cases would be. Six of the others were the kind of lawyer that Seng wouldn’t have hired ever, the kind that had a sleazy vibe that made her think they would cut corners wherever possible.

  Apparently Zhu had agreed with her, because the only six people he had hired were the ones she had talked to at the hotel that morning, the ones as interested in the law as in the client, the ones who were looking at life on the Moon as an adventure, while acknowledging how dangerous the place had become.

  They had come to work that morning together, dressed to the nines, in their offices an hour before Zhu had told them to arrive. The building had let them in—a little too trustworthy, she thought, even though they did have S3 clearance—and they were all reviewing the compensation and business packages that Zhu had left for them the night before.

  Plus she heard the sound of desks bumping against walls, chairs toppling over, boxes being set down. Grunts as the new team was setting up their offices, one little movement of furniture at a time.

  The day before, Zhu had pulled her aside and told her she would double as office manager until he could find a real one. She knew he had given her that job because she had done similar work while in college, and she had received good recommendations from those employers.

  Plus, the public defender’s office at the Impossibles had given her a recommendation that she saw as both excellent and as a slap in the face: it had said that she was as good at organizing her cases as she was at defending them.

  Since no one from the PD’s office won cases at the Impossibles, that was the best recommendation she could get. Except for the organization slap.

  That part disturbed her more than she wanted to admit.

  Still, a job was a job, and she now had a good one with S3.

  Which made that whisper through her links so very odd. Why would someone tell her about S3’s conflict of interest? She traced the link, and saw that it had come from Zhu himself. So she tried to contact him directly.

  She got nothing. Not even a hint that she had the right link.

  She tried again, and this time she got an official discouragement:

  You have not been cleared to use this private connection.

  So, she tried to reach him on the S3 link. She was told to wait.

  She’d never received that message on a link before.

  She thought of contacting the other attorneys, but they were as new as she was. Besides, she’d had weird bosses before. One of the reasons Zhu had put her in charge was that she was organized and knew how to get things done.

  She pinged the network and asked if Zhu’s location was considered public or private.

  For S3, the network responded, Torkild Zhu’s location is available.

  She wanted to impatiently snap, So where is he? But she didn’t. Instead she searched his location, and was stunned to discover he was near the front of the building.

  How long has he been there? She sent, thinking she could just wait until he arrived on their floor.

  Ten minutes.

  That seemed odd. And it included the moment when she had gotten the weird message. So she pinged him again, and got nothing.

  Then she realized she could turn on the building’s security system. She asked to see the front sidewalk.

  The security feed showed her an empty sidewalk, except for something near the door—which she couldn’t really see.

  Zoom in, she instructed it.

  That something was a pair of shoes, attached to two legs bent at strange angles. Then she realized that liquid was running down the sidewalk toward the next building.

  She felt a surge of panic.

  The liquid was dark, and there was a toppled cup near the bottom of her screen. Coffee. She had to hope she was looking at coffee.

  Zoom in closer to the door, she instructed the feed.

  It did. She saw a man sprawled, face down, body twisted and bent in a way that no person’s body should be twisted.

  Her breath caught.

  Are emergency services on the way? She asked the security feed. After all, it should have sent for help if someone had a medical emergency outside the main door.

  Emergency services have come and gone, the security feed responded.

  She didn’t understand that. And she had learned through hard experience that she shouldn’t argue with an automated system.

  Instead, she sent, Show me.

  It did. Police officers, faces averted from any security feed, grabbed Zhu, threw him to the ground, and then beat him.

  She stopped the feed. It made her hurt in empathy, and terrified her at the same time.

  Send for medical personnel, she sent the security feed. And then, in case it had been tampered with, she sent for an ambulance herself.

  But she knew better than to sit up here and wait. She sent a message to the other new hires:

  Anyone got medical training?

  Two people responded, saying that they knew basic health stuff.

  Meet me at the front sidewalk, she sent. Right now.

  Then, without waiting for a response, she got up from her desk and ran to the stairs. She wasn’t going to take the elevator, not when she had no idea what was happening.

  She thumped down the stairs, her heart pounding, her breath coming in big gasps, regretting the heels she had so proudly put on that morning.

  I’m coming, Mr. Zhu, she sent, even though she doubted he could hear her. I’m coming right now.

  NINE

  MILES FLINT HAD barricaded his office in Old Armstrong. He had never before used his office’s full security package, which he had updated after Anniversary Day. He preferred to do the most delicate computer work on Dome University’s Armstrong campus or on the public net at the Brownie Bar.

  He liked the anonymity of their systems. The university’s had so many users that isolating one would take hours, if not days, and the Brownie Bar had no internal surveillance, so it was impossible to see who was using the system. The Brownie Bar also did not track its customers.

  But the research Miles was doing was so dangerous that he didn’t want to implicate either of those two places. If he angered the wrong people, then they might go after the locations where the work was done, as well as go after Miles himself.

  He couldn’t endanger innocent lives like that.

  So he hunched on one of the few chairs in the office. He’d spent a fortune for chairs, even though he didn’t use them as much as he’d planned. The nanofibers never worked exactly right. They didn’t quite sculpt to his body the way he wanted. He got uncomfortable
if he sat longer than twenty minutes.

  This time, he had arranged half a dozen work stations, some of which allowed him to stand. He was combing for information on a variety of networks, not just the Earth Alliance’s network, and he needed to monitor the programs.

  He went from station to station, standing or sitting, sometimes looking at information presented holographically, sometimes at a 2-D flat screen that rose above the desk, sometimes on the desktop itself.

  The only thing he did not do was let the computers talk to him. He trusted his security only so far. It was easy to track sound. That could be done with the right kind of equipment several meters away—even outside a so-called soundproofed building.

  To hack his data streams, though, required extremely sophisticated programs that had to go past his constantly updating security walls. Plus, half the time he used an actual keyboard, which very few people did any longer. A good eighth of his encryption was tied to an existing keyboard, with its quirks. All of the keyboards he had in the office only responded to his DNA combined with the warmth of his fingertips and a measure of the blood flowing through his veins.

  No one could cut off his hands and use them to enter his programs. He had to do it, and he had to be alive.

  He paced the small room. The floor used to be uneven, but it wasn’t any longer. He’d leveled it after his daughter Talia had complained. The building that housed his office was on a list of historic places. He couldn’t make a lot of external changes without some committee’s approval—or, at least, that was the way it had been in the past.

  He had no idea how the regulations would be enforced in this new post-Anniversary-Day, post-Peyti-Crisis Armstrong. He suspected some things might be different.

  Flint was a Retrieval Artist. He found humans who had Disappeared—who had vanished, using a service or on their own, rather than face the justice system in the Earth Alliance—which meant he was really good at examining huge amounts of information for the tiniest clue.

  In the six-plus years he’d been doing this job, he had gained a healthy dose of paranoia. And he’d been pretty darn paranoid to begin with.