Vigilantes

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  She burst into tears. She stood up and went to the door. She couldn’t pull it open, and she couldn’t stop crying. She was actually sobbing, unable to take a breath without big honking sounds, and it felt like her entire body was going to break in half, but she couldn’t stop.

  She had separated into two people: inside her head, the Real Talia was watching all this drama and standing, arms crossed, urging the What-The-Fuck-Are-You-Doing? Talia to stop crying and to suck it up. Other people have it worse, and she knew that.

  A box of tissue floated over to her on a server tray. She glared at it, wishing she had the power to make that tray and those tissues burst into flame, just to prove a point.

  But she didn’t have that ability. No human did—no species did, as far as she knew.

  Then she realized she had stopped sobbing. The anger at the tissues had made the tears stop.

  She grabbed a handful of tissues, and wiped off her face.

  “Thank you,” she said begrudgingly.

  She felt like she was at a crossroads now. If she really wanted the high ground, she should leave. But he’d actually gotten her to stop crying.

  The last few days, these crying jags would hit her unaware and hold her for about an hour. Her throat was raw from them, her chest ached, and she looked like a mess.

  She turned around.

  He was watching her. This time, the compassion on his face didn’t seem fake.

  Or maybe she needed it not to be fake.

  But he hadn’t gotten up to hug her or told her to stop or asked her what was wrong. And she actually appreciated that.

  “It sounds like you’ve been through hell,” he said quietly.

  She shook her head. “Other people have it a lot worse right now.”

  “We can’t compare pain,” he said. “You lost a parent and a way of life. Then you came here to a new way of life, only to have that literally blown up six months ago. And last week, you watched people die. And you lost a friend.”

  She shook her head again, then blew her nose. When she finished with the tissues, she didn’t put them in the recycler—clone caution, she called it once when her dad mentioned it; she didn’t want anyone to test her DNA.

  She put the tissues in her pocket.

  “He wasn’t my friend,” she said softly. “I told you that yesterday.”

  “But you had feelings for him,” Llewynn said.

  “That didn’t make him a friend.” She moved back toward the chair.

  “Which makes his death, and your reaction to it even more complicated,” Llewynn said, “because those feelings will forever be unresolved.”

  She froze. She had been about to sit down again, but she wasn’t going to now.

  “He wouldn’t have been in that room if it weren’t for me,” she said.

  Llewynn threaded his fingers over his stomach. That movement was something that fat people usually did, but he wasn’t fat.

  “How so?” he asked.

  “I was the one who fought him when he called the Chinar twins clones. His hatred of clones really pissed me off. He was playing on prejudice to make them feel bad, and that caused the big fight in the cafeteria, which led to his father trying to pull him out of school and all the meetings with the lawyers, which wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”

  Llewynn sat up slightly. “Did it anger you when his hatred of clones proved to be an accurate reaction to the threats we face?”

  Her mouth opened slightly. “What?”

  “Clones,” he said in a tone that implied she was stupid for not understanding. “We’ve been attacked by two sets of them now. We’re threatened by them. You clearly think the same way, or you wouldn’t have defended biological twins against a false accusation.”

  Her mouth was still open. She couldn’t believe he was saying this crap.

  “His hatred of clones wasn’t reasonable,” she said in a small voice.

  “Even though they attacked us?” Llewynn said.

  “A group of clones attacked us,” she said. “It’s the same as if a large family came after us. Do we hate the family?”

  “Except that it’s not the same,” Llewynn said. “Clones are manufactured. They were weapons and they ended up killing your friend.”

  Her stomach turned. What would he do if he realized she was a clone?

  For a moment there, she had actually started to think this man—this place—could help her. And now, this.

  “You think clones made from a human original aren’t human?” she asked, trying to sound neutral.

  “I think the answer to that is obvious,” he said. “No true human would behave that way.”

  “Not even PierLuigi Frémont?” she asked.

  “He had a different pathology,” Llewynn said. “He had a God complex. He also had charisma, so that he could lead followers into places they didn’t want to go. That’s not the same as attacking an innocent city. That takes a lack of humanity.”

  “You claim PierLuigi Frémont as human, but not one of his clones?” she asked. She couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing.

  “It’s the difference between a human and an android,” he said. Then he peered at her. “Do you disagree?”

  The tears were threatening again. Damn him. She had a moment of clarity, and now this—from someone who was supposed to help her. Someone they were paying to help her.

  She shook her head. “I’m going to leave. Make sure that door’s open.”

  “But we’re not done with the entry interview,” he said.

  “We are,” she said. “My dad said I could leave if I didn’t like this. I don’t like it.”

  “I felt like we were starting to make progress,” Llewynn said. “Running now won’t be good for you.”

  Like you know what’s good for me, she thought but didn’t say. She was biting her lower lip so hard it hurt.

  “I’m leaving,” she said again, and made her way to the door.

  She felt hollow inside, as if someone had taken every bit of her, scooped it out, and replaced it with nothing at all. Not even her breath came easily.

  “Talia,” he said. “Let’s finish—”

  “Talia Flint-Shindo,” she snapped as she pulled open the door. “And believe me, we are finished. For good.”

  SIXTEEN

  RAFAEL SALEHI HUNCHED over a table in the law library on board Schnable, Shishani & Salehi’s fastest large space yacht. The law firm owned dozens of these yachts, but none could travel quite like this one—and carry as many people.

  Over the past week, he’d acquired a lot of company on this ship. In addition to the thirty human staff members he’d brought—lawyers, legal assistants and researchers—he’d also picked up twenty Peyti lawyers when the yacht briefly stopped on Peyla.

  In addition, he had gathered a large group of legal minds to join them, from professors and former judges to some of the best legal theorists in the Earth Alliance. He needed a team; what he was trying to do was something much bigger than a single case or even a group of cases.

  He was trying to change clone law forever, and he was going to use the Peyti Crisis on the Moon to do it.

  The law library was his favorite room on this ship. It was one of the largest public rooms on the ship, with tables everywhere, intermingled with comfortable chairs. There were networked computers, built into the ship’s system, and a few non-networked computers, known only to S3 attorneys.

  But what added to the ambience here, besides the soft lighting, were the shelves and shelves of books—or what appeared to be books, the old Earth collectible, made-of-paper kind. A simple brush of the fingers revealed that these books were actually holographs, but they still functioned like books.

  They were non-networked volumes, which contained everything known on that particular topic—at least everything known when the law library downloaded its latest updates. He had downloaded an update just before leaving on this trip, and when he needed a moment to rest his brain, he would remove one of the book
s, open it, and watch the information meld with his links.

  Mostly, he avoided clone law or Alliance history or treatises on mass murderers. His fingers kept finding the history of the Moon—the ancient history of the Moon—with faint images of the man who had given the Moon’s largest city his name and the strange-looking craft that had actually delivered that man, for a few brief hours, to the Moon itself.

  Salehi did so to remind himself that to the first man on the Moon, a man named Armstrong, Salehi’s quest was unimaginable. There had been no Earth Alliance then, no knowledge of other life in the universe, no real knowledge of the universe outside of the Earth’s solar system.

  Once upon a time, in a land so far away that no one completely understood it, a group of humans had devised a craft that would enable them to (barely) leave their planet. It had seemed impossible to everyone, according to the millennia of human history before that, and yet these people not only tried it, they succeeded.

  Without their risk, his entire culture would not exist. He probably would not exist.

  They had tried.

  Which was more than most people ever did.

  He was trying now. The chief Peyti lawyer on board, Uzvuyiten, believed Salehi’s quest to change clone law was as impossible as an ancient human finding a way to the Moon. Yet, Uzvuyiten was willing to use Salehi’s impossible dream to help all Peyti.

  Because right now, after the Peyti Crisis, the Earth Alliance—and particularly the Moon—had become an inhospitable place for all Peyti. Uzvuyiten was going to stop it somehow, even if he had to use Salehi to do so.

  Salehi looked over his shoulder at Uzvuyiten. He sat with his colleagues at a table, its top covered with some kind of chart in Peytin, that they were all studying.

  The ship’s systems saved all networked computer work, and all of the ship’s guests did not have the ability to work on non-networked systems. If Salehi wanted to know exactly what Uzvuyiten was doing without asking Uzvuyiten, then he could have the ship’s systems look it up for him.

  Uzvuyiten was the most distinctive Peyti that Salehi knew. Most humans had trouble distinguishing the Peyti, primarily because half of their faces were covered in masks when they were in a human environment. But Uzvuyiten was recognizable even with a mask. His skin had turned a whitish gray, unlike the darker gray of most Peyti, and his fingers had been damaged a long time ago. They bent backwards at the tips, where a human’s fingernails would be, and the bent ridge glowed an odd blue in the right kind of light.

  Salehi could recognize Uzvuyiten from his posture alone, but everyone on the ship could recognize him by his hands or his strangely colored skin.

  And everyone knew that Uzvuyiten would be Salehi’s co-counsel if any of these cases went to court. Technically, Salehi represented the Government of Peyla, because the government had hired S3. But anyone with brains understood that Peyla was using Uzvuyiten to protect its reputation and its cases.

  The door to the law library opened, and Lauren Jiolitti leaned in. She was a slight woman with shoulder-length dark hair and intense eyes. She was on track to make partner, and she worked harder than half the lawyers at S3. That was one reason he had brought her along.

  He could trust her.

  She scanned the room, then her gaze caught his. She beckoned him.

  He thought it odd that she didn’t even use her links to reach him.

  He threaded his way past lawyers and researchers lounging in chairs, working on tablets, and clearly having intense discussions across links.

  He slipped out the door into the corridor. It felt like he had left a quiet, safe place and found himself inside a spaceship. The lights were brighter here, and the design all gray and silver.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “We got contacted by a woman named Melcia Seng, who claimed she was with S3 On The Moon.”

  “I’ve never heard of her,” Salehi said.

  “Neither had I.” Jiolitti kept her voice down. “So I checked. According to our records, Zhu hired her yesterday.”

  Salehi didn’t like this. “Why did she contact us?”

  “Because she says that Zhu can’t.” Jiolitti’s mouth had become a thin line.

  “Did she say why?”

  Jiolitti let out a long sigh. “I think you need to talk with her.”

  He frowned. This wasn’t any kind of procedure. But then, they were all in strange circumstances.

  “All right,” he said. “Where’s her information coming from?”

  “The main S3 links,” Jiolitti said. “But you need to go somewhere private.”

  “Because…?”

  “Because,” Jiolitti said, swallowing hard, “I don’t think anyone else on this ship should hear what she has to say.”

  SEVENTEEN

  BARTHOLOMEW NYQUIST LOOKED…cheerful.

  Miles Flint studied the image of the man he’d always thought of as morose and rumpled. Nyquist stood outside of Flint’s office, waiting to be let in.

  Even when someone looked right, Flint still went through his security protocols. In fact, he went through them in even more depth than usual. He knew how easily systems could be fooled into assuming one thing when another was actually true.

  And Nyquist looking cheerful—especially after the week they’d all had—was just plain strange.

  Flint examined everything from the DNA off Nyquist’s finger to the shape of his retina. Apparently, that man with a half-smile on his face was Nyquist. Maybe the half-smile was the final clue. Flint couldn’t remember if he’d ever seen Nyquist smile fully.

  Flint opened the door, and Nyquist slipped in.

  “I was beginning to think I was back at the Reception Center,” Nyquist said. “That took forever.”

  Flint shrugged. He wasn’t going to defend his security policies. “You sounded mysterious when you contacted me,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Nyquist looked around for a chair. Flint’s front office only had one, by design, something he had learned long ago from the woman from whom he’d bought the business. Paloma.

  He shook off the thought, and wondered if it had come from Nyquist’s presence here. The Bixian assassins that had killed Paloma had nearly killed Nyquist, as well. His face was slightly mismatched because he had never bought the enhancements that would repair all of the damage.

  Flint thought of getting the other chair he kept in back for Talia, then changed his mind as Nyquist leaned against one of the desks. The holoscreen that Flint had up reflected light against Nyquist’s back and sides.

  “I spent the morning with Uzvaan.” Nyquist didn’t sound as upset about that as Flint would have expected. “He gave me some information that might lead us to the masterminds, as you keep calling them.”

  Flint raised his eyebrows in surprise. He had been convinced that Nyquist’s interviews with Uzvaan would bring nothing to the investigation—but he didn’t want to say that to Nyquist. Nyquist hated the interviews already, and Flint hadn’t wanted to close off any possibilities.

  “The Peyti clones,” Nyquist said, “had their masks delivered.”

  He bounced a bit as he said that.

  “The explosive masks?” Flint asked.

  “All of their masks. From the moment they moved to the Moon. Maybe even before that. They were forbidden from buying the masks here,” Nyquist said.

  Flint had no idea that the Peyti could buy masks here. That feeling he’d had earlier, about not knowing a culture, grew even stronger.

  “I never thought about how any Peyti got their masks,” Flint said.

  Nyquist nodded. “I knew there were stores—we’d investigated a few over the years, mostly for smuggling operations—but I hadn’t thought to trace the masks. The new masks—the explosive ones—are different from all the others.”

  Flint leaned back. He should have realized that from the start. The clones had to get the masks from somewhere.

  “I thought the bombs were an add-on,” he said.

  “You d
idn’t see them in action, did you?” Nyquist asked. His smile was gone. He looked haunted. Uzvaan had tried to kill Nyquist—everyone at the Detective Division.

  “I saw the footage,” Flint said. “And the aftermath.”

  That had been enough. And he hadn’t looked at the footage closely. He’d been concentrating on the collateral damage and the faces of the Peyti, not on the method of attack.

  “The masks were in two parts. The bomb was on the lower part of the mask,” Nyquist said. “The masks looked like a redesign of what we usually saw.”

  Flint nodded. “And those were delivered.”

  “Every mask that the clones wore, from the moment they got here to the moment of their attack, was delivered.”

  Flint let out a breath. “And you think we can trace that.”

  “Easily,” Nyquist said. “That’s the leak. We can easily trace that. I’m pretty certain your masterminds would never think we would be able to talk to the clones, so we wouldn’t know that the masks were delivered.”

  Flint frowned. They’d know—eventually. Maybe. If the bombs had exploded as planned, there would have been rebuilding, and then investigation. The investigation would have gotten short-changed.

  “I think you’re right,” Flint said.

  Nyquist gave him an exasperated look. They weren’t easy friends, and Flint knew why—although he didn’t try to change it. Both men felt like they had to be the best investigator in the room.

  “Even if the bombs had exploded as planned and the investigation started, we wouldn’t have found this for months if not years. By then, the information wouldn’t lead anywhere.” Flint templed his fingers, then tapped the tips against his chin.

  He looked at Nyquist, who seemed to be waiting for Flint to catch up to him.

  “But it’s only been a week,” Flint said slowly. “And the masterminds, whoever they are, are probably not thinking about covering up their tracks.”

  “If they are,” Nyquist said, “they’re worried about shutting up the clones.”

  Both men looked at each other. Obviously neither of them had thought of that until now, either.