A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (31 page)

“To what purpose?” The judge asked.

“I don’t know,” Zhu said honestly. “It wasn’t in the record. I’ll be frank, Judge. I met with him, wasn’t sure I wanted to take his case, and promised to read his file. That’s when I realized that his imprisonment is not strictly legal within the Alliance. If he was manufactured—”

“—outside of the Alliance, he doesn’t need Alliance identification, and if he’s not owned by someone inside the Alliance—or wasn’t at the time of his arrest—then he’s not illegal in anyway. That’s what you’re going to argue, Counselor?”

“Yes, sir.” Zhu felt warm. He was relieved no one else was in the courtroom. He couldn’t tell if her sarcasm came from the law itself or was directed at him.

“I assume a big-shot attorney from S-three has all his facts straight? You’ve made sure there’s no proof that this clone was made inside the Alliance?”

He was relieved to hear the question. It meant that she was taking him seriously. “Sir, I think the preponderance of evidence shows that this enclave was trying to make clones
outside
of the Alliance, on purpose. The enclave got destroyed shortly after the FSS arrived, and the destruction came from within. Someone was getting rid of evidence.”

“Of what?”

He shrugged. “We don’t know, and no one investigated. Apparently everyone was more concerned with the Eaufasse’s entry into the Alliance than they were with solving the mystery of the enclave.”

“And that’s in the file too,” she said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And this file, how long will it take me to go over the evidence and to read your brief?”

He didn’t know how to answer that. Was she asking him if he was thorough or was she asking him if he had been
too
thorough?

“It depends, sir,” he said. “If you want to review the footage of the initial interviews, it could take eight to ten hours. If you just want to read the brief and scan the evidence, maybe two hours…?”

“Sounds like a waste of time,” she said, and his heart skipped. He didn’t want her to rule against him, but it sounded like she was going to do just that.

He tried not to look too upset.

“And,” she added, “imprisoning clones costs money, especially in medium-security facilities. We can’t work the critters like we can in the maximum security.”

He was holding his breath. He made himself exhale.

“So I’m inclined to rule in your favor, Counselor. Does S-three need a judge on the payroll?”

Oh, crap. Was this a quid pro quo? “I’m just a junior partner, sir. I could check with the senior partners. I know they’re always looking for…”

He let his voice trail off when he realized he was about to say “leverage.”

“Well, we can’t have a junior partner dictating things to the senior partners, now can we?” she said, and he felt his case dry up and vanish.

Then her gaze met his and she grinned.
Grinned
. He’d never seen a judge do that in court, at least with an attorney arguing in front of her.

“But you will put in a good word, right?” she asked.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“That’s all I can ask.” She nodded, the grin fading. “I will, of course, review everything. But unless I find something glaring, you’ll have your order for release within the normal three weeks.”

Three weeks?
In all the other courts, motions for release could take place the same day.

“Make sure someone from your office is here to shepherd this clone out of the area. I don’t care what happens to him,” the judge said, “so long as he gets out of the sector. He really shouldn’t even be in the Alliance. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Zhu said, wondering how he could get her to gavel this down today. He didn’t want to come back, even for a technicality. And he really didn’t want her to see that Trey was related to Frémont. It might make her change her mind.

“Record off,” she said.

That was when Zhu realized she didn’t care if the quid pro quo was on the transcript. Was that as a possible escape in case someone questioned her ruling? Did that give one of the higher courts grounds to overturn something if Trey did something wrong?

Or did she really not care about anything anymore?

The robot powered down. Then it left the court room.

She watched it go. The android remained, but the other robot left too.

Zhu felt a little dizzy. That had gone better and stranger than he had imagined it would.

She watched them leave. When the door closed, she grinned again.

“You talk to your partners,” she said, “and I’ll have your clone ready for deportation. Deal?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and then because he couldn’t do otherwise, he asked, “You’re not going to review—?”

“Would you?” she asked. “Clone law is about as dry as it gets. I’ll see you—or one of your staff—in three weeks.”

Then she stood and stomped back to her office. The android left through a different door.

Zhu remained rooted in place for a moment. He was committed to helping her at S
3
now. He’d have to tell Salehi. And if she hated work as much she intimated, she didn’t belong in the firm’s culture. Still, a former head judge on their roster would only help the firm, and she knew it.

It wouldn’t be his decision. All he would ask Salehi was to postpone the decision until Trey was free.

Zhu let out a sigh, then packed up. He debated telling Trey that it had all gone well, and decided against it.

He didn’t want to see that face again. He didn’t want to think about what, if anything, he had just loosed on the universe.

At least, as a condition of his release, Trey would be banned from Alliance space. That was good.

Zhu stared at the bench. Maybe clone law wasn’t for him after all. Or maybe he could argue theory somewhere else.

Or maybe this was Zhu’s last hurrah. It certainly wasn’t as much fun as he had hoped. Nor had he changed anything for anyone else.

He gathered his things and walked out of the courtroom. He tried to call the map back up on his links, but he had somehow erased it.

At least he was in no hurry to find his way back to the shuttle. Although he did want to get to that company space yacht. He wanted to indulge in comfort all the way home.

The one thing he did know: he wasn’t coming back here ever again.

THIRTY-FOUR

GOMEZ FELT THE pasta sit heavily on her stomach. She’d seen too much over the course of her career to be completely shocked. “You saw children killing each other in the footage from Epriccom?”

Everyone in the cafeteria was watching Nuuyoma. He stirred his pasta with a spoon, but had stopped eating a while ago.

When he didn’t clarify, she took that as a yes. She had known he wasn’t lying. He
couldn’t
be lying, not about this. Yet, it felt odd.

“I had previous deputies look at this footage fifteen years ago,” she said. “How could they miss this?”

He set his spoon down. “I searched for laser fire. I didn’t just eyeball it. Considering how much time they had, they were probably eyeballing.”

She remembered. She had felt confused in those few days, like she often did with a case on the Frontier, pulled in many directions at once. Her mandate was to smooth over difficulties with any alien culture, to make sure that they knew about the Alliance in a positive manner, and of course, to make sure that she served justice for the humans who had somehow ventured deep into the Frontier.

“The computer helped me,” Nuuyoma was saying. “I couldn’t have eyeballed the laser fire. I wouldn’t have been able to see most of it. I had to enhance a lot of what I saw.”

He kept his gaze down, but she could see how haunted his eyes were. He would never forget what he had seen.

“So,” Simiaar said to Gomez, “your friend TwoZero didn’t tell you that, did he?”

Gomez hated the needling, but she wasn’t going to rise to it. She wasn’t sure what she would say. She finally understood why TwoZero had been so vague about his routines inside the enclave.

He had given her clues. He had stressed that they were being trained. He had said there were more clones when he was young than there were when she found the enclave. But he had never tied those together.

“No,” Gomez said. “He didn’t say a word about that. In fact, he led me to believe this was the first time the clones inside that compound had gone after each other.”

Her words hung in the air for a moment. Then Verstraete shifted in her chair so that she was looking directly at Nuuyoma.

“Could that be true?” she asked him. “Could only some of the colony have been involved in the earlier attacks against the clones?”

Nuuyoma looked at Gomez first, maybe asking her to save him. But she wanted the answers as well.

Then he looked tiredly at Verstraete. “I don’t see how only some of the colony could have been involved. It seemed to me that they were weeding down the kids, looking for…something. The most murderous? The most pliable? I don’t know. And remember, I was just looking at visuals, and these kids really do look the same.”

“God,” Apaza said. Gomez didn’t know if that was a comment, a prayer, or just a sound that Apaza hadn’t even realized he was making.

“Well, we stumbled on something charming way back when,” Simiaar said. “And now we have a lot of information that apparently we can’t give to the Alliance. So what’re we doing, Marshal Gomez?”

“Well, that’s what we have to figure out,” Gomez said. “I have some ideas, but I don’t think we’re entirely done briefing each other. I know I’m not. Have you finished, Elián?”

“No,” he said, and then to Gomez’s surprise, he smiled just a little. “A ship did leave the enclave before the enclave destroyed itself.”

Gomez shook her head. Now she was feeling uncomfortable. Was he watching the wrong footage? Because she had had scanned through the footage of that enclave herself when she had been on Epriccom. When she had gotten the news that the enclave had destroyed itself, she watched the footage to make sure no one had escaped.

She had wanted so desperately to catch someone, anyone, whom she could blame for the horrors.

“We didn’t see that,” she said to Nuuyoma now. “And we were watching for it.”

“You wouldn’t have seen it,” Nuuyoma said. “Near as I can figure, it left when Thirds asked for asylum.”

“He didn’t ask for asylum,” Gomez said through gritted teeth.

“I’m sorry,” Nuuyoma said. “When he asked the Eaufasse for protection.”

Gomez stopped focusing on his words, and realized what he had just told her. Thirds had asked for protection
before
the
Stanley
had arrived. Even though the Eaufasse hadn’t properly communicated it, that request was what had brought the
Stanley
to Epriccom in the first place.

Simiaar stood, then picked up her plate. She set it on the recycler, then grabbed some of the others. She had her back to the table when she said, “So let me get this straight. Thirds asks for protection. Then the Eaufasse contact the crazies inside that enclave?”

“They told me they hadn’t,” Gomez said, “and I don’t think they could. I’ve been looking through the history of the relationship between the Eaufasse and the enclave, and to call it a ‘relationship’ is truly an overstatement. The people who wanted to start the enclave contacted the Eaufasse to figure out what it would take to acquire the land, and if the Eaufasse had any complaints about human usage of that land. When the Eaufasse said they did not, then that’s when the enclave got started. I didn’t see much after that, after all of the regulations got followed, not that there were a lot. The Eaufasse are pretty live and let live.”

“The reports on them from the diplomats and scholarly teams that facilitated their admission into the Alliance say that they fight among themselves, and have so many tribes that it’s not fair to call them the Eaufasse at all,” Verstraete said. “So maybe they didn’t have time to pay attention to what some small group of humans did.”

“That’s the impression I got,” Gomez said. “If the human enclave had just taken care of itself and had no real impact on Epriccom, then we would never have known about it.”

“Apparently, they didn’t care about the deaths of the clones as much as Thirds’ request,” Nuuyoma said.

“Had those bodies you talked about appeared outside before?” Simiaar asked.

“Yes and no,” Nuuyoma said. “They were killed outside of the enclave, then dragged back into the enclave. But from what I can tell, no one had ever escaped one of those hunting missions before. The twelve were still chasing Thirds. If they had caught and killed him, then they would have dragged all the bodies back to the enclave.”

“Lovely,” Apaza said. Now Gomez knew that these comments of his were deliberate. And she agreed with his sarcasm. This was horrible.

“I don’t get it then.” Simiaar had grabbed Gomez’s plate, and held it just to her left. “You said the ship left
before
we arrived, but the Eaufasse and the enclave had no communications. How could both be true?”