A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (34 page)

At least, not yet.

Zhu hadn’t heard from Trey since Trey received notification that Zhu was his attorney. Zhu had no idea how Trey reacted to the release information if, indeed, he knew it.

Some prisons liked to keep that information confidential until just an hour or so before release. Doing that solved several problems. It prevented the newly freed former prisoner from carrying information to the outside, and it also prevented some disgruntled current prisoners from killing the new release in the days before he got out.

“Out of pocket, right,” Zhu said. “Let’s get the best service we got for this. I don’t want trouble. This is the kind of case in which trouble would bounce back on us.”

Louise’s gaze stayed on his for a long moment. It almost felt like she had sent him a message through the links.
You should have thought of that before defending this creature
. That’s what she would have said. But of course, she hadn’t.

This time.

She had asked sideways if he considered what he was doing. But of course, that had been after he returned, after she realized that he had helped a clone of PierLuigi Frémont go free.

“Is that all?” he asked her.

“I suppose,” she said.

He hated her tone. Maybe he would ask for a different assistant. Maybe he’d make a note in her file that she wasn’t suited to defending anyone. Maybe he would let the partners know she wasn’t worth recommending to any law school.

Of course, if they did that, then he might be stuck with her. And he couldn’t face that judgmental gaze for much longer.

“Get this done,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” She let herself out of his office.

Maybe the problem wasn’t that she was judgmental. Maybe it was that he felt guilty for getting this man out of prison.

He walked to the windows and looked out into space. He was doing exactly what he hated in others. He was prejudging someone. Trey clearly had been unjustly imprisoned. Trey had also defended himself. He could have unleashed those plant weapon things on the twelve clones at any point; he waited until they tried to attack him again.

Zhu leaned his forehead against the coolness of the window.

Maybe he did need time away from the law. Maybe he needed some counseling. After all, it was pretty clear that those Anniversary Day bombings affected him deeply, and he hadn’t dealt with it.

The firm covered psychological services.

Time to take advantage of them.

Because trying to solve this one on his own simply wasn’t working.

THIRTY-EIGHT

THE FOOTAGE LOOKED eerily familiar, even though it was decades-old. An explosion, followed by another, and then another, in rapid succession.

Gomez remained standing while she watched all of it. Charlie could only provide two-dimensional imagery, so she watched it on the wall in front of her, the holographic map of the clone travels floating almost forgotten behind her.

Her office felt small and close, and it took her a while to realize that she was rocking from side to side as she watched. She didn’t make herself stop; she needed to get some of the distress out somehow.

Much of the narration of the footage was in a language she did not understand. The translation into Standard was poorly done—the original narrator would speak for a minute, and then the translator would speak for maybe three seconds—but she gleaned enough.

Only the last part of that gigantic base attack completely mimicked the attack on Anniversary Day. In that part of the base, security personnel had run to find the bureaucrat in charge, some person with a name she couldn’t quite decipher—a man, by the looks of the official portrait—and as they reached him, someone near him shot him with a laser pistol.

The security guards had shot that person, and then, as others were trying to get help for those wounded in the cross fire, the rest of the base blew up.

The vids she had watched were among the last transmitted off base.

Her stomach turned again. Instead of freezing the vid, she shut it off, and stared at the blank wall for a long time. Her arms were folded over her torso, her back aching from the awkward position. Slowly, eventually, she managed to stop herself from rocking.

All of this happened ten years after the ship that would take the clones to Epriccom left the area. Ten years.

A sample attack. Or maybe the real inspiration.

All the reports about Anniversary Day listed the bombing in Armstrong four years before as the practice event and/or as the inspiration, but what if it wasn’t? What if it became part of the Anniversary Day attacks only because the leaders all over the Moon commemorated the survivors of that bombing, and the choices it led to on the Moon.

After all, the leaders on the Moon were working on unifying the Moon, and they had used that initial bombing to seize more power—in the words of some—and to solidify the Moon as a base around Earth—in the words of others.

She usually didn’t pay attention to controversies that came from the center of the Alliance. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of them each day. But she kept a hand in, just in case she would find some of the disaffected political types out on the Frontier. She had to be able to talk to them.

Worse, she had to be able to talk to them as if they were rational, which most of them were not.

She finally sat down at her desk. She had to find a few things. First, she had to see if she could find even more explosions, to see if these bombers practiced elsewhere.

That she could do on her own. She didn’t want her crew to dig in that area.

Besides, she had a set way she wanted to work. She wanted to see how the Alliance continued its fiction that this starbase still existed. If she found the same language or the same kind of data uploads elsewhere in the Alliance database, then she might have coordinates to hand to Charlie for his other databases.

She let the system search.

And while she did, she contacted Apaza through a secure link.

I know I had you search the ships’ registrations to see if you could find the ships,
she sent.
But did you find who owned them? Not the legal title information, but who the title actually traced to?

His answer was immediate.
I looked at the registrations, but I didn’t dig deep because they were old, and because I knew that old information wouldn’t lead me immediately to the ships. You want me to dig?

Yes,
she sent.
I want to know the names of all the shell owners, the corporations, everything. If there is an “everything.”

With your permission
, he sent back,
I’d like to investigate the payment records for those ships. It’s easy to come up with a name to register ships in some places on the Frontier, but it’s harder to hide who bought the ship. Even out in the wilds, it’s hard to hide who buys something. Universal funds are rare, and the local currency—

I know
, she sent. She did, too. She understood that local currency could change from culture to culture, but almost every group near the Alliance took Alliance funds in one way or another. It was one of the few leverages the Alliance had to encourage membership.

Search for it all
, she sent.
The more we know, the better
.

Then she signed off. She glanced at the Alliance databases now that her searches were done. She found nothing about the explosions, the destroyed base, or the causes of the violence.

The language about the base seemed pretty normal for something that far away from the Alliance. The only thing she found that was suspicious was an entry about the base from five years before. The entry sounded like someone had traveled there recently. But the posting was anonymous, one of those ubiquitous reviews that showed up about every corner of the universe.

As if the base still existed.

She would have Apaza investigate the listing as well.

She rubbed her hands over her arms. The chill hadn’t gone away. Neither had the goose bumps.

She started to contact Charlie, to have him search his outside maps for more locations like this one—destroyed cities, destroyed bases, destroyed domes.

Then she stopped herself just before activating her link.

Everything on the
Stanley
was monitored. She’d shut off most of it, but not all of it. Even though she thought she had gotten everything, she wasn’t certain about the cockpit. There might have been some really deep fail safes that she had missed. Maybe the cockpit couldn’t entirely shut off its connection to the Alliance.

She would be alerting someone that she was on their trail.

If there was a someone within the Alliance whom she should worry about.

If there was a trail.

She moved the holographic map back into place.

She needed to go to the second moon.

But she would do it under the guise of something else entirely.

No one would blame her for investigating the clones she had discovered on Epriccom. Everyone would assume she was looking into the connections with Anniversary Day.

After all, who wouldn’t look?

They would simply think her oblivious to the links to the Alliance.

If she played this right.

She needed to play it right.

She needed to talk to the Eaufasse first.

THIRTY-NINE

RAFIK FUJITA HATED these jobs the most. Transporting former prisoners always entailed some kind of problem, usually caused by the prisoner himself. The prisoner expected freedom, expected that he could order Fujita around, expected that he would be able to do whatever he wanted from the moment he boarded Fujita’s ship.

Fujita carried a full crew on cases like this, and the crew knew how to handle former prisoners and troublemakers.

Usually, though, Fujita carried former prisoners with enough clout to hire S
3
and to get out of prison, whether the charge was just or not. He’d never dealt with a clone prisoner before, and certainly not one like this.

Zhu had warned him that the clone would look like the clones that harmed the Moon. Zhu also paid a little extra so that the clone—whom Zhu said to call Trey—would be as far from Alliance space as possible.

Fujita loved working for S
3
, so he would follow orders. Even if he had to imprison that deadly clone all over again.

He’d been reading the file that Zhu provided. The clone seemed harmless enough. But Fujita had dealt with enough so-called harmless prisoners to know that what a former prisoner seemed like and what he actually was were often two different things.

But Fujita was as prepared as a man could be. He owned five different ships, and he was using the Alus 15, the most complex, for this mission. The Alus 15 had a double-reinforced frame, so that it would survive most standard weapons attacks. It had a sophisticated internal security system that could determine if a marked passenger acted strange or out of line—and Fujita would certainly mark this clone.

The internal security system would also detect common bomb manufacturing and standard weaponry, and isolate anyone not authorized to use such things on a ship.

All of the weaponry that Fujita’s people had—and he had two dozen highly trained warriors on the Alus 15—was keyed to their DNA, so if they lost a grip on their weapons, then those weapons went out of commission. No stealing anything.

Fujita didn’t have back-up weaponry anywhere that wasn’t tied to his staff, although he did have some additional firepower built into the Alus 15 itself.

If, somehow, someone was able to take over the Alus 15, then that person could, in theory, use the ship to attack another ship.

But that would take a lot of work, and many, many things would have to go right for the attacker.

In fact, almost everything would have to go right.

Everyone on this ship could pilot it, just like everyone could man the external weaponry, and everyone could defend the interior. The crew that Fujita had chosen for this mission had worked together off and on for more than thirty years.

He figured they’d do all right.

Fujita had been to clone prisons before, but never to pick up a clone. He’d dropped off guards, and picked up Salehi back when the man was practicing a lot more law than he’d been doing of late.

Fujita missed Salehi. He liked working with the man. Salehi was a bit of an idealist, but he was a risk-taker too. He’d gotten disillusioned during some major cases. Fujita had actually tried to talk him down, to make him feel better, but to no avail.

So Fujita continued to work for S
3
, hoping Salehi would come back. But Fujita had a feeling he might not. Fujita didn’t really like the other partners, and he hadn’t liked Zhu at all.

They’d had an uncomfortable meeting. Zhu had apparently done a good job for his client, and then regretted it. Fujita thought it a strange attitude for a high-level defense attorney.