Starbase Human (28 page)

He had an in; at least, he hoped he did.

The one other thing he had done along the way, at a space station where he knew his work couldn’t be traced, was look up a Retrieval Artist who lived in Armstrong, a Retrieval Artist named Miles Flint.

Zagrando had met Flint years ago, on Valhalla Basin. Flint had come in search of his ex-wife, only to discover her missing. She had been kidnapped and had left a child behind, a daughter that Flint hadn’t known he had.

Because the daughter was a clone of the original child, who had died as a toddler.

Flint could have left the clone behind. He had no legal obligation to take care of her. He hadn’t created her—his ex-wife had, and his ex-wife had died as a result of her kidnapping.

But Flint had taken the clone, adopted her, and made her a legal human being with the same rights as everyone else. He had shown compassion in a way that Zagrando hadn’t expected—indeed, in a way that Zagrando hadn’t believed existed any longer.

Now, he was going to rely on that compassion to get him into Armstrong. Even if Flint didn’t know who was leading the investigations of the Anniversary Day bombings, he would know who to contact.

All Zagrando had done in that single, brief, look-up was see if Flint still lived on the Moon and still worked as a Retrieval Artist. As of a few days ago, he had.

Although Zagrando now worried that he would have to check again.

The so-called Peyti Crisis had occurred days ago, and a lot of information was just coming to light. Zagrando actually sat on one of the comfortable chairs in the entertainment room and let the various recap news accounts wash over him.

Hundreds of people, maybe a thousand or two, had become collateral damage. The Office of Moon Security, apparently the only thing left structured like an all-Moon government, had ordered that the Peyti who had initiated the crisis be segregated, and then their environment changed from Earth Normal to Peyti Normal. That environmental change had defused thousands of bombs, but had killed any humans within range, leaving the Peyti perpetrators alive.

Zagrando had initially watched the coverage in disbelief, thinking perhaps someone had spoofed the entire Alliance. The Peyti were the most peaceful, non-violent people inside the Alliance. Peyti lawyers, on the other hand, were the most feared lawyers in the entire Alliance legal system because of their incisive minds and their take-no-prisoners attitude. They could manipulate Earth Alliance law to their own ends in ways that humans and other Earth Alliance lawyers could only emulate.

So, the idea that a group of Peyti lawyers had turned on the Moon simply seemed like a tasteless joke.

For a few minutes, Zagrando had scrolled through the mountains of data he had received from that download, thinking perhaps something had gone awry, that he had downloaded a bunch of particularly nasty satires instead of actual news reports.

When he finally realized that he was watching actual news reports, he got up and paced the small room. His brain couldn’t handle the idea that the Peyti would turn against the Alliance like that.

However, it had taken a while for him to get all of the facts, and the one fact that was distributed in the days following the event that no one seemed to think worth mentioning in the more recent updates was that the Peyti lawyers were all clones of a Peyti mass murderer named Uzvekmt.

That detail made Zagrando sit back down again.

In fact, it made him shut off the reports while he thought about them.

More clones. Another mass murderer.

Slow-grow clones, too, which meant that this plan—whatever it was—had been brewing for years.

Like Zagrando’s seemingly aimless wanderings in the three years since he went deep undercover for the Earth Alliance.

After a fast-grow clone of him had been murdered right before his very eyes.

None of this could be coincidental. None of it.

Including his search for the Frémont clones, who had been impossible to find. Even the criminals he had met with on Jan hadn’t said they had access to slow-grow Frémont clones. They had implied that they could get clones trainable for homicide before his partner, the operative he had left behind, had focused their attention on designer criminal clones specializing in thievery instead.

Zagrando’s handler had gotten his answer, and then had decided that Zagrando was useless to him.

And the panic that Jarvis showed once Zagrando resigned told Zagrando that he had a lot of information that could lead to whoever the people behind these attacks were.

In no way did Zagrando believe that Jarvis was a mastermind of something this big. The man was venal and cruel, and not nearly as smart as he thought he was.

Jarvis wasn’t a long-term planner so much as a reactor, someone who followed circumstances rather than trying to direct them.

The more Zagrando had reviewed his past three years, the more he realized just how much of a pawn he had been—a pawn in some kind of shadow game he hadn’t known he was playing.

When he got inside Earth’s solar system, he would contact Flint. He needed Flint’s help to get into the Port of Armstrong. Zagrando firmly believed that someone—probably Jarvis—would have flagged the space yacht or put Zagrando’s description into law enforcement networks in the space ports all over the Alliance.

Only now, with the so-called Peyti Crisis, Zagrando wasn’t sure that Miles Flint still lived. For all Zagrando knew, Flint had been collateral damage in those attacks.

Zagrando had no way to double-check that information. He could search the current download, but he wasn’t sure anyone had the names of all the dead.

He didn’t dare execute another information download. He kept the yacht in its masking mode and didn’t ping any nearby systems. He had worried about the two downloads he had done—one outside the Alliance and the other inside—but felt he couldn’t do without them.

Still, they made him feel traceable.

Zagrando had to think that Jarvis and the people he was working for were searching for him and doing everything they could to find him.

Because he was a threat to their organization. If he weren’t, they would have given him another assignment after Jan and sent him on his way.

Instead, they had tried to kill him.

They would try again.

He needed Flint, but if he couldn’t get Flint’s help, he would need to find someone else who could help him enter the Port of Armstrong without calling too much attention to himself or his ship.

He needed to search his memory and the databases he had for the name of the lawyer who had helped out Flint and his daughter. Because that lawyer had been from the Moon as well, and she might be able to smooth Zagrando’s way through the port.

Or not. She was a lawyer, after all. And he wasn’t sure how a lawyer would be willing to bend the law to let a man who no longer existed onto the Moon, particularly after the two disasters the Moon had experienced just this year.

He could only hope that Flint had survived, and that Flint would be willing to help him.

Zagrando could only hope that this trip wouldn’t be in vain.

THIRTY-SEVEN

THREE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS
later, Pippa Landau packed. At first, she packed every single fancy outfit she had—dresses, shoes, slack and blouse combinations. Then she unpacked them and grabbed utilitarian clothes—black pants, comfortable sweaters.

Finally she closed the suitcases and collapsed on the hardwood floor of her bedroom, exhausted and alone.

If only her husband were still alive. She would sit across their kitchen table from him and say,
Ray, I’m in a hell of a mess
.

He’d smile at her and reach out his big, callused hand.
Pips, you’re never a mess
.

What would he have done if he had known that she had lied to him every day of their lives together? What would he have said?

I love you anyway, Pips
.

Or…

I asked for one thing and one thing only, Pips—Takara—whoever you are. I asked you to always tell me the truth. And you
never
have. Ever.

She leaned against the bed. Their bed. The bed she hadn’t been able to bear replacing for ten long years.

Maybe it was good that Ray was dead. She wouldn’t have that conversation.

She had decided not to have that conversation with her children, either. Twice, she had nearly pinged Takumi’s links. If she told anyone, it would be him. He was the executor of her estate, her firstborn, the one she trusted the most.

He would have kept her secret if she asked. He would have never told his siblings. He would have defended her to the death.

After he assimilated the news.

Because Takumi was like his father. Volatile and loving, quick to anger and just as quick to forgive. Brilliant and strong and reliable.

Pippa drew her knees to her chest.

When she had Disappeared so long ago, the Disappearance service warned her that returning to her old identity would—at best—ruin her life. At worst, it would result in her death.

But it would also have all kinds of impacts on the money she earned, the things she owned, the relationships she had. The final identity she received—and she went through six under the service’s aegis—was legal, at least in the Alliance.

Her marriage was valid, her property ownership valid, her will valid.

Unless she admitted that she had once been someone else. Then everything could be challenged. Depending on the laws of the place she ended up, she might lose everything.

Or her children might.

Or they might be subjected to the justice she had escaped.

She sighed and picked at the throw rug, which had bunched up near the foot of the bed.

Only she hadn’t escaped justice. She hadn’t run afoul of any aliens. She hadn’t committed a crime against another species.

She had been the sole survivor of a horrific experience. She had been chased by a ship filled with people who wanted her dead, and she had managed to kill them.

But it had taken time—and they might have had a chance to warn someone that she had escaped.

From that moment on, she had proceeded as if her life were in danger. The Disappearance agent she had contacted had told her that was a good thing—that the only people who had long lives had the kind of caution she had exhibited.

The Disappearance service had recommended the full Disappear—and they had no incentive to do so, since she had no money at all. She had gone in as a poor client, hoping to get a grant.

She hadn’t gotten it.

Instead, she’d had to spend the first five years of her Disappearance working for the service. Terrifying Indentured Servitude, one of her colleagues called it.

Indentured Servitude, because she had to work off every bit of her fee, mostly in helping other Disappeareds get to ships or get a hotel room or find a job.

Terrifying, because if she had failed in any way, she would have been sent back to the Frontier, her name restored, and maybe—just maybe—she would have died there. Because maybe, just maybe, if she had screwed up badly or committed more crimes or harmed one of the other newly Disappeared, the Disappearance service might have let her presence in the Frontier be known.

That had never been stated, but the threat had been implied. And she had felt it every day of that five-year period, always feeling like she was being judged and always worrying she was coming in short.

Afterwards, she had fled as far from the Frontier as she could go. Earth, where Disappeareds rarely ended up. Earth, with its strict laws and its ancient history.

When she was pregnant with Takumi, she had gone to a lawyer in Chicago and hired him for one hour’s worth of advice. She had paid him in cash, and she had never told him her name.

She had met him outside of his office, so that nothing inside his office could identify her. She had colored her hair, changed her eye color, and used a short-term vanity enhancement to darken her skin. She wore lifts inside her shoes, and clothing so unlike what she usually wore that her friends wouldn’t have recognized her—
Raymond
wouldn’t have recognized her.

She had told the lawyer she was a long-time Disappeared, just starting a family, and she wanted to know—she
needed
to know—if her deception were discovered, what would happen to her husband and her child?

The lawyer had quizzed her, asking all sorts of questions about the set-up of her new identity. Finally, he concluded that her children would be subject to nothing—no untoward laws—nothing. Her husband would probably be fine as well, because as far as the lawyer could tell, she had broken no Alliance laws.

But he was uncertain about the status of her estate. Not that she would lose the money in it, but whether or not anything she did under the Disappeared identity would matter if her deception were uncovered.

And he used the word
deception
, which made her shudder.