Starbase Human (8 page)

Koos nodded, as if Deshin’s praise embarrassed him. Then he left the office.

Deshin watched him go. As soon as he was gone, Deshin contacted Gerda on their private links.

Koos might have increased security, but Deshin wanted to make sure everything was all right.

He used to say that families were a weakness, and he never wanted one. Then he met Gerda, and they brought Paavo into their lives.

He realized that families
were
a weakness, but they were strength as well.

And he was going to make sure his was safe, no matter what it took.

ELEVEN

IT HAD TAKEN
more work than Brodeur expected to get the body back to the coroner’s office. Just to get the stupid crate out of the warehouse, he’d had to sign documentation swearing he wouldn’t use it to make money at the expense of Ansel Management.

“Company policy,” Najib Ansel had said with an insincere smile.

If Brodeur hadn’t known better, he would have thought that Ansel was just trying to make things difficult for him.

But things had become difficult for Brodeur when DeRicci’s partner, Rayvon Lake, arrived. Lake had been as angry as Brodeur had ever seen him, claiming that DeRicci—who was apparently a junior officer to Lake—had been giving him orders.

Lake had shouted at everyone, except Brodeur. Brodeur had fended off a shouting match by holding up his hands and saying, “I’m not sure what killed this girl, but I don’t like it. It might contaminate everything. We have to get her out of here, now.”

Lake, who was a notorious germophobe (which Brodeur found strange in a detective), had gulped and stepped back. Brodeur had gotten the crate to the warehouse door before Ansel had come after him with all the documentation crap.

Maybe Ansel had done it just so that he wouldn’t have to talk with Lake. Brodeur would have done anything to avoid Lake—and apparently just had.

Brodeur smiled to himself, relieved to be back at the coroner’s office.
Office
was a misnomer—the coroners had their own building, divided into sections to deal with the various kinds of death that happened in Armstrong.

Brodeur had finally left the alien section after two years of trying. He’d tested out, rather than relying on a supervisor’s recommendation. If he’d waited for that, he might never have left.

He hated working in an environmental suit, like he’d so often had to. Weirdly (he always thought), humans started in the alien section and had to get a promotion to work on human cadavers. Probably because no one really wanted to see the interior of a Sequev more than once. No human did, anyway.

There were more than a dozen alien coroners, most of whom worked with human supervisors since many alien cultures did not investigate cause of death. Armstrong was a human-run society on a human-run Moon, so human laws applied here, and human laws always needed a cause of death.

Which often caused all kinds of problems with cultures that had differing views of death—particularly the Disty, who controlled Mars.

Brodeur never wanted to work a Disty Vengeance Killing ever again, and not because of the gruesome way that the Disty spread out the entrails. It was because the Disty seemed to go a little crazy around corpses, in a way he didn’t ever want to deal with again.

A nice human body, served up on its own bed of lettuce, was just about perfect.

He smiled to himself at that thought. He couldn’t make jokes like that to anyone. Everyone—including his colleagues—thought his sense of humor was inappropriate.

Even his friends shied away from his comments most of the time. And women—he was considered a player in the department because he dated so many, but that wasn’t because he was a love-’em-and-leave-’em kinda guy. It was because around date three he’d relax and make a joke, and he’d get one of those what-the-hell? looks. Too many humorous comments and he wouldn’t be able to reach the woman on her links.

So he’d try again.

Even with his reputation, he’d never dated a woman as beautiful as Sonja Mycenae. He had placed her on the autopsy table, carefully positioning her before beginning work, and he’d been startled at how well proportioned she was.

Most people had obvious flaws, at least when a coroner was looking at them. One arm a little too long, a roll of fat under the chin, a misshapen ankle.

He hadn’t removed her clothing yet, but as far as he could tell from the work he’d done with her already, nothing was unusual.

Which made her unusual all by herself.

He also couldn’t see any obvious cause of death. He had noted, however, that full rigor mortis had already set in. Which was odd, since the decomposition, according to the exam his nanobots had already started, seemed to have progressed at a rate that put her death at least five hours earlier.

By now, under the conditions she’d been stored in, she should have still been pliable—at least her limbs. Rigor began in the eyes, jaw, and neck, then spread to the face and through the chest before getting to the limbs. The fingers and toes were always the last to stiffen up.

That made him suspicious, particularly since livor mortis also seemed off.

He would have thought, given how long she had been curled inside that crate, that the blood would have pooled in the side of her body resting on top of the compost heap. But no blood had pooled at all.

He decided to have bots move the autopsy table into one of the more advanced autopsy theaters. He wanted every single device he could find to do the work.

He suspected she’d been killed with some kind of hardening poison. They had become truly popular with assassins in the last two decades, and had just recently been banned from the Moon. Hardening poisons killed quickly by absorbing all the liquid in the body and/or by baking it into place.

It was a quick death, but a painful one, and usually the victim’s muscles froze in place, so she couldn’t even express that pain as it occurred.

He’d have to put on a high-grade environmental suit in an excess of caution. Some of the hardening poisons leaked out of the pores and then infected anyone who touched them.

What he had to determine was if Sonja Mycenae had died of one of those, and if her body had been placed in a waste crate not just to hide the corpse, but to infect the food supply in Armstrong.

Because the Growing Pits inspections looked at the growing materials—the soil, the water, the light, the atmosphere, and the seeds. The inspectors would also look at the fertilizer, but if it came from a certified organization like Ansel Management, then there would only be a cursory search of materials.

Hardening poisons could thread their way into the DNA of a plant—just a little bit, so that, say, an apple wouldn’t be quite as juicy. A little hardening poison wouldn’t really hurt the fruit of a tree (although that tree might eventually die of what a botanist would consider a wasting disease), but a trace of hardening poison in the human system would have an impact over time. And if the human continued to eat things with hardening poisons in them, the poisons would build up until the body couldn’t take it anymore.

A person poisoned in that way wouldn’t die like Sonja Mycenae had; instead, the poison would overwhelm the standard nanohealers that everyone had, that person would get sick, and organs would slowly fail. Armstrong would have a plague but not necessarily know what caused it.

He double-checked his gloves, worried that he’d touched her at all. Then he let out a breath. Yes, he knew he was being paranoid. But he thought about these things a lot—the kinds of death that could happen with just a bit of carelessness, like sickness in a dome, poison through the food supply, the wrong mix in the air supply.

He had moved from working with living humans to working with the dead primarily because his imagination was so vivid. Usually working with the dead calmed him. The regular march of unremarkable deaths reminded him that most people would die of natural causes after 150 or more years, maybe longer if they took good care of themselves.

Working with the dead usually gave him hope.

But Sonja Mycenae was making him nervous.

And he didn’t like that at all.

TWELVE

DESHIN HAD JUST
finished talking with Gerda when Koos sent him an encoded message:

Need to talk as soon as you can
.

Now’s fine
, Deshin sent.

He moved away from the windows, where he’d been standing as he made sure Gerda was okay. The Dome Daylight seemed to reveal everything and nothing. He looked at the light on the buildings, wondering what was actually going on in the city.

At least Gerda had sounded happy, which she hadn’t since Paavo moved in.

She said she no longer felt like her every move was being judged.

She said that Paavo seemed happier too. He wasn’t crying as much, and he didn’t cling as hard to Gerda. Instead, he played with a mobile from his bouncy chair and watched her cook, cooing most of the time.

Just that one report made Deshin feel like he had made the right choice with Sonja.

Not that he had had a doubt—at least about her—after her reaction that morning. But apparently a tiny doubt had lingered about whether or not he and Gerda needed the help of a nanny.

Gerda’s report on Paavo’s calmness eased that. Deshin knew they would have hard times ahead—he wasn’t deluding himself—but he also knew that they had made the right choice to go nanny-free.

He hadn’t told Gerda what happened to Sonja, and he wouldn’t until he knew more. He didn’t want to spoil Gerda’s day.

The door to Deshin’s office opened, and Koos entered, looking upset. “Upset” was actually the wrong word. Something about Koos made Deshin think the man was afraid.

Then Deshin shook that thought off; he’d seen Koos in extremely dangerous circumstances and the man had never seemed afraid.

“I did what you asked,” Koos said without preamble. “I started vetting her all over again.”

Deshin leaned against the desk, just like he had done when he spoke to Sonja. “And?”

“Her employers on Earth are still filing updates about her exemplary work for them.”

Deshin felt a chill. “Tell me that they were just behind in their reports.”

Koos shook his head. “She’s still working for them.”

“How is that possible?” Deshin asked. “We vetted her. We even used a DNA sample to make sure her DNA was the same as the DNA on file with the service. And we collected it ourselves.”

Koos swallowed. “We used the service’s matching program.”

“Of course we did,” Deshin said. “They were the ones with the DNA on file.”

“We could have requested their file sample, and then run it ourselves.”

That chill Deshin had felt became a full-fledged shiver. “What’s the difference?”

“Depth,” Koos said. “They don’t go into the same kind of depth we would go into in our search. They just look at standard markers, which is really all most people would need to confirm identity.”

His phrasing made Deshin uncomfortable. “She’s not who she said she was?”

Koos let out a small sigh. “It’s more complicated than that.”

More complicated. Deshin shifted. He could only think of one thing that would be more complicated.

Sonja was a clone.

And that created all kinds of other issues.

But first, he had to confirm his suspicion.

“You checked for clone marks, right?” Deshin asked. “I know you did. We always do.”

The Earth Alliance required human clones to have a mark on the back of their neck or behind their ear that gave their number. If they were the second clone from an original, the number would be “2.”

Clones also did not have birth certificates. They had day of creation documents. Deshin had a strict policy for Deshin Enterprises: every person he hired had to have a birth certificate or a document showing that they, as a clone, had been legally adopted by an original human and therefore could be considered human under the law.

When it came to human clones, Earth Alliance and Armstrong laws were the same: clones were property. They were created and owned by their creator. They could be bought or sold, and they had no rights of their own. The law did not distinguish between slow-grow clones, which were raised like any naturally born human child, and fast-grow clones, which reached full adult size in days, but never had a full-grown human intelligence.

The laws were an injustice, but only clones seemed to protest it, and they, as property, had no real standing.

Koos’s lips thinned. He didn’t answer right away.

Deshin cursed. He hated having clones in his business and didn’t own any, even though he could take advantage of the loopholes in the law.

Clones made identity theft too easy, and made an organization vulnerable.

Deshin always made certain his organization remained protected.

Or he had, until now.

“We did check like we do with all new hires.” Koos’s voice was strangled. “And we also checked her birth certificate. It was all in order.”