A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (17 page)

The Earth Alliance legal system was deeply flawed. The laws were primarily local—if a human broke a law on some alien planet, even if that law made something like singing completely illegal, that human would be subject to the legal system of the native culture. And by human standards, those laws were often barbaric.

The disappearance systems had arisen so that humans could escape the reach of non-human justice, and so many corporations encouraged just that kind of behavior. There was an entire division in this law firm dedicated to Disappearance Theory and Practice, trying to find legal loopholes that would enable human corporations to operate their own disappearance services. Right now, most of them operated illegally, paying disappearance services under the table to squire away employees who ran afoul with local laws.

As a young lawyer, he’d thought defending those people fun and worthwhile. Until he saw how many people actually went off to alien justice systems and how most of those people were simply too poor to pay for a disappearance service.

Worse, how many of them had to send their children to serve time for their crimes, because aliens like the Wygnin believed that punishment for crimes went through entire generations.

Zhu tilted his head back. He would search for the right pro bono case. He didn’t need more frustration at the moment, which ruled out the Impossibles. Most cases brought before a judge there were decided long before the attorneys made their pleas.

No, he’d take a case he could actually win.

Something that would make a difference.

He just didn’t know what that was.

TWENTY

GOMEZ AND SIMIAAR went to the forensic lab on the
Stanley
only because Simiaar insisted. Gomez still considered the lab the most important part of the large ship. When the
Stanley
had been retrofitted ten years before, she’d demanded that the lab increase in size and that Simiaar get more staff. The lab was one reason that Simiaar stayed on the
Stanley
, even though there were nicer berths for a woman of her age and experience.

Simiaar had two offices—a small one that no one entered, no exceptions, and a larger one where she held small meetings. That office had two extremely comfortable chairs that could re-form into one uncomfortable couch, a built-in desk with an elaborate computer system, and a small testing area.

It also had a rectangular space that Simiaar set aside for holoviewing, mostly because she hated having imagery superimposed on her existing furniture. Since most of what she viewed concerned dead bodies and/or some kind of alien goo, no one really blamed her for being unwilling to watch that on her desk.

Simiaar indicated the chairs. “You can sit if you want, but I’m going to stand.”

Gomez had heard that before, and it never boded well. “What am I watching? A new case?”

“No.” Simiaar put her hands on the back of the overstuffed chair. Her fingers dug into the fabric. “While you guys were onsite, negotiating your sex deal—”

“It’s not a sex deal,” Gomez said.

“I don’t know what else you’d call it,” Simiaar said.

“An apology,” Gomez said, “and I don’t want to hear you call it anything else.”

“I’d love to have someone apologize to me like that someday,” Simiaar muttered.

Gomez resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She’d already had this discussion with Simiaar. They’d talked about the impropriety, the level of coercion involved, the discomfort and the religious side, and still Simiaar joked about it.

Of course, both she and Simiaar had learned over the years that sometimes an inappropriate joke was the only way to deal with a difficult situation. Usually they joked together.

“You wouldn’t find this one funny if it were you,” Gomez said, simply because she couldn’t keep quiet.

“If it were me, I wouldn’t have camped on that godforsaken lake in the first place.” Simiaar raised a hand to stop Gomez from speaking, as if she knew that Gomez was going to say she missed the point. “If I
had
been stupid enough to come this far out to camp on some stupid lake that looks like one of a hundred-thousand lakes on Earth, except for the dueling sunsets, I would have apologized the minute I realized I screwed up. Don’t these people know what can happen when you cross another culture?”

That was a question Gomez asked herself almost every day. With all of the troubles constantly in the news about people charged with crimes in the Earth Alliance for doing things in alien cultures that were everyday human activities in human-centered cities, she would have thought that sane people would be careful when they traveled to a non-human environment.

But most humans never researched where they were traveling to, expecting someone—maybe someone like Gomez—to take care of them. They were always shocked when she informed them that, legally, she was obligated to abide by local laws and customs, just like she would be inside of the Alliance.

Maybe more than she would be inside of the Alliance, since no treaties governed the interactions humans had with others outside of Alliance space.

Gomez didn’t want to think about this anymore. She actually wanted to plan some time off. But she wouldn’t get that until she was done with whatever Simiaar wanted her to see.

“What are we going to watch?” Gomez asked.

Simiaar sighed.

Gomez then realized that Simiaar had instigated the old argument about the Ceanese situation because what they were about to watch made her extremely uncomfortable.

Simiaar glanced at the rectangular space, even though nothing was happening in it.

“While you guys were dealing with the apology, I decided to catch up on the news. I hadn’t paid any attention to what’s been going on in the Alliance for nearly two months now—”

“Me, either,” Gomez said, not liking where this was heading.

“—and I selected for human stuff only, the biggest stories, just so that I could—you know—converse about current events when we got back into Alliance space.”

Simiaar’s fingers were still digging into the top of that chair.

“We missed…” her voice trailed off. She raised her head, her eyes red-rimmed. In all their years together, Gomez couldn’t remember seeing that before. “We nearly lost the Moon, Judita.”

Gomez didn’t understand. What moon? When? How could someone lose a moon? “What do you mean, nearly lost the moon?”

“I’m not staying for this part,” Simiaar said. “I’ll get us something to drink. You want tea or something? If it weren’t for the damn apology, I’d offer you something stronger.”

“What part?” Gomez asked.

“I found an overview. It compressed a few days of information into an hour. I’ll be back.”

She toggled the program on, then left the office before Gomez could complain.

A flat, gender-neutral voice recited the facts of something everyone was now calling Anniversary Day, which confused Gomez enough right there. She knew about Anniversary Day because she had family on the Moon. Anniversary Day commemorated the deaths in a bombing in Armstrong four years ago that could have destroyed the entire city, but didn’t.

It took her a few moments to reconcile the images that she saw with what happened. And that whatever happened had happened recently, not four years ago.

The voice narrated as the images bled from one scene of destruction to another. Apparently someone or someone
s
hijacked this year’s anniversary commemorations. Out of nineteen major domed cities on the Moon—Earth’s Moon,
the
Moon to most human-centered societies—out of those nineteen domes, twelve had holes blown through them.

The destruction when a dome blew open was extreme. Buildings fell apart, people died horribly—and that was only in the outer areas. Nearer to the bombs themselves, actual craters appeared. The destruction was the worst that Gomez had ever seen.

She leaned into the chair, glad that Simiaar had warned her not to sit down. Gomez wanted to pace, but she also didn’t want to take her eyes off the imagery playing out on the floor in front of her. Bombings, destroyed cityscapes, blackened and broken domes, people lurching through rubble searching for loved ones—devastation on a scale she couldn’t quite comprehend, on a scale she couldn’t entirely ignore.

She couldn’t recognize most of the places involved, although she’d visited several of them. And even though everything happened weeks ago, she felt panic rise within her.

Surely someone would have contacted her if she lost family. Surely she would have known by now.

But she didn’t know. She checked her links as she watched, and found nothing.

That wasn’t unusual. Sometimes it took forever for information to reach the Frontier.

Her mouth was dry. She wanted to look up her family, but she also wanted detail, and this overview was not about detail.

Instead, it gave her statistics.

Hundreds of thousands—maybe a million—people died that day. More would have died if it weren’t for the quick thinking of the Moon’s chief of security, Noelle DeRicci. She had ordered the domes to be sectioned, limiting the damage to the areas where bombs went off.

Among the hundreds of thousands dead were most of the influential mayors of those cities, and Celia Alfreda, the visionary leader who had been trying to unite the domes into a single government.

Important people and people whose names never would have registered on any news site. More people than anyone could count. Hundreds of thousands, the gender-neutral voice had said, maybe a million or more.

Maybe.

Because no one knew.

Sometimes in bombings, bodies evaporated. They became tiny pieces of blood and bone and brain matter, so small that it would take years of painstaking searches with nanobots to separate one drop of blood from another, to run the DNA, to identify the lost people.

Gomez leaned against the chair, hand to her mouth. She thought her job had trained her to accept bad news with relative calm, but this—this was nothing like anything she had ever faced.

Her family was in Armstrong, one of the only domes that wasn’t attacked. Apparently the bombing there got thwarted; something—she didn’t quite process how it all happened—interfered, got solved, got noticed.

Too much information, too much
shocking
information for her to understand all of it.

She wasn’t sure she moved a muscle through the whole summary. And as it wound down, she realized that what she saw only covered the first three days of the disaster.

The overview ended. It had been compiled a month before, a week after the disaster—or the disasters.

The imagery froze on the remains of the Top of the Dome, a restaurant/hotel complex in Tycho Crater, a place she had actually visited on vacation the last time she had gone to the Moon—which had to be maybe twenty-five years ago now.

She leaned against the chair—wishing,
hoping
that this was all an elaborate ruse. But she’d been watching closely. She had seen familiar faces among the people interviewed, people she knew by name if not reputation, and she knew, she
knew
, it wasn’t faked.

Still, she would double-check. Mostly because she didn’t want to believe destruction on this scale was possible.

Not in a modern society. Not in the heart of the Earth Alliance, around 384,000 kilometers from the Earth herself. Earth’s doorstep, the Alliance called the Moon. So close that they were often considered inseparable.

Simiaar pulled the door open, balancing a tray precariously on one hand. Two steaming mugs slid one way and then another, stopping only when they encountered bowls of finger food.

Gomez wasn’t sure she could eat, but she’d known Simiaar long enough to understand that Simiaar thought food the solution to any serious problem.

“Need a break?” Simiaar asked.

Gomez needed to go back one hour and remain ignorant of the Anniversary Day bombings. Actually, she needed the entire universe to go back a month and stop the bombings before they happened.

“There’s more?” Gomez asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Simiaar said.

“They come back, do more damage? If so, why didn’t you just show me the complete footage and not let me—”

“It’s not that bad,” Simiaar said, then corrected herself. “Afterward anyway. It’s cleanup and stuff. But what I have to show you, it’s upsetting. To us.”

“To us,” Gomez repeated. “You and me?”

“Yeah.” Simiaar set the tray down on the built-in desk.

Gomez took her mug of tea, not because she wanted something to drink, but because she needed to warm her hands. They had grown cold.
She
had grown cold.

“Just show me.” She couldn’t handle the suspense. And she was usually the most patient person on the
Stanley
.

Simiaar shut off the imagery of the Top of the Dome. She flipped through several other stored images, things that she had clearly followed as she tried to piece together what occurred.