A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (18 page)

“I’m going to show you the raw footage,” she said, “because the commentary is—well—let’s say it’s ignorant.”

Gomez leaned over the chair, gripping the hot mug of tea. It smelled faintly of perfume. Not Earl Grey, which she found too strong, but less pungent Lady Grey, which usually soothed her. She hoped that she wouldn’t come to associate her favorite tea with this moment.

She concentrated, so that the smell wouldn’t become linked.

Suddenly security footage appeared on the floor. The security footage was less condensed than the overview, easier to manipulate. She immediately recognized Armstrong’s port. She’d arrived at it dozens of times. Armstrong’s port, judging by the footage, hadn’t updated its interior in nearly twenty years.

But she stopped looking at the structure of the port. Armstrong hadn’t been bombed—at least on what they were calling Anniversary Day.

She frowned, not sure what she should be looking at. All she saw was a group of passengers leaving the arrivals area and laughing as they made their way into the wider crowds. She started scanning the crowds, and then stopped, gasped, and nearly dropped her tea.

“Go back and zoom in,” she said.

Simiaar did.

The twenty faces—laughing faces—seemed so innocent. A group of family men, traveling together, cousins maybe, who looked a lot alike.

At least to the casual eye.

But Gomez’s eye wasn’t casual, and neither was Simiaar’s. They’d seen these faces before, these
exact
faces.

The men, walking through Armstrong’s ports, were clones.

“So what’s the ignorance?” Gomez asked, not because she wanted to know so much as she wanted to think. She needed a moment to get rid of the spinning sensation the last hour or so had started within her.

“The stupid announcers all seem to believe that because these men are clones of PierLuigi Frémont, they’re automatically mass murderers.”

Gomez looked directly at Simiaar. Simiaar was staring at the tiny three-dimensional forms in front of her.

“But they
are
mass murderers,” Gomez said. “They’re the ones who bombed all the domes, right?”

“Yeah,” Simiaar said. “But not because they’re made from the same stuff as PierLuigi Frémont. They bombed the domes because they were
designed
for it. You know that.
We
know that.”

Gomez did know it. She took a deep breath, remembering those faces—that whole incident. It had been—what?—fifteen, maybe sixteen years ago when the
Stanley
was called to Epriccom because of a problem that the Eaufasse couldn’t handle.

“You mean to tell me that no one has any idea that someone cloned PierLuigi Frémont?” she asked.

Simiaar looked at the frozen image. She sighed. “Who knows what the press has been told and what the governments actually know.”

Gomez recognized that tone. “You have a guess.”

“Yeah,” Simiaar said. “My guess is that someone wrote up the Epriccom incident, it got filed, and no one even noticed the link to Frémont. Or knows it now.”

“What about Thirds?” Gomez asked.

“I don’t know,” Simiaar said. “We handed him to the lawyers, remember.”

Gomez did remember, but that wasn’t what she was asking. Thirds was supposed to talk with authorities about everything he knew. Then they would decide what to do with him.

“Did you look up Thirds?” Gomez asked Simiaar.

“I don’t research well,” Simiaar said. It was a bold-faced lie. She researched brilliantly, but only for cases that she had in front of her.

“You want me to do this,” Gomez asked.

Simiaar grabbed a lemon cookie off the tray. She broke the cookie in half before taking a bite from it.

Simiaar clearly wasn’t going to say a thing. Gomez didn’t like that.

“So,” Gomez said, “we just assume that the Alliance has known about the clones of PierLuigi Frémont for more than a decade and has chosen to ignore it, even now after some of those clones bombed the entire Moon. We’ll just let the Alliance handle it.”

“Dammit, Judita,” Simiaar said around a mouthful of cookie. “You know no one in the Alliance has put Epriccom and the Moon bombings together.”

“I don’t know anything.” Gomez glanced at those faces. Laughing. Apparently they arrived together. Why would that happen? It would make the attack obvious.

“You’re curious,” Simiaar said.

Gomez glanced at her. The cookie was gone.

“Yeah,” Gomez said. “I am. And that doesn’t surprise you.”

Because they knew each other so well. They had become the best of friends partly because they both reacted the same way to something disturbing. They wanted to know why that something happened and how to resolve it.

But they also trusted that they were the first responders to some problem outside of the Alliance. They had to believe—they
had
to—that the Alliance would then take the information they had provided, and make sure everything would work out.

Gomez closed her eyes and leaned on that chair. Her legs were tired from standing in the same position for so long, but she didn’t want to settle.

She didn’t dare.

If she didn’t find out how the information about the PierLuigi Frémont clones failed to get to the right people in the Alliance, then she would never trust the Alliance again.

TWENTY-ONE

THEY STARED AT him, everyone in the recreation yard of the prison. Only it wasn’t a yard—not in the sense that he had known as a child. The prison was a space station, not planetside. He hadn’t seen anything growing outside of the greenhouses in nearly fifteen years.

Trey wanted something to cover his face, a hood, a scarf, something to shield him. But of course, he had nothing here. So he kept his expression impassive. He stared at the holographic images playing out in the center of the recreation yard as if they had nothing to do with him.

And technically, they did have nothing to do with him.

He’d been in this prison longer than anyone else in the yard—almost half his life. He knew the system; he had been king of the cell block since he was twenty years old. He was thirty-one now, trapped here, forgotten.

But now the other inmates—all male, all human—stared at him, as if he had caused the explosions on Earth’s Moon. Twelve explosions or more, hundreds of thousands dead, and the people who had committed the crimes, the men who had committed the crimes, the
clones
who had committed the crimes, all had his face.

Because, like them, he had been created from DNA provided by PierLuigi Frémont.

He wasn’t the only one here who was a clone of PierLuigi Frémont, but he was the only one who was of an age with the Anniversary Day attackers, and he was the only one in this cell block.

And for the first time in a long time, the fact that he was the only one made him afraid.

The prison had been on edge since word of the bombings trickled in a month before. But the imagery didn’t show up until two days ago, and even then it had only been of explosions. Those caused cheers throughout the block, but the new images, the ones that started running today, were the ones that unnerved him.

Because those images showing the faces of the bombers as they passed through the port on the Moon’s largest city felt like something else.

Something new. Something that shoved the emotions building for the past month off that edge.

Those images finally gave the inmates something to do.

Trey realized that maybe a half second before they did. He managed to shout, “Lawyer!” just before the nearest inmate shoved Trey so hard that he stumbled backwards into two other inmates.

They pulled his arms back and held him tightly as the first inmate, his friends, and men who had wanted Trey dead—or at least, no longer in control—for a long time, punched that pretty face of his. Or what they used to call his pretty face.

His unusual face. Pale-skinned, blue-eyed. Rare and memorable, just like his progenitor, PierLuigi Frémont. Only Frémont had founded colonies with that face, claimed a special relationship with the people who followed him because of his unusual coloring, claimed he had descended as a pure example of the first men who left the Earth.

Trey wasn’t pure and he technically hadn’t descended from anyone. He hadn’t even realized that there were people who looked different from him until he was sixteen years old. He hadn’t even met a woman until that year, not that it had done him any good. The women he had met since had either run the prison or were upper-level guards.

His entire life was about being locked up somewhere—at first in a place he considered the entire world, which was just a small domed community, and then in ships, and finally here, the one place he’d believed he had conquered.

Until right now.

Fists in his face, knuckles against his skin. His nose shattered. His teeth bit through his cheeks. Blood filled his mouth. Someone punched him in the stomach, knocking whatever air he had left in his lungs out.

He gagged, then choked.

All of this happened in a kind of silence—the men didn’t scream at him. They just hit him, the only sound flesh against flesh. Or the shattering of bones.

Something should have broken this fight up right away. There were androids on the yard, equipment that sensed a fight and stopped it.

The beating continued, not because the equipment failed, but because someone wanted it to continue.

And then the hold on his arms ceased. He toppled to his knees. Somehow he managed to put out his hands before he fell on his face.

He coughed up blood, spit blood, tried to wipe at his nose but nearly fell over, his balance gone. A door slammed, then another.

His eyes had swollen shut. He had to breathe through his mouth. He couldn’t have asked for help if he tried.

Hands grabbed him and he flinched.

“Don’t fight me, laddie,” said a soft voice, a male voice, a vaguely familiar voice. It took him a moment to realize he heard the voice of the prison’s doctor, someone he had barely interacted with, someone who had warned him once that the violence he had used to survive would swing back on him one day.

That day was now, apparently.

“You let me take you to the infirmary. We’ll put a guard on you. A real one this time, not that you deserve it. You knew about those foul doings?”

Of course he hadn’t known anything about the attack on the Moon. Because that was what the doctor was asking about, wasn’t it? Hadn’t the doctor thought this through?

Trey had been locked up here. He had had no visitors, he hadn’t contacted anyone, not that there had been anyone to contact. Everyone he had known (everyone he had loved) was dead. No one even knew he was alive.

But he couldn’t say that. He couldn’t say anything from that injured mouth of his.

They had tested him after he arrived, found an intelligence so high they couldn’t comfortably measure it. They figured he’d been artificially enhanced, but in his reading, he’d learned that PierLuigi Frémont had been unusually mentally gifted, apparently something encoded in his DNA.

Or so Trey had liked to believe.

Not that he had told anyone that, either. He hadn’t wanted to call attention to his manufacture, or the fact that he had come from the DNA of a man who had murdered millions.

But that man, that DNA, had given Trey a prodigious brain, and Trey had trained that brain to anticipate things. (Not that he had foreseen this beating. How could he have known?)

He knew now that he would go from king of the cell block to the biggest pariah.

Everyone would try to hurt him, except maybe the damn doctor, who seemed to believe there was something redeemable in everyone.

Trey wasn’t sure there was anything redeemable about himself. But he wanted to live, and that might not be possible here.

Unless he proved himself worthy of survival.

He couldn’t just claim that he was innocent.

No one believed in innocence here.

He had to claim that he knew something. And maybe, deep down, he did. That shout for a lawyer might be what would save his life.

He let the doctor drag him out of the yard and into an enclosed plastic gurney with its own lock, its own air, and its own security shield. He would probably live in that damn thing until the lawyer arrived.

But that was okay. Because he would live.

Moment to moment, day to day, he would live.

And maybe, just maybe, they would move him from here. And maybe, just maybe, those damn prisoners had screwed up his face enough that no one else would gaze on him and see the Moon murderers.

Or PierLuigi Frémont.

Maybe, just maybe, this moment was the second luckiest moment of his life.

Maybe this moment would actually set him free.

TWENTY-TWO