A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (24 page)

He found it bizarre, and he’d mentioned that to one of the other diners at the habitat’s main cafeteria. That diner, part of the prison’s administrative staff, had laughed at Zhu.

You didn’t know this was a clone facility?
The diner asked.
This is standard. You’d be surprised how many fake lawyers we get in places like this.

Finally, his clearance had come through. He boarded the VIP shuttle—made possible thanks to S
3
’s connections—and headed to the prison proper.

Like all Alliance prisons in this sector, it had the same design he’d seen dozens of times. A large starbase with layers and warrens and all sorts of security measures, from decontamination chambers to isolated areas. It also had six different recreation areas for the prisoners that were designed to look like someplace else—a planetside garden, a sports arena, whatever the guards decided to program. It also had smaller recreational areas, and an excellent library that was not networked anywhere outside of the base itself.

What surprised him was that the prison was divided in half. One side was for offenders. The other was for lifers.

He was heading to the “lifer” section, which he only discovered when he put in the saved links he had received when he responded to the request for an attorney.

To get into the “lifer” section, he had to have all of his links except his emergency link shut down. Then his hands were sealed in an Alliance-approved wrap, to prevent easy transport of small chips and other materials out of the prison itself. He’d suffered through that part of the procedure before.

What he hadn’t experienced before was a manual check of his links to make sure they were actually off. When that was over, he asked the guard who conducted the check who the lifer section housed.

The guard, a heavy-set older man, had looked at Zhu like he was crazy. “Illegals,” he said.

Zhu hadn’t understood. “As opposed to what?” he asked. They were all criminals. They had all done something illegal.

“Illegals, as opposed to criminals,” the guard said. “The criminals done something bad. The illegals
are
bad.”

The human side of the Alliance rejected that argument in the law. In fact, Zhu himself had prepared briefs for the Multicultural Tribunal that stated no non-human culture could consider a human bad
per se
, no matter what the non-human law required. The punishments would follow non-human law, but only humans got to define humans. And, by definition, humans were not born bad.

Then Zhu’s breath caught as he realized what he’d been thinking.
Clones
were not human under the law.

“Clones,” he breathed, “can be considered bad? Not defective?
Bad
by definition?”

“Yep,” the guard said. “And you’re about meet one. Feel like changing your mind now?”

“No,” Zhu said. Oddly, he felt more resolved. The deeper he got into this side of the Alliance legal code, the less he liked it. And the more intrigued he became.

No wonder Salehi believed there was a future in clone law. Zhu was beginning to see it.

It would be hard to fight for, though, because the clients weren’t human, but they weren’t alien either. They were property. Or they were illegal. They weren’t actual
beings
under the law.

At least as far as he could tell.

“Send me to him,” Zhu said. “I want to meet my client.”

“Good luck,” the guard said. “He’s not just bad, that one. He’s evil.”

Zhu frowned at the guard. “By whose definition?”

“The entire Alliance,” the guard said.

“The Alliance has ruled this clone is evil?”

“Hell, no,” the guard said. “It just showed what that creature’s DNA is capable of. Evil, pure and simple. You should leave now, attorney. That clone don’t need you.”

Zhu straightened his spine. “It seems to me that that clone needs me now more than he ever has.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

GOMEZ GATHERED THE trusted members of her team around her. Two deputies, Simiaar, and a single researcher. They all looked confused about the reason for the meeting.

She hadn’t told them, any more than she told them why she had opaqued the windows in the conference room of the
EAFS Stanley
and shut off the recording equipment. She also asked them to shut off all links except those they needed to monitor the ship. She monitored them silently, just to make sure that everyone had followed her request.

She didn’t want any record of this meeting.

She’d been feeling paranoid ever since she left Clone Hell. The research she had done on the trip back to the
Stanley
had exacerbated that feeling.

It had taken her half a day to make the journey because of the regulations around Clone Hell and the fact that the shuttle simply wasn’t built for speed.

She hadn’t cared. She spent the time reviewing the file she had written about the incident on Epriccom fifteen years ago. In that report, she had focused on the diplomatic side of the incident, on the Frontier issues, and on the Eaufasse. She had given everything else, including Thirds and the clones, relative short shrift.

She didn’t blame herself for that; she had been working on the Frontier after all, and her job was to stop problems, not analyze situations. But in several places in the report, she had highlighted that these clones needed to be investigated in some way. She had even flagged the report for extensive review. She had felt, even then, that something was off about the entire setup.

But the review hadn’t happened, and the report itself got buried in the mass of information filed about the Eaufasse as they continued to apply for acceptance in the Alliance. The report was excerpted, but not attached, to the files that accompanied the injured clones to the hospital. A full copy of the report went with Thirds on his journey into the system, but only because the damn Peyti translator had insisted that something had gone wrong with Thirds’ treatment on Epriccom.

Uzven’s complaint got attached to her report and sent with Thirds. As far as she could tell, that’s as far as the information ever got.

She was researching what she had done fifteen years before because her sessions with TwoZero had completely unnerved her. The information he had given her—if true—should have been a warning to the Alliance.

She had known that he was the second clone of something known as twenty, which she assumed was the twentieth clone of PierLuigi Frémont, but she didn’t know that for certain. He also told her that he knew a clone in that enclave named Sixteen of Two Hundred, a name that just scared her.

Two hundred was the highest second number that he could remember. He believed, but he wasn’t certain, that he was “of Twenty,” a fact that also unnerved her.

He had been in the enclave as long as he could remember. He also had been with a large group when he was very little, but that large group kept getting smaller and smaller over the years.

And he swore he had never seen anyone who looked different from him until he left Epriccom for good. The people who ran the enclave were much older, but their faces were familiar.

She had asked about his daily routine then, but he said it varied. He got vague on specifics on the way the enclave ran, and he claimed he couldn’t remember what had happened on his outing to kill Thirds. She wanted to pin TwoZero down on that, but she wasn’t certain how relevant it was.

Besides, she had learned enough to terrify her.

She had also learned enough to realize that he lacked a lot of crucial information.

He did not know where the clones had come from. He did not know who had created them. He hadn’t realized he was created until he was in the hospital, trying to survive his hideous wounds. He had not realized that there was life outside of the enclave.

He had learned Standard and a few other languages. He had had a solid education in the classics, mathematics, and some science. He had also been tutored on the finer points of etiquette. But he had not been taught where those habits would be used.

And of course, he had learned to use every weapon known to the Alliance, plus how to make weapons out of pretty much anything. He had also learned how to turn weapons on the person who was trying to use that weapon against him, which made her think of Thirds and the way he had attacked the twelve chasing him.

He had been trained to do that.

Every description was difficult and chilling, and she had tried very hard not to show the disgust on her face.

She wasn’t certain she had succeeded.

She had probably left before some trained Alliance interviewer would have, but she knew she could return to interview TwoZero any time. No one had spoken to him in more than a decade; she doubted anyone would talk to him until she returned.

Still, she asked the prison to notify her if anyone wanted to see him.

It greatly disturbed her that the Alliance hadn’t treated him according to standard procedure. Standard procedure in cases like his involved interviews and re-interviews. Plus, the Alliance should have searched for his originator.
Someone
had created these clones. They had clearly been illegal, even to the hospital staff.

Standard procedure was simple: Illegal clones got investigated, their originators found and punished. None of that had happened.

All of TwoZero’s information should have been investigated more than a decade before, and if it had been, she was beginning to believe that Anniversary Day might never have happened.

She couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had deliberately buried the files. Someone or some
thing
. She wasn’t entirely convinced it could all be blamed on carelessness, not with Uzven making such a fuss. She also couldn’t blame the purity of hindsight. She had seen warning signs in her meeting with Thirds, in that damn enclave, in the death of the three boys, and with the attack of the twelve.

She had simply trusted her colleagues to do their jobs as well as she tried to do hers.

By the time she had returned to the
Stanley
, she had a plan in place. The plan made her stomach twist. She had never done anything like it before, and she couldn’t do it alone.

Now, she faced the four people she had chosen to help her, and hoped she had chosen wisely.

She had asked them to return early from their off time, and they had all gotten back to the
Stanley
within the hour. Even though the ship only had a skeleton crew, she had darkened the conference area and shut off all access to it.

If anyone condemned her for making these plans, she would lie. She would say this meeting never took place.

The very idea of lying about this shook her. A few days ago, she had not been that kind of woman.

“You gonna tell us what this is about?” Simiaar asked. She sat at the head of the table, as if she had called the meeting. She was chewing on a long, hard strand of some kind of thin, pink, stick candy, something she tried to buy every time she had leave off the ship. Her diet was usually stringent—no sugar, no additives, as healthy as healthy could be on the Frontier—but she had a weakness for these things, and binged on them during her off time.

Apparently, she still considered herself off.

“Lashante,” Gomez said, using her most no-nonsense voice, “you’re the only one who remembers what happened on Epriccom. Can you tell the others?”

Simiaar narrowed her eyes at the tone, then broke the candy in half. She set most of it on the table in front of her, and sighed.

Gomez braced herself for Simiaar’s next question—why didn’t Gomez just assign the others the overall incident report, not the one she had written, but the official one that had gotten stored in the history of the Frontier network? Gomez had actually debated doing that, but she had decided she didn’t even want that much information available to the rest of the crew.

She was so focused on her answer to the hypothetical question that she almost missed Simiaar’s actual question. “How deep into detail do you want me to go?”

Gomez hadn’t expected Simiaar to acquiesce so easily.

“Just the high points,” Gomez said, “with this year’s surprise as your ending.”

Simiaar bit the end off the half-candy, crunching it loudly. Then she took a swig of water from the glass she had brought into the room and set the rest of the candy stick down.

She was now officially back to work.

She looked at the others in the room.

“Okay, kids,” she said. “Back in the dark ages, long before you were baby deputies…”

She launched into the story of Epriccom as if it were a grand adventure. The others listened. Gomez watched them, assessing.

Nuuyoma’s face remained impassive, but his eyes widened at some of the telling. Gomez was glad it distressed him. She wanted him on this team. She trusted him more than anyone on the ship with the exception of Simiaar, and Gomez wasn’t sure she could go forward without him.