A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (33 page)

Those lines represented the ships. The red and pink lines were the ships that founded the enclave on Epriccom; the bright blue line marked the escape route for the ship that left the enclave.

None of the multicolored dots scattered around both sectors and inside Alliance space connected to the lines.

The tan, beige, and white lines left Epriccom and went either to a prison or to a hospital. In the case of the beige and tan lines, they went to a hospital first, and then to a prison.

Those locations were where the Epriccom clones ended up. None of these three lines crossed the first three lines, and none were in areas where designer criminal clones got made. None linked areas known for criminal activities at the time, and none were in areas known for criminal activities now.

Even the areas that PierLuigi Frémont had inhabited in his violent life were nowhere near these lines, and areas known for supporting his memory even now weren’t near the lines either.

“Okay,” Gomez said. “What’s on that moon?”

“At the time the ship went there,” Apaza said, “the moon was uninhabited.”

“Now?” Gomez asked.

“Part of it is used for some mining operation,” he said.

“See if there’s a connection—”

“I’m looking into it, but I have no way of knowing,” he said. “The corporation running the mining operation is only five years old. And, yes, I’m investigating its registrations and its ties to any conglomerates, but I’m turning up nothing so far.”

Gomez frowned at it all. Lots of information, and none of it enlightening.

“And that base?” she asked. “Where the ships originated?”

“I can’t find any information about it,” he said. “At least in our databases.”

She studied it all for another few minutes. She saw nothing that surprised her, nothing that helped her either.

“Thank you,” she said to Apaza, dismissing him.

“You want me to shut the map down?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’m going to stare at it for a while.”

“Okay.” He let himself out of the office.

She stared until the lines blurred, but it didn’t help. The connections were tenuous, and they were old. Nothing TwoZero had told her helped either.

She had one more thing to try.

She used her private links to contact the
Stanley’s
pilot.

Hey, Charlie
, she sent, making certain that the link she used was secure.
I have some coordinates. I don’t like what I’m seeing in the Alliance’s database. You want to tell me what’s in other databases?

The star maps FSS pilots used had to come from a variety of sources, partly because the Alliance didn’t map every non-Alliance sector, and partly because corporations and native groups often used their maps for misinformation. If a corporation didn’t want the Alliance to know a starbase existed on the Frontier, then the corporation simply did not list it.

Such misinformation meant using Alliance maps outside of the Alliance was often a dangerous proposition. Ships could go into hostile areas without knowing it, or actually be on a collision course with an existing (but small) starbase.

Give the coordinates to me
, Charlie sent.
You know I have to give you the usual caveats
.

He said that as if this were an official mission. On an official mission, he had to inform her every single time that the maps were simply of places, and often not much more. Occasionally they would show ownership or the name of a native group. Sometimes the maps would contain warnings specific to other groups which were not always human-focused.

In other words, the maps were “use at your own risk.”

Consider the caveats understood
, Gomez sent. And then she added the coordinates. She knew he could just input them into his navigation system with a little less than the speed of thought.
Got anything?

The moon near Epriccom has a mining operation,
he sent
. We’d need permission to land on that part of the moon.

She nodded, even though she didn’t have him on visual.
And the other?

Hang on
, he sent, which got her interest up right away.

She waited, staring at that little base, with the red line attached to it. Nothing in that part of the sector looked familiar to her. While she waited, she overlaid another map on top of the one Apaza had made. The overlay showed her travels throughout her career, something she kept just for her. If she were a different kind of woman, she would have had that map displayed on the wall of this very room.

But mostly, she liked to move forward, not back. She looked at the map with its overlay, and saw that it confirmed what she had already sensed.

Even though she’d spent decades traveling all over the Frontier, she had never gone to that part of it. She hadn’t even been close.

She overlaid a third map on it, showing human-oriented FSS investigations in that part of known space.

The FSS had never officially gone that far out.

Okay, sorry to take so long
, Charlie sent.
I was trying to confirm.

Confirm what?
she sent.

That base only shows up on Alliance maps
, he sent.

That surprised her. Secret Alliance bases were on special maps, which she had used here. But this base was on
all
Alliance maps, which meant that no one inside the Alliance was trying to hide it.

She touched the holographic map, and watched the little base grow in size as everything else decreased.
What do you mean? Is someone else hiding the base? Are certain groups in the Frontier unwilling to go there?

That’s what I thought,
he sent,
but that’s not what I’m finding.

What are you finding?
she asked.

It’s on some of the oldest maps from outside the Alliance
, he sent.
It’s got a dozen names, but it’s there
.

Her heart was pounding.
But?

But it’s not on any of the new maps. Not at all
.

Who’s hiding it?
She asked.

That’s what I was trying to confirm
, he sent,
and what I got were a bunch of net vids from twenty-some years ago
.

She felt chilled. Why would information make her feel chilled?

So something happened there
, she sent. She didn’t want to guess. A murder? A lot of murders? Some kind of criminal conspiracy? Maybe the ones her team had been looking for?

Yeah, something happened there,
he sent.
Something huge
.

What?
she sent, because it sounded like he needed prompting.

It blew up
. And she heard something in his voice, although she might have imagined it. After all, the voice was filtered through a dozen systems before it went directly inside her head.

All
of it?
She sent.

She peered at that base in relation to other things in that part of space. The base didn’t seem huge, but it wasn’t small. Not like a ship. It would take a lot of coordinated effort to destroy an entire base.

Yeah
, he sent.
Dozens of explosions, mostly at the same time. The dome was compromised and the ships on its rings were destroyed, and oh my God, would you like to see the footage?

I would
, she sent. Even though she had a feeling she had seen such footage before. Only that footage had been on Earth’s Moon, decades later.

She rubbed her arms, feeling goose bumps along her skin. She wasn’t just chilled now. She was
cold
. Ice-cold.

Clones of PierLuigi Frémont. A series of explosions. Destruction on a massive scale.

It was Anniversary Day. Twenty years before. On a base that no longer existed.

Except on maps, put out by the Alliance.

THIRTY-SEVEN

THE RELEASE ORDER arrived in Zhu’s mail exactly two weeks after he left Clone Court Primary. He grinned to himself as he examined the document.

He had been right about one thing: that judge really wanted to leave the bench and join S
3
. She didn’t know, of course, that Zhu hadn’t even discussed her request with the partners. On the way back to S
3
, he decided he didn’t want any appearance of impropriety on his side, so he wasn’t even going to bring up her inappropriate request until the case was decided.

And even then, he would approach it all gingerly.

For a moment, he fought the urge to see Salehi. They really hadn’t talked much since Zhu got back, and all of that was because of Zhu. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do. He felt queasy whenever he thought of this case.

He remembered his excitement before he argued it, and then the judge’s snide comments about clone law, the fact that she was aware of the arguments as if dozens of others had pursued it all before as well, and she usually turned them down.

Maybe that was why he kept silent about her desire to work at S
3
. Because she was so willing to trade one life for her career. He wasn’t naïve—he’d seen that sort of thing before—but he’d never experienced it, and certainly not on a case he’d been passionate about.

And then there was the entire problem of Trey himself.

Zhu ran a hand through his hair and stood up. He sent for his assistant, but didn’t want to be sitting down when she came into the room.

He’d been restless since he got back—hell, he’d been restless since he left Armstrong—and it wasn’t abating. If anything, the trip to Clone Court had made the feeling worse.

His assistant Louise came inside the office, clutching a tablet like a lifeline. She looked ten years younger than he was, but she was as old as his grandmother. Louise’s job here marked the beginning of her third “life-long” career, and she was using this legal assistant position as a stepping stone into one of the best law schools in the region.

She’d probably be working long after Zhu was dead.

Still, he couldn’t get by without her.

“The prisoner release came through,” Zhu said. His words echoed in the large space, and he realized the release hasn’t felt real until just now.

Trey would be free to do whatever he wanted, provided he got out of the Alliance.

Zhu shivered. He hoped Louise hadn’t seen that.

She was staring at him, her chocolate brown eyes never leaving his. She had never let her opinions be known about any of his cases, at least not aloud, but he had the sense that when she got her license, she wouldn’t become a practicing defense attorney.

“It’s our job to make sure he leaves the Alliance,” Zhu said. “We have people for that, right?”

“We have several services,” she said, “but we only use them for difficult cases. Usually the lawyer or an assistant handles the release.”

He raised his eyebrows at her. “You want to go to that prison and lead a clone who has never been unsupervised to some distant place outside of the Alliance?”

Her lips thinned. “That’s not my job, sir.”

He almost smiled. He knew he could get her on that.

“However, we do have someone in-house, if you feel the need—”

“No,” he said. “I need one of the services, and one that can handle a dangerous client.”

“All right,” she said, “but most of those insist on a couple things. Half the payment up front, money for the client to get started elsewhere, and expenses.”

He nodded. He didn’t care, but knew better than to say that.

Apparently, she could read him. “It should matter to you. This is a pro bono case, which means the firm spends a fixed amount. On a case like this, you’ll be thousands out of pocket.”

He suppressed a sigh. Thousands out of pocket sometimes made other attorneys travel with their clients. It was called
incentive
. Want to save money? Travel outside the sector on the law firm’s money. Want to lose money? Hire someone else to do the dirty work.

Maybe if he had liked Trey, Zhu would have supervised Trey’s release on his own. But Trey scared him, more so now. Trey had sent a video through Zhu’s link, composed before Trey found out that Zhu represented him. The prison system either automatically or accidentally sent it to him. That video was filled with invective and a kind of anger that Zhu usually saw in the scariest of his criminal clients.

The out-of-control ones weren’t the scary ones. It was the cold ones, the ones who eyed him like they could see into his soul, like they knew exactly what terrified him, and how to achieve that.

He had no doubt that Trey could see into his soul. Zhu even felt it through that vid. The only difference between Trey and all those other scary clients was that Trey probably didn’t know how to terrorize Zhu.