A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (38 page)

As that sentence was halfway out of his mouth, he realized he sounded ungrateful.

“Would you like to return to your cell?” the warden asked.

He thought for a moment. He was
leaving
? Had she said
released
?

“Forgive me, sir,” Trey said, “this is surprising me. Does this mean that I’m in my attorney’s custody? That I’m going to another prison?”

“No, 99373. Judge Bruchac has invalidated your imprisonment. Apparently you are not an illegal under Alliance law. You are free to go, provided you leave the Alliance immediately. Since inmates rarely have the resources to hire a ship to take them anywhere, it is the Earth Alliance Prison System’s policy to have the attorney of record take responsibility for the client upon release. The attorney will be in charge of getting you to your destination. After that, you will be on your own. A free…creature…without any notice of this imprisonment on your record. As far as the Alliance is concerned, you have not been here.”

All those years did not exist? He felt dizzy. What had Zhu done?

“Am I supposed to talk to some Alliance representative?” Trey asked.

“You are to leave the Alliance, and you are not to return unless you have the proper documentation, including a Day of Creation Document and other information proving you are who you say you are. If you return to the Alliance without those documents, you will be subject to imprisonment again as a possible illegal. Do you understand this?”

He understood her words, but he could barely process them.

“You now have eighty-five minutes. Would you like to return to your cell to collect your possessions?”

His possessions. All of them acquired after long and hard negotiations with other prisoners, with difficult work through the system, with a lot of saved money from his tiny allowance given to him through the EAPS regulations.

Everything he had in that room, that
cell
, he had acquired to ease his life inside.

“No, sir,” he said. “I don’t need anything. Except maybe real clothes.”

“Those are the responsibility of your attorney’s representative,” the warden said.

“My attorney—” and he was startled to think he had one “—he’s not coming?”

“Most attorneys do not handle this phase of client release. They hire a service. I can give you the name of the service if you like,” the warden said. Her voice sounded eerily formal.

It finally dawned on Trey that the person standing in front of him wasn’t in this room at all. It was some kind of projection.

The warden was probably somewhere else in this office suite, talking with him via some network or something.

“For the record,” the warden said, “I do not approve of this release. We know who you are here, and what created you. We know how deeply evil your kind can be.”

He felt a chill. He couldn’t really see her eyes. Was she going to do something to him? Was that really the purpose behind his visit here?

“In my opinion, you should remain locked up. But the court does not share in that opinion, and I do the court’s bidding. Still, I will make sure that you leave this place. If I discover that you’re in the Alliance, I will ensure that you are confined for the rest of your unnatural life. Is that clear?”

He had to swallow hard. “Yes, sir, it is.”

“Good,” she said. “Now, get out of my sight. I have trouble looking at your face.”

He felt his cheeks warm. He wanted to say that he had nothing to do with the bombings, but he knew it would make no difference.

The guards spun him around and led him to the door.

“Where are we going now?” he asked.

One of the androids with a mouth actually answered him. “There is a holding area,” it said. “You will wait there until your representative appears in…seventy-three-point-two… minutes Earth time.”

“Thank you,” Trey said, then bit his lower lip. He was shaken enough that he was thanking a nonliving guard.

He was getting out of here in a little more than an hour. Then he would leave the Alliance with people he had never met before. People he had to trust.

Without a plan, without even an idea of what to do next.

He had always imagined getting out of this prison—it had been his goal for years. But he had doubted he would ever achieve it.

Even if he had achieved it, he’d thought he would have weeks, maybe months, maybe even a year to prepare. He would research where he could comfortably live, what kind of work he might get, how he would survive.

He hadn’t done any of that. He knew nothing of the worlds outside of the Alliance. He had always thought he would remain within the Alliance.

He had no friends, no family, no one to help him. He didn’t even know who this representative was.

And it sounded like he wasn’t needed to testify on the Anniversary Day bombings. Apparently, Zhu had gotten him out without even mentioning that.

Which was weird, since he never heard from Zhu.

Trey rubbed his palms against the jumpsuit. He was terrified. He didn’t want to be terrified, but he was. What if this was a plot to kill him? What if it was all a ruse?

What if it wasn’t?

How would he live? What could he do? He had no formal education, no training in any sort of real job, no active skills. And, in the Alliance at least, he wasn’t a person. He had no idea what the worlds outside of the Alliance thought of people like him.

They couldn’t have thought too kindly of him. Could they? He’d talked to others in the prison, some of whom were known as designer criminal clones. They too had been made outside the Alliance, usually for an express purpose. Most of them wanted to get back to that purpose.

Very few of them wanted to become something else.

He had about an hour to figure out how he would live the next few years of his life. He had no weapons, no money, no possessions, no real identity.

He had nothing.

Except, apparently, something he had never had before in his entire life.

He would have freedom.

And he had no idea what to do with it.

FORTY-TWO

THE INFORMATION ON Ohksmyte was sparse. Before Gomez left, she had Charlie, the pilot, check other star maps for outside-of-the-Alliance specs on Ohksmyte. She also had Apaza find what information he could in the data that Mir Munshi had sent.

There wasn’t much, and what existed differed from Alliance information only in the rules and regulations for arrivals. Apparently Eaufasse, with the proper clearance, could visit the mining site, but it took months, sometimes years, to get that clearance.

The mining site had heavy security and could not be approached from the ground or from space, at least by unknown outsiders. Since the corporation running the site was registered in the Alliance, Gomez could approach the site without difficulty.

Not that she planned to.

She was going to one spot on the farthest side of Ohksmyte from Epriccom. She had had Charlie double-check the coordinates that Mir Munshi had given her, and see what was nearby.

Apparently nothing was. No cities, no settlements, no outsiders, and most importantly, no domed communities, like the enclave that had been built on Epriccom.

Gomez had half expected to find one or the remains of one.

But the remains should have been visible to the
Stanley’s
sensors. And there was nothing—at least in the non-mining side of the moon.

Ohksmyte wasn’t as big as Epriccom, and its atmosphere was thin. It had no real plant life, and very little water. Part of the area secured by the mining operation included some ice fields that went thirty meters deep into Ohksmyte’s soil. The ice fields were probably providing some of the operation’s water supply. And, Gomez suspected, might also be the source of some of the moon’s mineral richness.

The area she was going to was often used by smugglers back in the day, at least according to some of the information Apaza had found. The smugglers would land, change ships, and leave before anyone could catch them.

Apaza had found that information in Mir Munshi’s records.
It wasn’t hard,
Apaza had said,
almost like he wanted us to find this.

Mir Munshi was good at making his suspicions known without saying a word.

Gomez did not notify the mining operation that she was coming. She had taken a fully loaded security shuttle, which everyone in the EAFSS called a “gunboat.” It was sleek and maneuverable. It would allow her to pursue anyone who tried to take off in a fast-moving ship—at least until the
Stanley
could take over the pursuit.

It also had every weapon known to the service, and more security protocols than any other ship outside of the military arms of the Alliance. She could start a war herself with this thing, or at least fight a serious and prolonged battle.

Not that she wanted to. She’d done that before, and it hadn’t ended well.

The gunboat, named
Stanley Security One
, was the top-of-the-line model. She had had dozens of gunboats named
Stanley Security One
over the years. The
Security One
was always the best gunboat on the
Stanley.
This particular
Security One
would be replaced when she took the
Stanley
in at the end of this sojourn, or at least demoted to a lower-level security ship. It saddened her to lose this one; she liked this incarnation.

It was easy to pilot, so she didn’t need to bring anyone with specialized skills. She could handle everything in the cockpit herself, from the weaponry to the cells to the flight.

Since this side of the moon was dead, and since she didn’t expect to find any serious trouble near the remains of a fifteen-year-old ship, she did not bring the pilots along. She brought Nuuyoma and Verstraete. Simiaar muscled her way in as well.

Gomez had tried to argue Simiaar out of coming—the amount of forensic material that Mir Munshi had given them was astonishing—but Simiaar insisted. She wanted to collect the evidence from the ship herself, even though she fully admitted that Gomez could probably handle it. From Simiaar’s tone, however, it was clear she believed that Gomez wouldn’t do the best possible job.

Gomez flew in. She went directly to the coordinates, having decided long before that she was not going to orbit Ohksmyte even once. She didn’t want to attract any attention from the mining operation.

Nuuyoma sat in the cockpit beside her. Gomez was monitoring the flight on a holographic screen, showing the area of space around Ohksmyte. Nuuyoma was monitoring the landing area, on both instruments and according to the visuals
Security One
was picking up.

As they got closer, it became pretty clear that the area near the abandoned ship was littered with other ship bits. Not quite a ship graveyard, because that implied intact ships, and nothing here was intact.

That trade-off the smugglers used to do probably involved repairing ships as well. Or stealing better ships.

Everything near the site seemed to be covered with dust from the flakey soil. Gomez had warned Simiaar that might be the case, but Simiaar claimed she didn’t care.

All the better that I’m going
, she had said.

The presence of the ship debris made it harder to find a good landing location than Gomez had thought. She had to scan the surface, find something relatively flat, and choose that, not worrying what the bottom of her ship might rest on.

Gunboats were designed to land on pretty much anything, so she wasn’t really worried about harming the ship. She was actually worried about exiting the ship. She’d once had a deputy get injured when he disembarked on a bad landing site, and she really didn’t want to repeat that here, especially with such a small team.

No one from the mining operation pinged her as she entered the space around Ohksmyte. She didn’t receive any warnings from the operation, which she found odd.

Usually in places like this, heavily guarded by a proprietary corporation, incoming ships would receive ads or warnings or little messages, often in the form of holograms that just appeared in the cockpit. Such things were hard to filter out and, to be honest, on this trip, Gomez hadn’t even tried. She wanted to see what the corporation warned against.

Apparently, it didn’t see any Alliance ship as a threat. Or it didn’t give warnings.

She wasn’t sure which was the case.

She brought the
Security One
down ten meters away from the coordinates Mir Munshi had given her. As the
Security One
landed, a puff of dust or sand or whatever this part of the moon was made of wafted over the ship.

The ship warned that too long at this site unprotected and its systems would get filled with fine particles that would make it nearly impossible to take off.

She linked the ship to her external chips, told Nuuyoma to do the same, and then got into an environmental suit. Even though the atmosphere here was good enough to sustain human life, according to the information she had found, she didn’t want to risk getting whatever this soil was made of in her system. She didn’t want to go through the detox.