A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (39 page)

Through her links, she ordered everyone who was going out onto the moon to wear their suits as well.

She rather hoped that would discourage Simiaar, since Simiaar loathed the things, but as Gomez and Nuuyoma approached the airlock, Simiaar was waiting for them.

“This kind of place is a nightmare for evidence collection,” Simiaar said, her voice sounding hollow through her helmet’s speaker. “So I’m going with you.”

In other words, her tone said, you can’t get rid of me that easily.

Gomez tried not to sigh. The environmental suits they had on the
Security One
were better suited toward military and police operations than simple exploration. The suits were heavy and bulky, their helmets the only good thing about them. They were completely clear, so that the wearer’s face was easily visible.

Simiaar’s eyebrows had risen in a challenge to Gomez, as if she expected Gomez to tell her to stay.

“Your choice,” Gomez said. “It’s not going to be fun out there. And you know, what you’re calling evidence is meaningless. The site is—”

“Fifteen years old,” Simiaar said. “I got it, Chief.”

The “chief” was sarcasm. Nuuyoma looked at Gomez to see if she would challenge Simiaar’s disrespectful attitude, but Gomez wasn’t going to. They were all taking risks here. If Simiaar wanted to explore the site, then Gomez was willing to let her.

Verstraete was the only one who wasn’t going to join them. She had seen the landing site and decided to be the one to stay inside the
Security One
. She was going to maintain a private encoded link with each member of the landing team, and make an automatic back-up of the information they collected.

Gomez nodded at Simiaar and Nuuyoma. Then she put her gloved hand on the airlock controls.

“Here we go,” she said.

She went through the airlock first. Protocol was different for marshals. They were the ones who generally made first contact, who needed to know what the dangers were and how they were encountered. Unlike the military vessels, on FSS ships, the marshals were often the only ones who had any planetary or alien contact at all.

The
Security One
’s exterior door opened, and she stepped into what seemed like a sand storm. Wind blew at a steady rate of ten kilometers per hour, at least according to Gomez’s suit.

The particles were primarily composed of silica, zircon, and feldspar, but mixed in were all kinds of other materials, from bits of permaplastic to metals used in shipbuilding to biogenic fragments. The suit asked Gomez if she wanted to know more, and she didn’t. She would leave that sort of information filtering to Simiaar.

Gomez had to use two different maps to find the coordinates because the air was so thick with particulates that she could barely see. Her breath was ragged, partly because she’d been in real sandstorms without protection, and she knew how they felt.

The map she ran along her left eye, in bright red, showed a direct line from the
Security One
to the coordinates. The other map she ran came through her environmental suit sensors. It was a topological map—adjusted for items in the sand, so that she could put her feet down safely and not damage her suit.

She also sent the information from that particular map to Simiaar and Nuuyoma. Then she slowly walked the ten meters to the coordinates.

The sky was a gray-brown, but she couldn’t tell if that was from the constantly moving particles or if it was from the actual atmosphere itself. A separate visual, with the sand storm filtered out, showed mounds in the dirt, constantly shifting as the sand moved over them. Sometimes she could tell what the item was—a control panel, a chair—and sometimes it looked like nothing she had ever seen before.

A few ships’ hulls loomed beside her, but the only one she cared about was the one that rose in front of her.

The ship that had left Epriccom just before she arrived the first time was smaller than she had expected, little more than a short-distance speed ship, designed to travel between moons, from a moon to a planet, or from a larger ship to a landing site.

Whoever had that ship on Epriccom had not expected to use it to get out of the sector. That someone had planned to travel to Ohksmyte all along.

She opened a file in yet another link and recorded her observations. She did not make these observations available to the rest of her team. She did not want to influence them; if they made different assumptions, that would help rather than hurt.

She also made a list of items to review when she returned to the
Stanley
. She needed to know the timing between the request for her presence from the Eaufasse and the moment when this ship left Epriccom. Had another ship arrived on Ohksmyte? And if not, were there ships in the area? Did the Eaufasse and/or one of the other cultures on Epriccom keep track of those kinds of things or did she need to ask the mining operation?

The wind buffeted her, and the sand pelted her suit. She left the exterior audio on. She heard the constant suss of particles scraping her suit, plus the crunch of her feet on the surface.

She only turned around once, to make absolutely certain that Nuuyoma and Simiaar were following her. Nuuyoma walked in Gomez’s footprints, but Simiaar toddled on her own, arms extended for balance, as if she were afraid she was going to fall at any moment.

It took longer to reach the ship than Gomez would have predicted. The wind hampered her, and she moved slower than she had thought she would because she didn’t want to trip.

It seemed like the ground was composed of ship parts. She wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the sand components on the lower part of her visor, but she could see that the particulate composition kept changing, and sometimes the particles listed were in an alarming red, which she did not read.

As long as whatever it was did not penetrate her suit, she was happy; she wouldn’t be here long enough to suffer much damage. She did commend herself for deciding on the environmental suit even before she knew about the sandstorm.

She reached the ship a few moments ahead of Nuuyoma and Simiaar. The ship was a half-enclosed shell. The back area, where the galley and the bathroom would have been, had no casing at all, just ship frame suggesting where the pieces had been.

But the front, where the bullet-shaped cockpit was, still had a bubble-like enclosure over the seats. The actual roof was gone here too, and so were the controls, but other pieces remained. The bubble-like enclosure was sand-scored and cloudy. She suspected that damage had happened shortly after the ship arrived in this place, provided the wind blew constantly. She hadn’t checked, but she would wager that it did.

Nuuyoma joined her first.
What a surprise,
he sent through his links.
There’s nothing here
.

The ship’s tiny,
Gomez sent back.

He nodded.
I see why smugglers use this place for an exchange. No one would want to be here permanently, and building a dome is probably prohibitively costly.

I wonder how the mining operation works
, Gomez sent as she watched Simiaar nearly topple, catch herself, and then finish walking the last meter to the ship.

This ship is so uninteresting you’re talking about mining?
Simiaar sent.

It was a long shot,
Gomez sent.
We’ll search it for additional identifying marks, but I doubt we’ll find anything.

Oh, ye of little faith,
Simiaar said, quoting some old religious text like she was prone to do when she was feeling particularly sarcastic.
There is a lot of information here. Especially now that I see part of the cockpit is actually preserved
.

What’s here?
Nuuyoma asked.

Simiaar grinned.
Lots of DNA and, I’ll wager, all of the cockpit information from the last trip this little baby took
.

How can you be so sure of that?
Gomez asked.

I had a gigantic hunch after I saw the model description
, Simiaar sent.
These babies were designed as information gatherers. The Alliance released them into the wild as “stolen” ships so that criminals would trade them and we could gather information.

How come I didn’t know about that?
Gomez sent.

Because it happened twenty years ago, my friend,
Simiaar sent.
And only the folks in forensics really cared. Or do you remember every memo that crossed your screen during the course of your career?

Of course she didn’t. But Gomez still felt a little odd.
You’re positive you’ll get information from this thing.

Oh, yeah,
Simiaar sent.
My sensors are already beeping. We can get lots of information here. But it’ll take some work.

What kind of work?
Nuuyoma asked.

Simiaar didn’t answer. Instead, she bent at the waist, her gloved hand searching for something under the enclosure.

Gomez looked at Nuuyoma and shrugged.
I have a hunch
, she sent him privately,
we’re about to find out.

FORTY-THREE

THE DOCKING RING on the most protected side of EAP 77743 gave Fujita the creeps. Prison docking rings always bothered him. They were always on the protected side of a prison, near the guard rings and all of the weaponry. The exterior docking ring was one of any prison’s most vulnerable spots, and so the show of force was always dramatic.

But the design bothered him. It was hard to land here, hard to maneuver, and hard to unhook the
Alus 15
from the ring. He knew that was on purpose, but when he saw this design, it made him feel trapped.

No matter how much he investigated, no matter how he tried to change his own ship’s procedures, he couldn’t control this part of the situation.

If there was some kind of prison riot, if someone attacked the prison itself, he would be stuck here, just like the prisoners. He wouldn’t be able to get his ship out quickly.

He docked his ship in what looked like the narrowest part of the ring. But he knew from experience that this section of the ring was where prison employees docked their ships. The materials surrounding the
Alus 15
weren’t as sturdily made here, and often dropped away in a crisis so that the employees could leave fast.

Plus, his crew was ready for anything. They were armed and they were on alert.

Two of his best men accompanied him into the prison. Fujita would have brought more, but prison regulations only allowed three people to pick up a prisoner. To bring more, he would either need permission or he would have to show that the prisoner might be dangerous to transport.

He’d only done that once, early on, and learned that his opinion of danger then influenced prison officials. The prisoner didn’t get his release, and Fujita had lost the business of that particular law firm.

From that moment on, he had always followed the prison rules to the letter. He just made certain that the security team he brought with him included the most highly trained (and trustworthy) people on his staff.

The docking ring was empty except for the ubiquitous mouthless android guards that these places seemed to favor. Lights glimmered from the walls and ceiling. The lights weren’t designed to illuminate; they were designed to show whoever was entering the prison that they were being watched.

He noted that the walls themselves weren’t really walls, not from his waist down. What looked like wall pieces were actually guard bots that would attack if anyone unauthorized entered the docking ring.

Despite himself, he felt a thread of nerves. He tried to talk himself down. This prison, even though it specialized in clones, was no different than any other prison he had dealt with. He had to remind himself that he always got nervous at this moment because he never quite knew both what and who he was facing.

Faint lavender lights lit the way to the holding area and this prisoner that the system called 99373 and Zhu called “Trey.” The guard bots still blended into the walls of the corridors, and four android guards followed Fujita’s team as if the team were the bad guys.

Fujita had camera chips mounted on the back of his neck as well as on his clothing. He monitored what was happening behind him as well as what was in front of him. His security team did the same.

The lights took him to the prisoner release area, and he felt a small thread of relief. At least he wouldn’t have to meet with the warden. Whenever the prison warden got involved in the release of a prisoner, procedures slowed down and the transfer became awkward.

Either the warden didn’t want her name on any of this except the release order, or everything was going according to plan.

He had a code he needed to send to the doors that allowed him access. He sent it, along with all of his identifying information. The doors swung open, revealing a narrow corridor with obvious weaponry built in, and a series of doors that extended into the distance.