Authors: Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Tags: #Detective and Mystery Fiction, #Science Fiction
Starbase Human
Contents
For Annie Reed
Thanks for watching my back
(and for giving the College Kid such a great home)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I could not have done any of this project without the help of dozens of people. It has truly taken a village to finish the project—sometimes simply to keep me on track.
I owe a huge debt to Dean Wesley Smith for helping me with the plotting, to Allyson Longueira for her patience and attention to detail, to Colleen Kuehne who makes sure the details are accurate, and to Annie Reed for making sure I’m consistent from book to book (and for her eagle eye).
With this book, I also owe Sheila Williams and Kevin J. Anderson a rousing thank you. Sheila bought a novella for
Asimov’s SF Magazine
that I wrote to figure out some details in this book, and Kevin bought the opening as a standalone short for
Pulse Pounders
. He helped the pulse pound even more.
Most of all, I want to thank the readers. You have stayed with me throughout, and I’m very grateful. Thank you, all.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Dear Readers,
Parts of
Starbase Human
should be familiar to those of you who track down every little story in the Retrieval Artist universe. I wrote one full novella and a short story to explain what happened with a few characters before I realized that the novella and the short story belong in the longer Anniversary Day Saga.
These, and the story of someone I hadn’t written about since
Blowback
were those elements I kept trying to shoehorn into earlier books, and they weren’t shoeing (or horning, or whatever the right word actually is).
It’s time for a short explanation. Those of you who have faithfully bought the new books I’ve been releasing in the saga since January, thank you! You know what I’m going to say next because you’ve seen it in the previous author notes. Skip a few paragraphs, if you like.
Those of you who picked up this book without ever having read a novel in the Retrieval Artist universe, well, I’m sorry to tell you that you bought book seven in an eight-book saga. Usually the Retrieval Artist novels stand alone. But these eight books don’t. Go back to
Anniversary Day
, and start there. There’s a list in each of the books that’ll tell you which one to read next.
Those of you who regularly read the Retrieval Artist books, but somehow missed the first four books released in 2015, you have some catching up to do. The book to read after
Blowback
is
A Murder of Clones
. Then follow the list to see which book comes next.
Starbase Human
is the last book before the big finale. A few loose threads get tied up here, and a lot of characters get to do what I intended them to do all along. You should have some a-ha! moments and a few what-the? moments.
All will be revealed in the final chapter of the saga,
Masterminds
, coming in June.
—Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Lincoln City, Oregon
July 27, 2014
OVER THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO
ONE
TAKARA HAMASAKI CROUCHED
behind the half-open door, her heart pounding. She stared into the corridor, saw more boots go by. Good God, they made such a horrible thudding noise.
Her mouth tasted of metal, and her eyes stung. The environmental system had to be compromised. Which didn’t surprise her, given the explosion that had happened not three minutes before.
The entire starbase rocked from it. The explosion had to have been huge. The base’s exterior was compensating—that had come through her desk just before she left—but she didn’t know how long it would compensate.
That wasn’t true; she knew it could compensate forever if nothing else went wrong. But she had a hunch a lot of other things would go wrong. Terribly wrong.
She’d had that feeling for months now. It had grown daily, until she woke up every morning, wondering why the hell she hadn’t left yet.
Three weeks ago, she had started stocking her tiny ship, the crap-ass thing that had brought her here half her life ago. She would have left then, except for one thing:
She had no money.
Yeah, she had a job, and yeah, she got paid, but it cost a small fortune to live this far out. The base was in the middle of nowhere, barely in what the Earth Alliance called the Frontier, and a week’s food alone cost as much as her rent in the last Alliance place she had stayed. She got paid well, but every single bit of that money went back into living.
Dammit. She should have started sleeping in her ship. She’d been thinking of it, letting the one-room apartment go, but she kinda liked the privacy, and she really liked the amenities—entertainment on demand, a bed that wrapped itself around her and helped her sleep, and a view of the entire public district from above.
She liked to think it was that view that kept her in the apartment, but if she was honest with herself, it was that view and the bed and the entertainment, maybe not in that order.
And she was cursing herself now.
While the men—they were all men—wearing boots and weird uniforms marched toward the center of the base. Thousands of people lived or stayed here, but there wasn’t much security. Not enough to deal with those men. She would hear that drumbeat of their stupid boots in her sleep for the rest of her life.
If the rest of her life wasn’t measured in hours. If she ever got a chance to sleep again.
Her traitorous heart was beating in time to those boots. She was breathing through her mouth, hating the taste of the air.
If nothing else, she had to get out of here just to get some good clean oxygen. She had no idea what was causing that burned-rubber stench, but something was, and it was getting worse.
More boots stomped by, and she realized she couldn’t tell the difference between the sound of the boots that had already passed her and those that were coming up the corridor.
She only had fifty meters to go to get to the docking ring, but that fifty meters seemed like a light-year.
And she wouldn’t even be here, if it weren’t for her damn survival instinct. She had looked up—before the explosion—saw twenty blond-haired men, all of whom looked like twins. Ten sets of twins—two sets of decaplets?—she had no idea what twenty identical people, the same age, and clearly monozygotic, were called. She supposed there was some name for them, but she wasn’t sure. And, as usual, her brain was busy solving that, instead of trying to save her own single individual untwinned life.
She had scurried through the starbase, utterly terrified. The moment she saw those men enter the base, she left her office through the service corridors. When that seemed too dangerous, she crawled through the bot holes. Thank the universe she was tiny. She usually hated the fact that she was the size of an eleven-year-old girl and didn’t quite weigh 100 pounds.
At this moment, she figured her tiny size might just save her life.
That, and her prodigious brain. If she could keep it focused instead of letting it skitter away.
Twenty identical men—and that wasn’t the worst of it. They looked like younger versions of the creepy pale guys who had come into the office six months ago, looking for ships. They wanted to know the best place to buy ships in the starbase.
There was no place to buy new ships on the starbase. There were only old and abandoned ships. Fortunately, she had managed to prevent the sale of hers, a year ago. She’d illegally gone into the records and changed her ship’s status from delinquent to paid in full, and then she had made that paid-in-full thing repeat every year. (She’d checked it, of course, but it hadn’t failed her, and now it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except getting off this damn base.)
Still those old creepy guys had gotten the names of some good dealers on some nearby satellites and moons, and had left—she thought forever—but they had come back with a scary fast ship and lots of determination.
And, it seemed, lots of younger versions of themselves.
(Clones. What if they were clones? What did that mean?)
The drumbeat of their stupid boots had faded. She scurried into the corridor, then heard a high-pitched male scream, and a thud.
Her heart picked up its own rhythm—faster, so fast, in fact, that it felt like her heart was trying to get to the ship before she did.
She slammed herself against the corridor wall, felt it give (cheap-ass base), and caught herself before she fell inward on some unattached panel coupling.
She looked both ways, saw nothing, looked up, didn’t see any movement in the cameras—which the base insisted on keeping obvious so that all kinds of criminals would show up here. If the criminals knew where the monitors were, they felt safe, weirdly enough.
And this base needed criminals. This far outside of the Alliance, the only humans with money were the ones who had stolen it—either illegally or legally through some kind of enterprise that was allowed out here, but not inside the Alliance.
This place catered to humans. It accepted non-human visitors, but no one here wanted them to stay. In the non-Earth atmosphere sections, the cameras weren’t obvious.
She thanked whatever deity was this far outside of the Alliance that she hadn’t been near the alien wing when the twenty creepy guys arrived and started marching in.
And then her brain offered up some stupid math it had been working on while she was trying to save her own worthless life.
She’d seen more than forty boots stomp past her.
That group of twenty lookalikes had only been the first wave.
Another scream and a thud. Then a woman’s voice:
No! No! I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll—
And the voice just stopped. No thud, no nothing. Just silence.
Takara swallowed hard. That metallic taste made her want to retch, but she didn’t. She didn’t have time for it. She could puke all she wanted when she got on that ship, and got the hell away from here.
She levered herself off the wall, wondering in that moment how long the gravity would remain on if the environmental system melted. Her nose itched—that damn smell—and she wiped the sleeve of her too-thin blouse over it.
She should have dressed better that morning. Not for work, but for escape. Stupid desk job. It made her feel so important. An administrator at 25. She should have questioned it.