Starbase Human (11 page)

And for an entire month, they had been successful.

He was furious at himself, but he knew he couldn’t let that emotion dominate his thoughts. He had to take action, and he had to do so now.

He used his links to summon Ishiyo Cumija to his office. He’d been watching her for some time. She had been Koos’s second in command in the security department. She had set up her own fiefdom, and she had once mentioned to Deshin that she worried no one was taking security seriously enough.

At the time, Deshin had thought she was making a play for Koos’s job. Deshin
still
thought she was making a play for Koos’s job on that day, but she might have been doing so with good reason.

Now, Cumija would get a chance to prove herself.

While Deshin waited for her, he checked the clone’s DNA and found that strange clone mark embedded into her system. He had never seen anything like it. The designer criminal clones he’d run into had always had a product stamp embedded into their DNA. This wasn’t a standard DCC product stamp.

It looked like something else.

He copied it, then opened Cumija’s file, accessed the DNA samples she had to give every week, and searched to see if there was any kind of mark. His system always searched for the DCC product stamps, but rarely searched for other examples of cloning, including shortened telomeres.

Shortened telomeres could happen naturally. In the past, he’d found that searching for them gave him so many false positives—staff members who were older than they appeared, employees who had had serious injuries—that he had decided to stop searching for anything but the product marks.

He wondered now if that had been a mistake.

His search of Cumija’s DNA found no DCC product mark, and nothing matching the mark his system had found in the clone’s DNA.

As the search ended, Cumija entered the office.

She was stunningly beautiful, with a cap of straight hair so black it almost looked blue, and dancing black eyes. Until he met Cumija, he would never have thought that someone so very attractive would function well in a security position, but she had turned out to be one of his best bodyguards.

She dressed like a woman sexually involved with a very rich man. Her clothing always revealed her taut, nut-brown skin and her fantastic legs. Sometimes she looked nearly naked in the clothing she chose. Men and women watched her wherever she went, and dismissed her as someone decorative, someone being used.

One rather memorable afternoon, she had killed a man who was coming after Deshin with a laser pistol. She had disarmed the man with a blow to the elbow, and then, when he grabbed a knife and threatened her with it, she kicked him in the leg. The point of her high heel punctured his femoral artery, and he couldn’t contain the bleeding.

No one helped him do so, either.

On this day, she wore a white dress that crossed her breasts with an X, revealing her sides and expanding to cover her hips and buttocks. Her matching white shoes looked as deadly as the shoes that had killed the man that afternoon.

“That nanny we hired turns out to have been a clone,” Deshin said without greeting.

“Yes, I heard.” Cumija’s voice was low and sexy, in keeping with her appearance.

“Has Koos made an announcement?” Deshin asked. Because he would have recommended against it.

“No,” Cumija said curtly, and Deshin almost smiled. She monitored everything Koos did. It was a great trait in a security officer, a terrible trait in a subordinate—at least from the perspective of someone in Koos’s position.

Deshin said, “I need you to check the other employees—
you
, and you
only
. I don’t want anyone to know what you’re doing. I have the marker that was in the cloned Sonja Mycenae’s DNA. I want you to see if there’s a match. I also want a secondary check for designer criminal clone marks, and then I want you to do a slow search of anyone with abnormal telomeres.”

Cumija didn’t complain, even though he was giving her a lot of work. “You want me to check everyone.”

“Yes,” Deshin said. “Start with people who have access to me, and then move outward. Do it quickly and quietly.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Report the results directly to me,” he said.

“All right,” Cumija said.

She nodded, thanked him, and left the office.

Deshin stood there for a moment, feeling a little shaken. If the Alliance was trying to infiltrate his organization, then he wouldn’t be surprised if there were other clones stationed in various areas, clones he had missed.

After Cumija checked, he would have Koos do the same check, and see if he came up with the same result.

Deshin went back to his investigation of that building that the clone had visited regularly. He had no firm evidence of Earth Alliance involvement. Just suspicions, at least at the moment.

And regular citizens of the Alliance would be stunned to think that their precious Alliance would infiltrate businesses using slow-grow clones, and then disposing of them when they lost their usefulness.

But Deshin knew the Alliance had done all kinds of extra-legal things to protect itself over the centuries. And somewhere, Deshin had been flagged as a threat to the Alliance.

He had known that for some time.

He had always expected some kind of infiltration of his business.

But the infiltration of his home was personal.

And it needed to stop.

SIXTEEN

BRODEUR STOOD IN
the outer office of the autopsy theater, staring at floating computer screens. He had pulled his environmental suit’s hood back to talk to DeRicci (
that
had been fun), and he hadn’t put it back on yet. He was still too hot.

But now, he didn’t care.

He was looking at the information pouring across his screen, and, after a moment, he let out a sigh of relief.

The hardening poison wasn’t one of the kinds that could leach through the skin. He still had to test the compost to see if the poison had contaminated it, but he doubted that.

The livor mortis told him that she had died elsewhere, and then been placed in the crate. And given how fast this hardening poison acted, the blood wouldn’t have been able to pool for more than a few minutes anyway.

He stood and walked back into the autopsy room. Now that he knew the woman had died of something that wouldn’t hurt him if he came in contact with her skin or breathed the air around her, he didn’t need the damn environmental suit.

Hers was the only body in this autopsy room. He had placed her on her back before sending the nanobots into her system. They were still working, finding out even more about her.

He knew now that she was a slow-grow clone, which meant she had lived some twenty years, had hopes, dreams, and desires. As a forensic pathologist who had examined hundreds of human corpses—cloned and non-cloned—the
only
difference he had ever seen were the telomeres and the clone marks.

Slow-grow clones were human beings in everything but the law.

He could make the claim that fast-grow clones were too, that they had the mind of a child inside an adult body, but he tried not to think about that one. Because it meant that all those horrors visited on fast-grow clones meant those horrors were visited on a human being that hadn’t seen more than a few years of life, an innocent in all possible ways.

He blinked hard, trying to focus on something else. Then he stopped beside the woman’s table. Lights moved along the back of it, different beams examining her, trying to glean her medical history and every single story her biology could tell.

Now that it was clear that the poison that killed her wouldn’t contaminate the dome, no one would investigate this case. No one would care.

No one legally
had
to care.

He sighed, then shook his head, wondering if he could make one final push to solve her murder.

Detective DeRicci had asked for a list of bodies found in the crates. Brodeur would make DeRicci that list after all, but before he did, he would see if those bodies were “human” or clones.

If they were clones, then there was a sabotage problem, some kind of property crime—hell, it wasn’t his job to come up with the charge, not when he gave her the thing to investigate.

But maybe he could find something to investigate, something that would have the side benefit of giving some justice to this poor woman, lying alone and unwanted on his autopsy table.

“I’m doing what I can,” he whispered, and then wished he hadn’t spoken aloud.

His desire to help her would be in the official record. Then he corrected himself: There would be no official record, since she wasn’t officially a murder victim.

He was so sorry about that. He’d still document everything he could. Maybe, in the future, the laws would change.

Maybe, in the future, her death would matter as more than a statistic.

Maybe, in the future, she’d be recognized as a person, instead of something to be thrown away like leftover food.

SEVENTEEN

THE CHIEF OF
detectives, Andrea Gumiela, had an office one floor above DeRicci’s, but it was light years from DeRicci’s. DeRicci’s office was in the center of a large room, sectioned off with dark, movable walls. She could protect her area by putting a bubble around it for a short period of time, particularly if she was conducting an interview that she felt wouldn’t work in one of the interview rooms, but there was no real privacy and no sense of belonging.

DeRicci hated working out in the center and hoped that one day she would eventually get an office of her own.

The tiny aspirations of the upwardly mobile, her ex-husband would have said. She couldn’t entirely disagree. He’d had the unfortunate habit of being right.

And as she looked at Gumiela’s office, which took up much of the upper floor, DeRicci knew she would never achieve privacy like this. She wasn’t political enough. Some days she felt like she was one infraction away from being terminated.

Most days, she didn’t entirely care.

Andrea Gumiela, on the other hand, was the most political person DeRicci had ever met. Her office was designed so that it wouldn’t offend anyone. It didn’t have artwork on the walls, nor did it have floating imagery. The décor shifted colors when someone from outside the department entered.

When someone was as unimportant as DeRicci, the walls were a neutral beige, and the desk a dark, wood-like color. The couch and chairs at the far end of the room matched the desk.

But DeRicci had been here when the governor-general arrived shortly after her election, and the entire room shifted to vibrant colors—the purples and whites associated with the governor-general herself.

The shift, which happened as the governor-general was announced, had disturbed DeRicci, but Gumiela managed it as a matter of course. She was going to get promoted someday, and she clearly hoped the governor-general would do it.

“Make it fast,” Gumiela said as DeRicci entered. “I have meetings all afternoon.”

Gumiela was tall and heavyset, but her black suit made her look thinner than she was—probably with some kind of tech that DeRicci didn’t want to think about. Gumiela’s red hair was piled on top of her head, making her long face seem even longer.

“I wanted to talk with you in person about that woman we found in the Ansel Management crate,” DeRicci said.

Gumiela, for all her annoying traits, did keep up on the investigations.

“I thought Rayvon Lake was in charge of that case,” Gumiela said.

DeRicci shrugged. “He’s not in charge of anything, sir. Honestly, when it comes to cases like this, I don’t even like to consult him.”

Gumiela studied her. “He’s your partner, Detective.”

“Maybe,” DeRicci said, “but he doesn’t investigate crimes. He takes advantage of them.”

“That’s quite a charge,” Gumiela said.

“I can back it with evidence,” DeRicci said.

“Do so,” Gumiela said, to DeRicci’s surprise.

DeRicci frowned. Had Gumiela paired them so that DeRicci would bring actual evidence against Lake to the Chief’s office? It made an odd kind of sense. No one could control Lake, and no one could control DeRicci, but for different reasons.

Lake had his own tiny fiefdom, and DeRicci was just plain contrary.

“All right,” DeRicci said, feeling a little off balance. She hadn’t expected anything positive from Gumiela.

And then Gumiela reverted to type. “I’m in a hurry, remember?”

“Yes, sir, sorry, sir,” DeRicci said. This woman always set her teeth on edge. “The woman in the crate, she was killed with a hardening poison. For a while, Brodeur thought she might have been put there to contaminate the food supply, but it was the wrong kind of poison. We’re okay on that.”

Gumiela raised her eyebrows slightly. Apparently she hadn’t heard about the possible contamination. DeRicci had been worried that she had.