Starbase Human (15 page)

Gomez had told him she didn’t want him to come with her.

You have a career, Elián. I’m at the end of mine. I have enough money saved to last five lifetimes if I need it. But you, you’re just starting out, and you’re
good
. You shouldn’t risk your future for my quest.

He had argued with her. Three others from the
Stanley
had gone with her—Charlie Zamal, probably the best pilot the
Stanley
had ever had; Neil Apaza, a researcher whom Nuuyoma had never gotten a sense of; and Lashante Simiaar, the chief forensic examiner, who was absolutely cranky and absolutely brilliant.

All but Apaza had had long careers. And Apaza was not a good fit for Frontier Security. He had trouble remaining in shape, and Nuuyoma had a sense that Apaza missed the Alliance more than he wanted to admit.

Gomez had taken him, not just because she needed him, but also because he probably would have tested out of the service in the next year or so.

Nuuyoma wasn’t going to test out. He had always known this would be his career. He loved the first contacts and the strange encounters. And he loved being away from all the familiar things. He loved the way this ship became the real world for everyone on board, and he loved the way that it forged its own future.

That was why he thought he could get away with this particular investigation. He had told Gomez that.

No one cares what direction we travel in. I’ll make sure we answer any requests for assistance, but I’ll also head in the direction of the starbase. You don’t have time to go there. It’ll take more than a year to get there and back, especially since you want to go to the middle of the Alliance when you’ve finished. Let me do this job, Judita. Not even the staff will know what’s going on.

She had studied him for a long time after he said that. He’d worked with her long enough to know that she contemplated while studying people like that.

Finally, she had nodded.

He had the sense she didn’t believe there was much to learn out here. The destruction of that starbase looked like a practice run for the destruction on the Moon. The fact that the destruction had come thirty-five years before Anniversary Day made sense; the bad guys, as Gomez had started calling them, needed time to make slow-grow clones and to test them, like they had done on Epriccom.

Nuuyoma slowly walked around observation deck, sticking to the path along the windows, looking at the area where the starbase had been. The coordinates for the base put the
Stanley
right on top of the center of the base.

Unlike historical sites on planets, there was no way to see even a remnant of the destruction and death that had happened here. The emptiness made it look like the
Stanley
was the first ship to ever come to this part of space.

He knew better—there was a long history in this sector. It just wasn’t an Alliance history. Humans who had come this far out were running
from
the Alliance. They didn’t want to be part of it.

That was the other side of work on the Frontier. The humans who were out here were mostly anti-Alliance and anti-Earth. They didn’t like humans in uniform showing up and telling them what to do. They really didn’t like it when the Frontier Security Service started asking various cultures if they were interested in joining the Alliance.

Footsteps resounded behind him, clip-clopping their way toward him. He didn’t turn around, but he watched the reflections in the windows. He saw the form first, and realized that Chepi Verstraete was joining him.

She wasn’t wearing her uniform. Instead, she was wearing her day-off clothing—a white, gauzy, flowing pants-and-shirt thing that always made him think she could fly away. She was tiny to begin with, and the clothing seemed to give her wings.

The white did set off her ebony skin and made it seem even darker. It added a depth to her dark eyes, as well. She had gathered her black hair in the back, but left it down. It flowed to her waist.

Verstraete was the only other person on the
Stanley
who knew why they were out here. She also knew about the clones, and wanted to investigate. Gomez hadn’t given her the same speech, but a similar one—Gomez hadn’t wanted Verstraete to ruin her career, either, by going on “this crazy mission.”

So Verstraete remained on the
Stanley
, and Nuuyoma had promoted her to his number one deputy. He had done so because she was good, but he had also done so because they shared a secret.

“I kinda thought maybe there’d be something here,” she said by way of greeting.

He nodded. “Me, too.”

She stopped beside him. The scents of teak and green bamboo teased his nose. Verstraete designed perfumes in her free time, usually using materials she found on their journeys. But for herself, she always wore a scent her grandmother had designed. Verstraete had had to tell him what the scents were, and now he would always associate them with her.

“That report threw me off,” she said.

Report
was the wrong word, but he knew what she meant. Someone had actually written about the starbase just a few years ago, as if that person had stayed at the base recently.

His entire team had tried to trace the author. Apaza was also working on it, or he had been when Nuuyoma last saw him. They all had found nothing. It was a deliberate misdirection, one Nuuyoma still didn’t entirely understand.

Just like he didn’t understand who had made the Alliance maps of this sector, and why those maps still included the starbase—and had included the starbase for the past 35 years.

He had done a cursory investigation of that in his spare time, but he wasn’t as good at ferreting out information as Apaza was. And Nuuyoma had to be careful, too; he didn’t want to tip off whoever was in the Alliance, trying to keep the base’s destruction a secret.

That was the one thing that had worried Gomez about their trip here. She knew—they all knew—that their presence would show someone in the Alliance that the maps were wrong.

Nuuyoma figured he’d deal with that by not reporting that they had ever come to these coordinates. One nice thing about being the head of this ship was that he could control what information he sent to FSS headquarters.

He wouldn’t send their exact route to headquarters. And he certainly wouldn’t do so before he sent information he gathered—if it was valuable—to Gomez herself.

She needed time to finish her work, and he was determined to give that to her.

“The maps threw me off more,” he said.

Verstraete stood beside him, mimicking his posture, hands clasped behind her back, chin out, staring at the field of stars before them. She looked younger when she wasn’t in uniform.

“Hmm,” she said. “The maps didn’t bother me much. I’ve always figured that Alliance maps of the Frontier had mistakes in them.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about it.” More than he wanted to admit, actually, although it felt good to talk to her. “And I’m still confused by it all. I mean, if no Alliance ships have been out this far, how did we get the maps in the first place?”

“No
official
Alliance vessels,” she said. “I’m sure that members of the Alliance have come out here.”

“And sent maps back?” He looked at her. She had to raise her head to meet his gaze.

She shrugged. “Why would that be unusual?”

“Most humans who come out here don’t want anything to do with the Alliance,” he said.

“Maybe the maps came from one of the non-human Alliance members,” she said.

“Maybe.” He still didn’t like it. It felt wrong.

“We can’t research it in depth without tipping someone off,” she said.

“Except in the non-networked databases that we have,” he said.

She nodded. “It sounds like you have.”

“Yeah,” he said. “And the only materials I’ve found have been ‘screw-yous’ from people who got contacted as they headed out here, and then severed their links so that no one could find them. I found one reference that mentioned a human-only starbase.”

“You think that was this one?” she asked. “The review said it had an alien section that was small but sufficient.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s a weird detail, don’t you think?”

“Why?” she asked.

“It seems specific.”

She turned toward the windows again. Her image looked slightly wavy, as if something was causing a distortion.

“You think it’s true,” she said.

“I do,” he said. “That alien part makes sense to me. Even a human-only base would need an alien section for ships that had malfunctions or refueling issues or needed to stop for some other reason.”

“And it would have to be well-segregated to avoid trouble.” She rocked back and forth on her flat shoes. That was the closest she could come to going barefoot. Regulations didn’t allow it on the ship.

“Yeah,” Nuuyoma said. “That would have to be memorable, even after thirty-five years, don’t you think? A small alien section, humans only, that sort of thing. It couldn’t have been common.”

“Actually,” Verstraete said, “it is.”

Nuuyoma frowned. He hadn’t heard of anything like it in nearby regions, and he’d been working the Frontier longer than she had.

Still, he didn’t correct her. He had learned that she often saw things he didn’t. “Why do you say that?”

“Because,” she said, “there’s another human-only base not far from here.”

Replacing the one that got destroyed? He didn’t ask that question, even though he thought it. He wanted to hear what she had to say.

“How long has it been in existence?”

She smiled at him, eyes twinkling. “Thirty years.”

He let out a small breath. It took time to build a starbase. “What’s it called?”

“It has several names,” she said, “depending on the map. The most common one, in a variety of languages, is
Starbase Human.
”

“That can’t be a coincidence,” he said, more to himself than to her.

“I thought it was,” she said. “So I did a little digging. It’s run by the same corporation that ran the other starbase.”

“Is it an Alliance corporation?” he asked.

“That would be too easy,” she said. “No. It’s a corporation that runs bases all over the Frontier. Most of those bases cater to different species. This is the only one that I could find that catered to humans.”

“The corporation isn’t human-owned, then?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I’m not one of those researchers who can find that stuff, and I was leery of digging too deep. I don’t know how to hide my trail.”

“Probably a good call,” he said. “So there’s a need for this starbase out here. It makes me wonder how many humans fled the Alliance and settled out here.”

“Because they didn’t like the multi-species aspect of the Alliance?” she asked.

“It still causes issues,” he said. “A lot of humans think we shouldn’t be subject to alien law.”

“We’re not,” she said. “We’re subject to
Alliance
law. We agreed—”

He held up a hand to stop her from launching into one of her favorite rants. “I know, Chepi,” he said softly.

She glanced at him—and then laughed. “Gosh. It’s like I’m programmed to give that response whenever anyone says anything.”

“We all are,” he lied. It was part of being in the FSS, though, that need to explain what the Alliance was about and how it worked, and how fair it actually was. He just didn’t like ranting about it.

He sighed, thinking about that other base. “I wonder if there’s an institutional memory.”

“In the corporation?” she asked. “Did you really want to contact them?”

“In the starbase,” he said. “Essentially, that’s the rebuild, even if it isn’t in this exact spot.”

She looked around, as if she could see the base with the naked eye.

“Thirty-five years isn’t that long,” she said. “Someone has to remember something.”

“Starbases don’t get destroyed very often,” he mused. “A lot of people would have died. You don’t get over that, no matter how long ago it was.”

She stood next to him silently for a long moment. She was clearly giving him time to come up with something.

When he didn’t speak, she started shifting position. He recognized it. She didn’t like silence. She never had.

“So,” she said when he didn’t speak. “Are we going to go in as FSS or as some people who are on our way somewhere else?”

“Undercover or official?” he asked. “They both have advantages.”

“I don’t see any advantage in being official,” she said. “Not in a place that’s clearly hostile to a lot of things.”

“You really believe they hate the Alliance,” he said.

She nodded. “If they don’t want aliens, they don’t want humans who are forced to interact with aliens. And that would mean they certainly don’t want someone who is supposed to enforce the laws between humans and aliens.”

He hadn’t thought of it that way. He might have come to it later, although he wasn’t certain. Verstraete had a way of seeing the heart of the matter much quicker than anyone else.