Starbase Human (16 page)

“Undercover it is,” he said. He felt a little jaunty about it, even though that would create problems. Because he wasn’t sure how to explain to the rest of his team why he wanted to go into a human-only base.

He would come up with something, though.

He always did.

TWENTY-FIVE

MARSHAL JUDITA GOMEZ
stood with her right hand clasped over her left wrist, behind her back. She straightened her shoulders, a habit she had just acquired in the last few months. She’d done more sitting around than she had ever expected, so after she felt herself growing flabby and tired, she decided to stand whenever possible.

Before her were the two other main people on this silly quest. Neil Apaza probably hadn’t stood up since he boarded the
Green Dragon.
He had become pear-shaped, something that didn’t surprise Gomez. One of the reasons he had joined her on this misadventure was because he knew he would no longer pass the physical tests for the Frontier Security Service, and he wasn’t willing to put in the time or the effort to get into shape.

Lashante Simiaar hovered beside him. Simiaar was the best forensic director in the FSS, and she had taken a year off to join Gomez. Simiaar had lost some weight on this trip—surprising, since she’d been cooking fantastic meals for them—but she still carried an extra kilo or two. She was tall and broad, and one of the strongest people Gomez had ever met, although she didn’t look strong at the moment.

She looked concerned.

Gomez couldn’t blame her. They were staring at a floating screen showing a tiny section of the planet below them. Hétique was deeper in the Earth Alliance than any place Gomez had expected when she started following this lead, and a lot more established.

Sixty-six different sentient species called this planet home, even though its land mass was relatively small. Most of the species either lived in the water or in the skies above the planet’s surface. They claimed the cliff tops, the oceans, and the lakes—which was why a human colony had been founded on the only arable land long before the Alliance even existed.

That human colony had now spread to three major cities, crammed into a few thousand kilometers, and housed several industries that human-governed societies usually didn’t want on their land.

Humans were not the dominant species on Hétique. When three-quarters of the species joined the Earth Alliance, the Alliance determined Hétique was non-human, and not governed by human laws.

Gomez had never even seen the laws for the dominant culture, winged aliens called Tiquis. She didn’t want to look those laws up now.

She felt at loose ends these days, because the way she used to conduct a mission—investigating everything there was to know about a planet before she even approached it—did not apply at all now.

She couldn’t even really call what she was doing a “mission,” nor could she call Apaza, Simiaar, and the senior pilot, Charlie Zamal, her staff. They had worked for her when she ran the Earth Alliance Frontier Security Ship
Stanley
, but she had stepped away from that post for a year, ostensibly to see if she was ready to retire.

She had left the
Stanley
in the capable hands of Elián Nuuyoma, who continued its mission on the Frontier. She missed the constant changes, the unsettled moments when she wasn’t certain what she was about to encounter.

Ever since she had left the
Stanley
, she had gone deeper into the Alliance. Before that, she hadn’t been in Alliance space—truly deep in Alliance space—for years.

Her ultimate goal now was to get to the Moon. She had information—a lot of information—that she believed the people there would want, and she didn’t trust that information to any of the normal channels.

In fact, the longer she had been on this quest, the less she trusted channels at all.

“This planet is
settled
,” Apaza said. “I mean, it’s completely
established
. I’m not liking this at all, Judita.”

They had somehow segued away from last names and titles in their conversations since their first month on this ship. They were colleagues, and Gomez decided they should act like it.

Especially since they kept the support staff on the
Green Dragon
specifically segregated from these main rooms.

The support staff was still pretty impressive. Gomez had hired an extra pilot, who had never been inside the Alliance before and had no family or ties here. She could pilot the ship if she had to—the
Green Dragon
was a medium-sized cruiser, with its own weapons system and a fairly good ability to mask its presence within the Alliance—but she didn’t want to pilot the ship at all.

Still, she had learned its weapons systems, just in case, and she had encoded every high-level system to her voice and DNA prints. She did have a navigator and a chief weapons officer, as well as some people that Simiaar simply called “the muscle,” glorified security guards who would protect Gomez and her team as long as she paid the guards to do so.

That was the diciest part of this plan—she hated paying people to do their jobs well. She really wanted them to volunteer and do the job because they believed in it. Hiring people to do a job for excellent pay meant they could get bought away if someone else offered them even better pay.

She worried about it, which was why she kept them away from the discussions she had with Zamal, Simiaar, and Apaza.

Sometimes she wished they hadn’t come along, either. Oh, they were doing fantastic work, but Gomez felt responsible for them. And the deeper she was traveling into the Alliance, the more responsible she felt.

She worried that this entire mission—quest—trip—whatever she wanted to call it, could cost them their lives.

Especially now.

The floating screen showed the coordinates Gomez had found on an old ship. She, Simiaar, and Apaza had been back-tracing the ship’s route from a planet called Epriccom in the Frontier all the way to its starting point inside the Alliance.

For some reason, she had expected that starting point to be some uninhabited part of some remote moon or a difficult-to-reach starbase.

She hadn’t expected to find an industrial plant with a footprint so old that it looked like it had been in place for a couple of hundred years.

“Let’s see this up close,” Gomez said.

Apaza zoomed in on the coordinates. The buildings had a grayish look. They were rectangular and built up several stories. It appeared as though some of the buildings went deep underground, as well.

People swarmed the entire area—walking, talking, sitting in some grassy areas. Gomez supposed she could ask Apaza to go even closer, but she didn’t.

“I guess the first thing we do,” Gomez said, “is figure out what business this is and how long it’s been on this location.”

“Already on it,” Apaza said.

“From the look of those buildings,” Simiaar said, “it’s been there longer than we would like.”

Gomez looked at her. Simiaar did not look back, which was not a good sign. Usually Simiaar winked at her or smiled or had some kind of snide comment.

This industrial park unnerved Simiaar as much as it was unnerving Gomez.

Gomez shifted slightly. She realized that her right hand had tightened so much on her left wrist that she had twisted the skin. She let go, brought her hands forward, and looked at her left wrist. The skin was an ugly red where her fingers had dug in.

Nothing on this trip had gone as she expected. She had left the Frontier, initially planning to travel alone. Then Simiaar had convinced her not to try this by herself. Simiaar had helped her find the
Green Dragon
.

It had been easy to retrofit a forensics lab into the ship—a good lab, equal to the one on the
Stanley
. The
Green Dragon
had been a science vessel for one of the human Frontier communities—one of the communities that had hidden away from the Alliance—so the ship had all kinds of features that weren’t common to Alliance ships.

The lab, the weapons system, even a small area in the cargo bay that changed environments independent of the rest of the ship, and could be locked up tightly. Apaza hadn’t known what it was for, but Gomez had, right from the start.

It was used to imprison or kidnap other species and relocate them.

She hadn’t removed it from the ship when it was retrofitted because she wasn’t sure if she would need to arrest someone.

She could still do that, even though she had taken a leave of absence from her job. She was still Marshal Judita Gomez, a fact she had yet to play up on this trip.

“We’re looking at a licensed cloning facility,” Apaza said. “It’s been on this site for at least two hundred years.”

Simiaar looked over her shoulder at Gomez. Simiaar’s brown eyes seemed even darker than usual. Was she frightened? Simiaar had expressed her concern about this mission from the very start.

And this mission had started—even though they hadn’t known it at the time—nearly sixteen years ago.

With a bunch of clones.

“What does
licensed cloning facility
mean, exactly?” Simiaar asked.

“I don’t know exactly,” Apaza said. “I assume it means that if you want to clone yourself, you’d go here and get the clone made. It seems strange though. There’s more to this facility than just growing clones.”

Gomez was noticing that too. There seemed to be too many buildings for someone to simply create clones and have them removed when they had reached term. People took babies out of cloning facilities all the time.

“Are there fast-grow clones here?” she asked Apaza.

Fast-grow clones grew to full size in hours or days. They had severely diminished mental capacity, however, and were usually used for one kind of job, something that would often end in the clone’s death. And that was if the fast-grow clones actually had a job to do.

Many of them were fast-grown for medical research reasons, creating certain kinds of enhancements, for example, or seeing what effect new alien environments had on unprotected humans.

“I would assume so,” Apaza said, “but I see no evidence of it. I can search, but you didn’t want me to do anything that would attract their attention.”

“You’re right. I don’t want to attract their attention,” Gomez said. “But let’s not assume anything. Surely, you can easily access the history of this facility.”

“Well, no,” Apaza said. “That’s why I’m using the word ‘assume.’ Nothing is easy here.”

“Okay. I’m going to help.” Simiaar sank into a chair far from Apaza’s magic monstrosity. He had brought his own chair to the ship, and it did all kinds of things that Gomez believed chairs shouldn’t do.

Apaza shot a glance at Gomez, which she translated as
don’t let her, please
.

“What are you helping with?” Gomez asked, trying to keep her voice neutral.

“‘Licensed cloning facility,’” Simiaar said. “I want to see if all human cloning facilities in the Alliance are licensed.”

“Eh,” Apaza grunted, which meant he hadn’t thought of that. He was focusing on this facility. “Okay. Go for it.”

Simiaar called up a second screen. It had the forensic lab logo on it, so she was going through her private links, the ones she used to research things in the lab.

Gomez and Apaza had helped her set this up when they first got the ship. Gomez in particular worried that Simiaar would get so deep in her research that she would forget which network she was using and bring attention to the
Green Dragon
, which was the last thing they wanted.

“Yep,” Simiaar said. “Every cloning facility inside the Alliance—
human
cloning, which I assume this is—”

“It is,” Apaza said, without looking at her. He was doing something else. Both of them made Gomez feel useless.

“So…” Simiaar snapped her fingers in front of Apaza’s face. He started.

“Lashante,” Gomez said warningly.

“I need his attention,” Simiaar said.

“You had it already,” Apaza said, sounding annoyed.

“Was the first thing you got on this facility that it was licensed?” Simiaar asked, ignoring his reaction.

“Yes,” he said.

“Isn’t that weird?” she asked.

He lifted his hands from the virtual keyboard that he was using, and turned slightly in his chair. “Now that you mention it, yeah, that’s weird.”

“See why I’m helping?” Simiaar asked Gomez.

Gomez didn’t feel the need to answer. Instead, she was watching Apaza, who looked a little stunned.

“Why in the world would they trumpet that?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Gomez said quietly, “we should find out.”

TWENTY-SIX

NUUYOMA LOVED DOING
undercover work. He considered it one of the perks of his job. Or he used to. As acting marshal in charge, the regulations suggested he remain with the
Stanley
at all times.