Starbase Human (18 page)

“Not family,” the man said softly. “And, truthfully, not really friends. People I knew.”

Verstraete nodded. “When so many died, it would be—”

“You know what happened on the Moon?” the man asked, turning his chair so that his back was to Verstraete. He was cutting her out of the conversation entirely.

You okay with him talking just to you?
She sent.

Yeah.
Record it if you can
, Nuuyoma sent back.

“Which moon?” Nuuyoma asked.

“Earth’s,” the man said.

Nuuyoma shook his head. “I don’t care about the Alliance.”

“Hmm,” the man said. Something in his tone put Nuuyoma on guard. Had the man figured out who they were?

The man sighed. “You’ve heard of designer criminal clones?”

Nuuyoma frowned. He hadn’t expected the man to discuss clones, not this soon in the conversation.

“Yes,” Nuuyoma said. “I’m not sure how that relates.”

The first waiter slammed down a plate of pakora. The individual pieces were oddly shaped, which meant it had been made from scratch using what looked like cabbage as its main ingredient. The waiter also set down a bowl of tamarind chutney that seemed as pretty and fresh as the fruit on Verstraete’s meal.

The waiter moved on without speaking.

The man touched one of the pieces, then moved his hand back as if the fried exterior was too hot.

He pushed the plate away. The food was steaming.

“Clones attacked the Earth’s Moon several months ago,” he said. “They blew it up the way that they blew up the old starbase.”

Nuuyoma blinked. He didn’t have to work hard to be surprised. He was surprised that a man who was clearly a clone of PierLuigi Frémont was sitting across from him, telling him that clones had blown up the Moon.

He would have thought the man would want to hide that.

“Clones,” Nuuyoma said, as he processed what he heard. “Blew up the starbase.”

The man nodded. “It was accidental. They weren’t supposed to destroy the starbase. They were supposed to destroy a part of the starbase.”

“You know this how?” Nuuyoma asked.

The man smiled. He slid the chutney toward him, then put a hand over the pakora. He looked at his food as if it were more interesting than Nuuyoma.

“I knew about the planning sessions,” the man said.

“Were you a part of them?” Nuuyoma asked before he could stop himself. That was a marshal question, not an I-lost-my-father question. But the man didn’t seem to notice or perhaps he didn’t care.

“In the beginning,” the man said. “Before they decided to use fast-grow clones.”

“I thought designer clones were created for a particular job,” Nuuyoma said. “You’re saying—?”

“What I’m telling you doesn’t contradict that,” the man said. “The job was supposed to be simple: take over the starbase, destroy one small part of it, and keep the people in charge out of the way.”

Nuuyoma frowned. He suddenly hated his undercover role. He would ask different questions as a marshal than he could ask now.

So he settled for “What happened?”

“As near as I can tell,” the man said, “they did exactly what they were told. They just didn’t do it smartly, because they weren’t smart. They were fast-grow. They had the brains of children.”

“With augmented programming, I assume,” Nuuyoma said. “I mean, children can’t—”

“Yes, augmented programming. But augmented programming doesn’t give anyone the ability to reason.” The man actually sounded irritated. He pulled his plate closer and picked up one piece gingerly with his thumb and forefinger. He bit the edge of the piece, then nodded as if he approved, and dipped it in the chutney.

“I’m still confused,” Nuuyoma said. “You’re saying they were wrong for the job, but they did the job.”

“I’m saying that they kept the authorities out of the way by killing them, not by holding them under threat. Then they planted the bombs too close to the jury-rigged physical plant, which then set off some chain-reaction explosions.”

“You know this for certain?” Nuuyoma asked. He sounded suspicious. He
was
suspicious. He suspected he would have been suspicious even if he had been searching for information on his father.

“Yes, I do,” the man said.

“Because you were there,” Nuuyoma said flatly.

The man shook his head. “Because I got a message from my cohorts, saying I should join them in blame.”

“Blame?” Nuuyoma asked. “For killing so many people?”

He didn’t have to fake the indignation. He felt it.

“For screwing up the mission. We—they—believed it would work with fast-grow. I did not.”

“What was the mission?” Nuuyoma asked. “What got my father killed?”

The man popped another piece into his mouth. Then he smiled. “What was the mission?” he repeated.

Something in his tone made Nuuyoma’s heart pound. The man didn’t ask the one question he’d been expecting:
Who was your father?

Maybe the man didn’t need it. Nuuyoma had a name of someone from the Alliance who had disappeared in this part of the Frontier about the same time, and he was pretending that the name belonged to his father. He had used that name throughout the station.

Maybe this man had heard it.

He certainly had known that Nuuyoma was looking for information on his father’s death.

“The mission was pretty simple,” the man said. “There was a black market trading off the Mercado in that part of the base. The market made a lot of money in the kind of goods that, well, aren’t really goods. More like services. Things the Alliance would frown on.”

“You’re being deliberately vague,” Nuuyoma said.

“Indeed.” The man ate another piece, his fingers dark red with chutney sauce.

Nuuyoma’s meal had cooled and congealed. He no longer felt the urge to eat any of it. Verstraete had finished her food, however, since she couldn’t participate in the conversation.

“All you need to know is that some places out here still use items for currency,” the man said. “Things you can’t find on a network or in links. Actual physical items. And there were a lot of them on the base at the time.”

“It was a theft gone wrong?” Nuuyoma asked.

Seriously?
Verstraete sent him, as if she couldn’t contain herself.

“It was,” the man said. “And considering how much money had been invested in those clones, you can do the math. Figure out that entire mission probably cost ten percent of the take, maybe less. Or would have, if it had succeeded.”

Nuuyoma sucked in air. He was stunned. He hadn’t thought of the reason for the explosions at all. “And you were part of this?”

And the man was so casually admitting it? That stunned Nuuyoma, too.

“In the beginning,” the man said. “Before the fast-grows. I thought they were a mistake.”

Ask him how they would have pulled off the theft without them,
Verstraete sent.

“You blame the fast-grows for everything that went wrong,” Nuuyoma said.

“I blame my cohorts,” the man said. “They thought it would be easy. It wasn’t, and it killed them.”

“They were on the base, too?” Nuuyoma asked.

“They were supervising, until things went wrong,” the man said. “Then they tried to get off the base. They contacted me from their ship. Apparently it blew up on the docking ring.”

“Apparently?” Nuuyoma asked.

The man nodded. “There are rumors that they made it out, and then their ship exploded.”

“Rumors,” Verstraete said, probably because she couldn’t stay quiet. “No one knows?”

The man let out a small snide laugh. “This place is very far from anything. For things to be observed, someone has to be around to observe them.”

“It just seems to me that you’re working on some conjecture here,” Verstraete said.

The man moved his chair so that he could see her.

“Here’s what I know,” he said, his words sharp and short, but also soft. “I know that you are both with the Earth Alliance’s Frontier Security Service. I know you’re searching for answers to the Moon bombing, and I know I have some of those answers. I think we can trade.”

Nuuyoma let out a small breath. Had they made mistakes? Probably. He didn’t know enough about this sector to know if they had missed something in their prep. Or maybe the base had such fantastic security, they could see through the fake identification he had given the ship.

“Trade what?” Nuuyoma asked.

“My information for the whereabouts of one person,” the man said.

“We don’t do things like that,” Verstraete said.

Nuuyoma held up a hand. The FSS did a lot of things—Gomez used to do a lot of things—that weren’t always regulation.

“Let’s talk,” he said to the old man, “and I’ll see what I can do.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

DESPITE WHAT SHE
let the others believe, Gomez was good at research as well. She had planned to do a lot of the work on this trip alone, before Apaza and Simiaar had joined her.

“Found the company’s name yet?” she asked Apaza.

“It…no.” He was looking at a floating screen. “I know what it used to be, not what it is.”

Gomez nodded. “Let me try something.”

She sat down in front of three non-networked computers in the room. Apaza had initially wanted them in different rooms, away from the networked computers, but the
Green Dragon
didn’t have the space for that.

He had a non-networked computer in his tiny room down in the crew quarters—a room he really wasn’t using.

Gomez had a non-networked system in her captain’s suite, and none of the computers in Simiaar’s actual lab were networked, although the one in the entrance to the lab was.

Apaza called these three non-networked systems the half-networked computers, because he claimed that he could access them through a networked system easily.

But you’d have to know they existed to do that
, Simiaar had said to him back when the systems were set up.

There is that
, he had replied.

So we don’t discuss it at all,
Simiaar had said.
Problem solved
.

Gomez never thought that really solved the problem, but it was a good half measure, and one she was taking advantage of now.

She called up one of Apaza’s virtual keyboards—he thought they were safer than an actual keyboard. Simiaar didn’t, which was why the ship carried both—and sat down in a nearby chair.

Gomez entered one of the many databases the group had downloaded before they left on this trip. She had downloaded this database herself, because she had been the only one of the three of them who had access to it.

She entered the coordinates and leaned back as the floating screen vanished for several seconds. With this database, nothing showed on that screen until the requested information showed up.

“ ‘Licensed cloning facility!’ ” Simiaar sounded triumphant. “In this context, it meant a facility that the government uses to create its own clones.”

“Why would the government need clones?” Apaza asked.

Gomez didn’t answer him. He didn’t have the clearance to know. And then she smiled at herself. He didn’t have any clearance any more. Both she and Simiaar had taken leaves of absence, but he had quit outright.

“Product testing,” Simiaar said tightly. “A lot of them work tough jobs that need human involvement, but no one wants to risk original humans.”

“Like what?” Apaza asked.

“Some types of mining. Agriculture in some rather dangerous environments.” Simiaar shrugged. Gomez knew that movement well. It meant that Simiaar did not approve of what she was discussing, but she wasn’t going to say that aloud.

“I thought that’s what androids were for,” Apaza said.

“No matter how hard we try,” Gomez said, “we can’t get artificial intelligence to work exactly like human intelligence.”

“And why try,” Simiaar said rhetorically, “when we have easily available and cheap clones who do think like humans, even though they’re not human.”

“But they are,” Apaza said. “They’re—”

“Don’t sell me on this one,” Simiaar said. “I don’t make the rules.”

Gomez was glad Simiaar had shut down the discussion. They’d had it before. Simiaar hated the fact that the Earth Alliance did not consider human clones to be actual human beings. Those laws were an outgrowth of ancient practices within the Alliance, an excuse to get work done without recordable loss of “human” life.

“So,” Apaza said, “this is a government cloning facility. Does anyone else find that weird?”

Gomez didn’t answer him. She was already deep inside her database. The facility no longer had a name. It had a number. There were hundreds of these facilities scattered throughout the Alliance, and that was fewer than the amount there had been when the Alliance was newer and smaller.