Starbase Human (24 page)

And she loved it.

Now she was like the garden she planted every spring. Her roots had sunk deep into the rich loam that had kept generations of humans alive in this very spot for hundreds and hundreds of years.

She wiped the back of her hand over her eyes, felt the wet, and made herself take a deep breath.

Then she walked deeper into her yard and looked up.

As she had thought after Anniversary Day, her backyard was not the ideal place to gaze at the moon. The lights of the city were up tonight, which they hadn’t been when she went to Prospect Park six months before, unsettled because she had seen the clones that haunted her nightmares.

Only on Anniversary Day, those clones had been alive and entering the Moon’s main port in Armstrong, on their way to committing mass murder.

Just like they had done on
Starbase Human
, over thirty-five years ago.

She wrapped her robe even tighter and looked up again.

When she had stood in Prospect Park, the Moon had been full and the night sky clear. The damage to some of the domes had been visible to the naked eye.

On this night, gray clouds skated across the dark sky, threatening even more rain. The weather maps showed thunderstorms that would form over her house by six a.m., which was why she’d had the bots clip the grass.

The Moon was a fingernail, peeking through the clouds at the oddest moment. Even if the damage from the latest attack were visible, she wouldn’t have been able to see it, which was why she avoided Prospect Park this evening.

She had a hunch a crowd was gathering again.

The people of Earth—or maybe just the people of Davenport—loved their Moon.

She shivered in the humid air, her neck aching from looking up. She had told herself before she got ready for bed that she wouldn’t think about this new set of attacks.

It wasn’t human clones this time. This time, the clones were Peyti, and some news sources reported that they, too, were based on a mass murderer—although that hadn’t been confirmed yet.

The destruction was less, but there was a lot of collateral damage, and that was what she found herself thinking about, alone in her comfortable bed, window open. Wind shushing through the nearby trees usually lulled her to sleep. She liked the quiet here.

But every time she closed her eyes, she heard the stomp-stomp-stomp of boots overlaid with screams of her friends. She dozed off briefly and the screams became the screams of her children.

She wiped her eyes again.

She wanted to contact them. They were all grown now, with their own families, and their own schedules. She would probably wake them up if she contacted them—and what would she say? That the new attacks on the Moon brought back old memories—memories they didn’t even know about?

They had no idea their mom was a Disappeared. They knew she had grown up elsewhere and that her parents were dead, but that had just been part of their lives. Parent stuff. When they questioned her—and they all had—she gave vague answers or told them about going to school at the University of Iowa, how it had felt so different to study in a place that had existed for so long it seemed a part of the Earth itself.

Her children had accepted that.

They had no idea that she had been someone else.

They would feel betrayed when they learned it.

If they learned it.

She wiped her eyes again, wishing they would stop leaking, wishing to whatever god she could locate in the heavens—the made-up heavens—that she had been able to sleep this night. Really and truly sleep.

Because if she had slept, it would have meant that she had put the attacks away, had remained Pippa Landau, whom she had been for so much longer than she had been Takara Hamasaki.

In her life here, she had hardly ever thought of Takara Hamasaki.

Except when she named her children. She had told them she liked the names, but in truth, she had named them for the family she had lost. Takumi had her father’s name; Toshie her mother’s. And Tenkou was named for the brother she had lost before she had ever ventured to
Starbase Human
.

She had redefined the names so that she could redefine the memories. And, for the most part, it had worked. For more than thirty years, after her travels and her life settled down, she had lived as Pippa Landau.

Eventually, just like the woman in the Disappearance service had promised, Takara had
become
Pippa Landau. Or she thought she had.

But Takara’s memories were breaking through. The fears she had held at bay for decades were rising to the surface.

The clouds glided over the Moon. It peeked down at her like a sideways smile, as if it had a secret that she couldn’t know.

What if something she knew—something buried deep in her memories—would help the Moon?

Because if there had been a second attempt, there would be a third. And maybe a fourth.

Until they succeeded—whoever
they
were. Until they completely destroyed the Moon.

What if she could have saved the lives lost this day just by revealing herself?

What if she could save more lives?

She wiped at her eyes. She didn’t want to leave this life.

She didn’t want to reveal herself.

She didn’t want to be someone else.

Again.

THIRTY-THREE

THE SHUTTLE HAD
an encrypted, protected version of the same database that Nuuyoma had back on the
Stanley
. If anyone tried to hack into the shuttle’s database, it would destroy itself. It took layers and layers of security codes, DNA links, and other protections just to access the database.

The problem was that the database, just like the one on the
Stanley
, was almost a year old.

To get updated information, the
Stanley
would have to ping the Alliance, then schedule time for a data download. Updating the database was standard for FSS ships near the border, but those deep in the Frontier often didn’t update for months, sometimes years. It was risky, and often irrelevant.

Yes, that meant they missed some of the important Alliance news, but what seemed important inside the Alliance often wasn’t important outside the Alliance. Particularly when he and the crew were dealing with cultures that had never
heard
of the Alliance.

Nuuyoma decided to do his search on the old database inside his quarters. He had assigned some information to Verstraete, but she didn’t seem as willing as he was. He would search, then have her double-check his information.

His quarters on the shuttle were much smaller than the quarters he had on the
Stanley
. Yet in some ways, he preferred the room here. It was well designed, with a bed in one corner, a work table in another, and a state-of-the-art (well, as of last year) entertainment package that could make him believe he was in New Orleans getting laid if he felt so inclined. (He didn’t.)

He had been sitting so long that he decided to use a floating screen to get the information he needed. Normally, he would have used voice commands, but he still had that strange feeling that he might have been hacked. He didn’t even feel comfortable using the encrypted link because he felt that the link could be back-traced.

So he did things the old-fashioned way, tapping the holographic screen and occasionally calling up a floating keyboard. Typing things slowed him down, but he didn’t mind.

He walked and searched and grew in turns frustrated and relieved. Frustrated that he couldn’t find a lot of information on Takara Hamasaki, and relieved that he couldn’t at the same time.

After hours of searching, he found a lot of references to a young Takara Hamasaki. She’d had an old ship that had broken down a lot before she arrived at the first
Starbase Human
. She had stopped there for repairs, and hadn’t left.

Over the years she was on the starbase, she had worked her way into administration, so her name and her image were on thousands of reports and files. Her DNA, encrypted, was also on some files. He used his marshal’s identification to download the DNA comparison information.

There was no record of a Takara Hamasaki after
Starbase Human
exploded, except notations in some official records that she had probably died on the starbase, along with everyone else.

However, that ancient and dilapidated ship of hers turned up on sales records on the moon of a planet just inside the Frontier. The ship had broken down (again) and needed repair. Instead of paying for it, the owner had vanished, and the ship got scrapped for parts.

As much as Nuuyoma searched, he couldn’t find any more references to Takara Hamasaki. However, he found an internal border security notation that the DNA profile he had found matched a DNA profile of one Suzette Hamdi, who crossed the border into the Alliance shortly after Takara’s ship was abandoned.

Hamdi’s internal file showed she had gone to Raaala, a city just inside Alliance space. Raaala had just one claim to fame: it had more Disappearance services per square kilometer than any other human-centric city inside the Alliance.

Takara/Hamdi’s trail died right there. He could find no more information on her, no matter how hard he looked.

He waved the screen away and stopped walking for a moment. He sat on the edge of the bed and ran a hand through his hair.

Takara Hamasaki had escaped the Frontier and then had Disappeared. That seemed backwards. Most of the Disappeared he had known about or helped track down had either gone to the Frontier when they Disappeared or had gone to the edges of the Alliance.

Maybe his information—his personal experience—was very Frontier-oriented, given his job. He had to take that into account.

The fact remained, though, that someone with Takara’s DNA profile and with her ship had gone
back
to the Alliance, and then had vanished. She had gone to a place that had a mountain of Disappearance services.

But someone who used a decrepit ship like hers couldn’t afford a Disappearance service. He wondered how she had paid for it, if indeed, she had used one.

It might be another way to track her down. But he wasn’t going to search for her. He would wager that One Of One Direct did not have the information from inside the Alliance, because One Of One Direct wouldn’t have access to the border and DNA records. So, Nuuyoma could trade that little bit of information for whatever One Of One Direct was withholding.

That relieved Nuuyoma a little. Because he felt as if he wasn’t putting Takara in any danger.

Although, he knew, this information could enable One Of One Direct to hire a shady Retrieval Artist to find Takara.

If a Retrieval Artist existed this far out, and if one would work for someone who looked like One Of One Direct.

Nuuyoma sighed, then stood. He had one more task to complete before he had Verstraete retrace his steps.

He opened the floating screen again and started pacing, seeing if he could find information on designer criminal clones that looked like PierLuigi Frémont.
Old
information, stuff that predated Anniversary Day by decades.

He didn’t find anything. He wasn’t sure he expected to. Criminal activity, even high-end expensive activity, was hard to find through established networks. He wasn’t good enough to search criminal sites to see what he could find, nor did he want to.

He would see what One Of One Direct told him. And then Nuuyoma would send what he could find to Gomez. After that, Nuuyoma would consider this particular quixotic task complete.

He’d found something. He hoped that would be good enough.

It was all he could do.

THIRTY-FOUR

NO ONE GREETED
Gomez as her shuttle docked on the
Green Dragon
. Her interactions with the ship, from the moment she left Hétique, had all been automated.

At first, she hadn’t thought anything of it, but as she stepped out of the shuttle into the docking bay, she was stunned to find herself alone.

She had at least expected to see Simiaar. And no one was in the bay’s reception area at all.

The
Green Dragon
had three shuttles, all of them big enough for a crew of four if the crew were crowded into each other. Otherwise, the
Dragon
had to land in an official port, something that Gomez hadn’t wanted to do on this trip.

She had thought the shuttle practical, and it had felt that way, until she was faced with the emptiness of the docking bay.

The other shuttles were clamped into place. The lights were on low, as they always were when a shuttle came in to dock. Bots scurried to the side of the shuttle she had just left, securing it, and making certain that it had brought nothing on its hull.