A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel Read online

  The Eaufasse let out a small peep and scrambled after them, using its long limbs to pull itself through the branches. The branches would swing it forward just a bit until finally it arrived at Gomez’s side.

  Wait. Please. Me lead. The translator said for it.

  It’s okay, Gomez sent. I have a map.

  No, no. The Eaufasse sounded distressed. Could Eaufasse sound distressed? Or was she anthropomorphizing again? Colleagues yours. Know not. Secret us.

  Okay, she sent. I didn’t understand that. Try again.

  Colleagues yours. Think secret. Yes?

  She sighed. She still didn’t understand it.

  “I think it’s saying that the enclave has no idea that the Eaufasse know anything about them,” Washington said, sounding tired. Or maybe he was overwhelmed. This was already shaping up into something bigger than either of them wanted it to be.

  Is that correct? Gomez sent. Do the humans know you are watching them?

  Humans know not us, the translator sent back. We want not humans know.

  That one she got. They didn’t want the humans to know that they had discovered the enclave. Which begged the question: how did the enclave get here without the Eaufasse knowing?

  But Gomez wasn’t going to ask. She wouldn’t get an answer she understood anyway. She’d leave it to the diplomats, whom she was going to have to send for, given the three bodies.

  I won’t reveal your location, Gomez sent. I don’t want the enclave to know about us either.

  At least, not right now. Not when there were only two marshals standing here and an unknown number of people in the enclave.

  I just want to see the property, Gomez sent. And in case they didn’t understand that, she added, I want to know how big it is.

  One hundred, the translator answered.

  She hoped to hell that was 100 humans and not 100 buildings. But she didn’t ask that question either. All would be answered soon enough. She simply sent a thank you and kept going.

  The weird underbrush was thinning. She recognized this area. It took her back to the trail carved into the wilderness—or what she thought of as wilderness. She could cut across the trail and head directly to the enclave, or she could backtrack, and take a much larger trail that had forked from this one a click back.

  She was about to take the long route when the Eaufasse peeped at her again. It made that same gesture with its arm (at least she thought of it as an arm), the gesture she had thought of as Come on.

  Maybe that was actually what it meant.

  If we stay off the trail, she sent to the translator, are we in danger of walking in protected areas?

  That was probably too complicated for them, Washington sent her on their private link.

  There was no answer, at least not immediately.

  Of course. Permission. Walk you want. Okay.

  “Or maybe not,” Washington muttered, just loud enough for her to hear.

  She smiled. They continued. As long as she had permission on the record—or something she understood to be permission—she was going to take the easier route.

  The land was hilly here, with more thick underbrush. The Eaufasse would touch branches as it went by, probably wishing it could pull itself along with them like it had before. It would lose Gomez and Washington quickly if it did that.

  As rough as the terrain was, the distance they had to cover was relatively short. They reached a hill. The hill wasn’t that high, but the hillside was steep.

  Down, down, the translator sent.

  Gomez and Washington looked down, seeing nothing but ground cover. But the Eaufasse with them made that Come on gesture again, only its head was pointed toward the top of the hill.

  Then it fell on its—stomach? front? Gomez wasn’t certain what to call that part of its anatomy—and started pulling itself through the underbrush. So that was what the translator meant by down.

  You gotta be kidding me, Washington sent her.

  Something wrong? Rainger sent.

  Not with us, Gomez sent. Collection there yet?

  They say they’re an hour out, Rainger sent. I can join you.

  We’re okay, she sent again.

  Except for this stupid obstacle course, Washington sent, then promptly fell on his belly. It wasn’t like they hadn’t done this in training. They’d pull themselves forward by their elbows or their gun barrels or their knives, sometimes for hours.

  But Washington was a lot closer to that training than Gomez was. She hadn’t done this in nearly a decade. Plus she didn’t know what this ground, and this ground cover, was composed of.

  Still, she flopped down and pulled herself forward, using the branches. They actually moved with her, and she wondered if they were some kind of creature. She remembered that feeling she had earlier, that they had clawed at her boots. She wasn’t sure if they were physically pulling her forward now.

  The movement through the underbrush was a lot more quiet than she expected it to be. She could barely hear the rustle of Washington and the Eaufasse ahead of her. It took almost no time to reach the crest of the hill.

  The branches formed a web in front of her, but she could see through the openings. She could have sworn that the branches weren’t in that position when she had started up the hill, but she didn’t say anything. She’d seen too many strange things throughout her career to doubt her impressions now.

  She moved just a little closer to the edge. Washington was at her left, the Eaufasse was at her right. It almost flattened against the ground, looking like a pile of branches all by itself. The perfect camouflage.

  She blinked a high-powered scope over her right eye. For the moment, she kept her left open. The red lines of the map converged before her, but she didn’t need them.

  The enclave looked like an eyesore against the landscape. Gray buildings, made with that weird self-grow permaplastic that colonists often used, rose from the underbrush like rectangular rocks.

  She blinked the map away, and closed her left eye, letting the scope in her right eye magnify even further.

  Seven buildings, six in a circle around a large main building of some kind. The underbrush had been destroyed here, and it looked like there was some kind of dome or force field around the enclave itself. The underbrush ended several meters away from the first two buildings.

  The enclave looked like it had been here for a long time.

  Do you have any idea what they do here? she sent to the translator.

  No, it answered.

  How long has this enclave been here? she asked.

  Unknown. Long time. Guess.

  That was clear enough. The fact that the enclave had been here a while complicated matters although not with the Earth Alliance. Earth Alliance law was clear on this point. In a Territory, Earth Alliance enclaves were guests at the whim of their hosts. If a guest offended its host, the guest had to leave, no matter how much it had invested or how long it had been there.

  The problem wasn’t the law. The problem was enforcing the law.

  And that was the saga of her entire career.

  She deactivated the scope and glanced at Washington. He looked at her, and she could see on his face the same frustration that she felt.

  They were going to have to monitor these bastards, maybe for months, while they waited for the Earth Alliance Military Guard to arrive. Then it would take a small-scale war to get these idiots out of here. After, of course, someone—probably her—tried to talk them into leaving voluntarily.

  The diplomats got the easy job in these situations. The diplomats got to talk to the locals who barely understood Standard and who probably didn’t understand Earth Alliance customs at all.

  She was going to have to talk with the humans who had been here for years, humans who didn’t want to be found, humans who were probably doing something they believed to be ideologically pure or economically beneficial. Humans who would probably go to war—either for their beliefs or their fortune.

  And she wasn’t su
re which one was worse.

  Because they would both cost her months of her life—and, if she wasn’t careful, her life itself.

  Then she smiled to herself, keeping her head down. Moments like this were the reason she loved this job.

  She glanced at Washington again. He was looking at the enclave with great concentration, probably through a scope of his own.

  We need to set up surveillance, something as modern as we have, so that their monitors won’t find it right away, she sent to him. And we’ll do something from orbit, of course.

  And maybe, if the diplomats did their job and got permission from the Eaufasse, they could fly little bug-like cameras around the enclave itself.

  She was tempted to go down to the edge of the enclave and see if someone would let her in. But if they didn’t—or even if they did—she would tip her hand. The enclave would know that the Eaufasse were aware of them, and would know that the Eaufasse had contacted the FSS.

  She glanced at the Eaufasse. It looked like part of the ground cover. She’d never seen such effective camouflage. Only the glistening of its eyes and the fact that she knew it was there let her see it at all.

  Let’s go, she sent, and wondered how the hell they were going to back their way out of this mess. And by that, she meant both the branch ground cover, and the situation here on Epriccom.

  THREE

  GOMEZ’S SHIP, THE EAFS Stanley, was one of the flagships in the FSS fleet. The ship had all of the bells and whistles the squad could ask for, from the latest weapons systems to the best forensic labs to several prisoner wings. Not to mention an entire section designed for non-standard passengers.

  She had set up the non-standard section to Peyti normal. But she was less concerned with the non-standard section than she was with the forensic lab. She wanted to find out what the heck was going on with these corpses and why they caused the Emir to send for the FSS in the first place.

  The bodies had proven difficult to move. It had taken nearly 24 hours to remove them from their resting place in the clearing and get them to the orbiting ship. Several of the branches had worked their way into the corpses and had to be dislodged. Of course, no one wanted to do that without the Eaufasse’s permission, and no one quite knew how to ask for it.

  Plus no one knew if it was possible to carry bodies out of the place where they had died. If this were a Disty-run area, the problems would be extreme. The Disty believed that bodies contaminated everything, and had elaborate rituals for dealing with them.

  The Eaufasse didn’t seem to have problems with bodies, but the translations weren’t really clear on anything. Gomez was guessing, and sometimes not even guessing on much evidence.

  She had managed to retrieve the bodies with her own squad, feeling uncomfortable the entire time. At least the shuttle landing points had been safe.

  One of the first things the Alliance did with any Territory was negotiate landing points. The Eaufasse had a space traffic system, but no real port—not in the way that the Alliance thought of ports, anyway—so some diplomat somewhere had negotiated landing areas.

  Gomez’s team had used the one closest to the bodies for picking up the bodies. After she had done what negotiations she could, given the limitations of the language, she had assigned Rainger and the collection team the task of bagging and carrying the bodies back to the shuttle.

  She had had more important things to negotiate: She needed to coordinate everything, from the diplomats to the arrival of the Earth Alliance Military Guards. She also needed someone who spoke both Standard and the Eaufasse’s language well. Fortunately, that person wasn’t too far away.

  Unfortunately, that person wasn’t really a person at all.

  That person was Peyti, which was why she had set the non-standard section to Peyti normal. The Peyti had arrived quickly.

  Its name was Uzven. She had no idea what its gender was. The Peyti were unusually reticent about gender. It was considered offensive to ask. The names certainly didn’t give a clue either.

  She wasn’t a big fan of the Peyti, but she had to work with Uzven because there was no diplomatic unit anywhere near Epriccom. And she wasn’t going to let the Earth Alliance Military Guards anywhere near Epriccom until she had diplomats and translators in place.

  Which meant that she was on her own until she figured out what was going on here. She preferred it that way. Her experience had taught her that most things could be resolved with very little work, as long as the parties involved understood each other.

  The first thing she had to understand was what happened to those corpses. And the first step toward figuring that out was determining what killed them. She knew no one better than Lashante Simiaar, the best forensic director in the entire FSS.

  Simiaar ran the forensic lab on the EAFS Stanley. The lab was the most important part of the ship. In fact, a well-stocked forensic lab had become one of the most important parts of all FSS ships. Often the problems that marshals ran into could be resolved with the right kind of forensic analysis. Or they could at least be understood.

  Uzven, the Peyti, was in the forensic lab, along with Simiaar. As Gomez entered the lab, she smiled at the two of them standing side by side, watching the last of the corpse removal on a gigantic flat screen. Uzven wore a human-style business suit, which had the effect of making it look like a child wearing its parents clothing.

  The illusion wasn’t helped by Simiaar’s presence. She looked large next to the Peyti. She was a tall, broad woman with extra flesh that held a surprising amount of muscle. She could lift and move and carry better than almost anyone on the team, but she was no good in a fight, and she probably hadn’t run anywhere in the past fifteen years.

  “What a mess,” she said to Gomez without looking at her.

  “Yeah,” Gomez said, knowing that neither of them was referring to the corpses. Both women knew that something was amiss here, something they didn’t understand yet. “May I borrow Uzven now?”

  Uzven looked at her. It looked like every other Peyti she’d ever known. It wore a mask over its face, because it couldn’t breathe oxygen. Its eyes were huge, but the rest of it looked like it could easily fall into pieces.

  The Peyti were fragile, and they tired easily. Plus, Gomez didn’t like them on principle. Most of them had gone into the legal side of the Alliance justice system, and a startling number of Peyti had become defense attorneys.

  She wasn’t fond of defense attorneys. Every time she had had to testify about something they made her seem stupid.

  She expected no less from a Peyti translator, since it did have the upper hand. After all, it knew the Eaufasse language, and she did not.

  Simiaar sighed. “I guess you can borrow Uzven. But when those corpses get in here, I’m going to need Uzven back. I don’t know what they got contaminated with, and so I need to ask the Eaufasse a lot of questions.”

  Simiaar had already set up part of the forensic wing as a quarantined area, just in case the dead had contracted something or been infected with something that wasn’t obvious to the collection team.

  Gomez beckoned Uzven to move with her to a different part of the lab. Gomez wanted to keep Uzven here in case Collection had more questions for it.

  Uzven walked beside her on its spindly legs. It hadn’t said more than a handful of words to her since its arrival. She didn’t know if it was naturally reticent or if it disapproved of the Stanley’s presence here.

  “First,” Gomez said, “I assume you understand the Eaufasse culture since you speak their language. Maybe you can answer a question for me.”

  Uzven put two fingers against the breathing mask that covered the lower part of its face. It adjusted the mask as if the mask were uncomfortable, then said, “The assumption isn’t a good one. We have just begun to understand the Eaufasse. Our language is more compatible with theirs than yours is. That is why I am somewhat fluent.”

  “Somewhat fluent?” Gomez didn’t like the sound of that. She had asked for someone fluent.r />
  “I am as fluent as anyone in the Earth Alliance,” Uzven said. “But that is not saying much. I understand quite a bit of Fasse, the Eaufasse language, but I do not have much jargon for technical details.”

  “Like murder?”

  “Death is a universal,” Uzven said. “However, I am not entirely sure of what constitutes murder to the Eaufasse. Not that it matters here. We do not have Eaufasse corpses. We have human ones. I will keep the discussion focused on the human side of things as much as I can.”

  “I don’t want you to make unilateral decisions,” Gomez said. “If I have a question that needs an answer, I expect you to ask it. And if you cannot get an answer from the Eaufasse, I don’t want you trying to find a way to force one. I want to know that they didn’t answer my question. This isn’t a court of law, so I don’t necessarily need something on the record. I need information, and if we can’t get that information without a cadre of diplomats working the case, then I need to know that as well.”

  “I understand,” Uzven said. “I am at your service.”

  Gomez thought she heard sarcasm. It wouldn’t surprise her. Peyti always thought themselves superior to humans. Working with a human boss had to be difficult for a Peyti. But Uzven had signed up to work with the Earth Alliance, so it didn’t get to choose who its boss was on any particular job.

  “We will be speaking to my initial contact with the Eaufasse,” Gomez said. “If we need to speak to someone of higher rank or with different knowledge, then we’ll do that.”

  Uzven nodded, always a strange movement from a Peyti. The mask didn’t really bend, so the head moved without any mask movement.

  With Uzven’s help, Gomez contacted the Eaufasse. She did not have this conversation through an audio-only link, but used both audio and visual, so that the Eaufasse could examine her body movements. She didn’t move a lot, though, just in case some movement might be offensive.

  Still, the Eaufasse had had interactions with humans before, so they were somewhat familiar with the way that humans did things. She stood as casually as she could when she began the conversation.