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

  The ambassador wheezed. She glanced at Uzven in panic. Uzven was leaning back slightly, then it tapped the bottom of its breathing mask, as if it were trying to improve the flow of whatever it was that they breathed.

  “Do not worry,” Uzven said to her. “That is the sound of an Eaufasse laughing.”

  “Forgive me,” the ambassador said when it quit wheezing. “If your politicians are like ours, they do less anyway.”

  She smiled. “They are similar, then.”

  The ambassador wheezed again. “We shall do what we can together. What do you need from my clan?”

  She let out a small sigh, hoping it was inaudible. “If you have surveillance material of the dome, I would like to see it, particularly of the incident itself. You will not offend us if you do have such material. We expect it. Also, if I might meet the fourth person, the one who wants asylum. You may continue to protect him, but I would like to talk with him about the incident.”

  The ambassador’s arms dropped to its side. “You do not offend with your requests, although I am surprised that you approve of the surveillance. It heartens me, like our mutual jobs do.”

  She smiled. “It heartens me as well.”

  “We shall send you the materials within the hour,” the ambassador said. “As for the fourth, we shall talk with it. We shall encourage it to talk with you. But that is all we can do.”

  “I understand,” she said. “I do have one last request, however. Even if the fourth human won’t speak with me, I would like the name, the gender, and the place of origin, so that I might forward the information to the Earth Alliance. It will expedite the asylum proceedings.”

  “Will it?” Uzven asked.

  Damn translator. “Just translate,” Gomez said, just for him.

  Uzven did. Or at least, she hoped it did.

  “I shall have that information to you along with the surveillance materials,” the ambassador said. “And now, if you do not mind, I would like to ask you a personal question.”

  “I don’t mind.” She had learned over the years such questions were often the most interesting of any conversation in a first-, second-, or third-contact.

  “This is my first time working with humans,” the ambassador said. “Usually such matters are for a different clan.”

  “Yes,” she said, mostly so that it would continue.

  “I would like to ask if you are a separate gender than those in the enclave. Or are you in a different clan? Your appearance is quite different. I am told by my assistant that your entire team all looks quite different from what we expect.”

  “Humans are a diverse species,” she said. “I can better answer you after I have seen the person asking for asylum. Do you mind the wait?”

  “Not at all,” the ambassador said. “And please forgive the personal nature of the question.”

  “It’s quite all right,” she said. “I suspect I shall be asking difficult questions as well over the course of the next few days. Thank you for your candor and your assistance, Mr. Ambassador.”

  “Thank you,” the ambassador said, and severed the link.

  Uzven started to speak, but she held up a hand. Then she disassembled the screen so that it couldn’t be activated from the other side. She didn’t want the Eaufasse to listen in.

  “You acquitted yourself well for someone who is unfamiliar with the culture,” Uzven said.

  She hadn’t expected the compliment. “We’ll see,” she said. “This is only the first step. There’s a lot more ahead of us, and if experience is any guide, most of that will be filled with surprises.”

  She hoped the surprises would be pleasant ones, but experience also told her that such hopes were idle ones. She was in for a bumpy few days. The best she could do was avoid making an already strange situation worse.

  FOUR

  AS GOMEZ TURNED away from the screen, Lashante Simiaar poked her head out of a sealed-up corner of the large forensic area.

  “Suit up,” she said, “and come in here.”

  “Both of us?” Gomez asked, using her head to indicate Uzven.

  “Just you,” Simiaar said. “No offense, Uzven.”

  “I do not take offense at procedure,” Uzven said. “If I am not needed, I should like to leave so that I might settle into my quarters.”

  “You’re not needed at the moment,” Gomez said.

  Uzven nodded, adjusted its mask, and walked out of the room.

  Simiaar watched it go. “You’d think, given my job, I’d know that individuals are all different, that a species shouldn’t have an effect on me, but jeez, the Peyti.”

  “Maybe we’ve just met the wrong ones,” Gomez said.

  “Yeah, sure,” Simiaar said. “Get in here.”

  “Okay,” Gomez said, choosing not to express her surprise. In all the years they’d worked together, Simiaar had never ordered Gomez into the autopsy area. Gomez had often gone of her own accord, but she hadn’t been required to go in.

  She could do what so many others in her job did, and watch the holographic recording of the autopsy. All the mess without the smell. And sometimes she did that, particularly when Simiaar was pulling apart some alien to determine if it got killed by an Earth Alliance weapon.

  But usually she watched. As Simiaar once told her, the smells told as much as the body itself. Besides, if she had it to do all over again, Gomez probably would have gone into forensic pathology inside the FSS. A lot of alien contact, a lot of travel to distant worlds, and none of the difficult conversations with a species she didn’t understand.

  Simiaar handed her a pathology suit. Gomez slipped it on. It was different than the suits the marshals used to go planetside. This suit was a thin version of a biohazard suit, one that kept the icky stuff out while allowing her—or whomever—to do delicate work.

  She slipped the equally thin helmet over her face. It adhered to her skin, and would keep everything out—including smells.

  So the fact that she was wearing a suit meant the problem wasn’t scent-related. It was something else.

  Gomez slipped inside the autopsy area. The light was bright, with even more lights on the tables. Some of the lights were on, others were off. Simiaar’s workstation was also brightly lit, and there were petri dishes alongside filled slides alongside microchip dishes, all storing samples. She also saw vials of blood and other fluids.

  Simiaar was doing a full autopsy, using all the tools at her disposal, preserving tissue and fluids. Eventually, she would use nanoprobes to examine the interior of the bodies, but the probes changed the ecology of the bodies—anything inserted inside did that—so they were used last.

  Simiaar was wearing her suit too, but her helmet was off.

  “What’ve you got?” Gomez asked.

  “I was finding some very strange stuff,” Simiaar said, “so I decided on a holographic recreate. You need to see it. And before you ask, yes, I did double- and triple-check this.”

  She hit a button alongside her workstation, and the lights dimmed. Above the bodies, intact bodies appeared, reconstructed whole from DNA combined with the remains.

  The bodies belonged to young human males, not quite full grown, with very rare pale skin covered with equally rare light blond hair. They had long, athletic legs, well-formed torsos, and muscular arms. They also had the exact same face.

  Gomez frowned.

  “Triplets?” she asked, hoping that she was right.

  “Clones,” Simiaar said. “I checked the telomeres. Definitely clones.”

  Gomez walked around them. Clones, like twins, ended up looking slightly different from each other. No matter what they did, they ended up living different lives, and those lives had an impact on the skin.

  But these boys were too young to have lived through much, and besides, she was looking at a recreation, not at the actual faces themselves. The actual faces had decomposed into unrecognizability.

  “You checked the telomeres?” Gomez said, suddenly realizing that Simiaar had checked the D
NA, an unusual—if accurate—procedure for clones. “Does that mean there were no clone tags?”

  The Earth Alliance heavily regulated human clones after criminal syndicates used clones to take identity theft to a whole new level. All clones needed an obvious interior tag and a clone mark on the exterior of the skin, usually in a visible place like the back of the neck.

  “No tags,” Simiaar said. “Are you surprised, given how far we are from anywhere?”

  Gomez wasn’t surprised. Especially since the clones looked young. “They’re not fast-grow clones, are they?”

  Because that would show up in the telomeres. Telomeres were often shorter in clones, especially clones made from an adult original. However, if the clones were meant for a normal-length life, a lot of the cloning companies engineered longer telomeres. Fast-grow clones had strange, sometimes broken telomeres, usually caused by the fast-growth process.

  “They’re not fast-grow,” Simiaar said, “but their telomeres are pretty short. They were made from an older adult, and it seems to me that they were being groomed for something. Still, they are fully human—or at least, as human as a clone can be.”

  “Can you guess at their ages?” Gomez asked.

  “If these were girls, it would be easier,” Simiaar said. “With boys, it’s a bit harder to be precise, but I can tell you that they were still growing. They were probably in their mid-teens when they died, just a few years past the onset of puberty.”

  “Seventeen? Eighteen?” Gomez asked.

  “Sixteen at the oldest,” Simiaar said. “But I’d guess fourteen or fifteen.”

  Gomez let out a small breath. “The enclave has been here for sixteen years,” she said.

  Simiaar’s eyes met hers. “These clones weren’t made at any of the cloning companies, I can tell you that. Or at least, any of the ones associated with the Earth Alliance. Because if they were, they would have a tag, and if their telomeres had been repaired, those would have a tiny gold marker.”

  “The shorter telomeres couldn’t have another cause?” Gomez asked.

  Simiaar shook her head. “Not like this. Whoever made these clones was very careless about it. There are things that cloning companies do that ensure longer life and better health for clones. None of that was done here. In fact, some of the things I saw here could be considered serious mistakes.”

  “Serious how?” Gomez asked.

  “Well,” Simiaar said, “in human cultures outside of the Earth Alliance, clones get sold, but the person or companies selling the clones have to guarantee the clone’s health and the fact that it will have a ‘natural’ lifespan.”

  Gomez had heard about clone sales, but she had never encountered one. She was glad she’d been spared that part of the Frontier—at least so far.

  “So these clones weren’t made for selling?” Gomez asked.

  “I don’t know what they were for,” Simiaar said. “But I can tell you this. Whoever cloned them didn’t really care about them. Or only knew enough science to make a clone. They didn’t know much else.”

  “Enough science,” Gomez said. “What do you mean by that?”

  “It’s not as hard to clone someone as the companies make it sound,” Simiaar said. “I could do it with the technology in this room. You couldn’t, though. You don’t have the scientific skills.”

  “Such a vote of confidence,” Gomez said with a smile.

  “Well, you don’t have the training—”

  “It’s all right,” Gomez said. “I have to admit, though, that I’m surprised the process isn’t hard. So, could the clones have been made here, on Epriccom?”

  Simiaar’s lips pursed. “I don’t know how I could tell you that. There’s nothing in the science or the bodies that would show where the clones were made if they weren’t marked with some kind of company tag. It—”

  “That’s not what I’m asking, Lashante,” Gomez said. “I’m asking if the science is easy enough that some half-assed scientist could have run a lab in that enclave and made their own clones.”

  Simiaar let out small sigh. “You don’t ask easy questions, do you? You know I don’t like speculating.”

  “I’m not asking you if they did it,” Gomez said. “I’m asking you if they could.”

  Simiaar looked at the images of the intact bodies floating over the mess that the corpses had become.

  She sighed. “These poor boys got created somewhere, under pretty primitive conditions. Or at least, with an inept scientist who only knew how to clone, not how to make a clone anything more than viable.”

  “So,” Gomez said again, “the cloning could have happened on Epriccom in that enclave.”

  “Or on a ship on the way here or in a city a thousand light years away. I’m telling you, Judita, I don’t know and I have no way of finding out.”

  Gomez stared at the bodies just like Simiaar was doing. Gomez had never understood why clones were treated differently under the law. People could argue that everyone got made, just using different methods.

  But she knew that the laws she upheld—at least for now—made unlicensed cloning illegal.

  “But,” Gomez said, “you can’t rule out the fact that they could have been made here.”

  “Good grief, Judita. Are you sure you weren’t trained as a lawyer? Yes. Okay? I can’t rule it out. But this isn’t a damn court of law.” Simiaar ran a hand through her thick, curly hair.

  Gomez smiled at the backward compliment. Simiaar hated lawyers.

  “I know it’s not a court of law,” Gomez said. “Still, I thank you for your answer.”

  “You shouldn’t thank me,” Simiaar snapped. “Because if these clones were created here, we stumbled onto something both big and dangerous.”

  “I know,” Gomez said.

  “An illegal cloning operation could be worth millions,” Simiaar said.

  “I’m aware,” Gomez said.

  “And they’ll kill to defend it. Human life is cheap to people like that.”

  “I know that, too,” Gomez said. Simiaar was about to start a rant, so Gomez had to retake control of the conversation. “So, do you know how they died?”

  Simiaar sighed. She ran a hand across her mouth and then studied those intact images. The boys almost looked angelic. The imagery certainly seemed unreal, particularly considering the destroyed bodies below.

  “There’s a lot of damage here because of the decomposition,” Simiaar said, “plus I’m not sure how those branches work, exactly, but they had some effect on the bodies.”

  “Enough that you can’t say how the boys died?” Gomez asked.

  “I’ll have to run tests with some organic specimens that I grow,” Simiaar said. “You wouldn’t, by chance, be able to get some information from the Eaufasse on those plants?”

  “I can barely understand the Eaufasse when they’re giving me walking directions, and I’m pretty sure the Eaufasse have a similar problem with me.”

  “It didn’t sound that way with the Peyti,” Simiaar said.

  “If it’s translating things correcting,” Gomez said.

  “You have doubts?” Simiaar asked.

  Gomez didn’t answer. She raised her eyebrows, just so that she could claim that she had said nothing bad about the Peyti.

  “I know you don’t like to speculate,” Gomez said, fending off that argument again. “But, the plants aside, what can you tell me about the bodies?”

  “I can tell you what I don’t like,” Simiaar said. “I don’t like the age of these boys. They’re too young to die of natural causes, even for clones, and they shouldn’t have died in a group.”

  Gomez nodded. She agreed with that.

  “I don’t like the fact that the shirts I pulled off them had laser burns in the back. I don’t like the fact that the skin on their backs have laser burns as well. A cursory glance of their internal organs, particularly their hearts, show more laser burning.”

  “A laser pistol?” Gomez asked.

  “A laser rifle, gi
ven the power of the shot or shots,” Simiaar said. “But I don’t know. I’m just telling you what I see and what I don’t like.”

  “And the laser pattern looks familiar to you?” Gomez asked. “It’s not something that the Eaufasse use?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Simiaar said. “This culture is as new to me as it is to you.”

  “I mean—”

  “I know what you mean. And here’s my answer. The laser burns are consistent with human weapons. That doesn’t mean they’re inconsistent with Eaufasse weapons or that they might come from some weird laser source that I don’t know about. I’m just telling you what I don’t like.”

  Which was, apparently, different from speculating. Gomez didn’t understand the distinction, but she appreciated the fact that Simiaar made such a distinction.

  “What else can you tell me?” Gomez asked.

  “Nothing,” Simiaar said. “My likes and dislikes are accounted for. Now I need to get my hands dirty, do some real science, and then go through the DNA database to see if the source of these clones is registered somewhere.”

  Gomez had never heard of such a thing. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because home-grown clones like these usually come from megalomaniacs who don’t believe one of themselves is enough to satisfy the universe. They need to create more of themselves in their own image to satisfy their God complex.”

  For a moment, Gomez thought Simiaar was joking. Then she realized that Simiaar wasn’t joking at all.

  “You think that person might be in the enclave?” Gomez asked.

  “I think that person might be identifiable,” Simiaar said. “That’s all. Now, get out. I have work to do.”

  Gomez didn’t need to be told again. She left the forensics lab with more to think about than she had ever expected. Simiaar told her a lot without saying anything. And Simiaar’s opinion coincided with what the Eaufasse said. A group from inside the enclave chased these boys into the clearing and killed them.

  So why had one lived? Had he lived as a warning? If so, why was he outside the enclave instead of inside?

  That surviving kid would have answers that Simiaar was just guessing at.