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

  Gomez had to figure out the legalities. She had no idea if she could interview someone who requested asylum from humans. She wasn’t even sure if “asylum from humans” was a proper request.

  She headed back to her cabin to contact whatever idiot lawyer FSS managed to have on call.

  FIVE

  THE IDIOT LAWYER hovering on the other side of the table in Gomez’s office was older than she expected, and not as vain as some people his age. His holographic image shimmered, either as a result of the extreme encryption necessary to have this conversation or because of the distance between them. He was chubby, stuffed in a cheap suit, and had no obvious enhancements. His fleshy face showed signs of exhaustion.

  She saw none of that as a good sign. If the idiot lawyer wasn’t fresh out of law school and working in the prosecutor’s office as a junior attorney attached to the FSS, then he was most likely a lifer who had given up on any ambitions or creativity long ago. Or he was a supervisor.

  She was praying for supervisor.

  In fact, she was going to be blunt about a supervisor.

  Before she even said hello, she said, “No offense, but I need a ranking prosecutor who has worked on Frontier issues his entire career. Are you that person?”

  To her surprise, he smiled slowly and it softened his features. “And if I said I was and I was lying, do you have a way to check?”

  She did. She had hundreds of databases at her fingertips in this office attached to her private suite. Some of those databases were what she liked to call extra-legal. Others were sanctioned.

  The only problem she had was that the official FSS database she carried was about a year old. She hadn’t updated in a long time, because her secure connections out here on the Frontier were as good as the one she had with him.

  Which was to say, unreliable at best.

  But she didn’t want to look him up. She’d have to terminate the conversation, investigate, and then request him (or not) when she contacted the judicial branch attached to the FSS a second time.

  “So this is the kind of conversation we’re going to have?” she asked him. “Defensive and territorial? Because I’ve got big issues here, and I want someone not just experienced, but experienced with clout.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Name, position, and for God’s sake, tell me if you can help me, because if you can’t, I’m going to find someone who can,” she snapped.

  He grinned. “Your reputation precedes you, Marshal. You never call in for legal help. You know more about the Frontier and its legal issues than most lifers here ever will. So when you pinged us, we knew it was important, and you got me.”

  She wanted to ask, So I should be impressed? but she didn’t. Instead, she waited. Waiting had become part of her arsenal over her years as a marshal. Waiting protected her from blurting something stupid to an intelligent species she didn’t understand; waiting helped her discover many crimes because humans generally couldn’t remain silent; waiting made her seem mysterious and strong when, in reality, she was often just plain cautious.

  The caution was why she was good at her job.

  He tilted his head and gave her a half-smile, as if he were acknowledging that she had just won this part of the conversation.

  “I’m Frank Mishra,” he said. “I’m one of the chief litigators for the FSS. I’m also linked at the moment to one of our best legal researchers, just in case you have an issue we haven’t heard of before.”

  So they really were worried about the issue she was bringing up. The respect surprised her. She hadn’t experienced it in her early years with FSS, and after those early years, she hadn’t really needed the judicial branch.

  She’d made sure of that. She had hated dealing with officious bastards.

  “All right,” she said, making sure her tone wasn’t quite as abrupt as it had been. She folded her hands on the tabletop and watched his chubby image flicker. “Let me explain my issue. I have a young man who survived an attack by humans in his own enclave. He has asked the Eaufasse for asylum. But his request was not for asylum from the Earth Alliance, but asylum ‘from humans.’ Realize that I got all of this from the Eaufasse through a Peyti translator, and that the Eaufasse do not know there are humans outside of the Earth Alliance. I’m not even certain that the word ‘asylum’ is the Eaufasse’s or the Peyti’s. But I do know if I do something wrong here, we will have repercussions for years.”

  Mishra ran a hand over his mouth. He tapped the table in front of him, so that it looked like his holographic image tapped the table Gomez’s arms were resting on. Only her table didn’t vibrate from his touch. His movement made him seem unreal, as if he were a figment of her imagination.

  “Your fear of repercussion, is that why you haven’t spoken to him directly?” Mishra asked.

  “I’m not sure I’m allowed to,” Gomez said. “In fact, I’m not sure I have any standing with the young man at all. Let me add that the Eaufasse are willing to let me speak to him, but they are also eager to become part of the Earth Alliance. They tried to sell me on Epriccom in the middle of our discussion about the enclave.”

  “You can’t trust them,” Mishra said.

  “I honestly don’t know what trust means in this circumstance,” Gomez said.

  Mishra sighed. He glanced sideways, maybe checking with that “best legal researcher” he said he was linked to. He looked grim.

  “Do you know who this kid is?”

  “We don’t know anything,” Gomez said. “We don’t even know what the enclave is.”

  “What information have you received from the Eaufasse?” he asked.

  “What I just gave you. Courtesy of the rather obnoxious Peyti translator, who admitted he was translating from Fasse to Peytin to Standard, which, as you can tell, is not the ideal way to talk with another species.”

  “Especially about something that turns on a word.” Mishra held up a finger, and this time, he turned most of his body sideways. His lips moved, but Gomez couldn’t hear anything. Then he nodded, as if he had just received an answer.

  He turned back toward her, and for once, their link was solid. He stopped flickering.

  “You were correct to contact us. I’d like about an hour to research your question. May I have it?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’d rather have you act on an educated guess instead of a hunch.”

  Mishra grinned again. “You think there’s a difference?”

  “Oh, maybe,” she said. “To some of the Multicultural Tribunals, anyway.”

  “Good point,” he said and signed off.

  The room actually felt bigger and emptier without his image floating on the other side of the table. The muscles in her shoulders were tight. She felt more alone at this moment than she had in years.

  There was a lot at stake in this one interaction. She could handle murder. She could handle an illegal enclave. She could handle a first- or second- or third-contact situation.

  She wasn’t sure she could handle a legal request from a government that her government didn’t yet recognize.

  She wasn’t sure what would happen—to all of them—if she got it wrong.

  SIX

  SHE’D TESTIFIED IN front of most of the Multicultural Tribunals, usually by hololink, and always in cases that she had resolved rather than ones in which she was an accused. She did not ever want to go in front of that part of the legal system because she had done something wrong. There wasn’t a lot of give in the Tribunal system. Most everyone she knew who went in front of the Tribunals accused of some heinous act were found guilty of that act—even if she knew for a fact that they were not. She’d heard rumors, ones she did not want to substantiate on her own, that if the accused had the backing of a large corporation and all of its wealth, the accused might go free. Or get off with a slap to the wrist.

  She had the Earth Alliance behind her, but she also had a sense that the Alliance was willing to throw most of its underlings aside if it served a greater purpose
.

  She tapped into the FSS database to see if she could find Mishra. She had no trouble. He was not only a supervisor, but he was at the top of his division, with an impressive list of cases behind him.

  She should have felt like she was in good hands—and she did—but that still didn’t reassure her.

  Much as she loved her job, much as she loved working on the Frontier, moments like this made her nervous. The legal risks were the ones she couldn’t control with a laser pistol or a well-timed look. She couldn’t smile her way out of this or slam a suspect into the cells on the lower deck.

  She hated ceding control to someone else.

  And she hated waiting.

  So she tried to research the asylum information on her own. As she did, she got a notification on her links that the materials from the Eaufasse had arrived.

  She asked that the information get forwarded to her here, and that it remain off her links. She had learned the hard way that material on private links was sometimes considered personal, and she didn’t ever want to be accused of a crime because she had downloaded the wrong material onto her private links.

  The Eaufasse materials showed up on the table’s main screen. It popped up in front of her, complete with menu. The Eaufasse had sent surveillance recordings of the incident, the discovery of the bodies, and the messages they had sent to the Earth Alliance.

  They also sent materials about the survivor.

  She went to those first, in case she needed more information in her next discussion with Mishra.

  The images showed up as small holograms. She left the holograms alone, but called up a two-dimensional image on another screen so that she could see the boy’s face clearly.

  And it was a boy’s face—unlined and very young. He was blond and unusually pale, so rare as to be almost unheard of in the Earth Alliance. She had noticed this with the clones’ bodies, but had not really thought about it much, figuring that Simiaar’s reproduction was as much guess as it was accurate.

  Faced with a truly pale-skinned human, though, Gomez felt a slight disbelief. She knew that there were groups of pale humans with blond hair and blue eyes, but usually they were the result of decades of genetic purity—none of them allowed to breed with anyone who did not have similar skin and eye color.

  Occasionally, there would be a pale, blue-eyed throwback in a large family, but it was so unusual that she had never met anyone that light-skinned in her travels.

  The boy stood at the center of four Eaufasse. They encircled him, apparently deliberately. He was as thin as they were. His clothing was ragged and filthy, and he looked tired.

  One of the Eaufasse spoke. The boy gave it a wary look, and responded.

  In Fasse.

  “What the hell?” Gomez asked.

  She scanned forward on the recording the Eaufasse had sent. The five seemed to be having a discussion. She stopped the recording farther in. The discussion was happening in Fasse.

  Which meant that the Eaufasse knew what the boy had asked for. Now the question was if the Peyti had translated correctly for her.

  She tapped a corner of the desk. “Please translate this discussion into Standard,” she said.

  An error reading rose in front of her eyes. Language insufficiently known for accurate translation was the response she got.

  Dammit. She would have to talk with Uzven after all.

  SEVEN

  WHILE SHE WAITED for Uzven to arrive, she watched the surveillance recordings of the enclave. She couldn’t tell time from them; like Fasse, the way that the Eaufasse told time was unfamiliar to her. But she could guess at how much time passed while she watched the imagery unfold before her.

  The surveillance recordings began as four young men left the enclave. They were all the same height, thin, and blond. They wore identical clothing. They stumbled outside as if they had been pushed. Then they stood for just a moment, as if they had never seen the area before.

  A loud bang made them jump. Then they all ran in the same direction. The camera floated above them, keeping the same distance, following them as they moved. Another image bifurcated from the first, keeping a vigil on the enclave.

  Gomez realized that the Eaufasse probably had years of footage from that enclave. She felt a mixture of relief and exasperation. Relief, because she would be able to see what had happened in this place from the very beginning. Exasperation, because she would have to investigate all of this with her team, and it would take time. No matter how sophisticated a computer program she set up to cope with all of this, she would still have to review some of the footage in person. She wouldn’t know what she was looking for until she found it.

  Then a third image split off from the other two. One of the boys left the group. Instead of running blindly through the underbrush, this boy stopped and surveyed his surroundings. He no longer seemed nervous.

  She backed the images up, going to the moment he first appeared. He remained slightly behind the other three as they stumbled out of the enclave. She hadn’t been able to see his facial expression. She had assumed he had reacted the same way the others had.

  She moved the images forward to the moment he had left the other three boys. As he walked away—calmly, slowly—he touched the plants. They shivered into place, as if no one had passed through.

  Her breath caught. How had he known to do that? The others seemed confused by the area away from the enclave, but he had a calm familiarity with it.

  The others continued forward, eventually growing tired and beginning to walk. By then, the other boy had gone very far in a completely different direction. Gomez cursed herself. She should have opened another program so that she could see where, exactly, all four boys were on the map of Epriccom. But she hadn’t done that. She could either go back and start over, or she could continue to watch.

  A sound behind her made her start. The door opened. Uzven entered. It adjusted its mask.

  “You have footage for me?” it asked.

  She nodded, and stopped the visual she was watching. Uzven did not ask about the boys, and she was glad of that. It sat down next to her, folding its twig-like body into what seemed like an uncomfortable position.

  She started up the images of the surviving boy and the four Eaufasse. She played the imagery with the sound until the boy answered the Eaufasse.

  Then she paused it.

  “Is he speaking Fasse?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Uzven’s tone was flat, even for a Peyti. It put its long fingers against its mask, adjusting again. A nervous habit, then. She wouldn’t have believed that the Peyti allowed themselves such gestures. She thought all Peyti too controlled for that.

  “What’s he saying?” she asked.

  “I—he’s asking for asylum,” Uzven said.

  “They spoke first,” she said.

  “They want to know his name.”

  “And he didn’t tell them?”

  “He asked for asylum first,” Uzven said.

  Her heart pounded. “That was his word? ‘Asylum’? He specifically asked for asylum from what?”

  Uzven did not move. She let the images run a bit more, the sounds surrounding her, then she stopped it again.

  “Uzven,” she said. “What did he ask for?”

  Uzven sat still.

  “Why aren’t you telling me?” she asked.

  Uzven’s mask made a large sucking sound. She turned toward it, afraid that it was suffering from mask failure. Instead, its hand dropped and its fingers played along the edge of the table.

  “He is fluent,” Uzven said quietly. “I am not.”

  “What did he say?” she asked again.

  “He asked for protection,” Uzven said. “He needed a promise of protection and safety before he would tell them anything.”

  “Protection and safety,” she said. “You’re sure?’

  “No, I’m not sure,” Uzven said. “I would need to listen to the entire interchange.”

  “Protection and safety from what?”
she asked.

  “From the humans,” Uzven said.

  “Which humans?” she asked.

  Uzven’s large liquid eyes turned toward her. “Those that want to kill him.”

  “Not all humans?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Uzven said. “I need to listen to the entire interchange.”

  Her stomach turned. She had a hunch, one she didn’t like. “The words that this boy uses,” she said, “are they the ones that the Eaufasse used with you when you said the boy wanted asylum?”

  “Protection and safety,” Uzven said, turning its gaze back to the images. “What is that, but asylum?”

  She cursed and slammed her hand on the table. Uzven leaned back as if it thought she was going to hurt it.

  “You inserted the word ‘asylum’?”

  “The boy needs protection. Others were killed, by humans. The others were clearly clones. Your barbaric attitudes toward—”

  “Son of a bitch,” she said. “Get out.”

  “You need me to listen to the entire interchange—”

  “I don’t need anything from you right now,” she said. “Get out of this room before I kick you out.”

  It stood, adjusted its mask, and hurried toward the door. There Uzven stopped. “None of us understand the Eaufasse well. We don’t speak the language as well as that boy does. There are nuances—”

  “That some other translator will find,” Gomez said. “Consider yourself fired. I’ll take care of the documentation myself.”

  Uzven made a noise she had never heard before. Its eyes had become slits. Then it let itself out of the room.

  She stood, her heart pounding, her mouth dry. It had taken all of her strength not to grab Uzven and slap that scrawny little superior creature silly. It had cost her hours, and it had cost the legal department hours. She had a feeling that those hours would prove precious, although at the moment she couldn’t say why.

  And she also knew that Uzven’s politics had gotten in the way of a solution. She could have spoken to the boy shortly after learning about him. Because Uzven was wrong. Protection and safety from the humans was not the same as asylum from all humans.