A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (29 page)

“He also doesn’t have access to normal medical procedures,” Gomez said.

“Why?” Nuuyoma asked.

“He’s an accused murderer and a clone,” Verstraete said. “You figure it out.”

“I thought we have to treat prisoners humanely,” Nuuyoma said.

“Sometimes I forget how stuck you are in the human branch of the FSS,” Gomez said. “We have to treat
human
prisoners humanely. We have to treat other species according to their customs. Clones are neither human nor another species.”

Nuuyoma shook his head. “How are these laws able to stand?”

Apaza looked at Gomez in disbelief. “He doesn’t know the history of the sector, does he?”

She ignored that because she didn’t want the discussion to go sideways.

“So we don’t have anything from the other injured clones?” she asked.

“No, we don’t.” During their little discussion, Simiaar had managed to eat half the food on her plate.

Gomez suddenly felt like she was behind. “And Thirds?”

“Ah, Thirds.” Simiaar said. “We have some information, but I don’t trust it.”

“Why?” Gomez asked.

Simiaar set her fork down and looked at everyone for effect. “Because,” she said, when she was done meeting their gazes. “The information provided about TwoZero from the prison itself is incorrect.”

“Incorrect how?” Gomez asked.

“You want to tell them?” Simiaar asked Apaza. “After all, you’re the one who found him.”

“I found him by tracing records,” Apaza said, his face red. “What exactly are you accusing me of?”

“She’s accusing you of tracking faulty DNA,” Verstraete said. She was picking at the green pasta covered with garlic sauce.

“I didn’t track the DNA.” Apaza sounded offended. “I tracked the arrest records. And it was damn hard because the names—”

“We know about the names,” Nuuyoma said, “even if we might not know the history of the sector.”

Apparently Apaza’s dig had stung.

“Why didn’t you track the DNA?” Gomez asked Apaza. That point caught her attention. It clearly caught Simiaar’s too, because she was frowning at Apaza.

“I figured clones, you know? I could be led down a false trail, especially since we didn’t know the names. I figured several people had the same DNA, but only one had his history. That’s how I tracked him.” Apaza’s gaze met Gomez’s. It appeared as if he expected her to chastise him.

“No wonder he found them,” Simiaar muttered. She picked up her fork.

“Oh, no,” Gomez said. “You can’t go all cryptic on me. What does that mean?”

“If he’d tried to track by DNA, he would never have found TwoZero, that’s what I’m saying.”

“I got that,” Gomez said. “But why wouldn’t he?”

Simiaar took a large bite of pasta and chewed. Everyone waited for her to finish. “His biologicals claim he’s had a lot of nanowork, and that his DNA isn’t available because it’s clearly been tampered with.”

Gomez let out an involuntary sigh of exasperation. “I asked specifically for his DNA files.”

“And you got them,” Simiaar said, “along with an apology that there was no DNA inside it.”

“But there was a lot of material in those files,” Gomez said.

“Mostly about procedures done at the prison to keep him alive. I can’t quite figure that out either, since he’s a clone. They shouldn’t have made any extra efforts. They wasted the money on him.”

“You’re so cynical,” Nuuyoma said.

“No,” Verstraete said. “She’s just reporting the facts. I’ve been looking into some of the laws. There’s no requirement for a prison to maintain the health of a clone.”

Simiaar shrugged. “It is at their discretion. Maybe they just found it too hard not to follow the rules.”

“Or maybe they weren’t aware of the rules,” Nuuyoma said. “I wasn’t, and I’ve been in the field for years, and I had years of training.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gomez said. She needed them to focus. “What we do know—what I could see just by looking at him—was that he’s clearly had no nanorepair procedures. He still has scars so bad from his injuries on Epriccom that I can’t see how he’s of any use to the prison at all. He said he wasn’t.”

“Maybe he’s their pet,” Simiaar said.

“Are you saying that the files imply that he looks like a clone of PierLuigi Frémont because of a nanoprocedure?” Nuuyoma asked Simiaar.

Simiaar nodded. “It’s not said outright, but that’s what I would have expected if I had a body on my table along with his file. Because the prison-provided materials say he’s a unique individual with a lot of nanorepairs, when the truth is something different. If I hadn’t known the truth, I would not have been able to identify him as TwoZero from that file, since his DNA definitely shows that he’s a clone of PierLuigi Frémont.”

“That’s so odd,” Gomez said. “Because he doesn’t look like PierLuigi Frémont any more. He’s too damaged. In fact, he was that damaged when the file was made.”

“I know,” Simiaar said. “The files don’t reflect the reality. Fascinating, isn’t it? I suspect if we look for the other injured clone, we’d find the same thing.”

Gomez frowned. She toyed with her food for a moment. She could understand doctoring the files to make TwoZero seem like he had chosen to remake himself in the image of a mass murderer. But there was no reason for that, not if TwoZero looked different. So someone was doing this to hide who he actually was.

“What about Thirds?” Gomez asked Apaza. “You found him the same way, right? Through his history?”

“Yeah.” Apaza had a frown that was probably deeper than Gomez’s. “Here’s what’s bothering me. If what Dr. Simiaar says is true, then I wouldn’t have found these clones at all.”

Gomez could read the thought that everyone suddenly shared. No one had known that the twenty men who looked alike but dressed differently as they arrived at Armstrong’s port were going to do their best to assassinate leaders all over the Moon.

No one had known that from looking at them, and they had been grown, created, and deployed, after years of work. The reports that Gomez had read stated that these clones were not fast-grow clones, which meant that they were as individual as TwoZero or Thirds.

They could have hidden in plain sight for years, if someone wanted the mission to work that way. They didn’t have to arrive on the Moon on the same day.

“I don’t like this,” Nuuyoma said.

Gomez didn’t either. None of them did.

“Then you won’t like this either,” Simiaar said. “TwoZero’s DNA does not match that of the Armstrong assassins’ DNA.”

Gomez felt her breath catch.

Nuuyoma lifted up one of his hands, palm out, as if he were blocking that piece of information. “But you found the assassins’ DNA in the records, right? And we should assume those records were tampered with, right?”

Simiaar was shaking her head before he had even finished. “I’m not going to assume that. The reports on the assassins' DNA were filed by twenty-five different sources, twenty of them on the Moon itself, at least one only an hour after the assassination of Mayor Arek Soseki. That would take a lot of planning, in my opinion, for someone to handle tampering throughout the system so quickly that it would cover any sign of tampering.”

“It could be done, I suppose,” Apaza said. “But I wouldn’t want to try. Plus, a couple of these guys failed, right? And a few got caught—or their bodies got found or something? Wasn’t the timing off?”

“It certainly wasn’t a smooth operation,” Gomez said. “If it had gone smoothly, we would have had a lot more dead. It had been designed to let the assassination trigger a panic, and then first responders and other emergency personnel would show up just as the bomb went off, destroying not just them but the dome as well—and an unprotected dome. If this had gone right, the main domes on the Moon would be completely obliterated.”

“But they weren’t,” Simiaar said, “and the Moon shares information among its domes, or they started to when poor Celia Alfreda decided to found the United Domes of the Moon. It was her director of security—what’s her name?”

“DeRicci, I think,” Apaza said.

“Who insisted on the sharing of information, which means that someone would have found that footage of the clones arriving at the Port of Armstrong, even if the damn port got obliterated.” Simiaar grabbed her half-full plate like a lifeline. “Which is all a long way of saying that, in this instance, I think someone
wanted
to blame PierLuigi Frémont, or at least his crazed followers. They wanted us to find those clones. So, back to Elián’s very good original question, the files would not have been tampered with.”

“That’s a long way to go without facts,” Verstraete said. “You’re asking us to assume that whoever is doing this is hiding information on the one hand and revealing it on the other.”

“And you’re assuming that the same person, persons, or organization is behind those attacks and the warehousing of TwoZero and Thirds,” Simiaar snapped.

“And neither thing is relevant to us at the moment,” Gomez said, “although your point about different organizations is well taken.”

Simiaar inclined her head in acknowledgement, although she kept her gaze on Verstraete.

“Does the different DNA point to that as well?” Gomez asked. “I’m afraid I’m not entirely clear on that. Are you saying that the assassins weren’t clones of PierLuigi Frémont?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” Simiaar said. “They’re of a purer line. Maybe first generation clones, rather than clones of clones of clones.”

“Great,” Nuuyoma said softly.

Gomez shook her head. She’d spent her career studying non-human life, not clones. She knew very little about the intricacies of cloning because she didn’t have to know it. She had more work looking at the universe outside of the Alliance rather than the worlds inside of it—including the cloned worlds.

“I’m still unclear on what that means, exactly. They’re closer to Frémont? They’re less damaged? They’re more malleable? What, exactly?” Gomez asked.

“Nothing, exactly,” Simiaar said. “It could be all of the above and none of the above. We don’t know. Clones are as different from each other as siblings, no matter what the propagandists say.”

“Some things are similar,” Verstraete said. “Like a propensity for left-handedness or eye color.”

“Although even the basic appearance stuff can be different from clone sibling to clone sibling,” Simiaar said. “They can have enhancements like anyone else.”

“So…?” Gomez didn’t want to repeat the question, so she let that single syllable serve as the entire question itself.

“So,” Simiaar said. “I’m thinking they’re not made by the same group, person, ideologue, whomever. I’m thinking there’s lots of Frémont DNA loose in the universe.”

“There are supposed to be procedures to prevent that for mass murderers and other undesirables,” Nuuyoma said.

“And there are supposed to be procedures for accurate logging of DNA for prisoners,” Verstraete said. “We’re seeing right now how well that’s working.”

Apaza shook his head in disbelief. “This is such a mess.”

“It might not be as big a mess as you think,” Simiaar said. “It doesn’t take a lot of DNA to clone someone. So if you have any from the original source, and someone steals a little bit of it, that someone is going to make that little bit stretch.”

“And maybe sell it to someone else,” Nuuyoma said.

“So, you’re saying we’ve stumbled on someone with a different agenda than taking on the Moon,” Gomez said.

“We don’t know that either,” Simiaar said. “What we do know was that colony was really far away from the Alliance, at least at the time of the colony’s founding. They were out there for a reason.”

“Yeah, I think I know what that is,” Nuuyoma said.

Everyone looked at him.

He pushed his plate away, his mouth twisted in disgust. “Someone was training those clones to be killers.”

“I figured that,” Gomez said. “That’s why they hunted.”

“Yeah,” he said softly. “But that wasn’t the first training session or the first deaths. It was just the oldest group of clones.”

“They sent out children?” Verstraete asked.

“Yeah,” he said, looking down. “And it wasn’t pretty.”

THIRTY-THREE

ZHU HAD ALREADY taken the shuttle to Earth Alliance IntraSpecies Court Special Circumstances Region 625 before he notified Trey that they were now lawyer and client. Zhu did not want Trey to convince some guard to allow him to come to the hearing.

The Special Circumstances courts had cropped up near the major prisons for hearings just like this. Most of the courts had several lower level magistrates who were on a career track. They had to serve their time here, shuffling documents and okaying standard procedure, before moving up to more interesting work in a “real” court.

Most of the judges he’d met who had worked in a Special Circumstances court let that fact remain in their personal histories, but never mentioned it in public and tried to downplay it. Zhu suspected that the judges who had worked in Earth Alliance IntraSpecies Court Special Circumstances Region 625 really downplayed their involvement here, because this court’s nickname was Clone Court Primary.