The Peyti Crisis: A Retrieval Artist Novel: Book Five of the Anniversary Day Saga (Retrieval Artist series 12) (26 page)

He wasn’t even certain he agreed with himself. A gift? Maybe. But it was also a burden. He wanted to catch the perpetrators, and interrogating the Peyti clones would have felt like he was doing something.

He went out the other door, into the now-empty bull pen. That restlessness, that need to do something, made him wonder if he was more of a hypocrite than he realized.

Had he gone in to talk with Gumiela to stop Romey and others like her?

Or had he wanted Gumiela to clarify the rules?

And if she had made it official that no one would get punished for harming the clones, what would he have done?

Nyquist was very glad he would never find out.

THIRTY-ONE

AS FLINT LEFT DeRicci’s office, he felt like he’d won a Pyrrhic victory. She would use the methods he had developed to find the Peyti clones only a week ago to see if other large groups of clones existed on the Moon. Only it would be a bit worse than the methods he used. He had traced the clones of a known mass murderer. DeRicci would be looking for large groups of similar faces, no matter what the species. Then DeRicci would have to determine how many clones of an original were “normal” and how many were “suspicious.” Once she deemed them suspicious, she would try to match them to known killers.

Or something. He wasn’t sure about the second half of how the search would work.

But he did know this: If DeRicci found anything, her actions might have a negative impact on a lot of individuals as wonderful and innocent as Talia.

At least DeRicci understood that. She was someone he could trust to use the power she had minimally, taking it no farther than she needed to.

The needs were what worried him. Times were extraordinary, and he was enough of a student of history to know that procedures developed in extraordinary times were often misused in ordinary times.

He also knew that DeRicci wouldn’t be in charge forever.

But she was in charge at the moment. He had to trust her to do the right thing. Because, as he kept reminding himself, if they didn’t figure out where, when, and what that third attack would be, then his concerns about clones and individual rights wouldn’t matter at all.

He didn’t see Talia. He had expected to find her in one of the chairs littering the reception area where Popova’s desk was.

Popova watched him for a moment, as if she were trying to decide something. Then she beckoned him.

He stepped forward, a bit surprised. Popova wasn’t the beckoning type.

“Sit for a minute,” she said.

“I need to find Talia,” he said.

“She’s in the bathroom. She’ll be there a while.”

He felt a surge of panic. “She’s sick?”

Popova shook her head. “She’s getting herself together again.”

Flint glanced toward the restrooms. If Talia was letting other people see how poorly she was doing, then she was in very bad shape indeed.

“Listen,” Popova said. “I know someone.”

He looked at her. Her cheeks were flushed. The normally unflappable Rudra Popova was flapped.

“There’s a therapist I saw after Arek died. I needed someone to talk to.” Popova’s voice was soft.

Flint remembered how she had been in the days after Anniversary Day. She had been just like Talia, emotions right on the surface, unable to function the way she had before.

Popova was no longer the woman she had been before Anniversary Day, but that day had changed everyone. She was closer to that woman, though, than she had been after Anniversary Day. At that point, DeRicci hadn’t been certain if Popova would be able to remain on the job. DeRicci hadn’t been certain Popova would ever recover—and neither had Flint.

“Talia needs someone,” Popova said, as if she thought Flint were going to contradict her. “She’s hit a breaking point and, no offense, you’re not the person she can turn to. Neither am I, and I doubt a girl like her has the right kind of friends who can help her through this.”

Popova was right; Talia didn’t have anyone she could talk to, not about the things that truly disturbed her.

“She and I talked a little,” Popova said, glancing at the bathroom doors. She clearly didn’t want Talia to walk in on them. “She got quiet pretty fast, but not before I could put a few things together.”

Flint weaved his fingers so tightly that his hands ached. But he didn’t want to show how uncomfortable this conversation made him, not just because he was worried about Talia’s mental health, but also because he was worried about her general safety.

Right now, given the climate in Armstrong, he didn’t want anyone to figure out that she was a clone.

“She lost her mother, she lost her home, she lost her friends, and she was just rebuilding her life when Anniversary Day happened.”

“She handled it all right,” Flint said, and realized he sounded defensive.

“She handled it,” Popova said, “until she watched a group of people die in front of her at her school. Just like her mother was kidnapped from her home.”

Flint nodded. He had known this. But hearing it from someone else made it even harder to deal with.

“And there’s something in the middle of all this, something that made her stop talking to me, and start up the tears again.” Popova glanced at the bathroom doors one more time. Then she leaned forward and lowered her voice even more. “It was the last straw. If you don’t get her help, I’m not sure what will happen.”

“I don’t know what would help her,” Flint said.

“She has secrets,” Popova said. “I get that, and they’re probably important, given what happened to her mother. But a therapist is bound by confidentiality—”

That didn’t mean they would follow it,
Flint wanted to say, but didn’t. He let Popova go on.

“—and Talia should be safe talking about things she doesn’t want the rest of us to know. And that includes you. She’s going to have to work this one out on her own.”

“She’s already worked out too much on her own,” Flint said. He had only been able to do so much. Some of it she needed to work out with her mother, but her mother died before the secrets got revealed.

“Exactly,” Popova said. “I’m going to give you the name of my therapist. I’ve already given it to Talia. I want her to present it to you, but if she doesn’t do so in a short amount of time, just take her there. She can’t go on like this.”

“I know,” he said, wishing Talia would come out of the bathroom. “Believe me, I know.”

FOUR DAYS LATER

THIRTY-TWO

THE COMPANY’S FASTEST space yacht felt more like a cargo ship. Even though Rafael Salehi knew that S
3
’s largest yacht could hold over 150 people comfortably, not counting ship staff, he had never traveled with more than twenty guests on board.

No one here was a guest. No one could even consider being a guest. Everyone had to work.

He left Athena Base with thirty human staff, including lawyers, legal assistants, and researchers. He had picked up a contingent of legal theorists—professors, former judges, and the like—on the way to Peyla. There he had gathered another twenty Peyti attorneys, plus their retinues.

And then there was the staff on the yacht itself. Hired for their discretion and their dedication to service, if he could believe the crap shoveled at him from S
3
’s personnel department.

Even so, he didn’t conduct a lot of conversations where the staff could hear, and he had hired his own expert to make certain that personal areas were not networked, and could not be accessed from the outside in any way.

He felt like he was sneaking into enemy territory, when all he was doing was heading to the Moon.

Part of the Earth Alliance.

Where he had spent his entire life.

He sat in the law library, a large, fully enclosed room that had holographic books on the walls. The books contained non-networked information on the topic listed on the book’s cover, sometimes linked to other books or with actual footage of the trials or the rulings. S
3
had a similar room in its research building.

Usually Salehi found all this knowledge, placed in tidy booklike forms, uncomfortable; he preferred to work on the private networked systems. If he were being honest with himself, he had relied too much on AutoLearn the past few years. He’d plug in a legal question, download cases, and then turn on his AutoLearn program.

He’d end up with a vast knowledge of the topic, but the knowledge would be superficial, and often wouldn’t last for more than a month. Sometimes, when he used AutoLearn, he wouldn’t even remember what the case had been about.

He refused to use AutoLearn on these clone cases—and he had already made it clear to his staff that anyone caught using AutoLearn would be removed from the project and had a good chance of being released from the firm. Some of the legal assistants had hated that, but he had noticed the researchers nodding.

The researchers had told him many times that AutoLearn shouldn’t be called AutoLearn at all. In fact, in the research building, the preferred term for AutoLearn was FakeKnowledge.

He thought that sounded as good as any.

No FakeKnowledge here. Only deep research, even deeper discussions, and a lot of theorizing. He actually scheduled everyone’s day. They still had three days of travel before they arrived in Armstrong, and he meant to make use of as much of that time as he could.

He’d even scheduled downtime because he knew that study without downtime was as effective as AutoLearn.

Many of the group had meals together, but he only joined them for dinner, and then for only an hour or so. No legal discussions about these cases at the table, only anecdotes, stories, and jokes could be about the law; the rest of the conversation had to be about something else. He didn’t care what else, so long as it gave everyone’s brains a rest.

This room was reserved for what he privately called the A Team. The best minds of their generation and all that. Really, the best minds he could assemble—not just on clone law, but also on legal theory and courtroom procedures.

He had lawyers on this ship who had argued several cases in front of all of the Multicultural Tribunals. He needed those minds just to keep the team on track. Eventually, he knew, these cases he would be arguing would go in front of one of the Multicultural Tribunals; he just wasn’t sure which one.

The thing that made this an Alliance case was the presence of two different kinds of clones—human and Peyti. The fact that both had come from known mass murderers tied his cases together even if he never found who had created the originals.

Right now, the A Team was working on the question of standing. Even though S
3
had been hired to represent the clones, there was some question as to whether or not the clones could appear in court without their owners present.

Since the owners were criminals set on destroying the Moon (at the very least), there was no chance the owners would ever show up in court.

The idea that the clones’ actions during the Peyti Crisis had disrupted business for the Peyti Alliance-wide was an argument that the non-legal authorities on the Moon and in the domes might buy, but he wasn’t certain any court would accept it.

If he were a judge, he would say that S
3
and the Peyti government did not have standing to defend the clones on any of the charges. S
3
had the ability to argue the unfairness of judging the Peyti according to the behavior of some clones, but not the legality of the clones or their behavior.

He was looking for a way around it, as were two of his assistants, huddled in chairs on opposite sides of the room. These assistants had traveled on the yacht many times and knew that those chairs, with built-in adjustable desks, provided the best place to get serious business done.

There was only one Peyti lawyer in the room, partly because, if Salehi were honest, the Peyti were making everyone nervous right now. The masks obscured most of their faces, and their eyes didn’t seem that different from each other’s.

He had gotten used to differences in building and skin coloring, as well as the way some of the Peyti held themselves.

He could recognize his co-counsel, Uzvuyiten, anywhere.

Uzvuyiten was one of the oldest Peyti Salehi had ever seen. His gray skin was almost white, the color uneven as if the skin’s pigment weren’t designed to last as long as Uzvuyiten had. His twig-like fingers were bent at the tips, and nothing he seemed to do could straighten them out.

Salehi had seen some of the other humans on the trip look at Uzvuyiten’s fingers and turn away in disgust. Salehi could still remember feeling that way when he had first seen them. The Peyti hand looked almost human until it became clear that the fingers bent in directions no human hand could.

Uzvuyiten’s fingers were bent backwards, between the last knuckle and the tip on a human finger, about halfway up a human fingernail. To make matters worse, the bent ridge was a bright blue that glowed in the right kind of light.