Starbase Human (20 page)

She had enough credibility to make this work—if she did it right.

If she did it wrong, then she jeopardized everything she had already done.

She decided to walk while she thought about this.

She used to walk the ship when on the
EAFS Stanley
, but that ship was the size of some cities.
The Green Dragon
was small, lean, and fast, able to pivot in seconds instead of minutes or hours, great in a fight and even better at escaping from a bad situation.

But it meant that walking the ship took her a little over an hour instead of several. Often, she wouldn’t make it around the
Stanley
at all, stopping to talk to crew or someone who needed help with a problem or a discovery.

On the
Green Dragon
, the crew stayed out of her way. They let her walk. They understood that she wanted to keep a hard line between them and the four former members of the
Stanley
.

The problem, she realized as she moved, was that she was risking a lot, and yet she wasn’t risking as much as she had initially thought she would.

The
Green Dragon
had three distinct levels, with a fourth and fifth that mostly contained equipment. A dummy bubble covered a fake cockpit on the top of the ship. According to the seller (and the material Simiaar researched on the ship), almost every single time a ship in the
Dragon’s
class would get attacked, the bubble would get hit first.

That enabled the
Dragon
to target the weapons systems on the attacking ship without receiving a damaging hit.

Gomez liked that feature. Sometimes, when she walked the ship, she walked up to the dummy cockpit and stared at the models inside. It wasn’t secure enough to hold environment, and going inside the dummy cockpit wasn’t recommended in transit, so she would just look, wishing ships could be designed like this in actuality, because riding in an open-windowed cockpit seemed to combine the best parts of space with that moment of increased adrenaline that she always used to get when she walked into a situation in an unknown culture.

She missed her job. She would love to return to it, if she could.

The upper level housed the quarters. Crew quarters were actually below decks, but since she had hired such a minimal crew, she had given them the larger guest quarters on this level.

She had the captain’s suite at one end of the corridor. Simiaar had the second largest suite on the other side of the corridor. Even though Gomez had offered Apaza the third largest suite, he had opted for a room in the actual below decks crew quarters, with a built-in bunk and barely enough room to move.

I’ll be spending all my time in the information room anyway,
he had said.
I just need a place to shower
.

It had taken her two days to realize that he hadn’t said he would sleep down below. He just stored his clothes there, and cleaned up there.

Besides clothing, the only things he had brought on board were equipment (some of it self-designed) and that amazing chair like none she had ever seen. It bolted into the floor, like all regulation chairs did on this ship, but the nanofibers the chair was composed of transformed into a hard wood-like chair if he wanted it or the most comfortable bed she had ever touched.

Apaza had let her examine the chair before she allowed it onto her ship; after it had been bolted in, she hadn’t touched it—although she had walked in on Apaza sleeping on it more than once.

She preferred her four-room suite, although she didn’t enter it at the moment. She needed the walk. The exercise room on the crew level simply didn’t help her think as much as the changing scenery on the ship did.

Her anger at the Alliance wasn’t just because no one had paid attention to her reports and requests concerning the events on Epriccom. She figured that things went awry often within all parts of the Earth Alliance. There was simply too much information and not enough people to process it.

Plus, as Apaza told her, much of the information wasn’t easily available through links and the usual nets. It took computer specialists with incredible skills and the ability to open some back doors that should have remained locked just to find some of the information that Gomez needed for this (and other) investigations.

After Anniversary Day, she had initially blamed herself for the fact that the information about the Frémont enclave hadn’t gone through the proper channels and prevented the attack on Earth’s Moon.

And then she started to investigate what went wrong. She decided to start with the injured clones. She was able to confirm that one clone, named TwoZero, had died just after she had seen him. So had the other surviving clones.

They were deliberately erased, as if they had never been.

Other things she had discovered in her early investigation led back to the Alliance, and that was when she realized that she had to investigate off-books, because someone—or many someones—were preventing this information from getting out.

But most of this trip hadn’t panned out the way she expected. Gathering information, never easy, was proving terribly elusive—and she couldn’t blame Simiaar or Apaza for that.

Some of it was her own fear.

She tried to investigate how TwoZero died, but stopped the moment she realized she would need to use her position as a marshal in the Frontier Security Service to get inside any system.

Apaza was able to get some information, but nothing they needed. Gomez knew if she went back to the prison system in her capacity as the arresting officer for TwoZero, she might set off every possible red flag.

She felt that she had done that before she took the leave. Simiaar believed that the leave of absence actually protected Gomez from the idea that she was investigating anything.

The moment Gomez showed up in any Earth Alliance facility in any kind of official capacity, someone—or those someones—would notice her, and would probably try to kill her.

Her stomach clenched.

She wandered down the corridor, then took the steps to below decks, skipping two entire decks so that she could walk past the cargo area, the crew quarters, and the exercise area. Simiaar’s lab was one deck above her, and Gomez didn’t want to stop there.

Even Peyla—the Peyti home world—had brought its own share of disappointments. She had tried to talk with Uzven, the Peyti-Eaufasse translator who had mistranslated the initial request from the clone on Epriccom.

Uzven had been deliberately obtuse about the clone’s request, later claiming that all clones should have asylum from humans. Uzven had even tried to contact the clone once it was imprisoned.

Gomez had thought fifteen years ago that Uzven was involved in something nefarious. After she had seen the Anniversary Day clones, she believed Uzven was involved.

But Uzven remained cagey to the end, claiming that Eaufasse to Peytin to Standard translations were bound to create errors, that Gomez had been wrong in trying to read any more into the mistakes.

She had disliked Uzven fifteen years before, and she had disliked it again when she saw it on Peyla.

Nothing had changed—not even the amount of information it would share.

The way she saw it, this cloning facility was her last chance to get additional information before she arrived at the Moon.

Either she went into this cloning facility in her capacity as a marshal with the Security Service, or she let Apaza investigate it.

And that was what she needed to decide.

Because if she went in, alone, she might not come out. If she did come out, and then an order came through to stop her, the
Green Dragon
had to escape this area and head to Earth’s Moon so fast that no one could catch them.

At some point, she would have to take another risk.

She stopped in the exercise area. Small, built-in holochambers for running and rowing and all sorts of Good-For-You exercises. One small holochamber that could be filled with water so that someone could swim if they wanted to.

She had tried it just once, and decided that it wasn’t for her. Simiaar had laughed at her for even trying, and Apaza thought exercise was something the human race should have banned by now. None of the crew used that chamber either, so near Peyla they had drained the chamber, so they wouldn’t be carrying the extra weight.

She put a hand on the door to her favorite holochamber. Maybe she should run on the program set up for the mountains of Edgiofor. It was a tough workout and always blocked out her thoughts.

But she didn’t need them blocked out.

She needed to figure out if she was taking that last step.

She took her hand off the chamber door and stood for a moment in the small exercise room.

Her tiny team had done a lot of work already. They had found out about the enclave of clones, they had traced the ship that left Epriccom fifteen years ago to Ohksmyte, and they had taken a lot of trace from that ship.

On Ohksmyte they had learned that clones had flown the ship away from the enclave as the enclave was destroying itself, and the ship had been left behind. They learned that the ship was made in the Alliance to distribute to criminals, and instead had been flown directly to the enclave.

They had traced it to the building facility, found other ships that had left and gone into the Frontier, and by all appearances had never been abandoned as they were supposed to have been.

They had even, through Apaza’s wizardry and some of the information they had gathered off that abandoned ship, found the registration for the ship that had colonized the enclave and traced that ship’s path throughout the Alliance.

Because of that ship, they were orbiting Hétique. All of the information they had found had led them here.

Gomez clasped her hands behind her back and paced the room itself, going around the holochambers and using them like an obstacle course.

It took time to get to the Moon from Epriccom. Months. Traveling in the Frontier took even longer.

She hadn’t gathered nearly enough information, but she would wager that the authorities on the Moon—those not involved with the Earth Alliance—did not know anything about the enclave or the fact that there were other clones.

They didn’t know about the clone factory here at Hétique.

Maybe all of that would be enough to get their investigation on the right track.

“What are you doing?”

Gomez jumped, startled. Simiaar stood in the doorway of the exercise room, arms crossed.

“I needed to make a decision as to how to proceed with that clone factory,” Gomez said.

“You could have discussed it with me.” Simiaar spoke softly, then looked over her shoulder, obviously trying to see if anyone was coming down the hallway.

“This is a decision I needed to make myself,” Gomez said.

Anger crossed Simiaar’s face. She stepped deeper into the room and pulled the door closed.

She said, “It’s not just you on this trip, you know. We all get a vote. And I’d like to think I’d get more than one vote.”

Gomez felt her cheeks warm. She and Simiaar had been friends forever, and sometimes more than friends. On this trip, they’d managed to spend time together that had nothing to do with a case or with the Alliance or with the FSS.

“I know,” Gomez said, feeling a little guilty that she had shut Simiaar out. “But I wanted some time alone first. And if I had decided to go down to the factory, I would have discussed it with you, and then we would have presented it to Neal.”

“You might not go?” Simiaar sounded surprised. “I thought this was our last stop before Armstrong.”

“It is,” Gomez said. “I think we go in clean. The attacks were six months ago. Nothing else has happened. The authorities in Armstrong are probably ready to investigate now. We can help them, maybe figure out what’s going on next, and—”

“We end up in the same place,” Simiaar said. “You won’t be able to return to the
Stanley
any more than I will. There’s still a war out there.”

“I thought we weren’t going to use that term,” Gomez said. “Your decision. You said a war scared you.”

“It still scares me,” Simiaar said. “And we’re pawns in it. We can’t just go back to the Frontier and pretend like nothing has happened.”

Gomez stared at her. Simiaar hadn’t done nearly as much on this trip as she had thought she was going to. They had used the lab to analyze the materials they brought from the ship on Ohksmyte, and then they had used it for little else.

Was Simiaar feeling useless now? Feeling like she hadn’t been doing enough? Was that why she was surprised Gomez wasn’t going to the surface?

“I think,” Gomez said slowly, “it might be better if we give the folks in Armstrong our information, and then we all decide how to proceed. We don’t know what they know and don’t know. We are only guessing.”

Simiaar frowned. “Tell me one thing, Judita. If you had on this trip alone, like you had planned, would you be going to the surface tomorrow?”

“Without Neal,” Gomez said, “I’m not even sure I would have made it this far. I might have gone into the prisons to find out what happened to TwoZero and his colleagues.”