Starbase Human (23 page)

Guan inclined his head toward her. “Indeed.”

“What kind of training do you use law enforcement for?” she asked.

He walked to the giant pillows, grabbed two, and flung them onto the floor. “Would you care to sit, Marshal?”

She wasn’t sure of the etiquette here. But he had phrased that as a question, so she decided to answer it honestly.

“I think I prefer to stand at the moment,” she said. “I don’t sit much. My job requires me to keep moving, and that’s how I’m the most comfortable.”

“Even on your ship?” he asked.

He sank, cross-legged, onto one of the pillows. If she were a standard job applicant, that change in his position would have made her feel uncomfortable. It didn’t. She had dealt in situations stranger than this every single day of her career.

“Especially on my ship,” she said. “I have to remain in shape for onsite situations. Sometimes I end up running several kilometers, sometimes I have to carry twice my weight. A good thirty percent of the time, my job is physically demanding, and I can’t use enhancements for that.”

He placed his palms on the edges of the pillow behind him. “Fascinating. I had no idea.”

His tone made it sound like he wasn’t fascinated at all.

“Sit,” he said. “You’re making me uncomfortable.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

But she had. She needed to see how this place worked, and he was giving her hints of it. The indirect way he had of speaking made it clear that the people who ran this factory did not like to reveal anything easily.

She sat down, keeping her back straight.

“We used to be a military facility,” he said, “but military uses for clones have declined in the past century. The factories that work best with the Human branch of the Alliance Military are housed in a different region of Alliance space.”

Nice way to tell her that where they were was none of her business. She nodded, mostly to encourage him to continue.

“Here, our needs are different. The more established parts of the Alliance have internal problems that we tend to.” He said that as if she should understand what he meant.

She waited. When he wasn’t going to say more, she opened her hands slightly.

“Modern Alliance history is a bit beyond me,” she said. “I’ve been on the Frontier for the better part of my life. I’m afraid you’ll have to be a little more specific.”

“Criminals,” he said with just a bit of irritation. He didn’t like her. It was becoming obvious. She wasn’t at all the kind of person he was used to. “We have a lot of trouble with the Black Fleet operating at the fringes of the Alliance and, yes, within the Frontier—”

She wanted to correct him. The Black Fleet did not operate within the real Frontier. They operated in parts of known space that had rejected Alliance membership, thinking they’d be better off.

In her opinion, they weren’t, but she didn’t say that.

“Here in the Alliance, in the human-dominated regions, we have another problem. Very savvy crime families who have learned how to operate on the edges of the law in the areas they’re based in, and yet they manage to break the laws in other areas. When someone connected to those families get caught, the families disavow them.”

Gomez folded her hands together. She hadn’t heard of this problem, but it didn’t surprise her. Humans had worked on the fringes of society from the beginning of time.

“We have to make cases against them, but first, we need to know exactly what they’re doing. These organizations have existed for such a long time that outsiders can’t get in, and those that do get in aren’t trusted.”

Gomez nodded, again to encourage him to continue.

“Which is where we come in. We embed into the operation, and eventually, we make our operative live.”

“Embed,” she repeated. His vagueness made it difficult to follow him. She thought about that for a moment. Embed, using clones. Who remained inactive until they were needed.

“Yes, Marshal.” Something in his tone told her that he thought her a bit slow. “We—”

“Where do you get the DNA?” she asked.

He smiled. “We don’t shake hands here for a reason.”

She smiled back, even though she didn’t want to. In other words, he wasn’t going to tell her.

“And you need people like me to train these possible embeds—what, exactly? What law enforcement needs?”

“Something like that,” he said, letting her know now that he was being vague. “It depends on the group we’re infiltrating, and the age of our embed.”

She felt herself grow cold. “You use young embeds, then?” she asked, remembering TwoZero and Thirds.

“Yes, sometimes we do,” he said, and there was a challenge in his voice. If she didn’t like that, he was inviting her to leave.

“I see,” she said. She put her hands on her knees. “I have to ask, given what’s happened on the Moon, whether or not these crime family clones are clones of nightmares like PierLuigi Frémont.”

Guan raised his chin slightly. He had obviously expected that question. It made her stomach jump, made her wonder if he knew why she was here after all.

“Generally,” he said, “we use the DNA of relatives who are not known to be involved in operations—children, cousins, friends of friends—people whom our crime families haven’t seen in decades or more. Sometimes we embed a cloned member of one family with another family that has an association with the crime family. It’s very complicated.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” she said.

“We try not to use DNA of anyone famous,” he said, “and we certainly try to avoid anyone who might be uncontrollable.”

“Like a mass murderer,” she said.

“Like a mass murderer,” he agreed.

“Sounds like you’re speaking from experience,” she said.

“I have no idea what happened here before I arrived,” he said. “But I can tell you that in the twenty years I’ve been working here, we’ve never cloned any notorious criminals.”

“Good to know,” she said, making her voice sound warm. “Because I would have no idea how to train one of those individuals.”

“You would need training first,” Guan said. “You wouldn’t start here. We would decide if we think you’re suited to work here, and if you are, we would send you to one of our operations elsewhere.”

Gomez noted that he didn’t say where. He was being deliberately cagey about that.

“Then you would return here—if they felt your skill set was best used here. Otherwise, we have facilities all over the Alliance to which you might be better suited. Your physical condition alone might be enough to recommend you to our military facilities. At those facilities, they try not to enhance the clones. They try to develop their own innate strengths and weaknesses. Enhancements can be stripped from someone. Innate strengths cannot.”

Oh, but they can
, Gomez thought, but didn’t say. It wasn’t relevant to this conversation.

“If you would like,” Guan said, “I can help you fill out a transfer application. We can choose where you would do your training, not necessary the place, but the climate.”

Her feelings of triumph were leaving. She realized just from his attitude that she would get no farther than this room, and he would oversee anything she did. She couldn’t even access systems using her codes and claim she had done so accidentally, as Apaza had wanted her to do.

“How long would the training last?” Gomez asked, casting around for a reason to say no. “As I mentioned, I’m looking to settle down.”

“We generally do not bring anyone into this facility without five years of experience in our business. I’m not sure how the military operations work. They might be more amenable to someone with your experience. Maybe…a year or two before you get your posting? But don’t quote me on that.”

Gomez allowed herself a heavy sigh. “I wish your notification had mentioned that. I had used a good part of my leave to come here. I thought there were opportunities.”

“I didn’t mean to mislead you, Marshal. There are opportunities. The timetable is ours, however, not yours. I’m sure there are other jobs inside the Alliance which might serve your desire to settle down and your need for the occasional risk.”

“I’m sure,” she said drily. “I don’t suppose you could point me in that direction?”

He swept a hand toward one of the tables. “You could apply—”

“I don’t have years,” she said. “I would like to settle when I retire, and I was hoping I could do that when I returned to my ship.”

He rose to his feet without uncrossing his legs, the sign of someone quite limber. Then he extended a hand so that she could rise.

She remembered his comment on DNA. She smiled at the extended palm, and shook her head slightly.

“Thank you,” she said, “but I doubt I’ll ever look at such casual contact in the same way again.”

He smiled, and let his hand drop to his side. She stood exactly as he had, using her thighs to lift her without bracing herself on anything. She almost felt like slapping out the pillow—or taking it with her. She was suddenly very conscious of the DNA she had left behind.

She looked wistfully around the room. It had no windows and didn’t reveal anything. Not even a map of the facility.

She wished she could ask for a tour, but that would seem presumptuous, especially now that she had turned down any possibility of working in this field.

“I thank you for your time,” she said.

“If you change your mind, Marshal…” Guan let his voice trail off without promising anything. It was an effective way to leave someone with a good feeling.

She smiled. “I’ll remember what you said.”

Then she let herself out of this room. The map reappeared under her vision, and she silently cursed it. She couldn’t pretend to walk in the wrong direction and see the rest of the facility.

She had a hunch a variety of alarms would go off if she did so.

She contemplated it, though, as she walked out of Building Fourteen. But she wasn’t sure what it would gain her.

Right now, she knew, she hadn’t attracted anyone’s attention. Her cover story could easily pass as truth if she did nothing else, like pretend to get lost.

All that worry about risk, about exposing herself and this little mission, and nothing had come of it.

She felt vaguely disappointed.

Unless Apaza found something while she was here, she had the same amount of information to bring to the Moon as she had had when she left the Frontier.

She had traveled this way with such hope, seeing the possibility of bringing more than news of the enclave to the Moon.

Instead, all she had to offer the authorities there were the bits of information she had gathered in the Frontier, and her ability to investigate.

She suspected that she and Simiaar would be very busy once they got to the Moon. They would be investigating, while others were probably still cleaning up the mess.

She had to be content with that.

But it wasn’t the atonement she had been looking for.

She guessed she would have to find that somewhere else.

THIRTY-TWO

PIPPA LANDAU OPENED
the door of her centuries’ old house and stepped onto the lawn. The air smelled faintly of cut grass and Mississippi River mud. Davenport had just experienced the annual spring flood. Back in the day, the people who lived here had sandbagged the riverbanks to prevent the brown Mississippi water from overrunning the city.

And it didn’t always work. Much of Davenport had been built based on the knowledge that the Mississippi would flood periodically. So most of the city was up high, on the bluffs.

Now, the houses had stilts that lifted the buildings above any known waterline. Her house, built above the traditional flood stage, had only used its stilts once in the decades she had lived here. That flood, which happened when her children were small, had been epic, a disaster that would have wiped out the city if modern technology hadn’t made city protection possible.

She thought of that flood every time the smell of the Mississippi became overpowering.

And she was thinking of it now.

The grass was wet. She probably shouldn’t have had the bots cut it so soon after the heavy rains, but she had. The ground was still squishy, and water soaked into her favorite slippers, making her feet cold.

She wrapped her robe around her waist, hoping the neighbors wouldn’t see, and then realized that worrying about her neighbors meant she had become an Iowan.

Tears pooled in her eyes. She wanted to remain an Iowan. A Midwestern teacher of uncertain origin, who raised her family here and put down roots, like she had never thought possible.

When she first arrived on Earth, she had felt like a plant in a hydroponic garden: roots visible in her little glass container, taking in nutrients, but movable—constantly on the alert for the best conditions, the best life, the safest place.

She had found it. Right here. Davenport, Iowa, Midwest, Earth, the center of the Earth Alliance, the place most people ran from.