Starbase Human (25 page)

She had to go through a cursory decontamination. If Simiaar or Apaza or anyone had been waiting for her, they would have been just outside the actual bay itself, in a little reception area.

But she would have been able to see them from the moment she stepped off the shuttle.

And she didn’t.

In fact, that little reception area was dark.

Her stomach clenched.

Maybe her visit to the surface hadn’t been as harmless as she had thought it had been.

She stepped into the decontamination chamber, half expecting the warm light to find something had attached itself to her. But she was cleared within the standard sixty seconds. She stepped outside, into the reception area, and the lights came up, just like they were supposed to.

The reception area lights were supposed to stay up for at least twenty minutes after the last person departed.

So, not only had no one been waiting for her, no one had been in the area prior to her arrival.

She couldn’t take the silence anymore.

Lashante?
she sent.
Where is everyone?

Come to the mess,
Simiaar sent back. She did not use a visual or even sound, which was odd. Because Simiaar preferred the human touch, or so she claimed.

Gomez left the reception area and stopped in the cargo bay. A tiny armory hid in a small closet there, known only to her, Simiaar, and the pilot. No one else needed to know that extra weapons existed on this level.

Gomez grabbed a laser pistol, checked to see if it was charged (it was), and then carried it with her to the stairs between levels.

The mess was one deck up. They didn’t use it much—or rather, Apaza, Simiaar, and Gomez didn’t use it. The small crew did. Which made the gathering even stranger than it had initially seemed.

The mess was directly across from the stairs, taking up a good half of the deck. The smells of coffee and the last meal cooked—whatever it had been—filled the corridor. As she crossed, she smelled eggs, toast, and a bit of soy sauce.

Breakfast.

Her stomach growled. For her, breakfast had been a long time ago. Hétique City did not operate on Earth Standard time.

Gomez slipped into the mess. Most of the crew stood inside, staring at the far wall. Coffee still sat in pots along the counters, as well as donuts and some cold dim sum. Eggs had congealed in serving trays.

Gomez grabbed a donut and scanned for Simiaar. She didn’t see her immediately. Instead, her gaze found Apaza, who clutched his personal, gigantic coffee thermos as if it were a lifeline.

Gomez started; she hadn’t expected to see him outside of the information room. He was even more pear-shaped than he had been when he started on this mission, and she worried, ever so remotely, about his health.

Apaza shifted slightly, and Gomez saw Simiaar at his side. Simiaar was watching the screens, as well.

Gomez threaded her way through the crew. Normally, they would have nodded at her or said hello or welcome back. She would have greeted them, as well.

Instead, they were focused on the screen, too.

Gomez looked up, saw some flying cars passing over buildings, and Peyti everywhere, with their masks off and clutched in their long fingers. She knew if she scrolled through her links she could find sound, but she didn’t.

Instead, she stopped beside Simiaar.

“What the hell is going on?” Gomez demanded.

“They tried again,” Simiaar said softly.

“Who tried again?”

“God, if we knew who, we could stop this, couldn’t we?” Simiaar snapped, which was wholly unlike her.

“Back me up here, I’ve been traveling,” Gomez said.

Apaza glanced at her, his face lined with worry. “Someone attacked the Moon again, only this time, the word is they might have used Peyti clones.”

Gomez cursed softly, heart pounding. “Is anything left?”

“They seemed to have caught it in time,” someone said from behind her.

“The Peyti were using bombs built into their masks, and the bombs didn’t work if the environment got changed from Earth Normal to Peyti Normal. Some kind of failsafe.” Apaza clutched his coffee thermos even tighter. “But anyone with those Peyti when the environment changed from Earth Normal to Peyti Normal died.”

“They have no idea what the body count is yet,” Simiaar said softly. She looked over at Gomez. “Did we miss this?”

Gomez was staring at the screens. The images made no sense to her. Various Peyti faces, buildings she didn’t recognize, people standing near sectioned domes.

She was startled. She hadn’t expected the Peyti.

The Peyti, who considered violence a last resort. The Peyti, who always questioned any addition to the Alliance if the addition had a culture based on violence.

Her brain was having trouble processing this.

“The commentators I’m listening to are reeling,” Apaza said. “They all thought the first attack was blowback against some human policies, and now this with the Peyti, it doesn’t make sense.”

“Peyti clones,” Gomez repeated. “The cloning facilities generally don’t mix clone types.”

“What does that mean?” Camilla, the secondary pilot, asked.

“It means that the businesses are human-only or Peyti-only,” answered Jiang, the third pilot. That meant Charlie was alone in the cockpit.

Gomez wondered if that was a good idea.

“Uzven knew, didn’t it?” Simiaar asked Gomez. “The bastard just didn’t tell us.”

Gomez looked at her. Uzven, the Peyti translator who had screwed them up so badly on Epriccom more than fifteen years ago.

“Uzven trains the Peyti in human customs,” Simiaar said, practically spitting the words. “I bet it trained these clones.”

Gomez wasn’t so certain. But Uzven had been a problem from the moment she met it. It would be so easy to believe Uzven had something to do with this. But Uzven might simply have been a cranky, difficult Peyti. She’d met dozens of those. They always believed they were superior to humans—and in some ways, they were.

Gomez shook her head. “We don’t know anything yet, Lashante.”

“This is a nightmare,” Simiaar said. “I can’t imagine what those poor people are going through.”

Neither could Gomez. But one thing was clear. These attacks were focused on the Moon itself, for whatever reason.

That piece of information was probably important.

The fact that these attackers had used clones as weapons again was important as well, although she wasn’t quite sure how that factored in.

And with more people dead in yet another attack, the investigators on the Moon would be tied up with another emergency.

She turned away from the screens and looked at her small crew.

“We’re heading to the Moon as fast as we can,” she said. “Obviously, it’s one of the most dangerous places in the Alliance at the moment, and I won’t look askance at any of you if you want to leave. There are human cities here on Hétique. I’m sure you can find your way home if you don’t want to travel with us.”

What the hell are you doing?
Simiaar sent.
If they don’t believe in us, they might report what we’re doing.

Gomez didn’t care. And she wasn’t going to handhold Simiaar at the moment.

The crew was looking at her, faces gray with shock. A few people had tears in their eyes.

“I’m afraid, however, that you’ll have to make your decision now. We’re leaving Hétique’s orbit in less than an hour. I want to thank you all for your help—”

“What can we do on the Moon?” asked Floriano, who grew food for the kitchen. “I mean, we have jobs here, but you’re planning to stay once we get on the Moon, right?”

“I’m not planning anything at the moment,” Gomez said. “Things have obviously changed. And we have a ship. If the Moon government needs us to track things or investigate things, then we might have to travel to do so.”

“And if we don’t?” Floriano pressed.

“Then I’m sure there will be plenty for you to do.”

To Gomez’s surprise, that sentence came from Apaza. He sounded almost angry.

“Like what?” Floriano asked.

“Clean-up,” Sionek, who handled the cargo bay, said.

“Rebuilding,” said Hana, whom Gomez had brought in to handle the weapons systems on the ship.

“Taking care of the dead,” Simiaar said, and the conversation stopped.

Everyone looked at her. She shrugged.

“Think it through,” she said. “They lost millions in the dome collapses. And now they have collateral damage from their attempt to stop this second attack.”

“What a nightmare,” Floriano murmured.

Gomez nodded. She glanced back at the Moon images on screen. Yellowish atmosphere swirled around an enclosed room with a single window. A human hand slapped against the window and then slid down, out of view.

She shuddered.

Gomez turned back to the crew. She had no idea how many people had just seen that.

“Let me repeat,” she said. “Anyone who wants to leave, can.”

Floriano was shaking his head. The rest of the crew stood very still. No one seemed to be bolting for the door.

“You’re right,” said Hana. “They need a lot of help.”

“There’re not a lot of us, but at least we’ll be fresh faces,” said Sionek.

“And we’ll be a little more emotionally stable,” said Jiang.

“Speak for yourself, my friend,” said Camilla, and everyone laughed, breaking the tension.

Then, as quickly as the levity appeared, it dissipated.

“Thank you,” Gomez said, and eased out of the mess. She had a lot to do.

More clones, but of a different species. More killing. More attempts at destroying the domes.

And yet, she knew all of this was coming from inside the Alliance.

She needed to review the material she had gathered and see what she’d missed.

She had a feeling the pieces were there.

She just had to put them together.

THIRTY-FIVE

NUUYOMA AND VERSTRAETE
returned to the restaurant that evening. Verstraete took a table near the entrance. Nuuyoma had reserved the same table he’d had the evening before.

At first, he thought the snotty maître d’ wouldn’t give him the table. But after a bit of arguing, she relented.

The restaurant was full. People—humans—sat in tight groups of three and four, having intense conversations. As the maître d’ took Nuuyoma to his table, he noted again how strange it was to see a human-only restaurant. It made him uncomfortable on a very deep level, as if he were heading into a dark place.

Conversely, he loved the smells of Earth-based spices and herbs. Cinnamon and nutmeg, garlic and ginger, pepper and more pepper. The scent of baked bread combined with the smell of cooked fish. All of those smells would have to be isolated in some restaurants with mixed clientele since the scent of some of the human spices could kill certain aliens. Most mixed restaurants opted for some kind of manufactured “cooking” smell that had been designed to appeal to all customers (and probably appealed to none).

The maître d’ sniffed as she pulled back his chair and made a production of handing him the bound menu. Everything about this place was an affectation. The bound menu—on this level, at least—had a screen inside. He was told that the upper floors had actual paper menus, which were not just expensive, but wasteful.

Nuuyoma scanned, even though he knew he was going to order ogbono soup with fufu. He hadn’t had a chance to finish yesterday’s order. This time, it didn’t matter what One Of One Direct said to him; he would finish the meal.

He had ordered a pineapple lime drink, no alcohol, and received it—with a bit of fresh pineapple attached to a stir stick—by the time One Of One Direct appeared.

One Of One Direct limped, which Nuuyoma hadn’t noticed before. His skin tone seemed even paler than it had the day before.

One Of One Direct glanced at Verstraete, then sat down heavily across from Nuuyoma. “Have you ordered?”

“I’m waiting for you,” Nuuyoma said.

One Of One Direct reached out a hand and grabbed the nearest passing waiter, nearly making her stumble into a table of diners.

“I’m having rigatoni with meat sauce,” One Of One Direct said. “
Real
meat. From an animal source. Got that?”

“That’s all we serve, sir,” the waiter said.

“Yeah, sure,” One Of One Direct said. “And my friend here will have…?”

“Ogbono soup with fufu,” Nuuyoma said, hoping the waiter didn’t take the word “friend” seriously.

“They have four hundred items on the menu,” One Of One Direct said, “and you order the same thing twice?”

Nuuyoma shrugged. “I know what I like.”

“Hmmm,” One Of One Direct said. Then he looked at the waiter. “I want whatever he’s drinking, as soon as you can get it to me.”