Starbase Human (32 page)

She had heard that swill from the moment she arrived in Dubuque. When her kids were in school, they had come home repeating it—even when she quizzed them about the other species in their classrooms. Apparently, to her children and so many others, “aliens” were not the children of non-humans whom they had grown up with. Aliens were the species they’d never seen or the ones that made the news, like the Disty with their Vengeance Killings or the Wygnin, coming in to steal children in the night.

Raymond used to disabuse their children of these notions, but Pippa had remained quiet, deciding that on one level, the ignoramuses who taught her children were correct: space was dangerous, and her children never needed to travel there.

Well
, she sent to her son, making up the lie as she went along,
one of the organizations I belong to is holding a conference that’s rather hands-on, letting us help rebuild the Moon. I think it’s a good cause—

Mother, let someone else do this,
her son sent.
We have no ties to the Moon.

It’s the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time,
she sent, and that part was true—at least in this solar system, it was. The Earth’s solar system hadn’t seen this kind of mass loss of life from a non-organic cause in decades.
If I’m going to teach my students to respond with compassion, then I’m going to have to allow them to travel to places like this. In order to organize a return trip later in the year, I have to attend this conference now. I have—

Now?
Takumi sent.
Mother, hundreds of people have just died up there. Again. It’s the wrong time to go.

I’m sorry, Takumi,
she sent, and hoped the links picked up her rather sad tone,
but right now is the
best
time to go. If there’s going to be a third attack, it won’t happen for weeks, maybe months. Just like the second attack. Everyone will be vigilant. I think right now is the absolute best time to go, and if I don’t like the measures the Moon government is taking in the wake of these two crises, then I won’t bring my students later.

Mother, there
is
no Moon government. There never really has been—

You know what I mean, Takumi,
she sent.

It’s not fair that you’ve contacted me as you’re about to leave,
he sent.
I’ll reimburse you for the ticket. We need to discuss this before you go.

Takumi,
she sent.
The conference starts tomorrow. I can’t wait.

Mother—

I love you, darling. Give kisses to that little girl of yours, and your beautiful wife.
She was about to sign off when she added one more thing.
And don’t worry your siblings. They have enough on their plates at the moment. I’ll be back in no time. You won’t even miss me.

That’s not fair, Mother—

She signed off as if he weren’t sending anything at all. Then she blocked any reply with an automated response, saying that her ship was boarding.

It wasn’t, of course. There wasn’t even a notification above the exit, saying that the trip was about to start.

She stood up. Her stomach wasn’t as knotted as it had been.

Maybe she had just been frightened of telling her children what she was going to do.

She was on her way now, even if she hadn’t yet boarded the ship.

She was going to do what she believed to be right.

And then she could go back to her anonymous little life.

Once and for all.

FORTY-ONE

THEY TRAIPSED IN,
one by one, looking smaller than usual. Deshin hadn’t realized until the eight guests he had invited to this little meeting had actually showed up for it how much their bodyguards added to their own aura of invincibility.

They sat around the table, four men and four women. The only person he had never worked with before was the one whom he had to struggle to stop staring at. Sonja Mycenae.

She looked like her clone’s older, tougher, meaner sister. She had stunning, copper-colored skin and matching brown eyes. Her dark brown hair was cut short, accenting the angle of her jaw and the curve of her neck.

She wore a black tank top that revealed every muscle in her torso as well as the aureole of her breasts and a pair of tight, black pants that looked like they’d been glued to her legs. Only her shoes weren’t practical. She wore black sandals that, in Deshin’s opinion, did not offer enough protection against injury to her shapely feet.

She saw him looking at her, and she gave him a sardonic grin. He nodded in return, wondering if her mother had ever told her that he had hired one of her illegal government clones, and that that particular clone had ended up dead.

He couldn’t ask. Aurla Mycenae had died five years before in a failed raid against the Earth Alliance. And because of that, frankly, he was surprised that Sonja Mycenae had shown up at all.

“Food first?” Nartay Cyzewski asked. He was a round man with chubby red cheeks and bright green eyes. He kept his perfectly shaped skull shaved, revealing tiny ears and a gigantic birthmark on the back of his neck that he obviously refused to enhance.

Deshin smiled at him. They had worked together on a construction project near the edge of the known universe, and had nearly come to blows over the financing. They had worked out an understanding and, of all the people in this room, that made him the person Deshin was the most comfortable with.

“Food first,” Deshin said.

The group went to the various food stations. No one asked a single question; obviously, they’d listened to the briefing and knew how Deshin would run this meeting.

He took a stir-fry, made of vegetables grown inside the conference center, and a drink made of fresh berries. He doubted he would eat much of this, but he didn’t want to be the only one not partaking.

He set his plate at the head of the table, grabbed chopsticks, and sat down, scooting his chair back slightly so that he could watch everyone else fill their plates.

Sonja Mycenae finished second. She took exactly the same food he had, then met his gaze as she found her name card at the seat to his right. Her food choices were a challenge and a message:
I don’t trust you, so I’ll eat what you do
.

Everything about her startled him. He was surprised that she had once worked as a nanny, even if she had given it up after her mother died. He couldn’t imagine anyone hiring this woman to care for children.

Although he had hired a facsimile of her.

The others sat down, some carrying more than one plate, others balancing their plates over a wine glass. Layla Kee carried a glass and an entire bottle of wine to her place first, then added six small bowls, each filled with things that looked lumpy and unrecognizable. She, too, had chopsticks.

Deshin waited until everyone was seated before he spoke. Some in the group had already finished eating by the time others had sat down. The others ate as slowly as they had gathered their food.

“Thank you for coming,” Deshin said. “I’m sure all of you are aware of what’s been happening to the Moon. I also know that these events have had an impact on your businesses.”

“Half my employees can’t get to the Moon these days,” said Gahiji Palone. He was the only person who had filled his plate with all meat. He was eating a large rib of something or other with his bare hands. Some brown sauce stained his well-trimmed gray beard.

“Why can’t they?” asked Bibi Steeg. She was delicate and pale, her hair silver, her eyes almost clear. The only things she had taken were some yogurt dish with raisins and almonds, pita bread, and some weak tea.

“Half his employees are Peyti,” said RaeAnne Ibori. She was tiny as well, but nothing about her was delicate. In fact, she looked like she could fight everyone in the room while finishing her meal.

“Why would you hire aliens to work for you?” Steeg asked Palone.

“They’re smart,” he snapped, then yanked some flesh off the bone with his teeth.

Deshin grabbed his glass of juice and held it as if he were going to make a toast. He couldn’t let this meeting get out of hand, but he felt just how hard it would be to keep these eight people under control.

“As you can probably guess,” he said, speaking over Steeg, who seemed to want to continue her argument with Palone, “these attacks on the Moon have had a dramatic impact on my bottom line.”

He was exaggerating. The attacks hadn’t yet had an impact, and he suspected that, if the attacks stopped, his bottom line would grow rather than decrease. The impact had been more emotional than he wanted to admit—the loss of life, the loss of friends and colleagues, and the loss of that sense of protection that living in the center of the Earth Alliance used to bring.

“The authorities on the Moon aren’t getting anywhere in their investigations,” Deshin said. “I’ve had some of my best people on this as well, and there are some connections that I don’t like.”

“What does that mean?” Mycenae asked. She leaned close enough to him that he could smell her vanilla perfume.

“There are some Alliance connections to these attacks,” Deshin said.

“Meaning what?” Cyzewski asked.

“Meaning that either lower-level officials are working in concert or they’re covering up something,” Deshin said.

He explained as much of his investigation to them as he felt safe doing, telling them about his search for the designer criminal clones of PierLuigi Frémont, the hunt for the explosives, and the fact that several trails dead-ended in Alliance connections.

He ended with, “I invited all of you here because we have one thing in common.”

“Besides the loose way we do business?” asked Locan Robuchon, and then he burped. He shoved aside a plate covered mostly with chocolate covered sweets.

Deshin gave Robuchon a sideways look. Deshin didn’t conduct loose business in any way, and most of the others in the room didn’t, either.

But no one corrected Robuchon.

“I invited you,” Deshin said, “because we’ve all had Alliance-made clones infiltrate our organizations, sometimes with extreme ill effects.”

It took a lot of self-control not to look at Mycenae. Her mother’s raid on the Alliance facility had started because every single member of the Mycenae family had been cloned, and Aurla wanted it to end. She had pretended disinterest when Deshin had told her about the Sonja clone he’d discovered in his organization, but he later found out that afterwards, Aurla Mycenae had launched an aggressive campaign against Alliance clones that had nearly destroyed her organization.

“We just kill them,” Mycenae said flatly. “We find them, we slaughter them. We record it and send the information back to the source.”

This time, Deshin did look at her. Her expression was cold, her eyes glittering with rage.

“Yeah,” Ibori said to Mycenae. “Isn’t that how you took over the family business? After you proved yourself by killing, what, twenty-five different versions of yourself?”

Mycenae turned toward her.

“They’re not me,” Mycenae said. “They’re not versions of me. They’re blobs of flesh that don’t deserve life. And I killed seventy-five clones, not just of me, but of my family members, as well. I’m the one who is rebuilding the Family Mycenae after my mother let this thing with the Alliance make her crazy. Trying to stop the Alliance is crazy. Using tools at our disposal to find and destroy clones is the best use of our resources.”

Deshin felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

Cyzewski’s gaze met Deshin’s over Ibori’s head. Deshin recognized the look on his old colleague’s face. Cyzewski was scared of Mycenae, and not because he feared for his life. Instead, he feared that her desire for vengeance made her reckless.

“You said that you send information back to the source,” Deshin said to Mycenae. “What do you mean by that?”

“We found out where they were making the clones,” Mycenae said. “My late brother sent someone in to destroy all the Mycenae DNA, but of course that didn’t work. The DNA is backed up off-site.”

She grabbed her berry juice, then leaned back in her chair, her gaze still on Deshin’s, her look challenging.

“You do realize,” she said, “that the Alliance has collected DNA on all of us.”

He didn’t “realize” it. He had worried about it, and suspected it, but he didn’t know it for a fact. And he wasn’t sure she did, either.

“How do you know that?” Steeg asked Mycenae.

Mycenae gave her a withering glance. For a moment, Deshin thought Mycenae wouldn’t answer the question. Then she said, “You know, people pay me to get this kind of information.”

“The government has a DNA collections division,” Palone said. “It puts everyone in there.”

“Everyone?” Kee asked.

“There’s a criminal division,” Palone said. “But think about it: how else do they confirm your identity when you travel?”

“I don’t know,” Kee said. “I don’t let the Alliance confirm my identity.”

Deshin set down his juice glass. Mycenae mirrored his movement. He didn’t know if she was deliberately trying to annoy him or if she was just focused on him.