Starbase Human (34 page)

She tried not to smile. He was taking her on, and in a way that she approved of. She let him continue.

“You’re assuming that we’re up against the usual stupid types, the folks who don’t understand how government works or why the Alliance exists or what benefit it brings. I learned something when I was chasing criminals. The folks at the bottom—the thieves, the murderers, the thugs—they were often stupid. But the people who ran the networks? They were usually twice as smart as those of us pursing them. Our arrogance led to many mistakes. Once we stopped thinking of ourselves as superior, we actually made progress.”

“That is the second time you have used the word ‘arrogance’ around me,” she said.

“Yes, sir.” If there had been a moment when he should have apologized, this was it. And he did not.

“You believe we are making the mistakes of the arrogant,” she said.

“Yes, sir.” He kept his gaze on her. The only thing that betrayed his nervousness was a visible, rapid heartbeat in his neck.

“You believe that we have missed a lot of opportunities to solve or prevent these crimes—”

“Acts of war, sir, I truly think they are acts of war.”

“To prevent these acts, criminal or warlike,” she said. “We have missed the opportunities not because they were impossible to find, but because in our arrogance, we did not look for them. We are, in your words, being diligent against enemies we do not have while failing to protect our Alliance from the ones we do have.”

“Yes, sir. Exactly, sir.”

She made a soft sound. She had been thinking of that since she saw him the day before. That was one reason she had taken the long walk this morning, hoping to find peace in the Imperial Garden.

She had found tranquility here, but no peace. Peace was not something she could simply command into being, no matter how much she wanted to.

“Please, sir,” he said, “I’d love to have more help on this. Not just from within our division, but from the other intelligence and investigative units.”

“And if our division is as corrupt as you say, then what is the point?” she asked.

He suddenly seemed less agitated than he had a moment ago.

“The point, sir, is that we make this top-secret, need-to-know, high clearance. We choose the people we know we can trust and we do the investigative work quickly and quietly.”

“And if we find traitors in our midst, Mitchell?”

He swallowed again. “I don’t know. I guess we either use them to find more traitors or we prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law.”

“The fullest extent of the law,” she said,
“Alliance
law, is draconian, put into place after the Disty joined the Alliance.”

“Vengeance killings?” he asked, surprised.

She shook her head. “Vengeance killings look tame in comparison. We haven’t applied the fullest extent of the law to treason and traitors in hundreds of years for a good reason. Are you still certain you want to pursue this?”

Brown ran a hand through his hair, then looked over at the Hall of Imperial Peace. He probably had no idea what the building was or what it stood for.

“If I’m right, sir,” he said slowly, “then these traitors are the masterminds of attacks that have cost millions of human and alien lives. Disty Vengeance Killings are brutal, yes, but perhaps, when facing this type of organized mass murder, we leave all options on the table. Including whatever it is that’s worse than slaughtering a single murderer for revenge.”

Brown was much more bloodthirsty than she had expected. Her respect for him went up again.

“So be it, Mitchell,” she said. “We’ll do this your way. Let us hope that what we find is something less dramatic than what you envision. Because if you’re right, then we will be making examples of these traitors, and the next two years inside the Alliance will be some of the most controversial this organization has ever seen.”

His gaze met hers. His expression seemed calm for the first time.

“Not if we handle this right, sir,” he said. “Not if we handle it right.”

FORTY-THREE

TWO HOURS LATER
, the rest of the group left the dinner meeting. They had decided on a strategy to attack the clone factory on Hétique, and they had agreed upon a plan to deal with Mycenae. She would leave after the rest of them did.

Deshin moved to his apartment inside the convention center. Before he made certain his staff had heard the conversation in the private dining room, he wanted to be in the safest part of the center. Like the private dining room, Deshin’s apartment was set up so that no one could hack into it.

Still, he set up extra protections as he walked, knowing that Mycenae, among others, might try.

He opened the door to the apartment to find Keith Jakande waiting for him in the center of the entry. Jakande was a strong man who looked bigger than he was. He was also Deshin’s head of security—the best person Deshin had ever had in the job.

Deshin trusted him just a bit more than he probably should have.

As Deshin entered, Jakande said, “We got—”

Deshin held up a finger to silence Jakande, then double-checked to make certain the door was not only closed but all of its protections were turned on.

Then Deshin moved Jakande through the large living area, past the kitchen, and into a corridor. There, Deshin opened a panel, revealing one of six secret rooms inside the apartment.

The room smelled faintly of old air. Deshin turned on the room’s environmental controls, put a hand inside so that his security chip could measure the quality of the air, and then, when it turned out to be fine, stepped inside.

Jakande joined him.

This room was small, barely big enough for the two of them. Deshin had designed this part of the apartment before he met Gerda and before they had Paavo. This was a one-man room, built for survival. There were features Jakande didn’t need to know about, features only Deshin’s old friend Garner had known, features that—since Garner was dead—only Deshin knew.

The panel closed, and a dull gold light turned on. It cast an unfortunate glow over Jakande, turning his dark skin sallow.

“Well?” Deshin asked.

Jakande grinned. “We checked. Eto was right: there is a cloning facility on Hétique, right near Hétique City. That crazy Mycenae girl might also be right. There’s no evidence of alien clones anywhere near that facility, at least now. But decades ago, when those Peyti clones were designed? The facility was handling some Peyti work.”

Deshin nodded. “Good work. I want to see all you have on the facility before we join in this little parade I started.”

Jakande looked surprised. “I thought we were leading this.”

Deshin shrugged. “We might. We might not. It depends on what our informants find. I assume we already have some ships in the area…?”

“Yes,” Jakande said. “We’ll have information shortly.”

“Good,” Deshin said.

“Why wouldn’t we want to participate?” Jakande asked.

Deshin smiled. “There’s organizing and then there’s participating. I value our people, Keith. It might be too risky to get deeply involved.”

“Your nasty friends will notice if you don’t send a ship or two,” Jakande said.

“I know,” Deshin said. “I never said we wouldn’t send a ship. I said we might not participate.”

Jakande grinned. “You can be pretty devious, sir.”

If Deshin hadn’t been devious, he wouldn’t have built a business that spanned the known universe. But he didn’t say that.

Instead, he said, “It’s always best to not only know who is useful, but what they’re useful at, and whether or not you’re better using, or leading.”

“You’d rather use,” Jakande said.

“Oh, no,” Deshin said. “I’ve spent all day leading this small group. It might just be time for the troops to take over.”

Jakande’s smile faded. “You’re anticipating a large loss of life.”

Deshin suppressed the urge to nod. “We’ll contain the attack to the cloning facility, and we’ll do it when the human work force is at its lowest daily point.”

“Still,” Jakande said. “There might be hundreds working in some place like that.”

“Yeah,” Deshin said quietly. “They make and discard clones. We’ll show this little group that we value life as much as they do.”

Jakande shuddered. Then he asked, “Is that everything?”

“For the moment,” Deshin said. “Let me know when the images come in.”

“Yes, sir,” Jakande said, and let himself out.

Deshin kept the panel door open, feeling a cool breeze and fresher air enter the small space.

He had forgotten: Jakande hadn’t worked with Deshin as Deshin set up his business. Jakande was used to a more genteel Deshin, the Deshin who had a stable, long-time marriage to a good woman. The Deshin who loved his son.

Jakande knew that Deshin had a dark history, but a dark history was easy to ignore when it was only history.

Deshin would keep an eye on Jakande. If the man got squeamish about any of this, he could be replaced. Or left behind.

Or forgotten.

Deshin had done a lot of forgetting in the past.

There was nothing to stop him from doing it again.

FORTY-FOUR

ZAGRANDO HAD
JUST crossed into Earth’s solar system when the space yacht jerked and then stopped. The stop—a full stop—lasted less than five seconds, but the state-of-the-art cockpit informed him, not just with little holographic warning signs rising off all of the boards, but across his internal links as well.

Oddly enough, Zagrando felt a thread of relief. He’d been expecting something like this for more than a week. He hadn’t been stupid enough to think that, just because he had reached the center of the Earth Alliance, he would be safe.

If anything, he was in even more danger.

Zagrando tapped one of the warning signs that appeared above the board. It flared, which meant he could send a message to it.

What the hell is going on?
he sent.

The yacht didn’t respond.

He had never called her by name, although she had a name:
Day’s Reach
. He had no idea what the name meant, and he didn’t care. He had scrubbed it from the yacht’s exterior—which was not a hard task. The name
Day’s Reach
only appeared when some port pinged the yacht or needed additional information.

It took three layers of actual official behavior to get to the name at all—making him harder to trace.

Maybe that was why he had never called the yacht by her name.

What’s going on?
he sent again.

And again, no response.

That was a bad sign. It meant she didn’t feel like she could respond. He had set all the security features on this space yacht at the highest level, which meant no easily traceable communication during a crisis.

Which, apparently, this was.

Fortunately, he had been in the main cockpit when the crisis happened.

He shielded the cockpit’s controls so that they couldn’t be accessed from anywhere else on the yacht.

The second cockpit, on a different deck, was coded only to his DNA, combined with his warm and living body. If blood wasn’t coursing through his veins, then his skin, his DNA, his entire body, wouldn’t gain anyone access into that cockpit.

He’d bought the yacht for that feature combined with all the other defensive capabilities. He’d known someone would try to get him eventually; he also knew that his brains alone wouldn’t keep him alive.

He had the same training that the people who were coming after him had. In fact, Ike Jarvis had done most of Zagrando’s undercover training.

The big challenge, since Zagrando started running from Jarvis himself, was to think outside that training, in a way that Jarvis would never consider.

No one knew about this space yacht except the woman that Jarvis had partnered Zagrando with on that fateful last mission. And from Jarvis’s panicked tone in their last conversation, she was most likely dead.

The space yacht changed course—and the course change did not come from Zagrando. More warning beacons went up until he shut off all except the one on the console in front of him.

He tapped on a live holographic representation of the yacht’s exterior. It appeared above the console, his beautiful big space yacht, bought with more stolen money so far outside the Alliance that he had never seen a space yacht like it.

Beside it—or, rather, all over it—was a larger ship, made of a black material so dark that it almost blended into the darkness around it. Only the slight reflection of faraway stars gave it away—that, and the fact that it seemed to displace everything around it.

He’d seen ships like that hundreds of times before. They belonged to the Black Fleet. Only the Black Fleet didn’t operate deep inside the Alliance. It couldn’t—at least, not obviously, like this ship was.