Starbase Human (41 page)

He knew that sounded harsh, but he had no choice. A few of the adults put hands over their mouths.

“Can’t you find out what’s going on there?” that annoying woman asked.

“No,” Koos said. “It’s not my concern.”

He stared at them, willing someone else to challenge him. No one did.

“You need to let us know your decision when we arrive. If you decide to stay, you must remain on the ship.”

“Where will the ship go?” one of the adult men asked.

“I’m not going to tell you until we’ve left the starbase.”
And not even then,
he thought but didn’t say. “We’re in the business of saving lives today, and the last thing we want is for one of the adults who leave us to tell the people who bombed your home tonight where we’re going.”

Some of the teenagers were nodding. Good.

“Then how can we make a decision as to whether or not to leave?” the annoying woman asked.

“I don’t care,” Koos said. “You will make your decision. Once we leave the starbase, we’ll have food and water for all of you, a comfortable place to sleep, and the right amount of care.”

“What happens when we get where we’re going?” one of the teenage boys asked.

“I have no idea,” Koos said. “My job was to rescue as many of you as I could as quickly as I could. I was told to start with the youngest and work my way to the older children. I did that. We saved as many of you as we could. I know expecting you to be grateful is probably a bit too much, but I will tell you one thing. Not one of you would be alive now, without us. Clear?”

The room was silent for a moment. Then the annoying woman spoke in a near whisper. “Not even the babies?”

“Not even the babies,” he said. Then he looked directly at her. “And you know why.”

He met as many eyes as he could. Then he nodded once and stepped back.

He left the cargo bay and waited until the doors closed before leaning against the wall of the corridor. He was exhausted, and he still had a lot to do.

He hadn’t lied about one thing: He had no idea what Deshin would do with all of these children.

The man had never taken children before, and he had an aversion to clones. This was completely atypical behavior.

But Koos had learned early in his career with Deshin not to question what the man did.

Koos would simply be glad when this assignment was over.

And he hoped nothing like it would ever come up again.

FIFTY-NINE

THE STUPID DOCTOR
was forcing Zagrando to drink water. She’d hooked up some kind of solution into his arm, hydrating him, and replacing—oh, he didn’t know what. He didn’t care.

He needed to think.

Behind him, the gigantic space ship that had tried to destroy him was falling into pieces. More explosions racked it, and he wasn’t sure how that happened, but it had. The laser pistols? Stuff they carried?

He couldn’t think about it.

His next problem was what was waiting for him ahead as he careened toward Earth’s Moon.

His calculation was pretty simple: He’d get there in less than two hours. This damn bullet ship was well named. And once he got there, no one in authority would let him into the Port of Armstrong, or any other port.

The news reports he had seen said that the Peyti weren’t getting in, and that meant anyone suspicious wasn’t getting in, and he sure as hell was suspicious. In the old days, he would have asked to get onto the surface and then let them deal with him, but these weren’t the old days, this was post-Anniversary Day, post-Peyti Crisis, and he didn’t know anyone—

Except a Retrieval Artist.

Except Miles Flint.

God, Zagrando’s brain was working slowly. He had planned to contact Flint anyway.

He needed to do so now.

Flint had given him a back-up link long ago, when Detective Iniko Zagrando of the Valhalla Police Department had worked with Miles Flint, father, to adopt his clone daughter.

Zagrando had to pray that the link still worked.

He sent:
Miles Flint, this is Detective Iniko Zagrando. I need your help.

Nothing. Of course there was nothing. Why would he expect anything? The universe was making this hard, and of course it needed to get harder. He needed—

He yelped. The pain that shot through him would have made his eyes water if there were any water left in his body.

Sorry
, the doctor sent.
You need real medical attention
.

No kidding
, he thought but didn’t say, at least he hoped he didn’t say it or think it or discuss it.

Maybe he could contact that lawyer, Celestine Gonzalez, if she were still alive. Lots of lawyers died during the Peyti Crisis, all in meetings with the Peyti, and for all he knew, she was one of them—

My sources tell me Iniko Zagrando is dead
.

Zagrando let out a shuddery breath. A happy, shuddery breath. He had gotten a response. On these back links.

Detective Iniko Zagrando is dead
, he sent.
But Iniko Zagrando isn’t. I was working undercover for Earth Alliance Intelligence. You can check that with Celestine Gonzalez, but do so fast, because I’m coming in hot, and I need some serious help…

Zagrando realized that Flint had checked out in the middle of that contact, that he hadn’t heard the entire message. It echoed, like unsent messages often did. Maybe Gonzalez was dead. Maybe he couldn’t contact her.

Maybe Zagrando had made a huge error, contacting Flint.

Maybe the authorities were already listening in and—

What do you need?

Flint was back. The man was nothing if not efficient. And Zagrando blessed him for it.

He yelped again, hoped that sound didn’t go through the links, and made himself breathe one more time. He was dizzy. He didn’t want to be dizzy.

Please get me clearance with Space Traffic Control. I have information you need
.

He had no idea why he thought Flint could help him with something that official, but a whisper of a memory told him it was okay to ask.

That won’t be easy,
Flint sent back.
We’ve had some serious—

I’m coming in hot,
Zagrando sent.
There are factions in the Earth Alliance who don’t want me to talk to you people. Please, do what you can. Please.

God, he was begging now. He’d never been a begging man.

Send me the relevant information,
Flint sent.
I’ll see what I can do.

It wasn’t much of a promise, but it would have to do.

Thank you
, Zagrando sent. He gripped the edge of the console to keep from passing out.
Thank you so very much.

SIXTY

DESHIN SANK INTO
a chair in his suite. He had taken one of the newer space yachts from Garner’s Moon and brought most of his team. He was heading to one of his compounds near the Frontier. It would take nearly a month to get there, especially since he had to stop to pick up a few experts and an entire cadre of lawyers and accountants.

Koos had rescued about four hundred children, of all ages, more than Deshin had been told were even on the property. Not all of the children were young; some were teenagers, which would be a problem.

Deshin had already drawn up a plan, which he would need his people to implement. He was going to adopt out the children. He would give them legitimate birth certificates, and he would make certain they would go to human families scattered around the Alliance. No children with the same DNA profile would go to the same area.

The adoption service would be for-profit, but mostly to cover expenses. Or maybe it would be non-profit—some kind of war orphan thing. He would leave that to the lawyers and accountants.

He didn’t want to lose money on this venture, but he didn’t want to make money, either. He didn’t believe in trafficking in human beings.

He realized that, under Alliance law, these children weren’t human beings, but he didn’t care. They were to him. If he had thought of them as property, he wouldn’t have gone to all the expense to save them.

Expense and loss of life. Two downed shuttles, with at least six people on each, maybe more.

He hadn’t known anyone who had died—his organization was so big he couldn’t know everyone—but he felt it.

No one would have died if he had known that the Alliance had been raising slow-grow clones on site.

If he had done his research.

And if he hadn’t felt like he needed to do something, anything, to deal with the clones attacking the Moon. He had figured that finding where the Alliance made clones would help.

And he had figured that going after the secret clones based on criminals would be best. It would stop everything.

He wasn’t sure now if it would stop anything. He had been bent on vengeance, and in the process, he had made the kind of mistake he hadn’t made since he met Gerda.

Of course, he hadn’t consulted with Gerda on this, and he wouldn’t tell her now.

He would clean up his mistake—as best he could, anyway.

He ran a hand over his face. He hadn’t slept in more than a day. He’d managed to choke down some food before the mission. He knew he needed more.

Gerda would yell at him for not taking care of himself.

She would be appalled at what he had done.

He wasn’t entirely appalled. He knew that two different groups inside the Alliance would understand why Hétique City and the clone factory were destroyed.

The Security forces would know that the clone factory was targeted by some of the larger criminal organizations, working together, and maybe this would finally stop their infiltration of the families.

But he hoped that the masterminds behind the attacks on the Moon would understand why this factory had been chosen and not some other Alliance clone factory. Those masterminds had to assume that someone knew about the Peyti clones being grown here, all those decades ago.

Deshin toyed with sending a message to Miles Flint. But any message Deshin could think of was one that admitted guilt.

And while Deshin was bothered by what he had done, he wasn’t about to admit guilt. He had survived a long time by avoiding any admission of anything.

He was going to avoid this, as well.

He’d left Flint with enough information to track those clones, and maybe he had diverted the attention of the masterminds away from the Moon.

Deshin leaned his head back. He needed that sleep. And that meant he couldn’t think about the Moon any longer.

His family was off the Moon until the crisis was over. And he had a new business to start that would take all of his attention.

Maybe he would move his base of operations away from the Moon, away from the Alliance itself.

He felt a deep sadness at the thought.

That would be a decision for another day. Right now, he had work to do—and a lot of it.

And maybe, by the time he finished all of that, the Moon crisis would be completely over and he could go home.

He closed his eyes and thought of Gerda and Paavo.

He was such a fool sometimes.

Home was where his wife and child were, not some arbitrary place.

When he was done setting up the new business, he
would
go home—to his family.

Where he belonged.

SIXTY-ONE

EVERYTHING BLURRED AND
scraped in his mind.

At some point, Zagrando had slipped from the chair to the floor. He’d ordered a shadow console to appear close to his hands—or maybe the bullet ship doctor had.

She kept talking to him, exhorting him to stay awake, telling him she was giving him this and that to stimulate his brain, but his brain didn’t feel stimulated.

It felt like his brain was melting.

Only he knew that couldn’t happen.

Someone or something was communicating with his ship, and the doctor told him to communicate back. Identification, ship’s code, all kinds of information.

He couldn’t remember any of it, couldn’t really remember what he had called this little thing. It didn’t have the same name as the space yacht, and even if it had, he wouldn’t have wanted to state it.

He couldn’t have stated it, not now.

He sent to Flint,
They need stuff. I don’t know what—

And he couldn’t remember if Flint responded.

The trip seemed to take forever and it seemed like the trip was over quickly. Every now and then, he’d have a moment of clarity, and he realized that he was truly injured, maybe dying. The burns were more than a yacht's doctor program could handle.