Forever Magazine - December 2016 Read online

  But, if DeRicci lost her job, she wouldn’t be able to investigate anything.

  The next time, she got a clone case, she’d sit on that information for as long as she could, finish the investigation, and maybe make an arrest. Sure, it might not hold up, but she could get one of the other divisions to search the perpetrator’s home and business, maybe catch him with something else.

  This time, she had screwed up. She’d followed the rules too closely. She shouldn’t have gone to Gumiela so soon.

  DeRicci would know better next time.

  And she’d play dumb when Gumiela challenged her over it.

  Better to lose a job after solving a case, instead of in the middle of a failed one.

  DeRicci sighed. She didn’t feel better, but at least she had a plan.

  Even if it was a plan she didn’t like at all.

  The place that the clone frequented near the Port was a one-person office, run by a man named Cade Faulke. Ostensibly, Faulke ran an employment consulting office, one that helped people find jobs or training for jobs. But it didn’t take a lot of digging to discover that was a cover for a position with Earth Alliance Security.

  From what little Deshin could find, it seemed that Faulke worked alone, with an android guard—the kind that usually monitored prisons. Clearly, no one expected Faulke to be investigated: the android alone would have been a tip-off to anyone who looked deeper than the thin cover that Faulke had over his name.

  Deshin wondered how many other Earth Alliance operatives worked like that inside of Armstrong. He supposed there were quite a few, monitoring various Earth Alliance projects. Projects like, apparently, his family.

  Deshin let out a sigh. He wandered around his office, feeling like it had become a cage. He clenched and unclenched his fists. Sometimes he hated the way he had restrained himself to build his business and his family. Sometimes he just wanted to go after someone on his own, squeeze the life out of that person, and then leave the corpse, the way someone had left that clone.

  Spying on Deshin’s family. Gerda and five-month-old Paavo had done nothing except get involved with him.

  And, he would wager, that Sonja Mycenae’s family would say the same thing about her.

  He stopped. He hadn’t spoken to the Mycenae family in a long time, but he owed them for an ancient debt.

  He sent an encoded message through his links to Aurla Mycenae, the head of the Mycenae and Sonja’s mother, asking for a quick audience.

  Then Deshin got a contact from Cumija: Five low-level employees have the marker. None of them have access to your family or to anything important inside Deshin Enterprises. How do you want me to proceed?

  Send me a list, he sent back.

  At that moment, his links chirruped, announcing a massive holomessage so encoded that it nearly overloaded his system. He accepted the message, only to find out it was live.

  Aurla Mycenae appeared, full-sized, in the center of his floor. She wore a flowing black gown that accented her dark eyebrows and thick black hair. She had faint lines around her black eyes. Otherwise she looked no older than she had the last time he saw her, at least a decade ago.

  “Luc,” she said in a throaty voice that hadn’t suited her as a young woman, but suited her now. “I get this sense this isn’t pleasure.”

  “No,” he said. “I thought I should warn you. I encountered a slow-grow clone of your daughter Sonja.”

  He decided not to mention that he had hired that clone or that she had been murdered.

  Mycenae exhaled audibly. “Damn Earth Alliance. Did they try to embed her in your organization?”

  “They succeeded for a time,” he said.

  “And then?”

  So much for keeping the information back. “She turned up dead this morning.”

  “Typical,” Mycenae said. “They’ve got some kind of operation going, and they’ve been using clones of my family. You’re not the first to tell me this.”

  “All slow-grow?” Deshin asked.

  “Yes,” Mycenae said. “We’ve been letting everyone know that anyone applying for work from our family isn’t really from our family. I never thought of contacting you because I thought you went legit.”

  “I have,” Deshin lied. He had gone legit on most things. He definitely no longer had his fingers in the kinds of deals that the Mycenae family was famous for.

  “Amazing they tried to embed with you, then,” Mycenae said.

  “She was nanny to my infant son,” he said, and he couldn’t quite keep the fury from his voice.

  “Oh.” Mycenae sighed. “They want to use your family like they’re using mine. We’re setting something up, Luc. We’ve got the Alliance division doing this crap tracked, and we’re going to shut it down. You want to join us?”

  Take on an actual Earth Alliance Division? As a young man, he would have considered it. As a man with a family and a half-legitimate business, he didn’t dare take the risk.

  “I trust you to handle it, Aurla,” he said.

  “They have your family’s DNA now,” she said, clearly as a way of enticement.

  “It’s of no use to them in the short term,” he said, “and by the time we reach the long term, you’ll have taken care of everything.”

  “It’s not like you to trust anyone, Luc.”

  And, back when she had known him well, that had been true. But now, he had to balance security for himself and his business associates with security for his family.

  “I’m not trusting you per se, Aurla,” he said. “I just know how you operate.”

  She grinned at him. “I’ll let you know when we’re done.”

  “No need,” he said. “Good luck.”

  And then he signed off. The last thing he wanted was to be associated in any way with whatever operation Aurla ran. She was right: it wasn’t like him to trust anyone. And while he trusted her to destroy the division that was hurting her family, he didn’t trust her to keep him out of it. Too much contact with Aurla Mycenae, and Deshin might find himself arrested as the perpetrator of whatever she was planning. Mycenae was notorious for betraying colleagues when her back was against the wall.

  The list came through his links from Cumija. She was right: the employees were low-level. He didn’t recognize any of the names and had to look them up. None of them had even met Deshin.

  Getting the clone of Sonja embedded into his family was some kind of coup.

  He wouldn’t fire anyone yet. He wanted to see if Koos came up with the same list. If he did, then Deshin would move forward.

  But these employees were tagged, just like Sonja’s clone had been. He decided to see if they had been visiting Faulke as well.

  And if they had, Faulke would regret ever crossing paths with Deshin Enterprises.

  Detective DeRicci left Andrea Gumiela’s office. Gumiela felt herself relax. DeRicci was trouble. She hated rules and she had a sense of righteousness that often made it difficult for her to do her job well. There wasn’t a lot of righteousness in the law, particularly when Earth Alliance law trumped Armstrong law.

  Gumiela had to balance both.

  She resisted the urge to run a hand through her hair. It had taken a lot of work to pile it just so on top of her head, and she didn’t like wasting time on her appearance, as important as it was to her job. Of course, the days when it was important were either days when a major disaster hit Armstrong or when someone in her department screwed up.

  She certainly hoped this clone case wouldn’t become a screw-up.

  She put a hand over her stomach, feeling slightly ill. She had felt ill from the moment DeRicci mentioned Mycenae and Deshin. At that moment, Gumiela knew who had made the clone and who was handling it.

  She also knew who was killing the clones—or at least, authorizing the deaths.

  DeRicci was right. Those deaths presaged a serial killer (or, in Gumiela’s unofficial opinion, already proved one existed). Or worse, the deaths suggested a policy of targeted killings that Gumiela could
n’t countenance in her city.

  Technically, Gumiela should contact Cade Faulke directly. He had contacted her directly more than once to report a possible upcoming crime. She had used him as an informant, which meant she had used his clones as informants as well.

  And those clones were ending up dead.

  She choked back bile. Some people, like DeRicci, would say that Gumiela had hands as dirty as Faulke’s. But she hadn’t known he was killing the clones when they ceased being useful or when they crossed some line. She also hadn’t known that he had been poisoning them using such a painful method. And he hadn’t even thought about the possible contamination of the food supply.

  Gumiela swallowed hard again, hoping her stomach would settle.

  Technically, she should contact him and tell him to cease that behavior.

  But Gumiela had been in her job a long time. She knew that telling someone like Faulke to quit was like telling an addict to stop drinking. It wouldn’t happen, and it couldn’t be done.

  She couldn’t arrest him either. Even if she caught him in the act, all he was doing was damaging property. And that might get him a fine or two or maybe a year or so in jail, if the clone’s owners complained. But if DeRicci was right, the clone’s owners were the Earth Alliance itself. And Faulke worked for the Alliance, so technically, he was probably the owner, and property owners could do whatever they wanted with their belongings.

  Except toss them away in a manner that threatened the public health.

  Gumiela sat in one of the chairs and leaned her head back, closing her eyes, forcing herself to think. She had to do something, and despite what she had said to DeRicci, following procedure was out of the question. She needed to get Faulke out of Armstrong, only she didn’t have the authority to do so.

  But she knew who did.

  She sat up. Long ago, she’d met Faulke’s handler, Ike Jarvis. She could contact him.

  Maybe he would work with her.

  It was worth a try.

  Otto Koos led his team to the building housing Cade Faulke’s fake business. The building was made of some kind of polymer that changed appearance daily. This day’s appearance made it seem like old-fashioned red brick Koos hadn’t seen since his childhood on Earth.

  Five Ansel Management crates stood in their protected unit in the alley behind the building. They had a cursory lock with a security code that anyone in the building probably had.

  It was as much of a confession as he needed.

  But the boss would need more. Luc Deshin had given strict orders for this mission—no killing.

  Koos knew he was on probation now—maybe forever. He had missed the Mycenae clone, and, after he had done a quick scan of the employees, discovered he had missed at least five others. At least they hadn’t been anywhere near the Deshin family.

  The Mycenae clone had. Who knew what kind of material the Alliance had gathered?

  Faulke knew. Eventually, Koos would know too. It just might take some time.

  He had brought ten people with him to capture Faulke. The office had an android guard, though, the durable kind used in prisons. Koos either had to disable it or get it out of the building.

  He’d failed the one time he’d tried to disable those things in the past. He was opting for getting it out of the building.

  Ready? he sent to two of his team members.

  Yes, they sent back at the same time.

  Go! he sent.

  They were nowhere near him, but he knew what they were going to do. They were going to start a fight in front of the building that would get progressively more violent. And then they’d start shooting up the area with laser pistols.

  Other members of his team would prevent any locals from stopping the fight, and the fight would continue until the guard came down. Then Koos would sneak in the back way, along with three other members of his team.

  They were waiting now. They had already checked the back door—unlocked during daylight hours. They were talking as if they had some kind of business with each other.

  At least they weren’t shifting from foot to foot like he wanted to do.

  Instead, all he could do was stare at that stamp for Ansel Management.

  It hadn’t been much work to pick up the Mycenae clone and stuff her into one of the crates.

  If Deshin hadn’t given the no-kill order, then Koos would have stuffed Faulke into one of the crates, dying, but alive, so that he knew what he had done.

  Koos would have preferred that to Deshin’s plan.

  But Koos wasn’t in charge. And he had to work his way back into Deshin’s good graces.

  And he would do that.

  Starting now.

  Gumiela had forgotten that Ike Jarvis was an officious prick. He ran intelligence operatives who worked inside the Alliance. Generally, those operatives didn’t operate in human-run areas. In fact, they shouldn’t operate in human-run areas at all.

  Earth Alliance Intelligence was supposed to do the bulk of its work outside the Alliance.

  Gumiela had contacted him on a special link the Earth Alliance had set up for the Armstrong Police Department, to be used only in cases of Earth Alliance troubles or serious Alliance issues.

  She figured this counted.

  Jarvis appeared in the center of the room, his three-dimensional image fritzing in and out either because of a bad connection or because of the levels of encoding this conversation was going through.

  He looked better when he appeared and disappeared. She preferred it when he was slightly out of focus.

  “This had better be good, Andy,” Jarvis said, and Gumiela felt her shoulders stiffen. No one called her Andy, not even her best friends. Only Jarvis had come up with that nickname, and somehow he seemed to believe it made them closer.

  “I need you to pull Cade Faulke,” she said.

  “I don’t pull anyone on your say so.” Jarvis fritzed again. His image came back just a little smaller, just a little tighter. So the problem was on his end.

  If she were in a better mood, she would smile. Jarvis was short enough without doctoring the image. He had once tried to compensate for his height by buying enhancements that deepened his voice. All they had done was ruin it, leaving him sounding like he had poured salt down his throat.

  “You pull him or I arrest him for attempted mass murder,” she said, a little surprised at herself.

  Jarvis moved and fritzed again. Apparently he had taken a step backwards or something, startled by her vehemence.

  “What the hell did he do?” Jarvis asked, not playing games any longer.

  “You have Faulke running slow-grow clones in criminal organizations, right?” she asked.

  “Andy,” he said, returning to that condescending tone he had used earlier, “I can’t tell you what I’m doing.”

  “Fine,” she snapped. “I thought we had a courteous relationship, based on mutual interest. I was wrong. Sorry to bother you, Ike—”

  “Wait,” he said. “What did he do?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You get to send Earth Alliance lawyers here to talk about the top-secret crap to judges who might’ve died because of your guy’s carelessness.”

  And then she signed off.

  She couldn’t do anything she had just threatened Jarvis with. The food thing hadn’t risen to the level where she could charge Faulke, and that was if she could prove that he had put the bodies into the crates himself. He had an android guard, which the Chief of Police had had to approve—those things weren’t supposed to operate inside the city—and that guard had probably done all the dirty work. They would just claim malfunction, and Faulke would be off the hook.

  Jarvis fritzed back in, fainter now. The image had one meter sideways, which meant he was superimposed over one of her office chairs. The chair cut through him at his knees and waist. Obviously, he had no idea where his image had appeared, and she wasn’t about to tell him or move the image.

  “Okay, okay,” Jarvis said. “I’ve
managed to make this link as secure as I possibly can, given my location. Guarantee that your side is secure.”

  Gumiela shrugged. “I’m alone in my office, in the Armstrong Police Department. Good enough for you?”

  She didn’t tell him that she was recording this whole thing. She was tired of being used by this asshole.

  “I guess it’ll have to be. Yes, Faulke is running the clones that we have embedded with major criminal organizations on the Moon.”

  “If the clones malfunction—” She chose that word carefully “—what’s he supposed to do?”

  “Depends on how specific the clone is to the job, and how important it is to the operation,” he said. “Generally, Faulke’s supposed to ship the clone back. That’s why Armstrong PD approved android guards for his office.”

  “There aren’t guards,” she said. “There’s only one.”

  Jarvis’s image came in a bit stronger. “What?”

  “Just one,” she said, “and that’s not all. I don’t think your friend Faulke has sent any clones back.”

  “I can check,” Jarvis said.

  “I don’t care what you do for your records. According to ours—” and there she was lying again “—he’s been killing the clones that don’t work out and putting them in composting crates. Those crates go to the Growing Pits, which grow fresh food for the city.”

  “He what? ” Jarvis asked.

  “And to make matters worse, he’s using a hardening poison to kill them, a poison our coroner fears might leach into our food supply. We’re checking on that now. Although it doesn’t matter. The intent is what matters, and clearly your man Faulke has lost his mind.”

  Jarvis cursed. “You’re not making this up.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “I’m not making this up,” she said. “I want him and his little android friend out of here within the hour, or I’m arresting him, and I’m putting him on trial. Public trial.”

  “Do you realize how many operations you’ll ruin?”

  “No,” she said, “and I don’t care. Get him out of my city. It’s only a matter of time before your crazy little operative starts killing legal humans, not just cloned ones. And I don’t want him doing it here.”