Vigilantes (8 page)

“—that I would go on to law school for the Earth Alliance. I would qualify for one of three law schools, all the best in the Alliance. To do anything else would be to fail.”

Nyquist clenched his other fist.

“I would graduate close to the top of my class, but not at the top of my class. I was not to call unneeded attention to myself,” Uzvaan said.

Because, Nyquist knew, to do so would be to fail. But he didn’t say that.

“I would become a defense attorney. I would serve at the Impossibles for the minimum amount of time, and then only accept interviews from Moon-based firms. If I did not get any interviews with Moon-based firms, I was to go to the Moon on my own, and apply for work as a law clerk or legal assistant and work my way up to partner, if possible. The timeline was not as certain here, nor as important, as long as I practiced law on the Moon.”

Uzvaan met Nyquist’s gaze.

“I was not to make attachments outside of work. I was not to spend my money extravagantly. I was not to call attention to myself. To do so would be to fail.”

Nyquist hated that repetition, and he wasn’t Uzvaan. How deep had that concept been drilled into the clones?

“I was not to leave the Moon in the final year of my existence. I was to proceed to the end moment calmly and without regret. I was to act professionally at all times. I was not to tell anyone that time was nearly up.”

Uzvaan closed his eyes again, slowly, as if he could not bear to look at Nyquist.

Then even more slowly, Uzvaan opened his eyes. His skin tone remained the same for the first time in their entire meeting.

“I followed each and every instruction. I did not deviate, even when I wanted to. One could argue that I am breaking the rules now, but one could also argue that the rules no longer apply because I no longer exist. The end date did come. I did not physically die. But I am no longer Uzvaan. I am nothing.”

So that was how Uzvaan justified this conversation. Or this series of conversations.

Nyquist waited. He wanted Uzvaan to be done before continuing.

They sat in silence for several minutes. Finally, Uzvaan said, “That is the entire assignment, Detective.”

Nyquist wanted to ask the psychological questions. He would have if this were a standard crime. But it wasn’t.

“You mentioned a mask upgrade packet,” Nyquist said. “I’ve never heard of that. I thought Peyti got their masks locally, in the various shops here on the Moon.”

Uzvaan shifted a little in his seat. “I do not know about other Peyti,” he said. “Ever since I left for school, I have received a mask upgrade packet each quarter. I was told I could only use those masks or it would impact my health adversely. The older I got, the more I believed there was some kind of tracking within the mask, something that allowed them to watch over me.”

“Them?” Nyquist asked.

“The ones in charge,” Uzvaan said.

“Who are they?” Nyquist asked.

Uzvaan closed his eyes again, then tilted his head. “I do not exactly know.”

“Someone ran you around,” Nyquist said, and instantly regretted the word choice. “Ran you around” was antagonistic.

“Yes.” Uzvaan opened his eyes. Their expression seemed more distant. “Many someones. They never told me who they worked for and I never asked. They were simply The Ones In Charge.”

“How did you recognize them?” Nyquist asked.

Uzvaan’s head tilt grew more pronounced. “What do you mean?”

“Could any Peyti come up to you and tell you that he was in charge of you? Would you have believed that?”

“No,” Uzvaan said. “They had to call me by my number.”

That stopped Nyquist for a moment. “Your…number?”

“We did not have names for the first ten years of our lives. Some did not have names until we left for school. We were numbered.”

“What’s your number?” Nyquist asked.

“Private,” Uzvaan said.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Nyquist reminded him. “That person no longer exists.”

Another shudder ran through Uzvaan. “I am…” and then he let out a sigh. “I cannot tell you. You could use it to control me.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Nyquist said, “we already control you.”

Uzvaan nodded. “I am….” And again, a sigh. “I am not to tell anyone.”

“You weren’t supposed to live this long either,” Nyquist said. He wanted to add,
Overcome the damn training. Get on with this
.

“True enough.” Uzvaan shifted. It almost looked as if he were about to stand. Movement reflected in the bubble around Nyquist.

He glanced over his shoulder.

The android guards had also shifted position. Apparently, Uzvaan wasn’t supposed to move out of that chair.

“I am,” Uzvaan said, not noticing that Nyquist wasn’t looking at him. “I am Eighty-Five of Three Hundred.”

Nyquist turned, wanted to say,
See, that wasn’t so hard
,
was it?
But the words stuck in his throat as he realized what Uzvaan had said.

Eighty-five of Three Hundred.

It was a clone name, meant to mark the run. Three hundred clones, and Uzvaan was 85th. Or, the three hundredth branch from the Uzvekmt DNA.

“Do you know what that means?” Nyquist asked.

“No,” Uzvaan said.

“Were there any others in your group who were ‘of Three Hundred’?” Nyquist asked.

“Originally,” Uzvaan said. For a moment, Nyquist thought he would continue and give a number. But he said nothing else.

“How many?” Nyquist asked.

“Twenty-five,” Uzvaan said.

“And how many survived?” Nyquist asked.

“Survived what?” Uzvaan asked, clearly reverting to lawyer-speak.

“Your childhood,” Nyquist said, if what Uzvaan had gone through as a young clone could be called a childhood.

Uzvaan took a deep breath. He shifted for a third time. Finally, he said, “Me.”

“Out of twenty-five?” Nyquist asked.

“There were two hundred of us in the compound who received our assignments,” Uzvaan said.

Which meant that two hundred of them made it to the age of 10.

“How many of those two hundred went on to school?” Nyquist asked.

“Fifty,” Uzvaan said.

Nyquist felt the chill get worse. He couldn’t remember exactly how many Peyti clone lawyers had tried to destroy the Moon. That number never stuck in his head. But it wouldn’t be hard to find out.

He forced himself to focus.

“Did they all get mask upgrades like you did?” Nyquist asked.

“I do not know,” Uzvaan said. “I was not allowed to communicate with them.”

And he wasn’t going to assume. But Nyquist would.

“Who sent you the upgrade packets?” Nyquist asked.

“They came from
Legal Fiction
,” Uzvaan said. “A different branch of it. I had contact information in case the masks were late.”

“Do you know what that information is?” Nyquist asked.

“I never had to use it, so I do not have it memorized,” Uzvaan said. “I can no longer access my chips or any of my links. If those contacts have not been destroyed, then the information is there.”

Nyquist had a hunch the information had been destroyed. It was short-sighted for an investigation, but not as a response to an on-going threat.

“How did the mask upgrade packets reach you?” he asked.

“Through one of the Moon’s delivery services. It varied as to which one,” Uzvaan said.

“Where did the packet arrive?” Nyquist asked.

Uzvaan nodded. He understood why Nyquist was asking this. “My office,” Uzvaan said. “When I was hired, I gave that as my permanent address. If I lost that job, I would have failed.”

“And if you joined a different law firm?” Nyquist asked. “Was that a failure?”

“It was not,” Uzvaan said. “I would have had to change my delivery information at the address I had. But I never had to do that.”

Still, it was a lead. And like the one from
Legal Fiction
, it was a good lead. It also probably applied to all of the Peyti lawyer clones.

Nyquist finally felt like he had gotten important information, things that would move the investigation forward. Things that would have died with Uzvaan if Uzvaan had succeeded.

Nyquist allowed himself a few seconds of triumph. Then he continued the interrogation, hoping he could stay at least one day ahead of S
3
.

He was going to find that mastermind, if it was the last thing he ever did.

EIGHT

THE MESSAGE THAT came through Melcia Seng’s links was garbled. Something about S
3
and a conflict of interest. She thought maybe the message came from Zhu.

Seng stood in the center of the Armstrong Offices of Schnable, Shishani & Salehi, one of the most respected law firms in the known universe. They were opening a branch on the Moon, right after the Peyti Crisis, and, as one of their first cases, they were representing the Peyti government in regard to the Peyti clones who had tried to destroy the Moon.

Yesterday, when she had learned that, her breath had caught, but it hadn’t stopped her from taking the job. She wanted work—prestigious work, work that would take her to the upper levels of her profession—and she wasn’t finding that kind of work anywhere on Earth.

There were millions of human lawyers on Earth, and outside of the major cultural centers, very few of them were working in human-alien relations. She had majored in human-alien relations in college, then had gone to law school with an eye to interspecies law. She had served at the Impossibles—who hadn’t?—and then had returned home to Toronto because her mother had taken ill.

Her mother died last year, and Seng spent six months cleaning up the house, taking her inheritance, and investing it “wisely,” as everyone said. That allowed her the time to find the right job, the one that might eventually take her on a road to the Multicultural Tribunals. She wanted to be certified to argue in front of them, and she couldn’t get that as a prosecutor, not without a whole new form of training—and more years of school.

She needed to work as a defense attorney, and what better place than at S
3
, one of the most famous firms in the Alliance. When she heard about this job opportunity, she took the first shuttle from Earth she could find. She didn’t even care when the headhunter warned her that representing a Peyti on the Moon would be a dicey proposition.

Defense attorneys handled bad characters all the time; that was something she learned in the Impossibles. There, she discovered that sometimes what seemed like evil was, in actuality, ignorance. Not that she would say that about these clones.

But she knew there was more to S
3
’s defense of them than altruism. She had a hunch S
3
had a plan, and she was willing to help with that plan.

Even though the office itself was mostly unfinished.

The furniture had been delivered just before she and the other two dozen potential lawyers arrived. They were interviewed one by one by the only guy in the entire firm at that time, a man named Torkild Zhu.

He looked a little slick in his silk suit. He wore too much cologne. He had broken capillaries on his nose, which made her wonder if he drank too much. Alcoholics often used clearers to remove the alcohol from their system, but it took years for them to realize that they needed enhancements to repair the damage the alcohol had done to their skin and blood vessels.

She’d worked with a lot of alcoholics on Earth, and she would wager that Zhu was one.

But he had seemed pretty together in the interview. And afterwards, he had hired her. He’d even given her an office. It was directly across from the elevator, but the office had a window that overlooked the dome itself. He had apologized, saying the offices were in a part of Armstrong that was being gentrified. He said that was how S
3
managed to get so much space so quickly. He’d even apologized for the view—something about the dome being yellow and scratchy.

She didn’t see that. All she saw was the moonscape, gray and bleak, covered with actual sunshine, not the dome-manufactured stuff she had seen since she arrived here.

Of the two dozen people the headhunter had brought, nearly half had walked out when they realized what their first cases would be. Six of the others were the kind of lawyer that Seng wouldn’t have hired ever, the kind that had a sleazy vibe that made her think they would cut corners wherever possible.

Apparently Zhu had agreed with her, because the only six people he had hired were the ones she had talked to at the hotel that morning, the ones as interested in the law as in the client, the ones who were looking at life on the Moon as an adventure, while acknowledging how dangerous the place had become.