Unraveling Conspiracy (Forgotten Fodder Book 3) Read online

  “That is an interesting conundrum,” Samarin said. “I suspect that, while he may have fed you some false data, he was more likely to misdirect you in other ways. And now that he’s destroyed your data, that will make it far harder to track. How much did you have that we hadn’t spoken of before?”

  Although Onima had sent Samarin a short message once she, Jace, and Kara had returned to the Aquila from Aarde, she proceeded to tell him in more detail what had happened when they’d met with the former NEEA politician—their capture and escape, as well as Dr. Patel’s information from Vuk, which had exposed Feroz in detail.

  “I believe that, despite being assigned to me by Director Rand, Deputy Marshal Martinez has proven herself an asset to the team,” Onima concluded.

  “Good,” Samarin said. “That serves both you and Rand, and keeps him and anyone else from deciding to add people to your team. I will personally see to getting you a new cryptanalyst. I have someone in mind—someone I believe you can trust.”

  “After what happened here, trust means less,” Onima said. “I’d come to think of Agent Jones not just as an asset to my team and an impressive cryptanalyst, but also as a friend.”

  “Betrayals always hurt,” Samarin agreed. “Keep at it, Marshal Gwok. Your investigation’s implications clearly cannot be ignored. We’ll get you back on your way as soon as we can.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Onima said.

  Samarin nodded. “Deputy Director Samarin, out.”

  The screen winked off.

  Onima paused a moment. She had not yet dealt with all her feelings, in the short time since Feroz had betrayed them and nearly destroyed their ship.

  There were not many people Onima Gwok considered friends. Trust took time, and learning that someone she’d allowed in had been willing to betray her was unsettling. Sure, it would have hurt worse had it been Yael. Or Jace, even after such a short time. But it still hurt.

  Worse yet, Dr. Patel was hurting. Feroz had become her lover, and as much as Onima felt betrayed by her friend, she imagined the betrayal of a lover was far, far worse.

  She would allow Maira to come to her when she was ready. In the meantime, Onima had a job to do, and the best way to deal with her feelings was to keep busy.

  She arose from her desk and went out to the greater MBCC.

  The agents were all doing what they could to recover any data on the cases they’d been working. Anyone who had most of their materials on the ship’s infodrives would be scrambling to reclaim anything. There were at least five other cryptanalysts on Onima’s CBI team, but none with the degree of skill or knowledge Feroz had possessed. The others tended to be more analytical and specialized in what they did.

  Jace, Kara, Dr. Patel, and Yael were all at Feroz’s former station. Kara, in fact, was in his seat, working on accessing anything at all that he’d had on his system, and the others were going over datacards and datapads.

  Jace was looking quite a bit better. It had only been a day, but his normal color had already returned, and he seemed much as he’d always been. For once, it was clear that being a clone had its advantages.

  “How are you doing?” Onima asked as she approached the team.

  Kara let out an exasperated noise. “Agent Baker ran a sweep of Feroz’s terminals and didn’t find any additional traps. Which is great. But that bastard really did wipe out all the data that was here.”

  “What about you guys?” Onima asked the rest.

  Yael said, “He wiped several of these datacards. After you didn’t return from Aarde right away, I suspect he knew that if and when you did, he could be in trouble.”

  Jace added, “We do still have the list of company directors Ms. Varma gave us. Didn’t you also keep a copy of the data Mr. Cadoret provided, and she had shared with us, on our second trip to New Terra?”

  “Yes,” Onima said. It was on a personal infodrive she kept. “I shall go get it in a little bit.”

  “The shuttles all checked out,” Yael said, “but the Aquila is going nowhere. Captain Barr expects we’ll have a new ship at our disposal within a week or so.”

  “Good,” Onima said. She looked to Dr. Patel. “How are you doing, Maira?”

  Dr. Patel was a consummate professional. But it was no secret that she and Feroz had been in an intimate relationship. Still, she was certainly acting emotionally guarded.

  “Best I can,” Dr. Patel said.

  “If you want to talk, find me later,” Onima offered.

  There was a counselor on staff as a member of the Aquila’s crew. While Dr. Patel could avail herself of their services, Onima wanted her to know that she had other options too. Specifically, the ear of her friend.

  “Thank you,” Dr. Patel said, but elaborated no further.

  Onima looked at her team. She hoped her trust in them was not misplaced.

  “Hey,” Jace said, getting her attention. “All of us are feeling it, ya know.”

  “Yeah,” Yael said. “Feroz had us all fooled.”

  “Yes,” Dr. Patel agreed.

  “I know I’m still new,” Kara began, “but I want you all to know that I’m proud to be part of this team. You’re some of the best people I have ever had the privilege of working with. This investigation is far from over, and this setback will be challenging to overcome. But if anyone can do it, we can.”

  Onima considered Kara’s words. Though she’d known both the deputy marshal and Jace for far shorter than she’d known everyone else, she believed they had earned her trust, as well as her team’s.

  “Thank you all,” Onima said. “There is no rush. We’re going to be stuck here for a while. Let’s assemble everything we have, record anything we remember that is missing, and set up an independent infodrive.

  “Kara is correct. This setback won’t derail this investigation—because this team can do anything I could ask of them.”

  3

  For the first time in five days, Jace was feeling normal.

  Despite his enhanced survival abilities, as a clone, the first few days immediately after his exposure to radiation and extreme cold he’d felt truly awful.

  For the first time in his life, he hadn’t wanted food at all. It had taken Dr. Patel practically forcing him at gunpoint for him to consume a ration bar even after two days.

  His skin had felt as though it was covered in some sort of coating, and nothing touching him felt right. That, according to Dr. Patel, was residual damage from the cold.

  For three days, Jace hadn’t felt like he could truly warm up. He’d had either a dull or sharp headache since the first time he’d slept after going into the compartment to flip the switch.

  Dr. Patel assured him it would pass. Between the dark radiation—which was still not as well understood as other forms of radiation—and the exposure to the cold, Jace’s body needed to heal.

  It was fortunate that, in addition to being more resilient, clones also healed faster. An ordinary human might not have survived.

  It raised some questions Jace had never considered before. As a soldier, one’s life expectancy was never spectacular. In fact, you tended to expect that death was just a matter of getting overwhelmed by the enemy, caught in an explosion, or some other deadly, war-related experience.

  Without war—and given how clones were constructed and resistant to illness and other issues—Jace wondered what his life expectancy might be. Though he appeared to be in his early thirties, Jace was only about fourteen years old. If the average human life expectancy was somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 years, what did that say for Jace and other clones?

  The morning five days after his exposure, feeling hunger for the first time in days, Jace made his way to the galley.

  Once there, he found Onima, Yael, and Kara seated at the viewport, looking out.

  “Jace,” Dr. Patel said, surprising him. “How are you feeling?”

  “Much more like myself,” Jace told her. “I’m getting food now, Doc.”

  She smiled, but it had tha
t ever-present tinge of sadness it had held since Feroz’s betrayal. “Great. Come join us, okay?”

  Jace nodded, then went and got more food than he had eaten in a single sitting in years—and coffee too.

  The rest of the team had saved Jace a seat. He joined them, noting that they were all looking at something out in space.

  He looked out the viewport and saw that a starship was approaching them. It looked very similar to the Aquila, but somehow newer and sleeker.

  “Is that the new ship?” Jace asked.

  “Yes, it is,” Yael said.

  “One of the new Mythology II-class starships from the Office of Confederation Defense,” Kara said. “Similar in most ways to this ship, but with some refinements, improvements, and other new tech.”

  “Did I miss something?” Jace asked.

  Onima looked to him. “No. Captain Barr reached out to me five minutes ago to tell me that they were here. He’ll make a ship-wide announcement once they are docked with us.”

  “How will this work?” Jace asked.

  “Everyone will transfer to the new ship,” Kara said.

  “CBI and Aquila crew alike?” Jace asked.

  “Yes,” Yael said. She pointed and added, “That ship currently has a skeleton crew. They’ll transfer over here to figure out the best way to repair our ship, or if scrapping her makes more sense. Captain Barr and the current crew will all transfer over. The other pilots and I need to get the shuttles and Darts over to the new ship.”

  “Lots of shifting around today, then,” Jace remarked.

  Onima added, “Captain Barr let me know that a replacement for Feroz is on the new ship too.”

  Jace’s companions were all still observing the new ship’s approach, but he thought he could sense trepidation.

  He started to eat, and after a while, everyone else went back to their breakfasts too.

  “You look a lot better, Jace,” Kara said.

  “Feel a lot better,” Jace admitted.

  “I still can’t believe what you did to save the ship,” Dr. Patel said.

  Jace just shook his head. “I did what needed to be done. That’s really all there was to it.”

  “Maybe. But there isn’t a person on this ship who doesn’t respect you now, Jace.”

  “I’m just me.” Jace was not used to being given attention that didn’t include insults, taunts, sneers, and other derisive attitudes thrown at him. He was a clone, after all. A second-class citizen.

  A tone sounded overhead. “Attention, all Aquila crew and CBI staff. The CBI Daedalus will be docked with us in approximately three minutes. All crew, prepare for transfer operations. CBI staff, report to Special Agent Wei for transfer assignments. Aquila crew transfer operations begin once docking is complete, CBI operations in three hours. Barr, out.”

  Jace glanced at Onima. “You have Wei handling getting everyone organized?”

  “Yes,” Onima said. “I need to meet with this new cryptanalyst, get them up to speed, and see if they want to look at the infodrives.”

  “Think they can do something with that?” asked Kara.

  Onima shrugged. “Anything is possible.”

  They finished their meals without further conversation. As the two ships docked together, there were numerous clangs and bangs. It wasn’t just a boarding party coming over, but a transfer of crew, supplies, and various materials between the two ships.

  “I need to go check on the medical bay,” Dr. Patel said. “Even with Wei handling the CBI transition, I am responsible for medical.”

  “I hear you,” Yael added. “I need to go to the shuttle bay and coordinate taking the shuttles over to the new ship.”

  “Let’s plan to meet on the Daedalus this evening,” Onima said. “I’ve never done a ship-to-ship transfer like this. How long do you think it’ll take?”

  “Maybe six hours total,” Kara said. “Everyone has been prepping for it for days now, so I suspect it’ll go smoothly. Also, Captain Barr expects no nonsense.”

  “Later,” Yael said, walking away.

  Dr. Patel nodded at the remaining trio and also departed.

  Kara sighed. “Poor Maira.”

  “Yeah,” Onima agreed. “She’s keeping a good game face on, but this hurt her far more than the rest of us. She thought they had something special.”

  Jace knew Dr. Patel and Feroz had started a romantic relationship. Intellectually, he understood what that meant. It wasn’t that clones lacked emotions; they had the full range. But the inherent inhibitions built into them to keep them from getting too ambitious—or deciding to rebel—also lessened how much emotion affected them.

  Since their visit to Clones Remembered, the scientists had been sending Jace information in exchange for him sharing his experiences with them. Jace was the first clone willing to volunteer to provide information about clone life, so the scientists were more than happy to share data in return.

  One thing he had learned, after they’d examined Dr. Steingarten’s notes, was that emotions could allow a person to act for the greater good of all. That was part of what made clones superior to automatons. But at the same time, emotions could also overwhelm people and cause them to work against their own best interests.

  As part of the inhibitions placed into the clone psyche—when the brain scan of their donor was uploaded to the control input sector—clones had more a logical understanding of the what of an emotion than the how of its feeling.

  Thus, clones tended not to form attachments and to come across as emotionless. It was part of what made others see them as less than human.

  So Jace logically understood what love was, but he was not sure it was something he could feel in the romantic sense. Caring, on the other hand, came naturally to him. It was why he had not hesitated to risk his life to save the Aquila.

  “We need to go meet the new cryptanalyst,” Onima said, interrupting Jace’s brief introspection. “You two are with me.”

  “Okay,” Kara said.

  The three of them headed for the MBCC. When they arrived, it felt like a different place than usual. The Mobile Bureau Command Center was not as busy as it normally was.

  The agents, special agents, and other staff were not sitting at their stations working. Instead, they were collecting any personal effects and all other materials that were not built into the ship. Jace had helped Onima the day before with putting personal items from her office into a crate for transfer to the new ship.

  Feroz’s former station looked no less picked over. Between Jace, Onima, Kara, and Yael, they had gone over everything more than once and removed all the datacards, portable infodrives, and datapads Feroz had kept around it.

  “Weird,” Kara said.

  “How so?” Onima asked.

  Kara gestured vaguely to the MBCC. “Everyone is nervous and excited today. The energy is really different.”

  “Oh, good,” Jace said. “I thought it was just me.”

  If they did question his ability to feel things, it wasn’t for lack of his comments to that effect.

  “You should know, Kara,” Onima began, “that you will have an office on the Daedalus.”

  “Really?” Kara looked genuinely surprised.

  “Yes,” Onima said. “A deputy marshal should have an office, not just a terminal in the MBCC.”

  Kara laughed lightly. “I’m so used to hopping from team to team and ship to ship that I seldom have more than a bench wherever I land.”

  “I expect you to be around for a while,” Onima told her.

  Kara seemed touched by the gesture.

  Despite Kara’s governor being Jiro Rand, whom Onima and her governor knew was tied to the conspiracy, both Jace and Onima trusted Kara. They had been through a lot together in a short period of time. More than once they had only gotten through a dangerous situation by working together, and as such, they made an excellent team.

  An unfamiliar figure had entered the MBCC. They were non-binary and had visible tech implants just beside th
eir temples. Approaching the trio, they said, “Is one of you Marshal Gwok?”

  “I am.” Onima offered her hand. “Onima Gwok.”

  “Teru Smith,” they replied. They tapped their forearm, and a small holograph appeared. “My credentials.”

  Onima nodded. “Impressive. Deputy Director Samarin told me he would send the best.”