Authors: Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Tags: #Fiction
He wasn’t sure he could do that.
“There are two ways to argue this,” Shishani said. “You know that when Peyti lawyers finally arrive, they’re going to go with the property argument. They’re going to try to get the killers off by declaring them property, and therefore not responsible for their actions.”
“If you get them defined as Peyti, as actual members of the Earth Alliance, then they need to be tried like other sentient beings. And this becomes an Earth Alliance case, not a local Moon case.” Schnable shrugged. “Sounds interesting no matter how you play it.”
“Play,” Salehi snapped. “This is not play—”
“You know what I mean,” Schnable said.
“What’s Peyla’s interest in this?” Salehi asked. “Why would the government foot the bill? It’ll be hugely expensive.”
“That’s the first thing I asked,” Schnable said. “They’ve got state’s interest. As a species, they’re being blamed for this attack. Right now, all of their business interests and all of their personnel are banned from the Moon, even though it’s not an official ban.”
“There are ways around that,” Salehi said. “I’m sure there are a million corporate lawyers working for some Peyti-owned corporation that would love to go after that kind of discrimination.”
“And,” Schnable said, “you have to remember how Peyti culture works. They believe in the letter of the law. They’re the best lawyers in the Earth Alliance, and they’re not allowed in the middle of this case. They’re feeling discriminated against.”
“Who cares?” Salehi said. “Let them deal with it.”
“I think they will,” Schnable said. “The problem is that if someone doesn’t get to the Moon and quickly, then those clones could be destroyed, and along with them, the best opportunity to find out what the hell is going on here.”
Salehi narrowed his eyes. “You’re trying to make this a
civic
duty for me to handle this damn case?”
“These cases,” Schnable said. He didn’t seem upset at all. It was as if they were discussing a divorce settlement.
“Right now,” Shishani said, “they need a human face on these cases, one who can make an actual difference. If you approach this from the clone law angle—”
“It’ll take years,” Salehi said.
“Yes, but if you want, when the raw emotions are calmed, you’ll be able to hand this case to the Peyti if you like.”
“You’re just looking at the money,” Salehi said to Schnable.
“Of course I am,” Schnable said. “You’d be billing Peyla by the hour. Their government has a lot of money, and our firm would get a goodly portion of it, even if you leave after a few months. Maybe you can train someone to take over, if this whole idea of changing clone law doesn’t appeal to you.”
It did appeal to him, and that made him angry.
And of course, Schnable then tried to press his advantage. He smiled. Schnable should never smile. “You can get an odious law tossed off the Earth Alliance books.”
“In exchange for freeing hundreds of killers,” Salehi said.
“This is going to take years, Rafael,” Shishani said. “You won’t ever have to take them to court. By the time the court cases come up, you can retire and go off to your damn desert. You won’t get them off.”
“But my arguments would be responsible for someone else getting them off,” Salehi said.
Shishani stood. She was taller than he was, and she always used that fact to great advantage, especially when she wanted to intimidate him into something.
“You would also change the lives of millions of clones,” she said. “You would
improve
their lives. They’d be subject to benefits that they couldn’t get before. They’d be able to marry and have children. They wouldn’t be subject to archaic laws.”
It was a good argument. He could feel it starting to sway him.
“You know how the law works,” Schnabbie said. “You have to stick your hands in warm smelly crap to remove a hunk of gold.”
Shishani, her back to Schnabbie, closed her eyes. Salehi bowed his head. He’d almost been convinced, and then Schnabbie had opened his big mouth.
The ah-fuck-it moment was lasting longer than usual.
“Think about it,” Schnable said. “This case will put us on the map. It’ll make you one of the most sought-after attorneys in the sector. Almost immediately, you’ll have to be certified to argue in front of the Multi-Cultural Tribunal, and if anyone can do that, you can. Your certification will make us a prestige firm again.”
Now, Shishani bowed her head. She knew that these arguments wouldn’t work with Salehi.
“Debra’s certified,” Salehi said.
“But Debra’s not an expert in this point of the law,” Schnable said. “That’s why she went against your wishes and is representing the Fujita family only in that wrongful death suit.”
Shishani said, “That’s not why—”
“Debra,” Schnable said, warningly.
“Don’t warn her off, Domek,” Salehi said. “She’s right. She isn’t representing the clone, Trey, because she didn’t want to. She didn’t really care that he died.”
“Not fair, Raphael,” Shishani said.
“Fairness and the truth don’t often go together,” said Salehi.
“Neither do fairness and the law,” Schnable said. “But this time, they just might.”
Salehi rolled his eyes. Schnable was so bad at manipulation. But it was still having an impact.
Salehi didn’t care if the firm made millions. He didn’t care if the law firm had prestige.
He cared about making a difference, about doing something right. If he had it to do all over again, he would not go into law. He’d find another profession, one that actually improved lives rather than defended or prosecuted those who costs lives.
Shishani’s argument about changing the lives of millions of clones was rattling around in his head.
“Let me think about it,” Salehi said.
No one spoke.
But they all knew that he had just agreed to take the case.
FIFTEEN
BY THE TIME the group arrived at his office, Luc Deshin had calmed himself. Or, rather, calmed himself as much as he was going to.
He leaned against the front of his desk, legs spread in front of him, crossed at the ankles, his palms resting on the desk’s surface. He was staring at the clear wall with its frozen image, and he hoped that the expression on his face was one of intrigue, not disgust.
The three representatives filed in, followed by two of his security guards. The representatives wore black, which Deshin thought clichéd. The woman had long black hair, an angular face, and large eyes.
The man to her left was muscular in a way not common among the space-raised. Deshin suspected that if he looked closer, he would see evidence of enhancements, not actual strength.
The third man was older, his white hair contrasting against a youthful face. But his small eyes seemed both old and wary, and his mouth was set in a thin line.
The woman glared at Deshin’s guards, then back at Deshin. “We understood this was a private meeting.”
“It is private,” he said.
“No guards,” she said.
“Then no meeting,” he said.
“We agreed—”
“We agreed that I would meet with you privately, nothing more,” he said. “In Deshin Enterprises, privately means protecting the Deshin at all costs. Hence, the guards. If you don’t like it, get out.”
He was taking a risk. The entire meeting could end right now, and he might have to rely on someone else to get the information he wanted.
And honestly, he had no idea who else he could rely on.
Which was why he was doing all of this himself.
The woman studied Deshin as if she were thinking of calling his bluff. Then she looked at the image on the clear wall. She studied the entire office, saw its 360-degree view of the city, and smiled with only half her mouth.
The expression made her seem bitter.
“Well,” she said, “I suppose one of us has to take a leap of faith.”
As if she were making a sacrifice by letting his guards stay. As if she had risked anything at all.
He had let these people into his empire. He was going to risk his reputation—well, not his reputation, really, but his own sense of self-worth—just to talk with these assholes.
The woman took a few steps toward him, then extended her hand. “Hildegard Iban.”
He didn’t want to take her hand, but he did. Her palm was dry, her fingers bony. “Luc Deshin.”
His guards closed the door and then blocked it with their bodies. The men who had accompanied her shifted nervously.
She tilted her head toward the images on the clear wall. “I see you have the most notorious clones in the universe on your screen.”
Deshin smiled slowly, hoping he looked as dangerous as he felt. He let her hand go. “They were the most notorious until last week.”
She shrugged. “I’m assuming you don’t have a need for alien clones.”
He knew how these negotiations went. Probing questions, parried answers, nothing really resolved until the negotiators came to some kind of deal.
If they came to a deal.
“Can you provide alien clones?” he asked, his voice flat.
Her men looked at him sharply, as if they hadn’t expected him to ask that. She hadn’t bothered to introduce them, which made him think they were her guards.
But he wasn’t going to point out that she had guards and she didn’t want him to.
“I can’t provide anything,” she said.
He felt his heart sink. He had reached out to his contacts in the Black Fleet, knowing he was dealing with the devil. Most of Armstrong believed him to be the worst criminal mastermind in the city, even if none of the prosecutors managed to charge him with anything. And, if he were honest with himself, he was a criminal mastermind, just of a different ilk than most people expected of him.
He saw himself as a bit more fair, a bit more humane, than others saw him. He believed in clarity, which there was little of inside of Armstrong. Hell, inside of the Earth Alliance.
And clarity made him see that the Black Fleet did all of those things that people believed he did, and so much worse. The Black Fleet mostly operated outside of the Earth Alliance, in Frontier space and beyond. But they also did business inside the Alliance, usually through proxies.
Iban was unusual; she admitted her Black Fleet connections.
Of course, it was hard for her not to. She was one of the few members of the Black Fleet who had been captured, tried, found guilty, and who had served time in an Earth Alliance prison.
Deshin suspected she had done so because she wanted to work within the Alliance. The Black Fleet, a loosely connected group of pirates (or at least that was how he characterized them to his staff), was more organized than the authorities thought, and a lot more savvy about how to manipulate the system—all of the systems, not just the Earth Alliance’s systems.
He’d done some business with other members of the Black Fleet before, and it had always left him feeling unclean.
Like now.
The Black Fleet was clearly fronting for someone. Or maybe they wanted to find out if Deshin himself had contacts in the designer criminal clone community.
He had been led to believe that the Black Fleet controlled the entire designer criminal clones market. He had been misled before, but he had caught the misunderstanding before the person trying to mislead him had gotten into his empire.
He would have to do even more work than usual as he scrubbed the building and his networks of any attempts the Black Fleet made to steal information from his business.
“I don’t provide anything directly,” she said into his silence, “But I do have contacts.”
His shoulders relaxed slightly, even though he felt a great deal of irritation. Of course she had contacts. Of course that was why she was here.
He was off his game; he let the images of those damn clone assassins influence his very thoughts.
He longed to shut the image down, but knew he couldn’t.
Iban shifted from one foot to the other. Then she glanced around the office, as if she could peer beneath its surface, and didn’t like what she could see.
Her gaze finally met his again. “If you want to take this discussion any further, we’ll need to mutually agree to shut off all recordings, and shut down our links.”
He snorted in derision. He had learned what was behind that trick long ago. The Black Fleet actually recorded the method each business had for link shutdown, so that its operatives could replicate it when they needed to break into the system.
“No,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows, obviously surprised. He wondered how many other people took her up on that offer, how deep the Black Fleet’s penetration was of every single system inside the Earth Alliance.
“Then we won’t talk,” she said.
He shrugged. “If we don’t talk, you lose millions, maybe a billion or more.”
She pouted just a little. “Oh, you play rough.”