twin’s fetus had been lost. While that was a tragedy, it wasn’t like losing an existing child.
But to the Gyonnese, who considered anything divided from the Original to be inferior, entire families had been destroyed forever.
The Fifteenth Multicultural Tribunal had no Gyonnese sitting on that particular bench at that particular time. For the court, the incident was an intellectual exercise. While it understood the Gyonnese position, it did not show much compassion for what was, to the Gyonnese, the loss of sixty thousand children.
As her punishment, Rhonda Flint was to give up all her children—living and any born in the future—to the Gyonnese. But Rhonda Flint’s daughter died in a horrible accident not long after the court’s final ruling. If Flint had succeeded in cloning the child, the clones would not be considered children under the ruling or, indeed, under Gyonnese law.
But the Gyonnese were sophisticated. They understood that to humans, children—whether they were cloned or created naturally—were considered human. They knew that Rhonda Flint would consider the clone a true child. So they, rightly, believed she had circumvented the rule of law.
The Gyonnese had given Yu all this material and sent him to a diplomatic conference room to learn about it. He watched the spraying, saw the Gyonnese mourn their young, watched the end of the trial. He saw a visibly frightened human woman burst into tears when the verdict was called. Her lawyer had argued that she wasn’t liable for her actions, that the corporation was.
While the Gyonnese had ended all of their contracts with Aleyd, they believed punishment needed a living face. And that face belonged to Rhonda Flint.
The court agreed.
It was convenient that Flint’s daughter died shortly thereafter.
Yu was shaking when he finished with the materials. Not just because of what he had seen, but because he knew—on a visceral level—that the woman he saw sobbing on the holoimages before him was a mass murderer.
The Gyonnese adored their children. Because families could only have one—not by law, just a simple matter of biology—the Originals were so precious that they were kept from outsiders until they reached young adulthood. Even then the Gyonnese treated the young with an affection that touched him more than he wanted to admit.
If the Gyonnese were right, and this woman had her daughter—the original child—cloned, then she was skirting the law and the legal ruling. And that was wrong.
Of course no Tracker would take this case. Human governments wouldn’t understand it.
And Retrieval Artists—at least the ones Yu had met—would think that the Gyonnese were overreacting. After all, there were four other identical “children” per larva. Humans would believe that those children should be treated equally with the Original. But the truth of it was, those children were not equal to the Gyonnese.
And that was what mattered.
Before, Yu hesitantly took the case for the money. Now he was going to bring back Rhonda Flint to face the courts again because it was the right thing to do.
Hadad Yu was normally not the kind of man who did the right thing.
He wasn’t quite sure what to do with his strong visceral reaction to Rhonda Flint’s crimes. Perhaps he had learned a kind of empathy for the Gyonnese that he hadn’t realized. Or perhaps he needed a kind of hatred to go against his essential nature and recover a human instead of an item.
Whatever the cause, he was now on the case. He would remain that way until Rhonda Flint was in Gyonnese custody—something he would bring about with the same kind of precision he used toward finding missing items.
First, he used the Gyonnese’s information as the basis for his own research. He quickly learned that Rhonda Flint had moved from Armstrong on the Moon to Valhalla Basin on Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons. Callisto was the home base for Aleyd, which had turned Valhalla Basin into a company town where everyone had a connection to the corporation, even the visitors.
Second, Yu made certain that the original daughter was truly dead. He looked at the police reports, studied the visuals. He soon learned that Rhonda Flint now called herself Rhonda Shindo. Flint had been her married name. She had followed an old-fashioned custom and taken on the identity of the man who had fathered that daughter, a man Rhonda Flint/Shindo eventually abandoned.
Finally, Yu hired an assistant, a man he’d worked with before. Janus Nafti was strong and compliant. He was a big man who shaved his head and wore tattoos as if they were disguises. He wasn’t very smart, but he worked hard. Nafti didn’t question, did as he was told, and rarely spoke unless spoken to.
Yu promised him double the usual fee, telling Nafti that the Gyonnese were paying him twice as much as usual.
The rest of the preparations were simple. Yu researched Aleyd, Valhalla Basin, and Flint/Shindo herself. He learned that she now had an on-site job. She was allowed no contacts with races other than humans, and she kept her name off most research, even projects she spearheaded.
She claimed, in one paper she had delivered at an Earth-based conference, that she had taken a less adventurous position so that she could be home after school every day to be with her daughter.
Which led Yu to the Aleyd recruitment information system. He put in a request for Valhalla Basin, claiming he had family, and learned exactly how the systems worked there.
The houses were owned by the corporation and given to the employees according to pay grade. He even found floor plans and rough smart house schematics. He learned when the schools started, when they let out for the day, and which schools catered to what level of income.
Income was a specious term, since much of Aleyd’s payments for its Valhalla Basin employees came in services, from medical care to shopping bonuses, all of which varied by pay grade. Essentially, everything he wanted to know about the entire community was available on Aleyd’s recruitment site, including how to get through the port at Valhalla Basin with a minimum of fuss.
All of that relieved him. Kidnapping a human—no matter what the law or the Gyonnese called it—would be the most difficult thing he had ever done. He was happy that finding her, and figuring out the best times to take her, was easier than he expected.
He hoped everything else would be as well.
Getting into Valhalla Basin’s port required very little cunning. He bought seventy-five pieces of high-end Earth-made real wood furniture and resold them to Aleyd Corporation. His arrival on Callisto, then, was just that of a businessman making a delivery. He claimed a crew complement of three—two men and one woman—and hoped that no one would check how many crewmembers he brought into Valhalla Basin because the only one traveling with him was Nafti.
They unloaded the furniture quickly. They had permission to stay for three days, should they need it. Yu hoped they wouldn’t need it.
He had memorized the map of Valhalla Basin, but nothing had prepared him for the real thing.
He had expected Valhalla Basin to resemble the Moon’s largest city, Armstrong, with its cobbled-together dome, built over time, and buildings of all different styles and shapes.
But Valhalla Basin was uniform. The buildings in the downtown area seemed to have been built at the same time by the same architect. The dome was also uniform—one arched vista dominated by Jupiter, which loomed over the city like a round attacking ship.
He didn’t need public transport to get to the neighborhoods. When he landed, he received credits, courtesy of Aleyd, to spend in local hotels, restaurants, and stores. The credits let him rent a vehicle for the day.
He wasn’t sure if he should call the vehicle a car: it was larger than any car he’d ever seen, with six wheels instead of the usual four. The driver sat in the center, and any passengers had their own section behind him.
He had chosen the vehicle because the sectioned areas could be shut off and the doors double-locked from the front—a child-protection feature, he was told, but which seemed more like a prison to him.
