A Murder of Clones: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel Read Online Free

real port—not in the way that the Alliance thought of ports, anyway—so some diplomat somewhere had negotiated landing areas.
    Gomez’s team had used the one closest to the bodies for picking up the bodies. After she had done what negotiations she could, given the limitations of the language, she had assigned Rainger and the collection team the task of bagging and carrying the bodies back to the shuttle.
    She had had more important things to negotiate: She needed to coordinate everything, from the diplomats to the arrival of the Earth Alliance Military Guards. She also needed someone who spoke both Standard and the Eaufasse’s language well. Fortunately, that person wasn’t too far away.
    Unfortunately, that person wasn’t really a person at all.
    That person was Peyti, which was why she had set the non-standard section to Peyti normal. The Peyti had arrived quickly.
    Its name was Uzven. She had no idea what its gender was. The Peyti were unusually reticent about gender. It was considered offensive to ask. The names certainly didn’t give a clue either.
    She wasn’t a big fan of the Peyti, but she had to work with Uzven because there was no diplomatic unit anywhere near Epriccom. And she wasn’t going to let the Earth Alliance Military Guards anywhere near Epriccom until she had diplomats and translators in place.
    Which meant that she was on her own until she figured out what was going on here. She preferred it that way. Her experience had taught her that most things could be resolved with very little work, as long as the parties involved understood each other.
    The first thing she had to understand was what happened to those corpses. And the first step toward figuring that out was determining what killed them. She knew no one better than Lashante Simiaar, the best forensic director in the entire FSS.
    Simiaar ran the forensic lab on the EAFS Stanley . The lab was the most important part of the ship. In fact, a well-stocked forensic lab had become one of the most important parts of all FSS ships. Often the problems that marshals ran into could be resolved with the right kind of forensic analysis. Or they could at least be understood.
    Uzven, the Peyti, was in the forensic lab, along with Simiaar. As Gomez entered the lab, she smiled at the two of them standing side by side, watching the last of the corpse removal on a gigantic flat screen. Uzven wore a human-style business suit, which had the effect of making it look like a child wearing its parents clothing.
    The illusion wasn’t helped by Simiaar’s presence. She looked large next to the Peyti. She was a tall, broad woman with extra flesh that held a surprising amount of muscle. She could lift and move and carry better than almost anyone on the team, but she was no good in a fight, and she probably hadn’t run anywhere in the past fifteen years.
    “What a mess,” she said to Gomez without looking at her.
    “Yeah,” Gomez said, knowing that neither of them was referring to the corpses. Both women knew that something was amiss here, something they didn’t understand yet. “May I borrow Uzven now?”
    Uzven looked at her. It looked like every other Peyti she’d ever known. It wore a mask over its face, because it couldn’t breathe oxygen. Its eyes were huge, but the rest of it looked like it could easily fall into pieces.
    The Peyti were fragile, and they tired easily. Plus, Gomez didn’t like them on principle. Most of them had gone into the legal side of the Alliance justice system, and a startling number of Peyti had become defense attorneys.
    She wasn’t fond of defense attorneys. Every time she had had to testify about something they made her seem stupid.
    She expected no less from a Peyti translator, since it did have the upper hand. After all, it knew the Eaufasse language, and she did not.
    Simiaar sighed. “I guess you can borrow Uzven. But when those corpses get in here, I’m going to need Uzven back. I don’t know what they got contaminated