Free Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) by Mel Odom

criminal.”
    “What about industrial spying? Copyright infringement?”
    “All of those were civil matters.”
    “How many?”
    “Twenty-nine.”
    “How many went against Dawes?”
    “Only five.”
    Shelly sounded happy. “Then we already have five suspects. Those settlements are rarely enough to offset the losses most corporations suffer by the time cease and desist orders are issued from the courts.”
    “At least five. Sometimes corporations aren’t the only ones hurt by intellectual property theft. Occasionally, corporations assign some percentage of profits to developers or committee heads that oversee a project.”
    “You’re an awfully suspicious guy, Drake.”
    I heard the smile in her voice and didn’t turn around to confirm its presence. I knew her. “That suspicion is part of my operating parameter.”
    “Of course it is. What else has happened to Dawes lately?”
    I paused at another intersection, plotted the eventual connections back to Dawes’s hotel suite, and chose a path that would take us to the greatest confluence of those routes for anyone choosing to drop to the lower levels. That had seemed the most advantageous destination.
    “There was an incident on Mars four months ago.” I went to the right.
    “What happened?”
    “IdentiKit was building a cloning branch on the planet.”
    “ Was? ”
    “The manufacturing plant was bombed. Funding to rebuild the plant hasn’t been secured.”
    “Who destroyed the plant? Terrorists or competitors?”
    On Mars, the corporate competition was stiffer and often more violent. The colonies were fragmented and frequently underwritten by specific business interests; economics propelled decision making—as well as bomb placement—rather than politics. Politics only weighed in when a situation or a region was under control. With the terraforming yet to be done on the planet, Mars wasn’t there politically yet, and wouldn’t be for years.
    Mars was increasingly political, though. There were several factions on Mars that promoted a laissez-faire approach regarding Earth interference and influence. The idea of free trade came from a seventeenth century French finance minister named Jean-Baptiste Colbert, but I doubted Shelly wanted to know that, so I didn’t tell her.
    “Anti-Earth terrorists.” I viewed the 3D inside my head as I traveled through the duct. The fires raged and twisted through the building’s wreckage. A lot of vid had been shot of the destruction, but I couldn’t tell how much of it was enhanced and how much was fabricated. Knowing what I did of the media, at least some of both had been done.
    “How many people were killed?”
    So many times investigations boiled down to numbers. One death equaled X number of man hours that would be put into the effort to figure out who the killer was. That number was also affected by the social and economic presence of the victim, and whether the public at large had a justified reason to feel threatened by the continued operation of the killer or killers.
    “Thirty-seven.”
    “Any high-profile targets?”
    I ran through the list. “No.”
    Shelly’s voice turned sour. “Then in a few months, the dead will be forgotten.” She didn’t like the fact that all investigations weren’t pursued with equal vigor.
    I understood the reasoning behind the sliding man hours, though. Unless a victim rated enough merit for continued public interest, people forgot. Along with forgetting about the murdered person, they also forgot leads, conversations, and numerous other things investigators needed to close a case.
    I didn’t point that out. Shelly hated it when I did.
    A moment later, I reached the confluence of ductwork tunnels. I stopped and studied the maze before me.
    “What’s going on?” Shelly closed in behind me. Her breath ghosted across my shoulder and I was suddenly reminded of the woman in the hotel. The memory was disconcerting and splintered my concentration for a moment—something