Consequences

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Because if it had, only the tightness of the building was keeping them alive. That person thought, anyway.

  But DeRicci knew that a breach would have caused a lot of problems that would have been readily apparent—at least a large breach. A slow leak, on the other hand, would take out the atmosphere bit by bit. The building would protect them, for a time, and then it would be all over.

  She had wanted to make fun of the idea, but she hadn’t. It still made her nervous.

  Never once in her entire life had she heard of the inside of the dome going dark.

  Now that the doors opened, she was going to be able to get off the floor, but she wasn’t sure she would like what she found when she got down to the street.

  Fifty-two

  Security got her out. Somehow they had remembered she was inside, and they got her through the doors.

  Orenda Kreise was so grateful, she wasn’t sure how to express herself. She had never been the supplicant before, at least not in this kind of situation. Bloodied, terrified, barely able to breathe—she still wasn’t sure how the air had gotten so bad.

  It wasn’t until the lights flickered on, and she saw the extent of the devastation, that she began to understand. The dust she’d been covered with hadn’t come from the dstroyed statues. Something had damaged the dome and the filters had quit. The dust, always a problem in this part of Armstrong, took over—quickly, poring into the Cultural Center—a building completed without thought to weather or temperature differences. A building that needed the city’s dome to survive.

  The Center didn’t even look like it had before. The ceiling had cracked—it wasn’t attached to the dome after all—and above it, something dark had fallen, like a steel grate over an open window.

  She coughed and spat and tried to catch her breath. The security guards were covered with dust just like she was, but had somehow escaped the blood and bruising. Apparently the main security area had few artworks and almost no furniture.

  The security team’s links were up, but hers weren’t. Buildings were damaged all over town, and no medical relief would reach her for long time. No one knew if it could reach her. The streets were dark, and no one knew what had caused the problems.

  One of the men on the security team gave her water from a nearby sink—the water mains hadn’t broken at all, if indeed Armstrong had mains; Orenda had no idea how this city in the middle of the Moon got its water. The water cleared her throat but not her lungs.

  Her breathing was shallow, but another member of the team, who claimed to have medical training, said she would be all right. He kept apologizing that they didn’t have oxygen to give her. She kept repeating that it was all right.

  But it wasn’t all right. Something terrible had happened, and until a few hours ago, she hadn’t realized just how vulnerable everyone on the Moon was. Living in domes. Who had thought of that? And what did they plan to do if the dome somehow failed?

  She wanted to go back to Earth, where there was sky and easy-to-breathe air, and it was safe to go outside, even when the ground quaked.

  For the first time in her life, she wanted nothing more than to go home.

  Fifty-three

  With the lights back on and the primary links back up, Soseki felt some semblance of normality. His assistants had cleaned up his office while he got damage reports from all over the city.

  There had been an explosion in one of the trendier shopping areas not far from the university. The explosion had been serious enough to damage the dome, which set off all the safety protocols.

  That part of the dome became isolated. Dome walls fell all over the city, not just the walls surrounding that section of town. Each wall landed with such force that it caused the shaking sensations, which were worse the closer one was to a falling wall. The main shaking at the City Center had occurred when eight different walls fell, isolating the city government and its services from computer-perceived threats.

  Then the dome cover crept its way across the permaplastic dome. The cover worked faster in some areas than in others—in the newer areas, the cover operated within seconds. In the older areas, it took nearly fifteen minutes. It took nearly twenty minutes for the cover to protect the entire dome from more breaches.

  And the cover left the entire city in darkness—something the engineers had always warned about, but no one had experienced.

  And no one had expected a power failure. As yet, Soseki didn’t know what had caused that.

  He felt like he had lost thirty pounds in the past three hours. He was covered with sweat and dirt, and he was moving faster than he ever had. He was also thinking harder, because he felt like he had to do the thinking for two people.

  In the past, Londran had helped him. But Londran had a head injury, and, the medical team said, wouldn’t be helping anyone any time soon.

  That news, more than anything else, had panicked Soseki. But he didn’t dare show it. The entire city had panicked, and he had to calm them somehow.

  He had to calm himself.

  His links were open, processing more and more information. As soon as the citywide net reestablished itself, he would make announcements, keeping people informed about the current activities and telling them not to panic.

  At the moment, he was trying to solve the problems created by the fail-safes. So far as the engineers could tell, the dome had been damaged only near the explosion, and the cover prevented continued atmosphere breach. The walls could come up everywhere except the explosion section.

  And yet the walls weren’t coming up. The city’s chief engineer informed Soseki that was because of the power problems and the computer system glitches, not because the rest of the dome had failed.

  Soseki believed it. He had been to the briefings. He knew what Armstrong would look like with a serious and continuous dome breach.

  It wouldn’t look like this.

  It might not even remain standing.

  As it were, the most damage came from the shaking as the dome walls came down. The walls were thick and heavy, and in the older sections, not even see-through. The entire dome got sectioned off in a matter of minutes.

  A few people were killed when the walls slammed on them, an image he really hadn’t wanted in his head, but one which was now there permanently.

  Soseki sank into his chair at his desk, which still felt like the only safe place in the city, at least to him. He would have to do more than tell the people not to panic. He would have to tell them that he was going to find and rectify the mistakes. He was going to be upbeat and positive, telling them that this was a warning bell. If they had truly been attacked from the outside, then they might not have survived.

  But now that they knew so many systems malfunctioned, those systems would get fixed.

  Something had exploded, someone had accidentally lit the wrong thing in one of those tony restaurants, and the dome got damaged. From the inside. The dome had been built to withstand problems from the outside. All those meteors, big and small, that fell onto the Moon’s surface didn’t damage the dome because the dome engineers had designed it with strength.

  Now they had to improve the earlier design, make certain nothing like this ever happened again.

  Soseki took a deep breath. Coming to that decision had cheered him up. He wished Londran was here to bounce the idea off of, but Soseki had the idea that Londran would approve.

  One of Londran’s assistants, some woman who had been hired only a few weeks ago, stopped in front of Soseki’s desk.

  “Sir,” she said, “there’s something you have to look at.”

  There was a lot he had to look at, probably more than some new hire realized, but he humored her. This was a crisis in his mayoralty and he had to handle it well, better than he had handled the Etaen crisis.

  A few people had already accused him of starting that riot, when he had only been trying to protect his city. He and Londran had a variety of ideas on how to defend him.

  Ironic now that a defense probably
wouldn’t be necessary.

  “Sir?” the woman said again.

  “Yes,” he said. “I heard you.”

  She put a handheld in front of him. “The public links are just coming up. This was sent across them a few minutes after the explosion, but we’re only getting copies of it now. The public links aren’t up in this part of the building, so I thought you’d want to see it.”

  He picked up the handheld and stared at the small screen. The message was text with a symbol behind it that he didn’t recognize.

  But he recognized the words.

  This Bombing is for Etae!

  Bombing. Etae.

  Soseki closed his eyes. He had been right after all, and the governor-general had been wrong. She had let the terrorists into his city and they had nearly destroyed it.

  “Sir?” the woman asked again. He wanted to snap at her, but he didn’t.

  He opened his eyes. She was peering at him, her small face pinched with concern.

  “See if you can trace where this came from,” he said.

  She nodded, and started to leave. Then she stopped.

  “Sir,” she said for the fourth time. “Do you think they’ll do it again?”

  “What?” he snapped, already angry that she wouldn’t leave him alone.

  “Set off another bomb,” she whispered.

  He hadn’t thought of that. He hadn’t thought of that at all.

  “I certainly hope not,” he said.

  And, seeing the terror on her face, he shooed her away, calling over another assistant to contact all the emergency services personnel in the city to tell them that things might actually get worse.

  Fifty-four

  Flint had been downloading information on the Lahiri murders from Armstrong news sites, so that he could prove to Taylor that Carolyn was dead, when all contact with Armstrong quit.

  The dome had been bombed.

  At first, Flint didn’t believe it. Then he saw the coverage coming from everywhere but Armstrong. The bullet trains between domes were shut down, and Armstrong’s dome itself had turned black.

  It took two different commentators to explain why: the dome had a shield that automatically activated when the dome had been breached.

  No one knew how bad the dome breach was. No one had been able to contact the city at all.

  That didn’t stop Flint from trying while he was inside Ian Taylor’s house.

  Taylor was watching the downloads on the murders, occasionally asking questions—such as why his mother wasn’t mentioned—and then looking at old images of Carolyn Lahiri and comparing them with Claire Taylor.

  It was clear to Flint that Taylor was beginning to see who his mother had been.

  Not that Flint cared. At the moment, he was more concerned with his friends back on Armstrong. He tried to reach DeRicci first, figuring police links would always be up.

  They weren’t.

  Then he tried everyone he knew in the Port, and those links weren’t working either.

  Finally he tried Paloma, thinking that perhaps she had gone to her new space yacht, the Dove II, and had gotten out of there.

  But she hadn’t either.

  No one could answer him. No one had contact with the dome.

  Finally, he got permission to use one of Taylor’s wall screens. Flint watched reports from every dome except Armstrong’s, from several ships in orbit, and from outside commentators, including a few from Mars.

  No one knew what had happened, although a few had gotten footage of a hole blowing out of the dome. The hole was small and had to be magnified several times just to present a good image, but when it was, the image showed something being expelled from the dome.

  Whatever had happened to Armstrong had happened from the inside.

  Flint resisted the urge to get into his yacht and head home. There was nothing he could do, not until Armstrong’s dome was accessible again. With the dome shielded, the Port was shut down.

  No one was going in or out of the city.

  No one was even sure if anyone inside of Armstrong was alive.

  Flint kept the news coverage on even after he left Taylor. A small feed ran along the bottom of Flint’s right eye, and he had another running inside the aircar.

  He went back to his hotel, having lost the spirit of the investigation. He also didn’t like seeing Taylor’s confusion, learning that he had a family he hadn’t realized he had, and that the new family was dead.

  Flint wasn’t sure Taylor understood that he might inherit everything the Lahiris owned—provided, of course, that what they owned hadn’t been destroyed with the dome.

  When Flint got back to his hotel in the French Quarter, he went to his room, switched on as many feeds as he could find, lay on his bed, and hoped that his city would survive.

  Fifty-five

  Andrea Gumiela did not look like her normal self. Her clothes were torn and stained, and her skirt, usually turned to reveal her slender legs, tilted sideways, as if someone had tried to take it off and failed.

  She stood near the side exit in the foyer of the main law-enforcement building, and ran a finger through her messy hair. Her eyes were glassy, she was clearly exhausted, and she was looking for someone.

  Noelle DeRicci had a hunch who.

  The uniformed officers had gathered in the foyer, along with as many detectives as could be rounded up. Emergency notification had come across the links—the thing that started this whole mess was a bomb, set off by the Etaen terrorists that had been let into the Port the day before.

  DeRicci wondered whose idiocy had caused that. She couldn’t remember the news reports—thinking, at the time, that they had nothing to do with her.

  What had nothing to do with her any longer was the Lahiri case and the feeling of betrayal she had carried for the past few days. Flint was out of Armstrong, which meant there was one less person for her to worry about, and the Lahiris were dead. No one would remember that case now.

  DeRicci could barely remember how she had felt earlier that day, or why she had even cared enough to stay up all night, searching through computer files.

  Gumiela pushed her way through the crowd of officers. No one looked good. Everyone was dirt-covered or bruised, wearing ripped clothing, or scratching dried blood off their skin.

  But it was a measure of their professionalism that no one had suggested leaving the building or asked for help or wanted to go home. Everyone knew they had a job to do.

  They just weren’t sure what.

  Gumiela finally reached DeRicci’s side. “I need you, Noelle,” Gumiela said without preamble.

  “I was ordered here with everyone else,” DeRicci said, not sure she wanted whatever minor political task Gumiela was going to assign her.

  But Gumiela grabbed DeRicci’s arm, finding a bruise DeRicci hadn’t even realized was there. “I’m ordering you elsewhere. Come on.”

  DeRicci let herself be led to the corridor just outside the main hall. It was cooler here—the environmental controls were on strong. In the foyer, packed with hundreds of nervous cops, the heat had grown intense.

  “Looks like the engineers have a way to open the walls that shut down the domes,” Gumiela said. “Most of the cops are gonna go through, help people calm down, make sure there’s not other crisises to deal with.”

  DeRicci glanced over her shoulder. Behind her, in the foyer, the chief of police was starting the meeting.

  Gumiela pulled DeRicci farther away from the crowd. “They’re gonna check for the bombers as well. Rumor has it that there’s a dozen spread out throughout Armstrong.”

  “Rumor,” DeRicci said.

  Gumiela shrugged. DeRicci got a sense of exhaustion from the woman that she’d never seen before.

  “Everything’s rumor right now,” Gumiela said. “All we’ve got is word of mouth and panic through the links. And that damn threat.”

  “Threat?” DeRicci asked.

  “Someone took credit for the bombing. For Etae—you know. Those ter
rorists sent in yesterday. I’ve seen it. It’s legit. We have techs working on it now, trying to trace it, but with the systems in such bad shape, we don’t have a lot of hope.”

  DeRicci felt her stomach twist.

  “I need someone good, Noelle. I need someone who can keep a clear head in a crisis.”

  “That’s what cops do,” DeRicci said.

  Gumiela shook her head. “Not like this. I need an investigator. Someone who’ll track down the source of the explosion, maybe even the person who caused it, in record time. I’ve only got one investigator who I know can investigate while the world’s crashing around her. That’s you, Noelle.”

  DeRicci’s mouth was dry. “Other people—”

  “Other people haven’t survived one other crisis like you have. And I gotta admit, this is political too.”

  Of course, DeRicci thought.

  “If you say so-’n’-so did it, people are gonna believe you, where they might not believe Kinyone or Stevens. You’ve got the experience behind you, and a record for doing good work.”

  DeRicci shook her head.

  Gumiela’s hand tightened on her arm. “The public knows you. They know you saved the dome once. They’re gonna think you can do it again.”

  “I don’t want to be a publicity stunt,” DeRicci said.

  “No stunt.” Gumiela brushed hair out of her face. Her skin had scratches and cuts around the browline. DeRicci wondered what had happened to Gumiela when the lights went out. “I’m not even going to mention an investigation until it’s done. But when it is done, no matter how long it takes, we need a voice the people will trust. Like it or not, that’s you, Noelle.”

  DeRicci sighed. “I’m not trained for this.”

  “No one is.” Gumiela let go of DeRicci’s arm. “You can put together your own team. First thing you need to do is look for leads, see if you can track down whoever did this or maybe where they’re going to strike again. As many people as you need, Noelle. Just let me know.”