The Peyti Crisis: A Retrieval Artist Novel: Book Five of the Anniversary Day Saga (Retrieval Artist series 12)

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  She hoped he hadn’t lied about anything else.

  SEVEN

  THE COVERALLS MADE Jhena feel like a different person.

  Or, more accurately, they made her feel like the person she’d left behind.

  She sat on the bench between the lockers, finger-combing her now-dry hair. She had taken a quick shower because she didn’t want to leave the evidence bags alone for very long, even if they were in a guest locker, secured to the chips hidden under her skin. Even after the shower, she still felt like she smelled of vomit: she knew that came from the lining of her nose, and the back of her throat. She had used oral cleansers, and they had helped, just not quite enough.

  Her hands were still shaking, and the coveralls weren’t helping.

  They were blue and white, prison guard regulation clothing, for dirty jobs, and they were made of some scratchy material, as if the designers couldn’t find something soft that worked equally well.

  The scratchiness, the bagginess, the unfamiliarity reminded her of that night her father had given her to the authorities, with the promise that her aunt would come for her. She had no idea what would happen; she thought he was gone for good, and that he had lied.

  He was gone for good, but he hadn’t lied—at least not to her. Her aunt had shown up from Earth, a seven-day journey. By then, Jhena had given up all hope.

  And the entire time, she’d been wearing regulation coveralls, because god forbid that any child would feel different from any other child in government care. The long-timers had no special clothing, so Jhena didn’t get to wear hers.

  She had gotten it back, along with the toys her father had packed for her, but she hadn’t had any access to it during those seven days.

  Those days had changed her, made her quieter, made her terrified, at least on some level. She certainly never trusted anyone.

  Even though she was trusting Didier now.

  Kinda. She was at least following his instructions.

  Or she would the moment she opened the locker.

  You’ll be surprised at how simple it will be, Didier had said as he told her what to do after she left the cell block. You take out the evidence bag, put your clothes in it, then put that bag wherever they want you to. Then you take the box back to storage, with all of the DNA bags inside it. No one will look at it, and I’ll clear everything out when I leave.

  She stared at that closed locker door. Black, like everything else in this place; a bit reflective, unlike other parts, probably so someone can check to see if the clothes fit properly without moving to the mirrors; impossible to open without the right code, just like all the other staff areas in the entire prison block.

  She swallowed. Her throat hurt. She had actually damaged it. The last time she’d been that sick had been the one and only time she had gotten drunk. Being drunk made her uncomfortable; the loss of control terrified her, instead of liberating her like her friends had promised. And then it had all ended like the last hour had ended, on a bathroom floor, staring down cleaning bots as if they had a mind of their own.

  He was using her. That’s what her entire mind kept coming back to.

  Didier was using her. He might have done so from the very beginning.

  He hadn’t chatted her up because he found her attractive. When had any man found her attractive? He wasn’t needy—that had become clear in the cell block. He had used her, maybe not with Frémont’s death in mind, but somehow, with some random future event awaiting both of them. Saving her for just the right moment, which had happened today.

  What she couldn’t quite figure out was if he would turn her in. She didn’t think he would because that would raise too many questions. But he wouldn’t be that accommodating either.

  He’d spoken of millions. And now that her head cleared, she understood why. He was going to sell the DNA. Crazies always thought that criminal DNA had uses. And some people liked to buy it just because they had a fetish for horrible people like Frémont.

  She didn’t doubt that there would be millions if Didier figured out a way to monetize Frémont’s DNA. She just doubted that there would be millions for her.

  She would be taking half of the risk, and getting none of the reward.

  She would spend the rest of her life in fear if she didn’t turn him in, and maybe even in fear if she did turn him in.

  After all, she had no idea who Didier was actually working with.

  From his calm attitude, he had done this before—and he knew that she hadn’t.

  She ran her hands through her hair. She couldn’t sit here very long. She had no idea how long it would take Didier to get off shift. Probably a long time, considering the debrief.

  The sirens had ended while she was in the shower, but the investigation was just beginning. She hadn’t been through this before, but she knew the drill. It was in all the procedure manuals.

  Whenever something went wrong on a floor, there would be a full-scale investigation, one that could last weeks, maybe even years. The best thing to do, according to the guidelines, was to be honest.

  And she doubted she was going to do that. Not unless she did it right now.

  Because she needed to turn in Didier right now, or never.

  She wished she knew what he was going to do next.

  She let out a small sigh. She did know one thing: if he had partners, and they expected millions, and she screwed them of those millions, then they would come after her.

  She hadn’t been a government orphan for long, but she’d been one long enough to learn how feral humans could be when threatened. It was a lesson she never forgot.

  Her entire childhood was a lesson she would never forget.

  That decided her. She leaned forward, and used the back of her left hand to unlock the locker. Then she blocked the bottom of the locker with her body as she pulled the door open.

  She grabbed one clean evidence bag, put two of the full evidence bags she had carried out for Didier in that clean bag, and then sealed the clean bag. She then took another evidence bag, opened it, and stuffed her filthy pants into it, the stench of vomit making her gag.

  She put the bag with the two bags on top of her pants, then stuffed her shirt on top of that, tucking in the sides so that none of it was visible with a single glance. All anyone could see would be her clothing, nothing more.

  Her hands were shaking. Her brain stuttered. Her conscience spoke up—not for the first time today—and reminded her of something she already knew.

  This was her last chance. Her last chance to be honest, to do the right thing.

  Her father had done the right thing—and she had never seen him again.

  She sealed the evidence bag, and watched it turn yellow, which meant the seal was active. Then she set it beside her, and took out the box with all those incriminating bags.

  If she reported Didier now, the discrepancy between the bags he said he filled and the ones he actually filled might become a matter of record. She could only hope that he hadn’t counted the bags he used. And if he counted the bags left in the open box, she would tell him that she needed four bags for her clothes.

  He might actually believe that.

  Or he might expect her to steal a bag or two.

  She sat up. Her hands weren’t shaking any more.

  She had made her decision, and she was acting on it.

  Next stop, the storage room to replace the bags, just like Didier had instructed.

  Then she would finish her shift, go home with her evidence bag of soiled clothes, and leave it in the bottom of her own closet until she figured out what to do with it.

  The lightheadedness had returned—not because she was still suffering from ODS, but because she had forgotten to breathe.

  She could breathe now.

  She was nearly done with her task, and with her shift.

  And then she could pretend that this horrible day never ever happened.

  NOW

  EIGHT

  LUC DESHIN SLAMMED his hand on th
e lists covering the top of his desk. The lists, nothing more than holograms, split apart into a thousand pieces. When he lifted his fist, the pieces reassembled.

  He stood up and turned his back on his entire office.

  Dammit.

  Just before the second attack on the Moon a week ago, Deshin had met with the Retrieval Artist Miles Flint at the offices of their mutual attorney, Celestine Gonzalez. Deshin had several reasons for meeting with Flint.

  The authorities weren’t solving the Anniversary Day attacks. From what Deshin could tell, through his usual monitoring of law enforcement, the authorities hadn’t a clue about anything. They were going in circles, if they were doing any work at all.

  Deshin walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows in his office. The office had a 360-degree view of the entire city. Armstrong had been lucky on Anniversary Day: the city had lost its mayor, but little else. Nineteen other domes had been attacked, and twelve had had holes blown through them.

  Millions of people had died.

  Deshin had nearly died, since he had been at a meeting in Yutu City. He’d lost friends and colleagues and security staff—more people than he cared to think about.

  Had the attack in Armstrong succeeded, he might have lost his beloved wife Gerda and his amazing son Paavo. And Deshin wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it.

  He had been too far away.

  So he had started to investigate immediately after the attacks, and discovered a hell of a lot more than the so-called authorities had. And what he had discovered unnerved him.

  He met with Flint because he liked the man and Flint had done him a good turn a while back, actually saving Deshin’s family by getting rid of a personal threat.

  No matter what Flint thought of Deshin (and Flint made it clear he didn’t really like Deshin at all), Deshin respected the hell out of Flint.

  That respect got confirmed just last week. All of Deshin’s sources confirmed that Flint had helped the Moon’s Security Chief, Noelle DeRicci, thwart the second attack—by a group of Peyti lawyers who had been undercover on the Moon for decades. Those lawyers, also clones like the Anniversary Day attackers, had been designed as suicide bombers. They activated on the same day, and would have destroyed another million lives and domes and everything else.

  It was enough to make even the most dug-in businessman want to move off Moon. Only Deshin didn’t know any place safer, especially if whoever was masterminding the attacks wasn’t aiming at the Moon, but at the Earth Alliance itself.

  He blinked and made himself look at the city. He loved this place. Cranes still rose from the area around the first bombing, four years before Anniversary Day, almost hiding the neighborhood housing Dome University. Beyond that was the former slum where he had grown up and where he later invested a fortune buying ancient real estate and turning it into housing for young professionals.

  That hadn’t even been his first fortune. He had money in dicey places, and he dealt with a lot of shady types.

  Hell, he was a shady type, although he’d been trying to clean up his act since he and Gerda adopted Paavo. But some acts weren’t so easy to clean. He still had—and used—a lot of connections that he was certain the Armstrong Police Department (the Pre-Anniversary Day Armstrong Police Department, anyway) would have loved to confirm.

  He turned slightly, saw the glinting roofs of the homes in his neighborhood. They looked lovely in the slightly red tinge of Dome Daylight which was designed to look like early morning on Earth.

  The area where he had made his home wasn’t one of those ostentatious upscale neighborhoods that lawyers and politicians and the “upwardly mobile” folks preferred. Nor had he gone for the hectares of land that people like Bernard Magalhães used to show off their wealth.

  The Moon was full of empty land; Deshin didn’t need to buy large swaths of it to prove he had money. He knew he had money. No one else needed to.

  Fortunately, Gerda agreed with him. She hated people who flaunted their wealth. She liked being comfortable. When she spent money, she spent it on things that added to the comfort inside the home rather than impressing anyone who looked at the place from the outside.

  Or she spent money on their son. Paavo already had the finest education anyone could buy on the Moon—if only the schools were still open.

  Deshin was clenching his fists so tightly that his hands ached. He made himself let go, one finger at a time.

  People had died at Paavo’s school in the second attack. The order that had come from the United Domes of the Moon Security Office had subjected anyone in the room with a Peyti lawyer to an instant switch to Peyla’s environment—which was hostile to humans.

  A lot of humans died last week because the bombs the lawyers were wearing only exploded in an Earthlike environment. When the environmental systems shifted, the bombs stopped working.

  Millions of lives saved—at the price of thousands.

  Deshin understood it. He knew how those calculations worked.

  But the events had revived his son’s nightmares, just after Paavo was starting to get past the traumas inflicted on him by his biological parents.

  And those attacks—the deaths in the Armstrong Wing of the Aristotle Academy—could have been so much worse, if that little conference room where the Peyti lawyers and the human clients hadn’t been shut off from the rest of the school.

  Deshin had laid awake nights, imagining how horribly his son might have died.

  Deshin didn’t care if he died, but he didn’t want his son to die. Paavo wasn’t even ten yet. He hadn’t even started to live.

  And Deshin would do anything to ensure his kid’s future.

  Deshin returned to his desk. The holographic images of the lists that Flint had sent him still hovered in front of Deshin’s chair.

  The damn things were useless.

  He had asked Flint for lists of the explosives used in the Anniversary Day attacks, thinking—hoping—believing—that those lists would have some secret on them, some clue that Deshin would see that the authorities missed.

  But Flint had told Deshin last week that the explosives used all across the Moon on Anniversary Day were different, depending on location. Some of the perpetrators used a mix of explosives, others used what was on hand.

  And the thwarted attack here in Armstrong would have used some rigged ships in quarantine in the Port, which would have destroyed all access to the Moon for large ships.

  Deshin had hoped for more. He had expected more.

  When he followed the trail left by the zoodeh, the stuff the assassins used to kill various Moon mayors and the governor-general on that same day, he had discovered something chilling.

  Most of the zoodeh hadn’t come from quarantined ships like the authorities believed, but had already been on the Moon when the zoodeh had joined the list of banned substances.

  The traders in zoodeh and similar weapons had sold their zoodeh to the Anniversary Day killers the week or so before the attacks.

  And then those traders—to a person—had been murdered.

  Deshin poked a finger through the floating holograms of lists and lists and more lists.

  The authorities hadn’t known about the murders and hadn’t tied that loose end together. Last week, Deshin had told Flint to look into it all and hoped that Flint would encourage the Security Chief to start investigating the zoodeh suppliers and the deaths. Because Deshin was sure there was some kind of lead there, but nothing he could pursue without calling attention to himself.

  He had expected the lists of explosives to provide the same revelations. But the past five months had turned into one frustrating dead end after another. No trail of murders here, no easily findable link to the Anniversary Day killers.

  Just a lot of missing explosives—and not recently missing either. So many explosives had gone missing five years before, when the regulations were looser. Every human household on the Moon could have a tonne of explosives and still hundreds of kilotonnes of missing explo
sives would been left over.

  The very thought chilled him.

  And none of that counted all the illegal weapons quarantined in the Port of Armstrong.

  What Deshin knew and what he could prove were different. That was why he wanted Flint on board with some of this investigation.

  What scared Deshin, though (and until this year, damn near nothing scared Deshin) was this: everything he had found in his post Anniversary Day investigation—everything—showed intimate knowledge of the way that the Moon worked, not just in its governmental systems, but also its underworld.

  The breadth of information needed to figure out this plan was astonishing—so broad, in fact, that he hadn’t known some of it until he started looking.

  And then last week: new clones, new problems, Peyti clones.

  Deshin had thought, like everyone else, that this was primarily a human issue—even though he had taunted Flint, and reminded him that there were nonhuman players involved.

  But the Peyti involvement, the Peyti clones—and the fact that they were planted decades before, and had gone to law school all over the known universe, and had, in fact, practiced law on the Moon for years without ever doing anything wrong—those Peyti clones made Deshin’s fear worse.

  He couldn’t keep quietly investigating.

  He couldn’t give hints to Flint any more, hoping Flint’s contacts would take up the investigation and do it properly.

  Last week, before the second attack, Flint had asked Deshin to investigate sources for Designer Criminal Clones based on PierLuigi Frémont. Deshin had agreed, then got sidetracked—as everyone did—by the horrors a few days later.

  Now, Deshin needed to do more than investigate the Frémont DNA. He needed to investigate designer criminal clone companies that specialized in multispecies clones. And not fast-grow clones. Slow-grow ones.

  He would be putting himself in danger.

  But, he reasoned, better him than his family. As long as the threat of another attack hung over the Moon, his family was at great risk.