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

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  He could take them out of here—he would talk to Gerda about that—and then he would see what leads he could uncover.

  And this time, instead of hinting at them to Flint, Deshin would tell Flint what he found.

  Deshin would make sure no attack would destroy the Moon, even if it was the last thing he ever did.

  NINE

  OFFICER MAUDE LECKIE kept her right hand on her laser pistol, and surveyed the train car. All the damn Peyti clones, looking exactly alike, sat in the exact same position, and stared out the windows at the landscape whizzing by.

  The bullet train, commandeered by the Security Office of United Domes of the Moon, was going fast, but not fast enough to miss the damage outside the domes. The moment the train zoomed out of Glenn Station, she noted the destroyed buildings of the local manufacturing planet.

  Somewhere on this car—Glenn Station’s prisoner transport car—sat the Peyti asshole who had sent his colleague to the plant. She had lost a cousin there.

  She scanned the car, making eye contact with as many Peyti as she could. The damn things didn’t look threatening. They were thin as sticks, with fingers that were too long and eyes that were too big. Their skin was an unhealthy gray.

  But the masks they wore that enabled them to survive in an Earth-like environment—those damn things sent a shiver through her. Because this group of asshole lawyer Peyti had weaponized their masks just a week ago, with the idea of killing as many people as possible.

  Leckie knew her superiors had checked the masks. She knew some androids had gone over the masks with the various technical tests that only prison android guards could do efficiently.

  She knew that these masks had been examined a dozen times each—and she still wanted to rip the damn things off, and toss them out the window onto the Moon’s gray surface.

  She wanted to see these fuckers die slowly, unable to breathe, their faces turning that weird blue they got when they were “distressed.”

  She’d turn them blue. She’d make them explode if she could.

  It was taking all of her control not to turn her laser pistol on them. She’d flick on the pistol’s red sight, and deliberately place the dot on the forehead of the Peyti prisoners, one by one. She wanted them to feel scared, terrified, that she was going to kill them slowly.

  She’d told her captain she had this impulse and he had just laughed at her.

  They’re suicide bombers, Leckie, he had said. They’re not going to be scared. They’re going to welcome death. Take them to the City of Armstrong. Let them face justice and live with their failures. That will frighten them. That will destroy them. They expect you and your little gun; they don’t expect a future filled with incarceration and daily punishment.

  She knew he was right. She knew it deep down, and she had said as much, which was why her captain had sent her as one of the ten human guards designated to shepherd the prisoners to their new home.

  But that didn’t stop the impulse. She still wanted to kill these creatures. Maybe the pistol wasn’t good enough. Maybe she should go after them with her bare hands.

  She flexed the fingers of her left hand, imagining them tugging down those stupid old masks, and then wrapping her hand around a scrawny neck, seeing if she could snap it with her grip alone.

  She was tired of being frightened, tired of the explosions and the deaths and the uncertainty.

  The idea behind bringing these assholes to Armstrong was simple: the cops there would interrogate them and find out what—if anything—was going to happen next.

  But anyone with a brain knew that wasn’t going to work. These Peyti assholes were lawyers, for god’s sake. Lawyers who knew how interrogation worked, who knew how the law worked, who knew what could be done and what couldn’t. Suicidal lawyers with enough patience to await attack orders for years.

  They would be able to handle impatient cops trying to figure out where the next attack would be. Even the Moon’s most experienced interrogators wouldn’t be able to crack these nuts. This was a wasted trip, for no good reason.

  They should put the Peyti in some crowded room with Peyti atmosphere, confiscate the masks, and then change the atmosphere to Earth Normal. Yeah, the cops would never figure out what prompted these assholes to try to destroy every single dome on the Moon, but the cops wouldn’t find out anyway.

  And everyone would feel so much better when they were all dead.

  She glanced at her colleagues, stationed at various points throughout the car. They were watching the Peyti too, as if the Peyti were doing something interesting. The fact that they all moved the same, they all looked the same, it really bothered her. She wondered if it bothered her colleagues.

  She half-wished she were alone on this train with the android guards, stationed at the exits and on platforms outside. The android guards wouldn’t care if she shot every single Peyti in the place. The android guards didn’t care about anything.

  The only reason they weren’t shepherding the Peyti to Armstrong was that no one knew if the Peyti had skills enough to compromise the guards. Plus no one knew if these guards were trained to recognize the Peyti lawyers as lawyers, not as prisoners.

  She’d heard that officials in Armstrong had already reprogrammed their Android guards to accept no Peyti lawyers anywhere in any facility. She’d also heard that Armstrong was closing its Port to the Peyti—too damn late, in her opinion.

  Someone should have barred the Peyti decades ago.

  But that was all dust on the tracks now. Nothing she could do. Nothing anyone could do.

  She’d finish her assignment, and head back to Glenn Station, just like she was ordered to do.

  And any Peyti there, lawyer or not, non-clone or not, had better stay out of her way.

  Because she was done.

  No one was going to try to destroy her home again.

  And she knew she wasn’t alone.

  If the authorities couldn’t stop these people, she would—one way, or the other. She’d stop them. Whether it was “legal” or not.

  TEN

  BARTHOLOMEW NYQUIST BUTTONED his last clean shirt. He looked at the pile of laundry at the bottom of his closet and grimaced. He could set the laundry for a quick nano-clean, which got the smells out of everything, but left a residue that always made him crawly, as if the damn nanobots were moving around his skin like a dozen tiny aliens, or he could wash everything later, wasting water, and expending lots of energy.

  He ran a hand through his wet hair, and glanced around the darkened bedroom. His apartment was small and cramped, but the building had some amenities. If he wanted to pay the building staff, they would do the laundry for him. Of course, that took organization as well, and he didn’t have the mental energy for that.

  So he pulled off his clean shirt and set it on a chair, so that the laundry—which smelled of personal funk, sweat, and every stupid person he had encountered in the last week—wouldn’t brush against the fabric. Then he carried the pile to the nanobasket, and set the cleaning program to start in four hours.

  By then, Noelle DeRicci would be awake.

  He glanced at her as he grabbed his shirt. She was sprawled kitty-corner on his narrow bed, her hand on his pillow, her curly black hair covering her face.

  She had shown up at his place at two a.m., claiming to need a night off. He hadn’t had the heart to tell her that night had passed long ago, and they were into morning now. She had brought real hamburgers, still steaming hot from the expensive meat-place down the block, and waved them at him.

  He didn’t need a bribe to spend time with her, and he had told her that, but she claimed she needed food.

  As gaunt as she was looking, he believed it. He wondered how many meals she had skipped since Anniversary Day. He knew she’d been trying to put her life back in some kind of order, and then a group of Peyti clones had tried to blow up the entire Moon.

  She had stopped that by acting quickly and probably illegally, saving millions of lives. Still, the thousands
of lives lost weighed on her. She hadn’t thought of the locations outside of the domes—the Growing Pits, the mining facilities. The casualties there had been real and heartbreaking, and the press had been reporting on those, as representative of what could have happened to the entire Moon.

  This place was jittery—he was jittery—expecting another thing to happen each and every moment of each and every day.

  He had no idea how DeRicci felt. She was the Chief of Security for the United Domes of the Moon, and after the Anniversary Day attacks, pretty much the only living representative of the United Domes government.

  Until just a few years ago, the domes had been independent entities, ruled by their mayors and city councils. A series of crises convinced the Moon’s first Governor-General, Celia Alfreda, that the Moon needed an overall government to band together for security and other projects. She had pushed that agenda for nearly twenty years before it became real. She served as the first Governor-General, only to be assassinated six months ago in the middle of the Anniversary Day attacks.

  Since then, the surviving members of the United Domes Council had gone home to their cities to help rebuild, leaving the Security office and a few other organizations as the only representation of the United Domes. Everyone seemed to agree that a Moon-based, not a city-based, government was necessary, and with the serial crises mounting, no one wanted to upend the system that was already in place.

  Not that there was any legal framework for it. DeRicci was seizing power, and she knew it. It made her deeply uncomfortable, but at the same time, she had no idea where the threats to the Moon were coming from.

  And clearly, the threats were to the Moon.

  Nyquist wanted to go over to her and brush the hair off her face, but he was afraid to wake her. They had gone to sleep about 4, and the four hours that she had was probably the most continual sleep she’d had since the beginning of what the press had started calling the Peyti Crisis began.

  He worried about her more than he should have, given the casual nature of their relationship. Her curls were now threaded with gray, she had frown lines on her face, and permanent shadows under her eyes. She wouldn’t see a doctor because, he knew, she was afraid the doctor would tell her to slow down.

  Since she was the only major Domes official left standing, she didn’t feel like she could slow down.

  And Nyquist didn’t feel like he could do much to help her.

  He could give her a quiet place to sleep. He had convinced her security detail that he could handle anything that might happen, any break-ins or threats from whoever it was that had been attacking the Moon.

  So she got what passed for privacy here, and a little bit of time to think about things other than bombings and assassins and mysteries that neither of them could solve with conversation.

  He left the bedroom, and went into his small but functional kitchen. Since Anniversary Day, he had stocked up on essentials, and kept the pantry full. He liked to tell himself he did it to make sure DeRicci ate when she came to his place, but if he was honest, he wanted to have supplies in case society broke down completely.

  Besides, he found that he liked cooking.

  He made himself some coffee, using one of those special blends that Flint kept giving DeRicci. She had a weakness for real Earth food, even though she felt like she should only eat Moon-grown items. But when someone gave her something, she rationalized it by saying it was churlish for her to refuse to use it.

  Nyquist had never suggested the obvious: that she could give the food to one of the city’s food banks. If he suggested that, she would feel guilty that she hadn’t thought of it, and she felt guilty enough about everything already.

  He pulled eggs out of the refrigerator, along with some cheese, fresh spinach and tomatoes, and just a bit of oil. He would make two omelets, and leave hers in the warming basket. She could reheat, and while the omelet wouldn’t be as good as it was when he scraped it out of the skillet, it would still be better than anything else she would eat all day.

  He stirred the eggs, cut the tomatoes, and concentrated, as much as he could, on cooking the perfect omelet. He had cut up some fruit the night before, making DeRicci promise she would eat it before she left. He dished some out for himself.

  The cooking calmed him, and he needed calm—not as much as DeRicci did, but more than usual.

  Everything at the police department was in chaos. He had a meeting at ten a.m., and he was stalling his arrival. Every detective had to come. Apparently, the Chief of the Detectives, Andrea Gumiela, was going to assign interrogation partners.

  She was determined to break the Peyti clones, and find out not just who created them, but who sent them on these sleeper missions.

  There were a million problems with Gumiela’s ideas, first among them her refusal to see the scope of the situation. Armstrong’s was the only major city dome not damaged in some way by the Anniversary Day attacks. While many of the cities had functioning jails and functioning police departments, the key word was “functioning.”

  Many of those dome governments had asked Armstrong to take the Peyti prisoners. Armstrong had a first-stop “Reception Center” for prisoners who had been charged with major crimes, but not yet convicted. The Reception Center was a maximum security facility that was “temporary” for the prisoners, while they were being bound over for trial.

  There were only two on the Moon. Armstrong’s Reception Center was by far the largest, so it was getting the Peyti prisoners.

  Armstrong also had enough interrogation facilities to handle the large wave of prisoners.

  What Armstrong didn’t have was jurisdiction over the attackers from other domes. Until and unless the interrogations bore fruit, the attacks had to be prosecuted on a local level. There was no Moon-level of jurisdiction. Either the attacks had to be prosecuted by each dome, or they had to be prosecuted by the Earth Alliance itself.

  Nyquist scraped his omelet out of the pan, and wiped out the pan, and poured the stirred eggs for DeRicci’s omelet into the pan. He monitored that while taking bites of his. The omelet was fluffy, the cheese perfectly melted, and the tomatoes just crisp enough to add a sweetness that his omelets usually lacked. He wished he hadn’t put in any spinach, and decided not to add it to hers.

  Any good lawyer was going to see the problems here. Nyquist had already told Gumiela that the individual domes had to send permission for the Armstrong PD to act in the stead of the other domes, and hope that it would all stand up in whatever court the prosecution ended up in.

  Gumiela had countered that her plan was simple: no Armstrong detective would interview a suspect from another dome. If those interviews got done, they’d be done by police detectives from those domes, who had to travel with the prisoners.

  That might work as well, but Nyquist wasn’t so certain.

  Nor was he convinced that anyone would get these Peyti clones to talk. They had all been on the Moon for years, and during that time, all but a handful of them had been practicing attorneys. The one he had corralled had been one of the most important defense attorneys in Armstrong.

  Getting these Peyti clones to talk would take a skill set he didn’t think most detectives had. He knew he didn’t.

  He finished his omelet and put it in the sink. Then he left two large notes for DeRicci, one that would float in front of her face the moment she left the bedroom, and the other on the back of the door, telling her that she had enough time for breakfast, since it was cooked, and it would only take her a minute or two to eat it.

  He hoped she would take five minutes, but he didn’t want to discourage her.

  Then he gulped his coffee—a travesty, she would call that—and grabbed his shield, and his weapon.

  He had a long day ahead, in what might be a series of long days, maybe even long months.

  His biggest worry wasn’t so much getting the Peyti clones to talk—he already saw that as close to impossible. His biggest worry was that another group no one paid attention to would tr
y a third attack.

  And he was afraid the third group would learn from their predecessors’ mistakes.

  He was afraid the third attack would succeed.

  ELEVEN

  LUC DESHIN DID something unusual. He went home only an hour after he arrived at the office.

  He needed to. He had to settle something before he could move ahead on his business.

  He knew coming home would worry his wife; he also knew that it could not be helped.

  He swept through the front door. His home was modest. Most of the money he spent on the house he’d spent on security. He kept all the security features up to date, and since the latest attacks, he’d also placed some guards—human guards—outside.

  For once, Gerda hadn’t objected. She was good in an emergency, but she sometimes needed help, and he hadn’t been here for either attack—Anniversary Day or the attack last week. Much as he wanted to be available for his family, he so rarely was.

  The house smelled of baking bread, which overlay the usual faint mint scent that Gerda used to calm them all. Gerda had been cooking ever since the Peyti Crisis. She either cooked or organized when she felt helpless.

  He preferred the cooking. The organizing sometimes felt compulsive.

  He threaded past the living room chairs, which looked like they hadn’t been used in weeks, and went into the heart of his home—the kitchen.

  His small wife bent over the old-fashioned oven, door open and hot fragrant air wafting into the room. Deshin’s son, Paavo, stood beside her, protective gloves on his hands, a streak of flour on his cheek. The evenness of the streak told Deshin that the flour was expensive Earth-made flour, not the Moon flour that most people used.

  Gerda was getting fancy. She had been cooking the old way for weeks now, not using any of the conveniences he had purchased for her. She had asked for this oven long ago, and he had protested: He hadn’t wanted Paavo near anything that could heat up like that.