“You don’t have that power,” he said.
She let out a small laugh. “That shows how little attention you’ve paid to events outside of Tycho Crater. Who the hell do you think has kept this Moon functioning these past six months? It sure wasn’t the council. A lot of the most influential mayors died. And a whole bunch of the most important governmental support staff got obliterated in the bombing of Littrow. I’ve been running almost everything, and I’m not happy about it. But one thing I’ve learned is this: If there’s a problem, it needs to get solved immediately. And I’m beginning to believe you’re a problem, Dominic. Are you?”
He stared at her. His face was even redder than it had been before. His left hand tapped against his left thigh, a movement DeRicci doubted he even knew he was making.
“People died here,” he said in a small voice.
“Yes,” she said. “And a lot more people survived. We can’t help the dead. We can only help the living.”
He shook his head slightly. “You’re a cold bitch, you know that?”
“Yeah,” she said, even as she wished it were true. “You’re not the first person to say that to me. I doubt you’ll be the last.”
Three
Miles Flint actually had an office in the Security Building in downtown Armstrong. He wasn’t exactly sure when that happened. Somewhere along the way, someone had steered him to this room. It was on the same floor as DeRicci’s office, not far from the room he and his daughter Talia had worked in feverishly on Anniversary Day.
When he had first moved into the room, it had been nearly empty, with a generic desk and an uncomfortable chair. Now it had a desk, a couch, shelves he’d actually filled with personal items, pads, notebooks, and a wallboard that constantly rotated security messages. One wall even showed moonscapes, and he’d been here long enough to have a favorite.
He liked the sunlight on the Moon dust, the Earth bright in the distance.
The moonscapes stood in for windows. Noelle DeRicci’s office was the only one with really good windows, something he thought a bit odd. If someone wanted to take out the Chief of Security for the United Domes of the Moon, they could watch her every move from any of the buildings nearby.
Even though DeRicci had reassured him that no one could do such a thing because nanoprotectors coated the windows’ exteriors and interiors, he wasn’t reassured. He knew better than anyone else that something protected by technology could be breached by technology.
And right now, whether she liked it or not, Noelle DeRicci was the only person standing between normal life and a complete government meltdown.
That was one of the reasons he didn’t mind working in this office. He wanted to support DeRicci as best he could.
There were other reasons he worked here as well. One of them was simple protection. Despite his worries about DeRicci’s office windows, this was one of the (if not the) best protected buildings in all of Armstrong. He was relatively safe here—if anyone was safe, these days.
And he needed to stay safe. Talia depended on him. He had promised her he would retire from his Retrieval Artist work while he raised her, and he had more or less kept that promise until Anniversary Day. Even now, he wasn’t really doing Retrieval Artist work. He was doing actual investigative work.
The work was dicey. He was going into areas of the net that made him extremely uncomfortable, following leads brought to him by the detectives working the various aspects of the Anniversary Day crimes, and following leads he and Talia had developed that very first day.
Flint’s biggest worry—which he had expressed to no one—was that someone or something absolutely horrible would track him back through some trail he inadvertently left in his digital travels. Most of his job as a Retrieval Artist had been following those trails; he knew they got left all the time.
He also knew that the most cautious person—and he regarded himself as even more cautious than that—left some kind of trail. The key was to minimize those trails and to make sure that no one could follow them easily, if at all.
He had worked a lot of cases, first as a detective for the Armstrong Police Department (where he met DeRicci—they had been partners), and then as a Retrieval Artist. He had learned caution as a Retrieval Artist. One false move and he could cost someone their life.
Retrieval Artists found people who had Disappeared. Those people usually paid a service for a new identity and a new life. Generally, the Disappeared were accused of a crime committed on an alien world or in an alien culture.
When the Earth Alliance was formed, one of the agreements the parties had to sign onto was that in local cases, local jurisdiction held. It sounded good in theory, but in practice it was often nasty. Small things that humans did—such as walking on a bed of flowers and accidentally crushing them—were considered crimes in some alien worlds. And no matter how much a human was warned about the various differences in the other culture, not even the Earth Alliance knew what all the differences were.
The punishments were often severe—loss of life or loss of a firstborn child. So corporations usually facilitated the Disappearance of any worker who violated a local law, just so that the corporation could function in a non-human environment.
Finding those Disappeared could subject them to the very punishments they’d been fleeing, so Flint had to be particularly careful when he did his job. He was always aware that his very investigation might cost someone their life.
In this investigation, he was aware that his work might cost him his life or the lives of everyone he held dear. Whoever had caused the terrible Anniversary Day assassinations and bombings clearly didn’t care about life at all. They cared about some kind of agenda, and they were willing to kill thousands to achieve it.
Which was why he worked here, instead of in his small office in Old Armstrong. His office had a lot of safeguards, but he had installed and upgraded them himself, leaving trails just in the work he had done.
He had done some similar work on the computer systems here as well as on the digital security systems, but he hadn’t done all of the work. Indeed, much of what he had done was tweak what he found, and he worried about the parts he couldn’t upgrade.
On some levels, he knew his office in Old Armstrong was much more of a digital fortress. But he figured that whoever or whatever was behind these attacks expected someone from the various police departments on the Moon and from the Security Office for the United Domes of the Moon to investigate. Those people—or creatures—didn’t expect Miles Flint, Retrieval Artist. And if they tried to take out anyone who got close, he didn’t want to be an easy target.
Nor did he want to bring these agents of chaos to other places in Armstrong, places he usually used to download sensitive information, like the Brownie Bar or Dome University’s Armstrong campus.
He had never really worked from a completely protected position before, and he knew it handicapped him. Usually he was a bit more reckless, a little bit more of a believer in his own abilities to escape detection despite the stakes.
But in this case, even after six months, he still couldn’t figure out whom or what he was investigating. And he couldn’t figure out why they had acted the way they had. He couldn’t see what purpose there was behind these attacks. There had been no follow-up, no secondary or tertiary attacks after Anniversary Day itself. He had expected it. So had everyone else.
On Anniversary Day, Talia had noted that the bombing in Armstrong four years before might have been practice. So if that was practice, she suggested, were the Anniversary Day bombings a dry run for something even bigger?
DeRicci latched onto that theory. She combined it with a secondary theory, derived from the way the attacks had been conducted. First, a group of cloned men assassinated or tried to assassinate leaders all over the Moon. Then, a few hours later, the bombings occurred. The assassinations were not the main point of the attack; the bombings were.
DeRicci called this “Distract and Destroy.” Flint believed she was o
nto something with that theory—with all of her theories—but he didn’t know what that something was.
What he feared the most was that whoever this was happened to be applying the distract-and-destroy method on a much grander scale. He worried that the Anniversary Day bombings were the distraction, but from what he did not know.
If it was on a grand scale, then he had a hunch that the target wasn’t the Moon herself, but the Earth Alliance. DeRicci had already warned the Alliance of this and they said they would follow up, but Flint had no way to know if they had. Six months after the Anniversary Day attacks, he—and the entire investigative team—was still trying to figure out who or what caused the attacks. For every clue someone found, someone else found a clue that contradicted it.
He had never done anything this complex, this frustrating, or this important.
He had six different computer systems opened around his desk, all attached to him. No one else could work them, not even Talia. He didn’t want her in this mess.
She did help him when she wasn’t in school, but on a separate system attached to the most comfortable chair in the room. His teenage daughter loved to work in the most uncomfortable positions, arms and legs draped, the holoscreen often floating on the chair’s back.
He had long since stopped complaining about how she sat and paid more attention to how she worked. Not that he expected her to do bad work; on the contrary, Talia was much more talented on computers, systems, links, and the net than he was—and he had helped designed some of its modern components.
No, he watched because he was worried that she would trigger something that would put her in horrible danger. He had already lost her once; he wasn’t about to lose her again.
The door opened, and Rudra Popova walked in with a tray of food and coffee. Popova, a thin woman with long black hair, had been DeRicci’s assistant since DeRicci got this job. At first, DeRicci hadn’t liked her, but she gradually learned how valuable Popova was.
Flint completely understood how Popova made herself valuable. She was one of those rare people who was both smart and empathetic. Only her empathy didn’t come in the form of sympathetic nods or a good ear for problems. Popova figured out what someone needed before they needed it, and then somehow delivered it.
She was the one who found Flint this office, and she was the one who furnished it. And it wasn’t until Flint smelled the cinnamon in Popova’s special chocolate/coffee blend that he realized how much he needed a break.
Then he saw the roast beef sandwich she had placed in the center of that tray, and he realized how hungry he was.
He could get used to this. He had worked alone for so many years and kept friends at bay, following the instructions of his mentor, Paloma, that he found this assistance both pleasing and uncomfortable. But he didn’t mind it either.
He stretched, his eyes bleary from the caverns of information he’d been lost in.
“Thank you, Rudra,” he said. “I’m going to take a break. Why don’t you join me?”
“I’d like that,” she said. “Just let me get a mug.”
And then she hastily left the room, her long black hair swinging behind her.
Flint watched with a bemused frown. He’d expected her to say no, like she had every other time he had asked. Popova had suffered a severe loss on Anniversary Day, and she was still skittish. Not that she had ever been friendly before. In fact, early on, she had greatly disapproved of Flint.
Somewhere—and he wasn’t sure where—her opinion of him had changed.
She came back in, carrying an empty mug by its handle and a plate with a matching roast beef sandwich. She sat in the straight-backed chair on the other side of his desk.
He had to tap the desk’s surface to shut down the holoscreens. She couldn’t see them, but he could. In fact, they blocked most of his vision of her.
He grabbed his sandwich, slid the chair to one side so that he wouldn’t rest the food on the desk’s command surface, and took a bite. The meat was real, the bread made with real flour, the lettuce and tomato fresh-grown. So much of Moon food had imitation ingredients—imitation beef, bread made with Moon flour which, so far as he could tell, was paste—that it was always a joy to get food with flavor.
“Everything okay, Rudra?” he asked.
She poured herself some coffee from the carafe that she had placed on his tray. Then she wrapped her hands around the mug and leaned back in the chair, leaving her sandwich for the moment.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, her black eyes twinkling. “I’m hiding.”
He raised his eyebrows. Popova, not only avoiding her work, but smiling about it. Not to mention the smile itself. He wasn’t sure he had ever seen it.
“From whom?” he asked.
“More Earth Alliance investigators. I think they’re being cloned, honest to God.” Then she bit her lower lip, as if she had said something wrong.
But Flint laughed. He appreciated the normal old-fashioned clone jokes. Recent clone jokes were nasty, and the entire city’s attitude toward clones had become a lot darker. He worried for Talia, who was a clone of his firstborn, Emmeline. People didn’t know she was a clone, but she did. And she was sensitive about it.
“These guys just come in and think they can take over what we’re doing,” Popova was saying, “and they can’t. They don’t understand anything about the Moon except that we were attacked.”
She sipped some coffee, then set the mug down.
“And,” she added in a confidential tone, “I’m beginning to think that Chief DeRicci schedules her trips around these guys. She gets some notification that they’re coming and she flees Armstrong.”
Flint’s bemusement grew. He’d never seen Popova like this. He knew she had a private life but here, with the exception of Anniversary Day itself, she always acted strictly, almost robotically, professional.
“I know, I know,” she said, looking at his expression. “She wouldn’t do that. She hates these trips, but still. I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to tell these guys. I ask them to leave, and they come back later like an incurable disease.”
A chatty, complaining Popova? That was new. Flint couldn’t quite figure this moment out.
“Do you want me to talk to them?” he asked.
“No!” She sounded alarmed. “If they find out we have a retrieval artist on the payroll, then they’ll really think we’re incompetent.”
Her eyes widened as she realized what she said. Flint suppressed a smile.
“I mean, I didn’t mean that like it sounded. You know. They think we’re small fry already. They’re going to really think…”
She let her voice trail off. At least Popova was smart enough to realize that she was making things worse.
“It’s all right, Rudra,” he said. “I understand what you mean. We could tell them that I’m not on the payroll.”
After all, that was true. He didn’t need money. He already had more than he knew what to do with. Technically, he was volunteering his time here, although he didn’t see it that way.
He believed he was doing emergency triage. He was protecting his home, his family, and his community. He knew that most people didn’t have his level of skill, and he knew that even if they did, they didn’t have the ability to put information together the way that he did.
The fact that it was taking him months to figure this out instead of days worried him. It meant he was up against something he’d never been up against before. It also meant that if someone less capable had been involved, this crime might never get solved.
Like the first bombing, four years ago.
Much as he loved DeRicci, her team hadn’t managed to figure that one out, nor had the Armstrong PD. Which made Flint wonder if the Earth Alliance authorities shouldn’t be involved. After all, they were theoretically the best investigators across cultures.
Of course, they would have an Earth Alliance agenda, not a Moon-based agenda. But still, that might help.
P
opova was watching him. He recognized the look, and it made him slightly uncomfortable. She knew him a lot better than he knew her.
“Do you want to talk to them?” she asked. Her voice had switched. The chatty woman was gone, and the professional was back.
“I don’t know,” he said. “What exactly could they do if they don’t like how we’re conducting this investigation? I thought all the crimes—as heinous as they were—fall under local jurisdiction. Noelle’s been fighting just to allow her own investigators from the United Domes to observe in some jurisdictions.”
Flint knew that because he’d been listening to DeRicci’s complaints, and he understood them. He also understood how the local police departments felt. They didn’t want a government agency overseeing them, especially one without a lot of teeth but with a lot of ambition.
That was why DeRicci was visiting a lot of sites herself. She was trying to ingratiate herself with the locals in charge. In some cases it worked, and in others it didn’t. It would really have helped if Celia Alfreda was still alive. She had the best diplomatic skills Flint had ever seen in a Moon official. That was one of the many reasons she, as Governor-General, had managed to unify as much of the Moon as she had.
“C’mon, Rudra,” he said. “Don’t tell me you haven’t looked this up.”
Popova took a bite of the sandwich, her gaze on his.
“The Earth Alliance is all about local jurisdiction,” he said. “Believe me, I know. It’s one of the things that got me out of the Armstrong Police Department. So what’s different here?”
Popova sighed. “Technically, I’m not supposed to tell you.”
“You don’t take orders from them,” Flint said.
“That’s right,” she said. “Noelle DeRicci is my boss.”
Flint’s eyes narrowed. DeRicci told her not to say anything? That meant that DeRicci believed that she had done something wrong, something that opened the door to the Earth Alliance, something that—
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