“Oh, my God,” Flint said. “She opened the door when she warned them she thought this might be an attack against the Earth Alliance, didn’t she?”
“I didn’t tell you that,” Popova said.
Flint scanned what he knew of Earth Alliance law and the Alliance itself. He had a lot of knowledge about the Earth Alliance, much of it arcane, but none of it organized. He wasn’t an Earth Alliance lawyer or someone who specialized in any kind of Earth Alliance law, except as it pertained to crimes in Armstrong.
Which, technically, this was. And he knew that the Earth Alliance had no jurisdiction unless there was suspicion or proof that the crime wasn’t centered here, but it had been directed at, conceived of, or caused by the Earth Alliance itself.
“So when she contacted the Earth Alliance on Anniversary Day, asking for help, and giving them a heads-up that the attacks might occur elsewhere, she gave them an excuse to come here,” Flint said, more to himself than to Popova.
But Popova nodded.
“The weird thing is,” Flint said, “that they used the excuse. They could have come here and investigated a whole host of things after the Disty crisis or the Frieda Tey incident, but they didn’t. They came here after this. They know something.”
Popova tilted her head. Clearly she hadn’t thought of that. “Why wouldn’t they tell us?”
He sighed. “I’m guessing, but I suspect there could be two reasons why. First, the investigators who are visiting us have no idea why they’ve been sent here.”
“You think that’s possible?” Popova said. “I mean, everyone knows about the bombings.”
“Yes,” Flint said, “but these investigators might not know the reason that the Earth Alliance is involved. Investigators often don’t know why their superiors send them into the field.”
He knew that one from bitter personal experience.
“And the other reason they won’t tell us?” Popova asked.
“Well, actually, they might have already hinted at it with you,” Flint said. “They think we’re just dumb locals without the skills to investigate anything this large. And honestly, when it comes to some of the cities that got attacked, they might be right.”
“I can’t believe you think they should get involved,” Popova said.
“They have the teams, Rudra,” Flint said. “They have the money, and they have expertise that we don’t have in large numbers. Armstrong does, and so do a handful of the other cities, but what about Littrow? They barely have a police force. And Armstrong doesn’t have the personnel to send there. Neither does this office.”
“The chief says we have the expertise,” Popova said defensively.
“Really?” Flint asked. “Where?”
“Here,” Popova said. “We can export people to the smaller towns.”
“Not right now, we can’t,” Flint said. “We still haven’t solved the cases here, and we didn’t have a bombing. Our bombing teams are in Littrow because of the United Domes Council deaths there, but do we have teams anywhere else?”
Popova frowned at him. “No,” she said. She sounded almost sullen.
“What if there are clues in those other towns, things that they have that no one has investigated because they lack the experience to understand what they have?” Flint was getting worked up, and he tried to keep himself calm. Popova wasn’t the person he should be having this argument with.
DeRicci was, and she wasn’t here.
But she hadn’t told him about the Earth Alliance interest. It seemed like she hadn’t told him a lot of things.
He understood that and didn’t understand it at the same time. He was volunteering his time because he believed this case—these events—were time-sensitive, because he still felt they were one step away from an even larger crisis.
And DeRicci was acting like someone was encroaching on her turf.
That wasn’t fair. He knew her, maybe better than anyone. She hated authority and worked best when she was the one in charge, which was why she had done so well in this job.
If she brought in the Earth Alliance, they would be in charge.
But what if there was a way to have them coordinate the entire investigation, bring their large resources to bear on this case, and not relinquish control?
“Let me talk to them,” he said again.
Popova shook her head. She clearly thought coming to him had been a mistake. “That’s the chief’s job.”
“Okay,” Flint said. “Let me talk to DeRicci first. Where is she?”
“She didn’t want to be bothered unless it’s an emergency,” Popova said.
“Rudra,” Flint said softly, “every hour we waste is an hour we lose. We’re already six months behind. God knows what we’ve missed. I’m terrified that we’re four years behind, that we could have prevented all of this. We don’t have the expertise. I’m not sure the Earth Alliance does either, but they have access to experts from everywhere—”
“We could request them,” Popova said. “I’ve been telling the chief that. We should request experts—”
“But the Alliance can order them here,” Flint said. “And we can use them.”
Popova stared at him. “We’ll lose control of this investigation,” she said after a moment.
“That’s the point, Rudra,” Flint said. “We don’t have control of the investigation. We never did.”
Four
Iniko Zagrando exited the Black Fleet ship onto some kind of pavement. The Black Fleet called the ship a cruiser, but it outclassed half the ships in the Earth Alliance. And the cruiser looked huge on this landing strip, partly because he had nothing to compare it to. Buildings rose in the distance, but there were no trees, no rock outcroppings, no vehicles. Just a lot of flat brown land that suggested that whatever had been here had long since disappeared.
The air was cold and smelled of rain. Earth rain. Zagrando wouldn’t even have recognized that smell three years ago, but he’d been through a lot since then. And he wasn’t even sure if the smell meant rain would arrive here or if the place always smelled like this.
He’d read a lot about Abbondiado, but he had somehow missed all the information about its climate. He had known only what every school child in the Alliance had learned: that Abbondiado could easily sustain human life—and had, for nearly forty years.
He shuddered, then pulled his sherlskin coat around his shoulders. Illegal as it was, sherlskin was both warm and comfortable. It had a softness he’d never encountered in any other fabric. But, he supposed, you got what you paid for, and this thing cost fifteen times his annual salary in Valhalla Basin.
“Soaking up the ambiance, Zag?” A man he only knew as Whiteley stood just a few meters from him. The names were purposely short. Whiteley didn’t know Zagrando’s real name either. Here, everyone thought of him as Zag and never asked for another name.
Of course, most folks in the Black Fleet had only one name. They didn’t need any other. They were family, and often their first names or their ship identified which branch of the family they belonged to.
Whiteley was pretty high up in his branch. He was thin and wiry, no enhancements that Zagrando could see. But then, Zagrando had been trained to recognize only sanctioned enhancements.
He doubted that one of the best scouts in the Black Fleet had anything sanctioned on his body or otherwise. The Black Fleet was the largest human criminal organization in the sector. It mostly worked the Frontier, avoiding the heart of the Earth Alliance whenever and wherever possible.
Rumors, however, stated that the Black Fleet had tentacles inside the Alliance, and maybe even had a few of its people placed within the Earth Alliance government.
It had taken Zagrando two-and-a-half years to earn the Black Fleet’s trust, although he couldn’t really infiltrate it. One detail he had garnered that apparently no one in Earth Alliance Intelligence had known was that there were only two ways into the Black Fleet: You were either born into it or you married into it.
A
nd in both cases, no matter how hard you tried, you never ever left the Black Fleet alive.
Which made it resemble Earth Alliance Intelligence more than either side was probably comfortable with.
The Black Fleet did have what it called trading partners, and so far as Zagrando could see, the only difference between the partners and the Black Fleet itself was that the partners hadn’t joined the family.
Zagrando had managed to affiliate with a weapons-trading group that had long ties with the Black Fleet, and then rise up in the ranks. He lead the group now, much as he didn’t want to.
And once again, the Earth Alliance wanted him to destroy all his years of hard work. This time, the Earth Alliance hadn’t “killed” him to get him to do their bidding. They needed him very much alive.
They wanted him to chase a long-dead phantom.
All because a group of idiot clones had bombed a bunch of cities on the Moon.
“I dunno, Whiteley,” Zagrando said. “You could probably say I’m soaking up the atmosphere. It’s different than I expected.”
“Yeah,” Whiteley said. “I had that reaction the first time I came here. You see all the vids and hear all that history, and it only shows you what stuff was like fifty-some years ago. I half expect to see a group of thugs, hands raised, chanting at that pale guy like he was the savior of the entire human race.”
Whiteley did his best to sound uneducated, but he—like most members of the Black Fleet—was not only extremely educated, he was also frighteningly intelligent. Whiteley knew who had run Abbondiado and how many years it had been since the colony was truly viable.
This place marked the last stand of PierLuigi Frémont, until his own people turned against him and, with the help of the Earth Alliance, managed to overthrow him.
Frémont committed genocide, not just in Abbondiado, but in the two colonies he’d run before that. In fact, he had completely destroyed those colonies before starting this one. Something about this one made it more successful in Frémont’s opinion than the others had been, and he let it thrive for decades before he turned against his own people.
When the Earth Alliance finally arrested him, they brought him to a Multicultural Tribunal for justice, and before his trial began, he killed himself. Zagrando always thought it ironic that the man who forced millions to their death couldn’t face the consequences of his actions. He killed himself rather than justify what he had done.
But Frémont hadn’t been in Abbondiado for fifty-five years. The colony broke apart without him, even though it had seemed like a viable community before he turned against his people. None of the colonists or their families wanted to stay on this land, deeming it “contaminated by its own history,” and so they abandoned it.
The buildings remained, or so Zagrando had been told. And other groups had taken over the area, mostly the Fahhl’d who lost their homeland centuries ago, and took over abandoned sites all over the sector.
He wasn’t coming for the Fahhl’d, though. He was here to meet with some arms dealers who promised him his own designer assassins.
His handlers in the Alliance hoped these dealers had a connection to whomever had caused the Anniversary Day attacks. No matter how much Zagrando explained that arms dealers never got involved in political events because they liked to provide the weaponry to all sides, the Alliance didn’t listen to him. They kept insisting that this attack was different, although they never told him what evidence they had for it.
And, honestly, they didn’t have the time to prove it to him, anyway. His contact with his handlers was, of necessity, short and to the point. He wasn’t in any position to argue, either. He did what he was told, or he tried to.
His only other choice was to leave the service and, tempted as he was, especially considering how angry he had been at them for the past three years, he had no idea what he would do if he just walked away. He’d spent his entire adult life working in Intelligence, always pretending to be just one thing when in fact he was two or three. The very idea of simplifying scared him to his bones.
Zagrando looked at the vast emptiness around him. A wind blew dust around the huge black ship, coating it, even though it hadn’t been here long.
“Why would anyone live here?” he asked.
“Why would anyone live anywhere?” Whiteley asked, which was such a Black Fleet response. The Black Fleet had no base, no planet where everyone gathered. It had several rallying points that only the families knew, and a few others for the special partners, like Zagrando. Mostly those rallying points were preset coordinates in a particularly empty part of space, although he’d heard rumors that one of the points was a Black-Fleet-owned starbase beyond the Frontier.
“Yeah, but here in particular,” Zagrando said with a shudder. It felt wrong. It felt off. He had been to a few other places that had provoked a similar reaction in him, but not as strongly.
“I don’t know what’s bothering you,” Whiteley said. “History can’t bite you.”
He picked up a pack filled with all kinds of material for trade, from prototype weapons to informational devices to various types of currency. The pack weighed almost as much as Whiteley himself. Zagrando had carried it from the cargo hold, but now that they were on the planet itself, Whiteley wouldn’t let him near it.
Zagrando understood why. Everyone in the Black Fleet had been betrayed at one time or another. Trust didn’t come easily to them.
It no longer came easily to him either.
“It’s not the history,” Zagrando said. “Something physical bothers me. That wind, maybe.”
Or a smell. He’d been unsettled by smells before. When he’d met the Krasna, he’d had to excuse himself from early discussions while he got some kind of air filter. The Krasna themselves smelled of decaying human flesh, and no one had warned him about that. He hadn’t been able to stand near them without gagging.
Sometimes smells were subtler. The Black Fleet often flooded an enemy’s environmental system with stress pheromones, hoping to anger them or at least put them on heightened alert. By the time the Black Fleet invaded the ship, the crew members were often so tense that they made terrible mistakes.
“It’s the history,” Whiteley said. “I’ve brought folks here before and they react the same way. I’ve yet to meet a human who likes this place. And since humans used to live here, I’m guessing it’s nothing more than knowledge creeping them out.”
Zagrando didn’t look at him as he said that last, although he made a note of it. Whiteley had brought others here. Zagrando hadn’t known that. Whiteley hadn’t shared it.
Zagrando didn’t know what that meant exactly, whether it meant that Whiteley had brokered a lot of deals here or whether it meant that Whiteley used this place to shake down so-called partners. But Zagrando would now be prepared for anything.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Zagrando said. “It’s the history.”
He knew that the N’gelese could actually sense a stain on land where massive violence and pain occurred. The Disty believed that dead bodies contaminated the environment, not just while the bodies touched the ground, but for all time.
He wasn’t sure the alien groups were wrong.
“Let’s just get this done,” he said, slipping his hands in his pockets. Not only was it windy here, but it was also cold. And that rain smell bothered him as well.
“Get it done?” Whiteley asked. “That’s not like you. Usually you take your time, get the lay of the land, meet the regulars, become acquainted with the way things are done.”
Yeah, Zagrando thought but didn’t say, that was when my job was to find out as much as possible about all the arms dealers in the sector. I’m on a different mission these days.
“Yeah,” he said, echoing the thought in his head. “That’s when I have my own ship and can keep my own schedule. You’re the one making me nervous here, Whiteley. An insistence on your ship, not mine. Skeleton crew on board, a limitation on the weapons I can bring. If I didn’t know better,
I’d think you were out to get me.”
Whiteley grinned.
“You know me, Zag,” he said. “If I was out to get you, you’d be got already. Besides, I’d torture you a bit. And I’d tell you what I was about. I’m not out to get you. I still think we have years of business ahead of us.”
A promise to put him at ease? Or the truth? Or a combination of both? Zagrando wasn’t sure. He’d seen Whiteley kill on a whim and he’d seen Whiteley torture his victims just like he said he would.
He’d also seen Whiteley walk away from a supposed friend in trouble with one of the businesses that Whiteley had brought him to.
Zagrando knew better than to completely trust anything Whiteley did, no matter how much he wanted to, or how many assurances Whiteley gave him.
Whiteley grinned again and clapped him on the back. “Because I like you, I’ll do this the way you ask. Fast. Let’s go.”
He slung the pack over his shoulder like it weighed nothing, and headed down the trail away from the crumbling pavement. That was the other thing that Zagrando had seen, but which hadn’t registered until now.
Everything manmade here was falling apart. The wind, the dust, the ruins, all made him feel like he was somewhere remote, when, theoretically, a million aliens lived within walking distance from here. A thriving community had risen from the ashes of the human ruins, or so the descriptions of Abbondiado said.
Zagrando took a deep breath, allowed himself one wish for backup that a lone agent never, ever had, and followed Whiteley into the remains of Abbondiado.
Five
The lunch room at Aristotle Academy wasn’t really a “room” so much as a wing, with all kinds of cordoned-off areas, special alcoves, and a large open area that rivaled the auditorium in size. Normally Talia Flint-Shindo loved the lunch room. It gave her the sense that she wasn’t on the Moon or even on Callisto, where she had grown up. It seemed like a magical place, a place that only existed in someone’s imagination.
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