Blowback

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  That second part was a warning, and Flint knew it. It was his cue to leave if he didn’t want to hear the information.

  “Of course,” Deshin said, “you’re no longer with the APD, and if you believe you can somehow take the information from this meeting to the authorities and get me arrested, you’ll get a brief victory. The arrest might happen, but if we go to court, I will deny the meeting ever took place. I had a confidential meeting with my attorney. You came for a meeting with your attorney. We’d met before. We said hello. That’s all.”

  Flint could see how that would play out. He had known that Deshin was a smart man; this was simply more evidence of it.

  “All right,” Flint said. “Then answer me this. If discovering what is going on is so important to you personally and financially, and you possess information that solves the crimes, why haven’t you gone after the perpetrators?”

  Deshin let out a small laugh, then shook his head. “Assuming that I have a criminal organization. Assuming that I would take extralegal methods to settle a score.”

  “Assuming that you’re a patriot and you would want to ensure that these possible future attacks that you’re speaking of would never happen,” Flint said.

  Deshin smiled. Those cold eyes had warmed. They twinkled. “You are a fascinating man, Mr. Flint.”

  “Not really,” Flint said. “I’m a serious man. And I want an answer to that question before we go further.”

  “Assuming facts not in evidence,” Deshin said, using a legal term, “which are that I am capable of taking out someone or something big enough to cause these attacks, why haven’t I? The answer is truly simple, Mr. Flint, and you know what it is.”

  Flint suspected he knew. “I want to hear it from you.”

  “Fair enough. Like you, I have only bits of the puzzle. Only I have different bits than you do, I’m sure, and a greater knowledge of the darker world we’re operating in.”

  Flint doubted that part, but he didn’t contradict Deshin.

  “What I have found leads me to the underbelly of the Earth Alliance,” Deshin said, “as well as points outside of the Alliance. It leads me to places with more money than I have, more clout than I have, more weaponry than I have, and more ruthlessness than I ever imagined.”

  That answer took Flint’s breath away. He had expected part of it, but not all of it.

  “You’re afraid of these people,” Flint said.

  “You’re assuming that we’re dealing with people,” Deshin said.

  Flint blinked. He had made that assumption from the first.

  “Don’t worry,” Deshin said. “It’s part of your ethnocentrism.”

  “Not bigotry?” Flint asked, with a bit of a smile.

  “Call it what you want,” Deshin said. “We’re working together, so I was being polite.”

  “Now,” Flint said.

  “Now that you are being polite as well,” Deshin said, and his own smile took the childish edge off the words.

  “You know that we’re not dealing with humans?” Flint asked, returning the conversation to its original direction.

  “I know that some of the players aren’t human,” Deshin said. “Whether or not they’re the instigators, I have no idea.”

  He sighed and walked to the window, his fingers brushing against that faux wood desk. He looked out over the city.

  Flint didn’t move. He had no idea if Deshin’s restlessness was normal or if it was because this topic made Deshin so uncomfortable.

  “We live in a fragile environment,” Deshin said. “Not just because the dome is the only thing that protects us from the harshness of the Moon’s surface, but because we are trying to keep hundreds of species allied in an organization that’s deeply flawed and deeply necessary.”

  Flint had heard a similar version of this speech from DeRicci. He’d heard it from her as recently as a week ago. She lamented the fact that the Moon had allowed a haphazard group of local governments to function instead of an overall government, that the haphazardness infected the entire Earth Alliance and threatened it from within.

  “It deeply disturbs me,” Deshin said, “that I don’t know what the motive is behind these attacks. Something this orchestrated, something that took decades to accomplish, has a set agenda behind it, and it doesn’t matter how hard I look, I can’t find that agenda.”

  “So you came to me,” Flint said.

  Deshin nodded, his back still to Flint. “I came to you. I hoped that in exchange for information I give you, you’ll give me information in return.”

  “What kind of information?” Flint asked.

  “The component parts of the various bombs used all over the Moon on that day. I know you’re keeping them quiet.”

  Flint sighed. “That’s the one thing we aren’t keeping quiet. They’re all different. They were all built with local materials, and often brought in by the stooges that the assassins found in each city. Somehow, these people knew what material was available, and they were able to move it to the right place, and activate it at the right time.”

  “Still,” Deshin said. “Get me a list.”

  “In exchange for?” Flint asked, not promising anything.

  “Two rather large things that, from what I can tell, your people don’t know,” Deshin said. “First, most of the zoodeh used to kill the various mayors and heads of state did not come from that quarantined ship, like you believe.”

  Flint didn’t move, although his heart rate increased. While the media reported that zoodeh had killed the mayors, no one reported that the zoodeh had come from quarantined ships inside Armstrong’s Port. DeRicci didn’t want anyone else to learn that hazardous materials were stored inside ships in the Port. Even now, even though they’d learned what a danger those ships were, no one knew what to do with them or their hazardous cargo.

  After the attacks, DeRicci had increased the security around the quarantined ship area of the Port, but hadn’t done anything else. She figured the ships had been there for years, so they weren’t the pressing problem like so many other issues raised by Anniversary Day.

  She was probably right.

  But Flint was unnerved that Deshin knew this, and knew that other quarantined ships existed.

  Flint also didn’t know how to respond to Deshin. The easiest way to confirm information you were uncertain about was to speak about it with certainty. That way, the person you were speaking to would tell you what you needed to know, while assuming you already knew it.

  Flint had used that technique hundreds of times himself.

  “You don’t have to confirm or deny the existence of the ships,” Deshin said. It was uncanny the way that this man seemed to know what Flint was thinking. “I know you want to keep the existence of the quarantine area in the Port secret. Unfortunately for you, a number of my current and former clients have ships locked away there, with a mountain of money in inventory and no hope of ever getting those ships out.”

  Flint tried to think of a response to that, but couldn’t. Apparently, he didn’t need to because Deshin turned around, his mouth a thin line.

  “You’re going to say they broke the law trying to smuggle that stuff into the Port,” Deshin said. “I agree. That’s why I’ve never offered support or legal representation in trying to get those ships out of quarantine. But that doesn’t stop the clients from complaining. It’s quite a list.”

  Flint moved to one of the chairs and sat down. He was tired of standing, tired of working hard to control the reaction of each muscle in his body. So far as he could tell, Deshin wasn’t playing any games—or, at least, any obvious games.

  Deshin took the chair opposite him. Neither man sat in Gonzalez’s chair, which Flint found privately amusing.

  “All that stuff about the quarantined ships aside,” Deshin said, “has anyone in any of the police forces, the security office, or the crime scene laboratories done an analysis of the amount of zoodeh it took to pull off all of these assassinations?”

  Flint
felt his cheeks warm. Looking at the weapon, where it came from, and how it could be obtained was standard in any murder investigation. The thing was, it felt like they had done it here. They identified the zoodeh, saw that it was a banned substance, and figured it had come from the quarantined ships.

  That led to Ursula Palmette, who then tried to blow up Armstrong’s Port, using yet another quarantined ship.

  No one did any deeper analysis. No one felt the need.

  “You’ve done the analysis,” Flint said.

  “Yes, I have,” Deshin said. “Zoodeh is very unstable, and it would have been hard to transport, especially for twenty young men, even if they were specially trained. So not only did they need the zoodeh, they needed a special case to keep the tiny needle in until the moment they could use that needle.”

  The heat in Flint’s cheek rose. He wasn’t really blushing; he was too angry at himself for that. They had missed it. They had all missed it, and it was obvious.

  No wonder Deshin was feeling dissatisfied with this investigation. It had started haphazard and had grown more so rather than less so as the months went on.

  “Plus,” Deshin said, “even if they handled the needle right, there was no guarantee that they wouldn’t scratch themselves first. So they had to have some kind of protection there too. Whether it was some kind of breakthrough on the weapon itself—some kind of protection developed that we don’t know about—or whether it was some immunity built into the clones themselves, I have no idea. But nevertheless, they had some protection or they wouldn’t have been able to carry the zoodeh all over the Moon, and then use it so casually.”

  “The immunity wasn’t built into the clones,” Flint said. He figured he could give Deshin that much.

  Deshin looked at him, surprised. “How do you know?”

  “Because the assassin in Glenn Station didn’t follow the plan. He was supposed to take out as many as he could with him, like the other assassins tried to do, and instead, someone evacuated the building he was in. He died alone in a room he had run to, after using the zoodeh on himself.”

  Deshin took a deep breath. “I hadn’t realized that. All right. That’s actually an important piece of information.”

  “Why?” Flint asked.

  “The clones mean something,” Deshin said. “They weren’t fast-grow. They developed over twenty or more years. Which means that they were grown special for this task.”

  Flint had thought that as well, but he didn’t want to tell Deshin that—at least, not yet. “We have no proof of that.”

  “You might not,” Deshin said. “But I do.”

  Now Flint knew why he was in this meeting. “How could you know that?”

  “Because,” Deshin said, “designer criminal clones are a problem that the Earth Alliance has never acknowledged.”

  Flint felt cold. “I have never seen anything about designer criminal clones and in all the jobs I did for the local authorities, I would have seen something.”

  Besides, he would have looked because of Talia. He knew a lot more about clones because of Talia. He had made it a point to learn everything about clones. Or so he thought.

  Deshin let out a small chuckle. “It’s amazing what the police don’t see,” he said, leaning back in the chair. “Designer clones, used for criminal purposes, are a big business. Generally, they get used for petty crimes or family crimes, regional crimes, things that stay beneath the Earth Alliance’s notice.”

  Flint wanted to ask Deshin if he had used such clones, but he knew better. It would derail Deshin, and at the moment, Flint didn’t want to do that.

  “Let me get this straight,” Flint said. “People buy specific clones for a specific crime.”

  “Yes,” Deshin said.

  “And not just fast-grow clones, but clones that can think for themselves. Clones raised for a specific purpose. Clones who are, in reality, human beings with free will.” Flint tried not to let too much passion in his voice here.

  Deshin’s eyes narrowed. “You can breed humans just like you can breed animals. You can select for certain traits. And then you train them, like you would anyone. You train them from birth to do a certain kind of job, to learn a certain kind of morality.”

  “That’s a big gamble,” Flint said. “You’re hoping that your designer clone won’t rebel.”

  “That’s why designer slow-grow clones are raised in bulk,” Deshin said. “You cull from the group the ones in which the indoctrination doesn’t take.”

  Flint shuddered. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “No,” Deshin said.

  Flint shook his head. “And people actually pay for this? It would seem a lot of work and financial outlay for something that’s not guaranteed.”

  “That’s what I think,” Deshin said. “Not to mention the moral side of this. I believe that slow-grow clones are human. It sounds like you do as well.”

  “All clones are human,” Flint said. “Some have simply less of an opportunity for life than others.”

  “Again, a philosophical argument. Although I don’t traffic in clones, slow-growth or otherwise. I think it takes a particularly cold human to do so,” Deshin said.

  “But other people do,” Flint said.

  “People, yes,” Deshin said. “Alien groups as well. As I said, it’s big business.”

  “If you don’t do this,” Flint said, “how do you know about it?”

  “I get offers,” Deshin said, suddenly coy. “People want to sell me everything. They think I will buy anything, have need of all kinds of items, and am willing to pay for a variety of rather disgusting things. I came across designer criminal clones a few years back when it became clear that some wealthy friends were being targeted by the Black Fleet. The Black Fleet was installing nannies inside wealthy households, and the nannies were legit. It made no sense, frankly, until I found out that the nannies were taking DNA from every member of the household.”

  Flint blinked, frowned, and then his chill grew. “If they were going to put in a cloned family member,” he said, “then they’d have to remove the original family member.”

  Deshin nodded. “That’s what I thought initially. The cloned member would inherit or whatever. But it’s more complicated than that. Especially since most families have wills that specifically state that no clone can inherit, to prevent just this type of scenario.”

  “So what are they doing?” Flint asked.

  “Installing a low-level spy into the household. With the right links to send information back to the Fleet. The spy doesn’t even know what it’s doing. It becomes—it is—for all intents and purposes, a member of the family.”

  “And what happens to the original?” Flint asked.

  Deshin shook his head, his mouth a thin line. “I have no idea. I really don’t want to know.”

  And that was the difference between them. Flint would want to know. Flint would want to do whatever he could to stop the practice.

  But for now, he had to keep the focus on Deshin and the information he was getting about Anniversary Day.

  “So these clones who attacked the Moon, you believe they were designed for the attack,” Flint said.

  “Yes,” Deshin said. “And if they were created by the company that originally contacted me—or if they were created along the same lines that the company used—then these clones were the successful ones. There have to be unsuccessful clones from the same line.”

  “You don’t think they’d kill the unsuccessful clones?” Flint hated Deshin’s language. It was so impersonal. But it served the purpose of this conversation.

  In fact, Flint didn’t want to think about all the implications of everything Deshin told him. Not yet, anyway.

  “I’m sure they do kill the unsuccessful clones,” Deshin said. “But someone would have to notice, wouldn’t they?”

  This time, Flint shook his head. “It’s a big universe. You can do a lot without being noticed.”

  “They wanted to be noticed,” Deshi
n said. “They arrived in a group. They could have arrived separately.”

  “That crossed my mind as well,” Flint said. “They got off transport in the Port and separated here in Armstrong, in front of surveillance, rather than arriving at different times on different ships. I figured they were sending a message.”

  “What do you think the message was?” Deshin asked. The question seemed sincere. He didn’t seem to know.

  “I think they wanted us to be distracted by PierLuigi Frémont,” Flint said. “I think it was a diversion.”

  “PierLuigi Frémont was a ruthless cold-blooded killer,” Deshin said. “If you wanted ruthless cold-blooded assassins, he’s a great place to start.”

  “Sorry to say this,” Flint said, “but there are and have been millions of ruthless, cold-blooded killers in the known universe. Frémont was a famous one. If you wanted to do this and not get noticed, you would have chosen someone other than Frémont.”

  “So Frémont was a message,” Deshin said slowly.

  Flint nodded.

  “The question is,” Deshin said, “who was the message for?”

  “You don’t think it was just for propaganda value? Distraction?” Flint asked.

  “These bombings were well thought out,” Deshin said. “I think nothing had been left to chance. I think that if something could have done double- or triple-duty, then it would have.”

  “You think the message was for you?” Flint asked.

  “I’m not that arrogant,” Deshin said. “But you already said that designer criminal clones have not been a police focus. It’s pretty well known that the Earth Alliance either avoids thinking about such clones or hasn’t noticed them at all. So that message is—hey! The clones exist! And look, we can clone evil bastards like PierLuigi Frémont.”

  “But you knew the clones existed,” Flint said, beginning to see where Deshin was going.

  “I know, and others know. A lot of others,” Deshin said. “As I mentioned, it’s a big business.”