With the edge of a chopstick, she scooped the last of the sauce from her Zhajiangmian, enjoying the hot sauce combined with garlic. There hadn’t been enough cilantro in the dish for her, but she would remedy that the next time she ordered.
If she remembered.
She so rarely remembered anything about her day-to-day existence anymore. It felt like her mind was always elsewhere, thinking about other people’s problems and other people’s lives.
She wrapped her black skirt around her knees, then waggled her toes. She had kicked off her sandals, but she kept them beneath her feet in case she had to slip them on quickly. Her white blouse felt almost too heavy in the warm sun, but she did not care.
At some point soon, she would have to turn her links back on. She had the emergency links on, of course, but she shut off all other links—including family links—during lunch.
It was the only uninterrupted time of her day.
The slap of sandals against the ancient path made her sigh. That didn’t sound like children at play. That slap sounded like someone running at great speed.
And even though she had no reason to connect the sound to her, she knew whoever it was had been looking for her for some time.
“Um, Ms. Odgerel…I mean, Odgerel, sir, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but…”
She didn’t open her eyes. That whisper of a smile lingered. Just the confusion with her name told her who the man was. The latest member of Earth Alliance Security Division Human Coordination Department had just come over from the West, where two names were common.
Oh, who was she kidding? Two or more names were common for humans within the Earth Alliance now. So much in the Alliance, at least on the human side, ended up following Western traditions.
Which meant that her ancient Mongolian name seemed strange and out of place, even in a universe where strange and out of place had become the norm.
A hand brushed her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, sir, Odgerel, sir,” the voice said.
She couldn’t remember his name, either. Something common, at least in the West. And old-fashioned common, the kind of name that the West had seen throughout human history.
Charles? James? Thomas?
Mitchell. That was it. Mitchell Brown.
Now that she had his name firmly in place, she felt like she could safely open her eyes. She did, slowly, and she was glad of it, because his face was only centimeters from hers.
His hazel eyes were bloodshot, and his caramel-colored skin was pockmarked.
“I’m not deaf, Mitchell,” she said calmly.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry to interrupt you. I just—you know—I needed—”
“Of course, you needed,” she said. “Is it an emergency?”
“No,” he said.
She suppressed a sigh. Young and eager and stupid. Why did they always appoint the stupid ones?
“You’re a little close,” she said.
“Right,” he said and leaned back. He was a tall man, thin in an intense way, the kind that suggested he regularly forgot to eat rather than had a metabolism that worked overtime. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his black pants, then pulled them out and smoothed his ill-advised pink shirt.
He glanced around, then moved the remains of her lunch without asking her if she was done. He sat down next to her.
“They told me that lunch was the best time to get you alone,” he said. “So I…”
She didn’t listen to the rest. Of course, someone had told him that lunch was a good time to find her alone.
It was a kind of hazing ritual the older staff members in the division practiced on the newcomers. Odgerel had asked them to stop, but they never did. And they never took credit for forcing a brand-new idiot into the old routine.
Maybe if she yelled. But she wouldn’t have received this assignment—and held it for two decades—if she were the kind of woman who yelled at the smallest thing.
“You were misinformed,” she said. From the look on Brown’s face, she had interrupted him. She did not apologize. “Lunch is my private time. I have repeatedly asked that no one interrupt me unless there is an emergency.”
“Oh, jeez, sorry.” He bounded up as if the bench had suddenly become scalding hot. “I didn’t know. I’ll just—”
“You’re here,” she said. “And I’ll wager you spent most of this past hour searching for me, didn’t you? Because lunch is nearly concluded.”
His face flushed. “I did. I’m sorry—”
“So stop apologizing, sit down, and tell me what was so important.”
“You sure?” he asked.
She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Instead, she patted the bench. A group of teenage girls approached down the walkway, laughing and pointing at something behind Odgerel. She did not turn around, although Brown’s gaze flickered in that direction. He smiled momentarily, then the smile faded as his gaze met hers.
He nodded, the flush growing, and sat down like a recalcitrant child.
The girls passed, giggling and talking so loudly that Odgerel could barely hear herself think.
She waited until they were several meters away before continuing.
“Well?” she asked, knowing it sounded imperious.
She used to hate that quality in herself. As she got older, she embraced it. She had an affinity for the lost empires. That was one reason she came to Beihai Park every day, one reason why she had insisted the Earth Alliance Security Division Human Coordination Department be housed near the Forbidden City.
She wanted the EASDHC employees—at least the human ones—to know what they were defending. Civilization had existed here for a very, very, very long time. Things humans took for granted, like paper and silk, had all started in this nation, on Earth, before any human ever went to space. Long before. So far back that most humans never even studied these civilizations at all.
She had. She believed in their import.
And she believed in protecting them against alien incursions. She still started when she saw Disty sitting cross-legged on the rails overlooking Beihai Park’s lake or eight-legged Sequev stomping their way across the beautiful arched bridges.
Brown was staring at her. Apparently her invitation to speak had made his brain freeze.
“Mitchell,” she said, “please forgive me, but I have finished my lunch and I was going to stroll back to the division offices. If you would like to talk with me, you have only ten minutes or so before I begin my journey back to work.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “Sorry. You must think me an idiot.”
She did not answer that. Instead, she felt a pang at the loss of privacy, that lost moment when the sun would caress her face.
“You’re familiar with the situation on the Moon, right?” he said, then shook his head. “Of course you are. That’s all anyone talks about, whether or not the attacks will start here. Everyone’s acting like it’s terrorism or y’know, some kind of coordinated attack on the Moon. Y’know, a crime or something.”
It was a crime. One large crime that masked several small crimes. But she didn’t correct him. She had worked personally with the head of the Earth Alliance Security Division Human Investigative Department to dispatch investigators to the Moon after the Anniversary Day bombings. She made certain that there were Earth Alliance investigative staff in every devastated city, and she had lost some staff members in the Peyti Crisis, as the media called it.
She folded her hands in her lap. Anyone who knew her well would see that as a sign of impatience.
“If you do not believe this is a crime, what would you call it?” she asked.
“It’s a crime,” he said. “Clearly. But there’s a lot of chatter about it, coming from the Moon itself, and that chatter scares me.”
Since she scared him, she didn’t know if his fears were something to be alarmed about. But again, she said nothing.
“Some of the local officials—and some of the people who are acting heads of this
and that—are calling the attacks ‘a war on the Moon.’”
She let out a small breath. She hadn’t seen that.
“What do you mean by local?” she asked.
“Sorry,” he said, obviously still unsettled by the trick the other staff members had played on him. “I mean, Moon-based officials. The folks in charge. The remaining folks in charge.”
Inwardly she winced at his correction, not because he made the correction—it was accurate; so many on the Moon were dead—but because he had to make it. For clarity.
“How many references have you found?” she asked.
“Just a few, three weeks ago, mostly in private, link-based conversations,” he said. “But after the Peyti Crisis, it seems to be a meme. Everyone mentions it. Usually in this sort of way, ‘Why would anyone declare war on the Moon?’”
Why indeed? It was a good question, and one she had not looked at from that angle. It was not the normal way she approached anything. She headed the Security Division. Her office coordinated all of the human parts of the security forces, from Frontier Security to the Earth Alliance Police Force.
She thought of protection and crime, not about war. If one group in the Alliance wanted to declare war on another group, then the diplomats had to sort it out. Or the various military divisions.
Not hers.
“This meme, as you call it, alarms you,” she said after a moment.
“Yes.” Brown said.
“Should the Moon officials not think they are at war?” she asked, then realized she had probably phrased the question incorrectly. “After all, they are under repeated attack.”
“But they don’t know who is attacking them, and neither do we,” he said. “And some of the arguments I’ve seen, they lead me to think this isn’t a crime at all, nor is it isolated to the Moon. I think these people, they have a point.”
Odgerel looked at him. She had assumed, because he had fallen for the hazing, that he was stupid. She had also assumed that, because he was the latest appointee in a string of relatively incompetent appointees, that he was similar to them. And finally, she had assumed, because he apologized too much, that he always made mistakes.
She had probably assumed incorrectly. Now that he had relaxed into the subject he had intended to discuss, his eyes glimmered with intelligence. He seemed stronger than she realized, and most people did not seem strong when they met with her. They allowed her power to reflect their weaknesses.
“You felt the need to tell me this privately,” she said, “and outside of our offices. May I ask why?”
He took a deep breath, then glanced over his shoulder. Those movements told her more than any words would. Either he had not been in Beijing long enough to learn to trust anyone or he believed no one worthy of his trust.
“I read data differently than a lot of the staff,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons I got promoted. I make leaps—”
“Of intuition, I know.” She remembered him now. She had seen his results in various documents. He had headed a small division near the Outlying Colonies and had managed to dissolve two criminal syndicates that had operated out of the Outlying Colonies since the days when the Colonies were at the edge of the known universe (and were actually colonies), instead of places squarely inside of Alliance territory.
Odgerel had asked for him a year ago, and then forgotten about the request. She often forgot about requests because so many of the people she requested did not want to return to Earth (if they had ever been to Earth at all), believing the “action” happened at the edges of the Alliance rather than in its very heart.
“The attacks are focused on the Moon,” Brown said, “but they use resources from all over the Alliance.”
Odgerel nodded. She knew that.
“Because of its proximity to Earth,” he said, “the Moon is considered a human place. If you ask anyone from the Outlying Colonies about the Moon, they would tell you that only humans live there. They do not know about the large alien populations or the way the port brings in species from all over the known universe.”
“The perception is correct,” Odgerel said softly. “Humans govern the Moon, just as the Disty govern Mars. There are human enclaves on Mars, but they are not the center of Martian life.”
He frowned a little. “The enclaves are the center for the humans on Mars.”
Odgerel noted that piece of information. He was human-centric as well. That did not disturb her. She encouraged that among her staff. Even though the Earth Alliance Security Division handled security for the entire Alliance—humans and aliens—her wing only focused on humans (or focused as much as it could).
When humans had to interact with other species, she watched the line between whether the interaction belonged in the Human Coordination Department or went back to the Security Headquarters for reassignment in the Joint Department (Humans and other species) or into a strictly alien department (such as the Peyti Coordination Department).
Watching that bright line was part of her work, seeing where the impact on humans was and whether or not her people could deal with it without involving aliens at all.
She actually encouraged the reluctance of her staff members to involve aliens. She liked to keep human issues human, because she knew that deep down, humans cared more about themselves than they cared about any other species.
“Nonetheless,” Odgerel said. “Your point about Mars is a side issue. You were making a much larger point.”
Brown nodded, then watched as a group of earnest children walked by, name badges flaring in a square on their lapels. A school group. So many came here. She liked to watch them as well, and to remember that the future started with them.
Always, the future. And keeping that future safe.
“The human point is an important one,” he said. “The first attacks used human clones—and clones of a type that would scare humans, if they know their history.”
Odgerel nodded. She knew that. It was one of the most discussed points whenever the Anniversary Day bombings became the topic of conversation in the overall staff meetings.
“But the attempted bombings last week,” Brown said, “those used Peyti clones of a mass murderer not known to humans. Had the murderer been known to humans, the Peyti clones could not have hidden in plain sight for decades.”
Odgerel shifted slightly in her seat, turning her body toward him. He was making points she hadn’t considered.
“So, if the attacks were designed to scare humans,” he said, “they would have used other clones of human mass murderers. This is something bigger, and something much more complicated.”
Odgerel leaned her head back, considering. He was right.
And she had missed it, precisely because of her focus on the human angle inside the Alliance.
“And here’s the other thing,” Brown said. “These attacks used slow-grow clones. The Peyti clones lived on the Moon and integrated into society there. These attacks were planned for decades. I’ve spent my life combatting criminal enterprises, and none of them has a decades-long view of their work.”
Brown leaned just a little closer to Odgerel, and the movement didn’t bother her. He had engaged her mind in a way that no one had for some time.
“That’s been my experience, as well,” she said. “Criminal enterprises may have plans that last a few years, but never decades. No leader can expect to maintain control that long.”
She truly had been looking at these attacks incorrectly. It irked her to think how wrong she might have been.
“And if the leader does expect to maintain control that long,” Brown said, “he won’t tell someone his plans, because it would be easy to thwart them. But these plans? The ones that led to the attacks on the Moon? Just to raise and train the clones would take a large staff, and a lot of investment up front.”
“Which is something else criminal enterprises generally do not do,” she said as she thought aloud.
She looked at the nearby pagoda. Ironically, it was surro
unded by a tour group that had two Peyti, a couple of Imme, and a handful of humans wearing clothes too bulky for the weather.
“A war on the Moon,” Odgerel said softly.
“No,” Brown said. “The Moon is the gateway to Earth. And Earth is the heart of the Earth Alliance. If you want to destroy the Alliance—”
“You destroy Earth,” she said quietly.
That was an old adage of the Alliance, which came from the early years. The Earth was under threat so often back then that its defenses became rigid, and the Earth became difficult to travel to. It still was.
If someone wanted to go to Earth, they had to go through the Moon first. And even then, getting to the Moon did not mean that someone could travel onto Earth.
The Moon’s ports were relatively open; the Earth’s were closed.
“You think this is a proxy attack,” Odgerel said. “The Moon substituting for Earth.”
“I’m not sure,” Brown said. “But I think ‘war’ is a much more accurate term than ‘crime’ for those attacks.”
Odgerel almost nodded, but caught herself in time. She needed to think about this.
“I scan the reports from the Military Division,” she said. “I have not seen any credible threats from communities outside of the Alliance. The Alliance has grown so big that no single culture can attack it. No one would consider trying. If cultures do not approve of us, they do not do business with us. They do not travel through our space. But they don’t attack us. What would they gain?”
Brown shrugged. “It’s not my area of expertise. But I do know human history.”
She looked at him. He had caught her attention.
“In the past, in places like this and in the West—all over Earth—empires rose and fell. They fell because of hubris, yes. We were taught that quite young. But sometimes the fall was initiated from outside. When a group saw the cracks in the empire, saw the places where the right amount of pressure applied in the right way would make certain the empire would collapse.”
“I know the history, as well,” she said. “Generalizations do not help.”
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