Masterminds

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Go into the port. But let me warn you—all of you—you’re not going to find a hospitable environment inside of Armstrong. You’re better off opening your branch office on Mars or somewhere.”

  “I appreciate your opinion, officer,” Salehi said. Then he stepped in front of his staff and pushed the double doors open. He waved a hand, so that everyone could walk past him. He held the door open for them, even though he didn’t have to.

  The people—and they were mostly human—inside the arrivals lounge looked startled at the S3 contingent coming at them. A few people moved away from the Peyti.

  The officers watched the group leave the berth. Uzvuyiten stepped through last, and narrowed his strangely colored eyes as he went past. Salehi stopped holding the door and stepped inside as well.

  As soon as they were away from the doors, Uzvuyiten sent a message along the links.

  You should have let me handle that.

  Salehi knew what irritated Uzvuyiten. He wanted the Peyti barred so he had a case. Salehi did not respond. Instead, he followed his staff through the port.

  He didn’t see the security guards that Seng had supposedly hired.

  He hoped they would arrive soon, because the officers had had enough time to let friends who weren’t wearing uniforms know that Peyti lawyers had just arrived on Moon soil.

  They weren’t in the clear yet. And even if they made it out of the port, they would have to be wary wherever they went.

  Salehi didn’t need the implied threat of those officers to convince him that the Moon was dangerous for every member of S3.

  He just had to remember what happened to Torkild Zhu.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Ó BRÁDAIGH HAD climbed the steps out of the substructure. To get into the control room that Petteway might have tampered with (had tampered with), Ó Brádaigh had to go clear across Armstrong to the oldest part of the dome substructure, where the main override controls were.

  The Armstrong Express, the city’s massive public transportation, stopped right near the substructure. And since he hadn’t brought a car to work today, he took the fastest route he knew to get around town.

  He stood in the center of one of the train cars, clinging to the handrails and feeling jittery.

  Very few people rode the train in the middle of the day, particularly on the way to Old Armstrong. When the train went to the university, the cars were often packed, even at non-peak hours, but in other parts of the city, the train mostly went by empty.

  He wanted to go to the front of the train and reprogram the controls, setting the speed even higher. But he knew he couldn’t do that.

  Still, he felt like he was wasting precious time.

  He wished he could contact one of his colleagues, but he wasn’t sure what he would say. That he suspected Petteway of tampering with the controls? That Ó Brádaigh had been in the substructure and had tried to get into the control room, even though he was no longer on the clock? That he suspected something bad was happening, but he didn’t know what?

  He needed to check on his own first, even though this damn ride fueled his impatience.

  The main override controls had existed in Old Armstrong since the founding of the city. Over the centuries, more and more parts of the dome controls and maintenance moved to other parts of the city, but the override controls for the doors and for some other emergency systems remained here.

  The propaganda issued by the City of Armstrong claimed all that remained in this site were controls for the oldest section of the dome. That propaganda was completely wrong. The controls for the oldest section of the dome stood alongside the other controls in the substructure where Ó Brádaigh had entered earlier in the afternoon.

  Where he had seen Vato Petteway.

  That sighting—and the fact that Ó Brádaigh couldn’t access the main controls—bothered him enough that he contacted his mother to let her know he wouldn’t pick up Fiona for another few hours. He couldn’t let the situation remain, not because he was afraid something would happen, but because he was afraid something would happen if he didn’t check.

  The controls in Old Armstrong only changed access codes for the many doors and control rooms in the entire dome substructure. Some engineer, long before Ó Brádaigh’s time, had decided it was safer to put the access code controls far from the doors, so that no one could change those codes on a whim.

  It sounded good in theory, but in practice, it led to moments like this one, where an engineer had to leave one site and go to another just to finish an override.

  After Ó Brádaigh’s wife died, he wanted to streamline all of the dome controls. He had researched why one of his predecessors thought this access code idea was a good one. Turned out the engineer who designed this had been thinking about tamper prevention.

  The engineer thought that anyone who had his access blocked to the control rooms would search around those rooms for ways to change the codes. Frustrated that he couldn’t find the access controls, the saboteur would give up.

  Ó Brádaigh didn’t believe the give-up part of this, but he did think that one aspect of the separated controls made sense: If someone had to act quickly, he needed a partner at a different location. Generally, it was hard for saboteurs to have more than one person who could access the control panels and rooms for the domes. Having two probably thwarted several attacks.

  If no one knew about the way the panels worked—no one outside the dome engineering staff in Armstrong. The other domes had a much less elaborate system, but none of those domes covered cities as large as Armstrong or as well known throughout the Alliance.

  As the train swayed its way through the city, Ó Brádaigh got more and more nervous. He was acting like a saboteur, going into the substructure on his time off, investigating things without permission.

  If Petteway was exactly what he seemed—a good man with a stressful job—then he might think Ó Brádaigh was doing something wrong.

  It felt like Ó Brádaigh was doing something wrong. He wasn’t trusting anyone, and that felt odd for him.

  But he worried. He kept thinking that if others had been observant before the Peyti Crisis, they would have seen how oddly those clone lawyers were behaving. Or maybe someone in the port would have wondered why twenty clones of a human mass murderer were laughing as they made their way into the City of Armstrong six months ago.

  Ó Brádaigh shuddered and looked at his city. His daughter’s city. The place where his wife had died.

  He’d been doing his best to rebuild it. He wanted to stay here. His family was here. His life was here.

  And, if he took Fiona to Earth or some other part of the solar system, he felt like he would be running away from his home. He didn’t want to do that.

  But if he didn’t calm down, he might have to, no matter how it felt to rebuild.

  Or how deeply he was falling in love.

  He didn’t want to tell Berhane how obsessive he was getting about the dome. She might have understood; she might have suggested therapy. She might have decided he was no longer worth her time.

  He gripped the railing tighter as the train rounded a sharp corner and headed into Old Armstrong. Everything seemed a little duller here, a little grayer, the dome a weird yellow as its exterior aged poorly.

  Even though the dome here looked worse than the rest of the dome, it was stronger than other sections. The original materials the colonists used to build the dome were the strongest used on the Moon. They were also impossible to replicate. The colonists had used materials brought from Earth, materials now restricted because of scarcity and also because of toxicity in some parts of the manufacture.

  Still, Ó Brádaigh wished that all of the dome could be as strong as the dome here.

  The train stopped at a platform that looked older than the dome, even though it wasn’t. The stop was maybe a hundred years old, but like so many things in Old Armstrong, it hadn’t been maintained.

  The dome engineers didn’t want
it to look fancy. They wanted everyone to ignore this site.

  Ó Brádaigh waited until a few passengers moved out of his way, then stepped off the train. A woman stepped off a few meters down, looked at him as if he startled her, and then scurried to the nearest side street. She probably lived near here and was surprised to see someone else disembark at her stop.

  Which meant that if something went wrong, she would remember him.

  He took a deep breath. This was his last chance to change his mind.

  The train’s doors closed. Then it slowly left the stop. He waited until the cars passed, then let himself into a small building near the end of the platform.

  He hesitated before opening the door to the stairs.

  If something did go wrong, all of his behavior would be suspect. All of it. He froze for a half second, then decided he could do only one thing.

  He had to register as at-work again. Who would tamper with anything if they admitted they were onsite?

  He used his standard link access, and clicked his at-work status to on. Because he had worked ten hours already, the system asked him why he had returned to the job.

  Saw something out of the ordinary, he sent. Need to check it out. Have been denied access to standard control rooms, so am seeing what the problem is.

  Honesty: the best policy, as he repeatedly told Fiona. He hoped it would help him.

  He placed his palm on the door handle, and it opened. He had to go through two more layers of security to reach the stairs leading down to the substructure.

  He slowly made his way inside, the jittery feeling remaining.

  Something was wrong. He could feel it.

  He just didn’t know what to do about it.

  TWENTY-THREE

  IKE JARVIS TURNED out to be a major surprise—and that surprise was just in the public records.

  Flint ran a hand over his face, eyes tired from scanning information that flowed to him from a variety of sources. He looked over the screen he had stationed at eye level and saw his other searches proceeding, some flagging information he would have to look at.

  At the moment, however, he maintained his focus on Jarvis. Who, on the surface, didn’t seem like much of anyone.

  According to the easily accessible information, Ike Jarvis was a mid-level staff operations operative. He handled a lot of covert operatives, mostly working in Earth’s Solar System. Although the public information didn’t say so, Jarvis handled operatives who embedded with corporations whose headquarters weren’t based in the Alliance or who sheltered much of their money outside of the Alliance.

  Before that, Jarvis had worked as a targeting officer, and had some success outside of the Alliance. He had been decorated for a still-classified op that targeted pirates working at the edge of the Alliance.

  The public information didn’t directly state the target, but Flint had done enough of this research to know the codes and the hints that allowed him to glean a greater understanding than the simple facts should have allowed.

  The interesting part of Jarvis’s public history mentioned his loan to the Earth Alliance Security Division’s Investigative Department. He had done a lot of work in Earth’s solar system, and some of that work had centered on the Moon.

  Once Flint saw that information, he was relieved he hadn’t had DeRicci assign Goudkins to researching Jarvis. For all Flint knew, Goudkins had worked with Jarvis.

  The Jarvis loan had occurred in the middle of his targeting service with the Military Division Intelligence Service. Given that division’s love of secrecy, Flint wondered if Jarvis was doing two jobs—one on loan for the Security Division and the other for the Intelligence Service.

  If Zagrando didn’t regain consciousness soon, Flint would have to do some research to see if that was when Jarvis’s handling of Zagrando began. Flint had a hunch that it was.

  Flint opened a small window on his screen and mapped Jarvis’s timeline. According to that, Jarvis was still working on the Moon, or connected to the Moon, when Flint was finishing his detective’s exam. Flint was still at Space Traffic then. He might have seen Jarvis, but not known who he was.

  The images of Jarvis that Flint found—and there weren’t many of them—seemed unfamiliar.

  He almost contacted DeRicci to see if she remembered an Ike Jarvis, and then changed his mind. Flint wanted this research as complete as he could get it before bothering her.

  As he started to dig, he hacked into Jarvis’s government file. The hack was a low-level job, and Flint went through a backdoor that he had used countless times before. He knew this wouldn’t set off alarms—or at least, it hadn’t in the past.

  So he was startled when something red flashed along his vision. He almost shut the entire search down, when he realized what the red flash was saying.

  New update on the status of Ike Jarvis.

  Flint knew better than to follow the lead directly. When he had trained new computer investigators years ago, he had showed them how following leads like that often enabled the established systems to detect the hack.

  Instead, he logged out of the search, and logged back in to a different area in the government database, staying away from the intelligence database entirely. He searched for recent updates on military employees and found Jarvis almost immediately.

  There was just a bit of information on Jarvis, with the promise of more information to come.

  Jarvis was identified by his service number first, name second, and no listing of his position. He had been identified as part of a crew of a ship that had exploded in Earth’s Solar System hours before. Cause of the explosion was unknown.

  A single sentence caught Flint’s attention.

  Authorization for the ship’s mission not yet verified.

  Flint stared at that for a long moment. He’d seen such things before. Often, unverified information disappeared from news updates when the mission or the job became clear to the system. Then the system could properly filter the information to the right database.

  The notice of Jarvis’s death was automated, and the system had flagged an anomaly. The anomaly was that ship.

  So Flint followed that trail, and paused when he understood what the ship was.

  It was a vessel that looked like it was part of the Black Fleet.

  The ship had belonged to Jarvis’s old mission, the one where he targeted Black Fleet ships at the edges of the Earth Alliance.

  In other words, this mission hadn’t been part of his official job.

  Who were you working for? Flint had asked Zagrando.

  Zagrando had said, Ike Jarvis, bastard. Killed him. Looks like he killed me too.

  Zagrando had destroyed that ship. Zagrando hadn’t mentioned anything about his injuries except to say that what happened was “complicated.” Clearly Jarvis was part of that complication.

  And it was, as Flint had hoped, a promising lead instead of some confusion on the part of Zagrando.

  Another promising lead.

  Flint allowed himself a brief moment of excitement before he leaned forward and started the difficult task of digging deeply into the life and history of a man whose entire career was based on secrecy.

  Flint had no idea if he could do this without giving himself away, but he was going to try.

  And he was going to try fast.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  IT’S HAPPENED AGAIN!

  Odgerel woke out of a sound sleep, head pounding, klaxons echoing, voices screaming.

  It took her a moment to realize all of the noise came through her emergency links.

  She was alone in her bedroom, sprawled sideways on the mattress, her arm pushed up against the elmwood frame. She sat up, holding the covers tight against her chest.

  “Lights,” she told the house.

  Slowly, the lights came up to a level she once called drowsy. They were amber, set to comfort her when she got near the time to sleep.

  She allowed no screens in her bedroom, nothing except the antique bed, so old that
the last person she had brought in here had blanched when he discovered she was actually using it. The front of the frame was designed to look like the entrance to the gardens she so loved in Beijing’s Forbidden City.

  Matching end tables rose from the floor as the lights came up just a bit more. Those were modern, just like the images painted on the wall. All of them were simply designed to look ancient.

  The noise in her links continued. It took her another moment to realize that the noise was directed at her, and not a general emergency response.

  She blinked. She was getting too old for this sort of thing; she did not wake quickly any longer, no matter what the emergency.

  She sent a general query into the noise. What is happening again?

  Bombings.

  The word was simple, but it echoed from a thousand sources. She tried to isolate them, and couldn’t. She then commanded her links to show her the first message to get through her sleep blocks.

  It had come from Mitchell Brown, the newest employee at the Earth Alliance Security Division Human Coordination Department. Even though he had been at headquarters for a very short time, she already had a fondness for him.

  He could see things that others could not.

  She filtered the noise down, kept the visuals off, and set the link on audio only.

  Brown, update me.

  Sorry to wake you, sir, he sent, but Hétique City was bombed a few hours ago. An entire swath of the city has been destroyed.

  Hétique City. Hétique City. She had to think about it for a moment. The name was familiar, but her brain didn’t fire as quickly as it used to.

  She liked to blame that on the depth of her sleep, but she suspected it was one of the first signs of aging.

  And then she remembered. Hétique. There was some kind of government facility there.

  What part of the city? She sent.

  The clone factory, and some other Alliance buildings, he sent. That’s all we have.