Masterminds

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Clone factory. She sighed. Now she remembered. Hétique City had housed much of the Earth Alliance’s human cloning capability for decades. Much of the cloning had moved off-site, especially some of the sensitive clone projects, but routine cloning for inside-Alliance operations still happened at the old facility.

  How bad is the damage? she sent.

  We don’t know, Brown sent back. We’re just starting to get footage now.

  Was it attacked by clones? she asked. She was already trying to figure out if it had been attacked by the same mysterious operatives who had gone after the Moon.

  We don’t know that, either, Brown sent. The attacks seemed to have come from orbit, and what we can see of the ships—well, they look remarkably dissimilar.

  She nodded. She wasn’t sure the different types of ships meant anything. Loss of life?

  We don’t know that, either. The attackers hit during their night, and there are some reports that some of the clones were stolen. Most of the workers were in their homes, asleep, when the attacks happened. And I don’t know if you’ve been to Hétique City, but the residential parts were several kilometers from the clone factory.

  So, she sent, trying to cut through his excitement, and the dearth of information, minimal loss of life?

  I’m not going to make that claim, sir, he sent.

  She could monitor everything from here, but that would disturb the tranquility of her home. She had set up her home as a haven, a sanctuary, since her job was so very stressful.

  I’ll be at the office within the hour, she sent him. I’ll expect a full update when I arrive.

  Yes, sir, he sent and signed off.

  The noise in her links began again, and she muted them. She probably shouldn’t have done that, given the fact that there was yet another emergency within the Alliance, but she needed the silence so that she could think.

  Besides, the screaming panic from her own people was disturbing the serenity of her bedroom. She couldn’t afford to have this room in particular associated with the stress and terror of another attack inside the Alliance.

  She pulled back the covers and slipped out of bed, her bare feet touching the warm wooden floor. She would get herself a bite of breakfast, since that would probably be the only food she would get for hours, and then she would go to the office.

  Her head was still pounding—all that noise and worry, the klaxons, the alarms—had had an impact.

  She needed to center herself before she could guide her people. They expected her to be an ocean of calm, a font of wisdom, the decisive leader who understood more than they ever could.

  Sometimes, she wished all of that were true.

  Especially in emergencies like this.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  JHENA ANDRE STEPPED out of the meeting and into the corridor. She was shaking with fury.

  She sent an encrypted message along her links. I told you never to contact me. Ever.

  The moment she sent that message, she regretted it.

  She hadn’t gotten this far by being careless.

  It showed just how angry she was that Claudio Stott had contacted her without a good reason. Fortunately, they worked in the same division—sort of.

  She could figure out a way to lie about that message if she had to.

  She just hoped she wouldn’t have to.

  Chances were, no one would ever know about the message. She had the best encrypted links in the entire Earth Alliance Security Division. She was always changing and updating them, but she knew that sometimes the best links were not enough. She had completed dozens of successful investigations of Security Division employees simply by monitoring their links. Security Division employees always thought they knew more than anyone else about personal security.

  Those employees were always wrong.

  And now she was in the middle of the same situation, all because Stott had panicked.

  I’m getting out, Jhena, he sent. They found us.

  Now, he was simply repeating what he had said earlier, and she found that just as irritating as the fact he had contacted her.

  She walked farther down the corridor before contacting him again.

  The corridor was wide, and done in pale blues. The carpet was soft beneath her feet, and the walls designed to absorb sound.

  She was in an unfamiliar part of the division. The meeting had been called without her permission, which was happening more and more these days.

  Someone would get it in their head to investigate an important personage, and she would have to meet that someone on their turf.

  She hated that. She was in charge of investigating employees of the Security Division, and therefore she should choose where the investigation happened.

  At some point, she would have to reclaim her own place within the division, and that meant reclaiming her power, even on small things such as where meetings took place.

  If she still cared enough when that happened.

  If she cared at all.

  She straightened her shoulders, trying to calm herself. She had to figure out a way to deal with Stott without drawing attention to herself.

  The problem was that she didn’t know enough about this area physically, and stupid her, she hadn’t checked it out before deciding to attend the meeting. She had no idea if this section had been upgraded to include the latest technology, the kind that listened in on every single link transmission.

  She had to act as if it did.

  And she had to keep her expression neutral. She knew she was under surveillance. If she acted at all suspicious, some lower-level security personnel would walk past her, their investigative chips set so that they could detect elevated hormones or the presence of flop sweat.

  She probably had elevated stress hormones, and she knew she was covered with flop sweat. She had never bothered to get one of those enhancements that prevented sweat, thinking them counterproductive—the human body sweated for a reason.

  But sometimes that reason was complete fury tinged with a bit of panic.

  Damn Stott for contacting her here and marking it as an emergency.

  She opened the links again to tell him that he needed to calm down, and realized he hadn’t stopped sending.

  …if they stole records, we’re screwed, Jhena. Imagine what they’ll find…

  Idiot. He was breaking every single directive she had ever given the group.

  She had thought him an ally once. She had also thought him smarter than he turned out to be.

  By then, she had already compromised the group by involving him.

  He was in the center of everything, and now he was about to destroy it all.

  I have no idea why you’ve contacted me, she sent. Clearly, your division is having issues. Resolve it through the chain of command. You have no right to contact me directly.

  And then she blocked him.

  She wanted to grab the wall and close her eyes for a moment, but she didn’t dare. She had to look like she was dealing with the meltdown of an old friend, not a colleague who was going to destroy everything they had ever worked for.

  And she still had no idea what had set him off.

  She walked back to the conference room. The meeting had to do with some high alert notice every employee in Alliance government had received because of the Moon bombings.

  When the meeting began, the sense of controlled panic in that room had amused her, even though she couldn’t show it. Every employee in the Security Division seemed to believe that more attacks were imminent, and that the entire Alliance was at risk.

  They were right.

  They just didn’t understand why she had chosen the Moon as the prime target.

  And she wasn’t about to explain it to them.

  Even now, when the attacks hadn’t quite gone as expected.

  Initially, she had hoped for more destruction on the Moon. Then, when the lawyers and the architects and the money people would have felt it was safe enough to show up and repair the Moon, the Peyti clones would initi
ate another attack. The third attack would come shortly thereafter, destroying what remained of the domes and anyone who responded, and making the Moon a desolate place.

  The Alliance would scramble, because there would no longer be an easy way onto Earth.

  And everyone would panic, searching for the perpetrators. Or, as they were calling her and her team now, the masterminds.

  She loved that word “masterminds.” It made her seem much more powerful than she was.

  She took a deep breath and reminded herself that even though the attacks hadn’t quite gone as planned, the Moon was still on edge. And the third attack would come soon.

  She had seen nothing to show that the Alliance—or, indeed, the thorns in her side on the Moon itself—had any idea what or when the next attack would be.

  They hadn’t yet figured out that she was exploiting the Alliance’s own disaster playbook: Clean up the mess, then rebuild with tighter security.

  Remembering what she had done—and what she was about to do—calmed her.

  She pushed open the door and stepped back into the conference room.

  That sense of controlled panic felt like a buzz along her skin. She liked the way everyone looked at her, as if they were frightened of everything.

  Twenty humans, all theoretically in charge of some major part of the Earth Alliance Security Division. They sat around the table like scared children, staring at her with big eyes.

  For a moment, she thought the sound of the door opening startled them. Then she realized she had missed something.

  Maybe it was the something Stott had mentioned.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Jiannan Faizy, the head of the Human Section of the Earth Alliance Security Divisions Prisons Department, placed his hands firmly on the table. It took her a second to realize he had done that because his hands were shaking.

  She didn’t know everyone in the room well, but she knew Faizy. She had recommended him for the position when she was promoted out of it.

  He was trustworthy—or as trustworthy as someone who believed in the Alliance could be.

  “We’ve been hit again,” Faizy said.

  She frowned. The next attack wasn’t scheduled for hours. Who had screwed up?

  “What happened?” she asked, because she knew better than to offer information in the form of a question. That was how suspects always tripped up. She wasn’t a suspect—not yet, maybe not ever—but she had to be cautious.

  “They attacked Hétique City,” said someone in the back of the room.

  Andre didn’t look at the speaker.

  “What?” She wasn’t sure she had heard correctly.

  No one was scheduled to attack Hétique City. The attacks were supposed to be on the Moon.

  Were there copycats?

  “Massive bombing run,” said Abija Rowe, the second in command in the Political Department of the Security Division. “From orbit, it looks like.”

  Hétique City. Andre kept her hand on the door, more for support than anything else. Not the Moon. Hétique City was on Hétique, where the original clone factory was.

  The factory she had used years ago. She hadn’t made the Armstrong clones there, but she had used the original clones of PierLuigi Frémont, created in that factory, to help her raise the Armstrong clones.

  Well, she hadn’t exactly, but her people had.

  She blinked. She wasn’t concentrating on what the group was saying.

  “Orbit,” she repeated. “So no clones attacked this time?”

  “Clones were attacked,” said Bosco Welker of the Legal System in the Security Division. She didn’t favor him with a glance either. His nitpicky nature had annoyed her before this meeting; she didn’t want to deal with him now.

  “We have no idea who attacked,” said someone farther down the table. “They used all kinds of different ships.”

  Andre was jittery now. Stott was right; someone was on their trail.

  But no one in this room knew that. The brightest human minds in the Earth Alliance Security Division—at least at the System level.

  She wondered what the actual Division thought of this, then decided she didn’t want to know.

  She willed herself to be calm. Everyone here thought the attack on Hétique City was another attack on the Earth Alliance.

  She could use that.

  Her group could use that.

  In the short term, anyway.

  Long-term, Stott was right. They were going to be discovered, and they needed to plan for that.

  If the Alliance held together after the next attack on the Moon.

  She felt a surge of gratitude to those mystery bombers in Hétique City. Judging by the panic in this room, those bombers might have made the dissolution of the Alliance a lot easier. Panicked people made bad decisions.

  She saw it every single day.

  She sat down in the chair she had vacated when Stott screamed across her links.

  She was much calmer now, but she didn’t want to show that. She wanted to add to the panic, not quell it.

  “Unknown ships,” she said, rubbing her hands together the way that nervous people often did. “Has anyone contacted the Military Division?”

  “Do you think we should?” Faizy asked, his voice shaking.

  “The sooner we figure out what’s going on, the faster we can stop it,” she said, thinking that the faster they acted, the more likely they were to make a mistake.

  The bigger the mistakes made inside the Alliance, the greater her opportunities.

  “I think we need to contact the Human Coordination Department in Beijing,” Rowe said.

  The last thing they needed was a cool head like Odgerel’s involved in all of this.

  “I’m sure they know,” Andre said.

  “I’m sure the military does as well,” Rowe said, a slight frown creasing her forehead.

  “Let’s see if we can track those ships,” Andre said, ignoring Rowe. “Technically, it’s not my job to plan this. I’m not even sure whose job it is.”

  Earth Alliance Security at this level was too scattered to address this kind of attack. That was one of the reasons she had planned actual attacks to shatter the Alliance.

  For years, she had studied where the holes were.

  Now, she was exploiting them.

  And, apparently, she had help.

  “We have to know the type of ship first before we figure out jurisdiction,” Welker said, bless his anal little heart. “If those ships came from outside the Alliance, then the pursuit does belong to the military. But if they came from inside, then the security police need to take this one.”

  “Why didn’t Hétique City go after them?” Andre asked.

  “I think their port was destroyed,” said a woman whose name Andre always forgot.

  “I guess we better find out what actually happened,” Andre said, and leaned forward, her mind racing, preparing to slow the people in this room down while she scared them half to death.

  She hadn’t expected this day to be fun. She had thought that kind of fun would happen on the morrow.

  She settled in, ready to stir up some chaos, while she considered what else she needed to do.

  TWENTY-SIX

  FLINT WORKED AS fast as he could. He had to get up every now and then to answer the pings his other searches sent him. Most of those pings were questions about refining the searches.

  The other searches were going through reams of information, finding hundreds of shipments to the hundreds of Peyti clones on the Moon. The searches had found the first unique spot where the shipments came from, but that had been a false address.

  Flint had set those searches to find the actual address, or figure out a way to track where the masks had come from. He hated that he didn’t have several assistants at the moment; he really was doing a half-assed job. He could never figure out how to set those searches to figure out which subtle piece of information was important and which wasn’t.

  The othe
r searches, for the corporation with the Peyti name that could be interpreted as Legal Fiction, were finding a lot of false positives.

  “False positive” wasn’t the most exact phrase he could come up with, but that was how he felt when he looked at them. Apparently, a lot of Peyti corporations had the words “legal fiction” in their names—another sign of how upright almost all Peyti were.

  Corporations were legal fictions, no matter what anyone said. The fact that the Peyti admitted it in so many corporate documents would have amused Flint under different circumstances.

  At the moment, it merely annoyed him—and it distracted him from the investigation into Ike Jarvis.

  Still, Flint had managed to find out a lot in a short period of time, things that looked suspicious once Zagrando had pointed a light on them. Flint had a hunch, though, that when Jarvis was alive, he had figured out a way to explain most of those things away—or he had the time to cover his tracks.

  His death had prevented the last of the track-covering.

  Someone in the Alliance had flagged Jarvis’s operational accounts within the last hour. Millions were missing, most of them moved from other operations. If Jarvis had been stealing money, it wasn’t showing up in his personal accounts.

  But Zagrando had arrived in an expensive bullet ship that was part of a larger space yacht design. Had he taken the money? Was that why Jarvis was after him?

  Zagrando had said their relationship was complicated. Who had stolen from whom? Had they both stolen from the Earth Alliance?

  Flint’s shoulders tightened. He had sent his daughter to watch over Zagrando because, despite it all, he trusted the man. Had his trust been misplaced?

  Then Flint took a deep breath. Even if Zagrando were malicious, he would have no reason to harm Talia. Zagrando had come to talk with Flint, and Talia would let Flint know when Zagrando was awake.

  Besides, Zagrando was hurt too badly to harm anyone.

  No one in the port’s medical unit would let him near weaponry, even if he were getting better.

  Flint had made the right decision.

  It was amazing to him, though, how quickly he could question his own actions, based on so very little.