Masterminds

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Earth Alliance Treasury Division would give the Security Division its operating budget, but through the funds designated for that Division, not from Currency.

  The Currency Department handled exchange rates and the money supply inside and outside of the Alliance. Handling exchange rates inside the Alliance was the most important part of the Currency Department’s job. Many of the alien governments maintained a local currency for use on their home worlds. That money had to be converted into Alliance credits for any purchases, travel, or businesses done outside of the home worlds.

  And Flint didn’t even pretend to understand how the money supply was determined. He’d never had to know.

  He felt a frisson of excitement. He had found an important link: Brooks and Jarvis. Flint had to check on procedures with Goudkins, but he knew in his gut that this was the thing he had been looking for.

  He had known there was a conspiracy inside the Alliance, and it had covered its tracks. He had found hints of it before, but never something so blatant.

  As Deshin had said to Flint, and as Flint had kept in mind ever since, operations like Anniversary Day cost a fortune to pull off. Add the Peyti Clones, Legal Fiction, and the entire second operation, and the expenses were off the chart.

  No small group could fundraise its way into that kind of money. And Deshin had repeated that most criminal enterprises with Anniversary Day kind of money didn’t have the leadership at the top that could manage a plan conducted over decades. There was no guarantee that the leadership would remain in place that long.

  Factor the Peyti Crisis into all of this, and the expense got too much, even for the large (if loosely associated) organizations like the Black Fleet. No criminal organization would spend its money this way.

  But a rogue political organization hidden inside a real organization with nearly unlimited funds—that might be possible.

  Flint would have to check with someone who knew finance better than he did, but he suspected that someone with a criminal bent could figure out how to skim a fraction of a percentage off the float inside any currency exchange. If Flint was right, doing that in an organized and somewhat hidden way would net billions. If that money wasn’t being moved into a separate bank account, then it wouldn’t get flagged.

  The money would be moving from one Alliance account to another, and the movement would seem innocuous.

  Flint had just seen how the computers ignored it in his search for Jarvis’s funds.

  Flint smiled. He had finally figured out how an operation of this size received funding and remained relatively hidden. He wondered if the participants in the organization were hidden in the same way. That would make them impossible to see—until someone figured out a way to catch a glimpse of them.

  Then their appearance would become not just clear—but obvious.

  Flint paused for just a moment to allow that feeling of movement, of finally going forward, sweep over him.

  Then he delved deeper into the research, hoping he found the masterminds behind the attack before they found his searches.

  He knew it was only a matter of time before they did.

  THIRTY-NINE

  LAWRENCE OSTAKA HAD taken over the top floor conference room to run his investigations. Initially, he and Goudkins ran their investigations from here, but since the Peyti Crisis, Goudkins had helped DeRicci.

  DeRicci hadn’t been in the conference room for longer than a moment since then. The room smelled of coffee and spicy cologne, and the faint odor of someone else’s office, instead of the neutral scent of a little-used conference area.

  Ostaka sat at the head of the large table, all kinds of equipment scattered around him. DeRicci recognized some of it, and didn’t recognize the rest of it.

  Ostaka looked up as DeRicci stepped all the way inside the room and closed the door behind her. He was a gray man who wore a rumpled gray suit and didn’t seem to care much about his own appearance. He had taken the suit coat off and draped it on the back of his chair. A little extra weight made him look doughy rather than comfortable.

  His gaze was hard, as if she had interrupted him, as if she worked for him.

  DeRicci made herself smile at him. He was here on sufferance. Her sufferance.

  “Have you seen the attacks on Hétique City?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Do you have any information on them?” she asked.

  “Not anything more than what’s been in the media. I’m searching now.”

  He seemed a lot more focused than she would have expected. During the Peyti Crisis, he had viewed the problem as something DeRicci had to handle, not something that concerned him.

  It had been one of the things that had greatly angered Goudkins.

  “Would it help to use some of our systems?” DeRicci asked.

  His eyebrows went up. One of the terms that allowed the Earth Alliance investigators to work in this conference room was that they couldn’t have anything more than standard access to the Security Office’s systems. DeRicci had been adamant about that, although she had broken that rule when Goudkins had joined them during the Peyti Crisis.

  “It might,” Ostaka said, and she could tell: he was trying not to sound too eager.

  Had he been waiting to be included, like Goudkins was? Or did he have another agenda?

  DeRicci had a system in her office that dated from the Peyti Crisis that was minimally networked. She could let him use that system.

  “I think someone’s blocking Earth Alliance investigators,” Ostaka said. “I know that sounds weird, but I keep getting bounced back every time I try to find out what happened on Hétique.”

  Was he trying to explain his eagerness? Or was he just being enthusiastic? She’d never seen Ostaka be enthusiastic before.

  “Maybe if my searches look like they’re coming from another entity, I might get through,” he said.

  “Or you might be doubly-blocked,” DeRicci said without humor. “After all, the Moon’s been the primary target until now.”

  “Yes, it has,” he said. “But this seems different, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” she said. “I’m wondering if it’s something else entirely.”

  He nodded, then tilted his head slightly. “It’s possible. You’d think that the masterminds, as you call them, would continue their focus on the Moon.”

  “But that’s what we expect,” DeRicci said.

  “Yeah.” His mood seemed subdued. “It is, isn’t it.”

  He was silent for a moment, as if he were contemplating all of it. Then he added, “Maybe, when things didn’t go as they expected, these so-called masterminds decided to try an attack away from the Moon.”

  “It’s a possibility.” DeRicci had thought of that too. “It would certainly confirm that the attacks were about the Alliance, and not about the Moon.”

  He looked startled. “You think that’s what’s going on?”

  She had forgotten that he hadn’t been in any of the conversations about motivations for the masterminds.

  “I’m guessing at everything,” she said. “I just want to find these people and stop them before more goes wrong.”

  He nodded. “Wilma thinks you’re on the right track. Do you?”

  DeRicci shrugged. “For all I know, there’s a third attack coming and it’s been planned for decades. I can hope that I’ll figure it out before it happens, but I’m not going to bet on it.”

  His skin seemed even grayer than it had earlier. “You said third attack. You don’t think this attack on Hétique City is the third attack?”

  Apparently, she didn’t. She hadn’t realized it until she had spoken up. But she wanted his help confirming her hunch.

  “Oh,” she said, thinking quickly. “I meant the third attack on the Moon.”

  He nodded. “If the attacks are six months apart, then you have time.”

  “We only have two data points, maybe three,” DeRicci said. “That’s not enough to draw a conclusion. If we use th
e two, then you’re right: there will be another attack in six months. If we add in Hétique City, then we could have another attack tomorrow.”

  “Or five years from now, after everyone has become complacent,” he said.

  “No,” she said the word before she even had time to think. “When you have someone on the edge, you don’t wait five years to finish them off. You do it fast.”

  His eyes narrowed a little. His mood seemed to shift again, but to what, she couldn’t quite tell.

  “Well,” he said, standing up. “You want me to work on your systems?”

  He made it almost sound like a repair. She was definitely going to make sure he only had access to the non-networked system.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I can use your help. Let’s see what you can find out.”

  FORTY

  Ó BRÁDAIGH MADE it back to the main substation. Damn public transportation. Damn him for not having a car.

  I don’t need a car, he often told his nagging mother. The city is so well constructed, I can get wherever I want to go faster on the Armstrong Express.

  Except on days like today, when he needed to move at lightspeed. Plus, half his links shut down as he moved from one section of the dome to the other, something he had never noticed before.

  But he had noticed it this time, because he had been constantly pinging the Security Office. As he got on the Express, he had gotten some kind of canned response, something about being in a queue.

  And then nothing, as if the pinging had been shut off. He asked one of the others on the train if their links had shut down, and the man responded that they were going past some high-security buildings that had link-blocking equipment installed.

  Ó Brádaigh had sent his emergency message to the Security Office again as he got off the Express and ran to the substructure.

  This time, he didn’t take the stairs down; he took the elevator. And he was halfway down in that cramped box when he was informed that he was in a queue again.

  As the elevator doors opened, he pinged the Security Chief, DeRicci, and got a not-authorized message. He would have to contact someone at the Armstrong Police Department in a moment, or maybe contact Berhane. She knew everyone. She might get him through.

  The substructure was empty this time. The cool air covered him with the faint scent of regolith mixed with the dry smell of active equipment.

  He sprinted to the control room, and slammed his hand against the identification panel. This time, his identification ran, the system worked, he had a password, and he was clearly authorized.

  The door clicked open.

  He wiped his palms against his pants, then stepped inside. Lights came on, and the system greeted him by name.

  He ignored that—for a moment. Then realized he could use the vocal feature of the system. Now that he was reinstated, he could ask the system anything he wanted.

  “Vato Petteway was in here earlier,” Ó Brádaigh said. “What did he do when he was inside this room?”

  Ó Brádaigh knew that the simplest question brought the quickest answers. Besides, open-ended questions like that often gave him the most information.

  “Vato Petteway altered the settings on the dome sections,” the system told Ó Brádaigh. “Would you like to see what he has done?”

  “Yes.” Sweat dripped off Ó Brádaigh’s face. His heart was pounding from all the exertion, but he felt calmer than he had in the past hour.

  Lights flared around the small room, followed by numbers in various colors. The numbers told Ó Brádaigh what the changes were—and they were extreme.

  Brilliant engineer that he was, Petteway had not shut down the dome sections. That would have needed two other confirmations from at least one other location.

  Instead, Petteway changed the settings for the sections. The normal settings throughout the dome were designed to ensure that the sections fell whenever there was a breach or a hint of a breach. The sections would also fall when commanded to do so by various officials. The commands were normally set so that all it took was one official to order an area to section.

  There were other ways that the sections could lower. Anyone inside this control room who had the proper identification and codes could lower or raise the sections at will. And that was just one of the extra ways the sections could fall.

  But Petteway had changed all of those settings. He had redone the settings on what would cause the sections to lower. He didn’t shut down the sections or make it impossible for them to function.

  He had set the standards for dropping the sections so loose that a bomb could go off in the center of Armstrong , and the sections wouldn’t come down at all.

  Ó Brádaigh felt physically ill. Why would anyone do that? Everyone inside the dome would die.

  Ó Brádaigh couldn’t think about what he had found—not yet. First, he had to fix this. The sections had to be restored to their normal settings.

  It would take him several minutes to complete the task. He didn’t trust the system to reset itself. He hadn’t asked the system if Petteway had tampered with things earlier in the week. Ó Brádaigh had only asked about today.

  The nausea got worse.

  Ó Brádaigh would deal with that secondary problem after he finished this one. He needed to reset the sections—and he needed to do it now.

  FORTY-ONE

  TO THE HUMAN ear, all Peyti names sounded similar. Goudkins knew that the Peyti thought there was as vast a difference between the names Uzvaan and Xyven as there was between Goudkins and Zorn. But Goudkins struggled with the difference. Most humans did, even those fluent in Peytin.

  Goudkins had resorted to whispering names out loud. She could do that because she was alone in her ship. She probably would have been embarrassed to do it anywhere else.

  That damn subtlety in the names slowed down her investigation. Plus, she was probably mispronouncing everything. She finally decided to stop scanning the information while listening to it. She actually made her computer show her the translated names—and the spellings, at least, helped her distinguish between names that had seemed exactly the same to her before.

  After Goudkins decided on that little trick, she realized that Mavis Zorn had mentored even more Peyti in the Impossibles than Goudkins had initially realized. Dozens and dozens of Peyti lawyers.

  Goudkins was looking through their backgrounds now, but she believed that all of the Peyti lawyers that Zorn had mentored had been clones of the Peyti mass murderer Uzvekmt.

  But, not all of them had received jobs on the Moon.

  Goudkins couldn’t track them all. She had sent information on those clones to her superior, Ava Huỳnh. Huỳnh had told her that all of those clones had killed themselves at the same moment as the Peyti Crisis started unfolding.

  Now, Goudkins needed another piece of information, one she hadn’t thought to ask before.

  She wanted to know if all of the off-Moon clones had been lawyers who had gone through the Impossibles. Because if they had, they had probably been in touch with Mavis Zorn.

  Asking about the lawyers without mentioning Zorn wouldn’t set off any red flags at all.

  Besides, Goudkins needed to get up and move around. The depth of the perfidy that she was finding was making her ill.

  She left her investigative area and went to the ship’s cockpit. She sent a message through her government links to Huỳnh, asking if she could get a piece of information.

  Goudkins didn’t expect a response immediately. She figured she had at least an hour before Huỳnh finished whatever she was doing and got back to her.

  Instead, Huỳnh appeared on a nearby table, her hologram wearing her signature purple outfit.

  “Wilma,” Huỳnh said with a smile, “Lawrence Ostaka is still saying bad things about you.”

  Goudkins felt her stomach clench, but she rolled her eyes anyway. “He’s the only person I know who can sit on his ass in an emergency and claim that it doesn’t fall into his jurisdiction.”

&n
bsp; “And here I thought you two would complement each other,” Huỳnh said. “I was wrong. Sorry about that.”

  Goudkins was sorry about it too. She didn’t want to admit how much she had grown to hate Ostaka to Huỳnh.

  “Just finish this assignment,” Huỳnh said, “and I’ll assign you a new partner when you return.”

  Goudkins had no idea if Huỳnh was watching her at a large size or a small size, so she made herself smile. She hoped the smile didn’t look too fake.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Huỳnh nodded, then looked over her shoulder as if someone had entered the room or something had happened.

  “Is this a bad time?” Goudkins asked.

  “No, it’s fine,” Huỳnh said.

  Goudkins hoped that was true. “I just wanted to check on something. You had probably told Ostaka, but, well, you know how things are going.”

  Huỳnh said, “I do,” but she sounded distracted.

  “I was wondering, you know the Peyti clones off-Moon? That information I sent you two weeks ago—”

  “The ones related to the clones that nearly blew up the Moon again?” Now Huỳnh sounded annoyed. “Of course I do.”

  “Do you have information on how many of those clones were lawyers?”

  “I don’t have information at the moment, without checking,” Huỳnh said, then looked over her shoulder again. “How quickly do you need it?”

  “Sooner rather than later,” Goudkins said.

  “Huh,” Huỳnh said, sounding a bit surprised. “I actually thought you might’ve wanted to talk about Hétique City.”

  “Hétique City?” Goudkins asked.

  “You didn’t know?” Huỳnh asked. “There’s been another attack, Wilma. On Hétique this time. We’re investigating.”

  “Oh.” Goudkins had to remind herself to breathe. “How many—”

  “I can’t talk any longer. I’m about to go into a meeting. If I send that information, you’ll have everything from me, right?”