Masterminds

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  FORTY-EIGHT

  THAT WAS TWICE. Rudra Popova felt a surge of anger at herself. Twice she had melted down in a crisis. The first time had been on Anniversary Day, when she had seen images of Arek Soseki’s body splayed on the sidewalk in front of O’Malley’s Diner. She had loved Soseki, hadn’t told him because they wanted to keep their relationship secret until after the election, and then he was gone—such a vibrant man, gone.

  And now, a betrayal in their midst—and it was her fault. She had checked and double-checked and made sure the staff had checked Lawrence Ostaka’s credentials, but had anyone here ever thought to check for clone markers? Of course not.

  She hurried down the hall, listening to her feet whisper against the carpet, thinking the overweight, rumpled asshole could hear her every move. He probably had the conference room booby-trapped or something, his stuff protected.

  He had sat in that space for weeks and watched them scurry around, trying to protect the entire city during the Peyti Crisis, and he hadn’t lifted a finger to help. Why hadn’t any of them seen that as a red flag? Why had they accepted that as normal?

  Because Goudkins had, and Goudkins was helping them. She knew everything they were doing. Everything.

  Popova took a deep breath, knew she had to stop panicking, panicking would ruin everything. And she had to be stealthy.

  For all she knew, the chief was just debriefing Ostaka or they were having a private conversation. Nothing bad was going on in there. It couldn’t be.

  Just because everything had changed for Popova didn’t mean it had changed for Ostaka—if she didn’t reveal herself now. She had to be careful, and normal at the same time. She had to be innocent if he was already back in the conference room.

  She stopped at her desk, got the little device the Security Office used to measure stranger DNA. Everyone on staff had gotten one of those back when the office opened, and Popova had never had to use it before. The systems downstairs and throughout the building—hell, the systems at the port, the systems on locked doors, the systems all over the city—always checked DNA, and confirmed someone was who they said they were.

  She had laughed when she got this little device, back when Arek was alive, when Celia Alfreda thought this office was going to be her little police force, long before Anniversary Day.

  I have no idea why I’m going to need this thing, Popova had said, holding it. It’s a waste of money.

  At least it was simple to use. She had tested it on herself that day, and sure enough, she had been who she said she was.

  Now, she needed to use it on something Ostaka had touched—and only Ostaka.

  She glanced both ways, saw no one else in the corridor, realized that the very movement alone—that glance—probably looked suspicious. Her face heated.

  She was awful at this.

  She snuck down the corridor, reached the conference room, and let out a small sigh of relief. He wasn’t in it.

  Then her stomach clenched. He wasn’t in the conference room, which meant he was still with the chief.

  Popova hoped the chief was all right.

  Popova pushed open the door, hating the windows that opened the entire conference room to the corridor. She had initially put Ostaka and Goudkins in this room for the windows, so that Popova could monitor them if she had to, back when she’d been suspicious of both of them. Then she ended up trusting Goudkins (had that been a mistake?) and forgetting about Ostaka.

  How stupid was she, anyway?

  Popova was shaking. She was no hero, and she knew it. She could organize heroes; she couldn’t be one.

  But she had to do this. She didn’t trust Berhane Magalhães to do it, and she didn’t like the man Ms. Magalhães had come with. Not that Popova didn’t trust him. She actually did. He was just an idiot, and she couldn’t give this job over to an idiot.

  Well, not that she was much better.

  She glanced into the corridor, saw she was still alone, and collected herself. She walked to one of the side counters, pretending to be looking for something, all the while scanning the room using her peripheral vision.

  Networked machines—not networked to the Security Office, but, in theory, to the Alliance (Popova shuddered. The Alliance. They had known for a while that the Alliance was involved. Dammit). The tablet she had given Goudkins for work here in the Security Office, with most of the important systems blocked off. (Why didn’t Goudkins have it? Had Ostaka taken it from her?)

  A mug, filled with some liquid. A plate covered with scaly leftovers.

  And a jacket crumpled against the floor. A suit jacket, gray and undistinguished, like everything else Ostaka wore.

  The jacket had fallen off the back of his chair.

  Still, Popova picked the jacket up and shook it out, making sure it was big enough for Ostaka. It was.

  If he saw her with it, she would simply say that it had fallen and she was replacing it. She ran the device along the lining of the jacket, and down its edges, watching the device record the sloughed off skin cells and tiny hairs it collected.

  She had more than enough. She probably had too much.

  But she made sure the device went all the way to the hem of the jacket before quitting.

  Then she looked out the windows again, saw no one—where were the guards? Where was the rest of the staff?—and dropped the coat behind the chair.

  She had to kick the coat’s edges so that it bunched up the way it had before. She slipped the device into the pocket of her pants, then went to the sideboard again, as if she were still looking for something.

  If Ostaka was monitoring her from his links, he would be suspicious now. She should have put that coat on the back of his chair.

  Or not. She had no idea. If he had seen that device, he would be suspicious anyway.

  She swallowed hard, clenched her fists to hold back the panic, and then made herself walk to the door.

  She half expected him to jump out at her from the corridor.

  He didn’t.

  She couldn’t see him at all.

  She thought again about warning the chief, but knew if she had it wrong, the chief would be mad. Besides, Ms. Magalhães had been right; he’d been here for months. What could another few minutes matter?

  Popova snuck back to the office where she’d left the other two, device pressing against her thigh.

  She had to figure out what she was going to do if Ostaka turned out to be a clone.

  She always worked better with a plan.

  It was time to devise one.

  FORTY-NINE

  FOR THE FIRST time since he’d gotten the assignment to investigate Zhu’s murder, Nyquist was happy he had Andrea Gumiela’s ear. Because he contacted her immediately about the situation at the Security Office, and she didn’t question him, she didn’t make some snide comment about his relationship with DeRicci, she didn’t even say she’d get back to him.

  She sent, We’re on it, and he knew, he knew, that they were.

  Nyquist got the message almost immediately that all officers in the vicinity of the Security Office should head to that building. The announcement didn’t make the knot in his stomach go away, but it made him feel better. It made him feel like something was going to get resolved.

  Still, he couldn’t stay in the station and wait to hear what the officers did. He had to get there.

  If something happened to DeRicci…

  He didn’t want to complete that thought, and yet he couldn’t get it out of his head. He had to see her, and he had to see her now.

  He tried to contact her, and he kept getting kicked back from the system, something telling him that he wasn’t authorized to speak to her. It made him mad at first, even though he knew the Security Office’s system had been compromised.

  Of all the people who weren’t authorized to speak to DeRicci, it wouldn’t have been him. It would never have been him.

  He tried contacting her on their private links and got nothing at all. That scared him even more than
the unauthorized message. Why would her links go silent? Even her emergency links didn’t work—as if they didn’t exist at all.

  That—that moment when he realized that the links were completely gone and he had to contemplate a world without DeRicci, because he couldn’t stop himself, that—that got him running before he even realized he was moving. He was down the stairs and across the parking structure, heading for one of the squads because the damn things were faster than his car, if he could even find his car in this distracted state.

  The squads didn’t have a governor like regular cars, nothing regulated how fast a squad car could go except the limitations of the car.

  So he grabbed a new one, slid his hand across its exterior as an authorization, and felt guilty for a moment, because he was probably taking the squad from some deserving officers who could actually do something important, but he didn’t care.

  He had to get to that Security Office. He had to know what was happening with DeRicci, and he couldn’t wait for anyone to tell him. He had to see it with his own eyes.

  He slapped the dash, the identification in his palm and his DNA and the warmth of his skin bringing the thing to life.

  Out loud, he gave the squad the Security Office’s address, and said, “I need to get there at top speed.”

  Then he slipped on the restraints, slamming backwards in the seat as the squad car left the parking structure faster than Nyquist believed possible.

  He just hoped it would be fast enough.

  FIFTY

  Ó BRÁDAIGH HAD just decided to leave the substructure when he had a horrible thought: what if someone besides Petteway tampered with some other part of the dome? And how would Ó Brádaigh know?

  He stood still for just a moment, looking at that control room. He wondered if he could get the system to answer a question about tampering without using the word “tamper.”

  If he had changed the system, he would also have taken the word “tamper” out of its vocabulary.

  He took a deep breath, and as he did, the dispatch reappeared in front of him.

  “We are unable to reach anyone at the Security Office,” she said to him. She seemed to have more of a grip on herself than she had had earlier. “We’re investigating that now.”

  Ó Brádaigh swore. “Look, we have a major emergency here, and I’m only one guy. Do you—”

  “Dome inspectors are already suiting up,” she said. “We’ll have them cover everything.”

  “I need to talk to someone with authority,” Ó Brádaigh said. “No offense, but I don’t think this is isolated to Armstrong’s dome. If something is happening here, it’s happening all over the Moon. That’s why I wanted to reach the Security Office—”

  “Hello?” A male voice echoed in the substructure.

  Ó Brádaigh’s heart nearly pounded out of his chest. He hoped to hell that voice didn’t belong to Petteway.

  “Hello?” another voice shouted. That voice was female.

  “You watch everything I do,” Ó Brádaigh said to the dispatch. “If someone comes after me, then you need to get someone on this. There’re others in the substructure and they shouldn’t be here—”

  “I’ll monitor the area,” the dispatch said.

  Two uniformed officers ducked under one of the low ceiling beams. They were holding their weapons at their sides. Ó Brádaigh wanted to tell them that the laser shots from their pistols would ricochet horribly down here, but he didn’t—not yet.

  “What are you doing down here?” Ó Brádaigh asked, trying to sound authoritative. Not even the police had easy access to this site. He wasn’t sure how they’d gotten here.

  “Are you Donal Ó Brádaigh?” the female officer asked. She was taller than Ó Brádaigh and more muscular. She looked like she could throw him across the substructure without using much effort at all.

  “Yes,” he said, deciding there was no reason to lie to her.

  He expected her to say that he had to come with them, that they thought he was breaking some kind of law.

  “We’re going to check your ID,” she said. “Can you extend your right hand?”

  “I wouldn’t be down here if I didn’t have the proper identification,” he said.

  “We beg to differ,” the male police officer said. He wasn’t quite as tall as his partner, but he looked as strong.

  “Just let us see your identification, sir,” the female officer said. “Please.”

  The “please” decided Ó Brádaigh. It was filled with tension, the kind of tension that came from a person who was barely holding it together, who knew what the stakes were, and how bad things could get.

  Ó Brádaigh had been overthinking everything, and he knew he could overthink this. After all, these cops could be filled with tension because they were going to do something to him, to facilitate Petteway’s plan—whatever the hell it was—or they could be filled with tension because they knew something bad was about to happen.

  He extended his right hand. The female cop took it in her left and then holstered her laser pistol. She held her right hand over his palm.

  He could feel her shaking ever so slightly.

  “He is who he says he is,” she said out loud.

  The male officer let out a small sigh.

  “All right then.” The dispatch spoke from behind Ó Brádaigh, and she wasn’t talking to Ó Brádaigh. She was talking to the officers. She had sent them, and she hadn’t said anything about it.

  She hadn’t trusted him.

  Somehow, that made him feel better.

  “We have a serious problem here,” the dispatch said to all of them. “You two do whatever it is Mr. Ó Brádaigh needs. We’re going to have to take some kind of action. I’ll make certain we facilitate it from up here.”

  The female officer looked at Ó Brádaigh. “Someone has been tampering with the systems?”

  “Worse than someone,” he said. “My boss, Vato Petteway. He changed all the sectioning controls. If something happens to breach the dome, no sections will fall. He set the controls for only six hours, so I think whatever’s going to happen will happen soon.”

  The male officer swore. “What can we do?”

  “We’re going to need as many people as we can get,” Ó Brádaigh said. “I don’t even know what we’re looking for. I fixed the sectioning commands, but that doesn’t solve the problem. Look, something’s going to breach the dome, and I don’t know what that something is.”

  “We’ll send someone to pick up Petteway,” the dispatch said. “He’ll tell us what’s going on.”

  “All he has to do is wait a few hours,” Ó Brádaigh said. “And then whatever he’s planning will happen anyway.”

  The female officer glanced at her partner. “Should we notify the population?” she asked softly.

  “And what? Have them panic?” Ó Brádaigh asked. “Where would they go?”

  “They could suit up,” the male officer said.

  “Or they could panic and stampede the trains,” Ó Brádaigh said.

  “This is way above my pay grade,” the female officer said. “Someone needs to figure out what to do.”

  “That’s why I’ve been trying to get through to the Security Office,” Ó Brádaigh said.

  “We can’t reach them,” the dispatch said from behind him.

  “Maybe, maybe in person?” Ó Brádaigh said to the dispatch. “Maybe the links are just down.”

  He hoped.

  “We’re sending teams there now, but we can’t count on the Security Office,” the dispatch said.

  “The acting mayor or someone with authority,” Ó Brádaigh said. And the right kind of brain. He knew how things worked, not how to get people to do something.

  Then he looked at the two officers before him.

  “I don’t need you down here,” he said. “You need to do whatever it is you do. I’m okay. I just need to figure out how to resolve all of this.”

  As if he could. He let out a shaky breath. The officers
hadn’t moved. But the dispatch’s image was frozen. Clearly, she had frozen it while she handled something else.

  “Hey,” he said, sending the message to the dispatch through his links at the same time. “I need to talk to the chief dome inspector. They’re going to need to do an emergency surface sweep, and they’ll need my help.”

  “What’s an emergency surface sweep?” the female officer asked.

  Ó Brádaigh didn’t answer her. It wasn’t her business. But that made him realize that there hadn’t been a surface sweep of the entire dome in as long as he could remember. And when there were surface sweeps, they happened during Dome Night, when no one outside of the city’s engineering and inspection staff would notice.

  The dispatch moved slightly, and then frowned. She was paying attention now.

  “That could cause the panic you’re worrying about,” she said.

  “Again, not something we can solve,” Ó Brádaigh said. “The assistant mayor or the chief of the United Domes has to warn people, and make it sound like they’re checking because of an asteroid hit or something. Something minor, okay? Just something that needs to be checked.”

  He didn’t know why he was the guy on all of this. Someone else should have taken point. But the limited time had put him in charge.

  “Can you get me the chief inspector?” Ó Brádaigh asked.

  “In just a moment,” the dispatch said.

  “Look,” the male officer said to Ó Brádaigh. “We’ve just been assigned to protect you and help facilitate your travel through the city if you need to get somewhere else. They can’t find this Petteway guy, and they’re worried he might come for you when he realizes what you’ve done.”

  “Great,” Ó Brádaigh muttered. And then his heart rose in his throat. “I need to do something.”

  He held up a finger, holding them back, and sent a message along his family links.

  Mom? Mom, are you there?

  To his great relief, she answered, You coming home any time soon?

  No, he sent. Look, if my boss Vato Petteway shows up, don’t let him in. And you and Fiona are going to need to suit up.