Masterminds

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  What? his mother sounded surprised. Have you ever tried to put a four-year-old in an environmental suit?

  Of course he had. He did once a month, making sure that Fiona had a suit that fit.

  Make it a game, Mom, he sent. For the next six hours, okay?

  Six hours? Donal, that’s ridiculous—

  Mom, just do it. Your lives could depend on it.

  Even though he couldn’t see her, he could feel the panic coming through the links.

  Should I be telling my friends? she sent.

  The choice between panicking people and not panicking them. There’ll be an announcement soon, he sent, hoping he wasn’t lying. Once you hear that announcement, let your friends know. Until then, just take care of yourself and Fiona for me, please. I can’t work here if I think something will happen to you two.

  He hoped she would listen. His mom was usually good at listening.

  This doesn’t sound good, Donal, she sent.

  I hope it’s nothing more than an inconvenience, Mom, but I can’t be worrying about you two, okay? Do it for me. Please.

  I will, she sent, and he let out such a large sigh of relief that the two police officers standing near him turned toward him simultaneously.

  He turned his back on them. Thanks, Mom, he sent and signed off.

  He had to make one more contact. He had to let Berhane know what was going on. Or at least, that she had to get out of the dome—any dome.

  He pinged her links and got nothing. She had given him a private link, but it didn’t seem to work.

  His shoulders tightened. Had she blocked him somehow? He wouldn’t know why.

  So he tried her emergency links and again, got nothing. Nothing at all. As if she didn’t exist.

  He felt dizzy and he had to remind himself to breathe.

  She was probably in one of the damaged domes somewhere and her links had disconnected. Or in a building that blocked link contact.

  Still, the emergency links should work.

  He couldn’t focus on it. He had to solve this. Only a few hours left, and his daughter was in the dome. He had to think of Fiona.

  He turned, looked at the officers who were watching him closely, and shook his head. “I’m okay.”

  Then he wished he hadn’t said that. He wasn’t okay. He was worried.

  He set up his own system to ping Berhane every few minutes.

  He would reach her soon.

  He had to.

  FIFTY-ONE

  POPOVA HAD NEVER felt such stress while watching someone else gather information. She had brought her device back into the small office near her desk, and had given the device to Berhane Magalhães and her friend, Dabir Kaspian.

  Magalhães took the material before Kaspian, which made Popova feel better. She trusted Magalhães, but Kaspian seemed to have an agenda.

  Popova had decided, when she was in the conference room, that she would trust her gut instincts from now on. She had hated Lawrence Ostaka on sight, and she had never trusted him.

  If she had acted on that instinct, she wouldn’t be standing here now, watching Magalhães’s face scrunch up with concentration.

  “I found artificially grafted telomeres,” she said to Kaspian. “What do you find?”

  “The same,” he said.

  “What does that mean?” Popova asked, twisting her hands together.

  Magalhães looked up at her. “He’s a clone.”

  Popova made a small involuntary sound, and then her cheeks heated. She had to be the most calm person here, and she was the least calm.

  “I have to let the chief know,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t tell her in person,” Kaspian said.

  Popova glared at him. He was right though. He clearly saw how upset she was, and figured she wasn’t calm enough to make the right decision.

  She opened her private link to the chief.

  Chief, I need to talk to you now, without Lawrence Ostaka in your office. It’s critical.

  She highlighted, alarmed, and underscored the word “critical.”

  And then her message bounced back at her.

  “What the hell?” Popova muttered.

  She sent the message again, and again, it bounced. Then she examined it.

  The message didn’t technically bounce at all. It never got out of her personal system.

  Magalhães and Kaspian were both watching her. Popova frowned at them, that panic rising all over again.

  “Send me a message across your links,” she said to them. “Right now.”

  Magalhães tilted her head slightly, then shook it. Kaspian actually slammed the heel of his hand against his ear, as if he could knock some sense into his links. (Maybe he could knock some sense into his own mind. Popova willed that thought away; it wasn’t constructive.)

  “My links don’t seem to work,” Magalhães said, sounding confused. “I’ve never encountered this before. There’s usually a message.”

  She was right: When links shut off, there usually was a message that something external was blocking them. Popova empathized with Kaspian, even though she didn’t want to.

  This link blockage felt like a personal malfunction, only she knew it wasn’t. Because they had the same problem she did.

  She had to tell the chief right now. And she had to do it carefully.

  Then Popova frowned.

  “Have you two seen anyone else from the Security Office since you entered this room?” she asked.

  “No,” Magalhães said. “Should we have?”

  Probably. Someone should have checked on them. Had Ostaka blocked the links and sent the staff away?

  Popova felt chilled.

  “I have one other question,” she said, wishing she didn’t sound as panicked as she felt. “Were there any female faces in that DNA you found?”

  “Female…?” Magalhães asked. “Why?”

  “Please,” Popova said. “Just answer me.”

  “No,” Magalhães said.

  “But that doesn’t mean anything,” Kaspian said. “There’s no way to know if we’ve found all of the clones.”

  Popova decided she hated him. She hated his precision and his fussiness, the way he had to contradict everything. She hated him because she couldn’t afford to hate Ostaka at the moment.

  “I’m ninety-nine percent positive we’ve found all the clone originals,” Magalhães said.

  Popova would have to accept that, and ignore Kaspian.

  So, she spoke only to Magalhães. “Three rooms down from right here, there are two women. One of them is Marshal Judita Gomez. Tell her I need her in the chief’s office immediately. Tell her that the situation is probably dire, and that our links aren’t working and that the man in there is a clone. Can you do that?”

  “Yes,” Magalhães said.

  “What do I do?” Kaspian asked.

  “You keep the other woman in that room calm,” Popova said and managed to add without sarcasm, “You can do that, right?”

  “Of course,” he said with his irritating precision.

  “Where are you going?” Magalhães asked.

  “I’m going to the chief’s office and, I hope, I’ll separate her from that clone. But I have no idea what’s happening there, so…” Popova let her words trail off. She wanted to tell both of them she would be fine, but she had no idea if she would be fine.

  “So,” she said, finishing lamely, “wish me luck.”

  “Good luck,” Kaspian said.

  She smiled at him. She actually appreciated the good wishes. She wasn’t superstitious, but she needed something to hold onto right now.

  Because she had a hunch this day was about to get a lot worse.

  FIFTY-TWO

  FLINT ARRIVED AT the Security Office only to find dozens of squad cars parked haphazardly all over the road. Cops milled around the outside of the building, some touching an almost invisible barrier, others conferring, a few waiting along the edges of the sidewalk as if unable to move without orders.r />
  Flint parked half a block away and ran to the building’s front door. It was shut as well, and the windows were dark, clearly dimmed from the inside.

  Nyquist was peering at the building, hand shading his eyes from the glare of Dome Daylight. Three tactical officers stood nearby in deep conversation, but Nyquist was ignoring them.

  Flint hurried to his side, and asked without preamble, “What, exactly, is going on?”

  Nyquist didn’t move. He continued to try to see in the building. But he said, “The entire building’s in lockdown. No one on our team has ever seen anything this sophisticated. Nothing can get in or out, including link contact.”

  Flint let out a breath, then felt a surge of irritation. He had warned DeRicci about this, that the various systems she had installed and she had let Celia Alfreda’s people install when they built the building’s security might cancel each other out.

  “Get me someone from the United Domes,” Flint said.

  Nyquist dropped his hands as he turned to look at Flint. Nyquist’s irritation was plain in his scarred face. “What?”

  Flint didn’t care how irritated he was. “I can access one of the security panels if I have an active United Domes security clearance. It has to be governmental. Mine isn’t.”

  “Can’t the police do this?” Nyquist asked.

  That irritation was back. They had to move, and move quickly, and Nyquist was questioning him.

  Flint said, “You’re all welcome to keep trying, but in the meantime, get me someone in the United Domes government.”

  “I’m not the guy who usually does this stuff,” Nyquist said, and then seemed to realize what he was saying. “Besides, I think they’re all inside that building. Noelle’s been complaining about that for months, that she’s the only representative—”

  “But she isn’t, though, is she?” Flint snapped. “There are councilors and representatives all over the Moon. They might have gone back to their domes, but that means that there should be some here in Armstrong, and if there aren’t, then there should be one or two in Littrow.”

  “That’s a half an hour away,” Nyquist said.

  “No kidding.” Flint knew Nyquist was upset, and he knew Nyquist wasn’t the kind of man who usually took orders, but Flint didn’t care. He needed to get into this building’s security system.

  Flint walked around the barrier that had fallen over the sidewalk until he found some of the police computer techs. Two were officers he had trained a long time ago.

  At least the department had put their best people on this.

  Flint stopped beside Kaz Issassi, who had opened a virtual window near the building’s barrier. Of all the people Flint had trained when he first joined the police department, Issassi had been the most talented.

  Her fingers moved across lines of light, things he couldn’t read because he was standing in the wrong position compared to the virtual window—one of the security measures he had installed.

  “Finding anything?” he asked.

  She started. She had been lost in her work. She glanced over her shoulder and smiled when she saw him.

  “Thank God,” she said, “someone who actually knows what they’re doing.”

  She didn’t look down the line at the other techs, but he knew what she was talking about. Of the eight techs he could see, only two others could handle something this complicated.

  “Catch me up,” Flint said.

  “This isn’t an outside hack,” she said, and she was speaking softly. “The system’s been altered, and in a very deft way. I had to search to find anything at first. It’s mostly changes to the protocols. Instead of deleting them and replacing them, or inserting a worm or a virus or a new program, whoever did this used the existing programs and made them something other than what they were intended to be.”

  Flint felt cold. “You think this came from the inside?”

  “I know it did,” Issassi said. “And it took a lot of time. Someone couldn’t have done this in an afternoon.”

  Flint didn’t like the sound of that. Because if it took weeks to program, then it would take an equally long time to reprogram. Unless…

  “Can we reset the system?” he asked.

  “Not from out here. The system is designed for outside attacks, not an inside job. So everything about this system uses identification codes or locations to approve any changes. It doesn’t matter if you can spoof the system or use a code that you know might work from the inside. You actually have to be inside.”

  Flint nodded. He remembered that from when he had tweaked the system. He had seen that information go by him, and hadn’t thought much about it.

  Hacking the system from the inside was nearly impossible. It would take weeks just to break in. He had dismissed any inside hack as a near-impossibility.

  He silently cursed himself. He knew that most security breaches were caused not by someone getting lucky or having incredible programming skills, but by an error in the assumptions of the security system’s designer.

  He had compounded the error by failing to flag it.

  Even though he had given himself a way in should something go wrong, he hadn’t planned for this. That way in was predicated on the idea of an outside hack, not an inside breach.

  “How much of the system has been changed?” Flint asked.

  “Everything,” she said. “The access points, the codes needed, the ways the system protects itself, it’s all been changed from the inside, and every time I try to touch it, I get knocked out of the system. Here, you try.”

  Flint shook his head. “I don’t know what you’ve done, and I don’t want to make things worse. Just give me a quick tour.”

  She did. She went through all of the pieces she had touched. Flint moved behind her and watched. He didn’t recognize anything anymore. Everything he knew about the system was wrong. He wondered if the outside access was wrong too. Maybe he wouldn’t need the United Domes identification.

  Then he remembered: he had set up the emergency access outside of the security program. It had been an add-on that he had designed, with only a few people who knew how to run it.

  He just hadn’t trusted the security system DeRicci had. He had also figured he would be trying to dismantle any outside hack, and he wouldn’t be in the office when he did it.

  He was glad for that; it would probably give him a way in.

  He hoped.

  He sent a message to Nyquist, Have you found me someone from the United Domes government yet?

  They’re scattered to the winds, Nyquist sent back. The nearest I can find is in Littrow, and he doesn’t want to come here. Says we can solve it ourselves.

  Flint cursed. Get him here or have the Littrow Police arrest him and bring him here. Right now.

  You say that like there is a Littrow Police, Nyquist sent. He had a point. The Littrow Police Department was small and mostly useless.

  Do what you have to, Flint sent.

  The easy way into the system wasn’t going to work. With what he was learning, his back-door might not work either. He was going to have to hack his own system.

  “Do you think that whoever did these changes also altered some of the internal security protections?” Flint asked.

  “Of course they did,” Issassi said. “That’s what I’m running into.”

  “No,” Flint said. “This system has redundancies upon redundancies upon redundancies. Do you think whoever altered this knew about all of the redundancies?”

  She grinned at him, then turned back to the virtual screen.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” she said.

  FIFTY-THREE

  THE CURRENT NEWS from Hétique City conflicted with the initial assumptions. DeRicci frowned at the images of the ships that had attacked the city from orbit. Some of them seemed familiar.

  Ostaka worked on the minimally networked computer that DeRicci had had in her office for the past several weeks. DeRicci had checked the security on that particular mac
hine before giving it over to Ostaka. He had worked hard on it ever since.

  When she asked him what he was finding, he would say “Not much,” and continue working. When she had pressed him about five minutes before, he confirmed what she had already found: that the information coming out of Hétique City was contradictory.

  Then he swore.

  The word seemed like an unconscious utterance. His fingers were flying over the keys, and he was leaning toward a virtual screen as people did when they used their own links to interface with the system—something she had not approved.

  Clearly Ostaka was one of those people who, when given permission to do one thing, thought it was permission to do a dozen things.

  “Hey,” DeRicci said. “I didn’t—”

  The door burst open, and Popova pushed her way in. She looked terrified.

  “Chief, all our links are down and I have to tell you—” She glanced sideways at Ostaka as she spoke, and then choked.

  DeRicci looked in the same direction. He was reaching for something inside his shirt.

  Popova walked farther into the large room.

  “You have to leave,” she said to DeRicci. “Right now.”

  DeRicci wasn’t going to leave Ostaka alone in here. “Why are our links down?”

  “I don’t know. We just found out, but please, come with me. Please.” Popova gave Ostaka another terrified look. He kept one hand on the computer he was working on.

  DeRicci sighed. She had seen Popova panic before, and it wasn’t pretty. There was probably a glitch in the security system, and one of the techs could fix it. But Popova without links was like most people losing their hands.

  DeRicci walked toward the door. “Come on, Lawrence,” she said. “Let’s see if we can solve this.”

  He grabbed her and pulled her toward him. He had a laser pistol in his left hand and he put it to her temple.

  “We don’t have to solve anything,” he said. “You’re either going to wait until I’m done, or I’m going to kill you.”

  Popova screamed and put her hands to her mouth. No help from that quarter.