Masterminds

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  SIXTY

  BEFORE Ó BRÁDAIGH executed an emergency dome surface sweep all on his own, he decided to try Berhane one last time. He didn’t want her to panic when the dome went dark.

  He was probably going to panic enough for the both of them. He would have to trust computers that might’ve been tampered with to tell him the sweep worked. He would rather have had the city’s fifty inspectors monitor their dome areas, and their own systems, than trust the overall system that Petteway had touched.

  For all Ó Brádaigh knew, Petteway had set something to blow when there was a surface sweep.

  Ó Brádaigh took a deep breath and turned to the two police officers who were assigned to guard him. “You both are making sure the city knows that Lombrozo wouldn’t cooperate?”

  “We’re past that,” the male officer said. “We’re working our way up the chain of command, seeing if we can bypass that tight-ass for good.”

  “Thanks.” Ó Brádaigh wished he could believe that the work the officers were doing would help. But he wasn’t sure anything could.

  He’d already warned his mother. But he still needed to reach Berhane.

  Berhane, he sent on his private links. Oh, please, Berhane, answer me this time.

  Donal? It was her.

  He gasped with surprise. Kobani looked at him.

  “I got ahold of my girlfriend,” Ó Brádaigh said by way of explanation. Then heard himself. That was probably the first time he had ever told anyone that Berhane was his girlfriend.

  “You don’t have a lot of time here,” Kobani said.

  Donal, I’m in the middle of something, Berhane sent. Can I contact you in a while?

  Berhane, listen, he sent. I’m probably not supposed to tell you this, but you should put on an environmental suit. I’m not sure we’re going to make it through the next few hours, and if you have a suit on—

  What? What’s going on, Donal? She sounded surprised, but not panicked like his mother had.

  I found evidence that someone’s messing with the dome, and I can’t reach the Security Office. Armstrong PD is trying to help, but we’re running into problems at every turn. I—

  I’m in the Security Office, Berhane sent. Let me patch you through to the chief.

  Ó Brádaigh looked at the officers in surprise. They frowned at him. He must’ve been making a spectacularly strange face.

  I’m going to go to full visual, Berhane sent.

  Okay, go.

  She appeared before him, a life-sized hologram so real he wanted to put his arms around her. He couldn’t see behind her—wherever she was appeared to be whited out—but he got the sense that she wasn’t alone.

  She looked on either side of him, obviously seeing the officers.

  “Where are you?” Berhane asked.

  “I’m in the substructure where the dome controls are,” Ó Brádaigh said. “The officers here are guarding me. We’re in trouble, Berhane.”

  “You are or we are?” she asked.

  “We are,” he said. “The Moon. The next attack will happen in the next few hours. I just happened on my boss, altering the commands for the sections.”

  The Chief of Security for the United Domes of the Moon appeared beside Berhane. They were about the same height, but the chief appeared to be covered in blood.

  “What happened there?” Ó Brádaigh asked the chief. “You look injured.”

  Berhane glanced at the chief, who waved her hands in an it-doesn’t-matter gesture.

  “Tell me exactly what you found,” the chief said.

  So he did. He explained the problems with the sections, the trouble he’d had with the chief inspector for the domes, and the fact that the smallest crack in the dome could cause a catastrophic dome failure. Everyone would die.

  “And it’s not just this dome,” he said. “I think it’s going to happen in other domes on the Moon. We only have a few hours to stop this, and I haven’t been able to tell anyone.”

  “You’ve told me,” the chief said. She looked over his shoulder, as if seeing someone else arrive. Her expression relaxed for just a moment. Then she turned her attention back to Ó Brádaigh and nodded. “I’ll make sure the other domes know, and I’ll override that chief inspector. We’re going to get moving on this immediately. Tell me what else we need to do.”

  His knees had gone weak with relief. Finally, someone who could actually help.

  “We have to do the sweep,” Ó Brádaigh said, “but that’s just the beginning. We need people inside and outside the dome, seeing if there’s anything on them. A surface sweep will take care of a problem on the exterior, but crap sticks to the inside of the dome all the time. In Armstrong, at least, the interior surface sweep capability is minimal. It only searches for flaws in the surface, not for stuff sticking to the surface.”

  “Meaning what?” the chief asked.

  “Meaning I could place a small explosive the size of a fingernail on the interior, and the sweep won’t catch it. It’s one of those things that the engineers and the inspectors know, but the general population doesn’t. The problem is that I’m afraid Petteway has been running this thing, and he’s an engineer, a damn good one.”

  The chief nodded. “What can we do from the inside? Bots? The kind of nanocleaners that someone would use on the exterior of their house? Would any of that work?”

  “It might,” Ó Brádaigh said. “That’s outside my area of expertise. I need someone to consult with.”

  “We may have leads on that, as well,” she said. “Is there anything else?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Whatever breaches the dome might not be something small. For all I know, someone has set up a large explosive on the roof of a building somewhere. Or inside a building. Anything’s possible, chief, and we only have a few hours. That’s the tough part. Plus, I don’t know who to trust.”

  “Can I send him the images?” Berhane asked the chief.

  Ó Brádaigh looked from one to the other of them. He had no idea why Berhane was in the Security Office, and he didn’t know what she meant by images.

  It appeared the chief didn’t, either. She was frowning at Berhane.

  “The Old DNA,” Berhane said. “The originals. Can I send those to him, because if I do, then he might know who he can rely on.”

  “It’s worth a try,” the chief said to her.

  The officers had moved closer to Ó Brádaigh. They glanced at each other, then looked at him. He wished they were watching the area around him, but he didn’t say that.

  “We’re going to send you images of one hundred people,” the chief said to Ó Brádaigh. “They’re the originals for clones that we believe are planning this attack on the Moon. We already caught one. Maybe we can find some of the others this way.”

  “Are all of these images possible clones?” Ó Brádaigh asked.

  “I have no idea,” the chief said. “We’ll have to proceed as if they are. At some point, with only a few hours to go, we’re going to have to trust, at least a little bit. Can you do that, Mr.—”

  “Ó Brádaigh, sir,” he said. “I’m Donal Ó Brádaigh.”

  “Mr. Ó Brádaigh, you have probably saved millions of lives today,” the chief said.

  “I haven’t saved anyone yet, Chief. But I’m going to do my damndest.”

  “We are too, Mr. Ó Brádaigh,” she said with great passion. “We are too.”

  SIXTY-ONE

  MILES FLINT HAD entered the office while DeRicci was speaking to Donal Ó Brádaigh. DeRicci held it together until she finished talking to Ó Brádaigh, and then she hurried across the office.

  She stopped for a half second. She wanted to hug Flint, but wasn’t sure she should. She was covered in Ostaka’s blood. She didn’t need to coat Flint in it, no matter how happy she was to see him.

  He looked at her for a moment, as if trying to see if the blood were hers, and then wrapped her in his arms. They held each other tightly for a long moment.

  She couldn’t remember if
she had ever hugged him before, but it felt right to hug him now.

  “That sounded awfully serious,” Flint said as he pulled back. Her shirt stuck to his. She eased them apart.

  “It’s worse than serious,” she said. “We’ve got to act fast.”

  She felt like she could do that, now, with Flint here.

  And then more people came into her office, some she didn’t recognize. At their heels, Bartholomew Nyquist. She hugged him too. She had gone to every extreme today—from beating the crap out of Ostaka to holding the two men in her life.

  “I was so afraid something had happened to you,” Nyquist said in her ear.

  “Well, it’s been exciting,” she said as she pulled out of the hug.

  He saw the blood and blanched.

  “It’s not mine,” she said. “It’s his.”

  She pointed with her thumb over her shoulder.

  “Look,” she said to the dozen people who had come into her office—cops, Nyquist, Flint, and her own security staff, released from the lower floors where Ostaka had held them. “I don’t have time to brief you people. Marshal, can you get them up to speed?”

  “With pleasure,” Gomez said from beside Ostaka.

  Flint frowned at her, and DeRicci realized he had never met Gomez. Neither had Nyquist. Well, they’d meet her now. DeRicci didn’t have time for formal introductions.

  “When you’re done, Miles, I’ll need you to tweak one of our security programs—you’ll understand why—and I need someone good repairing our own systems. Bartholomew, we need Armstrong PD rallying the citizenry. We’re going to need everyone searching for suspicious anythings.”

  “Meaning what?” he asked.

  “I’ll explain,” Gomez said.

  “No offense,” Nyquist said, “but I have no idea who the hell you are or why I should trust you.”

  “You trust her because I do,” DeRicci said.

  “That’s not a reason, Noelle,” Nyquist said. “That Earth Alliance investigator—”

  “Fooled all of us, Bartholomew, including you. Now shut up and listen, because we probably have less than four hours to save this stupid moon, again.”

  She took a breath. Just stating the number of hours left made the panic she’d been living with for so long gnaw at her. She willed it away.

  “I’ve got to talk with the heads of the various domes, and for that, I need you, Rudra. We need to get them all, and we need to get them all at once.”

  “Do you want to change your shirt, chief?” Popova asked. Always practical, that one.

  DeRicci almost agreed, and then she shook her head. She needed to impress on everyone how very important it was to act quickly.

  “No,” she said. “And I need the images of those originals. Now, the rest of you, give me a minute, because I’m going to need to think how to present all of this.”

  Normally, she would kick them all out of her office, but that wasn’t going to work. Instead, she moved to the couch, and started outlining her presentation in her head.

  She had to talk about the dome sectioning, the possible breaches, the multitudinous clones—it all sounded impossible. There was no way they were going to reach everyone.

  Then she took a deep breath. One thing at a time. The domes first.

  She looked up at her team. “We’re going to need to section our dome, just in case. Rudra, that’s first. Then get me the leaders of the other domes. Just send out the order, all right?”

  “Are people going to have warning this time?” someone asked.

  DeRicci didn’t notice who questioned it. “Give them five minutes. Sirens, blaring lights, all that stuff. Let’s give people time to clear intersections and get to the part of the dome they need to be in. Quickly, though, all right?”

  Half the people in her office nodded their heads. Flint didn’t. He was leaning toward Gomez. Nyquist was gesturing. He was clearly still trying to figure out who she was.

  DeRicci turned her back on the crowd. She had to trust them to act.

  She would tell the other dome leaders that they needed to section immediately as well.

  She needed to tell them to examine their domes, that the threat was pretty clear, albeit difficult to thwart. She would also need to send the images of the originals to the dome leaders, but she wished she had a shorthand to help them search for the clones inside their domes. Before, she’d had one image. This time she had a hundred—literally.

  She looked over her shoulder at Magalhães and that skinny guy she had arrived with.

  “Did you notice any patterns with those originals?” DeRicci asked. “Anything at all?”

  “Nothing we can use,” Magalhães said.

  DeRicci let out a breath.

  “They’re male.” The voice cut through all of the chatter. DeRicci didn’t recognize it. She looked near the main door. A strange-looking, middle-aged woman in clothes that didn’t quite fit her stood near the wall with her arms crossed.

  “I told you to stay in the other room, Pippa,” Gomez said to the woman.

  “You were gone for a long time,” the woman said. “And you left the door open. I’ve been watching from the hallway. The faces, the originals you pulled, they’re all male.”

  DeRicci hadn’t noticed that but Magalhães nodded. So did the skinny guy.

  “They are,” the skinny guy said. “All that means, though, is that we might’ve missed the females.”

  “Or it might mean they’re all male,” Gomez said.

  “Originals?” Flint asked.

  “In a minute, Miles,” DeRicci said. She wasn’t going to get sidetracked.

  She frowned as she considered what the group had just told her. She’d been thinking about clone patterns for a long time. The serial killers were a pattern. The Peyti clones embedded in society were a pattern. These people were embedded too, but they weren’t based on serial killers. They seemed to be clones of good citizens. But why males?

  Then she realized the answer didn’t matter. What mattered was acting with the knowledge they all had, and searching for more knowledge at the same time.

  “What we have is this,” she said, “we have one hundred originals, all human, all male, all born on the Moon. We use that. If we miss, we miss, but I’m pretty sure we have what we need.”

  Everyone was looking at her. She felt stronger than she had in weeks, maybe months.

  She had only a few hours, but a few hours were more than she had had during the Peyti Crisis, and definitely more than she had had during Anniversary Day.

  A few hours was a damn luxury.

  Or, at least, she had to convince herself of that.

  And she had to convince everyone else too.

  SIXTY-TWO

  IT ONLY TOOK a few minutes for Marshal Judita Gomez to catch both Flint and Nyquist up on what was going on. It would have taken less time, but Nyquist had decided not to trust her, and was quizzing her about all kinds of things.

  Flint finally had to send a message across his links, warning Nyquist to tone down his inquisition. They only had a short time to act, which meant they even had less time to learn what was going on.

  They didn’t know Gomez, but DeRicci had been right: they had to trust her. Her identification checked out—not that it mattered. Ostaka’s had as well.

  Ostaka still leaned against the desk piled in trash, his head down. Flint suddenly felt a surge of irritation.

  “Did someone block that guy’s links?” he asked Gomez, jerking his head toward Ostaka.

  She cursed, and turned to one of the security staff. “Put a link blocker on that man.”

  “I need to check with—”

  “Put the link blocker on,” Flint said. “And right now, no checking. Just do your job. As the chief said, we have a very short window here.”

  The man nodded, then went to a nearby desk where Flint knew a stash of individual link blockers hid. He had put some of them there himself.

  “I hope we didn’t start something else,” Nyqu
ist said.

  “We need to trace his contacts,” Flint said, and then he shook his head. Nyquist was the person best suited to do that, but he had a lot of other things to do as well, maybe more important things.

  He did, too. Now that Gomez had told them what was happening, he needed to tweak the program he had used to find all of the clones during the Peyti Crisis. He had already decided he would open a second version of that program and search for more human clones, without the criminal background.

  And he probably needed a third program, searching for alien clones, which was ever so much harder.

  He sent a message along his links to Kaz Issassi. I need you in DeRicci’s office.

  He wished he could send for Talia too, but he wanted her away from all the trouble. Right now, he needed to concentrate. He had to believe she would be all right.

  He moved to the computer system he usually used in DeRicci’s office and began his work. Immediately, he got thousands of hits on the already-known clones.

  “Noelle,” he said, “there’s no way we’re going to be able to arrest all of these clones. No city on the Moon has the manpower for it.”

  She waved a hand at him to shut him up. She was talking to the mayors and acting mayors of every domed city on the Moon.

  “That’s a problem,” Gomez said from beside him.

  “We’re going to have to release the information to the citizenry,” Flint said. “They’re going to have to isolate these people.”’

  “Great,” Nyquist said. “Do you realize what we’ll be unleashing? We’re giving people the go-ahead to maim or murder their neighbors. And there’s going to be a lot of misidentification, a lot of panic—”

  “You have a better idea?” Flint snapped.

  Nyquist’s lips thinned. He clearly didn’t.

  “I can release names and identification for most of these clones,” Flint said. “I’ve been comparing citizen records. We know who these people are, we just don’t have the ability to arrest them.”

  “No android police in Armstrong?” Gomez asked.

  Nyquist looked at her, clearly horrified. Flint wondered how long she had been away from the heart of the Earth Alliance.