The office covered the top of one of Armstrong’s few high-rise buildings. It was a gigantic bubble, with 360-degree views of the city. The thick, reinforced nanomaterials were clear, but his architects reassured him that the materials would protect him from pretty much anything someone would try to throw at them. A structural engineer put it differently: she had told Deshin that the clear bubble was stronger than any of the walls in any of the nearby buildings.
He used to see this clear office as a screw-you to anyone who wanted to mess with him. A dare. Try it, the office seemed to declare. You can see me, but you can’t touch me.
He had been younger then, and naïve. He had thought that someone who was after him would go after him, would try to kill him. He had since learned that vengeance wasn’t so simple, and that random events not directed at him or his people could harm him more than an attack on his empire.
Last week had proven that.
The empire spread out below him. The rest of the building housed dozens of businesses, many of them shell corporations, that he owned. His main business, Deshin Enterprises, rented the top six floors of the building, which he owned under a different name through a different corporation.
He used to keep all of the twists and turns of his various businesses in his head. Yes, there were a dozen spreadsheets, some of them actually legitimate, but none of them told the full story.
He needed a spreadsheet that did, now. Ever since Anniversary Day, a part of his brain seemed to be reserved for processing the changes, processing his losses, and processing the emotions he felt behind the ones he was supposed to feel.
He couldn’t focus on the business as much as he wanted to. Instead, he found himself focusing on the math.
His reflection moved in the window. At least Armstrong set its dome according to Earth light. He could tell the time, just from the appearance of the dome. It was Dome Daylight, bright enough to be midday. He loved the generated sunlight, even if the yellow of the dome’s light was somewhat artificial, and he loved the way it cascaded through his office, over the chairs and the desk and the conference table on the far side of the room.
Those little moments, that appreciation of the light, that was new too. It was as if part of him reveled in being alive.
He wasn’t certain how many other people inside the sectioned domes understood just how close they had come to disappearing forever.
Unlike them, though, he knew.
He also knew how much explosive it took to breach twelve domes and damage seven others. Not to mention the explosion that nearly happened here, and didn’t because of quick thinking on the part of Armstrong authorities.
That math bothered him. It colored his sleep, what little he’d been getting. Because it wasn’t just the math that bothered him.
It was the coordination in the attacks.
First, an assassination of an authority figure, followed by the destruction of a dome.
There was no real reason to assassinate the authority figure, not if the dome was going to explode anyway. In fact, it could be argued that the assassinations were what tipped off DeRicci and her cohorts. If the assassinations hadn’t happened, the Moon might have become desolate all over again.
He didn’t think the masterminds behind this gigantic attack—whoever they might be—considered the assassinations as warnings. He suspected the masterminds had meant the assassinations as symbols. Those masterminds wanted someone—survivors, the Alliance itself maybe, the Earth, he didn’t know exactly—to understand that the bombings were directed at authority figures, not just at the domes.
The masterminds had had an agenda, and they had failed at a great deal of it. Not every leader targeted had died—again, thanks to the security chief—and not every dome targeted had had a hole blown through it.
For some groups, those failures might have been enough to stop them. For this group—which had clearly spent years planning the attacks—those failures might cause them to regroup and try again.
He paced the length of the office, in the middle of it, avoiding chairs and occasional tables, and found bits of art that Paavo had made during his various years in school. The path he took was a surprising obstacle course; he never walked this way.
In the past, he had always paced around the windows, probably subconsciously daring someone to test the strength of those nanomaterials. He probably should do so again. It wasn’t like him to shy away from anything.
Of course, it wasn’t like him to be careless either.
He ran a hand through his hair.
There would be a second attack. Someone (or someones) didn’t plan that hard to give up at the very first failure. They would try again.
A lot depended on whether or not they had planned on failing in the first place.
If they hadn’t planned on failing, the second attack would take longer.
If they had planned on failing—or not entirely succeeding—then the second attack could happen tomorrow.
His stomach clenched and he returned to the seat in front of his desk.
Right now, the authorities were concentrating on search and recovery efforts. They had to put the domes together, they had to figure out who was dead and who was missing and who took the opportunity presented to attempt to disappear.
They didn’t have time to trace the attackers.
He did.
He needed to, or he needed to move his family and his businesses off the Moon.
He had already calculated the cost of that. Even though he had billions tied up in corporations that did business elsewhere, the bulk of his business was Moon-based. He’d always been a local guy, and he was paying for it now.
It would cost five years’ earnings to move his businesses permanently off-Moon, and that didn’t count what would happen to the stock prices of the legitimate businesses. Would the markets see his decision to leave the Moon as prudent or as unwise? If they saw it as unwise, the stock price of his legitimate businesses could plummet even more.
The more money he lost, the more he would have to rely on his illegitimate businesses. He’d been trying to legitimize those since he and Gerda had adopted Paavo. He wanted his boy to inherit an empire he could be proud of, not one that he would need street and survival skills to run.
Paavo didn’t have those skills, and if Deshin had his way, Paavo would never gain them—not in a life filled with crisis, the way that Deshin’s had been. He wanted Paavo to be one of those dilettante owners, and he wanted to protect the boy from insider theft as much as possible. So when the time came, he would teach Paavo to understand the business, how to run the business, and then how to keep a distant eye on the folks who managed it from day to day.
Deshin couldn’t do any of that if Deshin Enterprises had much of its capital in businesses that weren’t always legal.
Which trapped him—and his family—on the Moon.
He could shut everything down. He had more than enough money to live on. But the very idea of that gave him the shudders.
As he saw it, there was only one realistic thing that he could do.
He could figure out who was trying to destroy his home and destroy the bastards first.
He had the resources.
He had the investigators.
He had the will.
And best of all, the masterminds—whoever the hell they were—would never see him coming.
ELEVEN
AVA HUỲNH STARED at the information scrolling across her screens. Then she looked at the 3-D image plastered against the back wall of her office:
Twenty young men, all clones of PierLuigi Frémont, laughing as they stood together inside the Port of Armstrong, three weeks ago now. They had arrived two weeks before the catastrophe called Anniversary Day, and they had done their best to destroy every major city on the Moon.
If it weren’t for a security chief in a newly minted government that hadn’t even applied for Earth Alliance recognition, those young men would have succeeded.
Hu
ỳnh tucked a strand of purple hair behind her right ear, one of the dozen earrings she wore scratching the skin of her finger. She sucked on the scratch absently as she stared at everything around her.
She was drowning in information and none of it made sense. It poured in from dozens of locations, ancient news, old suppositions, arrest records, and problems from earlier eras.
She desperately wanted to find something that would help the people on the Moon solve this massive crime, and so far, she had found nothing.
She wiped her finger on the skirt of her lavender dress. That morning, she had color-coordinated everything, from her hair to her fingernails to her shoes, to make herself feel like she was in control of something. But the clothes, hair, and nails had only left her feeling ridiculous.
And in the cafeteria during lunch, at least two of her colleagues asked her if the purple explosion had occurred in her closet or her bathroom.
Sometimes she thought Earth Alliance Security Headquarters for the Human Division was a lot more like high school than any professional organization she had been a part of.
She sank into her chair and ran a hand over her face. She made herself look away from that image of the twenty clones.
Her office was small, but interesting—or at least she thought so. She had chosen it because of its trapezoidal shape. The entire building was oddly shaped, and she loved that about it. The shape of her office seemed appropriate to her, since no investigation was ever perfectly square, but the investigations that got solved had at least two parallel lines, just like a trapezoid.
She’d tried to explain the correlation of the geometrical shape of her office to the shape of a standard investigation to one of her assistants years ago, but he’d given her a somewhat cross-eyed look and said, I got into investigation precisely because it didn’t have math.
He was wrong. The most successful investigations—particularly human investigations—often involved some forensic accounting as well as some basic arithmetic.
Every investigation she had ever been involved in felt like math to her. Sometimes in the investigation, she solved a relatively easy math problem (two plus two), and sometimes she had to use calculus, and sometimes she had to rely on some alien math equations that made her own eyes cross.
Right now, she felt like someone had dumped a gigantic box of centimeter-sized toy numbers on her and told her to make sure they made some kind of mathematical sense. Almost as if the very problem were hidden from her, and she had no idea what kind of equation she needed or what she really needed to solve.
No, scratch that. She knew what she needed to solve.
The Moon attacks were, at their core, a good old-fashioned whodunit. The problem was that there were lots of dunnits to unravel and lots of whos to be found.
Who created the clones? Who raised and fed them? Who trained them? Who sent them to the Moon?
Who wanted the Moon destroyed?
And why?
Whys were always the hardest puzzles to solve. She’d closed many a case without fully understanding the why of it. The who was always easier, even on this scale.
Still, something about this whole thing—its vastness and coordination—bugged the hell out of her.
Then she slapped a hand on her forehead and muttered, “Alien math,” and stumbled her way out of her office.
The Earth Alliance Security Division had its own starbase, with layers and divisions all over the base. It was part of what she always thought of as a spider-like web of bases, surrounding the Earth Alliance Human Division for the First Sector. The outlying bases were all attached to the Human Division base by gigantic travel tunnels.
The entire base system was a maze of tunnels and circles, all attached to that gigantic base in the center. The smaller bases, like the Security Division, somehow managed to spin on their own axes (she didn’t understand all of the engineering) so that the views changed all the time.
Sometimes the buildings with windows had a view of the stars beyond and sometimes they viewed the travel tunnels or the underside of the Human Division base.
That was the only feature she didn’t like about living here. In the past, she had lived on bases or cities that were planet- or moon-side, and the view from a window always remained the same. It had taken her a year of living in the Security Division to realize that it was the view from her apartment window that was disorienting her, not the actual life on the base.
Once she figured that out, she had asked for a windowless apartment deep inside her building, which had the twin benefits of being larger and cheaper than the windowed apartment. And then she opted to take this office, with its straight line walls and unusual angles.
They comforted her.
And oddly, she needed the comfort while considering this case.
Mostly because it pissed her off.
The very idea that someone would launch such a coordinated attack on the Moon pissed her off.
The fact that it was proving hard to solve pissed her off more.
She headed down the hallway, and up five flights of stairs (walking was good for her; she liked real exercise as opposed to enhanced muscles), then across a “sky bridge,” which wasn’t in the sky at all. It just connected the Human Investigative Unit with the Joint Investigative Unit for this sector—all within the Security Division itself, so she was still in the smaller base.
(She had once tried to explain the way everything connected here to a new hire, without using images, and he had stopped her after about three sentences. I’ll just use the mapping function in my links, he’d said. She doubted he ever learned how to find his way around without computerized help. She, on the other hand, could find her way through this base blindfolded and without any working internal technology at all.)
The Joint Unit combined Human and Alien investigations. Each Earth Alliance species had its own investigative unit within the Security Division, and the Joint Unit coordinated everything. It also handled investigations that had no real jurisdiction.
Everyone thought the Moon bombings belonged in the Human Division, but maybe everyone was wrong.
She stepped into the main reception area, green with silver trim, with more 90-degree angles than she liked. Everything was precise here, because one thing the Alliance government had learned was that most species felt calmer in predictable spaces—squares, rectangles, circles.
“Most” being the key word here. And it wasn’t always consistent inside a species. Because half the human staff hated the trapezoidal offices. And one woman flatly refused to work in anything that wasn’t a perfect rectangle.
Huỳnh hated that kind of difficult.
She was a different kind of difficult. A creative kind.
The android receptionist stood when Huỳnh entered. The thing was bipedal, since many species could relate to a biped, and it had an almost-human face. The face could shift depending on what kind of being entered reception, and it could also shift languages faster than any link-guided human could.
Still, it creeped Huỳnh out. Its bluish/goldish/greenish eyes seemed to judge her. No, that wasn’t right. It seemed to look at her like What do you want this time, troublemaker?
She flushed. Androids weren’t supposed to have the ability to judge. They were simply machines that worked on a higher level than the bots that cleaned the place.
She was paranoid and knew it. Not that paranoid was the right word. Pesty. The investigators here thought she wanted to do joint investigations more than was healthy.
But she always figured it didn’t hurt to ask.
She had learned not to ask the receptionist to let her pass. She just walked by as if she belonged here. If the damn thing wanted to stop her, it could.
Behind the door, the offices were a Disty-warren of clutter and low ceilings. The design was no coincidence. The first head of the Joint Unit had been Disty, until he was dismissed because he funneled too much information to the Disty government.
A lot of joint security investi
gations in those dark days had ended in Disty Vengeance Killings before that head had been replaced.
There had been nearly two dozen heads since then, from all different species. The current head was a fussy Peyti male named Xyven. He had one of the highest closure rates the investigative department had ever seen, first in the Peyti Investigative Unit, and then in the Joint Human/Alien Unit. But Huỳnh always felt his management skills left something to be desired.
She grabbed an environmental suit from the rack just inside the Unit. She never brought her own to work, probably because she never thought she’d need it.
Contrary to what some of her colleagues thought, she didn’t come to work every day thinking that she would head into the Joint Unit for a casual chat and an invitation to a joint investigation.
She stepped into the nearest restroom to slip the suit on. She used to put the suits on in the hallway, but she eventually learned that wasn’t the brightest idea. She’d had more than one skirt ride up to her shoulders as she tried it.
This time, her clothing stayed in place—but of course, she’d picked a suit of the right size. She hated using the company mask, but she knew they had a coating made of nanocleaners that theoretically removed all traces of the previous wearer.
Sometimes, though, she was just too trusting. Or maybe she really did need to bring her own suit to work.
She slipped out of the restroom and headed down the main corridor to Xyven’s office. A divider separated the Peyti part of the unit from the human part. She placed a gloved hand on the divider, and tapped her personal code into the material. She also tilted her head so that it could do a retinal scan.
It took a moment, and she temporarily thought her access was going to be denied.
Then a door in the divider pivoted a few degrees, just wide enough to let her in. She stepped into the tiny bubble that the door created to prevent the atmospheres from mixing.
The door closed and the bubble vanished. She now had to wade through the murk that was a Peyti-normal environment.
Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel Page 7
