“Daddy?” Berhane asked.
The conversation stopped—not guiltily, just the way conversations did when an outsider showed up.
Her father smiled at her. He looked wide awake and cheerful this morning, his ruddy face clean-shaven, his black eyes twinkling. He was a big man who slouched whenever he sat down, and this morning was no exception. His head was at the same level as everyone else’s. If her father sat up all the way, he’d tower over all of them, even as he sat.
“For those of you who don’t know,” he said to the collected executives, “this is my daughter Berhane. Be nice to her. She will run the company one day.”
Murmured hellos, disinterested and somewhat sheepish, rose around the table. Berhane smiled at all of the gathered executives, even though she didn’t feel like smiling at all.
“Join us, my girl,” her father said, using his personal nickname for her even though he was in a business meeting. “You should probably be part of this.”
She didn’t want to join any kind of meeting. She took a sip of her coffee as a stall.
“What are you discussing?” She couldn’t quite tell from the assembled executives. Sometimes, her father’s choice of business partners told her all she needed to know.
“Rubble and rebuilding,” her father said cheerfully.
Her stomach clenched and she was sure her dismay showed on her face. But typically, her father didn’t seem to notice.
“Show her,” he said to the white-haired man beside him. That man was younger than her father. The white hair, which was all one color, was clearly an affectation, not something hereditary.
Berhane started to protest, but before she could get the words out of her mouth, screens appeared all around her. They were covered with before-and-after pictures. Or now-and-future pictures, if she wanted to be more accurate.
Near each executive was a domed Moon city, with its destruction on full display. The hardest to look at was Tycho Crater, whose central dome had imploded along with a resort built at the top of that dome, against any kind of Earth Alliance regulations. The debris there was meters deep and probably housed thousands of bodies.
Next to it, a new version of the resort, Top of the Dome, rose on stilts and wasn’t attached to the dome at all, but seemed to be. Little side pods moved even closer to the dome and the top of the crater, all of them marked with some kind of moniker—hotel, restaurant, shop.
Berhane gripped her coffee cup hard so that her hand didn’t shake.
“You’re working on the rebuild?” she asked, hoping her voice sounded neutral.
“No one’s hired us yet,” her father said, “but they will when they see how much we’ve done.”
He owned one of the largest construction companies in the solar system. He had built entire subdivisions on some of the moons of Jupiter. He had built the now-destroyed government offices in the center of Littrow. He had built so many things that Berhane couldn’t quite keep track of all of them.
And that was just one branch of the corporation she would eventually run. One small arm that, in theory, didn’t look at the other arms, which had their fingers in real estate Alliance-wide, in building materials, in demolition, and in so many things that she honestly couldn’t keep track.
If her father died tomorrow, she would have to take a small course in the history of the corporation just so that she knew what she was in charge of.
“I don’t think anyone’s ready to rebuild,” she said softly. “Every single destroyed dome section is a crime scene.”
“We’ve handled crime scene restoration and repair,” one of the executives said. She didn’t recognize him. He was a round little man whose bald head looked deliberately shaved. His coffee-colored pate reflected the overhead light—and not in a good way.
“I’m aware of that,” she said in her coldest voice. She could reprimand him. She couldn’t reprimand her father. “With this kind of mess, I suspect it’ll take months before anyone can even contemplate moving the rubble or rebuilding.”
“The domes need covering,” another executive said, a woman this time. She had hair as red and fake as the white-haired guy had. “Survivors will need to know that life goes on.”
Berhane had to set her coffee cup down on the nearby buffet. If she didn’t, the cup would shatter in her hands.
These executives were talking to her like she was like a stupid child, which she was not. She knew her father hadn’t told them anything about her, so they were all showing off to her father, trying to impress the boss without calling his intelligence into question.
One way to do that was to show the stupid child what she would be up against when she finally came into the organization.
Those executives weren’t the only ones who could play the let’s-talk-to-someone-else-while-really-speaking-to-the-boss game. She could too.
“I think you’re all being premature,” she said. “In case you’ve forgotten, my father and I have been through this before. My mother died in the Armstrong bombing, the one that everyone considers a precursor to last week’s events. Back then as well, dozens of companies pressed the government of Armstrong to hurry and rebuild. Arek Soseki, rest his soul, agreed. And now, it’s clear that had he actually allowed the police time to investigate, we might have prevented a Moonwide disaster of unbelievable proportions.”
“Berhane,” her father said with a bit of reprimand in his own tone, “we’re not talking to governments yet. We’re just getting prepared.”
“It’s too soon,” she said directly to him.
“Clean-up will begin with or without us,” said another man at the far end of the table. “We should be part of it all.”
“Because there’s a lot of money to be made,” Berhane said to him, deliberately keeping her voice neutral.
“Yes,” he said.
“Because someone will be making that money,” she said, “so it might as well be us.”
“Yes,” he said, glancing at the others, who were wisely keeping quiet.
“Because we made so much money four years ago,” she said in that same tone. “What was it? Millions?”
“More than that,” someone else said. “Just on cleanup alone, we charged the city two billion dollars.”
“One city, two billion for clean-up of something smaller than what happened in each of nineteen domes.” Berhane looked at the rubble images, which, she knew, were there in two-dimensions because that made the images less real.
Her gaze met her father’s. He gave her his warning look.
She ignored it.
“So,” she said. “Just on clean-up, if we get the bid, we’ll make more than 38 billion, probably something closer to 50 billion.”
“Our projections show about 100 billion,” said a woman at the far end of the table, “and that’s if we only get half.”
Berhane nodded. “Then we get money for the rebuilding materials from one of our subsidiaries, money for the processing of the rubble for the investigators from another of our subsidiaries, money for recycling and salvaging everything that can be cleaned, money for our architectural firms, money for each building we contract for—am I missing anything? Oh, yes, what my father mentioned from the start. Money for making sure the domes are properly repaired.”
“Berhane,” her father said warningly. He knew the tone. The rest of them didn’t.
“It’s been a week,” she said to him.
“It’s going to get done with or without us,” he said. “Last time we came in late—”
“And we still made two billion on clean-up,” said the bald guy, obliviously.
“We were late,” Berhane said, “because Mother died in there, and we were thinking about—”
“Ourselves,” her father said. “We don’t have to do that this time.”
As if it were required to think about the dead, not something that just happened out of love or honor or anything else. As if they had been following a rule, and not their hearts.
Maybe her fat
her had been. Maybe Bert had shielded Berhane from it.
Maybe that was why he left.
She made herself take a deep breath. She wouldn’t be able to stop this meeting. Her father would just move it to his office or somewhere else, and wouldn’t tell her what happened.
She picked up her coffee cup, no longer afraid she would crush it.
“I’m not dressed to join you,” she said. “You all go ahead. I’m sure I’ll be brought up to speed at some point.”
Then she pivoted on her bare feet and headed back across the foyer.
She finally understood what had happened these past few years. She hadn’t been engaged to Torkild. She’d been engaged to a less charming version of her father.
No wonder her mother wanted to warn her.
No wonder Bertram left.
Only Berhane wouldn’t leave.
She’d learned a lot of tricks from her father over the years. She already had shares in the corporation. She’d quietly buy up more of them, using some holding companies. She’d amass power without him even realizing it. And she’d exercise that.
But that was the long-term plan.
In the short term, she would do something different. She had been throwing her money at various charities. Now she’d investigate what needed to be done.
Her father’s people, his companies, would destroy DNA, ruin any hope that families had of finding if their loved ones died on Anniversary Day.
She’d do her best to stall that destruction. She’d prevent it, and she’d make sure the families got closure.
She just had to figure out how to do it—and do it right.
THIRTEEN
PIPPA ALWAYS LOVED the first day of summer session. The day was invariably sunny. She couldn’t remember ever suffering a thunderstorm, even in the afternoon.
The kids would complain, as they had at the beginning of every single summer session of their short lives. Why, they would invariably ask, did anyone have to be inside on a day like this?
And she would always take her students to the garden in the middle of the rectangular building. The garden was large, protected on all sides by red brick that had to be refortified with a nanocoating every year or so, and by mid-June, smelled of half a dozen different flowers, all competing for the most beautiful and the most fragrant.
Because she planned ahead, she always got the outdoor classroom. A covering would slide across the top of it on rainy days, but she would rarely use that. She set up the chairs herself, and used a giant floating screen rather than individual ones to hold the students’ attention.
She loved how they would stumble into her “classroom” and smile with delight.
On the first day of summer session, she would arrive an hour before anyone else, primarily for setup, but also to enjoy the garden before the students learned to tame it. She taught biology, and in the summer months, she focused mostly on botany since the school didn’t offer any formal classes in that discipline.
She taught inside and outside: the students had to maintain an outdoor garden patch and a small hydroponic garden, so they could learn the difference between a contained garden and an uncontained one. So many of her students would send her thank-you messages after they arrived at whatever college they planned to attend, because they were often the only Earth-based students who had learned how to do indoor gardening as well as outdoor.
It was yet another way that Earth education fell short, at least in her opinion. Education on Earth was always Earth-centric, as if Earth were the only place in the universe.
She used to complain that Earthers believed Earth was the center of the universe, and then one of her colleagues pointed out that as far as the Earth Alliance was concerned, Earth was the center of the universe.
Pippa stopped making that comparison.
The garden’s ground was soft and moist this morning. There had been a heavy dew the night before, and it glistened on the leaves. The earth smelled of loam, a scent she had learned to love.
She stood in the early morning sunshine and thought how perfect the day was, then felt a stab of guilt because she was acutely aware of how much suffering continued on the Moon.
Usually, she ignored all disaster coverage, or she’d drown in it. The Earth Alliance was huge, and there was always something horrible happening somewhere. But the Moon’s crisis felt touchable, perhaps because the Moon had remained so visible in the night sky ever since the attacks. She couldn’t ignore this one as effectively as she had ignored the other disasters.
At least she had managed to avoid most of the coverage.
Not because she was cruel, but because the attacks reminded her of her last year in the Frontier.
She dismissed the thought. She didn’t want anything to ruin her day. She wanted to see the surprise on the kids’ faces, enjoy the way that her class always became their favorite in the summer, not because they liked her best but because they could indulge in the great outdoors.
Pippa grabbed the small chip that would become the large screen. She often let it float in the early sessions, but today, she’d put it against the windows of the cafeteria. Too many students stared longingly on the first day, before they realized they could transfer into one of her classes, and she wanted to prevent that.
She set up the screen, placing it in the perfect position. Then she flicked it on, to see if she should make the background white or if she could safely make it translucent. It would depend on the light, of course, but also on whatever was going on inside the building behind it.
She rounded the chairs and stood against a pioneer rosebush that had been on this location for centuries, nurtured and cultivated long past its usual lifespan. She loved those white roses and their unbelievable fragrance. She sniffed before she looked up at the screen—
And froze.
Images of twenty men, all identical, laughing as they made their way through a port, scrolled across it, under the heading of Moon Bombers. Her breath caught, her heart pounded, and her knees buckled.
She had collapsed in the dirt before she even realized what had happened.
She didn’t need sound to know that those men were clones. She had seen them before—sometimes she saw them in her nightmares. Always, always in a group, but never laughing.
Marching, together, their boots stomping, stomping, stomping in unison, and she was running…
She wiped a hand over her face and made herself take a deep breath. She was imagining this, dreaming it. It couldn’t be real.
She hadn’t seen that face in more than thirty years. She had watched for it. Her husband had always told her she’d be safe, no matter what, but he hadn’t seen them, those blond men who always worked in groups—
But not laughing.
Not once in thirty years had she had a vision of them laughing.
She made herself look up again.
The image on the screen now was of devastation in one of the Moon’s domes. Androids and machines working in the rubble, trying to recover something, to clean out the debris. People sitting with each other in hospitals, humans gesticulating as they explained what had happened to them. Rev talking about their experiences.
The things she had tried to ignore every day for more than a week now.
She couldn’t stand, not yet. She set up her link to the screen, then commanded it to show the images of the bombers again.
And there it was: twenty men, clones of PierLuigi Frémont—something she hadn’t known—entering Armstrong’s port fourteen days ahead of the bombings. Going their separate ways.
Clones of one of the most well-known serial killers in human history. She frowned, trying to wrap her brain around that.
Why hadn’t she known that?
Why hadn’t she known any of this?
She had thought they couldn’t get into the Alliance. She had thought she was safe from them.
She bowed her head, hiding it between her knees, the scent of her favorite rosebush overwhelming her.
She
felt trapped for the first time in her life. Here, in the center of the Earth Alliance, where she had thought she was safe.
Where she thought she could settle in.
Where she thought she would never ever have to run away again.
FOURTEEN
DESHIN HATED TRAVELING to Crater de Gerlache. The city disturbed him. It was built deep inside the actual crater, with buildings and streets on various levels. He always thought of Crater de Gerlache as a wannabe starbase rather than a domed city on the Moon.
It hadn’t even been big enough for the twenty damned clones of PierLuigi Frémont to target. That honor went to Crater de Gerlache’s sister city, Sverdrup Crater, whose dome towered over the entire area. Rather than confining itself to the actual crater, the founders of the City of Sverdrup Crater saw the gigantic hole in the ground as the beginning of their city, rather than the thing that contained it.
Until ten days ago, when one of those damned clones blew a hole in the multi-faceted dome, Sverdrup Crater had been one of the prettiest cities on the Moon.
Deshin hadn’t even stopped there on his way to Crater de Gerlache. Usually he took a bullet train and spent a few days in Sverdrup before steeling himself for Crater de Gerlache, but this time, he brought his own transportation.
He suspected he would do that for a while, after his Anniversary Day experience.
Still, as his shuttle flew over Sverdrup, he couldn’t help but look at the broken edges of the dome. Pieces littered the ground between Sverdrup and the open Shackleton Crater. He would wager some pieces even went into Shackleton, which probably caused energy corporations turmoil. They used Shackleton to collect (and ship) energy from various natural sources—solar energy from Shackleton’s rim, and other forms of energy from the cold trap in the eternal darkness of its interior.
He didn’t know all the details, only that Shackleton had always been too important to the Moon to inhabit. That was why Sverdrup and Crater de Gerlache were founded in the first place; they had originally housed the workers from two different Earth countries (back when they competed for business centuries ago), and then became domed cities in their own right.
Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel Page 9
