Vigilantes

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “I thought S3 gave you all injunctions against harming those clones,” Flint said.

  “Yeah,” Nyquist said. “They enjoined us, the authorities. But these masterminds of yours—”

  “They’re not mine,” Flint said, beginning to regret coining the term.

  “—they seem to know how every single system we have on the Moon works. They might be able to get someone or something into the Reception Center and take care of the clones.”

  Flint didn’t like the sound of that. He sighed, thinking about it. These masterminds weren’t above using bombs and causing a lot of collateral damage.

  “They might attack the clones when they get into court, as well.”

  “If they get into court,” Nyquist said. His smile was long gone. “This is a major mess.”

  “Yeah,” Flint said. “But we’re making headway. You said you got other information?”

  Nyquist half-smiled again. “I did. It turns out that Uzvaan wanted to talk. I didn’t get to half my questions before the guards shut me down, but I’ll go back.”

  “What else did he tell you?” Flint asked.

  “That’s stuff Noelle can investigate or have her pet Earth Alliance investigators look into it,” Nyquist said. “I just didn’t want them to know about the masks.”

  “Even Noelle?” Flint asked.

  Nyquist let out a small sigh. Then he shrugged. “It bugs me, how many systems these masterminds know,” he said. “And how we ignored those damn Peyti clones. We assumed that because they were lawyers, they were going to follow the law.”

  “They did,” Flint said. “Right up until the day they stopped. We had no reason to distrust them.”

  “I know.” Nyquist ran a hand over his face. “I never liked Uzvaan. I thought he was a good lawyer, but I never liked him.”

  “I’m sure there are a lot of people you don’t like who are trustworthy,” Flint said.

  Nyquist’s gaze met his. Flint could read the thought without Nyquist putting it into words. Nyquist wouldn’t be here if he thought Flint untrustworthy. The respect between the two men was clear. The friendship—or even the “liking” as Nyquist had put it—wasn’t.

  “Still,” Flint said. “It might be worthwhile to tell me.”

  “Uzvaan gave me the name of his mentor at the Impossibles. It was a human woman, and she protected him from that failure thing that happens to most attorneys there. It might mean nothing.”

  “It might mean everything,” Flint said.

  “The masks are a tangible lead,” Nyquist said, taking over the investigation. “The mentor might mean nothing at all—and the information is decades old.”

  In other words, Nyquist would prefer it if Flint investigated the masks first. Nyquist was trying to direct Flint’s investigation, and if Flint were feeling just a little more contrary, he would prevent it.

  But he agreed with Nyquist: the masks were a better lead. And combined with the information about the law schools, he might be able to find the masterminds through channels they never even considered.

  “And here’s the other piece of information that you need to know,” Nyquist said. “I’m going to get Popova to double-check it all, but Uzvaan told me the corporation or entity or whatever you want to call it that paid for his law school was some damn Peyti word that means legal fiction.”

  Flint wasn’t sure he heard that correctly. “What?”

  “That’s what I said. Apparently the word has many meanings. But that’s the one that Uzvaan, at least, prefers. I asked him if law schools thought it odd that a company called ‘legal fiction’ paid the bills and he said he had no idea.”

  Flint let out a long breath, not sure if he believed what Nyquist told him, and not sure he could disbelieve it.

  “I’m going to play you something,” Nyquist said. “Record it when I do. Maybe you can use the sound.”

  Flint recorded everything that transpired in this office, at least when there were verbal conversations, so he didn’t have to worry about it being recorded. However, he wasn’t sure he wanted Nyquist to know that.

  So Flint made a show of setting up a recording.

  He nodded when he was ready.

  Nyquist touched a chip on his hand. A voice Flint half-recognized said, Who created us? This I do not know, at least, not exactly. I do know that a corporation titled… and then a Peytin word resounded in the room, followed by, The name has many translations, but I believe that the one the corporation’s founders intended was a little known meaning for the phrase. It is ‘legal fiction.’

  Flint met Nyquist’s gaze. “Do you think he’s making this up?”

  “I don’t know what the Peyti are capable of,” Nyquist said. “I investigated the meaning myself on the way over here, and got all kinds of translations for the phrase. It’s a Peyti idiom that, in some of the southern regions of Peyla used to mean legal fiction, decades ago. So he’s not lying there. I’m going to play this for Popova when I get to Noelle’s office, and see what she says.”

  “You’ll need that other expert of Noelle’s—what’s her name?—Rastigan?” Flint said.

  Nyquist nodded. “I plan to do that. But you might be able to get into some databases with that recorded word, maybe even find how the thing is spelled in Peytin, and scan for that.”

  “I’m not sure what I’d find,” Flint said, “since I don’t read Peytin.”

  “But the system—” Nyquist held up his hands and shook his head. “What do I know? You know how to search for everything, and I don’t know how to search for anything. But, I figured, you’d need this for the law school part of the investigation.”

  Flint smiled at him. Another breakthrough, no matter how they used it.

  “Yeah, I will,” he said. “Thank you.”

  And now he had recorded it in some different places. He wondered what he would find when he used it.

  He had a lot of work ahead of him, but it was, as Nyquist said, work Flint was uniquely qualified to do.

  “Should you let Noelle know about the threat to the clones?” Flint asked.

  “I’ll tell her in person,” Nyquist said. “It’s not going to go over well, particularly after that incident with S3.”

  Flint nodded. His mind was already on the searches he had to do. He leaned over the screen in front of him, and started searching the home addresses of the clones. He began with Uzvaan because that was a name he knew. Once he found it, he searched for delivery information to Uzvaan’s home, looking for a regular package.

  “How often do the Peyti replace their masks?” he asked.

  “Uzvaan said they got the packets quarterly,” Nyquist said.

  Flint nodded. That made the search even easier. At least for the delivery. He would cross-reference against deliveries to some of the other clones.

  “Can I help?” Nyquist asked.

  Flint didn’t want Nyquist touching his systems. “Maybe, but not here.”

  Nyquist half-smiled again, as if he had expected that response. “Okay,” he said. “Rather than duplicate the effort, you tell me when I need to do the footwork.”

  “Deal,” Flint said, monitoring both screens.

  “And if you need my help you say so.”

  Flint nodded.

  “All right,” Nyquist said. “I’ll wait to hear from you.”

  Flint nodded. He looked at the various screens, still scrolling the information he had plugged into them earlier. The screen to his left, the one he had searching for deliveries to Uzvaan, had a list that ran hundreds of items long.

  Hundreds, instead of millions.

  He found himself smiling as well. He had a hunch this was finally going to work.

  EIGHTEEN

  SENG PACED THE tiny office that Torkild Zhu had given her before he died. She had a single window and it overlooked the street, but she still didn’t see emergency vehicles or any kind of authority show up.

  Her stomach twisted.

  She’d managed to reach someone at
S3 on Athena Base, who wouldn’t really listen to her.

  If you want to talk about S3 On The Moon, that idiot had said, you need to contact Rafael Salehi, and he’ll be unavailable for another day or two. Or perhaps you should contact S3 On The Moon directly.

  After too many back-and-forths, she had managed to convince the idiot that she was dealing with an emergency. She wanted to contact Rafael Salehi directly, but all the idiot would give her, besides the contact information for the damn office Seng was standing in, was the public line to the ship that Salehi was traveling on.

  Then it had been some crew member, followed by a pilot, followed—finally!—by a junior associate, who seemed to know what she was doing. She promised that Salehi would contact Seng, and then broke the link.

  Seng had promised herself that if she didn’t hear in the next fifteen minutes, she’d go through the entire rigmarole again.

  A holoscreen rose in her office. She hadn’t even known that this office had that kind of capability. The screen flicked on, showing an ostentatious S3 logo, followed by a privacy gray background. The privacy background made sure that whoever was looking at the hologram would only see what the sender wanted and nothing more.

  A man, slender to the point of gaunt, appeared human-sized where the screen had been. He wore a gray suit, with black highlights that set off his close-cropped black hair and accented the hollowness of his cheekbones.

  “Rafael Salehi,” he said curtly. “You wanted to speak to me.”

  Seng’s mouth went dry. She licked her lips and almost made herself smile before she remembered that a smile was inappropriate. His manner made her nervous.

  Of course it did. He was the head of one of the biggest law firms in the entire Alliance.

  “Melcia Seng,” she said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I didn’t know where else to turn.”

  He tilted his head slightly, as if urging her to continue.

  “Mr. Zhu is dead,” she said. “He was murdered only a couple of hours ago, and we’ve been running into trouble….”

  Salehi’s dusky skin grew darker. A frown formed between his eyes. “Murdered?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Right outside this building. And it’s awful, Mr. Salehi. He said that you would be here tomorrow, but we need something today—”

  “Murdered by whom?” Salehi’s voice was calm, but his eyes weren’t. They had grown almost black.

  “I can send you the security footage,” she said. “It might get hacked along the way, but I can try.”

  “Try,” he said. “Use the connection we have now.”

  She sent the security vid, knowing he wouldn’t even get it for a few minutes, let alone have a chance to see it.

  She lowered her voice, even though she doubted anyone else was able to hear. “It was the police,” she said. “They beat him and left him for dead, and then no one responded to our distress calls. The coroner says that if someone had showed up on time, Mr. Zhu would still be alive.”

  Salehi’s chin went up. It was as if the mourning posture he’d had a moment ago faded away, and he became a high powered lawyer, all in one movement.

  “The coroner said?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I recorded it and so did two of the other new hires. They’re downstairs recording everything. I made them. I figured if the police are at fault, then we need a record, but I don’t know what to do from there, sir. I didn’t know Mr. Zhu well, but I can’t think what he did to deserve this.”

  “And you received no hints from the security footage?” Salehi asked.

  “The coroner said that Mr. Zhu was hated for the injunctions. The coroner made it sound like it had something to do with the Peyti clones, but Mr. Zhu told me he’s from the Moon, and I don’t want to jump to any conclusions—”

  “Don’t worry,” Salehi said. “You won’t have to jump. I’ll take care of that.”

  He sounded grim.

  “When will you be here, sir? Because I’m not sure what to do next.”

  His gaze met hers. His eyes were so dark that she couldn’t see any light reflected in them at all. She wondered if that was a trick of the projection or if his eyes really were like that.

  “I’ll be there tomorrow at the latest,” he said. “Will you still be at the office?”

  In other words, he was asking her if she was going to stay with S3.

  “I don’t know about the others,” she said, “but I’m staying. I’m pretty mad about this, sir. They shouldn’t have treated him like that. Not just the beating—y’know, rogue cops. That stuff has happened throughout time—but it seems like the whole system conspired to let Mr. Zhu bleed out on the pavement.”

  “You didn’t notice him right away?” Salehi asked.

  Interesting question at that point. He wanted to know if she was part of the bleed out.

  “I—he—I—he sent a message, sir, and it took me a minute to understand he was sending for help. So I searched for him. I found him downstairs ten minutes after I received that message. My colleagues went down with me, and they tell me he was already dead, but the coroner says he could have been revived if an ambulance had arrived on time.”

  “How long did it take for an ambulance to arrive?”

  She shrugged. She hadn’t checked the exact time stamp. “I have it all recorded. Every moment of it. We can document it, minute by minute, and add the coroner’s comments. I believe him, sir. I think that something’s really wrong here.”

  “Torkild Zhu,” Salehi said, his tone soft. “How was he before this? Scared?”

  She wasn’t prepared for the shift in tone. She frowned. “I just met him yesterday, sir, but he seemed…overworked, a little scattered, glad that a team of us had come on board. We had a lot to do and we were going to get to it this morning, and I have no idea what to do next, sir, I really don’t.”

  Salehi straightened his shoulders as if he were seeing her for the first time.

  “Keep recording, keep documenting,” he said. “I’ll take care of the rest when I get there. Don’t give out any materials, even if the police ask for them, and if you have someone who can set up protections on the building’s security feeds, have them do so immediately. We don’t want any information to disappear, do you understand me?”

  She did. He was afraid all evidence of this crime would get covered up before he arrived.

  “What are you going to do when you get here?” she asked.

  His eyes glinted. He looked dangerous to her, and she almost took a step back.

  “I’m going to get justice for Torkild,” Salehi said. “No matter what it takes.”

  NINETEEN

  SURPRISINGLY, HIS GOOD mood was holding.

  Nyquist bounced on his heels as he waited for the elevator to reach the top floor of the United Domes of the Moon Security Office. He wasn’t quite smiling—he wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to smile these days—but he wasn’t frowning either.

  The doors slid open and he stepped into the main area, waggled his fingers at Rudra Popova, who seemed startled, and nodded toward DeRicci’s door.

  “She in?” he asked.

  “Yes, but—”

  He didn’t wait for DeRicci to finish whatever it was that she was doing. He opened the door, stepped inside, and stopped, as startled by the mess as he had been every single time he had come here since the Peyti Crisis.

  DeRicci’s office covered most of the top floor of the Security building. Dome Daylight poured in the floor-to-ceiling windows, which would have made the room exceptionally bright and comfortable if it weren’t for the mess that surrounded everything else.

  Food containers were piled high on a desk near the door. Fortunately, the containers had self-cleaning nanolining so they didn’t smell (that badly). Behind them, the weapons cabinet that he insisted she have remained closed. He wondered if she had ever opened it. She could still get to it, despite the mess.

  A pile of clothing rose like a mountain from behind DeRicci’s desk, explaini
ng why she never seemed to have anything to wear anymore. Desks and computers and chairs were scattered haphazardly around the large plants that had once been decoratively placed, back in the days when an office could be a showroom and a workspace.

  But DeRicci spent most of her waking hours here, and since she rarely slept more than four hours per night, this had become her actual home.

  He had forgotten to bring her food—something he’d been doing on a regular basis. The moment he realized it, he sent a message through his links to Popova:

  If you order us all lunch, I’ll pay for it.

  She sent back, Already done, Detective, when I realized you arrived without your customary bag of goodies.

  He wasn’t quite sure how to take that, so he smiled and let it pass over him. He was still scanning for DeRicci when she crawled out from under a desk.

  “Got it,” she muttered.

  “Got what?” he asked, and she jumped.

  “God, Bartholomew,” she said. “You could have warned me.”

  “And you should have heard your door open and close,” he said. “What did you get?”

  She held up something between her thumb and forefinger, something so small that he couldn’t tell what it was.

  “I lost this earring on Anniversary Day,” she said. “I finally found it, embedded in the carpet.”

  So it had been six months at least since this place was properly cleaned. He could believe that. It had a slightly funky locker room smell, despite the abundant nanocleaners that were probably working overtime to keep this place as clean as possible.

  DeRicci herself looked as ragged as the office. When he’d met her, she’d been slightly heavier than she probably should have been. She’d had “soft edges,” he liked to call it, and now she was all edge. She was so thin that he could see her bones. They were particularly prominent in her shoulders and neck. He had grown used to the sharp contours of her cheeks; they made her eyes seem even bigger.

  “I take it you’re done with Uzvaan?” she asked.

  “For today,” he said. “I hope to get back there tomorrow.”