Consequences

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “It doesn’t matter when they get in,” he said. “I’ll publicize the meeting. I’ll publicize your action, and I’ll tell everyone what kind of killers you let into ‘our’ dome. See whose political career survives then.”

  He didn’t wait for her reaction. He turned, digging his foot into that beautiful rug, and hurried out of the office. As he walked, he sent messages through his links to Londran, asking him to prepare a press conference.

  Soseki would need what little background they had on the “security” team being let into his dome. He would also need a history of Etae, a biography of Döbryn, and a history of Etaen-sponsored terrorism throughout the known universe.

  He wanted Armstrong—hell, he wanted the entire Moon—to know the danger that the governor-general and the Alliance had put them in.

  Seventeen

  Flint kept his screens up. As he watched DeRicci get into her car and sit while she clearly mulled over what to do next, he moved money through his various accounts. He had several dummy accounts that allowed him to transfer funds until they could no longer be traced. He went through four accounts that were numbered only—no names on them, no way to trace back to him—before he hit one of his emergency accounts.

  He moved a large amount of his fortune into that account, just in case he decided to disappear. If he left, he would be able to do it on his own, without an agency, and he would have his own money.

  He also downloaded twenty thousand credits into one of the chips on his hand, so that he would have traveling money if he needed to run right away.

  His mouth was dry. He felt more nervous than he ever had. Even when he had defied Armstrong’s laws and gone against the police department itself, he hadn’t felt this nervous.

  Paloma had warned him this would happen. She had told him that he would break laws he wouldn’t normally dream of breaking. She had also told him that he would become a person he didn’t recognize.

  If Flint ran, he would become that person.

  DeRicci finally started her car and pulled out of the parking lot. Flint wondered what kind of decision she had come to.

  He guessed he would find out soon enough.

  He took a deep breath and focused on the computer in front of him. Before he came to any decision about his own future, he had to have more information. He opened the files he had made on the Lahiris. When he was considering their case, he had tracked them for a long time.

  He had even put tracing devices into their apartment’s systems. His devices had been—at the time—state-of-the-art and untraceable. But they might not be now.

  The Lahiris had excellent home systems. The systems were well hidden, in keeping with the old-fashioned air, but they existed. Their apartment cleaned itself, and they used robotic equipment to serve them when necessary.

  Each movement, each command, left a trace within the system, and if Flint wanted to, he could see what the Lahiris did for every second of every day since he first loaded his spyware into their equipment. He even saw the security scans their system did, searching for security breaches.

  Now he needed to use those tracers to view the current scene inside the apartment. He also had to download the system history, and do so before the police scanned the system. He doubted the police could trace him either, but he had to be cautious nonetheless.

  He brought up a second screen, and turned on the cameras throughout the apartment. That screen also handled sound. On a third screen, he ran the sensory information: he needed to know what the smells were—the system could only give him component molecules, but his own settings would identify the odor—and if anything had changed in the apartment—had the temperature gone up, or were there other molecules in the air, ones that had not been there before?

  Their system would also inform his of any breakdown, and give him an account of the routines and the changes therein. He hoped that the Lahiris would have used audio/visual continually for security’s sake.

  He hoped there was a recording of the murders itself.

  As their system downloaded into his, his second screen went blank. Then the Lahiris’ apartment filled the screen. Each room had its own window, small and square, and he could see people moving inside the bedrooms, the kitchen, and the living area.

  Techs. They were still on-scene.

  Flint had his own system record them. Their conversation might provide him with information; their actions certainly would.

  He searched the windows for the bodies and found them in the living room. He enhanced the window, making it fill the screen.

  The room looked like it had on his visits to the Lahiris. The furniture was fussy, the lighting was too dark for his tastes, and the tables had old legal tomes on them, as if Judge Lahiri had been too snobby to use a link for his legal information.

  Flint had found the place stuffy and repressive, and that sense came through the window, almost as if he were there.

  Only two bodies remained on the floor. One had already been loaded into a SmartBag by the medbot, but the other two lay near each other.

  They were recognizable, their faces slack in death. Dr. Lahiri was covered in blood, her hand open, looking surprisingly vulnerable. Judge Lahiri seemed even frailer than he had in life—an elderly man with no hope of defending himself.

  Too much had been moved. Flint couldn’t tell where the bodies had been, if the blood around them had come from all three or only one, and if anything had been moved prior to the police’s arrival.

  Another large bloodstain covered the floor a few meters from the couple. It had soaked into the hardwood floor, making the wood seem black.

  Flint had no idea how that happened. Dr. Lahiri was phobic about cleanliness. She even had a cleaningbot sweep Flint’s chair when he had stood to leave. Flint had once asked her why she hadn’t bought self-cleaning furniture, and the judge had answered instead of his wife.

  We prefer antiques, he had said with such precision that Flint wondered why the couple had any modern conveniences at all, much less so many. Apparently appearances were more important to them than the actual simpler-era lifestyle.

  The bots should have cleaned, even if the Lahiris were dead. The bots should also have called in the emergency information when they encountered bodies.

  And the apartment itself should have called for police when the first shot was fired, unless the weapon wasn’t recognized by the system. If the weapon had been similar to the one he had given Caroline (or, worst case, if it had been that weapon), the system would definitely have recognized it and sounded the alert.

  Something failed here, and failed spectacularly.

  The techs really weren’t discussing much. Occasionally, they’d ask one another to verify something or move an item. But mostly, they worked in silence.

  Flint left the audio on and studied the sensory information. The air was thick with the smells of decay. It also had a lot of perfume in it. Dr. Lahiri used some natural odorizers in her home, so that the place often smelled of flowers or wood smoke, and she also wore a lot of perfume.

  He found nothing else unusual, at least in the first readings. He would check again, and cross-compare to his old records. If Flint had managed to break into the system, then he had to logically assume that someone else could have, especially someone else on-scene. If that someone else changed the apartment’s computer command structure, that would explain the lack of bots, the dirt, and the failure to note an emergency situation.

  Flint then downloaded the remaining files off the security records. He wanted to see if there were vids, but he wasn’t willing to do so in real time, while his system was open and vulnerable.

  He left the tracking on, set the chips he had planted when he first took the case to record the techs so that he would have a double backup, and then he logged off.

  He had several things to do before he really got deeply involved in this investigation. He had been thinking about it while he had been watching the Lahiri place, and he realized he needed more than th
eir records.

  DeRicci would keep concurrent records of her investigation. He knew she wouldn’t confide in him—not after the way he had dismissed her—but he would need her information if he was going to solve this case.

  Flint leaned back in his chair. He hadn’t realized that he wanted to solve it until now.

  He had the skills for it. He also had more information than DeRicci ever would. Unlike her, he wasn’t bound by Armstrong law or even Alliance law. He would hack into systems with impunity, find out what he could, and then move on.

  He also wanted to know his own culpability—he had been honest with himself about that. And the only way to discover how liable he was—or wasn’t—was to find out the extent of Carolyn Lahiri’s involvement.

  If he did solve it, and found out that this case actually had nothing to do with him, he would somehow send the information to DeRicci. He would even try to make it seem like she had put the information together herself.

  Then he smiled. As if DeRicci would fall for that. She would know where the information came from, even if she couldn’t trace it, and she would double-check it herself.

  And if she believed him, she would act on it.

  But he was getting ahead of himself. First he had to find out who killed the Lahiris, who the third body belonged to, and, with luck, clear himself.

  Eighteen

  She was about to give up. Anatolya Döbryn couldn’t handle the waiting any longer. If she paced this suite any longer, she would literally go insane.

  She was still in the Port, still in the same section they had brought her to shortly after her arrival, only now they had moved her to a suite of rooms.

  Apparently no one liked her pacing in that public waiting area. And no one liked the constant questions she asked.

  She was given a choice: return to her ship and go through the entire decontamination process again, or stay in a private suite at the Alliance’s expense until the matter was settled.

  She had chosen the suite, expecting it to be outside the Port. But Armstrong’s Port had been here forever, and apparently had had time to think of every inconvenience. There were, one of the officials had informed her, several hotels built into the Port itself.

  It almost felt like she was moving backwards, as if all the progress she’d made getting to Armstrong had been for nothing.

  She would have complained to the attaché, Gideon Collier, but he had vanished long before that little Port employee had banished her from the official waiting area.

  Anatolya didn’t even have Collier’s link so that she could inform him where she was going. She had to trust the Port to give him that information.

  For all she knew, this could be an embarrassment set up by the Alliance, to show to her how unworthy Etae’s petition to join was. She had missed the reception they had planned for her, and would probably miss the first meeting as well.

  The suite was nicely apportioned, done in human proportions instead of Disty, like were some of the suites she’d seen on Mars. The furniture was made of a plastic she didn’t recognize—it probably predated the plastics used on Etae—and seemed unusually durable.

  Three rooms composed the suite: a living area, with all sorts of entertainment—almost enough to make a person forget that she was cut off from everyone around her, a bedroom, and a kitchen.

  Anatolya’s off-world links had shut down the moment the ship entered Port—standard procedure in any large port. But she also couldn’t link with anyone outside a small prescribed area within the Port—and that area did not include the dock where her ship waited.

  Nor, apparently, did it include any place Gideon Collier was. A simple page of the area brought no response at all.

  She wasn’t sure how long she’d have to stay here. She peered into the bedroom with its small bed and cheerless gloom, and hoped she wouldn’t have to sleep there. The fact that the tiny kitchen, attached to a larger dining area, had provisions also unnerved her.

  It made her feel like she would be here for the rest of her life.

  Perhaps the problem she had with this treatment was that she wasn’t, by nature, a supplicant. She never had been, and she never would be. She liked to be the one in charge, the one making the decisions, the one in control

  She sat down on the couch and drew her knees to her chest. Etae was ready to join the Alliance, and Etae needed the Alliance. Nearly a century of war had destroyed the planet. The oceans were so heavily polluted that the fish were dying, and none of the decrystallization equipment worked.

  Half the arable land was covered with landmines or had been fallow for so long that it would take a decade of work to revitalize the soil—at least with Etaen technology. And there wasn’t enough food to feed her own people, let alone the ones who had now become subjects under the Etaen accords.

  She had gone from being a military leader to the ruling member of a peacetime council, and she had learned something startling: commanding armies was easier.

  Yes, some of the problems were similar. Soldiers, supply routes, food—food was always an issue. So was water and so were maintaining systems—lights, heat, military equipment.

  But she had been trained to run armies, and her government had always placed a priority on its soldiers. That was one of the reasons she was in power and the previous government was not.

  One of the many reasons.

  But she would lose that power soon if she didn’t find some solutions, and she wasn’t sure she was going to. The only solution that seemed reasonable was joining the Alliance. Alliance members helped each other, and sometimes deferred payment or forewent it altogether.

  And she needed them to forego that money.

  Because one of the many things that Etae lacked was capital. The money had fled the planet long ago, afraid that they’d lose what little they had left.

  No resources, no food, barely enough water, and nothing to sell. She was amazed she had gotten this far.

  And now the Alliance would let the very rich, very comfortable City of Armstrong turn her out without a hearing. They couldn’t judge her people on their backgrounds: Etae had been at war. If her security team was labeled terrorists, she would never get inside Armstrong.

  If they had known that her deputy, Gianni Czogloz, was here, they would never have let her in. Gianni was the man who had ordered the massacre of a thousand then-government soldiers in retaliation for the Child Martyr attack. Gianni hadn’t picked up a weapon in nearly a decade. He now went to the temple every day, asking for forgiveness, trying to find a way to become a man of peace.

  All of her advisors and every member of her security team had terrible pasts. But these people, her friends, had lived a peaceful life since the war ended. She wanted them judged for the past ten years, not the decades before that.

  She envied the established governments; she really did. They had gone through these crisises so long ago that they didn’t remember what it was like. They all had their military leaders—the ones who became great peacetime leaders, whose reputations were rebuilt. Not just the humans, although she could cite example after example from Earth alone, but also the Disty and the Nyyzen, and even the high-and-mighty Peyti.

  All of them had once let reformed killers run their government, and those killers had succeeded.

  She would fail.

  At least on this attempt.

  She stood and was about to contact the port on the wall link when the door opened. Collier hurried in, his hands clasped together and a smile on his narrow little face.

  “Your security team may join us,” he said as the door slid shut behind him.

  She had been so prepared to give up this plan that she wasn’t sure she understood what he had said. “My security team?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry that the whole delegation can’t come, but who’s to know which of your two dozen are security and which aren’t? At least you’ll have some.”

  “Who approved them?”

  “The order came from the
Moon’s governor-general a few moments ago.”

  “The governor-general,” she said, sounding stupid. Feeling stupid too. She hadn’t expected this after her treatment in the Port.

  “Apparently the mayor wasn’t going to let you in. It’s a big to-do, but it’s Moon-based. We don’t have to worry about it.” Collier moved his hands as he talked—the first time he had really done that. He also grinned at her—the first time he had done that too.

  “The Moon’s part of the Alliance,” she said.

  “But this is internal, an argument over procedures and policies. By the time it’s settled, we’ll be long gone.” He inclined his head toward the door. “Are you ready?”

  Past ready. But she didn’t say that. Instead, she smiled at him. “Of course,” she said and walked to the door.

  As it slid open, she asked, “What about my team?”

  “They’re going through decon and the standard entrance procedures just like you did. We’ll wait in a portside restaurant. One of my assistants will bring them to us.”

  Assistants of assistants. Another sign of long-established and long-peaceful civilizations. Döbryn doubted Etae would ever achieve that in her lifetime. But they would get to it someday; she would guarantee it.

  For the first time since she landed on the Moon, she had hope.

  Nineteen

  Flint sat in the back of the Brownie Bar, a bowl of turkey noodle soup beside him. The soup was made with real turkey special-ordered from one of the small farms near Tycho Crater, real noodles, hand-made on the premises with flour imported from Earth, and real vegetables, grown in the greenhouses outside the dome.

  The Brownie Bar could afford real ingredients at all level of its cooking, and sell that food for a reasonable price, because of its clientele. The Brownie Bar catered to marijuana users.