Consequences

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  DeRicci hadn’t realized how hungry she was; it had been more than twelve hours since she had eaten anything.

  She had come back to her office after meeting with Paloma and dug into the systemic research herself. DeRicci stayed late, fiddling with systems she never normally thought about. Finally, at one a.m., she called one of the computer guys in Tech and asked for some assistance.

  If Flint was on the up and up, DeRicci had decided on the way back, he would have left something for her—a message, something encoded, something that would allow her to believe that he wasn’t involved with the murders.

  Maybe even something small.

  She had found nothing in her own system, and neither had the tech. He had gone back to his own office, and DeRicci had continued to look, feeling discouraged.

  Then the tech had called her through the departmental link. He said he’d found a note that seemed like an internal memo, although everyone in his area denied writing it. Attached to the note was a version of the apartment building security vid, stripped and analyzed.

  The tech took his version of the security vid, did his own stripping, and decided the note was correct.

  All of this sounded mysterious to DeRicci, so the tech sent her the vid himself.

  “You gotta watch it a few times to understand it,” he said.

  He uploaded the same damn security vid that she had been looking at—the one with Flint or his look-alike cousin—going to the Lahiri apartment dressed in all black. She watched it until her eyes grew tired. Finally, she had transferred the image to her wall screen, and that was when she saw it—the shaky image at the beginning, the changes in the elevator door that couldn’t have been caused by a continuous loop recording, but had showed, quite clearly, that the vid tape had been tampered with.

  Everything, then, on the vid she’d watched was fake—or at least recorded over something else. Or screwed up in some way.

  Which made the ties to Flint suspect at best.

  Someone did want him out of the way.

  That got her even more focused, and made her think about the security in the Lahiris’ building. If the security in the building had been so fine, how come the Lahiris’ themselves hadn’t had good security?

  DeRicci had spent the next five hours searching all the downloads stored in the department files for the Lahiri security vids. It wasn’t until Passolini had arrived at seven a.m. that DeRicci had finally gotten some satisfaction.

  “There aren’t any,” Passolini said. “The Lahiri system shut off.”

  “It what?” DeRicci had asked.

  “Weeks ago, before anything happened.”

  DeRicci then told her about the tampered hallway vid, and Passolini cursed, promising to get back to her. DeRicci hoped Passolini’s team could find something, after DeRicci pointed them in the right direction.

  It took time, but Passolini finally returned with a partial security vid from the Lahiri apartment. The vid came from one camera and had no sound—showing an assassin that DeRicci would have thought impossible, except that she had seen a few of them at the riot the day before.

  That was when she had staggered out for some coffee and something to eat, to give her mind a chance to review everything.

  DeRicci took another donut, then poured herself some sludge and drank it like it was fresh-brewed. She leaned against the table, her hands shaking—not from the caffeine, but from exhaustion.

  Passolini figured that Flint had tampered with all of the security vids, but DeRicci didn’t. She’d make a report to that effect. Flint was talented with computers, but he wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t make one vid to implicate himself and another to vindicate himself. And he certainly wouldn’t make the vid that vindicated him hard to find.

  What DeRicci didn’t like was the suggested tie to the riot the day before. Had the killer been at the riots? Had he started it? Was all of the Etae stuff happening in Armstrong connected to the Lahiris, and if so, how?

  She had no idea. Her brain was moving as slowly as the sludge she was calling coffee. She was going to keep this part of the investigation from Gumiela for as long as possible.

  Gumiela was already upset about the political implications of the murders. She would certainly hate any ties to the riot—and maybe to intergalactic politics.

  DeRicci took one more donut, then headed back to her office. She would make a personal report and log it into the private area of her server, password-protecting it. The only reason she was logging it in was so that she could prove to Gumiela what she knew and when she knew it.

  But she needed to keep the information to herself. She wanted to control how the department responded to this crime. She didn’t want Gumiela taking off and going after Flint, or making some kind of press announcement and scaring the city about the Lahiris’ killer.

  And, DeRicci hoped, without stating it aloud (even thinking it made her nervous), that Flint had gone somewhere to prove that someone else had killed the Lahiris.

  That was how she decided to live with all that she had learned in the last few days.

  She was tired of believing that Miles Flint would run.

  Forty-five

  The chef part of Nitara hated what she had done to her kitchen. Liquids, flammables piled on top of her two ranges, the smaller cookstoves scattered about the room like tiny bombs.

  Such a mess.

  No one would ever cook here again.

  If her estimates were right—and she was rusty; she could be off by quite a bit—then no one would cook anywhere on this entire block again.

  If the dome survived.

  She turned around and around, a tiny dervish in a room that was filled with the work of her long night. The restaurant didn’t look like hers any longer.

  She didn’t look like herself any longer.

  She wasn’t herself, not really.

  Or maybe she was more herself. She didn’t know.

  And it didn’t matter. Her staff had tried to take her home. For a while, she had thought she would have to go with them, to coddle them, let them believe she was all right.

  Her lie about the riot—was it a lie? She had been there, after all, and that was where she got the blood on her cheeks—had convinced them she was injured or in shock or at least not thinking clearly, when she was thinking clearer than she had in a long, long time.

  If she hadn’t been thinking clearly, she wouldn’t have been able to reorganize an entire restaurant in the space of a night. A long night, but an important one.

  She had only few more things to do.

  First, she had to let everyone know why this happened. She wanted them to know these were the dangers the Alliance faced if the current Etaen government joined up. She wanted to stop Anatolya Döbryn, and this was the best way to do it.

  Nitara had stumbled on her new plan yesterday, through all the news coverage. Blame the Etaens, the current ones. Some of them were missing, the “terrorists,” as they were being called.

  Such a small word for the horrors these people had inflicted on others. Terror was finite, an emotion which ended.

  What she had learned about herself in the last few weeks was that some things never ended. They just got buried, to be called up later, when they could no longer be suppressed.

  Her family was dead, everywhere but in her heart. Just because they had been part of the government, part of the government that Döbryn had destroyed, didn’t mean they had to be destroyed. But they were.

  And she had survived it—so that she could get revenge.

  She walked into the main part of the restaurant—lights dimmed, windows shaded, door locked—and over to the public link. Eventually, they’d trace where the message came from, but it would make no difference. Anyone could send a message on a public link.

  She had been thinking of the wording all night. She punched in the message rather than speaking it, keeping the vid screen off, and then timed the message to be delivered one hour from now.

  It would be sent imm
ediately, but the recipients wouldn’t know it had arrived for an hour. She so loved technology.

  Technology would help her now.

  Then she went back into her kitchen—or what was left of her kitchen—and took a deep breath. She climbed the chairs she had stacked beside her favorite range, then grabbed the lighter she had placed on a rafter near the top.

  She studied the lighter for a moment. It was long-handled, ornate, something she’d bought on many of her cooking trips to Earth. Every chef needs a lighter, one of her teachers had said. Patrons love dramatic food.

  That was when she had learned that drama caught the attention like nothing else.

  She clenched the lighter in her right hand, waiting for the remorse, the guilt, the moment when she would change her mind and become the Nitara Nicolae that everyone in Armstrong knew.

  But that moment never came. And after a good five minutes of waiting, she extended her arm, placed the lighter next to the fuel she had poured so liberally over her combustibles, and flicked her thumb.

  The flame seemed so tiny at first, so powerless. One tiny soul against the darkness.

  Then it grew, traveling across the fuel until something ignited in a pile of sparks.

  So beautiful. So destructive. So tempting.

  She was reaching for the flame when the bomb she made out of her kitchen finally blew.

  Forty-six

  The entire building shook.

  DeRicci stumbled and fell to her knees, the coffee sloshing in her cup and spilling on her thighs. At least it wasn’t hot. Just lukewarm and thick, uncomfortable—a horrible mess. The donut she’d been holding slipped through her fingers, and it rolled along the floor.

  The building continued to shake, and she heard something—a concussion? Something loud—and then the lights went out.

  She caught the edge of her desk with her now-empty donut hand and pulled herself up, wiping at the wetness on her thighs.

  A thud resounded so loudly that it shook the building a third time. And then a fourth, and a fifth and a sixth.

  Someone screamed down the hall, and that released a cacophony of screams. DeRicci wanted to yell at them to shut up, but she didn’t.

  Instead she sent an emergency message along her links, only to realize that the odd clarity she felt was because her links were down. That silence she heard was something she had missed these last few months when Gumiela insisted DeRicci keep her emergency links on at all time.

  DeRicci tried to reestablish her links, but nothing worked. They were off, and it wasn’t even her fault.

  She thought she heard more thuds, but they didn’t shake the building. It was so dark inside that she couldn’t even see her hand. She couldn’t see shapes. She thought she had been facing the window, and then she frowned.

  It didn’t matter if she had been facing the window or not. If the window was sending light into the room, she’d see it, no matter what direction she faced.

  “Son of a bitch,” she muttered.

  She tottered toward her window, felt the cool plastic. No blinds were drawn, no privacy shades had automatically closed against the fake glass.

  The dome had gone dark—and it was Dome Day.

  A shiver ran down her back. Something had gone very, very wrong.

  DeRicci wiped her hands on the sides of her pants, then extended them in front of her, moving like a blind person through her office.

  Her left thigh hit her desk, and she cursed as pain ran along the muscle. Then she stepped on something squishy and backed off, afraid the squishy thing would cry out in pain.

  It didn’t. It couldn’t, of course. It had been her donut.

  That made her smile. Absurd. She had always thought people acted absurdly in an emergency and now she was doing it.

  She continued to cross the room, and got to her door, pulling it open.

  The screaming had quit, for the most part, except some hysterical shouting a floor down from hers. What worried her was the moaning from the center of the main room.

  “It’s okay,” she said, “I’m coming.”

  And she walked toward the pile of desks that the baby detectives used, hoping she wasn’t going to step on anyone, hoping that everything would be all right.

  The floor was covered with debris—things that had fallen from desks, maybe ceiling tiles—she couldn’t tell, not in this darkness.

  Then, as if the gods above had heard that thought, the lights came back on—not all of them, and not real well. They were a sickly gray, making the entire office look like something from a badly recorded security vid.

  That thought made her even more nervous, and she continued to head toward the whimpering.

  “It’s okay,” she said again. “I’m here.”

  Here turned out to be two desks down. A cabinet had fallen on a pair of legs. She was sure the legs were attached to someone, but she didn’t know who, and she didn’t try to figure that out. Instead, she levered the cabinet, raised it up just enough that the whimperer could get out.

  “Can you roll?” DeRicci asked, but the whimperer crawled instead, pulling herself forward on her arms until her legs were free.

  “Oh god,” the woman said. DeRicci didn’t recognize her—a woman with streaky makeup and the look of someone who didn’t belong. “Are we going to die?”

  “No,” DeRicci said, but she didn’t know. She’d never seen the lights go out in the dome before. She didn’t even know what would cause it.

  Or would cause something as big as this building to shake, not once, but repeatedly.

  For the first time in her life, DeRicci hated not being hooked up. She wanted information at the touch of a thought, and she wanted it now.

  But she was alone in her head, and she didn’t want to be.

  She wanted everything back the way it had been just a moment before.

  Somehow she doubted that would happen any time soon.

  Forty-seven

  The blackness was so complete that Anatolya could see nothing. Debris rained on the bed each time the building shook.

  She stopped counting the shakings, even though they were being caused by something exterior—not an earthquake or something belowground. She’d experienced enough of those on the volcanic islands near the Idonae’s original settlements on Etae to know the difference.

  These shakes were being caused by something big, something powerful, something designed to make things shake—some kind of concussion, maybe. A series of bombs landing nearby. Weaponry.

  A bombardment.

  Which, she suddenly realized, shouldn’t have been possible unless the dome had been breached.

  Wouldn’t that have caused a sound all by itself? An explosive decompression, the way that a ship sounded when something breached its hull?

  She took a tentative sip of air, tasted nothing different, and then rolled over on her stomach.

  The shaking stopped.

  She lay still for what seemed like hours but had to be only minutes. No more shakes. No lights, no environmental controls—the air smelled stale—but no shakes either.

  Slowly she got to her feet, hands out, prepared for anything that might fall on or near her.

  Then something banged, and she heard shouting—voices, a dozen voices. They came toward her with a violence that had her shaking.

  She was wrapped in arms before she realized what happened, bundled forward and out of the room, her own arms clasped at her sides.

  The bodies were unfamiliar, the voices too. It wasn’t until she heard them issuing commands back and forth that she knew who had invaded her space.

  The guards.

  They blamed her somehow and they were taking her out of the room—not for her own safety, but for everyone else’s.

  She let herself be dragged. No sense in fighting. They’d realize their mistake soon enough.

  Forty-eight

  Orenda Kreise crawled through the broken art, her hands reaching and often discarding sharp pieces of metal and glass. She t
ried to find the least destructive path, but she knew her knees and palms would be badly carved up before her trip was over.

  The worst part was the way the darkness had descended.

  First there had been that hideous noise—to call it a bang was to minimize it; something tremendously loud and violent—and then the building had shaken.

  The lights went out, and for the first time, she had been grateful for the sunlight filtering in from the Moon’s day.

  Then the building shook again. And again. And the next thing she knew, the sunlight was fading.

  She looked up at the dome attached to the Cultural Center, and watched as darkness spread across it, the way that clouds would cover the sun back on Earth.

  That was when her heart started pounding too hard. Before that, she hadn’t been frightened, despite the falling statuary and the crashing picture frames.

  She shouldn’t have come here. She had been getting ready for the meeting later in the day with Anatolya Döbryn, making sure the security was good, after the riots of the day before.

  She was alone in the building, except for the security team, and they had left her alone in the main area while she tried to decide where to put the tables.

  Was the security team all right now? They were in the entry, which was filled with just as much artistic junk. These buildings weren’t designed to be earthquake proof—so far as she knew, the Moon wasn’t subject to quakes.

  But she wasn’t sure.

  She wasn’t sure about anything.

  The dust from the shattered sculptures rose around her like a storm, swirling.

  She stopped crawling, bowed her head, and wrapped her arms around her face.

  Too late, of course. Her eyes were already burning, and her lungs ached.

  She was going to die here, among broken art she hated in a city she hated even more.

  Alone.

  In the darkness.

  For a reason she might never, ever understand.