A mayor who wanted to suck up to the woman who was, in reality, in charge of the Moon? Or someone on the mayor’s staff who wanted the prominent visitor to be comfortable?
Or both?
DeRicci didn’t know, and she didn’t entirely care.
She opened the wrapping, found some locally grown produce—purple apples (why purple? What was wrong with red or green, for that matter?), purple grapes, and some kind of fruit she couldn’t identify. She also found an orange with an Earth Alliance label in the peel. She took that instead of the local stuff.
With her heartburn, the last thing she needed was some weird-tasting apple that didn’t agree with her.
She clutched the orange and stared at the apples for a moment. If the bad guys (as her office had started to call the unknown people behind the attacks) wanted to truly disrupt life on the Moon, they shouldn’t have taken out the center of the domes. They should have taken out all the Growing Pits and agri-habitats outside the various domes.
They should have knocked out the food supply.
She supposed that would have been harder because all of those greenhouses and grow-plants and hydroponic warehouses were so well guarded.
And fewer people would have died.
She stood up, playing catch with that orange. Fewer people would have died in the short term. In the long term, everyone would have suffered. But they would have trusted the governments to take care of it. And it wouldn’t have taken more than a few days to get relief supplies from Earth or Mars or both.
Still, the disruption would have been profound. And long-lasting. It would have taken years to rebuild the food supply, costing the domes millions.
Not that these attacks wouldn’t cost millions. They would. But the surviving populations still ate well, and in the smaller cities and towns, they went about their lives as if nothing had happened.
No, what had happened on Anniversary Day was designed to murder as many people as possible.
The attacks on the mayors and on Celia Alfreda showed what the true intent was: It was to disrupt the governments down to their core.
To make the Moon completely non-functional. And to keep fear alive.
To make people do rash things, like consult with known criminals.
“Damn it, Miles,” she muttered. She hated it when he went around her. He had done it more often than she liked to think about.
She set the orange on the bar.
What was she accomplishing here? What would she accomplish in those other cities besides making her heartburn worse, making her guilt worse?
She needed to appoint someone to handle the cleanup Moonwide. She needed a coordinator, someone who would glad-handle the surviving mayors and the interim-mayors, someone who was better at fielding sob stories and combining those with real action, getting plans approved, getting the rebuilding started.
The sooner the rebuilding got underway, the better for everyone.
She picked up the orange and put it back in the gift basket. She was going to go down to the hotel restaurant for dinner. She would have a good, warm, healthy meal, with no alcohol, and then she would have her travel assistant change her plans.
Tomorrow morning, she was heading home.
And then she would deal with Miles Flint.
Eighteen
She wasn’t supposed to leave her dad’s office, but she was hungry. Talia regretted turning down her dad’s offer of dinner before he left on his mysterious errands. She had been mad at him—he hadn’t really taken her side in that whole school-fight thing. He said he admired her for standing up for friends, but maybe she should have thought twice about the time and the venue. After all, things were dicey for everyone right now.
She knew what he meant: He worried that in the heat of the moment, she would reveal her own status as a clone.
He had left it all up to her. She could tell everyone who she was or not, what her life had been like back in Valhalla Basin or not, that she was adopted and her dad’s biological child or not.
So far, she had chosen to keep her background quiet. In fact, she couldn’t see a time when she would reveal it, especially now, when tempers were so high. Since she couldn’t imagine ever telling anyone who she was, she couldn’t imagine letting the information slip in the heat of the moment either.
But she didn’t reassure her dad about that. It irritated her that he worried about it, that he didn’t trust her on this thing.
She had draped herself over her favorite chair, niggling at her homework. Ms. Rutledge had assigned everyone a written essay about bigotry and violence, due the following morning.
Talia hated writing. She saw no point in it. She always did vid essays whenever possible. But this time, Ms. Rutledge had said there’d been too much talking. She wanted everyone to quietly reflect on all that had happened, and perhaps learn from their mistakes.
Yeah, right. Like an essay would do that.
Talia had done some research, not that it helped. Her brain really wasn’t on the science of bigotry. She wanted to keep looking for information about PierLuigi Frémont, or learn something new about Anniversary Day to prevent the new attacks.
Only her dad had told her she couldn’t do anything without him present. He was afraid she’d leave a trail.
If she were honest with herself, she was afraid of that too. She’d left one before, when she was looking for her sister clones. She’d found several of them living very different lives from her, and then her dad told her about the risk she had put them under.
He had helped her bury her tracks, but too late. She had set off a different kind of investigation—not into the cloning her mother had done, but into one of the cloning companies.
She had learned her lesson then, although her dad was afraid that all she had learned was how to cover her tracks better.
On the small stuff, he was right; she did cover her tracks better. But now she left the big stuff for him.
And anything to do with Anniversary Day was the big stuff.
She sighed and set down the pad she’d been noodling on. What she really wanted to do was write a history of Kaleb Lamber’s family, with a focus on their bigotry. But she knew that Ms. Rutledge wouldn’t allow it.
This was one of those moments when Talia wished she had really good friends so she could at least share the idea with someone who would appreciate it, someone who wouldn’t tell on her.
She stood, and debated for a brief moment. Her dad wanted her to stay in the room, but he couldn’t regulate bodily functions like that. She had to leave for the bathroom, so it followed that she could head to the in-house kitchen area too, just to make herself a snack.
She supposed she could ask Rudra Popova to bring her something, but as her dad had told her repeatedly, Popova wasn’t her assistant. She was Noelle DeRicci’s assistant and as such, she had a really important job, more important than running errands for teenage girls.
She pulled open the door and looked around her. No one in the corridors. Of course, she couldn’t tell if someone was monitoring the surveillance cameras. Someone probably was, but she wasn’t going to do anything technically wrong—at least not by Security Building standards. She was only going to do something wrong by her dad’s standards, and then only if she couldn’t argue her way out of it.
The kitchen was to her left. She made a detour into the bathroom so that she could use it as an excuse (and just plain use it), then she headed to heat up something good. She’d learned over the past few months that there was always something yummy here, which her dad (and Detective Nyquist) said was unusual for a government building.
The kitchen was a small room, almost an afterthought, to the right of one of the other offices. A large refrigerator held a lot of fresh foods, the kind that were really expensive elsewhere in Armstrong. A cook-to-order unit had a basic menu, but right next to it stood an actual stove with a warning that flashed whenever someone touched it. The warning informed the user that they had to know how to operate the stov
e before trying anything.
Talia knew how to operate a stove—she’d learned from her mother years ago—but that warning on this stove always scared her silly. She opened the refrigerator door to see if someone had left something prepared, something she could reheat.
“Your father works here, doesn’t he?”
Talia jumped. She hadn’t realized that anyone else had come into the room.
She closed the door and turned around. A slender woman with wedge-cut black hair leaned against the wall, arms crossed. Her hair had reddish purple highlights that matched the trim on her black suit.
The woman smiled, then leaned forward, hand extended. “I’m Wilma Goudkins.”
Talia stared at the outstretched hand, like she had seen her father do when he didn’t approve of the person who owned it.
Goudkins finally pulled her hand back, then smiled again, softly. She probably thought the smile was conciliatory. Instead, it seemed embarrassed. “And you are?”
“I’ve never seen you before,” Talia said coldly. She wasn’t about to tell any stranger who she was.
“I haven’t been here long,” Goudkins said.
“Obviously.” Talia looked her over carefully, didn’t see any weapons, and so turned around. She opened the refrigerator door again.
“There’s a leftover meat pie,” Goudkins said.
The meat pie did look good, but Talia wasn’t about to take it now. She removed an orange, then closed the door. She leaned over to the cook-to-order unit, punched in the number for the only thing that tasted remotely like food, and hoped it wouldn’t take long.
She wasn’t fond of the cook-to-order taquitos, but they were better than nothing.
“So you’re here often enough that you don’t have to put an ID into the cook-to-order unit,” Goudkins said.
Talia rolled her eyes, happy her back was still to the woman. No one had set up the identification part of the cook-to-order unit because everyone figured that only authorized personnel would be on this floor. But again, she wasn’t going to say that.
The unit beeped. Talia opened the drawer and removed six steaming taquitos. They smelled good, which told her just how hungry she was. Normally those things smelled like dirty socks.
“Are they any good?” Goudkins asked.
“Why would I make something that isn’t good?” Talia asked. She put the taquitos on a tray and then added the orange. She grabbed a bottle of water, and carried it all to the door.
Instead of saying “excuse me” or politely asking Goudkins to move, Talia just waited. Finally, Goudkins smiled that uncertain smile again, and stepped to one side.
Talia walked past her and headed straight to Popova’s desk. Goudkins probably had a reason to be here, but Talia was hoping she was unauthorized. The woman had annoyed her so much that Talia wanted to see an arrest.
Popova sat at her desk, her long black hair pulled back. She had big circles under her eyes, and she’d lost so much weight that she looked like she might break.
Talia’s dad never said anything about the changes in Popova over the past few months, but Talia had noticed. One of the guards here said that Popova had been in love with the mayor and the mayor’s death nearly broke her.
Talia had offered condolences when she found out. Popova had thanked her, teared up, and left the room. Later, DeRicci made Talia promise not to speak of Popova’s relationship again.
“Hey,” Talia said. “I got some crummy taquitos. You want one?”
Popova lifted her head and smiled. Unlike Goudkins’ smile, this one was filled with good humor. “What an offer. Did they come from the cook-to-order unit?”
“How’d you guess?”
“Why don’t you let me order you something edible from one of the restaurants around here?”
Talia smiled. “Then who would we palm these taquitos off on? That Goudkins woman?”
All the humor left Popova’s face. “Did she talk to you?”
“Yeah,” Talia said. “Is that a problem?”
Popova’s mouth thinned. “What did she want to know?”
“If my dad worked here,” Talia said. “I didn’t answer her. Who is she?”
“One of the investigators the Earth Alliance keeps sending. She’s the most annoying person.” Popova stood, and handed Talia a small pad. “Here’s a list of restaurants that we order from. Just get yourself something.”
“Where are you going?” Talia asked.
“I’m going to tell that woman not to bother us,” Popova said.
“Can I watch?”
Popova frowned at her. “I thought you were hungry.”
“I am, but if she leaves the kitchen, I can heat up something from the fridge.”
Popova laughed. “Come on then. Let’s take care of this problem once and for all.”
Nineteen
H’Jith took a different route to the docking bay. Zagrando had a hunch that the section H’Jith took him to was nowhere near the section where he had initially docked. If he hadn’t already been on alert, he would have become so now.
He had no quick and obvious escape route, and if he hadn’t had a map of the station on his links, he would have been lost. Even so, some of the passages that H’Jith took him through were not on the map.
All of the passages were brightly colored, however, and the colors seemed to have no relation to anything that Zagrando could tell. The earlier passages, through one of the storefronts (if, indeed, that’s what it was) and through a back area, were a deep, rich brown. Then, within the pace of a single step, it became a vibrant lime, followed by a stunning fuchsia. Sometimes the colors accented each other, but most often they clashed. And all of them made H’Jith’s multicolored orange look garish and loud.
Three doors led to the docking ring, but they were a different three doors according to Zagrando’s map. They were a shiny silver with black etchings. He ran the etchings through his universal translation unit (not that it really translated everything, but it knew thousands of languages—ancient and modern), and got no translation at all. Either the etchings were decorative or they belonged to a language the program did not know.
H’Jith took him through the middle door, and they were in the docking area. Unlike most starbases, the docking area did not form a ring, but jutted out of certain sections, like a child’s pouting lower lip.
Like the other docking area, this one had an airlock design as well, but Zagrando saw no guard or anyone who could be mistaken for a guard. He wondered, then, if the other section was for non-sanctioned or non-J’Slik vessels.
H’Jith stopped as they encountered another series of doors.
“I owe you honesty,” H’Jith said. “I do not sell my personal vessels. I only sell certain ships. I do not even have for sale a vessel like my own.”
“That’s all right,” Zagrando said. “I would still like to see yours.”
H’Jith’s tail, which had been slightly off the ground as they walked, settled on the floor with an audible thump.
“Let me at least show you my inventory,” H’Jith said. “You might reconsider once you see the vast selection.”
“I will not buy a ship until I see yours,” Zagrando said.
“I understand,” H’Jith said in a tone that implied it did not understand. “Still, look here.”
It shoved against one of the doors with its left paw, and the door banged open, revealing a gigantic docking bay. Ships of all kinds and sizes extended off into the distance.
Zagrando remained at the door, staring at them. He noted some excellent—if dated—vessels up front, but farther back, he saw models so old he wondered if they could fly.
That sense he’d had from the moment he arrived, that sense of impending doom, finally became clear. He understood now that the risk wasn’t of dying on Hellhole, but dying outside of it.
If he left Whiteley’s ship here, then that ship would become the property of someone like H’Jith—probably of anyone who wanted to take on the Black Fl
eet. If he then bought a ship from H’Jith, H’Jith would know more about that ship than Zagrando. For all Zagrando could tell, the ships here all had flaws that might cause them to stall or break down not too far from Hellhole. Or perhaps they didn’t move quickly and could be easily tracked.
One ship, even with up-to-date weaponry, couldn’t outgun an organized group of ships from Hellhole. And he doubted that the ships for sale here, no matter what their model specifications were, actually had the highest speed range.
He could lose Whiteley’s ship, pay out a small fortune for another ship, and then lose either that ship, all of his funds, or his life as he left Hellhole.
And contacting the Alliance wouldn’t help him. Nor would contacting his handlers, because his handlers wouldn’t be able to get him help quickly enough.
Zagrando wondered if H’Jith had purchased all of the ships here or if they had been stolen from people passing through. Zagrando had a hunch that most of them had been abandoned, like he was about to do with Whiteley’s ship, or stolen according to one of the scenarios he had just come up with.
“You are right,” Zagrando said. He needed to keep control of this meeting. “You have an amazing amount of inventory. But I have a personal policy. I like to see how a ship broker keeps his own ship before deciding to buy something from his inventory.”
“You are a cautious human,” H’Jith said. “Most humans are not that way.”
Zagrando smiled. “I would assume most humans aren’t comfortable on this place and would like to leave quickly.”
That twinkle had returned to H’Jith’s eyes. “You are also a wise human.”
Zagrando bent his head slowly in mock nod, as if flattered by the compliment.
“But,” H’Jith said, “you have made it clear that you have a meeting and must make this decision quickly. As you can see from my inventory, just inspecting the ships will take time. If you would like to leave quickly, then we should look at the ships available for purchase.”
H’Jith was clearly beginning to think of this as a sales game. Fortunately, H’Jith enjoyed the process as much as human salespeople seemed to.
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