“Good afternoon,” she said. “May I help you?”
“I think I’m in the wrong place,” he said. “Sorry to bother you.”
“You’re looking for a spaceship, right?” she asked. She had reddish brown hair and dark eyes.
“Yes,” he said.
She smiled, and he realized she was older than he had initially thought. “The design here was my father’s. He loved old sailing ships and probably would have been happier selling them. I used to hate the way this place looked, but since he passed on, I can’t bear to change it.”
Zagrando nodded, uncertain what to say.
“As if that matters to you,” she said, her smile changing slightly. It was sadder. “I’m Ruth.”
“Zag,” he said, using his alias’s nickname. “I’m sorry about your father.”
She shrugged. “People who knew him really aren’t. All except me. And again, I’m sharing much more than you need to hear. He’s only been gone a month. So it’s still new to me.”
“I understand,” Zagrando said, even though he didn’t. His parents had passed away long ago and he hadn’t had a close relationship since he started with Earth Alliance Intelligence. No one would miss him when he was gone.
She squared her shoulders as if donning her salesperson identity. “What brings you here today?”
“I lost my ship just outside Hellhole,” he said. “A friend brought me here. I’m supposed to be on the other side of the sector right now, and I need a way to get there.”
It wasn’t all a lie. He had lost his ship, and he’d left Whiteley’s ship behind. H’Jith wasn’t a friend, but anyone checking on Zagrando would see that he had come in one of H’Jith’s ships. Besides, the friend story only had to hold until he got away from this resort. Then he’d set H’Jith free, and H’Jith could say whatever it wanted about him.
“Sounds like a dilemma,” Ruth said. She didn’t seem as eager to sell him anything as H’Jith had been.
Zagrando didn’t know if that was her sales style or if she really didn’t care if she sold another ship. Or maybe she was just muted because she was still in mourning.
He thought that both odd and admirable. Usually people with money got mood enhancements so that the unpleasant emotions, like grief, passed by with barely a notice.
“Are you looking for a long-term vessel or a short-term one?” she asked.
He was just looking for a quick way off Goldene Zuflucht, but he didn’t want to say that. “Long-term.”
“Luxury with or without defensive capabilities?”
Since he had already said long-term, he needed to go all the way with the ruse. “With.”
She smiled again, but this time the smile was businesslike. She moved to a podium near the center of the room, and tapped the surface. Holograms of ships surrounded him.
Large ships, small ships, mostly black with a few that were as rich a brown as the walls of the store. None of them had prices, but all of them looked expensive.
“I’m going to some dicey parts of the sector,” he said. “I’m not sure something that luxurious would—”
“They all have masking capabilities,” she said, and by that she meant that the ships could appear less than they were. The size was always impossible to hide, but the exterior could change just enough to look like a ship that was a cheap imitation of something like this.
“Good.” He knew better than to ask about price. Someone who could buy ships like this cared less about price than about features. “I don’t need a large ship. I will never carry many passengers and not all that much cargo.”
Five of the ships faded away.
“And I’d prefer ships with a bit of speed,” he said.
Six more ships vanished.
That left seven ships, all of which looked just fine to him.
“Which do you prefer?” he asked.
She made one of the images grow. “This one has the best captain’s quarters I’ve ever seen. You’d be traveling in luxury. Plus, it has a secondary cockpit. Not just the ability to pull the controls to a different part of the ship, but a whole secondary unit so that you can shut off one cockpit and use the other. It’s especially nice if the ship gets boarded, and since we do have a pirate problem in this part of the sector, you can lock them off and save yourself all at the same time.”
He had to repress a smile. He’d already locked someone out of a cockpit today, but, he had to admit, capturing H’Jith was unbelievably easy, especially when compared with taking on the Black Fleet.
“Let me see that one, then,” he said.
“My pleasure,” she said. “Follow me.”
She tapped the podium and all of the ship images disappeared. Then she walked to the back of the shop, and pushed open a door he hadn’t even seen. He followed her as she requested, and saw that the door led to another docking bay.
This one was probably part of Goldene Zuflucht’s docking ring, but the bay had been walled off. It looked private. It didn’t extend forever like H’Jith’s seemed to. Instead, it only had two dozen or so ships, which was still more than the eye could take in at one time.
She led him around a corner and up a small flight of stairs. The ship he had expressed interest in was on the same level as the other ships, but its entrance was in a non-standard location.
“This ship was built outside the Earth Alliance,” he said.
She smiled at him over her shoulder. “We’re standing outside of the Earth Alliance.”
He smiled back, feeling like she had put him gently in his place. “So many ships are built to Earth Alliance specs that I’m not used to seeing one built on a different model.”
She nodded. “Earth Alliance specs make ships easier to board. Out here, we prefer non-standard luxury ships. They’re safer.”
That made a lot of sense. If the layout of a ship was unusual, then it would be harder to attack. She led him into the ship, showed him the dual cockpits as well as the captain’s quarters, which were, indeed, luxurious. He wanted to fall on the bed and sleep now.
He wasn’t sure when he’d last had a good sleep; it had probably been years.
As he walked through, he had his links ping for any obvious tracking devices. He didn’t get any. He knew the ship had some tracking material built in, but he could deal with that when he purchased it.
“So,” he said, “can I buy the ship and take it off Goldene Zuflucht today?”
They had just gone through the corridor to the large cargo area. Ruth stopped, a little frown of concern on her forehead.
“It’s irregular,” she said.
He shrugged. “I have business away from Goldene Zuflucht, and I need to leave as soon as I can.”
“I didn’t say it couldn’t be done,” she said. “The problem is not with payment—we have systems for that—but with registration. The ship won’t receive your registration for at least two days. You won’t be able to take it to any Earth Alliance venues until that registration comes in.”
“That’s not a problem,” he said. In fact, it benefitted him. He didn’t say that. “I can even return to Goldene Zuflucht if I need to after my meetings to make sure all of the registration happens.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “You won’t have to do that. We run into this a lot. We’re far away from anything, and often if someone has a problem with a ship, they leave it here in trade for a new ship. So we have dealt with this situation before.”
He nodded. “All right, then,” he said. “I like the ship, and I’ll take it.”
She smiled. “Then let’s finalize everything and get you to your business as quickly as possible.”
He smiled, too. Finally, something had gone his way. He hoped the trend continued as the day progressed.
Twenty-nine
Flint pulled out a chair in the conference room and sat down. Ostaka watched him. Goudkins still stood by the windows, looking at the city beyond.
“I’ll tell you part of what I have,” Flint said, “but I exp
ect information in return. I know the Earth Alliance sent you here to both monitor us, and to augment what we do. You also have information that they sent with you, that you may or may not share, depending on how you feel about us.”
Ostaka’s eyebrows twitched ever so slightly. Apparently, he was surprised that Flint knew that much.
“I’ll start,” Flint said. “I think the key to finding out what happened is weapons.”
Goudkins turned around. She glanced at Ostaka, who pointedly did not look back at her. So either the Earth Alliance agreed with Flint on weapons, or something else was going on.
Maybe they had even more information on the weapons systems than he did.
“I’m looking at more than one kind of weapon here,” Flint said.
“Each dome was different?” Ostaka asked.
“We don’t know,” Flint said. “That’s part of the problem. I’m taking this from a strictly Armstrong perspective. I’ve discovered, just today, that the amount of zoodeh used for the assassinations is more than the amount the supplier we caught had access to.”
“What does that mean?” Goudkins came back to the table. She pulled out her chair, but didn’t sit, her hands fluttering nervously over the chair’s back.
“It means we missed something. The Earth Alliance banned zoodeh a long time ago, but never shipped the zoodeh here out.”
“Actually, that’s not true,” Ostaka said.
Flint glanced at him, a little appalled that the Earth Alliance investigators were already looking into the zoodeh side of things.
“The Earth Alliance had a give-back program, but assumes that there was only one-third compliance. Everyone who had zoodeh was supposed to turn it in, and they could do so anonymously. But the records don’t match. The amount of zoodeh turned in was much less than the amount shipped throughout the Alliance in the previous five years alone. If you compound that number by decades that zoodeh could be sold here, then the amount loose in the Alliance is staggering.”
Flint felt cold. “You knew that and said nothing?”
Ostaka shrugged. “We assumed you people knew it as well.”
Goudkins’ fingers played across the back of the chair. She wasn’t trying to hide her nerves.
“We honestly didn’t realize how disorganized the criminal justice systems are here on the Moon until we got here,” she said. “Usually we deal with only one jurisdiction, you know, Armstrong or Gagarin Dome or some place like that. The systems seem fine when you do that, but the overall system here—well, it doesn’t exist.”
“It’s starting to,” Flint said because he couldn’t just let DeRicci hang. “That’s what Noelle’s been trying to set up.”
“Yes, at the urging of Celia Alfreda,” Ostaka said. “But she’s dead now, and there’s no guarantee that this system will work.”
It wasn’t working right now.
“Right now, twenty jurisdictions are trying to solve the same crime,” Goudkins said. “It’s terribly inefficient.”
“I know,” Flint said. He’d already told them that. That was why he was here.
“We’ve made all kinds of assumptions that aren’t valid,” Goudkins said. “You want to know why the Earth Alliance takes over your investigations? It’s because you people don’t have the resources—”
“Stop,” Flint said. “I’m not ‘you people’ and this won’t get us anywhere. You knew about the zoodeh. We didn’t. We do now. Can we track it?”
They looked at each other again, and there was a long pause.
“We’ve done some tracking,” Ostaka said after a moment. “But the information we have is old. It takes us to the usual groups—the crime organizations that work in this area, the corporations that initially thought they could use zoodeh, and all of the quarantine areas run by places like the Port of Armstrong. It’s going to take a lot of old-fashioned legwork to see if the zoodeh came from any of those places, and even then, we might never know.”
Flint let out a sigh. He thought he’d had a good lead here. He leaned back in his chair, and as he did, he saw a movement behind him. Popova stood outside the room, a frown on her face.
“She been out there long?” he asked.
“Almost as long as you’ve been in here,” Goudkins said. “Do you want me to yell at you so she doesn’t think you’re cooperating?”
“Am I cooperating?” he asked.
Goudkins smiled and looked down just a moment too late. So much for yelling.
Flint got up and pushed the door open. “You’re welcome to join us, Rudra.”
“The chief wants to deal with them,” Popova said.
“I know.” Flint continued to hold the door open. “You’re her eyes and ears. Join us.”
Popova bit her lower lip. “She wants me to.”
“Noelle does?” Flint asked.
Popova nodded.
Flint swept his hand back. “Then come on in.”
“What are you doing?” she whispered. “Just stop.”
He shook his head. “I already told you what I’m doing.”
Popova nodded. Then she leaned forward. “She’s going to be furious with you.”
“I know,” Flint said. “Coming?”
“No,” she said.
“No need hover, then,” he said, and let the door close.
Ostaka and Goudkins hadn’t moved. Nor had they said anything out loud. He wondered what they’d been sharing on their links.
“All right,” he said. “I gave you what little I had.”
Which wasn’t entirely true. He held back on the clones, at least for the moment.
“Now, tell me why my discussion of weapons made you two share not just a glance but some information across your links.”
Ostaka moved slightly. Goudkins’s fingers gripped the top of the chair.
“Full disclosure, remember?” Flint said. “We’re working together now.”
Ostaka’s gaze met Goudkins and he shook his head so minutely that Flint almost missed it.
She raised her chin. “We’ve been ordered away from the weapons.”
Flint frowned. “Ordered away? By whom?”
Her gaze moved toward Ostaka, and then she blinked. He was still sending messages along her links, probably warning her off.
“The Earth Alliance doesn’t want us to look at the weapons,” she said.
Ostaka spun his chair away in frustration.
“The zoodeh?” Flint asked. “Why? They didn’t want us to know how much was loose?”
“No.” Ostaka stood. His voice was flat. He shot Goudkins a long look.
“Stop using the links,” she snapped at Ostaka. “You can leave and talk to that horrible woman watching us if you want to. You can report me or do what you want. But I want to solve this. Mr. Flint is right; we can’t do it without cooperating. So make your choice.”
Flint knew better than to say anything. He needed to let this play out.
Ostaka glanced at the door. Popova still stood outside, arms crossed, watching, as if through the force of her will, she could stop Flint from talking to the Earth Alliance investigators.
Ostaka rubbed a hand over his mouth, sighed, and then let his hand drop. “We’re not supposed to follow the clones.”
Flint’s breath caught. “The clones as weapons,” he said, deciding not to play dumb. “You weren’t supposed to figure out who sent them?”
“Who made them, who trained them, who sent them,” Ostaka said. “It’s all of a piece.”
“Why weren’t you supposed to follow those leads?”
“Supposedly,” Goudkins said, the word sharp with emphasis, “someone else is doing it.”
She was standing rigidly straight, her dark eyes flashing with anger.
“You don’t believe that,” Flint said. It wasn’t a question; it was a statement.
“No,” she said, “I don’t.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because I think the clones are blowback, Mr. Flint,” she said, “
and I think the Earth Alliance doesn’t want anyone to know.”
Thirty
Meetings conducted by secure holographic link sucked. Jin Rastigan hated them and now she remembered why.
She stood in the center of a small office in the Earth Alliance headquarters in Henatan, the only place in the headquarters that a human could use a secure link without wearing an environmental suit. She felt crowded even though she was alone.
The images of a dozen Earth Alliance investigators littered the floor, the desk, and the shelves. A few actually rested on the back of chairs. Some of the holograms fuzzed in and out, leading her to believe that the investigators watched from different parts of the Alliance.
Most of them hadn’t identified themselves. A few kept their faces obscured. Some used a vocal scrambler. She suspected even more investigators watched through a non-holographic link, but she had no way to prove that.
She had already explained—or tried to—why her boss, Cyril Connab, wasn’t contacting them. She had to use diplomatic language, too. She couldn’t tell the gathered investigators that Connab was a self-absorbed jerk who only wanted credit if something worked. He didn’t care about saving lives.
She did, and she made that clear.
She sent the security vid from the Peyti murders. She sent images of the Peyti mass murderer on whom the clones were based. She even sent an affidavit from Uzvot that the information Rastigan was presenting was correct.
The investigators listened, but she had a sense that they didn’t understand.
“You’re saying that there will be an Anniversary Day-style attack on Peyla?” the head investigator asked. Like so many of the others, he hadn’t identified himself. She thought of him as Chubby Guy because he had a roundish face and he wore loose clothing. She couldn’t imagine him working undercover, but what did she know about that stuff?
“Or against the Peyti,” she said. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“Based on the clones,” Chubby Guy repeated.
“Yes,” she said. Why was it so hard for everyone else to take this leap? Why could she see it and no one else could?
“Not anything else?” he asked. “No evidence, no threats, no missing bomb materials?”
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