Blowback

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Was there evidence or threats on the Moon before the attacks?” she asked. “No, there wasn’t. It was a surprise attack.”

  She could feel the frustration yearning to take over her voice.

  “You say the clones are based on a Peyti mass murderer?” Chubby Guy asked.

  “Yes.” Jeez. How stupid were these guys? They were supposed to be investigators. They were supposed to understand information when it came to them.

  “And that’s your evidence?”

  “Why do you keep asking this?” she asked. “Yes.”

  Some of the other investigators shifted. She realized that as this exchange continued, a few of the investigators had left the meeting. They didn’t see this as important.

  “Do the Peyti believe this will result in an Anniversary Day-style attack?” Chubby Guy asked.

  “You have Uzvot’s statement,” Rastigan said. “She wouldn’t have made this claim if she wasn’t worried.”

  “About such an attack or about criminal activity?” Chubby Guy asked.

  She bit back, What the hell is your problem? and took a breath before continuing.

  “She wanted me to get this information to the Earth Alliance,” Rastigan said. “The Peyti are subtle, as you well know.”

  Even though this idiot probably didn’t know. He watched her, but he didn’t seem all that interested.

  “She wouldn’t have presented this to the Earth Alliance if she thought it strictly a Peyti matter.”

  “But it wasn’t strictly a Peyti matter, was it, Rastigan?” another investigator—who hadn’t identified himself either—asked. He had his face obscured, but not his voice. He sounded familiar. Did she know him? She wasn’t sure.

  God, she hated politics.

  “That’s right,” another investigator said. “A human was involved from the beginning. Don’t you think that’s why the Peyti wanted the Earth Alliance to know about this? The Peyti are rules-followers. They’d want every detail seen to. I don’t read anything sinister into this at all. I think it’s a Peyti matter, and they’re doing us the courtesy of keeping us informed.”

  “I think your boss feels that way as well,” Chubby Guy said. “Otherwise he would have presented this himself to someone higher up.”

  Rastigan’s face warmed.

  “Did he speak to you about this?” she asked, because she couldn’t keep the question to herself.

  “Of course not,” Chubby Guy said, a bit too quickly. “It’s just the way procedure works. You want us to pay attention to the details of Peyti procedure. Perhaps you should look at ours as well. This really isn’t unusual.”

  “Clones based on mass murderers aren’t unusual? We just suffered a major attack—”

  “And it’s being investigated,” Chubby Guy said. “We will look into this incident as well. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.”

  He signed off. The holograms of the other investigators vanished as well. Her skin crawled. She felt weirdly alone and yet watched.

  What the hell was wrong with these people? Didn’t they understand the implications here? Something was happening, something important.

  And she didn’t even have their names. When the actual attacks happened—and she believed they would—she wouldn’t be able to report these people for ignoring her warning.

  “Jin?”

  She whirled.

  One image remained. It stood on her desk, but she had to squint to see it. A youngish human man, muscular and trim, or so it seemed from the image. His face was obscured, but not as darkly as some of the others. It looked like someone had placed a gray sheet over his features.

  “Have they seen anything like this on Peyla before?” he asked.

  His voice was altered too, but she was convinced she knew him. He called her “Jin,” and wasn’t doing it in a derogatory way, in an attempt to put her down. He was doing it because he was comfortable with her, because they had worked together.

  She hit one of the chips on her hand to record this part of the conversation. She should have done this before, but she hadn’t expected the investigators to ignore her warnings.

  “Do you mean the killings?” she asked. “Because the mass murderer—”

  “No,” he said. “The clones. Have they seen clones based on major criminals before?”

  Her breath caught. He knew something.

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said.

  “But you don’t know,” he said.

  “Uzvot wouldn’t have reacted like this if they had. She wouldn’t have worked with me. She would have dismissed me.” Rastigan was convinced of that. She knew Uzvot well enough. But, as Chubby Guy would have said, this was a hunch, not actual facts.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “I think you’re right. I think this is important.”

  “Can you convince the others?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “But I will investigate. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

  “If I find something,” she said, “how do I contact….”

  He had vanished. Dammit. All the secrecy. All the hiding. It didn’t help.

  She felt an urgency and no one else seemed to. They seemed to think they had a lot of time before something else happened—if something else was going to happen.

  But she thought it might happen soon, and then where would they all be?

  She sank into one of the chairs. Maybe Uzvot could get someone higher up to contact the Earth Alliance. Maybe then they’d listen.

  Because they weren’t listening to Rastigan—not in the way that she wanted. Not in the way they needed to listen.

  She had to take matters into her own hands, but she wasn’t quite sure how.

  Thirty-one

  The ship flew beautifully. Zagrando had never had a ship this new, this expensive, or this well-made. He had used H’Jith’s account, and the transaction had gone through without a blip.

  He hadn’t freed H’Jith before he left. Instead, he sent an anonymous message to Goldene Zuflucht’s security that H’Jith was being held prisoner in his own ship. The anonymous message went through dozens of systems so that it couldn’t be traced, and Zagrando timed it so that the message would arrive an hour after he left.

  He needed the head start.

  He also made sure to file a travel plan with Goldene Zuflucht, like the average traveler would. It made most travelers easy to find. Zagrando submitted detailed travel plans that set up routes for the next week.

  When he got on board the ship, he followed the first part of the route until he had established the ship’s new identity. Then he sent one of the life pods with a built-in navigation system out on the route he had registered. He cloned the pod’s navigation system so that it registered as the ship. That would lead someone on a merry chase if they decided to track him, and by then, they wouldn’t be able to find his ship.

  He changed the ship’s identity three times in the next hour, and followed a meandering path until he had checked the entire ship for tracking devices to make sure no one could tail him.

  He didn’t trust his own systems—they weren’t sophisticated enough to detect some new kind of technology—but they were good enough to get him to the meeting.

  First, however, he had to contact his handler. And he had to trust that he had blocked enough of the tracking devices that it would take a lot of work to figure out who he was talking to.

  Even so, he went into the large kitchen. Most people would never send important messages from a kitchen, particularly in a luxury ship. The kitchen had been designed to hold a chef and a staff, most of whom would be outside hires. They wouldn’t have clearance to listen to important messages.

  Zagrando leaned against one of the wood counters. It was smooth and warm against his back. Then he sent a message along his secure link to his handler.

  Ike Jarvis’s face appeared above the grill. Slowly the image rose so that Jarvis’s face would be directly across from Zagrando’s, unlike real life, where Z
agrando towered over the bastard.

  Generally, Zagrando tried to use other handlers to deal with small matters. Zagrando had done his best to limit contact with Jarvis since Jarvis moved him off Valhalla Basin. Zagrando tried not to think of that day often because it so infuriated him.

  Unfortunately, this was not a small matter.

  “I have a lead,” Zagrando said, “but I also have a problem.”

  Jarvis’s image didn’t extend to his neck. The head was three-dimensional, but clear, so Zagrando could see expensive tile through Jarvis’s skin. It made him look tattooed.

  “Problem first,” Jarvis said in his gravelly voice.

  “Lead first,” Zagrando said. “I have put a down payment on weapons, but the seller insists on meeting the buyer. He knows I’m just a broker.”

  “That’s unusual,” Jarvis said.

  “No kidding,” Zagrando said. “But it actually makes sense with these weapons. They’re individually designed.”

  Jarvis’s head moved slightly, but Zagrando couldn’t tell if that was deliberate or if the man had shifted in his chair. Zagrando hated it when someone let only their head show and nothing else.

  “You sure this is a big enough fish, then?” Jarvis asked. “Individually designed seems like small weaponry.”

  “Oh, this isn’t small,” Zagrando said. “This might actually lead us to the Anniversary Day attackers.”

  Jarvis blinked, as if surprised. Of course, he could just be reacting to something else being sent across links or maybe he always blinked like that. Zagrando stopped trying to read the man long ago.

  “You’re sure?” Jarvis asked.

  “Yeah,” Zagrando said. “I think I found the source of the clones.”

  Jarvis nodded, his chin dipping in and out of the grill. The tile tattoos slid eerily along his face.

  “How come you didn’t just follow through?” he asked. “You need more cash?”

  Zagrando slipped his hands behind his back so that he could clench his fists. No surprise, no thank-you, no reaction at all. He had expected a reaction.

  “I need a buyer,” Zagrando said.

  “Find one,” Jarvis said.

  “Within a few hours,” Zagrando said. “I’m heading to the meet now.”

  “It doesn’t look like you’re in your ship.”

  “My ship is blown,” Zagrando said.

  Jarvis frowned, clearly irritated. “A buyer would never show at this kind of meet.”

  “Well, I don’t get the sale without one,” Zagrando said. “I don’t get a sale, I can’t follow the money or the source of the weapons. I can’t follow anything, I can’t catch anyone.”

  “Where’s the meet?” Jarvis asked.

  Zagrando knew better than to answer that. “This isn’t an open line, boss, but I’m not sure how secure this new vehicle is either. How about I meet you somewhere?”

  “Me?” Jarvis asked. “I can’t pose as anything. I haven’t been undercover in a generation.”

  “Send me someone,” Zagrando said.

  Jarvis glanced off to the side. Something reflected in his eyes, and Zagrando realized Jarvis was looking at an exterior screen.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “I can meet someone at Javier’s Corner,” Zagrando said. Javier’s Corner was a space station, but a small one. The folks who stopped there needed something from fuel to a meal to a quick-and-dirty hire. “Get him there in two hours.”

  “That’s not a lot of time,” Jarvis said.

  “It’s what I’ve got,” Zagrando said. “And make sure this is someone impeccable. I may only get one shot at this.”

  “I don’t like threats, Iniko,” Jarvis said.

  “Not a threat,” Zagrando said. “Fact. We blow this one, we lose a lot of opportunities.”

  He severed the link, mostly because he didn’t want to hear Jarvis’s complaints. And Jarvis would complain. The man was never satisfied. It took Zagrando too long to find contacts, or Zagrando wasn’t working hard enough or Zagrando was moving too quickly on something.

  Zagrando had actually put in for a new handler every six months or so, but he never got one. He was told that handlers needed to have a long-term relationship with their operatives.

  A long-term relationship was one thing; a long-term hatred was another.

  But he couldn’t say that, because if he did, then someone would see that as the reason for his complaints, not because Jarvis had killed him.

  Not that anyone in Earth Alliance Intelligence saw Jarvis’s actions as anything close to murder. Killing a clone was different from killing the original.

  Supposedly, Zagrando understood that.

  But in truth, he didn’t. He didn’t understand any of it. He tried not to think about it. But his brain kept returning to that day on Valhalla Basin, the day he had to leave his old job forever.

  Someday Jarvis would pay for the cruelty he showed that day. Not just to Zagrando, making him watch his own clone die. But to the clone himself.

  Zagrando had a hunch Jarvis liked watching things like that. He also had a hunch that Jarvis refused to step aside as his handler because Jarvis thrived on the hatred.

  But Zagrando couldn’t prove any of that.

  It wasn’t his job. Just like dealing with the Earth Alliance wasn’t really his job.

  His job was tracking weapons back to the biggest suppliers and, with luck, hooking them up to the corporations who funded those suppliers.

  He was on a good track for the first time in years.

  Maybe if he succeeded, he could get a new assignment—one that took him far away from Jarvis.

  One he might actually enjoy.

  Thirty-two

  “Blowback,” Flint repeated. He hadn’t heard that term in years. It referred to weapons created by one group for one purpose, only to have those weapons eventually used against that group by someone else.

  Corporations that dealt in arms manufacture sometimes suffered from blowback, but mostly, blowback happened against countries that sold or gave weapons to other countries—to prop up a government, say, or to defend a country in a war. Eventually those weapons would get used against—or would blow back to—the country that invented them.

  “Blowback.” He ran a hand over his face. “We don’t develop weapons on the Moon, at least, not those kind.”

  That he knew of. He didn’t know what all of the corporations were doing.

  “Not the Moon, Mr. Flint,” Goudkins said gently. “The Earth Alliance.”

  Flint closed his eyes. The Earth Alliance. Of course. He had known this was big. He couldn’t quite wrap his brain around this.

  He opened his eyes. Goudkins was staring at him. Ostaka had looked over his shoulder at Popova who was, apparently, still standing outside.

  “Why would the Earth Alliance develop clones from known criminals?” Flint asked.

  “Thieves, mostly,” Goudkins said. “Plants, to insert into the Black Fleet.”

  Flint bowed his head. “Using real live people as the originals, not dead people, right? So that these clones could go undercover?”

  “More or less,” Goudkins said. “We’re not allowed to investigate, so it’s only what we’ve heard before.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Flint stood up. He had to move. He couldn’t remain sitting with this information. “The Earth Alliance isn’t involved now, is it?”

  “No,” Ostaka said quickly. “Definitely not.”

  Goudkins gave her partner a withering look. “We don’t know that. We don’t know anything. We’re not allowed to investigate it. Someone else is supposedly doing that.”

  “But you don’t believe it,” Flint said.

  She shook her head.

  “The Earth Alliance wants this part of the investigation dropped.” Flint walked away from the table and went to the windows. The city spread before him, intact, the damage from four years ago impossible to see.

  So many other cities weren’t intact. So many were r
uined, so many lives destroyed, and the Earth Alliance didn’t want all of this investigated?

  And DeRicci knew?

  He couldn’t believe that of her. He knew she followed orders she didn’t like—that was why she stayed with the police after he left—but she had ethics, just like everyone else.

  She couldn’t know.

  Could she?

  “I’m sure the Alliance doesn’t want to be embarrassed,” Ostaka said.

  Flint bit back a curse. Embarrassed. That was more important than preventing other attacks.

  “Do you think the Earth Alliance knows who launched this attack, then?” he asked.

  “No,” Ostaka said.

  Flint turned. His gaze met Goudkins’.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Flint gathered himself. He had to think clearly. “You know I’m going to investigate this.”

  “I do,” Goudkins said.

  “If you help me, you could lose your jobs over this.” He made sure he looked at Ostaka, who had turned slightly gray. “If you don’t want to be part of the investigation, leave now. We’ll say you had nothing to do with our conversation.”

  Ostaka tapped his fingers against his mouth. Then he looked at Goudkins.

  “If I leave now, the Earth Alliance will know something is up.”

  “Not right away,” she said.

  “They’ll shut you down,” he said.

  Flint watched. They could have carried this part of the conversation to their links. They weren’t. He wasn’t sure why. So that he would be witness to it, obviously, but why have the personal part in front of him?

  “Not right away,” she repeated.

  Ostaka glanced at Popova. She still had her arms crossed, and she was watching intently, swaying slightly as if she wanted to keep herself focused.

  Focus. Flint let out a small breath.

  They were having this conversation out loud so that he would volunteer his systems. So that he could look up this information without implicating them.

  Was it altruism? Or was it a way of tracking him?

  God, he didn’t trust anyone anymore.

  They looked at him, as if they expected him to say something. But he wouldn’t.