She had a long and varied history, mostly with the aliases he’d found. No one had placed obvious warnings on her nor had they flagged her.
When he logged off that system, he piggybacked on several others, looking again, and finding nothing.
Finally he logged off entirely and used one of his secure links to interface with the Earth Alliance system. He didn’t contact the system itself, just the downloads he carried with him. She was in there, along with her date of hire. Her real name took access to the network itself, and he decided not to look for it.
He had as much confirmation as he needed.
But he still felt awkward, forced to trust someone in a potentially dicey situation, and he knew nothing about her.
He had known more about Whiteley than he would ever know about her.
The ship pinged him. They neared their destination. Either he went for this or he didn’t. But he was the one who had requested her. He was the one who had set up this meet.
He would go through with it, even though he had his doubts. Once he got the information the Earth Alliance believed it needed, he would decide what to do next.
Without their help.
Thirty-eight
The contact startled her awake.
DeRicci had fallen asleep propped against the wall of the train, pillows scrunched around her neck and back. She had been dreaming about the Moon Marathon all those years ago, when she had to deal with dying runners and Frieda Tey. Only this time, Tey ran away from her and no one would let DeRicci run after her.
She awoke with her heart pounding and a blinking signal in front of her left eye, one that wouldn’t go away.
The signal came from the Earth Alliance headquarters on Peyla, of all places. She didn’t know anyone there. She decided to ignore it, but as she blinked it away, it flared a bright red, with the word Please embedded into the image.
Someone knew DeRicci would ignore the signal and wanted to prevent her from doing that.
Her curiosity piqued, she answered the signal. She left the privacy settings on so that whomever contacted her couldn’t see her.
I’m sorry to bother you, Chief DeRicci, the message said, but my name is Jin Rastigan and I’m with the Earth Alliance on Peyla. I’ve worked with the Peyti for years and have encountered a situation that has the Peyti spooked, but the Alliance itself won’t listen to me. I was wondering if I could get advice from you.
The message was a canned one, just like that Please was. DeRicci blinked, and smoothed a hand over her tangled hair. In spite of herself, she was intrigued.
She sent a message back: Make it quick.
Then she hooked Rastigan’s link so that a visual would appear when Rastigan got back to her. DeRicci swung her legs over the side of the bed—no more sleeping this night—and decided to take a shower before finding out exactly where the train was. They couldn’t be too far from Armstrong by now.
She’d barely had the thought when Rastigan’s image appeared in front of her, startling her. She had expected Rastigan to take a while to get back to her.
Rastigan was a middle-aged woman with lines beside her delicate mouth. Her light brown skin looked bruised, and deep shadows had formed beneath her almond-shaped green eyes.
“Thank you for this,” she said.
DeRicci left the visuals off. She didn’t want to appear like someone who had just woken up, even though she was. Instead, she used a still shot where the visual would be.
“What do you need?” she asked.
“Advice,” Rastigan said. She appeared to be sitting on something in a small office, shelves behind her. “Let me explain what happened here today.”
She told DeRicci about the killings, how she got called in, how upset it made the Peyti. That they had found a compound with clones.
“Cloning is frowned upon here,” Rastigan said. “And seen as really unusual. The Peyti don’t have anything like identical twins or triplets. Each individual has a certain look.”
DeRicci’s stomach clenched. She didn’t like the way this was going.
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “The clones are of someone famous.”
“Yes.” Rastigan sounded relieved.
“Someone famous and awful,” DeRicci said.
“Yes,” Rastigan said. “The most famous mass murderer in Peyti history. This whole thing so disturbed one of my Peyti cohorts that she wanted me to contact the Earth Alliance, but no one in the Alliance will listen to me. My boss won’t contact his superiors. He had me talk to the investigative unit, who just shut me down. Only one member of the unit even thought I had a reason to worry.”
DeRicci closed her eyes and let out a small breath, thankful she hadn’t put her image on visual. Not because of how she was dressed, but because she had actually felt the blood leave her face when she heard who these clones were.
“Tell me why you’re worried,” she said, mostly as a stall. She needed to think.
“Isn’t this how the Anniversary Day attacks started?” Rastigan asked. “With clones of a mass murderer?”
“But they didn’t kill each other,” DeRicci said. Or did they? She really didn’t know what they had done before they came to Armstrong. They had been slow-grow clones, which meant they had a life before they came here.
The Earth Alliance had told her they would investigate the clones’ history, but she hadn’t received any updates on anything. And the history should be the easy part.
“So you don’t think it’s anything to worry about?” Rastigan asked. She sounded almost hurt.
DeRicci made herself look at the woman. She recognized Rastigan’s face, not because she’d met her before, but because she used to be her—a woman who got frustrated by bureaucratic inactivity. A woman who hated hitting walls in an investigation. A woman who knew something was wrong in her gut, but lacked proof.
She clicked off the still shot, revealing herself in all her sleep-rumpled glory.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t say that. I think you have great cause to worry. You and the Peyti. I think we all have something to worry about.”
It couldn’t be a coincidence that there was another group of famous clones involved in crimes. It had to mean something.
“What do you think I should do? The Alliance won’t listen to me.” Rastigan sounded panicked.
“But the Peyti are investigating this,” DeRicci said.
“As a crime of murder,” Rastigan said. “They’re leaving the possibility of a bigger attack to me.”
“Because they don’t believe in it?” DeRicci asked.
“I don’t think some of them believe it could happen here,” Rastigan said. “Uzvot—she’s the one I’m working with—does, but she has less clout than I do.”
“We didn’t believe anything like this could happen here, either,” DeRicci said. “And we had warning.”
That earlier explosion, the one that had made her career. It had saved lives here on the Moon only because she had learned the value of fast action. But it hadn’t prevented any attacks.
What if Rastigan’s information could prevent attacks?
DeRicci ran her hand through her hair again, hoping she didn’t look too crazed. “Can you get the Peyti to help you?”
“Do what?” Rastigan asked.
“I don’t know enough about the Peyti,” DeRicci said. “I’ve only worked with them here, and they’re always wearing those damn masks. Does facial recognition work with them?”
“Of course,” Rastigan said, and then her cheeks flushed. She must have realized that her answer was a bit abrupt.
The abruptness didn’t bother DeRicci. She was all about abruptness—or she used to be.
“Then you have to do the biggest search of your life,” DeRicci said. “You need to use facial recognition to search all over Peyla, and find out if more of these clones exist. If they do exist, what are they doing? If you find a bunch of them, go back through old security footage and see if you can figure out what they’re up to.”
/>
A small frown had formed between Rastigan’s eyebrows. She was concentrating, hard.
“The clones that ended up attacking the Moon looked innocent enough,” DeRicci said. “They arrived in a group at the Port of Armstrong, laughed and joked with each other, and then they went off in their separate directions, just like any family would. Not too many people noticed how similar they looked, and no one noticed until after the attacks that they resembled PierLuigi Frémont. Only in hindsight did their actions look sinister. When they arrived, they looked like any other group traveling together. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Yeah,” Rastigan said, sounding both tired and frightened. “I do.”
“Is there going to be a problem with the Peyti on this?” DeRicci asked.
“No,” Rastigan said. “They’re already upset about what’s happening, and as a group, they’re very law abiding. They have security everywhere. We should be able to track anything on Peyla.”
“What about other parts of the Alliance?” DeRicci asked. “I know that a lot of Peyti work in the justice system. Are they spread out all over the Alliance or just in certain parts?”
“All over,” Rastigan said. “They mingle well with other groups.”
So many alien groups didn’t. They preferred their own groups. “They’re like humans, then,” DeRicci said.
“Even more outgoing, if you can believe it,” Rastigan said. “No Peyti minds being the only one in a university or a town or even in a region. They don’t get that sense of being an outsider that can drive humans nuts.”
DeRicci had noticed that, but it hadn’t registered until now. How often had she seen a single Peyti going about his business? She’d seen dozens of them on this trip alone. Peyti were common; they blended in.
“That makes things harder, not easier,” DeRicci said. “How old are your clones?”
“I don’t know,” Rastigan said.
“Ours were slow-grown, and by the time they got here, they were in their late twenties. That means there’s a twenty-year trail that we have to follow to figure out who and what they are.”
And she hadn’t been following it. She had trusted the Earth Alliance to do it. No wonder Flint was mad at her.
“I don’t know anything about Peyti, or Peyti lifespans,” DeRicci said. “But you need to figure all this stuff out. The more assistance you can get on this project, the better off you’ll be. Let’s just hope this is some weird coincidence, something that means absolutely nothing.”
Rastigan’s mouth thinned. “Do you think it is?”
“No,” DeRicci said. “I think the problem is even bigger than we originally thought, and that has me worried.”
“For us here on Peyla?”
“For everyone in the Earth Alliance.” DeRicci let out a small sigh, then shook her head. In trying to do the jobs of a dozen people, she had lost track of who she was. She wasn’t Celia Alfreda or Arek Soseki. She didn’t run a city or even the United Domes of the Moon.
She ran the Security Office, and she should have kept that as her focus and nothing else.
Not Earth Alliance rules, not Earth Alliance promises. Not rebuilding, not even being mourner-in-chief like she had been. She had to drop the guilt, drop the sense of responsibility, and remember who she was.
She was Chief of Security for the United Domes of the Moon. Nothing more and nothing less.
“Send me the image, would you?” DeRicci asked. “Is there anyway to modify it so that I can have some different images? I need the young clones’ image, the images of the mass murderer throughout his life, and images of all of them with a mask they might wear in the human parts of the Earth Alliance. Can you send me that?”
“You’re going to search, too?” Rastigan asked.
“I’m searching the Moon,” DeRicci said. “And I’ll send the information to the Earth Alliance through the channels your boss refused to contact. I’ll flag everything.”
Rastigan put a hand over her mouth and closed her eyes. She looked like a woman not used to being overwhelmed with emotion trying to hold back tears. Then she opened her eyes, let her hand drop, and nodded once.
“Thank you,” she said. “I can’t thank you enough.”
“Me?” DeRicci said. “You’re the one who deserves the thanks. You may have saved countless lives.”
“Everyone tells me ‘may’ is the operative word.”
“I don’t know about them,” DeRicci said, “but I like to make decisions that err on the side of saving lives, rather than wait to have some bomber or killer prove my suppositions for me. Even if no one is planning an attack, you may have given us the kind of clue we need to solve our problems here on the Moon. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that. Keep me posted on what you find.”
“I will,” Rastigan said. “I promise.”
And then, after an exchange of basic information, she signed off.
DeRicci sat on the side of the bed. The train leaned into a series of curves.
She believed Rastigan. The attackers were still out there, and they were planning something else. They had a larger plan in mind, and it wasn’t what DeRicci had guessed it to be. She would never have thought of Peyti involvement, not ever. The Peyti were peaceful people. And that was probably one of the reasons to use them, for whatever this was.
She got up and made her way to the small shower. She felt refreshed. Not because she had finally gotten some sleep, but because Rastigan had given her some clarity.
DeRicci remembered who she was and what she needed to do.
She would leave the tasks of governing to people who actually had a talent for it.
She knew how to keep people safe. She had done it countless times. And even though she had lost a lot on Anniversary Day, she had saved millions of lives by thinking quickly. Millions, just by sectioning the domes.
She had to take credit for what she had done in a surprising, impossible situation.
The situation wasn’t surprising any more. She had to act differently because the criminals who had instigated these attacks expected her to be on alert.
She needed to find them, she needed to figure out what they wanted, and she needed to surprise them.
She needed to take the offensive.
As soon as she figured out what, exactly, that was.
Thirty-nine
“I don’t want to go,” Talia said, her head tilted back against the passenger seat. She’d been saying some version of that sentence ever since they left home.
Flint stuck his hand out the window for the sixth and final layer of security he had to undergo for the private underground parking facility attached to Aristotle Academy. The system approved him, and he brought his hand inside. The window closed.
“Dad, please,” Talia said. “Let me help you out. I know you’re working on something—”
“Are you scared to go in today?” Flint asked, without really looking at her. “Or are you just embarrassed?”
She sat up. “Why would I be embarrassed?”
“Whether you like it or not, you helped precipitate that fight yesterday.”
“I did not.” Talia flounced in her seat, facing him. She bumped against the automated controls, but they didn’t acknowledge her. She wasn’t registered on this car.
He kept his hands on the controls even though he wasn’t driving. He wanted Talia to think he had shut off the automation. He didn’t want her to see the full range of his expressions.
He understood her desire to help him. He also knew that she didn’t handle social situations well with kids her own age. She had to face the results of her own actions yesterday.
She had to learn that even the right response had consequences.
“You did,” Flint said. “And people will bring it up today. Does that bother you?”
“No,” she said, and looked out the windows as the car headed to its designated parking space.
Flint could feel her anger and her frustration. He wondered if she felt
just a bit of fear, too. After all, Selah Rutledge had hinted at Talia’s clone status. That had to make her feel threatened.
It certainly bothered him.
“Oh, crap,” Talia said, and sighed. “Look at that.”
Flint glanced toward the interior doors. Five people dressed in suits flanked a man that Flint barely recognized, and one of the kids who had been sitting out in the hall with Talia the day before. People with suits weren’t unusual. The fact that they flanked the man and the boy suggested they were either security or legal.
“Who is that?” Flint asked.
“Kaleb Lamber.” Talia sounded sullen. “His dad thinks he’s important.”
It took Flint a moment to parse that sentence. He believed she meant that Lamber senior thought a great deal of himself, not that he thought his kid was important.
“Is he?” Flint asked.
“I don’t know,” Talia said. “He has less money than we do.”
Flint glanced at her. She was chewing on her lower lip. She clearly hadn’t meant to say that.
“You investigated their finances?” Flint was trying hard not to sound accusatory. “What made you investigate their finances?”
She shrugged. “Kaleb’s always talking about how important his dad is. And he’s always talking about how much money they have. But they don’t, really. They just have a lot of property, which lost tons of value after Anniversary Day. They can barely afford the tuition.”
“Talia.” It was Flint’s turn to face her. “You didn’t confront him about that, did you?”
“No,” she said, frowning. “I’m saving it for when he’s a total jackass.”
Flint let out a small sigh. “You can’t say anything. You’re not supposed to know about other people’s finances. It’s not legal to hack into their personal information.”
She rolled her eyes. “I know that.”
“Then why did you do it?”
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