“Why?” Flint asked.
“Most of them are out of business, for one thing,” she said, “and from what I’m seeing, the loss of the government contracts pretty much devastated them financially.”
“Which gives them incentive to find other money,” Flint said.
“Yeah, it does,” she said, “but they’d need it faster than they’re getting it. I suspect they just had bad products, and that’s why the Alliance got rid of them.”
“Suspect isn’t the same as know,” Flint said.
She smiled at him. He was beginning to like her in spite of himself. “I’m aware of that.”
“We’re also having trouble finding any evidence of blowback,” Ostaka said. Then he held up both hands as if to forestall Flint’s next comment. “Not that I expect to find such evidence easily. But I had hoped there’d be discussions or meetings or something about the problem.”
He ran a hand over his mouth, then shook his head.
“I’m afraid the fact that I can’t find anything like that means this problem has existed for a long time.” He sounded disturbed by it.
“Blowback is an old term,” Flint said. “I think it’s been around as long as human governments built weapons.”
Ostaka gave him a tired look. “I mean the problem with clones in the Alliance.”
“Wouldn’t we have seen something sooner?” Flint asked.
“I have no idea,” Ostaka said. “This truly is above my pay grade.”
A movement outside the room caught Flint’s eye. DeRicci stood there, watching him. She looked too thin and exhausted. She didn’t move at all, but he could tell that she wanted to talk with him—and she didn’t want to come in here to do it.
“Can you two excuse me for a moment?” Flint didn’t wait for an answer. He walked out of the conference room and almost—almost—asked DeRicci not to yell at him.
Apparently, he was feeling just a little guilty for going behind her back.
“Have they found anything?” she asked.
“You don’t even know what they’re looking for,” Flint said.
“That’s true,” she said. “And I doubt they can help you.”
“Why’s that?” He felt wary. The entire conversation seemed off. Or maybe it was just his fury. He wanted to yell at her for that discussion they’d had the day before, but he didn’t dare. He was too angry for that. He had to just deal with her right now. He could yell later.
“Because the Earth Alliance seems to be covering up important information,” DeRicci said.
“I know,” Flint said coldly.
She closed her eyes for a brief moment, then sighed. “Miles, I’m sorry I didn’t let you—”
“Later, Noelle. We don’t have time for this conversation.”
“Actually, we need to have it,” she said. “I need to apologize to you. I’m really naïve at times.”
Whatever he had expected, that wasn’t it. “Naïve?”
“I didn’t tell you about the assassin clones because I legitimately thought the Alliance was investigating that side of things. Yes, they were confidential, and yes, I shouldn’t even be talking to you about them right now, but I really thought that part of the investigation was being handled. I thought it was in all of our best interests to discover everything about this attack.”
Flint frowned. Something had happened. “So did I. I still do.”
“Me, too,” DeRicci said.
“What changed your mind?” Flint asked. “Why are you talking to me about this now?”
“I’ve had some disturbing news,” DeRicci said, “and it came through a source that shouldn’t have spoken to me.”
“Like Luc Deshin?”
She gave Flint a tired smile. “Actually, a more reputable source than Luc Deshin.”
That was as close to an apology as Flint would get on the Deshin issue.
“This source,” DeRicci said, “was a low-level Earth Alliance official on Peyla.”
“Peyla?”
DeRicci nodded. “Come to my office. I have a lot to tell you. And, as always, I could use your help.”
Flint glanced at the conference room. He wasn’t getting anything from the two investigators in there, at least at the moment.
He still felt wary around DeRicci, but her apology had gone a long way to mitigating his anger.
Or maybe he had just gotten good at tamping it down.
“All right,” he said. “But if I don’t like the direction you’re going, I’m going to continue on my own.”
She nodded, that small smile still on her face. “I would expect no less of you, Miles,” she said.
Forty-eight
Flint looked furious. DeRicci recognized the expression, although she had never seen it directed at her before. His features were flat, as if he were trying not to have any expression at all. She was a little offended that he was so angry. After all, she hadn’t intended to slow down the investigation. She had honestly believed the Earth Alliance would do its job.
She didn’t have the time to work things out with Flint, at least not more than the apology. She hoped that eventually he would forget his anger, or at least put it aside permanently.
Still, he followed her to her office, which she saw as a good sign.
She pushed open the door to find Popova standing in the center of the room, a deep frown on her face. Peyti faces with and without masks floated around her, and others appeared on various screens. Some had frozen. DeRicci recognized them as security images.
Her heart rate increased.
“I was just about to get you,” Popova said without turning around. “Are you sure our system works for the Peyti?”
Flint came up beside DeRicci.
“What is this?” he asked.
Popova whirled. She clearly hadn’t expected to find him in here. “Mr. Flint.”
“Rudra.” He bowed just a little. It almost felt mocking. Or maybe DeRicci was just being a bit too sensitive.
“This,” DeRicci said, “is what I was telling you about. An Earth Alliance official on Peyla sent me images of clones made of a Peyti mass murderer.”
“I didn’t know there was such a thing,” Flint said. But he didn’t seem to be as interested in that as he was in those faces. He walked around a few of the holographic ones. “The Peyti are a non-violent people.”
“Now.” DeRicci’s breathing had quickened. She was conducting the conversation with only one part of her brain. The rest of it was trying to absorb what she was seeing. “Where are these images from, Rudra?”
“I haven’t touched anything, Sir,” Popova said. “These are the settings you had me use.”
The Moon. The images were from the Moon.
Popova was saying, “That’s why I was wondering if the facial recognition works for Peyti. Because this just isn’t possible.”
This was dozens, maybe hundreds, of images, from all over the Moon. All Peyti faces, all of which looked the same to DeRicci.
“Okay,” DeRicci said, trying to make sense out of what she was seeing. “These images span how many months?”
“That’s just it,” Popova said. “They’re all from today.”
DeRicci looked away from the images and directly at Popova. Her face had gone gray. “What?”
“They’re from the past few hours. And if facial recognition does work on the Peyti, then something’s really wrong.”
“If you’re using the system here,” Flint said softly, “then yes, the facial recognition works on the Peyti, provided that you have images of them with and without the masks.”
DeRicci felt just a little dizzy. “We do.”
“Let me look at what you did,” Flint said. “Just as a double-check. These faces are supposed to be of the clones of that Peyti mass murderer, right?”
“Yes,” DeRicci said. She had already counted twenty images of clones, and she had just started.
Flint moved to DeRicci’s desk. “You trust your source? You believe these im
ages are of the clones?”
DeRicci hadn’t thought of that. “I hadn’t double-checked, no.”
“What’s the name of the mass murderer?” Flint said.
DeRicci’s irritation rose. “I don’t know. All Peyti names are Uz-something, and impossible to remember.”
“Do you know when the murderer was active?” Flint asked.
DeRicci blinked. She made herself look away from the images for just a moment.
Flint’s blank expression had left. A light red color had suffused his pale skin. He didn’t look panicked—Flint rarely panicked—but he seemed alarmed.
“Um,” DeRicci said, “she said he was the last mass murderer on Peyti, and the most famous.”
“All right.” Flint tapped her desk. Somehow he was in her system. Had she given him access to her desk’s computer? She didn’t remember doing it, but that meant nothing. Flint knew more about computers than anyone else she had ever met.
An image rose in front of the desk. An older three-dimensional image, with the 3-D showing some wear, the kind that came from files that were translated from old non-human programs.
It looked like the Peyti clones, but DeRicci couldn’t tell. Not only could she not remember the damn Peyti names, but she couldn’t tell them apart by anything except height and weight.
“Can you run some kind of scan to see if it’s the same face?” Popova asked. Her voice shook.
“I just did.” Flint raised his head, his blue eyes clouded. “It’s the same face.”
DeRicci did not want to hear that. She squared her shoulders and looked at all the images. Amazing that the software had caught them, considering the masks were an updated version from the image that Rastigan had sent her.
Then DeRicci’s frown grew deeper. She had never seen that mask style before.
“I’m going to sort the images by location,” Flint said, “and I’m only going to use the ones from the last five minutes.”
He was tapping quickly. Popova watched him, as if staring at him would make the work go faster.
DeRicci kept track of him out of the corner of her eye. She was staring at the masks. They were all the same. A little fatter on the bottom. Not much fatter, though. An added piece about the size of a cupped human hand.
The images winked out, then reappeared. There were fewer images, but not many. Not many at all.
“That’s got to be a hundred clones,” Popova said.
“Two-hundred-and-fifty-seven,” Flint said, his voice remarkably steady. “And that doesn’t count the ones that weren’t near a security camera five minutes ago.”
“Two-hundred-and-fifty-seven?” Popova breathed. “We would have seen an influx on the Port security cameras, like those bombing clones, and I didn’t see anything like that.”
DeRicci now wished she had stayed for the program’s initial sort. She could have double-checked everything herself. Instead, she had walked the hall. That was when she had seen Flint. And while she was walking, she had gotten a short message from Rastigan.
Make sure your search parameters are for different ages.
Different ages.
And of course, DeRicci hadn’t done that since she got back. Flint had sidetracked her.
“We didn’t see it,” DeRicci said, “because they didn’t come in together. Some of them have been here for years.”
“You can’t know that for sure,” Popova said.
“No, I can’t,” DeRicci said. “But we can verify, right, Miles?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll see what I can find.”
“And as you do, see if they’re always wearing these masks.” She pointed at one of the floating faces. “These masks look strange to me.”
“They’re different any I’ve seen before,” Popova said. “You want me to see if I can find out what that is?”
“No,” DeRicci said. “I have to talk with Jin Rastigan. She’s my source on Peyla. She’ll know.”
At least, DeRicci hoped she would know. Someone had to know. Because DeRicci didn’t like what she was seeing. She wanted reassurance that she was overreacting.
Even though she had a hunch she wasn’t.
Forty-nine
Zagrando spent the first part of his journey away from Jan double-checking his space yacht. He’d kept it locked up tight while he’d been on the island, so he worried less about people attacking the interior, but he scoured the exterior for bugs and tracking devices.
So far, he had found nothing.
The highly sophisticated cockpit, with its state-of-the-art equipment—all of which was nonstandard—sensed no ships around him, and nothing monitoring him from the planet he had just left.
After he had checked all of that, he checked every part of the ship that Elise had been on to make sure she hadn’t added her own surveillance devices. He used the security footage to follow her from place to place, then slowed it to a fraction of a second so that he could watch her every move.
When he had finished that, he laid out a map of the places she’d been and the moves she’d made, and physically followed them. He had to see for himself that she had done nothing.
He used a device he picked up from the Black Fleet to check for nanotrackers left by clothing.
Either Elise hadn’t known about such things or hadn’t thought them important. She probably figured she could use his DNA to get back onto the ship, and then fly it back.
Or maybe she had thought he would go along with her betrayal. She certainly had seemed surprised when he walked away.
He had set the ship on a random course, making sure it used evasive maneuvers. He had no place special to go, and as he traveled, he planned to reset his course a dozen times.
The smart move would have been to dump the ship, but he had become attached—which was probably a mistake. People who grew attached to anything were vulnerable, and that was the last thing he wanted to be.
Of course, going completely solo with no obvious vulnerabilities hadn’t worked for him, either. Whiteley had betrayed him on Abbondiado, and then Elise had betrayed him on that island.
Zagrando let out a small sigh. Thinking of betrayal made him think of Jarvis. Zagrando needed to contact him. Jarvis needed to know that Elise had been compromised.
But Zagrando wasn’t going to use any of the shipboard systems to make the contact. He was going to try a riskier link-to-link contact. If someone wanted to trace him, they’d be able to figure out where he’d been, but not what he was traveling in.
He’d toyed with going to some kind of a resort or a starbase, and then changed his mind. He didn’t want anyone listening in on this conversation. And the risks of that on any kind of station were great.
So Zagrando went into the yacht’s cargo bay. It didn’t have great communications equipment here—nothing that could relay his signal outside the ship. The only way to communicate with this part of the cargo bay was to do so through the ship’s internal system.
He stood in the empty area, feeling alone for the first time in weeks. He hadn’t realized how much he had been through.
And he didn’t want to think about it now.
He used his most secure link, and he sent a message to Jarvis.
He didn’t expect to hear from Jarvis for a couple of hours, so he was extremely surprised when only a few minutes later, Jarvis pinged him back.
I didn’t expect to hear from you for hours, Zagrando sent to Jarvis.
Zagrando was using his most secure links, which did not allow for holographic imagery. Those links filtered out all kinds of information, from location to ambient noise to anything that might reveal something about the user. The only thing that activated were the communication portion of the links themselves.
A small image appeared in the corner of his left eye. He could see Jarvis if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to. For all Zagrando knew, making Jarvis visible might turn on all the security protocols that Zagrando had turned off.
I know you’re on an op, Jarvis sent. I
stayed available.
Which was a lie. Zagrando had been on ops before and had a hell of a time reaching Jarvis. Distance factored into all communication, even link communication. The fact that Jarvis answered meant he was in this sector and not, by Earth Alliance standards, very far away.
Zagrando walked back to the center of the bay. His mouth had gone dry, and his heart was pounding. Jarvis’s proximity made him nervous. Or maybe the nerves from the entire operation had finally hit him.
I’m not on the op any longer, Zagrando sent. Elise torpedoed it.
She what? Jarvis sounded alarmed, although it was hard to tell via links.
She told the sellers we wanted thief clones, not assassin clones.
That was my order. Didn’t I tell you? Jarvis asked. Where is she now?
You ordered the change? Zagrando had to clarify.
Yes. I told you. The op had to go a different direction.
I was on the trail of the assassin clones, the ones that bombed the Moon, and you felt it more important to go after thieves who don’t have any impact on the Earth Alliance? Zagrando’s hands were shaking. He had that same trapped feeling he’d had the day he watched his own clone get murdered.
I don’t care about thieves, Jarvis sent. It was just too late to cancel the op.
It’s never too late, Zagrando sent. We risked our lives going in there, for nothing.
I’ve been trying to ping Elise, Jarvis sent. Is she around? Because she can explain this better than I can.
I left her on that damn island. I made sure the sellers knew she had betrayed me. Zagrando remained motionless. If he moved, he would punch something. But the shaking had stopped. He finally knew who had really betrayed him.
Jarvis had.
You what? Jarvis sent. Go back. Don’t you realize she’s in danger?
Oh, Zagrando sent, she’s probably not in danger anymore.
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