Blowback

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “What is it, Noelle?” Flint asked.

  Too big to contain, that’s what. If she captured one of them, just one, he would let the others know that she had figured it out. If she disabled one bomb, just one, the Peyti wearing that bomb would let the others know.

  Five hundred bombers.

  Five hundred.

  On her Moon.

  In places she couldn’t always see.

  “Give me just a minute to think,” she said.

  Because, she suspected, a minute was all the time that she had.

  Fifty-three

  Kaleb met her outside class. Talia stiffened and tried to move away, but he was too quick. He caught her arm.

  No one else seemed to notice. They all streamed to their next classes. Even the security guards were looking the other way.

  “I know you don’t like me,” Kaleb said. “But can I talk to you for a second?”

  “No,” she said, and shook him off.

  She started down the hall. She heard his footsteps behind her, his voice on her link.

  Talia, please. Just one second. Please. It’s important.

  She turned around. He seemed smaller than he had before. She had always thought of Kaleb as a big guy, but he wasn’t. He was beefy, but not tall. In fact, in the right shoes, she would be taller than he was.

  She could pull over one of the security guards. She could contact someone on the school’s links, saying that this was an emergency, that Kaleb wouldn’t leave her alone.

  But something in his face bothered her.

  Talia, please, he sent again. Taking a risk, using the school links, stuff that could be traced.

  If he was up to something bad.

  She sighed. Rolled her eyes. Stopped. And turned around.

  “What?”

  The puffiness in his face looked worse than it had that morning. The bruising went all the way down his chin. Kaleb clearly didn’t like looking like that. He turned his head slightly, so that the bruised side wasn’t in the main part of her field of vision.

  He took her arm again, and she immediately regretted stopping.

  “Touch me one more time, and I swear, I’ll hurt you,” she said.

  He let her arm drop.

  “Can we go over there?” He nodded toward a side corridor. No one stood in it. “Please? It’s private.”

  “You try anything—”

  “I won’t,” he said. “I promise.”

  She was going to make some snide comment about the quality of his promises, but she changed her mind. She wanted this conversation over fast, and taunting him would prolong it.

  She followed him to the side corridor, and they stood near some large plant that Talia couldn’t identify. Its blue leaves gave them a bit of cover from the kids still passing through the main hallway.

  He lowered his head. “I know I’m a jerk. I know I’m an idiot. I know I’ve been really mean, and I’m sorry.”

  “You shouldn’t be apologizing to me,” Talia said. “It’s the Chinar twins and all those other kids—”

  “I know, but they’re not here.” Kaleb sighed. “My dad wants me to stay home. He wants to hire someone to tutor me there, and I can’t, Talia. I just can’t.”

  Something in his voice, something terrified, caught her. She looked at him, at the bruising, at the way his lower lip trembled.

  He said, “If you say you’ve forgiven me, if you say that I’m not so bad after all, maybe they’ll let me stay here.”

  He sounded desperate. She recognized desperate. But she didn’t get this, not entirely.

  “Why won’t they just put you in a different school?” she asked.

  “My mom.” His voice broke. “My mom died last year, and she said school was important. My dad doesn’t think it is, and he thinks if we hire someone or use one of those knowledge implants, I’ll be just fine. And maybe I will, but I’d have to stay home.”

  And the way he looked, the way he said home, Talia got the idea that he wasn’t objecting to leaving school so much as to being trapped.

  “They’re not going to listen to me,” she said. “I’m just some kid.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said. “Your dad has juice with the headmistress.”

  Talia bristled, but didn’t say anything.

  “And besides, you and me, we’re the ones who started everything yesterday.”

  “No, we didn’t,” Talia said.

  He nodded. “Sorry. I started everything. You tried to stop it.”

  “That’s better.” She sounded mean. She felt mean. But why the hell would he think she’d do anything for him, considering how mean he’d been?

  He’d been mean as long as she’d known him. He’d always picked on other kids, and he’d always laughed at them. She hated him, and she hated his pretty eyes, and his occasional really funny sense of humor. If he left school, no one would miss him except those dumb kids who banded around with him.

  “Why don’t you ask your buddies to talk to the headmistress?” she asked.

  “No one’ll believe them,” Kaleb said. “Everybody knows they listen to me.”

  “And everybody knows I don’t, is that it?” Talia asked. “So if I say you’re okay, then you are, right?”

  He shrugged.

  She shook her head. “I’m not doing you any favors. You don’t deserve favors.”

  She pushed past him and started down the hall, bracing for him to comment on her links. Bracing for more begging, bracing for him to try to manipulate her.

  But he didn’t say anything.

  In spite of herself, she glanced over her shoulder. He was still standing behind that stupid plant, his head down, one fist covering his face.

  He looked defeated.

  That should have made her feel better.

  Instead, it made her mad.

  Fifty-four

  “Noelle?” Flint asked. That frown between his eyes had grown. He clearly knew something was wrong.

  So did Popova. She stared at DeRicci. DeRicci wasn’t sure what to say.

  The Peyti faces, with those awful masks, floated around DeRicci’s office as if they haunted the place.

  DeRicci held up a finger. She wasn’t sure she could stop the Peyti bombers. She would have to mobilize all of the law enforcement on the Moon, officers she wasn’t even—by law—in charge of, and she would have to make them move in unison.

  Provided they all knew where the bombers were.

  She would have to accept some casualties. Because she wasn’t going to be able to contain all of this.

  “Were you able to cross-check the faces with the Peyti members of the Earth Alliance bar?” DeRicci asked.

  Flint’s frown remained. “I did. I got a lot of matches, but only four-hundred-and-eighty are here on the Moon.”

  “We have more than four-hundred-and-eighty Peyti in our image database,” she said, looking at those horrible faces.

  “I’m cross-checking with law school students, and with interns,” Flint said. “I’ll find them. But I’m not sure I’ll find all of them.”

  DeRicci nodded. Now she would have to let the Earth Alliance know about the Peyti threat. It seemed like days ago that she had learned about this Peyti mass murderer and his clones. All she had planned to do was let the Alliance know they existed—elsewhere.

  She had thought the attack would be elsewhere.

  It was going to be here. Again.

  “All right,” she said. She didn’t have time for emotions. Not if she wanted to save the Moon. “I’m going to need some massive help. And somehow we’re going to have to coordinate all of this, stealthily. We’re not going to have room for error. And we’re going to have to act really fast.”

  That frown disappeared from Flint’s face. Popova moved just a little closer, her shoulders squared. Clearly both of them were ready.

  DeRicci wished that were enough.

  “What did you learn, Noelle?” Flint asked.

  “You saw the different masks, right?�
�� she asked.

  Both Flint and Popova nodded.

  “The new ones. They’re a Peyti military prototype. They’re bombs.”

  Popova cursed, but Flint didn’t move. He always managed to set his emotions aside quickly. DeRicci envied that.

  “They weren’t wearing those prototypes yesterday,” he said.

  “That’s right,” DeRicci said. “This is another coordinated attack against the Moon, and it’s going to happen today. Rudra, I need the head of every law enforcement agency on the Moon in a conference. I’ll also need all of the surviving and acting mayors, and every member of the United Domes of the Moon council. I’ll need to talk to them in ten minutes.”

  “What’re you going to tell them?” Popova asked.

  “We’re going to send them the last known location of every one of those clones on the Moon,” DeRicci said. “We’re going to have to get eyes on those clones, and then we’re going to have to arrest them all, somehow neutralizing those masks.”

  “How do we neutralize them?” Flint asked.

  Thank God she had remembered to ask Rastigan that. Thank God Rastigan had had an answer.

  “That thing we noticed on the mask, that extra piece? It comes out. It becomes a bomb when you activate it.”

  “How easy is it to set off?” Flint asked. Leave it to him to be practical.

  “It depends on what you want to do,” DeRicci said. “If you want to blow yourself up along with everything around you, you can click through two safeties and do it fast. If you want to escape, you need to put in a code and set a timer. It’ll count down.”

  “How easy is it to deactivate?” Flint asked.

  “It doesn’t activate at all in a Peyti-only atmosphere,” DeRicci said. “It’s built to explode in any atmosphere except a Peyti-only atmosphere.”

  “These things were designed to kill humans?” Popova asked. “By the Peyti military?”

  “Our environment isn’t that unique. A number of aliens can thrive in it,” DeRicci said. “The Peyti environment, on the other hand, only exists on Peyla.”

  That was the answer Rastigan had given DeRicci when she asked this question, and that was the answer she was going to share. Because she wasn’t going to think about the implications of this. At all. She didn’t want to think about the larger implications.

  She had to solve this, and she had to solve it now.

  “So we turn the environment from Earth Alliance Standard to Peyti Standard and the bombs are deactivated?” Flint asked.

  “Actually,” DeRicci said, “they simply won’t work. They remain activated until we physically deactivate them. But they won’t work in a Peyti environment. It’s like a failsafe.”

  “It is a failsafe,” Flint said, more to himself than to her, “and that’s an easier solution than I had hoped for.”

  “Except that someone will have to deactivate that bomb in a Peyti atmosphere no matter what,” Popova said.

  “We can do that,” Flint said. “We can send someone in wearing a suit.”

  “Or we can send in a Peyti after we’ve neutralized the bomb,” DeRicci said tiredly. “Not every Peyti is involved here.”

  Popova took a deep breath, as if that very thought disturbed her. Then she said, “If we switch to Peyti Standard, the atmosphere will kill everyone in the room except the Peyti.”

  “And if we go in wearing environmental suits before we change the atmosphere, they’ll know something is up,” DeRicci said. “See why we need to coordinate this?”

  “If we have time,” Flint said.

  “We’re going to pretend we have time,” DeRicci said, “because that’s all we can do.”

  Fifty-five

  Kaleb didn’t show up for lunch. And Talia, weirdly, was watching for him.

  Normally, she wouldn’t be able to find him easily in the lunch area. The alcoves, the private spaces, the sheer size of the space meant she shouldn’t have been able to see him at all.

  But, she realized, he was always at lunch when she was, and he always hovered somewhere nearby. Every day, she had done her best to avoid him—and most days, she usually succeeded.

  Of course, on the day she wanted to see him, she didn’t. She even did a walk around the lunch area, just scanning. She wasn’t sure what she wanted. She was kinda worried about him, and that bugged her because he was such an idiot.

  But their conversation had disturbed her, and she thought about it during her entire next class.

  Plus, she looked up his dad through the public nets. Not his dad’s financials. Just reports about his dad’s personality.

  And she didn’t like what she had seen.

  Like most parents, Kaleb’s dad had money. Mostly he used that money to make problems go away. She found the ghosts of some domestic violence complaints, erased when Kaleb’s mom died, but remaining as gaps in the record.

  Talia also found some complaints from former employees who worked with Kaleb’s dad, saying he had behaved “unprofessionally,” whatever that meant. And then a couple of those employees moved out of Armstrong, buying expensive property elsewhere on the Moon.

  Talia didn’t exactly want to talk to Kaleb about this, but it bothered her, just like his reaction bothered her.

  And the fact that he wasn’t here bothered her too.

  She grabbed an apple and wandered out of the lunch area. The headmistress’s office wasn’t too far from here. Talia didn’t exactly want to tell anyone that she had forgiven Kaleb—she hadn’t—but she did want to know what was going on.

  Her dad would tell her that curiosity could harm her. He had told her that a lot since she looked for her sister clones a while back. But he always seemed a little uncomfortable saying it, since he got overly curious too. Otherwise he wouldn’t do the job that he did.

  As she walked toward the headmistress’s office, she saw a couple of security guards standing outside of one of the conference rooms. Talia stopped. They only did that when a meeting was going on.

  No one had thought to opaque the walls of the conference area. Inside it, she could see the guys who’d come in with Kaleb that morning, plus some lawyers. She could tell who they were by their fancy suits and the Peyti sitting in the group. A larger version of Kaleb with a florid face and a downturned mouth and mean, tiny eyes sat in the middle of the lawyers. Ms. Rutledge also sat there, hands folded, with yet another lawyer beside her.

  At least, Talia thought that guy was a lawyer. She’d seen him around a few times, so she figured he worked for the school.

  Kaleb sat all by himself at the far end of the table, his head resting on his arms. He looked worse than he had an hour ago, and now, despite herself, Talia felt sorry for him.

  He hadn’t been lying to her. He didn’t want to leave the school.

  The question was, did she want him to leave? He was nasty and disruptive and unreasonable. She shouldn’t have to defend him just because he wanted her to.

  But maybe he acted tough here because he couldn’t be tough at home.

  Or maybe he had learned it there.

  She finished the apple and cupped the core in her hand. How come she was the one who had to make this decision? How come somebody else couldn’t?

  And she didn’t know who would get hurt worse: the kids around her if Kaleb stayed in school or Kaleb if he had to leave.

  Not that she was sure if it mattered.

  She tried to figure out what her dad would do, and couldn’t. She knew what he would say. He would say it was her choice.

  Only she didn’t know what choice to make.

  Fifty-six

  It didn’t take long for the location program to notify Flint that it knew where most of the Peyti clones were. At least, the ones that were lawyers. Lawyers had to bill for each waking hour, which meant they kept track of every single moment they worked. Most law firms used the same program. Once Flint got into that program, he could track a bunch of them, provided he had their names.

  He had the names of four-hundred-a
nd-eighty Peyti clones. The problem was, he still couldn’t find the other twenty to thirty that he knew were on the Moon. And as DeRicci said, the takedown had to happen with all of the Peyti clones at once. If the security teams missed just one clone, then a dome might get destroyed—again.

  No matter how many casualties there were, no matter how few casualties there were, another destroyed dome would demoralize the Moon’s population. The very idea made Flint’s heart sink.

  He had no idea why anyone would target the Moon, and he knew DeRicci was right: that was a question for another day. On this day, he and DeRicci and everyone else had to prevent another devastating attack.

  Popova had left the room to set up the complicated conference that DeRicci needed to have in just a few short minutes.

  Flint had already sent word to some of the best techs in the building. They would meet him in DeRicci’s office while she was having her conference. With luck, he and the others would find the remaining clones.

  But what he was most worried about was that one or two or five of those clones had been smart enough to stay away from security cameras, and weren’t lawyers or interns or law students.

  He was afraid of clones who couldn’t be tracked.

  He also had one other worry, considering the names he had found in the Earth Alliance bar database. There were dozens of clones not on the Moon itself. Had they washed out? Given up?

  Did they work for firms that didn’t use the tracking program? Did they work off the grid?

  Or were they planning another attack elsewhere?

  DeRicci stood in the center of the room, surrounded by the creepy Peyti faces, working on a pad as if none of this bothered her. She managed to shut off everything.

  Flint was having a tougher time. He didn’t want to think about Talia, and yet he couldn’t stop doing so. He was glad she was in school, but he wanted her here, where he could keep an eye on her.

  He also wanted her brain. She would help him as no one else could.

  Only he didn’t want her to travel here. He felt that being out in the open right now would be worse than being in Aristotle Academy or the Security Building itself.