He really wanted to go get her, but he knew the best thing he could do was remain here and work, neutralize the threat so that she wouldn’t even know she had been in any danger.
Only he couldn’t do it all alone.
“Noelle,” he said, “I need your attention for one minute.”
She raised her head, her hand still clutching the pad. She frowned at him, and he wasn’t sure how much of her brain was here, and how much of it was planning the takedown of all those Peyti clones.
“There are dozens of clones not on the Moon,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “We can’t worry about that.”
“We have to worry about it,” Flint said. “We don’t know what they’re going to do.”
“It’s not an immediate threat, Miles. We—”
“I know,” he said. “Which is why I propose we bring the Earth Alliance investigators in on this. We can have them take this information to the Alliance. Your Peyti friend couldn’t do it, and you’re busy with this. Let them do it.”
DeRicci shook her head. “There’s too much evidence that the Earth Alliance is involved. We can’t trust them, Miles.”
He was prepared for that argument. “It’s not going to hurt. If we don’t tell them anything, there might be attacks off-Moon. If the investigators don’t inform anyone, the attacks will happen anyway. If they actually do their job, then we might be able to prevent those attacks as well.”
“And if they warn the Peyti clones?” DeRicci asked. “The ones here?”
“It’s on me,” Flint said.
“You’re willing to risk Talia’s life for that?” DeRicci asked.
It was a low blow, but an effective one. DeRicci knew how to get to his heart with one quick question. Did he trust those two investigators enough to risk an attack on the Moon?
He had to think. His heart was pounding. He hadn’t realized that until now.
“I trust Goudkins,” he said after a moment.
“All right then,” DeRicci said. “Bring—her? Him? I forget which one that is—”
“Her,” Flint said.
“Bring her in, but don’t let her tell the partner. Can we shut down her links?”
“I can,” Flint said, “but that’ll make contacting her people at the Alliance tougher.”
“We have to minimize risk,” DeRicci said, but her attention had already gone back to the pad.
She was right. Flint had to minimize risk. He could shut down the links for most anyone who might ruin the operation that DeRicci was trying to set up.
He sighed and sent for Goudkins. He hoped to hell she could get someone in the Alliance to listen to her.
Because if she didn’t do it, if he couldn’t find all the clones, if DeRicci couldn’t get law enforcement Moonwide to cooperate, this would be a very bad day.
Worse than Anniversary Day ever was.
And he didn’t want to even try to imagine that.
Fifty-seven
The secondary conference room felt crowded even though Noelle DeRicci stood in it alone. Popova had coordinated every mayor, every acting mayor, all the members of the United Domes Council, and all the heads of law enforcement all over the Moon, and put them on visual, with their names underneath the images (thankfully). Some of the faces floated like the Peyti clone faces had, and DeRicci wanted to swat them away from her.
Instead, she stood awkwardly like a schoolgirl waiting for a date, her mouth dry and her hands shaking.
“First,” DeRicci said loudly, trying to get their attention, “I need you all to be alone in your rooms. I need you to shut off all of your links except emergency links, and I need your word of honor that you have done so. I don’t have time to check, but believe me, I will know if you failed, and I will know rather quickly.”
She sounded ominous. She felt ominous, and all alone.
Popova worked in an alcove off the conference room that had its own secure link, so DeRicci could tell her if something went wrong. Normally a high-level tech would be inside the room, making sure everything worked smoothly, but the high-level techs that DeRicci had on staff were working with Flint, trying to find all of the Peyti clones on the Moon.
She was terrified they would miss one.
She was certain they would miss one.
She waited as various people turned away from their cameras or clearly waved a hand, instructing someone to leave the room. Her heart pounded.
As the faces turned back to her, she said, “I’m sorry to be so harsh, but we have a situation that makes Anniversary Day look like practice.”
Nods, responses to the affirmative, and some folks who didn’t move at all.
“Do any of you have lawyers in the room with you?” she asked. She initially was going to ask if they had any Peyti on staff, but she decided against it. Too obvious, too easy a warning.
She heard a few yeses.
She cursed silently. She had already told them to clear the room, and they’d left lawyers in there. She had been around government long enough to know that some government officials didn’t think of lawyers as people—which was why she asked the question.
She had hoped no one had made that mistake. The fact that a group of them had made her mad.
“Get them out,” she said. “I know they are supposed to be good at this confidentiality stuff, but what I’m about to ask you to do will automatically put them in an ethical quandary. Better that they leave the room. You don’t want them to hear what I have to tell you. It’ll be bad for the future of your administrations.”
She had thought of that as her excuse. too, even though it wasn’t strictly true. She wasn’t sure she had the legal authority to do what she needed to do, but the government lawyers and the lawmakers would back-date everything if she was successful, and crucify her if she was not. It didn’t matter if lawyers were in the room.
She just didn’t want Peyti in the room.
“Okay,” she said after a moment. “Are we alone?”
She got a lot of yeses, didn’t see any noes, even if there were any, and decided to proceed.
“Okay,” she said. “That situation I was talking about, it’s going to happen today. We have to work together to stop it, and we cannot miss. If we miss, thousands, maybe millions, maybe tens of millions will die. Am I being clear?”
Faces going gray, closed eyes, a few moans.
“I’m going to give you a plan of action, I’m going to give you a timeline, and if any of you deviate from that timeline by as much as one second, we are all doomed, am I clear?”
“Are you going to tell us what this situation is?” Dominic Hanrahan asked. Of course, he’d be one of the first to slow everything down. He was so afraid of everything, so afraid of being blamed for everything, and such a victim.
She took a breath. She was still angry at him for his comments the day before. (Just the day before? It felt like weeks ago.)
“Yes,” she said. “Then I’m going to tell you what we all are going to do. I’m going to give you a very short time frame in order to act because once this information gets out, and it will get out, we will lose. After this conference ends, I will send you coordinates of where the potential attackers were last seen. You will use a jammer in the area where those attackers are. You will shut off all links, including emergency links. You will shut off foreign links. You will shut down every communication system, including your own. Am I clear?”
“What the hell are you afraid of, DeRicci?” asked Dmitri Tsepen, the mayor of Glenn Station. She gave him a hard look. He didn’t seem to be drunk today, which was a good thing, since she probably had him dismiss his very competent assistant.
“You’ll understand in a few minutes,” she said.
Her gaze met that of Diane Limón, the acting mayor of Armstrong. Beside her, in a different bubble, was Olympia Hobell, chief of the Armstrong police department, and DeRicci’s old boss in the First Detective Unit, Andrea Gumiela. So just judging from Armstrong, Popova had doubled u
p on the security forces, making sure the people in charge knew what was going on, and the people who could actually do something knew as well.
“I cannot stress how important this is,” DeRicci said. “I also need to emphasize now that some of your actions today might result in civilian casualties. That can’t be helped. If you cannot deal with it, then you need to bring in someone who can right now. Is that clear?”
She expected to lose half the mayors right there. Her gaze met Hanrahan’s. He had gone gray but he hadn’t moved. Tsepen actually looked awake. Terrified, but awake and ready to act.
Olympia Hobell hadn’t moved. Neither had Andrea Gumiela. They watched with a coldness that DeRicci recognized in herself.
They would deal with the collateral damage later. They would do what they needed to do.
DeRicci wished she personally knew everyone of these people she was talking to. She wished she knew if she could trust them.
Surprisingly, though, she knew many of them, and she knew they’d do what they could.
That was all she could ask.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to give you the timeline first, and I want you to keep track of it. Back it up, do what you must, but do not lose it. You must follow it. Am I being clear?”
Everyone nodded. Or so it seemed. It was hard to tell with the damn floating heads.
“I am telling you the timeline first,” DeRicci said, “because this situation is so big and so difficult that I expect it to stun you for a few minutes. You have to plan for that, and figure out a way to set aside your emotional reaction. If you do not, you might harm everyone in a domed community on the Moon.”
“That’s everyone,” said a woman she didn’t recognize. “We all live in domed communities.”
“Yes,” DeRicci said. “I know.”
Her words hung for a moment.
She took a deep breath. “Pay attention, because we don’t have a lot of time to implement this, and the longer it takes to get you all on board, the greater the chance we have of losing everything.”
She steeled her shoulders. She had to communicate clearly as well. This was on her as much as it was on them.
“Okay,” she said. “Here we go.”
Fifty-eight
Sixteen people, half of whom Flint didn’t know, crowded into DeRicci’s office. They hunched over pads while sitting on chairs, on the floor, or leaning up against the wall. They had split the Moon into eight sections, by population, and two people concentrated on each section.
Flint had glanced quickly at their personnel files. He put one of the best on each team, going down by population. The most populous places, the ones with the most lawyers, got the best teams.
All of this seemed haphazard to him. It made his stomach twist. He collated all of the information, ran scans over the entire Moon on his own, and had Murray from Space Traffic send information from the private security system in the Port. The system that wasn’t supposed to exist, but that Flint, as a former member of the Space Traffic Patrol squad, knew all about.
He found half a dozen other clones all on his own. The ship records showed that another eight had left the Moon in the past week on ships bound back to Peyla. He sent that information to DeRicci’s contact on Peyla, without asking DeRicci’s permission.
Someone had to take care of this, and DeRicci was already overwhelmed.
He was overwhelmed, too. He had to coordinate all of this information. He hadn’t had a chance to absorb it, verify it, or examine it as closely as he would have liked. If someone asked him directly where all the clones were, he couldn’t say. He would have to refer to the information in front of him.
There was simply too much information to absorb, so he didn’t try to absorb any of it. Instead, he gathered it, and put it in easily understandable packets for the leaders and law enforcement officials DeRicci was still talking to. As soon as she was done, he would have to send all of this information to them, whether it was complete or not.
He wasn’t going to believe it was complete, either. He planned to keep working on finding more clones even after the information got sent. He really didn’t want someone—anyone—to slip through on this. It could be devastating.
Goudkins agreed. She had taken a spot in the far end of the room. She was using the Security Office’s equipment to contact the Earth Alliance. She didn’t use her links at all, trusting DeRicci’s system to get her through. DeRicci’s system and Goudkins’ identification.
Flint didn’t know what Goudkins had told her partner and he didn’t care. All he cared about was that she was sending information throughout the Earth Alliance about the clones. She was going outside of the investigative unit and to upper-echelon people, letting them know that the Moon had decided these clones were some kind of threat.
Goudkins had also decided that if she felt like she was getting a runaround, she would go directly to as many government leaders as she could before someone in the Alliance shut her down.
Flint trusted her more than he had earlier, but he would make sure the information got out once this day was over. He also warned her not to say that the Moon was taking action today or to say what the exact problem was.
They would save all of that until after the success or the failure of the Moon mission.
He glanced at the information pouring across the screen. They had most of the clones’ locations down to the second. But most wasn’t enough. Some had been seen a minute or two before, some five minutes before, and some thirty minutes before.
He was worried about them, but the ones he worried about the most were the ones that were off the grid, the ones that hadn’t been seen for a day or two.
Just one of those clones on the loose, just one, could ruin everything they were working toward.
He tried not to think about it.
But it seemed he could think about nothing else.
Fifty-nine
The conference room emptied, faces winking out in groups of two, three, and five. DeRicci still stood, hands clasped. They weren’t shaking any longer, but her stomach was so upset she wondered if she was going to be ill.
She made herself breathe. She couldn’t do much else. She couldn’t do anything else. It was all on them now.
And she hated that.
The last face vanished and she sank into a chair. It creaked slightly, as if no one had bothered it for a very long time.
She sent a message to Flint and Popova, Release the whereabouts information.
Then she put her hands over her face and closed her eyes. She felt absolutely helpless.
Perfection was not a human trait. Humans did not do things one-hundred percent. They usually missed by five to ten percent on everything they did, and usually that was acceptable.
Now she was trusting people whom she knew to be incompetent boobs, like Dmitri Tsepen, to not only rise above themselves but do so at one-hundred percent.
Maybe fear would make them do well. Because she hadn’t doubted the fear she had seen on all of those faces. Some, like Gumiela, had hidden it quickly, but it had been there.
Everyone knew what was at stake. In that, at least, DeRicci had done her job. Whether or not they completely understood the plan was another matter. But they understood the stakes.
DeRicci couldn’t do anything now except monitor.
And give the order for the dome sectioning so that destruction—again—would be on her.
She had fifty minutes before she gave that order.
Fifty minutes in which she had to trust others to do work she wasn’t even sure she could do.
Fifty minutes in which everything in her world could disappear—and very well might.
Sixty
Mayor Dominic Hanrahan stood in the center of his office, his hands clenched into fists. He could barely breathe. That bitch DeRicci had been right. The news was paralyzing, and he had to take action.
For himself and for his city.
And because one of the last things DeRicci had s
aid to him when she had visited here yesterday haunted him: If you don’t want to make the hard decisions for your city, we’ll find someone who can. And we’ll instate him as mayor of this city. I’m sure everyone in Tycho Crater will be relieved.
Right now, he wanted someone else to be mayor. He needed someone else to be mayor. He didn’t want this responsibility.
But he had gotten in trouble for freezing when the Top of the Dome collapsed six months ago. He couldn’t freeze now.
He had to take action.
Even though all he could think about was his favorite lawyer, who happened to be Peyti, who for some reason hadn’t come into work today. Or that Peyti lawyer who’d sat in this very room yesterday, talking about lawsuits against Tycho Crater for all the deaths that happened on Anniversary Day.
Lawsuits. Deaths. And he had only his memory of those lawyers to check against the database. At least for the moment, at least until DeRicci’s people sent him the information about where Peyti lawyers would be.
He wished he could call in his assistants, but he couldn’t. He needed to talk directly to law enforcement here and he had to set it up. Fortunately, at least three of them had been involved in that conference call. If he were acting on his own, he would wait for them to contact him.
But he didn’t have time to wait.
If he waited, Tycho Crater could be obliterated.
The information packet that DeRicci had promised hit his links accompanied by actual alarm bells. Like he needed alarm bells. Like he wasn’t alarmed enough already.
He combed through the information, found five of the clones here in Tycho Crater, all of them with their locations known. As he examined them, his emergency links opened.
Law enforcement contacting him. Of course. They had only a few minutes to coordinate everything, too.
Five. Known. None of them his lawyer.
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