Masterminds

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Unauthorized Access

  Use Entry Passkey and Try Again

  He expected to get that message if he had tried the door without using the passkey. So that was working.

  He wondered if Petteway had had trouble accessing the room. If he had, wouldn’t he have told Ó Brádaigh?

  Had this problem cropped up since Petteway was in the control room?

  Ó Brádaigh started to open an encrypted link to Petteway and then stopped. This was the moment in which Ó Brádaigh decided whether or not he trusted his boss, the man he had known for decades.

  Ó Brádaigh’s throat was dry, his face flushed, his heart pounding.

  He felt the risk as if Petteway were standing right here.

  And, after a moment, Ó Brádaigh shut down the link. If he hadn’t seen Petteway here not ten minutes ago, Ó Brádaigh would have opened the link as a matter of course.

  But he had seen Petteway and now the control room wasn’t responding properly. And Petteway had said nothing about it.

  Ó Brádaigh cursed under his breath.

  He wasn’t sure who he could trust. He was also aware that he was down here alone, after his shift ended, and if someone reviewed the security footage, they would think he had acted suspiciously.

  Any other man would have walked away and saved this for another day.

  But he couldn’t.

  He needed to investigate, and he needed to do it now.

  SEVENTEEN

  “DID YOU CHECK to see if the DNA has clone marks or some kind of trademark?” Berhane asked.

  Kaspian stared at the faces floating around him on the various holoscreens. Berhane didn’t glance at them, not at the moment. She would deal with the faces—the identities—after she and Kaspian finished their discussion.

  “Yeah, I had our labs check,” he said. “No clone marks, no trademarks, nothing. I didn’t have them check for shortened telomeres, but I’m not sure, given the samples we’re using, how reliable that would be anyway.”

  His comment on telomeres made her think. She didn’t like seeing these long-dead faces, and she really didn’t like the implication that yet more clones were on the Moon, plotting something evil.

  But she didn’t yet know if that was true. She grabbed one of the chairs and leaned on its back, staring at the floating faces. A few of them looked vaguely familiar, but she didn’t trust that. All faces looked vaguely familiar once someone placed that suggestion in a person’s brain. She wasn’t going to rely on her gut sense.

  “Did the same labs come up with the same identifications?” she asked. “Meaning, did one lab—”

  “Did one lab only identify one of the old identities, did another only identify the other identity, and so on?” he asked. “Oh, God, I wish. But the answer is no. The DNA comes from different parts of the Moon, from different volunteers, and was collected at different times. That’s what took so long to find this. And, I’ll be honest, I didn’t find it. One of the lab techs found the first set.”

  Berhane frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “He asked if we had some kind of error in our routing system. Because he claimed he had already tested some of the samples.”

  Berhane ran a hand over her face. She thought about that for a moment. “Do we have an error?”

  “No,” Kaspian said. “First of all, the samples were in varying degrees of decay. Some were covered in regolith from the Moon’s surface, some had smoke damage, some included bits of destroyed building—I mean, if we were sending the same samples, they should have been the same on all levels. They should have been from Littrow or the same building and they should have had the same contaminants. They didn’t.”

  Berhane’s heart was beating hard. If there were more clones, then what did that mean?

  “How many samples have you found?” she asked.

  “Enough to disturb me,” Kaspian said.

  She shook her head. That wasn’t a good answer. “There are cloning operations all over the Moon—all over the Earth Alliance, for that matter. Legitimate cloning operations.”

  “Those clones would have had some kind of tag in their DNA,” Kaspian said curtly, as if she hadn’t been listening. She knew he had addressed that, but she couldn’t quite accept what she was seeing. She didn’t immediately want to go to the worst case.

  “Could that tag have been destroyed?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a scientist.”

  “Did you ask?”

  He glanced at her, then took a deep breath, obviously trying to contain his irritation. “Yes, yes I did.”

  “And what did the labs say?”

  “They said anything’s possible, but chances are, if they can use the DNA to identify someone, then the DNA sample would still have its clone marks.”

  She didn’t like that at all. She bit her lower lip and looked at the floating faces. All male, yet again. She wondered if that was some kind of pattern, or if she was reading something else into this entirely.

  “If these clones were supposed to set off another attack,” she said slowly, “how did they die in this one? Wouldn’t they have known?”

  Kaspian raised his forefingers and tapped them against his lips. “I don’t know the answer to that. You would think they wouldn’t have died.”

  “Unless they were suicide bombers,” she said. “Unless the bombs weren’t set off by the people we thought.”

  “These people we’re finding now,” Kaspian said, “they couldn’t have set off the bombs. There were too many surviving witnesses, too much evidence pointing to those Frémont clones. At least that’s what’s in the press. We have known for months who set off the Anniversary Day explosions.”

  Berhane nodded. This wasn’t making sense. She made herself take a deep breath.

  “Let me try this again,” she said. “These clones we’ve found, who are the originals? I mean—”

  “There are too many originals to give you a quick answer,” Kaspian said. “I can give you names here, but I’d be looking them up, just like you would.”

  “No,” she said, thinking it was hard to be clear about these matters. “I mean the originals. You’ve already examined them, who they were, right?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And were the originals mass murderers like Frémont?”

  “No,” Kaspian said. “They aren’t even murderers. They lived pretty quiet lives. They’re not famous in any way, at least that I could tell.”

  “How many of them are there?” she asked.

  “Originals?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “We found one hundred different originals who had been cloned,” he said.

  “How many clones have you found?” she asked again. This time, though, her tone was softer.

  “Hundreds,” he said.

  She felt her breath catch. Twenty clones had damaged nineteen domes on Anniversary Day. Hundreds of Peyti clones had tried to do something similar during the Peyti Crisis.

  And now, Kaspian was telling her that their small search for the identity of the dead had uncovered hundreds of clones.

  “Not all of the same person,” she said to herself.

  But Kaspian heard. “Not all of the same person.”

  His gray eyes met hers. She could see how troubled he was. She was just as troubled.

  “I wonder what would happen if we searched the rubble for Peyti DNA,” she said. “I wonder how many of the Peyti lawyer clones we would find.”

  “We could do that,” he said.

  She nodded, but felt dismissive. She didn’t want to waste resources like that, looking into the perpetrators rather than looking for victims. She had already limited what they used their precious resources for.

  In fact, that had led to the first fight with Kaspian back when they set up this company. Back then, he had argued that they should search for human and alien DNA. Berhane had already felt overwhelmed, just searching for humans. She agreed that ADVI-RS would se
t aside all organic materials—or at least as much as they could—until they had more lab space.

  But she had been looking at limited funds, limited time, and limited numbers of volunteers. She had made the hard choice four months ago to only look for human remains. Even that was daunting, given the millions who had died.

  “I don’t want to search for the Peyti clone lawyers,” she said. “We have a mission. We can’t get sidetracked.”

  “The mission is no good if we’re going to get attacked again.” His voice trembled just a bit.

  The entire city was on edge—the entire Moon was on edge—after the Peyti Crisis. Everyone was waiting for the next attack.

  “We are not equipped to deal with this,” she said. “Figuring out who those clones were and what they were doing here isn’t our mission. We have to remain focused on what we do.”

  “If we have the information that could prevent the next attack, then we should—”

  She put up a hand and stopped him. “Let’s take this to the authorities. Let them deal with it.”

  “You want me to do that?” he asked. “Who do I take it to? Armstrong PD?”

  She shook her head. Even if she were feeling kindly disposed to the Armstrong Police Department right now, she wouldn’t approach them with something this big.

  The only organization on the Moon big enough to handle Moonwide information was the United Domes Security Office.

  Berhane had met Noelle DeRicci once at a fund-raiser before Mayor Arek Soseki died. DeRicci had made it clear that she didn’t do events for political reasons, and she had spent most of her time there cradling a drink and looking extremely uncomfortable.

  It was a tenuous connection, but it was probably enough to get DeRicci to listen to her.

  Besides, Berhane was the daughter of Bernard Magalhães, one of the richest men on the Moon. That always opened doors.

  Even doors that claimed to remain closed in the face of local politics.

  Someone would have to deal with Berhane, and quickly.

  “Get me the information you gathered,” she said. “I’ll take it up to the Security Office.”

  “This isn’t something that can wait,” Kaspian said. He must have thought she would go up to the office when she found the time.

  “I know that,” she said, hiding her irritation at his assumption. “The sooner you get me the information, the quicker I’ll head up there.”

  He straightened his shoulders. She had never seen him stand up straight. He was taller than she had ever realized. She hadn’t realized until that moment just how badly he slouched.

  “I have everything now,” he said with a dignity that she hadn’t heard from him before. “And I’d like to come with you. You’ll need me to answer the detail questions.”

  She stared at him for a moment. Usually she would say no. Dealing with people wasn’t Kaspian’s strong suit.

  But she didn’t need a diplomat here. She needed someone to tell the leaders of the Moon about something suspicious.

  She could get them to listen—for a minute, anyway.

  He could show them why they needed to investigate.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  EIGHTEEN

  FLINT RETURNED TO his office in Old Armstrong. He had only been gone part of the day, but it felt like he’d been away for months. After he closed the door, he stood for a moment in the silence.

  Before he left, he had been running massive searches on a variety of Peyti-related items. He was investigating a corporation with the Peyti name that had a variety of meanings, one of which was, of all things, Legal Fiction. It apparently had paid all expenses for the Peyti clones’ education. It had also sent the clones their masks every quarter.

  Which meant that it had also sent the bombs.

  Flint had compiled hundreds of addresses for the Peyti clones, and he had been in the process of checking the shipping records to those addresses when he got called away.

  He had shut down the searches when he left. He hadn’t known how long he was going to be gone, and he didn’t want to leave systems open. This office had fantastic security, but no security was good enough to prevent a breach from a dedicated—and smart—attacker.

  He ran his hand through his hair and considered his options. He had a human name now, and a connection to the Alliance. But he felt that the investigation of the Peyti clones was worthwhile as well.

  He set up his systems again. He had saved his searches, even though they weren’t complete. He could start them roughly from where he left off.

  But he also wanted to make certain that he had one of his more powerful computer systems free. He needed to find Ike Jarvis.

  That search would be even more delicate than the ones Flint was conducting into Legal Fiction. If Jarvis was running an illegal operation from inside the Alliance, then he would be set up to catch any potential incursions into his systems or background.

  For that very reason, Flint had decided against doing his preliminary searches in the Security Office. He had debated telling DeRicci about Jarvis and then rejected that idea. He wanted to see what he could find first.

  Flint also knew that DeRicci would suggest that Wilma Goudkins run the search. Goudkins worked with the Investigative Department of the Earth Alliance Security Division, but she was doing a lot of off-book searches for DeRicci. Goudkins was looking into databases that Flint couldn’t easily access.

  On the surface, a search for Jarvis’s information would be a prime search for Goudkins.

  But Flint had decided against it for several reasons. The main reason was Zagrando. Flint didn’t want anyone else to know that Zagrando was here. Flint hadn’t even told Murray Atherton who Zagrando was, and Murray had shown himself to be very trustworthy over the years.

  Flint didn’t know enough about Jarvis or Zagrando to know if a search into one man’s history would lead to the other man. He didn’t want to take that risk.

  And, if truth be told, he wasn’t certain he could trust the information he had gotten from Zagrando. Zagrando had been floating in and out of consciousness. He had lost his train of thought once in their conversation. Flint was worried that Zagrando had spoken a name that had no relationship to the Moon, and had simply been in his mind before he got injured.

  Flint decided to work at his desk. He’d had enough moving around for one day.

  Before he settled in, he shut off all of his links except his link to Talia and his emergency links. Normally when he did work this delicate, he shut off all of his links. But he couldn’t do that right now. He couldn’t leave his daughter unprotected, and he couldn’t ignore the fact that something else could easily go wrong.

  He sat down and started his search for Ike Jarvis. When Flint did these searches, he had learned to start with the most accessible place, and then move forward. So he opened the public Earth Alliance databases, keeping his own signature as encrypted as possible.

  He needed all the official information on Ike Jarvis first.

  Then Flint would find out who the man really was, and if he was at all relevant to everything that had been happening on the Moon.

  NINETEEN

  JUDITA GOMEZ WALKED through the doors of the United Domes of the Moon Security Office as if she had done so every single day of her life. The ease with which she entered the building startled her. She knew that the systems here had checked her identification, but still, someone or something should have stopped her by now.

  The entrance was wide and high. The doors looked like glass, but weren’t. They weren’t even clear. They just appeared that way, because the person entering saw her reflection, and then shadows from inside the building.

  Only the shadows weren’t real.

  Gomez hadn’t liked her reflection. She had put on weight since she left the Stanley. She got most of her exercise by walking around her ship, and the Green Dragon was tiny compared to the Stanley. She had thought she had put on only a little weight, and she was startled to re
alize she looked a bit tubby.

  Then she smiled to herself. The reflecting doors were brilliant. They made the entrant focus on herself instead of the building. She had stepped inside, through obvious security that didn’t seem to mind her, and into a high-ceilinged lobby that had almost no décor. No chair, no sofa, no tables, and no desks. Nothing for anyone to stand near or behind. Everything was open, and that made it all uncomfortable for her.

  She almost felt like yelling, Hey! I’m here! Make sure I’m not going to attack this stupid building!

  But she didn’t, of course. Since yelling something like that would be suspicious, and, apparently, walking through wasn’t suspicious at all.

  She hit her first barrier just inside the obvious security. A clear wall shimmered before her, and across her vision an automated person appeared.

  State your business.

  She straightened her shoulders. Earth Alliance Frontier Security Service Marshal Judita Gomez here to see Noelle DeRicci.

  You do not have an appointment.

  That’s right. She hated these automated greetings. All of them frustrated her, and the frustration piled onto old frustrations. Just knowing the automation existed frustrated her, even before the thing started talking with her.

  Please exit the building and return when you have an appointment.

  She had known it would say that. Please let Noelle DeRicci know I’m here. This is an urgent matter.

  The avatar winked out and the wall before her hardened. Some people would have gotten discouraged here, but Gomez did not.

  Then an oval-shaped face appeared in her links. The face belonged to a stunning woman with long, black hair that hung over her shoulder like a waterfall.

  Are you the woman who contacted me? the woman asked.

  Noelle DeRicci? Gomez asked, not certain how to respond to the query.

  No, I’m her assistant, Rudra Popova. The woman looked irritated. You did not answer my query. Are—

  I haven’t contacted you, Gomez sent. I decided I should come directly to the office. I just arrived on the Moon. You can check out the history of my ship, the Green Dragon. I have information that Chief DeRicci needs to hear.