Masterminds

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “I don’t know. The city, I guess.” Ó Brádaigh had no idea how all the departments worked.

  “Maybe the acting mayor could help,” Kobani said.

  “It’s not our decision. We just gotta impress on these people that this is an emergency, and someone else can light a fire under that guy’s ass,” the male officer said.

  Ó Brádaigh nodded. He glanced at the control room. He didn’t want to do this on his own.

  But, he realized, he had no choice.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  FLINT STOOD NEXT to Issassi and opened another virtual screen. Sometimes it was better to work beside someone and share information rather than work in isolation.

  He would rather work beside Talia, whose thought processes he understood almost better than his own, but he didn’t want to bring her into this.

  She saw the Security Office as a safe place, and he didn’t want to alter that perception. She was still at Zagrando’s bedside, and it was the best place for her. With luck, this entire crisis would be past before she ever found out about it.

  Chaos continued around him—police officers whose names he didn’t know were talking out loud on their links; a few tactical officers were trying to figure out if there was a vulnerability in the building’s barrier; two officials were arguing over who was in charge.

  Several people went up to the windows and peered in, just as Nyquist had done. Flint wasn’t sure what the point was behind that. Were they worried that no one was inside?

  His stomach jumped at the very idea and he willed the thought away, but not before another followed on its heels. He hoped everyone was still alive in there.

  He didn’t want to think about what he would do if DeRicci were gone.

  He made himself focus. He had a gift for remembering details of systems he set up, and he had set up so much inside this system that it felt like one of his own.

  The changes were as visible to him as they would have been if someone had highlighted them in gold. And as he looked, he had a realization: Whoever had done this hadn’t been a gifted programmer. Whoever had made these changes had learned enough about systems to change them, but not to design them.

  “Hey, Kaz,” Flint said softly, “I think only one person did this.”

  “If that’s the case, it took ‘em a long time.” The light from the virtual screen illuminated her face. She was frowning in concentration.

  Flint nodded once, putting that piece of information in his mind to use later. Whoever did this had to have had access for Issassi’s “long time,” and not a lot of people had that.

  There was a pattern to what this person had done. Flint could see the edges of it.

  He worked, for how long, he didn’t know. He was losing track of time, like he often did when he was digging into systems. And then he saw it.

  The hacker—or alterer—or whatever this person was—had changed things in the same order. If he changed an entry code to one part of the system, he then worked his way through that part of the system as if he were walking from front to back in a room, instead of fixing all of the entry codes at the same time.

  “Kaz,” Flint said. “Look.”

  He showed her what he had found. She grinned at him, her expression victorious.

  “Idiot,” she said—about the hacker, not about Flint. “We don’t reset by item, we reset by date.”

  She was right; they had to find the first access date. Flint switched everything on his screen, querying the system, asking it when this user first appeared.

  The date he received was a month after Anniversary Day. Flint tried to remember when he had beefed up the system. It had to be earlier than that.

  He couldn’t get deep enough into the system to check his alterations. If he reset too early, those alterations would be lost.

  But did it matter? The system was inaccessible, and if he managed to fix the system, then he could repair what he had destroyed.

  “Can you find what date this person entered the system?” Issassi asked.

  “I got a date, but I don’t trust it,” Flint said. “Let’s do this: let’s use a date we can be certain of.”

  She glanced at him, her fingers still working even though she wasn’t looking at what she was doing.

  “What date?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Anniversary Day,” he said.

  “But, how do we know this person wasn’t already in the system?” she asked.

  “Because I made some alterations after Anniversary Day, and I would have noticed changes this inelegant,” Flint said.

  “We don’t have the authorization to reboot the entire system. Not now,” she said.

  “Oh, but we do,” he said. He had just checked. His outside security protocol, the one very few people knew about, seemed completely untouched. In that protocol, he had given himself the ability to reboot the entire system.

  He had thought of it as the doomsday option, because he had known, even then, that it would wipe the system clean.

  He opened a third window, found his little protected part of the Security Office system, and took a deep breath.

  “You ready, Kaz?” he asked.

  She widened her black eyes slightly. They expressed what she couldn’t say out loud. She wasn’t sure this was going to work. She was afraid it would make everything worse.

  There was only one way to find out.

  Flint initiated the reboot—and waited.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  DERICCI GRABBED A cleaning cloth from her desk and wiped off her face. The cloth smelled faintly of garlic and polish. Popova made a circular motion in front of her left cheek, indicating that DeRicci hadn’t gotten everything. She wiped again.

  She wasn’t really doing it to get rid of the blood. She was doing it because of the iron smell that the blood had coated her with. Only the spray on her face wasn’t the problem.

  The problem was her clothes, soaked in the blood from Ostaka’s nose. They were extra-heavy. She rummaged behind her desk for something to change into.

  Her adrenalin flowed, her hands moving faster than they usually did. Even with the adrenalin, she could feel a pulled muscle along her spine. Picking up a man of Ostaka’s weight and flinging him, even when done properly, really wasn’t something she had done of late.

  Heck, it had probably been five years or more since she had dropped someone. She was rather pleased to know she still could.

  Gomez had taken the laser pistols from Popova. The woman who had said there were hundreds more problems had come farther into the office. It had taken DeRicci a second to place her.

  That was Berhane Magalhães, Bernard Magalhães’s daughter. They had met at some long, stupid, boring fundraiser for something, and DeRicci’s impression of the young Ms. Magalhães was that she was one of those rich, sincere types who wanted to give money to every single cause that caught her fancy.

  DeRicci had no idea why she was here.

  Ostaka had closed his eyes. He hadn’t said a word since Gomez had come into the room, and DeRicci wasn’t sure he was going to say more.

  What he had said alarmed her: he had shut off all access to the building.

  “We need to get everything back online,” she said to Popova. “And where the hell is the rest of the staff?”

  “I sent them away,” Ostaka mumbled. Apparently, he was going to talk.

  “Away where?” DeRicci asked, making sure she sounded as angry as she felt. Asshole. Ruining her building. She had trusted him.

  “Middle of the building. Told them there was an emergency. Then I locked down the floor.”

  Gomez’s gaze met DeRicci’s, and DeRicci could almost hear her thoughts. Something was happening today besides this lockdown.

  But DeRicci wasn’t going to assume that.

  “Did you decide to mess with our systems today because I let you into my office?” she asked.

  “No,” he said miserably. Then shook his head, winced as if it hurt, and said, “I mean, I took some liberties,
yes, but I didn’t do it because you were dumb enough to let me in here.”

  She wanted to hit him again. She came closer, fist clenched. It wasn’t just for effect—or maybe it wasn’t for effect at all.

  “Then what was so important about today?” she asked.

  Gomez watched it all, expression impassive.

  Ostaka opened his eyes as far as he could. He even attempted a smile. “You’ll find out.”

  DeRicci wasn’t going to play games. She was going to make him talk. Enough playing.

  As DeRicci took a step toward him, Berhane Magalhães spoke up.

  “I think we need to deal with all the others,” she said. “If he’s doing something today, they probably are too.”

  Popova nodded. “She showed me a lot of clones, Chief.”

  Gomez looked back and forth between them. “We should see this.”

  DeRicci took a step back. She was angry—she had been angry for months—and she finally had someone to direct her anger at. No wonder her control and focus had slipped a little.

  “You’re right.” She took a deep breath. “Rudra, do you know how to access the emergency lockdown on the lower floors?”

  “I’m already on it,” Popova said. “It’s a little more complicated than I expected.”

  In other words, this jerk had tweaked things to make it hard for Popova to fix from up here. DeRicci wished Flint were here, but she’d already tried to use her links after she had hit Ostaka. The links weren’t working.

  “Show me what you have,” she said to Magalhães.

  Magalhães glanced over her shoulder. “Can I bring my partner here?”

  “We don’t have time to bring in someone from the outside,” DeRicci said. “I need to know—”

  “He’s in the next room,” Magalhães said.

  “Go,” DeRicci said. She sighed, then looked at Gomez. “Any good with computer systems, Marshal?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Gomez said. “But I can probably get this one to talk, if you like.”

  DeRicci felt reluctant to give up Ostaka. That emotion alone was a warning sign.

  “Sure,” DeRicci said. “See what you can do.”

  Ostaka winced even before Gomez got to him. She yanked him up by his collar and shoved him against the desk buried under the trash.

  “It’ll be in your best interest to tell us everything,” Gomez said.

  He shook his head. “I no longer have a best interest.”

  Just like the Peyti clones. DeRicci would wager everything she owned that this fool had been on some kind of suicide mission.

  Magalhães returned with a skinny man who looked like he needed a good meal. His long hair was pulled back into a ponytail.

  “Did Berhane explain to you how we got the DNA?” he asked.

  DeRicci had no idea what he was talking about.

  Popova looked at all of them from above a floating screen. “Chief, they found some information on clones. Ms. Magalhães runs one of the search and recovery efforts in the domes.”

  “Thanks for the context, Rudra,” DeRicci said. “You found—”

  “Old DNA, out of place.” Magalhães spoke over her partner. “These people had died decades ago, so we didn’t know how they kept appearing in the destroyed parts of the dome. I can tell you how we found it all later, but you need to see this. These are the originals.”

  She nodded at the skinny man. He raised a dozen screens around the room, and faces appeared.

  DeRicci recognized half of them. She’d seen them around Armstrong—not dead people, but living people. One of the originals had Ostaka’s face, albeit an older, fleshier version. She recognized others from some of the city planning meetings she had attended in the past few months.

  Her breath caught.

  “The thing is,” the skinny guy said, “the pattern repeated over and over. It wasn’t like we found only one person’s DNA in one dome. We found versions of these originals in most of the dome sites we’ve worked.”

  “Obviously something is going to happen today, and these people are involved,” Gomez said. “How the heck are we going to deal with that?”

  As she said that last, she shook Ostaka. He winced again, but didn’t say anything at all.

  DeRicci was just staring at the faces. No wonder she hadn’t found anything. She had set her searches to find large clone patterns, figuring the Peyti Crisis was the new model for clone attacks. Not twenty clones of one person, as she had seen on Anniversary Day, but hundreds.

  Although she had set up a different search for the port, searching for smaller groups of clones who had come in together on a transport, as they had done before Anniversary Day.

  She hadn’t been imaginative enough.

  “These originals,” she said to Magalhães, “they were born on the Moon, weren’t they?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “and that’s about all we can find in common between them.”

  If DeRicci had to guess, she would have guessed that the clones had come in as children or had come in at different times, or maybe were even cloned here, in some illegal operation.

  She didn’t have time to worry about the how. She needed to worry about whatever was next.

  Ostaka hadn’t grown up on the Moon. He had come here.

  “I assume you have a higher rank than all the other clones,” she said, appealing to his vanity.

  “In life or in the Earth Alliance?” he asked.

  Fascinating response. She wished she could mention that to Gomez on a link, but the links were still down.

  “In general,” DeRicci said. “You know who the players are.”

  “I don’t know those people,” he said.

  “But you knew they existed,” DeRicci said.

  He shrugged, then grimaced. She had hurt him badly.

  “Let’s preserve him,” she said to Gomez. “He’ll lead us to the masterminds once today is over.”

  “We won’t be here when today is over,” he said.

  DeRicci grinned at him. “You have consistently underestimated me, Lawrence,” she said softly. “And I just heard you do it again.”

  FIFTY-NINE

  THE MASSIVE SECURITY system for the United Domes of the Moon Security Office disappeared from the screen Flint was working on. The entire screen had gone dark as the system rebooted.

  All down the line beside him, techs stepped back from their screens.

  “What the hell?” someone asked.

  Issassi glanced sideways at Flint. She was biting her lower lip so hard, she had drawn blood. She didn’t seem to notice.

  One of two things could happen. The system could harden, and he would never get in this way. Or it could completely disappear, leaving the Security Office vulnerable.

  Then he mentally shook his head at himself. The Security Office was already vulnerable. Even if the security shut down, the office would be better off than it had been when he arrived.

  And his “one of two things” estimation was just wrong. A million things could go wrong. Attempting to reset the system, back to a date before Anniversary Day, might trigger something, some kind of internal worm or something that he had no idea about. Because he hadn’t been able to check.

  So he listened to the techs, fretting and worrying and wondering what they had done, not telling them what he had done, and he watched the blackness on his screen.

  Then the screen lit up, and a cheer went up around him. For a moment, he thought the techs were cheering, and then he realized it was the hardened police officers.

  The shield around the building had disappeared. Police officers streamed forward.

  Issassi extended her hand. She grinned at him.

  “It worked,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Now we have to repair whatever the hell this person has done.”

  But first he sent a message along his links to DeRicci. Hey, haven’t been able to reach you. Are you all right?

  He got an immediate message back. Miles? Is that really
you?

  Yes, he sent. Are you all right?

  Oh, yeah, she sent, but can you get here right now? We’re having trouble with our systems.

  He smiled—really smiled—for the first time in hours. I’m already here. We’re in the systems now.

  Great, she sent, because I really need your help with something else. Can you come upstairs?

  Yeah, he sent. I’ll be right there.

  “Think you can handle this?” he asked Issassi.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’ll do everything I can. Where are you going?”

  “I’m needed inside,” he said.

  She nodded. “I’ll clean up this mess as fast as I can.”

  “I’d rather you be accurate,” Flint said.

  “Point taken.” Her head was already bent over yet another screen. He could tell from the way she leaned that she was using her own links to access some of the information.

  He hurried past her. Relief mixed with worry as he headed toward the main door of the office. Relief was winning out, though. If someone had been trying to imitate DeRicci, they would have never gotten that level of command correct. DeRicci was all business. Clearly, she had to be.

  He entered the main door, saw that the security system had rebooted to its pre-Anniversary Day level. It greeted him by name (something he had gotten rid of) and welcomed him into the building (something else he had gotten rid of).

  Several police officers complained as he slipped through. They felt their badges should let them in. At least that rudimentary level of security existed. Clearly, the system was confirming who they were before allowing them access.

  He ran across the lobby floor, startled that no humans were there to greet him. And since the elevators were automated, he decided he wouldn’t get on one. He still had no idea what was working and what wasn’t.

  As he took the stairs, he sent DeRicci another message. I’m coming to your office, right?

  Oh, yeah, she sent. And ignore the mess.

  He had been ignoring the mess for months. He wondered what she meant by that, then figured he would find out soon enough.