He nodded, his expression serious. “I would do the same in your position,” he said.
He had meant the words to comfort her, but they did not.
Perhaps she couldn’t be comforted. She had known that there were traitors inside the Alliance, but to learn they had been operating from within her precious division disturbed her more than she ever wanted to admit.
She knew that for weeks, maybe years to come, she would see a lot of dawns from the wrong side of the night. Sleep would become a luxury.
She had housecleaning to do, and decisions to make.
Awful decisions.
Life and death decisions.
She hated making them, but she had done it before.
She knew she could do it again.
SIXTY-NINE
DARKNESS MOVED ACROSS the top of the dome. DeRicci watched the change through the floor to ceiling windows in her office, as she continued to argue with the leaders of the other domes. They were furious at her for releasing the faces without running the information through them first, without giving them a chance to warn their police or security departments.
The fact that some of those faces showed up in their police departments seemed beyond the leaders. And as she argued with them, wishing she had more time, she watched the programs shut off in Armstrong’s dome. First, Dome Daylight vanished, and the dome became clear.
This part of the Moon was tilted away from the sun, but hadn’t entirely gone dark yet. Some rays of light hit the dome, just not enough to compensate for Dome Daylight.
Then a shadow darkened the outside of the dome, and even though DeRicci knew that the shadow was part of the emergency surface sweep, it still startled her.
All surface sweeps were done during Dome Night. Although they were visible to the naked eye, most people didn’t notice because the dome was in darkness anyway. She had watched one from this very office when she first became chief of security.
That seemed like a hundred years ago.
Around her, half of the people in her office stopped working and looked at the shadow spreading across the top of the dome. She wanted to tell them to get back to work, but she was too hooked into her conversation with the dome leaders.
She made herself turn away from the windows, moving the images of the leaders with her as she did, because she didn’t want to focus on the dome. Still, she could see the shadow through the windows of the other side of the large room.
And the lights in her own office had gone up because of the darkness outside.
She glanced over at Flint, whose head was down. He and the technical officer from the Armstrong Police Department, a woman he had introduced as Kaz Issassi, were consulting with each other, and then they’d do something on a screen in front of them, and then they’d consult some more.
After that initial moment of alarm as the shadows crept along the surface of the dome, everyone had returned to work. Even Berhane Magalhães seemed busy. She was talking to the skinny man she had brought with her, and the strange-looking middle-aged woman was standing just outside their conversation, head down, seemingly listening intently.
DeRicci made herself focus on the conversations she was having. And then two of the mayors looked startled, almost frightened. And behind DeRicci, someone cursed.
“What?” she asked, but she wasn’t sure she knew who she was asking.
Popova opened a large screen in the center of the room. Apparently, she had made the noise.
On the screen, images appeared. DeRicci recognized the damaged spires of Sverdrup Crater in the distance. The image she was watching seemed to be from some kind of security camera. To one side, she saw the massive Shackleton crater, where energy companies thrived but no city existed, and prominently, near the front of the image, the bubble of the small dome of Crater de Gerlache.
Sverdrup had been one of the twenty cities targeted by the Frémont clones, but Crater de Gerlache had been too small. DeRicci had declined the opportunity to visit there. Sverdrup had freaked her out enough. She didn’t like that part of the Moon; it was in perpetual darkness, and even with everything the cities had done to combat that, she had been unable to forget it.
“What is this, Rudra?” she asked. Two of the mayors had disappeared from her line of vision. Another cursed.
And then the image from the security camera changed. As she watched, the dome over Crater de Gerlache exploded outward and upward, illuminating the rocks and Moon’s surface all around it, the explosion reflecting in the clear spires of Sverdrup’s remaining towers.
DeRicci’s knees buckled, and she caught herself on her desk. “Did that just happen? Or was that a propaganda video?”
“It happened,” someone said softly.
“But,” DeRicci said stupidly, “it wasn’t one of the twenty domes.”
She had sent a message to all the leaders on the Moon, but she hadn’t spoken to everyone. She thought the same domes would be targeted, not all the domes.
The debris fell around Crater de Gerlache, but where the city had been, there was only darkness. The top of the dome had disappeared. Correct that: the dome had disappeared.
“How many people live in that city?” she asked. She mentally corrected herself on that too. Lived. How many people had lived in that city?
“Forty-five thousand,” Popova said quietly.
Someone swore, but the rest of the room was quiet. Then the strangely dressed woman, the one who had been talking to Gomez said plaintively, “I thought we had hours, still.”
“Me, too,” DeRicci said, feeling cold.
“Mr. Ostaka over there sent messages all over the Moon before we shut off his links,” said Issassi. “He sent several to Crater de Gerlache.”
DeRicci turned toward him. Despite the evidence of the battering she had given him still swelling his face, Ostaka was smiling.
“Son of a bitch,” she said. “Find out who else he contacted—which other domes—and warn them. Rudra, warn all the domes, say an attack could be imminent. And…”
She took one menacing step toward Ostaka. He cringed. The movement seemed involuntary, not theatrical. He wasn’t doing it for show. He was terrified of her.
“Get this asshole out of my office. Put him in custody, and make sure his link blocker still works.”
No one moved.
“Now,” DeRicci said, “before I kill him with my bare hands.”
Nyquist stepped forward, even though he didn’t work for DeRicci, grabbed Ostaka by the arm, and said, “You’re going to wish you hadn’t survived this day,” as he led Ostaka out of the room.
DeRicci looked up at the image, which someone was replaying. Her stomach was churning.
They had run out of time. They had just lost forty-five thousand people, in an instant.
She didn’t want this third attack to succeed, and it looked like it was going to, no matter what she did.
SEVENTY
FLINT COULDN’T THINK about the dead, the people who had just died in front of his very eyes. He didn’t have the time or the luxury. Everyone in this room—everyone on the Moon—had just learned that the domes could blow at any moment.
He hoped to hell the other dome leaders had at least sectioned their domes. That would decrease the deaths, make certain that not everyone in the domes died.
Unlike Crater de Gerlache. The crater hadn’t protected its people. The crater itself had probably reinforced the power of the explosion, and rained down hell on them, even as the oxygen sucked out of the city’s layers and the environment vanished.
He took a deep breath, forced those thoughts away, and came up with—
Luc Deshin.
In one of their very first meetings just before the Peyti Crisis, Deshin had talked to Flint about explosives, and tracking explosives, saying it was hard for him to find what was happening.
Flint had let that investigation go as other things happened. Besides, he thought the attackers were opportunists, like the woman whom they had thwarted in
Armstrong on Anniversary Day, using whatever was available to make bombs.
Then, after the Peyti Crisis, where it became clear that those explosives had arrived with the masks, Flint had dropped that part of his investigation altogether.
But Deshin had said explosives were all over the Moon, easily available. Construction sites, mining operations—
Flint was leaning forward before he could even think about what he was doing. He searched the old security footage from Crater de Gerlache, stuff that had already been uploaded before the city vanished, and then scanned in on the interior of the dome.
This explosion was in a crater, and the city was layered, if he remembered correctly. It would have been hard to explode upward—it would have taken longer for something from below to harm the dome.
He assumed, anyway. He was no engineer.
But before he bothered the one engineer they all seemed to trust, Flint would do a bit more digging. He opened another window, silently queried one of the information gathering surfaces, and moved the footage of the Crater de Gerlache bombing onto it.
What explosive would cause that kind of result? he asked.
The question seemed so bloodless. And as the system gave him options, names of different kinds of charges, he looked at the interior of the now destroyed dome’s surface.
Something small, placed along the sections, and where the dome sections met in the very center of the dome.
Something small, and on the inside, not the outside.
He looked at the list of explosives that the query had found for him. His heart was in his throat.
All of the previous attacks had been uniform. The same kind of clones executing the same kind of event, using the same (or similar) kinds of equipment. Even the Anniversary Day bombers used the same system—they had taken what they could from the cities they had gone to in order to make their bombs.
But these clones had had time. They could have all used the same explosives, and they had jobs that allowed them to attach those explosives to the parts of the dome where they would do the most damage.
If the sections didn’t go down, then the dome would explode outward, just like it had done in Crater de Gerlache. Even if the sections went down, if the explosives ran all along the mechanism, each section of the dome would be destroyed anyway.
“Noelle,” he said, “I have got to talk to your engineer.”
DeRicci whirled toward Flint. “My engineer?”
Clearly she was thinking of something else, focused on the entire Moon, not the city of Armstrong.
He needed to focus on the Moon too, but he also needed that engineer.
“He means Donal Ó Brádaigh,” the Magalhães woman said.
“Did you find something?” DeRicci asked.
“Yes,” Flint said, “and we need to deal with it right away.”
SEVENTY-ONE
Ó BRÁDAIGH WATCHED the sweep finish its fifth run across the dome. He saw nothing and neither did all of the other people he had assigned to monitor the sweep.
More importantly—or maybe as important—the computers found nothing either. There were no weaknesses in the dome’s surface, and nothing out of the ordinary covered it. Just Moon dust, and debris from a dozen meteoroids that had hit the dome since the last official sweep several weeks ago.
Ó Brádaigh wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He wanted to find something, in part because he knew something was going to happen. He wanted to discover it in time.
Then he got an alert from the United Domes of the Moon Security Office. Before he could even step out of the control room, a man he’d never seen before appeared before him.
“I’m Miles Flint,” the man said. “I work with DeRicci.”
Ó Brádaigh had heard of Flint, but he couldn’t remember in what context.
“We just lost Crater de Gerlache,” Flint said, his tone even.
Ó Brádaigh’s breath caught. His chest ached. They had lost a city? Already? He’d thought they still had a few hours.
“I’ve looked at the footage,” Flint said, “and I think I know what we’re dealing with.”
It took Ó Brádaigh a moment to understand what Flint said.
“I’m going to send you my work. It’ll be easier for you to digest,” Flint said, “and you might see a few errors. But in short, we’re looking for explosives along the section lines and in the very center of the dome where everything meets. On the inside of the dome. I think we even know the explosive, but you can double-check me on that.”
And then he dumped all kinds of information along Ó Brádaigh’s links. Ó Brádaigh staggered backwards, nearly hitting the control room wall.
He couldn’t think about the destroyed dome, even though he was seeing it on the images that Flint sent, a series of small explosions, the debris floating out of the dome, not into the dome, the light and fire blazing against the darkest part of the Moon.
A series of small explosions, concentrated on the dome’s weakest points, guaranteed to destroy it all at once.
And the kind of material that could be applied to the dome’s surface.
Ó Brádaigh would double-check, that was the kind of man he was, but he had a hunch Flint was right.
They knew what they were dealing with.
They knew how to solve it.
And they had also run out of time.
SEVENTY-TWO
WITHIN TEN MINUTES, DeRicci had heard from Ó Brádaigh. Ó Brádaigh had confirmed Flint’s work. They had found the type of explosives, and where they were on the domes.
DeRicci had no idea if the explosives were on timers or if they hand-detonated. She had no idea if something would set them off randomly, although sectioning Armstrong’s dome hadn’t done it.
Now getting rid of those explosives was out of her hands. She had to trust the city engineering and inspection staff, the bomb squad of the Armstrong Police Department, and all of the equipment inside and outside of the city to get the work done.
Magalhães offered to contact her father, one of the major builders in the city, to get his explosives experts working on the interior of the dome as well. DeRicci didn’t feel comfortable with that, even though she knew that Magalhães’s father had access to the same clone information that DeRicci did.
So DeRicci corrected a mistake she had made during the Peyti Crisis. She sent Magalhães’s father and all of the construction and mining experts outside of the domes, to handle smaller units like the Growing Pits and the train stations and the warehouses and the living quarters for some of the mining areas, anywhere that living creatures gathered and could possibly die.
And DeRicci sent urgent information to all of the other domes. All of them, every single dome on the Moon, and she hoped to God those idiots running the places would take immediate action.
It looked like the destruction of Crater de Gerlache had inspired several of them to section their domes. Now those leaders had to stop blaming people and solve the damn crisis.
It was out of DeRicci’s hands, even though she didn’t want it to be.
She encouraged Marshal Gomez to let the Earth Alliance Security Division know what kind of explosives they were dealing with, and what kind of attack, just in case this was the first plan that wasn’t Moon-oriented.
DeRicci believed it was, but she didn’t know.
She didn’t know anything.
All she could do was direct people to solve this crisis for her.
She did a few more things: In addition to isolating the clones, she ordered citizens to look for suspicious packages or to contact the police if it looked like there was something in one of the clones’ homes or offices that might harm the city.
DeRicci wouldn’t put it past these creatures to have backup explosions planned.
After all, Ostaka had been damned determined to make this work. He had encouraged his cohorts in Crater de Gerlache to act ahead of schedule. He had sent messages to Gagarin Dome as well, but they either didn’t get through or they
were ignored.
Nothing else had blown up.
Yet.
SEVENTY-THREE
WORD OF THE first destroyed dome on the Moon reached Jhena Andre in her bedroom. She was digging her go-bag out of the closet, changing out a few items before she headed to the port. She had a reservation on a shuttle flight to the nearest large city, and it had been easier to book than she had expected.
She had altered the information in her file to reflect a death in her family, not that she had any close family or that anyone had died. But the alteration would last as long as she needed it to—just a few days.
By then, she would be on the Frontier, heading toward her new home.
She took a moment to look at the footage coming from the Moon. She actually turned on some human news programs with real anchors talking about the crisis, just to hear their tone of panic.
So what if someone had released the trigger a little early? So what if the other domes had an hour or two of warning? As that Ostaka man in the Moon’s Security Office had noted, DeRicci and her crew were close to figuring out what was happening, and they probably were dealing with the warnings.
Not that it mattered. Soon they’d either be dead or handling so much disaster that they wouldn’t remember anything about the information they had received early.
Andre smiled softly. The final leg of her plan was underway. The Alliance would buckle under this stress. The destruction of every dome on the Moon would cause everyone to rethink the devil’s bargain they had made, particularly when Andre released her one and only manifesto, reminding everyone how many humans inside the Alliance had died because Alliance law made it legal for non-humans to kill them.
If Andre actually believed in the eye-for-an-eye thing that had been part of humanity for millennia, her actions against the Alliance still wouldn’t come close to making up for all the Alliance-caused deaths.
If she were being honest with herself, the deaths on the Moon were also Alliance-caused. If those people hadn’t lived in the heart of the Alliance, they wouldn’t have died there either.
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