Of course she knew him. She knew everyone who was anyone on the Moon. Wasn’t that why Torkild had hooked up with her in the first place?
“Look,” she said. “Arek is dead, and I can’t reach my father, and you’re being an absolute ass. We have to—”
“You can’t reach your father?” Torkild frowned. He seemed competent suddenly. Why would he revert to the Torkild she had loved right now? That wasn’t fair.
“No, I can’t,” she said. “I’m hoping it’s a problem with the links—”
“Berhane, it’s crowded here. Let’s go somewhere else.”
“There is nowhere else, haven’t you figured that out?” she asked. “We can’t leave the port.”
“I mean inside the port.”
Like she had been thinking. Somewhere else inside the port.
“We need to figure this out,” he said.
She wasn’t sure what this was. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to figure anything out.
He took her elbow and she shook him off.
“We’ll lose each other in the crowd,” he said, and grabbed her elbow again. This time she let him hold on, thinking, Bastard. Bastardbastardbastardbastard, just so that she could keep focused on what she hated about him rather than what she liked about him.
He pulled her forward, and she let him.
She let him.
Trailing along behind him just like a dutiful fiancée—
Which she used to be.
SEVEN
THE YUTU CITY train station was long and beautifully designed, with minarets whose tips attached to the newest section of the city’s dome. Deshin had heard about the conflicts over the tips touching the dome, how much Kerman and his people had spent to be able to break the regulations so that the station’s beauty could impress visitors the moment they arrived.
Deshin felt calmer as he got closer to the station. He activated his link with Gerda.
Paavo’s safe, he sent.
I know—
He stumbled, fell, the breath knocked out of him. Around him, people were screaming. Buildings were crumbling and the air had turned a dusty gray.
The link to Gerda had broken.
Jakande was on top of him, holding him down. Deshin’s ears ached.
“What the—?” he asked aloud, then stopped. He couldn’t hear himself, which meant that Jakande couldn’t hear him either.
Deshin looked up, saw that the dome had sectioned. The section was a muddy brown and looked like it hadn’t been cleaned off since it was built.
He could see people on the other side, also down—the impact of the section colliding with the ground had been worse than the sectioning in Armstrong four years ago after the bombing there—and it took him a moment to realize that two of his team members were on the other side, one of the men and one of the women.
Do you know what’s going on? he sent to Jakande.
Jakande rolled off him but kept a hand on his back, holding him in place. No, sir.
Deshin shook him off. We need to get to that train, right now. They’re going to shut down transportation, if they haven’t already.
The other two members of his team could make their own way back. It was one of the risks of working security, that things didn’t always go as expected.
They knew it. He knew it.
They had instructions. They would be all right.
He got to his knees and then a whomp! knocked him back down. He felt the whomp! rather than heard it. A vibration so strong that he wondered if he would ever stand again.
The screaming grew louder, and Deshin was about to grab Jakande, force him toward the station, when he turned.
The area beyond the section was alive with light and fire and smoke. Orange and black and gold, buildings gone, the section streaked with blood and debris.
He let out a small breath or maybe it was a large breath, he had no idea. Just that the area beyond the section was different, that two of his people were in there.
Deshin had no idea how to get them out. They would only have seconds, if that.
Jakande had somehow found his feet and had hurried to the section. Deshin followed. They were almost touching it when yet another whomp! knocked them back.
Above them gunshots or something that sounded like them. Deshin looked up, expecting more building to collapse around him.
Instead, he saw chunks of gray brick pelting the dome. It took him maybe five seconds—which felt like five days—to figure out that was bits of building landing on the exterior of the dome. The outside. Where no bits of the dome should be. No bits of building.
And nothing should fall from above. That was not how the Moon worked.
Then red matter and some liquid spattered on the top of the dome, and Deshin made himself look at the section instead of what was above him.
It took a second for his brain to assemble the pieces into something that made sense.
The dome had exploded.
Or rather, the part of the dome where his people had been. The fires—the red and orange lights—they were gone, and what remained was like a gray dust, a haze he couldn’t see through.
Jakande had both fists against the section. He was yelling, but Deshin couldn’t hear his individual voice above all the other voices, screaming and screaming and screaming.
Deshin took Jakande’s arm and pulled him back. The rest of his team—the remainder of his team—was yelling too.
His best people, forgetting their primary mission. Not because they were bad at what they did, but because this was unthinkable, so they weren’t prepared for it, none of them had prepared for it, and only one of them knew how to keep a cool head with the universe burning around them.
Him.
His team was good, but they were trained. They hadn’t lived through disasters like he had.
We’re going to the train, he sent. And we’re going to get that fucker out of this city, even if we have to crash through a section. You got that?
He pulled Jakande away from the section. Deshin repeated the directive and then took off on a run, going around stunned people, startled Peyti, and frighteningly calm Disty, sprinting past vehicles that were landing on top of other vehicles and rubble from buildings that hadn’t been built to code.
It took forever, but really only a minute or two, to reach the station. It at least was intact. Train doors were open in the passenger sections, but Deshin didn’t go into them.
Instead, he ran to the front of the bullet train. Pounding on the door, sending codes he shouldn’t have known, codes he had saved from his work with Kerman, and the control room doors eased open.
Deshin jumped inside, Jakande jumping after him, the woman (God, he’d forgotten her name) joining them, but no other team members in sight.
Too damn bad.
Deshin closed the doors, overrode the security protocols, praying that this train was like older bullet trains, because he hadn’t done anything like this in twenty-five years.
He was actually hijacking a train.
He had to get out of this city, and waiting for the authorities wasn’t going to work.
For all he knew, the authorities were dead.
You can’t go through the dome, Jakande sent. It sectioned here too.
Dome emergency exit codes are all the same, Deshin sent back. At least they were on the Moon. It was a failsafe, mostly for dome workers, so that they could escape if something went wrong.
Deshin had learned that when he started working in dome maintenance, and he always kept the updated codes in a personal, easily accessible file, even after he left, when the codes came to him as part of the construction files he got through his various legitimate businesses.
Make sure the doors are closing, he sent to Jakande. Look—with your eyes not your links to make sure we don’t kill anyone as we start up.
Deshin flung every emergency code he had at the dome, putting them on a loop, figuring one of them would open this section and let them outside onto the Moon
scape.
If someone was blowing up the domes, he had to get out of them. He had to head home, and he had to protect his family.
With Soseki dead, no one would figure out how to protect Armstrong’s dome.
The only thing Deshin could hope for was that these bombs were either on a timer or they were being planted at different times in different places, maybe starting with the cities farthest from Armstrong and working their way back to the port.
He didn’t know, he didn’t want to ask—not that there was anyone to ask—and he didn’t want to worry Gerda or Paavo.
He sent her a message now, hoping it would reach her when the links got re-established: Heading home, love. We’re safe here, lying through his damn teeth (his damn links) but he didn’t know how else to do it, and he didn’t want her to panic.
He wanted her and Paavo out of Armstrong’s dome, but he wasn’t sure if they’d be safe traveling without him. If they got caught in a dome section, they’d be split in half, like his team had been. And he knew that his home, and the school, weren’t anywhere near the government sections of Armstrong.
Because that was what blew up here. The section that exploded was near Yutu City’s local government buildings, might even have been in them, he wasn’t sure, and he wasn’t paying attention.
With Soseki dead, the governor-general dying, an explosion in Yutu City, he had to figure that someone was attacking any government building possible.
He didn’t confirm any of that. He needed to focus—and he already was.
Somehow, as he started working the train, he had shut off his visual links. He’d done this in the past, his subconscious mind working at minimizing distractions so his conscious mind could work unimpeded.
He managed to get the train started. He programmed in the speed, making sure that the train scanned the route ahead for debris.
Trains like this were built to plow through small debris, but they couldn’t handle large things, like parts of buildings and entire pieces of dome.
The route he programmed took the train around the largest domes, just in case they blew up, kept the train in the non-domed parts of the Moon, the industrial and mining regions, away from any government areas.
Deshin knew he could go faster that way.
And he would be home within the hour, so that he could rescue his family and figure out what the hell to do next.
EIGHT
TORKILD PULLED HER toward what appeared to be a solid wall, covered in screens. Berhane couldn’t see them clearly—there were too many other people in the way—but she saw the movement on them.
Torkild, taller than she was, pushed his way through the crowd, his fingers pinching her elbow as he pulled her forward. She stumbled behind him, occasionally banging into someone, usually a short little Disty scurrying to somewhere else.
But sometimes Berhane hit the back of a person bent over a screen or subvocalizing on their links. More than once, she passed someone (often a human male) shouting as if he were alone, “I’m stuck here. Don’t you get it? They’re not letting anyone in or out…”
The cacophony was huge, ear-splitting, and it was giving her a headache. She heard more languages in this drag from one part of the gigantic terminal to the other than she had heard since college.
A group of Peyti stood silently near a clump of chairs and watched. She had no idea if the Peyti were communicating on their links or just thinking that the humans were being stupidly emotional all over again. And she couldn’t really tell if they were talking to each other—those masks covered their mouths.
Torkild looked over his shoulder at her, as if she were the one holding them up. He pulled harder, and she emerged through a cluster of people into an open area.
Here, everyone was staring up at the screens. She couldn’t help herself; she looked up too.
And wished she hadn’t.
She saw Nelia Byler, the governor-general’s assistant, clutching a gurney. The person on the gurney had black hair and a grayish face (like Arek?) but Berhane couldn’t quite tell who it was.
She turned on her links—all of them—then wished she hadn’t. The chatter in them made her feel like her head was full.
She filtered them down to news updates, heard
…attack on Governor-General Alfreda as well…
…going on in Armstrong today? Clearly, these attacks were coordinated…
…uncertain how many other leaders, if any, have been threatened…
She looked up at Torkild.
He had stopped moving, his hand still holding her elbow, but not pinching anymore. His face was squinched. He was looking at her with sympathy, and the look didn’t fit on his skin very well. It never had.
“Did you reach him?” Torkild asked.
She hadn’t even tried, not since they’d started their mad dash across the crowded terminal.
“No,” she said. “But he hasn’t answered me.”
“I’m sure they have the site locked down,” Torkild said.
“But link communications?” she asked.
“I’d be shutting down everything but the emergency links,” he said in his lawyer voice. “You don’t want rumors to start and you don’t want the wrong information to slip out.”
Like the fact that everyone else who attended the governor-general’s speech might be dead.
Her stomach clenched.
Her father couldn’t be dead, he just couldn’t. The cruel irony of dying on Anniversary Day aside, he wasn’t the kind of man who just died. Not even in a situation like this.
“Come on,” Torkild said, and his grip on her tightened.
She couldn’t tell if he was disgusted with her. She hadn’t answered him, she hadn’t even tried to answer him, she just looked up at him like a dazed child, the way she had done when her mother had died and he had shown up at the house. Dazed, terrified—not at all the same woman who had led a train car full of people onto the unstable platform near the bombed-out section of Armstrong.
Torkild walked directly toward the screens, and Berhane tried to pull back. Didn’t he see where he was going?
He slipped behind one of the full-sized screens, touched the wall, and a door she hadn’t seen before opened. As it did, a sign flashed across her vision:
Earth Alliance Lounge. No Admittance Without Clearance.
She stopped, and pulled him back.
He turned, a frown on his face, then nodded. “It’s okay,” he said. “I have clearance.”
Lucky him.
He led her inside.
The lounge smelled of oranges and wet feet. The weird stench made her eyes water.
The door closed behind her, and as it did, she realized that this room, while smaller than the main luxury terminal, was still quite large. It was filled with dozens of people she recognized—big-shot lawyers, diplomats, and some lower level government officials.
Some were talking to each other, but most were slightly hunched, clearly communicating on their links. A handful watched the screens ringing the room.
Images on those cross-cut between the police working on the crime scene outside O’Malley’s, a still shot of Arek’s strangely stonelike visage, and that panicked shot of Nelia Byler, clutching a gurney.
Several Disty sat cross-legged on top of tiny tables. There were even more Peyti in this lounge than there had been in the main terminal. These Peyti all sat at tables and tapped on devices held in their sticklike hands. They at least seemed familiar.
Because some of the other aliens didn’t.
She wasn’t sure she had ever been this close to a group of Rev. They were unbelievably huge, pear-shaped, and had more arms than she could easily see. She’d read some history of the Rev, of them using their size and extra limbs to intimidate humans, and she finally understood it.
The smell near the door came from the cluster of Lynisians near the door. They reeked of oranges, something they ate in large measure (and used as cologne) whenever they came to human-based communiti
es. Oranges weren’t available on Lynae.
Most humans kept a big distance from the Lynisians, partly because they were loud, but also because their appearance was uncomfortably strange. They had tentacles poking out of the top of their torsos, like long, out-of-control hair, but at the end of the tentacles, they had hands.
Two long limbs on either side of their torsos ended in faces, which made them very hard to look at. Often one of the limbs would be upside down by human standards, talking to a compatriot’s face that was in the same position.
She had had a class with a Lynisian, and he’d required three chairs so that he could lift his faces upright to watch class interactions.
She hadn’t been able to look at him then, and she couldn’t look at this group now.
Torkild had let go of her arm. He was marching forward to a group of empty, plush, blue chairs in the center of the room.
She stopped following. It was quieter in here, if stranger.
She ran a hand over her face.
Daddy, she sent through her links. Please answer me the moment you get this. Please.
She wondered if she should let her brother know that their father was in the middle of this mess. But Bert was on the Frontier, and he probably didn’t even know there was a mess.
Torkild was shouting at someone—shouting! A man looked up, as if he had done something wrong, and Torkild headed toward him.
Berhane was done traipsing along like the dutiful fiancée. She had thought she was supposed to be talking to Torkild. Instead, he was heading toward someone named Barry who apparently was an old friend.
Berhane leaned on one of the chairs. It slid, which she didn’t expect. Most of the furniture in the port was bolted down, but apparently not in here.
Daddy, she sent again. She had a feeling she wouldn’t hear from him for some time, but she couldn’t stop herself from pinging his links. Maybe she should try his business offices and see if they could track him down.
She might not be on his emergency list, a thought that would once of have twisted her stomach but now seemed as normal as breathing.
Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel Page 5