Vigilantes

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Paranoia was serving him well at the moment, because he was trying to track down the masterminds behind the Peyti Crisis. He was working with—not for—the Security Office of the United Domes of the Moon.

  In reality, he was working with his old partner Noelle DeRicci. But even then, he was really working for himself, using the systems that her office had.

  He had hit a dead-end in his investigation of Anniversary Day—at least for the moment—so he was trying a new tack, one he’d come up with just the day before.

  He was going to go after a money trail, like he had done with Anniversary Day. Only the Peyti Crisis trail had threaded through a series of criminal enterprises and ended up, of all things, with the name of a human who had high security clearance in the Earth Alliance.

  Even though he’d reported the woman’s name to DeRicci, he considered that trail a dead end—at least at the moment. He could hack into the Alliance, but at that high level, there was a good chance he would leave footprints.

  He’d been thinking of other ways around that particular problem when he realized he had a prime financial trail to follow.

  He needed to track the education of the Peyti clones. Most of them had been lawyers until the day of the bombing. That meant they had gone to reputable Alliance-sanctioned law schools.

  And law schools were nothing like the Earth Alliance. The security in the average law school was child’s play for a man like him.

  He’d been up since Dome Dawn. Ever since the Peyti Crisis, he’d been having trouble sleeping through the night. His brain was too busy. Plus he was worried about Talia. She just wasn’t herself.

  This morning, she had come out of her room, face blotchy as if she’d been crying. He knew she wasn’t sleeping either. But the expensive penthouse apartment they had purchased at Talia’s urging had soundproofing between the rooms.

  He had to be near her room to hear her cry out, something that worried him. She thought it unimportant. She believed no one would get into the apartment with their level of security.

  She didn’t think that he’d want to comfort her from a nightmare or simply hold her when she sobbed. She only seemed to believe he wanted to hear if someone attacked her.

  The longer her depression lasted after the Peyti Crisis, the more his concern turned from outside attacks to interior ones. Talia was falling apart, and if she called for help in the middle of the night, he wouldn’t be able to hear her.

  He had taken to staying up for hours after she went to bed, and a couple of times, he had fallen asleep on the couch—a place from which he knew he could hear her if she was in distress.

  He had taken her to a psychologist at the urging of DeRicci’s assistant Rudra Popova. The therapy felt like a last ditch effort. Besides, Flint wasn’t sure how honest Talia could be with the therapists, given that she was a clone.

  He told her she could decide whether or not to reveal that information about herself. But he hoped she didn’t.

  Both major attacks on the Moon—attacks that had destroyed life as all of the residents had known it—had used clones as the primary means of delivery. In many respects, the clones—both Peyti and human—had been weapons in and of themselves.

  Now, inhabitants of the Moon—no matter the species—hated clones and saw them all as evil.

  Flint didn’t care how open-minded the therapists were. He was terrified that they wouldn’t be able to get over their gut reactions to Talia’s origins.

  He ran a hand through his blond curls and felt some dislodge. He looked at his fingers. His hair was starting to fall out. Baldness did not run in his family. He wondered if he was losing hair due to stress.

  Then he decided he didn’t want to know the answer.

  He couldn’t think about Talia, at least right now. The best thing he could do for both of them was find out who had financed the Peyti clones and stop another attack.

  He had promised himself that whenever he was here working, he could concentrate on work only.

  He had left Talia at the United Domes Security Office for just that reason.

  If he were being honest with himself, though, he had left her there for other reasons as well. He didn’t want her to be on her own. He didn’t think she was emotionally stable enough for that.

  He decided that if Talia couldn’t be with him, then the Security Office was the safest place he knew. He had installed hundreds of extra safeguards after the Anniversary Day attacks, and he had installed a few more after the Peyti Crisis—not that he’d had a lot of time.

  He knew that the security staff was also fortifying those offices.

  In addition, Popova was there. She understood what Talia was going through, at least on some levels. Popova didn’t know that Talia was a clone (hardly anyone did), but she knew some of Talia’s history, and knew that these attacks had devastated Talia in ways that nothing else had before.

  Popova had lost her lover in a particularly brutal way on Anniversary Day, and the therapists she had sent Talia to had helped Popova overcome the worst of it.

  Talia had an appointment with her therapist later that day. Popova said she’d make certain Talia got to the appointment. Flint had asked that some security accompany them.

  Yes, he was being overprotective. And at the moment, he didn’t care what others thought of that. He needed to keep an eye on his daughter. He was worried.

  But he also needed to focus on his work.

  He returned to one of the desks and stood in front of it, hands in his back pockets. The information scrolled on the see-through screen faster than he could process it.

  But he saw bits and pieces of it—records, documents, forms—all in Standard, even though the language of Peyla was Peytin. He rocked a little. He peered closer and saw shadow documents scrolling with each Standard document. He peered at the shadow documents and realized that his own mind had edited them out.

  They were in Peytin, which was a language he couldn’t read. It wasn’t even recognizable as a language to him. It looked like pen marks on paper, scratches on the surface of a desk, random lines and waves that made no sense to him at all.

  Of course the Peyti law schools would require their documentation to be in two languages. Standard was the language of the entire Earth Alliance. If the Alliance certified a school—particularly one that would have graduates that functioned on the Alliance-level, not just some regional level—then the Alliance required all documentation (and anything searchable) to be in Standard.

  The Peytin documents had to be for internal use only.

  He wondered if he should set up one stream to translate every single Peytin document that his system was sorting through. He walked around the room for a moment, considering it, realizing as he paced just how restless he was.

  His job as a Retrieval Artist primarily involved sifting through records. Documents. Histories. Yobibytes of information, more than he cared to think about. He looked for the smallest hint of a fact hidden in large amounts of information.

  His greatest skill was combining all of that information in a way that no computer system could.

  Even now, even though the networks and links and information streams were all hooked together, and there was more easily accessible information than ever, even though computer systems had gotten so sophisticated that the correct information rose to the surface with a single query, he still out-analyzed the computers. Mostly because even the most modern equipment still couldn’t make an intuitive leap that the human brain could.

  The error rate in computer intuition was about fifty percent—much too high for someone to rely on.

  And he often did the best analysis while he was watching information scroll.

  The system was comparing names, backgrounds, applications for the law school, for college, for any public database. It was also looking at financial records, funding, scholarships (and who provided them), grants, and financial aid.

  He hoped the Peyti school’s financial system was at least similar to the human ones he had encoun
tered in the Alliance.

  Because the largest problem he faced now, as he went through all this information, was that he had never analyzed big data from a non-human point of view. He had always searched for Disappeareds or researched the backgrounds of potential clients.

  Retrieval Artists were a human phenomenon—at least as far as he knew. He always found that a bit ironic. Humans formed the Earth Alliance, primarily, at first, as a trading partnership with other species. But the partnerships would have quickly fallen apart without more complicated legal agreements.

  As the known universe expanded, so did the need to protect all different types of species from each other’s laws. Plus, each group needed a treaty to work with the other groups.

  And inadvertent crimes, things that seemed small to one group, were often life-and-death to other groups.

  Because the original organizers of the Earth Alliance were business types, with very little loyalty to any one form of government, their biggest focus was on the way that money, business, and trade flowed between species. If a person got crushed by an alien legal system, so be it, as long as a corporation could freely participate.

  The Earth Alliance itself nearly collapsed early on, as humans finally realized what they had signed into, and how much risk it put them at individually. The corporations—by then, many of them interstellar—faced losing trillions almost immediately if the Earth Alliance collapsed.

  At that moment, the Disappearance services sprang up. Cynics said they were created by the corporations to keep the humans inside the Earth Alliance. Legal officials believed that criminal enterprises always filled a vacuum, and no matter what anyone said, Disappearance services were illegal.

  But over the centuries, the evidence showed that the services were a mix of both—criminal enterprises and corporation-formed dodges, as well as good-hearted (originally nonprofit) organizations that attempted to save lives threatened by a single uninformed act.

  In doing his due diligence on his potential clients, Flint always started with that uninformed act. He wanted to see if it were truly uninformed. He’d turned down dozens of clients who, he discovered, would deliberately go into alien environments and break their laws for financial gain. They wanted him to let them know when it was safe to return or to test old identities.

  He refused to do any of that. Repeatedly.

  Researching those uninformed acts had often led him deep into alien databases, but he’d always looked at those databases from a human perspective—could a human being reasonably know that their particular action was against the law? Was this so-called crime a major cultural taboo or was it simply something so local that not even the majority of the culture knew about it? Was the corporation (or the human) educated in the ways of that culture? Or were they venturing into that culture for the very first time?

  All fairly easy questions to answer, even with a minimal knowledge of the alien culture.

  The questions he had to answer now, with the Peyti, required a more detailed knowledge of the ways that the Peyti culture worked. He was stunned to realize how little he actually knew about the Peyti: They’d been deeply involved in human life and human customs for hundreds of years, but he hadn’t realized until this week how little humans had been involved in Peyti life.

  It wasn’t just Peyti either. Humans seemed to remain uninvolved with all of their alien partners—at least on a day-to-day level. Oh, the experts were involved: those who studied the other cultures or had to work in them for corporate jobs.

  But to get as deeply enmeshed in Peyti day-to-day life as the Peyti had become in human day-to-day existence, that didn’t happen at all.

  And it was already placing him at a disadvantage.

  He’d gotten used to having Peyti lawyers, a few Peyti teachers (dealing with Earth Alliance matters), and a lot of Peyti students around, but he’d never done more than interact with them the way one did with people one had no interest in.

  His face was flushed, and it wasn’t because of the temperature in the office. That hadn’t changed. He hadn’t realized until now just how human-centered his life and his work were.

  If he had been focused on other cultures sooner, he might have figured out how to get the information everyone needed about the Peyti sooner.

  He hoped he knew enough about them to find the information now.

  He leaned over one of the keyboards and corralled some of the documents that the filters had flagged as important to his search. He would investigate those while more information filled the files.

  Then he would examine what he could, looking for patterns.

  He hoped he found some sooner rather than later.

  He hoped he could find them without asking for help.

  Because the more people who got involved, the longer all of this would take.

  And he knew, deep down, that the Moon was running out of time.

  TEN

  MELCIA SENG REACHED the first floor of the S3 building, out of breath and slightly nauseous, her feet aching. She had careened down the stairs, hand gripping the metal railing, barely able to keep her balance as she hurried. Then she slammed through the stairwell door, into the lobby—and remembered. It wasn’t really a lobby at all.

  Just a lot of empty space.

  Her stomach cramped, and her heart pounded. Some automated voice on her links told her that an ambulance was on the way. She acknowledged, but didn’t speak.

  There was movement outside the main doors.

  She wanted to run back up the stairs and hide. Police had kicked Mr. Zhu. Police. And then they had left him on the sidewalk.

  All the way down the stairs, she’d been hoping that the river of dark stuff she had seen had been whatever he was drinking (coffee?) and not something else (blood).

  She was shaking.

  She could see shadowy figures through the opaque doorway. They moved, and it seemed like they were moving near Zhu.

  At that moment, she realized that she had called an ambulance. Which meant that whoever was outside might be taking care of Zhu rather than harming him.

  Or about to harm her.

  She owed it to him to see what was going on.

  She swallowed and walked toward the door. Behind her, the elevator pinged. She turned, saw—what was his name? Vigfusson. Yeah. That was it, the last name anyway. She could fake the first name. He burst out of the doors and hurry toward her, a small kit in his left hand.

  “Where’s the injury?” he asked, his pale skin flushed with red.

  “Outside,” she said. “Be careful.”

  God, she was a coward. She was going to let him go first. He hurried across the empty lobby, leaving scuff marks on the thin carpet, and slammed the door open.

  Then he stopped, and for a brief second, she held her breath. What did he see?

  He didn’t look at her. Instead, he moved forward, and the door closed behind him.

  Whatever he saw obviously hadn’t scared him.

  Seng squared her shoulders, made herself breathe twice to calm herself, and then she walked to the door. Now there were two moving shadows, and a lump on the ground.

  Her people, maybe. Because she had contacted them before heading down here.

  She pulled the door open, and stopped just like Vigfusson had. Zhu blocked the door. He was twisted, his legs bent. It took her a second to realize why that looked wrong to her: the legs bent at the upper thigh and the knee. One foot was turned inward and the other outward, but neither position looked natural.

  She couldn’t see his face or his torso, just his fingers, curved and bruised. The river that ran from him to the street wasn’t brown, like coffee. It was thick and dark, with a reddish tint.

  Vigfusson knelt beside Zhu, kit open. He was doing some kind of nanowork or something. The other person beside Zhu was one of the other new hires—a man named Rosen. She couldn’t remember his first name either. God, she’d only met these people the day before, and there had been two dozen of them, names and faces and ea
gerness, and she’d been frightened, and oh, God, what was going to happen now?

  An ambulance turned onto the street. In her links, the automated voice said, Your ambulance is arriving now. Be sure to point out the injured party to the attendants.

  Her ambulance. Not the one she’d asked building security to contact. Hers.

  She crouched, finally saw Zhu’s face, and winced. It was swollen, black and purple, and his mouth was caved inward, blood everywhere. The attack was so savage that the internal repair bots that most people used wouldn’t be able to overcome it.

  “Is he going to be all right?” she asked, her voice wavering.

  Neither man looked at her. They were both tending Zhu. Neither of them answered her.

  She was about to repeat the question, louder, when the attendants arrived. They were human, not androids, and all business. They shoved the two men aside and crouched over Zhu.

  The first man, a white-and-gold medical cap on his black curls, looked up at her. Did he know she was the one who had sent for them?

  “What happened here?” he asked.

  “I’ll send you the security video,” she said. “Do you have a secure link?”

  He nodded, and sent it to her on her open links. Then she sent him the information. He leaned back, looked up at her, so startled that his skin turned gray.

  “You’re certain of this?” he asked aloud.

  “I had the security system send for the authorities,” she said. “No one has arrived.”

  The other attendant, who wasn’t watching the interaction, said, “We’ll need police. This is a crime scene.”

  “We had police,” said Rosen. Apparently he had looked at the security footage too. “They did this.”

  So much for secure links. Seng wanted to reprimand him, but she wasn’t really in charge of him.

  “That’s a hell of an accusation,” the attendant said.

  The other attendant touched his arm. “They have footage,” he said. “And she’s right. I found two separate calls for help from this area, and no one has responded.”

  “Well, get someone to respond,” the first attendant said, “because we can’t leave until someone arrives.”