Masterminds (26 page)

“Have you heard of a woman named Jhena Andre?”

Gomez shook her head. “Should I have?”

“She’s the only person we can find who is linked to the slow-grow Frémont clones. but she hasn’t been selling the DNA. She’s been sitting on it, as far as we can tell. I have people investigating her now.”

“Who does she work for?” Gomez asked.

DeRicci gave her a thin smile. “The Alliance.”

Gomez frowned, and as she did, the door to DeRicci’s office burst open. Popova let herself in. Her cheeks were flushed as if she had hurried across the building.

“There’s been another attack,” she said, then waved her arms and brought up half a dozen screens. Some of them were still processing the facial program that DeRicci had been working on. Popova hid that work in the background, and showed images of burning buildings.

Gomez stood up. “That’s Hétique City.”

Popova gave her an odd look. “Yes, it is. How did you know?”

DeRicci stood too, letting the blanket fall. Her heart was pounding. Maybe it
was
no longer about the Moon. Maybe this was all the proof they needed that the attacks were about the Alliance.

Gomez’s face had gone gray.

“I’m not liking this,” she said to DeRicci as if Popova weren’t there. “I investigate something, and then it gets wiped out. That happened with the imprisoned clones and now here.”

DeRicci forced herself to focus.

“Where was the attack, exactly?” she asked Popova. “The city or some other part of Hétique?”

“The bulk of the explosions happened in an industrial park,” Popova said.

“On the edge of the city?” Gomez asked.

“Yes.” Popova was really frowning at her now, as if Gomez were disturbing her.

“That’s the clone factory,” Gomez said to DeRicci.

“Do you think there was information at the factory that got destroyed in these attacks?” DeRicci asked. “Information that we could use?”

Gomez nodded, her gaze still on the burning buildings, the loop of destruction that showed up over and over again in the visual feeds.

DeRicci didn’t need to see more destruction. She’d seen enough of it on the Moon. She had empathy for the people on Hétique, but she couldn’t let scope of the disaster sink deeply into her consciousness.

Still, she had to ask.

“How many dead?” she asked Popova.

“No one knows yet. The attacks happened at night, and most of the workers weren’t at the factory.”

“But people lived onsite,” Gomez said softly. “There were children…”

DeRicci closed her eyes. She didn’t want to think about any of that. She needed to keep her mind on the Moon.

“Do we know how this attack happened?” she asked Popova.

“From orbit,” Popova said. “That’s what they’re saying now.”

DeRicci’s gaze met Gomez’s. That wasn’t the way that the Moon’s attacks had happened.

“Were there clones involved in the attack?” Gomez asked.

“Not that we can tell,” Popova said.

Gomez was frowning. DeRicci could feel the tension in her own face as well. This wasn’t adding up.

Not an attack
with
clones. An attack
on
clones. Or the factory. Gomez was right. This was some kind of cleanup.

“This is a lead,” DeRicci said. “We need to investigate this place from a different angle.”

“We don’t have anyone,” Popova said. “And besides, we just got some more information. I have a woman in the lobby who saw the Frémont clones attack nearly five decades ago. She’s—”

“Where was this clone attack?” Gomez asked.

Popova looked startled that someone had interrupted her. Or rather, that someone who wasn’t DeRicci had interrupted her.

Popova glanced at DeRicci, silently asking if she should tell Gomez.

DeRicci nodded.

“It was on the Frontier. Some place called Starbase Human?”

Gomez whistled as DeRicci cursed softly.

Gomez took a step toward Popova, as if unable to contain herself. “How is this woman connected?” Gomez asked.

“She says she’s a Disappeared,” Popova said. “I was going to ask you, Chief, if our Retrieval Artist friend should—”

But she couldn’t finish because Gomez was already talking over her to DeRicci. “Nuuyoma said that the old Frémont clone was looking for a woman who had vanished after the attack. I’d like to talk to her, Chief.”

DeRicci felt a little off-balance. She glanced at the burning ruins of yet another destroyed city, and found—sadly—that the images focused her.

“Rudra,” DeRicci said, “does this possible Disappeared have any current information?”

“She’s been living on Earth for twenty or thirty years or something like that,” Popova said. “So, most likely, no.”

“She might not have current information,” Gomez said, “but she might have
valuable
information.”

“If we had the time to get it out of her,” DeRicci said.

“You don’t, but I do. And I have someone on my staff who can investigate Hétique City for you, if you would like.”

DeRicci wasn’t sure how much she wanted to trust Gomez, at least not this early in their relationship.

“If you don’t mind, see what you can find out from this woman,” DeRicci said. “I think I know someone who can look into Hétique City.”

Gomez gave her a knowing glance, then said, “If you need more information or help, I have an information whiz as well as one of the best forensic scientists in the entire Alliance on my ship.”

“Noted,” DeRicci said, then realized that sounded curt. “Thank you. I’ve got to handle one crisis at a time, though.”

Gomez nodded. She looked at Popova. “You want to show me where this Disappeared is?”

“I’ve sent a map to your links,” Popova said. “I’ll let her know to expect you.”

Gomez glanced at DeRicci.

“I’ll talk to you shortly,” DeRicci said to her. “Thank you for doing this.”

“Let’s hope she has real information,” Gomez said.

DeRicci nodded. Then she waited until Gomez let herself out.

Popova started, “I think we should have Miles Flint investigate this possible Disappeared—”

“He’s got enough to do,” DeRicci said curtly. She had known that was what Popova had been thinking, and she wished Popova hadn’t brought it up again. “I want to know what’s going on with Hétique City, at least as far as the Alliance is concerned.”

“I suppose I could—”

“No,” DeRicci said. “We’re all stretched here. I think we should see if Goudkins’ partner can help us with this.”

“Ostaka?” Popova asked. “Goudkins said he doesn’t want to help us directly.”

Goudkins didn’t like Ostaka. It was pretty clear that Popova didn’t either.

“This wouldn’t be helping us directly,” DeRicci said. “It would get us all information.”

“I think he’d say no,” Popova said.

DeRicci sighed internally. Obviously, Popova couldn’t finesse this line of inquiry, so DeRicci was going to have to do it.

She needed to talk to Ostaka, and she needed to do it now.

THIRTY-SIX

THE ENTIRE ROOM
of twenty high-level Alliance Security officers were panicked—and Jhena Andre was having trouble keeping a smile off her face.

She was tweaking them, pushing them, forcing them to think about what else could go wrong. And they were. Who knew that bureaucrats at this level had such fantastic and gruesome imaginations? She certainly hadn’t. She should have pushed these people years ago. Her attacks might not have followed the Earth Alliance Emergency Response Playbook so closely then.

Half of the people in the room were leaning across the conference table, arguing with each other about who held jurisdiction. A quarter were staring forward, investigating on their links or with some screens that they carried with them, trying to see what kind of ships had attacked Hétique City. Another quarter was trying to find out where the next attack was going to be.

The Moon, idiots
, she thought but didn’t say.
Wait a few hours. There will be an attack on the Moon
.

She listened to the arguments. It sounded like the ships were not some coordinated military power, but different vessels from different parts of the Earth Alliance, maybe even some from outside of the Alliance.

If she were actually worried about this attack, she would have directed these nincompoops to see which ship had arrived first and from where.

But if she had to guess based on what she already knew, and what had been happening the last few months, she would guess that these ships had come from some criminal organization, one that finally discovered where the Alliance clones that got embedded into those organizations had been made.

Bye-bye huge long-term investment in stopping the Alliance’s great criminals. Hello, panic.

She just loved this panic.

Then a red light flared over her right eye. She blinked, startled. Earth Alliance alerts were sent across the left eye because some doofus had believed that most people’s dominant eye was their right.

She frowned, then remembered: she had set up her own personal alerts along her right eye.

Emergency
alerts.

She stood. “I have to deal with something,” she said to no one in particular, and then she stepped into the corridor.

It took her a moment to find where the alert came from and when she did, her knees actually buckled. She reached for the wall and held herself up, silently cursing at that moment of physical weakness. It would show up on the security feeds, and someone could trace it.

But the reason for the reaction wouldn’t be as obvious to an outsider as her conversation with Stott might have been.

Because this alert told her that someone had found Mavis Zorn.

Andre let herself into a darkened office. The office smelled faintly of vanilla and sweaty socks. She moved away from the window and the door, and stood near the closest wall, with her back to the wall across from her. That way her face wouldn’t be visible on security feeds.

Andre’s heart was pounding. She hadn’t expected anyone to find Mavis Zorn. The only reason Andre had put a security alert on Zorn’s information was because Andre had put a security alert on all of the major players in her group.

Zorn had been very important. She had been one of the few willing to work with non-humans. Her willingness to deal on a day-to-day basis with the Peyti allowed the group to create the second “event” on the Moon.

It had been Andre’s idea to use non-human clones for that event, but she had initially thought it impossible to execute. No one in the group wanted to deal with aliens. Aliens were the root of the Alliance’s problems, after all.

Well, aliens and the founders of the Alliance. If the Alliance had been set up properly, then none of this would have been necessary. The founders should have decided that aliens had to abide by human laws, human ethics, and human morality. There was enough variation among humans to satisfy most alien legal scholars.

But Andre had watched the old debates and read the old documents. Even though the majority of humans had put that idea forth, it hadn’t gotten adopted into the Alliance. The aliens threatened to walk, and the corporations, already a serious force in human-alien relations, saw billions leaving with the aliens.

So the “Earth” Alliance became a joke. It should have been called the “Alien” Alliance, because alien laws and alien morality trumped human laws and morality all the damn time.

Andre had lost both of her parents to alien laws, and the Earth Alliance had backed those rulings up—
allowed
the deaths to happen as if her parents had actually done something wrong. In the decades since, she’d lost countless friends the same way, and saw even more lives destroyed by the so-called justice inside the so-called Earth Alliance.

She had been only twenty when she realized the Alliance had to be taken apart and reconstructed. Eventually, with the help of others who had had similar upbringings, she realized that only a hard blow to the Alliance itself, one that dissolved so many of its assumptions, would allow her group (and others who believed the same way) to rebuild the Alliance according to
human
values and laws.

A real
Earth
Alliance.

If there were no aliens anymore, so be it.

She had loved the way that the Moon responded to what they were calling the Peyti Crisis. Blaming the Peyti. Exactly how it should be when something went wrong inside the Alliance.

The non-humans should have been blamed.

Zorn had agreed with that, but somehow she could still summon the strength to put up with aliens and alien law. Maybe because she had become a lawyer when she was Andre’s age now.

Zorn had been one of the driving forces inside their group, and had remained so until her death. She had been the wise one behind so many of their systems—limited contact, meetings in isolated places with no tech allowed, and Andre’s personal favorite: no name for the group.