Anniversary Day (26 page)

Eventually, the city attached the Top of the Dome to the Dome itself, so as the light changed on the Dome, it also changed underneath the Top of the Dome. But that also made the Top of the Dome even more vulnerable. If someone took over the resort, they had access to all of the Dome’s major systems and that, Keptra maintained, was a risk the city should never, ever take.

Of course, the city had taken that risk against her advice.

And now some wannabe assassin with a laser rifle held dozens of people hostage in the restaurant. The assassin was part of a group of assassins who had targeted (with some success) the other leaders of the other cities on the Moon. No one knew if the assassins on the ground had help or if they worked alone.

So Keptra had no idea if the man she was going after had someone to help him—people to turn out the lights on the Dome, people who could open the Dome without warning, people who could wreak all kinds of havoc in the city without doing much more than lift a finger.

She had to believe that the assassin worked alone. She had to believe that if he had that kind of assistance, he would have used it by now. Because if she believed anything else, she would be paralyzed.

She had sent guards to the various systems throughout the Dome, and asked city officials to have their best specialists on hand to override any problems, but that didn’t mean that the problems wouldn’t happen anyway.

No one had attacked Tycho Crater before. Not the city itself. Not once in its long history.

Now it was happening on her watch.

If she survived this, she owed a hundred people a thousand I-told-you-sos.

At least her team had practiced rescues at the Top of the Dome. She had always believed it was the most tempting target in the city. It certainly had attracted its share of suicides in its long existence, until someone figured out how to put a clear protective barrier around the resort itself.

The rescues had gone well, and so had the tactical assault practices. But now her team had to do it for real: they had to get into that damn circular restaurant with its 360-degree view of the city, the crater, and the Dome itself, and somehow rescue all of the hostages without anyone getting hurt—not even the damn potential assassin.

She glanced at Strom. He looked as nervous as she felt. In the first two drills her people had gotten so distracted by the views that they had lost focus on the mission. In the more recent one, they’d seen too many reflections in the clear walls and actually “shot” each other. She had “lost” five team members that day, and had let everyone know about her great displeasure.

She hoped the rest of the team was remembering those mistakes. She wanted them to be at the best of their abilities, not their worst.

This time, they wouldn’t get another chance.

Through her link, the dispatch gave her an estimate: fourteen hostages, including some family members of the VIPs who had gone to the mayor’s speech. The family members included children too young to sit in an auditorium for an Anniversary Day celebration.

Great. Children as well. Her mouth was dry. In some ways, she was no more experienced than her team. She had no idea how they were going to pull this off—and she was the one who had to have an idea.

Need security footage
, she sent back to Dispatch.

It’s been disabled,
Dispatch sent.

A shot of fear went through Keptra. Maybe that assistant she had been worrying about actually existed.
How’d he do that?

He didn’t
, Dispatch sent back.
It went down months ago, and no one fixed it
.

And Keptra had never checked the restaurant’s footage on her practice drills because she had footage of her own. Her stomach clenched.

They were going in blind.

Anyone inside have visuals they can send?
she sent.

We haven’t received any contact from inside
, Dispatch sent.

Which could have meant anything. The group inside might be too young to have links (God forbid). They might be too inexperienced to realize they could help the police. Or the assassin somehow used a device to disable links—which meant he had even more technological sophistication than she expected.

All right then
, Keptra sent back.
Let me know if anything changes
.

Then she nodded at Strom.

Everyone in place?
she sent to her team on their private link.

She got affirmatives from all the unit leaders.

She had the largest team, with four, because they were going in the main doors.

All right then
, she sent.
Let’s go!

Forty-five

Nyquist was breathing hard. He had managed to get a hazmat suit and arrive in front of Terminal 81 in less than the ten minutes that Murray had allowed him. Putting the damn suit on, however, was proving a problem.

Fortunately, the Traffic Quarantine Squad that Murray assigned to this job was willing to wait for him. Besides, they had to figure out how, exactly, to get to Palmette.

Apparently, she was deep inside Terminal 81, near an old ship without a lot of data attached to it. The old ship records were sketchy at best. Most of those ships were supposed to leave Terminal 81 when their owners or some government reclaimed them.

But not all ships got reclaimed. And some had remained in port for decades.

Like this one, apparently.

The squad was trying to figure out the best way to get to the ship, a way that took them through the fewest webs of protection, and away from the most dangerous quarantines.

Nyquist wondered if Palmette had thought about any of that.

Probably not, since she wasn’t wearing a hazmat suit. Or, if she had been coerced, she probably figured it didn’t matter: she was dead no matter what she did.

That thought sent a little twinge through him. Wouldn’t she have insisted on a hazmat suit? And if not, if she knew the result of cooperating with whomever was trying to coerce her was her own death, then what was the point of cooperating?

The corridor here was narrow and dark. When he had arrived, he noted how forbidding it was, compared with the corridors leading to the other terminals. It was as if someone wanted anyone who entered here to feel uncomfortable, to know that they had gone to the wrong place.

Most of the squad had arrived ahead of him, and they had already started a discussion about entering Terminal 81. It wasn’t a matter of hitting a palm on the identification pad. It took access codes from four different people, authorization codes from higher ups, and the ability to go through fifteen different webs of protection just to get to the standard identification pad at the front of the door.

It took Nyquist a minute to put on his helmet. He hated hazmat suits. They made him think of the worst investigations he had participated in, the ones that ended badly, the ones that had led him to question his job.

Nyquist pulled on the suit’s helmet. He had asked for a face-hugging helmet even though it meant that he wasn’t as protected as he would have been in a larger one. He wanted Palmette to see him.

The helmet made him even more aware of the suit.

Oddly, the cases where he had needed a hazmat suit and hadn’t had one—the day he saved Palmette’s life came to mind—had given him a kind of inner strength that he hadn’t had before. On the afternoon of the bombing, as he waited for the Dome section to open, he thought about the murder, about Alvina, about Palmette—about his terrible life—and he had had a realization.

Instead of making him want to quit his job, that dark day had made him realize how much he loved his work—and how frightened he was of losing it. He had been afraid that everything would change after that, and many things did. But not his job, not investigation, not police work in general.

And he had changed. He knew he was strong enough to face all kinds of terrible odds—which helped him later when he found himself alone with Bixian assassins. It helped him now, because he knew the city would get through this.

But he wasn’t sure how many people would die in the meantime. And every second it took the squad to open a web of protection made extra loss of life even more probable.

He wanted to tell the squad to hurry, but he knew better. They didn’t dare avoid protocol. If any of those webs of protection were tainted, it would cause Terminal 81 to get sealed off. If the damage in Terminal 81—or the threat in the terminal—was too bad, then someone (probably DeRicci) would have to decide whether or not to destroy the entire area.

After evacuations, of course. After the Dome protections had fallen, so that any explosion would be contained.

If there was an explosion. This terminal had also been designed to open directly into the vastness of space, the nothingness that was the Moon itself. If the threat was chemical, then the chemical would disperse in the lack of atmosphere. If there was a fire or an explosion caused by something lethal, then the lack of oxygen would shut that all down.

Any contagion would disperse as well.

So theoretically, Terminal 81 was the safest place to have a crisis in all of Armstrong.

But that didn’t explain why Nyquist’s heart was pounding, why he was having so much trouble regulating his own breathing.

He was nervous, maybe even a little frightened. And as much as he told himself that such feelings were normal in a situation like this, he didn’t really want to believe it.

He couldn’t believe it, and be effective.

He had to stay calm.

He had to do this right.

Forty-six

They broke through the door with relative ease. To Keptra’s surprise, the interior of the restaurant was light. All of her training had told her that a perpetrator would keep it dark.

But he hadn’t.

The assassin stood in the center of the circular restaurant, at the maître d’s station. It was surreal. Her people stood in all the doorways, which were placed around the restaurant at regular intervals. Between them, booths lined up against the windows. At every third booth, hostages—most of them families with small children. The windows next them showed the crater walls. Below, the lights of the city beckoned, and above them, the Dome. Just barely visible through it, the lights of the solar system itself against the blackness of space.

Usually that view held the attention of everyone, but no one looked at it now. Not even the assassin.

He had the maître d’s station on slow rotate, so his back wasn’t to anyone for very long. He clutched the laser rifle, and as he rotated, Keptra noted that he had a laser pistol tucked into the waistband of his pants.

None of the hostages sat at the tables scattered through the middle of the room. There were no employees either, and the kitchen door was barricaded. The employees, apparently, had made their escape.

Leaving families, a handful of single adults, and way too many children under five.

Just like Keptra had feared.

She cursed, then sent to her team,
Remember, no one shoot until we get the hostages out of here
.

The last thing she wanted was a malfunction, not of her people’s weaponry, but of that weird technical stuff the other assassin—the one in Armstrong—had worn, the stuff that had taken a knee shot and brought it all the way to his heart. If the technical stuff had malfunctioned, it might ricochet any shot around the room, randomly killing people.

Randomly killing children.

She took one small step forward.

“I’m Captain Polly Keptra,” she said. “I’d like to talk with you.”

The assassin stopped the maître d’s station from rotating, then he turned to face her. As he did, she saw a reflection around him. Something on that station was set up to mirror imagery, so that he could mask where he was really standing.

Or maybe it had a more innocuous purpose: maybe it had just been there so that the maître d’ could see anyone new who came into the restaurant, no matter what door they used.

“So talk,” the assassin said.

He had no discernable accent; she had expected an accent. She
wanted
an accent. She
needed
an accent. She needed him to be something
other
, more than being a clone.

She didn’t want him to seem rational and human and oh, so reasonable.

It didn’t help that he was thin and young and relatively attractive, with his unusual blond coloring and his pale eyes.

“It would be easier to talk if you let the hostages go,” she said.

He tilted his head, as if her request amused him. Then he nodded, ever so slightly, and said, “It would, wouldn’t it?”

It took her a moment to process the words. She hadn’t expected them.

“I tell you what,” he said, ever so reasonably. “I will let them go, if you let me keep this one.”