Anniversary Day (35 page)

A deeply unhappy woman.

Or so Keptra wanted to imagine. Because she didn’t think a happy woman would “facilitate” an attack on the mayor.

Keptra sent the image, flagged emergency, to everyone in authority on Tycho Crater, as well as to every single dome operator and public transportation supervisor in the entire city. Someone had to have seen that woman today. Someone would give Keptra insight.

She only hoped she would get it in time.

Sixty-one

DeRicci stood in front of her gigantic screen, looking at the hole where Nyquist’s image had been. Her stomach clenched. This new bombing would have been worse than four years ago, but Nyquist had prevented it.

Nyquist, who couldn’t help her now.

And if DeRicci went to Popova, she had no idea if Popova could help. DeRicci would waste precious time. Hänsel was useless. None of the leaders of the Moon could talk to her. Getting someone in authority in the Earth Alliance up to speed would take forever. Flint was working on the bigger picture—whoever was behind the clones—and she needed him there. He didn’t know what she could do as Security Chief. Hell, she didn’t know what she could do sometimes.

Flint came into the room unannounced, followed by Talia. DeRicci wished she could talk to Flint without his daughter, but she also knew that Flint didn’t want to let Talia out of his sight.

“Have you got anything?” DeRicci asked.

“I thought you wanted to pick my brain,” he said.

“I do,” she said, “but I’m half-hoping there’s more information.”

He shrugged. “The only new information I have is strange.”

She felt more irritated at him than she should have been. He wasn’t withholding information from her, but she hated the way he dragged this out.

“And it is…?”

“Nineteen others arrived with our assassin,” Flint said.

DeRicci frowned. “Twenty clones?”

“Yeah,” Flint said, “and they weren’t hiding.”

“Twenty.” She swallowed hard. “Twenty.”

Then she looked at him. His gaze met hers. He seemed to be waiting.

But Talia wasn’t. “Have there been twenty assassinations today?”

Her question seemed breathless.

“No,” DeRicci said, “but several have failed.”

But what if a few quit? Or didn’t make it to their target? Failures she didn’t even know about.

And Nyquist had told her that the attacks were diversions, that each assassin had a facilitator, an insider. At least one of those insiders—Palmette—had a secondary assignment.

Flint was still watching her. “What?” he asked.

“Each one of these assassins had a facilitator,” DeRicci said. “Someone connected who got him near his target. The Armstrong facilitator was supposed to blow up the Port.”

Talia started, but DeRicci ignored it. Flint glanced at his daughter, his mouth in a grim line.

“We caught her,” DeRicci said. “We got this information from her.”

“Do you think she was unusual?” Flint asked.

“I don’t know,” DeRicci said.

“You have to assume she isn’t. That these other facilitators have a secondary job.”

“I know,” DeRicci said. “But what can I do? It doesn’t feel like Anniversary Day. It feels like the day of the damn bombing….”

That last bomb, four years ago, it had been a nightmare. She had been in her office at the Armstrong Police Department, and then everything fell apart, lights out, building shaking, environmental controls off. And things got worse when the Dome sectioned. Its protective walls came down and…

Her breath caught. She knew now. She knew there would be an attack. She didn’t know where the attacks would be, but she knew they would be bad, and they would be in every single Dome on the Moon.

“Noelle?” Flint asked.

She held up a single finger, silencing him. Then she sent a highly coded
Extreme Emergency
message through her links to every single authority in every single Dome:
Section your Dome. Now! We have a credible threat that your Dome will explode within minutes. Section your Dome
.

She set the message on repeat. Then she hurried across her office, pulled open the door, and pointed at Hänsel. “I’m sending you a message now. Send it to the Earth Alliance on my authority, and keep sending it until you get a response.”

That message—simple:
All Domes on the Moon under attack. Warn Domed communities throughout the Alliance. We have no overt threat to them, but just in case, they need to be on alert.

Then she turned to Popova. Popova’s hair was a mess, but her eyes were bright, as if this new emergency had reawakened her.

“Make sure our Dome sections.
Now!
” DeRicci said. “Then monitor the other Domes here on the Moon. They need to be sectioning. I need to know what’s going on. Got that?”

“Yes, sir,” Popova said, sounding like her old self. Her cheeks filled with color as she started to work.

Flint stood near the door. “You’re sectioning the Domes?”

“It’s the only thing we can do,” DeRicci said. “Brace yourself. This won’t be fun.”

She stepped past him, and went back into her office. She sent the messages again, then made sure the message went to everyone who worked for the governor-general. DeRicci had no idea if the same woman that Nyquist had been working with had facilitated the governor-general’s attack, but just in case that attack had a different facilitator, DeRicci made sure they were warned.

“What can we do, Dad?” Talia asked.

“Sit down,” he said, pointing her to one of the chairs. Talia sat. So did Flint. But DeRicci didn’t.

Then a loud bang echoed throughout the building, and it shook, hard. DeRicci grabbed onto her desk, but it slid across the floor. Flint and Talia’s chairs slid too. Neither said anything, but Talia looked terrified. Flint seemed grimly determined.

The Dome was sectioning, just like DeRicci had ordered.

It wouldn’t stop an attack, but it would minimize the damage. Not counting, of course, the damage to the ground because of the sectioning. There hadn’t been a lot of warning. She hoped no one got hurt.

Then she didn’t think about it any more. She watched feeds from the other Domes. Some were sectioning. Others hadn’t yet.

She checked her message, re-sent it, added as much urgency as she could.

If Nyquist was right, and the attack on Armstrong was going to be first, and he’d been working on this woman for a few hours, then the other attacks were imminent.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” DeRicci muttered. She felt completely out of control. She stared at the images. Then she had a terrible thought: How many Domes could section? They had all been built to section, but they had balked at the order from the governor-general shortly after DeRicci’s hire to check the sectioning mechanism. Too costly. Too difficult.

She clenched her fists and sent a prayer—or maybe a command—out into the universe.

Please let it work. Please let it work. It has to work. It has to work now.

Sixty-two

Keptra sprinted for the stairs in the parking garage. It made no difference if she used the elevator—if the power went out here, she was screwed no matter what—but she hated being caught in small spaces. The garage was open to parts of the Dome, one of the design features she hated about the entire Top of the Dome structure, something she had complained about for years.

It would be so easy to access the exterior of the structure from here. There were a dozen other places just as easy to access.

Maybe that bastard had been wrong. Maybe it wasn’t just the facilitator working on something destructive inside Tycho Crater. Maybe an entire team of people worked—

Something shot past her vision, whistling as it went by. Then the entire structure rocked, and she nearly lost her footing.

She grabbed onto the wall and steadied herself, sending a message to Strom:
What was that?

The Dome is sectioning,
he sent back.
The mayor’s orders
.

What did the mayor know that she didn’t know? How come that order hadn’t come to her as well?

She was about to ask when a loud boom echoed through the parking garage, followed by another, and then another. Fire at one end, suppression systems working to put it out. Then another boom and another, and suddenly she was sliding, falling downward, grabbing onto whatever she could.

A final boom resounded and she had nothing to hang onto. The world was burning, collapsing, cratering around her. Cars were sliding toward her, sliding downward, and she couldn’t reach them either.

She wrapped herself into a little ball, and felt herself bounce.

Sixty-three

Somehow the coroner managed to get the body out of the Bohemian Theater. Lillian Miyaki watched as a group of bots with tops that combined to make a kind of tray lifted the body into the coroner’s van. That body wasn’t really a body. It was something other, something she really didn’t want to think about.

Just like she didn’t want to think about the other message that had just come through from Security Chief DeRicci. Somehow her team was supposed to find a “facilitator,” the person or persons who had gotten the wannabe assassin into the Bohemian Theater or into Glenn Station—no one was clear on that point—and stop this person or persons from doing something nefarious.

No one was clear on that point either.

Miyaki’s team was still inside the theater. DeRicci’s people seemed to think there might be a bomb or some kind of improvised explosive. The mayor’s office (really Adriana Clief) wanted security teams all over the city to look for something out of the ordinary.

And then Clief had given only a few minutes warning before sectioning the Dome. That had happened not five minutes ago, nearly making the bots drop that icky, gory body. Miyaki wasn’t afraid of many things, but she was afraid of dying like that—horribly and graphically, in a way that would leave her not quite human.

The coroner told Miyaki that the would-be assassin had died quickly, but after questions, Miyaki realized the assassin hadn’t died quickly enough. The coroner estimated it had taken about thirty seconds for the stuff—this
zoodeh
—to work. Any cop knew that thirty seconds was a very long time.

One of the Dome sections had fallen between the Bohemian Theater and the downtown train station. The Dome sections hadn’t been used in Miyaki’s lifetime, not even on a practice drill. She was, frankly, a bit surprised that they had worked at all. Since they landed with a lot of force, shaking the ground beneath them, she suspected many things had gotten broken throughout Glenn Station.

If that was the worst of the day’s events—that and the death of the wannabe assassin—then the day wouldn’t be as bad as it had started out to be.

Still, she stared at the Dome section. It was supposed to be clear, but it had aged into a yellow-gold color that made it seem brittle. The station, just beyond, looked like it had faded as well. The long building, which matched the Bohemian Theater in its old Earth design, seemed farther away than usual, probably a trick of the warped Dome section.

Miyaki sighed deeply and headed back into the Bohemian Theater.

Suddenly, the Dome section bowed in toward her, material hitting it, followed by a loud
whomp!
and then splattering sounds as the material kept hitting the section itself.

The Dome section moved inward, then straightened.

Miyaki realized she was sitting on the ground. She had fallen and not even noticed. People were pouring out of the Bohemian Theater and other nearby buildings, talking and yelling.

She didn’t pay any attention to them. She got up, then walked toward the Dome section. It was scratched and charred and covered with bits of building. Stuff was dripping down the interior.

Stuff. Red and gray and black stuff. Ichor from some of the aliens in the station. Human blood. Human brains.

She was shaking. She couldn’t see the train station any longer and it took her a moment to figure out why.

It was gone. It had exploded, and it had taken part of the Dome with it.

If the mayor’s office (Adriana Clief, bless her) hadn’t ordered the Dome to section, Miyaki would be dead now. The environment would be gone. The oxygen would be gone.

Not that it mattered.

Miyaki wouldn’t have survived an explosion that large.

The Dome section had barely held it in.