Anniversary Day (37 page)

Deaths.

How many people had died because others got the job done, as Palmette had said. How many died? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

And once again, in a moment of great crisis, he was stuck with Palmette. He was dealing with Palmette. He had to figure out what to do with Palmette.

Besides kill her. Because that was what he wanted to do. He should have left her to die in that squalid kitchen, on the floor of that squalid house. No one would have known. No one would have cared.

Only back then, he had thought her worth saving. Hell, he had even thought Alvina Ingelow was worth saving. And she had cost him months in court time and in headaches.

In comparison, though, Alvina had been worth saving.

Palmette had not.

He clenched his fist and nearly sent it into the wall again, but the soreness on the side of his hand stopped him. Hurting himself wouldn’t help. Punching a wall wouldn’t help.

He couldn’t go into those destroyed domes and save lives. He couldn’t be a first responder. So far, everything in Armstrong was fine.

Everything here would rest on the investigation.

Because the assassins had said that the assassinations had only been the beginning. Maybe they were referring to these attacks. Or maybe they’d been referring to something more.

Why attack every major city on the Moon if it wasn’t the prelude to something bigger?

Only what? He didn’t know.

Maybe Palmette did.

It was time to find out.

Sixty-seven

Flint would never get the images out of his mind, playing and replaying on DeRicci’s gigantic screen. Worse, Talia had seen them too. Just after she had found the passenger manifests. Those twenty would-be assassins had been in each of the cities that had been attacked. Or the nineteen cities, since somehow Armstrong had been spared this time.

Was this how everyone else had felt four years ago, when the bomb had exploded here in Armstrong? He had been involved in his own crisis on Earth, and hadn’t realized what had happened for days. And by then, the impact was a bit blunted.

So he hadn’t experienced this shock to the system, this
I can’t believe what’s happening
feeling, as if he were watching an entertainment instead of seeing a crisis develop in front of his eyes.

A crisis that had DeRicci looking like a wild woman, even though she was trying to keep herself under control.

That request,
Find out all you can,
was spot-on. Because what else could he do? He wasn’t anywhere near the explosions. He couldn’t help rescue survivors or help with the first responders. He could send money—he had a lot of money—but at the moment, there was too much confusion. He didn’t even know where to send it, what to do.

He took Talia’s arm and led her from DeRicci’s office. Popova was moving quickly, hands flying, as she worked on her screen and talked to someone through her links. Hänsel looked panicked, but he worked quickly as well. Hänsel nodded as Flint went past, as if they shared a secret.

Maybe they did. They both knew how tenuous everything was, how—in truth—no one was in charge.

It wasn’t until Flint got back to his work area that he realized Talia was shaking. His daughter, who hadn’t had anything easy since her mother died.

Talia’s face was gray, and her eyes red-rimmed. But she wasn’t crying—not yet.

“What do we do, Dad?” she asked. “They’re going to bomb this place next, right?”

He didn’t know the answer to that. He had made it a policy from the beginning not to lie to her, even if the truth was painful.

“I don’t know what their plans are,” he said. “I don’t even know who ‘they’ are or what they want from this. We have to trust that the building’s security will take care of any threat.”

“But security didn’t solve the threats to all those cities. Dad, those people, they’re dying.” Her voice rose and wobbled.

He put a hand on her back, and she stiffened. She didn’t want him to touch her. She didn’t want a hug or casual comfort. She had moved beyond that.

Now she wanted
answers
.

They all wanted answers.

“Yes,” he said, surprised at how calm he sounded. “People are dying right now. But a lot more would have died if the Domes hadn’t sectioned. We’d be looking at casualties in the millions.”

Talia stared at him, her eyes narrowing. He recognized the look. She was getting angry.

“And that makes it okay?” she asked. “Thousands dying instead of millions?”

“No,” he said. “It’s not okay. It’s just not as bad….”

He realized how lame his argument was and quit talking. He ran a hand over his forehead. His fingers were trembling. He was more shaken up than he wanted to admit.

“We can watch this all day,” he said. “We can follow the coverage, keep track of how many people survive, what happens to the various cities, or we can contribute.”

“No, we can’t,” Talia said. “They shut down the trains. Didn’t you hear that? No one is traveling right now.”

“We’re not going to travel,” he said. “We’re not going to leave this building. You and I have skills other people don’t have, Talia. We can find things. We know how to get information. And that’s what Noelle needs right now. The more information we have on these people, the faster we can solve this.”

“So what?” Talia said. “They already killed people.”

“And they might kill more,” he said. “We don’t know. If we find out who they are and what they’re doing, we might be able to get to them first.”

“Don’t you think they’re ready for that?” she asked.

He studied her. His brilliant daughter. She understood how people worked as well.

“Yes,” he said. “I think they’re ready for the authorities to search for them. They wanted the assassins to be traced. I don’t think they expected anyone to discover who set off the bombs. We caught a break there. So we trace and track.”

“Just like the police are doing,” Talia said.

“The police aren’t doing anything right now except dealing with a crisis,” he said. Except in Armstrong. In Armstrong, the secondary crisis had been averted.

Talia crossed her arms.

“Besides,” Flint said, “these attackers expect the police to follow the rules. Noelle brought
us
in here because she knows we won’t. We’ll follow the information wherever it leads us.”

Talia tilted her head. Her eyes had brightened. He had her interest for the first time since she saw all the images of destruction. “So I don’t have to do things the way I would if I was in school.”

“That’s right,” Flint said. “Do it any way you can. The faster we find out what’s going on, the better off we’ll be.”

She picked up the pad and tapped it on. “Do you think the assassins are the place to start?”

“I’ll follow them,” Flint said. “I’m used to tracing a lot of people at once. I want you to look into the communication files for that woman Nyquist captured. Someone had to put her up to this. Let’s figure out who it was.”

“That sounds important, Dad,” Talia said. “I think you should do it.”

He put a hand on her arm. “It
is
important. And you’ll do much better than I ever would.”

She stared at him for a moment. Then she took a deep breath and started to work.

He watched her for a moment, the frown of concentration on her face, the way she bit her lower lip. He had calmed her down. He wished he could calm himself.

But he had learned long ago that the best way for him to deal with a crisis was through a computer screen. He needed to focus on detail, on being busy, on solving things.

And he would.

He would solve this.

If it was the last thing he ever did.

Sixty-eight

Not every Dome had been destroyed. DeRicci took that as good news. She was looking for good news wherever she could find it.

She had turned her back on that gigantic screen, but she had kept it on, the images filtering in from all major cities. She was standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, looking at her city. Intact, glimmering in the mid-afternoon Dome light. Light that someone had programmed, light that came through the very thing that protected them all.

Below, cars moved. People were still walking on the streets, even though they were monitoring what was going on.

Hundreds of other towns on the Moon had not been hit with an attack, and life went on there too.

She had a hunch those citizens were as shell-shocked as she was. But they didn’t have to cope, moment by moment, struggling to wrap their brains around the magnitude of this crisis, not just because it had happened, but because they had to solve it.

She
had to solve it.

So far as she could tell, she was the only one left alive who had the ability to do so. She could try to gather the Moon Council members, but she didn’t know how many of them had been in Littrow near the governor’s mansion. Or attending some Anniversary Day speech in some important venue that might have been in a section of some Dome that got obliterated.

Nineteen explosions. Twelve Domes had holes blown through them. If she hadn’t ordered those Domes sectioned, twelve cities would have been completely destroyed.

She had to take comfort in that. Just like she had to take comfort in the fact that seven of the explosions hadn’t been severe enough to crack or destroy a Dome.

Although the situation in Tycho Crater was bad. If the Top of the Dome fell, it would flatten the city center below.

She’d already received reports on the evacuation effort, but the authorities there were afraid they might not get people out of that area. The Dome was still sectioned, and they weren’t sure if raising the sections would dislodge the resort.

Who the hell built something like that against a dome?

She supposed she shouldn’t rail at their stupidity. There were high rises here attached to the Dome as well. Nyquist had nearly died in one.

Nyquist. She hadn’t heard from him.

Even though she had heard from nearly thirty different authorities in the Earth Alliance. They were sending emergency personnel, aid, money, medical supplies and avatars, hospital ships, dome engineers, anything she could want.

She just didn’t know what she wanted.

Except a guarantee that this attack was over.

Although this wasn’t really an attack.

This was something more. An act of war?

She didn’t know. No one had owned up to it. No one had claimed it.

Just like no one had claimed the bombing four years ago.

This was so devastating, someone had to take responsibility. She needed them to.

Why weren’t they?

She asked the Earth Alliance to send ships and military personnel and all the help they could give. And they were.

But it would take time to get here.

Time she wasn’t sure she had.

Sixty-nine

The psych reports hit Nyquist’s links just as he touched the door to the interrogation room. He paused, scanned them, and got even angrier.

Palmette had been an iffy hire in the first place. Parents dead in a murder-suicide when she was young, caused—or so it seemed—by an inability to hire a Disappearance Service. Palmette had moved in with relatives, always been the outsider, unhappy, unwanted.

But she had a fascination with crime and she’d scored better than any other candidate for the police academy on investigative techniques. She was also exceptionally brilliant, very driven, and extremely teachable.

She was also unable to connect with others, unable to form a close bond, and unwilling to go into therapy to work through the problems. She got an enhancement so that she could handle social situations, but even that was a stop-gap measure, one designed to help her in the field, not to improve her life.

Her entry psych report stated:
This woman is a marginal candidate emotionally, but so brilliant and talented that we would be remiss not giving her a shot at the work. If she suffers serious trauma, she must receive a greater and more thorough examination afterwards than more stable candidates. But many officers go through their careers without serious problems; we trust Ursula Palmette will be one of them
.

They trusted wrong. Nyquist wanted to let them know that they had gambled and lost big. But that wasn’t his place at the moment. At the moment, he needed to deal with Palmette herself.