Anniversary Day (38 page)

At least he understood what went wrong now. It had gone wrong when her father had killed her mother, and then killed himself. Something twisted in Ursula Palmette’s brain. That twist had been evident from the beginning, but not something that the people in charge worried about.

They did what they were programmed to do—they didn’t rehire her after she had nearly died in the line of duty. Maybe if they had rehired her, Arek Soseki would be alive.

Nyquist slammed the door open. Palmette looked up, startled.

As he stepped inside, letting the door close behind him, he realized he didn’t know how to play this.

Then he decided he didn’t want to play it at all.

“I need to know who your contact is, Ursula,” Nyquist said.

She shook her head. “I don’t even know.”

“You do, and you’ll tell me.”

She frowned at him. “I don’t.”

Hundreds, maybe thousands of people died because of her, and he knew if he threw that in her face, she wouldn’t care. She had stopped caring about dead people when her parents died. Dead people had become a puzzle to her.

He splayed his hands on the table. “What the hell were you thinking?” he asked. “You didn’t just want to blow up Armstrong. You wanted to destroy the Moon.”

She smiled—that cold, chilling smile. “Have I done so?”

“You haven’t, no,” he said. He sat down. He wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of knowing that the other bombs had gone off.

She tilted her head. “Then why are you so angry?”

“Because you of all people should know better,” he said. “You know how it feels to be abandoned because someone got murdered.”

She flinched.

“You know how it feels to suffer in an attack that wasn’t aimed at you.”

“You forget,” she said. “I wasn’t injured in the bombing. Alvina Ingelow nearly killed me.”

“And you wouldn’t have been vulnerable if the bombing hadn’t happened,” he snapped. “I saved your life. I thought you would amount to something.”

“I
did
,” she said.

He stared at her.

“People will remember me,” she said.

His heart was pounding. He was alone here. Everyone in Armstrong was dealing with a different crisis. No one was observing him. He could probably even convince Murray Atherton to get rid of any footage from this interrogation.

He could do what he should have done before: He should have left her to die. He could make sure she died now.

But he wasn’t like her. He wasn’t a killer—except in self-defense. And this had moved beyond self-defense long ago.

“No one will remember you,” he said coldly. “I’ll see to it. They’ll have no idea that you even existed.”

She blanched.

“I’ll wipe you from the records,” he said. “I’ll make sure you’re not in any reports. You know how this chaos works. You know no one will double-check. Ursula Palmette disappeared on Anniversary Day, and no one knows why. Worse, no one will care.”

“You said you cared,” she whispered.

He nodded. “I did, until I found out what you were.”

She raised her chin, but it was trembling. “I’m a good person.”

“You’re a mass murderer, Ursula. You’re worse than Alvina Ingelow. You’ve killed many more people. You’re worse than your father.”

Palmette straightened. “I am not.”

“You are,” Nyquist said. “You did to countless people exactly what your father did to you. You destroyed their lives. You
purposely
destroyed their lives.”

“I did not,” she said.

“No one remembers him except you. No one thinks about him, no one cares about him. And that will happen to you.”

“No,” she said.

“I’ll make sure of it.” He sat down, crossed his arms, and glared at her.

She shook her head. “You wouldn’t.”

“I will,” he said. “In fact, I’ll enjoy it. I’ll happily destroy you, Ursula. And what’s ironic is that I can.”

She blinked, holding back tears. He watched her, knowing what was going through her mind. She knew he was manipulating her, but she couldn’t stop the emotions. Emotions had always been her problem, and if she had been able to control them, she would still be on the force. She’d be a productive member of society, not one who had nearly destroyed it.

“All right,” she said quietly. “What can I do?”

Seventy

As Flint and Talia worked, neither of them spoke. The room wasn’t exactly quiet—people ran down the hall outside. Occasionally someone yelled. Talia didn’t look up. Instead, she seemed to go deeper into her work, her teeth pressing on her lower lip. Every once in a while, she’d make a little grunt of acknowledgement or acceptance or discovery.

Flint would look up when she did that. He couldn’t help himself. He had to keep an eye on her as well. Not that he expected anything to happen to her, not here at least. But he worried about the effect this event was having on her, whether it would bring up the trauma from the day her mother got kidnapped.

But his worry for her didn’t stop him from focusing on his own work. He was doing a few things by rote. He had systems that he’d established when he became a Retrieval Artist, and he followed them now.

Retrieval Artists found people who had vanished on purpose, escaping prosecution from any one of fifty different alien cultures. Because of agreements the Earth Alliance had made, humans and aliens alike were subject to the laws of whatever place he found himself. That meant that sometimes humans received terrible punishments for things that they never believed to be crimes.

Corporations, in order to do business in truly different cultures, founded Disappearance Services, to help any worker (generally an executive) who inadvertently broke a law to escape punishment.

When Flint quit the police department because he had been unable to enforce some of those laws, he became a Retrieval Artist. Retrieval Artists found people who had Disappeared, but not for any alien government or even any human government. Retrieval Artists worked independently, finding someone whose sentence had been commuted or who had received a large inheritance.

Unlike Trackers, who did work for various governments, Retrieval Artists never found someone and turned them in to serve out their sentence. Retrieval Artists delivered a message or the inheritance, and let the Disappeared go back to their old lives.

Which meant that Flint had learned to cover his tracks. He didn’t want some Tracker or police department to piggy-back on his work, finding someone who didn’t want to be found.

Flint’s search methods were different from other Retrieval Artists’ methods. He often used techniques he’d learned as a detective as a place to start.

The legitimate routes added speed to his work, especially at times when he didn’t have to worry about anyone tracking his preliminary searches.

Like right now. The moment he had decided to track the assassins, he ran a modified version of Armstrong PD’s image search. He also ran one that DeRicci had here in the Security Office.

The Security Office program followed the assassins as they moved from Armstrong’s Port to their final destinations. If he wanted to, Flint could watch the assassins’ comings and goings before Anniversary Day.

But he didn’t want to. Let the prosecutors do that. He knew what they'd end up doing.

He wanted to find out where they came from.

Talia sighed heavily. She had moved in her chair so that she was sitting up again. Sometimes she sprawled, sometimes she sat up, but mostly she’d been leaning forward.

“Trouble?” Flint asked.

“Everything’s encrypted. For the past year,” Talia said. “I can’t trace anything easily. I have to fight for each piece of information, and most of it’s worthless.”

“But the worthless stuff is hiding something important,” Flint said.

“I hope so.” Talia shifted in the chair again, sitting cross-legged, resting the pad on the chair’s left arm. She kept pounding her finger onto the screen as if the pad itself had offended her.

Normally he would tell her to treat the equipment with a bit more respect. But he understood her frustration, so he didn’t say anything.

One of his systems pinged. He glanced at the screen on the desk and froze. The computer identified the face “to ninety-nine percent” certainty. He touched the screen gently, unlike Talia had been doing, to see what caused the ninety-nine percent instead of the usual one hundred percent on this program.

Face reappears in several locations at the same time,
the program said.
Even though features are the same, probability that faces belong to the same person in all locations low
.

In spite of himself, Flint smiled. Computers were so literal, and programs like this couldn’t make the leap that these images could have been caused by something other than the same person. The program hadn’t been designed to make that distinction.

He tapped the screen again, moving away from the explanation, to the image of the face itself. It was a 3-D image on a 2-D screen. He tapped it, and a holographic image of the head rotated on the desk.

“Creepy,” Talia said. “Which one is that? The one that killed the mayor?”

Several of the assassins killed mayors, but Flint knew what she meant. She was asking if this was the man who killed Soseki.

“I don’t think so,” Flint said. “The hairstyle is different from what we’ve seen, and that high neck collar hasn’t been in style on the Moon in generations.”

“So who is it?” Talia asked.

PierLuigi Frémont
,
Ruler For Life of Abbondiado
,
committed suicide fifty-five years ago the night before his trial for genocide began
, the computer said. Apparently Talia had asked a question the program thought it could answer.
Evidence suggests Frémont’s crimes extended beyond those he was accused of. He killed indiscriminately—

“Enough,” Flint said to the computer. He was familiar with Frémont. Every school child learned about him—or at least, every school child had learned about him when Flint was in school. Frémont was a cautionary tale: a supposedly good-hearted man who left the confines of the Earth Alliance, was forced to take over an area at the outer regions of the known universe, only to lose control of the people who settled the area. Rather than work with them, he killed them and started a new colony; an act he repeated twice before the founding of Abbondiado which, surprisingly enough, managed to overthrow him with the help of the Earth Alliance. The Alliance charged Frémont with genocide, but the night before the trial was to begin, Frémont found a way to end his life.

Chillingly, he did not die alone. He took his guards and an entire wing of the prison with him.

These clones of Frémont, which were in their twenties, had been made thirty years after his death.

“This is some kind of message,” Flint said, mostly to himself.

“We’d know what it is if you let the computer finish,” Talia said.

He shook his head. “You didn’t study Frémont?” he asked.

“I’ve heard of him, but that unit happened before I came to Armstrong,” Talia said. “One more thing I’m supposed to catch up on.”

The differences in the education system between Armstrong and Valhalla Basin struck him again. But he didn’t have time to dwell on it.

Whoever had created these assassins and sent them to the Moon knew what kind of impact they would have, even after their deaths. Flint shuddered. The discussions of whether or not murderous behavior was innate would become important, along with the tendency toward suicide.

Even if the other attacks hadn’t happened—

But they had. The other attacks had happened as well.

Everything was deliberate, from the choices of targets to the choice of assassins. Flint stood up.

“Where’re you going?” Talia asked.

“I need to talk to DeRicci.”

“Again?” Talia asked. “Can’t you just send the information to her?”

Flint glanced at his daughter. She hadn’t complained before about going to DeRicci’s office.

But before, Talia hadn’t known that the images would be playing and replaying on that gigantic screen.

“You can stay here,” Flint said.

Talia immediately shook her head. She clearly didn’t want him out of her sight—and he couldn’t blame her.

Together they left the room to tell DeRicci more confounding news.

Seventy-one

Domes all over the Earth Alliance on high alert. Starbases using security so high that many ships were unable to dock. Many spaceports refusing access to humans.