Vigilantes (9 page)

They had come to work that morning together, dressed to the nines, in their offices an hour before Zhu had told them to arrive. The building had let them in—a little too trustworthy, she thought, even though they did have S
3
clearance—and they were all reviewing the compensation and business packages that Zhu had left for them the night before.

Plus she heard the sound of desks bumping against walls, chairs toppling over, boxes being set down. Grunts as the new team was setting up their offices, one little movement of furniture at a time.

The day before, Zhu had pulled her aside and told her she would double as office manager until he could find a real one. She knew he had given her that job because she had done similar work while in college, and she had received good recommendations from those employers.

Plus, the public defender’s office at the Impossibles had given her a recommendation that she saw as both excellent and as a slap in the face: it had said that she was as good at organizing her cases as she was at defending them.

Since no one from the PD’s office won cases at the Impossibles, that was the best recommendation she could get. Except for the organization slap.

That part disturbed her more than she wanted to admit.

Still, a job was a job, and she now had a good one with S
3
.

Which made that whisper through her links so very odd. Why would someone tell her about S
3
’s conflict of interest? She traced the link, and saw that it had come from Zhu himself. So she tried to contact him directly.

She got nothing. Not even a hint that she had the right link.

She tried again, and this time she got an official discouragement:

You have not been cleared to use this private connection
.

So, she tried to reach him on the S
3
link. She was told to wait.

She’d never received that message on a link before.

She thought of contacting the other attorneys, but they were as new as she was. Besides, she’d had weird bosses before. One of the reasons Zhu had put her in charge was that she was organized and knew how to get things done.

She pinged the network and asked if Zhu’s location was considered public or private.

For S
3
,
the network responded,
Torkild Zhu’s location is available.

She wanted to impatiently snap,
So where is he?
But she didn’t. Instead she searched his location, and was stunned to discover he was near the front of the building.

How long has he been there?
She sent, thinking she could just wait until he arrived on their floor.

Ten minutes
.

That seemed odd. And it included the moment when she had gotten the weird message. So she pinged him again, and got nothing.

Then she realized she could turn on the building’s security system. She asked to see the front sidewalk.

The security feed showed her an empty sidewalk, except for something near the door—which she couldn’t really see.

Zoom in
, she instructed it.

That something was a pair of shoes, attached to two legs bent at strange angles. Then she realized that liquid was running down the sidewalk toward the next building.

She felt a surge of panic.

The liquid was dark, and there was a toppled cup near the bottom of her screen. Coffee. She had to hope she was looking at coffee.

Zoom in closer to the door
, she instructed the feed.

It did. She saw a man sprawled, face down, body twisted and bent in a way that no person’s body should be twisted.

Her breath caught.

Are emergency services on the way?
She asked the security feed. After all, it should have sent for help if someone had a medical emergency outside the main door.

Emergency services have come and gone
, the security feed responded.

She didn’t understand that. And she had learned through hard experience that she shouldn’t argue with an automated system.

Instead, she sent,
Show me
.

It did. Police officers, faces averted from any security feed, grabbed Zhu, threw him to the ground, and then beat him.

She stopped the feed. It made her hurt in empathy, and terrified her at the same time.

Send for medical personnel
, she sent the security feed. And then, in case it had been tampered with, she sent for an ambulance herself.

But she knew better than to sit up here and wait. She sent a message to the other new hires:

Anyone got medical training?

Two people responded, saying that they knew basic health stuff.

Meet me at the front sidewalk,
she sent.
Right now
.

Then, without waiting for a response, she got up from her desk and ran to the stairs. She wasn’t going to take the elevator, not when she had no idea what was happening.

She thumped down the stairs, her heart pounding, her breath coming in big gasps, regretting the heels she had so proudly put on that morning.

I’m coming, Mr. Zhu
, she sent, even though she doubted he could hear her.
I’m coming right now.

NINE

MILES FLINT HAD barricaded his office in Old Armstrong. He had never before used his office’s full security package, which he had updated after Anniversary Day. He preferred to do the most delicate computer work on Dome University’s Armstrong campus or on the public net at the Brownie Bar.

He liked the anonymity of their systems. The university’s had so many users that isolating one would take hours, if not days, and the Brownie Bar had no internal surveillance, so it was impossible to see who was using the system. The Brownie Bar also did not track its customers.

But the research Miles was doing was so dangerous that he didn’t want to implicate either of those two places. If he angered the wrong people, then they might go after the locations where the work was done, as well as go after Miles himself.

He couldn’t endanger innocent lives like that.

So he hunched on one of the few chairs in the office. He’d spent a fortune for chairs, even though he didn’t use them as much as he’d planned. The nanofibers never worked exactly right. They didn’t quite sculpt to his body the way he wanted. He got uncomfortable if he sat longer than twenty minutes.

This time, he had arranged half a dozen work stations, some of which allowed him to stand. He was combing for information on a variety of networks, not just the Earth Alliance’s network, and he needed to monitor the programs.

He went from station to station, standing or sitting, sometimes looking at information presented holographically, sometimes at a 2-D flat screen that rose above the desk, sometimes on the desktop itself.

The only thing he did not do was let the computers talk to him. He trusted his security only so far. It was easy to track sound. That could be done with the right kind of equipment several meters away—even outside a so-called soundproofed building.

To hack his data streams, though, required extremely sophisticated programs that had to go past his constantly updating security walls. Plus, half the time he used an actual keyboard, which very few people did any longer. A good eighth of his encryption was tied to an existing keyboard, with its quirks. All of the keyboards he had in the office only responded to his DNA combined with the warmth of his fingertips and a measure of the blood flowing through his veins.

No one could cut off his hands and use them to enter his programs. He had to do it, and he had to be alive.

He paced the small room. The floor used to be uneven, but it wasn’t any longer. He’d leveled it after his daughter Talia had complained. The building that housed his office was on a list of historic places. He couldn’t make a lot of external changes without some committee’s approval—or, at least, that was the way it had been in the past.

He had no idea how the regulations would be enforced in this new post-Anniversary-Day, post-Peyti-Crisis Armstrong. He suspected some things might be different.

Flint was a Retrieval Artist. He found humans who had Disappeared—who had vanished, using a service or on their own, rather than face the justice system in the Earth Alliance—which meant he was really good at examining huge amounts of information for the tiniest clue.

In the six-plus years he’d been doing this job, he had gained a healthy dose of paranoia. And he’d been pretty darn paranoid to begin with.

Paranoia was serving him well at the moment, because he was trying to track down the masterminds behind the Peyti Crisis. He was working with—not
for
—the Security Office of the United Domes of the Moon.

In reality, he was working with his old partner Noelle DeRicci. But even then, he was really working for himself, using the systems that her office had.

He had hit a dead-end in his investigation of Anniversary Day—at least for the moment—so he was trying a new tack, one he’d come up with just the day before.

He was going to go after a money trail, like he had done with Anniversary Day. Only the Peyti Crisis trail had threaded through a series of criminal enterprises and ended up, of all things, with the name of a human who had high security clearance in the Earth Alliance.

Even though he’d reported the woman’s name to DeRicci, he considered that trail a dead end—at least at the moment. He could hack into the Alliance, but at that high level, there was a good chance he would leave footprints.

He’d been thinking of other ways around that particular problem when he realized he had a prime financial trail to follow.

He needed to track the education of the Peyti clones. Most of them had been lawyers until the day of the bombing. That meant they had gone to reputable Alliance-sanctioned law schools.

And law schools were nothing like the Earth Alliance. The security in the average law school was child’s play for a man like him.

He’d been up since Dome Dawn. Ever since the Peyti Crisis, he’d been having trouble sleeping through the night. His brain was too busy. Plus he was worried about Talia. She just wasn’t herself.

This morning, she had come out of her room, face blotchy as if she’d been crying. He knew she wasn’t sleeping either. But the expensive penthouse apartment they had purchased at Talia’s urging had soundproofing between the rooms.

He had to be near her room to hear her cry out, something that worried him. She thought it unimportant. She believed no one would get into the apartment with their level of security.

She didn’t think that he’d want to comfort her from a nightmare or simply hold her when she sobbed. She only seemed to believe he wanted to hear if someone attacked her.

The longer her depression lasted after the Peyti Crisis, the more his concern turned from outside attacks to interior ones. Talia was falling apart, and if she called for help in the middle of the night, he wouldn’t be able to hear her.

He had taken to staying up for hours after she went to bed, and a couple of times, he had fallen asleep on the couch—a place from which he knew he could hear her if she was in distress.

He had taken her to a psychologist at the urging of DeRicci’s assistant Rudra Popova. The therapy felt like a last ditch effort. Besides, Flint wasn’t sure how honest Talia could be with the therapists, given that she was a clone.

He told her she could decide whether or not to reveal that information about herself. But he hoped she didn’t.

Both major attacks on the Moon—attacks that had destroyed life as all of the residents had known it—had used clones as the primary means of delivery. In many respects, the clones—both Peyti and human—had been weapons in and of themselves.

Now, inhabitants of the Moon—no matter the species—hated clones and saw them all as evil.

Flint didn’t care how open-minded the therapists were. He was terrified that they wouldn’t be able to get over their gut reactions to Talia’s origins.

He ran a hand through his blond curls and felt some dislodge. He looked at his fingers. His hair was starting to fall out. Baldness did not run in his family. He wondered if he was losing hair due to stress.

Then he decided he didn’t want to know the answer.

He couldn’t think about Talia, at least right now. The best thing he could do for both of them was find out who had financed the Peyti clones and stop another attack.

He had promised himself that whenever he was here working, he could concentrate on work only.

He had left Talia at the United Domes Security Office for just that reason.

If he were being honest with himself, though, he had left her there for other reasons as well. He didn’t want her to be on her own. He didn’t think she was emotionally stable enough for that.

He decided that if Talia couldn’t be with him, then the Security Office was the safest place he knew. He had installed hundreds of extra safeguards after the Anniversary Day attacks, and he had installed a few more after the Peyti Crisis—not that he’d had a lot of time.