Masterminds (6 page)

So was everyone else.

So was Flint.

They had to figure this all out—and soon.

SEVEN

RAFAEL SALEHI REACHED
into the closet in his suite on S
3
’s fastest space yacht. Even though the ship was fast, it had still taken longer than he expected to reach the Moon. The yacht was approaching Moon space now, and he was nervous.

He wished he had more belongings to gather. He wished he had more space in this luxury cabin. He wished he had something to distract himself.

He hated being nervous. It made him feel weak.

Salehi never used to be nervous. He used to have balls of steel. He could go into courtrooms against impossible odds and turn a jury in his favor. He could charm a humorless judge into laughing, and that laughter would often guarantee a case went in his favor.

He could face down some of the most vicious defendants in this corner of the universe and convince them to act reasonably so that they could beat whatever charges they faced.

He used to be a much greater man than he was now.

Maybe that was part of his nervousness. The death of his friend Rafik Fujita at the hands of Alliance authorities had galvanized Salehi into action, brought him back from the disillusionment that had hit several years ago.

And now the murder of Torkild Zhu by the City of Armstrong Police reminded Salehi how much he had forgotten.

Half of the responsibility for Zhu’s death rested on Salehi’s shoulders. Salehi hadn’t considered the atmosphere on the Moon when he hired Zhu to start S
3
On The Moon. All of the Moon’s communities had been ravaged by explosion or the possibility of explosions. Almost every citizen knew someone or was related to someone who had died in the past year.

The Moon had been a dangerous place before S
3
decided—
Salehi
decided—to represent the Peyti clones who had tried (and mostly failed) to initiate a second bombing nearly two weeks ago.

Salehi had known that decision would be controversial on the Moon and inside the Alliance. He just hadn’t realized the degree of anger that would come at S
3
. He hadn’t thought it through.

Maybe Zhu’s death was more than half Salehi’s fault. He shouldn’t have set up the situation in the first place.

He should have hired guards and made certain that Zhu understood security was a top priority.

But Salehi hadn’t even thought of that, so he had had no way to counsel Zhu.

And now it was too late.

Zhu was dead.

And if Salehi and his new team weren’t careful, they could die on this job as well.

Salehi wiped his damp palms on his khaki pants. He took a deep breath, and reminded himself that he was here for the love of the law. He was going to change clone law forever.

Those Peyti clones might be totally reprehensible, but they had once been living, breathing, functioning members of society. No one had known they were clones. And had they continued producing, being good little lawyers with strong practices and good reputations, no one would ever have known they were clones.

Then they chose to act on some command—some plot, some plan—and tried to blow up the very people they had worked alongside for decades.

And at that moment (actually, just a little earlier), the entire Moon figured out that these lawyers weren’t individuals under the Alliance law definition.

They were clones, and as such, they were property.

The very idea that someone could go from person to property in the space of a few hours upset Salehi. What no one seemed to realize was that the Peyti clones would receive more appropriate punishment if they were treated as individuals under the law rather than as property.

They would be imprisoned forever. They would have to think about what they had tried to do each and every single day of their long remaining lives.

And for lawyers, for individuals trained to follow the law along its jagged edge, for individuals who were once considered officers of the court, that punishment would hurt much more than non-lawyers could ever expect.

Or maybe Salehi was being too sympathetic to them.

He removed all five suits that he had brought with him to the Moon. He would have an assistant order more clothing for him once he settled in. Because he was going to stay here a long time.

Now that Zhu had been murdered, Salehi wasn’t just going to get justice for some mass-murdering clones. He was going to get justice for Zhu.

It was the least Salehi could do, since it was his carelessness that had gotten Zhu killed.

Salehi set the suits on his clothes carrier. When he was ready, it would fold everything into a tight ball of material that he would put in a small bag, along with some personal items he always brought with him when he traveled.

The suits and the rest of his clothing had nanofibers that pressed everything and made them look crisp, no matter what happened to them—something he had relied upon back in the days when he practically lived in the courts around Athena Base.

He was ready for this. He was ready for all of it.

He had spent the last week holed up in the library of this ship, preparing arguments for the clones. Technically, he was working for the government of Peyla. They wanted those clones dealt with because the Moon’s policies were interfering with all business run by the Peyti.

Some of the Peyti lawyers he had brought with him even argued that the Moon’s actions were a de facto way of kicking the Peyti out of the Earth Alliance.

And some bigots on the Moon probably felt that the Peyti should be tossed from the Alliance, given what those clones had done.

He grabbed his shirts out of the closet and tossed them on the carrier. Then he opened the box that contained his shoes. He grabbed the dress shoes and some athletic shoes, but he left the sandals. The Salehi who loved Earth’s deserts and had his office on Athena Base mimic their conditions wasn’t going to the Moon.

That Salehi was careless and thoughtless and hadn’t paid enough attention to his work. That Salehi was lazy and uninterested in most things.

He was leaving that man behind, and going back to the lawyer he had once been. The lawyer who had taken his family’s moribund firm and rebuilt it into an Alliance powerhouse.

The legal community in this part of the galaxy wouldn’t know what hit them.

His links chirruped. He hadn’t realized he had set them on
notify except for emergencies
. That was his default link setting when he was deep in researching a case, and he apparently hadn’t reset the links as the ship’s destination approached.

The message was from the cockpit. His tension rose.

Yes?
he sent.

We have a problem, sir. The Moon won’t let us into their space. We’re not cleared to land on the Moon.

What?
he sent. This made no sense. Of course they should be cleared. He had never encountered this situation in his decades of work at S
3
.

They’re telling us that, as a mixed-species ship, we need some kind of documentation that no one here has ever heard of. We need you here, sir.

Damn straight they needed him in the cockpit. This wasn’t about being a mixed species ship. This was about S
3
.

He set his shoes beside the bed. He would finish packing when he solved this.

The authorities in the Port of Armstrong had no idea who they were dealing with.

And he would show them, in a way they wouldn’t forget.

EIGHT

BERHANE MAGALHÃES SAT
in the first class compartment in the train from Littrow to Armstrong, elbow on the small table in front of her, a fist over her mouth, as she stared at the passing grayness of the Moon.

She didn’t really see it, the regolith, the rocks, the bright lights of the Growing Pits in the distance. She’d taken this route so many times since she started her work that it felt normal to her.

After she got past those first few minutes of entering a train.

Berhane had been on a train—Armstrong’s citywide inner-dome train, the Express—when someone had bombed the city four years before. Her mother had died in that explosion.

Berhane thought of it every single time she stepped through a train’s doors. It didn’t matter that the Express wasn’t nearly as fancy as this train. The Express was designed for short distances, while this was a bullet train, designed for travel between domes.

The trip from Littrow to Armstrong only took thirty minutes, but after the news she had just received, she needed privacy.

Her ex-fiancée, Torkild Zhu, was dead. Murdered, maybe by the police.

She’d heard from her father while she was supervising some cleanup in the devastated part of Littrow. Her father sounded shocked, something she would have thought impossible; he hadn’t even sounded like that when he found out Berhane’s mother had died.

After hearing the news, Berhane forced herself not to think about it. She had to finish briefing the new volunteers on the things they would discover inside the ruined section of Littrow. She always started her newest volunteers in Littrow, mostly so that she could oversee their work, and so that she could make her little “this is hard but important work” speech.

Four months ago, she had founded the Anniversary Day Victims’ Identification and Recovery Service, and immediately hired Dabir Kaspian away from Armstrong Search & Rescue to run the business. She did fundraising, mostly, and handled the bigger things, like opening branches in all nineteen affected domes.

But one day per week, she went to Littrow and did hands-on work, donned an environmental suit, had some bots trail her, and used the equipment to scrape the DNA from the rubble, searching for the faintest traces of human DNA.

Her company found the Anniversary Day victims and, more importantly, identified them. So far, her company had identified nearly fifty thousand victims Moonwide—a drop in the bucket, considering the millions killed—but, as Donal Ó Brádaigh constantly reminded her, she was comforting each family whose loved one she found.

The days were wearing but worthwhile. The entire company made her feel like she was finally doing the work she was meant to do.

But she could find little comfort in that today.

She squinched up on the luxurious, high-backed chair, kicked off her shoes, and tucked her feet underneath her thighs. She still stared out the window, seeing her own narrow features reflected. Her black hair was boyishly short, something that had shocked Torkild the last time she had seen him, not quite a week ago.

Tears threatened. She shouldn’t be mourning him. She shouldn’t even be sad about him.

He had treated her badly throughout their relationship and had ended it in public, on Anniversary Day, just before news of the bombings struck. Which would have been memorable enough if it weren’t for the fact that he was showing complete insensitivity.

Her mother had died exactly four years earlier. The “anniversary” being commemorated on that day was that of the Armstrong bombing, which had killed her mother and had, in its own way, inspired Berhane’s entire company.

Because for years,
years
, Berhane had expected her mother to walk through the door. Berhane had expected her mother to show up, claim she’d had amnesia or had been in a coma or something. It wasn’t until her mother’s DNA had been found that Berhane had finally gotten peace.

And Torkild had never understood that. He always thought grief was something to be overcome.

Berhane wondered if he would have appreciated the irony of having her grieve for him.

She wasn’t sure she appreciated the irony of it.

Especially since it forced her to admit that despite their history, despite the way they had treated each other, she had loved him.

She had thought the love was gone, murdered by their behavior, his and hers. But it remained, underneath, like the regolith beneath the bullet train, covered over, but still there.

She leaned her head against the back of the seat, glad she was alone in first class. She had bought this seat with her own money right after talking to her father. She wasn’t going to charge a first class ticket to ADVI-RS, no matter how much she needed the privacy right now.

She could afford the ticket, of course. She was only recently coming to terms with the fact that she was incredibly rich. She always had been, but she had once thought of that as her father’s money, something that had nothing to do with her.

Yet Berhane was extremely wealthy in her own right, and she was now using that money in a way that made her feel less like a spoiled rich girl and more like an important person.

Her father didn’t approve, of course. He didn’t believe that charitable foundations were worth anyone’s time, except as a public relations obligation, but he had soon realized if he didn’t stop complaining about her work, he would never see her.