Masterminds (44 page)

Unlike Crater de Gerlache. The crater hadn’t protected its people. The crater itself had probably reinforced the power of the explosion, and rained down hell on them, even as the oxygen sucked out of the city’s layers and the environment vanished.

He took a deep breath, forced those thoughts away, and came up with—

Luc Deshin.

In one of their very first meetings just before the Peyti Crisis, Deshin had talked to Flint about explosives, and tracking explosives, saying it was hard for him to find what was happening.

Flint had let that investigation go as other things happened. Besides, he thought the attackers were opportunists, like the woman whom they had thwarted in Armstrong on Anniversary Day, using whatever was available to make bombs.

Then, after the Peyti Crisis, where it became clear that those explosives had arrived with the masks, Flint had dropped that part of his investigation altogether.

But Deshin had said explosives were all over the Moon, easily available. Construction sites, mining operations—

Flint was leaning forward before he could even think about what he was doing. He searched the old security footage from Crater de Gerlache, stuff that had already been uploaded before the city vanished, and then scanned in on the
interior
of the dome.

This explosion was in a crater, and the city was layered, if he remembered correctly. It would have been hard to explode upward—it would have taken longer for something from below to harm the dome.

He assumed, anyway. He was no engineer.

But before he bothered the one engineer they all seemed to trust, Flint would do a bit more digging. He opened another window, silently queried one of the information gathering surfaces, and moved the footage of the Crater de Gerlache bombing onto it.

What explosive would cause that kind of result?
he asked.

The question seemed so bloodless. And as the system gave him options, names of different kinds of charges, he looked at the interior of the now destroyed dome’s surface.

Something small, placed along the sections, and where the dome sections met in the very center of the dome.

Something small, and on the inside, not the outside.

He looked at the list of explosives that the query had found for him. His heart was in his throat.

All of the previous attacks had been uniform. The same kind of clones executing the same kind of event, using the same (or similar) kinds of equipment. Even the Anniversary Day bombers used the same system—they had taken what they could from the cities they had gone to in order to make their bombs.

But these clones had had time. They could have all used the same explosives, and they had jobs that allowed them to attach those explosives to the parts of the dome where they would do the most damage.

If the sections didn’t go down, then the dome would explode outward, just like it had done in Crater de Gerlache. Even if the sections went down, if the explosives ran all along the mechanism, each section of the dome would be destroyed anyway.

“Noelle,” he said, “I have got to talk to your engineer.”

DeRicci whirled toward Flint. “My engineer?”

Clearly she was thinking of something else, focused on the entire Moon, not the city of Armstrong.

He needed to focus on the Moon too, but he also needed that engineer.

“He means Donal Ó Brádaigh,” the Magalhães woman said.

“Did you find something?” DeRicci asked.

“Yes,” Flint said, “and we need to deal with it right away.”

SEVENTY-ONE

Ó BRÁDAIGH WATCHED
the sweep finish its fifth run across the dome. He saw nothing and neither did all of the other people he had assigned to monitor the sweep.

More importantly—or maybe as important—the computers found nothing either. There were no weaknesses in the dome’s surface, and nothing out of the ordinary covered it. Just Moon dust, and debris from a dozen meteoroids that had hit the dome since the last official sweep several weeks ago.

Ó Brádaigh wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He wanted to find something, in part because he knew something was going to happen. He wanted to discover it in time.

Then he got an alert from the United Domes of the Moon Security Office. Before he could even step out of the control room, a man he’d never seen before appeared before him.

“I’m Miles Flint,” the man said. “I work with DeRicci.”

Ó Brádaigh had heard of Flint, but he couldn’t remember in what context.

“We just lost Crater de Gerlache,” Flint said, his tone even.

Ó Brádaigh’s breath caught. His chest ached. They had lost a city? Already? He’d thought they still had a few hours.

“I’ve looked at the footage,” Flint said, “and I think I know what we’re dealing with.”

It took Ó Brádaigh a moment to understand what Flint said.

“I’m going to send you my work. It’ll be easier for you to digest,” Flint said, “and you might see a few errors. But in short, we’re looking for explosives along the section lines and in the very center of the dome where everything meets. On the
inside
of the dome. I think we even know the explosive, but you can double-check me on that.”

And then he dumped all kinds of information along Ó Brádaigh’s links. Ó Brádaigh staggered backwards, nearly hitting the control room wall.

He couldn’t think about the destroyed dome, even though he was seeing it on the images that Flint sent, a series of small explosions, the debris floating
out
of the dome, not into the dome, the light and fire blazing against the darkest part of the Moon.

A series of small explosions, concentrated on the dome’s weakest points, guaranteed to destroy it all at once.

And the kind of material that could be applied to the dome’s surface.

Ó Brádaigh would double-check, that was the kind of man he was, but he had a hunch Flint was right.

They knew what they were dealing with.

They knew how to solve it.

And they had also run out of time.

SEVENTY-TWO

WITHIN TEN MINUTES
, DeRicci had heard from Ó Brádaigh. Ó Brádaigh had confirmed Flint’s work. They had found the type of explosives, and where they were on the domes.

DeRicci had no idea if the explosives were on timers or if they hand-detonated. She had no idea if something would set them off randomly, although sectioning Armstrong’s dome hadn’t done it.

Now getting rid of those explosives was out of her hands. She had to trust the city engineering and inspection staff, the bomb squad of the Armstrong Police Department, and all of the equipment inside and outside of the city to get the work done.

Magalhães offered to contact her father, one of the major builders in the city, to get his explosives experts working on the interior of the dome as well. DeRicci didn’t feel comfortable with that, even though she knew that Magalhães’s father had access to the same clone information that DeRicci did.

So DeRicci corrected a mistake she had made during the Peyti Crisis. She sent Magalhães’s father and all of the construction and mining experts
outside
of the domes, to handle smaller units like the Growing Pits and the train stations and the warehouses and the living quarters for some of the mining areas, anywhere that living creatures gathered and could possibly die.

And DeRicci sent urgent information to all of the other domes.
All
of them, every single dome on the Moon, and she hoped to God those idiots running the places would take immediate action.

It looked like the destruction of Crater de Gerlache had inspired several of them to section their domes. Now those leaders had to stop blaming people and solve the damn crisis.

It was out of DeRicci’s hands, even though she didn’t want it to be.

She encouraged Marshal Gomez to let the Earth Alliance Security Division know what kind of explosives they were dealing with, and what kind of attack, just in case this was the first plan that wasn’t Moon-oriented.

DeRicci believed it was, but she didn’t know.

She didn’t know anything.

All she could do was direct people to solve this crisis for her.

She did a few more things: In addition to isolating the clones, she ordered citizens to look for suspicious packages or to contact the police if it looked like there was something in one of the clones’ homes or offices that might harm the city.

DeRicci wouldn’t put it past these creatures to have backup explosions planned.

After all, Ostaka had been damned determined to make this work. He had encouraged his cohorts in Crater de Gerlache to act ahead of schedule. He had sent messages to Gagarin Dome as well, but they either didn’t get through or they were ignored.

Nothing else had blown up.

Yet.

SEVENTY-THREE

WORD OF THE
first destroyed dome on the Moon reached Jhena Andre in her bedroom. She was digging her go-bag out of the closet, changing out a few items before she headed to the port. She had a reservation on a shuttle flight to the nearest large city, and it had been easier to book than she had expected.

She had altered the information in her file to reflect a death in her family, not that she had any close family or that anyone had died. But the alteration would last as long as she needed it to—just a few days.

By then, she would be on the Frontier, heading toward her new home.

She took a moment to look at the footage coming from the Moon. She actually turned on some human news programs with real anchors talking about the crisis, just to hear their tone of panic.

So what if someone had released the trigger a little early? So what if the other domes had an hour or two of warning? As that Ostaka man in the Moon’s Security Office had noted, DeRicci and her crew were close to figuring out what was happening, and they probably were dealing with the warnings.

Not that it mattered. Soon they’d either be dead or handling so much disaster that they wouldn’t remember anything about the information they had received early.

Andre smiled softly. The final leg of her plan was underway. The Alliance would buckle under this stress. The destruction of every dome on the Moon would cause everyone to rethink the devil’s bargain they had made, particularly when Andre released her one and only manifesto, reminding everyone how many humans inside the Alliance had died because Alliance law made it legal for non-humans to kill them.

If Andre actually believed in the eye-for-an-eye thing that had been part of humanity for millennia, her actions against the Alliance still wouldn’t come close to making up for all the Alliance-caused deaths.

If she were being honest with herself, the deaths on the Moon were also Alliance-caused. If those people hadn’t lived in the heart of the Alliance, they wouldn’t have died there either.

She grabbed her jewelry from the small safe she had in the back of the closet. To anyone who investigated her, the jewelry—as miniscule as it was—would represent all of her wealth.

The rest of the money she had made over the decades grew in several accounts in the Frontier.

She put the jewelry next to the unnamed doll she’d had since she was a little girl and sealed the go-bag closed. She would get rid of almost everything in that bag on her second stop, where she would completely redo her look.

She needed a makeover anyway. She was no longer a government employee. Now, she had officially become a mastermind.

She smiled, slung the bag over her shoulder, and silently said good-bye to the small room. Then she walked through the living area and pulled the door open to the stairs—

To find two dozen laser rifles pointed at her. Her heart rate rose.

She hadn’t expected this despite Stott’s warning.

But she recognized most of the people in the hallway, and standing on the stairs.

She smiled at them. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked cheerfully.

James Noya stepped forward, holding cuffs. She had trained Noya, hand-chosen him herself. She had had dinner with him and his wife just two days before.

“Jhena Andre,” he said in a voice she had never heard before, “you are under arrest for treason, and mass murder.”

Her eyebrows went up. Treason and mass murder? She hadn’t expected that at all. Maybe for a connection to criminals, conspiracy or something. But treason and mass murder?

“James,” she said softly. “You know me. You know I would never—”

“I suggest you come with us willingly, Jhena,” he said. “Because we can use lethal force if we need to.”

She felt the blood leave her face. No one smiled back at her. They were all looking at her like they had never seen her before.

She remembered how people had done that to her father, after they realized he hadn’t lost his wife, but that she had died in an Alliance-sanctioned legal murder.