Blowback Read online

  “Didn’t know,” the assistant said in a conversational tone.

  Zagrando slammed the assistant against the control panel. “This is not something you should be discussing so easily.”

  The assistant didn’t fight him. He let Zagrando hold him against the wall. Zagrando put his arms down and backed away. He had wanted that fight; they had known he had wanted that fight, and they hadn’t given it to him.

  “We have to leave now, Iniko,” Jarvis said, his use of Zagrando’s first name his only acknowledgement of Zagrando’s distress. “We have to get out before they close down this part of the Port.”

  “Oh, you don’t have a secret room for that?” Zagrando snapped.

  “Actually, we do have our own way out,” Jarvis said. “And you’re coming with us.”

  “And if I don’t?” Zagrando asked.

  Jarvis turned toward him, his expression flat. “You’re already dead, Iniko. Which body those people out there find is your choice.”

  “I thought we worked together,” Zagrando said.

  “So did I,” Jarvis said with that weird half-smile. “So did I.”

  Six Months After Anniversary Day

  Two

  Noelle DeRicci actually had an entourage. She didn’t like it, but she needed them now. Five people went with her everywhere on this trip—two security guards, two assistants to run interference with the local governments, and one person to shadow her everywhere she went. She needed them all, particularly the shadow, because she was prone to making promises just to get people to leave her alone.

  And she wanted to be alone right now.

  She stood in the rubble that had once been the city center of Tycho Crater. Six months before, Tycho Crater had suffered the worst casualties of the nineteen cities bombed during the Anniversary Day Crisis. The Top of the Dome, a hotel/resort that someone had built against the dome itself, had been a successful target of one of the twenty bombers.

  That horrible day, DeRicci had taken her authority as Chief of Security for the United Domes of the Moon to new levels. She had ordered every single dome in every single city on the Moon sectioned just in case—something she still wasn’t sure she had the authority for—and that action had saved all nineteen domes from complete collapse. Bombs blew holes through twelve of the domes, but the sectioning prevented the complete loss of those cities.

  Including Tycho Crater, one of the oldest cities on the Moon. Tycho Crater had a lot of problems, from its corrupt government to its ancient dome and grandfathered-in projects. The Top of the Dome had been one of those projects, built just high enough so that visitors could see over the rim of the crater that housed the city. And they could also see the city below.

  Apparently the Top of the Dome had been a spectacular place to visit until it exploded, then fell—in pieces—onto the city center below. The city center, which couldn’t be evacuated without lifting the sections of the dome and threatening the rest of the city.

  This part of the dome was still sectioned, but a temporary dome had been built over the holes created when the Top of the Dome exploded and fell. There was atmosphere, not that anyone really wanted to call this atmosphere. The air was light gray, filled with particles and sludge. The free-standing construction filters couldn’t replace the dome filters, which still didn’t work. Even setting up new filters every twenty-four hours didn’t help.

  This environment was toxic, and everyone knew it.

  DeRicci and her team wore personal space suits that created atmosphere from the neck down. But DeRicci had known she wouldn’t have been able to see everything she wanted to see in a traditional helmet. So she wore a thin emergency helmet that emergency personnel carried in case of a dome emergency or an evacuation outside of a dome itself.

  The thin helmet felt like light plastic wrapped around her face and neck. When she breathed, the coating (whatever it was) went in and out, then processed the CO2 into nanofilters that submitted it to the suit below. The air came from small reservoirs built into the helmet itself. She had only two hours of air, which she had hated when she first set up this visit, and which she appreciated now.

  She wanted to get the hell out of here.

  The rubble remained all around her. Building carcasses jutted out of the dirt and the dust. It was often impossible to tell what was a building that had been on the ground and what was part of the Top of the Dome.

  Fifteen thousand people died here. DeRicci knew the numbers—she knew all the death numbers from that horrible day by heart—but she still couldn’t quite contemplate what that meant. Fifteen thousand people, all of whom had families and friends and neighbors and co-workers. The amount of personal loss was staggering.

  It was even more staggering when she thought of the numbers who had died moonwide. Those numbers hovered around one million right now, but she knew it would continue to climb. People who didn’t have family, people who had no one watching their daily moves, would be missing and then someone would guess that they had been in Tycho Crater on Anniversary Day or in Glenn Station or Littrow.

  And she was still getting reports from thousands of alien governments, asking for updates on their citizens or on visitors who happened to be on the Moon that day. She had no idea how many aliens died in the bombings: Some alien cultures didn’t ever speak of the dead. Others kept their statistics to themselves. Still others were folded into the death rates for citizens of various cities, because so many of these cities were hugely multicultural.

  She felt them here. Not all of the dead, but the ones who died in Tycho Crater. The entire Moon—the survivors anyway, the ones who weren’t helping with other rescue efforts—watched that horrible day as the people in this section tried to figure out ways to survive without jeopardizing their friends and family.

  The very thought of it all made her tear up, and she didn’t dare tear up. She was the closest thing the Moon had to a leader right now, and she was of the personal opinion that leaders didn’t cry.

  Except in the privacy of their own apartment, long after everyone else had gone home.

  She was on a tour of all the damaged cities. It was her second such tour. The first had happened about three weeks after the Anniversary Day bombings, when she was certain that the Moon was secure from more attacks. Or, at least, as secure as they could be.

  On that tour, she had seen the damage from outside the sectioned areas, but she hadn’t gone in. Most of the domes hadn’t yet covered the holes blown in them. Besides, the damage was pretty visible. She had concerned herself with the cities that hadn’t lost part of their domes, thinking that maybe those bombings might tell her something about the overall plan.

  So far, she only had inklings. And she wasn’t even certain about those.

  “Chief DeRicci.” Dominic Hanrahan, the mayor of Tycho Crater, beckoned her from a few meters away. He was a whip-thin man, made even thinner by the tragedy. When she had met him shortly after his election a year or so ago, he had looked like a twenty-something kid. Now he had frown lines all over his face, and the bags under his eyes were so deep they looked like craters.

  She supposed she looked just as bad. Her entourage did its best to make her look good every day, but she hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in six months. And when she did sleep, she woke up terrified that she had forgotten something—or someone—important.

  Hanrahan stood alone on a section of sidewalk that someone had cleared of rubble to make walking paths. His pet lawyers hadn’t come in here with the group, primarily because the head lawyer for Tycho Crater was Peyti. The Peyti found the Earth-type atmosphere poisonous and had to wear masks against it. Suiting up in an environment like this one proved a challenge most Peyti didn’t want to face unless they had to.

  DeRicci actually missed the head lawyer. He, at least, was sensible. She wasn’t so sure about Hanrahan

  He glanced downward, then back at her. He clearly wanted her to do something, but she didn’t want to ask him what.

  DeRicci suppress
ed a sigh. She shut off all but her emergency links whenever she went into a disaster site, but all the environmental suits were sound-linked as a double-check for breathing and other problems, something that workers in Moscow Dome had learned was necessary as they started their cleanup. There was a lot of weird toxicity in the air here, and not all suits had been designed to block it.

  She toyed with turning her internal links back on just so that she could talk with Hanrahan privately. Of course, he probably didn’t want their communications private.

  He probably wanted her to see some horrible death site or the site of some great heroism or something. She’d seen a lot of that on this tour, and while she appreciated it, she didn’t want to see any more.

  The tours were all deeply personal for each and every mayor—the saga of their city was the tale of their Anniversary Day Crisis—but DeRicci carried the saga of the entire Moon on her shoulders, and sometimes the details blurred.

  She didn’t want them to, but they did.

  A psychologist that one of her assistants hired for the entire staff told DeRicci that the blurring was a self-protection mechanism, allowing her and the others still dealing with the crisis to cope. In fact, the psychologist had suggested that DeRicci wait to deal with the worst of her own emotions until she believed the urgency of the crisis was past.

  She didn’t believe that the urgency of the crisis had passed yet. She wouldn’t believe it, not until the masterminds behind this horrible attack were caught. Then she could let down her guard.

  One of Hanrahan’s assistants held out his hand to help her down the rubble. She smiled at him, but didn’t take it. She’d been climbing on this stuff for months. And she tried not to think about how many obliterated bits of people and aliens were still here, how many lives she was walking over so very gingerly.

  She tried not to think of it, but she always did, and always with that clutched feeling in her stomach, as if she had somehow failed. Maybe she had. After all, she had been the Chief of Security for the United Domes of the Moon when this happened.

  Hanrahan watched her progress over the rubble.

  “This is what’s left of the restaurant,” he said through the sound links, indicating the area below him.

  Of course he would show her that. This was his personal story.

  She nodded in acknowledgement as she looked at bits of broken tables and glass, flooring materials and shattered crockery. Apparently no one had touched this part of the rubble, either using it as a marker or a shrine.

  She supposed it made sense. This bit of rubble held several parts of the story. Assassins had targeted the mayors of nineteen domes, and had killed several of them. One assassin had also killed the Governor-General, leaving the United Domes government on shaky ground. Or shakier ground, since the government was just beginning to truly unite the domes.

  The assassin in Tycho Crater hadn’t made it to Hanrahan. His security detail had saved him. Instead, the assassin held a bunch of hostages in the circular restaurant. The hostages got rescued. In fact, almost everyone who had been at the Top of the Dome that day had gotten out during the first part of the crisis.

  It was only after the evacuation of the hotel/resort that the dome sectioned, leaving the people below to die when the complex fell.

  Then DeRicci looked up. Hanrahan was still staring at the mess, looking as haunted as she felt. He hadn’t been the most courageous mayor on Anniversary Day. And he hadn’t really known how to handle the Top of the Dome crisis. But he was still in office, probably because he had done well afterward.

  Or maybe because the citizens of Tycho Crater didn’t want to hold another election on top of everything else they had gone through.

  DeRicci waited in silence for a few minutes, the appropriate amount of time (she felt) before changing the subject. And the subject change was going to be dicey for both of them.

  “So,” she said, moving away from the restaurant debris. “How are the rebuilding plans going?”

  Several domes had changed plans in the past few months. Many of the plans she had seen in the weeks after the bombing had been discarded. Some cities had decided to abandon the destroyed sections of the dome. Others had made their rebuilding plans even more elaborate.

  Hanrahan had been cagey about his plans from the beginning. In fact, DeRicci had never seen them. She was beginning to think no plans existed.

  Hanrahan looked away from the mess in front of him. He shook himself a little as if coming back to the moment.

  “We’re not the richest city on the Moon,” he said, “and we’ve gotten a lot poorer in the last six months. Half our economy was based on tourism.”

  He didn’t have to add that a goodly portion of that tourism came from off-Moon tourists, tourists who had yet to return after the Anniversary Day events.

  “We’re far away from everything,” he said, “and the outside workers are committed to other places that can pay them better.”

  DeRicci had heard this complaint from other cities. The rebuilding of the Moon would take years and would cost a lot of money. On the one hand, it was an economic boom to the construction industry and several other industries. On the other hand, it destroyed a lot of local industries—tourism included.

  Plus, all nineteen cities now competed for limited resources, from personnel to building materials. To get materials from off-Moon cost a lot of money, and many governments didn’t want to—or simply couldn’t—handle the pricing. Not to mention, some of those cities had only a temporary government to make the difficult choices.

  Which was not a problem Hanrahan faced. Unlike many of the other mayors, he was still alive and still in office.

  “I just want to see the plans, Dominic,” she said. “You know they have to be approved through my office before any rebuilding can start.”

  He glanced at the remains of the restaurant. “We haven’t even cleared the rubble yet.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “You can’t leave this here. It’s right in the center of the city.”

  The damaged sections other domes had abandoned were on the outside edges of the dome, not in the interior. With this mess cutting through the center of Tycho Dome, it was almost impossible to get around the city easily.

  “Lawsuits,” he said. “Some people claim this is a grave site.”

  She cursed silently. He hadn’t told her that. No wonder he had lawyers trailing him. And if the grave site issue had become important in Tycho Crater, then traipsing around it was a dicey proposition at best.

  “Filed lawsuits?” she asked. “With injunctions?”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “Then I suggest you clear this out before the suits get filed,” she said, knowing how harsh that sounded. “The faster you move, the better off you’ll be.”

  He gave her a baleful look. “You don’t want me to get re-elected, do you?”

  “It’s not my concern,” she said. “The safety of the Moon is my concern, and having this crap in the middle of a major city could be a safety issue.”

  “Maybe you should take over the cleanup,” he said.

  A flush warmed her face. Son of a bitch. He’d maneuvered her into this position. He wanted her to take over the cleanup so he wouldn’t be blamed for disturbing the dead, so that he could get reelected.

  If he had asked her politely, if he had had a discussion with her in his office, explaining his dilemma and asking for help in finding a resolution, she might have considered taking over the site. But she wasn’t going to be maneuvered into anything.

  “Maybe you should do your job,” she snapped, and turned her back on him, heading carefully back down the path to the makeshift exit.

  “Or what?” he said loudly.

  It was a good question. The United Domes was a toothless organization. Since colonization began, each dome ruled itself. Only in recent years had anyone decided that the Moon needed a strong central government. The woman who had led the charge to change the Moon’s government, Governor-
General Celia Alfreda, had been one of those assassinated on Anniversary Day.

  DeRicci closed her eyes. She had been doing a lot of extra-legal things since Anniversary Day. What was one more?

  “Things have changed, Dominic,” DeRicci said as she turned around. “If you don’t want to make the hard decisions for your city, we’ll find someone who can. And we’ll instate him as mayor of this city. I’m sure everyone in Tycho Crater will be relieved.”

  She wanted to take back the last statement, but she didn’t. There were many reasons she hadn’t run for Governor-General after the collapse. One of them had just shown itself. Noelle DeRicci was not a diplomat, particularly when someone pushed her. She couldn’t be politic if her life depended on it—and she suspected that some day it would.

  The difference between the woman she was now and the woman she had been when she accepted this job was this: that woman would have winced or apologized for her harsh statement; this one stood her ground.

  Hanrahan’s cheeks flushed as well. His eyes glittered with anger. “You don’t know how hard it is,” he said. “Looking on this every day and realizing what we’ve lost. We were the hardest hit of all of the cities. We’ve lost thousands of people, had even more families ruined—”

  “I know the statistics, Dominic,” she said.

  “They’re not statistics,” Hanrahan said. “That’s what you Armstrong people don’t understand. Your city is just fine. You haven’t lost a damn thing. You have no idea—”

  “We were bombed first,” she said quietly. “The practice run, four years ahead. We know. And we lost our mayor. Don’t you forget that. Arek Soseki was a friend. Governor-General Celia Alfreda was a good friend. I have been to all nineteen cities. I’ve presided over funeral after funeral, helped with all kinds of plans, and have fought to set up victims funds. So don’t you tell me I don’t understand. You think this happened to you alone, but it didn’t. It happened to all of us. And some part of me naïvely believed it would bring us together. But talk like yours, separating Armstrong’s citizens from Tycho Crater’s citizens, only divides us. I’ll be happy to replace you, Dominic, if that’s what you want. But be warned. If I do it, you’ll never hold elected office again.”