Twenty-nine

 

Flint pulled out a chair in the conference room and sat down. Ostaka watched him. Goudkins still stood by the windows, looking at the city beyond.

“I’ll tell you part of what I have,” Flint said, “but I expect information in return. I know the Earth Alliance sent you here to both monitor us, and to augment what we do. You also have information that they sent with you, that you may or may not share, depending on how you feel about us.”

Ostaka’s eyebrows twitched ever so slightly. Apparently, he was surprised that Flint knew that much.

“I’ll start,” Flint said. “I think the key to finding out what happened is weapons.”

Goudkins turned around. She glanced at Ostaka, who pointedly did not look back at her. So either the Earth Alliance agreed with Flint on weapons, or something else was going on.

Maybe they had even more information on the weapons systems than he did.

“I’m looking at more than one kind of weapon here,” Flint said.

“Each dome was different?” Ostaka asked.

“We don’t know,” Flint said. “That’s part of the problem. I’m taking this from a strictly Armstrong perspective. I’ve discovered, just today, that the amount of zoodeh used for the assassinations is more than the amount the supplier we caught had access to.”

“What does that mean?” Goudkins came back to the table. She pulled out her chair, but didn’t sit, her hands fluttering nervously over the chair’s back.

“It means we missed something. The Earth Alliance banned zoodeh a long time ago, but never shipped the zoodeh here out.”

“Actually, that’s not true,” Ostaka said.

Flint glanced at him, a little appalled that the Earth Alliance investigators were already looking into the zoodeh side of things.

“The Earth Alliance had a give-back program, but assumes that there was only one-third compliance. Everyone who had zoodeh was supposed to turn it in, and they could do so anonymously. But the records don’t match. The amount of zoodeh turned in was much less than the amount shipped throughout the Alliance in the previous five years alone. If you compound that number by decades that zoodeh could be sold here, then the amount loose in the Alliance is staggering.”

Flint felt cold. “You knew that and said nothing?”

Ostaka shrugged. “We assumed you people knew it as well.”

Goudkins’ fingers played across the back of the chair. She wasn’t trying to hide her nerves.

“We honestly didn’t realize how disorganized the criminal justice systems are here on the Moon until we got here,” she said. “Usually we deal with only one jurisdiction, you know, Armstrong or Gagarin Dome or some place like that. The systems seem fine when you do that, but the overall system here—well, it doesn’t exist.”

“It’s starting to,” Flint said because he couldn’t just let DeRicci hang. “That’s what Noelle’s been trying to set up.”

“Yes, at the urging of Celia Alfreda,” Ostaka said. “But she’s dead now, and there’s no guarantee that this system will work.”

It wasn’t working right now.

“Right now, twenty jurisdictions are trying to solve the same crime,” Goudkins said. “It’s terribly inefficient.”

“I know,” Flint said. He’d already told them that. That was why he was here.

“We’ve made all kinds of assumptions that aren’t valid,” Goudkins said. “You want to know why the Earth Alliance takes over your investigations? It’s because you people don’t have the resources—”

“Stop,” Flint said. “I’m not ‘you people’ and this won’t get us anywhere. You knew about the zoodeh. We didn’t. We do now. Can we track it?”

They looked at each other again, and there was a long pause.

“We’ve done some tracking,” Ostaka said after a moment. “But the information we have is old. It takes us to the usual groups—the crime organizations that work in this area, the corporations that initially thought they could use zoodeh, and all of the quarantine areas run by places like the Port of Armstrong. It’s going to take a lot of old-fashioned legwork to see if the zoodeh came from any of those places, and even then, we might never know.”

Flint let out a sigh. He thought he’d had a good lead here. He leaned back in his chair, and as he did, he saw a movement behind him. Popova stood outside the room, a frown on her face.

“She been out there long?” he asked.

“Almost as long as you’ve been in here,” Goudkins said. “Do you want me to yell at you so she doesn’t think you’re cooperating?”

“Am I cooperating?” he asked.

Goudkins smiled and looked down just a moment too late. So much for yelling.

Flint got up and pushed the door open. “You’re welcome to join us, Rudra.”

“The chief wants to deal with them,” Popova said.

“I know.” Flint continued to hold the door open. “You’re her eyes and ears. Join us.”

Popova bit her lower lip. “She wants me to.”

“Noelle does?” Flint asked.

Popova nodded.

Flint swept his hand back. “Then come on in.”

“What are you doing?” she whispered. “Just stop.”

He shook his head. “I already told you what I’m doing.”

Popova nodded. Then she leaned forward. “She’s going to be furious with you.”

“I know,” Flint said. “Coming?”

“No,” she said.

“No need hover, then,” he said, and let the door close.

Ostaka and Goudkins hadn’t moved. Nor had they said anything out loud. He wondered what they’d been sharing on their links.

“All right,” he said. “I gave you what little I had.”

Which wasn’t entirely true. He held back on the clones, at least for the moment.

“Now, tell me why my discussion of weapons made you two share not just a glance but some information across your links.”

Ostaka moved slightly. Goudkins’s fingers gripped the top of the chair.

“Full disclosure, remember?” Flint said. “We’re working together now.”

Ostaka’s gaze met Goudkins and he shook his head so minutely that Flint almost missed it.

She raised her chin. “We’ve been ordered away from the weapons.”

Flint frowned. “Ordered away? By whom?”

Her gaze moved toward Ostaka, and then she blinked. He was still sending messages along her links, probably warning her off.

“The Earth Alliance doesn’t want us to look at the weapons,” she said.

Ostaka spun his chair away in frustration.

“The zoodeh?” Flint asked. “Why? They didn’t want us to know how much was loose?”

“No.” Ostaka stood. His voice was flat. He shot Goudkins a long look.

“Stop using the links,” she snapped at Ostaka. “You can leave and talk to that horrible woman watching us if you want to. You can report me or do what you want. But I want to solve this. Mr. Flint is right; we can’t do it without cooperating. So make your choice.”

Flint knew better than to say anything. He needed to let this play out.

Ostaka glanced at the door. Popova still stood outside, arms crossed, watching, as if through the force of her will, she could stop Flint from talking to the Earth Alliance investigators.

Ostaka rubbed a hand over his mouth, sighed, and then let his hand drop. “We’re not supposed to follow the clones.”

Flint’s breath caught. “The clones as weapons,” he said, deciding not to play dumb. “You weren’t supposed to figure out who sent them?”

“Who made them, who trained them, who sent them,” Ostaka said. “It’s all of a piece.”

“Why weren’t you supposed to follow those leads?”

“Supposedly,” Goudkins said, the word sharp with emphasis, “someone else is doing it.”

She was standing rigidly straight, her dark eyes flashing with anger.

“You don’t believe that,” Flint said. It wasn’t a question; it was a statement.

“No,” she said, “I don’t.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because I think the clones are blowback, Mr. Flint,” she said, “and I think the Earth Alliance doesn’t want anyone to know.”