Thirty-six

 

After her discussions with half a dozen Earth Alliance officials, Jin Rastigan started to believe she didn’t know anything about Anniversary Day. So she went to her office in the Earth Alliance headquarters on Peyla and spent an hour watching the crisis unfold. Then she scanned through half a dozen sites that told her all about the investigation.

Her office was aggressively Earth-centric. Much as she loved Peyla, she missed her home. Sometimes she got tired of the poisonous atmosphere here, the unfamiliar plants, the strange customs. Her office had hard-to-tend orchids and dozens of different species of violets under soft grow-lights. The ceiling had a sky-show program based on her Iowa hometown, and she often had the scent of fresh-mowed grass pumped into the environmental system.

None of that comforted her today. Her meetings had upset her, although not as much as the security vid or Uzvot’s willingness to give up Peyti secrets.

Something was happening here, and no one outside of Peyla seemed to care.

Plus, they all seemed to be feeding her misinformation.

Each site she went to—and the damn vids—all had the same image of the clones arriving in the Port of Armstrong, talking with each other like old friends, and then going their separate ways.

She hadn’t misremembered that at all. But someone—a lot of someones—in the Earth Alliance wanted to downplay that part.

Rastigan didn’t care about the politics of the situation—or any situation, for that matter. If lives were at stake, then someone had to do something.

She just kept getting the sense from the Earth Alliance officials she had contacted that human lives were worth a lot more than Peyti lives.

Of course, because of her status in the Alliance, she had to either work through Peyti representatives or through human ones. The Peyti expected her to handle the humans on this potential conflict; the humans expected the Peyti to come to them if there was some kind of Peyti problem.

She was stuck, and worse, she was beginning to feel like the worst kind of whistleblower—the kind that continually and fruitlessly pissed into the wind until something awful happened, and she was seen as the poor sap everyone should have listened to.

It wasn’t until she was deep into yet another vid that she realized there was one person she could talk to without going through the Earth Alliance: Chief of Security for the United Domes of the Moon Noelle DeRicci.

All of the reports mentioned DeRicci and her unorthodox methods that had saved the Moon, not just this time, but during a crisis with the Disty some years back. Apparently DeRicci knew when to take things into her own hands and when to let the system take charge.

Right now, Rastigan needed that kind of advice. Even if DeRicci couldn’t help her with the Earth Alliance, the woman might give her a touchstone, a way of approaching the problem from a completely different angle, one that might save Rastigan time and grief.

And maybe, just maybe, DeRicci would understand the significance of Uzvot’s fear and everything Rastigan had seen today.

Rastigan started digging through all her Earth Alliance contacts and protocols. There had to be an easy way to contact someone on the Moon without involving the Earth Alliance.

Rastigan just had to find it.