Fifty-four

 

“Noelle?” Flint asked. That frown between his eyes had grown. He clearly knew something was wrong.

So did Popova. She stared at DeRicci. DeRicci wasn’t sure what to say.

The Peyti faces, with those awful masks, floated around DeRicci’s office as if they haunted the place.

DeRicci held up a finger. She wasn’t sure she could stop the Peyti bombers. She would have to mobilize all of the law enforcement on the Moon, officers she wasn’t even—by law—in charge of, and she would have to make them move in unison.

Provided they all knew where the bombers were.

She would have to accept some casualties. Because she wasn’t going to be able to contain all of this.

“Were you able to cross-check the faces with the Peyti members of the Earth Alliance bar?” DeRicci asked.

Flint’s frown remained. “I did. I got a lot of matches, but only four-hundred-and-eighty are here on the Moon.”

“We have more than four-hundred-and-eighty Peyti in our image database,” she said, looking at those horrible faces.

“I’m cross-checking with law school students, and with interns,” Flint said. “I’ll find them. But I’m not sure I’ll find all of them.”

DeRicci nodded. Now she would have to let the Earth Alliance know about the Peyti threat. It seemed like days ago that she had learned about this Peyti mass murderer and his clones. All she had planned to do was let the Alliance know they existed—elsewhere.

She had thought the attack would be elsewhere.

It was going to be here. Again.

“All right,” she said. She didn’t have time for emotions. Not if she wanted to save the Moon. “I’m going to need some massive help. And somehow we’re going to have to coordinate all of this, stealthily. We’re not going to have room for error. And we’re going to have to act really fast.”

That frown disappeared from Flint’s face. Popova moved just a little closer, her shoulders squared. Clearly both of them were ready.

DeRicci wished that were enough.

“What did you learn, Noelle?” Flint asked.

“You saw the different masks, right?” she asked.

Both Flint and Popova nodded.

“The new ones. They’re a Peyti military prototype. They’re bombs.”

Popova cursed, but Flint didn’t move. He always managed to set his emotions aside quickly. DeRicci envied that.

“They weren’t wearing those prototypes yesterday,” he said.

“That’s right,” DeRicci said. “This is another coordinated attack against the Moon, and it’s going to happen today. Rudra, I need the head of every law enforcement agency on the Moon in a conference. I’ll also need all of the surviving and acting mayors, and every member of the United Domes of the Moon council. I’ll need to talk to them in ten minutes.”

“What’re you going to tell them?” Popova asked.

“We’re going to send them the last known location of every one of those clones on the Moon,” DeRicci said. “We’re going to have to get eyes on those clones, and then we’re going to have to arrest them all, somehow neutralizing those masks.”

“How do we neutralize them?” Flint asked.

Thank God she had remembered to ask Rastigan that. Thank God Rastigan had had an answer.

“That thing we noticed on the mask, that extra piece? It comes out. It becomes a bomb when you activate it.”

“How easy is it to set off?” Flint asked. Leave it to him to be practical.

“It depends on what you want to do,” DeRicci said. “If you want to blow yourself up along with everything around you, you can click through two safeties and do it fast. If you want to escape, you need to put in a code and set a timer. It’ll count down.”

“How easy is it to deactivate?” Flint asked.

“It doesn’t activate at all in a Peyti-only atmosphere,” DeRicci said. “It’s built to explode in any atmosphere except a Peyti-only atmosphere.”

“These things were designed to kill humans?” Popova asked. “By the Peyti military?”

“Our environment isn’t that unique. A number of aliens can thrive in it,” DeRicci said. “The Peyti environment, on the other hand, only exists on Peyla.”

That was the answer Rastigan had given DeRicci when she asked this question, and that was the answer she was going to share. Because she wasn’t going to think about the implications of this. At all. She didn’t want to think about the larger implications.

She had to solve this, and she had to solve it now.

“So we turn the environment from Earth Alliance Standard to Peyti Standard and the bombs are deactivated?” Flint asked.

“Actually,” DeRicci said, “they simply won’t work. They remain activated until we physically deactivate them. But they won’t work in a Peyti environment. It’s like a failsafe.”

“It is a failsafe,” Flint said, more to himself than to her, “and that’s an easier solution than I had hoped for.”

“Except that someone will have to deactivate that bomb in a Peyti atmosphere no matter what,” Popova said.

“We can do that,” Flint said. “We can send someone in wearing a suit.”

“Or we can send in a Peyti after we’ve neutralized the bomb,” DeRicci said tiredly. “Not every Peyti is involved here.”

Popova took a deep breath, as if that very thought disturbed her. Then she said, “If we switch to Peyti Standard, the atmosphere will kill everyone in the room except the Peyti.”

“And if we go in wearing environmental suits before we change the atmosphere, they’ll know something is up,” DeRicci said. “See why we need to coordinate this?”

“If we have time,” Flint said.

“We’re going to pretend we have time,” DeRicci said, “because that’s all we can do.”