Starbase Human (29 page)

She had deceived everyone, but if she hadn’t, she would be dead now. She wouldn’t have met Raymond, she wouldn’t have married or become pregnant with Takumi, she wouldn’t have had an estate.

She had left the lawyer in tears, just as frightened as she had been when she visited him, but more determined than ever to make sure that no one knew Pippa Landau was a Disappeared.

And now—

Now she couldn’t sleep because someone—that same someone who had destroyed her life on the Frontier—was destroying the Moon. She had information—very old information, but information nonetheless—and telling anyone about it would put everything she had worked for in her entire life at risk.

She had toyed with sending an anonymous message along her links, but she would be sending it to the authorities on the Moon, and honestly, she was no good at encoding or hiding her tracks.

Not anymore.

Her information was decades out of date.

She would screw something up.

Plus she wasn’t certain if anyone would pay attention.

If she went to the Moon, she could force them to listen to her, force them to take her seriously, force them to make her sacrifice worthwhile.

Maybe, if she did it right, it wouldn’t be a sacrifice.

Maybe, if she found the right person to talk with, she would remain safe.

She leaned her head against the bed’s softness.

Her heart was pounding so hard, it almost felt like it would come out of her chest.

But she had to make this trip.

Somehow.

She stood back up and looked at her suitcase.

The clothes were wrong. Everything was wrong.

She had to be sensible. She had to think it all through.

And she had to do it right.

Even though no one in her family realized it, they were all counting on her.

And maybe, just maybe, the Moon was, too.

THIRTY-EIGHT

ODGEREL FINISHED THE
last of her noodles and set the container down on the bench beside her. She tilted her face toward the sun, feeling its warmth on her skin.

She didn’t get long breaks from her job at the Earth Alliance Security Division Human Coordination Department, so she snuck away for lunch whenever the weather was nice. She always went to Beihai Park because it was so large, and that made her hard to find, even when someone tracked her through her links.

On this day, she sat on a red bench in the Hao Pu Creek Garden. Behind her, trees swayed in the wind. Children ran past, laughing, as a group of tourists gathered with their guide not too far from her chair.

She loved Beihai Park. Its age appealed to her and made her remember that Earth had centuries—millennia—of history before it became part of the Earth Alliance. Many of the gardens here had existed for centuries, including this garden-within-a-garden, still considered one of the best of the existing imperial gardens in all of China.

If Odgerel had it to do over again, perhaps she would be a garden architect or a historian, someone whose work echoed through the ages, instead of carving a bit of a future for humanity inside the ever-expanding Alliance.

With the edge of a chopstick, she scooped the last of the sauce from her Zhajiangmian, enjoying the hot sauce combined with garlic. There hadn’t been enough cilantro in the dish for her, but she would remedy that the next time she ordered.

If she remembered.

She so rarely remembered anything about her day-to-day existence anymore. It felt like her mind was always elsewhere, thinking about other people’s problems and other people’s lives.

She wrapped her black skirt around her knees, then waggled her toes. She had kicked off her sandals, but she kept them beneath her feet in case she had to slip them on quickly. Her white blouse felt almost too heavy in the warm sun, but she did not care.

At some point soon, she would have to turn her links back on. She had the emergency links on, of course, but she shut off all other links—including family links—during lunch.

It was the only uninterrupted time of her day.

The slap of sandals against the ancient path made her sigh. That didn’t sound like children at play. That slap sounded like someone running at great speed.

And even though she had no reason to connect the sound to her, she knew whoever it was had been looking for her for some time.

“Um, Ms. Odgerel…I mean, Odgerel, sir, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but…”

She didn’t open her eyes. That whisper of a smile lingered. Just the confusion with her name told her who the man was. The latest member of Earth Alliance Security Division Human Coordination Department had just come over from the West, where two names were common.

Oh, who was she kidding? Two or more names were common for humans within the Earth Alliance now. So much in the Alliance, at least on the human side, ended up following Western traditions.

Which meant that her ancient Mongolian name seemed strange and out of place, even in a universe where strange and out of place had become the norm.

A hand brushed her shoulder.

“I’m sorry, sir, Odgerel, sir,” the voice said.

She couldn’t remember his name, either. Something common, at least in the West. And old-fashioned common, the kind of name that the West had seen throughout human history.

Charles? James? Thomas?

Mitchell. That was it. Mitchell Brown.

Now that she had his name firmly in place, she felt like she could safely open her eyes. She did, slowly, and she was glad of it, because his face was only centimeters from hers.

His hazel eyes were bloodshot, and his caramel-colored skin was pockmarked.

“I’m not deaf, Mitchell,” she said calmly.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry to interrupt you. I just—you know—I needed—”

“Of course, you needed,” she said. “Is it an emergency?”

“No,” he said.

She suppressed a sigh. Young and eager and stupid. Why did they always appoint the stupid ones?

“You’re a little close,” she said.

“Right,” he said and leaned back. He was a tall man, thin in an intense way, the kind that suggested he regularly forgot to eat rather than had a metabolism that worked overtime. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his black pants, then pulled them out and smoothed his ill-advised pink shirt.

He glanced around, then moved the remains of her lunch without asking her if she was done. He sat down next to her.

“They told me that lunch was the best time to get you alone,” he said. “So I…”

She didn’t listen to the rest. Of course, someone had told him that lunch was a good time to find her alone.

It was a kind of hazing ritual the older staff members in the division practiced on the newcomers. Odgerel had asked them to stop, but they never did. And they never took credit for forcing a brand-new idiot into the old routine.

Maybe if she yelled. But she wouldn’t have received this assignment—and held it for two decades—if she were the kind of woman who yelled at the smallest thing.

“You were misinformed,” she said. From the look on Brown’s face, she had interrupted him. She did not apologize. “Lunch is my private time. I have repeatedly asked that no one interrupt me unless there is an emergency.”

“Oh, jeez, sorry.” He bounded up as if the bench had suddenly become scalding hot. “I didn’t know. I’ll just—”

“You’re here,” she said. “And I’ll wager you spent most of this past hour searching for me, didn’t you? Because lunch is nearly concluded.”

His face flushed. “I did. I’m sorry—”

“So stop apologizing, sit down, and tell me what was so important.”

“You sure?” he asked.

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Instead, she patted the bench. A group of teenage girls approached down the walkway, laughing and pointing at something behind Odgerel. She did not turn around, although Brown’s gaze flickered in that direction. He smiled momentarily, then the smile faded as his gaze met hers.

He nodded, the flush growing, and sat down like a recalcitrant child.

The girls passed, giggling and talking so loudly that Odgerel could barely hear herself think.

She waited until they were several meters away before continuing.

“Well?” she asked, knowing it sounded imperious.

She used to hate that quality in herself. As she got older, she embraced it. She had an affinity for the lost empires. That was one reason she came to Beihai Park every day, one reason why she had insisted the Earth Alliance Security Division Human Coordination Department be housed near the Forbidden City.

She wanted the EASDHC employees—at least the human ones—to know what they were defending. Civilization had existed here for a very, very, very long time. Things humans took for granted, like paper and silk, had all started in this nation, on Earth, before any human ever went to space. Long before. So far back that most humans never even studied these civilizations at all.

She had. She believed in their import.

And she believed in protecting them against alien incursions. She still started when she saw Disty sitting cross-legged on the rails overlooking Beihai Park’s lake or eight-legged Sequev stomping their way across the beautiful arched bridges.

Brown was staring at her. Apparently her invitation to speak had made his brain freeze.

“Mitchell,” she said, “please forgive me, but I have finished my lunch and I was going to stroll back to the division offices. If you would like to talk with me, you have only ten minutes or so before I begin my journey back to work.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “Sorry. You must think me an idiot.”

She did not answer that. Instead, she felt a pang at the loss of privacy, that lost moment when the sun would caress her face.

“You’re familiar with the situation on the Moon, right?” he said, then shook his head. “Of course you are. That’s all anyone talks about, whether or not the attacks will start here. Everyone’s acting like it’s terrorism or y’know, some kind of coordinated attack on the Moon. Y’know, a crime or something.”

It was a crime. One large crime that masked several small crimes. But she didn’t correct him. She had worked personally with the head of the Earth Alliance Security Division Human Investigative Department to dispatch investigators to the Moon after the Anniversary Day bombings. She made certain that there were Earth Alliance investigative staff in every devastated city, and she had lost some staff members in the Peyti Crisis, as the media called it.

She folded her hands in her lap. Anyone who knew her well would see that as a sign of impatience.

“If you do not believe this is a crime, what would you call it?” she asked.

“It’s a crime,” he said. “Clearly. But there’s a lot of chatter about it, coming from the Moon itself, and that chatter scares me.”

Since
she
scared him, she didn’t know if his fears were something to be alarmed about. But again, she said nothing.

“Some of the local officials—and some of the people who are acting heads of this and that—are calling the attacks ‘a war on the Moon.’”

She let out a small breath. She hadn’t seen that.

“What do you mean by local?” she asked.

“Sorry,” he said, obviously still unsettled by the trick the other staff members had played on him. “I mean, Moon-based officials. The folks in charge. The
remaining
folks in charge.”

Inwardly she winced at his correction, not because he made the correction—it was accurate; so many on the Moon were dead—but because he had to make it. For clarity.

“How many references have you found?” she asked.

“Just a few, three weeks ago, mostly in private, link-based conversations,” he said. “But after the Peyti Crisis, it seems to be a meme.
Everyone
mentions it. Usually in this sort of way, ‘Why would anyone declare war on the Moon?’”

Why indeed? It was a good question, and one she had not looked at from that angle. It was not the normal way she approached anything. She headed the Security Division. Her office coordinated all of the human parts of the security forces, from Frontier Security to the Earth Alliance Police Force.

She thought of protection and crime, not about war. If one group in the Alliance wanted to declare war on another group, then the diplomats had to sort it out. Or the various military divisions.

Not hers.

“This meme, as you call it, alarms you,” she said after a moment.

“Yes.” Brown said.

“Should the Moon officials not think they are at war?” she asked, then realized she had probably phrased the question incorrectly. “After all, they are under repeated attack.”

“But they don’t know who is attacking them, and neither do we,” he said. “And some of the arguments I’ve seen, they lead me to think this isn’t a crime at all, nor is it isolated to the Moon. I think these people, they have a point.”