Masterminds by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Read Free Book Online

expect.
    Or maybe Salehi was being too sympathetic to them.
    He removed all five suits that he had brought with him to the Moon. He would have an assistant order more clothing for him once he settled in. Because he was going to stay here a long time.
    Now that Zhu had been murdered, Salehi wasn’t just going to get justice for some mass-murdering clones. He was going to get justice for Zhu.
    It was the least Salehi could do, since it was his carelessness that had gotten Zhu killed.
    Salehi set the suits on his clothes carrier. When he was ready, it would fold everything into a tight ball of material that he would put in a small bag, along with some personal items he always brought with him when he traveled.
    The suits and the rest of his clothing had nanofibers that pressed everything and made them look crisp, no matter what happened to them—something he had relied upon back in the days when he practically lived in the courts around Athena Base.
    He was ready for this. He was ready for all of it.
    He had spent the last week holed up in the library of this ship, preparing arguments for the clones. Technically, he was working for the government of Peyla. They wanted those clones dealt with because the Moon’s policies were interfering with all business run by the Peyti.
    Some of the Peyti lawyers he had brought with him even argued that the Moon’s actions were a de facto way of kicking the Peyti out of the Earth Alliance.
    And some bigots on the Moon probably felt that the Peyti should be tossed from the Alliance, given what those clones had done.
    He grabbed his shirts out of the closet and tossed them on the carrier. Then he opened the box that contained his shoes. He grabbed the dress shoes and some athletic shoes, but he left the sandals. The Salehi who loved Earth’s deserts and had his office on Athena Base mimic their conditions wasn’t going to the Moon.
    That Salehi was careless and thoughtless and hadn’t paid enough attention to his work. That Salehi was lazy and uninterested in most things.
    He was leaving that man behind, and going back to the lawyer he had once been. The lawyer who had taken his family’s moribund firm and rebuilt it into an Alliance powerhouse.
    The legal community in this part of the galaxy wouldn’t know what hit them.
    His links chirruped. He hadn’t realized he had set them on notify except for emergencies . That was his default link setting when he was deep in researching a case, and he apparently hadn’t reset the links as the ship’s destination approached.
    The message was from the cockpit. His tension rose.
    Yes? he sent.
    We have a problem, sir. The Moon won’t let us into their space. We’re not cleared to land on the Moon.
    What? he sent. This made no sense. Of course they should be cleared. He had never encountered this situation in his decades of work at S 3 .
    They’re telling us that, as a mixed-species ship, we need some kind of documentation that no one here has ever heard of. We need you here, sir.
    Damn straight they needed him in the cockpit. This wasn’t about being a mixed species ship. This was about S 3 .
    He set his shoes beside the bed. He would finish packing when he solved this.
    The authorities in the Port of Armstrong had no idea who they were dealing with.
    And he would show them, in a way they wouldn’t forget.

 
     
     
     
    EIGHT
     
     
    BERHANE MAGALHÃES SAT in the first class compartment in the train from Littrow to Armstrong, elbow on the small table in front of her, a fist over her mouth, as she stared at the passing grayness of the Moon.
    She didn’t really see it, the regolith, the rocks, the bright lights of the Growing Pits in the distance. She’d taken this route so many times since she started her work that it felt normal to her.
    After she got past those first few minutes of entering a train.
    Berhane had been on a train—Armstrong’s citywide inner-dome train, the Express—when someone had bombed the city four years before.