Chapter Twenty-Four
“Report. What have you learned since yesterday?” Carter paced the makeshift war room in Luna Center. His chest hurt with a pain nanos couldn’t fix. The sizzling jabs from the photon blast would subside, but the agony of betrayal would continue on. I trusted her. How could I have been so wrong?
“Are you all right?” Brock asked with a concerned frown. “Maybe you should sit.”
He couldn’t sit, couldn’t still his body while an assassin remained at large and Mikala and Vincere’s lives hung in the balance. What would Beth’s next move be? Ransom them? Kill them?
He’d never seen it coming. People revealed their true selves in body language, tonal variation, expression. Clues could be faint, but they were there if you knew what to look for, and a cyborg could detect the subtlest nuances. He’d racked his human brain and his cyborg processor for behavioral tells, but come up with nothing that could have warned him.
He would have bet his life on her trustworthiness.
He had.
She’d tried to murder him and Andros. She had switched the blaster to the kill setting and shot them both in cold blood. She would have succeeded if he and his security personnel hadn’t been wearing protective photon-absorbing suits under their uniforms. The material developed by Dale Homme had absorbed, and then dispersed, most of the energy from the blaster.
Even with the suit, the blast had knocked him on his ass and incapacitated him for hours. But he and Andros were alive.
“I’m fine,” he said, glancing at Andros, who fidgeted in his chair. He knew how the other cyborg was feeling. The lingering effects of the photon stream felt like a swarm of biting ants. Except Andros’s heart wasn’t being squeezed in a vise.
He had no one to blame but himself. His ready, foolish trust had endangered Mikala and Vincere. Could I have fucked-up any worse? I did everything but put the weapon in her hand. I taught her how to fight, insisted she learn how to operate a blaster. She’d used everything she’d learned against them.
Perhaps her inexperience had been the ruse. Who would send in a novice assassin? She’d done extremely well in the self-defense and weapons training. Too well. He had to face the possibility his organization had been infiltrated by a pro. If Cy-Ops went down, there would be little to prevent Lamis-Odg from conquering the sovereign planets of the galaxy.
“We’re certain Beth O’Shea has no ties to Lamis-Odg?” he asked. Just saying her name hurt, but linking it even remotely to the terrorists sickened him.
“Certain? No.” Brock shook his head. “That was my first thought so I have Illumina combing cyberspace. But, according to her preliminary report, Beth is what she claimed to be: the clone of Liza O’Shea, the daughter of Georgetta and Reuben O’Shea.” Assuming command while he had been out of commission, Brock had mobilized Cy-Ops.
“The O’Sheas—who’ve been very cooperative—have been questioned. From Clo-Ventures, Beth went to the space station and never left until she arrived here for her Aym-Sec interview. The only chance for contact with Lamis-Odg would have been during transit.”
A slim chance, but still a chance. “So there was a window of opportunity.”
“We’re reviewing flight manifests, investigating every single person she might have encountered. Illumina is reviewing every single electronic transmission Beth has ever received.”
“Get the information, stat.”
“I’ve taken her off every other case except the Cornelius one.”
“Pull her off that one, too. This is her sole priority.”
“Will do.” Brock pressed his lips together. “Every cyborg and ship we can spare are searching for Vincere’s shuttle, as are the galactic police. Without knowing her motive, it’s hard to predict where she’ll go. The AOP’s undersecretary general who has stepped into Vincere’s shoes has issued an Interplanetary Bulletin for her arrest. Cy-Ops agents are standing by at the O’Shea space station in case she goes there. We’ve contacted our informants inside Quasar in case the pirate syndicate is involved—although I doubt they are. Quasar tries to keep a low profile. Mikala and Vincere are too well known to be sold into slavery.”
“You’ve done everything I would have done,” he said. Brock hadn’t missed a step. It couldn’t have been easy for him, either. “How is Penelope holding up?”
“Pia is upset, but she insisted I join the search. She wants her mother back and her kidnapper brought to justice.”
“We all do.” He resumed pacing. “What kind of ship did Vincere have?”
“A class two cruiser.”
“His own ship. Not a diplomatic shuttle?”
“Correct,” Brock replied.
“What was the time span between the launch and when Cy-Ops began looking for the ship?”
“I pinged our crew immediately, but we were watching for a diplomatic vessel at first. Beth capitalized on the panic, timing her escape to coincide with the mass exodus from Luna Center. Very few followed flight regulations. It was chaos in lunar air space and pure luck no ships collided.”
“It was chaos in the general assembly arena, too.” Cyborg Sonny Masters tipped his head at Amanda Mansfield. “We had our hands full trying to control the crowd. We were circulating in the tiers when the shots were fired. Because of the size of the arena, people paid more attention to their personal monitors than the floor. The incident occurred at the far end of the arena, outside line of sight for many people. Until the yelling began in the tiers, many didn’t realize the attack was happening then it became bedlam.
“People tend to panic in a crisis,” Brock pointed out.
Sonny shook his head. “The shouting felt timed, like people were cued. I’d swear every section of the tier had several instigators who shouted in multiple languages.”
Manny nodded. “It appeared some people were trying to incite a stampede to keep security busy. In my section, someone shouted, ‘The president’s been shot—run!’ before it happened.”
Carter’s gaze snapped to the female cyborg. “What?”
She nodded. “In the commotion, no one but a cyborg would have noticed, but the shout came two tenths of a second before the blast was fired.”
“How many instigators were there?”
Sonny and Manny exchanged a glance. He shrugged. “We can estimate. I can download visuals and/or audio recordings from my microprocessor for the instigators in my section and the contiguous ones.”
“I can do the same,” Amanda said. “We’ll contact the other operatives who were assigned tier-duty and get the same from them. That will account for most everybody.”
“Do it,” he said. “Let’s run an ID match against the attendee list, find those people, and question them.”
“You’re thinking she had accomplices?” Brock asked.
Carter pressed his lips together. “It looks like it.”
Brock’s eyes widened, and he jerked his head. “Son of a bitch.”
“What it is?”
“Roarke pinged me. He located Vincere’s ship.”
“Where?”
“In orbit around Katnia.”