Masterminds by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

transfer or send a message to a medical professional or to let children know that they needed to come home because their father wasn’t going to make it through the week.
    Her eyes welled. She missed Raymond. He hadn’t known any of her history, and he probably would have been furious when he found out she was a Disappeared and hadn’t told him.
    But he had always been steady in a crisis. He had known how to handle everything, even the momentary lack of courage that was affecting her right now.
    The very thought of him, his lanky, sturdy frame, his broad, sun-reddened midwestern face, calmed her.
    She had loved him. She had had three beautiful children with him.
    She had a legacy.
    She could do this and not regret the life she had lived.
    She opened an encoded link and sent a message to the woman who had been listed as DeRicci’s assistant, Rudra Popova.
    My name is Pippa Landau, Pippa sent. I am a longtime Disappeared. I have information on the history of the Anniversary Day clones that I believe you need. I’m taking a huge risk contacting you. Please do me the courtesy of letting me speak with Noelle DeRicci as soon as possible. Thank you.
    Pippa brought her hand down. It was shaking.
    Her link only brought silence.
    Somehow she had thought she would get an immediate response, even if that response was automated. But she didn’t.
    She looked at the edge of the bed, the spread wrinkled from her moments of indecision.
    She wasn’t going to sit back down there. That was a defeat.
    She would wait up here for an hour, and then she would get something to eat from one of the nearby restaurants.
    If she hadn’t heard from the Security Office by then, she would contact them again. She would keep doing so until they responded.
    No matter how long it took.

 
     
     
     
    FIFTEEN
     
     
    FLINT TOOK THE elevator to the top floor of the Security Office. He hated standing in that little box. It made him feel restless.
    He was being pulled in eight different directions. He had been trying to get back to his office to investigate the leads he had received earlier in the week, and then he’d gotten derailed by personal events. He had just settled those when Zagrando contacted him.
    Now that Flint had spoken to Zagrando, Flint wanted to investigate Zagrando’s (albeit truncated) information. But Flint also felt odd about leaving Zagrando alone with the medical authorities.
    It wasn’t so much that he didn’t trust them—although that was a factor. It was that he worried he would lose Zagrando to some Earth Alliance official without anyone ever knowing.
    Flint had already asked Space Traffic’s Murray Atherton to keep an eye on Zagrando, saying that Zagrando had information essential to solving Anniversary Day, and he would only give it to Flint. Flint warned Murray that someone might be coming after Zagrando, and under no circumstances was Murray to allow anyone to take Zagrando without contacting Flint first.
    Of course, as he did that, Flint didn’t use Zagrando’s real name, but the alias he’d arrived with.
    So far, no one had come after Zagrando, either on a space ship or inside the port. Murray had stationed a number of space traffic cops near the port’s medical facility, and some near Zagrando’s room. Everyone in Space Traffic was on alert for a ship that might arrive in obvious pursuit of someone. Flint wanted to make certain that no one followed Zagrando here.
    He had looked at the trajectory of Zagrando’s ship once it got close to the Moon; it appeared as if no one had followed him. But Flint knew that only time would tell.
    The port was relatively safe—as safe as it could be, given what was going on these days on the Moon. He never thought of the port as a dangerous place. These days, he thought of it as a potential escape route.
    He had told Talia that a number of times. If things looked particularly bad in the dome, she was to go to Flint’s ship, the Emmeline, and wait for him there. If the dome was