Free Vigilantes by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page A

morning.
    I’m coming, Mr. Zhu , she sent, even though she doubted he could hear her. I’m coming right now.

 
     
     
     
    NINE
     
     
    MILES FLINT HAD barricaded his office in Old Armstrong. He had never before used his office’s full security package, which he had updated after Anniversary Day. He preferred to do the most delicate computer work on Dome University’s Armstrong campus or on the public net at the Brownie Bar.
    He liked the anonymity of their systems. The university’s had so many users that isolating one would take hours, if not days, and the Brownie Bar had no internal surveillance, so it was impossible to see who was using the system. The Brownie Bar also did not track its customers.
    But the research Miles was doing was so dangerous that he didn’t want to implicate either of those two places. If he angered the wrong people, then they might go after the locations where the work was done, as well as go after Miles himself.
    He couldn’t endanger innocent lives like that.
    So he hunched on one of the few chairs in the office. He’d spent a fortune for chairs, even though he didn’t use them as much as he’d planned. The nanofibers never worked exactly right. They didn’t quite sculpt to his body the way he wanted. He got uncomfortable if he sat longer than twenty minutes.
    This time, he had arranged half a dozen work stations, some of which allowed him to stand. He was combing for information on a variety of networks, not just the Earth Alliance’s network, and he needed to monitor the programs.
    He went from station to station, standing or sitting, sometimes looking at information presented holographically, sometimes at a 2-D flat screen that rose above the desk, sometimes on the desktop itself.
    The only thing he did not do was let the computers talk to him. He trusted his security only so far. It was easy to track sound. That could be done with the right kind of equipment several meters away—even outside a so-called soundproofed building.
    To hack his data streams, though, required extremely sophisticated programs that had to go past his constantly updating security walls. Plus, half the time he used an actual keyboard, which very few people did any longer. A good eighth of his encryption was tied to an existing keyboard, with its quirks. All of the keyboards he had in the office only responded to his DNA combined with the warmth of his fingertips and a measure of the blood flowing through his veins.
    No one could cut off his hands and use them to enter his programs. He had to do it, and he had to be alive.
    He paced the small room. The floor used to be uneven, but it wasn’t any longer. He’d leveled it after his daughter Talia had complained. The building that housed his office was on a list of historic places. He couldn’t make a lot of external changes without some committee’s approval—or, at least, that was the way it had been in the past.
    He had no idea how the regulations would be enforced in this new post-Anniversary-Day, post-Peyti-Crisis Armstrong. He suspected some things might be different.
    Flint was a Retrieval Artist. He found humans who had Disappeared—who had vanished, using a service or on their own, rather than face the justice system in the Earth Alliance—which meant he was really good at examining huge amounts of information for the tiniest clue.
    In the six-plus years he’d been doing this job, he had gained a healthy dose of paranoia. And he’d been pretty darn paranoid to begin with.
    Paranoia was serving him well at the moment, because he was trying to track down the masterminds behind the Peyti Crisis. He was working with—not for —the Security Office of the United Domes of the Moon.
    In reality, he was working with his old partner Noelle DeRicci. But even then, he was really working for himself, using the systems that her office had.
    He had hit a dead-end in his investigation of Anniversary Day—at least for the moment—so he was trying a new