Free Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page B

than any of the walls in any of the nearby buildings.
    He used to see this clear office as a screw-you to anyone who wanted to mess with him. A dare. Try it , the office seemed to declare. You can see me, but you can’t touch me .
    He had been younger then, and naïve. He had thought that someone who was after him would go after him , would try to kill him . He had since learned that vengeance wasn’t so simple, and that random events not directed at him or his people could harm him more than an attack on his empire.
    Last week had proven that.
    The empire spread out below him. The rest of the building housed dozens of businesses, many of them shell corporations, that he owned. His main business, Deshin Enterprises, rented the top six floors of the building, which he owned under a different name through a different corporation.
    He used to keep all of the twists and turns of his various businesses in his head. Yes, there were a dozen spreadsheets, some of them actually legitimate, but none of them told the full story.
    He needed a spreadsheet that did, now. Ever since Anniversary Day, a part of his brain seemed to be reserved for processing the changes, processing his losses, and processing the emotions he felt behind the ones he was supposed to feel.
    He couldn’t focus on the business as much as he wanted to. Instead, he found himself focusing on the math.
    His reflection moved in the window. At least Armstrong set its dome according to Earth light. He could tell the time, just from the appearance of the dome. It was Dome Daylight, bright enough to be midday. He loved the generated sunlight, even if the yellow of the dome’s light was somewhat artificial, and he loved the way it cascaded through his office, over the chairs and the desk and the conference table on the far side of the room.
    Those little moments, that appreciation of the light, that was new too. It was as if part of him reveled in being alive.
    He wasn’t certain how many other people inside the sectioned domes understood just how close they had come to disappearing forever.
    Unlike them, though, he knew.
    He also knew how much explosive it took to breach twelve domes and damage seven others. Not to mention the explosion that nearly happened here, and didn’t because of quick thinking on the part of Armstrong authorities.
    That math bothered him. It colored his sleep, what little he’d been getting. Because it wasn’t just the math that bothered him.
    It was the coordination in the attacks.
    First, an assassination of an authority figure, followed by the destruction of a dome.
    There was no real reason to assassinate the authority figure, not if the dome was going to explode anyway. In fact, it could be argued that the assassinations were what tipped off DeRicci and her cohorts. If the assassinations hadn’t happened, the Moon might have become desolate all over again.
    He didn’t think the masterminds behind this gigantic attack—whoever they might be—considered the assassinations as warnings. He suspected the masterminds had meant the assassinations as symbols. Those masterminds wanted someone—survivors, the Alliance itself maybe, the Earth, he didn’t know exactly—to understand that the bombings were directed at authority figures, not just at the domes.
    The masterminds had had an agenda, and they had failed at a great deal of it. Not every leader targeted had died—again, thanks to the security chief—and not every dome targeted had had a hole blown through it.
    For some groups, those failures might have been enough to stop them. For this group—which had clearly spent years planning the attacks—those failures might cause them to regroup and try again.
    He paced the length of the office, in the middle of it, avoiding chairs and occasional tables, and found bits of art that Paavo had made during his various years in school. The path he took was a surprising obstacle course; he never walked this way.
    In the past, he had always paced