Masterminds by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

from the Peyti Normal environmental change, and the successful bombings outside the domes.
    Torkild didn’t seem to care about all those new deaths, all those lost souls. He seemed to think that the Peyti clones deserved a defense, as if what they had done was defensible.
    She had told her father that, and he had chuckled. Young Torkild will get his head handed to him , her father had said. Clones aren’t individuals under the law. They’re property. And no piece of property has the right to a defense.
    She opened her eyes. The train was closer to the Growing Pits now. Their lights illuminated the Moon’s harsh surface.
    She hated agreeing with her father. She didn’t think of the Peyti clones—or the human clones that had bombed the Moon on Anniversary Day—as anything other than monsters. Only monsters did such horrible things. Those monsters had no value to the universe.
    She couldn’t understand why Torkild hadn’t seen that.
    She sighed. It was a watery sound.
    He’d still be alive if he had listened to her. She had offered him a job with ADVI-RS. She needed lawyers to represent the victims to the insurance companies, in lawsuits against the cities, and to help with all of the estate issues, especially for those whose loved ones had essentially vaporized.
    Sure, ADVI-RS couldn’t have paid him one-tenth what S 3 was paying him, but that hadn’t been the point, at least to Berhane. He would have had the chance to do some good, instead of representing monsters.
    She had no idea why Torkild had wanted to represent monsters. He had given her some crap about being a society of laws, and when she had pressed him, he had said, There’s a lot to dislike in the Alliance system, but there’s a lot to like. We get along with thousands of alien species. We have cultural exchanges and economic cooperation because of this ‘crap’ you’re talking about. That means, sometimes, you have to abide by laws you don’t believe in. It also means that sometimes you have to make sure that a group of bad individuals get the best treatment possible under the law.
    The response had made her sick, just sick. He seemed to think that the Peyti clones were equal to the people they killed. Maybe even more important than the people they killed.
    She had blurted, You can’t believe that .
    And he had looked at her oddly for a moment, as if contemplating her statement. Then he had given her a half-smile, the half-smile he used to charm her with.
    You know, he had said , I actually do.
    He had believed it. He had believed it enough to keep working at the firm, hiring new lawyers from off-Moon, doling out injunctions to law enforcement, and generally acting as if everyone agreed with S 3 ’s position.
    And it had gotten him killed.
    She had accused him of all kinds of terrible things that day. The thing she had said that bothered her, even before she had heard of his death, was that she had accused him of caring more about money and prestige than about people.
    And after she had left, she realized that if he cared about prestige, he would have joined her, not S 3 .
    Because these days, everyone was on the side of the victims and no one was on the side of S 3 .
    Everyone who knew about S 3 On The Moon actively loathed them. No one wanted to be associated with them. She had gone to Torkild in the first place because her friends had asked her to reason with him.
    She had thought, even before she went, that she couldn’t reason with him. For their entire relationship, she had catered to him. Then he had ended the relationship and left the Moon. When he returned, she had mostly avoided him and then, at the end—
    She swallowed hard.
    At the end, she had treated him as badly—or worse—than he had treated her.
    He had refused to fight with her that day. He had claimed he understood what she was doing. He had been nice to her, and she had accused him of all kinds of terrible things.
    She put her head in her hands, feeling a sob in her