Consequences

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  DeRicci slipped on the environmental suit she’d taken from Gumiela’s closet—amazed at its quality and its strength—and tried to quell the nerves in her stomach. DeRicci had been to a lot of dangerous places, and she’d worn environmental suits outside the dome many times, but she had never worn one inside.

  As the car wove past the tilting buildings and the damaged street signs, DeRicci tried not think about all those dead pioneers whom she’d learned about in school. Dome technology, her teachers had proudly told their classes, had come about thanks to the courage of the original settlers and the ingenuity of those who followed. After each disaster, the dome got stronger.

  And the disasters were hideous: dome fires in which much of the city burned, and those who didn’t die in the flames died from lack of oxygen; dome collapses that had taken out entire sections of the city—literally made them whirl around the interior until they were sucked into the vacuum of space.

  The dome hadn’t collapsed here—although what she was hearing on her interior links led her to believe it was a near thing—and the fire was survivable, at least for anyone in an environmental suit, but this disaster would probably rank with all the others when it finally hit the history books.

  And she was on the front line.

  The car had to stop just inside the double wall. The second wall had been brought down by the dome engineers when they saw the level of the disaster. It was an older wall, almost never used, but the engineers had felt they needed the added protection.

  DeRicci got out of the aircar and found the engineers who were monitoring this section of the dome. Like her, they were wearing environmental suits, and, like her, they had the helmets strung around their necks, waiting until they got somewhere close before putting them on.

  “How bad is it?” DeRicci asked.

  “Worse than going outside in real night,” one of the engineers said. “We’re gonna double-check your suit for leaks. You got good lights built into that thing? Otherwise, you’re gonna have to borrow a suit from someone out here.”

  DeRicci had already checked the lights. She’d heard about the darkness problem, and wanted to be prepared.

  “My lights are fine,” she said.

  “Then helmet on. Run your own diagnostic, and then we’ll run ours.”

  DeRicci slid the helmet over her face, and flicked the artificial environment on. The suit was so sophisticated that she didn’t feel the usual puff of air the cheaper suits used to convince the wearer that everything was fine. Instead, she grew just a little more comfortable—the temperature was regulated to her body so that the thin sheet of sweat that she’d had since she rode over dissipated in just a moment.

  Her diagnostic beeped. The suit was fine. She gave a thumbs-up to the nearest engineer. He held up a finger while another engineer put a device on her hip. That device made her suit whir. For a moment, she thought it had screwed up the environmental controls. Then she realized it was just double-checking them.

  The whirring stopped after thirty seconds, and the engineers sent a message along the bottom of the helmet’s visor. She was good to go.

  DeRicci sighed, hoping no one would see her shoulders rise and fall as she did so. The engineers led her to the first door. A porta-airlock had been assembled around it, so that accidental loss of atmosphere wouldn’t occur in this section of the dome.

  DeRicci had never used a porta-airlock before, and it made her stomach clench. Still, she went inside, waited until the portable door closed behind her, and opened the door built into the dome wall for just this type of emergency.

  She felt nothing different as she stepped through, but then, she wouldn’t. She always had a fantasy, though, that she could feel the changes in atmosphere as she moved.

  The distance between the old wall and the automatic one was only about two meters. DeRicci felt claustrophobic. She also worried about the inky darkness ahead of her.

  The engineers weren’t kidding: the darkness inside the ruined section of the dome was formidable.

  DeRicci closed the first wall door behind her, waited the requisite thirty seconds, and opened the next door. Wafts of smoke were being sucked into this section—not blowing, just billowing as if something (a fire still burning?) were forcing it this way.

  And if it were a fire, how could it burn without oxygen? She wasn’t an arson specialist and she didn’t know the answer.

  Maybe there was more oxygen in this section of the dome than anyone realized.

  She stepped inside, and started when a hand grabbed her arm. Someone pulled her to the left. She found herself in a small tent, surrounded by other people in environmental suits. These people seemed as anonymous as she felt—all gray suits and tinted helmet visors.

  DeRicci sent a text message introducing herself and got another back: she was to talk to the head of the fire unit near the bomb site.

  She nodded, then let herself out of the tent on the far side. There she saw that the interior wasn’t as black as it seemed. Blackness coated the dome wall and many of the buildings, probably from the force of the blast, but she was in a gray twilight filled with dust and debris and floating ash.

  There was some kind of atmosphere here; she just wasn’t sure how much. She didn’t ask her suit to tell her, preferring to remain ignorant of some things.

  People moved like uniformed ghosts through the swirling dirt. Lights illuminated pockets of the mess—showing truly destroyed buildings, many of them shattered like a giant fist had punched through them.

  DeRicci looked up at the dome. The cover stopped halfway across, revealing a hole that seemed—from this distance—human-sized. The hole had blown outward, preventing the cover from sliding across it, and someone had plugged the hole with a makeshift cover that seemed as fragile as the dust that was floating inside.

  Even if a small crack still existed in the makeshift cover, the atmosphere would leak out of here at a rate DeRicci didn’t have the math skills to determine. Engineers were probably outside the dome now, working on the edges of that hole so that the cover could completely protect the insides.

  Nothing here would be safe until they did.

  It wasn’t hard to see the bomb site. A blackened crater in the center of the mess seemed to be the origin of the dust spew. More people gathered around that, all in suits similar to hers—or cheaper versions, the kind she had worn when she was a mere detective.

  She walked over, careful not to hit her boots on anything sharp. There was a path of bootprints—probably from people who had had the same thoughts she did.

  Ambulances stood beside several dome doors, but she didn’t see any wounded. Of course, it had been hours since the blast: the wounded should have been evacuated long ago.

  If there had been wounded in this eerie place. Maybe all the officials found were bodies. She didn’t know that, and wouldn’t, until she was farther into the investigation.

  She reached the main site, surprised by a warning from her suit along the base of the helmet:

  Surface temperature abnormally high. Check for fire.

  “Is it safe to come over?” she said across the audio links. “I’m Noelle DeRicci. I’m an assistant chief of detectives, handling the investigation for the city.”

  “Safe enough,” a male voice answered her. “But watch out for hot pockets. There was a hell of a fire here when we got here, and the embers still flare from time to time.”

  She walked toward the group of investigators. “I’m looking for the head of the fire unit.”

  “That’d be me,” the male voice said. “I’m Peter Brajkovic.”

  He held out a gloved hand, and DeRicci shook it. “I’m supposed to start investigating, to see if we can figure out who did this.”

  Brajkovic’s laugh sounded loud through her links. “Sorry,” he said after a moment. “But I’ll be surprised if you’ll find much.”

  He swept a hand toward the crater. She saw crisped things rising out of the mess, twisted and blackened and completely uni
dentifiable.

  “Here’s what we know,” he said. “We know that the bomb blew up in the kitchen of this building which, we know, was a restaurant mostly because parts of the stove are still intact. We have found evidence of accelerant, which may mean that the bomb wasn’t one thing but several things which combined make an explosive.”

  DeRicci wanted to slow him down. This wasn’t her area of expertise. But she decided to let him finish first, recording everything, as she always did, for her personal log.

  “We did find some DNA and part of a foot, but that’s all we’ve found so far. One person was either in there when it blew or nearby—we can’t tell which—and we don’t know if more people were there and vaporized.”

  DeRicci looked at the mess. The ash floating around her seemed almost white in the light from Brajkovic’s suit.

  “I know you want to catch the people who did this—and nothing would please me more, frankly,” he said, “but I gotta tell you, this is going to be a job for the science guys, not for eyeball types. It’s gonna take weeks, maybe months, to piece all this together.”

  DeRicci had been afraid that it was too soon for her to visit the scene, but she hadn’t known how to tell Gumiela that. So instead, DeRicci had come here. At least she had assembled the best forensic team from the department and maybe, if Gumiela gave her enough power, she might send for some other specialists from around the Moon.

  “So what can I do right now?” DeRicci asked. “Besides stay out of the way?”

  “Record the scene, I guess,” Brajkovic said. “It’ll all be yours when the hot spots are cleaned up and the dome is secured. Otherwise, there’s not much to be done. I suspect most of your evidence either burned or got sent out of the dome. Sorry about that.”

  DeRicci shook her head. “No one ever said this was going to be easy.”

  He moved away from her, and left her standing in front of the ruined block of buildings, where she knew she’d be spending the next few months of her life, trying to piece together exactly what had happened here.

  Fifty-eight

  “Come into the kitchen,” Taylor said. “I have fresh coffee—and a lot more weaponry in there if need be.”

  Flint smiled. He appreciated the other man’s caution. It called to something in himself.

  He crossed the entry, staying as alert as he could, and followed Taylor into the hallway. Mirrors were discreetly placed along each curve, so that Taylor could see what was going on behind him.

  There appeared to be no place in this house that lacked defenses.

  The kitchen was a large, homey room—or would have been if the windows weren’t barred and covered. The ceiling had skylights that were also covered, and the artificial lighting in here was nowhere as good as the artificial lighting on the Moon. The room felt dark even though it was not.

  Taylor poured a cup of coffee from a pot on the tiled countertop, then shook the pot at Flint. Flint nodded, and was surprised to receive coffee that tasted like it had been made with real beans.

  He wrapped his hands around the mug and sat at the kitchen table, his back to the cabinets. Taylor set his cup on the table and sat so that he could see the entrance to the kitchen from the hallway and the other entrance from the side.

  The gun rested near his right hand.

  “Why would the government of Etae try to kill you over an event that happened three decades ago?” Flint asked.

  “I started wondering when I first got word of the pardons,” Taylor said, “so I did a little research.”

  “You put in all this defensive stuff in the last few months?”

  Taylor shook his head. “I’ve always lived like this. I figured they’d come for us. I just didn’t know when. Claire—Carolyn—said I was being paranoid.”

  Flint sipped the coffee, enjoying the rich flavor. Still he kept his guard up. Just because Taylor seemed to have relaxed didn’t mean Flint could.

  “What did your research tell you?” Flint asked.

  “That the former rebels of Etae want into the Alliance. They don’t have a lot to bargain with, since war has pretty much ravaged that entire planet, but they’ve got a few corporations willing to go in, if the Alliance approves.”

  Flint had heard some of this before. “Corporations often go in without the Alliance’s okay.”

  “Yes, but in this instance, the corporations know they’ll need some of the Alliance’s legal protections, particularly the courts. Everything on Etae is still in a state of flux, and if the corporations lose money due to Etae’s internal conflicts, they’re going to want to recoup. They can’t do that without Alliance aid.”

  “Why go in at all?” Flint asked.

  Taylor shrugged. “Probably military knowledge, weaponry. Those enhancements that I’ve been guarding against are exceedingly effective, no matter what your body style is. It puts humans on par with the Rev, if you can believe it.”

  Flint had faced down Rev. He had trouble believing any human—even an enhanced one like Hank Mosby—could take on a Rev.

  “But that’s not what matters. To get into the Alliance, you have to convince not just the monetary wing but the diplomatic wing. And the diplomats have a vested interest in keeping the peace in the Old Universe.”

  “Looks like they have a point,” Flint said, setting his mug down, “considering what just happened in Armstrong.”

  Taylor nodded. “We’ll get to that. I know how the Etaen government operates. They’ll do anything to get what they want.”

  “Even kill supporters?” Flint asked.

  “Former supporters, not that I’ve ever spoken out,” Taylor said. “And yes, considering the knowledge we have. If they hadn’t needed us—hell, if I hadn’t been on top of it, even then—we’d be dead already.”

  “On top of what?” Flint asked.

  Taylor held up a hand. “I got the government to clear us, to buy our Disappearances right before the Child Martyr footage hit the intergalactic news.”

  “Before?” Flint asked. “Then how could you know the truth?”

  “Because,” Taylor said. “I wasn’t just helping us all Disappear. I Disappeared the Martyr too.”

  “What?” Flint asked. “I saw that footage. That poor child was killed.”

  Taylor’s smile was bitter. “That poor child was never harmed. A few months before, some kids were killed outside the capital, and that raised a small outcry, giving support to the rebels. Anatolya Döbryn—the media mastermind of the group—figured out that the death of a child, a hideous, very public death, might actually give the rebels the edge they needed—if they could convince the rest of the universe that it was a rebel child who died at the hands of the then-government troops.”

  Flint leaned forward. His coffee mug was empty, but he didn’t ask if he could have more. He was too intent.

  “Döbryn figured we didn’t dare risk killing one of our own—something like that might come back to bite us—so instead, they staged the entire thing. The outside reporters got what they thought was distant live footage of the child being killed, then someone—no one ever said who, but it was Claire who did the actual work—released a vid of the stuff that you’ve probably seen: the child begging for mercy, then being hideously slaughtered by the government’s troops.”

  “We’re all sophisticated enough to recognize a doctored vid,” Flint said, not sure he believed what Taylor was telling him.

  “Really?” Taylor asked. “After the original setup? Those reporters were from all over the known universe. They just never got close-up footage. No one thought to look for doctoring after that. No one dared.”

  “The Child Martyr is alive?” Flint asked.

  “Well, she was when we got her off Etae. She Disappeared like the rest of us.”

  “Did the Child Martyr travel with you?”

  Taylor picked up his gun and carried it to the counter. Then he grabbed his cup off the table and poured more coffee. “Want some?”

  Flint nodded.

&nb
sp; Taylor poured the rest of the pot into Flint’s mug.

  “Carolyn and I insisted on Disappearing together because we believed we were in love,” Taylor said. “She was pregnant and I wanted to raise a child in a peaceful place. I had a hunch, even then, that Claire couldn’t settle down for long. But I thought maybe I could tame that. Ian was about five when I realized I couldn’t. But if we hadn’t Disappeared together, I wouldn’t have seen my son, let alone raised him. He’s not perfect, but he’s got a good heart. You’re lucky you didn’t hurt him.”

  Flint held out his hands, palms up. “I had no reason to hurt him. I’m just here to get information, maybe see if I can figure out what happened to Carolyn.”

  “She was killed by the government she helped create for the secret she helped bury,” Taylor said. “If news that the Child Martyr was a fake comes out, then Etae will never have a chance at the Alliance, at least not while Döbryn and her crew are alive.”

  “I don’t get it. If the child wasn’t hurt—”

  “The Child Martyr was the turning point, her so-called death the moment when the rebels became legit. We got weapons, we got support—through back doors—we got everything we wanted to defeat the government. If the Alliance finds out the rebels manipulated them, then Etae won’t ever get a chance to join. And, even worse, if the factions on Etae find out the Child Martyr is a fake, the war will break out all over again.”

  Flint nodded. The situation was beginning to make sense. A cynical, twisted sense, but sense nonetheless.

  “So,” he said, “the current government pardoned you—”

  “To make us easier to kill,” Taylor said. “I mean, how perfect is it? Disappeareds come out of the woodwork, and then they’re murdered. Hmm, the death must be caused by the very reason they Disappeared. Of course, no one knows why most people Disappear, so the deaths will remain unsolved. And using hired killers…well that makes it even easier, really. It’s brilliant, just like Döbryn.”