Extremes: A Retrieval Artist Novel

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  “How many medical teams do you have?” DeRicci asked.

  “Ten,” Lakferd said. “more than enough for a race of this size.”

  His sudden defensiveness surprised her. Apparently he didn’t think ten were enough. And if they didn’t have a large enough medical staff, then a few deaths might be due to negligence.

  She wondered if that was what he believed had happened to Jane Zweig, if someone hadn’t responded quickly enough. DeRicci would have to get someone on that part of the investigation quickly. She had a hunch the organizers could hide information if they thought it necessary.

  Chaiken looked at the clock running near the ceiling of the wall across from the door. His movement was ostentatious, his meaning clear.

  This time, DeRicci would let him hustle her out of the building. The short interview she had done with them had raised a lot of questions.

  The body would provide the answers.

  THREE

  MIRIAM OLIVIARI LEANED against the emergency medical scooter. She stood just outside the dome, watching the spectators inside. Her borrowed environmental suit was a good one, bought by the marathon committee especially for the medical team. She had a better environmental suit on her ship, but she didn’t dare use it. The only thing she liked about this suit were the gloves—they were so thin that they felt more like she was wearing lotion instead of material.

  Still, this suit did a good job of protecting her from the boiling heat of a Moon day. The sunlight, unfiltered and brilliant, fell on the surface road, gray as the dust it was made of, revealing all the pocks and flaws in the design. The road covered most of the first mile, and small side trails went off in all directions, leading to maintenance buildings and storage units for surface equipment.

  Armstrong had all of its Outside buildings tightly locked. A few were guarded. At one of the early marathons, a spectator had sneaked into one of the buildings and sabotaged all of the city-owned vehicles. Three vehicles failed while in use, causing city workers to die and resulting in two decades of lawsuits.

  The marathon had somehow managed to survive that tragedy, but only by making a lot of concessions—including keeping spectators and unauthorized personnel inside the dome. The rules had gotten so tight that it had taken Oliviari six months to figure out how to get Outside herself. The organizers were an in-group of people who had known each other since they all raced six or more decades ago. The only opening Oliviari had found had been within the medical teams, and it had stretched all of her resources to obtain it.

  Around her, other members of the medical team waited. Teams One, Two, and Three had already been called out on emergencies. She was in Team Five. The teams were not linked via a comm system, which she wished she had known about from the beginning. She would have insisted on a group link, claiming it would make for a safer race.

  She would have been lying, of course. She really didn’t care about a safe race. What she wanted was the opportunity to collect DNA from all the female runners.

  Her own private links were off. She didn’t want them to trigger the marathon’s high tech security system. She had allowed the organizers to link her to the emergency personnel, as well as to the race’s security system. Theoretically, she was supposed to return those links when the race was over—and she would. But the clones she had made of them would remain in her system so that she could investigate at her leisure if her DNA plan didn’t work.

  It was beginning to look like the plan wouldn’t. The organizers had changed policy this year. They had hired a medical team leader who, in turn, hired the medical teams. During the race, he managed the medical teams’ crisis responses.

  In the past there had been one large medical team, which coordinated its own efforts. Apparently there had been a lot of miscommunication at the last two marathons, and one of those miscommunications had been serious. A runner had nearly died because no one had responded to his panic button for more than a half an hour. The team who should have responded claimed they hadn’t received the initial alarm.

  The other teams ignored the alarm, thinking it was not their problem.

  It took three different runners, going past, to query via their links about the runner down at milepost fifteen before a med unit went out to investigate. Oliviari never did find out what the runner had nearly died of; it had taken her a lot of oblique conversations and delicate probings to find out this much of the story.

  The race’s organizers maintained a lot of secrecy around the deaths and injuries. Oliviari had a hunch not all of the deaths were reported on the field. That way, the numbers remained within the “acceptable” range for a tourist event of this nature, and Armstrong wasn’t put into the difficult position of investigating one of its most popular sporting events.

  It made her job even more difficult, however. She had been tracking Frieda Tey for years now, always edging close, and somehow getting thwarted.

  Oliviari was one of the best Trackers in the business, and she had been fooled several times by false information planted by Tey. The tangle behind Tey’s Disappearance was even more muddled than most; the false information had a lot more solidity than information created about most Disappeareds.

  And that was the other problem: Oliviari had never been able to identify Tey’s Disappearance service. It appeared, from all the evidence Oliviari had gathered so far, that Tey had Disappeared on her own.

  Oliviari didn’t believe it, though. No one was that good. It took entire teams of people, along with very sophisticated systems, to properly hide a Disappeared.

  Most Disappeareds did not vanish as well as they thought they did; it was just that the roadblocks set up to finding them were solid enough to discourage the casual searcher. A real Tracker, like Oliviari, was expensive, and most governments did not have enough resources to hire a Tracker for every Disappeared.

  Generally, the governments hired Trackers for only the most grievous cases. In all others, the governments did a cursory search themselves—a search that usually failed.

  Oliviari hadn’t failed yet. The Tey case, however, was testing her limits.

  The whistle of a panic button echoed through the earpieces in her soft-sided helmet. At the bottom of her visor, the location of the injured appeared, along with a bio readout.

  She studied it closely, hoping that Team Four wouldn’t get an assignment she wanted. Finally the information that she was interested in crossed her screen.

  The injured party was a male runner. Already there’d been two calls involving women, and Oliviari hadn’t been involved. Her best opportunities for DNA sampling had already been taken.

  Still, she finished looking at the readout. Male runner, mid-forties, first time in the race. Insufficient oxygen. Probably a problem with his environmental suit. A lot of the suits sold to athletes for this event were untried. During training, the medical recruits had all been warned that they would primarily be dealing with various forms of suit failure, mostly with the breathing systems.

  Oliviari had been glad about that. She had a dozen years of off-and-on medical training, augmented by field experience, but there were gaps in her knowledge wide enough to drive a shuttle through. One thing she did know, though, was how to deal with oxygen problems—bad suit flow, high carbon dioxide, too much pure oxygen.

  The information feed started again, this time with an image of the runner. Oliviari watched it, feeling no sense of urgency. This emergency was Team Four’s problem. The next injury that came up would be hers, and she would have to respond to that.

  The members of Team Four split into their two smaller units—two on the swift-moving Emergency Scooter, carrying their med kits, followed by the other two members in the field ambulance.

  The ambulances were parked behind one of the maintenance buildings, hidden from the crowd. The scooters were parked near the organizer’s table, but any time a warning resounded, the drivers had been instructed to launch behind the buildings. The crowd needed to know that there were medical facilities,
but they didn’t need to know when the facilities would be used.

  As Team Four headed off, the feed at the bottom of Oliviari’s visor shut off. All med team members got the initial information—it was one way of preventing the disasters of the last few years—but the moment a team launched, the information no longer had to be shared.

  Oliviari sighed. Her plan wasn’t perfect. She had hoped she would be on a quicker response team, like Team One, so that she would get into the medical tent sooner. At the end of the race, all of the runners had to come through there—even the runners who did not finish—so that they could be processed.

  It irritated her that she hadn’t gotten inside so far. She wanted to see these runners without their helmets on.

  Long ago, Oliviari had memorized Tey’s features, as well as her movements and the sound of her voice. All of that could be changed through enhancements, but generally the Disappeared didn’t use enhancements. The money always went toward the Disappearance itself instead of the reinvention.

  Trackers also had another advantage: people didn’t change their fundamental natures. They were instructed to modify their interests, to avoid things they had done before, but usually, they found ways to get involved in similar occupations.

  Frieda Tey had always been a fitness nut. Even when she had been stationed in isolated labs in the most remote places, she had kept herself in immaculate physical condition. Toward the end, she had started to focus on the human body’s physical limitations, with and without enhancements.

  Oliviari figured that Tey was probably not doing official science any longer. No more experiments, no more high-profile projects. But Tey’s interest in the edges of human existence probably hadn’t changed.

  That was what Oliviari gambled on. She followed hints in Tey’s record that could have led Tey here.

  Oliviari looked back at the crowd. The spectators noticed nothing. They couldn’t hear the panic whistles, and the feeds they watched cut to a different section of the course whenever a problem developed.

  A movement in the aisle between the bleachers caught Oliviari’s eye. Two people, a man and a woman, strode toward the dome, wearing environmental suits. The suits had hoods instead of helmets, and the hoods were down.

  The woman appeared to be in her mid-forties, though appearances were often deceiving because of enhancements. She had short black hair with gray highlights that caught the dome’s artificial light. Her angular face had stress lines; the mouth seemed permanently downturned in anger or disappointment. She was surveying everything, her expression wary.

  The man behind her was younger—maybe twenty-five—and shorter than the woman. He still had a young man’s thinness, although something in his movements suggested a wiry strength. He too tried to take in everything, but he seemed easily distracted, his head turning this way and that.

  As the woman and the young man became visible between the bleachers, two of the race’s organizers hurried to their side. The organizers hustled the pair toward the organizers’ in-dome booth, closing the door tightly behind them.

  Most of the spectators hadn’t even noticed. Those who had didn’t seem to think anything of it. The medical teams were staring at the empty path that led to the finish line or examining their vehicles, obviously hoping for a run.

  The woman and the young man had been police. Probably a detective and a recruit. Armstrong didn’t dare send high-profile officers to the marathon; someone was bound to notice. But a low-ranking detective and a patrolman to back her up would be able to take charge of any accidental death scene, even one that occurred outside the dome.

  Oliviari frowned. She hadn’t heard anything about a death, and she should have. She placed her hand on the scooter’s climate-controlled seat, unable to feel anything but the seat’s hardness through her glove. She flicked on her visor monitors, adjusting the information until she got only the medical reports.

  The scooter part of Team Four had arrived at the male runner’s side. Insufficient oxygen due to a clogged interior line; he was light-headed and sick, barely alert enough to push the panic alarm at all.

  Team Three’s injured woman had a broken ankle. She was being moved off course now. Team One’s injured woman had a broken wrist and a poorly sealed suit—she had tripped in one of the craters, fallen, broken her wrist, and scraped the suit open. It had sealed, but not well enough to allow her to continue. They were all still debating in field about whether or not she should go on.

  Team Two had responded to a male panic alarm about six miles in. His bio readout had been fine, but sometimes bio readouts malfunctioned just like everything else. Team Two had not come back with a follow-up report, like the teams were supposed to, and they’d been with the man for more than an hour.

  Oliviari frowned. She hadn’t paid a lot of attention to Team Two’s call—she wanted to keep track of the injured women, not the injured men—but it seemed suspicious. Especially with the arrival of the police and the lack of follow-up.

  She wondered if she should bring this to the medical leader’s attention. Maybe if she offered to follow-up, she would be allowed to find out what was going on.

  The gamble was that the man had accidentally hit his button and the Team hadn’t thought the follow-up worth anyone’s time. If Oliviari involved herself in someone else’s case, she might hurt her chance to attend at least one woman on the field. The more chances she had to work in the field, the less she had to do when the race ended.

  The other problem with approaching the team leader was that Oliviari would call attention to herself. The key to her success as a Tracker had always been in maintaining a low profile. She never even checked in with local governments the way Trackers were supposed to.

  She had found, over the years, that the locals sometimes had moles that fed information to the Disappeared. Sometimes, the Disappeared had gotten government jobs just to have the chance to monitor Tracker arrivals.

  Oliviari never allowed anyone to get ahead of her—which was why Tey annoyed her. It felt like Tey had had the better of her from the very beginning.

  Oliviari shoved the thought away. She wanted to find out about that mysterious call Team Two had gone on. Tey was the kind of woman who would find a race like this a challenge, and Oliviari was afraid that if she ignored any detail, she might miss Tey altogether.

  Oliviari summoned all the vid images of the race, and let them stream across her visor, with the real lunar landscape in the background. She had the suit add the coordinates and mile markers. Logically those would all be consecutive. Since she was part of the med team, her feeds should have remained unblocked and she should have seen the emergency care underway.

  The two first-response members of Team Four were huddled next to the male runner. He was sitting down, his feet shaking as if they wanted to continue on the race alone. Team Three was loading their victim into the field ambulance, and a member of Team One was spraying something on the arm of the injured woman, probably an additional sealant for the suit.

  Like so many of these athletes, the woman probably felt she needed to finish this race to prove something. As if competing in an artificial environment like a marathon proved anything. A person never knew what she was made of until she faced a life-or-death situation that surprised her, not one she had spent the last five years training for.

  There was a gap between miles five and six. Proximity cameras focused on a large rock, almost as if they had been broken and pointed in the wrong direction. When Oliviari tried to compensate, her visor went black.

  The images were gone, leaving only the moonscape—the man-made road, the runner’s path leading off into the distance, the dark horizon that still seemed too close.

  She tried to call the images back, to get the feeds provided to the medical teams, and they wouldn’t reboot.

  Obviously her query had come to someone’s attention—and that someone hadn’t liked what she was doing.

  Oliviari sighed. The only thing she could do now was go to t
he medical leader and ask about Team Two, pretend ignorance and assume that there was a problem in communication, rather than an attempt to hide something.

  Even though she knew what that something was. Someone had died on the course between miles five and six. That was why the police had been called; that was why there was video silence. Someone had died and the circumstances were odd. The initial readout had listed that a healthy person hit the panic alarm. Either there was something wrong with the bio readout, or a runner had stumbled on another runner’s body, literally.

  There were very few cases in which runners lacked the time to hit their own panic alarm. Sudden suit depressurization would be the worst. But those deaths were messy, and hard to miss. Usually people talked about that sort of thing, especially civilians like runners, who had to be passing by the body.

  But no one was saying anything.

  And Oliviari found that strangest of all.

  FOUR

  FLINT SAT in a research café three blocks from Dome University’s Armstrong Campus. Paloma had introduced him to this place. The café provided net linkage for poor students whose families couldn’t afford standard enhancements. The café was funded with grant money, and augmented by paying customers like Flint, who had a favorite corner in an alcove just off the bathrooms.

  Because of its location, the alcove was usually empty and therefore private. The screens here were smaller than the others, and voice commands did not work because of a slight echo effect that the café couldn’t afford to get rid of.

  The screens were touch screens or, for an extra fee, the café provided a keyboard. Flint used the touchscreens here. No sense in calling attention to himself.

  He did, however, wear gloves. A clear skintight pair that weren’t visible to the naked eye. They even had ridged fingertips so that they seemed like real fingers, since a lot of touch screens didn’t operate for people with gloved hands.