Extremes: A Retrieval Artist Novel

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  He touched his suit, another involuntary movement. She was gong to have to teach this kid to play poker or something. He gave away himself with every movement.

  “I don’t really want to think about it out here,” he said softly.

  “Well, this is precisely the place to think about it.” DeRicci looked up at the dominating Earth. So strong and powerful, the place where humans had come from, and yet a place where they could go outside without fearing death.

  “How long does it take, Leif?” DeRicci asked, deliberately using his first name.

  “I dunno. A couple of minutes,” he said.

  “What do you think you’d be doing for those minutes?” DeRicci asked. “If, for example, your suit malfunctioned and you realized you were no longer getting air.”

  “I’d try to fix it. I’d be sending for help and trying to fix the damn thing myself.”

  “Right.” DeRicci waited for him to make the connections, but he didn’t say anything. “Did you find a panic button on this suit?”

  “I haven’t looked yet. I was still recording when you had me look at the boots.”

  “Look now,” DeRicci said.

  Van der Ketting leaned across DeRicci, nearly lost his balance again, and was about to put a hand in the dirt when she caught him.

  “Careful,” she said. “I don’t want you contaminating my crime scene.”

  “I wouldn’t—”

  “Just record. Backup record. And find a way to stay balanced, all right?”

  He sighed so loudly she could hear it echo inside her suit. Then he stood up, which was probably the best thing he could do.

  She leaned slightly to her right, and gingerly touched the victim’s hands. On the left forefinger, a marathon volunteer had drawn an O in permanent red marker. It was this year’s sign that the runner had received a chip—called the panic button—so tiny that it attached to the pad of the thumb, and was not linked into any main personal systems.

  DeRicci wasn’t ready to pull off the gloves—she’d leave that for the coroner—but the O symbol was more than enough confirmation that the runner had at least started out with the right equipment.

  “Looks like she had a panic button,” DeRicci said.

  “Why didn’t she use it?” van der Ketting asked.

  “One of many mysteries.” DeRicci frowned. Rigor mortis always hit the extremities first. But this body’s arms were mobile. Either the woman hadn’t been dead very long—and DeRicci knew the body had been here for more than an hour, time enough to make the arms hard to move—or the woman had been dead more than a day.

  The coroner would have to confirm, but DeRicci was pretty sure that this woman had been dead long before the race started.

  “She doesn’t have excess oxygen bottles,” DeRicci said. “We’re only at mile five, right?”

  “So?” van der Ketting said.

  “So, all runners carry extra oxygen, just like they carry extra liquid. There is a refueling station around mile twelve, where they trade in the bottles for fresh ones, but that’s still seven miles away.”

  “Maybe she didn’t want the excess weight,” van der Ketting said.

  “They’re required,” DeRicci said. “You can’t leave the dome without your extra oxygen. It’s one of the rules the organizers instated years and years ago. It’s essential.”

  “Maybe she threw the bottles away once she took off,” van der Ketting said.

  “Maybe,” DeRicci said. “We’ll have to look for them.”

  But she doubted that had happened. The tiny hip rings which everyone used to hold their extra bottles still had their plastic coating. That coating came off the first time a snap connected with the ring.

  DeRicci studied the suit. It looked as new as the boots. Unused, untested even. She knew a lot of runners wore new suits in the Moon Marathon, but new here was a relative term. It meant that they hadn’t used the suit in a marathon before, but they had done practice runs in it. All of these runners were experienced; they knew better than to use a brand-new piece of equipment on race day.

  The dirt only covered the parts of the suit that were touching the ground. A bit of splatter fell elsewhere, but DeRicci could trace the pattern. It came from footfalls. Other people’s footfalls.

  Her frown deepened. DeRicci scanned the dirt around the body again. There were dozens of different boot prints, many of them obliterating the prints below. She doubted anyone swept the course from year to year, so she suspected some of those boot prints were decades old.

  Still, she looked for prints with a lightning bolt running down the center, and she found them. At least ten of them, all in a patch around the body.

  Her breath caught, and she crouched as low as she could, studying the prints. They were wider than she would have expected and longer too. They seemed to be made by a bigger foot.

  These prints were all beside the body, pointing to the body. An associate, perhaps? Someone who had something in common with the victim?

  The killer?

  DeRicci couldn’t tell. “We need records of all these prints too. Make sure you get holographic as well as flats, and I want measurements as well. And compare the lightning-bolt prints to the bottom of the victim’s boots.”

  “We already know that she didn’t walk on those boots,” van der Ketting said.

  “Actually,” DeRicci said, “we don’t know that. We don’t know if the boots and suit have an automatic cleaning system that is malfunctioning now. There’s a lot we don’t know.”

  Van der Ketting nodded, sighing.

  “But I do want to know how she got here,” DeRicci said. “If she didn’t walk or run here, she was brought here, and I want to know how.”

  Van der Ketting peered at the prints. “There’re vehicle tracks beneath some of these footprints. Lots of vehicle tracks.”

  That was what DeRicci was afraid of. The evidence here had been badly compromised, and whoever had dumped the body had known it would be.

  DeRicci sent a message to both the coroner and the forensics team to get here as soon as possible. Then she sent another message to Gumiela, warning her that this was an unusual case, and that the body would have to remain on the course.

  That would bring the big guns here. Maybe, once they saw the body, DeRicci wouldn’t be blamed for disrupting the marathon.

  Van der Ketting was taking excess vids, examining footprints, and being as precise as DeRicci had hoped. DeRicci followed the upper layer of vehicle tracks—or at least what she assumed was the upper layer.

  They followed the path exactly. For all she could tell, the vehicles belonged to the marathon, making certain everything was fine along the track.

  She crossed her arms, stared at the curving landscape and the Earth beyond. Visibility was only a mile or so. Anyone could work here without worrying about being seen.

  But that begged a lot of questions. If the body had been moved here, as the evidence suggested, how had it been moved? Where did the death occur? And how did an unauthorized person get on the track?

  “Crap,” DeRicci whispered.

  She hadn’t been completely clear in her message to Gumiela. DeRicci and van der Ketting would have to disrupt the marathon even more than DeRicci had planned to.

  The only people with access to the track after the marathon started were medical personnel, race personnel, and the runners themselves. The singlet and the outfit suggested that this runner had started the race, died elsewhere, and then was brought here. But the body itself contradicted that assumption. If the woman had died the day before, she wouldn’t have been able to get her singlet.

  But maybe the singlet was a misleading clue. Maybe the runner never made it onto the course. Maybe someone had put the singlet on later, and left the body out here to mislead.

  DeRicci had a lot of things to check. The vids of the runners getting their singlets and signing in, the vids of the starting line, the information concerning each entrant and each employee.

  She nee
ded to know if this number was even one of the numbers issued by this marathon. There was a possibility that the number was fake.

  But why leave a body on this course? Why not hide it deeper in the Outside where it would take days, weeks, maybe years to find? Why make it look like part of the race?

  For that matter, why do it during the race?

  “Noelle?” van der Ketting asked. “What’s the problem?”

  “We can’t let anyone leave,” she said. “Every single person connected with this race is a suspect.”

  “Oh, God.” Van der Ketting shook his head. “And they thought they were running a marathon. We’re going to be here forever.”

  He was right. The investigation had just taken on staggering and immediate proportions.

  DeRicci would have to page Gumiela again, this time sending a small oral report. Her superiors weren’t going to like this. No one was going to like this, particularly the Armstrong Board of Tourism.

  Gumiela had sent DeRicci out on an easy case, and she ended up with the political nightmare of the year, as well as a mystery she wasn’t sure anyone would be happy to have solved.

  NINE

  OLIVIARI FOUND HERSELF in charge of the environmental suits. She got to see everyone who came in off the course, and she got to do the first diagnostic pass. It was a job she hadn’t even known existed when she drafted her undercover plan.

  If she had known, she would have angled for it, but she doubted she would have gotten it. Most of the people in the tent had been with the marathon for a long time.

  She was stationed in a small changing area just off the main door. Her partner, a woman named Hayley, took the suits, labeled by singlet number, and hung them in a special decontamination room.

  Decontamination was something that most domes required when people went from an unenclosed environment to an enclosed one. The moon’s surface had no known contaminants on it; the fear in this instance was disease or a manufactured toxin.

  Oliviari liked handling the suits. She got her DNA samples, along with the singlet number, so the very problem she’d been fearing from the moment she decided to search for Frieda Tey here had been alleviated. Oliviari was able to get her samples and label them at the same time, without anyone noticing.

  The runners were coming into the medical tent regularly now. Oliviari took their suits before doing the diagnostic pass, handing the suits to Hayley. As Oliviari took the suits, she used a small fingertip-sized DNA net to swipe globes of sweat and sloughed skin, moving each sample to a collection bag on her hip. Then she had the net tag the samples with the singlet numbers. If she got caught, she could always say that someone had told her to do this, and she would give over her evidence.

  The preliminary information, taken off the DNA net, would be enough to run a cursory investigation. Of course, it would be best to hang onto the entire sample, but she was prepared in case that wasn’t possible.

  The runners seemed dazed and tired, unable to immediately adjust to their change in environments. As the runners stepped out of their suits, it seemed like they were stepping out of their skins.

  Most runners didn’t even wear anything underneath, except special lotion designed to keep the material from chafing. They seemed embarrassed by their nudity, as if they hadn’t thought this last part through. And generally, Oliviari noticed, the runners who weren’t wearing undergarments were first-timers, people who were just proud to finish anywhere in the first hundred runners.

  She looked up, studying a wall screen for a moment. Runners were still approaching the finish line in clumps. And there would be even more clumps as the afternoon went on. The bulk would finish in between four and six hours, with a few stragglers taking anywhere from eight to ten.

  So far she hadn’t had a DNA match. Her links would have sent her a signal, so that she would be able to follow the person who might be Tey. Oliviari thought it odd that Tey hadn’t come in yet.

  If Tey had been participating in the marathon, then she should have finished in the top one hundred, maybe even the top ten.

  But that was Oliviari’s expectation. She had no real basis for that in fact. So she continued to work, hoping she would find Tey somewhere in the group of runners.

  A man was holding up the line. He was too thin, and he seemed to be having trouble removing his suit. Oliviari grabbed her diagnostic just as he pitched forward.

  She caught him, his body unusually cold, and staggered backward. “Need some assistance here.”

  Hayley had taken the suits into the main room. Another medic came running, took the man out of Oliviari’s arms, and then took the diagnostic.

  “Fluids!” the medic shouted. Then he looked at Oliviari. “We need to get him to one of the stabilizer beds.”

  She glanced at the line. She would miss an entire group of runners just because she was helping this one. But she could still feel the man’s chilled skin against hers. The smell of his sweat clung to her clothes. She slipped an arm around his back, and helped the medic drag him into the main part of the tent.

  A handful of runners sat on bedsides while medics looked at sprained ankles, torn ligaments, pulled muscles. A few were lying on beds, while IVs poured liquids into their systems. One or two more wore breathing masks, while someone monitored the readouts bedside.

  A gopher brought a cup of miracle water to the medic who was helping Oliviari. Miracle water wasn’t a miracle at all, just water filled with electrolytes, proteins, a touch of salt, and a lot of sugar, guaranteed to revive the most dehydrated soul.

  The medic stopped dragging the runner forward. He tipped the runner’s head back.

  “Hold him still,” the medic said.

  Oliviari braced the runner as the medic tried to pour water into him. Half of it trailed out of the man’s mouth and down his face, dripping onto Oliviari.

  She tried not to grimace. The runner coughed, put up a hand to stop the flow of liquid, then shook his head. He looked more lively than he had just a few minutes ago.

  “It’s a start,” the medic said. “Let’s go. Bed three.”

  Bed three was about two meters away. Oliviari helped the medic drag the runner there, then eased the runner onto the bed. The man’s skin was gray, his eyes sunken. He had clearly pushed too hard. Oliviari wondered if his suit had malfunctioned as well, maybe not controlling temperature as well as it should have or giving him too little oxygen.

  “Thanks,” the medic said, bending over the runner. Neither of them looked at Oliviari. She backed away, scanning this part of the tent.

  Most of the people getting treatment were men. Oliviari saw nothing suspicious about that. It was just the luck of the draw. Besides, the marathon always drew a lot more male first-timers than female ones, so the chances of a man being in this part of the tent were greater than the chances of a woman being here.

  Still, Oliviari made sure she looked carefully at the women. None of the women looked like Tey, and most were too young to be her, even if Tey had had a lot of enhancements. Oliviari went to each bed, though, and put a reassuring hand on the women’s shoulders, asking each one if they needed anything extra.

  To a person, they all said no.

  Then Oliviari went back to her post.

  Hayley looked overwhelmed. The line had bunched together, people crowding in three and four across. The diagnostic was on the table behind Hayley, obviously unused and unseen.

  Suits had piled up behind her as well, since she clearly hadn’t had a chance to take them to the closet. That made Oliviari smile. Maybe helping that poor man hadn’t harmed her search at all.

  Oliviari picked up the diagnostic and walked over to Hayley.

  “Hey,” she said softly. “Leave the suits. I’ll help you gather them later, okay? We’re in the crunch period and we’re going to have to work hard to get caught up.”

  Hayley flashed her an angry glance. “You’re not supposed to leave your post.”

  “Except for an emergency,” Oliviari said. “That man
fainted against me. That constitutes an emergency.”

  Hayley pressed her lips together, but didn’t say anything as yet another runner forced a suit into her arms. Oliviari pushed forward, getting Hayley out of position. Oliviari wanted to be able to touch all of those suits.

  She ran her diagnostic over the runner, said, “You need some fluids, and probably something to eat. There’s a juice bar just through that door. I’d suggest liquids before you clean up. Otherwise, you’re fine.”

  The runner smiled at her, and she smiled back. She slipped his DNA sample into her bag and continued, dispensing advice as she stole a tiny piece of each person who stopped in front of her, expecting a little help.

  TEN

  WHEN FLINT RETURNED to his office, he immediately set his security system on highest alert. He had the system double-lock the doors and seal them, then he had his internal net lock itself down, severing any contacts it had with the outside world.

  He ran a diagnostic, looking for trackers, tracers, ghosts, and bugs. He found echoes at the edges of his system, places where various people had tried to break in since Paloma had left, but no evidence that anyone succeeded.

  He reprogrammed the diagnostic, taking out all of Paloma’s codes and back doors. He should have done this when he bought the business from her but, despite her warnings that he could trust no one now that he was a Retrieval Artist, he had trusted her.

  He had always thought Paloma’s warning that Trackers, aliens, and others could get to Retrieval Artists through their loved ones was a fairly obvious warning. Threaten a loved one and of course a Retrieval Artist would give in to any demand.

  But her warning was more complex than that, the problem subtler than he had realized. No one looked as closely at the people they cared about as they did at strangers. A loved one could compromise a Retrieval Artist’s business better than anyone else could.

  Flint cared about Paloma and trusted her more than he had trusted anyone in years. But even she had secrets, secrets that might hurt his work.

  The fact that he hadn’t taken her out of the business completely was his fault, not hers. If he had problems because of that, well, then, he couldn’t blame her for them either.