Extremes: A Retrieval Artist Novel

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  DeRicci could only imagine what he was thinking. It was quite possible that no matter what happened, no matter how careful everyone was, that this would be the last Moon Marathon ever run.

  It was one thing to have people die accidentally on the course. Everyone who had ever been in an environmental suit knew that accidents happened—sometimes caused by a person’s own stupidity, and sometimes not.

  But a murder on the track, after the race started, would be a sensational story, picked up all over the known worlds. Reporters from all media would come in from various planets. Alien groups who thought marathoning unusual would use this as filler, or as yet one more way to prove that humans were unstable.

  The Moon Marathon would get a terrible reputation. Big-name runners didn’t come to marathons with bad reputations. If the bigger names weren’t here, the tourists would drop off.

  And since this event brought in a large portion of Armstrong’s tourist revenue, any decrease in attendance would have a profound impact on that sector of Armstrong’s economy.

  “The publicity is why we have to do this quickly,” DeRicci said. “If we allow the investigation to drag on, then the marathon is tainted forever.”

  The organizers were nodding. She had them on her side, finally. The next thing they would try to figure out would be how to keep the murder secret which, in the short term, wouldn’t hurt her investigation at all.

  But that wasn’t what she wanted the organizers to do next. She wanted them to make her job easier. She needed them to rearrange this temporary complex so that she could conduct interviews in private.

  DeRicci knew she had only a few minutes to take control of this investigation before Chaiken got over his shock and started to fight with her.

  “I suggest,” she said in a tone that made it clear her suggestion was really an order, “that you feed these people, make sure they have enough to drink, and find some chairs for them. I also suggest that you keep them Outside if possible. Once they get inside the dome, they can scatter all over the city. It would be better for all of us if they didn’t.”

  “You’re going to arrest one of our runners?” Chaiken asked.

  “I don’t know,” DeRicci said. “I’ll need to talk to everyone connected to the marathon. If you can find a way to keep the spectators here as well, that would be helpful.”

  “You realize that you’ll have to talk to hundreds of people.” Lakferd seemed like the only person who wasn’t in shock. DeRicci made a note of that, although she wasn’t sure what it meant at the moment. “You and your partner can’t do all of that in one day.”

  “I know,” DeRicci said. “I’ve already been in contact with my boss. We’re diverting a lot of police to these interviews. We want them done as quickly as possible. This is a full-blown crisis for the city. We’re going to deflect as much of it as possible.”

  “You can’t conduct all of the interviews in here,” the woman said. “You’re going to need other facilities.”

  “Yes,” DeRicci said, relieved someone was going to help with this. “Places with private rooms would be best, so that we can interview without being overheard.”

  The woman nodded. She stood. “I know just the place. I’ll get you set up.”

  No one else moved. Finally, the woman touched Lakferd’s arm.

  “Come on,” she said. “The detective is right. We have to move quickly, and we have to make these runners comfortable. We have the dining hall. We may as well use it. I think I can arrange for more food to be brought in.”

  “Dining hall?” DeRicci asked.

  The woman nodded. “I know it’s not what you asked for because it’s inside the dome, but I think it’ll work better than anything else. We were planning a dinner for the first twenty runners, along with a medal ceremony. The area is big—we were going to feed some city luminaries, but I’m sure you don’t want them here. So we’ll have food for about two hundred people. I’m sure we can scrounge up even more.”

  “It’s a disaster,” Chaiken muttered.

  “Not if we handle it right,” the woman said. “We’ll feed the runners and the volunteers, and you can put some police on the doors so that no one leaves until the interviews are done. Would that work?”

  “It might,” DeRicci said. “But I’d prefer it if people stayed Outside.”

  The woman shook her head. “Logistically that just doesn’t work. They go into the Med tent when they’re finished, get cleared, and come into the dome. The runners are already following that procedure. Changing it now would make things even harder for you.”

  DeRicci thought about it. Saving time was her top priority. Saving time and making certain that everyone went through a preliminary interview.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll get some uniforms on the doors. You’ll make sure no one leaves. If we lose even a single witness, I’ll blame the marathon organizers.”

  “Threats again, Detective?” Lakferd asked.

  “Threats for the first time,” she said. “And this time it’s a serious one. I have to talk with everyone connected to this event. If anyone slips through, I’ll look harder at the organizers. The last thing you folks want to do is be in trouble for interfering with a police investigation.”

  “We won’t interfere,” the woman said. “We’ll do what we can.”

  Chaiken made no such promises. He continued to stare at the wall screen.

  “Right, Alfred?” the woman asked, elbowing him.

  Chaiken looked up at her. “You’re not in charge, Dorthea.”

  Dorthea Jonston. DeRicci nodded slightly. She was going to have take notes because she was going to hear a lot of names before the day ended.

  “I am now,” Jonston said. “No one is going to sabotage my marathon. I’m going to do everything I can to save this event.”

  She looked at DeRicci. DeRicci saw both anger and determination in the woman’s face.

  “You tell me what you need and when you need it,” Jonston said. “I’ll make sure you get everything.”

  “Thank you,” DeRicci said, feeling absurdly grateful. At least she wouldn’t have to fight the organizers as hard as she had thought she would.

  For a while, all she would have to do was concentrate on finding a killer. And that was always the part she did best.

  TWELVE

  OLIVIARI HAD LOST TRACK of time and she had lost count of the runners. This had to be the crunch—six exhausted runners stretched across the narrow corridor, lines going back as far as Oliviari could see. She wondered if people were bunched in the small airlock and knew there was no way for her to tell.

  The recycled air seemed thin here, perhaps because so many exhausted people were breathing it. The temperature in the arrival area had risen dramatically, and Oliviari was sweating, even though she’d stripped down to her T-shirt and pants.

  Two other medics had joined Oliviari, all of them doing diagnostics, some of them taking suits and putting them away. Somehow Oliviari still managed to touch each runner, grabbing them and pulling them forward or helping them step out of a suit.

  No one seemed to notice her extreme helpfulness. No one seemed to notice that she was doing anything out of the ordinary at all.

  Several other runners had collapsed against her, but none as badly as that first man had. Oliviari thought she could still smell his stale sweat mingling with her own, as if they’d had a night of passion instead of a momentary touch.

  She hadn’t had time to check on his condition. The afternoon was at its busiest pace, and she had to concentrate just to get DNA from all the runners. She kept reciting singlet numbers to herself, so that she could keep track of the people she’d touched. She also tried to focus on their faces, doing her best to make certain no one slipped past her.

  Few of the runners spoke, and those who did were ignored. Most of the runners were too tired to compare notes, and some were irritated at the end-of-the-race procedures, even though everyone had been warned about them. Except for a few murmurs,
Hayley’s short and repetitive instruction speech, and the occasional cough, the only sounds in the room were the rustle of fabric and the shuffling of feet.

  Oliviari almost felt as if she were still wearing her environmental suit. She wasn’t used to large groups of people being so silent. But then she’d never worked in a situation like this before.

  Every now and then she’d stop, take a moment to look at the rows of runners, and scan for Tey. So far there had been no sign of the woman, and Oliviari was beginning to doubt the wisdom of her plan.

  Oliviari smiled at a thin, unenhanced woman with exceptionally dry skin. The woman looked exhausted as she handed Oliviari a damp environmental suit. Oliviari slipped a bit of the DNA off, bagged it, and ran a scan of the woman.

  “You need fluids,” she said, as she so often did. “And check in with one of the medical personnel. You’ll need a thorough going over.”

  “No,” the woman said.

  Oliviari had already moved to the man beside her. It took a moment for the woman’s refusal to register. “What?”

  “I’m not going to see anyone. I didn’t come here for treatment. I came to run. I’ve done that, and I’m going home.”

  “Ma’am,” Oliviari said, wishing this wasn’t happening at the moment, “you’re dehydrated, and your skin is slightly blue. I have a hunch that for the last few miles, your environmental suit wasn’t operating at peak efficiency.”

  “Which is my problem, isn’t it?” the woman snapped. “I can deal with it inside the dome with my own doctors instead of the quacks you people hire.”

  The runners in the narrow corridor looked at the woman. Whispered conversation began in the back, near the entrance. Oliviari couldn’t tell if the sounds were agreement, disagreement, or just information being passed back and forth.

  “Ma’am,” Oliviari said. “Just go into the main part of the tent. They’ll work with you there.”

  She had almost said “deal with you there,” but some measure of self-control had prevented it. One thing she did know: she would never go undercover in a job like this again. She didn’t like being at other people’s beck and call, working so hard for very little return, and dealing with people who had tested their own limits—and were cranky about the results.

  “Hand me my suit,” the woman said, holding out her hand. It trembled.

  “You’ll have to wait until it comes out of decon,” Oliviari said.

  “I’m not waiting for anyone. I want to get out of here. I heard that you’re holding people against their will, and I won’t stand for it. You hear me?”

  The woman shoved her way toward the open door where the suits were being taken. A large man in a uniform who acted as the med tent’s security wrapped his arms around her and moved her to one side.

  But Oliviari had stopped working. The entire team had. They were staring at the woman being carted toward the main area of the medical tent.

  “What did she mean, being held against their will?” Hayley asked, voice so breathy she was almost whispering.

  “I don’t know,” Oliviari said. “I hadn’t heard anything.”

  “A few of us who’ve been doing this for years don’t go through the tent.” The man Oliviari had been about to help spoke as softly as Hayley had. “We tried this year, and we were redirected here. When we asked about it, one of our friends, a guy who’s been volunteering for thirty years, said no one gets to leave until some investigation gets completed.”

  Oliviari remembered the police heading off on the surface vehicle. She’d been trapped in here ever since, so she hadn’t seen if more police had arrived. Odd that they wouldn’t come inside the medical tent.

  “What kind of investigation?” she asked.

  The man shrugged. “No one knows. I’ve asked a few times. They were adamant, though. Everyone through the medical tent. Allison thinks that we’re all being checked for something.”

  “Allison being the woman they just carried off?” Oliviari asked.

  He nodded.

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but I saw a lot of runners down out there this year, and at least one of them wasn’t moving.”

  The murmuring got louder, as word traveled backward. Something strange was going on. Oliviari wondered how she could find out what it was without blowing her cover.

  She extended her hand for the man’s suit.

  “Well, let’s keep going through the motions, shall we?” she said. “I mean, if there were some kind of contamination, we’d be looking for it on the prelim diagnostic, and I haven’t been told about it. I also haven’t been told about everyone staying here. So that might just be a bad rumor, designed to make you guys follow procedure.”

  His gaze met hers, and he shook his head ever so slightly. But her small speech, spoken louder than the rest of the conversation, seemed to calm the murmuring. The runners shuffled, but didn’t seem as nervous as they had a moment before.

  Still, long after the guy left, Oliviari pondered what he’d had to say. An investigation put her in a difficult position. Armstrong required Trackers to register with the city, theoretically to discourage vigilantism. Mostly, though, Armstrong, as the Moon’s main port city, used its own resources to help Trackers, figuring Disappeareds were bad for business.

  If she got caught, she would be charged significant penalties by the City, penalties that would go on her record. Earth Alliance would immediately review her license, and she might find herself restricted to certain worlds, or have to requalify for her job all over again.

  Sweat rolled down Oliviari’s face. She was very hot. So were Hayley and the others. Someone had to complain about the environmental system. Someone had to find out what was really going on.

  Oliviari couldn’t do it. She’d already attracted too much attention, and she didn’t want to attract any more. Particularly if the police were investigating the marathon’s volunteers as well as the participants.

  Maybe this was all a blessing in disguise. If Tey had joined the marathon, then she would be trapped here too. If Tey wasn’t here, Oliviari wasn’t sure where to look any more.

  Sometimes Oliviari felt like Tey was a figment of her own imagination.

  Oliviari smiled at the next runner in line, even though she didn’t feel like smiling at anyone. She held out her hand, and the runner handed her the damp suit. Oliviari pulled the DNA sample, and tucked it away.

  She would continue to work here until someone made her stop. No matter what setbacks she had today, Oliviari would catch Tey. And all of this would come to an end, for Oliviari, for Tey’s victims’ families.

  For everyone.

  THIRTEEN

  THE SYSTEM had more ghosts than Flint expected.

  He spent the remaining hours of the afternoon, capturing and retrieving the ghosts, putting them in a separate system where no one else could steal them. He felt a mixture of anger and worry as he worked, primarily because Paloma hadn’t been as cautious as she had led him to believe she was.

  Anyone with a hacker’s knowledge of systems could have broken into her files and stolen whatever they needed.

  Flint wondered if that had happened. He wondered if she had had any inexplicable failures in her career or if a Tracker had worked off her systems, finding people Paloma thought were safely hidden.

  Maybe that was why Wagner had come to him, because they knew this in-house network was so very vulnerable.

  There was no way Flint could find and download all the information, read the necessary files, and be finished in time for his meeting with Wagner. Flint would have to finish after Wagner left, provided he had time to do so, provided he didn’t take the case Wagner was so hot for him to have.

  As Flint worked, he also grew angry at himself, for not double-checking everything Paloma had left him. A sense of disillusionment was growing in him, and he found that ironic. He had thought all the illusion had left his life ten years before.

  An hour before his sched
uled meeting with Wagner, Flint set up a program within the system to net all the ghost files imprinted on the system’s memory. He would deal with those later.

  While the system worked, he made the files he had found solid, then searched them for mentions of the Wagners. To his surprise, hundreds upon hundreds of files scrolled down his screen, all of them with at least one mention of WSX or one of the Wagners.

  The files dated back fifty years or more.

  That surprised Flint too. Paloma had updated her system several times in her career, but apparently she had simply expanded the existing system, letting information flow between the old and new parts, rather than moving information to the newer system and destroying the older one.

  Not that information could ever be completely destroyed. Perhaps that was why she operated the way she had. Perhaps she felt that she had to keep her old systems here, hidden within any upgrades, so that no one could scan her discarded systems for deleted information.

  It didn’t help him, though, and there was so much about the Wagners in her files, he didn’t know where to start. He wouldn’t be able to go through everything in a week, let alone an hour.

  Flint scanned some of the early files, saw that Paloma had not lied to him about her position with WSX. She wasn’t on payroll, but she seemed to have handled any job they had for a Retrieval Artist. Her early reports were crisp and to-the-point: she wrote about the status of a Disappeared, even to the point of advising WSX as to whether or not to pursue a case.

  It seemed that most of the early cases revolved around estate work: a Disappeared would inherit significant funds, and Paloma would evaluate the case. She would determine the cost of finding the Disappeared. If the cost exceeded the amount of the inheritance, she recommended that WSX put the inheritance into some kind of escrow, and had them flag the file for review every three years.

  It looked, at first glance, as if she had a cushy relationship with the law firm. They would give her more than enough to work to keep her busy for years at a time, and they seemed to pay her a handsome amount as well.