The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  His clothes were wrinkled and clung oddly to his skin, as if they had gotten wet. His hair was a mess as well, parts of it clumped together. He stood up when he saw her.

  “Marnie,” he said.

  “Rajivk,” she said. “Gotta tell you I’m recording.”

  She was, too, using two different pieces of equipment. The YSR-SR had learned long ago to make recordings of every call, just in case tourists sued or someone—even an YSR-SR member—died. Recordings didn’t always settle the liability issues, but recordings could provide answers when, in the past, there had been none.

  “I know,” Rajivk said, as if he expected nothing less. He swept a hand toward the walls that jutted out over the water. “It’s a two-part scene. There are shoes on the lower overlook.”

  She frowned. “That’s what the dispatch said. Why are shoes important?”

  “Because your body is barefoot,” he said.

  She sighed. Some dumb tourist, then, doing some dumb tourist thing.

  “But that’s not the curious part,” he said. “At least for me.”

  Marnie made herself focus on him. She remembered him being a good volunteer, conscientious and hard-working. He wasn’t the most fit member of the group, but he had always been willing to do what he was told.

  “The curious part,” he said, “is that there is more than one pair of shoes.”

  “So there’s two bodies down there?” Marnie asked.

  “I only saw one,” he said.

  Her gaze met his. He looked both sad and concerned at the same time. She understood: Either two people had died or someone was missing.

  Either way, the YSR-SR would have to assume that one person was missing until they learned otherwise.

  “How long has the body been there?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I walked the lower trail on my way to work this morning. I haven’t been on the upper trail for the past couple of days.”

  “What made you do it today?” she asked, although she could have guessed. The weather was lovely, and everyone knew that great weather would be disappearing in the next few weeks. It was as if the citizens of Sandoveil were batteries: They stored up the great-weather energy from the late-spring to mid-fall so that they could survive the travails of the winter.

  “The announcement at the sector base,” he said.

  It took her a moment to parse the answer. She had been so expecting him to talk about the weather that what he actually said took her by surprise.

  “You heard, right?” he asked.

  She had heard. Her daughter had contacted her during lunch, needing to talk. Her daughter, all of thirty, was acting like the loss of Sector Base E-2 was the end of the world—as if she hadn’t had warning that the base would shut down eventually.

  “I heard,” Marnie said. She had to ask, even though she didn’t want to. “You upset about that?”

  He shrugged. “I took a longer walk to think about it,” he said. “But I wouldn’t characterize myself as upset. The reactions, they bothered me.”

  “Reactions?” she asked.

  “Other people’s. They seemed strange.” He shrugged again. “Although none of it is important when you get down to it. I mean, someone is dead.”

  Marnie nodded. This was where Rajivk’s old YSR-SR training had failed him. His motives for coming up here weren’t unimportant, any more than the way he felt about the sector base’s closure. That was the biggest news Sandoveil had had in a long time, maybe in Marnie’s entire lifetime.

  The base closure would change the way everything would be done in Sandoveil, from the way people worked to the supplies they got to the way they thought.

  The fact that the closure was thirty years out made it seem less important, but as Marnie’s daughter reminded her this afternoon, the changes began now.

  Nothing at the sector base would work toward the future. Everything would be focused on the closure.

  The future was moving across the galaxy, along with the Fleet.

  “You served with the Fleet, didn’t you?” Marnie asked Rajivk.

  “This isn’t about me.” He sounded testy. “There’s a dead person in the pool.”

  Marnie nodded. “I can’t do anything about the body until the rest of the team arrives.”

  “You could at least look,” he snapped.

  She let out a small breath of air. He was right about that. She hadn’t even looked. Because he had been YSR-SR, she had trusted his observation. Had he been a tourist, she would have assumed he was wrong.

  She inclined her head toward him, slightly embarrassed that she hadn’t followed procedure to the letter, particularly when she could be the bitchest person in the city if someone else didn’t follow procedure.

  She glanced at the overlook. The black nanobit-formed structure looked a little dull in the late afternoon light. At this time of year, the spray was pretty minimal, so water didn’t coat the surface of the overlook. The overlooks generally looked shiny and almost new, except up here, which was why she always considered the ones up here to be the most dangerous.

  She walked across the overlook, her boots squeaking against the dry surface, and braced herself against the wall. She had a trick for looking over the edge without endangering herself.

  First, she bent down and put her boots on the lowest adhere setting. Then she slid on a pair of gloves. She used the small control under the surface of each glove, setting them on a strong adhere setting. Then she placed her hands, deliberately, at the very center of the top of the wall.

  She raised her boots and pushed their soles against the middle of the wall. Behind her, she heard Rajivk make a small sound of protest.

  She ignored it. He didn’t work with her anymore, and even if he had, he had never outranked her.

  Still, she could hear him approach, as if he thought he could grab her if she slipped over the edge. To be truthful, his presence actually relieved her.

  She hated doing this alone.

  She leaned forward, looking to the side and down. The Falls thundered past her like it always did, but it didn’t sound as fierce at this time of year. In the spring, the Falls sounded angry and powerful, as if it could break free of its setting and attack the entire city.

  Marnie tried to ignore the Falls, a nearly impossible task. The water rushed below her, making her slightly dizzy. She always hated this perspective. The movement, the rushing water, the loud rumbles, made her feel off-balance, even though she wasn’t.

  It was hard to see through the spray. Some of that difficulty was caused by the dimming sunlight. If she had come here any later, she would have had to set up lights.

  She looked at the deceptively calm water in the second pool. The water seemed to push away from the Falls. Only the currents really didn’t do that. They swirled.

  She knew that because she had pulled nearly a dozen bodies from the pool in her career with the YSR-SR, most of them accidental deaths or suicides.

  Now she had one more. She could see the body, slowly turning as if someone were holding it from underneath, spinning it in a circle as if it were up for inspection.

  Confirmation done, she nearly looked away. But something stopped her. She blinked, frowned, tried to figure out what had caught her.

  Red pants. Bright red pants. And a yellow top.

  She recognized that. It was the usual outfit of a woman with long brown hair.

  Glida Kimura had worn that very outfit at the Sandoveil Sandwich Bar more than once.

  Marnie stared at the body for a moment. She couldn’t see the features clearly, but everything else was right.

  She cursed softly, then lowered herself back on the nanobit base of the overlook.

  “Did you see it?” Rajivk asked. He meant the body.

  Marnie nodded. She wanted to tell him who she thought the body belonged to, but she knew better. Ten years before, someone in the YSR-SR had told a local the identity of a dead body and caused a panic, particularly when it turned out that
the identification had been wrong.

  Marnie hadn’t seen the body’s face clearly enough to identify it, and anyone could wear a combination of red and yellow. Not that just anyone would.

  “You look shaken,” Rajivk said.

  She made herself give him a rueful smile. She was shaken, but she wasn’t going to confess that.

  “I’m going to make sure the rest of the team is on the way,” she said, walking away from him. Her boots stuck to the surface. She had forgotten to turn down the adhere setting.

  First she peeled off her gloves and shut them down. Then she shut down her boots, remaining bent over for just a moment.

  She couldn’t assume. She knew that. Assuming was the worst thing she could do.

  But her mind wouldn’t settle.

  Because if Glida was in the pool, barefoot, and there was a second pair of shoes beside hers, then the only logical conclusion was that she hadn’t come up here alone.

  Glida had come up here with Taji Kimura.

  Her wife.

  SIX

  “SO THAT’S WHAT you heard?” Wèi asked. “A ship left and blew out the door?”

  Bristol stepped inside the storage room. She held out her palms, then asked the suit to measure the room’s environment. She wanted to know if it was safe to remove her hood.

  No one else had removed theirs yet. She didn’t know if that was because they were following procedure or if their suits had measured something.

  “It’s not that simple,” she said, waiting for the suit to respond. “A ship couldn’t leave here using its regular drive. It would either have to be transported manually or, in the case of the FS-Prime runabouts, it could use its anacapa.”

  “Yes,” Wèi said, as if she were treating him like a stupid man.

  Everyone at the base knew the only way in and out of the base was to use an anacapa drive. Small ships came in here only in the belly of a larger vessel. One part of the base used to open at the top, but no ship had used that exit in over a hundred years.

  Besides, the entire base would have known if the old exit had been used. It probably would have been quite dramatic.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “I’m working on that runabout’s anacapa drive now. The one in the runabout, the one that got used, was temporary.”

  “So?” Wèi asked. Even though he was challenging her, his tone had changed. Now he sounded on edge.

  “So,” she said, “I had simply installed it to make sure the runabout’s systems continued to fire. It’s a feature of these FS-Prime runabouts that they had technical issues if the anacapa was ever removed.”

  “What are you saying exactly?” DuBerry asked.

  Bristol squared her shoulders, trying to look stronger than she actually felt. “I’m saying that the anacapa I put in that ship probably doesn’t work properly.”

  “Why would you do something like that?” Tranh asked, as if Bristol had done something criminal.

  “It’s standard procedure.” Bristol made sure her voice was level. “We have anacapa drives that we change in and out of older ships for just this reason. You’re not supposed to launch a ship from this part of the base. Ever. We just transferred the runabout from Ijo to this storage room internally, using the base’s anacapa drive. We never use those auxiliary anacapa drives.”

  “Then how do you know someone didn’t just transfer the runabout out of here?” Fitzwilliam asked.

  “I don’t for certain,” Bristol said. “But I received no notification of it. Did you?”

  “No,” Wèi said, his voice soft.

  “We’ll have to check that,” Tranh said. Clearly something about this job bothered her.

  “Yes, we will.” Fitzwilliam spoke gently, as if he were talking down to a child.

  “You think someone stole a runabout?” DuBerry asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bristol said. “I just know that I’m the one in charge of that runabout. And I didn’t authorize its removal. In fact, I thought it was here until you came back here.”

  “We need to track it then,” Fitzwilliam said.

  “I hope we can,” Bristol said, doubting that was possible. “I really hope we can.”

  SEVEN

  THERE WAS A trick to getting bodies out of the side pool at Fiskett Falls. Tevin Egbe had pulled more bodies out of that pool than anyone else.

  And he hated it.

  When the call had come in from Fiskett Falls, he had grabbed all of his gear, hoping that the body was in the water’s edge on the upper Jeleen River. Of course it wasn’t.

  By the time he had arrived, Marnie Sar had contacted the team, letting them know the body was at the base of the Falls, in the side pool. So, Tevin made certain that the air van pulled up on the far side of the Falls, away from the overlooks where the body had been sighted and the shoes discovered.

  Before he had left his office, where he’d been working when the call came in, he had contacted his best team. The Falls were scary on good days, and things rarely went as planned. It was always best to have the finest people beside him.

  Ardelia Novoa had come with him. She worked only a few buildings down from him. He had picked her up and brought her along, stopping twice, once to pick up her gear and once to pick up Jabari Zhou.

  Zhou had his gear ready. He had helped at the Falls five times in the past two years, and each time had scared him to death. Yet he continued to work it.

  Tevin believed that Zhou performed better because of his fear—which wasn’t usually the case with people who join the YSR-SR. But it made Zhou both more cautious and more insightful.

  It had gotten to the point where Tevin hated working without him.

  The fourth member of the team, Cherish Dinithi, had already arrived. She had her suit on, with her hood down. The main part of the suit was white, as the YSR-SR recommended, since they did so much work at night.

  The suit they all used had been developed by the Fleet for water environments. So many underground teams developing sector bases encountered groundwater that someone whose name was now lost to the history of the Fleet had modified the environmental suits the Fleet used for working in space, and made them work in water.

  The suits themselves were thin, with their own controlled environment. They compensated for water temperature, and often had to compensate for water pressure.

  More than once, a member of Tevin’s team (not this team) had gotten caught under the pounding waters of the Falls and had been gotten out safely, partly because Tevin would do damn near anything to make sure no one on his team died while recovering a dead body.

  And so far, none of the calls he had gone to—at least for the side pool—involved any survivors.

  “Let Marnie know we’re here,” he said to Dinithi as he got out of the air van. He spoke louder than usual, just to compensate for the noise of the Falls. The sound always overwhelmed him at first, although it receded slightly into the background as he worked.

  “Already have,” Dinithi said. “And she warned us. There’s a good chance this body belongs to someone we know. So be braced.”

  Tevin didn’t care, but he knew his team did. He wiped off his face. Spray had already sprinkled his skin with tiny drops of ice-cold water.

  “Shit,” Novoa said. She had gotten out of the van as well. “Did it have anything to do with the news today?”

  “The sector base closure?” Zhou asked. “You think people are going to suicide already?”

  The YSR-SR had been warned that one of the sad results of base closures was an increased suicide rate. The YSR-SR got briefed on all kinds of things about the base, and since Sector Base E-2 was the next slated for closure, the emotional results of the changes had been part of the briefings for the last several years.

  “Suiciding this early would surprise me,” Dinithi said, “but I don’t get the mentality anyway.”

  “Some people don’t handle change well,” Novoa said. “Maybe the very idea that the Fleet will be leaving this sector for
good has people upset.”

  “No way to know until we get into the water and see what we have,” Tevin said, and then clamped his mouth shut. He shouldn’t have said “what.” He should have said “who.”

  But the “what” was a window into his mindset. He couldn’t think about people, not at this juncture. Because he wasn’t being asked to recover a person.

  He was being asked to recover the remains of a person.

  He removed his shoes and his dress clothes, leaving only his undergarments in deference to the rest of the team. If he were alone, he would have worn nothing underneath the suit.

  The air had a bite to it, which meant that the water might already be early-winter cold. It shouldn’t matter. The suit should protect him from the elements.

  But he always thought about these things, just in case something went wrong.

  He slipped the suit on, and then pulled the hood over his face. The hood was clear and had several different communications links built in. First he set up the environment, running the on-site test, something he demanded his entire team do.

  They had all suited up as well, their expressions grim. They knew this task wouldn’t be pleasant. Because Dinithi had suited up before everyone else, she had grabbed the equipment—a bag that they might or might not use for the body, and everything from an old-fashioned webbing gun to a catchall pole.

  She held up two harnesses.

  “Need these?” she asked out loud. She hadn’t yet pulled up her hood.

  Sometimes, on the mountains, the team had to harness the injured back to safety. It was different with the Falls, though, and made Tevin realize she had never worked this part of the Falls before.

  Tevin touched his hood, indicating that she should put hers on.

  She gave him a deliberate grimace, then pulled up her hood with one hand. The edges were unattached, but at least the presence of the hood would allow him to check the team communications link.

  He used that now.

  “No,” he said in response to her question. “We should be able to hook and pull.”