The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  From above, that body in the pool didn’t look bruised and battered. It probably was, but not in the same way. The yellow shirt seemed to be intact, at least from this vantage, and the hair floated, rather than being tangled.

  Rajivk sighed. He was speculating on things that meant nothing because he wasn’t in the thick of it. People walked up and down the path, sometimes alone, sometimes consulting, rarely going into the upper overlook, although for a while, one entire team worked the overlook closer to the mountains, where the Jeleen River turned smooth.

  If the body belonged to Glida Kimura, they could let him go right away. The only real thing he had in common with Glida was that they both worked at the sector base, just like 80 percent of Sandoveil. He and Glida didn’t even work in the same department.

  The only reason he had gotten to know her was that they sometimes passed each other on these paths. She’d be walking with her wife, and he’d be walking alone. Eventually, they would nod a hello.

  When he got to work one morning, Glida had been heading inside at the same time. They had exchanged names and pleasantries, and had laughed about being the only ones in Sandoveil who loved the Falls enough to walk around it on a regular basis.

  He didn’t even know the name of Glida’s wife. The only reason he had known they were married was because Glida had said they had wanted to hold the ceremony near the Falls, and the city had denied them a permit for it.

  He had no idea where they had even had their ceremony, only that it hadn’t been up here.

  Voices came up from below, apparently loud enough to be heard over the roar of the Falls.

  Another chill ran through him. Did that mean they’d found another body? Located another person? Or lost a member of the recovery team?

  He wanted to ask, but at the moment, he was alone on this level.

  And then his work handheld buzzed in the corner pocket of his shirt. He had forgotten he was even carrying it. This day seemed so long already that work had been a very long time ago. The first thing he usually did when he got home was to place the handheld in its little charger by the door, set on emergency notification only.

  But he hadn’t done that yet, which meant they could get to him for stupid stuff.

  He hauled it out of his pocket. The handheld had a red border, which meant urgent. He sighed and placed the device on audio only. He didn’t want them to see anything going on up here—even though, most likely, anyone looking at this scene through a screen would only see darkness.

  There was a message for him to listen to before he contacted the base.

  We have a situation. We need you at the base immediately.

  The message came from Bristol Iannazzi, who was one of his supervisors. Only he’d never had any real interactions with Iannazzi. She did her work and let the staff beneath her supervise everyone else’s.

  A situation. He couldn’t remember ever hearing that language before.

  But, on some level, the summons didn’t surprise him. The day had started oddly. The reaction of his colleagues to the news had been even stranger. If someone was going to break and do something untoward, today would have been the day.

  He stood up. He had to find Marnie.

  He had to let her know that he was going to leave—whether she wanted him to or not.

  ELEVEN

  MORE MEMBERS OF the YSR-SR had arrived as word spread. Either that, or Marnie Sar had called them. Tevin didn’t have time to figure out which was the actual case.

  Twilight had fallen, which meant the light at the base of Fiskett Falls was mostly gone. His team had set up large lights on this side of the trail, and someone—he had no idea who—had set up lights on the other side from either the path or the overlooks. The lights pointed downward.

  He wished he had learned about this body earlier in the day, because they would be working all night now. Even with the best possible lighting, the brightness would change the entire look of the scene, making it seem deceptively safe.

  If he reminded his team of that, they would get angry at him for telling them something obvious. If he didn’t remind them and one of them died, he would regret it.

  So he opted for a statement that would remind them, but wouldn’t upset them quite as much.

  “Watch the shadows,” he said.

  He got no response at all. He glanced at his team. Even through their hoods, they looked grim. Apparently, they were as determined as he was to remain safe.

  Dinithi had grabbed a light and put it over her shoulder. Zhou had some extra gear in a pack over his—and that probably had an extra light as well. Tevin had one large light and several built into his suit.

  Only Novoa didn’t seem too concerned. But she was the only one of them who had ever worked in space. Darkness didn’t bother her as much as it bothered the rest of them.

  Tevin slipped behind a pair of six-foot-tall rocks to the opening that led behind the Falls. The city had built a protective barrier here, making it look like the rocks continued, when in fact, they did not. In the early years of the city, too many people had died here, so the city decided to make changes.

  At the same time they built the path, they barricaded off the most dangerous parts of the Falls. Some were barricaded permanently. Others, like this one, were useful for search, rescue, and recovery, so people with the proper codes could bring down the barriers.

  He pulled off his glove and touched the side of one of the rocks. It was smooth, because it wasn’t a rock. It was composed of nanobits, programmed slightly differently than the nanobits in the path.

  The barrier here had a simple code, based on fingerprints from a living hand and an easy-to-remember pattern that changed quarterly. In theory, anyone at the YSR-SR could use the pattern to access this part of the Falls recreationally, but as far as he knew, no one ever had.

  He placed his fingertips on the extra layer of nanobits. The usually smooth surface felt slightly rough; that was how he knew he was in the right place. He tapped his fingers in the set pattern for this quarter—three from his index finger, one from each finger, then three from his middle finger, and so on—until he finished the entire pattern.

  The barrier slid down, disappearing into the path. It looked like someone had cleared rocks quickly or like they had gone to a completely different part of the Falls.

  Dithini let out a breath audible in the comm.

  “That’s always so impressive,” she said.

  No one answered.

  Tevin stepped across the barrier—always the most dicey moment, in his opinion, because he worried that it would rebound in place. It didn’t, at least for him.

  He stepped back, then watched as Dinithi crossed, followed by Novoa and, finally, Zhou. They crowded near him, waiting for the barrier to go back up. If it didn’t reset within five minutes, he would have to do it by hand.

  He hated waiting. If he had been even slightly convinced that they were heading toward a rescue instead of a recovery, he would try to reset the barrier right now.

  But sometimes doing so upset the delicate mechanism. The barrier didn’t come down very often, and its controls had been badly constructed. Fixing the barrier hadn’t worked its way up any priority list, so any team who crossed that barrier had to waste precious time waiting for it to work or worry that they might leave it open for anyone to wander back here.

  Finally, it bounced back up, making the path back to the vehicles look impassable.

  “All right,” he said. “One at a time to the pool.”

  The path here was wide and deliberately rough. It had been built by the original Fleet settlers hundreds of years ago. Everyone in the team activated their boots so that they clung to the rough nanobits with the same kind of power they would use if they were outside of a spaceship.

  Right now, they didn’t need that power, but they would in twenty yards or so. The path was wide here because it wound around the mountainside. There was plenty of room for the team to walk abreast, even though they didn’t.
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br />   The path would narrow in ten yards and become treacherous ten yards beyond that.

  Right now, it hugged the mountainside. The pool was a few yards away and nearly ten feet down from the path. The water in the pool was choppy from the Falls pouring into it, but there was no danger that the team would slip and fall into it—at the moment anyway.

  The path wasn’t even wet here. But the roar of the Falls made it hard to hear, especially since Tevin didn’t shut off the outside noise when he had his hood on. The hood cut noise automatically, but not severely. He set it to let outside noise in when he was working in a natural environment so that he could judge hazards as well.

  The path wound around one more corner. Spray rose up here, and the pool had gotten closer to the edge. No rocks or anything extended beyond the path. From here on out, the path was decidedly more dangerous.

  Tevin rounded that corner and found himself beside the waterfall. This moment was always breathtaking. A wall of water, cascading in front of him. The first time he had walked here, he had removed his hood just to feel it all—the ice-cold spray on his face, the fresh and damp scent of the air, the crackle of power all around him.

  He didn’t dare be distracted by that this time. He inched his way behind the Falls, where it was deceptively calm.

  To his right, the cliff face curved inward. It had eroded in the centuries since the Fleet’s engineers had built the path. Some of the dirt still piled along the interior edge of the path. In theory, the nanobits should process the dirt and use it to make the path sturdier, but that function seemed to have failed years before.

  Tevin always saw the dirt as something that made transversing this part of the path even more difficult, but Zhou, who worked as a geologist for the sector base, said the problem was worse than that. The entire cliff face was unstable. Either it could crumble bit by bit over years, or something could trigger an avalanche, which would bury anyone on the path and possibly fill in this back area of the pool.

  That would be a shame, because Tevin loved this part of the pool. In daylight, it was an eerie brownish-green, and exceptionally clear. The turbulance from the Falls seemed to flow outward—toward the main part of the pool. While the pool back here wasn’t exactly calm, it wasn’t filled with as many eddies and currents either. Just the soft and somewhat predictable ripples from the water falling like a curtain before it.

  In this light, the pool looked black. The lights from above, filtered through the moving water, shone on the surface, but didn’t penetrate it. Tevin knew from experience that shining the lights the team carried on this part of the pool would make the water reflect more but look dirtier at the same time.

  Tevin moved carefully past the fallen rocks. He kept his hands free and didn’t touch any part of the cliff face. Ever since Zhou had warned him that the cliff face was unstable, Tevin didn’t want to do anything that would initiate some kind of slide.

  The roar of the waterfall seemed muted back here. He had known that was going to happen too, but he still didn’t understand it. He once thought that the sound of the water would echo back here, along with the vibrations from the power of Falls, but it didn’t.

  It felt like a shelter, like a place he could hide forever, and no one would find him.

  On this part of the path, he wasn’t even getting hit with spray. It almost felt like he was in a cave, protected from the rest of the world. The waterfall formed a curtain of water that, in daylight, was opaque and comforting at the same time. Right now, it looked foamy and bright with the lights from above—as if someone were shining a spotlight through thick fabric over a window.

  If it had been like this all the way along, the city of Sandoveil would have allowed this path to remain open. But as the path got narrower, it got lower as well. In the spring—all three parts of it—the water rose so that sometimes, it actually lapped against the edges of the path.

  So far, Tevin had never had to cross this path during the worst of the spring rains and snowmelt, so he had no idea if the path was ever submerged, but he suspected that it might be.

  He finally reach the last wide part of the path. It might have been an overlook in the days before this path was closed off, but if that was the case, the protective walls were long gone. He stood in front of the cliff face—not leaning against it—and waited for the rest of the team to arrive.

  Dinithi came first, head moving as she observed all of her surroundings. Novoa peered at the water, maybe looking for clues or something to do with the body. Zhou brought up the rear, careful to check behind them as they stopped to make sure some civilian hadn’t followed them.

  “Okay,” Tevin said. “This part will be tricky. Cherish, I need you to follow Ardelia through here.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Dinithi said.

  And that was the reason Dinithi unnerved him. Because she sometimes (often) dismissed his orders.

  “You haven’t seen the next part of the path, and it’s growing very dark,” he said. “I want you to follow me and Ardelia. Jabari will bring up the rear because he knows the procedure down here.”

  “Seems like an excess of caution, Tevin,” Dinithi said.

  He smiled in spite of himself.

  “Yep,” he said. “That’s why I’m team leader and you’re not. We all need headlamps, people, but pointed downward so we don’t blind each other.”

  Everyone reached up to the top of their hoods and manually adjusted the lights. That was learned through long experience as well. The adjustments happened quicker and were more accurate when done by hand. A flaw in the suits that, according to an YSR-SR team member, seemed to happen only in real gravity, not in the zero-g the suits were designed for.

  The additional lights, pointed downward, revealed the moss growing on the rocks beside the pool, and the algae at the pool’s edges. If Tevin pulled off his hood, he knew he would be able to smell it all, along with the unusual humidity in this place.

  Instead, he got the metalic tang of the recycled air inside his suit.

  He rounded the last corner, and peered at the path ahead. It was worse than he remembered. Parts of it had fallen away. Other parts disappeared into the growing darkness.

  He was glad they hadn’t had a rescue call. At this time of day, there was no way to hurry through this part of the path. Getting the body out would be another chore he really didn’t want to think about.

  “Okay,” he said with more cheer than he felt. “Let’s go.”

  TWELVE

  THE PROBLEM, BRISTOL thought as she worked, was that this was a storage room. No one expected anything to happen in here. And unlike storage rooms on the surface, no one expected break-ins or thefts either. Everyone who had access to this part of the facility had high clearance, and knew better—or should have known better—than to steal something from such a remote location.

  Plus, the storage room didn’t have small items. It had housed a runabout, for godsake, as well as some smaller equipment used in repair. But none of the equipment could be easily carried from the facility.

  She spent half an hour getting current readings from the walls and door, so she could compare them with the original readings. But the security system itself didn’t surveil this room the same way it surveiled the others. It had a camera, like her main room did, but the monitoring for everything from the environment to the integrity of the room itself got bundled into the standard surveillance of her lab.

  Her lab had two separate surveillance systems—the standard one, and the technical one. She usually used the system that focused on the tech because she wanted to know the details of whatever went wrong, if something did. The standard system was for security, and usually she thought that a good arrangement. She hated having anyone, be they human or computer, examine what she was doing on a micro level.

  Right now, though, she would have loved it, especially if it had been focused on the storage room. Because she had no easy way to compare the room as it had been with the room as it currently was.

&nbs
p; Bristol didn’t want to think about the fact that someone might have snuck into her lab and stolen the runabout. She hoped, although she saw no evidence for it, that the someone had snuck in while she was working earlier in the day, and that was why she heard that door bang.

  But if she paused and really thought about it, she knew that the door had banged as the damage occurred inside the storage room. If that blast door hadn’t held, she would probably be dead now. Or so injured that she might never be able to function again.

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. Even when she promised herself that she wouldn’t think about the what-ifs, they rose out of her subconscious like water bubbling out of the mud flats.

  She had come close to dying, through no fault of her own. She had always thought that if she were going to die at work, it would be because she had done something wrong, not because someone else had done something illegal.

  She made herself open her eyes. Then she squared her shoulders, and walked purposefully into her lab.

  It was full of people. Half a dozen people worked on the various stationary work stations, under the aegis of the security team. The team had questions. The techs might be able to answer them.

  She had never had this many people in her lab before. They made her both claustrophobic and nervous. She didn’t want them to touch anything or move anything, even though they would have to in order to work.

  This place would be a mess for weeks after the crisis ended, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Bristol ended up beside the closed-off anacapa drive. She didn’t want anyone to come near it. She had already locked off the anacapa drive she had been working on. She was going to be the only person who touched that.

  She called up a holographic screen so that she could review her work. She needed to make sure she had done nothing wrong, as well. Eventually, though, she would have to either use one of the stationary screens or a handheld for privacy. She didn’t want some of the people in this room to see what she had been doing for the past few days.