The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  But, he knew, Iannazzi was in there. Why would he have expected her to be alone?

  The team walked through the door, and moved to one side. Rajivk entered last, startled to see four others besides Iannazzi and the person she was talking to. Iannazzi and four of the others were wearing environmental suits, with the hoods down. But the remaining person was dressed casually—and, he realized, she was frozen in the middle of the floor.

  The door banged behind him, and he jumped. One of the women in the environmental suits had pulled it shut. He glanced at her, recognizing her from security, but he didn’t know her name.

  And still, the woman in the middle of the room hadn’t moved.

  It was a holographic image, someone in mid-movement.

  His mouth went dry. It was Glida Kimura.

  “What the hell?” he asked, his worry about overcrowding forgotten.

  Everyone in the storage room turned to him. He didn’t look at them, but instead walked toward the image of Glida. She was mostly solid, but he could see the glimmering of the black nanobit walls behind her.

  The walls were supposed to glimmer. No wonder Iannazzi had brought the team in here. The room was repairing itself.

  Still.

  Which meant the damage to this room had been extensive.

  That crawling feeling under his skin had grown worse. He suddenly wondered if it was more than simple aversion to the situation and all the other people. Was that feeling also being caused by something in this room? Something he couldn’t see? A remaining chemical reaction? Something to do with the explosions? Some kind of electric charge in the air?

  He suddenly wished he had an environmental suit, for protection or something. But he didn’t say anything.

  Instead, he walked toward that image of Glida.

  “What’s going on?” Pereyra asked the question, not Iannazzi. Iannazzi, as head of the team, should have been the one to corral her teammate, but Iannazzi had never been very good with people.

  “That’s Glida Kimura,” Rajivk said. His voice sounded hollow even to himself.

  “Yes,” said one of the men wearing an environmental suit. He was the one standing closest to Iannazzi. His brown eyes snapped with intelligence, and his tone was flat, as if he were humoring Rajivk somehow.

  “But I thought…” He let the words trail. He wasn’t supposed to know that the YSR-SR believed—that he believed—the body in the pool belonged to Glida.

  “You thought what?” The man’s tone sharpened.

  Rajivk sighed. He had already started, and they were in an enclosed environment, dealing with some kind of confidential emergency. By the time he got out of here, the situation at the Falls would probably be resolved.

  Or so he told himself. Because he didn’t think he dared keep this information back.

  “This is going to sound so strange,” he said. His voice still didn’t sound like his own. “This afternoon, after I left work, I went walking up the trails at Fiskett Falls.”

  One of the women just at the edge of his vision shifted from foot to foot. Everyone was uncomfortable in here, and no one wanted to be here, and now he was prolonging their torture.

  So he shortened the story.

  “I…um…saw a body in one of the pools. And honestly, I thought it was Glida’s.”

  “What?” the man asked. He looked at Iannazzi as if she had an explanation.

  She looked like she was about to burst into tears. She had always struck him as the most nervous department head he had ever met, someone who preferred to be alone. And now she was in a small room with nine other people. That alone would probably make her lose it after a while.

  But with the added stress of this crisis, she seemed to be barely holding on.

  Rajivk made himself look away. He didn’t have a lot of sympathy for her, and he probably should have.

  “You saw her up close?” the woman who closed the door asked.

  Rajivk shook his head. “Just the clothes. Her hair.”

  And, he realized as he looked at this image, the hair had been off. Or this image was older. Because that hair was long, and the hair here was short.

  “What?” Iannazzi asked. Her voice shook. “What-what-what’s making you so uncertain?”

  Rajivk’s gaze met hers. He had forgotten how perceptive she could be. Maybe that was why he never really liked her. She was odd and perceptive.

  “When was this hologram made?” he asked, pointing at Glida.

  “From an image in the last twenty-four hours,” the man in the environmental suit said. He was clearly in charge in some way.

  Rajivk swallowed hard. He mentally compared the woman in the water to this woman, and realized he had no idea who he had been looking at in the pool. Was he supposed to think that Glida Kimura had died? Was it some kind of setup?

  He shook his head. “Something’s really wrong here.”

  “Clearly,” said the woman who had closed the door.

  The rest of the team was watching quietly, as if they didn’t know what to make of this.

  He didn’t know what to make of it either. He was confused. She was dead, but she had been at the base twenty-four hours ago? He didn’t understand.

  “Why exactly do you have Glida’s image down here?” Rajivk asked.

  “She’s the one who broke into the lab,” the man in the environmental suit said. “She might even have stolen the runabout.”

  That very idea made his brain hurt.

  “Glida?” he asked. “Really? You think she could have done that? She’s completely harmless.”

  “You’re basing that on what?” the other man in an environmental suit asked. He had shaved his head, and clearly not for aesthetic reasons, since he didn’t have a symmetrical skull.

  Rajivk didn’t ever remember seeing him before. Or any of them, besides the woman in the suit.

  He looked at Iannazzi, who nodded at him, her lips thin. The nod could be interpreted any which way, but Rajivk chose to interpret it to mean go ahead and tell them.

  He shrugged. He wasn’t sure why he thought Glida was harmless. He just did. He usually prided himself on having a good sense of people.

  “It’s not based on anything, really,” Rajivk said, and realized just how stupid that sounded. “I mean, I’ve seen her around. I know she works here, and I know that she wanted to get married up at the Falls. I’m not sure if she did, but she and her wife walk around the Falls a lot. I figured they love it here as much as I do.”

  The words hung in the air. They didn’t quite echo, but Rajivk could feel them, as if they hadn’t dissipated.

  “None of this makes any sense,” Iannazzi said, her voice trembling. “This Glida woman doesn’t have security clearance to get down here.”

  “But she used to,” the man with the shaved head said.

  “Rajivk, who is a good and honorable man, thinks she died in a pool near the Falls,” Iannazzi continued as if the man hadn’t spoken.

  Rajivk felt his face heat. Iannazzi had never given him a compliment before. If he had been asked a few hours ago what her opinion was of him, he would have said she didn’t have one.

  And she probably hadn’t even realized she had complimented him. Because he finally recognized her tone. It was one she used when she was brainstorming an idea.

  “That’s not quite what he said,” the woman in the suit said.

  Rajivk glanced at her, unused to being discussed in the third person. “No, that is what I said. It’s just that the identification was based on the appearance from above.”

  “What you said,” Iannazzi continued in that same tone, “was that everyone thinks the body in the pool belongs to Glida. Which is just brilliant.”

  The three people who had been in the room with her looked at her in surprise. Pereyra smiled just a little, as did Sheldenhelm. They had worked with her, just like Rajivk had.

  Iannazzi liked to think out loud, and whenever she came across something that was smart, she labeled it as such, even w
hen it got in the way of some theory she was proposing or something she was doing.

  “Why is it brilliant?” the first man asked. He sounded almost offended.

  Iannazzi blinked at him as if she had forgotten he was here.

  “Well, think about it,” she said, and then didn’t say another word. Her sentence wasn’t a rhetorical twist. It was an order.

  Rajivk felt an inappropriate giggle rise in his throat. The fact that the inappropriate response was a giggle—something he probably had done three times in his adult life—told him just how very nervous he was.

  He knew that look of confusion the first man had. Rajivk had had the same look on his face the first few times he worked directly with Iannazzi. She expected everyone to keep up.

  When she said think about it, she wasn’t going to explain any more. She was going to let the person think about it, and come to their own conclusion.

  “I have thought about it,” the man said, even though he really hadn’t had a lot of time to consider it all, “and I have no idea why you think this is brilliant.”

  He sounded both annoyed and offended, as if he hated having his own stupidity pointed out to him while expecting her to spoon-feed him whatever it was she had been thinking.

  Rajivk had a hunch he knew, but he’d learned over the years that his hunches were never as complete as Iannazzi’s. Which was why she had her own lab and team, and he was on the team—avoiding Iannazzi whenever he could, because she made him feel stupid sometimes too.

  But, as usual, Iannazzi didn’t consider how her words made other people feel. Although the man in the environmental suit’s annoyance had gotten through to her. Strong emotions sometimes did.

  She leaned back, looking at the man as if she were seeing him for the first time.

  Rajivk braced himself. He knew how this next bit would go before she said a word.

  “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” she said to the man.

  “If it were obvious, I wouldn’t have asked you,” he snapped.

  Most people would have smiled at that, thinking they had won some kind of rhetorical battle. But Iannazzi hadn’t been battling. She had actually expected him (and the team) to keep up.

  “This Glida woman,” Iannazzi said as if she were speaking to a very young child, “faked her own death, probably to buy some time.”

  “Time for what?” the man asked.

  Iannazzi looked at the man, a slight frown on her face. “Time to steal the runabout. We wouldn’t be looking for her if we thought she was dead.”

  Iannazzi said that last as if anyone would do the same thing in the same circumstance. And maybe she was right. Because it seemed logical now.

  But Rajivk felt a chill run through him.

  “You’re saying Glida would have had to kill another woman and toss her body into the pool just to buy some time,” he said, but even as he spoke, his brain was whirling. Of course. That explained the shoes.

  Two people didn’t take off their shoes and then fall to their deaths. Someone—Glida—put both pair of shoes in the overlook, and then put a body in that pool. She knew procedure. She knew that the YSR-SR team would search for the owners of both pairs of shoes.

  She had also known that if they misidentified the body as Glida’s, they would think the other missing person was her wife.

  Rajivk shook his head a little, not liking the way his own thoughts were going.

  But apparently, he wasn’t walking down this mental trail on his own, because Pereyra put her hand on his arm.

  “Were you there long enough to see the rescue team bring the body out?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “So we don’t even know if what you saw was an actual body,” Pereyra said.

  “What?” the man in the environmental suit asked. “He just said it was a body.” Then he looked at Rajivk. “It was a body, right?”

  “I looked down on it from the top of the Falls,” Rajivk said. “I assumed it was real, but I don’t know if it was.”

  The very idea that the body wasn’t real made him feel uncomfortable, and the fact that he was uncomfortable made him even more uncomfortable. If the body was fake, he had called out the YSR-SR team for no reason, and that bothered him. Former YSR-SR volunteers knew better than to send in a false alarm.

  But how was he to know?

  And did he really want that body to be real? Because if it was, then someone was dead—and they had probably died badly.

  “I didn’t think we had murderers here,” said Pereyra. She sounded perplexed.

  Rajivk realized that he was feeling perplexed too. He couldn’t remember the last murder in Sandoveil. If there had ever been a murder in Sandoveil.

  If there had been one now.

  “We don’t know if she did murder someone,” Rajivk said. He wasn’t sure why he was defending Glida. He wasn’t even sure if he was defending Glida. Maybe he was defending himself, what he saw, and what he had perceived.

  “All we know,” the security woman said, “is that she stole the runabout.”

  “We don’t even know that,” Iannazzi said. “That’s why I called the team in here. This room is still repairing itself. There’s a good chance the runabout never left.”

  Rajivk let out a small breath. He hadn’t thought of that either.

  But, if the runabout was still here, then it would be shielded, and still in the center of the room. He should have been able to touch it—well, someone should have been able to touch it.

  “We would have bumped into it by now,” the man in the environmental suit said, using that same condescending voice Iannazzi had used on him.

  She didn’t seem to notice. She never noticed rhetorical games. It was one of the things that was most annoying about her.

  She was shaking her head. “I know it’s not shielded. It’s obvious that the runabout is no longer intact.”

  The color drained from the man’s face. It clearly hadn’t been obvious to him until just then. And Rajivk wasn’t sure a non-scientist would understand the implications.

  So he said them aloud, to Iannazzi, as kind of a way of explaining things to everyone else. “You think it exploded.”

  Her gaze met his. Her eyes were glistening slightly, as if she were overstimulated and just a little terrified. Her lower lip was bleeding in the center. She must have been biting it.

  “That’s why I called you in here,” she said, then swept her hand at the whole team. “Whatever happened in here was bad.”

  Her words hung in the room. That crawling feeling increased underneath Rajivk’s skin. Now he knew at least part of it was nerves. But he had no idea what part.

  Sheldenhelm glanced at him, eyes wide. Pereyra was biting the cuticle on her left thumb, apparently not even realizing she was doing it. The other members of the team looked as stunned as Rajivk felt.

  The idea of standing in an anacapa blast zone made his heart pound even harder.

  “The question,” the man in the environmental suit said, “is whether that bad thing was intentional or accidental.”

  “That’s not the question,” Iannazzi said curtly. “The question is, did the runabout go into foldspace or did it explode?”

  “I got that,” the man in the environmental suit snapped again.

  “No, you didn’t,” Iannazzi said. “Because if it did explode, we have even more questions. Did the temporary anacapa drive malfunction? Did it destroy the runabout, or did the malfunction send the runabout into foldspace? And if it did, was that foldspace the foldspace that Glida had planned to go to?”

  Rajivk felt a shiver run through him. He had never heard anyone discuss the various ways that foldspace could malfunction—at least, not in an official capacity.

  “Or,” Iannazzi was saying, clearly not finished, “did something else malfunction on the runabout? The thing was old and poorly maintained. There were a dozen ways that it could have obliterated itself. Which is why I want my team in here, why I want us to investigate wha
t happened, before the nanobits repair it all and ruin our best evidence.”

  She looked at Pereyra, then at Rajivk, and that look couldn’t have been clearer. Get to work, it said.

  Rajivk took a deep breath. She was right: They needed to act fast. He nodded at Pereyra. They had to start reviewing everything that happened, as well as scraping information off the walls before it all went away.

  He returned to the team. They all looked determined.

  But apparently, the man in the environmental suit wasn’t done with his pissing contest with Iannazzi.

  “That’s the question you have to deal with,” he said. “But you’re acting on an assumption. You believing she came in to steal the ship.”

  “Of course I am,” Iannazzi said. “Why else would she go through that elaborate ruse and come down here?”

  “And I thought assumptions were an anathema to science,” the man said.

  Iannazzi opened her mouth, apparently to rebut him, but he continued.

  “What I want to know,” he said, “is did this Glida woman intend to steal the runabout? If so, why? And if she didn’t, did she come down here to steal something off the runabout? Did she accidentally triggered something? Or, did she come down here intending to blow up the runabout? And if so, why?”

  “If she did intend to blow it up,” said the man with the shaved head, “how come she didn’t know that the blast doors would protect the base?”

  “Or maybe she did know that,” the other man said.

  “Then why would she want to blow up the runabout?” one of the women in the environmental suits asked.

  Iannazzi was watching all of them, shaking so hard that it looked like she was vibrating. For the first time since he met her, Rajivk felt some sympathy for her.

  “We always speculated that the blast doors might not hold,” she said quietly. “At least if something happened with an anacapa drive.”

  Everyone looked at her.

  “The idea was that anacapas would link together, create something bigger.” Her voice was firmer than Rajivk would have expected it to be, given what she was discussing. “That’s why each lab is on its own level, and why they’re not stacked one on top of the other.”

  Her gaze met Rajivk’s. He knew, at that moment, that she had always understood his fear of the anacapa, and maybe even respected it. And yet she had continued to work around them.