The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Later in the day, though, most people did not act like locals. Most of them acted like Sandoveil’s downtown was unfamiliar territory.

  Some of those daytime people were locals, but if she had to guess, a goodly number of the daytime people were tourists.

  She did not suspect a tourist killed Taji, although perhaps she should have. After all, Taji ran a business that catered to people who did not live in Sandoveil. Perhaps one of them had killed her…and then what? Carried her body away in a fashion that made it hard to track?

  Or was the blood at the scene Glida’s? Had Taji killed her and then taken her body away? Taji would have known how to shut off the environmental system and how to get across parts of Sandoveil without being seen.

  Bassima shook her head slightly. She trusted her instincts, and her instincts told her that Taji wasn’t a killer. But everyone could become a killer, given the right circumstances. Or so Bassima had been taught.

  She continued to scan through the images, heading backward. She hit the darkness of two nights previous, and saw nothing before the early morning people started to show up.

  Until the early morning hours, when her gaze caught a shadow. It was at the blurry edge of one of the cameras. She backed up the image and froze the frame. Then she saved her place on the other screens and momentarily shut them off. She expanded the holoscreen with the shadow, and moved it to a 3D image.

  The shadow was the tail end of a vehicle. Bassima recognized it: some kind of medium-sized aircar with a bubbled back. Cars like that were made just outside of Sandoveil and usually sold to businesses that had to haul things around town.

  She moved the image backward at half-quarter time, hoping to see more. The tail end of the car was all she could see, but the reason she had noticed the shadow at all was because someone was moving beside it. She slowed the image even more, saw a flash of color reflected in the car’s shiny surface.

  Her heart was pounding as if she were actually on-site, about to catch a criminal by herself.

  She made the image even bigger so that it was life-size. Then she stood up and walked toward it, examining the sides.

  The back of this particular vehicle had no windows, so she couldn’t see inside. But it looked like the flash she had seen had been some yellow caught in the light.

  She moved the image backward farther, but didn’t see any more. So she went forward again, trying to get the system to show her whether she was actually seeing something yellow or another reflection.

  She couldn’t tell.

  She let out an exasperated sigh, then moved the image backward farther than she had before. No movement, nothing. Just the vehicle, sitting on the side of the road, barely inside the one-square-mile radius.

  Of course. Anyone would think to use a standard measurement in a search, like one square mile.

  She changed the search parameters to one-and-a-quarter square miles.

  The entire car appeared before her—life-size, slicing into two nearby desks and completely absorbing one of the chairs. She didn’t move anything, and she didn’t bring the image down.

  Instead she went back and forth over that small window of time.

  Someone approached the vehicle from the front, not from the back like they would have if they had been coming directly from Taji’s office. Yellow flashed again, and this time, Bassima realized she was seeing some kind of fabric.

  The cameras didn’t record sound. Normally that would have pleased her, but in this instance, she wanted to hear what was going on. The vehicle rocked as a door on the far side opened, away from the camera. She saw feet, small feet, wearing women’s shoes. Locals’ shoes.

  A surge of triumph ran through her. She had known she was dealing with a local.

  And then the triumph faded.

  She had no reason to tie this vehicle or anything about this vehicle to the crime scene at the office. For all she knew, the owner of the vehicle was picking up a delivery from a nearby business or adding something to the vehicle to take elsewhere. And the shoes—they were common in Sandoveil. Many local women wore them.

  Assumptions were the death of investigations. Bassima knew that, and she was getting lost in this one.

  Bassima brought the image size back to 2D and made it the size of a tablet. She now knew where to look. She even knew what to look for.

  She needed to expand the search just a bit more, see who approached the vehicle from the other direction, and then go back even farther and see who actually parked the vehicle in this spot.

  It would take a little time, but she would get some answers—even if they might not be the kind of answers she wanted.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  RAJIVK FINALLY FIGURED out how to slow down the nanobit repair. He stood in the middle of the storage room, sweat trickling down one side of his face. It was hot in here, partly because so many people were still standing around. The security team was watching as if they expected everyone inside the room to run off with the room itself or something.

  Rajivk had no idea what was left to steal in here.

  Most of his team stood near the walls, taking readings, doing the kind of research that Iannazzi had asked them to do. He hadn’t consulted with her about shutting off the nanobits. He had simply done it.

  The nanobits, by doing their job and repairing the damage, were destroying the very information he and the team needed to solve the mystery of the missing runabout.

  He had never needed to shut down nanobits in the midst of a repair before, and he hadn’t been certain he could do it. The nanobit system was pretty self-contained. He had worked with nanobits throughout his career, and essentially, all he had to do was activate one of several programs, and they did the rest of the work.

  There were fail-safes that, in theory, protected techs from activating nanobits incorrectly. He usually complained about all the times he had to confirm that he wanted to inject new nanobits into a system or he wanted to have nanobits create a small part that he needed for repair.

  He did understand why he had to do so, though. Nanobits were powerful technology. They could transform the interiors of mountains, create caverns where there were none, and create material so strong that it could protect human beings against all of the hazards of space.

  But just because he and the other engineers couldn’t imagine using nanobits without extreme caution didn’t mean that others had the same attitude.

  So there had to be some kind of mechanism that overrode human error. What did people do if they programmed nanobits to repair something that didn’t need repair? Or to repair something that was beyond repair?

  At first, he thought that something would be simple to find, but it hadn’t been. There were very few manuals for nanobits. There were textbooks and lectures on the nanobit, similar to the ones he had taken for classes a long, long time ago, but he didn’t have time to go through those right now.

  He would have thought that it would have been in some basic instructions on the nanobit, only he discovered as he did his quick search that there were no basic nanobit instructions, not connected to Sector Base E-2. The base was so old that Sector Base Operations believed that the beginning how-to-build-a-base information didn’t need to be here.

  And considering the day’s events, they had been right.

  Besides, the base itself didn’t need repair often. Ships did, but, generally speaking, their nanobits worked automatically, just like the nanobits had done here. And if the nanobits ceased to work properly, they got revitalized or replaced with a new batch of nanobits, which would then take over the job.

  He had finally stepped back, taken one single nanobit, and examined it, finding what he was looking for in its operating system. He hadn’t looked in a nanobit’s operating system in decades, probably not since he had been in training.

  And even then, he couldn’t recall doing it.

  But he found the way to pause the nanobits—not shut them off—which would allow them to continue their cleanup when the team
had finished with their investigation.

  Pereyra was doing her best to reverse-engineer the crisis, using information from the nanobits as well. She was downloading the repair records, seeing what the nanobits had done since the incident happened.

  Rajivk grabbed a cloth and wiped the sweat off the side of his face. The environmental controls had been partially shut down since the team was working with nanobits. No one wanted nanobits from this room to get sucked into the air system. There were filters and capture equipment, but he hated relying on that.

  He stopped work and took a deep breath. He would have to take some kind of break soon. He hadn’t eaten in hours, and he was tired. This was the middle of his night. He needed to attend to himself—food, since he couldn’t have sleep.

  He glanced at his colleagues. Pereyra was standing near one of the walls, her hands cupped in front of her, a holoscreen floating on one side. Two other team members were using scanners on the blast doors, which had clearly taken some kind of terrible hit. Sheldenhelm was measuring the room for the umpteenth time.

  And that damn image of Glida Kimura still stood, completely frozen in the center of the storage room. The image bothered Rajivk. Her form—twisted slightly as if caught doing something wrong—looked as if it were trying to escape. Even though it couldn’t.

  Some of the security team was still here as well, guarding the room, for reasons he didn’t entirely understand. He wished they would leave. They were adding to the room’s heat. Plus, they were watching everything (and probably not understanding any of it). Rajivk didn’t like being watched while he worked.

  Iannazzi had returned a while ago. She had vanished shortly after she had given everyone the order to get to work, and then she had returned, looking frazzled. She had informed the team that that the anacapa wasn’t preprogrammed. Which meant that even if it had activated automatically, it wouldn’t have taken the runabout anywhere predictable.

  As Rajivk had pointed out, the anacapa could have simply reactivated its last known program and sent the ship there.

  Iannazzi had nodded—perhaps that was part of the reason she looked frazzled—but Sheldenhelm frowned.

  “You’d think we would have heard if it showed up on some other base or somewhere in the Fleet,” he had said quietly.

  “Has anyone checked the interior of the Ijo?” Rajivk asked. “It might have returned to its normal bay.”

  “Good thought,” Iannazzi had said. “I’ll check.”

  And that had ended the meeting. He hadn’t heard if the runabout had returned to the Ijo, but he doubted it had. He knew Iannazzi. She was the kind of woman who hated having anyone in her lab, and he knew she considered this storage room part of her lab.

  The quicker she resolved all of this, the faster she could clear the area. He had to trust that she would do all she could to clear the room.

  He knew part of the reason he wanted to double-check her was because he was so very tired. He hadn’t been this exhausted in a long time. His eyes ached as if he had been rubbing them too hard. But that was because he had been staring at small things—small screens, small sections of wall, small representations of nanobit operation systems.

  He needed to connect with the team before he decided his next move. He didn’t want to duplicate work they had already done, unless, of course, he needed to on this side of the room. Information might differ here.

  He started toward Pereyra, avoiding the center of the storage room, just like everyone else. Iannazzi’s point had been a good one: That runabout could return at any moment without warning, particularly if the anacapa wasn’t working properly.

  He had just taken a few steps when the blast doors banged open, startling him.

  Harriet Virji, Captain of the Ijo, strode in. She seemed bigger than everyone else here. Tall, straight back, square shoulders. She wasn’t wearing her uniform, but she just as well might have been. The black shirt and pants made her look official, even though her brown curls were still damp and her face was ruddy with the cold.

  She did, however, have a laser pistol strapped to her hip as if she were going into battle.

  For one brief moment, he worried whether she had clearance to be down here, and then he almost smiled at himself. He was a lot more tired than he was willing to admit. Of course she had clearance.

  Starship captains could go anywhere in sector bases.

  Virji glanced around the room as if she was startled that so many people had been packed into such a small space.

  Everyone stopped working and stood at attention, or what passed for attention in a sector base where half the staff didn’t consider itself part of the Fleet at all. Just employees of the base, sir, as Rajivk would’ve said if she had asked him.

  And of course, she wasn’t going to ask him.

  She gave the image of Glida Kimura a hard look and then said, “At ease.”

  She didn’t reassure anyone, like most captains did, that this visit wasn’t official. Of course it was official: Her runabout was missing.

  “Forgive me, sir,” Iannazzi said, sounding a bit breathless. “I must have miscommunicated. I was going to contact you when we had information. We could—”

  “Did you think that I was going to ignore the loss of a runabout?” Virji snapped.

  “Um, no, sir,” Iannazzi said. To her credit, she didn’t apologize again.

  Rajivk didn’t move. He didn’t want to call attention to himself. He hated dealing with captains or anyone from Fleet vessels, really. Their culture was very different from his, even though, in theory, they were part of the same organization.

  “I take it there’s no news since you contacted me?” Virji asked.

  “No, sir. We’re making progress, but it’s as small as the nanobits.” Who knew that Iannazzi could be so poetic? Rajivk hadn’t thought it in her.

  “I’ll be honest with you,” Virji said to Iannazzi as if no one else was in the room, “the runabout isn’t worth much to me or the Fleet. I had hoped to retire all of my FS-Prime runabouts, but due to some reasons I won’t go into, I wasn’t at liberty to do so if the sector base staff felt the runabouts were still space-worthy.”

  “Are you saying that we should stop searching for the runabout?” The head security guy—Wèi, was it?—sounded weirdly nervous for someone in his position.

  Rajivk repressed the urge to roll his eyes. Clearly, Wèi did all his work around sector base employees and not around the crews of the Fleet ships, or he would have known, first, how to address someone of Virji’s rank, and second, how ridiculous the question was.

  Virji gave him a withering look. “You are?”

  “Karter Wèi.”

  Rajivk wanted to whisper, Sir. Add sir, but he wasn’t close enough.

  Wèi seemed to sense that he needed to say something more, but he clearly wasn’t certain what it was. “I head security for this section of the base.”

  “Well, you’ve done a piss-poor job, haven’t you?” Virji said. She didn’t wait for his response. She walked over to the image of Glida Kimura.

  No one else in the storage room moved, not even Iannazzi, who was nominally in charge.

  Rajivk turned slightly so he could see Virji’s face as she reached the image.

  “Is this our thief?” Virji asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Iannazzi said as Wèi spoke as well. He said, “We don’t know if she’s a thief—”

  His voice was the one that carried.

  “Really?” Virji’s sarcasm was withering. She didn’t even bother to look at him. “She broke in and a runabout is missing. Even if the anacapa activated and took the runabout somewhere unexpected, this woman had no business on one of my ships.”

  Then she inhaled, almost as if she had stopped herself from speaking further. She bent over slightly so that she could peer into the face of the holographic image.

  “This woman is…?”

  “Glida Kimura, sir,” Iannazzi said. She didn’t move as she spoke, as if she wanted to add more, but d
idn’t dare.

  Rajivk wanted to tell the captain that Glida had been thought dead until a few hours ago, but he didn’t say that either. He didn’t want to get into the middle of this discussion at all.

  “Glida Kimura,” Virji repeated, almost as if she were trying the name on for size. “Glida Kimura.”

  She shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “That’s not right.”

  “Beg pardon, um, sir,” Wèi said, clearly catching a clue about his methods of address, but not yet figuring out how to talk to someone of her rank. “But that woman is Glida Kimura—”

  “Oh, perhaps here she is,” Virji said. “But she served on my ship, decades ago.”

  The room grew exceptionally quiet, as if everyone held their breath. Rajivk frowned at Virji. She didn’t even seem to notice him. She was staring at Glida’s face, as if memorizing it.

  Then Virji looked up. Wèi had been watching her.

  “Sir,” he said, slowly. Carefully. “We have no record of her ever serving on your ship.”

  Virji nodded. “Because she did not go by Glida Kimura then.”

  “But her DNA should have been on file. We should have had a record of her, no matter what name she served under.” Wèi sounded so distressed that he forgot the honorific.

  Even though Rajivk noticed, it didn’t seem that Virji did. Or perhaps she didn’t care.

  “Yes, it all should have been on file.” Virji pulled herself away from the image and turned toward Wèi. “I assume you are not the man in charge of the entire security division.”

  “No, sir,” he said. He sounded very polite, but color had crept into his face. Either he was getting annoyed or he was embarrassed. Or perhaps both.