The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Or conversely, Kimura killed her wife and then, in despair, flung herself off that overlook into the water below.

  But how did that fit with the second body that Marnie had found in that pool?

  He closed his eyes and tried to control his errant mind. He was speculating without evidence. He couldn’t do that.

  All he had to do was keep his mind open to possibilities.

  Possibility: Glida Kimura had been here when her wife died.

  Possibility: They both had died here, and were taken to the Falls.

  Marnie had said the first body was badly damaged, although he wondered. How could the on-site investigators recognize Glida Kimura if the body were badly damaged? Those two pieces of information did not jibe.

  Another possibility: The bodies were not the Kimuras and he had at least three deaths on his hands.

  He stood, tired now. He felt slightly overwhelmed. That was what speculation did—it made all the possibilities real, made him feel like he had actual choices.

  He did not. He had one more duty here before returning to the death investigator’s office.

  He had to check the environmental system.

  And, given the situation here, the way the site was decaying, he would also have to see if any part of the environmental system could be salvaged.

  He wanted to preserve this death scene as best he could. An intact environmental system had features that would allow him to do that. He just had to get to them.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THE CAPTAIN’S ARRIVAL and abrupt departure unsettled everyone even more. The security team scuttled around Bristol’s lab like little crazy rodents, the extra researchers were talking among themselves, and she was so stressed that her hands were shaking.

  That simply would not do.

  She slipped away from all of them into the storage room, which looked more like its old self with each passing moment. Her team, at least, was focused, working hard on the information they could gather from the walls and the very air itself.

  That horrid holoimage of this Kimura woman or whatever her name really was stood in the center of the room. The security team and, in particular, Wèi, had gone into Bristol’s lab, trying to do whatever it was that Captain Virji had asked for.

  Bristol put her hands on her hips and stared at the image of that woman, the woman who had ruined Bristol’s day, the woman who had thought she could endanger the entire sector base for some odd reason.

  According to the captain, this woman had served on a Fleet vessel. This woman had used runabouts before. And, more pertinently, she had used one to vanish.

  The Kimura woman clearly understood anacapa drives. So starting the runabout had been no accident. She had known what she was doing.

  What she wouldn’t have known was that Bristol had switched out the anacapa drive with an older model. This Kimura woman would not have known that the older model hadn’t been used in decades for anything but backup. It certainly hadn’t sent anyone into foldspace.

  On the holoimage, the woman’s face was clear. She had beady eyes and a weak chin. Bristol stared at the image for a long moment, then decided that she hated this Kimura woman. Hated her. And wanted her gone.

  With the flick of a finger, Bristol shut down the holoimage of Kimura. Let Wèi bitch. Bristol no longer cared. She had work to do.

  At that moment, Sheldenhelm beckoned her. He was standing next to Pereyra, their heads together.

  As Bristol walked over to them, Sheldenhelm said, “I think we have some results we can trust.”

  Bristol wouldn’t let herself feel relief. There were too many wiggle words in what he had just said. “I think” did not count for any kind of certainty. But he wouldn’t have brought anything to Pereyra without some kind of confidence, and Pereyra wouldn’t have involved Bristol without even more confidence.

  Still, Bristol had to push, not for research’s sake, but for her own.

  “You think…?”

  “Yes, sir,” Sheldenhelm said. “We’ll need to run a few more tests and make some comparisons for complete certainty.”

  Bristol’s gaze met Pereyra’s. Pereyra’s jaw was set, her dark eyes serious. She nodded slightly.

  She agreed with whatever Sheldenhelm was going to say. She clearly approved it.

  “All right,” Bristol said. “Let’s hear it.”

  Rajivk tilted his head. He was standing on the other side of the small room, but he could clearly hear them, as could the rest of the team. They were probably feeling a bit left out that they weren’t consulted, but Bristol didn’t mind.

  They would be consulted in a minute. Bristol would have them double-check whatever results Sheldenhelm was about to present.

  “I’ve run several scenarios as to how that runabout would have exploded,” Sheldenhelm said. “In all of them, bits and pieces of the runabout would have scattered through the storage room. Even with the nanobits on full, making certain everything was cleaned and repaired, we should have discovered a little bit of the runabout as we took samples. We’ve discovered none of it.”

  Bristol frowned. She wasn’t sure she accepted anything that Sheldenhelm was telling her, and she felt a twinge of annoyance that Pereyra let him waste her time.

  Pereyra must have read Bristol’s expression. Pereyra put her had on Bristol’s arm, maybe to head off Bristol’s response.

  For whatever that would do.

  “Anacapa explosions are by their very nature unpredictable,” Bristol said. “No computer can predict what happened here. The anacapa drive might have obliterated the entire runabout. Or it could have sent half of the runabout into foldspace. Or it could have sent all of the runabout into foldspace. It could have exploded—I hate to use the term, but it’s the only one that comes to mind—normally, sending out shrapnel like you mentioned. But that’s only one scenario among many.”

  She turned to Pereyra, ready to tell her not to send anyone to her with only half-formed opinions when Sheldenhelm said, “I understand all that, ma’am. I ran every scenario that we have on record, not for what could happen, but for the debris left behind.”

  That caught her attention.

  “The debris and the damage are the only things we have,” he said. “I ran the models of the various possible explosions with a runabout of that make, and an anacapa with that kind of instability. Then I cross referenced all of those with the readings we took off of this room.”

  “We’re not done with the readings.” Rajivk had left his post and joined them.

  Bristol felt another surge of annoyance. He had been useful talking to Captain Virji, but he was not being useful now. He was butting in. He should have known how much she hated it when anyone butted in.

  “We have enough to get a pattern,” Pereyra said quickly, apparently trying to keep Bristol from snapping at another member of the team.

  “I would disagree. Your side of the room—”

  Bristol held up her hand, stopping Rajivk midsentence. It was too late. The conversation was underway, and Sheldenhelm might have had a point.

  Debris was debris was debris. Except when it was cleaned up. And even then they had started their work soon enough to capture at least some of it.

  “If the runabout exploded,” Sheldenhelm said, “we would have debris, even if ninety-percent of the shrapnel went into foldspace. That ten percent should have scattered around this storage room. Some of it would have still been in the air when we arrived. Jasmine was running an algorithm that showed how quickly this storage room’s environmental unit cleaned up any mess it found, and we were in luck. This is a storage room, and most of the equipment here is lower grade. The theory is that the system will work slower here. We haven’t double-checked that part, but the history of the environmental system shows that’s the case.”

  Bristol nodded. She understood the theory, and she knew that environmental systems worked differently in different areas.

  “So, based on all of that,” Sheldenhelm said, “we believe that
there still would have been particulate in the air when we all arrived—had the runabout blown up.”

  “It sounds like a lot of supposition,” Rajivk said.

  “Supposition is a start,” Pereyra said.

  Supposition wasn’t something that Bristol usually liked, but she had known when she decided to find out what happened in this storage room that supposition might be all they ended up with.

  “You have found no particulate matter,” she said to Sheldenhelm.

  “None,” he said, “and no shrapnel or damage that suggests the runabout exploded outward.”

  “What about the blast door?” Rajivk said. “It moved, after all.”

  “I ran that,” Pereyra said. “It would move if the runabout had been facing this wall.”

  She pointed to the wall opposite the blast doors.

  “The sudden displacement of air would cause it,” she said.

  “When the runabout arrived, there was a similar movement of the blast doors,” Bristol said.

  Everyone looked at her. Some had accusing expressions. She could read them easily, which was unusual for her. They all wondered why she hadn’t said anything before.

  It was a bit of information she was keeping in reserve. One of the things her team hated about her was the way she always tested them. Withholding information, making them work harder than any other team in this part of the sector base.

  But, the one thing she never told them was this: The fact that she did test them was what made them the best team in the base. One she was proud to have at her side, no matter how much they irritated her.

  “You knew this?” Rajivk said.

  Pereyra made a small gesture that Bristol wasn’t supposed to see, trying to get Rajivk to calm down.

  Bristol didn’t care that the Rajivk had spoken up. If one person thought it, they all had.

  “An explosion would have caused something similar,” Bristol said. “So the movement of the blast doors told us only one thing: that something had happened in this room. What that something was could not be deduced by the movement of those doors.”

  Rajivk let out a small breath, as if he had been holding it. “We’ll have to double-check this information.”

  “Yes, of course.” Bristol’s tone was curt. She wasn’t sure if he was saying that about the blast doors, about Sheldenhelm’s research, or about both. She wasn’t sure she cared. “In fact, you’ll have to triple-check.”

  But, given what Captain Virji had said, given the fact that this Kimura woman—whoever she was—knew how to pilot a runabout, and given the fact that the runabout was operational, just not at optimal levels, probably meant that it had left of its own accord.

  “I think we should split up the team,” Bristol said. “I want half the team to double- and triple-check the results. I want the rest of you to help me figure out where that runabout went.”

  “How can we do that?” Rajivk asked. “We have no idea what course that woman could have set.”

  “If she set one,” Bristol said. “That anacapa was not very powerful. I deliberately use small and weak anacapa drives in repair work. It’s just safer.”

  Although she could never consider an anacapa safe. She didn’t have to tell her team that, however.

  “She might simply have used the anacapa to get the runabout to orbit. If that’s the case, we should be able to find a record of it. Someone needs to check that,” Bristol said. “I want Sheldenhelm and Pereyra to help me determine the runabout’s possible locations.”

  She wasn’t rewarding them for their work, although they might take it that way. She was simply making certain she was using the team most efficiently. It was never good to have the same people who did the work double-check the work.

  The team was still looking at her. No one was moving.

  “Let’s get to it,” she said. “Right now.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE CONTROLS FOR the environmental system in Taji Kimura’s office were behind a panel in that narrow hallway. Hranek found them after more searching than he had planned on.

  Time was slipping past him. He wanted to be at that dive at dawn, and he wanted to see the body in his office before that.

  But letting himself feel the passing of seconds would only make his work incredibly sloppy. He wasn’t quite sure why he was having to work on his emotions so much on this death scene.

  He suspected it had nothing to do with the scene and everything to do with all of the bodies that had suddenly cropped up in his small town. He wasn’t used to having a workload like this, and it was impacting his thought processes.

  It only took a moment to override the command controls on the environmental system, using codes from the YSR-SR. The environmental controls were holographic. They flared yellow as they formed before him.

  He studied the display for a moment, frowning at it. Everything was normal, except that the environmental systems had been shut off. He had rarely seen environmental systems off. The Sandoveil Valley was temperate compared to some other places on Nindowne, but the temperature did vary a lot, and it was easier to let the environmental systems control the differentiation than it was to do so by hand.

  People did tamper with the environmental controls, often in a murder or a suicide, but usually when they decided to use the environmental controls as the source of the death. And that took both technical expertise and access, because the system was designed to veto a change in the oxygen mixture or the introduction of some kind of noxious gas into the mix.

  But something about these controls was not right, and he couldn’t see exactly what it was—not yet, anyway. He was about to shut it down and let Okilani work on the controls when he realized what it was.

  The environmental controls had not been shut down manually. That was what had caught his eye. The controls were off, yes, but they had been shut down using a remote system.

  He had to press his way through layers of menus to get to the proper remote system. The system the killer used—and he had to identify the tamperer as the killer simply because who else would have done this?—had been internal. The killer hadn’t used a remote device to shut off the system once the killer had left the area. Nor had the killer used the remote shut down offered to vacationers or someone who planned to keep a building empty for long periods of time.

  Those remote programs left a level of environmental control on—a certain remixing of the air, a steady temperature control.

  This system had been shut down entirely, which Hranek had never seen before. He knew this part of the program existed, simply because buildings that were going to be remodeled or torn down needed to have the environmental system shut off before it was removed.

  And to say that the shutdown was remote was incorrect. The shutdown was timed. It was set up so that the system would shut off piece by piece after the building was permanently vacated.

  Only this building hadn’t been permanently vacated.

  He double-checked the controls to see what parts of the building they covered. The command for complete shutdown was given only to Taji Kimura’s office system, not to the entire system.

  So it wasn’t a building-destruction command; it was a remodel command, designed to activate after the building was emptied and before the machines arrived to tear that part of the building down.

  He looked through the other parts of the environmental system and saw a barrier between this system and the one in the other offices. That barrier had been reinforced, so that nothing—no air, no heat, nothing—moved through the walls.

  If the killer had left the body here, no one would have been able to find it, maybe not for weeks. The smell would have been contained inside the room.

  Except, perhaps, someone on the street might have smelled the decay. Since the environmental system was off, the window controls were off as well. Air would have seeped outside.

  He had no idea if that was carelessness on the part of the killer or if the killer didn’t think about the windows or the fr
ont door. He reserved judgment while he poked around the environmental systems some more.

  Because he had one more question he needed answered.

  There were hidden commands in every environmental system in Sandoveil. He had asked that they be implemented shortly after he arrived here, and he had to get special permission from the city to do so.

  He wanted the system to maintain an automated backup, one that the homeowner or building owner did not know about. He wanted that backup to cover one week’s worth of information, minimum, and he wanted it to be hard to access.

  If the killer knew about the automated backup, that would limit the possible identities of the killer. It would have be someone who worked on the environmental systems or someone in his office or someone who had worked for the city when he had applied for this upgrade.

  It took him almost ten minutes to access the backup on this system, but he found where the backup should be. For one frightening moment, he thought it had been erased.

  But it hadn’t.

  He let out a small breath. So, good news and bad news. Good news in that the killer had not found it at all. Bad news in that the suspect pool became wide again.

  A large number of people in Sandoveil knew that you could shut off the system before a remodel. He had no idea how big that large number was, but he knew it was a great deal bigger than the number of people who knew how to get rid of the backup.

  He downloaded the backup into his own equipment, but he left the backup in place because the best place to do playback was on-site.

  The backup wasn’t a faithful reproduction of the minute-by-minute activities in a room or a building. The backup didn’t record conversations (although he suspected they could be recovered in part by a skilled engineer), and they didn’t record exact visuals of what had occurred in a space.

  However, they tracked changes in temperature as well as the chemical composition of an area. They also tracked humidity, dampness, and a thousand other small things that an environmental system would concern itself with to make life easier on the people inside the building.