The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  She had cleared the secondary security team from her lab. A few of them waited outside because Wèi didn’t want the lab to be empty, not yet. But she needed it to be empty. She had sent the extra researchers back to their own labs so that they could work there.

  Her team was still inside the storage room, following her instructions, checking and double-checking each other.

  She had glanced over Sheldenhelm’s work herself and concluded he was right: There had been no explosion. The one thing she had done that he hadn’t was review the footage from the moment the runabout had arrived in the storage room.

  The blast doors had moved then, too. In fact, they might have had some damage from years of receiving small ships, damage she hadn’t noticed because most of those small ships arrived in the storage room during the off-hours when she was at home.

  She hadn’t told anyone she had found that, but she did make a note in her report. She also flagged the doors for special attention. Clearly, they needed more repair than the automated nanobit response could give them.

  The fact that the runabout’s substitute anacapa had activated was going to cause more problems than she had told anyone, including her team.

  No two anacapa drives malfunctioned in the same way. And some of the malfunctions were not really mal-functions. They were more inadequate functions. The drives underperformed or they overperformed, sending a ship too deep into foldspace or not sending it far enough.

  Sometimes the anacapa didn’t get the ship all the way to foldspace, a nightmare she had only seen once. That anacapa drive had activated inside the sector base and was to move the small ship to a storage area, much like the runabout had done.

  Only that anacapa had misfired, and the ship hadn’t ended up in the storage room. It had ended up in the mountain itself.

  Bristol cursed slightly as she remembered that. She opened the door to the storage room and gestured to Pereyra.

  Pereyra finished whatever she was doing on her small holographic screen and then walked over.

  “I need someone to move to a different area of research,” Bristol said softly.

  “Who do you want?” Pereyra asked.

  “I’ll let you decide.” Bristol didn’t always pay attention to which of her team was best at what. She had Pereyra for that. It was the only habit that Bristol got in repeated trouble for from her superiors. She was supposed to be an excellent scientist and an excellent manager.

  And she wasn’t. She was too good at her tech/science job to fire, so everyone looked sideways when she let Pereyra manage the team.

  Except when moments like this happened, and the administration of the sector base expected Bristol to know administration stuff.

  “What’s the job?” Pereyra asked.

  “We forgot to look up one thing,” Bristol said.

  Pereyra frowned.

  “We thought maybe the runabout exploded or it went far away using foldspace or it went into the solar system after a burst of foldspace.” Bristol paused, not for effect so much as to choose her next words.

  “Yes,” Pereyra said, as if she felt like Bristol was wasting her time.

  Bristol decided not to reference the ship-in-the-mountain incident. It was too graphic, and it might send whoever Pereyra assigned on the wrong mission.

  “We didn’t check the base itself,” Bristol said.

  Pereyra sighed in recognition. “Of course. The short hop.”

  Which was what the runabout had done to get to the storage room.

  “I’ll put Rajivk on it,” Pereyra said. “He’s great at this kind of work.”

  “Thank you,” Bristol said, no longer caring. She knew that Pereyra told her things like that so that Bristol could make the assignment if Pereyra wasn’t around, but Bristol saw all of that as unimportant information, not worth wasting the brain space on.

  Bristol went back to the lab. She had something else to investigate. It would be harder to do. She needed to investigate both anacapa drives—the one she had in its box, which had been part of this runabout until a few days ago—and the other anacapa drive, the one she had used repeatedly to be the placeholder while she repaired the runabout’s actual drive.

  She paused for a half second, uncertain where to go first. The anacapa drive from the runabout would tell her how the runabout interfaced with the anacapa drives. The information from the placeholder drive would tell her how that drive had worked in other ships.

  For a moment, she wished she could bring someone on this project to help her. But she had no idea how to do it.

  Ninety percent of what she needed to do was in her own mind, impossible to access for anyone else, because she couldn’t communicate it well.

  She had to do this on her own, which meant figuring out how to make the data reveal what she needed to know. It meant figuring out a structure that she could follow quickly.

  She headed to her favorite spot near the anacapa casing. Then she called up her personal screen and made a list of what she needed to know.

  She needed to know what the placeholder drive’s quirks were. Then she would look at the runabout’s quirks. She needed to subtract what she knew about the anacapa that she was working on here—the runabout’s actual anacapa drive—to see what quirks of the runabout remained, if any.

  She had a lot of data on the idiosyncrasies of the anacapa she’d had in storage here. It would take a bit of an effort to subtract that from the problems the runabout had had over the years, but probably not as much as she would have thought.

  The toughest part of all of this would be to figure out what the placeholder drive would do when it was fully activated. According to her records, it hadn’t been fully activated in decades.

  And she couldn’t find who had last worked on that drive. Not fiddled with it to make it a placeholder drive. (That had been her, more than once.) But who had actually worked on it to try to repair it before deciding to retire it.

  Those decisions were often hard. Because anacapas were difficult to build and deploy. Weak or very old anacapa drives, without a lot of problems, were selected to become the placeholder drives.

  They were also selected because they didn’t have enough power to activate on their own.

  She let out a small breath. Which meant that she now knew for certain that this Kimura woman (or whoever she was) had chosen to enter foldspace—not to get out of the base, but to travel very far away from here. Bristol had made the underlying assumption that the Kimura woman had wanted off Nindowne, but would only use the anacapa to get out of the base, not to travel a long distance.

  Because anyone with half a brain would realize that the runabout was being repaired, which meant it was dangerous. Anacapa drives were dangerous even when they weren’t being repaired, so a runabout that didn’t work quite right combined with an old anacapa drive spelled disaster.

  Besides, runabouts were built for short trips.

  And short trips did not mean long periods of time in foldspace.

  But if this woman had another agenda, then maybe she would risk entering foldspace, for whatever reason.

  Not that it mattered. The Kimura woman’s motivation was someone else’s problem.

  Bristol’s problem was figuring out what happened to her—using the available data and a bit of deduction.

  Glida Kimura (or whoever this woman was) had probably achieved a perfect storm of disaster. The runabout had problems, and the placeholder anacapa drive had problems. Those problems would most likely have made accessing foldspace either impossible (which Bristol’s team was working on) or, more likely, unpredictable—at least for the person flying the runabout.

  If Bristol had to guess right now, based on the information she had, she would guess that the runabout was probably in either an uncharted part of foldspace or in a part that hadn’t been accessed for decades.

  All of which presented some problems—and not just for the Kimura woman. The Ijo would want its runabout back. And the sector base was going to want to ma
ke an example of Kimura, since she had cost everyone in the base both time and money.

  They would all want her back.

  Which meant a foldspace rescue.

  Foldspace rescues were difficult on good days.

  And this was not a good day.

  But it could be done. It would just take a lot of calculations and some educated guesses.

  Bristol was up for the task.

  If Bristol couldn’t find her, then absolutely no one could.

  FORTY-ONE

  THE PAST SEEMED very close. Virji hooked her thumbs in the top of her pants and paced across the small room. She had known she wouldn’t be able to sit while telling Nicoleau her history with Sloane Everly, but Virji hadn’t realized just how many emotions even thinking about it would arouse.

  The worst emotion—and the strongest—was shame. She had let someone get the better of her, someone whom she should have been watching closely, someone she had thought she was watching closely and she hadn’t been.

  People had died.

  Maybe more people than she realized.

  Virji took a deep breath. Nicoleau didn’t need to know all of it. Just the highlights—the lowlights—whatever she wanted to call it.

  “I haven’t heard that phrase ‘mass killer’ in years,” Nicoleau said. “And never concerning someone who worked for the Fleet.”

  Virji nodded. “Everly was trouble ever since she was a child. But she went through behavioral courses on the Erreforma and it seemed like they had taken. She went through test after test, and passed.”

  Virji was pacing, but Nicoleau hadn’t moved. It was as if this information froze him.

  “She became one of our pilots. We trusted her to go planetside after a few years.” Virji’s voice broke. She willed it to remain strong. That shame was rising, and she couldn’t let it. Because it would cripple her.

  “Planetside,” Nicoleau breathed. She could tell that he understood.

  “She only killed when we let her stay for longer than two days. And never anyone the Fleet had contact with.” Virji shook her head. This was the part she didn’t entirely understand. “It was sport for her. I assume it still is.”

  “Sandoveil is a small community,” Nicoleau said. “The Sandoveil Valley doesn’t have a large population. We would know if someone has been routinely murdering people here.”

  “Would you?” Virji said. “Because I’ve heard since I first started coming here how dangerous the natural environment is around Sandoveil. People die here. I was supposed to tell my crew that, every time we stopped here, whenever I ordered them to take a vacation. I also had to warn them to take precautions so that they wouldn’t go over the Falls or get trapped in the mud flats or drown in the ocean.”

  Nicoleau let out a small breath, then tilted his head back and closed his eyes. As head of security for the sector base, he would partner with the security team in town. He might even run it. That was how some of the towns connected to sector bases worked.

  “She can’t be that crafty,” he said, eyes still closed. His voice was flat.

  Virji remembered feeling like that—the disbelief, the denial. The anger would come later, and then the shame.

  But she wasn’t here to take care of Nicoleau.

  “She’s very smart,” Virji said. “She thinks everything through. We didn’t find out about her murders until after she had stolen the runabout. I used to think we should have known, but…”

  She let her voice trail off. She didn’t want to tell him that her superiors and her own counselor had told her that even she couldn’t anticipate everything.

  Everly had chosen her victims at random. She had often traveled to a different city or township to kill them. She used different methods for each kill.

  It wasn’t until Virji’s own security team started backtracking Everly’s movements hoping to find her that they discovered the murders at all.

  Nicoleau was watching her now. He clearly knew there was a lot she wasn’t telling him.

  She also suspected he would look up Everly’s files as soon as Virji left the area. The files wouldn’t tell him much, though. When the Fleet wanted to keep a secret, it did so very, very well.

  “Anyway,” Virji said, letting him know she wasn’t going to expand on that, “we might not have figured out that she committed murder at all if she hadn’t run.”

  “Why did she?” he asked.

  “Because she lost control,” Virji said. “She had a lover onboard—Tom Harkness. They were planning a wedding. The next thing we knew, he was dead from a dozen stab wounds. We didn’t find him for two days after the runabout went missing.”

  “He was her lover,” Nicoleau said. “No one thought to contact him when they realized she had stolen the runabout?”

  “For a while, we thought he was with her,” Virji said. “She had ghosted the system, created a double image and then used it to mislead us.”

  “I know what ghosting is,” Nicoleau said in a tone that told Virji he had experienced it.

  She hadn’t, not in that way. She was a straightforward woman. She couldn’t quite imagine why anyone would lie about anything.

  “She made us think they had gone away together,” Virji said, partly because she was feeling like she needed to justify her actions. She always felt that way at this point of the story.

  It was the part that made her feel the most inadequate.

  “We thought—”

  “He was on the runabout, I get it.” Nicoleau’s voice was dry. “Then you found his body.”

  “And some footage she didn’t have the clearance to tamper with. We don’t have images of the murder, but they were fighting so loud that some of their shouting could be picked up in the ship’s corridors. Then she started to leave his suite.”

  That image of Everly was burned on Virji’s brain, which was probably why she had recognized Everly so quickly from the hologram.

  Everly, standing in the door as it slid open, covered in blood. She had been about to step into the corridor, then put her hands to her mouth as if she realized her mistake. She had slammed the door closed and was turning away as that clear image vanished.

  His blood, in the shape of her palm, was found on the door’s control panel. Her footprints were all over the front room of the suite, although she ended up leaving her shoes behind.

  She had cleaned up in his shower, then put on his shirt and some loose pants, as well as a pair of his slippers, and walked, like a furtive lover, back to her own quarters. She had stayed there for nearly two hours, apparently making a plan and altering the DNA in her personnel file.

  Everly had known a lot about procedure, and once she had gotten past the emotions that had led to her murder of Harkness, she had implemented all that she knew with a coldness that still bothered Virji.

  “It was clear that she killed him,” Virji said. “It was even clear how she killed him. She was so organized afterward that it seemed to me she had done this before.”

  “Lost control and killed?” Nicoleau asked.

  Virji shook her head. “Killed. I think the losing control part was new. I later learned she had killed at least fifteen times before. Each time, she had had a plan going into the murder and a plan coming out of it. I think the killing of Tom Harkness was the first time she hadn’t had a plan going in. I think she surprised herself.”

  “What makes you say that?” Nicoleau was standing now. He looked as unsettled as she felt.

  “All of her other murders, the ones we know about, anyway, they were efficient. I think she actually had feelings for Harkness, and he had angered her and she lashed out.” Virji shook her head.

  She’d been thinking about this for a long time. Not just the image of the woman at the door, but the bloody shoes, left behind at the death scene. So very neat. Side by side as if they were removed so that their owner could walk barefoot through the ship.

  Everly had done it again—murdered in a moment of passion and then fled in a runabout.
/>   What would she have done if the Ijo hadn’t docked?

  Or had the Ijo itself pushed her into it? The memories of the ship, the way that she had lived before.

  “Was she here the last time we came for maintenance?” Virji asked.

  “What?” Nicoleau clearly didn’t follow her leap in logic.

  “We’ve come here several times since she worked in the base,” Virji said. “Someone would have recognized her. I wonder if she had arranged to be gone every time we showed up.”

  “We can check,” he said in a way that made it sound like he didn’t really care. It was a minor detail, at least at the moment.

  Virji stopped pacing. She took a deep breath. She felt calmer for telling him.

  “Why didn’t you want to tell everyone in that room?” Nicoleau asked.

  “Because they’ll focus on the murders, not on the theft,” Virji said.

  He leaned his head back, clearly surprised. “Aren’t the murders the important thing?”

  “Not if we let her get away,” Virji said.

  He tilted his head just a little. “I hate to break it to you, Captain, but she has gotten away.”

  Virji shook her head. “I’m not so sure.”

  “You think she’s still on base?”

  “No,” Virji said. “I think if your people determine that the runabout went into foldspace instead of destroying itself, then we have a chance to get her.”

  “I don’t understand,” Nicoleau said.

  Of course he didn’t understand. He wasn’t a spaceship captain. He had probably never served on a ship. Ships came to him.

  “We hook into the anacapa,” she said. “We use the maintenance system. She wouldn’t have known how to shut it off. She might not even have known it was on.”

  “And that will bring a ship out of foldspace?” Nicoleau asked.

  “My small ships are all equipped that way,” Virji said.

  What she didn’t tell him was that it was her interactions with Everly that had made Virji order that every small ship on the Ijo, no matter how insignificant, be outfitted with maintenance recall.