The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  No one ever brought boats in here. It was too hard. And a blow-up raft would be at the mercy of the Falls.

  There were footprints everywhere on this little patch of ground. Even if the killer had left her footprints behind, the footprints would be gone now. Completely gone. Buried under more footprints.

  This was why he was here. Too late, of course. The YSR-SR had trampled the scene for over twelve hours.

  Hranek stepped back and looked up. Then he looked at the pool. The divers were gearing up, taking their equipment, leaning toward each other the way that people linking up comms did. Marnie was bent over her equipment, as far from the water’s edge as she could get, and another man—what was his name? Zhou?—had joined them. Like Novoa earlier, he wore half of his diving suit. Apparently, he wasn’t going in the water with the rest of them.

  There were rocks of all sizes at the base of this cliff. Most appeared as though they had been here for a long time, but several had darker surfaces than the others. Some of the ones with darker surfaces had mold growing up the sides that just stopped.

  He walked around the edge, then looked up again. There was no way that anyone could place a body into this pool and fling rocks on top of it from above, not and do it accurately.

  If the rocks were somehow attached to the body, well, then it would take someone freakishly strong to toss it over one of the overlooks. Or it would take some kind of equipment that was usually forbidden up here.

  The simplest—and strangest—explanation was that someone had weighted down the body, and then piled rocks on it, from this vantage point, swimming into the pool and doing it laboriously, one rock at a time.

  Hranek whirled around and watched the divers double-check each other’s suits. They were standing in the water, with it lapping against their ankles. They wouldn’t have to walk far to grab one of the rocks from beside the cliff face and take it into the pool.

  He had no idea exactly where the body was, but it couldn’t be too close to the Falls. They wouldn’t have seen it or have suggested diving for it if it were buried under all that water.

  So the actual effort to take and drop the rocks was not as great as he had initially thought. It would take work, yes, and a lot of risk. But everything he had seen from Glida Kimura in the past day had involved risk.

  He doubted that stopped her.

  But she would have had to come in through that barricade. And in theory, the barricade’s passcode was only known to a few people. It was “tourist proof,” or so he had been told repeatedly.

  A thought itched at him. It had bothered him before, particularly when he stood here, and it bothered him now.

  All those bodies he’d pulled out of this pool—or had the YSR-SR pull out of the pool—had come from above. Or so he had assumed. He had believed they had jumped off the overlooks or ridden down the Falls and tumbled sideways.

  He’d only dealt with one body at a time back here. This was the first time he’d dealt with two, and he was only doing that because YSR-SR had been following his procedures.

  He would have to thank Marnie for that, when he was less tired and less annoyed.

  He walked over to her now. She was hunched over the equipment. The divers were finishing their rituals and wading into the water.

  “Hey, Marnie,” Hranek asked, “how many people have the passcodes for the barrier?”

  “I don’t know,” she said without looking up. “Do you want me to put this on a holoscreen for you or can you watch from here?”

  “My own screen, thanks,” he said.

  She started to set that up, and as she did, he realized she hadn’t realized how serious his question was.

  “Marnie, please, how many people have the passcode?”

  “I don’t know,” she said a lot more forcefully. “You can either have me monitor what the team is doing or you can have me look up the esoteric information. Which do you want?”

  He wanted both, but he wasn’t going to get both. He would have to wait for the answer to his question until the dive was over.

  “My screen, please,” he said.

  He noted that Zhou already had his own screen. He was sitting on a pile of rocks, away from the water, staring gape-mouthed at what the divers were doing. His equipment was beside him, except for the suit, which he now wore all the way up to his neck. The hood was tipped back, but at the ready.

  Hranek realized that Zhou was the designated rescue diver, in case something went bad. Hranek couldn’t remember ever seeing that before and wondered if it was because of the rocks they all had to carry or because this dive was a particularly dangerous one.

  He wasn’t going to ask.

  A screen popped up beside Marnie.

  “You can move it to the left,” she said, “but not too far. We’re working with limited resources here.”

  He didn’t question that. Instead, he pulled the screen over. It was split between all three divers. The water was gray and filled with silt from all of their cameras. The suits gave water temperature, chemical components, and pressure.

  “You’re getting all the environmental details, right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Marnie said.

  “Make sure you make a backup of that for me,” he said.

  She let out an exasperated sigh. “I always do.”

  “You going to watch this dive or not?” Zhou asked from his corner of their little world.

  Hranek didn’t answer him. Instead, Hranek brought the screen up and combined all three images into one. The silt, moving in three different directions because of the combined imagery, made him slightly dizzy, and he was having trouble identifying what, exactly, he was seeing.

  He had to change them back into a split screen, hoping one of the divers would end up being the primary one.

  They would be in the water for some time. He probably should sit down, but he didn’t want to at the moment. He felt oddly exhilarated and deeply exhausted.

  And the day had just begun.

  FORTY-SIX

  WHEN BRISTOL USUALLY worked with anacapa drives, the drives remained off. They looked cold and unassuming when they weren’t in use, resembling nothing more than a hunk of black-and-gold rock that a stream had polished smooth. Small threads of color worked through the black-and-gold exterior, leading to different parts of the drive.

  But when the anacapa drive was activated, it looked completely different. When the drive worked properly, it gave off a whitish gold-and-pink glow at rest, and a rich blue, laced with white and gold, when it linked with foldspace. When the drive was malfunctioning, those bright lights were laced with other colors.

  Sometimes Bristol could diagnose by color alone. But sometimes she actually had to dig in to the drive. It was easier to dig in when the drive was completely deactivated, because the colors threaded through that black and gold sometimes leached gray. She could use anacapa-specific tools, open the tiny area where the leaching occurred, and do the repairs.

  Even though the repairs were usually simple at that point, they could take weeks. She would have to determine why that portion of the drive had died, then figure out if she could simply reactivate it or if she needed to grow an entire new section of the drive. Reactivation meant finding the nanobit specific to that little section and turning on the piece that had shut itself off.

  Reactivating that little portion of the drive would take constant monitoring, to make sure whatever problem had caused the anacapa to malfunction in the first place didn’t repeat. Reactivation was chancy.

  She usually grew new sections of the drive if she knew that the drive itself hadn’t killed those nanobits. Growing new parts of the drive was what took all the time. She had to baby the parts along, make sure that nothing went awry, and hope that the drive would accept the newly grafted part.

  When she discussed the drives with others, she spoke of the drives as things. But when she actually looked at the drives, they shared a lot in common with biological organisms. She had had some medical trainin
g, and privately, she thought that was what made her one of the best anacapa experts in the Fleet. She knew that the drives operated like the human body—the theory was the same for all drives, but each drive was so vastly different from the others that she often thought of them as different planets.

  She always tried to be cautious, and test everything she could, because there was a mysterious component to the anacapa drive. She believed that the original founders of the Fleet had stumbled onto the anacapa drive accidentally while building something else. They harnessed the power they found, and built the Fleet around it.

  Over the millennia, the Fleet learned a lot about the anacapa drive but never quite conquered the whole foldspace equation—what was foldspace, how did they communicate with foldspace, and what, exactly, could they do to create something else that interacted with foldspace.

  She believed the answer wasn’t just in the anacapa drives, it was also in foldspace. But she wasn’t courageous enough to venture into foldspace to find the answer.

  She’d gone to foldspace several times. Of course, she had. She couldn’t do her job otherwise. But she had hated it, more than she hated being in conventional space. And conventional space didn’t work for her well at all.

  Which was why she was one of the most cautious anacapa experts in the Fleet. Because there were apocryphal stories of engineers opening an anacapa drive’s protective case, activating an anacapa drive to work on it, and getting sent into foldspace—without a ship.

  She personally couldn’t find records of that, so she actually doubted it happened.

  But it sounded so plausible that she thought of it each time she prepared to work on an activated drive, her back and stomach muscles tense like they were now.

  Before Bristol opened the anacapa casing, she had asked Fedo to step back. Captain Virji sat in front of a console near the door, chair turned so that she could see part of what they were doing.

  “I don’t know if you looked at this drive before you got to the sector base,” Bristol said to Fedo, “but it’s a mess.”

  “I didn’t look,” Fedo said. “I would love to retire all the FS-Prime runabouts.”

  Bristol peeled back the anacapa casing to reveal the small drive. Over time, its polish had become a dull sheen. There were huge holes in the drive’s center, and most of the drive’s gold was gone. The remaining black had only three colors threading through it—a yellowish, puke green; a pale, lavender blue; and a startling orange pink.

  Until she had started work on this drive, Bristol had seen none of those colors in an anacapa drive before. She was of the personal opinion that this drive was dying. But she couldn’t express that sentiment in those terms to another engineer. Because most engineers did not consider anacapa drives to be living things.

  “Holy…” Fedo said before stopping herself. “This was the drive that was in the runabout?”

  “Yeah,” Bristol said.

  “What’s the problem?” Virji stood and came toward them.

  Bristol extended a hand, palm facing Virji.

  “Captain,” she said, “it’s better if you don’t come too close.”

  “I’ve been around anacapas my entire career,” Virji said.

  “Not like this, Captain,” Fedo said. “We’re going to have to activate this one, and I would prefer that you leave the area. We’ll call you back down when we think we can recall the runabout.”

  Her tone made it sound like she didn’t think they could recall the runabout.

  “Very well,” Virji said. “I’m sure there are some things I can check on the ship itself.”

  She walked to the door. She tried to look at the anacapa as she did, but she wouldn’t have been able to see it from her vantage point.

  She let herself out, and Bristol let out a sigh of relief.

  “Is she always that difficult?” Bristol asked.

  Fedo grinned. “She’s a captain. You don’t work with them here, do you?”

  “Sure I do,” Bristol said. “All of them find their way to this base at one point or another.”

  “But you don’t work with them. They’re tough, demanding, and used to getting their own way,” Fedo said. “Sometimes they listen to reason, but sometimes they don’t, particularly when they’re feeling guilty.”

  “Guilty?” Bristol asked.

  “She feels responsible for Everly/Kimura.” Fedo shrugged. “It’s a long story, and I’d rather focus on this thing in front of us.”

  Bristol suppressed a sigh. Human beings were much too complicated for her. She’d rather work with the damaged anacapa drive.

  “These colors,” Fedo said. “I’ve never seen these colors before.”

  “Neither have I,” Bristol said. “And I’ve only seen a few drives this damaged. All of the drives that had similar holes were extremely old, with connections missing. The problem with old anacapas, though, is that their power usually flares as they die.”

  Fedo leaned back, that pale expression back on her face. “We had no flares registering inside that cargo bay.”

  She sounded certain. Bristol believed Fedo was certain. Those flares would have registered on all kinds of equipment, especially in a ship as large as the Ijo.

  “Which means that the flares were contained,” Fedo said, more to herself than Bristol.

  Bristol nodded. “I’ve seen it before. We build great casings for the anacapa drives. I think the flares are what cause the holes in the drive itself. The problem is that anything hooked up to the drive will also experience the flare.”

  “The maintenance system,” Fedo breathed. “Son of a bitch. I thought it was such a great workaround.”

  “It might be, for a healthy anacapa drive.” Bristol mentally winced at the word healthy and hoped Fedo didn’t notice. “But for one like this…”

  “The anacapas in the FS-Prime runabouts are hooked into the entire ship,” Fedo said, clearly thinking out loud. She hadn’t even heard what Bristol had said. Or if she had, she wasn’t acknowledging it. “That runabout might not work at all.”

  “Well, it works,” Bristol said. “We determined that it didn’t explode. But what interacted with the anacapa I had put in there, we have no idea.”

  “Whatever route she’d programmed into that runabout,” Fedo said, “might not even communicate with the anacapa you put in there in the way she intended.”

  “You people knew her,” Bristol said. “Would she have simply tried to reverse the last command and put the runabout back on the Ijo?”

  As Bristol spoke, a chill ran down her back. That old anacapa drive had taken the runabout from the bay in the Ijo through foldspace to the storage room beside her lab. They were all lucky that some kind of explosion hadn’t happened at all, or a flare or something horrible.

  That was it. She made a mental note to request that all of the model FS-Prime runabouts were removed from service purposely. She’d attach an image of this anacapa drive to the request.

  “I don’t think she would go back to the Ijo,” Fedo said. “Given her history with us.”

  Bristol nodded. That seemed logical.

  “The damage to this drive was probably caused by the fact it was never shut off,” she said. “All the other drives only get activated when we’re going to use them. They are rarely in rest mode.”

  “That’s the theory,” Fedo said. “In practice, some ships leave their anacapas in rest whenever they go through hostile or unknown territory.”

  Which explained why drives from different DV-class vessels had different levels of wear.

  “I hadn’t known that,” Bristol said. “I’ll be honest. I was going to activate this drive and take information off its memory, to see how it interacted with the maintenance system on that runabout, but I’m leery about activating the drive at all.”

  “Plus, if the drive has flared and damaged the systems in the runabout,” Fedo said, “then how this drive interacted with the runabout doesn’t matter much.”

  Bristol stared at it
for a moment. The leached colors, the gray parts, the holes. She frowned.

  “Actually,” she said. “It does matter. This drive will have a record of its flares, and we will be able to figure out what—if any—systems got hit.”

  Fedo’s gaze met Bristol’s over the drive.

  “So we can figure out if Everly actually has control over the runabout or not,” Fedo said.

  Bristol nodded. “I’m going to double the containment field around the anacapa. We’re going to have to work through the field. If you’re not okay with that, then I can do this myself.”

  “I would triple the field,” Fedo said. “I routinely work with a double field on the Ijo.”

  “Good,” Bristol said. “Then we both have experience with it.”

  And, because she didn’t want to sound too negative, she didn’t add, Let’s hope that will be enough.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  EVEN THOUGH TEVIN couldn’t feel the water against his skin, he could sense the coolness, the pull of the current. His movements always felt elegant when he was underwater, as if he had become a professional dancer and the entire city watched.

  He shut off information about the water temperature, pressure, and composition, and left only the warnings on. They would tell him if he was about to enter a riptide or if the current suddenly shifted so that he would be pulled toward the waterfall.

  The undertow was the most dangerous part of this dive. Even though the surface of this pool looked calm, the water underneath was anything but. The force of the water coming down differed from day to day, by water volume, snowmelt (or lack thereof), and a whole bunch of other factors. Even a rock that slipped into the river above might change the flow of the Falls, which would then alter how the water hit the pool.

  He’d seen the current go in so many different directions underwater that he couldn’t keep track of it visually. He let his suit keep track of some of it, but he had made a rule years ago that none of his people would ever dive near Fiskett Falls without a free-flow barrier blocking passage from the dive to the Falls. He had insisted that the YSR-SR implement that rule before he ever took teams to the Falls.