The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Considering how hard it had been to get here in the first place, she doubted they would let her go back to the surface on her own.

  But she wasn’t sure how long she could stand here.

  And then she realized she had no choice.

  FIFTY-TWO

  IT TOOK A long time to set up the probes. Part of the problem was that Marnie didn’t want anyone new brought in to the death scene, as Hranek now called this pool. Marnie was afraid that she would get too many volunteers.

  And Dinithi’s point was a good one: The only people who had easy access to the pool were all volunteers at the YSR-SR.

  Besides, who better than the YSR-SR to carry out deaths like this? Someone in the YSR-SR would know who was missing, who was hard to find, who didn’t have help. Some of the volunteers worked alone, and all of them had YSR-SR identification.

  While the identification didn’t make them instantly trustworthy, it did help. That was one reason she insisted her teams all have identification.

  Of course, the identification had to be earned. Everyone had to go through psych evaluations to make sure they could handle the stresses of the job, through physical training to determine their aptitudes, and then intern—for lack of a better word—at more than a dozen rescue/recoveries before ever becoming an official volunteer.

  Marnie liked to think she knew everyone who worked at the YSR-SR, and she liked to think she trusted them.

  If someone had asked her yesterday if she did, she would have said yes.

  But today? No. She would have to say that almost everyone who worked for the YSR-SR was a suspect, at least in her mind.

  She had to rule out this team. They were still working the pool, tirelessly, making certain all the details were correct. She had to think—making an assumption in a way that Hranek probably wouldn’t approve of—that the team wouldn’t be working this hard if one of them was involved in placing all the bodies here.

  Besides, it was hard to fake a physical reaction like the one that Dinithi had earlier in the day.

  Still, Marnie kept her eye on all of them, so maybe she wasn’t being as trusting as she would normally be.

  Zhou had set up monitors so that they could all watch the feeds coming from the probes Marnie planned to send into the pool. Dinithi had stripped out of her suit and was sitting in the sun, making sure all of the probes were linked up properly. She was also checking to make certain they could handle the currents below.

  Tevin had reinforced the barriers. He still wore his suit, and went in and out of the water several times to plant some lights near the work area. The probes all had lights, but he wanted this thing flooded.

  He also offered to drop some lights into the trench, but Marnie had overruled him on that. She didn’t want the lights to bang their way down in the current and destroy something that might end up as evidence later.

  Novoa had coordinated everything while Marnie went back to the YSR-SR to get equipment. The reason the team still seemed to function smoothly had little to do with Marnie or with Tevin, but with Novoa.

  She had also helped Marnie carry the equipment into the pool area. Floating carts were useless back here. The spray from the Falls got into their mechanisms. Many floating carts got tangled in the waterfall itself.

  Marnie had lost too many carts over the years to leave anything like that to chance.

  She brought in two carts, but she and Novoa held them and didn’t use the guidance systems or the autopilots.

  “And there,” Tevin had said as the first cart came in, “is how our killer or killers brought the bodies in here.”

  Marnie hadn’t responded to any of that. Because the fact that the killer or killers had known how to maneuver a cart through these narrow paths meant that the killer or killers had some kind of working knowledge of how everything functioned back here.

  Which, she supposed, the killer or killers could have gotten through their own personal experience.

  But she kept thinking about the timeline—the fact that, as Zhou had said, the bodies still had some of their connective tissue—and she knew that whoever had done this, had done it in a relatively short space of time.

  Marnie supposed anyone could learn in a short space of time, but in her experience, people didn’t do things more than once if those things were hard.

  Unless the person in question loved a challenge.

  Marnie and Novoa had also brought in food, enough to last through the evening. Marnie had spent part of her trip back into Sandoveil trying to plan how this operation would work.

  She figured they needed the information from the probes, and that would be what they focused on today. After that, they would have to bring in other team members.

  Recovery was going to take days, longer if Hranek still wanted the rocks.

  He wasn’t here to ask any longer. He had gone back to Sandoveil to continue work on the body he had and the death scenes he was overseeing. Plus, he looked like a man who desperately needed some sleep.

  By rights, Marnie should have needed sleep as well, but she didn’t. She had trained herself to handle long jobs like this one. She wouldn’t be handling all the detail work—she was going to leave that to the team—but she would still need to do some of it.

  And, from what she gathered, she had gotten a little more sleep than Hranek had the night before.

  “We’re barely going to get coverage with ten probes.” Zhou opened a holographic screen near her. It had a map he had drawn up. “Here’s what we know of the currents near that trench and structure. I think we’ll need five probes on that side of the pile all by themselves, rather than the two you’ve allotted.”

  “We’re using two,” she said calmly. She was used to being questioned like this. She wasn’t even going to explain herself.

  The first two probes on that side of the pile were sacrificial. They would show what the currents were now, as opposed to at dawn, and they would probably show what other dangers lurked on that side of the structure.

  If the probes made it out all right, then she would send in even more, because Zhou was right: Two was really not enough.

  This operation was going to cost the YSR-SR a lot of money. She was already planning on losing two probes. She had a hunch she would lose a lot more before the day was out.

  “I think we’re good to go,” Dinithi said. She had color in her face again. Earlier that day, Marnie hadn’t been sure whether or not she should send Dinithi home.

  But Marnie was unwilling to. She didn’t want to let anyone out of her sight—hers and Novoa’s.

  Marnie had brought Novoa in on this instead of Tevin because Tevin had told everyone he had known Taji. That meant that he might actually have a motive to kill her, although if Marnie was pressed, she would say Tevin was uninvolved.

  Of all the people she knew, Tevin seemed the least likely to murder anyone, even when provoked.

  Novoa hadn’t known Taji Kimura, or at least, hadn’t known her well. Marnie wasn’t an investigator and didn’t know exactly how to ask her team if they were involved with the dead woman, without somehow leading them.

  So she had decided to trust them as best she could.

  Still, she had urged Zhou to keep an eye on Novoa, and Novoa to keep an eye on everyone else.

  Paranoia was ruling the day out here, which irritated her to no end.

  “Want me to double-check the probes?” Novoa asked Marnie.

  “That would be triple-check,” Zhou said. He sounded a little irritated.

  Marnie decided to ignore that.

  Tevin stood half in the water. He looked almost feral. His hair was dry, but spiky because it had been wet earlier. He still had the lower half of his diving equipment on, while the upper half just hung off his back. He was getting too much sun—or maybe his skin was always ruddy like this after exertion.

  That, she had never paid attention to before.

  He looked all right, though.

  “The barriers are holding,” he said, “
and the light is good.”

  He swept a hand toward the pool. The sun had finally crested over the mountain peaks and hit the pool, making it look green and grainy. Considering how small this pool was, the sun wouldn’t be here long, especially at this time of year.

  He was right: They only had about two hours of sunlight on the water to work with.

  Although the probes were going so deep into that trench, Marnie doubted sunlight had reached those depths in years. If ever.

  Was that why the bodies were hidden here? And if it was, why leave one body floating, to point out that the others existed?

  She only had one answer at the moment, and she didn’t like it.

  It felt like a giant arrow on the water, accompanied by the words Ha-ha, idiots. Look at what you missed.

  And they had missed it. They had missed all of it.

  Marnie took a deep breath. Finally, she understood the truth that Hranek had been expressing all along. They couldn’t speculate. They didn’t dare speculate.

  Not only because they might be wrong, but also because it was so very demoralizing.

  Right now, she needed to know what was down there. Then she would figure out how to deal with it all.

  “All right,” she said, bracing herself. “Let’s send in those probes.”

  FIFTY-THREE

  THE LAB WAS unusually quiet, and it felt stuffy. The environmental system here wasn’t set up for so many people. Virji didn’t know all of them. She knew Fedo, of course, who was working with Iannazzi to finalize the whatever they were going to do to recall the runabout. Fedo had tried to explain their change in thinking, but it had gotten too technical for Virji—and she was usually good with technical.

  All of Iannazzi’s team had returned, and all of them stood near consoles, clearly prepared to step in should something go wrong. Wèi and his team scattered throughout the room and then Nicoleau had brought in another woman—big, tall, and wide-eyed. Obviously, she’d never been in a lab like this one.

  Virji wasn’t going to ask for history on the Beck woman. Nicoleau thought it important for her to be here, which was good enough for Virji.

  Virji’s entire crew had returned to the Ijo. They now stood by.

  She wanted her staff to be ready if the runabout boomeranged back to the Ijo instead of the storage room. She wanted someone to storm that little runabout and pull Sloane Everly off it. Virji wanted that woman in custody.

  Virji rubbed her hands in anticipation, wishing this would get underway faster, yet knowing that something experimental like this was better if it wasn’t rushed.

  “All right,” Iannazzi said as she looked up from the screens she had been working on. “We’re a go.”

  “Now?” Rajivk asked. “What about—?”

  Iannazzi held up a finger at him, silencing him. She was about to speak when Wèi said, “I’ll take the security team into the storage unit.”

  Virji could almost see Iannazzi consider it. And the consideration wasn’t one of safety: it was one of annoyance. Virji had felt that way many times throughout her career—if someone wanted to be stupid, she was willing to let them be stupid, so long as it didn’t get them killed. Particularly if they annoyed her, as Wèi clearly annoyed Iannazzi.

  “No,” Fedo said forcefully, missing all of the interpersonal dynamics. “This runabout has a lot of damage. If it got lost in foldspace for a while, it might have other issues as well. We have no idea what’s going to happen when it returns here.”

  “What do you mean, no idea?” asked one of Wèi’s security personnel, a woman.

  “Precisely that,” Iannazzi said. “The runabout could show up and be just fine. It could boomerang just as we expected, ending up in the storage room. It could arrive slightly off-coordinates, and end up on a different part of the floor or in the wall.”

  Or out here, Virji added mentally, but didn’t say since everyone seemed on edge enough.

  “It could explode,” Iannazzi said, “like we initially thought it had. There are a thousand ways this entire operation could go wrong. Including that it won’t work at all.”

  No one spoke. Everyone stared at Iannazzi, as if they hadn’t thought of any of that. Most of them hadn’t.

  In fact, the new woman, Beck, shifted slightly. Virji got a sense that Beck wanted to bolt right now, maybe even run screaming from the room. Clearly, she was not raised in the Fleet, nor would she ever qualify for it.

  “But don’t worry,” Iannazzi said with a little more relish than Virji would have. “The blast doors should hold if there is an explosion.”

  Beck looked from side to side. Virji almost smiled. If Beck could have snuck out of the room, she clearly would have done so.

  “If Kimura is in that runabout,” Wèi said, “how do we prevent her from just firing the runabout back up and heading out before we even get into the storage room?”

  Iannazzi gave him a withering glance. She clearly disliked him.

  “She could do that whether you’re in the room or not,” Fedo said before Iannazzi could answer. “It’s a risk we’re all going to have to take.”

  Besides, Virji knew, they would simply boomerang the runabout back again. Or they would try. There were several tricks the sector base could use, with the help of the Ijo, if it came down to it.

  She had an open comm link to the Ijo just in case. But she wasn’t going to reassure Wèi either. Virji wanted Sloane Everly to face justice, but justice throughout the sector, not just justice on the base.

  “We’re going to watch the storage room live,” Iannazzi said. “We’ll see what happened this time. We’ve finally rigged cameras into that room so that we’ll know what occurs with the runabout.”

  She moved her hand over one of the holographic screens. The wall screens all came on, half showing the interior of that storage room, and the rest showing some sort of space view. Virji frowned. Had they already connected with the runabout? Because sometimes space views showed what the ship that the system had linked to was seeing.

  She had no real idea, and she wasn’t going to question it. She didn’t want her eagerness to show.

  Virji had lived with the ghost of Everly for years.

  This time, she would bring Everly to justice herself, make Everly pay for everything she had done. Everly would understand the agony she had put families through—the agony she had put the crew of the Ijo through.

  No matter what the onboard psychiatrists said. They claimed people like Everly never understood the consequences of their actions, because their emotions were wired differently.

  But Virji would prove them wrong. She would make Everly feel the pain she had caused.

  Somehow.

  All Virji wanted was the opportunity.

  And it looked like she just might get it.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  THE PROBES STREAMED into the pool like big fat fish. Tevin watched them until they disappeared under the surface. Then he slogged back to the shore, where Marnie and his team waited.

  Dinithi already had a hand over her forehead. Novoa had her arms wrapped around her waist. Zhou was fiddling with something in front of him, and Marnie was shaking her head.

  Ten probes, ten pieces of information. Ten times the confusion.

  Tevin had known that would happen, but he hadn’t wanted to weigh in until everyone saw the problem. Solutions came quicker when everyone agreed about what was wrong.

  “Unify the information streams,” he said to Zhou, “and build a three-D holographic model. Not life-size.”

  Because life-size would take up the entire dry patch that they were working on, plus half of the cliff face. He knew that without doing actual measurements.

  That pile spread out as it went deeper. If it filled the trench, it would end up being bigger than he ever wanted to imagine.

  It only took a moment for Zhou to follow Tevin’s instruction. Zhou had defined the information that would be in the 3D model so that it didn’t include the swim toward the pile, which was sma
rt. Tevin hadn’t thought of that.

  The model appeared between Zhou and the three women. It carved a human-sized image in the area around them, kind of an opaque shadow, one that Tevin recognized. Whenever the probes and computers did not have enough information, they built something like this.

  Right now, all the probes had were the trench, its depth, and the top of the pile. So they knew how tall it was, and the hologram established that by creating a white space around it all.

  As Tevin walked toward the group, no one moved. It was as if they couldn’t take their gazes off that big patch of nothingness.

  Then, as he got close, he saw that it had already formed into a bit of the pile. The top existed all the way around, a small mound, with rocks on the top, and Taji’s body, bent and broken, one arm waving in the non-existent water.

  Her necklace floated upward, visible only as a small black line so miniscule that it seemed like a flaw in the image.

  Tevin joined the others, watched as the pile emerged, layer by layer. Rocks and seaweed and strands of hair. Skulls and finger bones tapping away at the emptiness.

  Zhou had been right. Most of the connective tissue still held everything in place, which was just plain creepy.

  The probes continue to delve downward because the pile kept emerging. Femurs and pelvises and ankles—some of the feet missing.

  Tevin swallowed hard. Now he was feeling just a little queasy, not because everything was so graphic, but because there was so much of it.

  No one spoke. They just watched.

  He walked around them all, looking at the entire model, stunned at what he saw.

  He counted ten skulls, then eleven, then twelve. And he couldn’t quite understand the layout—not where the rocks were placed, but how the bodies had been placed.

  Some of the lower bodies had lost their small bones—the fingers were gone, leaving parts of the arm and sometimes not even that. The image grew darker as it went down, and he wasn’t sure if that was because the information from the probes reflected the loss of the sunlight on the water, or because they had gone deeply into that trench.