As he walked around the mountainside of the image, something wavered, and then blanked out. The growing information stopped on that side entirely.
“Lost a probe,” he said, since he was the only one on that side of the image at the moment.
“Yeah, I know,” Zhou said. “Cherish, prep another for me, will you?”
“Two more,” Marnie said. Her voice sounded strangled, as if it hurt her to talk.
They were all pretending to be professional, but there was nothing to be professional about. None of them had ever seen anything like this.
Novoa took a step toward Tevin, her own fingers white where they grabbed the black shirt she always wore under her diving equipment.
“This can’t be the work of one person,” she said, but she didn’t sound convinced.
Of course it could be the work of one person, over a long, long period of time. But he didn’t understand why anyone would do this.
“I mean, this couldn’t be something from the sector base, or something, could it?” Novoa asked.
“No, it’s not,” Marnie said. “They handle their own corpses.”
She had gotten blunt. Heaven help all of them when Marnie got blunt. Blunt meant she no longer cared about anyone’s feelings. Blunt meant she had had enough.
“So even if one of their mighty ships blew up,” she said, “and flung dead bodies everywhere, the sector base would deal with it all.”
“And besides,” Zhou said softly, “they didn’t need to hide the bodies here. If they wanted to hide bodies, they could just send them into space.”
Tevin looked away from the empty patch at Zhou. Zhou was right. That one little comment, that one little insight, confirmed something that had niggled at Tevin.
Whoever did this was a local. Someone with a lot of knowledge about the way everything worked in Sandoveil, the Sandoveil Valley, and in Sandoveil government. The person (or persons) would also have a working knowledge of the YSR-SR.
Tevin took a small breath. Those three details meant that it wouldn’t be hard to find whoever did this. Because, as Dinithi pointed out earlier, there weren’t that many locals in Sandoveil. And there were even fewer that knew the workings of the YSR-SR.
That didn’t mean that whoever did this was a current or former member of the YSR-SR. Someone close to the organization, yes—like a spouse or a close friend of someone who volunteered.
But not necessarily a member.
He hoped.
“Got them,” Dinithi said, and for a moment, Tevin thought she meant that she had figured out who had done this horrible thing.
She meant that she was releasing the new probes. He turned so he could watch.
They scuttled across the surface of the water until they reached the edge of the barrier and then they sank underneath it.
Something in their telemetry told them that this was a better approach than the ones the now missing probe had used.
The waterfall roared and pounded, the water spilling over the edges of that cliff, nonstop, relentless.
That was the problem: Tevin wasn’t being relentless. He was looking at this as a gigantic tragedy for the town and for the YSR-SR. Not to mention the recovery teams that would dive it, and the people who would have to deal with the remains.
But there was another way to look at this entire thing. Now, at least a dozen families would get information, maybe even closure, about what had happened to their loved ones. And the Sandoveil Security Office would find the person or persons who did this and stop even more killing.
It wasn’t the best solution, but there were no good solutions in situations like this.
There was only discovery, which would answer questions and bring something that had been hidden into the light.
If he pursued whoever had done this as relentlessly as that water spilled into this pool, he would make a difference.
He would help someone, even a little.
The missing part of the holographic image filled in, and he wished it hadn’t.
Two more skulls, one almost on top of the other. A ribcage that didn’t seem attached to either of them.
And more jewelry and bits of clothing, trapped under the rocks.
The entire base of this pile was still unmapped. The destruction looked like a sculpture carved on top of marble. A hideous, disgusting sculpture.
Novoa sighed beside him. “We’re going to spend months on this, aren’t we?”
He nodded, although “months” probably wasn’t accurate. “Years” was more likely. And then procedures would change, because of this, and the casual nature of life in Sandoveil would go away, along with the base.
The world he had grown up in, the community he had grown up in, would no longer be something he recognized. Maybe not in thirty years, like he had expected with the base closure, but next year or the year after.
They couldn’t trust each other anymore.
They had let a predator into their community, and now, everyone would pay.
FIFTY-FIVE
BRISTOL LOOKED AT Fedo. They had become compatriots in this quest to get the runabout back. Fedo seemed pale, but determined.
Everyone else in the lab looked either frightened or a little too tough. Only Virji seemed unfazed by this. She leaned back, arms crossed, as if daring someone to anger her further.
Bristol took a deep breath, and nodded ever so slightly at Fedo, asking Ready? without saying a word.
Fedo nodded back, almost imperceptibly.
Then Bristol activated the program they had developed together.
It pooled all of their resources—the maintenance mode that Fedo had designed, the linked anacapa rescue system inside the sector base, and the educated guesses that Bristol had made about the runabout’s location.
She waited, breathing shallowly, hoping that this would work. If it didn’t, she wasn’t sure what to do next.
People stared at the screens. Fedo watched her own holographic screen to see if the runabout turned up inside the Ijo. Bristol’s screen ran a series of numbers along with all of the other coordinate information she had gathered, but so far she was getting nothing.
Nothing at all.
If they didn’t capture this woman, someone would have to conduct some kind of search. If they didn’t capture her, she would continue harming people everywhere.
Bristol would have to write some kind of program so that the sector base could continually search for the runabout, even once the base was closed. She’d make the search automated, and she’d make sure that Glida Whateverhernameis would come back here, even if it were years in the future.
It would serve her right.
But Bristol doubted that would happen. She had a hunch they would all end up as frustrated as Virji, constantly searching for the ghost of a woman who had bested them a thousand times over.
Bristol wasn’t even certain there was a good punishment for Glida. Everyone would fight over jurisdiction, and she’d be an old woman before someone decided to try her or imprison her.
She would get away with everything.
No one wanted that. But even with Bristol’s limited knowledge of the way the various justice systems worked, scattered throughout the sector, Bristol had a hunch that Glida would get away with it all.
Glida was smart. She could play one group against another. She might even find another way to escape.
Not that she would need to, since it looked like she had already gotten away. It looked like Glida Kimura was gone forever.
Then the blast doors slammed against the wall, making the entire lab shiver. Nanobits rained down from the ceiling, something Bristol had never seen before.
The new woman—Beck?—looked up, startled, as if she were afraid the entire base would fall in on them.
Bristol glanced at the monitors.
The runabout sat in the middle of the storage room, ice fog rising off the surface. The temperature in the storage room had dropped almost fifty degrees in the few seconds since the r
unabout arrived.
“Is that it?” Wèi asked. “That looks like it.”
He sounded excited. He gestured to his team and started heading toward the door.
“You wait,” Bristol said with more command in her voice than she had ever used before. “We’re checking the environment first.”
Glida Kimura was a dangerous woman. She might have planned for a contingency like this. If she had, she might actually have some of the shipboard chemicals isolated and ready to deploy as a weapon outside the runabout.
That was what Bristol would do. She would attack any way she could—if she couldn’t get the runabout out of the base a second time.
After all, Glida had nothing to lose. She had already killed people, so killing more wouldn’t make that much of a difference. And it might buy her enough time to get the runabout ready to leave again.
Maybe.
The environmental system in the storage room had restored the temperature to normal. The system wasn’t doing any extra work, according to the information Bristol was getting, so Glida hadn’t deployed any makeshift weapons.
Bristol glanced at Fedo. Fedo shrugged one shoulder. She wasn’t seeing anything.
Then Bristol looked at her team. They were all focused on their screens, except for Rajivk.
“See anything unusual?” she asked him.
“Yeah,” he said. “Look at the exterior of that ship.”
He meant the runabout. She looked, ran a composite.
The runabout was in much worse shape than it had been a few days ago. The exterior, which had been pockmarked before, seemed thinner. It looked like there might actually be a hole in its side.
Bristol couldn’t get her equipment to examine that, not closely, and not given the limited resources she had in the storage room.
“Any way your people can detect life forms in that runabout?” Bristol asked Fedo.
Because Bristol hadn’t thought to set anything like that up in the storage area. She never had need of major scanning equipment there before. What she did have was limited, even in the lab, because she worked on anacapa drives, not on ships.
The person who answered Bristol wasn’t Fedo. It was Virji.
“I’ve already checked,” Virji said. “We’re not reading anything. But there seems to be some sort of interference with the Ijo’s scans.”
“Because of a malfunctioning anacapa drive,” Fedo said to Bristol, not to Virji. “It’s acting as a low-level cloak.”
Bristol’s mouth went dry. Glida could have planned that. She might have booby-trapped the entire runabout.
“Is the anacapa naturally acting that way?” Bristol asked. “Or did she do it?”
“I think it’s from the anacapa you installed,” Fedo said, without blame. “I think that’s how it’s interacting with all those problems inside the runabout.”
Maybe. But that was all speculation.
“I don’t think it matters,” Virji said. “We have to go get her before she manages to get that runabout functional again.”
Bristol wasn’t sure what functional meant. But she did understand the dangers.
“If anyone goes in there as she sets off that anacapa to take the runabout back into foldspace,” Bristol said, “all of us could die. If the blast doors are open—”
“Then vacate the lab,” Virji snapped. “Because we’re going in.”
FIFTY-SIX
VIRJI DIDN’T CARE about the delicate sensibilities of the planet-bound. They had no idea how to face any kind of danger, with their layers of security and their tiny worries about a base closure that would happen decades from now.
They were weak, and they were scared, and they were in her way.
She glared at all of them, mentally daring them to stay in the lab.
That Beck woman tugged on Nicoleau’s sleeve. He shook his head once. Clearly she wanted to leave, and he didn’t want to go. Since she was, apparently, reliant on him, she would have to stay too.
“If you want to go in, come with me,” Virji said to Wèi. She’d let him take the arrest as the security of the Fleet’s sector base. She’d argue jurisdiction later.
But she was going to have the satisfaction of taking that murdering bitch into custody. Virji wouldn’t kill her, but Virji would certainly let her know just what kind of shit she found herself in.
Virji was trembling ever so slightly. Adrenaline. She wanted Everly in the worst way.
“If you’re coming with us, Captain,” Wèi said, “you’ll have to stay toward the back. This is our op.”
“My op,” Virji said. “You’re with me.”
She didn’t care about protocol. She only cared about getting Everly.
Virji shoved her way past the stupid lab spectators, most of whom still looked stunned at the idea that they might die this afternoon, and approached the blast doors.
“Open them,” she said to Iannazzi.
Iannazzi didn’t hesitate. She moved a finger, and some kind of command went through her screen to the blast doors. They shuddered, making more nanobits fall from the ceiling.
A couple people looked up, worried.
Virji was more worried about the way that the doors strained. They didn’t fit their frame any longer. They had been warped by the anacapa field.
If she couldn’t get in because the anacapa had destroyed the damn doors, she’d figure out a way to carve her way through the stupid wall. She was going in before Everly had yet another chance to escape.
Then the doors wobbled open.
The smell of burned dust wafted in, along with a hint of space-cold. Usually Virji loved the smell of space, frigid and clean and surprisingly familiar, but not right now. It felt almost contaminated by its contact with Everly.
Virji pulled her pistol. Wèi maneuvered around her and stopped at the doors, following procedure, doing a visual check to make certain that no one was waiting on either side.
Virji could have told him no one was. No one had left that runabout, and anyone who had been waiting inside that storage room would be dead right now. She didn’t smell death, not from the storage room.
And she heard no sound except the shuffling of the people behind her and her own ragged breathing.
She wasn’t as calm as she wanted to be.
She started to go in, but Wèi held her back. He shook his head.
“No captain is dying on my watch,” he said.
She didn’t care about his watch. She pushed past him. He didn’t know how to get into the runabout, and he didn’t know the way the vessel was laid out.
Besides, he couldn’t open the runabout’s door without her.
The runabout dominated the storage room. The air still had that slightly frigid feel as the environmental systems worked to equalize the oxygen and temperature levels.
The runabout looked unfamiliar. Oh, it was the right make, and it had the proper markings. It was her runabout.
But it looked damaged and gray and old, as if the nanobits had ceased working a long, long time ago. Something had scored the side of the hull closest to Virji.
“We’re sending Tranh in first,” Wèi said, pushing up beside Virji.
Virji glared at him angrily, but he didn’t seem fazed by that. He moved the tall, dark-haired woman—Tranh, apparently—in front of both of them. Another of his team members—a man—flanked her.
It was the smarter play, even if Virji didn’t like it.
She palmed the exterior of the runabout. It felt cold and clammy against her skin, not warm the way it should have after a few minutes in the new environment.
The runabout’s exterior was badly damaged, and the damage didn’t look like it had been done by another ship or a firefight.
A shiver ran through her. Foldspace was unpredictable.
She revised her expectations downward. They might not find Everly at all. They might find a completely empty runabout, with no clue as to where she went.
In fact, if Virji had to hazard a guess based on the ev
idence, that would be what she would expect now.
She let out a hiss of disappointment. Wèi looked at her oddly, but didn’t say a word.
The runabout’s door should have opened by now. Virji palmed the opening again, and nothing happened.
So she tapped in an emergency code—one of fifteen that the Fleet used to override protocols.
Still, the door didn’t open.
“Let me,” Wèi said. He pulled out a small, thin, metal tool Virji didn’t recognize and inserted it between the door and the runabout’s frame. “Now try.”
Virji put her palm against the control panel, and this time, the runabout’s door squealed. It opened only a half an inch, enough for Wèi and Tranh to get their fingers into it.
They braced themselves and pulled the door toward the other side of the frame, their muscles bunching, their faces turning red.
If Everly was inside, she certainly had enough time to prepare for them now.
The door’s squeal grew louder, as if it were protesting the way it was being treated. Finally Wèi and Tranh managed to get it into the frame.
The air emerging smelled fetid. Virji would wager it wasn’t even air, but some kind of leftover chemical component of the environmental system.
“Fitzwilliam,” Wèi said. “I need clamps.”
The bald male security guard who had been at Wèi’s side since Virji first met them hurried forward. He was holding small door clamps in each hand. Apparently, he had been ready for this, or maybe some had been on the shelves in the back of the storage area.
Fitzwilliam and Wèi struggled with his side of the door, and then they both helped Tranh with hers.
The door to the airlock on the runabout stood open.
“It doesn’t seem like anything’s working in there,” Wèi said.
Virji sensed the same thing.
“We’re going to have to suit up,” she said. “And then we’ll see what we can find.”
FIFTY-SEVEN
THEY HEARD EVERY sound coming out of the storage room, which Bassima did not think was a good idea. Having the blast doors open wasn’t a good idea, and coming down here had been a terrible idea.
The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016 Page 33
