People would have thought exactly what he had initially worried about—that Glida and her wife, Taji, had died together, either as a murder-suicide or a double suicide. And then, with the discovery of Taji’s office and all the blood, the authorities would settle on murder-suicide, and not give it much more thought.
For her entire life, Glida had trusted the fact that people did not give the things she did much thought.
He ran a hand over his wet face.
Everyone in town had known she was a little off. Everyone had suspected her of being crazy in one way or another. And a lot of people had discussed Taji, wondering how she could live with Glida, because Glida was so odd.
But not murderous odd. No one had suspected that.
Just like they hadn’t suspected Glida Kimura to be anything other than who she was.
He sighed. It was starting to get dark.
Light filtered up the waterfall in ways he had never seen before because of all those powerful lights planted near the pool. Marnie wanted to keep working on the body dump, as she had called it when he spoke to her briefly. She didn’t want onlookers to show up, or others to get in the way of the recovery effort.
The original team had already gone home, except for Tevin Egbe, who wouldn’t leave. He wanted to supervise the entire mission, and he probably would—even though it was going to take days and days.
Rajivk didn’t envy him.
Nor did he envy those who were going to have to put the entire story of Glida Kimura into the record.
He had heard enough, between Captain Virji and the YSR-SR team. Kimura—Everly—whatever she was called—had been trouble from the start of her young life. She got a second chance and used it to hunt whenever she left the Ijo. And no one knew.
Until she lost her temper at her lover. Had he found out what she had been doing? Or had it been a lover’s spat?
Rajivk wasn’t clear on that.
But he was clear on one thing: She had used her skills in a fit of rage to murder the man she claimed she loved.
Then she had tried to fake her own death and she fled the Ijo. Somehow she had learned how to spoof DNA, and her name, her Everly name, never ended up tied to her Kimura identity.
She had used that trick to make the entire sector base her playground.
He shuddered. At least she hadn’t murdered anyone in the base.
That he knew of.
He shook off the water as if he were getting out of the shower. If he was going to make it around the upper path before dark, he had to keep moving.
He gave the overlook one final glance.
She hadn’t wanted to be caught. But she had wanted some kind of acknowledgement. She wanted the community to know that she was gone, maybe even wanted them to know that she had killed Taji.
Of course, Glida should have been long gone by the time the body was discovered. But she had had bad luck from the beginning of this one. She hadn’t expected all the attention on the sector base closing. She hadn’t expected the runabout to fail her.
And she hadn’t expected to die, trapped, in foldspace.
He smiled just a little at that thought.
It had been horrible watching how frantic she had gotten as the days went on and she realized she could not escape. There had been no escape pods on this runabout, and even if there had been, where would she have gone?
And yet, when he thought of all that she had done, all of the lives she had ruined, all of the people she had killed, he shouldn’t have considered her death horrible at all.
He should have considered it justified.
What did it say about him that even knowing all she had done, he felt twinges of compassion as he scanned through the images of the end of her life?
He shook his head and started up the trail. The sun had moved behind the peaks. It was gloomy up there.
His heart pounded, and he was tired. Exhausted, actually.
The exact setup for a misstep on the slick black trail.
He sighed, then smiled at himself.
He wasn’t being honest with himself. He’d walked this trail in growing darkness, so tired that the rumble and roar of the Falls barely registered, many times before.
This time, he wasn’t so much worried about a misstep or a tumble into the river.
This time, he saw the shade of a woman up there, a woman who saw people like him as fair game for the sport that she pursued.
Her sport probably wasn’t murder. From everything he had seen, her sport was duping the people around her. She liked never getting caught.
But to never get caught, you actually had to do something.
Or encounter someone doing something.
He took one more step forward and then stopped.
He wouldn’t be as haunted after some sleep. She wouldn’t bother him at all. He would be able to put the events of the last two days in some kind of perspective.
He hoped.
And then he turned around, and took the safe route home.
And coming in 2017, the next Boss Diving novel: The Runabout.
Read on for a preview.
Choral music. Sixteen voices, perfect harmony, singing without words. Chords shifting in a pattern. First, third, fifth, minor sixth and down again.
I can hear them, running up and down the scales like a waterfall, their chorus twice as loud as the rest of the music floating through the Boneyard.
Of course, I know there is no music here. I am hearing the malfunctioning tech of a thousand, five thousand, ten thousand ships, all clustered together in an area of space larger than some planets. The sound is the way that my head processes the changing energy signatures, although, oddly, I can’t hear any of it when I have my exterior communications link off.
Anyone with a genetic marker that ties them to the Fleet can hear this. Everyone else can’t.
Although I’ve never really tested this assumption thoroughly. I don’t know if those of us with the marker hear the same thing.
My mind is wandering, which is dangerous during a dive. I have just exited the Sove, a Dignity Vessel we pulled from the Boneyard months ago, and I’m heading toward a completely intact Dignity Vessel only a one-hundred meters away. I’m wearing an upgraded environmental suit, with more features than I’ve ever used before. I hate those, but I’ve finally gotten used to the clear hood that seals around the neck, instead of a helmet, like I used to wear.
We’ve sent a line from the Sove’s smallest bay door to the only visible door on the Dignity Vessel, and I’m clinging to that line by my right hand.
I’m facing the Dignity Vessel, when the sound catches me.
Elaine Seager, one of the original Six who learned to dive with me way after we discovered the need for markers, is slowly working her way toward the other Dignity Vessel. She’s ever so slightly ahead of me on the line. I was the second one to exit the Sove.
Orlando Rea, another one of the Six, is waiting to exit the Sove. We have strict procedure about the distance between divers on a line.
In fact, we have strict procedures about everything.
The procedures keep us safe.
“What’s the hold-up?” Yash Zarlengo asks from inside the Sove. She’s monitoring us. She hates diving, and avoids it as much as possible.
She’ll have to do a lot of it on this trip—she often has to dive when we’re in the Boneyard—but she’s going to dive only after we know what’s inside our target vessel.
I snap to attention, still caught by that sound.
“I’m the hold-up,” I say. “Orlando, you need to go around me and catch up to Elaine.”
“Not procedure, Boss,” Orlando says from behind me. His tone is half-amused, half-chiding. I’m the one who always harps on procedure.
But he does as I ask. He exits the bay door on the right side instead of the left, and grips the line.
I flip my comm so that Yash can’t hear what I have to say to the other two divers.
“You hearing that?” I ask O
rlando and Elaine.
Orlando looks around—up, down, sideways. There are ships everywhere. Different kinds, different makes, different eras. As far as we can tell, they’re all Fleet vessels, although some of our team back at the Lost Souls Corporation hopes that we’ll also find vessels of other makes.
There’s a theory that these ships were stored here during a protracted war.
I think the theory’s wishful thinking. Because I love diving ancient and abandoned ships, I’ve learned a lot about history. And one thing that unites human beings, no matter where they live, is their ability to take a historical fact and discard it for a story that sounds ever so much better.
The war sounds so much better than a ship graveyard, put here to store abandoned ships until they’re needed—a kind of junkyard in space.
I’ve stopped arguing that point of view, though. I figure time will tell us what this place actually is.
I can’t see Orlando’s face through his hood. He has turned away from me.
I wish the new suits had one more feature. I wish we could monitor each other’s physical reactions in real time. We send that information back to the Sove as we dive, but we don’t give it to each other.
I didn’t help with the design of the new suits, and that was a mistake. Yash designed them to handle the constantly changing energy waves we identified inside the Boneyard. The waves come from all the anacapa drives inside the Boneyard and, Yash thinks, from the Boneyard’s anacapa drives as well. Each drive has a different signature, and malfunctioning drives have even stranger signatures.
We hit the waves as we move across the emptiness from one ship to another, sometimes one wave in the short distance, and sometimes three dozen waves.
Orlando’s hand remains tightly wrapped around the line.
“Yeah,” he says softly, in answer to my question. “I do hear that. I can’t tell where it’s coming from.”
Elaine has stopped a few meters from us.
“Are we diving or not?” she asks.
That annoyed question went across the open channel, which means Yash heard it.
“Is there a hold-up?” she asks again. “Besides Boss?”
I decide to come clean. “We’ve got a strange energy signature.”
“I’m not reading anything from your suits,” Yash says.
I sigh silently. We’re now getting to the thing she hates—the musicality of the Boneyard itself.
“I can hear it,” I say.
“Me, too,” Orlando says. He doesn’t have to. I hope he’s not protecting me.
Even though Yash represents the Fleet on these dives, I’m in charge of them. I still run the Lost Souls Corporation, even if I’ve delegated many of my duties to Ilona Blake.
I never go on dives where someone else is in charge.
“Well,” Yash says, “whatever you ‘hear’ isn’t important. Examining that ship ahead of you is.”
She’s right. We are salvaging ships from the Boneyard, and it takes a lot of work. We’ve taken seventeen Dignity Vessels so far, but not all of them work as well as we want them to. We’ve ended up using six of them for parts.
Orlando turns toward me, remembering, maybe at this late date, that I’m the one who gives the final orders here.
I nod, then sigh.
“She’s right,” I say. “We’re on the clock. Let’s keep moving forward.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.
Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award.
She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.
She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own.
To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.
Look for These Other Titles from Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Diving Series (novels):
Diving into the Wreck: A Diving Novel
City of Ruins: A Diving Novel
Boneyards: A Diving Novel
Skirmishes: A Diving Novel
The Runabout: A Diving Novel (coming 2017)
The Falls: A Diving Universe Novel
Diving Series (novellas):
Diving into the Wreck: A Diving Novella
The Room of Lost Souls: A Diving Novella
The Application of Hope: A Diving Universe Novella
Becalmed: A Diving Universe Novella
Becoming One with the Ghosts: A Diving Novella
Stealth: A Diving Universe Novella
Strangers at the Room of Lost Souls: A Diving Universe Novella
The Spires of Denon: A Diving Universe Novella
Diving Series (bundles):
The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas
Sign up for the WMG Publishing newsletter to receive updates about new releases, bonus content and more at wmgpublishing.com
Copyright Information
The Falls
Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Philcold/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Ninet
een
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
Forty-eight
Forty-nine
Fifty
Fifty-one
Fifty-two
Fifty-three
Fifty-four
Fifty-five
Fifty-six
Fifty-seven
Fifty-eight
Fifty-nine
Sixty
Sixty-one
Sixty-two
Preview of The Runabout
Newsletter Signup
About the Author
Look for These Other Titles from Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Copyright Information
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016 Page 36
