The Disappeared

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Jamal felt a shiver run down his back. “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “It happens,” she said. “Sometimes the jobs are so big—”

  “No,” he said. “The breakdown in security.”

  She gave him a tolerant smile. “I usually don’t mention it. The dome doors go off-line a lot, particularly near the space port. I think it has something to do with the commands issued by the high-speed trains coming in from the north, but no one will listen to me. I’m too junior. Maybe in my off time…”

  But Jamal stopped listening. Another shiver ran down his back. It wasn’t Dylani’s news that was making him uneasy. The kitchen was actually cold and it shouldn’t have been. Cooking in such a small space usually made the temperature rise, not lower.

  He went to the kitchen door. Closed and latched.

  “…would result in a promotion,” Dylani was saying. Then she frowned. “Jamal?”

  “Keep talking,” he said.

  But she didn’t. Her lips became a thin line. He recognized the look. She hated it when he did this, thought his paranoia was reaching new heights.

  Maybe it was. He always felt stupid after moments like this, when he realized that Ennis was safe in his bed and nothing was wrong.

  But that didn’t stop him from prowling through the house, searching for the source of the chill. He’d never forgive himself if something happened and he didn’t check.

  “Jamal.”

  He could hear the annoyance in Dylani’s voice, but he ignored it, walking past her into the narrow hallway between the kitchen and the living room. He turned right, toward their bedroom.

  It was dark like Dylani had left it, but there was a light at the very end of the hall. In Ennis’s room.

  Jamal never left a light on in Ennis’s room. The boy napped in the dark. Studies had shown that children who slept with lights on became nearsighted, and Jamal wanted his son to have perfect vision.

  “Jamal?”

  He was running down the hallway now. He couldn’t have slowed down if he tried. Dylani might have left the light on, but he doubted it. She and Jamal had discussed the nightlight issue just like they had discussed most things concerning Ennis.

  They never left his window open—that was Dylani’s choice. She knew how contaminated the air had become inside the dome, and she felt their environmental filter was better than the government’s. No open window, no cooler temperatures.

  And no light.

  He slid into Ennis’s room, the pounding of his feet loud enough to wake the baby. Dylani was running after him.

  “Jamal!”

  The room looked normal, bathed in the quiet light of the lamp he had placed above the changing table. The crib nestled against one corner, the playpen against another. The changing table under the always closed window—which was closed, even now.

  But the air was cooler, just like the air outside the house was cooler. Since Ennis was born, they’d spent extra money on heat just to make sure the baby was comfortable. Protected. Safe.

  Jamal stopped in front of the crib. He didn’t have to look. He could already feel the difference in the room. Someone else had been here, and not long ago. Someone else had been here, and Ennis was not here, not any longer.

  Still, he peered down at the mattress where he had placed his son not an hour ago. Ennis’s favorite blanket was thrown back, revealing the imprint of his small body. The scents of baby powder and baby sweat mingled into something familiar, something lost.

  Mr. Biscuit perched against the crib’s corner, his thread eyes empty. The fur on his paw was matted and wet where Ennis had sucked on it, probably as he had fallen asleep. The pacifier that he had yet to grow out of was on the floor, covered in dirt.

  “Jamal?” Dylani’s voice was soft.

  Jamal couldn’t turn to her. He couldn’t face her. All he could see was the gold bracelet that rested on Ennis’s blanket. The bracelet Jamal hadn’t seen for a decade. The symbol of his so-called brilliance, a reward for a job well done. He had been so proud of it when he received it, that first night on Korsve. And so happy to leave it behind two years later.

  “Oh, my God,” Dylani said from the door. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.” Jamal’s voice shook. He was lying. He tried not to lie to Dylani. Did she know that his voice shook when he lied?

  As she came into the room, he snatched the bracelet and hid it in his fist.

  “Who would do this?” she asked. She was amazingly calm, given what was happening. But Dylani never panicked. Panicking was his job. “Who would take our baby?”

  Jamal slipped the bracelet into his pocket, then put his arms around his wife.

  “We need help,” she said.

  “I know.” But he already knew it was hopeless. There was nothing anyone could do.

  * * *

  The holovid played at one-tenth normal size in the corner of the space yacht. The actors paced, the sixteenth-century palace looking out of place against the green-and-blue plush chairs beside it. Much as Sara loved this scene—Hamlet’s speech to the players—she couldn’t concentrate on it. She regretted ordering up Shakespeare. It felt like part of the life she was leaving behind.

  Sara wondered if the other two felt as unsettled as she did. But she didn’t ask. She didn’t really want the answers. The others were in this because of her, and they rarely complained about it. Of course, they didn’t have a lot of choice.

  She glanced at them. Ruth had flattened her seat into a cot. She was asleep on her back, hands folded on her stomach like a corpse, her curly black hair covering the pillow like a shroud.

  Isaac stared at the holovid, but Sara could tell he wasn’t really watching it. He bent at his midsection, elbows resting on his thighs, his care-lined features impassive. He’d been like this since they left New Orleans, focused, concentrated, frozen.

  The yacht bounced.

  Sara stopped the holovid. Space yachts didn’t bounce. There was nothing for them to bounce on.

  “What the hell was that?” she asked.

  Neither Ruth nor Isaac answered. Ruth was still asleep. Isaac hadn’t moved.

  She got up and pulled up the shade on the nearest portal. Earth mocked her, blue and green viewed through a haze of white. As she stared at her former home, a small oval-shaped ship floated past, so close it nearly brushed against the yacht. Through a tiny portal on the ship’s side, she caught a glimpse of a human face. A white circle was stamped beneath the portal. She had seen that symbol before: it was etched lightly on the wall inside the luxurious bathroom off the main cabin.

  Her breath caught in her throat. She hit the intercom near the window. “Hey,” she said to the cockpit. “What’s going on?”

  No one answered her. When she took her finger off the intercom, she didn’t even hear static.

  She shoved Isaac’s shoulder. He glared at her.

  “I think we’re in trouble,” she said.

  “No kidding.”

  “I mean it.”

  She got up and walked through the narrow corridor toward the pilot’s quarters and cockpit. The door separating the main area from the crew quarters was large and thick, with a sign that flashed No Entry without Authorization.

  This time, she hit the emergency button, which should have brought one of the crew into the back. But the intercom didn’t come on and no one moved.

  She tried the door, but it was sealed on the other side.

  The yacht rocked and dipped. Sara slid toward the wall, slammed into it, and sank to the floor. Seatbelt lights went on all over the cabin.

  Ruth had fallen as well. She sat on the floor, rubbing her eyes. Isaac was the only one who stayed in his seat.

  The yacht had stabilized.

  “What’s going on?” Ruth asked.

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” Sara said.

  She grabbed one of the metal rungs, placed there for zero-g flight, and tried the door again. It didn’t open.

  “Isaac,�
�� she said, “can you override this thing?”

  “Names,” he cautioned.

  She made a rude noise. “As if it matters.”

  “It matters. They said it mattered from the moment we left Earth—”

  The yacht shook, and Sara smelled something sharp, almost like smoke, but more peppery.

  “Isaac,” she said again.

  He grabbed the rungs and walked toward her, his feet slipping on the tilted floor. Ruth pulled herself into her chair, her face pale, eyes huge. Sara had only seen her look like that once before—when they’d seen Ilanas’s body in the newsvids, sprawled across the floor of their rented apartment in the French Quarter.

  Isaac had reached Sara’s side. He was tinkering with the control panel beside the door. “Cheap-ass stuff,” he said. “You’d think on a luxury cruiser, they’d have up-to-date security.”

  The door clicked and Isaac pushed it open.

  Sweat ran down Sara’s back, even though the yacht hadn’t changed temperature. The smell had grown worse, and there was a pounding coming from the emergency exit just inside the door.

  Isaac bit his lower lip.

  “Hello?” Sara called. Her voice didn’t echo, but she could feel the emptiness around her. There was no one in the galley, and the security guard who was supposed to be sitting near the cockpit wasn’t there.

  Isaac stayed by the emergency exit. He was studying that control panel. Ruth had crawled across her cot, and was staring out the panel on her side of the ship. Her hands were shaking.

  Sara turned her back on them. She went inside the cockpit—and froze.

  It was empty. Red lights blinked on the control panels. The ship was on autopilot, and both of its escape pods had been launched. A red line had formed on a diagram of the ship, the line covering the emergency exit where the noise had come from. More red illuminated the back of the ship.

  She punched vocal controls. They had been shut off—which explained why silence had greeted her when she tried the intercom, when she hit the emergency switch, even when she had touched the sealed door.

  Warning, the ship’s computer said. Engines disabled. Breach in airlock one. Intruder alert.

  Sara sat in the pilot’s chair. It had been years since she’d tried to fly a ship and she’d never operated anything this sophisticated. She had to focus.

  Warning.

  First she had to bring the controls back online. Most of them had been shut off from the inside. She didn’t want to think about what that meant. Not now.

  Intruder alert.

  She needed visuals. She opened the ports around her, and then wished she hadn’t.

  A large white ship hovered just outside her view, its pitted hull and cone-shaped configuration sending a chill through her heart.

  The Disty had found her—and they were about to break in.

  Two

  Miles Flint stepped inside the crew tunnel leading to the docks. He thought he had escaped this place. Two months ago, he’d been promoted to detective—a job that would allow him to remain inside Armstrong’s dome and solve crimes, rather than arrive in the Port at 0600 and launch at 0645, to play traffic cop in the Moon’s orbit.

  Of course as a space cop he’d seen a few detectives in the Port, but only rarely. Most crimes found by traffic cops had clear perpetrators. Those that didn’t were referred to Headquarters and usually the crimes were solved without the detective ever setting foot in the Port.

  Just his bad luck that he would get a case that required his presence here. He suspected that he and his partner, Noelle DeRicci, had been chosen specifically for this one, primarily because he knew how the Port worked.

  DeRicci walked several meters ahead of him. She was a short, muscular woman who had been a detective for more than twenty years. Her dark hair, shot with gray, remained its natural color because she felt people gave more respect to older detectives than younger. She hadn’t paid for other cosmetic enhancements either, for the very same reason.

  She scanned the sheet on her hand-held as she walked. Flint wondered how she could see. The old colonial lighting was dim at best, the energy cells nearly tapped out. The light was yellowish-gray, giving the tunnels the look of perpetual twilight.

  The crew tunnels were one of the few original underground structures left. They’d been reinforced after a few cave-ins had convinced Armstrong’s governor to spend the funds to prevent more lawsuits.

  The public tunnels leading from the Port to the dome were newer—if something that had been around for fifty years could be considered new. They were wider and safer, at least, built to the code finally developed for underground structures once Armstrong realized it couldn’t expand horizontally any more.

  But cops weren’t allowed in the public areas, unless they were acting as security. Armstrong made a large chunk of its income off tourists who came to see the Moon’s history, wrapped in one place. Armstrong not only boasted a large number of original colonial structures—the first ever built on the Moon—it was also the site of the first lunar landing, made when human beings wore bulky white suits and jettisoned into space in a capsule attached to a bomb.

  Flint took several long strides to catch up to DeRicci. “What’ve we got?”

  She gave him a sideways look. He recognized the contempt. She’d been trying to intimidate him from the moment they became partners. For some reason, she seemed to think intimidation would work.

  It was probably his face. He looked younger than he was. His ex-wife used to say that she sometimes thought she had married an overgrown baby. In the early years of their marriage, she’d said that fondly, as if she loved the way he looked. That horrible last year, she’d spit out the words, angry that the grief which had consumed both of them and devoured their marriage hadn’t left its mark on his face.

  “Well?” he asked, knowing DeRicci wouldn’t answer him if he didn’t press.

  “Won’t know what we have until HazMat’s done,” she said and clicked her hand-held closed.

  He already knew why they had come here. A ship with bodies aboard had arrived at the Port sometime that afternoon. But he knew there had to be more information than that. He used to tow disabled ships as part of his space-cop duties. Before ships got towed, the space cops entered, and usually their reports were sent on to the investigative team if one was needed.

  He would find out what happened soon enough. They were heading toward Terminal 4, where derelict and abandoned ships were usually towed. If the ship had a living crew member or a recognizable registration, it went to Terminal 16. Ships whose owners were suspected of criminal activity went to Terminal 5, and ships carrying illegal cargo went to Terminal 6.

  The tunnel opened into the office ring. Square offices, walled off by clear plastic, clustered against the wall. This section of each terminal looked the same—tiny desks inside tiny rooms, littered with notices, signs, and electronic warnings. A few of the desks had their own built-in system—again on the theory that direct uplinks were untrustworthy—but most of the Command/Control center was on the upper levels.

  Signs pointed the various directions that the crews went, many to clock in, others to find their uniforms before beginning shift. Also down these corridors were interrogation rooms, holding cells, and the required link to customs. Flint had taken several illegals into that link, never to see them again.

  The main corridor went to the terminal proper. Each terminal had its own dome that opened whenever a ship needed to dock. More tunnels led to the docks, only these tunnels were open, made of clear plastic just like the offices were. They had their own environmental controls, which could be shut off at a moment’s notice. The tunnel doors could also slam closed with a single command from Terminal 4’s tower—a security precaution that Flint had only had to use once in his eight-year stint on Traffic.

  Two uniformed space cops were waiting at the edge of the docks. DeRicci touched the chip that made the shield on her collar flash.

  “Which way?” she asked them,
but Flint didn’t wait for their answer. He could see which dock held the ship. The HazMat crew’s orange warning lights covered the tunnel, warning Control not to set any ship down in a dock nearby until HazMat had cleared the area.

  As Flint walked toward the affected tunnel, he scanned the far end, searching for the ship. He had to squint to see it, small against the tunnel’s opening.

  A space yacht. Its design—narrow and pointed—made it of Earth construction. It was a fairly new ship, built for speed not luxury, certainly not the kind of vehicle that was usually abandoned or left derelict in the Moon’s orbit.

  In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he had seen a yacht in Terminal 4. Sometimes yachts were used for contraband, and sometimes they were used to transport illegals, but never did they arrive here, where someone had to trace their registration to see who had abandoned them. Yachts were stolen and often resold, but never abandoned. They were too valuable for that.

  Two more space cops stood near the tunnel entrance, hands behind their backs, staring straight ahead. Flint recognized the posture. They were guarding the entrance, a duty given only to the cops who found the vessel. When a space cop was in charge of a vessel, that charge didn’t end until HazMat was done and the vessel was released to the appropriate authority.

  The cops were both male, and at least ten years younger than Flint. He introduced himself, pressed the chip that illuminated his badge, and said, “I take it you two towed in the vessel.”

  The cop closest to him, whose hollow cheeks and muscles spoke of deliberate malnourishment in the name of exercise, nodded.

  “What’ve we got?” Flint asked.

  “It’s in the report,” the other cop said. He was older, more experienced. His almond-shaped gray eyes had a flat expression, as if he resented talking to a detective.

  Flint peered at the cop’s last name, sewn across the pocket of his uniform’s jacket. Raifey. “I didn’t have a chance to read the report. Why don’t you fill me in?”

  The cops glanced at each other, then looked away. Neither of them, it seemed, wanted to say anything.

  This was going to be harder than Flint thought. “Listen,” he said. “I was just transferred from Traffic to Armstrong proper. My partner doesn’t like to share and, frankly, I don’t think she’ll understand this one anyway. Before she gets here, tell me what’s different, so that I can—”