The Disappeared

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Whether that designation was legitimate or not wouldn’t be hard to check.

  From the moment the yacht left Earth orbit, there was communications silence. Until:

  “D.I.E.M., this is Brocene.” The speech had no inflection at all. A computerized voice, although not one from Earth Alliance. This one didn’t sound human at all.

  “Brocene, go ahead.” The responding voice was male, and Flint identified it as the pilot’s voice. So far he had heard nothing from Palmer at all.

  “Rendezvous at the usual coordinates?”

  “Roger that, Brocene.”

  Then there was silence. Flint checked the time. The yacht was nearly to its destination coordinates. Then he checked for the initials D.I.E.M. he did not see what they referred to. That was not the designation that had been used for the ship in San Francisco, yet it seemed to be used as a name here.

  When the yacht reached the destination coordinates, communications began again.

  “Brocene, this is D.I.E.M. We have you on visual.”

  Flint leaned forward and checked for a visual file. There was one. He turned it on and it appeared as a small image on the screen before him, and was startled to see the blue and orange markings of a Rev prison ship.

  It was a small ship, as Rev vessels went, but it was still imposing. And it was large enough to destroy this yacht with a single blast of its weapons.

  “Roger that, D.I.E.M.” said the computerized voice. Flint now recognized its toneless qualities. It was designed to mimic Rev vocal inflections. “Have you our cargo?”

  “Primed and ready. As soon as we receive payment, we are a go.”

  Flint sat up, a chill running down his back.

  “Payment sent, D.I.E.M.”

  “Checking now, Brocene.”

  There was silence on both ends. Flint wondered how the pilot confirmed the payment being sent. Flint had found no record of credits in the computer system, and the computer was an internal unit. Had there been another computer on board?

  He would have to search for it, and for the information on the ship’s computer. His work here might take longer than he had planned.

  “Okay, Brocene. We have a record of payment.”

  “The agreement is that we get the cargo immediately.”

  “Nice try.” It sounded as if the pilot were smiling. “We do this without direct contact.”

  “It would be easier—”

  “Ease is not the issue and you know it. Caution is. I even hate these communications. If we could find a way around them, I’d sure as hell appreciate it.”

  Flint let out a small whistle. This was something that had happened before and the pilot thought it would happen again.

  “Communication is necessary. In the past there have been problems. Unexpected guests.” Somewhere along the way the Rev voice had changed. Flint couldn’t pinpoint the moment the computer stopped speaking for the Rev and one of its crew had started speaking directly.

  “I remember,” the pilot said.

  “So if you feel this is not cautious enough, then changing the plan should not be a problem for you.”

  “We’ll be evacuating the ship in thirty Earth minutes.” The pilot sounded firm. Evacuation? Palmer had said nothing about evacuation.

  He listened as the pilot continued. “She won’t know we’re gone.”

  She? Could the pilot be referring to Palmer or someone else? Was the cargo they were discussing human?

  Odd that the pilot hadn’t dumped any of this from the computer system. Unless he needed it for some other purpose. After all, his voice was the only part of him that appeared here. Even though Flint had searched for crew identification in the system, he hadn’t found any—and there were no visuals of the crew either.

  “Give it another thirty minutes,” the pilot was saying, “and you can board. I’ll be picking up the ship from impound in a week or so. If there’s permanent damage, I’m coming after you.”

  The plan was to abandon the ship and its cargo—probably its passenger or passengers—to the Rev. Which must have happened, since the crew was gone. They took the escape pods from the cockpit before Palmer even knew what was happening.

  But that still didn’t explain how she came into possession of the yacht and why she wouldn’t tell all of this to the authorities on Armstrong.

  Unless the Rev had a warrant. If they did, she was the one in violation of the law, not the crew of this ship.

  The Rev agreed to the terms and signed off. There was silence again. Flint glanced at the log before him. It registered a number of communications files after this one. They probably came from Palmer.

  Maybe she hadn’t lied about her incompetence at flying a sophisticated ship like a yacht. Any competent pilot would have purged all of this, and anything else that contradicted her story, assuming that Armstrong authorities would only do a cursory search of the computer system and send her on her way.

  She probably hadn’t even realized that the yacht itself was suspicious. No registration, no serial numbers, not even an I.D. program built into the computer.

  He let the communications files spin forward.

  “Brocene, this is D.I.E.M.” The pilot’s voice again. Only he sounded different. Strained.

  “This had better be important.” The Rev didn’t seem happy to hear from him either.

  “It is.” There was more than strain in the pilot’s voice. He had an urgent tone, the kind humans got when they were trying to impart information different from the ones their words implied. “I just got a coded message from my headquarters. I need to keep the yacht.”

  Flint crossed his arms, and tilted his head. Interesting. This wasn’t playing out the way he would have expected.

  “We have an agreement.” The Rev sounded angry. Even though the anger wasn’t directed at him, the hair on the back of Flint’s neck rose. He’d seen an angry Rev only once. It wasn’t something he wanted to see again.

  “Which I’m living up to.” The pilot spoke so fast that he seemed to have interrupted the Rev, which was a cultural no-no. “All I wanted to do was let you know that I’m dumping her into a pod. You can pick it up an hour after we’ve left the area. Is that clear?”

  Flint frowned. So a woman was supposed to be in the pod. The pilot’s story sounded logical, but it didn’t explain what really happened.

  There wasn’t enough information here. Was Palmer the only passenger on the ship? Was she really a passenger at all or a member of this crew?

  “We’ll pick it up now.” The Rev was referring to the pod.

  “No!” The pilot sounded terrified. Flint’s frown grew. He had learned in his early days as a space cop that a person never argued with a Rev using that tone. The Rev could be manipulated or lied to, so long as the lies were convincing, but a direct argument usually made the Rev angrier. And an angry Rev was likely to go berserk.

  Flint winced as if this conversation were taking place in front of him. His entire body tensed.

  “There are other ships in the area,” the pilot said. “If they witness the exchange then we will never be able to do this again.”

  That sounded plausible, but even plausible explanations didn’t always appease an angry Rev. This one didn’t answer immediately. Flint turned over various scenarios in his mind. Had the Rev come after the crew at this moment? If so, why was there no evidence of boarding on the airlock? Rev ships were no more sophisticated in mid-space boarding than human ships were. There should have been grapple marks on the exterior of the ship.

  Flint glanced at the communications logs. They were still spinning forward. The silence he heard was the same silence the pilot had listened to.

  It did not bode well.

  Finally, there was a click in the log. “We shall do so this one time,” the Rev said. “But this will not become policy, or our business is done.”

  “It’s not policy. It’s just a—” There was a bumping sound and a slight grunt from the pilot “—blip. Something went wron
g at headquarters that they want the yacht for. I don’t have as much flexibility as usual.”

  He sounded terrified. Any human on the other end would not have agreed to this plan. But apparently, the Rev did not know the subtleties of human vocal cues.

  The Rev agreed to the terms and then added, “But should you try this again, you will feel our wrath.”

  “Yeah, I know.” The pilot sounded resigned. Then he signed off.

  The communications logs continued to spool. The next communication came from Palmer, claiming she didn’t know how to fly the ship, that her crew had been taken by the Rev, and she needed help. She sounded panicked too, but her panic, while louder than the pilot’s, seemed more controlled.

  Flint could not say why he had that impression, although he did. He listened all the way to the end, as the ground crew in Armstrong talked her down. She said nothing about the conversations between the pilot and the Rev, nothing about the missing woman—if indeed there had been one—and nothing about a plan gone awry.

  She sounded like an innocent victim, yet somehow he doubted she was.

  He bent over the logs and replayed the last communication between the pilot and the Rev. That bump and pause was the clue. If Flint had to guess, he would say that the pilot was more afraid of someone in the cockpit than he was of the Rev, which was saying something.

  He thought back to the woman’s story. She claimed she had been one among many passengers. She claimed that three of the passengers had taken an escape pod. And, she claimed that the Rev had boarded the ship, taking the crew with them.

  But nothing on the ship confirmed her story. Yes, a pod was missing, but it was missing from the cockpit. And if the communications logs were accurate, the Rev were expecting a single pod to drop out of that ship. They would let it float for nearly an hour before picking it up, giving the yacht time to escape.

  In fact, that hour would be all that a yacht, flown manually, would need to reach the Moon first. The Rev would be delayed even longer, thinking the pilot had somehow played a trick on them.

  Combine that with the lack of boarding marks, no sign of forced entry into the cockpit, and no evidence of passengers at all, and Palmer’s story completely fell apart.

  Not to mention the fact that she claimed she was on vacation from Mars when this ship had no intention of going to Mars. It was flying round-trip to San Francisco. It had arrived at its mid-trip destination when the pilot had contacted the Rev.

  Then there was the matter of the matching ships. The Rev and the Disty hated each other. They would not work together for any reason. But humans had no qualms about working with both.

  The Disty ship had three bodies of people supposedly on a vacation. Palmer was supposedly on a vacation. She didn’t seem like someone who lived on Mars. She had skills and an education that wasn’t listed in her file.

  And then there was a fact that DeRicci had mentioned: What better place to hide from the Rev than on Mars? The Disty had overrun Mars and the Rev hated them.

  The group from the Disty vengeance killing had been found by the Disty in a yacht similar to this one. Flint wanted to hear their logs, if he could. He would wager that, if the logs hadn’t been purged, they would reveal a conversation similar to the first one he’d heard here.

  Someone was selling people who were trying to Disappear to the very groups that wanted them.

  Which meant that Greta Palmer wasn’t a victim of an in-space ship takeover by the Rev, nor was she a run-of-the-mill yacht thief. She was a criminal wanted by the Rev, a criminal who had managed to force an entire crew into an escape pod and turn them over to the Rev in her place. Then she had come here, pleading for assistance.

  She was too smart to tell the truth, and she was good at survival.

  She had mentioned that she thought the Rev would be after her too. Neither he nor DeRicci had thought her protests sounded right—the Rev wouldn’t behave the way she had said they would. But the Rev would come if Palmer were their quarry.

  They would be here soon, and they would want her.

  Palmer was desperate. She might be willing to try anything, including attacking police officers, in order to escape the Rev.

  Flint opened his link and hoped he would be able to warn DeRicci in time.

  Fourteen

  Ekaterina clutched her purse against her body, playing the terrified tourist. The terror wasn’t that hard to feign. She hadn’t heard about any Rev arriving yet, but she knew it would only be a matter of time.

  She sat in the back seat of an ancient aircar, a model that she hadn’t seen since she was a teenager. It had been modified for police use—there was a plastic protective barrier between the back seat and the front, and there were no door handles on the insides of the back doors.

  The rest of the aircar hadn’t been changed, however, and she wondered if the police department on Armstrong knew how vulnerable their vehicles were. She had learned all about this model when she’d been defending a client in San Francisco. He’d used a laser pistol to disable the secondary systems while a friend had been driving.

  The car had crashed.

  She was constantly surprised at how much practical information she had, both from her wild teenage years and her years as a defense attorney. She only hoped it would serve her in good stead now.

  One of the guards sat beside her in the back seat. He’d been solicitous—helping her strap in before the car started. He’d also been practical as well. His partner had taken his weapon into the front seat, and anything that Ekaterina could use against the guard went also.

  They were treating her as a prisoner—sort of. If they were really worried about her, they would have taken her purse as well. But they weren’t certain if she was telling the truth, and they had a myriad of regulations to follow.

  A tourist could sue Armstrong Dome for maltreatment, especially if the tourist claimed she needed help. The media always supported the tourist’s claim, and the publicity alone often hurt tourism in an area after such an event. As a result, governments like Armstrong, especially those whose economy had a strong reliance on tourism, tried to prevent problems through regulation.

  Often those regulations hampered law enforcement techniques, just like they were doing now. Detective DeRicci hadn’t arrested Ekaterina yet. They didn’t have enough information. So they couldn’t take away her personal possessions because of her potential tourism status.

  That would all change once Ekaterina got to the station. She had to make her move before then.

  DeRicci drove the aircar manually, which Ekaterina initially thought to be an interesting choice. The car rose only a few inches off the roadway, making Ekaterina wonder why the police didn’t use a wheeled vehicle. They probably wanted the high speeds and short cuts that air routes provided.

  Armstrong itself looked different. The area near the Port had been rebuilt—the dilapidated buildings and dusty roads were long gone. Ekaterina felt a deep disappointment. She had hoped that the slum area of Armstrong would provide her with a means for escape.

  Instead, the nearby buildings had the shiny newness of the latest synthetic materials. Some of them actually shimmered in a variety of changing colors, and a few seemed to use the dome wall as part of the building structure—obviously another change in Armstrong building codes.

  It wasn’t so hard, then, to look around as if she were a tourist who had never seen this part of the universe before. She hadn’t.

  But the road was familiar, its twist and turns the same as they had been a decade before. DeRicci was not a cautious driver. She took corners sharply, and when she floated the car to avoid obstacles, she went up on a steep and often dangerous trajectory. Other aircars had to swerve to avoid her, and a lot of them used their horns.

  Aircar drivers weren’t used to surprise. Most of them punched in their destination and let the cars take them there, using set routes. All aircars were linked to the street traffic control system, which prevented most collisions by making sure that
each car had its own direct route.

  A manual driver screwed all of that up. A manual driver, while being tracked by the system, could make sudden and unexpected moves, and the computerized system couldn’t compensate. Instead, the other aircars had to.

  Perhaps all cops had to learn to drive aircars manually. That way, no one could hijack the system and prevent cops from chasing criminals on the streets.

  Ekaterina suppressed a sigh. No matter where she went in the human-settled universe, everything was monitored. Perhaps she was just deluding herself. Perhaps she had no chance of evading the Rev at all.

  Still her left hand, the one farthest from the guard, slipped behind her, feeling the warm plastic of the aircar’s window. Beneath it, on the body’s interior, she knew she would find a circular opening the size of her fist, leading into the car’s secondary systems.

  The dome filters were shifting from daylight to twilight, in a vain attempt to mimic Earthlight. The result was simply an odd sort of dusk that seemed like badly lit darkness. The automatic street lights hadn’t flicked on yet, and visibility was poor.

  Ekaterina’s fingers finally found the opening. It was smaller than she remembered, and she felt a frisson of fear. Maybe her client had lied about what he’d done after all.

  Still, she unlatched the cover over the opening, then brought her hand back to her lap.

  The guard hadn’t moved.

  The dome was taller here, and newer. Perhaps this section of the city hadn’t been completed when Ekaterina had visited. The buildings that surrounded her right now were at least ten stories high, and she didn’t remember ever seeing any buildings in Armstrong taller than five stories.

  DeRicci turned another corner. The buildings here seemed almost monolithic, attached above in a series of interlinking floors. Ekaterina couldn’t even see the dome.

  Without the automatic street lights, the areas beneath the buildings was very dark. The aircar’s lights came on, but Ekaterina still found herself blinking, trying to get her eyes to adjust.