Buried Deep

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Of course, that had been before he had seen Ki Bowles’ news report. He had punched a button beside his desk, calling up one of the screens that he had hidden in the antique permaplastic walls. He usually let one of the news programs run all day, covering stories from all over the Alliance, never repeating them, always “Fresh! Up-to-Date! Surprising!”

  Usually the packaged reports for the various media companies were high on sensationalism and low on details. But they provided a background-noise overview of the “important” events in Alliance space. Flint could always download reports from various sources, including the non-corporate sites, to get greater detail.

  Often he spent his days that way, chasing news stories, keeping himself informed so that he would know which country had internal strife, which part of what planet was torn apart by civil war, which corporation had screwed its employees yet again.

  All of that might be unimportant, and yet all of it might matter later if he took a case that involved it.

  He had been reading a long report on the mines of Igesty when he had heard DeRicci’s name. He looked up from his e-reader, but couldn’t see past one of his raised desk screens to the newscast. He did recognize the voice narrating the piece, however. It belonged to Ki Bowles.

  He set his e-reader on the desktop, stood, and faced the left wall. The front part of the office was small, with very little furniture—only his desk and his chair—which made it seem even smaller. Or maybe the large image on the wall did that. Ki Bowles had been to this office, and she had never taken up as much space as her recorded face now did.

  “…filed reports branded her a ‘screwup,’” Bowles was saying. “Someone who couldn’t take or understand orders. Guaranteed, one supervisor said, to ruin any assignment she was given.”

  Flint pressed a corner of the screen and got the piece’s title, along with its running time. He’d already missed five minutes of the report, and there was only a minute to go.

  He had left the screen running, returned to his desk, and pushed a button on the underside of his desk, raising yet another screen. This one was part of his main system, unlike the wall screen. He went to InterDome’s site, looked for Ki Bowles’ most recent reports, and found the one he was listening to: NOELLE DERICCI: ACCIDENTAL HERO?

  He downloaded it, then logged off, not caring that InterDome had a record of his download. If Bowles somehow learned of his download and asked him about it later, he would simply say he was making certain she hadn’t used any of her discussions with him.

  And now, after he had watched the report three times, the content had broken his heart. DeRicci had a bad history, one that he thought she was past with her various promotions, and now with the new position as Chief of Moon Security.

  Apparently, however, Bowles saw DeRicci as a story, maybe even a career-making one. And it didn’t hurt that Bowles had DeRicci’s former boss, Andrea Gumiela, on record saying what a screwup DeRicci had been.

  “We were all surprised when she came into her own at the Moon Marathon,” Gumiela said.

  She wore a little too much makeup and had a few enhancements to make her look younger. She had never looked that pretty when Flint worked for her.

  “If you thought she was such a bad detective,” Bowles asked in voice-over, “why did you keep her on the force?”

  Gumiela seemed unfazed by the question. Instead, she had smiled as if she had expected it. “Noelle is brilliant, strong, and very driven. We look for those qualities in our officers. She had never been engaged before. Apparently, her heart wasn’t in solving crime. It was in preventing crime.”

  When she gave that interview, Gumiela probably thought she was doing DeRicci a favor. Flint suspected there were a lot more statements like the last, statements that, in context, praised DeRicci. But Bowles only took snippets of what had obviously been a long interview, interspersed them with video reports and confidential memos about DeRicci’s job performance, all of which must have been leaked by someone, maybe even Gumiela herself.

  The whole thing made DeRicci sound like the biggest failure to ever join the Armstrong Police Department. It also sounded like the governor-general’s assignment of her to the new United Domes of the Moon Security Department was a great mistake.

  DeRicci only took the oath for her office the day before. She hadn’t had a chance to do anything except give a gracious acceptance speech when Bowles’ attack came out.

  Flint was relieved Bowles hadn’t used anything he said, even inadvertently, the day he had seen her at the press conference. She had mentioned his name, however: Miles Flint, a local Retrieval Artist, had been one of Detective DeRicci’s partners. He got rich shortly after he resigned from the force, some say off a case that he had worked with DeRicci herself.

  The first implication, of course, was that Flint had gotten rich through illegal means which, he supposed, he had—saving hundreds, maybe thousands of lives in the process, something he would never discuss. The other implication was that DeRicci had helped him, and was somehow hiding millions of credits from her nefarious activities in the police department.

  The irony was that she could have gotten rich if she had only quit when he did. He would have worked with her. He even offered to.

  But she had turned him down, preferring to stay on the known path, even though it branched into places that made her morally uncomfortable. She had stayed with the police because she believed in the law, because it was the only thing she completely understood.

  And now, she was getting pilloried for it.

  A screen opened on his desktop. The screen only opened when his perimeter alarm went off. The perimeter alarms were set in a half-mile radius around his office, so at least one of them went off once a day.

  Some days, the alarm went off several times, providing a much-needed distraction. Usually, he would look at the screen that displayed the section where the alarm had been triggered, and see a neighbor coming home, or the seedy lawyer who had rented the office next door coming to work.

  This time, however, Flint saw a rented aircar park in a little used lot. He pulled out the keyboard shelf. His mentor, Paloma, from whom he had bought the business, had taught him a healthy aversion to touch screens and voice commands. They were too easy to replicate or overhear. So he did most of his work on an old-fashioned ancient Earth English-language keyboard, augmented with special keys for special commands.

  He pressed a command key, and the image on the screen zoomed closer to the aircar. He had the system check the license. The car belonged to Port Rentals, the largest aircar rental firm on the Moon.

  He transferred the still image of the car and license to his private system, however, the one that he never linked to a network. If he had to, he would make yet another copy, and use that image to hack into Port Rental’s system, to find out who had rented the car.

  He always liked to be prepared.

  The car landed with a caution that only Earth drivers used. Most Moon-based drivers and drivers who were used to Domes landed at the same speed they drove, knowing there would be little interference from wind or the ground. People who grew up in Earth’s constantly changing environments never knew what to expect, so they acted with extreme caution.

  He was intrigued now, even though he knew the chances of the aircar’s driver coming to see him were slight. His office was in Old Armstrong, where the Moon’s first settlement had been. Most of the buildings here, including his, were made of the original colonists’ permaplastic, and were on a number of registers of historic places. A lot of tourists came down here to walk the streets and touch the past.

  The car’s driver door opened and a woman got out. She had an athletic build that came from exercise, not thinness enhancers. Her black hair was cropped short, and curled under her ears. She wore a loose blouse that looked too wrinkled to be Moon-made, and tight pants that showed off her muscular legs.

  Flint didn’t recognize her. He transferred her image to his private system and ran it through known Eart
h records. If he didn’t get a hit there, he would go to Moon records and maybe beyond.

  She looked around as if she were expecting to be attacked at any moment. Then she looked up, a sure sign of a non-dome dweller. The Dome was in Dome Day, radiating pure sunlight on the city below, but the sunlight was artificial. This side of the Moon was in complete darkness, and had been for the last two days now. It would remain in darkness for another ten.

  The woman bent slightly, grabbed a bag from the car, and slung the bag over her shoulder. The bag was too large to be a shuttle gift, something the passenger shuttles handed to tourists who carried too many personal belongings. It looked more like a suitcase of some sort.

  Apparently, someone had warned the woman about the neighborhood. Flint wasn’t sure if wearing the bag was any better than leaving it in her locked aircar.

  Her shoulders went up and down in a visible sigh, then she left the lot, crossed the sidewalk, and entered the street, looking around as she did so. Such a naïve thing. He wondered how she had made it so far on her own. Anyone watching her could tell she was a newcomer to Armstrong, probably with all of her belongings on her.

  A victim ripe for the taking.

  He zoomed in even closer, so that he got a better view of her face. She touched the edge of one eye, then blinked, and he realized she was following an overlay map that she had downloaded through her links.

  She had a specific destination.

  His private screen rose to full height. It was clear, so that he could see the office in the background. The screen displayed the still image of the woman, and beside it, a lot of tiny print.

  Obviously, his system had found her.

  He glanced at the information, blocking the photo, and making the print readable.

  Aisha Costard

  Forensic Anthropologist

  Permanent Address: Madison, Wisconsin, Old USA, Earth

  Last requested visa [information two days old: system has not updated]: Sahara Dome, Mars

  Visa approved by Sahara Dome Human Police Department. Reason given for issuance: forensic assistance on an unidentified corpse…

  Flint stopped reading and frowned. A forensic anthropologist. He had heard of the job title when he was at the police academy, but had never had cause to bring one in on a case. Apparently, she was good enough at her profession to be summoned to Mars.

  None of which explained why she had come to Armstrong.

  He scrolled through the information, scanning, until he reached:

  Warning given: subject must report position daily to Sahara Dome Disty Police Department. Failure to do so will result in drastic action

  That surprised Flint. He’d seen enough of these when he’d been space patrol to know that drastic action meant she was subject to Disty law. The only way she would be subject to Disty law outside of Disty territory was if she had committed a crime that the Disty considered particularly heinous.

  Another screen went up, and a silent alarm buzzed against his hip. She had come close to his building. Now he watched her on two screens, moving closer to his door.

  When she reached it, she paused, blinked, and rubbed one eye. She had probably switched off the overlay map.

  He shut down the hip alarm but kept the screens up. Her face looked unnaturally large in the building screen. She looked for something that identified the building.

  She paused, as most people did, over the plaque that declared the building’s historic value to the city of Armstrong. Then she saw, just below, the tiny sign that declared a Retrieval Artist worked in this office.

  For a moment, she closed her eyes, as if she were terribly exhausted or extremely disappointed to find him. Then she took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and knocked.

  He saved the information on her and shut down his alarm screens. He kept the wall screen on but muted it, and put his e-reader on the desktop as if he had been working with that. He shoved the keyboard into its place under the desk.

  She knocked again.

  “It’s open,” he called, even though it hadn’t been a moment before.

  The knob turned and she stepped inside, stopping suddenly as her links shut down. Most people had some kind of information being fed to them constantly, so much that they had gotten used to the constant crawl along the bottom of their vision or the soft voice droning inside their heads.

  A handful of Flint’s potential clients had fled the moment the links quit.

  “You didn’t have to do that.” Her voice was soft, almost musical. Its depth surprised Flint. “I’m a client.”

  “I do that to everyone. The only systems that run in my office are mine.” He hadn’t stood. He hadn’t done anything by way of greeting. It was his job to make potential clients uncomfortable so that they wouldn’t hire him.

  Hiring a Retrieval Artist usually put the Disappeared in jeopardy. He usually worked cases in which he felt the Disappeared was already about to be found, had been reprieved, or was in new trouble anyway. He rarely took on cases in which he was the first to search for the Disappeared.

  She still held the door open, almost as if her muscles had stopped working with her links.

  “If you don’t like the silence, you can leave,” Flint said. “Otherwise, close the door. I have a lot of sensitive information here that I don’t want hacked. The longer the door is open, the more danger you cause countless people you don’t even know.”

  She started, as if she were embarrassed, and pushed the door closed. Then she wiped her hands on those tight trousers.

  “You’re Miles Flint?” she asked.

  “That’s what the sign says.”

  She took a step closer to him. “You’re the eighth Retrieval Artist I’ve seen, and the only one who has been this rude.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “All of them should have been more cautious.”

  He was curious why she had seen eight previous Retrieval Artists, but he wasn’t going to engage. He had learned, in the past few years of doing this job, that his curiosity often drew him to cases he shouldn’t take.

  “You’re being rude on purpose?” she asked.

  “I’d hate to think that I’m so socially inept that I’d be rude by accident.” He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair.

  Her face was very pleasant. Her eyes were dark, her skin a light chocolate. She had round cheeks and a button nose that seemed at odds with her generous mouth. Yet all of the features worked together into something more, something quite appealing.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “You’re in business.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t need the money. Any Retrieval Artist who does is more of a Tracker, and probably doesn’t care if he inadvertently exposes a Disappeared.”

  “I thought Trackers and Retrieval Artists were the same thing,” she said.

  He felt a flare of anger. He hated that comparison. “If you believe that, then why are you visiting Retrieval Artists? We’re much more expensive.”

  “I thought—you know—Trackers worked in the public sector and Retrieval Artists were private.”

  “You thought wrong.” He touched a key on the board under his desk. The door swung open. “Thanks for this little enlightening conversation. Your ignorance has been the highlight of my day. I hope I don’t see you in my office again.”

  “You’re kicking me out?” she asked. “You haven’t even heard why I need your services.”

  “You probably need a Tracker.” He stood, letting his height give his words added strength. “I will throw you out if you don’t leave.”

  She looked panicked, as if he had already touched her, leaving bruises. Then she fled out the door. It closed behind her.

  Flint sat back down and sighed. The case, whatever it had been, sounded like it might have been interesting, but he couldn’t trust someone who didn’t know the difference between Trackers and Retrieval Artists.

  He hadn’t lied to her when he said her very ignorance might put someone in jeopa
rdy.

  He pulled out the keyboard as he tried to dismiss Aisha Costard from his thoughts.

  Eight

  He had run her out. That arrogant man had tossed her into the dusty street as if she had been nothing more than a child.

  Aisha Costard stopped on the tilted sidewalk outside the Retrieval Artist’s office and coughed as the Moon dust swirled around her. Nowhere in Sahara Dome had she seen so much dust, not even at the open gravesite. Here it seemed like the dust filtered in from outside, as if the Dome weren’t properly sealed.

  Her stomach lurched, and the fear she’d been trying to suppress rose again.

  She had a list of two dozen Retrieval Artists. She had already seen the eight “trustworthy” ones on Mars. This Miles Flint was the only Retrieval Artist that SDHPD felt worthy on the Moon.

  If she had to hire someone else, she’d have to go to Earth, and in order to do that, she’d need special permission from the Disty themselves.

  Two more trips through customs and security. Two more trips that were probably going to be worse than the one she had just endured. Earth’s security was tighter than anywhere else in the solar system. Earth made most suspicious outsiders go to the Moon, rather than risk the center of the Alliance.

  She’d probably be in custody for weeks rather than days.

  She couldn’t face it.

  That arrogant man was going to listen to her, no matter what it took.

  She turned around, walked back to the dirty plastic alcove that served as a front door step for this rundown place, and knocked again. She waited.

  No answer.

  She knocked again.

  Of course, he probably had some kind of surveillance. He knew it was her and he wasn’t going to let her back in.

  “You should really listen to people before you make judgments,” she said as loudly as she could. “I’m not your typical client.”

  Her words rang against the plastic. She had no idea if this Flint was listening to her. She had a hunch anyone else on the street could hear her.