Buried Deep

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “I’m here on official business,” she said. “This is really important.”

  Silence.

  She had never, in all her years traveling to all sorts of different places all over Earth, encountered anyone as rude as this man. She had run into people she didn’t like, people who didn’t like her, and people who didn’t want her on a case. She’d even faced the Disty who had already decided that she was an enemy, and she had made them listen to her, with partial success. She wasn’t going to let some low-rent “artist” get the better of her.

  She tried the doorknob, but it wouldn’t turn. She shoved, but the door didn’t open.

  Bastard.

  He probably didn’t appreciate her discussing this on the street. She didn’t appreciate it either.

  What had he said? That leaving the door open would jeopardize information in his files. Was he pretending to care about the clients he had been rude to? Or was it the actual Disappeareds who were important to him?

  Maybe this was just a negotiating ploy so that she would pay any fee to get him to help her.

  She backed away. She wouldn’t do that. This trick wouldn’t get her to pay any price, not that it was her money. It wasn’t. The money came from Sahara Dome—the human branch. It didn’t matter if she saved them money, at least not to her, but it was the principle of the thing.

  Principle.

  He seemed to want her to believe that he was principled. Well, fine. She could play that game, even if she didn’t believe him.

  “No one’s going to get hurt,” she said. “The Disappeared is already dead.”

  Silence again. She was about to turn away when she heard a slight click. The door eased open.

  He was sitting behind that crummy little desk, looking like a pale ghost in the cold room. “Shouting on the street is a sure way to get someone hurt.”

  She stepped inside, braced for the double-clunks she had heard the last time when her links closed down. She wasn’t one of those people who had information running all the time, but apparently the links came with some white noise that she hadn’t recognized until now.

  She actually missed it.

  The door closed behind her. She shivered involuntarily. He kept this room unbearably frigid.

  Her bag shifted slightly, then slipped off her shoulder. She let the heavy thing fall onto the floor.

  “Are you going to listen to me?” she asked.

  “If it’s the only way to get rid of you,” he said.

  She hesitated, the rudeness catching her again, making her anger work.

  His expression softened. He leaned forward, looking engaged for the first time.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  So she did.

  Nine

  Flint paid little attention to her saga of woe: How she felt she had been tricked when she went to Mars; how she was unfamiliar with Disty customs; how she had stayed four times longer than she had expected. She spoke with an intensity he hadn’t seen before, as if each thing that happened to her had been a personal affront.

  Obviously, she had taken his attitude as an affront as well. She seemed like a timid thing; maybe anger was the only emotion that got her to stand up for herself. It certainly put some color in those round cheeks of hers, and added an even richer timbre to her already deep voice.

  He was determined not to ask questions, to listen to her and then get her out of his office. If she had already seen eight Retrieval Artists, then she had failed to engage them as well.

  Although this time, he wouldn’t use the ignorance as his reason to turn down her case. He’d find something in this litany of woe that would sound plausible. Rudeness seemed to get her back up; maybe she would respond better to kindness.

  After a few minutes, he held up a hand. “Enough. I want to know about the case. The background can come later.”

  “The background is very important.” She shifted from foot to foot, but unlike most of his visitors, did not ask for a chair. It was as if she hadn’t even noticed the chair’s absence because she had been so focused on convincing him to pay attention to her.

  “I can’t understand the relevance of the background unless I know why I’m hearing it,” Flint said.

  She nodded and said, “I was called to Mars to view a skeleton, Mr. Flint. Bodies that decay in the Martian soil should mummify, just like they do in the real Sahara.”

  “This still feels like background, Ms. Costard.”

  Her face flushed. “It’s not.”

  “I deal with Disappeareds, Ms. Costard, not skeletons. You mentioned a Disappeared. You also said she was dead. If you know that, and know who she is, then you don’t need a Retrieval Artist. A detective maybe, or even a lawyer if the problem is with the estate, but—”

  “My skeleton is the Disappeared,” Costard snapped. “She was planted in Martian soil like a clue to a crime I don’t even understand. She was killed somewhere else, probably stabbed, judging by the slash in one of her ribs, and then whoever killed her cut the skin off of her. This was deliberate.”

  Flint winced at the description. He had seen a lot of violent death during his years with the police force, and the sheer creativeness of it never failed to disgust him.

  “Her real name is Lagrima Jørgen. She’s been missing for the last thirty years, and I think she’s been dead at least that long.”

  Flint shrugged. “I’m sorry to hear of it, but there’s nothing I can do. You have her body, her name, and probably a lot of her history. I find people, Ms. Costard.”

  “I know,” she said. “I may have made a mistake about Trackers, but I know what Retrieval Artists do, Mr. Flint. I really do. Lagrima Jørgen angered a group of M’Kri Tribesman by selling the mineral rights to their homeland. She tricked them out of those rights, and when BiMela Corp’s engineers arrived to stake their claims, the Tribesman killed them. The case went before the Fifth Multicultural Tribunal, who ruled for the Corporation—which was no surprise, because the documents were in order. But, the Tribunal noted that the Tribesman actually had a case against Jørgen under tribal law for using a type of language that they had forbidden in negotiation. They had lost the rights because they had failed to engage an Alliance lawyer to protect them—which is simply incompetence, not illegality—but they still had redress under their law for the actual trickery itself.”

  Flint frowned. “The M’Kri aren’t known for their inhumane treatment of people who break their laws.”

  “The Tribesman are a subculture. They follow different laws—which is, apparently, another reason they lost their case. They weren’t the dominate culture of their region.” She sounded a lot more confident and authoritarian than she had before.

  “As a subculture, they allowed killing to redress crimes?” Flint didn’t understand. Usually—although not always—subcultures were subject to the dominate cultures laws.

  “The Tribesman don’t kill, Mr. Flint. They enslave. And that is legal. They call it servitude and the punishment lasts as long as the effects of the crime itself. A week for a damaged pot, until that pot can be remade, all the way to life and beyond if the crime has changed the very way the Tribesman or the ones affected, live.”

  “The loss of the mineral rights was permanent?” he asked.

  Costard nodded. “So Jørgen’s children and her children’s children would be in service to the Tribesmen, unless the mineral rights could be released to them. Even then, her family might not have gone free. If the minerals were taken, then the effects of the crime continued.”

  Flint sighed. He understood why Lagrima Jørgen had Disappeared. But he still didn’t understand what Costard thought he could do about this case. “Tell me, in one sentence, why you believe you need a Retrieval Artist.”

  “I’ll give you two,” she said. “I don’t think Lagrima succeeded in Disappearing.”

  Flint wouldn’t necessarily agree, but he didn’t say that.

  “But no one has seen her two children in thir
ty years either.” The color had risen even further in Costard’s face, making her eyes seem incredibly bright.

  “You think she got her children to disappear?” Flint asked.

  “They’re not with the Tribesmen,” Costard said. “The SDHPD already checked that. And the warrant is still outstanding.”

  “They were probably murdered then,” Flint said.

  “There’s that chance,” Costard said. “But their bodies haven’t turned up anywhere.”

  “You’ve checked the site where you found hers?” Flint asked.

  Costard nodded. “The SDHPD is still looking, but they doubt the children are there. The team has already gone through too many layers of soil. They’re convinced that no more bodies were buried at the same time as Jørgen’s.”

  “But you say she wasn’t killed there,” Flint said.

  “And therein lies my problem, Mr. Flint. I can’t prove anything. I know she tried to disappear. I know she took her children with her and no one saw them again. I know she ended up dead, probably murdered. Clearly her corpse has been violated, and done so with a probable intent to upset the Disty. And that’s all I know.”

  Flint frowned, feeling a mixture of irritation and excitement. She had certainly aroused his curiosity. He was interested, partly because the case was so different from anything that anyone had brought him.

  But several things still nagged. “Do you know how expensive my services are?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” she said. “But I hear that a Retrieval Artist can cost a small fortune.”

  “I take a retainer of two million credits,” he said. “I always investigate the information you gave me myself. If I decide, after my investigation, not to take the case, the two million is all this will cost you. If I decide to take the case, I bill weekly for expenses, which can run into a great deal of money. I also collect a weekly fee. I may terminate our arrangement at any time. If I take your case, you cannot terminate. If it takes me five years to solve this case, you will pay the weekly fee and expenses for those five years—”

  “Five years?” She took a step backward. “It could take that long?”

  “It could take longer.” He folded his hands together. “Why should that matter you, Ms. Costard? This is an intellectual puzzle to you, right? Nothing more.”

  Except maybe the money. But if it was just the money, she would probably have left when he mentioned the two million credits. He had no idea how much forensic anthropologists got paid, but he doubted it was enough to indulge an intellectual whim.

  She blinked hard several times. “Five years, Mr. Flint. I don’t have five years.”

  “To solve the case?”

  She shook her head, swallowing visibly. “To live, if we don’t find those children.”

  “What do the children have to do with it?”

  “They’re the only ones who can clear the contamination,” Costard said. “I have to give them to the Disty in order to go free.”

  Ten

  Sharyn Scott-Olson couldn’t shake the feeling of déjà vu as she walked in the freshly dug Martian soil. The hole was deeper now, still square, and still a wide-open space inside the Disty area.

  The main difference was that the buildings looked abandoned, not empty. Amazing what a few weeks could do.

  Petros Batson leaned against one of the backhoes. The human-made machines were bigger than the Disty ones. Scott-Olson wondered how they had been brought into the Disty section. Probably in pieces—that was how large things made their way in here—and probably at considerable effort on the part of the human workers.

  “I don’t believe that you found another body,” she said as she got close.

  Batson gave her a baleful stare. His face was covered with dust, just like it had been the first time, only this time, the dust had gathered in even more creases in his skin. Batson had aged in the last few weeks, just like she had.

  The fear ate at all of them. It hadn’t helped that Costard, the Earth advisor, had gotten so angry about her own involvement. They should have told her, she said. They should have warned her. They should have realized she had very little interaction with alien cultures.

  Maybe Scott-Olson should have. But Costard taught at a university, and Scott-Olson remembered from her own student days on Earth how diverse the campus population was. Various alien races on exchange programs, some who lived locally, others who had come in spending their own credits just to get whatever specialty the university offered.

  Besides, everyone knew that Mars was controlled by the Disty. The fact that Costard had been ignorant of Disty law wasn’t Scott-Olson’s problem.

  Batson hadn’t answered her comment. In fact, he hadn’t moved from his position beside the backhoe. His long coat was stained brownish-red, and his hair was mussed.

  “Don’t tell me it’s another skeleton,” Scott-Olson said.

  “It’s not.” His voice was flat.

  She turned around. They were in the very center of the square hole. It was twice as deep as it had been when they discovered the skeleton. The Human-Disty Relations Department of the Human Government had continued the dig at the Disty’s insistence, in an effort to show that the contamination was a one-time thing. The Disty required that the hole be doubled in depth—some kind of weird Disty tradition. The backhoes hadn’t quite reached that level, but they were close.

  Batson still hadn’t moved.

  “You gonna show me or not?” Scott-Olson said.

  “We’re going to have to keep this quiet,” he said. “I have the backhoe operator and his assistants in custody. Fortunately, they called me. If they’d called a street officer, then we’d really be screwed.”

  His flat tone chilled her even more than his words. She’d never heard of humans taking each other into custody over a discovery.

  “They hurt someone?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Come on.”

  He led her across the sand. It was darker at this level than it had been at the upper levels. The lines on the side of the hole showed definite strata—the color varied from a bright orange to a rust to a near-brown, with just a touch of white weaving through. The white, she knew, came from chemicals leaching from the Disty buildings. She had seen that before.

  Only one set of footprints crossed the backhoe’s path. Batson was careful to step in them. Apparently they had been his own.

  He stopped at the edge of a deeper section of the hole. Then he turned his back to it, tipped his head backwards, and walked away.

  In all the years she had worked with him, he had never done that before. He left her alone without explanation, without guidance.

  She was shaking when she peered into the section.

  At first, she saw nothing. Just an uneven sand surface, caused by the blade. Then she hopped down inside and nearly stumbled.

  Her boots had caught on a hard surface, like brick or rock. But there weren’t rocks here. That was one of the charms of the Dunes, the fact that there was only sand to contend with, instead of giant rock.

  She crouched, her breath catching in her throat. Everything had combined to make her nervous: Batson’s strange behavior; the abandoned look to the buildings; the pressure she already felt from the Jørgen case.

  Her feet hadn’t caught on a rock. They had caught on an arm. It poked out of the dark red sand like an arm poking out of a blanket. She followed it, found the shoulder, and a little farther up, a bit of an ear.

  A mummy. That at least was normal. And judging by the depth at which it had been uncovered, it had been here for a very long time.

  She put on her gloves. They tightened automatically against her skin. She brushed a bit at the sand, then stopped and studied the entire uneven surface.

  Bile rose in her throat. She swallowed hard, forcing the bitter-tasting fluid back down. She hadn’t thrown up at a crime scene in her entire life. She wasn’t about to start now.

  But clinging to her professionalism meant she had to deal with the scene
before her, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to do that, either.

  Because the scene before her defied any other scene she’d ever witnessed. What she had initially taken for an uneven sand surface caused by the backhoe was a sea of body parts, rising from the depths like corpses leaving their graves.

  Arms, legs, hands, heads. All mummified, all apparently still attached to the bodies, strewn before her like rocks on a beach. The parts continued to the walls of the section, disappearing under the sand in ways that told her this mass grave continued beneath the yet-unturned dirt.

  Her mouth was open, already dry from the air and the sand floating in it.

  Sand, and whatever else, particles, perhaps, of the unfortunates in front of her.

  The bile rose again, and this time she covered her mouth with her gloved hand. She scrambled out of the hole and lay at the edge, swallowing against the dryness in her throat.

  Swallowing, swallowing, completely unsure what to do.

  She wanted to go to Batson, tell him to order the workers back, have them cover this space, cover everything, and lie to the Disty, telling them everything was fine.

  But they wouldn’t believe it. The Disty knew better. Most of them never even bothered to learn English, but even those had one phrase that they used like a mantra: Humans lie..

  Yes, they did. It was innate, a survival mechanism. Sometimes it was the only option that humans had.

  Scott-Olson wished she could lie, pretend this never happened, pretend she had never seen it.

  Because if the Disty considered a single skeleton that had been in the ground for thirty years to be major contamination, what would they consider this? Did they even have a word for it? And if so, what was it? Could it express the horror she felt even now?

  Because if the Disty thought her contaminated by that skeleton, what would they think of this?

  Eleven

  “I’m not going to help you find two people just so that the Disty can treat them to a vengeance killing.” Flint was appalled that this slight woman had suggested such a thing. She had seemed so mild a few moments ago; he had even been slightly amused by her anger, as if it could have no real impact on the people around her.