Recovery Man

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  For all his exterior toughness, Nafti was surprisingly delicate. Yu couldn’t decide if the man was a hypochondriac or just plain whiney. The slightest thing made him take to his bed. Something as annoying as rhythmic pounding might actually make him ill.

  “We’re not going to New Gyonne City.” Yu didn’t have any other answer. He didn’t want to go into the hold and make the stupid woman shut up. He’d hoped she’d stay unconscious for the entire trip, but obviously that had failed.

  “I thought the Gyonnese wanted her.”

  “They do, but they’re trying some legal maneuver. They’re going to stash her in some abandoned science base on Io until they can resolve this thing.”

  “What thing?” Nafti was now rubbing the bridge of his nose. He’d probably give himself a headache.

  “Whatever it was she was yammering about when we snatched her.”

  Nafti shook his head. He climbed the metal ladder to the next level. Yu followed, then brought down the hatch by hand. That shut out some of the noise, although not all of it.

  That damn woman was determined.

  This was why he normally avoided human cargo—more trouble than it was worth.

  “We’re not getting off this rock while she’s pounding,” Nafti said.

  “I’m taking care of it.”

  The ladder led to the bridge level—a large and complex series of networks and navigating systems that once required a crew of a dozen. Yu had customized the cargo ship so that he could run it alone, although it worked better with four or five.

  On this trip, however, he’d only brought Nafti who, for all his complaining, was the best and least greedy second he’d ever had.

  “I hope you got it planned,” Nafti said as he sank into the chair which ran the co-pilot’s board. “Because corporate colonies like this one scan cargos more than any other kind of ship.”

  As if Yu didn’t know that. “She’s the third member of our crew. I told them we have a contingent of three. I also told them she’s being disciplined according to our customs. If they have a problem with that, then they’re welcome to come aboard and deal with her, according to our laws.”

  Nafti looked over his broad shoulder at Yu. “You’re kidding. You already submitted a crew compliment?”

  “Had to when we landed.”

  “And you were so sure that we were going to get her.”

  “I wasn’t positive,” Yu said. “But I had a backup.”

  “Which is?”

  “That she left the ship and we didn’t have time to find her. But I was going to give her name to the authorities here, and then tell the Gyonnese to get here fast to pick her up.”

  Nafti whistled. “All right. At least you thought some of this through.”

  Yu ran a hand over the board. He liked the no-touch system the Gyonnese had developed. Once he got used to the delicate movements he had to make to control the ship, he realized the no-touch method was superior to anything else he’d tried.

  He’d been running cargo to and from the Gyonnese for a decade now. He’d also hired out as a Recovery Man, mostly for the Gyonnese, but also for a few other aliens in that sector of the galaxy.

  Usually he recovered things—heirlooms, one-of-a-kind pieces, rare and exotic creatures/plants/nonsentients. He liked the work. It paid well, and it kept him on the move. And mostly, he stayed on the right side of Earth Alliance law.

  The pounding sounded like someone tapping a finger on a metal board.

  “Still think we should’ve let this one pass,” Nafti said. “Trackers, at least, have the equipment to bring back a Disappeared.”

  “I keep telling you, she’s not a Disappeared.” Disappeareds were people who went missing on purpose, usually to avoid prosecution or death by any one of fifty different alien cultures. There were whole schools of thought as to whether or not these people were actually criminals.

  By Earth Alliance law, they were. The Earth Alliance formed around the idea that on each planet, the native species’ laws were paramount. So if a human broke a law on Planet X, he was tried under Planet X’s laws, even if the rules seemed barbaric by human standards.

  Over time, corporations lost a lot of good employees, and so developed internal systems to help humans get new identities and new careers somewhere else. These systems became so successful that they became subcorporations and then they became businesses with no ties to the corporations at all.

  Technically, Disappearance Services were illegal, but they’d developed their businesses in such a way that they never asked what the Disappeareds had done, nor did they keep records on the people they helped. So there was no trail, no way to prove that the services knowingly helped criminals escape.

  And humans often looked the other way. Only the alien governments got angry, and they usually hired Trackers to find the Disappeareds. Trackers made a lot of money off the system.

  Yu didn’t have the stomach to traffic in human lives. He once toyed with becoming a Retrieval Artist—people who actually worked for the Disappeared’s family or lawyers, trying to find the Disappeared to give them an inheritance or to tell them the charges were dropped. Retrieval Artists worked hard to make sure the Disappeareds were never caught and convicted by the alien governments.

  Yu admired the effort required to keep Disappeareds away from Trackers and various alien governments, but the work was too subtle for him. And even though it paid well, a Retrieval Artist had to be careful. He couldn’t just take any old client. He had to make sure the client wasn’t a front for a Tracker or the government that had a warrant out on the Disappeared.

  Yu didn’t want to work that hard. He preferred doing a lot of small jobs for medium money. He could take any client he wanted for any project he wanted, and he got paid if and when he delivered.

  So far, in twenty years of “recovering” items for various individuals, governments, and businesses, he had always delivered.

  “She seems like a Disappeared.” Nafti mimicked Yu’s movements, and the screen beeped. Nafti hadn’t learned how to fly this thing yet with the new equipment. They’d set his console on demonstration so that he could practice without screwing up the ship.

  “You’ve never met a Disappeared,” Yu said. “How would you know?”

  “She’s living in Valhalla Basin, under a different name,” Nafti said, moving his hand over the console again. This time it turned green, which meant he had succeeded.

  “She got a divorce. She’d been old-fashioned. She took her husband’s name,” Yu said. “She’s still working at the same job for the same corporation.”

  “But she has some kind of Gyonnese judgment against her.”

  Yu sighed. This was another reason he didn’t usually do this kind of work. It was hard for the people he hired to understand.

  “Yep, she does,” Yu said. “She broke one of their laws, killed a bunch of their embryos or something, and did it all by accident.”

  Which sounded like something a Disappeared would do.

  “But under Gyonnese law, the punishment is simple: she can’t have children of her own, and if she does, those children must be forfeited to the state.”

  Nafti ran a hand over his bald head a second time. He leaned back in the chair. It squeaked a protest. He nearly exceeded the per-person weight limit for this type of vessel.

  “So why didn’t we take the girl?”

  “Because this woman is smart, that’s why. The Gyonnese have rigid definitions of what a child is, and that kid didn’t meet them.”

  “I don’t understand,” Nafti said.

  “I know.” Yu sent a message to Valhalla Basin’s SpaceTtraffic Control. It included his flight plan and his crew compliment, along with a notification that he was having some trouble with a member of his crew and would like to leave as soon as possible.

  “I don’t think the money they’re paying us is worth the pounding.” Nafti closed his eyes. Yu reached over and shut off his board.

  Nafti had no idea how much
they were paying Yu. Every single time he said no to the assignment, the Gyonnese upped the price.

  They didn’t want to hire a Tracker because Trackers had to report their various jobs to some Earth Alliance agency to keep their licenses current. Methods didn’t matter, but the type of work did. Since Rhonda Shindo hadn’t technically Disappeared, and her daughter was with her on Callisto, there was no legitimate job for a Tracker to do.

  The Gyonnese were barred by their own laws from hiring Retrieval Artists. It was just a formality. He’d never heard of a Retrieval Artist working for a nonhuman concern. Retrieval Artists were pro-human all the way.

  So that left him, and he was a last-ditch effort. The Gyonnese had been negotiating with Aleyd Corporation for fourteen years to get them to give up Rhonda Shindo, or at least find the legitimate child. Aleyd had just tied up the Gyonnese with lawyers, pretending to cooperate.

  They could do that for another two and a half years, and then the case would be moot.

  Rhonda Shindo’s real daughter would turn eighteen, which made her an adult by human standards. Adults weren’t subject to this clause in Gyonnese law.

  The fact that time was running out was what led the chief Gyonnese investigator to hire Yu. Yu had worked for the man before, recovering property stolen from various worksites by employees of Aleyd when it first came to Gyonne.

  In that case, he’d actually negotiated with Aleyd Corporation’s head of interspecies relations. Those jobs were easy.

  This one could be a nightmare.

  But the Gyonnese had offered him more money than he had made in his entire life. He couldn’t turn it down and live with himself.

  He could quit work when this case was done.

  If he wanted to.

  He didn’t really want to.

  But he hadn’t told Nafti how much they were getting paid. He gave Nafti the standard second rate, the rate that they always used for cases on which there were only two of them. It was a pittance compared with what Yu would earn.

  Valhalla Basin Space Traffic Control got back to him with approval for his flight plan (only a few modifications) and a departure time less than two Earth hours from now.

  All he had to do was wait.

  And hope that Rhonda Shindo would give up pounding on the walls of the cargo hold.

  Five

  Talia pushed against the closet wall. She hated the darkness, hated the bitter taste in her mouth, hated the aches in her head. She had more than one—there was the headache that she’d woken up with, but there were also the bruises where the bald guy had dug his fingers into her skull.

  Then there was that sensation behind her eyes, the one that felt like if she just let go of herself a little bit, she’d start sobbing so hard she wouldn’t be able to breathe.

  Mom always said, Keep calm, Talia. Nothing ever got solved by a person who panicked.

  Mom. Who never told Talia she was a clone.

  There are five more, the small guy said to Mom, and Mom hadn’t corrected him. She hadn’t corrected him about that or the weird legal case.

  But she had said she loved Talia. And the last thing on the recording, the last thing her mom said before those guys took her away, was Talia’s name.

  Her mom did care. She was worried.

  She wouldn’t worry about a clone, would she? She wouldn’t love a clone.

  Talia rubbed her eyes, trying to force that sobby feeling into the background. Then she took a deep breath. She wasn’t solving anything stuck in this hot closet with the door locked.

  “House,” she said, “turn on the closet light.”

  Lights came up slowly. Talia saw her clothes, hanging above her, pressed and cleaned by House, smelling faintly of the floral soap that came with every building in this subdivision.

  Everyone smelled like that floral soap, and everyone’s yard smelled of pine, and everyone had to use the prescribed perfumes so that this place smelled the same everywhere.

  She usually hated it.

  Right now, it was a comfort.

  Her shoes had been moved to a pile near the side of the wall. She found one—a retro piece that she’d ordered before Mom took her financial privileges away. The shoe was expensive and very old, older than the settlement on Callisto, even. But it had a steel reinforced heel, and the heel came down to a point.

  “House,” Talia said, “is anyone else here?”

  “We are alone.”

  She hated the way House thought of itself as a person. It wasn’t. Some systems knew that. House didn’t, probably because it was designed for middle-income people instead of the wealthy. A lot of stuff for middle-income people assumed stupidity on the part of the user.

  “You sure you can’t override that programming?” Talia asked. “How about if I give you a master override code?”

  “You may try, Talia,” House said. “But his work was thorough.”

  “Not thorough enough to get rid of his image or his voice,” Talia said. She recited the master override code, the one she wasn’t supposed to know—only Mom was supposed to know it, and only Mom was supposed to use it—but Talia had always extended her privileges through it, and Mom never once figured it out.

  After Talia recited the code, House was silent for so long that Talia got worried she’d done something wrong.

  Then House said, “I’m sorry, Talia. The code does not work.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, even though it wasn’t. She was going to have to bust out of here. But the doors in the house were reinforced—made so strong that no one could break through them without special equipment.

  She wasn’t sure if that applied to closet doors, however.

  “You know,” she said, trying one last gambit, “I’ll die if I’m left here too long.”

  “You are not dying, Talia,” House said in its nurse’s voice. That voice was an automatic programming, done so that the listener knew that House had checked vital signs.

  “Not yet,” Talia said. “But I will if I’m here too long. Go ahead, check your records. See how long a human can last without food or water.”

  “I know how long, and you have been in that closet for five-point-two-five Earth hours. You will be just fine.”

  “Not necessarily, House. If no one comes here, no one can get in, and no one knows where I am, I could be here for days. I can’t contact anyone because of that barrier those guys set up through your systems, and you can’t contact anyone because of the same barrier—unless it’s an emergency. Then you can blare stuff outside, alerting the neighborhood.”

  “This is not an emergency,” House said.

  “It sure is!” Talia snapped. “I’m trapped in the stupid closet.”

  “You will get free.”

  “My mother was kidnapped.”

  “You do not know that for certain,” House said, using that horrible soothing voice again.

  “I do too, and you would too if you could speculate.” Talia sank back against the wall and crossed her arms, grazing her skin with the heel of that shoe.

  “I cannot speculate,” House said sadly. “I am not designed for such a contingent, nor do I have the programming which would allow anyone to modify me to do so. If you would like a system with speculation capability, then you might like a House upgrade…”

  “Oh, for all the rocks in the universe,” Talia said as House launched into its upgrade ad. For years, she’d wanted to go into the programming to shut off the ad, but if she did, then Mom would have known that she could tamper with the machinery.

  House finished the ad, then said, “I can repeat if you like. I believe you were not paying attention.”

  “I have the stupid thing memorized,” Talia said. Then she frowned. “How much of your programming did they shut down?”

  “Quite a bit,” House said. “Subroutines must be disabled in order to prevent me from constantly pinging Valhalla’s security network.”

  “Will your failure to ping bring anyone here?”

  “No,�
�� House said. “Even though the programs are set up that way, statistics show that Valhalla Basin’s Police Department does not respond to Failure to Ping emergencies. Too many systems break down, and the calls are unnecessary. Valhalla Basin Police have too many real emergencies to investigate all the daily Failure to Ping calls.”

  “Figures,” Talia muttered. She ran a finger along that shoe. “Okay. Tell me this: if I break into the wall network, will you hurt me?”

  Chips and sensors ran throughout the walls in every house in the subdivision. That was how House was able to form two different screens in the closet.

  “I believe the interior emergency response system is off-line,” House said.

  “You believe?” Talia asked.

  “My self-diagnostics have been disabled, so I cannot be precise,” House said. “Since the external emergency response system is disabled and blocked, it would be logical to assume that the internal system is also blocked.”

  “Isn’t that speculation?” Talia asked.

  “No,” House said. “I cannot perform speculation. Upgrades…”

  “Oh, stop!” Talia said.

  But House didn’t. It launched into the ad as if Talia had never heard it before.

  But she did think it odd that House had used the word believe and the phrase logical to assume. House had never before used either in reference to itself.

  When the ad finished, Talia said, “Can you make a control panel on this wall?”

  “Usually I cannot without manufacturer’s authorization,” House said, “but that too has been disabled. I will make an attempt.”

  Manufacturer’s authorization disabled. Talia was impressed—not with the Recovery Man’s skill, since it was clear he was following some kind of instruction, maybe a manual or someone else’s—but with whoever had told him how to disable House’s parts.

  She’d tried for years to disable the manufacturer’s authorizations and had been unable to. Early on, her mom had caught her, and had told her if she did too much of it, House would be uninsurable.