Recovery Man

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Perhaps that was more accurate than he cared to admit.

  The office was in the oldest section of Armstrong. The building itself had a plaque that marked it one of the first permanent buildings in the colony. The historical designation brought more problems than benefits: he couldn’t change the permaplastic exterior, he couldn’t make improvements without approval of the City of Armstrong Historical Oversight Committee, and he couldn’t insist that the city replace the roads and sidewalks. They were all authentic, just like the Dome, which still had the original parts from the original Dome.

  As a result, dust plagued this section of Armstrong. Moon dust, thick and gritty, got into everything. And that was if the resident was careful.

  Flint had been careful until a few months ago. Then he had taken an unexpected trip in the Emmeline, a trip that had literally lasted months, and had returned home just in time to deal with Paloma’s murder.

  His homecoming was only a few weeks ago, but it seemed like forever. And the office looked worse than it had when he left.

  He unlocked the door with his palm, grateful that the electronics were working. Inside was dark and smelled bitter. The air had a gritty taste.

  “Lights,” he said.

  They came up slowly, almost reluctantly, and that was when he remembered he had taken apart the environmental system, meaning to replace it as he cleaned the office.

  But he had gotten sidetracked by Paloma’s files, and then he decided it would be better to view them off-Moon, just in case.

  In dealing with Paloma’s death, he had tangled with Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor, the Moon’s largest law firm. As far as the firm was concerned, their relationship was now fine, but that would change as soon as news stories, prepared by Flint’s old nemesis and now his liaison to the press, Ki Bowles, hit the various news services.

  She had a lot of work to do before the first story leaked. Flint had complete approval over everything she did—Bowles also had access to Paloma’s files—and he had made it clear that he would destroy Bowles if she crossed him.

  Over the last two weeks, she had learned he had the resources to do so.

  But he’d gotten uncomfortable with Bowles being the only one digging through the files. As he had worked to clean the office and repair it just after the Paloma case resolved, he felt he had to know what was in those files, as well.

  So he started reviewing them, and then he felt paranoid. The office, with its environmental system down and its computer systems compromised, wasn’t the safest place to work.

  His apartment had no security at all. When he’d worked for the Armstrong police, he felt he didn’t need it. Now if he felt threatened, he stayed in the Emmeline.

  He scanned the small room. Dust covered everything, even the parts of the environmental system he had left in the middle of the floor. Then he sighed. He would take the old computer system with him to the Emmeline, but he would lose a lot of information that way.

  Paloma had been bad with computers, and good with them. She knew how to do certain tricks—some of which she had used just before her death—but she didn’t know how to do some basic things, like wiping information clean.

  Retrieval Artists were supposed to keep their files confidential. Paloma, in giving him her special rules, had told him to delete all information when he was done with it.

  Typically, however, she hadn’t followed her own advice.

  So just after he bought the business, he found ghosts of those files—bits and pieces of them scattered throughout the system. Those bits and pieces were so complete that he could reassemble the file for every case she’d ever worked on.

  He didn’t, of course. Instead, he’d upgraded the system, but kept the old one. He felt it wasn’t right to examine old files, but he wanted the opportunity to do so should an old client of Paloma’s come to him or threaten him, and he couldn’t ask Paloma about the case.

  After she died, he learned she had left him the ghost files on purpose. She had expected him to snoop, expected him to come to her with questions, expected him to discover for himself the things he learned after her death. She told him, in her holographic will, many of the secrets she’d been keeping from him, and somehow managed to sound disappointed that he wasn’t unethical enough to discover them for himself.

  He let out a small breath. He was still angry at her.

  He wondered if he’d ever get over it.

  Dust swirled around him. It was thicker than it had been when he left. He’d tried to have the old environmental system vacuum the dust from the room, to no avail. That was when he’d disassembled it, thinking it would be easier to retrofit it himself rather than install an entirely new system.

  Then he’d gotten distracted by Paloma’s files and left.

  He grabbed pieces of the environmental system from the floor, wiped them on his pants, and shoved them into the wall. He at least needed some fresh oxygen in here. The system wouldn’t work properly, not right away, but it would blow fresh air into this place and cool it down. Of course, that would move the dust around.

  The system groaned, something he’d never heard it do before, and then air brushed against his face. The breeze felt good for a moment, before it had a chance to pick up dust and layer it across his skin.

  Once the dust mingled with the air, he felt like he was being pelted with bits of sand.

  He shut the system off.

  He would have to sit here, in the dim light, do his work, and suffer with the heat and bad air.

  He slogged into the back room. He had copied the ghost files onto his new computer system, but he didn’t want to look at the copies. He wanted to see the originals, in case there was something he had missed.

  The back room of Flint’s office contained an extra chair, some parts for various pieces of equipment, extra changes of clothing (all of which would need to be cleaned now), and things from Paloma’s reign that he didn’t know what to do with.

  He’d moved the old computer system into that last section. Most of the system was in Paloma’s old desk, which was too small for him. He grabbed the extra chair and set it in front of the desk.

  As he sat, the chair wobbled on the dust. He stood again, kicked the dust aside, coughed as a small dust storm arose around him, and then sat back down. His knees banged on the desktop, but at least he was able to work.

  The old system started and greeted him by name. Apparently, it had gone to default, which meant that everything he did would be repeated aloud. He reset that and started to work.

  It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for. He had an approximate timeline. If anyone visited Paloma requesting to see Emmeline, it would have had to be done in her last year as a Retrieval Artist, but before he bought the business.

  He found initial files made of the visit, but they were corrupted. He didn’t really expect the visuals—they were always the first to go—but he had hoped for a DNA sample, which could have told him a lot.

  His security system always took voice readings, palm scans, and DNA from the doorknob whenever someone new visited. He had inherited that system from Paloma.

  But he got nothing except an audio file, also corrupted. Paloma truly had tried to delete this, more than once. The audio file gave him the word Callisto again, and his own last name, but nothing more.

  So he looked for other files, and finally found one. It had the date of the meeting Paloma had had with her mystery person, and a few notes, which duplicated the ones he’d found when he went through the files on the notes.

  He also found Emmeline’s medical history. He’d seen that file. In fact, he had compiled it, starting on the day she was born. He scanned to the end to see if anything had been added after her disbursement by the funeral home, but nothing had.

  The autopsy confirmed that it was Emmeline, and that she had died horribly. Her brain had rattled around in her skull, causing bleeding, and she had lost her ability to breathe, probably because of the way the day care employee had held
her.

  Flint stared at the words, which he could almost repeat from memory, but did not look at the images. They were probably corrupted anyway, but he didn’t need to look at them. He’d never forget how his daughter looked, her tiny face swollen, her eyes closed, her torso covered with bruises.

  How could anyone not know he was killing a child? How could anyone not care?

  Flint stood. He wiped a hand over his face, then winced as his fingers came away covered with grit. He was turning into a man made of sweat and dust. If he didn’t have so much confidential stuff in here, he’d hire out the cleaning.

  But he did—even if the confidentiality had been compromised the week before by a short police investigation.

  He frowned. Something about that nagged at him. But he was looking for distractions. He didn’t need to think about police or confidentiality or cleaning.

  He simply had to get the image of his dead daughter out of his mind.

  He sat back down. There were a handful of other files, all of them corrupted, as well. He supposed he could reconstruct them, but he wasn’t sure of the point.

  The only file that he could access at least part of had an unsigned report that a child matching Emmeline’s description had been sighted in Valhalla Basin on Callisto. Callisto had some of the oldest domes outside of the Moon, and its settlements all had corporate ties.

  Flint stared at the very short write-up, which looked like a transcription from an aural report or a visual one. He wondered how anyone could think that someone who “matched Emmeline’s description” was in any way unique.

  Yes, the blond hair and blue eyes had become unusual—signs of true inbreeding among people who came from the same Earthly backgrounds—but Flint’s wife hadn’t had his pale skin or his light hair. Emmeline hadn’t settled into who she would be yet, at least in looks.

  Was this some kind of joke?

  He got up again, found one of his formerly clean shirts, and wiped his face. All he managed to do was smear the dust around, but that felt like progress.

  No one knew about the ghost files, except Paloma and whomever she had told. He supposed she could have told someone at Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor, but he no longer had contacts there so that he could ask.

  Besides, she had no reason to discuss them. She was trying to keep certain things hidden, not reveal them.

  If someone wanted to plant information on Emmeline to mess with Flint’s mind, there were better ways to do so. This was too convoluted.

  The police, even though they had come into the office, didn’t have the technical sophistication to make these files look like the original ghost files. Someone connected with Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor would, but Flint couldn’t see the point.

  Besides, the Wagners were always a bit more direct in their nastiness.

  Flint had to investigate the possibility that someone had planted this information, but he wouldn’t count on it.

  He had to assume that what he saw before him had actually come to Paloma.

  He had to assume that someone, six years ago, had believed his daughter was alive.

  Seventeen

  Yu stood near his pilot’s chair and monitored the decontamination. The machine was working, which was good, considering how cheaply he got the thing. He rarely used it, but he figured he was going to die of something, and if it was some awful contaminant…well, then, he’d find himself a nice modern convalescence apartment and let someone give him drugs for the rest of his miserable life. He had enough money saved up. He’d go out in a fog, and he wouldn’t care.

  But Nafti obviously cared. The man had been going through the lower levels of the ship with a device that Yu had seen only in Ports—some kind of wand that measured every single contaminant known, at least at the time the wand was made.

  The thing was making all sort of beeping, squealing, and bopping noises. It was turning various colors at different parts of the ship, and Nafti was clutching the front of his environmental suit as he walked, as if pulling it tighter made it work better.

  Yu hadn’t told him where he got the environmental suit. It was off a mine just at the edge of the known universe. If anything was horribly contaminated in this ship, it was that environmental suit.

  He’d planned to sell it to some unwary customer, not have his partner use it.

  Eventually, he’d have to tell Nafti that probably half the readings he was getting from the corridors came from the suit itself.

  Yu glanced at the decon again. He couldn’t tell if it was helping her—only some up-close readings off the machine itself would reveal that—but it was a better idea than going with a medical persona and the unauthorized stuff he kept in his medical lab.

  If Shindo was half as paranoid as Nafti, she’d want to go to the lab after the decon, but she seemed pretty calm as she came out of that cargo hold. In fact, she looked like she was holding back a laugh, for which he didn’t blame her, considering that stupid suit.

  She had to understand chemical mixes and biological compounds. After all, the Gyonnese wanted her for some kind of chemical sin against their planet, not because she went in there with a laser pistol and shot their offspring.

  Shindo was probably smarter than Nafti and Yu combined, which made Yu nervous, particularly as she roamed around free. He’d checked her background before he took off for Callisto, wanting to know what he was up against, and was relieved to find she had no weapons training, no known physical skills, and no piloting abilities.

  Even if she wanted to take over the ship, she wouldn’t know what to do with it once she got it.

  Which wouldn’t stop her from using the escape pods.

  He’d locked most of them off—something that had taken him nearly two days to do. He’d had to override some systems in the ship that were designed to be overridden. Ships like this one had escape pods every 500 meters or on every level, depending on the size of the level. The pods were self-sufficient little units, and were theoretically tamper-proof.

  He hadn’t tried to tamper with the pods themselves, but locking them into their bays had been nearly impossible. So he was beginning to believe the tamper-proof claim.

  He’d left the pods on the bridge level alone, figuring that a cargo ship—designed for a small crew—would have the most protections on the command level. Besides, if she made it up here, something had gone wrong.

  That decon was taking longer than he liked. Yu glanced at the screen showing the rest of the ship. Nafti was going through the cargo holds now, and shivering so visibly that it looked like his suit might fall off.

  If Shindo did nothing else, she had rendered Yu’s best partner ineffective. Maybe even made him impossible to work with on other, bigger jobs. Yu had no idea how to play this one when Nafti got to the bridge.

  If Nafti got to the bridge. The man might just take a pod himself and hope he arrived at some medical center, where they’d take one look at his suit and quarantine him for the next month.

  The decon unit rattled, like he’d been warned it would. It was reaching the end of its cycle. He double-checked the Gyonnesian shields that he had placed on the corridors near the decon unit.

  Shindo might try to go down a specific corridor, but she couldn’t without his or Nafti’s DNA signature. She was trapped in the maze that Yu had made for her.

  If this worked as advertised, she wouldn’t be able to get near the bridge level, either. The green lights he’d used to get her to the decon area would lead her to the medical lab—but not his special part of it. She’d go to the part he’d left for Earth Alliance authorities, the part that looked like a functioning medical unit.

  There she’d meet the first of the three personas he’d just paid too much for. If that one couldn’t help her, the next one would appear, and so on.

  He figured all of that would keep her busy until the ship arrived.

  All he had to do was deliver her.

  Then he’d get out of the people-stealing business and return to what he knew: returnin
g precious possessions to their rightful owners.

  This job was too much for him—and he hoped he’d get through it unscathed.

  Eighteen

  They made her tell the story four times. Then Detective Bozeman asked her, in the nicest possible voice, if she had known she was a clone.

  And Talia burst into tears.

  Bozeman didn’t know what to do. They were sitting on the floor of her room, near the closet door, next to her bed. Detective Zagrando was inside the closet, looking at the control panel that House had made at Talia’s command.

  Bozeman looked at the closet first, like he expected help. Talia wiped her face with the back of her hand, but she couldn’t stop that little hitch in her breath. It kept coming, and every time it did, more tears welled in her eyes.

  “It’s been a stressful day for you,” Bozeman said lamely.

  Talia didn’t dignify that with a response. It had been a horrible day, and it wasn’t over yet.

  “We’ll find your mom.” But he didn’t sound too convinced.

  Zagrando peeked his head out of the closet. He saw that Talia was crying, but he pretended not to notice. She was liking him better and better.

  “You got the House to do that?” he asked.

  Talia nodded.

  “You have some amazing technical skills,” he said.

  “Mom says I got them from my dad.” Then her voice hitched again. Was her dad really her dad? Was Mom really her mom? If Talia was a fake kid, were they fake parents?

  Bozeman looked at Zagrando like he was looking for help. Zagrando made a little movement with his hand, which kinda said Get out of the way without being blunt about it.

  Then Zagrando sat down across from her, legs crossed. “Normally…,” he said in a very calm voice.

  She liked that voice. She liked the word normally. She wished everything was normal again.

  “Normally,” he repeated, glancing at Bozeman, who moved over some more, “we call Valhalla Basin’s Child Watch Unit. Do you know what that is?”