Recovery Man

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Now he would worry about that child. What had the parents done and why the hell were they procreating if they were going to break Alliance laws?

  Like Shindo. If she died, her daughter—her cloned daughter—would be left in legal limbo. Even if Talia had been an original child, she would still have had troubles. She would have been left alone in a place that didn’t deal with orphaned children well. She would lose her home, and probably be deported back to the Moon, a place she didn’t remember at all, a place where, she said, she had no family.

  He would have to check that. But humans could be as strange as the Gyonnese sometimes. They didn’t always see clones as real people, which they were. They had just started life in a different way from other human beings.

  And all of the things that could have happened to the original Talia Shindo would happen to this one, along with several others.

  In Valhalla Basin, clones had no legal standing. They weren’t considered legitimate children. She would have to sue just to get any money in her mother’s accounts. She might even have to sue to retain her name, if the original child wanted it back.

  So he had tried to tell her to get a lawyer, but there weren’t many good ones in Valhalla. The good ones already worked for Aleyd, and they wouldn’t cross into family practice even if it paid well.

  He stepped outside and stopped before going to his office. The street looked normal at least—lots of folk on foot, a few being dragged into a side door of the police building, and some hurrying in on their own, probably to report some petty thing that they thought was a crime.

  Work in the Basin should have been a cushy job. He didn’t have a lot of authority, since his came from the city and not the corporation. But the corporation wanted crime eliminated in its perfect little domed city, and that meant a level of paranoia he hadn’t seen anywhere else.

  Everyone would react with fear to Talia’s story, although the fear would come out in dozens of ways. Fear of her, fear of her mother, fear by everyone else in the mother’s section, of being discovered or blamed in the same way, fear of random kidnappings, fear of a loss of everything.

  He needed to keep the case quiet as long as he could. He hoped no one had notified Aleyd, because if someone had, that would make his job harder.

  He wanted to find out what Rhonda Shindo really did do, what warrants—if any—there were against her, and what options he had for finding her.

  He doubted he had any options at all, but he would be creative. He would stretch Callisto law as far as he could without actually breaking it.

  That was least he could do for the poor, lonely, frightened girl in the building behind him.

  Twenty-three

  Flint liked working in Van Alen’s office when she wasn’t there. The wide space had a silence that seemed almost reverential. Even the office noise, which was bad out front, disappeared back here.

  Van Alen scented the air with a different kind of perfume daily. The perfumes varied according to the kind of work she needed to do. Apparently, this day had been a day of hard work, because the perfume was Mountain Chill, a crisp, almost cold scent with a mixture of peppermint and something the manufacturer called sunlight.

  Flint doubted sunlight could have an odor. He thought it an Earth conceit, like so much of the gobbledygook that came from the home planet, but of all the scents Van Alen used in her office, he liked this one best.

  She had four computers that weren’t networked to the rest of her office. They weren’t linked with each other, either. Periodically, she had someone come in and clean out the memory. Once a year, she replaced the computers.

  She used them for her confidential work, and after Paloma died, Van Alen let Flint use them for his. She wanted him to continue exploring Paloma’s files in this office, but he had felt a bit too constrained by Van Alen, even though they both had a stake in the project.

  Instead, he went to his yacht.

  And now he was back. He had taken the machine closest to the wall. It was part of a built-in desk, and the desk was the only thing the interior designer had screwed up in creating the office. The desk was too close to the wall. Sitting there for a long period of time felt claustrophobic.

  Which meant that the computer wasn’t used much. It also meant that most people, when searching for something on Van Alen’s systems, searched here last.

  For those reasons, Flint loved the machine.

  He hunched over the screen, which he had left on the desktop instead of using the holoversion—he didn’t want any of the junior partners or the associates to walk in and see what he was doing—and he carefully opened a back door he had created years ago within the Armstrong Police Department’s computer systems.

  When he had been with the police, he’d pointed out various flaws in their systems, and one of his bosses had him work with the techs to improve things. His computer skills were greater than theirs—primarily because he had worked in the private sector. He was hired for his skills and paid accordingly. The techs in the police department took the job either because they’d shown an aptitude in their police academy tests or because they’d been turned down by the private sector as being unqualified.

  So far, only one detective had figured out that Flint had access to police department records. He had some techs block that access, so Flint used his secondary systems and went around the blocks.

  His back door remained in place. In fact, it was probably more effective now than it had been before.

  Still, he had to act quickly. He was always afraid someone would shadow him or trace his work. Trackers sometimes haunted the police database, as well, looking to see if files on Disappeareds got accessed, so he had to be very careful.

  He glanced up. He was still alone. He wished he had the right to bring down the frosted glass doors, but only Van Alen could do that. The protocol prevented her associates from using the office when she was out.

  He didn’t want to hack into that system. He wanted to do this work quickly and then leave.

  Still, his fingers were shaking as he looked up his daughter’s files. He’d never examined the official records. He’d received his civilian copies before he went to the academy, but he hadn’t dug into the files after he became a cop. He had always meant to, but never found the time.

  Never made the time.

  There were fewer records than he expected. The case had been a media sensation and the killer had eventually gone through a very public trial and a very satisfying conviction. Yet the files of actual police work were short: the video records Paloma had, the autopsy file, and the history of the day care center, with links to the previous death and the death that happened after Emmeline’s.

  He looked at the day care center first. It had opened years before and had a great reputation. Then its founder died, and her daughter, a woman known for being an activist in Armstrong, had taken it over. The place still passed inspections with the best ratings, and still had children from the best neighborhoods, but there were indications of employee disgruntlement, mostly from employees who had been let go after years of service.

  The newer people got special treatment, one woman said in a recorded interview. They had private meetings, they got the best assignments, and they had longer vacations, even though they hadn’t been with the center as long.

  It took him a while to find what “assignments” were. Apparently, the center had been divided into the public wing and the private wing. He had only seen the public wing. He and Rhonda hadn’t made a lot of money. Their biggest household expense was the fees at the daycare center. Flint had figured the price was worth it; to her credit, Rhonda hadn’t blamed him for that attitude after Emmeline died.

  Apparently, Emmeline and the other two children had died in the private wing. He didn’t know how his daughter had gotten there or why she was unsupervised with a single employee.

  He knew she had been alone with the man who killed her. Now he knew where.

  Flint stood up so abruptly, he knocked over
the chair. He had to take a deep breath before he could even bend over to pick up the chair. Then he went to the small kitchen area between the office and the waiting room (the storage was in a fake wall panel at the edge of the waiting room), removed some bottled Earth water, and walked back to the computer.

  For the longest time, he stood in front of the chair, holding the cool bottle to his forehead. His face was flushed—he could feel that, like a furnace inside him—and he knew if he wasn’t careful, he would erupt in anger.

  He was holding back his emotions, something he normally had no trouble doing. But this was Emmeline.

  This was his daughter.

  And he was jeopardizing everything if he stayed in the police department archives too long. Jeopardizing Emmeline if she was still alive; jeopardizing his own work if she wasn’t.

  It was this thought that calmed him, this thought that made him sit back down at the computer, this thought that got him to the next section of the file.

  The autopsy.

  He figured he would find something else here, something that wasn’t in his civilian copy of the same document. But as he read it, listened to the coroner’s explanations, and saw the flat vid of the interior wounds, he realized he had much of the report—almost all of it, in fact—memorized.

  He knew what killed his daughter. He knew how much pain she’d been in when she died. He knew that her last moments of life were the worst moments in her short existence.

  This autopsy changed nothing.

  But he backed it up, anyway, so that he could examine it later, and he added the police files to the small chip he had brought, as well.

  Then he decided to check one last thing before he left.

  He looked at the access logs for Emmeline’s case.

  And that was where he found his surprise.

  Twenty-four

  The door to the bridge opened. Nafti stood on the threshold, looking like some kind of white bulky alien in his environmental suit.

  Yu suppressed a sigh.

  “I’ve been all over the ship,” Nafti said, “and every single area is covered with contamination. You’ve killed me.”

  “Shut up and close the door,” Yu said.

  Nafti’s shoulders rose and fell, as if he were sighing or steeling himself for the conversation. Yu didn’t care which. He was more concerned with the medical lab.

  He had just lost communication with it. According to the computer, the lab was now working on a backup Earth Alliance system.

  The problem was that he couldn’t access that system. He kept getting a message he’d never gotten before: System unavailable due to issues of patient privacy.

  The message wasn’t in Gyonnesian either. It was in Spanish, which irritated him even more.

  Nafti slammed a fist on the navigation panel, which caused all kinds of alarms to go off. Yu grimaced, floated his hand across the panel, and soothed the system.

  “You’re not listening,” Nafti snapped.

  “You’re right, I’m not,” Yu said.

  “I’m scared.”

  Yu shook his head. “You’re worried about nothing.”

  “That’s not what the computer’s saying.”

  Yu looked up. “Which computer?”

  “The on-board computer.” Nafti looked blurry through the visor on his helmet. The visor was scratched and probably porous.

  Sometimes Yu wished he could hire people who had brains to help him. The trouble was, the brains always tried to take over the ship, and they were never very good at the rough stuff. The dumb guys were good at the rough stuff, but once they got an idea in their heads, it was impossible to shake it.

  “We’re going to have to ditch the ship when we get back,” Nafti said. “It’s unfit for any kind of human inhabitation.”

  “The computer told you that, too?” Yu asked, making sure the problems Nafti started on the navigation board had ended.

  “Yes,” Nafti said.

  “The Gyonnesian computer?” Yu asked.

  “So?”

  “The ship was built for humans,” Yu said. “The computer system is grafted in. It is designed for a ship that can’t accommodate humans at all.”

  “Huh?” Nafti asked.

  “I cobbled systems together,” Yu said. “They’re going to lie to you.”

  “Like you did when you said the ʼbots cleaned this thing?”

  “I thought they had,” Yu said.

  “When was the last time you went belowdecks?”

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done a full inspection. He didn’t really trust the cleaning ʼbots, not entirely, and he hadn’t been able to afford a full overhaul, which was what the ship required. So he hired loading and off-loading ʼbots at various areas, and he tried not to go below unless he had to.

  “I’m not sure when I was last there,” Yu lied.

  “Because you know it’s unsafe,” Nafti said with surprising craftiness. “You know that you’d get contaminated and die.”

  “I wouldn’t breathe the air on a ship that had that level of contamination,” Yu said. “It’d get all over the environmental system.”

  Except that the upper decks had a separate environmental system, one that he always used. That way, he didn’t have to switch over if he had live cargo that didn’t breathe air. He could readjust the system in the cargo hold to accommodate whatever creature he was ferrying from one place to the next.

  “You were wrong to trust those ʼbots,” Nafti said, tapping on his suit. “You should be wearing one of these. You should go through the decontamination just like that woman did.”

  Yu checked the medical lab. Still unavailable. What the hell was she doing?

  “You’re not listening!” Nafti said, raising his fist.

  Yu caught it. “I am listening. You don’t understand.”

  “What don’t I understand?”

  “That you’re a hypochondriac.”

  “What?”

  “You got a headache when she started pounding. Then the canny woman mentions contaminants, which all ships have, and you go off the deep end. You put on that suit, which, by the way, looks like it might have some integrity issues, and you go all over the ship looking for contamination, forgetting that the suit is probably contaminated from its contact with the hold.”

  Nafti looked down. The suit creaked as he did so, and Yu saw a rip along the neck.

  “I did carry the wrong cargo in the hold,” Yu said, “and I clearly didn’t double-check whether or not the ʼbots were full. I thought they worked. Obviously, they didn’t. But the ship is fine or we wouldn’t have been allowed in and out of the Ports, especially the Ports in the Earth Alliance.”

  Which wasn’t really true. He had a few special licenses and agreements with several Alliance-based corporations, although not Aleyd. Whenever he was near a planet that had a lot of corporate business, he made sure those agreements were front and center in his contact protocol.

  He had no trouble getting onto Valhalla Basin because of them, although he’d been worried about leaving. During his landing, someone probably figured he was representing one of the other corporations, and about to do business with Aleyd. If anyone had checked what he had done, he wouldn’t have been able to leave. Those agreements wouldn’t have protected him if he lied about the number of people on board or he got charged with kidnapping.

  “Honestly?” Nafti sounded vulnerable. Yu was glad he couldn’t see the man’s face. A man built like Nafti shouldn’t sound vulnerable.

  “Yes, honestly,” Yu said. “Remember that the holds have their own environmental systems. I showed you that when I hired you years ago. You asked about it.”

  Nafti reached up and removed the helmet. His face was covered with beads of sweat and his skin was red. Obviously, the suit’s environmental system hadn’t worked properly, either.

  Yu resisted the urge to shake his head yet again. He tapped a few areas on the security monitor, trying to get access to the medical lab.
r />   “I did ask, didn’t I?” Nafti said.

  “Yes,” Yu said.

  “I’m not a hypochondriac,” Nafti said.

  “Then what are you?”

  “A worrier.”

  “What would you have done if this entire ship were contaminated and I refused to pay for your medical help?” Yu asked.

  “It’s not, right?” Nafti asked.

  Yu ran his hand along the security board. “What did I just say?”

  “You said it wasn’t.”

  “Then maybe you should believe me,” Yu said, “and stop thinking about the authorities.”

  “I wasn’t,” Nafti said.

  “Deny that you would demand a full decontamination of the ship when we got to the next Port,” Yu said.

  “It is only sensible if the ship’s contaminated.”

  Yu leaned forward. “Think, you dumb-ass. What happens when you get a full decon?”

  “The ship gets inspected….” Nafti’s voice trailed off. “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh. Do you know how many unapproved systems I have on this ship?”

  “Is that why you’ve never had an inspection?”

  “What do you think?” Yu snapped.

  Nafti wiped at his face with his gloved hand. “Sorry.”

  “You should be,” Yu said. “When I hired you, I demanded your full trust. You violated that today.”

  “I got scared.”

  “I know.” Yu double-checked the security board a final time. “Take off the suit.”

  “I’m not sure I should.”

  “It’s got a rip in the back. It never worked right. We’ve got to destroy the thing.”

  “A rip?” Nafti ran his hands along the front as if he could find it.

  “Near your neck,” Yu said.

  Nafti reached around back, then stuck a gloved finger inside the rip and started. Apparently, he had touched his own skin. He cursed.

  “Next time, let me do the thinking, okay?” Yu said. “I didn’t hire you to think.”

  Nafti unhooked the front of the suit. The fasteners still worked. They opened themselves quickly once he started the sequence.