Recovery Man

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  After the lawyer kept Aleyd away from her, of course.

  After the lawyer made sure Talia was her mother’s legal heir.

  After the lawyer fixed everything.

  Thirty-one

  Tejumola Kazin’s version of legal maneuvering left Celestine Gonzalez feeling dirty. But the little lawyer with the weird gray suit had done what he had promised: he had gotten her out of that line within ten minutes, and he had gotten her a work visa, as well as permission to stay in Valhalla Basin for a week.

  Now she stood outside the Port in a town that looked too new to be a domed city. Every building had the latest paint style, the most current windows, the best sidewalks. The roads looked unused even though dozens of cars drove along the surface.

  Most of the aircars had official markings—whether those markings belonged to Aleyd or the city government, it didn’t matter—and the cars on the ground had none.

  Gonzalez was getting a feel for this place. Maybe that was what had left her feeling dirty, not the way that Kazin practiced law.

  After informing her that Oberholst had gone to his hotel, Kazin had scuttled back inside the Port when he’d finished getting her out of that line—apparently looking for more customers. Once Gonzalez had gotten outside the Port and turned her links back on, she got a message from Oberholst, telling her to join him as soon as she’d located Talia Shindo.

  Thanks for the support, Gonzalez wanted to send back to him. But she knew better than to yell at her boss, particularly this boss—the senior partner for the entire company, the largest shareholder, and one of the more powerful attorneys on Armstrong.

  And, clearly, elsewhere in the solar system.

  She set her small bag down, then ran a hand through her hair. She’d been standing here too long.

  An aircar swooped below eye level and the passenger-side window opened. A man leaned toward her.

  “Would you—?”

  “No,” she said. “Thank you.”

  She had turned away enough cabs in the last half hour to recognize yet another. They seemed to zoom in on her. Maybe it was the bag, maybe it was the fact she was loitering. Maybe it was simply that they always did so whenever someone stood alone.

  She backed closer to the exterior wall of the Port, then put a hand to her ear. She dialed up the white noise of her link. Still working, even this close to the Port, but she was getting no result.

  The moment she stepped outside, she switched her links back on. That was when she had gotten the order from Oberholst to come to the hotel after she had found Talia Shindo.

  Gonzalez had expected to work from her hotel room, but Oberholst had nixed that quickly. He wanted the girl found first, and comfort later.

  Gonzalez should have expected that. She should have thought of it herself. But she usually didn’t focus on strange clients in distress. Most of the clients she saw were already charged with a crime or had been falsely accused of something.

  And that was on Armstrong, where she knew all the laws.

  She’d downloaded the local Valhalla Basin laws, but hadn’t had time to study them. Instead, she’d set aside a small personal download which would go directly into a link in her brain. She would gain superficial knowledge of the laws—a temporary fix that at least gave her as much advantage as a bad local attorney.

  But the overlay of knowledge would give her no depth, no real understanding of the way the legal system worked here. She had already gotten an inkling from Kazin, and she hadn’t liked it.

  It seemed a lot was done under the table in Valhalla Basin, and even more was influenced by Aleyd. That meant the laws here had more nuances than the laws in Armstrong, which were pretty straightforward. Armstrong had its own share of corruption, but it kept trying to purge that corruption from its government.

  And every now and then, it was successful.

  She sighed and waited. In addition to the legal downloads, she had sent messages establishing herself as Talia Shindo’s lawyer of record, and asked for any arrest records, incident reports, or legal violations that had occurred under Shindo’s name.

  Gonzalez had also requested the same information filed under Rhonda Shindo/Flint’s name.

  In Armstrong, Gonzalez would have received that information immediately. So far, she hadn’t even gotten a blip on her links.

  Soon she would have to have Oberholst make the request, something that seemed like a failure to her.

  Or she would have to go to the police department herself, and see what she could dig up.

  Because she knew there had to be something. Talia had asked if she should go to the authorities. When she had finally severed the intersystem connection, she had no other choice. She probably would have gone to the authorities.

  Or disappeared.

  Gonzalez hoped the child hadn’t disappeared, because if she had, she might be far away from Callisto by now.

  Finally a message flashed in front of Gonzalez’s left eye.

  Requested information classified. Official participants see Detective Dowd Bozeman or Detective Iniko Zagrando for further information.

  Classified? Information on a child?

  Gonzalez’s stomach clenched. Possible disappearance, then.

  Which meant she was already too late.

  Thirty-two

  The ship was unlike anything Rhonda had ever seen. Now that the green lights and the protective barriers no longer guided her way, Rhonda got to see the entire ship, and it had none of the amenities she was used to.

  Not that she had ever traveled in style, not even for Aleyd in the early days. Then she’d taken passenger ships and ridden second class. When she and Talia moved to Callisto, they were on a ferry that Aleyd occasionally rented for new hires. She’d had more space in her cabin, but only because she had a newborn with her. Her belongings had either gone below or by cargo ship.

  Probably in a ship a lot like this one.

  No amenities, no passenger compartments. Just decks and decks of similar corridors without decoration, and sometimes without lights. A number of doors with numbers on them remained closed, and the only reason she knew they were cargo holds was because the same numbering system had been on the hold she’d been imprisoned in.

  She saw no other crew members and no indications of others, and she was grateful.

  She was still shaking. Part of her couldn’t believe she had given the bald man another injection. Part of her couldn’t believe she’d actually killed him.

  And the ironic thing, the thing that shook her up the most, was that she looked at his death as the first she’d ever caused. No matter how hard she tried to fight that feeling, it was real.

  She had touched him. She had talked to him. She’d even felt a little sympathy for him,in the end, and still she had killed him.

  If only she could have planned how long it would take her to escape. If only she were strong enough to be one of those people who didn’t take a life to save her own.

  But it wasn’t just hers she was saving. Seven young girls depended on her, whether they knew it or not.

  Seven.

  And if she screwed up in any way, if she let the wrong piece of information slip, any—or all—of them could die.

  She wasn’t sure what was happening to Talia, who was the only child as real to her as the bald man had been. Then Rhonda paused. That wasn’t entirely true. Emmeline was real, too. Emmeline, whom Rhonda hadn’t seen since the girl was a toddler, was real, as well. Only she had never progressed past that little girl who had just started teething, the little girl who smiled when she saw her daddy but held her arms up when she saw her mommy.

  Rhonda’s shaking had grown worse.

  She couldn’t think about them. She couldn’t. If she did, she would screw up, she would hurt them, she would sacrifice them, and she couldn’t.

  She had to remain strong.

  She had to survive this, so that they would, too.

  Surviving this meant that she had to kill one more person. She had
to get rid of the Recovery Man, whatever it took.

  She wandered the decks longer than she wanted to. She couldn’t find her way to the bridge. On any other ship, the way would have been marked, but not on this one. She hadn’t found a ship map since she started, and she wasn’t going to touch the computer panels that she saw.

  She just had to keep blundering around in the semi-darkness, trying to find her way, until she actually did.

  What clued her that she was going in the right direction was the light. She climbed up two decks using an old-fashioned ring ladder—there were no stairs on these levels; apparently stairs were for passenger ships—and saw, several decks above her, light filtering downward.

  The only reason to have light was to guide a living person’s way.

  She climbed in earnest now, regretting that she hadn’t kept herself in better shape. She was getting winded a lot quicker than she expected.

  Of course, the antitoxins were still coursing through her system, and she was fighting nausea, which she blamed on them, not her murder of the bald guy. (Whether or not that was true, she didn’t know.) And her system was weakened from the exposure, even if it hadn’t caused any lasting damage.

  Then there was the extra weight she carried in the form of five laser scalpels and some more hypos. Most of them were in a medical bag around her waist, but she’d put one scalpel in her right sock, and another bound in between her breasts.

  It took a long time to reach the light at the top of the ladder. She was so winded that she had to stop and rest before heaving herself onto the platform around the ladder. She didn’t want to be seen, although if anyone was walking through the corridor, they could certainly hear her, panting and gasping for breath.

  She wasn’t sure what they’d think of the sound. She wasn’t sure she cared.

  She had the advantage. She had surprise, and she was sure she could get anyone who came to investigate.

  If someone came to investigate.

  She had to assume the Recovery Man was on the bridge, and if he was alone, then no one would pass her, no one would hear that breathing, no one would know she was even here.

  When she finally caught her breath, she pulled herself up and sat on the ribbed metal flooring. Through an archway, she saw a real corridor, with lights and carpeting and wall décor.

  This level, then, was the level meant for human habitation. The rest of the place was just function space, with no real purpose except materials hauling.

  And people hauling.

  He had stored her as far away from the bridge as he possibly could and still have her in the ship. If it weren’t for the nervous bald guy, she’d still be in that contaminated cargo hold, pounding on the door and screaming herself hoarse.

  If she had survived this long.

  She stood, and noted that the shaking had stopped. A calmness that was as welcome as it was surprising took over her entire system. Maybe it was the lights and the warmth. She hadn’t realized how cold she’d been belowdecks. Obviously, the environmental systems there were set on minimum.

  Which could also explain why she was gasping for air as she climbed. If the environmental systems were on minimum in the unused portion of the ship, then perhaps the oxygen levels were at minimum levels, as well.

  She hadn’t been getting enough air, and now she was.

  No wonder she wasn’t shaking any longer. No wonder she felt calmer. Her system wasn’t in distress.

  And she was thinking clearer. Another sign that she hadn’t been getting enough oxygen. Too bad she was too smart to convince herself that she had killed the bald guy because of oxygen deprivation.

  She hadn’t. She had killed him to ensure her own survival.

  And she wasn’t going to rethink those calculations.

  She didn’t dare.

  She peered into the corridor, afraid she might see ʼbots or other passengers or obvious sensors, but she didn’t. Now she would have to move quickly. Security measures had to exist on this level.

  No ship she’d ever been on allowed anyone near the cockpit, not without permission. Still, this wasn’t a passenger ship, so a lot of the Earth Alliance regulations weren’t in place.

  She might get lucky and get close without setting off any major alarms.

  She eased back near the ladder and looked at the walls around her. A computer panel, obvious and visible. She wished Talia were with her, just for this one moment. Talia would know how to shut down the ship’s security system—or if she didn’t know, she’d figure it out.

  Talia had a gift for understanding computer systems, just like her father had. It had always bothered Rhonda that technical systems had seemed more alive to Miles than she had, but at this moment, she missed it.

  She missed him.

  She willed the emotion back. She really was out of control. She hadn’t let that feeling rise since she went to Callisto, knowing that she would never see him again.

  And forcing herself to remember that it was for his own good.

  Then she saw it. Along one wall in the actual corridor was an etched schematic of this floor. It was bolted to the wall and framed like an actual piece of art. As she scanned the corridor walls, she saw other bits of found art—all of them architectural renderings of the ship.

  She had its name—the Nebel—which meant nothing to her, and the ship’s class—a Grade Five cargo ship—which also meant nothing to her. If she could access her links, she could find out what a Grade Five cargo ship was and where its vulnerabilities were.

  But she was in the middle of nowhere, literally, and she had her links shut down (not voluntarily at first, but she kept them down now so that she couldn’t be tracked), and she no longer had the constant flow of easy information.

  She had to do this on her own.

  She moved closer to the image, without leaving the platform or stepping onto that carpet. The bridge was to her left, several meters down a meandering corridor.

  But the schematic told her nothing else. She looked at the other visible renderings and felt her heart stop.

  One was Gyonnese. She recognized the script and the flowing way the Gyonnese made their engineering drawings. The Gyonnese had to learn how to translate their drawings into something humans could read, but they had, and the resulting renderings were bold and vivid, and uniquely Gyonnese.

  Her stomach twisted, and she had to swallow against the nausea.

  The Gyonnese hadn’t hired this Recovery Man by accident. Either they had given him this ship—which she doubted, given the way his accomplice had talked about it; the bald idiot had believed that they were responsible for the contamination, not the Gyonnese—or they had worked for him before. Enough so that they fixed his ship, improved it, with some of their proprietary designs.

  She made herself breathe some of that rich oxygenated air.

  She had known the Gyonnese were involved. She had known that the Recovery Man worked for them.

  She just hadn’t realized how very close they were.

  And that shouldn’t matter.

  Except that they had been bogeymen in her life ever since that horrible synthetic water debacle. Ever since she had signed her name with such a flourish on that successful product, thinking it would advance her career, thinking it would be a stepping stone to a better position in the company or a better position in another company, only to have that signature haunt her—and her family—for the rest of her life.

  The Gyonnese blamed her. Just as they didn’t understand the concept of multiple children, they didn’t understand the concept of teamwork or, for that matter, corporate responsibility. They looked only to the individual, and because she had signed her name on the recipe for the product, she became the person responsible—at least, according to their laws, their beliefs, and their customs.

  No matter how much she argued against her singular involvement—and no matter how much her lawyer had tried to emphasize the difference between human culture and Gyonnese culture—the Gyonnese continued to bl
ame her.

  And target her.

  She made herself look away from the image. Yes, the Gyonnese were involved.

  They had finally gotten her the way that they wanted her—alone and utterly at their mercy.

  Except for the makeshift weapons she carried.

  Except for her determination.

  She was going to that bridge, and she was going to kill the Recovery Man.

  Then she was going to find her way home.

  Thirty-three

  Flint left Van Alen’s office so quickly he forgot to clean off the computer. He was halfway through the waiting room when he realized his mistake and doubled back. He hadn’t even signed off.

  He was shaken. He was more than shaken. He was almost out of his mind.

  There was a chance—a real chance—that someone had tampered with Emmeline’s records, and there was no reason for that. She was an infant. She had no life of her own.

  So Rhonda had to have done something.

  He stopped in the middle of Van Alen’s office. The question was whether he was to go after Rhonda’s life or pursue Emmeline’s death.

  If he did either, who was he putting at risk?

  “You look upset,” Van Alen said.

  Flint whirled. He hadn’t heard her return. Usually he heard everything. But she stood near her desk, her hands resting on its glossy surface, a quizzical expression on her face.

  She had walked into the room, had maybe even greeted him, could even have looked at the computer screen, and he hadn’t heard a thing.

  Yes, he was upset.

  He made himself take a deep breath, but all it did was make him slightly dizzy. “Have you heard of Guerrovi Chawki or Saari Namate?”

  “Yes,” she said. Her quizzical expression had changed to a frown. “They’re lawyers with Gazzaibbleuneicker.”

  At least, that’s what it sounded like. He knew the spelling for the law firm looked nothing like Gazzaibbleuneicker.