Recovery Man

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “I’ve never heard of the firm,” he said.

  “They rarely do business with the police.” Van Alen walked back to her desk and sank into the chair as if her feet hurt. She tucked a strand of hair behind one ear. “Why do you want to know?”

  “They seem to be interested in the same information I am.” He wasn’t going to tell her more than that.

  “Something to do with Paloma?”

  “My search started in her files,” he said.

  “You’re being cautious,” Van Alen said.

  He nodded. “Sometimes you don’t want to be involved.”

  She sighed, as if she were going to disagree with him. Then she sighed again, and he could tell she had changed her mind. “They work for the Gyonnese government.”

  “The Gyonnese? I haven’t heard of them. Do they have a consulate here?”

  “They do,” Van Alen said, “but Gazzaibbleuneicker isn’t directly tied to them. All their lawyers are licensed for Moon work or by the Earth Alliance. A lot of governments do that, so that they can handle smaller incidents on foreign land themselves.”

  “Incidents?” Flint asked.

  Van Alen shrugged. “Everything you can think of, from harassment of their countrymen to murder to business law.”

  “I’ve never heard of the Gyonnese,” Flint said. “Who are they?”

  Van Alen took off her shoe and rubbed her foot. He could no longer see her face. “Why do you think I know?”

  “Because you’re familiar with Gazzaibbleuneicker.” He hoped he said that right.

  She shrugged. “I’m in the Armstrong bar. I meet a lot of lawyers.”

  But she still hadn’t looked at him. Van Alen’s specialty was helping the Disappeared. He had hired her because of that, because she could go up against large firms like Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor without fear. He knew it was strange for a Retrieval Artist to have a Disappeared’s lawyer, but it hadn’t been a problem.

  Until now.

  “You’ve met them in court,” Flint said.

  “I’ve met a lot of lawyers in court.” Van Alen took off her other shoe. “I’ve got to get more comfortable footwear.”

  He ignored that last comment. “The Gyonnese have draconian laws, don’t they? And some kind of corporate development on their world. Something that they do inspires people to Disappear.”

  Only Rhonda hadn’t disappeared. He saw her transcript. He’d seen her for more than a year after Emmeline died.

  “Do they go after children?” Flint asked.

  Van Alen finally looked up. “You can get the information you want off any database.”

  In other words, she wasn’t going to tell him. That much, in her opinion, violated privilege on some damn case or another.

  “Tell me what happens if you cross them,” Flint said.

  “Normally nothing,” she said.

  “What about in an abnormal situation?” Flint asked.

  She shook her head. “Look it up, Miles.”

  “What can you tell me, off the record?”

  “I can tell you that they have perfected methods for growing food that have been marketed all over the known universe. I can tell you that they use so little of their own land that they used to lease it to various Earth Alliance corporations.”

  “Used to?” Flint asked.

  She held up a hand. “I can tell you that they are members in good standing with the Alliance, but that they’re getting irritated at some of the ways that humans bend the rules.”

  He let out a small breath. “They know about Disappeareds.”

  “Everyone knows about Disappeareds. Only the Gyonnese are an extremely rule-bound species. When their laws get broken by their own people, the penalties are severe. They have no concept of civil disobedience. The law is the law. Anyone who breaks it is a criminal.”

  “What does this have to do with the Alliance?” Flint asked.

  “For years, the Gyonnese have petitioned the Alliance to stop the flood of Disappeareds. The Alliance tables the petition each time. I’ve heard that the Gyonnese are going to try a new tactic, and I’ve heard that it might work.”

  “What is the tactic?”

  Van Alen shrugged a single shoulder.

  “You can’t tell me,” Flint said.

  “I can tell you that if they succeed, you would be out of business and I would need a different class of clients.”

  “No one has successfully fought the Disappeared system,” Flint said. “A lot of alien governments don’t even understand it.”

  “Neither did the Gyonnese,” Van Alen said. “But they do now.”

  “This law firm,” Flint said, “they are the ones at the head of this suit?”

  “There is no suit,” Van Alen said. “Just a lot of rumors.”

  “But the case will be fought by Gazzaibbleuneicker?” Flint asked.

  “Among others,” Van Alen said. “If it happens. If it’s allowed to happen.”

  “By whom?” Flint asked.

  “Any one of the Multicultural Tribunals. They have to read briefs first, accept the case or cases, and then listen to the arguments.”

  Flint was calming down. This discussion had helped him get control of his emotions—for the moment, anyway.

  “You think the Tribunals will listen,” he said.

  “I think it’s past time,” she said.

  “You can’t tell me what the Gyonnese are going to do?”

  “I can’t tell you much more, Miles.” Her voice held compassion. “What did you stumble upon?”

  He wanted to tell her. He could tell her, too; she was his lawyer and she had to keep anything he told her confidential. “I’m not sure,” he said truthfully.

  “But it upset you.”

  He nodded. “Everything in Paloma’s files upsets me. This is just worse than some of the other things I’ve found.”

  “You really cared about her, didn’t you?” Van Alen asked.

  She was asking about Paloma, but he chose to answer as if Van Alen had asked about Emmeline.

  “That’s the problem,” he said. “Sometimes I’m not very rational about this.”

  Van Alen tossed her shoes in the corner, then leaned back in her chair. “Sometimes being rational is overrated.”

  “And sometimes,” he said, “it’s the only way to stay alive.”

  Thirty-four

  The Valhalla Basin Police Department looked like one of Armstrong’s major corporate headquarters. The building wasn’t as new as others Gonzalez had seen in her airtaxi ride over here, but it was newer than anything back home.

  The building rose several stories, with windows on all four sides, a luxury that Armstrong PD did not have since the Dome explosion a few years back. Next door to the Valhalla Basin PD was an apartment complex that looked like it had been built at the same time.

  Gonzalez wondered if all police employees made their homes in that building. She’d heard that housing was provided in Valhalla Basin, at least for Aleyd employees. She wondered if that was the same for city employees.

  The apartment complex suggested it was.

  The inside of the VBPD, however, looked just like any other police headquarters she’d seen: organized chaos. People came and went seemingly without purpose. Some ran. Others had to be dragged inside. It took some effort to see the restraints. Many of them were made of light, and the light was closer to the invisible than the visible part of the spectrum.

  The place smelled of sweat and fear and filth, just like the other police departments she’d been in. The employees wore brown uniforms instead of the blue favored in Armstrong, but everyone had the same look of overwork. At some point, enhancements couldn’t remove the bags beneath the eyes—not without a serious lifestyle change.

  Employees here were gray-skinned from the lack of light, flabby with lack of exercise, and listless with exhaustion.

  At least Armstrong PD required its employees to remain fit, however they chose to do it. Here, that didn’t seem t
o be a requirement at all.

  Detective Bozeman had told her to wait near the elevators. As she walked past the main desk, she noted one other thing: She hadn’t seen a single alien in her entire time in the building.

  The biggest problem that Armstrong PD had was handling the various cultures, the various builds, and the various needs of the city’s diverse population. Here, everyone seemed to be human—police and criminals alike.

  She wondered if that was because the laws pertained only to humans, and the police department for the alien population was somewhere else in the city—that was the way things worked in many Martian cities, since the Disty were in control.

  But more likely, there wasn’t much of an alien population here at all. Aleyd was a human-owned, Earth-based corporation. Maybe it had started its own city on Callisto to avoid the diversity laws that so many corporations complained about on the Moon.

  Maybe Aleyd wanted to remain, at least in parts of its operation, 100 percent ethno-centric.

  She shuddered. She automatically mistrusted anyone or anything that was speciesist. She wondered what else was wrong with them, in what other ways couldn’t she trust them.

  But she was making an assumption about an entire city based on little knowledge. The city’s attitude toward aliens was another bit of information she would have to research when she returned to her hotel room or, more accurately, if she ever got to her hotel room. She was beginning to have doubts that she would ever arrive there.

  There was no directory of any sort near the elevators. There were no markings on the elevators at all.

  She had no idea how she would get to the upper floors—or even if she needed to go to an upper floor.

  “You Celestine Gonzalez?” a man asked.

  He stood in a nearby doorway, his arms crossed. He wore blue pants that looked like they were made of real denim, and a chambray workshirt that was so new it still had the creases along the sleeves.

  The blue of the clothing only accented the pallor of his skin. He wasn’t as pale as Miles Flint looked in the images Gonzalez had studied on the way to Callisto, but he wasn’t as dark as most people were, either.

  The man’s face had a rumpled look that could be comforting in the right circumstance.

  This was not the right circumstance.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m Celestine Gonzalez.”

  “Come with me, then.” He slid back through the doorway as if he hadn’t been there at all. Her stomach clenched, and she wondered if there was some kind of technology here she didn’t recognize.

  Then she stepped through the door and saw a standard interrogation room, just like the ones in Armstrong’s police station—a table in the center, obvious cameras so that perpetrators knew they were being recorded, and uncomfortable chairs all around.

  The difference here was the same difference she’d seen all over Valhalla Basin—everything was newer, more expensive, and of much higher quality than the things she was used to.

  The man stood in the far corner between two retractable screens, his arms crossed. He had real muscles under that chambray shirt, and he wasn’t flabby. He looked strong, and in the brighter light of the room, a little more menacing than she expected.

  Gonzalez remained in the doorway so that the door couldn’t close automatically.

  “And you are?”

  “Detective Zagrando.” He spoke his own name grudgingly, as if he’d never used it before.

  If she were in Armstrong, she would use her links for a comparison identification. But she wasn’t. Her links had already notified her that the police station required them to be on emergency notification status only. She couldn’t hook up to any network if she wanted to.

  “What’s an Armstrong lawyer doing on Callisto?” The question was hostile. The man—this Zagrando—hadn’t moved from his corner.

  “Talia Shindo is my client,” Gonzalez said.

  “How come she doesn’t know that?” he asked, and that was when Gonzalez realized that the emotion she had taken as a threat was really concern—not for her, but for the child.

  “She contacted me,” Gonzalez said.

  “She couldn’t’ve,” Zagrando said. “We have her in lockdown for her own protection. She can’t contact anyone off Callisto.”

  “She contacted me before the police arrived at her house.” Gonzalez felt her cheeks heat. She willed the embarrassment away, but it wouldn’t go. It would take her a long time to get over the way she’d handled the intersystem contact.

  “Contacted you?”

  Gonzalez nodded. “Asking me what to do.”

  “And so you came here out of the goodness of your heart.”

  She wasn’t sure how much she could trust this man. She wasn’t sure how to play this at all. She wondered how Oberholst would do it, then decided that it didn’t matter. Oberholst wasn’t here. He had left finding Talia up to her.

  “Look,” she said. “I also represent Rhonda Shindo/Flint. I understand she was kidnapped. I tried to get the police records on that and discovered it was classified.”

  “We do that for ongoing investigations. No need to have attorneys screw things up.” He nodded toward the door. “You coming inside or are you really that afraid of me?”

  It was a challenge and one she wouldn’t normally back away from. But she wasn’t going to be manipulated here.

  “I don’t know you,” she said. “You shut down my links so that I have no way to identify you. I am here on a provisional visa trying to catch up on this entire case, and because of your silly system, I can’t even find my clients.”

  “Well, we can’t find one of them either.” Zagrando stepped forward.

  He extended his hand. On it, she saw a police identification badge—the Earth Alliance kind, provided so that people who had authority in various parts of the Alliance could travel to other parts unmolested.

  “Do you mind if I test that?” she asked. She had an old downloaded tester, but it should work, if his badge was legitimate. Early on in her career, she’d had to test a lot of those things.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  She put her index finger in the middle of the image. A beep sounded in her right ear before a soft female voice spoke inside her head:

  Detective First Class Iniko Zagrando from Valhalla Basin, Callisto. Has Earth Alliance Intelligence clearance, Earth Alliance high-grade military clearance, and Earth Alliance security clearance. Any Earth Alliance officials viewing this image may trust Detective Zagrando with low-level security items. For higher-security items, the person testing this image must have higher security clearance than Gonzalez, Celestine, does.

  She had to work at keeping her expression neutral. He wasn’t just a local detective. He worked for the Alliance.

  “How many people here know you have two allegiances?” she asked.

  “The important ones,” he said.

  “I’m not important,” she said.

  “Not to Callisto. But you work for Oberholst, Martinez, and Mlsnavek, and that has some clout. Besides, Aleyd is afraid of you people, which is something I appreciate.”

  Gonzalez had no idea that Aleyd was afraid of Oberholst, Martinez, and Mlsnavek. There was way too much on this case that she didn’t know.

  “Is that why you’re talking to me instead of this Detective Bozeman, who is, according to what records I could access, in charge of this investigation?”

  “Detective Bozeman is following up on some leads,” Zagrando said.

  Sure he was. Detective Bozeman was investigating trivia so that he wouldn’t bother Zagrando on a case that involved Aleyd. But Gonzalez wasn’t going to let herself be sidetracked.

  “If you know who I work for,” Gonzalez said, “then you know I’m telling you the truth.”

  “I know that someone made an intersystem contact,” Zagrando said. “But I don’t know if it was Talia or the kidnappers.”

  “She contacted me after they left.”

  “So you say.”


  “Check your damn records,” she snapped.

  He smiled. He already had, and he was seeing how far he could push her.

  Now he knew.

  “Look,” she said. “This has already been a long day. I didn’t handle the initial contact real well. You can check with Talia if you like. I was not the primary attorney on this case. I wasn’t even an attorney fifteen years ago, when Rhonda Shindo became our client. It took me a while to understand what was going on.”

  “And all the while, Talia had to fend for herself.” He sounded angry. “Do you know what’s going on now?”

  Gonzalez shook her head. “If you let me see your so-called confidential files, I might. I need to find her. If my information is correct, that child is alone and she needs my help.”

  “I doubt an Armstrong attorney can help her,” Zagrando said. “Things are done Aleyd’s way on Callisto. That’s different from Armstrong.”

  “You’re familiar with Armstrong?”

  He didn’t answer. He crossed his arms.

  “You still don’t believe me,” Gonzalez said as the realization sunk in. “You’ve done all this checking and you still don’t believe that I’m here for Talia.”

  “I know you’re here for someone. I even know you’re connected to the case somehow. As for Talia, I know you’re not here for her.”

  Gonzalez felt a surge of anger, but set it aside. She couldn’t do good work if this man made her angry. She had a hunch a lot of things here would anger her. She needed to remain calm so that she could do her job.

  “How do you know that?” Gonzalez asked.

  “Because she’s looking for an attorney right now. If she knew you were coming, she wouldn’t be.”

  He knew where she was. He knew what she was doing this minute. He might even be in contact with her.

  “Can you tell Talia that I’m here? That might change things. She’ll want to see me, I’m sure of that.”

  “You’ve never met her, have you?” Zagrando said.

  “I told you, I’m new to the case.”

  “So you don’t know Rhonda Shindo, either. And you don’t know Callisto law.”

  “I’m not sure Callisto law is what applies here.”

  He tilted his head ever so slightly. That comment clearly interested him.