Recovery Man

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Oh? And why is that?”

  “Because whoever took Rhonda wasn’t working for Aleyd. Whoever took Rhonda had something to do with her past.”

  “You know this how?” Zagrando asked.

  “She’s a midlevel employee at Aleyd. She’s not a CEO or a member of the board. She’s not even a high-level manager. She doesn’t make a lot of money, and she doesn’t have a lot of power. She’s working for the company on their sufferance, and she has been for a long time.”

  Gonzalez chose the word sufferance on purpose. She couldn’t discuss anything but the public facts of Rhonda’s employment, but she assumed that Zagrando knew of the ties to the Gyonnese. He would understand the code.

  He leaned his head back, watching her through half-shaded eyes.

  “There’s no reason to take her off-world,” Gonzalez said.

  He straightened. “How do you know she’s off-world?” he asked.

  “I don’t for certain. But in an environment this closely controlled, it would be logical. From what I know of Valhalla Basin, the crime here is minor or domestic. A kidnapping is neither, unless it involves children. The Shindo child remains. The woman is the one who is missing. If Aleyd wanted to punish her for something, they’d do so internally. Hell, they’d just fire her and send her away. So whatever happened, happened from the outside. And I’d wager that it has something to do with whatever brought her to Callisto in the first place.”

  Zagrando was studying Gonzalez as if he hadn’t really seen her before. She hoped she hadn’t revealed too much.

  “This could be domestic,” Zagrando said. “There is a father involved.”

  “A father who doesn’t live on Callisto,” Gonzalez said. “Which goes back to my earlier point. Whatever happened today happened because of something off-world.”

  He continued to stare at her, but he stood up straighter, as if he had come to a decision.

  Finally, he said, “You’ll need the help of a local attorney. You can’t do this on your own.”

  “What’s this, exactly?” Gonzalez asked. “I have no idea what I’m facing until I see the records.”

  “I know what you’re facing. You may have a provisional license to practice here, but you can’t go up against Aleyd with that.”

  “I’m not sure why you think I need to go against Aleyd,” Gonzalez said.

  “Because,” he said quietly, “they claim they have custody of Talia.”

  Gonzalez started. She’d never heard of a corporation having custody of someone’s children.

  “And if they do,” he said, “then she won’t survive the week.”

  “They’d kill her?” Gonzalez asked. “Surely they don’t have the right to do that, not even in a company town.”

  “See why I said you’d need help? Because I have a hunch they have every right.” He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “And you’re way over your depth.”

  “I have some help,” she said.

  “Local?” he asked.

  She shook her head. She wasn’t going to tell him about Oberholst. That was something she didn’t want out yet.

  “You’ll need local.”

  “I’m gathering that. Can you recommend someone?”

  “It’s not my job,” he said. “In fact, it goes against everything I do for Valhalla Basin. But you might want to look up an old friend of mine. His name is Hakim Olaniyan. He used to be head counsel for Aleyd on Callisto.”

  “Used to be?”

  “Retired young,” Zagrando said.

  “Isn’t that unusual?” Gonzalez asked.

  “Not for people who no longer believe in what they’re doing.”

  “You mean he has a grudge.”

  “More than that,” Zagrando said. “He has specialized knowledge.”

  She didn’t respond to that. She’d have to check out this Hakim. But first, she needed to find Talia.

  “Are you going to let me see the records?” Gonzalez asked.

  “Are you going to contact Hakim?”

  “Yes,” she said, not sure if she was lying.

  “Then you have provisional clearance to see the case files. You cannot download them. You can only see them in this room.”

  “And Talia?”

  “She’ll come to you,” he said.

  Thirty-five

  The door to the bridge opened. Yu shook his head, then looked at the console before him. Still no response from the medical bay.

  “Took you long enough to get here,” he said. “What’s she doing down there?”

  Something felt wrong. He couldn’t quite say what it was—a faint scent, a sound—but whatever it was, it made him turn.

  Just in time to avoid being jabbed with a hypo.

  The woman was in front of him, her hair falling across her face, her skin covered with reddish blisters, her eyes wild. She dropped the hypo and grabbed something from her belt.

  He reached for her.

  She slashed at him, and he yelped. Pain burned through his palm.

  She was holding a laser scalpel.

  He cursed and backed away. A laser scalpel was a close-up weapon. His hand was useless. It dripped blood. His fingers ached, and two of them wouldn’t bend.

  She’d severed something.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked as he continued to back away. She came forward, the scalpel extended as if it were a knife.

  “Saving myself,” she said.

  “Where’s Nafti?”

  “In the medical bay,” she said, and he could tell from the tone of her voice that Nafti hadn’t survived her attack.

  She lunged at him, and he moved to the right, grabbing her shirt with his left hand. More hypos fell onto the bay floor. She whirled, slashing with that vicious laser. It nicked his side—he felt the burn, knew it wasn’t as deep as the cut to his right hand.

  Then he yanked her toward him with the shirt, let go, and for a brief moment, thought she’d regain her balance. She hadn’t. He grabbed her by the hair, and forced her head back.

  He shoved his foot into her knees, forcing her down. She slashed, getting a thigh this time, and the wound brought tears to his eyes.

  He felt a moment of surprise—she might actually win this fight—and then he smashed her face into the side of the console.

  She went limp, but he didn’t trust it, so he smashed her face again. Then once more just because she had pissed him off.

  Stupid woman.

  He let go of her hair and she toppled. Then he kicked her in the stomach.

  She didn’t move.

  She was out.

  He collected the laser scalpel and its friends—she had hidden two more—as well as the hypos. He found cydoleen pills and recognized them as extreme antitoxins. He left those in her breast pocket.

  Then he searched the rest of her, finding two more scalpels—one against her ankle and another between her breasts.

  He set all the makeshift weapons aside, dragged her to a chair on the far side of the bridge, and threw her in it. She listed to one side. He held her by the throat, tempted to squeeze.

  But then he wouldn’t get his credits.

  He wondered if he’d get them, anyway. She was covered in blood—and it looked like he had broken her nose.

  Then he realized that the blood on her was his.

  She’d nearly succeeded in killing him.

  Hell, she might succeed if he didn’t do something, and quickly.

  “Computer, lock her into zero-g position in chair six.”

  The chair closed around her, so that she couldn’t float. Zero-g position also kept her prisoner, unable to move, unable to set herself free without the proper commands.

  Still, he made sure. This woman was smarter than he had given her credit for.

  “Release her on my command only.”

  The computer cheeped its affirmative.

  Her head lolled forward, hair covering her face.

  Yu studied her for an extra minute, stunned she
had gotten so close.

  Then he looked at his wounds.

  His thigh was dripping blood, but she’d just barely missed the artery. He would need some medical attention to close the wound, but that one wasn’t life-threatening.

  Neither was the wound on his side. He’d lost a chunk of skin, but nothing else. He didn’t know enough about his own internal anatomy to know if she’d gotten close to anything important.

  But his hand was an issue. He could see the bones and the connective tissue, some of it severed. His hand was red with his own blood, and the pain was exquisite.

  Repairing that might take more than three cheap medical programs and some bandages. He’d probably have to stop at some space dock, and have a real expert repair his hand.

  Or replace it.

  He shuddered, then he kicked chair six. The woman’s head lolled to the other side. Blood dripped from her nose. Yu’d done some damage of his own.

  He was pleased about that. He’d leave her untreated. She could feel the pain for a while.

  Behind him, the computer cooed. He turned to the nearest console and saw images of the medical bay.

  Nafti was crumpled in a heap on the floor, clearly dead. None of the medical avatars had appeared around him. So much for state-of-the-art. Somehow he’d been murdered in the very place that should have saved his life.

  Yu turned to the woman. Rhonda Shindo/Flint. He’d underestimated her.

  He’d never do so again.

  Thirty-six

  Flint went to the Brownie Bar to do his next bit of research. He’d been queasy ever since he stumbled onto the Emmeline files on the yacht. As he left Van Alen’s office, knowing he had to continue some of his work away from her puzzled expression, he realized that some of that queasiness could be due to the fact he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten.

  He knew better than to get any old cheap food when he was this upset. The Brownie Bar seemed like the ideal place to go.

  The Brownie Bar was one of his favorite places in Armstrong. Not because he used marijuana, which the bar specialized in, but because the bar honored its patrons’ privacy and the bar had the best food in Armstrong.

  The place was always busy, but usually up front, in the party section. Only a handful of people used the section in the back, where the Brownie Bar catered to its regulars—folks who stopped in for lunch or did a lot of their work at the free-access ports that were part of every table in the quiet section.

  No one disturbed him here, no one asked questions about what he was working on, and best of all, the Brownie Bar cleaned its screens hourly and dumped the memory on its entire network during the graveyard shift.

  Tracing what he did here was as difficult as tracing something on his own system.

  Still, he was always cautious. He ordered a cornbread muffin—without mind-altering herbs—and a bowl of chili. Both the muffin and the chili had real ingredients, no plastic-tasting Moon flour or ersatz beef. The beef came from the Dome ranches near Gagarin Dome, and the flour was flown in daily from Earth, as were a lot of the ingredients that the Brownie Bar used.

  The smell of baking bread made him realize how hungry he was, despite his upset. He ordered a stomach-soothing tea to go with his meal and then he logged in, using a generic Brownie Bar identification number.

  Even though the bar wiped its touch screens, he wore gloves. He didn’t want prints on anything, especially prints that a cleaner might miss. The gloves were expensive and skin hugging, an upgrade on what he used to use on the force. Unless someone touched his skin, they wouldn’t know he was wearing gloves at all.

  He knew he was probably being overly cautious—the information he was looking up here wasn’t much different from information students at Armstrong University looked up for class assignments. But he didn’t want anyone to get close to what he was doing—especially since he still wasn’t quite sure who he was protecting.

  He knew that Rhonda had no ties to the Gyonnese, at least she hadn’t had any when he had known her. She had lived her entire life on the Moon, until she moved to Callisto. During their marriage, she hadn’t traveled off-Moon at all.

  If her family had history with the Gyonnese, he would discover it later. But generally, any lawsuits or warrants or punishments from alien governments within the Alliance came from fairly recent events. In other words, the crime—or perceived crime—had happened within five years of the punishment’s administration.

  If Emmeline was somehow tied to the punishment, then the crime had to have occurred a few years before her birth. Unless Rhonda’s family was involved. But he couldn’t picture that. Her parents, who had still been alive when Rhonda got pregnant, had not opposed the birth, which they would have if they knew of some sort of price the family had to pay for contact with the Gyonnese.

  Flint had a hunch that the loss of Emmeline was tied to Rhonda’s employment at Aleyd. So he looked up Aleyd first.

  While he waited for his food, he digested the corporation’s stock filings, its corporate documents, and its public relations literature.

  Like many corporations, Aleyd had hundreds of branches. But Aleyd specialized in biochemical and genetically modified creations designed for human colonization—increased crop yield; protection against harsh sunlight from a thin atmosphere; bio-engineered buildings, so that newly colonized places wouldn’t receive potentially hazardous contact from permaplastic or the older types of building materials.

  He had had no idea that the material his office was made of—in fact, the material still used (and historically protected) throughout Armstrong—was considered too hazardous to use in new colonization. It would probably take a third of his fortune and half of his life to get permission from the city to replace the permaplastic walls.

  The waitress brought him fresh cornbread with real honey-butter, an addition he’d forgotten. She smiled at him because she clearly remembered him. He was one of the few people in the city who knew the old-fashioned Earth custom of tipping live waitstaff—not that most people in Armstrong had much experience with live waitstaff. Most places used ʼbots, human-looking androids, or trays that took a verbal order and then delivered the food, often in record time.

  Flint waited until she was gone before returning to his research. He went from Aleyd’s site to the public filings site for lawsuits against various corporations. Earth Alliance law required corporations to report any suit against them; few people who invested in or worked for the corporations bothered to look up the filings. There were too many, for one thing; for another, they were often frivolous (some filed by a subcorporation of the corporation itself to keep the list long and seemingly unimportant); and finally, the filings were in a legal language that seemed impossible for the average person to dig through.

  Flint wasn’t the average person, and he had time. He waded through the frivolous suits, discovered the names of several subcorporations and dismissed anything listed by them, and went directly to the cases filed by foreign governments.

  To his surprise, he found nearly a hundred filed by the Gyonnese alone, tied to an incident that occurred fifteen years before on Gyonne. Van Alen had been right; at the time, much of Gyonne’s land had been leased, and much of it to Aleyd, which several Gyonnese corporations were working with to develop ways to market Gyonnese farming techniques to poor regions of planets with difficult environments.

  The Gyonnese had even developed a technique for terraforming some areas—although they called it something else (all consonants again), since terraforming meant, literally, “to make another place like Earth.” The Gyonnese scientists were to work with the Aleyd scientists in several test areas. In exchange, Aleyd leased some land on Gyonne for its own work on colonial products.

  Then something went horribly wrong. Flint couldn’t find exactly what that was, but it led to the breakup of the sweetheart deal between the various corporations, and almost led to the Gyonnese leaving the Earth Alliance.

  Many lawsuits were still pending. Thos
e were against Aleyd itself or some of its subsidiaries. Those lawsuits were standard. The damages were fortunes large enough to bankrupt entire domed cities, but probably not enough to completely wipe out Aleyd.

  Other cases were filed against divisions within Aleyd, and many of those cases were settled, although the results were marked confidential. And a handful of cases were filed against individual scientists. He couldn’t find the name of those scientists, nor could he find exactly what had happened, but he did note that these cases were filed as criminal cases, and at least one of them had the Earth Alliance code for mass murder.

  He went cold. He recognized the code because he’d had to enforce mass murder and genocide judgments in the past. Often those judgments were for accidents—someone dropped a rock and wiped out an entire colony of sentient beings. Others were deliberate—a worker at some corporation slaughtered creatures the worker thought ugly or in the way.

  People who had these judgments tried to Disappear. If these folks were indeed guilty of the crimes—which meant, in the human corporate world, that they had truly committed a mass murder that humans would recognize—they had a lot more trouble Disappearing than someone who killed a bacteria colony by stepping on it with mud-covered shoes.

  Disappearance companies had their standards, as well.

  Most of the criminal cases were settled. Warrants had gone out to all the human governments, and a number of the scientists had paid the price—whatever it was. That, too, was confidential, and the only way Flint knew the cases were resolved was because of another code, which he was also familiar with from his days in Armstrong’s PD.

  The waitress brought him his chili, and his stomach turned. He hadn’t eaten the cornbread, because he’d been so wrapped up in the filings.

  Now he had a hunch, and it made him ill.

  Still, he took the chili and set it beside the screen. Then he took a long drink of the stomach-soothing tea. It actually helped—his stomach, that is. His mind couldn’t quite wrap itself around its suspicions.

  Rhonda still worked for Aleyd. She had been a scientist, and she had loved her work. Sometimes she talked about her love for what she did after she got home, careful not to tell him exactly what she was working on.