Recovery Man

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Rhonda sighed, levered herself upward, and then realized before she got out, she should make certain that nothing surrounded the box. She didn’t want to get hurt because she was frightened.

  That was when she found the side controls. What she thought of as a box was really a cold sleep chamber designed for unimaginably long flights. She’d seen these models before, when Aleyd thought of opening a branch at the very far edges of the known universe.

  She’d been offered a position there, but she didn’t want to take Talia to a new colony.

  Maybe that had been a mistake.

  Rhonda pushed herself out of the box and set her feet on the floor, then stood and brushed herself off. The air was artificial here and had the faint odor of dust. The environmental system, in this room at least, had been off for a very long time.

  She checked her links and found that they worked. But she couldn’t hook up to anything except an in-house network that had dated information and no new feeds.

  The network programming cycled in Spanish, the language of the Alliance.

  Where had the Recovery Man brought her?

  She put a hand over her face. Her nose had been repaired, but her muscles ached. She wondered if that was the beginning of an illness, the unfinished contamination. That made her touch her pocket.

  Miraculously, the drugs were still there.

  She sank into a dusty chair in front of a sealed control panel and tried to remember the last thing she’d experienced. The nose repair, the bubble, a conversation with the Recovery Man in which she’d tried to convince him to sell her, just so that someone would find her, and which, it seemed, he considered.

  And then he contacted the Gyonnese.

  She went cold, and it had nothing to do with the room’s environmental system. She’d seen some of the instrumentation on his panels, a few of the readings and some of the images.

  They hadn’t been anywhere near Gyonne or New Gyonne City. They hadn’t even been that far from Callisto, which had surprised her. For as long as they traveled, they should have been farther.

  He’d been waiting for a rendezvous. He told her that.

  Maybe he hadn’t considered her offer, after all. Maybe he’d just been stalling.

  She ran her hand along the panel, and to her surprise, it opened at her touch. Lights appeared on the board itself, and an old system groaned to life. Then part of the wall lifted, revealing an observation window. It had the shiny texture of old-fashioned one-way viewers.

  She leaned forward and saw a chamber below her. It had light and mats along the floor. Five Gyonnese stood in a circle, their hideous arms waving as they talked.

  Rhonda had watched Gyonnese before, at her trial. They rarely went anywhere alone. Usually they traveled in groups large enough to form a circle when they stopped. Apparently, they made sounds with the whiskers on their incomplete faces, but in order to understand them, humans needed both a vocal amplifier and a translator.

  She had neither.

  Or did she?

  She examined the panel. It was old, but it was human made. She’d seen a few panels like it before in her early days at Aleyd, when she had to update several of their systems.

  Her hands trembled as she ran them along the panel’s controls. If she did this wrong, the Gyonnese would know she was here.

  Even though they probably already did. They probably thought she was still unconscious.

  She wondered why they hadn’t restrained her, anyway. Maybe they thought the empty room was enough. Gyonnese hated touching other species. She’d learned that at the trial, too, when one of the human lawyers accidentally brushed against a Gyonnese. The Gyonnese scuttled backward as if it had been struck.

  She found a systems’ diagnostic for the control panel. Inside the diagnostic, she found a menu. It told her how to turn on the sound in the chamber below—which she did.

  But all she heard was slight whispering, almost like the shush of wind that she’d heard in her short time on Earth. Then she found the verbal control system.

  “Computer,” she said, hoping this system worked like all the other systems she’d encountered, “can you translate the conversation in the chamber below?”

  “Experimental Hall One?” The computer’s voice faded in and out, as if the vocal program had problems starting up.

  “If that’s what I’m looking at, yes.”

  “You are looking at Experimental Hall One. The language being spoken is Gyonnese. What language would you like to hear the conversation in?”

  She watched the Gyonnese. They seemed unaware that she was watching them. Apparently, that meant they couldn’t hear the voice, either.

  “Spanish,” she said.

  “Done,” the computer said.

  Over the whispering, computerized voices rose. Fortunately, the translation program was sophisticated enough to choose a different voice for each speaker. But as she watched, she couldn’t tell which voice belonged to which Gyonnese.

  All she could do was listen.

  —I thought we were taking her to the Multicultural Tribunal.

  —If this doesn’t work.

  —What do you consider “work”?

  —I believe she knows where the original is.

  Rhonda felt cold. They still wanted Emmeline.

  —Evidence we have acquired in Armstrong suggests the original may have survived. The additional clones imply it, too. Humans do not make so many clones. She was leading us astray.

  —You believe.

  —I am convinced.

  Rhonda’s shivering grew worse. She wondered what evidence they’d found. She’d covered her tracks as best she could. The firm she’d hired to do the clones had helped, and they’d also used a Disappearance Service. They had assured her they’d done similar things before. Even the man who’d been convicted of murdering Emmeline was part of it. He had helped the Disappearance Service before.

  His mistake was to help them one final time. Rhonda had felt bad that she hadn’t been able to help him stay out of prison. But Miles had been so determined that someone pay for Emmeline’s death.

  And Rhonda couldn’t tell him that Emmeline was alive.

  After she had paid the attorneys and the two companies, she had told no one. Emmeline had been adopted. If there was any luck in the universe, she was being raised in a loving family, oblivious to her past.

  —If the original is alive, and this Shindo knows, she will never tell us. She has guarded that secret for one entire growth span.

  —That’s why we’re here. None of you have ever asked about this place. It has a history of interesting human experiments.

  Rhonda’s chill grew. “What’s the name of this place?” she asked the computer.

  “The Tey facility.”

  Tey. Tey. The name sounded familiar.

  Then Rhonda moaned as she remembered. Josephine Tey was a scientist convicted of mass murder in absentia for an experiment she ran in a scientific colony on Io. She had killed all her subjects by infecting them with a superflu and expecting them to come up with a cure before their time ran out.

  They didn’t find a cure. They all died.

  The site had been abandoned, even though the government claimed the flu had been contained and destroyed.

  Rhonda rubbed her hands over her arms. Her flesh was covered with goose bumps. Maybe the chill she felt wasn’t just the air. Her immune system was weak from the contamination in the Recovery Man’s ship.

  Maybe she got the superflu as well.

  Were humans even allowed here anymore?

  —This facility has many experimental human procedures. One delves into the brain to find hidden or forgotten information.

  —You know how to work this?

  —There are instructions in the base’s systems. The procedure does work, although it is flawed.

  —Flawed how?

  —She will not be able to testify should we bring her before the Multicultural Tribunal.

  —The procedure wi
ll kill her?

  —No. But we will possess the information in her brain. She will not.

  “Computer,” she said, “is this true? Does this facility have an experimental procedure for extracting information from the human brain?”

  “Yes,” the computer said.

  “Does it work?”

  “It has in all but one of the trials.”

  “What happened to the one?” Rhonda asked, hoping the answer was something she could use.

  “The subject died of a hemorrhage before the information could extracted.”

  “Because of the equipment?” Rhonda asked.

  “Because the subject had an undiagnosed aneurysm that burst when pressure was applied to the brain.”

  A fluke, in other words. In all other cases, the information was extracted.

  Clinical terms for taking what someone knew and destroying the brain in the process.

  Rhonda got up and tried the door. It was locked. She went back to the dusty seat.

  She had to remain calm.

  She needed to get out of here, and quickly.

  If she didn’t, the Gyonnese would learn enough to track Emmeline.

  She would die, in horrible pain, all because Rhonda had been just a little curious. All because Rhonda had ignored the advice of the Disappearance Service and vetted the potential parents herself.

  Emmeline, who probably looked like Talia.

  Emmeline, for whom Rhonda had given up everything.

  Rhonda wrapped her arms around her chest and tried to figure out what to do.

  Fifty-one

  The offices of Space Traffic Control in Valhalla Basin were nothing like the offices of Space Traffic Control in Armstrong. Space Traffic and Port Security were separate here, run by a private firm attached to Aleyd. Flint needed access to both, which Zagrando managed to get him.

  But Flint would have to go back and forth between two different offices. They were beautifully designed—high ceilings, extremely clean, lots of screens and holos showing the space around Callisto—but they didn’t look used.

  Space Traffic merely approved ships already on the list sent up by Port Security, and used automatic technology to guide those ships into Port.

  After a useless half an hour, Flint figured that out. He got Zagrando to take him to Port Security, where he finally found the type of control system he was looking for.

  Every ship that landed in the Alliance had to be registered somewhere. Those registrations were sent to the Port automatically, along with the first contact from the ship, so that the ship’s ownership records and its history could be traced.

  There were countless ways to mask the registration, and Recovery Men, like Retrieval Artists, knew most of them. Other people who would mask registrations, from criminals to extremely private wealthy individuals, didn’t come to places like Valhalla Basin. Company towns didn’t respect anyone’s privacy—only the privacy of the corporation — and criminals usually went to places that were easy pickings, like Armstrong. Places like Valhalla Basin were fortresses without a lot of internal wealth.

  No one who wanted to run away from their lives came here, unless they were working for Aleyd. No one who wanted privacy came here. And no one who wanted to steal or cause someone harm came here because it was too difficult to get around anonymously.

  All Flint had to do was run a search for the most obvious way to mask a registration: overlay it with a real registration of another ship. The overlay would show up as a small glitch in Armstrong’s system. Here, the network was more sophisticated (probably because of all those ads that had assaulted him as he approached), so he didn’t find a glitch.

  He found a ghost.

  The Recovery Man’s ship had come in as a pickup vessel for special Aleyd merchandise, sent by a subsidiary corporation housed on Gyonne. Why no one thought to flag any ship registered in Gyonne for this kidnapping was beyond Flint. That would have been the first thing he had done back in his days as a space-traffic police officer. It didn’t require special skill or knowledge.

  But he didn’t insult Zagrando with that.

  Instead, Flint looked under the registration and found a secondary registration, and then a tertiary. He kept searching until he found evidence of twenty different registrations, all faint and all difficult to detect without looking for them.

  None of them were probably the correct registration for the ship, but that didn’t matter. The ship had arrived hours before Rhonda’s kidnapping and left shortly after, without the delivery.

  And Flint found one more anomaly: the ship registered three crewmembers, but only arrived with two. However, three left Valhalla Basin: two men and one woman. The woman had not disembarked when the ship arrived. She left with them, however, which meant that she had to come from Valhalla Basin itself.

  Flint showed the results to Zagrando, who immediately turned to the woman heading Port Security, and snarled at her.

  “How come you didn’t find this?”

  She shrugged, staring at the information scrolling on the holoscreen before them. “I had no idea this was even possible. How did you learn it, Mr. Flint?’

  She made it sound as if Flint were breaking the law by helping them.

  “Doing these kinds of registration searches are standard procedure in the Port of Armstrong,” he said. “I worked for Space Traffic Control early in my police career. You don’t forget something this basic.”

  Her cheeks colored and she stepped back.

  “Maybe you should have Mr. Flint teach you this technique before he leaves,” Zagrando snapped.

  “Yeah,” she said softly.

  “What we need to do next,” Flint said, “is request information on any of these twenty registrations from all Alliance Ports. If he’s using the same registrations, we’ll find him in a matter of hours.”

  “Can you do that?” Zagrando snapped at the woman.

  “Yes,” she said, not looking at him. “Mr. Flint is right. It shouldn’t take long to get an answer.”

  She sat down at a separate terminal and began to work. Flint got up and stood behind her. Zagrando came and stood next to him.

  “You’re convinced this is our guy?”

  “I don’t know who else it could be,” Flint said. “Does this Port have visual security?”

  “Not in the cargo area,” the woman said as she worked. “Aleyd doesn’t allow it.”

  So they could transport anything out of Valhalla Basin that they wanted.

  “Well, that’s the part of the Port he landed in,” Flint said. “Seems he knew your system better than you did. That handicaps us a little.”

  “How?” Zagrando asked.

  “We have to hope that wherever this ship is, he’s still on board.”

  “How’re we going to do that if we don’t know what he looks like?”

  “Most Ports have visual security throughout. We’ll be able to pick up whoever got off the ship.”

  “And see who’s on,” Zagrando said, as he clearly understood what Flint was talking about.

  “Provided he didn’t land at a nonsanctioned port,” Flint said.

  “A what?”

  “There are a lot of abandoned bases in this solar system,” Flint said. “Recovery Men use them all the time to make their trades. Some Recovery Men never stop for long at sanctioned ports.”

  “I thought you said it would be easy,” Zagrando said.

  “I said it would be easy to find the ship,” Flint said. “Finding the man might be harder.”

  And finding Rhonda, he thought but didn’t say, might be the hardest of all.

  Fifty-two

  Rhonda swallowed against a dry throat. She was trying to stay calm, but she had to get out of this place, and she had to do it before the Gyonnese realized she was awake.

  She kept their conversation playing around her. They were arguing Alliance law and their responsibility given the fact that the humans in the Alliance flaunted the law by allowing Disappearance Services to f
lourish. A couple of the Gyonnese wanted her as an example in a new trial, one that challenged whether they had to follow Alliance law since no one else was.

  But the Gyonnese in charge wanted Emmeline. Her death would exact revenge under their laws for the crimes that Rhonda had committed. Yet one other Gyonnese thought there was no point in gaining that revenge if Rhonda lost her capacity to reason.

  —If the mother does not know the price exacted, then what is the point of exacting the price? the Gyonnese asked.

  “The mother knows,” Rhonda had said after that question got posed. She was searching the existing database for help, but she wasn’t finding any.

  The science station had no exterior net access. She couldn’t contact any bases nearby. She didn’t know if that was because this place was abandoned or if Tey had set that up for her own experiments.

  Next, Rhonda searched for a map of the facility. One of the original holographic maps overlaid the one-way mirror. When she asked the system to update the map—what parts were still viable (to be shown in red)—only a small section glowed.

  She was in that section.

  Because the old system was able to do that update, she hoped it would do one more for her. She asked the system to put icons of all the ships that were still on the facility onto the map.

  Nothing appeared.

  So she asked the question a different way, hoping that the system simply hadn’t understood her.

  But it had. Finally, after the third question she posed, the computer said, “There are no ships in this facility.”

  “What about the Gyonnese ship?” She’d fly it if she had to. There had to be some kind of automatic pilot.

  “The Gyonnese have no ship.”

  “How did they get here?”

  “They were left.”

  “When will their ship return?”

  “It is my understanding that their ship will not return until they summon it.”

  “Which means that the Gyonnese can contact the outside. How do they do that?”

  “I do not know,” the computer said. “I would assume it is through their personal links. This system is not devised for exterior access of any kind.”