Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Peyla was a relatively bright planet, with good light from a young sun. She never understood why the Peyti preferred their space environment to be dimmer than the human environment. Of course, she never asked either.

  Xyven’s office was at the end of a long corridor. The Peyti atmosphere was thicker than Earth normal, so she always felt like she was swimming even though the gravity was the same.

  The door at the end of the corridor opened, and Xyven stood just inside, his long arms spread from door jamb to door jamb. He was spindly, even for a Peyti, and his thin arms looked more like taut rope than like sticks.

  He had a pointed chin and almond shaped eyes. It had taken her years to realize that Peyti whose names began with a Xi sound had different facial features as well. Those features were as subtle as changes in human features—something only those deeply familiar with the species would notice.

  She also noticed that his gray skin was tinged blue, a sign of emotional distress.

  Again? He sent.

  She sighed. He was going to criticize her for asking for another joint investigation as well? Didn’t anyone think in the Security Division?

  I told you to check in at reception, he sent.

  Her lips twitched. She almost smiled, but knew better. He hadn’t been angry at her about a new possible investigation, but about her usual lack of protocol.

  Apparently the android in reception had recognized her, or had had some kind of reaction to her intrusion into the unit. It had probably been flagged to look for her.

  Check in so that you can have an underling deal with me? she asked, knowing it sounded bitchy, but not caring.

  Xyven’s skin turned a darker blue. Her barb had hit. He let his arms drop, and he stepped deeper into the office, not quite inviting her in, but not keeping her out either.

  She walked inside as if it were her office, not that it could ever be.

  Xyven’s office had some human furniture, scaled down to accommodate his slight form. It also had strangely shaped Whetting furniture, with the holes and tubes that accommodated the Whetting’s multi-appendage form.

  Other things scattered around the room looked like sculpture to Huỳnh, even though Xyven had once told her that everything on the floor was furniture of one kind or another.

  He was a collector of alien things. Apparently his home—a penthouse apartment in the Peyti-only building near hers—was filled with curiosities and artifacts from almost every species he’d interacted with.

  Xyven seemed to prefer the human furniture, probably because it was similar in style to furniture the Peyti used regularly. He retreated to the tall, narrow chair that he had used on previous visits with her.

  I don’t have time for a long chat today, he sent. He preferred to use links, even inside his office. More than that, the links he insisted on kept a record of the conversation. He claimed he preferred it, because of the lessons he had learned as an investigator.

  Some in the human unit believed he did it to prevent any kind of strife. They thought that knowing they were being recorded would change people’s behavior.

  Maybe it would change some people’s behavior, but it didn’t change Huỳnh’s.

  Have you been following the events on the Moon? She sent him. She hovered near a chair in front of him, but wasn’t sure if she could sit down. While this environmental suit didn’t make her clothing ride up, it was tight enough to make bending uncomfortable.

  You are referring to the Anniversary Day massacres, he sent.

  I’ve never heard them called “massacres,” she sent.

  Millions have died, including many, many of my people. What else would you call it? He sent.

  The media are calling this the Anniversary Day attacks.

  He shrugged, his thin little shoulders rising up past his pointed chin. When Peyti made that movement with a mask on, it seemed unnatural. When they did it without their masks, it seemed like an affectation.

  The end result is the same, he sent. Murder on a vast scale.

  Yes, she sent, and decided to sit down anyway, despite the fact it was uncomfortable. She could feel the edge of the chair through the thin material of the suit.

  You are handling the investigative oversight? He sent.

  I am, she sent. These attacks are coordinated and they were planned years ago. I’m not finding much in my investigation here, so I’m going to assemble a large team and send a lot of them to aid in the investigations on the Moon.

  Good thinking, he sent. I’m sure the Moon can use all the help it can get.

  He put his spindly hands on the chair’s arms and levered himself up.

  It seems that you have the investigation well in hand. I appreciate the update.

  She didn’t move. I’m not here to give you an update.

  The blue in his skin, which had been fading, rose again. But he sat down.

  I want Peyti, Disty, and other non-human investigators to be part of those teams, she sent. Only you can authorize that.

  This is not a joint human/alien investigation, he sent, folding his hands over the center of his torso. This close to Earth, the attacks are a human problem.

  This close to Mars, she countered, the attacks are a Disty problem.

  He couldn’t argue with that; the Disty controlled Mars, just like humans controlled Earth.

  He tilted his head sideways, his version of acknowledging her point. His skin had faded to its usual gray.

  The Moon is considered a satellite of the Earth, he sent, and something in the tone of the linked message added condescension. Or maybe it was just his wording. That makes the attacks a human problem, solved by human law, investigated by humans. Besides, the attackers are human.

  Not under Alliance law, she reminded him. Two could play the condescension game. Clones are not human. They’re property.

  Human clones point to a human perpetrator, he sent.

  I’m sure that’s what the real perpetrators want us to think, she sent. The suit was digging into her thighs and her stomach. It was starting to itch. She had to use incredible self-control not to shift in her chair.

  You seem to know who the real perpetrators are, he sent.

  No, I don’t, she sent, and an attack this big and this long in the making should be easy to trace. By now, someone should have taken credit for it.

  Don’t you believe the credit is in those clones? He sent.

  I thought so at first, she sent, but they’re some other kind of message, one I don’t entirely understand yet. Oh, and by the way, in case you haven’t been following this closely, they’re clones of a serial killer, which makes them illegal. They might’ve been made in the Alliance, but only by some kind of criminal company. I’m voting for something outside of the Alliance. So our investigation is going to have to span the Alliance anyway. Why not make it easier, and bring in every species that lost more than one hundred members in the attacks?

  Because that’s not how joint investigations originate, and you know it, he snapped.

  I know that joint investigations happen when you approve them, she sent.

  And I see no reason to believe that non-human investigators will add to our understanding of these massacres. The loss of life of all species is tragic, but it is clear to me and clear to anyone who studies the footage of that day that these attacks were focused at the Moon, a human-centric Earth satellite. Which keeps these investigations squarely in your department and not part of mine.

  It had been a long shot. She knew that, and she still felt disappointed that he said no. Worse, she felt disappointed that he wouldn’t concede her point: that there was no way to know who or what had authorized the attacks.

  Have you thought about how huge this is? she sent. How deep inside the Alliance it is? How much planning went into it, and how close these attackers came to destroying the Moon? I think it was just luck that they didn’t.

  I think you have too many preconceptions, he sent. Make certain the investigators you send into the field have n
one.

  She stood, shaking a little, not from the cut-off blood flow due to the suit’s tightness, but due to a fury she was having trouble containing. She hated the way that Xyven refused to consider most joint investigations.

  It was as if he saw his job as preventing investigations instead of authorizing them.

  I was trying to make certain that the investigators I sent into the field had no preconceptions, she sent. But you just guaranteed that they’ll conduct a human-only investigation. And that means that if the perpetrators, whoever they are, used famous DNA to create those human clones to throw us off some non-human motive, they’ve succeeded.

  You’re reaching, he sent.

  I’m trying to be thorough, she sent. What’s your excuse?

  His mouth opened slightly. Apparently he wasn’t used to anyone talking to him like that, particularly since the conversations were always recorded.

  If I were your boss, he started.

  You wouldn’t be, she interrupted. You’re too rigid.

  What would you do? His skin was bright blue now. Quit?

  Petition for your removal, she snapped. It’s easier when you’re a subordinate. Unfortunately, I’d have a tougher time with you as it is, since we’re in different departments. But I think your lack of vision will bite you on the ass at some point.

  Colorful, he sent, apparently not noticing the irony. She hadn’t ever seen him that vivid a blue. But irrelevant. I have closed more cases than you.

  And I’ve managed more investigators than you, she sent. I actually believe my staff can do the jobs they’re assigned. I don’t go out of my way to ensure that they have nothing to do. I send my people into the field.

  Wasting resources and costing the division money, he sent.

  Solving crime and finding perpetrators, she sent. And I’ll do it here, with or without your help.

  Without, he sent. Definitely without.

  She shot him a look filled with all the fury she’d been trying to suppress. Bastard. Did he just not care about the fact that millions had died? That the Earth Alliance had suffered a serious blow? That this kind of planning wasn’t just a one-time thing?

  Was he all about his job?

  Or did he truly believe that what happened to humans didn’t matter to Peyti?

  She didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to waste time finding out.

  She needed to get her all-human teams on the ground. She needed to do some planning.

  Without him.

  Or the Joint Unit’s resources.

  Still, she’d be offering the damaged governments of the Moon the kind of assistance they needed. And maybe, just maybe, she’d protect the Alliance against further attacks.

  Whether they were caused by humans or not.

  TWELVE

  FRAGMENTED DREAMS OF her mother haunted her. Whenever Berhane closed her eyes, she saw not the images of disaster that filled the screens and poured across the public networks, but her mother’s black hair, with its reddish highlights catching the fake sunlight of Dome Dawn that last morning, the smell of cinnamon coffee in the air.

  The sky was red with early morning light, the shopping district illuminated in copper, everything sharp and clear and focused.

  Berhane would wake up without feeling rested, pressure in her chest from unshed tears. Those months after the bombing, those months when she kept hoping and hoping and hoping that her mother had somehow gotten away, that she had survived and lost her memory, that—ridiculously—she had decided to run away from home and not tell anyone, that she was still breathing somewhere. The “magical thinking,” as her father called it, had trapped Berhane as surely as the sectioned dome had trapped those inside it for just an instant, before their world evaporated into nothingness.

  Then Berhane learned the sequence, realized the bomb had gone off first and the dome had sectioned afterwards, that everyone was dead before Berhane had even known anything was wrong, that her mother hadn’t been trapped, but had walked blithely toward the Shenandoah Café, thinking the morning beautiful and soon she would be talking with her very annoyed daughter.

  Annoyed.

  Berhane still felt the guilt of that.

  She could only handle two or three of those dreams per night. She would get up afterwards, and usually get some coffee or a muffin and sit on her balcony on the dome side of her father’s house. She had moved back in after Anniversary Day because her apartment had too much Torkild in it.

  He had helped her pick out the furniture, had slept in that bed on the final morning of their engagement, had betrayed her there. She was subletting the place to a friend, but Berhane knew she wouldn’t return.

  Besides, she liked to think that this way Torkild couldn’t find her.

  Or maybe he would be too embarrassed to come here.

  He was on the Moon still—everyone was; no private ships had left yet—and he had only tried to contact her once since that awful day. She had told him she didn’t want to think about him anymore, and had shut down all of his access to her links.

  To escape him, and all thought of him, she had moved into the suite of rooms that her mother had remodeled for guests. Berhane’s childhood bedroom remained, but Berhane wanted to leave that as it was—a monument to a person who no longer existed.

  Besides, if she stayed in the suite, she felt like a guest in her father’s home instead of a little girl moving back for comfort. She was already looking for a new place, one that wasn’t as upscale as Torkild liked, one that had a bit of attitude, maybe even a funky groove, one that didn’t show off her wealth, but showed off her personality instead.

  Her father’s house did show off his wealth. He owned a disgusting amount of land at the northern edge of Armstrong. The area had been settled forty years ago, the dome expanded to accommodate, and covenants added so that no one could build a new subdivision on the empty Moonscape beyond.

  The covenants had been no big deal, mostly because there were small craters and hills on this part of the Moonscape. If someone wanted to build there, they would have to make the subdivision a “natural” one, incorporating all of the natural landscape—something more expensive than it seemed since Moon dust was always a problem inside the domes.

  Her favorite feature of her father’s house was the balcony view of the Moonscape. Blasted and barren, with only small signs of civilization across it. The tracks from whatever had driven across the moon dust recently, a few of the Growing Pits to the east, the high-speed train to Littrow to the west.

  If the dome settings were just right, she could see the white-and-blue blur of the high-speed train, the lights of Littrow in the distance, glowing across the black-and-gray Moon. And she remembered, whenever she saw that, how much she loved this place, and how terrified she was for it.

  Millions had died a week ago. Millions. The domes were devastated, community leaders murdered, the violence on a scale that even now she had trouble imagining.

  And yet, on the microcosmic scale, she knew what it was like. Four years ago, against her father’s wishes and her brother’s advice, she had suited up and gone into the bomb site. She had wanted to stand where the Shenandoah Café had been, where that sidewalk that her mother had walked along had been.

  The area had been black with soot from the chemical fires that had flared before the oxygen all escaped from the hole in the dome. The sidewalk still existed, twisted and gray from Moon dust. The Shenandoah Café still had its famous counter and the mural behind it, a mural that got salvaged thanks to the efforts of Berhane and the Café owner’s family.

  She had found so many things—shattered coffee mugs, spoons, a single shoe—but she had never found her mother.

  For nearly three years—after the bombing, after the funeral, after everyone else had seemingly put the entire crisis behind them—Berhane would imagine her mother walking through the front door of this house and asking everyone to forgive her. Her imaginary mother would say that she hadn’t realized how much time had passed. She
had lost her memory, lost herself, but she had found both again, and she was back.

  Then they found her DNA, and Berhane had mourned all over again.

  Only a year ago.

  And now, this.

  Berhane stood on the balcony, cupping the coffee she had had sent up from the kitchen, picking at a muffin made with real blueberries from the Growing Pits, and sighed.

  She was so tired, and yet she couldn’t rest. She needed to do something. She’d been throwing money at every charity she could think of, but hadn’t felt like she had done anything.

  It actually felt like cheating.

  She set the coffee on a nearby table, then went into the bedroom, grabbed a sweatshirt she’d commandeered from her brother’s room on the night of Anniversary Day (it was the only way to bring Bert back home, at least for the evening), and slipped on a pair of loose pants.

  She left her feet bare.

  Then she went back onto the balcony, got her coffee, grabbed a handful of muffin, and headed out of the suite.

  Initially, she thought she’d take a tour of the house, just to stretch her legs without going onto the grounds. Sometimes, looking at the Moon-centric art that her father had collected over the decades made her feel better.

  But today, she knew it wouldn’t.

  Instead, she thought maybe she’d cook something. She hadn’t done that in more than a week. And cooking focused the mind, even if it was only for a short period of time.

  She padded down the front stairs, her feet sinking into the deep, warm carpet. The warm coffee spilled a bit over her hand, and she licked it off.

  Voices echoed across the foyer. She frowned, called up the clock inside her right eye, and saw that it was barely eight in the morning. Her father usually started his day at nine, with a heavy breakfast before he made his way to the office. He stayed there until one or two in the morning, rarely making it home to get his normal six hours of sleep.

  She crossed the cold marble of the foyer and walked through the formal living area into the formal dining room.

  A dozen top executives from her father’s company sprawled in the chairs, a breakfast spread of eggs and cereal and fruit on one side, dim sum and some kind of stir-fry on the other, and in the middle, more pastries than she had seen since the wedding brunch for her best friend from Aristotle.