Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  She didn’t want to ask Alfonso, who hadn’t given her his last name. She didn’t even want to look at him.

  Instead, she stared at the screen floating in that tiny room in the Tycho Crater morgue. The information in front of her morphed into two screens.

  Possible image of the deceased based on DNA profile. Some information, such as weight, scars, and the like, might be variable…

  And then her sister Carla’s face appeared, proportions off—the image wasn’t sharp enough. Carla had cheekbones that looked like they could cut glass. The eyes were wrong too. They were flat, unrealistic.

  Carla’s eyes were alive and snapping with intelligence.

  Carla’s eyes were alive…

  Goudkins made a small sound in the back of her throat and pushed her chair back. Tears threatened, and that embarrassed the hell out of her.

  She didn’t cry. She never cried. She hated people who cried in front of professionals. Crying was for moments alone, so that no one saw how deeply someone was hurt or moved or saddened.

  Or grieving.

  “How…” her voice broke, and she willed it to stop. “I mean, where was this sample found?”

  She couldn’t use the phrase “organic material.” That little bit was her sister.

  Some bot had found her sister somewhere. Maybe a drop of blood, maybe something that showed she wasn’t dead after all, just hurt, and Goudkins could continue to look for her, maybe in the hospitals, maybe in Carla’s apartment…

  “Um.” He leaned across her and let his hand rest above the keyboard. “May I?”

  “Just tell me how to do it,” she said.

  He told her where the information was—under some code, in the back of some section, on some map she hadn’t even realized was there.

  A tiny red dot appeared in a blackened area of the map. The blackened area was right in the center of the two-dimensional image of Tycho Crater.

  She didn’t have to guess where that was, but she still wanted him to tell her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly, and she could tell he’d done this before. Countless times before. A few minutes ago, she had felt compassion for him, doing this day in and day out as his job.

  Right now, she just wanted him to get it over with.

  “This is the rubble of Top of the Dome. I can find exactly what they took it off of.”

  “So she could have gotten out,” Goudkins said, “and this was just left behind from an injury?”

  She hated the hope in her voice.

  “Um.” He sounded doubtful. “You can go deeper in the map, see if there is some matching material nearby.”

  Material. That word again. She hated it too.

  She followed his instruction at going deeper. Little yellow dots appeared on the enlarged map section to show where more of the “organic material” had been found.

  There were a lot of yellow dots.

  “I can ask it to do a probability search of whether or not this was a wound or something more…dire,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. She needed it. She needed the confirmation. She needed to know.

  That was why she was in the morgue in the first place.

  He had her input a few commands, and the probability search was done: 99.9999%.

  Something dire, in his words.

  In the words of the program, 99.9999% certainty that the subject was deceased.

  Goudkins closed her eyes. She wasn’t the kind of woman who held on to small probabilities. And she’d worked with these kinds of devices and programs before.

  The machines never ever stated that they were 100% accurate. But the more accurate the program believed it was, the more nines it added to the right side of the decimal point.

  If she were back at Earth Alliance Security Headquarters, she wouldn’t tell anyone about the slim possibility of error. She would look at that number as a guarantee. These samples had come from a deceased person.

  Her sister Carla had died on Anniversary Day.

  In the Top of the Dome.

  Because she went back in, thinking that was what Goudkins would do.

  Dammit.

  “Thank you,” she said to Alfonso. She stood up, her knees shaking.

  “You want the chip, right?” he said.

  Crap, she would have left it. All that caution, and she would have left her own DNA behind. He was helping her.

  She had to focus.

  “Yes, sorry,” she said. She leaned forward and removed it herself, just like he had instructed her to.

  Then she wiped the system’s memory, which she knew how to do from her work in Earth Alliance Security.

  She pocketed the chip.

  “Thank you,” she said, standing upright. “You’ve been very helpful. More than I can say.”

  He bit his lower lip. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” she lied. And forced herself to concentrate again.

  He watched her, clearly uncertain what she was going to do next.

  “Can you give me something? A document, something, so that I can get into her apartment tonight as next of kin?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll issue a certificate. It’ll only take a few minutes. Do you mind waiting here?”

  Mind. Waiting. She put the words together, hating how sluggish her thoughts had become.

  “No, I don’t mind,” she said.

  He left the room, and she was alone.

  Truly alone.

  Those relatives she had, the ones she never saw, were all she had left. The person who had known her all her life was gone. Just gone.

  Vaporized.

  That was a much better word than the phrase “blown to bits.” But her sister had been blown to bits. A recovery bot had found the bits and Goudkins had just used them to identify Carla.

  Or what was left of her.

  She put the heel of her hand against her forehead.

  The hope was gone. Completely gone. And that made her feel as if she had nothing to hold on to.

  This place—this city—was such a mess that she wasn’t even certain she could hold a funeral. And how would she handle the estate? Did Carla even have an estate? Did it go to Goudkins?

  She was making assumptions that she had no right to make.

  God, death was full of decisions. She remembered that from her parents’ deaths.

  But Carla had handled most of that.

  Leaving Goudkins to do her job and live her life.

  Just like she had done now.

  Goudkins could walk away, and no one would know except, maybe, this guy named Alfonso-something, who needed sleep more than Goudkins did.

  But she wasn’t going to walk away.

  She had a final obligation to her sister, and she would do it. Whatever it took.

  ONE MONTH AFTER ANNIVERSARY DAY

  THIRTY

  ARMSTRONG SEARCH & RESCUE sent Berhane to Littrow. She had requested time in one of the more distant domes, maybe Glenn Station or even Yutu, but Kaspian had vetoed that. He still believed that she would work for a day and quit.

  He told her that she had to put in at least a week of hard work near Armstrong before he ever sent her far from her home.

  She was determined to impress him.

  Which, she realized when she arrived at the bomb site, would be very hard to do.

  She was with a team of a dozen workers. They had been cautioned that they could only work in areas that had already been cleared by investigation teams. Very few areas had been cleared, because there weren’t enough investigators.

  But the investigators had gone to the original bomb sites first—or what they assumed were the original bomb sites. In Littrow, that meant they went to the place where the governor’s mansion had been. From the footage that the investigators had from before the bombing, they believed (although they did not see) that the bomb had been placed there.

  They were still working on the area, but they had cleared parts of it.

  Berhane had no id
ea what exactly they were doing, or how they could clear a site, but hers wasn’t to question. Hers was to go in and work.

  Even though everyone knew there was no rescue involved, Armstrong Search & Rescue, along with the other S&R organizations, was the only one that had the equipment to do the recovery work needed to find the bodies—or what was left of them.

  It was grim work, or so Kaspian had warned her, as if telling her that would change her mind. It wasn’t going to change anything, except maybe her point of view about her own self-worth and importance in the world. She fully expected a reminder of how unimportant she truly was.

  The environmental suit she was assigned would be hers until she decided she no longer wanted to be part of Armstrong S&R. She offered to bring her own suit, but Kaspian had turned that down.

  If we let you do it, we let everyone do it, he said. And not everyone can afford a top-of-the-line environmental suit designed for harsh environments. And don’t misunderstand this: you’ll be going into one of the harshest environments on the Moon.

  That hadn’t scared her off. Nothing had scared her off. In fact, it had strengthened her resolve tremendously.

  The train ride from Armstrong took only half an hour. That was why Littrow had been chosen as the center of the new government in the first place. The other domes had complained that Armstrong would be too powerful if the center of the United Domes had been there, but everyone knew how important it was for government officials to be close to the port.

  Littrow had been a compromise.

  Not twenty years ago, it had been one of the smallest domes on the Moon, but opportunists, like her father, saw how the debate about the United Domes was going, and built up all kinds of housing and shopping districts near the city center, anticipating a lot of growth once the government site had been chosen.

  The speculation worked—her father’s speculation almost always worked—and now those buildings were in ruins.

  He saw profit in rebuilding them.

  She saw lost lives.

  An official with Littrow S&R met their group at the train station and carted them to the edge of the segmented dome. Littrow S&R hadn’t really existed two weeks ago, except as an outline of an organization, something the town had known it needed.

  Now, it was composed of volunteers who, Berhane suspected, were as conflicted about what had happened to their city as she had been back when her mother died. They really couldn’t work—they hadn’t had any training and they had no equipment—so they mostly organized and coordinated with Armstrong S&R. They also sent quite a few members to Armstrong for training.

  She suspected that by the end of the month, Littrow S&R would become large enough to handle some of its own recovery work.

  The official led them to the approved area. It was on the far side of the sectioned dome, in front of what had been the center of Littrow. It was hard to see the damage through the section. Fine shrapnel from the bomb had hit the clear material so hard that it looked like the bottom part of the section had been painted black. The spray went upwards, thick in the middle and fine at the top. Through the top part, black chunks, rocks, and parts of buildings were barely visible.

  Within hours, Littrow had capped the hole in the dome and turned the gravity back on, but had left the rest of the environmental systems off inside. All of the domes had done that, so that the Earth Alliance (and other) investigation teams would be able to work on a relatively untouched site.

  Some of the domed communities, with more money and a better S&R organization than Littrow’s, had actually scraped the exterior of their domes and searched the land outside it for materials that had been blown out with the top of the dome.

  Littrow hadn’t done that. Someone in the remaining local government had ordered the dome cleaning units to turn on, and any material that had escaped the dome’s original confines was gone forever.

  That made her sad.

  The dozen Armstrong S&R workers had a private link that was secure and encoded. No one wanted the locals to hear about a found but unattached body part, or to hear the reactions of the searchers as they discovered something more gruesome than ordinary.

  In addition to signing all the waivers, Berhane had had to go through a two-day class in recovery work. (Had she been doing rescue work, she would have needed an even longer prep.) The class included procedures for handling remains as well as codes to use on the links, so that most things went undescribed.

  She had loaded the codes into her AutoLearn program and replayed it over and over again, as well as storing them (and the procedural reminders) in a chip that she could access while she worked.

  She didn’t want to make any mistakes.

  She was responsible for five bots. They would be linked to her so that she would control their movements. Mostly she didn’t have to tell them what to do; the links were so that she could stop them if need be. One debris platform would be assigned to her as well, and it was actually marked with her identification code.

  When the platform was full, she was done, at least until it emptied itself off and then returned for more. Her breaks would come every two hours or when the platform was full, whichever was sooner.

  Some of what she had frustrated her. There were DNA sensing devices, things that would help her scrape off the smallest amount of DNA from any debris, but the organization had limited numbers of those tools and wanted them in the hands of the more experienced staff and volunteers. She understood that, but she also knew that relying on the bots to tell her how much human or alien DNA a bit of debris had was a bit like using a hammer as the only tool.

  But, as Kaspian told her, they had to limit themselves somewhere. When she protested, he reminded her that nothing would get thrown away. Everything in the debris fields outside the domes would probably be reassessed before being recycled or disposed of.

  She tried to ignore all the qualifiers that he used, and hoped he was right.

  But she couldn’t think about that. Just the amount of debris she could see through the sectioned dome overwhelmed her. She mentally tried to multiply the destruction by 19 domes, and her mind shied away from the amount of work and effort it would take to recover anything.

  She attached the suit’s hood, which sealed around her face, doubling as a clear helmet, then followed her team leader into the open door through the section. Each volunteer went in by herself, her bots and platform following behind.

  Just to get into the dome took fifteen minutes. Each volunteer had to pay attention to the route they took, because they would most likely leave on their own for breaks. It rarely took two hours to fill one of the platforms.

  That fact alone had broken her heart.

  She was one of the last people through the door. The volunteer from Littrow S&R closed the door behind her.

  Debris towered around her: spindly stalks of metal, thick rock, and dust—more dust than she had expected. She was glad she wore the environmental suit, just because of the dust.

  It wasn’t gray like Moon dust. The dust in this section of the dome was mostly black. The governor’s mansion had been a stunning building, made from the regolith of the Taurus Mountains. She had been inside it several times, usually at some event on her father’s arm.

  The exterior of the building had been very gothic, rising above the rest of the city like a beacon, but the interior had been beautiful. It incorporated material from every corner of the Moon, and it had décor from most of the Moon’s strongest companies. Celia Alfreda, the governor-general, loved to brag that nothing in the mansion had come from off-Moon: not the materials, not the product itself, not even something as small as a thread.

  And now, Berhane walked through the remains of it all.

  In some ways, she felt glad that Celia Alfreda had not lived to see this—the symbol of the fledging United Domes government, destroyed so thoroughly. The loss of it, and of the governor-general, made Berhane’s heart twist.

  So she focused on where she put her booted feet.
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  The path the crew walked along had been carefully carved from the rubble. It went all the way down to the road or sidewalk or whatever was beneath. There were cracks along the road’s surface, probably from the impact of all this weight so quickly, but at least she knew she wasn’t destroying evidence.

  Someone else—the investigators, most likely—had cleared the way to the mansion site.

  She hoped they had done so with care. But considering what she had seen from the investigation of the Armstrong bombing, she doubted that had happened. She suspected all of the rubble alongside of her had once been on this path.

  The path was wide and straight. The bots that accompanied her could now flank her. Four did, two on each side. But one bot and her platform remained behind her.

  The walk was a cautious one, and since she was last, she wasn’t certain if that was because the other new people on the team were having trouble picking their way forward or if it was because this was the preferred method of walking through such hazards.

  She knew she had to be careful to keep her suit intact. She could cut it on things and it would self-seal, but too many self-seals and the suit would be compromised.

  That was one of the many reasons why Armstrong S&R wanted the volunteers to use S&R’s suits. Those at least had been inspected, to make certain there were no flaws. The last thing S&R wanted was for someone to die while doing recovery work.

  The bots were programmed to keep her from sharp objects as well. She knew that without being told. There was no other reason for them to flank her like that.

  The team finally reached the approved area. They were still several meters from the mansion site. Now she understood how the investigators knew where the bomb had gone off.

  Instead of a spectacular building that rose above a well-built cityscape, there was a deep crater. Bits of the building itself had toppled into the crater, but mostly, the crater stood alone, black and shiny and smoother than she expected.

  She stared at it for the longest moment, feeling a bit of dislocation. One moment the building she remembered had stood here; the next, this had formed.