Consequences

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Consequences

  A Retrieval Artist Novel

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Copyright Information

  Consequences

  Copyright © 2012 Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  First published 2004 by ROC

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover and Layout copyright © 2012 by WMG Publishing

  Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Rolffimages/Dreamstime

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  The Retrieval Artist Series

  The Retrieval Artist: A Short Novel

  The Disappeared

  Extremes

  Consequences

  Buried Deep

  Paloma

  Recovery Man

  The Recovery Man’s Bargain: A Short Novel

  Duplicate Effort

  The Possession of Paavo Deshin: A Short Novel

  Anniversary Day

  Blowback (2012)

  For Mike Resnick

  with thanks for everything

  (and there’s a lot of everythings)

  Acknowledgments

  The Retrieval Artist books have attracted a lot of attention, and I’m grateful to the readers who’ve followed me on these multigenre hybrid novels. Thank you for making it possible to continue the adventures of Miles Flint.

  Thanks also go to my husband Dean Wesley Smith, who got me through a difficult summer.

  One

  Kovac huddled against the edge of the crevasse. Below him, the massive rip in the glacier extended several hundred meters, narrowing as it deepened. He had no idea how deep the crevasse was, but he knew that a fall would kill him.

  His white environmental suit, with crampons extended along its surface, clung to the smooth ice, leaving his hands free. One of them clutched the rifle, while the other remained at his side.

  His feet dangled over the emptiness below him, but he knew better than to brace them. Too much pressure on the side of the crevasse could cause an avalanche, and then the month he had spent out here, scouting the proper location, would be in vain.

  His head barely popped out of the crevasse; only his eyes and nose were exposed to the surface elements. He’d left the helmet off the environmental suit: he didn’t have to worry about the oxygen content of the air, and, he hoped, he wouldn’t be here long enough to expose his skin to the dangers of deep cold.

  The part of the glacier in front of him angled downward, and with his far-range vision goggles, he could see the village nearly forty klicks away as if it were right next to him.

  The village was laid out on a grid pattern, with buildings made of a local concrete-like substance that could hold up to the valley’s harsh winters. The buildings were white against the green of locally grown plants.

  Vehicles weren’t allowed there, so the streets were narrow, except for the market square, which filled every summer with makeshift booths and open tables selling handmade goods and produce, just like humans had done since time immemorial.

  At the moment humans did crowd the square. That was the most unusual aspect of this place: the fact that only humans were here. No aliens of any sort visited—and the natives, if there had ever been any—were long gone.

  Trieinsf’rd was the farthest Kovac had ever gone on assignment. Nearly two years’ travel outside of Earth Alliance space, Trieinsf’rd was an outsider’s paradise. The planet had been originally settled by a group who had rebelled against the Earth Alliance. Over the years, other colonies sprang up, none of them affiliated with Earth Alliance, and all of them containing people who wanted no contact with outside governments, for whatever reason.

  The village below, called Nowhere by the locals, was as far away from anywhere as a person could get. It was in the only habitable valley in the northernmost continent on Trieinsf’rd—a valley that was hundreds of kilometers long and a hundred wide. But to get to Nowhere, a person had to cross three huge mountain ranges, most of them still covered by the glaciers that had carved the valley.

  The mountains were so tall that regulation aircars couldn’t cross them, and the glacier was so fragile that most space yachts couldn’t land anywhere near it.

  To get here, most people had to rent a specially designed vehicle from one of the towns at the very edge of the first mountain range. Once one of those vehicles got rented, the leasor notified the authorities in Nowhere that someone was coming.

  Kovac didn’t want to notify anyone. He had bought his own vehicle off-world and had one of his partners serve as a driver, launching illegally off his space yacht over Trieinsf’rd’s Black Sea. Kovac had flown the vehicle low, landing it in a bowl about four klicks from here, then hiked to the crevasse.

  The rifle felt sleek against his hands. The environmental suit sealed around his wrists, leaving his hands untouched by any fabric. He didn’t wear gloves. Instead, he wore two layers of DuraSkin—enough to ensure that he wouldn’t get frostbite, but not enough to interfere with his own delicate nerve endings.

  He needed the sense of touch. The rifle was a fragile weapon, built for extreme conditions, and accurate only in the hands of an expert. The slightest thing, from the thickness of fabric to the infinitesimal vibration of a finger, could cause a shot to go wild.

  Kovac had worked with rifles most of his career, and knew most of the hazards. Still, other problems could arise without warning, and in cases like this one, where he would only get one chance, he didn’t dare make any errors.

  He’d even made the bullets himself, something he had learned to do after the last disastrous job. Because this job was so important, he’d used a combination of water and a lightweight poison to create the pellets. That was the nice thing about ice: the evidence melted.

  Not that anyone would be able to trace him. He was, as he had always been, a ghost. But he had learned long ago that there was no such thing as being too careful.

  With his free hand, he adjusted the goggles, making certain that the glare from the ice field around him wouldn’t affect his accuracy. He focused on the doorway that the Tracker had told him about. It was behind a booth selling Earth produce—strawberries, asparagus, red bell peppers, all obviously from a greenhouse.

  If the Tracker’s information was correct, the woman would emerge within the next five minutes. She would put a hand over her eyes, shading them from the thin sunlight as she surveyed the area around her. Then she would grab a basket from beside the door and begin her daily shopping.

  Worried, yet not worried. Believing, deep down, that she was safe after all, not realizing that she had been found nearly a year before, and watched for six more months before the Tracker even contacted Kovac.

  Kovac’s heart pounded harder than usual, and he could feel the chill air sting his face. If she didn’t come soon, he would have to retreat, set up again the next day, hope that his normally reliable source hadn’t failed him for the first time.

  Then the door opened. The woman stood inside the threshold, younger than he had expected. Her skin was soft, the color of the sand found on the Atlantic coastline of his childhood. Lines had formed around her brown eyes, but they were laugh lines, which he also hadn’t expected.

  Somehow he had thought she would be old and miserable, sorry she had been trapped in this godforsaken place. Sorry for the choices she had made.

  She wore a dress made of material so thin that he could see her n
ipples through the cloth. No protective gear underneath, nothing to shield her from weapons fire. She had obviously adopted the credo of the community, the belief that they were so far away from human settlement that they were safe.

  He used the suit’s crawl circuitry to help him move upward. He set the crawl for a decimeter—enough to get his shoulders above the mouth of the crevasse. He had programmed the suit for a fragile ice field and hoped that the suit’s actions would be as delicate as they had been in simulation.

  As he rose, his perspective shifted. He was looking down on the village now, his view of the market square like one that a man would have if he stood on a rooftop.

  Kovac didn’t like it. He wanted a direct shot, not an angled one.

  He waited until the suit finished its climb, then he adjusted the goggles again, but he still couldn’t get the perspective right.

  He glanced up, saw nothing except a pale grayish sky—the color Trieinsf’rd’s distant sunlight created as it flowed through the planet’s odd atmosphere. He shuddered, not from the cold, but from the isolation.

  He hit the crawl again, and this time eased himself out of the crevasse entirely. He moved away from the opening, and sprawled on the ice field.

  Then he lined up as he used to, decades ago, when he trained on Earth using conventional weapons—real rifles shooting real bullets, as they had for hundreds of years. He’d always preferred those weapons, thinking that a man couldn’t truly be a sniper without one.

  After he settled, he adjusted the goggles again. His angle was direct, just like he wanted.

  Only he had wasted time. She had moved away from the door, mingling in the crowd, beginning her shopping by examining the strawberries at a nearby booth. She held up the little carton, apparently looking to see if any of the berries had been crushed, and as she did so, the little man behind the booth talked with her.

  Kovac didn’t know what direction she would move in after she finished with the strawberries. The Tracker’s diagram of her day made it clear that she had only one routine—the one Kovac had just missed when she left the door.

  But he didn’t want to hurry. If he hurried, he risked making an even bigger mistake. He risked shooting and missing—warning her, allowing her to escape once again.

  She set the strawberries down, shook her head slightly, and turned, facing Kovac, exposing the front of that too-thin dress.

  He steadied himself, steadied the rifle, concentrated on being motionless—motionless except for the flick of his right forefinger, the one that controlled the trigger.

  He almost didn’t hear the shot. The puff of air, the slight sound vibration as the pointed piece of ice left the rifle and zoomed down the glacier at a velocity even his airglider couldn’t achieve.

  Velocity, the strength of the ice, and his aim would cause her death. But he had the poison as a backup: a trace of it in her system, from the outside edges of the bullet, melting from the friction in the air, melting even more as it absorbed her body temperature, would kill her even if the bullet failed.

  She moved toward the center of the market, just a millimeter off, a millimeter that he hadn’t anticipated, that he could do nothing about.

  Kovac held his breath, watched through the goggles, his finger still wrapped around the rifle’s trigger.

  Then she staggered back, raised a hand as if warding off a blow. The hole wasn’t immediately visible, lost in the drab brown of that dress.

  People exclaimed around her, going through what looked from this distance like a grim parody of panic.

  She hit the wall behind her, hand still raised, and slid to the ground, a red stain leaving a trail on the white concrete.

  Kovac let out his breath then. He’d hit her. Whether she died now or later, whether they thought they could save her or not, it didn’t matter. Her life was over.

  He had done his job.

  Two

  Miles Flint placed his hand on Carolyn Lahiri’s back as he took her up the stairs toward the private room above the Spacer’s Pub. Her muscles felt rigid, her nerves evident not only in her posture, but in her stiff movements. She was taking quite a risk coming here, and they both knew it, no matter how many assurances he tried to give.

  The Spacer’s Pub was only a few blocks from the Port. Flint liked the Pub. It was designed for clandestine meetings. The pub’s upstairs room had one-way windows on all four sides, and it also had no closets, no storage, and no hidden areas. Only one door led into the room, and an open security system allowed guests to monitor the bar below.

  Had Flint discovered the room when he worked his previous job with the Armstrong Police Force, he would have had to shut the entire pub down. Now he used the room for important meetings—not all of them, but enough to trust the room’s system as well as he could trust any place outside of his own.

  The stairs led to a trapdoor that opened into the room, giving whomever was inside a defensive advantage. As Flint reached the fifth stair from the top, he put a hand on Carolyn’s arm.

  “Let me go first,” he said.

  She nodded, the nerves he’d felt in her body not evident on her face. Her skin still had the dusting of color it had received from her time in Earth’s sunlight, and the white highlights in her hair, she had once told him, also came from the sun. Those highlights took years off her face, made her seem like she was in her twenties instead of in her mid-fifties.

  Flint reached up, unlatched the trapdoor, and eased it back. Then he climbed two stairs at once, popping his head into the private room.

  The sheer size always surprised him. The room was hidden under an angled roofline, and he always thought that the floor space should have been smaller. Instead, it stretched almost as far as he could see.

  He carefully scanned the walls, the ceiling, and the floor before going all the way into the room. The chairs that line the back wall were empty. He latched the trap door open, then reached down to help Carolyn up the last few steps.

  She ignored his hand.

  She came up, her chin raised, her dark eyes focused on a point in the distance. Only when she stepped onto the black floor did she look around. Her shoulders relaxed visibly as she saw that the room was exactly what Flint had initially presented to her—a wide-open space, with no places for an assassin to hide.

  “They’re not here yet,” she said, her English soft and accented, an affectation she had picked up while on Earth.

  “We’re fifteen minutes early,” Flint said. “I wanted to make sure we had time.”

  “You wanted to make sure this isn’t a setup.” Carolyn clasped her hands behind her back and walked to one of the one-way windows. She peered down at the street below.

  “If it were setup,” Flint said, “I would never have taken your Retrieval in the first place.”

  Carolyn was too exposed by the window, even though no one should have been able to see inside this place. People knew the room existed; all someone had to do was shoot out a window, and they could see inside.

  Someone determined could attack this place easily.

  He and Carolyn were trusting that no one determined still wanted to kill her.

  “You need to sit,” Flint said.

  She glanced over her shoulder at the open doorway, realized that she had her back to that and her front to a window, something that should have made any long-term Disappeared nervous.

  Then she walked to the chairs, her rubber-soled shoes making no sound on the hard plastic floor.

  Flint removed a small device from his pocket. He’d had it specially made only a few months before. It located most hidden spying equipment—and constantly updated its programming as new equipment hit the market.

  He flicked the device on with his thumb, and then walked around the room, holding the device near the walls, the ceiling, and even the seemingly incorruptible floor. He found nothing, which didn’t surprise him. He’d come here the night before and run the same scan, and then he had done so a few hours ago.

  Still, F
lint was uneasy. He had been uneasy since he accepted the job to find Carolyn. In his two years as a Retrieval Artist, he had only Retrieved only four Disappeareds. He had found several more—people who had been on the run from various alien governments; who had somehow angered the Earth Alliance; and in one case, a woman who had committed a crime—but, for a variety of reasons, he hadn’t brought the Disappeareds back to the people who had hired him.

  Disappeareds went missing on purpose, usually to avoid prosecution or death from any one of fifty alien cultures. Most of the Disappeared were guilty of the crimes they’d been accused of, but by human standards, those crimes were insignificant and often harmless.

  Unfortunately, the Earth Alliance had agreed to treaties with all of these alien governments. The point of the treaties was to facilitate trade, but the treaties also agreed to legal arrangements. Included in those were the instances in which humans could be prosecuted for crimes against the alien cultures.

  The Multicultural Tribunals handled those cases. Humans sat on the tribunals as well as aliens, but usually the human judge only had one vote. So, often, humans were sentenced to death for crimes that would, on Earth, not have been considered crimes at all.

  Carolyn Lahiri’s crime was a bit more complicated. She fought in a war on a non-aligned world and because of her actions had to Disappear. The government of that world had recently pardoned all of its war criminals and its Disappeareds.

  Flint had investigated, and the pardons seemed legitimate. Still, after he had found Carolyn Lahiri, he warned her that returning to the family that raised her before she went off to fight in a foreign war might still result in her death.

  She had been willing to take the risk, and now she was here, beside him in this pub, waiting to see parents she hadn’t acknowledged for most of her life.