Consequences

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “You knew this?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “So when I asked you about your partners—”

  “Don’t try to implicate me in anything, Passolini,” DeRicci snapped. “I outrank you and I could have your job.”

  “Provided you still hold the rank when you try to take the job,” Passolini said. “You’re not working with Flint, are you?”

  “Hell, no,” DeRicci said.

  “You alerted him to your investigation.” Passolini shook her head. “Noelle, you alerted him and he put tracers in your system. He’s done something. He’s guilty of something, and now you let him get one step ahead of you.”

  DeRicci felt her mouth go dry. She wanted to beg Passolini to keep this quiet, to make certain Gumiela didn’t know about it, but DeRicci couldn’t bring herself to say the words.

  Besides, the other techs would hear her. They would know.

  “We don’t know he put the tracers in,” she said.

  “That’s true, we don’t,” Passolini said. “And if we follow the DeRicci method of investigation, we don’t make assumptions. We find facts. But if I find out that he put those in, Noelle, I swear to you this will be on your record. I know—”

  “That you would never make such a mistake.” DeRicci had had enough. “You would never trust a friend. You would never ask someone to work with you if you thought they had specialized knowledge. Hell, you wouldn’t even think twice about busting into a chief investigator’s office and commandeering her entire office system, even though you don’t have the authority to do so. You want to put stuff on the record? Go ahead. You’ll have more charges of investigation tampering than you’ll know what to do with.”

  Passolini had paled. Everyone else in the office had stopped working. They were all staring at DeRicci.

  “How do I know that there is a tracer?” DeRicci continued. “I have no proof. I didn’t call you people. I’m letting you do this out of the goodness of my heart. But if you find that this is an inside job—as you say—and you decide to blame it on Miles Flint, who is decidedly not inside, and then you decide to take me on, well, I will have to talk to my bosses about what ‘inside’ really means, and how could someone who hasn’t been near this precinct in two years actually get through the so-called firewalls to the system? Who failed then, Barbara? Certainly not me.”

  Passolini crossed her arms. “Do you want us to stop working?”

  “Of course not,” DeRicci said. “I believe you when you tell me that my system is compromised. I just don’t believe you when you tell me who did it without any proof whatsoever.”

  Passolini sighed.

  “Finish.” DeRicci waved a hand at the other techs. “I’m heading to a different office. I have to write a report on this incident, thank you very much, and I’ll inform Gumiela that you came in here with the culprit already decided. I’ll also inform her that you allowed this breach, and that you threatened my position here. You want to play games, Barbara? Well, good luck. Because I don’t play them. I just tell the truth.”

  “You think you’re invincible because you have that hero thing going, don’t you?” Passolini asked.

  “I think I’m a target because I do.” DeRicci pushed past Passolini, stepped around the techs, and left her office. She pulled the door closed behind her and stood in the hallway for just a moment.

  She was a target, and Passolini did hate her. But that didn’t stop Passolini’s accusations from having a grain of truth. If Flint felt threatened, he just might put some kind of tracer into a computer. He’d done it before, on a case that she had worked on with him.

  That was the case that had somehow made him wealthy.

  DeRicci was shaking. She was angry and unsettled, and she felt wildly out of control of this investigation.

  But she needed to take control. Her actions in her office had been correct. She didn’t dare let Passolini know that the woman had upset her.

  DeRicci went to a nearby desk and sat down. Then she wrote the report, just like she said she was going to, making certain that all her bases were covered.

  She had a feeling that the interdepartmental struggles in this case were about to get a lot worse.

  Thirty-eight

  The trip from Moon to Earth was an extremely short one, especially at the speeds Flint traveled. To avoid calling attention to himself, he programmed the ship’s autopilot to slow several thousand miles outside of Earth’s orbit.

  He also made a few other critical decisions. He wasn’t going to dock his ship on the space station. Instead he would take it into the atmosphere, and pay for a berth at one of the ports. He wanted his own ship as close as possible. He didn’t want his ability to leave the planet contingent on someone else’s travel schedule.

  Unlike some space yachts, the Emmeline was designed to handle trips through atmosphere. That was one of the many features Flint had insisted on when he had ordered the ship.

  While the ship flew herself, he remained in the cockpit, monitoring the autopilot and doing more research. He couldn’t find more on the assassin—there was no trail on Earth at the moment, although he suspected he’d find it when he landed.

  But Flint also wanted more information on Carolyn Lahiri. With a tie to Etae, with the pardons coming when they had and the assassin finding her just after Flint had, then it was clear that she had done something—or she had been part of something—that someone didn’t want out.

  He had a lot of information about her stored in the ship’s systems. He had done some of his primary research here, in a much slower trip from the Moon to Earth a few weeks before. Then he had been concentrating on finding her, and using her past as a blueprint for her present.

  Now he saw her past as a blueprint for her murder.

  He went all the way back to her school records, trying to find how she had gotten interested in Etae in the first place. When he had initially done the research, he had scanned this part. The information was dense and not all that interesting. Mostly, he found school papers, sent through links, about various political subjects. Most of them involved the dangers of colonization and the problems caused by intergalactic corporations.

  The writing was mediocre, the arguments childish—everything had a black-and-white component: corporations bad, independence good. There were also a lot of studies that seemed directly aimed at her father; as if his work with the Multicultural Tribunals was responsible for the mess some of the outlying areas found themselves in.

  Over time, her work had focused not so much on the outlying areas, but on Etae. At that point, Etae had just received intergalactic notice. The slaughter of its native peoples, the Ynnels, by the Idonae had become justification for the original human colonists’ ruthlessness.

  These people had come in, killed any Idonae that got in their way, and established a human government—one that allowed no input from the Idonae at all. Nor did the human government try to rehabilitate the few remaining Ynnel tribes. Instead, the humans sent the Ynnel off-world, to “protect” them from the Idonae.

  Carolyn, of course, hated all of this, and used it to prove that the human government was worse than the Idonae had been. It didn’t hurt that her father had been on the Tribunal that had ruled that, since Etae was not a member of the Alliance, its internal politics were not subject to Alliance jurisdiction. The killing could—and did—continue, and apparently Carolyn laid much of that at her father’s feet.

  Flint looked over at the screens. They showed only the blackness of space. He seemed to be the only one out here, even though he knew he wasn’t.

  Flint leaned back in his chair. All of this begged the question, the one that Carolyn had never really answered to his satisfaction: why had she come home? Not that it would have mattered for her. Hank Mosby or whatever his name really was would have found her on Earth and killed her.

  But he would have left her parents alone.

  Had she known she was being followed? Was this one final act of revenge against her
parents?

  He turned his attention back to the research. She had moved to a college not far from home, and there she had gotten involved in some political organizations bent on stopping colonization by large corporations. Initially, Carolyn had signed on to spend a year protesting in the Outlying Colonies, her expenses paid.

  And somehow that year had become not about protest, but about Etae.

  Flint dug deeper into the material. He found nothing on Carolyn, but a bit on the organization that had brought the protestors out to the edges of the known universe. Apparently the organization recruited from colleges all over the solar system, finding willing young people to block certain projects proposed by intergalactic corporations.

  It didn’t take a lot of digging for Flint to find that the organization was a dummy corporation for one of the rival intergalactics, trying to block the competition.

  He wondered if Carolyn had found that out. If she had, he knew she would have reacted badly. But he saw nothing of that in the official reports.

  Only a letter from the organization to the Lahiris, stating that Carolyn was no longer under the organization’s auspices, that she and four others were heading out on their own to fight for justice in Etae.

  Flint had seen the letter before, but he had never searched for the names of the others. Now he did, looking for copies of the same letter sent on the same date.

  It didn’t take long to find them, along with the dossiers of the others. Two of them looked younger, but familiar—the Disappeareds who had been assassinated in the weeks before Carolyn’s death. The other two didn’t look familiar at all.

  Flint traced them and found that one of them had died shortly after arriving on Etae—slaughtered by Idonae as he was trying to minister to a tribe of them. The other, a young man, had no records after six months in Etae.

  Flint looked at several photographs of him, and did not recognize him. Still, Flint had his system run some comparison checks—and some aging programs, just to see if the young man had turned up elsewhere.

  Flint even searched by the young man’s name, Ali Norbert, hoping to find something, but there were no records—not of his life after he arrived on Etae and not of his death.

  That was the most curious detail: three young women and two young men traveled from one of the Outlying Colonies to Etae to “freedom fight.” One died. The three women Disappeared, and then end up murdered.

  The remaining young man completely vanished. He more than Disappeared. He became no one.

  Flint flashed on the ruins of Carolyn’s face. She had become no one too, in the end.

  Flint had his system cross-compare Ali Norbert’s images with Hank Mosby’s, not expecting much. Even if they were the same person, the enhancements would alter the recognition patterns, and Flint didn’t have enough information on Norbert to compensate.

  The system would, in the end, only guess.

  The key, then, was what these five had done on Etae. Flint wasn’t certain he’d be able to trace what had happened, not from such a long distance and not with the limited records available over the nets.

  But he was going to try.

  He was going to see if he could discover why Carolyn Lahiri had Disappeared.

  Thirty-nine

  Of course, the tracers led to Flint. The way DeRicci’s day was going, they couldn’t have done anything else.

  At least one of the techs had told her, not Passolini. DeRicci couldn’t have dealt with Passolini’s superior attitude, her condescending way of looking at DeRicci, as if DeRicci didn’t deserve the promotion she had received.

  At the moment, DeRicci didn’t feel like she deserved that promotion either. She felt like a rookie, bamboozled by someone with a few more tricks up his sleeve.

  Beneath the anger, she felt a sense of loss so deep that it was almost crippling. She was closer to Flint than she had realized—or perhaps it was simply that she had so few friends that the loss of one made it seem like the world had ended.

  To make matters worse, Flint was not in his office. Because she could no longer trust him, she checked the outgoing records at the port to see if he had fled Armstrong.

  The fact that the Emmeline was gone made her feel even more betrayed. He had left a few hours before, about the time that DeRicci had been studying the hallway security vid, the one that showed a man who shared too many physical features in common with Flint.

  DeRicci had left the office, claiming she was going to get dinner. Instead, she found herself in one of Armstrong’s newest neighborhoods. The people who lived here were so far above DeRicci in payscale that she felt that she was soiling their sidewalk just by standing on it. Even the Lahiris probably would have felt out of place here, in the latest trendy neighborhood for Armstrong’s super rich.

  Still, DeRicci couldn’t force herself to turn away. If she couldn’t talk to Flint, she would talk to someone else who knew him, someone else who might be able to give DeRicci an insight into whatever it was that made him lose his grip, possibly kill two of his clients and their daughter, and flee Armstrong.

  The very thought made her eyes burn.

  She squared her shoulders and headed for the main entrance to the center high-rise. She used to think she hated these places. But she had found, as her salary had grown, that what she had considered hate was merely another form of envy. Now she looked at them with half an eye toward living there someday—maybe when the police department didn’t steal her speaker’s fees, and she felt jaded enough to sell the media rights to the marathon story for more money than she could even imagine.

  To get to the main doors, she had to walk up several flights of clear glass stairs. She had to state her business, and then she found herself in the lobby.

  It was an eerie place, with a black floor, expensive furniture, and too many plants. The far wall was floor-to-ceiling windows, with a clear view of the lunar landscape.

  She used the automatic doorman feature next to the elevator to find out what floor Flint’s old mentor Paloma lived on. As DeRicci scanned the list, she realized she had never learned Paloma’s last name.

  Fortunately, she didn’t need it. Paloma had registered only under the one name, which made things much easier for DeRicci.

  The automatic doorman also told her that Paloma was in, which felt like the first break DeRicci had had all day.

  She got into the elevator and spoke the number for Paloma’s floor. The doors closed, but the elevator didn’t move. Instead, an androgynous voice said, “State your name and business.”

  “DeRicci,” she said. “I’m here about a homicide investigation.”

  The voice didn’t answer her. Instead, the elevator started its ascent. The elevator walls were also made of glass and gave her a floating view of the regolith and the dark rocks beyond. It was a lunar day, which she hadn’t realized, and the shadows the rocks gave stretched for kilometers.

  She had never floated above the lunar landscape before, at least not like this, and it was a novelty. She almost didn’t notice as the doors pinged open behind her.

  “Officer DeRicci?”

  DeRicci turned, her heart pounding. She had left her back vulnerable, something she hadn’t done in years. Behind her, an elderly woman stood. She hadn’t had obvious enhancements—her skin was thin, revealing the blood vessels beneath the gently wrinkled surface. Her hair was white and floated around her face like a cloud.

  Only her eyes seemed young; they were bright and intelligent and filled with a hardness that made DeRicci nervous.

  “I’m an assistant chief of detectives now,” DeRicci said.

  She hadn’t seen Paloma in nearly a year. They’d spent very little time together in the past—mostly because of Flint. He had introduced them, and had seemed to hope that they would get along.

  The fact that Flint had tried to facilitate the friendship hadn’t helped. If anything, it made things seem even more awkward, and whatever relationship DeRicci and Paloma might have had fizzled even before it was born
.

  “Such a grand title,” Paloma said. She stood in a doorway, her hands resting on its frame as if she were blocking DeRicci’s way. “And now you’ve come to investigate me?”

  DeRicci hadn’t expected the paranoia. “Actually, I came to ask you a few questions about a case I got today. If you don’t mind.”

  “Questions only? Am I or will I be under suspicion?”

  DeRicci hadn’t realized before that Paloma’s attitude came from her distrust of authorities. Had she instilled that in Flint? He had already been leaning that way when he had left the force.

  “The case has nothing to do with you,” DeRicci said. “I’m merely looking for your expertise.”

  Of course, she had thought that the case had had nothing to do with Flint either, and she had been wrong. But she didn’t say that.

  “Expertise in what area?” Paloma hadn’t moved. Those eyes seemed even sharper than they had a moment before.

  “As a Retrieval Artist.”

  Paloma shrugged. “I cannot help you. I can’t talk about my former work. I keep confidentiality.”

  DeRicci was handling this badly. She shook her head. “I’m not here about past cases or anything like that. I want to ask a few questions about how it works being a Retrieval Artist.”

  “You should ask Miles,” Paloma said.

  “I can’t.” DeRicci was still standing in the elevator and it made her feel awkward, like a supplicant who wasn’t being heard. “He’s fled the Moon.”

  “Fled?” Paloma raised her wispy eyebrows. “Miles Flint? I didn’t think he knew that word.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know the word, but he sure acts on it.” DeRicci’s tone surprised even her. She sounded bitter.

  “So this is about Miles,” Paloma said.

  “I guess.” DeRicci shrugged. “More about theory than anything, really.”

  “Theory,” Paloma repeated.

  DeRicci nodded. “You know, theory. Maybe you could explain why a Retrieval Artist might do a certain thing.”