Extremes: A Retrieval Artist Novel

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  Score another point for van der Ketting. DeRicci almost smiled at him.

  “If the killer did know,” she said, “then we have to find out who has access to these cameras, and who knew where they were placed.”

  “And whether they’re moved from year to year.”

  “I would assume that they’d have to be,” DeRicci said. “No one would leave valuable equipment out there.”

  “It’s not going to get stolen,” van der Ketting said.

  DeRicci suppressed a sigh. He had come so far, only to forget about the Outside again.

  “Of course not,” she said. “But it might get hit with space debris. Lots of stuff comes down every year. I’d assume that any equipment left out there would have to be really hardy or really cheap. And this doesn’t look cheap.”

  “I’ll check on it.” Van der Ketting’s tone seemed muted, but the excitement lingered.

  DeRicci would still have to supervise him, but perhaps not as much as she had worried about. “Let’s watch this.”

  He started the images, letting them move forward.

  Once Coburn started to appear in the frame, the images looked very similar to Zweig’s. The helmet bobbing up and down, then Coburn appearing beside the boulder large as life.

  Van der Ketting had been right: Coburn’s suit was a reddish gold. It sparkled like the light pink suit did—obviously the same design and make—but Coburn’s seemed sturdier somehow. Or maybe DeRicci thought that only because Coburn hadn’t ended up dead.

  Unlike Zweig, Coburn’s steps slowed as he passed the boulder. The Earth had been reflected in his visor, but that reflection faded as he looked down.

  Zweig’s form, huddled in a fetal position, covered the golden filter. What Coburn saw was very clear. He had studied the body as he pulled up close to it.

  By the time he passed the camera, he had almost slowed to a stop. DeRicci started to turn away, but the image shifted, and suddenly she was seeing Coburn from a different angle—one farther away.

  Coburn stopped near the body, then walked over to it. After a moment, he crouched down, put a gloved hand near the visor—and pulled away as if touching it would hurt him.

  He thrashed, apparently searching for his own panic button. He did seem panicked—just like he had said he had been.

  DeRicci wondered if he was a good actor or if this reaction had been real.

  “Where are we looking at this from?” DeRicci asked.

  Van der Ketting was staring at the images as if he hadn’t seen them before. Maybe he hadn’t. “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t recognize this camera angle from the earlier footage,” DeRicci said.

  “It’s definitely different.” Van der Ketting sounded almost angry. “I searched for more angles, too. I even went to mile six, to see if that camera had picked up something from mile five, but I couldn’t see the body from there. And there was certainly nothing from this camera.”

  DeRicci frowned. “Anything from it on the runners between Zweig and Coburn?”

  “I don’t know,” van der Ketting said. “I only scanned them, waiting until I found Coburn. You said you wanted this in a hurry.”

  She had said that. “Interesting that all of this is missing from the Zweig footage.”

  “Maybe the sensors didn’t pick it up, so they didn’t turn the camera on,” van der Ketting said.

  “Didn’t pick up a woman dying of oxygen deprivation? Are you kidding? All of the sensors should have been on at that point.”

  “But we already determined that she didn’t move,” van der Ketting said.

  “And that determination might be wrong,” DeRicci said. “Whoever killed her had time with the corpse. He might have cleaned off the suit, like you said, and then he might have tried to bust the face plate.”

  “Why wouldn’t he do that first?”

  “I don’t know,” DeRicci said.

  “Do you think he was part of the race?”

  “In one capacity or another,” DeRicci said, “which wouldn’t surprise either of us, I think.”

  Van der Ketting shook his head. “I did check the singlet numbers. There weren’t any extras so far as I could tell.”

  DeRicci nodded.

  “And, according to the organizers, the right number of people have crossed the finish line or are still being tracked on the course.”

  “I didn’t say that the person involved was a runner,” DeRicci said. In fact, her doubts about that had grown. “There’s too many pieces that don’t fit.”

  Van der Ketting watched her as if he were waiting for her to list them. But she’d already told him enough.

  “Watch the rest of this,” she said. “Watch for the smallest detail. And look for stuff from miles four, five, and six from before the race. If the cameras were set up early and the sensors activated, they might have picked up movement from earlier. It would be nice to know what that area looked like before the runners showed up. We might even be able to isolate the newer footprints from the old.”

  “All right.” Van der Ketting was no longer complaining about this part of his job. “You think everything’ll be on these vids?”

  “I think a lot of the answers are here, yes,” DeRicci said. “I’m just not sure yet what they are.”

  “You want to keep this stuff?” Van der Ketting swept a hand toward the image on the wall.

  “No,” DeRicci said. “It’ll be a distraction. And let’s not leave it for the organizers either.”

  Van der Ketting gave her a small smile. Apparently that had been what he was thinking of. He went to the unit, and destroyed his initial download.

  “Do you want me to send anyone in particular for the next interview?” he asked. It almost sounded like he had someone in mind.

  DeRicci shook her head. “I’m going to contact the coroner first. I want to let her know about the faceplate filter. I also want her to check the suit. Maybe that suit has a download as well. It would be worth seeing.”

  “I’ll get it,” van der Ketting said.

  “No,” DeRicci said. “I need you here.”

  She glanced at Gumiela, whose image still talked on the small screen. DeRicci was really glad that the sound was off.

  “You think there’ll be problems at the station?” van der Ketting asked.

  “Yeah.” DeRicci reached inside the wall unit and shut off the small screen. Gumiela disappeared as if she had never been. “I’m sure of it.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Oliviari’s skin was covered with goosebumps. She was freezing now, where fifteen minutes ago she had been so hot she was sweating.

  She tried not to worry about it. Worrying about it would get her nowhere. First she had to see if her concern about Frieda Tey was forcing her to make things up.

  “Let me see what you’ve got so far,” she said to Klein.

  His eyes seemed too large for his face. She had scared him. Or maybe she had just reinforced his fear. After all, he had dealt with the dead man.

  “You want to see the body?”

  Oliviari suppressed a shudder. “Not yet. I want to see the virus.”

  She was glad she masqueraded as a medic. If she had masqueraded as some other kind of volunteer, she wouldn’t have had access. And she was probably the only person here who could identify the Tey virus—except Frieda Tey herself.

  Klein handed Oliviari his handheld: An image of the virus floated on it, a thousand times too large. It looked like the map of a misshapen crater or a puddle of spilled coffee.

  “I’m going to need net access,” she said.

  “The handheld can do it. Go ahead.”

  “Standard access?” she asked, not even waiting for his answer as she touched the surface. The virus disappeared for a moment; then she fingerprinted one of her codes into a locked file, and downloaded the virus information.

  She didn’t want to rely on her memory of this one. She had all of Tey’s research—even the stuff that hadn’t gone public—scattered throughou
t her holdings on the web. Oliviari just had to get the right file.

  Klein watched her face instead of his handheld, and somehow that made her nervous. The little room had grown cold again, the boxes and the furniture making it seem even smaller than it was.

  As Oliviari worked, she wondered if Tey had slipped by her, if she hadn’t been running after all, but working the marathon just like Oliviari had.

  What would have been the point of infecting people out here, though? They could be forbidden access to the dome if the virus was caught in time. And since the virus was so fast-acting, getting caught early was a possibility.

  Unless something happened to prevent that. Perhaps another emergency, something that might actually make people go into the dome instead of remain outside of it.

  Another chill ran through Oliviari, and she suspected it had nothing to do with the cold room. “Why aren’t we allowed back into the dome? It’s not because of this disease, is it?”

  Klein studied her. His look changed with her question, became more measuring somehow. “Didn’t you get the message?”

  She shook her head.

  “There was a murder out on the track.”

  “A murder,” she breathed. So the missing response team had found itself on the scene of a murder. That was why the police had come. “What kind of murder?”

  She was thinking of Tey and the virus, the way that it killed without the killer being anywhere nearby. If Oliviari was right, there had been more than one murder at this marathon today.

  “I don’t know. The Med Team said it was oxygen deprivation, but for some reason the cops think it’s murder.”

  “You don’t think it could be the virus, do you?” Oliviari asked. He had seen the poor man die of this virus. He knew what the corpse looked like, at least inside the proper atmosphere.

  Klein shook his head. “I don’t think a person who died like our runner, even in an environmental suit, would look like someone who died of oxygen deprivation.”

  Neither did Oliviari, but she had to check. She frowned. A murder was just too much of a coincidence.

  “You’re sure it wasn’t an accidental death?”

  “Yes,” Klein said.

  Oliviari finally found her file. She downloaded the images of the virus that she had, the ones the scientists had managed to isolate from various mutations of the disease.

  She compared them to the images Klein had and found exactly what she’d hoped not to: the virus the runner had died of was the final mutated version of Tey’s cold virus.

  Oliviari read the specs she had on the virus: it took four to six hours from exposure to the appearance of symptoms; from the onset of symptoms to death took another four to twelve hours; and the rate of infection, so far as anyone could tell with the limited evidence that they had, was one hundred percent.

  She put a hand over her face. Her skin was clammy. She leaned against the desk and made herself remain calm.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” Klein asked.

  Oliviari nodded. “But not unsolvable.”

  That much they had learned. Because Frieda Tey had escaped, and because so many believed that she had escaped with some of the virus, the decontamination company who had initially underwritten her experiments modified its decon units to destroy the virus in its early stages.

  “Have you ever heard of the Tey virus?” Oliviari was beginning to get a headache, and her throat felt raw. But sometimes her throat felt like that from too much dry air, and she often got headaches when her blood sugar was low.

  She had been infected, but only a few hours ago. She couldn’t have symptoms yet.

  “The Tey virus?” He frowned. “It sounds like something I should know, but I specialize in sports medicine. I’m not a virologist.”

  Very few people were any more, at least in this solar system. The virologists had moved farther out, where viruses were still common and deadly.

  “I’ll tell you about it when we have time,” Oliviari said. “For the moment, though, I need to see the specs on your decon unit.”

  “Why? What is this?” He sounded panicked, and why wouldn’t he? He had just seen a man, ruled healthy enough to run in a difficult marathon, die of a virus that probably hadn’t even shown up on the morning tests.

  “One of the ugliest diseases I’ve ever seen,” Oliviari said. “It destroyed a domed colony about ten years ago.”

  Klein stared at her, as if he couldn’t believe what she had just told him. “I suppose we should isolate the body.”

  Oliviari shook her head. “It’s too late for that.”

  He took a deep breath. He clearly understood that. He also understood its implications—for all of them.

  “All right,” he said. “We need the specs for the decon unit. What else?”

  “Modify your diagnostic wands to recognize the Tey virus.” She handed him the handheld, with her entire file still on it. “We need to know who was infected and when.”

  So that they could triage. Those most likely to survive would get treated first.

  If they could treat anyone. That was what she wasn’t going to tell him, at least not yet. Because if the marathon didn’t have an up-to-date decon unit, and there weren’t any mobile ones in Armstrong that could handle the Tey virus, Oliviari wasn’t sure anyone would survive.

  The problem was that this virus killed quickly. The virus was so rare that most domed colonies didn’t have vaccines available. Decontamination units were supposed to stay up to date, but not all of them were. In fact, a decon unit in a city as old as Armstrong could have been made from five to fifty years ago. If the unit’s owner had failed to keep the updates current, there was a good chance the unit couldn’t handle the Tey virus.

  The medical unit only had a few hours to work with. Once those hours were past, no one who had been infected would live through this.

  No one at all.

  NINETEEN

  “MY GOD,” Flint said. “This is a dome. What the hell are you thinking? If your suspicions are right—”

  “Then we’ll all die, I know.” Wagner walked to the office door and back, as if he couldn’t remain still, not for this part of the conversation. “I’ve been trying to talk to my brother about this.”

  “Talk?” Flint said. “You should have gone to the police.”

  Wagner stopped walking. “And say what, exactly? That I believe we’re all in danger because a Retrieval Artist who didn’t believe in enhancements died from complications of the common cold which, I grant you, is not so common here on Armstrong, but does occur. You think I didn’t look that up too? People do get infected, though God knows how. The decon units are supposed to take care of any diseases that come in through the Port.”

  Flint sighed. Everyone trusted the Port, but it wasn’t the perfect gateway. People slipped past the decon lines all the time. The Port security was too busy with major breaches to do much about it.

  “I can’t even prove he had contact with Frieda Tey, and until I can prove that, I can’t even mention her name in connection with him, not legally or ethically.” Wagner put his hands on his hips, as if he were angry that Flint had queried him. “See why I came to you?”

  “You want me to go to the police?”

  “I want you to back trace what Rabinowitz did, see if he was close to Tey, and if he even saw her. If he did, I want you to go to the police. They’ll believe you.”

  They probably would, not because he had more information than Rabinowitz had, but because Flint had been a cop. He had a lot of credibility because of his past.

  It was a neat plan. So Paloma had been right in part; Wagner had come to Flint because of who Flint was, not just because of his connection to Paloma.

  “How much time do we have?” Flint asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If this is thing is as contagious as you made it sound, then I want to know when someone else is going to get sick and die from it. Do I have hours? Days? Weeks?”

  Wagner
shrugged. “That’s part of the problem. If everything I read about the most virulent strain of the virus is right, we should be dead already.”

  Flint started. Whatever answer he had expected, it hadn’t been that one.

  “Tey’s file said that the most virulent strain killed within a day. But Rabinowitz has been dead for two days, and as far as I can tell, no one else has gotten sick.”

  “So you’re just being alarmist,” Flint said.

  “Cautious,” Wagner said. “If you look at the earlier trials, some of the strains of the virus took weeks to incubate. And Rabinowitz had been calling in sick for a few days.”

  “How long exactly?”

  Wagner took a deep breath. “Four days. I have all his stuff. He didn’t do anything for the last four days of his life except stay home and rest. I’m not even sure he saw a doctor.”

  “But you’re positive about time of death.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Wagner said. “I had my assistant check in on him every day.”

  “Ms. Krouch?”

  “No.” Wagner smiled. “My real assistant. Ms. Krouch is an attorney, just like she told you. She usually handles her own stuff.”

  “Only this time, she handled me.”

  Wagner took a deep breath. “Look, I know this all sounds kind of crazy. I know that I’m probably worrying about nothing. But I can’t rest unless I know that Rabinowitz died of natural causes.”

  That sounded sincere. Flint’s gaze met Wagner’s. The man wasn’t trying to hide the fear that guided him. In fact, he seemed to want Flint to share it.

  “Before I make a preliminary decision on whether or not to take this case,” Flint said, “I have one more question. Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say that Rabinowitz found Tey, and that somehow, contact with her made him ill. What do you want me to do?”

  “I already said. You should tell the police.” Wagner sounded annoyed. “God knows how many people Rabinowitz infected.”

  Including the entire staff at WSX, most likely. And now Flint. But he wasn’t going to let a hypothetical illness get in his way.