Extremes: A Retrieval Artist Novel

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  “All set,” he said. “Her name is Detective DeRicci. I’ll be right back with your water.”

  Oliviari looked up. A woman’s face hovered near the wall. Holographic projection. It looked odd.

  This was the woman Oliviari had seen hours ago stepping through the bleachers. She looked competent, and she was the first person that Oliviari had seen in the past hour who didn’t look scared.

  “I thought I was supposed to talk to a Mikhail Tokagawa,” the woman said.

  “You’re better off talking to me.” Oliviari forced herself to focus. “You’re the detective in charge?”

  “Noelle DeRicci. But I have no idea who you are.”

  The tech came through the door, handed Oliviari a large bottle of miracle water, and then left, pulling the door closed behind him. She twisted off the cap.

  “You wouldn’t know who I am,” Oliviari said. “And that’s part of the reason I’m talking to you.”

  “I don’t have time for riddles,” DeRicci snapped.

  “I’m not going to give you any. I’m going slow because I’m ill. I want to get this right, because I might not get another chance.”

  Oliviari had to be clear about that. She needed to let Detective DeRicci know that she would be on her own shortly. If this fuzziness continued to take Oliviari’s brain, it wouldn’t matter whether she stayed conscious or not. She wouldn’t be able to answer questions in any meaningful way.

  “All right,” DeRicci said. “You’re the one who says this is the Tey virus, right?”

  “Actually,” Oliviari said. “Dr. Tokagawa agrees.”

  She took a swig from the miracle water. It was cool and tasted faintly of strawberries.

  “My name is Miriam Oliviari. I’ve been Tracking Frieda Tey for years. I have followed more leads than you can imagine, and I made a serious mistake when I came to Armstrong.”

  DeRicci didn’t move. It almost seemed like the holographic projection of her head was fake—something inserted into the room to make it seem like DeRicci was listening when she really wasn’t.

  “I didn’t register with the police,” Oliviari said. “I’m sure you’ll want to investigate me and my background. Go ahead. You can check my DNA to make sure I am who I say I am. But do all this after you fight this virus.”

  “We’ve already quarantined the area,” DeRicci said. “I’m not sure what else we can do.”

  “I am,” Oliviari said. “I’ve already told Dr. Tokagawa and his assistants. He’s taking care of it. You can make sure none of your people leave.”

  “I’ve already done that,” DeRicci said.

  “And that no one else comes in here.” Oliviari blinked. “No one has left since they arrived, have they?”

  “My assistant is checking on that.” DeRicci moved her head as if she were looking at someone. Oliviari had a hunch DeRicci just used that moment to make the assignment.

  “Good,” Oliviari said. “Let me give you what I know as quickly as I can because you need to be in contact with your headquarters.”

  DeRicci frowned. Oliviari felt like she had the detective’s full attention, and she was grateful for that.

  “I was hired by the families of Tey’s victims,” Oliviari said. “They’re the reason we can even hope to save anyone here. They badgered decontamination companies to make sure their units could zap the Tey virus, even though the virus has never spontaneously appeared before today—”

  “Do you think it was spontaneous?” DeRicci asked.

  “No,” Oliviari said, “and I’ll get to that. But let me tell you this first. The families were afraid she’d strike again. They thought she was crazy—and you have to understand, there’s some debate about that. Some people think Tey’s a reputable scientist who became a scapegoat for an experiment that went awry. But it’s not that simple—nothing is—and you have to know this.”

  “Know what?” DeRicci sounded impatient.

  Oliviari wiped more sweat from her forehead, then made herself take a long drink from the miracle water. The dizziness was coming back.

  “Frieda Tey is a spectacular scientist,” Oliviari said. “All of her experiments before this, all of her work, has been to show that humans haven’t reached their full potential, and that we must. In this alien-infested universe, she believes the only way we’ll survive as a species is to grow, to change, to use the best of ourselves.”

  “I’ve heard this before from a whole lot of other people who haven’t murdered anyone,” DeRicci said.

  “Exactly. It’s not new,” Oliviari said. “What is new—and what Tey was trying to do—is that she felt people could be forced to develop. She thought if she could isolate whatever it is that makes some people react better under severe stress, then she could teach all of us to do it.”

  “Do what?” DeRicci asked.

  “How to step beyond our limitations.” Oliviari made herself drink again. The water was nearly gone. She had no idea she’d had that much. “She had two theories on this. The first was that we learned how to become better, how to tap all of our potential. The other was that it was biological, that some people were able to do better in stress than others, and if we could isolate what caused it, we might be able to enhance the entire population, so that we’ll all be superhuman.”

  “She used that word?” DeRicci asked.

  “No, it’s mine.” Oliviari shook her head. “It’s the best shorthand I know, even with the negative connotations.”

  “This is background and it’s not important,” DeRicci said. “I don’t care why she did it. I just care that she’s done it, and that now her damn virus is loose in my city.”

  “It is?”

  “It will be if we’re not careful.” DeRicci seemed to cover quickly enough, but her eyes moved sideways. She was lying. There were traces of the virus in Armstrong then, and that was very, very bad news.

  “We might be too late then,” Oliviari muttered.

  “What?” DeRicci asked.

  “If it’s loose in Armstrong.”

  “It’s only loose here,” DeRicci said. “And I think we’ve got it contained.”

  “Okay,” Oliviari said, even though she wasn’t reassured. There was just nothing she could do about it. Not now, not in this condition.

  Damn Tey, anyhow. What made her snap at this point, when Oliviari had been so close?

  “You thought it was important I know this,” DeRicci said. “Why?”

  “Oh.” Focus. Oliviari really had to focus. “Because I think Tey’s using Armstrong as her next experiment. A greater, larger site. The dome itself, with millions of people instead of hundreds.”

  “But she can’t study us,” DeRicci said. “There’s no place that she could watch the experiment unfold.”

  “She doesn’t have to watch it from here,” Oliviari said. “This isn’t an isolated place. We have media here, and we’ll be keeping records of everything. If she’s right, then a few people would survive even if we don’t contain all of this. They would have been witnesses to it too.”

  Oliviari finished the water. She was having trouble catching her breath.

  “If that’s the case,” DeRicci said, “and she gets what she wants, then what? What does it mean? Nothing. She will have murdered people to get the results, and everyone’ll discount them.”

  “That’s the beauty of her original plan,” Oliviari said. “She wouldn’t have been discounted. None of it would. No one would have known that Frieda Tey was connected to all of this—and if they figured out that she was Jane Zweig, well then, we already have it on record from your own department that Zweig or Tey or whatever you want to call her died before the virus outbreak started. She guaranteed that there’d be media coverage by having the death—a prominent death—occur at the marathon.”

  Oliviari wheezed, coughed, and held up a hand. DeRicci looked concerned. Oliviari made herself take shallow breaths. She had to finish this, had to get everything she knew to DeRicci before the virus took over.


  “In other words,” Oliviari said, “she wouldn’t benefit from it—at least in the eyes of the public and the other scientists. She would have Disappeared again, and this time no one would search for her. She would have continued writing her articles all under pen names. She probably would have established herself as a scientist under a new name, and gained respectability.”

  “I still don’t see how,” DeRicci said. “It seems like some sick person’s wet dream to me.”

  Oliviari shook her head, and then wished she hadn’t. “No, that’s the ingenious part. Everyone would have looked at this as a disaster. Armstrong Dome taken out by a virus that no one expected. And science moves forward from disasters because no one wants the scenario to repeat. Human relations often move forward too. So if some unknown scientist could prove—using the Armstrong Disaster—that human beings could avoid similar things, even maybe gain domination on the interstellar stage, by doing whatever it is Tey would believe she learned from the disaster, then we’d do it. We always do. We never want disasters to repeat themselves.”

  DeRicci stared at her. It was an eerie effect, the clear gaze of those eyes from the disembodied head. Oliviari knew she was having this reaction, in part, because she wasn’t feeling well, but she also had the sense that DeRicci was judging her in lieu of Tey. That by espousing Tey’s views, Oliviari had put herself in the same category.

  “So,” DeRicci said after a moment, “all of this investigation, all of this mess, is a prelude to a big-scale experiment. She killed Eve Mayoux so that she’d have a body out there, so that we’d think that Zweig was dead, so that she’d Disappear. Son of a bitch.”

  Oliviari had to force herself to concentrate. “Eve Mayoux? Did you say Eve Mayoux? Duncan Mayoux’s sister?”

  “Yeah.” DeRicci frowned. “You know her?”

  “She’s one of the people who hired me. I work for her. I work for the families of the victims. I have from the start.” Oliviari put a hand to her forehead. She felt as if she were on fire. “Eve must have seen her, must have recognized her. That’s why this year. That’s why Tey was so clumsy that we caught her. I’ll bet if Tey had more time to plan, we would never have known.”

  “You were close to her, though,” DeRicci said. “You’re at the marathon.”

  Oliviari nodded. But she wondered. Were those intuitive leaps she credited herself with actually hers? Or were they small clues, very tiny clues, that Tey had left for her, getting her here to get her out of the way as well?

  She would never know.

  “You’ve got to find her,” Oliviari said. “If this doesn’t work, she’ll try again. She’s obsessed with this. If you look at her records at Extreme, you’ll see that she would routinely send people places they weren’t qualified to go. She was trying to test on a small scale. That’s one of the things that brought me here, one of the things that made me think Jane Zweig might be Frieda Tey. If she can’t do it on a large scale again, she’ll continue on a small scale.”

  “You’ve studied her,” DeRicci said. “Where would she go?”

  “She’s leaving the Moon,” Oliviari said. “She’ll go as far away as she can, as quickly as she can. We might even have missed her. I’m sure that was part of the plan. Keep us busy so that we can’t trace her if we get lucky and figure everything out.”

  “What a nightmare,” DeRicci said.

  “Oh, yeah.” Oliviari took a shallow breath. She resisted the urge to cough, not wanting to alarm the detective. “And if we didn’t contain this virus like we think we have, then this nightmare has just begun.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  FLINT NEVER ORDERED DINNER IN. He always saw it as a lapse of security, one more way someone could figure out his systems and get to him. He also tried to vary his routines—which was even more difficult, given the sameness of his life when he was not working a case.

  He had been tempted to break his own rule this time, and order in a sandwich, but he didn’t. He ordered one through his links, and picked it up himself. He needed the chance to move around anyway. He was getting restless in his tiny office, even though he was working hard.

  The evening was a pleasant one. Whoever had set Twilight in the filters had made the dome a very pleasant sienna which, combined with the rays of the sun, made the entire area look like it had been painted with a light brown brush.

  It added class to the dilapidated buildings, making them seem almost new. Flint carried the sandwich in the returnable plastic container and enjoyed the scenery, something that didn’t happen much to him in this neighborhood.

  He had nearly reached his building when his personal link sprang to life. DeRicci’s message bounced back to him, unread, the emergency whistle blaring as if he had sent the message at a high priority to himself.

  Anger flared through him. She had promised him she would check the messages. Then he realized that DeRicci usually kept her promises. Something had happened to divert her attention, something that caused her to use her links and, in typical DeRicci fashion, clear out the messages that clogged them before she opened anything.

  He tried to send the message back, but the links were blocked again. He ran the rest of the way to his office, double-checked as he always did to see if anyone was watching him before he opened the door, and then, feeling secure enough, went inside.

  He closed the door, reset the security, and hurried to his desk, setting the sandwich container on a corner as he slid into his chair. He punched up the main screen and logged in to one of the media areas, hoping to catch a news cycle.

  Instead, he got Earth’s weather. He did a search for current marathon news, and found nothing except the rerun of Gumiela’s press conference from earlier in the day.

  They weren’t letting anything out. Or maybe something had happened with DeRicci.

  Flint grabbed the container, opened it, and removed the sandwich, taking a bite while he searched for news in other venues, hoping to find something on Tey, Zweig, or the marathon.

  Nothing.

  At least the sandwich was good, black beans cooked in some kind of sauce with fresh lettuce and a real tomato, wrapped in a tortilla that, even though it had been made from Moon flour, didn’t taste of cardboard. He chased it down with bottled tea and continued his search, all the while setting the message for DeRicci on automatic—so that it would continue to send to her until she received it.

  Then his screen pinged at him. Flint looked at the small window appearing in the upper left-hand corner. A retinal scan was in progress at the spaceport—and it took him a moment to realize why he was being notified.

  He had left bugs in the Extreme Enterprises system in case someone tried to access the security files. Part of the bug would also show him whenever there was a personal scan, and one was going on right now.

  He punched the keyboard and made the window bigger. The scan came from Extreme’s personal space yacht. Apparently the yacht was tied in with Extreme’s systems. Someone was trying to gain entry to the yacht itself—standing outside the door, and letting the system scan her eyes.

  That someone was Jane Zweig.

  Flint cursed, stood, and knocked over his bottle of tea. It crashed to the floor, spilling the remaining tea on the ancient permaplastic. He didn’t care.

  It was too late. Zweig was going to get out Armstrong.

  Time to use his own connections. He sent a message through his links to Sheila Raye, the chief of the space cops. She was a desk cop, but she used to do fieldwork, and she understood procedures. He used to work for her, and she had always claimed he had made a mistake when he left.

  There was a lot of goodwill between them and he needed every bit of it.

  Her holographic image appeared on his desk, her entire body standing before him, only six centimeters high. “Miles,” she said with a smile. “I—”

  “Sheila, I’m sorry, but I have an emergency.”

  She became all business. “What?”

  “I’ve been working with Detective DeRicci, b
ut I can’t reach her. I wanted her to get some cops to a space yacht to prevent liftoff, but she has her links shut off. The yacht’s being accessed right now.”

  “You’re not with the force any more, Miles.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m calling in every favor I’ve got.”

  “Who’s accessing? Is it being stolen?”

  “No. I’m sending you the specs now.” He pressed a button and they went directly to her. “I need you to stop this woman from leaving the Moon.”

  Raye looked down at an unseen screen, then shook her head. “I wish I could help, Miles, but she owns the yacht, and she’s not a felon. There’s nothing I can do without risking my job—”

  “Risk it,” he said. “She’s a Disappeared and she’s dangerous. If we let her go, then we’ll have a lot to answer for.”

  “Not enough, Miles,” Raye said. “I wish I could help, but I can’t. Besides, it looks like she’s already got clearance.”

  Flint’s system was telling him the same thing. The scan had stopped. Zweig was inside the yacht, and the yacht was powering up.

  Zweig was leaving, and he couldn’t stop her.

  “Can’t you stall? Maybe check her license, anything? Warn her of a threat, make me sound like the bad guy. Have some space cops pull her over for liftoff violations?”

  “Miles—”

  “Harass her for a few minutes,” he said. “Give me time to get there and at least I can tail her until I can reach DeRicci and she can give you proper authorization.”

  “I have no idea how you talk me into these things.” Raye crossed her arms. “Consider it done.”

  And then her image winked out.

  “Sheila, I could kiss you,” he said, even though she couldn’t hear him any longer. He pulled open his desk drawer and removed his laser pistol.

  Getting to the port would be no problem, but what he would do when he got there would. Patrol ships had souped up engines—they could catch anything except the latest yacht. His old cruiser couldn’t get him past a thirty-year-old junker, and he had just used up a lifetime’s worth of favors with Sheila Raye.