Extremes: A Retrieval Artist Novel

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  He had a feeling she didn’t have to, and that feeling bothered him.

  Still, he stopped in front of the main door, feeling like he was breaking into someone else’s ship. His fingers shook as he keyed in the code—Paloma had a series of locks, each more sophisticated the deeper into the ship he went—and the main door slid upward without a sound.

  Nice.

  The airlock was small and efficient. Flint waited until the main door eased down before speaking the day’s code into the audio pad. That opened the first door into the ship. He took a step farther, and pressed his finger on the plate above the knob on the second door. It rose as his fingerprint registered.

  Then he stepped inside.

  Lights came on as he moved and he felt the rush of air as the environmental systems turned on high. He was in a corridor that led to the pilot’s area directly in front of him. To his right were passenger quarters and the recreation area, such as it was in a ship this small.

  He hurried down the hall into the cockpit. The yacht was set up for a one-, two-, or three-person team. He placed his palm on the main screen, and the yacht powered on around him.

  He strapped in, and linked up with space traffic control.

  “This is the Dove,” he said. “I have special permission from Sheila Raye to depart the Port of Armstrong. I need emergency clearance. Please open the dome hatch above me as soon as possible.”

  “Acknowledged.” The response was automated, which didn’t reassure him, but the ship informed him that the hatch was opening over their dock.

  He glanced at the controls, saw that they were standard, and looked for any special features. With the flick of a finger, he turned on audio information and instructed the ship to tell him its specs, including any changes from regulation.

  As the computerized voice droned on, he concentrated on piloting the ship upward, clearing the dock, and heading into Moon Space.

  Once he’d been one of the best pilots in Traffic. He kept his skills up weekly, just like he exercised, never knowing when he would need to use them.

  He would need them now.

  Sheila Raye had given him the coordinates for Extreme Enterprises’ yacht. Flint plugged them into the navigation system, and hoped he would at least have a chance of catching up to Frieda Tey.

  Although he doubted it. She had too much of a head start.

  But he had to try.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  DERICCI LET HERSELF OUT of the bungalow. There were no unis guarding the door. The anteroom, which had been so crowded not an hour before, was completely empty.

  She stepped out to find herself in a new world. People were scurrying back and forth. Volunteers were taking down the bleachers, and other people—not wearing the bright T-shirts of the marathon—were putting up plastic barriers that the public events often used to corral crowds down a particular walkway.

  An old dome wall had been lowered between the apartment buildings across the street and the main thoroughfare four blocks away. She hadn’t seen an old dome wall come down in years, but it made sense.

  Whenever Armstrong made its dome bigger—which seemed to happen once a decade—the city kept the old walls. After the expansion was finished, the dome engineers replaced the old walls with retractable ones, so that the dome could be sectioned off in times of emergency.

  Like now.

  DeRicci stared at the old wall, and shook her head. She had asked the Tracker Oliviari if the virus had been airborne, and Oliviari had said no.

  But DeRicci had forgotten to ask an equally important question—whether or not the virus had an airborne stage. If the virus did have an airborne stage—and had hit it—then Armstrong was in serious trouble. No lowered plastic wall would help.

  This part of the dome was on its own now, and it made DeRicci nervous. The city would do anything to protect the rest of the dome. The reason the city isolated this section was simple: if the virus was here and incurable, the city would solve the problem in a ruthless way.

  They’d use the air.

  The city could pump anything through the air filtration system. This portion of the dome had been separated out of Armstrong’s air-circulation system when that wall came down, just like the people had. If the city wanted to, they could put in a toxic gas or remove the air altogether. Or the dome engineers could open one of the dome panels to Outside.

  Even the most sophisticated environmental suit—at least of human design—could protect a person for only so long. Eventually it would fail. People in this little sliver of dome would die a lingering death.

  DeRicci shuddered and watched the volunteers scurry around her. On the other side of the wall, air trucks were pulling up with equipment on their flatbeds. Pieces of the decon units.

  She swore softly. She’d had no idea that the units would have to be assembled. But it made sense. How else would they travel through some of Armstrong’s narrow streets?

  Time, time, and more time. From the look of that Tracker, some of the people in the medical tent didn’t have time.

  DeRicci turned her back on the wall and walked toward the center of the activity. Of course Chaiken was there, directing people as if he had expected his day to be about surviving an epidemic instead of running a race.

  “Your people are over there,” he said, waving a hand toward a small dressing area that some of the runners had used to put on their environmental suits.

  DeRicci glanced over, saw Landres talking to a handful of people. Van der Ketting stood near him, clutching a handheld.

  “You haven’t told everyone what’s going on yet, have you?” she asked.

  “Well, a lot of them have figured it out.” Chaiken pointed to one of the volunteers. “You! We need help on that panel. Move, and quickly. We have to get these set up before we can use the units.”

  DeRicci hadn’t had any respect for him before, but she did now. She had worried that she would have to do this, but Chaiken already had it under control.

  And she was relieved. He clearly had a lot more experience with organizing volunteers than she ever would.

  “Figured it out how?” she asked.

  “I guess it’s a war zone in the medical tent.” He stopped, put his hands on his hips, and shook his head. “We do this to celebrate life, Detective. The marathon started as a challenge, kind of a way to spit in the face of the gods, you know. Like we’re human and we can conquer anything, any damn thing you put in front of us. Each person who runs this race, they come out of it saying that it’s life-changing, that they realize if they can run in an environmental suit, their oxygen regulated, only a thin wall of reinforced fabric between them and death, then they can do anything.”

  His voice was shaking, but his eyes were dry. DeRicci watched him. He looked away from her, snapped his fingers at two other volunteers, and directed them toward another sheet of plastic. It took DeRicci a moment to realize the plastic now being set up as walls had once formed the bleachers.

  “Jane….” His voice broke. He cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and started again. “Jane Zweig seemed to understand that. I’d have conversations with her about the importance of showing people what they could do, how essential strength was to living. I thought she agreed with me, and instead she used me. Why would she do that?”

  DeRicci bit her lower lip, then shook her head. She knew some of the answers—the publicity that Zweig wanted so that people believed she was dead—and a few other things, but DeRicci hadn’t thought about the personal side, the extreme side.

  She remembered what Oliviari had told her, about the theories that Tey had regarding human potential.

  Tey had chosen the marathon not just because it was the largest tourist event in Armstrong, but also because of the nature of its participants. She must have figured that if anyone would rise above the impossible problem she had set up for Armstrong dome, it would be the people involved with the Moon Marathon.

  And here they were, setting up paths in an orderly fashion, not ri
oting, not panicking, not trying to break into Armstrong proper, even though they had guessed, as Chaiken said.

  They were working together to solve this the best they could.

  DeRicci didn’t know how to tell him that. She didn’t know how to say that in some twisted way, Tey’s choice of the Moon Marathon was a show of faith in the event Chaiken promoted.

  So DeRicci patted his arm, and shook her head. “She wasn’t who anyone believed she was. Everything she did was a lie.”

  He waved a hand at a volunteer who nearly toppled her section of the wall. Chaiken ran over to help.

  DeRicci remained where she was. She wondered how Chaiken would feel when he learned that Jane Zweig was still alive. DeRicci wasn’t going to tell him now, since that would simply distract him.

  He had to concentrate on survival.

  They all did.

  It was the only way to defeat Frieda Tey.

  THIRTY-NINE

  FLINT WAS WELL OUTSIDE of Moon Space heading toward Mars when he saw the first pieces of debris. Bits of metal too small to be considered chunks, whirling toward him at a speed that suggested they were part of a recent explosion.

  The yacht had a reinforced hull, so small items, no matter how fast they were coming, couldn’t penetrate. He would have to watch for bigger pieces, though, and he set the sensors on extra-wide scan, so that he could steer around any danger.

  He tried not to think about what the tiny pieces of metal could mean.

  The yacht itself had been a pleasant surprise. In addition to the reinforced hull, it had unprecedented speed. Even the traffic ships he’d used when he was a space cop hadn’t had engines this refined.

  He had made excellent distance in a record amount of time. And he stayed on the updated coordinates that Raye had sent him every fifteen minutes. She hadn’t sent him anything for quite a while, which, he tried to reassure himself, didn’t mean anything.

  If the space cops were involved in an arrest, they weren’t going to update their position. Even if they were involved in some kind of pursuit and thought they were undetected, they wouldn’t risk sending the coordinates back to the Moon so that Raye could relay them to Flint. The last thing anyone wanted would be for Tey to scope them out.

  Flint wasn’t actually sure what he would be doing when he caught up to the space cops and Tey. Maybe acting as some kind of backup. The one thing Paloma’s yacht lacked were external weapons, and he couldn’t get the system to confess to any, either.

  He knew some had to be hidden somewhere. Paloma was a cautious woman. With the amount of money she’d spent to reinforce the hull and to build up the engines, she would have thrown in some more credits to put in some weapons systems.

  But because of that caution, and because Retrieval Artists worked alone, she probably didn’t want someone to be able to access the weapons easily. Even though Flint had been tinkering with the ship’s computers since he left the Moon, he couldn’t find anything.

  He was running a systems diagnostic, searching for unusual power diversions or parts of the ship that seemed to have no function. But he was having no luck.

  The yacht also lacked some defensive items built into the traffic ships. There were no external lasers, designed to cut through grapplers or tunnels sent from other ships trying to illegally board. There were no double airlocks, and no small, enclosed space that could be used as a brig. He even doubted that handcuffing someone to a seat would be easy in this yacht.

  His sensors picked up more debris, clouds of it coming his way. He steered around it and turned on the viewscreen so that he could see what he was facing.

  Magnified at one-thousand percent that the image merely looked like a smudge against the blackness of space. A lot of debris by human terms, but in space, it didn’t count as much more than a speck.

  Still, he had the ship analyze the debris heading toward him. It was all man-made. Bits of reinforced plastic, more metal, and—alarmingly—bone.

  He suspected that if he let the analysis continue, there’d be more than bone in the mix. Probably blood and water and flesh.

  He shuddered. Something had happened out here, and had happened recently, but he had no idea what. He didn’t even know if it was related to his search.

  But Flint didn’t like the coincidence.

  If this debris was related to his case, he hoped he was looking at the remains of the Extreme Enterprises yacht. That would make everything easier for all of them.

  But he would have to do something if it wasn’t. That meant Frieda Tey saw the space cops, and destroyed their ships.

  He couldn’t go into the area like a conquering hero if he had no weapons at all except his laser pistol. He would need to let Armstrong Dome know what he’d found, and he’d have to stall Tey somehow.

  He hadn’t realized that in taking Paloma’s ship, he would come out here essentially blind and toothless. He would have gone with a traffic ship if he’d known.

  But then, of course, he wouldn’t have been here yet—wouldn’t have seen the debris, wouldn’t be doing all this speculation. And he would be hampered by space cops who lacked the experience he had, who would question his every move because they had the right to, because they would have been the ones in charge.

  The debris field had grown. It was big enough to be a good sized ship, and the parts—what parts he could see on his screen—were black, not silver like traffic ships.

  Maybe this was unrelated. Maybe he was thinking all this through for nothing. Maybe he really had lost their trail, and he was just out here on his own.

  If that was the case, then he hoped the traffic cops stayed with her. The last thing he wanted was for Tey to escape.

  The yacht eased around the debris field, and the perimeter scanner let him know that there were ships ahead. Flint let out a small breath. He put the images on-screen, but didn’t get more than two blips, drifting apart. They were both silver—that much he could tell—and they were tiny.

  He had the screen increase magnitude by a hundred percent. He still couldn’t see much. Then he increased magnitude again.

  The ships definitely were drifting, and he recognized their configuration. Their long, pointed shapes would have made them Moon Traffic issue even if the police logos on the side hadn’t identified them that way.

  One of the ships had scorch marks along its entire hull. The other had a hole blasted through the center of it. No one could have survived that, not with the design of the ship and the obvious destructive power of whatever had made that shot.

  He had his yacht continue to scan for other ships. The powerful sensors Paloma had upgraded to found nothing in the immediate vicinity.

  The two ships that had followed Tey were disabled or destroyed, and there was enough debris for a third ship. Apparently the Extreme Enterprises yacht had been destroyed.

  Or that would have been what he thought if he were still a space cop, unfamiliar with this case. But Tey was cunning. She might have had a partner, someone who would pick up her escape pod after this fight. Or maybe someone who had been waiting out here, attacking the police ships that were following her, and then destroying the Extreme Enterprises yacht so that everyone would think—yet again—that Frieda Tey had died.

  Was she that smart? Had she made that many contingency plans? Had she really believed that the police would have followed her this far, while dealing with an epidemic and a crisis inside of Armstrong?

  Flint set up his scan to search for an escape pod hiding in the debris field, and found nothing. He wasn’t just searching for Tey. He was searching for survivors. Then he widened the search looking for a pod drifting away from these vessels, and still found nothing.

  Flint sent his coordinates back to Armstrong, letting them know one ship had been destroyed and another disabled, and asking for backup out here. He sent the images, scrambled, so that Armstrong would realize he was not bluffing, that his word could be trusted, even though he was no longer on the force.

  Raye would
help him. Raye would help them.

  Flint scanned the intact ship. He couldn’t tell much. Police vessels were set up so that whatever was going on inside them remained hidden from criminals. The technology that made Paloma’s yacht state-of-the-art also protected the traffic ships from the prying eyes of others.

  The City of Armstrong insisted on that, and did upgrades every year. Apparently the upgrades had been effective.

  What he learned was small: the engines had been disabled, and the rest of the ship’s systems were intact. He could be certain about the engines because he knew the design of the ship, and he saw the damage where the engines had been. And he had gotten a glimpse of the cockpit as the ship slowly revolved, and noted that the main interior lights were on. If the ship’s atmosphere had been compromised or its environmental systems had failed, the lighting would have changed from bright white to a pinkish red.

  The system had been designed so that other space cops could know when their companions were in trouble, even if they couldn’t scan inside the hull.

  But the other extras on Paloma’s yacht—the ability to scan for life signs—couldn’t penetrate the reinforcements on the hull. If anyone was alive in there, Flint couldn’t tell it from here.

  He contacted the ship, sending a standard police emergency message and asking for a reply. He was being extremely cautious, he knew, but the times demanded that kind of caution. If some other ship were listening in from any distance, they would think that more of the space traffic fleet had arrived. They would think twice about returning here.

  Anyone close by, of course, would see the Dove, and know that there was no fleet. But they would assume that there were traffic cops aboard this ship as well, making it tough to tangle with.

  He only hoped they didn’t scan for weapons.

  He sent his message several times and got no response. That bothered him. He was no longer a space traffic cop, but he knew the procedures. If his partners were down or disabled, and help was on the way, he was to secure the scene as best he could.