Extremes: A Retrieval Artist Novel

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  Even if he hadn’t killed her, he had probably blinded her, and he would be able to drag her to the brig.

  She didn’t come into the corridor after him. And when he could move again, the pain so severe that the entire right side of his body throbbed, he peered into the cockpit.

  Frieda Tey lay on her back, arms above her head, just like the space cop she had killed earlier that day. Her face was a mass of burns, her hair covered with blood.

  No one could live through that. Not even a woman who believed herself superhuman.

  He turned away and slid down the wall, closing his eyes, trying to ignore the odd feeling of regret that filled him. She had been smart and attractive and charming, and despite everything, he’d liked the challenge she’d presented.

  That moment when he pulled the trigger, he’d actually felt proud of himself. He’d found the one hole she’d missed.

  She had cared about her own survival—and that gave him checkmate. A player had to have something to protect in order to have something to lose.

  Flint had had nothing to lose—and she didn’t know that because she hadn’t known him.

  She hadn’t known that he didn’t care if he survived.

  FORTY-SIX

  IT FELT LIKE DERICCI had been in isolation for a year, but she’d been in the building the city had set aside for only a night. The clothing she had been given was too big, but comfortable. She hadn’t taken a cot, preferring to sit against the wall and doze.

  If she slept too deeply, she saw too many faces, faces she wasn’t sure had survived. The health officials had taken her handheld away from, her along with her clothing, so she didn’t have the case to preoccupy her, and she was apparently being kept in a different part of the building from Landres and van der Ketting.

  She did see Coburn however, and he looked like death himself. His eyes were bloodshot, his nose was red, and his cheeks were chapped.

  The man had been crying.

  He sat down next to her and hadn’t said anything for a very long time. When he did speak, it had been so softly that she wasn’t sure for a moment if she’d heard him.

  “Is it true?” he asked. “Jane did all this?”

  “Yeah,” DeRicci had said.

  “Jane? My business partner Jane?”

  His former lover Jane. The woman he had described as being a little cold, impossible to get to on a deep level, a woman, DeRicci was beginning to believe, he had really loved.

  “Yeah,” DeRicci said.

  Coburn had shaken his head, and stayed silent for the better part of an hour. DeRicci had almost forgotten he was there when he spoke again.

  “When you start to set up a case against her,” he had said, “you contact me. There were accidents, so many accidents, at Extreme Enterprises. I always thought it was a combination of her greed and inexperience. But now I’m beginning to think she did them deliberately.”

  DeRicci knew that they had been deliberate even without checking into them. But she didn’t say anything. She didn’t dare. Even though she believed Coburn innocent of all of this, she would still have to investigate him.

  She would have to investigate everyone who came into contact with Jane Zweig, and determine whether they were guilty or not. If DeRicci did the investigation right, she would be able to clear their names. The last thing she wanted was for Frieda Tey to blame someone else for her crimes.

  During one of her dozes, Coburn had moved away from her. Maybe he couldn’t stand to remain there, or maybe she had answered enough of his questions.

  All she knew was that when one of the health team tapped her on the shoulder and told her she was free to go, she didn’t see Coburn anywhere around.

  It took DeRicci until she reached the front door of the building to realize that “free to go” meant that she was no longer infected with the virus. She had survived it—when so many others hadn’t.

  She was so busy trying to deal with her mixture of elation and guilt that she didn’t even notice Andrea Gumiela waiting on the building steps. There were no reporters around, and no volunteers either. The street was eerily empty, probably blocked off by uniforms and barricades.

  “Noelle,” Gumiela said.

  DeRicci looked at her, and wondered what the woman wanted now. Probably to chastise her for all the deaths, for not seeing this sooner, for not understanding the crisis from the moment she got there.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to take you back to the precinct.”

  DeRicci sighed. She didn’t have the energy to protest. Besides, her air car was behind the wall, near the place where the bleachers had once been.

  “Okay,” DeRicci said.

  They walked down the stairs together.

  “I wanted to warn you before we got there that you’re going to be getting quite a reception,” Gumiela said.

  DeRicci cringed. Here it came.

  “The virus got contained. The case you mentioned out here was isolated and a different version of the virus. No one else got it. By closing down the marathon as fast as you did, you prevented a large scale disaster. The entire city thinks you’re a hero.”

  Gumiela had stopped on the sidewalk. She was looking at DeRicci, and there was no contempt on her face. She was being completely sincere.

  “I’m no hero,” DeRicci said. “The heroes all died.”

  Gumiela didn’t say anything for a moment, but she didn’t move either. Finally, she put a hand on DeRicci’s shoulder. DeRicci suspected Gumiela was trying to comfort her.

  It felt odd. Gumiela wasn’t the comforting type.

  “You’re going to get a promotion, extra benefits, your long-overdue vacation. And you’re probably going to get a lot more attention than you’re used to.” Gumiela’s hand tightened on her shoulder, and then let go. “I know you’re exhausted, but you did a good job. The team at the unit will help you through this. We’re damn proud of you, Noelle.”

  DeRicci frowned. She had stepped into an alternate universe. She was sure of it. Somewhere, everything had shifted, and she wasn’t sure where.

  “I didn’t do anything,” she said.

  Gumiela gave her a gentle smile. “Yes, you did, Noelle. You did more than you’ll ever know.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  THREE DAYS LATER, Flint sat in his office, reconstructing old files. He had managed to avoid the media circus with help, in part, from the police department. They didn’t want anyone to know that a civilian, acting on his own, had killed Frieda Tey. And he didn’t want his name bandied about in the press. His actions on that ship had made him seem more like a Tracker than a Retrieval Artist.

  They’d done the DNA testing and confirmed that indeed the woman who died had been Frieda Tey. But they were still grappling with how to present her death to the media. The police were afraid that she would become a martyr to people who held the same beliefs, and were also afraid that people who hated Frieda Tey would feel that death was too easy for her, that she deserved a greater punishment.

  DeRicci had said as much to Flint, had implied, actually, that perhaps he had done the wrong thing in killing Tey. He had told DeRicci that he hadn’t had any other choice, and he knew, deep down, that he was telling the truth.

  He’d been thinking about it ever since he’d come back to Armstrong. If he had let Tey live, she might have found another way off that ship. She might have killed him, attacked the space cops, and taken their vessel.

  Then she might have tried the same drifting-in-space technique she’d used to snare him, to snare some other ship. That official police logo on the side of the traffic ship would make law-abiding pilots feel secure in approaching the ship to see what the trouble was.

  The police had run the ship’s logs. Tey had apparently known she was being followed. It had taken only a few shots to destroy the first ship and disable the second. Then she came aboard the ship, surprising the crew and killing them.

  Apparently she had set a remote-controlled self-destruct for the Extreme Ente
rprises yacht. Once she had secured the traffic ship, she had blown her own ship up, baiting the trap.

  Flint, of course, had fallen right into it.

  He had fallen into a lot of traps lately, and he finally understood Paloma’s warning about the slow periods on his job. It led to bad decision-making.

  Wagner had hired Flint in good faith—Flint had actually been able to check that. Wagner had liked Rabinowitz and had worried about his death.

  But Ignatius Wagner really was the lesser brother in Wagner, Stuart and Xendor. He hadn’t known anything that his older brother had known. From the files that Flint had gathered, Justinian had more than an inkling that Frieda Tey was on the Moon. He might even have known who she was.

  It was clear that Tey’s father had known who she was, and that was why he had revised his will. The question was why Tey hadn’t taken the money when he died. Maybe she hadn’t wanted her name cleared. Or maybe she thought the Armstrong “experiment” would clear it for her.

  Whatever the reason, it had died with her.

  So had a lot of other things, and Flint was content to let them. Only one thing nagged at him: a single word uttered in the middle of his fight with Tey.

  Paloma.

  He had justified it during the fight, thinking Tey had looked up the registration on the Dove, but she hadn’t. There was no record of it on the traffic ship.

  She had recognized the Dove—or at least the yacht’s name—and she had been surprised when the person who had confronted her had been Flint and not Paloma.

  He’d asked Paloma about it when he sent her the credits to pay her for the loss of her ship. She hadn’t wanted to meet face-to-face.

  She had denied ever knowing Frieda Tey or Jane Zweig. Paloma had said that she had no idea why the woman had spoken her name.

  But Flint had a guess, and it had taken him days of reconstructing Paloma’s files to find out that he was right.

  Paloma had been working for Wagner, Stuart and Xendor when Frieda Tey’s father devised his first will. Apparently, Old Man Wagner had sent Paloma in search of Frieda Tey, and Paloma had found her.

  But Paloma hadn’t told WSX that. She hadn’t told anyone. She had believed Tey, and Tey’s account of that first experiment as an accident gone bad. Paloma had actually believed Tey to be a scapegoat, and, good Retrieval Artist that she was, she had let Tey continue in her new life.

  In her life on Armstrong.

  Experimenting with the lives of extreme athletes—and finally, with the entire city itself.

  The knowledge disturbed Flint more than he could admit. He found himself pacing the office, trying to figure out what it all meant.

  All he knew was that what looked to be the right thing at the moment might not be the right thing in hindsight.

  And he wasn’t sure how that made him feel.

  But he did know he was not going to go to Paloma for advice any more. He finally understood his own job. He was going to do it his way from now on.

  And he would live with the consequences.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  USA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHOR Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.

  Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award.

  She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.

  Her popular weekly blog on the changes in publishing has become an industry must-read.

  She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own.

  To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.