The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Her most trusted colleagues weren’t here yet. She had called them back from whatever they did after their work days ended. She hadn’t spoken to them, because she didn’t like dealing with people one on one. She had received acknowledgement on her work handheld (which she hated) that everyone had seen the messages, though, and if someone failed to show up this evening, that someone would be fired, at least if she had something to say about it.

  She needed the people whose work she knew, not these qualified, but unknown to her, members of the evening shift.

  She returned her attention to the screen. Before she got into the details of the changes in the storage room, she needed to review the anacapa data, to see if anyone with clearance had switched out the anacapa in the runabout with yet another anacapa. Such an action would cause the kind of breach she had seen in that room, and there would have been a record of it.

  Every anacapa that the base owned did a security update to the anacapa teams’ systems. The security update—which was in the code used by all anacapas—meant nothing to anyone else. No one knew how it worked except the teams. But updates allowed the teams to know if an anacapa got handled by someone not cleared to touch one or if an anacapa in its protective casing got moved to another part of the base without the teams’ permission.

  Both of those things had happened in the past, and both were firing offenses.

  She half-hoped she would find something in the security data, but so far, she hadn’t. She knew the security team had looked as well. They hadn’t found anything that obvious. Yet.

  Wèi stepped out of the storage room. Bristol stiffened. Watching everyone move through her personal space was slowly making her crazy.

  Only he didn’t move through. He walked over to her. He was holding a screen in his left hand.

  The screen looked blank as it was held away from her, but as he raised it, she realized there was an image on it. Apparently this was one of security’s screens, the kind that only allowed people with clearance to view it.

  He swiped the image, then held it in front of her. It showed her lab, dark and empty. The blue lights from pieces of equipment blinked quietly. The pale, whitish overhead that she kept on low added to the blue tones. The equipment was in dark shadow, the pathways around it lighter.

  Usually she stood in the lab after she had turned everything off for the evening, just soaking in the ambience. The lab almost felt like a live thing to her—a friend, a place of comfort. She liked it in darkness and in full light.

  But she knew, she knew, that this day would change all of that. It would make her feel unsettled here.

  She already did.

  And “unsettled” was the wrong word. She felt unsafe.

  She swallowed, watching the screen. Nothing looked different. It seemed to be the lab at night. She was about to ask what she was supposed to see when a triangular sliver of light indicated that the main door had opened.

  A slight figure blocked the light, and then the door closed. The figure became a shadowy form that worked its way past the screens, almost blending against the back wall.

  Bristol’s breath caught as the figure headed toward the anacapa container. Bristol had one of two metal keys that unlocked the container’s keypad. The head of security had the other key and, she supposed, all the other keys for the anacapa containers scattered throughout the labs in the sector base.

  The head of her division knew that the keypad was a dummy pad. To open the container, the keypad had to be pulled down, and a flat screen in the back took fingerprints, as well as a tap-key. The final step in opening the anacapa container was entering the daily security code in the keypad before it was replaced into its position.

  Bristol’s poor heart continued to pound hard. She hadn’t been this stressed in years, not since one of her team members accidentally broke off part of an ancient anacapa drive, partially activating it. Three days of severe stress and worry that someone would get unintentionally sent into foldspace.

  This incident could evolve into the same kind of thing, particularly if that shadowy form knew how to open the anacapa container. Which would somehow mean that the form had a metal key.

  Bristol bit her lower lip so hard she tasted blood. She leaned toward the image, praying she wouldn’t see a break-in near the container. The image blurred a moment, or maybe that was her vision. She lost track of the shadowy form.

  If someone had tampered with the container, Bristol would have known, right? Something would have shown up the next day as she opened it herself. Wouldn’t it?

  She actually didn’t know the answer to that. She had always assumed that the security at the base knew what it was doing. Besides, no one from Sandoveil would ever break into the base. Sandoveil had a security force, but it mostly handled incidents with tourists.

  And tourists had no idea that the sector base was here.

  “This is what I wanted you to see in specific,” Wèi said, and froze the image.

  Bristol blinked again, unable to see anything other than her lab, filled with the black shapes of the equipment and the bluish glow of the walkways between. She couldn’t even see the shadowy form anymore, because it was lost in the muddiness around the anacapa container.

  “What?” she asked.

  He tapped the farthest section of the image. She blinked a third time, then wiped her eyes. In her concern for the anacapa container, she had missed the fact that the shadowy form had moved past the container. The form had looked like another piece of equipment to her, but she now realized there was no equipment near the entrance to the storage unit.

  “Oh,” she breathed, startled. “It was someone breaking in.”

  Wèi frowned at her.

  She flushed, not certain if she should have spoken aloud. But no one else turned around. They all seemed focused on their various screens, hands moving, lips moving, heads inclining forward.

  “No,” he said, his tone just a little condescending. “This.”

  He tapped the screen again, and a section of the image grew. Suddenly she realized she was looking at a reflection in one of the screens near the storage room’s door.

  Half of a face, angular, pale, a strand of brown hair curling against the forehead. A hood pulled over the head, obscuring the rest of the image.

  “Recognize that person?” Wèi asked.

  The thing was, Bristol did. Or thought she did. The half face looked familiar. If she had to guess, she would say she was looking at woman, but she couldn’t be completely certain.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, because that was the only truthful answer she could give. “Can’t your systems make an identification?”

  He didn’t answer her. Instead, he tapped the screen, and Bristol watched as the shadowy form grabbed the storage room door and slipped inside, then pulled the door closed.

  Bristol swallowed hard. She didn’t like Wèi’s sudden silence.

  She wanted to defend the fact that the storage door had been unlocked. But the truth was, none of the storage doors in any of the labs had locks, unless the person in charge of the lab installed them. Since Bristol’s team all needed access to the storage unit, she had never seen a point of installing any locks.

  Besides, the team couldn’t get in without going through several layers of security. She looked over at Wèi.

  “Do you have a record of that person going through security?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer her, and she felt her adrenaline spike even more. Was the shadowy person someone in her team? Someone she had just called in?

  Was there something going on here that she did not understand, but had, perhaps, facilitated?

  “No,” he said so quietly she almost didn’t hear him. “We don’t have any record of that person at all.”

  THIRTEEN

  TEVIN REACHED THE secondary pool behind the Falls ahead of the rest of his team. The Falls sounded muted back here, the rocks somehow dampening the usual fierce roar.

  The lights from above illumina
ted the slag rock behind him and the path, which glistened blackly. The area curved in here, a wide spot that butted against the cliff face. A landing pad, his own supervisor had called it, years and years ago, when Tevin had received his training in water rescues.

  The landing pad had grown smaller over time. There had been rockfalls. Tevin didn’t remember ever before seeing any boulders touching the path, and now an entire pile of them forced him to go around. Working here would be harder than he’d anticipated—and he hadn’t expected it to be easy.

  He didn’t look at the water, not yet. He didn’t want to make any decisions or get lost trying to figure out where the body was. He needed to set up first.

  Dinithi and Novoa arrived next, almost side by side, with Zhou bringing up the rear. Zhou and Novoa set large lamps opposite each other, so that they cast light upward and out, covering the edges of the pool.

  Dinithi should have put her lamp in the center, but there wasn’t room for a lamp and for a person, not with the rockfall. Tevin moved her closer to Zhou and instructed her to set her lamp as close to the water’s edge as she dared.

  He put his large lamp closer to Novoa’s. The lights created bright spots on the rocks behind them, and increased some of the shadows. He sighed, knowing that was the best they could do.

  Tevin turned to the water and raised his headlamp, steering it so that he could use his forehead like a beacon.

  The lights made the pool black, as he’d expected. To his right, the Falls tumbled, the lights illuminating that swirling water, making it gold and white and seemingly solid.

  His team gathered around him. Dinithi held her catchall like a cudgel. She seemed subdued. Maybe she finally understood the difficulties of their task.

  Zhou swept a flashlight over the water. The gold circle skated across the top, showing just a bit of sediment below the surface. Finally, the light caught something pale and bloated.

  A hand.

  No one said a word. No one made a sound.

  Only Zhou moved. He shifted the light slowly, so that it moved along the red-clad arm toward a torso. The center of the light hit the stomach, but the edges of the light illuminated the entire body.

  It seemed to be intact. The hands were outstretched, the bare feet pointed. The yellow pants and red top made it look like it belonged to Glida Kimura, who was known around town for her gaudy clothing.

  But there was something wrong with the hair. Reports had said that the body here had brown hair, but in this light, the hair looked black. The face was impossible to see, half submerged, one milky eye open and staring.

  Not for the first time, Tevin felt relieved that fish avoided this pool and birds found it impossible to get to. He hated seeing bodies that had been in the water and then picked apart by Ynchinga’s wildlife.

  “Is that Glida?” Novoa asked quietly.

  “I don’t think so,” Dinithi said, just as quietly.

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Tevin said. “Let’s just get her out, as carefully as possible.”

  FOURTEEN

  SIX LAYERS OF security on his way to the labs. Rajivk had never seen the security department this active. At each checkpoint, he had to answer questions from four different officers. He walked repeatedly through the detectors instead of being waved past. And before he took the stairs to the laboratory level, he had to stand under the examination light, normally used for guests and visitors with high clearance.

  After he went through the first two layers of security, he thought maybe they were spending more time on him because he was disheveled from his attempted walk home. After the next two layers, he wondered if security was always this tight at night. After all, only a skeleton crew and a handful of stubborn techs worked at night. So therefore, anyone who came down here would be considered suspicious.

  By the time he reached the last two layers of security, though, he realized that this level of response was unusual. Everyone was on edge, and it seemed to get worse the deeper he went into the sector base.

  Down here, it actually felt like he was in a series of caverns. The black walls seemed to absorb the light in a way they didn’t above. The ceilings were high, but that still didn’t help the claustrophobic feel of the lower labs.

  He didn’t work down here regularly. He had requested and received a small lab on the second level of the base. He came down here occasionally because his supervisors asked him to repair the small ships that the DV-class ships used to land staff on planets or to explore parts of a new system.

  But this level of the base was reserved for anacapa work, and he tried to avoid that. He hated anacapas, and it showed. His discomfort with them actually caused his hands to shake whenever he had to touch them.

  It wasn’t an unusual reaction to the anacapa drive. A number of employees had similar issues.

  But very few of those employees had ever traveled with the Fleet. Rajivk had. He knew that little bump-shift a DV-class ship would make as it activated its anacapa. He remembered the ever-so-slight increase in tension around the ship as it traveled in foldspace.

  Everyone knew that some ships never returned from foldspace. And everyone worried that this time would be their time.

  The relief when the ship left foldspace was always palpable.

  He could never get those memories out of his head when he worked on anacapa drives. Those memories were what caused his hands to shake. That, and the worry that he might accidentally activate an anacapa and send himself into foldspace. Or do something he didn’t entirely understand.

  He preferred to repair every other part of a small ship. Those parts made sense to him. He could take them apart and rebuild them. He could construct a piece brand new. He could add new bits of technology and know how they would interact.

  The anacapa…

  His stomach clenched. He hadn’t really thought it through when he got a summons from Iannazzi. She worked almost exclusively with anacapa drives. The fact that she had sent for him meant that he would be going into her lair, where there was never just one anacapa drive. Sometimes there were several.

  The thought made him shudder as he passed through yet another detector. He wished he could turn around and head home. This time, he would take the underground transportation. He didn’t want to see what was happening at the Falls, and he really didn’t want to know what was happening here.

  As if he had a choice to avoid it.

  No one spoke as he passed through the last security point. At the others, there had been desultory conversation about the base closure, but nothing here. The silence bothered him almost as much as the beefed-up guard.

  The security checkpoint here was several yards from the door to the anacapa labs. There was no signage, of course. The doors had numbers that only appeared for workers who had the security clearance to be down here.

  He went through the main door and was surprised to see more security in the hall near the door to Bristol Iannazzi’s lab. A woman, wearing a security-issued environmental suit, had her hood down. She was examining some recessed places near the door, places that had to house camera lenses.

  A male security official who was not wearing an environmental suit examined the entrance locks. And still another security official, whose gender was impossible to determine, had taken apart a section of wall that housed even more equipment, a section that Rajivk, at least, hadn’t realized was there.

  His gaze went back to the environmental suit. His entire body stiffened. He no longer wanted to enter the lab at all.

  “Excuse me,” he said in his most authoritative voice. “Can someone tell me what’s going on?”

  The man handling the locks stood up. “And you are?”

  “Rajivk Agwu. Bristol Iannazzi sent for me. I’m part of her team.”

  The man pulled out a handheld and tapped it. Apparently, he had information on the entire team on that thing.

  “All right,” he said. “You can enter.”

  Rajivk didn’t move. “I’m not sure I want
to. Do I need an environmental suit?”

  He sounded scared, which surprised him. He hadn’t realized he was scared until he spoke up. But he was. All those years of worrying about the anacapa drives had now come to this.

  “No,” the man said. “You’re clear.”

  “Then why is one of your team wearing a suit?” Rajivk asked, wishing he could gain more control over his voice.

  “An excess of caution that’s no longer needed.” The man stepped aside. “Go ahead and go in.”

  Rajivk’s heart rate increased, and this time, the pounding of his heart felt different than it had at the Falls. There, he had known the dangers. He had protected himself from them, and he had done his best.

  Here, he was walking into the unknown, and he was doing so for a paycheck.

  He couldn’t move his feet. He didn’t want to die because someone had called him in for an emergency.

  He’d had no idea that he was this deep-down terrified of the anacapa drive.

  “Really, it’s all right,” the man said. “Apparently Iannazzi wants her team to examine data from the last few days. We’re trying to figure out what happened.”

  “But something did happen, right?” Rajivk asked.

  “Yeah,” the man said. “And no one’s exactly sure what it was.”

  FIFTEEN

  WITH TINY PADDLES and some expert sculling, Tevin’s team managed to ease the body to the edge of the pool.

  “We caught a current,” Dinithi said, loudly, over the sound of the Falls.

  She was right. The body had reached the right position at the edge of the falling water to enable the group to slide it toward them using the strength of the water instead of fighting it.

  The recovery of the body couldn’t have gone better, although it wasn’t entirely done yet.

  Tevin wasn’t going to call this a victory until he had the body back at his van.