The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  On the wall beneath the shuttered window was a couch that was too big for the space. It had a flat surface that could fit Bassima—which was saying something given her height and girth.

  A pillow was scrunched against one arm, with another pillow on the couch’s back. Blankets and sheets were bunched at the door side of the couch, as if someone had just kicked them back. Another blanket had slid to the floor.

  She had seen that after all through the Main Street window.

  The musty smell didn’t come from the food containers. They would have been self-cleaning if they had come from any of the nearby businesses.

  But something had spilled along the floor. Something that looked black and haphazard.

  She stepped around it and peered into the bathroom. No one was there.

  Then she grabbed the scanlight on her belt.

  “Hello!” a male voice shouted, and she just about jumped out of her skin.

  She whirled, saw Reginald Udhe hovering just inside the office door. Apparently, he was the backup she had asked for not all that long ago.

  “Hey,” she said, by way of greeting. “Stay there, would you? Don’t let anyone else in.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Not that there’s anyone on the street.”

  She nodded, noting that. She crouched, and held the scanlight over the blackness.

  As she got down close to it, she realized the blackness was the source of the musty smell. This close, it smelled foul, like something rotten. Whatever environmental system was in this office had been turned off, but the systems still worked in the neighboring buildings, probably cleaning out the air here, just a little bit.

  But not this close. Clearly, nothing else had been this close.

  The scanlight revealed how thick the blackness was, how it had pooled. She could have flaked it off with her finger if she were so inclined. She wasn’t.

  Because she knew what she was looking at. She was looking at blood.

  A lot of it.

  More than anyone could afford to lose at one time.

  “Let dispatch know we have a death scene,” she said to Reginald. She didn’t want to contact them, because they’d put her through to Amy.

  And Bassima was going to investigate this, no matter what anyone else said.

  TWENTY-TWO

  TEVIN LEANED FORWARD, as if movement would make it easier for him to see what the probe was showing him. The images the probe was sending back were playing on the holographic screen on his hood visor. Dinithi was using a handheld screen for the same imagery, and she had moved it closer to her face.

  She had already seen the neck, but hadn’t identified what it was. Or maybe she had and hadn’t really allowed that to sink in.

  He wasn’t sure he had allowed it to sink in, either. Maybe he expected to see a neck, so what he saw was a neck. He moved the probe just a bit toward the rocks on the left side, a little distance away from the waterfall, and farther from the chain that had led him to the neck in the first place. He wanted a perspective that he hadn’t had before.

  “Oh, no,” Dinithi breathed. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Finally, she understood what her eyes were showing her.

  He wasn’t going to answer her, though. Not until he was certain.

  He made himself catalog what he was seeing.

  First, the waving thing. It wasn’t human. It was some kind of plant, with filaments that also waved in the constantly moving water. The plant was thin and supple, bending in ways human beings did not.

  As he looked, he slowly realized that there were several plants, all of them rising between the rocks, growing up like weeds. Maybe they were the same plant, with lots of tendrils.

  He didn’t know, and he couldn’t exactly identify it. That was a problem for a later time.

  Right now, he needed to focus on the thing attached to that chain, the thing he assumed (correctly: he just knew he was correct) was a neck.

  He blinked several times, trying to clear his vision. Neck, arched slightly, leading into a torso. He thought he saw a collarbone, but that might have been a trick of the light. The torso arched as well, and disappeared under the rocks.

  The arms weren’t floating alongside, like he would have expected. And there didn’t appear to be any hair floating upward, either. If the clothing was loose, he saw no indication of it because it didn’t fan like the plants did.

  He guided the probe along the far edge of the rocks, hoping it wouldn’t get caught in the inevitable riptide this close to an eddy like that. He would lose the probe altogether if he did that.

  He wasn’t quite shaking, though. He was holding his breath.

  “Tevin.” Dinithi’s voice was different. Serious. Hushed. “Is that a person?”

  Not anymore, he thought, but didn’t say. They were on comm now, and he didn’t want such a callow comment recorded.

  He couldn’t tell if this body was newer or older than the other one, although it appeared to have intact skin. After some time in the water, the skin would have worn away, and instead of a neck, he would have seen neck bones.

  He shuddered just a little, and moved the probe closer to that neck. The top of it bent backward unnaturally, and finally he saw a somewhat delicate chin, and black hair that caressed what was apparently the sides of someone’s face.

  “That is a person,” Dinithi said. “Trapped under the rocks.”

  He hadn’t put that together, but she was right. The body was being held down by those rocks. “Trapped” was a good word, maybe the best word.

  The question was, had the rocks been in place long before the body (and whomever the body belonged to) had swum or fallen and got caught underneath because of that riptide? Or had the body gone down with the rocks or at the same time as the rocks?

  He couldn’t answer that, not from here.

  He moved the probe across that strange neck and over to the face. His breath caught.

  He recognized the delicate features, the open eyes.

  Taji Kimura.

  His heart twisted.

  He didn’t say anything about the identification, though. He knew it only because he had been there when Taji had gotten a thin scar just beneath her chin, a scar that she liked, a scar she considered a badge of a landlocked life.

  The scar glowed whitely under the water, beckoning him to come get her.

  It was beginning to look to him as though someone had deliberately stashed her corpse down here. He couldn’t tell if she had been alive when they had done so. He was no expert, despite the relatively large number of bodies he had pulled out of this water over the years. He had no idea what distinguished a drowning victim from a water-logged corpse.

  Either way, he needed to let Marnie know. They could call off the search.

  He had found two bodies. He was now becoming convinced that the first body belonged to Glida Kimura.

  He would have thought the deaths a dual suicide if it weren’t for those rocks, holding Taji down. Had something worse happened? Had someone targeted the two of them?

  If so, why?

  “You know her, don’t you?” Dinithi asked.

  He raised his index finger to his lips. He didn’t want to make an identification on the comm. Even if he had wanted to do that, he didn’t dare. His voice would have wobbled.

  His emotion would have showed.

  Dinithi nodded, just once, to show she understood what he was indicating.

  He stared at the face, the plants waving above it, the watery sediment flowing past like snow on a windy day.

  Then his gaze traveled to the rocks.

  Not a double suicide. Maybe a murder suicide. But why the rocks, then?

  A chill passed through him. Something awful had happened here.

  Something he didn’t entirely understand.

  Oh, Taj, he thought, using all of his restraint not to speak aloud. What the hell happened to you?

  And why?

  TWENTY-THREE

  BRISTOL LOOKED UP at t
he ceiling of the storage room and did some computations in her head. Each layer of nanobits had been designed to hold extreme amounts of pressure. They had also been designed to prevent collapse from above and explosive decompression from below.

  Each floor had the standard nanobit layer, and the floors between here and the top also had blast protection.

  Then Bristol looked down at Wèi, who was watching her warily. Fitzwilliam leaned slightly away from her, arms crossed. The only member of Wèi’s team who didn’t seem hostile was Tranh. She remained in her place near the door.

  Bristol’s team huddled together, except for Rajivk, who was still standing beside the hologram of Glida Kimura. Bristol hated the way that hologram was in mid-movement. She almost wanted to start it up, so she could see Glida move forward or out of the frame or just leave them alone.

  That last thought left Bristol shaken. She hadn’t realized how angry she was, beneath the fear.

  She glanced at the glistening walls. Before she said any more, she turned to her team—to Jasmine Pereyra, who always seemed to know how to make Bristol’s desires into commands that the team understood.

  “Every minute we stand around talking,” Bristol said, “we’re losing evidence.”

  Pereyra nodded, even though Wèi cringed as if Bristol were reprimanding him. Maybe she was, in an offhanded way. She hadn’t exactly meant to.

  Pereyra leaned into the team and spoke so softly to them that Bristol couldn’t hear, despite the close quarters of the room. Rajivk gave the hologram a regretful look, then headed toward the team.

  Bristol turned to Wèi.

  “Glida Kimura wasn’t trying to kill everyone,” Bristol said. “There are much more efficient ways to do that, if she so desired. I’m sure you’ve planned for them—”

  “We block all the easy ways,” Wèi said.

  “If she worked security,” Bristol said, “then I’m certain she knew how to unblock those easy ways, just like she knew how to get down here without the proper clearance.”

  Fitzwilliam raised his eyebrows. They looked out of place since he had shaved his head. She could tell, though, that he agreed with her.

  “Besides, even with a massive anacapa explosion, there would be no guarantee that anyone would die several stories up. This is Sector Base E-2. Anacapa explosions have been part of our history from the beginning.”

  Wèi opened his mouth as if he were going to interrupt her. Bristol didn’t want him to. She really wanted him out of her storage room. He could do whatever it was he was supposed to do, somewhere far away from her.

  “If we were in Sector Base A or maybe even Sector Base M, I would completely believe that she was trying to destroy the base with a large anacapa explosion. However, over the centuries, we have constantly redesigned sector bases. After all that we’ve been through, and all the history that we have, and all the fail-safes—”

  “Don’t you think they’re just like the fail-safes for the rest of the base?” Wèi asked, a little too forcefully. Apparently, he had decided he disliked Bristol as much as she disliked him. “Something someone from security could override.”

  Bristol couldn’t help herself. She smiled.

  Rajivk looked over at her from the team meeting and rolled his eyes. Then he returned to the meeting. Clearly, he understood what she was feeling.

  She tried not to sound too patronizing. But she didn’t really know how. And rather than let that statement stand, she had to answer it.

  “Well,” she said, “I suppose someone from security could try to override all of the protocols we’ve established over the years to prevent a massive anacapa blast.”

  Wèi’s expression had become wary. He glanced at Fitzwilliam, who shrugged.

  “But,” Bristol said, “that would mean disassembling huge parts of the base, destroying many of the nanobits, and figuring out how to breach not just security but the very integrity of the base itself.”

  Wèi tilted his head a little, as if he wanted to ask her to stop, but didn’t know how.

  She couldn’t help herself: She had to finish.

  “I would think,” she said, “someone would have noticed all of that activity, don’t you?”

  Wèi’s mouth thinned. “That’s not what I meant.”

  That was a defense Bristol loathed. It was the defense of small minds, who seemed to always believe they were being misunderstood. Sure, he might have misspoken, but she doubted it.

  “Well,” she said, “let’s assume that your scenario is correct, that this Glida woman snuck down here and planned to create some kind of anacapa chain reaction at the very moment the meeting was going on several stories above us.”

  Wèi tensed. All of Bristol’s team watched now, as if they were watching a particularly interesting show.

  “How did she know the meeting was going to happen?” Bristol asked. “We were all told that the decision had come from the Fleet itself. Which means that the administrators of the base didn’t even know they were going to hold a meeting this morning, until they got the news about the date of the closure—”

  “Which probably came last night,” Wèi said.

  “We don’t know that,” Bristol said. “Not that it matters, anyway. Because the entire time that all of this was happening, this Glida woman was in the storage room. Doing…what? Waiting for a meeting she couldn’t even have imagined twenty-four hours before?”

  Wèi’s skin flushed. “Point taken.”

  He sounded surly.

  “It is a good point,” Tranh said, “and one we should explore. What could she have been doing in a runabout for that many hours? Or was there something else stored here in the room, something none of us know about?”

  Bristol froze. What else had been stored in here? The backup anacapa was in the runabout. There were some tools, but for the most part, she had cleaned out the room when Captain Harriet Virji from the Ijo made it clear that only Bristol’s intervention would cause the runabout to be decommissioned.

  Bristol looked at Pereyra.

  “We moved everything to the storage room near the big lab,” Pereyra said, reading Bristol’s mind.

  The secondary lab. Where Rajivk worked. Where the rest of the team did whatever it was they needed to do that allowed Bristol to focus on the anacapa drives.

  “We should investigate that, then,” Wèi said.

  Bristol nodded. They should. Because there might be something in that room that should have been in this one. Although—

  “We didn’t leave a lot here,” Pereyra said. “It wouldn’t have taken Kimura more than a day to figure out we had taken everything out of the room. It wouldn’t even have taken her an hour.”

  Bristol crossed her arms and stared at the spot in the center of the room where the runabout had once stood.

  “Then what exactly did she want?” Bristol asked. “And why is that so very hard to figure out?”

  Wèi shrugged. “We’ve never encountered anything like this before. In my tenure, at least, no one has stolen anything from the base.”

  Bristol leaned back slightly, then glanced at the frozen holographic image. No one had stolen anything.

  He was right: She couldn’t remember hearing that anything had been stolen ever.

  Why would anyone want to or need to?

  Everyone who worked at the base had all of their needs taken care of. They lived in a beautiful place. If they didn’t like living here, then they had choices—they could move to one of the other sector bases, including Sector Base G-2, which was going to replace this one—or they could apply to return (or go to) the Fleet itself.

  If they wanted to leave Fleet employ, they could do that as well, working in Sandoveil or leaving the area entirely. And if they left the Fleet’s employ, they did so with the understanding that they could return to the Fleet at any point.

  They also received enough money to cover their moves and their expenses for years to come. It was a safe way to let people out of the Fleet, and made them less like
ly to reveal secrets or to take the kinds of risks that people who needed basics like food and shelter sometimes took in order to care for themselves.

  In fact, the only thefts she knew about happened in Sandoveil proper, and they usually were perpetrated by tourists or the children of tourists. If they were children, they stole because they were badly brought up or because they were bored.

  “How could someone work for security and be a thief?” Bristol asked Wèi. “Don’t you vet your employees?”

  He bristled. “They’re not my employees. I don’t work with everyone there. I do vet my team, though.”

  As if his team mattered at the moment. Although the defensiveness of his comment made her look at them. They watched her as well.

  Her gaze caught Fitzwilliam’s. He raised his chin defiantly. She had no idea what he had to be defiant about.

  “But you worked with this Glida woman, when she had really vast security clearance,” Bristol said. “Hers was reduced. Isn’t that unusual?”

  “No,” Wèi answered before Fitzwilliam could. “If you no longer need to visit some parts of the sector base, you don’t need clearance there.”

  Bristol frowned. Some of the rules were different for different types of employees. The techs kept their clearance until they left the base altogether.

  Which, she supposed, made sense. Techs had no idea if they would be called in elsewhere in the facility, either for some emergency or because whatever was causing the problem might be immobile.

  If someone could no longer do the difficult work of overall security and was restricted to information-duty, that person wouldn’t need to have a clearance for parts of the facility outside of the information area.

  “Was she trustworthy?” Bristol asked Fitzwilliam.

  He glanced at Wèi, as though trying to see if Wèi was as surprised at Bristol’s bluntness as Fitzwilliam clearly was.

  Wèi shrugged one shoulder almost imperceptibly. Apparently that meant, I have no idea why she’s asking this, but you can answer it.