The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  She had cooked, something she rarely did. But the kitchen had spectacular views of the Jeleen River. She had watched the sunset while the fish baked, the windows open so she could hear the rumble of nearby Fiskett Falls.

  Then she and Illya had spent the rest of the evening in bed.

  He had gotten up when Bristol something had contacted Virji. Both Virji and Illya had jobs that required them to hold almost everything they did close to the chest. She knew that Illya was one of the directors of Sector Base Operations for the Fleet, but she hadn’t known why he needed to come to Sector Base E-2 until he had finished his task this afternoon.

  Then he told her that he was the one who let everyone at the base know they now had a firm date for shutdown. He called it a rough time for any community, and warned that he might have to leave at a moment’s notice.

  And yet she had been the one who had received the middle-of-the-night contact.

  A missing runabout.

  She leaned her hands back on the soft sheets. The bedroom had an option to shield the windows against any light from the outside, something apparently designed for starship crews, because they weren’t used to daylight at all times.

  She had set the window shield when she and Illya went to bed, not to keep out the light, but to keep any potential hikers from peering in at them. Even though the rental agent had told her that this cabin was about as isolated as it got this close to Sandoveil. He had actually warned her that she might not see another human being for days.

  Her eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. The rental agent had described the bedroom as small, but it was twice the size of her bedroom on the Ijo. She had a full suite, of course, and that took up a lot of room. The actual sleeping area wasn’t much bigger than the room she had had as a cadet on the Brazza Six.

  Here, the bedroom had a double-large bed, two comfortable chairs that faced the windows she had currently shielded, end tables, and an entire entertainment wall if she felt like she needed to remain in bed for several days.

  She also could have had her meals prepared for her, an option she hadn’t ordered.

  A missing runabout wasn’t a crisis in and of itself. But it would become one. She knew that as clearly as she knew her own name. Something was off here.

  Something she would have to deal with very carefully.

  “Was that something important?” Illya entered the bedroom, carrying a tray of food. While Virji had been dealing with Bristol something, Illya had cut up some local cheeses and cured meats, along with fruits Virji didn’t recognize. A rich, warm chocolate smell wafted over to her, and she sighed slightly in disappointment.

  She would have to forgo the lovely meal, shower, get dressed, and make herself official again. Instead of drinking sweet warm chocolate, sampling local cuisine, and then sampling Illya again.

  Their relationship wasn’t new, but it felt new. They saw each other so rarely. His job with Sector Base Operations kept him moving between five different systems, constantly monitoring things.

  It was rare that she and he got assigned to the same area.

  Each time she saw him, he seemed just a little older. His back was still straight, his shoulders broad, but he always had more care lines on his face and a little more silver in his well-trimmed black hair.

  He set the tray down on the bedside table and sat beside her. She leaned against him. He felt solid and strong, just like he always had.

  He often kidded that she was the adventurous one in their relationship—heading off here and there on some important and often dangerous mission—but he had a steady consistency, the kind she valued in her own support staff. If there was a problem, he would solve it, quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

  The food, the supportive shoulder, that was fuss, for him.

  He had asked if something important had happened, but the tone of his question implied that he already knew something important had happened. After all, who contacted a captain in the middle of a vacation except someone with an emergency?

  “I have to go to the sector base.” She smiled a little at the irony of it. They had been together in this cabin for a week, and she had hardly seen him.

  He had spent every day, and almost every evening, at the sector base. He had just told her at dinner this evening about the shutdown date. She hadn’t understood why it was such a big deal. He had tried to explain—something about planning and raising entire families in the same place for generations, and the expectation of consistency for generations more.

  She understood that—intellectually. She had some consistency in her life. The Fleet was consistent. It flew together, ever forward, heading to new systems and new worlds. The people were mostly the same, although some did retire near sector bases, some grew up and decided to leave the Fleet, and some disappeared on dangerous missions.

  But the Fleet never remained in the same place for long. The sector bases got shut down because the Fleet would move so far past the old bases that the only way to get back to them was via anacapa drive. While it could be done relatively easily, the Fleet had set up its system millennia ago.

  She had been taught that it was easier to build a new base than it was to maintain an older base, but since she’d been involved with Illya, she learned that wasn’t true. If she had thought it through, she would have realized the falseness of that teaching. A new injection of nanobits, some reprogramming, maybe some additional buildings somewhere, and an old base would be retrofitted just fine.

  But this system, the new bases, kept the Fleet fresh. It also kept Illya and his entire staff incredibly busy.

  He’d dealt with one other base closure in his long career. He said he had stories for her about how difficult it was, about the ways that people went somewhat crazy in the years leading up to the actual shutdown.

  He said the first difficult day was the day that the base staff was informed that it would close some time in the future. That day was, in his words, a “bumpy one.”

  But the first dangerous day, he said at dinner, was a day like today. That day when the base would close went from “sometime in the future” to a particular date. It became real.

  And people went slightly—or majorly—crazy.

  He wouldn’t like this news. She didn’t like this news either. Primarily, though, because it inconvenienced her.

  She usually skated through changed plans. But not on vacation. Vacation was her time.

  “Your ship okay?” he asked.

  She took a slice of some kind of ham off the plate and took a bite. A little sweet for her, but no matter. She wouldn’t be eating much of it anyway.

  “My ship is all right,” she said, although as she spoke the words, she realized she didn’t really know if her ship was all right. “But one of my runabouts is missing.”

  He had been taking a piece of cheese, but froze when she got to the phrase “is missing.”

  He looked at her sideways, his silver-blue eyes narrow. “Missing? How the heck does that happen? I thought they were with the ship.”

  She gave him a small smile. He knew a lot about sector bases and almost nothing about the way that ships worked.

  “My runabouts are an odd model class.” She couldn’t tell him that she wanted to get rid of them. She no longer told anyone that. There were some things you couldn’t share with a sometimes-lover, particularly one whose entire life was spent in officialdom, not in shipboard operations. “I have them checked every time we do a major shipwide check.”

  “Because?” he asked, sitting beside her.

  “Because they can be dangerous, and I want to make certain that we take the proper care of them.”

  That wasn’t quite a white lie. When she had become captain of the Ijo, she had gotten in trouble for requisitioning too many new small ships for her crew. No one in Fleet Shipboard Operations ever thought that through, no matter how many times she tried to clarify.

  The Ijo had been the first DV-class ship built at a much larger size. It had two small s
hip bays instead of one. Everything on the Ijo was bigger and better than the previous DV-class models, and while the ship itself had been meticulously planned, some of the aspects around it hadn’t been.

  Such as filling those two ship bays. Apparently the Shipboard Operations didn’t want to send out the Ijo half empty, so they had assigned her a lot of the older, smaller ships to fill out the secondary bay. The smaller ships in the first bay were state-of-the art, so she usually used those.

  But the smaller ships in the second bay had their issues, and as she learned them, she tried to get rid of the ships. She had succeeded too much at first, and had caused that line item on her ship’s budget to be ten times higher than the recommended amount.

  As a result, she had gotten a reprimand that to this day she didn’t feel that she deserved. A black mark for making sure her crew was safe.

  Since she couldn’t exchange bad ships for good any longer, she now tried to keep the bad ships in as best repair as possible, until whatever sector base she visited recommended the ships get retired.

  So she wasn’t saddened to hear that the runabout was missing. But she was sad that her vacation was ending.

  “So the runabout was in the base,” Illya said, popping a small red berry in his mouth. The movement made the berry’s scent reach her—a cross between watermelon and brandy, if she didn’t miss her guess.

  “The runabout wasn’t just in the base,” Virji said. “It was in one of the lower tech levels of the sector base, getting its anacapa drive repaired.”

  He shifted slightly so that he could face her. “Anacapa drive? On a runabout?”

  “Told you it was an odd model,” she said.

  “Good God.” He thought about it for a moment. She knew where he was going mentally, and she didn’t want to go there. She reached across him for more ham, knowing she had to shower and leave, knowing that once she did, she might not make it back to this isolated place—and that marvelous sense of calm that had just started to overtake her.

  “I doubt that the disappearance is connected to the sector base closing,” she said to forestall him. She didn’t want to have that conversation.

  “Still,” he said, “you have to admit that it’s some kind of coincidence.”

  She sighed. She had known he would say that. And, if she were honest with herself, she had thought it. But, she had rationalized, she had had that thought because of their dinner conversation, about the things that people near the sector base did when the closing became a reality.

  She grabbed another slice of ham and stood up. “It seems rather odd to steal a runabout as a protest against a base closure. Especially an expected base closure.”

  She sounded harsher than she had planned to. She hadn’t meant that as a criticism of him. He had his focus; she had hers.

  This wasn’t the first time someone had stolen a runabout during her tenure as captain of the Ijo. It probably wouldn’t be the last.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, half turning, just so that she could see his expression. “I didn’t mean to be critical. It’s just that with the anacapa, the runabout—”

  “Could be anywhere, I know.”

  Her breath caught. He had interrupted her when she was talking about her ship’s business. When was the last time someone had interrupted her like that? Especially when she was speaking in her capacity as captain?

  “It’s just that,” she said more slowly, her tone deliberately harsh this time to let him know that the interruption was both unacceptable and incorrect, “with the anacapa, the runabout might not have been stolen at all. If the anacapa drive had malfunctioned, the runabout could have been obliterated.”

  “Taking the base with it,” he said. Clearly he hadn’t heard her tone, or if he had, it hadn’t concerned him.

  She felt a flash of irritation. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt that way about him, if ever.

  “You, of all people, should know that sector bases are built to withstand anacapa malfunctions,” she said.

  He froze midway through reaching for another piece of cheese. Her tone got through this time.

  “Yes, I’m sorry,” he said in a tone of voice she had never heard before. It sounded official. “I was incorrect. Wouldn’t it be odd, though, to have an anacapa malfunction the day the base learned the date it would cease to exist?”

  “Odd, yes,” she said. “Unusual, no. Anacapa malfunctions happen. They are the stuff of nightmares, at least for ship’s captains.”

  Then she pivoted, and headed for the shower, her heart pounding. Had that been a lover’s quarrel? An actual fight? The beginning of the end of something fun?

  She didn’t have the time to find out.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  BASSIMA ENDED UP in her office. Even though she had eaten hours ago, she was still burping strawberry-flavored meringue. That dessert had really been a mistake. She would have to remember that next time.

  But of course, she wouldn’t. This night would become a blur of images, not her own.

  Her investigative office was small, little more than a chair that she had to have custom-made because she was so tall, and a desk that she had placed on blocks to accommodate her knees.

  Mostly, she worked on holographic screens, scattering them around her so that she could follow the imagery, but the desk itself had become a kind of catchall for everything from gloves to bits of paper to small rocks that she brought to remind her of the great outdoors.

  One reason she had volunteered for the shift that began in the afternoons was to avoid office time with her more jovial coworkers. Most of them worked mornings. She did her rounds early in the afternoon to avoid the other officers who hung out in the office too much. Then she did any work that she had to be in the office for late into the evening.

  On this night, however, she had moved past evening work long ago. She was officially here after hours. She would have to fight to get paid for the time she spent sitting here, but she would argue that Hranek had deputized her as one of his assistants. She would also say that he had implied that the work needed to be done immediately.

  He hadn’t actually said that, no, but it had felt urgent. Even though the death scene was old, and no one, as far as Bassima could tell, was in jeopardy.

  Bassima smiled grimly at herself. She was making excuses for her own thoughts, because no one would end up caring how much time she put in or how much it cost. The Sector Base funded everything in the Sandoveil Valley, so there was an amazing amount of extra money in this community. She’d had after-hours time approved for events less significant than this one.

  She was just nervous and worried in general. That blood pool had startled her. The evidence collected by her shoes and moved into the collection bags upon her arrival at the security office had even more blood in it than she had expected. So she had stepped on the blood trail without meaning to.

  That embarrassed her. She didn’t like to think of herself as an inexperienced investigator, but when it came to death scenes without a body, she was. She couldn’t remember ever seeing a death scene like that before. Every time she found blood and signs of something awful, the scene was on the mountain or near the mud flats, and the something awful was usually something that had occurred because of the environment, not because of another person.

  Bile rose in her throat, and she swallowed hard. Her stomach ached. Maybe the discomfort she was feeling was coming from the potential loss of the Kimuras, not because of her rather overstuffed dinner.

  She rubbed her eyes and leaned back.

  Because she was working here alone, she had holographic screens surrounding her. Screens of all different sizes, all set on 2D at the moment, and opaque along the back. Usually, if she was working on something important, she worked on fewer screens and kept them only in her line of sight, so that she would know if someone approached her.

  The screens all showed different angles of the surrounding streets. She had taken one square mile’s worth of footage over the p
ast week. There was a lot of footage, from almost every building, from most vehicles, and from the street cameras at every intersection.

  Most people didn’t mind that their entire lives were recorded. Most people didn’t even think about it. Recording daily life was common on starships and many, many of the residents in Sandoveil had grown up in Fleet families, even if no one in several generations had served on a Fleet vessel.

  Surveillance was simply a fact of daily life for anyone connected with the Fleet, and that had become part of daily life in Sandoveil as well.

  Bassima hadn’t even noticed how common recording was until she became a security officer. Then she realized how much of her own life was on some kind of public record. The only place she was guaranteed complete privacy was inside her own home.

  She was running the images on the screens backward from her arrival at the scene. Initially, she had the images stop or slow and notify her any time a person entered the street. But as the images reached the close of business, they were all pinging her and letting her know that there were dozens of people on the streets.

  So she left that warning in place only for the evening hours. In fact, at the moment, she was scanning over the daytime hours, figuring that the killer (if, indeed, that blood pool meant someone was dead) had moved the body after dark.

  Bassima would examine daylight hours once she had gone through all of the nights.

  She hadn’t expected to find anything on this night, but she had hoped to discover something the night before. She did learn that a number of local residents window-shopped after they finished their dinners at nearby restaurants.

  At the moment, she found that habit irritating. She wanted the street clear except for the killer.

  Nothing suspicious had happened the previous night. Walkers went by, then the window-shoppers, and then nothing for hours at a time. Employees of various businesses started showing up around dawn, especially at the bakeries and restaurants.

  Most people did not use their private vehicles to get to work unless they parked outside of her one-square-mile radius. Most people walked or took the underground transport, and most of them acted like they had done nothing out of the ordinary. They didn’t seem distressed or uncomfortable; they weren’t looking around as if searching for stores or landmarks. The early morning locals simply seemed like people everywhere on their way to work—paying more attention to the destination than they were to buildings, vehicles, and others around them.