The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “The only people who can access them are YSR-SR,” Dinithi said.

  Her gaze met everyone else’s, one at a time, almost as if she were accusing the entire team of murdering people and placing them in the pool.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Marnie said.

  “You think one of our people did this?” Zhou asked.

  “I think Mushtaq is right,” Marnie said. “Jumping to conclusions is a bad idea.”

  Tevin glanced over his shoulder at the path. It wouldn’t be hard to get through that barrier. He couldn’t remember the last time the codes were changed—if ever. And so many people had them. Including people who worked at the sector base.

  But he wasn’t going to say that. He was sick of speculation.

  “You need to get investigators on all of the above-ground stuff,” he said to Hranek.

  Hranek nodded.

  “And you need to ask yourself one other question,” Tevin said.

  Hranek frowned.

  “It goes to the heart of your assumption earlier.” Tevin knew he was toying with Hranek a little, but he didn’t care. Hranek had given him enough grief over the years. He didn’t mind paying it back.

  “What does?” Hranek asked.

  “If a person or persons unknown hid these bodies in the pool, and went through all the difficulty of placing rocks on them to hold them in place,” Tevin said, “then why was the body dressed like Glida Kimura allowed to float?”

  “The killer got interrupted?” Zhou said, apparently enjoying the speculation.

  But Tevin hadn’t asked that to speculate, and Hranek knew it. Tevin could see that from Hranek’s face. They were still on the earlier conclusion.

  They were missing an important piece. But it felt like they were missing only one important piece—and once they had it, everything would fall into place.

  “You still think she’s involved,” Dinithi said.

  “Yes,” Tevin said. “I just don’t know how.”

  “Speculation,” Hranek said and turned away.

  “More like an educated guess,” Tevin said, and left it at that.

  FIFTY

  THE WORK WAS relatively simple: Accessing an anacapa drive’s memory was something Bristol did almost weekly. But because she didn’t want to turn this drive back on a second time if she discovered she had not gotten enough information, she accessed every backup memory subroutine in the drive, and hoped that would be enough.

  Once she and Fedo had powered on this drive, they worked quickly. Because the drive’s resting colors were as odd as the colors it had when it was off. There was no white or gold in the light that came from this particular anacapa, something she had never seen before.

  The light was the same yellowish, puke green as one of the color threads going through the drive when it wasn’t on at all. A flat, brownish rust wove through the puke green, and beneath it all, a twilight gray throbbed.

  The power readings were all over the chart. Fedo got different readings than Bristol did, so they both decided at the same time to get the information they needed and shut the drive off again.

  As soon as they had, Fedo had leaned back and wiped sweat off her forehead.

  “This thing is dangerous,” she said. “And to think we carried it with us on the Ijo.”

  Bristol didn’t comment. It wasn’t her place.

  Rather than converse with Fedo, Bristol investigated the drive’s memory. Some of it was as hole-riddled as the drive itself, but with all of the subroutines, she could read where this drive had been, when it had been activated, and how long it had been in foldspace.

  As she examined the memory, she started forming a theory. But she needed Fedo’s help. So Bristol said, “I need you to double-check the years that Kimura—I mean, whatsername? Evers—?”

  “Everly,” Fedo said.

  “—the years she served on the Ijo. See where this runabout went then,” Bristol said.

  “All right,” Fedo said.

  Bristol dug into the data while Fedo did her work. Then Bristol stepped away from that information and contacted her team. In particular, she wanted to know what Rajivk had found.

  She pinged him in his own lab first.

  He responded with a video image of his lab station. He was at the side of the image, head bent as he clearly worked a console.

  “How can I help you?” he asked.

  She loved the question, because the tone in which he delivered it was essentially, Tell me what you need or leave me alone.

  “Were there problems when the runabout left the Ijo?” she asked. “Did the runabout end up in the storage room at the precise coordinates? Was there something unusual?”

  Rajivk didn’t even have to check his data. He had clearly been exploring this.

  “It took longer than average to arrive,” he said. “But by longer than average, I mean milliseconds longer. I wouldn’t have found it if I hadn’t been looking for anomalies.”

  “Did you find any other anomalies?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “And I’ve been searching the base. We don’t have a runabout half in and half out of phase, either.”

  She let out a small sigh. Apparently, on a subconscious level, she had been more worried about that than she had realized.

  Fedo looked up at that, startled. Apparently that particular malfunction hadn’t even crossed her mind until just now.

  “Well, that’s good news, I guess,” Bristol said.

  Rajivk shook his head ever so slightly. If Bristol hadn’t been watching him closely, she wouldn’t have seen it.

  “Yeah, there’s no one dying in our walls,” he said. “That’s a good thing.”

  She felt her cheeks warm. That wasn’t what she meant. She would have liked to know where the damn runabout was, and if it were stuck in a wall somewhere, she would know.

  She severed the connection without commenting, only to find Fedo watching her.

  “He’s your subordinate?” Fedo asked, with judgment in her tone.

  “We don’t follow military protocol here,” Bristol snapped.

  “Clearly,” Fedo said.

  She ignored Fedo and contacted the rest of the team. So far, they had found no evidence of the runabout in this solar system.

  It was as she expected.

  After she finished with them, she asked Fedo, “Did you find anything from the years that Everly was with the Ijo?”

  “I’m not done yet,” Fedo said.

  Bristol felt a surge of irritation and tamped it down. Virji—Fedo’s captain—had stressed the need to hurry. Bristol felt it. Why hadn’t Fedo?

  Or was this how fast Fedo worked?

  “Give me what you have,” Bristol said.

  She only wanted to confirm something anyway. She had found an entire series of trips, one per week for a few years, that entered foldspace in the same way. The trips, as far as she could tell from the damaged anacapa, ended up in different places—different solar systems, different planets—but they always left the Ijo the same way, into a foldspace bubble that someone had created as a contained foldspace entry point.

  Bristol had hoped to find something like that. Because if a ship used a foldspace bubble, the ship was likely to have a default set to that bubble on its navigational system.

  But she thought she would check one more thing with Fedo.

  “Is your captain the one who prefers the use of a foldspace bubble or does that predate you?” Bristol asked, head down. She tried not to sound judgmental. Foldspace bubbles sometimes attached themselves to small ships, and created little warps that made foldspace dangerous for larger vessels.

  “No,” Fedo said, sounding surprised. “Ijo policy expressly forbids the use of foldspace bubbles. The Fleet discourages it too. We’ve lost too many good people over the years because of the bubbles. We have always considered them too risky to maintain. Why? Have you found one?”

  “For years, this runabout used a foldspace bubble,” Bristol said. “I’m assuming nothi
ng about that practice changed, at least for this particular runabout.”

  Fedo made a soft sound of disgust. “Why don’t people listen?”

  Bristol didn’t know the answer to that, although she would assume that someone like Kimura wouldn’t have listened no matter who had forbidden her to do something.

  Then Fedo looked at her, eyes wide. “You think that runabout is in its foldspace bubble?”

  “I think it tried to find the bubble,” Bristol said. “I’m sure that Kimura or Everly or whatever you call her activated the navigational program that would send the runabout to the bubble. But I doubt she got into the bubble the way she wanted to. The navigational system might have been compromised, the maintenance system definitely was, and with a different anacapa in place, the ship wouldn’t have some of its usual backups.”

  “Well, that makes it even harder to find her,” Fedo said.

  Bristol almost rolled her eyes. That settled it: Fedo simply wasn’t of a caliber that would ever allow her to work for Bristol. Bristol wondered how Fedo had gotten her job in the first place.

  Bristol hoped it was some kind of nepotism, because if Fedo was the best the Fleet had out in space, the entire Fleet was in trouble.

  “Actually,” Bristol said, “it just got easier to find her. We can narrow down the routes into that bubble.”

  “But you just said the ship wouldn’t know them,” Fedo said.

  “I said that she wouldn’t have gotten to the bubble the way she wanted to, and I mean that,” Bristol said. “The ship might have taken a circuitous route. Or it might have found a quick way into the bubble, a way that punched the bubble. Or it might have missed by a few degrees. We don’t know.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Fedo said. “We don’t know.”

  “Ah,” Bristol said, “but now we know where to look.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  SHE HAD A protective security covering over her coat. Bassima had almost asked Nicoleau if the coating would ruin her coat’s fabric, and then decided that sounded too self-involved. She really wasn’t self-involved.

  She was just scared to death.

  She had always wanted to go deep inside the sector base, and now that she was here, she was wondering if it was a good idea.

  Bassima had agreed readily enough. Nicoleau asked her if she wanted to be present when they captured Glida Kimura. Bassima had said yes. She had to clear her presence deep in the bowels of the sector base with Amy Loraas, but Amy had approved and had given Bassima permission to handle whatever came up.

  Although Bassima was beginning to wonder if she was qualified to handle any of it.

  She and Nicoleau had gone through five layers of security so far. Each seemed more draconian than the last. More people, more examination, more sideways looks.

  Even though Nicoleau headed security for the base, his own staff questioned him the deeper the two of them got into the sector base. They would ask him if he thought it a good idea to bring a “civilian” to the most dangerous part of the base, as if he hadn’t realized that Bassima even accompanied him.

  Each time someone asked him, he would smile and say Yes. No justification, no explanation. Just a simple yes. He seemed unperturbed by the questions, the attitude, or the situation.

  Bassima was perturbed by all of it. The base had a surprising sameness to its corridors and ceilings. They were made of some shiny black substance, probably the nanobits that the Fleet engineers had used to carve out various parts of the Sandoveil Valley, including the overlook where the shoes were discovered.

  It was one thing to look at the shiny black nanobits covered with spray from the waterfall, another to see them deep below the largest mountain range on Nindowne. She knew the deeper she went, the harder it would be to get out.

  She didn’t say anything to Nicoleau, though. Instead, she listened to his concerns about Glida Kimura, whom he said the Fleet had known as Sloane Everly. He’d said Glida had killed people before, and that the captain of the Ijo wanted her captured, which was why he had asked Bassima if she could handle jurisdiction.

  The more he spoke, the more Bassima wondered if she could. If what he said was true, there were going to be dozens of jurisdictions at play. There were three in the Sandoveil Valley alone—Sandoveil, possibly the Valley security force, and then the security team at the sector base. None of that counted this captain, who was apparently out for blood, or any of the places that the captain believed Glida Kimura had gone to murder people for sport.

  Bassima wouldn’t have believed any of that if she hadn’t seen the footage from the night before and spoken to Hranek about Glida. Glida had seemed a little off, but not that far off.

  Apparently, Glida had learned how to mask her abnormalities, at least somewhat. She had always seemed unusual—those colorful clothes, the occasional cold glance—but she had never seemed dangerous or even stranger than most people in Sandoveil.

  Glida had masked her abnormalities long enough to appeal to Taji. To live with Taji. Until something had gone terribly wrong.

  Bassima shook her head every time she thought of Taji. Taji seemed too nice, too normal to have married someone with Glida’s history.

  The last security checkpoint—or whatever they called it at the sector base—was in a roundish, bowl-like area, with corridors funneling off it on six sides. The guards down here seemed extremely serious. They made Bassima stand in the corridor while they argued with Nicoleau.

  From what she could overhear, they weren’t just worried that she might do something dangerous or illegal. They were worried that she would reveal secrets. Apparently, Nicoleau was trying to take her to a part of the sector base that most people who worked at the sector base couldn’t go to.

  Finally, he agreed to be the one to sign off on everything. The guards’ names wouldn’t be on any approval that had gotten Bassima through. If she did something wrong, Nicoleau would have to take the blame.

  Which, apparently, he was willing to do.

  She wasn’t so much fascinated by the arguments the other guards had; she was fascinated by the fact that he couldn’t just override them, even though he ran security.

  Nicoleau waved her through. The security this time was tighter than the last—she had to go through various boxes and readers, and submit to searches with devices she had never seen before. She had to give up DNA and saliva, register a voice print, and have her retina scanned.

  Only after all of that was she allowed to follow Nicoleau through the narrowest corridor spiraling off the security area.

  None of the doors down this corridor were marked. A few seemed almost invisible, at least to her.

  Yet Nicoleau seemed to know which door he wanted. He pressed a palm against a side panel and the door slid open.

  A woman cursed, followed by, “This is not the time to bring in a crowd.”

  “I’m not bringing in a crowd,” Nicoleau said, blocking Bassima’s entrance with his body. “I’m bringing in Bassima Beck, with the city of Sandoveil’s security office.”

  “Great,” the woman said, voice rising with irritation. “Just great. I hope she knows the dangers.”

  The hair rose on the back of Bassima’s neck. Dangers?

  “She knows,” Nicoleau said, but Bassima wanted to contradict him. What dangers? He hadn’t mentioned any dangers.

  “All right, then,” the woman said, “but don’t talk to us or touch anything. We’re still not sure this is going to work.”

  Nicoleau stepped farther into the lab. Bassima followed, gingerly, still wondering if she could flee.

  The lab smelled of sweat and recycled air. There was an underlying funk that apparently the environmental system couldn’t get rid of, as if someone had actually lived here, and bathed only occasionally. Overlying that was a metallic tang that Bassima couldn’t identify, except that she knew she had never smelled it before.

  The walls were covered with screens, some active and some not. Consoles jutted out from them, but the two wom
en in the center of the lab were working on holographic screens, the kind Bassima preferred.

  People stood all over the lab, most of them watching the two women work. Bassima recognized only one of them, a lean man with brownish hair and a rather sullen mouth. She had seen him around a lot, not in the stores or the diner, but walking.

  He was one of the people who hiked all over the city, and sometimes on the trails around the Falls. Whenever she was in a vehicle, hurrying to get from place to place, she’d see him plodding along, and feel guilty that she wasn’t getting enough exercise.

  A couple of people were talking quietly about some storage room. Everyone else was watching the two women work. They seemed involved in what they were doing, heads down, fingers moving quickly. They would consult with each other in single words and half sentences, as if they both understood what the other meant.

  One woman stood apart. She had broad shoulders and a trim figure, with perfect posture. Bassima hadn’t seen her before, but she had seen her type. That woman was a senior officer in the Fleet. She wasn’t in uniform at the moment, but she looked like she would be more comfortable if she were.

  Maybe she was the one who had spoken. She certainly seemed to be the kind who would take charge.

  Her gaze met Bassima’s, took her in, and then looked away as if Bassima were unimportant.

  Nicoleau moved Bassima toward a wall where no one was standing. As he brought her down here, he had made it sound like they had already brought the runabout back. All they needed to know was if Glida was inside.

  But that clearly wasn’t the case. They were still working on bringing the runabout back.

  Bassima sighed softly.

  Had she known that, she would have insisted that Loraas come here, not her.

  And then Bassima mentally smiled at herself. That wasn’t true. She had wanted to go deep into the security base—until she had gone deep and realized just how scary it all was.

  She moved closer to the wall but didn’t lean, in case there were features that she couldn’t see, things she would be messing with that she didn’t understand.