The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The ceiling kept shedding nanobits. She was covered in a layer of black dust.

  She wanted out, and Nicoleau wouldn’t let her leave.

  The next time she had the opportunity to step in for Loraas, Bassima would not do it. She would make a mental note about how horrible this experience had been, and she would call it to mind each and every time someone wanted her instead of Loraas.

  If Bassima survived this, which she considered to be a really big if.

  She didn’t even have her pistol. They had taken it away from her at one of the security checks. She couldn’t go to the blast doors and provide back up if Glida escaped.

  Or if someone else was in that runabout, someone other than Glida.

  And now, that horrid captain was asking for a suit. They needed environmental suits to go into the runabout.

  Iannazzi cursed when she heard that and waved her fingers at one of her staff members, who looked at her and rolled his eyes. Bassima had no idea who he was, only that he seemed as unimpressed with the captain as she was.

  He grabbed something out of a small storage area. As he carried it to the blast doors, Bassima saw that he was holding a thin, expensive environmental suit.

  She hoped it would fit Captain Virji, because maybe this nightmare would end soon—however it would end.

  With Glida coming out of the runabout with guns blazing or with the team going in and grabbing her, with the runabout disappearing (and no one getting hurt), whatever was going to happen, Bassima just wished it would happen and she could either die or get buried in rubble or scurry back to the surface.

  Because she had answered her own interpersonal questions: She was never going to work in the sector base. Ever, ever, ever.

  If she was lucky, she would never have to come back here.

  If she was lucky, she would get out.

  Because right now, she wasn’t sure.

  Right now, she was thinking that she was going to die.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  THEY BROUGHT THE suit to her in record time, and Virji slipped it on as if it were an old friend. It was as sophisticated as her suit, made of thinner material, and clearly newer. It hadn’t been used much.

  She double-checked her oxygen mix, flipped on the comm, and said to Wèi, “Ready?”

  He nodded. His suit looked older than this one, worn and tired. Or maybe it looked that way because it had been piled in some corner. He had clearly worn it earlier and then discarded it.

  The two other members of his team were wearing theirs as well. Only this time, Virji wasn’t going to defer to them. If a captain died on Wèi’s watch, so be it.

  These people were amateurs. They had probably never stormed a ship before.

  She had.

  She stepped into the airlock. It was dark, and the information on the screen of her visor told her that the air from the storage room was slowly infiltrating this space.

  When she stepped in, a light should have gone on. It did not.

  Before she touched the backup keypad to open the interior door, she ran a gloved hand over the door itself. A small blue light flared.

  A tag: Caution written in two languages.

  Followed by something in a single language her visor translated as Property of or maybe Reserved for…and then three more words that made no sense—one she couldn’t understand and two that she might have mistranslated. Ghost Corporation. Or maybe, the translation program told her Lost Souls Corporation.

  There was a logo attached, at least she thought that was a logo, and not another word.

  “You ever hear of something called the Lost Souls Corporation?” Virji asked Wèi.

  “No,” he said, his voice tinny through the comm.

  “Ghost Corporation?”

  “No,” he said. He sounded as confused as she felt.

  She removed her laser pistol and held it tightly. Clearly, someone other than Everly had been on this ship. And they had marked it, for what purpose she did not know.

  She had no idea if they were still on board or if they were gone.

  She also had no idea if they had rigged it to blow up, or if they had stolen everything off of it.

  Everything except the anacapa, of course.

  “I’m not getting any readings from the interior of this ship,” Wèi said.

  Virji wished that she had her people here. Wèi was too damn unspecific. He didn’t seem to know what to say in a situation like this.

  How did a man get to be a security officer on a sector base, anyway? Did he do it by kissing up to his bosses or by saving someone? Did he have to have field training?

  Those were all questions she should have asked long before she stepped into this airlock, and of course, she hadn’t.

  “What do you mean, readings?” she asked. The information she was getting from her suit was pretty specific. The only power the runabout gave off came from the anacapa. The environmental controls weren’t working inside the ship either, and she wasn’t getting any power signatures.

  “Life signs,” Wèi said.

  So nice of him to be specific now.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I told the entire lab that piece of information fifteen minutes ago.”

  “I meant, that I checked again, and still nothing.” He sounded flustered. Just what they all needed. Some flustered security guy.

  She lifted her hand and typed in the backup code. No response. Just like the exterior doors. She sighed, typed in another backup code, and another.

  No response at all.

  She turned toward Wèi, about to say that he and Tranh would have to pry this door open as well, when the entire runabout shuddered.

  Virji’s heart sped up. She wasn’t frightened, but she was startled. The runabout shouldn’t shudder like that for any reason.

  Then the door moved. It opened an inch, then stopped. Just as she was about to stick her gloved hand inside that opening, the runabout shuddered again, and the door moved three inches.

  “What the…?” Wèi said. “Why is the ship shaking?”

  Virji had experienced this before.

  “Illusion,” she said. “Just this part of the ship is vibrating, and it’s carrying throughout this part of the frame. If we were in the cockpit, we might see a tiny shiver, but that’s it.”

  Speaking those words out loud calmed her. She had to forget that she was with an inexperienced crew. She had to remember that there was a chance—however small—that Everly was inside this runabout, and maybe, for the first time in years, Virji would be able to capture her.

  The door opened six more inches.

  Virji flicked on a light on her wrist and pointed at the gloom inside. She saw shapes and some nanobits floating in the light, just from that little bit of movement.

  The runabout was slowly disassembling itself, something she had read about but never seen.

  Only really old ships did that—ancient ships. She felt her stomach clench.

  She didn’t like the way this was going.

  The door moved again, and as it did, she slipped between it and the frame, then pushed the door into its wall pocket, disturbing even more nanobits. They rose up off the floor, floating for a moment, before descending slowly back to the ground.

  She turned on her other wrist light, then shone them both in different directions.

  The runabout’s small corridor was gray, the floor littered with nanobits. A hole in the wall just below the ceiling made her wonder what had been there. She couldn’t remember.

  But that looked more like a hole someone made removing something than a hole made by a weapon.

  Still, she had hers out. She surveyed the entire corridor before stepping into it.

  “I’ll go first,” Wèi said with annoyance.

  “Stay out of my way,” Virji snapped, and deliberately stepped in front of him.

  She had been too intent on finding Everly. She hadn’t expected anything quite like this. If she had, Virji would have had some of her people report to this part
of the sector base.

  It wasn’t too late. She could send for them and seal up the runabout until they arrived.

  But that wouldn’t solve the possible problem of Everly getting the runabout running again. That wouldn’t prevent Everly from leaving.

  Although, judging by this part of the runabout, it hadn’t run on its own power for a long, long time.

  Virji didn’t feel like losing Everly one more time. If she were playing Virji for a fool—again—then she would set up this interior to give the illusion of time and loss.

  Virji wouldn’t do it that way—Virji would attack and flee—but long ago, the interactions Virji had with Everly proved that Everly and Virji were nothing alike.

  Virji stepped forward, moving cautiously as the nanobits rose around her.

  “Captain, no,” Wèi said, apparently trying to show some respect. “Let us—”

  “Shut up and do as I tell you,” she snapped. “Get your damn weapons out, and follow me. If one of you shoots me and I live, I will see to it that you will never work at any Fleet facility again. Are we clear?”

  “Yes,” Wèi said. The others either didn’t respond or didn’t have their comms set up right.

  What a damn clusterfuck.

  She moved slowly down the corridor. There weren’t many places to hide in a runabout of this vintage. The crew cabins—all two of them. The galley kitchen, sort of.

  And then there was the cockpit/inflight area, where everyone could sit together while the pilot took the runabout wherever it was scheduled to go.

  Virji was heading there.

  If Everly was hiding in the crew cabins, she would remain there. It was smarter to wait in the cockpit: She would retain control of the runabout that way.

  And Everly was nothing if not smart.

  Virji paused only to activate all of the suit’s sensors. She mentally accommodated for the security team following her. The suit didn’t like the nanobits that she kept kicking up. Clearly, everything had settled quickly once the runabout had arrived into this storage room.

  Her heart had stopped pounding. She was calm, like she always was when she led a mission.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually been on the ground on a mission.

  Her people would have fits when they realized she had done this. Ah, well.

  She was breathing shallowly, even though it wasn’t necessary. The suit itself prevented anyone else from hearing her breathe.

  And she needed the suit. According to the readings she got, the environmental system had been off for a very, very long time. There was nothing breathable, at least where she was at the moment. The environment from the storage room was slowly seeping in here, just like the gravity had forced all those little nanobits onto the floor itself.

  She reached the entrance to the cockpit area. Her mouth was dry. She couldn’t hide from whoever was in there, if anyone was, because the nanobits were already rising from where she had disturbed them. Her lights probably let whomever know as well that she was coming.

  So all she did was whirl, laser pistol held close so that no one could knock it out of her hand.

  For a moment, she thought the cockpit was empty.

  And then she realized that it was not.

  FIFTY-NINE

  PART OF HER was thrilled that she was nowhere near that storage room, and part of her was more worried than she had ever been.

  Bristol watched most of the action on the screens around her lab, but she stood just close enough to the blast doors that she could see the side of the runabout. She knew when the security team, led by Virji, had gone inside, and she could see the runabout rock a few times as their weight distributed or something got activated.

  Rajivk was working one of the stations, seeing if he could link up with the runabout’s interior cameras, but at the moment, he couldn’t access anything on that runabout. It appeared to be completely dead, except for the anacapa drive.

  From what she could tell from her own analysis, based mostly on the energy signal it was giving off, that anacapa drive had lost 90 percent of the power it had had when she had installed it one week ago.

  She had no idea how that happened. Anacapa drives lasted hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years.

  Fedo was working her screen, trying to link up to the runabout as well, using all sorts of tricks, including that maintenance mode that she had initially bragged about.

  So far, no one could get in.

  Half the room seemed worried by what was happening just a few yards away, and the other half continued with their own work as if nothing strange were happening.

  Bristol was somewhere in between. Inside that runabout was the woman who had hidden in her storage room for a full day, a woman who could have killed Bristol by activating that damn runabout while Bristol was in the lab.

  But Bristol really wanted to work. She wanted data, and she had none, not at the moment.

  Except that the runabout was dead, the anacapa was at 10 percent power, the runabout looked ancient, and it had come in from deep space.

  She had a hunch that the runabout had been trapped in foldspace for a long time, or abandoned somewhere accessible through that foldspace connection.

  What she didn’t know about anacapa-to-anacapa contact bothered her, particularly at this moment, because she wasn’t sure where, exactly, the runabout had come from.

  Or when, exactly.

  She stepped ever so slightly closer to that storage room. The runabout was inside it, but she wasn’t sure there were answers in that runabout. She was worried that there would be more questions.

  Not to mention the fact that something could still go horribly, terribly wrong. The runabout itself might be dangerously unstable in ways not immediately obvious.

  Or Glida was inside, waiting to strike.

  Or something else, much worse, was there.

  Bristol glanced at the woman in the room she didn’t know, that Beck woman who had come in with Nicoleau, the only person who seemed to express her extreme displeasure in ways that Bristol completely understood.

  Bristol wasn’t sure she would want to stand there either, waiting to see if they would all die.

  Because that was the unspoken part of all of this. Would the anacapa malfunction? Would the runabout take off with the blast doors open? Would it explode?

  Or was she worrying for no reason whatsoever?

  She had no idea.

  All she could do was wait.

  SIXTY

  VIRJI STEPPED INTO the cockpit. The pilot’s chair faced the navigational equipment, the anacapa controls open at the side. A ragged sleeve hung near the controls.

  Virji held her breath even though there was no need to. She took a step closer, Wèi at her heels. She put up a hand, holding him back. She didn’t feel like talking.

  The person in the pilot’s chair did not move. Two of the other chairs were completely gone. The remaining chair was set in its reclining position, almost as if it had gotten stuck there.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the galley kitchen. It was empty. It also looked like it had been gutted in part as well.

  She kept her pistol on the pilot’s chair, staring at the back of it as if she expected it to swivel at any moment. But it didn’t.

  She stepped to one side, pistol first, and gasped aloud.

  A mummified body was strapped in, one hand reaching for the anacapa controls, the other resting on the navigational board as if the person was still flying the runabout.

  Some wispy brown hair clung to the mummy’s head. Its clothing was black, boots worn almost to nothing.

  That was the odd thing: The clothing looked like it had been worn hard. The body looked like it had simply died in place.

  In space, clothing did not decay—but this clothing had. Bodies did mummify in some environments, though. Virji had seen more mummies than she could count.

  She let out a small breath.

  “Clear the rest of the runabou
t,” she said to Wèi, even though she knew that was not necessary. If someone else was alive on this runabout, they would have seen that person by now. If someone else was alive on this runabout, that person would have moved this body.

  But it looked like it had been strapped in place for a very, very long time.

  Virji approached it. Apparently, Wèi did not feel he had to follow her orders directly because he followed her.

  “I told you to clear the runabout,” Virji snapped.

  “I sent Tranh and Fitzwilliam away.” Wèi wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the corpse. “You think that’s Glida Kimura?”

  “I gave you examples of three different DNA samples that Kimura used,” Virji said. “We need to test this corpse against those. Do you have the information?”

  “Not in this suit,” he said, sounding startled.

  Oh, of course. Why would he do something sensible like carry anything with him? Virji let out an irritated sigh, keeping her thoughts to herself.

  Planetside security. Inept and lazy. Anyone from her ship would have brought the DNA with them, because going back and forth wasn’t just a waste of time, it was often impossible.

  She made herself take a deep breath. She really wasn’t angry at him. She had a lot of adrenaline and a huge desire to have a fight with someone, even if it was just a verbal tussle.

  She had hoped for a firefight—and if she were honest with herself, she had hoped she would have been able to shoot Everly at least once.

  “Do we leave it?” Wèi asked.

  It took her a moment to realize he was talking about the corpse.

  “Yes,” she snapped. “We leave it. We’ll need all kinds of techs to examine this scene.”

  She leaned back, looking. The navigational panel seemed surprisingly clean, considering the condition of the floors and walls. She walked over there, careful to avoid the corpse.

  Someone had scraped it off. There was actually the impression of a glove on one side, like a handprint.