Paloma

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

She walked slowly, studying the yacht itself. No signs of damage—the sleek black exterior was as clean as if it had just rolled off its assembly line. No dents, no dings, no laser scrapes. She thought she saw some grappler hook damage near the main exit, but she couldn’t tell for sure.

  Maybe the stupid yacht was self-repairing, as well.

  Or maybe Miles Flint had been telling the truth when he contacted a worried Noelle DeRicci. I’ve been on vacation, Noelle, he said in a slightly chiding tone. It’s my first. I thought I needed one.

  Bowles wanted to say that she’d overheard that message accidentally. But she hadn’t. Even though she’d cut off her illegal taps into DeRicci’s links, she’d left a tap on Flint’s, not expecting much. The taps went through InterDome, and they’d get blamed if she got caught.

  So far, she hadn’t gotten caught. She doubted Flint would pursue her legally even if he knew.

  Bowles had honestly thought he’d left Armstrong for good. He hadn’t come back from his mysterious trip for months and months—and he’d disappeared right in the middle of DeRicci’s first crisis, which Bowles, looking back, somehow found suspicious.

  How suspicious, she didn’t know.

  But there was a lot more to Miles Flint than she got off personal history and old vids. He wasn’t an average Retrieval Artist. He’d kept his friendship with one of the most powerful women on the Moon, and he’d managed to be on the edges of some of the biggest stories that Bowles had covered in her career.

  She didn’t have a story about Flint yet; she just had a hunch. A hunch that Flint was someone important—that he knew more, not just about DeRicci, but about Armstrong itself, than almost anyone else in the city.

  Somehow he would lead Bowles to the story that would rebuild her career.

  She would take her time, do the research, and back everything up. And this time, when she had the story, she would defend it. She wouldn’t let someone like the governor-general outmaneuver her and make her seem like a fool.

  She settled on the dock and stared at the outrageously expensive yacht.

  Miles Flint was back, and deep down, that pleased her more than she could say.

  Three

  The aircar slowed as it reached the outer edge of the Dome. Flint frowned at the controls; he hadn’t programmed in any caution in approaching Paloma’s neighborhood.

  Then the security lights flared—just once—signaling an external scan. Someone using government technology was probing his vehicle—either the police, the new security squad that DeRicci ran, or some other, less well-known organization.

  His stomach churned. He stopped trying to reach Paloma on his links—he’d had no luck, but he kept his system automatically pinging her—and he shut down every system that could be accessed through a general channel.

  Odd that this would happen now. He bit his lower lip, took the car off autopilot, and steered it through the high-rise buildings himself.

  Paloma had taken the profits she made when she sold him her business and bought an apartment in one of the most exclusive sections of Armstrong. Buildings that originally defied city code rose ten and twenty stories over the then-tallest buildings in the city. These apartment complexes also butted up against the domes themselves—indeed, to the naked eye, they were part of the dome wall—so that each apartment had its own unobstructed view of the moonscape beyond.

  Paloma loved the dome wall, the changing light, the view of rocks and dirt and brown emptiness that was the Moon itself. Initially, she would invite him over when the Earth was in full view, and he would marvel at the way the blue-green planet seemed to overtake the moonscape.

  But he hadn’t visited Paloma in a long time. She had been trying to wean him off her advice—reminding him of her early lessons: Retrieval Artists worked alone. The best ones had no friends and no family, no one that the corporations or the various alien groups could use to blackmail the Retrieval Artist against his clients.

  The job she had trained him to do—the job he had chosen to do, over her objections—was one of the strangest in the universe. He searched for Disappeared, people who had changed their identities and fled their old lives rather than face the legal repercussions of whatever crime they had committed.

  It seemed an odd job for a former policeman to do, but it wasn’t—not for someone who believed in true justice. Many of the laws in the Earth Alliance favored the alien cultures that had signed on. Humans could be—and sometimes were—executed for crimes that, in human culture, weren’t crimes at all, such as picking a flower or teaching a child how to read.

  In his last cases for the department, Flint faced turning human children over to aliens whose cultures would destroy those children because of a “crime” the parents had committed. He watched families get torn apart for things as simple as choosing the wrong homesite.

  When he realized that his entire career would consist of giving people he believed to be innocent over to groups that would destroy their minds, imprison them for life, or kill them, he quit. He went to Paloma—the only Retrieval Artist he knew well—and talked with her about doing a job where he picked his clients, where he chose which cases to take and which to avoid.

  So far, the work he enjoyed the most involved finding Disappeareds to give them good news—they’d been acquitted of the crimes they’d committed; or they had a large inheritance coming (and he helped them get it while keeping their identities secret); or notifying them that treaties with whatever alien government held the contract on them had changed and they were now free to live in public again.

  Those cases, as Paloma had warned him, were rare. Most of the potential clients who approached him were Trackers—people hired to hunt down Disappeareds and turn them in to the governments that wanted them. The Trackers often came through a front—a lonely elderly person or a lost child—and then used the Retrieval Artist’s skills to find the Disappeared—the lazy way of doing the Tracker’s job.

  So Flint had become adept at saying no. He’d also become adept at investigating possible clients, discovering who they really were instead of who official records claimed they were.

  He glided the aircar over Paloma’s street, noting the emergency vehicles parked below. Lights flared and warnings sounded. Police lines, marked by laser light and static signs, already marked Paloma’s building as a crime scene.

  He turned away from the street, now understanding why his aircar had become so sluggish. The police had an emergency band that tapped into autopilots, regulating vehicle speed and investigating any vehicle in the vicinity of a crime scene.

  They only used this technology in the most egregious cases or cases that they believed could become a cause célèbre.

  He scanned the newslinks, but so far found nothing. That was strange in itself. Something with this much area cordoned off should’ve been candy to opportunistic reporters like Ki Bowles.

  Flint’s mouth went dry. He landed the car on a parking roof half a block away, and shut the entire system down. He’d have to reboot when he returned to the car, but it was a small price to pay for keeping his vehicle’s information—whatever parts the police hadn’t already accessed—private.

  He got out, made sure all but his emergency links were shut down, then loped across the roof to the elevators.

  Very few cars parked up here. Most locals took public transportation or had private cars with actual human drivers—an expense that screamed wealth. The people who parked in places like this were either visitors to the neighborhood, like Flint, or employees inside the various buildings.

  The elevators were on the dome side of the building, and had clear walls. Flint stood inside, alone, leaning against the back wall, watching the elevator’s reflection in the building across from him. All of the new buildings had ruined this building’s view—which was probably why the owner gave up the rooftop garden with its once-lovely dome view for rooftop parking.

  As he finally reached the lower level, he saw the white-and-blue lights of the emergency vehic
les, the red of the police-line lasers, and the bloblike movements of various official personnel reflected on the building across from him.

  By the time he reached the ground floor, he had something resembling a plan. He hoped that the police on scene were former colleagues of his and they still felt kindly enough to let him into the apartment building.

  If they weren’t, he would have to talk his way in, since he was well-known in the department as someone who’d given up a real job for a shady career. The police didn’t like Retrieval Artists anyway; that Flint—a former detective, considered one of the city’s best—had gone to that barely legal world made them angry.

  The fact that he had become rich right about the same time made many officers even angrier. Flint could explain that his wealth hadn’t come from his Retrieval Artist work, but that would raise even more questions. He actually had become rich saving lives by onetime trafficking in information, something that would please his former department even less than his Retrieval Artist status did.

  He decided to play this more panicked than casual (which was how he felt). He jumped down the curb, hurried across the street—narrowly missing a car that had chosen to land-drive its way through this mess—and then ended up near the parked police vehicles.

  Three were unmarked, probably detectives’ vehicles. One belonged to the city—marked only as a city car by its license—and two vans that held crime scene techs.

  He stopped just outside the lights, scanning the milling officers for a familiar face. He finally saw one coming out of the building—Bartholomew Nyquist.

  Nyquist had headed the investigation of the death of a potential client of Flint’s just before Flint left Armstrong on his so-called vacation. Nyquist was a rumpled man with dark skin and thinning hair. His haphazard clothing hid an athletic body that he seemed to maintain without enhancements.

  Everything about him, in fact, pointed away from who he really was—one of the smartest detectives Flint had encountered in this or any other police department.

  Even though none of the other police officials at the scene had noticed Flint yet, Nyquist spotted him immediately. Nyquist crossed the real grass that groundskeepers somehow maintained, just so that this part of the Moon would look more like Earth than it needed to, and stopped as close to Flint as he could get without touching the laser crime scene light.

  Nyquist had a small shine that ran across his body, which meant he was wearing a protective covering so that he wouldn’t contaminate a crime scene.

  “Why am I not surprised you’re here?” Nyquist asked.

  Flint said, “I got an emergency message from my friend Paloma. She’s—”

  “Your mentor, you mean.” Nyquist dark eyes were red and tired. “You’ve been monitored for the last six blocks. Everyone expected you.”

  “And they called you from whatever you were doing to deal with me.”

  “They assume I know you.”

  Interesting choice of words. “You do know me.”

  “I’ve met you, and I’m still not sure what to make of you. But I’m under orders not to let anyone cross that line.”

  Flint nodded. He’d expected that.

  “And I know enough about you to know that if I tell you not to cross that line, you’ll find a way to get into the building anyway. Probably through some secret door that I don’t know exists. So, it’s better to escort you, keep an eye on you, and then send you away.”

  In other words, to babysit him. Flint’s stomach twisted even more.

  Nyquist hadn’t said anything about Paloma. He hadn’t said what happened here. By implication, it seemed to be over, and it seemed to be bad.

  Nyquist reached over to one of the laser chips and blocked it with his identification tag. Flint slipped through the emptiness and onto the grass.

  “What happened here?” he asked again.

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out.” Nyquist led him across the grass, obviously not concerned with evidence down here.

  “And Paloma?”

  Nyquist didn’t answer.

  Flint felt light-headed. He made himself breathe. Nyquist wanted a reaction from him—otherwise, he’d tell Flint what to expect—and Flint was determined not to give it to him.

  The main doors stood open. The lobby was empty, something Flint had never seen. The black floor, normally polished to a frightening shine, was scuffed and covered with some kind of dirt. The furniture was covered with robotic evidence-gathering equipment, and someone had shut off the automated air, making the entire place seem stuffy and small.

  The view through the dome of the moonscape, usually so vivid that it looked like a person could walk from the black floor to the rocks themselves, was gone. It took Flint a moment to realize that someone had shuttered the giant windows, the way the dome walls came down in an emergency.

  The elevator doors stood open, but the elevators themselves had been shut down. Techs—human techs—worked inside, collecting, gathering, recording.

  Flint involuntarily swallowed against the dryness of his throat.

  Nyquist led him to a staircase hidden in the black wall to the right of the elevators. Paloma lived on the eighth floor. It would be quite a hike.

  Flint walked up with Nyquist, feeling more and more distressed each level that they climbed. Either Nyquist was taking him to Paloma first because Flint had asked, or whatever happened had happened primarily to her.

  As they approached the eighth floor, voices echoed. The door to the stairwell here was open, and, judging from the conversation, techs worked the hallway.

  A woman peered through the door as Flint rounded the last landing. She had curly red hair and dusky skin. Her green eyes looked like they’d been added accidentally, but her generous mouth made up for them.

  “You think this is wise?” she asked.

  For a moment, Flint thought she was talking to him. Then he realized that she was looking past him, at Nyquist.

  “He needs to suit up,” Nyquist said.

  The woman rolled those strange eyes of hers, then vanished into the hallway. She returned a half second later holding a tech suit, one that covered every centimeter of the body and made sure that nothing—not one bit of trace evidence—fell from the wearer to the crime scene.

  Flint hadn’t worn one of those in years.

  She nodded toward Flint. He turned to Nyquist, unwilling to put on the suit without an explanation. The suit made for a great cover story; it could protect the crime scene or double as an evidence-collection bag. Flint had a lot of trace on him. He didn’t want to share it, or any part of his DNA, without a reason.

  He didn’t touch the offered suit. “Before we go any further,” he said to Nyquist, “you tell me what happened.”

  Irritation flashed over Nyquist’s features, so fast that Flint almost missed it. He understood it, though. Nyquist had been hoping Flint had forgotten or had been too upset to remember the suit’s double uses.

  “I’d rather you covered,” Nyquist said.

  Flint studied Nyquist. Nyquist would rather have Flint’s reaction to the crime scene than explain it. All right, then. Flint would have to make a compromise if he wanted to view the scene.

  “I’m not wearing your suit unless I get to keep it,” he said.

  “You know we can’t do that,” Nyquist said.

  Flint shrugged one shoulder. “Then I’m not going to put it on until you tell me what’s up there.”

  “He shouldn’t be here anyway,” the woman said.

  Nyquist glared at her, then at Flint, as if weighing which would be best. Finally, Nyquist said, “Give him the suit.”

  She tossed the suit down. Flint ran his fingers over the edge, shutting off all the internal sensors and any links the suit had to the department itself. He pulled out chips that couldn’t be shut off and handed them to Nyquist, who looked at them quizzically.

  “Your file said you had programming experience,” Nyquist said. “But I didn’t think you worried about
every single chip.”

  “Been checking up on me?” Flint asked as he slipped the suit over his clothes.

  “For the last case,” Nyquist said. “Then you vanished. I had to close it without you.”

  Flint shrugged again. “You didn’t tell me I had to stay in Armstrong.”

  “You didn’t have to stay. You just had some information that I would have liked.”

  Flint shook his head. “I gave you all the information I had.”

  It was a lie, but a small one. The murder victim in that last case had been one of Flint’s clients—or, more accurately, had wanted to become one of his clients. He didn’t dare give any information, even on a potential client, to the police. He had, however, bent the rules slightly, and pointed Nyquist in the right direction.

  Maybe this, going to Paloma’s floor, was a return favor. Maybe that was why Nyquist brought up the way they’d met.

  Flint pressed a manufacturer’s chip on the suit’s palm, and the entire thing sealed up around him. Only his face and ears remained uncovered. Everything else made him feel as if he’d been wrapped like a sandwich in one of those automated machines.

  He had forgotten how much he hated these suits.

  “All right,” Flint said. “Now let’s see what you won’t tell me.”

  Nyquist shot Flint a compassionate look. “I’m sorry,” he said, and started up the stairs.

  Flint hesitated before following Nyquist. Was the man apologizing for what Flint was about to see? Or for the way that Flint was—or would be—treated when he reached Paloma’s floor?

  The nerves that had bothered Flint from the moment he’d gotten Paloma’s message grew worse. He had no idea what he was walking into, and it bothered him.

  The fact that Nyquist wouldn’t tell him anything bothered him as well.

  The woman had moved away from the door. The techs’ voices grew louder, directing collection equipment toward certain areas, looking for camera chips embedded in the walls.

  Flint knew a few of the techs, but didn’t acknowledge them. Instead, he stepped across the threshold into a blood bath.