Paloma

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Paloma Page 19

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch


  And they probably had. The environmental system had shut down as a matter of procedure, leaving everyone in here to survive on the remaining air. It wouldn’t get cold—not for a while, not with the other parts of the port surrounding this section—but the air would get dicey soon, unless the port had a separate environmental system for this area.

  The team was moving. He hadn’t seen that before. Hands pushing underneath, legs bending. He would have to go back down there, see how badly they were injured—

  And then, one by one, they stood. Procedure again. This team was good. They checked themselves from the downed position, probably with their own handhelds, and then they pushed upward, after deeming the area safe enough.

  The ‘bots were intact. The shiny things along the ground were metal pieces from the ship itself.

  No one was injured. Except the woman who died.

  Because of Flint.

  Nyquist shut his eyes. They felt gummy and not his own. He had to get to decontamination. He had to make sure everything was all right.

  Warm air hit him. He turned. The doors behind him had opened, and teams of people streamed in, all wearing HazMat gear. Someone in a suit—someone he couldn’t recognize—grabbed him, moved him away from the door and toward a side of the terminal.

  He dug his feet against the slick floor, trying to stop them.

  “Wait,” he said. “We know who did this. He could still be in the port.”

  The person—very strong—kept dragging him. He stuck out a hand, touched a metal wall, now covered in slime.

  “Stop!” Nyquist said. “I’ll go with you. Just let me get notice out on the man who did this.”

  The person dragging him stopped. Maybe that person was talking to him. He couldn’t tell. Then the person’s hand went up, and they waited like that for just a moment.

  Finally, someone else came over, slight like Zengotita. He looked for her. She was walking toward whatever it was they had tried to drag him toward, her head down. The rest of the team was following, some with the needed help of the people in HazMat suits.

  The person who came toward Nyquist also had a HazMat suit. He thought he could see skin inside, but he wasn’t sure. He hated those things.

  “Look,” he said. “I can’t hear you. I have ear damage. But I need to tell you something. My name is Bartholomew Nyquist. I’m a police detective.”

  The person—a woman? He didn’t know, but he was going to guess, just to make things easier—nodded. Then a scroll ran through Nyquist’s links, words appearing in the lower part of his left eye’s vision:

  Make it quick. The longer you wait for decontamination, the greater chance you have of serious illness.

  He noted that the person didn’t tell him who she was.

  “Okay,” he said. “I got that. I’m going to send you the files—

  No sending. I can contact you, through a series of links, but you can’t contact me. You might have acquired some kind of virus.

  It took him a moment to realize that she meant an information virus. He shuddered. The person holding him looked at him as if the shudder were worrisome.

  Nyquist ignored that. He sighed, then wished he hadn’t, as something got into his mouth. “Look, we know who set the explosion. His name is Miles Flint. He’s a Retrieval Artist and a former police detective.”

  We’ll send someone to pick him up. The person in front of him reached for him. Now you have to go to the decontamination chamber. You’ll go through at least three of them. It’ll take a while…

  “I think,” Nyquist said, interrupting the flow of words, “that he’s still here. Somewhere. In the port. The quicker you move, the quicker you’ll find him.”

  I’ve already sent the message. The person took his other arm. Together, the two first-responders in their HazMat gear led him toward the far side of the Terminal. They’ll catch him if they can.

  “In the port,” Nyquist said.

  In the port. Stop worrying. We’ll get him, and we’ll get him soon.

  Nyquist hoped that was true, but he had his doubts.

  He was beginning to worry that Flint was smarter than them all.

  Twenty-eight

  Ki Bowles had cleaned up her new office herself. She had banished the ‘bots. They creeped her out, something she had never admitted to herself before. She kept two of them running because she was lazy—she didn’t want to get out of bed at three in the morning if she needed a drink of water—but she had relegated them to the corner of her laundry room, so that she didn’t have to see them.

  It felt good to arrange her stuff in her apartment. She put the disks of her important stories on the top shelf of her newly created library, and before she did anything else, she downloaded all her other work from the InterDome site, just in case they decided to delete her connection to them forever.

  She bought some storage space on an off-world server and she kept the reports there, using as much encryption as she understood, so that no one could access them and no one could delete them.

  Anything to prevent herself from becoming that whiny ex-employee of her imagination.

  She had sent a message to her manager, promising big money, and had gotten no response, which made her stomach tighten. Her manager had probably heard about the firing. Bowles had gone against her manager’s wishes in the first place by not going to Gossip. Maybe this would be the end of their relationship too, and she would have to find new representation.

  Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.

  Her hands shook at that last thought. She’d been putting her awards as data dividers on that top shelf, and she nearly dropped one.

  For a woman who hated change, she was going through quite a bit of it at the moment. She had lived the same kind of life for nearly a decade now, and she had liked it.

  But she hadn’t realized how isolated she’d become. She only saw the people at work every day. She arrived there so early and left so late that she didn’t even see the other people who lived in her building. She’d gotten dispensation when she moved in to avoid the owners’ meetings, so she didn’t know the politics of the apartment building she’d bought into.

  She didn’t know if they’d make it hard for her to stay because she wasn’t famous any longer.

  Then she sat in her chair and made herself take some deep breaths. She was still famous. Famous didn’t go away just because the job did.

  She just wasn’t employed, and that wasn’t as serious a problem as she had initially thought. One of the benefits of never doing anything except work meant that she had a lot of money stored up. She traveled, but it had been work related; she bought clothes, but only on the company’s credit; she ate out every day, but at company-approved (and company-billed) restaurants.

  Since she had become an employee of InterDome, she had hardly spent any money on herself at all. Just for this apartment, and while that had seemed like a stretch, given her monthly income, the fact that she spent so very little on anything else made it a wise purchase.

  Over time, she had even built in some equity, which surprised her. She was better off financially than she expected.

  While she unpacked her boxes, she’d had her apartment system download all the information it could find on the history of the Disappeared system from various public databases. She’d start work tonight because, she knew, not working would drive her crazy.

  She needed a focus, and the focus couldn’t be getting fired from InterDome or even reassembling her slightly shattered life.

  Eventually she would know everything there was to know about Disappeareds, Retrieval Artists, and the most hidden secrets of the society she lived in.

  Twenty-nine

  Flint led Van Alen through the back areas of the port, areas that only authorized personnel saw. Those areas were the only places that Flint could guarantee the interior protective walls wouldn’t lower.

  Van Alen clung to the bag containing the battered handheld. Flint wanted it, just in case they got separated,
but he knew she wouldn’t hand it over.

  She was moving slower than he liked—her boots had enough of a heel that she was unbalanced running, or maybe she just wasn’t used to moving this quickly. He had a firm grip on her left wrist, dragging her forward as if she were a recalcitrant child.

  Along the way, they’d seen half a dozen HazMat teams going toward Terminal 25 and another half-dozen heading toward other areas of the port. The announcements were so thick and so loud in back here that Flint had started to ignore them.

  Instead, he tied his links to the port systems, watching for any new announcements to crawl along his left eye.

  So far, they only told him what the first broadcast announcement had—that a ship had breached and the port was in a state of emergency.

  “Where’re we going?” Van Alen managed to gasp.

  Flint ignored her. The less she knew at the moment, the less trouble she’d be.

  No one seemed to care that they were in these corridors, going against the tide of HazMat workers, security personnel, and Space Traffic police. The tide got thicker the closer he came to the Port Authority Center. People, mostly uniformed, hurried past him, all trying to get to the crisis.

  He needed to get away, but before he did, he had to know what was going on.

  Finally, he was able to turn down a familiar hallway. It took some tugging to get Van Alen through that crowd and into the mostly empty space.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she snapped. “The announcements said to stay put.”

  “Do you want to be in the port for the next eight hours?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, “but—”

  He didn’t want to hear her argument. It would probably be well thought out and carefully reasoned and even amazingly logical. But it wouldn’t factor in the fact that Wagner had just left, after losing a verbal battle with Flint.

  Wagner could have orchestrated this. Flint wouldn’t put it past him.

  This corridor was one of the oldest in the port. It smelled musty, even though it was heavily used. It had flaking walls, made of some substance between permaplastic and that half-plastic so many modern buildings used. This substance was hazardous, but impossible to remove; he always tried to avoid touching these walls. He even felt that the corridor was an affront—putting everyone who used it in danger.

  Now he was relieved to be here.

  Van Alen was looking over her shoulder, watching to see if they were being followed. He tugged her, gently this time, and she stumbled with him. He glanced at that bag, still clutched in her hand.

  “You think some alien vessel breached?” she asked. “Not using our atmosphere?’

  “It could be anything,” he said. “It could be that. It could be improper decompression in one of our ships. It could be an on-board explosion. There’s no way to tell this early on.”

  “Unless you’re one of the privileged few,” Van Alen said.

  “Unless,” he agreed.

  He was walking now, but walking fast. Going the other way in the main corridor was enough to get them noticed, but probably not yet. The port was too busy dealing with the emergency.

  Finally, he got to the dark, unmarked door that led into Space Traffic headquarters. It was the door the cops used most of the time. He just hoped it wasn’t locked.

  He grabbed the well-used knob and turned it. The door pulled open just like it used to.

  Van Alen had come up beside him. “Where are we?” she asked softly, which showed that she was at least being cautious.

  “Let me do the talking,” he said, without really answering her. “I used to work here.”

  She frowned at him. She knew his résumé—at least, he thought she did—but he wasn’t going to illuminate her on any part of this. He wanted to find out what was happening and then leave the port, as invisibly as possible.

  The door opened into a filthy hallway that branched in several directions. Most of them led to various locker rooms and a few meeting rooms. Only the hallway to the right took them to the main part of Space Traffic Control.

  Van Alen clutched Flint’s arm, as if she were afraid to be in this part of the port. Most people never saw this area. It wasn’t pretty—it still had the same flaking material on the wall, and the signs were old-fashioned scrollers rather than blinking repeaters. Most of them used only Spanish and Disty, the main languages of the Earth Alliance, although a few of them also used English and a few other Earth-founded languages.

  Van Alen didn’t ask where they were. The signs helped her. They told rookies where to stash their uniforms, reminded veterans to check their laser pistols before leaving the area, and warned that any suspicious vehicle should not be allowed into port. An emergency sign had been turned on, and it repeated all the information that had been blared overhead in the public areas, as well as the words that were still running across Flint’s left eye.

  Flint led her down the hallway to the right. The muscles in his shoulder had tightened. He could be making a mistake here, getting them into even more trouble than they had been in near the Lost Seas.

  But he was going to risk it.

  The hallway opened onto a side door that led to the area behind the main desk. Murray sat there, monitoring screens that showed him all of the Terminals. He was focused on Terminal 25. That screen was yellow and orange with hazard lights and some kind of debris that Flint couldn’t see.

  “Murray,” Flint said.

  Murray jumped. Flint had never startled him before. He had always thought Murray was all-knowing and all-seeing. Then he realized that Murray wasn’t really watching the other screens. He’d only been focused on the disaster.

  “Oh, crap, kid,” Murray said. “You have to get out of here.”

  Flint nodded. “I know. The port’s closing down.”

  “You don’t know,” Murray said. “You’re wanted for blowing up a ship.”

  Van Alen gasped. Murray peered around Flint. Apparently, Murray hadn’t seen her before.

  “Who’s that?” he growled.

  “My lawyer,” Flint said.

  Murray’s mouth thinned and his expression went flat. He clearly didn’t want anything to do with her.

  “She got me into the Lost Seas. That’s where we were when the alert came down.”

  Murray grunted, then nodded, as if he had forgotten that. “Still, you gotta leave. If you do it soon, I’ll pretend I only saw the lawyer.”

  Flint pulled Van Alen in so that the door did close.

  “What did I allegedly blow up?” Flint asked, praying it wasn’t the Emmeline.

  “The Dove,” Murray said.

  “Paloma’s ship?” Van Alen asked.

  “It’s been blown up?” Flint asked.

  Murray pressed the wall unit with the back of his hand. Then he peeled out a chip and handed it to Flint. “Take a look, but not here.”

  “You’re not holding me?”

  “Why should I?” Murray asked. “You didn’t do it.”

  “You base this on my kind personality?” Flint asked.

  “I base it on something you said.” Murray grinned, revealing yellowing teeth. “You said if you wanted to do something illegal, you woulda disabled our security systems first. Besides, an officer is down. You wouldn’t set nothing up that would hurt a person, especially not a fellow officer. You’ve saved too many to do that.”

  Flint smiled at the words fellow officer. He had been right earlier. For all his gruffness, Murray had believed in Flint.

  “But they think you done it. A crime scene tech was inside when it went. She’s dead, others might be injured.”

  “The ship?” Van Alen asked.

  “The ship’s lost its hatch. I think it was some kind of booby trap designed to catch whoever went in. You coulda set that off.” Murray was still talking to Flint. The last was speculation.

  Flint shook his head. “I didn’t set anything off. Although the ship recognized me when I went in the first time.”

  “If it h
adn’ta, you think it woulda blown on you?”

  Flint frowned. If that was the case, then Paloma had set up the explosives. Why would she do that? It didn’t seem like her.

  Then he closed his eyes only for a second. Nothing seemed like her.

  “I don’t know,” Flint said. “When did they start looking for me?”

  “Call came down a few minutes ago. I’d get if I were you, and I wouldn’t go to none of your usual haunts.”

  Flint nodded. He turned toward Van Alen and the door, then he stopped. “Is the Emmeline all right?”

  “Dunno,” Murray said. “The ships in that area mighta gotten hit, might not. But if it is, it’s just space debris.”

  Meaning the damage would be minor.

  “Thanks,” Flint said.

  “Don’t mention it,” Murray said. “I mean it. Don’t.”

  Flint grinned, then pulled the door open. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t.”

  Thirty

  DeRicci sat on her office chair, chin resting on her palm, staring at the list of ships Popova had sent her. Sixty-five ships, all of them under various quarantines, none of them in Terminal 81. Some of them had been allowed to rust and decay at their berths for more than a hundred years.

  DeRicci shuddered, not wanting to think about all the problems this could have caused. Illnesses, deaths, some kind of radiation poisoning from the proximity to the vessels. Who knew what kind of contamination had spread through that port?

  The decon units helped a little, she knew, but certain species were allowed to forgo strenuous decon. For all she knew, certain people—certain groups—had spread all kinds of nasty stuff through Armstrong for years.

  But she couldn’t be alarmist. Instead, she had to be organized. She had to have her staff research each and every ship, and then the staff had to propose what to do about the problem.

  Which would take more time, and would create all sorts of political problems. Because once the news broke—and it would—the stupid reporters would wonder how come DeRicci hadn’t acted the moment this came to her attention.

 

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