Early on, a lot of Retrieval Artists were prosecuted for harboring fugitives, but then the entire profession grew smart. And useful.
Once again, ESI was at the forefront. When it negotiated an agreement with a native government that then changed the legal ramifications of what ESI had done in its initial phase, ESI became the first corporation to have in-house Retrieval Artists whose job it was to bring back the highly trained, highly skilled person in hiding.
Bowles found the entire concept fascinating. There was more than one story here, maybe more than one series. She could look at Disappearance Services, at Trackers, and at various governments, as well as Retrieval Artists.
From what she could tell, with just an evening’s cursory search, the early records had vid interviews with returned Disappeareds, the founder of ESI’s first Disappearance Service, and even some early Retrieval Artists.
She had stumbled onto a gold mine, a gold mine of history and stories that had been there all along. If she hadn’t known this stuff, none of her viewers would either.
The implications were far-reaching, going back to the early days of the Alliance and agreements people still argued about. The compromises every human put up with in order to live in a multiethnic, multicultural, multispecies universe were in stark relief here.
If she handled the information correctly, she could become not just an expert on Retrieval Artists, but on human cultural, business, and legal history and its daily ramifications for the Moon and the Earth Alliance.
It would take a long time to establish, but it would be worth her time.
She would become more than Ki Bowles, InterDome’s most famous reporter. She would become Ki Bowles, the Moon’s expert on all matters pertaining to the known universe.
She would be a source, not a grubby digger for information. She would be important. And, if she was honest with herself, that was all she ever really wanted.
Forty-three
When Nyquist reached the fifth floor of the First Detective Division, he was surprised to realize he wasn’t the only person from the morning shift still working a case. Three other detectives from morning were at their desks, researching or digging through files or completing a report.
Nyquist nodded at all of them, got words of concern from one who’d heard about the bombing at the port, and then he went into his closet-sized office.
He was too wired to sleep. He couldn’t interview suspects at this late hour—not without cause—and he didn’t need to be on the street looking for Flint. Patrol units were doing that. Flint’s arrest warrant had been flagged as high priority.
Instead, Nyquist was going to review the evidence the techs had processed and he was going to go over backgrounds on everyone from Flint to the Wagners to see what he missed.
But first, he was going to moonlight on the case he’d been forbidden to investigate, the one he was involved in, the Dove bombing.
If anyone examined his records, he would simply say he was following the suspect in his own current case, the Paloma murder case, and he would leave it at that. Let some internal affairs officer figure out which case Nyquist was working on.
After all, the Dove belonged to Paloma. Flint, one of the primary suspects in her murder, was the last person to leave it before it blew. Nyquist had to retrace Flint’s steps from the moment he entered the port until the moment he left it.
Nyquist knew no one had done more than a cursory search of the port’s security videos. Everyone, from the techs to Space Traffic to the detectives, was focused on finding Flint, not on developing a case against him.
Nyquist would work on that case, because he learned about his suspects from their actions. Flint had a reason for being on the Dove after he learned that Paloma had been murdered. Whether it was to establish an alibi—after all, why would an ex-cop be that dumb?—or whether it was to set the bomb, Nyquist couldn’t tell at the moment.
He wanted to be able to tell eventually.
So he fed an image of Flint into his creaky old computer system, had it match that image with the various security vids he’d gotten from the port, and then he watched a fairly continuous thread of images of Miles Flint.
Even alone, Flint had looked upset and distracted. Once or twice, the later vids caught the outline of a laser pistol under Flint’s clothing, which didn’t surprise Nyquist. Flint was an ex-cop, after all.
He had hurried like a man with somewhere important to go, but the images of his face that the vids had captured all showed a man who seemed lost, upset, and distraught.
Nyquist leaned on his forearms, careful not to touch the desktop screen. Flint went through the various sections of the port like a man on automatic pilot. When he finally reached Terminal 25, he paused, frowned, and seemed to come into himself.
Nyquist expected Flint to go straight to the Dove, but he didn’t. Instead, he went to his own ship, the Emmeline. And there, Nyquist got a surprise.
The InterDome reporter, Ki Bowles, was waiting for him. She stood as if she had expected him. He seemed surprised to see her, but that could have been acting.
They exchanged words, and Flint started toward his ship. Then he stopped, and told her—quite visibly—to go. She did.
Nyquist turned up the audio, but all he got was ambient noise, clangs, and audio announcements. The port’s security system wasn’t designed for sophisticated audio pickup, particularly in the high-end areas like Terminal 25. Wealthy yacht owners expected their privacy, and they got it to the best of the port’s ability, as long as the port could also provide them with the security that they so amply paid for.
When Nyquist couldn’t get the audio from the interchange, he ran a program to read their lips. Only, he couldn’t get much from that, either. Flint clearly told Bowles to leave, but whatever they had said before that was garbled or made no sense.
The program didn’t get a good enough look at either of their mouths to do an accurate lip-read.
Nyquist sighed. That meant he had to interview Ki Bowles about her meeting with Flint. Had she known he was going to do something? Or was she there to ask him about Paloma’s death?
He clicked his screen on InterDome and scanned for Ki Bowles latest report. What he got was weeks old.
He frowned. Was she on background? Had she filed something and he searched for it wrong? He couldn’t’ remember seeing her on the vidcasts recently, but that didn’t mean much. He didn’t watch the news unless he had to.
Maybe he had set up the parameters of the search wrong. He reprogrammed his search through InterDome’s latest downloads while he continued to watch the port’s security vid.
Eventually he would figure out what Miles Flint was up to.
Eventually everything would make sense.
Forty-four
Van Alen’s office was filled with odd, unfamiliar noises. Bangs and creaks and groans. It took Flint awhile to realize these were normal building noises, things that happened every hour of every day, and regular employees of the place no longer even noticed.
Flint stood, moving away from the computer, trying to keep the blood flowing. He was getting tired, and he couldn’t be.
He had a long, long way to go.
It did feel odd, though, being the only one in this opulent room, with its executive shower through the side door, and the complete kitchen just outside the main area. He wasn’t used to working in places like this. It either showed that Van Alen trusted him or that she had her confidential information locked up where no one could find it.
He didn’t bother to look. He had more than enough to do.
He raised his arms above his head, clasped his hands together, and stretched, listening to his back crack. Then he helped himself to more iced coffee, knowing that at some point the caffeine would simply make his heart race instead of keeping him awake.
Finally, he returned to the files.
The sheer volume of them overwhelmed him. He needed a plan of attack. But he wasn’t even sure where to start. Some of the fil
es he had examined were so mundane that he couldn’t see how they were relevant.
So he rubbed his eyes and thought. Finding anything relevant would be luck at this point. Or he had to figure out where Paloma hid the relevant files, if there were any. For all he knew, she had simply stolen the files from her old firm as a form of leverage.
Then why go to such lengths to protect them?
Or was she protecting something else?
He took another sip of the iced coffee, feeling it shiver down his throat. Maybe he was overthinking this. Maybe he should simply take the old-fashioned approach, as if Paloma were any client, not his mentor.
What did he know?
He knew that she had left the firm and taken the files. He knew that she had fought to protect those files.
He knew that she lied routinely and easily, with no thought to the consequences.
He stopped, rubbed his eyes, and sighed. He was bitter, and he couldn’t be. He had to let go of his emotions and think.
Paloma left the firm and changed her name. Yet she stayed connected as a Tracker and then as a Retrieval Artist. Those facts had to be important.
And the files he’d looked at, everything he’d scanned, showed that everything here came from her days as a lawyer.
So, logically, something toward the end of her tenure made her quit.
For the first time in an hour, his pulse quickened and he knew it wasn’t because of the caffeine. He finally had a plan of attack. He finally knew how to approach this.
He went for the most recent file with the numbers indicating the case belonged to Lucianna Stuart, the lawyer who became Paloma.
He opened the first subfile and felt his stomach churn.
He was looking at a long-range photograph of a collapsed dome. Subsequent photographs showed the same dome in more detail, bodies twisted in the wreckage.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to read this, but it was the first dramatic thing he’d found all night.
And somehow, he knew, it was important.
Maybe important enough to cost Paloma her life.
Forty-five
DeRicci could have gone home. One of the perks of this new job was that she didn’t have to work long hours unless there was a Moon-wide crisis.
But there was no real reason to go home. Work, even when it was routine, was a lot more interesting than anything in her apartment.
She had let two of her assistants go, keeping only Popova here in case she needed to bounce something off of someone. Popova claimed to have no life as well. Sometimes DeRicci tested her, trying to see how much Popova would take before admitting she had a date or a boyfriend or a secret hidden life.
So far, Popova hadn’t admitted anything, and DeRicci found that a bit disappointing.
She also found the files she was scanning disappointing. The list of quarantined ships was curious. The ships themselves seemed to have no pattern. Some had sat in their positions for decades. Some predated Terminal 81. Those made sense. They had gotten lost in the data systems, misfiled or overlooked once the terminal opened. No one thought to check on them, even though many of those ships hadn’t been accessed in nearly a century.
She shuddered to think about the mess that would cause—the legal hassles in tracing long-term ownership, and the destructive capability of whatever it was that caused the ships to be quarantined in the first place.
The quarantines were generally nonspecific. Sometimes DeRicci couldn’t even tell which organization had issued the quarantine, whether it had come from the port itself or from the ship’s logs (some quarantines were mandatory if the ship traveled to a certain planet or among certain alien groups) and often the quarantine didn’t seem to apply to the cargo and/or crew of the ship, most of whom had scattered long ago.
All of them would have to be tracked down. They’d have to go through decon and then they’d have to make a list of everyone they’d come into contact with, sometimes over the space of years.
DeRicci felt overwhelmed just thinking about that.
She got up and walked to the door, pulling it open and peering at Popova. Popova leaned over her desk screen, half asleep as she ran her finger along the touch screen.
“You hungry?” DeRicci asked.
Popova snapped into an upright position, her long black hair swaying around her like a robe. “Sorry?”
“You wanna get something for us to eat?” DeRicci asked.
“Sure,” Popova said. “What do you want?”
“Whatever’s open nearby and cheap,” DeRicci said. “I’m buying.”
Popova nodded as it became clear that she was the person in charge of ordering. She already knew DeRicci’s food preferences, and the kinds of things that DeRicci believed could be eaten at a desk without permanently staining it.
DeRicci slipped back to her office and went back to the list of quarantined ships. She sorted the list, placing the ownership of the vessel at the very top. And let out a sigh of annoyance when she realized most vessels were owned by holding companies related to more holding companies related to subsidiaries related to corporations.
Only a few were independently owned.
And one name stopped her. A name she hadn’t expected.
In the middle of the list, she found a space yacht quarantined ten years ago.
Its owner was someone she’d heard of but never met.
Claudius Wagner. Father of Justinian. And the lover—or maybe the husband—of a woman once known as Lucianna Stuart.
Paloma.
Forty-six
The subfiles in Lucianna Stuart’s last case seemed to go on forever. Flint finally looked at the system count for them, and discovered 450 subfiles. More files lurked in each subfile. This case alone would take him weeks.
He waded through motions and court orders and legal documents by the hundreds. He quickly learned how to scan them for the most important information.
He also found vids, more still photos, and a pile of holographic imagery, none of which he opened. The still photos were disturbing enough.
From what he could glean on a cursory examination, Lucianna Stuart had been the primary attorney for a large corporation named Environmental Systems Inc. ESI had existed long before Lucianna was born, and still continued. Flint recognized the company name from hundreds of products he’d seen all over Armstrong, most of those products having to do with heating ducts and sonic toilets and individual environmental systems.
ESI was an Earth corporation, but it had affiliates all over the known universe. ESI had a branch in Armstrong, its second-largest corporate headquarters after the one in Beijing on Earth. When Stuart merged with Wagner and Xendor to form the biggest law firm on the Moon, she brought ESI with her. Then she was a small attorney in a phalanx of attorneys from firms all over the Earth Alliance. Most of the other attorneys handled the local cases, but the big cases—the ones that could bankrupt ESI—eventually came to WSX, mostly because of Lucianna Stuart’s expertise.
Which was how she got the dome case.
Flint stopped drinking the iced coffee as he read these files, and moved to plain water. He needed something that wouldn’t upset his stomach further.
These files were upsetting it enough.
From what he could gather with his cursory review, the dome case began simply enough. ESI won a bid to build a dome on the fifth moon of S’Dem. The fifth moon had no atmosphere, like this Moon, and the dome building seemed like an easy task for ESI, until Flint looked deeper in the documentation.
ESI wasn’t building the dome for human habitation. It was building the dome for the Riayet, a race that survived in an atmosphere filled with a toxic mix of unbreathable chemicals, most of which Flint had never heard of. The Riayet swam through this thick atmosphere and incorporated it into their skin, making them almost inseparable from the environment itself.
Building a dome that would sustain them would be a difficult task. Spaceships that they built on their own often malfunctioned because of the heav
iness of the atmosphere.
The Riayet had never colonized an area before because of their unusual environment. While they’d been able to make their off-world vessels work, at least most of time, they’d never been able to sustain off-world travels for more than a few Earth months.
ESI swore it could change that, and when the Riayet laid claim to the fifth moon of S’Dem, they hired ESI to build the dome.
The ESI engineers studied Riayet systems for nearly a decade, familiarizing themselves with the Riayet’s most important needs. They ran simulations on Ria, the Riayet’s home planet, managing to get the Riayet colonists to survive for more than a year in an artificial environment.
Using the lessons learned on Ria, the ESI engineers built a fully functional dome on the fifth moon. The dome seemed fine, although it had the usual problems—breakdowns, a few cracks—and one unexpected problem: the weight of the Riayet atmosphere caused half the moon’s surface beneath the dome to slip. Apparently, the moon’s crust wasn’t as thick in some areas as it was in others, and couldn’t handle the incredible mass of buildings, population, and heavy atmosphere.
The dome, now braced unevenly on broken ground, started to fail.
ESI corporate headquarters in Armstrong contacted Lucianna Stuart, letting her know that the ESI engineers believed they had miscalculated. They hadn’t tested the entire surface of the planned settlement on the fifth moon. They had only tested a representative sample—and that sample was on the part of the colony that hadn’t slipped.
ESI, used to doing calculations for human domes only, hadn’t factored in the impact of the atmosphere, which was ten times heavier than air. It had assumptions, based on the faulty analysis of the fifth moon’s surface, and those assumptions had proven to be false.
The dome couldn’t be fixed. It would fail.
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