Buried Deep

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The architect—or maybe it was the interior designer—had ordered that greenery be the other feature of this place, and not just fake greenery like there had been in her detective’s office, but real plants that required some real plant person to come in every day, mist them, water them, and feed them as if they were children.

  As soon as DeRicci felt like she had freedom of movement, she would order those plants out of here. She wasn’t sure that freedom of movement would ever come. Right now, each breath she took was scrutinized, each tremble of a finger looked at as if she were signaling an order to one of her minions.

  She didn’t really have minions yet. She hadn’t hired them. The only people on her staff were the security team assigned to guard her, and the skeleton staff that any government office had. Right now, they were all being paid by the City of Armstrong. No one had worked out the logistics of having the United Domes pay for any of this.

  That, the governor-general had assured DeRicci, would happen in the next biennium—whatever the hell that was.

  A big office, no real staff, and only a vague mission. At the moment, DeRicci wasn’t even sure how to begin doing her job, let alone what kind of job she was supposed to do. She’d asked, of course, and everyone had given her the same answer: It’s your job to make the Moon more secure..

  But she didn’t have a budget or any way to enforce the changes she made. She didn’t even have a plan.

  And everyone outside of the government treated her like she had just become the Moon’s military dictator. All that popularity she had worked up after the marathon and her work on the commission had vanished like it had never been.

  Of course, Ki Bowles wasn’t helping. Those horrible news pieces, talking about all of DeRicci’s past screwups, without discussing anything positive she’d done, made it sound like she had bungled her way into this job.

  Maybe she had. She certainly couldn’t remember anything she had done right. Only the demotions and the reprimands and the anger she had carried in her very bones when she worked for the police department.

  Then she used to think if only she could run the department for one day, she would make such a difference. She would understand all the problems the street officers and detectives had. She would know how to treat everyone well.

  Now she just shook her head at her own naïveté. Here she was in charge of a fake kingdom, almost afraid to make a move for fear that someone somewhere would make a valid objection.

  Right now, her new department had bad press, no real design, and no power.

  And she was so politically inexperienced, she had no idea how to put any of this right.

  Thirteen

  Flint wasn’t trying to save her life. He was just trying to find out if she was telling the truth.

  He made Costard pay the retainer directly into one of his accounts, explained the rules and procedures to her, and sent her on her way. She left him the name of the hotel she was staying at, and he promised to contact her in no less than 48 hours.

  He had a lot of research to do during that time.

  Some of the research was easy. He started with Costard herself, going deeper than the cursory information he had received when he had gotten her facial recognition through his network. Everything she had done was in some database or another. Her parents were well-known archeology professors who had traveled the Earth, looking at artifacts. They had died on a dig in a region known as the Middle East, after some sort of accident had caused the remains of an ancient stone building to collapse around them.

  Costard was their only child. She had accompanied them on their travels when she was young, but as she got older, they had left her behind in various schools. She had worked her way to the top of all of her classes, and had shown great promise in several fields.

  When her parents died, she had been working on a masters in history. She had dropped that and had started all over again, focusing on physical anthropology, a field related to her parents’ expertise, but not in that area. Over time, she had specialized in forensic anthropology, essentially working with bones recently found to figure out how the person who had once worn those bones had died.

  Flint wondered if she ever thought about the irony of her work: that she dealt with people who had often been long buried—hidden by dirt or debris or ancient stone buildings. People like her parents, who, because of some misfortune, had ended life early and painfully, their bodies hidden by the ground itself.

  If she had thought of it, he found no record of it in her writings or the interviews she had done. Costard was passionate about her work and had become well known, one of the true experts in her field.

  Only her field was Earth-centric. There was little call for forensic anthropologists outside of the nurturing, oxygen-rich, humid environment of the mother planet. The more artificial the environment, the easier it was for medical examiners, doctors, and coroners to find the secrets of the dead.

  Flint learned, in his study of Costard, that the dead who kept their flesh had fewer secrets than the dead who had lost theirs. He had found it a ghoulish job, one that seemed almost irrelevant. He hadn’t talked with her about it; he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know what it was about the work that truly inspired her.

  Like most forensic anthropologists, she spent a few years at the Smithsonian Institute, doing work in their labs, and that was where she discovered an aptitude for solving murders. Current death, she called it in one of the many profiles he saw. Current death instead of carbon dating bones thousands of years old.

  This way, she had said in an interview, I can make an actual difference. I can let families know what happened to their loved ones. If the case is truly current, I can help put criminals in jail.

  And she did. She became well known throughout Earthly police circles for her unerring expertise and her willingness to throw herself into a job.

  Perhaps that was what led her to Mars in the first place, that willingness to get overinvolved. She hadn’t done her research, just like she had said. Her problems on Mars weren’t human problems; they were Disty problems, problems she rarely encountered in her work on Earth.

  Flint could have spent days developing a profile of Costard, but the deeper he dug, the more consistent she seemed. After the death of her parents, everything she had done seemed to follow a straight-line pattern. Each decision was logical, moving from one point to another.

  Even her decision to remain alone and uninvolved outside of her work made sense to him.

  But of course it would. He had made the same decision after Emmeline died.

  When he came to that realization—that he and Costard had their reaction to familial death in common—he had stood up from his desk and paced the office, trying to evaluate his own stance on this case. If he felt a thread, a common tie to Costard, could he keep his objectivity?

  And did it really matter?

  After all, her involvement in this case wasn’t personal. She hadn’t killed Lagrima Jørgen. Costard hadn’t been old enough to be a part of this case, even if she had some ties to the Jørgen family.

  Finally, Flint calmed himself enough to return to his desk. There he set aside the work he had done on Costard—he had done enough to get a sense of her—and turned to the most troublesome part of the preliminaries: Disty death rituals.

  When he looked them up in the alien database he’d kept from his police academy days, he nearly stopped work at that moment. The Disty had ten thousand known death customs, and several thousand more variations.

  Death frightened them and appalled them, although unlike some other alien groups, the Disty did kill when they had to.

  But their society had strong structures and taboos about death, so strong that the Alliance found no way to negotiate with the Disty over these issues. Eventually, the Alliance had decided to accept the Disty into the fold with warnings to anyone who did business with them: avoid the Disty death traditions. That seems to be the most sensitive side of their society.

  F
lint leaned back in his chair and threaded his hands behind his head. The cursory glance told him that Costard had not been making up the Disty paranoia. She had walked into the middle of the most troublesome part of Disty culture without a clue about its impact on her.

  He had done the same as a police officer. He had never realized that his work with corpses who died by Disty vengeance killings had made him unclean to other Disty. Of course, they hadn’t known that he had gone near victims of vengeance killings. If they had known, they would have insisted on other investigators, or worse, that he be punished for violating Disty law as agreed to under a variety of Alliance contracts.

  Costard hadn’t lied about the Disty death rituals. In fact, the deeper he dug into them the more he realized how cursory her understandings were. The purification ritual without family members was gruesome no matter which variation the Disty performed; Costard definitely would not survive it, but she would live long enough to regret ever seeing Jørgen’s remains.

  Flint felt a flash of empathy: living in this modern universe was like living in a war zone without knowing the combatants or the rules. The laws that governed the Alliance and its many peripheral allies were so complex that any venture off familiar turf brought with it dangers that initially seemed innocuous.

  It wasn’t hard to see how Costard had gotten into this situation.

  Flint had to make sure he didn’t make similar mistakes.

  Fourteen

  Scott-Olson sat down in the reddish-brown sand. She wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her cheek on her knees.

  She was exhausted. She had worked for five hours straight, uncovering three mummies, all in the area where Batson had first led her. Limbs still peeked through the surface in all directions. If she had to guess, she figured there were a least a hundred corpses here, all buried at the same time.

  Batson had brought her water, but no food. Like most normal people—the kind who didn’t spend their days around corpses—Batson figured she would be too nauseated to eat while she worked.

  But what she really needed now was a good meal and a hot shower, and a couple dozen assistants to carefully separate the corpses from the ground.

  Scott-Olson closed her eyes. She couldn’t get the assistants. She wasn’t even sure she could bring in her own medical examination team. Were they already tainted by the Jørgen corpse? That was one of the finer points of Disty law that she didn’t entirely understand. If they were, she had no problem bringing them in.

  If they weren’t, she didn’t want to bring them anywhere near this gravesite.

  She sat up and straightened her spine. Something cracked, sending a shiver of pain through her neck. She was getting too old for this kind of concentrated work.

  What she really wanted to do was go back to her lab, analyze the soil samples, look at the detritus she had bagged from the sand around the corpses, and then analyze the three corpses themselves. She had a hunch—more of an educated guess—that these corpses had been here long before someone placed Jørgen on top of them, but she wouldn’t know that for certain until she did her job, and did it meticulously.

  Something crunched behind her, and she turned, startled. Batson was approaching, his boots making soft sounds in the sand.

  “What have we got?” he asked, handing her a bottle of water.

  She took it and opened the cap and drank. The water was warm, but filling. It revived her. She drank until the water was gone, then handed Batson the bottle back.

  “We have a disaster,” she said.

  “That I know,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Not just in the Disty way, or even in the major-major-contamination way. These are human corpses, Petros, and they deserve a real investigation.”

  “Maybe this is one of those—what do they call them on Earth? Cemeteries. Maybe an early settlement did this.” He had his hands clasped behind his back as he looked down at the field of bodies.

  “I wish it were,” Scott-Olson said. “But we’ve never buried bodies here. It’s been against human custom from the very earliest colony. The Ddomed land was too precious, and no one wanted to put the bodies outside a Dome. Besides that, if it were a cemetery, the bodies would be in individual boxes, buried with care, and probably marked with some kind of stone or metal plate. You found no evidence of markers, right?”

  Batson shrugged. “I’ll ask.”

  “I doubt you’ll find anything. The lack of boxes tells me that something bad happened here—or was covered up here.”

  Batson sighed. “Is this connected to Jørgen?”

  “I don’t know.” Scott-Olson peeled off one of her gloves and rubbed her face. Her skin felt gritty. She was probably rubbing the sand into her pores. “I may not be able to find that out for you. Whoever killed Jørgen might have known this was here. Or not. I’m not even sure how long these bodies have been here.”

  “Do you have a guess?”

  “Not an accurate one.”

  “Then give me an inaccurate one.”

  She stared at the uncovered bodies. Two men and a woman, their faces wrinkled, mouths open, teeth as orange as Jørgen’s bones.

  “Older than her, I think,” Scott-Olson said, “just judging by the depth at which they were buried.”

  “You can’t tell from looking at the corpses?”

  She glanced up at him sideways. He was still staring at the field. “This isn’t like a fresh corpse, Petros. I can’t give you a guess that’s accurate within a few hours. I might not even be accurate within a decade.”

  “So these could have been here since the colony was founded?” he asked.

  “It’s possible. Or they could have been here fifty years or a hundred. I don’t really know.” She peeled off the other glove and reached into the pocket of her shirt, removing a cleansing tissue. She pressed the moisture chip on the side, felt the cleansing fluid fill the fibers of the tissue, then wiped her face. The tissue was cool and smelled faintly of soap, but she could tell from Batson’s look that all she managed to do was cover herself in orange muck.

  He reached into his pocket kit and removed more tissues. “Let me,” he said, and crouched.

  He cleaned her face as if she were a child and she thought, as he pressed and pushed and scrubbed, that she finally understood why babies moaned and complained when their parents did this. It looked nurturing, but it hurt.

  “There,” he said after a moment, taking the tissues and putting them in the recycler that came with his kit.

  Her skin burned where he had pressed on it. She wanted to close her eyes and indulge in a good long cry—not because she was mourning the people in front of her, but because she was so tired and she saw no way out of this situation.

  “You okay?” Batson asked.

  She shook her head without opening her eyes. “I can’t do this, Petros.”

  “What exactly?” he asked.

  She opened her eyes and looked again. Her imagination hadn’t added to the bodies; if anything, she had underestimated the task in front of her.

  “If I’m the only person uncovering the corpses, using proper procedures and working the way that I’m supposed to—let’s not even discuss the lab, and how I’m supposed to hide so many dead people. Let’s not even think about that.” Even though, now that she had mentioned it, she felt as if an even heavier burden had fallen on her. “Let’s just talk about the physical labor in front of me. It’ll take me months to get everything dug up, separated, and catalogued. If there are more bodies underneath, you might want to make that a year. And we can’t keep this secret that long. I’m not even sure we can keep it secret for a day.”

  He sank down beside her, sitting in the sand. She didn’t want to tell him that he might be sitting on top of even more bodies. The only difference here was that the backhoe had dug away from their perch instead of into it.

  “You’re not exaggerating?” he asked.

  “If anything,” she said, “I’m underestimating.”

  H
e crossed his legs and rested his hands on his knees, almost as if he were meditating. “You’d think we’d know about this. Fifty people, maybe more, all dead and buried here. Fifty missing people would get noticed. Wouldn’t they?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know enough about the history of the Dome. Was this ever Outside? If fifty people were buried here before the Dome was put in place, then I’d wager no, they wouldn’t be noticed.”

  “That’s a long time ago,” he said, “and besides, who would do that? The winds are fierce here. If I were going to bury anyone on the Martian surface, this is the last place I’d come—at least outside of a Dome. I’d find a small crater or someplace protected that clearly didn’t get a lot of wind.”

  She hadn’t even thought of that. The sandstorms here were legendary. They still caused consternation. The severe ones sandblasted the Dome, and repairs had to be done constantly. The Disty had worked out a system of repairing the Dome from the inside out, so there was always a thick inner layer. As the sand destroyed the top layer, there were always more to replace it.

  There was no predicting how the sand would cover things. Sometimes the Dome roof was covered with sand, and sometimes the sand was gone. It depended on the direction of the wind, on the power of the sand storm, and on whether or not there were dust devils—such small words for what was essentially a tornado filled with sand.

  “A lot of people buried without care or love or thought,” she said. “They look like they were buried where they fell.”

  “As if in battle?” he asked.

  “I don’t remember studying any wars fought here,” she said.

  “The early years with the Disty were rough,” he said. “I’ve heard that there’s a lot that happened that never made it into the official histories.”

  She shook her head. “These can’t be victims of the Disty. These corpses are intact.”

  “At least the first three,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “They don’t kill like this.”