He’d thought it would be the easiest job he’d had all year.
He was beginning to wonder if he was wrong.
“I have a list of the contaminants,” the ship said. “Some do not have street names. I am confused as to how you would like this information. Would you care for the chemical names in the absence of street names? Or would you like symptoms and cause of death? Also, there are interacting symptoms, based on conflicting chemical compounds, some of which might be unstable in the presence of oxygen. How would you like—?”
“Just scroll through it,” he said. “In front of those damn ads.”
The yellow fruit had vanished, but the bed had formed into an entire room floating on that sea. Another ad featuring a religious ceremony circled the edge of the bridge.
The ship created its own holoscreen—see-through, of course—and presented a list that scrolled so fast Yu had trouble reading it.
But what he did see chilled him.
He cursed. “Ship, how good are our medical facilities?”
“Adequate to most needs.”
“How about someone exposed to all that crap you’re scrolling at me?”
“That is not crap, Mr. Yu. Those are contaminants, many of which—”
“Yeah,” he said. “I meant contaminants. How about it?”
“What?”
He let out a small sigh and repeated his initial question.
“Ah,” the ship said as if it were human. “We have adequate equipment, but no guiding medical persona. I can download something from the nearest human settlement, but I can’t guarantee its ability to solve any problems that might arise—”
“How soon before someone trapped in that cargo hold starts showing symptoms?”
“From which contaminant?” the ship asked.
“Any of them,” Yu said, wishing the damn computer wasn’t so literal.
“Well, the first compound—”
“No,” he said. “When will the first symptom from anything in that hold show up?”
“Mr. Yu,” the ship said in that rich voice, which at the moment seemed more sulky than sexy, “symptoms should have started appearing within the first hour of contamination.”
“Scan the life-form. Is it healthy?”
“I do not have a baseline for my scan. I do not know what condition the life-form was in before it got on the ship.”
“Just scan her, would you?” He clenched a fist, then opened it slowly. He didn’t dare hit a ship that ran on touch.
“The scans are inconclusive. If the life-form was in perfect health, then it is showing symptoms,” the ship said.
Yu cursed again. “How long do we have before the illnesses caused by this stuff become irreversible?”
“Impossible to say without a baseline,” the ship said.
“Assume she was healthy,” Yu snapped.
“Then two to twenty-four Earth hours. I would suggest a treatment facility, since you do not want to download a medical persona. Would you like a list of the nearest venues?”
Yu rolled his eyes. If he stopped at a treatment facility in this sector of the solar system, he’d miss the rendezvous. He had a lot of time until then, but time got eaten up by medical procedures.
Besides, he was probably stopping at an Earth Alliance base. All Shindo had to do was tell someone she was being kidnapped, and he would get arrested. Even if no one could prove the kidnapping, there were dozens of charges that he could be held on.
And at least twenty of those were easily prosecuted.
“Download the best persona you can find,” he said. “Better yet, download two or three of them. Pay the fees if you have to. I want cutting-edge stuff. Modern technology. Nothing older than last year.”
“Yes, sir,” the ship said. “This will take fifteen Earth minutes for the various scans and downloads. May I suggest you remove the life-form from the cargo hold and put it in quarantine?”
“You may suggest any damn thing you want,” he muttered. But he opened his links, now that he was off Callisto, and sent a message to Nafti.
Get her out of there, but don’t go near her. Put her in the quarantine area, the regulation one for humans, okay?
How do I get her there without touching her? Nafti asked.
I dunno, Yu sent. Tell her she’s going to die if she doesn’t do what she’s told.
But you said we can’t kill her, Nafti sent.
Not us, stupid, Yu sent. The hold itself’ll kill her. Tell her the quarantine room is our exam facility. She’ll run for it.
Hope you’re right, Nafti sent, then signed off.
Yu hoped he was right too. Because this job was beginning to be more trouble than he had bargained for.
Although it had a long way to go before it became more trouble than it was worth.
Eleven
Mom’s lawyer was a fusty old guy who had semiretired. No one at his law firm could find him. And considering what distances Talia was working from and how slow the communications were, it took her nearly an hour to find that out.
She sat cross-legged in the reddish-brown stuff her mother refused to call grass. The stuff was mushy and cool against Talia’s legs. Down here, in the dirt and weeds, the smell of fake pine wasn’t so bad.
When she’d placed the contact through the emergency link her mother had set up, she’d started a timer at the base of her right eye. Most of her communication so far had been text running along her left eye.
Mom had said the lawyer would get to her right away, but if this continued, then Talia would have no choice. She’d need someone here.
Mom would be so mad at her for going to the authorities, but Talia was beginning to believe there was no choice.
Besides, how could Mom have killed people in that wind-swept field? She never went anywhere. Until she came to Callisto, she’d never even been off Earth’s moon.
Unless that was a lie, too.
Finally, a voice reached her. It was distant and thin, and it came after some text that warned her someone was going to contact her.
The voice said, “This is Celestine Gonzalez.”
By now, Talia was so annoyed, she almost said, Good for you. But she didn’t. Mom wouldn’t have liked it, and right now, she was doing what Mom told her.
“I wanted Martin Oberholst.” Talia knew she sounded petulant, but she didn’t care. This was an emergency. She’d told them that, and they hadn’t listened.
“Yes, I know, Miss Flint,” Celestine Gonzalez said after a slight delay. “But Mr. Oberholst no longer handles cases.”
“This isn’t a case,” Talia said. “This is my life. My mother’s been kidnapped.”
And my name isn’t Flint, but she didn’t say that, either. No sense in confusing the matters any more than they already were.
“That’s what it says here,” Gonzalez said. “When did this happen?”
“I don’t know,” Talia said. “An hour or two ago. Mom told me to contact Mr. Oberholst if anything happened.”
“Our records show that you are contacting me from Callisto. Can’t you contact an attorney there?”
“Can I talk to someone who knows what’s going on?” Talia didn’t scream, but she came close. “Mom told me to call you people if anything happened to her. She said you’d take care of me.”
“Even though we’re on Armstrong?”
“Yes!”
“I’m sorry,” Gonzalez said. “The file is very thick and marked extremely confidential. I’ll have to review it before I’m up to speed. Can you tell me what’s going on?”
“What’s going on is that I wasted an hour of my life and you people being dumb might’ve killed my mom. Do you know any attorneys here that can help me?”
“We operate solely in Armstrong, Miss Flint. I thought you knew that.”
“I’m thirteen and my mom’s been kidnapped and she told me to contact you if something happened to her and you people aren’t helping me! I need you to help me. Please.”
“
If you could tell me what caused this crisis,” Gonzalez said, “I should be able to—”
“Never mind.” Talia severed the connection. She hugged her knees to her chest. Mom had said talk to Oberholst, but they weren’t letting her, and now there was no one to help. Not even the promise of anybody.
Talia had to make her own decisions now. She’d tried it Mom’s way, but that didn’t work. Now Talia would have to do it her own way, even if she screwed it up.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Talia said, and sent an extreme emergency message across her links.
Twelve
Flint set a course for the Moon. Then he searched the general file to see if Paloma’s notes held any explanation as to why she had information on Flint’s family.
The audio notes were mostly reminders—Paloma wanted to check this piece of information or that piece of information. They held nothing of value.
And the sound of her voice made a shiver run up his spine. He wanted to find her and shake her and demand that she explain herself. Not just with the family files, but with everything, all that she had failed to tell him about her past, about her life.
He left the computer station and went to the pilot’s chair. For a while, he navigated the yacht on his own, just so that he would think about something else.
But it really wasn’t working. His brain played with the things he now knew about Paloma: She had once been one of the Moon’s most ruthless lawyers, and after she botched a major case, she had changed professions as well as her name and became a Tracker. She called herself a Retrieval Artist, but most of the work she did was with the very law firm she’d left, and she rarely worked with the Disappeared’s well-being at heart.
Every rule she had told him—take only a few clients, never harm a Disappeared, remember that ethics came first—she had violated them all.
And then she had apologized in that holowill, telling him that he inherited her estate because of his ethics.
He set the yacht on automatic and stood. He had to get back to Armstrong just so that he had room to pace. The yacht felt small for the first time since he bought her.
Besides, he needed more files. When he had come here, he had brought the files that Paloma had left him—years and years of files from her lawyering days to her tracking days and beyond. But he had left a lot of the ghost files in his office, figuring he would deal with those when he got back.
Those, he figured, weren’t as important.
Now he thought differently. In the remaining ghost files, he might find a deleted interview or notes, a hint as to what Paloma had been thinking when she created these files.
At the moment, however, he still had two files to examine.
He returned to the computer station, and opened the file Paloma had kept on him. It contained all the public information on him up until six years before. It traced his education, his marriage, Emmeline’s birth, his work history, and his commendations from the police department. The work history only went to his promotions in the Space Traffic Control department. They didn’t cover his year at the academy, taking classes in detection, nor his work with Noelle DeRicci as an actual police detective.
No one had updated this file since the composite had been made on Emmeline.
He found old holoimages of himself, from his training shots from the police department to his first security badge identification at his very first professional job. Unnervingly, he also found his fingerprint and eyescan, as well as a DNA scan he didn’t remember consenting to.
Deeper in the file, he found notes about his habits and routines, habits and routines he had abandoned when he had been promoted to detective.
But the detail with which those routines were documented meant someone was tracking him, not just on the Moon’s various networks, but also in person. Some of the notes even marked down who he had talked to on a particular day and why.
He hadn’t noticed. He’d been a trained policeman by this point, and he hadn’t noticed at all.
Whoever had tracked him had been good. Or Flint had been extraordinarily blind.
An automated reminder bleeped behind him. He stood, glanced at the navigation board, then told the ship to acknowledge the message.
The message contained standard instructions from Armstrong Space Traffic Control on the Port, landing procedures, and docking customs. He didn’t need any of that, and when the yacht acknowledged the message, he wouldn’t get any more. His ship’s information was stored in the Port’s system. He docked at the most exclusive terminal in the Port, which gave him all kinds of privileges the policeman in him didn’t approve of, and the Retrieval Artist part of him—the part that occasionally operated at the very edge of the law—thought extremely fortunate.
He returned to his computer, shut down the file on himself, and opened his ex-wife’s file. And found something disturbing there, as well.
She had left the Moon.
He hadn’t realized that. She had left the Moon more than ten years ago, and he hadn’t heard. Not that he kept in touch. After the divorce, they had slowly stopped seeing each other.
Then she had left Armstrong for Glenn Station, and they had promised to stay in touch, but they hadn’t. Rhonda hadn’t really approved of his new career with the police, saying that it was a waste of his intelligence.
He didn’t know how he could bury his intelligence inside computer systems when people—children, really—were dying all over Armstrong. Rhonda hadn’t understood, even though he had explained it. When she left, he’d been a rookie in Space Traffic, as far from children as he could get.
Then, when he became a detective and solved his first case, he thought fleetingly of her, but hadn’t contacted her. He had forgotten all about contacting her by the time that the unfairness of the Earth Alliance laws led him to sell information acquired by the police to save hundreds of lives.
Rhonda would have understood that.
Or maybe not. She saw grief as a private thing, something each person went through and then overcame. She always had an edge of anger against him because he never recovered as well as she thought he should.
He made himself look at the images—badges from all her jobs, from the earliest with Considine Corporation to her last on the Moon, with Aleyd Chemicals Incorporated.
She looked older, harder, her unenhanced features in that last image a bit too thin and a bit too sad. For all her talk, she hadn’t gotten over the central tragedy of their lives, either.
None of that showed on the first image—the one of the woman he’d met. She had snapping black eyes that always looked like they were smiling even when she was not. Her face was too angular for contemporary beauty, but the lines were so precise, so fine, that he always thought them stunning. Her hair was as black as her eyes, setting off skin the color of fine chocolate.
Looking at the image now, he felt an old vestige of that passion he’d had for her. He raised his hand to it, but didn’t touch. Unlike Emmeline’s holoimages, he didn’t get lost in Rhonda’s.
He did miss her, though. Her sensible way of seeing things around her. Her laugh.
Of course, her laugh had left long before she had.
Her file didn’t go beyond six years ago, either. She had left the Moon when Aleyd promoted her, sending her to supervise jobs on all of Jupiter’s satellites.
Her base was in Callisto.
His breath caught as he read that. The notes that had started this entire search speculated that Emmeline might be on Callisto. Because Rhonda was there?
Or was there more?
He glanced at the earlier image of Rhonda. She wouldn’t have done that to him. To them. She had mourned, just like he had. In some ways, her grief had been more terrifying. He had never seen anyone lose control the way she had shortly after the funeral. He hadn’t believed it possible.
A woman like Rhonda couldn’t pretend she was mourning. She couldn’t have shed a tear without some kind of provocation.
She had believed that Emmeline was dea
d, just like he had.
A message appeared in front of his left eye. The ship had reached Armstrong space. The ship requested, as it always did, that he navigate the arrival into Port himself.
He had programmed that, mostly because he loved hands-on flying. But at the moment, it annoyed him.
Still, he got up from the station and went to the pilot’s chair.
The answers were on Armstrong. He had a hunch the answers were simple—Paloma had made up this file to control Flint the police officer. That was how manipulative she had been, how manipulative he had recently learned she had been.
She wanted to guarantee favors. A promise of his beloved daughter, living far away, at a time when Flint couldn’t easily travel to somewhere like Callisto, might have been all it would have taken.
He navigated the Emmeline, the ship he had named for his daughter because, he believed, there weren’t enough ways to honor her available to him, into Armstrong’s Port.
The place no longer looked familiar, as if he had been gone for years rather than days.
He shook off the mood and steadied himself. He couldn’t follow his desires. He had to let his intellect control this investigation.
He had to discover the truth.
Thirteen
Rhonda stood by the door as it squealed open. She had no weapons, nothing to fight with, not even a plan, really, but if these two idiots wanted to truss her up, she would struggle until she had nothing left.
Then she saw whowas behind the door—and what he was wearing—and she struggled not to laugh.
One of the two men who’d kidnapped her wore an environmental suit. Only the suit was old and cheaply made. It might protect him from a vacuum, and maybe it would protect him from cold for an hour or so, but it wouldn’t do much more than that.
His face was a blur behind the visor. The thing was so old it was scratched. That took a lot of the effectiveness out of the environmental suit, as well.
He blocked the doorway, as if she’d run to escape. She’d already felt the liftoff. She couldn’t escape, not until she had a chance to explore the ship and see if it had escape pods. She didn’t know how to pilot, and she wasn’t able to do much on her own.
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