Recovery Man

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Have you ever thought that Talia Shindo is the only evidence you might get of whatever it is you believe Aleyd is doing?”

  He looked at her. Her expression was impassive again. Lawyer mode. She was thinking. She just hadn’t expected all he had thrown at her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If we handle the custody right,” she said, “you have access to all of Rhonda Shindo’s personal possessions.”

  “I have access now,” he said.

  “Really? Even the things she left in Armstrong?”

  “She left belongings in Armstrong?”

  “A few,” Gonzalez said.

  “Do you know what they are?”

  “I might be breaking privilege just telling you they exist,” she said. “But I figured I owed you, since you let me know who you really work for.”

  qaaaaHe didn’t like the way she’d said that aloud. She wasn’t cautious enough for him.

  “And then there’s Talia.”

  “What about Talia?” he asked.

  “She knows a lot about that house system.”

  “We know more,” he said.

  “She might have reprogrammed it.”

  “We’ll figure that out,” he said.

  “And even if she hasn’t, she has a formidable mind.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe she knows things.”

  He felt his breath catch. “About Rhonda.”

  “Things she doesn’t know she knows,” Gonzalez said. “Talia might be the proof you’re looking for.”

  “Or the start of it,” he whispered.

  “Or the start of it,” Gonzalez said softly. “But only if you step in and save her life.”

  Forty-five

  The closed science base on Io looked like it had been abandoned a hundred years ago. Parts of the structure had fallen down. Other sections were scattered across Io’s surface, as if some giant wind had come and shaken the place apart.

  But Yu knew no wind had touched this place. Colonists died here in a controlled experiment, and when their families found out, some family members tore the place apart in rage. It had made the news all over the solar system; he remembered because he’d been planning a trip to this part of Io to see what he could recover.

  After the families trashed the place, he figured he could recover nothing, so he didn’t even try.

  Now he was here. The landing had been scary. It was the first time he’d tried to maneuver the ship into a port without benefit of a copilot or space-traffic controllers. For the first time, he regretted Nafti’s death.

  But Yu managed to land. When the ship touched the old-fashioned pad, which showed he had landed safely by lighting up everything around him, he felt relieved.

  If he wanted to make a secret landing, this was not the place to do so.

  Fortunately, he didn’t. He had let the Gyonnese know he was coming.

  They were the only ones who wanted this place. Too many humans had died here, and even though it had been decontaminated and partially rebuilt, no one who did steady business with the humans wanted anything to do with this area.

  As far as most people were concerned, the place was haunted—not by the colonists who died, but by the superflu that killed them. Everything he’d studied told him that the flu had been restricted to a particular dome, which had since been demolished, the area that housed it open to the atmosphere.

  He wasn’t going anywhere near it, but even he was feeling a bit squeamish, and he fully believed the virus was long dead.

  He glanced over his shoulder at Rhonda Shindo. She was unconscious. He had packed her into a moving crate—which looked like a cold sleep coffin. Her face was still a little bruised. There had been a lot of damage, apparently, or the nanobots he’d been using hadn’t functioned as well as he thought.

  Her clothing also had blood on it, and was ripped along one side. He hadn’t thought to bring anything else for her, and he really didn’t want to change her unconscious form. So he left the ruined clothing on her, hoping that the Gyonnese didn’t know enough about humans to care that her clothing was seriously out of order.

  He wished now that he’d gotten partial payment up front. He’d contact the Gyonnese, let them know to send the rest to his account, let the ʼbots deliver her in that coffin, and then leave.

  But he couldn’t do that. He had to make sure he’d get some payment, and this was the only way. He was afraid they would complain about her physical condition. Technically, he had violated his agreement with the Gyonnese, but he’d worked with them enough in the past to know how picky they could be, and he worried about that bruised face.

  He could have kept her a little longer, had one of the medical avatars install some enhancements in her face and then wait for them to work. But he wanted his money.

  More than that, he wanted her gone.

  He shut down all of the ship’s systems except the essential ones. Then he touched the frame of the coffin, activating its float mechanism. He sent it to the nearest downshaft and followed, feeling like he was walking to his own death.

  From now on, he would trust his own instincts. From now on, he would only work with nonsentients. He would change his private ads so that they were specific. Currently, they said he would recovery anything. He’d change them to say he would recover any nonsentient object.

  Although at the moment, she looked like a thing: a middle-aged doll with a broken face, still inside her box.

  He shook off the thought and went to the lower levels of the ship. The science station had an environment only in selected sections, and since the landing pad was open to the atmosphere, he had to trust a corridor that automatically attached itself to the side doors.

  Considering how old this place was and how damaged, he wasn’t going to do that. Instead, he was going to don one of the working environmental suits, let the coffin lead the way, and head out the cargo bay. He would wait until the suit let him know that the environment was suitable before he removed his helmet.

  The coffin was already on the lowest bay level when he arrived. He opened a secret compartment off one of the corridors and removed his favorite suit—one that was so small it almost looked like articles of clothing instead of protective gear—and put on a thick helmet with a mirrored visor.

  He didn’t want the Gyonnese to be able to see his face unless he cleared the visor. The deeper he got into this job, the more it bothered him. He wasn’t going to let those creatures get the best of him if he could at all avoid it.

  According to his suit, the bay he walked through was as contaminated as the hold where he’d originally stashed Shindo. Maybe her face wasn’t healing because the bruises there weren’t caused by the broken nose. Maybe it wasn’t healing because of the contamination.

  What had she told him? Only ninety-five percent got cleaned out of her system? The rest had to work its way through or be combatted with those pills.

  He sighed, then opened the bay doors.

  The lights were still on full, revealing a rusted, ruined Port, filled with a lot of broken materials and destroyed ships. The landing pad looked like the only patch of ground that wasn’t covered with ruined equipment.

  The coffin floated toward a sealed doorway. A green light rotated above it, theoretically telling him that everything was clear inside. He’d be able to breathe, he’d be able to stand without gravity boots, he would be warm enough.

  Still, he tramped to the airlock doors, feeling like a giant in his suit. There was some Earth-level gravity here or his legs wouldn’t feel like they were glued to the floor with each step.

  Everything felt right—and if he were in one of the lesser suits, he might pull off the helmet the moment the airlock doors opened.

  But this suit still hadn’t cleared the area. It claimed that the oxygen, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide ratios were off. There was also too much hydrogen in the atmosphere, and another chemical that the suit didn’t have the sophistication to identify.

&n
bsp; At that moment, he decided to leave the thing on permanently. He wasn’t going to trust that the virus had been cleaned up any more than he was going to trust that the unknown chemical was safe.

  The airlock doors slid open and an accented voice welcomed him. He recognized the accent. It was Gyonnese. He felt a little offended. He spoke their language—they could have addressed him in it.

  The coffin remained in the airlock with him, crowding him as the doors closed behind him. Shindo looked peaceful even though she wasn’t. She’d fought him when he’d tried to put her under. He’d finally replaced the bubble and cut her oxygen until she passed out. Then he injected the sleeping drug.

  She’d be unconscious for hours after he left the compound. Then he wouldn’t have to think of her again—except when he spent his fee.

  The interior doors finally opened, and the suit approved. The environment was perfect for him.

  Still, he kept the thing on.

  A welcoming committee of five Gyonnese ringed the exit from the airlock doors. The Gyonnese were slender creatures, not much wider than his thigh, with long bodies and even longer heads.

  It took him what seemed like forever to distinguish their features. The Gyonnese had eyes, like humans, but there the resemblance failed. They had tiny whiskers in their faces, whiskers that varied in color and length, depending on age and gender. The whiskers on the most articulate Gyonnese could braid and blend and create almost a secondary creature.

  For the longest time, the Gyonnese thought humans spoke with their hair, not with their mouths. The whiskers/mouth issue proved the biggest barrier to communication between the two species until someone gave the Gyonnese a device that amplified the sounds their whiskers made.

  Then humans could hear actual words. Humans also had to learn to talk in a whisper to the Gyonnese so that they didn’t deafen the poor creatures.

  Whispering had become second nature for Yu. But Nafti had never picked it up, and consequently the Gyonnese hated him.

  Had hated him.

  “Where is the woman?” the nearest Gyonnese asked. When the Gyonnese spoke, it looked like the flesh beneath their eyes moved. It was merely the whiskers, rubbing to make sounds.

  “Here,” Yu said, putting his hand on the glass coffin.

  “You have killed her,” the Gyonnese in the center said. “She is worth nothing to us dead.”

  He expected the comment, but hated it, anyway. The Gyonnese were quick-tempered and violent. He’d been grabbed by one once. It was like being held by a braided rope, only one made of gooey flesh.

  “She’s not dead,” he said. “She’s unconscious. This was the easiest way to move her. I have to warn you. She’s very, very difficult.”

  “We know that,” the center Gyonnese said. “If she was not, she would not have killed our children.”

  Yu sighed, hoping that the visor caught the sound. “I mean hard to handle. You’ll need to restrain her from the first. And don’t expect her to give in to anything. She’s a fighter.”

  He lowered the coffin so that they could see her face.

  “That’s a bruise.” He ran his hand over her face. “I broke her nose trying to keep her from killing me.”

  “Will she live with that injury?” asked another Gyonnese.

  Yu knew he’d seen all five of these Gyonnese before. In fact, before he had met them, he recognized them from the air vids the Gyonnese used to distribute news. These five Gyonnese weren’t leaders of the Gyonnese, but they were the leaders’ assistants, famous in their own right among the Gyonnese people.

  But Yu didn’t know their names. He didn’t even know if Gyonnese had names as humans understood them. When he had asked, in his first dealings with Gyonnese, he had been told to use honorifics.

  The honorifics themselves got confusing. Each adult Gyonnese was to be addressed as Original. But the Original had to be followed with something—Elder, Senior, Junior, Apprentice—and you didn’t dare get that part of it wrong.

  Apparently, Gyonnese could recognize what stage of life the other Gyonnese were in, but he couldn’t. As far as he knew, there was no visual difference between an Elder—the oldest and most honored Gyonnese—and an Apprentice, who was barely an adult.

  There were also Original Larval, but he had never seen one (except maybe in that holo he had rigged up in Rhonda Shindo’s house). Other Gyonnese, the ones that had divided off the firstborn, were called Second, Third, and so on, without any title afterwards.

  He figured there had to be a way to distinguish Seconds from Thirds, but he’d never learned that, either.

  “I had the injury repaired,” Yu said, answering the Gyonnese’s question. “Even if I hadn’t, she could have lived with. Humans are resilient.”

  “Then what has disfigured her face if not an injury?” asked yet another Gyonnese.

  “The injury disfigured it, and the technique I used to heal it hasn’t gotten to that part yet. Also, she was exposed to some contaminants around the time she boarded my ship, so she has some medication to prevent an illness from them.”

  “I thought humans could remove contaminants,” said the center Gyonnese. “Or is that a lie from the Aleyd corporation, as well?”

  “It’s no lie,” Yu said, hating discussions with the Gyonnese. They were always circular, but somehow they never ended up where they started. It was as if the discussions did move forward, but in a way he didn’t quite understand. “I used the standard method to remove ninety-five percent of her contamination. The remaining part is slower and requires the pills. Make sure she takes them if you want her to remain healthy.”

  “We do not understand human physiology,” the center Gyonnese said. “We cannot be responsible for her care.”

  “If you like,” Yu said, “I can download a medical program that will take care of things for you. I’d have to transfer it from my ship to the original computer in this science facility.”

  “Do so,” the first Gyonnese said.

  “However,” said the center Gyonnese, “do not expect payment for this program. We would not need it without your negligence.”

  “I could have kept her from you until she healed,” Yu said. “I thought you wanted her quickly.”

  “We do,” the first Gyonnese said. He reached around the back of the one Gyonnese who had remained silent, stretching his already long arm, and brushing the center Gyonnese with elongated fingers.

  “I will not be quiet,” the center Gyonnese said to the first Gyonnese with irritation. “This human is cheating us. We can’t even quiz this person to see if she is indeed Rhonda Shindo.”

  Yu had forgotten that humans looked the same to the Gyonnese, just like Gyonnese looked the same to most humans.

  “She is,” he said. “She has identification chips in her hands.”

  “Which we cannot access,” the center Gyonnese said.

  Then Yu understood. They weren’t sure they could open the coffin. So he pressed the side and the lid slid back. The Gyonnese scuttled backward, swaying as they moved.

  Yu grabbed her hand and hung it off the side of the coffin. “Check now,” he said.

  The Gyonnese stared at her. Their arms flailed behind their backs, fingers touching, obviously communicating in a way he did not understand.

  Finally the first Gyonnese scuttled forward. With clear trepidation, he took her hand in his fingers and touched the nearest chip.

  He started, then his whiskers spread out wide, and then he dropped her hand as if it had burned him.

  “It is she,” he said to the others.

  A visible shudder ran through him. He excused himself and scuttled into the darkness. A liquid sound, like water filling a bowl, echoed from that spot.

  The other Gyonnese bent in the middle, their arms going up—their sign for anything that disgusted them or angered them greatly or, he learned through that holo, anything that caused them grief.

  “Is he all right?” Yu asked, not sure if he could talk while they were bending like
that, but deciding to, anyway.

  The Gyonnese rose slowly, as if they were underwater.

  Yu’s heart pounded. He was afraid he had violated some kind of protocol.

  Finally, the Gyonnese who hadn’t spoken said, “Touching her has made him ill. He will recover, but he will never forget the shame of it.”

  Yu wasn’t sure what his reaction should be. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I could have found another way to verify.”

  “There is no other way,” said the same Gyonnese.

  Then they stared at him, the remaining four, as if they expected something.

  “Look,” he said, “I can download the medical program from my ship. She’s going to wake up on her own in about four Earth hours. Then she’ll be ready to fight. As I said, make sure she’s restrained before that.”

  “You are certain she is not dead?” the center Gyonnese asked.

  “Positive,” Yu said, “and if you want, double-check with the guy who touched her. Living humans are warm to the touch. She should have been warm. She still is, if someone else wants to verify.”

  They all scuttled backward, as if he was going to make them touch her. He was glad they couldn’t see inside his visor, because he smiled at their reaction.

  “She is warm.” The first Gyonnese came out of the darkness. His skin had turned an orange-yellow, instead of the fleshy color that Yu was used to.

  “See?” Yu said. “All I need is my payment. Then I’ll send the download and leave you to do whatever you’re going to do.”

  “No,” the center Gyonnese said.

  Yu froze. He’d expected some argument, but not an outright no.

  “I delivered her,” Yu said. “You promised payment upon receipt. I trusted you. I didn’t even take a deposit, and this woman cost me. She murdered my partner. See why I’m warning you?”

  “We have no proof that your partner is dead,” the center Gyonnese said.

  “I can give you his body,” Yu snapped. “You want it? I don’t know what to do with it.”

  Four of them scuttled even farther back, but the center one stayed in position.