Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Tables strewn with equipment she didn’t recognize stood against walls. There were no chairs, and no obvious place for visitors to go.

  “Hello?” she called.

  One minute. The message that crossed her links was written in Standard and did not appear to be automated. Someone had contacted her through her public net, probably through some kind of program.

  Come around to the back, said the next message.

  Wherever the back was. Just as she had that thought, a map appeared in a box to the side of her right eye.

  She followed the red highlighted route. It took her past pallets of equipment, most of which she didn’t recognize, and past piles of emergency medical kits, the kind that Aristotle Academy used to take on field trips.

  The pallets formed a maze. She couldn’t see beyond all of the stuff. It made her feel oddly claustrophobic and a little lonely. She had come here to be with like-minded people, not to wander through a full warehouse in search of someone to talk to.

  She finally rounded a corner into a corridor. The red highlighted route seemed redundant here. There was only one way for her to go.

  She went through an open door, and there she saw a tall man with graying hair that brushed against his collar. He was too thin, not in the enhanced, egotistical way of social climbers and the wealthy, but in a way she rarely saw among her friends—he looked like he often forgot to eat.

  He extended a hand. “Dabir Kaspian.”

  She shook it. His fingers were warm, dry, and a little boney. “Berhane Magalhães.”

  “It’s not often we get a donor here.” Something in his tone told her that he thought she was inspecting where her money had gone. Which explained the route she had taken. She thought it had felt circuitous. It had been, so she could see the pallets of supplies.

  “I’m not here as a donor,” she said. “I want to volunteer.”

  The look he gave her was momentarily cold. She recognized it, and its message: I don’t have time to train a do-gooder.

  “What kind of skills do you have?” he asked, his tone filled with practiced warmth.

  “I have no medical training, but I’m physically strong. I can lift things, move things, and shout when I find something.” She tried not to sound sarcastic.

  “We have bots for that,” he said.

  “No, you don’t,” she said. “I read about the recovery effort that you’re doing. There’s a worry that the bots won’t respect the dead, no matter how well programmed they are.”

  He let out a small, half-amused sound. “Well,” he said, “that’s more than most people come in here knowing.”

  He stepped away from the door and let her walk all the way into the room. It was a small office. Every wall had an array of screens, and all of them showed a different section of rubble. The images were so close-in that Berhane couldn’t tell exactly where they were, only that they were live.

  In the midst of all of them were workers in the red-and-yellow Search & Rescue environmental suits provided gratis by the Earth Alliance. Nearby, bots lifted and moved debris, placing it on floating platforms that would take it outside the dome. Out there, someone or something would determine what could be recycled and what needed to be buried or jettisoned.

  She had seen a small pile of debris like that form outside of Armstrong after the bombing four years ago. In some ways, that little pile had been more offensive than the ruins inside the dome. She often found herself worrying whether bits of her mother were still in it, since her mother’s body had never been recovered.

  She took a deep shaky breath.

  “Who did you lose?” Kaspian’s voice was soft, sympathetic, and unlike that practiced warmth of a moment ago, sounded quite genuine.

  She said without thinking, “My mother.”

  Then her cheeks heated. Her mother had been dead a long time now. Berhane turned, then moved her hands slightly, as if she could take back her words.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You meant last week. Who did I lose last week?”

  “Yes,” he said, a frown on his weathered face. For the first time, she noticed that he was oddly good-looking. His hollowed cheekbones and heavy bone structure made him resemble those old-Earth Romantic Poets she’d been studying just last week, poets whose words had seemed so profound and now seemed…irrelevant. Or perhaps something less important than they had been.

  Something that would wait for her to have a life of leisure again.

  “I didn’t lose anyone close last week,” she said, her voice trembling, not just with embarrassment, but also with the sadness she had felt as she looked at the debris. “My mother died in the first bombing, four years ago.”

  “Oh.” In that single word, Kaspian conveyed a lot of understanding and a bit of compassion. Or maybe that was all conveyed by his extremely expressive face. “So you understand.”

  She nodded. “My father just wants to move forward, rebuild, pretend like these crises can be paved over.”

  “There’s an argument to be made for going ahead,” Kaspian said. “Some believe it’s the only option.”

  Berhane glanced over her shoulder at the images on that wall.

  “Millions of people are missing,” she said quietly. “We all assume they’re dead, but I can tell you, as someone who has been through this, there’s a tiny part of your brain that thinks, ‘Oh, they’re just missing’ or ‘they ran away’ or ‘they Disappeared.’ It’s a little bit of hope that, over time, becomes almost destructive.”

  The heat in her cheeks grew. She wasn’t used to revealing herself to strangers like this.

  “When we got Mother’s DNA, and when they told us where it was found, I grieved all over again. Maybe more fully.” Her voice shook. “But I finally got rid of the hope. I knew she was gone. And I think, strangely enough, that was an actual blessing.”

  Kaspian studied her for a moment, then nodded. He was good at this. He didn’t patronize her with any false platitudes, nor did he force some religious nonsense on her.

  Instead, he glanced at the wall, that sympathetic expression still on his face.

  “I’m one of the managers of this office,” he said, still watching the volunteers out there, working. “In different times, you would have received some kind of thank-you message from us, and we would have brought you here for a tour as a major donor.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Please, Ms. Magalhães, let me finish.”

  She bit her lower lip. She was used to taking over conversations, not listening to them. She nodded once.

  “I understand how this has revived your grief. I respect that. I also understand your need to do something.” He moved away from the screens, his gray eyes now meeting hers. There was a lot of very real sympathy in his gaze. “But there are a million ways to help, and you’ve been helping in the one way that most people can’t. You’ve already given hundreds of thousands to the rescue effort, and I can’t imagine that we were the only beneficiaries.”

  “Money is nothing,” she said. “It’s not—”

  “Money is everything to an organization like this one. It buys the pallets and the equipment, gets the volunteers to the site, pays for medical care if some volunteer gets injured, pays for DNA testing the domes won’t do, really, Ms. Magalhães, money is more important than you can ever realize.”

  She nodded. She supposed she knew that. But it felt wrong. It felt dehumanizing. Especially with her father sitting in his dining room, planning to replenish the coffers that she was emptying, and doing so in such a way as to obliterate some of the work that Armstrong S&R needed to do.

  “I don’t plan to stop giving financially,” she said. “But it’s not enough. For me, anyway. I need to do some hands-on work. I’ve never been in a situation where the whole Moon is in crisis, and I can’t do much—”

  “Ms. Magalhães…”

  “It’s my turn,” she said softly. “I’ve been very lucky in my life. I was raised in wealth and privilege. I don’t need to work
. I have more than enough money to last me and mine forever, and I didn’t earn it. Let me do this.”

  He studied her for a long minute. “Do you know what you’re asking?”

  “Not completely,” she said. “I suspect I won’t know until I’m out there, working my ass off.”

  He chuckled. The sound seemed rusty, as if he hadn’t done that for a long time. Maybe he hadn’t.

  “All right,” he said. “But I have to warn you, we have liability waivers that’ll take you all day to read and sign.”

  She smiled. “You mean in addition to the ones I had to sign just to get here.”

  He didn’t smile back.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s risky in these damaged domes. The debris isn’t stable, and anything can puncture an environmental suit. Our suits close up pretty fast, but no one knows what’ll get inside even in that short space of time. We have no idea if we’re dealing with chemicals we haven’t seen or bacteria or—”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I want the risk.”

  He sighed. “Just as long as wanting the risk doesn’t make you reckless.”

  “I’m sure you’ll keep me in line if that is the case,” she said.

  “In line?” he said. “No, I won’t do that. I’ll pull you out of the field and won’t let you back. I don’t care how much you donate.”

  She believed him. And she actually welcomed it.

  “Give me those forms,” she said. “The sooner I fill them out, the sooner I can get to work.”

  SIXTEEN

  FINALLY, FINALLY, THE Port of Armstrong let selected ships land. Wilma Goudkins cheated: she used her Earth Alliance Security Division credentials to expedite the landing, even though she wasn’t here on government business.

  This was as personal as it could get.

  After Anniversary Day—after she had seen what had happened to Tycho Crater (heard what had happened, dammit, Carla)—she had booked the first flight for this solar system out of the starbase housing the Security Division. She hadn’t been alone; the flight was filled with Earth Alliance employees who had taken emergency leave to see what had become of their families.

  Each person on this flight was grateful that she had used her credentials to jump the line in orbit around the Moon. Each person probably figured she was the one who would be fired for using government resources on a personal mission.

  And she really didn’t care.

  Just like she hadn’t cared that her boss disapproved of her leave.

  Her sister had just died, most likely (although Goudkins hoped—hoped against hope—that the lapse in communication late that day had been caused by some technical problem), and Goudkins' supervisor wanted her to stay until there was confirmation.

  Goudkins threatened to appeal. After she had snapped, If I wait, then I miss the funeral, even though she didn’t know if there was going to be a funeral. If anyone was going to have a funeral.

  As she got closer to the Moon, and the pilots announced that the Port of Armstrong still wasn’t letting in ships, she began to realize just how big a mess she was walking into.

  Alone.

  Her family mostly lived on Earth, but they were distant cousins and an aunt and uncle she had met only once. Her sister Carla hadn’t married, and had no children.

  Goudkins had married and divorced before she and her husband had the two or three children they had hoped for.

  She knew the difference between hope and reality; she had lived it every day of that marriage—hoping for one of those perfect relationships that some couples managed, and discovering that reality consisted of two people who simply couldn’t get along, no matter how much they wanted to.

  It was a small thing to compare to the evisceration of the Moon, but it was her small thing—and her greatest hurt after the death of her parents.

  Her greatest hurt until now.

  She and Carla had always been close. Her mother used to call them almost-twins—only 11 months apart. Goudkins was the younger and she couldn’t remember a time in her life without Carla.

  They’d been sharing a link that horrible day.

  Carla had been in the Top of the Dome, a resort built against the dome in Tycho Crater, when the attacks started. Carla contacted Goudkins, asked for her advice on how to deal with the crisis, and had managed to escape the resort and the madman who had taken people hostage.

  Then she had gone back in to help with the rescue, to help with the victims. She was leading first responders inside when Goudkins lost contact with her.

  Later, Goudkins learned she had lost contact at the exact moment the bomb destroying the resort had gone off.

  Still, she hoped—there was that word again, hope—that her sister had maybe been lying to her or that she had misunderstood where Carla really had been. Maybe her sister was injured in one of the local hospitals or so busy with reviving her city that she hadn’t had time to get her links repaired, hadn’t had time to contact her sister, figuring Goudkins would understand.

  And maybe Goudkins would have if the circumstances were different, if the incident was isolated, or if she had been closer.

  Maybe she would have done the same thing in Carla’s place.

  She didn’t know.

  What she did know was this: her sister and best friend was missing, presumed dead, and she would never forgive herself if she didn’t investigate in person.

  That’s what Goudkins was trained in—investigation. And she had investigated a thousand crimes for the Alliance. She had met thousands of victims who wanted to believe the best, even when faced with the worst.

  She knew she was behaving just like them, and she knew she couldn’t stop.

  As the ship was cleared to land in the Earth Alliance-only terminal of the Port of Armstrong, she took her seat. She started scanning available hotel rooms in Tycho Crater, hoping (again!) she would find something.

  So far, she had been shut out. Most of the hotels in Tycho Crater had been near the Top of the Dome resort, and that meant most of them had been destroyed.

  She had hoped she would find something, but she was coming up short.

  Which meant that she’d have to pull rank again. Not to displace someone from a hotel room, but to get one of the apartments reserved for visiting dignitaries.

  She didn’t want to contact Dominic Hanrahan, the mayor of Tycho Crater. He’d been one of the targets of assassination and had somehow survived. He would have his hands full.

  Plus, he would assume that she was in Tycho Crater on Earth Alliance business, not personal business.

  She wasn’t sure how to walk that fine line between using her credentials to get her way and obligating her employers to something they hadn’t yet agreed to do.

  She didn’t look at the other passengers in the waiting area on the ship. She couldn’t quite face them. They’d all spent more time than they’d planned together, in the time they’d been circling the damn Moon. They’d had conversations they would probably regret someday, sharing memories, sharing fears, sharing gossip and news and rumor.

  Once this ship secured its berth in the port, they’d all scatter across the Moon and would probably never see each other again.

  She knew better than to wish them luck. She would have gotten angry if they had wished her luck.

  So she gripped the arm rests, leaned her head back, and prayed she’d see her sister again.

  SEVENTEEN

  HUỲNH TOOK OFF the stupid environmental suit and used some extra nanocleaners to scrub her face. She wished she had the ability to clean the insides of her mouth and nose. She felt contaminated by the suit, or maybe by the encounter with Xyven.

  The restroom near the environmental suits was cold, but then her body temperature always felt a bit off when she removed an environmental suit. It was as if her body’s regulatory system took a vacation every time she put a suit on, letting the suit regulate the comfort level rather than her body communicating what kind of comfort it needed.

  She
looked in the bank of mirrors that covered the only unblocked wall. If she wanted to wash her hands or splash water on her face, she had to wave her hand over a little sign in the middle of the mirror that said Sink in whatever language the user needed.

  She needed a sink. Her hair—so nicely coiffed and purple-tinged when she left her apartment—did look like someone had spilled dye all over it and then frizzed each strand.

  She waved over the sign, then with a wave of her hand over the faucet, she turned on the hot water. It smelled faintly of roses, which irritated her. That would probably clash with her perfume. So she had two choices: she could comb her hair and hope for the best; or she could use water to tame her hair.

  She opted for a third choice. Comb first, water second. It kinda worked. Her face was still flushed, and her purple fingernails had turned darker than she remembered. Or maybe she had picked the wrong color after all.

  She adjusted her earrings and her dress. She still looked like she had just gotten out of bed after a night of hard drinking.

  She sorta felt that way too.

  Damn Xyven. His lack of vision would cost him one day.

  The problem was that she might not be around to revel in it.

  She ran a hand over her unruly hair one last time, then commanded the sink to retract. She slung the environmental suit over her arm and let herself out of the bathroom.

  “Hey, Ava!”

  She started at the voice, and turned slightly. Lawrence Ostaka stood near the door. He looked even more rumpled than usual, his shirt bagging around the fat he wore around his waist like a belt.

  She let out a private sigh as she put on her professional I’m-in-charge face. “Lawrence,” she said. “You need to call me Ms. Huỳnh now, remember?”

  “Sorry,” he said, but she knew he didn’t mean it.

  She had been promoted over him two years ago, and he always treated her like she was still the new hire. She was, compared to him. He had at least ten years more on the job than she did, but he had stalled due to his poor people skills.