And many had such traumatic brain injuries that their next of kin would face a serious decision—see if they could repair the brain and end up with a completely different human being than the one who had been injured on Anniversary Day or let their loved one go.
Wilma Goudkins had not found a hotel room yet or even stopped to find a place to stay. The administrator at Crater View saw Goudkins’ credentials and allowed her to keep her bags in his office. He knew of channels that helped visitors find places to stay, but at the moment, the entire city was full.
Rescue workers, aid workers, families, hangers-on all crowded into what places were available. The number of hotel rooms was down, and so was the number of the available apartments and homes.
There would be too few, even if emergency personnel hadn’t shown up.
A good third of the city had been displaced. The mayor was apparently not paying attention to the price-gouging going on either. So many people had no place to live or stay that some were sleeping in the train station and in other public sites.
The police were so busy with the fallout from the explosions (and each police officer’s personal losses) that they weren’t ticketing transients either.
Goudkins didn’t want to take space away from people who really needed it. She was going to have to find out what had happened to her sister, and then try to get into her sister’s apartment. At least the apartment wasn’t in the destroyed area; Goudkins had checked that far.
But it was hard to access someone else’s place, particularly if no one in the building knew Goudkins. She would need her credentials, her DNA profile, and some kind of proof about her sister’s whereabouts.
She might be able to do that last, but she hoped—and there was that word again—that she wouldn’t have to bully her way into the apartment by using her status as Earth Alliance Security.
She was already using that status more than she had planned. It had gotten her a ride to the hospital, and it had gotten her directly into the administrator’s office.
Carla wasn’t listed as a patient, either now or on Anniversary Day, but that didn’t mean anything. A number of patients had been injured too badly to identify themselves. Most of their links and personal chips had stopped working when they got injured, which told Goudkins that whoever supplied the chips was probably facing a large lawsuit at some point, because she suspected they had all been purchased from the same place.
Most people did not have DNA on file anywhere but in their own networks, which meant that the hospital had to get a court order to compare the DNA of an unidentified patient without relatives to existing DNA—and then the hospital had to know whose DNA it was so that they could ask for the comparison DNA.
A lot of people went unidentified because of silly regulations, designed to prevent DNA theft and cloning. She supposed identity theft was a serious problem in the settled part of the Alliance, but she thought failing to identify the dead and wounded was a worse problem.
Of course, at the moment, she was biased.
The hospital had been built on the crater’s outer shell, actually at what the locals called the Lip of the Rim. Like the Top of the Dome resort, the hospital had been built right against the dome, against all modern regulations but standard at the time of the hospital’s construction.
The entire city of Tycho Crater was lucky that Crater View hadn’t been destroyed when the Top of the Dome exploded.
The poor and unidentified were brought here—maybe because they were considered expendable. The wealthier patients had gone to Tycho Crater’s six other hospitals, all in more protected parts of the city.
Goudkins had checked all the hospitals and the city morgue relentlessly since Anniversary Day, looking for her sister’s name or some variation on it. And she hadn’t found a Carla Goudkins registered anywhere.
Goudkins was assured by everyone she contacted that, if her sister was unidentified, she would have ended up here.
Goudkins wasn’t allowed to enter any patient’s room. Instead, once she left the administrator’s office, she went to the viewing chamber. Most hospitals had them. The chambers were designed so that friends and family could visit with a very sick patient who needed complete isolation.
Too many diseases—and the wrong kind of cures—could be brought in on a nanofiber, so most of the desperately sick saw their loved ones through the viewing chambers. Some hospitals even disabled links so that all communications went through the chambers.
It didn’t matter what kind of hospital this was. Every time Goudkins tried her sister’s link, she felt like she was sending a message into the void.
The viewing chambers in this hospital were on its lower level in the central core. The hospital—one of the first built in Tycho Crater—had been set up to maximize views of the Moon, so anything that didn’t require a window was either in the middle or in the basement or, as in the case of these chambers, both.
An administration tech went with her, mostly to make sure she didn’t hack into their system and steal private information about the various patients. More hospital policy, all of which—Goudkins knew—had been developed after someone had done the crimes others were now prevented from even attempting.
The place the tech brought her to was less a “chamber” than it was a pod. She had to slip sideways through the door. Then she had to click off a dozen waivers before the chair rose out of the center of the floor.
Once the chair rose, she either had to leave the room or sit down.
She sat.
Screens appeared in front of her. Almost all of them showed a patient on a bed, curled, or blinking emptily at the ceiling, or covered in healing cloths. Beside each wrapped or damaged face was a hologram of what the hospital’s computers deduced the person had looked like before the injuries.
Height, weight, and clothing were also displayed, as well as other vital information that the medical facilities could figure out.
The hospital had deleted all the male unidentified from the images before Goudkins, but didn’t delete any of the women who had had children.
Goudkins had recommended it, worrying that there would be too many, but the tech had said no.
“I’m sure you know, Ms. Goudkins,” he had said, “that not everyone tells their families about each detail in their lives.”
Goudkins didn’t consider a child a detail, but she understood the point. She only saw her sister once per year, if that, and if something had happened that Carla hadn’t wanted to talk about, then there was no way Goudkins could have found out that information for herself.
The first images were of the living patients—all shapes and sizes, although none of which fit the profile that Goudkins had of her sister. The living patients moved and breathed and sometimes coughed. The images were streamed into the room, with the other detail placed on a side screen.
When Goudkins rejected those, the next set of images was of the dead.
They were harder to look at.
These people had been severed by the sectioning dome or injured in the escape from the Top of Dome. More than a dozen had been in vehicles that crashed into the dome when it sectioned, and an odd few had died of natural causes in nearby shelters.
There were one hundred people who had died, left a corpse—which, the administrator had told Goudkins gently, was unusual in this particular incident (meaning, she guessed, Anniversary Day)—and didn’t in some way match up against the list of the missing.
She had placed her sister on that list immediately, but didn’t have any up-to-date information about Carla in regards to weight, height, or even hair color. So Carla existed on the list as a name only, not as a fully realized human being.
Sometimes the guesses made of these corpses from the hospital’s recognition program were made based on a single limb. The DNA provided some clues, as did the size of the leg in one instance, and the arm in another.
Goudkins diligently went through the images, maintaining the calm she had used to good effect in h
er investigative training years ago, trying not to speculate.
Nothing—no one—none of these corpses had been her sister. She was certain of it.
But when she rejected the last group of images, a final screen rose. It asked her if she wanted to contribute DNA to match against any database of the dead.
Her job usually did not allow her to contribute DNA to anything. If Alliance security personnel had their identities stolen, they lost their jobs forever. Not counting all of the havoc the DNA loss could cause.
Normally, she would have opted to say no, but she didn’t here. Instead, she asked to see the administrator one more time.
Goudkins would contribute DNA if she could do it under tightly controlled circumstances and if she could run the matches.
She would find her sister.
She had to.
Because she didn’t want to contemplate what would happen if she couldn’t.
TWENTY-FOUR
THE IMAGES WERE frozen on the floating screen between Deshin and Pietres’s daughter Ethelina. Her eyes were red and her face unnaturally gray.
Jakande stood beside Deshin, his back to Deshin’s side, monitoring the room. Jakande clearly didn’t trust her—not that he should.
Deshin didn’t either.
The screen images caught Deshin’s eye: the shop, seemingly empty except that Deshin knew Pietres’s body was on the floor; the building’s exterior as the clone—Syv—hurried down the broken sidewalk.
Normally, Deshin would have bargained for the images, but this wasn’t a normal moment.
Instead, he scanned his database to see if he could find out what had happened to the clone that murdered the mayor of Sverdrup Crater. What Deshin found startled even him.
The clone had been murdered by the crowd—ripped apart after he escaped the bomb blast that he helped initiate.
There was a reason that this part of the Moon had fought against joining the United Domes. These two cities, and some of the mining colonies here at the south pole, had a law all their own, one that barely fit inside the Earth Alliance.
Deshin made sure his expression showed none of his emotions. He met the girl’s gaze.
“I’ve seen enough, thank you,” he said, telling her without ordering her to get rid of that screen.
She closed her hand, and the screen shrank, then disappeared, with the movement.
Deshin looked around the room as if he were seeing the storefront for the first time. He wasn’t, of course, but she didn’t know that.
“Do you need help shutting this down?” he asked, deliberately making assumptions for her.
She raised her chin. “I’m not shutting this down.”
“Well, you can’t run it alone,” Deshin said.
She crossed her arms. “Do you think I’m not capable?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
She opened her mouth in shock. Clearly, no one had confronted her like this before.
“It’s too complicated and too dangerous. The things you don’t know can get you killed. Even your father died doing this work, and he was one of the most careful men I ever knew—
“You have no right to speak of my father,” she snapped.
“I have every right.” Deshin took a step toward her.
Sir, stay close, Jakande sent.
Deshin ignored that. He had only taken one step toward her. What Jakande didn’t know was that one step, taken that way, was more than enough to intimidate someone like the girl.
“I knew your father before you were born. I’ve done business with your father repeatedly over the years, and I know how hard he worked, and the risks he took, risks he shielded you from. I could have come in here and killed you before you even saw my face.”
“You didn’t know my father was dead,” she said, but her voice shook a little.
Deshin shrugged one shoulder. “So? I could have killed whoever was behind that counter. You’re not protected here.”
“And you’re going to protect me.” Sarcasm, the weapon of the weak.
He didn’t say that to her. “It’s not my job to protect you. It is, however, in my interest to keep this business alive. I propose a trade.”
“Money for my father’s life work?” The sarcasm gave her voice a strength that her body belied.
“Training, for access to all of your father’s records and the security footage from the moment your father opened this store until right now.”
She blinked. An errant tear fell down the side of her face, but this time, she didn’t brush at it.
“Training?” she asked. “The business would still be mine?”
For the time being, Deshin thought but didn’t say. “The business would still be yours.”
She let out a snort. “What’s in my father’s records?”
“I don’t know,” Deshin said. “But I’m willing to send some of my people to work with you in order to find out.”
She stared at him for a long moment, then slowly shook her head. He repressed a sigh. She was stupid after all, if she turned down this offer.
The head-shake grew stronger, and then she laughed. Just once.
“I thought you’d try to steal the business. Or you’d ask for discounts or something. I didn’t expect this,” she said.
He smiled. “I forgot about the discounts. Add those in as part of the price of training.”
She placed both hands on the countertop as if it could hold her up. “You’re serious.”
“Yes,” he said.
“You’d train me? In how to—what? Be a bad guy?”
She was trying to bait him now.
He’d been called much worse. “In dealing with the unsavory characters who make up eighty percent of your father’s business.”
“You don’t want merchandise or anything?”
“Just the information, and the records, and the discounts,” Deshin said. “Provided, of course, that you want to continue running this business. If not, we can negotiate a price.”
She glanced at Jakande. Deshin couldn’t see Jakande’s face to see if there was any reaction at all, but Deshin would have wagered there wasn’t.
“Would you help me avenge my father?” she asked.
“Against whom?” Deshin asked. “The man who killed him is dead.”
“The clone who killed him is dead. Clones are owned by people. I want to find out who killed him.”
“You know who killed him,” Deshin said. “If you’re keeping the business for revenge, you’re doing it for the wrong reason. Better to take some of the things your father sold, store them, and then hire a mercenary to do your dirty work for you.”
“You say that so calmly,” she said.
He nodded. “In this business, everyone speaks calmly about a lot of horrible things.”
She continued to stare at him, as if she hadn’t considered any of this. Maybe she hadn’t. In the past month, her entire world had ruptured, and she clearly had no idea how to reassemble it.
Even if she didn’t sell Deshin the business, he predicted silently to himself that he would own the business within the year.
“Deal,” she said. She started to reach out her hand, and then stopped. “You don’t mind if I refuse to shake on it?”
He smiled. “I don’t mind at all,” he said.
TWENTY-FIVE
THEY SENT GOUDKINS to the morgue.
It was actually located in a tiny dome just outside Tycho Crater. Early in its history, Tycho Crater had suffered a contagion that went from the aausme through nanobots that were cleaning up human corpses, and then somehow infected human beings. The contagion’s source wasn’t known immediately, and everything became very Earth medieval, with the dead being stored outside of the dome.
Courageous doctors had worked on the corpses outside the dome, unable to come back in until they knew the source of the disease and its cure.
Their names were on the roads leading through the tunnel that took Goudkins to the morgue, and the name of the or
ganization was on a virtual plaque outside the morgue’s building.
While she traveled, Goudkins got the entire history, whether she wanted it or not.
Normally she did, which was why her links activated when she noted unusual architecture or something not generally done in human Earth Alliance cultures. She had forgotten to shut off that feature, and it hadn’t activated until now. She was on the Moon, after all, and a lot of what was considered normal for humans had developed here and on Earth.
Apparently, a morgue isolated from a dome wasn’t considered normal.
Nothing in her day was considered normal. She shut down the links, flagging her system to remind her, when she reached Armstrong’s port, to reactivate that feature.
The morgue itself was all cool lines and windows that had a close-in view of the Moonscape. Jagged rocks crowded against the tiny dome, making it feel as if the morgue were on some distant planet, and she was an early colonizer.
The air had no smell at all, which told her that the environmental systems constantly scrubbed everything to such a high degree that nothing organic could breed here, even if someone wanted it to.
Five minutes after Goudkins entered the morgue, a man emerged from a door in one of the steel-blue center walls.
“Officer Goudkins?” He was short and a little dumpy, the kind of dumpy that would get him kicked out of any Earth Alliance position for being out of shape.
“I’m not on duty here,” she said. “Call me Wilma.”
He inclined his head toward her. “Wilma. I’m Alfonso.”
He didn’t offer a last name or his hand. Maybe that was custom here, because of the history of contagion. She did not know.
“I understand you want to contribute DNA to identify a possible relative?” he asked.
“I’m a member of the Earth Alliance security team,” she said. “I’m only allowed to use my DNA under very controlled circumstances. I would need to run the comparisons myself.”
Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel Page 15