Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  No one had told her the power of that bomb—or if, indeed, it had been just one bomb—but her eyes told her that the bomb had been a lot bigger than the one used in Armstrong four years ago. She hadn’t seen a crater like this where her mother died. There had been a crater, but it had been shallow and wider spread.

  Not deep, as if the Moon’s defenses had shut off and an asteroid had hit.

  The team leader gave them all a few minutes to stare. Then he led them to their cleanup locations.

  Berhane’s was to her left, just a meter or so off the main path. A smaller path had been formed, wide enough for the bots and probably some of the equipment the investigators used.

  Her stomach flopped.

  Time to dig in, one bit of rubble at a time.

  She examined the pile she was to pull apart. It was as tall as she was, and the debris seemed to be at most a meter long. She had a new special chip, hooked up to her links by S&R, to examine a pile like that and see where its structural weaknesses were.

  The bot beside her would also watch for any possible accident.

  She sighed heavily, the sound echoing in her suit’s helmet, and ran the chip. It gave her three different suggestions as to where to start, with a recommendation as to which one seemed the safest.

  She didn’t care which one was the safest. Her eye had caught what looked like a bit of fabric, and she would work her way to that first.

  Tentatively, she put her gloved fingers into the pile. It shifted slightly and she quickly pulled her hand away.

  You are safe, sent an automated voice on her links. She assumed that was the bot. They didn’t really have the capacity to think or reason, but they could do simple tasks and communicate through preprogrammed sentences on links if need be.

  She thanked it even though she didn’t need to, and put her fingers into the pile again. The gloves had sensors that worked rather like skin and fingertips. She felt the shape of everything, and a suggested texture reached her as well. It wasn’t always accurate. Her eyes told her that she was touching smooth metal while the sensor made it feel like smooth wood, but it was close enough.

  The bot changed its top to a flat surface, preparing itself to receive some of the debris.

  She pulled out some sticks near the cloth. They were round and broken on the edges. She had no idea what they had been. She placed them on the bot, and then continued to dig.

  The work was hard, but necessary. And tomorrow, she would move to some other pile. So would the rest of the team.

  The rubble spread out before her, and she thought about her father’s plans, his company’s plans (her company’s plans), which were already underway.

  There was a time limit on the search and recovery effort. The time limit varied from community to community, but it was real.

  At some point, large machines would come into this part of the dome, remove all the debris to the outskirts of the dome, and then other large machines would sort it.

  DNA would be lost.

  Hell, actual bodies and body parts (organic matter as the S&R teams called them when dealing with donors) would be lost. People would never know what had happened to their loved ones.

  She couldn’t fight her father—she didn’t have the clout in the company—but on some level, she knew he was right. At some point, the dome’s interior—all of the domes’ interiors—would have to be rebuilt.

  She pulled something out of the debris. The long, thin, stick-like thing was soft. The ragged edge had sinew curling from the bottom. A finger, maybe. Human? She couldn’t tell.

  But it was organic matter.

  She’d had enough training so that she didn’t fling it away in disgust, like she had done in her early sessions. Now she called a bot over and placed the finger on it, with the linked instruction:

  Organic matter. Please treat gingerly.

  Then she slowed down as she went through the pile.

  Because where there was one body part, she had learned through sad effort, there would be more.

  THIRTY-ONE

  DESHIN LEANED AGAINST the window of his shuttle, feeling unsettled. Up ahead, Armstrong’s dome glittered in the sun, unbroken and perfect. His heart lifted.

  He was heading home.

  But he was also aware of how unusual it was to see an intact dome. Flying over the moonscape made him both angry and sad. Damaged dome after damaged dome greeted him, each with a hole somewhere, and bits littered across the ground.

  Sometimes those holes were just black spaces in the distance, surrounded by rings of light. Sometimes they looked like a giant inside the dome had punched his fist through the top in a fit of anger.

  He had stopped in five damaged domes, as well as several smaller undamaged domes. He was tracing the zoodeh and explosives providers.

  The zoodeh suppliers had all ended up like Pietres—dead a week or two ahead of Anniversary Day. Most had died from zoodeh contamination, but many had died in other ways. Some had been stabbed, some had had their heads bashed in. None of the deaths were being investigated by the authorities, as far as he could tell.

  He wasn’t sure how to figure that out exactly: he didn’t want to bring his association with these suppliers into the open.

  He leaned back in his chair. The interior of the shuttle was made for comfort—large chairs, entertainment screens for moments that the networks were off-line, food available with the wave of a finger over a holographic screen.

  But he hadn’t taken advantage of the comfort on this trip. For once in his life, he felt vaguely guilty for all he had, rather than inordinately proud of how he had earned each bit of it.

  His security team seemed subdued as well. Jakande sat across from him, also staring at the moonscape. Some of the other team members were playing some kind of holographic game in the back. Usually they punctuated that game with shouts and belly laughs, but on this day—this last month, really—they’d been unusually quiet.

  The murders bothered him—not just because they were a clear cover-up, but because they had been so unnecessary.

  The suppliers he knew wouldn’t have mentioned the name or the appearance of their customers. In fact, Pietres had been unusual in even having a surveillance system that stored images.

  There had been no reason to kill these people.

  Many of them would have died on Anniversary Day. Deshin might have seen some logic in killing the ones in the domes that weren’t targeted, but upon closer examination, even that made no real sense.

  These suppliers had aided killers and assassins for decades. Even with attacks as large as Anniversary Day, the suppliers would never have run to the authorities with information. If anything, the suppliers would have deleted what information they had stored, just so that they could plead ignorance and not get charged as an accessory.

  The clones had known who to go to in order to get the zoodeh. That meant they knew—or someone knew—that the suppliers wouldn’t talk.

  Logically, then, the murders were for a different reason.

  And the only reason Deshin could think of, the reason he couldn’t shake, was for the sheer pleasure of killing. These men knew they were going to commit murder in a week, and then compound it with mass murder, and they couldn’t restrain themselves.

  They had killed ahead of time just for the joy of it.

  Deshin had known a lot of people like that. He’d fired quite a few from his organization. People who killed for the sheer pleasure of it were uncontrollable. Ultimately, they would have made a mistake that would have harmed him or his family or his business.

  He always thought they were too dangerous to have around.

  “We’re not too far out, sir,” Jakande said. “Did you want to stop near the construction site?”

  There were three different construction sites outside of Armstrong’s dome, but only one that did not have some aspect of Deshin Enterprises in it. He’d stopped at a couple of those sites on this trip, as well as several mining operations.

  The
y were the only places that had a lot of easily accessible explosives.

  What Deshin had learned at those places had disturbed him almost as much as the murders had.

  “No,” he said. “Let’s just go home.”

  Jakande nodded, then glanced at the cockpit. He was probably relaying the information to the pilots at that moment.

  Deshin looked at the moonscape, at the glittering dome looming ahead of him.

  He had been handicapped in his investigations of the explosives that destroyed the domes. He didn’t know what the clones or their accomplices had used to blow holes in everything.

  With the assassinations of the various authorities, Deshin had known immediately what happened. A zoodeh death had its own signature.

  Generally, bombs did too.

  But the bombs inside the various domes had gone off in different parts of those domes. The bombs also seemed to have different explosive effects, depending on location.

  Some bombs seemed more powerful than necessary, while others weren’t strong enough. That was one reason that only twelve of the nineteen domes to suffer explosions had actual breaches of the dome.

  He didn’t know if the difference was because of the amount of material used, the inexperience of the bombers, or because of location. And he didn’t know if the same material was used in each place.

  Which made investigating the bombings harder.

  The clones had used locals to supply the zoodeh; Deshin figured the clones had used locals to supply the bombs. Over the past few years, however, access to explosives had become highly regulated. No one wanted to have their dome breached like Armstrong’s had been breached four years ago.

  So the regulations required signature after signature, identification processes involving background checks, DNA investigations, and delayed delivery of the materials. Plus, each user had to guarantee that the explosive material would be used for a specific job, and in some of the domes, spot inspectors had double-checked to make certain the users had done what they said they would.

  The only place to find unregulated explosives on the Moon were the unincorporated areas between the domes. The mines owned by corporations, the new building developments outside of the domes, places like that.

  And even those places generally followed regulations on explosives—primarily because they couldn’t easily purchase the explosive material outside of the domes, where they would be on record.

  Still, not every place used explosive material from inside the domes. Some of the shadier operations had private landing strips. These were generally far from Armstrong, some near the south pole, and Deshin had checked those.

  And he couldn’t get them out of his mind.

  Because they’d all lost explosive material, sometimes in large quantities, and sometimes in small. They told him something he had known from his own businesses: explosive theft was common.

  He’d actually gone to regulated explosives because they were less likely to be stolen. And he’d put major protections in place at any operation that needed explosives.

  He had also tried to phase out explosives in as many businesses as possible, taking the longer, harder, and more costly route of having nanobots disassemble things at the cellular level—or was it the subatomic level? God, he didn’t know, although Paavo would. Down to its smallest parts.

  Deshin had been doing the math the entire trip back to Armstrong—not for zoodeh this time. The math for zoodeh had led him on this trip.

  No, the math he’d been doing was for the explosives.

  And even if his estimates were high for the amount of explosives that destroyed the domes on Anniversary Day, he still came out with a number that unnerved him.

  Fifteen times the explosives used to destroy all the domes on Anniversary Day were still missing. Fifteen times the destructive power, missing and unused.

  And most of it, to his surprise, had gone missing—not two weeks before Anniversary Day, or even the month before. But five years before. Before the Armstrong bombings. Before any inkling that these attacks would happen.

  Five years, and many, many, many metric tons of missing explosives.

  He wasn’t sure he could chalk that up to simple theft.

  He needed to find out what had exploded the domes, and then track it by type.

  He had a large network of employees, investigators, and security.

  It was time to put them to use.

  THIRTY-TWO

  BERHANE WAS LATE for dinner—again. She should have canceled, but Donal so rarely got nights free. He was working as hard as she was—harder really, because he had a regular job (some engineering thing that she didn’t entirely understand) and he had to parent Fiona full time. He still found two days per week to volunteer for Search & Rescue, although he usually did in-house stuff because he didn’t want to put himself in any danger. As he said, he had Fiona to consider.

  Finding time to spend with Berhane alone was nearly impossible for him, yet he was making an hour here or an hour there.

  Their relationship had progressed beyond the coffee, past the first few dinners, and into the first stages of something physical, but they hadn’t had sex yet. They would, she knew, as soon as she finished moving into her new apartment. They certainly couldn’t do anything at his house: As he said, he didn’t want to give Fiona hope that the relationship would be something more than it actually was.

  Berhane hadn’t even seen Fiona since Anniversary Day. Berhane suspected Donal would want Fiona to know that he and Berhane were involved when he felt like the relationship had some permanence.

  And on days like today, Berhane wasn’t sure what permanence was.

  She had come directly from the Littrow site. She was exhausted. She had taken two showers—one at Armstrong’s S&R facility when she removed the last of her environmental suit, and the other at her father’s house before she set out to the restaurant.

  It hadn’t felt like enough.

  She wasn’t even sure she could eat.

  Beneath that debris pile, she had found parts of at least five people.

  At least.

  Not for the first time, she was relieved she had had an environmental suit on. Not because she didn’t want to touch the remains, but because the smell—in an oxygen rich environment—would have been overwhelming.

  She had no idea how her counterparts did this kind of work on Earth.

  It was discouraging, debilitating, and necessary.

  She stopped just outside the restaurant door, giving herself a moment. She wore one of her favorite dresses—a white chiffon thing that billowed around her when she moved. She had put on just enough makeup to feel pretty—or what she would have normally felt as pretty—but today it just made her feel like an imposter.

  She felt like she had put lipstick on over sweat and dust.

  Still, she knew Donal was inside. He had sent her a message when he arrived, and she had asked him to order since she would be a few minutes late.

  She smoothed the soft material of her skirt, took a deep breath, and entered.

  The restaurant smelled faintly of garlic, red wine, and coffee. Large flower displays near the entrance added some perfume to the mix. The restaurant was an Earth chain, and didn’t have any human greeters at the door.

  She didn’t mind. She had had her fill of “impressive” restaurants, with each detail laid out. She had left those behind when she tossed Torkild’s ring across the departure lounge.

  Donal sat near one of the windows, his chin resting on his fist as he looked out onto the street. An appetizer of fried gyoza steamed on a plate in front of him.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Berhane said as she sat across from him.

  He turned toward her and smiled. That smile made her heart jump every single time. She couldn’t ever remember feeling that particular emotion before she met him.

  “The appetizer just got here,” he said. It wasn’t a complaint about her tardiness, nor was it a criticism. Just a fact.

  S
he liked that about him too.

  “We probably shouldn’t schedule on days when you volunteer,” he said.

  “Then we wouldn’t see each other,” she said.

  She slid a plate toward her and picked up chopsticks. They felt big and clunky in her fingers. Even her hands were tired.

  He nodded. “You just look so exhausted.”

  “It’s emotional,” she said, although she was certain she was physically exhausted as well. “Our team found—well—”

  She didn’t want to tell him exactly what they had found.

  “I don’t mind hearing,” he said.

  “Oh, it’s not dinnertime conversation,” she said. “We did find DNA of at least fifty people.”

  “Excellent,” he said.

  “It’s not,” she said. “At least a million are dead, and so many more missing. We didn’t even make a blip.”

  “You helped fifty families,” he said softly. “That’s more than a blip. It’s the world to them. You know it.”

  She did know it. She just got overwhelmed. So much rubble. So many missing people. So much to do.

  He was watching her closely. He hadn’t picked up his chopsticks.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s eat.”

  She took two dumplings off the appetizer plate and poured some sauce on them. She made herself take a bite, getting a hit of ginger, onion, and garlic with the soy sauce.

  Her stomach rumbled. She had been hungry. She just hadn’t realized it.

  “I ordered a lot of food,” he said, “so go slow.”

  It was as if he could read her mind. He actually cared about her.

  “Tell me about your day,” she said. “Tell me about Fiona.”

  He did. He told some cute story about a dance recital for four-year-olds, about what it was like, negotiating his way through tutus and ballet slippers and tiaras.

  He had Berhane laughing by the time the second entrée arrived.

  They talked and flirted and laughed and enjoyed.

  And as they waited for the baobing he’d ordered with a side of strawberries, he leaned forward.