Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel
Page 20
“Now,” he said. “Tell me about your day.”
She shook her head. “You know what happened out there. You’ve been through it.”
“You’ve done it before too. Each day is hard, but today seems to have upset you even more than the others.”
He was astute about her. No one had been for four years. It still startled her.
“It’s been a month,” she said. “The investigations are continuing, as best they can, but there’s so much to do. And people like my father want to rebuild right away.”
“I know that disturbs you,” Donal said. “But the problems inside the shattered domes right now are serious, even with the temporary tops in place. For example, every environmental system has to be routed around. The domes weren’t designed for the problems we’re facing.”
She looked at him, feeling a bit disoriented. What had he just said? This was a side of Donal she hadn’t seen before.
“I’m a structural engineer,” he said. “I told you before. That’s my training.”
One of the serving trays tipped the bowls of baobing onto their table. The shaved ice had sounded so good earlier, and now it seemed decadent. The strawberries glistened on top, the richness of the food showing just how lucky Armstrong had been to have been spared on Anniversary Day.
“I’m not agreeing with your father,” Donal said. “I am saying that the attackers caused a lot of problems, and not all of them are visible or obvious to most people.”
She nodded. She understood that. And she was beginning to understand how much her father’s callousness affected her. The last thing she wanted was Donal to be like him. She’d had that kind of relationship before; she didn’t want another.
“We were talking about how you felt,” Donal said. “I interrupted.”
“No, you didn’t,” she said. “You’re right. Life moves forward whether you want it to or not. You and I both learned that four years ago.”
“But…?” he said.
“I just wish that we had more money and more help, and the ability to focus, not just on the organic material we find, but on a true DNA search, so we can help the families of the missing. They’re going to be hoping forever, and we can’t do anything about that, not at this pace.”
Donal frowned. “What would you do? We have to rebuild.”
“We do,” she said. “And it’s not the mission of Search & Rescue to continue past the initial crisis. I know. I read the charter.”
She wanted to add have you? but stopped herself. She realized in that moment how charged she had become.
“Everything will shut down and debris will pile up and someday some future generation will bury it or something or people like my father will recycle it, and on it will be—”
“DNA from the dead,” Donal said softly.
Berhane nodded. “It bothers me so much I can hardly sleep.”
“So why don’t you do something about it?” Donal asked.
She snorted. “I am. I volunteered.”
“No,” he said. “Your father is one of the richest men in Armstrong. Have him fund a foundation or something as part of the charitable work his company prides itself on, to do the recovery of the dead.”
“I already asked,” she said. “He laughed and said I needed to get over Mother at some point in my life.”
Donal closed his eyes, his cheeks reddening. He took a deep breath, then nodded. She’d never seen him quite so upset about anything.
“Your father’s a real treat,” Donal said after a moment.
She shrugged. “He is who he is. He’ll never fund something like that.”
“Can you fundraise?” Donal asked. “There have to be a lot of people with money that you’ve interacted with who would be willing to fund something like this.”
Halfway through his comments, her stomach flipped over.
People with money.
She never thought of herself as someone with money. It had been her parents’ money, and then it was her father’s money.
But she had inherited from her mother, and she also had her own trust. She had more money than she could ever spend. She had said that a million times.
She had the money. Maybe not the capital she would need to run a company that would search for all of the dead on the Moon, but she would have enough to start something that could handle Littrow.
Or start something that would then encourage others to invest.
Because Donal was right. She knew people with money. She knew non-humans with money, and all the heads of the charitable giving arms of the major corporations that operated in Earth’s solar system.
She could raise charitable funds. She’d done it before. She even knew who to hire to help her and how to go about it.
“Donal,” she said, “you’re a genius.”
“I am?” he asked.
She nodded, and smiled.
“We’re going to make a difference,” she said. “We’re going to help families, and help the Moon itself heal.”
He took her hand. She loved his touch.
“Tell me how,” he said.
So she did.
The thrilling adventure continues with the fifth book in the Anniversary Day Saga, The Peyti Crisis.
Blurb TK
Turn the page for the first chapter of The Peyti Crisis.
FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AGO
ONE
THE VOICE ON her links, so faint she almost didn’t hear it.
Jhena, I need you. Oh, God, I need you.
Jhena Andre sat in her tiny office in the back of the administration suite. She was comparing the approved list of names for the morning’s trial to the list of names vetted by the Earth Alliance Prison System. She had already compared the approved list to the list vetted through the Human Justice Division. She had five more lists to compare, and then she had to confirm that the DNA associated with the approved list of names for the morning’s trial actually belonged to the person with that name.
She had stocked up on coffee: It was going to be a long night.
Jhena, please. Please.
She paused the holographic lists. The same name was highlighted on each. Behind the floating list, she could see the bare wall, the one she’d been told not to decorate since she wouldn’t be here long.
Not long had gone from three weeks to six weeks to six months, and now, nearly a year. Somehow PierLuigi Frémont had managed to hire lawyers who actually argued his case, claiming at first the Earth Alliance had no jurisdiction over events in Abbondiado, and then when his lawyers had lost that, that what happened in Abbondiado had been an internal coup, not a crime against humanity.
The Criminal Court had already tossed out one of the genocide charges, saying that crimes committed on the Frontier did not belong in Earth Alliance Courts. Someone, her boss had said, was afraid of taking this case all the way to the Multicultural Tribunals, and losing.
Jhena….
She finally recognized the voice, and more importantly, she recognized the link. It was her private link, the one she’d only given to friends, and the message was encoded, which was why it seemed faint.
She cursed, and put a hand to her ear, even though she didn’t need to, even though she usually made fun of people who did the very same thing.
Didier? She sent back. She knew she sounded timid, but she wasn’t sure it was him. Didier Conte was the only person in the entire prison complex who could contact her on her friends link.
Yeah. Please. I need you right now. Bring evidence bags.
Evidence bags? She didn’t have access to evidence bags. And then she realized that she did. Extras were stored in the closet just outside her stupid little office, along with a whole bunch of other supplies that this part of the prison needed.
Why? she sent back.
Hurry. And then he signed off.
She stared at the highlighted name, the letters blurring, the image of the person the name belonged to not really registering. Why would Didier need her? Why not call another guard? A
nd why had he signed off so fast?
This was where she usually failed the friendship test. She didn’t care what other people needed, especially if they bothered her in the middle of something.
But the something she was in the middle of was extremely tedious, and if Didier’s locator was right, he was deep inside the prison, where she only got to go if a supervisor was nearby.
The prison wasn’t the most dangerous one Jhena had worked at in her short twenty-one years. That would be a super max on the edge of the Earth Alliance, run by humans but housing all different kinds of aliens who’d broken human laws in various outposts along the way.
She not only couldn’t go into certain parts of that prison because she would be fired; she couldn’t go because she would die without the proper gear. Not everything was set up on Earth Standard. The Peyti section alone had more toxins in the atmosphere than she had seen since her childhood, when her parents were working for Ultre Corporation.
Her brain skittered away from that memory.
She stood. This was probably her only chance to see PierLuigi Frémont without dozens of guards accompanying him. Didier said that Frémont was charismatic and that made him dangerous, not that it really mattered, since it didn’t matter how much the man charmed Jhena. She had no codes, no passkeys, and no DNA recognition that would allow her to open the doors to his cell.
She was quite aware of her place as a lower-level employee of the prison system, one who could be replaced with yet another machine, but wasn’t partly because the law protected certain human jobs against automation, and partly because of the belief that humans could do some work better than machines.
She was grateful for the law, even though she found the belief behind it stupid. But, then, she found a lot of beliefs stupid. She’d learned to be circumspect about it, learned to use those beliefs to her benefit, like now. Even though she hated the tedium, she was getting a hell of a good paycheck, and this job was a stepping stone to better jobs elsewhere in the Earth Alliance System.
All because of a stupid belief.
She grinned, stood, and smoothed her skirt. She wasn’t really dressed to go in the prisoner wing. She usually wore pants for that, and a loose-fitting shirt. Because she hadn’t wanted to come to work tonight, she had made it a game, deciding to look good for once, even though no one was going to see her.
Now, it seemed, someone was. A mass murderer, by all accounts. A fascinating man. Someone famous.
She left the office, pulling the door closed behind her, and then grabbed a box of evidence bags out of the closet across the hall.
She didn’t want Didier to chastise her for not bringing enough bags, so she brought too many.
She tucked the box under her arm, and headed into the high security area. She thought for a brief moment about the cameras that were everywhere, but she didn’t know how to shut them off.
If she got in trouble, she would blame Didier, say that he had asked for her help, and she didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to give it.
But no one around here looked at the camera footage unless there was a problem.
And she hoped that despite his tone, Didier hadn’t caused a problem. She hoped he just needed a little bit of help with something.
She hoped she wouldn’t pay for this forever.
The thrilling adventure continues with the fifth book in the Anniversary Day Saga, The Peyti Crisis, available now from your favorite bookseller.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.
Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award.
She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.
She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own.
To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.
Look for These Other Titles from Kristine Kathryn Rusch
THE RETRIEVAL ARTIST SERIES:
The Disappeared
Extremes
Consequences
Buried Deep
Paloma
Recovery Man
The Recovery Man’s Bargain (A Short Novel)
Duplicate Effort
The Possession of Paavo Deshin (A Short Novel)
The Anniversary Day Saga:
Anniversary Day
Blowback
A Murder of Clones
Search & Recovery
The Peyti Crisis
Vigilantes
Starbase Human
The Masterminds
Other Stories:
The Retrieval Artist (A Short Novel)
“The Impossibles” (A Retrieval Artist Universe Short Story)
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Copyright Information
Search & Recovery
Book Four of the Anniversary Day Saga
Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
All rights reserved
Published 2015 by WMG Publishing
www.wmgpublishing.com
Cover and Layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © George Tsartsianidis/Dreamstime, Angela Harburn/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Four Years Ago
One
Anniversary Day
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
One Week Later
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
One Month After Anniversary Day
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
The Peyti Crisis: Book Five of the Anniversary Day Saga
Fifty-Five Years Ago
One
The Peyti Crisis
About the Author
Other Titles from Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Copyright Information