Buried Deep Part 4

"Why don't you mention it to the council?" Flint asked. "Or are you supposed to deal directly with the governor-general?"

"I don't know," DeRicci said. "There's going to be a meeting tomorrow."

"So tell them." Flint finished his greens and set the plate aside.

"I'm afraid to," DeRicci said. "I'm afraid any objection I make will become an idea, and if I turn the job down, someone will remember the objection as a suggestion, and suddenly it'll all become policy, whether I like it or not."

"It sounds like you have no choice," Flint said. "You have to take this position."

"If only I could show them that this bombing was an isolated incident. Maybe they'll abandon the entire idea."

"The bombing may have been isolated and the marathon attack was isolated, but they came back-to-back," Flint said. "You were involved with both. They feel related."

She knew that. She felt trapped, leaning against the velvet couch, the beautiful table in front of her.

"I used to want the respect," she said. "Now I have it, and I hate it. It's forcing me into positions that I don't want to hold, places I don't want to go."

Flint templed his fingers, his eyebrows raised. He studied the double doors as if willing them to remain closed.

"But I'm really torn," DeRicci said. 'They're going to create the position, but they've given me the chance to create the rules. I'd be a fool to balk at that."

Flint took a sip of his coffee, then ran his finger along the cup's rim. "No one would ever call you a fool, Noelle."

"People used to," she said.

He smiled at her. "And they were wrong."

6.

Aisha Costard was shaking. If someone had told her two weeks ago that she would visit the Moon before she returned to Earth, she would have laughed. At that time, she had thought her Mars case something simple-an adventure really, instead of a disaster that had already changed her life.

She stood on the curb, waiting for Port Rentals to bring her an aircar. To other people, she probably looked like a typical traveler, clothes wrinkled from days on a shuttle, a bag over her shoulder. The clerk inside the rental office hadn't given her a second glance, merely took Costard's hand, pressed it against the identification box, and then touched a separate screen, confirming that Costard was who she said she was.

No mention made of the limited warrant, no comment on the fact that her travel visa came from Mars instead of her home planet of Earth, no discussion of the alert that had tinted Costard's file orange.

Apparently, Armstrong's customs had cleared all that. Or maybe they had simply modified it, giving whomever looked up Costard's ident.i.ty specific instructions.

Costard had been too afraid to ask, especially after the last few days.

The Disty had given Costard clearance so that she could settle the major contamination case. But they had warned her that they would come for her if she tried to run. They would hunt her down, even if she disappeared.

She was working for them at the moment, even though they wouldn't come into the same room with her, even though they considered her as contaminated as the bones she'd been studying.

But the Disty did concede that she was making progress. Her work on the skeleton had brought the contamination area down from three square blocks to two, because she could prove that the skeleton had been at that site only as long as the building, which was about thirty years.

The area still reeked of death as far as the Disty were concerned, but it wasn't as bad as it had been. And if Costard could find the dead woman's family, then maybe the contamination would disappear for good.

A man stopped beside her. He wore a long brown coat and thigh-high boots. His hair fell against his shoulders. On one arm he wore a corporate patch. He didn't give her a second glance.

She resisted the urge to move away from him. She didn't want him to look at her. Ever since she had gone to Sahara Dome, she had felt like the ground could shift under her at any moment.

She made herself take a deep breath of the recycled air. Dome air always had a metallic taste to it, no matter how fresh the engineers tried to make it. At least here the dome's ceiling was visible, and the buildings towered above her. Real streets, with no rabbit warrens, no need for her to crouch every time she went from one location to another.

Armstrong Dome was big enough, and the roof of the dome high enough, that aircars were practical here. That, at least, was enough like Earth to rea.s.sure her.

"How long you been waiting?" the man next to her asked.

Costard started. She glanced at him sideways, then realized the movement probably looked furtive. She made herself smile at him. "A while."

"They're always backed up here," he said. "I don't know why I schedule everything so tight."

"You're not local?" she asked, then realized it was a dumb question. Why would a man from the city need to rent a car at the port?

"I'm from the Outlying Colonies," he said, "but I do way too much business in this solar system. Seems like I'm in Armstrong half of my year."

She swallowed, trying to imagine that kind of travel and failing. "The literature says Armstrong is human controlled, right?"

He gave her a surprised look. "That's a strange question."

She shrugged. "I-had some trouble on Mars. I didn't realize the Disty had so much power."

"People rarely do." He rocked back on his heels, checked over his shoulder as if he were looking for his car, and then looked forward again. "You here on business?"

"Yes."

"I can show you around, if you like."

Months ago, she would have taken him up on the offer. She might have still if this had been Tokyo or London. But she was in another d.a.m.n Dome, and she wasn't sure how to behave.

"I'm not going to be here long enough for that," she said. "But thanks."

He nodded, as if he had expected the answer. "You're from Earth, right?"

She almost blurted, How do you know? How do you know? but caught herself just in time. "Why?" but caught herself just in time. "Why?"

"People from Earth rarely research their destinations. You live outside of the home world, you learn pretty fast that you have to know exactly what you're walking into."

She felt her face heat. "You never answered my question."

"About Armstrong? It's about as human as a domed colony can get. Maybe it'll get more human real soon now. I don't know."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"New security laws coming in," he said. "Armstrong's been attacked twice in the last two years. The city's become paranoid."

An aircar rounded the corner of a nearby building and slowed down. It hovered above the waiting area, then eased its way to the pavement in front of Costard. "Looks like yours," the man said. She nodded.

"The navigational equipment in the vehicles here are old by Earth standards, but still real functional. The only thing you have to worry about with these babies is that they're pretty easy to break into. Don't leave anything important in them."

He was being friendly. He was being helpful. She wanted to trust him more, but she didn't dare.

"Thanks," she said, as she went around to the driver's side. A Port Rental employee, wearing a dark green uniform, got out. He took her hand, just like the woman inside had, and pressed her palm against a screen.

"How come you don't use 'bots or straight computerization?" she asked, getting irritated at the way these people just grabbed her and pulled her hand toward the screens.

"Living flesh," he said without looking at her. "We have to make sure the part is attached."

The answer made her stomach turn. She wasn't sure she wanted to know how the whole living-flesh identification system could be compromised by a cutoff limb. The blood had to be flowing through the palm, and the skin had to be warm. How did someone fake that?

The screen beeped its verification and the car chirruped a greeting at her. She hadn't heard that particular aircar electronic voice since she was a child. The man who had helped her hadn't been kidding when he said the equipment was old here.

He grinned at her and nodded as she got into the car. She put her bag on the pa.s.senger's seat, strapped herself in, familiarized herself with the controls, and hesitated.

If this had been Earth, she would have gone straight to her hotel, checked in, and cleaned up. She would have let the hotel information screen tell her about Armstrong, its history and its sites, while she prepared for her meeting.

But she was behind schedule, and even though she'd notified everyone in Sahara Dome who needed to know about her delay, she didn't trust them to act rationally about it. She had only gotten four days away from the project, and she had spent half of one in travel, the rest of it and all of another day in customs, and now half of this day trying to get out of the port.

She didn't have time to follow her usual leisurely plan. She would have to see if she could meet with the Retrieval Artist first.

Then she would settle in. Then she would spend at least one evening pretending she was still free.

7.

Miles Flint sat at his desk, watching the report on InterDome Media for the third time. He had downloaded it nearly an hour ago, and ever since, he'd been watching like a man who couldn't take his eyes off a particularly devastating accident.

His office was cooler than normal. He had turned the temperature down when he had come in, mostly to stay awake. He'd been napping in his office too much lately.

Of course, that had been before he had seen Ki Bowles's news report. He had punched a b.u.t.ton beside his desk, calling up one of the screens that he had hidden in the antique permaplastic walls. He usually let one of the news programs run all day, covering stories from all over the Alliance, never repeating them, always "Fresh! Up-to-Date! Surprising!"

Usually the packaged reports for the various media companies were high on sensationalism and low on details. But they provided a background-noise overview of the "important" events in Alliance s.p.a.ce. Flint could always download reports from various sources, including the noncorporate sites, to get greater detail.

Often he spent his days that way, chasing news stories, keeping himself informed so that he would know which country had internal strife, which part of which planet was torn apart by civil war, which corporation had screwed its employees yet again.

All of that might be unimportant, and yet all of it might matter later if he took a case that involved it.

He had been reading a long report on the mines of Igesty when he had heard DeRicci's name. He looked up from his e-reader, but couldn't see past one of his raised desk screens to the newscast. He did recognize the voice narrating the piece, however. It belonged to Ki Bowles.

He set his e-reader on the desktop, stood, and faced the left wall. The front part of the office was small, with very little furniture-only his desk and his chair-which made it seem even smaller. Or maybe the large image on the wall did that. Ki Bowles had been to this office, and she had never taken up as much s.p.a.ce as her recorded face now did.

". . . Filed reports branded her a screwup," Bowles was saying. "Someone who couldn't take or understand orders. Guaranteed, one supervisor said, to ruin any a.s.signment she was given."

Flint pressed a corner of the screen and got the piece's t.i.tle, along with its running time. He'd already missed five minutes of the report, and there was only a minute to go.

He had left the screen running, returned to his desk, and pushed a b.u.t.ton on the underside of his desk, raising yet another screen. This one was part of his main system, unlike the wall screen. He went to InterDome's site, looked for Ki Bowles's most recent reports, and found the one he was listening to: NOELLE DERICCI: ACCIDENTAL HERO?

He downloaded it, then logged off, not caring that InterDome had a record of his download. If Bowles somehow learned of his download and asked him about it later, he would simply say he was making certain she hadn't used any of her discussions with him.

And now, after he had watched the report three times, the content had broken his heart. DeRicci had a bad history, one that he thought she was past with her various promotions, and now with the new position as Chief of Moon Security.

Apparently, however, Bowles saw DeRicci as a story, maybe even a career-making one. And it didn't hurt that Bowles had DeRicci's former boss, Andrea Gumiela, on record saying what a screwup DeRicci had been.

"We were all surprised when she came into her own at the Moon Marathon," Gumiela said.

She wore a little too much makeup and had a few enhancements to make her look younger. She had never looked that pretty when Flint worked for her.

"If you thought she was such a bad detective," Bowles asked in voice-over, "why did you keep her on the force?"

Gumiela seemed unfazed by the question. Instead, she had smiled as if she had expected it. "Noelle is brilliant, strong, and very driven. We look for those qualities in our officers. She had never been engaged before. Apparently, her heart wasn't in solving crime. It was in preventing crime."

When she gave that interview, Gumiela probably thought she was doing DeRicci a favor. Flint suspected there were a lot more statements like the last, statements that, in context, praised DeRicci. But Bowles only took snippets of what had obviously been a long interview, interspersed them with video reports and confidential memos about DeRicci's job performance, all of which must have been leaked by someone, maybe even Gumiela herself.

The whole thing made DeRicci sound like the biggest failure to ever join the Armstrong Police Department. It also sounded like the governor-general's a.s.signment of her to the new United Domes of the Moon Security Department was a great mistake.

DeRicci only took the oath for her office the day before. She hadn't had a chance to do anything except give a gracious acceptance speech when Bowles's attack came out.

Flint was relieved Bowles hadn't used anything he said, even inadvertently, the day he had seen her at the press conference. She had mentioned his name, however: "Miles Flint, a local Retrieval Artist, had been one of Detective DeRicci's partners. He got rich shortly after he resigned from the force, some say off a case that he had worked with DeRicci herself."

The first implication, of course, was that Flint had gotten rich through illegal means, which, he supposed, he had- saving hundreds, maybe thousands of lives in the process, something he would never discuss. The other implication was that DeRicci had helped him, and was somehow hiding millions of credits from her nefarious activities in the police department.

The irony was that she could have gotten rich if she had only quit when he did. He would have worked with her. He even offered to.

But she had turned him down, preferring to stay on the known path, even though it branched into places that made her morally uncomfortable. She had stayed with the police because she believed in the law, because it was the only thing she completely understood.

And now she was getting pilloried for it.

A screen opened on his desktop. The screen only opened when his perimeter alarm went off. The perimeter alarms were set in a half-mile radius around his office, so at least one of them went off once a day.

Some days, the alarm went off several times, providing a much-needed distraction. Usually, he would look at the screen that displayed the section where the alarm had been triggered, and see a neighbor coming home, or the seedy lawyer who had rented the office next door coming to work.

This time, however, Flint saw a rented aircar park in a little used lot. He pulled out the keyboard shelf. His mentor, Paloma, from whom he had bought the business, had taught him a healthy aversion to touch screens and voice commands. They were too easy to replicate or overhear. So he did most of his work on an old-fashioned Earth English-language keyboard, augmented with special keys for special commands.

He pressed a command key, and the image on the screen zoomed closer to the aircar. He had the system check the license. The car belonged to Port Rentals, the largest aircar rental firm on the Moon.

He transferred the still image of the car and license to his private system, however, the one that he never linked to a network. If he had to, he would make yet another copy, and use that image to hack into Port Rental's system, to find out who had rented the car.

He always liked to be prepared.