Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (11 page)

Or did he truly believe that what happened to humans didn’t matter to Peyti?

She didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to waste time finding out.

She needed to get her all-human teams on the ground. She needed to do some planning.

Without him.

Or the Joint Unit’s resources.

Still, she’d be offering the damaged governments of the Moon the kind of assistance they needed. And maybe, just maybe, she’d protect the Alliance against further attacks.

Whether they were caused by humans or not.

TWELVE

FRAGMENTED DREAMS OF her mother haunted her. Whenever Berhane closed her eyes, she saw not the images of disaster that filled the screens and poured across the public networks, but her mother’s black hair, with its reddish highlights catching the fake sunlight of Dome Dawn that last morning, the smell of cinnamon coffee in the air.

The sky was red with early morning light, the shopping district illuminated in copper, everything sharp and clear and focused.

Berhane would wake up without feeling rested, pressure in her chest from unshed tears. Those months after the bombing, those months when she kept hoping and hoping and hoping that her mother had somehow gotten away, that she had survived and lost her memory, that—ridiculously—she had decided to run away from home and not tell anyone, that she was still breathing somewhere. The “magical thinking,” as her father called it, had trapped Berhane as surely as the sectioned dome had trapped those inside it for just an instant, before their world evaporated into nothingness.

Then Berhane learned the sequence, realized the bomb had gone off first and the dome had sectioned afterwards, that everyone was dead before Berhane had even known anything was wrong, that her mother hadn’t been trapped, but had walked blithely toward the Shenandoah Café, thinking the morning beautiful and soon she would be talking with her very annoyed daughter.

Annoyed.

Berhane still felt the guilt of that.

She could only handle two or three of those dreams per night. She would get up afterwards, and usually get some coffee or a muffin and sit on her balcony on the dome side of her father’s house. She had moved back in after Anniversary Day because her apartment had too much Torkild in it.

He had helped her pick out the furniture, had slept in that bed on the final morning of their engagement, had betrayed her there. She was subletting the place to a friend, but Berhane knew she wouldn’t return.

Besides, she liked to think that this way Torkild couldn’t find her.

Or maybe he would be too embarrassed to come here.

He was on the Moon still—everyone was; no private ships had left yet—and he had only tried to contact her once since that awful day. She had told him she didn’t want to think about him anymore, and had shut down all of his access to her links.

To escape him, and all thought of him, she had moved into the suite of rooms that her mother had remodeled for guests. Berhane’s childhood bedroom remained, but Berhane wanted to leave that as it was—a monument to a person who no longer existed.

Besides, if she stayed in the suite, she felt like a guest in her father’s home instead of a little girl moving back for comfort. She was already looking for a new place, one that wasn’t as upscale as Torkild liked, one that had a bit of attitude, maybe even a funky groove, one that didn’t show off her wealth, but showed off her personality instead.

Her father’s house did show off his wealth. He owned a disgusting amount of land at the northern edge of Armstrong. The area had been settled forty years ago, the dome expanded to accommodate, and covenants added so that no one could build a new subdivision on the empty Moonscape beyond.

The covenants had been no big deal, mostly because there were small craters and hills on this part of the Moonscape. If someone wanted to build there, they would have to make the subdivision a “natural” one, incorporating all of the natural landscape—something more expensive than it seemed since Moon dust was always a problem inside the domes.

Her favorite feature of her father’s house was the balcony view of the Moonscape. Blasted and barren, with only small signs of civilization across it. The tracks from whatever had driven across the moon dust recently, a few of the Growing Pits to the east, the high-speed train to Littrow to the west.

If the dome settings were just right, she could see the white-and-blue blur of the high-speed train, the lights of Littrow in the distance, glowing across the black-and-gray Moon. And she remembered, whenever she saw that, how much she loved this place, and how terrified she was for it.

Millions had died a week ago.
Millions
. The domes were devastated, community leaders murdered, the violence on a scale that even now she had trouble imagining.

And yet, on the microcosmic scale, she knew what it was like. Four years ago, against her father’s wishes and her brother’s advice, she had suited up and gone into the bomb site. She had wanted to stand where the Shenandoah Café had been, where that sidewalk that her mother had walked along had been.

The area had been black with soot from the chemical fires that had flared before the oxygen all escaped from the hole in the dome. The sidewalk still existed, twisted and gray from Moon dust. The Shenandoah Café still had its famous counter and the mural behind it, a mural that got salvaged thanks to the efforts of Berhane and the Café owner’s family.

She had found so many things—shattered coffee mugs, spoons, a single shoe—but she had never found her mother.

For nearly three years—after the bombing, after the funeral, after everyone else had seemingly put the entire crisis behind them—Berhane would imagine her mother walking through the front door of this house and asking everyone to forgive her. Her imaginary mother would say that she hadn’t realized how much time had passed. She had lost her memory, lost herself, but she had found both again, and she was back.

Then they found her DNA, and Berhane had mourned all over again.

Only a year ago.

And now, this.

Berhane stood on the balcony, cupping the coffee she had had sent up from the kitchen, picking at a muffin made with real blueberries from the Growing Pits, and sighed.

She was so tired, and yet she couldn’t rest. She needed to do something. She’d been throwing money at every charity she could think of, but hadn’t felt like she had done anything.

It actually felt like cheating.

She set the coffee on a nearby table, then went into the bedroom, grabbed a sweatshirt she’d commandeered from her brother’s room on the night of Anniversary Day (it was the only way to bring Bert back home, at least for the evening), and slipped on a pair of loose pants.

She left her feet bare.

Then she went back onto the balcony, got her coffee, grabbed a handful of muffin, and headed out of the suite.

Initially, she thought she’d take a tour of the house, just to stretch her legs without going onto the grounds. Sometimes, looking at the Moon-centric art that her father had collected over the decades made her feel better.

But today, she knew it wouldn’t.

Instead, she thought maybe she’d cook something. She hadn’t done that in more than a week. And cooking focused the mind, even if it was only for a short period of time.

She padded down the front stairs, her feet sinking into the deep, warm carpet. The warm coffee spilled a bit over her hand, and she licked it off.

Voices echoed across the foyer. She frowned, called up the clock inside her right eye, and saw that it was barely eight in the morning. Her father usually started his day at nine, with a heavy breakfast before he made his way to the office. He stayed there until one or two in the morning, rarely making it home to get his normal six hours of sleep.

She crossed the cold marble of the foyer and walked through the formal living area into the formal dining room.

A dozen top executives from her father’s company sprawled in the chairs, a breakfast spread of eggs and cereal and fruit on one side, dim sum and some kind of stir-fry on the other, and in the middle, more pastries than she had seen since the wedding brunch for her best friend from Aristotle.

“Daddy?” Berhane asked.

The conversation stopped—not guiltily, just the way conversations did when an outsider showed up.

Her father smiled at her. He looked wide awake and cheerful this morning, his ruddy face clean-shaven, his black eyes twinkling. He was a big man who slouched whenever he sat down, and this morning was no exception. His head was at the same level as everyone else’s. If her father sat up all the way, he’d tower over all of them, even as he sat.

“For those of you who don’t know,” he said to the collected executives, “this is my daughter Berhane. Be nice to her. She will run the company one day.”

Murmured hellos, disinterested and somewhat sheepish, rose around the table. Berhane smiled at all of the gathered executives, even though she didn’t feel like smiling at all.

“Join us, my girl,” her father said, using his personal nickname for her even though he was in a business meeting. “You should probably be part of this.”

She didn’t want to join any kind of meeting. She took a sip of her coffee as a stall.

“What are you discussing?” She couldn’t quite tell from the assembled executives. Sometimes, her father’s choice of business partners told her all she needed to know.

“Rubble and rebuilding,” her father said cheerfully.

Her stomach clenched and she was sure her dismay showed on her face. But typically, her father didn’t seem to notice.

“Show her,” he said to the white-haired man beside him. That man was younger than her father. The white hair, which was all one color, was clearly an affectation, not something hereditary.

Berhane started to protest, but before she could get the words out of her mouth, screens appeared all around her. They were covered with before-and-after pictures. Or now-and-future pictures, if she wanted to be more accurate.

Near each executive was a domed Moon city, with its destruction on full display. The hardest to look at was Tycho Crater, whose central dome had imploded along with a resort built at the top of that dome, against any kind of Earth Alliance regulations. The debris there was meters deep and probably housed thousands of bodies.

Next to it, a new version of the resort, Top of the Dome, rose on stilts and wasn’t attached to the dome at all, but seemed to be. Little side pods moved even closer to the dome and the top of the crater, all of them marked with some kind of moniker—hotel, restaurant, shop.

Berhane gripped her coffee cup hard so that her hand didn’t shake.

“You’re working on the rebuild?” she asked, hoping her voice sounded neutral.

“No one’s hired us yet,” her father said, “but they will when they see how much we’ve done.”

He owned one of the largest construction companies in the solar system. He had built entire subdivisions on some of the moons of Jupiter. He had built the now-destroyed government offices in the center of Littrow. He had built so many things that Berhane couldn’t quite keep track of all of them.

And that was just one branch of the corporation she would eventually run. One small arm that, in theory, didn’t look at the other arms, which had their fingers in real estate Alliance-wide, in building materials, in demolition, and in so many things that she honestly couldn’t keep track.

If her father died tomorrow, she would have to take a small course in the history of the corporation just so that she knew what she was in charge of.

“I don’t think anyone’s ready to rebuild,” she said softly. “Every single destroyed dome section is a crime scene.”

“We’ve handled crime scene restoration and repair,” one of the executives said. She didn’t recognize him. He was a round little man whose bald head looked deliberately shaved. His coffee-colored pate reflected the overhead light—and not in a good way.

“I’m aware of that,” she said in her coldest voice. She could reprimand him. She couldn’t reprimand her father. “With this kind of mess, I suspect it’ll take months before anyone can even contemplate moving the rubble or rebuilding.”

“The domes need covering,” another executive said, a woman this time. She had hair as red and fake as the white-haired guy had. “Survivors will need to know that life goes on.”

Berhane had to set her coffee cup down on the nearby buffet. If she didn’t, the cup would shatter in her hands.

These executives were talking to her like she was like a stupid child, which she was not. She knew her father hadn’t told them anything about her, so they were all showing off to her father, trying to impress the boss without calling his intelligence into question.

One way to do that was to show the stupid child what she would be up against when she finally came into the organization.

Those executives weren’t the only ones who could play the let’s-talk-to-someone-else-while-really-speaking-to-the-boss game. She could too.

“I think you’re all being premature,” she said. “In case you’ve forgotten, my father and I have been through this before. My mother died in the Armstrong bombing, the one that everyone considers a precursor to last week’s events. Back then as well, dozens of companies pressed the government of Armstrong to hurry and rebuild. Arek Soseki, rest his soul, agreed. And now, it’s clear that had he actually allowed the police time to investigate, we might have prevented a Moonwide disaster of unbelievable proportions.”

“Berhane,” her father said with a bit of reprimand in his own tone, “we’re not talking to governments yet. We’re just getting prepared.”

“It’s too soon,” she said directly to him.

“Clean-up will begin with or without us,” said another man at the far end of the table. “We should be part of it all.”

“Because there’s a lot of money to be made,” Berhane said to him, deliberately keeping her voice neutral.

“Yes,” he said.

“Because someone will be making that money,” she said, “so it might as well be us.”