Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (14 page)

Until she was faced with the short trip across no man’s land, she hadn’t realized what kind of impact these areas had on the Moon. She had known intellectually that the areas were different, but she hadn’t thought about the strain that put on everyday folks.

She knew that a lot of the rules were made by people like her father, who wanted no liability, instead of by people like her mother, who believed that everyone should look out for everyone else.

For all the anxiety it caused her, the train ride was short—only three kilometers from station to station. It had taken less time to travel to her destination than it had taken to watch the warning vids and sign all of the documentation.

Berhane received a small chip that certified she had agreed to all of the conditions, and that chip, she was told, was good for the next twelve months.

Apparently, chips like that made it possible for people to travel inside and outside of the dome with much more ease than she’d had this afternoon.

Once the train docked at the warehouse station, the doors opened and everyone on board disembarked. There were only four passengers at this time of day. The trains only ran hourly between ten am and two pm; after that, they would run on fifteen minute cycles until some kind of shift change occurred that Berhane wasn’t privy to.

She remained on the platform long after the train left. She faced a white wall with Armstrong Search & Rescue’s red-and-blue logo emblazoned across it. The doors leading into the facility were also blue and red.

She hadn’t let anyone know she was coming; she wondered if that was a mistake. She suddenly worried that no one was even here.

For once, she doubted the information she had looked up at home. Maybe she would have to wait in this nothingness until the next train arrived.

The only way to find out, of course, was to go into the facility.

So she walked to the double doors as if she had done it a million times before. She pushed on them with both hands. They swung open, and she found herself inside a warm room with some blaring music. She didn’t recognize it, although it was melodic and comprised mostly of brass Earth instruments.

Tables strewn with equipment she didn’t recognize stood against walls. There were no chairs, and no obvious place for visitors to go.

“Hello?” she called.

One minute
. The message that crossed her links was written in Standard and did not appear to be automated. Someone had contacted her through her public net, probably through some kind of program.

Come around to the back
, said the next message.

Wherever the back was. Just as she had that thought, a map appeared in a box to the side of her right eye.

She followed the red highlighted route. It took her past pallets of equipment, most of which she didn’t recognize, and past piles of emergency medical kits, the kind that Aristotle Academy used to take on field trips.

The pallets formed a maze. She couldn’t see beyond all of the stuff. It made her feel oddly claustrophobic and a little lonely. She had come here to be with like-minded people, not to wander through a full warehouse in search of someone to talk to.

She finally rounded a corner into a corridor. The red highlighted route seemed redundant here. There was only one way for her to go.

She went through an open door, and there she saw a tall man with graying hair that brushed against his collar. He was too thin, not in the enhanced, egotistical way of social climbers and the wealthy, but in a way she rarely saw among her friends—he looked like he often forgot to eat.

He extended a hand. “Dabir Kaspian.”

She shook it. His fingers were warm, dry, and a little boney. “Berhane Magalhães.”

“It’s not often we get a donor here.” Something in his tone told her that he thought she was inspecting where her money had gone. Which explained the route she had taken. She thought it had felt circuitous. It had been, so she could see the pallets of supplies.

“I’m not here as a donor,” she said. “I want to volunteer.”

The look he gave her was momentarily cold. She recognized it, and its message:
I don’t have time to train a do-gooder
.

“What kind of skills do you have?” he asked, his tone filled with practiced warmth.

“I have no medical training, but I’m physically strong. I can lift things, move things, and shout when I find something.” She tried not to sound sarcastic.

“We have bots for that,” he said.

“No, you don’t,” she said. “I read about the recovery effort that you’re doing. There’s a worry that the bots won’t respect the dead, no matter how well programmed they are.”

He let out a small, half-amused sound. “Well,” he said, “that’s more than most people come in here knowing.”

He stepped away from the door and let her walk all the way into the room. It was a small office. Every wall had an array of screens, and all of them showed a different section of rubble. The images were so close-in that Berhane couldn’t tell exactly where they were, only that they were live.

In the midst of all of them were workers in the red-and-yellow Search & Rescue environmental suits provided gratis by the Earth Alliance. Nearby, bots lifted and moved debris, placing it on floating platforms that would take it outside the dome. Out there, someone or something would determine what could be recycled and what needed to be buried or jettisoned.

She had seen a small pile of debris like that form outside of Armstrong after the bombing four years ago. In some ways, that little pile had been more offensive than the ruins inside the dome. She often found herself worrying whether bits of her mother were still in it, since her mother’s body had never been recovered.

She took a deep shaky breath.

“Who did you lose?” Kaspian’s voice was soft, sympathetic, and unlike that practiced warmth of a moment ago, sounded quite genuine.

She said without thinking, “My mother.”

Then her cheeks heated. Her mother had been dead a long time now. Berhane turned, then moved her hands slightly, as if she could take back her words.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You meant last week. Who did I lose last week?”

“Yes,” he said, a frown on his weathered face. For the first time, she noticed that he was oddly good-looking. His hollowed cheekbones and heavy bone structure made him resemble those old-Earth Romantic Poets she’d been studying just last week, poets whose words had seemed so profound and now seemed…irrelevant. Or perhaps something less important than they had been.

Something that would wait for her to have a life of leisure again.

“I didn’t lose anyone close last week,” she said, her voice trembling, not just with embarrassment, but also with the sadness she had felt as she looked at the debris. “My mother died in the first bombing, four years ago.”

“Oh.” In that single word, Kaspian conveyed a lot of understanding and a bit of compassion. Or maybe that was all conveyed by his extremely expressive face. “So you understand.”

She nodded. “My father just wants to move forward, rebuild, pretend like these crises can be paved over.”

“There’s an argument to be made for going ahead,” Kaspian said. “Some believe it’s the only option.”

Berhane glanced over her shoulder at the images on that wall.

“Millions of people are missing,” she said quietly. “We all assume they’re dead, but I can tell you, as someone who has been through this, there’s a tiny part of your brain that thinks, ‘Oh, they’re just missing’ or ‘they ran away’ or ‘they Disappeared.’ It’s a little bit of hope that, over time, becomes almost destructive.”

The heat in her cheeks grew. She wasn’t used to revealing herself to strangers like this.

“When we got Mother’s DNA, and when they told us where it was found, I grieved all over again. Maybe more fully.” Her voice shook. “But I finally got rid of the hope. I
knew
she was gone. And I think, strangely enough, that was an actual blessing.”

Kaspian studied her for a moment, then nodded. He was good at this. He didn’t patronize her with any false platitudes, nor did he force some religious nonsense on her.

Instead, he glanced at the wall, that sympathetic expression still on his face.

“I’m one of the managers of this office,” he said, still watching the volunteers out there, working. “In different times, you would have received some kind of thank-you message from us, and we would have brought you here for a tour as a major donor.”

“I’m not—”

“Please, Ms. Magalhães, let me finish.”

She bit her lower lip. She was used to taking over conversations, not listening to them. She nodded once.

“I understand how this has revived your grief. I respect that. I also understand your need to do something.” He moved away from the screens, his gray eyes now meeting hers. There was a lot of very real sympathy in his gaze. “But there are a million ways to help, and you’ve been helping in the one way that most people can’t. You’ve already given hundreds of thousands to the rescue effort, and I can’t imagine that we were the only beneficiaries.”

“Money is nothing,” she said. “It’s not—”

“Money is everything to an organization like this one. It buys the pallets and the equipment, gets the volunteers to the site, pays for medical care if some volunteer gets injured, pays for DNA testing the domes won’t do, really, Ms. Magalhães, money is more important than you can ever realize.”

She nodded. She supposed she knew that. But it felt wrong. It felt dehumanizing. Especially with her father sitting in his dining room, planning to replenish the coffers that she was emptying, and doing so in such a way as to obliterate some of the work that Armstrong S&R needed to do.

“I don’t plan to stop giving financially,” she said. “But it’s not enough. For me, anyway. I need to do some hands-on work. I’ve never been in a situation where the whole Moon is in crisis, and I can’t do much—”

“Ms. Magalhães…”

“It’s my turn,” she said softly. “I’ve been very lucky in my life. I was raised in wealth and privilege. I don’t need to work. I have more than enough money to last me and mine forever, and I didn’t earn it. Let me do this.”

He studied her for a long minute. “Do you know what you’re asking?”

“Not completely,” she said. “I suspect I won’t know until I’m out there, working my ass off.”

He chuckled. The sound seemed rusty, as if he hadn’t done that for a long time. Maybe he hadn’t.

“All right,” he said. “But I have to warn you, we have liability waivers that’ll take you all day to read and sign.”

She smiled. “You mean in addition to the ones I had to sign just to get here.”

He didn’t smile back.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s risky in these damaged domes. The debris isn’t stable, and anything can puncture an environmental suit. Our suits close up pretty fast, but no one knows what’ll get inside even in that short space of time. We have no idea if we’re dealing with chemicals we haven’t seen or bacteria or—”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I want the risk.”

He sighed. “Just as long as wanting the risk doesn’t make you reckless.”

“I’m sure you’ll keep me in line if that is the case,” she said.

“In line?” he said. “No, I won’t do that. I’ll pull you out of the field and won’t let you back. I don’t care how much you donate.”

She believed him. And she actually welcomed it.

“Give me those forms,” she said. “The sooner I fill them out, the sooner I can get to work.”

SIXTEEN

FINALLY,
FINALLY
, THE Port of Armstrong let selected ships land. Wilma Goudkins cheated: she used her Earth Alliance Security Division credentials to expedite the landing, even though she wasn’t here on government business.

This was as personal as it could get.

After Anniversary Day—after she had seen what had happened to Tycho Crater (
heard
what had happened, dammit, Carla)—she had booked the first flight for this solar system out of the starbase housing the Security Division. She hadn’t been alone; the flight was filled with Earth Alliance employees who had taken emergency leave to see what had become of their families.

Each person on this flight was grateful that she had used her credentials to jump the line in orbit around the Moon. Each person probably figured she was the one who would be fired for using government resources on a personal mission.

And she really didn’t care.

Just like she hadn’t cared that her boss disapproved of her leave.

Her sister had just died, most likely (although Goudkins hoped—hoped against hope—that the lapse in communication late that day had been caused by some technical problem), and Goudkins' supervisor wanted her to stay until there was confirmation.

Goudkins threatened to appeal. After she had snapped,
If I wait, then I miss the funeral
, even though she didn’t know if there was going to be a funeral. If anyone was going to have a funeral.

As she got closer to the Moon, and the pilots announced that the Port of Armstrong
still
wasn’t letting in ships, she began to realize just how big a mess she was walking into.

Alone.

Her family mostly lived on Earth, but they were distant cousins and an aunt and uncle she had met only once. Her sister Carla hadn’t married, and had no children.

Goudkins had married and divorced before she and her husband had the two or three children they had hoped for.

She knew the difference between hope and reality; she had lived it every day of that marriage—hoping for one of those perfect relationships that some couples managed, and discovering that reality consisted of two people who simply couldn’t get along, no matter how much they wanted to.

It was a small thing to compare to the evisceration of the Moon, but it was her small thing—and her greatest hurt after the death of her parents.

Her greatest hurt until now.

She and Carla had always been close. Her mother used to call them almost-twins—only 11 months apart. Goudkins was the younger and she couldn’t remember a time in her life without Carla.