Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (18 page)

Goudkins stood, pressed against one of the walls in the joint human/alien part of the train. The bullet trains were segregated by species in the first class cars: that way each could enjoy the proper environment and accommodations.

Try as she might to get first class accommodations, she couldn’t. She could barely get a ticket on the train. One of the port employees recommended that she go into Armstrong and get a different bullet train from another part of the city, and she might have considered it if she hadn’t been able to get a ticket on this train.

The trains from the port were packed now that the ships were beginning to land. And everyone on these trains was trying to locate a loved one.

She recognized a few people from her ship, but she didn’t do more than acknowledge them. They were scattered throughout the car, mixed between Rev and Peyti and a group of Flittabats that clung to the ceiling as if the car had been designed for them.

She kept her personal bag around her torso and her business bag inside the jacket she had brought along—not because she expected to be in a real “outside” environment like she would have been on Earth, but because she’d found that jackets were useful for storing things during travel, and even on starbases and in domed cities, no one looked at a jacket twice.

The stench inside the car was worse than she expected. Some of that was the Flittabats—they smelled rather strongly of rotted fruit—but some of it was nerves and close quarters. Humans had their own stink when they were stressed.

She hadn’t been in quarters this close since she was promoted and sent off Earth. The Earth Alliance Security starbase had a low ratio of personnel to services, so not even at the busiest times was the public transportation crowded.

It would take hours to get from Armstrong to Tycho Crater, and she would have to stand the entire time. She could barely see out the windows, and what she did see—at least at first—seemed alarmingly normal.

Houses and businesses and restaurants, a dome that glowed with daylight colors, and a moonscape beyond.

She had known that Armstrong hadn’t been hit this time, but she hadn’t registered what that meant. It meant that life inside Armstrong seemed amazingly normal, while on the rest of the Moon, everyone panicked.

Or at least, she was imaging that they had panicked.

She was panicked, which angered her. She had too much training to be panicked. She knew how to keep her emotions in check.

And she was keeping them in check. But she could feel them seething underneath, and she felt that if she tapped them at all, she would erupt in some completely unpredictable way.

Dammit, Carla
, she sent to her sister’s unresponsive links for maybe the thousandth time.
Why did you have to go back into that resort? Why didn’t you leave?

So many people had escaped the Top of the Dome and headed just outside the part of the dome that sectioned—not on purpose. No one had expected that dome to section, so it couldn’t be on purpose. If her sister had escaped whatever the hell had been happening in that resort, then she shouldn’t have felt obligated to go back.

And Goudkins shouldn’t have told her to go back.

She replayed that conversation again in her mind:

You’re sure you’re all right?
she had sent to her sister.

There was a delay between the sending and the response. Communications with the starbase were expedited, just like everything within the Earth Alliance government, but it still took time for linked messages to cross the distance.

I’m uninjured, just a little scared
, her sister had sent back.

It’s normal to be scared
, Goudkins had sent.

A lot of people are still there, Wilma
, her sister had sent.
I’m thinking of going back in. You would, right?

They had promised each other they would never lie. Not at all. And in the spirit of that, Goudkins had answered.

I would,
she had sent.

And now she wished she had said,
You’re not me. You have other skills. Stay out of the Top of the Dome. Do what you can on the ground. Let others go back in
.

But she hadn’t sent that. She had communicated as best she could with her sister as Carla went back inside the resort.

Her last message had been a bit eerie:
I’m not sure what I’ll find here, so I’m going to go dark. I don’t know if they can listen in or if I’ll trigger something. Wilma, in case—

And it ended there.

Their entire conversation—their
lifelong
conversation—had ended there. At the exact moment a bomb had gone off, destroying the Top of the Dome resort, making it fall to the ground below, and creating a huge hole in the dome covering Tycho Crater.

A dome that had sectioned only moments before.

Goudkins always replayed that moment, that possibility that her sister had just shut down her links, the possibility that she hadn’t been anywhere near the Top of the Dome, that she’d been having this conversation with Goudkins just outside that section, and the links had been severed because they were so precarious.

Because Goudkins didn’t want to consider that her sister was inside the Top of the Dome. Nor did she want to think about her sister standing below it when the entire structure fell.

And she really didn’t want to think about her sister watching the dome section and realizing—at the last moment—that she was on the wrong side of it.

Goudkins steeled herself.

The train had moved outside of Armstrong now, traveling so fast that the gray landscape blurred through the windows. Two stops between Armstrong and Tycho Crater. Just two on this line.

Announcements said they were nearing the first.

She hoped enough people got off the train to ease some pressure in the car.

Hope versus reality.

She wished she could stop playing that footage in her mind, but it was the difference between her trained brain and her conflicted heart.

Her supervisor had asked her why she wanted to come here, when there was the great possibility that her sister was dead and there would be no funerals for any of the dead on the Moon.

“I need to know,” Goudkins had said.

That was reality.

She needed to know.

And soon, she would find out.

TWENTY-TWO

BOTHAINA ANGALL STOOD just inside the door of the Dangerous Criminals Division of the Special DNA Collection Unit. Her skin tingled, and she was covered in sweat.

She hated what she called “reentry” and wished she could bring a lunch to work. She tried not to take her breaks, but her boss reminded her that she had to. Eight times per day she had to go through scrubbing and decontamination just to do her job. It left her skin raw, despite the enhancements she had received to cope with this, and the procedures didn’t count putting on and removing her environmental suit, which sometimes scraped her raw skin.

She should have hated this job, but she didn’t. The science fascinated her. Usually.

Today, though, she had an uneasy feeling in her stomach.

She had stopped just inside the door of the Dangerous Criminals Division, staring at the pillar in the center of the room. The pillars, scattered throughout the work area, didn’t seem to hold up anything; they were there for design reasons only.

And propaganda reasons, as she had learned on her first day, five years ago.

Mostly, she ignored the pillars, but today, she couldn’t.

She was staring at the small, round chamber built into the pillar to the left of the door. Inside that chamber was a double helix, looking like a ride at one of the amusement parks she had gone to on Earth as a child. The double helix, which was a 3-D model, was not an artist’s rendering.

Instead, it showed every single detail of an existing person’s DNA.

The Cautionary Tale
, one of her colleagues called it.

The double helix mapped the DNA of one PierLuigi Frémont. It had been in the chamber for decades, long before Angall had even been born. She found that ironic, given today’s news.

Except that it wasn’t today’s news.
She
had discovered the news today, but the rest of the Alliance had probably seen it much earlier.

The security footage of twenty clones of PierLuigi Frémont as they arrived in the Port of Armstrong had gone viral around the Alliance the moment the footage was released.

Angall had no relatives on the Moon, but she had traveled through that port dozens of times, the last time on her way to interview for this job. She even knew what part of the port those clones had arrived in.

They looked so normal, like a group of young men on some great adventure.

That was the most tragic part, as far as she was concerned: how normal they looked.

How normal this little strand of DNA looked. Like so many other double helixes, the differences weren’t visible to the naked eye. And this double helix had no labels on its surface. Just one outside that little case, which had actually been painted onto the pillar.

Dangerous Human DNA: Mass Murderer and Megalomaniac PierLuigi Frémont

The DNA, she had been told, existed there to remind her—to remind every human on the staff—that trouble could exist on the microscopic level. If they let even a speck of that DNA out of these labs, then bad things would happen.

Like nineteen explosions on the Moon, twelve domes damaged, millions of lives lost in an instant.

She shuddered to think about it, and yet no one here had mentioned it at all. Weren’t they at fault? This DNA got out. It had escaped the Dangerous Criminals Division, and worse, it had done damage out there. Serious, bad damage.

(Damage wasn’t even the word for it, not really.)

“Bother you?” Claudio Stott had come up beside her. He stopped a little too close, which he always did. He had fewer social skills than most of the people who worked here, but he was probably the best researcher and cataloguer in the lab.

As she turned toward him, she took a tiny step to the side. She made it all seem like one movement so that she wouldn’t offend him.

Stott was taller than she was and pear-shaped. She had no idea how old he was, but he had been here long enough that his complexion had turned that olive-gold so many old-timers had, from the chemical showers they used to take coming in and out of the Special Collections Unit.

Those showers had been discontinued at least fifteen years ago, but the damage had been done. A few of the old-timers had gotten enhancements to improve their looks, but most of the older employees just didn’t care.

A lot of humans inside this part of the Forensic Wing of the Earth Alliance Security Division didn’t seem to care about the social niceties. Angall sometimes considered that a blessing—until one of those humans got a little too chummy.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” she asked, not keeping her voice down the way that the staff was supposed to in the middle of the shift.

“No,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back and looking at the spiral disappearing into the pillar.

“You know that his clones blew up the Moon, right?” she asked. “We failed, Claudio.”

“Technically,” he said softly, “the Moon is still there. And damage could have been so much worse. Imagine if those attacks had gone as planned, if the domes hadn’t sectioned. Then life on the Moon as we know it would have been destroyed.”

“I think it has been,” Angall said. “Nothing will ever be the same.”

“Well, the infrastructure is still there,” Stott said. “Most of the inhabitants are still there. The
domes
are still there, if damaged. So, I stand by my statement and its corollary which is, life on the Moon can become normal again.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said, mimicking his position. She put her hands behind her back, and stared at the DNA spiraling upward. “I still think we failed.”

“We didn’t fail,” Stott said. “This incident simply proves how valuable we are.”

“How do you figure?” Maureen Kamel left her post to join them. She was a short, dark woman who wore black clothes and black makeup that made her seem even darker.

“We make sure none of this material gets out,” Stott said. “Now, we can probably lobby for more funding, because these clones have given the Alliance a useful example of how valuable the protections we offer truly are.”

“Except that we didn’t protect the DNA,” Angall said. “It had to have come from us.”

“No, it didn’t come from us.” Terri Muñoz had joined them. She had run the Division longer than most of them had been alive, and that probably included Stott.

She was wizened and her olive skin had a translucent quality. Her hands would occasionally shake as she worked, and then she’d have to go in for enhancement upgrades. Someone said the damage to her cells from all the chemicals she’d subjected them to simply couldn’t be repaired.

“How do you know?” Stott was still staring at the DNA. If he hadn’t asked the question, Angall would have thought he wasn’t interested in the conversation at all.

Muñoz said, “I checked. We got notification from the Security Division days ago, when the footage first appeared, asking if we had a leak in the division.”

Everyone tensed. They knew what a leak in the division meant. More work than they could do, inspectors everywhere, and the possibility for all kinds of work getting compromised.

The division had been investigated years ago, and the old-timers still talked about all the missed work, the damaged careers, the accusations, the nightmare of it all.

“According to our records,” Muñoz said, “our Frémont DNA is still here, still protected, untouched.”

Angall swallowed before she asked the question that was first and foremost on her brain. But in her few-second pause, no one else jumped in with the query, so she felt compelled to speak.

“Did you just check the records?”

Kamel looked at her with a little bit of amusement. Angall closed her eyes for a half second. She probably could have asked that a bit more tactfully.