Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (19 page)

She had just asked her boss—well, her boss’s boss’s boss—if she had compared the records to the actual material.

Stott had turned slightly. Apparently that question interested him more than the rest of the conversation had.

“Of course not.” Muñoz sounded amused. “I put a team in place, and we all reviewed each other’s work. We’ve been here for days, making certain there is no leak.”

“And there isn’t?” Kamel asked.

“We’re fine,” Muñoz said. “No leak, nothing untoward. I documented all of it, and it has already gone to the Inspector General for our division.”

“We’re off the hook, then.” Stott let out a small sigh. “Good. Because I don’t ever want to go through an inspection again.”

But Angall couldn’t let it go. “Then how did the DNA get out there? I thought Frémont was one of those captured DNAs, impossible to get.”

“So did I,” Muñoz said, “but as I investigated, I discovered three different sales of Frémont DNA decades ago.”

“You did?” Stott’s face became a weird shade of puce. Apparently, that was what he looked like when he blushed.

“Yes, we got that too, or some samples of it, anyway. It’s not as pure as our DNA, which came directly from the man himself when he was in Earth Alliance Prison. The DNA was stored badly or contaminated by something, and could only be used for fast-grow clones, which were pretty erratic, even for fast-grow.”

“Then it’s not the same,” Angall said. “Our DNA is pure, and clearly those clones were pure as well.”

“It’s not the same,” Muñoz said softly, “and what it shows is that there is loose Frémont DNA.”

“So the idea that we have all of it is just a myth?” Kamel asked.

“It’s not a myth,” Muñoz said. “I checked the records for that too. Nothing in our records marks the Frémont DNA as complete. We did not do great containment on it. We contained it
after
we realized what a danger Frémont was, and not before.”

“So you think the DNA the clones were made of is
old
DNA?” Stott asked.

“Old DNA” was a particular phrase used in the Special Collections Unit. It meant DNA that might have come from a subject’s life before he was a criminal, from old clothes or possessions, locations he lived and worked before he came to the notice of the authorities, locations that might not have appeared in any official record.

“I suspect so,” Muñoz said. “We won’t know—that’s not what we do. But someone will find the source, and then we’ll get it.”

Angall’s stomach had clenched. She had always heard about the difficulties caused by old DNA, but she had never truly understood what that meant before.

It meant lives lost.

She had always thought her job was about money, not about lives. Protecting the DNA prevented identity theft and kept newly bred criminals from gallivanting all over the known universe. She had understood that from the beginning.

She hadn’t realized that “gallivanting” was too cavalier a word. Newly bred criminals could steal, or they could murder.

Or they could commit mass murder, just like their original had.

She shuddered.

Stott looked at her.

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “Stop worrying about it.”

As if she could.

She would worry about moments like this for the rest of her career or, more realistically, for the rest of her life.

TWENTY-THREE

MORE THAN A week after the explosion, only a handful of Anniversary Day patients remained in Crater View Hospital. Those that did remain had unexpected medical problems. Some of them had bodies that rejected the nanohealers and probably needed more sophisticated care. Some were going through round after round of treatment to replace skin lost to severe burns.

And many had such traumatic brain injuries that their next of kin would face a serious decision—see if they could repair the brain and end up with a completely different human being than the one who had been injured on Anniversary Day or let their loved one go.

Wilma Goudkins had not found a hotel room yet or even stopped to find a place to stay. The administrator at Crater View saw Goudkins’ credentials and allowed her to keep her bags in his office. He knew of channels that helped visitors find places to stay, but at the moment, the entire city was full.

Rescue workers, aid workers, families, hangers-on all crowded into what places were available. The number of hotel rooms was down, and so was the number of the available apartments and homes.

There would be too few, even if emergency personnel hadn’t shown up.

A good third of the city had been displaced. The mayor was apparently not paying attention to the price-gouging going on either. So many people had no place to live or stay that some were sleeping in the train station and in other public sites.

The police were so busy with the fallout from the explosions (and each police officer’s personal losses) that they weren’t ticketing transients either.

Goudkins didn’t want to take space away from people who really needed it. She was going to have to find out what had happened to her sister, and then try to get into her sister’s apartment. At least the apartment wasn’t in the destroyed area; Goudkins had checked that far.

But it was hard to access someone else’s place, particularly if no one in the building knew Goudkins. She would need her credentials, her DNA profile, and some kind of proof about her sister’s whereabouts.

She might be able to do that last, but she hoped—and there was that word again—that she wouldn’t have to bully her way into the apartment by using her status as Earth Alliance Security.

She was already using that status more than she had planned. It had gotten her a ride to the hospital, and it had gotten her directly into the administrator’s office.

Carla wasn’t listed as a patient, either now or on Anniversary Day, but that didn’t mean anything. A number of patients had been injured too badly to identify themselves. Most of their links and personal chips had stopped working when they got injured, which told Goudkins that whoever supplied the chips was probably facing a large lawsuit at some point, because she suspected they had all been purchased from the same place.

Most people did not have DNA on file anywhere but in their own networks, which meant that the hospital had to get a court order to compare the DNA of an unidentified patient without relatives to existing DNA—and then the hospital had to know whose DNA it was so that they could ask for the comparison DNA.

A lot of people went unidentified because of silly regulations, designed to prevent DNA theft and cloning. She supposed identity theft was a serious problem in the settled part of the Alliance, but she thought failing to identify the dead and wounded was a worse problem.

Of course, at the moment, she was biased.

The hospital had been built on the crater’s outer shell, actually at what the locals called the Lip of the Rim. Like the Top of the Dome resort, the hospital had been built right against the dome, against all modern regulations but standard at the time of the hospital’s construction.

The entire city of Tycho Crater was lucky that Crater View hadn’t been destroyed when the Top of the Dome exploded.

The poor and unidentified were brought here—maybe because they were considered expendable. The wealthier patients had gone to Tycho Crater’s six other hospitals, all in more protected parts of the city.

Goudkins had checked all the hospitals and the city morgue relentlessly since Anniversary Day, looking for her sister’s name or some variation on it. And she hadn’t found a Carla Goudkins registered anywhere.

Goudkins was assured by everyone she contacted that, if her sister was unidentified, she would have ended up here.

Goudkins wasn’t allowed to enter any patient’s room. Instead, once she left the administrator’s office, she went to the viewing chamber. Most hospitals had them. The chambers were designed so that friends and family could visit with a very sick patient who needed complete isolation.

Too many diseases—and the wrong kind of cures—could be brought in on a nanofiber, so most of the desperately sick saw their loved ones through the viewing chambers. Some hospitals even disabled links so that all communications went through the chambers.

It didn’t matter what kind of hospital this was. Every time Goudkins tried her sister’s link, she felt like she was sending a message into the void.

The viewing chambers in this hospital were on its lower level in the central core. The hospital—one of the first built in Tycho Crater—had been set up to maximize views of the Moon, so anything that didn’t require a window was either in the middle or in the basement or, as in the case of these chambers, both.

An administration tech went with her, mostly to make sure she didn’t hack into their system and steal private information about the various patients. More hospital policy, all of which—Goudkins knew—had been developed after someone had done the crimes others were now prevented from even attempting.

The place the tech brought her to was less a “chamber” than it was a pod. She had to slip sideways through the door. Then she had to click off a dozen waivers before the chair rose out of the center of the floor.

Once the chair rose, she either had to leave the room or sit down.

She sat.

Screens appeared in front of her. Almost all of them showed a patient on a bed, curled, or blinking emptily at the ceiling, or covered in healing cloths. Beside each wrapped or damaged face was a hologram of what the hospital’s computers deduced the person had looked like before the injuries.

Height, weight, and clothing were also displayed, as well as other vital information that the medical facilities could figure out.

The hospital had deleted all the male unidentified from the images before Goudkins, but didn’t delete any of the women who had had children.

Goudkins had recommended it, worrying that there would be too many, but the tech had said no.

“I’m sure you know, Ms. Goudkins,” he had said, “that not everyone tells their families about each detail in their lives.”

Goudkins didn’t consider a child a detail, but she understood the point. She only saw her sister once per year, if that, and if something had happened that Carla hadn’t wanted to talk about, then there was no way Goudkins could have found out that information for herself.

The first images were of the living patients—all shapes and sizes, although none of which fit the profile that Goudkins had of her sister. The living patients moved and breathed and sometimes coughed. The images were streamed into the room, with the other detail placed on a side screen.

When Goudkins rejected those, the next set of images was of the dead.

They were harder to look at.

These people had been severed by the sectioning dome or injured in the escape from the Top of Dome. More than a dozen had been in vehicles that crashed into the dome when it sectioned, and an odd few had died of natural causes in nearby shelters.

There were one hundred people who had died, left a corpse—which, the administrator had told Goudkins gently, was unusual in this particular incident (meaning, she guessed, Anniversary Day)—and didn’t in some way match up against the list of the missing.

She had placed her sister on that list immediately, but didn’t have any up-to-date information about Carla in regards to weight, height, or even hair color. So Carla existed on the list as a name only, not as a fully realized human being.

Sometimes the guesses made of these corpses from the hospital’s recognition program were made based on a single limb. The DNA provided some clues, as did the size of the leg in one instance, and the arm in another.

Goudkins diligently went through the images, maintaining the calm she had used to good effect in her investigative training years ago, trying not to speculate.

Nothing—no one—none of these corpses had been her sister. She was certain of it.

But when she rejected the last group of images, a final screen rose. It asked her if she wanted to contribute DNA to match against any database of the dead.

Her job usually did not allow her to contribute DNA to anything. If Alliance security personnel had their identities stolen, they lost their jobs forever. Not counting all of the havoc the DNA loss could cause.

Normally, she would have opted to say no, but she didn’t here. Instead, she asked to see the administrator one more time.

Goudkins would contribute DNA if she could do it under tightly controlled circumstances and if she could run the matches.

She would find her sister.

She had to.

Because she didn’t want to contemplate what would happen if she couldn’t.

TWENTY-FOUR

THE IMAGES WERE frozen on the floating screen between Deshin and Pietres’s daughter Ethelina. Her eyes were red and her face unnaturally gray.

Jakande stood beside Deshin, his back to Deshin’s side, monitoring the room. Jakande clearly didn’t trust her—not that he should.

Deshin didn’t either.

The screen images caught Deshin’s eye: the shop, seemingly empty except that Deshin knew Pietres’s body was on the floor; the building’s exterior as the clone—Syv—hurried down the broken sidewalk.

Normally, Deshin would have bargained for the images, but this wasn’t a normal moment.

Instead, he scanned his database to see if he could find out what had happened to the clone that murdered the mayor of Sverdrup Crater. What Deshin found startled even him.

The clone had been murdered by the crowd—ripped apart after he escaped the bomb blast that he helped initiate.

There was a reason that this part of the Moon had fought against joining the United Domes. These two cities, and some of the mining colonies here at the south pole, had a law all their own, one that barely fit inside the Earth Alliance.

Deshin made sure his expression showed none of his emotions. He met the girl’s gaze.

“I’ve seen enough, thank you,” he said, telling her without ordering her to get rid of that screen.