Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (24 page)

But, as Kaspian told her, they had to limit themselves somewhere. When she protested, he reminded her that nothing would get thrown away. Everything in the debris fields outside the domes would probably be reassessed before being recycled or disposed of.

She tried to ignore all the qualifiers that he used, and hoped he was right.

But she couldn’t think about that. Just the amount of debris she could see through the sectioned dome overwhelmed her. She mentally tried to multiply the destruction by 19 domes, and her mind shied away from the amount of work and effort it would take to recover anything.

She attached the suit’s hood, which sealed around her face, doubling as a clear helmet, then followed her team leader into the open door through the section. Each volunteer went in by herself, her bots and platform following behind.

Just to get into the dome took fifteen minutes. Each volunteer had to pay attention to the route they took, because they would most likely leave on their own for breaks. It rarely took two hours to fill one of the platforms.

That fact alone had broken her heart.

She was one of the last people through the door. The volunteer from Littrow S&R closed the door behind her.

Debris towered around her: spindly stalks of metal, thick rock, and dust—more dust than she had expected. She was glad she wore the environmental suit, just because of the dust.

It wasn’t gray like Moon dust. The dust in this section of the dome was mostly black. The governor’s mansion had been a stunning building, made from the regolith of the Taurus Mountains. She had been inside it several times, usually at some event on her father’s arm.

The exterior of the building had been very gothic, rising above the rest of the city like a beacon, but the interior had been beautiful. It incorporated material from every corner of the Moon, and it had décor from most of the Moon’s strongest companies. Celia Alfreda, the governor-general, loved to brag that nothing in the mansion had come from off-Moon: not the materials, not the product itself, not even something as small as a thread.

And now, Berhane walked through the remains of it all.

In some ways, she felt glad that Celia Alfreda had not lived to see this—the symbol of the fledging United Domes government, destroyed so thoroughly. The loss of it, and of the governor-general, made Berhane’s heart twist.

So she focused on where she put her booted feet.

The path the crew walked along had been carefully carved from the rubble. It went all the way down to the road or sidewalk or whatever was beneath. There were cracks along the road’s surface, probably from the impact of all this weight so quickly, but at least she knew she wasn’t destroying evidence.

Someone else—the investigators, most likely—had cleared the way to the mansion site.

She hoped they had done so with care. But considering what she had seen from the investigation of the Armstrong bombing, she doubted that had happened. She suspected all of the rubble alongside of her had once been on this path.

The path was wide and straight. The bots that accompanied her could now flank her. Four did, two on each side. But one bot and her platform remained behind her.

The walk was a cautious one, and since she was last, she wasn’t certain if that was because the other new people on the team were having trouble picking their way forward or if it was because this was the preferred method of walking through such hazards.

She knew she had to be careful to keep her suit intact. She could cut it on things and it would self-seal, but too many self-seals and the suit would be compromised.

That was one of the many reasons why Armstrong S&R wanted the volunteers to use S&R’s suits. Those at least had been inspected, to make certain there were no flaws. The last thing S&R wanted was for someone to die while doing recovery work.

The bots were programmed to keep her from sharp objects as well. She knew that without being told. There was no other reason for them to flank her like that.

The team finally reached the approved area. They were still several meters from the mansion site. Now she understood how the investigators knew where the bomb had gone off.

Instead of a spectacular building that rose above a well-built cityscape, there was a deep crater. Bits of the building itself had toppled into the crater, but mostly, the crater stood alone, black and shiny and smoother than she expected.

She stared at it for the longest moment, feeling a bit of dislocation. One moment the building she remembered had stood here; the next, this had formed.

No one had told her the power of that bomb—or if, indeed, it had been just one bomb—but her eyes told her that the bomb had been a lot bigger than the one used in Armstrong four years ago. She hadn’t seen a crater like this where her mother died. There had been a crater, but it had been shallow and wider spread.

Not deep, as if the Moon’s defenses had shut off and an asteroid had hit.

The team leader gave them all a few minutes to stare. Then he led them to their cleanup locations.

Berhane’s was to her left, just a meter or so off the main path. A smaller path had been formed, wide enough for the bots and probably some of the equipment the investigators used.

Her stomach flopped.

Time to dig in, one bit of rubble at a time.

She examined the pile she was to pull apart. It was as tall as she was, and the debris seemed to be at most a meter long. She had a new special chip, hooked up to her links by S&R, to examine a pile like that and see where its structural weaknesses were.

The bot beside her would also watch for any possible accident.

She sighed heavily, the sound echoing in her suit’s helmet, and ran the chip. It gave her three different suggestions as to where to start, with a recommendation as to which one seemed the safest.

She didn’t care which one was the safest. Her eye had caught what looked like a bit of fabric, and she would work her way to that first.

Tentatively, she put her gloved fingers into the pile. It shifted slightly and she quickly pulled her hand away.

You are safe
, sent an automated voice on her links. She assumed that was the bot. They didn’t really have the capacity to think or reason, but they could do simple tasks and communicate through preprogrammed sentences on links if need be.

She thanked it even though she didn’t need to, and put her fingers into the pile again. The gloves had sensors that worked rather like skin and fingertips. She felt the shape of everything, and a suggested texture reached her as well. It wasn’t always accurate. Her eyes told her that she was touching smooth metal while the sensor made it feel like smooth wood, but it was close enough.

The bot changed its top to a flat surface, preparing itself to receive some of the debris.

She pulled out some sticks near the cloth. They were round and broken on the edges. She had no idea what they had been. She placed them on the bot, and then continued to dig.

The work was hard, but necessary. And tomorrow, she would move to some other pile. So would the rest of the team.

The rubble spread out before her, and she thought about her father’s plans, his
company’s
plans (
her
company’s plans), which were already underway.

There was a time limit on the search and recovery effort. The time limit varied from community to community, but it was real.

At some point, large machines would come into this part of the dome, remove all the debris to the outskirts of the dome, and then other large machines would sort it.

DNA would be lost.

Hell, actual bodies and body parts (
organic matter
as the S&R teams called them when dealing with donors) would be lost. People would never know what had happened to their loved ones.

She couldn’t fight her father—she didn’t have the clout in the company—but on some level, she knew he was right. At some point, the dome’s interior—all of the domes’ interiors—would have to be rebuilt.

She pulled something out of the debris. The long, thin, stick-like thing was soft. The ragged edge had sinew curling from the bottom. A finger, maybe. Human? She couldn’t tell.

But it was organic matter.

She’d had enough training so that she didn’t fling it away in disgust, like she had done in her early sessions. Now she called a bot over and placed the finger on it, with the linked instruction:

Organic matter. Please treat gingerly
.

Then she slowed down as she went through the pile.

Because where there was one body part, she had learned through sad effort, there would be more.

THIRTY-ONE

DESHIN LEANED AGAINST the window of his shuttle, feeling unsettled. Up ahead, Armstrong’s dome glittered in the sun, unbroken and perfect. His heart lifted.

He was heading home.

But he was also aware of how unusual it was to see an intact dome. Flying over the moonscape made him both angry and sad. Damaged dome after damaged dome greeted him, each with a hole somewhere, and bits littered across the ground.

Sometimes those holes were just black spaces in the distance, surrounded by rings of light. Sometimes they looked like a giant inside the dome had punched his fist through the top in a fit of anger.

He had stopped in five damaged domes, as well as several smaller undamaged domes. He was tracing the zoodeh and explosives providers.

The zoodeh suppliers had all ended up like Pietres—dead a week or two ahead of Anniversary Day. Most had died from zoodeh contamination, but many had died in other ways. Some had been stabbed, some had had their heads bashed in. None of the deaths were being investigated by the authorities, as far as he could tell.

He wasn’t sure how to figure that out exactly: he didn’t want to bring his association with these suppliers into the open.

He leaned back in his chair. The interior of the shuttle was made for comfort—large chairs, entertainment screens for moments that the networks were off-line, food available with the wave of a finger over a holographic screen.

But he hadn’t taken advantage of the comfort on this trip. For once in his life, he felt vaguely guilty for all he had, rather than inordinately proud of how he had earned each bit of it.

His security team seemed subdued as well. Jakande sat across from him, also staring at the moonscape. Some of the other team members were playing some kind of holographic game in the back. Usually they punctuated that game with shouts and belly laughs, but on this day—this last month, really—they’d been unusually quiet.

The murders bothered him—not just because they were a clear cover-up, but because they had been so unnecessary.

The suppliers he knew wouldn’t have mentioned the name or the appearance of their customers. In fact, Pietres had been unusual in even having a surveillance system that stored images.

There had been no reason to kill these people.

Many of them would have died on Anniversary Day. Deshin might have seen some logic in killing the ones in the domes that weren’t targeted, but upon closer examination, even that made no real sense.

These suppliers had aided killers and assassins for decades. Even with attacks as large as Anniversary Day, the suppliers would never have run to the authorities with information. If anything, the suppliers would have deleted what information they had stored, just so that they could plead ignorance and not get charged as an accessory.

The clones had known who to go to in order to get the zoodeh. That meant they knew—or someone knew—that the suppliers wouldn’t talk.

Logically, then, the murders were for a different reason.

And the only reason Deshin could think of, the reason he couldn’t shake, was for the sheer pleasure of killing. These men knew they were going to commit murder in a week, and then compound it with mass murder, and they couldn’t restrain themselves.

They had killed ahead of time just for the joy of it.

Deshin had known a lot of people like that. He’d fired quite a few from his organization. People who killed for the sheer pleasure of it were uncontrollable. Ultimately, they would have made a mistake that would have harmed him or his family or his business.

He always thought they were too dangerous to have around.

“We’re not too far out, sir,” Jakande said. “Did you want to stop near the construction site?”

There were three different construction sites outside of Armstrong’s dome, but only one that did not have some aspect of Deshin Enterprises in it. He’d stopped at a couple of those sites on this trip, as well as several mining operations.

They were the only places that had a lot of easily accessible explosives.

What Deshin had learned at those places had disturbed him almost as much as the murders had.

“No,” he said. “Let’s just go home.”

Jakande nodded, then glanced at the cockpit. He was probably relaying the information to the pilots at that moment.

Deshin looked at the moonscape, at the glittering dome looming ahead of him.

He had been handicapped in his investigations of the explosives that destroyed the domes. He didn’t know what the clones or their accomplices had used to blow holes in everything.

With the assassinations of the various authorities, Deshin had known immediately what happened. A zoodeh death had its own signature.

Generally, bombs did too.

But the bombs inside the various domes had gone off in different parts of those domes. The bombs also seemed to have different explosive effects, depending on location.

Some bombs seemed more powerful than necessary, while others weren’t strong enough. That was one reason that only twelve of the nineteen domes to suffer explosions had actual breaches of the dome.

He didn’t know if the difference was because of the amount of material used, the inexperience of the bombers, or because of location. And he didn’t know if the same material was used in each place.

Which made investigating the bombings harder.

The clones had used locals to supply the zoodeh; Deshin figured the clones had used locals to supply the bombs. Over the past few years, however, access to explosives had become highly regulated. No one wanted to have their dome breached like Armstrong’s had been breached four years ago.