The Impossibles Read online

  The Impossibles:

  A Retrieval Artist Short Story

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Copyright Information

  The Impossibles

  Copyright © 2012 Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  First published Analog SF Magazine, December, 2011

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover and Layout copyright © 2012 WMG Publishing

  Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Keremgo/Dreamstime, Sscreations/Dreamstime

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  The Impossibles

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Alarm, six a.m. Earth time—the whole damn starbase ran on Earth time. Barely a moment to rub the sleep from her eyes, roll out of her bed, and bang her knees against the wall, just like she had every morning since she graduated from law school. Not quite the top of her class. Okay, twenty-fifth. Not the middle either, not last. Near the top, close to the top. Not in the top ten or even the top twenty—not in the area where she could’ve gotten recruited by some firm, somewhere.

  Didn’t matter that she went to Alliance Law, best school in the Earth Alliance, harder to get into than any school on the Moon or on Earth, harder than Harvard or Oxford or Armstrong Legal Academy. Only two hundred students qualified for Alliance Law every year, and only one hundred graduated three years later.

  Those statistics meant nothing. All that mattered, apparently, was the top twenty. And Kerrie had been just five spots away from a guaranteed recruitment.

  That was what she thought about every morning when her knees smacked into that wall. Then she would debate with herself: was it the 90 on her second-year contracts exam? Or the essay she had to redo five times for her Earth Alliance Agreements class? Or the party she went to that last week of first year that caused her to get up late for her Torts final, making Old Man Scott dock her two points for tardiness?

  Or had she failed some indefinable thing—not volunteering for Fair Housing duty or failing to participate in Moot Court every single semester?

  She didn’t know—and she cared. She had had such high expectations for herself, and she hadn’t achieved them.

  Her family was happy—she was a lawyer in the prestigious Multicultural Tribunal system. But it wasn’t as glamorous as all that. It wasn’t glamorous at all—not that people outside the base, this single base dedicated almost entirely to InterSpecies Court for the First District, knew about the ugliness of the place. She had been shocked when she arrived nearly two years ago.

  All newly minted lawyers arriving here for the first time were shocked. And all of them wondered what exactly led them here. Something they had done? Or something they hadn’t?

  It wasn’t just the student loans. It couldn’t just be the loans, with their lovely little check-off option: Loan will be paid in full if student volunteers for public service internship post-graduation.

  Everyone checked that box, and the law firms that recruited, they paid off the loan so the student didn’t have to.

  Only she didn’t get recruited. No one told her that only twenty students from every class get recruited when she applied to Alliance Law. They implied—as they handed her the damn loan forms—that all students of Alliance Law got recruited.

  And she supposed that was probably true if looked at in a purely legalistic sense.

  She would most likely be recruited when her stint was up, two months from now. After two years here, she had more experience in InterSpecies Law than half the professors who taught the courses at law schools all over the sector.

  Horrible, awful experience, but experience nonetheless.

  She rubbed her knee as she grabbed the outfit she chose for today—black skirt, black suit jacket, black blouse. No need to stand out, no need to dress well. She was as interchangeable as the shuttles constantly moving between here and Helena base.

  She downloaded the morning’s files through her links as she grabbed coffee from the tiny communal kitchen. The base provided almost everything: food, housing, clothing if necessary. Food and caffeine were the most important because otherwise (the base had learned) too many of the baby lawyers passed out in court. They were so busy they forgot to eat, something else Kerrie didn’t believe until she got here.

  Too much work, not enough time to eat let alone think. She thought law school was bad. Law school—the best law school in the Earth Alliance—was a cakewalk compared to Earth Alliance InterSpecies Court for the First District. The Court also known as The Impossibles.

  Here everything was impossible from the case load to the odds of winning. No one won, not really. The reality of the system was uglier than anyone ever imagined.

  From the counter, she took a banana, which was a little longer and a little more orange than she liked. 15,000 varieties of bananas alone were grown in the base’s hydroponic gardens. The gardens stretched all along one tier of the base, providing fresh fruits and vegetables for the residents and the guests, if they could afford it. Guests who couldn’t afford fresh got the same indefinable food served to the prisoners—all of whom were on their way somewhere else, all of whom were scared, confused and, in their minds, completely innocent.

  As she hurried out the door, she nearly rammed into one of the night court lawyers coming in (What was his name? Sam? She couldn’t remember and she should have, since they shared a lease). He grunted at her, so exhausted he could hardly move, and she nodded back, a little refreshed after a real night’s sleep.

  Refreshed but preoccupied. As she scurried to the elevator, she sorted the twenty-five cases she had to deal with today into four categories—morning, afternoon, evening, and Please-God-Never. The Please-God-Nevers she hoped to pass up the food chain to the lifers who knew how the system worked. The lifers, who had arrived as loan-lawyers like she did, and stayed because they claimed they liked it here. The lifers, who looked five times older than they were, and who—somehow—still had just a whisper of idealism in their voices.

  The idealism left her Day Three, when she had to send a toddler to the Wygnin for a crime his father committed six months before the kid was born. She couldn’t stop it. Hell, she didn’t even have time to review the file. She just had to plead and take the best deal—and in Earth Alliance InterSpecies Court there was no best deal, only a less egregious one.

  The elevator took her to the main hallway for Courthouse Number One, which housed most of the InterSpecies courtrooms. There was no court “house” of course—that was just a linguistic formality from Earth. There were a lot of linguistic formalities because this place had no buildings, just floors and sections, more floors and sections than she thought possible. Floors and sections and rings—how could she forget rings? Especially when she might have to go to the jail ring later in the day, although she hoped not.

  The only thing she’d scored on since she arrived here was the apartment. Hers was close to work. Some of her colleagues rode on the tram from the outer rings of the starbase, losing two hours of sleep per day because they didn’t dare doze for fear of missing their stop.

  She didn’t go down the main hallway. Instead, she took a short half flight of stairs because it was easier than waiting for another elevator. The half-flight took her to the public defenders office, which had been her home away from home since she got out of law school.

  After twenty-two months of actual survival—of not saying fuck it and letting Daddy or a rich cous
in pay off her loan, of not prostituting herself, or telling the loan agency to stick it and take it out of her pay for the rest of her life—she actually rated a desk in the defenders office. Granted, it was in the back of the bullpen and barely as wide as the chair she got with it, but it was still a desk. Some days she saw it as a medal of honor.

  Today she saw it as one stop too many in a day already overcrowded with too many stops.

  She tossed the banana peel in the recycler near the door, a bit surprised she’d managed to eat at all. She had no memory of consuming that banana—and she should have. She didn’t like the long orange variety; she thought they were too bitter and citrusy to be a real banana.

  Apparently she was so hungry she didn’t even notice, and besides, she was still shuffling case files in her head—trying to find the best order, one that sent her from courtroom to courtroom in a logical fashion and gave her the most possible time with clients.

  She’d learned through hard experience that nothing mattered more than the schedule. Not reading the file, not figuring out which judge she faced. Finding time to meet the client, who often had a wish or an idea or a scintilla of information that might get the sentence reduced or lightened or—in a perfect universe—tossed out, although that had never happened to her or one of her clients or even to a client of anyone she had worked with.

  She had heard rumors, of course. Gayle Giolotti had saved the lives of three kids on a technicality, and Sheri Hampstead actually got an acquittal by proving that the government bringing the case (Wygnin? Disty? Kerrie couldn’t remember) didn’t have the proper DNA identification of the accused.

  She’d always planned to check on those rumors, but of course she didn’t have time, and now her stint was nearly up, and once she left this godforsaken place, she would have no reason to look, no reason to check, no reason to think about it ever again.

  A steaming mug of coffee sat on her desk along with a pair of shoes she thought she’d lost. Her boss, Maise Blum, rested one hip on the desk’s corner, as if she planned to be there all day.

  Maise was tall and thin. Forty, maybe fifty, maybe sixty, she was one of the lifers, and it showed in the frown lines etched alongside her mouth. Her long black hair, which she wore up, had a sprinkling of silver, but Kerrie couldn’t tell if that was vanity, an attempt at gravitas, or an actual hereditary detail.

  “Got a case for you,” Maise said.

  “Sorry,” Kerrie said. “I’m here to check in and then I’m off to Judge Weiss’s court to begin today’s sprint.”

  “One case in exchange for ten of yours. I don’t even care if it’s ten of the toughies.”

  That caught Kerrie’s attention. In her first month, she would have agreed without looking up. In her first year, she would have agreed without questions.

  But she’d been here too long to trust a sweet deal.

  “What the hell’s wrong with it?” she asked.

  “It’s work,” Maise said.

  “They’re all work,” Kerrie said, taking the shoes and locking them into the bottom desk drawer. She’d actually written them off more than a year ago. She had forgotten that she had loaned them to Maise for some ritzy Bar Association dinner.

  “Work you should do,” Maise said. “This is your acquittal.”

  Kerrie froze, mid-lock. She stood up slowly and even—for a half second—stopped multitasking her schedule. She shut down all but her emergency links, leaving only the appointment clock running along the bottom of the vision in her right eye.

  “How come you don’t want it?” Kerrie asked. “You’ve never had an acquittal.”

  “How do you know?” Maise asked, without a smile. Her dark eyes were so serious that Kerrie tilted her head.

  “You have?”

  “Not all of us talk about our successes.” Maise’s tone held bitterness, and Kerrie understood. Successes here weren’t always one-hundred-percent positive. Most of them were bittersweet.

  “So why not have another one?” Kerrie asked.

  “I told you. It’s work. Real work. Research work.”

  Kerrie hadn’t done research work since she got here. She hadn’t had time.

  “They’re all research work and none of it gets done,” she said, realizing as she spoke she sounded like a lifer. “What makes this one different?”

  “The client is pregnant.”

  Kerrie closed her eyes. She hated pregnancy cases. She had one a month, maybe more, and they were all heartbreaking and sad and horrible. One client asked if she should abort the fetus rather than lose the court case; another wanted to find out if Kerrie would adopt the baby herself so that the child wouldn’t be considered a firstborn.

  “No,” Kerrie said. “No pregnancy cases.”

  “And the client says she’s a member of the Black Fleet.”

  That sent a wave of interest through Kerrie, so intense it felt like a live thing. She hadn’t had a feeling like that since law school. “She’s willing to admit that she’s part of a criminal organization to get out of an InterSpecies case?”

  “Yep,” Maise said. “You want it?”

  “I still don’t know why you’re not taking it.”

  Maise crossed her arms. “She has her own lawyer. Peyti.”

  She spit the word. The Peyti had the best legal minds in the Earth Alliance, but they could be difficult to work with. It wasn’t just their appearance, which was sticklike and gray. Their breathing masks made conversation difficult, and their insistence on following procedure to the letter usually offended the judges in the InterSpecies Courts.

  The judges here had to get through as many cases as possible on a single day or backlog would overwhelm everything. And preventing backlog was as important—maybe more important—than delivering justice.

  There was only so much room in the starbase’s jails and prisons, and there were only so many courts, and there was only so much time. Everyone in the First District who ran afoul with the laws of another culture brought the cases here to the special courts set up to reconcile one species’ law with another.

  Technically, the cases were supposed to go through the offended culture’s courts, but everyone waived that part of the procedure so that the case could be tried in the InterSpecies courts. It wasn’t an appeals court—that was on a different starbase in a different part of the First District—but it might as well have been, given the nature of the arguments here. They were always based on procedure and technicalities, not on the facts of the case or the finer points of the law.

  There was no way Kerrie could learn the case law from twenty-five different cultures for her twenty-five different cases that she had today alone. She had to wing it, and the judges knew she was winging it, and the prosecutors knew she was winging it. The formalities helped, and the commonalities helped as well. And she did try to bone up. Most of the cases involved familiar cultures—Disty, Wygnin, Rev—although occasionally she got something weird like the Gyonnese or the Ssachuss.

  “Now the truth will out,” Kerrie said. “Your Peyti prejudice could get you in trouble, you know.”

  “It’s not a prejudice. I just don’t have the patience to deal with them,” Maise said.

  Which was as good an excuse as any, Kerrie thought but did not say. “When’s it on the docket?” Kerrie asked.

  “Noon.”

  “Noon?” Kerrie’s eyebrows went up. “Whose court?”

  “Judge Langer.”

  Kerrie rolled her eyes. “Not the easiest judge in the universe.”

  “But one who will listen.”

  Kerrie knew that to be true. “I take this, you take all of my cases for today.”

  “No can do,” Maise said. “I have seven I can’t rearrange.”

  “All right, twenty cases, my choosing.”

  “I said ten.”

  “I was going to say no. I still can,” Kerrie said.

  “You’re intrigued.”

  “Not enough to handle a tough case at noon and keep everything on my d
ocket. Twenty cases, my choosing.”

  “Fifteen,” Maise said.

  “Done,” Kerrie said, and proceeded to shuffle through files. Four this morning that she hadn’t even looked at, keeping one. Three in the afternoon, and all of her evening docket—which was five. Plus three Please-God-Nevers that no one had been willing to take off her desk in more than two months.

  She removed her own name as defense counsel and added Maise’s before she sent the files to Maise, just so that there was no screw-up in the court listings.

  Maise sent one file so fat through Kerrie’s links that she actually got an overload warning. She had to switch the file to a different node, something she hadn’t had to do since law school.

  “You didn’t tell me she was a convicted felon,” Kerrie said.

  “I did too,” Maise said. “Black Fleet, remember? It’ll work out.”

  “It better,” Kerrie said, but Maise had already left.

  ***

  Kerrie had to mentally shuffle files and rearrange her entire schedule. It now seemed deceptively simple: one case at 9 a.m. in Courtroom 61, and another at noon in Courtroom 495. Never mind that Courtroom 495 was about as far from the public defender’s office as possible. Never mind that Courtroom 61 was close.

  Kerrie had to review the new file—she couldn’t scan this one nor could she trust the Peyti lawyer who might have more years of experience, but who had probably never ever appeared in InterSpecies Court.

  And that was always a recipe for disaster.

  Not to mention the client. A pregnant felon, willing to move to criminal court rather than face whatever the hell she did somewhere inside the Earth Alliance.

  But Kerrie was intrigued. She wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.

  Intrigued meant she’d pay attention, but intrigued also meant she could get emotionally involved.

  And emotionally involved here meant heartbreak of the worst kind.

  She set the thick file on AutoLearn, which would send the information directly to her brain. She hated AutoLearn, but she used it almost every day. AutoLearn didn’t give her any real understanding of the file. It didn’t even give her a good grasp of the facts. What it did was give her a sense of the file, a cursory knowledge of all of the details, which she would be able to find if she needed them during court.