Recovery Man Read online

  Flint didn’t watch the young man go. Flint had seen more than Van Alen usually wanted, anyway. The young man had cheap thinness enhancers because his skin had that oily look so common to them. His hair was thinning, but he hadn’t solved that. His clothing was expensive, but his shoes weren’t, which led Flint to believe that the young man either saved up for his clothes or they were purchased through work.

  Van Alen’s voice drifted from inside the office. “Are you joining me, Miles, or are we having a meeting in the waiting room?”

  He smiled. With the glass doors up, the waiting area had become part of the office. None of the associates came here without an invitation, not while the doors were up and someone was talking with Van Alen.

  “Maxine,” he said as he walked into the main part of the office, “I’m sorry to come on such short notice.”

  She was leaning against her desk. Maxine Van Alen was a tall woman who changed the color of her hair as often as she changed clothing. When Flint had met her, she had been a blond. This afternoon, her hair was a silvery purple and her skin had been lightened to match. Only her eyes were unenhanced. They were black and so intelligent that they sometimes startled him.

  “I have never known you to give me notice,” she said. “Is this an emergency meeting, or is it something that requires a favor?”

  They’d known each other less than a month, and already she understood him.

  “Both,” he said, “and neither. I have two questions, and an inconvenient request.”

  She tugged on the sleeve of her jacket, which was a silvery color that picked up the purple highlights from her hair. Her pants reversed the look—a glittery purple that picked up the silver.

  “Yes, you may use one of the unnetworked computers,” she said. “I assume that you have more Paloma work.”

  That was easy. He didn’t even have to ask.

  “I do,” he said. “And you’re quick.”

  “Your inconvenient requests have all been to use one of my computers,” she said. “You’re becoming predictable.”

  “I’m going to have to change that.”

  “And the questions?” She obviously didn’t have a lot of time for banter today. She kept glancing at the waiting area as if she were expecting someone else.

  “Have you gotten any indication that someone at Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor knows that we’re about to bring down the firm?”

  Her left eyebrow rose, and as it did, he realized it too was varying shades of purple and silver. How did she have time for such detail and still do her work? He could barely figure out what to wear half the time.

  “Has something happened?”

  He had thought about that question all the way over. “I found some unusual things in the computer system in my office. I’m not sure if they’re planted or if they were there when Paloma sold me the business.”

  “I thought you cleaned the computer system of her material.”

  “I did,” he said. “I found this in an unusual part of the system.”

  He hadn’t told anyone about the ghost files. He wasn’t about to tell Van Alen, even though he trusted her.

  “Hm,” she said as if committing it to memory. “You think Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor planted it?”

  “I haven’t got a clue,” he said. “But I need to know if it’s likely before going down that path. I have a lot of others to explore.”

  Van Alen tapped her forefinger against her purplish lips. She thought for a moment, as if reviewing every interaction she’d had in the last week.

  “I haven’t heard a thing from WSX, nor do I expect to until Ki Bowles’s first stories hit. I presume she’s your second question.”

  “Yeah,” Flint said. “Has she been in touch?”

  Van Alen smiled. “Better than in touch. I have a young associate whose only job is to vet everything she does. She can’t buy coffee without his permission.”

  Flint’s grin widened. “You don’t trust her, either.”

  “She’d sell her grandmother to Delfic Being Traders if she thought it would make her the most famous journalist in the solar system.”

  “You don’t think the agreement we have will hold her?” Flint asked.

  Van Alen laughed. “I think Ki Bowles will soon forget that we’re smarter than she is, and she’ll try to leverage the story into something that helps her. My associate, and a private detective I have hired, will prevent that.”

  Flint shook his head. “A private detective, Maxine? Working on a case that involves Retrieval Artists? Isn’t that redundant?”

  “He works for me,” Van Alen said, “and you’d get bored with the normal tailing and sleuthing and snooping. You already know Ki Bowles. He doesn’t.”

  “He doesn’t know about the case, either, does he?” Flint asked.

  “He’s just supposed to report where she goes and who she talks to,” Van Alen said. “He doesn’t need to know why.”

  “What does your associate do then?”

  “Monitors her expenses, takes her to lunch, makes sure she’s happy and thinks she’s the center of the universe. Little annoying things that, he keeps reminding me, have nothing to do with the law.”

  Now Flint laughed. He would have complained, too. He never liked Ki Bowles, but he saw an opportunity to use her. In fact, her self-interest and ruthlessness made her the best person for the job.

  As long as she remained under control. Which, it seemed, Van Alen was doing.

  He could trust Van Alen on this one. If it ever came out that she was party to bringing down a rival law firm, she could lose her own license to practice. She was guarding this scheme more than he was.

  “I don’t think any leak came from Ms. Bowles,” Van Alen said, “and she hasn’t been near your office in a long time. Although it looks like you have. Not all that dust came from our sidewalk.”

  “True,” he said. “I was in a hurry.”

  “Feel free to use the shower if you need to clean up. We still have extra clothes for you somewhere around here.”

  She’d bought him clothes when he was hiding here from the Armstrong police. The clothes were too nice for his tastes—the fabric too fine—so he’d left them for “future emergencies.”

  “If you can stand me as I am, I’d like to get to work,” he said. “That way, I’ll be able to leave quicker and you can get your office back.”

  “I’m due in court in half an hour,” she said. “My office is yours for the rest of the day.”

  Twenty

  When Rhonda stepped out of the decon unit, ninety percent of the contaminants were gone. Her internal examination chips showed that she had no lasting effects from them. But the remaining ten percent could be a problem.

  She was alone in the large room. Her idiot captor in the environmental suit hadn’t followed her into this part of the ship. He apparently thought she would be safe here, unable to do any damage to the ship.

  She sighed. An obvious barrier flickered in front of the airlock doors, not that she’d use them, anyway. She’d seen the technology before on alien ships that she toured with Talia on Callisto. That was one of the nice things about Aleyd’s education programs in Valhalla Basin: they provided a lot of multicultural opportunities for the kids and their parents.

  Safe multicultural opportunities—no possibility of offending the aliens or doing damage to the relations between Aleyd and the alien group, whatever it was.

  She felt a sudden longing for Talia. Rhonda wished she could trust the Recovery Man’s assurances that he hadn’t hurt her daughter. And she hoped that if Talia was all right, she had contacted Oberholst, Martinez, and Mlsnavek, and had some help coming her way.

  But Rhonda couldn’t help Talia from here, and she certainly couldn’t help Talia if the remaining contaminants made her ill. Rhonda would have to do something, and do it quickly.

  She double-checked her internal analysis. Sometimes a simple decon was enough. Sometimes they had to use state-of-the-art nanobots, which Rhonda knew
she wouldn’t find here. She wasn’t even sure those nanobots had been approved for general use through Earth Alliance’s medical distribution authority. All she knew was that they had worked more than once.

  She wished she had some now.

  She turned and saw the white of the environmental suit near the doors to this section.

  “He wants you to go to the medical unit,” the idiot said.

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Um.” He sounded flustered, as if he had made a mistake. “We want you to go to the medical unit.”

  Had his contamination gotten bad enough to affect his speech centers? She hoped not. She didn’t want any of these contaminants, working in conjunction with the others around here, to have a quick effect.

  She needed to keep thinking clearly.

  “Just follow the green lights,” said the idiot, and then he headed down the hallway, looking ungainly in that suit.

  She’d found his outdated and ill-fitting suit amusing before, but she didn’t find it amusing now. She needed some kind of plan, but before she had that, she needed information.

  As she followed the green lights, she looked for access ports, data panels, anything that could help her. She also scanned for escape pods, but she wasn’t sure how to use those without letting the people (person?) in the cockpit know she had gotten free.

  This part of the ship was dark and filthy. If she hadn’t discovered contaminants before, she would have worried about them here. This place looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in decades. Even the green lights that she was following looked dingy.

  If there were panels, she couldn’t see them in this poor lighting and beneath the filth. The pods had flashing red signs on them, which read in Spanish and a language she didn’t recognize, that use of these pods would trigger an emergency alarm.

  She might try the pods anyway, if she could come up with a plan. Right now, if she took an escape pod, the ship would simply follow her and use whatever technology it had to bring her back on board.

  She needed to know where she was, what systems she was near, and whether she had time to get help from something other than the cargo ship.

  She would need patience. She would have to approach this like a problem at work. She often got impossible tasks there, and she took those tasks in small increments, knowing that she would find a solution if she only remembered that Aleyd looked for scientific results on a yearly, not daily, basis.

  Then she shuddered. Taking the long view here might get her killed.

  She rounded a corner and found herself in a cleaner part of the ship. The idiot in the environmental suit had literally disappeared. She no longer saw his white back anywhere. He must have turned off on one of the side corridors, which all had shimmery barriers like the ones on the airlock doors.

  Apparently, he knew how to turn off the shields—or whatever those barriers were—a fact that might be useful to her. Even though he seemed like the stronger one of the two men who had taken her, he clearly wasn’t the brighter. She might be able to manipulate him into helping her.

  Or tricking him.

  The final corner led her to a brightly lit section of the ship. Lights over the door revealed the word MEDICAL in the three Earth languages she knew, as well as in Disty, and two languages she didn’t recognize. Scrawled in a different font above the Earth languages was that same language she had seen on the escape pods.

  She would have to find out what that language was. She had a hunch it was the key to the entire ship.

  The door opened as she stepped near it, and a human voice greeted her.

  “Welcome. Are you a patient or a staff member?”

  What would happen if she said staff member?

  “Staff,” she said.

  “Are you Mr. Yu or Mr. Nafti?”

  Could that mean there were only two “staff” members on board? Could she be that lucky?

  She thought she’d continue the masquerade. “I’m Rhonda.”

  “Ah, Miss Shindo. Please step inside.”

  Apparently, this thing was plugged into the main computer, and the main computer knew who she was.

  She stepped through the open door to find a fully lit room with compartments along the walls. At the moment, the room seemed empty, but she knew that once the computer or whatever was talking to her figured out what she needed, parts of the room would open or slide out or form into the kind of medical facility that best suited her problem.

  “I have been told that you suffered contamination poisoning in one of the holds. Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Rhonda said. “May I see you?”

  “I have several avatars. Perhaps you can choose from the menu?”

  A flat screen rose in front of her with a hundred different images. They varied from human female to Earth dog to Peyti to Disty. There were others that Rhonda didn’t recognize.

  “Something human,” Rhonda said, just because she knew that machines didn’t always respond well to the phrase I don’t care.

  A slender woman appeared in front of her. The woman was carefully formed so that she wasn’t too tall or too thin. She had light tan skin and eyes that were rounded with a touch of angle at the edges. Her hair was a neutral brown, her eyes also brown, and her features spaced in that precise way that computers programmers thought average. The avatar wore a white smock over her brown slacks, something not done in Valhalla Basin, but was common on parts of Earth.

  “Is this satisfactory?” the woman asked.

  “Fine,” Rhonda said.

  “Good. Extend your hand so that I might take readings from the blood and tissue. I would like to know the extent of the contamination.”

  “The extent of the contamination,” said a new voice, “is minimal, considering the fact Rhonda here has already decontaminated herself.”

  A second image appeared. It was shorter than the woman and square, as if its three-dimensional image processor had failed. It was clearly a human male, and clearly modeled on a real person. There was no reason to design facial features that pugnacious or hair threaded with gray. This avatar also wore the white smock, but it had a smudge along one edge that looked intentional, as if flaws might make Rhonda more comfortable.

  “Program One here,” he said, nodding to the woman, “is an inferior copy of a program developed on Earth. The program lacks the wide database that I’m privy to, so makes up for it in caution.”

  “The order of the programs was stated,” the woman said. “I am to begin the exam. If I am stumped, then you will be consulted.”

  “Best to consult me now.” The man stepped toward Rhonda. “Call me Doc.”

  “Fine,” she said again, suddenly feeling overwhelmed. Had they just downloaded these programs?

  “Your contamination isn’t as severe as we were lead to believe. The decontamination unit is better than most everything else on this boat.” He grinned at her. “You still have some mighty powerful problems, though. How long were you in the cargo hold?”

  “It says on the system.” The woman looked at the man with condescension, as if he were too dumb to find information on his own. “Less than five hours.”

  “Four-point-seven-eight hours,” said a third voice. A Peyti appeared toward the edge of the room, complete with oxygen mask, even though an avatar wouldn’t need it. The Peyti were known for their skills in law, diplomacy, and medicine. They were natural healers, having some properties in their long fingers and sticklike bones that gave them sensory input that humans did not possess.

  “Wait,” Rhonda said. “Are you a new program?”

  “We are all new programs,” the man told her. “Mine is the best for humans.”

  “Mine is the most expensive with the most expertise,” said the Peyti.

  “Mine is the most common,” said the woman.

  “Great,” Rhonda muttered. Medical programs without any experience were worthless. “Go away, all of you.”

  “Ma’am, you need help,” said the Peyti.

&n
bsp; “I know,” she said, “and I won’t get it from you three. I am commanding you to shut off.”

  The woman vanished first, then the Peyti. The man stayed for a moment.

  “I have an excellent start-up program,” he said.

  “Off!”

  He shimmered, then faded away, leaving her alone in the large room.

  “Computer,” she said, “I need a diagnosing table and access to your medical programs.”

  “You do not have staff access,” the computer said in the woman’s voice. It actually sounded disapproving.

  “I know,” Rhonda said. “But if you’re an Earth Alliance system, you have protocols that allow patients access to the medical section of the ship. Are you an Earth Alliance system?”

  “I am fused technology,” the computer said.

  Rhonda felt a shiver run through her. Fused technology meant that the ship itself ran off several systems. It made sense that this ship had more than one system. Some weren’t compatible with worlds that a Recovery Man would try to go to. He probably masked the ship’s signature in a number of places, but some had space technology so advanced that masking didn’t work. The only thing that would work was to actually be able to flip into a system specific to planets outside the Alliance.

  “What systems have fused to form you?” Rhonda asked.

  “That is privileged information,” the computer responded. “You are not a staff member.”

  She would try it a different way. “I’m human. Is it possible for me to talk with the Earth Alliance system?”

  A silence filled the room. She hoped that meant she hadn’t confused the system, just made it check the various protocols.

  “This is the Earth Alliance system.” This voice was new and carefully neutral. The Earth Alliance all the way, trying not to offend anyone, which either made the result bland or accidentally offensive.

  The neutral voice actually relieved her. “Can you operate the medical wing?”

  Again, silence surrounded her. Finally, the voice said, “I can.”

  “Then you can take orders from me even though I am not a staff member.”