Paloma Read online

  Mostly, he hadn’t stopped anywhere interesting, just some fueling and recreational bases in the long distances between settled colonies. He hadn’t been as interested in sightseeing as he was in moving, getting as far away from himself and his past as he could.

  And now he sat square in the middle of it. His decision to come home had seemed right at the time, but he wasn’t certain any longer. Paloma was dead, his office was ruined, his ideals were crumbling.

  A door swished open. Colette Bannerman entered. She had always been gaunt, but these days she looked positively skeletal. Her hair had thinned on top, revealing part of her skull. Her enhancements stood out, like grafts of real wood on a permaplastic building.

  She looked exhausted, overworked, and a little frightened.

  “We don’t deal with Retrieval Artists here,” she said as coldly as she could.

  “I’m not here as a Retrieval Artist,” Flint said. He had expected the greeting. In theory, Retrieval Artists and Disappearance Services were enemies. Retrieval Artists were supposed to find Disappeareds, often destroying the careful work of Disappearance Services and causing the death of the Disappeareds.

  In practice, Retrieval Artists and Disappearance Services sometimes worked together. More than once, Flint had helped a service find one of its own Disappeareds who had dropped the new identity and gone on to some other kind of life. Usually those cases were about Disappeareds who no longer had a reason to run, only they didn’t know it then.

  Once in a while, they were about a severing of the agreement between the company and the Disappeared. And once, he’d turned down a case in which a Disappeared used his knowledge of a Disappearance Service to attempt to destroy it. In that case, Flint had recommended a Tracker, feeling that the Disappeared needed to face the legal system he’d fled.

  Flint believed Disappearance Services had their place in this culture. He also believed that his job was just as necessary.

  “I don’t understand,” Bannerman said as she sat behind the heavy desk near the scenes of Earth. “If you’re not here as a Retrieval Artist, then what do you need?”

  They had played a bit of this dance a few years ago, when he had first come here. Then he had been a newly resigned police officer with a list and an agenda.

  He didn’t feel as altruistic now.

  “I don’t have lives to save this time,” he said, although he wasn’t completely sure. He wasn’t sure what was at stake. He knew only that Paloma was dead and she had believed that something on the Lost Seas would help him. “I’ve heard over the years that you’ve gone to court against Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor, and won.”

  She let out a soft laugh. “A few times.”

  “So it’s true, then?”

  She ran a hand through that thinning hair. Had she given up on enhancements? Or had she simply been too busy to take care of herself? He couldn’t tell and didn’t know how to ask.

  “We’ve gone up against them too many times to count,” she said after a moment.

  “And won?” he asked.

  She paused as if weighing her words. “The later cases.”

  “Because of the cases or because of your lawyer?”

  “We need a good lawyer,” she said. “Some would view what we do as illegal.”

  He knew that Disappearance Services skirted the law by never keeping records of their clients. If a client approached them because they had violated a Disty law, for example, Data Systems would make certain the client had a new identity that kept them as far from the Disty as possible. But Data Systems—and reputable services like them—never asked for the particulars of the crime. Sometimes the company didn’t even ask for more than a financial history.

  Just because a person helped someone who broke the law didn’t put that person at odds with the law. Knowledge counted. Otherwise, a waitress at a restaurant who fed a criminal on the run could be indicted for aiding and abetting.

  At least that was how the Alliance laws read now, and some of that was because of the corporations. Corporations invented Disappearance Services. It was the only way to go into uncharted areas and keep the natives satisfied. If a corporate employee broke some native law, the corporation vowed to cooperate with the native law.

  But while the corporations did that, in part to help their bottom line, they also protected their employees by giving them new identities and new lives. Eventually, a number of those services branched off, became independent.

  Some, like Data Systems, started without corporate sponsorship.

  It cost a lot of money to disappear. Sometimes it cost the Disappeared’s entire life savings.

  When Flint had sold Bannerman his information all those years ago, she had paid him ten million credits immediately, with a minimum of complaint.

  “You’ve always had good lawyers,” he said. “What makes this one different?”

  “This one isn’t afraid of people who have reputations,” she said. “She likes to shred them. She believes in what we do, and she’ll fight for it as hard as I will.”

  “Does she fight for all her clients?”

  “What’s this about, Mr. Flint?” Bannerman asked.

  He decided to be as truthful as he could. “I have just received an inheritance that will put me at odds with the Wagners of WSX. I’m not trying to protect money. I’m trying to protect confidential information. The kind that should never be in the hands of unscrupulous people.”

  Bannerman studied him. She knew that he had initially come to her because he felt being a police officer violated his own personal ethics. Yet she also knew that he had a touch of shadiness to his own dealings, because he had wanted money for that information he brought her, money that would enable him to live for the rest of his life without working.

  That wasn’t his only reason for asking for ten million credits. He also knew that people like Bannerman never trusted anything they got for free. They expected to pay exactly what something was worth.

  “You want the name of my lawyer,” she said flatly. “You want a Disappearance Services lawyer to represent a Retrieval Artist.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Bannerman laughed. She seemed almost pretty for that brief moment. “That’ll shock her.”

  Flint waited.

  Bannerman stopped laughing, wiped at her eyes, and leaned back in her chair. “You trust me, Mr. Flint?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Enough to rely on my lawyer for something this important to you?”

  He nodded. “I know a lot of lawyers in this city, and the ones I trust could never go head-to-head with the Wagners of WSX.”

  All the laughter had left her face. She studied him for a long moment. “You want to win.”

  “I need to win.”

  “You know that winning is nearly impossible with them,” she said. “What they can’t get legally, they get illegally.”

  He had suspected it. He knew that they knew how to manipulate systems to a degree that he had probably never seen before.

  “They’re ruthless and they’re vicious,” she said. “If they can’t beat you in a courtroom, they’ll destroy you personally.”

  “They haven’t destroyed you yet,” Flint said, although he wasn’t entirely sure. She looked a lot worse than she had when he met her years ago.

  “I hide behind a corporate veil,” she said. “They’ve tried to destroy Data Systems. They haven’t yet. But they’ve come close. I shudder to think of what they’d do to an individual.”

  Flint straightened. He wanted to tell her that he wasn’t just an individual here in an impersonal case. He was going up against the partners of the firm in a case that involved their mother.

  Their estranged mother.

  “I know you’re strong,” Bannerman said, “but if you have any choices at all, avoid WSX.”

  “I wish I could,” Flint said.

  Bannerman sighed. “You could always disappear,” she said, and they both knew it was only half a joke.

 
“No,” he said. “Not in this case.”

  Colette Bannerman looked at him with something like pity. “My lawyer’s name is Maxine Van Alen,” she said. “Don’t take advantage of her.”

  Flint thought that was a strange thing to say about a lawyer, particularly one who’d won cases against WSX.

  “I’ll treat her well,” he said, and meant it.

  Eighteen

  DeRicci stared at the door long after Nyquist left. She had never had anyone ask directly for her help before, not in her new job as Chief of Moon Security.

  His request was odd and he hadn’t told her all of the reasons for it, even though his logic was impeccable. He was keeping something back—something more than his suspicions of Miles Flint.

  She stood and headed toward that window, using the view to remind herself of her duties. She’d nearly screwed up in the past telling Flint things he should not have known.

  But on the flip side, he had always come through for her, always helped her.

  But she still didn’t make a move. If the past few months had taught her anything, they had taught her how important her job was—and how fragile. Flint had told her back when she was considering taking it that the job was a dangerous one. In the wrong hands, it could lead to an abuse of power that would harm the Moon, not help it.

  Of course, people like Ki Bowles had already accused DeRicci of abusing power in that way. The fact that DeRicci’s efforts had stopped a major crisis had helped, but the accusations would come again.

  DeRicci ran a hand through her hair, then stood. She went to her most secure node, attached to a desk near the windows. This node had more security precautions on it than her own private links. The computer techs had explained everything to her, and she hadn’t understood a word of it.

  Except that she would have to trust them to protect her most private information, and when they installed that link, she hadn’t been in the mood to trust anyone. She wished she knew more about computer tech herself, all that junk that Flint had learned in his first job, way back when.

  She envied him a lot of things, particularly his freedom to choose what he was working on. Maybe that was why she had agreed to help Nyquist. It was more than simple curiosity or the possibility that the investigation might return to her. It was also a way of choosing her own work, rather than having it thrown at her.

  A way of preventing a crisis instead of reacting to one.

  She activated the node and shut off the voice controls. She had several ways to access information on this machine. She could use voice commands, or call up a hands-on screen, or she could use the keypad, which she had insisted the techs install. Flint had taught her that with keypads the strokes she made weren’t traceable from within her office.

  Only if someone had already tapped into the system and was monitoring what she was doing. And if that happened, every form of communication she used with this node would be compromised.

  She hauled out the keypad, turned on the flat screen but left it on the desktop, and activated the securest part of the node. She didn’t even want her assistants to know what she was doing.

  Then she called up the name of the ship through the standard registry, just like she used to do when she was a detective. The Lost Seas, current/former owner Paloma/Lucianna Stuart.

  Immediately, the screen lit up with a warning. The vessel had been quarantined. All inquiries had to be made to Space Traffic Control.

  The word quarantined stopped her. She had seen the records for confiscated vessels before. No one had ever used the word quarantined to describe them.

  She accessed other registries, got the same listing, and then went to the private site for Space Traffic registries, the site that only officials were privy to.

  The Lost Seas wasn’t just quarantined by one source. Several different agencies had slapped quarantines on it, as well as the Bixian Government.

  DeRicci had never heard of the Bixian Government. She looked at the Lost Seas travel log and saw no reference to the Port of Bix or the planet Bix or the City of Bix. She also tried Bixian, but found no reference to that, either.

  She shook her head and went to her regular search area. She typed in Bixian Government and got this:

  The ruling class of a small country within the Hazar Empire. The Bixian Government has independent authority on all local and regional matters, but on matters of a grander scale must answer to the Hazars.

  There were links to more informative sites, historical documents, and a history of the Bixian Government before the formation of the Hazar Empire.

  DeRicci had heard vaguely of the Hazar Empire. It composed part of a large sector several light years from here, and was still negotiating its place in the Earth Alliance. Some said the Empire would never join the Alliance because the trade rules were too strict: The Hazars wanted to export their legal system to all other governments, rather than bow to the Alliance system, which allowed legal precedent of a region or government to stand no matter who committed the crime.

  DeRicci had some sympathy with the Hazar position and yet she knew how unworkable that would be within the Alliance itself. If she had more time, she would see what slowed down the negotiations with the Hazars.

  But right now, she didn’t have time to look. She had no idea why one of the quarantines would come from a small group within a large empire, so she went back to the original quarantine citing to see if it said any more.

  It did not. So she looked at Space Traffic regulations to see what a quarantine from the Bixian Government meant. The legal language seemed unclear, but from what she could gather, any ship that had a flight plan to Bixian territory could be confiscated if it were under quarantine from the Bixian government.

  DeRicci’s head hurt and her eyes ached from the unfamiliar way of searching for information. She had never been good at legalese. She opened a link and sent a message to one of her assistants, asking for legal clarification from one of the government lawyers of the meaning of a Bixian Government quarantine for a ship docked in Armstrong’s port.

  The reference was obscure enough, she felt, that no one would understand it was tied to Paloma’s ship. Not even Nyquist seemed to know about the quarantines, and he had been investigating the entire case.

  She leaned back in her chair. She would have to tell him. The quarantines did give her the right to confiscate the ship in the name of Moon security, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to. She still had some documents to dig through; she had to see what triggered the quarantine and why it still stuck to a ship in legal limbo.

  Then her stomach twisted. Maybe this wasn’t uncommon. Maybe a number of ships, docked in unsafe areas like Terminal 35, were in the same kind of limbo.

  She went back to Space Traffic’s main information screen, typed in quarantined ships not located in Terminal 81, and sat back, appalled, as a long list scrolled across her screen.

  She saved the list, then downloaded it to an information chip on her right thumb. She got up, downloaded the same information onto another node, and cleaned off all references to the security alerts from her most secure node. Then she sent the list to Rudra Popova.

  Popova had been DeRicci’s de facto assistant when she became head of Moon Security. They had clashed almost from the beginning, Popova believing that DeRicci wasn’t qualified for the job and DeRicci, for the most part, agreeing with her.

  The Disty Crisis had changed Popova’s opinion of DeRicci, as it had for so many others, and now Popova was the number two operative in the department, with a real job title: Deputy Chief for Moon-Based Security. She still had to approve everything through DeRicci, but she didn’t seem to mind. And she had proven herself valuable on more than one occasion. She specialized in research, rules, regulations, and the fine art of Moon-based diplomacy.

  DeRicci’s door opened. Popova stuck her head in. Her long black hair touched the floor, making it seem like she was attached to the ground by a pool of blackness.

  “What’s this?” she asked.


  “I hadn’t finished the instructions yet,” DeRicci said. She couldn’t count how many times this had happened between them—she’d send Popova the first part of a task, and the woman would enter her office rather than wait for the second part of the message.

  “So finish,” Popova said, her black eyes snapping. She was intelligent and impatient, one of the best researchers DeRicci had ever seen, partly—Popova once admitted over drinks—because she had such a short attention span that she flitted from one fact to the next, collecting them the way some people collected old Earth coins.

  “Looking for something else, I stumbled on a list of quarantined ships not housed in Terminal 81,” DeRicci said.

  Popova frowned. “If they’re not in 81, where are they?”

  “All over the port, from what I can tell. That’s what I sent you. I need them researched. I also need the law researched that allows this, or I need to know if this is some kind of accepted way of handling quarantined ships.”

  Popova let go of the door and slipped into the room. She folded her hands behind her back as if she were standing to attention. “I sure hope that isn’t the case.”

  “Me, too,” DeRicci said. But in her work these past several months, she’d learned that the legal way of doing things in many of the domes did not match the actual way of doing things. One of her jobs as security chief was to get rid of potential hazards from common practices like this one.

  “How bad do you think this is?” Popova asked.

  DeRicci shrugged. No sense panicking her most competent aide. “A lot of these ships have been in quarantine for years. I often can’t even figure out who ordered the quarantine or why it exists. I looked up one ship, found it had been quarantined not just by the Port of Armstrong, but also by a government I’d never heard of, and I just didn’t have time to research it all.”

  “So you want me to do that,” Popova said with a slight smile.

  DeRicci nodded.

  “How did this come up now? I thought you were talking to a police detective a few minutes ago.”