Paloma Read online

  “So?” Flint asked. “What does this have to do with the law?”

  She grinned. It was an impish look. “Legal history is a specialty of mine. If you know how laws evolve and why, you can sometimes find their hidden loopholes.”

  “You’re not getting to the point,” he said, only slightly annoyed. She was trying to impress him with how brilliant she was, and she was succeeding.

  “A lot of ship owners began to lie about where they’d been. It kept their ship and its contents out of the mandatory weeklong quarantine. It kept them from losing precious time.”

  Flint’s breath caught. “So the government made a law demanding the ship’s log.”

  “And since the ship was under quarantine, the government then found ways to examine everything on the ship’s computers, learning about all kinds of illegal activities.”

  “You’re telling me,” Flint said, “that the owners somehow got permission to download all the other incriminating stuff before they let the government into their ships?”

  “Not permission.” Van Alen’s eyes sparkled. “They got it written into the law. The ship owners had a lot of clout in those days. Remember that Armstrong got most of its goods from somewhere else at the time.”

  Flint nodded. Every kid who went through Armstrong’s school system learned how dependent Armstrong used to be on shipments from Earth.

  “But,” Van Allen said, “Armstrong found a way to modify the law. Ship owners had to request the download. A lot of them didn’t know that. They asked informally and got denied. But somewhere along the way, a clause got added that if the ship owners made their request through an attorney who put a request in to a judge, who had to act that same day. If they did that, then the request had to be honored.”

  “No matter what was in the ship.”

  “They wouldn’t know,” Van Alen said. “They couldn’t. They had to release the information before they examined the computers and the logs.”

  “Wouldn’t that enable the owner to alter the log, anyway?”

  Van Alen shook her head. “The owner didn’t do the download. A specialist on the HazMat team would.”

  Flint walked back to his chair and rested his hands on the back of the seat. The fabric felt cold to the touch, even though he’d been sitting there only moments before. “You’re telling me this law still applies?”

  “It’s never been wiped off the books,” she said.

  “Has it been used in the last hundred years?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Once or twice.”

  “By you,” he said.

  She shrugged. “The more tools you have, the better case you build for your client.”

  He smiled too. “This is why you win against the Wagners.”

  “No,” she said. “I have won against the Wagners because I’m too stubborn to give in. At some point, they’ll beat me, and then some other attorney, just as naïve and stubborn, will take my place. And more power to that imaginary young thing. I’m getting tired.”

  Flint hoped her exhaustion didn’t hit in full force until she had finished with his case. “You’re telling me that I can use this law as the ship owner?”

  “If Paloma hasn’t,” Van Alen said. “And given what little we know about the Lost Seas’ strange quarantine history, I’ll wager she hasn’t.”

  Flint wasn’t ready to wager on anything. He’d had too many surprises that day already. “So after you file with a judge, what then?”

  “He rules for us, and then a HazMat team shows up.”

  “How long will this take?” Flint asked.

  “If you stop quizzing me,” she said, “I should have the first information from that ship in an hour.”

  “An hour,” he breathed.

  “Provided Paloma hasn’t tried this before,” she said.

  “Right,” he said.

  Van Alen returned to her desk, looking like a woman who was ready to work. Then she gave him a sideways glance. It would have been almost flirtatious, if it weren’t so proud of itself.

  “You know the best thing about this?” she asked. “I mentioned it in passing.”

  “You mentioned half the history of Armstrong in passing,” he said.

  She laughed. “Yes, but this is the important part. The information is downloaded and removed from the internal systems of the ship. Once you have every bit of information Paloma stored on the Lost Seas, no one else can get it without getting to you.”

  Twenty-three

  The Bixian Government—whoever they were—considered the Lost Seas cursed? Nyquist couldn’t quite process that information. He’d heard some strange things in his time, but he had no idea why a ship would get quarantined because of a curse.

  He set down his plate, leaving most of the wriggling noodles with their peppery sauce, and got up, mostly because he felt too confused to sit still.

  “You want some coffee?” he asked DeRicci.

  “Good old detective-area coffee?” DeRicci asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Believe it or not,” she said with a smile, “I miss that slop.”

  He didn’t believe it. No one could miss coffee that was made from hybrid beans grown in the cheapest part of the Growing Pits, then ground and cut with something else, something that—if he had to guess by taste—was probably Moon dust.

  Still, he drank the stuff as if it were as important as water. And maybe it had become that important. He had no real idea. Maybe he would crave it when—if—he left the force.

  He found two clean mugs (he hoped they were clean; they looked clean) and poured the last of the only remaining pot into it. Then he set all three pots on their machines and pressed the start button, a simple procedure that everyone else in the department had apparently never learned how to do.

  He left before the liquid finished brewing. Anyone who thought the coffee smelled foul when it was lukewarm had never smelled it as it squirted fresh into the pot.

  DeRicci took the offered mug with a smile. She wrapped her hands around it and inhaled. Then she coughed.

  “God, as awful as ever,” she said.

  “You asked for it.”

  She smiled. “I need to remind myself that my current job has better perks than my old one.”

  “Your current job doesn’t seem that bad,” he said.

  Her smile faded. “Do you know none of the domes have evacuation procedures in case of a slow-dome breach? No real plans for an epidemic or for a biological attack? Everyone thinks the dome walls will protect them, but half the domes on the Moon haven’t isolated their environmental systems, so anything that contaminates the eastern section of the dome will automatically contaminate the western section.”

  He picked up the plates, not sure he wanted to know any of this. “I didn’t think you dealt with dome safety.”

  “I deal with everything,” she said. “At first, the position seemed advisory, even though no one knew what it was supposed to do, not really. But it became clear in the Disty crisis that someone had to make emergency decisions for the entire Moon, and that no politician was going to do that, not and keep her job.”

  “You mean the governor-general?” he asked.

  “I mean anyone,” she said. “I studied what happened on Mars after the whole crisis ended. A lot of government officials there just didn’t respond. And a lot of people died.”

  He looked at her, wishing he could end this conversation, but also knowing that she had to get it out. She was trusting him with this, talking to him because she probably didn’t get a lot of chances to talk to anyone else.

  “They have a different governmental system than we do,” he said after a moment. “The Disty are in charge.”

  “Actually, it’s similar,” she said. “Our domes are loosely confederated here. The United Domes of the Moon is relatively new, considering how long the Moon has been settled, and it has almost no power at all. Not overall power. Any decision it makes can be overruled by a dome mayor, did you know that?” />
  “Not for the whole Moon,” he said.

  “Only for that dome, but still.” She shook her head. “I have to come up with advisory plans and mandatory plans and then I have to do the political song and dance to make everyone believe me.”

  She wiped a hand over her face. There were shadows under her eyes that were so deep, he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t noticed them before.

  “I’d much rather solve a murder,” she said. “It’s easier.”

  He smiled and set the plates down. “Even with the Wagner family’s involvement.”

  “Even with,” she said.

  “You know,” he said, “if you were here, solving a murder, you’d have to drink that coffee all the time.”

  She sipped and grimaced. “I know. That’s why I’m drinking it now. Trying to remind myself that I have perks.”

  “Perks,” he said.

  “They even gave me a clothing allowance,” she said, and then she grinned. “And when I still didn’t dress better, they hired someone to shop for me. Apparently, appearance is everything in government.”

  “Apparently,” he said.

  She sighed and set her coffee down. “There’s one more thing I have to tell you, although you may already know it.”

  He frowned.

  “In addition to the Lost Seas, Paloma owned a space yacht. It’s registered in the name Paloma and the secondary registration, in case something happens to Paloma, is in the name of Miles Flint.”

  Now DeRicci was bringing up Flint. Nyquist took the plates out of his office and tossed them in the already overflowing recycle bin near the coffee table. Apparently, the bin had broken down again.

  “You hear me?” she asked.

  She was leaning against the doorjamb into his office, her arms crossed. In the half-light of the hallway, she almost looked beautiful.

  He nodded. He had heard what she said and what she meant. She had told him facts, but had also trusted him with some personal information. Now it was time for him to trust her with personal information, and she even guided that part of the discussion.

  She wanted the information he had on Flint.

  Her old partner.

  “I didn’t know she had a space yacht,” he said, pretending he didn’t understand the subtext of their conversation at all. “I had been looking up historical information. Stupid me, huh? I should have looked at all the current things first.”

  DeRicci studied him. For all her unorthodox manners, she missed nothing. She knew he wasn’t going to trust her with Flint. Nyquist needed to keep some things for himself.

  At least that was what he told himself. Deep down, he worried that DeRicci wouldn’t be interested in him any more if Miles Flint became the main suspect.

  “You need to get to that ship before Flint does,” she said.

  Nyquist closed his eyes for a brief moment. He had let Flint go free, after investigating the scene, after taking his suit with him.

  DeRicci might not have been playing games at all. She might have been warning him.

  But if she was, how come she waited until the end of the conversation to tell him about Paloma’s ship?

  “Bartholomew?” she asked.

  He opened his eyes.

  “You think Flint knows about the registration?” DeRicci asked.

  “I think Flint wouldn’t care,” Nyquist said. “I hadn’t even thought about some kind of space yacht. I’m sure he’s been there already. I hope to God he left something on board that we can use.”

  Twenty-four

  The Lost Seas was probably the most dilapidated ship Flint had seen since he quit Space Traffic. It almost hid in the corner of Terminal 35, a section so poorly lit that the HazMat team had had to ask the port to put up extra lighting before they approached the ship.

  HazMat’s own warning lights did work properly here, though. The lights, built into the ceiling, glowed bright orange, letting Space Traffic know not to have any other ship dock here until the team was through.

  Flint stood at the edge of the docking area, as close as the team would let him get. Van Alen stood beside him, towering over him in a pair of high-heel boots that made her outfit seem both sexy and macho at the same time.

  He had told her that he didn’t need her here, but she insisted. And he was beginning to realize that Maxine Van Alen was a person to argue with sparingly.

  The ship was at least fifty years old, maybe older, and of some kind of alien design cobbled with some ancient human technology. Its center core looked like a bubble. It even had the iridescent coating on the outside edge—or it appeared to; he wasn’t sure if that was caused by time or was part of the original design.

  All sorts of components had been added to the side of the bubble—hatches and bays and smaller bubbles, not nearly as well designed. Someone had even added a crude docking block, so that a nearby ship could grapple on.

  “Ugly damn thing,” Flint said to Van Alen as the HazMat team examined the outside. They were going slower than he liked, using instruments and all sorts of equipment he didn’t recognize to see if the hull itself was a hazard.

  As far as Flint was concerned, HazMat should have done that a long time ago, given how many quarantines this ship was under. But there were no records of any kind of inspection, thorough or otherwise, so HazMat had to follow modern procedure.

  “It’s yours now,” Van Alen said with a smile. “The proud owner of that ugly damn thing.”

  “Lucky me,” Flint said.

  The team, six members in all, moved around the ship as if they were a multiunit creature with a single brain. He didn’t get a formal introduction to them. He did meet their captain, a slender woman with unenhanced skin that was an odd greenish color. It came, someone told him after she had left the staging area, from a decontamination gone bad. She kept the skin color to remind everyone what carelessness could do.

  The rest of the team simply nodded to him, their faces masked by their environmental suits. These suits were especially designed for HazMat. They covered the team like a second skin, obscuring their faces and making them seem not quite human.

  If, indeed, they all were human. Flint had no way to tell.

  He watched the team record the ship as if it had just come in, examine the results of some of their on-site tests, as if the ship hadn’t been sitting in the open for decades, and treat everything nearby as if it were already contaminated—which, Flint supposed, it probably was.

  Then the team leader gave a hand signal. A siren went off, warning everyone out of the area in case the contamination spread. Flint grabbed Van Alen’s arm, moving her as far back from the staging area as he could.

  A squeal sounded above him. Dust rained down, followed by the protective barriers that surrounded every dock in every terminal. These were so old that they were scratched and cloudy. Flint wondered if they were effective any more. It seemed to him something could get through one of those scratches and contaminate the entire port.

  He glanced at Van Alen. She was watching the HazMat team through the scratched protective barrier. Mostly, they looked like colored blurs against another colored blur, but he could guess at what they were doing.

  After they ordered the protective barrier down, they would open the hatch. Then they would test the air—or whatever it was—that came out of the hatch. They would examine the area around the hatch for dangerous materials, and then the least experienced member of the team would enter first, in case there were booby traps of some kind.

  Even if Flint couldn’t see what was happening, he would be able to tell at this distance if there were booby traps. He’d been unlucky enough to be primary Space Traffic cop on a case in which the cargo ship had been trapped. He’d stood outside a barrier like this one and listened to an entire HazMat team scream in panic and disgust.

  They stood in silence for several minutes and then someone shouted. Flint jumped and squinted at the protective barrier, as if he could see what was going on inside it.

  Only wh
en there was a second shout did he realize the noises had come from behind him.

  He turned. Two Port Authority security guards trailed two other men. One of the security guards slapped the side of the tunnel door, and more warning sirens went off.

  Flint recognized these. Years ago, when he worked here, a sound like that would have brought him running.

  “Shut the damn thing down,” one of the men said, waving a hand. “We’re officers of the court.”

  “I don’t care who you are,” a guard answered. “You don’t have a right to be here.”

  “It’s all right,” Van Alen said smoothly, that lawyer persona back. “They’re with us.”

  Flint looked at her with surprise. Her lids were half hooded over her eyes, and her face revealed nothing. She stood, her body at alert, as she watched the two men come down the ramp.

  “You sure?” the other guard asked.

  “I am,” Van Alen said.

  The first guard kept following. “You were supposed to name your entire party before coming in here.”

  “Sorry,” Van Alen said. “I forgot.”

  She said it with such guilelessness that Flint almost believed her, even though he knew Van Alen was not the kind of woman who forgot anything.

  “They’re your problems, then,” the guard said, waving a hand in disgust. He looked at his partner, and they headed up the ramp, slapping the sirens off as they disappeared through the door.

  Flint started to ask Van Alen what was going on, but she made an almost imperceptible gesture with her right hand, silencing him. So he studied the two men instead.

  They looked familiar. The taller one had flowing white hair and a long patriarchal beard. He wore a dark suit that needed a cleaning, but his shoes shined and his hands were manicured.

  But the other man drew Flint’s eye. The man was shorter—short by most standards, actually—with a bullish build mostly hidden by his long, stylish suitcoat. His hands were manicured, as well—their fingernails actually shone in the orange light—and his eyes had a sparkle that only came from enhancements.