Recovery Man Read online

  “Did you record that?”

  “All of my exterior cameras have been disabled.”

  “What about interior?”

  “They’re back online now,” House said. “I did get a recording of the conversation through the door. Would you like me to replay it?”

  “Yes.” Talia sat up and pushed her sore back against the wall. Something had happened to her, too. It was just at the edge of her memory. It would have helped if House could have shown her that.

  But House couldn’t. Instead, House showed the interior of the side entry, complete with a view of the door. The door was obviously wired with a crude override device, the kind you could buy at any home maintenance store to alter an existing or out-of-date House system.

  Her mother’s voice was faint, asking about heat and temperature and the possibility of fire. House’s answers were louder. Then House told Mom about the man who had overridden the programming, and then a male voice said, No need. I did it.

  “Freeze the playback,” Talia said. “Show me the man who deleted the programming.”

  House switched screens, forming one on the other side of the closet wall. A small man with black curly hair sat near House’s main control panel (which Talia privately called the Control Panel for People Who Need a Stupid Panel), and worked the system like someone following instructions across his links.

  Then he turned ever so slightly, and her breath caught.

  Talia, bend your head forward. We’re not going to hurt you. We just want to look at the back of your neck.

  He had gotten into the house. He had been waiting in her bedroom, him and some big, bald, tattooed guy who grabbed her the moment she walked in.

  Her links had shut off (they always shut off in her room; she wanted complete privacy), and even though she was able to turn them back on, she couldn’t access House or send a message outside the closed loop of the neighborhood.

  And, it seemed, no one else was home.

  That was what she got for skipping school.

  Bend your head forward or we will do it for you.

  She hadn’t moved. She had to stall until her mother got home. Her mother had ways of stopping guys like this.

  Her mother had warned her that strangers might come. Her mother said that she had left the Moon because people confused her with someone else, someone criminal. It was safer here, but her mother always worried that those strangers might make the same mistake again.

  Here were the strangers.

  But Talia didn’t understand why they wanted her to bend her neck.

  No, she’d said. And then, like a baby, she’d added, And you can’t make me.

  But they did make her. The bald guy had bent her head forward and the small guy had rooted around in her hair. He cursed once—at least she thought it was a curse; it sounded like a curse, but he used words she’d never heard before and her links weren’t on so she couldn’t get a private translation—and then he said, How old are you?

  How old are you? She snapped back.

  Cooperate, child. Then we won’t have to hurt you.

  Too late. She sounded tougher than she felt.

  How old are you?

  The bald guy put his big hand on the top of her skull and covered the whole thing. Then he put another hand at the base of her neck and slowly twisted until she heard something creak. It didn’t quite crack, but it could.

  She knew it could.

  It doesn’t matter to us what condition you’re in, so long as you’re alive. The small man with the curly hair moved in front of her so that he could see her face. Doctors can repair almost any injury these days, so long as you don’t die first. But they can’t take away the pain you’ll experience until the injury is fixed. You’ll always have the memory of that. We can guarantee it.

  Then he smiled.

  Now, he said in a voice as fake-friendly as House’s current voice, tell me how old you are.

  Baldy’s fingers dug into her scalp. Her heart was pounding. Mom always said to cooperate instead of getting hurt. Hide if you can, run if you can, but if you can’t, stall or leave a trail.

  I’m thirteen, Talia said.

  Thirteen? He sounded surprised. Stop lying.

  I’m not lying, she said. Honest, I’m not.

  Part of her brain thought Honest, I’m not the stupidest sentence she ever uttered. That’s when she knew she’d truly panicked. Mom had described this sensation, the sensation where a part of you separated from yourself and stood back, watching as another part suffered through something.

  You can’t be thirteen, he said.

  I am. And then, because she couldn’t help herself—her stupid mouth, always getting her in trouble—she added, You’ve got the wrong family.

  You’re Rhonda Shindo’s daughter, right? the small man asked.

  Yes, she said. But you confused my mother with someone else. Someone who is a criminal.

  He laughed. So your mother’s the liar in the family.

  My mom doesn’t lie, Talia said.

  Your mother is good at lies. She has to be, to survive as long as she has.

  The small man looked up at the bald guy. His fingers still dug into Talia’s head. They pinched. She was starting to get a headache.

  I think this kid believes she’s thirteen, the small man said.

  The bald man harrumphed. Maybe the mother shaved twenty-nine Earth months off her age.

  Or maybe they’re counting her age in units other than Earth time. Are you?

  It took Talia a minute to realize the small man was talking to her again.

  I’m thirteen Earth years, she said, and this time her voice shook. These guys were scaring her. Bad. And Mom wasn’t due home for hours.

  The man cursed again. Either there’s a tag or Shindo lied to this kid.

  The tag has to be on the back of the neck, the bald man said.

  Only in the Alliance, the small man said.

  What tag? Talia asked. What’s a tag?

  A couple places do under the skin, the small man said as he reached for a pouch on the floor. She hadn’t noticed it earlier. He slid the pouch over, opened it, and pulled out something that looked like one of those pen-laser gun things she wanted but her mother wouldn’t buy.

  You’re not going to cut me open, are you? Talia asked. She couldn’t help herself. If she ever got out of this, she promised herself she’d learn how to control her stupid mouth.

  Naw, honey, the man said without any sympathy at all. Head wounds bleed.

  She closed her eyes as the man brought the pen thing forward. The bald man pushed her chin down to her chest.

  Nothing, he said after a minute.

  Some of these places allow tags anywhere on the back of the head, so long as they’re not in front of the ears for humans. Behind the eyes for most other species, but the back half of the head for humans.

  His voice was coming from behind her. She opened her eyes. Her neck ached from the position, and she felt some heat on her scalp, although she wasn’t sure if she was imagining it.

  There it is. The bald man sounded excited, as if he’d found money. Look at that.

  A six. The small man cursed again. A damn six. When were you born?

  He was talking to her again.

  She gave the date and the year in Earth time, then repeated it in Alliance Standard.

  Thirteen Earth years ago, the bald man said.

  Six, the small man said. That bitch put her here as a decoy.

  What? Talia asked.

  You weren’t born, you know, the man said. You were hatched. You know that, right?

  What? she asked again.

  Maybe she doesn’t know, the bald man said. Or maybe she had things erased. You want to check?

  We can’t check for erased.

  Don’t mess with my brain, she said, truly scared now. She’d seen what happened to people who had memories erased and then crudely repaired. Even with good doctors, those people were a little off.

  She didn
’t want to be any kind of off. She just wanted to be her.

  I don’t have the skill to do a full recovery, the small man said. I was just supposed to bring her back. Humans are out of my league.

  There are truth drugs, the bald man said. I have used them before. Here, hold her.

  They changed the grip on her head. She could have broken away from the small man, but now she was scared. She wasn’t sure she could get away, and if she did, she wasn’t sure they would let her live, for all that staying alive talk. She wasn’t what they wanted.

  They said Mom lied.

  The bald man let himself out the door. Talia wrenched her head free from the small man’s grasp, then shoved an elbow in his stomach, just like she’d learned. Then she pushed away from him, stood, and headed for the door.

  She pulled it open just as the bald man returned.

  He grabbed her and held her against the wall with one hand. Then he gave the small man a look of contempt.

  You really do need me, don’t you?

  I usually work with computers, the small man whined, his voice breathy. I usually recover things.

  The bald man shook his head, sighed, and then, with his other hand, pried open Talia’s mouth. She tried to turn her head, but he slid up the hand that held her and grabbed her neck. He squeezed, and she couldn’t breathe.

  She’d learned how to handle that, too. Kick him, stomp on his instep, knee him in the groin, don’t panic, but it was hard not to panic when there was no air.

  He shoved his fingers in her mouth, and then let go of her neck. She gasped involuntarily, and something went down her throat. Something bitter, so bitter that it stung.

  She had coughed, trying to get it out, and coughed again, and choked, and then everything had gone black.

  Or maybe she just didn’t want to remember. That nagging feeling at the edge of her brain was still there. She could remember if she wanted to, but she didn’t like what she’d said, what they did, what she’d learned.

  “House,” she said. “Unfreeze the playback.”

  She’d hoped to distract herself with it, but instead, her mom sounded panicked, and talked about Talia like she was going to give her away. And then the man talked about that six, and said that she was a false child.

  Her mom didn’t deny it. She didn’t deny anything, except that she’d invented something at Aleyd. They even called her a mass murderer, and Mom had just said that was settled in court, like she was a mass murderer.

  Which wasn’t possible. Not her mom. Her mom told her about all kinds of things, like how you had to treat everybody nice and you had to watch what you did because it reflected on you, and how you needed to be a good person, because bad people got punished in the end.

  Talia’s head hurt, and tears threatened. That little guy—that Recovery Man—had taken her mom. (And that big guy, the bald one, had threatened her.)

  Mom said there might be a chance she’d have to leave, that someone would come and take her, but it would be because of the mistake. Mom said she might go away for a few days, and if that happened, Talia had to contact the lawyer.

  But this wasn’t about a mistake. This was about murder and false children.

  False children.

  Like Talia, who was hatched.

  She wiped at her face. Human babies weren’t hatched. They were born.

  Her mom never talked about Talia’s birth, no matter how much Talia asked. Other kids saw holos of their birth or heard stories or had still pictures taken while they were in the womb,

  But not Talia.

  Her mom said, Talia is my real child, and that weird small guy agreed. Technically, he said.

  Technically.

  He also said: The Gyonnese want the original. The true child.

  Talia wasn’t the original. Talia was too young. She was a false child.

  Humans only had one kind of false child. The kind that wasn’t born. The kind that was hatched.

  In a lab.

  Clones.

  Talia shook her head. She couldn’t be a clone.

  Could she?

  The Gyonnese want the original.

  The original.

  Not the false child.

  Not the clone.

  Three

  Miles Flint sat at a desk he built in the cockpit of his space yacht, the Emmeline. The desk was behind the door, away from the other systems. He’d had to build it himself over the past few days, and then he’d assembled a new computer system from scratch.

  The computer had no links to anything. It was a completely self-contained system, one that used an old-fashioned form of backup. He actually had to stick a knuckle into a special port on the machine and download the information onto a chip.

  He was being as cautious as he could be. The Emmeline was on a meandering path just outside the Moon’s space. He’d programmed the ship to move randomly around the Moon itself, avoiding orbit and avoiding other ships.

  Still, he kept the external sensors on at all times, and an information shield on the cockpit itself. A handful of people knew what he had, and one or two of them might want to destroy it.

  The ship was on automatic, even though he kept all screens on visual and had the ship tell him verbally about any course changes or possible security breaches. He knew he could get lost in his work, and he didn’t want to lose touch completely.

  What he had on this special computer were records and files that went back decades. The files were his inheritance from his former mentor, Paloma, and dated from the years before she became a Retrieval Artist.

  She had died only two weeks before, and he was still coming to terms with all the lies she had told him. When she trained him to be a Retrieval Artist—one of his conditions when he bought her business—she had given him a set of rules to follow. The rules were based in an ethical system of behavior—one, it turns out, she never practiced.

  In other words, Paloma had taught him to be a Retrieval Artist she could admire instead of the kind she was, which was a glorified Tracker. Actually, when he looked at things objectively (and that was still hard, considering how much he had looked up to Paloma), 90 percent of her cases as a Retrieval Artist actually forced her to act like a Tracker.

  Or she chose to act as a Tracker. Tracking was easier than Retrieving.

  He got up and went to the small galley off the cockpit. There, he poured some steaming hot water and made himself some tea with imported Darjeeling from Earth.

  Since he’d become rich, he indulged in only a few things, but food was one of them. Most of the food on the Moon was processed or synthesized, designed to taste like the real thing and packed with synthetic nutrients that supposedly worked like regular nutrients.

  But food grown in the Growing Pits outside Armstrong’s Dome tasted better than the synthetic stuff, and food imported from Earth—so long as its transport time was less than two days from harvest or cooking—tasted even better.

  He splurged on all kinds of things and found that he had gained nearly ten pounds—he needed to eat less, he supposed, to get the same nutritional value.

  Or maybe he was simply justifying his expensive new habit. He still wasn’t used to real luxury—which he defined as useless comfort. Part of him felt that something had to have a purpose before he could splurge on it, which was why the Emmeline was the top of the line, but he still had the apartment he’d lived in when he joined Armstrong’s police force all those years ago.

  He carried his tea into the game room, which he rarely used, and stared out one of the portals. The Earth was off-center, its blue-and-white beauty just hinted to at the edge of the circular window.

  He’d been to Earth a few times, and while he liked its food, he felt very out of place. He was becoming even more of a loner than he had been before quitting the police force, and Earth was too crowded for him, too diverse. He preferred the familiar, and sometimes he preferred the solitude.

  Which was why this journey on the Emmeline was necessary.

  Whe
n Paloma died, she had left him a holographic message that explained some—although not all—of the lies she had told him. She also told him that he inherited her entire estate. While he hadn’t needed the money, he eventually did discover why she had entrusted him with the remains of her life.

  She had secret files that dated all the way back to her earliest days in Armstrong. She wanted him to have them and the information in them.

  He’d scanned them, and had been shocked at their content. He also realized that those files held more secrets than he could absorb in a few weeks.

  He brought them, and the ghost files she had left on the computers in the office he had purchased from her, onto the Emmeline.

  The ghost files intrigued him the most. He had discovered them a year after he bought her business, and figured that she had simply been too inept to delete everything from the systems.

  It wasn’t until her death that he realized she had probably left those files in the system on purpose, hoping he would find them and confront her about them. Then she would have been able to admit to him all those things he learned after her death.

  Although he’d found nothing in the ghost files so far that proved the supposition.

  He might have to go back to his original assumption: she was too inept to adequately clean the confidential information off her systems.

  He finished his tea, stretched, and left the game room. He put his cup in the recycler and returned to the cockpit, making sure the protective systems were still in place.

  Then he went back to work, doubting he would find anything, but looking, just the same.

  Four

  Hadad Yu, also known as the Recovery Man, stood on the flight deck of his cargo ship and listened to the pounding below. It sounded determined and angry.

  He’d never thought of soundproofing the place.

  He hadn’t had to before.

  “I am not going to be able to listen to that all the way to New Gyonne City,” said his partner, Janus Nafti. He rubbed his bald head for emphasis. He had cleaned the tattoos off his face and removed the whitener from his eyes. Now his skin was dark and pristine and his eyes a deep, royal blue. “I’m going to get a headache.”