The Recovery Man's Bargain Read online

  For the first time in his life, Yu understood both sides of an argument. The Gyonnese larvae had already split. The genetic material had been preserved in a secondary larval bed. From a human perspective, the equivalent of a twin’s fetus had been lost. While that was a tragedy, it wasn’t like losing an existing child.

  But to the Gyonnese, who considered anything divided from the Original to be inferior, entire families had been destroyed forever.

  The Fifteenth Multicultural Tribunal had no Gyonnese sitting on that particular bench at that particular time. For the court, the incident was an intellectual exercise. While it understood the Gyonnese position, it did not show much compassion for what was, to the Gyonnese, the loss of sixty thousand children.

  As her punishment, Rhonda Flint was to give up all her children—living and any born in the future—to the Gyonnese. But Rhonda Flint’s daughter died in a horrible accident not long after the court’s final ruling. If Flint had succeeded in cloning the child, the clones would not be considered children under the ruling or, indeed, under Gyonnese law.

  But the Gyonnese were sophisticated. They understood that to humans, children—whether they were cloned or created naturally—were considered human. They knew that Rhonda Flint would consider the clone a true child. So they, rightly, believed she had circumvented the rule of law.

  The Gyonnese had given Yu all this material and sent him to a diplomatic conference room to learn about it. He watched the spraying, saw the Gyonnese mourn their young, watched the end of the trial. He saw a visibly frightened human woman burst into tears when the verdict was called. Her lawyer had argued that she wasn’t liable for her actions, that the corporation was.

  While the Gyonnese had ended all of their contracts with Aleyd, they believed punishment needed a living face. And that face belonged to Rhonda Flint.

  The court agreed.

  It was convenient that Flint’s daughter died shortly thereafter.

  Yu was shaking when he finished with the materials. Not just because of what he had seen, but because he knew—on a visceral level—that the woman he saw sobbing on the holoimages before him was a mass murderer.

  The Gyonnese adored their children. Because families could only have one—not by law, just a simple matter of biology—the Originals were so precious that they were kept from outsiders until they reached young adulthood. Even then the Gyonnese treated the young with an affection that touched him more than he wanted to admit.

  If the Gyonnese were right, and this woman had her daughter—the original child—cloned, then she was skirting the law and the legal ruling. And that was wrong.

  Of course no Tracker would take this case. Human governments wouldn’t understand it.

  And Retrieval Artists—at least the ones Yu had met—would think that the Gyonnese were overreacting. After all, there were four other identical “children” per larva. Humans would believe that those children should be treated equally with the Original. But the truth of it was, those children were not equal to the Gyonnese.

  And that was what mattered.

  Before Yu hesitantly took the case for the money. Now he was going to bring back Rhonda Flint to face the courts again because it was the right thing to do.

  Hadad Yu was normally not the kind of man who did the right thing.

  He wasn’t quite sure what to do with his strong visceral reaction to Rhonda Flint’s crimes. Perhaps he had learned a kind of empathy for the Gyonnese that he hadn’t realized. Or perhaps he needed a kind of hatred to go against his essential nature and recover a human instead of an item.

  Whatever the cause, he was now on the case. He would remain that way until Rhonda Flint was in Gyonnese custody—something he would bring about with the same kind of precision he used toward finding missing items.

  ***

  First, he used the Gyonnese’s information as the basis for his own research. He quickly learned that Rhonda Flint had moved from Armstrong on the Moon to Valhalla Basin on Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons. Callisto was the home base for Aleyd, which had turned Valhalla Basin into a company town where everyone had a connection to the corporation, even the visitors.

  Second, Yu made certain that the original daughter was truly dead. He looked at the police reports, studied the visuals. He soon learned that Rhonda Flint now called herself Rhonda Shindo. Flint had been her married name. She had followed an old-fashioned custom and taken on the identity of the man who had fathered that daughter, a man Rhonda Flint/Shindo eventually abandoned.

  Finally, Yu hired an assistant, a man he’d worked with before. Janus Nafti was strong and compliant. He was a big man who shaved his head and wore tattoos as if they were disguises. He wasn’t very smart, but he worked hard. Nafti didn’t question, did as he was told, and rarely spoke unless spoken too.

  Yu promised him double the usual fee, telling Nafti that the Gyonnese were paying him twice as much as usual.

  The rest of the preparations were simple. Yu researched Aleyd, Valhalla Basin, and Flint/Shindo herself. He learned that she now had an on-site job. She was allowed no contacts with races other than humans, and she kept her name off most research, even projects she spearheaded.

  She claimed, in one paper she had delivered at an Earth-based conference, that she had taken a less adventurous position so that she could be home after school every day to be with her daughter.

  Which led Yu to the Aleyd recruitment information system. He put in a request for Valhalla Basin, claiming he had family, and learned exactly how the systems worked there.

  The houses were owned by the corporation and given to the employees according to pay grade. He even found floor plans and rough smart house schematics. He learned when the schools started, when they let out for the day, and which schools catered to what level of income.

  Income was a specious term, since much of Aleyd’s payments for its Valhalla Basin employees came in services, from medical care to shopping bonuses, all of which varied by pay grade. Essentially, everything he wanted to know about the entire community was available on Aleyd’s recruitment site, including how to get through the port at Valhalla Basin with a minimum of fuss.

  All of that relieved him. Kidnapping a human—no matter what the law or the Gyonnese called it—would be the most difficult thing he had ever done. He was happy that finding her, and figuring out the best times to take her, was easier than he expected.

  He hoped everything else would be as well.

  ***

  Getting into Valhalla Basin’s port required very little cunning. He bought seventy-five pieces of high end Earth-made real wood furniture and resold them to Aleyd Corporation. His arrival on Callisto, then, was just that of a businessman making a delivery. He claimed a crew complement of three—two men and one woman—and hoped that no one would check how many crew members he brought into Valhalla Basin because the only one traveling with him was Nafti.

  They unloaded the furniture quickly. They had permission to stay for three days should they need it. Yu hoped they wouldn’t need it.

  He had memorized the map of Valhalla Basin, but nothing had prepared him for the real thing.

  He had expected Valhalla Basin to resemble the Moon’s largest city Armstrong, with its cobbled-together dome, built over time, and buildings of all different styles and shapes.

  But Valhalla Basin was uniform. The buildings in the downtown area seemed to have been built at the same time by the same architect. The dome was also uniform—one arched vista dominated by Jupiter, which loomed over the city like a round attacking ship.

  He didn’t need public transport to get to the neighborhoods. When he landed, he received credits, courtesy of Aleyd, to spend in local hotels, restaurants, and stores. The credits let him rent a vehicle for the day.

  He wasn’t sure if he should call the vehicle a car: it was larger than any car he’d ever seen, with six wheels instead of the usual four. The driver sat in the center, and any passengers had their own section behind him.

&nb
sp; He had chosen the vehicle because the sectioned areas could be shut off and the doors double-locked from the front—a child-protection feature, he was told, but which seemed more like a prison to him.

  Everything about Valhalla Basin seemed geared toward families and business. The downtown, with its austere silver buildings that turned color when the dome itself did, had the no-nonsense image cultivated by most Earth-based corporations. But the neighborhoods had a regimented personality.

  He drove himself, Nafti, and what little equipment he’d brought into the neighborhoods, leaving the vehicle’s talking guidebook on. The talking guidebook was designed for prospective employees, so its patter was upbeat and positive.

  Even without the talking guidebook, Yu could tell when he got to the upscale neighborhoods. The more upscale the neighborhood, the more housing color varied. The houses got larger as well.

  The talking guidebook explained all of this, also mentioning the perks of the house computer systems, something Yu had studied in depth before he arrived.

  He’d paid a colleague to hack into the systems of the company that designed all the household computers for Valhalla Basin. The colleague had downloaded all the specs for the various systems, with a step-by-step guide for diverting the security system, wiping the memory clean, and taking over the House system without alerting the authorities.

  Yu had run through it all on a practice model. He had made no mistakes, and his colleague believed he was ready to handle an actual House system.

  Yu hated field testing, but in this case, he had no choice. He had to disable Flint/Shindo’s House computer before he did anything else.

  He parked half a block away from the address he had obtained through Aleyd’s corporate records. Rhonda Shindo and daughter lived in upper level professional housing. Shindo had opted for the best possible kitchen and a spa in the corner of the backyard instead of a bonus room. She used the spare bedroom as a home office and added the optional second bathroom.

  Yu had reviewed those plans so many times that he felt he knew this house. He’d toured the holographic model, he’d opened all of the various security systems, he had slipped through the doors as if they were his own. He was ready.

  He only hoped Rhonda Shindo wasn’t.

  He had planned his arrival for the middle of the day, when Rhonda Shindo would be at work and her daughter would be at school. He wanted to establish himself in the house before either of them arrived, shut down the House system, and use the element of surprise to get Rhonda Shindo out of there with the minimum of fuss.

  He had to deliver her alive and undamaged to the Gyonnese. He also had to check to make sure that Shindo hadn’t done a secondary bait and switch. There was the slight possibility that her so-called cloned daughter, named Talia, was the actual original daughter, Emmeline.

  Before he left, he needed to check for the mandatory cloning number, which was usually tattooed on the back of the head.

  The house had a side entrance, made invisible from the neighborhood houses by nooks and crannies in the design. Valhalla Basin residents were encouraged to use the front entrance, in full view of the neighbors and the street. Most residents did, but Shindo didn’t.

  She did a number of things that weren’t typical for Valhalla Basin residents, including a refusal to upgrade her House computer to the best model possible.

  Yu’s hacker colleague had already given Yu the repair code for the House system that Shindo was using. All he had to do was touch it into the small security panel on the side door, and the door clicked open.

  “Nice,” Nafti whispered.

  Yu whirled on him. Nafti had prepared himself for this job by tattooing his entire face and extending the whites of his eyes so that his blue irises looked like mere slits.

  “I was just saying.” Nafti shrugged.

  “Nothing,” Yu whispered. “You’re saying nothing from now on.”

  Yu knew that wouldn’t last, but it would cut down on the random chatter. He stepped inside the house. The side door opened into a kitchen that smelled faintly of real Earth coffee.

  “We have not put in a request for service,” the House said in a kind, matronly voice. “I shall notify the homeowner of your presence immediately.”

  “The homeowner requested our presence,” Yu said. That claim would stall the House system while it verified his statement.

  He went into the living room—sparsely decorated with the provided Aleyd furniture and a few personal items—and opened the House’s control panel. One glance confirmed that Shindo had the system he expected her to have, with no upgrades and no internal modifications.

  This was the system he had already disabled in his practices and he did the same here. He set up the system to shut down any human’s internal links, so no one could contact the authorities from the inside. He left the House’s overall system mostly intact—so that environment, cleaning, and general maintenance went on as usual—but he dismantled every aspect of the security systems except the ones that would trigger an automatic silent alarm.

  Which meant that the exterior security barrier was still active. All he did there was disable the cameras closest to the side door.

  He saw that feature as a protection for himself as well. If anyone unexpected—even a police officer—approached the front door, the House would comment on it and ask him if he wanted to take action. The part of the House system that notified anyone outside of the house of an approach had already been disabled by the homeowner, probably because it would be annoying to be interrupted at work every time a neighbor came by.

  Even though the work was easy, his heart was pounding. He was used to quick jobs. When he was recovering things, all he would do was enter, shut down the security system, and recover the item. He would already know where the item was, what it looked like, and how hard it would be to carry.

  “Okay, we’re in,” Nafti said from the kitchen. “Now what?”

  “You let me work,” Yu said. “Go to the bedroom and wait. The woman will be here soon.”

  But not that soon. Yu figured he had about three hours to prepare the scene. He wandered through the common area. He had to set up the repeating holographic message that the Gyonnese wanted to leave behind. The message explained Rhonda Shindo’s crimes, in case the Valhalla Basin police did not know she was a convicted felon under Earth Alliance law.

  The message would give Yu time to escape with his prisoner and get to the rendezvous point. Because even though the Valhalla Basin police department was on Aleyd’s payroll, it had to enforce Earth Alliance laws. And Earth Alliance laws allowed for the capture—or in this case, recapture—of a convicted felon.

  The thing that the holoimage did not mention was that, as far as the Earth Alliance was concerned, the conditions of Shindo’s sentence had been met and there was no need to take her back into custody.

  If the Valhalla Basin police force was like any other force, it would take them a while to access that information and even longer to act on it.

  By then, Yu hoped to have already turned Shindo over to the Gyonnese.

  The side door rattled, then banged open. Yu jumped, half expecting some kind of exclamation out of Nafti. But, for once, the big man said nothing. Maybe he hadn’t heard.

  “Mom?” A young girl’s voice echoed through the silent kitchen.

  Yu’s heart pounded. He had hoped to avoid the girl entirely. She should have arrived home long after her mother had.

  “Your mother has not returned from work as of yet,” the House said.

  Yu felt a half second of relief. The House hadn’t revealed his presence.

  “What’s that smell?” the girl asked.

  Nafti’s cologne. Yu had gotten used to it, but it probably trailed behind him everywhere he went.

  “It is a mixture of yicia leaves and synthesized scent enhancers, probably initially sold in a spray form,” the House said. “I am unfamiliar with the brand name, but I could find it for you.”

  “No,” t
he girl said with irritation.

  Yu pressed himself against the wall. She walked past him into the nearest bedroom. She was as tall as he was, and rail-thin. She also had the blondest hair he had ever seen.

  “Just tell me where the smell is coming from,” the girl said.

  “That information is not available to me,” the House said.

  “What?”

  Yu headed toward the bedroom, hoping it wasn’t the one Nafti was waiting in. He didn’t want Nafti to get to the girl first.

  “What do you mean it’s not available to you?”

  “Exactly that,” the House said. “Certain things are no longer within my purview. If you would like the controls reset, you must contact the homeowner and have her use the established protocols.”

  “Homeowner?” the girl said. “What—?”

  Her voice cut off suddenly. Then there was a large bang, followed by a female grunt. Apparently Nafti had been waiting in that room after all.

  Yu hurried in. Nafti had his strong arms wrapped around the girl. Her eyes were a pale blue and they flashed with anger.

  “Who the hell are you?” the girl shouted. Then she said, “House! House! Notify security! Call the police! Call Mom!”

  “I’m sorry,” the House said. “My emergency system has been dismantled. If you would like to reinstate the programming, you need to…”

  The House system continued speaking, but the girl screamed over it. She kicked at Nafti but he held her tighter, cutting her scream in mid-thrum.

  “You’re not supposed to damage her, remember?” Yu said. He had made that rule when he hired Nafti. Yu didn’t want anyone to get hurt on this trip, particularly the girl and her mother. Not to mention the fact that the Gyonnese wanted Rhonda Shindo to be undamaged.

  Nafti let the girl go. She staggered forward, gasping for air.

  “Grab her arms and hold her, but don’t hurt her,” Yu said. “I have to check something.

  Nafti reached for the girl and she slapped at him. The movement was ineffectual. She was still gasping for air.