Recovery Man Read online

  After that, Talia had to make her attempts in such a way as to not call attention to her failures. That was probably the difference between her and the Recovery Man.

  He didn’t have to worry about losing insurance or leaving other parts of House running.

  All he had to do was make sure he could get away with whatever he wanted to get away with.

  Like imprisoning Talia and kidnapping her mother.

  Talia swallowed hard. Do not panic. Do not.

  A screen fluttered on the wall behind her. Then additional light flooded the closet, and something squealed. The squeal vanished, and House said, “I have succeeded, Talia. I have formed a control panel inside the closet.”

  Not on the wall she’d asked about, but she didn’t care. House probably had to use the far wall so that there would be the right components.

  Talia set down the pointed shoe, pushed some hanging clothes aside, and scooched closer to the panel.

  It looked like all the other panels scattered throughout the house, except that the colors for the various functions bled into each other.

  “Shut off color,” she said. “Use labels instead.”

  She didn’t want to hit the wrong part of the screen.

  House shut down the colors and white labels appeared on top of black squares.

  “Can you talk me through a rehabilitation of your systems?” Talia asked, doubting it could be done. She’d tried to have House talk her through other reroutings before, and House had always said it would need permission to do so.

  “Usually, I require permission,” House said.

  Talia felt encouraged by the word usually.

  “However, since your mother is off the premises and presumably incapacitated—”

  Talia winced at the description.

  “I shall assume that you are now the person in charge of this building. Manufacturer’s authorizations are not required to rebuild already existing systems. But if you wish to add other functions into my programming, I will not be allowed to do so, given the limitations built into my systems. If you would like an upgrade—”

  “No!” Talia said. “Let’s get rid of that damn commercial first.”

  “Certainly,” House said. “Let me tell you how.”

  Six

  Flint found it in some rerouted system folder. A brief mention of his daughter, Emmeline, and a curious notation: On Callisto?

  His breath caught, and for a moment he thought his heart had stopped. A pain ran through his chest that was so deep he rubbed it, willing it to go away.

  It didn’t.

  He stood and paced the cockpit. The space was small, designed for two people maximum. The cockpit had a state-of-the-art navigation board that formed a U shape, as well as a streamlined board that ran straight through the middle of the room.

  In the streamlined board, he’d installed drawers, where he kept things like chips and discs and two laser pistols, so that they would be close at hand. He had weapons stashed all over this ship. He’d learned to be prepared for everything.

  Everything except a mention of his daughter’s name.

  Emmeline had been dead for a long time. She had been shaken to death at the day care center where he’d left her every single day. Shaken as if she were nothing more than a rag doll.

  And what made it worse (as if anything could make it worse) was that she wasn’t the only one. A child had died before her in the same day care center, in the same way. When another child died in the same way after, Flint was the one who noticed the pattern. Flint was the one who reported it, and Flint was the one who got the employee arrested—for murder.

  All of this had happened before he met Paloma. He had gone from his computer job, where he had been one of the best techs in the business, to the police academy.

  He knew he couldn’t save Emmeline’s life, but he could save other children, other people.

  He rubbed a hand over his face, and wandered to the viewscreen. The Moon seemed closer than it had half an hour before. On its surface, he could see dome after dome catching the reflected sunlight.

  From space, the domes looked like growths on the surface. The Growing Pits looked like part of the surface, but the domes seemed like scabs—precarious, dying, about to fall off.

  The tracks of the bullet trains charted paths from one dome to another, and lights flashed from Armstrong Dome’s Port, the largest port on the Moon.

  He’d loved living there. He had thought his life perfect the year his daughter was born. Then she died, and he found a new calling. His wife left, saying she no longer understood him, and he started his new job at the lowest level, a space traffic cop who took orders from almost everyone.

  He shoved his hands in the back pockets of his pants, and looked at the screen, shaping and reshaping itself above the desk he had installed.

  He had met Paloma in his last years as a detective. She’d helped him with a few cases. She had helped him with his final case—the one that had forced him to quit. When he realized he would have to give up a child to alien governments, as punishment for the parents’ crime, and often that child would die, or have its mind destroyed—he could no longer do the job.

  It was one thing to understand the theory; it was another to drag a child, while her parents screamed in the background, to a Tracker or an alien diplomatic representative executing some interstellar warrant.

  So he’d traded information he had received as a cop—broke more laws than he cared to think about—and saved hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives. The action made him rich, enabled him to buy Paloma’s business and ask her to train him.

  And somewhere in that period, just before he quit the force, he had told her about Emmeline.

  This file predated that confession.

  This file predated his first meeting with Paloma.

  He made himself take a deep breath. Paloma’s voice echoed in his head:

  You cannot see everything through the prism of your own pain, Miles. Emmeline is dead. Children die.

  Children die.

  He’d thought that a particularly cold statement, but he’d also believed that Paloma had said those words to him to get him to reconsider his choice. She’d said that when he told her he wanted to quit police work, in that heady week when he saw himself as the only person who could save all those lives.

  Children die.

  He knew that. He knew that better than most.

  So why was his daughter’s name in a file that Paloma had tried to delete? And why had she included that spectacular notation: On Callisto?

  Emmeline hadn’t died on Callisto, and she couldn’t be alive. He had held her broken and battered body against his own. He remembered that moment—not the moment captured by the reporters who had gathered, but the moment as he had experienced it, his daughter’s body too heavy, too cold, too motionless.

  Once his wife Rhonda had accused him of loving Emmeline more than he loved her.

  And she had been right.

  He sat down in the chair and opened the file. He got an error message. The file had to be rebuilt from pieces scattered throughout the other files.

  Paloma had deliberately hidden this information from him. It looked like she had tried to delete it and failed—not the kind of failure that had led him to those ghost files, which was something he’d dub as a fake failure, but an honest failure, an attempt to get rid of the information once and for all.

  He looked at the date of the attempted deletion.

  One week after he had told Paloma he wanted to buy her business.

  About the time he had told her about Emmeline.

  Seven

  The sides of her hands hurt.

  Rhonda slipped to the floor and tilted her head against the reinforced walls. This cargo hold was the sturdiest she’d ever seen. The walls weren’t made from the thin materials most ships used to transport goods.

  This thing seemed to be made of metal, which made no sense, considering the weight. Most ships tried to remain
as light as possible to increase maneuverability. But if the entire ship was built like this cargo hold, this vessel was the heaviest thing she’d seen outside of a museum.

  She made herself take a deep breath and think. She was a scientist. She should be able to think her way in and out of tight situations. If she couldn’t talk her way out, then she should be able to find a way out.

  It was just a matter of being practical.

  Practical. Practical was hard when she wasn’t even sure how she got here.

  The Recovery Man and his oversized helper had stashed their local vehicle half a block away. The Recovery Man had been smart—he had gotten her thinking about Talia and not worried about herself, not until they slipped some cuffs on her wrists, dragged her across the backyard and to the vehicle, where they threw her into the backseat.

  Then she’d protested. The big guy had turned around, pressed his hands on both sides of her face and then...nothing. She had passed out.

  He had obviously used a sedative that got into the bloodstream through the skin, which made her wonder if he’d been wearing gloves.

  But it didn’t matter. The sedative was light, and she had awakened feeling refreshed, which was a little annoying. She should have had some residual pain or fogginess or sadness.

  No matter how hard people tried to perfect sedatives, there were always consequences.

  Unless this sedative hadn’t been approved throughout the Earth Alliance.

  Her stomach clenched. She hadn’t felt that tightening in years. Fear. She was terrified of what would happen next.

  Of what they had done to Talia.

  Of what they might do to her.

  Already they were outside the law. Gyonnese law stated that the punishment for inadvertent murder was to lose the right to raise children. It was hard for the Gyonnese to have children—most Gyonnese could only manage one, and that was through great effort. So the Gyonnese had raised child-rearing to a privileged status, one that could be denied by law.

  The Gyonnese considered the loss of child-rearing status to be the worst thing that could happen to an adult. Worse than imprisonment, worse than torture, worse than death.

  They had already taken away Rhonda’s child-rearing privileges, and she had lived up to that legal judgment, at least according to Gyonnese law. The Recovery Man had been right: Talia didn’t count. She was a false child—not the original, but a clone of the original.

  The Gyonnese had false children under their laws as well, but they weren’t protected or privileged like originals. And the Gyonnese false children were the product of a weird form of binary fission. When the original Gyonnese larvae grew to a certain size, it split, like bacteria did. Sometimes the larvae would split several times.

  The Gyonnese would keep track of the original, and count the others, which also grew to full-size Gyonnese, as false children. The Gyonnese considered cloning to be a similar process.

  Rhonda and her lawyers had worked all of this out. The Fifteenth Multicultural Tribunal had actually approved Rhonda’s request to raise Talia, claiming that her presence did not violate agreements made under Gyonnese law. Nor did Talia’s presence fall under the warrant.

  Rhonda had done everything legally and in full view. That was how she stayed at Aleyd.

  That was how she’d been able to salvage a part of her life.

  This was kidnapping. And it had to have a purpose, one she didn’t understand.

  She stood up, wiped her hands on her skirt, and looked at the cargo hold again. It hadn’t changed. Lights recessed into the ceiling, locks near the small door that led into the ship itself, and another set of locks near the wide doors that allowed the cargo’s off-loading.

  There was no airlock outside those wide doors; she’d already looked. Which meant that this hold wasn’t designed for human cargo.

  Which confused her even more.

  The only humans Recovery Men ever trafficked in were slaves, bought and sold through cultures that were outside the Alliance. Those humans were—if the sensational reports that filtered into Callisto’s news services could be believed—usually scooped off some isolated planet or some small moon or from some newly formed colony.

  Never were they taken from old established places like Valhalla Basin. And never were they taken one at a time.

  She touched the walls. They had no seams, nothing obvious that held the plating in place. What would a Recovery Man use a cargo hold like this for?

  As she ran her hands along the smooth, slightly cool surface, she made herself review everything she knew about Recovery Men.

  They were almost always male—hence the name—although a handful of women had worked their way into the profession, mostly on the con artist side. Recovery Men found things that were “lost” or “missing,” but sometimes they were simply missing from some rich collector’s collection. As in “he’s missing a van Gogh,” not as in, “he once had a van Gogh, and it went missing.”

  Recovery Men were, at best, con artists, and at worst, ruthless thieves who stopped at nothing to get whatever they were after.

  And if this Recovery Man was to be believed, someone had paid him to “recover” Rhonda.

  At least he had left Talia behind.

  Or he had said he left Talia behind.

  Rhonda shuddered. She wasn’t sure how much she could believe this man. Maybe she wasn’t here because of the Gyonnese at all. After all, her legal troubles with them were a matter of public record.

  Somewhat public, anyway. It would take a court order to find them, and a lot of approvals through a lot of government and corporate agencies.

  Maybe this guy was good at breaking into the privately held court records, and maybe he would kidnap people with shady pasts for ransom.

  Anything was possible. Maybe that entire conversation he’d had with her outside the house had been for House’s cameras and recorders, not for her. Maybe that electronic message he’d woven into the door was designed to throw investigators off the trail.

  Maybe this guy wasn’t a Recovery Man at all—at least not the kind she was thinking of. Maybe he was something else entirely.

  She had worked her way around the whole cargo hold. She’d found nothing unusual: no thinning of the plating, no hidden panels, no ridges of chips that allowed someone inside the hold to link to the outside world.

  She’d already checked her links. They were blocked, probably by something inside the ship. This plating wouldn’t normally stop links from working.

  Plating of this sort usually protected from biohazards or radiation or…

  She froze. She hadn’t thought that through, not until now. She had seen plating like this before on science ships, often in the laboratory areas.

  There had been plating like this in Aleyd’s Discovery One, the ship she had taken to Gyonne. She had worked in a lab with walls identical to this, even though her work hadn’t been hazardous.

  All labs, on all Aleyd science vessels, had this kind of plating.

  It was regulation.

  It was practical.

  It was a safety feature.

  She walked into the middle of the hold. Except for a few empty holds built into the floor, this cargo hold was bare. She was the cargo, but she wasn’t the usual cargo.

  She extended her hands and studied them. They seemed intact. No one had removed the hazard chips or the information nodes that she used for work.

  With a fingernail, she removed the nearest hazard chip from its pocket in her skin. Then she inserted it into the reader behind her right wrist.

  Instantly, codes ran along her left eye. She gave her internal systems a silent order to slow down the information; she wanted to read it in real time instead of have the partial computer in her wrist give her an analysis. Partial computers were cheap versions designed for her corporation. They didn’t work well—at least not well enough for her.

  She’d learned long ago to trust her own mind when it came to analysis, at least when she couldn’t link to a
larger network or use the incredible machines in her lab at Aleyd.

  The codes slowed. Then she had them repeat twice more. Finally, she succumbed, letting the wrist computer give her its analysis.

  High levels of radiation, bacteria of all sorts, and more biohazards than the wrist computer could deal with. She recognized some of them; they came from materials banned in the Alliance. She’d wanted a few brought to her lab, but not even Aleyd could get the waivers.

  These contaminants were dangerous.

  Which explained the lined cargo hold.

  She swallowed and tried to remember her training. How long did she have before these leftovers started making her sick?

  She tried to ask the question of the wrist computer, but the damn thing only did analysis of chips installed in that fold of skin. She hated the limitations.

  Then she searched for some kind of computer link in the cargo hold. She’d already touched everything. She may as well try again.

  She kept her movements slow, so she wouldn’t seem frantic. When she didn’t find anything, she let out a moan of frustration.

  Had the Recovery Man picked her up so that she could die a long, slow death in his cargo hold? Was this some kind of Gyonnese revenge that she hadn’t heard of?

  She whirled and headed back to the small door, balling her hands into fists. Then she started pounding again. The fleshy sides of her hands were tender; she wouldn’t be able to keep this up for long.

  Although she’d have to. She’d have to annoy the Recovery Man just so that she could ask him questions.

  If she couldn’t pound any more, she’d kick. And if she couldn’t kick, she’d slam her skull into the plating. If she died doing that, so be it.

  Anything would be better than the deaths she’d read about from all the different contaminants that she’d been absorbing.

  Anything at all.

  Eight

  The closet door clicked open. Talia scrambled outside, afraid that the door would latch closed again.

  She stopped in the middle of her bedroom, startled at the mess. House hadn’t cleaned it up. Her clothes were scattered, her blanket was on the floor, and her bed was unmade. She hadn’t noticed any of that when she got home from school.