The Disappeared Read online

  “Oh, but I will,” he said.

  She looked at him as if she didn’t understand him.

  He gave her a cool smile. “We have to know who released the pods and why. There might be more people out there, more people the Disty are after.”

  “It’s not our problem,” DeRicci said. “If the Disty are doing vengeance killings, then they have every right to hunt those people down.”

  “And if these people are only peripherally involved?” he asked.

  “You know the law, Miles,” she said. “We stay out of it.”

  He knew the law. He’d just never faced it before. So far, his cases had involved humans committing crimes against humans. He always knew he would deal with the various alien cultures that existed in this part of the universe, but he hadn’t expected to so soon.

  “I’d read about these things,” he said, “but I had no idea how gruesome they really are.”

  Something in her face caught him, a softening, a look behind the tough woman she always pretended to be. “You’ll have to get used to it. The Disty are one of our nearest neighbors and closest allies. We never complain about them, no matter how hideous their sense of justice is.”

  Then she walked away, heading back toward the passenger cabin, effectively ending the conversation.

  Flint stared at the body scattered around the cockpit. That desecrated corpse had been a human being not too long ago. He shook his head, willing the thought away. He had learned, after his daughter died, how to keep his emotions and his intellect separate from each other. That was one of the reasons he’d been promoted to detective.

  He didn’t dare lose that detachment at his first gruesome crime scene. He studied the carnage until it became a puzzle, needing to be solved, and then, like DeRicci, he left.

  Three

  Ekaterina leaned back on the plush seat of the space yacht. The man who had brought her here, the man who said his name wasn’t Russell even though that was what she should call him, had told her to get some rest.

  But she couldn’t rest, any more than she could eat. She kept playing that last encounter with Simon over and over again in her mind. That would be the last time they would ever see each other. The last time they dared see each other, and it hadn’t gone the way she wanted it to. If she had the chance to do it her way, she would have told him everything, sworn him to secrecy, and apologized for getting involved with him in the first place.

  But she hadn’t done that. She couldn’t do that. Even if he promised never to reveal a thing she had told him, he might not be able to live up to that promise.

  One small sentence would be enough of a slip to get a Tracker following her. And a Tracker would report to the Rev.

  The passenger section of the yacht was big. It seated ten in the front where she sat now, and the seats folded out into single-bed-sized cots. The back boasted four suites: bedroom, living quarters, and bathroom designed, she supposed, for the Disappeared who paid some sort of premium.

  Or perhaps the suites were standard on a yacht of this type. She had no idea and no one to ask. She had expected to be one of many on this yacht, all of them going to new lives in new places. New identities, new jobs, new ways of approaching the world. She had imagined conversations—not about what they’d done or why they believed they needed to be Disappeared, but about their fears, their hopes, their dreams.

  She still had dreams. There was only one she stifled, and that was the one about returning to her old life, to San Francisco and to Simon.

  She had to be someone else now. It was the only way she, and the people she loved, would survive.

  Ekaterina stood and paced, as she had been doing ever since the yacht left Earth orbit. It felt odd to be sitting in the passenger section of a ship this small. When she was in college, she’d made money running orbital ferries during the summer. She took tourists around Earth, and showed them the sites from orbit. The job got old after a while, but handling the controls didn’t.

  Maybe the folks at Disappearance Incorporated would use her piloting experience and give her a similar job on another world. Maybe she would have a chance to try something she had dreamed of doing. She knew she wouldn’t be practicing law any more—that would be too obvious—but perhaps she would work in a related field.

  She touched the petals in her pocket. She was surprised they were still there. She had expected to be searched when she got to the space port, but she hadn’t been.

  The man who wasn’t Russell had walked her inside as if nothing were unusual. They had gone through side doors that led to a series of private yachts. She had never taken a private space flight before. All of her previous trips had been on commercial flights, and the regulations there were strict. Everyone was searched. Only so much extra weight could go on board, and everything was examined for its potential harm to the flight.

  Days before she left home, she had put a laser pistol in her purse. She had thought she might have to use it before she Disappeared, but no one had approached her. Even as she was finishing her final preparations for her Disappearance, she had left the pistol in her purse. The people at Disappearance Inc had told her to trust no one—not even the people who were to take her from place to place.

  The laser pistol, miraculously, made it out of Earth’s orbit, something that never would have happened on any other flight.

  If she had known that those regulations would be so lax, she would have brought a few other things. Her engagement ring, maybe, or a tiny silver pin that had been made by a Maakestad ancestor in the seventeenth century.

  One or two tiny things to remind her of home.

  Of course, that was precisely what she wasn’t supposed to do. Precisely what, the administrator at Disappearance Inc had told her, most people who got caught did wrong. They couldn’t let go of their past. They couldn’t let go of their own identities.

  They got caught because they didn’t understand how important it was to be reborn as someone else. No baggage, no past life, nothing except the person Disappearance Inc told them to be.

  You have to forget who you were, the administrator said. And you have to become someone new.

  Ekaterina could do that. She had known it from that first conversation with Disappearance Inc three weeks ago. She might have known it even before she approached them.

  But it still felt odd to be stripped down to her core self. Nothing would remain the same, not her job, not her name and maybe, if the company felt it necessary, not her face. The only thing she would have would be her memories, and she wouldn’t be able to share them with anyone. Ever.

  The door to the crew section slid open. The woman who told Ekaterina to call her Jenny entered. She was slender, her features as flat as Russell’s. Everyone she had met at Disappearance Inc had been so enhanced that they no longer looked like the person they had once been.

  It made Ekaterina uneasy.

  The door slid closed. Jenny handed Ekaterina a hand-held. Ekaterina hadn’t been linked for nearly a week. She usually wore security chips that linked her to her house’s system, her office, and the net. She had never gone for the full package—total linkage all the time—because she had valued her privacy.

  But not being linked now reminded her how alone she was. She couldn’t tap a chip and record a conversation, and she couldn’t—with a silent command—have House call emergency services. If Ekaterina were attacked now, she’d have to fend off the attacker on her own—no police, no instant 911 recording, no way of getting immediate help.

  The hand-held felt hard against her fingers. She hadn’t used one since she had gone to college on a scholarship, long before she could afford security chips and total linkage.

  “What’s this?” she asked without looking at the screen.

  “Your new identity,” Jenny said. “Read it, understand it, and prepare for it. We’ll give you links and chips before you leave the yacht. Some of this information will be downloaded to you for easy access, but the rest has to come naturally. You have
to make this fit.”

  Ekaterina nodded. She’d heard the speech before. It seemed to be standard at Disappearance Inc.

  “We used all the forms you filled out and your psych profile.” Jenny’s voice was soft. She had clearly given this speech a lot. “Remember, we can’t change anything. That’s not our job here. This is the best DI could do. It’s up to you to make it work.”

  She gave Ekaterina a false smile and stood up.

  “Have you read this?” Ekaterina asked.

  “It’s coded,” Jenny said. “You should have gotten the password before you left.”

  Ekaterina had, but she wanted to double-check Jenny’s answer.

  “So we’re nearly there,” Ekaterina said.

  Jenny shrugged. “I was instructed to give you the hand-held at this point in the journey. Where we are and where we’re going is not something I know much about.”

  She left the passenger area. Ekaterina watched the door close behind her. What would it be like to ferry people from place to place, not knowing where you were going or why? Did people like Jenny take the job for the excitement, the possibility that something might go wrong, and she might have to use her expensive security training? Or did she take it for the opportunity to travel? Or were her reasons more altruistic than that? Was she one of the political ones, the ones who believed that alien laws should not be able to target humans, no matter what the humans had done?

  Once, Ekaterina would have said that she had no opinion on that matter. She did now that it was too late.

  She settled into the yacht’s lounge chair and tapped the hand-held, twisting so that her body protected the screen as she punched in the code.

  Her new name was Greta Palmer. She stared at it for a long time, trying mentally to make it work. All her life, her name had had a lot of syllables, had been almost a language in itself. Greta Palmer seemed too simple, too plain to be her name. To be anyone’s name. It sounded made up to her.

  Ekaterina supposed any name would sound like that. If it were too fancy, she would worry that it sounded contrived. Too simple obviously bothered her as well.

  But she couldn’t hide with any variation on her name. She had to accept the new one.

  Only she wished they had let her pick it out herself.

  She read her new bio with interest. Greta was the same age Ekaterina was, born on the Moon just like she had been and moved to Earth at age three just like she had, and had gone to high school in San Francisco. After that, their bios diverged. Greta had stayed on Earth, not even taking an orbital until she accepted her new job. Ekaterina had traveled to the outer reaches of explored space. Her early training had included guaranteed jobs on three different alien-owned colonies, including Revnata, where she had gotten in trouble.

  Once she had planned on being a lawyer who was certified to argue in front of the multicultural tribunals. Instead, she was running from one of their rulings.

  She hated the irony.

  With a sigh, Ekaterina shifted position, and continued to read. Her new job was recycling textiles. She froze. Textile recycling meant taking ruined fabrics, like torn blankets and ripped upholstery, and remaking them into something cheap and functional. The job was menial and labor intensive. It was about as far from lawyering as a person could get. Intelligence was not an asset at a job like this. It was a liability.

  Surely there was a mistake. Maybe when she got to her destination, she would be reassigned. Or maybe they thought she could hide at a textile plant for a few years, since it would be the very last place the Rev would look.

  But would it really be a good hiding place? She was an educated woman, whose accent, whose simple sentence structure, made it clear that she had spent years studying with some of the galaxy’s greatest minds. Hiding that would be difficult, and might even be impossible.

  Surely Disappearance Inc would have thought of that.

  Maybe they had. Maybe it was buried deeper in the information they had just given her. Or maybe she had the wrong idea about plant workers. Maybe her objections had more to do with her own prejudices than with her abilities or lack of them.

  The idea of working in a textile recycling plant, with fibers floating in the air, not to mention the filth that had to be cleaned off other people’s possessions, made her queasy. She hadn’t had a job like that ever.

  Her palms were damp. She rubbed them on her pants and looked at the rest of the profile.

  The textile plant was in Von, a town she’d never heard of. She would have her own apartment—a one bedroom, company-provided by the plant, and if she managed to save enough money, she might be able to buy a place of her own.

  She ran a hand over her face. Money would be a problem. She had been short on funds before, but she’d always had the family money in a trust. This time, she would have no backup. When she got the company-owned apartment, they would own her. She would need the job and the terrible pay, and she would have to begin all over again.

  For the very first time, the reality of the change she was undertaking was sinking in. Before she had understood the loss, but not the future. She hadn’t thought about where she was going because she had no idea. She had decided not to fantasize about her new life because she hadn’t wanted to be disappointed.

  But she was disappointed anyway.

  An impoverished thirty-five year old woman whose skills only let her do manual labor, who lived in an unknown town.

  She frowned, wondering where the town was. There was nothing about her upcoming destination in the bio. It had to be somewhere else in the material Jenny had given her.

  Or perhaps it was in the hand-held’s database. Most computers carried the same basic information—dictionaries of over 1000 main languages, food compatibility charts for human/alien physiologies, and, of course, maps. She searched the hand-held for a moment, wondering if its memory had been purged of non-relevant information, and finally found what she was searching for.

  The map function. She typed in Von and added that it had to be in territory that could be occupied by humans. She only got one hit.

  It was on Mars.

  She stared at the map for the longest time. The blinking feature showed that Von was in Mars’ northernmost region, above the Arctic Circle. Obviously the town was big enough to have its own dome, but not really large enough to be well known.

  And that bothered her, because she’d been to Mars and she knew what this place would look like.

  Mars was run by the Disty, small creatures with large heads, large eyes, and narrow bodies. They hated the feel of wide open spaces and built their own colonies like rats’ warrens. When they took over human colonies, the way they had on Mars, they added corridors and false ceilings and narrow little passageways, so the entire place felt claustrophobic.

  She could get used to that. She knew there was a possibility she would go somewhere that wasn’t controlled by humans but where humans were tolerated. Initially, she’d even thought she’d go to Mars because the Disty and the Rev did not get along. They avoided each other’s colonies and were barred from each other’s home worlds.

  Then she had done some research. Both the Disty and the Rev had ventured into each other’s colonies in the past few years searching for Disappeareds. Because the Disty and Rev had similar missions, they respected each other’s warrants and often helped each other find Disappeareds on each other’s land.

  Both alien species had caught on to the game that the Disappearance services were playing, and were foiling them on the ground. Instead of hiding Rev fugitives in Disty territory and vice versa, the good Disappearance services were now going for less obvious hiding places.

  Her stomach twisted. She thought she had done the right research. According to everything she’d looked for, all the people she’d talked with, Disappearance Inc was the best Disappearance service in the known universe.

  Why then would it hide her in a place the Rev surely would look?

  She put the hand-held on her lap. Maybe the admin
istrators at DI had misunderstood. After all, she hadn’t written down whom she was running from. She’d told as few people as required by DI’s business practices, but she never told them what she had done because, they said, it wasn’t relevant, and she told only a few of them who she was hiding from since they had to know to keep her out of certain places.

  Like Mars.

  Unless things had changed even more than she realized. Maybe their research was more up to date than hers.

  But, judging by the personality profile they pulled, the job they gave her, and the place they had chosen to hide her, their research was shoddy. Either that, or they had confused her with another client.

  She picked up the hand-held again, and scanned the rest of the information. Her name wasn’t in it, of course, but that bio suggested that this was hers.

  Ekaterina stood, her restlessness growing. Damn them for not allowing her to bring anything along. She couldn’t even carry a hardcopy of her agreement with DI because that was like carrying a piece of identification. She wasn’t linked, so she couldn’t used the password they had given her to access the information.

  Had they planned it this way? If so, why? So that she wouldn’t complain? Were the reports of satisfied customers made up?

  She had no idea.

  Her stomach turned again, that queasy feeling remaining. The Rev never gave up searching for fugitives from their justice system. If she got caught, she’d spend the rest of her natural life in a Rev penal colony.

  She’d seen Rev penal colonies. Working in a textile recycling plant in a Disty-run Mars town would seem like heaven in comparison.

  She would do it if she had to. The problem was that she didn’t feel this identity would hide her.

  But she had no idea what her options were. She tried to remember the text of the agreement she’d signed. Essentially, she was putting her life into DI’s hands. It was, she knew, the only way to survive.

  She hadn’t even asked the lawyerly question: what if they were wrong? She had done what all naïve clients did. Once she had completed her research, she had trusted blindly.