Paloma Read online

  Her voice sounded the same, too, strong and commanding and a little too powerful. The hologram was staring at him as if it were alive—as if Paloma were alive—and waiting for the answer to her question.

  “I don’t—um—yeah,” he said, not sure what to say.

  An androgynous voice filled the cockpit, the voice of the ship itself. “Voiceprint verified. Proceed.”

  The hologram folded its hands in front of itself—Paloma folded her hands in front of herself, or she had, whenever she made this recording for him.

  There was no doubt this was all for him. From the moment his hand touched the console, maybe from the moment he entered the ship, this hologram waited for him, waiting for him to get here so it could start up.

  “Miles,” Paloma said with a sigh. “The fact that you’re watching this means I’m probably dead. The Dove is linked to me through a special chip, one that senses my body’s functions. It’s also linked through the standard emergency lines. If the emergency links go down, the ship does nothing. If my body stops working—or somehow gets out of range—the ship is supposed to contact you. You’ve probably heard the recording—I set it up to call for help in my voice, so you wouldn’t think someone was trying to fool you.”

  The message that had come to his office.

  “I used some illegal techniques. If the police are investigating anything, they’ll figure out that I didn’t follow Armstrong regulations. That could get you in trouble. I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t sound sorry. She didn’t even seem concerned.

  But why would she? She had been alive when she made this recording—as some kind of precaution—she had no idea what had actually happened.

  “If both my emergency links and my personal functions shut down, then the ship was instructed to play this hologram for you. There is a slight chance that somehow I could be off-world when this happens, but you would know if I’m traveling. I will make certain of that.”

  He leaned forward, feeling very unsettled, questions already filling his mind. What had prompted her to do this kind of preparation? Had something happened? If so, why hadn’t she told him about it?

  “Of course, if I were traveling off-world, I should be in the Dove, so you can see how unlikely that scenario is.”

  She smiled, and it startled him.

  “Nope. I’m probably dead, and you’re watching this, surprised that it’s even here. I only hope I went peacefully in my sleep, but I’ve always doubted I would go like that. I suspect it was something sudden and unexpected, and now you’re here either looking for information or trying to figure out how to reregister the ship so that you can sell her.”

  Paloma’s smile grew, as if she were satisfied with herself. “Yes, you’ve inherited her, in case you didn’t know. You get most everything, which will also create problems for you. For that, I’m sorry.”

  Then she waved a hand.

  “But I get ahead of myself.”

  Flint was holding his breath. He made himself exhale. Inherit everything? Why would she do that? He didn’t need things—he had enough money to take care of himself.

  But she probably had no one else.

  “Obviously, I can’t know what happened,” Paloma said. “With all the advances in technology, they still haven’t figured out how to let us see the future with any degree of certainty. What I can tell you is this: If you’re watching this and I died in my sleep, then don’t worry about anything.”

  Flint sighed. He wished she had died in her sleep, for her sake instead of his own.

  “But if I died any other way, or if I’ve mysteriously disappeared and the ship is still showing you this message, then you’re going to have to go through my files. And if I was murdered, that’s probably why you’re here.”

  For the first time, Flint smiled. She did know him well.

  Or at least, she had.

  “There are extra files. I’ve kept them here in the port. They’re in a ship called Lost Seas, as in sailing ships, not letters of the alphabet. That ship is registered under the name Lucianna Stuart, which was once, I’m sorry to tell you, my legal name.”

  He’d always known that Paloma wasn’t her full name, but he had thought it was part of her name. He hadn’t expected Lucianna at all, and he wondered why she changed it.

  “It’s no longer my legal name,” Paloma was saying, “but I never changed the ship’s registration, for fairly obvious reasons.”

  He wasn’t sure what the obvious reasons were. He’d learned, with Paloma, that what seemed obvious to her often wasn’t to anyone else.

  “However,” she said, “you have to get to the ship as soon as possible. Because I didn’t change the registration, there will be competing interests for it, interests that have some considerable legal muscle—”

  She waved her hand again, that dismissive gesture he suddenly realized he would miss.

  “I get ahead of myself again.”

  She cleared her throat and rubbed her hand over her chin. Such familiar movements. He threaded his fingers and clenched them together, hard. He had to concentrate on what she was telling him. The holorecording would go away, she said, and if he was wrong—if she had somehow designed this one right—he wouldn’t be able to get it back.

  “I was born Lucianna Stuart in a place called Los Angeles, which is on Earth. It’s a sizeable city; you should be able to find it if you need to. I doubt you will need to. I changed my name forty years ago. I made the change legal because I felt that my own name would never come back to me. I needed a fresh start. I’m sure you understand that.”

  Flint did—at least for himself—but he wasn’t sure about Paloma. She had told him so little about herself over the years, no matter what he asked, that learning anything about her from her (even after death) surprised him.

  She shifted slightly and her gaze became more penetrating. “I can almost see you, Miles. I know what it’s like to teach you. If you were sitting here—”

  I am, he thought. You’re the one who’s not here.

  “—you would say, ‘Why are you telling me all this now? Why not before?’ “

  He nodded almost involuntarily. She had captured his thoughts before he even had them.

  Again.

  She took a deep breath.

  “I’m telling you this for a variety of reasons. Let’s start with the important ones first. I have always admired you. From the moment I met that young police officer with the cold determination and such a firm sense of justice, I’ve admired you. I loved the questions you asked me, and I’m sorry I didn’t have most of the answers.”

  Flint started. He always thought she had the answers. He never noticed that she hadn’t.

  “When you bought the business, I thought you wouldn’t last. I was tired. I wanted out. But you asked me to train you, and I realized then that there was more to you than some gritty determination and too much money.”

  A laugh forced out of him. When he bought her business he had just come into his money, and she knew it. Apparently, she was ready to rid him of it as quickly as she could.

  “You have integrity, Miles,” she said. “I can’t tell you how rare that is in my world. You have integrity and heart and a terrifying moral ethic that you haven’t entirely realized yet. In some ways, I’ve held you back from that. I’ve given you rules, said they were hard and fast, and tried to steer you in the right direction, and still you forged your own path. It’s a path I would never have chosen, a path that has all sorts of dangers, and yet it works. It works better than anything I’ve ever seen.”

  She paused. Her skin had grown slightly darker. She was blushing. He’d never seen her blush before.

  “I couldn’t say that to you if you were here,” she said, her voice softer. “I can barely say it now. I’m going to disappoint you, Miles. Worse, I’m going to disillusion you. Everything that you’re going to find—because I can’t be specific, because I don’t know why you’re watching this holo—is going to shatter your life. I’m so
sorry. But it will all come to you—either through me or people who believe they’re my agents. So I thought I’d tell you first.”

  The image wavered, and for a moment, he thought it was going to fade. Then it came back even stronger.

  “I’m leaving you everything as part of my apology. But I’m also leaving it to you because I know that you, unlike everyone else in my life, will respect me, my choices—even if you disagree—and my decisions. You will put yourself back together, and you will be a stronger man.”

  He stared at the image. It was partially translucent. He could see the back of the cockpit through her. Had she done that on purpose or was there something wrong with the transmission?

  “Here’s your first problem, and the only one I can truly foresee in its entirety,” she said. “I told you that Retrieval Artists should work alone. They should have no ties—not of love, not of friendship, not even casual ones. You had some trouble maintaining that, but mostly circumstances—”

  And her voice shook on that word

  “—ensured that you would have no close ties. What I told you is not how I’ve lived. It’s what I’ve learned.”

  She looked away from whatever had been recording her. She steeled her shoulders. Flint had never seen her make that movement before.

  Then she raised her head.

  “I have two children, both sons. And I think if you consider for a moment, you’ll realize who they are.”

  Flint clenched his fingers even harder. He had no idea who her children were. He couldn’t even deduce who they were.

  He couldn’t imagine Paloma with children at all.

  “I made a classic mistake,” she said. “I fell in love with a man I worked with. Even when I tried to extricate myself from the relationship, I couldn’t. You can’t, you know, when there are children.”

  The only man that he knew Paloma had worked for had been a regular contract job she had done as a Retrieval Artist with a law firm—Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor, Ltd.

  Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor.

  Flint’s cheeks heated. That couldn’t be. She couldn’t have been deeply involved with WSX, could she? But she had kept detailed files on one of the sons of Old Man Wagner, files Flint found on another case.

  “You’ve met one of my sons,” Paloma said. “I told you Ignatius wasn’t the brightest Wagner. He was merely brilliant, not a genius like his father or his brother, Justinian. Justinian’s mine, too. The older three Wagner children—all of whom have left Armstrong—are not mine. They left with their mother when she found out about me. About Lucianna Stuart, the second partner. I had been a lawyer once, Miles. I’m sure you find that funny. I would if I hadn’t been so good at it. See? We all have our pasts.”

  Ignatius Wagner was her son? Justinian Wagner, the one who had protected a mass murderer? How had Paloma dealt with that? Why had she allowed it?

  Why hadn’t she gotten involved in that case when Flint was working on it? Was that why she had given him the first Dove, because just from the cursory information that Flint had given her, she knew her sons were involved?

  Her sons.

  Whom she would not allow to inherit anything of hers.

  Sons.

  Flint felt lightheaded. He had had more shocks this day than he knew what to do with.

  The hologram continued. “My sons have always wanted more of me than they could have. I wasn’t maternal. I had them on the condition that Claudius—their father—would raise them. He wanted an empire, and I was in love enough to give him one.”

  Flint frowned, not entirely understanding. An empire—built with children? Perhaps sons to continue the Wagner name?

  He wanted ask her what she meant, but he couldn’t. The hologram was not interactive, for all its resemblance to the real Paloma.

  She was gone, and he could never ask her a question again.

  “Of course, nothing lasts forever,” she said. “Especially love.”

  She sounded rueful. Then she gathered herself and looked back at the camera that made the recording.

  “My sons will fight you, Miles. They’ll want everything, particularly the files that pertain to WSX. I’ve remained a partner in the firm—that’s my last name on the door—but I put the money in a trust so that none of us could get to it. Those funds will go to various charities. A lot of them will help people that WSX has hurt.”

  She took another deep breath—or she had, way back when she made this. Flint flashed on her body again, how crumpled it had been, how it couldn’t breathe even if it tried.

  He wanted to stand, wanted to pause this thing, but he was afraid if he did, it wouldn’t come back. He would miss the rest.

  He wasn’t sure he could process much more, though. He was already stunned at Paloma’s family, the fact she’d been a lawyer, the fact she’d been good enough to become a partner—a senior partner (a founding partner?) in WSX.

  “I wish I could say I got ethics. I wish I could say—like you did when you finally realized what the laws were like, and how you didn’t want to uphold them. I wish I could say I had a change of heart, but I didn’t, Miles, not at first. I left the law, even though I was good at it. I left Claudius. I was the one who did everything she could to force him to dissolve the relationship, and when he refused, I dissolved it anyway.”

  Flint shook his head. He didn’t want to believe that of her. He didn’t want to believe any of this.

  “I needed a change of pace. I trained with some Trackers.” She crossed her arms, looking defiant. “I signed on with one of the major corporations as their chief Tracker, and I was good.”

  He had heard rumors that she tracked, and hadn’t believed it. When she trained him, she had had only contempt for Trackers, saying that they piggybacked on the real work that the Retrieval Artists did, and when they found a Disappeared, they simply turned that person in with no regard for the consequences.

  Had she been speaking of herself?

  “But the big money was in Retrieving.” She shifted a little. “And yes, Miles, it does come down to that.”

  He ran a hand through his hair.

  “You were so shocked that I bought my condo, so shocked that I ran through money the way I did, buying and spending and acting rich. You thought that wasn’t me. But you never really investigated it. You thought I was what you found, an old woman ready to retire, ready to achieve her dreams. I am so much more than that, Miles, and so much less.”

  He frowned. He wanted to stop her—he could stop her, he supposed, but then he would always wonder what else she had planned to tell him.

  “I became a Retrieval Artist, and I soon learned that I would have to work very hard to earn the money I thought I deserved. So I Tracked on the side for WSX. We always called it Retrieving, mostly because I never brought former clients back into the fold, but it was Tracking, and they paid me well. Claudius thought it was funny—I had left the fold only to return in what he saw as a lesser capacity. It wasn’t. It gave me deniability, and it let me walk away.”

  Her lips thinned. She tucked some of her floating hair behind her ear, then shrugged.

  “There’s a lot in these files,” she said. “A lot of regrets, a lot of possible enemies, a lot of information that could damage not just WSX but some powerful people in various domes, as well. It’s not pretty, Miles. I was starting to realize that before I met you. Then you came in with all that bluster and strength, and I understood I could have done so much more. Just like you wanted to do. I taught you to be the kind of Retrieval Artist I always admired, Miles, not the kind I was.”

  His shoulders ached. He was sitting in an awkward position, half-leaning forward, half-twisted away from her.

  “That’s what I needed to tell you, Miles,” she said. “I needed to disillusion you myself. I couldn’t let some investigation do it. I couldn’t let you go down blind alleys, not with Justinian on your back. He’ll be vicious. He was raised that way—not just by Claudius, but by my example. He’ll want everything I leave to you
. Don’t let him have it. He’ll use a lot of it in the wrong way. I’m sorry to put you in this position, Miles. I had hoped I would have a lot more years. I planned to update this every year, but if you’re watching it now, then you need to know this is only the first of these I’ve made. Something has gone wrong for me, and I’m leaving it to you to fix things if you can.”

  He was shaking. He wasn’t sure why. But he was. His legs barely moving, his hands shaking, his teeth chattering. He wasn’t cold. He was just shocked. Deep-down shocked.

  “If you find, after all this, you can’t do it for me,” she said, “do it for the people in the files. Don’t let my sons destroy everything. Don’t give them more power than they already have.”

  She reached a hand forward, as if she could touch him.

  “I trust you, Miles,” she said, and vanished.

  Twelve

  Ki Bowles stepped out of Terminal 25 into the main section of the port. Tourists from various places passed her, all in a hurry to get to their destinations. The humans carried their own bags, nearly running to make whatever shuttle they were going to. Several Rev—large creatures with a ginger odor and a bowling ball shape—cleared the entire corridor as they hurried through.

  They were followed by a group of Tegarkian Lap Dogs, who, despite their names (which was not what they called themselves), were fierce negotiators and even fiercer competitors on the intergalactic economic stage. They were tiny, though—not quite as large as Bowles’ foot—and they did look like small dogs.

  It was amazing that the Rev hadn’t stepped on them.

  This part of the port was heavily decorated—the black walls covered with rotating art from various cultures—and filled with comfortable chairs for any traveler who wanted to rest. Most of the port was utilitarian; this was the only area that had any comforts at all.

  It also smelled of real coffee and freshly baked breads, scents that made her mouth water. She ducked into a café near the entrance of Terminal 25, then ducked out again when she saw the Terminal 25-level prices.