The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016 Read online

  “She’s worked at the base for more than thirty years,” he added.

  “What part of security did she work in?” Bristol felt like she was behind in understanding what he knew.

  “That’s the thing.” Wèi glanced at the holographic image. It didn’t move, of course, making it look like a woman frozen in place, a woman who thought she couldn’t be seen simply by not moving.

  Bristol made herself look away from the image, and look at Wèi.

  He seemed to have been waiting for that, to get her full attention. She wasn’t sure why, exactly, except that he felt what he was going to say next was extremely important.

  “Kimura worked as an information manager,” Wèi said, as if Bristol should know what that was too. “She had been reassigned.”

  Bristol shrugged, then shook her head.

  “She didn’t leave her office. She could work at home with some of the non-classified stuff.” Wèi was speaking louder with each sentence. Tranh glanced over at him, as if he were making her nervous. “If she was in her office right now, we would probably farm some of this information up to her.”

  Bristol frowned. “I’m sorry. I still don’t understand.”

  Wèi took a deep breath, as if speaking the next sentence aloud put a huge burden on him.

  “She shouldn’t have been able to come down here. With her security clearance, she was limited to the upper part of the base.”

  Now, Bristol was really confused. “Then how could she work on secure materials?”

  Tranh gave Wèi an exasperated glance as if she believed he was making all of this too difficult.

  “The security team has several different kinds of clearances,” she said. “Some are information-based, some are location-based, and some are both.”

  Bristol let out a small breath. She wasn’t looking at Wèi any longer, and she tried not to look at that holographic image. The longer she stood near it, the more it upset her.

  She was watching Tranh. Tranh had come closer, as if she knew that Bristol felt more comfortable around her. Maybe Bristol did. At least Tranh was a familiar face.

  “So, Glida Kimura had information clearance,” Bristol said, “and nothing else.”

  Tranh nodded.

  “She used to have overall clearance, though.” Fitzwilliam spoke from the back. Both Wèi and Tranh turned at the sound of his voice. Bristol couldn’t entirely tell, but it seemed to her that his words surprised his teammates.

  “How do you know that?” Wèi asked before Bristol could.

  Fitzwilliam’s uneven face broke into an uneven smile. “I used to work with her,” he said. “A long, long time ago.”

  EIGHTEEN

  TEVIN SENT ZHOU and Novoa back to the van with the body. Because it was so waterlogged, it was heavier than the average female body. But Zhou was strong and could have carried it on his own. Novoa was just as strong, and would back him up if he needed help getting the body out of here.

  Tevin trusted the two of them to handle the path back to the van on their own. He didn’t trust Dinithi. She was too inexperienced with this part of the Falls.

  He kept her here, beside him, partly because she was a hard worker, and partly because he needed to teach her when the rules were more important than her rebel spirit. Back here, in the side pools behind the Falls, rules trumped everything.

  The lights were still on from above, making the pool water seem greenish-gold, and the Falls ice-gray. The falling water wasn’t as much a sound as a vibration: He could feel it in his teeth, and all the way through his bones. He knew he would feel it in his dreams for the next two or three nights.

  He and Dinithi were using scanlights, catchalls, and good, old-fashioned water rakes to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. He had two small underwater probes in his equipment bag, but he didn’t want to use them. The probes cost money, and no matter how skilled one of the team was at deploying them, they always ended up getting caught in the currents in this pool and eventually getting destroyed on the rocks.

  He would use the old-fashioned equipment first, then, if he had a hint that he had missed something, he would send out a probe. If the probe saw something, he would send in divers to recover it—if he couldn’t do it with more equipment.

  All judgment calls, and all based on what he knew, what he was told, and what he could see.

  He and Dinithi needed to make certain that they hadn’t missed anything. After all, there had been two pair of shoes on that overlook, which meant there could easily have been two bodies in this pool. His big concern was that one had floated and the other had sunk.

  “You know they think that the body belongs to Glida Kimura,” Dinithi said softly.

  Tevin wished she hadn’t spoken, because her words were now on the record. His entire team was still wearing their hoods, ostensibly so that they could continue to communicate. He had other ways to communicate with the team that didn’t require wearing the full environmental suit. But it was dangerous back here, and he wanted both himself and Dinithi protected if one of them accidentally fell into the pool.

  He didn’t answer Dinithi. He was using one of the rakes to stir up the water. The rakes could extend and go deep. They also had cameras attached to the tines. No one was examining the live footage. He would go over it himself when he returned to YSR-SR headquarters.

  “You could have told them what you saw,” Dinithi said. Clearly, his silence was irritating her.

  He wanted to tell her to shut up. He hated on-the-record speculation. He glanced at her. She was using one of the scanlights toward the edge of the Falls.

  The scanlights floated, pointing downward, illuminating what was beneath them. She had to have a small window open on her hood visor so she could monitor what the light was showing. She wouldn’t turn up much that way because the water was constantly churning, but it was the only way to safely examine that part of the pool.

  At some point, he would have to decide whether or not to send divers into the pool to see if they could find another body. He wanted to avoid that if possible. The surface of this part of Rockwell Pool looked calmer than the rest of the pool, but no part of the pool was calm, particularly below the surface.

  He’d only been down there once, but the currents, crosscurrents, and eddies were so strong that he had felt pulled in a thousand different direction at once.

  It was the hardest dive he had ever done, and he didn’t want to repeat it.

  “Why didn’t you tell them?” Dinithi asked.

  She clearly wasn’t going to let this go.

  “I don’t do investigations on the fly,” he said, more for the record than for her.

  “That’s not true,” she said. “I’ve been with you on several recoveries where you identified the body right away.”

  He grated his teeth together, then wondered if the sound would show up on the record. Maybe he shouldn’t care. But he did.

  He raked harder. The water in front of him was filled with sediment, but none of it looked like human detritus of any kind.

  He made himself focus on that, instead of answering her.

  “I mean,” she said, “they think it’s—”

  “It doesn’t matter what they think,” he snapped, cutting her off before she repeated the identification for a second time. “What matters is what they know. They were basing their opinion on hair color and clothing. No one was down here until us.”

  At least, that was what he hoped they had based it on. He never really questioned it. He hated knowing the assumptions before he went into a scenario. Sometimes he hated it because he didn’t want to know the details—the deceased is a family man, three children, all under the age of five. Raising them alone—and sometimes, he didn’t want to know because knowing pushed the identification in the wrong direction.

  This, clearly, was one of those wrong-direction times.

  Which he didn’t want to explain to Dinithi, not on the record, not in the ways that might actually make some kind of difference
in some kind of investigation.

  “Tevin,” she said. “If you know—”

  “That’s just it, Cherish,” he said. “I don’t know. I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell, not from the kind of examination we did. Sometimes you can know. Sometimes you can guess. I didn’t know and I couldn’t guess.”

  “But you could have used an image—”

  “No.” He stood up. His back ached from the pulling and raking and the lifting of the body. He winced, and wished he hadn’t. “It’s not my job—it’s not your job—to identify the person we recovered. It’s our job to recover that person. We’ve done that. And now we have to see if she was alone down here. That’s all.”

  Dinithi didn’t answer, which was typical of her behavior whenever he spoke sharply to her. He loved her work, but he had to remember she was, like everyone else on the crew, a volunteer. She was supposed to have training, but she probably didn’t have as much as some of the other volunteers had when they were new.

  He actually had no idea, because training quality depended on the training instructors. Everyone saw the recorded stuff and went through the same tests, but when it came to the in-the-field hands-on work, it all depended on who the trainer was and what kinds of calls the young volunteers went on.

  “It looked like Glida Kimura to me,” Dinithi said sullenly.

  Tevin felt his heart sink. He did not want that on the record at all. When they returned—hell, when they got off the communications equipment—he would remind her not to have these kinds of speculative conversations when they were being recorded.

  “Did you know her?” he asked, because he had to ask that now, because she had forced his hand.

  “No,” Dinithi said, and he cursed silently.

  “Then what makes you say that?” He needed to ask that question as well, now that she had forced him into it.

  “I called up her image when I heard the speculation. The features match up,” Dinithi said.

  He almost asked how she could know that, given the distortion from the water, but he didn’t want any more of her opinions on the official record.

  Instead, he said, “The features were hidden in the bloat, the skin was damaged by the cold water, the eyes were cloudy. We can’t make identifications based on visuals when that happens. It’s not allowed by the death investigator, and frankly, it shouldn’t be. So stop speculating, Cherish. It does no one any good.”

  She didn’t respond again. He was glad for that. This conversation was over, as far as he was concerned. He’d have to shut her down even harder if she tried again.

  But she didn’t say anything. Instead, she was running the scanlight back and forth over the same patch of water.

  He hoped that was a mental glitch on her part.

  “Tevin,” she said in an entirely different tone of voice. “You need to look.”

  He sighed and piggybacked on the scanlight signal she was working off of. A window opened in his hood visor. He saw sediment, white and powdery, then shadows of the water as it forced its way down toward the bottom of the pool.

  He almost asked her what she was talking about when he did see something, something glittery that caught the light, something that was not a natural part of the environment.

  “Move the light again,” he said, coming over to her side.

  Then he leaned as far forward as he could, pushing with the rake. Whatever it was didn’t budge. It was wedged down below.

  He was about to give up on the rake entirely when it grated against something. The little window on his hood visor showed him that the rake’s tines had snagged a bit of chain, raising it up just enough to reveal fine links, tiny ones—not something to hold equipment, but something ornamental. A metal lanyard, maybe, or maybe a necklace. A long one.

  He couldn’t tell what it was attached to, if it had fallen free from the corpse’s neck or if it had been dropped a decade ago by some long-lost visitor. The scanlight didn’t penetrate any farther into the gloom.

  All he could see below were rocks and shadows.

  He cursed, under his breath this time.

  He was going to have to send in the probe. And generally, when a probe went into the water, divers followed.

  “Okay,” he said, gently dislodging the tongs from the chain. “On to phase two.”

  NINETEEN

  RAJIVK STEPPED INSIDE Bristol Iannazzi’s lab. He had never seen it so crowded. People he didn’t know, some in environmental suits, worked at the lab stations against the wall. Others carried tablets, and still others worked with holographic screens, all examining data.

  He didn’t see Iannazzi at all, which surprised him. She was usually at the center of this lab, like a spider in the middle of a web. He’d always hated coming down here. She usually had an anacapa drive open and half-disassembled on the platform in the center of the room. The lab usually smelled like some kind of spicy incense, even though she didn’t burn any here. She probably burned it at home, and it came in on her clothing. Because she didn’t dare have fragrances in here that would interfere with the anacapa drive.

  He looked at the center of the lab, the anacapa table and storage. The table was folded up, forming part of the container for the drive. The container was locked, and a red light blinked on the console, signifying that the lock was encrypted as well.

  At least no one had gotten into that, yet. It didn’t quite relieve him, but it did make him feel incrementally safer.

  The only thing that calmed him were the members of Iannazzi’s team—his team—hunkered in the back like refugees in a foreign land. Five of them, clustered together, watching the others work as if the lab had been invaded by a foreign army.

  He didn’t see Iannazzi anywhere. But he went to the rest of the team. Three women, three men, counting him, with Iannazzi above all of them, although that really didn’t count. Rajivk’s immediate supervisor wasn’t Iannazzi. It was Jasmine Pereyra.

  She stood slightly in front of the team, as if she were guarding them against intruders. She was a tiny, plump woman with hair that changed color almost daily. This day’s color, fading as the day had faded, was a peachy purple. It made her dark skin seem sallow. Or maybe that was her reaction to everything going on.

  “Where’s Bristol?” he asked quietly, instead of saying hello.

  “In the storage room,” Pereyra said just as quietly.

  “What the hell happened?” he asked.

  “From what we can tell, a break-in and possibly a theft.”

  He immediately glanced at the anacapa container. His throat closed with the panic that had threatened since he realized all the security had been bolstered because of the crisis—whatever the crisis was. A stolen anacapa, particularly one from this lab, was beyond a crisis.

  It was a disaster. The anacapas here were malfunctioning. Iannazzi was the expert on repairing the small anacapas. The rest of the team backed her up, did research on lost anacapas or on the ships that worked with the anacapas. The ships were his specialty, but half the team, those huddled behind Pereyra, did the anacapa work.

  “No,” she said, following his gaze. “That’s okay as far as we know.”

  He frowned at her.

  “The runabout in the storage room is gone,” she said, “and the room is damaged.” She swept a hand at all the people around him. “Everyone here is supposed to figure out what happened.”

  Security investigations. That explained it. But his brain was having trouble figuring out what was going on. The runabout in the storage room was being retrofitted. It had many working problems. It should have been retired decades ago, but the captain of the Ijo liked those old-fashioned runabouts and wanted to keep them in service.

  “If they’re all investigating what happened,” Rajivk said, “then why are we here?”

  “Because Bristol thinks this might be a tech issue,” Pereyra said.

  Rajivk started to ask another question, but Pereyra raised her hand, stopping him.

  “That’s all I know. She’s
in the storage room. Now that we’re all here, we’re to report there.”

  He stiffened. The room was small and wouldn’t hold the six of them, plus Iannazzi and the runabout.

  But the runabout had been stolen. His frown grew. To steal a runabout from a storage room at the deepest security level of a sector base, the anacapa had to be activated. And Iannazzi had removed the anacapa drive, replacing it with an even older one.

  He hadn’t been present for that, but he had known about it. That was one reason why he had refused to work on that particular runabout until its regular anacapa drive was repaired. In theory, the regular drive wouldn’t malfunction while he was on the runabout.

  He had been lobbying to have Leroy Sheldenhelm work on the interior of the runabout—on-site—while Rajivk remained in his lab, studying the data. He had delayed the decision, though, by asking Iannazzi (through Pereyra) to wait until the original anacapa was restored.

  Sheldenhelm stood near the back wall, head down, fingers laced together in front of him, as if he had just finished praying. He looked terrified.

  Rajivk didn’t need to see that. He looked away.

  “Come on,” Pereyra said, and then headed toward the storage room.

  Rajivk waited until the others followed, then brought up the rear. He hated that storage room. It was larger than some—big enough to handle the runabout—but the room had always felt slightly claustrophobic to him. The idea of working in there, along with five other people, and Iannazzi, made him nervous. He hated being in that room with anyone else.

  As he threaded his way around the closed anacapa storage container, his skin crawling, he wished he were anywhere else. There were too many people in the lab, let alone in that storage room.

  What a strange day. The announcement of the base closure. The shoes. And now this.

  Pereyra opened the storage room door, and voices filtered into the lab, voices that stopped the moment they noticed the door was open.

  Rajivk tensed. Just what they needed: even more people inside that storage room.