Extremes: A Retrieval Artist Novel Read online

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Extremes

  Copyright © 2012 Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  First published 2003 by ROC

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover and Layout copyright © 2012 by WMG Publishing

  Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © 2011 Jonathan Kort, Luca Oleastri/Dreamstime

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  THE RETRIEVAL ARTIST SERIES

  The Retrieval Artist: A Short Novel

  The Disappeared

  Extremes

  Consequences

  Buried Deep

  Paloma

  Recovery Man

  The Recovery Man’s Bargain: A Short Novel

  Duplicate Effort

  The Possession of Paavo Deshin: A Short Novel

  Anniversary Day

  Blowback (2012)

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Start Reading

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  For Jack Williamson

  with love

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I OWE A GREAT DEAL OF GRATITUDE to a lot of people on this project, who helped in a variety of ways. Thanks go to Geoffrey A. Landis for help with some of the science—and so quickly, too; to the 2002 Short Story Workshop for the great, thoughtful, and timely discussions on sf; to my husband, Dean Wesley Smith, for all the support, the willingness to have strange discussions about even stranger topics at the drop of a hat, and all of his wonderful advice about the manuscript. Great advice, however, is only as good as the person who receives it, so I must stress that any errors are my own.

  Thanks, all. I couldn’t have done this without any of you.

  PROLOGUE

  THE EARTH GLOWED in front of him, green and blue and white: impossibly beautiful against the blackness of space.

  Coburn used the Earth as his marker, his goal, even though it wasn’t. The horizon was so close, and the Earth so large, that he almost felt like he could catch it, then hang it, like a souvenir, on the wall of his apartment.

  He followed the designated path on the Moon’s surface, his feet landing in footprints left from previous Moon Marathons. The regolith was packed solid here, the trail as old as time.

  He had forgotten what it was like to be alone with himself in a familiar place, the sweat from his body pooling at his feet before his suit recycled it. Earth marathons were not solitary events. Bodies bumped each other, and the narrow quarters always made him claustrophobic.

  Here he was on his own, with nothing to break the gray landscape except boulders, craters, and the packed trail.

  So he focused on the Earth, and tried not to listen to his own breathing. The sound screwed up the rhythm of his legs. It had been ten years since he had run a marathon in anything less than one-G. He was used to having the pounding of his feet match the force of his breath.

  In.

  Out.

  In.

  But here, on the flat, endless vista outside of Armstrong Dome, he ran with a different rhythm: step, half step, push—or launch, as his coach used to say. Only when Coburn thought of launching off the ground, he wasted energy going up, instead of moving forward.

  He had to concentrate on distance and speed, not height. And while that sounded easy in gravity one-sixth of Earth’s, it was not. There were too many things that could literally trip a man up.

  The monitor, built into the lower half of his helmet’s tinted visor, told him he had run for six miles, although it felt like much longer. The simulated programs he’d run hadn’t been good enough, and the City of Armstrong did not allow any training runs on the cross-country track.

  In theory, no one was supposed to be able to train on the Moon’s surface—suited, in the proper gravity. In practice, a handful of extreme athletes and rebels managed it every year. If they got caught, they faced jail time and disqualification from any off-Earth marathon for life.

  Normally Coburn would have taken that risk, but he hadn’t had time. He’d been planning an extreme event on Freexen, and hadn’t even planned to run in this thing until Jane called him back to Armstrong. Their business, Extreme Enterprises, was running into some legal troubles, and she needed his cool head to help her with the fine points.

  He signed up for the Moon Marathon when he learned he’d be in Armstrong during the event. And this marathon was turning out to be a lot harder than he had expected.

  The first mile had been easy. The area outside Armstrong, like the areas outside any established dome, was almost as tame as the interior of the dome itself. Several established vehicle tracks led to the dome’s exterior services, from the physical plant for each dome section to exterior maintenance and repair.

  A lot of private industry also had buildings outside the dome. Some of those buildings housed exterior equipment. Others had their own tiny environments for workers who had to stay outside for weeks at a time.

  These businesses and buildings were the real reason no one was allowed to train outside a dome. The potential for sabotage was too great. The only way for a domed environment to survive was for the residents to carefully monitor everyone who had access to the exterior.

  Coburn had understood that intellectually. He’d modified his own VR program to compensate for the changes in terrain, so he had trained in the proper conditions.

  But he hadn’t been prepared for the subtle things: the way the blackish-gray dirt moved beneath his feet, forcing him to sink to the harder crust beneath; the impact craters too small to show up on any map—some of them no wider than his fist, just wide enough to trip a runner and send him sprawling; the intensity of the sunlight etching everything around him in clean, rigid lines.

  Yet this was one of the safest places near any inhabited part of the Moon. The area around Armstrong was mostly flat by Moon standards, but it still contained dips and hillocks and hazards too small to place on any official map. And then there were the tiny alterations in the landscape that occurred because the Moon had no atmosphere to block space debris.

  Coburn had read about one runner who had stepped on the sharpened edge of an exploded shuttle, pieces of which had rained on the Sea of Tranquility the month before. The runner severed his foot. His suit, which had been severed along with his foot, depressurized. He didn’t even have time to die from the blood loss. The change in pressure and the loss of oxygen killed him first.

  But cases like that were rare. The more common injuries occurred when a runner misjudged a distance—taking the wrong step before a leap up a four-meter rise, for example. Once launched, a runner was committed—there was no atmosphere to beat against, no air or water to slow him down, nothing to create friction or to use to change the trajectory.

  Coburn had already seen victims of that miscalculation—good runners, excellent athletes, many of them extremists, who had fallen alongside the track, because they’d landed in an impact crater and broken an ankle or fallen against a tiny rise and ripped open one-half of their environmental suit.

  Most suits couldn’t repair damage that great. Coburn’s could, but his had been designed for conditions much more hazardous than this one—races where there were no panic buttons, and no well-worn track covered with generations of boot prints to keep the participants from getting lost.

  He was g
rateful for the suit now. The visor reported the distance to any object up ahead, and it also warned him of potential problems below. Unless he made a careless error, he would make it to the end of the 26.2 miles just fine.

  Coburn ran—if this skip-hopping movement he was making could be called running—toward a boulder. As he approached it, he realized it was taller than he was, and six times as wide. Someone had filled in the sides of its impact crater, and the path around it had been smoothed by the footprints of thousands of runners over the life of the marathon.

  The path along the right side of the boulder was thinner, not as well traveled as the path along the left. This boulder had been here for at least a hundred years, and it held no surprises. Even the tiny craters on the right side had been mapped.

  He approached the boulder faster than he expected, and narrowly missed kicking its outer edge. He veered away from it, focusing on the details of running, the placement of his feet, the way he launched—almost like long jumpers on Earth, only with another jump shortly after the first.

  The boulder cast a shadow that darkened part of the trail. He tried not to land there, trying instead to go past it. When he landed, he could finally see beyond the boulder.

  He saw something white in his path.

  Another fallen runner. Only this one hadn’t crawled off the path like he was supposed to. He was curled, fetal position, as if his injury was somewhere other than his legs and feet.

  New footprints on the dirt to the left of the fallen runner suggested that at least ten runners had already gone around him. None of them had stopped to see if the runner was okay. But that was normal. Coburn hadn’t stopped for the other fallen runners either.

  However, those fallen runners had been moving. Rocking back and forth as they held broken shinbones, pounding the ground in frustration at the lost dream. A few had been trying to get up as he passed, and a few others were stumbling along the pathside, trying to continue despite the injury.

  No one just laid there.

  This injury was clearly more serious than the others had been.

  He wasn’t going to stop—he would lose precious time—but once he reached the runner, and the visor gave him the location readout, Coburn would contact the Med Alert Team and let them know there was an unconscious runner on the path.

  Then the suit came into focus.

  It wasn’t white. It was a pale pink with gold strips that glittered in the sunlight. The bottoms of the boots had a familiar lightning pattern, a pattern which matched the one on the bottoms of his boots.

  Jane.

  She had been about fifth when she left him behind. Having her pass him in a marathon was a normal occurrence. Jane excelled in the run, and her suit, like his, didn’t allow her to lie unconscious for a long period of time. It should have contacted the Med Alert Team directly, rather than leave her here, where at least ten runners had passed her by.

  The only way her suit wouldn’t revive her was if it had failed.

  Coburn found his breath coming in small gasps. He slowed his loping gait, and altered his trajectory so that he stopped on her right side.

  Then he crouched beside her.

  Her face was turned toward the regolith, the helmet’s white shell blocking his view of her visor. He had no idea how she had fallen like this—both legs together, arms gathered against her chest.

  Jane ran beautifully, even in conditions like these. She should have sprawled, like anyone else, unless she gathered herself into this fetal position to compensate for some kind of pain.

  But her suit should have compensated for her by boosting her endorphins, or, if her injuries were severe, medicating her until help arrived.

  Medicating her and keeping her conscious.

  With one gloved hand, he touched her shoulder. The layers of fabric between them made her seem inhuman. He pushed her shoulder away from him, rocking her back so that he could see her face. One of her hands flopped into the dirt.

  Coburn’s mouth was dry. The monitor on the right side of his visor was blinking, cajoling him to breathe regularly and to take a drink before he dehydrated himself.

  He ignored it.

  Instead, he was staring at Jane’s visor. The sunlight filter was on low, allowing him to see inside. What had been Jane’s face was black and contorted, her beautiful brown eyes bugging out of their sockets.

  Coburn’s stomach turned over, and he had to swallow to keep the bile down.

  Somehow he managed to find his own panic button, and he pressed it two, three, maybe four times.

  There was no reason for the Med Alert Team to hurry, but he wanted them here, now, just in case he hadn’t understood what he was seeing.

  Just in case he was wrong.

  ONE

  FIFTEEN DAYS without a case, and Miles Flint was beginning to think he had made a mistake. He wasn’t cut out to be a Retrieval Artist. The solitude was driving him crazy.

  Paloma had warned him about this aspect of the business. A good Retrieval Artist—she said—picked cases with caution. Too many of them were fraught with dangers that weren’t immediately obvious.

  In fact, the systems she had designed, systems he had bought from her when he bought her business, were set up to give him ways out of a case once he had agreed to it. The worst thing a Retrieval Artist could do was find himself in the middle of a case that would destroy lives.

  Flint had thought he was up to the light caseload. His caseload as a detective had been overwhelming, and the idea of being able to pick and chose his jobs appealed to him. He hadn’t thought about the weeks spent sitting alone in his office, waiting for someone or something to come through the door.

  The office was no prize, either. It was small, with only his desk at one end, and the door at another. He had a single chair—his own—so that his clients remained uncomfortable when he talked with him. The single chair also meant that he couldn’t find another place to sit when he was at work.

  There was a back room, which was well hidden, but it wasn’t as comfortable as the front area. There were two other exits, also well hidden, and storage space in a secret compartment that Paloma had built herself.

  The building was made of original colonial permaplastic, and the walls had yellowed over time. The floors tilted and the door appeared to be off-kilter, although it was not.

  Even though the building was old, the security system was so advanced that Paloma had had to tutor Flint in its use—and he had once designed hacker-proof programs for a living. Flint had thought he could hack into any security system, until he had encountered Paloma’s. She had modified it in ways that he had never seen done before.

  Now the system was his, and he had to keep it as state-of-the-art as possible. It was more difficult than he would have initially imagined.

  A large part of his job involved remaining current—on security systems, on the news, on changes in the culture. He believed that if he was abreast of things, he would have less to investigate when he did get a case.

  Paloma hadn’t told him this trick—he had figured it out on his own, based on his years with the Armstrong Police. In those days, he had always wanted the extra time to keep up on all the various areas that would help him with his day job. Now that he had the time, he was stir-crazy.

  Even his routine didn’t help. He went to a downtown gym in the morning before coming into the office, exercised for an hour, and then walked to work. Most of his human interactions were shallow: ordering from wait staff at various restaurants; conversing with acquaintances from the gym; and nodding at his neighbors as he walked to and from the office every day.

  Flint lived alone and hadn’t had more than a casual relationship since his daughter died more than ten years before. He had thought that he liked being solitary—his ex-wife had even accused him of liking his own company better than hers (an accusation which, after his daughter’s death, turned out to be true)—but he was discovering that until the last year, he hadn’t been solitary at all.

 
He’d had friends at his job, people he saw every day and had real interactions with. He’d also struggled with criminals, and people who had accidentally broken the law. When he had worked for the Armstrong Police, he hadn’t been alone at all, not until he went to his apartment for his four hours of sleep every night.

  Now he slept eight hours and no one noticed. He went days without having a conversation about anything deeper than the kind of food he wanted for breakfast. And even though he was doing a lot of studying, he lacked stimulation of the kind that had always fascinated him: finding out what made other people—and aliens, for that matter—act the way that they did.

  No wonder other Retrieval Artists took too many cases, or the wrong kinds of cases. The sameness of each and every day was beginning to drive Flint nuts.

  Day sixteen looked like it would be no different from the preceding ones. The morning had bled into the afternoon, and Flint still sat behind his desk, reading the day’s news.

  The handheld reports contained color graphics that swirled, but he didn’t touch the screen to open them. He found lately that he preferred reading text only; audio, flat vids, holographic reporting, all added a level of noise that distracted him, made him wonder just how much was news and how much was made up.

  Perhaps it was the silence. Flats and holographic news all had the audio track, which felt out of place in this office. Paloma had always kept the tiny room quiet. Not even the computer system hummed. Flint could hear the sound of his shoes sliding along the old permaplastic flooring.

  A screen opened on his desktop, and he glanced at it. The screen only opened when someone had triggered his perimeter alarm. The perimeter alarm was located half a block away from the office itself. About a dozen times per day the alarm went off, usually showing local residents or tourists.