Extremes: A Retrieval Artist Novel Read online

  He had chosen this place to research Astrid Krouch and WSX because the café was far from his office. Eventually WSX would note the queries, but it would take a while for the WSX system to realize the queries had come from Flint.

  Because the café was close to the university, the system might ignore Flint’s queries altogether. A lot of university students researched law firms before sending in applications. The only thing that might trip the system to Flint’s presence was the mention of Astrid Krouch.

  He spent a few minutes reading about WSX, finding only their promotional materials and transcripts of court cases they’d filed. He realized quickly that this particular search would get him nowhere.

  So he turned to Astrid Krouch instead.

  Because he was curious, he had decided to see why Astrid Krouch had kept such a low profile for the past ten years. Usually lawyers—even baby lawyers—did everything they could to get as much publicity as possible. But Krouch hadn’t.

  Was she working her way into becoming one of the firms’ secret weapons, one of those talented but hidden lawyers who seemed new to the competition, but turned out to be better than all of them? Weapons like that fired only a few times, but they were useful in important cases.

  He found only her school records, her family history, and her resume. Once she had gone to work for Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor, Astrid Krouch had lost her interest in courting the public eye.

  A shape loomed behind him, reflecting in the touch screen. Flint hit the lower right-hand side, making the screen go dark.

  A man stopped beside Flint’s desk. The man was beefy, his arms barely remaining contained in his black business suit. His face had the rounded cheeks of a person who tended toward fat. He looked like he used slimness enhancers to keep his weight under control. But, like so many people who could afford the enhancers, he ate even more once he had them linked, and so the enhancers always fought to keep up.

  The man folded his manicured hands, their backs dotted with tiny security chips, and smiled. “Mr. Flint? I’m Ignatius Wagner, Astrid Krouch’s boss.”

  One of the Wagners of Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor, Ltd. Flint kept his expression neutral even though he was surprised. Big-time attorneys like Wagner didn’t come to cafés near Dome University, especially to seek out a Retrieval Artist.

  “And,” Wagner added, “in case you’re wondering, I’m the junior Wagner, the son everyone assumes will inherit the company only if I learn what the law is truly about.”

  Flint deleted his files and shut down the screen he’d been working on. He pressed a small indentation on the desk in front of him, confirming that he wanted to pay for his time with the credit he had on file.

  Wagner had probably traced Flint’s search, using the WSX office systems to find out who had been probing into Astrid Krouch’s background. But the trace had occurred much more quickly than Flint had expected.

  He also hadn’t expected anyone to show up at the café. Flint had expected WSX to monitor his movements, not confront him.

  “You must really want to hire me,” Flint said without moving away from the screen. It took a while for public systems to purge information. He wasn’t going to move until he was certain what he’d been looking at would vanish into the ether. “Aren’t there any other brand-new Retrieval Artists in town?”

  “Our firm has a history with Paloma.”

  Flint shrugged. “She hasn’t worked for a long time. Surely you use someone else.”

  “We were happy when we learned that she’d trained a successor. It means that you’re as ethical as she is.”

  Assumptions again, this time flattering ones. Flint could believe that the law firm was looking for an ethical Retrieval Artist, that they had done a minimum of research and decided that Flint would do. Or he could believe that he was being manipulated at the highest level for a reason he couldn’t fathom yet.

  “I turned down Ms. Krouch,” Flint said. “I’m not interested in the case.”

  “She said you didn’t even listen to her,” Wagner said.

  “I never do,” Flint said. “I make my decision based solely on whether or not I can trust the client. Frankly, Mr. Wagner, I find your presence here simply confirms that I made the best possible decision.”

  A Peyti college student staggered toward the restroom, trying to adjust its breathing mask with its long, twiglike fingers. Its translucent skin picked up the white of the walls, making it seem ghostlike. It disappeared into the women’s restroom.

  “You need to hear me out, Mr. Flint,” Wagner said. “I really don’t want to take this to anyone else in Armstrong.”

  Flint was getting intrigued, despite his misgivings. “Because someone else, you have to figure, would already know the rules of whatever game you’re playing.”

  Wagner sighed. “Look, Mr. Flint. I really can’t go into why we want to hire you here. Let’s just say there are some legal reasons that have nothing to do with your competence that make it imperative that we work with you.”

  Flint raised an eyebrow. “That’s a new one.”

  Another Peyti slunk toward the restroom, obviously looking for the first Peyti. This Peyti had its breathing mask on properly and its skin didn’t pick up as much white from the walls.

  It knocked on the bathroom door with the tips of its long fingers, then said something that sounded like a cross between a sigh and a groan. Peytin was hard to understand in the Peyti’s natural environment. Through a breathing mask of the kind all Peyti had to wear in Armstrong, their native tongue was nearly impossible to understand.

  “This clearly isn’t private,” Wagner said. “Should we go outside?”

  Flint shook his head. “I’ve paid for an hour’s worth of time here and I plan to use it. Make an appointment with me, Mr. Wagner, and I’ll listen to your legal reasons. But stop trying to flatter me with the ethical crap. You have no idea who I am or what my relationship with Paloma really is. One thing you can be assured of is that I won’t take any case if I feel manipulated.”

  “The ethics are part of the legal reason,” Wagner said.

  The Peyti knocked on the restroom door again, then pushed it open. A series of chirrups resounded from inside as the door closed.

  Wagner was trying to talk over the noise. “But I will make an appointment with you. Shall we do that verbally or do you have an appointment manager that I can link with?”

  Flint didn’t let anyone close to his links. “We’ll do it now.”

  “All right.” Wagner looked pleased with himself. “I’m free later this evening at six. If you could come to the office—”

  “I don’t come to you, Mr. Wagner. If you want me to work for you, you come to my office in Old Armstrong and we talk there. Or we can end this association right now.”

  Wagner looked surprised. Then he nodded. “All right. Six?”

  Flint nodded.

  “I’ll see you then.” Wagner looked at the narrow desk area, then at the nearby bathroom—from which more chirrups resounded.

  Flint had a hunch the Peyti were a couple and they were having a fight.

  “I don’t see how you can get any work done here,” Wagner said. “I, at least, would move to a screen closer to a window where it’s quiet.”

  “I’ll see you at six, Mr. Wagner,” Flint said, and powered the screen back up. He punched in his code, determined to use the rest of his credits. He wouldn’t be coming back here, not when his identity had been so easily breached.

  Wagner sighed, then left. The chirruping continued in the restroom, but Flint ignored it. He was more interested in tracing the café’s access.

  He wanted to know how the hacks in Wagner’s law firm had found him so quickly, and he wasn’t going to leave this tiny desk until he found out.

  FIVE

  DERICCI AND VAN DER KETTING stepped inside the air lock between the interior and exterior of the dome. The airlock was small, little more than two doors and a corridor.

  DeRicci’s heart always sta
rted to beat a little harder in an airlock, from both nervousness and excitement. She loved going Outside, something she rarely admitted, even to herself.

  When the airlock door closed, DeRicci lost sight of the dome’s interior. Lakferd had hustled her and van der Ketting inside the airlock—apparently to keep them out of view of the spectators—but DeRicci didn’t know where he was now.

  She was just glad that Lakferd hadn’t accompanied them. DeRicci really didn’t want to deal with a race organizer during the Outside portion of this investigation.

  She sealed her environmental suit, and had the suit’s smart chip check for leaks. Air puffed around her. A small green light appeared on the cheap see-through fabric of her hood. No helmets for low-grade detectives who had to investigate outside the dome. Just sealable hoods and a short-term air supply.

  Just once she’d like to know what it was like to venture Outside in proper gear, like the kind the runners had. Stuff made to last days should the wearer get into trouble, with its own water recycling as well as the recyclable air. All bodily fluids cleansed and reused. Efficiency instead of economy.

  DeRicci glanced at van der Ketting. He stood behind her as close to the dome entrance as he could get. His lank brown hair puffed up around his forehead, once, then twice.

  He was double- and triple-checking. She wondered if he’d ever been Outside before.

  “You’re not just wasting time,” she said through their link, “you’re wasting oxygen.”

  That wasn’t technically true, but if he was as green as he seemed, he wouldn’t know that. She had taken a lot of new partners Outside for the first time, and most of them did what van der Ketting had been doing. She learned that lying to them about their oxygen made them stop a lot quicker than ordering them to quit.

  The problem new detectives had wasn’t the environmental suit or even leaving the safety of the dome. Schoolchildren took excursions Outside during every year of schooling, and the police academy spent an entire semester on Outside investigations.

  The problem was a lot more complex. It had taken DeRicci years to figure out why new partners on their first Outside case were so nervous.

  The entire concept frightened them.

  Not the concept of going Outside—by the time they’d risen to detective, they’d gone Outside two dozen times or more—but the investigation itself, the open-ended nature of it. There was no instructor with emergency training beside them, no structured itinerary, and no planned route. Every cadet heard the horror stories of investigating officers who wandered in the wrong direction, who got confused by the large expanse of rock and craters only to be found days later dead of dehydration or oxygen deprivation.

  DeRicci, to get over her own fear, had investigated some of these stories and found all but one to be a myth. The one that was true happened when the dome was small, the police force new, and the equipment primitive. Apparently the policeman’s death had been horrible—he’d been conscious and radioing for help throughout most of it, but he hadn’t known his exact location—and over the years had become an example of the dangers of Outside.

  Right now, she didn’t have the time to warn van der Ketting about all the myths. She needed him alert and focused, not worried about whether he would survive the investigation.

  “I can do this alone if I have to,” she said to him.

  He gave her a startled look through his hood’s plastic face panel, and then shook his head. “I’m all right.”

  “I’m not going to take care of you out there,” she said.

  Van der Ketting’s shoulders straightened. She had offended him. “I don’t need help Outside, Detective.”

  He only called her detective when he was irritated at her. DeRicci turned away so that he couldn’t see her smile. She had gotten him to focus on something other than his fear of the Outside, and that was good. With a limited time on this investigation and all the hassles the marathon organizers would throw her way, she would need his observational powers as much as she needed her own.

  “We’re heading out then.” DeRicci opened the code box beside the door. With a gloved finger, she typed in the day’s police code, followed by her badge number. Then she pressed a chip in the corner and leaned forward, letting a small red beam of light examine her right eye.

  For a moment nothing happened, and she wondered if the eye scan had failed to identify her. That happened a lot to people in police-issue environmental suits. The hood’s plastic panel distorted the beam of light just enough to give the system a variety of misreads.

  Then a warning buzzer sounded, followed by an androgynous voice. “Dome door will open in thirty seconds. If you are not wearing an environmental suit, you have fifteen seconds to vacate the airlock. Repeat. Dome door. . .”

  DeRicci suppressed a sigh. Thirty seconds seemed like forever while a buzzer clanged over her head. Finally the buzzer stopped, along with the voice, and the door slid open.

  DeRicci loved the contradiction of Outside. The sunlight was so much brighter than anything she’d ever experienced inside the dome, yet the ground was dark gray and the sky black. It didn’t feel like day or night out here, at least a dome day or night. Instead it was something different, something that felt, to her, like an alien planet, which she always thought odd because she had been born and raised in Armstrong.

  She stepped through the door, feeling a wave of cooling air run through the suit’s interior as it tried to compensate for the exceptionally hot temperatures. She’d been told that more expensive environmental suits didn’t have that moment of adjustment; that when you wore one of those, stepping from inside the dome to Outside felt no different from crossing a street.

  One of the organizers waited for her, standing on the entry platform, white suit glowing in the sunlight. The visor was tinted, so DeRicci couldn’t see the organizer’s face.

  “Noelle DeRicci,” she said through the link that the marathon had provided. “And my partner Leif van der Ketting.”

  “Gordon Frears.” The responding voice, male, startled her. For some reason she had been expecting a female guide. “Come with me.”

  He didn’t wait for her to reach his side. Instead he used an odd loping gait to take him to one of the surface cars. He was clearly a veteran of the marathon as well, just like Lakferd and Chaiken had been.

  DeRicci didn’t have that kind of grace in the Outside. Besides, she wanted to take the opportunity to observe. To her left, maintenance buildings, storage sheds, and a few unmarked metal shacks clustered, most of them city-owned, but a few belonging to the bigger corporations that were headquartered inside Armstrong.

  The small staging area for the race stood to her right. The organizers’ table, a place where they double- and triple-checked the identification of the suited participants (in the past, too many people had sneaked onto the course—something caught only when the finishers numbered more than the starters), seemed small against the curved edge of the dome.

  Even farther to the right stood a variety of scooters, used by medical personnel, and some field ambulances, although not nearly as many as required by the city, which meant that several were already responding to calls.

  Medical personnel waited beside the ambulances. A small knot of organizers stood around viewing stations, and two people still manned the table as if they were waiting for more runners to join the race.

  Behind the field ambulances, a small semipermanent tent had been set up as the medical facility. After the race, all runners had to be cleared to reenter the dome. Outside workers had their own facility for that, but they wouldn’t rent it out for the race. They were worried about volunteers contaminating the site. DeRicci didn’t blame them; she had seen what kind of damage volunteers could do.

  Van der Ketting had stopped beside DeRicci. He too was looking around. She wondered if he was taking in the setting or worrying about the case. Maybe he was doing both.

  Frears waited for them at the surface vehicle. His arms were crossed, his back str
aight, his body language so clearly irritated that DeRicci wondered if he hadn’t struck the pose on purpose.

  She turned away from him. No runners yet, although she suspected the first ones would be crossing the finish line soon. Then this area would be complete chaos.

  Before heading to the surface vehicle, she walked to the medical tent.

  “I thought you wanted to see the body.” The voice in her link was Frears. He sounded as impatient as he looked.

  “In a moment,” DeRicci said. “I have one other stop to make first.”

  “I need to be here when the first runner comes back,” Frears said, but DeRicci ignored him. If he had to be here when the first runner crossed the finish line, the organizers wouldn’t have sent him. Still, it was a good ploy and one a newbie like van der Ketting would have fallen for.

  Van der Ketting had trouble keeping up with her. He was tripping along the surface, trying to remain low. Obviously he had never really learned the Outside gait.

  She wasn’t going to instruct him either. Most of the time he would be on the vehicle, and she’d give him tasks that would keep him there. With a walk like that, the last thing he needed was to cross an unpaved surface, with its rocks and fist-sized craters, perfect for catching a boot in.

  The medical tent had clearly been assembled for days. It had its own atmosphere. The tent’s rear exit was attached to one of the dome’s maintenance entrances; that way, cleared runners could go inside the dome without donning their environmental suits all over again.

  DeRicci headed for the main door, which faced the finish line. A tall person in another white environmental suit extended a gloved hand, stopping her.

  “Sorry. Only race participants are allowed past this point.” This time, the voice in the link was tenor. DeRicci couldn’t tell if she was speaking to a man or a woman. Even the face, which she could see faintly through the tinted visor, seemed androgynous.

  Van der Ketting glanced over his shoulder, as if he were looking for Frears. Maybe Frears was communicating to van der Ketting directly, not that it mattered. Van der Ketting couldn’t leave DeRicci’s side on this investigation.