Extremes: A Retrieval Artist Novel Read online

  “Police,” DeRicci said.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not authorized to let anyone inside before the race ends.”

  “That’s fine,” DeRicci said, even though she knew she could push the point if she wanted to. “Just let me look inside.”

  The organizer turned, the movement almost a pirouette, and skipped toward the door. DeRicci hadn’t realized how different everyone’s walks were on the surface. In her investigations at previous Moon Marathons, she had either gone directly to the death site or been taken into places with atmosphere.

  DeRicci followed, feeling clunky after the organizer’s graceful movements. If DeRicci felt awkward, she wondered how van der Ketting felt as he stumbled along behind her.

  The organizer stopped at the door and lifted a flap covering a large window. DeRicci placed one gloved hand on the window’s surface as she peered inside. Police suits did have a lot of job-specific extras. The gloves had extra chips for touch analysis, and she also had ways of recording everything the suit processed, even the visuals.

  Through her personal link, she sent van der Ketting a single message: Record. She would take care of her own backup, but she wanted his to be primary.

  The glove registered the window as clear plastic, the visuals inside as the actual interior instead of a feed flowing through the surface. DeRicci would doublecheck that when she got back to the station, but she had a hunch the glove was accurate on this. Since no tourists or reporters were allowed in this part of the race setup, there would be no reason to mask a window with a fake visual.

  She peered inside. Empty beds extended all the way to the second door. Three medical personnel sat in various parts of the room, watching wall screens of the race. Another medical person was setting up silver, finger-sized diagnostic wands on a long table in the center. Even though medical personnel could use their own chips for diagnosis, most preferred the wands. The wands made it easier to share the information with the patient.

  “No patients yet?” DeRicci asked the organizer.

  “We’ve had a couple of calls and sent out several teams, but so far no one has brought an injured runner back. We’re expecting one shortly.”

  DeRicci had encountered this on a previous race. The med team waited—if they could—to bring injured runners here until someone had crossed the finish line. That way it wouldn’t look so odd to see a runner, supported by a few “friends,” being carried to the checkout tent.

  A few times, however, runners were brought in early. On that investigation, DeRicci learned that a particular part of the course had been hit with a rock in the year between races, and the committee hadn’t changed the path to compensate. That little mistake had caused several injuries and the death DeRicci had been investigating.

  DeRicci took her hand off the window, nodded at the organizer, and headed back toward the surface vehicle. She was aware of the spectators inside the dome watching her movements.

  The police environmental suits were not obviously marked; no one from Inside could tell she was anything more than one more race volunteer, albeit one with a very cheap suit. Still, she felt conspicuous, and she had a hunch it was because the organizers had been so careful to hustle her and van der Ketting away from the spectators.

  Frears was already inside the vehicle when she and van der Ketting arrived. The vehicle was a large one, built for carrying personnel and cargo. Two seats up front, two benches in the back, and a long open area with an optional roof that closed at the touch of a button.

  “Ready?” Frears asked, and even though the question seemed innocuous, DeRicci heard a faint edge of sarcasm in his tone.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  The vehicle lurched forward, bumping off the paved road onto the unpaved trail. DeRicci loathed the surface vehicle, and not just for its bumpy ride toward the victim. She loathed the way it destroyed evidence by trampling it, loathed the way it created its own trail as if nothing else mattered.

  She didn’t ask Frears to drive around the footprints left by the runners, however. Following trails was very important Outside. The surface could be deceptive. Sometimes craters looked smaller than they were, or weren’t visible at all, causing vehicles to get caught, jackknife, or flip over.

  Everything Outside was fraught with what DeRicci thought was unnecessary danger. Sometimes she thought if she were ever elected to the Board of Governors (like that was going to happen), she would vote to dome over the entire surface and be done with it.

  The trip was short. DeRicci watched the rocks and flatness go by. There were no runners on this part of the course; even the slowest, apparently, had gone past the five-mile marker.

  Of course, this marathon, unlike the ones in the dome, took only people who qualified by winning or placing in other marathons. No one was going to walk for exercise out here. This marathon was for the best of the best, or at least the best of those who felt the need to prove their worth.

  Van der Ketting was staring at the Earth, looming large in the darkness above them. DeRicci looked at it too, its surface providing the only visible color. She loved the purity of the blue, the way the white drifted across everything, the brightness of the green. One day she wanted to go there. She had never been to a place where the Outside had more variety than the Inside.

  The vehicle went over a rise, and slowed. Before them, a large boulder dominated the horizon. The path split around the boulder, and each side of the split showed signs of foot traffic.

  A field ambulance was parked on the right side of the boulder. The attendants were leaning against the ambulance’s side. One of them was pointing at the Earth, as if identifying locations for the other attendant.

  DeRicci felt a tingle of anticipation run through her, and she immediately tamped the feeling down. She loved this part of her job, the moment of discovery, of learning what this case—if indeed it would be a case—was actually going to be about. She tried not to look like she enjoyed it, though, because no matter what else had happened, someone had just lost a loved one.

  The vehicle pulled up beside the field ambulance, and Frears contacted the attendants. They turned, clearly surprised by the vehicle’s proximity. DeRicci wondered if anyone ever got used to the silence out here.

  Everyone got out of the vehicle, and Frears introduced DeRicci and van der Ketting. The two attendants, Molly Robinson and Colin Danners, were now in charge of the police visitors. Frears made that plain even before he returned to the vehicle, turned it around, and headed back to the dome.

  DeRicci watched him go, and saw how the vehicle kicked up the dirt. The dirt didn’t have atmosphere to fly through, no air to slow it down. It flew behind the wheels in a fan pattern, each particle keeping its position until it landed on the ground.

  “All right,” she said to the attendants after Frears disappeared over the horizon. “Take us to the victim.”

  “She’s just around the rock,” Robinson said. Her voice was high and breathy, the voice of a young girl, even though the woman before DeRicci was taller than the men.

  Danners nodded. “I think she probably dislodged—”

  “Please,” DeRicci said. “No theories yet. Let us take a look and then we can talk.”

  She didn’t want any more preconceived notions than she already had. It was always best to approach a new scene with the freshest possible interpretation, the most open mind she could have.

  Danners and Robinson started walking side by side around the boulder. This time, it was van der Ketting who stopped them. “Didn’t you go in single file?”

  All med techs were taught to approach a dead body down the same trail. That way evidence, if it was needed, wouldn’t be compromised.

  “We were told it was a medical emergency,” Robinson said in that breathy voice. “We had no idea the runner was dead.”

  “Besides,” Danners said, “the entire field of runners has gone through here. We’re not destroying anything.”

  “You don’t know that,” DeRicci said, eve
n though she suspected Danners was right. “Just point us in the right direction and we’ll go. Wait for us here.”

  Robinson pointed around the boulder. “She’s a few meters on the far side. You can’t miss her. She looks like she curled up there for a nap until you get close enough to see inside her visor.”

  DeRicci shuddered, glad the motion was hidden by her suit. Outside deaths were ugly things. Sometimes DeRicci preferred a rapid-depressurization death. At least then she could imagine that the death was quick and painless.

  Oxygen-depletion corpses bore their suffering in every pore of their bodies.

  “I’ll go first,” DeRicci said to van der Ketting, hoping that she would now pick the right trail. She walked around the boulder, noting that its shadow fell on the forward part of the path.

  The sunlight blazed, reflecting off nearby rocks. They glittered, showing mineral components that had excited the first settlers.

  Most of the footprints followed the paths that merged a few meters away, and then disappeared over the horizon. The most recent boot marks were distinctive and clear, but the earlier ones had already been destroyed by too many feet stepping on them.

  DeRicci had no idea how many runners had signed up for this year’s marathon, but all of them had gone past this point. What had they thought, seeing the field ambulance and the runner on the trail? Or had the attendants been pretending to help until the last runner passed?

  Once DeRicci made it around the boulder, the body was clear. At first she thought the suit was a typical organizer’s white, but as she got closer she realized that the suit was a pale pink. Where the sun hit it, the pink got a rosy gloss—a festive, fanciful suit as well as a functional one.

  DeRicci felt her heart twist. The woman, the dead woman, had a nontraditional streak, something that had encouraged her to buy this particular suit. The suit’s unusual color made the woman seem real somehow, in a way that her body did not.

  But the body’s position was already bothering DeRicci. The position seemed almost fetal: legs up, arms crossed, hands cupped beneath the helmet as if in sleep. Not a natural position for someone to die in if they had lost oxygen or if their suit depressurized.

  DeRicci approached slowly, recording everything with a simple movement of her hooded face—the nearby boulder, the trail, the other scattered rocks, and the tiny craters no bigger than her hand. Near the boulder, she saw vehicle trails, and she wondered if they were from surface vehicles or field ambulances. She could hear her own breathing, raspy and shallow, and she made herself take deep breaths.

  The last thing she needed to do was get light-headed again, this time because she hadn’t been breathing properly.

  She took careful note of the footprints going around the body. Some were large, some small, and a number were deep. She couldn’t tell if everyone had leaped the body or if only a few runners had.

  There was also no way to tell from this distance if anyone had landed on the body itself, although she suspected one or two people might have. After all, the body lying across the trail, just a meter or so from where it met the other trail, might have been enough of a surprise that a runner might not have been able to correct in time.

  DeRicci shook her head slightly and followed the trail of narrower prints, prints that seemed to have been made by the attendants, to the corpse’s head. Then DeRicci crouched, bracing herself.

  The visor’s faceplate was nonreflective, although it had a special coating that protected the wearer’s face from the sun. A scratch in the faceplate formed a jagged bolt that worked its way to the plate’s bottom.

  But the faceplate hadn’t cracked through. It looked, at first glance, like the suit’s seal remained. The woman hadn’t died from rapid depressurization. The victim’s face was intact, but grotesque. Her eyes bulged out of a blackened and distorted face. Her mouth was worse; it took DeRicci a moment to realize that the large purplish thing sticking out of the mouth was the woman’s tongue.

  She had died of oxygen deprivation.

  Van der Ketting crouched beside DeRicci, and then nearly toppled forward onto the body. He caught DeRicci’s arm, and used it to brace himself.

  “Suit malfunction?” he asked via his personal link.

  “Don’t know,” DeRicci said.

  She rose slightly, looking at the helmet. It was covered in dust, looking grayer than the suit itself. DcRicci wasn’t sure why the helmet would have more dust on it than the suit.

  The victim’s hands were wearing standard-issue gloves, thick and heavy, not made for fine work like DeRicci’s were. She tried to remember what the other runners had worn, and couldn’t. She didn’t know if these fit within the regulation or not.

  “Double-check the information we were given,” she said. “Did this woman hit her panic button?”

  “I thought Chaiken said that some guy did,” van der Ketting said.

  That was DeRicci’s recollection as well. “Make sure.”

  Van der Ketting nodded. He remained crouched, looking at the body while he reviewed the early interviews.

  DeRicci continued to examine the area around the body. Aside from footprints, there were no other marks in the dirt. No glove prints, no swishes showing a struggle, and, most important, no fan of dirt, like DeRicci would have expected if someone collapsed and fell without bracing herself.

  “No contact from this runner,” van der Ketting said. “A male runner found her, pressed the panic button, and everyone thought they were going out for him. In fact his bio read was so healthy that a few of the med staff thought this was a prank.”

  Van der Ketting had done more than review the interview. He’d accessed some of the other files, the ones DeRicci had planned to look at only if this case was suspicious.

  Which it was.

  “Get her recorded, then check her for a panic button. See if she’s one of those extremes who believe that they shouldn’t ask for help.”

  Van der Ketting nodded, then extended his arm over the body. He was going to do a surface record as well as a contemporaneous record.

  DeRicci peered behind the body. Still no more scuffs in the dirt, besides the footprints, and only the imprint of a light fan of particles, so close to the suit that she probably wouldn’t have seen it without looking.

  The body hadn’t fallen from a standing position. If anything the woman had eased herself to the ground, like a person about to go to sleep.

  Then DeRicci frowned. She looked at the helmet again, and the dirt covering it. No large fan around it, and no small fan. Either the head went down so lightly that it barely made an impact into the dirt, or it had been set down gently.

  DeRicci didn’t like that last thought. She shouldn’t have let it creep in. Deaths should have been expected on marathon day. The organizers should celebrate whenever they got through a marathon without losing a runner.

  Van der Ketting was still moving his arm above the body, probably taking microscans as well as images. Good. They would need all the information they could get.

  DeRicci backtracked in the trail they’d made, careful to put her feet only where she or van der Ketting had walked before. She moved only half a meter, so that she could examine the body’s lower section.

  Legs lined up perfectly and bent at the knee. No obvious tears or rips in the suit anywhere, even at the top. No twists in the fabric, no bunching of the material.

  DeRicci had seen some expensive environmental suits in her day, but none as precise as this one. The suit was incredibly sophisticated. She’d seen advertisements for suits like this one. They stretched when the body stretched, shrank when the body curled up. They were self-repairing and self-diagnostic. They also, if DeRicci remembered correctly, had several different emergency services programmed in. If this runner had bought the Moon Package, she could have been anywhere on the surface or anywhere within Moon space, and received help for everything, including catastrophic suit failure.

  DeRicci finally leaned backward as far as she could without
overbalancing herself. She gazed at the boots.

  They were the same luminescent pink as the suit, but they were made of a different material, which meant they came from a different manufacturer. They were ridged, as so many Outside marathoners’ boots were, the runners believing that the ridges somehow gave them more traction.

  But running down the center of the boot was a jagged crack. DeRicci recognized the pattern as a lightning bolt, even though she’d never seen an actual lightning bolt in real life.

  She was about to glance at the jagged scratch on the faceplate, to see if it really matched or if it was just her fervent imagination that made it seem like it would match, when she froze.

  Her movement must have seemed abrupt, because van der Ketting looked up from his work. “You okay?”

  “Come down here and get the boots,” she said. “Stay in our trail.”

  He frowned, but backed toward her, his arms still extended. When he saw the boots, he whistled. ‘Expensive.”

  “The whole package is expensive. Tell me what you see.”

  “It sort of resembles the mark in the visor.”

  “And?” DeRicci asked, glad he found that bolt as strange as she did.

  He peered at the boots. “No ‘and.’”

  “There’s a big ‘and,’” she said. “One Gumiela, the chief of police, and hell, probably even the mayor, aren’t going to like.”

  He braced his hands on his knees, leaned closer to the boots, and would have fallen forward if DeRicci hadn’t caught him.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Be careful,” she said. “You almost ruined our most significant piece of evidence.”

  He frowned at her again, then examined the boots without touching them. “I don’t know what you’re seeing.”

  “The dirt pattern,” she said. “Look at the dirt pattern.”

  He shrugged. “A little spray on the toes from passing runners, but nothing unu—Oh, my. There’s no dirt on the treads. They’re as clean as a brand-new pair.”