Foundation (26 page)

He grabbed hold of his cell phone and dialed.

“Detective Trumaine ... I’m reporting the accidental drowning of a person. Yes. It’s my daughter ...”

He glanced back at Maia’s corpse through the glass panes of the French windows: she just lay there, like a fallen leaf or a twig snapped by the wind. If it wasn’t for the endless tapping of the raindrops, it might have been a black-and-white still.

“Yes. I’m sure,” he said. “She’s dead ...”

Trumaine hung up.

Exhausted, he shuffled his feet to the empty bedroom and lay down on the bed.

With a sigh, he closed his eyes ...

It was the same bedroom.

The rain had gone; now a bright sun shone through the window. Trumaine was still in bed. He wasn’t drenching wet anymore and wore a clean, unbuttoned shirt.

The picture of Maia had been momentarily removed from his self-sealing wallet: it sat on the nightstand next to him, along with the wallet and an old-fashioned alarm clock which read
10:59 AM
.

As the minute hand hit twelve, the clock buzzed to life.

Trumaine snapped his eyes open, reaching out his hand to switch off the alarm. He sat up with a yawn, wiping his face with the palm of his hand, then he lunged for Maia’s picture. He stared at it for a while, before he put it away in his wallet and the wallet in his pocket.

He came out from the bedroom wearing the usual ordnance white suit, but the jacket was unbuttoned and the shirt underneath wasn’t tucked in. Now that he had shaven properly, he looked like the most relaxed man in the world.

He dropped the large suitcase he was carrying next to the entrance door then, as he was about to return to the bedroom, the doorbell rang.

Trumaine opened the door to meet the friendly gaze of a large, smiling man; Firrell nodded his head in acknowledgment, then stepped inside.

He looked about, recalling the familiar things his eyes perched upon.

“It’s been ages since I visited.”

“Yes. It’s been ages ...”

There was a long, meaningful pause.

After Trumaine had called his captain, telling him he had found out who the crawler was, Firrell had sent a squad car to pick up Faith and the toy doll.

For all the time it had taken for the cops to arrive, she had sat in one of the armchairs in the living room, without saying one word. She was angry and hurt by the way Trumaine had treated her. What did she expect—flowers?

The toy Trumaine had found in the chest under the ebony mask was proof that she was involved in the murder of both Jarva and his wife. How it all happened was still undergoing investigation, since Faith wasn’t cooperating.

All she kept repeating was that she didn’t kill them. All the same, there was no denying that she was involved in the case.

When, at last, the cops had taken her away, she had peered into Trumaine’s eyes, looking for mercy, but all he had given her was a hard, unyielding stare.

When they got back to the department, Firrell had been happy like a pup he wasn’t going to lose his job, after all. He had congratulated Trumaine for solving the case and had wanted to know how he made it.

Trumaine had explained him that Faith had been reading his mind since he first met her, at Credence’s canteen. Possibly unconsciously, she had borrowed one single line from those Starshanna had spoken in the feed. Again, unconsciously—or maybe just to tease him?—Faith had repeated that same line when they were on the beach; that was proof enough that she was the crawler they were looking for.

But to nail her for good, Trumaine needed real evidence; something that could link her beyond any possible doubt to the Jarvas’ double murder. The evidence was Faith’s toy doll.

In fact, it was perfectly reasonable to think that in the moments when she was convincing the believers to grant her access to Jarva’s bunker, bits from her most fond memories had migrated to their minds. The toy must have been one of those bits and that was how the doll had found its way into the bunker.

As for using it, either Faith hadn’t noticed it was her toy, which was decidedly odd, or—and that was an idea that had come to Trumaine’s mind in the last few hours—she had an accomplice who killed the Jarvas on her account.

What still needed a lot of explaining was why they were killed, how Faith had planned it all and who helped her.

That would come by further questioning her, had said Firrell, but he would handle that. Even if Faith was determined not to say anything, a couple of weeks in the slammer would soften her.

Firrell had then relayed the good news to the Feds and the
TSA
. Within hours, they had revoked their ban over Credence and now that the real feed was again being administered to the believers, the intergalactic flights were being scheduled for departure.

The first ships to take off would be the cargos with the water supplies for the outposts.

Firrell fished out a yellow plastic card from his pocket and handed it over to Trumaine.

“This is for you.”

Trumaine turned the card around. Below his own picture, it read:
CHRISTIAN TRUMAINE - AQUARIAN - FIRST CLASS
.

He was overwhelmed.

It wasn’t like the Feds to walk out on a deal, but interceding for citizenship was something that would have to go through a lot of decisional levels and they just might get stuck at some point.

He looked up at Firrell, his old friend; there was so much he should tell him, so much he should explain, so much he should thank him for—possibly too much.

“Thank you,” just said Trumaine.

“No. Thank
you
,” replied Firrell. “You did a good job—everything is getting back to the norm. The farthest outposts in the galaxy are getting their supplies. Thirty minutes ago, the
TSA
got a transmission from the Hibiscus. They were diving into Canis Major—they’re safely to their destination now.”

Firrell grinned, then he realized that something wasn’t quite right with Trumaine. He could tell there were still unanswered questions rambling about in his head.

“You don’t look too happy. What is it?”

“We still don’t know why Alveraz murdered Jarva. We don’t know who stole the punch card and what purpose the card served. Also, we don’t know if someone else helped her.”

Firrell smiled. “There’s enough evidence to nail her, believe me, that’s all that matters. Don’t worry about that, she will talk. And when she does, we’ll pick up her accomplices too. You’ve done your part, Tru, let us do ours.”

“Sure ...” agreed Trumaine.

Firrell glanced at the suitcase sitting at Trumaine’s side.

“I see you’ve made up your mind ...”

“I’m going back to her. There’s little left for me here.”

Trumaine retrieved his blue detective badge and offered it to Firrell, but he didn’t take it.

“Keep it,” said the captain. “A little memento of the time we have spent working together.”

Even if Firrell was happy that Trumaine was finally going back to Starshanna, he was also a bit sad for being deprived of a former pupil.

“Will you say good-bye to Starsha for me?”

“I sure will.”

For a while, Firrell didn’t move, as if he couldn’t resign to the fact that nobody would be there in that house to open the door for him anymore.

He swallowed hard.

“Good luck on Aquaria,” he said.

With a bit of regret, Firrell turned on his heels and shut the door behind him as he left.

Trumaine had walked out to the patio. This was his good-bye to the house and he wanted to remind himself of it as much as he could.

This was the house he and Starshanna had lived in, the house in which they had loved each other. The house where the offspring of their love had grown and flourished like a beautiful flower, before it was too soon—he couldn’t finish the sentence ...

By leaving, Trumaine would leave all this behind.

He glanced at the roiling ocean, as if he could sound its impenetrable secrets ... and, as once before, the ocean peered back, washing away in his irises ...

Trumaine looked into the empty channel, at the discarded bucket sitting in it, then shifted his eyes on the lonely and weathered deckchair on which Maia had once lain.

Before another rush of painful memories submerged him, Trumaine turned his back to his past and went back into the house.

The taxi buzzed along the seaside highway.

Trumaine had left the unmarked car assigned to him in the garage of the department. He had turned down Firrell’s offer to accompany him and he had called a taxi.

The taxi driver was a sullen young man with a crazy hairdo who didn’t seem to mind that Trumaine wasn’t in the mood for talking. It seemed perfectly fine to both that the however short journey to the spaceport should be as quiet as possible.

Trumaine had stared out of the window for the whole time. For the first time in his life, he had the feeling that everything he glanced at—the vehicles in the traffic, the buildings, the City in the distance—looked suddenly old. The fact that he was leaving for good was estranging him from this world. Everything started to look a bit flimsy, a bit fake, as if it was Trumaine’s care for the things in the world he had lived in up to that moment that made it real. And now that he didn’t care anymore, the world had started to flicker like an illusion, before vanishing forever.

When they were close to the City, the taxi left the freeway and headed toward the shiny metal complex seen in the distance that was the spaceport.

The metal structure of City Spaceport coiled around the launch pads in a vague horseshoe shape that opened toward the ocean. It was in that direction that all spaceships took off regularly, flooding the launch bay with the bizarre, ever-shifting, diaphanous shapes exhaust vapors take as they billow through the air.

Basically, any piece of airtight junk that had a rocket attached underneath was capable of traveling long distance, good enough even for the galactic routes. While most cargos looked exactly like that—enormous metal boxes ugly as hell and mounted with odd-and-old fuel cylinders ending in the characteristic cone-shaped booster nozzles—the vehicles used for transporting civilians were quite different.

Depending on the class of the vehicle—which wasn’t determined by its size anymore, but by the quality of the service offered aboard—one could find a variety of spaceships:

The bulky and slower corvettes of the pre-Credence era, hardly used anymore if to resupply faraway terraforming stations on forgotten planets. The slimmer intra-system charters. The shuttles that brought day commuters back and forth between the major business planets of the galactic network. The ultra-streamlined “privateers” belonging to the big corporations and the majestic ships reserved for politicians and diplomatic corps.

However, there was one ship that wasn’t anything like that; one ship that belonged to a class of her own, unsurpassed by any other space vehicle for speed or beauty—she made the route for Aquaria and her name was Neptune.

Designed to be the best ship ever, with a keen eye to representing Aquaria’s uniqueness, the Neptune was famous for her many luxury decks, her three plush restaurants—each one serving otherworldy specialties depending on which month of the year one was going to travel—and the excellent service her crew would offer. The Neptune wasn’t cheap; a bit like the old ocean liners that used to sail and sink around the world a couple of centuries before, traveling aboard the Neptune was both expensive and exclusive, and Trumaine and Starshanna had spent considerable amounts of their hard earned wages to book a spot on that superb ship.

As the taxi approached the spaceport, the Neptune showed off from the distance; her slim, tapered body protruded from the launch pads like a purple-and-silver finger.

The hull was plated with the latest technological find; a most peculiar material that kept shifting and throbbing in waves under the sunlight, as if it was made of water.

It was a dreamy and fleeting sight.

Soon, the taxi slipped underneath the curlicues of the spaceport structure, hiding her from view.

Trumaine put his case onto the baggage detector.

A blade of green light flashed briefly, scanning its contents, then the case slid under a roller which fastened a small acceptance tag to it.

A conveyor belt whirred to life, swallowing the case; it would carry it through the many bowels of the spaceport, finally storing it in a massive, central baggage deposit. Only when its owner had bought a ticket for whatever destination in the universe, would the case be retrieved and associated with that terminus. It would then be picked up again and redirected to the proper launch pad for loading.

With a silvery ding, the machine spit out a receipt tag that should be used for baggage retrieval from a similar machine found at the arrival spaceport.

Trumaine pocketed his receipt, then walked along the crowded hall of City Spaceport.

It was quite an impressive view: more than a hundred feet tall and wide, it curved around the launch bay in a wide semicircle, embracing the many giants of metal that waited to be flung past the atmosphere into space.