Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (6 page)

Then she forced herself to walk down the remaining stairs, slowly.

She wasn’t going to look for Torkild any longer. She needed to locate her father, let him know that something awful had happened, and then she had to figure out what she would do next.

The port had released the passengers back into the terminal, which meant that nothing would leave for several hours. Longer than the authorities had said on the links and in their official communications.

She had a hunch something else had gone wrong.

She reached ground level. A Disty bumped her leg, nearly knocking her over. She hadn’t seen Disty in here earlier. Clearly, more than one ship had disembarked.

It wouldn’t do her any good to remain in the lounge. She needed to leave, maybe go to one of the upscale restaurants nearby, the ones the “peasants,” as her father would say, couldn’t afford. The fewer people who could afford the place, the greater the privacy she would have.

Then she could try to reach her father again.

She might not be able to leave the port, but she could at least get a meal, locate her father through her links, and figure out what she would do next.

Because going back to school wasn’t an option today.

She had had a hunch she wouldn’t make it to class anyway. She had thought she’d be drowning her sorrows after seeing her fiancé off for the first time this year. And if things had gone according to Torkild’s plan (the bastard), she would be drinking her sorrows away at some bar, trying not to cry because he had dumped her.

For a moment, she regretted giving away the ring. She wanted to fling it another time.

Then she made herself focus on little Fiona’s expression when she had received the ring. That had been worthwhile.

Fiona, who was upstairs with her father, hiding out from the news.

It was probably a good thing that they had gone, because this lounge had gotten very crowded. The disembarked passengers were stopping, clogging up the aisles as they stared at the imagery. Others were grabbing their ears, looking shocked. Still others kept moving, acting like they didn’t care at all.

They were moving swiftly, some of them trying to leave the lounge. Which they could do. Everyone could do it.

But they wouldn’t be able to leave the port until some authority told them it was all right.

Berhane squared her shoulders, trying to stay away from the panicked arrivals.

“Berhane?”

She started. The voice, so close to her, was Torkild’s. For half a second, she thought she had her links on audio, and then she realized he was standing right beside her.

She could smell his cedar-scented cologne, faint but familiar. He hadn’t changed it in more than a decade.

She turned.

He looked a little rumpled and a lot older than he had not an hour before. His coffee-colored skin was lined, and his dark eyes, with their small fold in the corner, were red-rimmed.

He hadn’t been crying, had he? He couldn’t have been devastated by their break-up. After all, he had wanted it. He had said,
Surely you should have seen this coming, Berhane
.

“If you don’t want to talk to me, I understand,” he said, and his voice now was mixing with the memory of his voice from earlier in her head. She had to blink to focus. “But I’m hearing something about a murder…?”

He was offering her
sympathy
? What kind of idiot was he?

“Torkild,” she said, her tone icy. “It’s Anniversary Day. Had you thought that through?”

“They mentioned it as they told us to disembark,” he said, and he was clearly oblivious, the idiot. “They’re thinking that maybe something bigger—”

“My mother died in the bombing that they’re commemorating, had you thought of that?” she snapped.

Torkild caught his breath, looked around at the people streaming around them.

“Here, Berhane?” he asked in a tone that implied
Really? You’re doing this now?

“Yes, here,” she said. “You chose this very spot to end our relationship.”

“But Berhane, right now—?”

“Yes, right now,” she said. “You’re the one who started this.”

“Berhane, they’ve evacuated the ships. Something is really wrong here.” Suddenly, he was the concerned Torkild, the man she had fallen in love with, not the bastard Torkild, the man the rest of her family thought he was.

But he wasn’t concerned for her. He was concerned for himself.

“Yes, something is wrong,” she said. “Arek is dead.”

She inclined her head toward the screen.

“Arek—?” Torkild didn’t know who that was. “Oh, you mean, Soseki. The mayor. You knew him?”

Of course she knew him. She knew everyone who was anyone on the Moon. Wasn’t that why Torkild had hooked up with her in the first place?

“Look,” she said. “Arek is dead, and I can’t reach my father, and you’re being an absolute ass. We have to—”

“You can’t reach your father?” Torkild frowned. He seemed competent suddenly. Why would he revert to the Torkild she had loved right now? That wasn’t fair.

“No, I can’t,” she said. “I’m hoping it’s a problem with the links—”

“Berhane, it’s crowded here. Let’s go somewhere else.”

“There is nowhere else, haven’t you figured that out?” she asked. “We can’t leave the port.”

“I mean inside the port.”

Like she had been thinking. Somewhere else inside the port.

“We need to figure this out,” he said.

She wasn’t sure what
this
was. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to figure anything out.

He took her elbow and she shook him off.

“We’ll lose each other in the crowd,” he said, and grabbed her elbow again. This time she let him hold on, thinking,
Bastard. Bastardbastardbastardbastard
, just so that she could keep focused on what she hated about him rather than what she liked about him.

He pulled her forward, and she let him.

She let him.

Trailing along behind him just like a dutiful fiancée—

Which she used to be.

SEVEN

THE YUTU CITY train station was long and beautifully designed, with minarets whose tips attached to the newest section of the city’s dome. Deshin had heard about the conflicts over the tips touching the dome, how much Kerman and his people had spent to be able to break the regulations so that the station’s beauty could impress visitors the moment they arrived.

Deshin felt calmer as he got closer to the station. He activated his link with Gerda.

Paavo’s safe,
he sent.

I know—

He stumbled, fell, the breath knocked out of him. Around him, people were screaming. Buildings were crumbling and the air had turned a dusty gray.

The link to Gerda had broken.

Jakande was on top of him, holding him down. Deshin’s ears ached.

“What the—?” he asked aloud, then stopped. He couldn’t hear himself, which meant that Jakande couldn’t hear him either.

Deshin looked up, saw that the dome had sectioned. The section was a muddy brown and looked like it hadn’t been cleaned off since it was built.

He could see people on the other side, also down—the impact of the section colliding with the ground had been worse than the sectioning in Armstrong four years ago after the bombing there—and it took him a moment to realize that two of his team members were on the other side, one of the men and one of the women.

Do you know what’s going on?
he sent to Jakande.

Jakande rolled off him but kept a hand on his back, holding him in place.
No, sir
.

Deshin shook him off.
We need to get to that train, right now. They’re going to shut down transportation, if they haven’t already.

The other two members of his team could make their own way back. It was one of the risks of working security, that things didn’t always go as expected.

They knew it. He knew it.

They had instructions. They would be all right.

He got to his knees and then a
whomp!
knocked him back down. He felt the
whomp!
rather than heard it. A vibration so strong that he wondered if he would ever stand again.

The screaming grew louder, and Deshin was about to grab Jakande, force him toward the station, when he turned.

The area beyond the section was alive with light and fire and smoke. Orange and black and gold, buildings gone, the section streaked with blood and debris.

He let out a small breath or maybe it was a large breath, he had no idea. Just that the area beyond the section was different, that two of his people were in there.

Deshin had no idea how to get them out. They would only have seconds, if that.

Jakande had somehow found his feet and had hurried to the section. Deshin followed. They were almost touching it when yet another
whomp!
knocked them back.

Above them gunshots or something that sounded like them. Deshin looked up, expecting more building to collapse around him.

Instead, he saw chunks of gray brick pelting the dome. It took him maybe five seconds—which felt like five days—to figure out that was bits of building landing on the
exterior
of the dome. The
outside
. Where no bits of the dome should be. No bits of building.

And nothing should fall from above. That was not how the Moon worked.

Then red matter and some liquid spattered on the top of the dome, and Deshin made himself look at the section instead of what was above him.

It took a second for his brain to assemble the pieces into something that made sense.

The dome had exploded.

Or rather, the part of the dome where his people had been. The fires—the red and orange lights—they were gone, and what remained was like a gray dust, a haze he couldn’t see through.

Jakande had both fists against the section. He was yelling, but Deshin couldn’t hear his individual voice above all the other voices, screaming and screaming and screaming.

Deshin took Jakande’s arm and pulled him back. The rest of his team—the remainder of his team—was yelling too.

His best people, forgetting their primary mission. Not because they were bad at what they did, but because this was unthinkable, so they weren’t prepared for it, none of them had prepared for it, and only one of them knew how to keep a cool head with the universe burning around them.

Him.

His team was good, but they were
trained
. They hadn’t lived through disasters like he had.

We’re going to the train
, he sent.
And we’re going to get that fucker out of this city, even if we have to crash through a section. You got that?

He pulled Jakande away from the section. Deshin repeated the directive and then took off on a run, going around stunned people, startled Peyti, and frighteningly calm Disty, sprinting past vehicles that were landing on top of other vehicles and rubble from buildings that hadn’t been built to code.

It took forever, but really only a minute or two, to reach the station. It at least was intact. Train doors were open in the passenger sections, but Deshin didn’t go into them.

Instead, he ran to the front of the bullet train. Pounding on the door, sending codes he shouldn’t have known, codes he had saved from his work with Kerman, and the control room doors eased open.

Deshin jumped inside, Jakande jumping after him, the woman (God, he’d forgotten her name) joining them, but no other team members in sight.

Too damn bad.

Deshin closed the doors, overrode the security protocols, praying that this train was like older bullet trains, because he hadn’t done anything like this in twenty-five years.

He was actually hijacking a train.

He had to get out of this city, and waiting for the authorities wasn’t going to work.

For all he knew, the authorities were dead.

You can’t go through the dome,
Jakande sent.
It sectioned here too
.

Dome emergency exit codes are all the same
, Deshin sent back. At least they were on the Moon. It was a failsafe, mostly for dome workers, so that they could escape if something went wrong.

Deshin had learned that when he started working in dome maintenance, and he always kept the updated codes in a personal, easily accessible file, even after he left, when the codes came to him as part of the construction files he got through his various legitimate businesses.

Make sure the doors are closing
, he sent to Jakande.
Look—with your eyes not your links to make sure we don’t kill anyone as we start up.

Deshin flung every emergency code he had at the dome, putting them on a loop, figuring one of them would open this section and let them outside onto the Moonscape.

If someone was blowing up the domes, he had to get out of them. He had to head home, and he had to protect his family.

With Soseki dead, no one would figure out how to protect Armstrong’s dome.

The only thing Deshin could hope for was that these bombs were either on a timer or they were being planted at different times in different places, maybe starting with the cities farthest from Armstrong and working their way back to the port.

He didn’t know, he didn’t want to ask—not that there was anyone to ask—and he didn’t want to worry Gerda or Paavo.

He sent her a message now, hoping it would reach her when the links got re-established:
Heading home, love. We’re safe here
, lying through his damn teeth (his damn links) but he didn’t know how else to do it, and he didn’t want her to panic.

He wanted her and Paavo out of Armstrong’s dome, but he wasn’t sure if they’d be safe traveling without him. If they got caught in a dome section, they’d be split in half, like his team had been. And he knew that his home, and the school, weren’t anywhere near the government sections of Armstrong.

Because that was what blew up here. The section that exploded was near Yutu City’s local government buildings, might even have been in them, he wasn’t sure, and he wasn’t paying attention.