Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (7 page)

With Soseki dead, the governor-general dying, an explosion in Yutu City, he had to figure that someone was attacking any government building possible.

He didn’t confirm any of that. He needed to focus—and he already was.

Somehow, as he started working the train, he had shut off his visual links. He’d done this in the past, his subconscious mind working at minimizing distractions so his conscious mind could work unimpeded.

He managed to get the train started. He programmed in the speed, making sure that the train scanned the route ahead for debris.

Trains like this were built to plow through small debris, but they couldn’t handle large things, like parts of buildings and entire pieces of dome.

The route he programmed took the train around the largest domes, just in case they blew up, kept the train in the non-domed parts of the Moon, the industrial and mining regions, away from any government areas.

Deshin knew he could go faster that way.

And he would be home within the hour, so that he could rescue his family and figure out what the hell to do next.

EIGHT

TORKILD PULLED HER toward what appeared to be a solid wall, covered in screens. Berhane couldn’t see them clearly—there were too many other people in the way—but she saw the movement on them.

Torkild, taller than she was, pushed his way through the crowd, his fingers pinching her elbow as he pulled her forward. She stumbled behind him, occasionally banging into someone, usually a short little Disty scurrying to somewhere else.

But sometimes Berhane hit the back of a person bent over a screen or subvocalizing on their links. More than once, she passed someone (often a human male) shouting as if he were alone, “I’m stuck here. Don’t you get it? They’re not letting anyone in or
out
…”

The cacophony was huge, ear-splitting, and it was giving her a headache. She heard more languages in this drag from one part of the gigantic terminal to the other than she had heard since college.

A group of Peyti stood silently near a clump of chairs and watched. She had no idea if the Peyti were communicating on their links or just thinking that the humans were being stupidly emotional all over again. And she couldn’t really tell if they were talking to each other—those masks covered their mouths.

Torkild looked over his shoulder at her, as if she were the one holding them up. He pulled harder, and she emerged through a cluster of people into an open area.

Here, everyone was staring up at the screens. She couldn’t help herself; she looked up too.

And wished she hadn’t.

She saw Nelia Byler, the governor-general’s assistant, clutching a gurney. The person on the gurney had black hair and a grayish face (like Arek?) but Berhane couldn’t quite tell who it was.

She turned on her links—all of them—then wished she hadn’t. The chatter in them made her feel like her head was full.

She filtered them down to news updates, heard

…attack on Governor-General Alfreda as well…

…going on in Armstrong today? Clearly, these attacks were coordinated…

…uncertain how many other leaders, if any, have been threatened…

She looked up at Torkild.

He had stopped moving, his hand still holding her elbow, but not pinching anymore. His face was squinched. He was looking at her with sympathy, and the look didn’t fit on his skin very well. It never had.

“Did you reach him?” Torkild asked.

She hadn’t even tried, not since they’d started their mad dash across the crowded terminal.

“No,” she said. “But he hasn’t answered me.”

“I’m sure they have the site locked down,” Torkild said.

“But link communications?” she asked.

“I’d be shutting down everything but the emergency links,” he said in his lawyer voice. “You don’t want rumors to start and you don’t want the wrong information to slip out.”

Like the fact that everyone else who attended the governor-general’s speech might be dead.

Her stomach clenched.

Her father couldn’t be dead, he just couldn’t. The cruel irony of dying on Anniversary Day aside, he wasn’t the kind of man who just died. Not even in a situation like this.

“Come on,” Torkild said, and his grip on her tightened.

She couldn’t tell if he was disgusted with her. She hadn’t answered him, she hadn’t even tried to answer him, she just looked up at him like a dazed child, the way she had done when her mother had died and he had shown up at the house. Dazed, terrified—not at all the same woman who had led a train car full of people onto the unstable platform near the bombed-out section of Armstrong.

Torkild walked directly toward the screens, and Berhane tried to pull back. Didn’t he see where he was going?

He slipped behind one of the full-sized screens, touched the wall, and a door she hadn’t seen before opened. As it did, a sign flashed across her vision:

Earth Alliance Lounge. No Admittance Without Clearance
.

She stopped, and pulled him back.

He turned, a frown on his face, then nodded. “It’s okay,” he said. “I have clearance.”

Lucky him.

He led her inside.

The lounge smelled of oranges and wet feet. The weird stench made her eyes water.

The door closed behind her, and as it did, she realized that this room, while smaller than the main luxury terminal, was still quite large. It was filled with dozens of people she recognized—big-shot lawyers, diplomats, and some lower level government officials.

Some were talking to each other, but most were slightly hunched, clearly communicating on their links. A handful watched the screens ringing the room.

Images on those cross-cut between the police working on the crime scene outside O’Malley’s, a still shot of Arek’s strangely stonelike visage, and that panicked shot of Nelia Byler, clutching a gurney.

Several Disty sat cross-legged on top of tiny tables. There were even more Peyti in this lounge than there had been in the main terminal. These Peyti all sat at tables and tapped on devices held in their sticklike hands. They at least seemed familiar.

Because some of the other aliens didn’t.

She wasn’t sure she had ever been this close to a group of Rev. They were unbelievably huge, pear-shaped, and had more arms than she could easily see. She’d read some history of the Rev, of them using their size and extra limbs to intimidate humans, and she finally understood it.

The smell near the door came from the cluster of Lynisians near the door. They reeked of oranges, something they ate in large measure (and used as cologne) whenever they came to human-based communities. Oranges weren’t available on Lynae.

Most humans kept a big distance from the Lynisians, partly because they were loud, but also because their appearance was uncomfortably strange. They had tentacles poking out of the top of their torsos, like long, out-of-control hair, but at the end of the tentacles, they had hands.

Two long limbs on either side of their torsos ended in faces, which made them very hard to look at. Often one of the limbs would be upside down by human standards, talking to a compatriot’s face that was in the same position.

She had had a class with a Lynisian, and he’d required three chairs so that he could lift his faces upright to watch class interactions.

She hadn’t been able to look at him then, and she couldn’t look at this group now.

Torkild had let go of her arm. He was marching forward to a group of empty, plush, blue chairs in the center of the room.

She stopped following. It was quieter in here, if stranger.

She ran a hand over her face.

Daddy
, she sent through her links.
Please answer me the moment you get this. Please
.

She wondered if she should let her brother know that their father was in the middle of this mess. But Bert was on the Frontier, and he probably didn’t even know there
was
a mess.

Torkild was shouting at someone—shouting! A man looked up, as if he had done something wrong, and Torkild headed toward him.

Berhane was done traipsing along like the dutiful fiancée. She had thought she was supposed to be talking to Torkild. Instead, he was heading toward someone named Barry who apparently was an old friend.

Berhane leaned on one of the chairs. It slid, which she didn’t expect. Most of the furniture in the port was bolted down, but apparently not in here.

Daddy
, she sent again. She had a feeling she wouldn’t hear from him for some time, but she couldn’t stop herself from pinging his links. Maybe she should try his business offices and see if they could track him down.

She might not be on his emergency list, a thought that would once of have twisted her stomach but now seemed as normal as breathing.

She slid the chair back into position. She was suddenly tired and in need of a seat. Maybe she would just close her eyes for a few minutes, and when she did, this long and terrible morning would be over.

She was reaching for the chair when the floor shook. The chair skittered away from her—
bounced
away from her—and she was having trouble staying on her feet.

A couple of the Disty fell off their tables. Two of the Peyti’s chairs toppled sideways. The Rev’s weird arms came out and caught the walls.

The shaking seemed to go on forever, but she knew it only lasted a few seconds.

People were screaming and shouting. A number of them had fallen, but she hadn’t.

She’d been through worse.

She even knew what this was.

The dome had sectioned. For the third time in her life, the dome had sectioned.

She wrapped her arms around her torso and looked up at the screens.

All the images of the governor-general and Arek were gone, replaced by images of burned-out buildings and smoke rising out of the center of domes. Only the areas didn’t look familiar. When the bomb had exploded four years ago, that area had still looked like itself. Like a horrible disgusting terrible rendering of a once-lovely place.

She didn’t recognize these places.

Voices around her, still shouting, were talking about the sectioning, but she didn’t care.

She was looking at those images.

Was she looking at Littrow? Or somewhere else? She thought she saw smoke rising out of one of the craters—Tycho Crater? Damn the Moonscape. It was impossible to tell exactly where the images were coming from.

She was spinning, slowly, staring at the screens, trying to make sense of them, and knowing, deep down, exactly what they were showing her.

The Moon. All of it. Looking like that little section of Armstrong had not four years ago.

The entire Moon.

Torkild reached her side. He grabbed for her, but she didn’t let him touch her. He looked panicked.

She didn’t need someone who panicked.

Not right now.

Still, her gaze met his.

“Do you know what this means?” she asked—softly, she thought, but with all the chatter, she probably hadn’t spoken softly at all.

He shook his head. All the color had leached from his skin. He still didn’t look like Arek, though. No one looked like those images of Arek.

“Nothing is going to be the same,” she said. “Nothing is ever going to be the same again.”

ONE WEEK LATER

NINE

FOR DAYS AFTERWARD, most everyone went outside after dark and stared up at the sky. The moon was full, or near full, and some of the destruction was visible to the naked eye.

Pippa Landau had been to the Moon more times than she wanted to think about, usually to Armstrong, which was mostly spared. But she had lived on Earth long enough to adopt some of Earth’s customs. Or maybe some of the customs of where she lived, a place that proudly called itself the Midwest, even though it was in the middle of no part of the west as she knew it, a place that liked its old names even better, even though the regions it referred to had less meaning than they historically did.

She lived in Iowa.

For a while she had lived near the flat farmland in the center of the region, but she had moved to the bluffs near the Mississippi River after her second son was born. She hadn’t thought of those farmlands until the night she learned about what the media was now calling Anniversary Day.

In those farmlands, the darkness would be richer, and the Moon even brighter.

But here in Davenport, right after Anniversary Day, the residents had started turning off lights at dusk, even the automated ones. Everyone gathered in the historic Prospect Terrace Park overlooking the river, where some major treaty, now completely unimportant, had been signed long ago, and she found herself part of “everyone.”

She hadn’t been to Prospect Terrace Park in more than a decade, and not at night since her children were little and wanted to attend the July summer fireworks party that had continued for centuries, unbroken, from a barge on the Mississippi.

The Anniversary Day gatherings didn’t have the festive feel of the fireworks parties or even the annual park blues festival, held in September just before the weather changed.

In fact, she had never in her life experienced anything like these gatherings. She had come to the park on a whim. Her backyard was small and not set up for stargazing. Usually, she didn’t look up at night at all. She didn’t like to think about what was out there in the known universe, the things that could come for her—and hadn’t so far.

So, when she heard about Anniversary Day, she thought about the best place to look at the night sky, and decided on the least developed park, the one that some historical society deemed too important for “services.” There were bathrooms at the end of the road, near the very controversial parking lot, but nothing more except benches that were replaced every decade or so as they wore out.

When she drove up the first night after the bombings, she was surprised to see that dozens of others had the same idea. Human, Peyti, Disty—it didn’t seem to matter. People from all species had gathered and were looking up, some with real telescopes and some using the scoping feature in their eyes.