THIRTY-EIGHT

 

 

NYQUIST FOUND IT surprisingly easy to get to the Port of Armstrong, considering the police presence around the city. Security at the port was high, but people and aliens and goods still flowed in and out. He wondered if he should say something to DeRicci, then decided against it, at least for the moment. He needed to focus on Ursula Palmette.

The port was a windy twisty building that had several wings. Really it was several buildings all attached to one hub, but the city preferred to consider the port as one unit. Rather odd, considering that it might be easier to shut down a section of the port if it were considered a different building than it would be to shut down the entire port.

Still, he wasn’t in charge, and he was glad of it. He would have hated to run the port, much more than he would have hated to have DeRicci’s job. DeRicci took care of the entire Moon, but she thought of it the way he thought of his city, as a unit. And she was working security, not running the Moon itself.

No one was running the Moon itself. Not yet anyway. Although he was seeing the government centralize more and more. He wouldn’t doubt if the office of governor-general and the United Domes council became more important during his lifetime, rather than less.

Particularly after a crisis like this. Leaders down, and only DeRicci’s office with the authority to handle the Moon-wide emergency.

He watched security let through two slender blond men without giving them any greater check than anyone else. Nyquist hurried toward them, and caught one of them by the arm, taking an image of the man’s face and comparing it to the suspect’s image via his inks.

“Sorry,” Nyquist said. “Thought you were someone else.”

“It’s okay,” the man said and headed into nearby restaurant. The other man had disappeared into the crowd and was long gone.

That decided Nyquist. He sent a message to DeRicci via the emergency links. I’m at the port following a lead. Security is lax here. You might already have lost the suspect. Better double-check your security order for here.

He got an audio message back with an audible curse embedded in it. That curse made him smile. Apparently that curse was just for him.

Thanks, Bartholomew, DeRicci sent. Am having trouble with Popova. Apparently she forgot to send the revised message through. Will take care of it now, and hope for the best.

Problems with Popova? That was really unusual. The woman was scarily efficient. Had this emergency finally taxed her to the limits? If so, even that would surprise Nyquist. He hadn’t thought Popova had limits.

He headed back the way he had come when he’d been pursuing the blond men. His stomach growled as he passed another restaurant, this one smelling of frying meat. He stopped at a nearby stand and bought an apple, one of the few things he knew would be fresh at the port.

Then he went through the police door. Even the security for that was still on the low-end. All he had to do was open his palm so that the door could read his badge number. The system should have done a retinal scan and a living tissue scan at this point in the crisis.

But he wasn’t going to bother DeRicci again. He had done what he could. Now he had to find Palmette.

The back corridors in the port were narrower than the main corridors. They were unadorned, and didn’t have the floating ads that the public areas had. Nor did they have pop-up directories with maps or port behavior rules.

He had to remember the layout himself or call up a detailed map, the kind only available to authorities who worked the port.

He let himself into Space Traffic Control. This was the heart of the port, with more people, doorways, and corridors than any other part. There was a security section, an operations section, a decontamination section, and dozens of others. Nyquist hadn’t been inside most of them, although he had been inside the decontamination area on one memorable evening.

He never wanted to go in there again.

Now that he was inside Space Traffic, he had to find Palmette’s section, and he couldn’t do that on his own. So he called up the directory via his links and asked it to locate Palmette’s desk.

Her name didn’t even register, which bothered him. Instead, the system asked for a job title and/or a job description.

He sent back Special Administrator for Quarantined Ships, and hoped he had the title right. Otherwise, he would have to go into Space Traffic’s reception, which he hated to do.

Murray, the guy who ran it most days, was a genial sort, and that made him a talker. They had a friend in common—Miles Flint, the Retrieval Artist who, long ago, used to work as a cop in Space Traffic. Murray liked Flint and thought he could do no wrong. Nyquist always felt uneasy around Flint, and worried that Flint was masking illegal behavior under the guise of cooperation.

Nyquist didn’t want to tell that to Murray, and so always tried to avoid conversations with him.

Fortunately the map displayed a path to Palmette’s desk, through a twist of warrenlike corridors, near the back of Space Traffic. Nyquist frowned. He had thought her job important, yet she had been shuttled to the very back of the building, away from everyone else.

Maybe that was the nature of dealing with quarantined vessels. Maybe there was a reason she was isolated.

He hoped not. He remembered talking to her a year after she had recovered from her injuries. She was going through psych evaluations, and failing them.

Nyquist had had to go through those as well before he got his shield back. He wasn’t allowed to work anything but a desk job until he passed each evaluation. And the desk job was a courtesy, given to him because of his rank and years on the force. He really didn’t do much work during that time, because no one wanted him on major cases.

He had hated that time of his life, sometimes wondering why he had survived the attacks at all, wondering why his service record and his closure rate made no difference. Later he understood: he’d seen others break down from post-traumatic stress or sheer terror based on an attack they survived.

Not everyone was designed to return to a job that had nearly killed them.

Apparently Palmette was one of those people. She had appealed to Nyquist, asking him for a recommendation to the board, trying to reinstate herself in the Armstrong Police Department. He hadn’t known her well, and was reluctant to do so, but he did talk to the Chief of Detectives Andrea Gumiela about it. His argument was essentially that Palmette, injured in the line of duty, should be allowed to prove herself as an investigator while she went through these evaluations. At least give her a desk job, which Gumiela had. Palmette had contacted him, thanking him for the good words.

Not that it lasted. She never passed the psych evals and was told that if she wanted to remain in law enforcement, she had to take the desk version of an investigative job. That was when the Special Administrator came up, and she had taken that, hoping it would lead to something better.

Apparently it hadn’t.

He had to go through a rabbit warren of narrow corridors to reach the back of this building—or section, as it was called. He expected to find an office, with Palmette’s name on the door. Instead, he found a desk crammed into a cubby filled with other desks. Her desk was walled off from the others by a kind of clear material that could be opaqued. She couldn’t even have true privacy.

For such an independent woman, this must have been hell.

He sighed. She wasn’t at her desk. In fact, her desk looked like it hadn’t been used all day. The chair was pushed in, the screen was off, and there were no personal items—no glass of water, no forgotten mug of coffee. There wasn’t even anything in the nearby garbage can—not even a stain or two.

Now that could be attributed to a zealous cleaning bot, but he didn’t think so. The desk felt unused.

There were no other employees nearby at the moment. Those desks, however, looked like they were being used, the chairs askew, jackets or sweaters on the backs of them, a purse still remaining on the floor.

No one to ask about Palmette however. So he did the next best thing: He used his link to ping her. Because she was Space Traffic and he was police, he should also be able to get her location.

The ping bounced back: Ursula Palmette is in the middle of an important assignment. She will return your message when she has a moment. If this is an emergency, use the emergency link system.

He was surprised. No cop should ever get that message from someone else in the department.

So he looked at her location, and started in surprise.

She was, according to the computer system, sitting at her desk. Working hard, in fact, because he got the same message warning him away. A message that told him how hard she was working.

He delved deeper into Space Traffic’s system, requesting her arrival time that morning, and her movements throughout the day.

She had arrived at 9 a.m, and except for a short lunch break, remained at her desk all day. The system was useless.

Or it had been rigged.

Which made him nervous, given Palmette’s job.

Something quarantined had made it into Armstrong, and now the one person who was in charge of quarantined ships had false information on her job report. Someone had tampered with it.

His heart raced.

Ursula Palmette was in trouble—again.