Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (22 page)

He sighed, as if he didn’t believe her. She wasn’t sure she believed herself.

“We have, um, a lot of—when the bomb went off…ah, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to say this.” He ran his hand over his face again, obviously a nervous habit.

She waited for him to finish.

He shot her an apologetic look.

“When…um…the bots come across what’s clearly organic material, they collect it, and so do our S&R people.”

It took her a moment to realize that S&R was Search & Rescue. Organic material. All these euphemisms. Brain matter. Blood. A bit of skin. Maybe a bone fragment. Things that DNA could be extracted from.

“Bot collection of larger…um…samples? Material?…anyway, um, we can compare to that. It’ll be weeks before we can compare to the microscopic…um, bits…but the larger…we can do that now.”

She froze at the computer. Did she want to know her sister had been reduced to “organic material”? Goudkins worked to get that phrase out of her mind.

“How do I compare?” she asked.

“I’ll walk you through it,” he said, and then he did.

TWENTY-EIGHT

PEARL BROOKS SAT in semi-darkness, lost inside numbers. She spent most of her days dealing with numbers and their implications. Numbers were so much easier to handle than people. Numbers had never done her wrong.

She could trust numbers, if she could find the right equations and the best ways to verify them.

Her office was in the very center of the Currency Division of the Earth Alliance Treasury Starbase. She couldn’t count on her office remaining here for long; the Earth Alliance Treasury was always vulnerable to attack, so its location was kept a secret and it remained in one place for two months or until the location was known, whichever was shorter.

It didn’t matter where the staff worked. What mattered was where the data was stored, and that changed too. The staff didn’t know much about data storage, and anyone who asked was flagged. If that person acted suspiciously in any way, they were summarily dismissed, whether or not they had done anything wrong.

In the Treasury Division, a person was guilty when suspected, and there was no proving innocent. You either toed the line or you didn’t.

Brooks didn’t care about the line. She knew who she was and what she did, and her confidence in herself, and in the numbers that she loved, had helped her move up the ranks.

She had started as a low-level analyst in the Human Currency Exchange, which handled conversions of all the millions of human currencies into Earth Alliance Credits. Then she got promotions, each time with more responsibility, until she moved to the Joint Unit, where she had to prove herself again.

She hated working with aliens, and had asked to be reassigned. It was one thing to learn numbers. It was another to learn the social behavior of all of her colleagues, some of whom had more appendages than she had strands of hair.

It had overwhelmed her, and interfered with her study of numbers. She loved watching the automatic conversions as a way to stay calm.

Most of the system was automated, but it still needed a living monitor at times, mostly to judge the importance of interactions, and maybe rank a local coup in Gdansk on Earth below an election in Wells City on Mars. Rankings helped determine where the currencies traded and how they would fare against each other as they converted to Earth Alliance Credits.

So beautiful. So elegant. And so simple, despite their seeming complexity.

Because of the numbers and the difficulties she had with some social aspects of her job, she had turned down three different promotions since she had moved into Earth Alliance Currency Division Headquarters.

She could still watch the conversions, and she could overrule anyone below her—the thousands and thousands of employees who thought they knew as much as she did. (They never would; so few of them had the same love of numbers she did, the same comfort with the regimented non-social thinking required in so much of the job.)

She stayed here, mostly so that she could work in silence and follow her passions without any interruption from living beings at all.

Which was what made the message that crossed her division link all the more annoying:

Moon crisis meeting already started. Where are you, Pearl?

She wanted to answer,
here, where the real work is being done
, but she didn’t. She sighed. She had hoped they would have forgotten her. She had already submitted her opinion, which she had written with the care of a legal brief. They didn’t need her to discuss anything.

Instead of sending her irritated message, she would have to deliver that irritation in person.

Coming
, she sent, and stood.

This,
this
, was the reason she hated working with others. They had to have dumb meetings when contact on links or through documents or even vids would work better. But no, someone determined that face-time was important so that everyone would get a chance to respond.

Apparently, some people ignored requests to participate, as they all told her in arch tones. And, she would say in return, sometimes ignoring was the best response.

She got up from her comfortable chair, which she had molded to her entire body and often felt like a second skin, and walked through her holographic screens.

She loved the symbolism of that. It felt like the numbers were part of her, if only for a moment. She left the screens running, their numbers scrolling faster than most people could ever see, and stepped into the hallway.

This particular part of this particular starbase was narrow and dark. Disty-designed for humans, someone had told her, and she believed it. The Disty knew that humans were taller than they were, but they never seemed to realize how much taller.

Fortunately, Brooks was not that tall, and quite thin—not because of enhancements but because (everyone said) she didn’t eat enough. She could wend her way through the twisty hallways without bending over (much). What she hated was the dim lights. Even on full, they made everything seem Mars-red and dusty.

The meeting room had been redesigned into a conference room that suited humans. Brooks didn’t realize until she got there that this meeting was humans-only.

She should have refused participation on that fact alone.

Of course, everyone was there—all fifty department heads. They looked up at her as if she had done something wrong by being late.

So she leaned just inside the doorway, and crossed her arms.

Since they were all staring at her—a sea of brown and tan faces, resentful eyes, and hair color ranging from white to sea-green—she decided to take control.

“Someone want to tell me why you folks felt it necessary to have a face-to-face without our colleagues from other species?” she snapped. She was laying the baseline for that particular argument.

“We figured we’d present it to them after we had human agreement,” Roger Srisati said. Srisati particularly annoyed her. He had frown lines so deep he could funnel sand through them, and he seemed to think he was a gift to finance.

“Present what?” she asked, even though she knew she shouldn’t.

“We need to find a legal means to send money to the Moon. The crisis there is severe, and—”

“You’re kidding, right?” she snapped. “
That’s
what this is about?”

She made it sound like she didn’t know, even though she did.

“Not entirely,” Veda Puth said. She had auburn hair that she piled on top of her head and let it cascade around her face in waves. “The Moon doesn’t have its own currency…”

Yes, I know that
, Brooks wanted to say, but she had learned that some sarcastic remarks were simply overkill.

“…and many here believe that the impact on the Earth Alliance credits will continue to be devastating—”

“It hasn’t been devastating so far,” Brooks said. “I’m actually surprised at how little this crisis has moved the currency markets. I would venture to say it’s statistically insignificant.”

The phrase
I would venture to say
, she had learned, made it sound like she was participating, when really, she wanted to shake every single person in the room and force them to understand how the damn markets worked. The Moon wasn’t the Earth, for God’s sake. If every major city on Earth had been targeted, maybe the Earth Alliance credits would have suffered more, particularly since so many Earth Alliance headquarters were located in those major cities.

But the Moon? The Port of Armstrong wasn’t even damaged. Nothing was going to affect the currency markets unless the port was rendered unusable.

Puth looked down, clearly rebuked by Brooks’s words. One of the other people toward the back, a woman Brooks didn’t know, said, “Pearl is right. We don’t need to worry about the Earth Alliance financially. The worst is over.”

They hoped, Brooks thought but didn’t say. If she were prone to biting her lip to remain quiet, she’d have bitten through the damn thing by now, and her part of the meeting had just started.

“What we’re doing here, really, is seeing if we can find a way to shave a millionth of a percent off some transactions and designate it into a fund to help the Moon through the crisis.”

“That’s not legal,” Brooks said.

“It is if the Earth Alliance Financial Board agrees,” Srisati said.

“Humans and non-humans,” Brooks said. “And most non-humans can’t give a crap about the Moon. Hell, most humans can’t either. You do realize that only one percent of the human population of the Earth Alliance lives inside Earth’s solar system, right?”

Half the people in the room were now looking at their hands. How happy everyone must have been that she arrived. She smiled inwardly, her sarcasm amusing her at least.

“It’s a stupid idea,” she said, “as I told you all in my brief. And, as I mentioned, we all have to vote yes to pull off any kind of charitable gift from the Earth Alliance, which hasn’t happened in my lifetime, and I doubt it will. Besides, has anyone thought about who might be the beneficiary? There is no overall Moon government.”

Someone started, “The United Domes of the Moon—”

“The United Domes of the Moon,” Brooks said, “is a start-up government whose leader was killed on Anniversary Day. The United Domes of the Moon has no standing inside the Earth Alliance, because that leader, in her brilliance, never applied for standing. So we couldn’t give them money if we wanted to. So, if you people want to contribute to the recovery of the Moon, by all means do so. There are lots of charitable organizations that would
love
your donations. But stop wasting time talking about something that isn’t going to happen.”

She stood up, uncrossed her arms, and smoothed her shirt. The entire room stared at her as if they were afraid of her.

And if they were afraid of her, they shouldn’t have insisted that she leave her little office-cave for this time-waster.

Oh, that’s right: they needed her. For their silly, worthless, unanimous vote.

“The problem with you people,” she said into their silence, “is that you don’t think. You want to help the Moon? Then go direct. Because what you’re trying to do needs some rewritten rules, it needs approval all up the chain of command, and I guarantee that there will be legal challenges.”

“How can you guarantee that?” a woman asked.

“Because she’d challenge it,” someone else said softly.

Brooks smiled at that person, whose face was lost in the reddish darkness at the back of the stupid conference room.

“That’s right,” she said. “Because there’s all kinds of improprieties going on here, including wasting staff time on frivolous and useless meeting items. My point, though, is valid. Your method will get money to the Moon in ten or fifteen years. If you just fucking donate, you’ll get money there next week.”

They stared at her. Someone had to have thought they could convince her to share their agenda, but whoever that someone was wasn’t speaking up any longer.

“Now,” she said, “if you’ll all excuse me, I have some real work to do. And next time? Read my brief before paging me. Because none of you people are ever going to change my mind. That would take logic and reason, and you all seem to function on something else entirely.”

“Yeah,” said a different person in the darker part of the room. “Compassion.”

She let out a sigh. That word irritated her to no end.

“Compassion?” she said. “You actually believe you’re compassionate? Because more people die every day due to the byzantine laws of the Earth Alliance than ever will in some catastrophe like Anniversary Day. There are wars going on all over the Alliance that our leaders feel are ‘local’ and therefore must ‘run their course.’ Refugees have no place to go, particularly if they apply for help from outside the Alliance, in places such as the Frontier. But some big crisis in a mostly human place, something that hits the news and is in our faces because it’s the ‘center of the Earth Alliance,’ and you all believe you need to ‘act compassionately.’ Bullshit. You wouldn’t know compassion if it bit you on the ass.”

“That’s an unfortunate metaphor,” Puth said, and everyone in the room laughed.

Everyone except Brooks. She shook her head.

“We’re here to keep the Alliance running,” she said. “We have a really important job, even if it seems dry to most of you. Give money if you want to, but don’t make it part of our work day, and leave those of us who actually care about our jobs out of it. You won’t get me to vote on your stupid projects, so stop asking.”

She stalked down the hall, but not fast enough to outrun the comments.

“…told you…”

“…really is an android, I swear…”

“…likes numbers better than people…”

That last was probably true. Because numbers weren’t stupid and they followed set rules. Just like the people working in this starbase were supposed to.

Of course they never did.

And they always failed to see the irony in that.

She was acutely aware of that irony. She faced it every single day. Irony was one of the few things that kept logical people sane in the Earth Alliance.