The Peyti Crisis: A Retrieval Artist Novel: Book Five of the Anniversary Day Saga (Retrieval Artist series 12) Read online

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  Table of Contents

  Retrieval Artist Series

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  For Paul B. Higginbotham,

  who has supported my writing from the beginning, and for being one of the best friends ever.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Peyti Crisis started as the third book in what I thought was a trilogy, and then it morphed into the fifth book of an eight-book series. My husband kept me sane through the transition, or at least, as sane as I’ll ever be. Thank you, Dean, for talking me down during each and every book of the series.

  I also have to thank Annie Reed, Colleen Kuehne, Judy Cashner, and Jerimy Colbert who have done their best to keep my errors at bay. (All mistakes are mine.)

  Special thanks to Allyson Longueira, who has shepherded this large project with aplomb and who has designed the fantastic covers.

  And, last but definitely not least, thanks to all the readers who are traveling with me on this journey. Your enthusiasm has kept me going through each and every word.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Dear Readers,

  When one of my regular readers saw the marvelous cover that WMG’s Allyson Longueira designed for this book, he also noted the title and asked, “Isn’t The Peyti Crisis a better title for Blowback?”

  Well…no. Because Blowback is all about the surprise. The Peyti Crisis is about the aftermath.

  Before I go any farther with this, let me address those of you who picked this book up because of Allyson’s wonderful cover, and have never read a Retrieval Artist novel before. You’ve jumped into the middle of a long series—which is fine. The series was designed to be jumped into at any point—except for the Anniversary Day Saga books.

  The saga is a contained story arc in the middle of the long series. If you want to read the saga, start with Anniversary Day, then move to Blowback, A Murder of Clones, Search & Recovery, and then read this book.

  If you want to read the entire Retrieval Artist series (and you don’t have to in order to enjoy the saga), start with The Disappeared.

  For those of you who have read Retrieval Artist books before and picked this up, thinking it’s the next book after Blowback, please go back and read A Murder of Clones and Search & Recovery before starting this book. You’ll be glad you did.

  I write out of order, and normally, I assemble my novels after writing all the pieces, rather like a quilter does when she has the fabric cut and the pieces laid out. The Anniversary Day saga is one big story, so having the luxury to finish the books all at once has allowed me to cut and piece this story together as it should go.

  The previous two novels took us into the recent (and not-so-recent) past. The Peyti Crisis starts just after Blowback and, indeed, was the book I wrote next—with side trips to Epricomm and a few other short stories (some you’ll see upcoming, and some which remain unfinished, written to explain something just to me).

  Initially, though, this book didn’t end correctly, but it wasn’t until I was midway through Vigilantes (the next book) that I figured out why. I was trying to add plotlines and characters that you won’t see until the last two books in this saga. They don’t fit in The Peyti Crisis, so I moved them to the places where they belonged, leaving me with some events that needed to be explored before I finished The Peyti Crisis. I wrote parts of Search & Recovery and Starbase Human before I revised this book and made it into the volume you have before you.

  Sounds complicated, right? It would be if I were trying to publish only one book a year. But the changes in the publishing industry have allowed me to write and publish the rest of the saga in a short period of time. In consultation with WMG, I decided to publish the last six books in the first six months of 2015.

  You don’t need a lengthy recap in the beginning, and I don’t have to worry that you’ll forget what happened from year to year. Plus, it leaves the reading in your hands. You can read all of the books as they appear or save them until July or read one or two in 2015, while reading other things. Your choice, not mine.

  I hope you enjoy The Peyti Crisis. I loved returning to Flint and the gang. I suspect it shows.

  —Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Lincoln City, Oregon

  June 14, 2014

  FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AGO

  ONE

  THE VOICE ON her links, so faint she almost didn’t hear it.

  Jhena, I need you. Oh, God, I need you.

  Jhena Andre sat in her tiny office in the back of the administration suite. She was comparing the approved list of names for the morning’s trial to the list of names vetted by the Earth Alliance Prison System. She had already compared the approved list to the list vetted through the Human Justice Division. She had five more lists to compare, and then she had to confirm that the DNA associated with the approved list of names for the morning’s trial actually belonged to the person with that name.

  She had stocked up on coffee: It was going to be a long night.

  Jhena, please. Please.

  She paused the holographic lists. The same name was highlighted on each. Behind the floating list, she could see the bare wall, the one she’d been told not to decorate since she wouldn’t be here long.

  Not long had gone from three weeks to six weeks to six months, and now, nearly a year. Somehow PierLuigi Frémont had managed to hire lawyers who actually argued his case, claiming at first the Earth Alliance had no jurisdiction over events in Abbondiado, and then when his lawyers had lost that, that what happened in Abbondiado had been an internal coup, not a crime against humanity.

  The Criminal Court had already tossed out one of the genocide charges, saying that crimes committed on the Frontier did not belong in Earth Alliance Courts. Someone, her boss had said, was afraid of taking this case all the way to the Multicultural Tribunals, and losing.

  Jhena….

  She finally recognized the voice, and more importantly, she recognized the link. It was her private link, the one she’d only given to friends, and the message was encoded, which was why it seemed faint.

  She cursed, and put a hand to her ear, even though she didn’t need to, even though she usually made fun of people who did the very same thing.

  Didier? She sent back. She knew she sounded timid, but she wasn’t sure it was him. Didier Conte was the only person in the entire prison complex who could contact her on her friends link.

  Yeah. Please. I need you right now. Bring evidence bags.

  Evidence bags? She didn’t have access to evidence bags. And then she realized that she did. Extras were stored in the closet just outside her stupid little office, along with a whole bunch of other supplies that this part of the prison needed.

  Why? she sent back.

  Hurry. And then he signed off.

  She stared at the highlighted name, the letters blurring, the image of the person the name belonged to not really registering. Why would Didier need her? Why not call another guard? And why had he signed off so fast?

  This was where she usually failed the friendship test. She didn’t care what other people needed, especially if they bothered her in the middle of something.

  But the something she was in the middle of was extremely tedious, and if Didier’s locator was right, he was deep inside the prison, where she only got to go if a supervisor was nearby.

  The prison wasn’t the most dangerous one Jhena had worked at in her short twenty-one years. That would be
a super max on the edge of the Earth Alliance, run by humans but housing all different kinds of aliens who’d broken human laws in various outposts along the way.

  She not only couldn’t go into certain parts of that prison because she would be fired; she couldn’t go because she would die without the proper gear. Not everything was set up on Earth Standard. The Peyti section alone had more toxins in the atmosphere than she had seen since her childhood, when her parents were working for Ultre Corporation.

  Her brain skittered away from that memory.

  She stood. This was probably her only chance to see PierLuigi Frémont without dozens of guards accompanying him. Didier said that Frémont was charismatic and that made him dangerous, not that it really mattered, since it didn’t matter how much the man charmed Jhena. She had no codes, no passkeys, and no DNA recognition that would allow her to open the doors to his cell.

  She was quite aware of her place as a lower-level employee of the prison system, one who could be replaced with yet another machine, but wasn’t partly because the law protected certain human jobs against automation, and partly because of the belief that humans could do some work better than machines.

  She was grateful for the law, even though she found the belief behind it stupid. But, then, she found a lot of beliefs stupid. She’d learned to be circumspect about it, learned to use those beliefs to her benefit, like now. Even though she hated the tedium, she was getting a hell of a good paycheck, and this job was a stepping stone to better jobs elsewhere in the Earth Alliance System.

  All because of a stupid belief.

  She grinned, stood, and smoothed her skirt. She wasn’t really dressed to go in the prisoner wing. She usually wore pants for that, and a loose-fitting shirt. Because she hadn’t wanted to come to work tonight, she had made it a game, deciding to look good for once, even though no one was going to see her.

  Now, it seemed, someone was. A mass murderer, by all accounts. A fascinating man. Someone famous.

  She left the office, pulling the door closed behind her, and then grabbed a box of evidence bags out of the closet across the hall.

  She didn’t want Didier to chastise her for not bringing enough bags, so she brought too many.

  She tucked the box under her arm, and headed into the high security area. She thought for a brief moment about the cameras that were everywhere, but she didn’t know how to shut them off.

  If she got in trouble, she would blame Didier, say that he had asked for her help, and she didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to give it.

  But no one around here looked at the camera footage unless there was a problem.

  And she hoped that despite his tone, Didier hadn’t caused a problem. She hoped he just needed a little bit of help with something.

  She hoped she wouldn’t pay for this forever.

  TWO

  NO HUMAN GUARDS were on duty in this part of the prison, at least not this late. The guard station had a full android unit behind the windows. Its yellow eyes tracked Jhena as she slapped her palm against the cool reinforced plastic.

  “Didier Conte sent for me,” she said as a purely cover-her-ass sentence. She suspected she could have opened the double-latched security entrance all on her own.

  But the android recorded everything, just like the security cameras did, and if anyone challenged her presence, she had her words as well as the link contacts to back her up. Unlike so many people, she kept track of every link contact instead of letting it fade into nothingness after a few weeks of time.

  She had learned young that it paid to be cautious.

  “Proceed,” the android said in its gender-neutral voice. The locks thumped, and the door into the decontamination/examination area swung open.

  She stepped inside, waving the box of evidence bags as a kind of notice that she had something unusual.

  Not that it mattered. Lights changed inside the decontamination/examination area as it checked her. Blue lights for biological hazards, and smuggled diseases; green for contraband goods; and orange for actual weapons. If the system found anything on her, the lights would either become bright yellow to signal possible trouble or bright flaring red for an actual discovery.

  Sometimes, when she slept, she dreamed that she was trapped in the decontamination/examination area as the red lights blinked and sirens blared. Guards would find dozens of weapons secreted on her person, or biohazard spread like goo along her clothing.

  She always woke from those dreams so terrified that she would have to get up and walk around, hoping the dreams would fade.

  Even though she had never carried anything into the prison proper. Even though she had never even thought of doing so, except when she stood here, afraid of being caught with something that someone had stashed on her.

  The air smelled faintly of ozone, like it always did at this part of the process. Then the lights returned to their low-watt whitish gray intensity, and the doors on the other side hummed open. Three sets of doors, each on a different timer, each opening from a different direction—the first to her right, the second to her left, and the last with the doors sliding up to the ceiling.

  Her heart pounded. If she went in there, she couldn’t get out without help, no matter how much she wanted to.

  She thought of tossing the box of evidence bags into the area, and then letting Didier know that they had arrived without her; he would have to come and get them.

  But two things stopped her: his tone, which had been odd, almost secretive; and the chance to see PierLuigi Frémont in what would be his natural environment from now on.

  She stepped through the doors, and into the cellblock.

  The air was noticeably colder and thinner. The theory was to keep the prisoners so cold that they expended some energy every day just to keep warm. The oxygen content was as low as it could get for human survival so that the prisoners were constantly short of breath.

  Every time she stepped in here, she hated it because she always felt momentarily lightheaded. If she stayed too long, she would get nauseous.

  She brushed the back of her hand, setting a timer that appeared in the corner of her right eye. The timer was an automatic one for the cell block. If she stayed longer than twenty minutes, the timer would go off.

  Twenty-five minutes was her maximum time without some kind of environmental suit in this oxygen-poor environment. That’s why she set for twenty minutes: she always gave herself five minutes to escape.

  She opened her link to the prison’s internal system. Find Didier Conte, she sent.

  Off-line, came the response, almost immediately.

  Her face warmed. Was Didier playing some kind of game with her? Off-line meant that he wasn’t in the prison at all.

  Her heart started pounding hard, and she suspected it wasn’t just because her body was struggling in this environment.

  She sent a message across her private link. The prison system says you’re not here, Didier. What are you playing at?

  Nothing, he sent back. I’ll reconnect to the system in a minute. I’m exactly where I should be, okay? Get here now.

  She frowned. He was playing a game of some kind, but she still thought he sounded terrified.

  She contacted the prison link system again, not covering her tracks. I thought Didier Conte was on guard duty tonight. What section was he scheduled for?

  High security, senior prisoner, Frémont. No record of Didier Conte’s departure and none of his presence. Would you like to reboot the system?

  Not yet, she sent, uncertain how that would play to someone examining her actions much later. But she couldn’t really say no to the system (imagining in her mind how that would go over with the bosses: Why didn’t you want to find Conte? Did you know where he was? Weren’t you concerned that he had left his post?) and she couldn’t say yes in case Didier really was doing something untoward.

  She walked through the corridors, passing a dozen expensive android guards, all of them high security. They were thicker than the average andr
oid guard, taller, and made of some shiny black polymer material that hid any access ports. According to the specs, these guards carried a dozen weapons just on their torso, but she couldn’t see any of them.

  The guards had no mouths or noses, just those damn big eyes that looked like they could see everything.

  They were androids because they theoretically could think for themselves, and they had a very human form, but she never really thought of them as androids. They seemed like a hybrid between the thinking android and the brainless robots that were everywhere outside of the prison system.

  In theory, the system couldn’t have a brainless contraption anywhere near high-value prisoners. The prisoners might be able to subvert the bot’s functions and create everything from a gun to a bomb. In theory, androids wouldn’t let that happen, but after the prison riots of twenty years ago, where the androids got turned to the prisoners’ sides, the androids were redesigned. No mouths, no noses, no obvious entry points, and absolutely no empathy.

  None.

  Not for anyone.

  Jhena shivered. It seemed colder the farther in she went.

  The cellblock was locked down for the night, which meant that each cell had been walled off from the others. Doors darkened, no windows, no access to the outside at all.

  In fact, it looked like she was walking past black wall after black wall after black wall, when she had actually passed twenty cells so far.

  At the end of this corridor was the specially designed cell that held the highest value prisoners that probably would not be permanent guests of this facility. They were supposed to lose their cases, and move to maximum security prisons far away from the Criminal Courts, prisons in the far reaches of the Earth Alliance, prisons that made this one look like a resort in the prettiest place on Planet Earth.

  The light around that cell was red, but it wasn’t flashing and there were no sirens. Just a deep red light that she should never see this far inside the prison.