Part 1 (1/2)

BURIED DEEP.

A RETRIEVAL ARTIST NOVEL.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Thanks on this one go to my husband, Dean Wesley Smith, who kept me focused on the heart of this book, and to Loren Coleman for one important late-night brainstorming session. Much appreciated, you two.

BURIED DEEP.

1.

By the time Sharyn Scott-Olson had reached the crime scene, she already knew something was seriously wrong. The three-block area surrounding the construction site was empty except for three police carts, five officers, and Petros Batson. Petros stood at the edge of the site, staring down the street, obviously waiting for her. His long coat brushed against the rust-colored Martian soil, and his boots were covered in dust, making them look pale orange instead of black.

There were no Disty. Not on the streets, not leaning against the doorways in the nearby buildings, not guarding the site, even though the excavation equipment was clearly Disty made.

The Disty had fled, and that made a s.h.i.+ver run through Scott-Olson. She knew that the Disty didn't like death. One of the many reasons vengeance killings worked in Disty culture was because the Disty believed that dead bodies contaminated the environment-not just for the moment those bodies touched the ground, but for all time.

But the Disty also valued their homes, their businesses, and their possessions. Scott-Olson had entered hundreds of locations in Sahara Dome, always to examine a dead body, and never before had she arrived at a scene without at least one Disty there. Usually the Disty was a member of the Death Squad.

Scott-Olson had never been to a scene so unclean that not even the Death Squad would stand guard.

The surrounding neighborhood looked no different than it had ten years before. The buildings appeared haphazardly built, although they weren't. Their doorways, tiny by human standards, were made for the adult Disty. There were no windows. The buildings seemed to grow off each other.

Only one open street went from block to block, and that was a nod toward the initial human requirements of Sahara Dome. Most of the streets, especially in this section, were little more than tunnels, with buildings on top that stretched all the way to the dome roof.

The tunnels were so low that no adult human could walk through them without crouching. The walls were narrow, as well. Humans who lived on Mars learned to stay thin if they wanted to travel inside the domes. Heavyset humans sometimes couldn't fit inside the tunnels at all.

Scott-Olson was too thin, but sometimes even her arms brushed against the walls of Disty tunnels. She was lucky she wasn't claustrophobic, since her job often took her into the Disty-only sections, where the tunnels seemed even narrower.

Perhaps what surprised her most about the crime scene was that it wasn't narrow or covered with buildings. It was the widest-open s.p.a.ce she had ever seen in the Disty section. An entire human-sized city block-perfectly square, just like the blocks in the human section of the dome-had been torn down. Someone had removed the Disty brick and piled it against the back side of the square as if building a wall.

Scott-Olson looked up, saw the yellowish light on the underside of the dome, the shadow of the inexorable dust on the top of the dome, and the darkness beyond.

Martian winter.

Even though she had been here for nearly twenty Earth years, she still couldn't get used to the darkness. She used to imagine that she'd leave before the next winter set in.

She had no such illusions now.

”It's about time,” Batson said as he walked toward her. He looked gigantic against the twisted Disty buildings and the tiny carts. His long coat swayed behind him, creating eddies of reddish dust.

She had forgotten how ubiquitous the dust could be inside the Dome. The Disty had developed an excellent filtration system to keep the dust outside, and almost all of the dome's interior was paved.

Except when buildings were torn down, and construction was underway.

Batson even had dust on his face. His dark skin seemed unusually ruddy, and his eyelashes, long and beautiful, accenting startling green eyes, looked like they'd been coated in red dye.

”I had to walk,” Scott-Olson said. ”I couldn't get a cart small enough for the all-Disty section.”

He grunted, shook his head, and then took her kit from her.

”Where's the Death Squad?” she asked.

He looked at her sideways as he led her to the construction site. ”We've got a major contaminant, as far as they're concerned,” he said.

”Major contaminant?” In all her years as medical examiner for the Sahara Dome Human Government, she had never heard of anything categorized like that.

”They took one look, decided the body'd been here for years, and ran off. I managed to catch one, and he yelled something about tearing down the entire community-at our expense.”

Scott-Olson frowned. ”Our expense?”

”The body's human,” he said.

She had figured that much. Otherwise, she wouldn't be on the scene. The Death Squad dealt with their own in this section of the dome. She got Disty who died in the human section, and had learned to perform Disty autopsies because the Disty were so squeamish about doing one themselves.

”I've handled human bodies in the Disty section before,” Scott-Olson said.

”Not one like this.” Batson stopped at the edge of the construction site. There were several large dips in the sand, caused by the weight of the buildings that had been on this site. She counted five separate rectangles, and stopped when she realized she couldn't take in the entire leveled area.

She scanned the site. Aside from the Disty excavation equipment-something that resembled a miniature backhoe, a claw-shaped digging something-or-other, and a tiny truck that carted the recyclable building materials to another location -she saw nothing except flattened sand.

”Where's the body?” she asked.

Batson set her kit on the side of the site, then jumped down the meter or so to the main part of the dig. He extended a hand to help her down, making her feel old.

She was old, or at least older than he was. She took his hand, let him ease her down, then grabbed the kit.

From here she could see Disty prints, with their distinctive three-toed mark barely deep enough to be called an impression. Disty bones were hollow, and the Disty themselves weighed next to nothing.

Batson walked in his original prints. He was a good detective, if a bit blunt and brash. She liked working on his cases because he actually cared. So many people on Sahara Dome's Human Police Force didn't.

He walked almost to the center of the large excavated area and then stopped. He crouched and pointed with one dust-coated finger.

She was probably dust-coated as well. Already she could taste the sand in the back of her mouth, grinding as she pressed her teeth together. Her eyes felt dry and gritty.

Amazing how little of the dunes had to appear before they coated the entire area, even with the fantastic filtration system.

She still didn't see anything. The area near Batson's finger was raised slightly, and nothing else.

She crouched beside him, removing a paintbrush from her pocket. She had learned during her first year that any case involving Martian sand required a delicate tool for brus.h.i.+ng it away.

”What am I looking at?” she asked.