Buried Deep Part 12

"If you'll do that," he said, "I promise you that I'll find you the moment your name is cleared."

She had her mouth open, obviously to continue arguing with him, and then she paused. "You can promise that?"

"Yes," he said. "Finding Disappeareds is my job."

"So I might be gone six months," she said.

"Or six years," he said.

"But I'd have the chance to come back, and you'll help the others."

"To the best of my ability, yes." He hadn't planned this, but he was curious. Lagrima Jrgen, through her death, might cause a dozen others. It would be nice to know who this woman was, what she had done, and if there was any way to protect all the people who had been "contaminated" by her.

Costard frowned. "I don't know anything about disappearing."

"Most people don't," Flint said. "That's why there are Disappearance Services."

"And you won't tell me which one to go to, will you?" she asked.

He shook his head. "That's not part of my job."

"With me gone, how will you get paid?"

"You and I will go to my office and set up a system for billing and payment through the SDHPD. It is their money, right?"

She nodded.

"Then I'll work with them."

"All right," she said, and let out a vast sigh.

Flint started to leave the greenhouse, but she didn't follow. Her gaze met his, her eyes wide and vulnerable.

"I'm terrified," she whispered.

"I know," he said, and offered her no more comfort. She was about to change everything in her life.

There was no comfort left to give.

18.

Sharyn Scott-Olson had never met with the Human Advisory Council before. Until a few hours ago, she hadn't even been certain she knew their names.

The meeting was held in a clean room in the Stanshut Government Office Building. The building had been named for the first governor of Sahara Dome, a man who ruled over a completely human colony. At that point, no one had heard of the Disty.

Scott-Olson wished that were still the case.

She sat in a wooden chair, built with recycled wood from some of the human buildings that the Disty had torn down. Most everything in this room was made of ancient or recycled wood. The conference table was one solid piece of wood, and the walls and ceiling had been paneled with it.

Every hour, someone came through the room and checked for loose chips, planted cameras or microphones, or illegal links. She had watched them check after she had come into the room, and the sight rea.s.sured her. She had never seen equipment that sophisticated.

Before they let her into the room, they had shut off her embedded links and confiscated her embellishments. She had come into the clean room feeling naked and alone.

She wasn't even allowed to have Batson beside her. Batson, who had started this entire procedure. He had gone to the head of the Human-Disty Relations Department, who had apparently stopped Batson before he could say much at all.

"The advisory board needs to hear this," the man had said. "They're our buffer."

It was Batson who explained the concept of buffer to her. If the Human-Disty Relations Department heard each conflict, they might become tainted in some way, according to Disty law. So the department was set up in a particularly Disty fas.h.i.+on: There were layers of underlings who heard items first, made decisions, or filtered information upward, through a series of meetings in clean rooms or with a handful of completely unlinked people.

The Disty looked the other way, just like they did in their own society, acting like the layers protected both original parties from any taint or tampering.

Scott-Olson still wasn't sure how that prevention worked, but she didn't question it. At least there was some sort of system in place.

Supposedly, she was meeting with the lowest of the low on the Advisory Council. At least three of the people at this level had never been networked. They were alone in their own heads. They had to use public boards just to get news, and those boards had to work on screens. No instant messages flas.h.i.+ng across the bottom edges of their vision, and worse, in Scott-Olson's point of view, no emergency links.

If these people ever got into trouble, they'd be completely and utterly alone. They would have no way of getting help with just a single thought. They would have to hope someone saw the problem or was close enough to hear them scream.

Such a primitive system unnerved Scott-Olson. She could never have agreed to a job on this council if that were the main requirement, no matter how much she believed in the system.

She had been waiting nearly fifteen minutes when the councilors filed in. At this level, all five councilors were old, with a lot of experience in various aspects of Martian government. That was the other strange thing about this system: The more experience you had, the less overt power you had. People with the expertise to make the decisions about what information was valuable and what wasn't had to be several levels below Disty observation so that they wouldn't be subject to the arbitrary nature of Disty laws.

The councilors entered through a side door that had, until that moment, been hidden in the paneling. They were laughing as if one of them had made a joke a moment before coming into the room.

The laughter made Scott-Olson uncomfortable.

So did the councilors. All five of them-three men and two women-were unenhanced elderly. They had the wrinkled skin and rheumy eyes; they moved with that hesitation common to people who knew their bones were fragile.

To see the unenhanced look so vibrant seemed unnatural to her.

Still she sat stiffly, her hands clasped in her lap, her ankles crossed and to one side. She was the thinnest one in the room, and hence the coldest. The temperature felt ten degrees below government-accepted normal.

The councilors sat around the conference table. One of the women, whose white hair was so thin her age-spotted skull shown through it, beckoned Scott-Olson to come forward.

"Join us at the table, dear," the woman said, her voice husky with age. "We don't bite."

"Although we might nibble," one of the men said.

The group laughed.

Scott-Olson stood, trying to match faces with names without the aid of her links. The woman who spoke to her was Tilly Kazickas, whom Scott-Olson finally recognized by the hair. The other woman, Dagmar Yupanqui, had thick hair that looked like it had yellowed with age.

"We haven't got all afternoon, young lady," said a second man. He had a thin face, almost as if someone had cut the bones on either side with a very sharp knife and overlaid the work with wrinkled fabric.

He had to be Linus Squyres, who was well-known within the human government for his patronizing att.i.tudes. Scott-Olson had certainly not been called "young lady" since she entered p.u.b.erty.

Scott-Olson slipped into the chair in the exact center of her side of the table. Two chairs were open on either side of her. Squyres sat directly across from her, and the two women sat on either side of him.

At the end and the foot of the table were the remaining men, Ulric Middaugh and Kurtis Wheat. Middaugh was raw boned, with florid skin that suggested broken capillaries due to either some kind of s.p.a.ce accident or too much drink. Wheat had perfectly smooth skin on his cheeks, but his black eyes were lost in a cascade of wrinkles. He looked like he was perpetually squinting.

"We've already heard about the disaster from your Detective Batson," Squyres was saying. Scott-Olson wanted to correct him. Batson wasn't hers. If anything, he was more theirs.

"He a.s.sures us that this is not some kind of cemetery. He suspects these are from the same period as the Jrgen grave, and that makes me wonder if he knows a thing about his job."

So much for the timeline lie.

"So," Squyres continued, "you're here, young lady, to tell us what you know."

"What I know for a fact is that there are a lot of bodies in that plot of land," Scott-Olson said.

"Well, that's fairly obvious, isn't it?" Wheat asked. "We've seen the images that Batson brought us."

"He also told us the potential problem with the Disty," Yupanqui said.

"Although we are bright enough to figure that out for ourselves," muttered Middaugh.

"Can you tell us how many bodies there are?" Wheat asked.

Scott-Olson shook her head. "We've been working at the site for more than a day now, and I can see no end to them. I've removed six bodies from the same small patch, and found three more beneath them."

"What do you believe this is?" Kazickas asked.

"I'm hesitant to speculate," Scott-Olson said. "I don't know how old the corpses are. I haven't had a chance to autopsy any of them or do the standard tests. I don't know how long they've been there or whether they died on-site."

"Surely you have suspicions," Squyres said.

"Nothing scientific," Scott-Olson said.

"Does this predate the Disty?" Kazickas asked.

"It certainly predates some of the Disty architecture," Scott-Olson said, "considering the fact that the Disty wouldn't have built anywhere near this site if they had known what lay beneath it."

"True enough," Middaugh muttered.

"To do this right," Scott-Olson said, "we need a ma.s.sive dig with lots of experts and a great deal of time. We might have to move more Disty buildings. I don't know how far this corpse field extends."

Wheat sighed and bowed his head. At his crown, he had a perfectly round bald patch. It made him seem endearingly vulnerable.

"I'm sure Detective Batson told you how worried we are that the Disty will find out about this," Scott-Olson said. "We don't know how to proceed, and felt it wasn't our decision."

"He said those last two things, but not the first." Squyres leaned forward on his elbows, folding his long fingers together. "In fact, he lied to us about the first. He said that if we told the Disty that it was from the same time period, everything would be fine."

Apparently, Petros wasn't the diplomat he thought he was.

"Would it be?" Scott-Olson asked.

"Are you prepared to lie for the human side of the colony, Dr. Scott-Olson?" Kazickas asked.

Scott-Olson wasn't sure how to answer that. She was becoming more and more willing to lie the more time that had pa.s.sed.

"I'm scared for us," she said, giving them a nonanswer. "I don't know what's going to happen when the Disty find out, and I don't know what to do about it."

"Finally," Squyres said, "an honest answer."

He leaned back in his chair, a small smile on his face.

Scott-Olson realized that the others used his outspokenness to put visitors off guard.

"We'll worry about the Disty," Yupanqui said.

Scott-Olson shook her head. "I have to worry about them. I have to know how to proceed."

"What's to stop us from simply covering these bodies back over?" Middaugh asked.

"Besides simple decency?" Wheat asked.

"Too many people know," Kazickas said. "The Disty will eventually find out."

"And they'll blame us for deceiving them," Yupanqui said.

"They'd be right," Squyres said.

"That would make things much worse," Wheat said.

"I'm not sure how it can be worse," Middaugh muttered.

Scott-Olson watched each one speak, wondering how they could even have thought of that. The dead had rights, just like the living. She personally believed that dig was the site of a tragedy, one that may have more importance than anyone knew.

"I guess you're forgetting," she said slowly, not sure if she should break in, "that the Disty have already ordered us to dig up the site to prove no other bodies were there."

"They're going to check up on that, aren't they?" Wheat asked.

"They'll want to know about our progress," Scott-Olson said. "Even if we tried to keep this quiet, too many people know about it. The Disty will find out."

The councilors sighed. Middaugh crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. Kazickas studied Scott-Olson.

"Have you suggestions?" Kazickas asked.

Scott-Olson threaded her fingers together, then twisted them until she could feel the ligaments stretch. "According to Disty law, I'm tainted because of the Jrgen case. So are Detective Batson and anyone else who has been in contact with the Jrgen corpse. The contamination is so great that the Death Squad wouldn't even get near the site to supervise us. They want nothing to do with this."

Squyres sighed heavily. Middaugh frowned and rested his chin on his hand.

Kazickas smiled, her gaze gentle. "We know this, dear."