(eng) Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Retrieval Artist 02 by Extremes

Author:Extremes [Extremes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

Oliviari’s skin was covered with goosebumps. She was freezing now, where fifteen minutes ago she had been so hot she was sweating.

She tried not to worry about it. Worrying about it would get her nowhere. First she had to see if her concern about Frieda Tey was forcing her to make things up.

“Let me see what you’ve got so far,” she said to Klein.

His eyes seemed too large for his face. She had scared him. Or maybe she had just reinforced his fear. After all, he had dealt with the dead man.

“You want to see the body?”

Oliviari suppressed a shudder. “Not yet. I want to see the virus.”

She was glad she masqueraded as a medic. If she had masqueraded as some other kind of volunteer, she wouldn’t have had access. And she was probably the only person here who could identify the Tey virus—except Frieda Tey herself.

Klein handed Oliviari his handheld: An image of the virus floated on it, a thousand times too large. It looked like the map of a misshapen crater or a puddle of spilled coffee.

“I’m going to need net access,” she said.

“The handheld can do it. Go ahead.”

“Standard access?” she asked, not even waiting for his answer as she touched the surface. The virus disappeared for a moment; then she fingerprinted one of her codes into a locked file, and downloaded the virus information.

She didn’t want to rely on her memory of this one. She had all of Tey’s research—even the stuff that hadn’t gone public—scattered throughout her holdings on the web. Oliviari just had to get the right file.

Klein watched her face instead of his handheld, and somehow that made her nervous. The little room had grown cold again, the boxes and the furniture making it seem even smaller than it was.

As Oliviari worked, she wondered if Tey had slipped by her, if she hadn’t been running after all, but working the marathon just like Oliviari had.

What would have been the point of infecting people out here, though? They could be forbidden access to the dome if the virus was caught in time. And since the virus was so fast-acting, getting caught early was a possibility.

Unless something happened to prevent that. Perhaps another emergency, something that might actually make people go into the dome instead of remain outside of it.

Another chill ran through Oliviari, and she suspected it had nothing to do with the cold room. “Why aren’t we allowed back into the dome? It’s not because of this disease, is it?”

Klein studied her. His look changed with her question, became more measuring somehow. “Didn’t you get the message?”

She shook her head.

“There was a murder out on the track.”

“A murder,” she breathed. So the missing response team had found itself on the scene of a murder. That was why the police had come. “What kind of murder?”

She was thinking of Tey and the virus, the way that it killed without the killer being anywhere nearby. If Oliviari was right, there had been more than one murder at this marathon today.

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