Free Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page A

numbers in his mind’s eye.
    Deshin envied that. He envied his boy’s brilliance, and he reveled in it as well.
    He shut the screens down for a moment, feeling overloaded, then pushed his chair back. He stood, but kept his back to the wall.
    Ever since Anniversary Day, he had felt vulnerable in his office. He had arrived home to Armstrong to find his wife and child worried, but in good health. His city was fine as well, thanks to quick thinking by that security chief, Noelle DeRicci.
    In fact, some believed—and he was one of them—that DeRicci had saved millions of lives by ordering the domes all over the Moon to section. Some whack jobs were starting to complain that her order was illegal. It was, but who the hell cared? She took action.
    She saved lives .
    Hell, she had saved his life.
    He shuddered when he thought about that. He had stepped outside that building, looked up, and in an instant, he would have been dust and molecules, floating because of the Moon’s lighter gravity. He would have vaporized, just like his two staff members had.
    Just like thousands of his employees had. Employees, friends, people he knew.
    The loss he’d suffered—his businesses had suffered—was staggering.
    And every day, he thought about how it all could have been worse.
    It wasn’t like him to dwell on anything bad, and he’d been through a lot of bad in his life. But he’d never been through anything like this.
    Hell, the Moon had never been through anything like this—not in its entire history.
    Some cultures went through this kind of devastation, but usually as a prelude to some war. He’d studied it in school and promptly forgot it, like all the useless school information that had come his way.
    But Paavo was reminding him every night at dinner.
    Deshin had made a point to go home every day, to spend time with his beautiful wife and his precious if inexplicable kid. Paavo, who was usually quiet and living inside his brain more than Deshin sometimes thought healthy, seemed to be trying to deal with the crisis in his own unusual way.
    Paavo had been talking—Gerda actually said “discoursing”—on all the history he could find. War, after war, after war, displaced cultures, bombed cities, certainly not something that Deshin wanted a child of seven (“almost eight,” Paavo would say defensively) to spend his time thinking about.
    But if Deshin could, he’d wrap Paavo in expensive gauze and protect him from the world. The boy had suffered enough, thanks to his biological parents (the flaming assholes), and then, after that got settled, this happens.
    At least Deshin got to play the conquering hero for his boy. He had gotten the train back to Armstrong in time to pick up Paavo and take him home, reassuring him that all would be fine.
    Deshin hated lying to his child.
    Nothing was going to be fine. And aspects of all of this bothered him more than he could say.
    The math didn’t work. Which was what he’d been staring at for the past hour now.
    The math bothered the hell out of him, and when something bothered him, he needed to pace.
    He collapsed some of the screens and stepped into the main part of his office.
    He’d seen this building, this office, as the jewel in the crown of his empire. Not that it was an empire. It was a confederation of businesses, friends, and enemies. He held it together through his will and his considerable fortune.
    Although even the confederation was ragged these days. Everything was ragged, like Armstrong itself. He barely recognized it, although he studied it daily from this office.
    The office covered the top of one of Armstrong’s few high-rise buildings. It was a gigantic bubble, with 360-degree views of the city. The thick, reinforced nanomaterials were clear, but his architects reassured him that the materials would protect him from pretty much anything someone would try to throw at them. A structural engineer put it differently: she had told Deshin that the clear bubble was stronger