Chapter Eleven
One week later
Michaela straightened her green tunic and smoothed a hand over her hair before poking her head into Ruyn’s office. He squinted at the numbers displayed over his desk, his brow furrowed. One hand tapped a stylus. “Are you busy? I can come back,” she said.
“No, no. It’s fine. I need a break.” He smiled, and her heart fluttered.
Don’t do anything stupid like fall for him.
Since dinner at Mama’s a week ago, they’d eaten together every evening. Sometimes at a restaurant, others getting takeout and bringing it back to the apartment building. Once, to their peril, they’d returned to Mama’s.
“Well, that was a mistake,” they’d said afterward and laughed together, agreeing that as much as they loved the food and liked Mama, it would be best if they went to restaurants where the owner didn’t try to set them up.
Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so awkward if she wasn’t attracted to him.
Her body hummed with awareness of his presence.
She found herself watching him, not in an acceptable professional manner but in a personal way.
Though she tried not to, she did all the usual things women did when they were infatuated—smiling, laughing, choosing flattering clothing, and taking greater care with her hair and makeup.
She should stop having dinner with him. She always swore that this time would be the last time, and the next time she’d beg off, but she always caved then rationalized that they did discuss the case.
However, the balance of the conversation always weighed more on the personal side.
She found herself hanging on his every word, fascinated by his life, his culture, his childhood, his relationship with his brother, his brief adolescent delinquency, his military career, everything.
She took a seat in front of his desk.
“Good news?” he asked.
“News,” she replied. “After a week of stonewalling, the coroner’s office sent me a copy of the death certificate.”
She couldn’t prove they’d been stonewalling, but they’d used every excuse in the book to delay fulfilling her request for information about the man who’d tried to kill Ruyn.
Since death certificates were public record, she should have been able to access it electronically, except it wasn’t in the archives.
The coroner’s office blamed a huge backlog of certificates needing to be processed—despite a very low death rate.
She might have attributed the delay to simple government bureaucracy until she finally received the certificate.
“Don’t keep me in suspense! Tell me. Was he Prellim or Luturnan?” Ruyn said.
“The certificate didn’t say.”
“What do you mean it didn’t say? That’s basic information on every certificate.”
“Not on this one. That question had been left blank.”
She wouldn’t put it past the government to send her the wrong certificate, so she’d done some digging.
“Your assailant was the only unidentified person to die on that date. I pulled the death certificates of all adult males who passed away on the day of the attack. There were two others—both elderly Luturnans. Call me suspicious, but I don’t think the lack of species identification is an oversight. ”
“I don’t suppose there was a delay in cremation?”
“Oh, no. They were quite efficient in that regard. In other news, I received an alert. A massive solar storm is coming. Korsan has ordered all employees out of the building within two hours. A lot of people have left already.” She’d peeked outside her office.
The way people poured toward the boosters reminded her of a school fire drill.
“I wondered why my computer system kept going in and out. I didn’t get an alert though.”
“It came a few minutes ago. Your alerts are routed to me. I’m your admin assistant, remember?”
“Oh, yeah.” He chuckled.
As he’d once told her, he didn’t get a lot of holograms and interruptions, but she screened what he did get to keep up appearances.
“Let me finish a couple more things, then I’ll be ready to go. Ten minutes?” he asked.
“Ten minutes,” she agreed. He didn’t appear concerned by the impending storm. “Does this happen often?” she asked. This was her first solar flare disruption.
“Often enough that buildings have radiation filters and manual locking devices. I haven’t been in a solar storm since I joined the military.
We should grab some food on the way home, before the restaurants close.
We won’t be able to use the flash cookers.
Electronics have to be powered down, or they’ll get fried. ”
He paused. “On second thought, let’s go now. I can finish up later. I’m not worried about getting caught in the solar flare, but everyone will be rushing to the restaurants. There will be lines.”
* * * *
Like a dense flock of migrating birds, hovercars darkened the sky as people rushed home.
“They’re not going to glitch and fall, are they?
” She hunched her shoulders, imagining getting crushed to death under a thousand kilos of metal.
The alert had given them a safety window of two hours before all hovercars had to be grounded.
“They’re not going to fall. They would if they were still in the air when the flare hits, but the government has a handle on timing.”
“Is this the same government that can’t figure out how to fill out a death certificate?” As she’d witnessed people rushing around, reacting to the impending storm, her trepidation had grown.
“Same government. Different department. It will be okay. I promise.” He surprised her by taking her hand and giving it a quick squeeze.
Her senses and nerve endings glitched like she’d been zapped by radiation. Her heart raced, and heat rushed to her face. She stumbled. He grabbed her arm to steady her. “Careful.”
His touch caused another power surge, but she handled it with more aplomb. “I’m okay.”
Somebody charged by and knocked her into him.
“It’s crazy out here,” he said. Walkways were as crowded as the sky, like rush-hour traffic on Earth. He stopped in front of a shuttered eatery. “Closed,” he said.
They’d deviated from their route to find an available restaurant. At least half had closed already; the others had lines snaking for blocks to get a preprepared take-out box. There was no eat-in this evening.
“Let’s try Mama’s,” he suggested. “If she’s not open, we’ll have to eat whatever we have at home. We’ll have to cook it right away.”
They picked up the pace, weaving among the hurrying crowd. As they neared Mama’s, they passed a man with a take-out container. “That’s a good sign,” Ruyn said.
But when they reached the café, it was closed.
“Shoot! He must have been her last customer.” Michaela tried to recall what she had in her food-saver unit. Not much.
“Wait—look!” Ruyn waved at the window.
Inside, Mama Murta hurried toward them. She unlocked the door. “Come inside, quickly!” She grabbed Ruyn’s arm and pulled him in.
Michaela followed, and Mama manually secured the door. Electronic locks had to be disengaged and switched off or they would be fried when the solar storm hit.
“We’re late, but do you have anything left?” he asked.
“Ah, Ruynko—I saved you both a dinner box.”
“You did? How did you know we’d be by?”
“I know things.” Mama smiled serenely. “Wait here, and I’ll get your dinners.” She disappeared into the kitchen, returning a brief time later with two boxes, their names printed neatly on the cartons. “I included some silverware. You can return it the next time you come.”
“Thank you.” Michaela peeked inside the box. The meal looked and smelled delicious. “It was very thoughtful of you to save us a box. We won’t need table service; we’re going right home.”
“You never know what you’ll need until you need it. Off with you now. The storm is coming.”
They said their goodbyes and left the restaurant. Foot and air traffic had begun to thin. “People aren’t wasting any time getting home,” she observed.
“They’re taking cover. Buildings are constructed to a strict code requiring radiation filters.”
“Radiation filters?” Earth had hurricanes, tsunamis, tornados, and earthquakes. At least with those, you could see the damage. But radiation was invisible. How could you be certain the filters worked?
“You’ve never been in a solar storm?” he asked.
“Not one that affected us to this degree. Earth’s sun has them, and they can disrupt the magnetic field and cause blackouts, but our atmosphere protects us from the radiation.”
“We’re protected, too, unless it’s an exceptionally big storm, which is why we have strict building codes,” he explained.
“Will this one be a big one?”
“Mediumish.”
That didn’t reassure her, and she sighed with relief when they entered their radiation-filtered apartment building.
Their footsteps echoed in the vacant lobby. “People have already holed up,” Ruyn said.
“Yes,” she replied, glad to be one of them. She’d take a hurricane over a radiation storm any day.
They boarded the booster. The doors closed, but then nothing happened.
He touched the keypad. Nothing.
“Why aren’t we going up?” she asked.
He tapped all over the controls. “It’s dead. I can’t even open the door.”
“Dead? But the storm didn’t hit yet. It’s not time!”
“I don’t think radiation knocked it out. I think the AI shut down the booster as a precaution. It was bad timing on our part to get on when we did.”
“Wouldn’t it scan first? Find out if there were people inside?”
“That would make sense,” he agreed, “but maybe it’s on a preprogrammed schedule to shut down so many minutes before a storm. Or it scanned, and then we boarded.” He looked at her. “I’m not known for having good luck.”
“Can we contact the AI?”
“Not without electronics.”
“What do we do now?”
He shrugged. “We wait out the storm. And we eat dinner.” He held up the boxes.
And then the lights went out.