Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(28)
Elise stripped out of her control suit and changed into her official Nutris Platform uniform. She hated the stiff, military-looking garb, but the director insisted all senior staff be properly attired when inside the Head Repository. Fortunately, that meant she had to wear this thing only once a week, during his status meetings.
She gave Charlotte an affectionate pat on the leg and relayed some last-minute instructions to the chief mechanic before heading out of the hangar. With a little bounce to her step, she passed by the lower dock corridor and stopped at an intersection, a slow smile growing on her face. This was where she had met Salman yesterday, the new security guy on her staff.
Elise had been floating on the ocean surface a hundred meters offshore when she noticed him wandering the perimeter like a lost puppy. She had slipped underwater and closed in like a shark. She even hummed the Jaws theme while she crept up behind him and launched the mechanoid onto her unsuspecting prey. The look on his face …
No matter how many times she had done that in Charlotte, it never got old.
Salman was nice. A little weird and awkward, but he seemed like a decent guy. Elise liked her men a little off. Mama always said to watch out for guys who were a bit too on the straight and narrow. The ones who showed a little bend were the good and honest ones. Mama was also a hippie from Portland and Dad was a bona fide weirdo, so all her advice needed to be taken with a grain of salt. Well, she and Salman were stuck on this giant metal raft for the next two years. She would have plenty of chances to get to know him.
Elise continued past the lower dock corridor and cut through Sector Two. Her sector. The idea that some supposedly very smart people decided to make her a sector chief blew her mind. As the youngest chief on Nutris and head biologist, she had an important role, and she wasn’t going to let any of her recommendations down.
Just last week, they’d found another of those plague blooms, a tiny one on the bottom of the Caspian Sea. Whatever this thing was, it was spreading. Fortunately, early trials were promising. The world community had caught the plague in its infancy, and the odds were good that they could nip the whole thing in the bud. Thank Gaia. If they hadn’t, that nasty mutation would theoretically have killed millions of cubic kilometers of ocean within a matter of years.
Elise had long come to accept that the tedium of the next four hours was just as important as her work four kilometers underwater. From their food reserves, to that new space-age energy generator, to the hordes of new staff coming online, the grand poobahs left very little unturned. Paper-pushing kept the lights on and the labs funded, Director Hammon liked to say. It was still a little soul-sucking but she grinned and bore it. By the time it wrapped up late in the afternoon, an early dinner or nap was in order. That or drinks.
“Hey, Elise,” Hugh, the security head from Sector Four, called out to her as the meeting wrapped up.
She motioned for him to follow her into the hallway. “What’s up?”
“You remember that security guard you transferred to my sector?”
“The Father Time guy with the long beard? About two weeks ago?”
“Yeah. Thanks for that, by the way. Great having a guard who uses a walking stick to go on patrol.”
She grinned. “How’s he working out?”
Hugh shrugged. “He’s not. The guy was around for a few days and then he went missing.”
Alarms rang in Elise’s head. They were floating on a giant platform filled with nooks and crannies and hundreds of places to fall accidentally into the middle of the Arctic ocean. She should have known better. Her initial instincts when the man had first approached her to ask for a transfer from Sector Two to Sector Four, on the grounds that Sector Two was too large for him to patrol, were simply to discharge him and send him off to retirement.
However, she had occasionally been beaten in triathlon and marathon races by ninety-year-olds, so she didn’t feel right firing someone simply because he was elderly. If the guy thought he could do his job, then by Gaia, Elise was going to let him prove to her that he could. Still, she couldn’t help but think she’d made a mistake, and a costly one at that.
“Did you report this to the director? Have you sent out search parties?” she asked. “I can get divers to survey the water under the platform. Maybe he fell and—”
“Already did. We came up empty,” said Hugh. “I had my guys go over all of Sector Four as well as his housing module. This morning, I went to go pull up his personnel files and got nothing. He’s not in our systems.”
Elise frowned. “That’s impossible. I saw them before I sent him to you.”
“That’s the thing,” he replied. “I saw them too when he came over, but they’re gone now. All of them.” Hugh looked behind him at the meeting room, where the director was still chatting with his deputy. “I really don’t want to go in there and tell Hammon that I lost a guy who somehow doesn’t exist.”
“Yeah, I could see how that could be an uncomfortable conversation,” Elise said. “What about landside? Can we query his background sources?”
“What sources? I can’t find anything.”
The two stood in the hallway in awkward silence. “Well,” Elise said finally, “part of me wants to say, if you don’t say anything, I won’t either, but that’s probably the wrong way to go about it.” She thought for a moment. “Go back to the security recruiting files and match them with our staff counts. He had to have come up through there somehow. If that comes up blank, then we have a problem and can’t rule out espionage. Until then, don’t raise the alarm until we’re sure this ghost doesn’t exist and we have all our asses covered.”