The Impossibles: A Retrieval Artist Short Story: Retrieval Artist, #18

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

To pay off her law school debts, Kerrie works in the public defender's office at the Interspecies Court. Her workload includes more clients than she can defend, most of them from cultures she does not understand.

The public defender's office loses almost all of its cases, but sometimes it gets a win. Kerrie thinks she has a winner. But does she? Or will winning the case mean she loses at everything else?

"Readers of police procedurals as well as fans of SF should enjoy this mystery series."

—Kliatt

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Apr 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386244806

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award. She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.  She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own. To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

Book preview

The Impossibles

The Impossibles

A Retrieval Artist Short Story

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

WMG Publishing Inc.

Contents

The Impossibles

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Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

About the Author

The Impossibles

Alarm, six a.m. Earth time—the whole damn starbase ran on Earth time. Barely a moment to rub the sleep from her eyes, roll out of her bed, and bang her knees against the wall, just like she had every morning since she graduated from law school. Not quite the top of her class. Okay, twenty-fifth. Not the middle either, not last. Near the top, close to the top. Not in the top ten or even the top twenty—not in the area where she could’ve gotten recruited by some firm, somewhere.

Didn’t matter that she went to Alliance Law, best school in the Earth Alliance, harder to get into than any school on the Moon or on Earth, harder than Harvard or Oxford or Armstrong Legal Academy. Only two hundred students qualified for Alliance Law every year, and only one hundred graduated three years later.

Those statistics meant nothing. All that mattered, apparently, was the top twenty. And Kerrie had been just five spots away from a guaranteed recruitment.

That was what she thought about every morning when her knees smacked into that wall. Then she would debate with herself: was it the 90 on her second-year contracts exam? Or the essay she had to redo five times for her Earth Alliance Agreements class? Or the party she went to that last week of first year that caused her to get up late for her Torts final, making Old Man Scott dock her two points for tardiness?

Or had she failed some indefinable thing—not volunteering for Fair Housing duty or failing to participate in Moot Court every single semester?

She didn’t know—and she cared. She had had such high expectations for herself, and she hadn’t achieved them.

Her family was happy—she was a lawyer in the prestigious Multicultural Tribunal system. But it wasn’t as glamorous as all that. It wasn’t glamorous at all—not that people outside the base, this single base dedicated almost entirely to InterSpecies Court for the First District, knew about the ugliness of the place. She had been shocked when she arrived nearly two years ago.

All newly minted lawyers arriving here for the first time were shocked. And all of them wondered what exactly led them here. Something they had done? Or something they hadn’t?

It wasn’t just the student loans. It couldn’t just be the loans, with their lovely little check-off option: Loan will be paid in full if student volunteers for public service internship post-graduation.

Everyone checked that box, and the law firms that recruited, they paid off the loan so the student didn’t have to.

Only she didn’t get recruited. No one told her that only twenty students from every class get recruited when she applied to Alliance Law. They implied—as they handed her the damn loan forms—that all students of Alliance Law got recruited.

And she supposed that was probably true if looked at in a purely legalistic sense.

She would most likely be recruited when her stint was up, two months from now. After two years here, she had more experience in InterSpecies Law than half the professors who taught the courses at law schools all over the sector.

Horrible, awful experience, but experience nonetheless.

She rubbed her knee as she grabbed the outfit she chose for today—black skirt, black suit jacket, black blouse. No need to stand out, no need to dress well. She was as interchangeable as the shuttles constantly moving between here and Helena base.

She downloaded the morning’s files through her links as she grabbed coffee from the tiny communal kitchen. The base provided almost everything: food,