The Last Campaign (The Near-Earth Mysteries)

by Martin L Shoemaker

  “Knighton seems pretty good,” I said.

  Anthony shook his head. “He’s no friend either.”

  “But he’s honest,” Alonzo said. “And he can’t be bought, but he can be swayed. If I let him know there’s a big exclusive coming along, but we need some breathing room to make it happen, he’ll do what he can to give us that room. He won’t be a booster, but he’ll double-check everything. I think we can count on him not to run with anything that he can’t verify from six different sources.”

  Anthony added, “And what he does run with, we back it up. We praise it.”

  Alonzo nodded. “We don’t fawn over him, but we make sure to confirm his stories wherever they’re true. Even if it hurts us. And no comment on hers.”

  “I have a few comments,” I replied.

  “Save them for your memoirs,” Anthony said. “Which, if we don’t get through this, you’ll have lots of time for. That’s how we’ll handle the media; now how do we handle the Steering Committee?”

  “I can delay the vote on the police chief tonight, Mr. Mayor. For one day. I can’t promise two.”

  “All right,” I said. “That’s half a day in the future. So that is a day and a half. What are we supposed to do before then to change their minds?”

  “Simple.” Alonzo smiled at me. “Solve the case.”

  Thirty-nine hours. Just over one and a half Martian days to piece together the full story behind the insurance fraud and the forces behind it. My first big case as police chief could be my last. I sat in my squad room, with the whole command squad called in. When they were gathered, I stood and addressed them. “This is the part of the job that you are going to hate,” I said. “Politics.” I looked them over. “Or maybe not. Maybe some of you are good at this, enjoy it. Maybe one of you would be better in this spot. And maybe you will get the chance very soon now.”

  At that, they gasped. Vile said, “Ms. Morais!”

  “This is no joke, people.” I explained the political situation, while trying to keep the personal matters out of it as best I could. When I was done, I said, “So that is where we are. If we do not know the true picture of this insurance scheme and who is responsible by the time the Steering Committee meets tomorrow night, I am out of a job, and who knows what happens to Mayor Holmes?” I was pretty sure I knew, but I was keeping that opinion to myself. “Even that may not be enough to save this department,” I continued. “If the Realists take over the city council, they have made a promise to dissolve the police force and ask Initiative Security to take care of things here in the city. Now some of you come from there, maybe you would be more comfortable with that.”

  “Not a chance,” said Wagner. “I’m a Martian. I left that behind me.” The other former security officers nodded in agreement.

  “All right,” I said, “so none of us want that. We need to brainstorm, look at all the evidence and see what we are missing. I put a lot of trust in you nine, so now I am asking you for your help. Where do we go next?”

  We spent the bulk of the morning going over the evidence. We broke into three groups, data, physical, and interviews, each attacking their part of the evidence. I bounced from group to group, listening to their discussions and throwing in questions.

  And I realized: I was proud of my team—for as long as I could call them mine. They had raw potential, and they were coming together. I could really make something of a police force with them as my core. If I got the chance.

  I treated the whole team to Zeb’s finest out of my personal account. Who knew if I would get the chance to do that again? We stopped examining the evidence over lunch, but we did not stop the discussion. A theory of the case was starting to gel. I did not want to state it, because it might be a figment of my imagination. I wanted to see if they would reach the same conclusion.

  So the discussion continued, arguments bouncing back and forth across the whole squad. We were halfway through dessert when I saw Monè’s eyes grow large. “You have something, Monè?” I asked.

  “A thought, Ms. Morais,” he answered. “But . . .”

  “Spit it out,” I said.

  “Not the cake,” Vile answered, and everyone laughed.

  “It’s just . . .” Monè paused again. “I’m seeing something big, big enough to implicate even more of the Libertists.”

  “I do not give a damn about that, Monè. No matter what you may have heard on the media, in here, we care about facts, not ideologies. I was told to solve the case, not to make the Libertists look good.”

  “Well . . . it’s not an answer, just a thought. We’ve been treating this as individual acts of insurance fraud, abetted by Flagg.”

  “And other opportunists in DPS,” Ammon added. “Mr. Aames’s clients have reported further fraudulent claims now that they know what to look for. Flagg wasn’t the only one who approved the false claims, but the others seem to have disappeared. They’re nowhere to be found in the city.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We have alerts out for them.”

  Monè continued, “But I just thought, What if we have it backward? What if those committing the fraud are coordinated? What if Flagg and whoever aren’t instigators, aren’t behind it, but are just accomplices? Taking their cut, but answering to someone else?”

  I thought about it carefully. Monè was starting to see what I had seen. But still, I wanted it to come from them, not to push them into an idea.

  “It doesn’t answer any more questions,” Vile said.

  “No,” Wagner said, “but it simplifies some of them.” He pulled up a data graph onto the big screen. “We’ve been imagining all of these little networks of collusion. We’ve been trying to see who interacted with Flagg and with the others, and where and how. But what if we posit”—he added an anonymous point to the graph—“coordinator one?” He added two more points. “One would be enough, but two and three might simplify it further. If we reapply a connectivity analysis now . . .” He punched in commands.

  They could all see that the resulting graph was simpler, cleaner. A theory was not proof, but a theory was where you started looking for proof. Before, we had had a mesh of theories. Now we had just a handful. Maybe one.

  I turned from the screen and looked at my squad. “We cannot be blinded by simplicity,” I said. “Sometimes the answer really is complex.”

  “I understand, ma’am,” Vile said. “But there’s another consideration. Wagner, go back to the old diagram.” Wagner did so. Vile got up and started tapping nodes in the network. “These are the places we’ll have to investigate if this is the picture. Now the other, please.” Wagner switched the picture back. “With this one, we have only a handful of places we have to apply leverage, people we have to pressure for information, places we have to search.”

  I shook my head. “That is still an argument from simplicity,” I said.

  “No, Ms. Morais, it’s an argument from pragmatism. I know you don’t want politics to have input into this investigation; but pragmatically, we won’t have time to investigate the other picture. This one is all we have time to investigate before the Steering Committee. If we’re going to solve it by then, we’re assuming this is what we’re solving.”

  “Space it, I will not have politics intruding!”

  “Don’t worry,” Vile said. “It’s only a day and a half. If it goes nowhere, the next police chief will have us try something else.”

  I had not even considered Vile’s final argument. It made sense. With the resources we had and the available theories, this was the best use of our time. So I sent them out to pursue the simpler theory.

  But I still was not happy about it. It smacked of desperation; and I just do not do desperate. I follow the facts. Cautiously, and completely.

  And there was one set of facts that I knew was out there, but I did not have access to them. I left the squad room in Vile and Monè’s capable hands, and I headed for the Aldrin City embassy.

  25. GALE’S STORY

  Nick ignored my comm signal
. He ignored the door buzzer as well, and he even ignored me rapping on the door with the butt of my sidearm. He was sending the clearest message he could: Stay away.

  But for once I was going to have to be more stubborn than he was. Too much was riding on this for me to let his wounded pride get in the way. And like Nick, I would never let a rule get in the way of getting the job done when it was urgent. So I used my police chief’s access code on the embassy door.

  For two seconds, I wondered if Nick had changed the security completely, and how he might have done that, so that my police chief code would not work. Then the door slid silently open, and I walked into the Aldrin City embassy.

  It had more furniture than when I had seen it two nights before. Somewhere Nick had scrounged a vid panel, another couple of chairs, and a dining room table. And also dishes and food, since the two of them were eating a late lunch.

  Gale looked up at me, eyes wide; but Nick stayed focused on the vid screen, some string of data scrolling past.

  “Nick,” Gale said, “get her out of here.”

  At that, Nick looked up at me. “Relax, Gale, she isn’t here. That would be an interplanetary incident, and Ms. Morais would never do that.”

  I shook my head. “I am not playing that ‘wife versus police chief’ game, Nick. I am both, and do not expect me to ignore my job. For as long as I have it.”

  That got his attention, and he blinked. “As long as . . . ?”

  “If I do not solve this insurance case, I am done. Out.”

  “Good,” Nick said, leaning back in his chair. “About time. We can get back to survival school.”

  I strolled forward and loomed over his chair. “You do not get it, Nick. I am not giving up without a fight. You would not in my position, and you know I will not.

  “I do not want to hear any arguments,” I continued. “I already gave up one career for you, because it was the right thing to do. I am not giving up this one, because this city needs me. Staying in the job is the right thing to do. We will have time for survival school later, Nico, but not now. Right now Maxwell City needs its police chief.”

  Nick nodded slowly. “And they have got a damn fine one. Who has a lot of fight left in her.”

  “You are damn right I do. But I am fighting this one with one hand tied behind my back.” I turned to Gale. “I need to know what you are keeping from me.”

  Gale shook his head. “Nick told you: the Libertists—”

  “Space the Libertists! This is between you, me, and Nick. If my word is not good enough for you, Gale, I do not know what will convince you. Somebody has you scared, but it is not me. If you tell me what I need to know, we will bring them down. I do not care what party they are.”

  Gale shook his head. “They’re more powerful than you.”

  “I am angrier than them. You have as much as admitted that they are Libertists, but I do not believe it. My city is under attack, and whoever is behind it is not a Libertist in my mind. They do not have the best interests of Free Mars in mind, whatever else they are after.”

  “Profit,” Gale said.

  “Hell, I could have guessed that. Of course it is profit. But I cannot see the connections. There is not enough money in insurance fraud to tempt people who are powerful enough to scare you like this. They do not deal in nickel-and-dime lots of parts.”

  “It’s much bigger than nickel-and-dime,” Gale said.

  “Fine. Hundred lots, I do not care. You have implicated people powerful enough to tell Anthony what to do. He still owns a fairly large share of his father’s empire, even if it is in trust to Aldrin University. He has voting control. Anthony Holmes is not a man to be bought, or he would never have come to Mars.”

  “I . . . Yes, I can see that.”

  “That implies that you are scared by someone even more powerful than him. Some of the movers and shakers of the Martian economy. Am I getting close?”

  Gale swallowed dryly, and Nick poured him a fresh glass of water. Gale took a drink, and then said, “I think so. I’m not sure. But this . . . There’s money behind it.”

  I shook my head. “But that kind of money . . . Penny-ante insurance claims are nothing at that level.”

  “We don’t think it’s about the insurance,” Nick said.

  Gale shook his head. “That fooled me at first. But Nick, he looked at it differently. He didn’t look at the value of what was lost, he looked at what was lost.”

  “And that was . . . ?”

  “Rare, hard-to-get items,” Nick answered. “Expensive, yes, but rare was the key. These were instruments and equipment that were too noticeable. That were useful, but twice as useful if you had two. But if you bought two, people would ask why you needed two. They’d wonder what you were doing with all of the spare parts and equipment. But if you lost equipment and then replaced it, you could keep right on working with the ‘lost’ items.”

  “Working? On what?”

  I looked at Nick, but no answer was forthcoming, so I looked at Gale.

  And he answered, “Boomtown.”

  If you hang around the right parts of Maxwell City, especially some of the seedier areas of the port, you will hear talk of Boomtown. I am told that Boomtown tales are a lot more common in some of the smaller settlements, where life is harder. It is strange how in just a generation, Mars has developed its own mythology about a lost settlement somewhere out on the surface. And how if you find it and sign up, you make your fortune. No one ever has, of course, but that does not stop believers from dreaming about it.

  In wilder versions of the myth, it is not just a lost settlement, it is a lost Martian settlement. Real Martians, nonhuman locals. The fact that we have never found so much as a fossilized microbe on the surface does not stop some people from believing that there are Martians hidden out there.

  Whether they believe in humans or Martians, explorers near the end of their rope often dream of Boomtown: of finding it, signing up, and becoming the lords of all of Mars.

  “Gale, you have lost it. You are crazy.”

  “It’s not me.” Gale shook his head. “I don’t believe in the Boomtown myth any more than you do. But there’s a project out there that sells itself to desperate explorers as Boomtown. It signs them up for work, secret work buried in the sands of Mars, and in secret hills, valleys, and crevasses.”

  Crevasses? I looked at Nick; but he raised an eyebrow, so I said nothing about crevasses. Instead I shook my head. “Gale, I need something more than a tavern tale. You are too experienced of a spacer to get scared by something like that.”

  Gale rose and started pacing, his assist suit grinding with the effort. Finally he turned back to us. “I know, ma’am. Because I was there.”

  I scoffed. “Sure, you went to Boomtown right after visiting Hy-Brasil.”

  “I’m serious, ma’am,” Gale insisted. “I was hanging around the Gander settlement. It’s a small place on the edge of the quadrangle, you might not have heard of it.”

  “I have.” Before this police chief business, Nick and I had paid a lot more attention to what happened on the surface than locally.

  “Well, I’ve done some work for two teams based out of Gander, but both went broke. It was the worst luck. I’d have been okay if one of them had fallen through, the other would have gotten me through to the next gig. But both within six hours of each other? That’s the old Gale luck for you.

  “So I was in a spot. My air bill was paid up for a week, my food and water for a little longer, and then I was going to be on the clock. Either sell to a labor combine or go back home to a world that didn’t want me. Either way, I’d likely be in debt for the rest of my life. I was just getting ready to decide which, the farms or the long trip home, when I was approached by a man who bought me a drink.”

  I shook my head. “Because of course a man on his last credit is going to spend it in a bar.”

  “In Gander, that’s where you’re most likely to find work. It’s not like Maxwell City, where the employment m
arket is so organized. You go to the bar, you nurse a drink, maybe buy someone else one if it looks like he’s having better luck than you, and you hope.”

  “And just when you needed it, an opportunity appeared.”

  “Of course,” Gale answered, “that’s how they work. They prey upon desperate people who are willing to work hard, but not ready to give up and haul slop. And I think . . . Well, I still have some reputation. I think they’d been keeping an eye on me. I do know my way around Mars.”

  “So you were recruited for this scam.”

  Gale shook his head. “Whatever else it is, it’s not a scam. They took me out in a crawler with a half dozen other new recruits. They had the windows painted over, so we couldn’t see where we were going. Not that their typical recruit could have guessed anyway. It was a sorry lot. Sorrier than me even. Hardworking, skilled even, but they would never make it on Mars on their own. Mars kills the unready. You know that, Nick.”

  Nick nodded.

  “Hold up,” I said. Gale had my interest, and I needed to hear more. I found a glass and poured myself some water, and I sat in the open chair. “All right, continue.”

  “They took us to Boomtown,” Gale said. “Which is complete bollocks. It’s no lost settlement at all. It’s too well organized for that, and too new. They use the legends to rope workers in, but it’s just a secret settlement. Getting built somewhere in Candor Chasma, not far from here.”

  “Ridiculous,” I said. “It would be spotted.”

  “Not necessarily,” Nick said. “If most of it’s underground like Gale says, there’d be nothing to spot. The planetary surveyors got bored with Mars a long time ago. All the major features are mapped, and the geologists have their working models now. All of the interesting planetary science is happening in the Pournelle settlements around Jupiter, and even the moons of Saturn. After almost a century of exploration, Mars is boring.”

  I shook my head. “But the Initiative still monitors the surface.”

  “They monitor for ground-to-orbit traffic,” Nick said. “And major surface flights. But they’re so focused on customs enforcement that they pay no attention to other responsibilities, the original reasons the Initiative was put in charge of Mars space.”