The Last Campaign (The Near-Earth Mysteries)

by Martin L Shoemaker

  “We are now. We’ve found the escape tunnel entrances and followed them; and they match to surface sites where we made arrests. There was fighting there, but . . . not so intense. These defenders were the true believers.” Hogan pointed through one shattered door. “Especially this one. He held us off the longest. Then . . . we had him surrounded, and we’d already passed his position. He was behind cover, but he couldn’t hurt us. We could wait him out. We tried to talk him down, but . . .”

  Hogan stepped aside, and I looked at the office within. A desk had been overturned to make a barrier. There were burn marks on the desk, and on the walls behind. A cracked display screen hung from a single hook. I looked over the desk, and I saw the body. The head was a barely human mess of blood and flesh and teeth, shattered by a bullet from the high-powered pistol that lay next to the figure’s outstretched hand.

  I shook my head. “He did not want to live. He had something to hide. To die for. Do we know who he was?”

  “Not yet,” Hogan answered. “Facial recognition is in progress. We got a picture before he died, when he popped up for a shot. It’s a bad angle, but we’ll find him.” He pushed the image to my comm.

  I paused. Finally I said, “I will save you some time. That’s Adam Simons.”

  Marcus’s team was far behind us, still gathering evidence in the blasted storage room. When we found Adam’s chamber, I called back and asked them to search it first.

  I was surprised how much Adam’s betrayal still hurt. Jacob’s murder had been bad enough. This just added to it. Adam must have been more involved with the Red Planet League than I had ever realized. He had always been a vocal proponent of Free Mars. In the end, maybe it was all he had really believed in. He had died for it.

  And killed for it, it appeared. And more than once. Marcus’s team found evidence that led to no other hypothesis. After three hours of searching, they produced a set of data chips. Taylor verified that they were secured, and then I inserted them into my comm. The contents were encrypted, and Taylor had not been able to crack them; but there were dates and other identifying metadata that painted a disturbing picture. The first folder contained records of a core survey that Jacob had performed, commissioned by Trudeau—but never stamped with his acceptance code. The second folder contained the core survey Nick and I prepared for Trudeau—and the metadata showed different location codes from Jacob’s. Adam had sent us to the wrong place. There was something that Adam had not wanted found.

  The clincher was the third folder, a request for another core survey. There were no result files, but it had been commissioned by Manuel Ramos—after Adam’s disappearance.

  How had Adam acquired this request? Had Ramos completed it before his death? And if so, where were the results?

  Ramos’s death had acquired new significance in my investigation. Maybe he had not been killed over just the insurance fraud. Maybe somehow Adam had returned to Maxwell City unobserved—it should not be possible, but we already knew that security systems had been compromised—and slain Ramos to conceal whatever secret Trudeau sought.

  And Ramos had died for that secret.

  “Dr. Costello, do you have any findings from the Trudeau investigation yet?”

  Marcus shook his head. “Only preliminaries, ma’am. Our caseload is backing up just like yours.”

  “So you do not know where he was killed yet.”

  “No, we don’t. I believe he was moved, but I don’t know how the killer hid it.”

  Another mystery. Another suspect moving through the city undetected—or maybe the same suspect, since Adam seemed to have had an ongoing concern with Trudeau. Coincidence did not prove a connection, but it was a strong hypothesis.

  That meant the Trudeau investigation was part of the Boomtown investigation; and from what we knew right now, Adam did not have Trudeau’s report from Ramos.

  I asked Hogan for an external comm channel. When it opened, first I sent an update to Anthony’s line, though he did not answer. His subcomp would inform him. Then I called Vile.

  “Ma’am! You’re all right,” Vile said. “We heard there was shooting.”

  “I am OK, Vile. Nick is in the hospital. I shall explain later. But I need you to get over to the courts.”

  “On my way. What do you need?”

  “Warrants. I am sure Magistrate Montgomery is getting tired of us, but we need warrants to search the home and lab of Philippe Trudeau. I will send her the probable-cause papers, but do not waste any time. Send officers to the sites now. Make sure they are people you trust, and tell them not to let anyone in until you arrive with warrants.”

  33. RETURN TO THE TOMB

  When Vile disconnected, I found myself standing and trembling. It was not the sort of post-crisis shakes I knew so well from Nick. Nearly the opposite: I trembled with the need to do something, and there was nothing I could do at that moment.

  Nothing there. I returned to a local channel. “Dr. Costello, is there any way I can help?”

  “Just let me do my work, ma’am.”

  “Sorry.” I had forgotten how short Marcus could get when he had a patient in trouble. How obsessive. How Nick-like.

  I did not need to pursue that thought. I turned to Hogan. “Chief, there is nothing for me to do here. Dr. Costello’s team knows how to investigate. Can I get a hopper back to Maxwell City? I am just one more civilian here for you to guard.”

  “About time you realized that,” Hogan answered, but he smiled. “Sure, but you’ll have to share the ride.”

  “With whom?”

  Hogan nodded at the office with Adam’s corpse. “Costello’s team tells me they’re done with the body. We need to get it into the morgue.” Before I could speak, he added, “Our morgue, ma’am. You’re here as consultants, but this is still our crime scene. We’ll turn the body over to your interment department once our medical examiners release it. You can hold ceremonies then.”

  I shook my head, remembering Adam’s fraudulent last wishes: no rites, no last respects for a killer. That still seemed good enough for the traitor now. “No ceremonies. All he is good for now is compost.”

  Thus I found myself and Adam’s remains sharing a hopper. Once we launched, we would be locked into an arc, letting Isaac Newton pilot us until we braked for a soft landing. It would be less than ten minutes once we were in the air; but I did not want to spend even that long staring at Adam’s body bag.

  So I strapped in, lying down in my couch with the nose of the hopper above me. When there was a lull in the launch checklist, I asked the pilot for an external comm channel. When he opened it, I put a call through to Maxwell City General.

  “MCG,” a cheery female answered. “How may I direct your call?”

  “This is Rosalia Morais.” I pushed my identification through the call. “My husband Nicolau Aames should have been admitted to Emergency in the last two hours.”

  “Ms. Morais!” The woman said. “Yes, the founder is in the ER. Let me patch you through to that department.” Then she leaned closer to the screen, lowered her voice, and added, “Free Mars!”

  The image switched to another face, a dark-skinned man in scrubs. I introduced myself again; and after he confirmed my identification, he smiled. “Nick is fine, Ms. Morais. The doctors have relieved pressure on his brain, and they expect a full recovery. He’s resting comfortably now.”

  Then, at last, I cried. Relief swelled through me. But before I could respond, the pilot cut into the line. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we’re ready for launch, so we’re going to lose this comm channel. You can reconnect when we’re ballistic. Launch in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”

  It was a gentle kick in the back, maybe 0.6 G—or 0.2 net G. I had ridden rendezvous shuttles for the Mars cyclers. Compared to that, a suborbital Mars launch was almost leisurely—even if it made me weigh 50 percent more than I was used to in my daily life.

  It took around thirty seconds for the engines to cut off. A longer trip would mean a
longer burn at higher G, and a lot more fuel use; but Boomtown was only three days’ walk from Maxwell City, at least for an experienced spacer. It hardly made sense to travel by hopper, unless you were in a serious hurry. Which I was.

  As soon as the hopper went silent, I reconnected to the hospital; and they put me straight through to Nick’s bed. “Nico, meu amor!” I said, tears flowing.

  “I must look pretty bad.” Nick smiled.

  “You look handsome and fit for duty,” I said, trying to match his smile. But I lied. His face was covered with cuts and bruises. One large dark bruise showed through his mussed red hair, much of which had been shaved on the left side.

  And worst of all, he looked tired. Nick never looked tired, not like this. “Rosie . . . ,” he said. “Horace . . . didn’t make it.”

  “Oh, Nico!” I reached my hand out, touching the comm screen. Nick reached out to his as well, touching my fingers across the kilometers.

  “I wanted a quick ceremony at the Tomb,” Nick said, not really seeing me. “They said . . . as soon as it clears . . . we can consign him to Mars.”

  I found myself sobbing, big gulping sobs. I had not even liked Gale. But even with all the man’s flaws, Nick had seen something in him. Had trusted him, when Nick trusted so few people. Had lately seen him as one of Nick’s few friends.

  Nick could not cry about Gale, not yet; I could see that. So I cried for him.

  I could not cry for long, though. The hopper was already starting to tilt for its descent phase. Finally I was able to speak. “Nick, it was Adam.”

  Nick nodded. “I wondered. You know I never believed his disappearance.”

  “I know. It is starting to piece together.” Quickly I explained what I had learned and what my hypotheses were.

  Nick frowned. “If Adam somehow snuck into the city unobserved—”

  “He might have, Nick,” I said. “He was an old Mars hand. He knew paths and tubes from the early construction phases, ways that are older than the current maps. And he might have known of new construction that has not been mapped yet.”

  “He might have,” Nick agreed. “But he would still need a way to spoof cameras or erase records. Adam wasn’t a data expert, he wouldn’t know how to do that.”

  “Jacob would have,” I said. “Maybe he made something, and Adam took it?”

  “Not impossible,” Nick said, “but unlikely. I learned a bit about data security from Carver. I’m no expert, but I know our security measures are adaptive. Any such device would have to be adapted as well, recalibrated and even reprogrammed by a skilled programmer. If it’s static, our security will lock onto it and counterattack.”

  “So it is back to my first idea: he had an accomplice, somebody with the skills. Moore should track them down.”

  Nick shook his head. “Someone with those skills might clean up their own record to erase that information.”

  I sighed. “That makes sense. So we need another lead. Maybe Marcus can find something in Trudeau’s autopsy.”

  “Maybe,” Nick said; but his eyes seemed to look past the comm. Then he looked back at me. “Rosie . . . about Marcus . . . I . . .”

  I read his face. He was about to apologize, something which did not come easily to him, and usually took a long time.

  A look at my comm showed there was no time right then. The braking rockets would soon cut in, and I had other calls to make. So before Nick could continue, I interrupted, “It is all right, Nico. We are all right. Nunca mais, Nick.”

  He smiled; and just like that, I had my old Nick back. I fought back tears as he said, “Nunca mais. Get ’em, Rosie!” He closed the call.

  I checked time on the comm. There was just enough flight time left for one or two quick calls. First I tried Anthony again. This time instead of getting his machine, Alonzo answered. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  “I was hoping to brief Anthony, and also make a request.”

  Alonzo shook his head. “You’re not paying attention to the campaign, so you wouldn’t know. Grace challenged him to a debate; and our numbers are so precarious, he had to accept. He’s in the auditorium now. It’s bad, ma’am.”

  I did not need to know this; but curiosity made me respond. “Bad?”

  He nodded. “He might pull it out, but instant polling shows him holding steady. Maybe losing ground. Here, let me share.”

  I was going to protest that there was no time; but before I could protest, the screen switched to a live stream of the debate. “A city of fifty thousand people doesn’t need a year-long election,” Anthony said.

  Grace answered, “What a city of fifty thousand needs is a mayor who understands that it’s a different city now than it was when it was five thousand people. It needs new blood with new vision, not the same old insider business as usual. Your League is out of control, Mr. Mayor.”

  The screen switched back to Alonzo. “It keeps going like that. She’s trying to tie the mayor to the League and Boomtown. We’ve already put out the evidence to counter that, but—”

  I checked the clock, and I cut Alonzo off. “Sorry, there is just no time. I need to make another call. Alonzo, we need a security audit. Someone is changing our records. As soon as the mayor is off that stage, ask him to order the audit.”

  “I can do better than that. I’ll kick that off immediately, ma’am.”

  “Good. Pay particular attention to preserving copies of all evidence. Gotta go!” I closed the call.

  Then I opened another call to Vile. “What have you found?” I asked.

  “You guessed it, ma’am,” Vile answered. “Monè’s at the lab, and it’s a mess. I’m in Trudeau’s apartment with three officers, and it’s worse. There was a fight here, ma’am. And the place has been ransacked. So has the lab.”

  I nodded, trying to visualize; but Maxwell City is a three-dimensional maze, and it is hard to keep it all in your head. Instead I split the screen on my comm, and I plotted both locations on the map. Then I had the system plot out possible routes between them, highlighting low-traffic routes preferentially. It took three seconds for the algorithm to work.

  One of the brightest routes ran right near Foxtrot Tube on level 2, the light industrial neighborhood where Trudeau’s body was found.

  At that time of night, Adam might have avoided human eyes, disguising his burden in a cart and himself as a maintenance worker; but he would have shown on some of the surveillance videos along that route. Yet Moore’s searches had come up empty.

  “Good work, Vile,” I said. “Keep searching.” I closed the call.

  I did not believe Vile would find anything; or at least not the thing, the reason Adam had risked coming back to Maxwell City. That had to be Ramos’s report for Trudeau. If it had been in Trudeau’s apartment, Adam would have found it, and he would have had no need to search the lab.

  Nor to bring Trudeau’s body with him. That only made sense if he thought there was a chance that the information was on the body. He would have searched the man’s pockets, surely; but maybe Trudeau had a subcomp. They were common enough today, not as rare and expensive as when Anthony had gotten his. Most people did not see the need to implant a computer that could only be upgraded surgically. It was easier to wear a comp on your sleeve, or just fall back on a comm. But some people, including many scientists, preferred instant access to data.

  If Adam had suspected a subcomp, he would have wanted to find it and extract it—a bloody bit of work that would take time. But it would go faster and easier in a lab! And Adam’s own lab was locked down for auction. But Trudeau’s lab might work.

  So Adam had searched the home but had not found the report. Maybe he found something else, the key code to Trudeau’s lab. He had packed the body into a trash cart. Maybe he had brought one as a part of a disguise for roaming the city, or maybe he even had the foresight to know he might need it. Adam was pretty smart.

  Then, heading to the lab, he had for some reason abandoned the body. Perhaps the search had taken too long, an
d there were too many people in the tubes. Perhaps his mysterious accomplice had warned him that it was getting late, and he needed to move quickly, so he had left the body where the accomplice could blank the cameras and no one was likely to notice.

  And then he had continued to the lab, searched it quickly, and found nothing. He had gotten out of Maxwell City through a maintenance lock and headed back to Boomtown.

  Or maybe he had searched the lab, found the report, and dropped it in the Martian sands between here and Boomtown; and the winds were busy burying it now, and we would never find it.

  Maybe. That would fit. It would mean that the only two people alive who knew what Trudeau had commissioned were Adam and his accomplice. And when he knew he might be captured and might be compelled to tell, Adam had chosen to prevent it the only way he could.

  We were so close. I could feel the answers just out of reach. Yet they could all be lost already.

  I would not accept that. I remembered a lesson from command school: acting as if. If your options were limited, act as if they were the correct options, and do what it took to get the maximum results from them. If they were wrong, then your actions did not matter anyway. You were defeated before you started. But if they were right, then acting as if was the only way to make them pay off.

  I breathed easier then. The only option that could possibly work was if Trudeau had a subcomp with all our answers on it. Marcus would get back from Boomtown, I would ask him to do an immediate autopsy, he would find the subcomp, and we would have our answers. For once the right path was simply to wait.

  But I did not like it. Something nagged at me. Something I had heard just recently. Something more urgent than I had realized.

  Nick had said: I wanted a quick ceremony at the Tomb. They said as soon as it clears . . . Why did it need to clear?

  Before I could pursue that thought, the pilot called back. “Ms. Morais, I have to cut off comms now. We’re ready to start braking.”

  “No!” I said, instinctively slipping into command voice. “Do not land yet.”