“You said it yourself, Nicole, most countries can’t mount the kind of effort that Wolfpack base represented, and only one private firm: Cobri, Associates. Could be I’m paranoid, there’s no reason to assume it’s the old man; may well be a loose cannon in his organization who’s pulled off the greatest con job in history. But whoever’s behind this possesses capabilities that have to be respected. So either prove to me my fears are groundless—and yes, Lieutenant, they are fears, I am scared and so should you be—or give me something to act on.
“You want a goal, aside from simple survival, consider the fundamental integrity of the Frontier. This is my turf, our turf,” and for emphasis she hammered a fist against the wall. “We’re dreamers here, Nicole, that’s why we come. Lord, why else live in holes in the ground or glorified tin cans? Where there’s no such thing as a breath of fresh air? We’re trying to build a decent way of life. Someone’s doing their miserable best to destroy it. That, I will not allow. And if those wings you earned mean anything, young Lieutenant, neither will you.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I need results, Nicole. Until then, we’re hamstrung.”
“And I’m on death row.”
“Very likely,” the Marshal said flatly, “as is anyone close to you.”
London was muted grey-greens, cool colors to go with the cool afternoon air—not that she had much chance to sample it, as she was bundled from one spaceplane to another, with barely time for feet to touch solid ground before she was skyborne once again. Seven hours, door to door—Sutherland to southern California—with the longest single stretch being at the end, waiting on the ramp at LAX for clearance to make the eighty-minute flight to Edwards. Only forty-odd minutes less than the time it took to return from Sutherland, or fly the seven thousand miles from London to Los Angeles.
Eight-hour time difference, teatime there being predawn twilight on the high desert. On any normal day, she’d be finishing her stretches before collecting Kymri for their morning run. The cold was bitter and she was thankful for the flight jacket Maguire had included with the uniform. She felt strange, and wondered how she looked to everyone else, in black from neck to toe, with the Marshal’s crest on one shoulder, the DaVinci Headquarters patch on the other, plus her badge. She’d thought about ditching it for a proper uniform—didn’t matter that all her clothes were in her quarters, currently sealed behind bright yellow-and-black security tape, she could get what she needed from her locker at the South Field Complex. Only she wasn’t given the chance. A car pulled up as the plane turned off onto the taxiway and she was ushered out while the engines were still running, the car speeding away before she’d barely had time to settle herself.
Colonel Sallinger was there, of course. Along with bods she didn’t know, presumably from Intelligence and the Military Police. Some civilians, too, who she assumed were FBI and Secret Service. Plus a minor but formidable contingent of uniformed Air Police to secure the street from the idly curious. Of which, given the hour, there were none.
She reported to Sallinger, but he waved aside her salute before it was halfway complete.
“You don’t work for me today, Nicole, no need for the courtesies.”
“Not my choice, boss,” she said. “No offense, but I’d rather be back in my blues.”
“Mañana, Cinderella. I’m only sorry the occasion isn’t a ball.” He shook his head. “Not what we had in mind at all.”
“I scanned the initial reports, sir. The Halyan’t’a called this in?” A nod. “Did they know about my absence?”
“You’ll have to ask them. But they weren’t supposed to, my orders were quite specific on that score. At this end, it was you and me and Special Agent Deschanel; on Sutherland, Marshal Maguire. On the Moon, General Canfield.” Which made sense, given the General’s dual responsibilities as Commander in Chief of the Air Force’s Space Command and NASA’s Director of Manned Spaceflight. “That’s it. Nobody else.”
“Except the President.” She thought of it as a small bit of humor, an attempt to ease the mood, but the words came out with an unconscious edge that brought Sallinger’s head around sharply, and she realized with a shock that she’d meant them seriously.
“How do I handle this, sir,” she asked with quiet desperation, flash-glancing down the line of hard-faced men and women.
“Ms. Shea,” Sallinger replied, with just enough emphasis on the “Ms.” to get her attention, “you bossed a multibillion-dollar spacecraft, how’d you handle that?”
“Just like flying a new plane, huh?”
“Precisely. So don’t obsess about auguring in.” Or, she thought, it’ll become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Just don’t do it.”
She strode over to the Base Provost Marshal, a bluff-bodied bruiser who topped her by half a head and dwarfed her bodily. He was a “mustang,” starting his career well before she was born as an enlisted man, winning a battlefield commission during a vicious firefight in the Saudi desert. They’d met a few times early on after her assignment to Edwards, to coordinate security for the Hal, and she’d been struck—then as now—by how much he and Maguire seemed to be cut from the same mold. There was no warmth in his greeting, but not outright dismissal, either; he was taking her as she was, at least to start. Where she went from here was her lookout. “Colonel Rachiim.”
“Ms. Shea.” Same mode of address Colonel Sallinger used, and she had to admire how neatly that straddled the gulf between her temporary status and the permanent one she’d revert to later on.
She cocked head and eyebrows slightly, silently prompting a status report. And the Provost, resting massive hands on hips, pivoted towards the front of the house.
“Decedent initially tagged as Nicole Shea, Second Lieutenant, United States Air Force. Upon direct physical examination, it became obvious the decedent was not the aforementioned Lieutenant Shea. Colonel Sallinger provided the correct identification, of Simone Deschanel, Special Agent of the United States Secret Service, attached to the presidential security detail.”
“You keep saying ‘decedent,’ here and in the report.”
“There’s no empiric evidence of foul play. Autopsy has established the cause of death as myocardial infarction, a massive heart attack.”
“Is there a natural etiology to support that?”
“Depends on what the hell you just meant?”
“She have a cardiac history? High blood pressure, genetic predisposition, arterial blockage, that sort of thing?”
He pivoted to face her. “She was on the President’s detail, cleared for off-world. Those operatives go through the functional equivalent of a NASA first-class astronaut’s medical every year. Agent Deschanel had her ‘annual’ immediately prior to the President’s recent Lunar visit, which was directly prior to your posting here.”
“I gather then, she was in good shape.”
“Superb. Doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes it happens.”
“The house bio-monitors. If she was in such acute distress, there should have been an alarm.”
“They appear to have been disabled.”
“That doesn’t seem suspicious to you, Colonel?”
“From the inside, Ms. Shea. Evidently, Agent Deschanel did the job herself. As a matter of fact, we don’t have any real-time live surveillance recordings, because that would have jeopardized the integrity of your mission. Colonel Sallinger ordered your quarters taken off-line. It was logged as ‘routine maintenance.’ I wasn’t informed until after the fact. Well after the fact. When I was standing over that poor woman’s body.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I. And no, Ms. Shea, I’m not blaming you. Lieutenants follow orders, same as Colonels, it’s just the Colonels are supposed to know a lot better. Fortunately, however,” he added, “the surveillance video was dumped directly into the house’s own memory. We’re still scanning but all indications are that Agent Deschanel went to bed and simply died in her sleep.”
“No offense, sir, but
that doesn’t mean dick.”
“Howzzat?”
“An attempt was made on my life on the Moon.”
“I know.”
“Then you should also know that the hitter penetrated presumably fail-safe secure computer networks and used them to do his dirty work. He executed lethal modifications to environmental systems while perpetuating the fiction to the core monitors that everything was fine.”
“You’re suggesting the same here, that this was murder?”
“Yes. You can pull every data stream in the house, it’ll only tell you what the killer wants you to know.”
“A plausible scenario. Only this isn’t the Moon, and she wasn’t in a sealed physical environment. The bedroom window was open—and yes, we scoured the yard for any sign of an intruder, totally no joy—and there’s not even a hint of residual atmospheric toxins. And the fact remains, she wasn’t asphyxiated. She had a heart attack.”
“Poison in the food?”
“Not there, not in the water. Scanned the video system, on the off chance she was watching a movie that scared her to death, nothing there, either. No external contact of any kind, from the moment she entered ’til the time my people kicked in the door. No outgoing calls, no answer of any incoming. Eleven in your buffer, mostly from the Cobri girl, Amelia. Concentrated in a two-hour window. She was eager as hell to get in touch. Along the way she figured you were home but not picking up, got pretty upset about it.”
“Anyone spoken to her?”
“Not yet. Officially, that’s still you in there. We’re not treating this lightly or casually, Ms. Shea, but we need tangible evidence to pursue it as a homicide. I got no hunch here, an’ yours don’t count for much.”
“You know Al Maguire?”
“Child, why d’you think we’re talking? Wearing that uniform don’t mean shit to me on my post. I respect you in this because I respect Al. But even she isn’t sure. Hell, Shea, you aren’t sure.”
“The house is sealed?”
“Totally isolated. We physically pulled every external link right after we found the body. Why?”
“If the Hal hadn’t called, would anyone have known anything was wrong?”
He crooked an eyebrow, then shook his head. “Colonel Sallinger and she had some sort of commo code,” he said. “He’d call in on a random schedule and if she didn’t give the proper response, that’d mean trouble. As I recall, there were some distractions through the evening. Nothing major, but they all seemed to require his intervention.”
“So he was out of position.”
“Seems like. Although a case could be made for coincidence.”
“Be nice to be sure,” she suggested gently.
“That it would.” And he called over a uniformed investigator to turn her thought into an order.
“You want to go inside?” he asked.
“Not yet.” And wondered how much of her answer was just plain fear. Simply because the trap had sprung once didn’t mean it wasn’t ready to try again. “I’ll talk to the Halyan’t’a first.”
“Be my guest. Kymri was the soul of cooperation, but who’s to tell with those folks? He could be lying through his teeth and I’d never know it.”
“Same applies in reverse, Colonel.”
“Maybe. Me, I’m in the habit of giving the guy across the table a tad more credit than he’s due.”
“You’ll keep me informed if anything new pops.”
He gave her a curt nod. “And you, likewise.”
Their door was open, all three Hal waiting just inside, as she strode up their path. Their manner was as casual and overtly relaxed as ever, but she noted a faint, upstanding brush of fur down the back of each neck.
“We greet with joy,” Kymri said formally as he ushered her across the threshold, “the finding that you have yet to transition from this corporeal plane.”
“For myself, I could wish for happier circumstances,” Nicole replied, matching his manner and bearing as best she could, feeling as always that she was falling far short. “Although I do appreciate the thought.”
“Different uniform,” he noted.
“Only for the day.”
“It makes you an enforcer of the law.”
“A Marshal, yes. You called in the alarm.”
“Tscadi alerted me.”
“To what?”
He growled something to the big engineer, the words too fast and slurred by accents for Nicole to properly follow, and she cursed the fact that she was learning the classical Hal language and not its colloquial variants. Same problem as trying to learn mainstream English and then trying to cope with the extremes of South Brooklyn or the Louisiana bayou. You come away with the knowledge of things as they should be, rather than what they really are.
“She is not precisely certain,” he said. “Something on the order of what you would call... ” and he spoke now to the CyberCrystal artifact on the living-room table, which replied—after a search of its memory paths—in its dulcimer tones: “A hunch.”
“You have them?” Nicole asked Kymri.
“There are far more levels to awareness than simply the conscious mind, Shea-Pilot. A mark of sentience is the ability to take an intuitive leap, based some while on data you are not even aware you possess. Tscadi sensed”—the faintest of pauses for emphasis—“a wrongness. And acted upon it. Regrettably, not in time to save the lady serving as your stalking horse.”
“Colonel Sallinger and Marshal Maguire thought they’d covered every eventuality. And I’ve been here at Edwards, wide open, for months now. Nothing had happened. I guess the sneaking assumption was nothing would.”
“A false one.”
“But why? What provoked it? The fact that I went haring off to Sutherland? If that’s the case, why wasn’t a strike made at me?! The attack came through the house, that has to be because the killer was certain I’d be there. Which means he couldn’t have known I was away.”
“Unless the intent was to strike at you through your friend.”
She shook her head. “Where’s the sense in that? Kymri, only a total fool pisses off the Secret Service. They’re a proud group of people, they won’t rest ’til they get the person responsible.”
“Unless the perpetrator is certain that is impossible.”
A ruefully mocking grin. “You’re just full of hope and good cheer.”
“You are at risk, Shea-Pilot. And part of my charge is to ensure your safety.”
She faced him. “Says who?”
“The authority I—and mine—answer to.”
“Just how far does that go?”
“As far as my discretion deems needful.”
“Surveillance?” A nod. “A network independent of the base monitors?” She couldn’t help the chill iron that layered her voice.
“Of course.”
She reacted with a growl from the back-base of her throat, something she’d picked up from Shavrin without realizing until much later just how extreme a profanity it was. In the beginning, sheer poor pronunciation saved her, but the first time she got it right—during Rehab actually, when her wonky leg refused to behave and five months of frustration and fatigue took the opportunity to catch up with a vengeance—she stopped conversation all around her. From the Hal present had come nervous chuckles; from the humans, outright gasps at a noise that sounded more appropriate to a Tarzan film.
Kymri didn’t bat an eye, though Tscadi laughed in outright appreciation and Matai humphed scandalized disapproval.
“Hunch?” she challenged, shifting a basilisk glare from Kymri to Tscadi.
“Knew you, it was not,” came back from her in Hal, spoken slowly for Nicole’s benefit, “from the start. Comprehension of the need for stealth. But at dawning, when mediscans indicated extreme distress, beheld no alternative.”
“No warning? No physical anomalies?” Nicole started the questions in English, shifted in midstream to Hal, too impatient to wait for Kymri’s translation.
“None, Shea
-Pilot. She was alive”—a shrug—“and then was not.”
“No chance,” this to Matai, “that your system could have been corrupted? That you could have been picking up false images?”
The Hal cyberneticist looked insulted a moment, then responded with a vehement negative.
“The consensus on the outside,” Nicole said quietly, looking through the window towards the crowd on her sidewalk, “is that she died of purely natural causes.”
“A conclusion not without some plausibility,” Kymri replied dryly.
“I wish I could believe that.”
* * *
ten
The first thing she noticed, entering her house, was the clutter. Wasn’t very much, some items of clothing cast over the back of the couch and on the floor, a slew of papers and data disks strewn across a table, the kind of semiorganized mess made by someone used to living on the run. But it made Nicole uncomfortable nonetheless, and she had to resist the urge to pick them up and put them away.
She cracked the seal of her teapak and took a genteel sip, doing a slow pirouette in the center of the room, taking stock of what she could see from there. Pretty much the same as when she’d left it, a few days before. Reached up with her free hand to rub vigorously at the hair behind her skull, wishing she had the slightest idea what to look for, furious with Al Maguire for dumping this on her.
Not my area of expertise, Marshal, she thought, Hana’s the police procedural nut; she’d love this, probably spot a ton of clues right off! Hana was one of the few people Nicole found it easy to talk with; really the only one left, now that Paul DaCuhna was dead. And she took a longer sip of tea, hugging herself as best she could, longing for her best friend’s presence, the smart-ass remark that’d take the edge off the diciest situation, the sounding board Nicole trusted enough to bounce the silliest ideas and notions off of. She felt alone and lonely, and desperately afraid all of a sudden that she and Hana would never see each other again.
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