by J. N. Chaney
“We need to get upstairs.”
Raven found the stairwell, and we crept up the steps as silently as possible, which wasn’t really that silent, as the stairs creaked loudly enough to warn anyone listening that someone was coming up. When we got up top, we found only a single door. The rental rooms were downstairs behind the fish and chips shop, but the top floor was a single apartment. The sign on the door read SLIP RENT UNDER DOOR. OTHERWISE, KEEP OUT.
I held back when I saw the sign, unsure of what I would say if anyone challenged us. Raven shook her head at me and turned the door handle slowly. It wasn’t locked, and it swung open with a gentle push.
She whispered in my ear. “If you had a sign like that, would you leave your door unlocked?”
I shook my head and drew my sidearm, and she did the same. As we stepped in, I reached around for a switch and turned the lights on.
The place had either been tossed, or whoever had lived here was worse than a slob. There were papers everywhere, and drawers had been emptied all over the floor. Some things had been broken, including an old vase. A lamp was knocked over.
Raven’s nose curled up a little. “I smell blood.”
“That’s quite a talent to have. Let’s sweep the whole place.”
We went room by room. When we found the dead man, he was seated in a chair with his head slumped back. There was one entrance wound in his chest and one in his head, and a splatter behind him on the wall.
I opened a channel to Andrea. “We found their mark. Looks like they found him first, though.”
“I’m on my way.”
14
The dead man had a funny look on his face, like getting murdered had taken him completely by surprise. The chair he was sat in was an expensive new swivel chair with scraps of the plastic it had been shipped in still clinging to it here and there. I wondered how much of the furniture in Sif had been appropriated from some container ship over the past few years. There was probably an auction house or a black-market store somewhere to distribute it all.
He was sitting in front of a desk with a pile of papers on it, including what looked like rent payments from the tenants downstairs. Some of the tenants had paid in local scrip. Paper money was hardly used at all in the big cities, but some smaller communities issued their own on a time-credit basis. Some had paid in IOUs, including one that read “IOU ten pounds Trout.”
In Sif, you could apparently pay your rent in stolen fish.
“I think this guy was the landlord.”
“What an astute observation,” Raven replied in a sweet voice. She was busy checking the dead man’s pockets. “See if you can find anything that would tell us who he is. I can’t find any ID.”
It stood to reason that a landlord with no ID would also be understanding about tenants with no ID. “He could be a fugitive. It’s not a bad plan for staying hidden.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure. Pick a remote community known for lawlessness, pay cash for some income-producing property, and leave the paperwork out of it. You see the same thing out in the colonies sometimes. Plenty of small planetoids have bar owners wanted for multiple felonies back here on Earth.”
“I wonder how they’d feel if they knew they could have just come here instead. But how does he connect to our mission? Until we know who he is, it almost doesn’t matter that we found him.”
“Well, let’s give Thomas something to do. Hold on.” I leaned over the body and activated the facial topography app on my dataspike. When the app was done, I sent the scan to Thomas Young along with a message: Can you ID this guy?
I knew he’d be working on something, and he wouldn’t want to interrupt whatever he was doing to do me a favor. With the way I’d phrased it, any failure to respond on his part would look like an admission that he couldn’t do it. If there was one thing Young couldn’t tolerate, it would be the suggestion there was a problem he couldn’t solve.
His return message was not too friendly: You manipulative twat. Of course I can do it. Give me a few minutes.
I grinned. He saw right through me but still couldn’t help himself.
Raven raised an eyebrow. “Did you just send that to Young? He’s not going to help you. Young never helps anyone except Andrea.”
“He just agreed.”
“Then I’m impressed. I’m never flirting with you again, you’re too good at game-playing.”
I winked at her and she rolled her eyes. Then I looked around, trying to reconstruct what might have happened. As an Arbiter, I’m technically in law enforcement, but the laws I enforce are mostly the big ones, stuff like war crimes and treason and attempted genocide. I’d learned how to analyze a simple crime scene in the Arbiter Academy, but it was mostly theory. Still—
“I can see you trying to remember how that chapter in your textbook went,” teased Raven.
“Yeah, I don’t have tons of practical experience with this. But let’s see what I can come up with while we’re waiting for Thomas.”
I went back to the first room we’d cleared—a simple bedroom, with an old bureau and a cheap frame bed. Someone had dumped out all the bureau drawers and strewn the contents of the closet all over the room. There was a poster on the wall, but it didn’t seem to fit the life of a cash-and-barter slumlord in the city of Sif. It was a faded image of a hand holding up a torch, and an androgynous figure staring heroically into the distance in front of a soaring bridge. Across the bottom, the poster had the words “NEW LIFE 2835: VISIONARIES ON THE VOLGA.”
The windows in this room looked out on the front of the Mary Rose at a diagonal angle. Anyone lying in Booth 6 with a sniper rifle could have taken out whoever was in here as soon as they showed their face.
I looked through the kitchen, where someone had also been dumping items out intentionally. Himalayan pink salt was all over the floor, along with multi-colored peppercorns and a bottle of truffle oil. Again, this didn’t quite fit. The pink salt and peppercorns, sure, but that truffle oil is an acquired taste, and Nunavut is not the place to acquire it. There was a pan in the sink, and even though it must have been sitting there for hours it still smelled like something you’d order off a menu with just four items on it. Whoever this landlord was, he had a taste for the good life.
I walked through the living room—the room with the door—but couldn’t see anything that stood out other than the obvious fact that someone had either been looking for something or just deliberately wrecking the place. We’d found the body in the office, but there was another room beyond it. I went through and found that it looked out on the Iron Mountain across the street. The polar bear had finished his food and was straining at the end of his chain to sniff at customers on their way in or out. One of them was laughing about it drunkenly while his partner shrunk away. The security guard was trying to calm them all, especially the bear. I let the blinds fall back and looked around.
There was hardly anything in this room except a mattress in one corner, with a thin pillow and a brown blanket. Two people had been staying here, one in a bedroom with a single poster for decoration, the other in this empty room with no decoration at all. They hardly even had a life here, just an off-the-books business and an apartment that would have seemed oppressive to your average prisoner. Yet at least one of them had a taste for gourmet cooking.
The only thing in that room other than the mattress and bedding was a small but extremely expensive signal booster on one wall, allowing the inhabitants to connect to any computer system in the world at the fastest possible speeds.
Raven was pointing at the chair when I came back to the office. “Look. The exit wound goes through the chair back. He was sitting down when they got him.”
She swiveled the chair around, and I saw that she was right. The bullet had blasted a gaping hole in the back, exposing blood-splattered foam and fiberboard underneath. The chair wasn’t as nice as it looked. It was kind of cheap.
“At least it was quick. If they shot him in the chest the second they saw
him, then he didn’t suffer much.”
“That makes sense, Tycho, but check this out.” She pointed from the dead man to the living room. “There’s a line of sight from the entrance of the apartment to the chair, so whoever shot him could have done so after stepping around the open door.”
I looked where she was pointing. “Yeah, that tracks. He was sitting here going through his IOUs, probably deciding whether to have trout or… let’s see, frozen curry for dinner. If I read this guy right, he would have gone for the trout. The door opens, he turns around with this surprised look on his face, and they shoot him in the chest. Then he sits there staring down at his wound, and they walk over and shoot him straight in the head to finish him off.”
“Did you find anything in the back room?”
“A mattress and a signal booster. Whoever these guys were, they put a high priority on high-speed network access.”
“So there were two people living here?”
I nodded. “There were two people staying here. The setup in back looks like an improvised guestroom, not a place where someone was living long term. My guess is that the only one living here was this guy.”
“Which implies that they didn’t get the wrong guy. He was the intended target. Hold on.” She went back to check for herself, then returned a second later. “That signal booster is top of the line. Katori Tech, which just happens to be owned by Huxley Industries.”
“Well, what else would it be? Katori’s signal boosters are the best.”
“It’s a Katori 383. Really new. It’s not technically impossible that the landlord could have gotten his hands on one, but it’s more likely the guest brought it with him.”
“Okay, so he’s the tech guy. He might have been the one doing the fancy cooking too. Expensive tech, expensive tastes…”
“That’s possible,” she said. “But still, I think we’re going to find out that this all connects to everything else somehow.”
“I’d certainly like to think so. I’m not exactly thrilled about my prospects with whoever handles policing here in Sif.”
“If you were a cop here, you’d walk around staring at the sidewalk all day and blushing every time one of the hookers glanced at you.”
“You’re probably right. Hold on, what’s this?” I stood up and walked over to the door, then ran my finger along a curved gash in the wood. On the floor nearby, there was a broken bottle. Unlike all the other shattered things in this destroyed apartment, it looked more like an improvised weapon than anything else. “Do you think that bottle could have made this mark?”
She came over for a closer look. “Sure. But if they shot Mr. Landlord while he was sitting down….”
“Then the struggle was with a third party.”
She bit her lip. “There’s only one body, though.”
“So he got away. Let’s say he was in the kitchen when they came in, so he broke a bottle and came at them berserker style. He cut his way out.”
“If he cut his way out, they why isn’t there any blood?” she asked.
“Because cyborgs don’t bleed?” I shook my head, unsatisfied. I wasn’t sure about my own analysis. I’d fought the cyborgs myself, and I wouldn’t have rated my chances against them with nothing but a broken bottle. Anyone who could cut his way to safety in that situation must be death on wheels.
My dataspike alerted me to an incoming call, which turned out to be from Thomas Young. His face appeared in front of me, looking as self-satisfied as always but far from amused.
“I have the dead man’s ID. His name was Misha Orlow, and he was a civil engineer. He won an award once at a major conference…”
“Let me guess, the New Life conference eighteen years ago?”
“Visionaries on the Volga? Yes, that’s the one, New Life is an annual engineering conference. Does it really matter?”
“Just confirming something.” In Misha Orlow’s lonely life, that award was the one and only thing he had wanted to be reminded of. “So, what’s he doing up here?”
“He’s not a fugitive, if that’s what you’re thinking. As far as I can tell, he just decided to drop off the face of the map. We’ll get to that in a minute. Do you want to hear the rest of what I’ve found out or not?”
“No question about it, Thomas. Go ahead.”
“So, first things first: his kids don’t speak to him. Or didn’t speak to him. They’ve been estranged for years.”
I noted the change in tense but didn’t say anything right away. I didn’t think Thomas would appreciate being interrupted again.
“Still, considering that they don’t have any contact with him, the timing of all this is… statistically remote. When this man died, his entire family line died with him.”
“But that happens, right? Lonely guy in the middle of nowhere dies alone, and part of why he’s alone is because he doesn’t have any family left.”
Except he didn’t die alone. Someone was here with him, sleeping on a bare mattress in the other room.
“It’s the timing of it, as I said. His wife Elena died fifteen years ago of Alzheimer’s disease. That was three years after he won his big award, and things didn’t exactly perk up for him after that. The estrangement from his children seems to date to around that time. They had sporadic contact for a few years after that, but no contact with any of his kids for the past decade. No contact with anyone, including former colleagues. I’m guessing he was already in Sif by that time. It was like he just didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone anymore.”
Part of me wondered how Thomas knew so much, and how he had discovered it so quickly, but I had seen him in action. The man who could take control of an entire android army on Venus could certainly get his hands on Misha Orlow’s personal data.
Thomas continued. “What’s strange about the timing is that he had two adult children, Lara and Quentin Orlow, and both are recently deceased.”
Young looked worried, or maybe “perturbed” would be a better word. I didn’t think he was worried about the people involved, though. It was more likely the statistical anomaly that was bothering him.
“Well, how recently are we talking?”
“Quentin Orlow was killed in an armed robbery just two days ago. Masked men came into his place of business—Orlow’s Dataspike Repair—and shot him dead. He didn’t have any children. Lara Orlow and her entire family were killed yesterday in a fire. From that point on, Misha Orlow had no living relatives. Then someone tracked him down and killed him.”
“One is chance, two is a pattern…” I said.
“What?”
“Just something I’m thinking about. And there’s nothing in his record to indicate why his kids stopped talking to him, or why he came up here to Sif and started renting out rooms?”
“My analysis rates it as psychological, a reaction to his wife’s death. He grew up without a father but started a family of his own. When he lost his wife, he also cut off his family. Her death was probably the triggering event for an underlying personality issue.”
“What happened to his father?”
“No info available. Father is unknown.”
“So, he disappeared just like his father had. Huh.”
Thomas shrugged. “I suppose. The interesting question is the apparent coincidence.”
“And it may only be an apparent coincidence. Thanks, Thomas. I have to go. I’ll keep in touch.”
“There’s really no need.”
His face disappeared, and I shook my head. “What a friendly man.”
“Thomas isn’t like other people.” Raven was looking out the window. She wasn’t tense, but her body language still looked anxious. “What was he saying?”
“Both of this guy’s kids were killed in the past few days. One in a robbery, one in a fire. He was the last living member of his family.”
She turned and looked at the dead man. “Hmmm. He doesn’t look like the sort of fellow to be involved in a vendetta.”
“Strange, though, isn
’t it?”
“Yeah, a bit. Doesn’t it seem like Andrea is taking a while, though?”
“Now that I think of it, yeah. Do you want to go out and look around for her?”
She shook her head. “Without my rifle, I feel naked. If there’s trouble coming, I won’t be much more use than you will.”
“Um, what?”
“No offense, Tycho. That didn’t come out the way I meant it to.”
These spies from Section 9 all had a huge tendency to be condescending. I wondered if that would change if I ever accepted their job offer, or if they would just keep acting that way.
“Look, we’re assuming the Augmen were behind this, but we haven’t proved it. Let’s see if we can find some hard evidence.”
She nodded. “Sure. I’ll check this room and the back room; you check the others.”
I don’t even know why I was doing this exactly, because it’s not like we were trying to build a criminal case. Section 9 was off the books; even if they arrested someone, they had to find a way to do it through legal channels. Circumstantial evidence was all we needed for our purposes. I was mostly just trying to change the topic and kill a little time while we waited for Andrea.
Either way, I found something. It was in the living room, the place where I thought the struggle had most likely happened. Something glinted in the light, and when I leaned in to see what it was, I found a few fragments of pleximesh skin embedded in the wall.
I touched one of the pleximesh scraps with my finger and pulled it away, wondering what bits of android skin would be doing here and how they would have become embedded in the wall in the first place. Then I noticed something else, something that looked like a silver paste. When I scraped at it with my finger, it turned out to be bits of an odd metallic composite, similar to the silica fiber lining of an android proxy joint.
“Hey, Raven…”
“Yeah?” She came out from the back, and I brought her the sample I had just taken.
“What does that look like to you?”
Her brow furrowed. “Huh. Pleximesh skin, like on an android? And that composite…”