by John Appel
Noo felt annoyed at missing what seemed like an obvious joke. “What’s so funny?”
“Oh, sorry. It’s just that Mizwar, or whomever he’s working for, got sloppy. Or lazy. Or maybe they were rushed.” Ogawa thought for a moment. “Is there some kind of common mistake stupidly naive criminals make?”
I think I see where this is going. “Oh, plenty. Usually forgetting that cameras are pretty much everywhere on-station.” She found herself nodding. “So claiming to be a ‘logistics specialist’ is some kind of giveaway that someone’s up to no good? Or not who they claim to be?”
“Hm, sort of. What I mean is, logistics specialist is one of those jobs that works really well as a legend for an operative, at first glance, anyway. It’s such a vaguely defined role, and so ubiquitous, that you can travel almost anywhere without being questioned too deeply. It’s so tailor-made for intelligence work that, well, it’s too well-suited. Too obvious.”
Noo cocked her head inquisitively. “And ‘planetary surveyor’ isn’t?”
Ogawa shook her head. “Too small a community, really. We don’t all know each other but chances are, I know someone who knows any other given person in the field. Well, perhaps there’s two degrees of separation between me and some of the newer people in the discipline. And then there’s the academic requirements.” She shrugged. “There just aren’t that many of us. But ‘logistics specialist’—”
“Is something anyone who can bullshit well enough can pass themselves off as,” Noo interjected.
“Right. And because it’s so obvious, it’s one of the first search filters we use when hunting potential operatives.”
Noo considered that. “Do you think Teng knows that?”
“Our ornamental captain? Probably.” Ogawa shrugged again. “If he doesn’t, someone in the Directorate will. Your people know what they’re about.”
The description of Teng as ‘ornamental’ caught Noo’s attention. The man was clearly Ogawa’s minder; in fact, Noo was surprised he wasn’t hovering nearby. “He is a pretty one, isn’t he?”
Ogawa smirked. “I don’t understand how he wound up in Intelligence. He can’t really work covertly. He’s too good-looking, too memorable.”
It was true, the man would hardly pass unnoticed, and likely attracted admirers of the male form from across the gender spectrum. “I’ll take your word for it.” Noo took another pull of her coffee. “He’s not keeping you under close watch?”
A downward flick of the eyes. “I suppose he thinks I can’t get into too much trouble in the middle of police headquarters. Too much monitoring for me to be able to go off on my own.”
“Do you do that at lot? Work on your own?”
Ogawa paused before answering that. “I most usually operate solo, or with only one or two partners, perhaps some local support.”
That made sense, Noo thought, given the woman’s public job. She hitched herself up in her seat and gave the other woman a frank look. “Got a suggestion for you.”
“Hm?”
She reached out and tapped one blunt finger on the table just in front of Ogawa’s dish. “You’re part of a team on this. A weird, slapdash team, I admit. But we got out of that situation this morning because we all worked together. The only reason your maneuver in the melee worked is because the rest of us had your back. I don’t give a rat’s scrotum who gets the credit for solving this. But I want this fucker Mizwar under the question, whether he was the trigger man or no.” Her voice dropped to just above a whisper. “If you can work with the team, we all get what we want, eh?”
Ogawa chewed on her lower lip as she regarded Noo. It seemed an unconscious habit, and for just a moment made the Commonwealth woman look at least a decade younger. Noo schooled herself to wait patiently and studied Ogawa in turn.
At last, Ogawa nodded and reached her hand across the table. “As you say, we can all get what we want.” They shook on it, then both sat back and relaxed.
“What’s our next move?” Ogawa asked.
“First step is determining if he stayed here in New Abuja or headed somewhere else,” Noo said. She pointed at the floor. “We’ll let the Constabulary do the legwork. They’ve got a building full of analysts and smart systems to rip through the data. We’ve got a likeness and some biometrics from the video footage.”
“He most likely had some kind of support network on the station. Does he have contacts down here? Accomplices?”
Noo shrugged. “I was hoping you’d have some insight into that. Did our friends not give you anything relevant?”
“Afraid not. They seem to be playing things close to their chests, considering how much pressure these people must be putting on them.” Ogawa gave a little jerk of her head towards the Constabulary seal displayed on the video wall.
A high-priority group call alert flashed in her implant and they both waved open message windows. Lieutenant Zheng’s youthful face appeared. “We’ve got a lead,” she said. “We’ve got a probable biometric match for our subject boarding a flight to Kochi. Briefing in meeting room 2347A in ten minutes. Bring your things. We’ll be leaving as soon as transport is ready.”
They both acknowledged and wiped their message windows closed as wayfinder arrows appeared. “Guess it’s a good thing I can sleep on planes,” Ogawa said.
Meiko
Constabulary HQ,
Kochi, Ileri
Kochi lay six hours flight north and east of New Abuja. It was a waterfront city like the capital but possessed of a different character. Where the capital sprawled across the equatorial plain, Kochi sandwiched itself between Tempest Bay to the east and the Black Claw Mountains to the west. Many of its towers clung to the sharply rising slopes of the range’s foothills. There were few blocks of low-rises here, Meiko discovered as she gazed out the window, cradling a mug of tea. Aside from the few blocks along the harbor proper and the industrial district south of downtown, Kochi tended to soaring towers, streamlined to allow the ever-present winds to flow around them. A network of connecting bridges, skywalks, cable cars, and elevated monorails meant citizens could go days or even weeks without descending to ground level.
The sky outside was dark gray, and low-hanging clouds shrouded the nearer peaks of the Black Claw Mountains rising to the west. Darker, more ominous clouds massed to the east, slowly pressing nearer to the city. The forecast called for a significant thunderstorm, which Meiko actually looked forward to; it had been too long since she’d last experienced nature’s force. Not that she planned to go out in a storm like that, but the feel of rain on her face was tempting.
Someone joined her at the window, and she recognized Fari Tahir’s broken-nosed face reflected in the glass.
“It’s a pretty view,” Tahir said. “Almost makes up for the weather.”
Meiko half-turned towards her. “You’re not a fan of temperate rainforest climates, then?”
Fari shivered. “Temperate? It’s only fifteen degrees out there, colder with the sea breeze blowing in.”
Meiko laughed softly. “You dislike unmanaged weather, like your partner, eh? I suppose you wouldn’t like some of the places I’ve visited.”
“Guess not,” Fari said, bringing the cup up near her face, breathing in the steamy warmth. “You were part of the Fenghuang expedition, weren’t you? All those months on that ice moon.” She shivered again.
“That is one of the colder places I’ve been, true, but we kept things toasty warm inside the habitat. It was below negative one-sixty Celsius on a good day outside. No atmosphere to speak of, so no wind chill to worry about, though.” She sipped her tea and watched the tiny people on the street far below going about their business. “I’ve done work on icy habitable worlds where you do feel the cold, and I’ve been to Salju once.”
Fari’s eyes widened a bit on hearing that. “Really? I didn’t think they allowed many visitors.”
“The Saljuans don’t court visitors, but they’re a major world,” Meiko said. “One of the First Fourteen, just li
ke Ileri or Novo Brasilia, if arguably the most marginally habitable of the lot. There’s a certain amount of interstellar visitation. Most people live in the underground complexes, but a few people live on the surface. I was there for a scientific conference that had an excursion to one of their geothermal oases.”
That seemed to pique Fari’s interest. “An oasis? I thought that was a desert thing.”
Despite herself, Meiko found herself slipping into teaching mode, something she’d discovered she had a knack for. “Salju—did you know that means ‘snow’ in their language?—is quite active, geologically speaking, so there are places where you have hot springs that create warm zones. They’re intensely interesting microclimates.”
“Were you there as a scientist, or in your other capacity?” Fari asked.
Meiko pursed her lips. “Let’s just say I frequently find myself doing both jobs at once.”
Fari nodded, and the two women fell silent for a moment. They contemplated the forested mountains challenging the sky as their companions chattered behind them. “What are they like, the Saljuans?” Fari asked. “As a people, a culture, I mean. We rarely see any of them out here in this part of the Cluster. I think that’s one reason people are so spun up about the warship.”
Meiko sipped her tea, pondering her answer. “Individually, I suppose, they’re not that much different from people that I’ve met anywhere else,” she said. “People who want to pursue callings that interest them, find companionship, perhaps raise a family.” She paused, considering her words; what to say with the Saljuans making threats? “There is a certain, well, resentment, I think, that suffuses their society. Like most of our ancestors, they came from very warm places on Earth. They wound up stuck on a glacier-covered world because their arks couldn’t make it any further and couldn’t reach a more accommodating planet. Is it any wonder that they’re so intent on keeping the mistakes that led to Exile, the abuse of nanotechnology and biotech and weaponized computing, from reoccurring?”
“I guess not,” Fari said. “But that doesn’t explain why they annexed Para and Rama by force.” She pointed skyward. “Or come here courting a war with both us and the Commonwealth.”
“They don’t feel safe, I think,” Meiko said. “They suffered greatly in those early decades, working to make the world they’d been handed into a place where they could do more than survive. The survival margins back then were thin. Not as bad as in space, or on a dead world, but still, they danced on a knife’s edge of extinction for a while.” She shrugged. “It explains their animosity towards the Commonwealth, since we’re more welcoming of technologies they still blame for the Exile. But we feel those genies are out of the bottle. Better to understand their nature if one wants to resist or control them.”
“Like how djinns got their name,” Fari said, waving hers. “To remind us of the way weaponized AI led humanity down the darker path towards our own destruction.”
“I think that story is apocryphal, but yes, something like that,” Meiko said with a chuckle. She drained her tea with a sigh. “I suppose we should get back to work. Looking at the mountains won’t help find our target.”
Fari nodded but stayed by the window. Meiko padded back to her work cubby, rolling out her shoulders to try and work the stiffness out. Her injured arm felt better; the nanosurgeons had done their work well. The itching in her forearm had subsided, finally, as the bones finished knitting. She looked forward to getting rid of the cast. At least the dose of Remex she’d taken before boarding the flight from New Abuja had let her sleep soundly. She hadn’t felt this rested since she’d boarded the shuttle for Ileri Station.
She waved her djinn through the display field, feeding it the code key she’d been given. Windows popped open and she delved once more into the Constabulary system, or at least the little part carved off for her to access. Her djinn chimed and she popped open the message to find Okereke wanted the whole team to gather in the briefing suite.
The investigator grinned smugly as the station team, plus their local liaison, congregated around the big 3D model of the city. Meiko wondered what motivated that self-satisfied look. “Thought of a way to shortcut the brute-force approach to the sightings,” Okereke said without preamble. “There weren’t any obvious patterns to those partial biometric matches. But then I remembered the increase in assaults and kidnappings on-station, so I tried a little correlation for reports of violent or damaging incidents and got a hit almost immediately.” Okereke waved her hand and the display transformed.
A column of gold light shone near a small cluster of potential sightings in a light industrial park in the southern suburbs. Text and images from incident reports flashed up in windows around the perimeter of the model, and the team gathered around whichever window was closest to them to read.
Zheng spoke up first. “A warehouse fire turned into a biological hazardous-material event is certainly unusual, but what makes you think it’s linked to the assassin?”
“Why come down the cable?” Okereke said. “To escape? That doesn’t make sense. If the assassination was the killers’ only task, they’d either lay low on the station or catch a ride out-system. Or at least to the outer station, maybe a vessel heading out to the New Arm colonies. No, they’re on a mission. They have objectives.” She reached her hand into the model and tapped two fingers at the site of the fire. “And somehow, this ties into one of them.”
Meiko chewed her lower lip as she considered Okereke’s theory. The evidence supporting it was thin, but plausible.
“You think our assassin has turned saboteur?” Teng asked.
Okereke nodded. “At the very least, it seems worth looking into.”
Meiko scrolled through the reports. “Do we know what was destroyed in the fire? Why it became a hazmat situation?”
“Here it is,” Fari said. “Medical nanotech, a new kind of broad-spectrum antiphage treatment. Meant for use in the New Arm colonies.”
Meiko felt a chill. “Medical nanotech? For off-world?” She pawed open a window and called up her files on the killing. “Wasn’t one of the collateral victims of the assassination involved with that kind of thing?”
Zheng, Teng, and the liaison officer conferred briefly while Meiko zoomed in the display to examine the scene of the crime, freshly updated with imaging from the Constabulary and fire department investigations. She glanced over at Okereke, who wore a feral smile. “This is a solid lead,” Meiko said.
“Damn straight,” Okereke replied.
The discussion across the room took on a tone of excited agitation. “We’ve got something,” Teng called across to them. They gathered around him as Zheng and the local liaison scurried off. “Another anomaly. The locals have been chasing down the producers of the biologicals destroyed in the fire. It’s a small bespoke manufacturer, dealing mainly in custom wet-nanoware biotech.” Teng stuck one finger into the model and another golden column sprang up. “Aye Tuntun Specialists. Guess who owns that?”
“The Lim family,” Meiko and Okereke said simultaneously. They locked eyes across the model. A Lim family rep had been killed along with Ita, the consul,
and Okereke’s kin.
“Constabulary pay this manufactory a visit yet?” Okereke asked.
“They’re waiting for us before they move in. Zheng just went to arrange transportation.”
“How quickly can we get there?” Meiko asked.
“Ten minutes by aircar. We’ll check this out, scoop up the staff and bring them back here for interviews. The Kochi team can handle the forensics.”
Zheng reappeared. “We’ve got rides,” she said with a grin. “Two aircars. We’ll drop into their lot and go in the front door while our people watch the back. Use the potty if you need to and gear up,” she finished. “We move out of here in fifteen minutes.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Toiwa
Starfall District, Ileri Station,
Northern Ring
“Tell me they didn’t have the whole bui
lding,” Toiwa said as Valverdes and the rest of her entourage, including the infonet specialist Okafor, approached the six-story building. It was surrounded by constables, small teams of Army troopers in half-armor, and bots belonging to both services. AR warning signs promised dire consequences for anyone who breached the perimeter. The mid-shift crowd of onlookers and passers-by gave the warning signs all due respect, but the presence of soldiers bearing shock guns and goober launchers probably had a lot to do with that. Even the media bots kept a respectable distance away.
“Just the top floor, and an office suite on the ground level,” Valverdes reassured her. “Sergeant Imoke says they were posing as a consulting firm advising groups headed for the New Arm colonies, but we’ve found no record of any actual clients.”
“Not so far, at any rate,” Okafor chimed in. She swept a white cane in front of her as she walked, the ferrule making scritching sounds on the turf as they walked across the street. She held her left arm across her chest, her gloved, open hand over her sternum. Her fingers moved continuously in slow, arrhythmic dance, her version of a sighted person interacting with a private AR field. An autopallet whisked along behind her, stacked with expensive-looking technical gear. The ever-present Constable Chijindu, head swiveling back and forth, led their little parade.
They passed through Imoke’s cordon and into the building’s foyer, now crowded with crime-scene technicians, Constabulary infonet specialists, and an idle pair of medics. It took Toiwa a moment to twig to what was wrong with the scene before she recognized it. The building’s own bots were stilled, locked down, robbing the tableau of the ubiquitous background movement of the station’s robotic population. Floor polishers, wall-climbing dusters, and a couple of courier bots all sat on the floor of the foyer or the central hallway leading to the ground-level office suites. The sound of Okafor’s cane switched to a sharp tick-tick-tick as they left the pedgrass street behind for the tiled interior. Valverdes directed them past the lifts, also locked down for the duration of the op, to a stairwell guarded by a uniformed constable in tactical gear and a pair of Colonel Carmagio’s troopers, these in full unpowered armor. After detailing the constables to pick up Okafor’s gear from the autopallet and carry it wherever she told them to, they trudged up the stairs.