by Adrian Speed
“Deploying e-seal, alerting authorities,” Vlad announced as Marlin shuddered in the robot’s arms.
I looked around in a flurry, trying to figure out what had happened. It had been silent. Utterly silent. Was there an invisible assassin in the room? Or had some distant sniper been waiting for Marlin to come into line of sight?
A bullet had embedded itself into the floor near where Marlin fell. The carpet around it smoked, and it had driven an inch into the moon-crete below. I turned to face the source of the bullet to see Sir Reginald already scrambling through a shattered window.
I looked down at Marlin, the old man was fading fast and there was nothing I could do. I wasn’t sure if his eyes even saw anything anymore. Only the exoskeleton gave him any strength, trying to push down on the source of the bleeding with the strength of robotic biceps but his feeble hands couldn’t keep the pressure. There was too much blood, there was nothing I could do.
Except chase after the killer.
I ran after Sir Reginald, diving through the broken window and into the garden. I could see Sir Reginald as a distant dark shape disappearing into the brush but beyond that he was chasing a blur.
I threw myself forwards into a sprint as fast as my feet could take me, preparing to shoulder through the undergrowth as if it was the defensive line at a hockey game, but as I hit it the force just bounced me off my feet and up into the air.
“I hate lunar gravity,” I cursed as I flipped myself upright and pushed off with as much force as possible. I couldn’t sprint so much as glide after them. I vaulted over the undergrowth and then followed Sir Reginald’s lead up onto the roof of the mansion, over the roof garden and down to the other side.
Sir Reginald had the attacker cornered against the edge of the skyscraper. It was almost half a kilometre of freefall on the other side. Even with lunar gravity, that’d kill you. The attacker seemed to be giving it some thought though, trying to find a fire escape maybe or some piping to slide down, but there was nothing. One hand hung onto a rucksack as if it could save his life while in the other glowed a heavy pistol. It looked more like the electronic rails that shot space capsules towards the earth than it looked like the guns of my time. No wonder it had been silent.
“Why did you do it?” Sir Reginald snarled, drawing up his cane to use as a weapon if needed. “He was just a poor old man.”
“Well, not poor,” I muttered.
“Tell me why!” Sir Reginald demanded again, as the pair of us closed in.
The man turned. His face was far older than I expected, easily in his fifties and maybe even older. He had a broad nose, but a thin face, lined over the years by frustration and pain. His hair was a mossy brown, receding and fading towards grey. His eyes drew yours in, as if they were black holes in the centre of his face that drew in all sight. They were brilliant blue, and both had a pupil fleck in the iris.
“You know why.” The man leapt over the railing.
I nearly followed him as I leapt to look over the edge. Sir Reginald’s cursing rang in my ears. Down below me the falling man hauled on his rucksack and a parachute no larger than a patio umbrella unfurled. But on the moon, that’d be enough to save him.
Sir Reginald joined me looking over the railing as the parachute disappeared from view, its user finding refuge a dozen floors below us.
“The police will find him,” I tried to reassure Sir Reginald.
“The police will find us first,” Sir Reginald sank down until his chin was resting on his arms. He looked like he wanted to throw himself after the attacker parachute or not. “But that’s not my concern.”
“What is your concern?”
“He said I knew why...”
“So... it might be a paradox. We’ve met him before... but not yet?”
“I’m getting a headache.” Sir Reginald buried his face in his sleeves and the sirens closed in around us.
Chapter III
The police station we were taken to was named after Georges Danton, the great libertarian. This was the only small amusement in the whole ordeal. Sir Reginald and I were both arrested, separated, and questioned. I decided to stay silent unless I had Sir Reginald with me. Or a lawyer, I thought. The reality slowly starting to sink in. Charged for a crime I didn’t commit in a time I wasn’t from.
The holding cells weren’t like the North American ones, with rows and rows of bars. Here the European influence had crept in and thick walls and heavy steel doors separated one prisoner from another. They smelt clean in an unwholesome way, as if filth was regularly washed off the walls with a heavy duty cleaning solution. It was interesting, from a time traveller’s perspective, that very little had changed in the design of cells over the centuries.
They took my phone away from me, and my notebook, and any other way of entertaining myself so the only thing I had was to stare at the walls and, from the police’s perspective, become consumed by guilt and confess. In the end the only amusement I had was to trace interesting shapes with my finger along the grain of the concrete walls, like cloud watching. Would Sir Reginald be able to talk his way out of this? Would I? Or would this be my fate? To forever stare at the bare concrete walls three hundred years from home.
I was lying on the floor after... I don’t know how many hours, when the door buzzed. Its electronic locks opened with a clunk and a robotic policeman filled the doorway.
“You will accompany me,” it ordered. I pulled myself upright, trying not to launch myself at the ceiling as I did so, and followed. It was not alone. A human officer followed along beside it, keeping the robot between me and him. The robot’s basic frame was strong enough to restrain all but the most brutal of prisoners, and it was also equipped with clearly labelled mace spray and restraining foam. Its casing was transparent glass, showing the mechanisms underneath. The prisoner was to be shown the inevitability of escape, and it worked quite well, even on me. The human policeman only needed to be there to preserve some sense of humanity in the justice system.
The two policemen led me to an interview room and opened the door. A faint hint of tobacco smoke wafted out and relief flooded through me. The only person I’d ever seen smoke in the twenty-third century was Ibrahim El Siddig, the administrator of ColCom.
I was ushered inside by the policemen and sure enough, there Ibrahim was, complete with his tiny robot eating the smoke to protect the lungs of others. The thin cigar lit up a very different face than when I had last seen it. Instead of the smiling, charming, man I’d met I saw the hard expression of the statesman who had clawed his way to the top of ColCom. The eyes were cold, the face was lined, and grey was beginning to attack his hair.
“Hannah,” Ibrahim acknowledged me. “Take a seat.” He was straining to sound friendly, but I could hear the stress hidden beneath the surface, as if his teeth wanted to bite rather than talk.
Sir Reginald sat on the other side of the interview desk. He had taken off his hat and rested it on the table. I sat down next to him, and turned back to our host. Sir Reginald didn’t seem himself either, he was stiff, like he sometimes got after an argument. For a long while none of us spoke, and Ibrahim smoked his cigar down to a nub.
“I don’t normally step into police business,” Ibrahim growled as he finally fed the stub to his tiny flying robot. “I am an administrator, not a dictator. If the forensics reports hadn’t come in as I was making my appeal this could have become a very... political... incident.”
“Then I timed my request for you to be summoned at precisely the correct moment,” Sir Reginald said, hinting of singed pride. “Any earlier and you would have been in dire political straits. Any later and you would not have come.”
“Of course I’d have come,” Ibrahim threw up his hand, as if he was about to throw a punch before restraining himself.
“As a friend,” Sir Reginald said. “But you would not have come as the Lunar Administrator, and I needed the Lunar Administrator more than I needed Ibrahim El Siddig, if you’ll pardon me for saying so.” Sir
Reginald leant forwards, momentum building. “You know we are innocent of the crime. But you are also well aware of current judicial practices of the Lucon Police Department. It doesn’t matter who is punished as long as someone is punished. Lucon is a five hundred metre deep Petri dish six miles wide on a lifeless, airless, often sunless rock. They believe that without fear of law the city will descend into anarchy, and anarchy will kill us all very quickly when there is no-one regulating the air, supplying the food, and so on.” Sir Reginald tapped the table. “They confiscated my cane, so now they know it contains a sword. They will use that to link me to the murder even if it is not possible for me to have fired the shot that killed. They have scanned and attempted to interview both Hannah and myself and know we were not carrying valid ID cards or identification chips. If they can pin nothing else on us, they will want to string us up for that.”
“You make us sound like a police state,” Ibrahim said bitterly.
“Have I incorrectly described the situation presented to you by the police when you arrived?” Sir Reginald said darkly. “I thought not. That is why I summoned you, Ibrahim, so that you could come and get this all thrown out before anyone files any paperwork but after the forensics came back proving we were innocent.” Sir Reginald leant back. “I gave an accurate description of the attacker. You should be able to find him very swiftly on the security recordings.”
“There is a complication.” Ibrahim drew out a device from his pocket and placed it on the table. It glimmered, covered in tiny fins stacked on top of each other like a radiator.
“Ah,” Sir Reginald said.
“What is it?” I asked.
Ibrahim and Sir Reginald exchanged a look, Ibrahim shrugged and Sir Reginald explained.
“It is known as a scramble cannon,” Sir Reginald said, lifting the device carefully and showing me that it had a core of electronics. “This one is spent, I believe. When activated, a scramble cannon fires off a targeted electro-magnetic pulse. It throws off positioning satellites, identification chips, and will scramble any recording equipment for a thirty-minute window, fifteen minutes before activation and fifteen minutes after. They are rare, and highly illegal.”
“And becoming more common every day,” Ibrahim muttered. I hesitated to suggest that if Lucon was not recording everything on CCTV they would be unnecessary, and instead just nodded.
“Was Vlad affected? Did he get an image of the killer?” I asked.
“Vlad?” Ibrahim raised an eyebrow.
“Marlin’s robot.”
“Oh, no, its cameras were not facing the correct way,” Ibrahim said. “Cybradyne Personal Assistance Droids stay focussed on their owner at all times, and have a limited field of view outside of that.”
“A computer is not intelligent enough to pick a face out of a crowd by description alone.” Sir Reginald drummed his fingers against the computer. “And yet the killer must be somewhere in the recordings. The scramble cannon’s effects only travel a few hundred metres. You must get your men combing the footage.”
“There are over thirteen thousand security cameras facing the edge of that sphere of disruption, assuming he left it,” Ibrahim said. “And a hundred and fifty thousand within the sphere. We’re not omniscient, Sir Reginald. He could have found some hidden space the cameras can’t see quite easily and he can’t be auto-tracked without a camera. To find him on the security recordings would take millions of man-hours. Lucon can’t afford that.”
“The rail-gun then,” I suggested. “There can’t be many guns of that design in Lucon.”
“Not... officially,” Ibrahim said slowly. Shaking slightly with stress he drew another long thin cigar and lit it. “But a rail-gun like that can be built from a number of mining tools if you’re desperate enough and have the right training. The ammunition might provide more clues, but even then it’s a wild goose chase.”
The silence that drifted over the room was broken only by the whirring of Ibrahim’s smoke eating robot.
“Marlin Arnold’s best friend was a robot,” Sir Reginald said after a few minutes. “All other friends beyond the mortal coil, all acquaintances far too old to be our killer. He’d been retired for twenty years. The only reason anyone could want him dead is because of his inheritance.”
“His inheritance defaults to the government,” Ibrahim said. “He has no legal heirs.”
“The Lucon government wouldn’t stoop to assassinating old men for cash,” I said.
“Not when it could pass an inheritance tax,” Sir Reginald added with a sardonic smile.
“A scorned relative, maybe? Someone who thought they should inherit the Arnold fortune?” I asked.
“Or someone who doesn’t want the hidden branch of the Arnold line to be found,” Sir Reginald suggested. “Someone who had heard all the research that was going on. All the records copied from museums. All the old diaries dug up. Someone waiting to silence those who dig too deeply into the Arnold past.” Sir Reginald looked down at his hat and stroked the brim for comfort. With a sudden lurch the thought that was troubling him started troubling me.
What if we started investigating the history of the Arnold family and that was why Marlin Arnold was killed in the first place? That would be a circular paradox with no escape.
“You know why...” I echoed the attacker’s words.
“And yet I see little choice,” Sir Reginald said. “If it is a paradox then it has already begun, and if it is not I will strive with the force of heaven not to create one.”
“If what is a paradox?” Ibrahim’s cigar twitched with irritation.
“It matters little,” Sir Reginald waved his concern away. “Now I need you to grant us our liberty.”
“Hold on, it’s one thing to stop you being treated like murderers but I can’t simply let you walk out of the building until the police have someone else, preferably the killer.”
“Parole then,” Sir Reginald said. “Until it comes to trial.”
“Sir Reginald I know you,” Ibrahim wagged the cigar like a finger. “The last time we spoke I showed you a purple pearl and you disappeared for nine months. If I let you go I know there’s nothing to stop you from disappearing again to god knows where.”
“Bail?” I suggested.
“There do exist sufficient sums of bail that would force me to return,” Sir Reginald suggested. “Simply set the bail price very high.”
“Oh, I intend to,” Ibrahim said, and a glimmer of his old, playful charisma flashed behind his eyes. “A very high price indeed.”
*****
“Utterly ungentlemanly is what it is,” Sir Reginald rambled and ranted he climbed the stairs to his rooms in Edgware Road. It made sense to leave the twenty-third century as soon as possible. We had infinite time to solve the case as long as we stayed out of events there. Sir Reginald seemed too shaken by events to suggest another time. Inside his rooms I made for the kettle, hoping a cup of tea would calm him down, but Sir Reginald went straight for the brandy. “What kind of man confiscates another man’s hat?”
“A person who knows losing your hat is the thing that would annoy you most?” I suggested.
“It was my favourite hat,” Sir Reginald scowled as he poured two glasses of brandy and shoved one in my direction.
“It was your only hat.”
“It was the only one I wanted,” Sir Reginald frowned. He took a swig of brandy and stole over to his shaving mirror to get a look at himself without it. He fussed over his hair and cursed more under his breath.
“Most people would be upset by the million lunas he wanted. We can get you another hat,” I suggested. “It may not be the millinery age any longer but I’m sure there’s a hatter somewhere.”
“It won’t be the same hat,” Sir Reginald sighed, pulled away from the mirror and slumped into a chair. “The devil could have taken my jacket or my waistcoat or my cravat or my cane or even my trousers, but he had to take my hat.” Sir Reginald drained his glass of brandy in what had to be a painful
single gulp. With the brandy gone he similarly banished his despondency, leaning forward and clasping his hands together. “Well now. The only way I’m going to get my hat back is if we crack this mysterious killer as fast as possible.”
“I had a thought on that,” I said, setting the brandy to one side. “We could go to the twenty-fourth century and look up the records of the case.”
“We’re potentially already in a paradox, and you want to introduce that into the mix?” Sir Reginald scoffed. “Why not simply look up the evidence of every conviction in history and deliver it to the police at the correct moment?”
“Well... we’ve been to the ninety-ninth century before to solve a case. What’s so bad about doing the same thing in the twenty-fourth?”
“I could trust the ninety-ninth century,” Sir Reginald said and immediately scoffed at the sound of his own words. “Ha. Well. I could trust some of it. I could trust the Genesis computer to give me otherwise hidden details that would lead me to the correct answer, without giving me the correct answer. Do you see the difference?”
“Honestly... no.”
“Suppose we act as Hamlet’s father, and go to inform Hamlet in Act 1 of Claudius’ guilt,” Sir Reginald suggested. “Hamlet demands proof, we do not provide it, and so he tricks Claudius into confirming suspicions. The time line can weather this paradox easily, Hamlet could easily have suspected Claudius in any case. Suppose instead we meet Hamlet in Act 1 and say ‘Regard this, dear Hamlet, a photographic plate of Uncle Claudius pouring poison into your father’s ear.’ Hamlet uses this information to convict Claudius and then we show up in the final act to find evidence of Claudius’s guilt and take the photographic plate back with us to Act 1. How well does the universe weather that paradox, do you think?”
“I am going to guess not well,” I pursed my lips. “I didn’t mean that... but if all we did was discover it was Joe Bloggs and then we found the evidence on our own...”
“It is a dangerous risk I would not like us to take,” Sir Reginald said, rubbing his forehead. “Do not be tempted by paradox. Some can be weathered. Others cannot.”