“I haven’t the foggiest, darling.” Kalei ran her finger over the rim of her glass. “The problem is, Mars is a crossroads for all sorts of shady characters and organizations. Some, like Prism Associates, like to be bold and stand out, announce themselves. Others get that it’s best to hide in the shadows while the cockier syndicates are drawing attention. Those old corporate ties from the beginning of colonization have kept this place more independent than you’d think, making it great for everyone from smugglers to insurrectionists trying to connect with supporters on Earth. That means whenever something bad happens here, it’s hard to whittle down the list of suspects.”
“But you don’t think it was Talos,” Jia concluded. “You think it was somebody local.”
Kalei shook her head, light catching the colors in her hair. “I’m here to strengthen certain information networks that have atrophied in recent years due to sudden and unexpected loss of personnel. Alina might be focused on Tin Men with bad attitudes, but they’re only part of my concern. I’ll tell you, my instincts suggest it wasn’t Talos.”
“Even though Sukorn was looking into them?” Jia challenged.
“Yes. I think he was on the wrong trail. It happens to the best of us.” Kalei shrugged. “And I think our boy’s in a pickle because he got caught up in something far more local. Radira was ever so grateful for the information I gave her on the Obsidian Detective and Lady Justice, so grateful she gave me some useful information in return.”
“About Sukorn?” Erik asked.
“No, about the local situation. There was an assassination a week back. It didn’t involve Radira and her boys, but it did involve two other syndicates, and it’s made the local syndicate situation more unstable.” Kalei quieted as a waitress clad only in glowing body paint depicting red and green vines approached with a tray of drinks.
The waitress set a new drink in front of Kalei and smiled at Erik and Jia. “What can I get you?”
“I’m okay,” Erik replied. “Thanks.”
Jia waved off the waitress. With a curtsy, the waitress departed, leaving them alone with Kalei again.
“As I was saying,” Kalei continued, “the syndicate situation is unstable, and Chetta Sukorn didn’t check in as expected after that assassination. I don’t believe he had anything to do with it, and Alina would have let me know if he had, but if he was poking into it, he might have pissed off the wrong people. To the best of my knowledge, he wasn’t looking into the syndicates themselves, but it’s not impossible that somebody thought he was working for somebody else local and decided to make a move. You’d be surprised how often that happens. You know criminals, always paranoid.”
“And his apartment?” Jia asked. “Any clues there?”
“I haven’t been there.” Kalei shrugged. “The only thing I know is that we can’t contact his PNIU or track it. It’s probably been destroyed.”
Jia frowned. “Why haven’t you gone to his apartment? You just said days have passed, and this guy could be bleeding out somewhere waiting for rescue. He could even be there.”
“It’s not my job, darling.” Kalei smiled brightly. “And I was only told about this shortly before you two arrived. The thing is, sometimes it’s best to stay in your lane. I don’t need to be seen poking around Chetta Sukorn and his haunts. I can’t toss aside my mission for one man.”
Her eyes cut to the side as a man stood from a couch and staggered their way. After a couple of steps, he turned and headed in a different direction, rubbing his shoulders and shivering.
“Our next step is easy, then,” Erik mused. “We check the apartment.” He frowned. “But we don’t have decent forensics equipment on the ship.”
“I can get you a decent DNA analyzer,” Kalei offered. “By tomorrow, even. I also can get you set up with access to some of the law enforcement DNA databases.”
“You can?” Jia tapped her leg. “Alina didn’t mention that.”
“It’s hard to know everything a person might need ahead of time, and she’s a busy woman. You can’t run the DNA of every random person you run into, but Cassandra Security has the appropriate licensing for access. I’ll leave it to you to decide who and what you want to submit.”
“Thanks.” Jia sighed and looked around. “Do we have to meet you here?”
Kalei smirked. “For now, darling. Sometimes it’s good to go to a place with atmosphere. It keeps you in touch with the scene.”
“Plenty of planets have atmospheres that would kill people in seconds,” Jia replied.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.” Kalei winked. “Do try to breathe easy until then.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Erik and Jia strolled down the hallway toward Sukorn’s apartment.
It was on the fifth floor of a ten-story building. The neighborhood was a pleasant enough area, with a park and the ubiquitous spidery trees of Unity City nearby. An occasional smiling child wandered into the park, but Emma’s drones spotted no obvious gangsters or spies.
Not only that, every suit in the area was conspicuously bland in its color choice.
All of that made sense to Jia. An ID agent living in a building filled with criminals was asking to be discovered. Settling into a bland, safe residential zone was a good camouflage, at least normally.
“How we doing, Emma?” Erik asked. “Everything still looking okay?”
“I have complete drone coverage of the outside,” she reported. “Beyond the lack of likely gun goblins, there are no vehicles of note approaching the building. Shall I begin hacking the apartment system?”
“No, not yet. There’s no reason to leave too much of a trail, and we can’t just say we’ve got probable cause as cops.”
Erik and Jia continued down the hall, half-expecting a Tin Man with a rotary machine gun to burst through the wall and open fire, but if Kalei was right, this wasn’t the work of a grand conspiracy.
Jia wasn’t as disappointed as she thought she’d be.
The only thing she was unsure about was if they should destroy a syndicate if it turned out they’d killed Sukorn, or if they should pass the information on to the local police and let them handle it.
She knew which choice Erik would make. Given what she’d seen of Mars and Unity City, she doubted the police would be enthusiastic about investigating the syndicate murder of a mysterious traveler with no deep roots in the community.
Jia stopped in front of Sukorn’s nondescript apartment door, which was numbered 545. She pressed the access panel, but it didn’t open. “Not like I expected it to be that easy,” she admitted, “but it would have been nice.”
“Okay, Emma, don’t need full systems access,” Erik whispered. “Just need you to open this one door.”
“Very well,” she replied. The door slid open shortly, revealing the inside of the tiny apartment. “It was a basic system. I would have thought he’d use something more sophisticated.”
“Something more sophisticated might have stood out to people probing and looking for him,” Jia suggested.
Inside the apartment, a chair and a table lay on their sides. Visible dents marred the table. There was a tear in the back of the couch. Jia crept inside and drew her stun pistol. Erik closed the door behind them and pulled out his weapon.
Jia inclined her head toward an open bedroom. She crept toward it, not saying a word, and rushed inside. The bed was still made, but there wasn’t much else in the room. Clothes hung in the closet, ready to wear. A single black suitcase stood in the corner. She returned to the living room in time to see Erik emerging from the bathroom, frowning.
“Clothes and luggage are still here,” Jia reported. “If he ran, he did it without bringing much.”
“I don’t think he ran.” Erik holstered his gun and nodded toward the bathroom. “You’ll want to see this.”
Jia put away her stun pistol and walked over to the bathroom. A light spray of dried blood arced across the white wall.
“No scorch marks, no bullet holes.” She gestured
to the blood. “And that’s not a lot of blood. I think I could get more blood by breaking someone’s nose.”
Erik nodded. “The assailant probably ambushed him in the bathroom, maybe got in a good hit before the counterattack.”
Jia shook her head. “If the assailant had the upper hand and attacked Sukorn in the bathroom, you’d see more damage. I think the attack started in the living room and then moved here.” She backed into the bathroom, holding up her right hand as if holding a gun before pointing at one of the fallen chairs. “See that. It’s pretty close, and the way it’s fallen is consistent with someone stumbling away from the bathroom and falling on top of it.” She walked over to the chair and crouched to nudge the chair aside. There was another small bloodstain.
“Good catch,” Erik commented.
Jia patted the back of her head. “Whoever it was probably hit the back of their head on the floor.” She pointed to the bathroom. “And I’m willing to bet these bloodstains are from two different people.”
“They could have used an injection, gas, or a stun rod. It was probably short and quick. If they killed him and then cleaned up, they wouldn’t have left this blood behind.” He looked over the living room. “Are there any cameras in here, Emma?”
“Not that I can detect,” she reported. “Nor any PNIUs I can ping.”
“Lift off and do a slow fly-by using your sensors,” Erik ordered. “I want to make sure they’re not hiding anything. Go ahead and change your color and transponder signal in case anyone’s watching closely. We’ll restore them when we leave.”
“One moment, Erik.”
The large shadow of the flitter passed the translucent windows, the vehicle moving at a crawl. It might look suspicious to anyone watching the building, but it’d be idiotic not to take advantage of the advanced sensors installed in the MX 60.
“I’m not detecting anything of note,” Emma transmitted. “It’s not impossible that he’s using advanced technology to conceal something, but the readings related to that apartment are in line with what I can detect from the nearby apartments.”
“That makes sense,” Erik replied. “If there was some secret ghost crap we were supposed to get, Kalei would have mentioned it.”
Jia folded her arms, her face pinched in concentration. “You’re right. He’s a ghost. He would travel lightly during an investigation. The only thing that bothers me is he can’t be the only ID agent on Mars.”
“Kalei’s here,” Erik noted.
“But there have to be more,” Jia noted. “So why are they sending two subcontractors to look into this guy?”
“I’m sure there are more here, but you heard Kalei. Everyone’s got a different job they’re working on, and the ID’s spread throughout the entire UTC, without the manpower of something like the CID or the military.” Erik grunted. “They need all the help they can get.”
“And that’s us,” Jia concluded.
“For now, but also you know Alina. It’s another way of testing us.”
“That’s starting to get annoying,” Jia grumbled.
“Hey, at least we got a ship out of it, and soon we’ll have some exos,” Erik observed.
“Ah, the tools we pointedly don’t have right now.” Jia snorted. “If this ends in a huge shootout, I’m going to be irritated we don’t have those, but for now, we need to figure out our next step.”
“Best bet is to play this investigation like cops.” Erik pointed to the blood. “It’s not like I threw out all the evidence sampling kits in the MX 60. We’ll get it analyzed by the equipment Kalei’s going to give us. I think we should submit both samples directly to Alina for now.”
Jia frowned. “You’re right. Submitting Sukorn’s DNA to the database might get flagged by somebody. I think that’s what Kalei was getting at when she said she’d leave it to us.”
“Exactly. Let’s get some drones in here to help us search for more evidence.”
* * *
November 14, 2229, Unity City, Mars, Sahoma Space Port, Aboard Rabbit-class Transport LLT9208 Pegasus
Jia’s attempts to pace in the small crew quarters were doomed to frustration.
They’d sent their data to Alina and were now awaiting the response in the more secure environment of the ship rather than in their hotel room. She had no idea how long it’d take for Alina to get around to sending the genomic data on for analysis since she’d sent a noncommittal message back the day before.
There was nothing more frustrating than waiting twenty minutes for “I’ll get back to you, do not use other resources” and then not hearing anything.
Despite spending half the previous day searching the apartment, they hadn’t found any other useful evidence, let alone his PNIU. They’d tried contacting him but couldn’t connect, not that they were surprised. If it were that easy, they wouldn’t be on Mars looking for him.
“You should run a simulation while you’re waiting,” Erik suggested. He was passing the time watching a recording of a sphere ball match.
“I’m too focused on the case right now,” she countered. “It’d be hard for me to concentrate.”
“It’s not really a case. We’re not cops anymore.” Erik winced as an offensive wing made a mockery of the goalie.
“Fine,” Jia replied. “The assignment. The job. It’s all the same. We don’t have a lot of extra time. If someone took him, they’ve had him for a while. Potentially weeks.”
Erik nodded. He paused his recording with a tap of his PNIU. “Worrying about it won’t change anything. Besides, this might be a high priority, but it’s not like Alina’s going to sit around doing every errand we suggest.”
“We’re only on Mars, and we’re already constrained by transmission times.” Jia stopped moving and put her hands on the back of a chair. “Now that I’m experiencing it, it’s bizarre to me that the military manages to stay coordinated out on the frontier.”
“A lot of that is about trusting the local offices in charge.” Erik shrugged. “If they needed everyone to sit there and wait for orders from Earth, our guys couldn’t do anything. You know how long it takes to get a message to Earth from Molino?”
“About two months,” Jia commented.
Erik chuckled. “Of course you knew. You probably studied everything about it once I became your partner.”
“It was more after you told me what happened there that I did that, but yes.” Jia shrugged. “It’s good to be informed.” She took a deep breath and sat down. “Then again, we did our own thing from the moment we became partners, and Captain Ragnar didn’t keep us on a tight leash. It’s like all our time at the NSCPD was leading up to this.”
“Funny how life works out.”
Emma appeared with a smile. “It appears Agent Koval has finally decided to cooperate. I’ve received a message from her with your results.”
Jia clapped once. “Great. What did it say?”
“You were correct,” Emma reported. “The samples come from two different fleshbags. One, Agent Koval confirmed, is your missing agent Chetta Sukorn. The other source is a gun goblin by the name of Thomas Draven, a suspected low-level member of a local syndicate, the Dome Society. There isn’t much information in the publicly available databases. I could put it in a request via Cassandra Security to local and Earth-based law enforcement. I can also start looking for him with drones.”
Erik shook his head. “It’ll take too long, and it’s not like you can hack an entire city. No, I’ve got a better idea. An efficient idea, as Lanara would say.”
“What’s that?” Jia asked.
“Radira wants to be friends.” Erik grinned. “So, let’s be friends.”
“I think she wants to be a lot more than friends,” Jia grumbled.
“I’m just saying, we should go ask her about this guy. She wants us to stay out of her way, and the best way we can do that is by knowing who he is and what he might be up to. It’s not our fault the guy ended up being a syndicate flunky.”
Jia furrowed h
er brow and looked down at the table. “We’re moving from non-aggression pacts with criminals to actively asking them for favors now?”
“Yeah.” Erik shrugged. “I’m not saying we go perform a hit for her or anything, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask her some questions. If it turns out this guy’s an enemy of hers, she’s not going to mind if we poke the hornet’s nest, and she might even feel indebted. We can use that in the future.”
Jia let out a bitter laugh. “In less than one week, we’ve gone from kicking at that gray line with our toe to doing a grand jeté over it.”
“If I have to help a few gangsters to take down people like Talos, I’m not going to lose any sleep at night,” Erik replied. “The kinds of bastards killing entire platoons are way worse than the local losers who the cops and the CID are containing. And as we’ve already seen, groups like Talos are making things worse. Kill the head of the dragon and the body dies.”
“Yesterday’s enemy is tomorrow’s friend.” Jia rubbed her temples. “I get it, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying.” She didn’t want to say the next part, but sacrifices were necessary for the assignment. “I think you should go visit Tellvane alone.” She sucked in a deep breath through her nose and spat it out through gritted teeth, “She obviously is into you. You might as well take advantage of that, and you won’t be able to with me around.”
Erik smirked. “Are you telling me to seduce her?”
Jia stood there staring at him, her stomach knotting. The whole thing was absurd. She’d gone from a cop to a pseudo-secret agent within a couple of weeks and now was planning to throw her blunt boyfriend at some oversexed mob boss for a few scraps of intelligence.
She burst out laughing, releasing the built-up tension. “Yes, go seduce her. Tell her the score from the match, and I’m sure she’ll drop her dress right away.”
“Hey, I can be seductive,” Erik insisted. “Very seductive, and it doesn’t have to mean anything.”
“And I can be relaxed after six drinks.” Jia snickered. “I trust you, Erik. Just get it done.”
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