Consequences

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  But in this circumstance, Unattached meant working alone. And a soldier-for-hire who worked alone was simply another term for assassin.

  If this was indeed the killer of the Lahiris, he had been hired to kill them. Which would explain his calmness, his lack of enjoyment or upset, and his methodical ways of cleaning up the scene.

  Flint captured the holographic ad. Then he paused the programs he was running, shut down his outside links, and set his entire system on Emergency Scrub. That program, of his own design, would get rid of anything any outside link had planted within his system.

  He made certain the building was locked, set the soundproofing on high so that his neighbors and anyone passing on the street had absolutely no chance of overhearing this broadcast, and commanded the hologram to play.

  It was an attractive little package that made no real promises. An anonymous voice spoke while the hologram itself shimmered on Flint’s floor, unassembled, waiting until the voice was done before showing Flint what he had downloaded.

  The voice said, “Blind Box six-five-four-eight-nine has worked unattached for the past decade, satisfactorily completing four hundred and thirty-two jobs. References available on request. A specialty soldier, six-five-four-eight-nine has no need of conventional weapons. Enhanced to free himself from tight situations, six-five-four-eight-nine will use those enhancements to take care of any serious problems you may have.

  “Especially useful in Old Universe areas where security is high, six-five-four-eight-nine’s weaponry will not attract the attention of law enforcement or Port Authorities. Able to cross into any colony, even the most heavily guarded ones, six-five-four-eight-nine is best used in the most difficult cases, since he provides our most expensive service. Six-five-four-eight-nine and the others in the six-five-four series have our best records and our most efficient workmanship. If you want the best, order six-five-four-eight-nine.

  “See Proceedings for ordering information. All transactions confidential.”

  The hologram continued to shimmer in front of Flint. It hadn’t coalesced. He would have to order it to start, which, if he had kept his links open, would have given the soldiers-for-hire site his voice imprint. He wondered if the hologram would start without his links being open, and decided there was only one way to find out.

  “Start,” he said.

  The hologram coalesced, forming a see-through image of the man Flint had seen in the security video. Statistics ran on a 2-D screen alongside him:

  Height: 6’4”

  Weight: 260

  Alterations: 165

  Updated: Every five years

  Original Service: Classified

  Home World: Classified

  Name: Classified

  Capacity: 6 adults at one time

  It took Flint a moment to figure out what that last meant; then, as he realized it, his hands clenched into fists. The man could handle no more than six adult humans at one time.

  Handle was probably the wrong word. The man could kill as many as six adult humans at once.

  “Create hologram from my file of killer in Lahiri apartment,” Flint said. “Do a point-by-point comparison.”

  He had already indicted and convicted the man before him in his own mind, but he wasn’t one hundred percent certain this man was the killer. He needed the computer verification, and then he needed more.

  He needed to break into the system to find out who this killer was—and who had hired him.

  The hologram from the site continued to turn. As it did, the “alterations” revealed themselves. In addition to the elongated arms and the fingers like knives, the killer could do a handful of different, small things like change his eye color at will, and carry chips in small pouches hidden in the pads of his fingers.

  His sight had been augmented to see movement a split second before the movement registered on the average human eye, and his hearing had also been augmented to include an upper range that very few mammals heard. His vocal cords had been enhanced to produce a sound that blocked most computer usage within several meters of him.

  He wasn’t really human, not any longer, if he had ever been. What kind of person would request these alterations, anyway?

  Finally, the hologram stopped its insane little sales program. Flint kept it on while his system finished its point-by-point comparison.

  Then he would purge any reference to this from his system. He would keep the information, however, and access it from a public port if he felt he needed to.

  He hoped he would be able to get information on 65489 some other way. He really didn’t want to dig through the records of the soldiers-for-hire site. Somehow that made him feel like he was setting himself up for surveillance of a kind as sophisticated as his own.

  The points-of-comparison check finally ended. According to every measure his system had—and his was more advanced than all but the strictest intergalactic corporations—65489 was the man who had been in the Lahiri’s apartment.

  Hired by someone to kill all three of them. Or one of them and whoever else happened to be there.

  The rest—the clean-up, the destruction of the evidence—was simply business as usual.

  And somehow that offended Flint even more. He had wanted this to be personal. If these people had to die, he wanted it to be in a crime of passion, not as an act for hire, by someone who had never met them and had no reason to value them as people.

  Flint owed them. He owed all three of them. And he would solve this, no matter what it would take.

  Twenty-nine

  In the end, Anatolya’s own people caused the riot.

  The banner unfurled from the Idonae’s tiny hands and floated over the crowd:

  Etaen Usurpers shall Pay for their Crimes

  And when it reached Anatolya and her team, it blared the words in all six Etaen languages, English, Peyti, and every other language she knew. The sign lit up and followed them like a tracking dog.

  This has to end, Gianni sent, and started to reach for the sign.

  She grabbed his arm, feeling its strange softness. No, she sent again.

  The others on the team sent more arguments to her. They agreed with Gianni. They had stopped moving forward, and the crowd surged against them, pressing them tightly into each other.

  It’s an insult, yes, she sent, and we have to take it.

  They had to realize, all of her people had to realize, how important this moment was, how much they needed the support of the Alliance. If they started something, then the Alliance would have nothing to do with them.

  Nothing at all.

  She stumbled and someone caught her arm—a member of the team. But she shouldn’t have stumbled in the first place. The crowd was getting rougher.

  Another team member reached for the sign, and she felt a surge of panic.

  No! she sent across their links, wondering how anyone could miss her point. No! Stop! Think! It could be a bomb!

  The hand went down, but too late. Someone in the crowd screamed, “Murderers!” and the sound carried across all of the noise.

  Anatolya stumbled again. Her team was being shoved.

  “Murderers!” the voice shouted again.

  It took Anatolya a moment to realize the voice was shouting in Alkan.

  “We are no worse than you!” Gianni shouted in the same language, and Anatolya felt her breath catch. The bait had worked, and her oldest friend, her protector, had been caught in it.

  The man with the most guilt let it flare up, and it snared him. How long had it been since he had seen an Idonae? Two decades? Three?

  The Idonae let out a shriek, a unison sound that blared over the crowd and silenced them. Then the Idonae scattered, screaming for protection from the evil Etaen.

  “We haven’t done anything,” Anatolya said, but as she spoke, she saw that her team had broken up. The reason she had been stumbling was because she had lost her left flank. They were pouring forward, out to get the traitor Idonae, the liars that had stolen Etae�
�s reputation from the beginning.

  The crowd plucked at her people, then slammed into them trying to stop them. But it would be no use. The weapons came out—hands swirling, arms stretching—and Anatolya glanced up at the news cars hovering overhead.

  It was a disaster, a horrible disaster, and she was losing everything she had ever worked for.

  She reached for Gianni, but he too was gone, in pursuit of the Idonae who he would swear had ruined their chances of joining the Alliance.

  But the Idonae were simply bait, and her people had risen to it, just like someone had known they would.

  Anatolya let the crowd jostle her, sweep her along—apparently without her team, no one recognized her—and she stumbled forward, always forward, each step blind, alone, and terrified.

  Thirty

  Flint didn’t want to hack into the soldiers-for-hire site, at least not from his own office. If any organization had the skills to trace his work, it would be that one. So he decided to see if he could find the information he needed some other way.

  He had dozens of searches running on all of his newly scrubbed machines. He’d spent the better part of an hour making certain that nothing had been left in his system, not even a fragment of code. He’d gone as deeply as he could into the system itself, looking for ghosts, for echoes, for anything suspicious, cleaning off all he could find, destroying information in an effort to be cautious.

  He’d even destroyed the hologram—deleting it wasn’t enough for him. He knew how to bury signals in holographic software; if he knew it, the soldiers-for-hire people did as well.

  But he kept the image he had made from the security vid. He was running that image against port arrivals, not just here, but all over the solar system. If he needed to, he would branch out to other parts of the galaxy before broadening the search even more.

  At the moment, he had limited his search to the past three months. The amount of information his system had to sift through was staggering.

  He had more hope for the other scans he was running. He was searching for the surgeons who performed these augmentations, and this time, he didn’t have to limit his search to the solar system.

  As he ran these searches, he also kept an eye on DeRicci’s files. She had downloaded more reports—all of them preliminary, many of them expressing confusion over the mixed-up spatter.

  Those reports inspired him as well. He looked for other unsolved homicides where the scenes had an odd mixture of cleanliness, multiple victims, and impossible-to-decipher splatter patterns.

  So far, he had found none in Armstrong, and even though he had expanded that search, he had a hunch he would find none on the Moon.

  Finally one of his searches stopped and seized a screen. It bleeped at him, informing him that it had found some of the information he wanted.

  He swiveled his chair and studied the center screen, backlit now so that he could easily read the data before him.

  That combination of enhancements, creating elongated arms, fingers like blades, increased vision and hearing, as well as a host of other things, had become a science in the outer regions of the known universe.

  Only one place needed that exact combination:

  Etae.

  The information he had discovered on the Etaen army, the information he had seen earlier that day, now tied directly to the man who had killed his clients.

  Flint had incontrovertible proof. No longer could he lie to himself and say that the man had gotten his enhancements elsewhere.

  Flint made himself take a deep breath. The contracts he had with his clients—contracts ably drawn up by Paloma over decades of work as a Retrieval Artist and modified for his own use—absolved him of any responsibility in the death of the Lahiris. Everyone knew, long before they had gotten involved with one another, that reprisals were possible. Otherwise, the Disappeared wouldn’t have had to leave in the first place.

  Usually, though, a found Disappeared hadn’t been pardoned. Carolyn had. She had fought with the resistance, which had become the current government. No one needed her dead now.

  She had been free to come home. Even she agreed with that. She had inspected the documents, done some research on her own, was even expecting Flint when he showed up.

  He froze.

  She had expected him. She had known she could leave. Still, she waited for a Retrieval Artist to find her.

  That fact had bothered him then; it bothered him now, but didn’t seem suspicious in and of itself. Nothing was. The case had been straightforward until everyone involved in it died.

  He set up a new scan, this one for murders connected to Etae. The list he got back was immediate and so long that it made his eyes hurt. Thousands and thousands of deaths, all occurring off Etae, all of them within the last few years.

  He tried to refine the search, uncertain of the best way to do so. Finally, he decided to search only for unsolved cases that were somehow tied to Etae—either in method of the killings or through the victims.

  That narrowed his field to a thousand entries. Then he looked for possible assassinations. Five hundred. And finally, he realized that he should search for non-Etaens, killed for being mercenary soldiers in that far-off place, just like Carolyn had been.

  And, as an added measure, he threw in possible pardoned Disappeareds.

  The search slowed. For a moment, he thought he’d get no results at all.

  Then his screen displayed three—one on Trieinsf’rd, one on Esterwk, and one possible in the Vekke system.

  Trieinsf’rd was obvious: the woman had been in hiding in a place called Nowhere for ten years. She had been killed by some kind of pellet weapon at long range—the pellet passed through her, leaving a trace of poison in her system.

  It was a clear assassination, one with a signature of a well-known and very selective assassin named Kovac. He had no ties to Etae, but she had. The victim had gone to Etae at the same time as Carolyn Lahiri.

  The killing on Esterwk proved, after a bit of study, to be a simple crime of passion—a murder that the local police believed to be an assassination since the victim was a Disappeared. Apparently, the victim hadn’t known that the leadership of Etae had changed since she had been exiled, and she had died at the hands of a brother-in-law who had been jealous of her attentions to her own husband.

  The final killing had just appeared in the database he’d been searching. It had occurred in the city of Binh, a cosmopolitan area of the conservative Vekke system. A bomb had gone off in a crowded café, killing dozens of people of various races, from Disty to human.

  One, however, closest to the blast, had been a Disappeared. She had been identified from DNA records and, like Carolyn and the Trieinsf’rd victim, had fought as a mercenary in the Etaen wars for independence.

  He let out a small breath. He was searching for coincidences. He shouldn’t have been surprised to find them.

  Still, all three deaths had occurred after the pardons had been announced. He wondered what other events were occurring at the same time.

  Why had Etae announced pardons anyway?

  He decided to run a news scan on Etae and was startled when a live feed poured into his screen. He was even more startled to see Ki Bowles reporting with an earnestness that she had lacked when she visited his office.

  Behind her, people swarmed in a small space identifiable to him only as one of the anonymous streets near thePort. He saw hands raised, Rev with their emotion collars flared, Disty struggling to stay on top. Signs floated all around, but remained unreadable.

  He turned up the audio.

  “…peaceful demonstration that turned into a riot.” Ki Bowles’s voice had an urgency that led Flint to think her own adrenaline was pumping. She must have been very close to the action. “Shortly after Mayor Soseki’s angry speech about the governor-general’s action allowing Etaen terrorists into Armstrong’s dome, various protestors gathered. The terrorists left the building a short time ago without a guard. It seemed like nothing was going
to happen, when suddenly the entire place erupted.”

  Footage of the screaming crowd interrupted her narrative. Flint could make no sense of any of it—he couldn’t tell who were Etaens and who were human residents of Armstrong. Only the alien residents of the city were clear, and they seemed just as angry as everyone else.

  “The streets around the Port are blocked off. The city has dispatched police and police robots trained in riot suppression to the scene, and they hope to have the situation contained within the hour.”

  Flint didn’t like the sound of that. If it was going to take the police an hour to contain the crowd, then the riot was extremely violent. A lot of people were going to get hurt.

  He left the feed running in a corner of his screen, but turned the audio back down. This riot was not a coincidence. The Lahiris died because something connected to Etae was going to happen in Armstrong.

  But he had looked specifically for ties between Etae and Armstrong and had found none. That had been nearly two weeks ago. How could things have changed so quickly?

  He recorded the names of the other two Disappeared victims, assassinated off-world, and decided to see if he could find their ties to Carolyn.

  Something was going on here, something that was very important, something DeRicci and the police likely wouldn’t catch.

  If he acted quickly, he just might find out what that something was.

  Thirty-one

  The arm movements were not natural. The cameras focussed on them—long, swinging, fingers sharp as blades as a tall man scythed his way through the rioting crowd.

  Orenda Kreise turned away from the live scene. The image was displayed on the clear screens the Cultural Center had dropped from the ceiling throughout the main room. The only way Kreise could avoid seeing the disaster at the Port was to bury her face in her hands.

  Which she did.

  She no longer felt like a leader, an ambassador, or one of the most effective diplomats in the Alliance. She felt like a fool.