Year of the Child

by R L Dean

  Fighting her mother was an exercise in futility.

  Misaki turned from staring at the Sadie as she heard footsteps behind her.

  "Hello, Mat," she said.

  A smile spread across his familiar, dark face that reached his eyes and he replied, "Hi. Need a ride?"

  2 - Tetsuya

  Tetsuya stared down at the body lying on the deck. The man must have been in his fifties, with thin gray hair and deep set lines in his face. There was a Shenhau patch on his coveralls. So he was a hauler, or miner. A hauler, Tetsuya made up his mind. Miners were not being killed on Butte, they were doing the killing. The piracy out-system was causing a rift between the two groups. While the haulers sat on their ships, refusing to leave until UN cruisers policed the flight routes back to the Moon, the miners weren't being paid for their ore. Threats had been made, and Klaus Zimmermann, the Apex Coordinator, was killed. Things had gotten worse after that.

  Tetsuya knew he should feel something for the man on the deck before him. His death hadn't been easy nor quick. There were bruises on his face and a sticky, red pool under him. He couldn't be certain from this angle but he suspected it was a gut wound ... a stabbing. In retrospect, it wasn't so much that he didn't feel for the victim, as it was he had learned to shift his focus away from the emotional entanglements of a homicide so that he could apply reason in finding the killer. Detectives were wanton to find killers.

  "Aren't you going to move the body?" The woman behind him asked, hurriedly. "It's bad for business."

  When he turned to look at her she shrugged and repeated, "It's bad for business. Who wants to drink with a dead body in front of them?"

  The proprietress of the Lounge Six was skinny and pale, with pink hair, faded tattoos, and a low cut blouse. She was dressed much too young for her age.

  "We have to wait for the cops, and Forensics," he told her. His voice was gruff and slow and had been mistaken for anger most of his adult life.

  "I thought you were a cop," she replied incredulously.

  Tetsuya frowned. "Not this kind of cop." At least, not anymore.

  The Butte morning began at its normal pace. Itsumi had awoken him at precisely 0600 and prepared breakfast while he showered. He sat at the little table and ate, reading the local news updates on his handcomm as she busied herself about the kitchen. She reminded him of the time, he kissed her on the forehead and searched for something comforting to tell her, and finding nothing he left for work. A repeating ritual— the average man's sacrament— that would continue decades longer, until he could retire and draw a pension. Or, if the family genetics had anything to say about it, he would die of a heart attack a few years short of retirement. Itsumi should still qualify for a sizable chunk of his pension.

  Leaving the apartment complex's access tunnel he stepped out onto the concourse, entering the flow of level two's human traffic. Butte's yellow lighting was a poor substitute for the sun, and Tetsuya's mind drifted to the skies of home— millions upon millions of kilometers away. And, of course, he reminded himself that it was he that put his family here, with his own hands ... his own self-righteousness. This also was part of the morning ritual.

  Two tunnels down he stopped at a vending machine and ordered a coffee. Real coffee was hard to come by, and expensive. Itsumi refused to keep the fake stuff in her kitchen, instead replacing it with tea made from passionflowers and chamomile buds that she grew herself in hydroponic pots that populated the apartment like a greenhouse. Tea was fine in the evenings when he came home, but had drunk coffee— in one form or another— for as far back as he could remember. It had long turned from habit to necessity.

  In the periphery of his vision Tetsuya saw the proprietress standing a few meters down the tunnel, working the control pad to the bar's hatch. She was a familiar sight on his way to work, and not one he paid attention much to. As he took the hot coffee from the vending machine and turned to leave, the woman suddenly screamed and started backing away from the hatch. He jerked to a halt. The woman looked down at the deck ... her shoes ... she was creating dark red smears as she walked backwards toward him.

  A month ago the woman's name turned up in a case of petty theft. It wasn't something that Tetsuya or his team would normally be involved in, but because the case had spiraled into a contraband issue involving a rock-hopper crew his department was called in for support. That same rock-hopper crew frequented the Lounge Six, and so he went there to ask some questions. This morning, when the woman turned and saw him she recognized him as a cop.

  Tetsuya himself was a memorable person. It was his face, a curse of unattractiveness that he inherited from his father. He had been the object of bullies in school and early in his career a source of disgust for numerous women that he met on departmental group dates. Wearing a light knee-length jacket over his working suit to ward off Butte's 'morning' humidity, he didn't stand out in a crowd ... but that face, the proprietress remembered.

  The dead man was on the other side of two vending machines in front of the bar's hatch, and blood, now sticky, had run to the edge of the tunnel under the hatch. After the woman showed him the body, walking behind him and pointing, he looked around the dead end tunnel and then called the duty sergeant directly at the station.

  Now, he stood staring at the man and the blood while his coffee grew cold in his hand.

  "What time did you close?" He asked.

  "What does that matter?" The woman snapped in a high voice. "Just get him ... it ... out of here. I have to open up, customers will be here soon."

  Shift workers and rocker-hopper crews, time was subjective for a lot of people. Places like the Lounge Six would always have customers.

  "I like to ask questions," he said. "Now, what time did you close?"

  "I don't know," she said. "Maybe one or two. Whenever there were no more customers."

  "You left by yourself?"

  "Yes."

  Tetsuya turned back to the woman. "What about your employees?"

  She huffed and folded her arms across her chest. "I sent the waitress home when things slowed down. It was just me. I left by myself."

  "Okay. And you didn't notice anything then?"

  "No! I would have called the cops if I did."

  So, between two and say ... five AM. That would have been the time frame for the murder. The blood wasn't dry ... it was sticky.

  Tetsuya was about to continue his line of questioning when he was interrupted. A thin crowd of passersby had stopped at the tunnel's mouth, near the coffee vending machine, and were looking at them. The proprietress' scream having attracted their attention, or perhaps they saw the red on the deck and recognized it for what it was. In turn, the crowd attracted the notice of a UNSEC soldier and he had come to investigate. As the burly man walked through the crowd and into the tunnel Tetsuya saw the sergeant's rocker on his chest and couldn't help but be reminded of Ben.

  Benjamin Weathers, had been his nephew and a UNSEC sergeant ... past tense. He was stationed at Harmony dome when it blew two months ago. His body had been found early on, crammed inside a cracked decompression bunker along with almost four hundred civilians. The soldier that approached him now had the same build ... the same young face.

  "Excuse me," the sergeant said, all business. "Is there a problem?"

  Tetsuya pointed to the body and then introduced himself and produced his badge and ID. He explained that Criminal Investigations had been notified and someone would be there shortly. In response the sergeant frowned slightly and nodded, saying, "Got it." Then he went to the end of the tunnel and stood in front of the crowd. Tetsuya suspected that his frown had been because the shift change was counting down, and now he was stuck here until the body was moved and the site secured. Ben would not have felt that way, or if he did he would never have shown it.

  As he turned back to the proprietress, Tetsuya realized that he was asking her questions more out of habit than necessity. It's what detectives did, they asked questions and formulated answers to them, but wh
at he was doing wouldn't be appreciated. Not here.

  As if on cue Alice Baldwin edged inside the tunnel from the side of the crowd. When she saw Tetsuya she openly scowled.

  "Morning, Superintendent," she said, her tone neutral.

  Baldwin was the Senior Sergeant for the UN's nominal Criminal Investigations department on Butte. She was the acting head of the department, in fact, serving in the same capacity that Tetsuya did for the Transit Authority. Except, his promotion to the position had the ring of permanency. Schindler, CI's lead investigator for robbery and domestic violence, must not be in yet, otherwise he would be with Baldwin ... trailing behind like a dog.

  Tetsuya grunted in response to her greeting, and nodded to the dead man.

  Baldwin looked around, then stepped over the blood and knelt down beside the man, trying to see under his side.

  "I've checked the end of the tunnel, there's nothing there," he told her. "This is Miss Litowitz, the owner of the bar. She left last night at around ..."

  "Thank you, Superintendent," Baldwin said, glancing up from her examination of the corpse. "I'll start fresh. Forensics is on their way."

  It wasn't quite a dismissal, but only because a senior sergeant couldn't dismiss a lieutenant.

  "Look, I was only trying to help," he told her.

  She looked back up and gave him a tight smile. "Thank you, sir. It's appreciated."

  * * *

  Tetsuya left the crime scene. A public game of verbal badminton with another police officer would not resolve anything and likely make matters worse. He could only hope that working with the officers of the Division on a daily basis, and doing his job to the utmost of his ability, would in time prove his worth as a fellow officer.

  The UN Police Department, Attached Offices of Butte, Division B, was located on the third level of the burrow. He reached the lift twenty minutes after shift change and stood in line for another twenty minutes with a crowd of maintenance technicians, UN service workers, and drunk miners.

  The Division offices were crammed into a single tunnel. As he passed the hatch to the lobby he could see through the small window several people were already at the complaint desk. That would be the start of the daily theft issues, business owners discovering that their shops were broken into overnight, maybe an assault case to investigate. Tetsuya sincerely hoped it was nothing more. The corpse in front of the bar that morning was the second one in two weeks.

  Criminal Investigations and the Transit Authority offices were across from one another, in the back of the tunnel. Administration was at the very end.

  He worked the control pad next to the hatch and entered the office.

  The Transit Authority staff, himself included, was piled in a ten by twelve meter space with tan paint over steel bulkheads and a support beam sticking through the deck to the ceiling in one corner.

  Bingbing Wei, the newest officer was twenty five, and smart. She was eighteen months out of the Academy and her rank required her to wear a uniform. Her job was to update the UN Advisory Boards on potential hazards, mining accidents, and ship traffic around ore drop-off points. As soon as Tetsuya entered the office and took off his jacket she stood and went to the coffee dispenser. The first week she was there he repeatedly told her that he could get his own coffee, but she seemed to think it was part of her duties.

  His desk was just to the side of the hatch and he folded his jacket over the back of the chair and sat down.

  The department's section leader, Sergeant Héctor Velásquez, and Anthony O'Hara's desks were to his right, against the bulkhead. They were in charge of hauler scheduling and liaised with Butte's various mining company coordinators on a daily basis. Velásquez's chair was empty, which was rare for the workaholic, but O'Hara was there, seated with his arms folded across his chest and watching a newsfeed play silently across the surface of his desk. His job had slowed considerably since the pirate attacks. Less than twenty ships left for the Moon last month, the normal departure schedule was twenty or more a week. Now, they floated around Butte creating a traffic problem for Control and when there was room to dock their crews created other problems.

  If Tetsuya had to describe O'Hara in one word he would have said, political. Like most of his team ... well ... most of the Division, he distrusted Tetsuya. If Admin had a spy in his office, O'Hara was the man.

  O'Hara looked up from his screen and gave a perfunctory grunt and nod in greeting.

  "Thank you," Tetsuya said as Bingbing stepped to his desk and set the cup of coffee down on the scuffed surface. Then he asked, "Where are Velásquez and Patel?"

  Salma Patel's desk was against the bulkhead opposite O'Hara. Patel's responsibility was the investigation of cargo safety and tariff violations. She spent a lot of time on the docking arms and frequently in a vac-suit inspecting mining containers and cargo pods. Or, at least that's what she was supposed to do. She was good at finding reasons not to.

  Patel didn't like him. It wasn't distrust, it was dislike or even contempt. She was several years Bingbing's senior, and her service dossier indicated that when she made sergeant she joined Criminal Investigations in Bangalore. Less than a year later she was here, now the same rank as Bingbing. Tetsuya wasn't privy to what was in between that gap, but it made him wonder if her spite was aimed more at UNCI— something must have happened while she was with the Bangalore team— and he was simply a target because of his past association with the organization.

  "The Shenhau Coordinator's office called, and Héctor left," she said. "He didn't say why."

  "Uh-huh," Tetsuya replied. "What about Patel?"

  The young officer was standing before his desk like an elementary student and he was the principle. When she frowned and licked her lips in hesitation he said, "Never mind."

  Patel was late.

  He took a sip of coffee and called up the Division's morning bulletins on his desk. He hadn't gotten any calls last night, meaning his department wasn't involved in anything new, but he liked to stay informed. Out of habit he turned to the Criminal Investigations section. Half a cup of coffee later Patel arrived.

  The Indian woman entered the hatch, saw him, and frowned. "'Morning," she mumbled and headed to her desk.

  "Would you like some coffee," Bingbing asked, standing.

  "You're late," Tetsuya said, closing the bulletins and turning his chair to look at Patel.

  Patel sat in her chair but turned to look at him. "Oh, sorry." She may have meant to sound polite, giving her voice a higher pitch, but to his ears it sounded sarcastic. There was a thin matter-of-fact smile on her face as she turned her attention to her desk and tapped on it to log in.

  "That's the fourth time in two weeks," he continued.

  She stopped what she was doing, looked at him, and nodded. "I'm sorry Superintendent, it won't happen again."

  The use of his title, instead of his rank, grated on him for some reason.

  "It better not."

  Patel suddenly exploded. Shooting bolt upright from her chair and slapping both hands down on her desk she yelled, "Look, what do you expect from me!"

  Tetsuya slammed his fist down on his desk and got to his feet. "You are an officer of the law! I expect you to be on time to do your job!"

  She shut her eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath, then dropped back to her chair, again turning her attention to her desk and tapping on it.

  Tetsuya sat back down. Under her breath, Patel may have said something about him being self-righteous. He chose to ignore it.

  During his brief, heated exchange with Patel, Bingbing had been frozen with her head down, looking at her desk. She was too timid to be a police officer ... too fragile. The young Chinese woman was smart, always wanting to learn, but she wasn't cut out for this kind of work. That was the reason he kept her away from the coordinators' offices and off the docks ... kept her glued to a screen updating reports for the advisory boards.

  She wasn't much older than his daughter.

  O'Hara had been starin
g at his desk also, a bland smile on his face, tapping away. Probably sending a message to Admin about how Superintendent Takahashi verbally assaulted Officer Patel for being a little late.

  Tetsuya went back to work, pulling up the Division reports that were flagged for connections to a ship docked at the station. He assigned Patel to investigate a damaged cargo pod that was clamped to the hull of a freighter on docking arm A, the captain reported some items missing from the pod's inventory.

  Velásquez returned. He walked in quickly through the hatch, heading to his desk.

  "Morning, sir," he said, taking his seat. There was this busy quality to how he moved and how he spoke, like he was always running out of time. It came through in every aspect of his job; reports, counseling other officers, eating lunch. If O'Hara would get his head out of Admin's collective rears he would make a more capable section leader.

  "A mining crew was causing problems for the Shenhau Coordinator," Velásquez continued, already flipping through screens on his desk's surface. "Said the whole piracy story was a sham. They hadn't seen any pirates and didn't know anyone that had ... it was all a corporate conspiracy to drive up ore prices."

  "Uh-huh," Tetsuya said, pulling up the next report.

  "The coordinator thought it might help for a cop to explain it to them. I think he was afraid of a riot."

  "Right."

  Tetsuya spent the rest of the morning reviewing and signing off on his departmental reports. For lunch he went to a cafe on the terminal level, then he made the rounds to Control, the docks, and a couple of coordinators' offices. Waving the flag never hurt and it gave him a chance to stay informed.

  When he returned to the office Patel was back at her desk, her hair still sweaty from the vac-suit. She didn't say a word to him, instead focusing on tapping out something on her desk— her report he assumed.