by Mel Odom
Hostins Genegineering had been sued on Mars for reverse engineering genetically altered agricultural products in Bradbury colony. The court case had dragged on for almost two years at the time of the bombing. Even though it looked like Deimos Natural Foods was going to win the case, the damage had been done. Deimos was going to win the suit, but get little compensation when balanced against the profits they’d stood ready to make.
The gene tech had gone viral. There was no way to put the genie back in the bottle. Deimos had lost ground spending smaller profits than they’d anticipated while struggling through court hearings. The Martian corp held onto only a small segment of the market as a result, and Hostins was prepared to close down, defaulting on the judgment.
Earth arguments concerning the lost control of the tech were that the gene modification to plants was a necessary thing for the continued survival of the colonies. The population on Mars continued to grow, and terraforming was hard pressed to produce enough fertile land to support all of those people.
The arguments were also being made that Deimos had threatened to get a stranglehold on a monopoly with their new products. According to the Fair Trade laws Earth had forced on the colonies, they were not allowed to be frozen out of the market. Ultimately, though, Deimos hadn’t intended a monopoly for their own benefit as much as they had intended to break the reliance on Earth-supplied agricultural products.
With no native flora and fauna growing on Mars to provide diversity, strains of fruits and vegetables became vulnerable to blight or other crop sickness. Pro-Earth terrorists who did not favor the “ungrateful” Martian colonists, had sometimes slipped diseases into the colonies’ agricultural blocks. Only four years ago, Arnold colony’s fields had nearly been lost when a genetically modified honeybee was sent in that multiplied rapidly and died shortly thereafter, spreading a disease throughout the hives that killed bee colonies in as short as seventy hours. It had taken three years to eradicate the honeybee with the artificially induced life span and introduce new hives.
Mars balanced constantly on the edge of survival against the rigorous constraints of the planet and Earth interference. That was inarguable.
During the Hostins Genegineering trial, Martian terrorists bombed the manufacturing plant and destroyed everything inside. Thirty-seven employees were killed.
There had been unsubstantiated whispers that Hostins had been merely a shell company for several agricultural corps on Earth that had gone to war with Deimos to slow down their production. The bombing had merely obliterated the evidence, allowed the corps to collect insurance to further profit from their crimes, and turned Earth more against Mars with thirty-seven more martyrs.
If that was true, it was diabolical. Shelly had believed it was true.
The three terrorists Simpkins was shown with had been caught and killed before they could speak out in their own defense. It still wasn’t known if their defense would include who hired them or if they hadn’t been involved with the bombing at all.
So Simpkins’s involvement with those men was suspect to some viewers and proof to others.
I didn’t know how the media had gotten onto that connection so quickly, but I was curious. Especially since Simpkins was a known criminal and that should have been in his background check from the beginning. Even more so because of his current looming kidnapping charges—before they had turned to alleged murder.
I sent data miners onto the Net to collect whatever information I could from the media. I didn’t expect to find much of a trail, if any, but Shelly had trained me to follow up on even the slimmest of leads.
“—here with us is Austin Kirkland, chief litigator for Skorpios Defense Systems.”
I couldn’t help thinking Kirkland had wasted no time getting himself in front of the media. The vid shifted over to a head and shoulders shot of Kirkland looking outraged and mussed from the explosion. The soot spots on his suit hadn’t been present when he’d been ushered from the tube platform. Point of fact, I did not believe he had been close enough to the blast area to receive those stains.
“Gordon Holder was alive until moments ago. I saw him. He feared for his life. Then those animals killed him.”
He didn’t point out that the “animals” had also been killed.
“I’ve only just now learned of the Martian terrorists behind his assassination.” The term dripped as poisonous and as harsh as acid rain. “Skorpios Defense Systems and their parent corporation, Argus, Inc., will not rest until these malfeasants are brought to justice.”
I did not doubt those men were dead, yet Kirkland talked about them like they were still threats.
“And the New Angeles Police Department will be held accountable for their decision to keep me from saving my client.” Kirkland made a fist in the air and shook it viciously.
“Drake.”
I pushed the Net feeds to the back of my mind and focused on Captain Karanjai. “Yes?”
“Can you go out there and try to intercept those people before they get away with those crates?”
“I can try, Captain.”
Karanjai motioned me to the airlock. I stepped inside and initiated the cycle.
“Warning! This unit does not register a viable spacesuit within the airlock.” The voice was calm and feminine. “Conditions on the other side of this safety barrier are presently unacceptable for biological safety. Please return with a proper—”
I ignored the warning and punched the bypass code into the keypad using NAPD authority. The airlock vacuumed all the air into the makeup vent in seconds so that resource would not be lost. The door opened and I went through.
As I approached the men working on the wreckage, I tried to access their comm frequencies, certain they were talking to each other. I drew my Synap pistol and held the weapon at my side. It was bigger and more bulky than the conventional slug-thrower because it fired bioelectrical charges that disrupted a human’s nervous system to cause temporary paralysis or unconsciousness. Regular NAPD officers didn’t care for the weapon and had nicknamed it “the Gandhi gun.” Only bioroids and clones carried them on the job for the police department.
I dialed the power back because the electron beam would work even better inside the vacuum that had been left in the tunnel. I couldn’t permanently harm the men I was after.
I also couldn’t communicate with them because access to their comm was blocked. I held my left hand high and broadcast an image of my badge with scrolling ID under it, leaving it in place in the air before me and controlled by my onboard PAD as I reached for my airbelt controls.
The men stopped working and pointed at me as I pressed the controls of the airbelt.
The airbelt lifted me from the ground and shot me toward the wreckage. Two of the suspects nearest me pulled laser pistols and took aim. They didn’t use slug-throwers because the resulting recoil would wreak havoc on them in the microgravity. Laser pistols didn’t have a recoil issue.
The laser beams leaped across the vacuum and would have struck me had I not taken evasive action. With a quick flick, the airbelt shoved me to one side and I took aim and squeezed the trigger of the Synap pistol in a nanosecond. The bright blue burst of electromagnetic energy ripped from the muzzle and struck the target. The light was artificially colored as a psychological deterrent.
When the blast hit the target, it threw out spiderweb-thin legs and enveloped the man in a whirling oval. I knew at once that the burst didn’t have any effect when the man fired at me again. The spacesuits apparently guarded against several menaces, including bioelectrical discharges.
Holstering my weapon, I caromed from side to side in the tunnel as quickly as my gyroscopic controls allowed. I moved like a pinball, catching myself on one hand or both, or on my feet, and launching myself again and again with the aid of the airbelt. Every leap I took brought me closer to my quarry.
Karanjai and the rest of the NAPD stood watching helplessly behind the transplas wall.
I landed again in the middle o
f the tunnel, narrowly avoiding the powered rail by millimeters and another laser bolt by even less. My heat sensors flickered a quick warning, but I was already moving again. I propelled myself to the ceiling, pushed off and jetted down, and caught the wrist of the closest man as he tried to take aim.
Twisting his wrist, I created enough pain for him to lose his grip on his weapon. Setting myself, I shoved the man into his partner, offsetting the recoil with a blast from the airbelt. On the other side of the transplas face guard in his helmet, I saw the features of a man in his mid-thirties, bearded, and with the tattoo of a flaming skull on his right cheekbone.
I ran his features through the NAPD database and found a match. Kenny Ichiro was a licensed mercenary, no current affiliations, but he had seen service in the Martian colonies. I logged the info and sent it on to Dispatch as I went after the man again.
I didn’t reach him this time, though. One of the other men blasted me with a laser burst that burned through my clothing, bathed my arm, and threatened to slag my right side. I dodged to the side as my internals tried to compensate for the massive heat buildup. The unrelenting chill of the lunarscape pouring into the tunnel through the crater helped draw off the heat.
The blast affected the airbelt’s thrusters as well. I attempted to compensate for my sudden movement as I caromed off the wall, then the floor. Fighting for equilibrium, my gyros stabilized my movements, then adjusted for the belt’s altered trajectories.
By that time, the six men had scooped up the crates they’d come for and flown through the crater.
“Drake, are you all right?” Captain Karanjai sounded concerned over the comm. I had not before seen compassion from him and it was oddly comforting.
I sent a quick email through my onboard PAD to his comm. “Yes. I am in pursuit.” My right hand was a ruin. The synthskin was a burned, smoldering wreck that showed the stainless steel digits and joints below. My movement was limited somewhat, and I knew that if I’d been in an air-rich environment the hand would have been on fire.
I flew after the retreating suspects, angling up toward the crater as the last of them sped through. My flight wasn’t quite on target. My compensation remained a work in progress. I hit the ceiling in a glancing blow but managed to wrap my left hand onto the crater lip and pull myself from the tunnel into the crevice.
The crack to the surface ran twelve meters. I bounced off the far side of the crater and shot up toward the opening. Seven meters ahead of me, the last of the suspects blasted onto the open surface of the Moon. I followed.
Once I cleared the crater lip, I had a brief impression of the lunar terrain. The crater had opened up in a lunar mare, one of the basaltic plains that covered sixteen percent of the Moon’s surface. When they were first discovered by humans, they were thought to be oceans. This one was part of the Sea of Tranquility, not far from Starport Kaguya and Heinlein. They were believed to have been formed between three and four billion years ago by volcanic eruptions.
I only had time to lock in a GPS position and try to ping for a helpful orbiting satellite that might provide some vid recon of the area when the cargo shuttle powered from the darkness and bore down on me. The shuttles were earthmovers, tracked for powering across the lunar landscape on captured solar energy. They were also capable of flight through compressed air bladders.
The unit headed for me weighed over forty-five thousand kilograms on Earth, but in microgravity weighed only 16.7 percent of that. But the mass remained a constant.
I tried to get out of the machine’s way, but failed. The brunt struck hard and I struggled to claw my way off of it. Then it punched me into the crater wall behind me. I had a brief impression of lunar dust, rock, and the inevitability of physics, then my systems plunged into an immediate fail.
Chapter Eight
Drake 3GI2RC, can you hear me?”
I fought to answer, seeking out the source of the voice in all the darkness that surrounded me. I thought I recognized her. Finally, I locked onto an external speaker that I found attached to my system. “Yes.”
“Good, that’s good.”
“My vid and audio systems appear to be offline.”
“They are for the moment. Please be patient.” The woman’s voice was calm and pleasant.
“I feel no anxiety. That is not within my programming.”
“Of course it isn’t. Sorry. Human social convention is hard to ignore when working with you higher-end bioroids. Take my lapse as a compliment to your impressive design.”
“Thank you.” Although there was no anxiety, I did feel a certain degree of discomfort. I saw no reason to inform the woman of that. “Who are you?”
The woman chuckled. “You are a curious one, aren’t you? No anxiety, but plenty of inquisitiveness.”
“That is within my programming.”
“Of course it is. You’re one of our detective bioroids.”
“Yes.” Our meant she was a Haas-Bioroid employee. Given the last thing I remembered, it was a given that I was at the corp reconstruction unit.
“In answer to your question, I am Jenny Crain from Haas-Bioroid’s engineering and diagnostics section. We’ve met before. The last time, your nanobots took care of repairing the damage. This time, I had to do a little more work. You seem to have a propensity for violence.”
I remembered her then. She was one of the people responsible for repairs and new designs. “I don’t know if it’s appropriate to say that it is good to see you again.”
“Good of you to think so, Detective Drake. And I think that’s appropriate enough.”
“Drake will be fine, Doctor.”
“Very well.” According to Jenny Crain’s voice patterns, she sounded surprised. “I suppose you’d like to know how badly you’ve been damaged.”
“Not damaged. Hurt. These soulless creeps just don’t get you, do they, Drake?” Hearing Shelly Nolan’s voice made me feel even more comfortable. “You’re not just a machine. You’re your own being.”
I didn’t reply. Since Jenny wasn’t mentioning hearing Shelly, I believed that she didn’t. That was odd, because she was hooked into every program and subroutine I was currently using for auditory and vocal response. In any case, my continuing relationship with Shelly was private and mystifying, something that I wanted to keep to myself.
“Yes. I would like to know.”
“Give me just a moment.”
I did, but while I was waiting for her, I tested my access to the Net and found that still within my means. I ran a subroutine and verified that the activity I undertook there was suitably off the grid of whatever programs she was using for supervision over me. As further insurance of that, I masked my Net activity with a three-layer subroutine dedicated to accessing damage done to my body.
“The fix is in on the investigation, Drake. Skorpios is shutting down investigation of the cargo that was taken from the tube car.”
I didn’t question Shelly about how she knew that. I knew it, too. In fact, I’d just discovered that fact in the NAPD field reports regarding Gordon Holder’s kidnapping and death.
I also discovered I’d been offline for twenty-seven hours and forty-three minutes.
“And change.” From Shelly’s tone I knew she was mocking me. “Can’t forget about those seconds.”
I didn’t. I never did. They added up. I had been inactive on the case for over a day. Most investigations ran by the forty-eight hour rule. If the event wasn’t understood, if a suspect was not in hand in those forty-eight hours, the possibility of never getting to the bottom of the investigation increased exponentially.
“Crimes are simple things, Drake. You know that. They’re always about power. Somebody has power over somebody else. That’s either through money or sex.”
That motivation was the coin of the realm in an investigation. Shelly had drilled that into me in ways not supported by the programming that had been archived into my personality.
The question was, who stood to benefit from killing Gor
don Holder?
But there was also the question of the crates that had been taken from the tube car wreckage. Where did those fit into this scheme? And had they been the actual target, not Holder?
I began gathering data from the NAPD files, then branched out into the media.
Judging from the NAPD’s files, they were pursuing the Martian terrorist angle.
“They have to, Drake. You know that. That’s the surface investigation demanded by the nosies. Earth/Mars conflict is good for media sales. Paranoia easily translates into profit.”
She had drilled that into me as well. Serial killers scared the public because the longer such a murderer was allowed to operate, the more the public became personally afraid. They tended to fantasize that they—or someone close to them—would be next to be killed.
Acts of terrorism did the same thing. Terrorism had the potential of paralyzing megapoli. It had happened before.
A quick glance at the tube-lev stats showed that travel had declined nine percent since the day of the incident. Given that few people had other means of transportation to their jobs on the Moon, that meant that the work force had called in sick, further debilitating corp production. Security on the tube-levs had been increased as well. Both of those things impacted financial bottom lines.
Since nothing else untoward had happened during the last three-shift cycle, the population would get over the initial scare. The increased security would eventually pull back and the work output would return to normal. The resulting hike in prices to make up for lost work and the increased expenditure for more security would create a ripple through the financial markets as well, which would trigger another wave of paranoia from a supposedly different sector. They were, in fact, twins birthed by the same event. Most people just didn’t put them together.
A true act of terrorism would be followed by another as soon as possible.