“Did the other engineers know?” Ishani cut in. Sheila looked up at her, her eyes clearing slightly, and shook her head. “I just put them in, but they were all, well, doing other…other things.” Sheila’s voice wavered again and pitched higher, but she took a couple of steadying breaths, and kept going. “But when Gregg told me that the failsafes didn’t work, I knew, I knew.” She paused, and then broke down into sobs again.
For the next ten minutes, both Ishani and Ali tried to coax more information out of Sheila, but only succeeded in driving Sheila into a greater frenzy. After a few minutes, Ishani motioned to Ali to leave, and they closed the door of the staff room behind them. Ishani knew when a witness needed space, and she was glad to be in the fresh air again. She signalled to one of the police officers to keep an eye on her as they walked away, and a young man with a pimply face took up watch by the door. He couldn’t have been much older than a teenager. Human power had always been short since the Terra War—almost three quarters of the human population had died—but still, she wished that the team here was a little more experienced.
“She seems pretty beat up about it,” Ali started to say, but Ishani cut him off.
“This is my investigation, Mini Man.”
“Pardon?” His eyebrows went up.
“You cut me off in there.”
“I did it because I knew arresting her wouldn’t have done her any good, or you.”
“That isn’t your decision to make.” Ishani’s frustration, formerly aimed at Sheila, now rebounded back to Ali. Her face flushed and she pushed his chest with her forefinger. It was solid muscle. She pushed the thought aside. “You are here as an observer, a politician. I am a detective with ten years on the force, and I have seen more murders and death than you probably ever will. So, you need to fuck off, capiche?”
The murder and death may have been an exaggeration, but it had the intended effect. Ali opened his mouth to argue, as if to say something back, but then closed it again. She could see him shaking. Good. She’d touched a nerve.
After a few moments, he took a deep breath, and then let it out. “Okay. Sorry. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Apology accepted.” She nodded at him, noted that he still seemed angry, and looked purposely away into her notebook. His feelings were not what was at stake here, and she wanted to make sure that he understood that.
She took out her cell and opened a chat box.
GROVER: CHECK THE FAILSAFES. NEED TO KNOW IF NEW ONES WERE INSTALLED.
ORTON: AYE CAP’N.
Edgar Orton was the resident techie assigned to work the investigation, and she had known him for a long time. He would be able to tell her if Sheila was telling the truth.
She looked at her briefing information. There were two more engineers on site, plus a dozen other support staff. She wanted to talk to the administrator, but he had not arrived yet. All of them would have already given statements to the authorities. She felt like sleeping standing up. But something was bothering her. She couldn’t quite place it, but it nagged at the back of her mind. She shook her head. Time to go see the other engineers.
***
Most engineers tended to be small people; the small ducts systems and narrow catwalks favored smaller people. At nearly seven feet tall, and broad-shouldered, Melqart was a veritable giant; Ishani wondered if they had to modify the duct system just so he could crawl through it. He had black hair that fell past his shoulders, and muscles rippled underneath his shirt. He had a plain face, but a handsome one, with gray eyes and a scar underneath his chin. When she found him, his head was leaning back on his cot. His eyes were closed, and he had on headphones that plugged into a jack in the wall. When she came in his eyes opened and he pulled them off, sitting up.
“Hello.” His voice was deep, velvety. She could smell his cologne: smooth, expensive, probably pre-war. Ishani smiled despite herself. What was it with crime scenes and attractive men?
She pulled out her badge. “Detective Ishani Grover. I just need to ask you a few questions.”
He nodded and leaned back into his cot. “About Ash, I presume.”
She nodded.
“Anything I can add to what I told him?” He nodded in Ali’s direction. Ishani ignored him.
“I’d like you to take it from the beginning, if you don’t mind.”
“That’s fine.” He sat up, strands of bloodstained hair falling forward.
“There’s blood in your hair,” she pointed out. He reached up, found the blood, and sighed.
“Went to the control room after it happened. It’s hard to wash out.”
“You certainly have quite the hairstyle, Mr. Melqart.”
“Gregg.” He smiled. Ali coughed next to her, and she sighed internally.
“Mr. Melqart,” she said, waiting for the implication to sink in for both men around her, and then continued. “Where were you when all this happened?”
“In here,” he replied, motioning around him. “Lying down. Listening to some music.”
“What were you listening to?”
“Electronic Rap. New CD by The New Earthians. Want to listen?” He motioned the headphones towards Ishani, but she waved her hand. She knew the band. They were terrible, and she was grouchy enough as it was.
“No, thank you. Carry on.”
“Well, I was in here. I must have dozed through Sheila’s screams, or the headphones blocked them out, but I was in here when John burst in and told me to come with. I ran into the room with him, and saw, well…” He left the sentence hanging in the air.
“So that’s all you know from the night? You didn’t see anything?”
Gregg looked up to the ceiling. He looked tired, and there were bags under his eyes. “Just slept in here, as I said. Been sleeping a lot lately.”
“Why?”
“Trying to quit coffee. Health reasons.”
In the back of her mind, she debated asking him for his rations, but decided it wouldn’t be professional. “Okay, so what do you think happened?” she asked instead.
“Failsafes broke. Maybe an equipment malfunction?” Gregg shrugged. “Really hard to say.”
“And if the failsafes weren’t broken? Would anyone wish Ash Snort any harm?”
“Pretty much everyone.” Gregg shrugged again. “He was a bit of a dick, as much as it pains me to say. Too much bad energy. He would yell at everyone for anything breaking. You should have heard him yelling about the broken failsafes, told everyone how dangerous it was, how anyone who broke it should be fired. Kinda ironic now, thinking about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he was the most concerned. None of us really thought about it since we usually take other precautions. It shouldn’t have been activated. And now the machine fires up and kills him when he’s on duty. Dude was right all along, and couldn’t stop it.” Gregg looked far away for a moment, then drew his attention back to Ishani. “I hope whatever happens to him after this life, he’s a bit more at peace now. Bad way to go.”
“You would have thought he’d be more careful then.”
“I suppose.”
“What if the failsafes were put back in beforehand?” Ishani asked him, eyeing him carefully. Gregg’s eyes widened a little, and he raised one eyebrow.
“Well, we wouldn’t be having this conversation then, I guess.”
“Are you aware that the new failsafes were put in beforehand?”
“No, I wasn’t.” Gregg’s eyes stayed wide. “I checked them after and noticed they didn’t work, but I figured they were the old ones. What does that mean then?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
“Well.” Gregg brought up his hand, scratching the back of his head. “If the failsafes weren’t installed properly, it would do the same thing as a broken one.”
“And if they were?”
“Well.” Gregg thought for a moment more, then shrugged. “I don’t know. Someone would have had to flick them off, overrid
e them, or get around them.”
“Can that be done accidentally?”
Gregg nodded. “Yeah, but you would need to enter in a password to override, and then have your accident. It’d be pretty hard to accidentally enter in a password. Power surge could do that too if the software had a bug.”
“Is there any reason why someone would disable it?”
“Not really. It wouldn’t help anything. Ash wasn’t a cowboy either; he was very by-the-book.”
Ishani thought about that for a moment.
“Did him being by the book create any conflict between him and everyone else?”
Gregg gave a short laugh. “It annoyed the hell out of us. Not much beyond that though. Ash was always the kind to dot his i’s and cross his t’s if you know what I mean. Did every one of our records, no matter how insignificant. If his shift started at eight, he would be there at eight, not seven fifty-eight, not eight-o-one. He knew the letter of his job and he’d stick to it no matter what.”
“Did it annoy the hell out of anyone in particular?”
Gregg thought for a moment, and then gave a noncommittal shrug. “Nobody really got upset about that. We all got along. Only person who never got along with Ash is Sheila.”
“Oh?” Ishani pounced. “What happened there?”
“Ash and Sheila used to bang, I think.” He grinned a little. “Knew each other since school. Had some pretty vicious talks sometimes, especially when Sheila got into the booze. I don’t know what to make of that, though. She seems very broken up.”
“Did they argue a lot?”
He nodded. “About anything and everything. It didn’t take very much. Sometimes if John was bored he’d just get them going.”
“What about?”
“Well, Ash was a neat freak and hated drugs of any kind. Took every chance he could to talk about the evils of booze or coffee or aspirin or lord knows what else he heard was going around. Sheila was a party girl so they’d fight about that. Sheila’s parents for another. Her folks are Wind Changers. Ash hated them with a passion. Didn’t think Sheila was too fond of her folks either, but I don’t think she liked to hear people insulting them.”
“Wind Changers?” Ali interjected. Ishani jumped; she had almost forgotten he was there.
“A cult. Believes that our solar tech is the devil or something,” Gregg answered. “Thinks modifying weather goes against God’s plan. I don’t know much about them beyond that though.”
Ali nodded.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Melqart,” Ishani told him. Gregg Melqart nodded, putting his headphones back into his ears. Within a few moments, he looked asleep.
As they walked away, Ali spoke. “So what do you think?”
“First, tell me what you think.” She was curious, despite herself.
“I think Sheila now has motive, method, and opportunity.”
“Pretty convenient, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean?” His face scrunched up into a cute expression. “You saw her. She’s a wreck. She screams guilt.”
She shook her head. “When one person gives you all three in one interview, you should corroborate your sources.” God, it would be easy to just leave it right at that; oh look, Sheila confessed, time to go to bed. Ishani refused to let herself. She identified with Ash a little that way; she would dot her i’s, cross her t’s. “She seemed too beat up about it for it to be an act.”
“Lots of murderers regret what they did.”
“Yeah, maybe. But I don’t buy it, not yet at any rate. Let us talk to the last engineer first, Nelson, go from there.”
Just then her phone went off.
ORTON: CALL ME WHEN AVAILABLE.
She loved Orton; others would just call, but he always sent her a message first for fear of interrupting her. She still called immediately.
“Hey.” He was a thick, bug-eyed man, and his face filled the viewscreen. He answered on the first ring and dispensed with all pleasantries. “Failsafes were installed and working, but power was cut to the dorms and redirected to the generator. Some code here looks like someone tried to program it to it to take from the reserves but there wasn’t enough and the backup systems took from the lowest priority area. The failsafes were in the software, but this basically forced a backdoor through the hardware.”
“No chance it was an accident, or a bug?” she asked. He shrugged.
“It would be pretty specific for a bug. Could be a virus, I guess, but definitely man-made, and had to be installed with someone who knew the place.”
“Thanks Orton, you’re the best.”
The man’s heavyset features beamed for a moment, and then blinked out.
This changed matters. They knew for almost certain now that they were dealing with a murder, or maybe even sabotage-gone-wrong. Either way, it would change the tone of her investigation. She was glad she didn’t take the easy answer. She couldn’t afford another mistake at the agency.
“When Sheila is awake, we need to talk to her again.” She told Ali what she’d found out from Orton. “For now, we still have one more engineer to talk to.”
***
When they found Nelson, he was in one of the electrical rooms, fumbling with wires underneath a console. She checked her watch; it was nearly four in the morning now. It had taken them nearly twenty minutes to travel to the generators from the dorms. She wondered if any of these people slept.
“Whore-lady piece of shit second-rate tech,” Nelson said, accompanied by a growl after a series of sparks shot out of one side. “Shoulda bloody thrown you out with the last hurricane, watch the wind blow you around like the tech garbage you fucking are, fucking fuck fuck.”
With a hum, the console, previously off, came alive, and buttons started to flash on the main screen in the middle.
“Fucking right.” John Nelson pulled himself out from underneath the console. He was a small, wiry man, with a thin scrunched-up face and a hooked nose that made Ishani think of the front of an airplane. Whereas some people would be bashful about expletives, Nelson only grinned when he realized he had an audience. He sneezed, half-catching it with his hand. A shower of dust shot out in front of him. He wiped his hands on a pair of filthy-looking jeans, then offered a handshake.
To Ali.
Ali took his hand reluctantly. John then looked at Ishani. “Sorry ma’am. I know I ain’t supposed to swear in the presence of a lady, but these machines, well, sometimes they need a touch of love to get moving.”
“Charmed,” she replied coolly. Then she offered her hand. “I am Detective Ishani Grover. This is Ali Gayth, he’s from the ministry.”
He looked at her hand for a moment, then shook it. His handshake was limp, and Ishani narrowed her eyes at him. “I just need to ask you a few questions,” she said.
“Figured someone would want to come talk once Ash got blown up. Didn’t figure it would be so quick.” Nelson reached down to pick up an assortment of tools that had been spread on the floor around him, and he started putting them into a toolbox off to the side. “Figured they’d wait ’til morning, on account of people sleeping.”
“Nobody here seems asleep,” Ishani commented.
“Hard to sleep when you just saw the insides of someone you know spread across your living space.” He said this without much emotion in his voice, as though it were a commonly-held fact. “Besides, we just got a shipment of parts in. Lots of work to do if we want to beat the storm.”
“You would probably have to get moving soon, huh?”
“Tomorrow is when we need to turn it on.” He nodded to Ali, and then hefted his toolbox. “Well, tonight now, actually. If there’s a good time to die, it probably wasn’t now. Put our schedule back at least another hour. If you want to chat, I have a diagnostic to do in the other room, I can talk while I work.”
He pushed past them through the doorway; he smelled intensely of body odor, and it took all of Ishani’s self-control not to gag.
“Besides,” Nelson said
over his shoulder, “already told all this to that fellow there what I saw and know. Don’t see why I gotta repeat anything. I have stuff to do.”
“I’d just like to hear it directly from you.”
Nelson put the toolbox down to enter a code into the door. “Waste of time,” he muttered. The door slid open. He picked up the toolbox and walked through it, and Ash and Ishani followed. This new room was bright, so bright they had to shield their eyes. Light streamed in from glass windows to either side. When they cleared the glass windows, and Ishani’s eyes adjusted to the new light, she noticed they were in a room that looked like the one Ash Snort had died in.
“Another generator?” She looked around, eyeing the different features.
“Yes ma’am.” Nelson set his toolbox down near one of the consoles. Without the blood, gore, police tape or other activity, Ishani could see the details of the room a lot better. A long cylindrical generator sat in the middle of the room, submerged into a network of wires that clung to it like suckerfish to a whale. A ladder ran along the edge, and as she got closer she saw that the generator stretched several floors beneath them. Information streamed across screens all around her, each console bearing labels that she assumed pertained to the generator’s function. The outsides of the generator and the consoles were all plated with a variety of different metals, giving the place a hodgepodge look. With metal being so expensive, and few of the old plants operational, she assumed they took what they could get to keep the place running. Nelson pulled out a panel, a copper-piece in between the stainless steel around it, and pulled out one of the parts. Immediately, all the doors hissed shut.
“What was that?” she asked. Nelson looked up and grinned at her.
“Safeties are still on, miss, you don’t worry your pretty face. The doors just shut whenever you muddle with the equipment. Containment measure.”
Ishani nodded, still looking at the equipment around her. It all seemed so vast. She had never been inside one of the weather manipulators. She wasn’t even sure how they worked, just that they found a way to manipulate gravity to affect the weather. Weather generators across the world worked in tandem to push storms to the right areas. The work the engineers did was extraordinary.
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