“Well, isn’t that interesting.”
“I thought you might think so, Ma’am. You may find the other item interesting as well. Chief Stanier has tried for years to get decommissioned military hardware for the Imperial Police. His ostensible reason is that the Imperial Police on planets like Wollaston may face terrorist or insurgent threats for which such hardware would be useful, and would be more immediately deployable than the military itself, especially if interstellar travel is involved.”
“That sounds thin to me, General Daggert.”
“I agree, Ma’am, and it did to Lord Newsom as well, apparently, as Chief Stanier’s entreaties have born little fruit until recently.”
“And now, General Daggert?”
“It appears that Lord Pomeroy may have greased the wheels with Lord Newsom for Chief Stanier on this issue, Ma’am. The Imperial Police have been receiving used military hardware from the Defense Department for about two years.”
“What sort of hardware, General Daggert?”
“Mostly small arms, Ma’am. Select-fire rifles, hand-held mortar launchers, that sort of thing.”
“That doesn’t sound like proper police armament to me, General Daggert.”
“Nor to me, Ma’am. But what’s more troubling is that they have also received a small number of armored Marine assault shuttles. In addition to being much harder to bring down than a standard police shuttle, they have some limited offensive capability.”
“How limited, General Daggert? What are their offensive capabilities?”
“They can launch rockets, Ma’am. Either as air-to-air or air-to-surface munitions.”
“Have such rockets been provided to the Imperial Police, General Daggert?”
“Not that we know of, Ma’am, but they’re not very big, and the Imperial Marines use a lot of them. There is no substitute for live-fire training. And where you have a lot of munitions being expended, you have a lot of opportunities for diversion.”
“Your recommendation, General Daggert?”
“Ma’am, the investigation into the murder of Vash Medved has already implicated high-ranking subordinates of both Chief Stanier and Lord Pomeroy. While Lord Pomeroy had the motivation for the murder, we know Chief Stanier’s people were involved as well. We also know that Lord Pomeroy and Chief Stanier are good friends and have regular meetings, and further that Chief Stanier’s Imperial Police now have some limited military capability. So I have to ask you a question.”
“Yes, General Daggert?”
“Your Majesty, would you consider being moved to a more secure location?”
“No.”
“You could still carry on all the business of the Empire through VR, Ma’am. Meetings, review, oversight – everything can be done by VR.”
“The answer is no, General Daggert.”
Daggert sighed. He hadn’t expected that one to work.
“Failing that, Your Majesty, I would like to pull our air support in closer. The motor pool for Imperial Park has a small hangar and shuttle pad facility. I could pre-stage a ready group of Imperial Marine attack craft there. We could get air cover up and around the palace much more quickly from there than from the Imperial City airport.”
Dee considered. It seemed like something of an escalation, but, at the same time, Daggert had not been excessively paranoid, despite his responsibilities.
“All right, General Daggert. I’ll allow that. But the Throne is here, and here the Empress shall remain.”
“Yes, Ma’am. Thank you, Ma’am.”
“And let’s get that DNA analysis under way.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Investigations. Detective Gorski.
“Good morning, Detective. Major Dunham here.”
“Good morning, Major. What can I do for you?”
“Your security recordings worked out really well. Between that and the map of the trash bins, we think we have the gun and the costume the Medved murderer used.”
“Really.”
“Yes, he was dressed as a delivery man, and carried a box.”
“In which he probably had the gun.”
“That’s our thought. We spotted him because he carried the same box back out of the building.”
“Sloppy.”
“Yes. So we have these items. Our problem is that we have no in-house DNA capability, and the Imperial Police showed up a little too quickly at the murder scene for us to be comfortable using them to do it.”
“Why, Major, did you know that we have a quite capable DNA lab here at Imp City PD? I would be happy to run your DNA samples and see what we get.”
“That would be most appreciated, Detective. And the Imperial Police?”
“Amazingly enough, they aren’t very well liked around here, Major. Something about them coming in and stomping all around like they own the place whenever they show up. I can guarantee you there will be no, uh, leakage, shall we say.”
“Excellent, Detective. I’ll have these items run over to you.”
“Very good, Major. We’ll get right on it.”
When the package showed up, Gorski took it down to the DNA lab in the basement of Imperial City PD headquarters.
“So what do we have here, Detective?” Debra Brown asked.
“An airgun, some clothing, and a box, presumably all from the same person.”
“What sort of analysis are you looking at? Quickie see what we get, regular, or deep dive?”
“Deep dive, I think, Debby. Very important case, and likely a professional. I think you’re going to be growing a lot of microsamples.”
“OK, so we go into the Class 1 clean room, pick off anything we find with microhandlers, and grow those, then we swab each square inch separately and grow all those, and we end up with something like a thousand or two samples, separate them all out and run them all through the big analyzer. Then we have the computer pound on all the individual results for a while and see if we can’t find a dominant profile. Like that kind of deep dive?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“All right. Must be an important case.”
“Very important. Oh, and we aren’t sure the Impies aren’t involved, so we really don’t want to say anything about any of this where they could get a listen.”
“All right. When I go bowling with them tonight, I won’t say anything.”
Gorski chuckled and Brown smiled back.
“Perfect. Thanks, Debby.”
“No problem, Detective. Gonna be maybe a week, though, unless we get real lucky right off.”
“I understand. Right in this case is definitely better than fast.”
“Got it. OK, I’ll let you know when we have anything.”
Tom Nixon was the guy for doing the deep dive. He was best at it and he enjoyed it. He really liked the challenge of it. Brown took the box with the bagged items back to Nixon’s office.
“Whatcha got there, Debbie?” Nixon asked.
“Oh, you’re gonna like this one, Tommy. Professional hitter. Thinks we can’t catch him.”
“Have I got the go for a deep dive on this one?”
“Yup. From Gorski himself. Important case, unlimited machine time, unlimited hours.”
“I love it.”
“Yeah, I betcha don’t find anything though. Airgun hit? What are the odds?”
“You just watch me.”
Nixon took the sealed evidence bags into the Class 100 clean room. He washed the outside of the bags and changed out of his street clothes into his clean room clothes. He then went into the Class 10 clean room. He put the first evidence bag into the Class 1 sampling booth, pushed the button to close the glass, and flushed the chamber with canned air. That done, he got into the operator’s chair and cozied up to the viewer, placing his hands on the controls.
The thing with humans was, they were dirty. They picked up dirt wherever they went. They also shed dirt wherever they went. Skin cells, droplets of saliva, sweat, bits of hair. Much of that he could extract DNA from, a
t least enough to replicate it to get a sample big enough for analysis.
The first step was to go over the items in the microscope and look for anything big, like a hair follicle or a bit of skin. Using the microhandlers, he cut open the evidence bag and extracted the airgun. He set the microscope on search and let the computer walk the microscope back and forth along the gun, looking for debris.
The airgun, of course, had not been kept clean. It had been discarded somewhere, and it had picked up debris from that environment. Every time the computer stopped and flagged a bit of debris, he had to make the judgment call as to whether or not to pick off that piece of debris with a microscopic manipulator, put it in a sample tube, and grow it to see what they got.
This was, necessarily, a long and tedious process. Nixon didn’t mind it, though. As the scan progressed, he learned more about this gun, about where it had been and how it had been used. That knowledge came slowly, but he enjoyed it.
Having finished one side, Nixon used the macro-manipulator to turn the gun over and began on the other side. This side was cleaner and went faster, leading him to conclude the gun had lain in this orientation. He already knew it had been in some sort of trash bin from the debris on the other side, but this side had been up.
When the scan was complete, he set the machine to swabbing small sections, one after the other, placing each swab tip in a sample tube. He watched the machine perform this task until it was complete on the upper side, then turned the gun over with the macro-manipulator and started the machine swabbing the other side.
When that was done, he used the macro-manipulator to spritz water into the bag, and ran the rinse water through a microfilter. The microfilter then went in another sample tube.
With the gun complete, at least for now, Nixon put the gun back in the bag and resealed it. He checked his watch. Well, that had burned the whole afternoon.
Nixon now had about three hundred loaded sample tubes in racks. He initiated the system prepping those samples and growing them. With that underway, he went back out into the Class 100 clean room and changed back into his street clothes, throwing the clean room clothes in the hamper.
The box and the uniform would wait until tomorrow.
“Hey, Sue,” Seth Hersch said, walking into Kwan Shufen’s office. “I was looking at the recordings again, real slo-mo, and look what I found.”
He sent her an invite into a VR channel. She opened it and saw a still of a young couple in the arcade.
“That’s our spotters, right? The people we think are spotters, anyway.”
“Right. Now watch.”
The couple in the VR strolled along in slow motion. At one point, the woman put a hand up to her mouth, then tossed something white into a trash bin as they passed.
“What the hell?”
“Let me scroll it back, and watch her mouth.”
Hersch scrolled the recording back, then zoomed in on her mouth.
“She’s chewing,” Kwan said.
“It’s gum. She spits it out in a tissue. After that, no chewing.”
“How’d we miss that the first time?”
“Let me show it to you in real time.”
This time the couple was walking at their normal pace. They saw her hand go to her face, but the gesture to the trash bin was so quick it was easy to miss.
“Damn. We got the trash bin ID?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Send it to forensics.”
There was one forensic team still out at the Imperial City spaceport today, in case something came up. When the call came in from Major Becker, they went out to the floor of the hangar and walked up and down, looking for the bin ID.
When they found it, they opened the bag, and, there on top, was a tissue with a lump inside it. They continued on through the bag to make sure there wasn’t more than one, but that was it.
They bagged it and sent it on to the palace.
“Investigations. Detective Gorski.”
“Good morning, Detective. Major Dunham here.”
“It’s too early for results, Major. We just started yesterday.”
“Oh, I know that. I have something else for you.”
“Another find? Whatcha got?”
“Gum.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s like DNA heaven.”
“I know, but it’s one of the spotters. We think, anyway. Can I send it on over?”
“Sure.”
“Hey, Tommy. Looky what I got,” Debra Brown said, dangling a small evidence bag with something white in it.
“What’s that?” Nixon asked.
“Gum.”
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“No, but it’s from one of the suspected spotters, not the shooter.”
“Oh. OK. I’ll run it with the rest today.”
Nixon washed off the evidence bag in the Class 100 clean room, then changed into his clean room clothes.
Gum! Can you imagine? It offended his sense of professionalism. How were you supposed to play cat-and-mouse properly if the mouse jumped right into your mouth?
Ah, well. At least it wasn’t the shooter. That would have ruined his whole day.
Nixon spent the entire day in the Class 10 clean room running scans on the box and the uniform jacket. taking a break only for lunch. At the end of the day, he had another thousand samples in processing, including one with a piece of the gum.
Tomorrow he would be able to start analyzing the first batch of samples. The samples from the gun.
Nixon came in the next day and went straight into the clean room. He moved the rack containing the three hundred samples taken from the gun out of the incubator and loaded it into the big DNA batch processor. The machine took a five-hundred-sample rack at a time, and performed DNA sequencing on all the samples. Some test steps it performed in parallel, some in series, but it was optimized to run five hundred samples in not much more time than it took to run ten by hand.
Nixon made sure the machine was topped up on all its critical supplies, and set it to run the three hundred samples.
Once he got that started, there wasn’t much to do but wait. He left the clean room and went to his office, keeping an eye on the machine in VR throughout the day.
Six hours later, at about 3:30, the first results started coming in. They came in for batches of twenty-five at a time, about five minutes apart. Looking at the results, it was clear that, unlike his spotter, the shooter had been a professional. There was very little there. He did get partial DNA results from maybe fifty of the samples. He set the computer to analyzing those and went home for the night.
The murder had been on Monday. Tomorrow was Saturday. Nixon planned an early evening so he could run that other thousand samples tomorrow.
On Saturday morning, Nixon was back in the lab. He loaded the first rack of five hundred samples, checked that the machine was topped up on supplies, and set it running.
That done, he went out and ran some errands, met his wife for lunch nearby, and was back in the office well before the first results started coming in. These had many more positives than the gun, and more complete samples, and he had a completely clean sample from the gum. When the results were all in and the machine complete, he loaded the second rack of five hundred samples, restarted the machine, and went home.
He set it up so that, when they were done, all the results from the thousand samples were run into the same computer analysis as the first three hundred. It would likely take all day Sunday and into Monday for that to run.
Results
It was Friday evening, four days since the murder of Vash, and Dee, Sean, Bobby, and Cindy were up on the roof after dinner in what had become their evening conference. Dinner tonight had been stuffed game hens and pan-fried mixed vegetables, with a garden salad and a piece of key lime pie for dessert.
They stretched out contented around the pool after the girls had swum some laps to work out the tensions of the day.
“So it seems like n
othing’s happening,” Cindy said.
“Why do you say that?” Dee asked.
“Well, we got Peabody’s answers, right? So we know who gave him the orders to be available. And Fairfield came in on his own and gave us his statement, so we know who was poking around about which employee of his might have been working with us. And now, nothing.”
“I’m waiting on the DNA,” Dee sad.
“The DNA?” Cindy asked.
“We sent the gun, the box, and the disguise to the Imperial City PD. They have a good DNA lab over there, and they don’t much like the Imperial Police. They’re running the DNA for us.”
“How long is that going to take?”
“Up to a week. There’s a lot of work to do, and some of it is incubation and chemistry, and those processes take a certain amount of time, even with good equipment.”
“So we just sit for a week? We’re not going to pick up Kershaw and this other guy, this Whitmore fellow?”
“No,” Dee said. “Not yet. When we pull in Kershaw and Whitmore, that’s going to make a big splash. I want all the DNA results first. If we can find the shooter, then we can follow the money.”
“Follow the money?” Cindy asked.
“Somebody paid the shooter,” Bobby said. “When we know how big that payment was, we can start looking for where that payment came from.”
“And somebody gave him his orders,” Sean said. “If we can get that out of him, it’s another trail to the top.”
“So the real issue is that the Peabody and Fairfield strands of the investigation are in front of the shooter strand, and we’re trying to synch them up,” Cindy said.
“Basically, yes,” Dee said.
“OK. I get that. And then we go after the next links in all three chains.”
“Right,” Dee said.
“Are you going to go into hiding for that part of it? It holds the prospect of getting really messy.”
“No, Bobby,” Dee said. “The Empress of Sintar does not hide from her responsibilities, or step out of the way of danger. No more than you or Sean did at Wollaston, or than millions of Imperial Marines do every day. If the Council strikes at the Throne, then they will find out to their sorrow that the Throne will prevail, as it always has.”
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