Obsidian Detective

by Michael Anderle

  Erik nodded, although he retained the defiant grin on his face. “Yes, sir.”

  “And what about the case, sir?” Jia asked.

  The captain’s face softened. “It depends on what Digital Forensics turns up. I’d hate to think you nearly died for nothing, or even just some minor billing fraud. For now, both of you stick around the station and write up your reports. I need every last detail in there. There are going to be a lot of important people asking me questions about what just went down, and I need to be able to give them half-way decent answers. For now, you’re dismissed, and try not to get in any gunfights on the way back to your office.”

  “No promises.” Erik headed out of the office, Jia close behind.

  “That wasn’t as bad as I expected,” Jia admitted once they were out of their boss’s hearing.

  “What’s he going to say? ‘How dare you let some bots shoot at you?’” Erik snorted. “We did what we needed to do, and we didn’t kill or injure any civilians.”

  Jia nodded and fell silent, sinking into her thoughts.

  She didn’t speak again until after they were back in their office and seated at their respective desks.

  “I want to bounce something off you,” Jia began, her voice quiet. “Unless you need more time to figure things out?”

  “I’m fine.” Erik looked at her. “You okay? I’ve been in a lot of fights, and I’ve lost my share of thoughts. I understand that battles aren’t always fun or exciting.”

  Jia’s breath caught and she swallowed, taken off-guard by his obvious concern. “I’m okay. About that, anyway. I’m still processing it all, but that’s not what is bothering me.”

  Erik’s brow lifted. “Getting shot at for the first time isn’t what’s bothering you?”

  Jia nodded. “Don’t you think it was too convenient?”

  “Too convenient?” Something approaching respect appeared in Erik’s eyes. “What do you mean, exactly?”

  “We’re looking into this company and executing a search warrant, and suddenly their bots malfunction and try to kill us.” Jia shook her head. “I thought about telling the captain my suspicions, but he’s already so spun up that I’m afraid if I push any more, he’ll pull us from the case. I want to get to the bottom of this.”

  “Yeah.” Erik grunted. “I think it’s incredibly coincidental the bots not only conveniently malfunctioned then, but they broke badly enough to go into live-fire mode. From what I overheard some of the techs saying, that shouldn’t have been possible without a manager’s override code. Plus, they’re not something you’d think you would need Uptown.”

  “It’s not unusual for companies to have that kind of security,” Jia clarified. “I mean, obviously we don’t have the kind of terrorism problems that you see on the frontier, but it’s not impossible. It’s just…”

  “Just what?”

  Jia licked her lips and took a deep breath. “What if someone got desperate enough to want to kill us, the problem children? I’m not saying I’m convinced of that, but I’ve been thinking about that man outside the club on and off since the incident, and now I just don’t know anymore. A lot of things that seemed so clear before…aren’t.”

  Erik nodded. “Good. Never assume you’re safe, and you’ll live a lot longer. You also need to understand something very important.”

  “And that is?” Jia asked.

  “That humans are humans,” Erik explained. “And Earth has more humans than any other place in the galaxy. Just because they’re better at hiding the corruption, it doesn’t mean it’s not here. Maybe the captain’s right and this is nothing more than fraudulent billing, but if you were hoping to be a cop in a huge metroplex and never run into true darkness, you were kidding yourself. I might have helped pull back the curtain, but the monsters were always there.”

  Jia gave him a shallow nod and blew out a breath of air.

  By the time Jia and Erik stepped into Malcolm’s office in the Digital Forensics area the next morning, Jia’s discomfort of the previous day had turned into a somewhat different although equally unpleasant emotion.

  She was angry.

  She didn’t want to believe someone had purposefully attempted to murder them, but if a criminal had, they needed to be brought to justice.

  A ruthless killer was the very definition of antisocial. They would be sent offworld to a prison. Such a person was too dangerous to even try to rehabilitate in a colony.

  Malcolm looked up when they entered. He had dark bags under his eyes. Even his brightly colored shirt was rumpled, and Jia recognized it from the day before. A half-dozen text windows floated above his desk.

  “Have you been working all night?” Jia pointed to his windows. “Did you even go home?”

  “It’s not just me, but I asked to take the lead. Don’t worry. My desk is very comfortable. I have an expanding pillow I use.” Malcolm waved at his windows. “Especially after some of the stuff I started finding.”

  Erik chuckled. “Like what? Signed confessions about how Windward is an insurrectionist front company secretly trying to strike at the heart of the UTC?”

  “Not in so many words.” Malcolm rubbed the back of his neck. “But the attack definitely wasn’t an accident.”

  Jia’s eyes flitted to Malcolm, then Erik, then back to Malcolm.

  “Windward purposefully tried to kill us?” Erik asked. He didn’t look all that annoyed or angry, just curious.

  Malcolm shook his head. “Actually, I’m not sure about that.”

  “But you just said it wasn’t an accident,” Jia observed.

  Malcolm gestured at a few different windows, but he moved too quickly for Jia to process the text. “It wasn’t an accident, but I don’t think it was Windward. There’s a lot of evidence that their systems were compromised. Not just that day, but for a while. Maybe months.” He looked up at her. “About thirty seconds after you transmitted the warrant, there was a huge amount of activity in the branch office systems, but from what I can tell from some of the logs, most of it wasn’t originating from the internal network.”

  Jia frowned. “What kind of activity?”

  “Record purges, mostly.” Malcolm shook his head. “I think the arrogant bastards were really sloppy before, and never thought they might get caught, but at least they were smart enough to keep an eye on the place. Just before you entered that loading bay, someone activated the security system, and someone made sure to lock you inside and upgrade the threat level. I think someone was trying to cover their tracks.”

  Jia shook her head. “But that doesn’t make any sense. If they ended up killing two police officers, wouldn’t that have drawn more attention?”

  Erik grunted. “It doesn’t matter what attention they would draw if they purged all the records. And desperate people do desperate things, and most of those aren’t well thought out. How often do police do these kinds of raids Uptown?” He looked at Jia. “You said it was your first.”

  “Sure, it was my first, but there are other detectives in this enforcement zone. It’s not like they’re unprecedented.”

  “You’ve been here for a year, and you hadn’t participated in a raid.” Erik shrugged. “They’re rare enough that the cops doing something they didn’t expect might have taken them completely off-guard.”

  Malcolm whistled. “This is messed up. I don’t know about all that, but the thing is, I think our criminals underestimated the Windward security guys and our computer guys on site. It’s like you said, Detective. It’s all about the purges.” He started beating on the desk with his hands, a rhythm Jia recognized from a song popular the year before. Malcolm's focus was lost somewhere. “I think the attack was a distraction to give them more time to delete stuff.”

  Erik looked at Jia, then he eyed Malcolm’s hands.

  Drumming, she mouthed.

  Erik’s eyebrows went up and he watched the computer guy.

  Jia resumed the conversation. “That makes sense. Everyone was so focused on the attack that
they wouldn’t or shouldn’t be paying attention to intrusions in other parts of the system.”

  “But things got really haphazard toward the end, and they didn’t completely purge everything they were going after,” Malcolm finished. He pointed to a window listing several files. “There was enough left over here and there that I was able to recover some of the data.”

  Erik chuckled, a dark texture to the sound. “They didn’t think we’d be able to fight them off. They probably figured we’d be killed and everyone would be freaking out. But when we started winning, they panicked and had to hurry.”

  “Perhaps,” Jia replied. She frowned and pointed at the file list. “Is any of the recovered data useful?”

  Malcolm replied with a huge grin, “Very useful, Detective, especially since our mysterious criminals started with the older records and worked their way forward. Because of that tactic, I figured out what they were mostly doing in those systems.”

  “Besides trying to kill us?” she asked.

  “Who knew?” Erik added. “We had multi-tasking murderers.”

  Malcolm nodded, the grin turning smug. “They hacked the system to reroute some of the cargo flitters and drones to make deliveries. Remember the funeral home?”

  Erik glanced at Jia. “If that woman’s secretly an insurrectionist, I don’t think I’m going to be surprised.”

  “Nope. She’s innocent. Or innocent of that, anyway.”

  “Damn,” Erik grumbled.

  Malcolm swiped with his hand, and every window disappeared except one. The text reversed itself to be readable by the detectives and he nodded at it. “This is the address where the actual delivery took place. I wasn’t able to recover the pickup location, though.”

  Jia leaned closer before her face scrunched, confused. “This can’t be right. This is in the Shadow Zone.”

  “Makes a lot of sense to me,” Erik countered. “The police presence isn’t as heavy down there.”

  “That’s a common misconception,” Jia explained. “The population density is far lower, so there are fewer police. Just because crime is higher there doesn’t mean it’s some out-of-control wasteland like you might see in a drama.”

  Erik barked a laugh. “Before I started at the station, I took a drive down there. I was there for less than thirty minutes, and four Tin Men tried to steal my flitter.”

  “That…” Jia blinked. “What?”

  “Have you been down there?”

  Jia shook her head. “Well, no, but it’s not necessary for me to have visited.” Her eyes narrowed. “How did you even get into the Shadow Zone?” she asked.

  “My military ID was still active,” Erik explained.

  “And you had enough status to beat a travel restriction?” Jia replied, a hint of surprise and even wonder in her voice.

  “Seems that way.” Erik grinned. “Interesting place. I found a bar I liked down there.”

  Jia’s lip’s curled in an interesting way. Erik wasn’t sure if it was wry humor or what as she countered. “Just because they aren’t total degenerates doesn’t mean there aren’t an excess of antisocials living in the Zone.”

  “Antisocials? Yeah, that about covers it.” Erik chuckled, a good-natured smile lingering on his face.

  Malcolm got their attention, his fatigue evident. “I don’t know what to tell you, Detectives. That’s the data I recovered, and that’s the address.”

  Jia frowned. “But whether they used an autonomous flitter or a drone, the traffic system would have flagged them, even if they hacked the vehicles to ignore the warnings. The traffic police would have intercepted them.”

  “Unless they had the appropriate clearance ID,” Erik suggested. “I’m not saying some ex-Special Forces guy showed up and moved to the Shadow Zone to make hacked deliveries. I’m just pointing out it’s possible to beat the system, and that’s assuming they didn’t hack the traffic system on a deeper level. One thing I’ve noticed about Neo SoCal is that a lot of people assume things are going to work out a certain way, and some people might take advantage of that.”

  Jia took a moment to think it over before she took a deep breath and blew it out. “I suppose it’s time for my first visit to the Shadow Zone.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Erik tried to keep the huge grin off his face as they dove through the vertical lanes on their way to the Shadow Zone, the haze steadily building.

  Jia sat in the passenger seat, her arms folded across her chest and a pensive look marring her features.

  His nav system came alive. “You are approaching a restricted area. Please turn your vehicle around to avoid potential fines.”

  Erik tapped his PNIU to sync his ID with the nav system. Unlike what had happened on his first trip, his police codes should have already been fully linked to the vehicle’s system.

  “Access level insufficient for entry,” the nav system replied. “You are approaching a restricted area. Please turn your vehicle around to avoid potential fines.”

  Erik grunted. “What’s going on?”

  Jia sighed. “I was afraid of this. I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to enter since our enforcement zone doesn’t perform normal patrols of the area, and, quite frankly, I’ve never thought about going there before. We need to turn around.”

  “What did I say about forgiveness and permission?” Erik asked, reaching over and flipping a switch on the digital nav as he slowed the vehicle.

  “We have evidence, though.” Jia shook her head. “I was eager to investigate, maybe too eager, but if we cause an unnecessary incident and the captain pulls us off the case, it will have all been for nothing. If we cause trouble in another enforcement zone, that’s going to happen.” She turned to him. “Please turn around, Erik.”

  The nav system repeated its warning.

  Erik continued slowing their descent until the MX 60 hovered in the air, lingering in the haze, well below any of the main Uptowner lanes but not in the Shadow Zone proper. His head turned while his hands stayed on the controls. “You sure? We can do this. I’ve got your back, even if the captain doesn’t.”

  “I know you do,” Jia replied softly. “And we’re close now. Everything we find leads somewhere.” She shook her head slowly, thinking it through. “If we get stopped now, it’ll hurt. I think this is one time we’ll benefit from being a little more careful.” She tapped her PNIU and dialed the captain. “We won’t fail,” she assured him. Another tap set her PNIU to open speaker mode.

  “What is it, Detective Lin?” Captain Monahan asked over the line.

  “Sir, have you had a chance to review the information Digital Forensics sent up?” she asked.

  “Yes, I have. That’s good work by them, and I’ll admit it looks like there’s more here than I realized, Detective.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. So, here is the latest challenge, Captain.” She looked out at the smog. “We’re near the Shadow Zone, but we’ll need you to transmit permission so we can check out the address Digi-Forensics recovered.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Detective Lin.” Captain Monahan sounded apologetic. “Wait, you’re not even supposed to be working today.”

  “Well, we’re working, so give us the permission,” Erik interrupted. “You just said you think there’s something with this case.”

  “Accepting that a crime has occurred, even a serious crime, and having our enforcement zone handle it are two separate things.” Captain Monahan’s tone was firm. “Especially now that it involves the kind of people who are capable of attempting to murder police officers. Based on the information I’ve been provided, I think it’ll be best to transfer this case to an enforcement zone with primary jurisdiction in the Shadow Zone. They’re better equipped to deal with this sort of thing.”

  “But this is my case,” Jia argued. “You’ve sent too many of my cases away before, including this one. Gone to the amorphous cloud of some other zone. I was right from the beginning, and now we know not only are there victims like Mr. Smyth
e, but the Windward company itself is a victim. If all the victims are in our enforcement zone, we should solve the case. We have more motivation to do so.”

  Captain Monahan groaned. “I have a feeling you won’t let this go if I say no, will you?”

  “That would be accurate,” Jia agreed.

  “I’ll think about it, but for now, you are not authorized to enter the Shadow Zone. This is me, explicitly not giving you permission,” the captain explained.

  Erik’s PNIU chimed with a message from the captain.

  I want to see you when you get back to the station, Erik.

  “Talk to you soon, Detectives. Head back home. You’ve done good work, but dial it down for now.” Captain Monahan ended the call.

  “I have a good feeling about this.” Jia turned her attention to Erik, a smile in her eyes if not on her lips. “ He just needs time to think about it.”

  “The captain is trying to make a move behind your back,” Erik told her, putting the flitter into an ascent. “I think he’s going to try to get me to convince you to give the case up.”

  Jia frowned. “What? You sure?”

  Erik nodded, his lips pressed together. “Don’t worry. I don’t like it when people try to ambush me. You tagged Smythe and the company as victims.” He dodged a couple of bots. “We’re victims too, and consider me a victim advocate.”

  The captain’s door slid closed after Erik stepped inside.

  Monahan was staring at a crime density map of the entire metroplex.

  It was impressive when you looked at it: the massively dense band of humanity hugging the coast of California. Despite the name, the metroplex didn’t cover all of Southern California. Large swaths of land were untouched by its supposedly civilizing hand.

  Many smaller cities farther out had dwindled in the preceding centuries, their populations moving to the metroplex. The cities were victims of urbanization and automation trends.

  Between robotic farms and agricultural towers, there was little need for people to live in rural areas.

  Erik opened the conversation. “Let’s get this over with, Captain.”