He hadn’t said more than three sentences to her since she introduced herself at the gate, so his request now almost startled her.
“Morganthur? We’re on borrowed time. Can you do something with their office comps, and still monitor the Port Police band?”
She didn’t think he’d noticed when she’d adjusted her percomp. She made a mental note to be more careful around him.
He sounded tired and hurting, although she couldn’t have said how she knew. A moment of uncharacteristic empathy made her want to help him, instead of act fog-a-mirror dumb like she ordinarily would have. Like she had for the past four years.
“Clone, take, or flatten?” she asked. Admitting to some comp skills was probably safe enough.
His eyes widened and an eyebrow raised, and she had the impression he was actually paying attention to her for the first time that night. She disciplined an impulse to flinch at the surprising force of his regard.
“Clone, preferably without leaving a trace.”
To her relief, the connection broke when his gaze left her. He opened the small hardcase he’d brought with him, which turned out to be another forensic kit. He pulled out a clonewire and handed it to her.
She went to a large terminal on a nearby mobile table and inserted the clonewire. The wire was fast and the cloneware was glossy. It only took a few moments to breach the warehouse’s barely adequate internal security and get their entire data hypercube. Centaurus Transport must trust its employees a lot more than the average company, she thought. On a whim, she found and cloned the security module while she was at it, noting with wry amusement that the warehouse was scheduled to have the new door cameras operational later that week. More worryingly, she discovered the intruder alarm had been tripped more than two hours ago.
Four minutes later, she disconnected the clonewire and wordlessly handed it to Foxe. She was unexpectedly… aware of his proximity, so she backed away fast to return toward her self-appointed post near the crates. His voice stopped her.
“I need your help.”
He looked toward the direction that Velasco had gone, then back to her. His expression and tone said he really hated having to ask. “If you can handle it, I need you to search the bodies quickly, and tell me what you find.”
He’d given her an out, but the despairing, almost haunted look that shadowed his warm hazel eyes and tense mouth were more than she could stand. For whatever reason, he couldn’t handle it right then, and she knew she could. She knew death from way back.
“Gloves?” she asked. She didn’t want to leave her biometrics around for the sniffers that even incompetent police typically used. She removed her topcoat rather than chance trailing it in body fluids. The warehouse felt cold but not unbearable.
He handed her a pair of microskins from his kit. She smoothed them on as she looked more closely at the bodies. They were about a meter apart, both wearing black civilian clothes and light coats. The dark-skinned woman would have been tall and imposing in life. One of her long legs lay across the lighter-skinned man’s feet. His body was curled in a fetal position, so it was hard to judge, but she guessed him to be considerably shorter than the woman. She crouched between the bodies, balancing on the balls of her feet to avoid the combined pool of blood and less-pleasant fluids that had leaked after death. Her boots would leave a distinctive print if she wasn’t careful.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
The corpses were starting to stink, so she cut off her awareness of it. There were other scents nearby, besides Foxe’s, but too degraded to be of any interest, except a couple of hours-old human scents and maybe a hint of something medicinal. She cut off her awareness of those, too, dismayed that she had so unthinkingly and easily allowed them to register in the first place.
“Tell me what’s in their pockets, anything unusual about their clothes. Anything you notice about their injuries,” he said. Although he was turned away, she thought he might be watching her with his peripheral vision. He still looked pale, almost traumatized. “If you have to move anything, try to put it back like you found it, so it doesn’t screw up the official investigation too much.” His tone implied he didn’t think much of the Port Police’s ability to notice things like that. Given their reputation and lack of response so far, she had to agree.
She started with the man first. Foxe had called him Leo, and she finally put it together with the last name of Balkovsky that she remembered from the Investigation Division. He was the source of most of the blood and stench, and now that she was close, she could see why.
“A broken-handled forceblade is stuck in the man’s left pelvic bone. The forceblade is large, maybe twenty-five centimeters. The strike came from right to left through his pelvis and intestines. He bled out.” If the handle hadn’t failed, the forceblade would have finished cutting the man in half and spilled more of his fried entrails. He’d died with an anguished look on his ash-white face.
Perhaps that was part of why Foxe couldn’t look at the bodies. In her peripheral vision, she saw him shiver as if even his winter coat couldn’t keep him warm.
She gently probed the body with her gloved fingers and searched the clothing, while avoiding the blood and tissue, and described what she found. Foxe had her clone the gory wrist percomp but leave it and the earwire on the body, as well as the ankle gun, jewelry, and a couple of wirekeys. When he told her to take and bag a joyhouse souvenir token, she did as he asked, but a hint of puzzlement must have shown on her face.
“It’s a percomp. Leo liked hiding things in plain sight.” He kept his eyes focused on hers, so she could see the effort it was taking to maintain composure, and his strong jaw pulsed once. It was like seeing someone unexpectedly naked.
She shifted her focus to the woman, Adina, whose body was lying on its right side, legs twisted unnaturally. She was feeling the pressure of time and worked quickly. “Holsters empty… pockets too. They were searched.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked.
She started to show him, but he’d retreated to his resolute stare away from the scene. “Pockets partially pulled out.”
“But not Leo’s?”
“No.” She continued her examination. “Blunt impacts on the left shoulder… Left elbow feels broken… Knuckles are bruised and broken… Percomp like yours on her left hand.” She leaned in and looked at it more closely and saw the characteristic distortion pattern and pinpoint blood spots on the nearby skin. “De-rezzed. Probably a mister.” Misters were small hand weapons that could temporarily paralyze or render unconscious. They were illegal in most places, but not in Etonver, where almost anything could be openly carried or concealed.
“A mister?” he asked.
Mairwen could have kicked herself. Dull security guards wouldn’t know what mister damage looked like. But she’d already opened her mouth, so she might as well go on. “Two shots, maybe more. Left arm, neck.”
“Misters aren’t usually fatal.”
She gently lifted the lapel and collar of the woman’s singed flatcoat to look underneath. “No, but a forceblade through the heart is.” The singed entry wound was unmistakable. The bottom half of the coat had soaked up most of the leaking blood.
She saw the hint of a tattoo on the woman’s neck and pushed aside the shirt collar to see the rest of it, and the skulljack behind the ear she expected to find. Now the woman’s bruised hand and broken elbow made sense.
“She did some damage to her attackers after the man—Leo—went down. Ex-Jumpers are hard to kill.”
Jumpers were the military’s elite special forces under the Citizen Protection Service. Unsurprisingly, both La Plata’s divisions employed a large number of military veterans.
She made one more discovery. Under the woman’s body, obscured by the blood-logged coat, were three identical, sealed packages of what looked like medical capsules, labeled with obscure identification codes and symbols. They were the source of the medicinal scent she’d caught a whiff of earlier. Sh
e shut down her sense of smell yet again, perturbed by how often that evening she’d been lured into breaking her own rules about using her extraordinary senses.
“Three squibs under her, maybe pharma or blackmarket chem samples,” she told him.
“Bag them.” She used her right forearm knife to lever each sample up and slide it into the bag he held open for her. She re-sheathed the flat blade and used her glove-protected fingertip to gently smear nearby blood around to obscure the shape of the void the packages had left.
She started to ask if he needed anything else from the bodies, but momentarily froze when she realized the rhythm of sounds from the corridor outside had just changed. Wheels on plascrete, the click of motion-sensor lights blinking on, human voices. Very likely the Port Police. If she said nothing, and the police entered the warehouse before checking in, she and her co-workers would be caught in a locked room with two murder victims.
Foxe noticed her hesitation and focused his eyes on hers. “What?”
Unable to come up with a plausible excuse, she gave him the truth. “I thought I heard something.” It sounded lame. She looked toward the bay door they’d used twenty-three minutes before.
He considered her words a moment, then put the evidence bag in his kit and started rapidly closing it up. “I think we’ve pushed our luck far enough. We’ll go out the back way with Velasco.”
She quickly stripped off the gloves inside out and put them in her pants pocket, then grabbed her topcoat and the large kit he’d just finished sealing and slung its strap over her shoulder. He picked up his luggage and hustled toward the back of the warehouse. She kept pace right behind him through the jungle of shelves to where Velasco was standing. She was now glad he’d given her the wirekey earlier, because it meant they wouldn’t lose valuable seconds waiting for Velasco to produce it. As she edged in front of Foxe and headed straight for the door, voicecomm from the Port Police band sounded in her earwire.
“Base two, six thirty at Centaurus Transport bay side. No visible breach. Harris is downloading the keycode now. Sitrep in ten.”
Velasco heard it, too. “Shit, the police are out front. They’re getting the key now.”
“We’re done. Let’s go,” said Foxe.
Mairwen used the wirekey to open the door in the hope it wouldn’t trigger another alarm. She calculated they had maybe ten seconds before the police entered at the other end of the warehouse. They’d be as unpleasantly surprised by the bodies as Foxe and Velasco had been. All in all, no one was going to be happy that night.
Once Foxe and Velasco were through the door, she sealed it and put the wirekey in her pocket, while turning up her senses to make sure more company wasn’t coming. Foxe seemed all right, but Velasco’s shallow breathing and fast heart rate said he was headed toward panic again.
She took the lead to get them walking fast down the corridor to get Velasco to put some of his adrenalin to good use. She heard a distant grav sled coming their way. She looked for and found the corridor split and led them into the side hall. She wanted to avoid triggering the motion sensors for the hallway lights, so she slowed to a stop after a few steps, as if adjusting the shoulder strap.
Velasco’s breathing was heavy, but he seemed to be in better control of himself now. Foxe took the opportunity to call up a holo map of the spaceport on his percomp. She was relieved because it meant he could plot their path away from trouble and out of the spaceport. She’d already planned multiple escape routes the moment she’d learned the warehouse’s location, but that wasn’t the kind of initiative exhibited by unambitious night-shift guards.
“Cart coming,” warned Foxe. Thankfully, his hearing was good enough to notice it. She felt him step close behind her. His unique, exotic scent teased her senses before she ruthlessly blocked it. What the hell was wrong with her?
Foxe’s fingers brushed her arm. “Wait until it goes by,” he said. Velasco nodded. She nodded, too, but stepped away because she didn’t want Foxe touching her again. She put her coat on and sealed it, wishing it was lined with flexin armor.
Even when he was quiet, the pressure of his breath and the resonance of his voice rumbled in her ears, provoking a desire to hear more. Very bad idea, the cautious part of her brain told her. She dulled all her senses to practically comatose levels. Her inexplicable and uncontrollable awareness of him was an unwelcome distraction, and dangerous. If the universe loved her, after tonight, she’d go back to her safe routine and never cross his trail again.
CHAPTER 2
* Planet: Rekoria * GDAT 3237.027 *
Luka Foxe slumped in the company vehicle’s well-padded back seat and huddled in his greatcoat while rubbing his throbbing left temple. The cold was in his bones again. He was grateful he didn’t have to drive, because even at one in the morning, Etonver traffic was horrible. He’d have liked to blame the double full moons, but Etonver traffic was notoriously bad all 388 days of the year.
He was deeply tired and stressed. Re-certifying his expert credential at High Court on Concordance Prime hadn’t been a vacation, and the last few hours had been a klústérfökk. The incompatibility of ship schedules and local times on two planets meant his body clock was haywire. He didn’t sleep well on small starships. He didn’t appreciate cramming five hours of reconstruction into twenty minutes. He didn’t like dodging the police. And he didn’t reconstruct murder scenes any more. Especially when one of the victims had been his best friend.
The vivid impression of the bodies of his colleagues Adina Schmidt and Leo Balkovsky was still acid sharp. It had only taken seconds for the phantasms of how it could have happened to ooze up and contaminate his mind with bile. Even though he’d looked away quickly, he’d already seen and memorized too much. The talent-driven visions of possibilities had twisted his train of thought, until he could hardly think of anything else.
It hadn’t always been that way. When he’d worked as a civilian for planetary police and military criminal investigation units, his hidden minder talent to see a crime scene and imagine the scenarios that fit had been useful. Involuntarily triggered by evidence of violence, but manageable. His final case changed everything. He’d hoped time and disuse would have made his talent easier to handle, but tonight proved that, if anything, his wayward ability was just as strong, and his ability to control it weaker.
As tempting as it was just to doze, he needed to organize the data and send a preliminary report now, because he expected to flatline for at least eight hours once he got home. The only bright spot of the night was Morganthur. She’d been much more useful than his nominal assistant, Velasco. He was glad Velasco had been dropped off first.
“Assistant” was maybe too strong a word. La Plata policy required its investigators to have partners, but no one else had the background to help him, and he was accustomed to working alone. They might have let the policy slide, except for his tendency to lose all track of time and space when he was deep in a reconstruction, even without using his talent. La Plata solved both problems by assigning him a personal security detail out of the Security Division. His assistant accompanied him, drove him places, provided another set of hands, and kept track of things. He’d gone through several of them. The latest was Velasco, who was comparatively reliable and affable, but talked a lot, was distracted by women, and was prone to fidgeting with anything nearby, including evidence.
Luka hadn’t really noticed the difference until tonight, when Morganthur had stood quietly still for fifteen minutes straight. At the end, when the violent visions of what had happened to his friends in the warehouse were practically blinding him, she’d been a living, steady anchor to reality, even if she didn’t know it.
That she’d been both unperturbed and competent in searching the bodies was a small miracle. Velasco would have thrown up on them.
Luka encrypted his findings and the data clones Morganthur had retrieved and transmitted them to Seshulla Zheer’s attention. The net connection was secure, but it never hurt to use added securi
ty with sensitive data. He guessed Zheer, the president of the company, was now his boss until she found a replacement for Leo.
Luka had never wanted a lead role, at least not until he regained control of his talent, and not while Leo enjoyed leading. Luka was numb now, as if he’d applied a slap-patch anesthetic to his emotions, but he knew the heartache would come. He was fluxed and wrung out at the same time. He swung his long legs across the seat and leaned back in the corner, trying to think of other things.
Movement up front from Morganthur caught his eye. He’d initially taken her for ex-military, but she was too slight to be an ex-Jumper, and her movements were too unconventionally fluid for regular military standards. Her almost translucent pale skin, arctic-lake blue eyes, and spiked blonde hair should have been dulled by the gray and black of her company uniform and coat, but weren’t.
Now that he had time to think about it, she was an enigma. She clearly had some intelligence behind the bland stolidity she wore like flexin armor. His other wayward talent, the one that let—or forced—him to see the essence of a person was curiously quiet around her.
And maybe he was too tired to think straight, and maybe he shouldn’t be imagining intelligence or mystery in a woman he’d only met two hours ago.
Just as his eyelids were drooping, he was surprised by a live ping from Zheer. He kept it earwire-only, rather than bring up the visual holo on his percomp.
“Where are you?”
“On the way home. I sent the data already.” His voice sounded as tired as he felt.
“It’s already being analyzed. Stop at the office first and see me. LANR says you’re close.”
LANR was the nickname for the planetwide Location and Navigation Reconnaissance system. Businesses paid to use it to track their commercial ground, water, and air vehicles anywhere on the planet surface. Up until that moment, Luka had thought it was a good idea.
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