by John Mierau
“Are you drawing enough ox? I swear you’ve got the worst lungs of any Reach-born I’ve ever—”
“Yes, yes, yes,” she sang, keeping her voice playful so as not to break the mood. Was he ever going to let her live down that time she passed out on that patio at her boss’s place. It wasn’t her fault she was born without the genes for high-altitude adaptation. You couldn’t use gene therapy to increase what you never had in the first place. Reinforcing her words, she bounced her wedding ring off the ox clipped to her belt, making it ring.
He nodded, relieved.
The fairgrounds were built on an elevated plain of exposed rock to the southeast of the city. The rail line ran up on pillars and led to the farthest station from city central. On any other day, a few dozen tourists might the long trek out to Landing Plain to see the statues, visit the Peter Cloke memorial pool, or walk through the restored landing craft that brought the first human beings to the planet Reach.
Starting next Landing Day, they would also come to ride ‘The Eye,’ a half-kilometre high Ferris wheel that would be the first of its kind on the planet.
Frankie had told Nate from the day it was announced that The Eye would make a fortune from slack-jawed farmers on their first trip to the big city, and rich kids looking for a kinky new thrill. She also promised Nate that the first time they got to the top of the so-called ‘ride of their lives’, she would give him the ride of his life.
But that promising piece of architecture wouldn’t open until next Landing Day.
This Landing Day, the best she could do for Nate was a quickie in the fenced-off construction zone between ‘Pete’s Piss-Pot’—the locals’ name for the memorial pool—and the Hilton on the Plain.
Past the fence lay a row of big-wheeled sand trucks. Frankie swung around, raising up her hand. She still held Nate’s hand, and now she pressed it up against a promising piece of her own architecture.
“How do I explain a trespassing charge at my next promotion review?”
She almost told Nate not to worry about money and promotion because she had enough for both of them, but she didn’t want to make him defensive about marrying a rich computer genius again. Not tonight.
“You worry too much! Besides, they love you at the transport office.” She squeezed his hand, then did it again because it felt good.
His fingers didn’t add any pressure of their own, though. “Frankie, you know there’s extra cops out this year, thanks to the striking miners. How about we find a quiet corner of the rail station to ‘share ox’ instead?”
She pouted, climbed up on her tiptoes and melted the last of his reserve with a blast-furnace hot kiss. She followed it up with the piece de resistance. “I’ve been practicing holding my breath.” She tugged at his belt. “Wanna see how long I can hum?”
That sold him.
Of course, being Frankie, once he was on the hook, she danced out of his embrace.
“Come get me, big boy!” she laughed, lifting her jacket to flash the dimples on her backside above low-slung pants.
She raced between two trucks and jerked to a stop.
Sitting on a crate, staring into a laser-precise hole that would one day anchor The Eye, was a cop.
“Frankie, I’m gonna do things to your—” Nate slammed into her from behind, sending them both stumbling.
She yelped, tripping over her feet and pitching forward. Unable to arrest her fall she landed face first on the ground, just a foot to the left of the cop. Beside her on the sand lay a bottle, empty save for the fumes.
She stared up.
He had a gun in his mouth.
Oh god.
She shook her head. “Please, don’t.”
His cheeks were streaked with sand and tracks of tears. His cheeks were trembling with strain, a symptom of a titanic inner struggle.
She got to her knees. “Let’s talk,” she said. She smiled gently. “I bet we can—”
The cop pulled the gun from his mouth and staggered to his feet. His face seethed with rage. He reached out and kicked her in the side, hard enough to lift her off the ground and send her rolling.
She landed on her stomach, pain flaring up from spasming hip muscles. She tried to get to her knees but collapsed, screaming out in surprise and pain.
“Talk?” the cop slurred. He stomped to her side and fell hard on his knees. “Don’t wanna talk!” His face crunched up, fresh tears welling in his eyes. “S’why I’m back in a uniform, ‘cause of talk!”
He pushed the gun into her back. Frankie screamed in terror.
“Wa-wait!” Nate’s said, behind her.
The pressure of the gun disappeared from Frankie’s back. “Fuggof!” the cop roared. Frankie heard someone bounce off the side of the truck, then race around it, breathing hard.
She rolled onto her side, holding her hands in front of her face as the fence groaned, popped out of its track, and wobbled loudly when someone slammed against it on their way through.
Nate.
Running off.
Leaving her behind.
The cop ignored her. “Oh man, what’d I do, what’d I do?” He slammed the side of the gun into his forehead. “Not gonna let me be a cop if they found out what I did!”
Frankie’s blood whooshed in her ears as fast as her terrified heart could pump it. She held her hands up and craned her neck away as if, somehow, those extra few inches would keep her brain safe from a bullet.
She was going to die. She was going to die because she wanted to get off with the chickenshit husband who had just abandoned her to a drunk, suicidal cop.
“I j-just did what they t-told me!” The cop was sobbing so hard snot was hanging off his chin. “Burn it down with ‘em still inside, that’s what they told me!”
Frankie’s brain latched onto the word puzzle. It was something to think about, and that dulled the terror. She peeked through her fingers. The cop’s ID tag read ‘Franzen.’
The cop held his head in his hands, spastically slamming the gun off his temple every few hitching breaths.
She had to work hard to get the words out. “Who did…who did you burn?”
“Hm?” Franzen asked, and snorted a mouthful of snot. He looked at her, but it wasn’t her he saw, thanks to the alcohol in his blood. “Farmers had to go before they got too famous, before too many people listened. ‘Gotta feed Earth’.” His lips twisted in self-loathing. “The unit bought me drinks the first night we lit ‘em up. I could still smell ‘em on me when I got to the bar. Lotta drinks, lotta drinks.”
Cops were killing farmers? Frankie’s brain connected frightening dots while her body tried not to piss itself.
Before the miners’ strike took over the news nets, the Farm Expropriation Act had been getting hammered with critical coverage. Students and farmers had marched together in front of Government Row just last week, and a coordinated education campaign had found its way into every Reacher’s messaging account. Frankie got the message too, even though she’d never signed up to receive it. Being Frankie, she had some solid filters in place so the sophisticated exploit had piqued her curiosity.
Before she’s started digging, though Nate started pissing and moaning about his promotion. Frankie had dropped everything outside work hours to cheer him up.
God, Nate was a needy little shit, she realized in the small corner of her mind not terrified by her imminent death.
A death Nate had left her to face alone.
A death she might just be too stubborn to sneak out of. She licked her lips and asked the question she couldn’t let go. “Who told you to do it?”
Franzen looked down, his expression muddled by the booze and even more by her question.
“What did you say?” he snarled.
Too fast for Frankie to understand what was happening until later, Franzen spun the pistol around in his hand and smashed her in the face with the butt.
“What did you say?”
He hit her again, and again. He punched her in the throat when sh
e threw her hands up. She flung her hands to her spasming throat, willing it to draw new breath. She realized her cannula wasn’t attached to its air bottle anymore. She was seeing spots in her vision.
He hit her in the face three more times before he whirled away and emptied the contents of his stomach on top of the crate he’d been sitting on.
After several more retches and splashes, the sounds stopped.
No more blows fell.
Franzen was only a blur in her vision as he fumbled over her body. She pushed feebly back, but he batted her hands away and ripped the air canister from her side.
The blur tossed the canister into the deep pit, turned and ran away.
Frankie started choking on her own blood, unable to roll to her side. It was shaping up to be a race to a death by asphyxia, or by drowning on her own blood. She couldn’t move, couldn’t scream for help, couldn’t do jack shit—except wonder what it was that was going to get her killed.
An obsession was born in that display of power, arrogance, cruelty.
Why was Gov killing farmers?
What the hell was going on?
As her hitching breaths slowed, it pissed her off that she’d probably never know.
CHAPTER FOUR
April 29 2347
Southeast Metro
South Reach City
Riddlemarch Rail Station
Detective Sameen Tenjin pulled a small automatic from the shoulder holster under her rumpled black jacket. She let her long jacket fall down over her wrist, obscuring what little barrel the piece had and walked faster, nose up in the air and looking overtop the crowd of morning rail commuters leaving the station.
Where did you go, little man?
The crowd parted up ahead. A current of space made by something shorter than most of the pedestrians.
“Hey, watch it!” someone shouted.
There you are.
The squat little guy with wide, muscular shoulders was on the move, pushing his way through the crowd towards the secretary.
Allan Buck, Under-Secretary and rising star of the Mining and Resources Department, was either an idiot or a way too humble man of the people. Sameen wasn’t sure which, after only two days on the minimal undercover security detail she grudgingly accepted, after his son carried a note in from the front stoop of his elegant downtown condo. The note had the names of seventeen miners on it, each with a slash through their names. Seventeen miners who all died in a mining accident Buck had reviewed, and found the mining company innocent of all wrongdoing.
Allan Buck’s name was at the bottom of the list with a circle around it. Even then, it was the wife who called the police.
When pressed, the handsome political star admitted he’d been receiving creepy souvenirs at his office for a week. A shattered metal drill bit, a cannula filled with sand, and finally a core sample of rock mixed with blood—or what looked like blood. He maintained it was nothing; he received threats all the time. Sameen and Dewie’s boss disagreed.
Which is why Sameen found herself turning left outside Riddlemarch station, following the crowd of business folks to the overflow building where the Department of Mines and Resources was housed, playing second shoe in an undercover surveillance team at the crack of dawn on a cold as hell April morning.
She put her other hand in a jacket pocket and tapped the ‘send’ on the radio wedged in her ear. “Dewie,” she whispered below the ambient noise level of the commuter crowd. “Old guy, short and stacked. Blue coat with hoodie, approaching on your six.”
She flicked an eye from the threat to Buck, then looked a couple heads to the right, for the nondescript black guy in a rumpled overcoat and the thick-furred ‘Elmer Fudd’ style tracker hat popular with the suit and tie crowd.
Master of disguise, our Dewie.
The radio crackled in her ear. “Yeah, I pegged him getting off the train,” Paul Dewhurst answered back, “but good call, kid.”
“No problem, ‘Dad.’” Sameen rubbed at her ear though her black watch cap as she chucked shit at her partner. “How ‘bout you turn down your volume, before I need a hearing aid same as you?”
Her partner grunted in her ear. Sameen watched Dewhurst’s furry tracker hat sink below the crowd. Surprised sounds accompanied a sudden hole in the traffic flow around him.
Sameen ran. She didn’t see anyone yet. She barrelled towards the hole in the crowd. It was getting closer to Secretary Buck’s oblivious but perfectly coiffed blonde head.
She looked right: there was another hole in the crowd where the guy she was watching had been.
She put the gun in the air. “Police!” she roared at the top of her lungs. “Get on the ground, now!” She fired into the air.
The sidewalk descended into screaming chaos. She knew people were going to be hurt. She didn’t care. Some people stopped, some even ran to cower beside the building. Buck—despite practicing this with Sameen and Dewie!—just stared stupidly back at her.
But enough people deviated course that Mister Blue Coat and Hoodie couldn’t fly under the radar anymore. He was jogging toward Buck, a long piece of metal—was that a drill bit?—in his hands.
Where was the other one? The one that had taken Dewie out. She didn’t spare a single glance after her partner. He’d be fine or he wouldn’t. First order of business was to find—there!
An older woman in a red knit cap was standing in front of Buck, raising something over her head. Another drill bit, same as the other suspect carried.
“This is for my chi—” The woman’s voice cut off mid-word. Red sprayed from her throat as soon as Sameen had a clear shot, and she fell to the ground. She was already sighting her barrel to Buck’s far side, but the second threat wasn’t rushing forward. Where was he?
She lowered her weapon a few inches to scan the emptying street. She ran forward, getting past three screaming women blocking her line of fire.
“Get down!” she roared.
One of Buck’s synapses finally transmitted a thought. He dropped to the ground. The man kept running.
She fired twice, center mass. The man spun and fell.
She walked over still-screaming suits and ties. “Are you all right, Under-Secretary Buck!” The politician nodded. He was bleeding from punching himself in the nose with the sidewalk, but otherwise unhurt.
She scanned the woman. Dead. Eyes glassy. No threat. She checked the man. His hand was trembling, reaching for the long drill bit. Sameen kicked it away, and kicked the man hard enough in the face to make him spin away from the drill bit.
Weapon still trained on the assailant, she backed up to kneel beside her partner. She heard sirens, which in Reach’s thin air meant backup was almost on the scene.
She got her fingers around Dewie’s pudgy neck. “She just cracked the back of my head, nothing vital. I’m fine,” he growled. Then, quieter: “‘Except for my pride.”
She nodded, still focused. “Stay down, uniforms are coming.” She stood and crossed to the male suspect, kneeling at his side to check his vitals.
He lay in a pool of blood, his face white. She’d put one bullet in his chest and one in his stomach. She holstered her pistol and waved to the police cars screaming down the road.
Despite the blood loss and shock setting in, her suspect had turned himself back over. He was reaching for the woman. “Carla!” he called weakly, choking on his own blood.
“Dead,” she said in a monotone voice, and jerked her head toward Buck. “Just like you wanted that guy.”
A flash of despair, then more hate. “Deserves it. Killed all three of my boys.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she sighed, looking over her shoulder at the under-secretary, almost as white-faced from his nosebleed as her suspect was from two likely fatal gunshots. “He’s a terror.”
“He covered it up,” the suspect gasped. “They killed Jon and Billy…and he kept the mine open!” His head dropped to the ground. “Carla wanted to kill him then, but I said no, Cole needed us.” The hard man started to
cry. “Then they killed Cole and sent a check.”
Sameen closed her eyes. She liked it better when she could hate the assholes who took lives.
The dying man coughed blood onto her shoes. “Take our blood…take our children…all for Earth.” He gave up the fight, and let go.
Sameen stood. She looked at her shoe. She looked at Allan Buck.
Dewie was standing beside him, gun out, eyes alert in case of a third assailant.
Allan, though. Allan been watching her and the man on the ground. “Did he say anything to you?”
Sameen just looked at him.
He reared his head back, and darted his eyes up to Dewie, and back to Sameen. “What did…?” he started again, then aborted the question.
He buried the fear and guilt behind a politician’s mask.
Red and blue lights coloured his face. A squad car screeched to a stop on the road.
Sameen turned back to the dead father on the ground, and stared.
Sameen didn’t feel much. Just how she was built. Emotions didn’t last, if she felt them at all. She kind of understood people, and she latched onto rules that made sense. That had saved her ass, turned her from a punk kid heading to a life in the mines into a cop.
Today, she felt something. Since she couldn’t ignore it, she drank.
She was drowning the ice cubes in her tumbler for the third time when Lena opened the door.
Sameen raised her glass. “Welcome home, Captain.”
Lena didn’t turn the door and lock it, just slammed it without a backwards glance and knelt between Sameen’s knees. Lena held her cheeks, taking in Sameen’s clothes, the glass, her bloodstained pants and boots, still on. She leaned in and pressed her cool lips to Sameen’s. She tasted better than the drink and Sameen pushed forward for more.
There was holding, and hard breathing, but no tears. Sameen didn’t do that.
A while later, Lena got her undressed and under the shower. She came back later and dragged her out, threw her in a robe and sat her at their table.
Warm soup. Spicy with noodles and fresh herbs. Only then did Sameen realize how worried her lover was.