Wu hesitated a moment. “You keep detailed records: photos, fingerprints, everything. You go public.”
“They’re teaching this at the Academy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good grief,” Spider said, not sure how to feel. “I’m a case-study in a textbook.”
“I think you did the right thing, Mr. Webb.”
He stared at her, astonished. “Thanks.” What else could he say? “Yeah, and look what it got me?” or maybe, “What would really help is if the fucking government would come to the party with whistleblower protection laws. Now that would help!” But no. All there was was the bitter knowledge that bright-eyed young recruits were being taught to Just Say No. Maybe, Spider had often thought, the real problem was that people were naturally corruptible. Maybe corruption was normal, and staying clean was deviant and wrong. Maybe he’d been wrong on the issue. He thought about Mr. Patel, lured over to the dark side by the promise of the best hotrod time machine ever. Just a few percent more, just a few percent. He sat and stewed, and said nothing.
“You’re welcome. I hope I have that much courage one day.”
“Courage is the bloody least of it.”
The body had been torn to pieces.
It was, or had been, a white male, in his thirties, with longish dark hair, and a goatee beard. Where Spider could see the man’s skin, there were the beginnings of what would ordinarily become heavy bruising. Every piece of the body had been punctured with holes, more like big bite marks than entry or exit wounds. The remnants of a black tracksuit, a cheap red skivvy and old running shoes long gone grey, lay strewn about. Something had ripped it apart like it was a piece of blood-soaked paper.
At length, Iris took Spider aside, out of the glare of the portable lights. “What do you know about this guy?”
Spider was so stunned he did not know what to say. “This guy? This this guy?”
“He knew you.”
“I — what?”
Iris showed him a cheap black vinyl wallet containing seventy-five Australian dollars, the bills well used, and genuine; and a total of fourteen Canadian dollars, consisting of a ten-dollar bill — very colorful — and two two-dollar coins which looked like a copper coin set inside a larger silver coin. The wallet also contained some Canadian ID: a driver’s license issued by the Province of Alberta to one John Stapleton, of Calgary, Alberta. The photo broadly matched the face of the victim. According to the stated date of birth, Mr. Stapleton should be in his middle-forties, but did not look older than mid-thirties, as far as anyone could tell based on what was left of his face. The reconstruction guys had a job ahead of them. Next to the photo was a torn piece of plain notepaper, the pulp and texture clearly visible, suggesting some kind of boutique paper mill, perhaps even a hobbyist supplier making paper sheets the old-fashioned way? Except on the paper, written in blue ball-point, was Spider’s full name: ALOYSIUS WILLIAM WEBB, AKA ‘SPIDER’. There was also Spider’s usual address, the Lucky Happy Moon Motel, which, Spider did not need to be told, was less than fifty meters to his right. Everything suggested that Mr. Stapleton was attempting to find Spider, and had been told to look for him at the Motel. Spider stared and stared, peering at the note. Why would a Canadian guy be looking for him? Most troubling: what on Earth could have come along and done this to him?
“So you don’t know him?”
“Never seen him before.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes, I’m sure.” He felt cold all through, and a little shaky. Why would he be looking for me? Spider thought to himself.
“We also found this in his pocket.” Iris reached into her raincoat and produced a plastic evidence bag containing a translucent red plastic six-sided die, the numbers marked out in white dimples. “Does this mean anything to you? Have you seen it before?”
“It’s a D6,” Spider said. “What do you want me to say?” Back in his gaming days, Spider had quite the collection of plastic dice: everything from four-sided D4s to six-sided D6s and on up to the ten-sided D10s, and the icosahedral D20s. All kinds of games required different sorts of dice, but none so much as old-school Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, AD&D, before the D20 upgrade. Back in the day, D&D was all about dice, lots of them, as many different types as you could find or borrow. The D6 Iris had in the evidence bag looked more like the kind of die you would find in a casino, at a craps table. Iris handed it to him, bag and all, and he took it in his hand, weighing it, examining the vertices and edges for signs of wear, and found plenty. This D6 had been around, seen some action, one way or another.
“Yeah, I know it’s a D6, Spider. Been there, played that. But hold it up to the light, have a look inside.”
Spider did so, squinting against one of the lamps, and noticed, faintly, that there was something in the heart of the D6, regular, blocky, but small. “Oh, hello, what’s this?”
“We think it’s portable memory. I had my watchtop open earlier, and it noticed an unknown storage device, unknown size and format, that hadn’t been there before. Definitely this thing.”
Spider was still playing with the D6, checking to make sure it followed the D6 rule, which was that opposite sides had to add up to seven. The three was opposite the four; the six opposite the one. It wasn’t much, but it made him smile a little, thinking about happier times.
“So,” Iris said, “Guy turns up, bearing both Canadian and local money, Canadian ID, one D6, your address, and gets torn to bits.”
“Bad day.”
“Bad day gets worse.”
“Worse?”
“Does not get a mention in the International Traveler’s database. Doesn’t get a mention anywhere.”
“Canadian records?”
“What we’ve found so far is this: name and prints and photo are a match to a physics teacher from Calgary who worked at one of the universities there—”
“Uh-huh,” Spider said, not liking the way this was heading.
“Disappeared more than ten years ago. Paff, gone. Wife, too. Just vanished. Officially listed as a missing person, and declared legally dead by the Canadian RCMP. Memorial service three years ago.”
“And it’s definitely the same guy.”
“DNA will confirm, of course, but…” Iris looked tired and annoyed.
“The DNA machines—”
“Got it in one.”
Spider looked around, the forensic and chrono techs dressed in white anti-contamination jump-suits were busy with their examinations, running their tests, and taking their samples; all of them shocked into whispered silence. This whole area was a park, recently converted and beautified by the local council. Once, years ago, a tilt-up office block stood here, but when the first waves of wild financial times hit, the businesses in it went toes-up, nobody bought or leased the building, so eventually the owners had it demolished and tried to sell the land, but nobody wanted even that, so at last the Midland City Council took it off the owner’s hands, and turned the site into a lovely park, with a beautiful lawn, rose beds, meandering paved paths, wrought-iron benches, and now perhaps the grisliest murder scene to have come along in recent WA history.
Spider could smell the blood. A perverse gremlin deep inside his mind chirped at him, telling him that blood would be good for the roses and the lawn. Beyond the blood he smelled acid. As bad as the physical destruction of the body was, whatever had attacked Stapleton had also used acid. Inadvertently, Spider flashed back to the classic Alien movies of the 1980s and ‘90s, creatures with acid for blood, eating their way through the decks of spaceships. At the time, and in many fan discussions long since, he had maintained the position that acid blood was a dumb idea, that it was far too dangerous. But here, with this poor bastard? He looked around. Apart from this park, between two office blocks, the rest of the area looked much as it always did, grim and lifeless. Which was to say
, normal. There was a major road, heavy traffic at all hours, like it or not. Planes overhead coming and going from nearby Perth Airport, making windows rattle. Across the road, shops, cafes, a service station, a vet clinic. And, of course, a gathering crowd of sightseers, ghouls, people with cameras.
Uniformed officers had put up barricades and taped off the area, but still, so many people wanted to see what had happened, and what would happen. There were catcalls and rude remarks, jokes in poor taste — and traffic backed up a long way, horns blaring, as the exclusion zone spread onto the road. Any minute now the media would arrive — but then, looking around at all those people with their watchtops open, each one with a video camera built in, there was a good chance the media was already on the scene. Iris left Spider at one point to confer with the team’s Intelligence Officer, who was busy taking note of the bystanders and gawkers, watching for ratbags, performance artists, serial pests, and all the rest of the public circus this sort of high-profile incident brought out.
Then Iris was back. “Some new developments,” she said.
“Let me guess,” Spider said. “There’s no official record of this guy entering the country, under any pseudonym: no fingerprints, no arrival card, nothing. He’s technically an illegal immigrant.”
She arched an eyebrow at him. “Exactly.”
“He’s a time traveler. Right?”
“Well, obviously. We just have to check every little detail.”
“So you’re all wondering: where’s his machine?”
“We’re looking. We’ve notified DOTAS, and they’re looking, too.”
Spider nodded. “Great. A time traveler who knows me, but who I don’t know, at least not yet. Oh joy. And what about—”
“We’ve got uniforms going door-to-door, checking for witnesses.”
“Witnesses to the event itself?”
“Somebody must have seen this happen.”
Spider reckoned they’d be lucky to find any witnesses. He could only think of two things that could have done what had happened to Stapleton. One was some kind of heavy industrial machinery. The other? Well, the word “monster” is so overused, but Spider figured some kind of monster was the likely culprit. Which, of course, was utterly preposterous. Absurd, even. One did not, ordinarily, encounter actual for-real monsters outside the realms of movies, games and cheesy books. One did not encounter actual monsters in a lovely park in the middle of Midland in the course of an ordinary evening. Say you’re a typical member of the public, going about your ordinary member-of-the-public business, and lo, out of nowhere as you make your way down the street with your shopping you see some big nasty thing tearing apart some hapless man. You likely run like mad away from the scene, and pretend you saw nothing, and say nothing, because you’re worried that whatever that thing was that you totally didn’t see, might decide to come after you and yours.
Sometime around midnight, after the pieces of the victim had been taken away, and after the scene had been processed and sampled and examined and photographed to within a nanometer of its life, and after the last of the hopeless gawkers and murder fans had been sent on their way, Iris and Spider stood there, in the ruins of this park in Midland, drinking bad coffee from a roadside van, talking. They were both, for different reasons, shaken up, tense, trying to recover, to relax — and nothing says rest and relaxation like drinking strong, bad coffee after midnight, Spider thought, sipping his and wincing.
“So,” Iris said, at one point, “you wanted a word with me today? Earlier?”
“I did, yeah.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. It’s just, this all came up, and we’re flat out, we’re—”
“No, honestly, it’s fine. I understand. I just wanted to talk to you.”
Iris was watching him over her plastic coffee cup. “What’s wrong? Something’s wrong, it’s obvious.”
He felt embarrassed that he was so easy to read. “Not, well, not wrong, exactly.”
“Talk to me, Spider. It’s not getting any earlier, and I have to be at the office by seven, so spit it out, mate.”
“I got sacked today.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry to hear it. I thought—”
“I quit, in fact.”
“Oh. You quit. Now I am surprised.”
Spider started to tell her what happened, about Mr. Patel wanting to see him, about his special project for Spider, about Kali, the children, the whole thing, including the smoking-gun file documenting the entire thing, which he no longer had. It took quite some time to fill her in. He wanted only to give Iris a bare outline of the situation, but the more he talked, the more he had to talk, and, after they moved to a nearby bench, he told her everything, in detail. When he finished, he sagged back against the seat, his legs out in front of him, starting to feel cold in the wind coming off the nearby river.
Iris sat next to him, compact, serious, thinking hard. “You know how to pick ‘em,” she said.
“How was I supposed to know the bastard was gonna drop me in all this?”
“By now, Spider, you should just be immediately suspicious of pretty much anyone you meet, I reckon. It’s like everyone who meets you turns out to be trouble in some way. Have you noticed?”
“Yeah,” he said, and managed a rueful smile, which Iris shared.
“So you are in fact out of a job.”
“Out on my fat arse, yes.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“How should I know?”
“Just a question. Trying to get you focused on what’s important.”
“I don’t even know where to begin”
Iris nodded. “I’ll alert DOTAS about this Kali. It went futureward, right?”
“Yes. At least ten thousand years.”
“Okay. No worries. We’ll set up an amber alert and start looking for the children, you know, just in case.”
“He’ll deny everything.”
“They all do. But he can’t deny reality. All DOTAS has to do is blip back a few days in ghost mode, and behold, there it is, the machine itself, in the garage, and Mr. Patel looking all guilty and remorseful, etc. etc. in front of the damn thing.”
Spider was dismayed at the image Iris had painted. He imagined the photo of Patel and Vijay standing in front of Kali, having finished the build, looking all rugged and tough, all “Look at what we made, here!” And Spider, surprising himself, felt a strange urge to defend Patel. Yes, the guy was a criminal, and yes, he’d built a machine way too powerful for its own good, one that could be used as a weapon, and yes, he’d been criminally irresponsible regarding his own and someone else’s child. Sure, there was all of that. But Spider did kind of like Patel. Despite everything. Not that he would warn Patel that the Feds were coming to bust his chops. It was more that he understood the guy, at least a bit. Recognized things in Patel that he saw in himself.
“Never good when children are involved.”
“Tell me about it,” Spider said.
Iris slapped his leg. “Yeah, sorry about that.”
“Me, too.” His leg burned where she’d touched him with her warm hand.
They said nothing for a while. Spider yawned. He was knackered. After a few minutes watching the traffic inching back and forth along the jammed-up road in front of them, Iris said, “So what are you gonna do?”
“Dunno.”
“You could go crawling back.”
“Screw that.”
“You need a job, Spider.”
“I’m not going crawling to any bastard.”
“It may have escaped your notice, but the entire world is burning right now. Pretty soon just about nobody’s going to have any kind of job at all.”
“Yeah. Challenging job market. I know.”
“Last
I heard,” Iris said, “the time machine biz is one of the best prospects for employment; at least in the near term.”
“I said—”
“I know what you said. But still.”
“I know.”
“Maybe you could try the competition.”
Spider was about to shoot down that suggestion, too, and tell Iris that Dickhead will have seen to that, poisoning the entire rest of the industry against him — until he remembered: Dickhead was gone. He was reduced to a severed head, now under lock and key at Section Ten. Dickhead wasn’t so mighty or so all powerful anymore. Maybe Spider could get a gig at one of the other time machine firms. If Patel hadn’t already spread the word against him, of course. Still, it was worth a try. “Yeah,” he wound up saying, scratching his face, staring off.
“Meanwhile, I’ll have a chat with some of my mates. Who knows?”
“Iris?”
“I’m saying nothing. Okay? I’m saying nothing at all.”
He stared at her, puzzled, wondering what on Earth she was on about.
They went quiet again. Spider’s mouth tasted foul. “That poor bastard tonight, Stapleton. How soon do you reckon he’ll be autopsied?”
“We put a rush on it, maybe tomorrow, late, maybe.”
He nodded. “I’d love to hear about it.”
“You’ll be the first person I tell.”
“Thanks.”
“Why’d you reckon he was looking for you, of all people?”
“Buggered if I know. I haven’t met him yet.”
“Only you, Spider!” Iris said, slapping his leg again. She got up, stretched, yawned, and shook her head. Spider could see her breath pluming in the cool night air. He stood up too, and walked her back to her car. “You know,” she said after a while, as they walked through dewy grass, “we could probably find you more work, maybe even as a paid consultant. You thought of that?”
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