by Devin Hanson
“Yeah, well, my whole department has standing orders to find you and bring you in. Top priority.”
Min’s stomach growled. He didn’t want to hear this yet. “What for?”
“If you had checked your messages, you’d know. Min, the gweilo you sent me that photo of? He was a marshal.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Was being the operative term,” Enrique continued. “He had left the service a few years back, but still did odd jobs as a contractor. There are a lot of people who want to know why he was in your flat with a dozen machinegun slugs in his chest.”
“What did Marianne say?”
“That the bounty hunter broad?”
Min grunted affirmative.
“She’s shut up tighter than a clam. Won’t say a word. I think she’s in surgery now.”
“Probably for the best. For what it’s worth, I wasn’t the one who greased the gweilo. What’d you find out about him?”
“His name was Yahzu Hong. There are sealed records under his name, standard procedure for contract work. The last one was early yesterday evening.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Min cursed. “Do you believe me now, Enrique?”
“It could be a coincidence,” Enrique started.
“Ah, that’s bullshit. You don’t even believe that yourself.”
“There’s no proof here, Min! I admit, it seems very suspicious. But that’s not good enough.”
“I need to know who Hong’s handler was. Who signed the order.”
“I told you already. The record is sealed. Encrypted. I’d need the digital key to get in.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it? Just ‘okay’? You’re giving up?”
“Who said anything about giving up? You need the key, so go get it.”
“Look, Min, you don’t understand–”
“You’re right. I don’t understand. You’re the computer guy, make it happen!”
“I can’t just–”
“Call me back when you have something.”
Min hung up on Enrique’s continued protests. The software technician had a mousey demeanor, but he was brilliant. If anyone could figure it out, it was him. In the meantime, though, Min needed to figure out what he was going to do next.
As he slipped back into the crowd and started looking for a place to eat, he went over what he knew. Anton Engel and his crew had kidnapped the girls. Min had visited the Redstone Lounge, then immediately had been discouraged from continuing the investigation. That had been fast work, and it screamed complicity from someone at the Redstone. Only Grendal Crade’s cooperation kept her from leading his list of suspects.
That left him with Anton and his crew, minus Lucien Talbot. Unknown to him was the person, or persons, in the marshals who had sent Marianne and Yahzu after him. Enrique was chasing down the marshal angle. Min felt a brief pang of guilt over browbeating Enrique into helping him. In all likelihood, Enrique was going to be in danger because he was helping Min. Well, they all had to make sacrifices.
That left Min with Anton.
The background summary on Anton gave him an address here in Olympus Cluster. It was unlikely Anton would be home, but it was worth looking into. It wasn’t like Min had any other options.
Anton’s apartment block was one of the oldest areas on Olympus. The few gweilo Min saw in passing had to hunch far over to keep from knocking their heads on the ceiling.
The block hadn’t originally been designed to cater to xenophobes, just people of Min’s height. But the area seemed to attract people who thought themselves superior. It was irrational nonsense in Min’s mind. Everyone would eventually develop the drawn-out physique; if not them, then their children, or their children’s children. Disliking someone because of generations of living on Mars was pure idiocy. That said, people were always looking for something to hate, and physical differences were something even the least intelligent could latch onto.
Min found he was attracting little attention. If anyone saw and recognized the slick ablative armor sticking out of his collar and sleeves, nobody found it worthy of comment.
Anton’s apartment, when Min finally located it, looked just as run-down as the others in the no-longer-wealthy neighborhood. The door was recycled and didn’t match the style of the external façade. It had been built for a taller frame, and someone had taken a hacksaw to it in order to get it to fit. The jamb had been replaced, probably at the same time the door had been, and the locking mechanism was poorly seated.
Min glanced up and down the hall to verify there wasn’t anyone loitering nearby who might take offense, then dropped a shoulder and rammed the door open. The door popped off the bottom hinge and twisted open.
Moving carefully, Min stepped into Anton’s apartment with his pistol in his hand. The air was stale with unwashed clothes and molding yeast. At one point, this had probably been a very nice apartment. It was bigger than Min’s flat, almost wastefully so.
Anton had put an entertainment deck on one wall and had set up a collection of mismatched sofas and easy chairs in a semicircle around it. Beyond the large front room, hallways led deeper into the apartment, cloaked in gloomy half-light.
“Anyone home?” Min called.
Silence was the only reply. Min took a moment to prop the door back into place. It was barely functional as a door, but looked good enough that a passerby wouldn’t comment on it. Even in this run-down neighborhood, a resident might call the police to report a break in if they saw a door hanging half-open on one hinge.
Min wrinkled his nose at the smell. In the kitchen, he found the counters littered with dishes, and mold grew in lively shades of green and blue. Whatever he was looking for, he wouldn’t find it here.
It was hard to say how long Anton had been away. There was enough mold to suggest at least a week of absence. The clothes in the bedroom were of decent quality, with a number of empty hangers. Anton had packed for a long trip, and in some haste.
Min frowned, poking through the strewn debris in the bedroom. The missing clothes implied the girls were being held somewhere too distant from Olympus for Anton to return home at night. Min had assumed the girls had been kidnapped on impulse, but perhaps it had been more planned out. Or maybe Anton had packed his bags after kidnapping the girls.
Min shook his head. He didn’t have enough data to build a story line yet. He left the bedroom behind and gave himself a tour of the apartment. If this were a movie, he would have found a wall covered in segments of string and news clippings. Or maybe a journal with snapshots of his previous victims. Or a tram receipt lying on a counter.
There was nothing. Or at least, Min thought sourly, nothing he had the wit to decipher. Some marshals excelled at deriving meaning from insignificance and building it into a reliable lead. Min wasn’t one of them.
Still, he was loath to leave the apartment without something to forward his investigation. Min returned to the front room and gingerly sat on the edge of the sofa. Everything in the apartment was garbage except for the entertainment console. In fact, it was by far the most valuable thing in the apartment, perhaps even including the apartment itself.
Min cast around and found the remote lying under a heap of empty food wrappers. He turned the console on and flipped through the menus until he found a list of the most recent things Anton had looked at. The top item on the list was a promotional video for the Redstone Lounge.
That gave Min pause. Had Aton gone to the Redstone on some other purpose? Or had he planned out the kidnapping beforehand? The first option seemed the more reasonable. There was no way to have predicted that Jasmine would pull Angeline into the Redstone on that particular day.
Min scanned through the history, looking for something else of interest. After paging past a few screens of cheap pornography, he found another high-end restaurant, this one in the Elysium Cluster. Campos del Cielo specialized in imports like the Redstone, and had an equally expensive menu.
Min glanced around the apar
tment again. It didn’t make sense that someone would live in such a dump and still visit such expensive restaurants, unless it was on business.
He sighed and leaned his head back. What did two restaurants in two different clusters have in common? He really didn’t want to go to Elysium just to wander around a restaurant and ask the manager a few vague questions. He needed something solid to go on.
The light changed in the room, pulling Min’s eyes to the console. The screen blanked and a number appeared on the screen. Caller ID identified the man as Yaling Ha.
“Anton, you motherless fuck. Take my call! I know you’re home. I don’t know what you’re doing back from Acheron, but if you’ve finished another job, then you had better pay me first this time.”
Min pushed accept on the remote and the screen clarified to show Yaling Ha. He was an old gweilo, hunched and frail-looking.
“Good morning,” Min greeted him.
“Who are you? Where is Anton?”
Min smiled pleasantly. “I was hoping you’d tell me.”
“I don’t know who you are, but Anton owed me money first. You can take your cut after he pays me off in full.”
“You can have his money,” Min shrugged. “I’m just interested in tracking him down.”
“What are you, a cop? What the hell would I tell you for?”
Min shrugged. “I can pay for the information.”
Yaling scowled at him.
“A thousand credits,” Min offered. “I just need to talk to him.” He held up his tablet so the console could pick it up. “I’ll wire you the credits right now. Easiest payday you’ve ever had.”
“Jesus. You with Esteres?”
“Yes.” Min bluffed.
Yaling shook his head. “I don’t know what Anton’s got into. I’m just his bookie trying to collect what he owes me.”
Min nodded, keeping his pleasant smile fixed on his face. His mind raced, trying to follow the thread of the lie. How much to say? “Like I said. I’m just trying to find him.” Min decided to twist the hook a bit. “You aren’t hiding him from me, are you?”
“No! No, I’m not.” Yaling’s face paled.
“Good. You want these credits or not?” Min tried not to smile at Yaling’s discomfiture. Whoever this Esteres fellow was, he could scare Yaling with just his name.
“Yes. I mean, I don’t know where he is exactly. If he’s not in Acheron, he might be out collecting.”
“Where would he be in Acheron?”
“Probably with Dr. Lenbroke… wait a minute. You’re not with Esteres, are you?”
“Of course I am.”
“Oh no. No, no. Fuck that. I’m not telling you anything. Not for all the credits on Mars.” The line went dead.
“Shit.”
Min glared at the blank screen, then cracked a grin. Yaling might have figured out he wasn’t with Esteres, but Min had gotten what he had come for. He had two leads to chase down now. Esteres, whoever he or she was, and this Dr. Lenbroke.
Now he had to get to Acheron Cluster. Things were looking up.
Min’s tablet buzzed and he glanced down at it to find Enrique’s number. That was fast work, even for Enrique. He picked up.
“Hey man, what’s the news?”
“I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing, but you need to get out of there, right now!”
“What? Slow down, mate. What’re you talking about?”
“Damn it, Min! You need to go!”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m going.” Min swung off the sofa and ran over to the ruined front door to Anton’s flat. “Alright, I’m moving. What’s happening?”
“They had an AI watching the network streams, searching for your voice pattern. They got a hit a minute ago and sent a response team.”
Min eased the door open and stuck his head outside. The hallway was empty. He stepped out and jogged toward the end of the hallway. “I’m assuming you’re scrambling this call?”
“I’m not an idiot,” Enrique snapped. “Unlike some others I could mention.”
“That’s low.”
Min reached the corner and peered around it. The halls were empty in both directions. That was strange. He picked a direction at random and ran.
“Gotcha!” Enrique said. “Wait! Stop. Go back the other way. Hurry!”
Min skidded to a halt and ran back the way he had come. Following Enrique’s prompts, he ran deeper into the neighborhood. After a few minutes of running, he left the residential blocks behind and entered into raw, unfinished tunnels.
When the clusters were mined out, the boring machines had sometimes found rich mineral veins that were worth following, even though the cluster’s floor plan didn’t have a use for the tunnels. Every cluster had them, in greater or lesser extent. Most clusters eventually found some use for the space, but for whatever reason, Olympus had never expanded into these tunnels.
“Good, now wait.”
Min wrapped his arms around himself. The tunnels weren’t insulated or heated, and the temperature was around freezing at this depth. “For how long?”
“Until the search parties give up. I don’t know how long that will take, but you better get comfortable.”
“Right. Hey, Enrique. Thanks for saving my ass back there.”
“You’re welcome. Being your friend is hard work sometimes.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. On the plus side, I think I found a new lead.” Min described his conversation with Yaling. “If you’ve got a moment, look into those names and see what you can find.”
Enrique sighed. “I don’t know, Min. You ever think about just letting this case slide? Look at you. You’re on the run from the marshals, your apartment is shot up, and you’re hiding in an unfinished mine drift. As life choices go, you have to admit, this one is going poorly for you.”
“I’ll think about it. In the meantime, it’d be interesting to know who wanted to have me found so badly,” Min said and ended the call.
Enrique might have a point, he thought. He settled down against the rough-hewn wall and tucked his legs up to his chest and hugged his knees. Thing were going poorly for him, there wasn’t much he could say to argue against that.
So why did he feel so alive?
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Handwriting sample from a 2nd grade student, circa 2123.
I wish all the wujin were gone.
My mama says that Jenna has gone to heaven.
I do not know if there is a heaven, but I hope there is.
Because then there would be a hell, and all the wujin would go there.
When I grow up, I want to be a police man so I can find my sister.
It was the seventh day of Angeline’s imprisonment. When the lights came on in the morning, she was already awake and slowly stretching out muscles that had stiffened overnight. She had never been so sore in her life. Even when she had fallen off the escalator and broken her arm it hadn’t hurt as much. The soreness was a different kind of hurt though. Her broken arm had been a stabbing pain and felt like someone ramming red-hot nails through her skin to the bone beneath. Her pain this morning had a wholesome throb to it. She knew muscles had to be torn down and rebuilt before they would grow stronger, but she wished there was an easier way to do it.
Two cages over, Adora woke and rolled out of her cot with a limber ease and started going through her own stretches. Angeline watched her, envious of the other girl’s fitness. She had never had much interest in playing sports in school, and now she wished she had.
With her stretches completed, Angeline didn’t have anything else to do. She was ravenously hungry, but the jailer had not yet returned to give them their food and water for the day. Her stomach growled and she settled down on her cot to wait.
Next to Angeline, Jasmine rolled over in her cot, and Angeline caught a glimpse of the girl’s face. Jasmine had been crying. Her cheeks were blotchy, her eyes red. Angeline opened her mouth to ask Jasmine what was wrong then shut it again. To hell
with Jasmine. She was probably just feeling sorry for herself.
Time was impossible to track. Without some reference to go on, she had no idea what time it was. For all she knew, the lights would go out at noon and they would sleep through the afternoon and spend all night awake. The best way they had to keep track of time was their own stomachs and the usually regular visits of the jailer.
Angeline paced her cage for a while, then returned to her cot to lie down again. She played with the I.V. catheter in her arm then forced herself stop touching it. Still the jailer didn’t return. To help take her mind off her empty stomach, she went through the motions of keeping herself clean, taking the time to give her long hair a good cleansing.
Jasmine still had not gotten out of her cot. She had her blanket pulled up over her face, with only the top of her head showing. Angeline stared at Jasmine, hating her. How had she ever considered Jasmine to be her friend?
Finally the door swung open and the jailer walked in. He wasn’t pushing his usual cart, though, and after a moment, Anton followed him through the door.
Seeing Anton again brought a welter of emotion. In a way, he was one of her only tangible links to her old life, before the cage. He was also the embodiment of the cruel fate that had befallen her.
Anton pointed a finger at her. “You’re first. Don’t fight me, or I’ll beat you bloody, just for fun.”
Angeline nodded meekly and turned, holding her wrists together behind her back. The cage gate opened, and she felt Anton’s rough hands seize her wrists painfully, then the cold plastic of the zip tie cinched tight. Angeline stumbled as Anton hauled her around by her arm and shoved her toward the gate. She managed to catch her balance before she fell. As she was marched from the room, she saw Jasmine staring wide-eyed at her.
It wasn’t until they reached the lab and Anton was strapping her to the gurney that she realized Jasmine hadn’t been looking at her, she had been staring longingly at Anton. The thought turned her stomach. What was wrong with Jasmine, anyway?