Paloma

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  But the system couldn’t show him any eyes or any ears, even though the information on the Bixians said they had stupendous hearing and a multilevel sense of touch.

  When he asked the system to show him how the assassins functioned, the holo became a blur of color. The rope-like Bixian whirled so fast that Nyquist couldn’t see what it did.

  Nyquist had to have the system slow down to one-one-hundredth time in order to see what had happened. Prey in the form of a human (which was as tall as the Bixian was long) stood beside the Bixian. The Bixian then started to spin. Its ropelike body, which had previously been smooth, became sharp, with scales—Nyquist didn’t know what other term to use—sticking out like tiny knives. The Bixian whirled and, as it whirled, it also wrapped itself around the victim, crushing it and slicing it in the same movement.

  Nyquist sped up the program, then asked for a view of the aftermath. The typical human victim of a Bixian assassination looked like Paloma—the entire body crushed as if each bone had been broken (often they were) and the skin flayed. Death happened so quickly that it looked like the victim’s skin was intact because the heart had stopped. No blood flowed out of the wounds.

  But Paloma had managed to kill one of the Bixians. How had she done that? These things moved too quickly for the human eye to see.

  Had she had some kind of warning? He got no sense of it from the security vid, and there had been nothing on the body itself.

  He kept the holo up in this office, the fake victim curled on the floor and the deadly Bixian still in attack posture with all scales extended outward. Then he went back to the report from the techs.

  The techs said that Bixian assassinations were rare on the Moon and Bixians themselves almost never came here. Which was why their DNA hadn’t been programmed into the security system at the apartment complex. They had been identified as biochemical goo because of the toxic makeup of their skin.

  Any Bixian that traveled from one point to another should have left a slime trail, and there was none. The techs went through the interior and the exterior of the building and found nothing, leading them to believe that the Bixians had an accomplice—someone or something that had carried them into the building.

  Nyquist felt his breath catch. Paloma had returned to the building with shopping bags, but those bags were never found. He peered at the holo, and asked the system to show him how small Bixians could get.

  The Bixian image curled itself into a ball that looked solid. It was about the size of a human head.

  Something that size could fit into one of the shopping bags.

  A wounded Bixian? Who had carried it out? And why?

  Nyquist leaned back. A wounded Bixian would have triggered the security alarms. When those went off and the building shut down, residents were ordered to evacuate. They had maybe three minutes to leave.

  He returned to the security vid.

  He’d been looking at Paloma’s arrival, not at the evacuation. The vid seemed to have been tampered with for the arrival, but that might have just been some kind of blip that momentarily halted the system. If the Bixians had known that their own DNA would set off the biochemical triggers, then their slime trail would have done it. The moment they touched Paloma, their DNA would have been in the air. They knew they only had minutes to get out of the building.

  They would have had a plan for this, just like they would have had a plan for a building with much less security.

  He scanned the security vid, looking for the exits, looking at the evacuees.

  He almost missed it. A man, at the edge of the crowd coming out of the stairwell, his body blocked by nearly a dozen panicked people. As he went through the front door, the security vids caught the edges of a bag in his right hand. Then he turned and headed across the lawn, the vid catching a full image of a bag in his left.

  Nyquist backed the vid up and froze it on the partial image of the man’s face.

  “Gotcha,” Nyquist whispered, then instructed the reconstruct program to build an image of the man’s face.

  Fifty-two

  Flint had finally grown tired of cold pizza. His stomach rebelled at the richness and he had to download an automatic calmer so that he wouldn’t get ill. The problem was that he needed to nibble while he worked, just to stay awake. He found some real apples, clearly grown in the greenhouses outside the dome, and chewed on one while he continued searching the files.

  He had no idea how late it was. He had no idea that offices could be so quiet. He figured in a law firm like this one, someone would arrive early. So far, no one had. The ‘bots had cleaned the place, and now all the noises had ceased.

  It was just him, the silence, and the files Paloma had left him.

  He could make a few assumptions about the modern files. Many of them came from Paloma’s days as a Tracker and Retrieval Artist for the firm. She copied her own files into this, with notes about things happening in the law firm.

  Claudius Wagner’s name was prominent in these files. She kept an eye on him and what he did. She also kept copious notes on Environmental Systems Incorporated, although she didn’t have access to most of their files any longer.

  Then, about four years before she retired as a Retrieval Artist, the subheadings for the files changed. That was when IG became one of the headings, and when Claudius’s name stopped being so prominent.

  At least, Flint assumed Claudius stopped being prominent. It was impossible to tell without going through all the files. But Justinian was the one who featured prominently in the later files, and from what Flint could tell, Justinian was as ruthless as his mother had been. Justinian often advised clients to do something which cost lives, giving the appearance of solving a problem when the problem was unsolvable.

  Ironically, Claudius, whom Flint had always assumed was the megalomaniac, never quite gave advice that put humans in harm’s way. He seemed to have no compunction about alien or native deaths, however, and often found ways to cover a company’s complicity in native deaths on new worlds.

  That was why ESI kept WSX after Lucianna Wagner became Paloma. Because Claudius saved them countless times. He was the one who advised them to expand their in-house Disappearance program, so that middle managers, opening new projects in poorly explored worlds, felt safe.

  The other addition Claudius made to ESI’s Disappearance Service was a lump-sum severance pay to the unfortunate employee. Unlike most Disappeareds, ESI’s Disappeareds had money to go with their new identities.

  Flint let out a small breath and kept searching. Finally, he gave up and looked at Bixian assassinations, just because he needed to get out of the files for a while.

  What he found astonished him. Not the violence with which the Bixians killed, but the relentlessness with which they pursued their contracts.

  Essentially, anyone targeted for Bixian assassination remained a target until the assassination was successful.

  Nothing Paloma could have done would have ever taken the curse off her ship. She had to hide from the assassins all her life.

  Flint leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. Why, then, had they caught up to her now? She’d been successful in avoiding them for decades. If anything, she was less visible than she had been.

  And she’d had warning. The Bixians did not give warning. So someone had tipped her off. But who?

  The same person who had given her the files after she quit being a Retrieval Artist?

  IG. Of course. IG stood for her other son, Ignatius. The first Wagner of Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor whom Flint had met.

  Flint hadn’t been impressed. Ignatius, the one who’d tried to hire him a few years ago. When Flint had told Paloma, she hadn’t mentioned that Ignatius was her son. Instead, she’d said, He was never the brightest Wagner. But that should mean nothing. Most of the Wagners are geniuses, especially with multicultural law. Ignatius is merely brilliant.

  Back then, Flint remembered, there had been some kind of power struggle at WSX, and Ignatius hadn’t been
pleased with the way the firm was going.

  The firm, under the leadership of his brother, Justinian.

  Claudius no longer seemed to have a hand in anything.

  Had he disappeared as well?

  Flint found no evidence of that, but that didn’t mean anything. There was so much evidence of other crimes, of horrible, nasty cover-ups, that he felt like he was drowning in information.

  He needed a focus.

  He needed to start with the very last file added to the cache in the Lost Seas. He would read that file all the way through and see if it held any clues.

  Then he would watch Paloma’s holo will again, and see if she made a reference to that old file, something he might understand now.

  He wasn’t sure what else to do.

  Fifty-three

  It didn’t take Nyquist long to find out the identity of the man who had carried the Bixian assassin out of Paloma’s building. He was Ken McKinnon, a small-time criminal who had a long list of arrests and few convictions. Often he performed jobs like the one he had done for the assassins, carrying a bag, opening a door, driving an aircar.

  He was usually so far removed from the crime that pinning anything on him was difficult. Even this one would be hard to prove. He could say that he found the bags in the elevator or near the stairs and decided to take them out of the building.

  At worse, he’d be convicted of petty theft, and that was only if the owner of the bags had brought charges. She wouldn’t, of course, since she was dead.

  Nyquist got up, poured himself more coffee from the communal pot in the hallway—the good stuff that DeRicci had brought was long since gone—and returned to his office. The exhaustion he had felt earlier had vanished. He wasn’t sure if he had gotten his second wind or if he had simply gone beyond exhaustion. All he knew was that he felt good for the first time in hours.

  Maybe that was because the pieces were falling into place.

  Not that he was happy with all the pieces. When he had discovered that McKinnon was his mystery man, Nyquist also learned that McKinnon’s file had been accessed that afternoon.

  Seemed that the street cops had been called to a loud and violent altercation near McKinnon’s apartment. They arrived to find the walls spattered with blood, some biochemical goo on the ground, and McKinnon propped up against the wall, his bones shattered, two bags crumpled at his side.

  The biochemical goo turned out to be some kind of trail, and it led out of the building. The techs had traced it to the street, but didn’t know what it was.

  Nyquist had the computer compare the information the McKinnon techs had picked up on the goo with the information his techs had brought back: the substance was the same.

  The Bixian assassins had killed McKinnon, then slithered to the street where, presumably, they had some kind of vehicle waiting.

  Nyquist would never know for sure, since McKinnon’s building had no security systems. McKinnon’s links had failed the moment the Bixians had touched him, and, from what little the techs had gathered, the Bixians had touched him through the bags. He had already deleted any reference in his own links as to what he had done that morning; apparently, the Bixians had waited until he completed that task before taking him out.

  This had all happened twelve hours earlier. Nyquist sent street cops and Space Traffic after any Bixians in Armstrong (none were registered, which was not a surprise), but he had no hope they’d be found. They had probably caught the first shuttle off the Moon, or taken their own vehicle, whatever that was, out of the port. He would have Space Traffic trace this, but he doubted they’d find much.

  The assassins were gone, and the man who had assisted them dead. Someone had to have hired them, though, and for a specific reason.

  Nyquist started a search of alien legal databases to see if there was any precedent for getting the Bixian assassins’ guild to admit who had paid them to put a curse on someone.

  Paloma’s curse had existed for a long time, but the Bixians had only caught up with her recently. Maybe if Nyquist figured out why, he would know who was behind the killings.

  He reached for more coffee when a message pinged through his links. He got a recorded image of one of the techs, telling him that the bomb placed in the Dove had been set months ago by Paloma herself. The bomb had a fail-safe protecting two people from harm; one was Paloma and the other was Miles Flint. Anyone who entered the ship without Paloma or Flint beside them would die.

  He shuddered, the explosion as real to him as if it had happened moments ago. He wiped at his face, surprised to find it smooth and not coated with blood.

  He made himself take a deep breath. Obviously, Flint had nothing to do with the bombing. He probably hadn’t even known the bomb existed.

  Assassins killing Paloma, Paloma setting the bomb. Both things that Nyquist had suspected Flint of probably had nothing to do with him. Certainly the charges behind the warrant were no longer valid.

  Nyquist probably should find Flint and talk with him, but finding him would prove difficult as long as there was a warrant. Nyquist sent an order through the regular links, revoking the warrant and clearing Flint of all charges. Nyquist also expunged the record, so that no one would consider Flint a criminal.

  Nyquist felt a bit of relief, not just because of DeRicci and the potential conflict between him and her old partner, but also because he hadn’t completely misjudged Flint. He’d trusted the man from the moment they’d met, then felt betrayed by him during the bombing.

  Now maybe he could use Flint’s first-rate mind and his knowledge of Paloma to help him figure out who killed her.

  But first, he wanted to see the man who had first pointed the finger at Flint.

  Nyquist wanted to talk to Justinian Wagner.

  Fifty-four

  Van Alen had arrived with breakfast. She brought a veritable feast—some kind of fake-egg dish, doctored to taste like the real thing, a cheese-and-rice dish, a fruit salad, and pastries of every type. She set the food on the conference table near the windows. She did not say hello.

  Flint shut down the screen the moment she walked in, and encrypted it so that only he could open it. Then he apologized to her for the mess near the desk.

  “I don’t really care,” she said. “I have celebration food.”

  “It looks like breakfast to me,” Flint said.

  “All right.” She grinned. “It’s a cross between breakfast and celebration food.”

  “You found out why I’m searching these files,” he said.

  “I found out that you are no longer under suspicion of anything. The warrant’s not only been lifted, but it’s been expunged. The police department sent me notification during my three-hours of shut-eye. I suspect the expunging is due to one of two things: one, the detective in charge knows he overreacted, or two, the entire department is afraid of me. I prefer to believe that it’s two, but you can choose whichever option you like, so long as you don’t contradict me.”

  Flint grinned. “I won’t.”

  “See?” she said, sitting down. “Celebration news.”

  “And I’ve been up all night. Let me shower before I join you.” Flint didn’t go near the table, not yet anyway. “Trust me, you’ll appreciate it.”

  “I trust you,” she said, as Flint went into the bathroom.

  He wasn’t sure how he felt about the lifted warrant. It certainly made his life easier—he could work in his office now or in the Emmeline—but on the other hand, it might just be a ruse to get him back into the open.

  On the third hand (the alien example, as DeRicci used to say), the expunging was a way to let him know that they wouldn’t reissue the warrant, at least on the bombing. Maybe on Paloma’s murder, but not on the bombing.

  Van Alen’s interruption was timely. He’d planned to shower before she arrived, but he’d gotten caught up in the work and had forgotten to look at the time. He’d read through the files, saw more work for ESI, including some kind of cryptic mention to a past lawsuit con
nected with the dome, and signs of confusion about this from Justinian. Flint had found no mention of Claudius at all.

  The last file placed into the Lost Seas had contained all sorts of internal memos about keeping the ESI account.

  Flint couldn’t see why ESI was thinking of leaving.

  He also watched the hologram again. Paloma had looked tired and, if it were possible, scared. Her apologies seemed real enough, but there was something in her gaze, something he had missed earlier—a calculation or maybe a determination, something that was directed at him, and yet beyond him, as if she expected him to do something she hadn’t quite explained.

  He wondered if he was too tired to know what that something was, or if he still didn’t have enough information.

  He also wondered if he had made up the entire look, if his interpretation was based on his new knowledge of Paloma, and not on anything that was actually there.

  Flint dressed in the clothes that Van Alen had brought him the night before. The shower and the change of clothing had refreshed him. The fruit salad that Van Alen brought and those pastries—he couldn’t face the egg or cheese thing—helped revive him as well.

  He was just finishing the fruit when Van Alen’s assistant poked her head in the door.

  “May I speak to you alone?” she asked Van Alen.

  Van Alen didn’t even look up from her meal. She was wearing a sedate suit this morning, all black, with pants covering her long and spectacular legs. She looked even more professional than she had the day before.

  “How about sending the information along a secure link?” she asked the assistant.

  “I kinda wanted to see your reaction,” the assistant said.