her. I listen to the Agency com frequency sometimes, helps the business. What about it?”
“I'm looking into her death,” I followed him to the bar and saw that he was pouring a cup of coffee from a glass pot, “Why was she wearing your shirt?”
“Tara and I used to live together, she still came over to borrow my clothes—she liked it, I guess,” He drank from the steaming cup. He took his coffee black, “You want some?”
“Were you and Tara serious?” I took a ceramic cup from the counter and poured the black liquid into it, the red undertone of synthetic.
“Not really, Tara never got serious with anyone. She wasn't the type. At least I gave her a nicer place to live than that dump in the slums,” He took another swig of his coffee before leaning against the bar.
“What was Tara doing here three days ago?” I found a jar of sugar near the coffee pot and poured most of it into my cup.
He narrowed one eye at me as I put the jar back, “What did you say you were again, an Agent?”
“I'm a Private Investigator.”
“Legally you can't investigate anything higher than a class two offense,” He took another drink of his coffee and worked his mouth into a smile that was just as bitter, “Murder is a class three offense.”
“What are you getting at?” I used my two fingers to rub at the bridge of my nose.
“A trade. I'll keep yours if you keep mine,” He scratched at his chin before sipping more coffee.
“Fine.”
“She was coming to me to do business. Trying to blackmail her new boyfriend—some chump with a lot of creds, I guess—but she never came back with the incriminating data core,” He finished his coffee and walked the cup to the sink, giving the garbage chute a wide berth.
“You're a data smuggler then. Who was she trying to extort?” I took a sip of my own cup and found that it was more foul than what I'd paid for earlier.
“She never told me the who or what, just that she would be making some money. She agreed to pay me after she squeezed him, seemed like she was expecting a couple installments.”
“What was the address of her place in the slums?”
He gave me the address and I recorded it into a note file. It was back on level ten and would take me a few hours to get there. I left Devin's apartment and thumbed open my mobile. I made a search of the number I had overheard earlier and found that it was a serial. According to the network, the serial belonged to a cam drone that had been unexpectedly taken offline for maintenance this morning. I used the drone's tag to find its tracking signal. The tracking chip was still active and it took me a moment to run a macro that triangulated it. According to the area's schematics, the drone was a few levels beneath me, inside Gamma sector. Human traffic in Gamma sector is strictly prohibited and the area has been closed for at least a few years. I never could find a reason.
Outside the apartment building, I found the entrance to a service tunnel. Someone had slid a dumpster in front to hide it. If Devin was using this place regularly, I suspected he had already hacked the keypad open. I tried all zeros and the hatch swung on its hinges.
It took me almost an hour to find my way through the service tunnel. While I was sure that Devin had been through it, I couldn't find any obvious path. I had the tracking chip signal to follow and at intersections in the network of tunnels I used the fingers on my cybernetic hand to gouge scores showing what direction I had taken.
The exit hatch came out in a rectangular cement room where one wall was a flapping sheet of tattered plastic. Behind the sheet, I found that I was on the top floor of some building that overlooked the city. From the ledge, the forgotten sector laid out before me. Empty highways twisted and wove like a braid of pavement around the clusters of crumbling buildings. Whole shopping centers stood unused, their windows like empty black eyes and doors like dead gaping mouths. The streetlights continued to burn, showing the dead city in a jaundice glow, the fingers of long shadows spilling into the street.
The room I had entered had been lived in, but it seemed only a little. Here and there were discarded food boxes and wrappers. In the corner was a torn sleeping bag and a battery powered lamp on a small square table. I suspected this was where Devin came to hide out when his trade got him in trouble, either with the Agents or the owners of the information he stole.
A steel door in the corner had been chained shut, but my arm twisted the links until they strained and popped, the length of chain tinkling to the floor. The next room was a work area it seemed, and like the room before it, the side wall was missing, save sheets of opaque plastic. Desks stood against the opposite wall, many of which strewn with screen projectors and cameras and cables. I found the cam drone on a small table to itself, neatly disassembled like a dissected insect—it's panels and components spread along the table's length. At the robot's core, the camera itself had been lifted out and placed in the forefront, long colored wire still connected it to the power source like an eyeball dangling from a socket.
The panel on the camera had actually been cut with a torch and the data core removed. The core itself was a card of diodes and chips that I found plugged into an adapter, connected to a screen. I powered the screen on and started scanning through frames of video. A large section of data was missing in the center of the camera's footage. The time stamp was marked twenty-three forty-six, one minute before the alarm at my office had been triggered. Checking the log on the tracking chip showed the coordinates for its flightpath went over my office. I searched for the missing frames, but there was no trace of them. Devin had done a better job than I had and I began to wonder whom he had been speaking to on his mobile.
05
The sound that came started like a deep thumping rhythm that reverberated in the cement floor. The glare of a searchlight snapped on, showing through the plastic curtain. It weaved and floated for a moment and the sound became a pulsing roar, a tangible force in the air. Amid the torrent of wind rushing through the open wall, a voice shouted some command, the words lost over the rush of noise.
Gunfire split the air with a cracking discharge and the plastic curtain exploded, huge gaping holes tearing through its surface like stones cast through a silk sheet. Something struck the table and sent carefully laid out parts into my face, a shard of a silicon chip striking my lower lip. I fell onto my belly and covered my head with my hands as the table tipped over and fell on me. A moment later the guns were silent, the echo in my ears continuing to ring. The gaping curtain silhouetted three men holding rifles, threads of steam drifting from the heated barrels. They seemed to be standing in open air, but as they stepped forward into the building a hovering personnel carrier was visible behind them.
It's body was an elongated black lozenge with a rotating disk. The side panel doors were open, showing the platform that they had been standing on. As one of the three gunmen made a signal with two fingers, the hovering vehicle pivoted away, the wake from its stabilizer field kicking dust from the concrete floor.
“Thermal says he's down, but alive,” Tork had a gauze bandage over one eye and a holographic monocle over the other. He was hefting a rifle with a banana clip, white plastic siding along its length, “He's taking cover behind that table.”
Gram stepped beside him and shouldered an identical weapon, steadying the barrel with a cast that was formed to his right hand, “Come on out, Adrian—got something with your name on it!”
His weapon discharged and a handful of rounds tore through the table over my head. I knew he wasn't trying to hit me, probably wanted to have fun with it—watch me die slowly. I put my hands over my head and began to stand, still behind the table. Gram took another potshot that went high past my hand and laughed with a high-pitched wheeze.
I got to my feet and lowered my hands to my waist, “I'm out. What now?”
Rask stepped forward and pushed a hand into Gram's upper arm, “The hell are you doing? This isn't the job—he needs to die.”
<
br /> “He'll get what's coming, don't worry,” Gram gave a tight smile and jabbed the barrel of his weapon in my direction, “Come here and get on your knees.”
I took the few steps and did as he asked, putting my hands back up when prompted, “How did you find me?”
Gram let go of his gun and let it rest on a shoulder strap, “We got called to clean up Devin's mess. He blabbed about the robot. When we found out it was you, we almost did the job for free,” Gram took hold of the hilt of his knife and pulled it from his belt, “Tilt your head back.”
The knife gleamed like a neon light in the glow of the dead city and I knew what he meant to do with it. I tilted my head back as he grabbed me by the hair with his unbroken hand. He brought the knife back to his ear, tensing his muscles and tightening his grip on the taped handle.
The moment he twitched to bring the blade down at me, I clamped my hand over his, jerking my body back to pull him forward. The fiber-steel blade faltered and cleaved through his forearm, the gleaming steel passing through clothing, flesh and bone in a single arc. I pulled the dismembered hand out of my hair and let it fall to floor. His eyes widened and he opened his mouth to scream. I seized his grip on the handle of the knife, turning it over and driving the chisel point into his sternum up to the ragged
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