Xenopath - [Bengal Station 02]

by Eric Brown

  “And?”

  She shrugged. “I dunno. I might’ve found a match. It’s a long shot. Nine months ago, a woman was found lasered in the arboretum on Level Two— in the same way, crossed loop, same weapon. It was in the dead case file.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Dana Mulraney. An off-worlder, from Tourmaline. She’d been on the Station for six months. She was with a lover at the time. I did some checking. Her partner’s still living here.”

  “You plan to question him?”

  “I’m meeting her at four.”

  “I’ll check out Scheering-Lassiter.”

  Kapinsky was shaking her head. “Let’s do this together. I want to see you in action.”

  Uneasy, he nodded. “Fine by me.”

  They left the apartment and took an air-taxi north.

  * * * *

  Five minutes later the taxi decelerated, banked tightly and came in to land outside the Bengal Tiger’s skyball stadium. From the outside, the edifice looked like some corporeal HQ in downtown Manhattan. The imposing matt black polycarbon fa ç ade was inset with a thousand silver viewscreens, which reflected the late afternoon sun in a scintillating array, like so many holo-screens tuned to the same station.

  Vaughan climbed out and stared up at the towering southside of the stadium. He glanced at Kapinsky. “She works here?”

  “You could say that,” she replied. “You heard of Petra Shelenkov?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “You not up on skyball?”

  “Don’t follow sport.”

  “Not even the Tigers?”

  Vaughan sighed, eager to be out of the heat of the sun. “Didn’t know it was compulsory,” he said.

  “Jeez, I thought every citizen on the Station was following them last season. They won the World Championship, you know? Famous last minute victory over Chicago?”

  He shrugged. “So Shelenkov plays skyball.”

  “Star signing from Vladivostok Vampires a couple of seasons ago.”

  Vaughan looked at Kapinsky. “You follow the Tigers?”

  “Me?” she wisecracked. “You’re joking, right? It’s a mug’s game.”

  He stared at her as she set off across the parking lot and entered the dark shadow of the stadium, then followed.

  They flashed their IDs at a security guard and stepped through a revolving door. Kapinsky led the way along a corridor until they came to a steep flight of concrete steps. They climbed, minutes later arriving at the first tier of banked seating.

  Vaughan had never been inside a skyball stadium, and he was surprised at the size of the place. On all four sides, six tiers rose around the central playing area—a great box-like rectangle, demarcated by low-powered lasers, two hundred metres long, seventy wide, and fifty deep. He was reminded of an aquarium, and the way the skyball players darted through the air, like so many polychromatic tropical fish, heightened the effect.

  Kapinsky edged along a row of seats and sat down.

  Vaughan joined her and watched the players practise defensive manoeuvres. They wore power packs and jetted through the air in pursuit of an oval rubber disc, which they struck with shields towards a goal board at each end of the playing area.

  He was surprised at how physical the game was, even in this workout. The players wore padding, but even so the way they rammed each other seemed sufficient to break bones. From time to time a collision resulted in a malfunctioning power pack, and the unfortunate players tumbled from the playing area and landed with a thump on a sprung rubber mat far below.

  They’d been watching for about ten minutes when one of the attacking players, swaddled in a red padded jacket, swooped from the playing area and landed in the aisle a few metres below where they were sitting.

  The woman climbed, unbuckling her helmet and wiping sweat from her face.

  She was a big-boned Slav in her late twenties, blonde hair cropped spiky short, with muscles on her arms and legs like a cartoonist’s caricature of a superhero on steroids.

  She sidestepped along the row of seating below Vaughan and Kapinsky and sat down in front of them. She nodded at Vaughan suspiciously, smiled at Kapinsky. “You wanted to talk to me about Dana, no?”

  Vaughan let Kapinsky do the talking.

  “We think her death might be linked to a case we’re investigating,” she said. “We’re just checking out a few leads.”

  Shelenkov shuttled an ice-blue glance between them. “So who’s the sidekick?”

  “Vaughan,” he said, before Kapinsky could answer for him.

  “You both telepaths, no?”

  He nodded. Kapinsky said, “It’s the best way to get results, darling.”

  “Listen, I don’t want no man fucking with my head, okay?”

  Vaughan held up both hands. “That’s fine by me,” he said, glancing at Kapinsky and killing the beginning of a smile.

  “You don’t mind if I...?” Kapinsky began, indicating her handset.

  “If it’s necessary for the investigation, then okay.”

  Kapinsky tapped her handset and smiled. “This won’t take long. I just want to ask you a few questions.”

  Shelenkov nodded. “Just like the pricks who said they were investigating Dana’s death, and then did fuck all?”

  Kapinsky said, “The cops, they’re stretched a lot of the time, yeah? Haven’t always got time to follow things up. These days, a cop’s lucky to have three days on a murder before it goes in the dead case file.”

  Shelenkov looked none too impressed. “That’s what the bastards told me nine months ago,” she said. “You know what? They asked me half a dozen questions—just six, yes?—then left and never got back to me. We’re talking about a murdered woman, no? They treated her death like a fucking traffic violation.”

  Kapinsky closed her eyes, then opened them and looked at Vaughan. He could see that she’d read something.

  Discreetly—not wanting to anger the skyball giant in the slightest—he pressed the start-up code into his implant and awaited the painful flare of an angry mind at close range.

  It came, rocking him.

  Shelenkov carried an image of her dead lover in her mind like an icon, to which she paid daily devotion: they had been together six years when Dana was murdered, the best six years of Shelenkov’s life, and now—

  Raging pain, a whirlwind of grief so powerful that Vaughan reached out to kill the link.

  Then he read something that stayed his hand.

  He sifted through images of the women together, recollections of conversation. They were in a park on Level One, and Dana was agitated, talking fast, looking around constantly to ensure they were not overheard.

  Vaughan picked the meat of the conversation from Shelenkov’s memory, and knew instantly that whoever had killed Kormier and Travers had also murdered Dana Mulraney.

  “Something’s happening on Mallory,” Mulraney had told her lover. “Something big. Scheering-Lassiter are covering it up, but we’re onto it.”

  The image fragmented; Shelenkov’s memory of the day, the conversation, was imperfect. He scanned deeper, looking for any other recollections of Mulraney’s mentioning Mallory or Scheering-Lassiter.

  Then he had it: Mulraney had told Shelenkov the name of her contact on the colony world.

  He deactivated his implant, and the sudden silence was bliss.

  Kapinsky was following up what she’d read so far, attempting to jog Shelenkov’s memory with careful questions. “Tell me about Dana’s work? She was an environmentalist, wasn’t she?”

  “A xeno-environmentalist. She worked for Eco-Col, monitoring the effect of human habitation on the settled worlds.”

  “And she was posted to Mallory for a while?” Kapinsky asked.

  She nodded, almost winced. “She went to Mallory. She was there just before she was killed. She told me that the government was involved in a cover-up. It had something to do with some animals on Mallory, yes? She was sure she was onto something. And then she was k
illed.”

  “You think there might have been a link?”

  “You know something, I told the cop all about what Dana had said, and he told me he’d look into it. But he did nothing. A couple of days later, they said the case was closed. What was the phrase? Insufficient evidence?”

  Kapinsky said, “You were questioned by a private investigator?”

  Vaughan glanced at Kapinsky, trying not to be impressed. He hadn’t scanned a hint of any private operative.

  “Yes. She was working for someone—she wouldn’t say who. I guessed Eco-Col.” She shrugged. “But she was as useless as the cops. She worked on the case for a month, told me there wasn’t a link to Mallory. You know what she said?”

  Kapinsky nodded. “She told you that Dana was the victim of a motiveless murder.”

  Shelenkov smiled, tears in her eyes. “I don’t know which would be the worse, do you? To have your lover killed for a reason, or for no reason.”

  Vaughan said, “What was the name of the private investigator?”

  The skyball star pulled a face, recollecting, then said, “Something Javinder. Can’t remember her first name.” She looked from Vaughan to Kapinsky, then asked with a note of hope, “You said you were investigating another murder, that it might be linked with Dana’s death?”

  Kapinsky, showing a compassion which surprised Vaughan, reached out and laid fingers on Shelenkov’s big hand. “This is off the record, and goes no further than us three, okay? It looks as if the killings are linked. Dana’s case is reopened. We’ll do our best to nail the killer.”

  Spring came to the tundra of Shelenkov’s Siberian features. She smiled.

  A minute later Kapinsky deactivated her implant. Vaughan noticed that she winced with relief.

  Shelenkov stood and said goodbye. Her smile included Vaughan, this time.

  He watched her elbow her power pack into ignition and rise into the playing area. As if invigorated, she attacked the defensive line-up with a war cry and drove home a goal from short range.

  As they were leaving the stadium, Vaughan asked, “Did you get the name of Dana Mulraney’s contact on Mallory?”

  She looked at him sharply. “No. Nothing... You?”

  “Jenna Larsen,” Vaughan said, unable to suppress a satisfied smile as they left the stadium.

  * * * *

  SEVEN

  SOMETHING FROM A DREAM

  Sukara paced from one end of the lounge to the other, avoiding the sunken sofa, her toes sinking into the plush carpet. Forty-five paces. Next she paced the width of the lounge, from the door to the floor-to-ceiling viewscreen. Twenty paces.

  She stopped with her nose to the viewscreen and stared out at the ocean, glittering in the afternoon light. Then she turned and took in her new apartment, and still it didn’t seem real.

  Two years ago she had been a working girl in Bangkok, living in a tiny cubbyhole no bigger than the sunken sofa.

  Now she was married to the finest man in the world and about to have his daughter—and then this. She smiled to herself, wiping tears from her eyes. Life on Level Ten had been good enough— even though the apartment had been tiny, and the neighbours loud—but this apartment and the life she would lead on Level Two was like something from a dream.

  But best of all was the thought of the child growing inside her. She placed her hands on her swollen belly and felt for movement, something she did constantly now, reassured when she felt the pressure of her baby’s head against the wall of her womb.

  She still found it hard to imagine what it might be like to be a mother—still less that she was actually going to be one. It seemed a thing that happened to other women, not to her. The thought filled her with a happiness such as she’d never experienced before, and at the same time a terrible fear of all the many things that might go wrong. To have Jeff’s child was so wonderful that she felt that such fortune could not be hers: at any moment, fate would take away everything it had given her.

  She banished these depressing thoughts, found her jacket and left the apartment.

  She took the ‘chute to Level One and walked through Himachal Park to her favourite coffee shop overlooking the ocean.

  She sat at a window table, sipped a strong Indian coffee and watched the voidships phase in over the ocean and bank towards the spaceport.

  She fingered the cool silver oval in her pocket and thought about Jeff. She wondered if it was because she once had nothing, and now had everything, that she felt so guilty—or if it was because Jeff had agreed to do a job he didn’t really want to do, so that she could have a big apartment and a rich lifestyle.

  A combination of the two, she thought.

  She hadn’t mentioned it to Jeff last night, but she worried about his new job. Not only because he would be reading minds, which he’d hated doing in the past, but because the job might be dangerous. He would be investigating criminals, murderers, and Sukara didn’t like the idea of that. And if he were doing it all for her...

  She took the mind-shield from her pocket and stared at it.

  What had he said yesterday, when he’d insisted on giving her the shield? That he didn’t want to risk her thoughts being read by competing telepathic investigators?

  Sukara smiled. She guessed that that wasn’t the reason at all. He was afraid, perhaps, of reading her mind, sharing in her past in Bangkok and the life she had led there. Perhaps—and the thought occurred to her suddenly, shockingly—he was afraid of reading that she didn’t love him.

  Well, the only way to reassure him about that would be to get him to turn on his implant, and for her to toss aside the shield—then he would find out what she felt for him. But Jeff wouldn’t agree to that, so she would simply continue to show him that she loved him in the only way she knew how, by being interested in him, in his life, his thoughts and opinions, by simply... loving him.

  She slipped the shield into her pocket, next to her jutting stomach, and finished her coffee.

  She left the coffee shop and made her way back through the park, strolling in the sunlight with all the other rich, well-dressed citizens of the upper levels. It was hard to think of herself as one of these people now—but she was, she told herself. She might feel they were looking at her, wondering what a Level Tenner was doing up here, but there was nothing to distinguish her from any of the other upper-class Thai and Indian women out for a stroll—some of them with babies—this afternoon. They might glance at the big scar that bisected her face, but Sukara had long ago ceased to be self-conscious about that—”long ago” being around the time that Jeff first said he loved her.

  From a Thai market stall she bought some freshly ground spices, spring onions, mushrooms, and an aubergine, then made her way back home. She’d cook Jeff’s favourite tonight—hot green Thai curry—to celebrate their first dinner in the new apartment.

  She caught the downchute to Level Two and walked along the boulevard to Chittapuram, pausing at the observation areas to look out over the ocean. She was almost home when she saw a small Thai girl—nose pressed against the glass—in shorts and a white T-shirt. From behind, with her bare brown limbs and jet black pudding bowl hair style, the girl looked just like Sukara’s sister, Tiger—and she felt a sudden painful kick of longing and grief.

  Tiger had left Sukara and Thailand seven years ago, and Sukara had never again seen her little sister. Just over two years ago, on arriving at Bengal Station, Sukara had learned of Tiger’s death—and learned also that Tiger had known a telepath called Jeff Vaughan.

  It was through Tiger that Sukara first met Jeff, and became involved with the killer he’d been trying to trace at the time.

  If not for Tiger’s death, Sukara knew, she might never have met Jeff Vaughan, would not have everything she had now.

  It was yet another reason to feel guilty.

  She smiled and told herself to grow up, as the kid turned and skipped away from the viewscreen: seen front-on, the girl didn’t look anything at all like Tiger.

  Sukara hu
rried home, thrilled again as she opened the front door and stared around at the dimensions of the apartment. She thought of a child running around the vast lounge, and the image filled her with joy.

  For the next hour she cooked the curry, with plenty of fresh galangal and juniper berries, then steamed a pan of sticky rice.

  She was still in the kitchen, cleaning the workbench, when she realised that Jeff had snuck into the apartment and was watching her.