by Piers Platt
“Who were they?” Paisen asked.
“Inmates, just like us,” Grip told her. “Mostly folks with long sentences. They got no chance of parole, so why bother hauling scrap? Better to just live out here on their own. They steal from us, and scavenge what they can from the city. Best to avoid them – fighting will get your sentence extended. This is their territory, and they feel like everything we haul out is something they might have wanted to use.”
“Why did they break the sled?”
Grip shrugged. “To piss us off. Stops us from hauling our scrap back to the compound, and costs the prison company money to repair it. Be happy that’s all they did.”
“How many of them are there?” Paisen asked.
“I dunno. Couple hundred, I think. They roam in gangs, mostly. The biggest – and nastiest – are the Warriors. Stay away from sector J22.”
“Warriors?”
“Yeah, they’re soldiers, or used to be. Mercenaries. Rumor is they herded a whole town’s worth of people into an air transport after a battle, and then programmed it to take a nose-dive into the ocean. The whole platoon got brought up on war crimes, and sent here, all twelve of them. They’re the most dangerous gang out there, so over the years they’ve attracted some followers who tag along with them for security.”
“Were those Warriors today?”
“The ones that smashed Tina? No. You’ll know Warriors by the red tattoo on their cheek, of an animal skull. The original ones have it, at least – they don’t let the new recruits get tattooed. If those had been Warriors, we’d be dead – they would have set fire to the building, then killed us when we tried to come out, just for fun. They might have let you live, though – they usually keep the women alive.” Grip cleared his throat to cover the awkward silence. “Anyway, if we see Warriors, we run.”
11
Rath and Beauceron met the following day at a conferencing facility downtown, where Beauceron reserved a small meeting room with a computer terminal and a display board. He showed up several minutes early, but Rath was already there, waiting.
“You’re early,” Beauceron noted, by way of greeting. “I assume you came early to make sure there wasn’t a Tactical Team waiting to arrest you?”
Rath gave him a lopsided grin. “Wouldn’t you be worried, if our roles were reversed?”
Beauceron nodded. “I don’t trust you either, not yet. That’s why I decided you’re going to wear this.” He handed Rath an ankle bracelet.
Rath took it, staring at it suspiciously. “And this is …?”
“A tracker cuff, similar to the ones parolees wear upon leaving prison. I want to know where you are at all times. That way, if you ever change your mind about turning yourself in, I can still find you.”
Rath shook his head, setting the bracelet on the desk. “No way. You don’t know the lengths I just went to in order to remove the trackers the Guild put in me.”
“Let’s get this straight,” Beauceron said. “I could go to jail for helping you – right now, I’m failing to turn you in, and that’s a crime. I’m not doing it to help you find your friend, or ease your guilty conscience, or anything like that. The only reason I haven’t turned you in already is that helping you right now gives me a chance – slim though it may be – at helping Interstellar Police make progress against the Guild. But you’re going to jail at the end of all this, regardless of what happens with the Guild. So you wear the tracker, or I call the police right now.”
Rath chewed his lip.
My Forge will make short work of this thing if I need to get it off. And if we get separated, and the Guild catches me, it’s not a bad insurance policy to have a cop that knows how to find me.
“Fine. But you need to promise me you won’t share my location with anyone else, ever.”
“Very well,” Beauceron agreed. He watched as Rath buckled the cuff around his right ankle, then checked his holophone that the tracker was active. “Okay, so let’s find your friend, this other contractor that saved you. What do you know about him?”
“Her,” Rath corrected. “She went by ‘Contractor 339’ in the Guild, but her real name is Paisen Oryx. Like me, she completed all fifty kills, then escaped when they tried to kill her. They sent me after her, on a place called Lakeworld, but she disarmed me and then warned me what was going to happen when I reached fifty kills. That was four years ago. I went back to Lakeworld and spent two weeks looking for her, but she never showed up.”
“You agreed to meet four years later?” Beauceron asked. He was scribbling fast in his notebook.
“No,” Rath shook his head. “She took my bracelet – this one is hers.” Rath triggered it, showing Beauceron the glowing 50 symbol. “She was supposed to monitor my bracelet, and head to Lakeworld as soon as I hit fifty.”
“And you’re sure you didn’t just miss her?”
Rath pulled the computer keyboard over and opened up the browser, pulling up the video feed from the micro-drone he had left at the spillway. Beauceron leaned across the desk to get a better look.
“This is a live feed of the place we were supposed to meet,” Rath said. “I’ve been checking it religiously since I left, but haven’t seen anyone.”
Beauceron stood up and walked over to the display board, activating it with a finger tap. “Okay, she’s not where you agreed to meet, so we have to determine the other possibilities. Where else could she be, in other words. Might she have forgotten about your rendezvous?” He scrawled several words on the board.
“No,” Rath shook his head.
“Could she have changed her mind?”
Rath frowned. “I doubt it. I mean, it’s possible, a lot can happen in four years. But she seemed pretty adamant. I don’t much care what happens to the Guild, as long as they leave me alone. But Paisen wants revenge – she wants her money. And I watched her stab herself multiple times, just to make it seem as if we had fought each other. She’s a very motivated woman.”
“Okay,” Beauceron agreed. On the board, he crossed out the words Forgot and Changed Mind. “Let’s assume that she’s still motivated. That means something is preventing her from meeting you there.”
“You think the Guild got her?” Rath asked. He felt a weight settle in his stomach.
“Possibly, yes,” Beauceron said. He wrote Guild on the board. “Would they kill her upon capturing her?”
“Yes,” Rath said. “But not right away. The Guild likes to torture escaped contractors, as punishment.”
“In that case, I think our investigation can’t be limited to finding this Paisen Oryx. We should pursue leads about the Guild as well, in case they have captured her. Two lines of inquiry often converge, I’ve found. And that has the benefit of building our evidence file against the Guild, for the time when we decide to take this public.”
“I suppose,” Rath agreed. “But I think chasing down anything directly related to Paisen should be our first priority.”
Beauceron turned back to the board and wrote Dead, next to Guild. “She may have died of other causes, too.”
Rath’s face fell. “She wouldn’t be easy to kill,” he argued. “You haven’t seen her fight.”
Beauceron ignored that comment. “If she is dead, and the body was found, we should be able to find a record of it in the mortuary database. I don’t technically have access anymore, but I know the morgue staff here on Alberon well.”
“Shouldn’t we just assume she’s still alive? This whole thing is pointless otherwise.”
“No,” Beauceron shook his head. “We need to address all of the possibilities. Process of elimination is our best bet.”
“If you say so.” Rath rubbed at his forehead, discouraged. He looked up as Beauceron jotted another word on the board.
“Really? Arrested,” Rath asked.
“Yes, it’s a possibility,” Beauceron confirmed. “Criminals often revert to habit under stress – there’s an excellent chance she continued to kill on her own; freelance, if you will. But she wi
ll have been arrested under an assumed identity, no?”
“Yeah, definitely,” Rath agreed, feeling a hint of hope again. “The Guild shared her cover identities with me, but she wouldn’t be using them anymore, for safety. So she could be literally any female within certain height and weight limits.”
Beauceron pursed his lips. “That does pose a challenge. Still, the police will have arrest records, and they scan all incoming criminals for implants as a matter of course. Would she still have those installed?”
“Almost certainly,” Rath told him. “I do.”
“So it might not be a dead end,” Beauceron said.
“But you can bet the Guild has been keeping their eye on that database, too,” Rath assured him.
“Likely,” Beauceron agreed. “I can’t access those databases anymore, anyway. I mean, I can try, I still have a friend on the force, but … I’d prefer not to go that route unless we have to.”
Beauceron took a seat, staring up at the display board. “Okay, so we need to check the mortuary database, and perhaps the arrests database. Where else could she be?” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “She could have been detained by some other party, or injured ….” he stood again, and wrote Hospitals? on the board. “Interstellar Police can access hospital admittance records, too. I don’t know if they track implants, but they might.”
“The Guild told me her home planet, she might have gone there,” Rath suggested.
“Why?” Beauceron asked.
“I don’t know,” Rath shrugged. “She knows it well, could be that she would feel safer there, be able to keep a low profile more effectively.”
“Would you go back to Tarkis?” Beauceron asked.
Rath considered for a second. “Probably not.”
“Okay,” Beauceron said. “Let’s examine the Guild angle. What do we know about them today?”
“Not much,” Rath sighed. “I told you my story yesterday at the diner, and it sounds like it just confirmed some of your suspicions from your own investigations.”
“Not necessarily – I knew of the recruiting process, but you added a lot. Details about the training planet, the medical staff there, the recruiters, the headquarters staff that run your missions … those are all things IP has suspected for years, but have never been able to confirm.”
“It doesn’t get us any closer to finding them, though,” Rath pointed out.
“I’m not sure,” Beauceron replied. “The Organized Crime Division has never made progress on the Guild because the only employees we’ve been able to catch are the contractors, and that only rarely, and not long enough to get any useful intelligence. Now we know that there are three other kinds of employees: the recruiters, the headquarters staff that run the operations center, and the medical staff who treat the contractors when they complete Training.”
“Selection,” Rath corrected. “Training Phase comes later.”
“Yes, sorry. If Organized Crime had this information, they would undoubtedly try to find one of these employees, and then flip them – offer amnesty in exchange for cooperation.”
“So how do we find them?” Rath asked.
“Well, we might be able to locate your recruiter back on Tarkis, given your description. But again, that would require police access. I’m not sure what we can do with the headquarters people, but I think the medical staff are a real possibility.”
“Why?” Rath asked. “They’re all on the Training planet, as far as we know … wherever it is.”
“I doubt it,” Beauceron said. “That planet is almost certainly deserted, except for the facilities you mentioned – it’s either privately owned, or quarantined, or they keep people away using some other method, I don’t know. But the Guild wouldn’t set up its training operation somewhere that members of the public could just stumble across it by accident.”
“True,” Rath said.
“And the implants you have, those are complex operations – that means highly-trained medical staff. Top caliber surgeons, who are generally well compensated wherever they choose to work. I find it very unlikely that those kinds of people are going to willingly spend their lives on a deserted planet. No one would agree to go there for so long, even for a significant amount of money. What good is money if you’re stuck on a desolate planet away from your family and home?”
“So they rotate them in and out?”
Beauceron rubbed at his bald patch. “Probably. Which means they must recruit them from hospitals around the galaxy … and then allow them to return when their tour is complete. There’s a good chance they’ve recruited here on Alberon. If we can find one of them, they may be able to lead us to the training planet.”
Beauceron activated the computer’s voice recognition mode. “Show me all cybernetic surgeons on Alberon who list facial implants as one of their specialty areas,” he told it.
A list appeared on the screen. “Thirty-two entries,” the computer replied.
“Cross-reference with their practice or hospital websites, or social media profiles. Search for the term ‘sabbatical’ or ‘charity work.’ ”
Rath cocked an eyebrow questioningly. Beauceron explained: “A doctor can’t just disappear for months – they’d have to tell their friends and coworkers they were going somewhere. An easy lie would be calling it a sabbatical – that’s like a working vacation that academics take. Or they could say they were doing charity work in the Territories; many doctors do that, too.”
The list shortened. “Twenty-eight entries.”
“Hm,” Beauceron grunted. “Pretty much all of them. Okay, this is where the legwork starts, unfortunately.” Beauceron stood up, pocketing his notebook. “You’re going to look through the doctors’ sites and social profiles, and see what you can find.”
“I don’t get it. What am I looking for, exactly?”
Beauceron shrugged. “Anything suspicious. Like a doctor that went on a sabbatical off-planet, and didn’t publish a paper after they came back. You can probably focus on just the ones that were gone for at least three or four months – I doubt the Guild would rotate doctors out more often than that.”
“Where are you going?” Rath asked.
“The morgue. Let’s hope your search is more fruitful than mine.”
* * *
Beauceron stopped at a drive-through coffee shop on his way to the morgue, buying two coffees. His car dropped him outside the building’s entrance, and then moved off to park itself up the street. Inside, he was relieved to find there were no policemen in the waiting area. He took his phone out and sent a quick message. Five minutes later, an examiner wearing glasses and a white lab coat pushed through the doors and waved to him. Beauceron stood.
“Hello, Whittier. Do you want to catch up out here?” Beauceron asked, gesturing to the waiting area.
“Of course not, come into my office,” the examiner said.
“I’m not sure I’m allowed to anymore …,” Beauceron said.
“Nonsense,” Whittier waved him away. “I can have visitors anytime I like. Come in, please, Martin.”
In his office, Whittier spent a minute shifting stray piles of paper onto his desk, until one of his seats was clear enough to accommodate Beauceron.
“Sorry,” he apologized. “You know me. Thanks for the coffee, by the way.”
“You’re welcome,” Beauceron said, taking a seat. “How have you been?”
“Good, all things considered. Been a quiet week, catching up on my backlog a bit. Perhaps I’ll finally clean this mess up.” Whittier sipped his drink, watching Beauceron. “I would ask how you’re doing, but … I fear I know the answer.”
Beauceron shrugged. “It hasn’t been an easy few weeks.”
“For what it’s worth,” Whittier told him, “I will certainly miss working with you.”
“Thanks,” Beauceron told him. “I appreciate that. I was wondering, actually, if I could ask you for a favor.”
“Of course,” Whittier said.
“I
was working on a case before I left, something of a pet project, long term. I had an idea, but I never got a chance to see it through. It’s been weighing on my mind a bit, I have to say.”
Whittier laughed. “You’re still policing, aren’t you?”
“I’m afraid so,” Beauceron admitted. “I wanted to see if a suspect ever turned up in our mortuary database. This is completely unofficial, though, so I understand if you don’t feel comfortable.”
“You want me to look now?” Whittier gestured at his computer.
“Whenever’s convenient,” Beauceron answered. “You probably have better things to be doing.”
“Let’s do it now. Easier while you’re here, anyway.” He activated the computer and pulled the keyboard close. “What am I looking for?”
“Uh, it would be a new record in the last four years. Make it five, to be safe. A female, average height, with a fairly unusual set of implants.”
“Alberon only, or galaxy-wide?”
“Everywhere,” Beauceron said.
Whittier typed for a few seconds. “Do you have specifics on the implants?”
“Yes. Facial reconfiguring and military-grade sensor suite: ears, nose, eyes, neural interface.”
“Interesting. I was going to guess ‘prostitute’ when you said the face implants – seen a few of those over the years. But given that sensor package, I believe you’re looking for a different type of professional.” Whittier finished filling out the query, and raised an eyebrow. “Let’s see if we got anyone.”
The database processed the request for several seconds, then spit back a result. “Nope,” Whittier said. “Sorry.”
“That may be good news, actually,” Beauceron said.
A window popped up on the screen, and Whittier frowned. “Our ever-helpful algorithm says there was a close match in a different gender. Any chance your mystery woman had a sex change?” He didn’t wait for a reply, but clicked on the record. “Ah, sorry. Biological male, no signs of prior reassignment surgery. Still, he had the exact implants you listed, and even hemobots.”