Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  “Too fuckin' right, I know,” Yates said, glaring at the holotank again as he took his finger off the call button to break the connection.

  “Supervisor Yates, you have a visitor at Reception,” said the speaker plate, the voice different but momentarily unidentified while Yates sat in a brown study.

  “Huh?” said Yates.

  “Shall I send her in?” It was the intercom circuit, and of course the voice was that of Echeverria at the front desk.

  He was a replacement for the shift's usual receptionist, a very attractive Pakistani girl whom Yates had catalogued for future reference when he was first being shown around the office.

  That was last week's plan, and it might not have worked out anyway because she turned out to have a husband, a diplomat here. They were found together in their apartment, covered in blood and scraps of lung tissue, two of more than five hundred virus-related deaths within a few hours.

  “Sir?”

  “Yeah, right, send her - “ Jesus Christ, it couldn't be Cecile, could it? “Send her in.” When the receptionist activated intercom mode, an orange light glowed above receiver's keypad and the speakers were voice-tripped. It let Yates think about other things for the moment. . . though surely somebody would have said, “Hey Sam, this your wife on the list?” even if he'd missed that file himself.

  A slim hand wearing an opal ring parted the strands that curtained the doorway and were supposed - actually, they weren't that bad - to do a better job of deadening sound than a solid panel would. The security man slid his chair back so that he could stand. It banged hard against the hologram viewer. A week hadn't been near long enough to learn control in low gravity.

  “Supervisor Yates?” said the woman who stepped into the office with a care that reminded Yates of just how small a cubbyhole it was.

  Thank God, it wasn't anybody he'd ever seen before!

  “Supervisor Yates, we met a few days ago,” the woman went on. She extended her hand to him. She was wearing a dress of shifting pale grays, natural fabrics and probably not cheap even before somebody freighted it from Earth to here. “Ella Bradley? At the restaurant four days - “

  “Omigod, sure,” said the security man, shaking the offered hand with embarrassment. His hesitation must have been obvious. Hell of a thing. As pretty a girl as this one was, and he hadn't remembered a thing about her except the prismatic contact lenses - which she wasn't wearing today.

  Though it was harder to catalogue breasts than eye colors, and he'd wound up the night with a lot of other things on his mind.

  “I'm sure you had a lot of other things on your mind,” said Bradley, with that transfiguring smile the security man had noticed before. “I'm glad that it turned out - not badly for you.”

  “Join the club,” said Yates, remembering the way the image of his bloody hands had swelled until they pushed everything else out of his mind. Thick with dead virus, the analytic computers in Central Medical had said; but no sign of live virus, and no sign of damage - even entry - to his system.

  “I don't think I've ever been so scared in my life,” he added wryly, “at least for longer'n thirty seconds or so. Will you have a chair?”

  Yates folded down the pair of seats built into the front of the data bank and hard-copy files across from his desk. He gestured Bradley into the one whose cushion filled with air properly when the unit locked down. He took the other, faulty, one for himself. You didn't need a real cushion in this gravity anyway; and if either he or his visitor sat in the swivel chair at the desk, the holotank would separate them like a table-center bouquet at dinner.

  “I wanted to talk to you about that, Supervisor Yates,” the woman said, settling herself into the seat. He turned at the waist to face her, but when her legs swung with her torso, their knees bumped. Her expression did not change, but she shifted her legs to miss him.

  So ... Not real skittish, but for sure not coming on. More's the pity. “Are you part of the investigation, then?” the security man asked.

  She'd said she wasn't an MD, hadn't she? Or was that somebody else? Anyway, everybody and his brother seemed to have been tapped to help the fact-finding committee one way or another. Besides which, at least a dozen nations were setting up their own panels to parallel the Secretariat's efforts. The influx of people wasn't making Entry Division's job any easier - especially with a shift supervisor too new to have learned all the ins and outs of the system here at Headquarters.

  He'd learned that he was definitely an out, if Arjanian on second shift had anything to say about it, though.

  “No, I'm not part of the investigation,” Bradley said, “and I realize that I'm intruding on your time . . . but I'd like to talk to someone in Security about what happened at Le Moulin Rouge and . . . everywhere. And I was very impressed by the way you handled matters that night, Supervisor.”

  “Can't say I impressed myself that much,” said Yates, who preferred candor as a response to unearned compliments. He seemed to have gotten through that business with his ass and his job intact, but no thanks to his own behavior, so far as he could tell.

  “But” - candid again - “flattery'll get you most places. How can I help you - ah, understanding that I know less about what happened than you do, if you've had time to follow the news?”

  “I'm an anthropologist, Supervisor Yates,” said the woman. “I'm here to document the way cultures change - or don't - when they're transplanted into this totally artificial environment. For that I have data on origins and ethnicity which probably isn't available - hasn't been culled out— anywhere else.” She tapped the data bank behind her, and in so doing brushed Yates' knee again.

  “So I just wanted to make sure,” she concluded with an inflection that made it a query, “that Security has realized that all of those who died four days ago were Arabs?”

  Marvelous, thought Yates, aware that muscles in his cheeks were shifting his face into a set of planes as forbidding as crated ammunition. A nut with a conspiracy theory, and coming to him with it. He remembered Ella Bradley now, the bitch who'd stared at him as if he'd just blown the waiter away and was likely to do the same to her.

  Damn shame she hadn't held that thought. Then she wouldn't be screwing up his morning besides.

  “Mistress Bradley,” the security man said, “one thing I am sure of is that this wasn't a mass poisoning, it was real disease. I spent a long time in Central Medical, and I made sure” - sometimes the fear that Security aroused was a hell of a good way to learn things that weren't properly your business; as a patient, for instance - “that it was a virus and not some other sort of, ah, problem that I'd been exposed to.”

  “A virus that attacked Arabs,” the woman said. She didn't seem to be concerned by the sudden hardening of Yates' face and attitude. In fact, she seemed to have relaxed a little, and she didn't jerk her knee back as abruptly when they bumped a third time. “Only Arabs.”

  “Not only Arabs,” the security man said, “and by no means all Arabs. The - okay, right there in the restaurant kitchen, the Moulin Rouge - four people, three dead and one no worse off'n I am except for shock.”

  “Ayesha, yes, the daughter-in-law,” replied Bradley as she ripped through the argument with the assurance of a circle saw. “Her bloodline back two generations is pure Kabyle - not an Arab among the eight grandparents. In fact, she's got an uncle who's the Minister of Education under the new regime, but she elected to stay with her husband after the revolution instead of going back to Algeria alone.''

  “Oh,” said Yates, relaxing minusculy. He was impressed, though no more nearly convinced than he had been to start with. Maybe he ought to shunt Bradley to somebody on the investigation staff . . .

  His phone pinged on the other side of the office.

  He raised a finger, silently asking the woman for a minute, and called, “Yates.”

  The green light above the keypad went on as the phone's brain compared the word with the voiceprint and instructions in its memory, then opened the circui
t. “Sam,” said the speaker plate at a volume cracklingly adjusted for the supervisor's location in his office. “This is Barney at Communications. I'm sorry as hell, but there was some slippage and the feed went to your, ah, went to the office in Sector Twelve -”

  “Shit,” said Yates, too softly to trip the speaker but with a level of emotion that caused the woman's eyes to widen as they had when she stared at him past the waiter's body.

  “ - instead of here. Ah, do you want the data now?”

  “Yeah,” said the big man, leaning forward to check that the holotank was still set to receive. “Hey, wait a minute, Barney. You got your people sorted out?”

  “You bet, Sam. It was just an old key list, and I've purged it myself.” It sounded like he meant it. Yoshimura didn't like screw-ups, least of all in his own shop.

  “Then hold for just a bit and send me over the file of virus casualties first,” the big security man said. “D'ye have them sorted?”

  The speaker plate gave a rattling laugh. “Sorted? yeah, you could kinda say that. I'm going to punch 'em over to you myself without having to look up the access number. That tell you something?”

  “Sorry, Barney.”

  “No sweat, Sam. Why should you have the only office in the Secretariat that hasn't had the files downloaded?”

  “I - “

  “Nothing like a real tragedy to liven up conversation on the party circuit,” Yoshimura concluded. “Hold on, nowhere it comes.”

  The green light on the phone winked out with a faint click from the speaker. The tank began to hum. Yates poked the button marked ECHO on the pedestal's control board.

  “The supervisor on second shift,” Yates said, partly to fill time before the hardware locked in, and somewhat to take his mind off Yoshimura's amusement at his nosy colleagues. “Has a nephew in this section, which ain't great all by itself, but he moved the kid into this office between when the previous guy left and I arrived.”

  He gestured. The look on Bradley's face as she followed the sweep of his hand around the office reminded Yates of what a ridiculous cubbyhole he'd fought for. Seemed to be his morning to make people smile.

  Still, the fight hadn't been one over space but rather pecking order. That had been occupying Terran life forms since before they grew backbones.

  Yates laughed, breaking Ella Bradley's careful control into a broad grin of her own.

  “Anyhow,” the security man continued, “Arjanian tried to get me shunted out to the Annex in Sector Twelve, even though my orders gave me a space allotment here at Central. Downside didn't say where at Central.”

  The holotank chuckled happily, settling its pastel colors into the features of a dark, glowering man who certainly could pass for an Arab. The face dissolved into another and more at the rate of one a second, the rate at which files were being downloaded from the main system to the data banks in Yates' office.

  The holograms were from the victims' travel documents, showing them as they had been in life, but Yates and Bradley both tensed as their minds supplied the blood and empty eyes of the similar faces that had stared at them in Le Moulin Rouge.

  No question about similar either. Yates tugged his lower lip between his front teeth as they stared at cascading holograms that lent nothing but support to Bradley's notion. Facial appearance didn't prove anything about race, but the security man figured that the scattering of blue-eyed blondes he expected would send his visitor on her way gently.

  Gently enough that he might get to know her a little better off-duty.

  Thing was, it still looked like she might be correct.

  “Our section head,” said Yates, continuing the story but keeping his eyes on the tank. Talking made him feel less like the stage magician whose hat didn't have a bunny in it after all. “He's not real big on tough decisions, you see. Thought it'd be nice if I went out to the Annex 'until he straightened things out' . . . but he couldn't order me, you see, without getting Personnel in New York to cut a change.”

  Christ, there'd been a lot of them. Scattered throughout Headquarters Colony the way they'd been, there hadn't been a single event significantly worse than what had happened in the restaurant. But seeing the faces in order like this, every second ticking off another corpse, was starting to get on Sam Yates' nerves.

  “He finally gave you the office, then?” said Ella in a pleasant tone that made up for the lack of eye contact. Like the security man, she was watching the display, and he was quite sure that she would call out as quickly as he if an evident non-Arab cycled by.

  Christ, there were a lot.

  “I had Communications run me hard copy of everything I might need, you know, for the job,” Yates explained. He was little embarrassed now about the childishness of what he'd done; but the hell with that, he'd gotten the office he was supposed to have.

  “Anyhow, I stacked it all in the corridor outside the section head's office and hunkered down to read it,” he continued. “You could just about get past me if you had to” - he grinned - “but you know, my legs're pretty long, and I - you know, people generally don't like to make an issue of things with me, face to face.”

  The woman giggled.

  “It took about half an hour,” Yates said, patting Bradley's knee in a gesture of camaradarie that he hadn't planned, “and I had a crew to help me move the kid's traps out of this office.”

  They laughed together and met each other's eyes. Then, as they turned back to the holotank with their grins fading, Bradley clutched the security man's arm and pointed with her free hand, calling, “There, Superv - “

  “Sam'll do just fine,” said Yates, who was already bending forward, his grim tone a reflection of what he had seen rather than the words he spoke. This viewer had voice controls, but they worked about half the time - which made them totally useless, so far as Yates was concerned.

  His fingers made firm, precise stabs at the control board, blanking the Echo into pastels again, though the data continued to course through the system with tiny clicks and beeps. Yates continued to prod the controls while the woman watched him, kneading together the fingers of her left hand.

  A swarthy, smiling face congealed in the tank and was replaced a second later by a child so similar in features that she was probably related. The files loaded before Yates hit the control scrolled backward while the security man poised to lock on the face that had struck both him and his visitor.

  “Looks like you were right,” Bradley said to the back of the kneeling security man. “Though most - there!”

  Yates stabbed, then blipped the data forward again to get the correct file. He poked one more button before shifting backward into the seat from which he had jumped to catch the controls.

  “Be hard copy in a moment,” he said to Bradley as the data bank behind her eeped. “Ella, you go by?”

  “Ella,” she agreed as she took the sheet of flimsy feeding from the slot beside her head. She handed it to the security man unread. “I must not have had all the names, or else I missed one when I keyed in the search commands. I don't have a staff here, you see, and I didn't want to wait for the department to get around to my request Downside.”

  “You recognize him, don't you?” Yates said, looking at the woman with a frown and then to the printout. He held the sheet so that he could glance past it at the face in the holo tank.

  “Well ...” Bradley temporized as she frowned at the hologram.

  The fellow certainly wasn't memorable. A little moustache, slightly darker than the sandy hair on his scalp. No beard, though one would have been useful to hide the weak chin. Eyes more brown than blue, and skin pale enough for the breasts of a fat woman.

  “Well,” she repeated, “he certainly isn't an Arab. You're right about that.”

  “Beaton, Rodney Alan Thomas,” Yates read from the flimsy. “He was in the restaurant. Sat down at my table just before - “ The security man met Bradley's eyes, then spun his finger in the air as a catchall gesture covering the waiter's death and the min
utes following.

  “Oh,” the woman said, nodding in fierce agreement. “Yes. Yes. He went into the kitchen with you, that's right, when you went to call.”

  “Something like - “ Yates said. His throat constricted before the next word came out. “That,” he added as an effort of will.

  Sam Yates had killed the little man. He'd squeezed fresh, disease-laden blood onto Beaton, maybe through a break in the skin. All the security man remembered was the unexpected slickness of what he'd thought was tweed - but he didn't remember much connectedly about that night. Maybe he'd touched Beaton's face, maybe slapped the citizen's open mouth.

  “Sam?” said Ella Bradley with concern.

  “Yeah,” said Yates. “Sorry.”

  Sorry indeed, but he wasn't about to blurt what had happened to this woman - who might have seen the incident but apparently hadn't - or to any of those investigating the disease outbreak. They might wonder why a virus with an obvious penchant for Arabs had struck down a single Northern European as well, but that wasn't reason enough for Yates to immolate himself.

  It wasn't the first time he'd killed somebody by accident, though this time he hadn't used an automatic rifle.

  The phone pinged.

  “Yates,” said the big man, pleased at the control in his voice as he listened from a mental distance.

  “That's the lot, Sam,” rattled Barney Yoshimura from the speaker plate. “What the Watch List now?”

  “Barney,” said Yates, squinting at the sheet of hard copy, “can you shunt the full file on Beaton, Rodney Alan Thomas, K-R one-five-zero, four-two-zero-two, zero-three-six? And then the Interprol feed, straight through.”

  “We've got clerks over here, you know, if there's something wrong with the computer link,” grumbled the communications supervisor; but it had been a clerk's screw-up that put him on the line to Yates, and he wasn't going to insist on requests through channels - with their attendant delay - just now. “Hang on.”

  Yoshimura had not asked for a repeat of the victim's entry number. The security man had barely enough time to reset the pedestal controls before Beaton's face formed again in the tank. The printer purred, rolling out the data as quickly as the base unit received it.