Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  “Yessir,” said Rosario's voice with such evident relief that Yates wondered just what threats the patrol lieutenant had made. “One-five” - the general Directorate of Security exchange - “two-three-six-niner.''

  “Got it,” Yates replied, nodding in part at the fact that the two civilians behind him had been separated on the correct sides of the door to the treatment cubicle. The room was quiet again, except for the hum of machinery and the mumbled prayers of the man kneeling in front of the cubicle. “And leave the message for Emeraud, okay?”

  He did not wait for a reply. Instead, he tapped the call closed and immediately punched in the lieutenant's number while his surface memory held it.

  “Central Four,” snarled the voice of a man who was either trying to juggle three things at once or was madder than hell - or mad because he was juggling three things, of course.

  “Supervisor Yates returning Lieutenant Yesilkov's call,'' said the security man, with enough edge to make sure that he wasn't going to get lost in the shuffle because somebody was having a bad day. Hell, his leg hurt like a bear was chewing on it, and he was dotting the i's and crossing the t's like a good citizen, wasn't he?

  Acting like a good citizen helped him forget what he'd been doing just an hour ago. He couldn't believe the shards of the firefight which his memory was still trying to fit into a connected whole.

  “Hold one,” said the phone, no happier than before but doing its job. “I'll buzz 'er.”

  Yates dabbed at the blisters on his face as he waited, head bent toward the phone. The man outside the cubicle was leaning his forehead against the door, but it was hard to tell whether he was even aware of his posture. The blisters had been shrunken flat and all the associated pain deadened at the same time the cubicle exuded the transparent cast around Yates' thigh, but the injured spots didn't move with the skin around them.

  Actually, his leg wasn't burning near as bad as at first. Certainly he could flex the big muscles without the stiffness that had begun to weld the limb rigid even before the shooting had stopped.

  “Sir, she says where are you?'“ demanded the phone with only token courtesy.

  “Central Medical,” Yates replied. He'd expected the patrol lieutenant to take the line, but apparently she wasn't in her office.

  There was another long pause while the security man bent and straightened the injured leg. Da Silva was talking into the console built into the side of the treatment cubicle, trying to get the patient to remove some article of clothing so that the hardware could get on with its work.

  Must be easier when the victims were unconscious - and there was a patrolman or two to control hysterical companions. You didn't need humans to deal with medical problems, maybe, but they sure would help on some of the human side effects.

  “All right,” said the phone. “She says meet her here in twenty, that's two-zero, minutes. Got that?”

  “Yeah, I've got it, but hold on,” said Yates with his anger rising - though twenty minutes was a good estimate of the distance by slideway, and the fellow on the other end of the line wasn't where these brusque orders originated. “I've been injured in a. . . in an explosion on M-M Corridor, and I think I'd better report it before - “

  “We'll take your statement when you get here,” interrupted the voice. “We're covering that too.”

  “You are?” said the security man, startled out of his irritation. “Is M-M in your patrol area?”

  “No sir,” snapped the phone, “but they've called in adjacent units because of the work load. Which I'll get back to now, if you'll excuse me.”

  Yates started to apologize, but the click of a broken connection forestalled him.

  Waving to the med tech who was still pleading with his patient, Yates walked out the door of Central Medical. An ambulance had just arrived, bearing someone motionless behind two harassed-looking attendants.

  Yates hoped that wasn't another side effect of something he'd done.

  He figured he had enough on his conscience already.

  Chapter 14 - TEAMWORK

  Yates wasn't whistling as he reached the door of the branch station, and his silence wasn't solely a result of the pocks of deadened skin which made it awkward to purse his lips.

  He reached toward the announcement plate - as before, there wasn't anyone visible on the door visor. Before his hand touched the plate, Lieutenant Yesilkov called from behind him, “Hang on, I'll catch it.”

  The overhead light picked out flecks of gray in the patrol officer's hair as she stepped past Yates with her card out, but those colorless strands only brightened the generally pale blond.

  “Nice timing,” she remarked while the door jacked itself open. Her eyes met Yates' momentarily before she led the way inside and to the left instead of toward the office where he'd found her the day before. “If it's that good in other ways,” Yesilkov called back over her shoulder, “you must be real popular with the ladies.”

  “Couldn't prove it by the time I've spent on the Moon,” the big man grumbled; but though his lips moved, he did not quite voice the words.

  “Sonya?” called a man whose head popped out a door they had passed. “Did you see the new duty roster?”

  Yesilkov put a hand on Yates' shoulder as the Entry Division supervisor flattened himself against the lockers that thinned the passage to less than the width in which two humans could pass comfortably. “Herb,” she called past Yates without trying to see her questioner, “you got a problem with the roster, you take it up with Ingraham. I don't even talk to her about my own shift anymore, okay?”

  Yesilkov turned, ignoring Herb's bleats. With a finger bent as if it were hooked through Yates' lower jaw instead of hovering a meter in front of him, she led the supervisor through the door at the end of the hall. The room they entered was relatively large, with seats for twenty or so. Several patrolmen were already clustered in the front, talking . They looked up as the lieutenant and her visitor came in.

  “Squad Room,” Yesilkov explained as she slid chairs out of her way instead of following a straggling aisle. “We've only got one holotank in the station, and it's here. It'll be long enough to shift change that we can use it and get out before Fernandez needs the room.”

  While the patrol officer loaded the holotank with a data chip, Yates rotated two of the movable chairs. The chairs could have been collapsed into fifty-millimeter disks and stacked, but the clutter didn't seem to bother the patrol personnel who used the room.

  And if the Squad Room were cleared, somebody would probably move lockers into it before the next shift change.

  Yesilkov slapped the machine. The equipment looked as doubtful as the unit in Yates' office. One of the projection circuits was out, and the test pattern of colors waving in the tank had a decidedly greenish cast.

  The slap didn't appear to help. The lieutenant swore in Russian, and a moment later the ripples snapped to full chromatic life.

  “Play,” said Yesilkov in a threatening voice. Colors coalesced into moving images, a corridor scene whose fuzziness was probably due to the recording rather than the playback equipment.

  “Got a copy of the pictures your friend Beaton was making,” Yesilkov said, settling herself in the chair without really relaxing. There was emotion underlying the huskiness of her voice, but Sam Yates couldn't be sure what emotion. “Thought you'd like to see 'em. There's an audio commentary, too, and I've heard it - but Third Platoon couldn't copy it till Maintenance finishes with the duplicator.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she looked the security man over carefully for the first time since they'd met in front of the substation. “Hey,” she said. “You look like you died three days back and they just brought you 'round again.”

  “This doesn't hurt,” said Yates, gesturing at his face. “My leg, though” - he pointed toward his left thigh, but he did not touch the trouser leg - “hurts like hell, and it doesn't look much better. There was a bomb or something on M-M Corridor, and I got caught in it.”

  �
��Yeah,” said the lieutenant in a neutral voice, “we'll get to that in a bit.” She pointed toward the tank - in which the glazed front door of Le Moulin Rouge had just appeared.

  “He switched it on, the cameras, about three blocks down the corridor,” the patrol officer explained. “Doesn't really help determine where he was coming from, but it's more likely the tourist hotel where he was staying than the air lock where his body was found.”

  Two more patrolmen entered the room, one of them loudly demanding coffee while his companion laughed. They quieted somewhat as Yesilkov turned and the flag of her short blond hair caught their attention.

  Yates grunted, though he did not know he made a sound. All he was aware of was that the figure swelling to fill the holotank was the Arab waiter who had died in front of him. Yates mind insisted on masking the face with blood and ruptured lung tissue that was not there.

  Yet.

  The picture wasn't sharp, but as the door opened inward, the viewers glimpsed Rodney Beaton's reflection in the clear panel. The British technician's face was set and white, in sharp contrast to that of the bored waiter who turned to lead yet another customer to a table.

  “There,” said the security man. “There.” His finger tapped the surface of the holotank as the image within opened past the waiter's shoulder. “That's the ... that's the guy at the next table, the one I thought might be an Afrikaner.''

  Yates' ribs tickled as he realized the man here glimpsed in hologram might be as dead as the waiter, one of the “utility workers” he'd hit with plasma bolts that afternoon. Maybe not. Yates was pretty sure the fellow in the restaurant was the same one he'd traded shots with vainly at the end of the firefight; but the spikes of plasma had been so bright that his vision still flashed ghostly afterimages, and the five men in orange coveralls had been pretty much of a type.

  There wasn't enough left of the three dead for anyone to swear to their faces now either.

  “Good,'' said the lieutenant mildly as more patrol personnel entered the Squad Room. “We'll keep that in mind.”

  The holotank filled with the torso and chin of the waiter during what the security man knew was an argument about seating. Occasionally Beaton would shift enough that the lenses in his lapel swept a broader expanse, but only in brief glimpses.

  A proper holovision recorder had its lens heads offset a considerable distance apart so that they caught significantly different aspects of the view between them. Even so, only the most elaborate studio rigs truly encircled a subject. Usually, portions of the hologram were created by the microprocessor in either the recording or the playback equipment.

  In the present case the hardware was of low sophistication - but the picture was more than adequate for the purpose of the two security officers.

  “Not a bad likeness,” said Yesilkov with the lack of emotion that was beginning to concern her visitor. The image of the waiter moved away and the recording lenses shifted across the table to a big blond man whom Yates didn't think was a great likeness of himself.

  Yates' image looked away from Yates' self, the hologram eyes drifting toward the next table and Ella Bradley.

  With a deliberation the security man had not suspected while he sat in the restaurant, Beaton shifted his body so the recorder slowly swept everyone in the room. Ella looked up, not quite at the camera. Her expression was detached. It melted minusculy, just the beginning of the smile Yates had seen transfigure the woman once in a while - and then froze into a mask of distaste which meshed perfectly with the security man's memory of the same incident.

  “Must not have liked her soup,” said Yesilkov.

  Yates was sure the patrol lieutenant was joking, but there was no emotion - no archness of suggested meaning - in her voice. Maybe she was just exhausted, flattened by a series of what were obviously double shifts ... but that wasn't quite what it seemed.

  The recording lenses tracked the Arab waiter rigidly as he returned from the kitchen. Watching the hologram, Yates was sure he could see signs of discomfort, of devastating illness, in the victim's features.

  There hadn't been anything at the time, though, just another professionally supercilious waiter going through familiar motions unexceptionably. Maybe the man had been as ignorant of what was about to happen as -

  The Arab coughed.

  Sam Yates stood up, the back of his calves shoving his chair away. He turned around. “Look,” he said in a voice that was so ragged that it shocked him, “I guess I'm pussy but, you know, I don't want to see this right now. I'm sorry as hell -”

  He breathed quickly, deeply, and wondered if he were going to need to stick his head between his knees to keep from fainting. Or would it be less embarrassing to faint.. ..?

  Lieutenant Yesilkov said something. It was an instant before Yates' mind realized that she had snapped “Exit” to the voice-controlled holotank.

  “Look,” the big man said softly. He turned and seated himself again, but he kept his eyes on his lap and hands, which suddenly felt clammy. “I'd like to say it was the, you know, the hospital and all that. ...”

  He gestured toward his left leg, though the injury could not be seen through his trousers, and anyway, it seemed to have stopped hurting so bad.

  There was some good to incipient fainting, it seemed.

  He breathed deeply again, and this time let it out slowly. “Truth is,” he said, meeting the lieutenant's worried eyes, “I can get this way sometimes, not so much remembering as being there again. And not being able to stop what's coming. It used to happen, you know, in dreams once in a while.”

  It was going to start happening again, while his mind came to terms with this afternoon.

  At least he'd be sleeping alone this time.

  “No sweat,” said Yesilkov. Though her voice was still blank, there was knowledge in her expression. “Wanted you to see that he was really tracking what went on, Beaton was. Followed you into the kitchen, close shots of the subjects there. Including the, ah, the witness.”

  Her voice changed very slightly, and perhaps her mouth quirked toward the start of a grin. “Picture degrades a bit from there on out. The lenses in his lapel got a little smeared 'r something.”

  Yates grimaced. “Yeah,” he said to the random colors of the holotank.

  Yesilkov shrugged. “People who ain't been there hisself, sometimes they don't understand somebody havin' a temper. Me, I wouldn't worry about it.”

  “He knew what was going to happen before it did,” said the big man, because he didn't know how to thank the lieutenant except with a shrug of his own. “He was there because of it, set to record the killings like it was somebody's election speech.”

  “That's right,” the patrol officer agreed with a nod. “He made sure he caught a good picture of the others when he came across 'em. Made a beeline for the air lock where they found him, but he was still on the job, I'd say.”

  “Right,” said Yates, drawn enough back into the problem that he absentmindedly crossed his right ankle over his left thigh.

  He'd been wrong to think his leg had stopped hurting.

  Wincing hard enough to close his eyes momentarily while he set both feet squarely on the floor again, the security man continued, “Thing is, where does that leave us?”

  “Just now, let's take care of the other business,” said Yesilkov coolly.

  The Squad Room had continued to fill, unnoticed in Yates' personal agitation, with uniformed men. Several slid into chairs Yesilkov and her visitor had disarrayed to use the holotank.

  The lieutenant ignored them. “Play map section four-four-one,” she said to the hologram projector while her fingers extracted the data chip she had loaded into it earlier.

  The tank obediently retrieved from the central memory bank a monochrome, two-dimensional plan of corridors and cross passages.

  “All right,” continued Yesilkov to her visitor. “Please indicate the point at which you think you were when the explosion occurred. Just touch the surface of the tank.”
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br />   Maybe her voice had become so detached because this was a speech she gave by rote with minor variations several times a day.

  Yates leaned closer to the tank so that he could see the identifying letters and numbers in miniature on the street plan. He found MM-NN12, the passage to Ella's apartment. He held his hand rigid so that it would not instinctively follow his thought and betray him to the patrol officer . . . and there was cross-passage 10, whose corner with Corridor MM had gouted molten fury when a stray bolt touched it.

  “Here,” said Yates, fingering the pebbly, warm surface of the tank. An orange dot glowed in hologram within, at the point he meant to indicate.

  The security man leaned into his chair again, combing his fingers through the lock of dark blond hair that had fallen onto his forehead. “I was walking past a jewelry store, I think it was” - he'd checked the site and his story on the way to Central Medical - “walking on the sidewalk because I wasn't in any hurry, and the wall, well, it blew up. Burned. I can't really describe it.”

  That was true enough. The bolt that almost hit him had left only a hazy recollection of rainbow coruscance and a tearing noise that filled the world.

  “Ever used a plasma discharger?” Yesilkov asked.

  “Once,” Yates replied with equal calm, making sure that he had eye contact with his questioner as he delivered the half truth. “In training, a long time ago.”

  “You were on the receiving end this time,” said the lieutenant. “See anything more?”

  “Well, not really . . .”the security man replied, wondering what exactly to claim.

  He was willing to admit, if necessary, that he had gone to Ella Bradley's apartment after the firefight and that the woman had provided the clothing he now wore. That wasn't something he wanted to say if he could avoid it - especially to Sonya Yesilkov - but he could scarcely avoid mentioning the shot-up van forty meters from passage MM-NN 12.

  “There was a car up the street, burning, too, I think, and people running all over the place,” Yates decided aloud. “But frankly, I was too shook myself to pay much attention.”