‘Arachnophobia?’ Nathan asked. ‘Entomophobia?’
‘The hell you talking about?!’
‘Fear of bugs,’ Nathan said. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘Ironside, you put a can on this freakin’ thing or I swear I’ll pop a cap in yo’ ass that’ll send steam outta your ears!’
Nathan leaned forward, then hesitated: ‘What’s the magic word?’
‘Now, damnit!!’
Nathan thrust the upturned trash can down as Vasquez yanked his boot free. The can clanged down against the tiles and rattled violently as Nathan stomped one boot down on it to pin it in place and looked up at the former soldier.
Vasquez was still sweating as he stepped back and breathed a hefty sigh of relief.
‘Man, I hate those things,’ he gasped as he holstered his weapon.
‘I understand,’ Nathan agreed sombrely as Foxx and Allen joined them. ‘I used to be scared of spiders too. When I was six.’
Allen’s face cracked with a grin as he looked at his partner. ‘Monsters under the bed gonna get ya?!’ he said as he jerked forward and wriggled his fingers in Vasquez’s face.
Vasquez shrugged them off. ‘Man, if you’d seen what these things did to people back in the day, your hair would fall out.’
‘Vasquez is right,’ Foxx said as she watched the bug spinning inside the bin, ‘they’re horrible damned things. Jay, get tech’ up here and have it taken away.’
‘Gotcha,’ Allen replied, and cast Vasquez one last amused glance before he left.
Foxx turned to Schmidt, who had now accessed a holopanel inside the office. Nathan watched as an image appeared of data files that he assumed had been downloaded from the bug.
‘What am I looking at?’ Foxx asked.
‘Simple programming data streams from the bug’s neural network,’ Schmidt explained, his glowing blue form of new interest to Nathan. ‘These files were created just four weeks ago.’
‘Before I was reanimated?’ Nathan said.
‘Which means that whoever is behind this really did know you were coming back,’ Foxx said.
‘It’s worse,’ Schmidt said. ‘They didn’t use just facial recognition to identify and target Mister Ironside.’ He turned to face Nathan. ‘They had your DNA.’
Nathan blinked. ‘My DNA?’
‘They knew exactly what they were doing,’ Schmidt confirmed, ‘and they had access to your genetic code in its entirety, something that has remained firmly under lock-and-key for centuries along with your remains.’
Schmidt turned to Foxx.
‘Whoever is behind this has something much larger in mind than the murder of Nathan Ironside,’ he said, ‘and I think that I can track them down.’
***
XIX
Jay Allen returned to the office with a tech’ team, which allowed Nathan to lift his boot off the trash can and the bug imprisoned within. Allen spoke even as the tech team wrestled the bug into a containment unit and hurried away, Vasquez maintaining a healthy distance from them.
‘I got a lead on that apartment where Viggo was hiding out,’ he said as he waved his hand over another holoscreen and an image of the city shimmered into view.
‘North Four?’ Foxx asked as Vasquez finally joined them.
‘Yeah, right down in the guts of the city,’ Allen replied, and for Nathan’s benefit added: ‘We call it the Black Hole because of the number of illegal disruptor devices down there, all designed to break up police communications links and conceal whatever dodgy deals are going down. A couple of our street teams got word out that they saw Viggo moving in the area over the last couple of weeks. He was a new face which was why he stood out.’
‘Street team?’ Nathan asked.
‘Informants,’ Foxx replied. ‘We’re trying to recruit a small band of informants for us down on North Four – it’s better than us having to do all the running around, and with most communicators out of action in the area it’s tough to get information in and out any other way.’
‘Kind of like Sherlock Holmes’s Irregulars,’ Nathan said, and for once didn’t get confused looks.
‘Pretty much,’ Vasquez said. ‘The kids down there don’t got much, so they’re happy to snitch on local bad actors for a few coins.’
‘The apartment’s on Wessex and 7th,’ Allen told Foxx as she opened her desk and pulled out a hefty looking pistol. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be leaving that behind? Forrester hasn’t cleared you for active yet.’
‘The hell with that,’ Foxx said as she holstered the weapon and pulled out two plasma magazines with it that she shoved into the pockets of her leather jacket. ‘After Viggo’s drug spray and the drones down on the surface, I don’t care if they take my damned badge from me but I’m not walking into the North Four without “Old Painless” here.’
Foxx patted the pistol at her side and Nathan grinned. ‘There’s a side to you I feel like I’m only just beginning to notice.’
‘Believe it,’ Vasquez said. ‘I ever tell you about the time she boxed down a pair of two hundred fifty pound greasers with nothin’ more than a baton and…’
‘In the line of duty,’ Foxx cut him off as she turned to Doctor Schmidt, whom Nathan realized had been standing silent and still with his eyes closed the whole time.
‘Doctor, what lead did you say you had on who programmed those drones?’
Schmidt did not reply. Nathan walked across to him and waved his hand in front of his face. He got no response so he pushed his hand right through. Schmidt opened his eyes and stared at Nathan, who suddenly felt embarrassed and jerked his hand out of the holosap’s face.
‘It’s considered rude to penetrate a holosap’s transmission without express permission,’ Schmidt announced to him, ‘in rather the same way you would feel violated if I were to take a baton and shove it up your…’
‘Ah, but you can’t pick a baton up,’ Nathan interrupted.
Schmidt stared at him for a moment and then decided to drop it and replied to Foxx.
‘The programming of the drone also revealed the location of the drone when that programming was done,’ he announced. ‘The drone’s locator beacon is always activated when data is being processed internally. It’s an automatic thing, which allowed the Marines who deployed them to know if they’d been captured by enemy units who were tampering with the devices.’
‘Where was it?’ she asked.
‘CSS Titan,’ Schmidt replied, ‘the flagship of the fleet.’
‘Titan?’ Foxx echoed in disbelief. ‘What the hell were drones doing aboard that ship in this day and age?’
‘Titan,’ Nathan whispered as he recalled Admiral Marshall mentioning the vessel. ‘Cool name.’
Detective Allen called up a holodisplay and Nathan got his first glimpse of a true spacecraft of the type he had imagined might one day traverse the universe with humans at the helm, and at a single glance he knew he was looking at a battleship. The hull was long, with ventral strakes to either side and an aggressively styled bridge section, all of which bristled with what looked like cannons and sensors.
‘CSS Titan,’ Allen said, ‘flagship of the fleet for two decades and undefeated in battle. Commanded by Admiral Marshall, a veteran, she’s two kilometres long and displaces four million tonnes. Currently she’s in dock at Polaris Station and just completing a refit.’
‘Now that’s what I call a spaceship,’ Nathan said as he admired the vessel.
‘She’s a carrier too,’ Vasquez added, ‘four squadrons of Phantom fighters and bombers, all state of the art. You don’t mess with the fleet, man.’
‘You’ve been aboard?’ Nathan asked.
‘Two tours,’ Vasquez confirmed as he clenched his fist and pressed it to his chest. ‘First Marines are always attached to Titan, right back since the Aleeyan War. We called the ship Old Ironsides, ‘cause her hull’s never been breached in battle just like…’
‘USS Constitution,’ Nathan recalled. ‘Good to see some of our h
istory has survived.’
‘Can we get a manifest for who was aboard the ship when this programming was done?’ Foxx asked. ‘If this drone was programmed aboard the ship, it stands to reason the person behind it is in the military, maybe one of the Aleeyan sympathizers we’ve heard so much about.’
Vasquez seemed uncertain. ‘The military won’t give up the ship’s manifest easily even for an attempted murder investigation, and the crew’s four thousand strong. Even if we got the manifest it’d take weeks to go through it.’
‘Weeks we don’t have,’ Allen added. ‘If Nathan’s a target they might try again.’
Foxx zipped up her jacket and headed for the door. ‘Viggo’s apartment’s the only lead we’ve got for now, let’s check it out and see where it goes. If we can find anything linking Viggo to Titan, it might be enough to force the CSS to release the ship’s manifest.’
‘What about me?’ Nathan asked.
‘You stay here,’ Foxx ordered as she marched out of the office with Vasquez and Allen right behind her. ‘I don’t want you in the line of fire again until we figure this out.’
The door shimmered closed behind them, and Nathan turned to look at Schmidt.
‘Well, here we are again,’ the doctor said cheerily, ‘two dead people stuck in a small room together.’
‘I’m not dead,’ Nathan pointed out
‘Near enough,’ Schmidt shrugged.
‘I’ve gotta assume that you’re only half the man you used to be, Schmidt,’
‘I’m not even that,’ the doctor replied, refusing to be cowed. ‘But I still have hidden depths that you can’t even begin to imagine.’
‘On the contrary, I can see right through you.’
‘Were you always a comedian?’ Schmidt asked as he glanced up at data spilling down a holoscreen before them. ‘Or was it something you learned?’
‘After my revival, a sense of humor is pretty much all I’ve got left.’
Schmidt’s joviality faded. ‘Fair point. How are you holding up?’
‘Not so well being stuck in here with you.’
‘That’s uncalled for,’ Schmidt scolded. ‘I brought you back to life, remember? You should revere me.’
‘How the hell do you even see things?’ Nathan asked as he looked at the doctor’s ephemeral form, a shifting blue glow speckled with points of light like dust motes glinting over a blue sea.
‘My projection contains elements of hard light that allow optical reflection of my surroundings,’ Schmidt explained. ‘Just like real eyes, the image that reaches my hard-light cornea is inverted. Although my brain is effectively a digitized copy, it still automatically flips the image for me so that I can see the world the right way up. Quite fascinating.’
‘That’s not the word I’d use,’ Nathan said, looking around for the source of the holosap’s projection. Moments later he spotted what looked like a small camera up high in one corner of the office, a tiny pin-prick of blue light in its center.
Nathan sauntered nonchalantly across the room as he spoke.
‘Jay Allen told me you’re nearly two hundred years old.’
‘A hundred ninety two,’ Schmidt confirmed, ‘and I don’t look a day older than sixty three. That’s progress right there. My entire existence is contained within a single fluid-optical hard drive unit, with a portable back-up here at the precinct office. It essentially keeps me alive.’
Schmidt gestured with a nod to a slim, glossy black disc on a nearby table top, no bigger than Nathan’s palm.
‘And you don’t get tired of being alive?’ Nathan asked, genuinely interested. ‘I mean, it doesn’t cause stress or make you more insane than you probably already are?’
A ghostly smile formed on Schmidt’s lips as he continued to survey the data streams.
‘Extended longevity might adversely affect an ordinary human being’s psyche, but as I’m really a machine now it doesn’t have the same effect. I feel no different now to when I died, minus the sickness of course.’
‘You had the plague?’ Nathan asked as he yanked a gravity pad from beneath a desk and climbed upon it.
‘I was involved in studying it and attempting to find a cure when I contracted the illness,’ Schmidt confirmed. ‘We were without proper facilities, down to our last few people and accidents were happening all too frequently. The other doctors were not able to treat me but it was decided that I should be preserved as a holosap so that I could continue the work.’ Schmidt’s gaze lost focus and he stared into the distance. ‘We were so close. Another few months and we cracked the cure, but it was too late for me.’ He shrugged. ‘Shouldn’t complain, I wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for… What are you doing?’
Nathan reached up from his perch and waved his hand in front of the blue light.
Doctor Schmidt’s projection quivered and broke up as he did so and he heard a cry of distress.
‘Stop that, now!’
Nathan chuckled as he lowered his arm. ‘Not quite as immortal as you thought, huh Doc’? I guess there must be an off switch somewhere too, right?’
Schmidt scowled at Nathan as he climbed down off the gravity pad. ‘That would be considered homicide by today’s laws, a crime which I’m contemplating committing right now. I honestly don’t know why I worked so hard to bring you back to life, Mister Ironside. So far all you’ve been is a pain in the ass.’
‘But how would you kill me?’ Nathan asked. ‘It’s not like you can pick up a gun and shoot me, is it.’
‘Where there’s a will…,’ Schmidt murmured.
Nathan stopped in his tracks and thought for a moment. ‘A will,’ he echoed. ‘Maybe that’s what this is all about?’
‘Oh I don’t doubt that somebody, somewhere has the will to snuff you out Mister Ironside, given all the trouble that you’re causing and…’
‘Not that kind of will,’ Nathan said. ‘I mean a will left by my father! He was a millionaire, Schmidt, and I was the chief beneficiary of his fortune.’
Schmidt considered this for a moment and then abruptly the holodisplay switched from data streams to an image of Gerry Ironside. Nathan was taken aback by the sudden appearance of his father.
‘Dad,’ he whispered as he looked up at the image before him, larger than life size.
‘Gerald Nathan Ironside,’ Schmidt said as he looked up at the display, ‘Chief Executive Officer of Ironside Industries, once a successful business developing and selling advanced hydration technologies to agriculture for use in desert environments.’
‘I know who my father was.’
‘The business was sold off by your mother after your father’s death twelve years after you were placed in biostasis,’ Schmidt informed him, ‘and turned an already healthy family fortune into truly considerable wealth. Your wife and daughter were ensured both a generous stipend and considerable inheritance, all of which ensured Amira’s passage through college and your wife’s successful career as a philanthropist.’ Again, Schmidt’s smug superiority slipped a little and a gentle smile flickered across his digital face. ‘You had a wonderful family, Mister Ironside.’
‘Yes I did,’ Nathan murmured. ‘What happened to the fortune?’
Schmidt scanned the files and frowned. ‘There is no record of the family fortune being inherited after Amira passed away,’ he said. ‘In fact there is no record of any relatives in the database, which is odd.’
‘How so?’
‘I thought that Amira had a family of her own,’ Schmidt said. ‘I distinctly recall a son and a daughter as being on the record when I first was presented with your case, but now the record is empty.’
‘You think that somebody’s trying to cover something up?’ Nathan asked.
‘Perhaps, but I could be mistaken,’ Schmidt replied. ‘During the plague most records of humanity were lost to history, immense volumes of data irretrievably damaged by war, looting, exposure to the elements and so on. Still, I was pretty sure I saw them.’
‘I thought that
a digital brain would record everything perfectly,’ Nathan pointed out.
‘My brain is a digital copy of my human brain,’ Schmidt replied with a smile, ‘faults and all. My database does however hold factual records…’
Schmidt’s voice trailed off as he scanned a series of data files, information spilling down the holodisplay at a rate far too quick for Nathan to understand any of it. Schmidt frowned again and pulled up a stationary screen.
‘DNA,’ he said finally.
‘What about it?’
‘Your genetic code remains active,’ Schmidt said. ‘I just made a search of the CSS medical records for anybody sharing your genetic code, in the hopes that whoever wiped your family’s fortune off the record might not have been able to access your medical files. It would appear, Nathan, that you have a descendent.’
Nathan felt a smile form on his features as he stepped closer to the display, hope growing in his heart.
‘Who are they?’
The display changed to an image of a young man with sharp, angular features, dark eyes smoldering with mistrust, his hair cut to grow horizontally out of the left side of his scalp, the right a metallic plate of some kind interwoven with flickering lights.
‘Arwen Minter,’ Schmidt said, the name emerging as though he had spat it out, ‘a convicted drug runner working the North Four area of New Washington. He’s a known criminal and killer, recently paroled after serving three years for manslaughter.’
Nathan’s heart sank as he realized that the first tenuous link to his past that he’d found had turned out to be a low-life criminal, the kind of man he despised. Then, something that Schmidt had said touched a nerve.
‘You said he works the North Four area?’
‘His preferred trading ground,’ Schmidt confirmed. ‘Looks like he’s got a crew working for him out there and…’
‘That’s where Foxx and the guys were headed,’ Nathan interrupted. ‘This Minter could know about me, if he’s anything to do with that other character, Viggo, and Foxx doesn’t have any communication with us while she’s down in the Black Hole.’
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