“There was a commotion?”
“Yeah, the guy really wanted to switch lines, but the other guy didn’t. Finally, someone farther back offered to trade, and everything settled down.”
“The asker ended up in a worse place in line?”
“Yeah, I guess he did. Maybe he just didn’t want a woman touching his stuff.”
“Try to remember his appearance. Tall or short?”
“Tall.”
“Blond, brown, red, or black hair?”
“Blond.”
“His suit: blue, tan, brown, or grey?”
“Tan.”
“Thank you, Private. You’ve helped a lot. Dismissed. Karl, come with me.” He followed Hailey out to the street.
“Do you think it’s Bracken?”
“Not likely. He hasn’t been here half the time rebels have snuck in.”
“Then what do you think about the switching guy?”
“He’s the one I saw with a briefcase emitting strong RF signals.” Hailey took her pocket tab out and looked for the location of the tracker she had put on the tall, blond, tan-suited man.
“How could you tell his briefcase was emitting RF—” A loud blast sent everyone running in random directions. Hailey recovered from the shock instantly and looked in the direction of the noise. A large plume of fire curled onto itself, then settled down toward the ground, leaving a column of dark smoke rising up from the site. Hailey estimated it was five-point-five klicks away. She looked down at her tab and saw that the tracker had disappeared. A moment before the blast, it had been nearly five-point-five klicks away.
“Suicide bomb?” she asked, stunned. Never had the rebels resorted to suicide bombings before. That added a whole new dimension of danger to the situation.
“What the hell was that?” Karl asked, steadying himself after the fright.
“Do you have a car here?”
“We can commandeer a taxi,” he offered.
“I have to get over there,” Hailey said as she hurried to the nearest taxi. Amid the mayhem of the terrified people, she used Karl and his badge to take over one of the cars. She punched the coordinates into the car’s programming and told it to go. The self-driving car gently accelerated away, rushing its occupant to her destination at a plodding clip of forty kph. She hit the “in a hurry” button repeatedly, but the taxi only accelerated another ten kph.
When the car became bogged down in stopped traffic, Hailey jumped out and ran toward the disaster. When she came upon the scene, she found a taxi in flames, smoke rising into the sky, and a crowd standing around watching the foreign sight. “Is anyone hurt?” Hailey yelled loudly.
“Over here!” someone shouted from her ten o’clock. She ran to the victim, a mother and child lying on the street where they fell, bloody and black, unconscious.
“Call for the medics,” Hailey instructed.
“Already did,” the stranger said. Hailey searched for a pulse on the child first. It was faint, but it was there. She watched the small chest, looking for it to rise and fall. It didn’t. Instantly, she plugged the child’s nose and blew a breath into its mouth. As she did so, she reached a hand to the mother’s neck. She couldn’t find a pulse. “You,” she said to the nearest spectator. “Come here.”
So forceful was the command that the stranger stepped forward. Hailey breathed into the child’s mouth again, then ordered the woman she had chosen to kneel next to the mother. “Put your hands over each other on her chest, right here,” she said, pointing.
Another breath in the child’s mouth. “Now push down hard. Again. Again! You have to keep going. Get your weight into it!”
Another breath in the child’s mouth. “You!” she called to another woman. The woman obeyed the implied command. She kneeled next to the fallen mother. “You see what I’m doing?”
Another breath in the child’s mouth. “Plug the nose. Lift the chin. Cover her mouth and blow air into her lungs.” The woman shrank from the task. “I know there’s blood and soot. It won’t hurt you.”
Another breath in the child’s mouth. “It’s just gross. That’s all. You can save her!” The woman plugged the victim’s nose and lifted the chin, like Hailey did for the child. “Together, OK?”
Hailey’s breathed into the child’s mouth. The woman breathed into the mother’s. Sirens were nearing the scene. “Just a few more. They’re almost here.”
The chest compressor and the resuscitators worked continuously until the medics arrived with proper medical tools. The three women sat back on their heels and watched. The woman who breathed for the victim coughed and spat on the street. “I know,” Hailey said to her, spitting dirt and blood out of her mouth too. “You did great. You, too, ma’am. You must be tired. That’s a hard job,” she praised the compressor.
“I just hope they’ll be all right.”
“Did either of you see what happened?” Hailey asked.
“They were crossing the street. They had right of way; the taxi was waiting for them to go by, then it just … blew up. Never seen anything like it, except in vids.”
“Self-driving, or was someone inside?”
“I think it was self-driving.”
“Anyone in the back?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention to an ordinary taxi.”
“You should both go to the ambulance and wash up. They should have cepti-soda to rinse your mouth. Swallow a little of it, too, OK?”
The grossed-out woman nodded and stood. Still shaky on her feet, she made her way to the truck. A gentleman offered his arm to help her. “I’m glad you knew what to do,” the first woman said. She, too, stood and made her way to the truck. Hailey looked around. Hundreds of people had gathered. A fire truck finally got through the throng and sprayed suppressant on the flames. In minutes, the fire was out. Hailey went close to see if there was a body inside.
“Ma’am, you’ll have to back away,” one of the officials said.
“I’m with SWORD.” After inspecting her ID, the man who spoke to her left her alone. Corporal Lipton finally arrived at the scene.
“Agent Ramirez! Are you alright?”
“Yes,” she replied calmly.
“You’re bleeding,” he said, pointing to the equivalent sections on his own face.
“Fetch me some cepti-soda, will you?”
“Of course,” Lipton said, dashing away. Hailey scanned the crowd. She concentrated her hearing in five-degree sections around the charred taxi. As she turned slowly, she picked up dozens of remarks and conversations. Witness reports were varying, but everyone agreed the taxi was stopped at the traffic control signal.
Lipton returned with a cup of soda for Hailey. “Karl, go over to that section of the crowd. Someone said something about a passenger in the taxi. Find out what they know.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Hailey swished the cepti-soda around inside her mouth and spat it out. She repeated the process twice more, then drank what was left in the cup. Karl returned with a report. “One man says a tall, blond man got out and walked that way,” he said, pointing north.
“Tan suit?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Come here. Look at this.” Hailey led Karl to the burned car and pointed in the back seat. “No body. One briefcase. I’ll bet his jacket is burned up in there, too. That’s why my tracker stopped transmitting.”
“But the rebel is alive?”
“And going that way,” she said, pointing north.
“On foot? He won’t get very far.”
“He doesn’t expect anyone to be looking for him. I’m going after him. You keep an eye on Bracken.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lipton replied. Hailey took off on foot. She calculated the length of time since the explosion, twenty-three-point-seven minutes, and the man’s stride based on what she observed in front of the spaceport, point-nine-one meters per step, sixty steps per minute, added several seconds for the time between his exit from the vehicle and the detonation
, let’s say, eleven, and came up with a circle of radius of thirteen hundred and three meters. One point three klicks.
She picked up her pace. With every second that passed, he could gain another point-nine-one meters on her. Of course, he could turn a corner, backtrack, or just stop. She slowed down and accessed a map of the colony. Mentally, she drew the circle on the map within which she expected him to be. Where was he going? The whole area was residential. He could have ducked into anyone’s house.
Hailey returned to HQ to speak to the commander. “The suspect is one hundred and ninety centimeters tall, has blond hair, average length is sixteen centimeters, last seen wearing a tan suit, but he may have ditched the jacket, so tan pants and a white shirt. His face was twenty-three centimeters wide between the cheekbones, twenty-four at the forehead –”
“Agent Ramirez,” Commander Kraus interrupted, “a general description should be sufficient for my forces to keep watch on the neighborhood.”
“Fine. Don’t put Sergeant Landry or Corporal Bracken on the hunt. They are both persons of interest.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m always serious.”
“What evidence do you have?”
“One suspicious passenger made a ruckus and was pulled aside by Sergeant Landry and subsequently released. A second passenger, the one I described to you, switched lines to be in Bracken’s line. I think the first one was a distraction while Bracken passed the second rebel through.”
“Then Sergeant Landry is not complicit. He only tried to calm an antagonistic passenger.”
“Or that was his role. Why did he show up at the port? Why was he watching that line and Corporal Lipton so intently? He shook hands with the trouble-maker before he left. Perhaps something was passed between them.”
“This is very difficult to believe.”
“There is the fact that Bracken was not on inspection duty for forty-seven percent of the Fanshan shuttle landings. How did they get through, then?”
“Well, before, the rebels were only talking to people. This is the first act of violence. What is there to find on a person who’s only here to talk up a rebellion?”
“Commander, do your forces place trackers on civilians?”
“Absolutely not. It is illegal to track innocent citizens without just cause and a court order.”
“I estimate nine percent of your population are wearing trackers or have a tracker on some article of clothing in their closet.”
“How would you know that?”
“I see RF signals – weak, to be sure – emanating from nine percent of the people I encounter in this colony.”
“Probably their comms or tablets.”
“Different kinds of emissions. Everyone has the comm signal.”
“What conclusion does that lead you to?” Kraus asked, baffled by all the new information Agent Ramirez was giving her.
“I can only speculate at this point.”
“What’s your guess?”
“Most believable scenario is that the trackers have been smuggled in for months. Every time the rebel rousers are here, they plant them on citizens they talk to.”
“Are those citizens interested in their message?” Kraus asked, alarmed.
“Unknown. Given the lack of restlessness among the population when the Fanshans are not here, I don’t think so.”
“What are the trackers for? And what do they look like? How come the trackees don’t know they have them?”
“It could be a micro tracker. You can basically toss ‘em on a person’s clothes and they’ll stick. Looks like a piece of lint. Or it could be something given to the people, something innocuous. Those UOE flag pins I see people wearing, for instance.”
“Wouldn’t that be ironic,” the commander muttered, shaking her head. “What’s next, Agent Ramirez?”
“I’ll find someone who has one and figure out what form the tracker takes. We can go from there. I’ll keep you informed.”
“Thank you.”
The Trackers
After cleaning the grime and blood off her body and discarding the ruined clothes she wore, Hailey went out in public dressed as a civilian. Scanning the passersby, she spotted a woman with the signature signal.
“Ma’am, I’m from SWORD, and –”
“Yeah, sure you are. And I’m the Governor of Sigmatál.”
Hailey flashed her SWORD ID in front of the woman. “Ma’am, are you aware that you’re carrying a tracker?”
“What? Why are you tracking me? You really are SWORD? You can’t track me. I haven’t done anything!”
“Ma’am, I did not place the tracker, but I can see that there’s a tracker signal coming from your sweater, from that pin, in fact.”
“How do you know?”
“I have… equipment that detects the signals. May I ask you, how did you acquire that pin?”
“There was someone outside the food store taking surveys. If you did the survey, they gave you a pin.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Oh, I don’t remember. Stuff about satisfaction with the government, my job… like that.”
“I’m sure you don’t like being tracked. May I take that pin away for you?”
“It’s just a cheap trinket. I don’t care. And if it really does have a tracker in it, then you’d better take it back.”
“I assure you, SWORD did not distribute these pins. We are not tracking you.”
“Then who is?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out. Thank you for the pin.”
“Commander, my guess was accurate. The pin conceals the tracker, but worse than that, it contains a small amount of C7 coating the back. See?” Hailey scraped at the clay explosive compound with her fingernail.
“Don’t mess with that!” the commander cried.
“Relax. I’ve removed the detonator. It’s not much material anyway. Just enough to blow a small hole in someone’s chest at the place where they are wearing it.”
“For what purpose?” she asked, aghast.
“For the purpose of injuring or killing the wearer.”
“Yes, but why?”
“I don’t know yet. But you need to free the citizens from these devices. We know there is a person here who is willing to detonate explosives.”
“We’ll make an announcement. Have people turn the pins in right away.”
“If you tell them it could explode, they might panic.”
“We can tell them… it was made with a hazardous material and it could make them sick if they touch it too often.”
“They might just throw them away. You’ll have to tell them that the pins are toxic with prolonged exposure, and they have to be disposed of properly to avoid ground or water contamination. Would that spur the average citizen to bring it in?”
“Yeah. We can add some bullshit, like ‘wrap it in a square of toilet paper to avoid contact with the skin’ and ‘if there’s contact, wash skin with soap and warm water for at least a minute.’ That gives it a believable ring.”
“Just emphasize not to flush them or throw them in the trash.”
“A burst pipe is the least of our worries,” the commander replied.
“Fifty thousand burst pipes are a big problem.”
“Hey, won’t the water ruin the mechanism—?”
Hailey shook her head. “Water has no effect on C7 or the detonator. It’s sealed inside.”
“OK, Agent Ramirez. I think we have a plan.”
“Please execute it. I’m going to find something to eat.”
The public service announcement went out to every comm in the colony. Every news feed mentioned the warning about the toxic pins and the collection receptacles that had been set up around the settlement. In reality, the receptacles were bomb containment units – affectionately known as “boom boxes” by local SS – with a tiny slit cut into the top and a big arrow pointing to it with the words, “Drop flag pins here. No loitering.”
Even if
the little cherry bombs blew and caused a chain reaction inside the boxes, the tried-and-tested boxes would contain the blasts.
Hailey relaxed with a salad and cheeseburger as she watched one of the collection sites from an outdoor café table. Corporal Lipton came up the street. “Agent Ramirez, I’m glad I found you.”
“I’ll be glad if you found the tall, blond man.”
“We did! I took a picture.” Lipton scrolled through his comm. “Here it is. Is this the guy?” He turned the comm to face Hailey.
“Nope.”
Lipton’s face fell. “It’s not? Are you certain?” Hailey looked at him with her standard withering stare. “Sorry. Of course you’re certain.”
“Back to the beat, Karl.”
“I had something else to tell you. You remember that man who made a big fuss about me asking him questions? Sergeant Landry took him to the side.”
“I remember.”
“A man matching his description has been talking up revolution at the community college.”
“Pick that guy up. But don’t let Landry see him until I get there. I need to see their reactions to each other at HQ. Bracken, too.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Comm me when you have him in custody.” Hailey returned to her burger. She thought, with an internal chuckle, that it was pretty nice to have a sidekick to do all the little rebel-hunting chores for her. She hoped Karl was enjoying the quest. Big excitement in his little life.
Hailey froze. That ugly, hopeless feeling flitted by again. Her limbic monitor stabilized her brain chemistry and the feeling was gone. It lasted only half a second, but she recognized it immediately. She looked down at her hands, clutching the thick burger. Her thumbnail had something underneath it. She had washed her hands thoroughly, but somehow missed a small speck of blood. Hailey didn’t know if the blood belonged to the child or the mother. She had handled both of them trying to find a pulse and then trying to maintain the pulse with CPR until the medics got there. Those two people didn’t need that kind of event in their little lives. Hailey stared at the speck. Maybe that child had a little, insignificant, unremarkable life, but it was the only life it had.
Hailey's Comet Anthology Page 14