Infinity Wars

by Jonathan Strahan

  “I understand the perpetrator is in custody,” Dexter says. “I would like to see him, please.”

  The detective nods his pattern-shaved head towards the door, lips pursed. Dexter can see sweat patches blooming under his arms. He hands the mortician his mask, trying to smile with only the very corners of his mouth, and follows the detective to the holding cells. He stops briefly to pump a battered dispenser for hand wipes.

  Only half the biolights on the ceiling wink open as they walk in. Behind scratched-up plastic, the holding cells’ lone occupant is hunched in the corner, as far as possible from a crusted-over pool of vomit. He’s holding his head between his hands, one of which is stained red.

  “He says he doesn’t remember.” The detective’s Basic is more thickly accented than Roode’s, turning the sibilants into a hiss.

  Dexter pulls up the file tagged with the perpetrator’s smiling face. “I’d like to speak with Panya alone, please,” he says.

  The detective hesitates for a moment, looking at the huddled perp, then at Dexter, at the haptics webbing his bare arms. He swipes a finger along the cracked screen of his tab, and a hole opens in the holding cell’s plastic shell. Dexter climbs through, careful not to catch his toe on the lip.

  The detective fidgets. “He doesn’t speak Basic. Better to use the babeltech.” As he turns to leave, he scratches at his face in a way that conceals his mouth. “The cam is off.”

  Dexter pretends not to hear. Had he wanted to turn off the badly-camouflaged cam in the back left corner of the cell, he could have done it himself without lifting a finger. As the detective leaves, he steps over the vomit and crouches facing the colonist.

  “Na kadawuri,” Dexter says.

  Panya says nothing. Dexter goes into his retinas, reviewing the incident footage spliced from eyewitnesses and Bar Insomnia’s cams, watching Panya thread expertly between tables with Ansel’s drink order. Watching him hand it over, smiling.

  Watching him drag a length of electric cable from underneath the holotable and loop it around Ansel’s thick neck, pulling it tight with a savage tug.

  “Na kadawuri,” Dexter says again, as Ansel’s eyes cloud pink with burst blood vessels.

  This time Panya replies, if woodenly: “Na kaday.”

  Dexter blinks the footage aside. He gives Panya a long look. “J’arida lu manca,” he remarks, raising his own, wiggling his fingers.

  Panya looks down at the scabbed-over welt on his hand as if noticing it for the first time. Dexter offers him a wipe, and when he takes it he finally meets Dexter’s eyes. His face is scrawled with desperation. He starts to babble, colonist patois coming fast and thick, too much for Dexter to make sense of.

  “Na lentis, na,” he says, but Panya only speaks faster. Slightly annoyed, Dexter activates his babeltech.

  “—mean to do it, but I felt so strongly, and I had to do it, but you know I would never, you know, I would never do that type of thing I did, my own hands, fuck, fuck, fuck, asi fuck.”

  “Did he do something to make you angry, Panya?” Dexter asks.

  “I don’t know,” Panya weeps. “I can’t remember. All I know, you know, is I felt so much, so sudden, and then I used my own hands, and...”

  Dexter waits for Panya to trail off. The scans showed no drugs in Panya’s system. No irregular brain activity. Dexter has his own theory, and for a moment he wishes he could switch off his optics and aurals, speak freely. Instead he speaks carefully.

  “I know what some of the miners are like, Panya. They come here on gravity leave with more money than they know what to do with. They act like they own this place. They act like they can do whatever they want, fuck whoever they want. It would be understandable, Panya, if that made you feel angry.”

  Panya shakes his head fiercely, spackling snot across Dexter’s knees. “I love the heavies. I love you all.”

  He starts to weep again, and says nothing more until Dexter finally departs.

  OUTSIDE, THE STREETS bathe in afternoon sun. Dexter’s haptics sing with warmth as they convert the solar energy. Yesterday’s rain clouds have moved on: one of the moons is partially visible overhead, dissolving in the hot blue sky. A soft breeze comes in off the water and scrubs the scent of the corpse and the holding cells from Dexter’s nostrils.

  He starts the walk back to his rented house. A pack of small gangly children race past chasing an ad-drone. It has ribbons of scrap-cloth tacked to its shell and they are laughing, trying to stick another on.

  “Heavy!” some of them shout. “Dexter! Hello!”

  Dexter gives them a distracted wave. As he walks past the rows of stucco-thick buildings, smelling the spices of streetside vendors, hearing the first quivering notes from a metal-stringed guitar, the dim hallways of the police station seem like another world entirely, incongruous. But when he stops at his usual shop and buys two krill-stuffed rolls, the vendor hands him the grease-blotted paper bag quickly, clumsily, with a nervous smile. News moves quickly in the colony. Dexter double-taps his finger on the payment screen and gives an extra ten percent.

  “Thank you,” the vendor says. Her voice trembles. “I think he must have been sick in the head. Very sick.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Dexter says. “We’ll sort it out soon.”

  She nods.

  The house the Combine had built for him is at the edge of the town, up a slope overgrown with blue-green weeds that ripple in the wind. Someone offered him a buzz-knife, so he could trim them back, but he declined. He likes the feel of them brushing his shins. The house itself is small, squat, square. Its burnt-pink walls and roof were fabbed whole and then bonded together with an enzyme paste. The door is dark blue—Dexter painted it to match the ones in the town.

  Wires trail from the solar membrane coating the roof, snaking away to a rusty battery behind the house and to the needlecast equipment he uses to send his reports. The transmitter spikes up tall into the sky, shivering slightly in the breeze, turning one way and then the other.

  The Combine will want to know everything about Ansel’s murder, and about his murderer. It’s been fifty-five years now since the rebellion was put down, since the colony resigned their claim to the moons and to a militia and the Combine lightened their yoke of economic policies in return. One death won’t endanger half a century of tranquility. It won’t be more than a blip.

  But Dexter still feels unease as he pings his door open and walks inside. His haptics flash him a teeth-aching proximity warning a split second before someone rushes him from the shadows, clamping long bony arms around his chest, squeezing tight.

  “You’re awake.”

  Roode moves her grip lower, to his hips. “You’re clever, Dexter.” She drags her fingers across his crotch, then takes the paper bag from his hand. “Yes. And I’m hungry.” When she kisses him her mouth still tastes like last night’s sickly-sweet liquor. Dexter’s heart beats hard, but he pulls back.

  “I need to make my report,” he says. “Give me a moment, please, Roode.”

  She shrugs in the colonist way, lips pursed, palms up, and goes to the kitchen. Dexter listens to the crockery clatter as he runs his tongue over his teeth. He knows last night was an error in judgement. The Combine discourages any sexual or romantic relationships with the locals. But after he and Roode spent all day at the cascades, they drank a jug of anise in the red biolight glow of a beachside tavern. Then they kicked through the warm surf with the moons overhead, laughing about nothing, fucked once in the water and again at the house.

  When the call from the police station rattled through that morning, Dexter’s implants had to work double-quick to purge the alcohol from his bloodstream. He feels a migraine looming now as he unlocks the screeching metal door to the storage room. The space is bare apart from the needlecast equipment. Once the door is shut behind him, he plugs a direct line into one of the ports under his ribs. Barbed wire spools through his body for a split second, then the pain is replaced by a crackling numbness.

>   The composite face of a corps AI appears. “Good morning, Sergeant. You’re making this report thirty-eight hours in advance of schedule. Is there a problem?”

  Dexter ignores it. He doesn’t like speaking to AIs. Instead he dumps all the recordings from his optics and aurals into the needlecast, feeling the data rush through him like foam.

  “Just a moment.” The AI blinks, to show it’s analyzing the input, and makes no mention of the gaps. “It looks like Ansel Anunoby, full citizen of the Earth Combine, was killed at 0313 hours by a colonist with no prior history of violence. Would you confirm that?”

  “Confirmed,” Dexter says. “I want to speak to my commanding officer.”

  “Sergeant, the Combine is re-deploying a combat satellite to your location. For now, your orders are to carry on as normal.”

  Dexter clenches his teeth. “I want to speak to my commanding officer,” he repeats. “A combat satellite will cause panic. This was an isolated incident with no political motivation.”

  “The re-deployment will be tagged as maintenance work. Stay alert, Sergeant.”

  The face dissolves; Dexter unhooks himself. The needlecasts are always kept brief—instantaneity is costly—but now he wishes he hadn’t reported at all. Whatever higher-ups decided to bring in the combat satellite have probably never set foot here in their lives. They don’t understand this place or these people. One murder won’t jeopardize a half century of peace, but a military overreaction might.

  He drags up the case file again. Panya worked out on the Spits, a ring of tiny islands loaded with dopamine bars and discos and skinshows, the place most miners go for their gravity leave. Dexter maps the distance from the mainland.

  In the kitchen, Roode is pouring two steaming cups of the bitter tea Dexter is still learning to enjoy. He takes one and sits down. “You said you work tonight, isn’t that right, Roode?”

  She slides in across from him, chewing a mouthful of roll. “Why?”

  “Something happened late last night,” Dexter says carefully. “On one of the islands. I’d like to go out there tonight and speak with a few people.”

  Roode sticks out her tongue, stuck with crumbs. “Or maybe you want to see a show.” When Dexter doesn’t smile, she swallows. “What happened, then?”

  Roode will know soon enough. Her little wrap-around phone skittered under the bed when she dropped it last night, but Dexter can feel its electronic signature receiving more and more messages.

  “An Earther was murdered,” Dexter says. “Bar Insomnia.”

  Roode’s eyebrows flash. She doesn’t speak for a moment, then, voice slightly frayed: “I can drop you on my way.”

  “I’d like that very much, Roode.”

  She swirls her mug of tea, making the steam spiral.

  BY THE TIME they get out to the Spits, the sun is sinking into the sea. Dexter watches it, recording the fiery patina of orange and purple, but Roode’s gaze stays fixed ahead. She spoke for the first part of the boat ride, in circles about how some people reacted strangely to hallucinogens and maybe the scanners had missed something in the Panya’s bloodstream, but eventually fell silent.

  Now her hand is welded tight to the tiller, maneuvering them around a spiny hump of coral, as they approach the shore. A stiff wind has kicked up over the past hour, chopping the waves; Dexter’s tailbone is sore from when he slammed against the metal bench.

  Roode cuts the engine and they slosh in. A row of cabins stretches down one side of the beach, perched on spindly legs that telescope with the tide. Further in, garish swirls of hologram and biolight shimmer through the dusk. But there’s no music: no colonist guitars and no procedurally-generated beatpop pirated from needlecasts. The only sound is the wind and waves.

  The prow of the skiff crunches on sand. Dexter swings himself out. He tried to contact Bar Insomnia’s owner on the way over, but got only static – not uncommon, with the relay buoys in disrepair. He tries again now and receives the same phantom hiss. Premonition churns his stomach.

  “Look,” Roode says. “Nobody moored those boats.” She points and Dexter sees two untethered rotorboats drifting away in the waves, one scraping on coral. “And where are all the others?”

  For the first time in a long time, Dexter feels the absence of the sidearm that used to hang at his hip.

  Roode wipes a crust of salt from the screen of her phone and frowns down at it. “No feed, either. Something’s wrong.”

  “You’re right,” Dexter says. He upshifts his optics and peers into the growing gloom. Down the beach, he sees someone kneeling in the sand.

  “I’m not leaving you here,” Roode says. Her black eyes are wide and shiny.

  “Please don’t. But I need to investigate this situation, Roode.”

  Roode nods, lips pursed, and drops the sand-spike. Its carbon fiber line slithers and snaps taut, tethering them to the beach. She balances herself on Dexter’s shoulder while she collects her bag, then springs easily out of the boat. “I’m sticking close to the soldier, then,” she says. “Any bits of you bulletproof?”

  “Very small bits,” Dexter says. He tries to smile at her, but doesn’t quite manage it. The old combat adrenaline is coming back. His nerves feel serrated with it. Roode follows a half-step behind him as he walks toward the kneeling figure. Back turned, bony shoulder blades rising like dorsal fins—a colonist. When Dexter gets close enough, his aurals pick up muttering. He switches on his babeltech.

  “... just beautiful, and then the moonlight comes, oh, yes, beautiful, perfect and exquisite.”

  Dexter’s bare skin grows goosebumps. Over the colonist’s bent head, he can see a tiny body splayed in the sand. The little boy’s discolored lips are the same hue as the bruises around his neck. Not many Earthers bring their families here, but there are always a few.

  Roode sees what he sees and her breath sharpens. She curses in patois with enough creativity that his babeltech only catches half of it.

  “Put your hands behind your head,” Dexter says. His voice comes out so ragged he hardly recognizes it. “Then get up.”

  The colonist startles. He scrambles in a little circle in the sand, turning to face him. His mouth fishes open and shut. Slowly, slowly, he puts both hands behind his head. He gets up.

  “What did you do?” Roode’s translated voice demands. “What the fuck did you do?”

  The colonist looks down at the child’s body. A tremor goes through him. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know, I just wanted…”

  Dexter opens up his heat sensors and finds the boy’s parents a little further along the beach, half-buried in the sand, corpses cooling fast and gouged with knife marks. He pushes his optics to the limit and sees an arm dangling out from a cabin door, fingers stiffening in rigor mortis. And he knows, with sick certainty, that there will be more bodies in the other cabins, in the bars, in the water. All of them heavy.

  His mind reels. The Combine tasked him with scouring the colony for signs of any covert cells, any traces of resistance or even lingering resentment. He’d looked for it. Expected it. And he’d found nothing at all. No indication of an invisible rage, contained but simmering for half a century and now finally boiling over. It doesn’t seem possible.

  “Who coordinated this?” he demands. “Who ordered this?”

  The colonist makes a keening noise in the back of his throat. He reaches one hand towards Dexter, fingers splayed. Dexter snatches it out of the air. For the first time it occurs to him that he could snap the colonist’s delicate bones with a squeeze. He’s strong here in the low gravity, horribly strong.

  He lets go. “Where is everyone?”

  The colonist shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Then he springs, reaching for Dexter’s throat, and before Dexter can shove him away something crackles through the air. The colonist seizes, collapses. Smell of burnt hair and ozone. Dexter turns and sees the spiky barrel of a compact stunner. Roode’s mouth is twisted downward, her bro
ws knit together. For a wild moment he thinks she’ll shoot him next.

  “I want to get out of here.” She rubs at her face. Exhales. “Fuck.”

  Dexter already suspects where the others are, the ones who used the knives: they’ve gone to the other islands to keep killing. He looks at Roode like she might be able to explain, the same way she explains hand gestures and sayings and how to eat certain foods. She carefully returns the stunner to her bag, then bends over and vomits.

  “Everyone’s going crazy,” she breathes, wiping her mouth with a shaking hand. “He’s crazy. Panya, him too, fucking crazy. How?”

  Dexter remembers the satellite re-deployment he mistook for paranoia. The Combine knew something was going to happen. Knew, and told him nothing.

  “I need to get to a needlecast,” he says. “There’s one on the main island, isn’t there? On Dosa.”

  Roode nods. They hurry back to the boat without speaking; she stops once, trying to throw up again, but only gets bile.

  There might be survivors further inland. The thought jars him, but there’s no time to look. He steadies the boat while Roode clambers in, then follows after her, hauling the sand-spike out by hand. The wind is stronger now, slewing them sideways. When the engine starts it churns up clouds of silt. Now that the last sliver of sun has slipped under the waves, the water is black as pitch. They only get a few meters back from the beach before the engine takes water, sputters and cuts out. Roode curses.

  They’re adrift, current carrying them parallel to the beach, toward the rotorboat caught on coral and back toward the bodies. Dexter thinks, distantly, that the colonist left sprawled on the sand will drown if he doesn’t wake up before the high tide. But when he looks, the colonist is gone.

  A proximity warning shivers through his teeth.

  Then the colonist erupts from the dark, leaping over Roode’s head, black eyes winched wide. Dexter sidesteps but a trailing leg hooks him; they slam against the boat-bottom in a mess of limbs. The colonist’s skin is slick, impossible to grip. Long hands reach for his throat again.