Final Inquiries

by Roger MacBride Allen

  In the front left-hand corner of the lunchroom were two large coffee urns, marked with official-looking stick-on signs marked REGULAR and DECAFFEINATED.

  Hanging on a pair of chains from the ceiling above was another sign, also quite official in appearance.

  ALL EMPLOYEES WITH KENDARI CONTACTS MUST

  OBEY CAFFEINE SAFETY PROTOCOLS AT ALL TIMES.

  A typed note on embassy stationery was taped to that sign. The paper looked like it had been there a while. It had browned a little at the edges, and dried splashes of what could only be coffee marked the lower right-hand corner. It was all in capital letters, and read:

  REMINDER, PEOPLE--CAFFEINE SAFETY PROTS

  EXTEND TO ALL UNUSED REG & DECAF COFFEE

  GROUNDS, USED COFFEE GROUNDS, USED AND

  UNUSED LOOSE TEA, TEABAGS (INCLUDING

  HERBAL--BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY) ALL OTHER

  CAFFEINATED BEVERAGES, ALL DECAF VERSIONS

  OF CAFFEINATED PRODUCTS, AND ALL

  CONTAINERS THAT DO OR EVER DID HOLD THE

  ABOVE OBJECTS!!!

  Dr. Zhen Chi, Med. Off.

  The ink scribble over Zhen Chi's typed name had to be her signature, but Hannah couldn't make out a single legible letter in it. Hannah had long ago observed that the stereotype about doctors and their handwriting was far better deserved than most.

  A final, smaller, handwritten note in neat block letters was taped to the other corner of the ALL EMPLOYEES sign. It was newer-looking, and cleaner.

  PLEASE REMEMBER TO WASH, NOT JUST RINSE,

  MUGS BEFORE RETURNING THEM TO RACK.

  THANKS!

  SNACK SHACK STAFF

  And, there, on the wall to the left of the coffee urns, were two sets of open shelves just deep enough to hold a single row of cups or glasses. The first shelf was filled with about thirty identical standard UniGov-issue coffee cups, each on its own saucer.

  The second set of shelves was plainly someone's well-intentioned but doomed effort to organize everyone's personal cups and mugs. There were neat little labels under each section of shelf, each with a person's name or title. There were about twenty of the labels. Most, but not all, had cups or mugs parked in their assigned spots. They were of all sorts--insulated mugs with lids, handmade ceramic ones purchased at this or that crafts fair at some previous posting, others with the logos of businesses or government departments, and a few with jokes or sayings. One showed a cartoon of a bureaucrat dozing at his desk over the caption Visit Fabulous Center--The Capital Planet on the Edge. Hannah was pretty sure she knew what gift shop that had come from.

  One bothersome fact was that no fewer than four of the mugs had the BSI logo--one of these was dark blue, but three were white, and identical to the one found at the crime scene. She checked the white ones, and found that all of them had names written on the bottom in black marker that looked to be quite recent. It looked as if the same person had written in all the names, but she couldn't be quite sure the handwriting was identical, judging only from lettering scribbled on the bottom of cups.

  She skimmed her eye over some of the other labels. Groppe, Lindermann, Bonkofski, Mtombe, Smith, DCM--that had to mean Deputy Chief of Mission, the officer second-in-command under the ambassador--Halloran, Med. Off., Singh, Farrell, and, inevitably, one just labeled The Ambassador.

  Stabmacher's cup wasn't in either of the spots one might choose as the highest-status spot, either first in line at the top, or in the center of the center row. It was instead democratically positioned off to one side of the second row. It was deep red, with the UniGov Diplomatic Corps logo printed on it. There was just the faintest film of undisturbed dust on its rim and handle, and around the base of the cup, making it clear that that cup was never used, or moved.

  The bottom row and a half of shelves gave mute and eloquent testimony to the limits of organization. Two labels had been peeled off incompletely, but cups still sat over where the labels had been. On another label, the original name had simply been scribbled over, and the words Fred's Cup awkwardly written in underneath.

  Down in the corner was one marked Linda in an aggressively cheerful, youthful-looking handwriting that was almost elaborate enough to be called calligraphy. The cup over it was blue and gold, and looked to have some sort of college crest emblazoned on it. It looked brand-new.

  Two or three of the empty spots over the name labels were a bit scuffed and scarred, and showed the remains of water rings. Other spots showed no sign of ever having been used.

  Hannah didn't have any trouble reading the story that the shelf told. Someone at the embassy was a great believer in the blessings of being organized and had decided the previous arrangements for storing cups just wasn't good enough.

  So that person--at a guess, judging from the handwriting on the original labels, that female person--had taken it upon herself to do the thing properly, and set up the shelf, done up the original labels, and busily typed up memos for distribution urging everyone to follow the new arrangements.

  Ambassador Stabmacher had dutifully gone along. Probably he was the second person to shelve his cup, right after whoever had set the thing up. It showed he was just part of the gang, a team player, just as likely as anyone else to wander down to the Snack Shack for a cup of coffee and a chat. Everyone joined him in pretending that was true, but everyone knew just as well as he did that it simply wasn't the way he ran the show. Hannah had seen his real personal cup, and his private coffee service, in a service alcove just outside his office.

  She judged that personal-cup shelf system was already well off its peak of compliance and had entered into a gentle decline. People were still putting up with it, mainly for the sake of humoring the person who had started it, but a few malcontents had never cooperated, and it would appear there had been a few backsliders in recent months.

  Silly, trivial stuff--except that it told her a lot about the community they were in, how it worked, what things were important to people. No doubt the fact that care had to be taken to protect the Kendari from caffeine had, all by itself, raised the social, and even political, importance of what a person chose to drink, what cup a person used, and even where one put the cup when done.

  She had the distinct sense that, given just one or two more outside facts, this collection of cups and mugs could tell her a lot about the recent social history of the place--and, just possibly, a great deal more. Her ideas were starting to take firmer shape. There were things that could be used here.

  "I take it the choice of murder weapon causes you to study this," Jamie said as he came up behind her. "Speaking of which--" He handed her a cup of coffee for herself. "Here you go. Our instant stuff mixed with their water in one of their generic cups. Let's see us get in trouble for that."

  "Thanks. The apparent choice of weapon causes me to study this, yes," said Hannah. "But the Frank Milkowski I knew was no fool, even if the crime scene would have us believe that Milkowski did it, then did the next best thing to hanging up a big neon sign that flashed on and off with the message 'I DID IT!' It makes no sense. No more sense than a handprint that appears out of nowhere."

  "And therefore it must be a setup--but who did the setting up and why?"

  "No data," said Hannah as she followed Jamie back to the table he had colonized. "Therefore, no comment. Hey, our mealpacks must have gotten better again. These almost look like real pancakes."

  "Yeah, but don't look too hard at the bacon." They both sat down and started to eat. "Okay, if you don't want to discuss things we don't have data on," said Jamie, "maybe we can talk about data that makes no sense--and I mean besides the coffee mug and the handprint."

  "Fine. That leaves us with plenty to talk about. For starters--either someone is not playing straight with us, or there's something odd about the discovery of the body."

  "Yeah," said Jamie. "I assumed you caught that too, but I didn't want to do any follow-up that might tell the ambassador we were especially interested in that point."

  "He'
s on your suspect list?"

  "Not especially--but what he doesn't know he can't blurt out by accident to someone who is."

  "Jamie, he's in charge of negotiating on behalf of humanity with the Kendari and the Vixa. I think we can assume he's capable of some discretion."

  "I don't want to assume anything I don't have to. But anyway, according to Ambassador Stabmacher, Milkowski found the body, locked down our side of the building, then immediately contacted Stabmacher, who brought in the other two BSI agents, had the tamper-proof seals put up on the outside of the human-side doors, then contacted the Kendari ambassador, or xenologist, or whatever they call him."

  "Right. Except Brox also claimed to have found the body--and got pretty emotional about it. If he's that good an actor, he shouldn't be wasting his talents as an IS Inquirist. He ought to be back on Earth, in Hollywood or Mumbai, playing the bad-guy Kendari in some vid series."

  Jamie thought it over. "They could both be right," he said. "There's nothing to exclude that. Supposedly each of them went in, saw the body, left it completely undisturbed, then left immediately and sealed the entrance, and the next time either door was open was when we went through it--first coming in on the Kendari side, then leaving on the human side."

  "Except that Stabmacher then immediately contacts Xenologist Flexdal--and for once shows some good sense and records the call with a time-and-date stamp--and informs him that one of their people has been found dead. Flexdal doesn't say 'yeah, we found her too' or anything like that. He lets Stabmacher think that's the first they've heard of it. Or else maybe he directs Brox to go see if there is anything wrong inside the ops center, without giving him any details. He goes and checks, and discovers the body."

  "That would work," agreed Jamie, "but Brox sure made it seem as if he was the very first one there, without any sort of warning or notice."

  "And there's nothing to indicate that he wasn't," Hannah pointed out. "Brox comes in, sees his intended mate dead. He immediately leaves, goes back to the head of his embassy, and reports. Then just enough time goes by for the Kendari to get good and damned suspicious. Maybe it's in the split second just before Flexdal is going to call Stabmacher--or maybe contact the nearest Kendari strike fleet--when Stabmacher calls him. Flexdal has had just enough time to get paranoid before then, so he gets all cagey and plays dumb to see what the humans are up to. That could work."

  "And both Brox and Milkowski are reported to have gone in, seen the body, and left immediately," said Jamie. "That would increase the chances of their not overlapping."

  "Plus it fits with the idea of the Kendari not jumping in immediately to explain whatever it is they know about that handprint," said Hannah.

  "What it doesn't fit in with is the idea that Brox has been completely forthcoming with us," said Jamie. "Unless he was unaware of the call from Stabmacher to Flexdal, he's been yanking our chain as well."

  "And don't tell me it hasn't crossed your mind that he has to be on our list of suspects--and pretty high up."

  "I know. Want to get in a fight over which one of us doesn't like it more?"

  "Let's just assume it would be a tie."

  "Fair enough," said Jamie. "New topic. The ambassador's lockdown plan. Is it just me, or does that really take the cake?"

  "It's not just you," said Hannah. What was obvious to both of them was that the lockdown was just the sort of idea that would appeal to a layman and be rejected by a real police officer out of hand, for any number of reasons. The first and foremost problem was that, except for the chief engineer, no one had actually been locked up. Anyone who wished could have gotten out, done whatever they liked in the night, then returned.

  The ambassador's second mistake was in seeing the tamper-detecting tape seals as infallible and the answer to everything. As Jamie had pointed out, it was far from uncommon for a shipboard cabin to have more than one way in and out--and there were plenty of ways to get around tamper-detecting tape.

  There was, for example, second-chance tape. It looked and behaved almost exactly like standard tamper-detect, except that it had a second, outer layer of adhesive. You could peel it back once without any effect--but the second time it went on, it would behave exactly like the conventional material. Supposedly there were also sources for the second-chance adhesive itself. Paint it on a surface before the tamper-detecting tapes went up, and an hour after the seal went up, it would simply slide off of its own accord. The list of tricks and stunts and workarounds went on and on. The moral of the story was that tamper-detect wasn't anywhere near as unbeatable as the vid shows made it out to be. Only an amateur would assume that slapping tamper-detect on everything was a foolproof solution.

  But there was another and more subtle problem: Confinement on the honor system would work fine--so long as everyone, including the killer, was honorable. The ambassador seemed to understand, on an intellectual level, that everyone, including him, had to be treated as a suspect. But somehow, at the same time, he seemed to be taking steps that would only be effective if everyone agreed not to cheat--including the murderer. His failure to secure some sort of cross-verification with the Kendari, and his failure to ensure proper surveillance could easily wreck the investigation.

  Hannah swallowed a mouthful of dubious bacon and went on. "The tamper-detect over everything and locking everyone up tell me that either he's seen too many bad murder mystery vid shows, and actually thought he was doing some good, or else he's involved in some really oddball conspiracy and they needed the lockdown to give the conspirators time to operate without being observed by the rest of the embassy staff."

  "Observed doing what?" Jamie asked. "Killing Emelza 401 some more? The victim was already dead by the time of the lockdown, as witnessed by Milkowski and Brox--who, in case you hadn't noticed, is working for the other side. Or is this conspiracy of yours going to be really oddball?"

  "I don't know what the plotters didn't want observed. Maybe they were preparing to flee undetected, leaving the simulants in their place so they can get away unnoticed."

  "No one this side of blind drunk would mistake my simulant for me from less than twenty meters away--I hope. Ten times that distance if they saw it walking or moving."

  "But we haven't seen your simulant yet this morning. They adapt. They get better. Your simulant might be your exact double by now. Who knows how good they get? For all we know, we were talking to the ambassador's simulant last night."

  Jamie snorted. "Yeah, right."

  "Hey, you asked for oddball. Obviously, a simulant substitution is a crazy idea. They'd never ever really try it. Let's forget it and move on. We've got about six hundred things to do, and we need to make decisions about who does what and in what order."

  Not so many hours later, Hannah had reason to think that "never" didn't last as long as it used to.

  THIRTEEN

  BAD IMPRESSIONS

  There had never been any thought of Brox meeting with Hannah and Jamie to talk out strategy over breakfast, or any other meal, for that matter. It was a given that they would meet after mealtime. If absolutely necessary, a Kendari could sit there and watch a human eat, or vice versa, but it was a duty to be avoided whenever possible. It wasn't just that caffeine was deadly to Kendari, or that there were common ingredients in Kendari food that were equally toxic to humans. Each species found the other's food absolutely nauseating in appearance and smell, and neither found the other's table manners all that attractive, either.

  The meeting location was also obvious--if awkward. The joint ops center was neutral territory and had facilities for both species. It was, however, also the crime scene--and, to state the same thing on a more personal level, the place where Brox had found Emelza dead. But Brox was the one who suggested the ops center, and if he could take it, so could Hannah and Jamie.

  They were on the way to the meeting when an odd sight greeted them. The ambassador and Zhen Chi were walking across the compound toward a small shed. Hannah and Jamie paused, then shifted course a bit t
o trail after them. They watched as the ambassador fished some small object out of his pocket and passed it over the door of the shed. It was obviously a keywand of some kind. The door swung open--and the ambassador and Zhen Chi stepped out of it, to greet the ambassador and Zhen Chi, followed by four other figures.

  "Okay," said Jamie, half-under his breath, "the simulants do get better and better."

  "Yeah," said Hannah, in an equally stunned tone of voice. "I recognize Milkowski from his simulant. And judging from the sim, it looks like he's put on weight and gone greyer."

  The illusion was good--but it was not perfect. It took only moments for Jamie to spot a half dozen subtle differences between the two humans and their simulants, and not very much longer to spot flaws in the other four as well--big enough flaws for him to be sure that he'd never again mistake any of them for human.

  They were further surprised to see Jamie's simulant emerge from somewhere and home in on the group. Jamie had completely lost track of his own sim at some point during the previous evening. He had no idea where the creature--or robot, or android, or whatever it was--had spent the night. That might be a worrisome point.

  He didn't think his simulant looked all that much more like him than it had the day before. He was a little irritated to note that it had a bit of an oddly shaped little potbelly. Jamie caught himself patting himself on the stomach, making sure that wasn't copied off him. He had to laugh at himself. Maybe he was a bit more vain about his appearance than he realized.

  For the moment however, his sim clearly wasn't worried about improving its similarity to the original. It was much more focused on herding together with the other six. That suited Jamie. Anything that got that creepy mirror image out of his hair.