The tenth time she watched their entry to Sector 12 she was no closer to understanding the extent of their involvement than the first. Her information indicated that Anatoly wanted to set up a guerilla team in one of the black zones, more than likely to begin conducting raids on vulnerable parts of UCF society. Most of the brass disregarded it as a minor threat. They figured if the police were afraid of the area, the denizens would deal with Anatoly and save them the bother. However, the fact remained: something had chased gangers out of Sector 12 en masse. Logic suggested an ACC Special Ops team, but Nina’s instincts agreed with the abject lack of evidence of such a penetration.
A search on that mystery woman yielded the name Elena White. It took Nina under a minute to determine it was a fake identity. Most of the information did not survive a deep check and some of the file creation dates were too new to be legitimate. The edits appeared to trace back to Joey’s IPv12 address. A facial search returned numerous videos from city cams, most were inconsequential, but two caught her eye.
One showed her casing a dock with a Sentinel Corp transport ship. The other had her walking right through the lobby of the Diplomatic Tower and going to Warner’s floor. The name she signed in with traced back to an outfit that provided twenty thousand credit a night call girls.
“So this woman works for or with Warner, or with Nemsky. Or she’s screwing Itai and Nemsky is jealous, or there’s tension between Itai and Nemsky and she’s stuck in the middle of it while Warner is off yanking it in the corner.” Nina’s frustration boiled over into a growl.
The more she tried to sort it out, the more convoluted everything seemed. There were simply too many possibilities. The next video showed the woman entering a Siege Arms manufacturing plant and standing in line with employees going through a security check. Out of curiosity, she dug into the company’s network and matched her time of passage by the desk with an employee name. Susan DeWitt, a name that also appeared on a purchase order that sent 2,250 combat rifles off on a transport truck that subsequently vanished.
Nina’s cheek bunched against her hand as she leaned on her desk, not a trace of surprise on her face when the image of Susan DeWitt looked nothing at all like the black haired vixen that just walked into the factory. The real Susan looked a few years older and many degrees less pretty, and sat in a jail cell for grand larceny. Nina fired off an email to the detective on the case, containing video and security logs showing who really entered the factory and hacked into the loading machines. With any luck, Mrs. DeWitt would be home in time for dinner.
She leaned back in her chair and tried to connect the dots in her mind. The black haired woman with no name appeared to be working for Nemsky. Setting up a guerilla operation required weapons, which she had just procured. Why would he be so rough with her? Maybe she threatened to back out, or wanted more money. Nemsky had all but thrown her around in the restaurant; it seemed out of place if she was loyal to him.
Nina shut her eyes for a moment of thought, her wan complexion blue in the castoff light, and stared at the terminals for several minutes. The whispercraft over the Imperial that day had followed Joey from the scene. The other man, Masaru Kurotai, they could find whenever they wanted. She replayed that footage, watching him drive all the way to the grey zone near Sector 12. Her fist stopped just short of taking a chunk out of her desk. The skinny bastard lived right near where Nemsky set up shop.
Now she had a place to start.
he unmarked black patrol craft’s tires cried out with a hydraulic whine as they folded down out of their protective doors. Cryonic mist blasted debris out from under it as weight settled into its ground wheels. Ion emitters fluttered then flashed as they powered down, and soon the car was as silent as the street in which it landed. Nina looked around the area as the gull wing door sank closed with a muted thump.
The blight started two blocks ahead; she did not want to park there or leave the car within easy sight of it. Driving a hovercar into the grey zone would attract a missile at worst and trouble at best; neither of which she was in any mood for. She went in the direction of Joey’s apartment with a determined gait and a look on her face that begged people around her to give her a reason to end them.
The conversation with Vincent on the ride soured her mood. He ceased any overt attempt to suggest she join him on the other side and just rambled about how he was happy to wait there alone for her. As long as she was happy, he was happy. The passive guilt did not work. She knew Vincent too well for that. He never sidestepped issues. If the twenty minutes of listening to the voice rattle on had accomplished anything, it had convinced her that she wanted someone’s throat in her hand for it.
Vileness hung in the sunken foyer outside the apartment, assaulting her with a smell that stalled her breath and brought a tear to the eye. Ugh, this body can be too real sometimes. Nina forced herself through it, activating combat mode to lessen the impact of noxious stimuli. She edged up to the door with her sidearm ready, waiting and listening. Her amplified ears picked up the fluttering crackle of thin plastic wrap caught in the intermittent breeze of snoring. She tossed her weapon to her left hand and wrapped her fingers around the door. A normal human-strength tug did not move it as it wedged against the ground. Nina set her stance and shoved the slab of half-inch thick steel aside. The sudden force bowed the door, bending it enough to detach it from the ground. Rusty hinges squeaked through the air. A body lay embedded in a mountain of trash that bore a faint resemblance to a couch.
Nina put her pistol away and walked up to him.
With two fistfuls of leather jacket, she lifted and flung him face first into the wall. Debris fell off him as he flew, like pixie dust from a slum fairy. He smacked into the cinderblocks, setting loose a human outline of dirt, which hung in the air for a second before dissipating. The man’s head bounced off the wall and he fell to the ground trailed by a bushy streamer of hot pink hair. He gawked up at her with a bloodied nose and an expression so dazed from his sudden unexpected consciousness that he asked the wall why it hit him.
Nina sighed, realizing it was not Joey. After shoving the delirious pink haired man out of the apartment, she swept the area with all the scanning modes her cybereyes contained. After several minutes of searching, only two child-sized footprints on a clear patch of smooth concrete stood out as unusual due to the dried blood. She squatted by them and her eyes zoomed in on the details. Blue lines appeared at several points along the print as the pattern within increased in definition with each pass of the sensor.
When the scan completed, she started a comparison run against the Biotrak database. If the parents had the child’s footprints recorded at birth, she could put a name to them. The rapid cycling of faces shrank into a small window hovering at the periphery of her sight.
“Joey, what the hell are you doing with a kid?”
She continued her investigation. The shower appeared to have been a casualty of a short gunfight. Enough bullet holes dotted the apartment to make a team of forensic analysts insane. She disregarded most. Caked with months of crud, they looked too old to be of any value.
A beep made her whirl, aiming her weapon at the VidPhone hanging on the wall. She sighed and lowered her arm, plodding over to the device.
Calm down, there’s nothing here that should scare me.
She stared at the logo for The Allcom Corporation, the pseudo-governmental entity that absorbed all telecommunications after the war. A silver and green octagon bearing an A superimposed on a C rotated at the center of the screen while the device made all sorts of noise. Her arm rose up and poked the answer button with the tip of her pistol.
“Oh, hello.” A pleasant looking man on the verge of being elderly smiled. “You must be the girl that Joseph’s told me so much about.”
“Do you know where I could find him?”
The man sighed. “I’m afraid I don’t, I was looking for him, too.”
“And you are?”
“I’m his father, William.” He seemed so s
weet he teetered on senile. “I’m on my way down from Mars to visit him; I haven’t seen him in almost two years.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
She spoke with him for the better part of twenty minutes as he regaled her with the most embarrassing stories of childhood idiocy; the sort of thing that parents adored sharing with their child’s significant other at any opportunity.
“You seem like a nice young woman, how long have you known Joseph?”
Nina turned in place, gazing through dust gleaming in faint streaks of light from bullet holes in the wall. “We only just met. I was looking to spend a little quality time with him as soon as I could.”
She narrowed her eyes; the elder Dillon did not react.
“That’s nice.” His smile almost made her regret what she planned to do when she found him. “I’m sure he’ll be good to you, better than that last guy.”
Nina froze. “What last guy?”
“Oh that other guy, oh darn what was the name…” Joey’s father rubbed his chin, lost in thought. “Vince or something… Joey told me about how that guy lied to you. Such a cruel thing to do.”
Nina snapped around to lock the VidPhone with a glare. “What the hell are you talking about, old man?”
“Joey told me how that guy got you hurt. I don’t remember all the details, some awfulness about making you trust him so they could get you into um, what was it… Division 9?”
Her knuckles creaked. Despite what this man said, his affect came off so nice she found it hard to get angry. “There was no setup. Vincent got killed by a crazy auggie.”
“Oh, no…” He put on the smile of someone delivering bad news. “Joey found out that he worked for C-Branch, to get you to trust him so you could get ‘convinced’ to join Division 9. He’s not really dead, you know. They wanted you for years, but your physical performance was below their standards, so they had to put you in a doll body. Don’t worry though, you’ll be much happier with Joey. His mother and I raised him right. He’ll be much better for you than Vincent could be.”
Nina’s pistol belched a single round; the VidPhone exploded into a shower of silver fragments that rained down over the table. She destroyed it faster than conscious thought at the implication that a piece of shit hacker working for a Russian terrorist was a better man than Vincent. She turned away, not believing what the man had said; but a seed of doubt cracked open in the back of her mind.
Nina never thought of herself as a master at reading people. Could Vincent really have been part of some kind of plot? Would Division 9 resort to a ruse like that to get her put into a doll body? She knew some of her contemporaries had healthy human bodies in cryo storage waiting for them to retire. It sounded ludicrous for them to go to such lengths to get her into a doll body when they could just ask and freeze her. Of course, she would not have accepted; she wanted to be a technician. Maybe they knew that.
Nina fell into the seat at the table, face cradled against one hand and a warm gun. All she had wanted to do was play with chemicals and forensic bots, solve crimes, and help people. She sat up straight, staring at her hands.
Now I’m a killer. I’m exactly what I didn’t want to be.
She searched the darkness of her memory for any way to refute the old man’s allegations about Vincent. A beep in her head distracted her rambles. The footprint matched. A smiling little girl’s face floated in a square of light superimposed over her vision. Text filled in to the right. Hayley Roth, current age 11. The image was over a year old, taken the last time she had a photo ID from her school.
The file indicated her father worked for Division 2, a detective by the name of Jacob Roth with the gang crimes task force. Hayley was not listed as missing, although her school had requested wellness checks since her online only course grades had fallen off. Other records showed a long list of entries from one counselor upset at her father not returning his calls.
What the hell was this kid doing here? Nina’s mind raced. Gang crimes task force… Did he kidnap her to throw off an investigation?
Worried, she pinned the girl’s address and stormed out.
The elevator opened with a soft rush of air. The sterile hallway of subdued earth tones stretched out like any of a hundred thousand other apartment buildings in the city, making her think that whoever sold these drab brown rugs had to be quite wealthy. Fluorescent light shimmered from recessed gutters near the ceiling, leeching the life out of everything here; even the plastic plants looked sick.
Detective Roth’s apartment was six doors down on the left by a two-foot tall pile of plasfilm ads for takeout food. Thermal showed a child sized figure in what looked like the bathroom; sitting on the toilet, arms and legs hanging limp. The presence of some manner of helmet masked the upper parts of her head in cool blue, and a barely visible oval of heat balanced across her legs. Nina panned back and forth, finding no one else at home. Up until now, Nina thought going into cyberspace while on the bowl was just a net meme.
The door looked like it had been replaced not too long ago, and blotches of propellant residue stained the wall on both sides. Nina rang the bell. The thermal image looked towards her, and then turned away. An orange blur of a hand extended a middle finger the second time she rang.
“Hayley, please open the door. I’m with the police.” Nina leaned close as she spoke in a loud tone.
The blue helmet swiveled toward her. Nina recognized the slouch of a long-suffering sigh. Reds moved as the slender outline stood up, removed the helmet, and walked to the door. Nina disabled thermal as soon as the door opened. A scrawny adolescent girl in a shin-length lavender shirt smirked up at her, weight on one leg and tapping bare toes into the rug. Nina tried to push aside the emotion that still lingered from her conversation with William Dillon.
“What?” Hayley folded her arms, annoyed at the interruption.
Nina held up her ID. “I’m sorry to bother you. Can I talk to you for a bit?”
The adolescent attitude evaporated. Her foot stopped tapping as eyes reddened and she stepped back with her hands over her mouth. The child trembled.
“Don’t worry, Hayley. You’re not in trouble, your dad’s not in trouble, I just wanted to talk to you about Joey.”
Hayley put her arms down, gripping her shirt into fists. She ambled away from the door with a confused smirk, her gait stiffened by hours spent on a toilet. After tripping over some of the discarded take-out containers littered about, she crawled to the couch and pulled herself standing. Nina closed the door behind her and blinked as she looked around the room. The apartment was almost as messy as Joey’s. It did not look like it had been cleaned in months. Stacks of holodisk cases piled up here and there around the dining room table and empty food containers were scattered everywhere. The girl smelled as though she had been wearing the same shirt for a week and had as much dirt on her face as a street kid.
“What about him?” A thin tone of defiance wavered out of her voice.
“It is very important that I talk to him.” Nina’s voice softened. “When was the last time you ate?”
“I dunno, yesterday… day before… who cares?” Hayley shrugged as she backed into the couch and sat down. “Why do you want Joey? Are you gonna kill him? That’s what you Division Nines do isn’t it, you just shoot people you think are bad?”
Nina tried to talk in a reassuring tone. This child looked like someone used to being lied to. “I’ve seen some things that I need to ask him about. He may be working with some bad people and not know it. I just want to clear up some misunderstandings.”
The thought that Joey may be responsible for her patrol route change made her fists creak tighter.
“Is this about that hack?” She rested her chin on her knees. “It was me, not him. I made the men come after us.”
The next several minutes of conversation convinced Nina that the girl played in cyberspace but did not know a thing about hacking. “Someone was leading you around.”
“Joey said tha
t too.” She pulled one knee to her chin and picked at the flaking nail polish on her toes. “I don’t know who did it, but it wasn’t Joey.”
Nina could tell the girl liked him, and sighed in her mind’s voice as she asked herself why criminals always had to involve kids. “How did you and Joey get mixed up together?”
Hayley forgot her nerves, giggling as she recounted how she just stumbled across him in the net one day and thought his avatar silly. He was all big mean and nasty and she wanted to make fun of him for being so serious. She shared a few stories about the torments she visited upon him, but got sad again when it came back to the men trying to kill them.
“WellTech was here?” Nina looked around. Her scan found evidence of firearms use; many patched bullet holes around the bathroom door. She felt a mix of pity for her situation and admiration at her survival. “Hey, why don’t you get yourself cleaned up and I’ll take you to get something to eat.”
Hayley shrugged and explained her lack of clean laundry. Nina made a note to track down her father and find out why he neglected her. She channeled her own mother and shooed the girl into the shower tube while gathering clothes from the floor. By the time the girl emerged, Nina presented her with clean clothing. Once dressed, she took her to one of those restaurants that had all the old kitsch on the walls. It was the least extravagant place that had reasonable quality food that did not come from beige slime.
Nina had not eaten much other than OmniSoy packets since waking up in the body of a doll, her brain did not need a lot of nutrition and the excess just passed right through her. Eating felt just like it always had thanks to the department ensuring that every part of her looked, felt, and worked like a normal person.
They told her she might one day need to use her feminine wiles as part of an operation, but that sort of thing was more of a C-Branch thing. Division 9 often just killed problems, not screwed them for information. She had little issue with the idea at the time; this was not her body anymore, it was just a tool issued to her like a gun or a car.
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