Up Against It

by M. J. Locke

  The remote comm light came on again, and Moriarty said into their shared space, “We’ve checked the logs. You should be fine. The university has sent out a team to survey the claim. You know Ngo Minh Xuan, Commissioner Navio’s husband?”

  “I’ve met him,” Geoff said.

  “He’s on the team. Everything looks to be on the up-and-up.”

  A sick feeling sank in Geoff’s gut. “All right. Thanks a lot, sir.” He signed off with a sigh. He could not think of anything to say that would not sound stupid or petty, so he simply said, “Let’s go,” fired up his rockets, and made for Ouroboros. His two friends did likewise.

  As Ouroboros grew slowly in their sights, Geoff tried to figure out a way to make this new development work out. Maybe, he thought, with the big ice coming Down, we can merely register ours, and hold off on selling it.

  Was there really anything wrong with wanting to benefit from his claim?

  He tried to picture what his dad and mom would say. No doubt Dad would be angry that here was yet another big secret Geoff had sat on for so long.

  Maybe, Geoff thought, next time, I’ll punch him in the face. At the notion, he got a mental glimpse of Carl looking at him, looking sad. Go away, he thought. Stop trying to make me care. You’re dead. If his friends had not been on the comm channel with him, he would have screamed it.

  * * *

  Aaron reached Jane via her wavelink as she left Sarah’s office and entered the lobby. Aaron’s face was pale, masklike. She broke stride. “What—? What’s wrong?”

  “A moment,” Aaron said, and—with an uncomfortable glance at Jane—used his new authority to invoke privacy. Dead spydust drifted down around her. On her waveface, the red “Stroiders” light winked out. Then he said, “Jane, Marty is dead.”

  The words sank in, and horror spread through her. She braced her hand on the wall. It couldn’t be. They’d talked only an hour or two ago.

  Marty!

  Ogilvie did this. It had to be.

  Think, Navio. Don’t jump to conclusions.

  She found her voice. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know yet. I tracked you down as soon as I heard. I’m on my way to the scene right now. Jane—” His voice broke. His gaze was anguished, his lips tight. “Too many things are happening at once. Too much is at stake. I don’t have the right to ask this, but I need your help.”

  He seemed only half convinced she would agree. That stung. “Of course I’ll help! What do you need me to do?”

  Relief broke over his face. “Thank you. I got a call from Police Chief Fitzpatrick, asking me to meet him at the scene. I don’t know the details. It may have been an accident, but I fear otherwise.”

  “I’ll be right there. Send me the coordinates,” she said. “And I’ll need you to commandeer a lift for me.”

  His hands danced in midair. “Both done. Hurry.”

  Aaron got Tania on the line while Jane made her way to the lifts. They briefed Jane as she rode up alone, clinging batlike by her feet to the lift loops.

  “I sent him on an assignment,” Aaron told her, “based on something Tania learned about the feral sapient attack last night. Tania, if you please…”

  Tania was pacing on her catwalk. Behind her, Jane could see glimpses of her programmers’ space. She spoke low and fast, in a monotone, as if trying to stay ahead of her own thoughts. “It’s standard protocol to run security checks after something like last night, and when my people did so, they found evidence that somebody broke into our systems. We were hacked during the attack. By somebody other than the sapient.”

  Jane gaped. “What? Are you sure?”

  Tania nodded once, sharply. “Pretty damn sure. While you and I were fighting off the sapient and doing the shutdowns, there was a point at which the systems were vulnerable for an instant—no more than that. Someone broke through our firewalls at exactly that instant, and planted a worm that tampered with our video banks.”

  “To what end? Do we know?”

  “Yes,” Tania replied. “They modified some backed-up images. The system crashed just as the worm was finishing its work, which is the only reason we were able to detect it; it hadn’t finished cleaning up after itself. Otherwise we never would have detected the intrusion.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t the sapient itself doing this?” But she answered her own question. “No—it wouldn’t have any reason to.”

  “Exactly. We have plenty of data on the feral’s state of awareness, and at that point it was not even aware of what videos were. It learned a lot during the attack, but not enough to know or care about some different, other videos about a time and place from before it even existed. And it was all but overwhelmed, dealing with us.”

  “It had to be preprogrammed, then, that worm. No way whoever planted it could have anticipated when our walls would drop.”

  Aaron said, “I was afraid Tania’s organization might be … infiltrated. That someone might have been cracking us on the fly during the assault. That was why I sent Marty. Communications had been corrupted by the feral sapient. Because of this, one major set of archives was offline during the worm’s attack. The drives in question had not yet been brought inwave and needed to be physically disconnected from the system before the repair sapients reached them, in case the worm was still hiding somewhere in the system.

  “I wanted to send someone we could trust. I knew I could trust Marty.” Then he broke down, and pressed his hands against his face.

  Jane had to speak. “Aaron…”

  He looked up at her, horror stamped on his face, and shook his head: a silent plea for her not to say anything—not to comfort him, not to absolve him. She felt a sharp pang, remembering all those late nights working together, the bull sessions afterward; all the confidences. Now she could not comfort him. She was no longer his boss, and no longer his friend.

  Aaron had not been work-hardened, yet, by all the forces they would bring to bear against him as resource chief. He would master himself, and excel. She knew Aaron. But any death resulting from one’s orders was a dreadful burden to carry. Ironic, that she had shouldered such a burden at the very end of her tenure while he had had his thrust on him at the very beginning of his.

  “What about the other videos?” she asked. “The doctored ones?”

  Tania answered. “We couldn’t detect anything from the tampered video. Whatever the worm was designed to hide or change, it succeeded in doing so. But we do know the place and time that was altered. The altered video was a span of about fifteen minutes, two months ago, recorded by a couple of store security cameras in a neighborhood in Uraniaville.”

  Uraniaville was a residential neighborhood in a mid-gee quadrant.

  “Why Urania?” she asked. “Why then?”

  “We don’t know,” Aaron said.

  “Hang on.” She brought up Jonesy. She fed it the term “Uraniaville” and asked it to cross-reference with information on news coverage over the past three months. Then her lift arrived at the Hub, and she launched herself out.

  Her destination was a set of computer archive banks at Weesu and Level 1, the uppermost level beneath the Hub. The tunnels surrounding the archive were cordoned off with a mesh of police tape. A crowd of spectators had gathered to ogle the goings-on beyond the barrier. The officers standing watch inside the barrier recognized Jane, but would not part the mesh to let her through until Aaron came over and authorized it.

  “This way,” he said.

  The mesh repelled “Stroiders” motes. An officer sprayed her with a fine mist to rid her of any clinging to her skin or clothing. Then she accompanied Aaron into the archive room. Chief Fitzpatrick stood nearby.

  The forensic team guided a small army of miniature sapients in the measuring of blood spray patterns, gathering of air samples, and collecting of dust for DNA analysis. Near the computer banks was Marty’s corpse, attended to by a medic in a body glove and filtration mask. Two other officers were studying the room.

  Mar
ty’s body lay inside a shallow, inflatable bug bath. Assembler fluid sloshed lazily therein. A network of tubing draped him. He looked like a vine-coated, semi-deflated, plant-based version of himself. The medic bobbed beside him, stripping off the paraphernalia. The sour-sweet smell of assembly fluid reached her.

  Jane started, remembering the dream image of her son with Marty’s face, dead and covered in vines, and again felt the Voice’s faint touch.

  She had known. She had known.

  “The medical team tried to revive him,” Fitzpatrick told her, “but we found him too late.”

  They lofted themselves over to Marty’s remains, which rested lightly on the floor. The body stirred in the faint gee as the medics worked. Fitzpatrick introduced the detectives assigned to the case, Detectives Duran and Wilkes.

  “What killed him?” Aaron asked. The medic gestured at the entry wound. “He was shot once in the belly with a semiauto biotic.”

  A biotic? Jane tasted bile. Aaron clenched his fists. Biotics were one of the nastiest hand weapons developed in the last century. The bullets contained an exploding head that on penetrating their target released disassemblers tailored to liquefy anything organic that had a high-enough water content—organs, muscles, connective tissue. It left the enveloping skin alone. The end effect was to convert a human body to a skin bag filled with bones and goo.

  Biotics were outlawed everywhere, because under conditions of dense enough biomass, there was a slight chance that the bugs would get splashed onto bystanders while in their brief active phase, and start a chain reaction that could take out a lot of bystanders. They were a favorite weapon of terrorists.

  “Probably a Glock-Prime Five Hundred Short-Slide—that’s the most popular model. Minimal blood loss,” the medic went on, “but”—a shrug—“not much you can do if you aren’t on-scene with the right cocktail of neutralizers at the instant of impact.”

  “How long…” Jane cleared her throat. “How long ago was he killed?”

  Detective Duran said, “It’s difficult to tell. Disassembly wipes out the traces that we could use to pinpoint the time of death—it messes with body temperature and obliterates postmortem decomposition.”

  Aaron answered, his voice thin and sharp. “I sent him to retrieve the archives about two hours ago. He was coming straight here from the office.”

  “During the ‘Stroiders’ blackout,” Jane noted. That had cost him his life. “It would have taken him ten minutes or less to get here, and how long, Aaron? Perhaps another five or so to remove the archives?”

  “I’m not sure…”

  “Maybe five,” Tania broke in from wavespace. “Maybe a few minutes more. He wasn’t used to doing it.”

  Detective Wilkes checked something in her waveface. “That would give a time of death between about three-twenty and three-thirty, then. He was clearly set upon while he was here. What exactly was he doing?”

  “Removing two archival drives for examination,” Aaron said. “As I explained to Chief Fitzpatrick earlier, we had evidence of a break-in to our computer systems during the feral sapient’s attack. I sent Marty up here to pick up the archives before they were brought back inwave. Tania, which were the units in question?”

  “They don’t show up on my waveface, but if I am visualizing your positions correctly,” she said, “they’d be over there. Behind Jane.” Tania gestured toward a bank of drives that glittered on one wall. They all turned and looked. Dismay settled in Jane’s belly. “Where the smashed equipment is now?”

  Aaron demanded of Detective Wilkes, “Were any loose data drives found in here?”

  “You mean these?” Detective Duran drifted up beside her partner, carrying two clear, labeled bags filled with biocrystalline data drive fragments. “Looks like the murderer stole whatever components were removable, and smashed the rest.”

  Jane looked at Aaron. So they had nothing.

  “Has his fiancée been notified?”

  Detective Duran’s eyebrows rose. “Not yet. Who are his next-of-kin?”

  Aaron provided the information, while Jane kicked over to the medic, who, with the help of Detective Wilkes, was putting Marty’s body in a shroud.

  “Is the—Is it safe for me to touch him?” Jane asked.

  “It is. We’ve thoroughly neutralized the toxins.”

  “Then I’d like a minute.”

  “Of course.”

  The medic and officer stepped back, and Jane alighted beside Marty. She studied his distorted face—closed eyes, tan freckles, smoke-pale lips. If Benavidez had not fired her, would she have sent Marty on this errand?

  A terrible fury stirred in her.

  “Good-bye, Marty,” she said. She took his hand. It was a collection of fluid and splinters, jarringly cold to the touch, even through the membrane.

  For the first time in a very long time she was free—free to follow her convictions and act on her will, and not worry about the political or resource implications. She was a free agent.

  “I promise you,” she whispered. I’ll catch the people who did this, and I will destroy them.

  Jane left Aaron talking with the chief of police and headed back down to Bottomsville. She told Sarah what had happened. Sarah stared at Jane, gravely. “Give me an hour to wrap some things up,” Sarah said, “and I’ll take you to dinner.”

  There, in private, while she waited, she got to work.

  Jonesy had the Uraniaville results. Most were junk info, of no particular interest—arts and entertainment news, neighborhood events, notices of public meetings for land use reallocation, and editorials about proposed use of structures in reassembly, and so on. But one stood out:

  22 April 2397 (Phocaea Free Press)—

  Uraniaville resident Ivan Kovak implicated

  in destruction of cluster ice stores. More >>

  She scanned the article. It contained no new information, but the fact that Ivan was a Uraniaville resident told her all she needed to know. Whoever had broken into their computer systems last night had been trying to suppress a video of something that had happened in Uraniaville about five weeks ago, shortly before Kovak’s marriage supposedly fell apart and his partners left with the kids. She was now sure that the video was of someone meeting with, or having access to the residence of, Ivan Kovak.

  She called Sean. “Have you heard about Marty?”

  She could already tell he had, from his expression. “Aaron just called me. Goddamned evil fuckwads. Tell me who did it. I’ll shoot him myself.”

  “I think I know who did it,” Jane said. “I’m trying to get proof.”

  He rubbed at his eyes. “Why is it that the young die and we old people are left to soldier on, Commissioner?”

  “Just Jane,” she said. “Please.”

  “Hell, you’ll always be Commissioner to me. But all right. Jane. Things are going to shit.”

  “I know, Sean. I know.” She sighed and rubbed at her eyes, which burned with fatigue. The meds Marty had given her had long since worn off. When had she last gotten a good night’s sleep? “Did the police have any evidence that Kovak accepted a bribe? Any unusual deposits into his bank account, or anything like that?”

  “Nope. If there was a bribe, the spouses took it with them.”

  “Or maybe the bribe was his family’s lives.”

  He made a disgruntled noise. “I’d rather go on thinking of him as a loss to humanity.”

  Jane looked askance. “Whatever helps you sleep at night, my friend.”

  He made a noise. “Incidentally, I’m assuming that bastard Benavidez pulled the plug on your Zekeston housing allowance.”

  “Actually, I’m supposed to get a shitload of money, but not till I leave. In the meantime … you guessed correctly.”

  “Well, you and Xuan are welcome to our spare room while you’re in town, for as long as you like.”

  Good to know who your friends were. “That’s kind of you. Xuan’s friends put us up last night, but I’m not sure if their invitation
extended beyond the night. Do you need to talk it over with Lisa?”

  “Nope. It was her idea.”

  “We may take you up on it, then. I’ll have to talk to Xuan, but it’ll be a while before I can reach him. He’s off somewhere on a sugar-rock claim and I’m not sure where he is.”

  “Ah? I can help you there. I saw him a while ago, out here at the docks as he was loading his equipment for the run. It’s the rock that belongs to the Agre kid—you probably heard about that.”

  “Geoff Agre owns a rock? That kid is full of surprises.”

  “You’re telling me.” Sean shook his head. “Apparently some old miner gave him a tapped-out claim a while back, and it has some ice in it. It’s what got him in trouble with the black marketers last night.”

  “Black marketers? I am so out of the loop! Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier? Never mind—things have been hectic. I get it. But what happened? Do his parents know?”

  “It wasn’t him, supposedly; his friend Ian Carmichael, the kid who had his arm removed, remember him?”

  “Of course.”

  “Shortly before the feral sapient attack, Ian apparently got Geoff and his friends tangled up with some bad elements. I helped them extract themselves, in my capacity as duly-deputized police officer.”

  “Ah. So that’s why you were with them at the time of the attacks.”

  “Right. And in answer to your other question, I am willing to bet the parents don’t know. Things between Geoff and his parents are … strained at the moment.”

  “‘Strained’?”

  Sean hesitated. “Put it this way. I got there this morning just in time to watch Geoff’s father plant a fist in his face.”

  “He didn’t! He’s got fifty kilos on Geoff!”

  “He did. It was ugly. Geoff took off and I doubt he’s gotten back in touch with them since.” Jane sighed. Sal, you asshole. Dee must be beside herself. Jane knew at that instant that Dee’s marriage to Sal was over. Dee had put up with a lot, over the years, for the sake of her boys. But she wouldn’t swallow that.

  “Anyhow,” Sean went on, “the kid’s sitting on a sugar rock, and Xuan is on the team checking it out.”