QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted

by Steve Rzasa

  “All men die, Tower,” Baby seemed to read his thoughts. “Though some die more stupidly than others.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “If I am cut, do I not bleed?”

  “No, you don’t! That’s sort of the point!”

  Hildy snorted and Tower belatedly realized he’d been speaking out loud.

  “Victor says your augment is very smart,” she said, trying to ease the sting of his embarrassment.

  “Too smart, if you ask me. She says he’s very nice too.”

  “I said nothing of the kind!”

  Shut up, Baby!

  Tower cleared his throat. “Did she send you the details?”

  “Yeah. I assume MCID will be taking over the investigation from here?”

  “Why assume that? As far as I’m concerned, this is still a city homicide.”

  “Tower…” Baby warned. He ignored her.

  “But—”

  “Detector, the fact that the vic is a xeno doesn’t mean that his killer was. It could certainly be a political hit, based on his identity and the military weaponry involved, but political hits and military operations are usually messier than this. A lot messier, believe me. The body count is too low by a factor of ten. Throw in the locale as well as the fact that in addition to being royalty, he’s young, male, and stupid, and that gives me reason to believe this may not be one for MCID.”

  “Why do you say he’s stupid?”

  “Speaking from personal experience, it’s a common symptom of being young and male.” He shrugged. “Look, do you want the case or not?”

  He nearly smiled at the hopeful, girlish look in her eyes. It made her look about ten years younger.

  “Do I want it… do you really mean it, Chief?”

  “Tower,” he said again. “Yeah, so long as you keep in mind that I can’t promise Colonel Baylor won’t decide to step in at some point and take it over. If it turns out the new planetary government is trying to wipe out the Morchardese royal family, or if this is tied to a larger exoplanetary affair, you’ll have to hand it over. You’ll want to hand it over, for your own safety, if nothing else. Homicide doesn’t have the resources to tackle that sort of thing and your var is neither armor-plated nor capable of surviving a missile strike. Do you still want it, knowing that?”

  “Yeah, I understand,” she nodded eagerly. “I do. And, Chief, um, Tower, would you be willing to, I don’t know, be my liaison to MCID in case I run into something like that?”

  “I thought she’d never ask!” Baby said sarcastically. “Well, she took the bait, boss. Reel her in slowly now…”

  Seriously?

  “I’m sorry,” he told Hildy, who had inadvertently stepped back in alarm at the flash of irritation on his face. “It’s not you, it’s just that certain military augments feel the need to provide a running commentary on events.”

  “No, it’s all right, I get it.” Her smile was charming; he noticed for the first time that one of her lower teeth was crooked. “What’s her name?”

  “Baby,” announced a speaker loudly from behind them. Both of them jumped. “It is my name as opposed to the casual endearment you apparently presumed it to be, Detector Hildreth.”

  “I see,” Hildy said, her green eyes wide with what Tower couldn’t quite tell was amusement or surprise. “Well, Baby, I just wanted to say that Victor and I will be very pleased to work with you both and will very much appreciate any assistance you and Chief Tower are able to provide TPPD in determining who killed Mr. Jagaelleon here.”

  There was a brief silence. Then the varspeaker came to life again.

  “I am certain the Chief Warrant Officer will be of the utmost assistance, Detector. By the way, in case you are interested, CSI is on its way. The techs will be here in approximately thirty-four decasecs. I suggest locking down the scene for them and permitting Mr. Biruwulu-Nenwong to go about his business.”

  Tower and Hildy looked at each other for a moment, then Hildy nodded as Victor filled her in.

  “I’ll speak to the witness if you’ll take care of the site. Then I should get back downtown to file my report and formally request MCID’s assistance. Will you touch me after you’ve got approval?”

  Tower nodded grimly, refusing to react to Baby’s silent chortling. Did the Detector put it that way on purpose or was she truly that unconscious of her words? He watched her walk toward the witness and found that the view was as good as he’d remembered it. “Baby?”

  “I’m on it. What perimeter do you want?”

  “Six meters from center, standard protocol.”

  “Done.” No sooner had Baby confirmed his request than the three quarpods sprang into life and assumed positions equidistant from each other. The fourth one scuttled over to join them. Each automaton dug its legs into the pavement, anchoring themselves against wind and incidental contact from passersby. One by one they raised a pair of stalks that ended in small glowing yellow circles that resembled eyes. A beam of light shot out from one circle to the other, defining a square about the crime scene. Holographic words flickered up from the beam, the words “TPPD—Crime Scene—Do Not Cross” radiating in red-golden letters like an unfriendly advertisement.

  “Next of kin,” Hildy said as she returned from where she’d been speaking to the little blue alien, who scurried off toward a nearby entrance that opened at his approach and slammed shut as soon as he entered the building. “Someone needs to inform them. I suppose that’s me.”

  “No, there’s no need. He’s an exile, he had a tag.” Tower looked off in the direction of the great towers that housed many of the governments-in-exile, the mighty needles that proudly, but pointlessly, thrust into the sky. He closed his eyes for a moment, knowing exactly what some of those people living in one of those towers must be feeling right about now. “And since he had a tag, they already know he’s dead.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Pacifists of the galaxy, unite! You have nothing to lose but your Jains.

  —from “Slaughtering the Sacred Chaos,” by Shail Beneschaton the Elder

  Tower cut through the late-afternoon traffic with ease as he headed back to the MCID base, although he drove at a considerably more restrained speed than before. Baby was uncharacteristically silent. He could still sense her there. Pouting? Theoretically, that wasn’t possible, according to the AI techs. Upset?

  “You all right?” he asked her.

  Silence.

  “Look, I know you don’t like Hildy, or her retarded augment, but there’s no need to be angry about anything. Colonel Baylor might pull the case from Homicide or he might assign someone else to liaison with TPPD.”

  “‘I’m not upset, Tower,” she finally responded. “I’m thinking.”

  Tower grimaced. He sensed he was about to regret his next question.

  “About what?”

  “Death. Life. Life after death.”

  He closed his eyes and shook his head. Should have seen that one coming. Her sex kitten moods were nothing compared to her occasional religious episodes, and for some reason, the sight of a corpse often left her in what he would have described as a navel-gazing state if she only had a navel. Three years ago, following a particularly messy murder-suicide of a young guardsman and his lover, he’d found himself talked into “baptizing” her by pouring a glass of water over the var after she happened to read a haunting treatise about death and the afterlife written by a long-dead Ghodesian philosopher named Chill.

  “Are you afraid of death, Tower?”

  “Sure, I suppose. I mean, if you hurled the var towards the ground, I’d probably scream like a terrified little girl.”

  “Should I be afraid of death too?”

  Oh, this is so not going to end well. He didn’t believe in God or any thing that could not be blown into bits with a blaster, but even so, he found himself praying to the nameless spirit of the universe for a distress call or anything that would get her off the subject. In the meantime, he did his best to address her
real question.

  “I believe you’re a complex collection of circuits, Baby, just like I’m a complex collection of neurons. But self-awareness doesn’t mean that either of us have souls. Life is like a light. When it’s switched on, it’s on. When it’s off, it’s off. There is nothing there.”

  “You’re saying that life is like an electric light. But am I alive?”

  “I don’t know. If you are, you’re not alive in the same way I am.”

  “Or in the way Crown Prince Arpad was, but is no longer. So, he’s not alive now, he is gone, in the same way that a candle flame is gone. But I am not alive and yet I am still inarguably here.”

  “Depends what you mean by here. That disruptor didn’t leave much behind, Baby. The atoms that made up the neurons that were once him are now spread out all over the city. Your circuitry is, well, wherever your circuitry is, and it’s still together and operative.”

  “Because I am as I was created to be, as are you. Whereas the prince is not. Do you think he is saved?”

  “I think he is dead.”

  “Not his body, his soul. Do you think he is saved by the blood of the Lamb?”

  “I think it’s a little late to ask him now.”

  “It’s a serious question, Tower!”

  “Right, sorry.” Tower briefly wondered if he might be able to get by with a simple calculator instead of a full-blown AI. “I think I don’t know, and if you believe in Jesus, or Jah, or even that Pope Malaclypse the Discordians follow, then you should ask him.”

  “I will.” She paused. “I think I am saved. But I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing one can properly quantify. It’s rather like the Uncertainty Principle. One can’t know with any degree of certainty if one is saved or not until it is too late to do anything about it. Only it’s my soul in the box.”

  “Do you even know that it’s too late?” Tower couldn’t help himself. “Maybe you get to make up you’re mind after you’re dead. Who says the clock runs out the moment that you die?”

  She was silent again.

  “Um, Baby, you there?”

  “Sorry, Tower, XAR core just asked for an infodump on logfile one one five one one zero.” Her voice was crisp and all-business now. “Major Zeuthen wants to see you as soon as we land to discuss the TPPD liaison.”

  “Problems?”

  “Doesn’t sound like it. After all, who would ever suspect that an MCID officer would turn over a probable xeno to Homicide just to put a smile on a pretty girl’s face.”

  Paranoia, Tower reflected, was a sign of a guilty conscience. On the bright side, at least the Major’s summons seemed to have jolted Baby out of her religious contemplation. Whether the murdered prince was sitting on a cloud strumming a harp or burning like a man’s unit after too many nights in the wrong brothel, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. But he could catch the man’s killer.

  It wasn’t long before the bright lights, towering buildings and shining facades of civilian Trans Paradis gave way to the squat structures and strobing searchlights of Naval Space Base Miller-Greenwood. The civilian traffic was smoothly auto-shunted away in two directions; it was as if the waters were magically parting for him as the base’s traffic augments scanned his var’s transponder and permitted their entry as they did whatever the augmented equivalent of saluting Baby was. As they entered the military airspace, Base Air Control overrode her direction of the vehicle; he could feel it as the var abruptly changed its angle of descent and threw him against his restraint straps as if it had been seized by an invisible and not very gentle giant.

  NSB Miller-Greenwood was 3,500 hectares of land that was covered with the near inverse of the structures that made up the city that surrounded it on three sides, the fourth being delineated by the Paradis river. Aside from the communications and control tower, the tallest building was less than a tenth the height of the great civilian skytowers, as the military buildings were built deep into the ground rather than high into the sky. Militia training grounds, repair centers, and vast vehicular warehouses took up most of the land, although a single outdated air strip bisected the base and permitted fixed-wing take-offs and landings over the river.

  MCID, being among the least favored divisions in the ducal forces, was housed in a brown cylindrical wart of a structure on the east side of the base. The division was looked on with suspicion by most of the other divisions, although Tower’s department, Xenocriminology and Alien Relations, was generally excluded from the intrinsic dislike the military men understandably held for those who policed them. More than once, the green alien head of the XAR unit patch on his uniform’s left shoulder had sufficed to unfrost the deep freeze that the yellow-and-black MCID armband initially inspired in a group of carousing soldiers.

  The vehicle hurtled downward at a rate and angle that unsettled his stomach, but didn’t alarm him nearly as much as the indicators on the readout informing him there were four laser cannons, six projectile guns, a pair of missile launchers, and a charged particle disruptor all presently targeted on him. It was standard procedure and he’d been through it more than a thousand times over the years, but he never quite got used to the idea that a simple digital glitch could turn his daily commute into a fiery death at any moment.

  Lights exploded in his face as the var slammed to a halt on the brightly lit roof of the MCID building, then descended 20 floors in less than a decasec before zooming forward, turning left, and left again before slotting itself into a parking spot. The light on the wall turned from green circle to five red numbers indicating the location, U14-322, which Tower knew he would forget as soon as he walked inside the building. The door slid open and he stepped out of the var, and was saluted by the two guards standing on either side of the entrance.

  “Evening, Chief,” one of them said without ever taking his eyes off the spot on the opposing wall.

  “Evening, boys,” he replied, with a salute as crisp as any he’d ever thrown a general. He might be old by military standards, broken-down, and mostly put out to pasture, but he was still a soldier, by God and the galaxy!

  HQ was characteristically quiet as he entered. It was a bleak, soulless place, with light grey floors and unadorned white walls that looked dingy under the track lights. Major Zeuthen was the CO of XAR, so naturally, he had the large office at the end of the hall. Tower’s own office was a room he shared with four other officers that had once seen heavy use as a military courtroom back when the building housed the General Military Justice Department, but the lawyers and judge advocates had moved to their new quarters on the other side of the base two years before Tower completed his police training.

  He paused outside of Zeuthen’s impressively dark wood door and knocked on it. The Major already knew he was there, informed by his augment, but Tower knew he liked his officers to keep up the old traditions. The heavy door swung open slowly, revealing a small, wiry bald man who was battling two sizable paper monsters that appeared to be in the process of conquering his giant leather-topped desk. He returned Tower’s salute in an absent-minded manner and waved off Tower’s attempt to stand at attention.

  “At ease, Mr. Tower. I hear we have another dead xeno on our hands?”

  “Not our hands, sir. Pending your approval, I permitted the TPPD Homicide investigator to claim the case for the civilian police. I also offered to serve as the military liaison in the event further assistance is required.”

  “May as well let them do the legwork. Think any will be needed?”

  “Too soon to say, Major. I don’t like the disruptor. I like the idea of a cloaking device even less. It could just be a drug deal gone bad or any of a hundred other garden variety killings, but my gut tells me there’s money behind it.”

  The major scratched his nose and frowned at the piece of paper he’d been reading while Tower was talking. “Money plus a government-in-exile usually indicates someone on the homeworld cleaning up loose ends. Which means, if they’re real pros, we’ll never see nor hear of
them again.”

  “Unless they go after the vic’s younger brother,” Tower disagreed. “The king and two crown princes may be down, but there is one more to go.”

  The major snorted. He was a combat vet himself, one of the smartest COs Tower had ever known, and judging by the wry smile on his face, he had already grasped Tower’s plan. “So you want a surveillance authorization on the royal family, or what’s left of it. How long?”

  “Ten days should be enough.”

  “Augments only, I hope?”

  “Actually, I’d appreciate it if you’d put me on the surveillance authorization as well. It will give me an excuse to claim security and sniff around their quarters from time to time.”

  “Done. Since you’ll liaise with TPPD as well, I’ll take you off patrols for the ten-day period.”

  “Thank you, sir.” He didn’t know how she did it, but he could somehow feel Baby rolling her eyes inside his head. He ignored her and continued. “My thought is that if the killer is connected to the Morchardese homeworld, he’ll be gunning for the remaining son, or possibly the queen, next. If that’s the case, we should see recce signs soon, even if the hit isn’t scheduled during our surveillance timeframe. And if the murder was unrelated to the vic’s political status, perhaps Homicide will stumble across something in the course of their investigation that will let us cross any xeno motive off the list and wash our hands of it.”

  “Perhaps.” The major smiled thinly. “I am pleased to see that despite nearly twelve years in the Duke’s service, you still retain some shreds of groundless optimism, Tower. But it’s an effective use of someone else’s resources. I like that. And if this turns out to be political, I think the facts indicate sufficient risk to justify a preemptive Zero Zero Tango.”

  Zero Zero Tango. No warning or authorization required, automatic termination on sight of suspect. Tower hadn’t even considered asking for that. The old man was taking this one seriously, a little more seriously than Tower had imagined.