by Steve Rzasa
“Wait, so he’s dead?” Hildy sounded aghast. “So we’ve got nothing. Again.”
“Not necessarily,” Baby said. “His corpse was never recovered, Detector Hildreth. And there is reason to believe that the records of the incident may have been tampered with.”
“Reasons?”
“First, the number of passengers initially reported by the media was off by one. The early reports said the shuttle had 58 passengers and four crew. That was based on the manifest. But subsequent reports, which were based on the mortuary and medical admissions, showed 63 total casualties, of which 40 were fatalities. Somewhere, someone went missing. And not only that, but one of the sub-space medics who responded to the accident was found dead in his apartment four rotations later. No robbery, no known motive, and no suspects.”
“You think someone might have been erasing his tracks,” Tower surmised. “It could be. St. James survives the accident, is treated by the poor medic, then escapes when they arrive on the orbital station. Somehow, he gets groundside again, and then kills the medic to make sure no one asks him any questions. The medic wouldn’t have known who he was, but might have been able to give a description.”
“There is one flaw in your logic,” Hildy interrupted his thinking out loud. “All of that medical information is automatically registered live, at the moment of treatment. The medical records would have showed how many corpses were scanned, how many of the wounded were treated, right down to their sex, age, blood type, and DNA. Killing the medic wouldn’t even begun to have covered his tracks.”
“That would be true, Detector Hildreth, were it not for the possible involvement of second party, one that was capable of covering all of the those tracks except for the physical existence of the medic.”
“A second party?”
“Detector Hildreth, you are aware that there is a considerable difference between my capabilities and the capabilities of a civilian intelligence augment such as your Victor. What you may not know is that many military devices, which can range from self-operating vehicles to electronic infiltration agents, are not only given considerably more autonomy than their civilian counterparts, but often develop close relationships with their human interfaces.”
“And James was in Intelligence, is that what you’re saying?
“I notice that his career was largely undistinguished until he was given an assignment at Fort Lanring on Mortain. At that point, he was teamed with a prototype security augment that was being designed for the Ascendancy’s special forces. The project was known as the Autonomous Cognitive Reason Array, or ACRA. Post-Lanring, his performance, particularly his combat ratings, were spectacular, even when compared with more conventionally augmented soldiers. I can’t get at all of his records, but look at the results of this three-gun trooper match in which he competed just prior to the start of the war.”
“Sweet St. Colt, he shot 941.6952!”
“That’s good?” Hildy asked.
“That looks more like a combat drone than a human. Even an augmented one. He wasn’t much younger than I am now and I’ve never broken 500 even with Baby’s help.”
“And that’s not all,” Baby said. “Listen to what the arresting officer reported him saying after he was arrested, before he went catatonic. It was part of why he was found insane. When the uniform asked him why he’d killed his wife, he said: ‘There was no other way. Cara said it was necessary.’ The prosecution notes show that they spent a fair amount of effort looking for a woman named Cara, but couldn’t find one.”
“You think ACRA became Cara, at least in his mind?”
“In their mind,” Tower said. “Under the stress of combat, strange things sometimes happen to the human mind. Everyone knows about post-trauma and so forth, but sometimes minds crack in unusual ways. And the city prosecutor wouldn’t have had any access to the Ascendancy records; the Rhys City police wouldn’t have known anything more than he had a skulljack with a wireless connection.”
“The police medics didn’t take it out?”
“They just installed a blocker,” Baby said. “It would have taken me about 10 nanoseconds to disable it. A souped-up prototype like Cara could do it even faster.”
“But is that even possible?” Hildy sounded incredulous. “For a human mind and its augment to actually… become one, to meld in some way? I mean, short of full spectrum unity?”
“Oh yes,” Tower and Baby replied at exactly the same time.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“No one in the Navy, the intelligence community, or any other agency ever recommended that we close the consulate on Basattria. We were aware of the threats and the various dangers as they were developing. But there was no decision made and nothing to prompt such a decision. We are constantly assessing and sometimes we get it wrong, but it’s rare that we get it so completely wrong. This was one of those terrible tragic times when there was an assessment, an assessment that was shared by the consul and the commander of the security detail, that turned out not to take into account the brewing ferocity behind the attacks that night.
—from “Transcript of the Basattrian Investigatory Panel’s Report to His Grace the Duke of Rhysalan”
The flames were still towering ten meters high in the air when Tower dashed into the burning wreckage of the bombed consulate. Josephs was well behind him, dragging the injured Basattrian they’d rescued. Too late, he had brought down the MA-33 by launching four of the six Skyseekers from his shoulder rack. The Basattrians were scattering, their barbaric triumph having turned to death and destruction in an instant, as the hovering Turmfalke crashed in the northwest quadrant of the plaza. Dozens of the lizards were crushed and several of the south-facing buildings were on fire as a result. Their alien roars of pain and shrieks of terror echoed off the crude bricks.
There were human cries too. Tower boosted his IR shields to make it easier to see through the leaping flames and turned on his scanner to detect human life-forms. There were at least twenty still alive somewhere in the wreckage, and he vowed that the Basattrians had better pray to whatever savage gods they worshipped that one of them was Melassa. If anything happened to her, he vowed that he would kill every last lizard and every Unity abomination he could find until he died.
The first two survivors he encountered were Calvin and Jeffersen, security detail Marines who were fortunate to have been fully suited up. Their armor permitted them to survive the bombing, but they were both still in shell-shock and barely capable of speech, let alone able to help him. He pushed them in the direction he’d come, hoping they’d recover soon enough to help Josephs hold a defensive perimeter if the Basattrians recovered enough to try finishing what the Unity rockets had begun.
“Calvin and Jeffersen are coming out,” he told Josephs. “But they’re pretty out of it. Stay there and keep the lizards back until they’re in shape to do it themselves. Then come help me.”
“Roger, Tower. Be careful.”
Tower checked the external temperature of his suit. It was barely 400 cells. It was rated for up to 1,025, so he wasn’t concerned, although he’d have to do something about his gloves before he touched anyone. He saw two dead bodies, then heard an animal-like screaming that caused him to whip his head around. Not ten meters away, flames were just igniting the hair of a woman who was trapped underneath a collapsed wall. Not Melassa, thank God, he thought as he brought up his FM-4 and fired a short burst that ended her suffering.
His mind revolted against the horror of it all but he was walking through Hell, he was on a mission to find his wife, and he had no time to ponder the implications of what he was doing. He detected two more people alive behind an obstructed door, and was able to drag enough of the rubble aside before smashing through the door with his servo-powered fist. They were badly injured, but alive and mobile. He led them to the questionable safety outside; Calvin was sufficiently recovered that he insisted on joining Tower on his search for more survivors.
He found two more survivors and seventeen
corpses, including the consul, before he found Melassa.
She was slumped against her console in the comm center, still attached to her deck by a thick cable plugged into the upper skulljack behind her left ear. The flames hadn’t penetrated here; the shielded center was a relatively cool 300 cells. She looked untouched—her face was as relaxed and peaceful as if she were sleeping. But his readout didn’t lie, and he could tell from the cracked ceiling and the similarly intact state of the five other bodies in the room that it must have been blast damage from the concussion that had killed her.
No.
One hand was closed in a fist, as if gripping something. He gently teased it open and saw it was the silver cross and chain she usually wore around her neck. The useless talisman hadn’t done a damn thing to protect her.
His panic and rage abruptly vanished. He stepped back and stared at her, as pretty and as sweet as the first time he’d ever laid eyes on her. He didn’t feel pain, he didn’t feel anger, he didn’t feel anything. It was as if he’d somehow stepped outside of alignment with the universe. It continued without him. He could hear the flames crackling and burning, hear Calvin talking to him, see the numbers on his sensors changing, but none of it touched him. He was merely an observer now, he was no longer a participant.
He didn’t know how long he stood there, but it was long enough to frighten Calvin.
“Tower! Tower! Tower!” He blinked and realized someone was shouting at him. “You’ve got to get out! The Basattrians, they’re moving in on us!”
Tower looked down at his sleeping wife one last time. Then he noticed something in the deck. It was a small yellow MSB data plug. Written on the exposed back, it had TOWER written on it in block letters. A last message to him? Checking first to make sure his gloves weren’t hot enough to melt it, he pulled it from the deck and slipped it inside one of his battlesuit’s storage pods.
He bent down and took his wife’s lifeless body in his arms. In the suit, she seemed to weigh nothing at all. Then he turned and began to walk through Hell, with no thought but to bring death to the crowds waiting outside.
Tower rubbed absent-mindedly at where the transrec was permanently implanted behind his left ear. He’d had a conventional skulljack there before, but finally upgraded three years ago. From time to time he’d thought about adding a new skulljack, but most of the time, if the information was in digital format anywhere in the subsector, Baby could find it and get it to him as fast as he could slot in an MSB or dataslug. On the rare occasions she couldn’t, he had slots in his Sphinx, his var, and the handle of his combat knife that she could access at will.
He was waiting for Baby and Hildy as they did their thing, trawling through the city cams and looking for signs of the man they hunted, and he wondered if St. James’s murderous insanity was the cause or the consequence of the mind-melding Baby suspected. If he was truly their suspect, if he had transformed himself from an amateur killer into a professional-for-hire, he was certainly a high-functioning lunatic. But Tower still wasn’t sure. The arrangement of Mara Tanabera’s body did point to him, and certainly some level of insanity was required to roll out of a vehicle nearly a kilometer off the ground in the middle of the city. On the other hand, how could anyone with St. James's marksmanship miss the queen and only score one out of four hits?
“Anything, ladies?” Tower was starting to get bored.
“It’s not much,” Hildy said. “Our best hint is a sequence of traffic detectors that tripped on something moving under the speed limit, but 40 meters below the minimum civilian traffic altitude than less 30 decasecs after the vehicle exit. There are no visuals, naturally, but if you follow the line of travel, it looks as if he was heading towards the Warehouse District.”
“Strange place to hide out,” Tower commented, thinking out loud. “There are probably more cams there than anywhere else in the city other than the banks and Embassy Row. And the military bases, of course.”
“Not if you’re cloaked,” Hildy pointed out. “Or if you have a little friend in your head who can tell the cams when to turn off as you walk by.”
“I wonder if I could do that… actually, I think I could track her down that way,” Baby said excitedly. “If Cara is blinking the street cams as St. James walks past them, then she’s leaving a set of footprints I can follow! She wouldn’t even have to turn them off, because the operators might notice that, she could just trigger their daily data-cleaning routines, or better yet, force a short loop, maybe the ten previous seconds, right before he comes in range.”
“Baby, we still don’t know that this Cara even exists,” Tower pointed out. “Don’t get too excited.”
“Just give me a decasec, okay, five. I already know where to look.”
Hildy laughed. “She’s rather enthusiastic, isn’t she!”
“She likes to win,” Tower said. She always did, he thought fondly.
“Gotcha!” Baby shouted. “Guys, look at this!”
She displayed a section of the Warehouse District, which abutted the industrial suborbital launcher and surrounded it on three sides. Then a line gradually lit up, with yellow lights bursting into life on either side of the street, one by one, at a speed that closely approximated that of a man walking.
“Those are cams that were interfered with in some manner this morning after the altitude reports, in 94 of 105 cases two 15-second loops selected randomly from the previous four hours and repeated alternately four times each.” Baby paused triumphantly. “Still think she doesn’t exist, Tower?”
“So Cara is real,” Hildy mused. “Unbelievable. Can we even arrest an augment?”
“No,” said Baby, her voice a little subdued. “But you can erase one.”
“What do you say to an undercover scouting mission, Tower? If this guy is as dangerous as he seems, I’d feel safer with you and Baby along than one of the department detectors.”
“Your Assistant Deputy Commissioner was pretty clear about me keeping my distance, Hildy.” And you’ve got a boyfriend, he added mentally.
“Look, I have to go take a look for myself, Tower. What am I supposed to do, take this to the chief and ask him to give me a SATT team to search the entire district? You’re not just going to let me go down there looking for a combat vet like St. James with nothing but a useless pretty boy like Vendersen watching my six, are you?”
“Shameless!” Baby said disapprovingly. “But she’s right, we can’t let her go in with those civilians.”
“Ah, well, I’ve got nothing better to do,” Tower growled, feeling he’d been had. Then he grinned. “And I’ve watched uglier sixes. But if we’re out past dinner, you’re buying.”
“It’s a date. Meet me at Second and Second, north, not south, in four Kay. And wear something casual, Tower, leave the tac-jacket and that stick-up-the-backside posture at home.”
Once he hit Second Avenue North, Tower angled the var toward the ground. A few hundred meters lower, he could see Hildy was leaning against an aerovar—an unmarked Homicide Zhang-Su in grey, rather than her usual TPPD black-and-white. He landed and put down the window. She winked at him.
“Good afternoon, my good personal friend. How do you feel about a nice personal drive through our favorite place to converse in a friendly manner?”
“Why, surely you must mean the Warehouse District, where we have often engaged in mutually satisfying personal discourse, Detector Hildreth.”
“Don’t push it, Tower,” she rolled her eyes. “You’re so much more attractive when you glower at people anyhow. Seeing you try to flirt is like watching an Yvainean wombat try to fly. In HG.”
He growled low in his throat. She laughed. “That’s better. You ready to do this?”
“Yeah, but we should take my var, not yours. It’s armed and armored, and it’s got better sensors. A 50 MHz laser would open this up like a can opener.”
“That’s why we’re going incognito, Tower. We’re just two civilians driving through the District. This is a scouting mission
and this unassuming civvy var is packed with sensors; once we figure out where he is, I’ll call in a SATT team and they’ll come in loaded for bear.” She paused and reconsidered. “Well, I suppose not what you would consider loaded for bear. What would that be, anyhow, nuclear grenades?”
“Nah, we use those to clean our refrigerators.”
Tower got out of the Steyrer and popped the trunk. “Open up the side door,” he called. Then he withdrew his tactical jacket, a spare electro-ablative vest, and the two Armada LR-64’s, and transferred them to the back seat of the Zhang-Su. He made one more round trip for the Benelli-Mossberg, which he slid onto the floor behind the seats.
“You brought an ASE?” Hildy exclaimed in disbelief. “Tower, I don’t think we’re likely to run into a riot.”
He shut the door and the autobelt slid around him. “I like to be prepared.”
“What, no ground-to-air missiles?”
“You jest, but they’ll come in pretty handy if he tries to go flightsuit on us. Do we have backup?”
“No. I told Vendersen I’m reviewing traffic cams down at the DoT.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at his var. “You going to leave that there?”
“Good point. Baby? Stealth mode, send it to two thousand meters and follow us 500 meters back.” He looked at Hildy, who had a strange expression on her face. “What? Now we have backup.”
The detector just made a strangled sound and shook her head.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Wherever there is a conscious mind, there is a point of view.
—from “Consciousness Refuted” by D.D. Clement