by MJ Blehart
“Why didn’t you tell us all this before?” Onima asked.
“Do you really think my office is private?” Ms. Varma countered. She gestured to the device on the table. “If I activated a scrambler in my office, that would let them know I wasn’t willing to be one of their puppets.”
Ms. Varma downed her drink, then shook her head. “I make damned good ESCA as a company deputy director—probably double or triple what the two of you make combined. I knew Palmer was on a fact-finding mission when he got himself killed, but I didn’t know until you came and spoke to me that it was murder.”
Ms. Varma looked pointedly at Onima. “You have come here today and reached out to Palmer’s associates and coworkers. How do you think I found out you were here again? The company has connections and ties that stretch just about everywhere. If they haven’t already figured out that Palmer was my friend, they will soon. As such, I don’t trust that I am safe here. Maybe not anywhere. But I can disappear.”
“Look, Ms. Varma,” Onima said, “I can bring you under the protection of the Bureau. We can take you with us and keep you safe until we can get you into witness relocation.”
This time Ms. Varma laughed. “Oh, you sweet, gullible summer child. You think your CBI is incorruptible in all of this? Trust me, they are not.
“I don’t know who, but I know the company has at least one CBI director and one or two deputy directors on their payroll, and certainly others in the Bureau as well. You can look closer, but all you need to do is ask yourself this: how do you think certain members of the former governments got away at the end of the war? The Bureau, in its previous incarnation, may have been neutral, but it was never invulnerable. Nor was it incorruptible.”
“So why did you want to meet me?” asked Onima. “Do you have some solid proof I can use to legally go after the Gray and Chuang directors or other executives?”
“No,” Ms. Varma said. “Palmer was working on that, and you saw how that ended. They cover their tracks rather well. I suspect that, had your clone here not witnessed the murder, you would already be done with your investigation.”
Ms. Varma lowered her voice, and Onima leaned in to hear her. “I do, however, have one thing you can use.” She handed Onima a datacard. “This is the list of all the current company directors. The CBI doesn’t have this info because the directors like to stay anonymous, save Chairwoman and CEO Gabrielle Nikosi. But it shouldn’t be too hard, from here, to connect some of the directors to former officials of the NEEA and NECC.”
“Former officials who got away because they were believed to be low-level bureaucrats,” Onima surmised.
“And that’s the other reason I’m sharing this with you,” Ms. Varma said. “For a CBI Marshal, you’re actually smart. That’s a compliment, since that’s rather rare, in my experience.”
“Thank you,” Onima said. “One last question. How did Mr. Cadoret catch wind of any of this?”
Ms. Varma looked around before saying quietly, “He was being groomed to become a full director. When that happens, you gain a whole lot of new insight and information. But you also get a look at the company’s seedy underbelly. Gray and Chuang is older than you might realize, craftier than anyone credits them for, and connected on lots of separate levels to lots of different people.”
She reached for Jace’s beverage, took a drink, and continued. “Palmer started to get access to the inner workings of the company that you don’t get if you are not a director. Hell, even the local directors seldom get that info. When Palmer began to explore it, he found some odd things and decided to look into them.”
“‘Odd things’ like politics and cloning?” Onima questioned.
“Exactly,” Ms. Varma agreed. “Palmer was ambitious, a hard worker, and bright. He had come a long way in a relatively short time. The only reason I wasn’t jealous of him, or interested in sabotaging him, was that he was a good person, super smart, and utterly charming. I could count on him for anything.”
She paused a moment, getting a bit emotional. “But he was also an idealist. The things he discovered were disconcerting, to say the least, and he couldn’t just let them go. So he began to dig, and that led him to all kinds of unpleasant, dark corners he would rather not have acknowledged.”
Ms. Varma shook her head. “He knew full well that the company hadn’t become the giant it was by being the cleanest, nor most honorable. But this distressed him. A lot. He never did say what it was, but the way the company intended to use clones offended his sensibilities. So he started gathering evidence, researching all the back-door deals and connections, and learning about the clone virus.
“They keep tabs on us. He knew that. And as careful as he thought he was, they were onto him. So they killed him. Maybe his idealism rubbed off on me, and that’s why, before I go away, I am sharing this with you.”
Onima appreciated the backstory. It helped put together all the pieces of the bizarre puzzle that was the murder of Palmer Cadoret, the involvement of Gray and Chuang and former officials of defunct governments, and a conspiracy involving clones.
Ms. Varma waved her hand dismissively. “This is all I can do for you. I’ve been here too long already. Please go now. Good luck.”
Looking a moment to Jace and Kara, Onima stood. She didn’t offer to pay for their unfinished drinks, and she led the other two out of the pub.
They walked a short way away, pausing where they could step out of the crowd and speak while still keeping an eye on the pub entrance.
“Now what?” asked Jace.
“We have a few options,” Onima replied. “I think we should wait and tail Ms. Varma, both for her protection and so that we can keep track of her. If we have some idea where she is going, we won’t be losing her as a potential resource.”
“You will have to tell me about your previous conversations with her,” Kara said. “Clearly they had an impact.”
“Neither was as long or as interesting as this one,” Jace quipped.
“Perhaps it would be best to contact the ship and get more agents involved,” Kara said. “Might make tracking her easier.”
Onima shook her head. As much as she didn’t want to admit it to Kara, she said, “No, I believe what Ms. Varma told us. We can’t trust anybody outside of the immediate team.”
“Does that include me?” asked Kara.
“You’re with us now,” Onima replied. “Does that answer your question?”
“It does,” Kara replied.
“She still hasn’t left the pub,” Jace remarked. Onima knew she could count on him to think the same ways she did.
“It’s up to us,” Onima said. “When she leaves, we’ll split up. Keep her marked, but stay out of sight. We keep in touch via comms, and hopefully she leads us to the spaceport or somewhere else we can use to determine where she plans to hide.”
A shout from the direction of the pub interrupted her, drawing Onima’s attention to a major commotion at the pub entrance. People were shouting. Somebody screamed.
Without a word, the trio walked swiftly back to the pub, trying not to attract too much attention. Once they got there, they could see what the commotion had been.
The crowd that had gathered at the slightly inset pub entrance were looking at the body of someone who had collapsed.
“CBI! Let me in there,” Onima called authoritatively.
She stood over the collapsed person.
“Hau ta ma duh!” Onima cursed.
It was Jun Varma. Her eyes were open wide, as if in surprise.
Onima knelt beside her to take her pulse, but she knew as she did that it wasn’t necessary. Jun Varma was dead.
10
Jace observed as Onima and Kara interviewed the witnesses at the entrance to the pub.
All told a similar story. Ms. Varma had stepped out of the pub and paused. Most surmised that she was pondering the best way to merge into the foot traffic, whichever direction she intended to go. But she’d seemed to freeze a moment, and then ju
st collapsed.
Jace looked over Ms. Varma’s body. At first glance, there was no obvious wound of any kind. Onima decided they needed Dr. Patel to take a closer examination.
The building across the street, Jake noticed, was only three stories high. He pointed and said, “We should check out the rooftop.”
“There are no plasma wounds on her,” Onima said.
“True,” Jace agreed. “But that doesn’t mean someone wasn’t up there, whether they were an assassin or not. This was not just a coincidence.”
Onima got access to the tallest building nearby. It was on the other side of the street and beside the building directly across from the pub, which Jace wanted to investigate. Onima had agreed that they should.
Jace carried Ms. Varma’s body to the roof, where Yael would meet them with the shuttle and pick them up.
On behalf of the CBI, Kara had informed the Centaurus law enforcement agency about the death, but CBI was claiming jurisdiction and would have their own medical examiner look at the body. Neither Jace, Yael, nor Onima were surprised to learn that the law enforcement agency was perfectly fine with that.
Jace couldn’t tell if the people on the street paid much attention to the shuttle hovering over the building as it lowered its ramp. They carried Ms. Varma’s body aboard and up to the passenger compartment.
“I’ll let Yael know to wait,” Onima said. “There are repelling guns in the bay below. I’ll meet you two on the roof.”
Jace and Kara went to the lower deck of the shuttle and opened the equipment cabinet. As Onima had said, there were guns with cables and hooks for repelling up and down walls.
They took three and returned to the rooftop the shuttle hovered over.
Onima joined them, and Jace passed her a repelling gun.
As one, Jace, Kara, and Onima fired the hooks into the roof at their feet. Extending just enough cable, they went over the roof and walked two stories down the side of the taller building to the roof below.
They left the guns and cables dangling and made their way across the flat roof to the lip overlooking the street and the pub across the way.
Jace paid specific attention to the cleanliness of the space. On Raven, when they had investigated Mr. Cadoret’s execution, the killer had cleansed the area thoroughly. Too thoroughly.
But nothing like that had occurred in Centaurus City. If someone had been present, they left no trace of any sort.
Onima ran a scan with her datacard and shook her head. “Nothing. No trace of people being here, no residue, not even a trace of an energy signature from a weapon firing.”
Jace looked around and found only a grate giving access to the building below. They went toward it, but a scan revealed nothing.
“If someone was up here,” Kara began, “they made sure to leave no trace at all.”
“I can’t see how anyone could have been up here,” Onima said. “But I can’t discount it entirely, either. Come on—let’s get back to the ship.”
They returned to the Aquila, where a pair of agents met them to take Ms. Varma’s body to Dr. Patel.
Jace, Onima, and Kara went to their separate quarters aboard the ship, taking about a half an hour to clean up and change. Then they met again in Dr. Patel’s medical bay.
Ms. Varma was on an exam table under a cover, and Dr. Patel at her desk making notes. Jace and Kara had gotten there a few moments before Onima.
“Are all your outings this exciting, Jace?” Kara ask quasi-facetiously.
Jace chuckled. “I don’t know what a normal CBI outing is like, so..sure, I guess?”
Onima arrived. Jace could tell she was still distressed about all that had occurred.
“Dr. Patel,” she began, “have you concluded your autopsy?”
“Yes,” Dr. Patel replied. She gestured, and a holographic screen appeared, showing a rotating image of Jun Varma’s body.
“As you can see,” Dr. Patel began, “there is no sign of blunt trauma, nor plasma bolt, knife, or any other piercing instrument. But a closer examination”—the image changed and zoomed into the body to look at the heart and lungs— “showed something different. This woman was in excellent physical health. Her internal organs were...well, not to put too fine a point on it, perfect. Which is why the cause of death is unusual.”
The image shifted to examine the heart. “Based on my examination, the victim’s heart was artificially stopped via a focused energy-pulse beam. Think of it like an electromagnetic pulse killing electrical systems. But this beam can stop internal organs.”
“That’s obscene,” stated Kara.
“I know this weapon,” Jace said.
All eyes turned to Jace.
He sighed. “It wasn’t used often because it was horrifically inefficient. First, it requires a lot of energy. Like, dark matter energy. Second, it’s expensive. The couple of times I saw it deployed, a non-clone officer was always attached to it. It was used mostly when a non-clone target needed to be eliminated and they didn’t want it to look like a standard sniper attack.”
“Yes,” Dr. Patel agreed. “A weapon that, after the war, was banned by the AECC. And, you should know, one of its manufacturers was Colonial Exoplanet Ventures, Limited.”
Onima practically growled. “Or Gray and Chuang, in other words.”
“Really?” Kara asked. She had not been privy to prior discussions about Gray and Chuang’s wartime and pre-war existence.
“Of course,” Dr. Patel continued, “I can’t prove definitively that this is what was used. A microscopic examination of the tissue between the heart and external layers of skin, however, shows residual energy signatures like what this weapon produced.”
“So, getting hit with this weapon produced an effect that looks like a heart attack without a closer examination,” Onima concluded.
“Or a brain aneurism,” Dr. Patel said. “That is, if the head is targeted. Which is part of why the energy required for the weapon was so great. It uses a tight-beam x-ray scope to focus on the appropriate target.”
Kara asked, “With a weapon that powerful, but difficult to trace, why wouldn’t that have been used to take out Mr. Cadoret?”
“Because,” Jace began, “he was one of three targets. It’s clear that the clones were also part of the hit. The weapon used on Ms. Varma, in addition to being illegal, can only be fired once without a lengthy recharge. I seem to recall it was a good thirty-second rest. What’s more, the precision scope took time to focus.”
“How could it have been used on Ms. Varma, then?” asked Kara. “Witnesses said she was still for only seconds.”
“The shooter was in position and targeting everyone who stepped out of that door,” Jace guessed. “It would have been a fast adjustment to be made at that point to acquire and eliminate the intended target.”
“It’s also possible that someone among the witnesses delayed Ms. Varma in position so the shooter could target her more easily,” Onima said.
“As I recall,” Jace said, “If they were dialed in, they needed maybe five or ten seconds to focus the x-ray scope and fire.”
“So all her precautions were pointless,” Kara said.
“She knew she was in danger,” Jace said. “And they probably have been preparing to make this move a while now. Unfortunately, our return to Centaurus City made them take her out, to prevent us getting any of what Ms. Varma provided us. But they needed her death to look natural.”
“There’s another reason I suspect this weapon was not used on Mr. Cadoret,” Onima interjected. “The murder of Palmer Cadoret was intended to send a message to anyone who may have been in on what he was researching. Ms. Varma got that message—but didn’t walk away fast enough to not be targeted too.”
“As aloof as she claimed to be,” Jace added, “Mister Cadoret’s sensibilities must have rubbed off on her.”
They were silent a moment. Dr. Patel added, “I will have a formal write-up on this in half an hour or so.”
“Thank you, Maira,
” Onima said. “Jace, Kara, let’s go see what Feroz has made of the data we brought back.”
As they headed back toward the MBCC, Kara asked, “How is it, Jace, that an infantry clone knows so much about a sniper weapon?”
Jace chuckled. “Rojas—the template—was an expert ranked rifleman. Some of us—his clones—retained that ability and were also capable snipers.”
“I always thought infantry clones lacked specialization,” Kara remarked.