The Butcher will be the culmination of my career. Catching this scourge of the galaxy will, perhaps, even upstage Mr. Sherlock Holmes. And when I succeed, I will be able to once again retire. This time for good.
Had the Butcher known that Twomanrie was planning to try and catch them? Had they lured her here to Gallawaygg with Ted Tamobi’s murder? Maybe they'd lain in wait for her to arrive, and watched her solve the murder—or at least think she had—before killing her. Had the Butcher laughed at her before cutting her tongue out? Had she begged for her life?
The interview I transcribed in my previous journal takes on added importance. Without speaking to the witness, I would never have learned the location of the Butcher’s home world. A suspect’s early life often holds the secret to where they are now. So I will start there.
The location of the Butcher’s home world? Armintor sat back, astounded. Twomanrie had interviewed someone who knew where the Butcher spent their childhood. She’d never mentioned it. Armintor turned to the beginning of the journal. Its first entry was dated October of 2418. So if it had been written in her previous journal, it would most likely have happened last year. Had it been on Proxima Centauri b? True North? Dwarf Harrow? Unless Armintor saw the journal, she’d never know.
But that was impossible. Twomanrie always sent her completed journals to her apartment on Variegor. Any secrets about the Butcher’s past were now the property of the Alphahood.
She read Twomanrie’s next words.
I am unsure whether I should trust Armintor with such an important task as assisting me as I catch the Butcher. There can be no room for error. Perhaps I might send her back to Variegor to wait for me. She will not like it or understand it, poor child, but it is for the best.
And, after all, she does not need to understand. She will only need to obey.
Capturing the Butcher will be my greatest achievement. I cannot allow anyone, even Armintor, to hinder me.
Hot tears trickled down Armintor’s cheeks, and she turned her head to prevent them from falling on the pages. Once again, Twomanrie was able to make her disdain for Armintor obvious. She’d contemplated sending Armintor back to Variegor like she was no more important than one of her filled-up journals. Scrubbing her face with her hand, Armintor placed the journal back on the table and searched the room. Nothing else but clothing, toiletries and a few reference books. There was no sign of Twomanrie’s detection manual. She searched again and again, but finally had to admit it wasn’t in there.
Had Twomanrie taken the manual somewhere and left it? Impossible. It was her most treasured possession. Even more treasured a possession, obviously, than Armintor had been.
At last she stopped searching. She stood motionless for several minutes, listening to the silence.
“Goodbye,” she finally whispered into the room. Did she feel something? A faint whisper? A brief coldness? No. There was nothing left for her here.
She turned and walked out the door.
Chapter 27
Gallawaygg
Date: 2419
Five days after Twomanrie’s death, two Alphas arrived on Gallawaygg. Armintor watched them enter Twomanrie’s room on the vid feed from her room’s control panel. They exited with a bag presumably filled with Twomanrie’s clothing and books.
As she stared at the bag, she thought again of Armintor’s well-worn copy of The Collected Work of Sherlock Holmes. All her mentor’s annotations. All the notes. Had it been in the room after all, but she’d somehow missed it? Was it in the bag the Alpha was carrying? No. That was impossible. She’d searched too thoroughly. If it had been inside that room, she’d have found it.
One of the Alphas banged on Armintor’s door. “You’re coming with us,” he shouted.
She cowered against the wall.
“Let’s go, Magga,” the second Alpha said in a bored voice.
“You can’t survive out here alone, Beta,” yelled Magga. “We’ll take you back to Variegor.”
Armintor’s entire body rebelled. To return to Variegor after she’d retasted the freedom of other planets? To be a Beta again? Never.
“I’d rather die,” she whispered.
“Magga,” the second Alpha said. “Let’s go. We don’t have time for this.”
But Magga kept yelling. A mecha arrived and attempted in vain to intercede. Magga punched it in its humanoid head. A few minutes later the lead detective from Twomanrie’s case arrived. After a long and tensely-worded conversation, he convinced the Alphas to leave.
After they’d left, the constable came to Armintor’s door. “You and Twomanrie did good work for us,” he said through the room’s aud/vid. “And we don’t have an extradition treaty with Variegor. No one does. You can stay on Gallawaygg as long as you want.”
There was one thing Twomanrie had left undone. She tried to hide the trembling in her voice. “I wanted, I mean, she wanted to let you know that she’s not sure anymore that Aom Howrd did it. Murdered Ted Tamobi, I mean.”
His face turned grave. “I know she had a poor impression of me, but even I’ve concluded that. The murderer was someone much more formidable than Aom Howrd, if the legendary Twomanrie Ohetto died investigating.”
After he left, Armintor stumbled to the bed and curled into a ball. The act of living without her mentor once again seemed insurmountable. She had no direction, no goal. Maybe what Twomanrie had always said, that Armintor would never have amounted to anything without her help, had been true.
Terry’s New Earth was uninhabitable. Variegor had never been a home. And Gallawaygg was just another in a long line of briefly-visited locales. She felt adrift in the galaxy.
Whenever Twomanrie had been at a loss, she’d looked for inspiration in her detection manual. Every quote from Mr. Sherlock Holmes that Twomanrie had ever mentioned spun around in Armintor’s overloaded brain.
“One’s ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,” Twomanrie had told her countless times. What wisdom lay hidden in those words?
And, “When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it. The highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny.”
What did that one mean? Even though the sense behind the words escaped her, they kept repeating in her mind as if convinced they carried the weight of truth.
She still had almost 4,000 credits from what Twomanrie had given her the night she’d died. Well, from what Armintor herself had taken. The credits would dwindle quickly. She had to make a decision before she ran out of funds. What did she possess? The credits, her body, and her mind. That was it.
All she could think of was the Butcher out in the galaxy somewhere, laughing while she was miserable and Twomanrie was dead. What she truly wanted was to find the Butcher, and prevent them from ever murdering even one more person.
One’s ideas must be as broad as nature…. What did that mean? Or more importantly, what did it mean in her situation? The Butcher hadn’t killed her. Why? Because she was so unintimidating? So ineffectual?
But they’d killed Twomanrie, because she’d been a real threat. Rage seized her heart. She needed to do something drastic, something unexpected. What did she need to go after the Butcher? Intel about their real identity. Where could she find it? On Variegor, in Twomanrie’s journals. But going there was impossible.
One of Twomanrie’s own oft-repeated sayings came to Armintor. If information exists in one place, it will exist in others.
Where could she go to find the information? The galaxy’s mecca of intel was a planet called Bituminous Tarsi. All the intel in the galaxy was said to reside there. Their planetary sphere alone was said to comprise over 900 YB.
But the Butcher was a master of intel as well. And, like the best of the best forgers, the Butcher could track people in the Underworld via their personalities.
If she went to Bituminous Tarsi as Armintor, the Butcher would realize she was taking on the failed task of her mentor. And then they’d kill her
, too.
So how could she get the intel she needed without dying?
One’s ideas must be as broad as nature….
And then, as if her memory of Twomanrie had become impatient, yet another Mr. Sherlock Holmes quote popped into her mind. The best way of successfully acting a part is to be it.
And just like that, Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s genius seemed to reach across the eons and give her a friendly tap on the shoulder.
She had to go to Bituminous Tarsi, but not as herself. She had to become someone else.
With her OS’s help, Armintor booked an anonymous berth on a commuter transport departing the next day from Llyl to Bituminous Tarsi. With that purchase, her credits dropped to 3,019.
OS? I need to create a pictula.
There are several OTS pictulas available. Her OS displayed some on her eyescreen. One was named the Betty Sue, another the Billy Bob, there was the Cum Ando and the Lush Eos. They all looked like caricatures of caricatures.
Are these any good? she asked.
They are suitable for short-term, basic transactions.
But I want this pictula to be better than that. I need to customize it.
So she created a custom pictula, and with her OS’s help, populated it in a corner of the Underworld called Cozplai. It felt therapeutic to lovingly craft the pictula’s background from her memories of Twomanrie’s detection manual. She left it there. Watson. Waiting to be deployed in three years. Plenty of time for her plan to come to fruition.
In front of the mirror, she drew apart her hair on the right side of her scalp. There was already only a faint scar where her cranial hook had been implanted. The skin around her tie-in socket, though, was still a little inflamed.
Once again she remembered her father’s words when she’d been so unhappy the week before her 13th birthday. Someday, this disappointment won’t matter so much. Someday, you’ll have a problem in your life that will put this in perspective. Then you’ll know that this was just a temporary thing.
How right he’d been. How sad he’d have been to know how right he’d been.
She wasn’t remembering her father’s words verbatim, and that bothered her. But that wouldn’t have to happen to her anymore. Entire swathes of memory could be stored in her cranial embed. She’d never have to forget anything again.
Easing herself down on the bed, she rearranged the pillows until they weren’t pressing on her tie-in socket. Breathing deeply, she folded her hands over her chest and closed her eyes.
OS? she thought tentatively.
A word superimposed itself in her lower right vision: Yes?
I want to create a new persona. An undercover persona.
An undercover persona?
Yes. Set up a folder for me to store parts of myself. Make it redundant. Five times redundant.
She’d heard of people hiding parts of themselves inside their cranial embed. Storing bad memories away, for instance. But they were still the same person, with the same mannerisms and the same accents.
But all that assumed that someone was the same person from the day they were born. That they followed a trajectory constrained—or bolstered—by their core personality. Yet she, Armintor, had been different when she was a child. Confident. Tek-loving. Happy. Well, mostly happy. What would she have been like if the Blue Mist Plague had never appeared?
Predators like the Butcher tracked people in the Underworld via their personalities. If she were to store away all those parts of her persona that she’d acquired after the Blue Mist Plague had struck her home planet, wouldn’t she be different enough from the current version of herself to escape detection? Yes. She was sure of it.
Her OS’s response remained in her lower right vision. Interacting with it still made her uncomfortable. She minimized the eyescreen with a thought. It shrank to a small, transparent tab.
Her socket still ached with a cold, toothachy tenderness. Only seven years later than she’d expected for her first hook surgery. She was now twenty years old. How much she’d longed to experience an immersible in the Underworld with Sally and Barta that day so long ago on the beach on Terry’s New Earth.
There. That was where she should start. Younger. More immature. No tek hangups.
And with that, Armintor began to store vast parts of herself in her cranial embed. She started with the earliest memories she wanted to purge from her new persona. Lots of details about her childhood. All her grief at losing her parents, her brother, her friends, her life. The terrifying time on Variegor. The teachings of Twomanrie.
She left her younger self’s love of tek, her sense of adventure, her friendly demeanor, a little bit of her petulance.
Then she purged the memories of herself and Twomanrie traveling the galaxy. But she left the love of travel. That would be helpful later for her Watson pictula to use. She stored away her recently-gained knowledge of the Butcher, but left a lingering curiosity about him.
Next, she stored the knowledge of the plans she’d just made. She retained her desire to travel to Bituminous Tarsi and get a job with an intel forger there.
She partitioned all the unneeded memories into a file in the corner of her cranial embed, closed it away, and saved it. All of this seemed much easier now, as if some sort of limiter had been erased inside her braincase. She didn’t remember why that would be, or why it made her happy. She needed a password for the memory file. Mr. Sherlock Holmes, her brain supplied. She wasn’t sure anymore what that referenced, so it sounded like the perfect password to keep it safe.
Lastly, she created another program to unlock the file containing all the memories she’d stored away. She created specific triggers that would cause it to unlock, such as if she left the planet Bituminous Tarsi, or if she learned certain information about the Butcher. She had just enough memory of her core mission left to do that, and then she added even that memory to her stored data, and forgot she’d just done it.
She needed to get some sleep before she boarded the commuter transport to Bituminous Tarsi tomorrow. She hoped the ship wasn’t filled with old farty gas giants like a cruise ship would. But a commuter transport wasn’t fancy-trou. Hopefully she’d find someone un-boro enough to talk to on the trip.
When she got to Bituminous Tarsi, she’d get a job with a forger. But not any old borsloggidy forger. She’d only work with the Forger. And she’d learn all his tricks, and become the best forger the galaxy’d ever orbed.
She rolled over onto her left side, then winced. Her tie-in socket was infected or something. Shit-clusters. How had that happened? It hadn’t ever gotten infected before. Had she used a shab tie-in jack somewhere? She couldn’t remember. As that thought drifted around in her strangely expansive braincase, Redcholate fell asleep.
Armintor's and Redcholate's stories continue in the
second novel in the Galaxia Mortem series:
The Voyage of the Norm Bissonnette
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Works by Danielle Ste. Just
The Disk Mirror Solution, Galaxia Mortem Book I
The Winter of Springtide's Queen
The Quays of Lac-Carge
Stories
The Forgottens
The Effect-Displacement Assassin
Bean Mother
George, the Second Act
Madeline, From a Dream
The Secret Garden
Danielle Ste. Just lives and writes in southern California. She has published several science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories.
She always loves to hear from readers. You can email her at [email protected].
Find more at www.daniellestejust.com.
Copyright © 2021 Danielle Ste. Just
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All rights reserved. Except as permitted by copyright law, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
Table of Contents
Cover
Front Matter
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
About the Author
Copyright
The Disk Mirror Solution (Galaxia Mortem Book 1) Page 19