Challenge of Steel

by James David Victor

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, Envoy,” the woman with the red hair said with a brittle smile. She was tall, athletic, and with high cheekbones. “This won’t take long at all.”

  Mahria sat in a kind of stunned shock as she saw the woman, with apparent nonchalance, start to take out various pieces of metal tubes and black plastic, slotting them together.

  It’s a laser rifle. Mahria’s eyes widened. It was going to be a laser rifle. Just like the one that had been used to assassinate her contact. “You killed that man!” she accused. Even in her terrified state, she was still sensible enough not to give herself way entirely.

  “Oh, come now, no need for shock and disgust.” The woman shook her head as if scolding a child. “Stealing secrets from the Golden Throne has a way of making your head explode, after all…”

  Mahria knew that she was going to die. She was no fighter. The people of Terevesin were gardeners and arboreal scientists, not warriors. They tended crops and plants—and information.

  But Mahria U’Losani was also not the sort of woman to take her death sitting down.

  The envoy leaped from her chair, snatching the vine-pendant from her throat and flinging it at the woman.

  The Terevesins might not be fighters, but they were very good horticulturalists. As soon as the envoy’s hand snapped the central stem, the vine sprayed a fine mist of highly irritant particulates into the air between them—the vine’s natural defense mechanism.

  Some of it hit the envoy’s hand, of course, making it feel like she was being pricked with a thousand needles of ice, but the rest of the cloud hit the woman despite her whisper-quick ducking movement.

  “Gah!” Mahria smiled as she knew that her only weapon had found its mark. The envoy reached for her node, meaning to call someone, anyone…

  But it was already too late. The red-haired woman might have one side of her face screaming in agony from the plant venom, but she was still quick enough to flick her modular laser rifle up…

  …and pull the trigger.

  5

  New Gate MPB Headquarters

  Dustin B’Halam was a complete hard-ass—that was what Anders thought of the squat captain of the Hexa system’s entire Military Police Bureau.

  “No,” the black-haired man said without even looking up from the data-screen in front of him. He wore the same black and gold uniform as the rest of the military police, only his had a lot more gold on it.

  “But, sir, I need to get access to the Gene Seer Registry. It’s the only way to determine the identity of this body,” Anders said from where he stood in front of the man’s semi-circular desk.

  Captain B’Halam ignored him and instead ‘threw’ a few more holo-reports from one side of the silver desk to another. Outside, the four-winged birds of Hexamon were flying past the blinds, and Anders found himself watching them in their complicated flight, envious of how easy their life was.

  “Lieutenant, do you have any idea how many days we have left to go until the Challenge?”

  “Not even three, Captain,” Anders said smartly. How could he forget when every MPB Officer had the countdown on their data-pads like a holy writ?

  Just three days and then all hell breaks loose, Anders thought. The system was already teeming with tourists, and on the day of the Challenge, that number would quadruple. There would be fistfights, petty theft, lost children, translation disasters, diplomatic disasters, and maybe even natural disasters.

  “And have the Office of the Gene Seers ever agreed to cooperate with the MPB?” B’Halam continued not looking up.

  “I wouldn’t know, sir,” Anders said a little facetiously. “I’m not the sort of rank that—”

  “You’re too old and too long on the streets to play coy with me, Lieutenant,” the captain said. “I don’t have the time for dead ends. The case is closed.”

  “What?” A jolt of anger ran through the lieutenant. “But, sir, I can prove premeditated murder, almost certainly ritualized to some degree. When was the last time we had one of those?”

  “Three hundred and forty-three years ago,” the captain said.

  “But Hexa was only settled three hundred years ago—” Anders pointed out. One of his many failings was that he was a stickler for the truth.

  “Enough. It’s out of my hands, anyway,” the captain growled, sighing as he finally lifted his clear gray eyes—genetically enhanced, of course—to his erstwhile lieutenant. At the same time, he raised one of the holo-reports from his desk—presumably the same one that Anders was working on—and showed it to the younger man.

  In large red letters across the top of the report were the words ‘CASE CLOSED’ with an accompanying seal of the Golden Throne—a sword, throne, and stars.

  “But how could you, sir!?” Anders burst out.

  “You are forgetting yourself, Lieutenant,” the captain said.

  “But—” Anders persisted.

  “It isn’t your place to question a superior officer, Lieutenant,” B’Halam’s growl went one notch deeper. “And anyway—as I indicated—it is out of my hands. These orders came down from on high, Commander-General Cread himself.”

  Anders opened and closed his mouth in a state of shock. Surely, the commissioner-general, the man who oversaw all defense and military matters, would see the value of solving a rare murder?

  “Along with all the rest of these cases.” B’Halam indicated the semi-transparent ‘pile’ of holo-reports. “Every as-yet unsolved case on Hectamon 7 has been summarily closed by the commander-general,” B’Halam glowered at the stack. “To allow us to concentrate on the Challenge.”

  The captain and the lieutenant’s eyes met over the desk and held for a moment. “I forbid you to look into this any further, and to do so would mean that you would be acting outside the scope of your badge, your rank, and station,” the older man said as he threw the top two (closed) holo-reports from the pile. Anders caught them and quickly sunk them down into his own data-pad.

  HOMICIDE: Unknown Male, Geo-Plankton Viewing Platform.

  Unsolved. Case Closed.

  HOMICIDE: Terevesin Envoy Mahria U’Losani, Hectamon 7 Bridge.

  Unsolved. Case Closed.

  “Three in the space of three days,” Anders muttered.

  “Do I have to remind you that I have given you an order to stay away from these closed cases?” B’Halam turned back to look at the data-streams on his desk. His implication was clear—that if Lt. Corsigon was going to get to the bottom of these murders, then he would have to do it on his own, and without the back-up of the MPB.

  “I understand completely,” said the lieutenant, beaming from ear to ear as he saluted and left.

  “Just like the first one,” Moriarty agreed in Anders’s ear.

  Anders currently sat at the always-open sushi place in New Gate City Southside. It was his regular establishment, and his regular patch. He liked to perch on the chrome stool by the octagonal windows and watch the city life bustle in front of him. Hectamon 7 was a busy place, given the Challenge. The plaza opposite him was busy with people, from humans in their colorful fashions to the Secari crab-men, the thin and willowy Ilythian, or the enormous, horned and shaggy Mondrauks.

  Shuttles like fat metal baubles rose and swooped through the air on pre-programmed routes. Thin sky-bridges like graceful silver suspension bridges arched from the high-rise towers. Anders liked it here. It was noisy, and it was busy. It was home.

  New Gate City was nowhere near as busy as Imperial 1—the seat of the Golden Throne—but then again, Imperial 1 was also a massive orb that floated in the center of Imperial Space and was still partially under construction.

  Anders was a regular sight here at the sushi-bar, and as the lights of the city started to glow brighter around him, he settled into looking at the reports from the two latest homicides.

  “You’re right, Moriarty, it is,” he confirmed as he looked at the autopsy pictures of the cadaver. The skin was smooth, unscarred, unlined, and unwrinkled
. It was almost baby-like, just like the first one.

  Well, apart from the fact that it doesn’t have a head anymore, that is, Anders thought.

  Anders frowned and tapped his data-pad to replay the scene footage. The lieutenant found himself looking at the opulent party at the geo-plankton viewing platform. A small horde of people in some very expensive fashions congregated around the golden holo-form of the herald, moments before there was a sudden explosion of red.

  “Freeze frame,” Anders said, to see the instinctive ripple of horrified delegates stepping back from the falling body.

  “Magnify grid three-five,” he said. The image suddenly zoomed in on one of the terrified delegates. It was a young woman perhaps in her mid-twenties with auburn hair and a gauzy dress.

  “That’s a Terevesin heart-vine,” Moriarty analyzed helpfully, talking about the living, curling form of woody stem and deep, glossy green leaves that fluttered around her neck and breast.

  “Hello, Envoy Mahria U’Losani,” Anders said. There was something odd about the picture, and it wasn’t just the freeze-frame globe of red ichor expanding from the man-baby’s head.

  “She’s looking away from the murder,” Anders said. “Zoom out view, track axis left…” he said. The frozen image extrapolated its three-dimensional shape of the room as the camera panned across to where the woman was looking. It was to the nearest exit.

  “Everyone else—even that big Red Judge bastard—is looking aghast at what has just happened, but our dearly departed Terevesin is looking for the nearest way out!” Anders whispered. Luckily, he didn’t have to worry about anyone overhearing him as he always worked within a personal privacy field, like most of the commuters and distance workers who used this place.

  Anders pulled up the second case file, the one with the similarly dead envoy, found in an express lift heading up the Hecta Bridge Services. The shuttle had docked at the top, and a trio of Golden Throne playboys were already loudly laughing about how many people they were going to see die in the Challenge this year as they stepped in—

  —to suddenly start screaming at the sight of the envoy on the ground, a bloody hole blown through her chest.

  And then, strangely… the lieutenant thought as each of the three young playboys started clawing at their faces as they reacted violently to some form of air-based toxin.

  “Well, it wasn’t an air-based toxin that killed the envoy.” Anders could see that quite clearly. It was maddening and infuriating—a closed, locked box with an unexplained murder in it. But it was also kind of exciting.

  The locked-room case was a classic in crime theory, and Anders had, of course, studied the many ways that they could occur:

  That the room wasn’t actually locked or was locked afterward. In this case, that meant that the express shuttle had been stopped, and the murderer had gotten in. That was unlikely, however, due to the nature of the ‘express’ shuttle.

  That the body had been dead before they went into the room, and the door locked behind them. That was also out there though as there was footage of the envoy stepping into the shuttle fine and healthy.

  That the murderer had been in the room the whole time.

  “It is the only logical explanation,” Moriarty agreed.

  “But our three playboys hadn’t seen the murderer, had they?” Anders asked. But then again, they had been caterwauling and howling with pain. Perhaps the murderer had sprayed it into their face and slipped out?

  “So, we’re ruling out the idea that the envoy is somehow responsible for man-baby’s death,” Anders mused out loud. To be honest, this looked an awful lot like someone was tying up loose ends.

  The lieutenant didn’t like feeling outwitted at his own trade. He knew that he wasn’t a genius, but he liked to think that he was stubborn enough to get to the bottom of any case.

  The man growled and collapsed the reports back into his data-pad before deactivating the shimmering haze of the personal privacy field.

  “Ah, Lieutenant?” a woman’s voice said soon after. It was one of the waitresses of the sushi-bar, holding a tray of kimchi and white rice rolls in one hand, and setting down a ridiculously retro saucer and miniature expresso next to him with the other.

  “Oh, thanks, but I didn’t order one…” Anders frowned. Maybe this waitress was trying to flirt with him. He was flattered, but he’d already given his heart to someone. And both his wife and daughter were dead.

  “Nope, someone else did. I think you have an admirer,” she said with a grin, looking over to the bar only to frown. “Huh, I guess they got cold feet. Pretty Ilythian lady ordered this, then told me to send it to you.”

  “An Ilythian?” Anders was shocked. The thin, almost elongated humanoids usually kept themselves apart from humans. Most humans called them ‘elves’ because of their pointed ears and fine features. They were usually aloof, reserved, and devastatingly beautiful.

  “Uh-huh, an Ilythian. Maybe she’ll be back tomorrow night? You can try your luck then.” The waitress gave him a wink and turned to deliver her rolls with a slight bounce to her step.

  Anders looked at the cup suspiciously, but then shrugged and decided to drink it. He was on his very first sip when he almost choked on the metal data-node that had been dropped inside.

  With a cough and a splutter, he took out the small ‘pebble’ of metal and crystal-wire, cleaning it off and carefully placing it in the connector port of his data-pad.

  Gene Key 430101

  The entire matrix, able to hold vast terabytes of data thanks to the crystal-wires inside, only had the one small line of words, and that was it.

  “A gene key is a registration of a particular gene therapy treatment,” Moriarty stated helpfully. The S.I. was of course linked to all of Anders personal nodes and had read the downloaded data.

  “Well, well, well…” Anders turned on his stool to look down the length of the plaza, up to the heights of the estates and hills that crowded New Gate City. There in the very distance and shining white in the growing dusk, he could see the local Gene Seer facility.

  “As a representative of the MPB, it is my duty to remind you that the Gene Seers have not granted us any permissions for us to use their registry,” Moriarty intoned.

  Anders’s eyes narrowed as he glared at the facility. Someone in there knew who these man-babies were. And he was willing to bet that someone in there knew something about these murders that were cropping up all over the city.

  “This time, I’m not asking,” Anders growled.

  6

  Near Orbit

  “I see that you got it done,” said the man with blonde hair and clear blue eyes. Commander-General Cread had a square jaw and wide shoulders. He would have been considered a good-looking man were it not for something that was almost too cold and calculating about his eyes. He kept his age frozen at somewhere around his early thirties—a costly procedure, and one that required constant doses of therapy, but it was a service that the throne was willing to provide for the likes of him.

  His whole demeanor was that of an alert wolf. The man was commander of Empress Helena’s defense forces. Everything from civil security all the way through the military bureau to the navies of the Golden Throne was under his control.

  Cread nodded to the door of the reception room as he led his most treasured asset out to the bridge.

  “I did, sir,” said the woman with rich red curls in a black tactical suit. Her modular laser rifle was once again disassembled and folded away into its various components and stashed along with half a dozen other sorts of weapons about her body. “As you suggested, I outsourced the initial job to one of my contacts and undertook the viewing platform myself.”

  “Good,” Cread said. It was a perfect cover. If, by some remote chance, someone started tying the two murders together, there would now be two different killers. A further complication.

  Cread was happy with the outcome, and he admired her graceful and lithe form as he showed her the bridge. She really
was a work of art, he thought. Every movement of her body from her hips to her swaying arms was one of minimal effort and maximum efficiency.

  The Architrex of the Gene Seers—a man by the name of Vasad Aug’Osa—claimed that he had even managed to splice a tiny bit of Ilythian DNA into her matrix, which probably explained her height and grace.

  But Cread knew that the operative wasn’t just the product of a bit of alien and human DNA. He personally had overseen the tests that had taken years of careful incubation and maturation to generate the perfect warrior.

  The perfect assassin.

  By a strange quirk of genetics—which was never an exact art, even in the twenty-seventh century—her hair had turned out a rich crimson red. Hence why Cread has given her the name.

  “I see that it wasn’t without complications?” Cread raised an eyebrow. Half of the her beautiful face was still a blotchy red from the toxins of the Terevesin heart vine.

  “I had to follow-up on the envoy myself, as my contact wasn’t the sort who could easily infiltrate the bridge. But this will pass.” The woman nodded slightly. She didn’t appear to mind the injury, although Cread was sure that it must have been terribly painful. She’s probably already told her medical nodes to release pain suppressants, he thought. Obviously, the woman had the very best releases and most advanced semi-cybernetic nodes inside her body.

  The bridge of the Reaver-class warship was a wide semi-circle of dull blue-gray metals. A series of black-garbed officers stood around nearby consoles, moving silently and efficiently.

  In front of them was the wide crystal-glass panels of the Reaver’s viewing windows, which looked out on the blue-green orb of Hectamon 7.

  And the mass of ships clustered around it.

  His bridge staff was too well-trained to think anything of the sight before them, and she was, of course, as cool as an ice planet.