by Piers Platt
“Evidence? What did I do?” Rath protested, but Foche ignored him, and Rath felt himself being pulled to his feet.
“Sheriff,” Foche continued, “I’m going to leave this suspect here in your custody for a little while. You should consider him extremely dangerous.”
The sheriff led the men down the hall, where they locked Rath in one of four holding cells. The others were empty. They dropped Rath’s Forge in an evidence locker and then disappeared, leaving Rath alone in the cell with his thoughts.
* * *
“Who was that?” the control room supervisor asked.
“Cops – cover story confirmation call,” the tech replied. He gestured to his screen, where Rath’s visual feed showed a group of uniformed officers, partially obscured by prison bars, disappearing down a hallway. “Doesn’t look like it did much good, though. I’ll get ready to initiate remote deactivation procedures on Contractor 621, if needed.”
“Did he finish the mission, at least?”
“We think so – visual feed isn’t enough to confirm identity, but we’ve got emergency services radio intercepts that seem to indicate the target is dead. Give it another couple hours and we should have public media release, too.”
“Well, at least we’ll get paid,” the supervisor said.
* * *
By the morning, Rath had a plan. The lieutenant and his men appeared to have left the station, but Rath caught occasional glimpses of the sheriff down the hall, and finally smelled breakfast cooking. Soon after, the sheriff brought him a tray of microwaved food. Rath thanked him and sat down to eat – the sheriff went back to his office. Rath accessed his neural interface and began programming a timed sequence of tasks for his hemobots. Finished, he took a deep breath, bracing himself for what was to come. Then he trigged the sequence.
He vomited first, and Rath realized, belatedly, that it would have been a good idea to anesthetize himself a bit as well, but then the hemobots produced their next chemical, and it was too late. The cell’s alarm sounded when Rath fell off his bunk onto the floor, the tray of food spilling across the floor as his body spasmed involuntarily. The sheriff arrived seconds later, panting, and gaped at Rath’s convulsing body.
“Medicine … in … backpack,” Rath gasped.
The sheriff glanced at the storage locker, and then rushed back down the hall. Rath groaned and let the seizure take him fully into its grip.
The paramedics arrived six minutes later, and the sheriff unlocked the holding cell with his keycard, where Rath lay prostrated, seemingly unconscious. Rath’s hemobots had stopped the seizure several minutes before, and were now clustered at his carotid arteries, where they disrupted the rhythm of his blood flow.
“Weak pulse … if that,” one of the paramedics reported, kneeling next to Rath. “I thought I had a pulse, but now it’s gone. Starting cardiac arrest procedures.”
With his eyes closed, he could not see them, but the one checking his pulse was a woman, by the sound of her voice and the faint smell of flowery deodorant his enhanced nose detected. Rath thought he smelled aftershave on the other paramedic.
“When he first fell down, he said something about some medicine in his pack,” the sheriff told them.
“Is he on any drugs? Any medical conditions you know of?” the other paramedic asked.
The sheriff shrugged.
“Well, shit, where’s the pack?” the male paramedic asked. The sheriff opened the locker and they pulled out Rath’s Forge, while the woman secured a chest compression device around Rath’s inert body. They searched the pack quickly, but did not find any medicine in its pouches, until the paramedic realized it was a 3D printer, and opened it fully. The nanobots whirred to life, following the instructions Rath had sent wirelessly minutes before. Soon, three transdermic syringes lay on the open tray. The paramedic picked up the pack, and Rath heard his steps approaching. He heard the man set the bag down and kneel next to him.
Rath moved fast, grabbing the paramedic’s hand and jabbing it – with the syringe – into the chest of the woman. She yelped in pain.
“What the …?!” the male paramedic protested, but Rath had already grabbed a second syringe, plunging it into the man’s neck. The sheriff, aghast, was fumbling at his belt for his tactical radio, so Rath stood and ran for him, tackling him hard into the bars of the cell. They collapsed onto the floor in a heap. Rath scrabbled for the radio, pulling it from the sheriff’s grasp just as he activated it. Rath turned it back off and stood.
The chest compression device was still squeezing him painfully, so Rath tore it off. Both paramedics were slipping into unconsciousness. Rath strode over to the Forge and picked up the final syringe, kneeling on the groaning sheriff’s chest to immobilize him while he administered the sedative. Then he spat some of the vomit out of his mouth, wiped his lips on his sleeve, and collected his backpack from the floor. His muscles ached from the long minutes of the seizure, but his hemobots would soon handle that. He stripped the male paramedic out of his uniform, and stood studying the man, reconfiguring his features to match. Then he locked all three of them in the cell and headed for the exit. A brief glimpse through the front windows revealed only the ambulance and the sheriff’s air car parked on the police station’s landing pad, so Rath exited through the front door, and took a deep breath of fresh air.
He pulled the keycard for the holding cells from the sheriff’s keychain and tossed it into a snowdrift, then sat in the sheriff’s air car, starting the ignition and pulling up the auto-navigation menu. Rath selected a destination city several hundred miles to the south of their location, programmed in a high rate of speed, then hopped out and slammed the door as the car rose past him into the air. Next he climbed into the ambulance and headed in the opposite direction, making for the high-speed rail hub.
Rath had his Forge build an electro-magnetic pulse grenade on the short drive, which he tucked into a cargo pocket on the paramedic’s uniform. He flipped the ambulance’s emergency lights on as he neared the rail hub, and parked the vehicle directly in front of the building’s main entrance, ignoring the numerous No Parking signs. He stuffed the Forge into a medical kit bag from the ambulance’s interior, got out, and jogged in through the front doors. Inside he took a sharp left for the restrooms. He stopped next to an ornamental tree outside the bathrooms and discreetly placed the grenade at the base of the tree, pushing some mulch over the top of the device. Then he strode into the bathroom.
Rath selected a stall and quickly changed out of the paramedic uniform, pulling on a spare set of clothes, eyeglasses, and a hat. He switched his eyes from the paramedic’s brown to blue, put on a pair of height-enhancing shoes, and slipped a red cover with a shoulder sling over his Forge, disguising it as a personal duffle bag. Lastly, he reconfigured to a new face, and shifted to short blonde hair. His transformation into a tourist complete, he stuffed the paramedic uniform and kit bag into the trash receptacle, and remotely triggered the grenade before stepping back out of the bathroom.
* * *
“What’s up with 621?” the supervisor leaned over the cubicle wall, sipping from a steaming mug coffee. “Did you shut him down?”
The technician on duty shook her head. “No, sir – not without notifying you first. He just initiated a standard break contact drill. His EMP grenade’s disrupting all the surveillance electronics in the area including our A/V feed, he should be back online in a few minutes when the grenade runs out of power, or he moves out of the grenade’s range.”
“Oh, no kidding? My handoff brief said he was in custody.”
“Not anymore,” she told him.
“Huh. Show me.”
The tech rewound the feed for several minutes, and they watched it through in silence.
“He got lucky,” the supervisor noted. “All kinds of ways that could have gone wrong.”
The tech nodded. “Luck can’t get you to fifty.”
“Nope.”
* * *
Rath felt the spacelin
er shudder and accelerate into faster-than-light travel. He breathed a sigh of relief. His biometrics had been persistently flashing high blood pressure and heart rate warnings at him since the minute the police had taken him into custody, and he finally silenced the notifications, ignoring them. He ordered a meal from the spaceliner’s delivery service, ate sparingly, and then showered, savoring the feel of the hot water. When he was done in the shower, Rath poured three miniature bottles of liquor – not caring which ones – into a tumbler glass. His hands were still trembling, and he spilled some of the liquor on the floor. Rath drank deeply, stopping to cough as the alcohol burned down his throat. He sat on his bunk and triggered his counter bracelet, watching as a golden 7 appeared, then turned into an 8, spinning above his wrist. Forty-two to go. He fell asleep with the television on in the background, the tumbler glass still in his hand.
In his dreams, he was back in the cell, sitting at a kitchen table with the sheriff and a woman whose features he could not make out. Across from him, slumped across the table, was a headless torso. Blood was steadily dripping off the edge of the table onto the floor. Rath stood and tried to leave the cell, but it was locked, and as he watched, a thick sheet of ice spread across the bars.
“Why did you do this?” the sheriff asked him.
The woman seemed to notice the body then, and she began screaming, just as she had at the cabin. Rath tried to quiet her, but eventually gave up and sat back down at the table. The blood dripped onto his lap, soaking his pants.
It was the sensation of wetness that woke Rath; his first coherent thought was that he had urinated in his sleep, but he realized the tumbler of alcohol had just slipped out of his hand and spilled. He set the glass on the night stand, and then went into the bathroom to wash his hands. Rath wasn’t sure how many hours he had slept over the last week, but it was somewhere in the single digits, he was sure. He pulled off his pajama pants and slipped into the full-body simulation suit.
Rath picked a tropical scenario in the simulator menu, and his drab spaceliner bunk faded into a white-cushioned lounger on a pink sand beach. Turquoise waters lapped at the base of his chair, and a gentle trade wind blew in from the ocean. Rebecca was sun-tanning on the lounger next to his.
“Hey, honey! Nice pick – I love the beach,” she told Rath.
“You love anything I choose,” Rath reminded her.
She frowned and stood up. “I can just as easily be grumpy, if that’s what you prefer ….”
Rath shook his head. “No, you’re fine.” She walked over and sat across his lap, linking her arms around his neck. Rebecca kissed him for a while. Her hands explored his chest, and then slid down into his board shorts.
“Everything okay?” she asked, after a time.
“Just tired,” he told her, looking out at the ocean.
She stopped stroking him and laid her head on his chest. Eventually, he fell asleep. The nightmares returned in the simulator, as they always did, but at least he could pretend he was not alone when he woke.
16
Beauceron rubbed his bloodshot eyes and swallowed another melatonin pill. Rozhkov swore these would help my body adjust to the new time zone … but perhaps some of that vodka that he drinks would have worked better.
Beauceron rarely traveled – on the shuttle launch from Alberon he had counted and realized this was only his fifth space journey: the trip from his home planet to the Interstellar Police Academy for initial training, then the flight to his duty station of Alberon, then a roundtrip flight with Katarina for their honeymoon, years ago.
I wonder if this is worse because it’s only a two-day flight?
When Rozhkov had asked for volunteers for the unusual assignment at the morning briefing back on Alberon, Beauceron had expected his fellow detectives to jump at the opportunity for travel. But after several seconds of silence, when no hands were raised, Beauceron searched for Colony A31 on his phone, and saw what a barren wasteland it was – not even terraformed. Not exactly an enticing prospect, all expenses paid or not. Rozhkov found him at his desk afterwards, and Beauceron knew before he had even asked.
“Yes, I’ll go.”
Rozhkov sighed with relief. “Thank you, Martin. Frankly, the case looks fairly black-and-white to me, just an isolated incident with one of those traveling amusement rides. But all they have on A31 is a part-time volunteer force, and no trained investigators. Knowing you, you’ll have it solved an hour after landing.”
There were no commercial flights to Colony A31 – the colony wasn’t large enough to warrant them, nor did it have an orbital transfer station where such spacecraft could dock. Instead, Beauceron had shared a steerage cabin with a family of three colonists who were moving permanently to A31. Besides cramming the small compartment with most of their possessions, their two-year-old had contrived to wake up crying every time Beauceron managed to fall asleep, and eventually he had given up, simply reading a book in the cafeteria for the remainder of the flight. That had at least enabled him to be first in line for the transfer craft that ferried him and his fellow passengers down to the windy, dust-swept surface of A31.
The landing craft touched down in a depressurized landing bay, so Beauceron pulled on a respirator hanging next to his seat and wheeled his overnight bag down the craft’s ramp along with the other travelers and colonists. The other passengers headed for an airlock, but Beauceron noticed a woman in a tattered set of overalls leaning against a utility truck, holding a handmade sign that read Alberon IPD. He waved and walked over.
Talking with his air mask on proved a challenge, so after a failed attempt at introducing himself, Beauceron allowed the woman to lift his bag into the truck’s cargo bed, and then climbed in next to her. She started up the truck and then backed out of the hangar, following a well-worn track, which snaked its way through the dust around the colony’s habitation module. They passed three other trucks on the way, and Beauceron could see some construction activity at a large site several miles away, which he assumed was part of the terraforming project. Then the woman pulled their truck into a garage on the perimeter of a large, clear dome. Beauceron followed her into an airlock, and pulled his respirator off when she signaled that it was safe to do so.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “I’m Jain Swick. I’m an atmospheric modulation specialist by training, but around here I also moonlight as the chief of our little police force. Thank you for coming.”
“Not at all,” Beauceron said, shaking her hand. “I’m Martin Beauceron.”
“I’m sure you’d probably like to get settled …?” Jain asked.
“No,” Beauceron said.
“Are you sure? I know the flight can be a bit taxing, we’ve got a room set up for you – space is not a problem these days, we just added another section to the Hab module.”
“No, it’s fine. I’d rather get started.”
“Okay,” she relented. “Let’s go take a look. The area where they set up the fairground is this way.”
It was a short walk from the airlock to the dome – Beauceron fell in beside Jain.
“Did you read my initial report?” she asked.
“Yes. It was very thorough.”
They rounded the final corner and entered the plaza, and Beauceron saw the Space Elevator ride standing in the center of the dome.
“There it is,” Jain said quietly.
“The rest of the amusement rides?” Beauceron asked.
“Packed up a few days ago and shipped out. They were due for a carnival on another planet. I tried to make them stay; it was all I could do to get them to leave that one behind.”
Beauceron grimaced. “Did they have security cameras?”
“The carnival guys had nothing, but we do have cameras mounted all around the exterior of the dome, so we’ve got some footage. The angles aren’t very good, though.”
They were at the base of the tower now, which was roped off using what looked like spare electrical cabling, and guarded by a single man seated on a f
olding chair.
“Hi, Moore,” Jain said.
Moore nodded to them, and went back to reading his datascroll. Beauceron walked slowly around the exterior of the ride. Jain followed.
“We had to clean up the bodies; the families wanted to hold their funerals.”
“Of course,” Beauceron said. “Were the bodies autopsied first?”
“No.”
“Did you inspect them at all?”
“No. I mean, I wouldn’t have known what to look for. It looked like they all died from the fall, or the impact, rather.”
“They probably did,” Beauceron agreed. He took a step back and looked at the top of the tower, and then turned to Jain.
“I’m sorry, but I’m struggling to see why you requested our assistance. Based on your report … it seems fairly clear what happened.”
“Perhaps,” Jain admitted. “What do you think happened?”
“A mentally unstable carnival ride operator wanted to kill himself, but he decided to kill a lot of innocent people first. He sabotaged his ride, killed some of the riders, and then killed himself by walking out of an airlock.”
Jain chewed the inside of her cheek, and then sighed. “The families that lost loved ones here … they have a lot of questions. And I don’t have any answers for them.”
“Questions about what?”
“Why, mainly. Why it happened.”
Beauceron shook his head. “Sometimes there is no good answer to that question. Believe me, I’ve asked it myself often.”
“Well, maybe you can answer it better than I can. At the very least, you can reassure me that there’s nothing I’m overlooking.”