by Mark Ellis
“Why didn’t you ask him?”
“I did. Before he could answer, a termination warrant was served.”
“Oh. Well, maybe he moved the tech through the Pits. Using noncitizens to shift the stuff through the lower squats.”
“He still would have needed a flyer to get it into the canyon. There’s no road into the hellzone that I know of.”
Brigid massaged her temples. “This makes my head hurt. You can maybe find a vehicle in the Pits, but the only place you can find a flyer, even a disabled one is—”
“Let’s not go there,” Kane interrupted sharply.
Brigid fixed a penetrating green gaze on his face. “You brought all this up. Curiosity always has its price, you know.”
Kane couldn’t deny that she spoke the truth, and he knew the only place a flyer could be found was the armoury, on C Level of the Administrative Monolith. The information on the disk was now unsecured, and as a Magistrate, it was his duty to report it, since he couldn’t resecure it. Protocol didn’t work that way. There was nothing on the disk indicating a brewing revolution or a planned overthrow of the barons.
His first impulse was to destroy the disk and walk away from the mysteries it posed. But now he had involved someone outside of his division, and his options were limited. Closure was required. His judgment had been clouded by liquor, and that error had to be concealed at all costs, by any measures necessary.
The Sin Eater holstered at his forearm suddenly seemed to increase in weight. It almost dragged his arm down to the floor, and his palm itched with the insistent urgency to fill it with the butt.
Kane straightened up quickly, unsteadily. Brigid’s eyes flickered in surprise, in apprehension. Kane allowed his right arm to dangle at his side, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the painful throbbing inside the walls of his skull. By any measures necessary. He heard the woman’s rich voice, calm and clear through the pounding in his ears.
“Tomorrow I’ll scan the data base, run a correlation search, see what we have in archives about Dulce. Okay?”
The drumming in his head receded, the pain faded and Kane opened his eyes. He locked gazes with Brigid. The room seemed to tilt around him, his fingers flexed, the tendons in his wrist tightened
She smiled at him, and it transformed her face. It wasn’t an empty smile, forced there by fear or tension. It was a smile of openness and honesty, of happiness at finding someone who shared her innate curiosity, of taking a delight in uncovering the unknown, of finding someone with whom she could be herself.
His thoughts fought through the fog of alcohol and paranoia and focused on one fact— you brought her into this, you drunken asshole. You take responsibility for bringing her out.
As if from far away, he heard himself say, “Okay. Fine.”
Numbly he took the disk from her hand. Their fingers brushed momentarily, her touch a soft caress, yet electric at the same time.
“If I find anything important,” she went on, “I’ll let you know.”
“Okay. Fine.”
With the bitter certainty that he would probably live just long enough to regret saying “Okay, fine,” he turned and left her apartment. The promenade was empty, and for some reason, it seemed much smaller, much more confining than it had an hour before.
MAGISTRATE Psychometric Report G-1268, Code. Grant, born 2160, Cobaltville. Awarded Active Badge of Duty, 2177. Cited 2178, 2186, 2194, meritorious service.
Courageous but not reckless. Has strong curb on emotions. Suggestibility low. Attitude scales show high stability. Strong candidate for administrative transfer. Action pending.
Salvo leaned back in his chair and tapped his fingers on the open file. The Intel section was very quiet, and its dim lighting always helped him to relax and concentrate. Morales and the rest of the duty staff studiously avoided looking in his direction.
Salvo glanced down at the file again. The psychometric report supplied only the public image. There wasn’t even a passing reference to Grant’s capacity for friendship and loyalty, and that was the crucial element. There was no point in cross-indexing the material with Kane’s own file. Salvo already knew Kane was at the extreme limit of the permitted range in a number of behavioural areas. The psychometric reading didn’t fully reveal these.
Suggestibility low.
If that was the case, then Kane would have never been able to persuade Grant to forestall serving the termination warrant on Milton Reeth. Obviously, Grant trusted Kane. More importantly, Kane trusted Grant, and very deeply.
Morales announced, “Here you are, sir.”
Salvo got up and padded quietly to the vid monitor Morales indicated. On the screen, he watched Kane walk down the stoop of an apartment and, hands in his pocket, shuffle along the promenade. He moved slowly, not with his characteristic catlike stride.
“Who lives there?” he asked.
Morales consulted a sheet of printout. “A mid-grade senior archivist. Brigid Baptiste. She has a Q clearance.”
Salvo’s lips pursed. “Never heard of the bitch.”
Morales shrugged.
“Why was he there?” Salvo muttered. “If he wanted her to take a look at the disk, then he should have ordered her to examine it during the duty shift. That way his ass was covered. Hers, too. This is very uncharacteristic of Kane. Sloppy.”
Morales coughed discreetly. “Shall we put her under surveillance, as well, sir?”
“Of course,” Salvo snapped. “And tomorrow, while she’s at her post, I want you to search her home.”
“Me, sir?”
“Yes, you sir.”
“Search her home for what?”
“For anything,” Salvo growled.
The corners of Morales’s eyes crinkled in puzzlement. “What if I can’t find anything?”
Salvo fixed his dark liquid stare on the man. He said nothing.
Morales ducked his head quickly.
“I’ll find something.”
CHAPTER TEN
KANE DREAMED IN choppy fragments, none of which made any sense. A humid darkness swathed most of his mind in sweaty, ebony folds. Only infrequently came brief flares of light and cogent thought. The lights took on the appearance of faces that somehow resembled his mother, his grandfather and father all at the same time. He had an inchoate, faraway awareness that he’d promised to do something for those faces—or was it one face?—but he couldn’t remember what.
He felt an insistent, jiggling pressure, as though he were riding on the back of a wag. He tried to roll with it, but he couldn’t seem to move. Finally, he realized a hard object was prodding his right thigh. He managed to reach down, and his fingers closed on something that felt like the toe of a boot.
“Up and at ’em. Salvo and slaggers wait for no drunk idiots.”
Kane struggled and managed to peel back one eyelid. Grant’s scowling face filled his field of vision. He looked curiously distorted, resembling a brown frog under a magnifying glass.
Clearing a dry-as-dust throat, he massaged his eyeballs with the heels of his hands. They felt as if they had been filled with broken glass.
“You have a good time?”
Removing his hands from his face, Kane saw a foggy Grant examining an equally foggy yet very empty wine bottle.
“No,” Kane croaked. He realized he was lying on his sofa, still wearing his bodysuit, though at some point during the night he’d taken off his coat, boots and Sin Eater. They lay in a disordered heap on the floor.
Grant sighed unhappily. “This was rare stuff. You have any idea how hard it is to find?”
“You’ve told me often enough.”
“And you knocked it off in one night, like a goddamn methanol swill-pig. And you didn’t save me so much as a sip.”
Kane frowned at him. “You don’t drink.”
“It’s the though
t that counts.”
“Yeah. It’s the thought that gets me. What time is it?”
“Twenty minutes till shift change. You’ve got till ten to pull your booze-soaked ass together.”
“Why’d you come by?”
“Because you didn’t answer my comm calls.”
“You were worried?”
“Not particularly. I just wondered what happened with Salvo last night.”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
“Just an ass-chewing. Not even that. More like an ass-gumming. Gave me a line of hoo-hah about some Roamer warlord with preNuke weaponry.”
Grant grunted. “That old saw.”
Kane got his arms under him and heaved his body off the sofa, not even trying to stifle his groans. Pain, like a clawed animal, tore at the inside of his skull. He was grateful that Grant postponed further questions until he was able to function again. He stumbled into the tiny bath nook and doused his face with cold water. He plunged his head repeatedly into the sink, blowing like a whale.
Grant watched him from the doorway. “Want some food?”
At the mention of it, Kane’s stomach boiled like a percolator. Face submerged, he mumbled, “You’re hell on a hangover.”
After the pain receded a bit, he straightened up and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the sink. He winced at the sight. His eyes were dark rimmed and netted with red. His colour was like mildewed drywall. He felt a small twinge of satisfaction. He looked exactly as he felt.
In a low tone, hardly above a whisper, Grant asked, “What did you do with the disk?”
Memories of his midnight visit to Brigid Baptiste returned in a swirling rush. Kane remembered everything, and a groan escaped between suddenly clenched teeth.
“Ah, shit,” he said softly. “Shit. Shit.”
“That bad?” Grant’s tone of voice wasn’t amused.
Stumbling out of the bathroom, shouldering Grant aside, he pawed through his wadded-up coat. The good thing about Kevlar was that it wouldn’t hold a wrinkle, no matter how much it was abused. The disk was still snug in an inner pocket, and he collapsed onto the sofa, not knowing if he felt relieved or anxious. Then Grant’s question finally penetrated. Directing a steady glare at him, he demanded, “How did you know about it?”
“Salvo called me this morning,” he answered quietly. “Said he was asking every member of our team if we’d boosted anything from the slaghole last night. Said he’d already asked you.”
“He did. Didn’t tell me what, if anything, was missing.”
“That’s because you didn’t ask him. I did. Doesn’t take a doomseer to guess who palmed it and when.”
Leaning his throbbing head against a coverless cushion, he asked, “You going to tell him?”
“Kiss my ass. Salvo asked me if I was the one who took it, not if I knew who did.”
Kane nodded, intoning, “‘A Magistrate is virtuous in the performance of his duty.’”
Grant grunted. “You find out, and one night you’ll have a termination warrant served on you.”
“What?”
“That’s what Reeth said to us, remember? My philosophy is simple—what Salvo doesn’t know won’t hurt us.”
Smiling bleakly, Kane asked, “So you’re beginning to think there was something a little fabricated about last night’s op?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think, doesn’t matter what you think.” Grant pinged a fingernail against the empty bottle. “Tell me the truth. Why’d you knock this off in one sitting? Drowning a sorrow?”
Kane dry-scrubbed his hair with his hands. “Do you think I’m going soft?”
“Not physically. Emotionally is another matter. You’re breaking old, ingrained habits and acting out of character. That can be deadly.”
Kane eyed the big man and chose his words with care. “Our whole lives don’t have to be part of a predetermined pattern, you know.”
“I don’t follow.”
“You can think, can’t you, even if it doesn’t matter?”
“Think about what?”
“About that portal thing, for instance, or whatever Reeth showed us. That matters.”
Grant shook his head vigorously. “That’s where you’re mistaken. Even it was one of those things, so the fuck what? It’s not within our parameters of duty. Now, get up and let’s go. Drop that disk in a trash hatch on the way. Follow the two F’s.”
Kane slowly arose. “Right. ‘File and forget.’”
With Grant’s help, he managed to put on his boots, Sin Eater and coat without fainting, but he still felt extremely unwell.
It was the time for many duties to begin, and the promenade was thronged with movement, with people heading to their duty stations in the Administrative Monolith. Even though they were of the Cobaltville elite, the people were subdued, many of them wearing self-conscious expressions of carefully calculated neutrality. Necessarily so, since frank self-expression could catch a Magistrate’s attention, and that could lead to any number of unpleasant consequences.
Although he looked for her, Kane didn’t see Brigid Baptiste.
The only trash hatch they saw was being serviced by a sullen-faced outrunner girl, hardly more than twelve years old, so Kane kept the disk in his coat pocket and he and Grant took the elevator to C Level. Despite the fact that time was growing short, Kane stopped off in the dayroom to wolf down a few sesame seed biscuits and swig a cup of sub. That made him feel more as if he’d achieved near-human status again.
They walked into the briefing room to find Salvo already standing at the lectern. He was reading shift assignments in a droning monotone. Two dozen Magistrates sat on the rows of hard benches, listening with impassive faces.
Salvo glanced up when Kane and Grant dropped onto one of the benches, but since he didn’t pause or even raise an eyebrow, Kane figured he hadn’t reached his or Grant’s orders for the day.
“Banyon and Colemund, Intel section, collating outlands reports. Leduc, Jessup and Kovacs, agricultural-section security. Orris, Fielding and Newson, manufacturing-section security. Boon, Grant and Kane, PPP duty.”
Salvo continued to read off the duty roster, but neither Kane nor Grant heard him. They were too occupied with exchanging surprised glances, then shifting their stares to Salvo. PPP duty—Pedestrian Pit Patrol—was a first-year-Mag assignment. All newly badged enforcers were required to patrol the Pits as part of their first-year duties. Generally the patrol consisted of nothing more than checking ID chips, making sure they were barony approved and not bogus.
Pit dwellers were stopped at random, ordered to present their left forearms for inspection and a hand scanner would react positively if the subcutaneous chip was legit.
PPP duty was supervised by one senior Magistrate, never a pair of them. Pits could be dangerous places, especially for rookie enforcers with no real combat experience, but there hadn’t been a major outbreak of anti-Mag violence in the Cobaltville Pit in a generation. Even the latest in a long line of self-proclaimed Pit bosses, an outrunner named Guana Teague, kept an exceptionally low profile. And though it was true Boon had been recently awarded his badge, and therefore was required to take patrol, assigning two veteran Mags to nursemaid him seemed ridiculous and a waste of resources.
When Salvo completed reading off the assignments and the rest of the shift filed out, Kane approached the lectern. “Tell me why.”
Salvo didn’t so much as glance up at him. “Why what?”
“Pit patrol.”
“It’s a standard duty assignment. You should know that by now.”
“Why the two of us?”
Salvo collected his papers and pushed past him. “Why not? Where is it written that two senior Magistrates can’t be assigned to supervise a PPP?”
Without another word, he turned and strode out
of the briefing room. Kane turned toward his partner, raising his hands in a gesture of exasperation.
Glowering, Grant said, “This is your fault, you know.”
A young, slender man of Asian extraction moved toward Kane. Falteringly he said, “I’m Boon. It’s an honour to be working with you.”
Grant sighed and stood up. “Let’s get this honour over with.”
They marched out into the corridor, Boon a bit behind, trying to match their impatient, long-legged stride. They stopped briefly at the tech desk so Boon could pick up a scanner. It was a small, cylindrical gadget, not more than four inches long with a two-pronged sensor probe at one end.
At the private elevator, they showed the sentry on duty their badges. The sentry punched in the numbers on a miniature three-digit keypad, and the door panel rolled aside. The elevator was one of six shafts on C Level that dropped directly to the Pits. The largest of the shafts was positioned in the armoury and could accommodate an armoured wag filled with a Magistrate squad, just in case a Pit outbreak had to be quelled.
After they stepped into the car, the sentry, with studied casualness, pressed a control toggle and set the lift for a fast descent. As the platform seemed to drop from beneath their feet, Boon reacted to the sudden sensation of free fall with a startled murmur. Grant and Kane affected not to notice the feeling of their stomachs forcibly climbing into their throats.
Casually, Kane inquired, “Remember the last PPP we worked?”
Grant replied, “You mean when old Guana was paying hard jack for Mag body parts?”
“What?” Boon asked faintly.
“A weird fad,” said Kane. “Pit dwellers tend to bore easy, need their diversions. What was it—six gold creds for a Mag nose, eight for a tongue?”
“Twenty for a set of balls,” remarked Grant calmly. “Getting those was a real bitch.”
“What?” asked Boon again. “When was this?”
Kane gravely glanced over at Grant. “Last year, right?”
“I never heard of that fad before,” said Boon.
“No wonder,” Grant replied. “Triple bad for morale. Salvo did his best to cover it up, but—”