The Scorpion Game

by Daniel Jeffries

  Hoskin saw signs of a struggle: a shattered Indian vase; orchids with crushed stems; an overturned table; blood splatters illuminated by the gentle glow of a hovering diamond chandelier. Kimball Turnbull’s big body lay on the floor by the bed.

  The rain and wind roared outside the busted central window where the girl had taken the swan dive. The shattered glass glittered.

  Hoskin walked to the window’s edge and looked out. The wind was strong and he could feel it tugging at him. A sudden sensation of falling hit him, and for a moment he thought he could see the girl as she jumped in his mind. He took a few steps back and turned to look at the body.

  The orca-fat Turnbull lay on his back. Tiny forensic spiders crawled his fat slowly, trolling for trace evidence. Hoskin walked over and squatted by the corpse. He sucked air through his teeth as he studied the body.

  Some of the cops saw Quinlin and raised a shout, clapping him on the back and slapping hands. “Shugggaaaa.”

  “Whaddya say, Shug?” said a bouncy, fat cop.

  “Light and sweet, baby, light and sweet,” said Quinlin with a wink. Laughs, smiles.

  “Get over here. Stop fucking around,” said Hoskin.

  “Aww, you never let me have any fun, mommy,” said Quinlin.

  Hoskin swatted the forensic spiders away and dictated to a steno-bot. His eyes snapped rapid pictures. “We’ve got five irregular wounds to the torso. Height is consistent with a small attacker. Shredded flesh outlines, cauterized skin, probably from a fission blade. Congealed blood. Tissue around the wounds is inflamed…”

  He stopped, rubbed his wiry stubble and stood up. With a cocked head he examined the body.

  “Something’s not right here,” said Hoskin.

  His backbrain pulled up a crime recreator program. He let his eyes drift over the scene slowly and it went to work, pulling in all the details. The blood spatter, the wounds, the signs of the struggle all fed the system. It started to render the scene in 3D in front of him in quick flashes. He watched as a holographic ghost of the girl stabbed the man with five vicious strikes. She was shorter than him and the wounds were all at chest height.

  Hoskin stood over the body and looked closely. The 3D playback glitched out when the victim collapsed. It tried to correct itself, but failed. Hoskin rolled the recreation back and watched the girl stab the guy again until it skipped and stuttered, unable to get the angles of the fall right from the visual evidence. He blinked the program off.

  “It’s glitching. It thinks the guy should have fallen right here,” said Hoskin, pointing to a spot a few steps away from where the body lay.

  “Just rip off a vSelf, check it out,” said Quinlin.

  Quinlin blinked and Hoskin knew he was fracturing up his mind into virtual copies. He could run the crime recreator with a dozen different inputs that way. Hackers like Quin loved the tech. They could get things done in a fraction of the time.

  “You use that shit too casually,” said Hoskin. “We ain’t meant to focus on fifty things at the same time. You miss stuff that way.”

  “Nah. Exact opposite. You catch more stuff. Why you always got to do it the hard way?” said Quinlin.

  “The right way is the hard way.”

  Hoskin shook his head. He looked down at the awkwardly positioned body.

  “vSelves ain’t nothing but a tool. Use ‘em. Just use ‘em only when you need to. And I don’t need crutches, I already see what’s glitching it anyway.” He pointed at the Senator. “This ain’t right. This body was moved. Probably flipped.”

  Hoskin squatted and mimed how the killer would have turned the body over.

  “Yeah but how’d the girl do that? She was a tiny little thing,” said Quinlin. “Look at the size of this guy.”

  “She could have used something for leverage or somebody else coulda got in here, helped her cover it up.”

  “Or maybe she got augments?”

  Hoskin flashed down to Zara, the crime scene tech. “Check if our girl out there got any augments.”

  “You got it,” Zara flashed back.

  Latex oozed from the pores in Hoskin’s hands, hardening into gloves. He reached under Turnbull’s head. Hoskin flipped the enormous man like he was flipping a car. On the back of the Senator’s neck Hoskin found what he was looking for, or rather what was missing: someone had cut open the base of Turnbull’s skull and ripped out his memory stack.

  “There we go,” said Hoskin. “No blackbox. Now what whore stabs a man, cuts out his blackbox and then jumps to her death?”

  ***

  “Who’s in charge on this floor?” said Hoskin.

  “He’s already waiting for you, Detectives,” said the dwarf, as the light-door opened onto another room, this one made entirely of dark flesh. Gnarled bone tables twisted up from the floor, their tops stacked with exotic drinks in heavy goblets. Blood-colored, curved couches lined the room’s edges, the couches crusted with strange couples. Six dwarf boys in living red masks writhed with a tall black man with no eyes. A fat woman with horns molested a short Asiatic man with feather ticklers.

  Oily, leather-clad servos ferried drinks through the knotted crowds. Nude women stood at the center of every group. A fat woman stood, tethered to shockwires held by a horde of masked men, her fat rippling as they hit her again and again with electricity. Another woman had grotesquely augmented feet. Men cowered around her, licking them. A biomechanical sex toy strutted past, just legs and ass, then another that was just a torso with tits like asteroids, no head, no arms. Black sculptures of naked women in countless positions stood around the room. A mediawall flashed intense close-ups of twisting, plastic-wrapped bodies. The place smelled of oil and sweat.

  A pack of dark men in shimmering spidersilk suits and grotesque biomech masks huddled together like a pack of grizzled hyenas. Behind them, hovering, shimmering red glowglobes threw out a violent light. Around them a cluster of genesculpted whores in babydoll dresses stood submissively on surgically-inserted heels like exotic grazing animals.

  A maskless man stepped forward, flanked by two massive men and five obscenely dressed young women, their skin luminous.

  “Detective Hoskin,” said the man, involuntarily gritting his teeth, like he wore dentures two sizes too big. He had a fierce face, as if chiseled from stone, and a fat artificial nose. He wore a dark red Mandarin suit with white cuffs that hung open to show a storm of holographic dragons goring each other on his exposed stomach. Tattooed rattlesnake skin covered his neck and chest, the scales oil-on-water shiny. He had prosthetic hands that looked heavy as sledgehammers, the fingers caked in thick jewels that flickered like jumping flames in the light.

  Hoskin knew him. His profile flashed into Hoskin’s eye: Barrelhaus; friends called him Vaseline; half-Chinese, half-whatever, a mutt; brutal enforcer for the Mountain Snake Triad; rank 426, in line for Incense Master; notorious and ever-hungry pedophile. All of it unprovable, of course. Hoskin blinked the profile away.

  “How the little girls treatin' ya?” said Hoskin.

  “Tasty as always,” said Vaseline, and he bit the air. “Bring 'em up young is how I say. Keep 'em tender. Like those little lambs they never let stand up.”

  He scratched his neck violently.

  “You got big fuckin' problems other than your love of little girls, Vaso,” said Hoskin, smiling. “You got a body upstairs and a body all over the street. But here's the best part: the girl's underage. You know what that means? Means we're gonna tear this fuckin' place apart. We're gonna expose everything. We're gonna flip you over and shine a light up your ass just to make sure you ain't hidin' nothing.”

  “Go ahead, little piggy. I'll make sure I don't wipe,” said Vaseline, scratching his nose and forearms. Flakes of skin erupted like dirty snow and whirled around.

  “And I’m thinking you’re a part of this too,” said Hoskin. “Maybe you got in there, saw what happened, tried to cover it up? Maybe snatched the blackbox off the Senator? Or y
ou coulda set the whole thing up? Somebody wants the Senator out of the way and they call you?”

  “I got no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  One of the girls to the left of Vaseline looked scared. She stood gingerly, looking down at the floor, brushing back strawberry-blonde hair from pixie ears. The girl reminded him of someone, though he couldn’t think of who.

  "You all right, girl?" Hoskin said to her.

  She looked up, her Asiatic eyes wide. "Me?"

  "Yeah."

  She looked away again, quickly.

  "She's tip-top," said Vaseline.

  "I don't remember asking you a goddamn thing. I was askin' her. What’s your name?”

  “Sakura.”

  “You all right?"

  “I'm—I'm fine.” She didn't look up.

  “See? Just like I said. Couldn't be better,” said Vaseline, smiling.

  “You open your mouth again and you'll be picking your teeth outta your shit,” said Hoskin.

  “You don’t talk to me like that in my own place.”

  Vaseline lunged, a rhinoceros on fire. Hoskin’s nanonet systems flared red and he dogged a sledgehammer punch, nanonets assisting his muscles like computerized steering. Hoskin’s fists flashed with astonishing speed. A brutal right cross caught Vaseline in the soft tissue of his neck, the fist slipping slightly on the slick tattooed skin then digging in, the false middle knuckle cutting the flesh and releasing a surge of paralyzing chemicals that exploded through his blood stream and spread like a gasoline fire. Vaseline went rigid and the second cross dropped him. Hoskin leaped on him, a storm of spiders crawling from his suddenly stretched pores. The spiders expanded and bit into Vaseline’s hands, clamping them together. They chained together to form larger spiders. Hoskin’s pores snapped back to size.

  Vaseline’s bodyguards charged forward like prize fighters but Hoskin and Quinlin’s gun hands flashed up, glowing fiercely with barely restrained energy. The megaloids stepped back slowly.

  “Now you shouldn’t have gone and done that,” said Quinlin to Vaseline. “Assaulting an officer.”

  Lawyers in the shadows bounded up and held glowing holographs of already-prepared lawsuits. “You mean police brutality,” said the shortest one.

  “Never heard of it,” said Quinlin, with a grin.

  “I’ll add ‘em to my collection,” said Hoskin, waving the lawsuits into his memory stack.

  “Hey, I gotta itch real bad,” said Vaseline, unable to move.

  Hoskin waved and one of the mega-spiders split in two. One of them crawled up and clamped down on Vaseline’s mouth, “Hey, He—”

  “Next time try moisturizer,” said Quinlin.

  Hoskin stood up, dusting himself off. He took Sakura’s hand. It felt incredibly soft. She looked up at him with huge eyes.

  “You really all right? We can help you. If they did anything to you we’ll make ‘em pay. You just let me know,” said Hoskin.

  Invisible nanosnakes slithered from Hoskin’s pores and crawled into Sakura’s. In seconds he knew they’d swim through her blood rivers and display a message across her eyes that only she could see. He saw it startled her, but he smiled and she relaxed. His message packet said “Detective Dante Hoskin. Call me if you need anything. This number will reappear whenever you need it.” His private number glowed in soft blue beneath the floating words before fading slowly.

  “No, sir. They treat me fine,” she said, looking over her shoulder. “Thank you.”

  The Lesson

  2398 Orthodox Western Calendar

  5096 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Phoenix

  Edgelands Ghettos, Snowstorm Clan Roving Starship Settlement

  When he was only seven, Salaris Venadrik learned the most important lesson of his life as his mother screamed “what are you doing?” over and over again.

  Never tell the truth.

  Later on, countless circumstances would reinforce that lesson, but he first learned it that day when his mom screamed at him. Later, he knew that when he told the truth most people didn’t like him. They thought he was wicked or evil or stupid.

  That day, so many years back, he’d sat in the long uncut grass that ran along the side of his apartment cluster, cutting apart one of the squirrel-rat fusions that ruled the Edgelands Ghettos. It was a quiet spot, one only he knew about. At least he’d thought he was the only one.

  He liked to listen to the apartments dying, all of them wheezing and choking as their nervous systems shut down from lack of maintenance. It was a good place to get away from his father’s whippings and his mother’s “episodes.” His father had RDed from an overdose a year earlier so the whippings stopped. It wasn’t his real dad anyway, so he didn’t care. His mother didn’t believe in relifeing, so he Real Deathed. People died because God said they should, she said. That was God’s way, the natural way, the right way.

  Sometimes he played with his little Anima doll there. He called her Reese. She had big eyes filled with brilliant, swirling colors that shifted depending on the angle you saw them from. He’d found the doll in the alley. He loved her eyes and her soft purple hair and the way she moved. She cooed whenever he pet her hair. She said nice things to him. Sometimes when mommy yelled at him he would pet her hair for hours and it made him feel better. He hoped mommy wouldn’t ever find her and take her, so he kept her hidden in a tiny rip in the wall outside his house.

  But today he didn’t have the doll. Instead, he’d captured the little rodent, brought it to his secret spot and sliced it open from tail to neck using a small fission knife that he’d stolen from school. It lay there quivering, looking up at him, its eyes huge and round, staring at him in unbearable pain. He wished it would stop staring. He just wanted to see what it looked like inside, but it wouldn’t stop shaking. Just as he was about to slice into one of those hateful eyes, a shadow swept over him.

  “My God, what are you doing? What have you done, you sinful little monster?” his mother screamed.

  He turned and saw her.

  “I just wanted to see what it looked like, Momma.”

  She grabbed his arm and whipped him around. His knife almost cut her, could have cut her. Inside, he knew he wanted to cut her. He hated himself for thinking that. His stupid mind was always thinking stupid thoughts that wouldn’t go away. There were always these…ideas…that bubbled up from somewhere deep in his mind. His mom’s eyes blazed fiercely. He dropped his knife.

  “It’s not my fault, Momma. I just wanted to see what it looked like inside. I kept thinking it and thinking it and then I had to do it, so it would go away,” he said, not able to look her in the eyes.

  “You evil, evil little creature,” she screamed, her face hideous, vengeful, ugly. “Wicked, wicked, hateful monster.”

  She laid into him, beating him viciously. He dropped to the ground and rolled into a ball, but it didn’t help. She was kicking him and kicking him. He wanted to reach out and grab his knife and make her stop for good, but he didn’t. He held that thought in. Later he would get her. One night he would take every knife from the kitchen and put them all around her while she slept, points facing her, and then stand there waiting for her to wake up. But now he would just take it and be quiet.

  She was tearing at her hair now, ripping it out by the roots as she screamed and beat him, her eyes wild. Her bun had torn loose and her hair looked electrocuted. She stopped only to look for a stick.

  And in that moment, as he lay there, Venadrik learned that very important lesson: never, ever tell anyone the truth.

  What You’re Up Against

  2458 Orthodox Western Calendar

  5156 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Dragon

  The Farm, One Police Plaza, Snowstorm Clan Roving Starship Settlement

  After they’d booked Vaseline, Quinlin tried to dig up records on Senator Kimball Turnbull and Hoskin went over the evidence from the crime scene again. A lot was still problem
atic. They hadn’t found the blackbox on or near the dead girl. It wasn’t in the room with Turnbull or anywhere in the club. The forensic spiders would have found it. They’d scoured the whole place and a two block radius around it.

  “Did we find any augments?” said Hoskin.

  “Nope. Girl didn’t have any implants,” said Quinlin.

  “So that means somebody helped her,” said Hoskin.

  “Sure. Problem is it’s a whorehouse. How many people been in and out of that room?”

  Hoskin looked at the crime-scan report. Thousands of people’s DNA and atomic signatures were all over the room. Barrelhaus was there, but he was in a hundred other spots as well.

  “If someone took that box, it’s gone,” said Hoskin.

  Another possibility struck him suddenly. Maybe she’d dissolved it in the room? He flicked an automated scan at the evidence meta-stack, looking for chemicals that could have taken out a blackbox. The box was designed to survive almost anything. Preliminary results came back negative.

  He flashed Azusa Newtype, the Medical and Forensics Examiner. She appeared on his innervision. Azusa was a Ravenclaw, a bird-human hybrid Phyle. She had a thin neck and huge, lidless eyes.

  “Need you to run a deep scan. See if you can find any evidence of a destroyed blackbox,” flashed Hoskin.

  “Always at your service, sweetness,” she flashed and then vanished.

  The scans would take a while. Quinlin wasn’t making much progress on Senator Turnbull either. The Senator had a lot of friends who didn’t want it known that he’d been found in a whorehouse when he had three conservative-faction wives and six kids at home. He’d run on a platform of traditional values. Right now there was a media blackout about the death, somehow. Every time Quinlin tried to pull up a record, it was missing or they weren’t authorized. They stayed late but didn’t get any further.