The Scorpion Game

by Daniel Jeffries

  Quinlin showed up finally.

  “Hey,” he flashed from behind Hoskin.

  Hoskin turned and looked at him. He hadn’t shaved and his shirt was badly wrinkled. The guy hadn’t worn a wrinkled shirt in twenty years.

  “The fuck?” flashed Hoskin. “Where you been?”

  “Overslept.”

  Hoskin stared at him. “Really.”

  “Yeah really. Can we get to work?”

  “All right. We talk later.”

  “No problem.”

  Twenty minutes later, after Hoskin finished snapping shots and video of the scene the ID came back. Hoskin stopped cold.

  He flipped the image over to Quinlin.

  “Am I reading this right?”

  “Treasury Secretary Salazar?” flashed Quinlin.

  Quinlin looked worried. Hoskin didn’t remember ever seeing Quinlin look worried.

  “Now we know why the military’s here,” flashed Hoskin.

  Daniels was looking at him as if he knew something.

  “Do you know who this is?” said Hoskin, pointing at the faceless corpse.

  “Of course,” said Daniels.

  “Has it gotten out yet?” said Hoskin.

  “No. That’s why we were called in, because we can keep things like this under wraps. With your men here, it won’t be long before it’s everywhere and uncontrollable.”

  Hoskin said nothing. He knew Daniels was probably right. Information had a way of sneaking out of The Farm fast. Reporters paid officers for the information and they paid well.

  Hoskin flashed Quinlin. “Put out spiders. Salazar pops up on the news anywhere—”

  “Already done,” flashed Quinlin.

  An hour later the first ping came in. The first report on Secretary Salazar’s death was out on a major newsstream. In minutes a thousand other alerts exploded into Hoskin’s mind.

  Things Fall Apart

  Hoskin had finally gotten a little rest after passing out in his office. He’d need more to catch up, but for today he wasn’t feeling as run down and strung out.

  Since the early morning, reports had been flooding in from all over the city showing Sentinels dropping from the sky and patrolling city streets. It didn’t take long for another Multiface message to hit the newsstreams.

  “Watch how they’ll use this to control you even more,” said the inhuman voice over the stream of frenetic images. “There’s always an excuse for them to exert more and more power over your daily lives.”

  Quinlin and Hoskin watched the mediawall in Hoskin’s office with grim faces. Hoskin paced like a street-fighting dog in its cage. Quinlin just stood smoking rapidly from a long, freshly rolled cigarette.

  The stream cut to a Sentinel patrolling a New Diamond City street. Hoskin knew it: Westmoreland Ave, a bustling shopping district in the Edgelands ghettos. People kept their distance from the giant military insect, eying it warily. It stalked slowly, deliberately, menacingly, like a scorpion hunting.

  “And where do they deploy their machines? Where the rich live in heavily guarded towers of light? In the skies around the orbital mansions? Or is it only where the poor and weak live?”

  Images of Sentinels whipped across the screen and Hoskin saw what the killer wanted everyone to know: in every instance they patrolled the ghettos, the free zones, the slums.

  Hypnotic imagery interlaced the footage, slipstreamed in. Hoskin slowed the frames in his left eye even as his right eye watched in real time. The killer had interlaced historical footage of people rioting; police firing into a crowd; crowds marching and chanting; protestors beaten savagely; a woman bleeding out on the street, the pool of blood around her head an ever-enlarging halo. All of the images were cunningly woven into the news clips for fractions of a second, slipping into the unconscious minds of the viewers.

  Quin was dressed impeccably again and clean shaven. He’d admitted to Hoskin he’d gone out to a drug bar the night before and apologized for being late to the scene. “Won’t happen again,” he’d said.

  “Why cut in that old footage?” said Quinlin.

  “Show us what’s coming. Incite people.”

  “He wants people to riot?”

  “Looks like it. And he just might get it. People won’t take military patrols lying down.”

  The image fractured into twenty pieces, showing amateur streams of Sentinels all over the city.

  “They never miss a chance to take more and more from you. Will you let them?” said the metallic voice.

  “Stop. Enough,” said Hoskin.

  The stream froze on a little girl running, naked, surrounded by other screaming children, herded from their city by dark green Sentinels, a famous photo from a guerilla war in the old Jovian Concatenate border habs that had brought down a Colonel and an entire brigade. Hoskin wiped it away with a flick of his hand. The mediawall blanked out.

  “Ridiculous,” said Quinlin. “What the fuck were they thinkin?”

  “Show of force,” said Hoskin.

  “They won’t catch nobody this way. You can’t fight a guerilla war from the barracks. You gotta get out on the street, talk to people.”

  “They don’t care. The orbital families are scared. People do stupid things when they’re scared. Smart guy I know said that.”

  “Yeah, I’m brilliant like that. The media, the military, they’re all playing right into his hands. I don’t like where this is going. He’s getting people whipped up. We gotta do something.”

  “Only one thing we can do. Break this goddamned case.”

  “If the case is even ours anymore.”

  Neither man said anything for a few seconds.

  “So what now, king dog?” said Quinlin. “What do we do? I figure we got maybe a few days left to break this thing open.”

  “Not even. President’s about to make a statement in a few hours. After that I figure they hand this thing over completely to CII. At best they let us tag along and tell us to stay outta the way.”

  “Probably what the fuck Daniels wanted all along.”

  “Probably. That guy’s the least of my worries right now though. I’m gonna go down and see Azusa, see if she’s got anything new.”

  ***

  Hoskin found Azusa in her lab, her head cocked as she pored over some trace evidence on a Q-scanner, the beat up device’s black and yellow tubing worn and threadbare. A red and white streaked metaroach dashed between her feet and scurried for the wall as Hoskin got near, its feelers pulsing.

  “I think you got—” said Hoskin.

  “Don’t say it. That joke is so lame,” said another tech in the office. He had dark brown skin and a basic orthohuman body, skinny, with soft black hair and wiry beard.

  “And you are?” said Hoskin.

  Azusa looked up from her specimen, her lidless eyes big and wide, her head, as always, looking almost too big for her thin neck to handle.

  “It’s me, jackass,” said Azusa, at the same time as the male lab tech.

  Hoskin didn’t understand for a second and then he realized what was going on. “When’d you go Morph?”

  “A little while ago, I just didn’t bring any of them into the lab until I got the official paperwork that says they can be at the Farm,” said the male Azusa. “Been planning it for a while. Don’t let any of these shitheads here know though. You know how they’ll act. People don’t get Morphs yet. Better to let them think I just got some assistants.”

  “Yeah, sure. How’d you get the department to go along with it? They don’t look too kindly on non-mainstream Phyles, especially ones that get a lot of shit.”

  “And what’s non-mainstream? A hundred years ago, half the Phyles in here would be non-mainstream. Pisses me off. I don’t get it. As far as I’m concerned there are way more radical Phyles out there.”

  “Whaddya mean you don’t get it?” said Hoskin. “We used to discriminate ‘cause someone’s skin color was different or their eyes h
ad a bigger curve or because they were deformed. It’s a new Phyle and anything new is scary. And people think it’s an economic advantage. Doesn’t play well when everyone’s broke. How’d you get the department to okay it?”

  The female Azusa smiled. “I told them they’d have extra lab techs without having to pay any extra salary.”

  Hoskin smiled. “I’ll bet they couldn’t sign off fast enough after that.”

  “If there’s one thing those conservative bastards like even more then not making waves, it’s saving a credit. Look, I was about to ping you. Glad you came down.”

  “All right. Whadda ya got? Whadda ya know?”

  “Got a suicide from last night. Prostitute, not far from where the Salazar thing happened. Maybe fifteen blocks away.”

  “And you think it ain’t a suicide?”

  “Nope. Looks like a suicide all right. Girl popped a blast-pill and blew her head off. Found bits of it still in her stomach, undigested before the mites made their way to her blood brain barrier and exploded.”

  “You sure nobody forced it on her?”

  “Hard to tell. Doesn’t look like it because there are no indicators on her neck or face. People fight when you force something down their throats. I’m not seeing it, but can’t rule it out.”

  “So why tell me?”

  “’Cause it ain’t what she did, it’s what I found on her.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense, girl.”

  “She was at the Treasury Secretary scene. Got some of both vics on her, the girl’s blood and Salazar’s. Something else too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothin’ on her hands. No defensive or offensive wounds. Nothing under her nails. Look here,” she said and waved her hand.

  A holographic display burst into the air over her hand. It showed images of a headless body tiled out and tagged with meta-information. Hoskin could see that the blast had torn off most of her neck and chunks of her shoulder too. Azusa wiggled her finger and one of the smaller images enlarged and zoomed forward.

  “So what am I looking at?” he said.

  “You tell me. See anything strange?”

  Hoskin looked closely, but didn’t see what she meant yet.

  “I’ll make it easy on ya,” she said and circled her hand.

  The image zoomed in on the girl’s right hand and arm. Hoskin looked close. At first he didn’t see and then he did. The spray of blood on her arm stopped abruptly at straight line near her wrist.

  “She was wearing gloves,” said Hoskin.

  “Give the man a prize.”

  “Let me guess, no backups, no relife insurance?”

  “Two for two.”

  “Body in the morgue?”

  “Yup, already told ‘em you were coming.”

  He pinged Quinlin and told him to meet him in the basement.

  ***

  In The Farm’s basement, Hoskin blinked a series of commands at the green wall of suspension cocoons. A grinding, like a drawbridge lowering, and then the wall rolled to the right swiftly, so the girl’s coffin slot was right in front of them. Another command and the cocoon slid slowly from the wall and hung in the air about stomach high. The organic tube had a non-organic rectilinear stitching around it. Hoskin flashed it and it tore open along the lines of its stitching. Inside, the girl’s headless body floated on a web of light, so nothing could contaminate it. Soft blue preservative gas spilled from the coffin and cascaded to the floor like a ghostly waterfall. The smoke could keep the body from decaying for hundreds of years.

  Quinlin flashed the cocoon and the girl’s body rose on the bed of light. Her meta-info materialized above her on a holoscreen. Images of her from every angle tiled on the screen, along with vital stats, blood type, links to her genetic profile, her state vector and more.

  “When’d this girl die?” said Quinlin.

  “Few hours after the Salazar murder,” said Hoskin.

  “So what do we know?” said Quinlin. “We think she may be the killer because she was wearing gloves and had the vic’s blood on her? A woman killer? It’s rare. Only tend to be a few types of woman killer: impulsives, ragers or paranoids.”

  “You left one out: a follower. A soldier, someone in a cult, killing for her leader,” said Hoskin. “I don’t think she’s our killer. She’s a helper most likely.”

  “So what happened?”

  Hoskin thought about it for a moment.

  “Maybe she panicked and took off? The helpers probably don’t get the whole story. Maybe she came into the room when she wasn’t supposed to? Or maybe she just got scared when fantasy turned into reality. She realizes she made a mistake, starts running? The real killer tracks her down and she takes the pill ‘cause she’s cornered or maybe he forces it on her but maybe he runs out of time before someone calls the cops, has to take off and can’t finish cleaning up? That’s why the vic’s blood is still on her. He ran out of time. Or maybe he just couldn’t find her at all? She sneaks off and gets away. But she can’t take what she saw or did and she suicides.”

  Hoskin waved his hand and the body turned slowly in the air, as if on a spit. He gestured and the meta-info streamed by until he signaled it to stop. The screen displayed a graphic of her internal systems.

  “There,” said Hoskin.

  “What?”

  “No mods. This girl’s got no combat implants. She’s got a basic immune system upgrade, a liver bypass so she can’t get drunk, a low grade nanonet and some lung scrapers.”

  “So how’d she shred up that hooker that was with Salazar?”

  “Exactly. I don’t think she did.”

  Quinlin and Hoskin said nothing, thinking for a few minutes.

  “What if she took something that melted down any implants before she bit it?” said Hoskin.

  “Yeah it could be done. For sure.”

  “Would it leave a trace?”

  “Probably not. But maybe we get lucky? Maybe the program doesn’t run perfect, leaves something behind. We run a deep scan, we find out.”

  “Get it rolling,” said Hoskin. “She could be a killer or just someone who got in over her head, didn’t realize what was happening. Maybe our guy’s plan sounded good at first: Kill that rich bastard. But then she sees it play out and decides not to go along with the program. I mean the gloves aren’t a good sign, but who knows what they were up to in that fetish parlor? Gloves may be the least suspicious thing in a place like that. The blast-pill’s a bigger tip off. Let’s say he didn’t force it on her. That means she took it. But it’s not easy to get that pill. You could make it. Get some mites, gorge ‘em on modded fertilizer, hack their nervous systems, but what hooker’s gonna know how to do that?

  “Even if she looked it up, not easy to pull off,” said Quinlin. “Takes time and initiative.”

  “Right. Which means someone gave it to her or sold it to her.”

  “So where’s this get us?”

  “Not sure yet,” said Hoskin. “If this girl had no implants and she was a vic, then she should have defensive or offensive wounds somewhere on her body, which her meta says nothing about. And if Azusa didn’t find it, it doesn’t exist. Girl’s thorough. You do not tear someone up the way that hooker was torn up without augments and not get so much as a cut yourself. And if she did have augs, they’re gone.”

  “Even if the disassembler script was good, it might have left something.”

  “We’ll find out.”

  ***

  “Don’t know what to do? Go back to the beginning,” said Hoskin to himself.

  With Quinlin running scans on their suicide vic, Hoskin huddled back up in his office. Not knowing where to go next, he decided to go with an old detective’s maxim and start over, look at everything again, throw out everything he knew or assumed, look at it all with fresh eyes.

  A storm of information sprawled across his mediawall. He could see it better that way, get some distance between himse
lf and the case and his thoughts. He cleared his innervision of everything, all HUDs, even the date stamp in the lower corner of his left eye. He flicked up his personal firewall and cut off any inbound connections, except if they came from Quinlin. He didn’t want anything between his eyes and raw data. No filters.

  Unlike in flicks or sims, real detective work got done in inches. Look at the same shit again and again and hope to find something that wasn’t there before or something missed.

  Hoskin started with a timeline of the case. It blazed across the top of the mediawall, the date stamps tagged with tangent lines that ran off to now hidden clusters of images and videos and reports. If he touched any of the glowing lines it would pull up the relevant cluster, but Hoskin wanted to start with the overall timeline, the big picture.

  It started with Mariliece, the Flower Smoke Girl with the nasty sex mods, and Senator Turnbull in the nightclub. He blinked and the timeline scrolled. His meeting with Sakura came next.

  Sakura. He realized he hadn’t pulled up her trace yet. He blinked up a link to the mites he’d tagged her with. A beautifully detailed street view map filled the mediawall. A dot blinked in the dead center of it. Sometimes it took a second to lock on to its target. He waited. It stayed in the center. Blinking. Blinking.

  What the—? I drenched her with that stuff.

  He tried to call up an active link to the mites now, to see if it could pull up her vital stats. Nothing. Connection time out. All the graphs and charts were blank, waiting for mites that would never fill them.

  There was no question now: the girl was linked to something, something that could wipe out an entire battalion of police grade nano. Whether it was related to the killer or not, he didn’t know. Hookers all had something to hide.

  He called up a link to his Apartment Personality.

  “How many mites we hit that girl with?” flashed Hoskin.

  “1.63 mil.”

  “Mil? Well, I’m getting a sig off none of ‘em.”

  “None of ‘em?”

  “That’s right, none.”