by Eric Brown
He took Elly’s hand and pulled her to her feet. “It’s okay, Elly. You’re safe now—”
Something in her wide-eyed expression of surprise alerted him. Vaughan tried to turn, to follow the direction of her gaze, but the neural incapacitator hit him before he caught sight of his assailant. He arched as voltage stabbed him in the back and coursed through his body. In the fraction of a second before he lost consciousness, he scanned but read nothing.
He seemed to come to his senses almost immediately, but even as he struggled to his feet, his body protesting with spasms of pain, he knew that minutes had elapsed.
Elly Jenson was no longer in the unit.
He staggered to the entrance of the chamber and sent out a probe. There was no sign of the girl’s harried cerebral signature—but he did pick up, approaching him at speed, the minds of the Sikh security guards. Whoever had attacked him—Freidrickson?—had alerted them to his presence.
He ran down the corridor in the opposite direction. The guards were ascending in the main elevator. He made his way to the auxiliary shaft at the back of the ship, his muscles jarring with every step.
He read the guards as they emerged from the elevator and ran along the corridor to the chamber he’d just left. He slammed a palm against the lift sensor, willing the doors to open. He scanned the guards. They were in the bedchamber, searching for him, their minds loud with anger. Three seconds was all it took for them to ascertain that he was no longer there. They exited and split up to search the ship. One headed away from Vaughan; the other ran down the corridor towards him.
He prepared himself for a fight, knew the futility of the idea. The Sikh was a matter of metres away, about to turn the corner and discover him, when the elevator doors sighed open. He dived inside, thumbed the sensor panel. The doors whirred shut and the lift carried him down into the belly of the ship.
A minute later he dropped through the emergency hatch into the hot night. He climbed from the berth, made sure his way was clear, and jogged from the shadow of the Vegan freighter. He scanned the deck for Elly Jenson in vain. Beyond the terminal building, fliers took off and banked into the red and blue air-corridors above the Station. He realised, with a sudden, plummeting despair, that the girl and her captor might be aboard any one of them.
He slipped the augmentation-pin from his skull console. If taken beyond the boundaries of the spaceport, the pin activated an alarm back at stores, detailing the device’s precise position: augmentation-pins were valuable commodities, dangerous in the hands of the wrong people. He would have to waste precious seconds and return it to stores: the last thing he wanted was for Weiss’s henchmen to find him now.
He was running across the deck when his handset chimed. Vaughan took the call.
Jimmy Chandra stared up at him. “Jeff. Can you get over here?”
“Sure. I need to see you, too. I found something aboard the ship.”
Jimmy looked grim-faced. “Later.”
“What’s wrong?”
The cop shook his head. “Not now. I’ll tell you when you get here, okay?”
Vaughan handed his pin to the clerk in stores and hurried to the flier rank.
* * * *
EIGHT
THE ADORATION OF THE CHOSEN ONE
The Law Enforcement Headquarters was a centrally located ziggurat of stressed polycarbon rising high above the surrounding buildings like a Teflon-coated Aztec temple. As the taxi-flier banked towards the third-level landing strip, Vaughan gazed out at the long windows that fronted the offices, interrogation rooms, and corridors, illuminated with a soft green light like so many tropical aquaria.
The flier landed on the broad margin of the step before the entrance. Vaughan paid the driver and climbed out. A young Indian officer was awaiting him. “Mr. Vaughan? Investigator Chandra is expecting you. This way, please.”
Vaughan followed the officer into the building. Despite its sumptuous exterior appearance, the headquarters was a warren of shabby corridors and cramped offices. Low lighting failed to conceal the scuffed floor-tiling and mildew-patched walls. Khaki-clad officers hurried back and forth like the soldiers of an army beset on every side by an invisible foe. Even unaugmented, Vaughan caught the mental miasma of a tense and harried workforce.
He came to an open area of desks loaded with computer terminals. The operations room was filled with the aroma of strong coffee and a head-height layer of floating cigarette smoke like captured cirrus. Across the room, Vaughan made out Jimmy Chandra, talking to a uniformed woman. Chandra saw him, dismissed the woman, and threaded his way through the desks.
“What’s happening?” Vaughan asked.
“What isn’t happening? It’s just another busy night at HQ. The usual murders, robberies, drug busts...”
“You didn’t call me in to tell me about your workload.”
“No, of course not. Come with me.”
They left the operations room and walked down an ill-lit corridor stinking of stale sweat. The walls were lined with benches, and dozens of weary men and women, Indians and Thais, either stared into space or tried to sleep.
Vaughan looked at Chandra. “Petty criminals waiting to be processed,” the cop explained.
They turned down an empty corridor. “As I said earlier, I took Weiss in for questioning. Routine stuff. I told him I was running tests on his flying licence. He demanded a solicitor—an unusual request for a minor misdemeanour.”
“And?”
Chandra paused. “Well, he must have guessed I was on to something.”
They came to the green door of an interrogation room. Chandra leaned through, exchanged a few words with someone inside. Through the gap, Vaughan could see two men and a woman busy attending to someone seated in a black leather swivel-chair. That someone had his head tilted back, staring at the ceiling with unseeing eyes.
Vaughan was aware of Chandra’s mind beside him, and those of the officers within the room. But the seated, silver-haired figure no longer emanated the mind-noise of the living, and the silence was shocking.
He stared into the room at the familiar, overweight form of Gerhard Weiss, deceased.
“What happened, Jimmy?”
“I left the room for a coffee. There was an officer in attendance. Weiss asked if he could smoke one of his own cigarettes, and reached into the inside pocket of his jacket. He came out with a device and clamped it to his neck, here.” Chandra slapped his hand over his carotid artery. “He was dead within seconds. Forensic are trying to find out what it was.”
“He knew you were on to him,” Vaughan said. “He didn’t want you discovering his true identity or what he was up to at the ‘port.”
“You found something in the ship?”
“Yeah, I found something.”
Chandra’s next question was interrupted by the forensic team as they left the room. “He’s all yours,” the woman said. “We’ll be back with the test results as soon as they’re through.”
Chandra gestured Vaughan through the door. They passed into the tiny room, empty but for two chairs, a desk, and the corpse.
Weiss had been a big, florid-faced man in his fifties, and his face was even more florid now. Veins had broken under the surface of his skin, suffusing his flesh with the mottled crimson blush of a blood orange. His nose had bled in the seconds before his death, the stream of blood dividing at his thick top lip and spreading around his mouth like a macabre, cosmetic moustache.
Vaughan glanced at Chandra. “Do you ever use a mind-shield?”
Chandra nodded. “When questioning suspects, of course.”
“But you don’t have one for personal use?”
Chandra shook his head. Vaughan reached into the inside pocket of Weiss’s jacket, but the pocket was empty. He tried the breast pocket and found what he was looking for. He produced a flattened, silver oval and held it out to Chandra on his palm.
“It’s yours.”
Chandra looked wary. “I’m not sure if I should.”
; “Take the damned thing, Jimmy. It’ll come in useful. He’ll hardly miss it.”
“Don’t you need one?”
Vaughan shook his head. “I’m fitted with a shield built into my console. I can’t be read.”
Chandra still seemed reluctant.
“Take it, for Chrissake,” Vaughan said. “Look, this bastard was up to something on a big scale, and he wasn’t alone. I want you to wear this thing all the time, understood? You’ll be investigating him and you’ll no doubt run into his partners. If they have a telepath working for them, then I don’t want him reading what you know. Okay?”
Chandra took the shield and slipped it into his pocket. Instantly his insistent, low-level thoughts ceased. “So... what did you find aboard the ship?” the cop asked.
Vaughan described the container he’d discovered in the hold.
“It was definitely shielded?”
“I know when I’m scanning a shield.”
“But why would Weiss have shielded people brought to Earth like that?”
“He wouldn’t. Illegal immigrants would just walk off the ship. I was supposed to be out of the way, remember?”
Chandra stared at the dead man in the chair. “So... what was he transporting?”
“I don’t know, maybe animals, a species banned on Earth.”
Chandra gave him a dubious look.
Vaughan hesitated. “There was something else. I don’t know if it’s connected. When I was aboard the ship I found a young girl. She’d been given away by her father on Verkerk’s World, taken and brought to Earth by someone called Freidrickson.”
“Where is she now?”
“I wish I knew.” He told Chandra about the attack.
“I’ll get a team over to the ‘port immediately, see what we can find. Can you give me the details of the ship?”
A minute later Chandra was talking to a dispatch team on his handset. He cut the connection and nodded to Vaughan. “They’re on their way.”
“What now?”
“How about a ride over to Weiss’s villa? He had a wife and kid. Someone has to break the news. I’d like to question her while I’m at it.”
They took a lift to the police flier compound and requisitioned a vehicle. As Chandra engaged vertical thrust and they rose high above the ziggurat, Vaughan watched the streets recede beneath him, losing definition and becoming no more than vectors of blurred illumination in the darkness. The hum of mental activity fell away too, so that soon Vaughan enjoyed the rare luxury of being alone with his own thoughts.
They banked and joined a crimson air corridor, heading south towards the conurbation of exclusive residences reserved for politicians and the higher administrators of the Station.
The Weiss villa occupied a prime lot in New Mumbai, on the very edge of the upper-deck. A split-level ranch-style dwelling, it overlooked a sloping lawn and the ocean beyond. Spotlights illuminated the villa front and back, but there was no sign of lights from within the residence. Chandra brought the flier down on the lawn with a roar of thrusters loud enough to wake the neighbourhood. They climbed out and walked up the lawn towards the villa.
Chandra pressed a chime panel and stood back, admiring the sloping glass and carbon fa ç ade. Vaughan sensed spheres of mind-noise in the neighbouring villas, but none from this building.
“No one home, Jimmy.”
“No? That’s odd. Weiss asked to phone and tell his wife that he’d be late back.”
Chandra took a card from his belt, ran it through the door lock. The door swung open and they stepped inside and moved through the open-plan house. Lights came on automatically as if the pair were being ushered through the rooms by a ghostly guide. Vaughan gazed about him, amazed by an Aladdin’s cave of rich carpets, furnishings, works of art: free-standing sculptures occupied strategic positions throughout the ground-floor, and paintings—both old oils and more modern plasma graphics—decorated the walls.
“Genevieve Weiss is an artist,” Chandra told him. “She specialises in com-gen ‘painting’, according to the files I accessed earlier. Apparently she’s very highly regarded. Her pieces fetch millions on the interplanetary market.”
The two men walked from room to room like children in wonderland. Vaughan had never experienced such space between four walls since arriving on the Station. He whistled. “You could get agoraphobia just walking to the john.”
He detoured down a short, carpeted corridor, came to what was obviously a child’s bedroom: a shadowy platoon of teddy bears and clowns lined the far wall. As Vaughan strayed across the threshold, the sensors activated a soft bedside, light.
On the bed a single sheet outlined the form of a child, blonde hair showing on the pillow.
“Jimmy,” he called. “Here.”
Chandra appeared down the corridor. He peered past Vaughan at the child. “I thought you said there was no one home?”
Vaughan nodded. “There isn’t.”
Chandra looked at him. “Shielded?”
Vaughan shook his head.
He crossed to the bed and pulled back the sheet to reveal the little boy’s face, still and pale. He felt for a pulse at wrist and throat, found none. “He’s been dead for a couple of hours.”
Chandra unfastened the boy’s pyjamas, checked the thin torso. He found the puncture marks on the inside of the arm. “Hypo-ject. I think you’ll find that whatever killed him was administered through the vein.”
The two men exchanged a glance and hurried from the room.
They found Genevieve Weiss sprawled on a Chesterfield in the lounge, her scarlet gown flowing to the floor as if arranged for maximum aesthetic impact. Her head was thrown back over the arm of the Chesterfield, long black hair hanging in a sheer fall. Her throat, a beautiful exposed arch of cream flesh, was marred by the ugly bruise of a hypo-ject entry point. The gun had fallen from her limp fingers and skittered across the chessboard tiles.
“You said that Weiss called his wife?” Vaughan said.
Chandra nodded. “Around three hours ago.”
“Did you hear what he said?”
“Of course, I was in the same room.” Chandra shrugged. “He told her he’d been delayed and wouldn’t be home till dawn.”
Vaughan thought about it. “It might have been a prearranged signal, warning Genevieve that he’d been rumbled.”
“Maybe.” Chandra shrugged. “But why? Why would she kill her son and take her own life, just because her husband’s fake identity is about to be discovered?”
Vaughan regarded the dead woman, thinking of the cold oblivion that had taken Genevieve Weiss. Some intimation of that oblivion, recalled from all those years ago, sent a shiver through him.
Chandra glanced at him. “She’s in a better place now,” he murmured. “They both are.”
Vaughan turned a withering look on the cop. “Are you quite sure about that, Jimmy? Are you sure they’re not both stone cold dead and gone?”
Chandra opened his mouth to reply, then thought better of it. He turned his back on Vaughan and spoke into his handset.
Vaughan moved across the room, pausing before an archway leading to an unlit room. He passed into the room, and the concealed lighting obligingly illuminated Genevieve Weiss’s studio. Compared to the rest of the house, this room was spartan: a big com array stood on a desk in the centre of a polished parquet floor and a dozen plasma graphics adorned the walls.
Vaughan crossed to the computer and seated himself before the screen. He activated the machine, accessed files, and for the next ten minutes scrolled through the portfolio of Genevieve Weiss’s collected work.
He spent a second or two with each graphic, not sure what he was looking for—some clue, some visual link to anything that had gone before.
He was almost ready to give up when he struck gold.
The girl stared out of the screen, the expression on her beautiful face caught between ecstasy and agony. She seemed to be floating, bare feet trailing, arms outstretched in the approximation of
a crucifix.
Vaughan stared at her face. He commanded the computer to create a print of the graphic.
Chandra appeared beneath the arch. “I’ve just spoken to the head of the dispatch team at the ‘port. They’ve been through the ship from top to bottom.”
“And?”
“It’s empty. Apparently an outside team of hauliers came for the container an hour ago. The security guards had voice-code authority from Weiss himself, so they let the hauliers through.”
“I’ll scan the guards when I get to the ‘port,” Vaughan said, “read the hauliers’ faces. I might come up with something.”