Chances were good that Commissioner Dawn was already going to have my hide for pulling the raw data on the backscatter images at Challenger to do just that. Sure, “hung for a sheep as hung for a lamb,” as the old adage puts it, but it was also a matter of sheer volume. About ten times as many people go through the Earth-Midway passage each day than go between Midway and the Challenger Planetoid. Even if I put my PAD to hunting through the images, it would take hours, maybe even days, to go through them all. Coleman and Hodgkins would almost certainly have adapted new electronic identities at Midway, and likely would be back on Earth before I found them.
Worse still, a lot of the traffic between Earth and Midway consisted of VIP risties—broadcast network executives and corporate CEOs visiting the geosynch businesses—and it really didn’t pay to irritate that lot. With enough money, they could purchase software secretaries that would alert them if someone pried into their records, especially the stuff recorded by the backscatter units.
I could just imagine Dawn’s reaction if the CEO of NBN found out the NAPD had been peeking at those files. Not good.
So all I could really do was alert Midway Security.
And then I went shopping.
I didn’t know whether the bug Jones had planted on me was on the surface of the jacket, or if it had been the sort that could burrow through the jacket and take up residence inside the weave of my shirt. Either was possible; what was not possible was simply washing the garments to get the bug out. Those things are designed to work themselves into the fabric itself, anchor themselves with tiny wires, and not let go.
There was also the matter of the bug being evidence.
So I donned both shirt and jacket and limped down to the circle of shops and stores off the Nearside arrival concourse. Black shirt, white jacket, and a new pair of white slacks as well, since the ones I was wearing were partially melted below and behind the left knee where I’d been brushed by that near-miss laser shot, the hole exposing a nasty blister as big around as the palm of my hand.
I slipped on the new clothing and pulled the wear-tabs, the smart fabric adjusting itself to my size and shape and smoothing out the wrinkles. The old clothing went into separate plastic evidence bags for shipment back to the NAPD. The techies Earthside would be able to find exactly where the nearly invisible bug was and remove it for analysis. The bad guys would know I was on to them, of course, but that no longer mattered.
And I wouldn’t be able to set another trap for them again, not like that. I’d need to think of something else.
I also stopped at a pharmacy and picked up some analgesic nanomed. My leg was hurting badly, but I didn’t have the time to run over to the Carousel medical center and have it treated. The analgesic nanobots, sprinkled across the burn with a talcum-fine bandage powder, would burrow in and switch off individual nerve endings, turning the burned area numb and reducing the inflammation. It would do until I could see a med tech.
Those chores taken care of, I checked out of the hotel and caught the next Beanpod down to Midway.
Commissioner Dawn called me on my vid on the way and gave me a royal chewing-out.
“What the hell were you thinking?” she demanded. I’d sent her an update on my investigation before leaving the hotel, and she’d seen it as soon as she’d come in to work that morning. “Why the hell didn’t you have backup?”
“Because getting backup would have alerted the perps,” I told her.
“I’ve already got complaints from Guerrero about your heavy-handed efforts up there. He says you shut down the Challenger Ferry, and he says it wasn’t necessary.”
“Guilty on both counts,” I admitted. “I didn’t stop to think that they might have doubled back without going to Farside. I was guessing the whole way. My guesses weren’t good enough.”
“So you’re descending now?”
“That’s right. I’ll be at Midway in another half hour.”
“And what happens there?”
“I don’t know if Coleman and Hodgkins stopped at Midway, or went on through. They could have caught another pod for Earth within a few minutes. I’ve already checked security records at Midway, though, and I don’t see any sign that they reboarded a new pod. I think they must still be there.”
“You’ve alerted SEA Security there.” It wasn’t a question. She’d been checking up on me from her desk.
“I have. And they have computer images of both of them. I’m hoping to pick them up at Security when they try to get on another beanpod.”
“Okay. Just try not to tick off any more of the security people up there. I remind you that we need them. The Force doesn’t have so many officers on the payroll that we can afford to make enemies, okay?”
“Yes, Mother. I’ll be good. Promise.”
And my beanpod continued its descent.
We were well into the deceleration phase of the trip. An electronic poll of the ten passengers in my pod had turned up no dissenting votes, so the floor of the beanpod now displayed the Earth spread out beneath our feet, spanning a bit less than twenty degrees and slowly growing.
I’d not been convinced that Eve and Henry were the murderers.
Now, I wasn’t convinced that Coleman and Hodgkins were the sole murderers.
First off, the psychology was wrong. Thea Coleman was a vicious, murderous malparida, and I could see her gleefully executing a plan to cause widespread anti-android riots…but had she planned it in the first place? I doubted that.
Her “Mr. Fix It” was even less likely. Coleman was smart; Hodgkins struck me as just about bright enough to walk and shoot at the same time.
No, there was someone else behind those two. Someone higher up the figurative beanstalk.
And there were players in the hunt that I’d glimpsed, but not yet flushed into the open. John Jones, with his bug. Mr. Green. The deceased Robert Vargas—though he might well have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The short, shaggy-haired man carrying the suitcase out of the High Frontier. Their presence suggested a larger and well-established conspiracy, one involving at least several other people.
Who might be in on it, at a planning level? Coleman’s boss, Thomas Vaughn, was a possibility for a start. Behind him, in the shadows, was Cheong Li Hua and the 14K triad.
This didn’t feel like a triad operation, though. Historically, the triads had preyed on Chinese populations worldwide—extortion, blackmail, money laundering, drugs, prostitution. They’d extended their range, somewhat, when they formed a loose working alliance with the Italian, American, and Russian mafias, but their operations still rarely rose above the level of simple thuggery.
Okay, Harrison. Think. Who would stand to benefit from widespread riots involving the deaths of hundreds of clones, the destruction of hundreds of bioroids, and the end of androids in the work force?
The ACM—the Anti-Clone Movement—was an obvious group-suspect. And Human First. Both of them were outgrowths of Humanity Labor.
And Humanity Labor was dirty.
The old labor unions had always walked a narrow and unsteady line between radical politics and corruption. Born in the same era as workers’ risings and communism, they’d fought against some of the more crippling excesses of capitalism, but at the same time they’d been vulnerable to wholesale takeovers by organized crime.
In 1933, upon his rise to power, Adolf Hitler had created the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, or German Labor Front, a monolithic organization that had all but replaced the older, diverse labor unions in the country, and which, like everything else, was controlled by the state. Under the new regime, workers had been better paid and had enjoyed better working conditions, but they’d not been allowed to strike, either.
Humanity Labor was a similar monolith, a titanic organization theoretically devoted to serving the interests of all workers—but which also guaranteed no workers’ revolts, no strikes, and plenty of government-mandated regulations to keep the workers in line. Attacking clones and bioroids in the work force�
�politically and literally—was a large and somewhat hidden component of their campaign to look after the interests of ordinary working humans—save jobs for human workers! Preserve human dignity! Employment for humans first!
The issue provided a clear win-win for Humanity Labor. By hiding Human First and the ACM within their ranks, Humanity Labor could position itself as fighting for the interests of workers, while eliminating androids from the competition for jobs, which made sure more human workers were employed—and able to pay Humanity Labor their monthly dues.
In the detective game, we always operate under one simple rule: if you want to know who done it, follow the money. Who stands to make a profit?
Unfortunately, and as always, the problem wasn’t that simple. As with the old German DAF, the US federal government was part of the issue, though you certainly couldn’t claim that Humanity Labor was a state-run operation. The manufacture of both clones and bioroids was big business, very big business, and those companies paid billions in taxes each year. Eliminate those businesses, and Uncle Sam took a major hit on income.
From that perspective, the situation wasn’t so much like Nazi Germany in the 1930s as it was like the United States in the early 2000s. Illegal immigration had become a crippling handicap for many states, yet the federal government had actually sued states that were trying to enforce immigration laws already on the federal books—primarily, at least according to the history downloads, to allow American businesses to maintain sources of cheap labor.
Androids. Clones and bioroids. The ultimate in cheap labor.
I had no idea what the Feds were thinking about the pro-android corporate confrontation with the labor force, but suspected that it was, as usual, divided and corrupt. Both sides were in there buying senators and representatives as quickly as they could, and the outcome might well devolve into who had the bigger political budget—Humanity Labor, or the big corporations like Haas-Bioroid, Jinteki, and Melange Mining. If it came down to that…well, no contest. The simulants were here to stay. Humanity Labor didn’t stand a chance in the long run.
Another tick in favor of Humanity Labor as conspiracy mastermind of this particular setup: their belief that if you can’t out-spend the other side, maybe you can out-sneak them. Enter Human First. Stir up enough popular unrest, and the government has to step in solidly on the anti-android side.
Now I thought I was pretty sure who was behind the plot.
The question was what I could do about it. Humanity Labor was big, and whoever had thought this one up would have placed several levels of cut-outs, blind alleys, and dupes between the soldiers like Coleman and Hodgkins, and the generals. Making anything stick was going to be damned tough—about like trying to use frictionless buckyfilm as glue.
I also knew that getting the NAPD to pursue those generals would be an uphill battle. The police force tries to maintain good relations with Humanity Labor without being owned by it—a constant political juggling act. Humanity Labor, as I said, is dirty, with numerous links to both corrupt government agencies and the tri-mafs. They had the money to bring a lot of political leverage to bear against anyone set on investigating them too closely.
It was more than just possible that the best I’d be able to do would be to get Coleman and her bodyguard brought to justice…while getting Eve and Henry off the hook.
I used my PAD to look up Thomas Vaughn.
His Netpedia entry was pure frag—a prettily written propaganda piece no doubt uploaded by Humanity Labor’s lawyers: happily married, with 2.1 kids, three-quarters of a billion in the bank, and a palatial estate high up on the western flanks of the Andes, above La Maná. He was currently on the short list for consideration for a cabinet post with the federal government—Secretary of Space Commerce.
That led me into some more Net-crawling. The current Secretary of Space Commerce was Karen Marie Bucholt. She was 105 and considering retirement. Several names had been floated so far as possible replacements, including Vaughn…and Dow.
Very interesting.
But still nothing definitive, nothing I could sink my teeth into.
I went up a level and looked at Vaughn’s boss—Geraldo Ramon Cevallos Martín, Chairman of the Board for Humanity Labor, and the temporary Chief of Security.
I found his full name and titles listed in an electronic brochure promoting Humanity Labor. Martín didn’t even have a Netpedia bio entry, which said something about how much money and power he had. I extended my search, looking for recent mentions of the guy in the news.
Nothing.
A man who doesn’t publicly exist either really values his privacy, or he has a lot to hide—quite probably both.
I set up a Net secretary to go out and retrieve news articles on Martín, then turned my attention back to Vaughn. There was a lot more on him, including news articles about investigations into alleged corruption, bribery, and payoffs from 14K—none proven, none even going to trial. At least two New Angeles district attorneys over the past ten years had built cases, then dropped them, and in both instances, the DAs had retired from public service after becoming quite wealthy. Vaughn himself was obscenely wealthy. I couldn’t find anything leading me to suspect that he personally would profit from an end to clones and bioroids, but he had linked the success of Humanity Labor to the elimination of simulated humans from the work force. Maybe he was just doing it for the company. Or maybe he wasn’t just a leader for Humanity Labor, but also worked for its darker side—Human First.
Midway appeared smack in the center of the two-thirds-full disk of the Earth gleaming in quiet beauty on the deck, a tiny, glittering jewel slowly growing brighter and larger as we continued our descent. I patched a vid call through to Lily, letting her know I was arriving, then sat back to watch the approach. Acceleration lessened, and the feeling of weight dropped away. We were barely moving as we slid down the superconducting cable through an open hatch and snugged down into the receiving bay for arrivals from up-Stalk.
Lily was waiting for me as an attendant hauled me out of the boarding tube and into the arrivals concourse, her magnificent cascade of red hair wound tightly up and secured against the prevailing zero-G. “Welcome down,” she said, and she opened her arms as I floated into them. We caught, clung, and held for a moment, partly entangled with a safety line, until an attendant cleared his throat and asked us to move along. We were blocking the flight path.
I wasn’t sure what it was, but there something was wrong. “Are you okay?” I asked.
She nodded. “Fine. You find any trace of them yet?”
“Not yet. They may have changed e-IDs again, though. I saw that Wiggins and Callahan debarked from the 0700 beanpod, but nobody with those names boarded the next down-Stalk pod.”
“That would have been at 0830,” she said.
“Right.” I checked the time on the back of my hand. It was now 1034, and the next down-Stalk pod was due to leave at noon. “We have time to get something to eat,” I said. “Can we? I was up early and haven’t had breakfast yet.”
“Sure,” she said. “Let’s do the Freefall. It’s close to the down-Stalk terminal.”
The Freefall is a microgravity restaurant for travelers in transit. The Sheer Heaven has better food and the ambiance of spin-gravity, but it’s located in a separate Midway structure, a rotating cylinder parked close to the main Beanstalk platform and accessed by space taxis—twelve-person ferries. It would have taken a bit too much time to make the transit and still have time to eat.
But the Freefall was okay. You slip your feet into grip-holds on the deck instead of sitting in chairs, which are superfluous in zero-G. There’s a small, round table between you with a gripper surface that holds your food—a plastic-covered tray with separate food wells and built-in straws. You can order just about anything you like so long as it’s pureed. Sucking down mouthfuls of hot, semi-liquid gog and steamed tofuto slush can take some getting used to, but the coffee, at least, was hot.
Absolutely the best part of breakf
ast at the Freefall, though, is the view.
One entire wall of the eating area is transplas. The environmental controls darken the transparency when the sun is shining directly in, but for at least half of each day the sun is behind you and the transplas is clear.
Earth was there in the middle of everything, of course, spanning twenty degrees and wrapped in gleaming, dazzling swaths and stipples and arcs and ragged tatters of cloud, but you could also see the Beanstalk’s shaft going out from one side and dwindling…dwindling…dwindling to a vanishing point in north-central Ecuador. Other Midway orbital structures were visible, as well: the rotating cylinder, a tin can a hundred meters across, that held the Sheer Heaven restaurant and a number of other businesses and facilities that required simulated gravity. The local Honeymoon Hilton was also visible, free-floating a kilometer clear of the Midway main platform, offering zero-gravity for would-be sexual athletes. Even further off in the distance was one of the orbital manufactories—I couldn’t tell which one—doing its bit to get heavy industry off the Earth’s surface and out into space where it belonged.
In the middle distance was a warship.
It was hard to tell from that distance, but I thought she was the Nassau—a troopship carrying a few hundred space-ready Marines. What was she doing here? For that matter, there’d been that kid, Kaminsky, on his way up to Heinlein Station. Were the Feds beefing up their military presence out here?
Why?
Something to think about, in light of some of what I’d recently learned.
You could also see other parts of the Midway platform itself, the facility that actually anchored the Beanstalk above and below. Besides the two cavernous Beanstalk terminals and the restaurant, there were shops offering a bewildering array of goodies from both Earth and Heinlein, as well as the corporate offices of companies doing business in orbit: space construction, microgravity chemistry, and robotics businesses, mostly.
And there was also, of course, NBN.
I think something like half of the Midway platform’s volume is taken up by the Net Broadcast Network and its various subsidiaries—newsrags like the Sol and the New Angelino, and the higher-tone NewsDirect. The complex is huge, though from our vantage point in the Freefall, you could only see some of the massed antenna array, off to the extreme right.
Android: Free Fall Page 24