The Ultra Thin Man

by Patrick Swenson

She pitched over the side and, unbelievably, the marble cam followed her. It was like some sort of virtual thrill ride. I dropped to my knees to steady myself, watching the unusual angle, my point of view following Dorie Senall as she fell one hundred floors. She had her blaster going, carving veins down the face of the Tempest Tower.

  There was a moment when the pavement rose up to meet her, when it rushed into my own eyes, that I expected the marble camera to follow her the whole way, smashing itself onto the street, but it stopped several floors up and gave me a sickening view of Dorie Senall exploding on the sidewalk.

  Two

  Alan Brindos arrived on the largest of all the Union worlds, Ribon, in the city of Venasaille, two days after Dorie Senall’s death. The Network Intelligence Office superseded local authority whenever the Movement was involved, and seeing as Dave Crowell was the head of the Movement commission, Brindos had been sent to pull rank and get more information.

  Brindos was on Ribon less than a day when things started to go to hell. The ride through the jump slot had been bad enough—Dave knew he hated spaceflight and field work both—but having to deal with the Venasaille police was worse, and what followed that was … well, beyond description.

  Brindos missed the old days, when he and Dave Crowell worked on their own, solving the big cases. Okay, none of them had ever been that big. Well, except the Baron Reiser gig. The data forger had taken them on a wild chase around the Union until he disappeared from sight. Brindos, who had no family, liked the close relationship he had with Crowell, and this Movement contract kept them farther apart than he liked. Brindos had been a foster kid all his life, and he’d had quite enough of that not-knowing-where-he-was-going-to-be-next kind of thing.

  Although Captain Sydney Rand of the Venasaille police department logged an official protest to the NIO office upon his arrival, as soon as he finished watching the holo-vid of Dorie’s death, Brindos ordered an immediate neuro-chemical autopsy of her remains. Rand called in the coroner, pulling him away from dinner with his family, and he locked him in the morgue when he arrived a half hour later. Brindos had the results an hour after that.

  The autopsy revealed psychosis in the form of paranoid schizophrenia, a condition made dangerous by Dorie’s drug and alcohol intake. The lack of even solid circumstantial evidence supporting her alleged illegal recruiting scam, and now possible connections to Terl Plenko, meant either suspicions were unfounded, or she really knew what she was doing keeping them in the dark.

  Because Dorie’s history of pathological behavior kept him from separating her truths from her lies, and because all her references to the Movement were vague during the holo-recording to begin with—no direct admissions of association—Brindos was forced to look closer for hard evidence that would help justify a raid on Coral Moon.

  Using the holo-recording, he had the police department’s computers map the spots Dorie’s body, eyes, and posture pointed to during heightened moments of her conversations concerning the Movement. Her unconscious attention consistently focused on the area below the vid screen.

  Lieutenant Branson brought Brindos to Dorie’s suite and they checked it out. Brindos had assumed she’d been thinking about the RuBy, for that’s where she’d rolled it, underneath the vid. When he shined his flashlight in the small cubbyhole, however, toward the very back, barely visible, he spotted something.

  He motioned to Branson, and the lieutenant rumaged around in a plastic bag he’d brought with him. He came up with a small aerosol spritz, sprayed his left hand with a light latex polymer, and reached into the cubby. What he pulled out seemed inconsequential at first, a small metal sculpture, spherical in shape.

  Branson turned it over a few times in his palm. “What’s this?”

  “Mortaline,” Brindos said.

  “What?”

  “The metal it’s made of. Very rare, and fucking expensive. Only found on Coral. The last major deposits of it were mined years ago, as far as I know, and they’re now just cleaning up the smaller bits and pieces in the Rock Dome. Along with all the other failing mines, of course.”

  “A connection to Coral.”

  Brindos nodded as Branson handed the sculpture over. About the size of a grapefruit, it resembled a planet twisting out of shape, as though a man inside were struggling to break out. A closer look, however, revealed that the black metal’s etchings included subtle forms on the surface, a sea of writhing bodies, what seemed like thousands. Each had a different face, and yet I could see the eyes of every face etched into the sculpture, and they seemed alive with torment.

  Like the rest of Dorie’s apartment, this valuable piece of art—albeit disturbing art—was more than she could afford. He wondered if it had been a gift. He figured everything in this apartment had been a gift. From the Movement.

  “DNA?” Brindos asked.

  Branson nodded and pulled out a sequencer from the bag. He passed it over the black mortaline. “Miss Senall’s DNA,” he said, checking the readout. He waited some more. “Also, DNA of the artist, looks like. All over the crevices of the sculpture’s surface.” He looked up suddenly, a smile on his face. “A perfect match.”

  “Match to whom?”

  Branson passed the sequencer. Coded DNA strands on the left, photo on the right. An old photo, not very flattering, of a First Clan Helk.

  Helks.

  Humans regarded the other nonhuman race in the Union, the orange-haired Memors, almost as saints. The Memors discovered Earth and offered their jump slot technology. It gave Earth access to known habitable worlds that could be used as colonies.

  Helks, on the other hand, found by humans twenty years later in 2060, were gigantic and were not as highly regarded. Brindos had never been to Helkunntanas and had no desire to go; most humans couldn’t stand the heat, and very few liked the idea of walking around surrounded on all sides by giants. A Fourth Clan Helk you could talk to without feeling terribly inadequate, but that was it. A light fur covered their broad bodies, and they had legs like small tree trunks, and long arms that rippled with muscle. Their heads were hairless, the skin dark and leathery due to the desert climate of their homeworld. When you met a Helk, you took in its size, its sad eyes, the rows of sharp teeth, then decided whether to say hello or run like hell.

  Helks and humans didn’t always trust each other, or play nice. It had become a growing concern even before Terl Plenko’s Movement. Humans started calling them Hulks, a colloquial expression that carried with it a pointedly negative connotation. Truth to tell, the name fit, if nothing else, because of the aliens’ immense size.

  Clans were based on size and social class, although a certain amount of crossover was allowed depending on upward mobility. First Clan was the largest of four clans. And this First Clan Helk on Branson’s sequencer was one of the largest Brindos knew.

  The Helk peering out from the DNA sequencer was the Movement of Worlds leader, Terl Plenko.

  “Goddamn.” Brindos pulled out his code card, the NIO agent super tool that allowed them direct communication with the agency brass, other agents, and the DataNet, and had more hidden gadgets than any civilian comm card. It was a little bigger than an old-fashioned paper business card, just as thin, and flexible, covered with flash membranes and tiny nodes. His finger whispered along the comm node, and he sent a message to Dave Crowell at the New York office a few seconds later, giving him a go-ahead to alert the director and President Nguyen to raid Coral Moon.

  Over twenty small domes on Coral made the moon habitable, conditions imitating Ribon enough so colonists could live and work there. Mining on Coral had been big business, but most of the desired minerals had been mined out, and times were tough.

  The NIO had hoped Dorie would raise the stakes on a tenuous friendship with Jennifer by offering a one-way ticket to Coral Moon, a suspected Movement outpost, making it sound like some holiday. Ribon officials had believed Dorie’s dismissal a month earlier from U.U. Mining Corporation had been a cover so she could run illegal recruits p
ast customs to the outpost on Coral.

  Crowell acknowledged Brindos and decided to send a message straight to Union President Richard Nguyen’s chief of staff. President Nguyen authorized three Arks for a raid on Coral Moon. It was unknown if the Movement had ships that could match even one Union Ark, but four Ribon days after Dorie’s death, three Arks arrived through the jump slot, armed for battle. They found the moon abandoned, its mass so ravaged by deep core explosives that officials feared it might become unstable in its orbit. As a precautionary measure, Ribon Provincial ordered evacuations of Ribon colonists, command and civilian, loading them onto transport ships, then sending them through the jump slot to a classified location, at some refugee camp on one of the other Union worlds. The transports ran continuously, and after two days, the Arks arrived. After completing a detailed analysis of Coral, the Ark captains okayed a request from Provincial to load as many refugees as they could fit aboard their ships, then jumped home.

  Brindos reviewed the survey photos of Coral’s surface while the evacuation procedures continued, and found the evidence striking. Structures on Coral’s surface had been blasted and melted beyond recognition, particularly around the area called the Rock Dome, where much of Coral’s mining took place. All that, coupled with the moon’s missing mass, intentionally removed by explosives not sanctioned for mining, demonstrated evidence of an actual firepower higher than previously thought.

  An hour after the Arks left the system, a final, cataclysmic explosion on Coral’s far side lit up the sky. Specifics of the explosion and the harrowing results didn’t come through until much later, but only a few Transworld Transport jump vessels managed to reach the system in time to attempt a rescue of more Ribon colonists. Brindos had already boarded a specially designated TWT vessel, Gateshead, loaded with politicians, dignitaries, and scientists, the last ones out of there.

  Brindos sat across the aisle from Grahlst Tah’lah, a Memor scientist assigned to the Gateshead. They had been discussing the grim news.

  “The explosion wasn’t nuclear?” Brindos asked the Memor.

  “Even that wouldn’t have been enough to cause the damage,” Grahlst Tah’lah said, his orange hair tied back in a tight knot.

  “What’s the Science Consortium say about this? Is that their opinion as well?”

  The Memor pursed thick, pale lips. “The five from the Consortium have been quiet about the possibilities.”

  “Have you heard from them at all since this happened?”

  “No. It is … disconcerting.”

  “Okay, so if not nukes, what the hell blew up Coral?”

  “Rumors are spreading regarding some sort of antimatter disruption.”

  “Antimatter?”

  “It is improbable, of course. The amount of antimatter needed to cause an explosion of that magnitude has never before been created, let alone collected without mishap.”

  Brindos had heard as much. Heard that the amount of antimatter humans had created in the past hundred years might light up a small colony town for about a minute and a half.

  “What’s going to happen to Ribon?” Brindos asked.

  “Coral didn’t fragment completely, but its orbit, now compromised, puts it in the path of Ribon. In a few days, Ribon’s atmosphere and gravitation will shatter what is left of the small moon, and pieces will orbit Ribon. Soon, the planet will have Saturn-like rings.”

  “A number of fragments will reach Ribon itself, won’t they?” he asked.

  Grahlst Tah’lah nodded and looked at him across the aisle. “Some have already entered the atmosphere. Without time to prepare for a calamity as destructive as this, the damage will be devastating, reaching worldwide in hours. The resulting gamma rays from the antimatter weapon will certainly alter the chemistry of living things still on Ribon. Although Coral absorbed much of the rays, and others dispersed into space, it won’t be known how much of the electromagnetic wave will find its way to Ribon.”

  “And for those people not evacuated in time?”

  “It will make no difference. Ribon will intersect the moon’s orbit and some of Coral’s larger fragments will slam into it. Shockwaves from the impacts will cause worldwide earthquakes, awakening dormant volcanoes and triggering massive tidal waves. Dust clouds will blanket the planet. Ash will fall from the sky.”

  Dear God, Brindos thought. Ribon would know nothing but darkness for months. Plants would die. Animals would die.

  Colonists would die.

  Sickened, Brindos barely made it in time to the Gateshead’s tiny lavatory and threw up. He had an idea how horrific the loss of life and damage would be. His heart thumped in his chest, and anger rose inside, making him shake. Even with the Arks, even with the transport jumps, only a fraction of Ribon’s population was moved off planet.

  He staggered back to his seat, barely able to walk. Grahlst Tah’lah left him alone.

  How could this have happened? Was it deliberate? Had Plenko killed this moon without regard for the inhabitants of Ribon? How had he found the destructive means needed to pull off this despicable act of terrorism?

  Brindos stared out the window of the Gateshead, the last emergency Transworld Transport. Now he could see the pieces of Coral quite clearly. The Gateshead was out in far orbit, having just departed Swan Station. All remaining evacuation ships had passed through the jump slot hours before.

  Moments before they jumped, he watched some of the remnants of Coral drop away into Ribon’s atmosphere like pebbles disappearing into fog. A million Ribon colonists were dying. It was the worst thing he had ever seen in his life.

  He wept.

  Brindos visited Jennifer Lisle at Sacred Mercy Hospital in New York when he returned. They’d treated her on Ribon, then shipped her off to Earth just before Coral’s high dive. She told him mostly what he already knew from her report, but added a few extra details.

  Dorie had first met Jennifer in Celine’s, a cafe in Venasaille where Jennifer had spent evenings watching the ice melt in her Scotch. Talking to Jennifer in person, without the distance provided by the holo-recording, Brindos felt a little uneasy. She was attractive the way a pretty librarian seems sexy with her glasses off. Withdrawn, aloof, skeptical of everything. She’d been disturbed by Dorie, and on more than one occasion had told her to fuck off. But that had only kept Dorie coming on to her. Jennifer had a job to do, and maybe she succeeded in winning over Dorie because of her earlier denials. Jennifer kept mostly to the script given to her by the Network Intelligence Office’s top officials, but she figured a little improvising wouldn’t hurt.

  What Dorie lacked in charm, she made up for in persistence. Dorie wanted Jennifer, and as time wore on, her confidence grew and Jennifer’s guard eased, revealing a sexual curiosity. A few days after the initial meeting in Celine’s, they ended up in Dorie’s suite. Brindos asked her about the holo-recording looping into the suite’s vid unit, wondering if she had any enemies, anyone who might’ve wanted to see her cover blown. She didn’t know, but it had definitely unnerved her.

  Brindos thanked Jennifer, wished her a speedy recovery, and flew back to New York to work out the kinks this goddamn trip had inflicted on him. He wanted to forget the whole mission, but figured he hadn’t heard the last of the whole affair. Of Dorie Senall, of Coral and of Ribon, of Terl Plenko, and of the Movement.

  Sure enough, a week later, at NIO headquarters in New York, Brindos was put back to work.

  He met Crowell in his temporary office on the twenty-eighth floor, the same floor his own cubicle was on, the same floor as Director Timothy James’s office and Assistant Director Aaron Bardsley. Only the size and poshness of the offices changed. Offices ringed the floor, and the cubicles of many NIO agents sat in the middle hub. It was evening, and most of the offices were dark, agents and staff home.

  Crowell was a big man, maybe 250 pounds, all muscle, a product of his strict five-times-a-week weight workout. Brindos wouldn’t have wanted to run into him in a dark alley. More than once Brindos had been hap
py he was on his side. Crowell had fifty pounds on Brindos and, at age thirty, was five years younger. Stubble darkened his face—the beginnings of a beard that matched his dark brown hair. He never grew out a beard, though. His brown eyes could cut through you with a glance.

  “After Ribon,” Crowell said from behind his desk, “probably the last thing you want to do is hop on a transport to Temonus, but I need you to follow up on the lead I’ve been given on Tony Koch.”

  “Koch?”

  Crowell nodded. “If one of Terl Plenko’s cronies is on Temonus as has been reported, maybe Plenko himself is over there. Frankly, it’s probably a dead end. That’s why I thought of you. You can stay a couple of extra weeks. You’re due for a vacation.”

  “Look,” Brindos said, “I may be due, but you need the vacation. Have the square boys in the round office been putting the spurs to you because of Coral? Because you went over James’s head?”

  “They gave me a choice between getting my nuts crunched in a vise or letting Nguyen throw darts at my ass.”

  “Right,” Brindos said. “What you tell them?”

  “I told them to save it for Plenko, that I’d have him for them within a year.”

  “Liar.”

  “Yeah, well those inflatable Plenko Halloween costumes are real lifelike, and I’ve got one that’s just your size.”

  “Great. I’ll stay here and terrorize New York while you go to Temonus and sip aqua vitae out of some coconut with a toothpick umbrella.”

  Crowell leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Not that easy, Alan. You’re going. Your itinerary and ticket info’s been synched to your code card. Connection to Florida tomorrow morning, then shuttle to Egret Station. Transworld Transport to Solan Station, Temonus. Leaves tomorrow night.”

  Brindos eyed his code card, saw the notification pulse green, popping up as a new node on the membrane. He wished it would disappear.

  Crowell reached into his desk drawer. “Oh, yeah.” He rummaged around for a moment. “Reading material.”