Liquid Crystal Nightingale

by EeLeen Lee

Dumortier nodded. “Students need months of practice to get a feel for the fan. And during the same time, the fan has to become familiar with you. I’m not sure how it is with training fans.”

  “The ones I have now have membranes grown to adapt more quickly to new users. But it greatly reduces the strength of their venom. At least half of the fan needs to be submerged in the solution. It takes an hour or two.”

  Dropping the fan back into its basin, Nadira reached into the neighbouring one to pick up another fan lying at the bottom. Dumortier peered inside: the fan was different from the others. It was familiar in its minimalism; the lacquer work on the ribs was sparser, done with a stencil depicting entwined coils like DNA strands, and it lacked the membranous black lace of the training fans.

  “We obtained Saurebaras’s personal fan,” Nadira observed, reaching into the basin. “Watch this.” At the moment Nadira’s fingers brushed the membranes of the fan it snapped shut in the solution. “But priority first: I must show you Gia Aront.”

  “Isn’t she supposed to stay in the morgue?”

  “Formally, this place qualifies,” Nadira said as she walked out of the gallery. “I had Gia transferred here in case someone tried to tamper with her body. Please pardon the use of the forensic sarcophagus.”

  “What do you want to show me?”

  “See for yourself—I insist on it.”

  Back in the main tunnel, the lights had stopped flickering. Dumortier felt the floor slope downwards as he followed her to another chamber.

  It was bigger than the ballistics range. A pair of junior technicians wearing red surgical veils stood facing each other in the centre of the chamber. Dumortier took reassurance from the reverence with which these newer SeForTecs treated their positions: in his early days as an officer, they’d always been brusque and impersonal. Upon Nadira’s order, one of them gestured at the black oblong defined in the floor in front of him. His hands described an elaborate geometric sequence in the air, and the other technician mirrored him for confirmation like an elaborate magician’s trick. Eight clicks instantly followed. Minute latches were released at each of the oblong’s vertices—four visible to Dumortier, the other four below floor level.

  The forensic sarcophagus rose like a periscope and stopped at waist-height. Dumortier realised the oblong was the lid of the sarcophagus.

  “Leave us,” Nadira told the technicians. They left in silence.

  Gia won’t get a better coffin than a forensic one: he considered telling her father that in all honesty. He was afraid to touch it in case of accidentally contaminating it: an absurd notion. The transparent panel below the lid had been hermetically sealed.

  Her mouth was closed, her lips purplish. One eye was still open and clouded over; her other eye was a clearly defined cross-shaped hole where the fan had penetrated it. Her fingernails were grubby and her palms calloused, not pink and soft like the Tier Dweller cadavers of his previous cases. Was practical work harsh and strenuous in those labs and seminars? The notion of Gia Aront doing menial chores and hard academic work was laughable.

  Dumortier peered closer. Gia Aront’s head was lying at a strange angle, loose at the base of her neck, as though her skull had been yanked too far back and now only the skin of her neck attached her head to her body. It had been realigned with care as she was placed in the sarcophagus.

  He tapped the panel over Gia’s neck. “Did this happen at any time during processing?”

  “My SeForTecs recovered Gia Aront in situ with her neck in that condition.”

  “I thought the fan through the eye killed her?”

  “The trauma to her eye was not the cause of death,” Nadira said. “The penetration of the periorbital socket was not deep enough.”

  “It would’ve only blinded her. And you and I wouldn’t be having this discussion right now.” Dumortier started pacing the floor in front of the sarcophagus.

  “Serotonin levels were found to be elevated around neck area. The cause of death was dislocation.” Nadira cupped the back of her head and jerked up her chin to demonstrate. “Hyperextension of the C2 vertebrae. An avulsion.”

  It was a common enough cause of death among suicide and murder victims. Dumortier recognised what Nadira was saying, but wasn’t sure he believed it.

  “A hangman’s fracture? In the middle of a fla-tessen piste?”

  “Yes, apparently that’s what happened.”

  Dumortier was now pacing up and down the chamber. Threads were unraveling and reweaving themselves in his mind. “Pull up the sparring footage.”

  Nadira nodded and touched a control panel. A screen flickered to life on the wall facing the sarcophagus. Gia Aront and Pleo moved within their intersecting pistes, their arms blurred. Pleo raised her liddicoate shawl to shield her face. Dumortier thought the shawl had deflected Gia’s fan, but she had not thrown it yet; it looked like she had used a castanet.

  “The fla-tessen piste is highly sensitive,” he said. “I’ve had a demonstration of its capabilities. It detects anomalies and it activated when I threw a mite inside it. You can’t even spit on it without it reacting.”

  Nadira said in mild irritation, “The footage quality emphasises the shadows.”

  “That isn’t a shadow.” Dumortier traced a fingertip around Gia’s head and a slightly darker area behind her, in the vague shape of an upper body. “It looks like three people were inside that piste.”

  “Two people,” said Nadira, then, “and one more presence.”

  Dumortier noticed wry satisfaction in her expression; he’d just passed a test. “That’s what you wanted me to see?”

  “Yes.”

  “What sort of presence? As in a rogue training simulation?”

  Nadira pointed at Gia Aront’s head and neck on screen. “Fla-tessen never uses training simulations. And training simulations don’t dislocate vertebrae.”

  Dumortier forwarded the footage to the moment the fan went into Gia Aront’s eye. He had seen many types of physical trauma in his time, but even he had to look away for a second. He had little stomach for eye injuries.

  “Perfect clean hit,” he said.

  “According to Pleo Tanza’s progress reports, fla-tessen is not her strong point.”

  “So it’s a fluke. Total beginner’s luck. “

  “Or was set up to look like one,” countered Nadira.

  He remembered Saurebaras in the hall: They sent you—how predictable.

  Dumortier pulled up the recorded excerpt taken from his collarbone stud. “Enhance and increase volume by 70 percent.” It played on a loop, over and over again. On the fifth replay Dumortier heard another voice speaking just below Saurebaras’s voice, denatured yet unmistakable.

  “There was something talking to you then, in the loosest sense,” acknowledged Nadira. “Enough to create air pressure and vibrate air molecules.”

  “If this presence can talk, then it can manipulate objects. Her shawl moved by itself when she attacked me and the Spinels, both inside and outside the fla-tessen hall. I don’t discount it; I’ve heard of telekinesis, maybe tested by rumoured Cabuchon military units. “

  “Tulpa, not telekinesis,” said Nadira, “and what Cabuchon military do are not rumours. Trust me, I’m privy to such information.”

  “Sure, but it doesn’t help us with anything to this case.”

  “It should,” said Nadira. “A tulpa is a thoughtform.”

  “Tulpas and thoughtforms are a myth.” Dumortier sounded sure of it, until he saw Nadira’s face.

  “Something inexplicable attacked you, but in Saurebaras’s presence?”

  “It was of Saurebaras and yet not her.” He was reluctant to say it, but it was true.

  “We’ll dub it an ‘un-person,’” said Nadira, “for the purpose of our discussions.”

  Dumortier replayed the footage. “And this un-person was in the piste, and at the moment when the fan went into Gia Aront’s eye, it pulled and snapped her neck.”

  “Yes,” said Nadira.
“The somatic reconditioning Saurebaras underwent has some side effects, but not all of them known.”

  “Saurebaras framed Pleo Tanza.” Dumortier felt the air in the chamber getting lighter at this breakthrough. “No one outside of Constabulary must know what both of us have discovered.”

  “I concur,” said Nadira.

  “When putting someone in prison, don’t give them access to a weapon. And make sure they themselves aren’t also weaponlike.”

  “Saurebaras found a way to work around the reconditioning,” said Nadira. “Thus the reconditioning cheated Chatoyance and Polyteknical; they believed it was infallible. Since there’s nothing else to follow up from the discovery of the body, let’s start tomorrow by going to the Aronts and questioning Gia’s parents. We leave out the part about the tulpa.”

  “Sakamoto believes it’s all a waste of time.”

  “You don’t agree?”

  He shrugged. “I know Katyal when it comes to the Tier Dwellers. To her nothing will be a waste of time.”

  “Look at how the accident happened, the position of the body in the piste, and that injury to her neck... it all seems so personal. There are so many possible threads.” Nadira peered at the footage again.

  “Well, let’s weave them together. See if they make up a rope.”

  “All links and symbols need to be decoded. The question is whether Gia was an opportunity kill, whether it could have been anyone—something on which to hang a murderer’s plan, perhaps—or if it had to be her, of all people.”

  “It’s already started with her,” he said. “Who she was. What she might have been to someone else. That’s the only starting point we have so far. And what Saurebaras tried to tell me.”

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, it makes perfect sense.”

  “Before you leave, I have something to present to you.”

  She led him back to the range. The Constabulary quartermaster was already waiting there, a bright-eyed woman with salt-and-pepper hair clad in creased indigos, who seemed very much at home in the chamber.

  She held out a weapons case and uniform to Dumortier. “Ocelot issue.”

  Nadira took the case from the quartermaster and set it down on the worktable. Inside the case was a gun Dumortier had only seen in arms and ammunition training footage. A shrapnel heart.

  “Senior SeForTec’s privilege,” informed the quartermaster, presenting Dumortier and Nadira with eye and ear protective gear. “She gets to test it out before you.”

  Nadira put on the gear, picked up the shrapnel heart, checked the serial number and racked the slim slide on top. She took aim at a new test dummy and fired. The recoil kicked but Nadira did not flinch, compensating with the extensive weapons experience of her previous transfusions. Dumortier had never seen a shrapnel heart in action before and what he saw demonstrated was quite impressive. It fired darts of compacted rock salt instead of bio-flechettes. The salt darts were a far cry from the organic barbs of the splinter heart, longer and more jagged around the tips.

  Dumortier glimpsed the worn and pitted back wall of the test chamber through four ragged holes in the dummy’s torso.

  “We like to say that splinter hearts whisper, while shrapnel hearts curse the air,” said the quartermaster with a measure of pride in her work, “but glass hearts shatter everything.”

  Nadira finished with the splinter heart and gave the gun a final check. “All yours, Ocelot Investigator.”

  Dumortier took the shrapnel heart from Nadira. He was pleased that there was no slide that bit into his skin. He felt its sturdy weight and her trust in him when she released her grip on the weapon. This gesture reassured him for now.

  “Pleo Tanza was last seen in Retail Sector 12,” Nadira told him. “An incident at the jewellery shop there. Should we send someone to question the owner?”

  Dumortier shook his head. “Katyal doesn’t want the net closing too tight around Pleo Tanza until further orders from her or Sakamoto.”

  “Time is being lost.”

  “Not for now. The owner of that shop is known to my unit. An ex-modrani called Jean-Ling Setona who used to frequent the Tiers. She can keep a secret.”

  BACK INSIDE THE Shirpen, Dumortier ran a check on Jean-Ling Setona and noted the name of her latest employee. He ran that through another background check which yielded brief yet more revealing information. Setona could keep a secret, but not the person working for her. Dumortier wondered if the Mias network had overcome its teething problems by now, and could get a lock on this employee. Ocelot clearance, it seemed, made accessing Mias a pleasant experience.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  MARSH STARTED OUT of a light sleep and almost rolled off the public bench. An approaching sound reminded him of his brush with the law back home, setting off alarms in his subconscious. His entire body tensed; unsurprising, given the events back in Setona’s shop earlier that day. Now it was after midnight and he had stayed out of his nanoapartment as an extra precaution.

  A vibration hummed in the air around him. The sound came again, this time louder and next to him at ground level. Four pairs of heavy grey boots, capped with metal, hit the paving in perfect sync as four guards trooped past him on the Subaltern’s Parade. It was the last thing he wanted to hear after encountering the tyro.

  Despite its name, the Parade had fallen out of use as a ceremonial route. Now it was a nocturnal park lined with victory cedars, frequented by marble doves and people walking off excess energy after Shineshift. The Parade exuded gravitas in what, according to the visitor information screens, was a too-little-too-late tribute to an unnamed Tagmat subaltern wrongfully accused of desertion, according to visitor information displayed on screens hanging from the cedars’ branches.

  These guards were not clad in the cardinal reds of the Spinels. Marsh saw their bone-white uniforms, covered with textured armour plates that were grooved like insect carapaces. Jagged spikes lined their gauntlets, giving the Aront house guards their Dogtooth moniker—and a hint of overkill. But these Dogtooths were too far from their homebase; the Tiers were across town. Marsh could see their lights twinkling in the distance.

  Perhaps in unconscious solidarity with the historic subaltern, the people along the Parade shrank from these mercenary enforcers of Aront will and power. Behind Marsh’s bench, an elderly Chatoyant couple stared and muttered their disapproval, then retreated inside the main pergola that flowed along the Parade. Marsh forced himself to stay still; running would have looked too suspicious.

  The Dogtooths’ figures receded and a recreational mood was restored to the Parade. Marsh hoped they were only conducting a training exercise, but the visit had soured his mood. He headed back to the glare of the Subaltern’s Parade station. Someone would be searching for the Polyteknical woman who injured him, but hopefully not for him.

  According to Setona, Constabulary or similar bodies always came after people during working hours. So at least for today, Marsh was safe; Setona had closed up in time for Shineshift. He was also glad she was going to pay him late this month; less uta flowing into his account meant less activity and less chance of anyone tracing his movements.

  He glanced at the back of the queue he had just joined, but there was no sign of any Dogtooths in the station. One by one the sentry turnstiles admitted commuters. Marsh hesitated for a moment—he was almost sure no one was tracking him—then by impulse, broke away from them to walk across the station’s utilitarian hall and to reach the other enclosed escalator which led up to the T-Car line.

  A man stood at the foot of the escalator; there was no reaching the T-Car platform without passing him. He wore an all-weather translucent overcoat over a brushed steel-grey suit: according to Setona, the outfit issued to plainclothes officers.

  He must have observed Marsh abruptly leaving the first queue; to return to it now would generate more suspicion.

  “This station is a long way from home, Cabuchoner,” said the not-officer in a casual voice, as if he a
nd Marsh were in a spaceport waiting lounge. “Your identification, please.”

  Marsh complied, showing his work permit, but he bristled at being singled out. “You’re not in your indigos.”

  “Don’t wear them.” He sounded amused. “My name is Dumortier. What are you doing here on Chatoyance?”

  Marsh shrugged. “I guess I’m lost.”

  “Lost enough to work here?” The man squinted at the permit.

  “My employer renewed my pass last month.”

  “Yes, I know Jean-Ling Setona well.” The Constabulary officer waved the permit away. Marsh’s leave to stay was not the issue at this moment. “You’re lucky I’ve found you in time. Alias—John CaMarr-Schist, but your landing name is Zynclave.” The not-officer paused to check Marsh’s reaction—Marsh bit the inside of his cheek to ensure his face remained expressionless. “Great-grandparents were administrators for ice settlements on Europan frozen seas. Family in high places. Chatoyance is a long way down from Corund, my friend. A cargo squirrel’s existence must be so exhausting.”

  Dumortier saw the blank look on Marsh’s face and laughed. “Cargo squirrels? No one knows how they came about. Possibly a type of rat and another type of rodent were desperate and horny. Found them in grain stores on supply frigates when I was working in Khrysobe Spaceport. Ordered to shoot them on sight. Could never bring myself to shoot one.”

  “Why?”

  “My supe called me sentimental. I’m not, but I recognised kindred spirits. Plucky little things. All survivors.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “You’re like a cargo squirrel—too small to fathom the true scale and nature of the grain you’re living off. Here’s some free advice: go back to where you’re now staying before the next Shineshift.” He pointed at the Dogtooths passing by the station entrance and added, “Or you won’t go home to Cabuchon at all. These Tier Dwellers’ guards are like gnats—they land on anyone and draw blood. They’re recruited from Anium. They have no connection to Chatoyance and no obligation to play fair. Dogtooths tend to like non-Chatoyant blood. My superior made me watch as my teammates clubbed cargo squirrels’ brains out with sawn-off pipes. I don’t want it to come down to that with you.”