Star Cops

by Chris Boucher

  “I’ll talk to her,” Nathan said.

  “Another face to face?”

  “You can’t tell they’re sweating if you can’t smell they’re sweating, Brian.”

  “Do widows sweat, sir?”

  “Depends what they’ve been doing. Report to me direct as soon as you’ve seen the partner, okay?” Before Lincoln could acknowledge the order, Nathan touched the end link panel on the callscreen.

  He withdrew his ID from the reader and, pocketing the card, he stepped out of the booth and crossed the road towards the reservoir.

  “You have not verified the details of that call,” his own voice said from the pocket of his jacket. Nathan ignored it, and turned onto a grass track that led through some birch scrub in the direction of the reservoir.

  “You have not verified the details of that call,” his voice repeated.

  “I heard you the first time,” said Nathan.

  “You took no action,” his voice said.

  Resignedly Nathan took out his ID, and thumbed the edge to activate: recall payment. Without bothering to look at the call details the holographic lens was magnifying, he waited a few seconds then thumbed: confirm input. “Happy now?” he asked.

  “Do you require an answer to that question?” his voice asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Do you require an answer to that question?” his voice asked again.

  Nathan reached into his pocket and withdrew a plain black box about the size of a cigarette packet. “Can you hear me now, Box?” he said to it.

  “Yes,” the box replied, in a weirdly undistorted copy of his own voice.

  “Then I do not require an answer to my earlier question: happy now? Is that clear?” Nathan said, then added quickly, “I mean is that understood?”

  “It is both clear and understood,” said Box. “The requirement to check all transaction details so that only correct payments are authorized –”

  “Shut up, Box,” said Nathan, putting it away and wondering – not for the first time – whether the bloody thing wasn’t actually more trouble than it was worth.

  He walked on briskly for maybe a mile without seeing anybody at all. If a man preferred his own company, he thought, this was certainly the place to come – which was when he remembered he was supposed to be meeting Lee that evening. “Box,” he said.

  But Box had not been closed down long enough to clear itself. “-is a statutory one,” it said, finishing what Nathan had blocked. “You have now complied with the law. Do you require details of the relevant sections and paragraphs of the Order?”

  “No. Book a table at the Lotus Garden for tonight please. Contact Lee and arrange a time for me to meet her there.”

  “She prefers you to do these things in person,” said Box.

  Nathan said, “Don’t identify yourself. Tell her you’re in a hurry. Be abrupt. Chances are, she won’t notice the difference.”

  Nathan pocketed Box as it said, “Very well. Processing is under way.”

  When Nathan reached the reservoir, the sun was shining and there was only the very lightest of breezes. He sat down on a low grass bank, which gave him a clear view across the broad expanse of glinting water.

  Although this was still officially designated as a Category Three Storage Facility, the reservoir no longer fed the main supply grid, and had been left to itself. Vegetation had been allowed to begin colonizing the banks. Trees which would normally have been cut back and rooted out, to avoid leaf debris silting up the water, were already growing taller than simple scrub. Reedmace, rosebay, willowherb and ragwort grew between the slope on which Nathan sat and the water’s edge. Behind him, silver birch trees – first colonizers for new woodland and one of the few genuinely native trees – moved in the soft wind, their vivid trunks drifting below vastly intricate cascades of tiny shivering leaves. The place was growing beautiful.

  Nathan flapped a midge away from his face and looked at his watch. He shifted uncomfortably. The grassy bank was not as restful as it looked. He stood up and brushed the seat of his trousers, trying to feel if it was damp. The grass had seemed dry when he sat down, but now his backside felt distinctly chilly. He was regretting the impulse that had brought him here. It was not one of his more rational notions. “This was a stupid idea,” he said aloud, and looked at his watch. Okay then, with a two and a half minute margin either way, the pathology unit had set – this – as the time the victim lost consciousness.

  He stared at the lake, trying to picture it happening; trying to see how it could have happened. He shaded his eyes, and scanned the banks slowly trying to see… what? He didn’t really have any idea.

  He completed the survey. Nothing.

  He was starting to feel more than a little foolish. Nobody lurking about? Nobody revisiting the scene of the crime? Shit. That was the trouble with murderers, he thought and said, “You can’t rely on the buggers to play the game.”

  He turned round to start back the way he had come, and found the old man standing behind him with a stick raised above his head.

  “Christ!” said Nathan.

  “Afternoon,” said the old man, and threw the stick down the bank. A black and white terrier burst out of a clump of bushes and raced after it with silent ferocity.

  “You frightened the life out of me,” Nathan said and smiled his best smile.

  The old man smiled back. “You took me a bit by surprise,” he said.

  The dog overran the stick, and fell in a rolling heap as it tried to stop.

  “Enthusiastic,” said Nathan, watching the animal scramble to its feet and rush at the stick.

  “Not the brightest I’ve ever had, but he’s got a lot of heart,” the old man said. “Never gives up.”

  “I had a Russell when I was a kid,” Nathan said, altering history and taking a friend’s pet for his own. “People don’t realize what’s involved, do they? Looking after a dog.”

  “That they don’t,” said the old man, as the dog headed back with the wrong stick, this one much larger than the one that had been thrown.

  “They’ve got their little routines,” Nathan said. He could still remember the tyranny of that small dog’s habits. “Eat, sleep, crap, walk. Set times for all of them.” When his father had offered to get him one of his own, Nathan had declined in favour of a rabbit. It had turned out to be just as demanding – and boring, as well.

  “We’re all creatures of habit,” the old man was saying, “one way or another.”

  Nathan nodded. The dog was struggling to get the stick past some brambles. “You walk him here every day, do you?” he asked.

  “Rain or shine,” said the old man, “regular as clockwork. Not as quiet round here as it used to be, mind. Lot more people.”

  * * *

  “Even if we ’ad the people, which we do not…” The general manager of the Charles De Gaulle, Françoise Lancine, was looking at Theroux as though he was several canapés short of the full hors d’oeuvres. “…budgets are tight.”

  Theroux said, “You mean it’s cheaper to replace the corpses, is that what you’re telling me?”

  They were facing one another across a small desk – large by station standards – in the full unit work-module which was designated as an office, and which came with the job of general manager.

  “What I am telling you,” Lancine said, “is what you already are aware of. It is not practical to insist always on two people being out there together. We can not afford to return to the buddy system for EVAs.”

  She was a handsome woman, in that elegant European way which Theroux always found too tight-assed to be really sexy. Her auburn hair was cropped no shorter than absolutely necessary, brushed carefully and pulled back into a small bob to show off her narrow, fine-boned face to advantage. A minimum of make-up was
perfectly applied to highlight the bone structure and the clear brown eyes. Not a trace of fat anywhere on the long-legged, light breasted figure. She had to be good-looking, of course. Good-looking and tough. No way, no day, she’d get charge of one of Europe’s top scientific and civil engineering projects, else. And all that stylish control not moved by weightlessness, by knowing she was held in position at her desk by Velcro patches on her slippers, knees, elbows and tush. Or maybe ambition generated its own gravity. She was certainly ambitious. Simon called her ‘the climbing frog’, which was one of his less slanderous insults. Aloud, Theroux said, “The deaths have all been guys working alone.”

  “Naturally, this is ’ow most of us work.”

  Theroux was tempted to ask when she next planned to go on an EVA, but confined himself to saying, “Not most of us.”

  “Most of us for whom suit-failure is a routine risk.”

  “A risk we can eliminate by changing the routine.”

  Brushing a well-manicured finger lightly above her ear, unconsciously checking that no hair was out of place, Lancine said, “No. We can not. The next death –”

  “The next death?” interrupted Theroux. “You say the next death?”

  “It is statistically inevitable, is it not? And it could ’appen to anyone, in a work team, alone… it could ’appen in the dark, or in full view of the world.”

  “Very poetic,” said Theroux. “And total crap.”

  Lancine frowned. “It could be suit-failure, solar flare, meteor strike.”

  “Could choke on an olive pit, but five’ll get you ten a suit system fucks up and there’s no witnesses when it does.”

  “So he didn’t actually see anything? This old man and his half-witted dog?”

  Lee wasn’t laughing at him, but she wasn’t taking him entirely seriously either.

  Nathan said, “Precisely because he was delayed by a total stranger asking for directions.”

  “Well, yes. But then again, if he hadn’t been a total stranger, he wouldn’t have needed directions. Would he?”

  She looked up from poking a chopstick dubiously into one of the bowls ranged in front of her, grinned, and then leaned back, tilting her head slightly to stop her hair falling across her face.

  Despite the current fashion for the off-Earther’s crop, Lee Jones wore her thick, brown hair shoulder length. Her figure, too, was softer and slightly fuller than was fashionable. Her face was round and gentle, pretty rather than beautiful, and her grin was slightly mocking, but never malicious.

  As he sat across the table from her in the Lotus Garden, it struck Nathan suddenly that she was extraordinary, and he was a fool to hesitate. “I don’t know why I bother to tell you my theories,” he said.

  “Who else do you trust, love,” Lee said. “If you don’t count that creepy Box, there’s no-one to talk to apart from me.”

  “Are you suggesting I’m paranoid?” Nathan leaned forward, and glowered theatrically.

  “I wouldn’t presume, Chief Superintendent.”

  “Good,” Nathan said, and twitched so that the food dropped off his chopsticks. “I am not paranoid. I’ve just got a lot of enemies, that’s all.” He glanced round, as if trying to see past the video panels which screened off each of the tables in the restaurant.

  “Be funnier if it wasn’t true,” she said.

  “I’m not paranoid,” said Nathan laughing. “Am I?”

  “No. But you have got enemies.”

  “Who gives a shit about them?”

  “You do, love,” Lee said and looked into his face.

  “I can live with it,” he said, and thought, as long as I’ve got you I can live with it, but couldn’t bring himself to say that out loud. He reached for more food, taking elaborate care as he scooped rice and flaked fish into his dish.

  Lee said, “Oh no, here comes that bloody panda again.”

  “What’s wrong with pandas?”

  Lee nodded at the video panels. “Haven’t you noticed the wallzac is the same damn thing over and over again.”

  “That’s what wallzac is.”

  “It’s what wallzac is in cheap dives like this.”

  “You get the best food in cheap dives like this,” Nathan said.

  “So you keep telling me. As justifications for thrift go, it has the virtue of…” she paused. “Actually, I’m not sure what virtue it does have, really.”

  “Paranoid and cheap,” said Nathan. “I can see why you find me irresistible.”

  Lee waved a chopstick at the panel. “Every half hour or so, that panda arrives, trots about. Eats some bamboo shoots…”

  “I like it,” Nathan said.

  “Well don’t get too attached to it, because it’s edited out pretty abruptly. It does something unappetizing, I imagine.”

  “You don’t want to talk about my murder, then.”

  “I’m not sure what makes you so certain it was murder.”

  “I’m not certain,” Nathan said without emphasis.

  This time Lee looked at him with genuine surprise. “Then for God’s sake, why are you making trouble?”

  Nathan shrugged, and shook his head vaguely. If he was honest, there was no compelling reason.

  “You haven’t got enough problems already?” Lee asked.

  He shrugged again. “Man’s a problem-solving animal,” he said.

  “You’re bored?” There was a small irritation in Lee’s voice.

  He shovelled rice and fish into his mouth with the chopsticks, and chewed for a moment to give himself time. Even then, the only answer he could come up with sounded defensive. “Not exactly.”

  “Not remotely, I hope,” Lee said. “You do realize that I turned down the promotion today?”

  “That was today was it?”

  “Isn’t that why we’re having this…” She gestured at the bowls on the table.

  “Outstanding Chinese meal?” Nathan suggested.

  She grinned. “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Something else, then?”

  Nathan shook his head. Why upset her? He had no intention of getting the damn job, anyway. He said, “I knew how much you liked this place, so I thought…” and smiled.

  Lee recognized the smile. “This drowning case isn’t worse than you’re telling me, is it?” she challenged.

  “How do you mean?”

  “It isn’t a career-breaker?”

  “It’s nothing like that,” Nathan said, and shrugged and shook his head yet again. He was conscious that he suddenly seemed to be developing a bunch of unconvincing spasms and twitches. “It’s not important. It’s just that I’ve got a feeling about it.”

  “Feelings are good,” said Lee and grinned.

  Nathan went on, “The decision was too quick. The machine was too sure, that’s all.”

  “It is just a machine.”

  “Exactly. It’s got no instinct for the job. I have. It’s called a detective’s nose.” He turned his profile to her. “I have a particularly fine nose, wouldn’t you say?”

  Lee was frowning slightly. “You’re beginning to sound as if you think of the regional crime computer as a rival.”

  “No.” Nathan knew what was coming, and he badly didn’t want to get into it.

  “You’re not in competition, Nathan.”

  “I’m not sure the boss would agree with you.”

  Lee said, “Your dad –”

  Nathan cut her off angrily, “I don’t want a rehash of the crap the marriage contract counsellor gave us.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  “I’ve had the blood test and the psych evaluation. I was passed fit on both,” he continued, though his temper had peaked and he was already feeling stupid. “It
’s no guarantee, I know, but as it goes I’m pretty nearly normal. Ish.”

  “I was just going to say –”

  “I know what you were just going to say, Lee. I don’t want to hear it, okay?”

  “Your father did not think more of the machines than he did of you.”

  “Fine.”

  “Sooner or later you’ll have to come to terms with the fact that he loved you, but he wasn’t very good at showing it.”

  “Right.”

  Lee looked him in the eye. “It’s not an uncommon trait,” she said.

  Nathan said, “I don’t believe a buyer for Corner Store International is really qualified to judge what my old man was or was not good at.” He kept his voice flat and cold, and he regretted the words even as he spoke them, but he couldn’t help adding, “Especially ones who never met the cold-arsed bastard.”

  “Senior buyers for Corner Store are blessed with superhuman skills. Especially ones who turn down promotion to Chief European Buyer to devote themselves to having the children of the sons of cold-arsed computer salesmen.”

  “Pity taking a hint isn’t among your super-human skills,” Nathan said – but he was smiling now.

  “It is,” she said, “but this meal only entitles you to the economy package.”

  “Why don’t you hate me?” he asked.

  “I like to be different,” she said.

  “In that case, the least you can do is believe in my murder theory.”

  “If it’s a theory it doesn’t require faith,” Lee said. “It requires testing.”

  “That’s what Lincoln and I are in the process of doing. Smart arse.”

  “I thought you liked my arse,” she murmured, and under the table she pushed her shoeless foot between his legs.

  Nathan jumped slightly. Behind him a waiter said, “Everything to your satisfaction, sir?”

  He blushed. “Yes. It’s fine, thank you.” Under the table, Lee rubbed his groin with her foot and grinned.

  “Madam?” asked the waiter.