by David Ryker
“Is it?” Ward had to ask.
Cootes shook his head. “Not unless Chiswick’s running something behind my back, but I doubt that. I got thirty guys working under me. Nothing AIA goes on in Eudaimonia without me knowing about it first.”
Ward nodded. “So I let them fish around, and once they figure out I’m clean?”
Cootes shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m up to my balls in the water here but I can’t see what’s swimming around my feet.” He had a way with words, that was for sure. “Let’s just see what shakes out. If you can get into this through the SB, then do it. You do technically work for them, you know.”
Ward cracked a rare genuine smile of amusement. “Yeah, technically. And don’t remind me.”
The sentinel manhandled Ward back toward their craft, the magnetic repulsors humming under it, the ferrous roadway keeping it hovering above like a cuttlefish over the ocean floor.
The sentinel opened the back and pushed Ward in, getting quickly into the front and stomping on the accelerator.
The fusion jets sang behind him and they pulled off at speed, the wake of hot air strong enough to wobble his bike off the kickstand. It clattered onto the curb and the two sentinels snickered under their helmets.
“Nice,” Ward said bluntly, kicking the divider between the front and the back seats. “Assholes.”
They could have given it a wider berth, could have let it be. Goddamn Martians. They laughed to themselves and joined the main carriageway, sirens blaring, and zoomed between the traffic toward the SB building.
It was a concrete colossus, sort of.
Most of the buildings in Eudaimonia were pale gray, tinged with green. It was testament to the Martians’ ability to maximize efficiency. Alcrete, they called it.
Their first terraforming capsules, flying out of deep space, had been filled with vast quantities of compressed gas — oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, to thicken the atmosphere. The Humans watched as they came, wondering what the hell was going on. They had a little colony there at the time, and went out to the nearest crash site to investigate, in their space suits and rovers, to see what the hell was happening. Even by the time they got there, the Gods-Moss had started spreading like a green carpet across the red and barren landscape. In actuality, it was a bioengineered alga designed to rapidly oxygenate the atmosphere, doing in a few decades what would have taken Humans centuries.
By the time the Martians arrived, the planet was overrun by the stuff — a soft blanket of endless green. Turned out that it was also highly nutritious, so was the perfect plant to nourish a flourishing biome. It normalized the atmosphere, insulated the ground, had a fast life-cycle that meant it died and rotted and fed the soil, too. But, what really blew the Humans’ minds was when the Martians started mulching the stuff and squashing it into blocks.
Machines went out to scrape it all up and then processed it into a gray-green mush and poured it into wafer-thin aluminum molds. In just a few hours it set into a rock-hard concrete substitute that was about fifty times lighter than its namesake, and much stronger. Buildings and settlements sprang up overnight and suddenly, it went from a couple of bio-domes and dusty boots to a sparklingly clean, meticulously constructed, utopian city. Or at least that’s what it seemed like from the outside looking in. But Ward knew better.
He grimaced looking up at the SB headquarters. He hated coming there, despite its architectural beauty. High arches and tall windows. Wide doors and curved roofs that caught drove solar energy into their electric grid. Humans got so jealous of the Martians’ engineering, all glass and eco-friendly construction. It was something they could never quite get their heads around.
Their entire existence was carbon neutral and Humans were still dredging oil out of asteroids and flying it back to their dying marble.
Ward was frogmarched up the green steps, his feet clacking on the hard alcrete, and into the main hall. He’d been in there a few dozen times over the last four years during his time at the capital, but never in cuffs before. Still, the domed glass ceiling surrounded by murals of the colonization of Mars never failed to amaze.
The two sentinels kept him walking through the labyrinth of corridors until they reached the interrogation rooms, and pushed him into the second down on the right. He’d never been in this part of the building before. No need, really. Interrogating suspects wasn’t really his bag. He’d done it for the AIA from time to time — all the old classics, you know, jumper cables on testicles, fingernail pulling, even some waterboarding — but it was never a part of his job description. The OCA was a lawless place and no one can hear you scream in the silence of space, and of course, there’s plenty of room to get good and lost. Made for a good torture spot, when the occasion called.
He slumped down into a chair and the sentinels hooked his cuffs onto the metal loop on the table. Martian or not, some things never changed.
Ward grunted as he went down, the sentinels being intentionally rough. Sadler’s death was causing unease, and it was already spilling over the sides of containment and into the city. The sentinels wouldn’t be privy to Epsilon Protocol cases, but if Cootes knew that an AIA agent who wasn’t supposed to be there had turned up dead in Eudaimonia, then the sentinels probably did too.
Part of the Thessaly Treaty — the OCA agreement between the Martians and the Humans that was trying to contain the spreading racial and corporate violence in the Axis — was transparency. No ops going on in anyone else’s back yard without prior agreement. Of course, it was a thin veil of honesty over a bed of lies. Hell, Cootes was still there, as was he, working for the AIA right under their noses. And Ward knew he wasn’t the only agent in the city. He didn’t know who else was there, but he knew they were, lurking. Posing as this person or that, but they were all the same, keeping an eye on Eudaimonia from the inside.
It wasn’t like the Martians didn’t have a clue, either; they just couldn’t prove it, and going around accusing was a good way to shake the sanctity of the agreement, and neither side wanted to do that, so they just sort of kept things quiet, didn’t rock the boat. The body of an AIA agent dropping in the streets, though? That wasn’t quiet at all, and the sentinels didn’t like knowing the Humans were pulling Human shit — deceit and lies. High and mighty snobs that they were. Not that the Martians were any different really from Humans, really, though they liked to think so. Truth was they were just further ahead. Maybe only a few centuries, but it was enough to give them an extra inch or two — just enough so they could comfortably look down their noses at Humans like they were shitting in their hands and throwing it around for fun.
“How about some water?” Ward growled, staring up at the blank visors of the sentinels who were quickly retreating from the room.
He didn’t want any, really; he was just trying to see what would happen. He was curious like that. Just liked to see things.
The sentinel at the back stopped, turned on his heel and curled his fist. Ward clocked it, clenched his jaw and offered his cheek just a little to take the incoming punch. It pinged off his face and his mop of dark hair flopped forward over his eyes.
He growled and spat blood onto the table, turning to watch as they left. “You hit like a bitch,” he called after the closing door.
They didn’t come back.
In fact, no one came in. Not for nearly two hours, and by that time, Ward was about to fill his trousers with seltzer.
When someone finally did enter the room, he expected it to be a faced sentinel. One of their investigators, or worse, one of their spooks, the Martian SB’s answer to the AIA agents of Ward’s caliber. Well, maybe not quite his caliber. But it was neither. It was someone that Ward had never met before, but someone whose face he knew well, because it was his job to.
“Moozana,” he said, unable to keep the surprise out of his voice.
Moozana was tall — nearly a head above Ward, and he was no short stack himself.
Moozana’s features were classically Martian. The pinkish
skin, the pointed chin, round and domed cranium with a high hairline. The slightly large, dark eyes over pronounced cheekbones The thin nose. The look of pure condescension. “Mister Miller.” He approached quickly and assumed the chair opposite, a file in his hands. An old-fashioned one — made of paper. This really was Epsilon Protocol. No digital trail. Nothing to be hacked or cloned.
Ward turned his hands out as much as he could while chained to the table. “This is unexpected.”
“Is it not your job to expect the unexpected? To anticipate the un-anticipatable? To read the unreadable?” he said airily, not taking his eyes off the file in front of him. He was tapping it on the table, allowing the print photographs inside to fall into a pile inside the unmarked manilla covers. “Is that not what I pay you to do?”
Ward bit into his cheek and measured Moozana’s calculating stare. His long fingers spread across the file now flat on the table, his eyes unflinching from Ward’s.
“Lately you’ve been paying me to do nothing,” he said after a moment. “But I kind of like it. Gives me time to work on my knitting.”
“Maybe you should spend more time working on your Martian. I hear it’s terrible,” Moozana came with the riposte.
Ward let his lip curl into a smirk. “It’s a tough language.”
“For Humans, perhaps.” He arched the piece of skin that normally would have had an eyebrow on it. Instead, there was just a thin line of white hair balanced on a ridge of the bone. He was right, though. The Martian sounds didn’t roll off the tongue with ease, and conversely, Moozana’s English was impeccable, like he was native. There was no doubt that he was just as intelligent as people said he was.
It was the first time Moozana and Ward had been in the same room, but it was radiating off him like heat. Ward almost had to squint to look at him, like staring directly at a star. It’s what made him so good at what he did, no doubt, like talking to a polygraph.
Moozana, satisfied that he’d won the bout, looked at the file and lifted the cover gently. “Anna Sadler,” he said, staring at the photo on top of the pile. “AIA operative.” He glanced up at Ward, looking for a response. “Did you know her?”
Ward nodded. “Yes, I did.”
“Did you know she was in Eudaimonia?”
“No.”
“Do you know that she’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Because I can see it on that photograph.” Ward nodded at the file and Moozana’s mouth twitched. “Unless people routinely lie face down in pools of blood in the middle Xaraniah Square?”
Moozana sighed, almost rolling his eyes. “Horrible pronunciation.”
“But my stockinette is impeccable.” Ward shrugged. Moozana looked like he was sitting on a thumbtack and it made Ward sardonically happy.
“I’m going to ask you very simply, now, Mister Miller, and if I don’t like your answer, then I’m going to make sure that your life here on Mars takes a downturn. I choose to exclude you from operations because I don’t much care for you, or think about you day-to-day. Not having you involved in our activities allows me some peace of mind. Out there on the mesa, I know where you are, and I know you aren’t causing any trouble. I hoped, even, you might just wither away, like an out of season flower that budded too soon, without anyone paying you any mind.”
“But not enough of a pain to be weeded from the garden?”
Moozana set his mouth into a neutrally upturned line, his well-mannered demeanor getting the better of him. “Were you aware that Anna Sadler was on Mars before today?”
“No.”
“Were you aware that she was dead before you entered this room?”
“No.”
Moozana studied Ward’s face, but there was nothing to see. He smiled gently, warmly, and his expression said he was thinking about the house he owned back on Earth, in the Colorado Rockies, above the smog line, overlooking one of the last unpolluted lakes in the state. A fire is crackling in the hearth and Canada Geese honk, flying overhead in a wide V. It was a good thought, and it was the sort of thought that Ward made Moozana think he was thinking. But he wasn’t. He was thinking about Sadler, and about what she had been doing here.
An investigator he could have gotten inside. A spook he could parry all day long. He knew how they worked. Hell, he worked with them, or had at least until Moozana had blacklisted him. But Moozana? He was too smart, and he was an unknown entity. Ward didn’t know his tricks, his tactics, so there was no way to know what lunges would land and which he’d be able to counter with ease. No, it had to be a defensive play, at least until he knew what move was coming next.
“It just seems strange that you’d not visit the city for over seven weeks, and then on the day that Anna Sadler turns up dead on my streets, you decide to gorge yourself on deep-fried poultry at Brannigan’s bar.” He pursed his thin pink lips and narrowed his wide eyes.
Ward shrugged. “I like the chicken wings.”
“Enough to drive sixty kilometers.”
“I had a coupon.”
“So the bartender said.”
“You should try them sometime.”
“So it’s coincidental?”
Ward shrugged again. “I knew Anna Sadler. I’m sorry to hear that she’s dead. We worked together on Ganymede six years ago. I haven’t seen her since. But, do I know why she’s here? No. I think the better question, is just why she’s lying dead on your streets.”
“Why? What do you mean why?”
Ward sighed and sat back in his chair. “Why because Anna Sadler was one of the most careful, capable agents I ever met.”
Moozana didn’t say anything, his heightened intelligence not excavating what Ward was getting at.
Ward let him stew, watching the vein pulse in his temple as his blood pressure rose. “If she’s dead, then it means something went wrong. If she’s here on behalf of the AIA —”
Moozana stiffened almost imperceptibly.
“— which I’m not saying she is, then who would kill her, and why there? If you didn’t know she was here, and it wasn’t the SB, then who was it? It makes no sense. A public execution in the middle of Eudaimonia? For what purpose? A show? A statement? But for who? For you? For someone else?”
“What are you saying?”
Ward rattled his chains. “I have no goddamn idea. I don’t know anything about anything. Like you said, I’ve been on the mesa for seven weeks, and don’t pretend like you haven’t been keeping tabs on me. But if you let me out of here…” He paused, looked at his hands, and then let out a long breath. “I’ll sure as hell find out for you.”
3
Moozana deliberated over it for a long time. Ward watched the cogs turn in his head, but his hard Martian face gave nothing away. It was shovel-shaped and about as expressive.
He finally gave in — by which time Ward was about to piss himself from all the seltzer water — and pushed back from the table. He spun the file around and pushed it across the metal surface with a dull hiss. His M2.0 Custom thudded down on top of it. Moozana had it on him the whole time.
“This is everything we have so far. My best investigators are already working on this, but as you said, it’s a delicate matter, at a delicate time. Prime Minister Chang is already on his way back from the outer reaches, and I want this sewn up before he arrives. And, as an added bonus, if this does turn out to be AIA interference in the capital — which is a violation of the Thessaly Treaty any way you spin it — it will be a good test of your allegiances. If my investigators come to that conclusion, then, well, that will be an illuminating time.” Moozana curled a wide smile, tossed a key to the cuffs onto the table, and then left, the door closing behind him.
Ward let out a long breath and reached for the file and his pistol. He ejected the mag, checked it, and then snapped it back into the grip before pushing it into the holster in the small of his back. He really did need to use the bathroom.
Outside, the corridors were empty. It was well
after the day staff had left the building and the sun had now long since set.
Ward’s heels thudded on the polished stone floor as he wound his way through the building, looking for a bathroom. He found one eventually and tossed the file onto the sink unit before relieving himself, letting the situation roll over in his head in the moment of stillness.
This couldn’t be AIA. It just didn’t make sense. It would have gone through Cootes if it was, and he would have told Ward, wouldn’t he? If not, what did he serve to gain from it? No, Cootes could be a jackass, but lying to Ward wasn’t going to do him any favors. Cootes knew he was too good not to find out eventually, and to tell him to go after this knowing that Ward would end up on his doorstep eventually? No, it didn’t fit. It was a stab in the dark that hit nothing, a grab for a familiar-looking puzzle piece on the off-chance it would slot in. It didn’t. Back to the pile then.
Ward zipped himself up and stepped toward the file lying between two sinks. He flipped the page and washed his hands, staring at the top image.
Anna Sadler was face down in the middle of one of the busiest streets in Eudaimonia. Her hands were at her sides, her feet parallel. Ward stared at it. She hadn’t been moving when she went down. She had been standing still and sank slowly, first to her knees, then onto her chest. Her hair was pooled around her neck. She hadn’t been surprised, not thrown her hands out to break her fall, not been shoved or thrown.
A dark pool of blood was spread around her like a black sheet and her eyes stared blankly into space over her right shoulder.
Ward dried his hands and picked up the folder. The photographs were bound in sets with bulldog clips — ones of the body, ones of the area. Investigator Initial Reports. Witness reports. Preliminary Coroner’s Reports. That’s why Moozana had been so long — not just to let Ward sweat, but to collect all the information from the scene. Ward smirked, letting himself out of the building and down the stone steps onto the road that ran in front of the HQ.