Tilted Axis

by David Ryker

  Ward wove right without warning and headed down a side-street.

  He looped back around and crossed his own path, cutting left back toward the coroner’s office, scanning the alleys and sidewalks for any activity.

  He rejoined the main highway through the city and picked up some real speed, leaving behind whoever might have been on his tail.

  There’d been nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that jumped out, but he’d had a feeling, and considering someone had died that afternoon with a bullseye shot made from over two clicks, maybe seeing something out of the ordinary wasn’t going to be his downfall. Maybe it would be a fragmentary bullet right through the heart — and he wouldn’t even hear the shot before he hit the ground.

  He swallowed and pulled back harder on the throttle, the motor whining under him as the bike zoomed along, putting more distance between him and a potential shooter than he hoped one of those bullets could carry.

  Old Town grew closer as the skyscrapers switched sides and stood stoic behind him.

  He parked his bike across the river and headed over on foot. The narrow streets of Old Town weren’t good to ride in. Especially not at speed. There were a lot of tight corners — too many for Ward’s liking, especially with the feeling of eyes on him. Especially when he didn’t know whose.

  The river wound into the city from the plains, orange and lazy, the red silt bed coloring it bloody. It was a stark juxtaposition against the glass and aluminum footbridge that stretched across it. The metal frame arched gently across the span and glass arms, gnarled veins twisted into a double helix around the walkway.

  Couples stood at the rails peering out over the water, the Earth-styled lamps standing on the shores casting a dim glow over the surface.

  Some kids were gathered in the middle, smoking hemp cigarettes and laughing.

  A Martian with a shock of white hair approached in a dark coat walking a dog. A Rhodesian Ridgeback. An Earth breed. A fashion statement for a Martian. Humans were the same. They wanted a Martian wolfhound. A Martian terrier. Of course, they had actual names in Martian, but there’s no way most humans could wrap their tongues around the pronunciation, so they went with Martian whatever because it was easier than butchering a word that had no vowels and a bunch of sounds their throats were just the wrong shape to handle.

  But none of the people in the bridge were the ones who’d been watching him. The feeling had faded, the sixth sense drummed into agents and spooks that told them something was off. There was no explaining it, and most of the time it was a hindrance, but you couldn’t ignore it. It spilled over into real life all too often. You’d approach a bar for a drink and stop suddenly. Something wouldn’t be right. You’d leave and spend the six hours peeking through the blinds at home with a gun in your hand. You’d be in the supermarket putting groceries in a basket and someone would walk past the end of the aisle. The only thing you could do was put down the basket and get the hell out of there. But this wasn’t that. This wasn’t a paranoid knife between the ribs. This was real and the city was on its toes, poised to lash out in some way, somehow. It was hovering around him, on a knife edge, and something was going to happen. Something was brewing.

  Old Town swallowed him up and blasted away his thoughts with a swipe of laughter and stink.

  Groups of Martians and Humans, some separated, some mingling, seethed, bottles of alcohol in hand, arm in arm, singing and cheering. Laughing and dancing.

  Bars lined the road next to the river on one side, the other open to the water. Behind the first line of buildings, hidden in nooks and sidestreets, apartments, restaurants, galleries, cafés and all manner of other businesses lurked. Like cyber-docs.

  The city was clinical beyond the river, but Old Town, curled up inside a kilometer-wide meander, was the cultural hub. Somewhere that the two races came together. Ward faced a lot of derision working with the SB, so it was always good to come back to Old Town. He was glad, suddenly, that his biggest problem was which street food vendor to choose.

  With each bar he passed, different music spilled onto the cobbles. There was a communal atmosphere and people moved between the places freely. The bottles and cups, filled with sloshing alcohol, were all woven wood fiber, totally biodegradable. Come dawn, the streets would be lined with them, thrown to the ground in drunken stupors By the time anyone else woke up to shake off the hangover, the cleaner-bots would have scooped them all up and taken them to be mulched. They’d get boiled and cleaned and stripped into raw fiber, and then spun into more bottles and cups before being delivered to the bars and bottling plants to be refilled. People couldn’t be trusted not to throw stuff on the ground. At least this way there wasn’t any bad blood over littering. Earth wasn’t quite so forward thinking. Traditionalism would be the death of that planet.

  Ward wondered how much it’d changed in the seven years he’d been gone.

  That thought stopped him in front of a taco trolley, a Latino guy with a grease-stained white T-shirt and permanent forehead sweat from the steam of his bean cooker smiling at him. “Hola,” he said warmly.

  Ward nodded. “Hola. Uno con pollo — y cafe, negra con leche.” One with chicken and a black coffee with milk.

  “Si,” the taco man said, grinning at hearing his native tongue, and then he went to work.

  Ward waited patiently, taking in the sights and sounds, turning and scanning the faces in the crowd, his brain tuning out all the drunkards like a game of guess who. Were they drunk? Yes. They turned to blurs. Were they in a group? Blurry. Were they too out of shape to be the cause the clamminess on his skin? Blurry.

  It didn’t leave many people.

  Ward took his taco, paid for it with a swipe of the hand, the microcredit chip embedded in his palm linked to his account transferring the balance, and ate it, studying the crowd. He chewed slowly, watching the people move, looking for that one needle of straw out of place in the haystack.

  His coffee was strong and cheap, the way he liked it, the bitterness a welcome break from the spicy-sweetness of the chilis. He felt the caffeine squeeze into his veins and focus him.

  He turned and started walking, strolling casually.

  Every now and then he’d stop, look out over the water, watch the fish break the surface and then dive away, or talk to some passers-by. Some were tourists, others local. Most were drunk. He asked casually whether they’d heard about what had happened in Xaranaiah Square. Some had. Most hadn’t. The SB were keeping a lid on things. So far it was only word of mouth, and Eudaimonia was a big place.

  He covered about a hundred meters in fifteen minutes.

  After that he walked toward a bar and went in, ordering a water. He set up on the corner of the bar so that he could see out through the bi-folding doors at the front. They were pulled back, exposing the street to the inside, giving Ward a full view of everything moving past.

  After a minute he hid a smile, made a point of asking the bartender to watch his drink and went to the bathroom.

  Two minutes after that he came up behind a Half-Breed blonde standing near the door with a cigarette between his lips. “Hast du ein Feuerzeug?” he asked in fluent German. Got a light?

  She turned, answering abruptly, as she did. “Ich rauche nicht.” Her eyes widened as they fell upon Ward. “Shit.”

  Ward pulled the cigarette from his mouth with his left and pressed the muzzle of his M2.0 against her stomach with his right.

  She was slim but built strongly, her shoulders sloping and narrow, packed with lean muscle. Her face was angular, her cheekbones pronounced, her nose thin and pointed, eyes round and blue, burning like sapphires in her flushed cheeks. She was seething, her pink Martian lips quivering with rage. But it wasn’t hatred or disdain. There was no malice there. It was shame and annoyance. She was pissed at herself for being made. But she was making no effort to counter, to try and snatch the gun away, or even to get out of it.

  She sighed and met Ward’s eyes, the embarrassment apparent on her face.


  Ward let himself smirk a little. “You’re SB. Why?” He knew German was one of the languages that SB sentinels working in Eudaimonia had to know. There was a large German population living there, working in the engineering sector. But, being a Half-Breed, it wouldn’t have been her native language. Which meant, if she knew the language, that she’d have to be SB. If she didn’t… Well, he already had the M2.0 against her gut. And, hard-packed muscles or not, a bullet would have torn her apart. And it wasn’t like he wasn’t prepared to fire either. But, if he’d thought she was the one making his hair stand on end, then he already would have. In those situations, it’s better to shoot first and deal with the paperwork second. But he didn’t think she was. In fact, he was pretty certain. She was green as hell and he didn’t get his back up for people like her.

  “Why am I SB?” she said incredulously, her head shaking a little, long, naturally platinum blond hair shimmering in the warm glow of the bar lights.

  Ward analyzed her face. She was definitely half-Martian, half-Human, but he wasn’t trying to home in on her Human heritage. Scandinavian, maybe? “Why are you tailing me?” He jabbed her gently with the M2.0, to let her know he was expecting a concise and honest answer.

  She narrowed her eyes, knowing he’d smell bullshit like a bloodhound. “Moozana put me on you, to see what you’d do. Where you’d go. Whether you’d report in what you found. I was sent to—”

  Ward dropped the gun and she cut off. He pushed it back into his holster and sighed. He hadn’t checked in — which was protocol — as a little eff you to Moozana. But he’d obviously been expecting that, and Ward’s attitude seemed to have landed him a babysitter. “Don’t suppose you’re just here to get a status report before you head off home?”

  She gritted her teeth and glowered at him. “I was told to hang back, keep an eye on you from a distant — maintain a low profile, follow up on your leads, report in.”

  “And how’s that going for you?”

  Her eyes narrowed down to little blue slits. “So what’ve you found out?”

  Ward measured her. Didn’t look like Moozana had filled her in on what was happening. At least not fully. Or on who she was supposed to be tailing. If he had, then she would have been more careful.

  He wondered what her story was. Who was she? Who was she to Moozana? Was she here as punishment or reward? “What’s your name?” Ward asked, ignoring her question.

  “Arza. Erica.” Her reply was as blunt as the question.

  Ward stuck out his bottom lip. “What’d you do?” He was leading her, not leaning one way or the other with his question, but waiting for her to tell him whether it was a punishment or prize.

  “To get stuck tailing you?“

  Punishment then. Ward gave nothing away, but it was good to know how Moozana viewed him, even if it was unwarranted — which it was. He was the fifth through the door to the coroner’s office, and yet he’d picked up something none of the others had. And as for the cyber-aug, the coroner had noted her eye, but not that it looked fresh. Maybe he wasn’t that familiar with them. Maybe he’d just missed it. Who knew? It was something, though, that Ward knew, that he didn’t think anyone else did. And, if he zeroed in on the cyber-doc responsible, then he’d have a really solid lead and no one jostling to take it off him. Except now he’d picked up a direct line back to Moozana. As soon as he was on to something, he’d have the investigation snatched out from under him. He knew that.

  The pressing question now was how sharp this Erica Arza was. He stepped back a little and scanned the crowd automatically. Arza was half a head shorter than him, but she was holding herself like she could take pretty much anyone apart without too much trouble. It made Ward smile. She even had her hands half curled at her sides, still squashing down her anger at being made like she had been.

  It wasn’t that she was that obvious. She was obvious, but not the worst Ward had seen. There weren’t many Half-Breeds around, and certainly not many that were as attractive as she was. Most had high hairlines, pronounced foreheads.

  He never got the attraction to Martians himself, but he could see how some might. And yet, there was something about Arza, like she’d gotten the best of both species. It wasn’t that there weren’t other attractive women there, either. But nothing stuck out more than someone who was attractive, out in Old Town, trying to not look attractive. That and the fact that she’d walked past once, cast a glance inside, then come back and stopped by the door, fiddling with her communicator absently like she was scrolling her news feed with no apparent agenda.

  Women didn’t do that, not in Old Town. They went to bars to get guys to buy them drinks, or to meet friends. It was a few little things that pulled her out of the crowd for him.

  Ward wanted to push her, see whether that rage would, and could, bubble over. If he could get her to compromise herself, she’d get tossed off his tail. He’d have an hour or two then before someone else picked up the baton. And if she didn’t snap under the pressure he was about to put on her, and she held herself well, then she might have been of use. Moozana might have been punishing her, but he wouldn’t put someone who didn’t know what they were doing on him. Ward was too slippery for someone totally useless.

  “This your first field assignment?”

  She hardened, glaring at him. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  Ward shrugged. “Just asking. You seem young. Inexperienced, obviously,” he said absently.

  She opened her mouth to retort, the venom rising. He watched the spark in her eyes, an exposed wire spitting at spilled gasoline. After a second, it faded and she regained herself, the protruding vein in her forehead receding. “I’m here because Moozana believes me more than capable of handling you, Miller. But if you’d prefer to berate me than focus on the case, then everything they say about you is true.” There was cool scorn in her voice, but it was a surgical amount, perfectly doled out without a hint of rage to guide it. Ward had his answer.

  He exhaled slowly and cracked a wry smile. “So, tell me. What do you know about cyber-docs?”

  Part II

  The Hunt

  Historical Archive Information

  Extract Retrieved From:

  Samantha Fairbrother’s “Terraforming in the 23rd Century”

  Published, October 2298

  Their method was simple and highly effective. Mars, of course, had a very thin atmosphere prior to their interference. We — and by ‘we’, I mean humans, were making a meager effort to make the place livable, though our one-hundred-year plan involved lots of connected greenhouses, and not much else.

  Their first terraforming-capsule was approximately one hundred and eighty kilometers in length and was filled with highly compressed nitrogen. It impacted at the North Pole and flooded the atmosphere with somewhere in excess of two hundred trillion tons of nitrogen. The heat of the impact caused a mass melting of the ice present, releasing hundreds of billions of gallons of water, and vast quantities of trapped CO2. Further impacts over the following decades with similar effects thickened the atmosphere and provided the surface with liquid water — enough to support the growth of Gods-Moss.

  Things began to change very quickly after that.

  6

  “You said seven,” Arza growled, standing from her chair outside the café, looking overly formal in an ash gray suit and white button down.

  It was after nine by the time Ward rounded the corner and came toward her in jeans and a hide jacket. She was right, though, he had said seven. But then again, he’d stayed up until three researching cyber-docs in the area, trawling through the social media sites for any chatter, and reading up on fragmentary bullets — apparently, you couldn’t just buy them over the counter. They were outlawed by the OCA, along with spiral-blade knives, nerve agents, and a bunch of other deadly things. There wasn’t any coming back from one. Too cruel for war. Ward had gotten a kick out of that one.

  As for social media, everything was abuzz for the return of Tremel Cha
ng, the Martian prime minister, who was set to return from his three-year tour of the Colonial Axis. But opinions were split. There were those who loved him — a Half-Breed ruling Mars? Hell, it was doing wonders for race relations in the Axis. A large percentage of the population was calling out for acceptance, peace, equality among the two races, and having a Half-Breed prime minister was a big step toward that. But there were others who were less happy about the whole thing. And those were the ones that Ward had spent the night checking up on.

  When seven a.m. had rolled around, he was out of bed and standing by the window in his hotel room, overlooking the street with the café on it where he’d arranged to meet Arza. She’d arrived on time and he’d cracked wry smiled. And then he’d gone back to bed.

  He hadn’t ridden back out to the mesa the night before. It’d contemplated it, but It was a long ride just to come right back in the morning, so he’d elected to stay in a cheap apartment-hotel in Old-Town. He knew it well — the proprietor was an older Martian lady. Nice enough place, the sheets were clean, and his usual room had a wide view of four incoming streets. And it only accessible via the entrance at the front, and through an enclosed courtyard at the back. The buildings were reminiscent of the European architecture you’d find in Paris, or Vienna maybe. It suited Ward. It felt a little like home.

  The streets below were quiet in the daytime. Old-Town came alive at night, but in the day it was the same as any other suburban neighborhood, just a little seedier. And yet, it was still home to the best restaurants, the best bars, the best clubs, the best women, the best tattooists and body modders, the best cyber-docs.

  Arza’s voice carried to him as he walked out of the hotel and stepped off the curb. She was flushed and angry, and seemed more annoyed by the fact that he’d been staying right across the street and was still late than anything at all — as if it was even more careless. But nothing Ward did was careless. He’d told her seven and made her wait until nine for a reason. He’d told her to meet at the café so she’d see him come out of the door for a reason. He’d come out of that door for a reason. He could have gone through the courtyard, cut through the baker’s on the adjacent street and circled around. But he wanted to see what she’d do, how she’d react. Maybe it was morbid curiosity. Maybe it was a little bit of sadism, a little once-removed screw you to Moozana for putting a tail on him.