Tilted Axis

by David Ryker

  “You can take me, show me around. I always wanted to live in one of those townhouses — brownstones, they call them?”

  Ward tried to speak.

  “Shh, save your strength — just stay awake, okay? Ward? Ward?” Her voice became distant and strange. “Can you hear me? Ward?” She started to fade, pulsing away into the darkness. “Where are you? Ward? Ward!”

  He sat upright in bed, twisting instinctively, his sweat-soaked hands wrapped around the grip of his M2.0, pointing it right at the bedroom door.

  It opened and Arza froze, throwing her hands up. “It’s me, it’s okay. I was calling for you — didn’t you hear?”

  Ward exhaled and tossed the pistol between his knees, rubbing his eyes, the nightmare-headache receding and his heart rate slowing. He’d hoped that one would eventually go away, but it never did. He didn’t know how many times he’d have to relive that night, but while he was working this case, he figured it was going to be a few more. It was the last time he’d seen Sadler — and his right arm, for that matter — though he didn’t dream about his arm like he did Sadler.

  “Are you okay?” Arza asked, not stepping across the threshold.

  Ward drew a deep breath, blotted his forehead dry on the comforter and swung his legs off the bed. He hadn’t bothered to undress before he’d laid down and now his shirt was damp. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he grunted, pushing himself to a stance and pulling his shirt over his head. “What did you find out?”

  Arza’s eyes went to his shoulder and chest, to the scarring running over his ribs and up toward his neck — shrapnel marks that disappeared into a seam of perfect flesh, where he ended and his arm began.

  He slung the shirt on the bed and went to the chest of drawers in the corner, pulling out a vacuum-sealed pouch and tearing it open.

  He slipped the new shirt on and re-holstered his M2.0 on the bedside. “Arza? What’d you find out?”

  She cleared her throat and folded her arms. “Uh — the SB doesn’t have anything on the code. They’re running cipher programs on it, have a bunch of analysts checking into Sadler and everything else — the AIA are being very cooperative — but there’s nothing yet. Apparently, Moozana’s not even convinced it’s of importance. Could be anything.”

  “Did you tell them about the date? Of my arm, I mean.”

  Arza’s jaw tightened. “I thought about it, but… I don’t know, I didn’t.”

  Ward measured her. “Don’t trust your sister?”

  “I do, it’s just… I don’t know that I trust anyone else and I didn’t want to put a target on her back, either.”

  “Good. That was smart.” Ward squeezed past Arza at the doorway, and headed for the kitchen. In the refrigerator he found some ration packs and pulled them out. He set the microwave and slung two of them in, not waiting for Arza to confirm she was eating. It was important to eat. To keep energy levels high.

  “What about you?” Arza approached the table and put her hands over the back of the seat tucked under it.

  “Salva’s dead — the coroner on duty last night.” Ward sighed, staring into the microwave. The plate turned inside and Sadler’s face spun around his mind. “And Sadler’s body is gone.”

  “Dead? What do you — wait — gone?” Arza was shocked. “What do you mean gone? Gone where?”

  “Cremated. Salva ordered it, wiped the file off the server and took the hard copy. I went over to his apartment. He was already dead — shot between the eyes.” Ward touched his forehead to illustrate. “And the file was gone.”

  Arza swore in Martian. “You call it in?”

  “Anonymously. Still not sure who we can trust.”

  “Are you worried they’ll think—”

  “That I did it?” Ward shrugged. “We were in Old-Town when he died. The magic eye in Matsumoto’s clinic will be our alibi when they get TOD. I’m not worried. And if they want to put me in a frame for it, well, alibi or not, they still will.”

  Arza watched him for a few seconds. “Moozana’s gunning for you. You know that? He wants you to check in. A shootout in Old-Town, a lead suspect dead? He wants you back at HQ.”

  Ward cracked a smile. “I’d put money on us being the only two legit investigators working this thing right now. We get pulled off it and more evidence is going to go missing, more leads are going to disappear. We give an inch and the trail is going to go cold real fast. Hell, it pretty much is already. Someone’s plugging holes faster than we can poke them.”

  The microwave beeped and Ward pulled two plates out of the cabinet over the sink. He dealt them onto the table like cards and pulled the ration-packs, sausage, rice, and beans, out of the microwave and tossed one onto each plate.

  Cutlery clinked on the table and Ward gestured for Arza to sit.

  He tore his pack open as she did and dumped the steaming contents onto the plate.

  “So what do we do now?” she asked, pulling apart the sides of her pouch and letting the beans run into a pile in front of her.

  Ward pushed a forkful of food between his teeth and chewed thoughtfully. “We keep going. We start thinking differently. We’re all out of leads, so we make some. We draw them out, force their hand. Make them make a move, and then we hit back.”

  “And how the hell do we do that?” Arza asked, pushing the rations around her plate with a look of mild disdain on her face.

  Ward swallowed and looked right at her, and then shrugged. “Eat up. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  10

  “So where do we go from here?” The words rolled around in Ward’s head.

  Sadler was dead, her body gone. Salva was dead and the SB would be crawling all over his apartment. They couldn’t go back to the Bureau, or they’d be pulled off the case. Arza would be interrogated, she’d give up the apartment and then they’d know that the AIA were still working ops in Eudaimonia — in direct violation of the Thessaly Treaty. Really not a good thing at a time like this. It would set back OCA relations by decades. It would also get Ward thrown in prison. And then the prime minister would be assassinated and everything would royally go to shit.

  No, he’d have to keep Arza close — keep her working the case, at least until he could figure out what his out-strategy was. Cootes knew about Arza, and he’d be thinking of something — that was what he did. Think of things. In the meanwhile, they’d just have to keep working the case. But now what? Where did they go from here?

  Arza stared at him over the table, the question hanging between them.

  Where could they go from there?

  “Did they ever find the location of the shooter?” Ward said, going over the order of events.

  “They think it was a rooftop — at the end of Xaraniah Square place. They found screw holes from a fixed bipod — into the concrete of the ledge.” Arza reeled off the information she’d got from her sister.

  “Okay, well we don’t know who the shooter is. And we don’t know what the numbers mean. And we don’t know where they’re holed up. And we don’t have a cyber-doc to help us ID them.”

  “Is there a ‘but’ coming?” Arza looked hopeful.

  Ward but into his bottom lip. “The way I figure it, we’ve got two leads to follow up on. The coroner’s office — we see if Salva had a visit from anyone during work hours — which I very much doubt.”

  “And the second one?”

  “The rifle.”

  “We don’t have the rifle.”

  “No, you’re right — we don’t. But I know that it takes a big one, high caliber, to shoot two thousand meters in the open air with that much accuracy. I doubt that they come cheap. I don’t know if they brought it with them or bought it here, but either way, it’s something we don’t know anything about. If they managed to get themselves into the city, they probably brought the rifle with them — or at least had it smuggled in. You think you could reach out to your sister, see if you can pull magic-eye footage from the coroner’s office?”

  She nodded and reached into her po
cket. “Sure — she gave me her communicator — they won’t know it’s not her using it. She has a spare. I can contact her.”

  Ward nodded. Arza was smart, he’d give her that. “Okay, in the meanwhile, we need to find a gunsmith, someone who knows what they’re talking about. Why are you smiling?”

  Arza’s mouth widened, exposing a beautiful set of white teeth. “I might know someone.”

  ‘Klaymo’s Rifles and Hunting Goods’ was outside the city.

  Klaymo was an old Martian, tanned and veined like a piece of ginger. His farm was a traditional Martian construction, domed like bubbles mounted on bubbles. It was a hand-mixed alcrete blend, made the old way — lengths of Martian bamboo braided and curved into a dome and then overlaid with limed Gods-Moss. Klaymo wasn’t one for the new way of doing things — guess it was lucky for him that despite their green outlook on life, hunting was totally legal.

  Meat wasn’t commercially farmed on Mars. If you wanted to eat it or sell it, you had to hunt it yourself. Buying it was expensive, because it meant it was coming from someone who killed it themselves. Guys like Bluk and the taco vendor spent their mornings and weekends out on the plains, hunting their produce.

  The system kept meat consumption to a minimum — about eighty percent of the populace was vegetarian. Ward? He’d rather pay the premium. He had a hunting rifle at his place on the mesa and a curing shed out back, but neither got much use. Ward didn’t like killing needlessly and he got paid enough to buy it when he wanted it. Shooting animals was somehow more cruel to him than shooting Humans. Maybe he just didn’t like people as much.

  They pulled up at Klaymo’s, the solar buggies he rented to hunters parked in a row next to the house-come-shop. The sign was etched right into the alcrete frontage. The door was arched but closed for the day. The sun was getting low and the shop had already been shut up. No one hunted at night. The Martian wolves were too fast and quiet for that fool’s errand.

  Ward killed the bike and Arza swung her leg off, pushing back from Ward’s shoulders. She’d kept her face pressed to his back the whole way out — he guessed she’d never been on a bike before, though neither of them said anything. It was the only reason he could think of that she would have held on so tight.

  “This is the place,” Arza announced.

  Ward looked around. Eudaimonia glittered in the distance, but otherwise, the plains stretched out endlessly.

  The journey had taken nearly half an hour, and it was the only time in the last twenty-four hours that Ward had felt relaxed. Just riding, the wind in his face, and the smell of the grasslands on the air — and having no vantage points they could be picked off from for fifteen clicks in every direction was the best part of all.

  “Is this guy going to even remember you?” Ward asked, putting his hands on his hips and looking up at the seemingly darkened building. He couldn’t see any lights burning.

  “Hope so. He and my father have known each other for years.”

  “Worked SB together?” Ward asked casually.

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Before he went to work for the Defense Committee?”

  She fired him a strange look — surprise flecked with annoyance. “You looked into me?”

  Ward shrugged. “Need to know who’s watching my back.”

  “Are you satisfied?”

  “I’ll let you know when the bullets start flying. Now come on.”

  They headed up the drive toward the front door, with Arza in the lead. She was striding purposefully. Ward was watching the windows and the corners. Whoever’d been on the tail had been right there every time — first with Ootooka and then with Salva. Ward wasn’t going to get caught out again.

  Arza knocked confidently and waited, rolling back and forth on the balls of her feet. She said she hadn’t been there for years, since she was a teenager. When her father had been friends with Klaymo, in their Bureau days, he used to bring Erica and her sister out here a lot. They’d go hunting together, she’d said. But since her father had been taken on by the Defense Committee, he spent a lot of time off-world, and their friendship had just sort of gone by the wayside. Still, she was confident that he’d remember her, and she said he was the best shot she’d ever seen — that he knew everything there was to know about rifles. SB sharpshooter, trainer, firearms consultant. She swore blind that if anyone was going to be able to point them in the right direction, it would be Klaymo. Except it didn’t seem that he was home.

  Arza sighed. “Shit.”

  “Car’s here.” Ward nodded toward a good-looking red vehicle under a carport to their right. It looked fast — a custom piece of hardware. “He a bit of a car-nut?”

  Arza shrugged. “Among other things.”

  “Out hunting maybe?”

  Arza turned and looked up, tweaking her ears. “Shh, you hear that?”

  Ward held his breath and closed his eyes. He did. A patch of silence, a barely audible hiss, and then a dull clunk.

  “Is that a hammer?” Arza asked, squinting.

  “Reloading press.” He made the motion, grabbing a handle next to his head and pulling it down to his waist. “Clunk. For making bullets.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He shrugged. “Just a hunch. Come on, it’s coming from around back.”

  Arza followed Ward around the house, closing in on the dull thudding of the reloader.

  A workshop stood a little back from the house, the doors hanging open, a dim light spilling out onto the dirty courtyard.

  The clunking got louder as they neared. Ward circled to come in from the front so as not to sneak up, but it didn’t matter — Klaymo might have been old, but his hearing was as sharp as ever.

  Ward didn’t even reach the threshold before the stout barrel of a shotgun stuck its nose out and into the flesh above his Adam’s apple.

  “You got a deathwish sneaking up on a gunsmith, boy,” Klaymo said sourly.

  Ward held his hands out and stepped back gently as he was walked into the open. Klaymo was short for a Martian, but lithe and muscular. His skin was like old leather, two sizes too big, hanging off his face and arms. He’d been bigger in his youth, muscular and stout. Now, he was withering, but still prepared to put up a hell of a fight.

  His thin gray hair shook around his head as his chin wobbled, his knobbled fingers like a crab’s pincer around the barrel of the shotgun. Shaking but strong as hickory and ready to take the kick when he pulled the trigger.

  “Don’t mean any harm, Klaymo,” Ward said carefully.

  “What do you mean, huh? I could shoot you right here — well within my rights to do so. So why don’t you give me one good reason—”

  “Klaymo?” Arza’s voice was gentle, young all of a sudden.

  He froze and turned his head, his thin turkey neck like a beanstalk under it. “Is that… Er— Erica?”

  Arza broke into a genuine smile of affection. “Yeah, it’s me, Klaymo.”

  He grinned back at her, his narrow teeth yellowed with time. “It’s… it’s good to see… What are you doing here?” He looked from her to Ward and back.

  “We need your help, Klaymo,” she said calmly.

  He nodded, a little at first, and then with more conviction. “Okay… Yeah, I mean, sure… Of course. Anything for an Arza.”

  She sighed, relieved. “Great — then would you mind putting down the gun?”

  The muzzle dropped from Ward’s neck, leaving a red ring in the skin. He breathed a little easier and dropped his hands. “For a second there I thought you were going to blow my head off.”

  Klaymo shrugged and turned away. “I was.”

  “That’s one hell of a story,” Klaymo said, sitting back in his fur-covered chair. It was an old wing-back draped with the hide of a Martian bear — though the Martian bear was closer to an eight-foot-tall bi-pedal wolf than anything else. When the full biome had finally been set up and the Martians released the reared cubs into the wild to complete the ecosystem, sto
ries of werewolves started rippling back to Earth — Humans had never seen anything like it. For the Martians, it wasn’t anything new — just more good eating.

  Arza sighed and rubbed her head, draining what was left in her tumbler. “You’re telling me.”

  They’d migrated back into the house once Arza had told Klaymo why they were there. He’d been asked to be brought up to speed on everything before weighing in.

  “And you said it was a Glock 17 at… Ootoonga’s?” he asked, his old voice like rice being rattled in a can. He looked like he could barely remember where his car keys were, and he got almost every name in their story wrong, but when it came to the weapons, he was right on the money.

  Ward nodded. “Yeah, modified. And it was Ootooka.”

  “Eh,” Klaymo snorted and waved him off. “Doesn’t matter — he’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Ward almost laughed. “Oh yeah. He’s definitely dead.”

  Klaymo scratched at his wrinkled chin. “Nice piece of hardware to just leave lying around, frame job or not.”

  “What do you mean?” Ward was getting sick of asking him to explain everything, but he kept leading in with vague statements and then staring at the mounted heads over the fireplace.

  There was a heavy, gnarled mantlepiece sunk into the alcrete and stone chimney and a fire crackled and spat in the hearth.

  Klaymo rolled the bottle of whiskey around on his knee, thumbing at the cork. “Well, they didn’t buy it in the city, that much is for sure.”

  “How do you know?”

  He scoffed. “No one stocks Glock on Mars. When the Martian Republic and the United Nations struck the peace deal that we’re all so thankful to have,” he said, lifting his arms as if to faux-curtsy — though Ward didn’t quite know why he’d do that, or why he wouldn’t like the Thessaly Treaty — which just so happened to be the only thing that was keeping the OCA in one piece just then — “there was a hiked trade tax enforced on imported Human weapons to UMR colonies. A trade embargo on heavy arms and large shipments meant that logistics got very expensive per unit. You won’t find any stores here slinging Human hardware.”