I took the screen out of her hand. I wanted to crumple it up and hurl it across the room, followed by a kitchen chair or two. Instead, I neatly replaced it on the fridge. Then, with my emotions on the flimsiest of leashes, I dialed Jose-Maria d’Alencon.
*
“Mike,” he said. “Heard.”
In my paranoid frame of mind, I wondered if he’d heard about what went down at Dr. Zeb’s. No. He would have been informed of my call to the police last night. “Bones,” I said, “I’m desperate.”
Sitting at my kitchen table, blindly moving my empty water glass around in circles, I told him the whole story of Lucy’s abduction.
D’Alencon listened, asked a couple of shrewd questions, and then summed up, “So your ex-wife is working for the Parsecs.”
“Yes.”
“And you believe that they kidnapped your child to stop you from poking your nose into their business.”
“Right.”
“OK, and you think they’re holding her at Ville Verde, although you don’t actually have any evidence for that.”
“If she’s not there, she could be anywhere,” I said, tasting the awful truth of it. “They might try to take her off-planet.”
“Well, I’ll initiate a missing persons case right now, because it’s you … and because it’s him. I would love to get something on him the prosecutor could not ignore. Sorry, Tiger, you know what I mean.”
“I know.”
“But we can’t raid his home or any of his places of business, not with what we got.”
“The footage shows Cecilia Parsec dragging Lucy into a car!”
“Yes, and I will seek to have her questioned. But we don’t know where that car went. I will order a review of the traffic footage, but unfortunately, all it takes is a cheap holo projector in the trunk to alter the visual profile of a vehicle and spoof its license plate. So my gut hunch is we won’t find any proof that the car returned to Ville Verde.”
“But—”
“Even if it did, Mike, it could take me weeks to get a warrant to go in there. I’ll apply for one, but don’t get your hopes up. Those gated communities are this close to being sovereign entities.”
Irene nodded as she heard d’Alencon’s cynical words coming from my phone. I had it on speaker.
“They got their own law departments, their own laws, in some cases their own launch pads.”
“Ville Verde doesn’t.”
“No, friend Parsec ain’t quite that rich, although I’m sure he would like to be. But that brings me to what I can do for you. You believe the kidnappers may attempt to send your daughter off-planet?”
“Yes,” I said. “My ex is from Montemayor. They might try to send her there.”
It was a moment before d’Alencon replied. “About your ex, Mike …”
“Yes?”
“Is her name Meimei? Or Pamela?”
“No! It’s Sophia. Sophia Hart.”
“I’m looking at my notes from the inquiries I conducted. There’s no one by that name working at Mujin Inc. They only got a few employees, mostly part-timers. The office manager is listed as Pamela Kingsolver.”
“Then that’s her. She’s using a fake ID.”
“There are no fake IDs that good,” d’Alencon said. “I ran deep background on all the employees. Pamela Kingsolver is a real individual, from Ulloa.” He named a Toolworld on the far edge of human territory. “She checks out on every level, right down to her DNA record.”
“Have you actually got any DNA samples from this Pamela Kingsolver, the one at Mujin Inc?” I said. “Do you have any pictures of her?”
D’Alencon’s silence told me no. And in a heavily surveilled city like Mag-Ingat, that was suspicious in and of itself.
“It’s her,” I said. “She’s a computer scientist. She’s faked an ID good enough to fool your software.”
“Be that as it may,” d’Alencon said stiffly, and I cursed myself for offending him. The police department took pride in its big-data advantage. They thought it was impossible for crooks to fool their systems. “We have no proof that Sophia Hart has stepped foot on Ponce de Leon for seven years. I’m not sayin’ she was not involved, but that leads me to think you may be correct that they’ll try to send your daughter off-planet … to wherever she is now.”
I gritted my teeth. It didn’t matter what he thought, as long as we found Lucy. “I got a friend out at the spaceport right now, watching Parsec’s freight terminal,” I said. Martin was not doing anything illegal, so I felt OK with admitting it. “But there’s no reason Parsec would have to use his own ship.” After all, he hadn’t used his own ship to send his contraband to Gvm Uye Sachttra. There were literally thousands of ships out there on Space Island; hundreds of them were for hire if the price was right; and I could imagine that all too many captains would look the other way if a frightened little girl were herded onto their ship, especially if they were informed that she was on her way to see her grandparents. “It’s a needle in a haystack,” I blurted.
“True,” d’Alencon said. “But there are two chokepoints leading onto Space Island. Namely, the East Causeway and Space Bridge. I’ll issue alerts to the traffic monitoring AIs in both places. I’ll need you to send me some recent vid of Lucy. We’ll open up the facial recognition parameters, and stop every little girl with the vaguest resemblance to Lucy Starrunner.”
I swallowed a lump of hopelessness. “Will do, Bones. Thanks.”
“I hate to bring it up at a time like this, Mike, but have you given any further thought to what we talked about last night?”
I had to wind time back in my mind, past the blind curve of Lucy’s abduction, until I got to what he was referring to. “Oh. Yeah.” I had nothing to give him. Silverback had not told us anything interesting. “Could be they’re holding her at Mujin Inc,” I blurted. “Could you get a warrant to go in there?”
Bones sighed. “Again, we would need more than your suspicions.”
“Damn,” I said emptily. “Hey, you might want to take a look at Trident Overland. Maybe they put her in one of those trucks …”
“That’s a possibility,” d’Alencon said, clearly realizing he was not going to get anything more useful out of me. “Thanks for the tip.”
I half-listened to his concluding reassurances, thinking about all the ways Lucy could be hidden from the eyes of the police department’s AIs … and all the other ways out of Mag-Ingat, by road, by sea, by air … and all the other spaceports on Ponce de Leon … and all the private pads—like the ones on Cape Agreste that d’Alencon had mentioned, and surely Parsec had some friends out on the Cape who’d let him use theirs. The fact was, I knew that any effort to stop him from taking her off-planet was hopeless. There were just too many travel options. It made me wish in vain for the days of passports, back before the widespread adoption of antimatter drives. Three to four hundred years ago, spaceflight was slower and riskier. Nowadays just about anyone could travel in space. The law had followed the technology, enshrining freedom of movement as a human right. By law, no human person could be disallowed from going anywhere. (Whether anywhere would let you stay, of course, was a different matter.) And now I saw what that freedom could cost me.
“We just have to find her before they send her off-planet,” I said to Irene, forcing myself not to think about the possibility that they already had.
“Yep,” Irene said. “Listen, Mike, I have to go meet Rex.”
“Where is he, anyway?”
“I’d rather not tell you yet … OK, OK. We’re trying to trace the contraband that might have been shipped in the toy fairies.”
“Fuck the toy fairies,” I said, opening the fridge.
“Uh uh,” Irene said. “It might be related.”
“I guess.”
“You might not know this,” she said carefully, “but contraband usually doesn’t originate on Ponce de Leon. We’re more of a transit hub. Stuff changes hands here and gets repackaged for onwards shipment. So, Rex and
I have—mmm—we know some people who handle … that kind of goods, that were not legally imported. They might know something.”
I stared blankly into the fridge, unable to remember why I’d opened it. A nectarine with two bites out of it stared back at me. Lucy had a terrible habit of taking bites out of a piece of fruit and then returning it to the fridge. The edges of the bites had just begun to go brown and soggy. Less than one day ago, she had been here, absent-mindedly nibbling on this nectarine as she watched holovision or did her homework.
I took the nectarine out of the fridge, and went into my bedroom for my gun.
“Where you going?” Irene said, pausing on her way out.
I located the Machina .22 and lodged the paddle holster inside my work pants. “Spaceport.”
“But …”
“I know,” I said. “I know!”
I took my gun because if I ran into Parsec, I was going to shoot the motherfucker dead.
41
I ate the nectarine on the way to Space Island. The traffic was awful. In preference to sitting there thinking, I drank from a mostly-empty bottle of bourbon I found in the glove compartment. By the time I finally drove over the bridge, the bottle was completely empty, and I was mostly toasted. I got out of the truck and loped over to Martin, feeling aggressive and ready to start some shit.
Martin sat sideways on his parked bike, on the shoulder of the intraport road. The front wheel of his bike rested about three inches from the boundary of Freight Terminal 1203, Parsec’s pad. The boundary itself was just a gutter dug out of the asphalt.
Three inches the other side of the gutter sat a bear, in human form, dressed in engineer’s coveralls and a ballcap that shaded his face. I knew him as Hokkaido, one of Parsec’s regular crew members. Clearly infuriated by Martin’s presence, and now mine, he obtrusively fondled a .45 that was so big of a dick substitute, it would have been funny under other circumstances.
Martin nodded to me, and went on talking to Hokkaido. “Then we had to decide what to do with the body. There aren’t that many places on an antimatter tanker to hide a corpse, believe it or not. Some of the guys wanted to throw him outta the skip field. I said no, we’ll get caught on the airlock cameras. Well, what are we gonna do, then. He’s gonna start to smell pretty soon. So I said, he ain’t started to smell yet.” Martin opened his mouth. It hinged wider, it seemed, than a human jaw should be able to. We could see the red inside of his throat, and the gaps in his molars. Shifters can’t get fillings. He closed his mouth, as Hokkaido stared in revolted fascination. “Then I ate him.”
“Get outta here,” Hokkaido said.
“I always thought he looked tasty,” Martin said, chuckling.
I pushed my shades up on my nose and looked past Hokkaido, across the expanse of overlapping old and new scorch rings on the asphalt. Fifty meters away, Parsec’s ship, the Great Bear, stood half in and half out of its hangar. The Great Bear was a pretty ship, with a swept-back arrowhead profile ending in the donut bulge of a powerful drive. Its whole body was a wing. Like my ship—like most all ships—it could spurt vertically off the ground to a height of a couple hundred meters, before going into a hypersonic launch trajectory at an angle no greater than 60°.
Even as I watched the Great Bear, another ship swept low overhead, drowning out Martin’s voice. With ships passing through the VTOL altitudes every three minutes, launching outside your slot would be insane. You’d risk a mid-air collision, and most definitely get your license taken away.
Parsec’s next scheduled launch slot wasn’t until the third of August, eight days from now—I kept tabs on these things. But I could see water hoses connected to the Great Bear, and a couple of Parsec’s other crew members working around the ship. Were they prepping her for an earlier launch? With Lucy on board? The sea breeze carried the smell of hot metal and machine oil, together with the usual Space Island tang of ozone from all the plasma exhaust dissipating into the air.
Hokkaido said to Martin, “No way. You didn’t eat a guy.” His gaze flicked to me, in what I took as a backhanded compliment: he believed I wouldn’t hire a man who would do something like that.
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t,” Martin said. “Anything can happen in the Cluster. You ever been to the Hurtworlds?”
“Nope.”
“Take Cuspidor Z. The natives got this fucked-up habit of eating their own body parts. Of course, that’s why it was classified as a Hurtworld in the first place.”
“Aliens,” Hokkaido said.
“And humans, nowadays. Anyway, who’s an alien? To many of them—” Martin waved in the direction of Mag-Ingat— “you and me are aliens, or as good as.”
“That’s too philosophical for him, Marty,” I said. “Way over his head.”
“I like ‘em dumb,” Martin said, giving Hokkaido a smile that made him shrink back a few feet from the boundary line and warn us about trespassing.
“Has anyone been in and out of here today?” I said, ignoring the bear.
“Only these guys,” Martin said. “Anyone else shows up, I’ll let you know before their shadow hits the ground.”
I nodded. There was no point me staying here, too. I’d just drive Martin mad as well as myself.
I left him regaling Hokkaido with more of his probably-untrue tales of the shipping industry, and drove to our own terminal. It was only half a mile as the crow flies, but three times that by road, as a lot of the smaller intraport roads are one-way.
Since I was last out here, Dolph had moved the ship inside the hangar—a pain-in-the-ass maneuver which involved jacking the auxiliaries up and rolling our motorized ship dolly underneath all four of them, one at a time. I parked at the entrance of the hangar, and walked in, glad to be out of the sun. The St. Clare still rested on the dolly, as if on a single giant rollerskate. The nissen-hut style roof of the hangar curved overhead, ribbed like the guts of Jonah’s whale. Our family of swallows twittered in the cool shadows up there. They weren’t really swallows, they were native PdL birds with nutcracker beaks and bronze plumage, but they sang beautifully, and they had come to live in our hangar, indifferent to the constant noise and the chemical fumes. We were grateful for their presence. Lucy liked to ride up in the cherrypicker and count their babies every time she was out here.
I moved around the ship, intending to check on the aft port radiator and the shrapnel damage to the hull. I couldn’t even see Martin and Dolph’s repairs, either because they were so good, or because of the tears in my eyes.
“Ahem?” I heard a mechanical throat-clearing from above my head. I angrily dashed my forearm across my eyes and looked up.
“Hi-dee-ho, Captain!” Mechanical Failure was lying in the port airlock, gripping onto its lip with his upper set of manipulators. “Hot enough for you?”
I stared up at the bot, which I normally considered the bane of my life. My current worries dwarfed that thorn in my side. “Yeah, it’s hot,” I said. “Go back in the ship, MF.”
“Something bothering you, Captain?” MF’s big optical sensor “eyes,” mounted above the speaker box that stood in for a mouth, goggled at me in his usual daft fashion. “Wanna watch a movie? That always cheers me up!”
The offer, which would normally have caused me a pang of annoyance, somehow felt like a friend’s arm around my shoulders. I had to wipe my eyes again. “No, I’m fine. Actually, I’m not fine. That motherfucker Buzz Parsec has kidnapped my daughter.”
I climbed halfway up the airlock stairs and sat on top of the aft port engine pod. MF poked the top half of his suitcase-like body out of the airlock. He listened in silence as I poured out the whole story.
Look, I know bots have no emotions. They are machines with a few more cross-firing electronic neurons. I believe that to this day. But it sure as hell felt like MF was sympathizing with me. His blinks, and the angles of the sensor covers that mimicked eyebrows, clumsily mirrored my feelings.
“So that’s why I’m here,” I finished. “If he takes off with
her. I’m going to dupe his destination coordinates and follow him, even if it means flying into the Core itself.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really,” I snapped, veering into sarcasm. I shook my head. “Didn’t even bring my kitbag. Don’t have a launch slot. Can’t you tell I’m drunk?”
“Yes, Captain. I have an atmospheric sampler with a sensitivity of 0.001 parts per million.” MF’s technical mode was even more offputting than his pervy mode. “I estimate that your blood alcohol level is 0.07 percent.”
I scowled at him. “Who needs a breathalyzer?”
“Captain, can I join in the search for your daughter? I might be able to help!”
I shook my head. “How could you help?”
MF was only a maintenance bot, not a private investigator. But as I spoke, I started to think about data analysis and pattern recognition. Maybe MF’s electronic brain could do something with the security camera footage that neither the police, nor our own phones’ AI assistants could do.
“First,” MF said, “I would like to examine the scene of the crime.”
My high hopes of the last few nanoseconds wavered. “Why?”
“There might be clues! The universe is governed by probabilities. Nothing is certain, even at the level of fundamental physics.”
“I know, but—”
“Therefore, nothing can be ruled out without a thorough investigation. Anyway, it can’t hurt to try, right?”
I sighed. This was rapidly starting to feel like a waste of time. But what other ideas did I have? “All right, come on.” I climbed down to the ground. MF spidered down the ladder after me, using his manipulator grips to swing himself from rung to rung, like a monkey. When he reached the floor of the hangar, he reverted to rolling on his tough little wheels. “You’ll have to ride in the back of my truck,” I said.
“Awww,” MF pouted. “I wanted to look around.”
“I’ll let you know when we reach the Strip. Plenty of scantily clad ladies there.”
“The Strip? Why are we going there? I want to inspect the scene of the crime. Your apartment.”
Lethal Cargo Page 24