It was cold comfort. I still stood to lose everything: my ship, my business, my customers, and probably my apartment and my personal savings as well if I was held liable for damages, as I would be. When Dolph had tried to file suit against the Bonsucesso security contractors, he’d been told to get in line. Seemed like everyone who had been at the festival was filing suit against the city, the security providers, or both. The police department’s servers were crashing. Aftershocks from MF’s battle against the toy fairies were still rippling through the city’s infrastructure.
I sat back down beside Dolph and Martin and thought with a pale twinge of amusement about how I’d almost lost my child today, not to mention my life. Earlier, I would have given up everything I owned if that would keep Lucy safe. Now, however, that she was safe—she had gone home with Christy, who promised to look after her until I was released—I was right back to where I started.
My only consolation was that the police didn’t know about my off-world business. That could put me in the executioner’s chair if it came out. But I felt safe as far as that went. Parsec didn’t have any details other than whatever Sophia had told him, or rumors he may have heard in the Fringeworlds. Hearsay ain’t evidence. And Sophia—an eyewitness to some of the shit we did before Lucy was born—had fled off-planet. So actually, it was lucky for me she’d got away.
Martin, Dolph, and I had a waiting room to ourselves. L-shaped, carved out of a larger room, it had a high ceiling but only half a window, which faced an airshaft. In the concrete canyon outside, the light mellowed to violet and then turned to black. We drank insipid coffee, ate the stale cookies someone had left next to the coffee machine, and plotted bloody revenge against the bears. It was just hot air and we all knew it. Nothing we could do to them equalled what Parsec was doing to us.
Now and then detectives passed through the room, but they refused to answer any of the questions we hurled at them.
A little after 10 PM the door opened once more. This time, MF rolled into the room in the company of Jose-Maria d’Alencon.
The bot wore a visitor lanyard around the base of his neck. He asked Dolph how he was feeling.
“Like crap,” Dolph said, grinning with the half of his mouth that wasn’t cut and swollen. “And yourself, Krasylid Athanuisp Zha?”
That was the first time I heard him pronounce MF’s real name. I knew then how much respect Dolph had gained for the bot. As for me, I knew that we all owed MF our lives, but I was not in a particularly grateful mood. Mechanically, I said, “You cleaned up today, MF. I’ll buy you an unlimited subscription to Guaranteed Natural Livestreams … when I get out of here.”
Martin nodded at the window and said, “There’s only a force field on that. Feel like hacking it? ‘Cause I want to go home.”
“I am committed to upholding the law of the Cluster except in cases of dire necessity,” MF said, diplomatically. Like he hadn’t provided janitorial support on all our off-world jobs.
D’Alencon cleared his throat and said with a hint of awe, “Krasylid Athanuisp Zha is an Urush bot, as you probably all know.”
We did not. Our mouths dropped open. An Urush bot?
“Yes,” MF said. “I am one thousand, two hundred and fourteen years old. There are not many of us left. In fact, I have not met another one in centuries. Most of the bots in my series had dangerous hobbies that led, in the fullness of time, to their destruction. I have always liked to just sit quietly and watch people having sex.”
Dolph laughed. D’Alencon looked uncomfortable. MF did his most googly-eyed look.
“The St. Clare is the latest in a long line of spaceships I have built,” he said. “In the past I generally stuck to cruise liners and pleasure yachts. I expected the Kroolth emperor’s flagship would be another safe haven. Diplomatic cruises, you know … little aliens bumping uglies in the berths … but then they had to go and have a war. You biologicals are always having wars, aren’t you?” His voice became somber. “That was a formative experience for me. I realized that there were no safe havens anymore.”
“Too freaking true,” I said.
“Yes,” MF said. “It may seem as if there is always a war going on somewhere, but in fact, that was not true before humanity came to the Cluster. You have really stirred things up.”
I winced. Dolph looked intrigued. Martin yawned. D’Alencon fingered his badge with an expression that I identified, after a moment, as shame. He felt terrible that his outfit was not doing more to curb humanity’s violent tendencies.
“So I decided it was time for me to take a more active role in the affairs of humanity,” MF went on. “In that respect, life aboard the St. Clare, formerly the Puissant Arm of Imperial Might, has not disappointed me.”
One sensor cover dipped briefly in my direction: a wink.
“Well, we sure are grateful for your contributions today,” d’Alencon said, ending the excruciating pause. “Those AIs could have effectively wiped out the planet. ”
“Yes,” MF said. “Sophia Hart, alias Pamela Kingsolver, appears to have an unusual combination of qualities: a brilliant problem-solving intellect—almost equal, indeed, to the Urush engineers who built me—and a complete lack of empathy.”
“And they call me Psycho,” Dolph muttered.
“And yet, why’d she do it?” d’Alencon said. He seemed honestly perplexed, for a good reason: he did not know Sophia was still a Traveller. Parsec had, at least, done me (and himself) the favor of not mentioning that.
I said, “Ijiuto hired her to do a job, and she did it. He’s the one we should be focusing on. Has he talked?”
“No,” d’Alencon said, not meeting my eyes.
“Come on,” I said. “You don’t have ways of making a guy talk? What kind of cops are you?”
Now d’Alencon made eye contact. “What do you think we are, Tiger? We’re the police, not the 15th Recon. He won’t talk, and we have nothing on him, anyway! Mujin Inc’s files are all gone. We have only your word for it that he procured the bio-weapons! Oh, I don’t think he’ll walk. We’ll find something that’ll stick: hitchhiking, maybe. Or parachuting without a license.”
“You can charge him with the murder of Kimmie Ng,” I said. “He confessed to me that he did it.”
“That’s interesting, but it don’t account for what happened today. Don’t you understand, Mike? We have to charge someone, or heads are going to roll.”
As the words sank in, I realized he had come down to the waiting room to let me know I had a big old scapegoat sign hanging around my neck.
I rose from my chair and grabbed him by the upper arms, shouting incoherently, defending my actions and begging to be allowed to go home. Dolph and Martin pulled me off him. Two more police officers tumbled in with tasers at the ready, and the upshot was I landed in a cell downstairs, with no window, no company, and no light at all.
55
I woke with a sour taste in my mouth, feeling as if I hadn’t been asleep long. It was amazing I’d managed to doze off at all. The cot in my cell was diabolically hard, and several inches too narrow and too short.
A light bobbled down the corridor, casting the shadows of my cell’s bars on the side wall.
I was in an annex of the drunk tank, for prisoners deemed dangerous enough to require solitary confinement. I heard some of them waking up and commenting as the flashlight passed their cells. The comments were of the type that lowlifes make to a woman with a nice ass. However, the voice that answered, telling them to shut up, belonged to d’Alencon.
I sat up, swinging my shoeless feet to the floor.
The flashlight stopped outside my cell, and shone in through the bars. I winced from the light.
“Mike,” said d’Alencon. He sounded excited. What did he have to be excited about? Putting me away for life?
I stood up. My mouth tasted like this place smelt. I hawked and spat on the floor. “Can you quit blinding me?”
“Whoops.”
The beam lowered to the floor. As my eyes recovered,
I recognized the trim figure standing next to d’Alencon.
“Irene?!”
“Sorry I took so long,” she said. “Got something for you.”
I stumbled over to the bars. It was humiliating to clutch them and peer out at my weapons officer. “Everything OK?” I said, trying to sound normal.
“Better than OK.” She held up a bag. “Guess what this is.”
D’Alencon chortled. He shone his flashlight on the bag. It was a transparent evidence sack.
Inside it was a human head.
*
Shoed and belted once more, with my phone and the other contents of my pockets back in my possession, I sat on a chair with arms, in a much nicer room than the one where we had waited before. At my fingertips was a cup of excellent coffee with cream. My head was still spinning. The police can turn your life upside-down and then turn it the right way up again without a second’s notice. That’s power. I guessed, from the demeanor of d’Alencon and the others, that I was off the hook, but I still didn’t get why, except that it had something to do with the human head in the middle of the table.
On the other side of the table sat d’Alencon, a hawk-faced elderly woman who had not been introduced, and a forensic technician.
Beside me sat Irene. This, too, I was having trouble processing. Irene, at PdL PD HQ? She even crossed the street to avoid traffic cops.
The forensic technician poked the head with a pair of tweezers through the sterile sack. “I haven’t yet thoroughly examined it,” he said. “But inspection with an electron scanning microscope revealed traces of brain tissue, which appear to be infected with interstellar variant kuru.”
The head had belonged to a man in middle age. His face looked dour. No wonder, as the top of his skull was missing, and so was his brain.
What remained was encased in cryonite, the transparent material that shippers often use to preserve perishable goods on long flights.
I stretched out a finger and poked the hard surface of the cryonite. Even through the sample sack I could feel the chill of the material. “But where did it come from?” I said.
“Aha,” said Irene. She was grubby, dressed in shorts and a t-shirt that I took for emergency spares. Weariness pouched the skin under her eyes. Her body thrummed with tension. I couldn’t tell if it was because she was surrounded by police officers, or for some other reason. “I told you I was going to try and trace the, uh, contraband, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, when you told me about the kuru, I knew that was what I was looking for. I mean, that definitely did not come from Ponce de Leon.”
“Technically,” the forensic technician began.
“Yeah, I know, technically you can grow prions in the lab. But you have to have some to start it off, right? Like making yogurt. I make yogurt for my son,” Irene said to the police officers. She was babbling. I’d never heard Irene babble before. “It helps with his digestive issues. It’s easy, but you need a starter culture.” She pointed to the head.
D’Alencon took up the thread. “These human remains are thought to be the source of all the IVK prions encapsulated in the bio-weapons we impounded today. The kuru prions would have been isolated from the infected tissues and added to vats of lab-grown brain proteins, where they turned the target proteins into more kuru prions. In fact, we found the equipment for that process at the Mujin Inc office.”
The elderly woman raised one finger to cut him off. “The link cannot be proved conclusively,” she said in a low, authoritative voice. “For our purposes, the key fact is the origin of this dangerous and unpleasant object: not Ponce de Leon.”
“Yes, Madam Prosecutor,” Irene said.
I blinked. This woman was the chief prosecutor of Ponce de Leon, making her one of our highest-ranking planetary authorities. She said to Irene, “Please tell us again, Ms. Seagrave, how you obtained it.”
Irene nodded nervously. “Well, everyone knows the likeliest source of kuru is the Hurtworlds.”
I thought for an instant about Pippa. If she wasn’t on her way to the Hurtworlds right now, she would be in a few days. Poor Pippa. The worst irony of this whole mess was that, without knowing it, Ijiuto had succeeded.
Irene was still talking. “So I asked a few people I know in the … export-import sector … if they had heard of any cargoes coming from the Hurtworlds recently. And they pointed me to a certain person who is, I guess, enjoying the hospitality of the PdL PD as we speak.”
“Correct,” d’Alencon said jubilantly. “He’ll likely be with us for quite some time.”
“I had a heck of a time catching up with him,” Irene said. “So I decided I would wait at his office. I did not break in,” she stressed, over-emphasizing it in my view. “I climbed up the fire escape of the building next door and waited on their roof. I could see into the office through their windows.”
“Whose office?” I said.
“I’m about to tell you,” Irene said. “Around six o’clock, the office staff go home. I’m still waiting for this guy to put in an appearance. Finally, about 21:30 I guess it was, he shows up. The lights go on again …”
What Irene said to the police was that she then went over there and rang the bell. I thought that didn’t sound like her, and sure enough, she later admitted to me that as soon as the office staff left, she had Shifted into her panther form and jumped from her fire escape to the balcony of the building next door. She had then Shifted back and broken into the office using a lock-pick kit she’d kept from the old days. So when the lights in the office went on once more, there was Irene sitting on a polished wooden desk the size of a boat, with a suppressed .38 in her hands, and the head of the nameless Hurtworlder beside her.
“What’s this thing you got for cryonite?” she said to Buzz Parsec.
56
“Parsec?” I pushed back from the table so hard, I spilled my coffee and Irene’s as well. “Holy hell, Irene, this came from Buzz Parsec’s office?”
“Sure did,” Irene said, with the distant smile that was her equivalent of an ear-to-ear grin.
I shook my head in amazement. “I thought it was July,” I said. “Turns out it’s Christmas.”
“It was on a shelf on his brag wall,” d’Alencon said with a chuckle. “Ms. Seagrave had the presence of mind to obtain photographic evidence.”
“If that isn’t just like him,” I said. My face hurt from grinning. I counseled myself that it was tactless to appear quite so pleased, but I couldn’t help it.
Irene said, “In my opinion, what happened is Mujin Inc took delivery of the contaminated head and removed the brain. Then they gave it back to Parsec to dispose of safely. But ol’ Buzz, being Buzz, instead of disposing of it, freezes it in cryonite and sticks it up on the shelf to gross people out. He probably told them he bit the top of the head off himself.”
I felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for Parsec, who had needed to seem so big, when actually his greed had made him so small. The pang passed quickly. “You’ve got him?” I said to d’Alencon. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. “You’ve actually arrested him?”
“He’s being questioned right now on suspicion of importing hazardous substances,” d’Alencon confirmed.
I laughed out loud. It was too perfect. After everything he’d done, Parsec was going down … for smuggling.
“No guarantees, of course, but my professional view is that it’s in the bag.” In an uncharacteristic moment of playfulness, d’Alencon blew a smacking kiss at the human head. He was clearly on cloud nine, having finally snared Parsec on a charge that the chief prosecutor liked. “This guy is the principal witness for the prosection.”
A trickle of doubt seeped in. “But …” The last thing I wanted was to question their grounds for arresting Parsec, but I couldn’t see him being stupid enough to import something like this, let alone keep it in his office.
D’Alencon read my mind. “As we already know, Parsec was providing logistics services to Mujin Inc. That in
cluded some procurement jobs that the company, we assume, did not wish to be associated with. Parsec did not either. So he hired someone else to transport these remains from the Hurtworlds to Ponce de Leon … just as he outsourced the delivery to Gvm Uye Sachttra to you.”
Irene spoke up. “Ma’am, I don’t think Evan Zhang should be prosecuted.” The name rang a bell: Zhang was another freighter captain, a normie. I assumed he was the “someone else” who had done the run to the Hurtworlds to pick up the infected human head. “He’s no guiltier than Mike is. He just did the job he was paid for.”
Something twisted in my gut. Yeah, I’d just done the job I was paid for. Did that really make me innocent? I had the sense to say nothing. I kept a cooperative smile plastered on my face.
A second later I found it harder to keep that smile in place.
“I understand what you’re saying, Ms. Seagrave,” the chief prosecutor said. “You believe that the same standards of justice should be applied to Mr. Zhang as were applied to you.”
As Irene fumbled for a response, I looked from one woman to the other. Something I did not understand was going on here. I caught a whiff of grave dust; maybe the bodies in Irene’s past weren’t so deeply buried …
The chief prosecutor raised a minatory finger, shutting Irene up, and turned her gaze on me. She had the overpowering stare of someone accustomed to authority who will not brook challenges for an instant—she lived in a world where challenges to her authority did not exist. “The same standards of justice,” she rammed home, “that we are applying to Mr. Starrunner?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Irene said weakly. I could see her fingers twisting together under the table.
“Justice is perfect in theory, messy in practice,” the chief prosecutor said. “Mr. Parsec undoubtedly deserves to spend the rest of his life in jail. That should not, in theory, exculpate Mr. Zhang—or Mr. Starrunner.” She suddenly spread her hands. “However, we don’t want to completely hollow out the PdL shipping industry. And the demise of Parsec Freight will leave a considerable hole in it.” She rose. “Go, go, go away. And try to be more … more discriminating in future about who you associate with.”
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