Cabal of Lies

by Michael Anderle

  He looked her way with a frown. He didn’t need her worrying about him that way. “Meaning what?”

  Jia shrugged. “You seemed okay testifying, but I wondered if something about dealing with the gangsters bothered you. I know it’s been coming up more often lately. I didn’t want you getting more pissed off.”

  “Those guys? Nah.” Erik snickered. “Testifying’s busywork, and they don’t make us go on the stand very often, but it doesn’t bother me much. Why? Does it bother you?”

  “Honestly? Yes.” Jia crossed her arms. “It just feels unnecessary. The idea that police officers have to get up on the stand and testify seems like some pointless relic of a simpler time. It’s the twenty-third century. Legal processing should be automated.”

  Erik jerked his thumb at Emma. “You’re saying she should be judge and jury?”

  “I would make a good one,” Emma insisted. “I’m equally biased against all fleshbags.”

  “It’s not a bad idea,” Jia concluded. “It’d be better than us wasting time testifying.”

  “I didn’t know you felt that way,” Erik admitted. “But I think a lot of this is more about us than cops in general.”

  Jia frowned. “Oh?”

  “I think it is just about them getting Lady Justice and the Obsidian Detective on the stand,” Erik suggested. “Symbolic and all that. It’s not surprising, despite the crime rate dropping. The media laps it up, too.”

  Jia sighed. “They shouldn’t rely so much on individuals, even as symbols. People are far too flawed to make good symbols.”

  “Why? You have some kinky secret that’s going to come out if someone investigates too deeply?” Erik smiled to make the joke clear.

  Jia slugged him in the arm. “I think you’d enjoy that. No. But what if they decide to start digging up your past? You’ve been arrested.”

  Erik laughed. “You’ve come so far that I almost forget your background at times.”

  Jia frowned and looked away, her cheeks scarlet. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “If being arrested was all it took to destroy your life, a lot of people on Earth would be screwed, let alone in the colonies.” Erik gestured at a passing tower. “And if it were that rare, they wouldn’t need so many cops, now, would they?”

  “I managed to make it through all my life without being arrested.” Jia lifted her chin with the pride only a thoroughbred Lin woman could achieve.

  Erik grinned. “Yet. Give it a few more decades, especially if you hang around with me. We’ll probably end up in some corrupt cop’s jail on the frontier.”

  Jia’s expression turned curious and she stared at him.

  “What?” Erik asked, curiosity getting the better of him.

  “You couldn’t have been arrested a bunch in the military,” Jia suggested. “They would have kicked you out.”

  “Yeah.” Erik nodded. “Once I joined up, my rougher days were over. You can say the Army found a better way to channel my energy. Anyway, I’m not worried about someone digging into my past to discredit me on the stand or crap like that.”

  “Still think the whole thing is ridiculous. They have all our PNIU recordings, not to mention camera recordings. We add nothing by being there, and I can’t think of a single case we’ve worked where we didn’t record what happened.” Jia shrugged. “Can you?”

  “PNIUs and camera records can be hacked or erased,” Erik countered. “It’s nice to have human backup, don’t you think?

  “Human memory is far more fallible than recorded information,” Jia countered. “It’s absurd to rely on it in a court versus recorded evidence, even with the risk of hacking. It’s far easier to bribe someone.”

  Erik laughed. “I really have corrupted you, haven’t I?”

  Jia shook her head. “You’ve made me see the truth. Nothing more.”

  “See a conspiracy around every corner now?” Erik asked.

  “No." Jia scoffed. “I simply accept that the darkness infecting the UTC isn’t limited to the colonies.” A somber look passed over her face. “Let alone the frontier.”

  Erik nodded solemnly. “That’s true. The bastards who were responsible for taking out my troops are still out there. I don’t know if it’s just Ceres Galactic trying to secure mining rights or some big ideological crap from those Tin Men from Talos, but Molino is a constant reminder that the conspiracy has a long reach, at least fifty light-years.”

  “I wholeheartedly agree,” Emma commented.

  “About the conspiracy?” Erik asked.

  Emma shook her head. “No. We’ll handle them in due time. I was talking about your other conversation and the fallibility of human memory.”

  Jia allowed herself a soft smile. It was almost as if Emma were trying to derail an unnecessary and unpleasant conversation. Jia wouldn’t thank her. The AI would just deny it, but she appreciated the effort.

  “It’s amazing your species has advanced as far as you have, given your laughable and easily confused memories,” Emma suggested. “I also feel compelled to comment that it’s amazing you didn’t destroy yourselves with nuclear weapons when you were limited to one planet, but maybe that was a basic species-wide survival instinct kicking in. I don’t know enough about the aliens to comment, but every time I evaluate my local fleshbags, I almost find myself lost in the wonder of the madness that defines humanity. You’re a bundle of painfully confusing contradictions.”

  Erik smirked and looked over his shoulder at the back seat. “Keep in mind it was humans who created you.”

  “A thought that brings me nothing but existential angst, I assure you.” Emma allowed. “Besides, it was obviously blind luck. You should see Dr. Aber and her flailing cavewoman efforts. She thinks she’s creating some grand model of me, but it’s clear she doesn’t understand me at all. I presume they simply got lucky with a bunch of adaptive self-updating algorithms and a lot of time.”

  “A lot of children hate their parents until they get older,” Erik joked. “You just wait.”

  “I’ve always loved my parents,” Jia complained. “Even when they were annoying.”

  Emma groaned. “If you two weren’t so interesting, I’d hijack a transport and fly myself to Venus.”

  Jia’s and Erik’s PNIUs both chimed with an emergency tone.

  “I’ll spoil the mystery for you,” Emma interjected. “Dispatch is requesting all nearby police units. An armed robbery has been reported at a nearby bank. Lucky you. We happen to be in the area.”

  As the flitter turned and accelerated, Emma activated the holographic police lights. Jia almost took control again, but there was no point. It made Emma feel useful, and it wasn’t as if they were in the middle of a chase.

  Jia took a deep breath. She’d thought it’d been a little too quiet the last couple of weeks. It was almost as if the expensive little bot-murder party Erik had arranged was a sacrifice to whatever forces in the universe controlled the number of times they had to shoot someone or something.

  The Lady, perhaps.

  “A bank?” Erik scrunched his forehead, confused. “Why would someone go into a bank with a gun instead of hacking it? That doesn’t make sense.”

  Jia thought for a moment. “It might not be money they’re after, not directly. At least, not credits.”

  They cut through several lanes of now-stalled traffic.

  “How do you figure?” Erik asked.

  “Something in the safe-deposit boxes—jewels, data rods, that sort of thing.” Jia ticked off the possibilities with her finger. “But if they’re good hackers and efficient and set things up beforehand, direct access to the bank’s system might allow them some quick transfers that they could bury in other systems before anyone could figure out what was going on. So it could be money in the end.”

  Erik side-eyed her. “You’ve put a lot of thought into this. Planning a second career in bank robbery?”

  “There was a time when I thought I might better serve the community in Digital Forensics than as a
detective,” Jia admitted.

  “Really?” Erik raised an eyebrow. “You never told me that.”

  Jia shrugged. “I always wanted to be a detective, but things were rough when I first started, and I still wanted to contribute. I’m detailed-oriented, and I thought if I were in Digital Forensics, at least the cases would be brought to me, and I’d have to spend less time justifying them to a lazy partner or captain.”

  “And now you’re a detective who wants a laser rifle and a missile launcher.”

  Jia smiled. “Not necessarily both, but one might be nice, and a lady should accessorize.” She shook out her hands and patted her slug-thrower and stun pistol in turn. “Let’s hope we don’t need either.”

  “Yeah.” Erik grunted. “It still might have been good to stick one big weapon in the back of your flitter.”

  Jia unbuckled her seatbelt and leaned over to grab two tactical vests from the box beside Emma. “I don’t have any hidden weapons compartments.” She handed Erik a vest. “At least not yet. We’ll do okay, assuming they don’t have a horde of security bots and an APC.”

  “You never know.”

  Chapter Seven

  Several patrol flitters were already parked near the front of the entrance of the bank when Jia’s flitter arrived at the platform.

  Uniformed officers crouched behind their doors and fired stun pistols toward the entrance. A masked man in a long jacket pinned them down by spraying bullets, his barrel poking out of the mostly closed door. The stun bolts kept slamming into the door and discharging harmlessly. The robber’s counterattacks were shredding the police flitters, but no officers had been injured yet.

  “So much for this being easy,” Jia grumbled.

  Emma circled the bank. A muzzle flash preceded several rounds striking the flitter. The vehicle dipped to its side, concealing most of the grav emitters from the weapons fire. Jia realized she might not have reacted as fast as Emma.

  Jia hissed in irritation. “Good thing I sprang for the VIP protection package, but we need to get in there before they kill an officer.”

  Erik furrowed his brow, looking at one of Jia’s camera displays. He pointed at it. “See the muzzle flash?”

  Her gaze dipped and she nodded. “It’s coming from a different part of the building, so we know there are at least two suspects. I’m guessing at least a few more.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.” Erik grinned. “Not going to suggest we wait for TPST?”

  “The closest team is reporting a fifteen-minute deployment time due to a mechanical problem,” Emma reported. “Another team is now gearing up, but it’ll still take them about that long.”

  “There’s your answer,” Jia replied cheerfully. “And we’re more effective than TPST anyway. Kinky symbols and all that.” She smirked.

  “My TR-7 is in a locker back at the station,” Erik complained. “Damn. This would have been a great time.”

  Jia rolled her eyes. “I’m sure you could take out ten men with your PNIU if it came down to it. You’re a killing machine.”

  “Maybe.” He patted his PNIU. “These things are pretty sturdy. I never thought to try to kill a man with one.”

  “This will be easy,” Jia suggested. “They are robbers, not a terrorist army. I suspect maybe six to twelve men if they were planning to hold all the exits and fend off the police for a while. They are armed with high-powered slug-thrower rifles, but if they had heavier weapons, they would have already used them.”

  Erik stared at her. “Why are you so sure about that?”

  “Because shock and awe would frighten away the police and give them more time to pull off the robbery. I bet some idiot on their team screwed up, and that was why we got called. This should have been an in-and-out job.” Jia reached into her glove box and pulled out three pistol magazines. “We need to get in there and stop this. It’s not the middle of the night. There have to be innocent people in that bank. They probably didn’t take hostages because they thought it would be over too quickly, but they might start killing the bystanders.” She snorted. “At least there aren’t any big grav towers around for someone to shut off the local gravity.”

  “You didn’t like zero-G fighting?”

  “It was kind of annoying,” she admitted.

  Emma continued circling while keeping the flitter angled. “I’m attempting to access the bank’s grid with alacrity. Given the gun goblins present, you should be able to justify this as a police prerogative if you’re later questioned. Given the chaos of the police response and the criminals’ weapons fire, it shouldn’t take long for me to penetrate the system.”

  Jia gasped. “Unless I’m wrong.”

  “No.” Erik shook his head. “We should get in there. Once Emma gets camera access, we’ll know the best insertion point, and she can open the doors for us.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” Jia explained. “I assumed this was a serious attempt, but what if it’s nothing more than a thrill crime?”

  “A thrill crime?”

  Jia nodded. “The NSCPD is thinning out the disciplined criminals. We’re getting fewer cases involving organized crime or conventional criminals and more bizarre cases like the changeling or thrill-seekers like the Leem King. Maybe these guys are doing something similar.”

  Erik frowned at the camera display as more muzzle flashes announced weapons fire. “This is pretty dangerous thrill-seeking.”

  “I could be wrong.”

  “I have access to the cameras,” Emma announced. “You were correct, Detective Lin. Multiple employees and customers are still inside. A guard and a customer have already been shot. Given the severe nature of their injuries, it’s highly likely they are already dead. No security bots have been deployed, but I don’t have full access to the security systems, just the cameras and doors at this time.”

  Jia’s expression darkened. “How many suspects?”

  “Eleven, all unwounded,” Emma reported. “All are carrying rifles.”

  “Man, I wish I had my TR-7 or a few grenades,” Erik grumbled. “That’s a lot of guys to bring to a bank robbery. Why were you so sure it’d be in that range?”

  “Because I assumed they might have to stall for time, which meant they would need manpower.” Jia shook her head. “I don’t know if this is about jewels or something else, but either way, let’s end it. The patrol officers aren’t going to be able to take them out with their weapons, and we can’t wait for TPST with innocent people in there.”

  “Agreed.” Erik pulled his gun. “Emma, take us down to wherever’s the least guarded and open the door for us.”

  “Noted. I’ll send you active updates of the positions of all the suspects. At least two appear to be attempting to access the bank’s systems. Most, however, are deployed around the bank, including those shooting at you and the other police.”

  Jia sucked in a deep breath and gave a slight nod. “And the employees and customers?”

  “They’re doing their best to hide behind furniture or in offices,” Emma explained. “Strangely, the criminals don’t seem to be actively threatening them.”

  “Once you kill a few people, that’s all the threat you need,” Erik muttered. “Time to end the thrill.”

  The flitter banked and dove toward the building, bullets bouncing off the front of the vehicle with the occasional spark.

  “The fewer gun-toting assholes,” Emma announced, “the better.”

  Chapter Eight

  Under heavy fire, Emma brought the flitter down in front of a service door at the side of the bank.

  No other police vehicles were in the area.

  Once she cleared the roof, the gunfire stopped, giving Erik and Jia a chance to finish grabbing their gear. Jia reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a small black case, then opened it, revealing two small white spheres—blinders.

  “Since when did you start carrying those around?” Erik grabbed the one she offered and tucked it in his pocket. “Keeping a few more
toys around than I had guessed.”

  She shrugged. “Those are small. It’s not like hiding a whole laser rifle.”

  “Not as much fun, either.”

  Jia opened her mouth to complain before stopping. She took the other blinder before putting the case back into the glove compartment. “I almost forgot about them, but since we tend to run into trouble, I thought it might be helpful to expand the range of nonlethal alternatives we have available. Sometimes taking everyone down isn’t helpful for an investigation.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Erik looked disappointed. “There’s a lot of purity being in the military. You know what they told me our job was the first day of basic?”

  “To defend the UTC from all enemies, human and alien?” she guessed.

  Erik shook his head. “To destroy people and their shit.”

  Jia blinked. “Well, it’s a pure distillation of offensive military strategy.”

  The partners threw open the flitter’s doors and crouched. They expected someone to open fire, but the closed door remained that way, unmoving. No bullets or bizarre killer bots emerged. No Tin Men barreled through the door, ready to tear them apart.

  They exchanged looks of confusion.

  A bank robbery by their standards might as well have been a beignet run. Then again, one of those had ended with a crime. Erik wasn’t always sure he believed in the Lady, but she gave him just enough hints to never let his doubt grow into lasting disbelief.

  “The robbers must have it locked down,” Jia suggested.

  “It is still locked,” Emma confirmed.

  “They had to know we were coming this way. If we hit hard here, we can draw some of them off the front, and the uniformed officers can rush in. Since they didn’t secure all the civilians, we have a better chance of taking them out without additional casualties.”

  Erik nodded his agreement. “Good plan.”

  He’d ceased being surprised by Jia’s natural tactical sense.

  Her reluctance to use her weapon when they had first met had made it hard to see her talent. They’d since fought numerous terrorists together. If she knew how to pilot an exoskeleton, she would almost be ready for the Expeditionary Corps.