Daisy Wong, Space Marshal: The Case of the Runaway Concubine

by Freddi MacNaughton

  #

  Once settled in their hotel room, Daisy and Muffy brought up the local business directory.

  "Fun and games, or basic survival needs? What's our girl after, do you think?" Daisy asked.

  "Most definitely survival," Muffy said. "She cannot afford fun and games at this point."

  "Survival it is," Daisy said.

  They soon found the Willamette Genetics Foundry. It was one of only two high-end genetics outfits on the Moon, so it seemed like a reasonable place to begin. They occupied an entire building on the outskirts of New Telluride. According to the company's profile, the core of their business was "fertility and life-enhancement solutions for the genetically challenged."

  "Do tell," Daisy said.

  "I am thinking Meizhen did not come all this way to have her breasts enlarged."

  Imitating Muffy's accent, Daisy said, "I am thinking you are being absolutely and most perceptively correct in your wonderful observation, Officer Chatterjee."

  They grinned and giggled and caught the next transport across town.

  The Willamette Genetics building was made out of stainless steel, glass, concrete, and security. It had no fewer cameras, sensors, and uniforms than a topnotch casino in a bottom-notch neighborhood.

  Time and time again Daisy and Muffy flashed their badges, and time and time again the people behind the reception desks flashed their smiles. Daisy asked questions. The people behind the desks refused to answer them. Daisy objected. They told her to come back with a court order and asked them leave.

  Daisy and Muffy left. Breaking heads at this stage would have only made things worse.

  Muffy hacked into the Willamette net. She found this and that, but the leads turned out to be false fronts, a string of Potemkin villages, set up to bamboozle the nosey.

  Muffy tried the space-marshal access codes, codes that were supposed to unlock any site in the solar system.

  No luck.

  "They must be completely off the grid," Daisy said.

  "Maybe they have their own grid," Muffy suggested.

  "Hard-wired: no signals to tap, no connections with the outside, nothing to unlock. It might be worth the effort, depending."

  "It appears to be time for another approach."

  "Agreed," Daisy said. "How about we check in with the Telluride PD."

  #

  Daisy and Muffy paid a visit to the local doughnut shop.

  Bingo.

  A few months back, the New Telluride PD had found a guy—a very dead guy—with a blaster scar on his face.

  "Where did you find him?" Daisy asked.

  "In his room at the Glacier View Resort," the NTPD sergeant said. "He was in a bathtub of cold water. And his own blood. Also cold."

  Over the years, Daisy had decided that cops came in one of two ways: tall and thin or short and thick. But this guy was tall and thick. On the other hand, the lights were on and somebody was home.

  "Tell me more," Daisy said.

  Sure thing. The water had been cold when they'd found him, but forensics had determined that it had been hot when he'd gone in. He'd slashed his wrists—the long way, not across—with a steak knife and had bled out. They'd found the knife, right there on the floor next to the tub.

  "No last-minute calls for help?" Daisy asked.

  "Not that showed up in the comm records," the sergeant said.

  "Any ID?"

  "Lots of it. He was Charles Emerson Pierce, MD, but he wasn't. Couldn't have been."

  "How so?"

  "Charles Emerson Pierce, MD, is ninety-seven and lives with his wife in Miami, Earth."

  Where they undoubtedly enjoyed sunrises over the Atlantic, fishing, bingo, sailing, and long walks on the beautiful, sandy beaches.

  Daisy felt her face flush with anticipation. They were closing in on pay dirt. "What about toxicology?"

  "He'd been drinking, but not enough to pass out."

  "What happened to the body?"

  "Cremated. What else? This is the Moon."

  "Yeah."

  The sergeant pulled a paper file from a drawer. He gave it an expert toss and it made a slow, low-gravity arc toward Daisy.

  She grabbed it and flipped it open.

  Double bingo.

  The autopsy images showed none other than Meizhen's friend and coworker Raedan William Gilmore.

  Maybe they'd gotten into a fight, or maybe he'd outlived his usefulness. One thing was for certain: he hadn't been nearly as handsome dead as he'd been alive. Not a trace of his bad-boy charm has survived the transition.

  "Got a desk we can borrow for a few days?" Daisy asked.

  "Sure thing," the sergeant said.

  #

  The sergeant assigned Daisy and Muffy to a cubicle, and for the next few hours, they searched the security grid for traces of Meizhen Fitzgerald.

  They teased out multiple hits. The hits spanned a period of about three months.

  The heaviest concentration was at the Glacier View Resort, where she and Ray had apparently spent most of their time.

  The next biggest group of hits was at the Willamette Genetics Foundry.

  The inside of the building may have been way off the grid, but the outside wasn't. Those cameras and sensors showed Meizhen and Ray coming and going on an almost daily schedule. Some days Meizhen looked happy and bouncy, and other days she leaned on Ray as they walked from the transport vehicle into the building. On two occasions an orderly wheeled her out to a waiting taxi.

  "Treatments," Muffy said.

  And then, two weeks before Ray Gilmore's supposed suicide, the hits stopped. Nothing from Willamette, nothing from the Glacier View, nothing from the street cameras, nothing from the transportation subnet.

  "It's as though someone has erased them from all of the databases," Daisy said.

  "Who could be doing that? Meizhen herself?" Muffy asked.

  "Or someone she hired," Daisy said. "It might even have been Ray Gilmore."

  "What now? Are you wanting to search for the spider that was doing her dirty work?"

  "No. We need to work this from the other end."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Think of us as a couple of bloodhounds. Meizhen has waded into a river and we've lost her scent. What can we do? Sit on our haunches and bay at the moon? No. We have to go across the river and cast back and forth until we pick up her trail again."

  "Oh, yes, but that spider could have reached anywhere in the solar system by now," Muffy said.

  "Possibly, but some databases are more secure than others."

  Muffy's face lit up. "And we have one thing her spider does not have: space-marshal access codes. They are absolutely the open-sesame to every node on the grid."

  Suddenly Daisy felt first-year-rookie stupid. Muffy was right. They had the one thing Meizhen hadn't had. Of greater even importance, they had the one thing that Daisy's uncle hadn't had: the space-marshal access codes. Daisy was so accustomed to thinking of the tongs as virtually omnipotent that she found it next to impossible to grasp their limitations. But the reality was, there were many, many places the tongs could not reach, actions they could not take, things they could not acquire, and the space-marshal access codes were one of them.

  Her uncle had turned to her because, first, she would not betray him, and, second, she had authorization to use the space-marshal access codes.

  #

  Using one of the semi-official templates, they put together a spider of their own and launched it.

  "Time for dinner," Daisy said.

  #

  Two hours later, their spider reported back enough data for them to take action.

  Two days after Ray Gilmore's death, the spaceport in Tsiolkovsky City, the Moon, recorded the departure of a woman matching Meizhen Fitzgerald's physical description. She was pregnant, traveling alone, and using excellent false identification. Her ID was so good that it had fooled the genetic sniffers. They registered her as one Florence Amelia Chang y Gomez, Ph.D., of Mexico Cit
y, Earth, traveling on business.

  The only slight problem with this scenario was that Florence Amelia Chang y Gomez had died in a plane crash in Brazil, Earth, five years ago. The death certificate had been purged, but not quite well enough.

  Not all spiders are created equal.

  "Where did you say she was headed?" Daisy asked.

  Muffy checked the screen. "Ganges Four. What luck! I have always harbored a profound desire to visit there."

  Daisy hadn't.

  Ganges Four was one of the newer Earth-Moon Lagrange colonies. It was a hub for both genetic and cybernetic research. The universities and companies there melded lots of grant-funded theory with lots of profit-motivated application. Which meant that the place was top-heavy with a smorgasbord of pushers, pimps, and prostitutes.

  Daisy and Muffy coded a special spider, pointed it at Ganges IV, and hit the "launch" key.

  Half an hour later it popped back with a cluster of hits in and around the Himalayan Android Works.

  For the first time since taking on the case, Daisy got a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. The Himalayan Android Works was a notorious android factory. Exquisitely skilled and highly amoral, they designed and built everything from pet cats to willing sex slaves, from obedient children that would never grow up to loving grandparents that would never grow senile, from fearless soldiers to cuddly assassins. Their client base ran the gamut from tycoons to tyrants and from goons to governments.

  Moreover, with that one simple piece of information, the job had suddenly flashed out of control, morphing from a missing-persons case into something utterly different. What that something might be, Daisy couldn't say. But it was now entirely possible that she would fail.

  "The Himalayan Android Works," Muffy said. "Why would Meizhen go there?"

  Daisy felt a surge of frustration. "Link the pieces. Meizhen came to New Telluride to save her baby. She did. What would her next logical step be?"

  Muffy thought, then said, "That would depend on her state of mind. But we have nothing to tell us what that might have been."

  "Which is why we have to go to Ganges IV."

  After another pause, Muffy said, "By now she's had her baby."

  "I know," Daisy said. "She had it three months ago."

  #

  They were about to board the ferry to Ganges IV when Daisy realized that she'd told Muffy a tremendous lie. They'd been thinking like cops and not like a spoiled child with a grudge. Worse, they had not been thinking like an anger-filled woman capable of murder.

  Daisy looked at the departure board and cursed the length of time they would have to spend in transit. They were working blind, proceeding on guesswork, and they were already far, far behind.

  #

  The Himalayan Android Works gleamed.

  No surprise there. Given the company's revenues, they could afford as much polish as they wanted.

  Daisy and Muffy's uniforms and badges got them as far as the security kiosk in the lobby. The security kiosk gleamed.

  Daisy and Muffy explained that they were looking for background information to help with a case. Technical stuff. Biological androids and such. Whom could they talk to?

  The uniforms in the security kiosk sent them to the public information officer.

  They soon had the public information officer stumped.

  "Look, this case is important," Daisy said. "Every case is important, of course, but this one is special. Political, if you catch what I mean."

  He did.

  He directed them to the executive vice president for advanced technological research.

  The executive vice president's office gleamed. The executive vice president himself, however, did not gleam. He radiated competence and self-confidence, topped off by a genuine desire to help, but he did not gleam.

  Within a matter of minutes, Daisy knew she'd found her man, a guy who could help, whether he wanted to or not.

  He was in his middle fifties and had a ruggedly handsome face. He also had a straight European nose . . . or he did have until Daisy smashed it down onto his gleaming mahogany desk.

  She grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up. Blood streamed from his nose.

  He spluttered about civil rights and police brutality and having her job.

  When he had finished his rant, Daisy said, "Listen to me, you smug Gweilo bastard, I've chased halfway across the solar system to get to you, so answer my question."

  She pulled his head back a bit more, preparatory to slamming it onto the desk a second time.

  "No, wait!" he said. "A woman answering that description was here." He pointed at a tastefully designed display screen. It gleamed. "Let me show you."

  Daisy let go of the executive-vice-presidential head.

  He jabbed at page after page until a picture of Meizhen filled the left side of the screen. She looked tired and pale, as though she'd been pulling double shifts in a waste-reclamation plant for the past six weeks.

  Text filled the right side of the screen. The text identified her as Delphinia Taylor-Boyd, a volunteer subject. There was a list of the projects to which she'd been assigned. The list was short but there were no entries beyond the previous month.

  Daisy pointed at the screen. "I need to talk to these project managers."

  "Of course. I'll make the arrangements right away."

  "Good. Thank you," Daisy said. "One more thing. You will not call security the instant our backs are turned. You will wait here quietly until we tell you to do otherwise. If you don't I will personally send you to the Hell of the Disobedient Sinners."

  His face paled.

  "I see you understand your predicament."

  "Which tong?" he asked, his voice ragged with fear.

  "Never mind which," Daisy said. "Do as you are told and you might live to tell about it."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "On second thought, you will never tell anyone about it. Am I understood?"

  "Yes, ma'am. Perfectly."

  #

  Outside the executive vice president's office, Daisy paused at the executive vice president's chief executive assistant's desk. The chief executive assistant was a lovely young woman. She was wearing a very short skirt and a very revealing open-necked blouse. She had a lot to reveal. And acres of gleaming hair.

  "May I help you?" she asked.

  "No, but your boss took a spill and hit his head on his desk."

  Something like surprise wiped the attentive expression from the executive assistant's face.

  Daisy continued, "I don't mean to tell you how to do your job, but if I were you, I'd call the medics."

  "Yes, ma'am. Right away."

  Daisy went on down the hallway toward the elevators, Muffy at her heels.

  On their way down in the elevator, Muffy said, "The Hell of the Disobedient Sinners. You are in excellent form today. Ganges IV is agreeing with you."

  "The Hell of the Disobedient Sinners is real," Daisy said.

  Muffy shook her head. "By the way, why do you get to have all the fun? I always have to play the bad cop or the silent cop or the good cop, but whenever it is coming down to the actual mayhem, it is always you who are twisting the arms, socking the jaws, and breaking the noses. Are those not skills I ought to be learning?"

  #

  There were four project managers on their list.

  The first three had less than nothing to say. They were conducting routine cybernetic research. Yes, they'd run various tests on Taylor-Boyd. Nothing unusual. Blood work. Encephalographs. No, they couldn't disclose the nature of their research. No, they couldn't comment directly on Taylor-Boyd beyond what was already in the official company records. Her identification and so on had been authentic and in good order. She had been helpful, cheerful, and pregnant. What mattered to them was that she cooperate, which she had.

  The fourth manager gave Daisy and Muffy the same song and dance until the moment they were about to leave.

  He said, "You know, Himalayan does a lot of w
ork off the books. Fee-for-service work and so on."

  "Was someone working with Meizhen off the books?"

  "According to the rumor mill."

  "Which managers? What they were doing?"

  "From what I can tell, they weren't working with her. It was her baby they were interested in."

  "Interested how?"

  "It could have been anything. 'Weird Shit' is our middle name."

  Daisy's cop alarms went off.

  "Why are you telling us this?" she asked.

  "Every once in a while, the weird shit can be a little too weird."

  "What was so weird about what they did to Taylor-Boyd's baby?"

  He shrugged. "I didn't sign up to turn babies into bombs."

  #

  On their way out of the building, they commandeered a screen at the security kiosk. This time their spider popped back in less than ten seconds. One Delphinia Helen Octavia Taylor-Boyd, now with close-cropped blond hair, had been living in an exclusive guesthouse in Novi Sochi until two days ago.

  At that time, she and her baby had boarded a flight for Los Angeles, Mars.

  #

  Daisy and Muffy took a taxi directly from the Himalayan offices to the spaceport. On the way, Daisy commed Snakeskin.

  "Meizhen left New Ganges two days ago," Daisy said. "She's headed your way. Look, Uncle, when she gets there, don't let her or her baby anywhere near you."

  "Why not? Their return has been my goal from the start."

  "I don't care about your goals. I care about you. Listen, I'll explain it all when I get there. Trust me. She's out for blood."

  #

  Daisy and Muffy were waiting for their flight to Mars when Jimmy Fingers commed.

  "I've chartered a fast shuttle for you," he said. "It's waiting at Gate G26-A."

  That was fast work, even for a tong with the reach and influence of the Association. Daisy's warning must have lit a fire.

  "Thanks," Daisy said. "Jimmy, do me favor. Do him a favor. Stall him. Lock him in his office if you have to, but don't let him go to her. And don't you dare let her worm her way in to see him."