The Archaeologist's Mistress

by Jamie MacFrey

  “Goddamn,” I moaned, my orgasm sneaking up on me. I guess the created reality had warmed me up a lot more than I realized, my pussy clamping down hard on Murado’s cock, my juices matting his pubic hair to his skin. I collapsed forward, my chest pressing against his face, and he sucked one of my nipples into his mouth, hard enough to make me groan out loud.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, squeezing me tight to him so that I was clinging to his shoulders, his hips slamming up as he drilled his cock into my pussy.

  “Oh fuck.”

  His cock erupted inside me, cum flooding my pussy, his groans in my ear making me laugh with delight, and I turned to stare at him as he filled me up.

  Finally, there was one last pulse and he relaxed, letting me sit up. I squatted over him, then lifted off slowly, watching him stare as his cock slipped out of me inch by inch before thudding against his belly.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” I told him, walking towards the bathroom.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” he asked from the floor.

  “If you can spare the hot water,” I said, turning my back. Behind me, I could hear him getting to his feet.

  * * *

  It’d taken me a while to get clean with Murado in the shower with me, but I’d gotten most of Hary’s memory out of my system, at least. Ok, so what did I know about the mysterious M. Hary Xu that I didn’t before? He was concerned about the size of his penis. Not exactly a unique quality in a man.

  His mistress was wild, maybe wild enough to drive a man from Landa Xu’s arms.

  And the two of them, Hary and Isibel, had a special place. It wasn’t on his home computer, and it hadn’t been on the neurochip. It could be on his optical, but that was now property of the New Angeles Morgue and state’s evidence, which meant I’d have to go through the SPD for it. I’d prefer not to.

  On the other hand, maybe Hary had been one of those people who know how to separate work and home life. I hear it works for some people. I’ve never been one—my work is too important for me.

  And also I live in my office.

  Murado had, after he’d been able to walk again, said he’d be able to look at the neurochip closer and see if the late M. Xu had left anything else of use on it. Hopefully it would be an address of the “special place” or better yet, a letter whose opening line was “if you’re reading this I am dead.”

  Not that I was holding out hope.

  No, what I was holding out hope for was that Theed, despite his message, wouldn’t be all shop talk when I got to his apartment. After all, if it’s safe enough to fuck your old work fling and your secretary in your office, ought to be safe enough to fuck just the work fling in your apartment.

  So, really, underwear seemed like an unnecessary distraction.

  Of course, there were a few hours to kill and I was a little worked up by the thought of Theed Montgomery. Sure, I’d just been with Murado, but that wasn’t the same. Theed was...Theed. Tall, ripped, washboard abs...that vibrating monstrosity he called a cock. And I currently wasn’t wearing any clothes at all and my optical connection could stream quite a bit of porn…

  A few hours later I hailed an autocab on my optical, maybe a little more relaxed than I had been earlier. My attendant wasn’t the same as the last few times, he barely seemed interested in me, outside of trying to get me to buy a pack of peanuts for a price you’d assume meant they’d be the best goddamned pack of peanuts in your life.

  I strolled through the lobby to the elevator. Theed had messaged me the code for his penthouse apartment just before I’d arrived.

  In a moment, I was standing in his parlor.

  It was a swanky place, I had to admit. Better than my fleabag office-apartment. Real hardwood under my feet, a view of New Angeles that couldn’t be beat. He even had a modest pool on the outdoor area. I pressed my nose to the glass, staring out. When I got paid for this job, I was going to get myself one of these places. I’d sit out there on a sweltering summer afternoon, watching the plebs down below sputtering in the heat, and I’d splash some water off the side to help them cool off. Then the posh association president would come up and chew me out and I’d show her my hand cannon and that would be that.

  “Theed?” I called out. None of the lights were on. Theed had always been one for surprises, though. Maybe he was tying a big red bow around that big ol’ cock.

  I’m a simple type of girl, I like handmade gifts the best.

  I walked through a kitchen, running my hand over the marble countertops, making my way through the apartment. There was the living room. The silhouette of a man sat in an easy chair.

  “Theed,” I said.

  No response.

  “Theed?”

  I frowned. He’d messaged me. Direct from his optical. I’d seen the signature.

  “Lights on,” I commanded.

  The lights came up, and Theed Montgomery sat in a white linen chair. He was dressed to the nines, except for his tie, which had a four-in-hand knot pulled slightly apart. His eyes stared straight ahead. One hand was clenched, as if holding some unseen object, and when I moved to the side, the shards of a broken tumbler sat on the carpet in a pool of brown stain.

  “Theed,” I said, not quite comprehending at first.

  Theed’s chest wasn’t moving. I stepped forward, slow, careful not to disturb anything, picking my way through the shag carpet.

  When I got close to his chair I saw it, a pinhole prick behind his right ear, a trail of blood leaking down his neck.

  The optical’s audio system blared in my ears as I placed the call, but somehow it seemed like I was listening to it through a distant tin pipe, rather than knowing it was sending signals straight to my auditory nerve.

  “Nine Nine One, what is your emergency?”

  “I’d like to report a murder.”

  Chapter 6

  C hief Inspector Daav King himself came to see me a few minutes after I’d been ushered into Theed’s bedroom and given my statement to one of the officers. They’d put up a curtained divider around the body in the living room, and looking out through the bedroom doorway, I couldn’t even see where Theed’s corpse was, but I could still imagine the blank stare and the trickle of blood running down out of his temple.

  King shut the door behind him.

  “Hi Sare,” he said.

  “Hi Daav.” He’d always had a crush on me, Daav King. He was a nice enough guy, too. Sometimes, if I was bored, I imagined being the Chief Inspector’s pretty wife, living in the ‘burbs, sending our kids off to school. I’d have a babysitter and go into the city nights to lavish parties with city bigwigs or the Officers’ Union Ball, hanging off his arm and laughing at dumb jokes.

  And then I’d drink a lot to wash the taste out of my head.

  “I wish I could have seen you under better circumstances.”

  “Yeah, like when one of our friends isn’t dead out in the other room,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood for pleasantries.

  I could see the pleasant school boy crush Daav King turn off and the Chief Inspector Daav King, the one who’d risen through the ranks of the System PD’s Martian division, even after the Dictator had come into power on Earth, click on.

  “What were you doing here tonight?”

  “You know how Theed and I were. I’m not wearing any underwear. So what do you think?” I didn’t want to throw it in his face, but there it was.

  “That’s what you told my guys, but that wasn’t why you came here,” said Daav.

  “Oh?”

  “I pulled your cross-contact record with Theed on the way over. You two hadn’t spoken for almost five years until a few days ago. You’re telling me you two fell off a cliff for five years, and then one day Theed got horny and called up his old booty call and you came running? Then he suddenly gets brained in his living room? Seems kind of thin, Sare. So what do you think I should do?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. It’s the truth. If you want to hear something different, I guess
you can have a couple of your goons work me over like they did Andred LaTell. I’ll tell you whatever you want to hear.”

  Andred LaTell had been a pretty famous comedian and holofilm actor who’d made his name mocking people with bigger names. Two years ago, he’d made a stray potshot at the Dictator on a late night talk show, a joke whose humor came mostly from how uncomfortable it’d made the studio audience and the host. The Martian SPD had picked him up for possession of an illegal substance two days later, an easy bust for a movie star. When they’d finally bothered to get him down to a courtroom to face charges, he hadn’t even been able to stand on his own two feet in court as he’d copped to the drug charge as well as a raft of other charges, such as inciting violence against the government and something they’d invented just for him called “intellectual terrorism,” which carried a life sentence. He’d hung himself in jail before they could start the trial. At least, that’s what the reports said. Pretty hard to hang yourself when you can’t stand up.

  The riots had been bad, the police response had been worse. And then the Dictator had made his call from Earth, troops had landed, and heads had begun to roll. Some literally. As far as I could tell, then-Lieutenant Daav King was the only guy who’d walked away clean from the mess, riding his competence to a promotion to Chief Inspector. The SPD’s golden boy.

  He shook his head at me.

  “Look, I know people like you and Theed left the force after the change in government.”

  “You mean the coup?”

  He ignored me.

  “It’s easy to criticize when you’ve walked away from everything. But I stayed. And just because I stayed doesn’t mean I suddenly became a bad cop. So don’t sit there and fucking bullshit me on why you were here, underwear or no underwear.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Daav. Sounds like you already got it figured out, though.”

  “You were working for Theed in some capacity?”

  “Are you charging me with a crime, CI King?”

  You could have crushed rocks with the look Daav was giving me. If he hadn’t been a lapdog for the Dictator, I almost would have felt bad.

  “No,” he said, after a moment.

  I stood up and made to leave and he grabbed me by the arm, pulling me toward him so he could talk directly into my ear.

  “Do not fucking cross me, Sare. I’m letting you walk tonight because of old times. But someone killed Theed, and to my mind there’s three possibilities: you know who did it, you know how to find out who did it, or you did it. And my superiors are going to be breathing down my neck for a suspect very soon.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, but it’s ‘no,’ to all three,” I said. I kept my voice calm and level, like I was the voice on a digital assistant. “And as for your superiors and your neck, so what?”

  “So I’m going to follow every goddamned lead, like I was trained to, and eventually I’m going to find the truth. And if I don’t, I’m going to come find you. And then I’m going to have my suspect.”

  “Is that a threat, CI King?”

  “That’s a promise, M. Jeffries.”

  * * *

  I was pissed all the way home. Sure, I hadn’t spilled my guts to King and his jackboot patrol and he’d figured it out immediately, but he sure as hell didn’t have the right to threaten me with a murder rap. Although, thinking about the changes that had come trickling down from Earth since I’d left, he probably did have the right, it just wasn’t right. And I couldn’t see a good way out if that happened. I didn’t have the money for a good lawyer, New Angeles didn’t have much in the way of a public defender’s office, and confessing my involvement with not only one but two murders was a good way to end up in a fatal and tragic autocar accident, courtesy GalaxJonesStein.

  Which led me back to where I’d been going the whole time since I’d walked into Theed’s apartment. Find his killer, then decide what to do next.

  I was so focused on reviewing every lead in my head, you could’ve hit me with a train and I wouldn’t have noticed.

  As it was, I didn’t notice that my place had been ransacked from top to bottom until I’d gotten all the way from the door to my desk and found the drawer smashed open.

  “What the—” I started to say, then let the sound of a gauss pistol spooling up interrupted me.

  “M. Jefferies, I presume?”

  A very small man, maybe a hair under five feet tall, was standing behind me. Small beady eyes peered through a pair of glasses with circular rims. Who wore glasses anymore? Most of his hair had beaten a hasty retreat from his scalp, but what little remained had be sent to cover as much ground as possible. Another gene therapy candidate in the making.

  Next to him was a hulking brute with a face that looked like a puzzle put back together by a three-year-old. In his hand was the gauss pistol.

  “Don’t fire that in here,” I told the muscle. “The walls in this building are so thin you could end up killing a dozen people with one shot.”

  “We’ll take that under advisement, M. Jeffries,” said the bald man. “Especially if you answer my questions.”

  I ignored him, checking my drawers instead. They were pretty much ruined.

  “Where’d my whiskey go?”

  “I’ll ask the questions,” said the bald man, not very convincingly.

  “Not until I get my whiskey back,” I said.

  “My associate here was in the Outback Liberation Squads,” said the bald man.

  “Then it’s too bad that that pistol he’s packing isn’t a bomb and that I’m not a bunch of schoolchildren,” I said. “Give me my fucking whiskey.”

  “I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation you’re in, M. Jef—”

  “I think I do. Shoot me.”

  “I—”

  “What’s the matter? Thinking there might be some problems trying to interrogate a corpse?”

  There was a long pause where the ex-OLS tough and I fought a small duel of stares. The bald man finally relented.

  “Give her back the whiskey, M. Card.”

  The gorilla reached inside his overcoat, pulled out my small handle of Colonel Heem’s Synth Bourbon and tossed it to me. I caught it with ease, popped the top off and took a slug from the bottle. The warmth seemed to settle me a little.

  “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

  The bald man continued his unbroken streak of doing all the talking.

  “I am here on behalf of my employer.”

  “I haven’t pissed off the Chan Hong, again, have I?” I asked. That might have worked out for the best, if I had. Even GJS would have to stand down if Anto Chan, the Asteroid King, wanted first go at making me a corpse. And Anto could be reasoned with. He, at least, had eyes for things beyond profit.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  I stared at them dumbly for a moment, trying to figure out who’d want to toss my apartment/office. I’d made my report to Theed, so GJS would already know everything I knew, except for Hary’s neurochip.

  “You’re ThorGen, aren’t you?” I asked.

  “See, M. Card? She’s quite smart, actually.”

  “I owe you a drink, M. Voddin” said Card.

  “It can talk!” I exclaimed, crossing myself theatrically. “Now what do you murderers want?”

  “We aren’t murderers,” said Voddin. He adjusted his glasses, seeming genuinely disturbed.

  “You killed Hary Xu,” I said. I took another slug of the whiskey. I was firing shots in the dark here, and the alcohol helped hide how unsure I was. Generally, you don’t get corporate raiders ripping apart your office unless they’ve been up to no good.

  “Of course not! M. Xu was a veritable fountain of information for us. We never would have killed him,” said Voddin.

  “Then he was leaking,” I said. “And Theed knew it, too. Did you kill him?”

  “Ha! The thought had crossed our minds, hadn’t it, M. Card?”

  “I was looking forward to it,” said Card.
“I enjoy watching lawmen die.”

  “Yes, ‘death to the suppressors,’ and all that,” said Voddin.

  “And babies,” I offered. Card took a step forward and Voddin grabbed him by the arm. I smiled and swallowed some more booze.

  “I would not antagonize my associate further,” said Voddin.

  “I’ll take it under consideration,” I said. I looked at the two men, sizing them up. “Then what’s your delightful visit about?”

  “Ah, well, have you looked me up on your optical yet?” asked Voddin. I had. Michel Voddin, Senior Vice President for Acquisitions at ThorGen.

  “Lot of executive power to come in here with one measly goon,” I said.

  “Indeed, but I felt a soft touch was required on this job. M. Xu came to us, months ago, with some information about GalaxJonesStein. We pressed him for more. And some more after that. And so on and so forth until two days ago he wound up dead in a neuro-chair with the System PD in hot pursuit of a suspect. The next day, you appeared at his home, and spoke to his widow. For some time, I might add.”

  “So?”

  “So, did you kill Hary Xu?”

  “No.”

  “Just no?”

  “Theed Montgomery hired me to spy on Hary because he thought he was leaking information to him. First night I do, he winds up dead. Now Theed’s dead. Now I’m a suspect in at least Theed’s murder, but given the sorry state of the System PD, I might end up catching the Xu murder too,” I said.

  “That puts you in an untenable position.”

  “No shit.”

  “Hary Xu was going to deliver us a very important set of documents on his research at the Ganymede excavation site before he died. These documents...how do I put this...would help ThorGen to better compete with GJS on the open market. We know he made copies, we know he removed them from his office,” said Voddin. “They were not on his body or in his personal autocar. They were also not at his home office. However, our investigators arrived after you did, and unlike you, they were not in a position to speak directly to his widow.”