The Colossus Collection : A Space Opera Adventure (Books 1-7 + Bonus Material)

by Nicole Grotepas

  The wind across my body, whistling through my ears as I leaned around corners and surfed the Spireway, dissolved the tension in my neck and shoulders where I held the gritty weight of all the crimes I dealt with daily. Up here in the spire-tops, I was free and Kota was the utopia the Centau wanted it to be. The seedy murders, the corruption in the government and police ranks, the drug rings, criminal trafficking, all of it sank into the spire shadows far below me and I could forget about them.

  The Spireway: it was such a stress reliever. The city should brand it that way.

  5

  “So we’ve recovered the e-comms from the victim’s computer system,” Meg said. I could hear paper rustling over the line. “There were a few disgruntled customers who sent him enraged emails. The bad news is that they’re all off-moon, so they might not be the best suspects.”

  “Keep looking,” I said, thinking about it. We had little to go on so far. The victim spent most of his time in a holographic online world rather than mingling with people in a real-space fashion. The most likely explanation was that the murderer came from that world. But how did we bridge the gap of actual space? Had they hired someone to carry out their dirty work?

  Meg continued. “I’ve got Daxan cross-checking flight information using the registered real names of those users. Gabe, they have such hilarious names for their game characters. Try HumungoRod6969 or GiantGirth.”

  I laughed. “Is it just a place to go find someone to tap in real life? A virtual meet-up service?”

  “I haven’t been on the inside. Maybe? But I mean, do these guys actually think that’s going to make the ladies swoon?”

  “Depends on the lady.”

  “Can we call them ‘lady’ if they’re on the prowl for humongous rods and girthy dicks?”

  “Well, now you’re insinuating that a woman’s preferences for a certain type of sex are intrinsically dirty.”

  Meg scoffed. “I’m not saying that at all. I have my own preferences.”

  “As I well know.” I could almost hear the blood rushing to her face, which gave me a strange satisfaction. Divorce was her choice. I’m hard to live with, she says.

  “Knock it off,” she said, her voice an embarrassed whisper.

  “Alright, look I’m sorry about that. Gotta run. I’m dropping in on the ex to ask some questions.”

  “Find out how they met.”

  She said it as I was hanging up. “Obviously,” I muttered at my communicator. Classic Meg. Getting the last word in before I hung up. Now she’d take credit for the question if it turned out that it led us to more pertinent information.

  And I didn’t doubt that it would.

  My gondola docked and I jumped out onto the crowded platform, taking deep breaths to get me through the press of bodies, employing some self-talk techniques that usually helped. The evening commute had begun.

  The ex lived eight miles from the victim. Which meant that they hadn’t met by bumping into each other at a local haunt. And since the vic hadn’t worked a regular nine-to-five job, my money was on either the Holo-R world, a mutual acquaintance, or a dating service—which, it was beginning to appear that perhaps the holographic world was something like that.

  Her residence was on the bottom floor of row-houses tacked onto the edge of the rich districts of the city. These areas were optimized for laborers that worked on the farms and sold their wares in the markets, among other places. It wasn’t the slums yet, but closer to that than Fogg’s tower suite in the wealthy jade districts of the city. The sidewalks were busy outside. Fifty feet away an open air market outlined the street in vibrantly colored tents. The evening was humid as the setting sun cast Kota in a hazy yellow light, tinted with the pale colors of Ixion.

  Humans, Constellations, and the occasional Yasoan crowded the streets and sidewalks as people returned home from work or went to the market. I banked on the fact that the ex-girlfriend was home as I knocked because it was that time of day, not to mention she was probably in a bit of shock from seeing the murdered body of a friend.

  “Hello. Trixie Kander?” I said when she opened the door. Her eyes were wary and puffy, like she’d been crying. Her stomach protruded in a very pregnant way, so I figured I had the right woman. I flashed my badge, then put it back into my jacket pocket. “I’m Detective Bach. I work homicide in the Ice Jade district. I’m here investigating the murder of Lennox Fogg. I’d like to ask you some follow up questions if that’s ok, if you have the time?”

  She blinked, stunned, and then stepped out into the street and shut the door behind her. The move bothered me, but I waited for an explanation before I used my dickhead-detective voice.

  “Can we just—,” she said, heading toward the market on the sidewalk, gesturing for me to join her. “Sorry, I’ll answer your questions. Just not there.” She jerked her head back toward her apartment.

  “What’s wrong with back there?” I asked, walking after her. “Is this a bad time?”

  “My boyfriend will be home soon. He hates cops.”

  I smirked. “Why? Has he been in trouble before?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe?” She lifted her shoulders in a shrug.

  The bodies filling the street began to press in on me. “I’d prefer to do this off the street.”

  “What do you want to know,” she asked, ignoring what I’d said—which also bothered me—and crossing her arms over the top of her belly. Her black hair fell across her face, but when I glanced at her as we walked, I could see the worry in her downturned eyes. She didn’t want me in her house and I doubted it had to do with her boyfriend. That was a suspicious emotion from a suspect. And telling. But it didn’t necessarily mean that she’d been the one to bludgeon Fogg to death.

  We cut into the cacophony of the market and her shoulders seemed to relax as the crowd absorbed us. People bustled between stands, bumping into each other and me, their arms laden with woven bags of produce, breads, dried meats, and sausages. I took deep breaths again, trying to focus on the questions and not the uncomfortable closeness of the crowd eating into my space.

  “Trixie, can I ask? How did you know Lennox? Where did you meet?”

  She looked around. “In Utopia, a game in Holo-R. I was building a house and he came up to me and asked if I wanted anything to set it up.”

  “Building a house? How does that work?” I tried to imagine her doing that.

  “You’ve never played Holo-R, I guess?” She stopped at a booth selling drinks.

  “What would you like?” the vendor asked.

  I took a step into the space between the drink vendor and a native Yasoan vegetable vendor, to remove myself from the stream of people.

  “Just sparkling water, please. Anything else makes me feel queasy.” She exchanged a handful of marks for the bottle.

  “Kasé for me, please,” I said, getting the vendor’s attention from my odd spot outside the fray. “White, nothing else in it.” I fished for some Syndicate Marks in my jacket to pay for my drink.

  “I wish I could have a cup of kasé. Or coffee,” Trixie said. “But that stuff just makes me sick right now.” She said it like I knew how pregnancy worked.

  I nodded at her—Meg had been a beast while pregnant, but I didn’t like the small talk. It was veering away from the investigation and I didn’t have a lot of time. So I steered it back. “I haven’t.”

  “What?” she sipped her water.

  “Played Holo-R. I don’t have time for hobbies. Too many murders to solve. City of Jade Spires, you know? It’s a beautiful morass of many questionable activities.”

  “Yeah, OK.”

  “So tell me about it.” The vendor handed me my drink and I sipped it. “Also, can we find a table somewhere? I need some space.”

  Trixie looked around as though to say, what do you call all this? I call it a crowd, I thought, pushing against me, breathing my air, stealing my air, closing in on me.

  She sighed and led the way toward what I hoped would be a table with space ar
ound it.

  “Well, I was just putting it together, my house. The game gives you the basic tools. Walls. Windows. Doors. A yard. But if you want better things or to get really elaborate, you have to make it using code and skins. But there are other options. Like buying things from other coders. Some of them have set up stores within the world. You can walk into them and pick stuff and buy it and put it in your house. But I wasn’t there yet. Lennox approached people and asked if they wanted to buy things. He did it in the social areas. That’s how we met. My avatar is an eggplant girl,” her gaze jerked up to my face, “er, I mean, a Yasoan girl. Sorry. Anyway, that’s probably why he picked me out of the crowd. He sold me things really cheap. Really complex things. Things that other places sold for quite a bit more.”

  “And you built a very nice house?” I took a breath, calming down as we came to a table in a space between two booths. I found an empty chair at a table and sat down in it.

  “Better than my shit real-life place,” she said.

  “Then what?”

  “Well, he helped me outfit my VR place. We talked a lot. Found out we both lived on Kota. He wanted to take me out, meet me in real-life. Then we dated a bit.”

  “Even though you’re not Yasoan? Was he decent to you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Did he ever treat you badly?”

  “Oh, no. Not really. Are Yasoan ever mean? I don’t think they can be. But he was competitive, just not in a cruel way. He didn’t treat everyone perfectly, of course, because he wanted to make money and drive out the competition. A few other gamers got wind of how cheaply he was selling his product. They had a . . . bit of a war. I mean, he was Lennox. Willing to do anything to become first. Just nothing too cruel. Which I liked about him. You know?”

  “What more can you tell me?”

  “Well, he almost put the biggest shop in the game out of business. That guy really didn’t like it. And I know there were gamers who sometimes felt cheated by Lennox and Lennox didn’t really have the best customer service.”

  “What happened to the two of you? I mean, did you break up with Lennox or . . .”

  “Did Lennox break up with me?” she finished for me.

  “Right.”

  “I broke up with him. He was too focused. Too driven to build his game empire. It made him . . . kind of unavailable emotionally, just in the end, I discovered that he was better than other guys. I miss him.”

  I caught what she didn’t say. At least, I thought I did. “Do you remember the name of the store he almost put out of business.”

  She shook her head. “No, I haven’t played it in almost five months. Pregnancy. I just don’t feel like playing. Oh, I need to head home. I’ve got to get dinner going.”

  She stood up and before she turned, said, “Please, if you’re going to come by, could you call first? My boyfriend doesn’t know.”

  “Know what?” I asked, thinking how outrageous it would be if he didn’t know she was pregnant.

  “That I went to Lennox’s that day.”

  6

  “He’s here,” Meg said when I walked into the precinct the next morning. She was adding a photo of a man to the suspect board. “This guy Gabe, he’s here. Pierre Brock. Resides on Joopa. Considered Lennox Fogg his direct competition in their Holo-R game.”

  I studied the photo. A twenty-something male, pale face, and dark hair clipped short. His weak chin suggested maybe an inferiority complex—the kind where a man resents other guys for looking more classically masculine. Together with his puggish nose, I got a sense of what kind of man we’d be dealing with. The quietly seething type. Chip on his shoulder. Suspicious of everyone because he knew that his own motives were suspect.

  But. For the sake of the case, I shoved all that aside. I would approach him as I did any person while working a case: with a blank slate, to see to what conclusions their behavior and answers led me. That was the fairest thing to do.

  I started, just registering what Meg had said. “What? Here, here? On Kota?”

  “Yes. He’s one of our suspects, or should be. And he’s here in our city, the City of Jade Spires. The convention capitol of the 6-moons?” She laughed. “That city—you know the one. Remember it? There’s a convention going on and he came over for it.”

  “If that’s a coincidence—” I didn’t finish. I sat down and began going over the notes from my interview with the ex-girlfriend. There was something . . . nagging at me . . . something. I felt I’d missed an important element, but I couldn’t latch onto it. I just needed time and focus.

  “What are you doing?” Meg asked, leaning over my desk.

  I looked up at her. “I don’t know, actually. I did that interview with the ex-girlfriend last night, but I feel like I missed something. It’s not settling right, you know?”

  “Can I look through your notes? Maybe a second set of eyes will help.”

  I handed them over. I was used to Meg as a sidekick. She was comfortable, like a favorite coat or something better, something with a little more dazzle, a bit more spark. A sequined scarf? I laughed in my head. I knew her well enough to realize that if I ever dared to call her my sidekick, that she would resist it with the assertion that it was me who was the sidekick.

  She put my notepad in her blazer pocket. “Great. Let’s look them over while we head to Brock’s hotel.”

  I stood up. “Right. Alright,” I said, looking around. Miko was at her desk, leaning close to her computer monitor. In our little wing in the precinct building, our desks were close together and the air was stuffy, because as the Centau had often reminded us, we didn’t need a big, spacious and nicely outfitted station because there should be no need for police. It was an age old misunderstanding between the races—Centaus and Yasoan had reached some moral acme hundreds of years ago, while the Constellations and us humans continued to drift in the swamp of our self-serving, destructive behaviors.

  “Miko,” the young detective looked at me sharply. “While I’m gone, please try finishing your look through Fogg’s financial records. Oh, and follow up with me or Meg if you get any more details about flight records. Still no word on that?”

  “Not yet. Currently looking. Daxan’s helping,” Miko said. I looked around but the three of us were the only ones in our wing.

  “How is Daxan helping?”

  “Oh, he went out for kasé and coffee,” Miko said, rubbing her eyes then squinting as she swiped at her screen. “We need the energy injection.”

  “Too bad we won’t be here to get ours,” Meg said as the two of us headed out of our wing into the hive of noise that characterized the rest of the station.

  “Yes. I wonder if they were Daxan’s treat or if he would have been requesting a payment for mine.”

  We were in luck. Daxan was just walking up the stairs in the main entrance as Meg and I skipped down the stairs.

  “Hey Daxan,” I said. “Did you happen to get me a drink?”

  He pulled a cup out of the carrier. “Totally naked kasé, just the way you like it, DI Bach.” He flashed a bright smile that contrasted with his soft violet skin. Daxan kept his silver-colored hair cut short—some kind of rebellion against the traditional style of most Yasoan. He was breaking all their cultural rules by becoming a detective, which was why I liked the boy in the first place—he knew that some rules were worth breaking, while others were too important to slight.

  “Sounds like someone already knows you too well,” Meg observed. Her remark, of course, wasn’t reserved for how I liked my drink.

  “And for you, DI Wolfe,” Daxan said, handing another cup to Meg. “Espresso with milk and sugar.”

  “Kasé be damned,” Meg said. “Thank you, Daxan.”

  “Glad we caught you on our way out,” I said, heading out the door. “Stick with Miko on those files and get in touch with us if you find something out.”

  “Of course,” he said as the door swung shut behind Meg.

  7

  “I
was here. At the convention. I’m on a panel you see.” Pierre Brock’s smooth grin was all in his mouth. Nothing touched his dark blue eyes.

  “So, at 9:30 AM yesterday,” I said, checking the time of death in my notes from the autopsy with Cassandra. “You were sitting before a crowd of people?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Check the schedule.”

  “I will. Which panel?”

  “‘VR Currencies and How Game Economies Influence Real-Life Economy.’”

  “Sounds gripping,” Meg said.

  Crowds moved through the lobby of the hotel. Raucous laughter and the sounds of a jazz band, tinkering as though warming up, spilled out from the hotel bar. As we sat around a sleek knee-height table, a woman came up to the suspect and touched him lightly on the arm. “I have a question for you. About how to handle an in-game competitor.”

  “And I’m happy to answer it,” he said, blinking and forcing a smile. “When I’m done here.”

  “What is that?” I asked as the girl wandered off.

  “What?” he asked, shaking his head like he was trying to clear his mind.

  Meg glanced at me and raised an eyebrow.

  “Did her question bother you?”

  “No, not at all,” he answered, recovering.

  “But you’ve heard of Lennox Fogg?” Meg asked directly.

  “Of course. He owned Fogg’s Toggs, a purveyor of cheaply coded and skinned in-game items,” he sneered.

  “Owned?” I repeated. “Or owns?”

  Pierre shook his head. “I assume that since you are here, something has happened to him. I noticed that his shop hasn’t been open since I’ve been on Kota.”

  “Ah, right, right. Fogg’s Toggs was your competition. And what is it your game-store sells?”