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

by Nicole Grotepas

  “So you were hoping he’d rescue you?”

  Her cheeks flushed and she cupped her glass of water with both hands, her shoulders curving in slightly like she wanted to disappear. “Yeah.”

  11

  I was back on a call with Meg, heading to the convention center. “The ex’s story has changed slightly.”

  “Oh?” Meg said.

  “Not that way. She was pretty convinced that Lennox was going to ask her to move in with him and he’d even alluded to that pretty strongly on the communicator call she had with him—she wasn’t taking things to his condo. She was going to see him, to perhaps set it all up. To go back to him. Her current boyfriend, the father of her baby, is abusive. According to her.”

  “Didn’t see that coming.”

  “Neither did I. But this time she was wearing short sleeves. She has fading bruises around her biceps that are consistent with a grabby man. The kind of dick that takes a girl by the arms and swings her or moves her around forcefully. I’d suspect that we’d find other bruises on her.”

  “I’ll destroy him,” Meg said, her voice icy.

  “Join the club. I’m going to have Daxan check her medical records to see if there’s more to back this up. Because if it’s true, then she’s definitely not our suspect.”

  “But the boyfriend could be. He could have followed her.”

  “That would make sense if she had any reason to protect him.”

  “She does.”

  “He beats her.”

  “Does she have a job? Does she have her own money? If he’s the only thing keeping her and her future baby clothed and fed, she has a reason to protect him.”

  “I’m going back to ask some of the people who were present for Brock’s panel if they remember him leaving his panel early.”

  “Great. I’m going to go try to get an interview with Trixie’s boyfriend.”

  “He’s an abuser.”

  “I’m not afraid of that dick. I have an aether gun, thanks to the Centau and their genius inventions.”

  “Do me a favor.”

  “I’ll consider it.”

  “Have him come into the precinct for the interview.”

  She sighed. “I’ll try. Lucy’s at Charm’s for the rest of the evening.”

  “Thanks for taking care of her. Did she tell you we ran down to a Centau dessert place?”

  “Yes. Kind of expensive don’t you think?”

  “Lucy’s worth it.”

  “Sounds like something she’d do with her dad. Lucky girl.”

  The taxi let me off at the convention center. I sighed and got out, taking a deep breath. The enclosed space of a car always made it hard to breathe. But it was quicker than the Spireway. And time was ebbing away as the convention came to an end. I needed to get these questions asked before people started to leave.

  Inside the convention center, I had no other option than to simply ask random people if they had been in the Holo-R currencies panel.

  “Hi, I’m Detective Gabriel Bach with the Ice Jade Precinct. Were you in attendance at the Holo-R currencies panel two days ago?” I flashed my badge and asked stranger after stranger.

  The conference had had a huge pull, according the numbers Daxan had given me about the number of panels and presentations, plus the sheer number of admissions. So it took me over twenty, maybe thirty people to finally find one person who’d been in it. A guy with an unhealthy complexion, perhaps related to hormones. I felt a pang of compassion or him, remembering my own late teenage years. But, he was clean and well-kept otherwise. I showed him the photo of Pierre Brock. The guy remembered him.

  “Do you recall if this man stayed for the entire panel?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Can I get your name? This is part of an ongoing police investigation.” He gave me his name—Stan Lewis—and I scribbled it in my notebook.

  “Thank you for your time.” I said, then began to walk off. “Wait.” I turned and went after him.

  “What?” Stan said, sounding impatient.

  “Do you remember if he said anything memorable?”

  “No.”

  “So he might have not even been there?”

  “I guess. I mean, maybe he left? Maybe? I wasn’t even there to hear him. I was there to hear someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, I thought the Fogg’s Toggs guy would be there.”

  “But he wasn’t?”

  “I guess he was never going to be there, which was disappointing. I’d heard there was a chance he’d show up last minute.” Stan’s gaze was focused over my shoulder, like he was remembering something. “Wait, hang on. Oh yeah.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Oh, wait. I do remember. It seems like that guy in your photo, he started coughing. He drank some of his water, and then kept coughing. And finally he excused himself and went out the side door, coughing the whole time.”

  “Did he ever come back?”

  “Not that I remember. Like I said. I didn’t even care to hear what he was saying. I think his in-game business just got lame after Fogg’s took off.”

  I copied down Stan’s contact info and let him go. Then I found two more people, eventually, who recalled similar things. As I was wandering around the convention center corridors, Daxan called.

  “Gabe, so at the moment, Miko is checking a specific trash bin in an alley not too far from the convention center. I uncovered some footage of a cloaked figure wearing a hood and carrying a bulky armload of refuse. The suspicious figure put it in a bin. She’s checking the bin.”

  “Keep me updated—I’ve found three witnesses who remember Brock coughing until he left the panel.”

  Across the room, I caught sight of Pierre Brock wearing a long black coat, a white dress shirt, and a pair of Holo-R goggles on his forehead as he talked with some people. I tailed him, hoping that Daxan or Miko would get back to me soon, though what I had was enough to question him further.

  As I tailed him, Meg called and let me know that the boyfriend was heading into the precinct for an interview. I mentioned to her that the Brock had left the panel early, and she implied that one of us was going to crack the case soon. She bet on herself.

  12

  The bin turned out to have a set of Holo-R equipment in it as well as a statue of a jade Buddha. Miko bagged it and took it in as well as the other stuff—the signal generators that hung on the walls and interacted with the player and the headset. Over the communicator Miko mentioned that she could see blood and possibly silver hair on the statue.

  Daxan checked the Utopia game logs, which arrived from the game developer finally. Pierre Brock, had been logged in around the victim’s time of death.

  But so had Harry Akhtar and Trixie Black. A quick call to Trixie told me that, yes, she had logged in that day, which was how Fogg had contacted her and was what led her to heading to his condo. I didn’t bother with asking her why she’d left that bit out—it was pointless. Suspects left as much out as possible. They never thought anything was important.

  I got Meg on the communicator. “You almost here?”

  “Almost. Keep your pants on.”

  “The boyfriend?”

  “He left about an hour ago. He’d never played the Utopia game. Thinks they’re for losers. ‘And your girlfriend?’ I asked him. ‘Gave them up when I came into the picture,’ he said. I would have asked him about Fogg and the game, but I didn’t want to give the bastard any reason to touch the ex-girlfriend.”

  “Taking him in for questioning at all—” I began.

  She cut me off— “I know. Don’t make me feel worse about it. I thought it would be him.”

  I felt a surge of pity. “That’s our job. You did the right thing.”

  “Did I?” Bitterness rang through her voice. “He reminded me of Graff.” The mention of the husband of her sister, Holly, got my fingers itching for a fist fight.

  “We don’t really know for sure if he’s—” she cut
me off again. I knew it wasn’t me she was mad at, so I let how brusque she was being slide.

  “Don’t. Let’s not,” she said, and I heard her voice nearby. I looked up to see her coming close as she lowered her communicator.

  It was time to take him in. There was every chance that Brock would run when he saw us coming. And though I could handle the kid in a fight and most anything else he’d think to throw at me, I didn’t want him to give me the slip. So I’d waited for the extra set of legs.

  Plus Meg was my partner.

  I had kept tabs on Brock. He was currently in the wide open atrium area, sitting at a table, sipping a drink with some other people. As we approached, he glanced up and saw us coming. An expression I was very familiar with flashed across his face for the briefest moment, before he got it under control. Then he stood up, pretended he hadn’t seen us, and began to walk away quickly.

  “He’s gonna run,” Meg said.

  “Shit, I hate chasing after a suspect.” I increased my pace.

  He checked over his shoulder, saw that we were still closing in and he took off running.

  “Damn.”

  The two of us sprinted after him.

  “Should we split up?” Meg asked, breathlessly.

  “If it comes to that. He’s heading for a side-door.”

  We dodged between people, and at first I did my best to say ‘excuse me.’ Eventually, as Brock got further away from me, I gave that up and merely bumped through the crowd, breathing carefully to keep my panic under control.

  He went out a side exit and we followed, crashing through it and pausing to ascertain which way he’d gone.

  “That way!” Meg said, pointing in the opposite direction from where I’d been looking. I spun and bolted after her. He crossed a street busy with bike taxis and cars, and we kept after him as he went up a flight of stairs into a plaza full of people and food vendors.

  “I’m swinging around to the other side,” I shouted at Meg and skirted the plaza to the only other outlet. If he didn’t end up hiding somehow in the plaza, he’d come out on that end. When I got there, I didn’t see him anywhere beyond the plaza, which meant that he was still in it. I went up the stairs, scanning the crowd and the booths. Meg caught up to me.

  “He’s not here,” she said, out of breath.

  “He didn’t get out. So he is. He must be hiding.”

  I studied the crowd and the booths, looking for the slightest thing that was off. “There!” I said, pointing. I’d seen a flash of his long black coat. We hurried through the crowd and dodged between two colorful vendor tents serving native Yasoan cuisine. Meg went around this time and I headed straight for the blur that had been Pierre Brock. He was hurrying around some boxes. I shoved against the end nearest me, which made them fall like dominoes, crashing into his path. He stumbled and I leapt at him. We tumbled into a landscaped garden that marked the edge of the plaza.

  “Got you,” I said, mashing him down. He tried to crawl away and buck me off his back, but I held him tight. “Why are you running, Mr. Brock?”

  “I like to run. Being chased brings it out in me.”

  “Because you’re guilty?”

  He scoffed. “Hardly.”

  Meg appeared, her aether gun drawn and leveled at the back of Brock’s head. She hovered over me as I finally got Brock’s arms positioned on his back so that I could cuff him. He would deny it, of course, until we presented him with irrefutable evidence.

  “I think the evidence will bear it out,” Meg said.

  “How’d you get past the locks, that’s what I’m wondering. Although, out of all the suspects, you’d be the one to know how to do it.”

  “You have no proof.”

  I scoffed. “I do. And it adds up. And it will continue to add up. The jade Buddha murder weapon—you should have covered your tracks better.”

  We took Brock back to the precinct once a squad car showed up. He was fingerprinted, DNA sampled, and soon we’d have the evidence documented from the trash bin.

  13

  Pierre Brock broke down and wept when I showed him the photos of the fingerprint smudges on the Holo-R headset and the Jade Buddha that he hadn’t cleaned up. He sat at the table in the center of the interrogation room, his hands cuffed to a ring on the edge of the table. The Centau hated that we had rooms like this. Daxan avoided it as well. I couldn’t blame them. The human/Constie condition was ugly to look at, even for me, a human.

  I sat across from Brock. Meg stood on the far side of the room, hovering, her arms crossed over her chest. She’d taken off her blazer and her face looked a bit haggard. She kept catching my gaze with hers. She was tough, but I knew that this part was hard for her. Just watching the fallout from a thoughtless, rash action, it was sobering. The ripples spread forever.

  “Those are your fingerprints. Thought you’d get off-moon before we could bring you in? Is that why this was such a rush job?”

  “I didn’t mean to kill him,” Brock said, his chin quivering as the rest of his face crumpled in horror and regret.

  I believed him. It was the second ugliest part about the job—the surprise over how fragile bodies are, how quickly something can turn into a nightmare when rage or anger propels an act. The pity I inevitably felt always fooled me into guilt. Because a part of me thought it was unfair to experience sadness for a person’s life spiraling downward, especially when they’d killed. Yet the sorrow I felt wasn’t just for the perpetrator, but the entire messy situation.

  “It just happened so fast. I showed up, thinking I’d just threaten him, tell him to back off. Stop cheating. Stop ripping off my code. I knocked on his door, and it opened, like maybe he was expecting someone. Inside he was standing there, oblivious to me, in Utopia. It looked like he was stocking virtual shelves, the way he was moving. He was also talking to someone. He even said something so kind—‘your baby would be my baby, see you soon’—but I was pissed at that point. He’d been slowly ruining my life. He’d said goodbye and I knew he was alone in the game. Before I knew what was happening, the statue was in my hand. I hit him in the back of the head. I didn’t know it would really kill him. I just wanted to hurt him the way he’d been hurting me.”

  “You cleaned up everything that would point to a Holo-R set up. Included the room generators that hang on the walls to help create the holograph world.”

  He nodded and buried his face in his hands. His voice came out muffled and horrified. “Yes. When I saw what I’d done, I didn’t know what else to do, but hide it. And run. I’m sorry. So sorry. I didn’t meant to kill him.”

  I exchanged a look with Meg, glad to have the confession, but burdened by it all the same. We finished the interview and let a desk officer process the arrest.

  Back in our little wing of the precinct, I sat down. My desk was a mess. It was the one place I let a mess pervade. If I put things away the way I wanted, the way I obsessed at home, I would forget things. I left them out so I remembered.

  I rubbed my eyes and looked across the room at Meg, sorting through papers, taking down the suspect photos. We would file this case away for now, keeping all the evidence together to prosecute Brock. And then we’d put a new case up, because murder was a business of which humans couldn’t let go. As she worked, Meg seemed to have a spring in her step. She always got more upbeat when she solved a case. She caught me watching her and smiled faintly. “That bad?”

  “You know it. This job.” I shook my head.

  “At least it’s not going to go cold. If Brock had gotten off Kota, we may have never solved it.”

  “I know. I just sometimes think the Centau are right about us.”

  “The Centau aren’t even right about themselves,” Meg said, hinting at some of the cases we'd dealt with that had no resolution. The investigations would proceed normally and then out of nowhere a case would go off on a tangent and slowly come to a dead stop. It was happening to too many cases to be a coincidence. We'd only seen the tip of the iceberg, but there was some
thing or someone preventing us from delving deeper into solving them. It was unspoken between us but I could tell we were thinking the same thing. Namely the possibility of a mole.

  I fidgeted with a stack of crumpled taco wrappers on my desk. “That girl. She’d had something, maybe something better. A Yasoan that wouldn’t beat her up. And now she’s got nothing.”

  “I know. Don’t get me started. I’m blaming myself. And after my interview with him, I’m certain he’s hurting her. But that’s not our job.”

  “It never is. We let women stay with abusive men and expect them to figure it out.” I was thinking of Meg’s sister, Holly. I was thinking of an officer in our very own precinct, Holly’s husband. Fucking Graf. Holly had never told us for sure. We’d just seen the vestiges.

  “We let women? Women are free agents. They have to do what’s right for them.”

  “While living with abusive partners who hold them in terror, who emotionally manipulate them so that they can’t even trust themselves.”

  “Gabe, come on. Parts of the job suck. Life is shitty in a lot of ways. But, look, we’ve got to take care of our own. Speaking of, it’s your day to go pick up Lucy. You better get out of here if you plan to get there before she’s already out and waiting.”

  I stood up. At least we’d caught Brock. Meg was right about that. I stretched and sighed, trying to shake the weight of the human condition, which was clearly not just a human problem. All the races suffered.

  Seeing Lucy would lighten my heart. “I’ll take her back to my condo. You can pick her up when you’re done here.”