Consequences

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “The people who flank my team,” she said. “Dismiss them.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “They don’t answer to me.”

  “Then I’ll make them leave.” She took a step forward, hoping that would be enough. She didn’t want to leave her perch near the wall.

  “Wait,” he said, catching her arm. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  She nodded, just once, and leaned against the wall again. His mouth was pursed, as if he had eaten something sour. He was clearly sending through his links.

  One by one, the Port employees stopped, all of them looking confused. But her team kept walking.

  Gianni stopped in front of her, taking her hands into his own. “Anatolya,” he said gently.

  Her eyes burned. She hadn’t realized just how panicked she was. Odd that she could be so strong on Etae and feel so weak here.

  “Did they treat you well?” he asked.

  “It depends on your definition of well,” she said. “I felt like a prisoner, and thought I’d never see you again.”

  Collier shot her an angry look, apparently deciding that he no longer needed to hide his emotions.

  “But they did feed me and keep me in nice quarters,” she added, as if she hadn’t seen the look at all.

  Gianni nodded. “We’ll make certain none of this happens again.”

  Collier’s chin went up, and Anatolya felt rather than saw his fear. She could see him rethinking his choices, wondering if he had done the right thing in setting her team free on Armstrong.

  Let him wonder. She needed them to give her strength.

  “Are you well?” she asked not just Gianni, but also the remaining eight members of the team.

  The other eight looked to Gianni for the answer. They knew better than to respond for themselves.

  “I too dislike being held prisoner,” he said, “even if it is on our own ship. Perhaps we should rethink this, Anatolya.”

  “We’ll issue a protest,” she said. “If we don’t get the response we need, we’ll stand aside.”

  He nodded again and she felt an almost irrepressible urge to smile. She and Gianni were a good team. They both knew they wouldn’t give up the meetings with the Alliance, not now, not after they had already suffered through the humiliations of the wait.

  But they were still going to issue the protest, still going to make Collier—and anyone he was linked to—squirm.

  Collier cleared his throat. “Your ride is waiting at the south exit. I think we should go.”

  Gianni didn’t look at him. Instead, he kept his gaze on Anatolya, as if waiting for her to decide if indeed she wanted to enter the City of Armstrong.

  She let the silence spin out between all of them for several seconds. Around them, conversations continued in dozens of languages. She saw no one she recognized, no one who seemed to care about her or her team.

  Collier shifted his weight. He was squirming, and it pleased her. She finally turned to him, holding herself as if he were a servant almost beneath her notice.

  “Is there enough room in that ride for my entire team?”

  He glanced at the ten of them—Anatolya, Gianni, and the rest of the team—and seemed to be sizing them up. So Collier played games as well. He just wasn’t as good at them as she was.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Excellent,” she said. “I assume we’ll have an armed escort.”

  He looked panicked. “We don’t do things that way in Armstrong.”

  She froze. “My people are not allowed weapons. If something goes wrong, we cannot defend ourselves.”

  “Nothing will go wrong,” Collier said.

  Anatolya bit back a curse. On Etae, such phrases were considered bad luck.

  But she didn’t rebuke him. Instead, she gave a silent signal to her team—a small movement of the hand farthest from Collier—so that they’d be ready for anything.

  Anything at all.

  Twenty-four

  It took Flint nearly four hours to find what he was looking for. Buried in the redundant systems, deep inside the code, he finally found the video for the past two weeks.

  The audio was gone or buried even deeper. No matter how hard he searched he couldn’t find it.

  But the video went from the day after Judge Lahiri stopped it to six days before Flint downloaded. The file then cut off abruptly, but not because someone had altered it. Someone had destroyed the program that caused the redundant backups—probably deleting most of the other files or compromising any chain that would allow him to find them.

  At that moment, he let out a breath that he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. He had been worried that his download was incomplete or that the police were monitoring him. Instead, he realized that someone had tampered with the Lahiris’ system—perhaps the same someone who had killed them.

  He had to rebuild the file, add links and code so that it would play on his machines. First, he isolated the file from the Lahiris’ download. The last thing he wanted to do was alert any bug in their system that one last piece of video existed.

  Then he took the isolated file, copied it, and moved the copy to a different machine, one not attached to the network that was analyzing the information he had gotten from the Lahiris’.

  Finally, he instructed that new machine to repair the files before beginning playback.

  The repair took another hour; the file had been badly damaged. He only hoped it was playable.

  When the playback was ready, the computer beeped at him. Flint pressed a button on his keyboard so his other screens receded into the desk. Then he instructed the remaining screen to play the download in six-hour increments, beginning with the last six hours first.

  The beginning was unremarkable. Judge Lahiri walked in and out of the main room, often talking to someone behind him. Dr. Lahiri worked in the kitchen—not cooking, but arranging food on a tray which she then brought to one of the back bedrooms.

  Flint felt a shiver run through him. In that back bedroom, he suspected, Caroline lay.

  He watched the vid in fast-forward, slowing it only when someone flitted across the screen. Generally that someone was either Judge Lahiri or Dr. Lahiri, although, curiously, he never saw them together.

  He got a sense, even from the two-dimensional soundless vid that a chill had fallen on the relationship, probably in the intervening months since Dr. Lahiri had decided to hire Flint on her own.

  After three hours vid time, he finally saw Carolyn. She crossed the hallway wrapped in a robe, her bare feet peeking out from the hem. Her hair was tousled, her eyes sleep-weary. She let herself into another room, probably the bathroom, and vanished for another half an hour.

  Dr. Lahiri joined Judge Lahiri in the living room, sitting in the uncomfortable-looking antique chairs and having an animated conversation. Occasionally either the Judge or the doctor would wave a hand toward the hallway. Obviously, the conversation was about Carolyn and was evolving into a disagreement.

  Flint sighed, and leaned back in his chair. If he wanted to, he could have his system decipher as much of the conversation as possible. The system had been set up to read lips in a variety of languages, so if the vid provided a clear view of the Lahiri’s faces, then he would be able to get much of the conversation.

  But he would wait to see how the vid ended before he made that decision.

  Then Carolyn appeared. She was dressed as she had whenever he had seen her—neatly, carefully, her body squared by the long blouse she wore over loose-fitting cotton pants. The same rubber-soled shoes that she had worn at the Spacer’s Pub graced her feet.

  Carolyn didn’t sit across from her parents. Instead she stood, the tension in her body as obvious as it had been when she had climbed the stairs in front of him the day she was going to meet her parents.

  Something had gone wrong in their reunion—or perhaps the reunion had never gone right. Dr. Lahiri kept her head bowed during the conversation, her hands clasped on her lap, her thumbs tapping against each ot
her in irritation.

  Judge Lahiri didn’t speak much either. His lips had thinned, his hands gripped the arms of his chair, his knuckles turning white. Carolyn’s head bobbed slightly, as people’s heads did when they were speaking emphatically, but Flint couldn’t see her face.

  That was when he realized the vid should have showed the room from all angles. All he had managed to find was one. Apparently what he had found was simply the remains from one camera; the record from all the others had been destroyed.

  The conversation went on for an hour, and then all three people jumped. Obviously, they had heard a noise and it had stopped the conversation.

  Judge Lahiri turned to his wife. She shot him a look of pure hatred, then stood and walked to the foyer.

  There she disappeared from the camera’s view and Flint wished that he could see what was going on at the door. That part of the system should have had the most redundancies—troubles that arose in private apartments often came through the front door—but clearly whoever had gotten rid of the security videos had known to double- and triple-check for the door vids.

  Carolyn turned, the fear on her face so palpable that Flint wanted to step in. Her lips moved, the words so clearly formed that Flint could read them.

  Do you have a weapon in this house?

  Her father looked shocked. He rose from the chair and reached for her, but Carolyn moved away. She scurried down the hall, the Judge gazing after her as if she had been a vision.

  He pressed one of the chips on the back of his hand, and then looked directly at the camera that provided this video.

  Get help, he said, followed by another word. Immediately? Quickly?

  Flint couldn’t tell, but he could see the urgency. He wondered what was going on at the door that sent the remaining two into a panic.

  Then he saw it—Dr. Lahiri being held in a man’s arms. Her eyes were wide and tear-filled.

  The Judge’s hands fluttered, a helpless move, and he started to glance toward the hallway, but caught himself.

  The man wasn’t yet fully in the camera’s range, but his arms were. And they didn’t look like normal arms. They seemed too long. They were digging into Dr. Lahiri’s stomach.

  As she moved past the camera, all Flint could see was the man’s back.

  Judge Lahiri spoke, his words lost to the blur of the vid. His hands fluttered again, the movement of a man who wanted something bad to end quickly. He was making promises, begging, stalling for time.

  Only once, he glanced toward the security system, but once was enough. The man looked too, the back of his head making a sharp, aware motion.

  He might have spoken, for suddenly, the Judge looked even more terrified.

  Dr. Lahiri’s entire body was hidden by the man’s. He was large and moved with a deliberation that made Flint’s skin crawl. The man had done this before, often enough that he had no real reaction to the fear around him. It didn’t anger him or excite him. If anything, it made him calmer.

  Judge Lahiri stepped in front of the man, reaching for his wife. The man’s head shook, and the Judge stopped, his body also partially blocked by the man’s.

  Flint wished for the other cameras—for sound, for anything that gave him a clue as to what was going on.

  The camera panned back a little—obviously the Lahiri security program was very good—so that the man’s body didn’t block everything.

  Still, Flint couldn’t see much more than he had before—just the man’s legs, Dr. Lahiri’s barely visible between them, and the judge’s hands, still fluttering.

  Then the Judge’s hands stopped fluttering. He looked toward the hall, and his face filled with chagrin.

  He hadn’t meant to look. It had been an involuntary movement that would probably cost his family their lives.

  At that same moment, the man whirled and shoved Dr. Lahiri forward. She caught the blast to the stomach that had been meant for the man.

  The Judge screamed, the horror on his face distorting it to unrecognizability. He fell on his knees beside his wife, touching her face, her wound, her shoulders.

  But it was too late: she was obviously dead, her eyes open, her hands flung back as they had been when the bodies were found.

  The man’s face was in full frame now. Flint had never seen it before, but that meant nothing. He didn’t know all the criminals in the universe. He didn’t even know all of them in Armstrong.

  The man’s mouth moved. His eyes glittered, almost as if he were playing a game, and had somehow won.

  Flint didn’t understand why Carolyn didn’t shoot again, and then the camera panned back one more time.

  The man’s strangely enhanced arms had elongated. He had grabbed the weapon in her hand, and was trying to tug it away from her with his right hand.

  She was struggling, avoiding the weapons that his left hand had become. The fingers had become knives.

  Flint’s entire body turned cold. His mouth was dry, and he wanted to look away, but he couldn’t.

  The man had enhanced himself into a killing machine: a walking weapon that somehow had more tricks than Flint could imagine. Carolyn did not seem shocked by it. She had moved her body sideways, somehow anticipating the man’s changes.

  Flint froze the frame and studied the man for a brief moment. He appeared human, except for his magical arms. But Flint knew that enhancements could make a variety of changes—keeping people young, repairing limbs, regrowing eyes.

  Why wouldn’t they be able to cause a human being to become a walking arsenal?

  Flint separated out the freeze frame, then rewound to that perfect image of the man’s face, and separated that as well. He set them aside, planning to plug them into one of the criminal databases he kept constantly updating.

  Then, reluctantly, he started the vid again.

  Carolyn lost her grip on the weapon. The man’s arms snaked back against his chest. He whirled, and shot the judge, just like he had shot Dr. Lahiri, in the torso, wiping out the center of his body.

  The old man remained on his knees for just a moment, then fell backward, his heels digging unnaturally into his spine.

  Carolyn did not scream. She didn’t even look. Instead, she ran for the door.

  The man’s arm elongated again, caught her, and pulled her toward him, as if she were a lover. His arm wrapped around her several times, like a rope, the weapon still clutched in his right hand.

  He spoke to her, close up, his face away from the camera. Her expression remained impassive. His other hand, the one with the knifelike fingers, rose and still she didn’t flinch.

  The blades threatened her eyes, and she didn’t even close them.

  Finally the man shifted her to his left hand, which had become human again, and then shoved her far enough back that she was in the range of the small pistol Flint had given her days before.

  The man spoke, his chin moving, but his lips hidden.

  Carolyn stared at the weapon, not moving.

  The man spoke again, but she still didn’t respond.

  Finally, he shot her in the face.

  She slammed backward, hitting the wall and falling to the ground, her body sliding down slowly, leaving a smear against the wallpaper.

  That smear hadn’t been at the crime scene. None of this evidence had been there.

  Flint swallowed hard, staring at her body. It didn’t move. It didn’t even make the involuntary shudders that sudden death sometimes caused.

  He froze the frame again.

  His hands were shaking, and he had to stand up. He paced around his small office, making himself breathe.

  Had he caused that? By finding her, had he made it easier for that man—that thing—to track her down?

  She had been visible from the time Flint brought her on the Emmeline. Sure, she had traveled by her Disappeared name, but she was in the presence of a Retrieval Artist. Anyone with brains could have figured out that she was a Disappeared.

  A bit of research, and they would have discovered wh
o she was, just like he had.

  This man—this thing—had waited until she was in her parents’ home, waited until she had been there for a few days, before attacking all of them.

  Perhaps this vid had been planted for the police to find. Perhaps they were supposed to think the three Lahiris died this way when actually something else happened. The evidence didn’t match the crimes, and that had to count for something.

  Unless…

  Flint returned to his desk. He unfroze the image, and the vid continued to play.

  The man was studying Carolyn as if he found her corpse fascinating. As he stood there, cleaning bots slid into the room from the kitchen. He slipped his hand into his pocket and removed a small device. He held it up, and the bots stopped moving, hovering in midair.

  Flint’s breath caught, and he knew without watching the rest what had happened. The man had reprogrammed the bots to clean only what he wanted cleaned. Then he had shut down the security system and the cleaning system so that nothing else would be touched, so that his carefully staged crime scene remained exactly as he wanted it.

  Why stage a crime scene, though? What, exactly, was he trying to hide?

  Perhaps Flint could get a clue by watching the man clean up. The man walked to the closest bot, opened its chip storage, and replaced two of the chips with two of his own. That bot bobbed for a moment; then the man spoke to it.

  Again, Flint couldn’t see the man’s face. But the bot lowered itself to the ground and waited in a corner, unmoving. Flint certainly hadn’t expected that.

  The man ignored the other bots, which remained floating, as if they knew he would command them, given time. Instead, he picked up Carolyn’s body as if it weighed nothing and carried it to the center of the furniture arrangement.

  The corpse dripped fluids across the hardwood floor, but the man didn’t seem to care. He set the body down, then stood back as though he were creating a piece of art.

  He fanned her hair around what remained of her head, except for the strands in the very back, which were matted with blood and tissue. Then he let her hands drop, as if they had fallen naturally. He studied her for a moment, shook his head as if he were dissatisfied, and moved away from her.