Consequences

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  All DeRicci could think was that Lahiri had gotten involved for the love of danger and, eventually, for the love of killing. That she had Disappeared at all was a surprise. The fact that she had stayed out of the news also seemed to be a surprise.

  But DeRicci would have DNA records shortly, and once she had them, she would know for sure if Carolyn Lahiri had indeed stayed out of the news. For all DeRicci knew at the moment, Lahiri had gone from identity to identity, fighting wars. With luck, the DNA would reveal her history for the past thirty years.

  DeRicci rubbed her eyes and made herself lean forward, concentrating on the case. Carolyn Lahiri was a mystery, but her parents also had ties to unsavory people. Dr. Lahiri was known for treating anyone who came through her door; so many doctors only took Alliance patients or human patients. If Dr. Lahiri had thought she could save an alien, she would try—often using a link with a doctor on an alien’s homeworld to conduct a virtual consult.

  And Judge Lahiri was known for his harshness, his willingness to uphold the legal traditions of the Alliance to the letter. If a judge could be considered conservative, not interpreting the laws at all if he could avoid it, then Judge Lahiri was that person.

  The suicide of the son bothered DeRicci as well. The son had never succeeded at anything, and finally had ended it all in an unremarkable fashion, notable only for its cruelty toward his parents, who discovered the body. He had set up a meeting with them, and had killed himself only minutes before they arrived.

  DeRicci knew she would have to reopen that case as well.

  She tapped the screen on her desk to see if there were any updates from the techs. She got several: the techs had finally finished at the crime scene. A few of them had left early to start examining the wealth of evidence.

  Their preliminary reports sent a shudder through DeRicci: the splatter wasn’t making sense.

  She read carefully, then pressed a corner of the screen for audio presentation. The information was the same.

  The way the splatter had fallen, it should have been isolated to each victim. The direction of the shots should have sent the spatter to specific places for each victim. But the initial results were surprising: the brain and blood had mixed—each splatter pattern held material from all three victims, instead of just one.

  The techs told DeRicci that they would make sense of the evidence; it would just take them more time. But this was precisely the kind of news she didn’t want to hear.

  And she didn’t know what to make of it. In all her years as a detective, she’d never had the visual evidence—the splatter pattern so obviously belonging to only one victim—contradict the DNA evidence. Usually those two things matched, and they contradicted eyewitness statements.

  Only there were no eyewitnesses here, at least not yet.

  She continued to dig through the preliminary reports. Most of them were simply a record of each tech’s experience in the apartment—something now required by law. She scanned those, and also the notifications of when the techs planned to finish the lab work, and the early guesswork at the dates when the techs would finish their final reports.

  DeRicci knew those deadlines would change—nothing ever worked the way it was planned, at least not in the detective business.

  Then she found a few other newly filed notes.

  The weapons specialist had already completed a preliminary report. Since he hadn’t been at the crime scene, his report was an examination of the pistol and test-firings of it, as well as a cursory comparison between the weapon and the wounds on the corpses.

  Aside from the things she already knew—that a small laser pistol like that could make those wounds—she didn’t expect to find anything else of interest in the report.

  And she was wrong.

  The weapon had been fired, probably on the day of the murders. It had a distinctive signature. It had been modified from its original specifications to emit a stronger laser pulse—one that could do more damage at closer range.

  That pulse left burn marks at less than two meters, marks that showed up on all three corpses. At point-blank range, however, the weapon could cause a fire. And none of the victims had been burned, not even Carolyn Lahiri, whom DeRicci had initially suspected of suicide.

  The suicide theory was officially gone now. There had been a fourth person at that crime scene, a person who had managed to get away from the bloody living room without leaving footprints, handprints, or any other trace of itself.

  DeRicci wasn’t willing to consider the killer human, at least not yet. So the killer could have escaped in any one of a variety of ways. Several alien species living on Armstrong did have wings and the ability to fly.

  She would have to check the apartment’s records to see if any of those lived nearby.

  She also wondered if an alien’s ability to fly or to travel by alternative means—using the sticky part of their legs or feet to adhere to surfaces and walk on walls—could have caused the mixture in the splatter. She made a mental note to ask the techs that when she acknowledged the receipt of their reports.

  The weapons specialist’s report went on in great detail, mostly talking about trajectories and wound edges. He wanted thorough autopsies, because the preliminary information he got also didn’t match up.

  Dr. Lahiri seemed to have been shot at close range, but Judge Lahiri had been farther away from his killer. He had also been fired at from above, while Dr. Lahiri had been fired at from a direct horizontal angle.

  So, from the preliminary autopsy information, had Carolyn Lahiri. Which also raised questions of splatter and trace evidence, and whether or not there had been more than one killer in the room—one who was taller than the others, who had shot Carolyn and her father, while the other killer—the shorter one—had killed Dr. Lahiri.

  DeRicci’s headache was growing. She closed her eyes for a moment, wishing she had someone to discuss all of this information with. Someone who had a solid detective’s mind, who would help her sift through the evidence as if it were a puzzle that the two of them could put together.

  She wasn’t willing to do that with Cabrera. At the moment, considering the delicate nature of this case, she wasn’t sure she wanted to discuss it with anyone.

  She opened her eyes again, and sighed. The words on the weapon specialists report still blurred together. She blinked and the words finally separated.

  She scanned ahead, past the discussion of trajectories and multiple killers and laser shot angles. She had to keep that information in the back of her brain, but not let it influence her, since it was all preliminary and could be wrong. She kept looking until she got to the end of the report, and a history of the weapon itself.

  A weapon used in a murder shouldn’t have had a traceable history. She rarely got enough information from the guns she found to know where they were sold, who had initially owned them, and how they had gotten into the killer’s hands.

  But this weapon had a history, and it told her more than she wanted to know about how it had gotten into the killer’s hands.

  Either he brought it to the apartment or it was already there, in the hands of Carolyn Lahiri.

  DeRicci closed her eyes again, feeling the old demons of failure and loss rise within her.

  She should have known that the gun belonged to Miles Flint.

  Twenty-seven

  There were aliens in the crowd.

  That was what struck Anatolya first as she plunged headlong into the sea of bodies. The supposedly peace-loving Peyti, their breathing masks grotesque against their elongated faces; the Disty, short but violent, always around when there was trouble; and oddly, a few Rev, large, cone-shaped creatures whom she had never seen away from their own kind.

  Gianni pressed against her—the rest of the team flanked her—and she barely walked. She almost floated toward the hired car, supposedly at the other end of the crowd.

  She had only Collier’s word for that—Collier, who was too much of a coward to walk with them.

 
; Shouts and screams in a variety of languages caught her ears. All the voices competed for her attention. She saw people only in bits and snatches—through shoulders, around heads, bobbing up and down as they tried to see her.

  Or were they trying to see her? They were shouting about terrorists, shouting about aliens, shouting about murder. They didn’t seem to know about Etae and its struggles. All they knew was that this group—Anatolya’s group—didn’t belong in Armstrong.

  “Criminals!”

  “Murderers!”

  “Baby-killers!”

  That last caught her. She turned her head toward the voice. It sounded familiar, but how could something sound familiar in this cacophony?

  The stench was almost unbearable—human sweat mixed with fear, the cloying odor of ginger rising from the Rev, the putrid smell of aausme hiding somewhere in the crowd.

  Gianni shifted against her—he had seen something and it made him nervous. She felt his entire body go into alert.

  Don’t do anything, she sent. We can’t afford to do anything.

  We have to defend ourselves, he sent back.

  Only if attacked. She was hoping that they wouldn’t be attacked, but even she was not certain. Nothing had gone their way since they had arrived on Armstrong.

  Signs floated around her, deliberately untouched by human hands. Signs that were illegal on Etae, anonymous protests sailing above the crowd.

  Etae = Mass Murder

  The Deaths of 18 Million Idonae Will Be Avenged

  Terror & Alliance Don’t Mix!

  Someone had leaked the information about them. Someone had told the good citizens of Armstrong who she was, who her team was, and why they were here.

  “Oh, no,” Gianni breathed.

  At least, Anatolya thought he breathed the words. He might have sent them across the link, but it felt real. Yet she wasn’t sure how she could have heard him over the noise of the crowd, which had grown deafening. She could barely hear herself think.

  Look.

  That word came from the three team members in front of her. They had sent the command in unison.

  She followed the tilt of their heads, and felt herself grow cold.

  On a makeshift ledge, cobbled together from chairs and scraps found nearby, a group of Idonae stood. They had their arms woven together like a tapestry, their fat brown bodies looking like cocoons trapped in a spider’s web.

  They stood like they used to at the entrance to all of their cities on Etae, in the first war—the one before the humans started fighting each other. The Idonae’s fragile limbs entwined together in an attempt to be strong, to hold out the invaders.

  She shivered, and for a moment, she thought she felt rain fall on her, her feet slogging in mud. Then she shook the image away, and continued moving forward, trying not to look, and being unable to stop herself.

  She had always found the Idonae hideously ugly, but never more than now—their lack of a conventional face made it impossible to see where they were looking, understand what they were thinking.

  They blamed all Etaens for their plight, not realizing that they had been the first invaders. The humans had only repeated the Idonae’s actions.

  And were being cursed for it.

  At the end of the line of Idonae, the last Idonae let its limbs flow like feelers in water. Then its tiny hands opened in unison and released yet another sign.

  Etaen Usurpers shall Pay for their Crimes

  Anatolya gasped in spite of herself.

  Her team moved close, pressing against her. Or were they being shoved against her by the crowd?

  The cries had turned to angry shouts, and she couldn’t make out the words—she didn’t dare.

  We have to defend, Gianni sent.

  No, she sent back, and hoped she was right.

  Twenty-eight

  Flint’s facial recognition program couldn’t identify the killer. At least not from all the databases he had swiped from the Detective Division, focusing mostly on the Moon.

  He expanded the search to include the entire Alliance, but knew that would take time, and his instincts were warning him that time was running out.

  He wasn’t quite sure why he felt that way—Armstrong police investigations, even ones of well-known victims—had their own pace, and it was usually slow. But DeRicci’s visit had come right on the heels of her trip to the apartment, and her disappointment in his unwillingness to cooperate had been palpable.

  Because he was thinking about it, he checked the spyware he’d been running in DeRicci’s computer. In the last hour, it had downloaded a significant number of reports.

  Flint flipped through them and cursed. The weapons specialist had already gotten back to her: DeRicci knew that the gun had initially belonged to him.

  She hadn’t contacted him either, when she discovered it. His instincts had been right. She was done with him. Still, he hoped that she would try to reach him when she left the office.

  Sometimes DeRicci didn’t do things in the order that he expected her to.

  He blanked that screen and returned to work on the killer. The system was sorting through millions of faces. But Flint had set up other scans as well, and those seemed to be getting better results than the name and face search.

  His databases had information on the killing method, but it came from an unexpected source. He was expecting to find a single killer’s modus operandi.

  Instead, he found an entire army’s.

  The Etaen army’s. Or at least one branch of it.

  Flint felt cold. These murders were obviously tied to Carolyn Lahiri, and to her past.

  He leaned forward as he read. The killer had been human, but enhanced in ways that had been forbidden throughout the Alliance. His DNA had been altered with Idonae DNA to give his limbs an elasticity that they wouldn’t normally have. The other alterations—the knives for fingers, the added strength—came from experiments done off-world with human children.

  Although there were rumors that these experiments had yielded the ultimate physical weapon, the Alliance had no proof of it. Because Etae wasn’t part of the Alliance, information on this sort of enhancement—how to achieve it, the benefits (and problems) of the alterations, and the uses of it—wasn’t available, at least through legitimate channels.

  Several intergalactic corporations had been lobbying the Alliance for approval of the techniques, claiming that corporate security guards needed the alterations to survive the opening of new worlds at the edge of the known universe.

  “History has shown us,” one corporate exec argued before the Alliance’s main governing body, “that the security corps for major businesses die in record numbers in the first years of a colonization. Laser weapons often don’t work in intended ways on different alien species. However, if these species believe that we have morphing powers and can become any sort of weapon we want, they will leave us alone, allow us to establish our businesses on the planets, and work with us diplomatically—provided, of course, the alien species has enough intelligence to understand the delicacy of diplomatic negotiations.”

  Flint shook his head. The only reason he had a job was because of the stupidity of intergalactic corporations. If they had researched planets before colonizing them, then the errors that caused people to Disappear would never have happened. But corporations didn’t work that way; they went in, colonized, stripped the areas of the goods the corporation wanted, and dealt with the consequences.

  Now the corporations wanted to alter the very makeup of their employees’ bodies, just to provide a measure of security for their colonizing executives.

  The computer to his left beeped. The facial recognition scans had found a match—or what the computer considered a match. Sometimes the program came up with false positives, and he had to weed through them to find what he was looking for.

  He called up the image on the screen, and studied it. It was a hologram crammed into a two-dimensional picture.

  The picture looked close enough, bu
t he couldn’t tell, not with the two-dimensional image. Faces got mashed sometimes when they went from a hologram down to 2-D.

  He would download it, but before he did, he wanted to see what database the computer had found the image on.

  As he stared at the web-trail, he felt a shiver run through him. This image hadn’t come from any law enforcement database. It had come from a soldiers-for-hire site, under the subheading of Unattached.

  Flint lifted his hands from the keyboard and frowned. He should, he knew, return to the Brownie Bar or some other public dataport to download the rest of the information about the site. But he felt crunched for time, and, for the first time since he started in this business, he didn’t want someone looking over his shoulder—not to protect his clients (a feeling he had all the time), but because he was afraid that simply by looking at the site, he might get himself arrested.

  The same problems existed within his own system, but he knew how to clean it up well enough that the police couldn’t trace it. Also, he knew, if the police were inside his system, they had enough information to arrest him on a variety of other illegal activities. They didn’t need his viewing of a soldier-for-hire information board as proof that he was breaking the law.

  Soldiers-for-hire had a long tradition within the Alliance. Corporations hired them for new world security. Sometimes entire teams went with the corporate diplomats to negotiate terms (read: threaten) with new natives on nonaligned worlds.

  But this little corner of the database worried Flint more than others. Unattached meant more than a mercenary. Mercenaries tended to hire themselves out in groups. They fought wherever the money led them—and they got good money for their work.