Year of the Child

by R L Dean

  "Well, alright, if you don't want to discuss that, there's something else we need to talk about."

  "What?"

  "Those ship crews we funded to ... liberate ... raw ore for us."

  Shultz looked up. "The privateers? What about them?"

  "I think it's time to pull them back," Jung replied. "The embargo is over ... we have an Apex plant being constructed in our orbit. And I'm hearing that there have been some unnecessary attacks, they're not just taking ore canisters. They're robbing crews, and there have been some deaths."

  Shultz crossed his arms over his chest and thought for a moment. "No. We still need them. The embargo won't technically end until the Apex plant is officially online. We have businesses that depend on parts we manufacture here to supplement what they must buy from PermaTech and Earth."

  His desk sounded and he glanced at the blinking notice, it was his secretary. "Yes, Patty?"

  "I thought you might want to know, sir," she said. "The numbers are in."

  Shultz couldn't help himself, he felt his heart quicken. He looked at Jung, who had turned on the sofa and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

  "Go ahead," he told her.

  "Ninety-nine percent, sir. Congratulations, you have the highest approval rating in Martian history."

  7 - Haydon

  The problem on a mining ship was that there was too much time to think about things you could do nothing about, Haydon reflected. Space was just too big.

  Floating in front of his rack in the cabin he shared with Yuri, he stared at the picture in his hand. The paper was creased down the center and worn from refolding numerous times, and the edges frayed from being in his pocket. He used his thumb to rub the glossy surface— somehow making the image of Central Park on Mars more tangible ... making the woman in the picture closer.

  When he was a soldier time hadn't moved any faster. There was significant waiting between deployments— there was boredom and mindless routine. A lot of waiting, just like being aboard a mining ship. But, he supposed the burdens had been less, and as a young man he hadn't been given to much contemplation.

  Haydon frowned and slipped the picture back into the pocket of his coveralls. Dwelling on regrets never fixed anything. He pushed off the railing of the rack and drifted in the microgravity to his locker on the far bulkhead. As he opened the locker door, Yuri, a heavy breath escaping him in his sleep, shifted in the webbing of his rack.

  The Russian was keeping late hours, doing something on his handcomm, and remaining uncommonly sober. Whatever it was he wasn't sharing.

  Taking his magboots from the locker he pulled them on and headed to the galley. Nobody was there. Mat would be on the Flight deck— doing Mat things— and Misaki would be in Engineering, or out on the hull. The little Japanese woman slept even less then he did.

  He threw a box of spaghetti in the heater and waited.

  The numbers on the heater counted down ... Haydon blinked, then squeezed his eyes shut. Things are looking up, he told himself, and opened his eyes. Misaki was back aboard and somehow that just felt right. And they had a contract with Apex on Ganymede.

  Turning away from those burning numbers he took a deep breath then let it out, slowly.

  After he ate he called Mat— you always wanted to check on the boss. He didn't need anything so he left the galley and headed to Engineering.

  When Haydon popped the hatch and pulled himself inside he found Misaki at the workbench. She was in a vac-suit with her helmet and gloves off. The casing of a pneumatic pump floated a few centimeters over the workbench's surface, and she was holding the pump's guts in one hand while using a thin screwdriver in the other to twist something deeper inside.

  Her eyes shifted to him, then slowly back to the pump. She would always know who was near her, look at them. On this ship Misaki was as safe as a little sister surrounded by her big brothers ... but those eyes— tracking you— Haydon knew it was something left over from her experience aboard the pirate tug.

  "Oh, hey, chief," he said, smiling.

  "Good morning," she replied, her voice flat. Her eyebrows drew together slightly as she focused on the pump.

  Shutting the hatch he moved to the main engineering terminal. "So," he started, flipping to the diagnostics screen on the terminal. "That pump goes to one of the turrets, right?"

  He helped the engineering crew at 2 Pallas install the turrets. It had been expensive work, but not even Yuri complained. The Belt wasn't safe any longer, it was just too big for UNSEC to patrol, and the turrets had been Mat's answer to the problem. There was some irony in the fact that they hadn't needed them, they hadn't seen a single ship— pirates or otherwise— in the three weeks they spent cracking ice and scooping it into the buzzard collectors.

  And Haydon was glad of that, but for an altogether different reason than the obvious danger involved in trading fire with another ship. Mat's conscience. After the incident with the pirate tug, he was too willing to pull the trigger. Haydon saw it when they left Butte and were passing across the Belt ... Mat walking out on the hull of the ship to position a rock-cracker, so that it could be fired at a freighter that wanted their canisters. They had the chance to run, but Mat had made up his mind. Even telling Yuri he would fly the ship himself, when the jumpy pilot refused to help.

  Haydon had failed to convince Mat of the stain that it would leave on his conscience, and so the nameless freighter was destroyed. Misaki had pulled the trigger, but it was Mat's idea.

  Mat's initiation into violence was another regret that Haydon carried.

  "Yes," Misaki answered him, glancing over her shoulder and snapping the pump's casing together over its mechanical innards. Then she said, "You can't obsess out on the hull."

  Obsess. Not distracted, not daydreaming, but obsessing. She had chosen the word for its accuracy. Quiet, unassuming, and always observant, Misaki recognized another survivor when she saw one. It wasn't an invitation to talk— because she didn't do that— but he found himself saying, "Sorry, just soldier stuff." He couldn't bring himself to say it was Mat he was thinking about.

  She glanced back again, her face expressionless, then she started putting tools away. Haydon shrugged and headed to the airlock locker.

  "You mean, like killing people?" She asked, quietly.

  He paused in pulling a vac-suit from the locker. In that moment— maybe it was something in her voice— he felt a connection. It was like she understood. Not the simple intellectual understanding of a military shrink, but by experience. It felt ... profound.

  "Yeah," he replied. "Like killing people."

  When he turned to look back at her, she was staring at him. "Haydon," she started. "Will you teach me to fight? Like a soldier?"

  He gave her a sad smile and nodded, because he understood why.

  8 - Tetsuya

  His best shirt and trousers were lain out for him, and Itsumi had taken special care with his jacket and shoes. Whatever her personal feelings may be on the subject of him going back to work for Criminal Investigations she would ensure he looked his best.

  Her reaction to his announcement yesterday evening had been muted, but she understood what it meant to him. Everything at home would be as perfect as she could make it so that he could focus on being a detective again.

  Tetsuya had been the one at the center of the inquest— Internal Affair's star witness— and his promotion off Earth the political consequence to that. And he had not stopped once during the maelstrom of his investigation to consider his wife. He had been on a righteous hunt for the truth ... and finding it had cost her as much as, if not more than, it did him. With Kaori gone, a result of his transfer to Butte, Itsumi was missing a part of her soul.

  All day, while he was at work, she had no one to talk to ... she was alone. Kaori might not have been willing to have meaningful communication with her mother, but at least she had been there in the apartment.

  He dressed and ate breakfast. When he was done, Itsumi retrieved a tie from h
is side of the closet and deftly, silently, put it around his neck.

  "Thank you," he said. In his mind it was for a lot of things. She ignored him and cinched the tie, then smoothed the shoulders of his jacket.

  He kissed her on the forehead and said, "I'll come home for lunch."

  "No. They will be watching you," she replied in her quite way.

  She meant his new team would be watching his behavior. As the new Superintendent they would be taking their cues from him, and so he should be present at lunch. Itsumi might understand that if he wasn't the department's Superintendent they would make him a pariah, what she wouldn't understand was her husband's breach of duty and honor. He was their leader, therefore he acted like it. Whatever else came from that he was expected to endure.

  As she is enduring, that little voice inside his head told him.

  He left the apartment.

  At the vending machine he ordered a coffee. He was in time to see Litowitz entering the Lounge Six and the hatch close behind her. His eyes trailed to the spot on the floor where the dead man lay yesterday, and he wondered if Baldwin had found the culprits, or if it would be on the active investigations roster this morning, waiting for him when he sat down at his new desk. He turned back into the flow of Butte's morning human traffic and made for the lift.

  When he arrived at the Division offices he had to admit to some nervousness. Standing at the tunnel entrance he considered stopping by TA. He could ask Bingbing to send the advisories over to him. He frowned, it didn't take a detective to see that he was delaying. Velásquez was probably in charge now, if Bratton and Long followed protocol, and he would have enough on his plate without Tetsuya stopping by just to settle his jitters.

  A uniformed officer stepped around him, continuing on into the tunnel. He was in the way.

  Adjusting his tie, Tetsuya walked to the hatch leading to Criminal Investigations and tapped the control pad. He had occasion to come to CI's offices a few times on case work and he found it unchanged. The office space was the same shape as TA, if a little bigger, and didn't leave room for creative desk arrangements. The Superintendent's desk was in the same spot as it was in TA, and the detectives desks were lined out on each side of the room. On a plastic foldout table against the back bulkhead there was a meal heater and a coffee dispenser.

  Baldwin was using a napkin to wipe the surface of a desk to the right of where Tetsuya would sit. It was the same place that Velásquez sat in TA. Lying in the chair was a picture in a frame, a stack of plastic folders, and a large-screen tablet. She looked up at him, frowned, threw the napkin away, and started moving the things in the chair to the desk. To her right Frank Schindler was reading something on his desk's surface, flipping through screens with a swipe of his hand. He looked up and breathed in, then standing he said, "Morning, Superintendent."

  Schindler gave him a half smile and pointed to the Superintendent's desk. "Lieutenant Cho dropped that off for you this morning."

  Tetsuya turned and looked. There was a silver badge bearing the UN flag, the Police Force's emblem, and below it the Division. He stepped over and picked it up. His rank and name were at the bottom in dark blue letters; LT. Tetsuya Takahashi. Across the top it read, Criminal Investigations. Not so unlike the badge he carried when he was with Kyoto-neo's Metropolitan Police Department.

  "Would you like some coffee?" Schindler asked.

  "Shut up, Frank," Baldwin said, before Tetsuya could answer. "The Superintendent's a grown man. He can get his own coffee."

  Opposite Schindler's desk, Tony Falk stood from his chair and stepped over to Tetsuya, holding out his hand.

  Falk was Tetsuya's senior by a wide margin. With gray hair turning to white and a craggy face he was the department's lead investigator for dockside and shipboard violent crimes. He often liaised with Tetsuya and Velásquez on cases that crossed over into the TA's jurisdiction. He was also a thirty year veteran of the Force, and that had made Tetsuya wonder why he was still a sergeant. His dossier had shown a string of transfers without any explanation beyond an HR code. His previous post was a sub-station in northern Canada. He was there for three years, then he apparently screwed up enough to be sent to Butte, where he had remained for almost five years now.

  Can Itsumi last that long here ... five years? He asked himself. Could he, last that long?

  "Good to see you again, Superintendent," Falk said, his face devoid of expression and his tone strictly professional. Beyond Schindler's preemptive suck-up 'strictly professional' was probably the best Tetsuya could hope for among the detectives. He shook his hand. "Thank you."

  The desk next to Falk's was empty. It had to belong to Horst George, the team's investigator for theft occurring on the docks and in the terminal.

  "Where is Sergeant George?" He asked.

  Baldwin sat down in her chair and tapped her desk's surface, powering it on. "Horst doesn't like the office. He'll be on the terminal level, looking around."

  "Well get him here," Tetsuya told her. "We're going to have a meeting."

  The corner of Baldwin's mouth twisted, and she asked, "What, you want to give us a pep talk?"

  "No, now get him here. And send me the case roster."

  Baldwin's lips bent further, but she pulled her handcomm out and tapped on it.

  Tetsuya stared at the badge in his hand, rubbed it with his thumb, then set it down on his desk and took off his jacket. He sat down and logged in and pulled up the Division's morning bulletins, and no longer having a direct link to the TA advisories he sent a request to Bingbing. She sent them over before he returned from the coffee dispenser, and just as he had done in the office across the tunnel for the last six months he settled in for his morning reading. Everyone else sunk into various stages of busy at their desks. As he read he began to have questions about ongoing investigations but he wanted to have the meeting first, so he marked them for review.

  George came in about forty minutes later.

  "Sorry," he said, stepping through the hatch. "I was on the other side of the terminal. I would have been here, but there was something I wanted to run down."

  His dossier said he was thirty-four. He was short, prematurely balding, and stocky— like bodybuilder stocky.

  Tetsuya stood and extended his hand. "It's fine."

  George took it— firmly— then released. Tetsuya nodded. "Take a seat and we'll get started."

  Tetsuya walked around to the front of his desk and leaned back on it. Baldwin refused to give him more than half of her attention. She was glancing between him and something on her desk, reports it looked like from this angle. Schindler sat straight as an arrow, looking at him with a weird sort of thin lipped smile on his face. Falk rubbed his eyes with his thumb and index finger. George sat back in his chair, casual, and pulled a hand-gripper from a desk drawer and started using it, and watching him.

  "Listen," he began. "I know this is not what you wanted. And it's only temporary, until UNSEC can field enough patrol ships to stop the piracy. But until then we have to work together."

  No one reacted, so he continued.

  "Now, Regional expects us to do our part in the piracy investigations ..."

  Baldwin reacted now. She was shaking her head at him. "I've told Bratton we don't have time for that," she said. "There's too much going on right here. Regional's crap is at the bottom of my list."

  Falk nodded. "I've got two new cases, just in this week."

  "Yeah," George said. "I should be back in the terminal, following up on ..."

  "Stop," Tetsuya said, firmly. "Look, I get that you're busy. Between the miners coming in, and the haulers refusing to leave, the population is growing, and with it so is crime. We're going to have to reorganize. I'm reordering the case assignments ..."

  Baldwin and Falk came out of their chairs. "You can't do that," Baldwin yelled. "There's a reason we're the primaries on those cases!"

  Schindler looked at Baldwin and stood slowly, and in subservient support he crossed his arms and pressed
his lips together.

  "Look, I get that you're the new Superintendent," Falk started, leaning forward in his chair.

  "Yes I am," Tetsuya agreed and bulldozed on. "I'm reordering the cases, and I'm assigning the priorities. Baldwin how many piracy cases has Regional sent you?"

  She was staring at him, stone faced, leaning forward over her desk with her hands planted on its surface. He saw her jaw clench. After a moment she snorted, then looked down at her desk and started tapping.

  "Three," she told him.

  "Alright, send me one. And every morning you'll be expected to read the TA advisories posted by Officer Wei. I need a detective's eyes on them."

  "How is that going to help?" Baldwin asked. She was still angry, but the fight in her was turning to frustration— the kind you get when a supervisor demands too much. "What are we supposed to do with the piracy cases, anyway? It's not like we can go chase them down or run around the Belt asking questions."

  He understood her frustration. Piracy fell outside of their experience. This was something that UNSEC should be dealing with, not local law enforcement. But Tetsuya was a detective through and through, by nature he knew what to do. "Look for patterns," he said. "Call the victims, some of those crews may be here on the station. We will pass what we find back to Regional."

  It was going to be hard to conduct thorough interviews without being face to face with the victims, and some of those crews might have taken their chances in the Belt again, or docked at other drop-off points ... millions of kilometers away. It would be a tedious exchange of messages and waiting for responses. The investigations into the piracy cases were going to take time, a lot of it. Tetsuya didn't think of the cases in terms of a resolution, which in his mind meant capturing the criminals responsible for the crime. Baldwin was a detective and likely thinking the same thing, but as she said, they couldn't hop on board a UN patrol cruiser and point and go chase down the pirates. The best that they could hope for was that their findings would be useful to whoever was pulling the strings over the heads of Bhargava and the Secretariat. They would do the pointing and chasing, based on Tetsuya and Baldwin's observations.