Year of the Child

by R L Dean

  Two years ago they sat in her office and she told him everything she wanted to do. It had come to her like how authors describe the idea for their next bestseller. It was a ball of yarn in her mind's eye, born from her frustration in dealing with UN business laws and her fear that her children would grow up in a world no better off than the one her father and mother brought her into. One night, lying awake in bed she teased a strand of that yarn, and then it exploded in her head. She had literally caught her breath as the pieces of a grand plan scattered in her mind.

  If she did it right, she would live to see it to fruition, and Jason might live the majority of his life within the outcome.

  Greg believed in her plan, she knew that. On that day in the office she had seen the glint in his eye as she told him of the future she wanted to create. He had asked questions, talked in details, and at the end of their conversation she had seen the weight of what they were going to do settle on his shoulders. And from that day forward they planned, a step at a time, he following her lead.

  Watching her son out on the field she tried to let the anxiety she felt over the possibility that Greg was having an attack of conscience, or was losing the vision, melt away. She cheered, yelled at the umpire, and ate soy hotdogs that Adam got from the vending stand. Jason's team won, and she took that as a positive sign. As Greg drove them home she congratulated her son again, called ahead to Maria and told her to make his favorites that evening for supper, as a way to celebrate. Jason was embarrassed at her, and she had to restrain herself from laughing at him.

  Greg came inside and ate with them, and congratulated Jason also. When he left he seemed his usual self. It would have been nice if Rachael were there to celebrate with them.

  10 - Tetsuya

  Long stood at the head of the breakroom, where Division B met each week to discuss case updates or when Administration wanted to make an announcement. Criminal Investigations and the Transit Authority team were seated down each side of the only table in the room. He and Velásquez were seated near the head of the table, followed by Baldwin and O'Hara respectively. The others were seated in no particular order, but the junior officers, like Bingbing, by instinct sat in the rear. There were two senior patrol sergeants standing against one bulkhead, their hands on their heavy belts. Fifteen years ago Tetsuya had been in their shoes. He spent many nights in a patrol car on Kyoto-neo's inner city streets. That was a life time ago, and as always, when he thought about it, he had a vague sense that he had forgotten more than he had learned. Even the details of his first arrest were clouded ... time erasing important memories in favor of today's minutiae and the pressures of living life against a schedule.

  Behind Long a screen showed the crime statistics for the previous month, not just for Butte but for all the major ore drop-off stations between Jupiter and the Belt. Theft and assault were full percentages higher across the board. Murder was up by point four percent. There was even an incident where a mining crew attempted to board a Martian freighter and make them confess to being pirates. Tetsuya silently thanked God that it hadn't happened in Butte's orbit. He had no idea how he would have handled it as the TA Superintendent, or in his current role as head of Criminal Investigations.

  "Based on the advice of Apex's managing team here on Butte, as well as the UNSEC Company Commander," Long was saying. "Apex's board of directors has agreed to limit access to the station. TA will issue forty-eight hour passes to docking ships. When the pass has expired, said ship and its crew will be required to move outside of the station's docking lanes for three weeks. This will provide time for crews to resupply, but not enough time to cause any real problems."

  Docking passes. Tetsuya didn't know enough about living in space to know if that had ever been done before, but he suspected it was a precedent. One that would make Criminal Investigation's life easier. Not so for TA, Velásquez would have his hands full. Bingbing would be good at the red-tape associated with it, he thought.

  Long tuned to Velásquez. "I want a plan to implement this on my desk by tomorrow morning."

  Velásquez's frowned, but wisely chose to nod instead of saying whatever was on his mind.

  "Alright, dismissed," Long said, turning off the screen.

  Tetsuya stood from his seat, but waited as everyone at the rear of the room filed out, and then followed Velásquez into the tunnel. His former section leader's face looked drawn, intense. He was flipping through the screens on his handcomm and tapping. Tetsuya was about to offer some ideas on how to distribute the docking passes when Baldwin suddenly stopped and turned to him.

  "I'm going to Legal," she said. "I gotta wrap up some details on the Phillips case."

  An assault case. He hadn't had time to look over the details, but he knew that it involved a maintenance worker and an intoxicated miner.

  "I know how you like us to report where we're going and all," Baldwin finished.

  "Yeah, I do."

  She snorted, then turned back down the tunnel and walked off.

  Tetsuya ignored her and started to catch up to Velásquez ... then thought better of it. The man wouldn't appreciate his offer of help. So after a moment of watching both teams walk down the tunnel, talking and joking with one another, he turned and headed back into the breakroom. Pulling his handcomm from his pocket he called Itsumi.

  On the handcomm's screen the dark eyes of his wife stared out at him from a fairy princess' pale face. "Hai," she said, looking at him expectantly.

  "Hey, thought I would call and see how you are."

  Itsumi blinked, then said, "Okay. Have you eaten?"

  "Yeah. Listen," he said. "I'm sorry for leaving you alone so much. I mean, with Kaori being gone ... I should call you more often. Or come back to the apartment for lunch, instead of eating here."

  She blinked again. He wished she would smile. "Everything is okay. Go back to work." Her face pulled back from the camera and her eyes shifted down, then she disconnected the call.

  Tetsuya sucked in air though his nose, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. He closed his eyes for a moment and let out his breath. Beneath the layers of stoicism and duty his wife was slowly going crazy, and he could do nothing about it. Powerless, came to his mind again. His handcomm beeped and he answered it even before he was aware of who it was.

  Long looked back at him, his mouth twisted at one corner. "Send me your progress on the piracy cases."

  He started to reply but Long disconnected.

  Returning to the office he made sure Falk, George, and Schindler were on track with their cases. Schindler was scheduled to give a deposition, he would be gone the rest of the morning. George's surveillance of the terminal had paid off earlier that morning. He found the thieves he was hunting, and he and Falk were leaving shortly to stakeout a pawnshop on level two. Tetsuya would be alone for several hours.

  He logged in his desk and pulled up his messages. Among the Division announcements and departmental updates there was a message from UNSEC Forensics. One of the techs responded to his request to speed things up with the Pendleton's black box. They expected the data to be reconstructed by end of day. That was good news. It was something he could pacify Long with, because right now all he had was a missing body ... and a nagging curiosity.

  He closed his message queue and reopened the Pendleton file.

  For a moment he stared at the still shots of the Flight deck's interior. The body of Roger Pendleton floated near one of the workstations. His wife was frozen to the steel deck plates.

  It was not the worst he had seen as a cop. People did bad things to one another and the only thing to stop them was a thin blue line. Earth or space, the Moon or Mars, human nature was the same regardless of location, and that line he stood on was needed where ever humanity was, or would one day go. It was something he had learned as a young idealistic officer that dreamed of protecting and serving.

  He flipped through the images, stopping on the exterior of the Flight deck. Ballistics said the hull plating ruptures were don
e by 20mm autocannon rounds. The Pendleton was attacked from its port quarter, its thruster assembly scrapped. There were two stray baseball size holes in the Engineering deck. One of those holes was patched with a shoddy weld on the inside bulkhead.

  Scorch marks marred the port side hatch, near the locking mechanism. The bodies of Greene and Weller were found in the connecting corridor. In the access tube beyond, the Pendleton's son floated ... arms outstretched, frozen in the semblance of a bird. It was unclear if he was killed there or in the airlock corridor with Greene and Weller, and then shifted as the Pendleton fell into Saturn's atmosphere.

  Personal effects.

  There was a list and images of personal belongings found in the ship's cabins and around its decks. Tetsuya's eyes moved down the list until he saw COVERALLS, GRAY/SM, IRIYAMA. "Where are you, Iriyama-san?" He asked softly. Was she floating out there in the black somewhere, dumped out an airlock by the pirates? Or, had they taken her?

  Using his TA access he called up the local records of the crew. A short list of retinal scan dates and times appeared. It was what you would expect to find of a mining ship's crew. They go out, harvest ore or gases, then return to drop their canisters and take on empty ones. Roger Pendleton and his crew would have come aboard to conduct business and buy supplies, and then a few days later leave, again heading out into the big black. There were a few gaps in the overall pattern of entrances and departures which could be explained by their mining location or use of another drop-off station.

  Tetsuya's eyes locked on Iriyama's entries in the list. She passed Butte's security checkpoint on dates the Pendleton was not docked. In fact she was here after the Pendleton was attacked. Leaning forward he expanded the record. She arrived on the station as a crew member of the Sadie.

  With a growing sense of curiosity he again accessed Control's records and called up the Sadie's flight plans. For records outside of Butte he would have to submit a formal request to the UN Registrar's office, but he found what he was looking for. The Sadie's flight plan put them in Saturn's orbit within a short window of the Pendleton's scheduled departure date, when they would leave orbit and return to Butte to drop their canisters.

  The two ships must have met, and Misaki Iriyama simply transferred to the Sadie. He let out a sigh. The thought that she wasn't aboard the Pendleton when the pirates attacked made him feel better.

  Forensics put the attack at occurring between two and three months prior to her arrival on Butte aboard the Sadie. Given travel time from Saturn she would have narrowly missed it. He could almost see the events play out in his head. The Pendleton and Sadie are both in orbit of Saturn, they decide to meet, and Misaki transfers to the Sadie. The two ships go their separate ways and the Pendleton is attacked— left to its silent death, sinking into the planet's atmosphere.

  "You got off just in time," he whispered, feeling a slight smile form on his lips. Then he frowned, swallowing. Misaki ... Iriyama-san ... is not Kaori, that little voice inside his head said. You're getting the two confused.

  Tetsuya squeezed his eyes shut, then reopened them. He closed the case file and sat back in his chair.

  Baldwin came in and he asked her where she was at on the two piracy cases in her queue, she said she was pulling up the first one now. She didn't sound particularly enthused. He understood, this was a side issue for her but she was being forced to focus on it. They had plenty of crime right here to investigate.

  The others were in and out, George more out than in.

  Tetsuya reviewed and signed off on reports, listened to Baldwin's occasional grumbling, and when Dispatch called to report that a hauler crewman had been assaulted on docking arm C he sent Falk to get a statement.

  He stepped out, ordered a coffee from a vending machine and walked down to his favorite place to people watch. As the analytical part of his mind slowed down, disentangled from the Pendleton case and departmental details, what surfaced was Bhargava and Bratton. Another mystery begging to be investigated. What's Bratton really up to? The hunter in him wanted to find a trail to follow.

  It was the same instinct that had landed him in the middle of an inquest ... and then there on Butte. Finishing his coffee he left the food court tables.

  When he walked through the hatch to the office, Baldwin was concentrating on open files pulled up on her desk console. She didn't look up. George was gone. Falk apparently hadn't come back, and Schindler was on his handcomm, talking with someone.

  Tetsuya sat down and logged in his desk. A notice blinked at him, and when he saw that it was a message from Forensics he slapped his desk to open it and leaned forward. If Baldwin and Schindler reacted he didn't notice. The Pendleton's black box data was attached to the message, he immediately tapped it.

  The data here should match his mental image of what happened to Misaki. Telemetry timeline, communications, system diagnostic reports, external optics ... he ignored them all and tapped the full manifest data. Over the course of the last six months Captain Pendleton made three updates to the manifest, none of them related to Misaki. He scrolled through the list, going back a full year. There was a single entry for Misaki ten months ago ... a request for a pay advance. And that was it. There was no transfer to the Sadie logged. According to the Pendleton's logs she was part of the crew at the time of the attack. Yet she was somehow here, on Butte, weeks after the shot-up remains of the Pendleton was left to disappear into Saturn's depths.

  He called up the Sadie's crew manifest, as it was reported at the time Captain Middleton and his crew docked and Misaki passed the security checkpoint. He hadn't paid much attention to it beyond seeing Misaki's name, and now, as he read in detail, he saw a mystery. Misaki had transferred from the Pendleton to the Sadie over two years ago.

  Tetsuya leaned back in his chair, taking a deep breath. His eyes were still on the Sadie's crew manifest. All cops know every mystery starts with a lie. Both manifests cannot be right, Misaki Iriyama could not have been aboard the Pendleton at the time of the pirate attack, and walk onto Butte as a member of the Sadie's crew. George got up from his desk and said something to him about leaving again. He nodded. When did Misaki board the Sadie? Could Middleton and his crew be the pirates? Did they take her ... threaten her somehow into passing the security checkpoint without asking for help? The scan records said she left the station aboard the Sadie as well. His mental image of what happened disintegrated.

  He filed an official request with the UN Registrar's office for both the Pendleton's and Sadie's flight plans for the last three years along with manifest data and crew security scans. It was a lot, but this was his only avenue of investigation.

  When he finally glanced at the time it was after 1700. Schindler was the only other person in the room with him, and when Tetsuya looked up from his desk, he did the same. Then the other man stood, and actually smiled at him.

  "There's a saké bar on level four," Schindler said.

  He knew of it— a gathering place for mining conglomerate executives. Predominately those of Apex, by virtue of the fact that Butte was owned by them.

  "Uh-huh."

  "Let's ... why don't we stop by, on our way out." Schindler was trying hard not to be suspicious, but Tetsuya could see that this wasn't a spur of the moment decision. And while he could do without Schindler's brown-nosing, he heard Itsumi's voice whisper in his ear that he should go. Perhaps he should endure a couple of drinks with the man, for the sake of being on the same team. If he was going to make friends Schindler was as good a place to start as any.

  * * *

  If Butte could be considered to have an upper-class neighborhood then the fourth level was it. There was a small park next to a hydroponics garden, Sol-X had a fashion boutique, and the UN Commissary sat next to the apartment complex where Butte's Apex masters lived. And, to keep it an upper-class neighborhood, there was a high UNSEC presence. It might not be New York's 5th Avenue, or Ginza, Tokyo, but there was a distinct difference here. The lighting was brighter, the bulkheads and deck fr
ee of dust. There were even potted plants down the center of the main concourse. But the real difference was the air. It lacked the metal tasting humidity of the upper levels.

  There were few kiosks and vending machines here, more cafes and walk-in restaurants. The place that Schindler took him to was called Butte Saketan. It was an ugly blending of words, but the fake oak beams glued around the hatch and the glowing electric lantern hanging on a peg made it stylish. If it were a restaurant on Hasegawa Street in Kyoto-neo there would be a man in a black suit standing here.

  Three months ago this was where Bratton's birthday celebration was held. Tetsuya had not received an invitation, and now found it ironic that a junior brought him here for drinks.

  Inside it was busy and smelled of saké and of something that was supposed to be barbeque. The long bar was packed with men and women in business suits. A single table free of customers was being cleaned by a waitress and Schindler headed for it, then passed it. He took Tetsuya to the back of the main room and into a hallway with a sign that read 'Private', where shōji walls made with white plastic tiles instead of paper lined each side. Private rooms, he realized. For a detective you're slow. Schindler wasn't taking him for a friendly drink at a high-dollar saké bar. There were other plans.

  Schindler stopped at one of the sliding-doors and pushed it aside. Beyond was a scene out of a Junichiro Tanizaki essay on aesthetics, but in plastics and synthetic wood. On one end of the room a decorative urn sat on a pedestal with a soft spotlight on it, and at the other a white scroll hung where the Seven Virtues of Bushido were emblazoned in black calligraphy. Fitting mantras for police officers to be gathered under, Tetsuya supposed. In the center of the room was a simulacrum oak chabudai where Baldwin, Falk, and George were seated. They turned and looked at him with dour faces. No, this wasn't going to be a friendly drink, it was an ambush. Schindler had gotten the short straw, it seemed, to invite him because none of the others could look at him and smile.