Year of the Child

by R L Dean

  In some parody of the office, Baldwin was seated across from Falk and George. There was a covered dish and upside down cup next to Baldwin— so obvious for Schindler— and the same at the head of the table, for Tetsuya. Whatever they were planning, he thought it would have been less trouble, and less expensive, if they would have done it in the office or the food court on the opposite end of level three.

  They were already into the nihonshu and small bits of cooked soy meat, and Baldwin, with one hand holding her small cup near her lips waved with her other hand to the end of the table and said, "Superintendent."

  "It's Lieutenant," he told Baldwin and stared at her for a moment before taking his appointed seat.

  As Schindler sat, Tetsuya turned his cup over, and after Baldwin pursed her lips she took the tokkuri flask and poured from it. He downed the clear liquid and set the cup down again— hard— holding on to it. Baldwin poured again and this time he took a small sip.

  "What's this about?" He asked.

  Baldwin shrugged and replied, "Just a friendly drink, Lieu-ten-ant." She downed the rest of her drink then added, "Heard you were called the Samurai, back in First Division. Thought you might like the ambiance." She held one arm out wide to indicate the room.

  Tetsuya understood now. Baldwin wanted answers to the rumors surrounding the inquest. Or, perhaps the others pressed her into it. She had never seemed particularly interested in his past, beyond suspecting that he was a snitch. That had seemed enough for her to base their relationship on. It was the same for the whole division, with perhaps the exception of Bingbing, and in his mind she was too young, too inexperienced, to know when to choose a side. For that reason he had maintained a stricter disposition with her, otherwise, if she accepted him as part of the team when everyone else did not, they would have forced her to choose a side.

  "Is that what this is about?" Tetsuya asked. "The inquest?"

  It was Falk that answered. "Look, Takahashi. We just want to know who we're working with ... there's a lot of things said about you, and what you did in First Division."

  Tetsuya toyed with his cup for a moment, then sat back. "You want to know if I'm a snitch."

  Schindler was studiously staring at his cup, and George was eating sauce covered meat, but glancing his way every few seconds. So this was Baldwin and Falk's idea. That meant that while the other two didn't like him, they also didn't have the stomach to confront him over something that wasn't any of their business. Baldwin, on the other hand, was a brute— pissed off because Bratton moving him into the Superintendent's position in Criminal Investigations shoved her back down the line, to Section Leader. And Falk, a screw-up lackey with just enough spine to agree to this nonsense.

  "That's what they say," Falk agreed.

  "People rarely change their mind, even when they have the facts."

  Baldwin shrugged at his comment and poured more nihonshu in her cup. "Why don't you walk us through it? Put the rumors to rest."

  "I was a Section Leader, investigating a homicide linked to an ongoing embezzlement case in Tokyo," he said, then tossed back the rest of his drink. "Turns out the homicide was easy to solve and opened up more avenues on the other side of the investigation. But, I got to thinking that my Superintendent already knew about those avenues."

  "Oh yeah?" Baldwin interrupted. "How's that?"

  "He didn't want my report, kept making me rewrite it ... started dodging me. So, I got suspicious and began asking questions. Next thing I know I'm cornered by an IA captain and he's telling me he needs my help to expose mistakes made in the embezzlement investigation. Only, when I start helping him the Chief Superintendent dogs my moves, has me followed."

  Falk wiped alcohol from the edge of his mouth and said, "Give us details, Lieutenant. We're detectives, we like details. Who's all involved?"

  "I'm telling you what I can. The case didn't end with the inquest, it's ongoing."

  "So, it's not a rumor," Baldwin said, sarcastically. "You are a snitch."

  Tetsuya felt heat rise to his face. She was baiting him, out of spite. Baldwin understood investigative confidentiality. He stared at her and said, "In the middle of the investigation I get an invitation to a party ... it was in a room like this. The Superintendent and Chief Superintendent were there, with the Division Captain, and they talk about how it's time I was promoted. Then the Chief Superintendent asks me if I've ever taken my wife to Miyajima Island. How it's nice year around. There could be an opportunity there for a new Superintendent, for someone that wanted it bad enough."

  Reaching across the table Tetsuya took the flask and filled his own cup.

  "Yeah," Baldwin said. "What'd you do?"

  "I completed my investigation," he replied and finished his nihonshu in a gulp. And it earned him a promotion, just not the one they were offering if he didn't complete the investigation. Standing, he said, "Baldwin, it's not that police officers are supposed to be something more than the ordinary human being, it's that we have to be something more. Otherwise, where is justice? Who will stop criminals?"

  And then he left.

  11 - Compton

  The barracks were attached to the offices of Security Command and Compton was in the habit of not going there. He thought of it as his people's personal space, when they were not on duty outside of Capital Burrow it's where they lived and they didn't need the old man prowling the halls and poking his head in doors. He left the prowling to JJ, as an enlisted soldier they felt a stronger kinship with her. But, since her injury at Cydonia Compton had to step up, and so that morning as he walked in the front doors of the building he found himself reluctantly deviating from his normal course and turning in the direction of the west wing.

  As he crossed the reception area the young woman manning the desk nodded to him with a polite smile. There was a certain surrealism to his days now, since Cydonia. During the first years of his tour Mars had been a relatively quiet post, more of an administrative headache than a security problem. Then as the economy began to bottom out crime began to rise, and with the added element of a grassroots anti-UN movement brewing his people were needed more and more as the local burrow police departments became overwhelmed with protests turning into riots and rampant vandalism of Earth owned businesses.

  Then the explosions started, warehouses of merchandise from Earth blown up. Messages feeding into the public boards from heavily encrypted private networks heralded the beginnings of Free Mars Now.

  Compton's dream of spending the end of his career in quiet bureaucracy was over years ago ... but Cydonia had done something to him. He pressed the control pad beside the barracks door and as it slid aside he walked into the hallway. This is a form of self-torture, he realized, as Corporal Derek Hayes walked out of his room into the hallway— the shiny metal back-brace over his shirt with its straps wrapping around his sides. Hayes had fell ten meters, followed by scree and rubble, when the FMN terrorists blew the crater wall with military-grade explosives. His UNSEC armored vac-suit had saved him, but not completely. It had taken an hour to dig him out of the rock and dirt, then he spent another hour in traction on a shuttle, and almost three hours in surgery at the hospital. Three weeks in regimented therapy ... and administrative-duty indefinitely.

  Hayes was lucky.

  He watched the corporal turn stiffly and head slowly in the opposite direction, with a towel in one hand and his flip-flops alternately making a swishing and tapping sound as he walked. When he disappeared around a corner Compton proceeded down the hall.

  The barracks were divided into two levels, thirty rooms to a level, each able to fit four bunks. Most of the rooms were filled, and the remaining few were given to senior enlisted and storage. He walked down the hall, his eyes forward, there was no need to knock on doors and make his presence known.

  A door opened to one of the rooms and Private John Turner stepped out, in his day-uniform and a duffel slung over his shoulder. He hadn't been a part of the team that was assigned to Cydonia. Thank God. As soon as Turne
r saw Compton he stopped, rigid as stone, and saluted. "Good morning, sir."

  "Good morning, private," Compton said, stopping and returning the salute. He made it a point to do it properly, like he was fresh out of the academy. "Carry on."

  "Yes, sir."

  Turner pivoted and headed to the barrack's doors. Compton walked on.

  JJ led the twenty man team at Cydonia Depot. The plan was to set an ambush for the Free Mars terrorists that Compton was certain would take the bait in his trap— false information entered into Governor Shultz's comm systems, which Compton felt was compromised. The plan had been hasty, he and JJ working out the logistics and determining the team in a single night.

  For almost seventy hours JJ and her team had sat hidden around the rocky desolation of the Martian crater that the depot was built in, while Compton sat in the comfort of his office waiting in anticipation and fiddling with reports. He wanted to observe the area with drones, but it was too risky. The FMN had military hardware, and they were trained to use it, they would be scanning for stray signals in the area.

  On the day that it happened he was about to leave the office. He had logged off his desk and stood, reaching for his jacket ... when his handcomm blared with an emergency call. It had been so sudden that his heart jumped. He grabbed it, almost knocking it off the edge of his desk before he snatched it up and stabbed the accept button.

  It was JJ. She was sweating inside her helmet, her face contorted in pain. The terrorists had done the unexpected, instead of descending into the old hangers to search for Earth merchandise to destroy— where they could be cornered— they planted explosives on the north face of the crater wall. JJ had been forced to expedite the ambush, and then the crater wall blew. Seven of his people were killed, and ten injured, two of them severely enough that they were medically discharged.

  Compton didn't encounter anyone else on the first level. He reached the stairs to the second level and headed up.

  What followed JJ's call was an eighteen hour ordeal of organizing machinery and equipment and digging bodies out of the rubble. He went there himself and supervised the whole effort. Several terrorists had died in the detonation, as well. One of the two rovers they brought was crushed, but the driver survived, and later died while being transported to the hospital. The other rover escaped the area, disappearing into the windswept Martian wilderness.

  Reaching the top of the stairs he entered the second level and stood just inside the door, staring down the hall. It was quiet. Yes, walking through the barracks was indeed self-torture, but one he deserved. JJ had told him no one blamed him for what happened. They were soldiers, this was their job. He found no comfort in that. After a moment he walked the hallway, at the end he turned around and walked back to the door. This, of course, was not what JJ would have done, but he could see no purpose to walking into each room; poking through lockers and remarking on performance scores. On his way out he met two more of his people, one had been part of the team at Cydonia but escaped injury, the other was just coming in from an extended rotation at a fueling station between Capital Burrow and Saint George Burrow. He hadn't been a part of the Cydonia team.

  When he entered the lobby to his office JJ's door was open and she was sitting at her desk, her uniform immaculate ... and one leg sticking out stiffly from behind the desk. She was looking at her desk screen, then glanced in his direction and almost rose before giving him a tight frown and settling for a nod. "Morning, sir."

  He frowned back at her and said, "You've already put in eight hours this week. The doctor said that's the maximum. Go home." Her rank and position afforded her permission to live outside of the barracks. She stayed in a small apartment across the burrow, and sent most of her money to her two daughters back on Earth. One was a freshman in college, studying to be a veterinarian, and the other was doing something in law.

  She shrugged, with a half-smile. "I just had a few things to catch up on."

  He snorted and turned, heading to his office door. When his assistant asked if he wanted coffee he nodded and went inside, closing the door.

  Hanging his jacket he sat down and logged in his desk. As he opened his message queue there was a light tap at the door and then it opened. Expecting his assistant he glanced up to give her the obligatory thanks, but it was JJ. Her leg was in the mobility brace that her therapist told her to wear, and she was holding his coffee. He grunted and kept peeling through the messages in his queue.

  "Miss Osteen had to be escorted off the premises this morning," she said setting his coffee down on his desk and then half-sitting half-falling into one of the chairs in front of it. "I don't know why we issued a trespass warning if we're not going to act on it. She'll be back in couple days."

  Judy Osteen was the mother of Robert Osteen, one of the bodies pulled from the rubble of the crater wall. One of the terrorists. She was one of thirty relatives, friends, neighbors, and work colleagues that Compton had interviewed to try and discover any connections that would lead him deeper into the FMN cell network. When she learned about the circumstances of her son's death she refused to believe it and became a regular in front of the building carrying a sign proclaiming her son wasn't a terrorist and wanted Compton to say so on the news networks.

  Sometimes she got worked up and tried to come inside.

  All of the other interviews ended in varying degrees of Judy Osteen's reaction. Derisive disbelief, stubborn refusal to believe, sarcastic incredulity. The bodies of the dead terrorists produced no leads. Nothing. They had video footage placing two of them at an anti-UN riot on the college campus there in Capital Burrow— two years ago. Again, no leads, no obvious ties to the FMN. The terrorists had lived double lives, or had been reclusive enough to hide their comings and goings.

  Miss Osteen had appeared on a couple of those news networks as well, giving her side of the story and exaggerating out of proportion the interview that was supervised by Compton. To hear her it had been an interrogation where they were trying to force her to admit her beloved, innocent son was a terrorist— for some, as of yet unknown, nefarious government plot. A few others had appeared in the media as well, proclaiming their family member's innocence or demanding details on Compton's investigation, but Osteen was the only one picketing. The media hadn't quite lost interest yet, there were still investigative, journalistic interviews making their way through the networks, and his office fielded several calls each day from family members, attorneys, and newscasters.

  "We're not going to arrest her," Compton told JJ. "She's just a mother hurting over her son's death. Whether or not he was a terrorist has little meaning in that regard."

  JJ hmmed and shrugged. After a moment of silence she said, "Burrow PD finally found the owner of that rover. It belonged to the Maintenance department, here. They used it topside, to drive around the terminal and landing zone. It was reported stolen four months ago."

  She was referring to the crushed rover that they pulled the single living terrorist from, the one that died on the way to the hospital.

  So, no lead. It was the same with the equipment the terrorists were carrying. The software in the armored vac-suits had been rewritten, there wasn't any digital traces for Forensics to find, but they did manage to reconstruct a partial serial number from one of the helmets. It led to a batch of suits packaged and handed over by the manufacturer to a UNSEC transport team and delivered to the UN Regional Spaceport in Greater Houston. Their final destination was supposed to be the UNSEC Shipboard Training Coordinator at Archimedes dome. Only, the Coordinator's office hadn't been expecting any new armored vac-suits. In effect, they had simply disappeared. That had been a year ago. It takes phenomenal idiocy to mess up military bureaucracy. Or, phenomenal hackers.

  Seven dead, two crippled for life, and no leads. Those facts repeated themselves in his mind as he closed his messages and took his coffee from the corner of his desk. You know it's not your fault. He could see that on JJ's face, she wanted to say it again. That's why she was sitting her
e in his office, instead of sitting in her apartment watching the game or writing messages to her daughters.

  He should have been there, at the depot. He should have been the one to lead the ambush, and told JJ to stay here and review reports and wait for his call. She would have resented him, but ...

  "I think it was a knee jerk reaction," JJ said quietly, glancing at her leg. "The wall, I mean. Whoever had the detonator got scared and ..."

  "I know what you meant," he told her. She had included that opinion in the after action report. Again, she was trying to say that it wasn't his fault.

  She shrugged again, then asked, "Any word on the court-martial?"

  "Not yet. It's still with the Tribunal's panel."

  A message from Marietta arrived early that morning, asking him the same thing. She had been on Earth three weeks, now. When things started heating up with the FMN he had hem-hawed around with the decision to send her back home, when General Hague warned him of the possibility of a court-martial it cinched it. He packed her up and stuck her on a cargo freighter headed back to the Moon. It hadn't been comfortable for her, but it made the trip in good time. Their son, Kyle, was less than twenty kilometers away. Whatever happened Marietta was going to be okay.

  "How's Marietta?" She asked, perhaps seeing through his eyes.

  "Jamala, go home. Write your kids ..." The rest would have sounded flowery, so he just finished with, "I know you've got my back."

  When the sergeant limped out of his office and the door shut he leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. When they court-martialed someone of his rank it ended in a crucifixion. What does Marietta need, he asked himself. She has her own account ... the house needs to be put in her name. The car is already in Kyle's name. What else, what else ...