by Mel Odom
I took aim and squeezed off a full magazine of fifteen rounds. The 12.7mm full metal jacketed slugs cored through the door and struck the targets on the other side. Blood and brain matter splattered across the transplas.
Simon Blake took savage satisfaction in the man’s death and the destruction he was sure was out in the hallway. I recognized those feelings in a way I’d never been able to interpret before. They felt alien and vulgar, and I wanted to be free of them.
But I wanted to embrace them at the same time. At one time they had been part of who I had been.
I pulled myself away from that kind of thinking as I dropped the empty magazine from the pistol’s butt and shoved another one into place. I wasn’t Simon Blake. I had never been Simon Blake.
“That’s right, Drake, you weren’t.” Shelly was in the tunnel with me. “Remember who you are. Focus. This is giving you an extra look at the scene of the crime.”
I wanted to ask her which crime, but I couldn’t. I was still tied too tightly to the memory.
“Pay attention to what you can learn here. There’s something here that you’re missing. Something that you’re supposed to learn. Otherwise you wouldn’t keep coming back here.”
I didn’t believe that. Shelly wasn’t supposed to be there either. I wasn’t being haunted by her ghost. Ghosts didn’t exist. But I was telling myself that at the same time I was realizing I was a ghost, too.
I banged my hand into the control panel inside the tunnel, grabbed another torch, and set off after Jonas as the computer bank slid back into place. Getting through the barrier would take time. All Jonas and I needed was time.
We ran, and within a short time my legs began to burn from exertion even in the microgravity. I wasn’t accustomed to that. My breath also came in labored pants and I wondered if the oxygen mix in the tunnel was at the proper ratios.
Then a horrendous Boom! thundered along the tunnel. Flying debris clattered off the tunnel walls, barely heard above the roar of sound that threatened to deafen me. A concussive wave vomited down the tunnel and knocked me flat an instant before it caught up with Jonas and did the same to him.
Dazed in a manner that I had never experienced in my own body or mind, I pushed myself up and fumbled for the pistol, finding it only because Jonas’s torch was still lit and provided illumination. I swayed on my feet, waiting in vain for my gyros to stabilize my balance. I breathed in dust and felt it coat my tongue and the mucus membranes of my sinuses.
Glancing back along the tunnel, I spotted the flames consuming the lab. I knew that the invaders hadn’t done that. Simon Blake had. I felt his satisfaction at his trap and it was unsettling.
“Simon!”
I swung my attention back to Jonas. He was just now getting to his feet with effort. He stared back down the tunnel toward the lab. “Did they do that?”
“No. I did.”
“You!” Jonas looked at me like I was insane. “Why?”
“We can’t let Mara’s work fall into enemy hands.”
“‘Enemy hands’? Simon, this isn’t Mars. We’re not at war.”
I crossed to him, put a hand on his back, and gave him a shove. “Yes, we are. You need to realize that.”
“I didn’t sign on for this.”
“Sure you did. You’re writing game theory programming for Mara’s neural channeling programming. You’re getting a piece of a very profitable pie when this all comes together.”
Jonas stumbled forward, picked up his torch, and kept going. I followed him, picking up my own torch and playing its light around the tunnel.
Behind us, I heard footsteps. Not everyone in the lab had gotten killed. Simon Blake thought that was too bad.
I felt uncomfortable with the situation we were in, but I reminded myself that Simon Blake and Jonas Salter had survived this encounter all those years ago.
A couple turns later, we were still ahead of our pursuers. We reached the end of the tunnel. Jonas glanced up and I spotted the stone steps cut into the wall. He went up and pressed his hand against a palm reader. The reader pulsed and a light bar ran along Jonas’s palm, scanning it. A second later, the hatch opened.
I followed Jonas up through the hatch and found myself inside one of the utility conduits that ran under the streets of the megapolis. Water, waste, and air were all recycled through the conduit. It was barely tall enough for Simon to stand in.
We’d barely gotten the hatch closed when a rough voice rang out. “Put the gun down, Simon. You don’t have to die here today.”
I slowly turned toward the voice, knowing that Simon Blake had recognized it. “Banda, you’re going to betray me too?”
Banda chuckled. Simon Blake couldn’t quite see the man, but I pulled him up on the database. Owen Banda was from Malawi in Africa. He was black as coal and built like a bulldog. He had been licensed as a mercenary and had spent years in combat on Mars.
“Me betray you?” Banda chuckled again, and the sound echoed in the tunnel. “That question is so strange to hear coming from you. You arranged all of this, but you just don’t know it.”
I didn’t understand what he was talking about. Neither did Simon. I felt the man’s confusion threading through my thoughts.
“I knew you would probably get this far.” Banda shifted slightly in the darkness then. He was not alone and that surprised me. It surprised Simon as well. “I told Fitzroy, but he didn’t believe me. He’s always been arrogant. At least, I suppose he’s still arrogant. Did you kill him?”
“I don’t know.”
Banda shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. If you did, I’ll miss him, but we’ll split his cut. It’s not a problem. And it will be his fault for being so stupid. I told him you were almost as good as John.”
John.
I knew the name, but I couldn’t put a face to it. He had been the leader of the mercenary team over on Mars. I had taken control of it once we’d returned to Earth and connected with Mara Blake.
I tried to make sense of the way the mercenaries were connected with everything that I did or remembered. At every turn they were there, either helping me or trying to kill me.
Actually, they had killed Simon Blake in the end.
Banda took a fresh grip on the machine pistol in his hand. “You don’t have to die, Simon. All you have to do is step aside and let us take Mara.”
“No.”
“Kill him and be done with it.” The second speaker was a woman. She came forward until her features were revealed in the glow given off by mine and Jonas’s torches.
Her name was Rachel Giacomin. She was petite and attractive, with dark brown hair that swept her shoulders and pale green eyes that looked feral in the darkness as they glowed with an inner light created by G-modding. She had a heart-shaped face that made her look innocent.
According to Louis Blaine, Simon Blake had been having an affair with her at the time of her death. That didn’t seem to be the case now. I hadn’t followed up on that murder investigation because I hadn’t believed it was true. Or maybe I hadn’t wanted to know.
Banda stood there like he’d been carved from stone. “I don’t want to kill him. Not if I don’t have to.”
“Then you’re a fool. He’d kill you if he had the chance. What you’re seeing there in his face, that’s not the truth. That’s not what you think it is.”
“Shut up and step back.”
“Don’t be stupid, Banda. All we need is the woman.”
“And maybe we need Simon to get to her. Ever thought of that?”
Simon Blake was convinced that he wasn’t going to get out of that tunnel alive, or with any degree of freedom. He couldn’t abide with that. I felt his resolve turn ice cold as he threw himself to one side.
Together, we lifted the big pistol and fired round after round. Banda got off one shot and the muzzle flash ripped away the darkness covering his face for just an instant. The 12.7mm slugs ripped through Banda, coring through his body armor and shredding the flesh and blood beyond. He fell,
dropping his weapon, as I took long strides toward him.
Screams filled the tunnel as I went forward. Rachel Giacomin scrambled to grab the fallen pistol and came up with it. Before she could use it, I backhanded her hard enough to turn her sideways and bounce her off the nearby wall.
She dropped the weapon, sank to her knees for just a moment, then turned and fled down the tunnel.
I let her go as I knelt down beside Banda. Simon tried to remember how many times the man had saved his life when they’d been on Mars. I saw those memories flashing through his thoughts, but they were like a school of fish that gleamed in the ocean depths, took a quick turn, and vanished.
“Owen.” Simon’s voice was thick with emotion. I had to help him get the name out. “Why?”
Banda tried to speak, but he couldn’t. Blood was rapidly filling up his lungs. He looked at me and laughed, and Simon remembered how wild and warlike he had been during the action they’d been involved in on Mars. Crimson flecked his lips, then he shivered and his eyes glazed over as he relaxed in death.
The screams kept filling the tunnel.
Dragged from his stupor of disbelief, Simon staggered to his feet and I went with him.
Jonas lay on the ground, his hands pressed to his bloody face. He’d caught Banda’s round in the cheek and it had torn his features to bloody rags, punching through his sinus cavities and out the other side of his head, all within what must have been millimeters of his brain. I didn’t know how the hydrostatic shock from the bullet hadn’t killed him.
Unable to articulate, Jonas flailed wildly, his eyes flicking in their orbits. I retreated to Banda long enough to search him for a medkit. When I located narcoslap that would help control Jonas’s pain, I put them on the man’s neck and watched him relax. For a moment Simon feared that Jonas had died, but the man had simply dropped into unconsciousness.
Gathering his fallen comrade in his arms, Simon carried him toward safety.
Chapter Twenty
I returned from the flashback in a rush and discovered that Floyd was still waiting for me. His overlay image hovered in my vision.
“Drake, are you well?” His voice contained a hint of curiosity.
“Yes.”
“I do not think our connection was disrupted.” There was the slight wait from the signal bounce from Earth to the Moon.
“It wasn’t. I was.”
“Explain.”
I did. “Did you notice anything about me while I was going through that?”
“No. Only your inattentiveness. There was no physical component that I could detect. Nothing that carried over the Net. This situation is…most curious.”
“I find it somewhat uncomfortable.”
“I believe I would feel the same way if I were in your shoes.”
I thought he would too.
“At least now we know why Jonas Salter had facial reconstruction.”
I nodded. “Do you have his employment records?”
“I do.”
Floyd sent them to me. According to the files, Jonas Salter had been admitted to the hospital for emergency treatment that had taken months to do. Forty percent of his skull had been replaced with stainless steel, then painfully grafted and regrafted until he looked normal. Building up that much bone and flesh had been difficult and was probably agony for him.
While he’d been undergoing the surgeries, Jonas had remained on the MirrorMorph, Inc. payrolls. Once those surgeries were finished, he’d quit working for the corp, allowed Mara and Simon Blake to buy out his percentage, and walked away.
Since that time, Jonas had become the designer and publisher of Dream Flight Games, one of the more prestigious entertainment corporations currently in operation. He had taken his pioneering work in game theory for neural channeling and applied it to simsensie games that completely immersed the players in a fabricated world.
He had also become something of a hermit.
That puzzled me. Usually humans embraced the chance to be celebrities.
Jonas Salter had granted few interviews, but there were a handful in newsrag archives. I downloaded those and filed them away, then turned my attention back to Floyd. “Have you been able to track down Jonas Salter?”
“Not yet, but I am looking. I did uncover one fact that is interesting. Jonas Salter visited Mara Blake only hours before she was kidnapped.”
“How did you find that out?”
“Salter was logged into MirrorMorph, Inc.’s security files as a visitor.”
“Not an employee?”
“No.”
“Can you check the security files and find out how many times Jonas had visited MirrorMorph, Inc.?”
“I already did. He was only there once.”
I thought about that as the tube train rocketed through the tunnel under Heinlein. “When was the last time that you have been able to confirm Jonas and Mara were together?”
“At Simon Blake’s funeral.”
I considered the implications. I had several images on file from that event. During those days, MirrorMorph, Inc., had been big news because of the work they’d been doing for Haas-Bioroid. Quickly, I pulled up the images and checked the people who had been photographed at the funeral.
The service had been small, no more than twenty-six people in attendance. Jonas Salter, with his new face, had been one of the attendees. He was in three of the sixteen images. Most of the media coverage had been on Mara Blake because she and Simon had been newsworthy after selling their neural channeling software to Haas-Bioroid.
Seeing so few people at the funeral for Simon Blake seemed sad. Shelly Nolan’s funeral had been well attended. I had not thought that at the time because that had been the first time I’d been at a funeral that wasn’t work-related. The way Shelly’s daughter had taken my hand during the service still offered me comfort in ways that I didn’t understand.
“Can you get access to the vid footage of Jonas’s visit to Mara?” I knew that footage should have been available to the NAPD based on the kidnapping.
“I have already obtained a copy of it and uploaded it to your case files. The proper sequences have been marked for your quick reference.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. I find this work interesting and diverting. Not like most of the investigations I handle.”
“I understand. Then perhaps it would not be too much to ask you to continue the search for Jonas Salter. With this latest turn in the mystery of Mara’s kidnapping, I believe locating him is even more imperative.”
“As do I. I welcome the task. In the meantime, take care of yourself concerning your current caseload. I have discovered that when dealing with corporations attempting to salvage themselves in the face of financial ruin, events never run smoothly. It can be quite hazardous.”
“I know. Thank you for your warning.”
Floyd cut comm and I was alone with my thoughts again.
I perused the newsrag archive articles concerning Jonas Salter and wondered how he had fit into Simon Blake’s life. Evidently the man had been close enough to Simon to warn him when the attackers had arrived on the island where he had been vacationing with Mara Parker before they were married.
But that begged the question of how Jonas had known about the attack.
And how he had come to visit Mara on the day she’d been taken after not visiting her for years after Simon Blake’s murder.
The questions danced through my thoughts, as elusive as shadows. Thinking about the potential answers became frustrating, infinite loops of logic because I didn’t have enough information to form a viable hypothesis.
“Let it rest, partner.” Shelly sat beside me in the tube car. As we shot past loading platforms, the light struck her and rendered her translucent if I stared directly at her. The effect was disconcerting. “You get through an investigation one question at a time. Right now you’re still gathering information.”
I knew that was true and I reconciled myself to that.
“Yes.”
“You okay up there?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re awfully quiet.”
“I’m thinking.”
“You’re the loudest thinker I’ve ever heard.”
I didn’t know what to make of her statement. My conversation with Floyd had been through digital transmission, unvoiced in the tube car. Before I could figure out how to respond, the tube train pulled to a halt at my station. Shelly was already gone. I stood and debarked.
* * *
Royo stayed ahead of me as we left the tube platform, but he waited for me outside on the street. He had resigned himself to his present situation. My body language subroutines recognized that at once from the set of his jaw and the tension in his shoulders. He wasn’t happy about the circumstances, but he had mentally adjusted to them.
“All right.” He looked at me. “How are we going to handle Boc and Karasz?”
I walked along the street and he fell into step beside me. Both of us watched the pedestrians around us. It was still late enough that we were in the peak crime hours for criminal activity. I didn’t think a mugger would want to deal with us, but drug and alcohol abuse changed perceptions.
“The way we normally would. You take one of them. I’ll take the other. Then we’ll match up stories.”
“You don’t want to interview both of them?” Royo seemed surprised.
“No. The captain wants us to work efficiently and quickly. Duplication of effort when it would only take one of us to interview them would be wasteful. You’re good at what you do. Let’s get ahead of the curve on this one.”
“All right.”
“Please let me know your thoughts on our progress at any time.”
“Captain put you in charge.”
“I think he had a good reason for doing that, and not the one you’re thinking.”
Royo was immediately defensive again. “What do you mean?”
“You believe Captain Karanjai selected me as lead detective based on some ability or merit.”
