Infinity's End

by Jonathan Strahan

  Foxy reassured the tour guide and helped him re-schedule so that the tourists could enjoy seeing the arrival of the clean-up crew coming for the body. “Drowned over in Pirate Booty Bay,” she told him and her entranced audience.

  “That’s half a world away!” said a boy, awed.

  “Yes, sir,” Foxy agreed, “That it is. You know a lot about the hotel do you, son?”

  “You have soft fur,” his little sister said, leaning through the rails. “Can I touch it?”

  Foxy turned and put her brush up against the rail. “Only because you asked so nicely.”

  “Minnie!” A horrified mother’s voice. “I’m so sorry, ma’am. Minnie, we do not touch the little people. They are not toys.”

  Minnie was very polite with the tail, as Foxy had known she would be. She didn’t mind. She’d got a track of this kid’s stay and she was as nice as they came, clean, tidy, caring. She assigned each child a special access pass to a ‘secret’ grotto where you could dive in powersuits along the most beautiful of the ocean reefs and later wear symbiote mertails and sport in a private lagoon. As the presents arrived at the family feed, the parents cooed and calmed down, which is what she’d been going for. Even as part of the police force at the String of Pearls Magnificent Hotel, keeping guests happy was her favourite part of the job.

  “Drowned off Voodoo Beach,” Tiggs said, returning from her tour of the thorn trees. “No identification on him and reception says he’s come in on a false ID. Quite a good one. They’re promoting the DNA search out of house.”

  Foxy recovered her brush with a flourish and bade the tour guide farewell as the cleaner crew’s glossy white and red cross rig appeared, floating down from orbit carefully to avoid disrupting the vulture tower. “Let’s sign him off to them and get ourselves over there then.” She took a walk over to the body and looked down at him together with Tiggs.

  A young male human, well built, with some sunburn on his shoulders and nose. He had short dark hair, some body hair, although not enough to really call it hair in her opinion. Maybe he had been handsome before the bloating and the bruising set in. She wasn’t sure about that. They had some in-house footage of him coming in from Kyluria Point by shuttle, and he looked like every other tourist to her, stepping out of the door into the soft, warm light of Caribae with that combination of hopeful and weary that characterised people on their second hundred years. His clothing was made by the AI house Turbulent and fit him perfectly, its mixture of clean colours and distressed cloths a popular affectation of the intergalactically wealthy. His combination showed no particular imagination. He was every inch the potential corporate spy.

  “We’ll assume he was dropped here so the body could be eaten,” she said, straightening and hopping up the long length of Tiggs’ leg to her position on the soft saddle that was part of Tiggs’ uniform harness.

  Tiggs grunted. The lions in question were a part of their regular work in Safari World, where they spent most of their time patrolling the vast expanses without trouble other than the odd bit of animal vetting, light fraud and a robbery or two. It was just luck that a murder investigation had kicked off in their area, but Tiggs’ grunt signalled her lack of agreement on the ‘luck’ interpretation that Foxy had placed on it.

  “Now we have to follow the whole thing through to the end, right?” Tiggs said, waiting for Foxy to settle down and get her hind paws in the bucket stirrups.

  “All the way,” Foxy confirmed.

  “Can’t hand it over to Pirate Baywatch?”

  “No way. Come on, Tiggsy, this is what we’re made for! We’ve never had our own murder before. To the Bay!”

  Tiggs grumbled at the idea of flying and the idea of being on someone else’s turf, the sound coming out as a growl as she set off at a run through the bush, weaving easily away from the scene and circling once at the landing site to signal the clean-up pod that it was safe for them to land—no wildlife of note around. Then she was doing what they both loved best: speeding through the hip-high grass of the plains, her feet almost silent as they struck, the wind blowing free through Foxy’s whiskers, following game trails, on patrol all the way to the distant lift-off point where the orbital shuttles rose and fell twice a day.

  HOTEL MAIN OPS sent them first class private through to the Bay. They said it was so the guests didn’t get disturbed, but Foxy knew they could have sent them cargo class for that. The luxury of first class was something that the Hotel itself was doing as a way of caring for them. The Hotel was its staff, just as much as its planets and its vehicles, its buildings and its life. The Hotel was all of them but bigger than them. Foxy and Tiggs had never heard the Hotel directly, but they felt it and, on occasions like this, they felt it a bit extra, a deep, lasting hug in their bones. It was good to be part of a Hotel. Foxy actually pitied the tourists who were always coming, looking, searching, leaving, combing things for every last mote of XP they could get before they had to move on.

  They tried out all the luxury treatments they had time for. Foxy had a deep tissue massage. Tiggs went for a complete nanomask deep-clean of her skin and feathers and, to amuse herself, got one of her teeth gold-plated. ‘Now do I look like a pirate?’ she asked as they made ready to disembark, flashing the fang.

  “Aye!” Foxy said and pulled down her eyepatch, which she had requisitioned with the notion it might not be a bad idea. The sunlight at the Bay was intense and there were many dark interiors at the buildings that ringed the beaches. She might need a good eye for each venue. “What about me?”

  “Arrrrr,” said Tiggs, making the most frightening kind of noise that Foxy expected anyone had ever heard, particularly when paired with the sight of her teeth. It was good they were in a soundproofed cabin.

  “You might want to ease up on that a bit,” she said as the door opened.

  Their itinerary opened, hotel-style, before them, soft colours showing the ways they had to go, but instead of cocktails and sun loungers, they were headed to the last recorded places that their mystery guy had been seen.

  Out at the front it was morning, and the boardwalk that ran the length of Voodoo Bay was already busy. The Bay was a very broad curl that ended with a spit of land sticking out into the ocean, pointing like a finger. On maximum zoom Foxy could see people at the tip diving into the deep water from the rocks, the glitter of drones taking their pictures like dots of light. Down the other end of things was a tall cliff into which one of the hotel guest houses was hollowed out in a series of caves. Some of these ran directly in from the sea, accessed by boat and fin; others were high above the waterline, serviced by interior lifts and private jet or glide packs. Behind them the majority of the bay was lined with shanty huts of low level and apparently no tech. There was no land side exit; you had to take a shuttle or a powerhaul to the adjoining coastal zone. She and Tiggs took a walk down to the hire shop where watercraft were loaned out, studying their inner maps of the new place as they went.

  “I got a ping from the lab,” Tiggs said as they walked along the sand, aware of being watched, so unusual and out of place. She returned various waves and signals from the local tritons who hosted the beach and pinged ahead for someone to talk to at the store. “They say the john is a fabricant from a shop out in the Bosphoric Chain, and not a particularly high quality one.”

  “Ooh, Chain stock,” Foxy said. “That’s slumming it, even for a spy avatar.”

  “They’re washing him for trip data—radiation sigs, all that—to see if they can match him to a factory.”

  The sun on the water glittered but the breeze onshore was cool. The bay water was shallow, a pale turquoise that slowly melded into deep sapphire blue at the bay’s edge.

  “It was old though, for an avatar. Someone on the run?”

  Tiggs nodded as they arrived at the Float Shack. “If you’re stuck in an avvie that long and you get killed in one, do you, you know, do you die? For real?”

  “Depends on the hosting dunnit?” Foxy said. “How far it was, how good
the transmission is, how encrypted. I mean, it got through on a special guest permit—a stolen one I may add, but even so. That’s not a hard data barrier, only a mild checker. You can get in and out on it. Maybe. But the host would have to have some kind of transmitter in the hotel and I’m pretty sure there aren’t any. I’m askin’ all the same.”

  The triton in charge of the shack had been updated and came out to greet them. He was a tall humanoid with a silver, sharkskin finish and many cartilaginous finny appendages, webbed fingers, but human hands otherwise for handling the gear. A triple row of ridged fins framed his face instead of hair, shielding a mass of trailing tentacles that hung to his waist in the back.

  “Detective Foxy. Detective Tiggs. Welcome to the Bay. How can I help you?”

  Behind him Foxy watched other tritons preparing a skim boat, loading it with picnic supplies, fishing rods and speeder skis. “Hey there, Lucas. We’re looking for news of a guest that was murdered out here sometime last night, we think around one a.m. local time. Has anyone asked about someone missing?”

  “No, nothing like that. We’ve been tracking all our gear and doing a backcheck since your shuttle sent out the alert. Nothing missing. And none of the deepwater services have mentioned anything.”

  “The water was from this Bay,” Foxy said. “What goes on here at night?”

  “Everything that goes on in the day time, minus the sunbathing I’d say,” Lucas said, “But last night was the weekly big bonfire up over on the point. Big cookout, lots of drinking, lots of partying. Everyone goes to it.”

  “We have a sighting that looks like it was at night. Here.” Foxy displayed it for him on his mindnet.

  “Ah, that’s definitely near the fire. What’s this from, a guest net?”

  “There’s something at work in the background,” Foxy said. “Very few pictures of him and what we do have is blurred, like interference. I think it’s a local firewall.”

  “Nothing like that here hotel side,” the triton said. “Maybe got yourself a stalker.”

  “Thought it,” Foxy said, tipping her hat to him. She was getting very hot and thought quickly, to spare herself some sun. “I’m going to go check out all the shanties and the buildings down on the far shore at the end of the ’walk, see if we can find someone who recognises him. Tiggs here is going to do the hard work, aren’t you, Tiggsy?”

  Tiggs flattened her crest. “I need someone expert on the water. See if we find an exact profile.”

  “I know the guy,” Lucas said and beckoned. “C’mon.”

  Foxy excused herself and took a drink of water as she watched Tiggs walk off, Lucas pointing, talking. After a moment her partner set off down the beach at a run, giving the sunbathers a wide berth, which didn’t stop several groups of them getting up and running off in a moment of panic. Foxy didn’t laugh. That would have been unprofessional. A lot of people started asking if there was a cross-level event, a dino invasion, something exciting like that going on, and was it a real dino and would it really eat anyone...

  Humans. They were such dipshits. If they bothered to read any of the hotel menus, they’d know they could go for a hunting party by special request, lethal or any other kind. But she made a note for Entertainments about the interest in unplanned monster attacks.

  Foxy finished her water and took a trike up from the shack to the walk, spinning along, taking readings of the air to see if any traces of interest were about, but the air was thick with barbecue fat and smoke, high with ozone. Even moving slowly among people, she didn’t find a human that had been in contact with him. Not that she expected to. Murderers who could falsify hotel data systems were few. But they must have hijacked a Private Skimmer to make the flight and the drop without getting rebuffed by Sysops, and that meant that they took it, like any guest, from the Skim Depot. So she was going there and showing her photos on the way. She asked a lot of people, all finding her “so cute, look at this fox, honey, look, she works for the security people, isn’t that adorable...” but although people did recognise that Foxy was especially lovely, nobody recognised the john.

  TIGGS REACHED THE cliff guest house and turned to the water when she found the barbecue pits and stone circle where Bay Services were steadily cleaning up from the previous night’s fire and entertainment. Records of the dead man’s few moves flashed through her mindnet and she matched them to the landscape she could see. He’d been here, here... and here. The moves took her towards the water in the direction she was going anyway. He had left the fire shortly after the music started and the dancing. He’d come out here... but of course the tide had washed all the marks away.

  She was met at the edge of the surf by Tovi from Deepwater Safety. Tovi was, like her, almost an identical replica of the creature he resembled: a giant mantis shell crab. His carapace gleamed, heavy with weeds and limpets. Mussels festooned his back. He raised his larger pincer in greeting and together, with him as the guide, they began to move out to sea. He walked and Tiggs swam above him, helped by some web-sheet that Lucas had given her for her hands and feet. Her skin found the water very cold but surprisingly enjoyable.

  “There’s a regular patrol at the reef’s edge,” Tovi told her as she was lifted and lowered by the rolling waves. “I’ve called in a few of the lads. They’ll meet us there. They know what they’re looking for.”

  By the time she had swum out that far, Tiggs was starting to feel tired. She was glad when Tovi pointed out a spot where the reef was close to the surface, and relatively safe for her feet, so that she could stand and have a breather. Their contacts were already there, gliding around, their fins breaking the water’s surface. Grey sharks. They could smell an individual ten miles away in the ocean, even more. She gave them the aroma of the dead man and they vanished, one by one, silently, into the depths.

  They were soon back with an answer. “Found it. The old raft beyond the point. There were swimmers in the water all night, but there’s residue on the rope there. Maybe on the top there’s more. I’ll call Vince, he’ll give you a lift.”

  Vince was a megalodon and couldn’t get too close to the reef. He surfaced at his slowest speed so Tiggs could swim out to him and walk up onto the broad back behind his head, as tall as the enormous fin behind her.

  “All aboard,” he said, mindnet to mindnet, and then, with imperceptible movements of his fins, they were off, Tiggs surfing all the way, her ankles breaking the water but never going deeper, her balance never in doubt. She thought that Foxy might be right about the luck. It was sad to lose a guest and perhaps dangerous to rout a troublemaker, but riding on a shark across the ocean on a fine day was an unexpected and complete joy. She held out her arms and her feathers caught the wind. She could imagine that she was flying...

  The fixed raft came up all too soon, and she had to leap off and onto the weathered old decking, hoping she wasn’t ruining a crime scene. Vince loitered as she made her inspection, studying the area as closely as she could, mapping it, then taking various tastes of the boards and the ropes with her tongue. Her nose was good, but the seawater was abrasive and pungent itself and she wanted to feel confident—the tongue never lied. And there it was. A match. And a lot of other DNA traces along with it.

  She pinged Foxy. “He was here. Vince verifies that the water profile by this raft matches his. It has a particular coral and protein signature from the plankton rising up that is almost unique to this kilometre. He was alive on this deck—I’ve got semen matching. It’s mixed with female human DNA. I’m relaying to the lab and to reception and guest services. I’m coming back.”

  FOXY WAS AT the Skim Depot. They had checked out several private shuttles around two a.m. None of the routes were tracked, but they could download the internal tracking data as long as there was a warrant. Foxy served the warrant and was shown aboard the one that had taken off last. It had recorded its flight to orbit, but then glitched and there was no further data to be saved.

  “You can see here once it’s back in the Bay, it reset
s,” the service manager said, poring over it with Foxy together. “I’m no expert but if there’s a mindworm involved, it will have been put in via the access panel...” They went over to the plate and undid it.

  Foxy took a sniff of the area. “Does this match what you’ve got, Tiggsy?” She sent over the sniffings.

  “Same woman,” Tiggs said immediately.

  Reception came back almost at the same moment. They had several in-use identities for the dead avatar, all being sent over. They had an ID on the woman guest. She had not left the hotel, and there was no current record of her whereabouts.

  “Well, I never,” the skim service manager was saying. “Spies! Here, in the Bay. What was she doing?”

  Foxy told her and thanked her, then popped her eyepatch down and went outside. Tiggs jogged towards her along the beach looking pleased with herself even as she complained, “Bloody hot it is out here.” She tiptoed around families and avoided various of their pets, snarling at a particularly barky dog and showing her gold tooth.

  Foxy ordered a bucket of water and an iced tea and took them out to a table with an umbrella sunshade at the edge of the sands to wait for her. Tiggs’ snout disappeared into the water bucket as soon as she reached the umbrella, and there was a long pause.

  Foxy twirled the tiny paper umbrella in the mass of fruit stuck to the side of her iced tea. “If she hasn’t left the hotel, and the skimmer was returned here...”

  “Then she’s likely still here. She hasn’t swum out, I already asked Tovi and Vince. Some of the Bay rats say they’ve got traces around the shanties—food stands, especially one that serves seafood skewers. Got quite a groove there. They’re looking all around now to see if they can find her.”

  “You’re so smart, Tiggs,” Foxy said, glad they were of one mind. It made life so much easier.

  “I am.” Tiggs lifted her head up and then lay down on a lounger for a moment, resting her head on the table. Her eyes swivelled to look at Foxy. “I rode a shark.”