Dirty Job

by Felix R. Savage

  And here we stood with Rafael Ijiuto. How were we going to talk our way out of this one? I glanced at Ijiuto to gauge his reaction, and got the worst shock of my life.

  Ijiuto was grinning.

  “They confessed,” he said. “Just like you said they would.”

  A bevy of uniformed officers materialized out of nowhere. Cuffs snicked on our wrists. They hustled us across the sidewalk and shoved us into the van, while the maelstrom of the Strip closed up again behind us like water.

  42

  “You brought this on yourself, Mike,” said d’Alencon, in the darkness. The van was air-conditioned to just above freezing. LEDs glimmered along one wall. I smelled plastic, body odor, and mint. Mint?

  We accelerated smoothly. A moment later, the note of the engine changed from an electric hum into a whir. My stomach dropped. The floor tilted. I lost my balance and fell on top of Dolph. The sensation of lift continued while I struggled to sit up. It was a flying van. We were going airborne.

  As we continued to climb, a light came on towards the front of the van. It had no regular seats in the back, where we were. One wall was lined with electronic equipment. D’Alencon sat on the operator’s stool, gazing sorrowfully at me and Dolph.

  Two uniformed officers sat on the jump seats along the other wall. One of them rested a taser casually on his thigh. Another officer had the controls. I now saw that they weren’t wearing PdL PD uniforms. They’d fooled me. Same navy blue, but they had no badges. Instead, there was an unobtrusive logo of a triangle on their collars.

  I had no attention to spare for them, or for Rafael Ijiuto, who sat on the floor behind the driver, biting his knuckles.

  I stared at the man in the passenger seat, which he’d twisted 180 degrees to face us, so he could sprawl with his thighs apart and look down on us like some kind of potentate …

  “Captain Smith.”

  I’d last smelled that minty chaw, and seen that bottlebrush black hair and those chilly eyes, in the Yesanyase Skont system. How could he now be here on Ponce de Leon?

  Well, I was.

  “Secure them,” Smith said. “I hear they bite.”

  The uniforms forced us into a sitting position and bound us back to back with whipcords that constricted around our chests and hips. These restraints were illegal. If given the instruction, the whipcords could tighten the rest of the way. Slice us in half like sausages.

  The memory of Parsec’s feat in the prisoner transport van taunted me. He had Shifted right out of his handcuffs and savaged his guards. We could theoretically do the same thing. Cuffs can’t hold Shifters and nor can whipcords, although it would be a gamble—they might be able to tighten the cords faster than we could Shift.

  But there was that taser. Smith and d’Alencon both had guns in their holsters. And most importantly, we were way up in the air. There was no jungle to run to up here. Even if, and it was a big if, we could kill or disable all six of our captors, we’d then have to land. And if we tried to land somewhere unapproved, the cops would simply take control remotely and redirect the van into their waiting arms.

  Controls were probably locked to the biometric pattern of blood vessels in the driver’s hands, anyway.

  Dolph’s spine pressed against my back. He was quivering with tension. I knew it wouldn’t take much to provoke him into Shifting out of sheer rage. The backs of our heads were touching. I shook my head minutely, hoping he got the message—play it smart.

  I tried to relax my shoulders, to calm both of us down, but it wasn’t working, because I wanted to eat Jose-Maria d’Alencon alive.

  I had trusted him.

  “Looks good,” Smith said when they finished tying us up. “You’re on, Detective Inspector.”

  How did Smith and d’Alencon come to be working together? The PdL PD was a planetary authority, not under the control of the Fleet. Why was a Fleet officer sitting in on our arrest, anyway? Why did he seem to be in charge?

  D’Alencon read off a tablet, in a monotone. “I am arresting you, Michael Starrunner and Dolph Hardlander, on suspicion of the murder of Timmy Akhatli, a subject of the Ekschelatan Empire.”

  I knew it was wrong to kill the Ek. I knew that very day that it would come back and bite us. I’d seen it in the water.

  “You have the right to remain silent, but it may harm your defense if you fail to answer questions fully and truthfully. Do you understand?”

  “I trusted you,” I said.

  “You sell-out, Bones,” Dolph said. “You feeble-hearted, two-faced excuse for a human being.”

  “You knew I was a police officer!” d’Alencon exclaimed, slapping his tablet on his knee.

  I twisted my head as much as I could to look d’Alencon in the eye. “We had an agreement. What happened to that?”

  “Our agreement did not include you murdering aliens in goddamn Millhaven! You promised me you were gonna go straight, Tiger! Have you been lying to me all along?”

  “How’d you find out?” I said, because they obviously had.

  “Jim Tierney,” d’Alencon said flatly. “Total Research Solutions was in the habit of purchasing biological materials on the black market. They would take delivery of these purchases by river. So one day when his employees were tooling along in their boat, they spotted the RV. They called it in. Imagine Dr. Tierney’s surprise when the RV proved to contain the decomposing body of his former shipping agent. He cracked under questioning, and admitted everything. So we’ve also nailed him for exporting genetic engineering materials. A two-fer.” D’Alencon lowered his tablet. “However, I should inform you that nothing we’re saying right now is on the record.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “Just like shithead over there wasn’t wearing a wire.”

  “Mr. Ijiuto agreed to assist us in exchange for his freedom,” d’Alencon said.

  “He killed my admin officer. He tried to kill millions of people on Gvm Uye Sachttra and Ponce de Leon. Why don’t you just jump into bed with the devil himself while you’re at it?”

  “What makes you think we haven’t?” d’Alencon said dryly, motioning with his head in Smith’s direction.

  Smith’s laughed at d’Alencon’s joke, although I wasn’t so sure it was a joke. “If I had a GC for every time we’ve been accused of doing the devil’s work, the Fleet wouldn’t have budget problems.”

  Dolph said, “When we were deployed on Tech Duinn, we used to take our leaves on the moon. Tech Duinn has a big moon, as I’m sure you know. It became a major Fleet base as the war went on. That’s how Mike and I learned to fly spaceships. We’d be knocking around the tunnels, drinking and getting into trouble, but then one day our friends in the Fleet said they had a better idea. Discipline was non-existent, I’m telling you. No one stopped them from taking us out and showing us the ropes, bouncing up and down over the craters, risking billions of GCs in military hardware on every hop. The reason they did that for us is because we saved some of their lives on the surface. This one time a crew had to bail out over Eas Rudah. Our unit rescued them. Escorted them back to the rear without losing a single man. That was due to their professionalism as well as our woodcraft. I respected those guys. They were as tough as … as Shifters.”

  “Yeah, yeah, the good old days,” Smith said.

  “I used to think the Fleet was on the side of good,” Dolph said.

  “I was on Tech Duinn, too,” Smith said. “In a staff capacity.”

  “Figures,” Dolph said.

  “It’s easy to joke about staff officers.” Smith’s jaw worked his chaw. “It usually signifies limited intellectual capacity, but anyway. I’m getting the impression you don’t really know anything about the Fleet.”

  I considered what I did know about the Fleet. It is humanity’s only standing species-wide organization. Its chiefs are appointed by a committee of politicians from the Heartworlds, Oren’s Star, and Earth. The Fleet gobbles up taxpayer money and fails to appreciably make a dent in the piracy problem, but no major human planet has ever
been attacked from space, except by the Fleet itself, so you have to figure they’re doing their job. Defending humanity against all those rapacious Eks, stargends, huspathids, aiora, Kroolth, and other aliens, who are foaming at the mouth or other parts with eagerness to conquer our nice, human-compatible planets … oh, wait.

  “You never heard of the Iron Triangle?” Smith said.

  The answer to his question was yes, actually, I had. But now I had a sad, self-critical question of my own. Why had it never occurred to me that the Fleet are, in fact, our rulers?

  43

  “The Iron Triangle,” Smith said, “is a community of three Fleet intelligence agencies working together to ensure the safety of humanity. You can go on calling me Captain if you want. No skin off my nose. But it’s actually Major General. I’m the special deputy for the mobilization director of the FCS, the Fleet Clandestine Service, one of the three agencies I mentioned. The other two are the Fleet Special Service, special ops, and the Fleet Cyberwarfare Service, self-explanatory. Got that?”

  “We met one of your people on the Kroolth homeworld,” I said. “She was working at a scrapyard.”

  “Yup. That’s when we first became aware of you. Anyone that buys a ship built by the Cluster’s only surviving Urush bot is automatically a person of interest. So we’ve been tracking your movements over the years, not with a whole lot of success, I might add. You’re very good at staying off the radar, aren’t you, Mr. Starrunner?”

  I sneaked a glance at d’Alencon. I had confessed all our crimes to him. The Iron Triangle may not have known about them before, but I had to assume they did now.

  “We’ve got nothing to hide,” Dolph said.

  “Not anymore,” Smith agreed.

  I slumped in my bonds. The whip cords cut into my chest. All my paranoia turned out to be justified. I had always feared that the authorities were watching and waiting, poised to come down on me like a ton of bricks if I made one wrong move … and now I had. And they had.

  Not just the police, either, but the highest authority of all.

  The Iron Triangle.

  In one moment of poor judgement, I had doomed Dolph, and probably Irene, Martin, Rex, and Robbie as well, to a short future in Fleet detention.

  One moment? Who was I kidding? A lifetime of poor judgement, impulsive violence, and reckless gambles had brought me to this point.

  It struck me as funny that they didn’t know I had IVK. They may have me in their power now, but they wouldn’t for long. My death, sooner or later, would cheat them of their victory.

  Sooner … or later …

  My inhales got shallower and quicker. Adrenaline flooded my brain stem. My muscles tensed against the whipcords.

  Dolph saved me from making a fatal mistake. He said, “I guess this ain’t really about Timmy Akhatli.”

  “The Eks are’t exactly threatening war over his death,” Smith acknowledged. “Any Ekschelatan who’d voluntarily live on a human planet is mud in the eyes of the Empire, anyway.”

  “But it’s still murder,” d’Alencon said.

  “I sense the inconsistent application of principles,” Dolph said, wagging the toe of his boot in Ijiuto’s direction.

  “In case it isn’t crystal clear,” Smith said. “Mr. Ijiuto is working with us. The same immunity that was extended to him can be yours as well, if you cooperate. Otherwise—”

  With a thunk, the side door of the van slid partway open. Cold wind rushed in. Six inches from my sneakers, a dusky void yawned. I was disoriented for a second, trying to match the city lights below to some part of Mag-Ingat—and then I realized I was looking at all of Mag-Ingat, a crescent of light squashed between the bay and the hills. We were much higher up than flying cars normally go. Guess traffic rules don’t apply to the Iron Triangle.

  “As far as I’m aware,” Smith said, “there are no Shifters with wings.”

  “No,” I said, eyes glued to the drop. “Even condors or eagles, the largest birds on Earth, only weigh about fifteen kilos. So a bird with the mass of an adult human being would be the size of a small airplane. Wouldn’t be able to get off the ground.”

  “Shove you out the door right now, humanity would be the better for it,” Smith said. “But it would be a drop in the ocean, unless we followed up with all the other forty million.” The side door slammed shut. “The mistake was allowing you to reproduce in the first place.” Smith’s voice had a tinge of throatiness in it. I realized I was in the presence of a mainstream human who actually did hate Shifters.

  “C’mon,” I said, shocked into smiling hopefully at him. “We’re all humans …”

  “No. That’s exactly what you’re not. The alt-human designation is a brilliant stroke of propaganda, but it’s misleading. You are a new and different species, and the best illustration yet of how genetic engineering is tearing Homo sapiens apart.”

  D’Alencon sighed, just a tiny sound, letting me and Dolph know that he wasn’t on board with this. It only made me hate him the more. He had brought us here. He had set us up.

  “The mission of the Fleet Clandestine Service,” Smith said, “is to safeguard the essence of humanity: our DNA. What else sets us apart from the Eks, the stargends, and the rest of them? The Eks, at least, are just as smart as we are. But they don’t have our spark,” he snapped his fingers as if looking for the right word, “our creativity, our restlessness, our desire to remake the universe in our image. All that is embedded in our DNA, and that’s what sets humanity apart. That’s what makes us the most successful expansionary species that we know of, bar none. That’s why they’re all afraid of us.”

  He lowered his voice on the last words, smiling confidentially, and despite myself I felt a shiver. He was a true believer in human greatness. The thing is, I was, too.

  “The only thing that can stop us now is … us. We’re holding a weapon to our own throats, and the name of that weapon is genetic engineering. The Age of Adaptation, as they call it, was the closest we’ve ever come to self-inflicted destruction.” The Big Shift came right at the end of the Age of Adaptation. We Shifters see ourselves as the culmination of a sorry era, and its redemption: we got gene-modding right. It was a pretty safe bet Smith did not see it that way. “You’ve never been to Earth—neither have I. But I’ve been halfway, as far as Oren’s Star. It’s an oasis in a wasteland of human wreckage. Those colonies along the way, oh brother. Those people don’t even look human anymore. And that kind of thing is still going on in the Cluster today. Gene-modding technology is widely available, thanks to idiots like your friend Dr. Tierney, and others who don’t even have the excuse of idealism. The genie is out of the bottle.” He chopped the air with a hand. “Our mission is to slay it.”

  I said, trembling, “You wanna clarify how you’re not threatening my people with extinction?”

  “Forty people is an objective,” Smith said. “Forty million is a fait accompli. Anyway, we have an operational code of conduct. Ethical guidelines. The Fleet does not go around murdering people.” He smiled at me and Dolph. “That’s your job.”

  “I have two words for you,” I said. “Fuck off.”

  Smith slid off his seat so he was squatting in front of me on his haunches. The smell of his minty chaw washed into my nostrils. I glared at him, refusing to play the part of vulnerable captive. That pissed him off. He had brass fingernails; some kind of cybernetics, I’d figured. He now stretched out one finger towards my face, while the nail on it grew and sharpened into a razor’s edge. Neurally controlled nanotech. Nifty. He pricked my throat with that brass nail—a sudden, breathtaking jolt of pain—and traced a line down over my collarbone. My t-shirt parted like tissue paper. The claw circled around my right nipple, leaving a bloody trail, and edged up to the nipple in a grotesque, agonizing parody of a sensual caress. Cold sweat drenched my back. I bit down on the insides of my cheeks. Dolph swore, unable to see what was happening. The uniforms sat like statues, professionally blind and deaf.

  “Jesus!” d’Alenc
on erupted, springing out of his seat. “Leave the guy alone!”

  Smith raised his eyebrows, his claw poised at my nipple.

  “He don’t need that kind of incentive. We got enough to incentivize him already. If he don’t cooperate, he goes to jail … this time, for good. And if that ain’t enough—” d’Alencon met my gaze for a painful instant— “it would be the work of a moment to dispatch armed officers to investigate the shooting range owned by Alec Macaulay, out in the hills.”

  So they knew where Lucy was.

  “We might even find Buzz Parsec there, too.”

  If Bones thought that, he did not know Parsec, or Alec. But he did know me. The veiled threat to Lucy punctured my defiance. I closed my eyes to shut out the sight of d’Alencon and Smith. Blood tickled, creeping down my chest. Sweat mixed into the cuts and stung like fury. “I’ll do what you want.”

  “Good,” Smith said, curtly. His claw withdrew from my skin.

  I opened my eyes. I happened to be looking directly at Rafael Ijiuto. He was gray in the face, but he mustered a smile and flashed me a thumbs-up. I looked away.

  “What do you want, anyway?” I muttered.

  Smith cleared his throat. “We have reason to believe you illegally removed a deportee from the Hurtworlds,” he said, in an exaggerated, booming, flat voice.

  He had spoken those words to me before, in the trunk corridor of the St. Clare. And he’d been right.

  MF had saved us that time …

  … but MF couldn’t save us now.

  “Where is she?” Smith said. “Your ship was searched—she’s not there. You haven’t removed her from the spaceport …”

  Dolph cackled. “Shit, man, you think we brought her back with us?”

  “Didn’t you?” d’Alencon said.

  “No,” I said leadenly. “We left her on Mittel Trevoyvox.”

  “Mittel Trevoyvox?” Smith said. “Are you shitting me?”

  “No.”

  “Christ in fucking cryonite. Mittel Trevoyvox! How long ago? Two weeks? You Christing idiot.” Smith leaned closer, his teeth bared. I thought for a second he was going to bite me. “Are you unaware that the Travellers are after her?”