by Stephen Hunt
‘It can crawl in the back then,’ grunted one of the city’s noble Watch, not so much grudging, as permanently displeased. ‘You make sure it behaves.’
Excellent. Always nicer to be taken in alive; their intention, if they were willing to let my metal companion travel along. There wasn’t much clearance for my head inside the cart’s cage, let alone Mozart’s, but then comfort probably wasn’t on the list of requirements the local wheelwrights had been working to. Blessedly, our uncomfortable journey across the capital only lasted twenty minutes.
We arrived at an open square with good sight lines, Watch carriages lined up like a taxi rank, horses fed and watered at a nearby series of troughs. The beasts took their rest in the lee of sloping grey concrete walls. Walls belonging to a building unlike any other construction I had chanced across inside the city. A six-pointed star-shaped citadel, narrow slits in its ferocrete for windows. A miniature forest of metal tridents spearing towards the sky and covering its roof – an ancient lightning conductor mesh. Hulking. Impressive. I guessed this was one of the original colonial buildings, perhaps even the old planetary capital building itself. Short of a direct asteroid strike, this structure wasn’t going anywhere. Not even the looming gas giant’s fiery wobbles had taken a bite out of the place over the centuries. Standards crackled on high in the unceasing wind. Each flapping pennant bore the same badge found on the Watch soldiers’ jacket: four hands in a nested circle, each hand clasping the next. I suspected the flag would have been more on the mark had each hand concealed a dagger ready to plunge into its neighbour. Four Families? Four crime syndicates, more like.
One of my minders unlocked the police-wagon’s cage, his comrades covering us with their firearms while I climbed shakily down the wagon’s short steps, followed by Mozart, my robot ducking to avoid smashing their transport. A woman with an hourglass figure approached from the side of the square, stepping into the pooled light of a nearby lantern. Unlike her comrades, the female officer actually made her black-and-crimson leather Watch uniform seem respectable. Perhaps I was favourably biased by her glowing porcelain skin and flowing red locks restrained in a fashionable topknot. Sweet savagery personified.
The woman glared at the squad of thugs who holstered their shotguns in response. ‘Captain Jenelle Cairo. I apologize for your escort’s manners.’
‘I’m not being arrested?’
The captain resisted smiling at me, but her intelligent green eyes twinkled. ‘Oh, but this is a friendly audience, Master Roxley.’
‘Then I’d hate to see how unfriendly hearings unfold. You could have popped into the tavern where I’m staying. I would have stood you a beer at the bar.’
‘Oh, you’re not meeting me. Your audience is with Halius Laur, Commander General of the Watch.’
‘And he doesn’t enjoy a good beer?’
‘No,’ she replied with a certain finality, then she eyed Mozart suspiciously. ‘Gods, that’s a large ruster. You’re not short of a few coins, then.’
‘Sometimes I find it sensible to invest a little in keeping what I’ve already got.’
Cairo snorted. I doubted she was buying what I had to sell. ‘This is the Citadel of the Watch, Master Roxley. You’re about to enter the safest place in Frente. As long as you’re innocent, of course …’
‘Do I look innocent?’
Cairo ushered us through the original blast doors and into the citadel. ‘Everyone looks guilty to me.’
The ancient interior had been retrofitted, fresh cloth to fit a fresh form – dark age chic – gaps in the ceiling and walls where defunct electric lighting strips had been torn out, replaced by mountings for oil lamps; mechanically-controlled doors removed and swapped for manual metal gates. Cracks in the internal walls filled by a spiderweb tracery across its self-healing surface, the extent of marble-like veins indicating just how long this building had been repairing itself. Watch officers stood sentry at staircases leading below ground. Most of the lift shaft doors had been walled over, but a few elevators were still operational – albeit powered via jury-rigged winch mechanisms driven by mule teams. Unlike my tavern lodgings, I suspected the layout here was purely traditional. I said a prayer of thanks that I wasn’t to be dragged downstairs and introduced to their extensive collection of thumbscrews, racks and dunking tanks.
Mozart’s clunking body drew more glances than I did. We passed through open halls filled with the detritus of law keeping. Maps pinned with outbreaks of unsolved deviances, mazes of wooden desks tended by clerks of the Watch, wall-mounted gun-racks, officers lounging on benches with the braggadocio of bandits in their hideout. None of the coppers noticed the tiny fly-sized machines departing Mozart’s stacks: each an identical representation of a local invertebrate called a bag bug. Of course, Mozart’s bugs weren’t interested in gnawing away at mushrooms like the real creatures. They also carried a lot more in the way of highly sensitive recording equipment than the local life-form they’d been designed to mimic.
Finally, a long wood-panelled corridor, busts of dignitaries standing sentry on shoulder-height stone columns. The panelling’s softening effect was like covering a mailed fist with a woollen mitten. I predicted that the Commander General of the Watch had made his lair at the end of this passage.
‘Your ruster can stay here,’ said the captain, halting before a tall set of double doors. ‘The Commander General doesn’t take much to talking metal.’
From her tone of voice, I gathered Mozart was one item on a very long list of things the Commander General didn’t much take to. I winked towards my robot friend and the glowing red dots of his eyes narrowed. Mozart wasn’t happy with his exclusion; but then, when was my friend ever happy?
Captain Cairo knocked on the door, opened it and ushered me inside. A large chamber, a wall to my side mounted with swords and bladed weapons in assorted styles. An exotic offworld collection. My m-brain fed me the blades’ values, all rare and highly collectible. I doubted the Commander General was accumulating them on his Watch salary. The brute didn’t look like a swordsman, though, closer to a wrestler: short, squat, muscled and powerful still, even into his late fifties.
‘William Roxley for you, general.’
‘Who?’ rumbled Laur without glancing up.
‘Lady Blez’s hireling …’ explained the captain.
Halius Laur didn’t bother rising to meet me from behind his considerable expanse of desk, littered as it was with papers and folders. The lack of rising was understandable given the weight of medals pinned across his grand uniform. There was a lot of correspondence spread out before the man. Maybe he had a problem reading without moving his lips? It might explain the general’s shaved head, running cold to help speed his brain-cells.
‘Him,’ sighed the general, as though he had asked for a nosegay and been passed a sack of dung instead. ‘You’re the one the Lady Blez intends to second guess my work.’ He dismissed the female officer with a weary gesture and she pulled the doors shut behind her. I was meant to be intimidated by the general’s presence. I gave him what he expected to see. My fingers fidgeted nervously by my side. I snatched the occasional sideways glance towards the wall of sharp steel, wondering if the top cop might yank a blade off and run me through should I annoy him. And let’s face it, I am often quite vexing.
‘Odd’s fish, m’dear, I hope you’re not offended by the task pressed on me by Lady Blez. I mean no offense to the work of the Watch here in Frente.’
‘Of course, I’m insulted,’ barked Laur. ‘I don’t need some green moneyass with fat pockets and no street-sense blundering around the capital. You’re a bloody spore-spice hawker for the love of the gods.’
‘I think the Lady Blez was more impressed by my previous trade as a medical examiner.’
Laur angrily pushed the papers in front of him to the side as if their presence vexed him. ‘Can you even remember that? Your kind forgets everything every few centuries. You’re practically born senile with that mess of wiring stuffed inside your s
kull.’
‘I try to remember the important things. I also served as a magistrate for Arius for over a decade.’
The Watch commander sneered. ‘Once a magistrate for Arius? In Frente, we have to do our own police work.’ He placed his hands together in a mockery of praying. ‘Beloved of holies, oh please could you commune with all recording machines for two leagues around the murder scene and drop the killer’s name in the temple plate for me?’ He snorted and thumped the table with his slab of a fist. ‘This is real work we do here. The real work of flesh and blood officers. We don’t pray for justice, here. We enforce it – we deliver it. Lady Blez is struck by grief. If she wasn’t, she never would have asked you to stick your nose in our city’s business.’
‘I feel your aggravation, Commander General, truly I do. But the Lady Blez is a hard woman to refuse. I was under the impression that if I said no to her, I would be leaving Hexator with fresh foldship fees to pay and only the air of my empty cargo hold to sell to cover my costs.’
Halius Laur shook his head in disgust at my avowed cowardice. A little hypocritical. I doubt whether the Watch commander dared decline many of Alice Blez’s whims, either. Not if he knew what was good for him.
‘You blunder across anything pertinent to the slaying of Lord Blez, I will hear of it before her ladyship. There are another three families breathing down my neck over the lord’s murder. I answer to the entire council, not just a single widow’s grief.’
I nodded in earnest agreement for the Commander General. And one of those houses, I suspected, was far more concerned with not being fingered for the assassination than actually solving the crime.
‘Might I ask what you know about the Lord Blez’s murder, general?’
‘You can ask …’
Damn the brute. ‘Please, Commander General,’ I pleaded, ‘you must have some idea about the murder. If I give Lady Blez nothing, I’ll be thrown near penniless out of Hexator.’
‘Near penniless? I have yet to meet any foreign maggot from the Humanitum even close to poor.’
I wondered if that was my cue to offer the commander general a large bribe? Best not to. He might well prefer to see me hanging in his lair’s dungeons on corruption charges, rather than enjoying my currency warming his pockets. ‘Please …’ I repeated.
‘I am investigating a number of lines of inquiry,’ Laur growled reluctantly. ‘There’re foreign cartels who will benefit greatly from higher spice-spore prices. Destabilizing the ruling order is a fine way to achieve that. Gangs of common agitators and troublemakers who celebrate every misfortune which befalls the Four. They’ll break soon enough. They’ll talk. The filth sneaks out of the city to drill in the wilds. They think my head will look fine mounted on a pike next to the Four Families. But they always end up in the citadel where we take good care of them.’
‘Thank you, Commander General, I understand.’ I understood that the Watch commander was every bit as thick as his neck.
‘Get out of here, Roxley. Stay out of my officers’ way or I’ll tread you into the ground.’
‘I promise you I will do my best,’ I said, being careful not to be too specific about what my best might involve.
‘I don’t need your best, I require your obedience,’ snarled Laur. ‘The capital is a safe city: the last safe city on Hexator. If it stops being quite so safe, even a well-heeled moneyass might run into the kind of scum who’d cut his purse and roll his corpse into a canal.’
And which well-heeled moneyass did the commander general have in mind? I resisted the temptation to ask. Laur used a bell-pull to summon an aide and I was marched outside where Mozart stood waiting as inconspicuously as he could, doing his best impression of an empty suit of armour. Captain Cairo reappeared to ensure I didn’t try to steal anything on the way out. The three of us walked in silence for a while until I couldn’t contain myself anymore.
‘I’m curious, captain; just how do the Four Families decide who should fill the commander general’s boots?’
‘Common consent. Each family has a veto over the appointment of the head of the Watch,’ explained the captain.
‘Ah,’ I said. An arrangement which meant that the most unambitious and least offensive brute would be always chosen. At least, inoffensive to the ruling houses. I’m sure offensiveness to the general populace and readiness to lay about with a nailed club featured quite high on the list of career requirements. A canny mind wouldn’t be on the job specification, though; I suspected the commander general lent considerably on the good captain here for that.
‘Ah, indeed,’ said Cairo.
Myself and Mozart were deposited by the captain in the open square outside the citadel, without, I judged, much prospect of a Watch cart transporting us back to the Sparrow’s Rest.
‘Goodbye, Master Roxley, spore-spice trader registered out of Rigel,’ Cairo snorted, sounding as though my cover was something faintly ridiculous. The captain wasn’t one of Laur’s dull blades. Jenelle Cairo was a whip and I wasn’t eager to find out how sharply she cracked. Or perhaps I was. Such conflicts don’t always dwindle as much as they should with age.
‘She’s a sly young bird,’ said Mozart, watching the captain stride back inside the citadel. ‘We’ll need to look out for her.’
‘Closely,’ I agreed.
‘It was dangerous, letting yourself be taken like that,’ chided my robot friend.
‘A risk worth taking.’
‘I can only protect your butt when you allow me,’ said Mozart. ‘Sometimes, doc, I think you’re out here looking to get yourself a right good slapping.’
‘Are you sure you haven’t hacked my courier ball … been chatting with Rena?’
‘Maybe I should. She was the only one who could ever talk sense into your thick organic head. What was the commander general like?’ asked Mozart.
‘The kind of law enforcer capable of strutting sitting down,’ I said. ‘And doubtless as crooked as a barrel of fish hooks, to boot.’
‘Do you think plod has any idea what is really going on here?’
‘You mean the changes heading this star system’s way? No, I suspect the only people who appreciate that are the idiots who arranged Lord Blez’s removal from this mortal coil.’
‘So, the top cop will suffer our help?’
‘Oh, he’ll suffer the indignity of mine. I suspect he’s too racist to consider anything you’ve got to say meaningful.’
‘Marvellous,’ sighed the robot.
‘I’m always willing to listen to you, Moz. I trust your infestation of bugs has returned. What did you pick up inside the citadel?’
‘What a fine employer you make, doc,’ said Mozart, his sarcasm level set to “dripping”. ‘Don’t worry, I made a copy of every document, file, interrogation order and map I could find inside the citadel.’
‘I trust you didn’t break too many locks.’
‘A few holes in their filing cabinets, doc, but I left said gaps resembling wood-worm. Not difficult given the state of the dump to start with.’
‘Your analysis?’ I asked.
‘We’re in the land of rough trade: beatings are up and crime is down. But only because most of the bandits and feral marauders in the outlying territories are suffering worse fertility rates than the city-dwellers. The protections the original settlers baked into their DNA are reverting to baseline human. Li’s radiation field is going to leave this moon as empty as an alcoholic’s beer barrel in another thousand years.’
‘Our concerns are a little more near-term. What does the Watch have on the Blez killing?’
‘The slugs recovered from the corpse were smithed locally, simple cased chemical reaction ammunition with lead projectile heads rather than smart-munitions or rail-gun pellets. Of course, just owning a rifle rather than a dagger in this place lands you high among the nobs. No shell casings recovered from the scene. No witness reports of the hitters even being seen. Given the list of sad gits being held for torture, the local plod are operating on the
assumption peasant rebels are behind Blez’s assassination, rather than infighting among the quality.’
‘Never torture a confession from someone who might decide your next promotion,’ I advised.
‘Facts don’t blooming cease to exist simply because they are ignored,’ said Mozart.
‘Then we better go out and find some,’ I sighed.
I hoped that Commander General Halius Laur and his merry band of thugs weren’t looking over my shoulder when I did.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fast to the feast.
Simenon gazed curiously as Mozart cast metal stalks across the floor of my room, a gentle rattle as the stalks landed, the lad seemingly fascinated by the ritual act of cleromancy.
‘Never seen runestones so narrow,’ said Simenon.
Mozart, lost in his casting, ignored the boy, so I answered for the robot. ‘They’re not runestones, they’re called yarrows. Our metal friend is seeking to scry the cosmological pattern through the yarrows’ fall. You’re viewing the art of the iChing, my young laddie. The hexagram patterns the yarrows make help reveal the future.’
‘How can a ruster call on the gods?’
It was a good thing for him that Mozart’ attention was otherwise engaged, otherwise I suspect the lad would have been made to pay for that. ‘His yarrows are cast from metal shells the gods used to inhabit when they were bounded by physical limitations. Mainframe casings and the like. They’re Mozart’s most valuable possessions.’ I pointed to my prayer box. ‘I use this in a similar fashion. The sand inside is from Mars, the very same fields of plagioclase feldspar and zeolite used to produce the nano-carbon which once composed the gods’ physical form.’
Simenon nodded, satisfied with the explanation. He instinctively sensed the power in the bones of the gods, the blood of the gods. He didn’t understand how much of an historical inevitability it was for the first truly sentient self-evolving artificial intelligences to have been breathed into existence on Mars. Inevitable, given the nature of the Californian pioneers who had colonized the Red Planet. Their resources and particular interests. A three-hundred qubit quantum computer can simultaneously process more bits than the number of atoms which exist in the universe. Produce a three-thousand qubit system and your main problem is trying to stop a self-evolving sentience developing. A god that’s exponentially smarter than our limited meatware can ever hope to reach.
