“For being here illegally,” he said. “For being a Red Hand.”
The woman smiled humourlessly. “You should leave. People will be angry with you after tonight. The sort of people you don’t want angry with you.”
Hammell watched her disappear through the whitewashed windows. She opened the passenger door and got inside the car and still the androids in the policenat sat impassively, not even bothering to turn their heads as the vehicle screeched away. He had a lot to ponder as he stretched out on the floor to finish his cigarette.
Roy Brown’s bar…
Chapter 12
“We had no reason to suspect they were criminals,” one of the androids said by way of explanation.
“I could have told you, if you’d bothered asking,” Hammell responded. “You weren’t interested in finding out what they were doing there?”
“It is not illegal to be in the Reserves,” the android countered. “It is only discouraged for safety reasons. The machines of the Restoration are demolishing every town. It is dangerous.”
“An I.A. was in need of medical attention,” Hammell said. “I needed help.”
“You said that you do not require medical attention.”
“That’s not the point!”
“The emergency call stated that an I.A. may need assistance,” the android continued in its frustratingly calm voice, “but we could not detect the presence of an I.A. and we were given no specific location. We therefore switched on our lights and sirens and remained visible in the street so that any I.A. present could easily locate us.”
It sounded almost plausible, but it also felt evasive. Then again, if the police androids really had been compromised, why would the greys have cut and run? None of it quite made sense, and Hammell’s head was hurting too much to try to figure it out now.
“Just shut up and take me home,” he muttered as he leaned back - jumping forwards again as his battered scalp encountered the headrest. He felt around back there and his fingers encountered the deep gash. It probably did need stitches, otherwise he might end up healing with a bald spot. He had however been quite insistent about not going hospital, and he’d be damned if he was going to climb down on that now. Sitting back more carefully, he spent the rest of the journey trying to hold the gash together to help it knit.
The nat dropped him outside his apartment building after a brief stop for medication: A dozen bottles of the finest scotches available to humanity. He walked over to the front door clutching his precious box, wishing for once that his building didn’t pre-date nat landing pads. He was fairly dreading the stairs tonight, so much so that he even began to entertain thoughts of sleeping in one of the abandoned apartments on the ground floor, in spite of the lack of a bed.
A mangy stray cat was sitting on his doorstep blocking the entrance. The stubborn little thing refused to budge, even as he leaned over it to shove open his temperamental front door. On a whim, he tried to nudge the creature inside with his foot, thinking that Kitty might appreciate the company. She sometimes went out into the hallway, but never went down more than a couple of flights of stairs, so she never encountered any of her own kind. This rotten little thing certainly wasn’t the finest specimen of a male - it might not even be male at all - but it would be better than nothing. The stray utterly ignored his boot as it stared up at him suspiciously. At a time of its choosing, it stood up, yawned, stretched, and then ambled away. Hammell decided against a chase. Kitty was perfectly capable of coming down here on her own if she needed a friend.
The lift had been fixed, officially speaking, but it was better to fight his way up the stairs for the next 15 minutes rather than risk getting stuck for the next 24 hours. He considered putting the whisky in and sending it up alone, but the thought of it getting stuck without him was even worse than him getting stuck in there with it. In the end he made his way up on foot, even more slowly than usual, stopping regularly for a swig from the half-finished bottle in his pocket, racing through it to get to one of the new ones. Soon though the climb became too arduous and he was forced to abandon his supplies. He took out an 18 year old single malt from the island of Jura. It would be enough until he felt able to come back down the stairwell to retrieve the rest.
Maybe I could collect them one at a time as I pass each day, he thought. They’ll be safe here, as long as the front door doesn’t get stuck wide open again. The only other people who had clearance to enter the building were his cleaner and the maintenance man, and neither of them struck him as the whisky-stealing type. It might be a good way to regulate his consumption too. He probably shouldn’t drink more than one bottle a day.
Inside his apartment, he looked around for the cat, but she wasn’t in the mood for greeting him tonight, perhaps because she couldn’t smell Chinese food. He shuffled into the bathroom and took off his dirty, dusty, blood-stained clothes. Standing in front of his mirror naked, he poked and prodded at his bruised head and back. His left eye was turning black and puffy. His implant informed him it was deferred bruising from the wound on the back of his head. He would live, but facial recognition software might not work on him so well for the next few days.
He showered, staring vacantly down at the plug hole as the water ran red. Turning off the taps, he dug around under the sink, locating an old first aid kit he hadn’t known he possessed. Inside he found a bandage still sealed inside a sterile silver packet. It was six years out of date, but he was dubious as to whether a bandage could really expire. Wrapping it around his head, he tucked the end in when he couldn’t find a safety pin.
Clean and dry, he collapsed gratefully into bed and lay for a time contemplating calling his former partner as he experimented with the unusual flavor combination of toothpaste and whisky. Middle of the night calls had once been, if not exactly normal, certainly not unusual. Toskan’s mood upon being woken up had always been entirely Meera-dependent. If she was back, he would be angry. If she was at her mother’s, he would just sound resigned. Hammell made a bet with himself that it would be the former, a bet which he lost when Toskan didn’t answer at all.
"This is your fucking fault," he said to Toskan’s messaging service before hanging up, his spirits a little lower.
Has he really gone? he wondered as he touched the back of his head, feeling the sore, puffy flesh around the wound through the bandage. And was my head always this squidgy?
Closing his eyes, he tried to sleep, but his mind wouldn’t shut down and his brain was throbbing. The painkillers he washed down with whisky would help. The cat appeared suddenly, leaping onto the bed, making him jump. She curled up between his feet - at least she had faith that he was going to settle for the night. Feeling oddly reassured, as if Kitty thinking it must mean it was true, he lay back down on a pillow already speckled with blood and began to drift off, feeling vaguely annoyed that he would have to put a wash on himself since Li wasn’t due for another couple of days. He hated changing sheets only a little less than ironing. He always got lost chasing the corners.
He passed out relatively quickly, but his dreams were vivid and frightening and he woke up more than once expecting to see an android standing at the end of his bed with a blue plastic barrel.
Chapter 13
He sat up and the pillow came with him. Slowly peeling it off of his head, he discovered that the bandage had soaked through. Taking off the already ruined pillowcase, he held it against the back of his head, finding that the wound had opened up again. He popped a couple of painkillers, swallowing them dry instead of with the Jura and then forced himself out of bed to watch for the sunrise. Today wasn’t a lucky day. He hadn’t really expected it to be.
It took far longer than usual to get ready; the combined effects of alcohol, pills, a bruised back and a pulpy head all having their effect. Despite his difficulties, the public nat still delivered him to the office on time. Asha Ishi would be in at nine am, so he had a couple of hours to toy with. This was his new favourite part of the day, before Asha Ishi arrived to annoy
him by talking, not talking and generally being alive. Turning on the aircon, he pulled out his chair and gazed longingly at the sofa. Fighting against temptation, he ordered a coffee from a whitetip and signed into his skywall.
The more he thought about last night, the more he realised that the rabbit hole had got a whole lot deeper. The behaviour of the androids was the most disturbing thing. There was a contradiction there that he didn’t yet understand. So many questions were buzzing around in his brain, but his sore head was affecting his ability to think.
Reducibility, he told himself. One problem at a time and the whole thing will gradually come down.
The first thing was to log his evidence. He notified the evidence room and then took out the crumpled bank note from his pocket. The android that appeared to collect it placed it immediately inside an evidence bag, something Hammell himself should have done. They might only get his prints and DNA from it now. Even so, it would set cogs spinning and tongues wagging all over the world. No-one had ever found a bank note with Roy Brown’s image on before.
The next job was to upload his data to polnet. He started with the pings, casting them onto the skywall and setting a process in the queue for the megaAI to check them against official city inhabitants. In seconds the results started coming back and Hammell was unsurprised when the first non-match popped up. He scanned through the list, pretending even to himself that he was looking at random, stopping when he found her.
Eva Valentine. So now he had a name… and more besides since she was a legal citizen, one of only a couple in the bar. Was she hiding, just as I was? he wondered, feeling an illicit thrill as he realised that her information would be on record. He pulled up her personal details, her census data and her bank records, surprised at the lack of data. Checking every database he was allowed access to, he found almost nothing. Her age was unknown, her birthday, her place of birth, her employer, her profession - the list went on and on. He did however have an address and her omni account information. All he had to do was touch the tiny floating image of her face and a call would go through…
An alarm sounded, startling him. He scrolled quickly down until he found the cause. He stared at it disbelievingly, but there it was in bold red lettering.
“Shit. Me. Out,” Hammell said to himself. Now he’s seen you too, he thought nervously.
Polnet was already going into meltdown as the megaAI in the basement dropped whatever it was doing to work on this. He imagined the information rippling out from the megaAI to the androids and to the Commissioner and to the wardens, making its way gradually throughout Interpol all around the world.
“Yes, you bastards,” Hammell muttered aloud as he sat back in his chair. “An I.A. got closer than the lot of you.”
He watched on a display as the megaAI began piecing together a new 3D facial reconstruction from his iEye’s 2D stereoscopic images. It took some time since Hammell hadn’t got a clear view and every frame had to be enhanced or combined to improve the resolution. As each image flicked up and was processed, he began to realise that he probably should have spent more time looking at the stocky man and less at the singer. He started to will each coming frame to not show Eva, but it quickly became clear just how unwaveringly he’d been staring at her. His face flushed red as the image centred on her chest and then went all the way down her legs to her feet and then back up again.
“Great,” he whispered to himself. “Now the entire police force knows I was leching.”
After a few minutes his humiliation was over and Hammell found himself looking at a reasonably lifelike severed head hovering just above his desk. He leaned in and stared into the small, black eyes of the latest face of the enigmatic leader of the last major organized criminal network in the world. Yes, Hammell thought, this is him. But the eyes are missing something. In real life, Roy Brown was more… chilling.
The new facial reconstruction was paired with the ping which had positively identified Mr Jeremiah Gok, and both were updated on Interpol’s Most Wanted List. When it was done, Hammell sat back and waited for Yun to call him upstairs. If the big man was in the building, it would take only seconds. If he wasn’t, he would currently be scrambling to get here as quickly as humanly possible. Hammell very much hoped for the latter.
While he waited, he casually called up one of the images of Eva. He rubbed his chin and looked over his shoulder as if checking nobody else was watching, then called up the reconstruction request again. Unsure exactly why he was doing it, he watched as the model of Eva Valentine slowly began to appear in front of him. It took even longer than for the Red King, partly because it was a lower priority, and partly because of the sheer volume of data he had for the singer.
Before the reconstruction was finished, the call came in. Hammell considered claiming that he was in no fit state, but it would only make Yun angrier if he had to come down here. So he dragged himself up from his chair and closed down his display, leaving the megaAI working in the background.
The magnitude of the rollicking was surprising. Frankly he’d expected some kudos for having proven unequivocally that Roy Brown was here, not to mention for providing a wealth of new data and leads. Commissioner Yun saw things differently.
Hammell tried to switch off and let it all roll over him, not reacting when Yun claimed that he himself was responsible for keeping Hammell on the payroll, keeping his cool when Yun claimed that he had somehow kept Hammell from being arrested for loitering outside Toskan’s house, saying nothing when the Commissioner implied that Hammell had swiped evidence to give him the lead to The Happy Trout, though that one was true. He largely succeeded in keeping his mind focused on kittens and lollipops and rainbows, right up until Yun implied that he had somehow messed up by not apprehending the Red King.
Even then, he was considered in his response. He thought about bringing up the fact that the androids could have at least tried to chase down the people leaving the bar, and to imply again that something was wrong with Providence, but he knew the timing wasn’t right for that yet. There was a lot he still didn’t know and he didn’t want to go off half-cocked again. In the end, he opted for the Toskan angle.
“Maybe I could have brought him in,” Hammell muttered, “if Toskan had been with me.”
The remark didn’t send Yun apoplectic, which was suspicious. The vein on the side of his head throbbed intensely, but if anything, it calmed him down. Hammell twitched as he watched the big man warily. This was unexpected behaviour and he didn’t like it.
“Yes,” Yun said. “I agree.”
“So... Toskan will be reinstated?”
Yun shook his head. “You should have taken your partner. Your new partner.”
Hammell threw back his head and tried not to scream.
“Let me be crystal clear,” Yun said. “Asha Ishi will go with you any time and every time you leave the station for the purposes of work from now on. That’s an explicit order, understand?”
“No,” Hammell said, “I don’t. I don’t understand why you’d get rid of a solid investigator like Toskan but retain that lunatic.”
“The order will be put into writing,” Yun said, nodding to his android P.A., “so there will be no misunderstandings. Every time you leave the building. Now get out of my office. And get yourself to a hospital. You’re dripping blood on my carpet.”
Back at his desk, Hammell allowed a medic to fix a new bandage around his head, before kicking it back out and pulling up Eva’s now-complete reconstruction. He spun her around, wondering absently whether there was any way to take a copy. If he was caught stealing personal data, he would face more than just firing… That said, the raw data had come from his iEye. That made it more of a legal grey area. Probably.
The office door flew open and Asha Ishi strode suddenly in, before he had time to close the display. Hammell cursed his luck. This was the only time ever that he hadn’t heard her coming from a mile away.
"Who’s that?" Asha Ishi asked, a knowing glint in her eye.
He closed the display with a swipe of his hand, trying to appear nonchalant. "Just someone from the bar last night. Did you see? I got beaten up,” He was surprised at how proud he sounded about it.
“Just someone?” Asha Ishi asked as she hung up her wet coat. “You were staring at her a long time for ‘just someone’.”
“You were watching the upload,” Hammell said, feeling his face betraying him.
Asha Ishi nodded. “Why are you making a model of her? That’s a little creepy, isn’t it?”
“She knew something,” Hammell tried. “She’s one of them.”
“And that means you need a model… why? Roy Brown changes his face regularly, but this Eva Valentine looks to have a perfectly good likeness on file.”
Hammell shook his head and muttered something inaudible.
“What?” Asha Ishi asked, not so easily dissuaded.
Seeing no way out and having no desire whatsoever to continue this conversation, Hammell stood up and collected his coat from the hook by the door, shaking off some of the dampness from the morning mist as he pulled it on.
"Running away?” Asha Ishi said, smiling to herself. “Really?”
“I have things to do,” Hammell grunted.
“I have things to do here," Asha Ishi replied.
“So do them.”
"Don't be stupid, Hammell. We were given orders."
But Hammell was already on the way out the door. Asha Ishi cursed at him, but she followed, shaking off her own coat as she came.
Chapter 14
His car had still not been located and Asha Ishi was steadfastly refusing to ride in a policenat, which limited their transport options somewhat. He wasn’t about to pay for a public nat just because of Asha Ishi’s quirks. After a brief, testy exchange, they headed for her private nat, which was parked a couple of roads away. It was raining hard, so by the time they got there Hammell was as soggy as he was miffed.
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