“You couldn’t just park in the nat bay like a normal person?” he muttered as he climbed inside and rubbed the water from his hair.
Asha Ishi scowled at him but said nothing as she began the pre-flight procedure, clearly intending on flying them herself, meaning that she had her L1 licence. He was grudgingly impressed, but he turned his head to look out of the window in case his face was showing it. He buried his respect deeply, covering over its grave with a thick layer of jealousy.
Firing up the engine, Asha Ishi gently raised the nat off the ground as Hammell watched the building appearing to descend beside him, acting as if being flown around by a person was the most natural thing in the world.
“I fly everywhere,” Asha Ishi said, not that he’d asked. “Even when the roads are clear.”
“The roads are always clear,” Hammell said, thinking that the megaAI in charge of the transport network would never allow a nat to always fly, since travelling by air was significantly more energy inefficient for short journeys. Asha Ishi’s constant flying was wasteful and frankly irresponsible. He folded his arms, having annoyed himself by siding with the machines.
They flew through the dense pall which hung over the city, the air so thick that he couldn’t see where they were going. Asha Ishi didn’t appear to be struggling though as she manoeuvred them expertly between the buildings and up to the lofty heights of the megastructures. The display on the nat made it relatively straightforward, Hammell supposed, outlining all of the buildings, flight lanes and other nats, as well as giving directions on the window display. Not straightforward enough for you to do it, his mind interjected.
The low visibility meant that Asha was concentrating hard, limiting the opportunity for conversation, which suited Hammell just fine. After a time, he found that he was secretly beginning to enjoy the ride - the buildings emerging slowly through the mist below them, the distant lights of the megastructures appearing gradually around them, the quiet except for the drumming rain and the hum of the nat’s engine. It was so rare to take an entire journey by air, and rarer still to do so outside of a chain.
There were no other solo travellers up at these heights. Asha had taken them right up to the middling flight lanes, usually the preserve of the clustered chains of intercity transits. Only intercontinental travellers generally went higher, but that wasn’t possible without linking to a long-range carrier. Hammell could hear them roaring by overhead occasionally, the carriers. He even spotted one through a break in the clouds above, an enormous shadowy object passing smoothly over them. He began daydreaming about where he might go if he decided to hook up to a carrier. He had accrued more than enough holiday time to go wherever he liked, and money was no object. But he knew he wouldn’t ever do it. The city was his home. He would only leave it for Abaddon or for nothing. So probably nothing.
Asha Ishi landed the nat on the street in one of the many empty parking spaces, right where he instructed her to. “Want to tell me what we’re doing here now?” she asked as she shut down the whirring engine.
Not knowing quite how to say it, he left her work it out on her own, stepping out of the nat into a mercifully light drizzle and hurrying across the slippery pavement towards a row of old, condemned terraced houses. There was no buzzer on the small white door so he knocked loudly.
"Her?" Asha Ishi asked as she caught up to him, obviously having checked the address on the networks. “Way too keen,” she said with a shake of her perfect hair.
“It’s not like that,” he said as he knocked again, but still nobody answered.
“What now?” Asha Ishi asked.
“We wait,” Hammell said, perching on a wall.
“Screw that,” Asha Ishi said and she walked back to her nat and dug around in her rucksack on the back seat before returning swinging a crowbar.
“Do you always carry that around with you?”
“Yes, why?”
"No reason,” Hammell said, with a shake of his head. “But you know you can’t…”
"You know I can."
She was perfectly right, of course. Police officers often had to break into apparently empty buildings and they couldn’t always trace ownership, especially for some of the older places where the owners may have died or gone XS. An officer with just cause was therefore allowed to enter any building which had been condemned under the Restoration Act. But this would be an abuse of that power. It was not what the law had been set up for.
“Wait,” Hammell said. “Really, we can’t.”
“She was in a bar full of Red Hands, right?” Asha Ishi said as she lined up the crowbar between door and frame.
“Yes, but…”
“Look, is she one of them or not?” she said as she looked back at him.
He opened his mouth to say something but no words came out. Asha Ishi had the door open in seconds, gesturing for Hammell to enter as she hung back to report what they were doing. Feeling uneasy, but not uneasy enough not to do it, Hammell stepped into the hallway, pausing to wipe his feet on the mat. The place smelled musty and old. Directly in front of him to the right was a wooden staircase, with a kitchen at the end of the corridor, tiled in a disgusting lime green colour which had surely never been in fashion. To his left was an open door from where he could hear the sound of a mechanical clock ticking.
“Hello?” Hammell called out as he stepped gingerly down the dim, narrow hallway. “Is anyone here? It’s the police.”
The room on the left turned out to be the living room, filled with of all manner of bric-à-brac: Ornaments from different places around the world, paintings of rural countrysides, even an old and probably illegal rifle hanging over the mantelpiece. A multitude of sofas and armchairs and tables meant there was barely room to stand, and doilies covered every surface, as if they’d been multiplying here in secret. It was an old person’s house, Hammell thought; almost a museum, filled with the things accumulated over a lifetime - a snapshot of life from a different time.
He edged his way in, trying not to disturb anything, his boots making dull thudding sounds through the heavy carpet and multitude of overlapping rugs the floor. Asha Ishi came thundering in behind him, back to her normal self, her heavy black boots hitting the floor hard enough to rattle the pictures on the walls. If she hadn’t been so small, she’d have been knocking things over left, right and centre. She picked up a crude ornament of a small boy holding a dog and blew the dust off of it.
“She’ll know someone was here,” Hammell hissed.
Asha Ishi stared at him incredulously. “She’ll have a new front door. I think she’ll notice.”
Hammell’s brow furrowed but he held his tongue as Asha Ishi put the ornament down, on a different shelf, and continued walking around the room, fingering everything. He watched with a look of mild distaste as she opened a cabinet drawer and rifled through its contents before moving on through the house. He closed the drawer and returned the ornament to its rightful place before following. He followed Asha Ishi towards the stairs, stopping to look at the photographs hanging on the wall.
“Stalkeeer,” Asha Ishi said as she stomped on up.
Hammell ignored her. Some of the images were faded, with styles of clothing and photography indicating they were at least 70 or 80 years old, maybe more. One in particular caught his eye, containing as it did a woman who looked remarkably similar to Eva but was clearly from another era: Her great grandmother perhaps. Maybe this place was her home, he thought. It might explain why this house didn’t fit with the woman he’d seen in the bar.
“There are books up here,” Asha Ishi called down and Hammell continued on up the creaking stairs, finding her standing in a tiny room containing a round wooden table and just enough space to fit the accompanying chairs. It would be bordering on the impossible for people to actually sit at the table, and yet Eva, or maybe her great grandmother, had decided there was still sufficient room for a bookcase against the back wall.
Hammell squeezed past Asha Ishi and fought his way p
ast the chairs, taking out one of the volumes almost reverentially and carefully brushing the dust from it. The pages were yellowed and stained and the glue on the spine felt weak. It was old, obviously. He leaned in and sniffed. That was the biggest loss from the digital-only world. No matter how convenient digital books were, no matter how valid the arguments were for saving the trees, there was something about the smell of a real book.
He considered pocketing one, but he couldn’t bring himself do it. It wasn’t like taking Eva’s data, which was mere duplication - nobody technically lost anything. This was a real thing, a valuable thing, with a presence in the real world. Suddenly he felt a strong sense of intrusion. It was wrong for them to be here. Placing the book respectfully back on the shelf, he went to drag Asha Ishi back outside, by her immaculate coiffure if need be.
She wasn’t in the bedroom, though evidence of her passing was: The drawers were all open and the bed covers had been thrown onto the floor. Hammell hurled the duvet back onto the bed and tucked it in before walking back out. Then he stopped, realizing that he didn’t know for sure it had been Asha Ishi. Eva may just have been messy. He thought for a moment and then returned and threw the bedcovers back to the floor. It would be better for Eva to think he’d messed up her room while searching her apartment, rather than that he’d broken in and made her bed.
Moving on down the narrow corridor, he reached out to open the bathroom door and something made him pause. Asha Ishi was inside but she hadn’t yet noticed him. He watched through the gap as she went through the cupboard behind the mirror, checking the labels on the various bottles of pills, before closing it up again. She looked around and then stopped as if she had spotted something. She bent down to pick it up - a dark ball of material tucked down behind an empty washing basket. Taking it between her fingertips, she pulled it apart and it expanded into a set of underwear. He watched, disgusted but weirdly fascinated, as Asha Ishi brought the underwear up towards her face…
“Shit,” he breathed involuntarily and Asha Ishi spun around. He quickly bundled into the bathroom, trying to look as if he’d only just arrived, and she slipped the underwear behind her back. “Shit-all here,” he said quickly. “You find anything?”
“No.”
"Then let's go."
The locksmith was already waiting outside with a policenat occupied by two standard model police androids. Asha Ishi gave herself up to one for scanning while Hammell perched on the small garden wall, staring into space. Is she a pervert as well as a lunatic? The whole thing left him feeling dirty. It had been a bad decision to come here, a worse one to allow Asha Ishi to come with him, and an even worse one to not prevent her from breaking in. At least the rain’s eased off. It was now barely distinguishable from mist. He held his face up to the sky, feeling the lightest of drops hitting his skin.
“Did you instruct the surveillor?” Asha Ishi asked, having approached silently again.
"Yes.”
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked, staring at him suspiciously.
“I need a drink,” he said as he opened his eyes and wiped the rain from his face. “Do you drink?"
“Never with colleagues,” Asha Ishi replied. “Ever.”
“I said drink, not fuck.”
“So you don’t want to fuck?”
Hammell thought about his response. There was no way in hell she was being serious – not even a chance… But, but, he would absolutely kick himself if he turned her down and it later transpired she’d been up for it. Women hadn’t exactly been falling at his feet lately. “I suppose,” he ventured, “you’re attractive enough that I could ignore the warning signs.”
“What warning signs?”
“You’re a nutcase,” Hammell said and Asha Ishi shot daggers at him. “What? Don’t tell me that’s news to you.”
She turned on her heel and stormed off towards her nat. Hammell nodded to himself. She had definitely not been serious.
Pushing himself up from the wall, he trudged after her and placed his hand on the passenger door handle. It was locked, so he tapped on the window and Asha Ishi opened it a tiny crack. “You’re an arsehole,” she said.
“And you’re a nutcase. Now can you open the door?”
She threw the engine into high and the nat shot up off the ground, nearly knocking him over. He stood there watching his ride disappear through the haze, sighing as the rain began to fall heavily again.
“I miss Toskan,” he said.
Chapter 15
Public nats were always a bit of a lottery. The strong odour of bleach couldn’t cover the fact that this one had recently been vomited in. Hammell could have called another, but that would have been more than a little hypocritical. Few people were taken home drunk enough to throw up these days, but he was one of them. It was perfectly possible he’d been the offender.
He could have got away with using a policenat, since he’d been out on police business, but for some reason he hadn’t wanted to, possibly because it was Friday night and he was done for the week. He was starting to regret that decision now as he tried to perch on as few of the brown stains as possible while the nat lurched through a crosswind.
Weekends were the worst. Back in the good old days, he’d never had to worry about having a life or entertaining himself. Work had taken up all of his time. These days he was in the office just five days in a row and had every weekend off and he rarely knew what to do with his freedom.
One last try, he thought as he threw the call up onto the side window, waiting as it took its time to connect. After a full thirty seconds, a message flashed up: ‘NO SUCH ACCOUNT’. Confused, Hammell double-checked he’d called the right person and then tried again, receiving the same message.
It doesn’t make sense, he thought. The evidence appeared to show that Toskan had gone, but why would he cancel his omni account and not just redirect messages? Realtime interplanetary communication was a nightmare, what with time differences and relativity and whatnot, but there were no problems sending messages. Had Toskan wanted to sever all ties here, like all the other I.A.s before him?
Directing the nat down to the street, Hammell clambered out. The house was silent, dark, apparently empty. He checked around, looking for the nosey neighbour, but the adjacent house was also quiet. Unlike Asha Ishi, Hammell had no crowbar ready to produce at a moment’s notice, but there were some sturdy looking paving stones forming a path through the garden. Even reinforced glass would have to succumb eventually.
The soil was saturated so the stone came out easily once he got a hand underneath to break the suction. He rolled it like a square wheel over to the side of the house, located the smallest and hopefully cheapest window, and then hauled it up and hurled it as hard as he could. It smacked into the wall beneath the window and cracked in half. Sighing to himself, Hammell collected one of the pieces and began to systematically batter at the glass. Soon it began to crack into a frosted spider-web like pattern and he stepped up his hammering until the entire gummy pane came loose. Running the stone around the frame to clear away any remaining shards, he took a quick look around to see if anyone was watching, and then climbed through.
The house was filled with motion sensors, linked to a silent alarm which fed directly into Providence, just as in most homes. He found the panel in the hallway and entered '1-2-3-4-5-6' on the keypad until the red light on the panel stopped flashing. "Stupid bastard," he muttered to himself. Toskan had never been particularly imaginative when it came to passwords.
Spotting something familiar on the hall table, he walked over. "I knew it was your fault!" he exclaimed as he looked around, half expecting to see his old partner standing there with his trademark perplexed look. Pocketing the keys, Hammell smiled at the prospect of driving his dear old banger again, his mood already improving. But then something began to gnaw at him. If Toskan had left for Abaddon, wouldn’t he have found a way to give the keys back?
Walking on through the house, it appeared undisturbed. Too undisturbe
d. There were pictures on the walls, sheets on the beds, even clothes in the wardrobes. All of Toskan and Meera’s things were still here. The place still looked lived in. If they’d gone, they’d left absolutely everything behind.
It wasn’t impossible. Locally produced goods were cheap on Abaddon, at least for anyone relocating from Earth with a decent coefficient, and interplanetary shipping was expensive. Maybe they’d just decided to dump everything and start again from scratch… And yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. It just wasn’t the way Toskan would leave. Somehow he had the feeling as he looked around at the immaculate house that something bad had happened here.
He scouted around again more methodically, employing his investigator’s eye, and found it in the living room; a slightly darker patch on the cream carpet beside the sofa about the size of a dinner plate. But Hammell knew that Meera kept a spotless house, and he was certain it hadn’t been there last time he’d been over. That didn’t mean anything necessarily. Hammell wasn’t particularly observant when it came to cleanliness, and it was also possible it post-dated his last visit. And yet…
Sitting on the wall outside to wait, he smoked another of Arthur’s cigarettes as he sipped at a small hip flask. The nosey neighbour’s curtains were twitching, so he waved to her.
“It’s ok!” he called out. “I’m an I.A.”
“You’re a drunk!” a disembodied voice came back.
“They’re not mutually exclusive!”
One side of the woman’s face appeared from behind a thick burgundy curtain. “I’ve called the police.”
“I am the police!” Hammell called back before muttering, “I just told you that.”
The glazier arrived first, scanning him and checking with Interpol for the legality of the entry before setting about its work. Hammell had already prevented an alert from being raised by informing Providence of what he was doing. This wasn’t a condemned building, so he’d had to claim he had reason to believe someone was hurt inside. Nobody would question it and Toskan wouldn’t press charges, unless he thought it would be funny.
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