The December Protocol

by Devin Hanson

  Charles glanced at the woman, then back at Min, his expression mutinous, but he ducked a little bow and left the two of them alone.

  “Marshal Min Yang,” Min introduced himself. There was something about the woman’s face that seemed strange to Min, and it took him a moment to put his finger on it. The woman was of Anglo-Saxon descent, with high cheekbones and a square jaw that was almost entirely absent in the Martian gene pool.

  “Grendal Crade,” she smiled and waved a hand absently at their surrounds. “Owner of this establishment. If you’re here on business, perhaps we could take this somewhere less public.”

  “That’d be good.”

  “Very well. If you would follow me, I believe we can be accommodating.”

  Min fell into step behind Grendal. They didn’t make it halfway across the foyer when the frosted glass wall on Min’s right lit up. Hidden by the frosting, vague forms shifted, the unmistakable movement of hardware deploying. The overhead lighting sank into flashing tones of red and yellow.

  “Oh, for the love of Christ,” Grendal snapped. “We know he’s carrying a weapon. Let him through.”

  The lights relaxed back to their normal levels. Behind the frosted glass, the shadows retreated from the glass, but were still visible as indefinable bulk that kept pace with them.

  “Trouble with the locals?” Min asked, carefully casual. The threat of machine security behind the glass had set his heart racing.

  “Think of it as proactive security.” Grendal ushered him through into the main space. “Anyone who thinks a quick smash-and-grab at the Redstone would solve their financial woes, also knows about the security systems. They look elsewhere for a quick credit score and we don’t have to mop the blood off the ceiling.”

  Min skinned his teeth in a tight grin. “And it doesn’t hurt to make sure you’re the only ones with the hardware once they’re inside.”

  “Goes without saying,” Grendal agreed.

  “You’ve got a nice place here,” Min admitted. The plain exterior of the building notwithstanding, the inside of the Redstone displayed quite good taste. “Probably more than Vastitas is good for, though.”

  Grendal brought them to a table scaled to be comfortable for Earth-born humans. No sooner did they sit down than a waitress appeared. “Coffee,” Grendal said and raised an eyebrow at Min.

  “Make it two,” he agreed.

  “It is,” Grendal said once the waitress had hurried off. “There are a few locals who patronize us regularly, but a good percentage of the population comes here for celebrations when they have a few extra credits. And there are the visiting dignitaries, of course.”

  “Still, you could be doing much better for yourself almost anywhere else.”

  Grendal smiled impishly at him. “I could, but if I were just in it for the money, I’d do something else entirely. Besides, this way I get all the pleasures of Earth, without having to pay someone else’s inflated pricing.”

  Min nodded. “I haven’t had coffee in ages. Is it real?”

  “Colombian Roast. You won’t find anything more real.”

  Min’s mouth watered. There were caffeine sources on Mars, though mostly synthetic. Coffee just didn’t grow well under artificial lighting. “I can’t wait.”

  “Well, you didn’t come here for fun, Marshal. What can I help you with?”

  Min reached for his tablet and froze when Grendal flinched. “Sorry. I’m just getting out my tablet.” Moving slowly, he drew it out and placed it on the table.

  “How embarrassing,” Grendal laughed a little, shaking her head.

  The waitress returned with their coffee, setting out the cups and carafe. The moment of tension faded away as they turned their attention to the beverage, each mixing their coffee to their liking. Min mixed in a large splash of cream; he preferred his coffee black, but passing up the novelty of cream when it was offered seemed like a crime.

  After a minute of careful sipping and giving the coffee the attention it deserved, Min thumbed on his tablet and pulled up the photos of the missing girls. “I’m on a missing person case,” he said. “Angeline Nueva de Vita and Jasmine Chow.”

  “And you’re looking for them here?” Grendal gave him an odd smile. “We don’t get many young customers.”

  “I have reason to believe they visited the Redstone,” Min said carefully.

  “I don’t doubt you, Marshal. I suppose we can pull up the footage from… what day did they go missing?”

  “Three days ago.”

  “That’s a cold trail for a kidnapping,” Grendal said.

  “There are extenuating circumstances.”

  “A bounty,” Grendal guessed.

  Min sipped his coffee and smiled blandly. “We all must make our way in this world somehow.”

  “Very noble of you.”

  Min gave her a seated bow.

  “If I may?” Grendal gestured at his tablet and he spun it around for her to use. After a minute of tapping, she returned the tablet. “I’ve uploaded the footage from that day.”

  Min pulled it up. The recording came from a dozen feeds scattered about the interior of the Redstone. He tapped through it, stopping the video on an image of two girls sitting at the bar. One of the cameras caught the girls’ faces in profile. It was unmistakably Angeline and Jasmine.

  “They were here,” Min announced. He hit play again, watching as the girls took their first taste of alcohol. There was something wrong with the image, though. As the video played, static built up until, after just a few seconds, the whole thing dissolved into snow.

  “The video is corrupted,” he said.

  “What? Let me see.”

  Min spun the tablet around and showed Grendal the footage again. Grendal switched frames, jumping from camera to camera. The static was affecting all the cameras, but the feeds closest to the two girls were completely unintelligible.

  “What is that?” he asked. “A pocket scrambler?”

  “Must be,” Grendal said. She worked at the tablet for a minute, then spun it around so Min could see. She had isolated a frame from one of the corner cameras. The image was tearing badly, but it was possible to see a group of five men in the bar area, one of whom appeared to be dancing with one of the girls.

  “The kidnappers,” Min mused. He checked the time stamp in the corner. “They were with the girls for nearly an hour. They must have bought drinks. Do you have credit records of your customers?”

  Grendal frowned. “We have a privacy policy…” she hesitated then shook her head. “Which I am happy to waive for these people.” She sniffed. “Nobody hacks my system and gets away with it.”

  “Very noble,” Min grinned. “And thank you.”

  Grendal waved a hand dismissively. “I’ll send the credit records to your tablet as soon as I have them. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  Min nodded. “One more thing. One of the girls checked something into a safe here at the Redstone. I would like to see the contents.”

  “You got Captain Giovanni to let you search the stack?” Grendal sounded surprised and perhaps a little impressed.

  “After a fashion.”

  Grendal laughed. “I’d love to hear that story someday, but if you don’t have anything else for me, I’m afraid I must return to my business.”

  “Thank you for the coffee,” Min said, getting to his feet and giving her a short bow.

  “Charles will accommodate you in the foyer. It’s been a pleasure, Marshal. Don’t be a stranger.”

  Min watched her walk away and shook the stilted formality from his brain like a dog shedding water. The caffeine from the coffee was starting to race around in his system. There was nothing like the rush from real coffee. Stimulants and artificial caffeine pills were effective but always seemed to give a chemical high, not the natural energy of a good cup of coffee.

  He left the restaurant, suddenly finding the interior of the Redstone Lounge in poor taste. He pictured Angeline walking in here, awestruck at
the casual display of wealth, trusting, innocent, and having that all taken away from her.

  By the time he got back to the foyer, he was in a foul mood. Charles saw him enter and waved him over.

  “Sorry about earlier,” he said smoothly. Clearly Grendal had given him a piece of her mind.

  “Skip it. I’m after an item checked in by a young girl. Angeline Nueva de Vita.” He held up his tablet, showing him the missing girl’s face. “She came in here three days earlier.”

  “Madam Crade has informed me of your desires. If you wait a moment, I’ll bring the item out.”

  Min resisted the urge to dig under the man’s skin and see how far he could push him. As pleasant as it might be he didn’t need the attention of the local police just yet. They were likely still smarting from the confrontation earlier in the morning. The last thing he needed was to be thrown in a cell for disorderly conduct. He would get out eventually, but Angeline’s trail was already days cold. If he was going to follow it, he couldn’t waste any more time.

  Charles returned and handed Min a plastic bag and a datachip. “This is what the girl stored. The chip has the credit records of the men who purchased drinks while the girls were here.”

  Min accepted the bag and weighed the chip in his hand. The easy cooperation from the Redstone was almost suspicious. “Thanks.”

  Min left the Redstone and wandered around the market at random until he found a place to sit in a public booth that was unoccupied. He unwrapped the ball of packing in Angeline’s bag and drew out the glass bird. The vagueness of the anatomy betrayed the artist’s lack of familiarity with real birds, but it had a whimsical beauty to it.

  He set the bird aside and pulled up the contents of the datachip on his tablet. There were several entries, the first from Zhen Chow, and then the rest were from a man named Anton Engel. Min frowned thoughtfully, turning Angeline’s bird over in his hands as he pondered.

  For a man who engaged in kidnapping girls for their ovaries, this Engel was a pretty dim chap. Using a secured credit line to make a purchase, then kidnapping the girls from that very establishment seemed remarkably unintelligent.

  Come to think of it, it was strange that nobody at the Redstone had objected when Engel left the bar with two drunken girls. But maybe that was just his Earth upbringing speaking. On Earth, giving girls barely in their teens hard alcohol at a bar would have been grounds for jail time, or the loss of a liquor license at least. On Mars, not only was it not taboo for young people to drink, it wasn’t strange to see very young women with much older men.

  “You Yang?”

  Min pulled himself from his thoughts and turned to find a fist swinging toward him. Stars burst in his vision and he sprawled off the bench. A quiet snick of metal-on-metal and a cold pressure at the back of his skull made Min freeze in place.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  Autopsy report from September 8th, 2128, in conjunction with case code 107951546.

  Victim is a male, around 30 years of age, 5’9” and 184 lbs. There is a large [redacted] tattoo on the left shoulder. Initial examination shows ample evidence of systemic failure. Major organs lack fibrous connective tissue or have liquefied entirely. The liver is notably absent, with only a large quantity of fluid remaining in the cavity.

  Given the frictional abrasions around the wrists and ankles, as well as subdermal hematomas in the feet and lower legs, it is likely the victim died while tied to a chair. Given the [redacted] column of [redacted], it is likely a ritualized killing of the type commonly seen in response to failure to make payments for continued Womack treatments.

  There is little sign of melanin bleaching, so the victim had not been on the treatments for very long.

  Min’s vision swam. Weight settled against his back and a knee dug into his spine.

  “Easy there, Marshal. You struggle too much and I’ll paint the floor with your wujin brains. Any bets as to what color they’d be?”

  Min forced himself to relax. Angeline’s bird had been knocked from his hands when he had taken the punch, and it lay on the ground under the bench. One wing had been broken and lay glittering amid the dust and grime.

  “That’s better. You just stay all peaceful-like and nobody has to get hurt. We’re just here to give you a message, that’s all. Forget the girl, Marshal. She’s not worth your time.”

  Min stretched out a hand and felt the razor edge of the broken wing come under his fingers. He gripped it lightly and tensed his legs, preparing himself to roll if the gunman on his back decided to punctuate his message with a bullet or two.

  “Say you understand me, so I know you’re not just sleeping down there.”

  “I hear you.”

  “You gonna leave the case alone?” The barrel of the gun at Min’s head dug into his skin painfully when he hesitated.

  “Since you asked so nicely.”

  “See, was that hard? Don’t want to see you snooping around anymore, Marshal. Next time, we’ll just pick you out of the crowd. We’re being polite, see. Civilized.”

  “I can tell.”

  The pressure of the barrel removed itself from Min’s skull. “You just lie there until we’re good and gone. You stop kissing the pavement while we can see you, and I’ll put one through your bleached skull. Capiche?”

  “Crystal.”

  “Good lad.” The weight lifted off Min’s spine.

  Min gave it a count of twenty before he pushed himself to his feet. There were a few people looking at him curiously, but lost interest after a few moments. Min gathered up his tablet from the table. The datachip was gone.

  He rubbed his jaw ruefully. He hadn’t expected someone to take objection to his investigations so rapidly. In retrospect, he shouldn’t have been surprised. The Womack Process and its attendant treatments was a billion-credit industry on Mars. The number of people receiving the treatment varied from year to year, but the current count was somewhere around several hundred thousand.

  By the time someone like Nuon Chow got around to having her ovaries removed, she had only a fraction of the eggs she had possessed at her first menstruation. At a conservative estimate, Nuon had donated a hundred thousand eggs. The process of engineering the treatment serum depended on the quality of egg provided, with a success rate ranging from one in ten to one in several hundred. The donor was paid based on the success rate of her eggs. The rates changed from month to month depending on supply and demand, but if Nuon had chosen her timing well, she could have gotten a thousand credits per successful egg.

  On the high side, Nuon could have made as much as ten million credits. And while Nuon might have only donated a hundred thousand eggs, a young girl just starting puberty might have three or four times that amount. A single kidnapped girl was worth millions, even considering the low rates black-market eggs would bring.

  No, Min wasn’t surprised that the people involved were protecting their investment.

  Min made his way to a net café and sat down before one of the terminals. He fed it a credit chip and punched in a number from memory. After a moment, the monitor cleared of the connecting icons and a man’s face resolved.

  “Min, how are you? Oh, man, you look like shit.”

  “Good to see you too, Enrique. I feel like shit.” Min reached behind him and swung the privacy curtain closed.

  “You calling from a public booth? What’s going on?”

  “Picked up a missing person case when I got back from the pole.”

  “The Esperalda bounty? I heard someone cashed that one in.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would have thought you’d take some time off after collecting a tag like that. What are you doing in,” Enrique’s eyes shuttled to the side, examining the call details. “Vastitas? That place is a pit.”

  “I like to keep busy. Anyway, I may have stuck my foot in deeper than I thought. Had a hit squad warn me off the case.”

  “So drop it. What’s the bounty? A few grand? That’s not worth your head, Min.” />
  Min rubbed his jaw and winced. Enrique was right. Collecting the bounty from Sarah Esperalda had put Min in the black for years to come. He could buy some water, invest in a tree farm and retire to a quiet life. The thought galled him. Someone like Grendal Crade could hide in their fortified bunker of a restaurant and live forever. It would be a dull life, safe and secure. A life that would drive Min mad as surely as getting married again would.

  Then he remembered the look on Justine Nueva de Vita’s face, the soul-tearing loss the whole family was going through.

  “Yeah. I’ll think about it. Run a name for me?”

  Enrique rolled his eyes. “Yeah, shoot it over.”

  “Anton Engel. Wujin, Earthborn build.”

  “Not much to go on.”

  “He’s probably an enforcer, or a headhunter. Travels a lot.” Min thought of the bar tab the man had run up. “Likes an expensive lifestyle. Probably lives in Olympus or Tharsis cluster.”

  “This might take a few. Oh, don’t forget you have your treatment coming up in a week or so.”

  Min rolled his eyes. He hadn’t forgotten. “Thanks, mom. Shoot it to my tablet when you get a result?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Thanks, Enrique. Owe you one.”

  “Watch your back out there. Can’t collect if you’re dead.”

  Min flipped off the camera and closed the connection. Enrique might nag like a shrewish wife, but he wasn’t wrong. If he was going to stay on the case, he needed something more solid to go on than the name of a disposable enforcer. If the people running the kidnapping ring knew Min was getting close, they’d have no compunction about sending Engel to the surface to collect rocks without a space suit.

  Either way, if Min was going to continue this investigation, he had to return to base and get tooled up. The thugs jumping him in the market had thrown a scare into him. It wasn’t the death threat that worried him, he had more than his share of those on a daily basis, it was the way they had caught him with his guard down. It showed a level of sophistication that was lacking in your average criminal enterprise. He wasn’t dealing with the dregs of society this time.