Guardian

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Taking on a senator? You have better odds waiting for the clock to kill him.”

  She frowned. “He’s a senator. He’s not untouchable.”

  “You’re Division 0. Strike one. Right there, everything we do is going to come under a microscope. Two, he’s got power enough to cause trouble. One senator starts questioning the ‘need’ for an entire police division to be devoted to psionics and things might get shitty in a hurry.”

  “Carter wouldn’t allow that.” She twisted the cup around.

  “Or Burckhardt… but what form would that take? They try to do something shady, it blows up in their faces, and then we’re all getting hunted down.”

  “What’s with the doomsday prophet stuff?” She glanced at him.

  He shook his head. “I’m only being realistic. I’ve seen this happen before. If you make a run at the senator and miss, hell… if you gear up to make a run at the senator, expect to be told to walk away.”

  I can’t see that happening. “You’re being cynical again. Senator or not, he arranged for a murder.”

  “Of no one important.” Dorian shook his head. “The machine isn’t going to care.”

  “How can you say he’s not important?” She blinked.

  “I mean politically significant. Charles is a faceless citizen no one at the top would care to make a big stink over.”

  Her NetMini beeped. She flicked over to auto-drive and spent the remaining eleven minutes of the ride reading a long email from Ashley Harris, thanking her over and over again for saving her from ‘those psychos.’ The girl explained she intended to join Division 0, but probably stay with Admin. She didn’t want to be a ‘cop,’ but she did want to help psionics who’d been abused… if she ever got out of therapy herself.

  Kirsten held off on replying; the message she wanted to send would take too long and leave her too choked up to be done before going into a possible crime scene. A quarter mile from the Morning Bean coffee shop, she took manual control and brought the car in for a landing about half a block away and on the other side of the street―the only open spot.

  Some people paused to watch her land and a few continued staring as if to see what happened. Most didn’t pay any attention, lost to their NetMinis or own affairs. Six blocks separated the coffee place from the grey zone, enough for the general composition of pedestrians to be more or less civilized. A few who appeared to have gang affiliations paid the most attention to her, flagrant in their display of weapons. She walked past them, abiding a mutual sense of defiance.

  Inside, the aromas of coffee, chocolate, maple, and cinnamon swirled, making the air outside bland and cold by comparison. She couldn’t help herself and ordered a gingerbread latte. The kid behind the counter looked about seventeen or so, and bored.

  “Kirsten.” Dorian put a hand on her shoulder and looked her in the eyes with overacted concern. “I need to talk about your coffee problem. You’re starting to go from one cup to the next without a break.”

  “Morning.” She swiped her NetMini to pay and smiled at the clerk. “Got a minute?”

  “Sure, need something else?” He smiled. “Running a ten percent discount on breakfast this week.”

  “I’m looking for information about some suspects involved in a recent crime. I have reason to believe they may have been in here within the past two months. Big bald guy, another with cherry red hair, and a third somewhere between the two with a deep tan.”

  The kid shrugged. “I don’t really look at people. I barely remember who was in here an hour ago.”

  “Which one of those terminals is unit 001C?” She gestured at a small room of round tables, each with a holo-term.

  “Do I look like I work in IT?” The kid glanced left as if hoping for someone else in line so he could stop paying attention to her.

  “This guy looks like he can barely figure out how to get coffee in a cup.” Dorian sighed.

  “Never mind.” Kirsten went to the nearest open table and waved at the gloss black plastic bar until a holo-panel scrolled open above it. She got into the system settings in a few key swipes and glanced at its local network identifier: 0018. Shit. One-cee… that’s twenty-six… no twenty eight. This one’s eighteen. Crap, no that’s hex… uhh, that’s twenty-four.

  She backed out of the system window and moved one table over. That one showed 0017.

  “Hey, you can’t do that,” said the kid from the counter. “How’d you get into that screen? Those things are supposed to be locked down.”

  Kirsten stood with a hand on her stunrod as he rounded the end and got in her face. “Police, kid. Get on back behind that counter.”

  “Nice try, sweetie. What are you fourteen? Where’d you get that black uniform anyway? Novelty store at 29P? I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”

  When he reached for her, she torqued his arm around and flipped him onto his chest. The room fell quiet save for the sputtering hiss coming from one of the espresso generators.

  “For your information, this uniform did not come from the Twenty-Nine Pines Mall. It came from the quartermaster of the National Police Force, Division 0. The same place that’s about to issue you a nice orange suit. Since idiocy has yet to be written into law as a chargeable offense, I’m placing you under arrest for assaulting an officer as well as impeding an active investigation and possibly tampering with evidence depending on what I find in your system.”

  She wrestled him into binders.

  The teen growled and squirmed. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Dorian raised an eyebrow. “You usually let the little stuff slide. Getting tired of being called a kid?”

  She grumbled.

  “Is there a problem, Officer?” asked a deeper voice. A man, fortyish, with traces of white in his black hair and four-day-old beard stubble hurried out of the back room behind the counter. “I’m Paul Collins. This is my place. Trevor, what did you do?”

  “This kid’s hacking into the terms, man. And she broke my fuckin’ arm.”

  Kirsten leaned down. “If you’re going to accuse me of breaking your arm, I should probably at least break it first.”

  Dorian looked shocked until she winked at him.

  “Uhh, Officer… is that really necessary? He’s only fifteen.”

  “Good PR, K.” Dorian smiled. “You can’t arrest him for calling you a fake cop. That brings attention to Div 0. It’ll bite you in the ass. Of course, you could make the assault stick. He did try to grab you.”

  Wow. Big for his age, unless that’s bullshit. “I’ll think it over. Someone used one of your terminals in the commission of a crime. You ever see three guys… big bald one, cherry red hair, third guy dark-ish skin with a shaved head?”

  Gradually, the din of people working on terminals or chatting on vid calls picked up.

  Paul offered a helpless shrug. “Can’t really say. Couple of people―men and women―come in here with cherry red hair. Honestly the girl with the neon blue hair stands out most in my memory since she’s always naked.”

  “Cat cyberware?”

  He nodded. “Yep.”

  “Do you have security cams?”

  He fidgeted.

  “Look, I don’t care if you’re spanking it to a neko-cyber-junkie… I’m tracking down suspects.”

  “Whoa,” said Trevor. “She is psychic.”

  Paul turned scarlet.

  Kirsten sighed. “I’d appreciate it if you’d hand over a holo-disk with the past six months of operating hours.” She removed the binders from Trevor and pulled him up. Damn, this kid’s taller than I am. “Are you really fifteen?”

  “Uhh, yeah.”

  His surface thoughts confirmed it.

  “One, you never try to grab a cop. Two, black uniform with a silver belt is Division 0. I understand you’re confused because there aren’t all that many of us, but we’re real.” She pointed at the counter. “Please stay out of the way.”

  Trevor slinked back over to the coffee machines.

&n
bsp; She looked at Paul. “Which one of these machines is 001C?”

  He gestured at a table where a pair of tween girls sat. “That one. I’ll go burn out a disk for you.”

  “Thanks.” Again, she peeked at his thoughts, and relaxed a touch when telepathy proved his intentions were to do exactly that.

  She walked over to the table. One girl continuously snapped her flip-flop against her heel while giving her the ‘this table is taken’ look. Fortunately, both had their NetMinis out and neither bothered with the table terminal. “Hi girls. I need this terminal for a little while.”

  “Go for it,” said the thinner one. “We aren’t using it.”

  The other girl’s mood shifted at blinding speed. “Are you really a cop? Or are you doing that social engineering thing? You look adorbs. You’re like twelve right?”

  “She’s too tall for twelve, plus boobs… hello?” The thin girl knocked on her friend’s head. “Sorry, don’t mind Andrea. She’s obsessed with hackers.”

  The other girl scoffed. “And you’re obsessed with boobs.”

  Andrea scoffed. “Oh please. I’m twelve and mine are bigger than hers.”

  “I’m a real cop, yes.” Kirsten fought the urge to blush. She pulled over a chair from a nearby empty table and rotated the terminal to face her. “Don’t mind me.”

  While the girls returned to a discussion about a school project they both dreaded having to finish, peppered with tangents about various holo-vids and bands, Kirsten dove into the terminal interface. One girl mentioned a boy she thought the other liked and the two got into a squealy debate about if ‘Noah’ really did like her. Ugh. I am glad I won’t have to deal with this when Evan’s a teenager. She checked the Inquest record via her armband and scrolled to the terminal activity log around the time someone entered ‘Charles Prentice’ on a search. The terminal showed an idle state for forty-five minutes prior, and an hour and ten minutes after. Shit. Spoofed.

  She took her NetMini out and called Sam. He answered on the second ring. “Hey.”

  “Need your help here. Ran a crawl last night and I got a hit on this terminal, but I struck out with the log. Has to be remote, can you chase it down?”

  “Oh he’s cute,” said the larger girl.

  “Totally.” Andrea leaned over to peer at Sam. “And he’s like totally into you.”

  “He is!” the other girl cooed. “Look at the way he’s staring at her.”

  Both girls made this ‘aww’ noise like they’d found kitten pictures online.

  Sam turned crimson.

  “Are you two dating?” asked the older girl.

  “Blunt much?” Andrea leaned closer to Kirsten. “Don’t mind Leslie. She’s got this whole personal space issue.”

  Leslie rolled her eyes.

  Kirsten’s cheeks got warm.

  “They are!” Leslie squealed.

  Again, they made the ‘aww’ noise. Fortunately, after that, they returned to their conversation about school.

  Kirsten wanted to crawl under the table, but compensated by staring at the floor. Having Dorian’s laugher in the background didn’t help.

  “I’ll, uhh… start a ghost trace.” Sam looked anywhere but at her.

  Blink. Huh? “Wait, you can trace ghosts?”

  Dorian’s cackling reached the point where it sounded as though he couldn’t breathe.

  Sam’s genuine laugh made her grin. “No… I wish. That would probably make your job a lot easier. We just call it a ghost trace. It’s a cyberspace thing. Some interface decks are modified to mask the user’s presence from the net, we call them ghosts. Not the paranormal kind. Ghosted connections route through dozens of network nodes, effectively concealing them in the net. Sometimes the packet streams break up over several hundred connections making one user seem to be an army.”

  “Oh. Great.” She sighed. “Proving myself a natural blonde.”

  The tweens made that ‘aww’ noise again. The smaller one whispered, “They’re so adorable.”

  “You get like that around Bobby,” said Leslie.

  “I do not!” Andrea blushed.

  Sam also looked like he wanted to find a quiet dark place. “I’m trying to reassemble traces of any connection from unpurged buffer logs over a few thousand separate routers, servers, and relays. Give me a few minutes.”

  “Minutes? Not hours? I had a data crawl running from last night and it’s still going.”

  He smiled, forgetting his awkwardness. “You’re probably running a search on user-entered parameters over a few dozen variables. I’m hunting down packets with a specific IPv12 in the header. Only need one thing…” A small sub panel opened, projected by her NetMini’s holo-emitter, bearing the face of a rabid cartoon weasel. “Load that on the terminal and I’ll get started.”

  “Right.” She ‘grabbed’ the square pane and flung at the table. The same graphic appeared on the terminal’s screen for a few seconds and faded away. “Done. What the heck was that?”

  “I see it. Couple minutes now. Uhh, Traceweasel soft.”

  A white hover-SUV landed double-parked out front and honked. A woman with brown-blonde hair and a leopard-print coat waved at the window. The girls jumped up, waved goodbye to Kirsten, and ran outside.

  Dorian sat in one of the vacated seats. “At last, quiet.”

  She chatted with Sam about possibly doing something, though neither one of them had ever much considered anything even remotely social. Coming up with a plan to ‘go out and have fun’ turned into an awkward staring contest.

  “Hey, Nicole once went on a Mars trip for a weekend.” Kirsten bit her lip.

  Sam’s eyebrows went up. “Never been to Mars. Might be fun. Weekend trip? I thought it took days to get there?”

  “Not if the shuttle jumps.”

  “That’s not cheap,” said Dorian. “Why not hit a museum or a restaurant or one of those blended reality VR games?”

  “Maybe.” Kirsten repeated the suggestions to Sam.

  “Up to you.” He smiled. “Oh, hey… shit.” The color drained out of his face. “Why were you tracing this?”

  “That ghost I’ve been after? The people who were searching for him used this terminal. Why?”

  “I figured out where the source signal came from. Sector 213, an office building. Infinity Towers.”

  “Great.” She smiled.

  “Not great.” Sam cringed. “That’s a known Syndicate operation.”

  Kirsten glanced at Dorian who also looked as worried as Sam. “Shit.”

  “Yep.” Dorian nodded. “This keeps getting better.”

  “If someone connected to the senator was arranging the attack on Prentice, they had to have gone through some high level channels.”

  “Indeed,” said Sam. “This could just be a called-in favor or he hired a cyber-jockey to hit medical records and hunt for a compatible ‘donor.’ The Syndicate might not have much of a stake in this at all beyond getting paid or turning in a favor.”

  She stood. “Am I supposed to be comforted or frightened by that?”

  Dorian flashed an appraising frown. “I’d say comforted.”

  A glance at her armband showed the data crawl still going. “Damn. I think it’s time I had a serious talk with Senator Winchester.”

  feeling of ominous dread settled on Kirsten’s shoulders as soon as she set the Navcon for Senator Winchester’s manor in the north. She didn’t expect much from walking into his office and threatening him. At best, she’d make a fool of herself. At worst, she winds up on the defensive facing a senatorial inquiry. Director Carter had her back when she confronted Commissioner Vernon, but that had been different. She hadn’t been investigating Vernon. She’d been trying to protect her from an abyssal spirit.

  This time, she had a mortal in her sights, and from what she kept on hearing, an untouchable one at that. There had to be something… some way. Maybe she’d prod him with a slight bend of the truth, say that it appeared someone was trying to set him up to look guilty and
see where that rabbit hole led. His reaction might give her some clue where to take it. One thing did bother her though, a thought that wouldn’t quite leave the tip of her brain.

  He asked for me specifically. That might mean he fully expected the ghost.

  Her conundrum hadn’t gone anywhere by the time she shot out from the area covered by the elevated city, and flew over natural ground. Snowy pine forest sprawled below, broken up here and there by silvery plastisteel and swaths of suburbia.

  “It’s beautiful up here, if not a little cold.” Dorian took on a wistful expression. “I’d planned on living out this way after retiring.”

  She looked down at her lap. “Sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t get all sad on my account. I’m still sort of ‘here’ to enjoy it. Maybe I’ll fall in among The Kind after you’re a distant memory. Course, I’ll probably stick around to keep Evan company.”

  “I’m twenty-two… couple months away from twenty-three. Are you going to torment yourself that long? You don’t want to go be with your family? Whatever’s on the other side?”

  He glanced at her, his face sad/serious.

  “No, I’m not trying to tell you to go away. I want you to do whatever will make you the happiest.”

  “Right now, that’s following you around and making sure you don’t wreck my car.” He wiped a finger across the dash, clucking his tongue at the dust smear. “And keeping you from joining me on this side.”

  She chuckled. “I don’t know how I’d have gotten this far without you.”

  “Try not to say anything blonde in there.” He winked.

  “As if.” She set down near the front door, and groaned at the exterior temperature reading of forty degrees on the nose.

  “The uniforms are actually fine in cold weather… if you’re active. It’s when you stand still in the wind they get frigid.”

  Kirsten hopped out and jogged to the front door. Marguerite answered the bell two minutes later.

  “Agent Wren.” The synthetic woman smiled. Her powder blue dress with white apron made her look even more like a huge child’s toy doll.

  Kirsten flashed a cheesy smile. “Lieutenant now actually. I need to have a word with the senator. It’s about the case, and important.”