Kill Ratio

by David Drake

But there was additional staff in the kitchen. Yates banged through the swinging door and headed for the phone, half expecting to slam aside a cook running into the dining area to see why someone had pushed the alarm that unlocked the way to the corridor.

  One of the four people in the kitchen was alive. She was a woman in her late teens, dark-haired but with blue Kabyle eyes. Instead of screaming, she huddled in the angle formed by a wall and the oven. Her knees were raised to her chest, and she had pressed the knuckles of both hands against her teeth.

  The smell of burning flesh probably came from the middle-aged man who lay across the range top with a spatula in one charring hand. A refrigerator stood open, and a tray of salads had fallen across the woman who had collapsed in front of it. A second man, old enough to be the father of the first, was sprawled where the door had slid him as the security man entered.

  It had been a long time since Sam Yates had seen that much human blood in one place. Not since he'd inspected a bunker after a heavy mortar shell had pierced the roof and exploded among seventeen Nicaraguan children.

  There was a phone to the left side of the door. Yates' eyes were flat as he stepped toward it, wiping his bloody right palm on his shirt front so that he wouldn't ruin his jacket - or the evidence on-site.

  The little man who had been at Yates' table was in the way, still muttering under his breath as he scanned the kitchen.

  Sam Yates had been cool - not calm, just emotionless - to that moment, operating by reflexes that he hadn't needed since he left Central America. This one wasn't his job, he just happened to be here, and there was enough human emotion under those reflexes for Yates to grab the little ghoul by both lapels and slam him against the wall. “What the hell d'ye think you're doing, buddy?” the security man shouted in the other's face. “Get out or - “

  Or what? the fellow from Sky Devon - assuming - was terrified, not a curiosity-seeker at all. He was saying, “The woman in the corner appears to be alive and unharmed, though deeply frightened. The man at our feet is not moving. The man - “

  “Jesus!” Yates shouted, brushing himself free of the little man whose flat “ays” made his cold voice sound like that of a machine running at too low a voltage. A would-be Good Samaritan, scared to death, and now with his clothing bloodied by a newcomer to Headquarters Security who'd rushed in where he had no business. Congratulations, Cecile, you'll be delighted to know that you've helped your husband fuck up his career on a whole new planet. . . .

  Yates took his identification card from the case in his inner breast pocket and set it against the wall phone's speaker/microphone plate. Instead of keying his identification number into the card's minuscule pad, he poked the red triangle for Emergency.

  Behind him the little man was walking stilt-legged around the kitchen, muttering to himself in a quietly demented fashion. He pinched the fabric of his jacket away from his chest in apparent fear that the bloody smudges Yates left on the tweed would soak through to his skin.

  The fabric couldn't have been pure wool after all - there'd been a slick stiffness to the lapels. Maybe it wouldn't cost Yates a month's salary to replace - assuming that he had a salary after he'd manhandled a citizen that way.

  “Emergency, Specialist Gomes,” said the speaker plate in the voice of a woman whose first language was not English.

  The wall niche in which the restaurant's phone was recessed was big enough for a view screen, but the instrument itself was voice only, like most of those in the UN colony. The designers had not figured on the influx - inevitable, non-architects would have said - of hangers-on who would follow transfer of the UN's formal headquarters to the Moon.

  Space was at a premium, but more important, the lines that had been laid in bedrock and intended to handle the colony's communications needs into the twenty-second century, were overloaded seventy years before then - and nobody wanted to face the disruption their replacement would entail.

  You could still get full audio-visual connections if you were willing to pay for them. The cost for that order-of-magnitude increase in line usage ensured that your screen would be blank unless you were calling a chief of mission - in which case you'd see a receptionist exceptional for beauty, as defined by the employing nation.

  “This is Supervisor Samuel Yates, Entry Division,” said the security man, bumping his knees against the wall as he bent to talk directly into the plate. The phone hadn't been installed for somebody of his height. Nothing much had been, except for the offices of people with too much rank to be Yates' business. “You've got an alarm call at Le Moulin Rouge, Central Sector, but I don't have the coordinates. You've got four dead here and a woman in shock, so don't . . .”

  The fellow from Sky Devon slipped out the door, already open because the woman with kaleidoscope lenses was standing there, listening to Yates.

  “... just leave it for the next patrol, okay?”

  “One moment, please,” said the speaker plate while the dispatcher checked location and availability of personnel.

  The woman's prismatic eyes were squarely on Yates as he waited for the dispatcher. That might have been a way to avoid looking at the bodies and the incredible quantity of gore elsewhere in the kitchen, but her chin was thrust out firmly in a triumph of will over emotion. It struck the security man that most people didn't have a past life that fitted them to function in carnage of this sort.

  “There is a uniformed team on its way to you now, sir,” said the dispatcher in her singsong intonations, interspersed with crackling from a speaker that had not been improved by the grease-laden air of a commercial kitchen. “Full medical will follow as soon as possible. You must understand that there have been many calls this shift, very many.”

  “All right, I'll stand by,” said Yates, as though he were more than an innocent bystander himself. He poked the keypad to close the circuit.

  “You're from Security, then,” said the woman beside him with a quaver that could have been a result of the corpses. Equally, it might mean that she thought he was the murderer. Guts either way, Yates supposed.

  “Why are you here?”

  A throaty voice, and that was more than the constriction of fear. “Because I asked my division head where a good restaurant was,” Yates said, not snapping, but pumped enough to respond in kind to the accusation in the woman's voice.

  At home Security meant jack boots and rubber truncheons to a lot of UN members. Over the years Sam Yates had gotten damn good and tired of the way faces froze and eyes took on a glassy patina when he mentioned his job. This woman sounded like an American, but she obviously thought he had something to do with what had happened here.

  Whatever the hell that was.

  “You know me, now,” said the big man. “Who the hell are you?”

  He let his eyes travel past her and out into the dining area beyond. Two of the Indians were there, looking very staunch and afraid. Everybody else had run, and none of the people pressing against the glass from the corridor showed any interest in coming in.

  The waiter still lay across the overturned table, his face covered with blood and amazement.

  “I'm Dr. Elinor Bradley of NYU,” the woman replied in a voice too bold to be fearless. “But I'm fully accredited to the General Secretariat, and my studies have the backing of important people in both the Secretariat and the government of my own nation.”

  You can't push me around, you dumb cop, Yates translated mentally. True enough, probably, and because he didn't even want to - this wasn't his job, for Chrissake - the security man found her attitude amusing rather than a challenge.

  The crowd outside the door rippled away like chilled molasses when an open car holding four uniformed patrolmen pulled up in the corridor. Yates realized belatedly that the clear panel was still locked. Swallowing the question he was about to ask Bradley, he moved toward the door in a forgetfully-mighty stride. His foot lifted another of the tables against the wall and back again with a violent crash.

  The two Indians, both males
, skittered to the opposite side of the room, reasonably concerned about where the Downsider's clumsiness was going to take him next.

  The uniformed lieutenant let herself and her patrol in with a pass key, a computer identification card no thicker than Yates' own.

  The lieutenant braced him - caught him, really. It wasn't Yates' day.

  Though his day was going a lot better than that of the four Arabs sprawled in the restaurant.

  “I was just eating here,” said Yates, letting his card ID him for the uniforms. The lieutenant's name tag read Yesilkov, and the short hair beneath her cap was pale blond. “The guy coughed blood, then hemorrhaged like he'd been opened up with a machete. Didn't hear the shot, and there's three more the same way in the kitchen, with a live one in shock.”

  “Todd, Shedron,” the lieutenant ordered, gesturing a pair of her men toward the kitchen with two fingers. She looked chunky and competent. Yates might be two pay grades higher than a uniformed lieutenant in bookkeeping's scheme of things, but he was just another witness for the moment.

  The third patrolman was already bending over the waiter's corpse, setting up a field diagnostic trellis from the satchel he carried.

  “Four deaths-by-violence,” Lieutenant Yesilkov grumbled as she eyed the room: Yates; the Indians, stiff enough to be expecting a firing squad; Elinor Bradley, moving toward Yates with tiny steps too precise to be described as “drifting closer.” “And they tell me it'll be an hour before they can get us a full medical.” She swore in Russian.

  “Ah,” said Yates. “That one - her name's Bradley, she was at another table. She's a doctor.”

  “Officer, I'm an anthropologist,” said Bradley in haste, with an angry glance at Yates, as if she thought the security man had scored off her deliberately. “I can't help with the, ah, with these, but perhaps I could talk to the woman who's in shock?”

  Yesilkov might have given the anthropologist more than an amused grimace if the black-haired woman had bothered to get the rank right. As it was, the lieutenant said, “Thanks, madam, but no problem.” She toed the satchel beside the waiter's body. “Todd'll bring her out of it. Better living through chemistry, you know.”

  The third patrolman had deployed his diagnostic trellis over the corpse and was keying preset questions into the control box which also acted as the base to which the sensors were attached. A tracery of probes, elbowed and crossed for stiffness, covered the body like a silver cobweb. The tip of each wire touched the waiter's skin, generally after having penetrated his garments.

  “Dead seven minutes thirty, Sonya,” said the patrolman. “Unless he was running a fever?” The man looked up, at Yates rather than at his superior.

  Yates shrugged, spreading his hands palms up to explain that he hadn't the faintest idea of the waiter's state of health. He'd forgotten about the blood until he saw Bradley and the two uniforms start as their eyes followed the gesture.

  “I was, you know, holding him when he died,” the big security man said, feeling more than a little awkward. Things had cooled off enough that his mind was becoming that of a social animal and no longer that of a hunted one surrounded by death.

  “Right,” said the lieutenant, perhaps to ease the embarrassment, and she motioned her subordinate back to his usual work with a curve of her left index finger. Yates noted that she always used her left hand for conversational gestures, though her right could not be said exactly to hover over the needle stunner in its cut-away holster. “There were more people here when it happened?”

  “Yes,” said the anthropologist, interjecting herself into the conversation from which the others' eyes had excluded her. “All the seats were occupied.”

  “They were part of a party of six,” Yates added mildly, motioning toward the Indians. It was no skin off his ass if the woman wanted a piece of this. “The rest'll be pretty easy to find from fingerprints, I'd guess. Most people just, you know, bolted because they didn't know what was going on.”

  It would be nice if the guy from Sky Devon stayed gone, at least until he forgot about Yates throwing him around . . . but what the hell, that'd better go in the formal report. Blame it on nerves.

  There was reason enough to be a little nervy, after all.

  “No sign of puncture, Sonya,” said the patrolman, frowning at the blue-green tungsten-sulfide readout of the trellis control. “I ran it three times, but no skin breaks - just conductivity changes where he puked blood on himself.”

  “Look, Xao, just gimme hard copy, okay?” said the lieutenant in irritation. With less overt emotion, she continued to Yates, “All right, sir, can you - “

  “Sonya, the tape spool on this unit's deadlined,” said the patrolman, looking up at his superior. “I can't get hard copy till we're back at the station.”

  Yesilkov swore again. Yates understood only the tone, but from the analytical look on Bradley's face, he assumed that she had enough Russian to translate. A really scatological language, he'd heard. Maybe he ought to learn it. It'd be useful to describe the way things were going lately.

  One of the two patrolmen stepped through the swinging door of the kitchen, supporting the surviving woman. His right arm was around her waist and her left hand in his, as if they were lovers. Her broad, swarthy face was blank, her blue eyes were almost beatifically empty.

  The patrolman looked as if he were about to add to the present mess by vomiting. Well, Yates had tossed his cookies the first time he walked into a similar situation, back when he was about the patrolman's age.

  “Lieutenant,” the patrolman said, “nobody came in and did it, it just happened, she says.”

  He took off his cap and wiped his forehead with it, then placed his hand back on the survivor's waist - the human support was not all one-sided. She was murmuring words, but they were not in a language Yates understood.

  The patrolman added apologetically, “I got the dose too high, Lieutenant. She speaks English okay, but she's down in this now - dunno what it is, but Todd don't think it's Arabic.”

  Bradley looked at the patrol lieutenant but managed to avoid even the hint of a knowing smile. Yates doubted that he could have managed equal restraint.

  “Yeah, well,” said Yesilkov, her face set in planes as harsh as those of a drop forge as she stared at her subordinate - and avoided the anthropologist's cool gaze. “Got what we needed for now, I guess. Maybe poison, you know ...”

  She looked at Yates because he was big and maybe support; because she'd fucked up, should've let the anthropologist take a shot at the survivor. Looked that way after the fact, anyhow. “Maybe suicide?”

  Sam Yates nodded, sympathetic and more than a little grateful that somebody else had put a foot in it tonight.

  Before he could say something as well, Xao at the diagnostic trellis looked up and said, “Not poison, Sonya. Virus.”

  “Huh?”

  “Virus,” the patrolman repeated, as stolidly as if the information had no personal implications for the speaker. “Cell walls of his lung tissue's been eaten away. It's like soup in there. How quick didja say it happened?”

  Xao was looking at Yates. They were all looking at Yates, at his hands still black with residues of the waiter's dying spasm.

  Everyone was backing away. Xao scrambled to his feet, then bent to snatch the face mask with an osmotic filter from the open satchel. Yates stared into the prismatic eyes of Elinor Bradley, but he could not ignore his own hands. His skin prickled everywhere as the blood withdrew from it . . .but not from its outer surface, from the hands that might have rubbed his eyes, brushed his mouth in some gesture forgotten when other things seemed more important.

  Lieutenant Yesilkov took the ground-conduction communicator from her belt sheath and stepped to the wall that was carved from bedrock. “I don't care what else they've got on,” she said carefully as she planted the antenna against the polished stone. “We need full medical, and we need it now.”

  Chapter 2 - HOBSON'S CHOICE

  Rodney Beaton was paid as w
ell as an engineer Downside, but his rank at Sky Devon was Technician Class Four - in effect, gofer. His status in the conspiracy was similar, which was why he was at UN Headquarters.

  Though the potential payoff here was infinitely greater than anything he could expect from his regular duties, the risk was also enormous.

  He was terrified. He was so much afraid that he would curl up in a fetal ball if he even hesitated in carrying out his tasks.

  Beaton ran along the first two sections of slideway after he left Le Moulin Rouge. His gait was clumsy and loping. The technician was used to Sky Devon's fifty percent pseudogravity, so he was overmuscled for the Moon. He knew that he should let the rollers carry him at their own speed, along with most of the other people using the system, but he could not bring his body to act on his knowledge until he had burned off some of the hormones that surged through his system.

  Until what had happened in the restaurant, Beaton's only emotional involvement with the project had been for the wealth and power it would bring him. He knew what the risks were, of course: he had helped to calculate them. But they were only data, like the growth rates of corn under varying angstrom balances - until the waiter had hemorrhaged over the table, the utensils, and the air in front of Rodney Beaton.

  There was a tie-up of some sort in the corridor ahead. The rotating blue lights of emergency vehicles at the scene turned bright-work into cascades of shimmering jewels and stained the stucco of the corridor's roof a sinister color in combination with its normal beige. Private vehicles were being halted, so that liveried chauffeurs and their haughty employers argued loudly with police while pedestrians climbed over the cars like so many hurdles.

  The sudden crowding relaxed Beaton, because it made him certain that others were interested in something besides him. He could almost believe that there was something important besides Rodney Beaton and the risk he was running.

  He could almost believe that.

  Beaton stepped off the slideway so that he was not rolled against the back of the sturdy-looking black in a djellaba ahead of him. He jostled a trip chattering in an oriental language as they all tried to squeeze past a six-place car whose driver's uniform was much more splendid than that of the female security patrolman with whom he was arguing.