Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  “Same hologram?” said Bradley, nodding toward the vacuous face in the tank.

  “They didn't run 'after' pictures in the general files they're giving out,” Yates explained, calm though just a little emptier inside now that he'd come to his realization about Beaton's death. “Not, I'd guess, that there's not a chief of mission or two with a set for his private viewing.''

  Why would anybody want to look at dead bodies? But people did.

  “Ah,” the security man continued aloud, “you may not have flubbed it when you keyed in the list.” He handed Bradley the original sheet of flimsy. “This guy and another were found late, in a utility locker or something.”

  “What was a tourist from Sky Devon doing in suit room number 137?” asked the woman as she scanned the brief data from the victim list.

  Not a bad question, Yates thought as he pulled the new printout from the slot, all the information that his section had on Rodney Beaton.' 'Not a bad que - '' he began aloud. “Son of a bitch!”

  When Ella Bradley leaned over to read the file data, her breast rubbed the man's right biceps. He was damned well aware of the contact, and he assumed she was also; but even though she shifted slightly, the two of them remained close enough together that warmth kept the memory alive.

  It was a great improvement over the recent past, especially when added to the fact that he had one fewer death on his conscience than he'd figured.

  “The victim list hadn't been updated either,” the security man explained, since he wasn't sure Ella would see at once the crucial bit of information that had unburdened him. “When they did a full medical on Beaton, it turned out he didn't die of a pulmonary virus. He stepped out onto the surface without a suit, and blew his lungs into vacuum.”

  He let the woman take the file sheet with her as she straightened slowly away. “Ah,” said Yates, returning to the initial problem, “that may mean that your, ah” - he caught himself before his tongue said “notion” - “theory is still supportable. I'll set you up with ...”

  Just who would be the right person to handle this officially? Somebody in the Bureau of Administration might—

  “What was he doing with camera equipment woven into his coat?” Bradley asked as she pored over part of the file the security man had skimmed.

  “Huh?” said Yates, bending over the woman in turn.

  “Say, is there anything here about him having an implanted microphone? The way he was mumbling at the table, that'd explain ...”

  He and his visitor looked at one another. Neither of them spoke for a moment, until Yates said, “You know, I wouldn't mind knowing a little more about Rodney, here.” He tapped the sheet which rustled in Bradley's grip.

  “The virus . . .” the woman began carefully. “What they've decided happened,” she went on, “was that cosmic-ray exposure on a shuttle to here caused a virus to mutate freakishly.”

  “And now it doesn't look like it was a virus,” Yates said, in agreement with what he understood to have been the woman's idea when she first began to explain her theory.

  Bradley shook her head sharply. “I don't know that,” she emphasized. “I'd think that the med staff could tell beyond question. But the precision was too great for the ... for little bugs. Somebody must have directed doses of the virus to every Arab he could find.

  “Somebody human.”

  Not a little paranoid, are we? thought Yates as he met the woman's burning, steady gaze.

  On the other hand, she seemed to be right.

  “I'll make some inquiries about Beaton,” the security man said with a grimace. “Somebody walking into space like that ought to rate a formal investigation, even with all the rest going on right now. But - he raised his hand, palm down but fingers toward Bradley in caution - “you understand, I don't have any authority in ... in a criminal investigation, if that's what's going on.”

  “I'll get the background on Beaton myself,” said the woman calmly as she stood up.

  On Bradley's right hip was a large purse attached to her belt by a coil of memory plastic. She drew the purse away, opened it, and tucked in the folded printout. It was a low-gravity style whose form but not function had been copied Downside. The plastic coil drew the bag slowly but firmly to the woman's side when she released it. Downside, a purse of similar size would have to be empty, a mere fashion accessory, or it would throw its wearer into hip-shot awkwardness.

  “I don't think - “ Yates began, the phrase a placeholder until he determined just what he did think.

  “Supervisor,” said Ella. Her face brightened and her whole body shifted, perhaps relaxed just a trifle, into a posture that made her beautiful. “Sam. Look, if I go through official channels with my present data - “

  If I go, she'd said, noted the security man.

  “ - I'll be passed off as a crazy. Crazy bitch, which won't help. It would have been one thing if I were just pointing out that the virus struck Arab ethnics, but the suggestion that this Beaton” - her hand flicked the surface of the holotank - “was prepared to record the event as it occurred ...” She laughed.

  “Yeah, well,” said Yates as he stood also, uncomfortable because of the ease with which he could imagine Ella being treated as a nut.

  Years ago a psychiatrist friend had told him, “Just because somebody's paranoid, it doesn't follow that there aren't people plotting against him.” The height difference when both of them were standing made it harder for him to take the woman seriously, but Yates was familiar enough with that quirk in his personality to know how to compensate for it.

  “If there's more involved than one person.” Bradley went on, “then an official inquiry's going to warn the others that they're at risk. I'll simply have to request for information on Beaton - as a visitor to Headquarters Colony - sent to Sky Devon through my Downside office at NYU.”

  “Might be interesting to learn if Beaton was orphaned when a mob in Cairo piled his parents on a bonfire,” Yates said in what was as close as he could bring himself to agreement with a plan that still bothered him. Civilians shouldn't get involved in what was real police business; and on this one, Sam Yates was as much a civilian as the woman herself.

  He couldn't think of a quicker route out of UN Security than an attempt to ram this conspiracy notion up the formal chain of command, though. The choice was to let it go, to trust that somebody else would follow it up - when only he and Bradley knew the technician had been in Le Moulin Rouge before the deaths began . . .

  “I don't guess,” Yates said aloud, “that I'll ever get so used to murder that I'll look aside t' keep from getting involved.”

  Bradley's face lost its smile but not its beauty. “Yes,” she said, “I agree,” though the security man could not be sure that she meant what he meant. “We'll be in touch, then?”

  “Do you have plans for dinner?” Yates asked with his voice and eyes both level.

  Bradley's relaxed appearance hardened, but not to the bowstring tautness she had exhibited when she first entered the office. “Dinner would be nice,” she said after a pause in which her eyes had not left the man's.

  “Nineteen hundred, then,” said Yates, “And I'll let you suggest the place. So long - “ his smile was grim enough to remind his visitor that they had business together, that she needn't freeze up - “as it's not French. I had a bad experience the last time I went out for French food.”

  “Twenty hours,” she replied with a nod and a quirk of her mouth indicating that she accepted the humor for what it was. “I want to have some information, if possible, and New York's five hours behind us here. Pick me up at my apartment. My office is there. I'm sure” - she nodded toward the data bank - “that you can find the address yourself.”

  Cool, aren't we? Yates thought. “I'll look forward to it,'' he said aloud. “And maybe I'll have learned something by then also.”

  Watching the anthropologist's series of maneuvers, real put-offs or else coyness, gave the security man an idea about how he might learn more about Bea
ton's death.

  He was pretty sure he'd better not tell Ella Bradley what he had in mind, though.

  Chapter 6 - SOMEBODY ELSE'S JOB

  The monitor beside the door of Patrol Substation Central Four showed that the reception desk was empty, but Sam Yates' ID card let him into the unit without need to touch the call button. The door was hydraulically actuated, a necessity because it was of thick titanium plate instead of the foam sandwich construction normal in the colony. The partition walls that separated the substation from the corridor had been armored with titanium plate on the inside also.

  The hallway within was narrowed by lockers against the outer wall. They faced doorways, most of which were closed. The door nearest to the right of the reception desk was ajar. Yates pushed it fully open to meet the stare of a uniformed patrolman young enough to be irritated at the intrusion but junior enough to remain deferential.

  “I'm looking for Lieutenant Yesilkov,” the security supervisor said. “Information says she's here.”

  The patrolman shrugged. “Yeah, she's here - three doors down. But she won't thank you, buddy. We're all fuckin' buried, and she's trying to catch up on paperwork while Todd handles the street.”

  “Thanks,” Yates said neutrally as he closed the door again. That news wasn't great for his purposes, but Yesilkov wouldn't have been around here if she weren't busy; and most people, not just bureaucrats, were willing to grab any excuse that rescued them from necessary drudgery. He knocked on the indicated door.

  “What the hell is it?” snarled the voice of the patrol lieutenant through the flimsy panel. There were three names in tungsten sulfide letters on the plate; none of them were hers.

  Yates opened the door instead of speaking to it. Yesilkov was at the desk console of a room smaller than the supervisor's own office. Metal boxes were stacked waist high in the narrow space surrounding the desk, but the sole chair to the left of the door was clear.

  “Lieutenant Yesilkov?” the big man said to the lieutenant's professionally-blanked expression. “We met last - “

  “Yeah,” Yesilkov agreed. She spoke with the same pleasure at recognition that Yates himself had felt when he was able to place Ella Bradley earlier that morning. “Sure, Yates, Samuel - surpervisor from . . . Commo?” She stood and reached over the desktop to shake her visitor's hand.

  “Entry Division,” Yates said in a tone of agreement. “But yeah, that's me. I'm just in a lot better shape 'n I was when you last saw me.” He paused before adding, “Ah, I know you're busy, but can I have a minute?”

  “Have what you need,” said the lieutenant, waving to the chair by the door and sitting down again herself. Her grip had been firm, dry, and warm to Yates' own palm. “After all, I figure you saved me about an hour by not dyin' and adding another name t' my report backlog.”

  Yates laughed with both his mouth and his eyes. He could see the left side of Yesilkov's face quirk in a grin of approval: he'd passed a private test of her own, let her know that he wasn't going to turn civilian and report her if she got loose enough to joke with him.

  “Look,” the security man said more soberly, “this won't make your job easier, but it just might lead to a result. All the disease deaths, that's the problem, right?” He gestured at the console.

  Yesilkov laced her fingers behind the blond hair fluffing at the nape of her neck, and arched to stretch herself over the seat back. She looked a damn sight less chunky in that posture, uniform or not; and though she was aware of Yates' interest, she clearly didn't disapprove.

  “All the ones my team investigated, yeah,” she said, “which was fourteen, all told. A great night. Plus all the rest of the crap because of the confusion - looting, accidents, you name it. You know ...”

  She leaned forward, lowering her voice. Her visitor almost certainly didn't know, and it did her soul good to blurt it to an outsider. “You know, the Kenyan ambassador ran his car up on the Mexican ambassador's when traffic, you know, tied up sudden? They started swinging at each other, and one of the chauffeurs was pulling a knife just as we got there.”

  She grimaced. “Had t' pop him, damn near had t' put down the whole damn lot of 'em. You think that's a fun report t' write and keep my job?”

  “I got my share of the third world,” said Yates, taking a risk of his own, “in Nicaragua. And some days I think that job was simpler.''

  If her visitor had not stuck his own neck out - that statement wouldn't have had to go far up the Secretariat hierarchy to net Yates a fierce reprimand - the patrol lieutenant would have tensed up at what she had said to him. That was the last thing Yates needed; and anyway, he didn't have any apologies for his own words.

  Yesilkov grinned and flexed her elbows back again, not really for exercise this time. “Okay, big guy,” she said. “Make my life tougher.”

  “I gave you a description of the other customers while we were waiting for Medical,” the Entry supervisor said. “I don't know how lucid I was?”

  He cocked an eyebrow at Yesilkov.

  She shrugged. “Not bad, considering,” she said, “we found the Yugoslavs - second secretaries. They won't admit they were there, but there's fingerprints all over the place settings. And ...”

  Yesilkov's grin narrowed into a slightly-forced chuckle. “We found the other four Indians, who were pretty clear that, well, somebody fitting your description had a violent argument with the waiter before cutting him with a knife and running into the kitchen to finish the job.

  “The other two,” she continued, “the guy you thought might be from a habitat and the guy with the beard - who the woman at the next table confirms, though no details - they must not 'a touched anything at the table, and they haven't come forward t' help.

  “Not,” she concluded with her full-face frown, “that they were likely to, but it'd let me close things a little neater on that one.”

  “I found one of them,” said Yates, flexing his right leg to rest his foot on the storage boxes beside the desk. He was frowning as he tried to remember the evening, not just the customers as individuals.

  He was sure that Beaton had picked up his water glass. Maybe the tumbler had been shattered beyond reconstruction for prints in the hasty investigation made necessary by the number of incidents. Maybe Beaton had carried the glass off with him.

  And maybe the technician's skin had been coated with an osmotic barrier, a standard laboratory precaution which would keep his fingerprints from showing up at the same time it prevented possible contaminants from reaching his skin.

  “Ah,” said the big man, aware of the expectant Yesilkov again. “He was dead, stepped out into vacuum, and the preliminary in my files looked . . . funny.” He reached over the desk to give the lieutenant a copy of the Entry Division printout.

  “Stepped?” said Yesilkov, accepting the hard copy but keeping her eyes on her visitor for the moment.

  “Fell, jumped, or was pushed,” said Yates, using the Downside phrase for which there was not as yet an equivalent off-Earth shorthand. “I'd be real interested to know what the full investigation turned up on that guy. If he had something to do with what happened in the restaurant, then, well . . .”

  The security man intended to keep his voice light, but he heard it harden and realized just how emotionally involved he was in this business, if there were a business - “he gave me a real bad night, and he gave a lot of other people a worse one, all over the colony.”

  “What d'ye suppose he was doing with a camera in his jacket weave?” asked the lieutenant mildly. She frowned at the printout, holding it in her right hand as her left keyed Beaton's ID number into the pad on her console by feel.

  Data flashed on the flat screen, visible but not readable from the angle at which Yates sat. Yesilkov stared at it for a moment before continuing in the same quizzical tone, “And why d'ye suppose he'd have a plug filter in his left nostril?”

  “If I had to guess,” said Yates, playful the way a cat is playful with a wounded bird, “I'd bet he sneezed t
he other one out when his lungs burst, but nobody noticed it outside the air lock when they hauled him in.”

  The lieutenant nodded slowly as she continued to read the screen.

  “You might check,” the security man added, going back to his earlier thought, “whether his hands weren't covered with osmotic gel. A lab barrier, you know - wash it off with alcohol after you're done.”

  “Hands and face,” Yesilkov agreed, still nodding. She touched another key and the printer at the side of her console began to whine.

  “You can give a firm ID on this guy being at the scene?” she asked as she turned to Yates and put her hands behind her neck again. .

  “Yes,” Yates said flatly. “I picked his hologram out of the victim list, just by chance.”

  “Right,” said Yesilkov. The printer paused, then resumed its function. She nodded to the sheet of copy feeding from the machine and said, “I'm burnin' you off one, too, but you don't need to tell anybody where it came from. Officially, I'll be in touch with you about the investigation. Probably have you eyeball the body.”

  She chuckled with the same grim humor she'd displayed earlier. “Have t' bring him in to do that. They got 'em warehoused on the surface. Thank God for vacuum, huh?''

  “I - “ Yates said, standing and extending his hand to the woman. He'd started to say “I appreciate this,” and he did; but it was Yesilkov's job, after all. “I'll be interested to hear what you get on this,” he said instead.

  The patrol officer rose and gave Yates the printout before she shook hands. “You're new up here, aren't you?” she said, easing back against her chair to look the man over carefully.

  “A week,” Yates agreed evenly. “My wife broke things off, and I figured taking a slot up here might be a good idea in a lot of ways.”

  “I see,” said the blond woman, nodding as she slowly sat back down. “Well, you're luckier 'n me. My husband wouldn't leave me if I put a gun to his head.”