Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  “Right,” said the lieutenant distantly. “There was a Bureau of Utilities vehicle here.”

  She touched the screen with a short, capable index finger. An orange pip glowed at about where Yates would have placed it.

  Still leaning forward, Yesilkov turned her head to look at her visitor before she continued, “It'd been shot up, plasma dischargers again. And there was a body in it.”

  She glanced back at the tank and prodded it. “Another body here.”

  An orange bead at the junction of the corridor and the residential passage. Hell, Yates had forgotten the fellow he blew off the back of the van, the one who'd been manning the other barricade. How was he going to explain forgetting that he'd stepped over a corpse on his way to Ella's apartment?

  Well, he'd done just that, too wrought up with other things to notice.

  Yates wasn't sure that nearly having his leg burned off would have been enough in itself to disconnect him that far from reality . . . but he figured he could convince Yesilkov that it had been.

  “Jesus,” he said aloud. “I didn't see him.”

  “Right,” the patrol officer said - agreed would give too much weight to the flat voice. “Another body here.” She tapped the corner of NN and the cross passage.

  And now you're lyin' dead on my barroom floor chorused Yates' mind, concluding the stanza it had been singing before he was interrupted by a man who was now a corpse.

  '' And there was enough shooting besides,'' Yesilkov continued, “to burn holes in a lotta walls and roof ducts.”

  Her finger dabbed quickly, sprinkling half a dozen orange dots across the map. These included the passage outside Ella's door - and a shop on Corridor NN, facing the passage. One of the men in utility coveralls must have fired past Yates during the first instants of the engagement, but the security man couldn't remember that for the world. The bolt had been lost in one of his own or the shot that vaporized the wall beside him.

  “Damn,” Yates muttered, and only the lift of Yesilkov's eyebrows warned him that he'd spoken aloud.

  “Yeah,” said the woman as she leaned back in her chair, watching Yates with eyes that gave up nothing. “Hell of a thing to have happen in the middle of the colony, ain't it?”

  “Sonya?” called the man who had just mounted the dais in front of the room. Collapsible chairs squawked and clattered as the roomful of patrol personnel turned toward the subject of the question.

  “Exit,” said Yesilkov to the holotank. Then, rising as quiet ripples flooded the disintegrating map, she nodded, “Sorry, Pedro. We can finish this outside. Anybody in Room Three?”

  “Not for a couple hours,” said the man on the dais. He shrugged. “You need it longer 'n that, let me know, okay?''

  Yesilkov threw a salute, both appreciative and sardonic, to her fellow, and led Yates out of the packed room. Her economy of effort impressed the visitor. Most of the patrolmen who moved out of the way were larger than the lieutenant, but it was as much her personality as her rank that opened the passage.

  “Where we were before,” Yesilkov said as she strode down the narrow hall. Her words were a drift of sound to which the man behind her fitted meaning a few steps later.

  A black patrolman, harassed-looking and late, flattened against her open locker as the lieutenant and security man passed. Beads of sweat glimmered on her fashionably-shaven scalp.

  “All right,” Yesilkov said as she opened the door of an office - the names on the plate weren't the same, but the clutter within hadn't changed - and waved Yates in ahead of her. “Sit down,” she added, not quite as a single word. She gestured her visitor to the chair facing the desk while she closed the ceramic-foam door panel.

  Yates wasn't surprised when the patrol officer shot the flat manual bolt to lock the door against anything but considerable violence. But he didn't expect her to clear hard copy and office paraphernalia from a corner of the desk itself and perch herself there, looking down at her visitor with blank eyes.

  The room was so small that if Yesilkov wished, she could rest a boot on the arms of Yates' chak, between the seated man and the door. For the moment she put her right sole lat against the front of the desk and gripped her bent knee with both hands.

  “Supervisor Yates,” the woman said formally. “I need to see your ID card.”

  “All right,” said Yates, pleased that his voice was placid, and hopeful that it hadn't jumped an octave above normal the way his frightened ears told him it had. “We'll have to go get it, though. The suit I was wearing burned when - “ He motioned idly toward his thigh.

  Yates' heart rate had shot up, and that was a bad thing because there was nowhere to run.

  “I left the card in the other suit when I changed clothes,” he concluded with open-faced calm.

  Yesilkov took her hands away from her right knee, letting that leg dangle while the toes of her left boot just brushed the floor. She was really very short. . . .

  “No, you didn't,” she said as her fingers opened the touch-sensitive closure of a breast pocket - not the one in which she was keeping the chip containing Beaton's data. She took out a plastic card and spun it onto the security man's lap with the slow perfection that proved her adaptation to lunar gravity.

  It was his, all right. But where -

  “You left it at the junction of corridor N-N,” Yesilkov said coolly, “and cross-passage twelve.”

  “Ah ...” said Yates as his mind searched for a lie.

  ''Under the body of one Jan-Christian Malan,” the woman continued, “ a foreman with the Bureau of Utilities ''

  “Ah.”

  “Jantze to his friends, one of whom was the Michel van Rooyan who provided the corpse at the other end of the passage,” Yesilkov said.

  She paused, looking the Entry Division supervisor over as if he, too, were a body hunched in the chair for her inspection. “Think you'd like to tell me what really happened, buddy?” she said.

  “I think I'd better,” said Sam Yates. He was genuinely calm for the first time since the moment before the shooting started. He was being forced to lay out the situation, so none of the results were his responsibility.

  The most likely result was that the Secretariat would, under the terms of the UN Charter, transfer him to the United States authorities to be tried for murder.

  And God knew what other charges.

  “I'd arranged a meeting with Ella Bradley,” Yates said. He would have gotten up to stretch - the room was too small for pacing - but the lieutenant staring down at him might have misinterpreted his intention. “There was a barricade and a man - that would be Malan, but I'd never seen him before. At Bradley's corridor.”

  Yesilkov nodded, but she did not speak. Her body shifted so that she could raise her right leg and plant it on the desktop. Her forearm rested on the knee in a pose more relaxed than any she'd displayed to her visitor thus far in the afternoon.

  “I took out my card, figured it'd get me through the barricade,'' the big man continued. “Must be there I lost it.”

  He grimaced. The woman allowed herself a grin.

  “He, the guy, he was giving me some crock,” Yates went on. He was suddenly nervous again, because he might have some hope after all. “There was a van up the passageway and some more utility people with it, but I didn't think anything about it until one of 'em looked around and it was the guy from the restaurant. The - “

  He gestured toward the desk display, where the holotank might have been if they had not left the Squad Room minutes before. Yates did not realize his mistake, continuing, “The guy we've got in holo now, I figure an Afrikaner.”

  He cleared his throat and went on, as Yesilkov waited without the tension of moments before. “I pushed through the barricade. The guy there had ... had a plasma gun. I took it away from him.”

  Yates didn't want to say what came next, not that the woman'd be in much doubt about it, but he said instead, “It was in a regular toolbox, the gun, that's how they kept it hidden.”

&nbs
p; His face had turned toward a wall of file drawers of no interest to him and of damned little to the uniformed officers whose records they were. Yates forced his eyes back to the waiting Yesilkov and said, “I shot him. Somebody shot from the van, a couple times, I guess, but I only saw the once. I engaged the vehicle with two rounds as it exited the passage. Then I gave pursuit.”

  Sam Yates was twenty years younger as he sat in the chair, and the images he was trying to describe kept getting confused with ghostly foliage and the bamboo shacks of villages whose names he never learned.

  “The vehicle halted,” his voice rasped on, shredded by a past in which everything had happened at the same time— not over the years and decades of objective reality. “I engaged its personnel without effect, then . . . then I think they ran off and I rushed them.”

  He was breathing hard, aware that something was wrong with the air but unable to say that the humidity was too low, that it wasn't dripping with moisture wrung from the surrounding foliage by a tropical sun.

  “They'd escaped up an air-lock shaft,” Yates said. “There were at least two of them, maybe a third, because I couldn't see the front of the vehicle. I - Jesus! Maybe that was before?”

  He couldn't remember the sequence. Veins stood out on his wrists and forehead as he strained - not because only the truth could save him from punishment, but rather because he was adrift in a timelesss Hell and every lost memory was another bulwark that had failed him.

  “S'okay, man,” said Sonya Yesilkov. She was standing beside him, though he hadn't seen her move. The fingers of the woman's left hand were kneading the taut muscles at the back of his neck.

  “I killed the fuckers,” Yates whispered. “Just blew their ass away. If anybody else got in the way, I didn't mean it, but I did ...”

  “Nobody else,” the woman said. “Nobody near as bad as you. It's okay.”

  “The woman, Ella Bradley, was in the vehicle,” Yates continued. The quiver in his voice was a sign of returning control, not that he was about to lose it. “She'd been drugged but the antidote was in the hand of the... man in there.''

  “He was dead?” said Yesilkov, interjecting a question for the first time since the security man had begun to blurt the true story.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Yates. His eyes were forward. The woman's hand had slid from his neck to his shoulder. He raised his own hand to clamp it there. “Not much doubt about that, was there? She was under a blanket, Ella was, so she hadn't been ...”

  His free hand gestured nervously in the air. He had a clear, frozen memory of the van's side panel vaporizing in his gunsight - metal burning and gaseous, a superheated bubble which must have flashed across the vehicle's interior. “When they're shootin' at you,” Yates said softly, “all you can think is make it stop.” His eyes were open, but he continued to look across the desk as if the lieutenant were seated there instead of standing beside him.

  “Some people just flatten 'emselves,” he continued to the empty chair. “Pretend they're diggin' a hole with their belly button. And some - if you shoot back, maybe it stops, and anyway, maybe you can forget it ... till it's over.” Yesilkov chuckled harshly.

  Yates turned and lifted his head. “You keep doing this to me, lady,” he said past the bright blue uniform shirt. “I'm not like this, most times. Long past it.”

  “Not what I'd've guessed from your box score t'night,” the lieutenant said with an eyebrow lifted sardonically. “You musta been hell on wheels before you got all broke down with age.”

  “You bet,” said the big man as his left hand touched Yesilkov's back and ribs to guide, not draw, her face toward him for a kiss.

  She did not resist, but her head turned slightly so that his lips met the corner of her mouth. “Do we think we're playing some cute game?” she murmured. “That's going to get us out of trouble that lying couldn't?'' Her enunciation was unusually precise.

  Sam Yates' mind flashed between two approaches to the problem. He could express anger, which would sound real because his body was momentarily suffused with rage at the possibility its needs would be ignored again. Alternatively, he could be calm and let the woman's body do the convincing. The uniform cloth had a slick feel that fitted its bright color, but whatever the lieutenant used to restrain the breast to which Yates' hand slid must have been of gossamer insubstantiality.

  “If you want,” he said aloud, “you can book me for a triple homicide right now. Just so long as we get five minutes in here before they lock me up.”

  God the breast was soft.

  “And explain t' my captain why I palmed your ID card at the scene and didn't list it in the evidence file?” said the blond woman as she straightened.

  Yates thought she might be pulling away. His face frowned in concern, but his hands did not attempt to restrain her.

  Instead, Yesilkov ran her index finger down the center of her shirt. The seam, sensitized to the touch that had last closed it, gaped open. She tugged the shirttail from her waistband and finished the task while Yates cupped her breasts.

  Not chunky at all. Very white, and the nipples were of such a pale pink that it was hard to be sure where the areolae merged with the outer skin. It was not until he tongued one that Yates realized there was another garment after all, a bandeau so soft and clear that his eyes and fingers had not noticed it.

  “It rolls up,” said Sonya Yesilkov. Her hands led him, lifted him, out of the chair. “Here,” she added. “I'll help you.”

  Problem Number One was well on the way to being solved. That still left the reason for the kidnapping and firefight, and the virus whose release was planned and observed while it slashed like a scalpel through UN Headquarters.

  But those problems could wait.

  PART THREE

  Chapter 15 - THREE ON A MATCH

  Yates' office hadn't shrunk, but with both Sonya Yesilkov and Ella Bradley sitting on the fold-down chairs opposite his desk, the hard-won space seemed unbearably confining. Yates ran his fingers absently through the strands of noise curtain in the doorway as he told the hologram tank,'' Play.'' It didn't.

  “Voice commands only work 'bout half the time,” he said apologetically into the sub-zero silence as he retreated to his desktop, where he could key into the unit commands it couldn't ignore.

  “My equipment is ever so much better ...” Ella Bradley's statement was as much a critique as an offer to adjourn to her apartment's office.

  Yesilkov, beside her, shifted long enough to give her a scathing glance which made Bradley blush.

  “I'll take your word for it, thanks, sister. Especially since, t' hear Sam tell it, the last time y' used it t' research Beaton, Sam here got parboiled, you got snatched, and the mess left in corridor M-M was ever so difficult to explain, don't you know?” The exaggerated send-up of Bradley's diction as Yesilkov tailed off wasn't lost on the slimmer, black-haired woman.

  If Bradley hadn't had on her prismatic contacts today, the look she stabbed Yates with might have drawn blood. Still facing Yates, she said, “Patrolman Yesilkov - “

  “That's Lieutenant to you,” said Yesilkov with a long-suffering sigh.

  “Lieutenant,” Bradley repeated with barbed pauses between the syllables. “I sent that data request via a UN office, not straight out of my apartment.”

  Yates, taking a seat at his desk, wondered what the likelihood was of witnessing a cat fight. He couldn't figure Bradley - Yesikov's combination of possessiveness and combativeness he could understand. Bradley had this way of treating Yesilkov like part of the furniture. Yesilkov had busted her ass making her rank; she wasn't going to take easily to being snubbed by someone who'd have thought she was a menial laborer even if she were three grades higher and the ranking security officer on the Moon.

  Maybe Bradley had scoped that there was something going on between Yates and Yesilkov, but Bradley'd had her chance. Yates didn't understand why it would bother her if somebody else was -

  “You what?” Yesilkov twisted in her seat, her
knees bumping Bradley's as she confronted the darker woman.

  “I had a friend of mine in the U.S. Mission bump the priority on my data request,” Bradley said.

  “Don't do it again,” Yesilkov ordered, and turned away from Bradley, shaking her head in Yates' direction. “Not unless you want to say who, and give us some warning - now we've got something else to check on.” She crossed her arms over breasts whose softness Yates could almost feel.

  “All right, team,” said Yates, stabbing with unnecessary concentration at his keypad, trying to set a good example. “Let's start -”

  But Bradley was unwilling to let Yesilkov's implication go unanswered: “Lieutenant, are you inferring that someone - anyone - in the U.S. Mission had a hand in my attempted abduction?” Now there was an edge to Bradley's tone that brought Yates' head up from his keypad. Next she was going to threaten to put Yesilkov on report for behavior unbecoming a security officer ... the emphasis on U.S. had already implied that Yesilkov's Russian nationality might become part of the discussion.

  “I ain't 'inferring' nothin',” said Yesilkov in Yates' direction, her back straight, her eyes sparkling. “Am I, Sam?”

  Yates treated them both to a pained expression and said, “Let's get this show on the road, ladies, you read me? Ella, if you don't want to tell us what U.S. Mission office you went through, that's fine for now. But if there's anything else as pertinent as your background check on Beaton, y' better level with us. It's your butt they came after, not either of ours.”

  Bradley digested that with a noncommittal look, and Yesilkov unbent some, satisfied for the moment. When Bradley shook her black-haired head indicating that she had nothing more to say, Yates looked down at his keypad and realized that all his data requests were spooled and ready to run.

  He hit the button and got up, because the holotank was going to play its data's front view to the women in the chairs facing it.

  The first file that came up was that of Jan-Christian Malan, one of the corpses from the firefight at MM. Bradley drew in a quick breath, and her hand covered her mouth.