Metal Fatigue

by Sean Williams

  "To be honest," he said in response to Barney's question, "I have no idea."

  The second elevator was crowded with RSD officers in uniform. He kept his eyes fixed straight ahead and tried to ignore the fact that he was dressed only in a hospital gown. Thankfully, the ride was short-lived and, from there, the walk to his office relatively easy.

  He unlocked it, went inside, and collapsed into his chair with a heartfelt groan. Before Barney could take a seat, he waved for the bag.

  "I'm going to change and get some rest. In the meantime, I want you to start with the image processor. Begin from when the Mole appeared, and work backward. I'll call you in a little while."

  "Sure," she muttered.

  "You don't have to," he added. "If you'd rather sleep."

  "No, that's fine." She straightened her posture with an effort. "It'll give me something to do, on top of worrying about you."

  "Don't. I'll be right as rain before you know it."

  "Somehow, against all logic, I believe you." She turned to leave.

  "And, Barney?"

  "What?"

  "Thanks. I really appreciate your help."

  "I know." Her smile was like the dawn after a long, cold night. "What would you do without me?"

  * * *

  When Barney had gone, Roads put his feet up on the desk and tried to relax. Pulling a bottle of water from one of the drawers, he washed down one of the painkillers. After a while, the pain ebbed, and he was able to approach its causes more objectively.

  The doctors were partly right: he had cracked three ribs on his left side, and one on his right; they burned within his bruised chest like rods of red-hot metal. The fracture of his skull he wasn't sure about, though; it seemed fairly intact, if tender, to his questing fingertips. A fair proportion of his exposed skin — face, hands and arms — had been scratched by broken glass; more nicks in a body already far from perfect.

  Switching on his terminal, he called up the city's bulletin-board network and began to browse. Blindeye, thanks no doubt to the efforts of DeKurzak, had been kept out of the headlines; apart from a brief paragraph on the break-in at the university, it wasn't mentioned at all. After the usual pro- and anti-Reassimilation rhetoric, the major topic of the day was another disturbance in the harbour suburbs, which led automatically to calls for a crackdown on street-crime. Talk of building new penal plants to replace those already full, or reintroducing expulsion for antisocial elements, rarely went any further than talk — and for that Roads was glad. The city had already devolved a long way from the complex organism it had once been; if it became any more authoritarian in approach, without genuine reason, then it risked breaking apart entirely.

  An hour passed quickly, and Roads began to feel a craving for sugar. Next to the bottle of water was a bar of dark chocolate he had been saving, which he opened and ate in its entirety. Afterward, he felt better. His wounds were already healing; the pain was tolerable.

  He dressed carefully, keeping his chest as unconstricted as he could. As he did so, he tried to predict the path of the X-rays through the various levels of Kennedy administration. If they had been taken upon his arrival, then a doctor must have seen them and forwarded copies to Chappel. He bet himself that they were sitting on her desk at that very moment — hence her call. He was tempted to contact her, but decided against it. She was too involved as it was. What happened next depended entirely upon who else had seen the X-rays, and how long Chappel could hold them at bay. The wheels of bureaucracy turned slowly in Kennedy, especially with a determined shoulder to the brake.

  He sat behind the desk and disconnected the computer from the mainframe. There was a band-aid on the back of his neck which he removed in order to attach the electrodes. He leaned back into the seat and concentrated, trying to remember exactly what had happened in the split-instant before the Mole had struck him.

  Both he and the Mole had looked up. Then a flash of light had blinded him and, according to Barney, had heralded the Mole's sudden disappearance. What he had seen in the instant before that flash, however, he could not remember.

  When he opened his eyes, the picture on the screen brought it all back.

  The face, framed from the neck up by the open skylight, was brightly lit. He must have taken the tag a split-second before the explosion of light had peaked. The first thing that caught his eye, then and now, was the vivid, cherry-red colour of the man's skin. Hairless, with a strong jaw and straight nose, the man stared open-mouthed out of the screen; his teeth were even and grey, not white at all; his tongue was oddly narrow. But his eyes were his most unusual feature: a non-reflective grey, like his teeth, with a darker pinprick pupil. They were completely inhuman.

  He stared at the face of the Shadow for five minutes, but it was no use; he did not recognise it. Had he seen anyone remotely like that in his life, he was sure he would have remembered.

  He printed a hard copy and removed the electrodes. Sighing, he went to stand at the window to think. The day was overcast, threatening rain. The wooded grounds of the university were hidden behind the crooked backs and shining, upthrust arms of the city. Kennedy Polis resembled a mixed gathering of people — half reaching for the stars, half trying to burrow back into the earth. The marriage of architectural styles was not a comfortable one, but appropriately symbolic, he thought. While Reassimilationists voted to open the city to the world around it, conservatives discussed plans to dig for landfills to plunder that might have been missed by the first wave of metal-seeking bacteria. Another desperate attempt to avoid the inevitable, but one it seemed many felt in sympathy with.

  On the street below, a demonstration paraded slowly by, waving banners protesting the Reassimilation. The voice of the crowd was muffled by the double-paned window, but he didn't really need to hear the words. After years of struggling to keep Kennedy isolated from a dangerous and uncertain environment, he could understand that some people were willing to fight in order to preserve the status quo. Even though the Mayoralty had officially decided that the Reassimilation would go ahead, or at least supported an end to isolation in principle, some Senior Councillors had expressed doubts. This core of hard-line isolationists occasionally encouraged protests like the one Roads was witnessing, although they never actually went so far as to defy the Mayor outright, or even lend their name in open support of the protesters. None of them, in Roads' opinion, was the sort to kill their colleagues in order to change the Council's mind — but he had been surprised before by how desperately people fought to preserve even a non-viable status quo.

  Still, he had trouble comprehending the motives of the anti-Reassimilation movement — and the killer in particular. It all seemed so simple to him. There was a point beyond which the fight for self-determinism became self-defeating. The only difficulty arose in defining where that point lay. In his opinion, the city had passed it six weeks ago, when the RUSA envoy had arrived. Reassimilation was an easy alternative to a painful, lingering death — the city's certain fate if it never opened its gates again.

  The few doubts he had concerned the RUSA itself: its long-term goals, its aspirations. While it was all very well to open Kennedy in order to gain much-needed resources, it might not be so clever to thereby shackle the city's fate to that of an aggressive military machine. If the RUSA ever went to war, as aggressor or defender, Kennedy would presumably be required to fight alongside it. Whether that was likely or not, Roads had no way of knowing. He didn't even know if there were other nations on the North American continent, let alone ones that might be capable of fighting the RUSA.

  Behind him, the door opened, interrupting his thoughts. Roads cursed himself for not locking it, and glanced into the window to see who it was.

  "I'm sorry to bother you," said Antoni DeKurzak.

  "What do you want?" asked Roads without turning around, already feeling defensive. He had little chance of avoiding the position of scapegoat awaiting him, but he would be damned if he went down without a fight.

  The
liaison officer raised a hand, as though to ward off an attack. "Margaret told me you were up and about. I thought I'd see how you were feeling before I went."

  Roads turned and stared at him suspiciously, but could detect no sign of deception. For once DeKurzak seemed off-guard, even vulnerable.

  "Thanks," he said, making an effort to soften his tone. "I've had better days, but I'll live. You?"

  DeKurzak leaned against the door frame. "Likewise. I've got a meeting with the Mayor later. Not something I'm looking forward to, to be honest."

  "Yeah. Sorry about that."

  "That's okay, Phil. You gave Blindeye your best shot, and I'll be sure to point that out to the Mayor. It wasn't your fault, after all, that someone tipped the Mole off, or that he wasn't working alone."

  Roads shrugged. He wasn't sure DeKurzak's analysis of the situation was correct, but was prepared to let the matter go for the time being. Full marks for enthusiasm, anyway. "Perhaps. I haven't had time to analyse what happened. Maybe when I have, we'll be able to say exactly what went wrong."

  "I sincerely hope so." DeKurzak sighed heavily. "This assignment is much harder than I thought it would be. Maybe I should have turned it down and gone back to Records..."

  "Don't be too hard on yourself," said Roads. "You're young and relatively inexperienced. That's nothing to be ashamed of."

  "I guess not." DeKurzak shrugged. "But the fact remains: we have to catch the Mole." Suddenly animated, the liaison officer took two steps into the room. "I can't stress highly enough how important it is to close this case. Our relationship with the Reunited States, and therefore the future of the city, depends upon it. That may seem like an overstatement, but believe me, it's not. We're hardly in a strong bargaining position, at the moment, and we must fight for every advantage we can get."

  The dark circles around DeKurzak's eyes stopped Roads from protesting that he wasn't stupid. Instead he said: "I understand what you're saying, and can assure you that we're doing everything possible."

  "I know." DeKurzak turned his face aside, as though realising that he had stated his case too emotively. "We have to prove that we can manage our own affairs before they'll even consider leaving our present infrastructure intact. Blindeye's failure leaves us in a very vulnerable position, and the longer the Mole remains free — "

  DeKurzak stopped with a sharp intake of breath. One hand rose to point at the screen on Roads' desk.

  "What the hell is that?" DeKurzak asked.

  Roads moved from the window. The Shadow's inhuman face stared out of the screen back at him.

  "I took it last night," he said, wishing he had been more careful. "It's the man we saw on the roof."

  "Do you know who it is?" DeKurzak's face had become suddenly pale.

  "No. Do you?"

  "No, of course not. If you hadn't told me otherwise I would have guessed it came from the archives — one of the aberrations from the old days." The liaison officer shuddered. "It's disgusting."

  Roads studied DeKurzak, surprised at the vehemence of his reaction. The face of the Shadow was startling, yes, but not that horrifying, for all its differences from the norm. Then he remembered that DeKurzak had probably never seen such drastic biomodification before. From the viewpoint of someone born after the War, the Shadow did look demonic — a pure corruption of humanity, worse even than the berserkers, who had at least retained a passing resemblance to the rest of the human race.

  DeKurzak blinked and wrenched his eyes away from the screen, back to Roads. "You'll let me know when you find out who it is, won't you? We can't have things like that in the city when General Stedman arrives."

  "Of course not."

  "Good."

  DeKurzak left hurriedly, leaving the door open behind him. Roads closed it, not surprised by the liaison officer's parting comment. Given the RUSA's firm stand on biomods, the presence of such a "thing" would not look good at all for Kennedy Polis. Worse even than an uncaught thief.

  Roads saved the picture, reconnected the computer and called Barney. Her face appeared in the screen, a picture of industry in miniature.

  "You've been off-line," she chided. "I tried to call you several times."

  "I was resting," he lied. "You've found something already?"

  "Something weird. Do you want to come down here?"

  "No. I'm not up to the exercise just yet."

  "Okay. I'll bring coffee. Give me five minutes."

  The line went dead, and he settled back to wait. Rather than dwell on the issues DeKurzak had raised — ones he himself had already considered — he drew up a list of the unknown quantities confronting him. How they fit into the equation was still beyond him, but at least he was beginning to know the right questions to ask. Five mysteries requiring, possibly, a single solution:

  (1) The man in the hat and coat last seen fleeing from Old North Street. A coincidence, or significant?

  (2) The items removed from 114 Old North Street: three of part-number EPA44210. What they were he still had no idea.

  (3) The timber wolf. Until Blindeye, he had considered the animal to be irrelevant; since its appearance on the university grounds, he was no longer sure of that.

  (4) The man on the roof of the KCU library, tentatively labelled 'the Shadow'. That he had followed Roads was alone sufficient grounds for suspicion. That plus the fact that he was clearly — radically — biomodified.

  (5) The Mole himself. Roads' fingertips still tingled from the brief moment he had actually touched his adversary. He remembered the cold most of all — possibly a side-effect of the method the Mole was using to make himself invisible. Whatever that was.

  * * *

  As was often the case with apparently unsolvable crimes, Roads suspected that one isolated piece of information was all he required to solve the mystery; it was just a matter of time before he found it. Time, or, as he had told O'Dell the previous day, unbelievably good fortune.

  Blindeye, far from solving anything, had brought the matter to a head. An end was at last in sight, if not the end he had originally hoped for. Reassimilation would make certain of that.

  Even without Reassimilation ... He glanced at his watch. The fact that DeKurzak had not brought up the matter of the X-rays was a good sign, although not one he could rely on for long. He probably had less than twenty-four hours in which to solve the case or face the retribution of the city — a day at most before the call came, and that long only if he was lucky, or the Mayor was in a good mood.

  I can't stress highly enough how important it is to close this case, DeKurzak had said. No mention at all of the killer. Whatever was going on in the Mayoralty — whatever made the Mayor so uneasy about keeping the city secure — seemed to revolve predominantly around the thief. But why? Why not the person or persons behind eighteen dead Councillors?

  Roads had a horrible feeling that one day wasn't going to be long enough.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1:30 p.m.

  The RSD image processing algorithm was similar to that employed by a simple motion-detector. Of a given segment of video footage, one control frame was selected and used as a reference to check all subsequent frames for discrepancies. If an object moved into view, or if one that had been there previously changed position, the program noted the differences and informed the user. The only difference between the image processing program and the motion-detectors employed in Operation Blindeye was finesse; the IP program was considerably more discerning than its outmoded sibling.

  "There," said Barney, pointing at the screen. It showed a section of a hallway on the library's ground floor. To Roads' eyes, it seemed completely unremarkable, and he told her so.

  "That's what I thought, at first. You have to know what you're looking for before you see it." She rewound the recording and pointed again. "Watch the bottom left corner, where the skirting board meets the door frame."

  The scene jerked back into life, and Roads watched obediently.

  "Are you sure you've got the right stre
tch of tape?" he asked after a few seconds. "I still can't see anything but wall."

  "Okay." She sighed. "We'll try again. This time, don't look for something concrete; keep your eye on the boundary between the skirting board and the wall itself."

  "Gotcha. Don't look for something, but anything — or possibly the other way around."

  "Clear as mud. Ready?"

  He nodded, and the recording began for the third time. He kept his eyes firmly fixed on the point she had indicated, but again saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  "Either I've got rocks in my head, or — "

  "Wait." She pointed at the screen. "There!"

  He saw it: a slight dimpling of the picture, like a reflection in a warped mirror. The distinct edge of the skirting board deviated from horizontal for an instant, then snapped back into shape — as though a curved, glass lens, a hand's-width in diameter, had passed between it and the camera.

  "Take it back." She did so. The effect was subtle; he could see no hard edges to define the area of distortion. "Could it be a glitch in the recording?"

  "It's not."

  "Sure?"

  "Positive." She killed the view of the corridor and produced another image. He faced an entrance to a ventilation shaft; the duct opened onto a maintenance corridor in the library's rear and had no grill. The edge of the duct shifted in a similar fashion to the skirting board.

  "I don't suppose you have any idea ... ?"

  She shook her head.

  "I didn't think so." He rubbed a hand across his eyes. "Did you find anything else?"

  She summoned a map of the library. "The dimple doesn't always show on the tape — you can't see it against a blank wall, for instance — but the IP program picks it up often enough to plot an approximate path through the building." She pointed, tracing a line from the basement toilets, up a stairwell, along a corridor, to the ventilation shaft and, finally, into the reading room. "Voila."