“Don’t mistake the messenger for the message,” Bedivere reminded her. “Besides, it’s about time we had an argument.”
“We argue all the time!”
“About trivialities, yes. This is different.”
“You want us to be troubled?”
“I would much rather see nothing but love in your face. Entropy is insidious, though. Nothing stays the same forever. If we are not moving forward, then we’re regressing. If we weather this, then we will have moved forward. We’ll be stronger. For that reason I welcome it. If the trouble comes from outside us, then that’s something I can fight. I can do something about that.”
Her yawn caught her by surprise.
“Tomorrow,” he added.
* * * * *
Bedivere’s thrashing woke her. Catherine sat up. “Lights.”
The house AI bought the lights up to a level that was just enough to see the bed. Dark shadows hovered all around it.
Bedivere’s eyes were closed, the pupils underneath moving rapidly. He tossed his head on the pillow, which was sweat stained. His body glistened as he writhed.
Catherine grabbed his shoulder and shook furiously. “Bedivere!”
He moaned. The sound was that of a man in torment. She shook again, harder.
This time, she roused him. He woke with a jolt that shook the bed. He breathed heavily and his gaze found her.
“I think you were actually having a nightmare,” she said. “You said you didn’t dream.”
He licked his lips and swallowed and laid his arm over his head to shield his eyes from the light. “I don’t dream,” he said. His voice was croaky. “At least, I didn’t until now.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
His breathing slowed. “It was horrible….” He spoke in a near whisper. Then he said no more.
Catherine laid her hand over his. “Was it about me?” That seemed a likely possibility.
Bedivere’s gaze moved back to her face again. “And Kemp.” He looked away again.
“That jealousy thing is a bitch, isn’t it?” She kept her voice light. There was no need to add to his horror. The nightmare would’ve delivered its own punishment.
Bedivere sat up and pushed his legs over the edge of the bed. “I think I’m going to go and read. Or watch a tank show. Something.”
“You know that if you go straight back to sleep, there’s very little chance you’ll have the same dream?”
He looked at her over his shoulder as he thrust his legs into his pants. “Tell me you’ve never returned to a dream a second time. A really vivid dream, that wouldn’t let go.”
She stayed silent.
Bedivere got to his feet and looked at her. “I can still hear you screaming my name.” He touched his temple. “In here. I think I always will, now.”
“If it really was a nightmare,” she said, “then it will fade. I promise.”
“Except I’m not exactly like you, am I?” He said bitterly. “I am the first of my kind and neither of us knows what my future is.” He shifted on his feet, toward the door. “Go back to sleep, Cat. I won’t have you losing sleep because I’m full of doubts.”
“I thought I was the one with the doubts.”
“You’re not the one having nightmares about them.” He shut the door gently behind him.
Catherine suspected that sleep would be a poor companion after that. Yet she woke to sunshine streaming through the high windows and lay blinking, orienting herself. She was the only one in the bed and that brought Bedivere’s nightmare rushing back to her.
The house AI chimed. It was the intercom signal. “Catherine, come quickly!” It was Lilly’s voice and she sounded closer to panic than Catherine had ever heard her before. “Glave save us, Kemp is dead.”
Chapter Four
Nicia (Sunita II), Sunita System. FY 10.092
Catherine didn’t remember running through the complex. She only remembered arriving at Kemp’s room, where Brant and Lilly stood in the doorway, watching for her.
“Where is Bedivere?” she asked them.
“He wasn’t with you?” Brant asked.
Catherine shook her head. “He couldn’t sleep.”
She stepped into the room and looked around. Kemp Rodagh lay on the floor, on his back. His eyes were open. He was unmistakably dead, for someone had taken a knife to his flat and fit abdomen and sawed right up the middle of it.
He rested in a pool of his own blood, wearing only the trousers he had arrived in. He was barefoot, as if he had been woken from sleep and had thrust them on for the sake of modesty.
The bed was rumpled and the covers thrown back, supporting the supposition.
Catherine’s gaze return to the gaping wound in his stomach.
“Computer, witness mode,” she called.
“Recording,” the AI said.
Brant moved into the room beside her, while Lilly stayed back at the doorway. “It couldn’t have been any of us. None of us had reason to do this. We barely knew him.”
Catherine’s heart squeezed. “The AI is in witness mode, so no one can tamper with it. Bedivere was tracking Kemp’s movements inside the complex. There’ll be a record of where he went last night. We can pull a copy before the gendarmes arrive.”
“You’re going to call in the police?” Brant asked softly.
“Not just yet. I have questions of my own I want to answer first. We need to move out of this room and seal it.” She stepped around him and went to the door, then looked over her shoulder.
Brant was staring at the body. “No alarms, no alerts. The shields were up. I don’t understand.”
“Brant,” she repeated.
He stirred himself and stepped out of the room.
“Lilly please seal the door.”
Lilly nodded. Her face was very pale.
Catherine headed down the corridor door, moving fast.
“Where are you going?” Lilly asked. She sounded frightened.
“I’m going to get dressed. Follow me if you want.”
Both Brant and Lilly came to her room. She knew they just wanted to stay within her proximity because this had shaken them badly. They were both children of College indoctrination. To them human life was utterly sanctified. The idea of deliberately taking a life in cold blood in this way, for no reason that they could currently understand, distressed them.
Brant had taken more than a few lives at the point of a gun as an Ammonite, when he had been working for what he thought was the greater good—the progress of mankind.
Catherine, however, knew there was a darker side to humanity that all the indoctrination in the world did not remove. While the death of Kemp distressed her, the fact that he had been murdered did not. She was not mentally stumbling, trying to encompass that someone would be capable of such an act. She knew in her bones that any human, given the right motives, would kill.
She dressed quickly. “Computer, locate Bedivere, please.”
“Bedivere is not in the complex,” the computer replied.
Catherine glanced at Brant and Lilly and saw her surprise mirrored on their faces. She looked over at the screen and said, “Show me the top deck, please.”
The image on the screen shifted from Kemp’s room to the grassed over deck at the top of the complex, where the landing pads were. Only one zipper sat there.
She pressed her lips together, stopping herself from speaking. There wasn’t enough information yet to even begin to speculate on what was happening. Bedivere’s departure may be completely unrelated to Kemp’s demise.
That didn’t stop her heart from beating harder.
Because the AI was in witness mode, the screen moved back to Kemp’s room. The still body was partially hidden by the bed. The blood was not.
Catherine deliberately moved to a spot in the room where she could not see the screen easily.
“We should call someone,” Brant said. “The gendarmes….”
“We will, just not now.”
“Why not?” Lilly asked, her voice sharp.
“He was murdered, Catherine. Someone deliberately took his life. And now Bedivere is not here….” Brant added.
Catherine met Brant’s gaze. “Do you really think Bedivere killed him? Bedivere?”
Brant’s gaze flickered away from her. After a long moment, he said, “It doesn’t seem likely.”
“That means you think it’s possible.” She wondered why she was pressing the point. Did she really want to hear this answer? She already knew what Brant was thinking, because she was asking herself the same questions.
Brant sighed. “Bedivere has been on edge lately with Jo’s death and I know that you and he argued last night. Something about Kemp.” His discomfort was acute. Yet he was making himself say it anyway.
“Arguments don’t generally make people kill someone. It usually takes long-term resentment, or severe trauma for that to happen. Up until yesterday, none of us had seen Kemp since we first met him. Let’s not draw any conclusions until we know much more than we do now. Lilly, we can’t move the body, not until formalities have been completed,” and she glanced at Brant, “and we will get to those formalities, including calling the gendarmes, eventually. For now, we should find Kemp’s personal data cache.”
“You won’t be able to start the regeneration process without a death certificate,” Lilly said.
“I know. I want everything ready to go as soon as that certificate is in hand. I really want to talk to Kemp.”
“If he followed standard procedure,” Brant said, “he will have backed up daily. There’s a good chance he will be missing the last day, maybe two. He certainly will not remember how he died.”
Catherine moved past them and down the corridor to her office. Brant and Lilly followed her. “I know he won’t be able to tell us who killed him. He will be able to tell us why he was here, though. We can start from there.”
“He couldn’t get back to Soward,” Lilly said. “That’s why he was here.”
“Really? Are you sure of that?” Catherine asked. She moved over to the desk and switched everything on.
“You think he had a hidden agenda?” Brant asked.
“I’m trying not to think at all right now,” she said honestly. “Have a seat. Both of you. Computer, display the tracking logs for Kemp Rodagh, starting from his arrival at the complex yesterday.”
The heads-up display streamed lines of text that scrolled up to the edge of the invisible screen.
“No video?” Lilly asked. “No images?”
Catherine shook her head. “Bedivere initiated passive tracking, I suppose because he was wondering why Kemp was here, too. It would’ve been invasive to follow him everywhere with a lens, because he was simply being cautious.” She was scanning the log lines as they scrolled upward, picking out the timestamps. “Halt,” she said.
“That was after dinner,” Lilly said, looking at the log line Catherine had displayed. “He was in the kitchen. With you.”
They both looked at her.
“He bought some empty dishes,” Catherine said.
Brant nodded toward the heads-up. “You were alone with him in the kitchen for ten minutes. How long does it take to recycle dirty dishes?”
“Then Bedivere arrived. Look.” Lilly pointed at the display.
“Then you left, thirty seconds afterward.” Brant looked at her through the heads-up. “I’m not an expert at reading passive logs,” he said. “You do know what that looks like don’t you?”
“I know. It looks as though Bedivere caught us doing something he didn’t like. That’s not what actually happened. Kemp and I were talking about Jovanka…and Bedivere.”
“What were you talking about, specifically?” Brant asked.
“Kemp had information that said that Jovanka was very old, possibly older than Bedivere and that she really had gone rogue. That she was delusional and suffering a persecution complex.”
“That’s what you argued with Bedivere about last night,” Brant said softly.
She shook her head. “I know what it appears to be. I do. We weren’t arguing, though. Bedivere didn’t believe Kemp and I….” She pressed her lips together. “I wasn’t sure.”
“Did Bedivere know that you doubted him?” Lilly asked sharply.
Catherine sighed. “Yes.”
“And he took Jo’s death hard, too,” Brant added.
“Then there was Kemp, arguing the traditionalist position, that computers are dangerous. Bedivere thought you believed Kemp.” Lilly pressed her hands together the fingers intertwining. Her knuckles were white.
“Are you to trying to convince me that Bedivere killed him? Or yourselves?” Catherine asked dryly. “Why are you even considering it? You know Bedivere. You know he wouldn’t do this, hell, he won’t even carry a gun unless forced to.”
“It’s not evidence,” Brant said. “However, the facts are damning.”
Catherine shook her head. She had no answer for that. Instead, she turned back to the heads-up display. “Computer, continue.”
There were only four other entries after that. Kemp went to his room not long after Catherine had left the kitchen. Then, in the early hours of the morning he went out to the common room. That was not remarkable. However, the entry logged a second person in the common room. Her heart sank.
“Bedivere was there,” Lilly whispered.
“And they were both went back to Kemp’s room.” Brant added.
The very last entry showed Bedivere leaving the room nearly an hour later. Catherine stared at the entry, her thoughts reeling.
“We must call in the gendarmes,” Brant said. His voice was gentle. “The longer you wait….”
She swallowed. Brant was right of course. “There’s no reason not to, now. We have all the answers we can get on our own. Once the room and the body are processed, we’ll know more. Lilly, would you mind calling them? If I call, it will be instant news. The feeds are registered to my voice print. For as long as possible, I would prefer to keep this out of the news. That won’t last forever and I want a chance to resolve this before the speculation begins.”
“You know what they going to say, don’t you?” Brant said.
“I can see the streamers now,” she said tiredly.
* * * * *
The Oceania authorities were just as anxious as Catherine to keep everything under wraps. Nicia was a law-abiding world and there hadn’t been a murder here for decades. Once news broke, tourism would drop and the economy would suffer.
Because the gendarmes were not used to processing a murder, things moved slowly. They were cautious even in the way they spoke to her, tiptoeing around her. Catherine knew they had drawn conclusions from the logs and from the interviews with Brant, Lilly and her. Of course they had—as Brant had said, the evidence was compelling.
It took twenty-nine hours for the room to be processed. Catherine did not protest over the delay. She wanted them to take their time and get it right. It was the longest twenty-nine hours of her life.
As the processing, testing and analysis wound to a conclusion, the gendarmes grew steadily more silent. They stopped looking at her sideways. They stopped looking at her at all. They began to whisper to each other and there were lots of conferences around the portable terminals as they consulted with others.
Brant, Lilly and Catherine stayed in the common room and used the galley to generate food and drink as they needed it. None of them seem to have an appetite, so mostly they just sat.
The common room featured cathedral ceilings and floor-to-ceiling armored steel glass that made up one wall, that provided a lot of the energy that ran the complex. Catherine watched the sun appear at the top of the window wall toward the late afternoon, then sink down into the sea in a spectacular display of purples and reds.
Not long after, a man they had not seen before threaded his way through the furniture over to where they all sat in a silent group next to the window. He was wearing an old-fashioned business suit
that looked freshly cleaned. He was drawing close to his next regeneration, for silver was showing at his temples and there were deep wrinkles around his eyes and mouth.
He did not sit down. “Mr. Shahrazad,” he began. “I have a few questions, if you don’t mind?”
“We are happy to cooperate,” Catherine said. She waved to the armchair sitting between the two sofas. The others who had questioned them this long day had all used that chair—usually uninvited.
The man sat down. “My name is Done Rison. I am the president of Oceania Securities.”
“You’re not with the gendarmerie?” Brant said.
“The gendarmes are out of their depth,” Rison said. “I have had personal experience dealing with violent crimes, so they asked me to step in as a consultant.”
“You’re not a native of Nicia?” Catherine asked.
“Since the planet was established, Nicia has recorded only five murders. It must be the sea air. No, I am not a native of Nicia.” He gave her a small smile. “Have you tried to contact Mr.… er… Bedivere?”
Catherine resisted the impulse to roll her eyes at the obvious question. “Constantly, throughout the day. I can’t reach him.”
“Or perhaps he chooses not to respond?” Rison suggested.
Catherine kept her mouth shut.
“Would it surprise you to know that Mr.…that Bedivere left Nicia early this morning?”
“You make it sound as though he was escaping,” Catherine said. “I’m sure by now you know exactly who Bedivere is. You must also know that for him, jumping to another planet is like you stepping over to the next complex. It is a barely significant shift in location.” She kept her voice casual as she asked her own question, making it sound as if the answer was of mild, passing interest to her. “Where did he jump to?”
“We don’t know. No one seems to know. He hasn’t registered at any gate station that we know of.” Rison studied her. “It is almost as if he doesn’t want to be found.”
Catherine decided she did not like Rison. “Or perhaps he simply forgot to register at the gate station. As he doesn’t use gates, it’s not as though his ship is automatically logged.”
“We have finished analyzing the room and the body,” Rison said, abruptly changing subject. “Nicia may be at a loss to deal with a murder, but there are exceptional research laboratories here. We not only scrubbed for any biological traces, including DNA, prints and pheromones, we also took a bio-map image and sent it to other experts to analyze.”
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