by Blaze Ward
“Interesting,” Marc observed. He turned to Zorge with a thin, cold smile. “When you nail down a probable target chop shop, let’s feed the constables an anonymous tip. I want to see these two in action so I know what to prepare for. We know they’re here. But they’ve gone to plainclothes work, so tracking them is harder. Let’s flush everyone out at once.”
“Understood,” Zorge said.
Further conversation ceased as the food arrived. Marc considered the two pounds of rare steak in front of him, with all the fixings. He had rarely eaten this well back on Earth. At least not since he got drummed out of the Sky Patrol.
Maybe he needed to bring in a few more folks from the old neighborhood, once he was well and firmly in control around here. The Accord of Souls was an old lady walking home in a poorly-lit alley, just waiting to be mugged.
Maybe Marc needed to make himself king.
Plainclothes
It felt wrong. Just wrong.
Eveth wasn’t naked in public, but she sure felt that way, wearing civilian clothing as they chased down leads. Back home, she would still be in her bodysuit with the scale armor and the ring badge over her heart.
That intimidated people, however unconsciously. Vanir weren’t the tallest species in the Accord of Souls, but they were the biggest, in terms of size and bulk. Eveth liked to use that to her advantage.
Here, she felt like an insurance salesman, cold-calling for new clients. Most of the people they had interviewed so far today had initially reacted that way when she and Grodray walked through the front door.
People got a lot less antagonistic when she dropped her wallet on the desk and flipped it open to reveal the badge inside, however
Still, they were making maddeningly-slow progress.
Slacks and a blazer did nothing to improve her humor.
Eveth checked the next address. Biomimetics Heavy Southern Industries LLKR.
The local Constabulary office had suggested that the place might be a cover for criminal activities. At no point, however had anybody ever been able to find anything even good enough to get a warrant that they could use as a wedge in the door, turn the place upside down with a fishing expedition.
She wondered if that just meant that the owners knew which local cops and politicians to bribe, to make sure that the authorities never knocked on their door.
She smiled to Grodray, checked the stun pistol tucked inside her jacket next to her insulating undershirt armor, and turned to her partner.
“Ready?”
“Let’s go,” he smiled sternly back.
Eveth stepped into the lift tube.
“Level Forty-seven,” she said aloud.
What will those folks upstairs do when the Constables just show up out of the blue?
There couldn’t be that many places left on Hurquar to hide. Three or four more stops, max, and they would have to rethink their approach. Maybe the human wasn’t going to go out in public, and someone just had him on ice for now, until his violence could be unleashed.
In a way, that made her more comfortable. The thought of a human scaled up to Vanir-size was truly frightening. Most of the Accord were more of a size with humans, as she understood the file Jackeith had showed her. She could take a human in physical combat, unless he had been trained to mastery in one of the amazingly-common hand-to-hand fighting arts that all human cultures seemed to invent.
Did everyone on that planet study violence from the day they could walk?
The lift deposited her on the right floor without providing any answers or solace. Grodray was there a moment later.
“Good cop?” she asked him as she strode down the unremarkable hallway towards a nice, wooden door at the end.
“Bad cop, Eve,” he replied, telling her to take the lead. “The humans call it turning on the light in the middle of the night, to see what scurries for cover.”
She nodded. Like her, he was getting tired of knocking on doors to bland faces and innocent shrugs. She could see that in his eyes. At least three of the places they had hit so far in the last two days had something about them that suggested to Eveth that a future police raid might be entertaining, but this case was too important to randomly kick over ant hills.
They needed to find a human on the loose, and do it without anybody who didn’t already know finding out.
The office door was locked, so Eveth pressed the comm panel to the right side.
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice answered a few moments later. A little light came on next to the speaker, indicating that the camera was working.
Eveth held up her badge, close enough to almost obscure any view of the hallway, and then lowered it so they could see how cross she had gotten today.
“Constabulary,” she said simply. “We’d like to ask the principal researcher a few questions.”
There. Nothing more. You don’t need to know, if you’re innocent. I don’t need to spell it out, if you’re guilty.
A fine game to play. A thin line to walk.
Long pause on the other end. Perhaps vermin scurrying? There was a team back at the precinct, watching for all auto-traffic in and out of this building right now. Anybody running would have the vehicle’s controls remotely overridden and get them deposited nicely in a police parking lot for questioning.
And Eveth could run down anybody on foot.
That left only Elohynn, but there weren’t that many in this city, and there were enough cameras available. They didn’t prevent crime, because it was impossible to watch all the screens at once. Instead, they solved crime by letting investigators go back and track your every step afterwards.
The lock buzzed suddenly.
Eveth gave Grodray a shrug and opened the door. Inside was a corporate reception area so standard they might have all come out of the same decorating catalog. Desk where a receptionist would sit, currently empty. Polished wood walls with art. Two chairs and a sofa for people waiting for meetings.
This place varied from the basic design by including a Brag Wall. Eveth quickly scanned the images of a Nari woman: shaking hands with local politicians and others, accepting awards at various dinner ceremonies, and a couple of scholarly journal covers indicating a woman named Talyarkinash Liamssen published something really big inside.
Blue eyes. Fur just lighter than stone blue, with faint grayer stripes and black highlights. Eveth guessed her to be perhaps in her early thirties. Probably one of those brilliant researchers that finished all their degree work and realized that they would make more money opening a clinic catering to people trying to recapture lost youth, than trying to find gaps in the programs left by the Chaa or curing disease.
But there were always going to be people looking for immortality, however they could arrange it. Most of those folks would get scammed out of their money, but that wasn’t Eveth’s problem. It was the ones who might succeed that she had to handle.
Or folks willing to transform a human to hide him from the authorities.
Doctor Liamssen emerged from an inside door a moment later. The photos really didn’t do the woman justice, or perhaps she had used her art on herself. Eveth would have said this woman was barely out of school rather than old enough to have established a corporation like this.
Eveth made a note to look her up later. Something just didn’t smell right, already, and woman hadn’t even spoken.
“Good afternoon,” the Nari woman said carefully, pulling the door closed behind her so that three of them were alone in the front room. “I’m Doctor Liamssen. How may I help you, officers?”
“Constable Eveth Baker,” she flashed the badge again, watching the woman’s eyes for a reaction. “This is my partner, Senior Constable Grodray. We’re investigating a smuggling case, and your organization came up in an offhand way. Normally, nothing, but the sensitivity of this case requires us to check off on every box individually, so we need to ask you some questions. Is there a conference room where we could talk?”
“I was actually in th
e middle of something…” the woman began.
“And we won’t keep you very long, Dr. Liamssen,” Eveth overrode her. “But we don’t really have any flexibility here, and we’d like to get back to our case before the good leads grow cold.”
Sharp blue eyes. Intelligent. Calculating the odds right now.
Everyone has something they want to hide. How hard did the good doctor want to push back on a pair of unknown Constables that just popped in for a bit of tea?
Eveth smiled. Dr. Liamssen smiled back, but it was plastic and brittle.
“Yes, I suppose,” the doctor said. “If this won’t take long.”
“Just a few minutes, Dr. Liamssen,” Grodray suddenly spoke up, his baritone voice drawing the woman’s eyes and face back sharply.
The doctor was perhaps five foot eight, not counting her ears. A little taller than normal for a Nari female. Eveth was six foot seven, and out-weighed the woman by probably eighty pounds, all of it bone and muscle.
But Jackeith, the quiet one behind her, was seven foot one and three hundred pounds. Even as a skinny guy, the Nari would probably feel like a child next to a serious adult.
The look in the woman’s eyes gave that much away.
She quickly led them back through the door into a large, spacious work area, with several black-topped workbenches that had seen hard use. Lighting overhead was bright and sharp, rather than friendly. Every blemish in anything would be shown.
Good thing to know about the occupant.
Eveth scanned the various things on workbenches, but couldn’t even begin to describe them, let along classify things. Biomimetics, she seemed to remember, was about studying natural systems to replicate them in scaled-up formats, but how you did that wasn’t something Eveth had ever bothered with.
At least this place wasn’t breeding better food animals so she didn’t have a wall of scared rabbits staring out at her, and all the fear/shit smell that went with it like that one time.
This place was almost a showroom, by comparison. Utterly clean ad lacking any personality.
The doctor led them to a small conference room off to one side, with a picture window looking back over the main room.
Eveth sat and pulled out her notebook to record a few thoughts.
“So what can I do for you, officers?” Liamssen said in a voice that was too forced to be calm and innocent.
But nobody was innocent.
“Smuggling,” Eveth challenged the woman. “What do you know?”
It was a throwaway question. The sort of thing they taught you in police school to knock a subject off kilter. You didn’t care what words came out of the suspect’s mouth. Instead, you were watching how her mannerisms change when she’s surprised.
When she forgets what lies she has prepared for them.
“Huh?” Liamssen replied, utter confusion resculpting her face, ears headed different directions, whiskers twitching a-harmonically.
“Sorry,” Eveth wasn’t, but it sounded good. “An organization that has dealt with you in the past has been accused of smuggling controlled chemicals without clearances or tax stamps. We need to eliminate you as fast as we can as a suspect. However, this is a very confidential case, so we can’t tell you who they are. I was hoping we could take a quick scan of the premises and get a copy of your last ninety days’ worth of inventory, just so we can mark you off the list and move on to the next place.”
The eyes gave her away. She was good, but the nostrils flared a little too much, as if trying to smell the lies Eveth was peddling. The pupils expanded.
Eveth would have been willing to guess that the fur on the back of the Nari’s scruff was standing up right now, hard as the woman was trying to hide it.
“I don’t believe we keep those sorts of records on site,” the doctor deflected well. “This is the lab, and most of the paperwork is in the main office. Is there something you can tell me? Perhaps I might be able to show you the right things?”
Eveth glanced significantly over a Grodray, as if asking permission. She was making it up as she went, and he knew that, but cops were never required to tell suspects the truth, except on the witness stand.
“Unlicensed genetic engineering,” Eveth said in a conspiratorial tone, dropping her voice a little and adding a quaver of emotion.
She did it quite well today. Must be on.
“Oh?” the doctor countered, still off-balance.
“Someone is conducting experiments that go well beyond younger skin and different eyes, Doctor Liamssen,” Eveth admitted on an awkward voice, watching the scientist’s reaction. “Those require specialist chemicals that most labs have no need to maintain, so we just need to check your hazardous materials placards and refrigerator, and then we’ll be on our way.”
“Oh,” the Nari brightened suddenly, like Eveth had just taken a weight off the woman’s shoulders. She stood like an excited schoolgirl. “That we can do. Right this way.”
Eveth smiled and rose, innocent as the dawn, and fell into the woman’s wake. Out into the main room, so clean and well organized. Right to a four-ring binder thick with laminated cards and stamped with dates.
Eveth made it look like she was carefully checking things, flipping through them one at a time and making interested noises, plus occasional chuckles and harrumphs.
She had no idea what ninety percent of them even were, let alone what a geneticist might do with them. Didn’t matter. She wasn’t watching the notebook.
“The refrigerator?” Eveth asked after she had finished the notebook.
“There are two,” the Nari doctor pointed across the room. “Or rather, the large one is at thirty-five degrees, and the small one is at fifteen below zero, depending on the materials we’re working with in our experiments.”
Eveth took the big one first. Inside, lots of vials and bottles for a pulse injector, plus a few larger bottles, none of which she could identify. Still, she pulled out her pocketcomm and dutifully took a couple of pictures so she had labels to inspect. The freezer differed only in that the bottles were usually metal, with screw-on lids and ice rimed on the outside. More pictures. More evidence, as it were.
“I think we’ve got everything we need, Doctor Liamssen,” Eveth said brightly. She turned to her partner. “On to the next one?”
“Very good,” he said. Grodray even bowed to the Nari woman. “Doctor Liamssen, thank you for your help.”
“My pleasure,” the woman said. “Will there be anything else?”
“No,” Eveth said. “I’ve seen everything I need to. And we can show ourselves out. Thank you.”
Grodray led. Eveth followed, twitchy because she didn’t have her usual armor on, if a shot was going to strike her in the back she had turned.
But they made it to the door, unlocked it, and exited.
Jackeith didn’t even look back, but walked right to the drop-tube.
“Ground floor,” he said, vanishing.
Eveth was a step behind him, and a beat back at the first floor.
He stepped to a quiet corner and looked significantly.
“How soon can you get a warrant for that place?” she asked. “That woman’s hiding something so big I thought her heart would explode.”
“Agreed,” he said. “I’ll need twenty minutes or so to pass a message to the right people. They’ll need another twenty to get us the paperwork we need. Think they’ll wait that long up there?”
“Don’t know,” Eveth said. “I tried to play it casual, but she might have made us. You noticed how excited she was to show off the main room?”
“I did.”
“I’ve never been in a working lab that clean,” Eveth said. “Day one, something gets spilled, or set on fire, or broken. The only way that place is that clean…”
“Is if it has never been used, and what we saw was a stage for folks like us, if we broke in,” he completed the thought. “We might have found our target. We’ve certainly found somebody. You wait here. I’ll call this in and ha
ve all auto-traffic to the building locked down until we can land a Heavy Response Tactical Group on the roof.”
Eveth moved to the front atrium of the building. A hex like this was impossible for one person to cover, but she found a tea shop table with a great view of the big, open space and settled herself in. Anyone emerging from the drop tube would be visible to her before they could slink out a side entrance.
And she could run down any human.
Made
Gareth looked up as Talyarkinash came down the secret stairs three at a time. He hadn’t noticed before, because he was always studying her face for clues, but she was wearing shoes with no heel and barely any cushion, instead of the two to four inch heels most women, most human women, wore in public as a matter of course. And baggy, maroon pants that gathered at the ankle, vaguely like harem pants, plus a long, green tunic.
But the shoes were what threw him off. She wasn’t human, so applying human fashion standards to the woman felt wrong. Off.
And human women wore skirts, not slacks. Right?
“We’re made,” she called out as she came into sight.
Gareth had found another room beyond the dentist chair and the music studio. There was a whole suite of rooms through there, as a matter of fact, but he was in a common room right now, seated on one end of a couch reading about the history of the Accord of Souls on a space tablet Talyarkinash had gotten for him.
Morty was on a barstool that telescoped down for a Yuudixtl and up to a Nari-height bar. Xiomber was at a low table, eating a sandwich he had made from ingredients in a refrigerator in the kitchen, down the north hall.
Gareth had slept in a room down the south hall. At first, he had been concerned that the woman might try to slip into his room, in spite of his commitment to Pippa. He had locked the door just in case. But after that first afternoon, if she was going to do that, Gareth was pretty sure she’d be bringing a gun.
