Metal Sky

by Jay Caselberg

  “Billie?” he called.

  A few moments later she appeared in her bedroom doorway, her clothes rumpled.

  “What?”

  “Oh, shit, sorry. I thought for a moment you weren’t here.” He felt himself relax.

  “Got tired. Couldn’t think.”

  “Yeah, sorry.”

  She wandered into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water and came back in, clambered onto the couch, pulled her legs up in front of her and took a couple of sips.

  “Well?” she said with a big sniff.

  Jack collapsed into the chair. “She’s gone.”

  “What do you mean?” Billie frowned across at him.

  “Gone. Checked out. Don’t know where she is.”

  Billie shook her head. “Great. What are you going to do?”

  Jack leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “Don’t know yet. I need to think about it a bit more. There’s something going on here.” He lowered his face again and looked at her. Her lips were set in a thin disapproving line and her eyes were narrowed. He ignored the expression.

  “Did you get anywhere with the artifact?”

  She sighed and pushed a tangle of hair away from her forehead. “Maybe.” She shrugged. “I need to look some more.”

  “Okay.”

  Jack glanced at the time display. He still had about an hour before things started shutting down for the evening. “Listen, I’ve had a thought. I’m going to try something.”

  She gave a half shrug and then took another sip of the water. He left her sitting there and went into the office, heading straight for the shelf where he’d dropped the card. Investigator Jim Morrish. He’d run into Morrish again for some reason, and right now it was time to put that coincidence to the test. Taking his seat, he put in the call.

  “Yorkstone police.” Another front desk program.

  “Investigator Morrish, please.”

  “Connecting you now.”

  Jim Morrish’s big doughy face floated into the screen. “Morrish,” he said, all business, but then his face broke into a grin. “Stein. Hello. I didn’t expect to get a call from you so soon.”

  “Yeah, well, you know. It’s funny how things happen.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  Jack paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts before continuing. “It’s a case I’m working on,” he said. “I was just wondering if you’d heard anything.”

  The grin faded and Morrish leaned forward. “What is it?”

  “I’m looking for this guy called Carl Talbot. I was wondering if you’d heard the name.”

  There was a flicker of a frown and Morrish leaned in still closer. “You know I’m happy to help you out, Jack, but there are other people around here who might not be so happy. It’s not proper procedure, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Jack. “But . . .”

  Morrish looked away to either side, then back at the screen. In the background Jack could see movement, the vague shapes of other desks, other people. A police station was still a police station no matter where it was. A large board was on one wall with papers and pictures stuck on it. They didn’t even use the building’s programmed capacity. Morrish frowned and then shook his head. “No, the name’s not familiar, but I’ll keep my ears open for you.”

  “I’d appreciate it, Jim,” Jack said. He didn’t want to mention the Farrell woman, not yet. He was certain that if he found Talbot, then he’d find her and possibly the artifact too. “You know where I am,” he said.

  “Yeah. It’s on file somewhere. I can look it up. See you sometime for that drink, hey?”

  Jack nodded and cut the connection.

  Six

  It took Billie two days to come up with something relevant to the artifact, and even then Jack wasn’t sure how useful it was.

  “So tell me.”

  She was grinning from ear to ear, standing in the middle of the living room, waving a hand at the wall—very different from her usual huddled position in the corner of the couch.

  “It was really hard, but I did it. It’s archeology.”

  “It’s what?”

  “Archeology,” she said triumphantly.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “There’s this planet and they’re doing all this archeology stuff there. Only it’s different. Xeno-archeology.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s like archeology, but it’s alien archeology.” She sat down, waiting for him to catch some of her excitement, pulling her legs up in front of her and clasping her arms in front of them, rocking slightly back and forth. Jack couldn’t share the enthusiasm. It made no sense to him. What the hell did archeology have to do with finding a missing object, and a family heirloom at that?

  Jack paced the room. “I don’t get it. I don’t know anything about aliens. What aliens?”

  She’d stopped rocking and had started to acquire that set to her jaw that told him she wasn’t impressed.

  She sighed. “Don’t you read anything, Jack?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, sure. But I don’t see . . .”

  She rolled her eyes.

  He came back and sat. “Okay. Tell me.”

  “It was on the newsfeeds a couple of years ago, but I found something and I remembered about it. It was an article. They said they’d found something on a planet called Mandala. There’s been a big project there, digging through what’s left from some alien civilization. It’s really interesting.”

  If it had been a couple of years ago, his attention had probably been elsewhere. “Yeah, okay. I remember something a few years back about some alien ruins or something, but what’s that got to do with this thing?”

  “Well, they found something there.” She was half grinning again.

  “Don’t tell me . . .”

  Billie nodded. “The article was talking about this tablet, made of some metal that they didn’t know anything about. Well, they thought it was metal, but they weren’t sure. There wasn’t anything they could test it with. They were really excited back then, but then things sort of went away when they made no progress. The interest kind of died. Anyway, this thing had designs on it, and they thought that it was some sort of translation device, or a key or something. Because of where they found it, they said it had been left as a pointer.”

  Jack leaned forward, suddenly interested again. That would tie in with the dream he’d had, that cast metallic sky stretching to the horizon with strange markings all over it, shafts of light heading into the distance. But what would someone like Bridgett Farrell want with something like that?

  “Jack?”

  “Yeah . . . sorry. Thinking.”

  “Do you want to see the article?”

  “No, it wouldn’t make any sense to me probably anyway. You just tell me about it.” Jack scratched his head. “I didn’t know there really were any aliens. I think I dismissed it as speculation at the time.”

  She nodded. “They don’t know if they’re still alive. All they’ve found is a few ruins and things on a couple of planets. They’re still trying to work out what they were and whether it’s some ancient civilization that all died out, or whether it was the end of an empire or something like that. They haven’t even worked out what they looked like yet. There’s been a team on this place Mandala for nearly two years.”

  “A team from where?”

  “Some university. I can’t remember the name, but I can go back and find out.”

  Yeah, okay, that made sense, but he still couldn’t see that there could be anything to link either Bridgett Farrell or the mysterious disappearing Carl Talbot to an archeological dig on some deserted planet. At least he assumed it was deserted.

  “Which university?”

  “I said I can look it up,” she said, a hint of exasperation creeping into her voice.

  “No, don’t bother now. Later will do.” There were other things about an operation like that that they’d need to find out too. Something that big didn’t exist in a
vacuum. He grinned at the thought. Maybe it did. He didn’t know anything about Mandala, what sort of planet it was, anything. It could be an airless rock for all he knew.

  Billie was looking at him strangely. “What’s so funny?”

  “No, nothing, sorry. Tell me more.” He sat forward, his hands linked in front of him, totally attentive. “So how do you know this thing is the same one from Mandala?”

  “They had a picture.”

  Jack nodded. “Okay, I’m going to need you to find out anything you can about the archeological team, about the university and about this planet Mandala. We also need to find out if there’s any record of our Bridgett Farrell leaving Yorkstone. Somehow, I don’t think she has. What’s she doing here? That’s the question. Why here and not somewhere else? It’s hardly the place for interplanetary commerce. I’ve got a hunch that whatever brought her here in the first place is going to be keeping her here.”

  A low insistent chiming from the wall interrupted his flow. Damn. He knew that sound. It was different from the normal tone indicating a call. He waved Billie away, and she jumped quickly off the couch and disappeared into the bedroom. She knew the sound too. Police.

  “Answer,” said Jack. Morrish’s face, larger than life, appeared across the wall.

  “Hello, Stein.”

  “Hello, Investigator,” said Jack, waiting.

  “I thought I’d give you a call.”

  “Uh-huh. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, you know that guy you were asking about, Carl Talbot?”

  Jack nodded.

  Morrish waited a couple of seconds, his eyes narrowed slightly. The guy was like an open book. He was clearly waiting to see if Jack gave any reaction.

  “Well, we found him.”

  Jack leaned forward. “Great,” he said. “Where is he?”

  “This is strictly off the record, Stein.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “I should have said we found what’s left of him.”

  Jack felt a chill run through him. “Where? How?”

  “That’s not important right now. Someone had taken to him with a high-powered energy weapon. Not a pretty sight, Stein.”

  So that’s what this was about, and that’s why Morrish was calling him on the police channel. He could just as easily have used a private line. Or maybe Jack was just reading too much into it.

  “Jesus, I’m sorry.”

  Morrish looked down, and then slowly looked up again. “What do you know about it, Jack?”

  Jack stood. “Nothing. This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “Why did you want to find Carl Talbot?”

  “You know better than that, Morrish. I can’t tell you.” He walked around behind the couch and leaned forward, his hands on its back, thinking hard. Someone had taken Talbot out of the picture and there had to be a reason for that. This artifact had suddenly become even more interesting.

  “Listen, Stein, I’m doing you a favor calling you, now do me a favor. Why did you want him?”

  Jack walked back around in front of the couch and spread his hands. “I can’t help you, Jim. As much as I’d like to. I just don’t know, right now. I have no idea why someone would want to kill this guy and I have no idea who might want to kill this guy. I just wanted to find him. I don’t even know if the case has anything to do with whoever got rid of him or why they might want to do so. Who knows what this Talbot was into? I don’t. Do you?”

  Morrish gave a short unamused laugh. “Pretty good, Jack. Not good enough though. I can’t tell you anything either. You know that.”

  “Yeah, well, give me the same respect, Morrish. If I could give you anything I would.”

  Morrish pursed his lips and nodded. “All right. But keep in touch. We’ll be talking again.” The wall blanked and Jack stood where he was, staring at it.

  Talbot dead. No Bridgett Farrell. It was getting better and better. And now he’d probably pissed off Morrish, his only decent contact in the department.

  “Billie?”

  She appeared from her room, glanced nervously at the wall, and then took up her usual position on the couch.

  “Did you listen?”

  “Nuh-uh,” she said.

  “Talbot’s dead.”

  She blinked a couple of times as she processed the statement. “So I guess we don’t have to find him,” she said, and shrugged.

  “Yeah, you guess right,” said Jack, shaking his head and turning away. “But I guess we have to find Bridgett Farrell now, don’t we? She’s the only link to finding this artifact, and finding the artifact is the only way we’re going to turn this case into something that’s worth anything.” He turned back to face her. “So, the task now just got all the more simple. We have to find Farrell.”

  She shrugged again. “I guess.”

  “Well, you’re damned right we do. Listen, I think now’s the time for me to do some work. You do what you want for awhile. I’m going to need a bit of space in the office undisturbed. Okay? You’ve got enough to do, don’t you?”

  She looked at him, her chin thrust out. “I want to go out.”

  “Yeah, you do that, Billie.” For some reason, her sudden threatened petulance was starting to annoy him, especially after what he’d felt on coming back to the apartment and thinking she was gone.

  “Aren’t you going to come?”

  “No, Billie. I told you. I have to do some work, some real work for once, okay? You go out.”

  He turned, headed into the office, and closed the door. She’d be perfectly all right on her own. She’d probably catch the shuttle up to Molly’s or somewhere, and she had enough credit on her own handipad for whatever she needed to do. Besides, if she got into trouble, she could call, couldn’t she. He stood behind the door, debating for a moment, and then shook his head. No, she’d be fine.

  “Lock,” he said. “Dark.”

  The windows opaqued, turning from transparent to darkened gray, letting the minimum of light through. In the dimness he stripped off his coat, shirt, shoes and trousers, then stepped across to the couch that sat at one side of the office. He reached up to a shelf above the couch and pulled down the inducer pads that would force him down into sleep state. It had been a while since he’d done this. In Yorkstone, he’d been forced to adapt his office space into a workroom as well, putting up with the dual purpose. Back in the Locality, he’d had separate space for these procedures, but here, with Billie, he just couldn’t afford the luxury.

  With a wry grimace, he affixed the inducer pads to his temples and lay back on the couch, forcing his breathing slower, trying to clear his mind.

  “Commence,” he said quietly. He closed his eyes, shutting out the gray dim shapes of the office, trying to clear them from his consciousness. He felt the waves starting to press in on his awareness as the inducer started working, teasing him away from consciousness, away into darkness and sleep. That was his cue. Jack conjured an image of Talbot in his mind, trying to forget what Morrish had told him. He brought the artifact into his perception, trying to hold the two images together in his mind as he drifted farther and farther downward into blackness.

  There was light. Blue-white light picked out details of a landscape unfamiliar to him. Jack stood in a pretty field, squinting against the glare. Grass, wild and tangled and sprinkled with tall wildflowers, stretched out toward a low hill in one direction, and what he presumed were trees in the other. They didn’t look like trees, but they grew out of the ground and were clustered together. In place of trunks, four large branches stuck into the ground, and they were slick, reflecting back the bright light. A single spire reached skyward on each one, making it look like a cluster of framed cathedrals. The air carried a tang. Jack wrinkled his nose. It was a bit like old sweat. He turned slowly, looking for some clue that might tell him where he was. Which way was he supposed to go? He thought about heading for the trees, but there seemed to be nothing prompting him to go in that particular direction. For a moment he tried w
illing himself upward, but in this instance he seemed confined to the ground. No flying here. Pity. With a shrug, he started walking in the direction of the low hill.

  As he neared, a figure crested the rise, silhouetted with glare so he could not make out the features. He stopped walking and waited. The figure stood at the top of the rise, seeming as though it was looking down at him. Jack couldn’t quite tell. The figure started down the gentle slope and started to become more distinct. It was a man, and as he drew closer, Jack could see exactly who it was. Carl Talbot was heading down the hill in his direction, wearing a pale suit and half-open shirt, his hair slicked into place like something out of the old vids. Talbot took his time, and Jack waited. He glanced behind him once or twice, but the cathedral trees were still there, so he turned his gaze back to watch Talbot’s steady approach. When Talbot was about ten feet away—though distance was always deceptive in the dream landscape—he stopped.

  “Hello,” said Talbot.

  “Hey,” said Jack.

  There was a silence, followed by a slight buzzing in the air, like the sound of insects.

  “What are you doing here?” said Talbot.

  “I guess I’m looking for you,” Jack answered slowly.

  Talbot nodded. The sweat smell was joined by the hint of ozone.

  “Where are we?” asked Jack.

  Talbot shrugged. “I wish I knew. You wish you knew.”

  Sometimes dream statements weren’t quite what you expected, but Jack just accepted it for what it was.

  “Who killed you?” he asked.

  Talbot frowned, puzzling over the question. “Am I dead?”