The Forever Drug

by Lisa Smedman

  There had been ten deaths so far, not including tonight's body count. All had been tagged as overdoses. Probably because the first two to die—a dwarf couple from Dartmouth—had been known BTL users, chipheads who'd already fried their brains with silicone dreams. And they'd been talking to friends about scoring a nova-hot new drug on the morning before their deaths.

  None of the ten bodies had shown any signs of violence, and patrol officers who'd responded to the calls had described each of the corpses as "grinning"— despite the fact that this wasn't physically possible. I knew from previous conversations with forensics lab techs that the muscles of a cadaver normally go slack in death, and only begin to seize up in rigor mortis some three hours later. But for some unaccountable reason, the faces of all the "overdose" victims were frozen in an expression that could only be described as euphoric. That should have clued the patrol officers to the fact that it wasn't a BTL overdose they were dealing with. Magic was involved.

  The elf girl killed by the ball of light had the same expression on her face, as had the two gangers who'd died with her in the parking garage. This time, however, the police had a credible witness: me. From the description I gave, the DPI detective concluded that the tentacled creature had used magic to suck the life from all three victims.

  It looked like the DPI was going to get the case, after all.

  I tagged along with the MTF squad, hitching a ride with them back to Lone Star's Halifax headquarters, a building the size of a small arcology that takes up a full city block at the corner of Gottingen and Rainnie Street. I figured it was time for me to report in to the sergeant, to see if he had another assignment for me. As I jandered down the hall, I stuck my nose into the office of Dass Mchawi, a DPI mage detective and probably the best paranormal taxonomist the division had.

  I found her doing datawork. She was hunkered down over her datapad—a laptop computer with a monitor shaped like a crystal ball. The design was almost too cute—a result of the Division of Paranormal Investigation having too much imagination and too large a budget.

  The laptop was responsive to voice-activated commands, but Dass was busy entering text data with a keyboard she'd plugged into it, stabbing at the keys with two fingers. Her close-cropped hair was hidden by one of the brightly colored patchwork "scrap caps" that were all the rage. She wore baggy white pants and a bright red shirt printed with stylized silhouettes of drummers whose arms moved in time with her heartbeat. Dass liked to tell people it was a magical effect, but it was actually technological; tiny sensors woven into the fabric triggered color changes in the threads, sending the drummers strobing through a series of pre-set poses.

  Dass had been born and raised in the Maritimes, but had traveled extensively in search of her shamanic "heritage," picking up a lot of lore about paranormal creatures along the way. Her family had lived in Halifax for generations, back when this part of the world was still part of Canada. Her great-great-grandparents had been born in Africville, an African-Canadian settlement that was bulldozed in the last century and that now lay buried under Seaview Park. Before that .. . well, Dass really didn't know what part of Africa her ancestors had come from. West Africa was a good guess, since the slave trade had originated there. But she'd found a tradition that spoke to her in East Africa, among the Bantu peoples.

  Dass had originally had another surname—now a closely kept secret known only to Lone Star's administrative personnel department. She'd taken the name Mchawi from the Swahili word for "magician." She actually spoke a little Swahili, and used that language to greet me as she looked up from her work.

  "Salamu, Romulus. I hear you ran into a little trouble earlier this evening."

  I leaned against the door frame. Dass was the only one at Lone Star who called me by my human name—Romulus—which my first set of foster parents had chosen after reading a myth about two boys who were suckled by wolves. The rest of the DPI detectives usually called me "Rover" or "Fido"—two nicknames I detested. Dass was also the only one who always smelled friendly. The other detectives were polite enough, but their smiles never reached their pores.

  "I was hoping you might know what I ran into, Dass," I said. "I've never seen anything like it, and the DPI detective who responded didn't seem to know what it was." I described the creature for her— both its physical and astral appearance.

  "Sounds like a corpselight," Dass said after a moment's thought.

  "The name fits," I observed, "considering the end result."

  She nodded. "Corpselights feed on sentient creatures, draining the life essence from them. They stimulate the pleasure centers of their victims' brains so the poor triggers don't have the willpower to get away— at least they die happy. But a corpselight in Halifax? They prefer desolate areas; the mana pollution in cities is too high."

  "Yet I saw one here, in the city."

  "Yes, you did."

  That's what I like about Dass. She doesn't call my observations into question, the way the other detectives do. She takes them at face value, even when logic seems to contradict them. She also gets right to the point.

  "Did you get the assignment to track and contain it?"

  "Don't know yet," I said. "I'm hoping to talk to the sergeant about it. Is he busy?"

  He must have heard me. "Hey, Romulus!" Sergeant Raymond shouted from down the hall. "We've got another blackberry cat for you. One was spotted aboard a pleasure boat down in the harbor. Think you're up for another chase, boy?"

  I heard laughter from another office. I growled and twitched my lip, revealing my canines. I knew Raymond called me Fido behind my back, but "boy" was his obvious in-your-face insult for me, suggestive of the master-slave relationship some pet owners have with their dogs. When he was really wanting to stick it to me, he'd call me with a whistle. He also liked to crack jokes about "house-training" me.

  As if I'd soil the office by leaving my mark inside. No, it was out on the front steps, where it belonged.

  Dass rolled her eyes in silent sympathy and turned back to her computer.

  I slunk down the hall to Raymond's office. I found the sergeant leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette. The smoke from it stung my nostrils.

  The sergeant was big for a human, over two meters tall, with piercing blue eyes and hair that, despite his angry denials, was going gray at the temples. He wore civilian clothes—a conservative, crisply pressed business suit—but with an air of authority that suggested he was used to wearing a uniform.

  With a twitch of his finger, he used telekinesis to direct one of the chips on his desk into his computer. Then he used the same spell to push a datapad toward me. Spirits forbid he should actually have to hand me something. He might accidentally touch a hand that was really a paw ...

  I forced myself to listen closely to the sergeant's instructions.

  "This is the report our harbor patrol officers just sent in," he said. "You can use the datapad to scan it on your way out to the site. The cat's been making a pest of itself, getting aboard boats and causing passengers and crew to jump overboard. It's currently aboard a yacht named the Party Animal." He rolled his eyes at the irony of the name. "Witnesses report that the cat was wet, as if it had fallen into the ocean itself. And there's nothing meaner than a wet cat. Except maybe a rabid dog..

  He glanced up, waited for a reaction, but I didn't give him the satisfaction.

  "So far," he continued, "this complaint is only at the nuisance level. But if that cat forces someone overboard who doesn't know how to swim ..."

  I filled in the blank: "Homicide."

  "Hardly." The sergeant looked at me as if I was an idiot. "This is a dumb animal we're talking about. It's just following its instincts. You might as well put a house cat on trial for murdering mice." His steel-blue eyes fixed me with a stare and acrid-smelling cigarette smoke puffed out of his mouth, punctuating his words. "Remember, Romulus, you're not going out there to arrest a criminal. You're doing animal containment. Now scan that report, grab the hover, and get
to it. Let's cage that cat and send the little para back to Europe, where it belongs."

  "Right." I stifled the growl that was forming in my throat. The "dumb animal" crack had been deliberate, as had the comment about putting paras back where they belonged. But I held my anger in check, once again. Sergeant Raymond was just looking for an excuse to send me back to the K9 patrol. I didn't want to give him one.

  "How much do I get for this one?" I asked.

  "Same as for the last. Two hundred and fifty nuyen on delivery."

  "What about the corpselight?" I asked. "Do I get that assignment as well?"

  "The what?"

  "The tentacled para—the one that killed three people in the North End parking garage tonight. I can track it. I know its scent."

  "So that's what it was," the sergeant said. I could see he was impressed by the fact that I'd identified it. But only for a moment. "Uh-uh. That's way out of your league, boy. Stick to what you know best: chasing cats."

  He looked down at his desk, dismissing me.

  I jogged down to the parking garage, using the datapad to listen to the information on the chip Raymond had given me. I reviewed the harbor patrol officers' report, watching images of wet and shivering people as they described how they'd suddenly felt an overwhelming compulsion to climb over the ship's railing and jump into the sea. Those who'd gone for a midnight swim included three deckhands from a fish boat and the pilot of a tug, but most of those picked up by the harbor patrol were passengers aboard a "booze cruiser"—a yacht chartered by a wedding party to tour the harbor at night. Even the bride had gone overboard; her long white dress now sodden, its bedraggled lace covered with a sheen of oil from the dirty harbor water. Talk about a memorable honeymoon.

  That was where the blackberry cat had last been sighted: aboard the rent-a-yacht. Which, according to the report, was cruising erratically up and down the harbor, still shedding wedding celebrants. Harbor patrol was content to follow along behind and pick them up; they'd leave it to the Magical Task Force to deal with the cat.

  At least I'd get to ride in the hover tonight. That was an unexpected bonus. A scaled-down version of the hovertrucks used by Lone Star's amphibious SWAT teams, the hover was about the size of a city car, with two seats and gull-wing doors. It rode on a cushion of air that would carry it smoothly over either land or sea at speeds of up to 120 klicks, even in choppy conditions that would swamp a small boat. Like the larger hovertruck, this was a people-mover; it was armored but without hard-mounted weaponry. Its object, like the humble patrol car, was to enable officers to get to the scene of a crime quickly.

  The officer on duty as driver tonight was a human named Hunt. I'd met him once before, during an MTF training exercise. He was a rigger, and he'd loaded his body with as much cyberware as it could hold.

  Even across the parking garage, I could smell the plastic and metal embedded in his body, and the lubricants that kept his cyberware running smoothly.

  Light glinted from the chrome irises of Hunt's cybereyes as he met me in the brightly lit parking garage, and a second Adam's apple bobbed in his throat where a subvocal communications microphone had been implanted. The hand that shook mine was covered in artificial skin. It twitched slightly; a product of his implanted neural boosters and adrenaline stimulators.

  Hunt was also rumored to have a "cyber skull"—a ceramic and polymer cap fused to his own natural skull. They said he'd gotten it installed after crashing a patrol car and concussing himself. If so, the surgery hadn't left any noticeable scars. The only visible reminder of that accident was a diagonal scar that creased his lip, just under his nose.

  No matter how many times I saw cybernetics, I still marveled at them. Cybernetic implants were something I could never have. The regenerative properties of my body caused it to reject all foreign matter. Back when I was a kid, my third set of foster parents had taken me to a dentist, who capped a tooth I'd chipped. By the next morning the cap had been forced out of the enamel, and the tooth had grown back. That was when they'd discovered what I really was, and had packed me off to the residential school, where the headmasters had tried to make a good little human out of me by thrashing me every time I gave in to my natural instincts or refused to speak English. Lucky for them my body heals so quickly I never bruise.

  I growled at the memory. My hackles still rise when I think of the place.

  Hunt wore a brown leather jacket that bulged under both armpits where a pair of Ruger Thunderbolts—the heaviest pistols issued by Lone Star so far—were holstered. Unlike him, I almost never carried a gun. The weapon would only have to be left behind on the pavement when I made the change out of human form. Besides, my teeth were weapon enough.

  Hunt thumbed the squealer in his palm, deactivating the hover's locks. The gull-wing doors swung up and open. I paused, tempted to mark the hover, but my training kicked in as I remembered that we were still inside the police station. Not inside—that was the golden rule.

  As we climbed into the hover's bucket seats, Hunt shot me a cautionary glance.

  "You're not going to try to hang your head out the window again, this time, are you?" he said in a stern voice. It was an order, not a question.

  I nodded as I buckled the five-point harness across my chest. "Don't worry," I told him. "I won't." I still had vivid memories of the painful fracture I'd received when the blast of inrushing air had slammed my cheek into the window frame, during the training exercise.

  "Good." He jacked into the hover's computerized controls and closed his eyes as the engine roared to life. The hover rose on a cushion of air as the balloonlike bag beneath it filled. The garage doors opened and we slid out onto the street. I could hear Hunt's cybereyes whirring softly as they switched to low-light vision. We were operating with running lights only; we wouldn't switch on the floods until we approached our destination. But we did use the flashers and the siren.

  As soon as I heard that howl, I couldn't help myself. It was the call of the pack, of the hunt. I threw back my head and sang along with it, my voice rising and falling, my eyes closed. A thrill shivered down my arms and I yipped with delight.

  "Do you have to do that?" Hunt shouted over the roaring engine.

  "Sorry." I grinned. "I can't help it." But I kept quiet after that. I had a good working relationship with Hunt, despite the open-window incident, and I didn't want to spoil it.

  We sped on through the city streets, traffic parting before us as we made our way down to the waterfront. Whatever vehicle he was operating, Hunt liked to run at full speed. They hadn't nicknamed him "boy racer" for nothing. Buildings blurred past as we turned at the Maritime Museum. Then we swooshed down a ramp and onto the ocean. Now Hunt could really open her up. The engine roared.

  The sea was dark and still, reflecting the lights of Halifax. In the distance, away to the left, I could see the MacDonald Bridge, which everyone still called the "old bridge," despite the fact that the newer MacKay Bridge had been built in the last century. We turned away from it, keeping downtown on our right and the suburb of Dartmouth on our left. According to the harbor patrol officers, who were giving us radio updates, the yacht had gone aground on Georges Island, an uninhabited outcropping smack in the middle of Halifax Harbor.

  It was only a moment before we saw it. Georges Island is a low hump of silt, no more than three-quarters of a kilometer in diameter and dotted with tumble-down, whitewashed buildings that looked like melted sugar cubes. An automated lighthouse crowns the center of the island, but the rest of the island is a tangle of thorny vines and scraggly trees, surrounded by the litter left by gangers who come to this desolate spot to cut loose and party. The island lies in the Halifax Harbor like the body of a floating whale, an eyesore and a haven for criminal activities.

  The yacht had rammed its bow into the island's soft silt, and was keeled over slightly. The propeller was still churning up foam at the stern of the boat, and lights were blazing inside. Loud techno-Celtic music blared out into the night. A number of p
assengers in suits and formal dresses—members of the wedding party, presumably—were crawling along the angled deck or had jumped down into the muddy water. They milled unsteadily along the shore, looking forlornly at the harbor patrol vessel, which was too large to come in close enough to the island to pick them up. The voices of the harbor patrol officers crackled over our radio as they called in a smaller vessel to remove the passengers from the yacht, which they had illuminated with a spotlight.

  Hunt circled around the yacht and brought the hover ashore next to it. We coasted smoothly up onto the island, over the litter of driftwood and other debris that lined the shore. As Hunt checked the hover's forward motion, I popped the gull-wing door next to me and unbuckled my harness. I stepped onto the rung next to the door, then jumped down onto the muddy shore.

  I approached the yacht, looking for a crew member. The most likely candidate seemed to be an ork woman in a waiter's apron, her white shirt stained with food and her black bow tie hanging loose. I flashed her a smile.

  "Lone Star," I said. "Magical Task Force. I understand you had a paranormal animal on board."

  "Lord love us, yes," the woman exclaimed. "We had some time of it." Her Cape Breton accent was thick; when she said the word "time" it sounded more like "toyme." Her gnarled hands absently knotted her apron as she continued.

  "It started when we found a cat onna boat and tried ta stop it from jumpin' up onna tables and eatin' da weddin' cake. B'fore ya know it dere were people jumpin' overboard. T'ree, maybe four went over da rail, startin' with da bride herself. We was cornin' around ta pick 'em outta da water when Skipper went nuts and put 'er full ahead and steered da boat straight for da container docks. Would'a stove in the hull, fer sure. Damn cat was dere, rubbin' at his ankles. Jim, he tried ta grab da wheel, and next thing ya know, Jim gets a funny look in his eye and he's over da rail, too. Then Skipper steers 'er instead for Georges Island, people jumpin' overboard alia time, and finally we wind up aground. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, but it's been a night!"