Based on the location of the body, Nyquist had guessed that Costard had been trying to disappear. DeRicci agreed with that assessment.
The vengeance killing served as a dual warning: the first to anyone who was involved with Costard or the murder that had sent her fleeing here; and the second to disappearance companies for helping people charged with Disty crimes escape punishment.
The media had contacted DeRicci’s office because Costard had gotten into Armstrong relatively easily. From what DeRicci had seen in the logs about the Costard case, Costard had been treated precisely the way any one else with similar red flags would have been treated. She had been sequestered in customs for days and then released once the Disty were contacted. The Disty had confirmed that Costard was on a mission to clear her name, and was allowed a limited travel visa to meet with detectives and Retrieval Artists.
The warrants said nothing about Disappearance Services.
But it wasn’t the security issues that had DeRicci intrigued. It was the hints that this wasn’t a Disty killing at all.
DeRicci would have thought this killing completely Disty if she hadn’t worked several vengeance killings. First, the location: Disty in this neighborhood, so close the old bomb site and near a Disappearance Service, would have been noticed. Disty with a human woman would definitely have been noticed.
Secondly, early reports indicated that Costard hadn’t been seen with any Disty since she had arrived in Armstrong. The records from her hotel showed her in the company of a few humans, but no aliens at all.
Thirdly and most importantly, many of the Disappearance Services had alarms that went off whenever aliens were in the vicinity. Most of the alarms were sophisticated: they didn’t just set off a warning at police headquarters (or some other designated place), they also brought down small cells that imprisoned the aliens, or the alarms activated locks and clamps that made the office impossible to enter.
None of that had happened here.
Small things but important ones, especially for a vengeance killing. Vengeance killings were usually for show, designed to act as warnings for others who had violated or thought of violating Disty law.
This almost felt too secretive. In the wrong location, no Disty spotted nearby, and no immediate Disty claims of responsibility.
Something was wrong here, but it wasn’t what the media thought. There were thousands of people like Costard in Armstrong, but Costard’s death was a new twist, something DeRicci didn’t like.
Nyquist had stood silently, waiting for DeRicci to speak first. She had liked him from the moment she met him. He was broad shouldered and dark skinned, his thinning hair bluish-black. He obviously didn’t go for cosmetic enhancements, although she wondered if his muscular frame came through artificial means as well as hard work.
“How many vengeance killings have you worked?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Maybe a dozen, maybe a few more.”
“Tell me about this one.”
He glanced at the closed door, then over at the rookies who still stood near DeRicci’s car. They were street officers. DeRicci would talk to them later and find out who had discovered the body, if the owners of the business hadn’t been the ones.
“It’s not a vengeance killing,” he said. “I’d stake my entire career on it.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Details,” he said. “You didn’t go all the way in.”
He looked pointedly at her shoes, which she had covered with borrowed evidence-collection bags. Then he let his gaze rise up her clothing until his look reached her face.
He obviously understood why she hadn’t stepped into the gore.
“No, I didn’t,” she said, careful not to sound defensive.
“The Disty are precise. If they hang an entrail on the wall, it’s a certain distance from the floor. The next piece hanging alongside is a slightly different distance. There’s a pattern to the whole thing.”
“As well as a pattern to the hanging,” DeRicci said. So that was what bothered her. The pattern looked off.
“There is no pattern here,” he said. “It’s as if someone described a vengeance killing to a person who had never seen one, and that person tried to imitate it.”
“You’re sure of this?” DeRicci asked.
“If you doubt me, go look at the sides of the original incision. Whoever it was didn’t use a Disty blade. This thing had ridges. The wound’s edges are jagged.”
DeRicci didn’t like the implications of this. “Has everything about Costard gone to the media?”
“Everything we know at the moment, which isn’t a lot,” he said. “I haven’t had time to do much more than call for backup, establish perimeters, and examine the crime scene.”
“Where’s your partner?” DeRicci asked.
“I’m between partners.” His tone carried a familiar bitterness. DeRicci had often used that tone herself, when she was between partners. “I caught this case on the way home.”
She nodded. “Have you contacted the Disty?”
“I sent word to headquarters,” he said. “They’ve got some specialist now who contacts alien groups. I’m told not to expect too much. There’s some kind of crisis on Mars. I haven’t seen the feeds, but I guess it’s got all the diplomats and Disty experts in some kind of tizzy.”
“Great,” DeRicci muttered.
“Honestly,” he said, “I didn’t expect you here. You missing the old detective work?”
She was missing it, more now that she was at the crime scene. She certainly enjoyed this kind of work more than position papers and incredibly optimistic resumes.
“The media is hounding me on this,” she said. “I thought I’d come see the scene for myself.”
“Hounding you?” He seemed surprised. “Why?”
“They seem to believe that Costard was a criminal who was a threat to the Dome.”
His eyebrows went up, giving his entire face a comical look. “Aisha Costard? She’s a well-respected crime scene analyst, who specializes in human bones. Didn’t you look her up?”
“I looked up the media reports and came right down here,” DeRicci said. “I figured I needed some information about the vengeance killing before I looked at the victim.”
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Why would they think she’s a criminal?”
“The warrant from the Disty. Technically, she is a criminal.”
“Technically,” he said. “All she did was consult on some long-ago murder. It caused some kind of foo-fah that I haven’t had time to look into. But she went to Mars to do it, and somehow angered the Disty. But they’re the ones who let her come here.”
“I saw that,” DeRicci said. “This isn’t making sense.”
“Well, it would have made sense if this were a true vengeance killing,” Nyquist said. “They let her here on a short leash, she tried to Disappear, they’re sending a signal to the others involved in the case back at Sahara Dome not to do this. Plus they’d done her a favor and she was screwing with it.”
“Do you think she actually tried to Disappear?”
He shrugged again. “Your guess is as good as mine right now. We don’t have evidence of much. All we have is an incident that would have made sense if it had been committed by the people who had the legal right to dish out the punishment. But this isn’t Disty. No Disty would make the errors I saw in there. This is something else.”
“Which makes it a crime,” DeRicci said. “Where it wouldn’t have been otherwise.”
“You got it,” Nyquist said.
“This has nothing to do with Moon Security.” DeRicci couldn’t keep the disappointment from her voice.
“I wish it did,” Nyquist said. “You’re the first person I’ve talked to in months whom I haven’t had to explain each and every little thing to.”
“I noticed that before I left the force,” she said. “They’re getting dumber, aren’t they?”
“And less trusting,” he said. “They simply don�
��t believe that I have experiences that are of value.”
“I don’t miss that.” But she missed the rest of it.
“You want to consult?” he asked.
She looked at him. “People are going to wonder. The media will follow my every step.”
“But they’re already on this case,” he said. “So why not? I can use someone intelligent to bounce theories off of.”
She grinned. “I’ll do anything for a man who recognizes that I’m smart.”
“Any man who doesn’t,” Nyquist said with an answering grin, “isn’t smart himself.”
Twenty-seven
Iona Gennefort stood in the control room high above the northern entrance to the Dome. Wells City had once been Mars’s premiere destination, named for an Earthman who had popularized Mars in the human imagination. Wells had been as human as human could be.
Then the Disty took over.
They changed everything—the architecture, the street layouts—everything except the Dome itself.
Gennefort wrapped a sweater around her shoulders and stared at the various monitors. Across her vision, warnings ran from a dozen different agencies. Around the periphery of her left eye’s vision, she had five tiny images going, monitoring the crisis in the other cities closest to Sahara Dome.
The news reports were circumspect, the tone dire. Humans didn’t want to offend the Disty, even now.
But the Disty were fleeing Sahara Dome in droves, and when she had contacted the head of the Disty government here in Wells, no one had responded. Finally, she reached a good friend, a male Disty whom she had known since childhood.
It’s a mess, he said. Our ambassadors are trying to contact the Alliance government. We need an immediate meeting. No one can talk to you.
They have to, she said. The bullet trains will arrive here within fifteen minutes. I need to know what to do with the passengers.
He told her he would get back to her.
He never did. Instead, she found herself talking to the entire Disty Council. All fifteen of them were yelling at her in both Disty and English, reminding her that she had an obligation to them.
I don’t know what the obligation is in this case, she had said.
Don’t let them in! The Disty screamed. They’re tainted.
But the trains, she said, they have to go through the Dome.
They had to go through the Dome. No tracks skirted the city.
The control room was in the center of the tracks and had a 360-degree view. The city was behind her, in Dome Twilight, and half a dozen tracks extended in front of her before the Dome wall ended and the Martian outdoors began.
On her right and left were the tracks, heading north and south, taking people away from her little universe.
Or bringing them into it.
She stood with two engineers and the Wells’s head of the train station. He kept telling her how many minutes she had left to make a decision, if she wanted to stop the trains.
The last number he had muttered was eight.
Eight whole minutes to decide some kind of future, one she didn’t entirely understand.
Her right eye was the only one without extra images running across her line of sight. She concentrated on the equipment, the screens on the surfaces showing dozens of trains catapulting toward Wells. Dozens, on tracks not built to hold that many.
How unfortunate that this crisis had started in Sahara Dome, where so many of the train lines originated. Sahara Dome, the stop before Wells.
“Seven minutes,” the train station head said. She hadn’t been able to think of any of these men by name ever since she arrived here. That was one piece of information too many.
“How long can we keep the trains stopped outside the Dome?” she asked.
“And keep all the passengers alive? A few days, maybe,” one of the engineers said.
“If they don’t jump out,” said the other. He claimed Disty who couldn’t board the trains in Sahara Dome clung to the trains’ exteriors as the trains hurtled out of the city, dying when the trains got outside the Dome.
“A few days,” Gennefort repeated.
She was trying to accommodate the Disty inside her city, she really was. But she had no idea what she was facing—what caused the outflow, why the Disty here were so incommunicative, and what would happen to her if she made the wrong decision.
Oddly, she was less afraid of the Disty than she was of the Alliance. She was a lesser official. She wasn’t supposed to make decisions about Disty lives. The Disty ruled here; she didn’t.
She could only think of one solution that accommodated the Disty and allowed the trains to continue moving south. “How long to build a track around Wells?”
“A track? You’re kidding, right?” the station head said.
“No,” she said.
“Even if we had the workers—which we don’t—we have to import laborers and robots and supervisors—even if we had them, it would take a month minimum. The terrain out there is difficult. Add the dust storms and the rocks, and the fragility of this Dome, and we’re probably talking six months, maybe more.”
Six months.
Her choices had narrowed. Do nothing and let this unfold as it may. Stop the trains between cities and let someone else handle the problem. Or let the trains through.
“Can these trains go through Wells without stopping?” She knew it hadn’t been done in her lifetime. Wells had fought for the position of permanent stop on the bullet train route. Sometimes, she believed, that permanent stop order was the only thing that kept the city alive.
“They can,” the station head said, “but it’s not done.”
“Why?” Gennefort asked.
“If something goes wrong, we’ll have a major catastrophe on our hands.”
“We already do,” she said. “We can’t accommodate any more Disty in this Dome. We can barely handle our own population. And once one train stops, they’ll all want to. How many Disty are there in Sahara Dome, anyway?”
“None, according to some news reports,” one of the engineers said. “At least none that aren’t trying to leave.”
“A lot more than we have here. Maybe ten times our Disty population,” said the other engineer.
“My God,” she said. Why weren’t the local Disty handling this? Why had they left it to her?
She sent another urgent message through her links, only to get the same automated reply she’d been getting since the crisis began. The Disty were in a meeting and could not be disturbed.
“You have five minutes,” the station head said. “Maybe less.”
She gave him a look that she knew was filled with fear. Then she took a deep breath. One decision was better than no decision.
“Let the trains through,” she said. “Don’t let them stop.”
“If they pile up,” the station head started.
“We’ll have fewer deaths than we would if we strand the trains outside the Dome,” Gennefort said.
“I don’t see how you figure,” the station head said.
“These trains aren’t programmed for that kind of backlog. We have no idea how many more are coming, and from what I can tell, the Disty aren’t acting rationally. Accidents outside the Dome will automatically kill those involved. They at least have a chance of surviving inside the Dome.”
The nearest engineer shook his head.
“Besides,” Gennefort said, “the safest action is to let the Disty through. Maybe by the time the trains reach Bakhuysen, the Disty there will have made a decision to stop this crisis, whatever it is.”
“I hope so,” the station head said. Then he looked at the engineers. “I’ll send the messages to the floor, but you open the Dome portals. Let the trains through and make sure none of them stop.”
“Make sure none of them hit each other,” one of the engineers muttered.
“Like that’ll happen,” another said.
“Give me a better idea,” Gennefort snapped. “One that’ll save lives.�
��
No one answered her.
She folded her hands together and took a deep breath. “Let’s do this thing.”
Twenty-eight
About two hours after ordering his second coffee and sandwich, Flint moved to another table with a different screen, and started using a different stolen identification. The law school cafeteria was filling up with students, most of whom seemed very intent on getting their food and finishing whatever project they were working on. A group of humans sat two tables over, arguing about the origins of the Multicultural Tribunals. Flint tried to tune out the argument, but at least two of the students were witty; he found himself smiling more than he thought possible when doing this kind of grunt work.
And grunt work this was. Corporate records, corporate finances, corporate regulations made his eyes cross. He was about to give up and move to a different line of research when he finally found what he was looking for.
A company that subcontracted to one of the subcorporations of Gale Research and Development had a single employee, a woman named Mary Sue Jørgen Meister. On most of the corporate records, she was listed as M.S.J. Meister, but on one he found her full name.
It hadn’t shown up in his initial search because the company was so small that it was buried in the records. Still, Mary Sue Jørgen Meister made Gale Research and Development two hundred thousand credits in the space of a month.
She had acquired water rights for a small tributary in an Outlying Colony. She sold those rights to a subsidiary of Gale Research and Development, who then sold those rights to Gale, who then transferred the rights to BiMela. Who then resold those rights to another corporation (not affiliated) for two hundred thousand more than Gale had originally paid for them.
Flint followed the lead all the way down to the tributary itself, which, it turned out, didn’t exist. The tributary had dried up decades before, shortly after that nation in the Outlying Colonies settled a city upriver, but for some reason, mapmakers kept the tributary on the map. The owners of the land didn’t mind selling the water rights for cheap, even though there was currently no water. They assumed that water would come back at some point, ignoring the dams that had been installed farther upstream.
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