Remains

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  “What the hell—? Why are you so pissed at me?”

  “Pissed at you. You think I’m pissed at you?” She stared at him for

  long, furious moment, her mouth working as if trying to dislodge something from her teeth. “Damn you. Nearly three years now you’ve been all wrapped up inside your own little obsessions and now that you’ve decided that it’s too boring in there you want to know why some other people have some feelings.”

  “Cambel,” Philip said.

  “Don’t,” Cambel snapped at Philip. “This doesn’t concern you. Not this part.”

  “Why is this so important to you?” Mace asked. “Helen was my wife.”

  “This isn’t about Helen!” She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t know, do you? You really don’t know Well, we never talked about it. You spent so much time drowning your conscience any way you could. Maybe if I’d come right out and—” She pressed her lips shut. “You work with someone, you get close... I don’t know why I’m surprised.” She looked down at her hands. “Maybe I’m not.” She looked up. “They didn’t just fuck you, Mace. When they made you sign Helen’s death certificate, they made me take it to you. From then on it wasn’t just you. I felt responsible. I tried to help. I tried to make it up. I tried to find out why PolyCarb did that to you and they threatened me with transfer. So I resigned. When you came out of your stupor, I was there. Did you think that was just coincidence? I’ve spent as much if not more time working on this than you. Did you think that was just because I had nothing better to do? When you started talking about quitting, it hurt, but I couldn’t argue with your logic. But it hurt anyway. It matters to me. I didn’t want you to settle with PolyCarb, but I understood it. Now things have changed again and maybe there’s a chance to see it through. But seeing it through might get your new friend expelled. So I need to know—is this still important to you?”

  “Still? No. It is again. I need to finish this.”

  “How finished?”

  “Finished. Over. Finished with Helen, finished with what happened, finished with the search.”

  “And afterward?”

  Mace studied her face for a hint of what she wanted. But Cambel’s masks, when she used them, were flawless and unrevealing.

  “We have a good partnership,” he said. “I don’t want to see that change.”

  “Oh.” She nodded slowly. “I see. All right. As long as I know where I stand.”

  “Cambel, I don’t—”

  She stood. “You might want to use Philip’s system to go over those. Yours is compromised.”

  Mace watched her wander off toward one of the cabinets. She folded her arms and stared down at the display.

  “Macefield?”

  Mace looked at Philip. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s difficult sometimes for people who work together to be clear about their feelings.”

  Mace stared at him. “Oh.”

  “Can’t be helped, I suppose.” Philip cleared his throat quietly. “How do you propose to proceed?”

  “With the investigation, you mean? We can’t overlook the possibility that Toler wasn’t the one. At least, not the only one.”

  “We have an incomplete body count from Hellas Planitia,” Philip said. “There was also the murdered cyberlink you found in the tunnel.”

  “Cyberlink,” Mace repeated. “Why murdered? What if she were part of it, why kill her? And the other body, the unaugmented one.”

  “Witnesses,” Philip said. “Especially the cyberlink. What she saw, what she knew, would be part of her augmentation.”

  “The missing augment?”

  “And the missing site recorder. Both may have identified Toler before this.”

  “He’d still need a way out. He’d need a connection outside the site.”

  “Cavery?” Philip suggested.

  “Security would be logical, but not necessarily the best. You’d look at that first.”

  “He was on Midline, though. Was he on either of the other two?”

  “Cassidy” Cambel said, returning to the table, “but only for a day, transferring to Midline. He was never on Five-Eight.”

  Mace licked his lips. He wanted to pace, expend the nervous energy being fed by logic. “Any one of them could be it...”

  “True, they all had access,” Cambel said. “Helen had the most opportunity.”

  Mace felt himself wince inside. “Do we know if anyone visited and left the site before the incident?”

  “No. No, we don’t know, but...”

  “Why would you say Helen?”

  “Helen was ambitious. Maybe they made her an irrefusable offer.”

  “She loved Aea, though... to hurt it...”

  Cambel grunted unsympathetically. “People change. You have.”

  “Why are you being so—?”

  “My career was ruined over this, Mace, and now this search has gotten me threatened with expulsion. I’m not inclined toward kindness concerning anyone who might have done it or been involved in it.”

  “You believe Helen did it?”

  “She was there, she had opportunity, she traveled widely, and she turned up missing. If Glim Toler was there and he’s part of this, that connects her to him. We never found her body and Toler got out alive. How does that sum for you?”

  “Which also means she might still be alive.”

  “Not legally. But yes. If Toler was there and he’s here now, then he survived. If he did, then she could have. And they killed some people on the way out.”

  Mace closed his eyes. Instead of revenge or justice for Helen or some kind of memorial by revelation for her, everything turned wrong, and he saw her as criminal. It made no sense, it made every sense.

  He sighed. “There still had to be someone who could get people into positions and cover up their records. Helen might have, but she was too distant from that kind of direct management at Hellas Planitia. Besides, someone else is still inside because someone is using Helens name to import Lunessa through InFlux. We find Toler, we find the trojan.”

  Mace called his dom to tell Nemily where he was and to ask her to join him. Her voice came back, a recorded message. “Mace, I need to get some of my belongings and take care of some details. I’ll be back, I promise.” He doubted SA or PolyCarb would pick her up again, but he still felt uneasy about it. He called her dom, but she did not answer. He could have missed her there already

  He scrolled steadily through the files from Hellas Planitia, faces and profiles he had not looked at in years. It amazed him how much data he remembered upon seeing each face—also how much he had forgotten. Birth dates, points of origin, security levels he remembered only imperfectly but a lot of the personal interests came back to him completely. What sort of collecting they were interested in, if any, their taste in food, pharmocopiates, political opinions—all that came back forcefully. It was the quirks that made for security risks.

  He stopped at an image of a man with a slight double chin and pale eyebrows. “Cru Mills” the name read, from Elfor, thirty-six years old. It was an expressionless image, as if the man had been drugged when he had posed for it. He had very few personal quirks—a dull, stable type, with no politics, no real vices, no worthwhile history. Utterly forgettable.

  Except that Mace saw familiarity now. He stared at the face and tried to be certain. The lighting made it difficult—the portrait illumination was flat, almost shadowless. Other things... adapt treatments changed faces as much as physiques.

  The more he stared, though, the more certain he became. He needed Nemily here to confirm, but he was almost sure that Cru Mills was Glim Toler and that this was the man he had seen at Piers Hawthorne’s party, in the hallway, and down the stairs, the house guest Piers denied having.

  “Philip,” he called. “Cambel.”

  Thirteen – AEA, 2118

  MACE MOVED THE FINELY MADE CHESS PIECES around the board, following no particular pattern, watching the light flow around them. He looked up when P
hilip came out of the back room.

  “Cambel is going through the InFlux records you accessed,” Philip said.

  “Piers isn’t answering his comm,” Mace said.

  Philip sat opposite him, reached out, and moved a piece. “It might be better to wait before confronting him. There could be another explanation.”

  “Of course there could. I agree, though. I don’t want Toler warned or panicked. I want to know where he is first.”

  “I confess I still don’t see the connections.”

  “What? Between Piers and Toler? Neither do I.” Mace moved a bishop, making a mental note to ask Cambel to do a deep background check on Piers.

  “It’s for sale if you like it,” Philip said.

  “Tempting. Would you visit me to play a game?”

  “If invited, certainly.”

  Mace picked up one of the kings. The interstellars had left two decades ago. Eleven years afterward, contact ceased. The tentative plans to build more of them now remained tentative.

  “It would be something,” Philip said, “to be with them. To see what they have seen.”

  Mace replaced the piece.

  “Why would Lunase indulge in mass murder?” he asked.

  “SetNetComb emerged out of a harsh beginning. Perhaps they see it as war. A matter of survival.”

  “Out here, we all survive or none of us do.”

  “Define ‘us.’“

  “It’s been over seventy years since the Exclusion.”

  “So, I suppose, we should all have outgrown the trauma of those times? Perhaps. Perhaps most have. But there always seem to be a few who never let go of their fears.”

  “Like me,” Mace said.

  “Why would you say that? I’ve never known you to be fearful.”

  “I hide it well, don’t I? Do you know why I’m here, now, on Aea? Because I was afraid not to be. I signed off on Helen’s death—alleged death—because I didn’t want to be stranded on Mars. Or anywhere else.”

  “Do you consider that an act of cowardice?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’ve continued searching. You’ve challenged PolyCarb. You’ve probed—”

  “Not very aggressively. I’ve been waiting for evidence to fall into my lap. And when PolyCarb made it clear that I risked losing everything I’d gained, I backed off.”

  “Is this fear or prudence?”

  “It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes. It takes a last act to decide.”

  “Have you made a last act?”

  “I went to Piers’ party. I met someone.”

  Philip frowned. “Meaning?”

  “I let go. I gave up.”

  “On Helen.”

  “On Helen.”

  “That was inevitable, though, wasn’t it?”

  Mace felt a spike of anger and impatience. “I had one goal growing up. Get off Mars. It’s hard to explain how much I hated it. The place bored me. Constantly. When it became obvious that the only skill I had was finding holes in systems and closing them, I thought I might be able to use that to finally emigrate. But it wasn’t the sort of thing you put on a resume. I went to security work, thinking at some point I might get a chance to show someone what I could do, someone who could help me. When I met Helen, that was still my main priority. Leave Mars at all cost.”

  “So you married her to become an Aean.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did she understand that?”

  “Better than I did, I think.”

  “So where’s the betrayal? If she knew, then she wasn’t deceived.”

  “No, she wasn’t. I was.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Helen... knew me better than anyone ever did. Even now. She knew what I wanted and she didn’t care. I thought I wanted her, too. I thought I was in love. I couldn’t get enough of her. But she was so clear about our relationship, I started thinking the same way. At least partly. She liked me, she said. I thought I was in love with her. But I thought the main reason was because she was getting me off Mars. I was grateful more than anything else. Devoted, loyal. Anything else was extra.”

  “Like love?”

  “It was easy to think that way with Helen. She was away so much for the company. I had duties. It seemed ideal, for both of us. Imagine my surprise when after she died I realized that the main thing had been her all along.”

  “How did you realize it?”

  “After I signed her death certificate. You wouldn’t believe the guilt.”

  Philip nodded. “I think I would.”

  “A month back on Aea, it all came home. I missed her. I’d betrayed her. I got what I always said I wanted, but it wasn’t what I wanted anymore.”

  “And now?”

  Mace shrugged, pressing his lips together.

  “So what has been the purpose of the search?” Philip asked after a time. “Such as its been.”

  “Moral painkiller.”

  “Harsh.”

  “Oh, it gets better. Now I have to wonder if I’d stayed in the company and kept pushing and digging, asking questions, I might not have prevented Cassidy and Five-Eight.”

  “Don’t even imagine that,” Philip said sharply. “A person’s responsibility is equal to his ability to respond. Taking on blame for things impossible to manage is simple self-pity and a waste of time.”

  Mace flinched. “Now who’s being harsh?”

  “Not harsh. Practical. Guilt slows us down, makes us stupid sometimes. We can’t get rid of it entirely, but we shouldn’t take on extra. Not if you want to resolve anything.”

  “That’s a good question, isn’t it? Do I want to resolve anything?”

  “Do you?”

  Mace opened his mouth to answer, but Cambel leaned into the room. “We have a partial match,” she announced. “A place to start, at least. An address.”

  The address Cambel had found was for an assemblage in segment four, assigned housing for one Kev Eiler. Cambel also found a Kev Eiler listed as an employee of Tower Enterprises—a Lunessa and a CAP, resident of Aea for the last two years. But the Kev Eiler on the InFlux jacket—the one who matched Mace’s memory of the man at Piers’ party—had just arrived within the last eight days.

  No new address was listed for Kev Eiler. Mace found it difficult to believe that he had been unable to secure better quarters in two years, working for a company like Tower. Philip volunteered to make a few inquiries among people he knew at Tower, but it might take time. Mace did not expect Kev Eiler to be found, at least not alive. Someone had stepped into his identity. Toler, he guessed.

  Kev Eiler’s assemblage seemed deserted when Mace entered. Vacant hallways, quiet and covered by a layer of debris that showed footprints. He walked softly till he came to the correct door....

  ...Which stood open, wide enough to see that the room was unoccupied. Mace pushed the door wider with one finger and stepped inside.

  Two meters by three, with fold-down table, cot and chair, and a toilet in one corner behind a stiff plastic flap, the only details that indicated human presence were the duffle beneath the cot and a jacket draped over the chair. Mace sat down on the cot and pulled the duffle out between his feet. It contained more clothes, a hygiene kit, a portable reader with a number of discs in its cache and a handful of unexchanged

  credit vouchers, all bearing Lunessa finance logos, all of them different denominations. He found nothing in the jacket.

  He found no ID of any kind, nothing to indicate who occupied this space.

  He moved to the chair, then, gazing around the room, hoping to recognize something that might give him direction, a hint where to look, how to proceed. Perhaps Toler would come back. But the open door suggested that the unit had either already been searched or had simply been abandoned. Maybe Koeln had already been through it. Except for the vouchers, nothing appeared to be worth coming back for.

  Koeln would not have left the door ajar. The vouchers, perfectly useful as vacuum, were still here
.

  Mace felt slow, like a long unused machine.

  He went through the cabinets. Packaged food, cans—picked through. People had been here, taken a few things. But not the jacket?

  He pushed the duffle back under the cot and left. He went quietly down the hall, rounded the corner, and stopped. He leaned against the wall and waited.

  A few minutes later he heard steps. He eased forward to peer around the corner in time to see a young man slip into the room.

  Mace covered the distance in seconds.

  The boy looked up in shock, the jacket in his hands.

  Mace closed the door.

  “I’m not SA,” Mace said quickly. “Who lives here?”

  “No one. I mean—” The boy swallowed hard, looking down at the jacket. “Was a man. He hasn’t been back in days.”

  “That your jacket?”

  The boy nodded. Then, looking guilty, he shrugged and shook his head.

  Mace pulled a picture of Kev Eiler/Glim Toler from his pocket. “This man?”

  The boy blinked at it, then frowned. “No. He came by, though.”

  “When?”

  “Four, five days ago.”

  “The one who did live here. Have you seen him since?”

  “No.”

  “How long did you wait before you started pilfering?”

  “I’m not—!”

  “Don’t lie. I’m not SA, but I can have them here in minutes. I’m not interested in you or what you’re taking; I’m interested in this man.” Mace returned the picture to his pocket. “How long?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “And you haven’t seen either man in how long?”

  “Four, five days.”

  Mace considered for a few moments. “Did you see both men together?”

  “No. That one came.”

  “How long since you saw the man who’s supposed to be here?”

  “Seven, eight days. Longer maybe.”

  “Huh. That’s interesting.”

  “Does it help?”

  Mace studied the boy. Tall, thin. Officially, no poverty existed on Aea. The boy did not look undernourished so much as constantly nervous, under stress.