Very quickly the temple came together, like an elaborate puzzle, the pieces fitting together precisely. The wisp lost sight of it at various points as it resumed its fly-overs through the room, but Hoskin and Quinlin were able to see enough of the construction and some fine long-range and close-up shots.
“This gets more interesting by the minute,” said Hoskin.
“That’s one way to put it. I might use something along the lines of more fubar by the minute.”
When it was finished, the dark temple dominated the middle of the room, as if it were the center of all gravity. Red glowglobes buzzed into place around it like tiny moons around a titan of a planet. It could be seen from almost any point in the room as the wisp circled the miles and miles of the hall.
They fast-forwarded to the party. The guests arrived, escorted in by the blank-faced Dynasty Security guards. At first only a few arrived, but then they came in swarms. All of them wore mediatronic masks that played loops of strange images.
“Zoom in, fifteen right. Stop,” said Hoskin.
He’d focused on a cluster of guests who’d just entered, all of their faces hidden behind the elaborate masks. On one mask a striking scene of angels at war raged, their swords of fire and light slashing. Another played a loop of a pack of lions taking down a big bison, the biggest one locked on the dying beast’s neck. Another played happy images of hyper-colored bunnies racing through an idyllic garden.
Elaborate robes complemented the masks. As soon as guests entered the room they activated their robes by squeezing the sleeves. Their bodies disappeared, making it look as though their heads were floating around the room under their own power.
“Mirror robes,” said Hoskin.
For hours the floating heads mingled, drank and talked. Pieces of the masks shredded whenever they pulled a glass to their lips, giving quick glimpses of whatever humanity was under them, but not enough for an identification. Different music played in different parts of the room and people talked and laughed, their voices obscured by vocoders built into the masks.
“Who are these people?” said Quinlin.
“We’re gonna find out,” said Hoskin.
At midnight, the party changed.
All the music stopped and all the revelers turned towards the dark temple. Silence swept the room. Everyone waited. The lights dimmed. Even the camera drone the detectives watched from had frozen in place, fixed on the temple.
Then new music started up, slow and low, a quiet rumble that built and built. The lights around the temple intensified. The music rose and rose, a haunting swirl that gave the two detectives chills even on the less-than-perfect audio in Hoskin’s office. Out from the windows of the temple, a series of light platforms zoomed and arranged themselves in a circle. All at once, figures appeared on them. Each of them gave off a brilliant light and the closest revelers shielded their eyes. It looked as if angels had descended on the carnival below. All faces were upturned now. The angels began chanting something.
Then, from the center of the circle, a large platform drifted slowly upwards. On it stood a tall figure in a dark red robe stitched with tiny red glowglobes. His mask was black and featureless and it stood out against all the more ornate masks. When he reached the center of the circle, a towering hologram of him sprung up behind the platform, from floating projectors, so everyone in the room could see him. He started to sing in a soaring, stunning voice. It seemed to float down to the room like a soft mist.
“What language is that?” said Quinlin.
“No idea,” said Hoskin, who broke off a piece of his backbrain to run a pattern match on the language. Seconds later the answer came back: unknown. He ran the search again, thinking it was a mistake. Still nothing. “It’s an unknown language.”
“What? Bullshit. Let me try.”
Quinlin’s search came back with nothing too. He looked shocked.
“They’re speaking a private language?” said Quinlin.
“Looks that way.”
“It’s gotta be a mistake.”
“I don’t think so.”
The singing went on as the angels joined him. The song seemed to hypnotize everyone. They stood, their masked faces upturned, waiting. Suddenly the song ended on an eruption of sound. On the final note, the temple exploded into flames. The flames burned brilliantly, chewing at the superstructure, eating away at it greedily.
“Some kind of malleable stone,” said Hoskin. “Exotic matter. Burnable. Guess that’s why it wasn’t there when we showed up.”
The flames spread more slowly as bits of the temple gave way, collapsing inwards. Bridges and verandas buckled and pieces of them flaked off and drifted around like black snow. The ceiling irised open and microclimate generators created a subtle updraft, sucking the smoke away from everyone and feeding the flames the oxygen they needed to rage.
The center of the temple collapsed with an incredible bang, and the rest gave way quickly. Many of the revelers charged the burning wreck, throwing glasses and meats and plants. It was tribal, primordial.
Above the frenzy, the red priest touched the faces of the shimmering angels one by one. They turned as they were touched and descended on the crowd, their light robes melting away. Underneath their robes were perfect bodies, male and female, their flesh lit by microbeads so they shimmered erotically.
The rest of the crowd shed their robes and the floating heads now had naked bodies. Most of them were not nearly as beautiful as the angel people, their bodies showing various signs of abuse and real world wear and tear. Quickly, the angels took hands of random revelers and led their partners off to groves, with crowds of people trailing after them. In minutes, a full scale orgy was in bloom. There were couples fucking everywhere, wearing only their masks. The angelic figures stood out, bright lights in the center of the crowds. The camera drone flew over and through the madness like it was drunk. Huge spouts of colored mist blasted up from the blades of grass, some type of drug to enhance the carnality.
“No wonder they didn’t want us looking into this,” said Hoskin.
“Yeah. While people are starving down here on the streets, these bastards are up there in a little bubble, doing whatever they want. I want to know everybody in that room. Expose ‘em.”
“Won’t go over well with people, they see this.”
They watched the rest of the footage from camera two. For hours and hours the party raged on, but there was no sign of the murder. Hoskin waved the third camera’s footage up. It was another camera drone. He skipped forward to the party. An hour passed. It showed more of the party from different angles. Many of the revelers descended into the tents and disappeared from view.
“Stop, there,” said Hoskin. “Roll back. Play. You hear that?”
“What?”
“That. Shouting. Roll back again. Play.”
“No…wait, yes. It’s faint. Where is it coming from?”
“Gotta be from one of those tents. Look, back there. Zoom. Enhance.”
In the background, they could see one of the tents. A few partiers had stopped what they were doing. They turned to look at the tent. Two of them dropped their drinks and rushed in. The mediawall struggled to clarify the blurry image.
“It’s so loud in there, I can’t hear it, goddamn it. Smartcore, isolate that sound.”
The program went to work, muting the music and enhancing the background sounds.
“Is that screaming?” said Hoskin
“It’s gotta be. That’s gotta be our murder. Fuck. We can’t see shit.”
Just then the camera shifted and the image cleared. They were zoomed in as far as possible now, with a decent view of the tent.
“Slow down. Quarter speed, forward.”
The foursome that had been fucking outside the tent had stopped now. More people rushed the tent. They didn’t come out. A crowd was forming around it. Someone stood in front of the camera. Then another. The detectives lost sight of the tent. They cou
ld only see bits and pieces between the bodies now.
“There. Freeze. Right there.”
Hoskin paused on a swarthy man in a blood mask rushing from the tent. They could see him between the bodies for a second. He was naked like the rest, but both Hoskin and Quinlin could see the subtle oil-on-water effect of a personal energy shield around him.
“Okay, roll forward. Frame by frame.”
The footage stuttered forward now, like a flipbook missing pages. They saw what happened outside the tent in snatches. A few members of the crowd tried to seize the man, but when they touched him they exploded like watermelons stuffed with grenades. The video went dark gray suddenly, hiding everything.
“Is that smoke?” said Hoskin.
“Yeah. Probably a smoke grenade. Those are military grade implants he’s using,” said Quinlin. “It must have been a massacre. You can’t just synth those implants up. Even on the darknets you can’t find a recipe for something like that. You think the Triads have access to that kinda shit?”
“Probably. They go way beyond our borders,” said Hoskin. “But is this even their style? A party? With all those people? This is no hit. This is something else. It’s a message.”
“From who?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“Maybe they just couldn’t get to Gilead any other way? A lot of these rich bastards never leave their little bubbles. You got to hit them where they live.”
“Somebody’s paying a lot of money for this. This ain’t some hooker they blackmailed into doing it. This was a fucking assault.”
“The hooker didn’t have any augs, right?”
“No. And Azusa knows her stuff. I had her check the rookie tech’s work. If she says there were none, there were none. But we better run it again to be sure.”
Hoskin flashed Azusa. “I need you to double check that hooker’s body from the Willows murder.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Combat implants.”
“I checked. There were none.”
“I know. Run it again. Be extra careful. It’s important.”
“All right. You got it, Love.”
She vanished.
“How the fuck did that guy get out of there?” said Quinlin.
“Not sure. Lots of chaos,” said Hoskin. “If we double check and the girl didn’t have implants, then she had help. She did not flip that body by herself. Maybe this guy was our helper? Or maybe this guy never got out of that damn mansion?”
“Well we don’t know at this point. If he’d dead, then Dynasty Security can just close it up nice and neat. Keep it quiet. None of those people want any of this getting out.”
“And if not, all the Dynasties’ security forces will be looking for him, so we gotta find him first. Gilead wasn’t the only one who got whacked in there. I want you to dive the Dynasty nets and set up screens and rolling searches. A lot of personal security teams will be hunting this guy. Something might show up there before it shows up through official channels. See if they’re looking for him. Maybe we beat them to it.”
Hoskin waved his hand and the footage rolled back and slowed down. He gestured with his fist and snapshots of the footage broke off and tiled on the right of the mediawall.
“We have stepped in something here, man,” said Quinlin.
“Yeah. The question is what, though?”
When it Rains Forever
2396 Orthodox Western Calendar
5094 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Tiger
Southern Lights District, Snowstorm Clan Roving Starship Settlement
“Sally? Sally? Come in here. Momma got something for ya.”
Salaris Venadrik came into his mother’s room slowly, not sure which mommy was there. Just barely five, he’d already realized that in a way he had two mommies who treated him very differently. He stopped at the door and peered in. Outside, he could hear the rain pounding the building.
“It’s all right. Damn it, come in here,” she said.
He edged into the room. Looking at her face, he couldn’t tell which mommy was there.
“Come sit by mommy,” she said.
Carefully, he walked into the room, looking up at her hopefully. It seemed like pretty mommy, but he wasn’t sure. He rubbed his head where it still hurt from the last time he saw ugly mommy.
She was sitting on the bed. In the low light her skin glowed, lit from within by tiny beads. An abstract stream flickered on her small mediawall, the colors green and gold and garish. The colors saturated the tiny room with no windows.
As always, Venadrik stared at his mother’s scrolling mediagraphic tattoos. On her left breast a tiny Sakura tree fluttered in invisible wind. A horde of butterflies dipped and swooped on her arm in the surging morning light. In the center of the butterfly storm the word “hate” blazed like a black sun. On her other arm dark angels, hideously deformed, with hundreds of eyes and ravenous mouths all over their bodies, fell screaming from a blackened sky, their bodies broken and pierced by golden arrows. Above the fallen angels the word “love” written in light cut through their darkness.
Sharp slashes cut through the tattoos, breaking up the beautifully designed images. Venadrik couldn’t help tracing the scars with his eyes. The scars were on her arms, stomach, near her right eye, on her hands and legs and neck.
“Sit,” she said.
She patted the wine-dark sheets. He climbed up onto the bed next to her, still cautious, keeping a slight distance. He could see the glittering paste on her lips. She wore mirrored contacts and Venadrik could see himself, his eyes big and distorted on the curved surface. Her hair was silver. She touched it and it turned a bright pink, his favorite. He smiled.
“I got ya something,” she said. “I’m sorry I hit you. Mommy wasn’t taking her medicine, is all, but you gotta stop doing stupid stuff.”
He was always doing “stupid stuff,” so he didn’t know which stupid stuff she meant. He thought about the turtle whose head he’d crushed with a big rock, but didn’t say anything. Not to pretty mommy. She didn’t know about that, so better not to say anything. He just nodded and put his head against her. She stroked his hair for a moment and then sat him up.
From behind her big bed, she pulled out a brightly colored box, wrapped in mediapaper. Tiny blue bears played on the paper, romping through a garden. The images played continually, never looping, always changing. He stared at them, his eyes wide, and forgot about ugly mommy all together.
“Go ahead now, don’t waste time, open it up.”
He tore into the paper.
“Don’t tear at it like a little fiend, just open it nicely. Don’t make mommy mad. We gotta save the paper.”
Venadrik slowed down, carefully opening the package with the pull-string that slit open the paper. From inside, he pulled out a freeze-gel package. The marketingware inside the package sensed Venadrik was a little boy and altered its image to match.
“It’s a light pen and pad. Here,” she said and touched the package in three spots. The gel evaporated.
Venadrik held the smartpad in his hands and touched its glyphs, not sure what they all did.
“Be careful with that. Do ya like it?” she said.
She looked at him, worried. He nodded. It was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen.
“Now don’t ya draw nothin’ sick with it, not like those pictures I caught you clipping. If I catch you drawin’ things like that, I’ll smash your balls off. I’ll come right in there with the hammer. Ya understand me?”
Venadrik looked up, terrified. He held the pad and pen tight to his chest like a shield.
“Don’t you fuck with momma. Don’t let me catch you. Only draw pretty things, ya hear?”
He nodded rapidly.
“All right, get outta here. My head hurts now.”
Venadrik scrambled down and back to his room. He sat in the dark and caressed the smartpad, its soft glow the only light.
Venadrik drew his mother standing in the window, under the red light. He worked the light-pen furiously, sketching her long legs, bathed in dark crimson. She twirled and he tried to catch that movement with quick, slashing strokes on the smartpad. When he drew, the tip of his tongue always stuck out.
He hated looking at his drawings though. They were ugly and stupid. He wiped most of them away with his hand or clicked them into memory and started over.
Crouched at the bottom of the stairs that led down to the bedrooms, he watched her standing in the long No-Glass windows. She’d told him not to watch her, that it was sick, that he was sick, but he liked to.
The last time she’d caught him, she’d threatened to take his smartpad, then beat him. He’d held the pen and pad so tightly while she smacked his head, terrified that’d he’d drop it and it would shatter into a billion pieces.
“Now go sit in your room and pull down your pants. Wait right there. I’m gonna get my hammer.”
Venadrik waited in the room for hours, terrified, sweat pouring off him, but she never came.
After that, despite being only five and a half, he figured out how to hide his most prized possession. She wasn’t going to take it from him no matter what. He found a tiny panel in the hallway that he could peel back. It blended into the wall seamlessly. She would never find it.
Now he was more careful when he watched her. He found that he could take one look at her and then see her in his mind perfectly and draw from that. He would sneak to the edge of the hall and watch her and then creep back a little, so if she turned around she couldn’t see him.
He liked the way his mother looked. She glittered. He liked to draw the tiny points of light on her, and he stabbed at the page to make as many of them as he could. His mother was beautiful and he liked to draw her, even if she didn’t like it. He also liked to draw dead things, but he’d figured out how to hide those with the lock glyph.
The Scorpion Game Page 7
