Memento Mori

by W. R. Gingell

  “Any deaths?”

  “Nope. I think that’s the only reason they were allowed to close it. There were a whole series of them that were big news a while ago—kids going on sprees in rich people’s houses and knocking them about a bit. I think this one was a bit smaller, though. The box for it wasn’t too big.”

  Marx gave a vague grunt. “Thought it’d be a bit busier in a place like this.”

  “Well, we’re mainly a processing station,” said the officer. “Orbiting Fourth World, what else are we going to be? It’s not like there’s anyone but the ditch rats to police down there. Ow! Man, what the heck?”

  “Sorry,” said Marx, through a red hot haze of fury. “Did that hit your head?”

  “I’m bleeding!”

  “Sorry,” Marx said again, blinking slowly and picking up the cup that had hit the officer’s head. He hadn’t expected that surge of pure, unadulterated rage. It wasn’t the human resources officer’s fault that Fourth World was a war-torn wasteland somewhere below them, or that the few remaining people down there were living worse than most shipboard rats. “Looks like I bumped the shelf. You should get that looked at.”

  “Yeah,” said the other man. He looked slightly off balance, though it was a tossup whether that was from the hit on the head or because he was worried he was about to be hit again. “Can you find your own way back?”

  “Yeah,” Marx said, trying not to sound too cheerful. The human resources officer might have been a pain in the neck, but now that he’d been dragged around half the station, Marx had a very good idea of where everything he needed was located. He also knew a little about the inside of a WAOF station. It was that combined knowledge that made him go straight for the records room rather than the evidence stalls. It was no good looking at swept evidence if he didn’t know what he was looking for. On a station this size, there were likely to be hundreds of stalls just waiting to be shipped out to Eighth World, and even if he had known what the Newlands Box looked like, he had no idea of which particular evidence locker it would be in. The only thing he was reasonably sure about was that it would either be coming in today, or had come in already. The Newlands Box, from what he had seen in the Core, was the kind of thing that stayed in one place for only a few days before murder, mayhem, and general bloodshed announced its exit.

  That made searching the WAOFy paperwork panel—there was a nice, obsolete name for you—an easier matter. Today’s arrivals sounded promising: two murders, a home invasion, one robbery, and a fatal stabbing. Marx discounted the robbery and home invasion cases without a second thought, and almost did the same with the fatal stabbing until it occurred to him that, accidental or not, it had been fatal. Fatalities and the Newlands Box were enough of a consistent theme to make it worth looking into. He went through the evidence lists one by one, at first swiftly; and then, when nothing useful turned up, more slowly.

  “What a shock,” remarked Marx, and slapped the panel shut. “Nothing.”

  Evidence lockers it was.

  ***

  Sergeant Gormley was losing feeling in his fingers. He would have complained about it, but the child guarding him had the look of a person who would kick him in the shins—to, as his mother had often said, really give him something to complain about—and he didn’t want to chance it.

  Instead, again going with the familiar, he asked, “What’s going on, then? What’s all this about?”

  “Told yer,” said the girl succinctly. “We ’ad to use your name to get around the station.”

  “Yes,” Sergeant Gormley protested, “but why my name?”

  “You’re new, ain’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes, but what has that got to do with it?”

  “Your details got held up in the system, didn’t they? Ain’t nobody knows what you look like.”

  Sergeant Gormley would have protested that, too, but when he thought about it, no one at this precinct did know him. He said, “You shouldn’t go messing with the personnel files at your age.”

  “Ay?” The child blinked at him, then narrowed her eyes. “Wasn’t us, bucko.”

  “It must have been.” Sergeant Gormley wasn’t certain of many things in life, but he was quite certain his file had gone through to the Fourth World Orbiting Station. He had sent it through himself, as the last of his duties at his old precinct, and the confirmation of receipt message had flashed up on his screen just before he signed off. “I sent them off before I came out. Last LRWU.”

  “Local relative week units ain’t that reliable,” said the girl dismissively. “Stuff changes when you’re in the regular local system.”

  Sergeant Gormley, who had always found them so, asked cautiously, “Why?”

  “Well, there’s people like me messin’ about wiv time-lines, see?”

  “What do you mean, people like you?”

  The child gave him a sharp-eyed look that managed to suggest, without her actually saying anything, that he had better shut up while he still had all his teeth, and said, “Ones wot mess wiv timelines.”

  “I don’t think there’s many other people like you,” said Sergeant Gormley, with conviction. He sincerely hoped there weren’t.

  ***

  The Evidence room, Marx knew, was likely to have human security on it. It was also likely to have a lock he wasn’t capable of unlocking, Multi Lock tool or not. And that was unfortunate, because it meant he would have to go back and get Kez. Still, Marx had lived most of his life by—and quite often nearly died by—the principle that it wouldn’t hurt to go along and have a look, so he sauntered along to the Evidence room despite his misgivings.

  In the hallway leading up to what Marx was reasonably sure was the evidence area, he passed an officer with one hand in his pocket and a faintly satisfied expression on his face. Thus, it wasn’t entirely a surprise to find that the Evidence room door was unguarded, though it was something of an unfortunate one. Marx would have preferred to get in with Kez’s help; if someone had sent away the guard on the door, it meant someone was currently in the locker room. And that was likely to be an inconvenience. More unfortunately still, today it was likely to be an Inconvenience who was after the same thing he was after.

  Still, the door was also conveniently unlocked for him, so Marx flexed his shoulders into some semblance of easy movement and brushed his fingers over the door’s sensor pad. The door was almost silent, but the small click it made on closing made Marx wince; it sounded as though it echoed through the Evidence room. If it had been himself in here, after bribing the guard to leave, Marx would have been listening for that particular sound. It seemed likely that whoever was in here would have been listening for it, too.

  Marx sauntered along the top end of the rows of lockers without trying to be too quiet, his hands in his pockets. He saw the briefest flash of movement from the corner of his eyes and turned just as casually down that aisle, his soles shuffling along the floor. There was another flurry of movement—and, in the silence between each of Marx’s shuffling footsteps, a sound that could have been an evidence locker closing.

  Marx was very, very nonchalantly turning his head to gaze at the corridor of lockers on his left when, further down the aisle, someone stepped back into the main corridor. He let his eyes travel back naturally, not too quickly and not too slowly, until he was gazing straight ahead. He found himself looking at the plump, approaching figure of Marcus Solomon.

  There was something very nasty about seeing the man you’d killed walking toward you. Marx was conscious of a creeping wish to be anywhere else in the worlds but where he was. He nodded briskly to Marcus as to an equal—they were both sergeants, after all, even if both of them were only pretending—and Marcus stopped. He had probably been waiting for the chance to find out exactly why someone else was sneaking into the evidence storage at exactly the same time he was. Marx found it convenient for quite a different reason—now that he could look at the man properly, it was obvious Marcus wasn’t carrying anything. That mean
t he had either been checking up on where something was, or putting something where it most likely shouldn’t be.

  Marx said, “You’re the new evidence sergeant.”

  “That’s right, Sergeant—”

  “Gormley,” Marx said helpfully.

  Marcus Solomon looked at him thoughtfully. “Yes, Gormley. And you’re the new desk sergeant, aren’t you, Gormley?”

  “That’s right,” said Marx. The other man didn’t say it, but it hung in the air between them—If you’re the desk sergeant, what are you doing in Evidence? “New today. Some of the boys thought they’d have a bit of fun; they’ve chucked my lunch in one of the evidence sweeper boxes.”

  A faint smile touched Marcus’ rounded cheeks. “You shouldn’t let them get away with that sort of thing, Sergeant.”

  “There’s ups and downs,” Marx said, shrugging. “Today I’m down, maybe tomorrow I’m up. Anything I can help you with while I’m here, Sergeant?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Marcus murmured. “I was just finishing up. Make sure you sign any lockers in and out, won’t you? We’re pretty strict about that. The lockers go straight to Eighth World from here, so we have to make sure everything is correct.”

  “Got it,” said Marx. It cost a bit to put his back to Marcus and continue down the aisle, but he managed to do it anyway. He sauntered between lockers until he heard the sound of the door clicking again, then turned around and retraced his steps.

  Where, he wondered, making his way slowly but surely in the direction Marcus had come from, where exactly had Marcus been? His eyes flicked along one row of evidence lockers and then down the next, gauging where it was he’d seen the man. There, he thought; over by a thin locker with today’s date as its received date. He looked over the information display and frowned. It was the evidence locker for the home invasion. Had he made a mistake when he discounted this case? Marcus could be up to something else, but it was a pretty big stretch to believe that on this perfect day for sneaking into Fourth World’s orbiting station, Marcus was here for any other reason than the one Marx himself was engaged upon.

  Marx brought up the contents list on the display and perused it slowly, frowning. It was almost everything he would have expected from a home invasion case; a sweep of the scene had been rendered for the sake of the display, containing all the things on that list. He could go back to a paperwork panel and cross reference the list of evidence there with the list here, but there was nothing even remotely close to a box on this list. And if he went back out, it was unlikely he would have the chance to come back into the evidence lockers without raising suspicion. He could always get Kez to take him in and out, but he didn’t want to run the chance of encountering Marcus again when he had Kez in tow. Regardless of how well Kez reacted, he was unwilling to put any ideas in Marcus’ head. There was no doubt that Marcus in any time and place would recognise Kez, even if she was somewhere she wasn’t meant to be.

  Marx went back to the rendered sweep with something tickling at his mind. All the usual things that you would expect to be in a personal dwelling were on the list and included in the sweep. But the sweep itself… The sweep consisted of a single room, and that was more than a bit strange. What was it that talkative little twit had said before? Lots of rich houses had been broken into lately, their owners terrorised and at last released without being materially hurt.

  So why had someone broken into a small, one-room dwelling? More importantly, why had this case arrived with other, far more important cases? It was a case that should have been solved onworld very quickly, without fuss and bother. It wasn’t a case that should have been shipped out with a yellow Unresolved sticker one day after it happened.

  It certainly wasn’t a case that suggested visions of the Newlands Box. In fact, it was the only case to come in today—Marx began to grin—it was the only case to come in today that wouldn’t have raised his suspicions in the slightest.

  ***

  Sergeant Gormley had been thinking. It wasn’t an exercise he commonly practised in—his usual exercise being to follow orders and directives without worrying himself too much about the whys and wherefores—and the unfamiliarity of it was as much of a strain on him as the wrap lock that was currently pinched around his upper body.

  He said, slowly, “Why are there people messing w—I mean, why are there persons unknown interfering with the timeline?”

  “Ain’t unknown, am I?” said the child. “I’m right ’ere.”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “Oh. My name’s Kez.”

  “Sergeant Gormley.”

  “I know. We pinched yer name, remember?”

  “Yes,” said Sergeant Gormley, distracted and more than a little confused. “No, I know that. What I mean is, if you’re not the one who stopped my paperwork from going through, who did? Are they going to show up today as well?”

  Kez’s black eyes glittered suddenly with interest. “Now that’s summink to think about,” she said. “Wonder if Marx thought of that?”

  “Who’s Marx?”

  Those sharp eyes turned back on him with a decidedly cutting sensation. “Ain’t none of your nevermind, bucko!”

  “You said,” Sergeant Gormley said, even more slowly, “us. Before. You said us and we.”

  “Wot do you know?” demanded Kez. “Your brain’s prob’ly addled cos I hit you too hard.”

  “You must have had help knocking me out.”

  “’Oo says I need help knockin’ people out?” demanded Kez. She sounded distinctly offended, and Sergeant Gormley had the absurd urge to apologise. “Want me to knock you out again?”

  “There’s no need for that,” Sergeant Gormley said, again falling back on the familiar in his time of exigency. “It doesn’t matter to me if you have a partner. But won’t he be surprised if someone else is going around with my name, too?”

  Kez looked more thoughtful. “Reckon it’s about time I took a bit of a walk, eh?”

  Sergeant Gormley found himself protesting, “What about me?”

  “Wot about you, bucko?”

  “Well—”

  “You’re gonna stay where you’re put, of course.”

  “Oh,” said Sergeant Gormley. “All right, then.”

  ***

  Marx popped the locker and looked through it manually. There was very little there; the one room that had been swept and rendered showed very little furniture, most of which would have been catalogued and then sent back, and the only other things in the room were a few changes of clothing, two mismatching socks, and some small personal effects. The person who owned this room evidently only used it a few days at a time.

  At first glance, there was nothing remotely box-y about the contents.

  Only, thought Marx, his eyes narrowing; only should that machine knit jumper be quite so bulky? The sleeves were almost sheer, the best in light-weight machine-knitting, and to look at it the rest of the jumper shouldn’t have been much thicker. But there it was, lumped up in a big bunch at the middle.

  Now that was interesting. So he and Kez weren’t the ones who had sent the Newlands Box to Eighth World, were they? Marx pulled away the layers of knit and found the Newlands Box nesting there comfortably, almost smugly. He could leave it where it was, but there was a very vocal part of himself that objected to leaving anything Marcus Solomon had adjusted exactly as it was after he tampered with it. No, if Marcus Solomon thought the Newlands Box was on Eighth World, it was far better for it not to be on Eighth World. And if the Box wasn’t on Eighth World, it was just as important that Marcus Solomon thought it was.

  For that to work, something very similar to the Newlands Box should actually be on Eighth World. The box was smaller than he’d expected, for something that left death and destruction in its wake—about the same size as a chocolate box, or a lunch box. There were patterns on its lid, too; something it would be hard to match. Mind you, it didn’t have to be a perfect match if it was going to be inside an evidence locker, out of si
ght. Something of the right size and weight would do the trick just nicely.

  Marx considered his options, sucking his teeth. He was still considering those options when he heard a small, ominous click somewhere in the background. His head snapped around to the door that he couldn’t see and he slapped the locker shut behind him.

  Company, was it? Marx grinned; but this time it was a savage, unamused grin. Time to be moving. He turned down the next aisle of lockers and sprinted silently for the back of the locker room.

  ***

  If Sergeant Gormley had thought about it in advance, he would have supposed it a very thrilling and terrifying thing to be kidnapped. The reality was very different. For a start, it was mildly embarrassing to be kidnapped from one’s own station and kept in a locked room on that same station. It was more than mildly embarrassing that the kidnapper who had done so was apparently a ten year old little girl—even if that little girl had a feral grin that could have curdled milk. The captivity itself was…boring.

  In fact, the only thing to do in the interview room was to wriggle himself closer to the door and attempt to hammer on it with either his feet or his head. Sergeant Gormley didn’t particularly fancy knocking on it with his head, and it was more than a bit undignified to be rolling around on his back on the floor, gathering dust while he hammered on the door with his feet. Thus it was that when the door suddenly opened with no prelude but the faintest of clicks, Sergeant Gormley was still staring up at it and trying to bring himself to roll over backwards to commence kicking.

  Sergeant Gormley found himself staring up at a masked, dark-skinned man whose almond eyes showed signs of neither amusement nor pity—either of which might have been expected from an officer discovering another in an awkward position. Only that officer’s insignia didn’t look quite right, and if Sergeant Gormley’s slow-to-wake instincts were correct, the officer wasn’t at all surprised to find him there.