Ash Ock

by Christopher Hinz

  “An accident of birth, which my parents chose not to correct,” smiled Xornakoff, taking notice of what Gillian had assumed to have been a subtle glance downward at the other hand. The inspector kept his eyes riveted to Gillian’s. “I’ve been assigned as your liaison. I hope you and your people can give us some help. This is the fourth Birch massacre I’ve personally investigated. Frankly, E-Tech could use a fresh perspective.”

  Gillian did not believe that his last remark was entirely sincere. “How many dead?”

  “Only eighty-three this time.” The inspector shook his head. “Sickening. I’d sacrifice another set of fingers for just one clean shot at these bastards with a thruster rifle.”

  Gillian nodded solemnly.

  “Of course, I suppose you’re more accustomed to seeing this sort of thing than I am. Before the Birch killings began, I was assigned to one of our tactical divisions. Homicide was never my specialty.” He paused. “I believe, however, that one of your assistants mentioned that you’ve been doing plasma necropsy research for a very long time.”

  “Eight years,” replied Gillian, recalling the data profile of the fictional Amphos Dynassa that he had been supplied with earlier this morning. He hoped that his “assistants” had also done their homework.

  The inspector raised his eyebrows, as if doubting Gillian’s answer. But that trick was an old one. Gillian said nothing and maintained a calm expression. Xornakoff continued smiling pleasantly.

  I’ll have to be careful here. Xornakoff projected the aura of a man skilled at detecting falsehood.

  “Amphos!” The word cracked loudly through the silence of the hall, capturing glances from half the people in the room. Two lab-coated technicans, examining a decapitated body near where Gillian and the inspector stood, frowned in dismay, as if to suggest: This is a place of silence. Please show more respect for the dead.

  Gillian turned. Two women, one tall and pale-skinned, the other stocky and black, were approaching up the far left aisle. Each carried a red medical pouch.

  “Quite a pair,” said the inspector. “Do the three of you work together often?”

  Gillian did not have an answer for that one so he remained silent, keenly observing the approach of his two “assistants,” pretending that he had not heard Xornakoff’s question.

  If these two women were not experts in the field of plasma necropsy, as promised, all three of them were going to be in a lot of trouble. Gillian had a fair understanding of postmortem examinations, especially where Paratwa victims were concerned, but about this specialized field he knew next to nothing. The data profile of Amphos Dynassa had contained a complete outline of the science, but there had been time to absorb only a few basic terms and definitions.

  Nick’s plan—to allow Gillian to examine this fresh murder site—had been conceived only last night, after they had learned of this latest massacre. Hastily executed plots always bore rough edges and this inspector was doing his best to snag some splinters, catch a lie. Gillian wondered whether something in particular had made Xornakoff suspicious. Had the two approaching “assistants” been careless with information? Or was the inspector merely exhibiting a natural distrust between E-Tech Security and La Gloria de la Ciencia?

  Originally, Gillian had wanted to meet with the two women before coming here, and then arrive at the murder site together. But Nick had worried that Gillian’s dearth of knowledge would be more sorely tested that way. Better to have the “assistants” come first, pave the way. That made a certain kind of sense. Still, arrangements could have been made for a prior rendezvous.

  “Hello, Amphos,” drawled the taller woman, sounding bored. She was a slim ponytailed blonde, wearing a gray blouse with a pair of tiny blue sapphires sewn across her nipples. Gillian stared at her, intrigued. And he found himself swept unexpectedly into an ancient memory.

  He and Catharine were very young, perhaps ten years old. Meridian had taken them onto a South American air club: one of those cavernous low-atmosphere ships able to periodically simulate zero-gravity for their customers via rapid ascensions and dives. A dancer in bikini pants—a wing nut, Meridian had called her—had been the air club’s star performer that day. The wing nut had had her nipples surgically altered into high-powered holoprojectors and each time the air club traveled the arc, treating the passengers to a brief foray into weightlessness, she would somersault violently across the glassed-in performance chamber, spilling intricate holograms of her breasts in all directions. Catharine, transfixed, had giggled with delight at the exhibition, but Gillian had found himself more interested in the reactions of the air club’s mostly male patrons.

  Silent austere faces; eyes flashing back and forth, following the wing nut’s gyrations with the rigorous intensity of tracking lasers. Awarenesses exclusively focused, to be sure, yet Gillian sensed that those possessed faces sought to fractionalize the moment even further, to cut through the density of spiraling holos, fragment the wing nut’s performance until each instant was somehow transformed into something of value, like a series of treasured video stills. But even that conceptual pattern did not capture the essence of what he was witnessing. He left the air club feeling deeply confused by the experience.

  Later that evening, as always, Gillian and Catharine had been asked by Aristotle to vocalize their impressions. Catharine stated that she had found the trip amusing, but ultimately silly and a waste of those few precious recreational hours that they were permitted. When it was his turn to confess, Gillian had stood in front of Aristotle’s brutish-looking male tways, vainly attempting to explain his perceptions of the bewitched men in the air club, stumbling for words and images to clarify his feelings.

  The tways of Aristotle had assumed identical frowns. “Why did you and Catharine not interlace? Is it not likely that the arising of Empedocles could have distilled your confusion?”

  “Coming together did not seem . . . proper,” Gillian had replied, feeling certain that such a vague response would anger his master, who would perhaps punish him for his lack of clarity. But Aristotle had merely smiled, and sent him on his way without so much as a word of disfavor.

  And that same night, Gillian had experienced his first wet dream.

  “Buff and I were telling the inspector all about you,” proclaimed the tall blonde with the sapphire nipples.

  Gillian’s awareness flashed back to the present. “Nothing bad, I hope.”

  “Oh, no,” replied the second woman, Buff, a compact bear with skin the color of light fudge. Buff stood only a few inches taller than Nick, yet she looked capable of hurtling a sumo wrestler through the netting of a freefall pen. “You know that Martha and I would never talk bad about our hero.”

  Martha and Buff. Gillian hoped that Nick knew what he was doing.

  Xornakoff’s smiling gaze remained pinned to Gillian’s face. “Mr. Dynassa,” he began, “I must admit to being professionally curious about your methodology. Plasma necropsy, after all, is still a fairly new field. I was wondering—do you plan to initially integrate the fluid linkages among victims or would the Vallochian transfer method be a more appropriate starting point?”

  Yes, Gillian wanted to answer. He restrained himself.

  “We’ll utilize data from both methods,” replied Buff, saving the day and locking a thick, well-muscled arm around Gillian’s waist in the process. “We’ll cross-reference on a Kay-grid and index tissue anomalies separately.”

  Xornakoff raised his eyebrows. “I don’t understand how that can be accomplished, Mr. Dynassa . . . could you elaborate?”

  “It’s very technical,” uttered Martha.

  The inspector smiled politely. “I believe that Mr. Dynassa could make himself understandable.”

  Buff squeezed Gillian tightly and laid her head on his chest. “Inspector, I’m sure that Amphos can answer all your questions. But later, okay? Maybe we can go to lunch and trade work-tech.” She stared up into Gillian’s eyes and sighed with pleasure. “Amphos M. Dynassa, I can’t wait to get
my mouth on you again. After we finish here today, I’m hauling you straight over to my apartment.”

  Xornakoff’s eyebrows arched another half-inch.

  “It’s not what you think, Inspector,” sighed Martha, affixing Xornakoff with a bored gaze. “Buff’s not interested in simple orasex.”

  “Martha, please!” snapped the heavy black woman, abruptly crushing Gillian against her side. “Don’t be crass. Admit it—you’re just jealous ’cause tonight it’s my turn.”

  “Galvanic dentures,” Martha revealed. “A little crushed ice, a set of acu-pins straight into the balls—some serious power-sucking.”

  Again, Buff released an exaggerated sigh. “Really, Martha. The voltages are regulated. You know that.”

  Martha rolled her eyes. Xornakoff cleared his throat and took a cautious step backward, his pasted smile fading beneath an ascending frown: a man doubtlessly considering the ramifications of electrified needles in the testicles.

  Gillian held back a grin. “Inspector, I’d like to be alone with my assistants for a few minutes. Would you excuse us?”

  Xornakoff nodded slowly, still uncertain of whether Buff and Martha were joking. Gillian led Buff toward the back of the assembly hall. Martha followed.

  “Not bad,” he offered, after the three of them were facing the rear wall to prevent lipreading. “Needles in the balls?” Gillian chuckled. “I’ve never heard of that one.”

  “It takes some getting used to,” offered Martha, not smiling.

  Gillian decided to change the subject. “At any rate, you saved me from an impending jam. Another few minutes with our inspector and my cover would have evaporated.”

  “You’re very welcome,” chirped Buff, releasing his waist from her iron grip.

  “Are you both wearing scramblers?”

  “Extra yes!” spouted Buff. “Are you kidding? This is E-Tech Security. They probably have enough surveillance gear in this hall to open a factory.”

  “Bug heaven,” agreed Martha, toying with one of her blonde ponytails.

  “How good is your shielding?”

  “As good as it comes,” said Buff. “How’s yours?”

  Gillian nodded. “I think we’re safe enough. What have you found out so far?”

  “Not much,” said Buff. “Other than the fact that Inspector Xornakoff is one suspicious puppy. Bend over and he’d sniff your ass for a week.”

  Martha wagged her head in agreement.

  “What we got isn’t much more than what’s already been released to the freelancers,” continued the black woman. “This was a local meeting of the Order of the Birch, advertised and open to the public. About seven hundred people attended. Up on the stage, the meeting’s special guest—a low-level Birch screamer named O’Donahee—had just finished a ten-minute rant about why we should vaporize one of Neptune’s micromoons with a few thousand nuclear devices. Mr. Neptune believed that such a vivid example of our atomic destructive capabilities would provide a noticeable warning to any returning Paratwa: ‘The Colonies are not playing games, we mean business,” et cetera, et cetera.

  “Anyway, the crowd loves this kind of nonsense, so at the end of Mr. Neptune’s speech, they’re all agitated and up out of their seats—”

  Gillian interrupted. “And that’s when this heckler starts carrying on.”

  “Yeah,” Buff continued, “bad man one—Slasher. And then Shooter appears on the stage with his thruster and it’s boom-boom time.

  “Our guest speaker—sweet Mr. O’Donahee—is blown right off the stage and lands in the third row of the audience, probably dead even before his spine broke across the back of a chair. And the other Birch presenters, seated at the table, were killed execution-style—one shot each to the back of the head.” Buff paused. “We think that might mean something.”

  “I doubt it,” said Gillian, closing his eyes, trying to intellectually piece together the images. “Shooter was probably just eliminating his nearest threats, and as quickly as possible. I’ll bet the next thing he did was to turn his thruster on the people going for the side exits.”

  Buff turned to him with a surprised look. “I’m impressed. That’s the way that E-Tech figures things happened.”

  “Keep facing the wall,” Gillian urged. “Xornakoff is bound to have lipreaders watching us.”

  “Maybe the inspector was even smart enough to have inserted microcams in this wall,” suggested Martha.

  “Wouldn’t matter. What I’m wearing will scramble even passive gear.”

  “Jesus,” muttered Buff. “Just how illegal are you?”

  Gillian smiled. He had asked for the best and Jerem Marth’s people had provided it. The meshwire shirt and tracking gear were not as potent—nor as detectable—as a genuine AV scrambler, but they were banned hardware nonetheless. If Xornakoff knew what Gillian was wearing, the three of them would probably be arrested on the spot.

  He still felt exposed, however, and he knew why. His Cohe wand remained with Nick. The midget had considered this foray to the murder site risky enough without the illicit energy weapon—trademark of the Paratwa—on Gillian’s person.

  “Do you two really know about plasma necropsy?”

  “Some,” said Buff. “I mean, we can get by as research assistants. We took a couple of crash courses back around the time the massacres began, four months ago. And we’ve been plugging into sleep modules at least two or three nights a week. As a matter of fact, I just recently completed La Gloria de la Ciencia’s advanced forensics course.”

  “But this isn’t your regular occupation,” Gillian concluded.

  “No.”

  “What is?”

  Martha, grinning, fingered the sapphire on her right nipple.

  Buff answered slowly. “We don’t actually work for La Gloria de la Ciencia. We’re sort of . . . security consultants.”

  “Whom do you work for?”

  “We’re sort of freelance.”

  Gillian sighed. Nick was playing games again. The midget had claimed that the two women were experts from La Gloria de la Ciencia. Half-true, perhaps. I’ll have to sort things out later.

  “Did Xornakoff give you any information about what E-Tech thinks about the massacre? Any conclusions?”

  “Same story as before,” said Buff. “E-Tech believes that we’re dealing with two crazed killers, who are imitating the actions of a real Paratwa. About the only notable difference in these killings was that the assassins didn’t utter any of their ‘Long live the Order of the Birch,’ or ‘The Paratwa must not be allowed to return’ crap. I guess, under the circumstances, our bad men felt that such statements simply would not have been proper.” Buff grinned. “At least we’re not dealing with hypocrites.”

  “Any obvious connections among the victims?” Gillian asked. “Some facet that makes any of those eighty-three stand out from the hundreds who survived?”

  Martha shook her head.

  “Anything at all?” Gillian prodded.

  “Well,” said Buff slowly, “you’re always going to find some connections when you have this large a sample. I mean, we’ve got six victims who were born in the same colony. We’ve got fifteen who worked in the shipping industry, thirty victims who were males between the ages of twenty-six and twenty-nine, seven people with minor communicable diseases—colds, mostly, plus a couple of different strains of flu.

  “We’ve got fourteen who’ve been in psychplans at least once in their life—not surprising when you consider the crowd. We’ve got thirty-seven confirmed pet owners—”

  “I get the picture,” said Gillian. “How many injured this time?”

  “Eighteen were hospitalized,” said Buff. “Most of them suffered minor injuries—grazed by thruster fire or banged up in the dash for the doors. All expected to recover.”

  Gillian nodded. “How did the killers escape?”

  Buff shrugged. “The same modus operandi as in the other Birch killings. Apparently, they put away their weapons and blended into the mass o
f people squeezing through the exits.”

  “Which exits?”

  “Witnesses disagree on that point,” said Buff. “But the majority seem to believe that Slasher moved toward the front of the hall, then made his way through the door below stage right. Shooter jumped off the stage and headed for the back exits.”

  Same pattern as in Honshu, Gillian mused. They head toward each other and when they’re close, they change directions and start moving away from each other, on perpendicular courses. And as in Honshu, the same shadow of confusion fell across awareness.

  Something is not right.

  A sudden question occurred to him. “Slasher and Shooter—were they wearing crescent webs?” Gillian recalled that at several of the previous massacres, the killers were believed to have used the near-invisible defensive energy screens.

  Buff shrugged. “Hard to be sure. A couple of the survivors who were close to Slasher reported hearing a low hum—that could be evidence of an active crescent web. And several people said that a man in the front row managed to get off a blast at Shooter with a low-powered thruster. They said that it looked like this man scored a direct hit, but that Shooter wasn’t bothered in the slightest. That might indicate a strong energy shield. But we’ll never know for certain. The man who fired the shot was killed an instant later.”

  “Slasher fights with a dagger in each hand,” Gillian mused. “But Shooter uses only one weapon—the spray thruster—holding the gun in one hand.” He hesitated, unsure of where his thoughts were leading. “Is Shooter right-handed or left-handed? Or is he ambidextrous?”

  Buff gave another shrug.

  “He’s right-handed,” said Martha firmly.

  “How do you know?” Gillian probed.

  “’Cause after the first massacre, Buff and I managed to question a couple of witnesses after E-Tech got through with them.”

  “The first massacre,” recalled Gillian. “That was the restaurant slayings in Brilicondor Colony?”

  “Yeah,” chirped Buff, “that’s right. About four months ago. Now I remember. One of the witnesses described how Shooter came marching into the restaurant through a robotized service tunnel—one of those ultraskinny corridors used by the mech waiters. Anyway, Shooter had to squeeze through there sideways—he could barely fit. And this witness said that when he came out of the tunnel, he was leading with his right—the weapon was in his right hand.”