The Ouroboros Wave

by Hayashi, Jyouji

  “I’m surprised she made time for us.”

  “You know those guys, Professor. With easy stuff, you better take a number. Ask for the impossible and you get priority service.”

  “Well, if the profile’s coming from Auntie’s team I’m sure it’s solid. What’s the verdict?”

  “They were able to isolate the sound of objects in the case striking each other. They think there’s a hollow metal tube, interior diameter at least five millimeters, and a number of cylindrical objects, same diameter.”

  “A disassembled weapon and—what, cartridges? Bullets?”

  “Bullets, according to Auntie. The acoustic characteristics of the tube are unusual, like hardened steel. And there are definitely bulletlike objects striking each other when the case moves. She thinks they’re using some nonstandard propellant system. Gas or liquid, maybe.”

  “How did she get all that from the acoustics alone?”

  “When bullets strike each other they sound different from cartridges. But bullets by themselves are useless. It makes sense, in a way. Cartridges wouldn’t make it past security and you can’t have them order-made—the end use is too obvious, the propellants are too specialized. But with the right shape, a bullet could easily be passed off as some kind of machine component.”

  “That’s first-rate work. Okay, let’s assume Rahmya is armed. If the weapon is in pieces she probably ordered the parts from different suppliers. Once this is over we’ll have to do something special for Auntie.”

  “I thought you’d say that, Professor, so I’ve already made reservations. Auntie’s pushing for Tuesday.”

  “Then it’s settled. And that’s one more incentive to get this off our plate by Tuesday.”

  Of course, everything had to be resolved before Tuesday. The target was arriving on Deimos in thirty-eight hours.

  Minus 13 Hours 30 Minutes

  With all this backtracking and detouring it’s taken me a long time to get here, but I made it on schedule, arriving at night. A quick check of AADD Net confirms the targets are waiting.

  There you are… present and accounted for.

  With my night-vision binoculars I can see one of AADD’s prospecting teams milling around in front of a vehicle like mine but much larger. Their van doubles as a research station and habitat. They’ve got a small trailer hooked up to it, a mobile power generator. They need a lot of juice, both for their ground-penetrating radar and for melting the permafrost layer.

  Antiproton production is rising fast now that the artificial accretion disk is going through its shakedown trials. That generator they’re running uses antiprotons from Kali. It puts out a huge amount of juice for its size. Reliable too. Antiproton-powered generators use pretty robust designs.

  I hear this high-pitched whine through the thin atmosphere. They’re probably running an oxygen/methane synthesizer, drawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Their vehicle’s got an internal combustion engine, so they’d need to synthesize fuel now and then with the generator.

  It also looks like they’re doing an equipment check, maybe evaluating samples. They’re totally oblivious to my presence; I’m certain they don’t see me. No lights around the vehicle. The light amplification circuits in their webs project images directly onto their retinas, so starlight is more than enough to work by.

  Their camp is at the bottom of a shallow depression, so I’m in luck. Makes it easier for them to work, but also easier for me to set up without being seen. I carefully extend the tripod and configure the weapon. Sighting system is good to go. I walk back to my vehicle. The Martian horizon is pretty close. Parked three kilometers back, they won’t see the cruiser till I want them to.

  So I saddle up and drive into camp like I’m half lost, lights blazing so they see me as soon as I top the horizon. Then I’m in the camp and out of the cruiser.

  “You’re Gong-ru,” says one of the prospectors. Must be the leader.

  “Yes, I am. I’m so sorry to arrive after dark.”

  “Oh that’s quite all right. Anything to show the people of Earth how the mines of Mars are helping humanity. We welcome journalists.”

  These guys are pros. Turns out they’ve done a lot of prep for Gong-ru’s visit. All four of them gather around me without the slightest fear. Maybe they’ve never seen a journalist before. Or maybe they’ve never seen someone from Earth before.

  “Listen, everyone, could you all line up together? I’d like to start by taking your picture.” Actually, I’d like to start by shooting you. “Let’s take it with that crater in the background.”

  “Certainly,” says the leader. All four stand at the edge of the crater, the ideal firing squad lineup, lit by the lights of the cruiser. I motion them closer together and activate the aiming system. The crosshairs appear on my visor. I put the crosshairs where they need to go and fire.

  They go down one by one, no clue what’s happening. They probably don’t even know they’re dead—except for the last one, who has the sense to duck, probably half by instinct.

  I run up quickly, looking concerned. This one took her round in the shoulder. A very young woman.

  “What’s happening, Gong-ru? What’s wrong with my team?” Fear and shock. She’s shaking. Her eyes stare up at me, pleading for help. Who am I not to help?

  “You’ll be all right. It’s just a scratch. This will make the pain go away.”

  I put the crosshairs between her eyebrows and make the pain go away. One round is all it takes.

  Minus 12 Hours 00 Minutes

  “Nothing new since we talked, Professor. The victim is a young woman. Bone density and musculature indicates she’s from Earth. At this point that’s all we have.”

  “You can’t ID her?” said Shiran.

  “Still working on it. There’s nothing in the database, no DNA or prints. But I’d bet my paycheck she’s from Earth.”

  Samar was guiding Shiran and Mikal around a crime scene in a maintenance tunnel of Kobe City’s Number Two Atmospheric Treatment Plant. Usually the tunnel was deserted. Now it was cordoned off by the forensic team. It had already been night when Shiran reached the surface, six thousand kilometers below Clarke Station. Most of the preliminary work had been finished before she arrived. Rahmya’s trail had gone cold, and the chairman of AADD would land on Deimos in thirty hours.

  “Think this is Rahmya’s work, Professor?”

  “Good question. Mikal?”

  “It’s Kobe’s first homicide this year. Rahmya shows up, the next thing we know somebody gets dead. I have a hard time believing there’s no connection.”

  “But why murder this girl? Our suspects say she’s not one of theirs.”

  “That’s what they say. Still, I’d be inclined to believe them on this one.”

  “So this killing might be totally unconnected. Samar, what’s your take?”

  In the elevator on the way down Samar had been in nearly continuous touch with his team—not that he didn’t trust them, but there was something about murder scenes that seemed to excite him. Sometimes after watching Samar scurry ecstatically around a fresh corpse Shiran wondered whether perhaps she should rethink their friendship.

  “The killer is probably Rahmya. Common sense points to it. Martians rarely go as far as murder. If they were stupid enough to try, they’d probably botch the job. If they were smart enough to succeed, they’d find a better way to solve their problem.”

  “I don’t disagree, but let’s not jump to conclusions, Samar. There’s too much we don’t understand about what Rahmya’s planning.”

  “I never jump to conclusions, Professor. I’m a professional.”

  “You’re also human. You make mistakes.”

  “I hope so. If I was even more competent than I already am, now that would be scary.”

  A maintenance robot had discovered the body. Shiran now had to juggle the search for Rahmya with the first stages of a murder investigation. The victim was nude. Her clothes were missing and her face had been pulped, preventi
ng quick identification by a facial recognition system.

  “Further down the corridor there’s another one of these metal doors, its lower edge covered in blood. Undoubtedly the victim was positioned in the doorway and her face crushed by repeated blows with the door. Whoever did this didn’t want us to ID the victim right away. Cause of death was strangulation.”

  “Hold on, Samar. How much time does that buy the killer, really?”

  “Six hours, at least. Maybe as much as twenty-four. Reconstructing the victim’s appearance won’t require that much time, but confirming her identity from bone structure alone could take a few hours. If she’s from Earth we can get a match from the elevator security cameras. If she’s a Martian we’ll be searching for a needle in a haystack. I’d estimate the probable time to ID at ten hours, give or take.”

  Shiran looked over the scene. In addition to the forensics team, a dish-shaped robot was moving slowly along the narrow corridor, painstakingly gathering up every hair, strand of fiber, flake of skin, and cell debris and noting its location. Cell debris was important evidence. Using the time-tested polymerase chain-reaction method, DNA could be cultivated and profiled. Rahmya’s DNA was already logged. If any cell debris not belonging to the victim had been left at the scene, it would be easy to determine whether or not it came from Rahmya. But no such evidence was found, not even a single hair that didn’t match to the victim.

  “Rahmya’s never left a trace of evidence at any of her crime scenes. I don’t know… Something still doesn’t feel right.”

  “What do you mean, Professor?” asked Mikal.

  “Don’t you feel it? Why destroy the victim’s face and make off with her clothes when all it buys you is ten more hours? Or if you’re really lucky, a day. And why did Rahmya have to kill this girl in the first place? She wasn’t with the group that hijacked the elevator.”

  “Yes, we’re sure we have all of them. Still, it’s always possible this one was known only to Rahmya.”

  “Given the probable time of death, we have to assume that Rahmya commits a brutal murder almost as soon as she arrives in Kobe. Why?”

  “It just hit me,” said Samar. “The victim and Rahmya are about the same age, height, and weight. We won’t know till the reconstruction is done, but I’d be willing to bet there’s a strong resemblance.”

  “You mean the victim was a stand-in?”

  “It would explain why she was stripped. Why do that if the victim was traveling under a false ID? A genuine ID chip, on the other hand, would be very useful.”

  “A stand-in… But Rahmya still only buys herself a few hours before we make the victim.”

  “Maybe that’s all the time she thinks she needs to prep for an assassination.”

  A notification arrived over Shiran’s web from a member of the investigating team on the ground. The case Rahmya was carrying had been purchased the day before in Kobe.

  “Professor, we have a general idea of the kind of weapon she’s carrying.”

  “That’s great, excellent work. Did she assemble it from components?”

  “Indeed she did. She sent specifications to several different clans before she arrived.”

  AADD’s manufacturing network comprised workshops that were each owned and managed by a different family. Each workshop was known as a clan, the word meaning more or less the same thing it did on Earth. On Mars, family units and manufacturing units were more often than not equivalent. Social identity was achieved through work. These businesses were more than just small enterprises, they were symbols of participation in the collective.

  “The specifications stated ‘parts for photographic equipment.’ All of them were picked up by the same woman, not Rahmya. The orders were filled yesterday—”

  “A woman? You said a woman paid for the components?”

  “That’s correct, Professor. We have her face from the scanners. I’m sending it now. The buyer ID’d herself only as a representative for Ryoko Kashiwazaki. Her web was switched off throughout the transaction. She claimed it was malfunctioning. Everything was handled manually. We expect to ID her from the scanner images shortly.”

  The footage sent to Shiran’s web showed a woman identifying herself as Kashiwazaki’s representative. She could have been Rahmya’s sister. Shiran turned to Samar. “All right, here she is. Could this be our murder victim?”

  “It’s very possible, Professor. I’d want some time to confirm it though.”

  There was more—a component list and the characteristics of the possible weapon. “The rifle is likely to be semiautomatic and tripod-mounted, with automated sighting functions. It could be operated remotely.”

  “Remotely? That’s interesting. Range?”

  “We’re still simulating, but effective range is probably a hundred meters or so.”

  “All right. Please attach your team to this group.”

  “Will do, Professor.”

  Mikal shrugged. “Now that really doesn’t make sense. What’s a pro like Rahmya doing with a weapon like that? It’s practically a toy.”

  “She had to source all the parts here. Pretty hard to build a sniper rifle that way.”

  “But she’s always gone for explosives. Sniping isn’t her thing. It would’ve been just as difficult or easy to order bomb components, even a small missile.”

  “Tetsu’s not coming to the surface,” said Samar. “A remotely operated weapon could be useful. But a range of a hundred meters? That’s a popgun. And she’s moving away from the target. What do you make of this, Professor?”

  “I don’t make anything of it. We don’t know what she’s planning, that’s all. It’s time to reach out for some help.”

  AADD HAD HUNDREDS of teams and enterprises, some as small as two or three individuals. None had more than a hundred or so members. Each project was handled through organic collaboration among teams. One group might be attached to several projects simultaneously. Most project groupings disbanded after the work was complete, but some spawned new functional teams or even a new enterprise that might go on to have a long life.

  The artificial accretion disk project was so large that it required multiple groups comprised of multiple teams. Teams in one group linked with others in a complex web of integrated mutual support. At the same time, many projects called for fewer than ten members all told. This organizational culture was the reason AADD could quickly turn theoretical research into real-world applications.

  The Guardians were just one of AADD’s groupings. Shiran and Mikal were attached to the group responsible for managing security systems on the orbital elevator. In this role they interfaced with other security teams to pinpoint emerging risks and formulate responses.

  Shiran did not give orders to other security teams. She set goals. Orders are a way to elicit a response from an organization; they are not goals. Organizations are cultural artifacts—when the motivation for maintaining them changes, orders lose their force. For a constantly evolving organization like AADD, goal-setting, not hierarchy, was the key to getting things done.

  AADD’s members didn’t gain status from the groups they belonged to. Different groups had different functions; that was all. People acquired status from performance regardless of their job. The poster child for AADD’s culture was Tetsuya Ochiai. The people of Earth assumed Ochiai was AADD’s dictator, because that was how Terran CEOs ran their companies. But that was a misconception. Ochiai was responsible for converting the policies of AADD’s decision-making bodies into an overall strategy—nothing more.

  Of course, serving as the CEO of AADD wasn’t a job just anyone could do. Ochiai had played a major role in planning the construction of the artificial accretion disk as well as in terraforming Mars. Still, he was a facilitator not a dictator. What dictator would be referred to by his underlings with a diminutive like “Tetsu”?

  “THAT’S RIGHT. Just contact us if you notice anything unusual. We’ll follow up on any potential links to Rahmya.”

  Shiran had contacted the h
eads of the other security teams to line up support, most importantly the team responsible for analysis of news coming out of Earth. Her team was too small to handle that sort of monitoring on its own. Her request for assistance went out to other teams via web, and specialized AIs went to work sifting every scrap of available information. But as the sun rose on the second day of Rahmya’s mission, nothing new had emerged. Ochiai would be arriving on Deimos in twenty-four hours.

  Minus 9 Hours 30 Minutes

  I take the land cruiser underground, through the ice caverns. This is another reason I’m not using a desert buggy. Underground the satellites can’t see you.

  AADD has thirty or so air locks between this road and the surface. I guess they’re there to stabilize subterranean conditions before they get into the serious prospecting. I’m using the caverns for a different reason. With all the work they did to map them I’d be nuts not to use the caverns.

  Problem is, for the first time the mission’s not going according to plan. The data I sourced on Earth is turning out to be pretty incomplete. I should probably blame the client too. They’re the reason AADD has started restricting data on their ore deposits, even in academic journals—and especially when someone from Earth starts nosing around.

  Still, I was able to plot a route. I don’t know how these caverns formed, but the ice in here has been frozen—what, a few hundred thousand years? A few million? The ice should be hard as rock. I should be able to drive something as heavy as this cruiser right over it. But it’s not working out that way.

  The floor was firm at first. And the cruiser is just the ticket when the ice is hard. But when I got past a certain depth, conditions deteriorated very fast. And the deeper I go the worse it gets. The floor has changed from ice to something like melting snow.

  I’m so deep under the surface now, I’m guessing the pressure is getting pretty high outside the cruiser. I have no idea why the cavern floor is the consistency of shaved ice, but it’s really complicating my plan.

  Another thing making it hard to drive is the trailer I’m pulling, with the generator and other equipment I lifted from the camp. The whole thing has to weigh a few tons. I did some dry runs on Earth, of course, using a snow cat to haul a big load of ballast. Based on that, you’d think hauling stuff on Mars should be easier, but the lower gravity is preventing me from getting the traction I need. I don’t have the weight; the tracks aren’t gripping the ice. At the same time, mass is mass. If the tracks slip, I have to deal with the same amount of inertia whipping me around.