“Are you feeling all right? Do you have a few minutes to talk about what happened?”
“What happened?” She thinks I’m a victim?
The armored woman stopped within arm’s reach of the bed. “The hospital contacted us based on your injuries… as well as the statement from the man who brought you in.” She held up a datapad. “I’m here to help.”
“I’m okay. Really, I’m just tired.” Shit, maybe I shouldn’t brush it off. That’ll make her more suspicious. “I got jumped by some SecSpiders lookin’ for points.”
“SecSpiders?” The officer tapped two fingers along the top edge of the datapad, making a soft woodpecker-like noise. “They don’t usually abandon their victims alive and naked in a hotel room. I understand if you find it difficult to talk about. Were you violated?”
She’ll know if I lie about something like this… “They didn’t. My clothes got ruined, I’d just showered and―”
“Given the hardware you’ve got, I expected you to be a better liar.” The woman pivoted on her heel and walked to the door, nudging it closed. “I found your Hotarus under the bed. Nice guns, they’ve had a bit of tweaking. Funny thing, both e-mags were at full charge.”
Fuck. Why? Risa glared at the ceiling. All these years and the cops don’t nab me until I want out. Maris, you bastard.
“Nothing to say?” asked the officer. “Well, hopefully you’re not thinking about killing me just yet.”
“I don’t want to kill anyone.” Risa looked away.
“An odd outlook for someone with military-grade NSK neuralware and Nano claws.” The woman lifted her head, the sound of a smile in her voice. “So if you’re not a victim of a sex crime, what happened?”
All the strength fled from Risa’s muscles. “If I told you the truth, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“I’ve had an interesting week.” The officer sauntered closer.
“I used to do merc work, but I’m trying to get out of it. Caught a job trying to defend an ag settlement from ‘unknown hostiles,’ but they turned out to be C-Branch.”
The cop’s body stiffened. “Military intelligence? Are you sure?”
“One of them admitted it as he was kicking my ass.” Risa sat up, making an effort to move in a slow, nonthreatening way. “I’m sure you saw the medical scans.”
“Yes. Your injuries didn’t seem likely for a DV case or SMV.”
“SMV?” Risa blinked.
“Sexually motivated violence event.” The cop tilted her helmet to the side. “Did you kill the person who attacked you?”
Risa blinked. Violence event? “No. Raziel did.”
“Who is Raziel?”
“An angel.” Risa chuckled and clasped her side where a lingering ache reawakened. “No, not like the man who brought me here. A literal angel”―she waved her hand about―“glowing gold wings, sword, lives in heaven, all that.”
The officer stared in silence for a moment.
Risa let her arm flop limp on the bed. “I did say you wouldn’t believe me.”
“When was the last time you saw Sergeant Aram?”
Pavo? Risa’s head snapped to the right, locking her gaze on where she imagined the woman’s eyes to be behind the mask. “The morning before I left for Arden.” Why did I just answer that?
“You haven’t seen him since?”
Risa leaned toward the woman, clasping the bedding on either side of her right knee. “No. Why? Why are you asking about Pavo?”
The helmet let off a weak pneumatic hiss as the metal visor plate pulled up and slid over the top of the helmet to expose the face of his duty partner. Risa looked from her Earth-toned skin to the nameplate above her left breast: Imari, A.
“The two of you disappeared around the same time. I got wind of a possible DV or rape vic fitting your description. As soon as I saw the video, I swiped the dispatch before anyone else could. I remember you from the street. I had every intention of coming here to slap you around until you told me what was going on. First time I laid eyes on you, I knew something wasn’t right.”
Risa’s somatic detection system projected a half-dozen indicators in her electronic vision, keyed to the woman’s eye motions, perspiration level, vocal inflection, and heart rate. All signs indicated calm and truthful, despite an unusual amount of static in the virtual images, as if the graphic engine teetered on the verge of a crash. “So what changed? You have a sudden attack of friendliness on the way down the hall?”
“Saw your medical report. Didn’t feel like getting my throat slit by a blurry ghost. If I was only interested in ass-kicking, there would’ve been thirty of us. What happened to Pavo?”
“What happened to Pavo?” Risa raised her voice.
“That’s what I asked. I was hoping you could tell me.” Sergeant Imari folded her arms. “What kind of shit is he involved in?”
Risa flung the blanket off and got out of bed, pacing circles over a freezing floor. The clingy medical smock, much thinner than her flexible armor and more snug, left no secret of her body’s opinion of the cold.
“This is off the record.” The cop sat in the chair by the bed, leaning forward, elbows on knees. “Unless you’re a serial killer, I’m only worried about finding him. Are you C-Branch? ACC?”
Risa stopped hard, bare feet squeaking on the gloss-white tiles. “He’s missing?” No, no, no, no. All I wanted was to come back to him and… Tears came unbidden, though her expression remained stoic. “What do you know?”
Sergeant Imari seemed surprised at the outpouring of emotion, and kept quiet for a moment. “Two days ago, a man broke into my apartment around the time I usually drag my ass out of bed. He must’ve been like you―boosted to hell. He was on me before I could get a hand on my weapon and… next thing I know, I’m cuffed and gagged on the floor, dizzy as hell from some kinda chem. I about shit myself, expecting… well, you know.”
Risa’s fear and anger stepped back a tick. “Yeah.”
“Captain Vasquez’s voice comes outta the Vidphone, so I look up to see the guy that ambushed me, wearing my bathrobe as well as my face… fucking hologram mask. He called me out sick, and left me there. I drifted in and out for―I dunno―a couple hours from whatever drug he gave me. When I came to, I got the tape off my mouth and started screaming, but the fucker smashed my apartment console. I had to wait for Juno and Ronas to kick my door in fourteen hours later when I didn’t show up for roll call. You wanna talk about awkward? People you work with every day finding you hogtied in your underwear with your own binders… They’ll be giving me shit about that for the rest of my life.”
“What about Pavo?”
Sergeant Imari grumbled, clenching her hands into fists. “Apparently, despite being unconscious and tied up at home, I picked him up as usual. Cams at the Primus landing pad showed him getting into a car with me driving it. We haven’t seen him since.” She shook her head. “He’s had duty in Primus for two years. You’d think he’d move by now.”
“No…” Risa stopped pacing and fell seated on the edge of the bed. “No…”
“I suspected some kind of intelligence operation. Whoever they were, they got in and out of the MDF network like ghosts. They had the codes to my apartment, and nothing showed up on cam near my place. It’s like they wanted people to see him getting in the car with me, even though I was drugged to hell and back at the time.” The woman looked her in the eye. “I know you’re connected somehow. All I want to do is find him.”
Risa narrowed her eyes. “I wouldn’t hurt him. I…” She lost the battle of wills, and bawled.
She put a hand on Risa’s shoulder. “Ain’t like that girl. We’re just partners. Men aren’t my thing. I’m worried about him like he’s my little bro.”
“Off the record?” What the hell am I doing? “Right?” Nothing matters but Pavo.
“I promise.” Light from inside the woman’s helmet went out. “Everything’s off.”
You’re an idiot, Risa. “I’m not C-Branch… Martian Lib
eration Front. So is Pavo. He’s Pueri Verum Martis.”
“Oh.” She let her arm fall. “Is that all?”
Risa looked up. “You’re not going to kill me?”
“No. You may be the only link I have to find him. Besides, the MLF is a puppet show anyway.”
“What?” Risa blinked. “Puppet show?”
Sergeant Imari leaned back, blowing air through fluttering lips. “Well, maybe it’s just a rumor, but I hear shit at the station. Everyone whispers about C-Branch setting it up for plausible deniability. You know, so they can blow shit up and blame someone else… course, might be conspiracy wonks rattling their empty brains.”
Risa’s mind raced. All the near misses she’d had went by one after the other. How could the MLF have smoothed things over legally for her? How could they get half the intel they get when they seemed like a bunch of scraps living in the sewers. Is that why Maris got so testy about his ‘rank?’ No… it couldn’t be. C-Branch wanted to blow up Arden to blame us. If the MLF was a C-Branch sham, they’d have just sent me to blow it up.
She squeaked, covering her mouth with both hands and gazed at the ceiling.
They did…
“Come on,” said Sergeant Imari. “You’ve been cleared to leave.”
Numb, Risa peeled off the medical smock and dressed right in front of the cop.
The woman glanced away. “I can see why he fell for you. You’re pretty.”
“Am I?” Risa twisted to lock eyes with her. “Even with these things in my skull?”
“The violet compliments your hair.”
She couldn’t tell if the flat tone was sarcastic, embarrassed, or laden with worry. Risa pulled on her clothes and followed Pavo’s partner out of the medical center to a waiting six-wheeled car. The cop paused at the trunk, removing a familiar bundle. Risa climbed in the passenger seat, unsure if she should feel detained. Sergeant Imari fell in next to her, and dropped the ballistic suit, boots, her Hotarus, and NetMini in her lap. The need to have armor around her proved intoxicating.
“You’re trying to get me naked again, aren’t you?” asked Risa, with no life in her voice.
“Maybe in better circumstances I’d find that fun.”
Risa wriggled out of her clothes as the car got underway, changing into her armor in the tight confines of the passenger seat. Is this some kind of gesture of trust? Giving me weapons? She frowned at her hands. These are more dangerous than the pistols. I was already armed.
The areas within Secundus where driving worked proved few and far between, though within the ‘tourist reservation’ removed from the military presence on Tier 1, they had enough room. Imari kept quiet as they drove at a touch more than a jogging pace, slaloming pedestrians on the way to a wide corkscrew tunnel that brought them down to Tier 4 and a public mall, for a little privacy from electronic ears. She pulled over and parked by a little store specializing in flavored Nicohaler vapors. Two gull-wing doors rose in silence to meet above the roof. Risa, still feeling stiff, grabbed the handle overhead and pulled herself out of the car.
The doors sank as the women walked away, the cop’s forearm guard chirping as soon as they closed. Holo-panels sprouted from the walls here and there, mostly pablum for the masses. Conflicting stories warred for prominence on the NewsNet. The heated debate regarding Arden emanated from several screens scattered about the commerce quad. Prattling voices faded in and out amid the din of the crowd. Risa followed her to an area formed by the crossing of two extra-wide passageways lined with stores that had evolved into a mixture of food court and hangout. No one had bothered decorating the bare rock columns holding up the ceiling, though numerous plasfilm posters for local shows and missing teens covered them.
Imari headed for an empty table and sat in the shade of a fourteen-foot tall artificial plant surrounded by hologram birds of bright blue, orange, and pink. This close to the oasis in the middle of the shopping area, the scent of artificial jungle stung her eyes. Sergeant Imari tapped at the console embedded in the table, opening a menu.
“You should eat something.”
“R-4 is fine.” She crossed her arms across her gut, not sure if she felt hungry or on the verge of being sick.
“Are you sure? I’m buying.”
“Yeah. I might throw it up… don’t waste credits on good shit yet.”
Sergeant Imari exhaled. “Yeah… I hear that.”
The cop pushed a few buttons and the holo-panel dissipated in a flash of blue specks. Three minutes later, a bored teenage boy with right-swept short black hair and a dark violet raccoon mask over his eyes dropped off two bowls of soup.
Whenever the voice of a distant child rose above the background noise, Risa’s mood darkened. She glanced from a bouncing tween girl tugging on her father’s arm while pointing at a store window full of video games to the table in front of her, peering into the depths of an untouched bowl of noodle soup. Despite her best effort to focus on the sound of chopsticks scratching the bottom, the pervasive voices on the NewsNet kept reminding her she’d failed. No answers lurked in the swirling mixture of broth, scallions, and ramen noodles. At least Arden hadn’t been wiped off the map, but the media already spun the attack to the point it didn’t much matter.
Pavo’s partner tapped her fingers on the table in a rhythmic march, creating ripples in the surface of her untouched bowl. “I should’ve taken you to Cheng’s. He cooks it while you watch.”
“I think I’ve been there… there’s dozens of ramen bars around Elysium, too.” Risa lifted some noodles on her chopsticks, and pondered them for a minute before stirring the clump back into the broth. “It’s not the soup. I didn’t want you to waste your creds on good food right now.”
“You’re really worried about him.”
“From the looks of it, you are too… or are you just not used to cheap food?” Risa flashed a halfhearted smile.
“Well, I’m more inclined to believe you now.” Sergeant Imari picked at her meal.
“If I were you,” said Risa, “I’d have established trust before giving me back my gear.”
“I did… mostly. I look much calmer than I am only because I can’t think of a reason anyone would want to hurt him. I’m sure he’s okay.” She grumbled. “C-Branch likely popped him because they suspected his affiliation with the PVM. They’ll want to get information. That takes time.”
Risa suppressed a shiver at the thought. She looked away from the table, captivated for a moment by six holo-panes of various sizes projected from support columns scattered throughout the area. Each bore the same image: four talking heads in bright colored frames arguing about whether they felt the destruction of Arden’s dome was an act of fate, war, or terrorism. A mousy-looking man in a dark-blue suit had been offering timid opinions that he thought it an accident, though much of what he said was ignored by the others. A young woman with neon-violet lip-gloss in the far-right frame (also purple) insisted it was corporate action to drive up the price of food in the region. One panelist in a green frame, a thick-bodied man with frazzled white hair, bellowed over the others and caught her ear. He argued such an attack on an agricultural outpost is contrary to the stated goals of the Martian Liberation Front. Arden had no military value. Crippling it would only harm civilians, which ran afoul of their entire ideology.
A dour-faced older woman in a cobalt blue suit jacket interrupted him, implying he had traitorous leanings and must have sympathies with known terrorists. According to her, the attack wasn’t about the people at all―the MLF wanted to show the UCF they could destroy things with impunity. It had been equivalent to throwing down a gauntlet. The two got into a back and forth of pseudo-facts. The woman brought up a number of bombing events over the past fifteen years, emphasizing the amount of civilian casualties. For each incident she mentioned, the white-haired man countered with ‘supposed’ proof someone other than the MLF carried it out.
Only two were really us… both ACC targets. The civilians were caught up in it because they wrap t
heir military targets with citizen shields. Risa shuddered, despair having flashed to anger. Neither incident had been her work. The Eridania City bombing happened six years before she was even born, and the explosion at Thyle had been the one that killed her friend Genevieve. The clamor of political harpies chewing on the dead meat of a few dozen Arden settlers faded out of Risa’s consciousness.
What if Gen knew?
The three bottom tiers of Thyle contained production facilities that produced armored combat vehicles and the kind of surface-to-air missiles she’d shared a cargo shuttle with. The ACC packed the rest of the city above it with civilians. If Genevieve figured out her mission would kill innocent people, perhaps her bomb’s malfunction wasn’t an accident.
No… Genevieve would’ve refused. She wouldn’t have done it.
“Hey,” said Sergeant Imari. “You okay?”
Unexpected fear in the woman’s voice caught Risa off guard. “Not really.”
“File says you’re possibly psionic, that you hear shit. For a second there, that look on your face made me think you’d gotten bad news from the other side or something.”
“Your file’s full of shit.” Risa’s anger had given her a small appetite. She twirled noodles around her chopsticks. “I’m about as psionic as this shrimp.”
“Didn’t you get the beef?”
“I don’t remember.” She ate it, whatever it was. All flavors of Nippy-Nom brand Quick-Ramen tasted the same except for varying degrees of saltiness. “Sometimes an angel talks to me. It’s nothing I can control.”
“Did she say anything about Pavo?” Sergeant Imari leaned closer.
“He, and no.” Risa scowled. “Why does everyone always assume an angel is a woman?” Her annoyance faded with a sigh. “Raziel has been quiet as a mouse since Arden fell on me.”
The woman sighed. “Well, that’s convenient.”
Hand of Raziel (Daughter of Mars Book 1) Page 43
