Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Nothing much to report and the encryption is standard. He was shot with a fairly large gun, using an explosive round. If someone can sneak something like that aboard then they can hide it from a search, but you’re welcome to try finding it. My guess is we’ll end up quarantined on arrival until they can sweep the ship and question the passengers and crew.’

  There was a sigh. ‘That was what I was expecting. Thank you for your efforts, Inspector.’

  ‘I’ll let you know if they send anything back before we arrive. I’m going to try to grab some sleep.’

  ‘Sleep well.’

  15th January.

  She did not. There were nights when sleep was not her friend and, apparently, this was one of them. The nightmares were never identical, but they were always the same, always about the same event: the last op she had ever done for the UNTPP. The Dallas operation. The reason she had a custom handgun designed and personally built by Jackson Martins.

  Waking with a start from another burst of automatic weapons fire which had never, in fact, claimed her life, Fox rolled out of the bottom bunk and stumbled across to the sink to splash cold water on her face and, hopefully, get rid of some of the sweat. The water was not really cold enough, but her brain started to function a little as she blinked at herself in the mirror.

  As usual, the imagery was not really staying with her. She had perfectly good, or bad, real memories of the Dallas op without needing the ones her dreaming mind came up with, but there was something which had prodded real memories to the fore. One of the terrorists had been using a micromissile launcher firing infrared-homing projectiles. Those had had armour-piercing warheads, but gyroc micromissiles were specifically designed for specialist warhead delivery. They were not so good at short range, however; being small rockets, they needed space to accelerate and there had been something a little odd about Hunt’s entry wound…

  Grabbing her shiny plastic bodysuit, she pulled it on and sealed it before padding out of her cabin and across to cabin one, otherwise known as ‘the crime scene.’ The door unlocked and opened on her command, though she expected one of the flight crew to ask her what she was up to fairly quickly. In truth she was not really sure, but she had a feeling that the gun used to kill Hunt had never left the room.

  She looked around at the desk. He had been sitting there, on one side of the room. The room was not wide enough for a gyroc to reach full speed, but wide enough to get up to a workable velocity against an unarmoured target. Still, the killer would have wanted as much room as possible… Fox crossed to the opposite wall and began looking around. A small launcher could be hidden fairly easily; micromissiles required little more than a tube and something to signal ignition.

  ‘Inspector?’ The voice came from the room’s speakers and she did not recognise it. A woman this time, one of the relief shift, probably. ‘This is Lieutenant Bright on the bridge. Is something wrong?’

  And that was when Fox saw the flicker of unusual edges highlighted by her visual enhancement software and spotted the short tube poking out of a half-concealed air vent in the cabin’s ceiling. ‘No, Lieutenant, nothing’s wrong. I just found our murder weapon. Could you get one of your engineering staff down here with a screwdriver?’

  ~~~

  The insistent chiming was in Fox’s head and in her ears. Her implant was echoing the room’s communications alert into her sleeping brain and dragging her out of an attempt to get back her lost sleep. A thought banished both sounds and she was sure her voice carried her disapproval of the disturbance when she spoke. ‘Yes? What is it?’

  ‘Inspector? Sorry to disturb you, it’s Parsons. We’re about an hour out of orbital insertion and I have a Captain Canard wanting to talk to you.’

  Canard was calling her very long distance now? Crap. ‘Put him through, please. Uh, audio only?’

  ‘At this distance, video gives you a headache and you’ll notice the delay on the audio. Putting it through.’

  There was a click and Fox said, ‘Captain? It’s Meridian.’ She rolled out of bed and reached for her suit. If they were going to dock soon… Well, maybe ninety minutes anyway… She was not going to get back to sleep anyway.

  ‘What’ve you got yourself into this time, Inspector?’ The question was snapped out and Fox did not need video to see the man fuming at his desk in precinct 19’s HQ. She closed the seams on her suit and reached for her jeans.

  ‘This homicide? They just asked me to look at the body because I was aboard. There’s nothing I can do, really. Don’t have the gear, don’t have the jurisdiction.’

  There really was a noticeable delay. She figured he had started speaking before she got the last word out. ‘Jurisdiction is the problem. Technically it’s the UniFeds’ case, but this guy was a US citizen on a US ship about to come down to US airspace and someone up the chain is pulling strings. UNTPP have agreed to let NAPA handle it so long as they’re kept in the loop and you handle the investigation.’

  ‘Crap,’ Fox stated flatly. If someone was pressing to have the case handled by American rather than international police, it was either political or intelligence, or both. It did look like a hit rather than something random or personal.

  She had not meant to leave so long a gap and Canard spoke into it. ‘Yeah, that. This is probably politics, Meridian. I don’t like it when my detectives are involved in politics.’ No, he wanted to be sure he was the one in the limelight all the time. Another political cop. ‘You report directly to me and you get this wrapped up clean and quick.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Can you get a forensics unit to meet the transport at the station? I doubt there’s much it can get out of the room, but it’s worth checking. I’ll need full backgrounds run on the crew and passengers too.’

  There was a slightly longer than usual pause and then, ‘Done. See you on the ground, Inspector.’ Canard was an asshole, but when he knew it was in his best interests he was efficient.

  ‘Great,’ she said after making sure the comms were off. ‘Just great.’ She pulled up a messenger app window and wrote a quick note into it: Assigned to murder of Sanderson Hunt. Need anything you have on him. Thanks, Fox. Then she encrypted it with the package Jackson had given her specifically for sending him messages, tagged it with his address, and sent it to the ship’s server for transmission. That was going to be a lot faster than the official route which she was also going to have to take. Then she opened up a channel to the bridge. ‘Captain Morris, it’s Inspector Meridian.’

  ‘Yes, Inspector,’ Morris replied immediately.

  ‘Looks like I’ve been assigned this murder case, Captain. I need to talk to the assistant who found the body, and if you could get Parsons to archive every bit of logged data he’s got on a stick for me, it’ll save us time at the station.’

  ‘He’ll get right on it and I’ll have Wenton report to your cabin. To be honest, I’m glad it’s you. If we had to wait for the Lensmen to get involved…’

  Fox shook her head; no one much liked the UNTPP. ‘Right. Well, I’ll do my best not to delay you too much.’ Cutting the channel, she pulled on her running shoes and then grabbed her jacket. She was not back on the streets, but there was work to be done, and she intended to dress the part.

  Eagle Station, High Earth Orbit.

  There were UNTPP technicians waiting for the ship to arrive at the station, but they seemed to be happy enough to let Fox handle the actual work, deferential, in fact, and they called her ‘Captain Meridian’ which did not put her in the best of moods, but it did speed things along. They handed over a large case, which was basically the same as the forensic investigation units she was used to, and then began arranging transfer of the corpse with Morris.

  Being at the station made things a little easier, and a lot more of a pain. The ship was no longer spinning, so it had no gravity. The station had spin gravity, and it was large enough that that was near enough Earth-normal, but not in the hangar bay the ship was in. So getting the case down to the cabin to deploy was easy, but
then actually setting the swarm to work was harder.

  The forensic kit had a number of strings to its sensory bow, all of them designed to be used on a relatively intact crime scene, which meant that the results were going to be patchy and if anything was actually found it would likely be dismissed in court. The scanning head was fine to operate: its job was to record every bit of visual evidence there was, in laser-scanned 3D, and terahertz radar. The latter might well have spotted the gyroc launcher given that it could penetrate the light structural plastic of the walls. There was an airborne chemical analysis feature on the ladar too, but that was going to be really useless this long after the event in a room with life support and air filters.

  The difficult bit was the microbot swarm. Thousands of tiny, plastic ants equipped with a variety of basic sensors and an ability to collect anything needing more analysis, they could be dispatched from the forensic unit to crawl over every square centimetre of the room. Except that they were not really designed for microgravity so their progress was slowed. It would take even longer than usual to get the results, and Fox was quite sure that the results would be useless. She was going to get too much data. Experience said so, aside from anything else, but she knew that people had been all over the room since the murder so she was going to have to eliminate herself and several members of the crew from anything she found just because of that. How many people had used that cabin in the past year? Because the little robot insects would find skin cells or hairs, or random patches of bodily fluid, going back at least that far. Yes, she could probably narrow the results down some, and she was focusing her tiny workers on specific areas of interest rather than the whole room, but she was going to end up with dozens of suspects.

  So Fox hung in the air near the door to the cabin, her eyes closed, and went over the files Canard had sent up to her about the crew and the victim. Full checks were still ongoing, but she had, at least, basic profiles on all of them. Morris and several of the other flight crew were ex-military; a lot of people went into spacecraft crewing after one of the services so that was not unusual. Parsons had been UNTPP, which was a little more out of the ordinary, but he was in charge of security and his training would be good for that. Not one of the crew had any particular political leaning. All but two of them had their registered votes delegated to someone on-planet, and one of those two had not used his voting rights for over five years.

  Hunt was a pretty typical guy, from his profile. Home school, degree in economics from Philadelphia, job with MarTech Services which had resulted in him handling several lunar contracts for the past two years… And she had a distinct feeling she was looking at bogus data. Sanderson Hunt was just too clean to be real, and there was a hole in his education and work records which she was sure someone could explain, but to Fox it all just stank of NIX.

  The National Intelligence Executive had been put together in 2030, supposedly as an exercise in cost-cutting and government footprint reduction. Civilian and military intelligence agencies were all squashed in under one roof so that there was no duplication of effort. Four years later the North American Police Administration had been formed out of federal, state, and local police agencies on a similar basis, but there had always been more rumours of conspiracy hanging around NIX. NAPA had been a success; people liked NAPA and viewed them… Well, no one viewed them as being worse than the old police agencies and most people thought they were a little more responsive. The drive for lower and lower footprint in the national administrative services meant that people were always looking for ways to reduce NAPA’s remit, but it was the police, and NIX was the Big Brother nightmare intelligence agency the people of the early twenty-first century had worried about, according to Fox’s history lessons.

  Of course, proving Hunt was a spy of some sort, or finding out what he had been up to, was probably going to be impossible, but it did provide potential motives, and it did explain the pressure to have his murder investigated by American cops.

  And then her implant threw up a message receipt indicator, and she noted the sender and opened it immediately. Re: Sanderson Hunt. Come to the office at your earliest opportunity. JM.

  Fox looked at the message for a second and then uncurled herself to check on the progress of the forensics swarm. Jackson apparently knew there was something off about Hunt and was unwilling to discuss it over unsecured comms, even with his special encryption. Well, maybe she would get to find out what the spook was up to after all.

  New York Metro, 16th January.

  It was well into the afternoon of the following day before Fox managed to get all the paperwork finalised, the body and evidence prepared for transport, and her own body shuttled down to the surface. Thankfully the maglev system between Newark Spaceport and Long Island, the LI-line, was fast and efficient, and it was maybe another thirty minutes before she was looking out of the carriage at the kilometre-high, gleaming spire that was the headquarters of MarTech Group.

  It was one of three arcologies in the immediate area owned by the company, though the third was new and still under construction. Each was structurally similar, a streamlined tower, aerodynamically designed to handle both normal wind and the raging storms that came up the Atlantic coast in the wake of the massive hurricanes which had made the Gulf of Mexico largely uninhabitable. You could basically live in one of those towers your entire life: they could produce their own food, recycle water, provide power, and they had every convenience you could ever want. True, the main MarTech building was heavily devoted to the labs and research facilities of the company, but the secondary tower and, as far as Fox knew, the new one were residential. The two completed buildings had over half a million inhabitants, and that was not counting the smaller apartment blocks which littered the space between them, housing an average of fourteen thousand people each.

  The train slowed as it climbed to the entry point on the side of the tower. Looking south out of the window she could make out the ocean and a couple of larger structures. The Hamptons still boasted a few single-occupancy houses owned by the very-and-conspicuously rich, the ones who had yet to cotton on to the fact that showing off wealth like that had really gone out of fashion. Then she was looking at the walls of the tower’s station and she got up to leave the train.

  Of course, she still had quite a way to go before she was at her destination. It was just that the rest of the journey was going to be vertical for the most part. Security passed her through to the nearest elevator block without comment, though she knew her arrival was being flagged upstairs as she walked through and, sure enough, a message appeared in-vision. Please take tube sixteen, Inspector. Mister Martins is expecting you. Of course he was. She followed a virtual trail of lights along the corridor, pasted there for only her to see, leading to a door amid the bank of elevators, walked into the waiting car, and turned to see the doors closing. Now it was just a matter of waiting.

  ‘When I said “your earliest opportunity,”’ Jackson Martins said as Fox stepped out of the car and into his private apartments, ‘I didn’t mean straight from orbit. You could’ve stopped off and changed. Had a nap. Eaten.’

  ‘Food and sleep are for wimps,’ Fox replied, ‘and you said “office.” This is your home.’

  ‘There’s no difference, as you well know. Order some food and come out to the solarium.’

  Fox watched his retreating back as he wandered out of the lobby through a door at the back which led into the deeper recesses of the suite. He was tall, over one-eighty-five centimetres, and aging very gracefully into his sixth decade with little grey in his mop of black hair. Jackson Martins had always been something of a geek, far more of a technician than a salesman, and probably more of a scientist than a technician. Certainly he was a genius, a pale-skinned, blue-eyed, likeable genius with a striking ability to put two and two together and produce five when it came to technology. He kept himself fit, mostly for his daughter, claiming he had no intention of putting her through the loss of another parent. His rather odd attachment
to Fox was because of his daughter too, but that was a longer story.

  She accessed the apartment’s computer, having been given guest access soon after moving to the area, and ordered up sandwiches and juice, and then she followed Jackson out into the solarium, which acted as both a nice place to sit and a link into the more private areas of the house. The place continued to impress her: Jackson was a technologist, but he had the money to buy physical decoration and was old enough to prefer the real over the virtual. His home was beautiful, elegant, and with little in the way of virtual enhancement which was not there for function.

  ‘Teresa is over in Oslo until Monday,’ he said as she sat down on a lounger beside the one he was stretched out on. Beside them, an entire wall of glass gave them a view of the park which took up the central section of the spire’s top. Above them was sky, shading toward a darker blue in the thinning atmosphere.

  ‘Well, I came to see you. Because you said I should.’

  ‘True. How was the Moon?’

  ‘Grey.’

  ‘Yes, well it generally is. I heard about the little incident with New Moon, however.’

  ‘I’d imagine it made news. A mercenary pretending to be UA. A corrupt cop caught by the newest of LCSS’s units and a NAPA consultant. Gunfire and explosions.’

  ‘All very exciting, yes. I have a far less exciting Technologies research facility out there which Sanderson Hunt had no reason to go near, but he seemed interested in the place. It’s in the Jenner crater. You need to try to get there and he did. Recently. He’s on my list of people I think subcontract their loyalties to other agencies.’

  ‘His background stinks of NIX. I’m glad it’s not just me that thinks so, but what have you got out there that they’d be interested in?’

  ‘Ah, well… That’s one of the reasons I wanted to see you personally. I restarted the Dallas nanotechnology research, and I was hoping to keep it away from United Anarchy by putting it up there, but NIX were always quite keen to get their hands on that work ahead of time too.’