Lou had to step around these people every day on her way to Sheb’s for her espresso. Their stink, even to her partly functional nose, was dire and sad. She watched a group of saffron-robed Buddhist monks moving through the refugees, offering basic emergency nourishment, and trying to encourage flagging spirits.
The Bastard and its fatal trajectory had been discovered over two years ago. Lou remembered that there had been numerous attempts, involving weapons whose destructive force ranked in the teraton range, to deflect it from its path, but it was too big and moved too fast. These people had had all that time to prepare for the Bastard’s impact, yet they had clung to their land and homes until now, the final moments of Kestrel’s life. There had been hushed talk of God’s judgment.
A few kids, locals in dirty rags and flip-flops, laughed by, riding plastic bicycles one-handed. Under their free arms they carried big black media boxes, high-end stuff looted from the luxury boutiques.
“Which brings us, I suppose,” Lou said, turning back to look at the dog, “to you two getting split up.”
Dog snuffled and scratched at his left ear. He seemed grim, his eyes looking away from Lou. “It was two nights ago, late. A cold night and no cloud cover. Stars were out. I could see the lights of the Stalk shuttles going up and down; there are Stalk altitude marker lights every half-kilometer, all the way up. The big killer planet thing was low in the western sky, lit on one side. I left Kid in the usual place, near a loading dock for a shipping company. There’s an overhang where he could keep out of the wind, and hide from spybot vapor.”
The espresso wasn’t helping. Lou was feeling tired, and it wasn’t even noon. She interrupted Dog, “Say, how about we go back to my place where we can be more comfy? How would that be? I know I could use a decent chair.” Her back was a constant and gnawing pain.
Dog looked wary. “Is it far?”
“Nah. ‘Bout half a k south of here. View of the Stalk and everything.” She smiled. Dog was starting to wish she wouldn’t do that.
Lou went back, through the glass bead curtain, into Sheb’s apartment, and found him sitting at his small kitchen table, sipping hot tea and mentally working on a crossword from his Supa-Giga-Monster Puzzlers book. She grinned. “Hey. We’re going back to my place so I can record Dog’s story properly. Here’s your lucky pencil. Please note, I did not chew on the end.”
Sheb smiled and took the pencil over to the sink area, holding it like it was radioactive. Lou didn’t take offense. He said, “So you got yourself a case, huh?”
Lou glanced back through the curtain at the dog. “Yup. So, if anybody comes here looking for a surprisingly smart beagle, you don’t know squat.”
Sheb shrugged. “What could I know? I’m just a poor dumb doofus trying to run a diner.” And he winked at her, grinning. “Good luck. And keep your nose clean.”
She grinned back, touching her nose, “I’ll be happy if the damn thing just stays attached.”
Chapter 3
Lou had moved into the Penthouse Suite on Level Twelve at the Hotel Metropol, in the upmarket end of Stalktown. The wide balcony boasted a fantastic view of the Stalk. The entire hotel was shut down and abandoned: no power, no data services, no plumbing — all of which was okay with Lou, who had few needs. Lou loved the “penthouse lifestyle” even though it meant walking up twelve flights of fire stairs every day. It kept her legs working. The Metropol, one of the first hotels built after the Stalk went onstream and the world economy boomed, had even been advertised as sound proof: and with the balcony doors closed and the curtains drawn, her grand old place was nearly silent.
Lying on the bed, in the dregs of night, she fancied that she could feel the nano fizzing in her tissues, fighting the systemic necrosis which was trying to consume her body: a condition similar to gangrene, but acting much, much faster. And, just as she required nano-based treatment to fight the postmortem rot, she had first caught the infection when she was eighteen, at a party where an anonymous nanohacker had released a vicious tissue-stripping nanovirus into a cloud of party mist.
Lou unsecured the door to her apartment and led Dog through. Sheb had given her some string which she had employed as a crude leash. Dog went along with this indignity for the sake of the illusion that he was a regular dog, and not a stray with valuable high-end photonics wired into his nervous system.
Dog paused in the doorway and glanced about the expansive living area, sniffing. The suite was decorated in white marble and gold with pastel accents, big and comfortable white furniture, and reproduction Earth Modernist artworks on the walls. Sunlight, through floor-to-ceiling windows, filled the suite.
“I smell a garden, flowers, vegetables…” Dog said, black nose twitching, tail up.
Lou beamed, crossing to the balcony doors, “That’s right!”
She pulled open the doors, letting in fresh morning air and the sounds of a dying city. She smiled at the light, and the sense of cool fresh air. Turning to Dog, she said, “I keep a garden out here on the balcony. I grow vegetables and flowers and sell ‘em in the markets for a little cash. Wanna see?” She smiled at the pooch; he padded across the cold floor, looking around at everything. He poked his head out the balcony doors and saw the garden, a collection of hydroponic racks bursting with healthy green life and startling flowers.
Dog wagged his tail. “It’s good. This whole place is good. It…” He looked thoughtful. “…reminds me, somewhat, of where I used to live. Before. Before…” His tail stopped wagging, and he turned to go back into the living area.
Lou followed. She spread out on a couch. “How long ago was it? When you were with those people?”
Dog jumped up and sat on the end of the couch. “I’m not sure. My memory goes back about sixteen months. Before that, there is less … coherence. There are blanks, lost time, things I don’t remember.” He looked sad again, and rested his head on Lou’s foot. After a moment, his nose twitched. He moved his head. “Excuse me. I thought I could stand your smell.”
Embarrassed, Lou pulled her legs close and felt her knees ache. “So,” she said, fighting awkwardness, “about these memories of yours. The night the kid disappeared.”
Dog looked relieved, his eyes bright and shiny. “Where should I start?”
She got up and lurched to a desk by the balcony; she pulled open a drawer and withdrew a rumpled sheet of Paper. Dog watched her. Lou said, “Your head machines. Are they compatible with Active Paper?”
“Who’s the manufacturer?”
Lou peered at the sheet. “I think it’s just generic, no-name. Brand X. I got it from a client about a year ago for something I did. Doesn’t come with any fancy built-in social life, either.” She resumed her seat on the sofa.
Dog asked, “What was that case about?”
She frowned. “You know, I’ve forgotten. No idea. Damn, I hate that. My whole brain is turning to Swiss cheese — whatever the hell that is.”
Dog bobbed his head. “Named after a country back on Earth. Mountainous. Neutral in war. Tidy. Famous for banks, and cheese containing holes.”
She stared at him. “Well aren’t you just a walking database!”
Dog said, looking at the Paper, “How fresh is the surface?”
Lou waggled a hand, scrunching her face at Dog, and powered up the page. The Paper flashed and turned a soft shade of blue. Yellow command touchpads appeared down one side. She checked her mail. No personal messages. Just a few posts from new folks on the accelerated tissue necrosis nanovirus support forum, but nothing interesting. Lou remembered when she used to get mail from lots of people, mainly the Stalktown Dead, and from a few in other star systems. No longer. Maintaining contact over interstellar distances was tricky.
Lou wondered when she was going to hear from her mother. It had been more than a month since she had received her last mail and then, it had only been a couple of lin
es. Probably too busy with the Ganymede space elevator project. Thanks for caring, Mom.
“Okay, Dog,” she said, setting the Paper to receive data by radio from Dog’s hardware, “let’s scroll back to the night in question. This Paper should work with your hardware.” She smiled. “I’d cross my fingers here, but they might snap off.” Dog twitched his ears in alarm, and she smiled again. “Dead people humor. Sorry.”
He began transferring his sense-memory files into the Paper’s buffer. Lou sized the playback window to fill most of the page. A counter measured time in milliseconds along the Paper’s lower edge. Lou watched the feed, scowling, trying not to chew her thumbnail, and trying to follow what was happening. She was viewing a processed sense impression; it was like a bad amateur vid, only less coherent. The sound was overly loud and included background noises that Lou had never heard before.
She saw Kid. He was skinny and looked malnourished. He walked like the experience was new to him: a teetering, lurching kind of movement, his head rolling loosely on a skinny neck, eyes all over the place, uncoordinated. He said nothing. Kid was dressed in dirty overalls, and a torn red sweater. His blond hair was shaggy and matted. Lou tried to imagine the enormous difficulties of trying to teach Kid even basic hygiene. God…
“Dog,” she said, “what about the psychic stuff you were getting from the kid? Have you got a record of that?”
Dog looked bashful. “It doesn’t record reliably. I’ve tried. It’s hard to explain. Sorry.”
Lou watched the feed. Dog made Kid wrap himself in a plastic tarp. Light was almost nonexistent: Kid showed up as a heat-source through Dog’s IR filters. There was no Dog-voice. All communication must have been going through the psychic link, she realized. It was hard to credit that all of Kid’s movements, which looked no worse than some disabled kids she’d seen, were the result of Dog’s skilled teleoperation of Kid’s motor cortex. But there it was. Amazing.
The picture shifted, a rapid sweeping pan: Dog headed off to get food. Which prompted Lou to ask: “Dog, who else knew about you two? Who would know where to find Kid?”
Dog looked thoughtful, while he scratched at fleas with one of his hind feet. His synth box said, “I talked to a few of the restaurant and café people. They knew about us. When we were first trying to get scraps, I got Kid to look like he was making me do tricks, so restaurant people would think I was cute and give us food.”
Lou muttered under her breath. She said, more calmly, “Dog, there’s about sixty different eating establishments in the StalkPlex, not counting the six hotels, the bars, the sandwich shops…”
Dog lay with his head on his front paws. “We did talk to lots of people. I did a lot of cute tricks.”
Dog approached the back of a restaurant, snuffling around by service doors and black dumpsters. His hearing was extraordinarily keen. Lou thought she could hear a faint recording of Dog’s rapid heartbeat.
He came to one restaurant. There was a metal plate with a few meaty bones piled up on it, and a bit of gravy. Dog lunged for the plate, licked at the food, the picture bobbing. Dog grabbed the bones, turned, and headed back, being very cautious.
Lou paused, scrolled the vid back, and slo-mo’d through it all, looking for clues. Everything looked oddly normal. It was amazing that Dog and the kid had managed to live like this for so long, without getting busted by security or the cops. Or maybe it was not so amazing: everything in town was winding down in anticipation of the Bastard’s arrival, including the cops’ attitude.
She resumed the playback. Dog had been seized with a sense of panic, evidenced by dropping the food and running. In the background, the sound of an electric motor; in the foreground, two guys talking in whispers while they opened a bag of some kind. Voices became clearer as Dog got closer. Lou listened, working the Paper to strip the sound layers out of the signal for separate processing.
Dog saw two guys in black bundling Kid into the bag. No struggle, no protest from Kid: his body was all wet noodles with a melon on one end. The guys poured him into the bag.
In the foreground, she heard Dog trying to suppress a growl. The image vibrated. She realized Dog was shivering in fright and anger. Lou checked a display next to the playback window: sound enhancement was proceeding; a translation package was working on the dialogue. The guys were speaking Martian French, but with regional accents it couldn’t identify. It also indicated that the guys were educated, and under a lot of stress. Lou dumped a translated transcript into a text file for later reading.
Martian French guys? That’s no help. There were twenty million people living on Mars, and two-thirds of them claimed some kind of French citizenship — even though — or perhaps because — the original France no longer existed.
Back with the feed, she watched as Dog padded after the guys; they were headed for their van, an Esotech Mule, a little water-powered rental thing, not much more than a toy. You’d only use it around the city, and you’d hope like hell the thing didn’t die in the middle of heavy traffic. The city government, like all else, had given up maintaining everything, including these cars. All the same, they would have had to sign out the van, which meant they would have had to have made a booking. Lou scrolled back a minute or two and found a sequence of frames showing the van’s ID number. Cackling with glee, she made a frame blowup of the number, and then sent the Paper’s sniffer to look around in the municipal public transport databases to see who might have booked that van and track how they paid for it. If they were smart, they would have used some kind of cash. But, if they were smart, they wouldn’t have left the van’s ID number in a readable form, would they? She also wondered if they might have stolen the van. In that case, they would have needed access to hacking skills. She would also need to find out if current public records were listing vehicle thefts. She made some notes in a fresh text file and attached it to that image of the van’s ID number.
Lou felt a sluggish spurt of excitement as her tink caught up with the signals from her brain. This was the fun part of investigation.
Suddenly, the picture in the Active Paper window broke up into static.
Annoyed, she chewed her lip and a piece came off in her mouth. She spat it out, swearing. “Gotta stop doing that. Bad habit.” Dog looked worried.
There was a jump in the picture noise. Probably everything rebooting, she thought. The image quality had a lot of fritz at first; the sound was patchy and distorted. Dog wandered around dazed and whimpering. He spotted the bag the two guys had used; it looked empty. He raced over. She watched Dog snuffle at the bag, trying to find the opening. He barked and whimpered, stared up at the sky, and saw nothing but StalkPlex floodlights, glaring out at the stars. He howled.
Dog looked at the bag and began pawing it.
Kid was gone.
He picked up the bag in his jaws and tried to tear at the heavy synthetic material. She heard a growling and saw the fabric rip. She watched the rest of the feed. Dog satisfied himself that Kid was not in the bag, and tossed it aside. He saw the van, ablaze, a luminous heat source.
Then she heard the approach of cop-hovs. Dog whimpered and ran back to the loading dock. He was panicking and desperate while he tried to suppress his grief. Dog huddled under cover, listening to the cops patrolling the area. Dog heard squawking radios and unintelligible talking from the cops. Dog’s heartbeat was loud and fast. She felt her eyes wanting to tear up and cry, her throat tight. Her eyes remained dry. Why was the pooch so frightened of the cops?
“I don’t know how much more of this I need to see, Dog. What do you think?” Her voice wavered.
Dog was looking sad again, his ears flat, tail tight around his backside. “You’re the investigator, Ms. Meagher.”
She looked at the images on the page’s screen, scrolling back and forth, trying slo-mo, different enhancements and filters.
“Now what?” Dog asked, sighing, eyes t
oo large and heartbreaking to look at.
Lou sat for a moment with the Paper on her lap, looking out the windows. It was a bright Kestrel day outside. She heard some noises drifting up from the streets. There were not as many refugees at this end of the city, but that didn’t stop the sounds of cops on looting-patrol: she could just barely hear the whine of their armor and their heavy footsteps as they ran by her hotel, radios squawking.
She remembered when she could hear that armor-whine from much further away.
“Ms. Meagher?”
She got up and went to the balcony. Dog padded after her, tail up, not wagging. Lou looked down into the street. Patrol-cops were beating a group of looter-kids. The whine-smack of powered armor gauntlets and boots hitting flesh reached her a moment after she saw the impact. There was gunfire in the distance and more sirens approaching. Dog shivered, watching the windows.
Cops. That’s what she was missing in all this.
“Dog?”
“Ms. Meagher?”
“Cops came in to check out what happened with the Martian French guys that night. You hid from them, afraid for your life, right?”
Dog looked away, unhappy. “Mmmm.”
“I don’t remember seeing, in your memory-feed, any evidence of the Martian French guys, after you woke up.”
“I didn’t see or smell them anywhere. Just the burning van.”
“Did you hear much of what the cops were saying while they searched? Or even if they were actually searching?”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe they weren’t looking for you or the Kid. Maybe they were securing the area after whatever happened, happened. Maybe they were working with the abductors.”
Dog looked at the ground, and twitched his ears. “No. They must have been looking for me. I knew they were. We were trespassing on StalkPlex property.”
Orbital Burn Page 3
