Grantville Gazette, Volume 73

by Bjorn Hasseler

  I rested my hands, still taped together, on the comp. "Can't, not this way. Keystroke-dynamics recognition."

  He swore, demanded I try authenticating anyway. Authentication failed twice.

  I raised my hands. "Remove the tape. It's the only way this will work."

  He did. I shook my hands, flapped my fingers all about. "Give me a couple of minutes. I won't type normally till the hands get circulation back in them and they wake up." I rubbed one wrist, then the other. I dropped the hands back into my lap, still massaging.

  Just maybe, I heard a soft scuffing noise from beyond the door.

  "Get to it," Darin said.

  I interlaced my fingers, turned my palms toward him. I straightened my arms, flexing fingers till the knuckles cracked. "Almost there," I announced.

  The gun came out of his pocket, though not yet pointed at me. "Hurry up. I have things to do."

  "Really?" Somehow, I held my voice steady. "You would shoot me?"

  "I have my father's death on my conscience. What do I care about you? So quit stalling and type."

  Indeed, I was stalling. I typed. Mistyped. "Umm, a gun in my face does nothing to steady my hands."

  "I'm losing my patience," he snapped.

  Ever so cautiously, the door behind Darin opened a crack. Sans squeak: as though the hinges had been oiled. Something (I could not make out quite what. A small mirror, perhaps?) peeked into the room.

  I logged onto the comp and opened my wallet app. "Almost there," I declared. "No need to shoot."

  I'd intended that suggestion for the cavalry, evidently preparing to breach. Darin must have grokked it, too, or heard a suspicious noise behind him, or seen an unexpected shadow or a reflection from the mirror. However, he intuited the danger, whatever he thought was going on—he raised his gun.

  And all hell broke loose—too many things, too quickly, to process, much less for their order to register:

  —I hurled myself down and to the side, off the sofa.

  —Shouted orders to "Drop the gun."

  —Maureen burst into the room.

  —Shots rang out.

  —Sadness at everything I was leaving behind, Bea most of all. Sadness and guilt for the children Bea and I had always wanted, but for whom I had never quite been ready.

  —With eyes wide, and a bright red splotch spreading across his shirtfront, Darin crumpled to the floor.

  —And excruciating pain, burning, in my shoulder . . ..

  ****

  The next several . . . minutes? . . . were a blur. Pressure—and agony!—on/in/throughout my shoulder. Ululating sirens. Urgent ministrations of the EMTs. Racing from my cell, with feet dangling off the end of an Earther-sized gurney. In the next room, where I'd seen bags and knapsacks piled, one lonely tote remained: Darin's, I assumed. The gurney jolting over an uneven surface, and me gasping with each bump. Cops swarming. An interminable ambulance ride, with Maureen at my side, squeezing my hand. The ambulance drove with its siren off; apparently, I was stable.

  "It's okay, Bernie," she said. "Try to relax, Bernie."

  Parsing Bernie took a second. That was me, as far as Maureen knew. Smart cookie that she was, she figured I was apt to be using aliases. Hence, she was reminding me of the name she had given to the authorities. Because she would've known some moniker for me, even if I were the kind of jerk who gave out fake names to women in bars. (Which the cops would decide, because I had been using a different name in Chicago. Likewise fake.) Just happening to be in the neighborhood from Washington to rescue a total stranger from his kidnapper would never pass the smell test. Especially not with a dead body involved.

  I had just about finished puzzling through all that when she leaned close, brushing the hair from my eyes. To kiss my forehead, I supposed. For show. I didn't see why she would bother when the EMTs were ignoring us, one tapping notes into her comp, the other poking around inside an ambulance supplies cabinet: inattention I chose to take as further confirmation I'd pull through. The next thing I knew, Maureen had a finger in my eye, removing one of my spyware lenses. She whispered urgently into my ear, "Where are you staying? Under what name?"

  I answered, wondering why she'd asked.

  An EMT glanced our way.

  "A little privacy, please," Maureen snapped, and the EMT's head whipped back around to her supplies cabinet. Maureen continued, in a yet softer whisper, "Keep your voice down. I'm guessing the snatch involved company business, and you want as many details as possible kept close."

  I nodded.

  "Here's our story. We met in a DC bar. We planned to hook up again when I came to Chicago on my own business. I'll refuse to identify the client. That bit of noncooperation may cause me some grief till my lawyer arrives, but no big deal. Before you and I could meet up, you were grabbed, told it was for ransom from the company. But you managed to get out a quick note to me, just ‘help.' How I found you is my problem to explain. Do not mention the tracker. And from the moment I came through the door, tell everything just as it happened. Okay?"

  I whispered back. "They'll want to confirm my note, won't they?"

  "You're married, so we were using self-destructing messaging. Um, Snapchat. No record anywhere. Okay?"

  As one more tiny bit of misdirection, my wedding band had been in a suitcase since Ceres, but she had read me right. Whatever the EMTs had put into my IV finally began kicking in and, my mind beginning to wander, I wondered what being able to understand people would be like.

  "Okay?" she prompted.

  Was it? "Maybe not. GPS on my comp is disabled."

  "Then how did . . . no, that can wait. I grabbed two comps from that room before the cops got there. Was one of those yours?"

  I managed to nod.

  "If it comes up, your captors took your comp. You have no idea where it is."

  "Okay." But through the ever-thickening drug stupor, yet another complication tried to assert itself. The cops would discover soon enough that I'd been asking around for Darin Hodges. I'd lost track of time, but that could not have been longer than a day or two ago. As I struggled to put my apprehension into words, the meds took over. Everything faded away . . ..

  ****

  "Dear Bea, I am so sorry that . . ." I stopped recording. Hit erase. Such an overwrought apology was no way to begin. Reconfirmed that I was in a tight close-up, that the odd position at which the exoskeleton held my arm immobilized was outside the camera's view, that no hint of wound dressing peeked through the fabric of my shirt. Switched mindsets to banter. "Hey, kiddo. It's yours truly, from the Land of Too Damned Heavy. I miss you bunches." Hit pause while I considered that opening. Good enough, I decided. "You have no idea how much I miss you, beyond even how abstinence makes the heart grow fonder. But the class is good. The food here is terrific. We"—while I lied through my teeth, what did some of the Royal We matter?— "even had the opportunity to play tourist. And check out the accommodations they gave us."

  I could feel my composure slipping. Panning the camera across the sitting area of the hotel suite, then showing the vertiginous view from the glassed-in balcony, got my face off the vid. "Here's the thing, hon. There was a bit of a mishap on a sightseeing excursion. Kids out joyriding, which means, I discovered, disabling automatics and controlling a ground vehicle manually. Primitive, right? Anyway, it was a minor accident, what folks here call a fender-bender." I finished panning, put on my best sincere face, and put that face back onto the camera. "The thing is, in the collision my safety harness did a number on my arm and shoulder. Belter bones, ya know? Not the sturdiest.

  "So, hon, as much as I hate to say this, I'll be staying awhile after the class ends. Being on Earth is tough enough. Launching from here before those bones fully knit, before PT? I could ruin that arm for good, or so the docs tell me."

  That prognosis, at least, was honest. The bullet that inbound had so inconsiderately missed my exoskeleton had struck metal when trying to exit my shoulder. Titanium is a lot harder than lead; ricocheting bullet f
ragments made mincemeat of muscle and bone.

  No matter my happy pills, I wasn't.

  I was feeling sorry for myself, again, knew I had to wrap things up before the self-pity slipped out. "So keep the home fires burning. I'll let you know when I know more. Love you."

  Off the recording went before I could add anything mawkish. I was again feeling like the wrong type of dick. Also, trapped, and not just by stern doctors and my duty. The Chicago PD expected me to hang around while they cleared up "a few details." After the surgery on my shoulder, that had meant questioning most every day. And if the cops decided to run my DNA against the Customs database? That would add another alias to those the police knew, and bring on unwanted attention from the feds.

  "Done," I called out.

  With only one possible shooter, the cops had taken Maureen into custody. Once the cops released her, she had shown up at my door. By then I understood: the cover story required that we seem hooked up. And it explained her questions in the ambulance about my latest name and hotel. I used the waterbed; she took the couch.

  "She's a lucky woman." Maureen emerged from the kitchenette with steaming mugs of coffee. She handed me a mug, then settled with the other into one of the overstuffed chairs overlooking the balcony. "Let's see about getting you home to her."

  Home, like clarity, seemed remote. Okay, I had survived. That mattered to me, but it didn't rise to the level of success. My one lead, my only reason for coming to this hellhole, had been Darin Hodges—and he was dead. "That will take actually accomplishing something."

  "Haven't you?" she asked. Because by then I'd shared some of what I'd been through, some of what this mess was all about. She had earned it, not to mention that I needed the help.

  "Precious little."

  Oh, I'd concluded Darin had been in on the conspiracy all along, never—till he forced Maureen's hand—its victim. If coercing his father to plant the bomb wasn't his idea, he had gone along, starred in the vid to make it all happen. He had, almost certainly, designed the whatever-it-was plague, and I'd messaged the company that the dust in the bottle was somehow relevant. We knew Darin had had accomplices and, courtesy of the nifty spy lenses, I even had some pictures—but not a full face shot of any of them. My snaps of the gear pile— "go bags," Maureen called them—turned out to be just as useless: the single luggage tag in view had been edgewise to my line of sight. From an address and menu I could remember only in part, Maureen had even identified the vegan restaurant. Which she had pursued into yet another dead end. The hostess—who had not shown up at her job since my abortive dinner—worked off the books and, it turned out, under a false name. For whatever it was worth, I spotted her in Maureen's picture of a staff-picnic picture found decorating a restaurant wall.

  "It was never about extorting money from the company, was it?" Maureen continued. Prompted? Goaded? Insinuated? Intuited?

  Because it turned out that detectives, like accountants, tend to follow the money. Go figure. And there had been no ransom demand for me.

  "I can't yet say that." From the start, I'd expected a demand for a payoff in return for some method to decontaminate the base. Within the company, everyone aware of the true situation did. But not for a while. "Remember that, apart from low-power helmet comms, company rocks don't have radio transmitters. Darin and friends hadn't expected the release of their nasty stuff to be discovered till the next crew rotation. That's months from now."

  Sun was streaming through the glass doors that opened onto the balcony. Maureen got up and drew the sheers. "Okay, maybe that was the original plan. But you told Darin, and he must have told his accomplices, that the company already knows about the device. That his father's crew, what remains of it, evacuated with the incoming crew. The bad guys gain nothing by waiting. So why haven't they made their demands?"

  I shook my head. First thing after my release from the hospital, I'd checked back in with a managing partner at the home office, the messages encrypted both coming and going. Still no demands.

  Maureen frowned. "So what are Darin's friends up to? What's their endgame?"

  "You're asking me?" Because I was a clear failure as a detective.

  "Well, you're who's here," she drawled. "Also, I don't accept for a moment that the cops have lost interest in me. So, yeah, there will be questions."

  Did she suppose I wasn't already asking myself these things? Not already driving myself crazy with them?

  Being privately owned, the company was not subject to securities law. They were not required to disclose disasters like the loss of the mine. The partners could hope to sustain the secret awhile, but their (and in the tiniest sliver, also my) stockpile of platinum had its bounds. Absent new production, there would be market turmoil and industrial disruptions. In habitats large and small, and on every settled off-Earth world, platinum was the essential catalyst for the production of nitric acid for fertilizer. When prices spiked at the prospect of shortages—and more so once actual shortages started to bite—entire ecologies would be endangered. I figured the company had maybe two years to reclaim or replace the abandoned mine before the sky fell.

  So okay, metaphor isn't my thing. Perhaps not irony, either. Or detecting. Maybe I should stick with accounting.

  "You all right?" Maureen asked. "You zoned out there."

  "Just tired."

  "I know you don't want to hear it, but we have work to do. So whenever you're ready for a few questions . . . ."

  That morning, a Chicago PD homicide detective had grilled me—again—for three solid hours. Disclosing much of the truth would've rocket-propelled us down the Teflon-coated slope to vile stuff in bottles, company secrets, and bringing chaos to commodity markets throughout the Solar System. I didn't want to go there, and "couldn't remember" much. In any event, the only captor I'd seen was Darin.

  To get ahead of the inevitable discovery, I had volunteered even before my discharge from the hospital that I'd been looking for Darin, explained it with the same promised-his-father-I'd-look-him-up spiel I'd told so many others. It wasn't as if Les could contradict me. (Not that the detective hadn't tried for corroboration. The company responded that Les was away on company business and would be unreachable for months. For once their legendary security measures came in handy. With a shrug, my inquisitor had accepted that any contact with Les would be a long time coming.) How was I to know, I had whined yet again that morning, that doing a simple favor would make me a target of larcenous opportunity? Not to speak ill of the deceased, but the young man had major abandonment issues. I had to assume Darin had chosen to take out his resentments on the company.

  Bottom line (and I was losing confidence in my ability even with those), I was well and truly drained before Maureen set out to reanalyze every word I'd exchanged with Darin, every sound that might have penetrated the walls of my cell, every pixel of every image I'd blinked. And beyond enervated, I was drowning in cognitive dissonance. What could I tell whom? What had I told whom? What, even, did I want to tell anyone? (Uh-huh, Mark Twain. I hear you. You weren't full of pain meds.)

  The nth time she started in again as to what I knew, inferred, or suspected about Darin's vanished accomplices, I snapped. "They're off to join the circus."

  She hummed a few bars of a tune I did not recognize. "If you're done yanking my chain, we'll continue."

  "I'm sure I heard one of them mention the midway. That's part of a circus, right? Where the sideshows are? Unless you think they took time out from their crime spree to discuss"—and here my memory of Earther history failed me utterly— "obscure naval battles."

  "The midway," she repeated, frowning.

  "Midway? Absolutely, I heard that word. You can't expect me to remember every ‘the.' "

  "Well," Maureen said, "Tracking down Darin's accomplices, once we figure out who to look for, just got harder. Midway is Chicago's second airport."

  We continued losing ground until I demanded a halt. "That's enough for a while. I'm ready for a big honking steak."
<
br />   "Geese honk, my friend. Cattle moo. Steers moo in soprano."

  "They can tap-dance while whistling Dixie, for all I care, as long as the meat is fresh. Just in case cattle are the beast they propose to starve . . . ."

  The penny had finally dropped.

  That there were no pennies.

  ****

  The looming disaster was bigger than the company, which even they conceded. Bigger than the Belt. This affected everyone—

  With me, incongruously, at the epicenter. No wonder I felt wrung out.

  "You did good," Andy Singh declared. He was Bollywood handsome, tanned, and self-assured. Short, even by Earther standards, and barrel-chested. Side by side, we were like a fireplug and a lamppost. Andy had hired Maureen—her true name, I was now to believe, being Jaime Olafson—to support me. It was only fair that he had posted bail for her.

  Andy was a senior partner at the white-shoe Washington law firm representing company interests on Earth. (What did the color of his shoes matter? I didn't get that, and anyway, those were black, not white. He had only smiled at the question.) By extension, he was the company's chief lobbyist and fixer on the home world. I guess I should not have been surprised when Ceres informed me Andy was also, sub rosa, a managing partner of the company—and I should do as he said.

  Being in the presence of Belter near-royalty impressed me less than the connections he had on Earth: the influence that had made possible the summit from which—with me used up, as limp as a dishrag—we had finally taken our leave. And also the clout to get the Chicago police to allow Maureen (I was doing my best to ignore any other name, lest it pop out at an inopportune moment) and me to fly to Washington for that meeting.

  The three of us were riding in Andy's car. His as in he owned it, not that he had been the person to summon it. His as in no one could possibly eavesdrop through the vehicle's voice-activated navigation system. His as in I could not shake the fear that, fatigue taking over, I'd drool on the soft-as-butter, cream-colored leather of its seats.