Blood Orbit_A Gattis File Novel

by K. R. Richardson

  Matheson unlocked his door and waved the inspector in ahead of him, wincing at his own ill-considered motion and moving slowly. He closed and double-locked the door on the inside.

  Dillal went to lean against the counter that did dual duty as food prep and wash bowl. He didn’t take the only chair, and his fingers brushed over the pommel of the broken fencing foil Matheson had left wedged between the counter and the food storage unit. What must that tell him? Matheson tugged the latch on the side of the narrow, mostly empty shelf unit to let his bed down from the cabinet. The platform unfolded with a low hiss and he dropped to sit on the edge of the neatly tucked mattress, stifling a grunt.

  “What happened?”

  Matheson drew a breath that shot spikes of red pain through him, and flinched. “I think the SOs don’t like my . . . promotion. Or you. Or maybe specific SOs don’t like it.”

  Dillal gave a small shake of his head. “That’s why, not what.”

  Matheson blinked at the inspector, thinking it over before he opened his mouth again. “Technically, the report says a practical joke went over the pole and I fell in the shower room trying to wash off the mess. That’s not exactly the whole of it.”

  “And not the first time.”

  “No.”

  The inspector shook off his annoyance and made a low grunt. “Tell me how it really went.”

  Matheson’s muscles objected to every breath in or out and every motion required to speak or keep him from toppling over, so he spoke slowly. “Well. Got the shit beaten out of me by members of S-Office after someone left an over-pressured bladder of fish guts inside my locker. I opened the locker, the bladder exploded. When I headed for the showers, unknown individuals turned off the lights and escorted me roughly to the shower room. They beat me, doused me in cold water, and told me I’d overstepped. Then came some vague threats and a list of actions I wasn’t to be caught doing. Apparently I’ve turned on my fellow SOs by working for you—or possibly for questioning Santos—maybe both. I step out of line again, and they’ll make sure I live up to the nickname ‘fishbait.’”

  “And you intend to do nothing to redress this threat.”

  “How? File a report with Feresintavi and have it get worse? Give the admin a reason to pry into your investigation? I want this job. And I don’t want to get my skull beaten in. Seems like my only choice is to keep my mouth shut and dodge.”

  “I can take care of this.”

  Matheson shook his head and regretted it. “No. My sister was right—I’ve been protected too much. Only things I’ve excelled at on my own merit are frivolous physical endeavors. Imagined that by becoming a cop I was pursuing something worthy. Had this infantile idea that I could make something better. But I was just running away from them. So here’s where I’m digging in my heels. I won’t be put on a desk and I won’t dump you in the shit. Santos said no one really cares about the deaths of a bunch of people with yellow skin, but I do. You do. I may not be a regular cop, may not have ended up where I wanted, and I may be in over my head, but I don’t want to let go. I want this case. I won’t screw it or you by whining to the Chief Supers or Pritchet.”

  Talking was tiring and he wanted to fall backward onto the mattress, but he wasn’t sure what the inspector was going to do or say next. Matheson stayed upright, leaning forward onto his braced hands. His forearms were bruised from protecting his head, but they weren’t broken, and the distance lent by the medical cocktail he’d been given let him ignore the discomfort of the posture once he was in it—so long as he didn’t breathe too deeply.

  Dillal watched him a moment, probably cataloguing every injury and drug in his system. The inspector turned his gaze aside after a while and ran his fingers over the broken fencing foil. “How did you spend your free shift before your last rounds with Santos? Not sleeping.”

  “No,” Matheson said, shaking his head and feeling woozy. “I don’t sleep well. Haven’t in . . . I don’t know . . . months. I have nightmares—anxiety dreams—sure I’ve done something terrible. Wake up, thinking I’m falling. Falling into mud and blood and just . . . deep black nothing. So if work doesn’t let me sleep, I work out. Broke that on day two. Y’know, I’ve had that thing for years and it shattered against a target—not even in competition.” I sound drunk.

  Dillal made a thoughtful sound in his throat. “I’ll hold your complaint for now—”

  “Haven’t made one,” Matheson objected.

  “Not officially, but I know,” Dillal said. “I need you and I am . . . relieved that you wish to continue. There are some . . . developments I have to deal with that may prove dangerous.”

  “Dangerous in what way?”

  “Starna’s genetic trace connects to someone I once knew.”

  “In the Ohbata? Thought your patch was the Dreihleat.”

  The inspector gave a minuscule shrug. “Regardless, it must be addressed immediately and I can’t ask that of you.”

  “I’ve got a feeling you don’t want to go, either.”

  “No. And there are internal issues to manage as well.”

  “Yeah . . . Neme cornered me about reports.”

  “I expect no discretion from that quarter—she’ll get them when I’m ready to let her have them.” He touched the unnatural curve of machinery embedded behind his left ear. “Filing reports via the cybernetic interface is slightly faster than typing them, but still time consuming. Also, I did discover Robesh’s missing fingernail. ForTech had scraped tissue off the carpet in both rooms and the shattered remains of the nail were in one of them. It was definitely Leran she fought with and no one else. I have yet to pinpoint the residue on his hands, though.”

  “Maybe it was clean-up wipes,” Matheson said, ideas falling out of his mouth without filtering first.

  Dillal cocked his head. “Why do you think so?”

  “No other residue on his hands, but he killed Robesh. Contact range with a short-plasma. Wouldn’t the plasma kick back particle jets? And if not, the pressure release from the . . . umm . . .” Matheson felt sick, unable to shut off his imagination completely, no matter how tired he was—or maybe because he was so tired and hurt. “When her head . . .” He stopped and swallowed hard, feeling the motion all the way up the back of his neck and across his jaw.

  “Ah!” Dillal murmured. “The steam ejecta should have left some residue on his hand.”

  Matheson nodded unsteadily. “If there was spray seal and he wiped it off his hands in a hurry, could have left some partially dissolved on his skin—in the creases of fingers or his wrists. And everyone forgets their forearms.”

  “Mixed with the ejecta, the seal and solvent might appear as one deliberate compound. I’ll look again. The solvent won’t break down DNA evidence and the speed and volume of the ejecta may have carried viable tissue out along with the rest. If Robesh’s DNA is in that sample, that will confirm Leran as her killer absolutely.”

  “Just leaves us to figure out who killed him.”

  “Also why petty criminals in the Dreihleat were using spray seal during a crime they would not have expected to come to GISA’s attention. Or why they had it at all.”

  “Mm-hm,” Matheson agreed. He nearly fell backward as he nodded.

  Dillal shook his head. “Stay out of the Security staff room from now on. You’ll have to work from my office and pick up the investigation in the Dreihleat as soon as possible. It appears that your presence stirs up something which may benefit us, however difficult the situation becomes.”

  He couldn’t argue—Dillal’s state at the beginning of the investigation had been worse than his currently was—and the inspector was already heading for the door as if there was nothing else to discuss. Maybe there wasn’t, though he did wonder how a dead man had wiped spray seal off his hands. A disconnected thought popped into the front of his head as he struggled to his feet and followed Dillal to the door. “A key. Did they find a key in the sewer sweep?”

  “A key to what?”

  “The j
asso’s door. Santos said he had one. Dropped it down the drain.”

  Dillal stopped and gazed into the distance. Things moved under the skin above his left ear. “You mentioned it in your report. I haven’t examined all of that evidence yet, but I shall when I return.” He continued forward. “Till then, I hope you’ll sleep. We must find Leran’s companions in this crime, but not at your further expense.”

  The inspector turned back as he reached the doorway. “There is a chance I’ll run into difficulty and be unable to call for help. The Ohbata is worse than the Dreihleat—nearly stripped of microtransmitters, and hard links exist only in the worst possible locations for me. If I’m not back in the morning, send Neme.”

  “Why her?”

  “Because she’d never refuse such an opportunity to embarrass me.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Day 3: Ohbata Angra Dastrelas—Night

  Dillal stood in a shadowed doorway at the very edge of it for the best part of an hour. Only the industrial port development was uglier than the Ohbata but the port had started that way—unadorned function without any softening grace. This part of the ghetto had made itself out of decline, dirt, and shadow. Long rows of shattered hothouses and the upthrust of silos gave the place a feral look—like a jaw full of cracked and ragged fangs.

  A crazed pane of glass distorted a flicker of movement that continued in warped progress across the front of what had been a forcing house long before the city had grown to fill the bowl of Trant’s Crater and clutter the shore of the cove with white towers. Other small motions answered from other broken panes along Biol Road, flickering and vanishing at angles too oblique to be reflection. Dillal watched from the corner of his right eye. He kept his head turned and a length of dark fabric pulled over his left eye to keep the light from striking the polished surface of the ocular.

  A short, stocky figure emerged at the end of the forcing house and turned from Caine Passage onto Biol. Dillal, dressed in dull brown as ragged as the ghetto, slipped from his hiding place and darted into another shadow, following the figure. When Dillal reached Caine, he turned and stepped into the shade of the forcing house. No new flurry of tiny signals erupted along the frontage of broken windows.

  He found a door in the dirt of the wall, and twisted and jiggled its handle in a peculiar pattern until the latch gave way. Then he ducked through the narrow doorway, closing the door behind him.

  The old forcing house still smelled of earth. Rogue plants—procullus, hair fern, and climbing aminta—had worked their way through the floors, growing toward the broken windows in search of light and casting shadows behind. An array of hand-grown OLEDs stretched across the top of the windows, dangling their strange electronic fruit down the inside of the remaining panes. Dillal darted past an observation post that looked out on Biol through the cracked and dirtied glass, and along a twisted aisle of sharp-bladed sedge. Swags of honey-scented aminta drooped from the ceiling beams, pale orange blossoms swaying as unseen creatures scuttled through the leaves.

  The avenue of wild plants meandered through the building until the path appeared to come to an abrupt end at a rusty steel door that had grown shaggy with moss and mildew. Dillal pushed his scarf down around his neck and squatted. He studied the edge of the door for a minute, running his hands over the filth-crusted frame and wall beside it. A crevice near the floor yielded and he dug his fingers through the rotten foliage behind it, groping until he flipped an ancient manual override mechanism loose. It turned by reluctant fits and the door made a squealing sound that caused Dillal to raise his head and look over his shoulder.

  No one came to investigate and the hanging plants remained still, rustling only where the breeze passed through the broken glass. It took three complete revolutions before the seal on the door gasped and the locks gave way with heavy thumps. He gave a thin smile, pushed the door open wide enough to squeeze through, and leaned his weight back against it on the other side until it sighed closed.

  A ramp sloped down into darkness. The walkway curved gently and his sure footsteps didn’t echo on the hard surface. The muffled passageway stank of mold and at two hundred meters in, his net connection failed. He ran his fingers over the left side of his head, pressing, but it didn’t return until he’d backtracked upslope several meters. He turned and walked back down. In less than a kilometer, he reached another door in the depths of ear-bleeding silence.

  Built like the first, but in much better repair, the door took little effort to open and he emerged into a small warehouse. He checked his connection again, but it remained dead. The subtle clicking and whining of his eyepiece shifting through its settings was the loudest sound in the room.

  The large space was poorly lit and thick with the odor of waterproofing and packing grease. Nitrogen-purged crates were stacked on chain-elevator racks that rose to within two meters of the lofty ceiling. He walked along the corridor created by two parallel racks, checking some of the labels on the crates as he went. He found a gap in the stacks where something had been removed and looked hard at it before moving on. His footsteps were accompanied only by the faint, asthmatic wheeze of the ventilation system.

  “Bomodai?” he said.

  No answering sound. He drew a small, slim gun from an inner pocket of his ragged clothes.

  He stepped out from between the racks, sweeping for trouble, and looked around the cleared staging area, drawing a slow breath through his nose. He turned his head sharply right, making a visual search, then ran a few steps past a loader.

  An Ohba woman lay on the floor in a swirl of ruddy brown robes a few shades darker and duller than her own skin and the thick, drying blood that had pooled around her. The bloody footprints of a small razor cat led from the puddle into the shadows. A wheeled work counter stood about four meters in from the locked loading door with another standard door beside it. Blood had splashed at head-height onto the shelving to the right.

  Dillal made another search of the area gun muzzle first, checking each of the aisles. The cat’s eyes glowed at him from under a pile of crates, but aside from the busy scurry of disturbed rats, there was no sign of anything else alive in the room.

  He scowled, walking closer to the body and putting his gun away. He crouched at the edge of the stain, touched the blood, and raised his fingers close to his ocular, which clicked for a few seconds. Then he looked back at the dead woman.

  Several bullets had passed through her cheekbone and brow and made the left side of her head an unrecognizable pulp. Dillal gathered a tattered bit of his sleeve over his hand and rolled the woman’s head a little toward him to examine the less-ruined side of her face. The corpse’s muscles resisted, but gave way, and a renewed odor of death filled the air. He looked at her face, then put his free hand over his eyes for a moment, his mouth compressing into a hard line.

  He rested back on his heels and looked her over, his hands hanging between his knees until he tried to reboot his connection one more time and ended cursing it under his breath. He gave a resigned grunt and leaned forward once more. He checked the ruined left side of her face again. A dark shape had flattened against the remains of her orbital ridge. He stared hard at it, then touched it lightly with his covered hand. It fell to the floor—a misshapen bullet. He tilted his head slightly.

  A door crashed open behind him. He rose and turned at the same time, reaching for the gun in his clothes.

  Two men and a woman, all bulky in full SO uniform, crowded through the doorway. The moment they saw Dillal, they raised weapons already in their hands and shouted conflicting orders—“stand still,” “get down,” and “who the fuck are you?”

  Dillal quirked an eyebrow at the weapons pointed at him—only one was the standard issue shock box. He let the fold of fabric fall away and raised both open hands to chest level, the ID checkerboard in clear view on his wrist. “I am Inspector J. P. Dillal, CIFO,” he said, his voice calm and clear as he looked from one to the next.

  “Like hell,” the man at the front
and center replied. “Bong mets don’t make Inspector.” The slur raised no response from Dillal as he shifted his gaze to the other two SOs.

  The woman scowled, while the remaining man—the farthest back, clearly the youngest, and the only one carrying a regulation weapon—looked nervous and uncertain. The right corner of Dillal’s mouth lifted in a fleeting smile before he returned his attention to the man who’d spoken.

  “Not usually, but I am an exception and this is my crime scene.”

  “You haven’t called it in—whoever you fucking-well are.”

  “You know there are no accessible microtransmitters this deep into the Ohbata, and the building’s shielded. If you have an uplink, or there’s a hardline nearby, call it in yourself. Then you can scan my command array and confirm my identity,” the inspector offered, twisting his left hand slightly so the dusty light in the room glided across the crystals embedded in his wrist.

  The two SOs in back exchanged nervous glances.

  “And get close enough that you can do to me what you did to that bitch?” the first one asked. “I don’t think so.”

  “This woman has been dead for hours. So, unless you imagine I’m as irredeemably stupid as you, I’m clearly not her killer.”

  The SO in front took an aggressive step forward, gun outthrust as if he could stab the inspector with it from a distance. “On the floor!” he shouted.

  The man at the rear took a step back, his hands starting to fall. The motion caught the first SO’s attention and he turned his head to snap at the man behind him. “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t like this . . .” the younger man started.

  Dillal dove toward the distracted SO and rolled forward. The woman behind him had no shot that didn’t endanger one of her companions and the men were too slow to adjust to the target closing the distance to them. The inspector hit the first man at the knee. Then he regathered his feet under him and kicked forward. The lead SO shouted and lurched backward into the younger man who was hesitating behind him.