Blood Orbit_A Gattis File Novel

by K. R. Richardson

  Dillal scowled at her for a moment, a trickle of blood running down his cheek. Then he closed his eyes, his jaw working a little as he ground his teeth and thought. He shook his head and opened his eyes again, his expression neutral now. “Yes. All right. Proposal accepted. What’s the rest?”

  “You think there’s more?”

  “Plainly there is.”

  Andreus grunted and gave up a thin smile. “All right. Number four is tell me what happened to cause this while I take a look at your eye—and that burn on your wrist and whatever else you didn’t bother to mention—and I’ll tell you what I’ve got from Santos.”

  Dillal assented and Andreus cleaned up so they could move to her exam room. She had him strip to the waist and attached several monitor pads among the patches and tracks of scars on his back and chest.

  Then she started to attach the data cable behind his left ear. The skin around the plug was slightly reddened and marked with small, charred black lines.

  “What happened to the socket?” the doctor asked, peering through a magnifier at the area.

  “Bad cable connection.”

  “What sort of analysis were you attempting to run?”

  “I wasn’t. It was a rather desperate improvisation and I’ve had to work around it. I haven’t been able to retrieve the data I was hoping to save, but I believe it’s still in the swap buffer.”

  She backed off and stared at him. “You did what . . . ?”

  “If you’ll complete your examination, this will make more sense.”

  “Will it?”

  “The damage to the data socket and the burn on my wrist are related.”

  “And the eye?”

  “Indirectly. Same incident, different cause.”

  Andreus gave him a hard look, studying him for a minute. “Fine.”

  Then she removed his ocular and continued the exam.

  “There’s a crack in the lacrimal bone and another in the supraorbital margin near the frame attachment. I can’t do anything about the cracks without detaching the entire frame, which would require a few hours in surgery and more downtime that I expect you’ll say is unacceptable, won’t you?”

  Dillal raised his remaining eye to hers as she stood in front of him. “Yes.”

  “Well, the cracks will heal on their own, but the blood and fluid from the tissue damage are draining to the lowest point along the infraorbital margin and through the cracks in the lacrimal. That’s causing the abscess under your eye. If you’re still taking the drugs I prescribed, that should stave off infection there, so long as you keep this dry, but it may still drain for a while, even after I clean it up today. I can fix some of this, patch some new spray skin, but you need to baby those cracks for a while—don’t go banging yourself around or putting pressure on your head or eye.” She leaned in again and peered at his left cheek. “This damage . . . it looks as if someone tried to yank the unit out of your skull.”

  “He didn’t try, he only threatened to.”

  Andreus stepped back and leaned against the nearest counter. “Who did this? What did he use?”

  “His fingers.”

  “Fingers?” Andreus looked intrigued. “He must have extraordinary grip strength. Who was this?”

  “My grandfather.”

  The doctor scowled at him. “The Ohba side?”

  “Yes.”

  “That explains the grip. These marks in your skin around the frame are from his fingernails.”

  Dillal said nothing.

  “The burn is his gift, too, I assume.”

  “Indirectly. I chose to leave before he had given permission. You’ll see it goes a distance up the arm,” Dillal said raising his right forearm between them for her to look at. The electrical discharge burn ran from below the smallest finger of his hand to his elbow. “There are two companion marks on my left shoulder,” he added, resting his hand above them. The two bright red patches were in perfect alignment with the long burn on his forearm and directly below the data socket.

  Andreus studied the geometry of the burns. “These didn’t come from the data cable—they don’t carry significant voltage.”

  “No. They’re from a homemade shock box. I was wet at the time and feared the charge would damage the socket if it chanced to arc to the device.”

  “Not a cable . . .” Her eyes widened. “You attempted a data transfer directly to the buffer from a free-standing device. You are insane.”

  Dillal shrugged. “It was a very small drive, there wasn’t much risk in it.”

  “Until your grandfather tried to electrocute you.”

  “One of his lieutenants did it when he noticed what I was doing with the drive. As I said, I feared the charge would damage the socket. My right hand was still free, so I blocked the contacts and the discharge traveled up my arm instead.”

  “What’s on that file in the buffer?”

  “I don’t know. I had no chance to access it, but I assume it’s unpleasant and damning or my grandfather would have no interest in forcing me to see it. I thought it better to take it and run than stay and discover what else he had planned.”

  Andreus watched him a while in inscrutable silence. “You really are a remarkable piece of work. Perfect specimen for this—the brain, the physiology, the sheer damned cussedness.”

  “I’m not familiar with the word.”

  “You know the phrase ‘too stubborn to die’?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s you.”

  He tilted his head as if accepting a compliment. “I believe you owe me some information in return.”

  “I’ll tell you while I upload the buffer and clean these wounds.”

  “Upload the buffer?”

  “You want access to the file don’t you?”

  “I don’t necessarily want it in anyone else’s hands.”

  “Tough. It won’t go beyond this room, but I’m as interested as you. And I’m the only person aside from you who stands a chance of extracting it. That’s my equipment in your head, so that’s my price.”

  Dillal gave an annoyed grunt, but didn’t object further.

  The doctor cleaned up the cuts and burns before she turned back to working on Dillal’s eye. “So, the interesting thing about Santos . . .” she started. “You already know this, don’t you?”

  “Not specifically. There was no viable blood sample.”

  “But you got trace indicators off the ligature and while we were in the morgue.”

  “Yes. But please amuse yourself before coming to the point.”

  She barked a laugh. “Hah! The report from that ass Orris claims Santos was a heavy drinker, but while there was a hell of a lot of alcohol still in his stomach and blood, there’s no evidence he was a long-term user. He was drunk at the time, but not habitually. He also wasn’t a habitual drug-user though there were drugs in his system—drugs the scene techs didn’t find in his house—and also some they did. All together, the relevant substances create something we called ‘deadman’s dram’—”

  The console on the doctor’s table made a noise and she turned toward it. “Looks like that file is some kind of video, but my machine says the codex is broken. It’ll take a little while to rebuild.”

  “Deadman’s dram,” Dillal prompted.

  “What, you didn’t look it up while my back was turned?”

  “Data cable insertion disables the system antenna.”

  Andreus barked again. “Hah! It’s a last-ditch, last-rights kind of thing. Developed centuries ago for terminal patients who were in extreme pain. We called it deadman’s dram on Marshel during that war, but it’s got lots of names: Snow’s Elixir, soldier’s rest, Brompton Cocktail . . . The combination of an anti-nausea component, like cannabis, mixed with a specific type of stimulant, alcohol, and an open-chain opiate, given in moderate doses, makes the patient comfortable and sociable for a few hours—even up to a few days—before they die. You’ve got a couple of choices of stimulant and opiate—which is great when
you have to work with whatever you’ve got—so there’s a small range of effect. If you mix in something sweet, it’s almost palatable and an appropriate dosage is about ten milliliters, maybe fifteen to twenty milliliters for someone of Santos’s bulk—less than half a shot glass full. There are better things, and it’s almost unknown outside of field hospitals and backwater clinics, but everything you need is easily available on most agricultural planets. Now, a side-effect of this specific combination is that it makes the patient extremely suggestible while it lasts. In this case, the tonic would have been effective for a little over an hour, two at the most.”

  “Suggestible enough to persuade a man to take his own life?”

  “That would depend on his mental state at the time, but it might not have been a very hard sell.”

  “And when did he die?”

  “Between 0300 and 0500.”

  “He would have been talkative during that period also?”

  “He’d have been willing to discuss anything an interrogator asked him, right up until he couldn’t talk at all.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Day 5: Afternoon

  Once his mind had settled, Matheson began picking at the investigation’s threads. He had questions and possible ideas, but he’d been unable to contact Dillal, so he went to GISA HQ to find him. There was no sign of the inspector in the morgue or the ForTech lab, which was staffed by a handful of techs and med/legals. The lab was clean, but the hallways outside had been tracked with the powdery blue sand from Santos’s neighborhood and the occasional sticky footprint made by spray seal solvent that some overworked scene tech hadn’t wiped completely off their shoe. The thought clawed at Matheson and he started to turn away.

  Starna caught him as he was nearly out the door and pulled Matheson into the small sample room off to the side of the main lab. The tech looked as if he hadn’t slept or bathed in days, and long welts down his forearms and neck spoke of scratching compulsively until he bled. His eyes were bloodshot, the whites gone a tea-stained yellow where they weren’t red. “Have you seen him?” Starna asked.

  “Who?”

  “The inspector. He was here. I missed him . . .”

  “I haven’t seen him, either.”

  “Oh.” Starna’s disappointment was deeper than reasonable and his breathing was ragged, but he didn’t seem to have been running or physically exerting himself. Matheson frowned as Starna looked down and swallowed convulsively. “Tell him I couldn’t . . .”

  “Couldn’t what? Starna, what’s wrong?”

  “Can’t you tell?” Starna gave a broken, hysterical laugh. “He can. And I can’t do it.”

  Matheson grabbed Starna by the shoulders and jerked him up straight. The tech was trembling, his skin too warm, but not sweating. “What is it you can’t do?”

  “I can’t—I can’t do . . .” Starna’s gaze darted around Matheson, and he gave up a twitching, miserable smile. “I can’t do what he wants me to do. And I can’t match—can’t match the sample. The other—that’s what he expected. The rest. I can’t.” He spoke as if his thoughts were tangled in his head and he could only get them out by tearing them into pieces.

  Starna gave a sudden short trill of laughter, and pulled out of Matheson’s grip. The tech stood up straighter, lifting his chin, and spoke in carefully deliberated bursts, his expression weirdly amused. “Tell. Him. The sample. Was. Not. Viable. And I. Can’t. Run it. Tissue. Solvent. Yes. The rest.” He punctuated the chopped-up sentence with a tiny laugh. “Total failure. I can’t. Do. What he wants. I’m. Sorry.”

  The apology seemed to unlock something and Starna sighed, closing his eyes for a moment, relieved. Then he spoke again, his voice calmer, but still a little high-pitched, and a slight tremor ran continually over him. “There is one thing I can do. So, I’ll do that.” He looked at Matheson and offered another crooked smile. “There can always be a goat. Tell him.”

  Confused, Matheson replied, “He’d rather hear it from you, I’m sure.”

  Starna grinned and laughed, quite normally. “I won’t be here.” He looked at the door and started past Matheson. “Excuse me.”

  Dumbfounded, Matheson didn’t follow him immediately and by the time he stepped into the lab, Starna was gone. On the off chance the tech was wrong, he started to go check Dillal’s office, but that was no haven either; Orris was prowling around outside the room. Matheson considered asking if he knew where the inspector was, but he didn’t want to give the detive an opportunity to interrogate him. He was too unbalanced, too raw with respect to Santos, and too worried about his own investigation to let Orris paint him into the corners of another one. Matheson needed somewhere to run searches without being interrupted or beaten. If the inspector wasn’t there to help him, he’d have to find another place . . .

  S-Office. It would be abandoned—it was the middle of the shift and everyone who wasn’t asleep or on patrol would be on riot duty. The irony almost made him laugh.

  Matheson ran every search parameter and permutation he could think of—just knowing the men’s names was no help in finding them unless he could identify them by sight or corner them somewhere they would have to go. Banzet was the more elusive of the two—he was nineteen and had no record in Angra Dastrelas, but he’d moved to the city less than a year earlier from Dreihleat Northcut. He had no local family, friends, or contacts, no clan affiliation, and his address was a general labor flophouse. Matheson would be surprised if he was still in residence.

  Matheson looked further into the man’s past. Northcut was an industrial town about three thousand kilometers northwest of Angra Dastrelas. Banzet’s family owned a small machine shop that seemed to do one-off and repairs jobs too minor to interest anyone else. Matheson didn’t see much about Hoda Banzet in the GISA Northcut Regional District files either, except a single warning for illegal assembly. The only file image available was a recent one from Banzet’s travel papers, but the young Dreihle didn’t look familiar and the name didn’t pop anything else.

  Matheson waded into the larger volume of material on Osolin Tchintaka. He’d been born in a contract camp on Gattis’s other major continent, Agria, and moved to Ariel and Angra Dastrelas six years ago—free, but with the stigma of the camps on him like a stench. He had a long list of petty cons, theft, public disruption, misrepresentation . . . There was no mention of Denenshe Leran or Hoda Banzet on his record, but there was also no clan association listed.

  Maybe “free” is almost like a clan of its own. Matheson imagined the three restless young men with no trade society ties floating around the Dreihleat, frequenting the same neutral territory, the coffee houses, the tunnels, until they inevitably met . . .

  He sat and stared in the direction of the display for a while, his eyes unfocussed. They’d known the Paz da Sorte well enough to know the routine and that it would be open late. If they were in with the “Relief, Redress, Revolt” movement, I can see how they’d be dazzled enough by that man to think a little robbery to support the cause wouldn’t be unforgivable. Until things went wrong.

  Matheson blinked and rubbed his eyes, refocusing on the display and looking for Tchintaka’s image. He hadn’t spotted Banzet at the mob scene, but maybe . . .

  Tchintaka’s image stopped him cold. He tilted his head in disbelief and stared. “Merry . . . fucking . . . hell.”

  The orator who’d sparked the crowd into a screaming mob was Osolin Tchintaka.

  Aya couldn’t have known what was going to happen, couldn’t have known Tchintaka’s rhetoric would set the mob on him . . . Matheson’s breath hitched in remembered panic. He forced himself toward calm with a few longer, slower breaths. He couldn’t think enfolded in irrational reaction. He had to find this man—both men—and that meant going back into the Dreihleat in the midst of a riot. The thought almost made him ill.

  He tried Dillal one more time and was surprised when the inspector picked it up as a voice call.

  “Yes, Matheson?” He sounded a little irritated.


  “I got some names and I’m following them up—Hoda Banzet and Osolin Tchintaka.”

  “Oso? I know him—knew him,” Dillal corrected. “Politically active, rather a trouble maker.”

  “Yeah. He’s one of those ‘Relief, Redress, Revolt’ speakers. Compelling—mesmerizing, really. I happened to be nearby when he incited a riot this morning. Had to run like merry hell to get out—”

  “I’ve only just heard. Did you get any useful information from the encounter?”

  “Not much—to be honest, I’m disturbed.”

  “Is this the same issue that disturbed you before?”

  “No. Something different—it’s weird.”

  “In what way?”

  “I . . . uh . . . I can’t say. I’m in S-Office.”

  “I see. Is it relevant, this thing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then set it aside and concentrate on what you do know. Your contact named Oso and this Hoda Banzet. What do you have on him?”

  “Banzet? He doesn’t have any record except a warning for illegal assembly back in Northcut—it wasn’t even a full booking. He’s nineteen and moved here about eight months ago, so I figured he’s probably part of Three R, just like Tchintaka, and sedition might have been his reason for moving.”

  “Northcut’s a small community, much harder to hide in. And Leran knew them both?”

  “According to my contact, yes. They were all of the same political bent.”

  There was a long pause before the inspector spoke again. “If the riot continues, they’ll be in the tunnels—I see no sign of either name on the sweep lists. You’ll have to take your contact as a guide. If you believe you can trust him . . . or her.”

  Matheson frowned a little. “I think so. And, I ran into Starna.”

  “In the Dreihleat?” Dillal sounded startled.

  “No. Here at GISA. He’s not well.”