Blood Orbit_A Gattis File Novel

by K. R. Richardson

  Startled, she looked up from helping a man out of the water, shot a glance toward the incoming riot team, and then did as she was told. Matheson watched her arc gracefully into the water and vanish below the surface.

  “Stay here. Explain the situation.” Dillal slapped his mobile into Matheson’s hand. “I’ll hear you if you call, but I won’t be able to respond.” He kicked off his shoes and dove.

  Matheson waved the team toward him. They split, four pursuing the scattering Dreihleen, the other three running toward Matheson.

  One of them took charge, stepping in front of the others and pointing them toward the wreck as he lifted the visor on his helmet. It was Charley Tyreda. “Get ’em up!” he shouted and then looked at Matheson. “What the fuck, rook?”

  Matheson filled in the SO on what they’d seen and how fast the transport had gone down. “There are still people trapped down there, but I’m not in any shape to be much help—”

  Tyreda made a face. “Yeah, I heard. Wasn’t me—”

  “I don’t give a merry fuck about that right now,” Matheson snapped. “Don’t know how many are down there. At least one of ours still alive and trapped in the pilot compartment. Dillal and . . . uh . . . a bystander are swimming down—”

  “That dreck girl?” Tyreda interrupted.

  Matheson glared, hesitated a second before he said, “She’s his sister.”

  Tyreda gaped and muttered, “Fuck me . . .”

  “Just shut up and listen. Organize extraction and pick up. She and the inspector are going to get anyone they can out of the transport. So get the rest of your team back here—we have to get people out of the water as soon as they come up.”

  Tyreda scowled and cursed. “Shit. They’re sweeps—we gotta arrest ’em.”

  “Screw that! These people will die if we don’t get them to safety! Merry fucking hell, Tyreda,” Matheson shouted at him, “is every SO in Angra Dastrelas a soulless, bigoted dogfucker, or just the ones I have to work with?” Then he winced and gasped around the pain that clutched his ribs and abs.

  Tyreda put up his hands. “All right, all right,” he muttered and turned to recall his team and request further assistance—wreckers and divers, more SOs, and a medical unit to deal with the injured.

  Several more Dreihleen came up and were hauled out of the water by Tyreda’s team. Then nothing.

  “Where are they?” Matheson muttered.

  “Don’t panic yet,” Tyreda said. “Drecks can hold their breath for-fucking-ever.”

  Matheson started to glare at him.

  Aya broke the surface nearby with her arm around an SO Matheson hadn’t seen before. He was pale and a dead weight with his riot gear on. Matheson wasn’t sure the man was still alive. Then Tyreda and one of the SOs hauled him out and he coughed up water.

  Two more SOs started roughly dragging Aya out as well. She fought, yanking one into the canal where she kicked him in the gut as she twisted away from the other.

  “Let her go!” Matheson yelled, walked toward them, wincing again. “She’s with me.” Aya wouldn’t appreciate his claim, but he didn’t care.

  The one still snatching at her looked up. “With you?”

  Matheson glared at him. “Yeah. Are you fucking deaf?” He was taller than the SO and he knew he looked like hell, which he hoped was intimidating enough, but he took the baton off his belt and flicked it out to full extension just in case.

  Aya splashed and shouted in the water. Matheson looked down to see the first SO trying to grapple her and shove her under. Matheson stooped and jabbed the man with his baton. The SO panicked and paddled at the water. Matheson was too sore and tired to rise, so he put his hand down to Aya instead. She took it. Her grip was like a claw.

  “Where’s the inspector? He’s been down a hell of a long time.” He sounded rough and angry rather than scared out of his wits.

  “I’m go back.” She took a long, deep breath and dove again.

  A massive air bubble breached and churned the water, flinging bodies, trash, and wreckage to the surface. With a grinding screech the transport tore away from the bridge, then creaked and settled deeper into the canal.

  Matheson lurched toward the water and dove in after Aya, but she bobbed back up beside him at once. “He’s where?” she asked, wild-eyed.

  The water seemed to boil for a moment longer, bubbles, bodies, wreckage all tossing on the disrupted surface. Some of the bodies flailed and moved weakly. One of them raised its head and swam toward them, towing another under its arm. Matheson was relieved when he recognized Dillal. Even wet, he was distinctive when the sun caught his face and ginger hair.

  The man in Dillal’s grip was the SO from the pilot compartment, but the inspector shook his head as he reached the wall between Matheson and Aya. “I couldn’t leave him,” he said, letting Tyreda and the newly arriving SOs pull the limp man from his arms.

  Medical Intervention shoved their way through and began working on the man. Dillal, Matheson, and Aya crawled from the water unmolested. Dive and wreck recovery arrived with Medical. Anyone still trapped down there’s probably dead. The thought left Matheson colder than his soaked state accounted for.

  Matheson shifted and watched with sick fascination as Dillal pressed on the inner curve of his metal eye socket. Gory pink liquid ran from a bright red wound below the orbit’s lowest edge. The spray skin under the inspector’s left eye had torn, leaving the golden frame of the prosthesis partially exposed where it met his cheek bone. The surface was curiously rough and light scattered off it in dull sparks.

  Dillal got to his feet and made a small beckoning motion with his head. Matheson and Aya followed him as he picked his barefooted way through the debris field toward the last standing goldwood tree on the canal side of the park. Dillal leaned his back against it. Aya and Matheson stopped close and faced him, though they didn’t look at each other.

  “Not an accident,” Dillal said.

  “No?” Matheson asked.

  “The man I brought up was afraid of dying, but more afraid of me. When they retrieve the wreckage, they may find a steering beacon for the drone, but perhaps not.”

  Matheson scowled, thinking. “Do you believe there really was a beacon?”

  “I heard it. I shouldn’t have, but Andreus has been tinkering . . .”

  “Who’s do this?” Aya demanded.

  “I can’t be sure, but one has only to ask ‘who benefits’ to compose a rather short list.”

  Matheson nodded. The morning seemed days ago, but the memories cut like broken glass. “First Santos, then that . . . video file . . .”

  “Santos didn’t kill himself.” Dillal put up one hand. “But we haven’t time for that discussion now. I have to persuade Pritchet not to allow any further action against the ghettos.”

  “Why they’re do that? Victims’re Dreihleen, not hoppers or shashen or blues,” Aya objected.

  “And half-a-dozen GISA personnel,” Dillal said. “Fear mongering is a high art at Corporation House and if it serves any faction’s purpose, they will do it.”

  Aya lowered her face and stared at the ground. “So, you’re go . . .”

  “To speak to the regional director. The two of you must find Tchintaka and Banzet as quickly as possible. Don’t linger. If I can offer any other focus to Pritchet’s attention—better if I can offer him a perpetrator—we may at least stave off more violence and buy time to solve the crime properly, without giving Corporation House more fuel.”

  “The tunnels, then?” Matheson asked. He shot a glance at Aya, who shifted her own gaze away.

  “Yes. Aya. I know my need carries no weight with you, but—”

  “I’m not a fool, Djepe. He’s need a guide and I’m know the way.”

  Dillal’s lips twitched. “Don’t kill him while you’re at it.”

  Aya snorted and turned away.

  “Sir . . .” Matheson started.

  Dillal seemed surprised by the title. “Matheson?”

  �
��You’re . . .” He changed his mind, and raised a hand to his own cheekbone, “. . . injured.”

  “Ah.” The inspector almost seemed stunned, yet Matheson knew he wasn’t unaware of it. The smaller man merely gave one of his tilting shrugs. “Well. If we survive two more days, I’ll give myself up to Dr. Andreus’s mercy. And if not, it won’t matter.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Day 5: Evening

  Matheson reclaimed his shoes and helped straighten up the coffee house while Aya retrieved his MDD from the loft. Then the two of them headed for Fish Market Basin, Matheson all too aware of distance that had opened between him and the woman only a foot away, and the questions that preyed on his own mind. The sun dried their clothes and left a lingering scent of canal water as Aya led the way through the riot’s wrack and ruin to the Tomb.

  The tunnels into the crater wall were as varied as the cliff face—some bored smooth with plasma torches, others rough, narrow, and as twisted as the society outside. For the first half hour or so, Matheson hadn’t had to stoop, though there had been passages he’d been forced to slide sideways through and every place the rough stone had rubbed against him was marked with pale blue dust and the dull, irritated itching of his healing bruises. They heard eerily distorted voices, the skittering of insects, and the sounds of other people moving in the tunnels, but Matheson’s Sun Spot only illuminated the flickering lizards that darted away from the light, and centipedes as long as his forearm. It made the skin at the back of his neck crawl.

  Aya yanked him backward into a shadowed gap that opened into a small chamber.

  He winced a little and shut off the Sun Spot as she pulled him to the ground away from the crack in the wall. A sharp edge caught the pocket on his thin shirt, tearing it open, and he barely caught the mobile before it hit the ground. He shoved into his shirt.

  In a minute, a slim figure went past, soft-footed as a cat, illuminating its way with a dimly glowing chemical stick. How did Aya hear such a quiet tread?

  Once the figure was farther down the tunnel, Aya motioned him to follow again.

  “How—?” Matheson started in a whisper.

  Aya put her hand over his mouth. “You’re wish to come on our terms, or as prisoner, heh?”

  He wondered for a moment which “our” she meant, but nodded and followed in silence.

  They walked on, now ducking under low ceilings and turning through narrow entries more often. Matheson noticed his aches more the farther they went.

  Eventually, a dim light came from ahead, with the soft sounds of people moving nearby. Once again, they stopped and hid in a fracture to let people pass.

  She knows the way so well . . . he thought, and saw her studying him.

  She tilted her head down and raised an ironically quirked eyebrow over a crooked half-smile. The expression was so much like one of Dillal’s that he was surprised he’d never seen the resemblance before. “I’m raised here as much as the coffee house, and I’m honor my mother’s work. No matter how ill, Mam’s not give up on reform. How else’s a Dreihle widow with a babe on her hip love an Ohba?” her whisper sharpened at the last and she glared at him defensively.

  “Reform and love . . . So your father died when you were an infant?”

  She nodded. “In th’agricamps. Same’s . . . same’s Djepe’s. Now hush.”

  Matheson connected the information in his head as they waited for another group to pass. Then Aya tugged him with her out into the larger tunnel and motioned him to follow. They trotted quietly. The light brightened, flickering once in a while, as they advanced.

  Around a corner the illumination was suddenly bright enough to read by as it poured from a hole high in the wall on their right. The tunnel curved slightly and branched right again, but Aya led Matheson past the gash of light and turned sharply left into a cleft that opened into a steep and narrow stair going up. She motioned him to go up the steps and wait.

  He leaned close to her. “I’m going with you,” he whispered.

  She leveled a cold look at him and did not move until he rolled his eyes and shrugged. He was well up the steps—more a sloping ladder than a staircase—when she slipped back into the passage, leaving him to clamber into the unknown on his own.

  Dillal had trusted Aya with this, but Matheson didn’t know if she would betray that tenuous sibling accord because of what he had done. How closely did she cleave to her mother’s—and by implication Dillal’s father’s—concept of colorblind reform? For Dillal, this case was an opening skirmish. The inspector’s design was crazy and as frangible as glass, but it reached far beyond Matheson’s own unfocused and damaged idealism, and guilt, or even the immediate desire to solve the case.

  At the top of the stone ladder, Matheson found a wide, flat shelf that must have been carved over the passageway Aya had taken. Ahead he saw light and heard movement and soft, rolling Dreihleen voices.

  Some unseen man said, “Aya,” and Matheson crept forward until he could look out through a break in the wall.

  Not far below lay what seemed to be a storage room carved from the rock and now converted into a field hospital. Light came from a mix of electric and chemical lamps set wherever there was room and moved as needed. Storage crates had been pushed out of the way, or stacked into makeshift beds and tables covered in stained plastic sheeting. All the beds were full and dozens of injured Dreihleen sat or lay on the ground, or leaned against the walls and crates. A few of the people murmured to each other, but most sat silent in shock. Some were bleeding, some blistered and burned from electric discharges, chemicals, or fire. The riot patrol had been brutal and indiscriminate. The insensible wounded—those whose injuries had been too severe to wait and had already been seen to—lay moaning off to the side, in too much pain to sleep. Beside them lay a few who didn’t move or make any noise at all.

  Among the rest, he saw a man cradling to his side a small child with an obviously broken arm, stroking the kid’s hair as blood dried on their torn and filthy clothes. The child—perhaps ten years old—didn’t cry, only clutched his fractured forearm and leaned against the man. Across from them, a young Dreihle woman in a blood-stained festival gown knelt in front of an elderly woman who sat on one of the crates and held up a flickering lamp. The girl was sewing up a ragged gash in the older woman’s face. The light shuddered with every stitch, and Matheson couldn’t tell if all the blood on the woman’s face and neck was from the vicious slash or equally from the lip she’d bitten through.

  The images twined with his fragmented memories of Camp Donetti. He felt ill and closed his eyes. I caused something like this . . . He hadn’t seen it then—couldn’t have—but it all knitted together, preamble to postscript, in blood and violence.

  He heard Aya ask after Tchintaka and Banzet, and kept his stinging eyes closed, concentrating on the voices.

  “Oso’s where?” Aya asked. “I’m need speak t’him. Or Hoda.”

  Someone scoffed. “You’re can’t be trusted. You’re entertain dehkas.” A male voice, Dreihleen, low and angry. “And you’re help them at the canal.”

  Matheson could hear the chilled fury in Aya’s reply. “I’m save ours. I’m let them die’s make you happier, Norenin?”

  Something prodded Matheson’s left elbow. He opened his eyes and blinked away the dust that stuck to his wet lashes.

  A Dreihle youth looked over the ledge and gave him a mean little smile, motioning Matheson forward. Had Aya turfed him? As he hesitated, the kid set a shock box on the shelf surface with a click. “You’re come down. Now.”

  “The way I came up, or head first?” Matheson asked politely—wiser to be civil to any person pointing a weapon at your face.

  The kid shrugged and teetered his unkempt, bloodstained head side to side, revealing the top of a tattoo that began on the side of his neck and vanished under the strap of his shirt to reappear on his just-visible shoulder. “Fairzee-mairzee.” He was younger than Zanesh, the unaff, but looked more willing to do violence at the mome
nt.

  “I’ll meet you at the bottom of the stairs,” Matheson said.

  He glanced down to look for Aya. She stood off to his left in an archway and stared anxiously at the ledge, no longer speaking. A man held onto her upper arm, turning an enraged glare at Matheson—it was the unusually husky Dreihle he’d seen outside the coffee house on Thursday. The kid scampered to the floor from atop a stack of crates and dodged around them, exiting the room.

  “I’m coming down,” Matheson called, glad most of his bruises were on his back and face as he eased toward the stone ladder on his belly.

  At the bottom, the boy—no . . . girl, Matheson corrected as he got a better look—was leaning in the narrow doorway, holding out the shock box. From the careful way she held it, Matheson was sure the kid had little experience with the device. It wouldn’t require much effort to take it from her, but Matheson had no desire for more trouble. He held his hands out together, palms up. “Do you want to cuff me? There’re binders on my belt.”

  The girl shook her head, blood-stiffened tufts of her chopped-short hair bobbing with the motion. “Not want t’get so close, dehka.” She looked defiantly at him, chin jutting up and her lip curled in disdain as she spoke. How old is she? Thirteen, fourteen? Except for the small curve of breasts, she was all bones and angles under her rough clothes.

  Matheson shrugged and placed his hands on his head. He followed the girl as she backed into the wider main tunnel and motioned Matheson ahead of her.

  The room down the passage was no different when seen from below. The injured and shocked Dreihleen had not vanished, but they were much closer and more than a few hateful stares turned in Matheson’s direction. He dropped his gaze and raised it again only to look at Aya. This time, she met his eyes. “You’re all right?” he asked.

  She twitched her arm from the grip of the man beside her. “That I am.” Her fierce tone wasn’t for him.

  The girl who’d escorted Matheson fell back and perched on the edge of a pile of crates, still holding the shock box and staying out of his reach. Slowly, Matheson dropped his hands while the man next to Aya looked him over, clearly noting the filth, bruises, and broken nose, and snorted. “You’re see Dreihleen hard side now.”