“GISA and Gattis Corporation will hardly care—”
“Central System will. If this is all being used as an excuse to reduce the Ohba and Dreihleen to a negligible effect on the charter before the review, then the threat of Central’s early intervention under the emergency clause is the last thing the corporation wants. It wouldn’t be able to execute its plans if Central is watching—not without much better provocation. They’ll have to manufacture a better excuse, which will buy us enough time to finish this.”
“Send to Central . . .”
“No. Send directly to Central’s media hub. They’re no more likely to let a scandal—or the promise of violence—go underexploited than Gattis’s media are. I’ve seen them in action before. It’s like watching sharks go after blood in the water. And Central’s hub will ram their version back down Gattis’s feed whether they like it or not. The number of transports coming down suggests that there’s some kind of staging area organized on this side of the jumpway. They’ll need the option to disavow it, so it’ll have to have a beacon and a needlecast transmitter that’s not controlled by Gattis Corp. Like the one that’s coordinating the out-system troops. If we can get our story on the needlecast before this vessel lifts out of range, nothing will stop that packet from going through with the next jump. It’ll hit Central and be on the media stream before we drop back to Angra Dastrelas.” He felt more stable on this subject—one with no bloody memories. He shot a glance sideways at the inspector.
“You’ll have to do it—I’m temporarily offline.” Dillal glanced down and chuckled. The sound left Matheson uneasy. “Your family doesn’t appreciate what they’ve lost in letting you slip the chain.”
The pre-lift warning squealed and Matheson flinched. They both looked up as if they could see the sound in the air. Dillal caught Matheson’s eye. “You have three minutes.”
They moved to secure themselves in the passenger slings—Dillal much more slowly than Matheson, after carefully re-stowing everything in his pockets, including the ocular. Matheson snatched his mobile from the loops on his shirt and started working, copying pieces of the files and grafting them with text, hooking keywords, weighting it with his family name . . .
Initial lift was much faster and harder than the lift out of Ariel—it felt like something heavy pressed on Matheson’s chest, making all the nearly healed bruises ache again. Breathing was difficult for the minutes it lasted. The mobile fell from his hands and skittered across the floor. The inspector groaned and Matheson tried to turn and look at him, but the increased pressure made it difficult. Matheson suffered through the long minutes, second-guessing himself. Am I like the rest of my family? And what about Dillal—is he as bad, worse?
Once initial lift was complete, Matheson struggled out of the sling, scooping up his fallen mobile as he pushed across the pod to Dillal.
The inspector seemed to have trouble catching his breath, but he managed to ask, “Did your message go?”
“Won’t know till we get there.”
Dillal’s eye socket was gruesome, even lined as it was with metal rather than bone; drops of carmine-tinted fluid oozed along the seam of the skin and into the cavity.
Matheson recoiled for a moment, then reached to get Dillal free of the sling. “Inspector—”
“It’s the pressure. She warned me . . .”
“You’re bleeding.”
“No. It’s fine. It’s not blood—not just. It will stop when the pressure eases—better to let it drain.”
“What measure of ‘fine’ are you using here, sir? Because you look like death.”
Dillal shook his head. “You confound me, Matheson. You’re my best ally one minute, my reticent subordinate the next. Now I’m ‘sir’ again, am I?”
“Depends . . .”
“On?”
Matheson got the last of the straps clear and Dillal sank down to sit on the floor, lowering his head. The liquid in his eye socket slid down his cheek and Matheson shuddered. It wasn’t the blood that bothered him, it was . . . something about the unfathomable injury itself.
“Why . . .” Matheson started, settling beside him. “I mean, I don’t understand. The approach you took with Zanesh and Banzet . . . Maybe I understand Banzet, but the boy . . .”
“I’m willing to play whatever role I must. The boy needs to maintain face. His only protection here—or when we return—is the appearance of toughness, of being unbreakable. And he can survive only if we eliminate Tchintaka.”
“Everyone will know the kid talked to us. Even Central’s intervention won’t change how that will play out.”
“Certain people will know he made a deal—but so long as it appears to have been on his terms and without giving up Tchintaka himself, he will still have a chance in the community. Banzet, however . . . I admit, I let my temper get away from me—I haven’t been at my best the past two days. He has no hope of survival, though he deludes himself into thinking so.”
“You lied to him and said you could change that.”
“Do you think he would have told us where the second gun was if I hadn’t? He wasn’t able to say where Tchintaka is, for certain, or who the bent dehka is. It won’t be enough, come Central’s intervention or not. There is no way out of a death sentence—we can’t change the world at a single stroke. Were it two deaths—maybe even three—and he weren’t a Dreihle, it might be argued that his cooperation was worth commuting it, but sixteen, possibly more? No.” There was a note of despair in Dillal’s voice—or he may have been too tired to sound anything but hopeless. “I’m trying to save as many people as I can, and a hundred thousand Dreihleen and Ohba are worth more to me than one would-be revolutionary who sees himself as a victim more than he sees the men and women he killed.”
“What about Tchintaka? He’s the same and when we finally catch him, will you not care about his fate?”
The chill was back in the inspector’s voice when he replied, “Oh, I care a great deal what becomes of him. The beauty of Banzet’s statement and what happened to Zanesh is that they give me hope Tchintaka won’t die a martyr. The trick will be in getting him to damn himself from his own mouth without going too far and condemning the Dreihleat with him.” Dillal panted and fished in his pocket.
“It was wrong-headed,” Matheson started, “but Tchintaka’s original robbery plan wouldn’t have caused him any serious loss of status with the Dreihleen community—as I understand it—and no one else would care.”
Dillal raised his head to Matheson, holding the mechanical eye in his hand. Matheson resisted shivering. “But you’re assuming my original theory was correct,” Dillal said, “and we know now that I was wrong. Zanesh said that Tchintaka knew when Dohan would bring Venn Robesh to Paz. He knew what could happen when Leran saw her. And if that’s true, then Leran’s death wasn’t an accident and Banzet would have been next. Considering what Banzet said about the victims, there was never any intention of letting anyone leave Paz alive.” He resumed cleaning the ocular.
“That’s where I get confused. It’s almost as if Tchintaka’s been working for the corporation—he’s given them excuses to attack the Dreihleen and Ohba without much repercussion.”
“I can see that, but I know him and he abhors the corporation to the point of blindness. It’s his arrogance and hate that lead him into their hands. Remember that Banzet said Tchintaka chose the people at Paz because they ‘profit by oppression,’ called them lying vultures and cannibals. Do those sound like the words of a young man from industrial Northcut? Or more like the rhetoric of a practiced rabble rouser who will say and do anything to reach his ends and sees no further than his own desire? You’ve seen it yourself. Tchintaka turned his victims into enemies with a few words, made it acceptable to rob them, then, in the heat of the moment, to kill them by reducing them to monstrous, inhuman things that devour their own kind. A neat trick to play on an impressionable young man like Banzet, but the effect didn’t last—it couldn’t. Once Banzet wasn’t in Tchintaka’s p
resence, his conscience and better sense returned. He began feeling guilty and threatened. He ran to the only place he thought no one would be willing to follow him.”
“But you think it’s no coincidence that Zanesh was sent to the same camp.”
“Of course. Haven’t I said so? Tchintaka eliminates two problems with a single stroke—he breaks and controls the boy without appearing to be involved, and makes him his watchdog on Banzet at the same time.”
“How did you know about . . . what happened to Zanesh?” Just thinking about it left Matheson feeling sick in mind.
Dillal looked down again. “I worked in the camps for three years. I’ve seen every way one human being can break another. To affect so much change so quickly . . . there’re only a few choices. I can smell what was done to him. I can see the result—a boy who was honestly afraid becomes one who cringes under the cover of false bravado to avoid more pain until the swagger becomes callousness and the pain becomes background noise. He has a chance to survive, but we don’t know what he’ll become to do so.”
“We don’t know what will become of us, either.”
“That is always the question, isn’t it?”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Day 6: Angra Dastrelas—Night
There was no sign of GISA’s usual patrols or any of the out-system troops here—no one cared about Centerrun now, not even as night was falling and shady businesses emerged like poisonous flowers opening to moonlight.
The two men didn’t wear any sort of uniform and carried nothing except the contents of their pockets, but no one would have mistaken them for residents. They had the manner of trouble passing on its way someplace else and no one wished to distract them as they progressed deeper into the zone. Matheson’s gaze was never still, eyeing the graffiti and decay, hearing the shrieks and howls of animals in illegal fight pits, noting every shadow as Dillal stalked beside him toward an old complex of buildings that had become ramshackle and half-abandoned after the race riots nearly a generation ago.
“Is there any place on this planet that isn’t some shade of perdition?” Matheson muttered.
Dillal’s reply was no louder. “Where there are fewer people, it’s sublimely beautiful. It’s us who make it a misery.”
“He’s got to suspect it’s a trap.”
“No doubt. He’s far from stupid—consider how he’s manipulated both of us and this investigation—but I think he’ll take this bait. If our gambit works, the blame falls fully on him and none on the Ohbata.”
Matheson nodded, but didn’t speak.
“I know you dislike what I’m asking you to do,” Dillal murmured.
“It’s not the thing itself, it’s what comes with it.”
They entered a building and went separate ways at the base of the main staircase. Dillal started up. Matheson continued to the rear, skirting a couple having noisy, half-clothed sex against the wall while a cluster of neighbors watched, drinking and smoking and calling out crude encouragement. Their voices lowered as Matheson hesitated a moment, but he didn’t intervene as the person on the bottom reached back and clutched the other’s hip with one hand. Someone laughed nervously as Matheson turned his head away and walked on to the secondary stairs.
Both staircases were hazardous with wild growth watered by constant tropical moisture trickling down the walls. By separate ways, they ascended to the topmost floor where the roof had long ago collapsed at one end. Something rustled in the Gripping Snare that curled into Dillal’s path and he nudged the vine runner aside with the toe of his shoe. Leafy tendrils curled closed like fingers until the tail of a small creature twitched in their curve and the plant cinched down to trap it. Dillal stepped over the squealing, thrashing animal as a second rank of barbed leaves closed over it, stinging it into silence. He walked out into the ruin of what had been a residential floor and was now a maze of tumbling walls and fallen roof beams wherever the incipient jungle hadn’t penetrated.
He looked for Matheson, but the younger man hadn’t arrived yet—his stairs had been overgrown to a lower level. Dillal walked surefooted through the wreckage and ruin toward an old doorway that still retained the hinges and half of its door. Cloud shadows left stripes and blotches of moonlight on the floors and walls, obscuring shapes and draining all color to gray for anyone but him. The same grasping creepers had begun to invade the corners of the room and he avoided them as he edged through the doorway and around a wall to an old drop-lid bureau. The top was bushy with moss that had been disturbed recently, leaving the dirty, angled surface partially cleared. He dug his fingers into the broken blanket of dirt and greenery and eased the desk open. The pistol lay wrapped in a scrap of cloth at the back.
Matheson eased out of the secondary staircase, watching a shadow move up from the main entry and toward the broken room Dillal had entered. Like the inspector, he took care not to touch the vines that curled along the floor bearing bundles of cinched-close leaves that writhed once in a while or pulsed grotesquely.
Dillal picked up the swaddled handgun and flipped the cloth open with care, the corner of his mouth twitching into a bitter smile. He started to turn back, pausing only slightly as another man eased into the room. He continued his turn and held up the gun, still wrapped in its shroud.
“I suppose you’ve come for this,” Dillal said. His voice seemed loud in the dilapidated space.
Matheson slipped across the floor to the last bit of wall between him and the two men, pressing himself flat beside a ragged hole where the cheap construction had tumbled down, leaving only the bare, rotting supports in the way and a trail of creeper on the other side.
“I should have guessed you’d beat me to it, Dillal. You’ve always been a wily little puke. That media blast about crooked cops and the report on the gun . . . that was all meant to get me right here, right now—don’t say you didn’t figure it was me did Santos.”
Dillal put the gun back on the desk top and looked down. “One of our witnesses identified you by your blue Agria Corps jacket—you still wear it after all this time. And the bloody footprints outside the jasso matched.”
“Footprints?” The man laughed and shook his head. “Fuck me . . . Fuck. Me. Half an impression and you pluck me out of the mess like a diamond out of trench slop and I’m not even the one did that shit at the jasso. Where’s the rook?”
“Matheson? I’m not sure.”
Orris sighed and stepped into a patch of light that turned his old, faded blue jacket white. He was holding up his shock box. “You’re a good liar, but I’d have to be a fucking moron to believe he’s not somewhere up here. So I guess the real question is going to be what does he value more—your life or your case? ’Cause I bet this little spitter’ll do serious mayhem to all that hardware in your skull.”
Matheson dove through the gap in the wall to tackle Orris, dragging the creeper along as it began its slow grasp.
The older ofiçe turned aside and backhanded him. Matheson snatched Orris’s right hand as he went to his knees. The vine began coiling around Orris’s hand as he hit the discharge button. Matheson took the bright arc of current on his shoulder and fell the rest of the way to the floor as dead weight, wrapped in the stink of singed cloth and skin. His hand spasmed open, but momentum threw Orris sideways and down into stronger contact with the plant’s writhing tendrils.
Orris tried to swing around and put Matheson between himself and Dillal, but the inspector was much faster and slipped his arm around the taller man’s throat, kicking his knees out from under him. Orris choked as he went down and tried to raise the shock box. The tangling creeper slowed him until Matheson—dizzy and weak, but struggling upward—head-butted him in the gut. Orris doubled over and Dillal came with him, slamming his free hand down on Orris’s right one. Dillal crushed the shock box into the other ofiçe’s palm and fingers as the creeper closed on Orris’s wrist and wound its way up his forearm. Orris gave a weak yell, then gagged as he tried to catch his breath under the pressure of Dillal’s forea
rm across his windpipe.
Shaking and twitching, Matheson shoved Orris’s other hand back toward the grasping vine. Dillal finished the job, yanking the older ofiçe’s wrists behind him until the vine had closed its grip. The inspector stood up, leaving the man on his knees, and retrieved the gun from the desk.
Orris squirmed and fought as the creeper’s layers of stinging hairs and longer thorns began piercing his skin. “You sick little fuck!”
“Still yourself. The plant will just make your arms numb a while—so long as it’s removed in a few minutes,” Dillal replied. “It’s no worse than what you’ve done to Matheson and much less than you did to Santos.” Then he waited in silence while Orris made increasingly feeble attempts to shrug out of the clinging vine.
It took several minutes for Matheson to shake off the worst of the shock effect. Then he hunched into a seated position on the floor nearby and looked at Orris. “Feels like my nerves are on fire.”
Orris stopped fighting the creeper and made a scoffing noise in his throat. “That’s how they work, rook. Didn’t anybody zap you at the academy? Or don’t they demo on rich boys? But you’re tougher than I thought. Most hoppers drop like a rock off the Pillars.” He shook his head. “Still can’t see how you caught on to me. I never gave you my shoe impressions.”
“I got one off the inspector’s floor when you were snooping around on Sunday. You thought everyone would be out on riot patrol. Did you prompt Tchintaka on the timing? It wouldn’t surprise me, since you’re in this up to your neck. You leaked intel only our missing link could have had, and you’ve been monitoring our reports.”
Orris gave a rueful laugh. “Blame the reports on Neme. She’s a twisted piece of work, that one, but she was starting to balk so I had to do my own legwork. You are so easy to push, boy.”
Blood Orbit_A Gattis File Novel Page 38
