She paused and took a breath, settling her mask of reasonable big sister back into place. Matheson edged deeper into the bunk until his back was pressed to the wall. “Besides,” she added, “you’ve already ‘sold out’ to us. Did you think the bankers wouldn’t tell me? I know about your deal with Mr. Orris. I have no objections, but if you’re going to go that far, why not all the way? You’re already dirty.”
Callista watched him with clear, ice-cold eyes and the tiniest of smiles. When he’d been silent a while, she said, “So, here is the deal. At our pleasure—and for a great deal of money—the review will rule this shooting completely justified. You’ll be released to return to your job as a hero who saved his superior officer at great personal risk, exposed a monster for what he was, thereby saving the ethnic natives of Gattis as well. One could go so far as to say you saved the whole planet—but that might be better held for later. You’ll even get a promotion out of this so you can continue to work in this very successful partnership you’ve formed. It’s an excellent strategic position, since the CIFO’s office is still developing and its career track can be molded as we need it. With the right words in the right ears, we can make sure you have the best opportunities to advance in the corporate structure both before and after the charter review, while building a legend for yourself that will make you an irresistible choice for planetary governor, when the time comes. And we’ll make sure it does.
“You and your whip have brought Central System to Gattis eight years early. That’s given the family an invaluable advantage. We’re going to be working very hard to ensure the Gattis planetary charter remains a corporate one, and that the changes made will favor us. And there will be a Matheson at the top of the heap. One or another, one way or another. It might as well be you, since you seem to have fallen so much in love with the place.” Her last words were tinged with derision, but he made no issue of it.
“What’s the other option?”
“Your situation remains as it is and we cut our losses with you. Whatever the review’s result, we’ll offer no objection. If they let you go, so be it, and you go back to—what’s the phrase—pounding a patch in the ghetto. You’ll make your own way with no help from us. Of course some little . . . things may come to light, because, as you know, we don’t take well to being thwarted.”
Mother of stars! What has she already done? Fresnel, Donetti, here . . . What can’t she touch?
Callista continued with a sad lift of her dark, delicate brows. “If the review doesn’t rule in your favor, we’ll send flowers—unless you’d prefer a donation to some charity or another.”
At least they weren’t going to make sure he died. I want nothing from you—I never have.
Callista smiled as if she could read his thoughts. “It took quite a bit of ingenuity to find a way to salvage you, little brother, but I think it will be well worth it. It even turns out that your frivolous pastimes are useful—I hear the shot you took was superb and that you dove down into a filthy canal to save people from a crashed transport. You really are the archetype of romantic hero. Women will flock around you—it is still women you favor, isn’t it? Because your relationship with the inspector has its risky side.”
Sleep with the boss? Matheson drew further away. “Merry hell, Callista, you have a nasty little mind.”
She looked smug again and gave an arch shrug. “I like to make sure the spin is in the right direction.” She dropped the affectation. “I personally find romantic heroes trite, but it appears that a white knight is what this foul little planet needs. So . . . will it be you? Or do I have to go trolling for someone more reasonable?”
We saved people, and Central is finally looking, but will it matter with the family here to twist any good thing I do into more Matheson family influence? And Camp Donetti . . . ? Merry hell, don’t let that be the defining moment of my life.
Matheson forced open the fists he’d unconsciously made. “So, the family will run my life after all.”
Callista studied him for a minute with a cool smile. “Don’t act the martyr,” she said. “We won’t run it and we won’t interfere in your work except where we have an interest you haven’t recognized. We want you to look as pure and unbiased as possible. We’re not simpletons. This planetary corporation can’t stay—it’s too corrupt. We’re in favor of change—so long as the final charter eventually favors a revised corporate structure.”
“With the Matheson interests in front of everyone else’s,” he added.
“Naturally.” She paused a moment and shook her head in exasperation. “We aren’t monsters, Eric. We want the disenfranchisement and oppression of the Dreihleen and the Ohba to end as much as you do—that situation isn’t good for business. You won’t find working for the family as disagreeable as you’ve always imagined. You’ll be able to do a great deal of good—which I know just warms your altruistic little heart.”
She finally shut up, raised interrogative eyebrows, and waited.
How much good could he do? He’d always found ways around Callista; there was hope . . . Hah! There’s that bitter little pill. But Aya said sometimes it’s all you’ve got. Aya . . . He had no real choice, but he wasn’t going to roll over for it. “If I agree to this,” he reiterated, “you don’t interfere with my ordinary work or personal life.” “Of course.”
“It’s never ‘of course’ with you, Callista. Your option isn’t really an option. So, I’ll agree to the goal you have, but not to having my every move dictated by the family.”
“You don’t get—”
“No, no. You need to get this: Gattis and its people aren’t going to fall in line with the usual Matheson way of doing things. I’m the one on the ground with the intel, so if you expect your shadow campaign to succeed, you’ll have to trust me in the particulars. You can navigate, but I get to steer.”
Callista narrowed her eyes in thought. “So long as we’re all sailing for the same port, I think we can allow that.”
“Not allow. Support. You want me to play politics and that’s an expensive, filthy game. I’ll get where you need me, and you’ll give what I ask and do what’s necessary, or I stop playing.”
Callista’s smile sent a chill over him. “As you say, but our game, our goals, our timetable.”
Matheson cast his gaze down and nodded. “Then we have a deal.”
The monsoon season had come on while Matheson was detained and the rain was loud enough to hear through the windows and roofs of the holding facility as the guard and Neme walked him out. She waited while he changed out of the prisoner’s coverall he’d been issued and collected his effects.
The uniform he’d been arrested in had been new and it had been recently cleaned, but it didn’t fit quite right and wearing it felt odd. He brushed it compulsively until he noticed Neme watching him. She’d lit a smoke while she waited, and she gave him a cynical smile as she exhaled.
“Feels wrong, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re missing something,” she said, holding out the cigarette.
He frowned at her. “I don’t—”
She scoffed. “Just hold it a second, tip-tits.” She reached into her own jacket to draw out his mobile and a slim card case. She flapped the case open and offered it to him. “Try this.”
She snatched back her smoke and drew on it like an addict as Matheson took the items she held out. He slipped the mobile into his jacket pocket and looked at the small case. A new GISA ID card snuggled in one side. The other was still empty, waiting for a badge. Matheson peered at the ID. Investigation: Assistant Detive Eric Matheson.
He frowned and glanced up. Was Neme screwing with him? But she only raised an eyebrow and curled her lip. “Read the whole damned thing,” she suggested.
“CIFO Liaison. What does that mean?” This was Callista’s hand in play and it made him as nervous as if he were about to step out onto a very narrow wire.
“Fuck if I know, but it seems to make a lot of people sweat and s
curry. You jumped a whole rank and a half. I think they’d have booted you all the way to Detive if they thought no one would scream about it.”
“I’m not really trained for this . . .”
She smirked. “As much as any IAD. Paz was a fucking minefield of a case. One of the toughest I-Office has fielded since I came on, and I’ve seen some real shitstorms. So take the bump and shut the fuck up—it’s better than dragging your feet as an SO or IO for another two to four years.”
It left a taste like the ash at Ejeirie. “Yeah, great work. I shot the primary subject, and spent a week in jail.”
“Sixteen days. You missed Spring Moon Night, but no loss there. And as to the other . . . I’d say shooting that prick was pretty good for a lot of people.”
“It’s not closure; it’s just punctuation.”
Neme smoked, shivered, and looked amused. “Technically, Dillal and I closed—”
“Dillal’s all right?”
“That would be a matter of opinion, but, yeah, he’s still sucking in air. What did you think—they were going to strip him down for spare parts? There’s plenty of people who don’t like that he hung the corporation’s dirty laundry out, but he’s untouchable at the moment. That didn’t hurt you any at the review. You’ve made your bones and he’s made some enemies, but I think he collects them like brats collect festival rings.”
She finished her smoke and ground it out against the intake desk. The ofiçe behind the property cage yelled at her, but she only sneered and dropped the lip end in her pocket. “Back your jets, Hollister.” Then she started to walk away and paused to look over her shoulder at Matheson. “I wish you the best fucking luck, Matheson—you’re going to need it with a boss like that. Invest in good body armor—Regausa if you can afford it,” she added and went out the door that led back to GISA by a long, subterranean slideway.
Matheson had come in by the slideway sixteen days earlier. There was a second door that led to the civilian waiting room on the other side. He shifted his glance between them. His knees were loose and his guts twisted nervously. Here was that high wire again. Straight to it, or out to cleaner air?
The ofiçe in the property cage—Hollister—glared impatiently. “Not gonna get easier the longer you stand around like the Pillars. Pick a damned door, or I’ll have someone toss you.”
Matheson folded the ID open—his ID—and tucked it into the appropriate place face out. Then he walked through the waiting room door.
Callista rose to her feet from a chair nearby and her dry storm coat flowed like smoke. She looked at his ID and gave him a small, smug smile. He returned a blank stare. She raised an eyebrow, then turned with milkweed grace and walked to the exit without a further word or gesture.
He turned his attention to Dillal, who’d sat against the exterior wall without moving since Matheson entered. The inspector’s hair had all been clipped short and the burns and scars showed through the bright red stubble; his prosthetic eye had healed in more and the frame was no longer exposed, but the ocular itself looked different. Perhaps Andreus had changed it, or maybe the improved mobility of Dillal’s face reduced its strangeness. Either way, he looked like a young bear that had just emerged from hibernation—weakened and scruffy, but still dangerous.
Dillal stood and offered Matheson his fleeting smile. “You’re well?”
“Well enough.”
The inspector tilted his head. “Something worries you. Is it this?” he asked pointing to Matheson’s new ID.
Matheson hesitated. “Not really, but this isn’t the place for that discussion.”
They took storm coats from a rack beside the door and went out into the sideways-slashing rain. They walked toward one of the public gardens with their collars pulled up to their cheeks.
“How . . . is Aya?” Matheson asked.
“She can’t see you.”
“Because of Donetti.”
The inspector shook his head. “Because of Tchintaka.”
Matheson hadn’t thought he could feel any more off balance.
Along the park’s path, an Ohba man in coveralls squatted to tie one of a row of saplings to protective stakes and mound the small trees’ roots with mulch and gravel, and secure it all with screen. Then the gardener moved crabwise to the next, soaked, but making no complaint.
“She’s become Norenin’s right hand,” Dillal said.
Matheson gaped at him.
Dillal looked blandly back. “Do you see?”
Matheson shook his head, dazed. “I can’t see anything,” he muttered. “I killed a man—possibly others—and you almost died, and nothing changed except the weather.”
Dillal stopped in the lee of a crooked cement sculpture. “No. The weather is the only thing that remained the same. We saved future lives—not just the Ohba and Dreihleen in the ghettos and camps that day, not just the people in the hotel. And what happened at Donetti has been exposed; it will never happen again. We threw ourselves against a wall and, though it still stands, we’ve knocked out the first stubborn brick. Each void we make weakens it further, allows more light through the cracks, and it will come down if beaten hard enough and long enough.”
“How? We’re not officers of the law, not really. We’re ofiçes, employees of a corporation that makes promises it doesn’t keep and treats people like parts.”
“We,” Dillal mused. “If you wish to affect change, you first change yourself. Don’t imagine that is accomplished without mistakes, pain, or loss. If you won’t willingly risk your own security and comfort, then you can’t change the system because you are the system. But you have changed, and I have changed.”
“You climbed inside the beast, but how can you be sure you won’t just become it?”
“Because I am no longer alone.”
Dillal’s level stare cut to his guilt, fear, and anger. Matheson took an unsteady step back, out of the calm and into the storm. The rain cut through small rents in his coat and worked down past his collar, soaking him as a million mental shards shifted and the negative space between the scattered objects began to have a shape.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There’s always a list here. The longer it takes to get a book onto shelves, the longer the list gets. At the top is my agent, Sally Harding, who read the first experimental chapters years ago and said “Where’s the rest?” Brian Thornton read the manuscript twice—I’ll be paying for his therapy. The Ladies of the Write (Raven, Bridget, Janine, and Teagan) read it in chunks and beat it mercilessly. Jim Richardson and Elizabeth Rose read it, gave advice and technical corrections, and haven’t yet exiled me from the family. I am indebted to the following people for diverse support and assistance (and in no order): Stephen Blackmoore, Kari Blackmoore, Randy Henderson, Richard Shealy, Rob Durand, Rachel Sasseen, David B. Coe, Cherie Priest, Laura Anne Gilman, James Ziskin, Stephanie Burgis, John Hartness, Janna Silverstein, Monica Valentinelli, Patrick Swenson, Gail Martin, Barb Ferrer, Trevor Carroll, Marci Dehm, Jacque Knight, Dave Morrison, Nisi Shawl, Mary Robinette Kowal, John Scalzi, Dana Cameron, Charlaine Harris, Jeremy Lynch, Steve Mancino, Jon Jordan, Ruth Jordan, Jennifer Jordan, the R.A.M.s, Stina Leicht, Diana Francis, Kevin J. Anderson, Warren Ellis, Christopher Golden, John Hemry, James Moore, Charlie Stross, K. B. Wagers, Yasmine Galenorn, P. J. Manney, Maria Alexander, Richard Morgan, Sandra Carpenter, Marc MacYoung, Mario Acevedo, Warren Hammond, and “the Lads.”
Special thanks to Fran, J. B., and the rest of the crew at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop (now closed), and the team at Pyr.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
K. R. Richardson is a bestselling Washington-based writer and editor of science fiction, crime, mystery, and fantasy. A former journalist with publications on topics from technology, software, and security, to history, health, and precious metals, Richardson is also a lifelong fan of crime and mystery fiction, and noir films. When not writing or researching, the author may be found loafing about with dogs, riding motorcycles, shooting, or dabbling with paper automata. Learn m
ore at gattisfiles.com.
Blood Orbit_A Gattis File Novel Page 46
