The Operative: Drop Trooper Recon

Book 4 Rick Partlow

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 THE OPERATIVE
©2023 RICK PARTLOW

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 CONTENTS

Also in Series
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Thank you for reading The Operative!

About the Author

ALSO IN SERIES

RECON
THE HUNTER
THE MERCENARY
THE OPERATIVE
 1

I jumped into the darkness between the buildings without a thought,

knowing that if he could make it, then I could too. Two meters of empty
space felt like the Grand Canyon to me, but I was airborne for less than two
seconds. Corrugated aluminum vibrated beneath the soles of my boots as I
impacted the gentle slope of the tenement’s roof, scrambling forward a step
to keep my feet before I started running again.
The guy I was chasing was only about ten meters ahead of me, over the
slight rise in the center of the roof and about to jump to the next in the line
of three-story row houses that were jammed together on this street. I didn’t
know his name, but I knew he could run. He was tall and skinny, with long
legs that ate up the meters, and dark, loose clothing that seemed to flap in
the breeze like raven’s wings when he made the leap to the next rooftop.
From up here, I could see the gentle, muted lights of Sanctuary just a
few kilometers away, stark in its contrast with the harsh glares and deep
shadows of Overtown. The sudden flares of security floodlights and cheap
neon from the bars and brothels scattered between the apartment blocks
made it hard to make out details in the darkness, even with the enhanced
optics of my contact lens. I held my breath as I jumped again, following the
man in black without being able to see where I was going to land.
This time it was bare, gnarled buildfoam shaped into a dome, which
meant this had been one of the first buildings constructed for the refugees
from the occupied colonies during the war. Those were all simple,
unadorned pours of raw buildfoam from automated dispensers, though in
the years since, they’d been covered up by cheap, colorful plastics in a vain
attempt to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Others had filled in the gaps
gradually, unauthorized and unregulated, slapped together from aluminum
and plastic scraps and wood taken illegally from the surrounding forests.
No one had bothered to stop them because there’d been a war on, and they
were refugees, and people had felt bad for them.
When the war had ended, most found themselves without a home to go
back to, so Overtown had stayed and grown, and had attracted gangs and
drugs and crime like a rotting corpse drew in scavengers. At some point, it
had become impossible to fix. To deal with it would have required an
expenditure of goodwill and political capital in quantities that no local
politician had been willing to pay, so far. The constabulary on Hermes
didn’t even patrol the place; as long as the violence didn’t spill out into
Sanctuary or any of the other cities on the planet, no one cared. That was
what made it a good place to hide out when you were wanted in connection
with a murder investigation, like this guy was. The cops wouldn’t chase him
in Overtown, but I wasn’t a cop.
Another rooftop, and I cursed as my shin smashed through a handmade
wooden railing, sending me tumbling forward into a clumsy shoulder roll. I
pushed myself back to my feet and froze for a moment as I realized that
there was someone sitting just a meter away. It was a child, dressed in worn
and ragged clothing that had probably been fabricated in Sanctuary and
given away by some charity. She was maybe eleven or twelve, with long,
dark hair in dirty, twisted dreadlocks, and she stared at me with eyes wide
and white with fear.
I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t going to hurt her, that she didn’t have
to be afraid, but I didn’t have time, so I did the next best thing and got the
hell away from her. My right leg was throbbing, and I was lucky I hadn’t
broken it, but I limped to the other end of the roof as quickly as I could,
trying to spot the guy. There he was, on the next building over, glancing
around like he was looking for something, like maybe a way down.
I kicked through the railing on that side, feeling the brittle, dry crunch
of it through my boot, then backed up far enough to get a running start. The
target was looking back at me now, hearing the sound of the breaking wood,
and I could see him take off for the next housetop. I threw myself across the
gap, nearly three meters this time, and barely caught the edge with the toe
of my lead boot. I felt myself starting to slip off and lurched forward,
desperately trying to get my center of gravity over solid rooftop. The spiked
soles of my boot dug in to the asphalt shingles someone had laid down over
the wood there, and I scraped my gloved fingertips across it until I could
feel my knees touch against the rough surface.
“Shit,” I hissed, pulling myself up and heading back after him.
I stood just in time to see him hit the next roof over…and then bust right
through it and disappear from sight. I wanted to curse again, but I didn’t
like to repeat myself. I ignored the nagging pulses of pain still radiating
from my right shin and sprinted into one last jump, trying to land off to the
side of where he’d broken through. The wood was rotten on this roof, and it
splintered under the soles of my boots when I hit, but I cat-footed off the
weak area far enough to get my balance, then carefully made my way back
to the hole the other guy had made.
I reached under my jacket and pulled my pistol out of its shoulder
holster, holding the weapon at low ready as I edged close enough to the
opening to look down into it. Old chemical striplighting, well past its
expiration date, lined the floor of the hallway beneath the gap, casting a
faint, green glow that barely illuminated enough to give the infrared filters
in my contact lens something to work with. Insulation, plaster and chunks
of rotten wood from the roof still clustered in a small pile beneath the hole,
surrounded by a cloud of dust that had yet to settle, but of the fugitive there
was no sign.
I kept my arms tight to my sides and my hands against my chest and
dropped through the jagged opening, landing with a hollow, echoing thump
on the cheap wood floor and falling into a crouch. I pivoted on my forward
knee, pushing my pistol out in front of me as I checked both directions in
the dust-shrouded hallway. Nothing, not so much as a footprint.
Damn.
I couldn’t just assume he’d gone to the street; if I charged downstairs,
he could be waiting to ambush me.
“This is Munroe,” I subvocalized into my mastoid implant mic. “I’ve
lost the target. Any sign of him on the insect drones?”
“Negative.” The voice had a nasal, slightly annoying accent, but I’d
gotten used to it over the last couple of years, especially since Vilberg had
taken over our command coordination after Kane’s death. He was all the
way over at the Sanctuary spaceport, monitoring the drone feed from the
cockpit of our ship. “The rooftops are all clear, and I don’t see him near any
of the known residences.”
 That was the trouble with drones: even if we’d had enough to cover all
of Overtown, which we most assuredly didn’t, and even if we’d had a
recognition algorithm sophisticated enough to pick him up just by his facial
characteristics from that far away, which we also didn’t, he could just pull a
hood or scarf over his face and he’d be invisible as far as our computers
knew. And there were only so many feeds one human could scan at a time.
“I see him.” That was Bobbi, hoarse and raspy and sounding like she
had a throat full of gravel. “He’s down on the street just below you, north
side of the building.”
“Bobbi, you and Sanders cut him off,” I ordered, standing and running
down the hall towards the stairwell. “Everyone else hold your positions. I’m
heading down.”
“You want me and Thiong’o to move up?” another voice, higher pitched
and smoother, asked me.
“Negative, Nemeroff,” I told him impatiently. “I said hold your
positions, and that’s what I meant.”
The stairs were dark and narrow and looked like they’d split apart if you
stared at them hard, but I took them three at a time anyway. I thought I
heard a couple of them crack beneath my weight, but I was able to keep my
balance anyway, skidding to a halt on the second-floor landing. Three men
sat there in the dim light, huddled into a corner, sharing hits of something
illegal from a plastic pipe. The smoke was sour and smelled of chemicals
and might have been Zed or something more conventional like Ice or Split.
They barely reacted to my presence, and I only regarded them long enough
to make sure they didn’t have any weapons; I’d been to shittier places than
this and seen people do much worse things to themselves. I kept moving.
The ground-floor landing opened up on the building’s lobby, such as it
was. I guessed it wasn’t bad for a place thrown together in a couple of
weeks by refugee labor and charity volunteers with construction experience.
However it had started, the intervening years had coated it with a layer of
dirt and dust and smoke, and I couldn’t have told you what color the walls
had been originally. One of the doors on the ground floor was open, and I
could hear a couple screaming at each other in Chinese inside the little
apartment. Across the hall, someone laughed, maybe at the arguing couple.
The outside door was propped open, and a cool breeze was coming in,
drying my sweat but carrying with it the stale smell of beer and alcohol and
smoke from tobacco and marijuana and other things less pleasant. There
were half a dozen people sitting on the steps outside, sharing a bottle into
plastic cups and mixing it with fruit juice, and they all looked around as I
came out, my gun in my hand.
“You looking for that guy?” one of them asked me, cocking an eyebrow.
I reached into my hip pocket with my left hand and pulled out a twenty-
dollar Tradenote, holding it out to him.
“That way,” he told me, gesturing to the left with his cup.
I handed him the bill, then took off at a jog. I was a good ways behind
him now, but I wasn’t worried because I wasn’t alone.
“Do you still have eyes on him, Bobbi?” I asked, eyes scanning back
and forth along the street.
It was early yet, and there were a lot of people out, a lot of people
gathered on the steps of their buildings. I didn’t think he could get away
with just heading into one of the row houses to hide out; he’d be worried
they’d sell him out, like the drinker back there had done.
“Affirmative,” she grunted. “He’s about twenty meters ahead of me and
Sanders. Want us to take him down?”
“Is he still heading for the crossroads?” I asked her. This strip of
apartment buildings ended in a cross street with a row of bars, minor-league
casinos and brothels, places he might think he could lose himself. He
couldn’t go left; that way went straight out of Overtown and put him out
into the open. I didn’t think he’d want to go right, because the next section
over was gang territory; it was a dangerous place to be at night.
“Yeah.”
“Then just follow. That’s where we want him to go.” That was where
the rest of the squad was waiting, the place I’d been trying to chase him
towards, although I have to admit, I’d been trying to catch him first just out
of stubborn pride.
I could see the end of the street now, shining in colored neon and harsh
white, could hear the music blaring in a dozen different songs from at least
three different genres. There were people moving toward it in ones and
twos and larger groups, making it hard to pick out our man. I could see Eli
Sanders and Bobbi Taylor just fine, though, their Identification-Friend-or-
Foe transponders glowing like red halos in my contact lens.
“I’m twenty meters behind you,” I told Bobbi. “Where’s he at?”
“Twenty-five meters at our three o’clock,” she responded tightly, and I
knew she was having to struggle to keep him under observation in the
crowd.
Far enough away that he wouldn’t spot me running to catch up, not at
this time of night. I stuffed my handgun back into its holster and picked up
my pace, going from a steady jog to a sprint, eating up the distance between
Bobbi and me in a few seconds. Some of the ambling crowd heading for the
entertainment strip stared at me in dull curiosity, but no one here was likely
to call the cops, so I ignored them. I slowed down again to a jog when I
spotted him, a black, man-shaped hole in the lights of the street ahead, and I
glanced around to see that Bobbi and Sanders were about even with me and
maybe ten meters to my right.
My jog turned into a brisk walk; this was just how I wanted us arrayed,
making sure he couldn’t double back if he spotted the others. And he just
might spot them; Victor and Kurt were hard to miss, at two meters tall and
about 120 kilos of nearly identical blond, bearded muscle. The other two…
well, I wasn’t sure about their ability to blend into a crowd because neither
had been around the team that long. I’d recruited four new people to replace
the troops we’d lost a couple of years ago, both on Peboan and then on
some unnamed, unknown rock dozens of light-years from anywhere. Then,
after another couple of missions, I’d had to recruit four more to replace
those. Two had died, and the other two had quit. Good help was hard to
find.
“We’re ready for him,” Victor assured me. “We’re spread out across the
intersection; he’s not getting past us.”
I don’t know what tipped him off. Maybe he’d seen one of them seeing
him, maybe it was just instinct or training or something, but the man in
black went from a fast walk to a run and cut straight off to the right,
towards one of the few alleys that went all the way through to the next
street over. The moron was heading straight into what the locals referred to
as the DMZ…
“Shit!” I blurted, taking off after him. The gangs might kill him, but I
needed him alive. “Victor, Kurt, he’s breaking to your left! Get after him!”
This was bad. The reason I hadn’t put any of our people down that way
was because I was fairly sure they’d end up in a gunfight before they had a
chance to catch our target. If we wound up having to chase him through the
DMZ, there was going to be enough of a body count to draw attention. I had
to get to him before it came to that.
 I slipped past and between and around the crowd walking up the street,
hearing the scritching of my spiked soles on the gravel road and the
indignant exclamations of the people I was brushing past, but mostly
hearing the chuff of my own breath. I knew I was faster than this guy,
because I was faster than almost anyone who wasn’t artificially augmented;
I’d been engineered to be faster, stronger and smarter by a mother who
could afford the best and wouldn’t settle for less. But I’d given him too big
a head start, and I could tell already that I wasn’t going to catch him before
he made it to the next street. Maybe if I got in before the rest of them and
took him down quickly, we could get out before…
There was a sound that was more than a sound, a screeching, warbling,
thrumming siren that went above and below what a human could hear, and
then a scream that cut off abruptly just before I entered the alley. The other
end of the passage between the two apartment blocks was cloaked in
shadows, but the enhanced optics in my contact showed me a dark, human-
shaped lump on the gravel almost to the other end, unmoving. Standing
over him was a tall, broad-shouldered figure dressed in dark clothing and
featureless even on infrared. Something large and metallic and oddly
shaped was in the man’s right hand, and I made the connection with the
noise I’d heard before, realizing that it was a sonic stunner.
My pistol was in my hand and on its way up before he spoke, and I
paused in mid-motion.
“Do I have to do your job for you now, Munroe?”
The big man stepped forward, and I could finally see the face that
matched that rough-edged voice. Alberto Calderon had the looks of a movie
star, with high, sharp cheekbones and a cleft chin and dark eyes that Bobbi
described as “smoldering.” The looks were pure camouflage, though,
because what was inside was plain ugly.
“How’d you know he’d go this way?” I asked Calderon, holstering my
pistol and sucking down a few deep breaths as my heart rate began to slow.
Sweat was trickling down the small of my back and dripping into my eyes
out of my close-cropped hair.
“I didn’t know,” he corrected me, tucking the sonic weapon into a pouch
inside his dark brown jacket while I fished a neural restraint web from my
pocket and fastened it on the unconscious man. “But I knew where you had
your people, and I knew that this was the only other place he could go.”
 “It didn’t make any sense for him to run this way,” I insisted, lifting the
target up and throwing his inert form over my shoulder. He was tall, but
light and skinny, and I was pretty strong for my size. “He had to know the
gangs wouldn’t let him get through this way.”
“He was desperate,” Calderon said with a sniff of disdain. His dark eyes
were nearly lost in the shadows. “Desperate men do desperate things. Come
on,” he said, waving at me to follow. “We need to get him back to the safe
house.”
I followed him with a deep sigh that I didn’t make the effort to try to
conceal. How the hell had I wound up working for fucking Calderon?
 2

I ’dat that
been asleep when the call came through. My ’link was set to hibernate
time of night except for emergencies…or a message from Cowboy.
This had been the latter. It had been received at the system’s Instell ComSat
by the automated message carrier, then rebroadcast to the Demeter satellite
communications network and then straight to my ’link. No one else could
have heard it; it was encoded to my ’link and, more specifically, to my
implanted receiver.
I sat up straight in bed at the tone sounding inside my skull and forced
myself not to reach for the pistol on the nightstand. I glanced over at Sophia
and saw her still sleeping, her long, dark hair fallen over the curve of her
chin, her face peaceful and content…more content than she was in waking
life, I was sure. The comforter had fallen off her bare shoulder; I reached
over and tucked it back in against the winter chill; then I gave the command
to play the message.
“There’s a job.” Cowboy was terse, jumping right in without any
prologue of “aw-shucks” bullshit this time. That wasn’t like him. “You need
to meet the others on Hermes, at the safe house in Sanctuary in 300 hours.
Calderon will have the details.”
I made a sour face. Of all the revolting and distasteful aspects of
working for Andre Damiani these last several years, the worst of them was
the series of go-betweens that I’d had to endure since Cowboy got too busy
to oversee our missions personally. First had been Divya Reddy, who’d
wound up betraying us for a better offer from my mother; she’d killed
Kane, our pilot, and would have handed me over for my mom’s reward, but
Kurt had put a bullet in her head. I hadn’t thought it could get worse than
that, but then Cowboy had hired Calderon.
When I’d met Calderon, he’d been a company commander in the
Savage/Slaughter LLC Security Contracting firm—a mercenary. He’d been
fighting for one side of a turf war between a pair of Pirate World cabals on
Peboan and hadn’t been very discriminating about how many civilians his
people killed in the process of doing their job. He’d lost that job shortly
after, mostly due to the report I’d filed with the Commonwealth military.
And then Cowboy had had the brilliant idea to hire him to replace Divya,
because nothing takes the place of one devious, murderous asshole like
another one.
Three hundred hours, the message had said. Given the travel time in
Transition Space from here to Hermes, that meant I’d have to leave almost
immediately. I hissed out a sigh and reached over to nudge Sophia. She
blinked awake immediately, glancing around worriedly.
“What?” she mumbled. “Is Cesar okay?”
“He’s fine,” I assured her. He was almost seven now, but sometimes he
had bad dreams and knocked on the door, wanting to sleep with us. “I got a
message from West.” Roger West was Cowboy’s real name, but I never
thought of him like that, because the whole time we’d served together in the
war, he’d just been “Cowboy.”
“When do you have to go?” The expression on her face didn’t change,
but I’d known her long enough to see the pain and doubt and worry.
“Pretty much now,” I admitted, throwing off the covers and swinging
my legs out of the bed. “I’ll have to pick up Victor and Kurt.” They were
the only two members of the team who lived here on Demeter, this was
their home, and they’d been part of the civilian resistance I’d organized
against the Tahni occupation during the war. So had Sophia.
She was silent for a moment as I began pulling on my clothes. I could
take care of personal hygiene on board ship; I’d have plenty of time for it.
“Are you going to tell your mother?” she asked me, finally, as I was
fastening the straps of my boots.
I felt her eyes on me and couldn’t meet them.
“I guess I have to,” I said. “She’s my only way out of this.”
Sophia had been there when Mom had finally found me, a couple of
years ago, and shown up here. She’d said we had a mutual enemy in my
“employer,” her brother, and we needed to start working together against
him before he got his hands on the Predecessor technology he needed to
take control of the Commonwealth government. Sophia didn’t trust her, and
neither did I, but I’d come to know Andre Damiani by the allies and
enemies he kept, and I didn’t want to be part of making him the de facto
dictator of the human race.
“If you keep playing both sides,” she warned me, her tone as flat and
final as a judge’s gavel, “you’re going to get yourself killed. And maybe get
Cesar and I killed, too.”
I winced at hearing the heart of my nightmare fears put to words.
“I’d offer to leave,” I said, “but I don’t think that would stop them.”
She rose from the bed, wrapping the comforter around her in the chill of
the early morning, and walked over to me. She put a hand on the back of
my neck and pulled me into a kiss.
“You’ll never leave me, and I’ll never leave you,” she promised, her
tone softening. “But Munroe, if we’re not going to fight, then we need to
run.”

As I pressed my hand to the biometric lock-plate of the safe house just

outside Sanctuary, I realized that I was still not running and not really
fighting yet, either. It had been more than two years since that night when
I’d agreed to work with Mom to bring down Uncle Andre, and most of what
I’d done had been feeding her intelligence from the missions Cowboy had
sent me on. Once or twice, she’d tasked me with sabotaging one or another
of his minor operations when it wouldn’t give me away, but I’d never gotten
a sense of how much any of that had accomplished.
When I’d complained to her once about how little we were doing, her
only response was that she didn’t want to burn my cover prematurely, and
she was waiting for the right time. I wondered when that time would come,
and whether I’d recognize it when it did.
“Get him in quick,” I told Victor and Kurt, pushing the door open. It
resisted with a heavy, metal solidity and squeaked aside reluctantly, to
reveal an inside as dark as the outside.
The brothers dragged the motionless form of the man in black out of the
utility rover parked next to the entrance, beside Calderon’s personal vehicle
that we’d left here several hours ago, and rushed him into the old,
unadorned one-story building that had once served as a spare-parts storage
facility for the algae farms out at the reservoir. It was unlikely there’d be
any eyes, either natural or electronic, on us out here; but all it took was one
satellite looking at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Bobbi walked in behind the massive, muscular brothers, a short and
stocky contrast to their towering height. Her face was as solid and
unadorned as the exterior of the safe house, and just as deceptive about
what it hid on the inside. She was dressed in generic-looking civilian
clothes like the rest of us, to avoid attracting attention, but it seemed strange
seeing her in anything except Marine-pattern combat armor. She looked
even more annoyed than usual, maybe because Calderon had ridden back
with us in our vehicle.
He was walking behind her…well, more sauntering than walking, I
thought. He seemed pretty pleased about his part in tonight’s operation,
which had, no doubt, contributed to Bobbi’s lousy mood. The last one out
of our rover was Sanders, who’d driven us here. He was a bit taller than me,
and maybe a bit broader in the chest, with hair a shade blonder than mine
and a short, well-managed beard, for the moment; he shaved the thing and
regrew it every few months, it seemed. He glanced around behind us as he
pulled the door most of the way shut, scanning the gravel road that had
brought us here.
“They’re taking a while,” he muttered.
“They’re just making sure we weren’t followed,” I reassured him. I
knew he was feeling more nervous than usual about this operation because
he lived in Sanctuary.
Victor flipped on a light over in the far corner of the room, and his
brother dumped the prisoner in a metal chair that was fastened to the floor
there with bolts sunk into the concrete. Sanders hastily pushed the front
door shut against the light, walking over to a panel of monitors against the
near wall and activating them with the touch of a control. They lit up with a
360-degree view of the place, including about a kilometer down the main
road that led past it, and he fell into a seat there to keep watch.
Calderon ignored all that and went straight to one of the storage bins
scattered randomly around the mostly empty floor, throwing it open and
pulling out the equipment to assemble a hypnoprobe.
 “Give me a hand with this,” he snapped impatiently to no one in
particular. I saw Bobbi’s facial expression and knew she was about to tell
him where to stick the machinery, so I stepped in quickly to help him set it
up. Not that I didn’t share Bobbi’s feelings on the matter, but that was
something that could be dealt with after the mission.
“So,” I prompted as we set up the electrochemical interrogation device,
“who the hell is this guy, and why do we care that he’s a suspect in a
murder investigation?”
I spared a glance for the prisoner, he was beginning to wake up, but
Victor and Kurt had strapped him into the chair before they’d pulled off the
neural restraint web. He wasn’t much to look at: horse-faced and pale, with
a long, thin nose and hair colored a dark shade of purple in the style of the
criminal element in Overtown and other colonies. He might have been old
or middle-aged or young, depending on whether he’d been born into a
family that could afford anti-agathic treatments and how much time he’d
spent outdoors in the wind and sun. But I had developed a sense for things
like that, partly due to hanging out with my mother’s crowd, who defied age
and tried to look like twenty-somethings for all of their lives. I guessed he
was in his forties, and I was curious to see how close I’d come.
“His official record says,” Calderon told me in his oh-so-pleased-with-
himself tone, “that he’s Tanner McClain, a refugee from Loki who came
here early in the war and amassed quite the rap sheet in that time, from
vandalism to assault-with-intent to grand theft. It says he’s spent three years
of his miserable life in work camps and most of the rest on probation.
“But…”
Calderon’s grin was full of malice.
“His DNA profile says something different. It just happens to match
exactly the profile on record for Ivan Molina, who was recruited out of
Space Fleet by the Department of Security and Intelligence back during the
war.” He adjusted the frame of the optical transducer and slapped McClain
or Molina or whoever he was across the face when he tried to resist having
his head strapped into place.
“Mr. McClain is wanted for questioning,” Calderon went on, “because a
few months ago, several of his known associates killed a man from a
Corporate Council mineral scout crew before the other crewmember killed
all four of them in self-defense.” He shrugged. “McClain wasn’t there, but
the fact that he knew all four of the decedent assassins is too much of a
coincidence for the local authorities. And the fact that Mr. McClain used to
be Agent Molina is too big of a coincidence for us.”
At the mention of the mineral scouts, I felt my blood run cold, and I
tried my best not to let the fear and trepidation show on my face. The
reason I’d been ready to work with my mother to bring down Andre
Damiani was the discovery just a couple of years ago by a mineral scout of
an invaluable cache of Predecessor technology on a remote, worthless rock
of a planet. I’d barely been able to keep the knowledge a secret, and I’d
known at the time that it wouldn’t stay a secret forever.
“They’re here!” Sanders’ announcement broke through my sudden
fugue and shocked me back to the present.
I looked over to the security monitors and saw the groundcar pulling up
next to the rover. Mũkoma wa Thiong’o slid out from the driver’s side, his
dark eyes darting back and forth carefully, his hand resting on the butt of
the gun holstered at his hip beneath his open jacket. His head was depilated
and shined like polished ebony in the moonlight. He seemed the best of the
new recruits, always keeping his cool and not running his mouth.
The man getting out from the passenger side of the car not so much.
Baby-faced and perpetually wide-eyed, Alexi Nemeroff was younger than
me, barely old enough to have served in the tail end of the war; but he had
been with the Recon Marines during the invasion of the Tahni homeworld,
and I’d thought that would be qualification enough. I was beginning to
wonder about that; he always seemed to need his hand held, even in the
middle of an operation. That might not be a deal-breaker in a line unit,
when you had a lot of support and layers of command; we had one squad
and not much support, and I needed independent thinkers.
DiStephano and Renzor, I was less certain about. Of the two, Adriana
DiStephano seemed the more competent; she certainly looked dangerous,
with a hard edge to her face and a hard set to her gray eyes, and I certainly
trusted her more than Nemeroff, but she also seemed like a follower. Peyton
Renzor was a cipher, quiet and unsociable and big enough to be
intimidating, but he did his job well enough to keep it. Neither had screwed
up or given me cause to get rid of them, but they felt…off. I didn’t have the
same confidence in them that I’d had in Prouty or Waugh or O’Neill…or
Kane.
The door banged open, and the four of them filed in quickly before
Thiong’o slammed it shut and nodded to me.
 “We’re clear,” he told me. “Ran a full scan; no drones following us.”
“Relax,” I told them, waving to the couches arrayed against the far wall,
where Victor and Kurt were already stretched out. “We’re gonna be here a
while.”
By the time I’d turned back, Calderon already had the rest of the
interrogation module set up around Molina like half a cage, the medical
scanners surrounding him, their injectors pressed against his neck. Bobbi
was leaning against the wall nearby, arms folded, watching intently as our
liaison touched the control to begin the process.
I saw Molina tense against his restraints, his horsey face screwing up in
futile resistance to the drugs that coursed through his system. If he was
actually DSI deep cover, he’d have technological defenses against the
drugs, but you had to start somewhere. The hypnoprobe was built to tear
down defenses, one layer at a time. Finally, Molina seemed to sag into the
rests of the optical transducer array, the tranquilizers taking hold. Calderon
propped the man’s eyelids open with a pair of electrodes that froze the
muscles in place, then began to align the cups over his eyes. Once they
were in place, he settled the system’s headphones over Molina’s ears, then
checked a readout on the front of the device.
“Okay, that should do it,” Calderon muttered, mostly to himself, I
thought.
“That quick?” I wondered, trying to make the question sound casual. “If
he is DSI…”
“He is DSI,” Calderon interrupted me confidently. “But he’s also
assigned to Overtown. I’m sure their biggest worry for him here was the
local cops. I doubt he’s had his anti-interrogation wetware upgraded since
the war ended. Times change, and this”—he indicated our hypnoprobe—“is
state of the art.”
That smile again, the one I would have loved to never see again, that I
wished I’d shot off his face two years ago. “Here, we’ll see what happens.”
Calderon twisted a flexible microphone toward him from the control
console. “Is your real name Molina?”
Molina seemed to want to jerk away from the headphones and from the
cups that held his eyes unwillingly in place. His throat muscles tightened
against each other, and for a long moment I thought he might not respond to
the question at all, even to lie.
 “Yes…” The word could have been drilled out of solid uranium with a
laser for the effort it took. “Ivan Molina.”
“Where are you from, Ivan?”
“Novya Moscva,” he insisted. It was the one stronghold of the Russian
bratva off Earth, more an idea than a physical location. It was also a place
where being second best was nearly as dangerous as being first, and it
didn’t make any sense that someone from there would have wound up in the
Marines.
“Where are you really from, Molina?” Calderon pressed, just as
skeptical about the answer as I was.
Molina groaned, either with pain or frustration, lips quivering.
“Capital City,” he admitted with a hoarse, reluctant rasp. “Earth.”
“That’s better,” Calderon said, chuckling softly. The glow from the
readouts at the rear of the hypnoprobe threw his face into sharp relief,
making his handsome features seem as diabolical as his character. “Tell me,
Ivan, who do you report to? Who’s your immediate superior in the DSI?”
Molina tried to squeeze his eyes shut, I could tell from the way his
brows wrinkled and his cheeks twitched, but the electrodes wouldn’t let
him, and the optical probe continued to do its work, too much for his
counterprogramming to handle.
“Direct…” he ground out. “Director Gregorian.”
My eyebrow went up and so did Calderon’s. He nodded to me with an
air of satisfaction. That was unexpected. I’d met Mateo Gregorian back
when he’d just been the DSI’s military liaison on Inferno, and working for
my mother. She’d said he’d go far, even back then, and he obviously had.
Why would a field agent out in Overtown report directly to the director of
the DSI?
“Why,” Calderon demanded, “would Gregorian want Edgar Martinez
and Kara McIntire dead?”
My eyes narrowed. I hadn’t heard the names before; Calderon hadn’t
shared the police report with us. I wondered which one had got killed and
which one was the badass. Molina didn’t answer the question though, his
face seeming to relax as if he was relieved that he didn’t have to.
“He doesn’t know,” I told Calderon, recognizing the reaction. “Ask him
what his mission was.”
The former mercenary officer frowned at me in annoyance; he didn’t
like being told how to do his job, particularly by me. But he leaned over the
microphone and repeated the question to the prisoner.
“I was told,” Molina answered through grinding teeth, the muscles of
his neck spasming with a futile effort to resist, “to board their ship while the
others attacked. I used a cracking module to retrieve navigational data from
the ship’s computer; then I erased the memory.” He paused, sucking in a
breath, panting in exhaustion. Sweat was pouring off his forehead and
matting his dark hair. I had the sense that he’d be lolling without the
framework holding his head in place. “McIntire, the ship’s captain…she
was jacked, she killed the others, but I got the data. I sent it to Gregorian in
a secure burst transmission.”
“A Corporate Council mineral scout can afford physical augments?” I
asked, my curiosity getting the better of my trepidation. I was “jacked”
myself, some of it thanks to Cowboy and some on my own dime, and I
knew it was really freaking expensive. The nanite repair suite Cowboy had
gifted me after my first mission for him had cost more than most military
cruisers and was about as hard to obtain.
“I don’t know who she is or where she got it,” he admitted readily after
Calderon relayed the question into his headphones. “I just did what I was
told and then kept my head down and waited for the heat to blow over.”
“Where is she now?” I wanted to know. Calderon looked irritated at me
again, probably because he’d been about to ask that himself anyway.
“Don’t know,” Molina said, his breathing close to normal now that we
were back to questions he couldn’t answer. “She left just as quick as the
local cops would let her.”
I felt like breathing a bit easier myself. True, Gregorian had the
navigational data, and if I was right in my assumptions, then he had the
location of the Predecessor outpost I’d visited a couple of years ago, and
that was definitely bad. But he hadn’t given it to Andre Damiani yet or we
wouldn’t be here interrogating Molina. I wondered whether he’d given it to
my mother, since he’d been in her pocket the last I’d heard. That possibility
wasn’t too pleasant to contemplate either, but of the two Damiani siblings,
Patrice was the lesser evil at the moment.
It took me a moment to notice the look on Calderon’s face. It was as
close as he came to insightful, which veered more toward cunning.
“You didn’t delete the data after you sent it, did you?” he asked Molina,
and I felt my stomach twist with the knowledge that he was right.
 Molina’s face went white, and he seemed too shocked to even resist the
question.
“No, I didn’t.”
Shit.
“Where is it?” Calderon demanded, eyes flashing with an ambition that
was almost hunger.
I realized that my hand was creeping inside my jacket towards my
holstered pistol. It was an idea: I could kill them both in two seconds and
make sure that Andre Damiani didn’t get the location of the Predecessor
technology. I forced my hand back to my side. It wouldn’t do any good.
Gregorian had the information already, and all I would accomplish by
killing Calderon would be to boost the price he was going to ask for it. Not
to mention, I’d be tipping my hand and putting Sophia and Cesar in danger.
I had to use my head.
“It’s in a dead-drop account on the public net,” Molina told him.
Jesus, I thought in disgust. What an amateur.
True, no one could tie it to him in a public-access dead drop, but there
was no way to secure that kind of account beyond a password. If he’d left it
in a secure data depository, like the one on Hermes’ moon, anyone who
wanted it would need to take him there in person, and he’d only be allowed
to access it in private with no one else present. It would give him a chance
to escape. But this…
“Tell me the account ID and the password,” Calderon instructed.
It took longer this time, and he had to repeat the question twice; I
thought for a minute that Molina was going to stroke out before he revealed
the password. But in the end, the technology proved stronger than the man,
and he blurted out the details with strings of drool hanging down his chin.
Calderon made him say it twice more as he checked the account on the
handheld display of his ’link. Finally, he seemed satisfied, and he shut the
machine down, pulling the headphones and eyecups off Molina.
Calderon was whistling softly to himself as he began disassembling the
hypnoprobe. I saw Bobbi staring at me, an unreadable look on her face, like
maybe she was waiting for me to do something. I had no idea what that
something might be, so I just stood there and watched Molina sag against
the seat restraints, his chin resting against his chest now that the framework
of the probe had been removed.
 “Clean that up for me, will you, Munroe?” Calderon said absently,
sealing the machinery back in its storage crate.
“You want me to drop him back off in Overtown?” I asked.
He turned and looked at me with something close to pity in his
expression, as if he thought me an idiot to even have to ask.
“No, we can’t chance the police or anyone else finding him and
extracting the same intelligence. Kill him and dispose of the body.”
I felt a flare of anger, and I wasn’t sure if I was angrier at the offhanded
way he’d ordered me to murder the man or at the fact that he thought he
could just order me to murder someone.
“I’m not your fucking janitor, Calderon,” I reminded him, a rumbling
behind the words coming from the back of my throat. “You’ve got a gun; if
you want him dead, do it yourself.”
He turned and squared off with me, his face a mask of stubborn pride.
We’d had this sort of confrontation many times in the last couple of years,
and neither of us was of a mind to back down.
“You work for West, and so do I,” he shot back, face turning a shade
darker. “He made it my job to relay his instructions, and it’s your job to
carry those instructions out.”
“Fine!” I waved a hand demonstratively. “You get me instructions from
Cowboy to kill this guy, and I’ll pull the trigger!”
“West is busy!” he snapped.
“So am I.” I stepped around to the other side of the chair that held
Molina and came within half a meter of Calderon, my hands balling up into
fists. “I seem to remember beating the shit out of you once, Alberto, while I
was drugged and unarmed and you had a gun.”
“That wouldn’t be a smart move for someone with so much to lose,
Munroe.”
If he’d thought that threatening my family was a way to calm me down,
I was about to show him how mistaken he was…
The crack-snap-hum of the laser discharging was loud and close and
filled the air with enough static electricity to make the hair on my neck
stand on end. I spun around, my gun jumping into my hand, but Thiong’o
was already reholstering the pulse pistol. He’d only been a few steps away
from Molina when he’d fired, and there wasn’t much left of the DSI agent’s
head. A blackened and scorched crater about a centimeter deep on the wall
behind him marked where the laser pulse had burned itself out.
 I stared at him in disbelief through the haze of smoke and steam, and he
shrugged expressively.
“Someone was going to have to kill him,” he said by way of
explanation. Then he walked away and flopped down in one of the chairs
beside Victor and Kurt. They’d both come alert during the argument, and
they watched the new trooper with narrow, suspicious expressions.
“Nemeroff, Renzor,” I said curtly, “clean this up and get rid of the
body.” My lip curled in distaste. “Dump it somewhere it won’t be found.”
Neither of them seemed happy about the job, but they moved forward to
do it anyway.
“You know, Munroe,” Calderon said, looking at me with far too much
satisfaction, “Gregorian used to work for your mother, Patrice, for years.
But he’s sensed the turning of the tide, and he’s making overtures to
Monsieur Damiani, trying to get on the winning side.” He sneered with
contempt. “He’s a fool. He’s trying to play both sides of this, and it’s going
to bite him right in the ass. There’s a lesson there for all of us.”
I felt a cold sense of dread at the words that I had to concentrate to keep
off my face.
How much does he know?
“Is that it?” I tried to sound annoyed and impatient, hoping it would
conceal the fear.
He shook his head, as if he’d tried his best and was giving up.
“The operation is over once you get rid of him,” he confirmed, walking
past me towards the front of the building. “The funds will be in your
accounts by the morning. If there’s anything else, well…” He grinned
coldly. “I know where to find you.”
He yanked open the front door and headed out to his vehicle without
another word. Sanders had gotten up from his seat, and he slammed the
door shut, scowling.
“Fucking asshole,” he muttered.
“Thiong’o,” I said sharply, and the ebon-skinned former Marine looked
over at me, his face dispassionate. “I’d like to talk to you in private.”
He followed me past where Renzor and Nemeroff were pouring
cleaning chemicals onto the floor around Molina’s body, and through a
light, interior door into a small office off the main storage floor. I switched
on the light over the desk and motioned for him to shut the unpainted,
primer-gray door behind him. I didn’t sit down, just faced him there in the
space in front of the desk, hoping to God I wasn’t making a big mistake.
“I’m sorry, Munroe—” he began, but I interrupted, not wanting to give
myself the time to change my mind.
“Shut up. I know you’re a plant,” I declared flatly. “I know you work
for my mother.” I saw his eyes go wide, his mouth starting to open, but
again I cut him off. “Don’t bother denying it. I’ve known since you joined
the team.”
He hissed out a breath, seeming to calm as he accepted it. His hands
very carefully didn’t go near the pulse pistol at his waist.
“So now what?” he asked.
“You heard what went on out there,” I told him. “You know exactly
what it means. I need to talk to Mom. I need you to take me to her.”
He nodded slowly.
“All right. When?”
“Now. We don’t have any more time to wait. I need to see her now.”
 3

T hiong’o drove in silence, operating the groundcar manually rather than

letting the automated systems control it. Most places out in the colonies,
new roads were constantly being built, and the cities were constantly
expanding, and the autodrive systems weren’t reliable enough to keep up
with it. I was actually surprised there even was a road that went this far out
from Sanctuary; we’d been driving for over two hours, and I hadn’t seen
any sign of habitation once we’d passed the city limits.
I didn’t bother asking him again where we were going. He’d declined to
tell me earlier, and he didn’t seem any more amenable now than he had
then. All I could tell was that we were heading into the Edge Mountains,
curving through switchbacks at maybe forty kilometers an hour, and I
thought I saw the faint gray of false dawn behind us. The gravel and dirt
thumped rhythmically beneath the tires, and I rested my head against the
seat and closed my eyes, trying to let it lull me to sleep.
I’d had maybe four hours of rest in the last fifty, and I felt exhausted,
but I wasn’t sure I could shut my brain off long enough to sleep. I couldn’t
stop thinking about what Calderon had said, about the risk I was taking with
Sophia’s and Cesar’s lives by playing this game. She was right: we needed
to run. I was going to tell my mother about Uncle Andre getting the location
of the Predecessor outpost; then I was heading back to Demeter, getting
Sophia and Cesar and getting the hell out of there.
“We’re here.”
I blinked awake to the glare of the rising sun and realized I’d fallen
asleep after all. The car was stopped at the end of a long, winding driveway
that stretched at least a kilometer back behind us. In front of us was a house
built into the side of the mountain. I blinked one more time, thinking maybe
I was still dreaming, but no, that was really what I saw.
The drive ended at the yawning opening of a garage dug into a wall of
solid granite; above it, at least a dozen two-meter-tall windows winked
reflections of the dawn back at us, stretching over nearly a hundred meters
of cliff face. I’d been to estates like this back on Earth, but I’d never seen
the like out in the colonies, where this sort of engineering required tools and
resources that were harder to get and much more expensive.
I almost didn’t notice the armed guards until one of them approached
the car, eyeing us carefully, a pulse carbine slung over her shoulder.
Thiong’o stepped out of the vehicle and nodded to the solid-looking
woman. I cracked my door open cautiously and stood up, stifling a yawn.
“Is everything cool?” Thiong’o asked, keeping his hand away from his
gun.
“We’ve been expecting you,” she replied, smiling that sort of
professional, courteous smile that didn’t reach all the way to her eyes. “You
can take him on up.”
I didn’t know what I’d expected when I’d got in the car with Thiong’o
back at the safe house, but this wasn’t it. I’d thought we’d be heading to a
secure communications facility where I could send my mother an Instell
ComSat message. What we were doing way out here, I had no idea. I shook
my head and followed him up the polished stone walkway to the front door
of the…well, to call it a house seemed to diminish it unfairly. The door was
ancient, faded mahogany fitted with stained-glass windows, and back on
Earth it would have cost more than most working-class people made in their
whole lives. It opened for us with a barely audible hum of servomotors, and
we stepped inside.
The interior lights were off, but the windows and mirrors were lined up
such that the burgeoning dawn bathed the entrance hall in a warm, golden
glow. Marble floor tiles and granite walls carved right out of the heart of the
mountain sparkled in the reflected light of Proxima Centauri like some old-
time vision of a heavenly mansion. On the walls hung paintings of pastoral
scenes; I didn’t recognize them, which meant they were likely originals
rather than copies of ancient works from Earth artists, but they had the look
of hand paintings rather than computer fabrications.
A marble-tiled staircase with handrails carved out of granite stretched
upward at the end of the entrance hall, and Thiong’o waved me ahead of
him towards it. The soles of my combat boots scraped against the tile with a
sound that made me wince, thinking of the scratches they were going to
leave, but it wasn’t as if they’d asked me to take my shoes off. I shrugged.
Someone who could afford this place could afford the robotic buffers to
polish the steps nice and bright again.
By the time we reached the top of the stairs, I’d decided that Mom had
some kind of liaison out here, a go-between for her and me the way
Cowboy was for me and Uncle Andre. It had to be someone important to
warrant this sort of security, but I didn’t know enough about her business to
know who that might be.
There was a set of gleaming white double doors at the top of the steps,
with a pair of security guards flanking them like gargoyles. At our
approach, one of them, a short, muscular man who might have grown up on
a world with heavier-than-standard gravity, stepped up to us and held out a
hand. Thiong’o slowly and carefully drew his pulse pistol and passed it over
to the guard. The big man handed it back to the other guard, then turned to
me expectantly. I pulled out my weapon, reversing it and handing it butt-
first to the man. He took it, but continued to look at me expectantly. I
sighed and retrieved the ceramic hold-out knife from my thigh pocket and
passed that to him as well.
I should have figured they had scanners here.
Satisfied, the big man pulled open one of the doors and nodded for us to
go inside. It turned out to be an office, as opulent and well appointed as the
rest of the house, with a desk and conference table of real wood and chairs
upholstered with real leather. Standing beside the table was my mother.
“Good morning, Tyler,” she said.
It was the crack of dawn, but she was already dressed in an
immaculately tailored business suit, her dark hair was already perfectly
coifed, and she seemed like she’d been up for hours.
I was so surprised to see her here in person that I didn’t even bother to
remind her not to call me Tyler. I’d been born Tyler Callas, but I’d changed
my name to Randall Munroe at the same time that I’d changed my face and
had run as fast and as far away from her and her plans for me as I could,
and joined the Marines.
“You didn’t just happen to be here right now by coincidence,” I
surmised.
 “Mateo Gregorian contacted me a couple weeks ago.” She pushed a
chair aside and sat on the edge of the table. The part of me that had grown
used to living as a working-class colonist the last several years winced at
treating something that valuable with such casual contempt. “He wanted to
put the location of the Predecessor cache up for auction between Andre and
me. When Thiong’o”—she nodded towards the man—“notified me of this
mission, I put two and two together and jumped on my private transport.”
She put a hand to her temple, massaging it as if she could rub away the
ache.
“It’s a risk, us being here together,” I warned her, my hands clutching
the back of one of the chairs. The leather was cold and supple. “I think
Calderon is starting to get suspicious.”
“It was necessary,” she insisted in that way she had of dismissing
anyone else’s opinion. “We’re shielding you from any surveillance for the
time being. Gregorian is a loose cannon, and it seems as if he’s given Andre
the final piece to complete his puzzle.” She scowled. “I’d been working
behind the scenes, sowing discontent among the other members of the
Executive Board, with the help of Cameron.”
I nodded at that. Cameron Weber was Andre’s biggest rival on the
Corporate Council Executive Board, and formerly a sworn enemy of my
mother, Patrice, as well. But recently, she’d been making overtures to him
to try to curb Andre’s ambitions.
“Now, I’ve heard that Andre has called a board meeting at our family
estate outside Calgary.” She looked up, shooting me a significant glance.
“A real-time meeting, in person.”
“Oh, shit,” I muttered. I could hear the leather creaking as I leaned into
the chair. “He’s going to tell them. He’s going to call for a vote.”
“And then there’ll be no turning back,” she confirmed.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, then opened them and looked
up at her.
“Mom,” I said, and I saw her eyes flicker in surprise; I hadn’t called her
that in a long time. “You’ve talked about the two of us fighting Andre for
two and a half years; but on my end, I haven’t done shit. If we’re going to
fight, we have to start now, and we have to get serious.” I shook my head.
“I’m not talking about boardroom machinations and behind-the-scenes
deals. I mean my kind of fight. Because if we aren’t going to do that, then
I’m going to grab my wife and my son, and I’m going to run as far away
from this as I can.”
She seemed to consider that for a moment, then nodded slowly. She
wasn’t fooling me for a second; she would never have brought me here if
she hadn’t already decided on a course of action.
“I need you to go to 82 Eridani,” she said. “I’m going to set up a
meeting for you there—I’ll send you the coordinates over the ComSat when
you arrive in-system.”
“A meeting with who?” I wanted to know.
She didn’t make a move, didn’t push a control, but a full-body hologram
sprang to life over the table from a concealed projector in the ceiling.
Another little thing that she took for granted that cost a fortune: projecting a
hologram outside a tank was complicated and fiendishly expensive.
I looked at the man in the picture. He was dressed in a black Fleet
Intelligence uniform, with a general’s rank on his collar. The uniform was
sharp enough to be a computer simulation, but that was the only thing that
stood out about the man. If there was one word to describe him, it would
have been “average.” He wasn’t particularly tall or particularly muscular or
particularly handsome or particularly anything. He had brown hair that was
cut short enough to meet military standards but not buzzed, and a rounded,
slightly soft-looking face with almost liquid brown eyes.
He could have been any report-pushing Fleet functionary, but that was
an Intelligence uniform, and as near as I remembered, the only General in
Fleet Intelligence was the one commanding it.
“General Antonin Murdock,” Mother said with an indicative nod. “Head
of Space Fleet Intelligence. He’s a man who can’t be bought, and Andre
probably already has a plan to deal with him when the time is right. I need
you to give him the location of the Predecessor cache and brief him on
everything you know.”
“Why me?” I asked her, frowning. “Wouldn’t it be better if you went to
him personally?”
“He knows who I am,” she pointed out. “He wouldn’t believe me.”
“And why the hell would he believe me?”
“Because he knows who you are, too, Randall Munroe.” The tone was
slightly mocking, but the look on her face was deadly serious. “During the
war, he commanded and was responsible for the creation of a covert action
unit called Special Operations Group Omega. You might know them better
by their unofficial nickname: the Glory Boys.”
I felt my mouth drop open and made an effort to close it. I did know the
Glory Boys. I’d worked with two of their operators during the final battle to
free Demeter, and then again during the invasion of the Tahni homeworld
that ended the war. And both times, one of those two had been Roger West,
the man I’d known as Cowboy, the liaison between me and Andre Damiani.
“Murdock doesn’t know about West,” I murmured.
“He will when you tell him,” she corrected me. Then a look passed
across her face, a slight softening of the stone-cold-bitch expression she
wore as a matter of course. “Son…if you do this, you’ll be crossing the
Rubicon.”
I nodded. “I need to trust you to do something for me.”
“Sophia and Cesar,” she guessed. “I can put a full-time guard on them,
or I can evac them both somewhere safe until all this is over.”
“If she’ll leave, get them out,” I decided. “You can tell her I said it was
the smart move.” I caught her eye. “And you have to do it in person. She
won’t believe it if you’re not there.”
“I know I’m not your favorite person,” Mom said, the corner of her
mouth curling upward at the understatement, “but even when things were at
their worst between us, I didn’t want to see you hurt, because you were the
only family I cared about. I told myself I did all that I did because I’d let
you see too much of the underside of my business, that I couldn’t let you
spread that information around. But the truth was, I didn’t want to let you
join the military because I couldn’t bear the thought of you dying
somewhere by yourself and me never seeing you again.”
She came off the table and reached out a hand hesitantly, laying it on
my shoulder with tenderness I hadn’t believed she was capable of.
“Cesar is my flesh and blood, and Sophia is his mother,” she declared.
“I’ll go there myself and make sure they’re safe. You have my word.”
I didn’t move, didn’t speak for a full ten seconds, just looked into her
eyes like I could judge her soul through them.
“I want us to be family,” I admitted finally, speaking softly, quietly. “I
want to trust you to do this because I believe that you love me and you
value my wife and son as human beings. I honestly hope to God that’s the
truth, because I want it to be, because you’re still my mother.”
 My voice hardened along with my face. “But I can’t know that. I can’t
know that you’re still not someone who’s incapable of acting except out of
self-interest and self-involvement, not yet. So, just in case what I fear is
more accurate than what I hope, I want to tell you something. If I live
through all this and find out that you allowed any harm to come to Sophia
or Cesar, either by action or inaction…” I felt my lip curl away from my
teeth in an unconscious snarl, felt her hand slide off my arm as her face
paled in the realization of who, exactly, I’d become, and what she was
dealing with. “I don’t care how many layers of security you have, or what
hole you crawl into, I will find you.
“And even if it’s the last action I take in this life, I’ll kill you.”

The great thing about spaceport towns is that the bars are always open.
They have to be, most of the patrons are working on some other time zone,
and it’s usually not worth it to synch your personal clock to any particular
part of whatever planet you’re on unless you plan on staying long-term.
Despite the fact that it wasn’t even noon yet, the Lost Horizon bar and
grill in Sanctuary wasn’t just open, it was bustling. Commercial spacers,
transitory military personnel and scientific research staff and locals who
worked a late shift all took shelter from the unwelcome daylight in its
darkened recesses, drawn by its reputation. The place was unpretentious
and sparsely decorated, yet it had been the most popular watering hole on
Hermes since a decade or so after the planet had been settled. One of the
draws was that they’d never succumbed to the temptation of using
automated drink dispensers or server-bots or food processing machinery in
the place of real, live, human bartenders, waitstaff and cooks.
I’d never got a chance to visit the place before the war, but since Bobbi
and Sanders both lived in Sanctuary and we’d wound up recruiting a lot of
our past and current team members from the Hermes colony, the Lost
Horizon had become a sort of unofficial gathering place for all of us at the
end of a mission, before we went our separate ways. When I’d left with
Thiong’o, I’d told Victor and Kurt to wait for me at the bar; I was their ride
back to Demeter. I could see them across the length of the place when I
stepped inside, the “airlock”-style entrance allowing my eyes to adjust
before I entered the dim lighting of the interior. The two were hard to miss
in a crowd, but as I got closer, I was surprised to see Bobbi and Sanders
sitting with them at a high-top table near the bar. They were sharing a very
large plate of gimbap and an even larger pitcher of some sort of dark ale.
“Hey, boss!” Sanders said, grinning and saluting me with his glass. “I
was wondering if you were going to show up or if Vic and Kurt were going
to have to walk home…”
“I’m glad you two are here,” I said, nodding to him and Bobbi as I
stepped up to their table. I glanced around. If my mother was to be believed,
I was shielded from drones and other remote surveillance at the moment,
but not from good old-fashioned eavesdropping. No one seemed to be close
enough to listen the natural way, and I figured the buzz of conversation
from the crowd should be enough protection from passive sound-
enhancement gear. I sat down at the last remaining stool and leaned into the
midst of them.
“I think we all knew this arrangement was going to end someday,” I
said, just loud enough for the four of them to hear me. “Today’s that
someday.”
Sanders nodded slowly, always the most forethoughtful of us. Victor
and Kurt shared a sharp glance with each other before turning back to me
with matching grim expressions. Bobbi showed no reaction whatsoever, just
kept chewing her food with an impassive look on her face.
When she swallowed the bite, she spoke casually, as if we were in the
middle of the conversation. “What’s the op, Munroe?”
I chuckled. Bobbi was like the sea, always there and always constant. I
quickly and quietly filled them in on my meeting with Mom and my
intentions for the future.
“I can’t guarantee they won’t come after you guys when I’m gone,” I
admitted, “so if any of you want, I can take you along on the Nomad and
drop you someplace where you can lose yourself for a while.” I shrugged.
“I’m sorry I can’t offer more than that, but it’s all I have time for.” To be
honest, I was worried about Vilberg and the others, too, but they hadn’t
been with the team as long, so I was hoping Calderon wouldn’t suspect
them of collaborating with me.
“Don’t be such an asshole, Munroe,” Victor snapped with
uncharacteristic harshness, refilling his glass from the pitcher. I frowned in
confusion, and that seemed to make him even more disgusted. He shook his
head and took a drink.
“We’re going with you, obviously,” Kurt supplied, looking at me like
I’d said something incredibly stupid.
“Me too, boss,” Sanders said. He stroked his short beard, maybe
thoughtful or maybe picking crumbs out of it, I wasn’t sure. “I figured this
was coming at some point. Already made my decision.”
I looked over to Bobbi, and she rolled her eyes, stuffing another rice and
seaweed roll in her mouth to avoid having to state the obvious.
“It’s not like any of us have anything serious to hold us down,” Sanders
expanded, with what might have been a tinge of wistfulness in his voice.
“Us or any of the others on the team.” I nodded, knowing it was true but
feeling a bit uncomfortable with it.
“Why is that?” I wondered, half to myself.
“If you hadn’t already been with Sophia before all this started,” Victor
asked me, “would you have gone out of your way to find someone to have a
relationship with, knowing what we do for a living? Would you put them
through that kind of fear and doubt every time you had to leave if you had a
choice about it?”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t have to. I hissed out a breath, feeling a
load of guilt settling in on top of what I already had for what I was putting
Sophia and Cesar through.
“Maybe, after this,” Sanders mused, draining what was left in his glass
between words, “we can all try to have something like a normal life, huh?”
“Fuck that,” Bobbi muttered, eyes looking down at the plastic surface of
the table. “I don’t want a normal life. Normal people are boring as shit.”
“Thanks for sticking with me, guys,” I said, feeling the slight break in
my voice near the end and not trying to fight it.
“You’re the best commanding officer I ever had,” Sanders cracked,
smiling lopsidedly at the joke.
“I’m not a damned officer,” I replied, grinning back. “I work for a
living.”
Even Bobbi laughed at that, and I felt the tension slip out of us all just a
little bit.
“Three hours, guys,” I said, sobering. “Get whatever you need and meet
me at the ship by then. I have to go make arrangements with the port
authority, then send a message home.” I made sure they all met my eyes
before I went on. “Be fucking careful. Calderon’s a lot of things, but stupid
isn’t one of them.”
Bobbi snickered at that, and I glared at her balefully.
“He sees you two”—I pointed to her and Sanders—“getting ready to
head out, he might twig to what’s going on. And whether you think he’s
stupid or not, he’s a ruthless son of a bitch who wouldn’t hesitate to kill any
one of us.”
Bobbi shrugged acknowledgment.
“You’ve got me there,” she admitted. “Three hours. We’ll meet you at
the ship.”
 4

T he spaceport at Sanctuary always seemed huge to me, probably because

I’d grown too accustomed to the packed-dirt landing fields out in the
Pirate Worlds. The buildfoam walls that divided the individual bays
towered twenty meters high, a Brobdingnagian rat maze constructed a few
kilometers outside the city, shining white in the afternoon glare of Proxima.
The administration buildings looked tiny by comparison, an afterthought
squeezed into the gaps between the bays despite the fact that some of them
were three stories high. Maintenance tractors and service vehicles trundled
in and out of narrow garages, weaving carefully through the constant crowd
of people leaving and entering the port, shuffling from one end to another
like ants in a colony.
I wiped sweat from my neck as I walked from the Port Authority
building towards the covered walkways of the landing bays. It was
unseasonably hot for autumn in this part of Hermes, and I wished I could
take off my jacket without displaying my gun for all the world to see. Yeah,
I had a permit for it, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t get arrested and
questioned for a couple of hours if I started flashing it around; this was
Hermes, not a periphery colony and certainly not the Pirate Worlds.
Usually, that made it feel safe for me, a nice break after a mission before I
headed home. This time, I wanted more than anything to get out of here.
I had more than an hour until the others were supposed to arrive, but I
still had to record a message for Sophia, and I wanted to do that at the ship
instead of using a commercial office. I could have just recorded a video on
my ’link, but I wanted somewhere quiet and private, where I didn’t have to
worry about being overheard by one of the hundreds of people crowding the
sidewalks here.
And, honestly, there was that whole part about wanting to get out of
here again. Being in the ship meant we could leave as soon as the others
arrived. I just had a feeling that every minute I stayed now was one minute
too long.
I let out a relieved breath as I moved under the shade of the pedestrian
walkway that wound its way through the intricate labyrinth of the port
facilities, and felt the ambient temperature drop about five degrees as a cool
breeze coursed through the man-made tunnel. I flapped the collar of my
jacket to try to let the cool air get to the back of my neck…which was why
my hands were nowhere near my pistol when I felt the unyielding metal of
a gun barrel pressing into my back.
“Keep walking. Don’t turn around.” I didn’t have to. The voice was
Calderon’s.
“What the hell are you doing?” I snapped, starting to turn anyway as I
bluffed righteous indignation.
My motion was intercepted by a strong hand on my arm, and if I hadn’t
been surprised by Calderon holding a gun on me, I was definitely shocked
to see Peyton Renzor walking beside me on my right, one hand clenched
tightly on my shoulder, the other stuffed inside a pocket. I looked to the left
and found Adriana DiStephano on that side, her eyes steely and her face
expressionless.
“Have you all gone nuts?” I asked, eyes going back and forth between
the two of them.
“I said keep walking and don’t turn around,” Calderon repeated, his
mouth very close to my ear, the gun barrel jabbing me painfully over my
kidney. “If you make a scene, I’ll shoot you. If you try to fight or go for
your gun, I’ll shoot you. If you try to run, I’ll shoot you. And when the
police come, I’ll simply have them call Monsieur Damiani’s contacts in the
Patrol, who will assure them you’re a wanted criminal and I’m working as a
special agent in their employ.”
“What the fuck, Calderon?” I demanded, but started walking slowly
again. I searched the faces of the people passing by us in either direction,
but they all seemed absorbed with their own thoughts or ’link
conversations, and none even gave us a second look. “Does Cowboy know
what kind of shit you’re pulling here?”
 “You can stop pretending you don’t know what’s going on, Munroe,”
Calderon snapped. “West doesn’t trust you any more than I do. That’s why
I’ve had you under drone observation since you left the safe house.”
“And what did your spy-bots show you, Alberto?” I ground out the
question, hoping Mom had been good to her word.
“Not a damn thing. Which is exactly how I know you’ve betrayed us.”
I laughed sharply, wanting to turn around again but thinking better of it.
“That sounds nuts even for you,” I commented.
“After every single mission for the last two years,” he went on, ignoring
my jab, “you’ve gone to the Lost Horizon to have a drink with Sanders,
Taylor and the Simak brothers before you’ve lifted off. One drink to toast to
your old pilot, Kane. This time, the drones showed you sitting in a park
three kilometers outside the city until you headed back to the port.”
I felt sweat on my upper lip.
“I needed to think,” I said. “I have some personal shit going on, and I
wanted to be alone.”
“I could have believed that,” Calderon admitted. “Except that I sent
Nemeroff to that park to check on you…and you weren’t there.”
Shit. Mom, you’re such a fucking idiot.
“It takes some serious tech to spoof surveillance drones like that. Jam
them, sure, anyone can do that. But to convince them that you’re there
when you’re not, to block you off from being seen somewhere else…that’s
bleeding edge, and it takes big money. And who do we both know with big
money and a serious interest in gumming up the works for Monsieur
Damiani?”
That all showed a depressingly intelligent amount of deductive
reasoning on Calderon’s part, and walking down that passage with a gun
shoved in my back, I couldn’t come up with a good argument to counter it. I
was about to make the suicide play and go for my gun and hope that jacked
reflexes and a good nanite repair suite would keep me from getting killed.
And then I heard a voice inside my head, coming over my mastoid implant.
“Get down!”
I acted without thinking, stomping down on Renzor’s shin to shake
loose his hold on my arm, then throwing myself off to the side and covering
my head. Even with my eyes closed and hands over my ears, I could see the
flash of the concussion grenade and hear its snare-drum cacophony like it
had gone off inside my eardrums, loud enough that I could barely make out
the screams of those unlucky enough to get caught in the blast. I didn’t wait
around for my hearing to return, my eyes were working fine, and I could
see Thiong’o emerging from the doorway of a public restroom, one hand
filled with his pulse pistol, the other waving for me to come to him.
I reached for my pistol, but there were stunned civilians staggering
between me and Calderon’s group, and I didn’t want to wait around to see
how timely the police response would be. I let it go and followed Thiong’o
through the crowd, still hearing nothing but a muted roar, a few stray spots
floating over my vision, hiding the image of Alexi Nemeroff until he’d
already stepped out of the throng of panicked, running civilians and shot
Thiong’o in the face.
I didn’t hear the discharge of the pistol, just saw the flare of the igniting
rocket engine as the round crossed the five meters between them; then
another, brighter flare as the warhead of the bullet erupted in a spear of
plasma as big as my pinky finger. I tasted the blood as it splattered in an arc
all around Thiong’o, and I saw in my peripheral vision the open, screaming
mouths of the witnesses. It looked fake, I thought not for the first time,
when someone’s head came apart like that. It looked like some sort of
special effect in a virtual reality simulation, or maybe the inner workings of
one of the pleasure dolls they rented by the hour in brothels on Belial
station. It didn’t look like something that had ever been alive.
Nemeroff seemed almost surprised, like he’d expected some other
outcome of shooting a man in the face, and I tried to remember if he’d
actually ever done that in any of the few missions he’d been a part of. It
didn’t matter; he’d never do it again. My pistol jumped into my hand almost
of its own accord, and I’d fired before I realized it was there. I had to
assume Nemeroff was wearing body armor—since he’d known he was
heading into a possible fight and I hadn’t, and I was wearing it—so I put the
round between his eyes.
I didn’t bother to stick around and gawk at what was left of him, just
ran. I was still half-stunned from the flash-bang, and all I could think was
that I had to get to the ship. I had to get out of here before I was cornered
and trapped again. People got out of my way, which you might expect since
I was carrying a gun and covered in someone else’s blood. As the ringing in
my ears faded, I began to hear distant voices shouting at me to stop, but I
ignored them except to run faster and make a turn at the next available
corner to get away from them. They might have been police or maybe Port
Authority workers or maybe just Good Samaritans, but no one was going to
stop me before I got to my ship. The shouts faded, but they were replaced
by the whooping siren of an emergency alert and an automated voice urging
everyone to evacuate the spaceport.
People began running blindly in four different directions, and I had to
concentrate on weaving through them. At least the panic was making me
less likely to be spotted before I reached the ship. I had a map of the port
projected onto my contact lens and saw that I was only a half a kilometer
from the Nomad’s berth. I memorized the pattern of turns before I got rid of
the map, not wanting the distraction. Left, the next right, second left, one
last right and straight down another hundred meters…
I was about to take that last right when something jerked me off my feet
and slammed me into the wall nearly hard enough to knock the wind out of
me. I was in a dark alcove, in the middle of a store of inactive cleaning
robots, and I nearly shot Victor Simak before I realized who he was.
“Relax, boss, it’s us.” I heard Eli Sanders’ voice behind me, and I
finally looked around and saw that both Simak brothers were there, along
with Bobbi.
“Thank God you guys are all right.” I sighed, lowering my gun. I looked
around at the shadowed nook in the wall and shook my head. “What are you
doing back here? Did Calderon come after you, too?”
They shared a look, and Bobbi scowled.
“Should have figured that asshole was behind this,” she muttered.
“Behind what?” I wondered.
“Have a quick look around the corner, Munroe,” Victor invited me,
waving towards the berth where our ship was housed.
I frowned and edged my way out of the niche, hugging the bare, white,
buildfoam wall and moving out till I could see the landing bay. The ship
was a dull gray wedge of BiPhase Carbide a hundred meters long and
slightly more than half that across, her utilitarian delta shape resting on five
sets of heavy-duty landing treads. Gathered around her blunt nose, a little
over a hundred meters away from me, was a Port Authority Police special
response team in full tactical armor, their pulse carbines pointed outward
like they were expecting an immediate attack.
“Shit,” I muttered, sliding back along the wall to the alcove. I looked at
the others looking at me, like I had the answer to this. “Calderon figured it
out.” I sketched a brief version of what had happened.
 “We have the hardest time holding on to new people,” Kurt commented
with a light irreverence that once might have disturbed me.
“So,” Bobbi said, pulling her gun from its holster, “we go take ’em
out?”
“They might just be innocent, honest cops who’ve been lied to,” I
reminded her, frowning. “I’d rather not kill them, even if we could.”
Actually, I was fairly sure we could.
“If we stick around here much longer,” Victor said, “they’re gonna find
us, and we’ll be in a shoot-out with the cops whether we want to or not.”
“Hey,” Sanders said, clutching the kit bag he’d carried with him to take
on the ship, “there’s a hopper rental place back around the corner, isn’t
there?”
“I think so,” Bobbi answered. She frowned. “What, you want to steal
one and make a run for it?”
There was an evil-genius look in his eyes that I didn’t recall ever seeing
before, and all of a sudden his closed-cropped goatee began to look a bit
Satanic.
“Not exactly.”

The alarm had gone silent, but the automated evacuation order was still
recycling every two minutes or so. I looked over at Sanders as he affixed
the cracking module to the security lock of the rental hopper and fervently
hoped we were doing the right thing. I’d never been all that comfortable
letting other people take charge, not since Demeter anyway. Having the
responsibility of a whole resistance army on my shoulders had been a
crushing burden, but you get used to anything after a while. By now,
command felt natural, and the lack of it was worse than its presence. But I’d
worked and fought with these people for years, and if I couldn’t trust them
at this point, then I’d never be able to.
“How’d you happen to have that cracking module in your ditty bag,
anyway?” I asked Sanders, eyes darting around the lot but seeing no one
there and no one approaching from the nearby office. There were security
cameras, but no one to watch them, and the automated systems wouldn’t be
alerted until and unless we entered one of the ducted-fan hovercraft without
authorization. “Last I remember, they were all locked up on the ship.”
“I kind of borrowed one,” he admitted, voice low and terse as he
programmed the highly illegal piece of equipment that Cowboy had
provided for us through Calderon. “I had this idea about maybe sneaking
into the VIP lounge at the Corporate Council headquarters here, just, you
know, to see how the other half lives…”
“I’ve been to those kind of places,” I told him, chuckling despite the
circumstances. “You aren’t missing anything. Just a bunch of pretentious,
self-involved old fucks that look like twenty-year-olds.”
“Got it!” he enthused, and I heard a hiss as the lock released and the
pilot canopy began rising to expose the cockpit to us. He pulled the module
off the door and moved it to the key plate on the control panel next to the
steering yoke. “This is going to be the tricky part,” he admitted, chewing on
his lip as the board came to life and started regaling him with safety
warnings and air traffic regulations. “I have to figure out how to bypass the
safety interlocks…”
“Move over,” I told him, pushing him aside and climbing into the pilot’s
seat. This was why I’d come along instead of sending one of the others.
I pulled my data-link out of my jacket pocket and hit the control to pair
it with the cracking module; I had the codes for the things stored for use on
operations. Once they were paired, I could access the hopper’s control
systems through my ’link, and I could access my ’link through my implant
receiver. And through that receiver, I could connect them both to the latest
piece of implanted wetware I’d invested in. No one else knew about it; I’d
used Mom’s connections to get it, because it wasn’t something that people
outside the military or certain government agencies could usually afford. It
had required a week-long stay in a specially designed auto-doc, where an
incredibly expensive nanite bath had built the thing a cell at a time inside
my head and connected it with my brain and nervous system.
I’d nearly rebelled at the idea of having a computer installed inside my
head; I kept thinking of the many horrific ways that it could go wrong, that
it could be used against me, that I’d wind up a vegetable… Sophia hadn’t
been that happy about it, either. But if I intended to fight Andre Damiani’s
organization, then I needed an edge, something to put me on their level.
The headcomp wasn’t quite as advanced as the sort of bleeding-edge
military wetware people like Cowboy had, but it was the best Mom could
find for me, and its built-in penetration programs sliced through the
hopper’s security protocols like they weren’t there. It felt surreal and
dreamlike, being able to control the thing just by thinking about it a certain
way, but I could see the changes reflected in the display screen as one
interlock after another was disabled.
“Put the course in,” I told Sanders, having to make a conscious effort to
say the words out loud.
He stared at me for a moment, not quite understanding what he’d seen,
but then he moved in and took my place as I slid out of the seat.
Programming the autopilot was dead simple, just a matter of bringing up a
mapping program and drawing a line with your finger from one place to the
other, then punching in your desired cruising speed. Finally, he punched in a
time delay, then yanked loose the module and slammed the canopy shut.
We stepped back and watched as the ducted fans began to spin, their
gentle hum growing to a high-pitched whine and then a metallic yowl as the
vehicle leapt into the air in a cloud of dust. The hopper climbed above the
level of the dividing walls in seconds, then angled its fans forward and
zipped straight out to the north. It disappeared from view behind the
intervening wall on that side, and for a moment I was afraid the whole thing
had gone wrong and it was just going to keep flying until it hit a mountain.
Then I saw it appear again, going as fast as its motors would drive it,
heading down at a steep angle that was taking it straight for the landing bay
next door to the Nomad’s, where a Corporate Council heavy-lift cargo
shuttle was taking on freight from automated pallet loaders. Sanders and I
were running by the time it hit, heading back the way we’d come, but the
dull, solid crump of the crash echoed off the retaining walls and through the
walkways. An explosion followed it, rattling the walls as pallet after pallet
of organic fertilizer, headed for the hobbyist farms of the wealthy over on
Eden or Aphrodite or other upscale colonies, was set alight by the crash and
ignited violently. Smoke began filling the walkway, billowing outward from
the corridors ahead and obscuring everything in a sooty, gray cloud.
“If that doesn’t get their attention,” Sanders said between breathless
pants as we sprinted back towards the ship, “nothing will!”
It had gotten their attention. The alarms were wailing again, and the
voice was back and more insistent now, warning that there was an official
police warning to leave the area, and violators would face immediate arrest
and possible fines. We took our chances and ran into the smoke. I tried to
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Akkra case
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The Akkra case

Author: Miriam Allen De Ford

Illustrator: Dan Adkins

Release date: November 22, 2023 [eBook #72197]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company,

1961

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AKKRA

CASE ***
 Miriam de Ford has given a good deal
of thought to crime and criminology
of other times and spaces (see
Editorial). Now she turns her talents
to constructing a "true crime" of the
future—and its solution. Herewith,
then, a criminologist's lecture-report
on:

THE AKKRA CASE

By MIRIAM ALLEN de FORD

Illustrated by ADKINS

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Amazing Stories January 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Deliberate murder being so very rare a crime in our society, an
account of any instance of it must attract the attention not only of
criminologists but also of the general public. Very many of my
auditors must remember the Akkra case well, since it occurred only
last year. This, however, is the first attempt to set forth the bizarre
circumstances hitherto known only to the authorities and to a few
specialists.
On February 30 last, the body of a young girl was found under the
Central Park mobilway in Newyork I. She had been struck on the
head with some heavy object which had fractured her skull, and her
auburn hair was matted with congealed blood. Two boys illegally
trespassing on one of the old dirt roads in the park itself stumbled
upon the corpse. She was fully dressed, but barefoot, with her
socsandals lying beside her. An autopsy showed only one unusual
thing—she was a virgin, though she was fully mature.
Two hundred years ago, say, this would have been a case for the
homicide branch of the city police. Now, of course, there are no city
police, all local law enforcement being in the hands of the Federal
government, with higher supervision and appeal to the Interpol; and
since there has been no reported murder (except in Africa and
China, where this crime has not yet been entirely eradicated) for at
least 20 years, Fedpol naturally has no specialists in homicide.
Investigation therefore was up to the General Branch in Newyork
Complex I.
The murderer had stupidly broken off the welded serial number disc
from her wristlet—stupidly, because of course everybody's
fingerprints and retinal pattern are on file with Interpol from birth. It
was soon discovered that the victim was one Madolin Akkra, born in
Newyork I of mixed Irish, Siamese, and Swedish descent, aged 18
years and seven months. Since it is against the law for any minor
(under 25) to be gainfully employed, and there was no record of any
exemption-permit, she had necessarily to be a student. She was
found to be studying spaceship maintenance at Upper Newyork
Combined Technicum.
People who deride Fedpol and call it a useless anachronism don't
know what they are talking about. It is true that in our society criminal
tendencies are understood to be a disease, amenable to treatment,
not a free-will demonstration of anti-social proclivities. But it is also
true that every member of Fedpol, down to the merest rookie
policeman, is a trained specialist in some field, and that most of its
officers are graduate psychiatrists. As soon as Madolin Akkra's
identity was determined, it was easy to find out everything about her.
The circumstances surrounding her in life were sufficiently odd in
themselves. Her mother was dead, but she lived with her own father
and full younger sister in a small (only 20 stories and 80 living-units)
co-operative apartment house in the old district formerly called
Westchester, once an "exclusive" settlement but now considerably
run down, and populated for the most part by low-income families.
Few of the residents had more than one helicopter per family, and
many of them had to commute to their jobs or schools by public
copter. The building where the Akkras lived was shabby, its chrome
and plastic well worn, and showed the effects of a negligent local
upkeep system. The Akkras even prepared and ate some of their
meals in their own quarters—an almost unheard-of anachronism.
The father had served his 20 years of productive labor from 25 to 45,
and the whole family was therefore supported by public funds of one
sort or another. When the Fedpol officers commenced their
investigation by interviewing this man, they found him one of the
worst social throwbacks discovered in many years—doubtless a
prime reason for the bizarre misfortune which had overtaken his
misguided daughter. To begin with, the investigators wanted to know,
why had he not reported his daughter missing? To this, Pol Akkra
made the astonishing reply that the girl was old enough to know her
own business, and that he had never asked any questions as to
what she did! Everyone knows it is every adult's responsibility to
report any deviation by the young more serious than the mischievous
trespassing by the boys who had found Madolin Akkra's body, and
who at least had gone to Fedpol at once. The officers could get no
lead whatever from the girl's father.
To find the murderer, it was of first importance to establish the
background of this strange case. Access to the park is difficult—has
been difficult ever since, more than a century ago, the area became
a hunting-ground for thieves and hoodlums, and was transformed
into a cultivated forest and garden preserved for aesthetic reasons,
and to be viewed only from the mobilways above. (The boys who
found the body are, of course, proof that the sealing-off of the park is
not entirely effective—but surely only a daring and agile child could
insinuate himself under the thorn-set hedges surrounding the park,
or swing down to the tree-tops from the structure above.)
If the victim had been killed elsewhere, how was her body carried to
the spot where it was found? Both murderer and corpse would have
had to penetrate unobserved into an almost impenetrable area.
Could the body have been thrown from above? But if so, how could
the remains of a full-grown girl have been transported from either a
ground car or a copter on to the crowded mobilway, brightly lighted
all night long? She must have gone there alive, either under duress
or of her own accord.
The first and most natural question, to Fedpol, was: who did have
access to the park? The answer was, the gardeners. But the
gardeners were out: they were all robots, even their supervisor. No
robot is able to harm a human being. Moreover, no robot could have
brought the victim in from outside if she had been killed elsewhere.
The gardeners never leave the park, and they would repel any
strange robot from elsewhere who tried to enter it. And one could
hardly imagine a sane human being who would go to the park for a
rendezvous with a robot!

It was Madolin's little sister, Margret, who interrupted the futile

interrogation of the surly and resistant Pol Akkra and provided the
first clue. She caught the eye of the investigating officer, Inspector
Dugal Kazazian, and quietly went into the next room, where
Kazazian followed her after posting his assistant with the father.
"I promised Madolin I would never tell on her," she whispered, "but
now she's—now it doesn't matter." She had loved her sister; her
eyes were puffy from weeping. "She—she'd been going to Naturist
get-togethers."
Kazazian almost groaned aloud. He might have known—this was the
first time they had been linked with murder, but it seemed to him that
in almost every other affair he had investigated for the past few
years, the subversive Naturists somehow had crept in. And if he had
reflected, he would have suspected them already, since there seems
to be no school or college which does not harbor an underground
branch of these criminal lunatics.
I need hardly explain to my auditors who and what the Naturists are.
But to keep the record complete, let me say briefly that this
pernicious worldwide conspiracy, founded 50 years ago by the
notorious Ali Chaim Pertinuzzi, is engaged in an organized campaign
to tear down all the marvelous technical achievements of our
civilization. It pretends to believe that we should eat "natural" foods
and wear "natural" textiles instead of synthetics, walk instead of ride,
teach children the obsolete art of reading (reading what?—the
antique books preserved in museums?), make our own music,
painting, and sculpture instead of enjoying the exquisite products of
perfected machines, open up all parks and the few remaining rural
preserves to campers, hunters and fishers (if any specimens worth
hunting can be found outside zoos), and what they call "hikers"—in a
word, go back to the confused, reactionary world of our ancestors.
From this hodgepodge of "principles" it is a natural transition to
political and economic subversion. No wonder that the information
that Madolin Akkra had been corrupted by this vile outfit sent a chill
down Inspector Kazazian's spine.

It explained a great deal, however. The Naturists profess to oppose

our healthy system of sexual experimentation, and Madolin had been
a virgin. The weird family situation, and her father's attitude both
toward her and toward the Fedpol, aroused suspicion that he too
was affiliated with the Naturists, not simply that Madolin had flirted
with the outer edges of the treasonable organization, as a "fellow-
seeker," without her father's knowledge.
Suppose the girl, fundamentally decent and ethically-minded, had
revolted against the false doctrine and threatened to betray its
advocates? Then she might have been killed to silence her—and
what more likely than that, as a piece of brazen defiance, her
murdered corpse should have been deposited in the only bit of
"natural" ground still remaining in the Newyork area?
But how, and by whom?

The first step, of course, was to fling a dragnet around all known or
suspected Naturists in the district. In a series of flying raids they
were rounded up; and since there no longer exist those depositories
for offenders formerly known as prisons, they were kept
incommunicado in the psychiatric wards of the various hospitals. For
good measure, Pol Akkra was included. Margret, at 13, was old
enough to take care of herself.
Next, all Madolin's classmates at the Technicum, the operators of her
teach-communicators, and members of other classes with whom it
was learned she had been on familiar terms, were subjected to an
intensive electronic questioning. (Several of these were themselves
discovered to be tainted with Naturism, and were interned with the
rest.) One of the tenets of Naturism is a return to the outworn system
of monogamy, and the questioning was directed particularly to the
possibility that Madolin had formed half of one of the notorious
Naturist "steady couples," who often associate without or before
actual mating. But day after day the investigators came up with not
the slightest usable lead.
Please do not think I am underrating Fedpol. Nothing could have
been more thorough than the investigation they undertook. But this
turned out in the end to be a case which by its very nature
obfuscated the normal methods of criminological science. Fedpol
itself has acknowledged this, by its formation in recent months of the
Affiliated Assistance Corps, made up of amateurs who volunteer for
the detection of what are now called Class X crimes—those so far off
the beaten path that professionals are helpless before them.
For it was an amateur who solved Madolin Akkra's murder—her own
little sister. When Margret Akkra reaches the working age of 25 she
will be offered a paid post as Newyork Area Co-ordinator of the AAC.
Left alone by her father's internment, Margret began to devote her
whole time out of school hours to the pursuit of the person or
persons who had killed her sister. She had told Kazazian all she
actually knew; but that was only her starting-point. Though she
herself, as she had told the Inspector, believed that the murder might
be traced to Madolin's connection with the Naturist (and though she
probably at least suspected her father to be involved with them also),
she did not confine herself to that theory, as the Fedpol, with its
scientific training, was obliged to do.
Concealed under a false floor in her father's bedroom—mute
evidence of his Naturist affiliation—she found a cache of printed
books—heirlooms which should long ago have been presented to a
museum for consultation by scholars only. They dated back to the
20th century, and were of the variety then known as "mystery
stories." Margret of course could not read them. But she
remembered now, with revulsion, how, when she and Madolin were
small children, their mother had sometimes (with windows closed
and the videophone turned off) amused them by telling them ancient
myths and legends that by their very nature Margret now realized
must have come from these contraband books.
Unlike her father and her sister, and apparently her mother as well,
Margret Akkra had remained a wholesome product of a civilized
education. She had nothing but horror and contempt for the
subversive activities in the midst of which, she knew now, she had
grown up. The very fact, which became plain to her for the first time,
that her parents had lived together, without changing partners, until
her mother had died, was evidence enough of their aberration.
But, stricken to the heart as the poor girl was, she could not cease to
love those she had always loved, or to be diverted from her
resolution to solve her sister's murder. Shudder as she might at the
memory of those subversive books, she yet felt they might
inadvertently serve to assist her.
It was easy to persuade the school authorities that her shock and
distress over Madolin's death had slowed up her conscious mind,
and to get herself assigned to a few sessions with the electronic
memory stimulator. It took only two or three to bring back in detail the
suppressed memories, and to enable her to extrapolate from them.

One feature of these so-called "mysteries" that came back to her

struck Margret with especial force—the frequent assertion that
murderers always return to the scene of their crime. She decided
that she too must plant herself at the spot where her sister's body
had been found, and lie in wait for the returning killer.
It would be useless to try to obtain official permission, but she was
only 13, as lean and agile as any other child, and if boys could evade
the hedges and the robot gardeners, so could she. The audiovids
had displayed plenty of pictures of the exact scene, and Margret
knew where to find it. But an inspection of the hedges showed her
that it would be easier for her to get in from above, at night—a likelier
time also for her prey.
She located a place where the trees grew almost to the mobilway
and shaded a section of it between the lamps. Perched on the stand-
pave and watching for a pause in the stream of gliders-by, she
dropped lightly into a tree and climbed down to the park beneath.
Hiding from the gardeners, she made her way to the bushes where
the boys had discovered Madolin.
For nearly a week, fortified by Sleepnomer pills, Margret spent every
moment after dark in this hideaway. It was a long, nerve-wracking
vigil: the close contact with leaves and grass, the sound of the wind
in the trees, the unaccustomed darkness away from the lights above,
the frightening approach of wild squirrels and rabbits and even birds,
the necessity to stay concealed from passing robots, kept her on
edge. But stubbornly she persisted. And at last she was rewarded.
It was not late—only about 20 o'clock—when she heard a scramble
and bump not far from her own means of access to the park. It was
not the first time since her watch began that she had heard other
adventurers, invariably small and rather scared boys who dared one
another to walk for a few feet along the dirt paths, then in a panic
rushed back the way they had come. But this time the steps came
directly toward her—human footsteps, not the shuffle of a robot.
Hidden behind a bush, Margret saw them approach—two boys of
about her own age. And then, with a sickening lurch of her heart, she
recognized them. She had seen them, acclaimed as heroes, on the
videoscreen. They were the two who had found Madolin. She could
hear every word they said.
"Come on," one of them urged in a hoarse whisper. "There's nothing
to be afraid of."
"Yes, there is," the other objected. "Ever since then, they've got the
gardeners wired to describe and report anybody they find inside the
park."
"I don't care. We've got to find it. Give me the beamer."

Margret crouched behind the thickest part of the shrubbery, her infra-
red camera at the alert. The tape-attachment was already activated.
The second boy still held back. "I told you then," he muttered, "that
we shouldn't have reported it at all. We should have got out of here
and never said a word to anyone."
"We couldn't," the first boy said, shocked. "It would have been anti-
social. Haven't you ever learned anything in school?"
"Well, it's anti-social to kill somebody, too, isn't it?"
Margret pressed the button on the camera. Enlarged enough, even
the identification discs on the boys' wristlets would show.
"How could we guess there was a human being there, except us?
What was she doing here, anyway? Come on, Harri, we've got to
find that thing. It's taken us long enough to get a chance to sneak in
here."
"Maybe they've found it already," said Harri fearfully.
"No, they haven't; if they had, they'd have taken us in as soon as
they dusted the fingerprints."
"All right, it's not anywhere on the path. Put the beamer on the
ground where it will shine in front of us, and let's get down on our
stomachs and hunt underneath the bushes."
Grabbing her camera, Margret jumped to her feet and dashed past
the startled boys. She heard a scream—that would be Harri—and
then their feet pounding after her. But she had a head start, and her
eyes were more accustomed to the dark than theirs could be. She
reached a tree, shinnied up it, jumped from one of its limbs to
another on a higher tree beneath the mobilway, chinned herself up,
and made her way out safely.
She went straight to Fedpol headquarters and asked for Inspector
Kazazian.
The frightened boys were picked up at once. They were brought into
headquarters, where they had been praised and thanked before, and
as soon as they saw the pictures and heard the tape-recording they
confessed everything.
That night, they said, they were being initiated into one of those
atavistic fraternities which it seems impossible for the young to
outgrow or the authorities to suppress. As part of their ordeal, they
had been required to sneak into Central Park and to bring back as
proof of their success a captured robot gardener. Between them they
had decided that the only way they could ever get their booty would
be to disassemble the robot, for though it could not injure them, if
they took hold of it, its communication-valve would blow and the
noise would bring others immediately; so they had taken along what
seemed to them a practical weapon—a glass brick pried out of the
back of a locker in the school gym. Hurled by a strong and practiced
young arm, it could de-activate the robot's headpiece.
When, as they waited in the darkness for a gardener to appear, they
saw a figure moving about in the shrubbery bordering the path, one
of them—neither would say which one it was—let fly. To their horror,
instead of the clang of heavy glass against metal, they heard a
muffled thud as the brick struck flesh and bone. They started to run
away. But after a few paces they forced themselves to return.
It was a girl, and the blow had knocked her flat. Her head was
bleeding badly and she was moaning. Terrified, they knelt beside
her. She gasped once and lay still. One of the boys laid a trembling
hand on her breast, the other seized her wrist. There was no heart-
beat and there was no pulse. On an impulse, the boy holding her
wrist wrenched away her identification disc.
Panic seized them, and they dashed away, utterly forgetting the
brick, which at their first discovery one of them had had the foresight
to kick farther into the shrubbery, out of view. Sick and shaking, they
made their way out of the park and separated. The boy who had the
disc threw it into the nearest sewer-grating.
The next day, after school, they met again and talked it over. Finally
they decided they must go to Fedpol and report; but to protect
themselves they would say only that they had found a dead body.

Day after day, they kept seeing and hearing about the case on the
videaud, and pledged each other to silence. Then suddenly one of
the boys had a horrible thought—they had forgotten that the brick
would show their fingerprints!... They had come desperately to
search for it when Margret overheard them. Kazazian's men found it
without any difficulty; it had been just out of the gardeners' regular
track.
In view of the accidental nature of the whole affair, and the boys' full
confession, they got off easy. They were sentenced to only five
years' confinement in a psychiatric retraining school.
The suspects against whom nothing could be proved were released
and kept under surveillance. Pol Akkra, and all the proved Naturists,
were sentenced to prefrontal lobotomies. Margret Akkra, in return for
her help in solving the mystery, secured permission to take her father
home with her. A purged and docile man, he was quite capable of
the routine duties of housekeeping.
The killing of Madolin Akkra was solved. But one question remained:
how and why had she been in Central Park at all?
The answer, when it came, was surprising and embarrassingly
simple. And this is the part that has never been told before.
Pol Akkra, a mere simulacrum of the man he had been, no longer
knew his living daughter or remembered his dead one. But in the
recesses of his invaded brain some faint vestiges of the past
lingered, and occasionally and unexpectedly swam up to his
dreamlike consciousness.
One day he said suddenly: "Didn't I once know a girl named
Madolin?"
"Yes, father," Margret answered gently, tears in her eyes.
"Funny about her." He laughed his ghastly Zombie chuckle. "I told
her that was a foolish idea, even if it was good Nat—Nat-something
theory."
"What idea was that?"
"I—I've forgotten," he said vaguely. Then he brightened. "Oh, yes, I
remember. Stand barefoot in fresh soil for an hour in the light of the
full moon and you'll never catch cold again.
"She was subject to colds, I think." (About the only disease left we
have as yet no cure for.) He sighed. "I wonder if she ever tried it."
THE END
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AKKRA
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