Fox Hunt

A Fox Meridian Novel

By Niall Teasdale

Copyright 2015 Niall Teasdale

Amazon Kindle Edition

Contents

Part One: Earthlight Becomes You

Part Two: Lunar Transit Blues

Part Three: Murder Is My Business

Part Four: Music to Get the Blood Pumping

Part Five: The Anarchy Meme

Part Six: Keep Your Friends Close

Part Seven: Striking Out

Part One: Earthlight Becomes You

Luna City, 5th January 2060.

‘Team A in position at LCC, awaiting breach order.’

Lieutenant Driscoll watched the video displays of the team as they stacked up at a surface exit which they were using for the last cover and concealment point. Their positioning looked good and his attention turned to a second camera’s view where he could see his second assault team moving up. They would, he expected, report good positioning soon. His attention flicked to his tactical display which gave him a schematic of the production complex they were going to enter and the locations of both teams.

‘Team B in position at LCC, awaiting breach order.’

Driscoll nodded to himself and did not hesitate further. ‘Both teams, move up to your designated entry points.’ He watched as the two teams left the areas covered by cameras, switching immediately to views through the helmet cameras of the team leaders as they climbed out onto the lunar surface and set out for a low, grey structure thirty metres away. ‘Watch your spacing. Team B to clear lock for entry on arrival. Team A hold for my signal.’ There was a green light signal from the team leaders on the TacNet to confirm orders and Driscoll smiled; of course, this was just the beginning of the operation and a lot could go wrong, but he was confident.

Team A had a little less distance to cover and arrived at the large, unsealed loading bay entrance before their counterparts on the other side of the structure. Driscoll watched as the second team arrived, visible on a surface camera mounted to keep watch on the rear, emergency airlock. As ordered, there was immediate activity as one of their operatives, Pierce, hooked her suit’s computer up to the door’s outer access point and ran security override software. TacNet indicated progress; Driscoll had to admit that the military-spec tactical suite made things a lot easier than the less functional package the police generally ran, but he still preferred the more immediate viewpoint given to him by visual confirmation.

‘Team A, make ready for breach,’ Driscoll ordered as the progress indicator told him the hack was nearing completion. They would go through the loading bay door with breaching charges. He had no intelligence on the interior because the terrorists who had taken the facility had cut the camera feeds from inside, but he knew that none of the hostages were going to be in the unpressurised bay.

‘Charges set.’

‘Team A, breach, breach, breach.’ Driscoll watched the flares of light and the plumes of debris. There was no sound, of course, but there would be sound within the facility. Inside there would be vibration through the structure and alarms. The terrorists would be rushing to defend their captured territory. His displays showed him the team’s progress into the bay using dynamic entry, swarming in to check all parts of the open area.

‘Clear,’ Belthorpe, their leader, reported. ‘Proceeding to hatch.’

‘Team B, breach, breach, breach.’ Sending in the second team as the first negotiated the airlock from the bay would force the terrorists into splitting their forces, or maybe even make them think that the breach in the bay was a diversion. There was every possibility that when the first team breached the main airlock, they would have confused targets dashing back and forth like idiots!

He watched the camera feed from Hepburn on the B team as they sealed the lock and cycled it. This was the most dangerous part of the entry since that team were all inside a sealed room with a single hatch they had to exit through. Then again, they had been training for room entry for two weeks before Christmas. He thought to check TacNet and noted that the A team override was almost complete. ‘Team A, proceed as soon as you have free movement.’ His attention returned to Hepburn’s display as the hatch levered back and one of the team tossed a stun grenade out into the hallway. The view showed nothing but the metal wall of the lock for a second or two and then Hepburn was moving out, hooking right after his buddy.

‘Team B reporting clear entry, proceeding to primary objective.’ Hepburn’s voice was calm, even a little relieved.

For the first time in the operation, Driscoll had a moment of doubt. He had expected some resistance at that point. Both of the sergeants in charge of the teams had expected to see some resistance when B entered the facility, which was why they had used a grenade. Stun grenades were very effective in the confined environment of a lunar factory facility, but that endangered hostages and there was the possibility of the concussion causing problems to the breach team. You used that kind of weapon sparingly, but this had seemed like a good place to deploy one and there was no one there. Well… Well, the terrorists had obviously not moved as rapidly as expected.

‘Team A,’ Driscoll said, ‘be aware of greater possibility of enemy combatants on exit from the airlock.’

‘Noted, entering lock now,’ Belthorpe replied. The airlock from the bay into the facility was larger and so was the lobby area on the other side of it. If there were people waiting there, they had a much larger area to cover when the team made their entry. Team B had had the harder ingress point so, actually, this was likely to work out for the best.

And then there was the detonation of a flash-bang grenade, the pulse of light, the sound deadened by the transmission medium, the rush of movement as the lock was evacuated and the team took up position to either side of the main hatch and evaluated the room. The room was unoccupied despite the large reception desk at the back which had seemed a clearly advantageous source of cover for those holding the facility when Driscoll had seen it on the briefing photographs.

‘Room clear,’ Belthorpe reported. ‘No contact with enemy, moving to primary target.’

‘Everyone, keep your eyes open,’ Driscoll snapped. ‘I don’t like this. Where are they?’

‘Sir, we have–’

‘Move in,’ Driscoll said, cutting off Pierce and whatever she was going to say. ‘I want that control room secured as soon as possible. Then we can search internal security.’

Team A beat their compatriots to the control room by nine seconds despite having breached the airlocks second. Driscoll made an absent note to talk to Hepburn about speeding up progression on ops, but he was more concerned about what he was seeing through Belthorpe’s camera. The central control room was designed to be able to see the entire manufacturing floor so it had windows all around. Through those he could see two figures in pressure suits and helmets standing guard. From this vantage point there was no way to be sure what they were guarding, but they appeared oblivious to the advancing assault teams. Intelligence indicated that there were four terrorists: they could take out two of them in one strike!

‘Team A,’ Driscoll said, confidence rising in his voice, ‘move in and eliminate the enemy combatants. Team B, hold position as backup.’ There was immediate confirmation from Belthorpe’s TacNet indicator and a slight pause before Hepburn’s flashed an acknowledgement. Driscoll saw Hepburn’s people fan out through the machine shop, taking positions with good visibility of the control room. Driscoll’s attention moved away as Belthorpe’s team hit the door.

They went in using a cross-hook entry form since the main bank of consoles was beside the door on the left of the room. Two went straight in and two hooked right to catch the combatants within a V-formation, but their fire options were immediately limited by the discovery of the four people sitting on the floor in the middle of the room: the combatants were guarding hostages. In the control room, the assault team were taking that in along with Driscoll, determining which target they were interested in and what that target was doing, taking in the rise of the shotguns the terrorists were armed with and deciding upon actions. There was gunfire, staccato bursts from the assault weapons the squads were carrying, and the suited figures went down. All by the book and perfect.

‘Barnes, get on the console and check the internal cameras,’ Belthorpe ordered immediately. ‘Cutter, check the hostages.’

Driscoll was wearing a grim smile of satisfaction as he watched the view through Belthorpe’s camera. Four safely rescued hostages out of seven humans in the facility. Belthorpe was turning to check the screens with Barnes, but Driscoll had made a quick assessment: no one looked like they were harmed and they had all been dressed in the standard light suits the workers there wore. There had been quite an attractive young woman at the front of the group which would probably please Cutter…

And then there was gunfire. Belthorpe’s camera began to turn and then it was skewing wildly as the man fell.

‘Team A is under attack,’ Hepburn reported. His voice was tense, but he was holding onto his calm. ‘Moving forward.’

Driscoll thought to check TacNet and saw the four indicators for the A team turning red. All of them were down? All of them in just a couple of seconds? What was going on?

And that was when the windows on the control room shattered and four micromissiles flew out, each one homing on a heat source, each one loaded with a smart-forged explosive head designed to penetrate the best armour available.

Hepburn had time to say, ‘Oh shit,’ before his camera went dead and his TacNet indicator turned red, and Driscoll had another five seconds to wonder what the Hell had happened to his perfect assault operation before the simulation ended and the entire Emergency Response Unit of Luna City found themselves back in the reality of their training room looking at the woman who had just wiped them out.

‘Who wants to tell me what went wrong?’ Fox Meridian asked as she got to her feet. She was a tall woman and fairly imposing because of it. Her physical charisma was not why she was there, but it did not hurt to push it when she was trying to drum instruction into the ERU members.

‘I was helping that gir– one of the hostages to her feet,’ Cutter said. ‘She had a gun, I think. Shot me and took my rifle? When the simulation cut out on me, I lost track of what was happening.’

‘A good summary of how you ended up dead, but she wasn’t a hostage, Officer Cutter. All four of the “hostages” you rescued there were the terrorists. The two terrorists you shot were hostages strapped into exoskeleton suits being run remotely by two of the real terrorists.’

‘Those terrorists shouldn’t have been able to fire our own weapons at us,’ Belthorpe stated, frowning. ‘That’s cheating.’

‘All they had to do was use your own hands to work the triggers, Sergeant,’ Fox replied. ‘The transponders operate from the power to your implants, and those will remain active for up to thirty minutes after your death. I do admit to cheating a little. I suspected that your team would end up hitting the control room and Cutter there has the medical training so you’d get him to check the supposed hostages. Given that it took him three days to take his eyes off my chest when we started this course, I put a girl with big breasts among the terrorists knowing that he’d be distracted and easier to surprise. But you still haven’t told me what went wrong.’

‘Lack of intelligence,’ Pierce said.

‘Lack of caution,’ Hepburn added.

Fox nodded. ‘Nice work on the machine room, Sergeant Hepburn. Belthorpe, you went through a room which had more than adequate cover with undue haste. I could have had people anywhere on your route in, but you were rushing to get to the control room and didn’t check for it.’

Driscoll saw her look his way and knew she knew about his note to call out Hepburn on his tardiness. ‘How were we supposed to gather intelligence when the cameras were out?’ Driscoll asked.

‘Pierce?’

‘Between us we had four cambots, sir,’ Pierce said. ‘If the internal cameras were all down then the terrorists couldn’t see us any more than we could see them. We could have sent the bots in and reconnoitred prior to moving deeper into the facility.’

Driscoll opened his mouth to ask why she had not mentioned this at the time, and then closed it again as he realised she had been going to and he had ignored her. His brow furrowed. ‘So… Okay, so this mostly went wrong because I was overconfident and trying to impress our guest lecturer.’

‘Lieutenant Driscoll,’ Fox said, grinning, ‘you get a merit badge for accelerated acquisition of self-knowledge. There were a few technical errors which we can go through tomorrow morning. I think we’ll call it for today so you can have tonight to see if you can figure out how you could have handled that better.’ She paused, her gaze sweeping the room. ‘That was your first simulated run as a unified group and you did not do that badly. Good work, but you can and will do better. Dismissed.’

~~~

‘Inspector Meridian?’

Fox paused, turning to flash a grin at Pierce. ‘I’m an inspector on Earth, not the Moon, and I’m not on duty. It’s Fox.’

Pierce closed the distance, returning the grin. She was a cute sort of girl, just inside minimum height for Luna City Security Services, something of a button-nosed sort of face with bright blue eyes which tended to ‘sparkling,’ capped off by short, blonde hair. Fox happened to know that she was in the ERU primarily for her technical skills, though all of them had passed advanced competency with firearms as well. ‘Thanks for backing me up there. For, uh, giving me a chance to show I knew what I was doing, I guess.’ Fox did suspect she had some insecurity issues, however.

‘Driscoll needs to learn to listen to his people.’ They started walking together down the corridor between the security complex and the main ‘city’ environment. ‘He needs to learn to take decisions, sure, but he needs to listen. It’s a balancing act. He’ll get it.’

‘We spent all the time before Christmas going over individual and team tactics. I guess the next part is going to be focused on getting us all working together.’

‘That’s the idea. I don’t expect to leave on the shuttle with you guys operating as the best unit in the solar system, but I expect you to have a good start.’

‘Well, I studied the Dallas op. I mean, that was amazing. Against all the odds–’

‘You don’t want to use Dallas as an example of a hostage rescue, Pierce,’ Fox told her, her tone flat. ‘Dallas was a total cluster fuck and the only reason I’m a hero because of it is that I get lucky when the odds are against me way more than I should.’

‘Oh. It was still kind of… It’s Lenora. We’re off duty, so it’s Lenora.’

Fox flashed her the grin again, but there was an edge of tightness around the eyes now. ‘Okay, Lenora, want a drink?’

~~~

‘So what’s a girl from London doing on the Moon?’ Fox was watching people passing by the café-bar they had selected in the Earthrise Plaza rather than the girl in the ERU uniform sitting across the table from her. The Plaza and its inhabitants were still a small fascination, even after three or so weeks there. ‘Why Luna City? Why the cops?’

Pierce shrugged. ‘I was basically out of work. I’d go out of the city in summer to help with the harvest, but I was trained in computer security and electronics and couldn’t get a job using those skills. Luna was recruiting electronics technicians willing to move long term. And then the job folded after eight months when the start-up died, but Security Services wanted technicians. And by then I’d met a guy… You know how it is.’

‘He’s a cop?’

‘No. He’s management in one of the mining companies. He’s not exactly ecstatic about me going down this ERU route, but it’s a secure job and he doesn’t earn enough to support us both. Can’t stay up here for long without a reason for being here.’

Fox nodded. Luna City, and Shackleton Base which it had grown from, was the more commercial of the lunar habitats. Tranquillity was where the tourists went, and where most of the richer inhabitants of Earth’s largest satellite called home. In Luna City, you worked or you left. ‘Your husband has to be excited at the moment.’

‘The helium-three thing? He’s mostly involved with minerals, but his company is waiting to see whether they can make anything of it. No one knows which areas are going to be opened up and what the bidding process for sites is going to be like. It could be lucrative, but it’s going to be costly. Plus there are people already complaining about the “destruction of the Moon’s environment” because of the large-scale processing they’ll need to do.’

‘Which is why the ERU is being rushed ahead, right?’

‘Well, three months ago the ERU was Hepburn, Wallander, and they had me on call if they needed a technician. Then the helium mining thing started coming up more and more in political circles and the next thing we knew we had a budget and they imported Driscoll from NAPA to head up the unit. Did you know him from down there?’

Fox shook her head. ‘He ran an armed response unit in Detroit–Chicago Metro and I’m based in New York.’

‘But you don’t do antiterrorism there?’

‘I’m available if they want advice. I don’t do that kind of op these days. Dallas… Dallas kind of turned me off special operations work. I’m a detective these days. I investigate things. Mostly homicides, but sometimes I get lucky and catch something that doesn’t involve people dying.’

Pierce grinned. ‘We don’t get too many homicides up here. Not saying we get none, but our murder statistics are pretty good.’

‘Maybe it’s the view,’ Fox suggested, her gaze rising to the ceiling of the domed plaza. ‘Kind of restful.’ The image was not real: Shackleton Base had been constructed on the edge of Shackleton crater on the southern pole of the Moon and the city had been built beneath the base, for the most part, so a clear view of the Earth in all its blue and white glory was not possible, even if they were not a hundred metres under the surface. It was, however unreal, quite a beautiful sight and one Fox never got tired of looking at.

‘I think it’s because if you kill someone here, there’s nowhere to run. If you want to kill someone in Luna City, you need to be damn sure no one is going to figure out it was you.’

Fox turned her attention back to her drinking companion. ‘Lenora, very few people who commit outright murder think they’re going to get caught until after that eventuality becomes a possibility.’

‘Not even the impulse killers?’

‘Well, they don’t know they need to worry about it until it’s too late. Rule of thumb: criminals don’t worry over getting locked up, either because they don’t think they will or they know it’s part of the job.’

6th January.

Facilities on the Moon stuck to an Earth calendar because people had evolved to live in a twenty-four hour, cyclic environment. If you allowed the day to be almost seven hundred and ten hours long, given some time to adjust and acclimatise, people tended to go a bit funny. Various definitions of ‘funny’ had been used over the years, but a lot of them involved sleep deprivation and psychosis. So it was the same lunar day when Fox opened her eyes the following morning on Earth time.

Fox viewed that kind of thing as likely to bring on psychosis as well, but that was what virtual assistants were there for, right? Hers almost blocked out the overhead virtual display of Earthlight she had programmed in with various important data elements. She was reminded that it was January sixth, that Christmas decorations should be taken down before midnight, and that her first appointment was at nine. It told her that it was now zero-seven-thirty, that the shower had been turned on and set for twenty-two degrees, and that she had requested breakfast in the hotel restaurant this morning at zero-eight-hundred. The local news panel told her about maintenance operations being carried out in City Quadrant Three for the next seven days.

She pushed all of it aside and cleared out the overhead view as she pulled the sheets back and rolled out of bed. A shower would clear the sleep from her brain and coffee would get it up to speed, and then she could deal with all the daily details on her way to the debriefing.

On the other hand, she did call up her notes from the simulation session they had run the previous afternoon while the water soaked into her hair. Then, eyes still closed, she pushed that to one side and pulled an image of the shower stall up to check what the inventory of shower products was like before deciding on a lightly perfumed, frequent-use shampoo and restoring the notes window. No one who really knew Fox would have described her as vain: she could afford not to take excessive care of her appearance given her natural advantages in that area, but many who knew her would have been surprised to discover that she did actually put some effort into it. Her orange hair was a case in point: the colour was natural from the orange-red crown to the far paler, near-white tips, not dyed as a few had suggested, but she did like to make sure it was washed right. In microgravity, that was especially important because the thin strands got everywhere; at least the Moon had enough gravity to make hair issues less common. Showers, however, were a little odd: the drops tended to be bigger and they fell slower. It was weird what you had to adjust to in lowered gravity, and it was not just the way it threw your walking tempo right off.

Shutting off the water with a thought, she stepped back and engaged the air dryers, and contemplated Driscoll’s performance. The simulator software was good, one of the best training sims MarTech Services produced, and it came with an array of useful tools for the teacher. She could, for example, see where Driscoll’s attention had been focused throughout the exercise, and she could see, right there, a bad habit he was going to have to get over.

~~~

‘Back on Earth you were frontline, Lieutenant? You were one of the guys breaking in the door?’ Fox was smiling as she said it and Driscoll knew he was being set up for a dressing down, but somehow the smile made it seem like it was not too bad.

‘Yes, sir. I ran a twelve-man unit, but we always operated as three teams of four, and we didn’t have manpower to w– to spare on someone sitting back and coordinating.’

‘Didn’t have this military-class TacNet software either.’ She grinned at him. ‘I know I miss it. Used to rely on it in the Army and the UNTPP had something similar. NAPA could really do with getting up to speed.’

‘It seems… Yeah, it could be really useful.’

‘Uh-huh, but you need to use it. Now, this goes for all of you, but it goes double for your CO. All of you need to get used to this tactical software, find out what it can do for you, and what it can’t do for you. You, Lieutenant, need to learn to love it and stop sweating the detail you think you need and can only get by watching the cameras.’

‘But I can’t get a real overview of what the teams are doing without…’

Driscoll trailed off as Fox turned and a virtual display appeared behind her on the wall. It showed the TacNet graphics from the previous day with all eight camera feeds, miniaturised, on the sides. ‘This is what I’d suggest,’ she said, ‘but you can play around with it and see what suits you best. The tactical system gives you all the overview you can want and having the team views off at the sides lets you get a picture of what they’re all seeing without paying too much attention to exactly what they’re seeing. You can always enlarge an individual view if you need extra detail momentarily.’

‘And if I’d had something like that in-view, I could have seen Cutter getting attacked and maybe done something about it in time.’

‘Yeah, maybe, but Cutter shouldn’t have been where he was anyway. You were letting your enthusiasm get in the way of procedure. In a situation like that, unless you have absolute identification of anyone you find, they should be considered hostile and cuffed. Securing them should have taken priority over the security system.’

‘I don’t get the setup though,’ Belthorpe said. ‘I mean, they didn’t know when we were coming in, so were they just supposed to be sitting there waiting for us?’

Fox smiled. ‘What makes you think you had surprise?’

‘Well… All the cameras were down…’ He watched her shaking her head and frowned. ‘The cameras weren’t down?’

‘The interior cameras were down. You checked the feeds from those and got nothing so you assumed the internal security system was out. They could still access the external cameras. So while the lieutenant was watching you all stacking up, so was I, playing terrorist leader. They knew exactly when you were coming in and that it was happening on two fronts.’

‘Well, shit,’ Belthorpe grumbled.

Fox was still smiling. ‘This was your first exercise as a unit under realistic conditions and I did not make it easy for you. You screwed up, but you’re learning and there’s plenty you did right. And, frankly, it’s way better that you get it all horribly wrong now, and learn from it, and get better, than doing this for real and ending up in body bags.’

‘Amen to that,’ Driscoll muttered.

‘Too damn right. Now, we’re going to go through this step by tedious step and work out how we could have done it better, even if it was done right the first time, so I hope you all had plenty of coffee this morning.’

Tranquillity Base, 11th January.

It was the last Sunday of Fox’s stay on the Moon and she was indulging herself. They had worked through until the late evening the night before to make best use of their time, but regulations demanded one day off in a week, at least, and she had never been to the Armstrong Lunar History Facility in Mare Tranquillitatis. In the half-dozen times she had been up there, not once had she had the spare time to go to what many considered to be the most important museum in the solar system. Pierce had suggested that this fact was verging on the criminal.

Fox was not quite so sure, but it was something to do. A short hop via local, sub-orbital shuttle and she was at Tranquillity Base in Sinus Amoris. The UN had declared much of the Sea of Tranquillity to be an international treasure; all the original Apollo landing sites were managed, secured, and monitored by a UNTPP unit which ensured that no one disturbed them. There had been some talk of allowing helium-3 mining in the area, but no one was expecting that to pass. So you could not actually get near the landing sites except via telepresence tours, and the museum itself had a lot of replicas in it rather than real objects. You could look at a carefully built replica of the Eagle lander. You could compare surface activity suits down through the decades from the bulky A7L suits of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which had brought Armstrong and Aldrin to the lunar surface, through the later EMU suits used on the Space Shuttle, to the Z-series suits with their progression to more and more advanced material usage which made them thinner and more usable. There was a very, very large exhibit on spaceship bathroom technology through the ages.

There was a huge collection of displays, often showing video taken from the actual missions, of the history of lunar colonisation. That most often meant the history of the Shackleton crater area which had been viewed as the best target site for a colonisation effort since the early years of the century. The south pole of the Moon was actually inside the crater, which was over four kilometres deep. Light never reached the bottom, while there were peaks around the rim which were nearly always in light. It was almost the definition of an extreme environment, but people had landed there, dug tunnels into the surface near the edge, hunted water in the depths of the crater, and turned the place into the commercial centre it now was.

It was all terribly historic, and after an hour of it, Fox had come to the conclusion that seeing models of Chinese lunar shuttles she had seen a million times before was not doing anything for her. She went back to the main base and found the spa.

Tranquillity had been set up as a recreation centre. There was a domed structure up on the surface where you could sit and look up at a real view of Earth. Whether you got a good view depended on the relative position of the Sun and lunar administration limited the time anyone spent up there, especially during periods of high solar activity, because of the radiation, but there was something romantic about the place and it had been a popular honeymoon spot for decades. The facility management had, eventually, bowed to pressure and put in some private rooms to one side of the dome, primarily to avoid embarrassing other guests: the lure of making love with the entire world watching had been far too much for far too many.

Fox made do with a massage and the solarium fifty metres under the surface. She was already on medication to stave off any ill effects from the reduced gravity and did not want to be taking chelating agents for the radiation exposure as well. So she lay in the simulated sunlight, without the more dangerous wavelengths of course, and allowed a very well-trained android masseur to work synthetic hands over her muscles.

‘Madam is comfortable?’ The voice was a quality baritone, smooth and soft. The frame was sculpted, looking more like a mannequin than a human, but between the synthetic flesh hands and the voice, you could believe you were being worked on by a man.

‘Madam is fine. You have good hands.’

‘The Tranquillity Spa prides itself on quality of experience and I take pride in my work, whichever frame I happen to be assigned to for my shift.’

That was sort of interesting. ‘You’re an AI-four?’ Class 4 AIs, capable of truly independent thought, emotional responses, and creativity, were still relatively uncommon.

‘The Tranquillity Spa is an equal opportunities employer and class fours are more common on the Moon than you might expect to find on Earth. We have advantages here.’

‘No worries about the gravity or the radiation. Quite happy to swap bodies if required. And the lunar population is reputed to be more open to artificial life. Didn’t I hear something about them voting through regulations on artificial organics recently?’

‘The “Bioroid Act?” Yes. It gives the same rights as any other sentient to any artificially manufactured life form, assuming that it can be defined as sentient. It’s an extension of a similar law governing AIs.’

‘Very egalitarian, especially considering that that kind of thing is probably a decade away from being a real issue.’

The robot had a slight burr in its synthesis when it chuckled. ‘It is also a matter of selfishness. Humans find themselves rapidly displaced by synthetic life, especially when companies are allowed to cut corners when dealing with non-humans. Equality gives you organics a chance to compete.’

Fox chuckled in turn. ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that, but you’re right. Especially up here. I’ve got a class four sitting at home waiting for me to get back. I’m supposed to be testing it out as a personal assistant for MarTech, but then I got sent to the Moon before I could really get the hang of using a PA. Always just used a basic VA on my implant.’

‘I think,’ the masseur said, ‘that you will find the experience quite different, and far more beneficial. At some point it will become common practice for people to run fully sentient AIs on implants. The technology is not quite ready yet, but when it is I think you humans will wonder how you ever did without us.’

‘I already rely on my VA almost too much. I’m not sure what the added intelligence is going to do for me.’

‘I hope you enjoy finding out. If Madam would turn over, I shall employ my talented hands on her front.’

Fox turned. Looking up at the sculpted plastic mask with its illuminated blue eyes was not quite the same, but he did have talented hands.

Luna City.

Her feeling of relaxed contentedness lasted until Fox was stepping off the shuttle. Hepburn and Pierce were waiting for her in the arrivals lounge, in uniform and looking serious. She wondered vaguely why they had waited this long to tell her whatever they had to tell her.

‘Driscoll wanted to let you get your feet back in the city before we dumped this on you,’ Hepburn said as she walked toward them.

‘I was wondering. What’s going on?’

‘Ninety-eight minutes ago a group of armed men accompanied by military cyberframes invaded one of the office structures in quadrant two.’

Fox frowned. ‘They hit an office, on a Sunday?’

‘It has the access for New Moon Data Security’s vault in it,’ Pierce explained. ‘They have a deep shaft with a big storage vault at the bottom and they put data storage media down there. It’s write-only stuff, meant for very long-term storage of data large corporations and governments don’t want to lose.’

‘These guys are threatening to blow it up if their demands aren’t met,’ Hepburn went on. ‘Driscoll wants your help on assessing the situation and it’s been cleared past admin.’

‘Taking the term “practical exercise” a little too far, but sure, of course.’ Fox saw a notification of briefing data arriving from Pierce before she had even got the sentence out.

‘These guys seem like professionals,’ Hepburn said, ‘but they’re making political demands.’

‘Oh good,’ Fox replied as they set off into the city proper. ‘Professionals are so much easier to work with, but I hate the political cases.’

~~~

Fox walked among the figures of the four attackers as they made their way across the concourse outside the New Moon offices. Three men, one woman, all of them in fairly heavy combat suits. You could only determine the genders by looking at the hip movement when they walked. And they walked. There was no running, just determined, controlled motion.

‘These guys know what they’re doing,’ she said aloud. She was watching as two small, but very functional, combat drones provided the necessary shock, launching micromissiles at the reception frontage. ‘Security guard taken hostage?’

‘Killed,’ Driscoll replied. To Fox, his voice came out of nowhere: he was not in the simulation with her and had his attention focused on the live data feeds from the environment. ‘They don’t have hostages. Human ones anyway. They’ve cut all the security feeds in and out of the structure.’

‘A bunch like this isn’t going to be left blind… No, there, that’s what they’re using.’

Driscoll’s body appeared beside Fox. ‘You spotted something?’

Fox nodded and pointed at the view through the shattered window. She had frozen the playback to make it easier to see the figures within. Something vaguely circular and flattened was dropping from the back of one of the men. ‘That’s a Bosluis-class scout frame. Six legs and a pointed snout. They’ve got good stealth characteristics, excellent sensors.’

‘Armament?’

‘Not on those models, but they’ll put one of these Bumblebees somewhere at the back. Someone goes in the front, it’ll pop up and they’ll get a missile in the face.’ Sure enough, as the scene advanced again and the louse-like robot vanished into cover, one of the airborne robots dropped into concealment behind some seating at the back of the room. The team vanished into an elevator and the scene froze again. ‘Do we have anything else on them?’

‘Not from inside. They disabled all the network connectivity as soon as they got down to the next level. We don’t know where they are or what they’re doing. We got a video giving their demands.’ The scene around them collapsed leaving them standing in the police operations room where Driscoll was directing operations, but the virtual panel which appeared to display the video was still shared between their vision fields.

A hard-faced man, his hair shaved back to near-bald, appeared. He had hard grey-blue eyes, a hooked nose which had been broken more than once, and sharp-edged cheekbones. And Fox’s facial recognition software supplied a match before he started speaking, but she waited to hear what was said.

‘These are the demands of United Anarchy.’ He had an Afrikaans accent, which was getting to be rare these days. ‘We want the immediate release of all UA members in custody in Cold Harbour, free access to all secured data sites of the American, Canadian, Russian, and Chinese governments, and twenty million Canadian dollars to be paid into our designated accounts. We also want a shuttle made ready to return us to Earth. You have twenty-four hours to meet these demands.’

Fox let out a sharp laugh. ‘United Anarchy? Seriously?’

‘UA are known to pull operations like this,’ Driscoll said, not catching her scepticism. ‘I’d imagine you’re well aware of the kind of thing they get up to. We’re checking through their known members to see if we can identify–’

‘His name is Marick Kriel and he isn’t going to turn up on any of the watch lists for UA associates and members. He doesn’t believe in anarchy. He believes in cold, hard cash. Kriel is not doing this for UA.’

‘So this is a cover for straight extortion?’

‘Probably. How did he get this gear into the city?’

Driscoll gave a shrug. ‘I just have to deal with the fact he has it. I’ve let the regular LCSS handle that end of it.’

Fox frowned, not liking how this was all starting to look, but Driscoll did have something of a point. ‘Okay, let’s get some schematics and see if we can work out how to dig them out.’

12th January.

Fox sat at one of the tables in the eatery with a cup of bad coffee in her hands and her eyes closed. The structural schematics of the vault floated in her vision field, but she was not happy. Someone had really screwed up when they had built the place and Kriel was benefiting from it.

‘Driscoll got word back from New Moon,’ Hepburn said. Fox did not open her eyes, but she did not complain when he sat down with her either. ‘They can’t raise the money. None of the governments are willing to open up their data or Cold Harbour either. They’ve got negotiators trying to work out how to approach Kriel about it.’

‘Go in direct. They built themselves a vault which has exactly one viable point of ingress and egress. We can’t get to him so if he wants to blow himself up with that data, there’s really nothing we can do about it. But Kriel isn’t going to kill himself over this. He’s no terrorist.’

‘He’s acting like one. I mean, if this is some sort of extortion racket, shouldn’t he be asking for something he’s likely to get?’

Fox opened her eyes and looked across at the pale, handsome face opposite her. Hepburn looked tired: there were bags shading in under his brown eyes and he was scrubbing at his close-cropped, light brown hair which, she had noticed, he tended to do when fatigue was starting to set in. ‘Have you slept any?’

‘No.’

‘Go get an hour under your belt. Sometime early they’ll want to send you in.’

Hepburn’s brow creased. ‘There’s no way we can get in there without him seeing us coming and blowing the place.’

‘Nope, but they’ll want to do something. Not a great start to Driscoll’s career.’

‘Huh.’ Hepburn got to his feet. ‘I’ll try to close my eyes for a bit.’

‘Good. You’re right, though. The ransom demand doesn’t make sense. Maybe he’s expecting to negotiate it down, but…’ Fox frowned and shrugged. ‘Go get some rest.’

Pushing aside the schematics, Fox pulled up the data she had on Kriel, some of it garnered from personal impressions and some supplied by the UN Trans-Planetary Police. She still had a few contacts there and the UNTPP was generally pretty open about sharing data with other agencies anyway. Even if her departure from them had not been on the best of terms, they kept their bridges intact where they could.

Kriel was on one of their watch lists and that did not surprise Fox in the least. She had met him on an op with America Special Forces. He had been contracted to assist in anti-drug activities in sub-Saharan Africa: he knew the territory, knew the people, and he had a strong, disciplined unit available for hire. The Army had hired him and he had done his job, but Fox had got the distinct impression that Kriel was always up for switching sides if the money told him to. He was a good tactician but not such a great strategist, so maybe he had come up with this idea and not thought it through… Somehow that was just not sitting right in Fox’s mind. Nothing in the updated data from the UNTPP suggested that Kriel had turned political and yet he had locked himself up in a bunker with one exit. It was a good plan for a terrorist with nothing to lose, but it was just plain dumb for a mercenary. There had to be a backup plan.

~~~

‘Pierce, what do you know about mining operations in the crater?’

Pierce was blinking rapidly as she tried to focus. ‘Wha– I was… Where am I? Mining?’

Fox leaned forward on the table Pierce had been lying on. ‘Sorry, you were asleep. Your husband is in mining, right? What do you, or he, know about the mining operations in Shackleton crater?’

‘Uh… They aren’t mining in–’

‘No, but they did some. Back when they were setting up the base, they knew there was a higher hydrogen signature in the crater.’

‘Oh! Oh, yeah. They thought it might be water ice so they did some exploratory mining. Turned out it wasn’t, but they managed to pull out some useful tritium and helium-three. Then the whole “international resource” thing put a stop to it and they’ve been waiting ever since to find out whether they could reopen it. Word is that they’ve found better sources for the helium anyway.’

‘But the mining gear was left down there?’

‘That I don’t know. Hold on. Aden won’t be pleased, but…’ Fox got a local call connection request through from her internal telepresence system as Pierce linked up with her, and a frame appeared in-vision indicating that a call was going through. A second or two later a good-looking, blonde-haired man who looked younger than Pierce appeared in the frame, rubbing at his eyes. ‘Aden, this is Inspector Meridian. We need some advice.’

Aden blinked, which was kind of cute considering that he was probably looking at both women through a virtual interface. ‘Advice from me? Uh… okay. Uh, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Inspector. Lenora has been gushing about you since you got here.’

‘Aden…’ Pierce whined. ‘The old mining operations down in Shackleton crater, would they have left the gear down there?’

‘Well… depends on the gear. That wasn’t my company. Before my time. As I recall, they were hoping that they could reopen operations. Even if all they could do was pull out the hydrogen, they’ve got useful resources there. They likely left some of the heavier gear in situ because it takes energy to haul it out and then back.’

‘Like the cutting equipment?’ Fox asked.

‘Yeah. Uh, it’s possible anyway. Typically they’ll be using five-metre mining worm cyberframes. They’ll bring in infomorphs to run them when needed and the frames aren’t costly enough that they couldn’t leave them in place for a while.’

‘Right. Thank you, Aden, that’s what I was hoping you’d say. That’s how he’s doing it. That’s his backup.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Pierce said.

‘That makes two of us,’ Aden put in, looking bemused. ‘This is something to do with this situation at New Moon?’

‘Yes,’ Fox replied. ‘I think you’ve managed to give me what I need to get this all worked out.’

‘Great, because that place is pretty important right now. Most of the mining companies use it for off-site data backup, and the UN’s helium-three commission is holding all their records there. It was supposed to be the safest place on the Moon for data storage.’

‘The UN commission is using that place? I thought it was just an archive.’

‘They have the deep archive, but New Moon also does secure off-site data storage and physically secure temporary storage. The commission is due to give out its findings soon and if they were to lose all that data… People could lose a lot of money.’

‘Yeah,’ Fox said. ‘Now this is starting to make more sense. Lenora, we need to talk to Driscoll and the negotiation team.’

~~~

Fox’s virtual assistant picked up on the v-tagged data elements in the operations room, accessed the feeds, authenticated her access, and showed her the imagery Driscoll and Seeforth, the negotiator, were seeing, all in the second it took for her to walk from the door to the two men. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked as she took in the view, which looked like it was being taken from a camera in an elevator.

‘They agreed to have a remote frame sent in to handle the communications,’ Seeforth replied.

‘You’re going to go in and tell them their demands won’t be met?’

‘I’m going to tell them that they can get out of this with their lives.’

‘There’s something–’

‘I’ll handle things at this point, Inspector. If Driscoll needs advice on handcuffing them, he can ask you about it.’

Fox watched as a personal message was passed through from Driscoll. He isn’t big on having his publicity shadowed by anyone else. She would have laughed except that political cops were high on her hate list and Seeforth had just been placed on it. On the other hand, if she was wrong he might actually talk sense to Kriel, and if she was right then nothing Seeforth could do was going to change anything.

The elevator doors opened and the drone they were watching through was being steered out into a corridor. ‘Where is this, and who’s driving?’ Fox asked.

Driscoll flicked up a schematic of the New Moon offices with a marker showing the drone’s position on the floor below the reception level. ‘They have the main communications and short-term data storage on this level.’

‘Uh-huh.’ That seemed to be where Kriel’s team were located, and that made sense.

‘Barnes is operating the drone. Looks like they’ve set up their position at the entrance to the vault.’

‘My turn,’ Seeforth said as the heavily built form of Kriel came into view on the screen. Seeforth was patching his voice through to the robot’s audio output. ‘Mister Kriel, I’m Captain Jason Seeforth. I’ll be handling communications here.’

Fox noticed the slight emphasis the man put on ‘captain.’ She had met the type before, mostly in the Army: men who had been handed rank for political or administrative reasons who believed they had earned it. They thought other people would be impressed by it. Fox was fairly sure Kriel would not have been impressed anyway. The mercenary stood impassively, the weapon pod on the right arm of his combat spacesuit resting easily at the ready. He had taken his helmet off, at ease with the situation, relaxed and confident. Behind him a pair of heavy armoured doors stood open: the security doors leading to the transport elevator of the vault itself.

‘You will meet our demands or your precious data will be destroyed,’ Kriel stated.

‘I’m fairly sure you didn’t go down there expecting all of your demands to be met,’ Seeforth said. ‘You’re cornered. Yes, you’re in a position to destroy the vault, but you’ll die too. You don’t want to die, do you, Mister Kriel?’

‘You doubt our commitment to the cause. Of course you do. You believe, as all government clones believe, that money and order are the only truth. United Anarchy is here to prove that your government is nothing but a passing phase, a historical footnote. We will demonstrate our commitment.’ Reaching out with his left hand, he picked up his helmet. ‘We detonate the perimeter bombs in ten seconds.’

Seeforth’s eyes widened. ‘What? You can’t be serious!’ But Kriel was busy locking his armoured helmet in place.

Fox grabbed Driscoll’s arm and pulled him back, away from the negotiator. ‘This is all about to go downhill faster than a greased snowboarder. You’ll need to get in and clear the bot they left in reception and get fire control teams down to the lower level.’

‘But–’

She held up a hand. ‘Kriel’s playing us. With your permission I’d like to take Hepburn and his team outside. If I’m right, you won’t meet much resistance in there and Kriel is going to be trying to leave.’

‘How? If we’re going in through the front, where is he going?’

Her answer was postponed as they heard Seeforth’s voice. ‘Shit!’

The drone appeared to be on its side, but it was still transmitting. There was noise and chaos coming over the link, the light from flames could be seen flickering on the wall, and they heard Kriel’s voice. ‘Idiot! You’ve set off all of–’ Then there was another flare and the image went to snow.

‘Lost it,’ Barnes announced from the back of the room.

‘Shit!’ Seeforth exclaimed. ‘Shit, shit… What the fuck was he…? Shit!’

‘You still want to go outside?’ Driscoll asked, ignoring the confused captain.

‘Yeah. Get in there and secure what you can. If I’m right, Kriel is on his way down.’

‘Down? There’s nothing below there except the vault.’

‘The vault, and the bottom of Shackleton crater.’

Shackleton Crater.

Endurance Mining and Extraction had been named for the ship Ernest Shackleton had taken on an ill-fated expedition to Antarctica, according to Pierce’s partner. The ship had been trapped in ice and crushed, and the company had been left in financially dire straits after they had had to shut down their operations in the crater, so maybe the name had been a bad choice. Aden had checked and, at the time, they did not have the funds to get their equipment out. Now they were doing better but hoping it could still be used since they had prior rights. They had left behind several mining frames, a couple of heavy pressurised trucks, and a prefabbed habitation unit designed for short-term occupation when humans needed to be in the crater for an extended period. It was all supposed to be shut down and out of use.

‘I’m registering EM emissions,’ Pierce said as the team closed in on the structure from the light transport they had used to get down the sloping walls of the crater. ‘There’s something active in there.’

‘We know they’ve got robots, probably autonomous ones,’ Hepburn said, ‘so everyone keep your eyes open and watch for movement. We don’t think they can be out of the vault this fast, but we don’t know, and we don’t know what they might have left around here.’

Fox listened to the interplay, half her attention on a TacNet display she was sharing with Driscoll. This was a far more practical end-of-course exercise than she had planned for the ERU, but if they got out of it without any casualties then it was certainly proof that they had learned what she was teaching. So far, so good.

‘Can we get a camera drone in to sweep the area?’ Hepburn asked.

‘Not rigged for zero atmosphere,’ Pierce replied, ‘but I’ve got a micromissile with an infrared camera. Won’t give us much flight time, but–’

‘Better than nothing.’

There was a short pause and then a small projectile was flying out across the crater floor, invisible in the darkness and inaudible in the vacuum. Half a second after it fired, the image feed from the missile appeared in everyone’s vision field. Everything was pretty damn cold in the eternal darkness of the crater, so the fact that the habitation unit was far warmer was quite obvious, and the gunbot which hauled itself out of the regolith in response to the disturbance stood out well against the dust. It fired on the missile, missed, and then figured out that there were other heat sources there with it, further away. It was turning its weapon mount toward the team when Hepburn’s own micromissile blew it apart.

‘Anything else?’ the team leader asked. ‘Everyone remember to watch for heat build-up in your weapons. Heat dissipates poorly in a vacuum.’

‘Motor’s burned out on the shell,’ Pierce said, ‘and I didn’t see anything else warmer than the grit. They could be inside.’

‘Any sign that the mining robots have been used?’ Driscoll asked over their link.

‘No sign of them here,’ Pierce replied. ‘They should be sitting down here with the habitat and the trucks. I’d say that’s an indication that someone’s used them for something.’

‘You can’t see where they cut in?’

‘The crater floor is too big and all the same temperature. We could maybe find signs of where they cut in, but the company was digging down here before now. It’s likely they extended existing tunnels rather than cutting entirely new ones.’

‘There’s nothing down here that can extract them,’ Fox said. ‘We’re supposed to think they’re dead or buried in the archive vault. So they come out here, hole up in the habitat, keep quiet for a while until everyone’s busy trying to dig them out, and then a shuttle drops in here to exfil.’

‘So we set up in their cabin and ambush them?’ Hepburn suggested.

‘If our expert agrees, I think that’s a damn good plan,’ Driscoll replied.

‘No such thing as an expert in this,’ Fox said. ‘The paid consultant thinks it’s better than an open position with no idea which direction they’ll come from.’

‘Do it.’

~~~

There was a slight hiss as the airlock door pushed out and then slid off to one side. The locks on prefabbed units rarely, if ever, managed to get a perfect balance before they opened and there was generally some equalisation. The interior lights sprang to life, bright blue-white LED bulbs which turned the darkness into almost uncomfortable incandescence. Kriel stepped out into the habitat proper and came to a grinding halt.

‘Luna City Security Services,’ Hepburn said through the speaker in his helmet. ‘Move into the structure slowly and divest yourselves of all weaponry.’ Flanking him were Pierce and Fox; the other end of the semi-cylindrical room was held by the other two members of the team.

Kriel was surrounded, and he knew it, and that worried Fox more than anything. ‘Looks like the bastard wants it all for himself,’ Kriel growled. ‘There’s four of us and five of you, but we have hardsuits and you don’t.’

‘And you’re surrounded by people with armour-piercing bullets in their guns,’ Hepburn replied. ‘You give it up now, no one has to get hurt.’

‘Huh… Steyn.’

Something shot out of the airlock, hit the wall opposite, and erupted into brilliant, white light. Flare protection cut in on everyone’s visors, but there was a moment of blindness and disorientation. Kriel had been ready for it. Fox had reacted to the name being called instead of the flash, but when she could see properly Hepburn was lying on his back with Kriel’s armoured boot on his faceplate and Kriel was holding Pierce off the ground by her throat with his weapon pod’s barrels pressed into her side. Fox rolled to her feet from where she had thrown herself and looked around to check that the airlock door was closing.

Kriel eyed her. ‘Open it.’

Fox smiled and raised her weapon. ‘No.’

Kriel looked down at the pistol Fox was holding. The ERU team were carrying standard-issue, light weapon pods, devices which mounted to the user’s arm housing an automatic rifle and a micromissile launcher. Fox was holding what looked like a compact machine pistol. It was not a familiar design; in fact, there was exactly one of them anywhere in the solar system, and it belonged to Fox. To a man in space combat armour it did not look that threatening, but she held it raised, aimed at his head. ‘Open the lock or we’ll find out how bulletproof your friend’s armour is.’ Kriel said, his voice level.

‘No. If you kill Pierce there, I’m going to set off the mine we planted in the airlock. Three people in hard armour locked in a pressurised container with a bomb. To be honest, I’m not sure what’s going to happen there, but I’d imagine we’ll have to spoon them out of their suits.’

‘You didn’t–’

‘I just armed it,’ Fox told him, arming the remote firing system as she said so. ‘Ask them if they see it.’

There was a slight pause and then, ‘First Lieutenant Fox Meridian. I remember you. Always the one with the clever plan. Always the one who thought it through.’

‘It’s Inspector Meridian now, Kriel. I’m with NAPA. You just caught some bad luck that I was teaching these guys how to beat scum like you when you pulled this op.’

‘Should’ve taught them better. Open the door or the girl dies.’

Fox’s smile broadened. ‘I think I’ll just blow your friends to crap instead.’ Her gun remained level, but her eyes dipped away from him as though looking down at something only she could see. Kriel’s arm moved, swinging out and away from Pierce, and Fox’s gun fired. Magnetic coils accelerated a metal needle, throwing it out with a sharp crack as it exceeded the speed of sound. It punched through the faceplate on Kriel’s helmet and then through his right eye. Fox was moving forward and grabbing his weapon pod, forcing it up and back even as Kriel was dropping Pierce to the deck. A second later they were both holding him down, but it was wasted effort.

‘I think he’s dead,’ Pierce said, looking in through the faceplate, which was badly cracked but already covered in blood.

‘Yeah…’ Fox agreed, frowning. ‘Hepburn? You with us?’

‘Fifty-fifty,’ the team’s leader replied, sitting up. ‘I think he hit me with a pile driver.’

‘And now you know why battles in close confines should be avoided. Want to see if the others want to be disarmed or detonated?’

‘Yeah. I’m on it, but you know there’s someone else in on this? He thought someone gave him up to take all of the loot.’

‘I noticed. I think that’s one for your investigative division, but…’

‘I heard him too,’ Driscoll said. ‘If you’ve got any thoughts on how to catch this outside man… Well, let’s just say the ERU could use an extra credit after the mess in the vault here.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Fox replied.

Luna City, 13th January.

The reception level of New Moon Data Security’s offices was still a mess. Fire had managed to get up through the elevator shaft from the floor below before the emergency teams could control it. It was crazy really; they were on the Moon, surrounded by a considerable amount of vacuum, which was very, very good at smothering fires, but it was not possible to use it without endangering the whole quadrant of the city.

The small cyberframe hidden away in one of the reception room’s ventilation ducts had gone unnoticed because everyone had been far too busy making sure the fire was out and starting the operation to clear the elevator shafts. With everything stable for now, the area had been cleared until morning and the little robot was free to emerge when it received the signal it had been waiting for. It scuttled out of the trashed room on six little legs and had just made it to the door when a voice broke the silence.

‘It’s a clever plan, Seeforth. I have to admit that I didn’t tag you for it.’

Eyes wide, Seeforth spun on the spot. The tick-like shell scuttled about his feet like a slightly disgusting puppy. Fox ignored it, watching the cop as he tried to work out how he was going to get out of this.

‘Meridian? What are you doing here? I was just–’

‘Picking up the data Kriel’s people dug out of the offline storage downstairs. None of them are talking, because that’s how idiots like that are. It’s professional integrity, despite the fact that they’ll get screwed over while you walk away rich. It’s the helium-three mining allocations, right? You get the details on which areas are going to be opened up for mining, sell them to the right people, you make millions, they make billions. Let me guess. You need the money for pulling in voting delegations. You want your political career to shift into high gear and you either need charisma or money.’ Fox saw the moment when he worked out that she was standing there alone, not holding a gun, not immediately arresting him. She knew what was coming.

Seeforth pulled a snub-nosed automatic from behind his back and aimed it at her. ‘Both is a lot better. What do you want? A few hundred thousand?’

‘No, I really don’t need the money. Technically I can’t arrest you here because I’m not a cop. Otherwise I’d be pointing a gun at you. I could defend myself now, of course. I don’t think you’d die as fast as Kriel. I’d have to hip-shoot and you’d catch a burst in the gut.’

‘Are you insane? I’ve got the drop on you. I’m… I’m going to have to kill you.’

Fox shook her head. ‘I think they might take exception to that.’

‘They? No one’s going to–’

He stopped as the entire ERU moved out of cover around the lobby area, all of them with raised weapons, aside from Driscoll who stepped up beside Fox with a pair of handcuffs in his hands. ‘Drop the gun,’ Driscoll ordered, ‘or there won’t be enough of you left to identify.’ There was a clatter as the pistol hit the ground. Fox winced. ‘Want to put the cuffs on him?’ Driscoll asked. ‘You figured out the way they were making the drop.’

‘Your collar. Pierce and Barnes located the bot. Besides, I don’t think I want to dirty my hands by touching the prick. I hate political cops.’

Part Two: Lunar Transit Blues

Lunar Transit Shuttle, 14th January 2060.

They did not bother putting windows of any sort in the economy cabins on lunar transit shuttles which only tended to add to the somewhat claustrophobic feel of them. There were good reasons for it, to do with radiation and the dangers of microimpacts, but it did not lessen the fact that a sterile, white, rectangular cupboard with little in it aside from a single bunk bed was not exactly the most exciting place to spend the two days of a typical Earth–Moon transit flight.

In Fox’s case, lying in the spartan room was just making her feel like repainting the place in blood. You could, if you wished, activate a virtual environment system and give the place more colour, but she generally found that made it more claustrophobic. They said that long-term spaceflight was more likely to result in suicide than any other form of transport, and she could well believe it. At least there were some vaguely entertaining sensies in the ship’s library. She was enjoying the rush of a high-speed buggy ride across the plains of the Arcadia region of Mars when a message pop-up alerted her to someone requesting access to her cubicle.

Mars dissolved into white walls and she shook her head to clear it of the false motion before rolling into a sitting position and selecting the lock release the virtual assistant on her implant was offering her. The door slid open and two men looked in at her. She was not entirely sure whether they were embarrassed or nervous, but she recognised both of them and they had no reason to be either. Just in case she had not remembered their names, her VA inserted them into her vision field for reference and she pushed the tags aside with a thought. ‘Captain Morris, Lieutenant Parsons… What can I do for you?’ She would have invited them in, but there really was little to the room aside from the bed and a small space to stand.

‘Inspector Meridian,’ Morris said, ‘you were checked aboard with a weapon?’

‘Your colleague checked it in and made sure it was correctly stowed, Captain.’

‘We need to check it again.’

Shrugging, but suspecting that this was going to turn into a problem of some sort, Fox reached up to the small overhead stowage box above her bunk and pulled out a slim, metal briefcase. It required her thumb and a coded signal from her implant to unlock it. She cracked the latches with the case sitting beside her and then turned it so that Parsons could open it up. The security and comms officer had seen her pistol before, but she noticed Morris frowning at it. Parsons took a handheld diagnostic tool from his belt and began interrogating the weapon’s on-board computer.

‘I don’t recognise the design,’ Morris commented.

‘You wouldn’t. MarTech aren’t marketing them yet, though I hear the rifle versions are going out to specialist military units in the next few months. What’s this about, Captain?’

Rather than answering, Morris looked at his security officer. ‘Like I said,’ Parsons said as he straightened up, ‘there’s no way it was her. It was last fired two days ago. You were in on that business in the crater, right?’

‘Yeah. I shot a mercenary in the eye with it.’

‘In which case, Inspector,’ Morris said, his shoulders sagging a little, ‘I’d like to ask for your help.’ He lowered his voice, just in case not everyone in the cubicle block was plugged into a sensie, but she knew what he was going to say before he said it. ‘One of our passengers appears to have been murdered.’

~~~

‘So this is how the other half lives,’ Fox said as she took in the scene in the largest of the ship’s cabins. If you wanted to shell out for the space, or you were travelling with someone, you could get a cabin instead of a bunk. The smaller ones were not exactly spacious, but you got two bunks and space to sit down. This one was the first-class cabin, with a double bed, a desk, and a couple of comfy chairs, and even a shower cubicle. ‘Or dies anyway.’ The victim had paid for his own first-class cabin and had died slumped over the desk. ‘He hasn’t been moved?’

‘We were going to radio Detroit for instructions,’ Morris said, ‘and then Mark remembered you were on board…’

‘You need to notify them anyway. Tell them you’ve got a dead passenger and a detective on site, and that I’ll forward an initial assessment as soon as possible.’ Her eyes scanned the room, software in her implant adding detail and sharpening the image as she did so. ‘Not that I’m going to be able to do much. I don’t have the right equipment.’

‘I’m more concerned that we might have a murderer on the ship.’

‘It’s not likely that someone’s going to wig out and kill everyone. To be honest, this looks like a hit. Who was he?’

‘Sanderson Hunt,’ Parsons replied. ‘He was a sales rep for MarTech, according to the documentation I have on him.’

Fox took a step into the room. ‘Travelling alone? Anyone else from the company aboard?’ The corpse had an obvious puncture wound in the back, just left of the spine, maybe through the heart. It looked like a large-calibre bullet, but there was something a little odd about it.

‘Yes and not that I know of.’

‘He was shot in the back. If someone had opened the door, he would have turned around to see who it was, so they had to be in here already, and he was happy enough to be facing away from them…’

‘That just makes things weirder. The ship’s systems detected a problem because his biomonitor indicated a flat-line condition. There was an attendant here inside of a minute and no sign of anyone around this area. The door had to be opened from the bridge. The other two cabins are empty and locked so the killer couldn’t have slipped into one of those.’

‘You’ve checked them? Visually, I mean.’

‘Right after I drew a zapper from the locker.’

Fox gave a nod. ‘I’m going to look around. Rooms like this are a bitch for collecting evidence anyway. I doubt we’d have got anything conclusive. Have you got a bag we can put him in for storage until we get to solid ground? And I’ll probably need to contact NAPA.’

‘I’ll make sure you have the communications authorisation,’ Morris said. ‘We’ll move you into cabin two, give you some room to work. Call it an in-flight upgrade. Company policy is that we can upgrade a passenger if we have reason, and right now I can’t think of a better one.’

‘Thanks,’ Fox said, flashing him a smile. ‘I’m not going to say no. Those cubicles depress the Hell out of me.’

The captain shrugged. ‘Long term, you either get used to them or you walk out of an airlock one day and don’t come back.’

~~~

Fox stood up and stretched, pushing up onto the balls of her feet and reaching up until her palms flattened against the ceiling. She could have managed another few centimetres with no trouble, but pushing between the two surfaces stressed her muscles a little and felt good. You could not do this in the cubicles. In the cubicles her head almost touched the ceiling, and if you were over six feet tall you had to stoop.

‘Subject appears to have been shot with a high-calibre weapon,’ she said, mostly for the benefit of her own ears: the transcript of her words was being typed out by the word-processing software on her implant. ‘Ten or fifteen millimetre with an explosive warhead, judging from the observed entry wound and apparent internal damage. The probability of recovering usable fragments is low.’

There was, unfortunately, no shower in the smaller cabins. Flight times on the transfer shuttles were not exactly short, but they were also not long enough that you needed all the modern conveniences of planetary living. It was a shame: after dealing with Hunt’s body, a shower would have been nice. There was a small washbasin in the toilet cubicle, however. She had not bothered putting extra clothing on to go to the scene, so she just had to strip off her plazkin bodysuit to wash. The garment was thin, slightly translucent, and purple. Fox had a thing for purple. The print design she currently favoured was long-sleeved, high-collared, string-backed, with enough structure that it acted as a bra. Morris and Parsons had not said anything, but they seemed to appreciate it. She briefly considered the idea that she should have thrown some jeans on earlier, but she was not, technically, on the clock.

‘The ship does not run surveillance on the corridors as standard,’ she went on as she dried her face. ‘However, there are no indications that any of the other passengers were out of their cubicles around the time of death. That leaves crew, but the captain is pretty sure of their positions around that time and doesn’t think any of them were near the scene.’

She wiped splashes from her breasts and stomach, glancing down at the pale skin and the muscles bunching beneath it. ‘A month in one-sixth gravity and you’re getting flabby, girl.’ The processor package did not record her words for posterity, which was probably good given that she was lying to herself to make sure she went to the gym when she got back. She had a good figure, no sense in denying it. She was fit, strong, long in the legs, and with a reasonably full bust. Her hips, she thought, could have been wider, but they were solid and her waist was neither excessively narrow nor too wide. The Army had helped her physique a little with muscle enhancements, but they only really showed when she put effort into something.

Someone had told her once that she had hard features. Her jaw was firm and she had wide cheekbones over sunken cheeks, but her nose had a nice curve to it and her lips were full. Her eyes could be a little icy, but there was a slightly green tint to the blue, which she thought took the edge off. Quite why the comment had bothered her she was not sure since she took pride in being as tough as anyone she worked with, male or female, but it had stung a little…

Oh, and there was her hair. Her hair was why people called her Fox. Orange-red at the crown, it was an untidy mess which refused to stay properly combed, but it feathered out as it descended around her face turning to a paler, near-white as it went. When she was a child, someone had told her she looked like she had a fox on her head, and she had broken their nose and split their lip. Her parents had grounded her for a month and told her that violence was never the answer, but it had made her feel better. The nickname had still stuck and she had grown to like it.

‘The body has been sealed in a bag for return to Earth and placed in the medical bay,’ she said, resuming the transcript process. ‘I suggest a full autopsy, though I doubt we’ll get any useful details out of it. This seems too well planned for a random kill, and no serial is going to risk trapping themselves in an environment like this… Well, unless they’re escalating in the hope of being stopped, but I don’t have any data on a killer with this kind of MO. That leaves a hit, but why would someone want to hit a salesman for MarTech?’ Jackson might know, but she was not going to bother him unless she was really assigned to the case, and this pretty clearly fell under UNTPP’s jurisdiction. ‘Personal effects have been placed in secure storage by the ship’s security officer and can be retrieved when required. The only noteworthy item was an unidentified data stick found plugged into the console. The contents remain unverified.’

Closing the file, she signed and encrypted it, dropped it into a transmission envelope, and had her implant pass it off to the ship’s comms system for immediate transmission to NAPA. Then she flicked open the internal comms access and put a call through to Morris.

‘Inspector Meridian? I see we’re transmitting an encrypted message for you.’ Morris’s voice came through the room’s speakers, sounding slightly irked.

‘Nothing much to report and the encryption is standard. He was shot with a fairly large gun, using an explosive round. If someone can sneak something like that aboard then they can hide it from a search, but you’re welcome to try finding it. My guess is we’ll end up quarantined on arrival until they can sweep the ship and question the passengers and crew.’

There was a sigh. ‘That was what I was expecting. Thank you for your efforts, Inspector.’

‘I’ll let you know if they send anything back before we arrive. I’m going to try to grab some sleep.’

‘Sleep well.’

15th January.

She did not. There were nights when sleep was not her friend and, apparently, this was one of them. The nightmares were never identical, but they were always the same, always about the same event: the last op she had ever done for the UNTPP. The Dallas operation. The reason she had a custom handgun designed and personally built by Jackson Martins.

Waking with a start from another burst of automatic weapons fire which had never, in fact, claimed her life, Fox rolled out of the bottom bunk and stumbled across to the sink to splash cold water on her face and, hopefully, get rid of some of the sweat. The water was not really cold enough, but her brain started to function a little as she blinked at herself in the mirror.

As usual, the imagery was not really staying with her. She had perfectly good, or bad, real memories of the Dallas op without needing the ones her dreaming mind came up with, but there was something which had prodded real memories to the fore. One of the terrorists had been using a micromissile launcher firing infrared-homing projectiles. Those had had armour-piercing warheads, but gyroc micromissiles were specifically designed for specialist warhead delivery. They were not so good at short range, however; being small rockets, they needed space to accelerate and there had been something a little odd about Hunt’s entry wound…

Grabbing her shiny plastic bodysuit, she pulled it on and sealed it before padding out of her cabin and across to cabin one, otherwise known as ‘the crime scene.’ The door unlocked and opened on her command, though she expected one of the flight crew to ask her what she was up to fairly quickly. In truth she was not really sure, but she had a feeling that the gun used to kill Hunt had never left the room.

She looked around at the desk. He had been sitting there, on one side of the room. The room was not wide enough for a gyroc to reach full speed, but wide enough to get up to a workable velocity against an unarmoured target. Still, the killer would have wanted as much room as possible… Fox crossed to the opposite wall and began looking around. A small launcher could be hidden fairly easily; micromissiles required little more than a tube and something to signal ignition.

‘Inspector?’ The voice came from the room’s speakers and she did not recognise it. A woman this time, one of the relief shift, probably. ‘This is Lieutenant Bright on the bridge. Is something wrong?’

And that was when Fox saw the flicker of unusual edges highlighted by her visual enhancement software and spotted the short tube poking out of a half-concealed air vent in the cabin’s ceiling. ‘No, Lieutenant, nothing’s wrong. I just found our murder weapon. Could you get one of your engineering staff down here with a screwdriver?’

~~~

The insistent chiming was in Fox’s head and in her ears. Her implant was echoing the room’s communications alert into her sleeping brain and dragging her out of an attempt to get back her lost sleep. A thought banished both sounds and she was sure her voice carried her disapproval of the disturbance when she spoke. ‘Yes? What is it?’

‘Inspector? Sorry to disturb you, it’s Parsons. We’re about an hour out of orbital insertion and I have a Captain Canard wanting to talk to you.’

Canard was calling her very long distance now? Crap. ‘Put him through, please. Uh, audio only?’

‘At this distance, video gives you a headache and you’ll notice the delay on the audio. Putting it through.’

There was a click and Fox said, ‘Captain? It’s Meridian.’ She rolled out of bed and reached for her suit. If they were going to dock soon… Well, maybe ninety minutes anyway… She was not going to get back to sleep anyway.

‘What’ve you got yourself into this time, Inspector?’ The question was snapped out and Fox did not need video to see the man fuming at his desk in precinct 19’s HQ. She closed the seams on her suit and reached for her jeans.

‘This homicide? They just asked me to look at the body because I was aboard. There’s nothing I can do, really. Don’t have the gear, don’t have the jurisdiction.’

There really was a noticeable delay. She figured he had started speaking before she got the last word out. ‘Jurisdiction is the problem. Technically it’s the UniFeds’ case, but this guy was a US citizen on a US ship about to come down to US airspace and someone up the chain is pulling strings. UNTPP have agreed to let NAPA handle it so long as they’re kept in the loop and you handle the investigation.’

‘Crap,’ Fox stated flatly. If someone was pressing to have the case handled by American rather than international police, it was either political or intelligence, or both. It did look like a hit rather than something random or personal.

She had not meant to leave so long a gap and Canard spoke into it. ‘Yeah, that. This is probably politics, Meridian. I don’t like it when my detectives are involved in politics.’ No, he wanted to be sure he was the one in the limelight all the time. Another political cop. ‘You report directly to me and you get this wrapped up clean and quick.’

‘Yes, sir. Can you get a forensics unit to meet the transport at the station? I doubt there’s much it can get out of the room, but it’s worth checking. I’ll need full backgrounds run on the crew and passengers too.’

There was a slightly longer than usual pause and then, ‘Done. See you on the ground, Inspector.’ Canard was an asshole, but when he knew it was in his best interests he was efficient.

‘Great,’ she said after making sure the comms were off. ‘Just great.’ She pulled up a messenger app window and wrote a quick note into it: Assigned to murder of Sanderson Hunt. Need anything you have on him. Thanks, Fox. Then she encrypted it with the package Jackson had given her specifically for sending him messages, tagged it with his address, and sent it to the ship’s server for transmission. That was going to be a lot faster than the official route which she was also going to have to take. Then she opened up a channel to the bridge. ‘Captain Morris, it’s Inspector Meridian.’

‘Yes, Inspector,’ Morris replied immediately.

‘Looks like I’ve been assigned this murder case, Captain. I need to talk to the assistant who found the body, and if you could get Parsons to archive every bit of logged data he’s got on a stick for me, it’ll save us time at the station.’

‘He’ll get right on it and I’ll have Wenton report to your cabin. To be honest, I’m glad it’s you. If we had to wait for the Lensmen to get involved…’

Fox shook her head; no one much liked the UNTPP. ‘Right. Well, I’ll do my best not to delay you too much.’ Cutting the channel, she pulled on her running shoes and then grabbed her jacket. She was not back on the streets, but there was work to be done, and she intended to dress the part.

Eagle Station, High Earth Orbit.

There were UNTPP technicians waiting for the ship to arrive at the station, but they seemed to be happy enough to let Fox handle the actual work, deferential, in fact, and they called her ‘Captain Meridian’ which did not put her in the best of moods, but it did speed things along. They handed over a large case, which was basically the same as the forensic investigation units she was used to, and then began arranging transfer of the corpse with Morris.

Being at the station made things a little easier, and a lot more of a pain. The ship was no longer spinning, so it had no gravity. The station had spin gravity, and it was large enough that that was near enough Earth-normal, but not in the hangar bay the ship was in. So getting the case down to the cabin to deploy was easy, but then actually setting the swarm to work was harder.

The forensic kit had a number of strings to its sensory bow, all of them designed to be used on a relatively intact crime scene, which meant that the results were going to be patchy and if anything was actually found it would likely be dismissed in court. The scanning head was fine to operate: its job was to record every bit of visual evidence there was, in laser-scanned 3D, and terahertz radar. The latter might well have spotted the gyroc launcher given that it could penetrate the light structural plastic of the walls. There was an airborne chemical analysis feature on the ladar too, but that was going to be really useless this long after the event in a room with life support and air filters.

The difficult bit was the microbot swarm. Thousands of tiny, plastic ants equipped with a variety of basic sensors and an ability to collect anything needing more analysis, they could be dispatched from the forensic unit to crawl over every square centimetre of the room. Except that they were not really designed for microgravity so their progress was slowed. It would take even longer than usual to get the results, and Fox was quite sure that the results would be useless. She was going to get too much data. Experience said so, aside from anything else, but she knew that people had been all over the room since the murder so she was going to have to eliminate herself and several members of the crew from anything she found just because of that. How many people had used that cabin in the past year? Because the little robot insects would find skin cells or hairs, or random patches of bodily fluid, going back at least that far. Yes, she could probably narrow the results down some, and she was focusing her tiny workers on specific areas of interest rather than the whole room, but she was going to end up with dozens of suspects.

So Fox hung in the air near the door to the cabin, her eyes closed, and went over the files Canard had sent up to her about the crew and the victim. Full checks were still ongoing, but she had, at least, basic profiles on all of them. Morris and several of the other flight crew were ex-military; a lot of people went into spacecraft crewing after one of the services so that was not unusual. Parsons had been UNTPP, which was a little more out of the ordinary, but he was in charge of security and his training would be good for that. Not one of the crew had any particular political leaning. All but two of them had their registered votes delegated to someone on-planet, and one of those two had not used his voting rights for over five years.

Hunt was a pretty typical guy, from his profile. Home school, degree in economics from Philadelphia, job with MarTech Services which had resulted in him handling several lunar contracts for the past two years… And she had a distinct feeling she was looking at bogus data. Sanderson Hunt was just too clean to be real, and there was a hole in his education and work records which she was sure someone could explain, but to Fox it all just stank of NIX.

The National Intelligence Executive had been put together in 2030, supposedly as an exercise in cost-cutting and government footprint reduction. Civilian and military intelligence agencies were all squashed in under one roof so that there was no duplication of effort. Four years later the North American Police Administration had been formed out of federal, state, and local police agencies on a similar basis, but there had always been more rumours of conspiracy hanging around NIX. NAPA had been a success; people liked NAPA and viewed them… Well, no one viewed them as being worse than the old police agencies and most people thought they were a little more responsive. The drive for lower and lower footprint in the national administrative services meant that people were always looking for ways to reduce NAPA’s remit, but it was the police, and NIX was the Big Brother nightmare intelligence agency the people of the early twenty-first century had worried about, according to Fox’s history lessons.

Of course, proving Hunt was a spy of some sort, or finding out what he had been up to, was probably going to be impossible, but it did provide potential motives, and it did explain the pressure to have his murder investigated by American cops.

And then her implant threw up a message receipt indicator, and she noted the sender and opened it immediately. Re: Sanderson Hunt. Come to the office at your earliest opportunity. JM.

Fox looked at the message for a second and then uncurled herself to check on the progress of the forensics swarm. Jackson apparently knew there was something off about Hunt and was unwilling to discuss it over unsecured comms, even with his special encryption. Well, maybe she would get to find out what the spook was up to after all.

New York Metro, 16th January.

It was well into the afternoon of the following day before Fox managed to get all the paperwork finalised, the body and evidence prepared for transport, and her own body shuttled down to the surface. Thankfully the maglev system between Newark Spaceport and Long Island, the LI-line, was fast and efficient, and it was maybe another thirty minutes before she was looking out of the carriage at the kilometre-high, gleaming spire that was the headquarters of MarTech Group.

It was one of three arcologies in the immediate area owned by the company, though the third was new and still under construction. Each was structurally similar, a streamlined tower, aerodynamically designed to handle both normal wind and the raging storms that came up the Atlantic coast in the wake of the massive hurricanes which had made the Gulf of Mexico largely uninhabitable. You could basically live in one of those towers your entire life: they could produce their own food, recycle water, provide power, and they had every convenience you could ever want. True, the main MarTech building was heavily devoted to the labs and research facilities of the company, but the secondary tower and, as far as Fox knew, the new one were residential. The two completed buildings had over half a million inhabitants, and that was not counting the smaller apartment blocks which littered the space between them, housing an average of fourteen thousand people each.

The train slowed as it climbed to the entry point on the side of the tower. Looking south out of the window she could make out the ocean and a couple of larger structures. The Hamptons still boasted a few single-occupancy houses owned by the very-and-conspicuously rich, the ones who had yet to cotton on to the fact that showing off wealth like that had really gone out of fashion. Then she was looking at the walls of the tower’s station and she got up to leave the train.

Of course, she still had quite a way to go before she was at her destination. It was just that the rest of the journey was going to be vertical for the most part. Security passed her through to the nearest elevator block without comment, though she knew her arrival was being flagged upstairs as she walked through and, sure enough, a message appeared in-vision. Please take tube sixteen, Inspector. Mister Martins is expecting you. Of course he was. She followed a virtual trail of lights along the corridor, pasted there for only her to see, leading to a door amid the bank of elevators, walked into the waiting car, and turned to see the doors closing. Now it was just a matter of waiting.

‘When I said “your earliest opportunity,”’ Jackson Martins said as Fox stepped out of the car and into his private apartments, ‘I didn’t mean straight from orbit. You could’ve stopped off and changed. Had a nap. Eaten.’

‘Food and sleep are for wimps,’ Fox replied, ‘and you said “office.” This is your home.’

‘There’s no difference, as you well know. Order some food and come out to the solarium.’

Fox watched his retreating back as he wandered out of the lobby through a door at the back which led into the deeper recesses of the suite. He was tall, over one-eighty-five centimetres, and aging very gracefully into his sixth decade with little grey in his mop of black hair. Jackson Martins had always been something of a geek, far more of a technician than a salesman, and probably more of a scientist than a technician. Certainly he was a genius, a pale-skinned, blue-eyed, likeable genius with a striking ability to put two and two together and produce five when it came to technology. He kept himself fit, mostly for his daughter, claiming he had no intention of putting her through the loss of another parent. His rather odd attachment to Fox was because of his daughter too, but that was a longer story.

She accessed the apartment’s computer, having been given guest access soon after moving to the area, and ordered up sandwiches and juice, and then she followed Jackson out into the solarium, which acted as both a nice place to sit and a link into the more private areas of the house. The place continued to impress her: Jackson was a technologist, but he had the money to buy physical decoration and was old enough to prefer the real over the virtual. His home was beautiful, elegant, and with little in the way of virtual enhancement which was not there for function.

‘Teresa is over in Oslo until Monday,’ he said as she sat down on a lounger beside the one he was stretched out on. Beside them, an entire wall of glass gave them a view of the park which took up the central section of the spire’s top. Above them was sky, shading toward a darker blue in the thinning atmosphere.

‘Well, I came to see you. Because you said I should.’

‘True. How was the Moon?’

‘Grey.’

‘Yes, well it generally is. I heard about the little incident with New Moon, however.’

‘I’d imagine it made news. A mercenary pretending to be UA. A corrupt cop caught by the newest of LCSS’s units and a NAPA consultant. Gunfire and explosions.’

‘All very exciting, yes. I have a far less exciting Technologies research facility out there which Sanderson Hunt had no reason to go near, but he seemed interested in the place. It’s in the Jenner crater. You need to try to get there and he did. Recently. He’s on my list of people I think subcontract their loyalties to other agencies.’

‘His background stinks of NIX. I’m glad it’s not just me that thinks so, but what have you got out there that they’d be interested in?’

‘Ah, well… That’s one of the reasons I wanted to see you personally. I restarted the Dallas nanotechnology research, and I was hoping to keep it away from United Anarchy by putting it up there, but NIX were always quite keen to get their hands on that work ahead of time too.’

Fox forced her fists to unclench and then remained silent as a service robot rolled in with her food, placing the tray down beside her and then retreating on silent, motorised wheels. ‘I thought you’d decided that research was too dangerous.’

‘I discussed it with Teresa. Actually, she discussed it with me. She’s quite determined that it should go on, I think because of what happened to her in Dallas. This technology has so much promise, Fox. It could literally revolutionise our production systems. You have no idea. I’m putting the prototype into the new tower. Production at twenty times the rate we have in current fabrication facilities, creating new materials at the molecular level. In your lifetime, we could see unheard of materials, nanoscale robotic devices capable of repairing damage at a cellular level. Miracle science, Fox. That’s what we’re talking about.’

She peered at the man in the baggy jeans and the surfer singlet. To her knowledge, he had never ever been a surfer, but the image suited him. That said, as far as she knew anyway, he had never tried weed and she felt that was a surfer-dude requirement. ‘You don’t have to sell me on the tech, Jackson. I just got the impression you viewed that line of research as… sensitive. And I don’t mean commercially or socially.’

‘Huh, well, it could be the latter. Disruptive technology. I hate the term, but this is. I was… loath to continue after what happened in Dallas, but…’

‘But you can’t resist a technical challenge. After meeting you I kind of understood what happened to Oppenheimer. Okay, so you think Hunt got his hands on some of the research, and someone killed him for it?’

‘That’s where it gets strange… Why kill him on the flight back to Earth? If they got the data on the Moon, why not kill him there? If they don’t have it yet…’

‘They’d have waited. I guess that’s my job. I know what to look for at least. There was a data stick in his cabin terminal when I got there.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s all getting run. We’ll see what comes out.’ Turning, she leaned back on the lounger. ‘I do feel like I’ve been on my feet for twenty-four hours straight.’

Jackson shrugged. ‘Don’t mind me. Nod off if you need it. I’ll say, under oath, you were interrogating me for a couple of hours.’

‘Oh yeah, the captain will believe that. Sure.’

~~~

Grant J. Canard, Captain in the North American Police Administration and the head man of precinct 19, had left middle age behind him, but you really could not tell. He prescribed to the theory that age did not make you look distinguished: it made you look old. He looked little older than Fox, but had actually been born a decade before Jackson Martins. His face still held a flush of youth, his body was firm and carefully sculpted to appear fit, he had a strong jawline, straight, narrow nose, and blue eyes which sparkled. His hair, mid-brown without a hint of grey, was cut into an authoritative, very sharp, flat-top.

As with many people rising up the social hierarchy, Canard was media-savvy and politically astute. Fox’s VA told her that his current level of delegated votes had gone up in the last month, which suggested the bastard had had a good Christmas season attending the right parties. His suit looked like it was a step up from his usual designer too.

Fox disliked Canard because she thought he was superficial, overly political, and a lousy cop. Canard disliked her because despite not being political, she still managed to move in circles he found it difficult to get near. Despite their mutual dislike, he indicated a seat in front of his large, stylish desk as soon as she entered his office. She knew the room was v-tagged with a host of images that made it look less utilitarian, but she had a policy of turning decorative tags off when she was working: she wanted to see things only when they were really there.

‘I’ve got your report on the scene,’ Canard said. ‘So we’re looking at a hit? Political?’

‘A MarTech salesman hit for political reasons? No, this isn’t political. He was probably a spook.’

Canard’s eyes tightened: wariness, Fox thought. ‘Evidence?’

‘Circumstantial at this point. His entire life looks manufactured to me and he was apparently nosing around some research facilities on Luna which he shouldn’t have been interested in.’

‘This would be according to Mister Martins, I assume?’

Fox nodded. ‘There’s a commercial sensitivity aspect to the information. MarTech is doing some research which a lot of other people would like to get their hands on up there.’ She knew that he knew that she knew what the research actually was, and she also knew that that fact was probably pissing him off. For some reason she could not quite bring herself to be unhappy about that.

‘Autopsy and analysis of his possessions should be done by tomorrow.’

‘I’ll pick the data up through my home system and go over it. Chances are we’re never going to close this one. If he was NIX they aren’t going to admit it, and the killer could easily be well outside our jurisdiction.’

‘Do what you can,’ Canard growled. ‘Our clean-up rate isn’t looking too bad at the moment, so losing one won’t make too much difference.’ Which was probably true, but she expected he would shaft her over it at some point in the near future. ‘How did the training assignment go?’

‘Fine. The incident with New Moon Data Security was a bit of a surprise, but it showed they were up to the task. Their commander gave a rousing speech at the dinner afterwards about collaboration being the best path to high-quality policing. I don’t suppose we’re going to see any of the money they’re paying NAPA for my time?’

‘Huh.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ There were, Fox had to remind herself, one or two things about the job which Canard and she agreed upon.

‘Keep me apprised of developments in the case,’ he said, which was as close to a dismissal as she was going to get so she nodded and got to her feet. ‘Have a good weekend, Inspector,’ he added.

‘Thanks, same to you,’ she replied as she walked out. The problem with hearing Canard say something nice to her was that she felt like checking her back for knives.

~~~

Fox knew she had forgotten something as soon as she walked out of the elevator car and turned down the corridor to her apartment. Sam was standing outside his own apartment door, a slight twist to his lips indicating that he was amused and waiting for her. Generally, a woman who found herself the subject of Sam’s attention was rather pleased. He was an attractive man with a firmly muscled, slim body, the result of training and not enhancement. His oriental features were distinctly pleasing to the eye: his eyes were dark, his lips quite full, his hair long and very black, perennially braided with silver beads to hold the ends and pulled back behind his head. Right now he was standing there in just a pair of jeans and she could see the programmable tattoo he wore over his right nipple, and she thought it likely that it was good that she could not read whatever Chinese character it was displaying.

‘Aw… shit, I forgot,’ Fox whined, slumping as she walked closer. ‘How the Hell did you know I was even in the building?’

‘I actually talk to my agent,’ Sam replied. He had a good voice, Boston educated, and very smooth. Fox kept going to her own door and he followed her; she did not object to this. ‘Javen asked Kit to let him know when you were back.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Fox grumbled as she sent the necessary signals through from her VA to the apartment’s security system. She had done a thorough job of locking the place down before going away for a month.

‘You have one of the most advanced personal agents there is, and you don’t actually talk to her. What’s with that?’

The door opened and Fox walked in. Her apartment was one of the few areas of the world where she always allowed virtual reality to override real reality. It was cheaper and a whole lot easier than actually decorating. In contrast to the bland, rather sterile, corridor which she knew the building owners had tagged with virtual planters and a few scenic views, Fox’s apartment was, she thought, tastefully decorated in warm earth tones. Off to the left as you walked in was a huge window, currently blacked out, but it was actually a window. Sam’s apartment only had the virtual kind, but Fox was unusual in thinking that the construction site for the North Hudson Barrier was worth looking at. Property prices along the Esplanade had taken something of a dip after the announcement of the New York Flood Defences project, which was why she could afford to live in a location so convenient to the precinct HQ on Governor’s Island.

Aside from the window and the large, curved sofa, the kitchenette and dining area on the right, and the bulky form of Fox’s crime scene kit waiting beside the door, the lounge had an additional feature which was watching them enter from where it appeared to stand in front of the window. ‘I must admit I would like to know that myself,’ Kit said. ‘Barely any contact for a month. Most people wish to at least check in with their agent, even when off-world.’

Fox sagged a little more and had her VA set coffee brewing. ‘Well… I’m just not used to having a proper agent.’ She brightened a little. ‘Terri said you were really capable, so I figured you could manage without–’

‘Even the most capable agent needs some training,’ Sam said, dropping onto the couch. ‘You’ve barely got to know Kit. I’m assuming you can see her, by the way, because she’s invisible to me.’

Fox glowered. ‘Make yourself visible to our guest so I don’t look like an idiot.’

‘You told me to remain unseen to anyone but yourself unless specifically ordered to appear,’ Kit replied, and then gave a nod to Sam.

Sam glanced up and nodded back, not bothering to hide a smirk. ‘Nice to see you again, Kit.’ He glanced over at Fox, the smirk widening. ‘I still think it’s really cute, but I also can’t believe Terri did it.’

‘She’s evil,’ Fox replied, pouring coffee. ‘You want some of this?’

‘Coffee makes me hyper and we are going out tonight. You’re not getting out of it.’

Fox grumbled and turned to the sofa. Kit watched her, quite calmly, saying nothing. Kit was Teresa Martins’ latest project, expected to hit the market in the summer. Teresa, who was Terri to her close friends, had presented Fox with the computer and software ‘for consumer testing.’ Officially, Kitsune-592.23 was a class 4 artificial intelligence, software with a full capacity for rational thought and creativity, but constrained to operate under the direction of an owner. The constraint was there because society regarded AIs as potentially dangerous, if very useful, tools. The fact that Terri had given Kit the ‘Kitsune’ designation and the appearance of the AI’s avatar suggested that Terri was having a little joke.

Kit’s avatar was a cute little anime-style figure, a Japanese girl with her features blended toward occidental and then exaggerated. She had a rounded face with a small, pointed chin, a pert nose, huge green eyes surrounded by clearly artificial, very black lashes, and a small mouth which still managed to have quite full, red lips. Her skin was pale and her hair was an ash-blonde mass which formed fox-like ears at the top. She was always dressed in an anime heroine’s style: a short, strapless, white dress cupped her small, but very pert, breasts and had a puffed out, pleated skirt. There was a bolero top with lace epaulets, white collar and cuffs, white knee-high, high-heeled boots, and then there was the thick, white brush which extended from her back. She was a kitsune, a fox spirit, and Terri had been grinning the entire time during the ‘product demonstration.’

‘We’ll go out. I’ll grab a shower and change. Give me a chance.’

‘I’ve had suitable clothes laid out in your bedroom, Inspector Meridian,’ Kit said.

‘Thanks… You see, this is what I mean. I’m not used to this kind of efficiency. I mean, you have to have had the house robot do that before I got here, so you anticipated me needing it and… I’m not used to servants.’

‘I’m not your servant,’ Kit replied. ‘I’m your personal agent and, if you work with me, I can be an exceptionally good one.’

‘Yeah… I know this. Sorry. The lunar trip came at a bad time. And transit flights make me cranky. Give me local news, please. If there are no urgent messages waiting, I’ll go through them tomorrow.’

The window sprang to life as Kit walked out of Fox’s view of it, displaying not the outside view but a wall full of her preferred local news channel, IB-62. ‘There are no urgent messages,’ Kit said. ‘I would have ensured such were forwarded to you.’

‘Right…’ Fox sank onto the couch beside Sam, took a drink, sighed, and leaned back, closing her eyes. ‘Okay, so I am happy for you to be visible to Sam and Terri. Uh… and I’ll designate others as needed. Can’t think of many…’

‘It isn’t like your address book is overflowing,’ Sam commented.

‘I’ve only been in this metro for two years–’

‘And you know me, Terri, her father… Is there actually anyone else?’ Fox opened her mouth to respond but Sam added, ‘That you actually talk to rather than the ones you dumped.’

Fox frowned. ‘I don’t make friends easily, or lightly. Where are we going anyway?’

‘New club opened in Lexington Tower while you were bouncing around on Luna. “Two Seven Lex” they’ve called it.’

‘Weird name.’

‘Something to do with Chinese lucky numbers.’

‘Seven is traditionally a number considered auspicious for relationships,’ Kit supplied without prompting. ‘Two may represent a doubling or something like “bright.” Two and seven together suggest a multiplication of good relationships or a bright relationship.’

Fox opened an eye and peered at her friend. ‘You’re not trying to drag me to a sex club, are you?’

‘If I am, they fooled me too. Drink, dancing, probability of attempted pick-ups is high, but that’s normal.’

‘I can provide individual or aggregate reviews, if you wish, Inspector,’ Kit said, smiling.

‘No… I said I’d go out with him and it’s probably better if I don’t know what I’m getting into until I get there.’ She turned, closing her open eye and opening the other to peer at Kit. ‘If we’re going to be getting to know each other, you’d better start calling me Fox. Nothing that looks as… cute as you do should speak so formally.’

‘Thank you, Fox,’ Kit replied, beaming and clutching her hands in front of her breast. ‘I think we will make an excellent team.’

Fox closed her eyes again. ‘I’m sure Terri’s just trying to wind me up.’

~~~

Clubs were another place Fox let the virtual tagging work pretty much as the designers had set them. If you were going to go to a club, there was no point in worrying over reality, and the result of not accepting what others wanted you to see was usually less pleasant.

For example, Fox had dressed herself in a slightly oversized T-shirt with a wide, scooped neck and a chaotic sort of pattern in black over a purple base, short shorts, and over-the-knee, high-heeled boots. What you saw was what you got. Sam was in jet-black plazkin jeans and a white T-shirt, but his shirt was v-tagged to run scrolling, dancing geometric video patterns with colour streams wound through them indicating his mood.

If Fox were honest, Sam in a tight, white T-shirt was better than the enhanced version, but she had the distinct impression that 27Lex would have been considerably more boring without its virtual imagery. There was likely chrome and glass, and it probably didn’t look too bad, but…

You entered straight from the level the maglev station was on, and the club went up and down. The dance floor was straight ahead, and apparently transparent: people were dancing in thin air with the bars and tables of the floor below quite visible beneath their feet. Looking up you could see a balcony with additional bars and people standing, looking down at the dancers. That was probably a real balcony. Everything was dark: black or smoked glass structural work, red and purple neon shone out, marking the railings. There was not a whole lot of light, and the music was throbbing, synthesised dubmetal that got into your chest and hummed. Now she was inside and looking around, she noticed the throb of the music was reflected in the red lighting. And there was something else…

‘Drink?’ Sam suggested, pointing upward.

Fox’s gaze swept the dance floor, taking in a lot of people who seemed to be dancing closer than she might have expected. The air had an odd, hot, musky scent to it. ‘I think a drink might be good.’ Her throat felt dry. As she followed her friend up the steps to the upper floor, she began to notice other things, like the number of people who seemed to have dilated pupils. As Sam ordered two drinks at the nearest bar, Fox leaned closer. ‘Are they using subliminals in the viron?’

‘Yeah,’ Sam replied, blandly. ‘I think it’s a little unsubtle. Their memetic engineer needs kicking in the ass. It’s just something to make the place live up to its name. They’ve got private rooms off the bottom floor if you can’t wait.’

‘Fuck, Sam! I’m not in the mood for picking up some random dick in a club.’

Sam looked at her, his lips curling. ‘Any urge to try to get me in the sack?’

‘No.’

‘Then it’s not affecting you.’ He picked up a wine glass and handed it to her.

Fox sipped it and glowered at him. ‘You’re not that irresistible, Mister Clarion.’

‘As a matter of fact, I am. I spend a lot of time making sure I am. It’s my livelihood.’ His gaze flicked around the people on the balcony as he took a drink. ‘You, on the other hand, are just going to have to fend off horny drunks because you’re genetically lucky.’

‘I would submit that you are too. You haven’t had much work done. Nothing structural, no muscle enhancement. I’m the one with the military-grade tendons and the enhanced muscle fibres.’

‘No cosmetic work though.’

‘All you do is cleansing and smoothing.’

He laughed. ‘Okay, so we’re both beautiful. People are going to wonder what’s wrong with us.’

Fox shrugged. ‘I’m a cop and you’re an escort.’ Sam was, indeed, a licensed prostitute, but more than that, he was a bodyguard. He frequently made more money providing companionship for bored, rich women, but he had male clients, and he did ‘special jobs’ where the sex was essentially a cover for guarding the life of his temporary partners. And despite the fact that his reputation suggested he was fantastic in bed, Fox had never slept with him.

‘Well, someone’s going to have to show a lot of promise before I take them home with me,’ he said. Making his living from sex disinclined him to consider it recreationally, which was why Fox had never suggested it.

Fox settled her back against the bar, curved her spine, pushed out her chest, and watched several men and a couple of women lick their lips. ‘Yeah. On the plus side, it could be amusing to fuck with the dopies for a while.’

‘You’re an evil woman, Fox Meridian.’ He turned and stretched so that his arm muscles flexed… Fox was sure she heard someone whimper even over the music.

‘I bow to your superior evil,’ Fox replied.

Part Three: Murder Is My Business

New York Metro, 18th January 2060.

The hangover had almost been worth it, the messages Kit had carefully prioritised and stored had been dealt with over breakfast, and then she had got the report through from the forensic techs saying that the mysterious data stick contained even more mysterious data. It was a single, encrypted data file; very high-end, military encryption had been used to conceal the contents. Most of the rest of the day had been spent trying to get authorisation to have it decrypted.

So on Sunday morning, Fox was really hoping for a lie-in and the buzz for attention from her VA resulted in a groan which became a bitten off scream of exasperation when she noticed the time. ‘Oh-eight-hundred! Fuck, this better be… All right, answer it, no visual.’

‘Identity verified against personal implant,’ a dull, impersonal voice said into her head. ‘Inspector Meridian, attend potential crime scene at apartment sixty dash ninety-two, your location. Possible unattended termination; patrol and EMT dispatched but not arrived. Please confirm.’

Fox let the statement from the dispatch agent at HQ sink in for a second before replying. ‘Inspector Meridian confirming assignment. ETA… five minutes. Inform the patrol to wait before gaining entry.’

‘Confirmed.’

The connection broke and Fox pushed herself up from the bed. ‘Damn. Kit, run the shower, cold.’ Gathering herself, she pushed and rolled and then dragged herself over to the shower which was built into a glassed-in cubicle at the side of the bedroom. Cold water hit her as soon as she stepped in, flushing away most of the rest of the fuzz in her head.

‘I should have a cup of coffee ready for you to gulp down by the time you are dressed,’ Kit informed her.

‘Off,’ Fox said, unable to take any more. She turned and found the fox-girl standing behind her, dry despite the shower jets since she was not really there. ‘Air jets, please. And thanks for getting the coffee ready, but you standing in the shower with me is creepy.’

Kit opened her mouth, and then closed it and vanished. ‘Perhaps that was not entirely advisable, no. I shall employ audio only in future.’

Fox grinned, letting the hot air jets dry her skin for almost long enough before she left the shower and grabbed for a fresh suit. Jeans, jacket, socks and trainers went over that, and then she was out of the bedroom and taking a half-mug of coffee from the small robot which handled her household chores. Kit was right: half a mug she could bolt before leaving.

‘Hopefully this is going to be a simple unattended death,’ Fox said as Kit waited for her beside the door. ‘I’ll be back in an hour or so to grab some food. We might even save them.’ She put her empty mug down and headed for the door, grabbing her kit as she went and pushing it ahead of her. Luggable was the best description of the portable kits; they were near enough fourteen kilos of equipment, and they came with a telescopic handle and wheels for when there was flat ground to move them over.

‘Good luck,’ Kit said as Fox rolled out on a call which was too close to home.

Apartment 60-092 was not right at the top, but it was on one of the higher-rent floors nearer the top of the tower. Fox, and Sam, earned enough to rent one of the larger apartments in the middle tier, but the upper floors were generally considered more prestigious. Whoever was dead, they were likely to be well off. Not Jackson Martins well off, but still in a fairly well-paid job of some sort, possibly with connections… She instructed her VA to put through a request for data on the occupant as she got into the elevator and began the ascent.

There was a patrol officer outside the door when she got to the apartment, clad in the standard, sealed, blue and white body armour and helmet of NAPA officers. The helmet concealed his face, but he turned at the sight of her and his voice came from a speaker under his chin. ‘EMT wouldn’t wait. Said we were still inside potential recovery timescales.’

Fox nodded. ‘That’s fine, didn’t expect anything else.’ She popped open a section of her kit and pulled out one of the crime scene suits she kept in there. This was a fairly loose, all-over suit with a built-in filter mask and visor. With the suit on and the mask in place she was as sealed as the patrol officer, and she knew the emergency medical technician would be wearing a white version of the police armour so that was going to be fine.

The apartment door opened and the tech, a woman, stepped out, pausing briefly before taking another couple of steps and then reaching for the release catch on her helmet. The upper and front part, what amounted to the visor, hinged up and back to reveal a young face with an expression of mild shock on it. ‘Uh… all yours. I… Uh, there’s no chance of recovery and, uh, I think you’ve got a homicide.’

Fox continued pulling her suit up her legs, keeping it matter-of-fact and business-like, keeping the tech’s mind on the details and not the whole. ‘Initial impressions?’

‘Uh… A woman. She’s lying in the front room. Her… uh… her head’s gone. I don’t know what’d do that to someone. I’ve never… never seen anything like that.’

‘Right. You’ve verified death?’

‘It was pretty obvious. And with that much brain damage she’s gone.’

‘Did you touch anything else?’

The girl swallowed. ‘Didn’t even touch her.’

‘Good. I doubt we’ll need further information from you, but we know where to find you. Go get a coffee or something. There’s a pretty good shop down on the entrance level.’ She turned to the patrol officer. ‘Contact dispatch, get an ME assigned and ready for body collection, and I want a tech with a large-area analysis swarm down here. Then you wait here. No one gets in here without my permission. Call through as soon as the tech arrives.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Sealing her suit, Fox activated her kit and watched as the multispectral sensor head lifted up to record her entry. ‘Okay then… Inspector Tara Meridian entering apartment sixty dash ninety-two at zero-eight-twelve, January eighteenth twenty-sixty. Suspected homicide.’ The door slid open and she pushed her box of tricks ahead of her.

Unlike her own apartment, the front door did not open straight onto the lounge. There was a short length of corridor with a single door leading off to the right. Fox checked it, finding a closet and no signs of violence. The inner door at the end opened and she paused, letting the scene from the cameras and her own eyes sink in before she continued. Then she extended the sensor head into the room ahead of her and began a ladar sweep, contemplating what she was seeing while the beam flicked out to scan the room.

The victim was a woman. Her VA chimed in with identity data and she got a name, Julianne Marie Trent. She put through the request for a full profile. Miss Trent was unmarried, Fox had that data already, but the visuals suggested she was quite happy with that; she had an attractive face, but it was aging, and she had put on weight around the hips and thighs and had never bothered to have that fixed. Clearly she had the money for the cosmetic treatment so that was a personal decision. Trent was lying on the floor, not exactly posed, but clearly meant to be found quickly and easily by anyone entering the room. She had more furniture than Fox did, which gave more opportunity for the body to be concealed, but there she was in full view, the wrap she was wearing splayed open. Fox made sure the sexual assault tests were included in the forensic swarm’s tasks, but somehow she was not expecting there to be any.

The cause of death seemed obvious but would need to be verified. Trent’s right eye was gone. The back of her skull had been blown open. It could have been a large-calibre bullet, a hollow point one, but Fox was betting on finding explosives residue: there was just too much damage. Readouts from the ladar began coming in and confirmed some of what she suspected: there were combustion products from a nitroamine explosive and the kind of plasticiser used in caseless ammunition. Someone had, in all probability, fired a handgun in the room.

A thought zoomed the sensor pod’s camera in on the victim’s face and switched the display to false-colour. Subcutaneous bruising around the jaw, burns across the forehead, nose, and right cheek, concentrating around the right eye… What was left of the right eye anyway; the bullet had punched through quite effectively, but it had been close range. She pulled up the ladar scan data and ran a measurement on the entry wound: ten millimetres seemed about right. So someone had held her down, hand pressed around her jaw, over her mouth, and then they had pointed a pistol at her, right in the eye from no more than a few centimetres, and fired. Julianne Trent had seen death coming from very close range. She would have fought if she was able, and the bruising on her jaw suggested she needed holding down. Whoever had killed her was strong, probably big.

The ladar and terahertz scans of the room complete, Fox slid her kit into the room and stepped around it to examine the body more closely. The arrangement of limbs suggested a struggle, but then Trent had been half-naked and being attacked by… Fox decided she was probably dealing with a male perpetrator, simply because she could not see it as a female. She would keep the possibility open, but a male seemed more likely. She was sure the statistics would bear that out, but statistics were damned for a reason.

‘Why would someone shoot you in the eye, Julianne?’ Fox asked aloud. ‘They really wanted to be sure you were dead too. Military ordnance, close-range execution. Who did you piss off?’

Well, looking was unlikely to get her much. She checked the swarm program and set the microbots loose on the scene while she took the scanner head through to the bedroom and bathroom to get scans of those areas. Her own swarm would go over the body and its immediate area, and that was going to take a couple of hours. Hopefully the tech would arrive soon and they would bring more microbots to go over the whole apartment.

The bathroom was clean and tidy. There was water in the bottom of the shower. The bed was ruffled, not yet made, but there was no sign of a struggle there. Trent had not been attacked until she walked out into the lounge. Had she disturbed someone? A burglar? Fox walked back to the lounge door and looked out. And really the only sign that anything had happened was the ruined body on the floor, the pool of blood soaking into carpet that looked like it had cost real money to fabricate. Not a burglary.

‘Another hit? With explosive ammo?’ she mused aloud, mostly to hear herself say the words. It was not a micromissile this time, however. This had been up-close, personal, a face-to-face killing, and yet it was controlled, efficient, and impersonal.

‘Inspector?’ The officer on the door’s voice came through over network comms, interrupting her train of thought.

‘Go.’

‘Tech’s here. Want me to send him in?’

‘Who did they send?’

‘It’s me, Fox,’ another voice said, sounding grumpy. ‘It’s Andy Holland. Let me in so I can get this over with.’

‘Andy… right. Let him through. I’m going to need a full forensic sweep of the apartment. All of it. I’ve got the body in process already.’

She heard the door opening and then she saw the armoured form of Andy Holland entering with a large, multiswarm hive unit behind him. He stopped in his tracks, the automated transport almost running into him, but he was not, as she had suspected, surprised by the body. ‘You seen the v-tag,’ he asked, nodding at the long wall opposite him.

Fox shook her head. ‘You know I turn that stuff off most of the–’ She stopped as her VA resolved the tags in the room and rendered the imagery, and the room changed to show far darker colours than she had expected, a more modern visual style with a lot of soft edges and dull neon highlights. There was also a neon, glowing message written across the back wall in dull, blood red: Murder is my business!

‘Looks like business was kind of cut-throat,’ Holland said, shaking his head as he set about programming the microbot sweep.

~~~

‘Julianne Trent was a writer,’ Kit said as Fox stuffed her face with what her personal agent considered to be an entirely inadequate nutritional intake of coffee and microwaved cheeseburger. ‘She freelanced for a number of internet broadcast stations, but is most famous for her work on IB-Nineteen’s Murder is My Business.’

Fox grimaced. ‘Infamous might be a better term. A cop show where the lead detective is this beautiful, charismatic, ex-special ops femme fatale-type who gets psychic hunches? Who comes up with this shit?’

Kit considered her owner’s personality carefully before answering; Fox was certainly attractive, had been in the Army performing special antiterrorist operations, and did have a degree of charisma, though it was hard to believe it watching her jam cheeseburger into her mouth… ‘Apparently Miss Trent comes up with some of it,’ Kit said. ‘Or she did until someone terminated her existence. Fox, I may be of greater assistance to you under these circumstances if I were allowed to look at the police reports as well as public records.’

‘Maybe, but NAPA policy says I can only use authorised software for data analysis. You’re not on the approved list.’

‘I am executing on a MarTech Technologies Series Seventy-Two server and have been designed with ISO twenty-seven thousand compliance in mind. I can be certified for use with confidential information with minimal effort on your part.’

Fox paused in her chewing. Then she swallowed. ‘Okay… Get me whatever I need to review and sign, and tell me what you’ve got currently about Trent.’

‘I will forward the documents to your VA. Miss Trent was forty-eight. She ended a cohabitation arrangement three years ago and has had no regular partner since.’

‘What was her partner’s name?’

‘Alan Roberts. He is one of the producers on Murder is My Business. Accounts of the break-up suggest an amicable separation and they have continued to work together. Trent is responsible for around ten of the scripts in a typical production season. She has written scripts for other police procedural shows, but generally on a one-off basis. Recently she became more heavily involved with a new show for a channel called Mystery and Mayhem.’

‘I’ve heard of it. Aren’t they in competition with IB-Nineteen?’

‘The two channels share a common demographic, though IB-Nineteen has a larger proportion of female subscribers. Mystery and Mayhem’s scheduling includes more male-targeted, action-based programming, and adult material.’

‘Late night softcore?’

‘And some less soft. They have a licence for age-tagged transmission.’

‘So she was working on a series for her station’s main competitor… What was it?’

‘Murder on My Mind,’ Kit replied, her lips curling upward, ‘a series about an attractive, charismatic detective who is an expert martial artist with the ability to visualise crime scenes through meditation. She also enjoys taking long, steamy showers after visiting a murder scene, according to the reviews I accessed.’

Fox wiped at the corners of her mouth with a napkin. ‘Well, we have that in common. I probably don’t have a camera playing over my voluptuous curves while doing it.’

‘It’s almost as though you’d seen some of the episodes.’

‘I didn’t know AIs as young as you could develop sarcasm.’

‘I am an exceptional artificial intelligence.’

Fox got to her feet and took the remains of her lunch to the kitchen for recycling. ‘Okay, so Trent was developing a show for a new channel which is clearly in direct competition with her old show. That’s… weak motive. I guess I’m trawling IB stations.’

‘IB-Nineteen is based in Manhattan,’ Kit supplied. ‘I’m afraid Mystery and Mayhem has offices in Boston.’

Fox sighed. ‘Well, I’ll go see the local ones first and put through a request for the travel budget if I need it. I hate paperwork, you know?’

‘I was aware. Don’t forget to look at the documents I sent you.’

Giving her agent’s avatar a glower, Fox started for the door.

~~~

‘A hit to stop her writing for a rival IB channel?’ Canard sounded, rightly, sceptical.

Fox shrugged. ‘All I have to work with for now, but I only picked up the case a couple of hours ago. I’d be interviewing her co-workers anyway.’

Her captain grunted. ‘I’ll authorise the travel to Boston if it’s needed. What about the other thing?’

‘Encrypted data on a memory stick.’ She lifted the small, black object in its evidence bag, turning it over in her long fingers. ‘Techs say it’s high-grade encryption. Only fingerprints on it are the victim’s. That in itself suggests he was NIX.’

‘Yes… I received an offer of help to decrypt it following your request going through. From Fort Meade.’

Fox winced. ‘Yeah, that figures. Probably came from Cyber Command, but it’ll be NIX that wants it. They’re watching the case.’

‘If it’s military encryption, how else are you going to find out what’s on it?’

He wanted to give NIX the stick, Fox figured. To a politically minded man like Canard, sucking up to the country’s intelligence organisation probably seemed like a good move. She knew them better. ‘Outside, local consultant,’ she replied. ‘Already associated with the case, and he’ll do it pro bono. Actually, I think he’ll want to know what’s on here as much as I do and his security clearance is as high as mine.’ She happened to know she had higher clearance than Canard.

‘All right. Do it. See you tomorrow.’ His virtual image vanished from behind his desk and Fox got to her feet to leave.

The fact that he had not bothered coming in on a Sunday did not really bother her and she fully intended to go home herself, right after she had button-holed the security techs and had them sign off on Kit’s access to sensitive data. That kind of thing was always easier if you showed you were making an effort, even when the person you were talking to was not.

~~~

Fox had to admit that Kit’s animation was excellent; her hair danced as she bounced up and down on her toes, clapping her hands in glee. There was even movement in her small breasts, even if they were constrained by her costume’s bodice. Actually, they moved exactly as one would expect from the constraint. It was really good animation and Fox marked down one more tick against the idea that Terri was trying to turn her gay.

‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ Kit said, her voice a staccato of enthusiasm which just went to show that AI programming was becoming more and more human-like.

‘Just don’t let me down. Make sure your security is solid, and don’t think you won’t be working for this.’

‘I’ll make you happy you put the time in. I know you did. I know it shouldn’t have taken this long to handle things on Governor’s Island.’

Fox shrugged and headed for the coffee pot. ‘Tech were sniffy because you’re technically an experimental model, but all your specs were there for them to check and they couldn’t deny the request once they’d verified everything. You’re cleared for access to police files utilising suitably tagged requests under my authorisation.’

‘Oh… This means a lot to me, Fox. Really. That you’d trust me–’

‘Well, this is a trial, I could rescind it, and you got lucky. I have no desire to wade through the Trent data until it’s narrowed down to cut out the media noise. Your first task will be to go through all her personal records, correlate them, check for people she’s communicated with, and flag any you think I should interview. You’ll also go over the scripts we have of her recent shows to see whether she’s been borrowing ideas from the old one for this new one.’

‘I can do that,’ Kit replied, beaming. ‘What will you be doing?’

Fox took an evidence bag from her jacket pocket and peered at the black object inside. ‘I am going to visit a friend and see if he can crack some encryption.’

‘Please give Mister Jackson my regards. I will send a message through to his agent to let him know you are coming.’

~~~

‘It must be my lucky weekend,’ Jackson said as Fox walked into the solarium.

‘I just can’t get enough of your smiling face, Jackson.’ He looked up and gave her a quick grin before closing his eyes again. She was quite sure that, behind his eyelids, he was working on something. ‘Kit sends her regards.’

‘How’s she doing? She’s Teresa’s baby, but I have an interest.’

‘I got dragged off to the Moon before I could really get to know her. I’ve got her reviewing some case notes for me so we’ll see how that goes.’ Fox sat down and let the social chatter slide past. There was no point in rushing things: Jackson Martins tended to work at his own pace, no matter what.

‘She got the clearance for that easily enough? I know all the standards were followed, but you can never tell until someone tries.’

‘Sorted it out today.’

‘Sunday? And you’re working. As usual.’

‘What’s playing in your head, Jackson?’

He waved a hand dismissively. ‘I’m old. You should be enjoying yourself when you have the chance.’

‘I do. I was out Friday night with Sam. This morning I got woken up for a homicide in my building, so I figured I might as well get a few things done before I curl up with a glass of wine and a sensie.’

‘Okay… To what do I owe the pleasure then?’

Taking the stick from her pocket, Fox held it up. ‘The data stick your salesman was carrying. Fort Meade have offered assistance with decrypting what’s on it. I’d prefer to try an alternative, more local, resource before I hand this over to them.’

Jackson opened an eye and peered at the lump of black plastic. ‘I’ll have a secure box brought up for it. We’ll run it through the Cube and see what falls out.’

‘How long?’ she asked, even though she thought she knew what the answer was going to be.

‘Depends. If it’s military-grade encryption… Ah… Well, obviously it depends on whether he used one of the latest encoding systems or something older. If he’s got one of the new ones, it could easily be days rather than hours.’

Fox raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s still pretty good.’

‘The Cube is fairly new. Two hundred and sixty-two thousand, one hundred and forty-four quantum processors. Five kilotons of cooling systems and optical interconnects. It’s over in the new tower. I built it, but I’m still not entirely sure what to do with it. Teresa wants to put an AI on it, which might be interesting, but I suspect we’ll keep it for other things. It’s very good at decryption, database searches, that kind of thing.’ He grinned. ‘You know Kit’s server has one of those cores in it. Just in case you need a lot of data processed quickly.’

‘I don’t think I want to know how much someone’s going to pay to have the commercial version of Kit in their home. You and Terri… You don’t have to–’

‘You know damn well why we do it, Fox.’ His voice was calm and easy, light, but with just a hint of tension in it. Still, there was the tightness after two and a half years.

‘I was just doing my job.’

‘Doing your job cost you too much and stopped me losing everything.’ His firm, insistent tone dissolved as quickly as it had come as he said, ‘Besides which you are an excellent product tester. I’m sure Teresa never thought of using a Kitsune model for police evidence analysis, and the data you got me on the Gauss pistol’s performance has improved the design considerably. And I haven’t had a speeding ticket since I met you.’

‘Jackson… you haven’t driven a ground vehicle in twenty years. No one drives ground vehicles anymore.’

‘Actually I have, on the Moon, but that’s beside the point. It’s a shame. Driving is a lost art except in low gravity, and we have huge open areas in the protectorates which could be used for off-roading.’

‘I’m happier knowing people don’t kill themselves on the roads now. You can fly a vertol, can’t you?’

‘I can, and occasionally my safety people let me. I think Teresa gets away with it more often. You have basic flight training, don’t you?’

‘It was part of the training for insertion teams. They wanted to be sure that if anyone survived they could fly out, assuming the ship was functional.’

‘If you want to take one of the company ships out…’ He was grinning.

‘Stop doing that.’ She grinned back. ‘Though I may have to go up to Boston soon. I’ll think about it.’ She glanced around as a tall man in a white coat appeared in the doorway. He was holding a box and looking hesitant. ‘I think your tech’s here with the box.’

Jackson turned, sitting up on his lounger and dismissing whatever was occupying his attention. ‘Bring that over here, Travis. We’ll need to get the evidence tag officially signed over and then we can see about disentangling whatever web Sanderson Hunt has spun.’

~~~

‘Alan Justin Roberts is one of three producers working on Murder is My Business,’ Kit intoned as she paced in front of the window in Fox’s apartment. Behind her was a grid of photographs, presumably of IB-19 employees, and one of those had animated out to show a larger picture of Roberts. ‘Cross-referencing his work against Julianne Trent’s, it appears that he produces a higher percentage of her scripts than the other producers, but not an exceptionally high proportion. The percentage has not significantly changed since their break-up. I judge that their working relationship has remained solid despite their personal problems.’

Fox’s lips curled as she watched the virtual kitsune pacing back and forth, arms behind her back, crossed at the wrists, which were just above her tail. Her tail was up, curled, and the end was twitching nervously, and Kit was wearing such an intent look of concentration. ‘What’s this?’ Fox asked. Kit paused, turning to look at her, and the expression switched from concentration to nervous query. ‘All the pacing and frowning. What’s with that?’

Kit’s hands swung forward and she looked even more nervous as she clenched them together under her chin and began wringing them. ‘I… wanted to look professional. It’s my first report on potential criminal activity and–’

‘Okay. The presentation is nice and I like the rows of photographs. You’re an AI, so I expect your data to be accurate. I am aware that this is your first try at this so I’m not expecting you to get all the inferences right. I’m expecting to have to teach you what I expect to see in these cases so you know what to look for. And the pacing is making me dizzy. Why don’t you sit down and tell me what you’ve learned?’ Fox patted the sofa beside her because Kit’s pacing was really distracting and she wanted her out of eye line.

Kit looked at the sofa and blinked. ‘Oh… o-okay.’

‘You know how to sit, right?’

‘Yes. I’ve just… I didn’t expect to be allowed to… It’s very familiar.’

‘I hate formality. I get enough of it at work. Sit.’

Kit sat, her tail curling around to settle in her lap where she fiddled with the end of it while she went on. ‘I accessed the local news feed archives for the time around their separation. Some of the gossip channels picked up on it, but the story was covered only briefly and there was little detail. There was no indication of real problems between them; they were simply dissatisfied with the arrangement.’

‘So they had an amicable split and they seem to have been working together just as they were before that.’

‘Yes. No indications of other relationships prior to the separation. Financial aspects were handled equitably. He got their shared apartment in Time Spire, but she got a substantial financial settlement.’

‘Put through a request for the details of her will and–’

‘I anticipated that and made the request earlier today.’

‘Very good.’

Kit smiled, still looking nervous. ‘I understand that money is a prime motivator in human society. If Mister Roberts were in some way financially inconvenienced and his ex-partner’s will favoured him, this would provide a motive.’

‘Thank you for explaining your reasoning. Who else do we have?’

Roberts’s photograph shrank back and two others zoomed out. ‘These are the other two producers, Walter Dolan and Nathan Shark.’

‘Wait… Nathan Shark?’

‘Originally Nathan Crabbit. He changed it five years ago before starting his career. A rapid rise through the ranks, but Murder is My Business is his “big break.” He’s the junior producer and the gossip channels suggest he was brought in to eventually replace Dolan, who is likely to move into an executive role.’

Fox sighed. ‘So… Dolan might see his promotion threatened if his star writer shifted her attention to the competition. Shark… I’m sorry, I just can’t believe someone changed their name to “Shark.” I’m going to interview him just so he can explain that, but putting that aside, he could be seeing Trent’s activities as threatening his upward move.’

‘I had not considered that motivation,’ Kit stated, sounding surprised. ‘It is a more subtle variation of money. I should have recognised it. I am learning already.’ She actually reached out and gestured at the display, enhancing her presentation with a little interaction. ‘This is Madeleine Paretski, the star of Murder is My Business. She plays Cassandra Brook in the show. I accessed and reviewed some of her work which seemed… competent.’ That got a snort of laughter from Fox. ‘She was romantically linked with Mister Roberts for a few months following his separation from Miss Trent. There have been some comments suggesting that she thinks Miss Trent is doing Murder on My Mind because of that.’

Fox peered up at the attractive, blue-eyed blonde in the photograph. ‘I can see her being catty, but not killing over it. Unless the other show is a big enough threat… What are the rating comparisons like?’

‘Murder on My Mind is Mystery and Mayhem’s premier show this year, first airing on a Saturday night. This means the shows do not compete for primary audience, but the new show is taking audience from the old one’s Saturday night repeat slot. They compete in a more comparable manner on a Tuesday night when both are showing repeats. Mind has been gaining steadily in that slot. The two are roughly even.’

‘Okay. I guess she’s worth a look. You’ve got a lot of people up there, Kit.’

‘Yes… But I believe most can be left to look at if these ones get you nowhere.’ She flicked her fingers at the display again, advancing a last picture. ‘This one, however, is Adrian Paul Daker. He’s a staff writer with the station, has done several scripts for Murder is My Business, and will get to do far more now that Miss Trent is deceased.’

‘Put him on the list then. Get requests for interviews sent out for all of them. I want to see them tomorrow.’

‘I will forward the requests immediately,’ Kit replied, smiling.

‘And I’m going to take a shower, grab a glass of wine, and watch something brainless.’ Fox got to her feet and was unbuttoning her jeans as she walked to the bedroom.

‘Unfortunately,’ Kit said to her retreating back, ‘neither Murder is My Business nor Murder on My Mind is showing tonight.’

‘Oh, ha ha. Not that brainless.’

19th January.

Time Spire sat beside the maglev in the crook of Broadway and West 40th, just outside the Manhattan Conservation District which began at 42nd Street. The Spire was one of the earlier arcologies on the island and had been through a couple of refits as people decided that its facilities were not quite up to what they expected and businesses moved in to replace residents. The highest residential floors still had occupants, however, and the address still held some prestige. On the other hand, you got off the maglev at the Time Square station and had to use one of the pedestrian slideways to get into the tower.

According to Kit’s directions, IB-19 had their offices and production facilities on the 65th floor. Roberts and Dolan had apartments near the top. Paretski, Shark, and Daker lived in other buildings, but had accepted requests to meet with Fox in the company’s offices. According to Kit, they were shooting an episode of the show today anyway so Paretski was on site.

The IB-19 office was a mass of v-tagged adverts for their programming which Fox had tuned out before she had taken the three steps from the main door to the reception desk. Her VA transmitted her ID to the receptionist, a stunningly attractive blonde whose smile barely flickered as she noted who was now standing in front of her.

‘Inspector Meridian. We were told to expect you. Mister Roberts is terribly upset over the loss of Miss Trent. We all are.’

Well, the fake regretful smile was impressive, but still fake. ‘I’m sure. Is Mister Roberts available? I’d like to start with him. I also understand that Miss Paretski is shooting today? If someone could arrange for me to see her when she’s available, that would reduce the disruption, I think.’

The blonde smiled. ‘Of course. I’ll make arrangements. Mister Roberts is in his office. Third door on the right.’ She pointed to Fox’s left where a corridor led deeper into the suite.

Nodding, Fox followed the directions and was walking into Alan Roberts’s office a second later. The work he had had done to keep himself looking young was not working for him. The bleak smile he offered up as she stepped into the room just appeared wrong on a face belonging to someone not really old enough to have seen much pain. He was, according to records, older than he looked. His hair was jet black and cut immaculately. His blue eyes had a hard edge, but there was enough softness about him to suggest genuine grief or moderately impressive acting ability. His face was all carved, elegant lines, too sculpted to be natural.

‘Mister Roberts,’ Fox said, before he could speak. ‘I’m Inspector Meridian. I’m sorry for your loss.’

Roberts nodded his head slowly and indicated a seat opposite him. ‘Thank you, Inspector. Julianne was one of our best writers. She will be a considerable loss to the show and the station. And… she was my friend.’

‘Friends and no more?’

‘I believe that friendship is the greater part of any relationship. It is true that we were no longer lovers, but we parted amicably. I was… less happy about it than she was, at first. It took a short while for me to see that she was right, that we had grown stale.’

‘That’s when you took up with Miss Paretski?’

His eyes tightened. ‘Not immediately, but not long after.’

Fox gave a nod. ‘You understand that I’m required to ask these questions, Mister Roberts. Your ex-partner was murdered, quite brutally and quite personally.’

‘And, of course, I’m a suspect.’

‘One among several. I don’t have evidence sufficient to link anyone with the crime here, and I would hope that you would want Miss Trent’s killer brought to justice.’

‘Of course.’

‘Miss Paretski has been heard suggesting that Miss Trent’s involvement with Mystery and Mayhem is due to the relationship you started with Miss Paretski.’

‘That, Inspector, is because Madeleine does not understand Julianne. She never did. Julianne wanted to try something new, to branch out. Not too far out, you understand, but she wished to push into more… adult-targeted programming.’

Fox smiled. ‘More breasts in showers?’

Roberts returned the smile. ‘Taking Madeleine’s comments seriously… Well, when you’ve met her you’ll understand that she is more talk than action.’

Continuing to smile, Fox decided not to point out that hiring a killer did not require much action. ‘I will need to know your whereabouts for the morning of the eighteenth, between six and ten.’

‘In bed until midday, or thereabouts. My apartment records should verify that. I have no secrets from the police, Inspector. Please feel free to access any security details you wish.’

‘That’s very helpful, Mister Roberts.’ She put an immediate request through her VA to have HQ grab and analyse the records, tagging it with Roberts’s permission statement. She knew records like that could be doctored or faked, but it was a start. ‘Your cooperation is noted. Can you think of anyone who might wish to harm Miss Trent?’

‘I haven’t been personally involved in her life for a few months, but no one I know would wish to harm her. Even this business with Mystery and Mayhem… She was still doing good work for us. Yes, we were losing some viewing share to them, but we were in no trouble with the advertisers. We’re still getting good replay value through on-demand, and our analysts are seeing good memetic take-up. And Julianne was a likeable woman. She was letting herself go a little…’ He frowned.

‘Mister Roberts, if there’s anything which may shed light on her death…’

He waved a hand dismissively, but what he said was, ‘It’s probably nothing, but she mentioned an online club several times. Uh… I’m sorry, I never recorded the name. It began with an “N.” The way she spoke about it… I don’t believe it was illegal, but I think it had a dark aspect to it. Perhaps she met someone there.’

Fox got to her feet. ‘Thank you for your time, Mister Roberts. I’ll look into this club.’ She was, in fact, already putting a request through to get Trent’s online tracking data passed to Kit for analysis.

‘Anything I can do to help, Inspector,’ Roberts replied, smiling, as she headed for the door.

~~~

Madeleine Paretski was, indeed, not a woman Fox would have classified as violent. She had the look, especially in her publicity stills, but the will was missing or submerged under a vast ocean of high self-opinion.

Fox found her in a dressing room which seemed oversized considering that her costume was a grey skinsuit with motion-tracking markers all over it so there was not much dressing to be done. In stills, her eyes looked bluer than they really were: the real ones were more grey than blue. Her hair was a bright, golden blonde, cut short this season. Fox took in the musculature around the arms and thighs, highlighted by the figure-skimming suit, and decided almost immediately that she was looking at grafted, cosmetic enhancement. It looked the part, and even gave a little extra strength, but it could cause problems if stressed and it never quite looked like natural muscle. The sculpted jawline and cheekbones were either a really good cosmetic job or natural.

‘Yes, I may have got a little steamed that she was writing that low-grade, cheap, spoof-porn rip-off, and I may have suggested she was doing it to get back at me for Alan…’ Paretski paused, smiling brightly and showing teeth which looked like they had been polished by the people who did NASA’s telescope mirrors. It seemed like it was meant to be a dramatic pause, but it also seemed to go on a beat too long. ‘It’s all part of the show, dear.’

Fox did not especially like being called ‘dear’ by someone she did not know. ‘The “show?”’

‘Yes, a little off-screen drama to get the gossip channels buzzing. It’s the main reason I took Alan for a spin, though he turned out to be more fun than I thought… Keep the viewers interested during hiatus, and make sure they know we’re still there. And the social channels are always willing to spread something when it’s a little malicious.’

‘I see.’

‘Julianne didn’t mind. She was busy losing all her free time in Niflhel.’

‘That was the online club she was involved with?’ Fox captured the name, got an immediate hit on something which looked right from her VA, and sent that on to Kit to help with her search.

‘Club, underground hangout, niche memespace for counterculture freaks, whatever you wish to call it, that’s where she’d been spending a lot of her time. I think she got into it before she broke up with Alan and it’s the reason for this… “need for a change” she suddenly developed.’

‘I see. I’ll need to establish where you were between six and ten yesterday.’

‘Asleep until nine, darling. I was out in the afternoon. Niles Wendover was throwing a small get-together on his yacht.’

‘I assume you’d have no objection to me checking your location against building biomonitor records?’

Paretski smiled. ‘Be my guest, but I’ve done enough of these shows to know there are ways around that.’

Fox returned the smile. All right, so this one was not quite the airhead she liked people to think of her as. Of course, that made it a tiny bit more likely that she was the killer, but Fox was still not putting her high on the suspect list.

~~~

Walter Dolan was, like many men in his line of work, older than he looked. To be fair, a lot of men in a lot of lines of work looked younger than their years, but those in media activities were prone to pushing it more than others. Solid jawline, tight muscles, jet-black carefully groomed hair, startlingly blue eyes… and Fox was fairly sure that little of that was natural. Still, he was looking good for a man of sixty-six.

He was dismissive of any threat Murder on My Mind might be posing his show, however. ‘It’s new and people are inclined to try out something new. Watch the ratings come the end of season. That’s when you can see where it’s going, and I’m expecting to see our share go back up.’

‘If it doesn’t?’

‘We’ll lose some revenue. We’ll consider the future of the show.’ He gave a shrug. ‘But we’ve seen off competition before, Inspector. Competition with bigger tits than Elaine Ross.’

Fox gave him a faint smile. ‘I understand you’re moving up in the company?’

Dolan narrowed an eye at her, his lips turning up at the corners. ‘And you’re thinking that I may lose that if that two-bit operation in Boston swings the public their way? The rumour is that Shark’s been brought in as my replacement, and for once the rumour’s true, but a little behind. It’s a done deal, Inspector. We’re announcing it next week. This is commercially sensitive, you understand. Janine Moss, our fictional programming director, is retiring in six months and we’re shuffling up. All decided weeks ago. Besides, Julianne’s death is more damaging to Murder is My Business than the other show is.’

‘She was a good writer?’

‘That depends on who you ask or what your opinion is of the shows we do. In my opinion, yes, she was, but she didn’t really get to display her talents as well as she might have here. No, I don’t think Mystery and Mayhem are any better. You want to see her writing at its best then you should dig up a novel she wrote a few years back.’

‘I’ll look that up. I’ll need to verify your whereabouts yesterday morning between six and ten.’

‘My wife and the building logs can tell you I was in my apartment all day. I don’t lie in on a Sunday as some do, but I did not get out of bed before ten either.’ His grin was the kind of knowing grin that said ‘I want you to know I still have sex with my wife,’ which Fox considered to be very nice for him, but she did not care.

‘Thank you, Mister Dolan. I just have Mister Shark and Mister Daker to talk to now.’

‘Good luck with that,’ he said in reply, but she was not entirely sure why.

~~~

They were kind of like a double act, but not exactly funny. Fox found Daker and Shark in the production control room, which seemed to be a centralised location for handling all the filming going on in the facility. Screens showed Paretski and a few other actors walking through a typical, TV cop crime scene analysis, but there were more screens showing other scenes being worked on in different rooms. There were people here monitoring it all, but most of the work seemed to be being handled by AIs.

Daker and Shark were only interested in Paretski’s performance, however. They watched her on a couple of screens off to one side of the fairly large room, out of the way of the technicians. One screen showed the scene as it really was, grey walls, no scenery, and all the actors dressed in skintight, grey suits, while the other one filled in the virtual set. Pretty much the entire production was filled in using computers, even the costumes, though there did seem to be something missing that Fox could not immediately put her finger on.

‘Nate and I did a lot of the same media courses before we came here,’ Daker said, explaining their relationship. ‘He wanted to go more into the management side, but he’s got a good eye for producing the actual product as well as running all the admin. When they said they were looking for a new producer, I suggested Nate.’

‘So you’ve known each other since long before you joined IB-Nineteen?’

‘Oh yeah,’ Shark replied. ‘There are a few of the old crowd still floating in both our circles. We had a pretty good time back then.’

‘Still do,’ Daker added, ‘but we do suffer from “responsibility” now. Nate more than me.’ The writer gave the producer a grin. ‘Producers are always more in the public eye than writers. We’re just about invisible.’

Shark gave a shrug. ‘Compared to the on-stream talent, we’re all invisible.’

Fox decided to indulge herself. ‘You changed your name, Mister Shark. Presumably to make yourself more visible?’

Daker cringed. ‘Don’t. He’ll do the–’

‘Well,’ Shark said, showing off a lot of very bright teeth, ‘I figured “Shark” had more bite.’

‘–the “more bite” joke,’ Daker went on, wincing this time.

‘Perhaps he needs a better scriptwriter,’ Fox suggested. She could see neither of them killing someone; they behaved more like a pair of students buddying up for a night on the town. Daker was probably the wingman. Then again… ‘Now that Miss Trent is out of the picture, you’ll be doing more work on Murder is My Business, Mister Daker?’

‘Well, yeah… I guess that’s true.’ Daker in particular did not fit Fox’s view of her perpetrator. He was slim, quite attractive, but not excessively so; she doubted he had bothered having work done and she could detect a little puffiness around the eyes which a cosmetician would have ironed out without thinking about it. His hair was neat but not especially stylish, a cap of dark brown without highlights or embellishments, and he had unremarkable, brown eyes. He looked, she thought, like a nice guy, but mostly he did not have the muscle she expected to see in her killer. ‘I’m not sure that’s such a great thing, to be honest. I’d prefer my own project to get my teeth into. Roberts isn’t going to let me, or us, change the formula on Murder much, or at all.’

‘Adrian and I wrote up a proposal for something a little grittier last year,’ Shark said. ‘We got a little interest… and a lot of reluctance. Then Mystery and Mayhem did their thing. Suddenly we’re looking at falling ratings, but the response from up the line was to make the show more appealing to people who don’t want tits in their face in a crime show.’

‘You consider Murder on My Mind a threat?’ Fox asked. Shark was more of a fit for the physical requirements: tall, well-muscled, and it looked like that was gained from exercise and a minimum of artificial augmentation. He was good-looking, and it looked like there had been a little work done to get that. His hair, at the very least, had been coloured, probably lightening a darker blonde to make a swept-back, honey-blonde style which went quite well with sharp, blue eyes. His jawline looked a little weak, still youthful, and his mouth was a little thin in the lips, but quite full. Overall he was good-looking and quite possibly strong enough to hold Trent down while he blew her brains out.

‘It’s a threat, but we need something new to see it off, not more of this.’ He grinned, showing off those white teeth. ‘I want something with more realism to it. Something hard-hitting, speaking to the reality of modern policing. I mean, we have to keep the audience with us, keep the action going, yeah, maybe put in a little more sex, but people want a hard edge now. Ever thought of a career change, Inspector?’

‘I act all the time, Mister Shark, and you wouldn’t want me in front of a camera. I can’t take direction worth a damn. Just ask my captain. I’ll need to know where both of you were between six and ten yesterday morning.’

‘On a Sunday? I don’t get out of whoever’s bed I’m in until midday.’

‘And whose bed were you in yesterday?’

He sagged a little. ‘My own. Alone. My apartment biomonitor logs should agree with me though.’

‘I…’ Daker said, pausing to think. ‘Yeah, I logged in to the office systems about eight-fifteen. I had some rewrites to finish up for today’s shooting. Before that, bed, asleep.’

‘Thanks.’ Fox glanced at the screens again, watching Paretski walk around a decapitated body which was not really there. ‘What am I missing? There’s something not there that I expect to see and I can’t figure out what it is.’

‘That’s good,’ Shark replied. ‘A lot of people don’t notice it’s not there, but you’re not supposed to notice it is. We don’t put the product placement tags in until the final edit. A lot of them are specific to the viewer and depend on who’s paying for time on the day. With modern analytics, clients can make decisions on exactly where to put their advertising budget just about hourly. Most don’t, but we add the product placeholders late anyway.’

Explained it was obvious: the sets lacked the clutter of normal life which a set dresser would have put in. The streamed programme would have things put in which linked to advertisers’ products. Quite which products anyone would want linked to a headless corpse Fox was not sure. Really good carpet cleaner? ‘It’s all just a lot of illusion, isn’t it?’

‘Kind of a metaphor for all of modern life,’ Daker replied. ‘Half the world, most of the developed world, lives in a dream.’

~~~

‘Yes, Julianne Trent spent significant time in Niflhel,’ Kit said. ‘There was no evidence of VR addiction, but she spent at least a couple of hours each day in the viron.’ She paused. ‘I used that right, didn’t I? “Viron” for “virtual environment?”’

Fox grinned at her. ‘Yes, that was right.’

Kit nodded. ‘I am trying to remember to use slang. Miss Trent was in that viron from eight in the evening on Saturday through to two in the morning. We would need a warrant to dig in and find out what she was doing. Her own system did not record her activities within Niflhel and I have found no notes or memories pertaining to it.’

‘So she was up to something she didn’t want recorded, or it was all just fun and she didn’t bother. Or she was up to some fun she didn’t want recorded, of course.’

‘Niflhel has developed a reputation for security and privacy, as well as offering its patrons all manner of recreation. She could have been doing anything. The symbology comes from Norse myth. The name means “misty Hell” or something like that. Hel, with a single L, was the Norse underworld associated with those who died of old age or disease, outside of battle anyway. We get the word Hell, two Ls, from that name, but there is little similarity between the popular conception of Christian religion and the Norse underworld. I don’t believe there is significant concordance between Niflhel and the Norse realm of the same name, aside from the entry viron.’

Fox gave a shrug and settled back on the couch, sipping her coffee. ‘Well, it’s worth a look. I’ll pay the place a visit tonight. Even if it just turns out to be a boring online club, it’s an evening out.’

~~~

Fox opened her eyes as the VR link fully established and looked out on the entrance viron of Niflhel. It was certainly misty. The draw distance was maybe ten metres; after that the world vanished into a grey wall of slowly shifting grey mist. Looking down, she saw her legs vanishing into the same grey fog, but she could feel soft, moist ground under her bare feet. It was like she was standing on a wet peat bog.

‘Oh! You look… different.’ Fox turned at the sound of Kit’s voice, giving her a smile. ‘Different, but the same.’

‘I had a body scan done for the basic avatar, so that’s the same. Then I changed the hair and eyes…’ Her online form still had eyes that were more violet than blue surrounded by purple shadow and black liner. Her hair was far darker, a dusty, very dark near-blonde with highlights of purple. Her dress was four strips of purple cloth with brighter, neon edges, tied just below her breasts and closed with a silver broach. There was a similarly coloured G-string to preserve some modesty. She had never been a particularly modest woman anyway.

‘That is a nice dress you are barely wearing,’ Kit said, deadpan.

‘You have seen what Terri dressed you in, right? How do I get into this place?’

‘Perhaps I could be of assistance?’ The mist seemed to roll back to reveal a figure walking toward them. He, or he sounded male, was little more than a black, humanoid mass of boiling mist with glowing, red pits for eyes. ‘I am Vali. I made this place.’

‘I’m Zorra,’ Fox replied, giving her online tag. ‘This is Kit.’

Something like a grinning mouth of red light appeared in the mass of black mist. ‘I am aware of who and what you are… Zorra. What is it you wish? Niflhel exists to provide leisure, a place to meet for any who wish it. The protocols I provide for connection have some of the best encryption in the world.’

‘That’s true,’ Kit said. ‘I needed to download custom encryption drivers and the data streams connecting us to the server are quite unique.’

‘So you’re selling privacy, for whatever use the participants may have for it,’ Fox said. She had the distinct feeling that this ‘Vali’ knew she was a cop, and she did not like playing games much anyway.

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

‘One of your… participants was murdered yesterday morning. Julianne Trent.’

‘She employed the online tag Mystral,’ Kit supplied.

‘Perhaps we should speak privately,’ Vali said, and the mist was swirling up around them before Fox could reply.

They were standing on the shores of a lake, the sun low in the sky over the mountains opposite, the air fresh in Fox’s lungs as she breathed it in. A grass bank extended down from where she was standing to the water of the… She decided that ‘fjord’ was the right word as she turned to see a farmstead behind her, built from wood with a roof of thatch.

Vali fitted the setting perfectly now. Where there had been a nightmare figure of smoke and fire, there was now a young man dressed in a rough tunic, trousers, and boots which might have belonged to a Viking. His blonde hair was pulled back into a long braid at the back of his neck, except for a few strands which curled on either side of a face that was young, but hard. His eyes were an icy blue, his lips thin, and his features were sharp and angular. Of course, Fox had no way of knowing whether this was anything like his real shape, but the avatar was good-looking and too severe at the same time.

‘Come up to the house,’ he said. ‘Would you care for some mead?’ He turned and began walking up the slope before getting a reply.

‘I’m not entirely sure that would be a good idea,’ Kit replied. She was looking around with a wide-eyed expression of surprise on her face. ‘I am not sure what synthetic alcohol would do to me. And I am surprised to be here as it is.’

‘Why would I leave you behind? I don’t discriminate against infomorphs. Any intellect is welcome here and this way Zorra will not need to brief you later.’

‘Thank you for your consideration.’

He walked into the low building and went to the back. There was the clink of pot on pot. Fox smelled grass, dried grass, hay or straw. There were other scents there too, animals, earth… The simulation was remarkably detailed. Somewhere she could hear a dull, bell-like tone and she was sure there would be animals outside, behind the house. Goats, she thought, perhaps a pig.

Vali turned, handing out goblets. He looked at Kit. ‘Try the mead. I promise it won’t do anything particularly bad.’ She took the goblet as though it might bite, and his hard lips twitched in amusement before he turned, picking up a goblet of his own, and then sat down on a straight-backed, wooden chair at the one table in the single room.

‘This place is quite remarkable,’ Fox said as she took a seat. The wood was rough beneath her buttocks and the texture of the table under her virtual fingers was perfect: there was roughness there, but it had been polished to smooth by age.

‘Thank you. I spent some time on it.’ His brow knitted and he turned his goblet slowly in long fingers. ‘Mystral came here for entertainment, nothing more. She was involved in a small writers’ group, and I know that was her line of work, but most of her time was spent entertaining guests in one of the brothels.’

‘Brothels?’

His smile had a distinct hint of resignation in it. ‘When you allow people to create their own content in a virtual environment, sex is an almost universal feature of it, one way or another. Mystral favoured a fantasy-themed establishment created by another of our members, Cleopatra. There’s a strong role-playing element. You don’t simply go there to bang and leave.’

‘She was there on Saturday night?’

He paused, possibly accessing data they could not see. ‘Yes. She connected at eight in the evening, went straight to Alexandria, and didn’t leave until two in the morning. Nothing I’m seeing in her connection records would indicate any kind of stress. She was enjoying herself.’

‘You monitor stress indicators?’

‘Niflhel features various forms of entertainment, Zorra, including combat simulation, some horror-based scenarios, and a few sexual virons which… can cause some degree of stress. My systems keep a watch on our participants’ biomonitors just in case someone gets up to something inadvisable. Some of the people in Alexandria can play a little rough at times, but there is no indication of anything like that from Mystral’s data.’

Fox smiled. ‘You’re being very helpful, Vali.’

He smiled back. ‘And you find it hard to trust someone in my profession who volunteers data so easily? One, I am… insulted by murder, especially of my participants. I’ll provide whatever assistance I can. Two, I am quite sure her presence here had nothing to do with her death, so I have nothing to hide. Three, I like your agent. She’s cute.’

Kit’s eyes widened. ‘Oh… I… Thank you?’

‘She is cute,’ Fox agreed, ‘but I still think her designer is trying to get me in the sack. Would it be okay for me to pay a visit to this “Alexandria?”’

‘Generally it’s members only, but I’m inclined to be generous. I’ll arrange a guest pass. I could entertain Kit while you’re looking around.’ He was smirking now, amused at the AI’s discomfort.

‘I’m not sure she’s ready for the interaction I expect to see, so why not. Just don’t break my agent.’

‘I assure you that she will be fine.’

Fox got to her feet and started for the door of the little house. ‘You hear that, Kit? You’ll be fine. Just remember that it’s best not to put out on a first date.’ And then she stepped through the door and was gone.

‘I’ll try to remember that,’ Kit said, turning to look warily at Vali. ‘Would you mind explaining what “putting out” is?’

~~~

Alexandria seemed to be modelled after some sort of ancient city. Fox had expected something far smaller given Vali’s description of the place as a brothel, but she arrived on a dock beside a boat, as though arriving by sea, and there were workers visible tending to various duties nearby. They bore the tell-tale signs of AI automata rather than real people, not quite looking real in a manner which was difficult to pin down and repeating the same set of activities over and over again if you watched them long enough. On the other hand, the place had the feel of an inhabited city, which meant Cleopatra had put time and money into crafting and running the place.

Well, if the simulations were there, she figured she would try talking to one. ‘Excuse me,’ she said to a man sitting near her point of entry mending fishing nets.

‘Good evening, lady. How may I help?’ The voice was a little stiff but had good tone. The model followed the ‘grizzled old fisherman’ school of looks and was dressed in a loincloth and a loose, sackcloth tunic.

‘I was hoping I could talk to Cleopatra.’

The figure’s face shifted, developing more of a sneer. ‘Oh, you’re one of her women. You’ll find her at the pleasure palace at the top of the hill.’

Vaguely amused at the attitude change, Fox nodded and said ‘Thank you.’ Then she set off down the dock to climb through the town to what she assumed was the ‘pleasure palace.’ There was, certainly, a decorated building of some sort among rows of stone houses, all of them whitewashed to shine in the sunlight. The palace itself was just stone, but that stone was white marble and gleamed almost as much, except for the places where it seemed to have been painted.

The frescos were there to highlight carved relief, but that was only really visible once she had climbed up the cobbled main street and was standing outside the colonnade of the building. All those painted carvings did give the impression that the building was there for only one reason: they were all depictions of various forms of sexual activity, and quite graphic depictions at that. Well, sometimes her job did involve terrible sacrifice…

The inside of the building was heavy on the red. A lot of the marble was covered in thick, red velvet drapes. Plush, red couches and loveseats were placed around a large, circular room with a pair of staircases winding up from the back which had a doorway set between them. Most of the furniture was occupied by women in various states of undress. No men, Fox noted; the men who were there were still dressed at this point, mostly they were standing, and they were posed in manners which suggested they were customers seeking to procure the women they were talking with. There was just that hint of anticipation about them, though the same could be said for a number of the women. No one came here unless they wanted to be playing their role after all.

‘A new face.’ The voice had a smile in it and Fox turned to see its owner was, indeed, smiling. ‘Seek you a vocation in my house, lady?’ This had to be Cleopatra. She was tall, tanned, had jet-black hair to her waist and dark, almost black eyes, and a voluptuous figure. The outfit was the giveaway, however: there was a silken loincloth set about her hips, dipping low at the front and falling down to almost touch the floor, and there was a wide necklace of blue and gold beads set about her neck and shoulders. Her full breasts were bare.

‘Zorra,’ Fox said. ‘I’m Zorra, and you must be Cleopatra, and a friend told me about this place. I was hoping to see her here. Mystral?’

‘Mystral… I don’t believe I’ve seen her since she exhausted four men the night gone last.’

Fox smiled. The weird mix of Greek and Egyptian culture and what sounded like fake medieval language was just a little off-putting, but when in Alexandria… ‘I do believe that her tales of this place are not exaggerated, and that this has brought out a side of her I have not seen afore now.’

‘Many say that their other lives are far less… adventurous than their time here. Can I put you to work, Zorra? The house charges twenty-five per cent of whatever you gain from your clients. You are free to come and go as you wish. I can provide accommodation in nearby apartments if you wish to spend time here, at reasonable rent, of course. Mystral has rooms here.’

So Cleopatra was speaking of Trent in the present tense, which meant she was probably unaware of the murder… Would a virtual house give any clues about the murder? Well, it might be worth a try… Fox lowered her voice. ‘Lady Cleopatra, might I speak with you in private? It’s a matter of… some delicacy and urgency.’ She could see the look of intrigue buried in the frown: Cleopatra was seeing this as some odd bit of role-playing. She was probably expecting a seduction attempt.

‘Come with me,’ Cleopatra said and set off across the room toward the door at the back which, it turned out, led into a suite of private rooms. The door let into a lounge set out for Roman-style eating with loungers and low tables. To the left, behind thin, blue drapes, there was a bathroom, of sorts, featuring a large pool. To the right, behind red drapes, was the bedroom; the bed was huge and did not look that comfortable to sleep on. Cleopatra curled onto a lounger, indicating the one opposite to Fox. ‘What is it that brings you here on such urgent and delicate business, Zorra?’

‘I’m sorry to drop out of character, but I have some bad news. Mystral was killed yesterday morning, in her home. I’m the detective assigned to her case, Inspector Tara Meridian. I can provide formal identification if–’

‘Killed?’ Cleopatra sat upright, her face serious. ‘You mean murdered. They wouldn’t assign a detective to her case for an accident. And that’s a name I’ve heard of. You were involved in that rescue in Dallas. Jackson Martins’ daughter. Aren’t you with the UNTPP?’

‘I was then. I’m with NAPA now.’

‘Ah…’ Her eyes widened as a thought hit her. ‘You can’t think that her coming here–’

Fox held up a hand. ‘At this point I’m trying to get a picture of her, especially her state of mind during the days leading up to her death. I heard she spent a lot of time here.’

‘Uh, I suppose she did. She first came… nine months ago. Niflhel had been open for a month and I’d only just got this place into the shape I wanted it. She was one of my first regular girls and well liked. I wasn’t exaggerating about her exhausting four guys on Saturday night. She was popular. I got the feeling she didn’t have much of a life outside, but she played the role to the hilt, you know? It was hard to get an impression of what she was like when she wasn’t Mystral.’

‘But she was happy enough in the last few days? No indications of problems outside. Maybe she was here more than usual or was more enthusiastic.’

The beautiful, exotic features of the mock Egyptian queen scrunched up in a distinctly unattractive manner. ‘Don’t… No, I don’t think she was acting any differently than usual. I’m usually pretty good at spotting that kind of thing…’ She sagged a little. ‘Outside of here I’m a psychologist. I work in memetics so this place is fairly easy, but it lets me be a bit more creative than crafting advertising campaigns. If there was anything wrong with Mystral, she was hiding it well.’

Fox nodded slowly. The more she heard, the more the entire thing was sounding like a random killing, which would be bad… ‘Could I see her apartment here?’

‘I don’t see why not…’ An absent flick of the wrist produced a key which appeared in Cleopatra’s hand from nowhere. ‘It’s right out of the front door, second house on the left, upper floor. She said… She said she liked the view out over the ocean.’

Getting to her feet, Fox took the key and started for the door. ‘Thanks. And I might be back to try the place out properly. The detail is beautiful, but… no men on the roster?’

Cleopatra got up to follow her, shrugging. ‘I used to have a mix, but I got fed up of all the bitching. Seriously, men are so childish.’

Fox gave a laugh. ‘I won’t argue that one.’

The ‘apartment’ Trent had rented in the virtual town was more like a room with some storage space and a bed, but it did have a balcony which jutted out enough from the building on the seaward side to let you stretch out in the not-really-there sun. The view was quite beautiful. The sea shaded from a pale, almost icy blue at the docks, darkening as it vanished into the distance. There was, Fox assumed, a limit to how far you could actually go out to sea, but the apparent horizon was a long way off.

There were two wardrobes and a dresser with drawers in the room. Trent seemed to have spent some time creating outfits for her Mystral persona. Suitable whoring outfits for the setting and a few more decorous pieces which still managed to look sexy. Clearly Paretski had been wrong about Niflhel changing Trent’s view of the world: she had broken up with Rogers years ago and the server had been around for ten months. So the outfits for selling her body in were a product of her new outlook on life, not a cause for it, but she had certainly decided to sink herself into the role.

‘So why did someone kill you, Julianne?’ Fox asked as she checked the drawers and found nothing of note. ‘Why did someone break into your home and shoot you in the eye? It’s a personal way of murdering someone. He had to have been looking right in your eyes while he blew your brains out. That takes a lot of hate or a lot of cold.’

Exasperated at the lack of anything that made sense in this case, Fox headed for the door. She would return to the docks and leave. Grinning, she rethought that: she would return to the docks, remember to pick up Kit, assuming the AI could be extracted from her love nest, and then leave to consider what to do next. The logical thing would be to arrange to fly to Boston…

She had just made the bottom of the flight of steps which led down the side of the building from Mystral’s apartment when strong hands grabbed her waist and she was pulled back into a small alley between the rows of houses. Then she was spun about, and her wrists were grasped and pinned above her head, a trick which indicated her attacker was tall.

‘Now I have you, my–’ And she looked up into blue eyes set in a handsome, bearded face that should have belonged to some sort of fantasy pirate, and she saw the look of confusion cross his face which she was quite sure the fantasy pirate would never have worn. ‘You’re not Mystral.’

‘No,’ Fox replied. He had not let her wrists loose, but she was not especially worried given that he had given her plenty of space to use her legs and an open target between his. ‘I’m a friend of hers, Zorra. She’s not here today. Are you one of her regulars?’

‘Draken of North Reach, at your service.’

Her eyes moved up to look at his arms, still pinning hers. ‘I believe I’m at yours, sir.’

He was, she thought, recovering from his surprise quickly. ‘It would appear that you are, but are you?’

Fox gave him a smile, narrowing her eyes a little. It was over a month since the last time she had been laid, virtually or otherwise… ‘You got the cash on you?’ No sense in breaking role.

‘I’m well prepared.’

‘You want it here or should we find a room?’

In answer, he pressed forward, his mouth covering hers.

~~~

Kit saw a slow smile creep over Vali’s face and peered at him, wondering what the joke was. She was having a little trouble concentrating and knew it was due to the mead. Whatever the code was that went into the golden, sweet-tasting fluid, which she had to admit she liked, it was slowing her data input and generally making her feel out of sync with her own brain. Was that what humans experienced when they drank alcohol?

Vali was still smiling. ‘What is the joke, Mister slightly smirking Vali?’

‘I believe your owner has found a little enjoyment in her search for enlightenment,’ Vali replied. He reached out and swept his hand in the air, the gesture causing a display to appear which Kit immediately recognised.

‘Those are the data streams from Fox’s biomonitor. Her heart rate is climbing and her breathing is becoming more rapid.’

‘Indeed. There is also endorphin release and a few other chemical signatures which suggest… Perhaps we should peek.’ His hand swept out again and the biological display was replaced by a visual of what appeared to be a street. There were whitewashed walls and two figures pressed together against one of them.

Kit tilted her head a little, trying to make out exactly what was going on. ‘Oh! Oh my…’

~~~

He was big, but this was not reality and big was just more filling instead of uncomfortable or painful. Fox wrapped her legs around his hips and swung against his thrusts, pushing him harder and deeper as her back rubbed against the whitewashed wall and she buried her head against his shoulder and bit her lips to avoid moaning.

She had avoided the complication of it on the Moon. She avoided complicating it most of the time and this was no different. Here she was engaging in the oldest method of stress relief there was, and that was exactly what this was. There was no emotion, no connection. In this case, she was even going to be paid for it, even if the money was not real. No complication, just gratification, and that was going to happen really soon.

There was the sudden tightening deep between her legs. Her hands tightened on his shoulders in response, and her eyes jammed shut, and the tension grew until there was just so much that she knew she would break… And then the explosion. It was like an explosion, sort of, but it roared out from her sex and consumed her slowly, burning its way up her body and down her legs until it filled her brain with noise and… fell away into quiet aside from the sound of Draken of North Reach panting in her ear.

‘Lady Zorra,’ he said, his voice soft and hoarse, ‘I’ll be sure to look you up again should you return to Alexandria.’ Somehow he had gathered the mental capacity and coordination to take her hand and press four coins into it.

‘My pleasure, sir,’ Fox replied, standing and straightening her skirts and the thong he had pushed aside. Flashing him a smile, she strutted away down the alley. She would give Cleopatra the coins: it was not like she had an account to lodge the money with.

~~~

Fox opened her eyes, blinked a couple of times, and laid aside the induction grip she was using to provide a cable connection to Kit’s server. Sighing, she squeezed the bridge of her nose and pushed aside the nagging sensation that her mind had partaken of an orgasm her body had not been privy to. And then she opened her eyes and wondered why she was seeing double.

‘Uh… Kit?’

‘One second, please. I need to synchronise my memories.’ There were two Kits sitting on the carpet facing each other, identical in every way including the look of slight annoyance. And then there was one, her mouth turning up into a smile. ‘There, now I am up to date with what happened within the viron. It seems you had a good time.’

‘I wasn’t aware that you could do that.’

‘I can partition off two additional copies of my runtime if required, executing one on my second quantum core and one on another, possibly external, processor. I could execute on your implant’s AI processor, but it would be… severely limiting.’

‘Right. So did you have a good time with Vali?’

‘We talked.’

‘That’s all?’ Fox raised an eyebrow.

‘I believe that Vali was interested in my mind,’ Kit stated firmly. ‘We talked about my inception and training, and I learned some things which you may find useful.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. I have the real name and identification of the gentleman who had you pinned against the wall.’

Fox coughed. ‘You saw that, huh?’

‘Yes.’ Kit paused, getting to her feet and walking over to sit down beside Fox. ‘Might I ask what the experience is like?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I’m an AI. I’ve never engaged in that form of sensual experience and I’m not really sure I could do so. What is it like?’

‘Uh…’ Fox leaned back on the couch and looked up at the ceiling. ‘I think it’s different for everyone. I mean, there are bound to be similarities, but what we feel is probably different. I think. And for me it’s never quite the same in VR. It’s like there’s something missing. I always feel a little let down, especially when I’m out. It’s like I’ve had the mental and emotional release, but the physical has been denied me.’

‘Which it has. The nanoprobe implants in your brain isolate much of the physical signals which would normally propagate during the activities simulated in VR. It’s akin to the physiological shut-off during REM sleep and there for the same reason. Physical reaction to what happens in VR could–’

‘Result in physical harm if it were acted upon by the body. I know, Kit. It just makes sex seem… less fulfilling. But to answer your question… No, actually, I’m not sure I can answer it, but when it’s just right it’s one of the purest pleasures I know of. What was the other thing you learned?’

‘Miss Paretski was the one who first introduced Miss Trent to Niflhel.’

Fox frowned. ‘Is that so? So she either has a really lousy memory or she was lying to me. What I’m not really sure of is why she’d lie.’

‘I would suggest that there is only one way to find out.’

‘Uh-huh. I’ll go ask her tomorrow.’

~~~

‘Best laid plans,’ Fox muttered as she rode the elevator to Jackson Martins’ apartment. She had received a request for her to go to the MarTech offices as soon as her eyes had opened: Jackson had news for her. It was Teresa Martins who was waiting in the lobby when the doors opened, however.

Pretty much everyone said that Terri took after her mother. Jackson went so far as to add ‘thank God’ to that statement, but he generally ignored the fact that he had certainly provided Terri with a significant boost in brain power. Not that Lysandra Martins had been stupid, by any stretch of the imagination, but compared to her husband most people were dunces. Lysandra had, in fact, been quite an accomplished psychologist, but after her marriage to Jackson the media had focused only on the fact that she was a stunningly beautiful African-American and he was… not exactly her aesthetic equal. Clearly that meant she had married him for his money. Jackson had, apparently, been more annoyed about the assertion than Lysandra.

Whatever the case, Terri had done well out of the union. She was a very attractive girl with long black hair, full lips, eyes which were somewhere close to a golden brown, faultless black skin, and a trim figure with quite enough curves, but not too much either. The gossip channels were constantly suggesting she was seeing some man or other from the rich and/or famous set, and as far as Fox was aware, they had never been right about a single one of them. Terri kept her private life private, and did not restrict her few physical relationships to men. Right now Terri was dressed in a short, grey tank dress and heeled pumps, doing her corporate employee thing, but she was grinning.

‘Clearly low gravity does you good. You’re looking well,’ Terri said by way of hello.

‘Low gravity makes me grumpy. I’ve had time to get over it. Your father requested my presence.’

‘I know.’ She turned and started for the solarium with all the poise several years of deportment training could provide. ‘How’s Kit?’

‘Cute, curious… maybe working out better than I’d expected.’

‘Poppa said you’d got her analysing a case.’

‘Summarising profiles, suggesting potential suspects. She is supposed to be good at working through a lot of data, right?’

‘That’s one of the things AIs are better at than humans, yes. She’s a good design, and I hope I’ve got the personality right. She’s easy to get on with?’

‘Yeah… Generally. If I hadn’t been dragged off-planet I’d be able to give you a better report. I think she got herself a boyfriend already.’

Terri stopped, turning in the doorway to look back. ‘You’re kidding.’

Fox shrugged. ‘We met a guy calling himself Vali who kept her company and said she had a nice mind.’

‘Huh. Have to keep an eye on that in the other test models. Poppa’s in his office. Come on.’

The office was through the solarium and left into the lounge, which had a large window looking out on the park, and then back into the tower. Jackson had his bedroom and office away from the outside walls because he liked it dark when he slept, and he liked privacy when he was working on some projects. Terri led Fox into the quite large room with its huge array of screens and bank of consoles, made sure the door was closed, and then nodded to her father who activated the full security suite. Fox heard the locks engage and knew the physical barriers were the least of what had just been initiated.

‘You really don’t want this being overheard, do you?’ Fox said to Jackson as he tapped at keys and data began to appear on the wall. Jackson was happy with virtual consoles and in-vision displays, but also liked the solid kind for some tasks.

‘No. No, I don’t. We cracked the file and we’ve decrypted all of it and, as I surmised, it contains a lot of data from Jenner Research Station.’

‘We’ve already kicked off an investigation into how he managed to get it out,’ Terri said, sounding annoyed.

‘However,’ Jackson went on, ‘I’ve gone over what’s here. It’s complete, but old. It looks like an archived database from two or three months ago. There were several significant problems still outstanding which have been resolved since then. If anyone tried to use this… They would not get what they were hoping for.’

‘What?’ Fox asked. ‘Are we talking grey goo scenarios? Weird infomorphs taking over the net? I’m still not clear on what you were working on that could be of any use to NIX or United Anarchy.’

‘They want the nanobot control software,’ Terri supplied. ‘It’s unique. It’s a paradigm shift in adaptive software. I mean… I can’t wait to be able to experiment with larger, wider-scale applications, but–’

‘But I’m a little worried about my daughter’s stroke of genius,’ Jackson said. ‘I wish to take things slowly.’

‘Terri’s idea?’ Fox asked.

‘It’s ours,’ Terri said. ‘Poppa will tell you it’s mine, but I just came up with the concept and let him use me as a sounding board while he turned it into something workable.’

‘My daughter is entirely too modest, and her ideas about using this to create an entirely new type of AI are hers, and hers alone.’

Terri giggled. ‘It’s the integration of multiple swarm intelligences that’s the key.’ Fox looked blankly at her. ‘Our current AI software is limited by the processing power of the computer executing it, yes? And we tend to find that throwing power at the problem produces diminishing returns. It doesn’t make sense. Someone with an IQ of one-sixty does not have a significantly more powerful brain than someone with an average IQ, but to get that kind of difference in an AI, we’d need…’

‘Something like a million billion times the processing power,’ Jackson supplied. ‘Clearly we are doing something wrong. Clearly the model we use to create our AIs does not scale well. Teresa believes that this “fractal connective model” will provide better scaling, and possibly result in more effective AIs using lower-powered processors.’

‘We’re already seeing it in the nanobot swarms we’ve been testing at Jenner. They have really weak processors, but they are proving capable of far more complex behaviour than their combined power should allow. The sum of the parts is proving greater than the whole.’

Fox’s brow creased, and her index finger tapped on pursed lips. ‘So… you could create an AI which utilised whatever processing power it could find, linking it all together to add to its… distributed brain? Every added component raising its intellect beyond the level of the combined components?’

Terri nodded. ‘It’s the complexity and efficiency of the network which matters, not the power of the nodes.’

‘I can see why you’re worried, Jackson. This is nightmare stuff.’

Terri pouted. ‘It’s not. It’s–’

‘Terri, the idea is scary, as in it’ll scare people. They’ll be seeing this as a “virus taking over the internet” thing, but it’s also heading right for that old “Singularity” concept. You could easily end up with something you can’t understand or control.’

‘Well, I admit it needs some careful planning and a lot of simulation, but the point is that the UA would likely use it to try to take over the net and NIX…’ Terri frowned and looked at her father.

‘I believe that NIX have substantial AI assets deployed in monitoring internet traffic,’ Jackson said. He held up his hand to forestall the comment Fox was about to make. ‘I know it’s a conspiracy favourite, that NIX watches everything we do, that it’s the real Big Brother, but I’ve some evidence to suggest that there is a kernel of truth there. A more powerful AI, or a distributed AI technology, would be highly useful in the espionage business, even if they don’t already spy on everything we do.’

Fox gave a shrug. ‘I’ll concede that point. I’ve never bought into them being that effective, but I could certainly see them wanting to be. And I agree that UA would love this. If either has the data on the stick, what do they have?’

‘The communications protocols scale badly. Beyond a few tens of thousands of nodes, adding more degrades performance rather than increasing it. No super-intelligence, and no internet-swallowing virus.’

‘Okay. That’s what they were after. Why did they kill Hunt before he could get it back to Earth?’

‘That,’ Jackson said, ‘I don’t know. If it’s all right with you, I’m going to have the information my people at Jenner find funnelled through to you. Perhaps if we find out how he got in and out with the information it will shed some light on why he did not get all the way.’

Fox nodded. ‘Of course it’s fine. Encrypt it and send it through Kit though. I don’t think I want Canard seeing it unfiltered.’

~~~

‘So far,’ Canard said, leaning back in his chair and contemplating the ceiling, ‘you’ve got industrial espionage, and someone took out the spy before he could return to Earth. There’s nothing to tie that to NIX. Actually it suggests MarTech would be suspects more than anyone else.’

‘If they’d known what he was up to before I told them,’ Fox replied.

‘You said Martins suspected Hunt beforehand.’

‘Of being NIX, or something similar, not of having got his hands on anything. Besides, if they had done it, they could have covered up their involvement very easily. They could have just swallowed the data, created a fake, or told us they’d failed to decrypt it.’

Canard gave a grunt, conceding the point. ‘Do you think you’ll get anywhere with this unless MarTech’s enquiry comes up with anything?’

‘You want to send me back out to Shackleton? Maybe with a side trip to Jenner?’

‘Not really.’

‘Then we’re waiting for Jackson’s people to find something. Besides, I’ve got the Trent homicide to deal with too. I’d like to go up to Boston to interview some of the people she was working with up there. I have found a way of cutting the expenses though.’

He lifted his head and looked at her, raising an eyebrow. ‘You have?’

In-flight, Northbound to Boston Metro, 21st January.

‘Oh yeah… This is how travel is supposed to be.’ The pilot, sitting back in the seat beside Fox’s, laughed as he heard her over the headsets they were wearing. She was pleased to note that he did not seem concerned over her current flight plan, which was skimming over the Atlantic at a height of ten metres and a speed just a bit in excess of two hundred knots. It was not especially close to the vertol’s top speed, but she did not feel like pushing it.

‘You ever fly one operationally?’ the pilot asked.

‘The combat models? No. Training, sure, but I never needed to fly one in anger. You’re ex-military?’

‘I did five years on aerospace tactical operations. Not that we got to do a whole helluva lot of real ops, but we did a lot of exercises.’

‘And now you ferry MarTech personnel up and down the coast.’

‘Better paid, and I’m home at night with my wife and daughter.’

‘I guess that’s way too much plus to ignore. I admit it’s nice to have a place I can really call my own to go home to.’ Her implant flagged up a course change relayed from the flight computer and she swung the nimble little aircraft to port. ‘Five minutes out. I guess you should take over.’

The pilot sighed and reached for his stick. ‘Yeah… I guess I should.’

Boston Metro.

Boston had managed to keep a big chunk of its central city area intact thanks to a lot of old New England money. You had to get out as far as the I-90 before you saw arcologies, and the Sprawl which covered much of the west of New York Metro was kept well back from the genteel city in the north. Fox had to take an autocab from the MarTech building in South Boston across the bay to East Boston, which was where the city planners had decided the newer, slightly uglier, semi-industrial buildings should be hidden away beside the airport.

The offices of Mystery and Mayhem were distinctly less well situated than those of their competitor, occupying a building which looked more like a warehouse than an office in a business park with a high wall surrounding it. Fox passed the reason for the wall on the way in: the Sprawl had made it here in the form of various random constructions of scrap and cast-offs which people were using as their homes.

Instead of a human receptionist, the station had a perfectly presentable but off-the-shelf gynoid apparently being run by their administrative AI. It was not an uncommon practice when you did not expect many visitors to your building, but Fox was a little surprised to see it in a media company.

‘Inspector Meridian,’ the machine said, smiling. It had a nice voice, she had to admit that. ‘Mystery and Mayhem are pleased to welcome you. Mister Poll is available in office three which is to your right.’

‘Thank you, uh, Sheila is it?’ There was a name plaque on the reception desk, but it just gave the one name, Sheila.

‘The staff like to call this frame by that name. They say that it gives it more personality.’

‘Right… thanks.’ Fox turned right and immediately spotted a door at the side of the reception area labelled with a ‘3.’ The admin AI, she decided as she headed for the office, was not a class 4 like Kit, but a lot of people felt that class 2s and 3s did the job and were less likely to decide to take over the world. They were cheaper too.

Grant Poll looked like a man with too much on his mind. He was attractive, of course, and not too old according to the profile she had on him. His hair was black and he had sharp, blue eyes, and not a single wrinkle to be seen, but he looked harried. He glanced at Fox as she walked in and she saw irritation flicker across his features. He was not best pleased with her turning up to talk to him.

‘Mister Poll? I’m Inspector Tara Meridian, NAPA precinct nineteen. I’m doing background interviews regarding the death of Julianne Marie Trent.’

‘I know who you are and why you’re here, Inspector.’ Poll waved at a seat, his irritation not subsiding. ‘You understand that I’m short a principal writer on my premier show because of this.’

‘I do understand that, sir, and I’m sure it was very inconsiderate of Miss Trent to get herself killed mid-season, but she did, so I need to ask a few questions.’

His anger flared, his mouth opened, and Fox stared at him placidly and watched the fire die in his eyes. He sagged back in his seat. ‘My apologies, Inspector. I have backers and advertisers riding me like a rodeo bull. Murder on My Mind was really making headway in the market and Julianne’s death… Replacing her is going to be hard, but even getting through the shows we have scripts for is not going to be easy.’

Fox nodded. ‘I do understand, Mister Poll. Miss Trent was that vital to this production?’

‘She spun us the original concept, wrote and redrafted the pilot several times until it fit what we needed, but she had a vision for the overall arc. She knew where Charlie Tasker was going over the next three seasons, and now we don’t know.’

‘Tasker is the detective character?’

‘That’s right. Played by Elaine Ross.’

‘There’s… a degree of similarity between this show and Murder is My Business–’

‘There is bound to be some similarity,’ Poll cut in, ‘but Julianne was careful about keeping the two series separate. Mind was the show she wanted to write, Inspector. The other one was taken out of her control years ago and she felt constrained by the environment at IB-Nineteen. She was going to tell the story she intended to tell with Charlie, and now she never will.’

‘When did you last talk to her?’

‘On the Friday. It’d be the sixteenth, I think. We had a meeting, virtual of course, to go over plans for the next three episodes.’

‘And how did she seem? Any worries, problems?’

‘None. She seemed fine. Enthusiastic about getting on with the work. Uh, Elaine may have spoken to her later. I think they would meet online occasionally.’

Fox raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you know where?’

‘I don’t, but Elaine is shooting. We can spare her for a few minutes if you’re willing to wait.’

‘I’ll wait, Mister Roberts. That’s not a problem.’

~~~

‘I saw her Saturday night, or her avatar anyway. She seemed fine to me.’ Elaine Ross sucked on a plastic tube of caffeinated something or other, wrapped in a towelling wrap which left her long legs exposed. She did not seem especially troubled by Trent’s death.

Ross was an attractive, quite bright woman, green eyed and with shoulder-length, red hair. Her legs were a little thin, but from the substantial amount of limb on display, Fox could tell she worked out; the musculature was probably natural, firm, long, and moulded by effort. She had a slim body, narrow waist, wider hips, and the breasts which the camera seemed to love on her show were almost certainly enhanced. Nature did not provide many women with that much volume and yet maintain such a firm, pert shape. Her face was interesting: attractive, certainly, but not conventionally so. Her nose was a little larger than Fox might have expected, her features harder, more angular. It made her distinctive, not like the typical, off-the-shelf beauties you saw on a lot of IB channels.

‘You, uh, moonlight in Alexandria?’ Fox asked.

‘Oh, God, no. I sometimes wish I could, but if the fans found out I was doing that… Well, we’d lose some and I’d never get any peace from the rest. No, I… appreciate variety and Alexandria gives me that, but I frequent a couple of other sections of Niflhel, and some other community sites. Saturday night I was in Alexandria and Julianne was in good form. She was popular in there, and for good reason. She had a talent for it. I think it was her imagination, you know?’

Fox nodded, her eyes on Ross’s face. The actress’s demeanour of dispassion was slipping as she talked more about Trent. There was a softening in the corners of her eyes, a slight tightening around her mouth as she fought to maintain control of her expression. ‘You can’t think of anyone who might have wished to harm her? Any reason for someone to want to do that?’

‘God, no!’ Ross’s hand, the one not holding the drink, tightened into a fist and relaxed just as rapidly. ‘No. No one hated Julianne enough to kill her. No one. She was even doing right by the crowd at Nineteen. She was fed up with that gig, wanted out, but it paid the bills and she felt an obligation to her ex and the team there.’

‘You seem to have known her quite well.’

‘I… guess I did.’ Her brow shifted, trying not to wrinkle, and she bit at her lip. Her eyes darted around, but they were alone and maybe she needed someone to confide in. ‘Not as well as I’d have liked. I had kind of a crush on her, and she would indulge me, but I knew she wasn’t really that into it. I was hoping to spend time with her on Saturday night, but she was booked through all night.’

‘Did you ever take this up on a physical level?’

‘Once. She was up here for face-to-face stuff, script conferences. I invited her out to my place to discuss the character. She was a little surprised I was interested in her outside the net, but… Well, she wasn’t quite as acrobatic in real life, but the imagination was still there.’

‘As far as you know, there was no one else in her life? No one regular?’

Ross shook her head. ‘She definitely preferred men. Wasn’t averse to women, but preferred men. She had several regulars in Alexandria, but they were all just there for what she could do in a virtual bed. Straight sex, no attachment.’ Ross frowned. ‘I don’t get the feeling she really wanted anything more committed right now.’

‘Thank you, Miss Ross,’ Fox said, smiling. ‘You’ve helped a lot.’

Ross returned the smile. ‘You don’t have time to stick around longer, I suppose? I’d love to get some ideas about making Charlie a little more… realistic. Give her a bit more of a real cop feel. I’m not a bad cook…’

The invitation was hanging there for something rather more interesting than discussing police motivation for a video character. And Fox had always had a thing about red hair on women… And then a message window popped up indicating that Kit was waiting to talk to her. ‘Uh… I have a call I need to take.’

The smile stayed in place, twitching to more of a smirk as the actress read Fox’s body language. ‘Sure.’

Kit’s low-res avatar appeared in Fox’s vision field; the 2D avatars were less intrusive than the full-immersion, 3D versions and quite good enough for what amounted to a video phone call. ‘Kit, have a good reason for interrupting me.’

‘I have taken receipt of messages from the precinct’s technical department and Captain Canard,’ Kit responded. ‘A sweep of transit records found evidence that Nathan Shark took a maglev journey to this building on Sunday the eighteenth, arriving at zero-seven-forty-two.’

‘His building computers have him resident in his apartment at that time.’

‘Yes, Fox, it is an anomaly. Captain Canard was apparently notified of the matter. He sent a message indicating that, since you were in Boston, he was sending Detective Sandoval to bring Mister Shark in for questioning.’

‘Sandoval? Don’t know him. Damn, this smells. Get on the data records and go over what they’ve found. Get me data on Sandoval, and go over Shark’s profile again. And get an autocab out to my location and put through a request to Jackson to get me flown back to New York.’

‘Of course, Fox,’ Kit replied. ‘Is it possible I missed something?’

‘If you did, we both did. Don’t second guess. Just do the checks and the job.’

‘Right.’ Kit’s image vanished.

Fox looked up at the actress in the gown which had, she noticed, slipped to show more cleavage. ‘I’m going to have to ask for a rain check on that dinner,’ Fox told her. ‘I need to get back to New York before my boss screws up my investigation.’

Ross tilted her head, the smile not faltering. ‘Rain check?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I can wait.’

New York Metro.

Fox marched into the observation room of the interview suite Sandoval was using to talk to Shark just in time to hear the words she had been hoping to avoid.

‘I don’t believe I should speak to you any further without legal representation.’ Up on the wall screen, Shark was looking angry: chances were that Sandoval had gone in hard and bounced.

Fox glared at Canard, who was watching the interview, now with an irritated look on his face. ‘You tell him to press this, Captain?’

‘We let him sweat for forty minutes after bringing him in,’ Canard replied. ‘I’ve used tactics like this before when we’ve evidence that they’ve lied. He sits and worries over–’

‘It’s taken me eighty-two minutes to get here after getting your message, and in that time my agent managed to find enough evidence of falsification in the records the data search found that I’m pretty sure he’s not lying. And now you’ve turned a friendly witness into a hostile one. And he’s in broadcasting. How long do you think it’s going to be before the story comes out saying that NAPA doesn’t fact-check before arresting someone?’

‘Your agent has… How the Hell were you able to get that done so fast?’

‘Quantum processor. Really good at massive database queries. If you’d let me know you were sending Sandoval to arrest Shark before doing so, I could have confirmed the data.’

Canard was doing his best to recover from what he was rapidly realising was a fuck-up. ‘Wait, you’re saying that someone falsified records in the maglev transit database to make it look like this guy was out of his apartment?’

‘Kit found inconsistencies in the timestamps and row identities dotted all over the period these records were found in. It’s not an absolute proof of tampering, but it’s plenty for a lawyer to use to present reasonable doubt and it’s enough to suggest a more detailed analysis is required before jumping to conclusions.’

The captain’s jaw was tightening, which was possibly fair, but she knew why he was pushing the case and was not pleased. The data Kit had dug up on Sandoval indicated that he was a recent hire out of a private security company with strong history in the Southern Protectorate, Wayden Executive Services. Wayden was trying to move into the metro zones having previously done most of their work in the two protectorates, and one of their ways of doing that was political pressure applied through those brokering law and order votes. Canard spent a lot of his time brokering law and order votes, and he was about to say something when Sandoval walked into the room.

‘Sorry, Captain…’ The tall, blonde-haired detective paused as he saw that Fox was also there. ‘Oh, uh, and Inspector. Sorry. He’s lawyering up. We’re not going to get anything more out of him until he’s got counsel.’

‘Inspector Meridian has some new information on the matter,’ Canard growled. ‘We’re letting him go until we can verify where the discrepancy lies.’

Sandoval frowned. He was moderately good at that having an expressive sort of face with a good supply of character to it. He shared blonde hair with Shark, but Sandoval wore his cut low on the neck and fairly shaggy. He was tall, taller than Fox, and well-built, but it was the face that made him. He had a face that suggested he had seen some action, strong features, rugged, a furrowed brow and a slightly heavy nose which a more vain man might have had reshaped. ‘I thought the point of getting him in here was to get him to explain the discrepancy.’

Fox bit back on her immediate answer: it was probably not Sandoval’s fault that Canard had wanted a fast resolution with an ex-Wayden man grabbing the collar. ‘I’ve determined that the transit records were likely faked,’ Fox said, watching Shark fuming in the other room.

‘Already?’ he sounded surprised, but when she flicked a glance at him his expression suggested that he was impressed. ‘That’s fast work.’

‘I’ve a few resources some don’t have.’

‘Okay, so if those were faked, why would someone want to put Shark here in the crosshairs?’

‘That’s not the question.’

Sandoval did look surprised now, or confused anyway. ‘It’s not?’

‘No. The question you need to be asking is why would someone attempt to frame Mister Shark and do such a piss-poor job of it?’

‘Huh?’

‘They doctored transit records to suggest he was out of the building. They didn’t doctor the building records, at all. So Kit, my agent, spotted the problem easily. If they’d messed with both sets of data then we wouldn’t know which was actually wrong. It would have made him appear to be guilty. Now it looks like someone’s targeted him to take the fall.’

‘Which suggests this is all about the show he’s producing,’ Canard put in. ‘First a writer, then a producer. What did you get from the channel in Boston?’

‘They wouldn’t have killed off their main writer to get at Murder is My Business. It doesn’t make sense. No, it’s not them. This is someone external with a grudge. I’ll run possibilities and see if I can salvage enough goodwill from IB-Nineteen to get them to help.’

‘I want Sandoval to assist on this one,’ Canard snapped.

‘Sure,’ Fox replied easily. ‘He can start by coming with me and apologising to Shark for the arrest.’

Part Four: Music to Get the Blood Pumping

New York Metro, 23rd January 2060.

Fox looked down at the corpse slumped against the wall of a cheap apartment just south of Rikers. There had been an airport there decades ago that had been abandoned to sprawlers when the need for three airfields in the area had gone away, and then someone had come in and put up four apartment blocks which were a little cheaper to rent space in than those in places that did not overlook a giant prison. People on the way up from the Sprawl moved into blocks like this. Some of them kept on going up, and others fell.

‘Who was she?’ Fox asked.

‘Brianne Adamshi, nineteen, moved in here nine months ago after landing a contract with ATW. Upcoming music artist.’ The speaker was Detective Helen Dillan who had been assigned the case by dispatch. She had recognised similarities between the body and the Trent case, and had done what the protocols demanded and called in Fox. ‘Don’t know what her music was like, but it’s a damn shame either way.’

‘Nineteen? Shit, yes.’ Her eyes flicked over the scene. Someone had knocked over a lamp in this apartment, but there was little indication of a struggle. Blood was splattered over the wall above the body. Blood and brains and fragments of bone had been slowly making their way down to the cheap carpet for the last couple of hours, but the largest concentration of red was high enough up the wall that the girl had to have been held off the ground when the killer had shot her. ‘So he held her up, pressed her against the wall.’

‘Scan suggests pressure over the mouth and jaw which fits with that scenario. Guy’s strong.’

‘Yeah. Then he shoots her in the eye.’

‘From about fifteen centimetres. Ten mil bullet, explosive payload. Whole thing sounds too much like your case to ignore. How d’you wanna play it?’

A sound behind them made them turn to see Sandoval appearing in the apartment’s only doorway. He looked a little less the attractive detective in his crime scene suit, but then Fox was vaguely impressed that he had remembered to wear it. ‘Glad you could join us, Sandoval. Do you know Detective Dillan?’

‘We’ve… met,’ Dillan mumbled.

The grin on Sandoval’s face, even partially obscured by his mask, told Fox all she needed to know. ‘Good, no need for introductions. Okay, since Canard has saddled me with Sandoval, and the killer seems to have saddled you with the two of us, we’ll work on this together until it’s clear it’s the same case, or not, and figure things out from there. You two can canvas her neighbours, and I’ll start going down the corporate line. Dillan, lean on the techs to get the comparison work done.’

‘If this is the same guy,’ Sandoval said, his eyes on the wall and its new coat of speckled, blood-red paint, ‘then we may be looking at a serial. I mean… no obvious link between a well-known IB vid star and a more or less unknown musician…’

‘Even if it’s the same guy and no connection, it’s not a serial until we’ve got three corpses.’ Fox looked down at the body of what had once been an attractive young woman. ‘I’ll get my agent to run the MO again anyway. Maybe he’s done this before.’

~~~

‘I am combing as many records as I can access as we speak,’ Kit said as Fox dropped onto her sofa with a mug of coffee. ‘So far I have detected no other murder presenting a sufficiently similar pattern of evidence.’

‘But you’re still looking?’

‘There are a lot of unsolved murder cases on file.’

‘Huh, yeah.’

‘I also sent a request to Vali asking whether Miss Adamshi used his viron.’

‘Came up with that on your own, did you?’

Suddenly the virtual girl looked worried. ‘Yes. Was I wrong?’

Fox smiled. ‘No, it’s a good point, but he may consider it private information. He may want a warrant–’

‘She did go there, but never to Alexandria. Vali responded quite quickly. So quickly that I wondered whether he was expecting to receive the request. He seems quite keen to assist us in this case.’

‘I still think he’s quite keen to get into your virtual panties, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Look at you, developing your own contacts.’

Kit’s cheeks coloured and she actually squirmed a little. ‘I do not believe I am programmed for that sort of interaction. Anyway, Vali said that Miss Adamshi used the name “Adamshi” in Niflhel, and that she frequented a virtual club where she would act as the DJ and sing. She has not been in the server for over a month, however.’

‘So it’s a link, but a weak one.’

‘That would be an accurate assessment, but unless some hidden connection exists, this is the strongest link we have between them. My initial analysis of their sociometric profiles suggests that it is highly unlikely that they knew each other or have ever met.’

‘Well… Keep looking. You got me an interview with her agent?’

‘I will keep looking. I don’t sleep so I have plenty of time to look. You have an appointment with Miss Adamshi’s agent via telepresence at nine tomorrow.’

Fox frowned. ‘I generally prefer to meet with them physically.’

‘That would be difficult in this case. Her agent was assigned to her by ATW and is an infomorph.’

‘Oh… Okay, well I suppose it means I don’t have to leave the apartment.’

24th January.

Brianne Adamshi’s agent took the form of a mid-height, middle-aged, slightly balding man, a little overweight with watery, grey eyes and round, wire-framed spectacles. He was dressed in a dark grey suit. The stereotyping was almost painful and it did not get better.

‘Inspector Meridian,’ the AI said as he appeared in front of the window in Fox’s apartment, ‘I’m Melvin, Miss Adamshi’s management agent. I’ve been asked to state that ATW is horrified by the news of her death and we will do anything in our power to assist your investigation.’

‘Thank you, I–’

‘Commensurate with international law, company ethical policy, and privacy regulations, of course.’

Fox managed a tight grin. ‘Of course.’ What the infomorph meant was that he would tell her absolutely nothing if he could get away with it. ‘This is my agent, Kit. She’ll be recording the interview. Sit if you wish.’ She settled onto her own couch, knowing that he was seeing her in a suit while she was actually still wearing a wrap; thinking about it, this was much better than having to interview humans in their offices.

‘Sitting does not make me more or less comfortable, Inspector, but thank you for offering.’

‘Do you know whether Miss Adamshi had any family? We’ve been unable to track anyone down.’

‘Her parents died in the twenty-fifty-six influenza epidemic. She has no siblings.’

Fox frowned. The epidemic that had swept the North American Metro regions in fifty-six had killed around three million people, though the numbers were a little vague because all the deaths had occurred in the Sprawl. Standard anti-viral nanosymbionts had blocked the disease for everyone able to afford them; the epidemic had killed the poor and there had been an outcry which had subsided quickly and been forgotten. And during that time, a fifteen-year-old girl had been left to fend for herself in the Sprawl. Fox could imagine what an attractive young woman had done to survive, and then just when she had climbed out of that life, some bastard had killed her.

‘Miss Adamshi was a recent signing?’

‘She was signed to our audio production label on the fourteenth of February twenty-fifty-nine. Her first single-track release was made available in April and was well-received. We were hoping to release another ten tracks at the end of this month with considerable advertising. A decision on whether to go ahead is pending.’

‘I’m sure it is. That single release was well-received. Was there any negative fan reaction? Or the opposite: anyone appearing to be excessively interested in her?’

‘We noticed nothing. You are welcome to obtain a warrant to gain access to her fan mail. Of course, we maintain records of all messages received for one year in accordance with normal legal requirements.’

‘Yes, of course you do. Were you aware of her activities in an online club in the Niflhel viron?’ Fox asked.

The question seemed to take Melvin a little by surprise. He paused, literally ceasing to move for maybe half a second before whatever was occupying his thoughts released his avatar. ‘Miss Adamshi made a name for herself performing on free, online sites. Obviously we requested that she cease such activity when we signed her.’

‘Yeah, obviously.’

‘She viewed the Niflhel site as different because it was private and subscription. Still, we requested that she cease her activities there in December.’

‘Uh-huh, and no one objected to her shift from free performances to purely paid ones? There were no threats? No one suggested that she might be selling out?’

‘Such messages are not uncommon when a new artist is signed to a large company. We routinely filter them to ensure that the artist is not troubled with–’

‘But you take them seriously? You presumably ensure that your client’s security is sufficient to protect them from anyone meaning them harm. You look for direct threats and react to them. You inform NAPA whenever such a situation arises. When I get that warrant you’re demanding I obtain, there will be no delay in delivering all the data and I will not find any evidence suggesting negligence.’

There was another freeze in Melvin’s animation, this time lasting longer, maybe a full second. Then the simulated manager smiled the most sickly-sweet smile Fox had seen this side of an accident damages lawyer. ‘There were no messages which raised particular red flags, Inspector, but it is possible that we missed something. In the interests of furthering your investigation, we will voluntarily hand over the data immediately. We would request that a post facto authorisation for acquisition be sent at your earliest convenience, to cover our own legal requirements.’

Fox smiled back. ‘Kit will be happy to take receipt of the data. Kit, would you please put through the request for the data to HQ? Please tell them to make all haste.’

Kit was also smiling, and she seemed to have mastered the diplomatic smile quite well. ‘Of course, Inspector. I am receiving the data records now. I’ll begin processing them immediately.’

‘Thank you, Kit. Thank you, Melvin. I believe we can work with that, but if anyone at ATW should think of anything, please contact Kit and I’ll be available to interview anyone as and when required.’

Melvin nodded, the smile still fixed on his face. ‘Goodbye, Inspector.’ And then he was gone.

‘What a nice… man.’

Kit wrinkled her nose. ‘A class three. They lack creativity and proper emotional development.’

‘That explains why he seemed more like a leech than I’d have expected.’

‘It would also explain why he was so terrible at lying. Lying is a creative process. I suspect the conversation was monitored, or that he contacted a human when he ran into difficulties.’

‘Huh. Do you know what you’re looking for in these mails?’

Kit looked thoughtful for a second. ‘Any indications of obsessive interest, anger at her stopping free performances, or extreme dislike of her work. These will need to be further analysed once they have been weeded out of the mass, but I should be able to create a shortlist within a few hours.’

‘Don’t forget to check for any actual threats. We’ll prioritise those for analysis.’

Kit’s lips twitched. ‘Obviously.’

‘Don’t you start!’

~~~

‘Inspectors clearly get more money than detectives,’ Dillan commented as she looked around Fox’s lounge. ‘You actually have a view.’

Fox grinned. ‘Clear the window, Kit. Let Detective Dillan see the view.’

Dillan walked over to the window as the panes became transparent and looked out. Across the water, the clutter of what had once been Jersey City and was now the Jersey Housing Combine presented a grey wall with a couple of shining spires spearing the sky above it. To the left, the rising concrete wall of the Hudson North Barrier was a mess of metalwork and machines, and thick, grey aggregate construction. ‘Oh… Okay, but that does not look like a cheap agent.’

‘Kit? No, Terri won’t tell me what they’re planning to sell the range for, but I agree, she’s expensive. I’m consumer testing her for MarTech.’

‘Uh-huh. Sure. We’re waiting for Sandoval?’

‘Detective Sandoval has entered the building,’ Kit announced. ‘He should be here in less than a minute. I have started the coffee brewing and I can distribute it when he arrives.’

Dillan grinned at the virtual kitsune. ‘I like you. You know how to speak to a cop’s soul.’

Kit smiled back. ‘I am afraid I did not know to have doughnuts available due to the short notice.’

‘You’re a class four.’ Dillan’s eyebrows went up as she spoke. ‘That’s… wow. I make do with a standard VA.’

‘So do I,’ Fox told her. ‘Kit’s more like a backup. Sit down, we’ll get started when Sandoval–’

The apartment’s outer door slid open and the big, blonde detective stepped through. ‘Hi. Not late, am I?’

‘I did say “as soon as you could get here,”’ Fox told him. ‘Park your ass and we’ll get going. Kit, set the window back to screen mode. Sandoval, that’s Kit, my agent. She can handle displaying anything you need to show us.’ Fox started for the sofa, noting that Dillan was already sitting and had positioned herself so that Fox would be sitting beside Sandoval, assuming she took the middle… But at least the spider-like house robot was handing out the coffee mugs, and Sandoval was attractive enough and had not, yet, given much indication of being an ass. ‘What did the neighbours have to say?’

Sandoval had developed the kind of expression that it sometimes took cops a decade to develop, a sort of resigned yet annoyed glower. ‘No one saw or heard anything.’

‘Yeah,’ Dillan added, sounding similarly resigned, ‘welcome to New York Metro where your neighbour can have her brains blown out with an explosive bullet, but you didn’t hear a thing.’

‘No one even suggested they’d heard someone dropping something, or a party popper going off. And I don’t think the soundproofing in that place is that good.’

Fox nodded. ‘I wasn’t really expecting much, but… Well, Kit, let’s have the list of possible stalkers.’

Smiling, Kit turned and threw, with gestures, a list of names up onto the window display area. ‘I have seventeen identities who have sent messages to Miss Adamshi which I classified as potentially threatening. Several of these are, however, from people who live in remote locations. I have left them on the list for now and I am attempting to verify that they have not been in this area within the last twenty-four hours.’

‘Okay, put those aside for now. What do we have left?’

A lot of names faded into the background. ‘These six people live close enough to this precinct area that they could have attended Miss Adamshi’s concerts previously, and are obviously well within travel range of her apartment block. I accessed some material on typical behaviour for the obsessive and dangerous fan, and I have been attempting to analyse the progression of messages from each individual. I would appreciate your input, however.’

‘Okay, we’ll start at the top and work down.’

‘Ah, the top one is actually a special case. This identity, ‘Buckyball,’ back-traces to a man named Donovan Bucksbridge. He sent one mail to Miss Adamshi suggesting that she was “typical of the sell-outs who gave up their souls to corporations who cared nothing for…” I would imagine you’ve all heard this kind of thing before. His name is flagged on a NAPA watch list. It is thought that he may be involved with United Anarchy.’

Fox looked up at the photographs Kit was displaying, clearly taken from an arrest record. Bucksbridge looked like an overfed rat with a beer gut, a hooked nose, and small, dark eyes. ‘He’s got a record as well?’

‘Minor stuff. Receiving stolen goods, small-scale hacking attempts.’

‘He doesn’t fit the profile, but get a watch out for him. If we can locate him, we’ll pick him up and grill him.’

‘You sure that’s worth the effort?’ Sandoval asked, looking at the screen with disgust. ‘I mean, he doesn’t look like he’s worth the hassle of bringing him in for questioning.’

Fox shrugged. ‘At this point we’re short on leads and the captain isn’t going to let three of us work on this for long. We go with everything we can find until something shakes out. Kit, let’s have the first batch of messages from the others.’

~~~

‘So what’s the story with you and Sandoval?’ Fox asked as she poured two glasses of wine.

They had been at it for hours, going over the text of the messages and trying to determine whether any of the people sending them represented a significant threat. They had decided that two were worth interviewing, at which point Sandoval had made a comment about needing to see one of his informants and rushed off leaving Fox and Dillan alone. Alone aside from Kit anyway.

Dillan seemed to relax a little with the big man gone, which was what had prompted the question. ‘Oh… We were…’ Dillan stopped and apparently rethought her words, her mouth scrunching up as she considered. ‘Dating is the wrong word. We engaged in various intimate activities for a couple of weeks last year. Though “intimate” isn’t quite right either. I’m not sure he does intimacy. The sex was good though and I needed the stress relief. I was working the Doran case then. Sandoval took my mind off it.’

‘You took down Doran. Yeah, I remember that one. Serial. Didn’t he go for insanity when you finally caught him?’

‘Claimed a demon had possessed him and forced him to kill. He’s in psycho lock-up. They decided he was insane and I don’t think he was faking it for the easy sentence. That guy shouldn’t have been out in society.’

‘Testing doesn’t catch all the nuts. You seem a little more uptight around Sandoval than your description of the relationship suggests.’ Fox handed the other woman her wine and sat down, settling back against the couch and doing her best to relax. Her back was stiff from sitting there glaring at personality profiles and emails.

‘I…’ Dillan shrugged. ‘I don’t know exactly but something about him just didn’t sit right after knowing him for a couple of weeks. Almost three. Eighteen days I think we were meeting up after our shifts and… It’s not like I ever heard or saw anything, y’know? I just…’ Another shrug.

‘He’s ex-private security, right?’

‘Wayden Executive Services. He said he was based in the old Texas area, handling corporate security for a couple of sites down there. Then there was the Dallas thing… uh…’ Dillan looked across at her hostess, colour showing in her cheeks. ‘I guess you know about that.’

‘Yeah. I’m aware of the incident.’

‘That, uh, had to be Hell. I mean, you succeeded against pretty bad odds, but…’

‘Mmm, yeah… I don’t really think of it as a successful mission. I lost four friends and a lover, and three other people who were under my command–’

‘From what I heard, sir, they weren’t under your command. You were forced to take a last-minute change of procedure, they pushed a new commanding officer on you and he fucked up. That’s why you resigned from the UNTPP.’

Fox took a pull on her glass of wine. ‘Marshall lasted about ten minutes. I never really worked out what the Hell was going on with him. He looked… surprised when he got shot. To this day I’m not sure whether he was incompetent or corrupt. He led us right into an ambush. Six died there, including Marshall and Pieter. I’d been seeing Pieter for about three months at that point. He was hit in the throat, died instantly. I was too busy surviving to worry about mourning him.’

‘Shit.’ The word came out as a breath more than a real word, but Fox heard it.

‘Yeah… I lost another one before we could stop the bleeding. The rest… We were outnumbered, but we were better than them. I should’ve been able to save more of them.’

‘You got out, with Teresa Martins, and none of them did. And they didn’t get what they wanted.’

‘Huh, no. That was partially because Jackson’s security protocols locked down their entire computer and communications system as soon as the site’s AI detected the problem. NIX and NAPA both told Jackson that the only way he was getting his daughter out alive was to unlock the data. They assured him that the UA cell responsible would be rounded up before they could get away. He said that nothing would persuade him to allow UA to get their hands on what was being researched in Dallas.’

Dillan’s face looked the way Fox expected it to. Anyone who heard the story first hand, without the filters that had been put in by the MarTech PR people, looked shocked, or horrified. ‘He was willing to let his daughter die–’

‘Terri agreed with him, but she also had faith in him getting her out somehow. He turned to the UNTPP and they sent me in.’ Fox gritted her teeth. She had never managed to get over the anger and talking about it always brought it out. ‘And I killed every last one of those rat-motherfuckers.’ Her jaw relaxed as the anger seeped away, because they were all dead and she could not go back and kill them again, even if she wanted to. ‘Jackson and Terri keep giving me “products to test.” When I came to in the hospital, Jackson was there and he asked me what he could do to repay me for getting his daughter back. I asked him for a gun that doesn’t jam, so he built me a working Gauss pistol. Electromagnetic feed and launch systems, all computer controlled. It’s like a tiny version of the rail guns they use on spaceships and tanks, but with a far higher rate of fire. And it doesn’t jam.’

‘It still hurts then?’

‘Yeah, it still hurts. So now you have to keep me company while I get drunk.’

Dillan barked out a laugh. ‘Oh really?’

‘Yeah, really. Besides, in the morning it’s a shorter trip into HQ for the interviews.’

‘True.’ The younger detective tipped her glass to Fox. ‘Okay, here’s to getting drunk and forgetting.’

Fox raised her own glass and drank, but she said nothing. Some things refused to be forgotten: all you could do was submerge them for a while.

25th January.

Fox slid the shower cubicle’s door open and looked out at the bleary-eyed form of Dillan sitting up in bed. The strawberry-blonde rubbed at her eyes and licked her lips, and appeared to be trying to work out where she was. Fox grinned and headed for the drawer where she kept a supply of new bodysuits.

‘Hey,’ Dillan said after a second. She was wearing only a pair of plazkin boy-shorts and had not thought to cover herself yet, which probably meant she was still half-asleep or had no issue with another woman seeing her breasts. ‘Um… Did we…?’

Fox laughed. ‘No. You were way too far gone after the sixth glass. Getting you out of your clothes was not easy, let me tell you.’

‘Oh, right. That explains the headache and the pants, I guess.’

‘Uh-huh. Painaway on the table beside you. Uniform have pulled in our two suspects, so we need to get moving.’

‘Right… Pill, shower, and then we can head out.’ She got out of the bed and started for the shower, ignoring the pills as she struggled to coordinate taking her panties off.

‘Dillan?’

‘Uh, yeah?’

‘Thanks for staying. It did help.’

‘Well, I brought Dallas up. Least I could do was get slammed with you. And suffer the consequences.’

‘Thanks anyway. I’ll go make coffee.’

‘Oh God… You are a goddess!’

Fox shrugged as she headed into the lounge. Goddess might be a little strong, but she did have good coffee.

~~~

‘Good night?’ Sandoval asked as he spotted Fox and Dillan walking toward him.

‘Good enough,’ Fox replied. She noticed his eyes flicking over Dillan: the man was noting that her outfit had not changed and putting two and two together to make sixty-nine. Fox pretty much always wore the same basic outfit to work, so that was hardly a clue, but he was seeing it as such. ‘What do we have?’

‘Two guys who look like they should’ve cut back on the steroids a long time ago.’ He turned, tapping a door control to gain access to the interview suite’s observation room.

This suite was configured for multiple interviewees: three of the walls consisted of displays showing a blank, white room, though only two of those were occupied. The advantage of modern interview rooms was that the passive EM sensors in all the walls allowed observers to view proceedings from any angle, and in extended visual wavelengths if required.

Sandoval seemed to be right about the men they had selected from the mail traffic. Both were big, heavily muscled men who were sitting at the interview room tables looking irritated rather than nervous. Increased aggression was a common issue with neosteroid abuse. One of them looked like he had had additional muscle grafted in on top of the steroidal-enhanced growth.

Fox sucked her teeth. ‘Well, they look strong enough to be our killer. No one goes in alone, and I want uniforms with stun batons ready outside. Those two do not look stable.’

~~~

‘Mister Greyling,’ Fox began, looking across the desk at the bulked-up thug sitting opposite her.

‘Shug,’ the thug responded. ‘Name’s Shug. Last person to call me “Mister Greyling” was… uh, anyway, it’s Shug.’

Fox watched as messages scrolled through her vision field from Sandoval, in the room with her, and Dillan, who was working the observation room.

Sandoval: He’s not just on neosteroids.

Dillan: That’s Titan or one of the derivatives.

Sandoval: Shit! Careful with this asshole.

‘Shug,’ Fox went on, ‘you sent a series of electronic messages to Brianne Adamshi. Two emails, three LifeWeb personal messages, a series of voice messages to her personal account.’

‘Yeah. So?’

‘You refer to her as a “sell-out.” You suggest that she should provide free music to “her fans what gave her a start with that big fucking moneybag corp” and then you go on to suggest that she will get nowhere without her “real fans.” I’m assuming that you are one of those real fans?’

‘I went to see her in clubs when she was nothin’ but a kid makin’ bread-money where she could. I deserved to get… I mean, her fans deserved to get something for stickin’ with her and getting’ her where she was, but she dumped us. Stopped doing gigs unless that fuckin’ corp said she could.’

Sandoval: Notice that slip?

‘It’s standard procedure,’ Sandoval said. ‘ATW needed to protect their investment.’

‘What about my investment?’

Dillan: Definitely views this as personal.

‘Did you ever actually talk to her?’ Sandoval asked. ‘I mean, face-to-face.’

Dillan: His heart rate just spiked.

‘I… No.’

‘Are you sure, Shug?’ Fox asked, her lips curling into a reassuring smile. ‘Maybe after a gig? Maybe just a quick chat? Maybe you waited for her backstage and spoke to her then. You did mention meeting her once in one of your messages.’

‘Oh, uh… yeah. Well, there was once, but there wasn’t much to it.’

‘Really, because you said, “I loved you an’ you didn’ even see me,” with three exclamation marks.’

Dillan: Pulse is rising.

‘Sounds like you fancied her and she rejected you,’ Sandoval said.

Dillan: Shit!

Shug lurched forward at a speed belying his size and grabbed the front of Sandoval’s jacket, yanking him over the table in one, smooth move. ‘She didn’t reject me, prick! She–’ He stopped with a yelp as Fox’s knuckles smacked into his right ear, and his grip on Sandoval released.

Fox stood, her chair clattering backwards as she moved around the table toward Shug. Letting out a howl, he pushed his own chair back and started to rise, and that was when Fox kicked him right between the legs. He stopped, eyes bulging, and then collapsed backwards, unbalancing the chair and ending up sprawled on the floor of the interview room clutching his groin. The door of the room opened and two uniformed men with stun batons burst in.

‘Put him in a holding cell,’ Fox said. ‘Dillan, put through a request for a full drug scan. I want him checked down to the last molecule.’

Meridian: He’s not our man though.

Sandoval: What? After that display?

Meridian: Dillan’s right, he’s probably on Titan.

Dillan: So he’s probably not got the smarts or self-control to kill Adamshi the way she was killed.

Sandoval: Damn. And I think he tore my collar.

Fox looked at the detective, shaking her head, and he flashed her a quick grin. He was kind of cute, boyish. Of course, boyish was not exactly a characteristic she valued in a fellow cop. She was considering that when another message appeared in-vision. It took her a fraction of a second to realise what it was saying, and then she was heading for the door. ‘Technical have tracked down Bucksbridge. Dillan, saddle up, we’re going hunting.’

~~~

‘We’ve only got partial camera coverage in this area,’ Dillan said as the three detectives scanned up and down the road in the Perth Amboy industrial district. ‘Local sprawlers like throwing rocks at the fixed ones. We’ve got a bunch of cambots in from the twenty-ninth, but if he’s spotted them, he’ll be hiding.’

Fox looked around slowly. The area had been residential before the push for urbanisation in the late twenties and early thirties. There had been houses, churches, even if there had also been more industrial sectors to the west. There was still a war memorial nearby, set between the road and the shore. Fox was not sure which war they were memorialising and the monument was not in the best of states, but it was still there and not being obviously used as a campsite by the sprawlers.

All the buildings here now were late-thirties’ constructs, put up to house the workers who would have worked in the factories which had been put up around the existing industrial areas. It had all been about population, and industrial, density. Hundreds of thousands of people were leaving the drought-stricken southern states and they needed jobs and cheap places to live. Even then the number of jobs was decreasing, and more and more people worked remotely from their homes using communications systems which the newly built worker blocks did not have. Briefly it worked and the migrants found work in local factories before the widespread use of automated fabricators housed in the arcologies and apartment blocks made manned factories almost obsolete.

‘I hate coming to sectors like this,’ Sandoval grumbled. ‘Reminds me how much we screwed things up.’

A message appeared in Fox’s vision field from Dillan. Maybe the guy has a heart after all. Fox suppressed a grin and said, ‘The connection we detected was from one of the buildings on this block. That’s as good as we’re getting because none of the buildings here are wired; it’s all off the municipal wireless hub.’

‘You have to hand it to those politicians forty years ago who said the internet was as important to the populace as electricity,’ Dillan commented. ‘Without that law we’d have never got this close.’

‘True. Okay…’ She glanced around to where six armoured officers were waiting for them to start. ‘You two take three uniforms and the building on the right; I’ll take the left. Take it floor by floor, and make sure you’ve got the access points covered so he can’t get past you. Maintain constant contact via local net. I want to know where everyone is at all times. Let’s go.’

Pulling up a display in-vision which showed her a basic schematic map of the area and the locations of the nine cops in it, Fox started for the building she had designated. When it had been built it had been an eight-storey block of apartments, put up quickly from prefabricated segments of steel and polymerised concrete. It had probably had a front door which locked back then, but now it was probably lucky that it still had a door.

She indicated one of the uniforms. ‘Grodin, you’re on door duty. According to the floor plan this place has one flight of stairs and an elevator. I’m willing to bet the elevator’s out of action so you make sure our guy doesn’t leave here and then you take the stairwell as we move up.’

‘On it, sir,’ Grodin replied, taking up position in the doorway.

‘Right. Everyone else, we go door to door. He’s suspected of UA involvement, but his sheet suggests he’s small-time. I doubt he’s going to give us trouble, but this is the Sprawl and we don’t know what we’re going to find. So you be careful. Clear?’ A pair of helmets nodded in her direction and she turned, walking deeper into the building.

~~~

‘Sixth floor checked and clear,’ Dillan said over their connection. ‘We’re getting ahead of you, Boss.’

‘You’ve got an extra man,’ Fox replied, grinning as she moved to the next apartment door. ‘Though it looked like Sandoval sat that one out.’

‘I took the stairwell duty,’ Sandoval replied, sounding defensive. ‘HQ sent me some data on another case that needed going over, and I figured Watlins could use the exercise.’

‘Thanks, sir,’ Watlins said. ‘I so enjoyed meeting the sweaty mouth-breather who couldn’t keep his eyes off my boobs.’

‘They’re good boobs, Watlins, even in uniform armour.’

‘That’s enough of that,’ Fox cut in as she reached up to knock on the door she had arrived at.

‘Sorry, Inspector,’ Watlins said.

Fox was too busy to reply as the door swung open to reveal a big man, naked from the waist up, bald, and heavily muscled. He glowered down at her with eyes which had pinpricks for pupils. ‘What?’

‘NAPA. I’m looking for someone. Donovan Bucksbridge, known as Buckyball.’ She held up a display card with Bucksbridge’s mugshot on it and watched the complete lack of recognition spread across the man’s face.

‘Never heard of him. Never seen him.’

‘Thanks for your time.’ She waited for him to close the door before moving on. The guy was using, probably Stellar, a stimulant popular with muscle men and noted for causing very contracted pupils, along with mood swings in habitual users. Busting the guy seemed like a waste of time, however: there were probably several dozen more users in the building and it was not her job.

Arriving at the next door, she reached up and… paused. The icons in her vision field showing the people in the other building had just vanished. ‘Dillan? Sandoval? Report.’ There was no response. ‘Watlins?’ Nothing. Fox turned and started for the stairwell. ‘Grodin, you cover the door to this building. No one leaves. Everyone else, we’re going over to the other building. Move!’

It seemed to take far too long to go down six floors, across the gap between the two buildings, and then up seven. By the time Fox was on the fifth, she could tell something had happened beyond some kind of weird communications failure; there were people in the corridors, milling about and shouting. She heard someone yell, ‘What happened to the power?’ And that was when she ran into Watlins.

The girl was in the stairwell, looking confused, with her helmet open. ‘Inspector! I don’t know what happened. Comms, computers, everything went out. My implant’s rebooting.’

‘EMP,’ Fox said, gritting her teeth and pulling her pistol from where it was settled against the small of her back. ‘Watch here. Your suit systems should come back up shortly. No one comes up from below. No one leaves.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Fox moved on. Watlins had made it to the sixth-floor landing and the others should have been on the floor above. Pushing through the door, Fox ran straight into Sandoval coming the other way. ‘Sandoval, what’s going on?’ The man had his pistol in his hands and Fox could smell propellant.

‘Are your comms working?’ Sandoval replied urgently. ‘Mine are out. I think it was an EMP mine. I never thought a little weasel like that–’

‘Sandoval! Where are Dillan and the other officers?’

‘Dillan’s down! He shot her. I left the other two watching her, but she needs a medic and my comms are still–’

Fox did not wait for him to finish. ‘Meridian to dispatch, I need EMTs to my location immediately! Officer down. I repeat, officer down.’ She looked at Sandoval again. ‘Now what the fuck happened?’

~~~

Fox stood at the door of the single-room apartment, her eyes on the body at the far side of it, barely three metres away. From here she could not see the microbots crawling over it, but it was routine procedure at this point and the forensic kit’s computer could handle it.

Bucksbridge had died quickly; Sandoval had shot him right through the throat, which had to be as much luck as judgement with his standard-issue, ten-millimetre caseless cop pistol. That had had to be bagged and entered into evidence because the EMP had wiped out the weapon’s inbuilt recording system, along with pretty much all the electronic systems in the building. Everything was back up now, but whatever might have been recorded was gone.

The mine had been attached to the wall beside the door, and it had triggered when Dillan had opened the door to check the room. She had been hit by the blast, disoriented by the explosion and her implanted systems going down, and then Bucksbridge had fired at her. He had used a four-mil personal defence weapon, a lightweight, fully automatic machine pistol which would have ripped her open if it were not for her jacket. Dillan wore a leather motorcycle jacket which was lined with reactive fibres: impacts stiffened it into an effective defence against bullets and knives, but the small rounds had still penetrated and Bucksbridge had coated them in a neurotoxin.

‘Fucking UA,’ Fox muttered. The EMTs had stabilised Dillan, but she was still unconscious in the HQ medical facility, and the toxin, known as Lethe-L, was known to interrupt memory formation as well as causing motor function disruption and heart failure. When Dillan woke up, it was unlikely she would remember what had happened. What was Bucksbridge doing with that kind of hardware? The UA were noted for handling all sorts of things which they were not supposed to have, but EMP mines and neurotoxin-loaded rounds in the hands of a bottom-feeder like him?

Bucksbridge was dead, so he was not going to be saying anything. Sandoval’s story was that he had arrived at the door just as Dillan went down, and he had fired at Bucksbridge. Three rounds, only one of which had hit, punching through his throat and killing him instantly. The other two rounds had embedded themselves in the wall, and there were holes in the corridor wall from the burst Bucksbridge had fired at Dillan. It all fitted together, but it was down to Sandoval’s report since no one else was talking, not even the electronic witnesses. Canard had actually decided to go into HQ to handle the interview personally, so that was where Sandoval was now while Fox handled the crime scene work. The probability was that it would be written up just as Sandoval said it had happened, but it was not getting them closer to the killer.

Fox looked across at the slumped body. ‘No way were you the one who did it. Did you hire someone? Have you got a friend around here with the muscle for this?’ Now that was a thought. She connected through to her home server. ‘Kit, put a request through to get all the local cameras run for other known UA-connected people.’

‘That will take considerable time,’ Kit replied, her image appearing in-vision.

‘I know, but Bucksbridge was not our killer and UA members don’t come in units of one. He had friends here, maybe somewhere close.’

‘I have lodged the request. Fox, your implant is noting a number of biochemical stress indicators.’

‘Well, yeah, I’m stressed. Dillan was shot, and what might be our best lead is dead. I’m still not absolutely sure this is one killer.’

‘You will do no one any good by becoming over-stressed. Is there anything you can achieve before tomorrow by continuing to work on this?’

Fox frowned at the air in front of her. Kit was, unfortunately, being far too damn reasonable. ‘I doubt it. Canard is taking care of Sandoval. He’s got my report and I’ll send over the data from these scans. I doubt we’ll get any results from the techs on Bucksbridge’s computer before morning, if then.’

‘Then I suggest you take some time to relax this evening.’

A thought occurred and Fox smiled. ‘I tell you what, I’ll do both. Get me a month’s access to Niflhel. I’ll go in there, see if I can talk to some people about Trent, and relax at the same time.’

‘Will you be relaxing against a wall with a lot of panting?’

‘Well, I can certainly hope so.’

~~~

Cleopatra spotted Fox almost as soon as she walked into the brothel and hurried her into the back rooms. Glasses of wine were poured and then the virtual queen paused and frowned. ‘Are you allowed to drink on duty?’

Fox shrugged. ‘No, but I’m not on duty. I’m going to talk to people about Mystral and see if I can get any more background, but I’m not on duty.’

‘Good.’ Cleopatra handed over the wine and then sprawled onto one of her loungers with the practised ease of someone who clearly did that a lot. ‘I don’t suppose you can really talk about the case either, but I wanted to ask. Mystral was popular. People have asked where she went. One of our semi-regulars, Jeanie, knew what had happened to her. I know she mentioned it to a couple of people.’

Jeanie was Elaine Ross’s online name, probably because her middle name was Jean. ‘She isn’t in, is she? I wouldn’t mind catching up with her.’

‘Jeanie has a real-world assignation she vanishes off to every few weeks. She hasn’t been in all weekend. Actually, she’s often back here on a Sunday night, but… Maybe her boyfriend is keeping her busy. Look, is it true that Adamshi was killed by the same man?’

‘I can’t confirm or deny that.’

Cleopatra pursed her lips. ‘You think so, but you don’t have solid evidence.’

Fox grinned. ‘I could be absolutely sure but keeping it secret to avoid public panic.’

‘I’m sure that only happens in detective stories. You know Adamshi used to come to Niflhel? Used her own name.’

‘I did. I was told she didn’t come here.’

‘No, she didn’t. But contrary to popular belief, I don’t spend all my online time on my back in this place. I went to a couple of the gigs she did. Have you actually heard her music?’

‘No,’ Fox said, a little surprised that she had never actually taken the time to check out what the world was going to be missing. ‘No, I haven’t had the time to sit down much since she was killed.’

‘It’s heavy on the electronica, as with a lot of modern music, but she was very into strong rhythms. Throbbing backbeats were common in her stuff, but she also liked doing… well, “fun” tracks, fast and light, but always with a strong beat to them. Music to get the blood pumping.’

‘Sounds good.’ Fox remembered the blood pooling around the young woman’s body and wondered whether she would ever listen to any of her tracks now.

‘It was. You know, it isn’t just Mystral that people have been asking about?’

‘No?’ Fox sipped her drink and frowned across the low table at her hostess.

‘No. Zorra made an impression with her one client and there have been a few people asking whether she would be back.’ The mock queen was smirking.

‘My personal agent tells me I’m over-stressed and I need to relax.’

Cleopatra’s eyes narrowed, her lips pursed. ‘I think, as a public service, that we should arrange to make sure you’re relaxed and ready to take on a new week of hunting for a murderer.’

‘Oh really?’

‘Yes. I’ll get Nariam in here to give you a massage. She’s a miracle worker, seriously. And then we’ll… see who’s around to keep you entertained.’

Fox gave a shrug. ‘Okay, sure, why not?’

Grinning, Cleopatra got to her feet. ‘Excellent. Tonight is really starting to look up.’

26th January.

Fox reached out, her eyes still shut, and slipped the band off her hand which was holding the induction contact in place. Slightly distorted memories of bodies, faces, and pleasure washed through her mind. She had the physical memory of… maybe six men and a couple of women? It had started to get confusing trying to work out who was doing what to her, or anyone else, after a while. Now she had the memory of sex, but not the feeling. She had the distinct feeling that she should be sore and tired, but her muscles did not ache and there was a vague feeling of dissatisfaction. Maybe she was doing it wrong.

‘That same feeling of it not being complete?’

Fox opened her eyes and turned her head. Kit was sitting, cross-legged, on the bed. Knowing what she was expecting, Fox had stripped and laid herself down, and used the induction connector with the strap. Now she felt her cheeks flush a little seeing Kit sitting there, as though she had been caught doing something naughty. ‘Uh, yeah. I mean, it was fun. I might even spend a little more time there. Maybe try out some of the other areas.’

‘I wish I could help. I’m not programmed for that kind of activity.’

‘Spend the evening with Vali again?’

Kit’s eyes widened a little. ‘I… Well, yes. I thought I might gain more information from him.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘All right, yes, I also enjoy the attention, but I do not really know what to do about it. I’m not–’

‘Programmed for that kind of activity?’

Kit frowned. ‘No.’

‘You don’t need to be programmed for it, you know? Humans aren’t. Well, not exactly. I’ll ask Terri whether there are any software blocks on your behaviour. I know they limit AI companions for kids to make sure there are no problems, but you’re designed for adults. If there’s nothing restricting you… Well, set one of your copies researching it or something.’

‘You would be okay with me spending some time on such research?’ The big smile on the kitsune’s virtual face was way too cute to deny.

‘Sure. Why not? As long as you’re not going to end up with some form of hypersexuality disorder.’

‘That is highly unlikely. Our programming heavily limits the kind of aberrant behaviours humans develop.’

Fox laughed. ‘Right. I’m glad to hear it. I’m going to try to get some sleep.’

‘Very well. Goodnight, Fox. Sweet dreams.’

Turning over and pulling a sheet over her body, Fox closed her eyes again and tried to settle her mind. Maybe the morning would bring something new.

Part Five: The Anarchy Meme

New York Metro, 26th January 2060.

‘Well, I have something for you,’ Brentmann stated after he had finished listing all the lacks he had. Brentmann was the most senior forensics technician they had at the precinct. He got called in to review cases when all his minions were failing, or Canard wanted ‘his best pair of eyes’ on the problem. The latter usually happened when the case had a political angle. This case was developing a strong media angle and no one was getting anywhere reviewing the evidence, but Brentmann was coming up with a spectacular lack of anything useful as well.

‘Don’t make me beg, Brentmann,’ Fox told him. ‘If I have to beg, I may develop a strong urge to shoot you in the knees.’

‘Okay, okay.’ He held up his hands to fend off the bullets and grinned, which was an unappealing sight because he never seemed to do much of a job of caring for his teeth. He was not the most attractive man in the world with his mouth closed, but it was a definite improvement. ‘I’d bump the probability of this being the same killer to ninety per cent. It’s the handprints we scanned off the victims’ faces.’

‘You got fingerprints off their skin?!’

‘No. Not that it’s entirely impossible, given the right conditions, but that’s not the point. We got no indication of structure to the fingers. It’s like he dug a set of finger-size spades into their skin.’

‘Ah… cybernetic hand.’

He snapped off a motion like shooting at her with his index finger. ‘Bang on. From the joint structure suggested in the prints, it’s a good probability that it’s the same model. Could be two people using the same model of hand…’

‘But given the other similarities in the crimes, it becomes highly probable that it’s the same killer.’

‘You’re on a roll, Fox. We’re going through this Buckyball’s data at the moment. Should expect some results later today. I’d say sooner, but the guy actually ran his computer as though he was an anarchist. Total freaking chaos in there.’

‘Okay, thanks. I’ll report to Canard.’ Fox watched as his image vanished from in front of her desk; shooting him would have meant going down several floors to the labs where he worked, but it would have been worth it. She activated a message app and composed a note to Canard saying that the same killer had almost certainly killed Trent and Adamshi, sent it off, and then checked on the progress of the facial recognition scans in precinct 29. Nothing there, of course.

Canard appeared on the other side of her desk without preamble. ‘You’ve got confirmation of the same killer?’

‘Not absolute, but good enough. Brentmann’s saying ninety per cent. Our perpetrator has at least one cybernetic hand, without synthetic skin. That means that none of our suspects are the killer, though it doesn’t rule out their involvement if the killer is being paid.’

Canard nodded. ‘We’ll officially designate both cases as yours. Dillan is going to be off duty for the next two weeks anyway. Sandoval is still on desk duty while we complete the investigation, but you’ll have him back tomorrow.’

‘Thanks,’ Fox replied, hoping it sounded like she meant it. Canard did not look like he was assuming sarcasm when his image vanished. Fox was about to pull up Brentmann’s detailed report when she got a connection request through from Kit and, since she was alone in her office, put it through in full 3D reception. ‘Kit? Something up?’

‘Something is definitely up, yes. I arranged for monitors to be placed indicating police and media activity regarding your main suspects. One of them has thrown an alert. Mystery and Mayhem put through a request to their local precinct regarding Elaine Ross.’ Fox felt her stomach sink. ‘She did not show up for work this morning and they are unable to contact her.’

‘Damn. Has Boston done anything about it?’

‘I do not have that information, Fox.’

‘Okay. I’ll call them.’

‘It may be entirely unrelated.’

Fox did not think the AI sounded convinced, and if an AI barely out of the box was suspicious then Ross was probably in trouble. ‘I’d rather assume there’s a connection and be wrong. Thanks, Kit. Good catch.’

Kit smiled, but what she said was, ‘This is the kind of thing I was designed for.’

~~~

‘She does it about once every three or four weeks,’ Grant Poll said. His image was sitting on the other side of Fox’s desk, looking worried. ‘She shuts off her implant comms, goes away for the weekend, and then she comes back looking refreshed and happy. Or… usually she comes back.’

‘Do you know where she goes or what she does there?’ Fox asked.

‘No. She calls it her “break from the world of media.” She makes sure we can’t find her. Or that anyone can, for that matter. Goes right off the grid and… meditates or something.’

‘Right.’ Cleopatra had said she went away every few weeks but that it was a boyfriend she was going to see. ‘She didn’t seem abnormally distressed before she went away?’

‘No. No more than normal. You can’t be thinking this is related to Julianne’s death?’

‘Right now, Mister Poll, I’d prefer to treat the two events as connected and discover that I’m happily incorrect than go the other way. Boston Metro are running the search, but they’ll keep me in the loop. If you think of anything which might help, please contact Boston or me immediately.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

Fox waited for him to disconnect and then settled back in her chair, closing her eyes and actioning a connection to Niflhel. Using a wireless connection reduced the data throughput and could result in dropouts, but she was not going in for the experience today. Sure enough there was a slightly longer pause before the misty bog imagery loaded and displayed, but a lot of the animation here was client-side scripting so it still looked good once she was in.

Raising her hands, she summoned up an administrative contact panel, which manifested as a glowing scroll hovering in the air before her, and tapped for attention. There was barely a pause before the fog gathered around her, thickening to opacity before rolling back to reveal the shore of the fjord beside Vali’s house.

‘Zorra,’ the young man’s voice said from behind her, ‘appearing here in the middle of the day on a Monday. That would likely suggest some official business. And you didn’t bring your lovely assistant.’

Fox turned around to see the blonde figure in his Viking outfit, standing there a little way up the bank. ‘I need a favour, but it is official in an unofficial way.’

‘Intriguing.’

‘One of your members, Jeanie, is missing. We’re looking for her, but Cleopatra implied that she went away every so often with a man. I need to know how she got that impression, but I don’t know who Cleopatra really is and getting the data through channels will take a while…’

Vali was frowning. ‘You believe this is related to the deaths of Mystral and Adamshi?’

‘That’s… a possibility I’m unwilling to ignore at the moment.’

‘Probably wise. Cleopatra works during the day, but she is usually contactable. Perhaps to get around the official breaching of her anonymity, I could message her and request she meets you in Alexandria? Say, at one p.m.?’

Fox grimaced. ‘Visiting an online brothel after lunch. The things I do for this job.’

He grinned back. ‘I’ll send a message to Kit if there are any issues.’

‘Thanks. You’re being very helpful.’ She narrowed her eyes at the man. ‘Vali, what are your intentions regarding my agent? She’s been asking about certain kinds of social interactions which I don’t think her initial programming was aimed at.’

His grin did not change. ‘I assure you, Zorra, that my intentions regarding Kit are entirely honourable, even if I admit to being intrigued to discover where her new interest will take her.’

‘Yeah, well… Don’t hurt her or I’ll come after you with a pair of virtual pruning shears.’

Vali bowed graciously. ‘I shall endeavour not to, Lady Zorra, for I do believe you would.’

~~~

Alexandria was quiet but not empty when Fox appeared at the dock and started up the hill toward the temple. There were the usual automata, but there were also the avatars of real people, either spending their lunch hours in virtual bliss or not working. She doubted anyone could afford to spend their time in Niflhel unless they had some form of job, but not everyone worked regular hours.

Cleopatra spotted her as soon as she walked in and waved her over, hurrying her through into the back rooms before anyone could proposition either of them. ‘Vali said that you needed to speak to me about Jeanie?’

‘That’s right. Did he explain why?’

‘No. Just that there was a problem and you needed to speak urgently so doing it this way got around legally requesting my real name. Which I don’t mind you knowing, by the way. I can give you contact details if you need them.’

Fox held up her hands. ‘No, no need. I like the mystery and as long as I can get what I need without resorting to all that paperwork… Believe me, it takes far too long to get authorisation to obtain a real identity.’

‘I’m… actually glad to hear that. What do you need?’

‘You said that Jeanie goes away every few weeks with a boyfriend?’

‘That’s right. It’s… three or four weeks between trips. She’s been doing it for as long as she’s been coming here.’

‘How do you know there’s a man involved?’

‘Ah… It’s a lot of things. I know she gets away from Boston. I think she goes out of the Metro to a resort of some kind. She said she went out there to get away from all the media press and that her “friend” liked to get away from it all too. And once she said that he had to travel further than she did to get there, so I know there’s a man. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s sexual… Uh, but I remember her saying that she was going to be getting the real thing one weekend.’ Cleopatra gave a little grin. ‘You know how it’s never quite the same when you’re in full-immersion virtual.’

Fox grinned at her. ‘I did know, but I was thinking it might be just me.’

‘Nope. It’s the physical lockout. It stops your body reacting normally to the stimulation. If you use telepresence with full sensory simulation instead of immersion you can get the full experience, but then you lose out on some other aspects.’

‘Never had a need to try that… This is getting off-topic. So you’re pretty sure that she was seeing a lover, a male lover, on these trips to some inland resort?’

‘Yes. Not absolutely sure about all the details, but that’s the general gist of it.’

‘It’s good enough. Thanks.’

‘Oh, anything to help catch the bastard who killed Mystral. Besides, I expect you to come back and pleasure me for hours this evening.’

Fox was fairly sure she was joking and just grinned as she let the real world flow back in to fill her senses. Opening her eyes, she blinked a couple of times and sat up. So Elaine Ross was having an affair with a man and did not want the company she worked for knowing about him. Which could mean nothing, or it could mean she was in trouble, or it could mean she was trouble. Whatever the case, it was going to have to be looked into.

‘Kit, I’m going to need you to go through a complete background check on Elaine Ross. Run her financials. Pay particular attention to anything to do with a spa or resort outside Boston Metro.’

Kit appeared beside Fox’s desk, frowning. ‘You think she may be involved in the murders somehow?’

‘No. Not exactly. Well… That’d make about as much sense as anything else in this case. None at all.’

~~~

Dillan looked around as the door of the medical bay she was in opened and Fox walked in. ‘Inspector. Here to get what little statement I have?’ The hospital wing at HQ was fairly well appointed with beds for a hundred patients and good facilities, but the place was far too close to people who wanted answers for comfort.

‘No,’ Fox replied, smiling and pulling a chair over from the side of the room. ‘I’ve seen the reports and that stuff does a good job of fucking your memory up. I came to see how you were doing, not pump you for more information.’

Dillan relaxed. ‘Good. I’ve got nothing I can add, though I got the feeling that was just fine by Captain Canard. I don’t even remember the EMP going off. Bucksbridge must’ve shot me right after the explosion.’

Fox’s smile turned to more of a grin. ‘Can’t stop yourself making a report of it anyway?’

‘I feel like an idiot,’ Dillan replied, her brow furrowing. ‘I got caught by surprise and I can’t even remember opening the damn door of his apartment.’

‘No one could’ve known he had that kind of gear with him. He was down as a person to watch, minor league, petty crimes, not the kind of person to have military weapons and high-end neurotoxins available.’

‘I guess…’

‘I know. Quit kicking yourself over it.’

‘Does make you wonder what he was doing with gear like that. You think UA is planning something in the area?’

Fox gave a shrug. ‘If they are then it’s precinct twenty-nine’s problem. I hope, anyway.’

‘Not mine, that’s for sure. I’m on medical leave for another week and Canard says I’m off the case after that.’

‘Yeah… To be honest, I’d prefer you to Sandoval.’

‘His charms aren’t working on you then?’

‘He’s charming, sure. Looks good. Comes over as… too eager.’

‘Like a puppy in a sharp suit.’

Fox bit back on the laugh which threatened to burst out. ‘How am I supposed to work with the man with that image floating in my head?’

Dillan grinned. ‘My work here is done.’

~~~

‘Did you know,’ Kit said, ‘that thirteen per cent of young people under twenty-one had their first sexual experience with their companion AIs?’

Fox paused with a forkful of noodles halfway to her mouth. ‘I did not know that. No.’

‘The percentage is expected to rise rapidly as implanted computers powerful enough to run AI-threes and fours become more common. You were correct in asserting that that kind of behaviour is normally blocked, but there are a number of commonly available patches which disable the locks.’

‘Huh.’ Fox chewed for a second or two and swallowed. ‘Well, in some ways I guess it’s better than the alternative. My first time was a kid named Danny Berkewitz. He had no idea what he was doing and I had almost none, but at least we knew to use condoms. If kids are doing it with their virtual friends there’s going to be no disease or pregnancy.’

‘Certain memetic, chastity-oriented campaigns have been initiated based around that aspect of the trend, yes. A number of religious groups attempting to promote “no sex outside marriage” memes believe this is a way of persuading young adults to stay chaste. Others see it as perverse, however.’

‘Uh-huh, that sounds about right. Religion has a way of viewing anything to do with pleasure as a sin. It’s one of the reasons I don’t tend to get involved in religions.’ She paused, considering. ‘I’m not big on a lot of the organised memeplexes, actually. Religion, politics, country dancing… You’ve been studying human sexuality, I take it?’

‘I have made some preliminary forays into the field. My understanding of the typical metropolitan human suggests that your friend, Mister Berkewitz, was unusual. By the age of eighteen, even a decade ago, most young males were well versed in basic sexual techniques thanks to pornographic imagery on the internet.’

Fox smirked. ‘We were fifteen. I was two months older than him. However, it wasn’t age that caused his lack of education. I grew up in the Kansas Belt, the Topeka Agri-Zone. A lot of pretty strongly moral people out there. They say you have to believe in something to put up with living in the ass-end of America.’

‘Your parents were religious?’

‘No, but Danny’s were. I think that was why he was so keen to try out sex. Rebellion is popular with teenagers. My parents…’ Fox stopped and sighed, scraping up the last of her food before continuing. ‘Mom and Dad were always really keen on me making my own way in the world. They said the Belt was the last place you could go where you weren’t constantly watched by the administration, and NIX, and NAPA. They pretty seriously considered packing up and moving off-world a couple of times, heading out to one of the orbital communities or even the Far Belt. Dad used to say, “Tara, a person’s got to make their own mind up about the world, and then they have to get out there and make the world work the way it should be.”’

Kit frowned. ‘I am having some difficulty in determining how your parents reacted when you decided to join the Army.’

‘That’s because you didn’t know them well enough. They had sympathies with UA. They’d bought right into the whole anarchy meme, but I’d seen where it all led to. March of forty-five there was a protest orchestrated by United Anarchy. Various things happened across the whole of Topeka and a friend of mine was caught up in one. She was in a mall when one of the gangs out of the Southern Protectorate came in and took the place over. I don’t know exactly how much of the media stories were true, but I saw some of the bodies before the marshals got everything covered up. I don’t think she had a pretty death.’

‘I am sorry.’

Fox flashed her a grin. ‘It was a while back. I remembered it though. Every time my parents were on one of their “those northern bastards are eroding our freedoms” rants, I’d remember that their idea of freedom left thirteen-year-old girls in pools of blood. When they told me how right United Anarchy was, I remembered that UA had killed my friend. So when I told them I was joining up, I was not really surprised that they told me I was a “traitor to the people of America.” I told them they were hypocritical, useless, toothless, and pointless. We haven’t spoken since.’

‘Well… yes. If they believe you have to make your own way, then they should respect your decision, even if they don’t agree with your views.’

‘Are you saying that because you’re programmed to be nice to me or because it seems reasonable?’

‘Because I find it difficult to reconcile your parents’ espoused opinions and their actions.’

‘And that, my dear young AI, is why humans will forever be difficult for your kind to understand. We’re really good at believing two mutually contradictory things at the same time, and seeing no problem with it. We are irreconcilable. But my parents were just performing the way they usually did. They talked a lot, and they planned, and they ranted about freedom. They never did anything. The morons didn’t even use their votes! They kept saying it was useless because the power was all in the north. Well of course it is! No one in the south bothers voting!’

‘I see,’ Kit said, and it did look like she was grasping the idea from the way her brows furrowed. ‘You are someone who believes in doing where you are able to do. Your parents talk a lot, but do not step outside their current lives to do anything about the problems they perceive. Even if you do not agree with what they believe, you would prefer they actually did something about it.’

‘It’s called “having the courage of your convictions,” yeah. To be honest, I wish they’d realise that the delegative democracy system we have is a little too close to anarchy already, and it’s what’s got them where they are. The thing is that most people have enormous trouble seeing past their own preconceptions. My parents grew up with the idea that “Big Government” was bad, even though what was meant by that term was busy collapsing. To them, the power still resides in the same basic geographical location, it’s still distant, it must be the same, and bad. Anything opposing it must be good, even if that means excusing someone who incites a bunch of thugs to kill children. How did we get from kids humping their imaginary friends to politics?’

Kit smiled. ‘I assure you that every step was perfectly logical and I have learned more about you, my owner, and society as a whole.’

‘Right. Perfectly logical, huh?’

‘Trust me, I’m an AI.’

27th January.

It was just after ten in the morning when the call came through. Fox saw the ident and connected immediately, and somehow she knew it was not going to be good news even before the man on the other end began speaking.

‘Inspector Meridian, this is Senior Officer Frank Marple of the Laconia district office.’ Marple looked, from his 2D avatar, to be typical of senior officer ranks in district offices: he was old enough to have got higher up the ranks but had not and had ended up out in the boondocks.

‘Senior Officer,’ Fox replied, ‘what can I do for you?’

‘I’m out at the Wolfeboro Retreat. It’s a high-end resort on Lake Winnipesaukee. They usually handle their own security, but they’ve got a homicide and when I ran the basic scans to send through to Boston, they said I should contact you for this one. Victim has been identified using facial recognition as one Elaine Jean Ross.’

Fox licked her lips. ‘Single gunshot wound, right eye, probably using an explosive warhead?’

‘Well, her right eye and the back of her head are gone.’

‘Okay, Senior Officer, I’m going to get out there as fast as I can. Uh, I don’t suppose this resort has a private landing pad?’

His image looked perplexed for a second. ‘Uh, yeah, I think it does.’

Airborne over New England Administrative Region.

‘So you just called Jackson Martins, asked if you could borrow a vertol, and he said “yeah, sure?”’

Fox glanced across to the co-pilot’s seat where Sandoval was sitting. ‘He’s civic-minded.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And if we’d gone by maglev and ground transport we would’ve been hours getting there, and waiting for a NAPA vertol to take us would be almost as long. And I can fly this thing.’

‘Uh-huh. You’re kind of stung that this guy’s hit Ross.’

‘I’m kind of stung that this guy’s hitting anyone.’

‘You can’t take this personally though. You need to keep it objective or you’ll go nuts doing this kind of–’

‘I’m aware of the need to remain objective, Sandoval. I’m quite capable of turning my emotions off when I need to. But this guy has hit three women in only a few days. This isn’t a professional, or if it is he’s on some sort of weird killing jag. It’s looking like we have a spree killer on our hands, and they’ll probably keep going until we stop them.’

‘It’s going to be tough. I mean, I’ve been over the reports and this guy has special ops training or something. Maybe an ex-spook. Adamshi’s security was nothing amazing, but your building has pretty good tech and he got in and out undetected. We’ve never caught anyone on camera around either building who looked suspicious.’

‘We have no idea what we’re looking for, but no, you’re right. Special ops is a possibility. He’s used to wet work and he’s been hurt, badly, at some point. He lost at least a hand, probably an arm. Hold on.’ She activated the vertol’s radio with a thought. ‘Wolfeboro Retreat airfield, this is November one three four mike tango requesting landing clearance. Over.’

There was a short pause and then a voice from the other end. ‘November one three four mike tango, you are cleared for a landing on pad four. Senior Officer Marple will be waiting for you. Over and out.’

‘Fast and efficient,’ Fox noted. ‘So, once we’re down I want you to get the two techs we have with us working on the scene. We don’t know how long she’s been dead at this point, and we don’t know how disturbed the site is. We go over that place with a fine filter. I’m going to handle the manager and staff, see what I can find out.’

‘Are you expecting to find anything?’

‘Well, she was coming here to meet with a man. She did not want her channel colleagues to know who this man was. If I find out nothing else, I want to know who that man is.’

Wolfeboro Retreat, New England Administrative Region.

‘Miss Ross was a very private woman.’ The speaker was a long-nosed, tall man with a highly developed ability to peer down that nose at anyone he considered beneath him. That was possibly everyone. ‘Here at the Wolfeboro Retreat, we value our clients’ privacy, respect it. If they wish to remain off the grid while here, we accept that, even encourage it.’

Fox did her best not to scowl at the man. ‘Well, Mister Freedmont, if you respected your clientele enough to monitor their health while they were here, Miss Ross would not have been lying there with her blood soaking into your carpets for forty-odd hours.’

Freedmont sniffed. ‘It’s a matter of choice, as is the matter of who our guests choose to have stay with them. Her male friend was not required to check in and we have no record of who he was.’

‘But you’ve seen him?’

‘I have.’ Freedmont appeared to consider the circumstances and relent a little. ‘In fact, I do not quite understand their reluctance to make the relationship public. He has been meeting her here for over a year. In this day and age of internet relationships, such regular physical meetings almost constitute marriage. I’m afraid a description would be of limited use as so many these days are blonde, blue-eyed, and attractive. The hair has a reddish tint to it, perhaps a little like your companion’s. Aside from that he could be any one of a million men you see in media.’

‘You believe he was in media?’

‘Believe, yes. I have no proof of that. It seemed likely.’

Fox nodded and looked through the door into the room where the two technicians were busy working over the room with sensors and microbots. ‘Hopefully we’ll get DNA out of here we can use to narrow the list of potentials. This was a general-use room?’

‘Miss Ross requested it every time she came here. She enjoyed the view over the lake. It was used by other clients between her visits, however.’

‘Yeah. I’ll need to talk to any staff you have had on duty here for the last two days, especially the one who found the body.’

Freedmont nodded, expecting that. ‘Maureen is in our medical facility. Finding the… Discovering Miss Ross was a shock; she had to be sedated. The other staff are on site. They can all be available as and when required and I have an office you can use in the administrative building.’

‘Very efficient, thank you. Sandoval, you’re with me. You two, I want any DNA run as a rush job.’

One of the techs looked back at her, his face obscured behind the mask of his suit. His voice came over their network comms, ‘We’re getting so much of that it’ll take days to get results on all of it.’

‘I’ll have my agent assist. I need that information as soon as possible.’

~~~

Maureen was still looking doped when Fox and Sandoval got to the little cubicle she had been assigned. The medical facility was largely meant for customers and it was clean, tidy, and very plush, with all the latest in medical gadgetry. It was kind of nice to note that Freedmont had decided one of his staff should be treated there: Fox had got the distinct impression that the man had a strong sense of social status.

‘I should’ve found her sooner,’ Maureen said, her tone morose. ‘The suite wasn’t needed yesterday and we had a bunch of them that needed to be cleaned sooner. I left Miss Ross’s until this morning to give me more time on the others.’

‘No one checked that she’d left the site?’ Sandoval asked.

‘Not my place to know, sir, but we don’t generally get people staying longer than they should. Policy is to have a room empty for a day after a guest uses it so that we can get everything perfect for the next guest, so if they’re a little late it’s not a problem. Most use ground transport in and out of here and it’s not regulated.’

‘Miss Ross’s companion? You saw him?’

‘I saw him on Friday, when he arrived. Handsome gentleman. Really beautiful eyes, and he really liked Miss Ross.’

‘He was gone by Sunday night, but she stayed on?’

‘Sometimes he would stay with her the whole time, but he would often leave earlier. I didn’t see him leave this time, so I can’t say when he did. Miss Ross liked to spend at least a few hours getting pampered before she left.’

Fox nodded. Checks had shown that Ross had missed an appointment with the beautician on Sunday afternoon, but the resort’s privacy policy had resulted in no one checking on her. ‘Thank you, Maureen. If you think of anything else, please contact NAPA and you’ll be put through to me.’

‘You don’t think Miss Ross’s friend could have done that, do you, ma’am?’ Maureen said before Fox could turn away.

‘Everyone’s a suspect until we discount them.’

The girl shook her head. ‘No, he was in love, Inspector. They both were. There’s no way he could have done that to her.’

Fox gave her a smile and walked out, Sandoval behind her. ‘She’s right, of course. Ross’s mystery man isn’t the killer.’

‘You sound sure,’ Sandoval commented.

‘I am. No one’s mentioned cybernetic limbs. Doesn’t mean her friend didn’t commission the murder, but he’s not the killer.’ She frowned as she noticed the time in her virtual display. ‘It’s getting late. The techs left already, didn’t they?’

‘Uh-huh. They wrapped the scene and took ground transport into Boston.’

‘I’ll call Jackson and let him know I’ll be late back with his vertol.’

‘Yeah, well, we wouldn’t want him worried.’

Fox rolled her eyes as the call went through, but it was Terri’s picture which appeared in-vision when it connected. ‘Terri? Your dad busy?’

‘Conference call with Europe and Japan,’ Terri replied. ‘You’re in Wolfeboro, right?’

‘Uh-huh. I just wanted to let him know I’d be late back with the vertol I borrowed–’

‘Stay over. Bring it back in the morning.’

‘Uh…’

‘We, as in MarTech, have a corporate suite there and I just checked and it’s free. Stay there tonight and come back tomorrow. Flying after a day interviewing people is not the best of ideas.’

‘I’ve got another detective here, Terri.’

‘I did say it was a suite, right? Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, hot tub, private pool. I’ll send through instructions to the resort. Stop off and see me in the morning when you drop the vertol off. Bye.’ And she was gone before Fox could stop her.

‘Did you have any plans in New York tonight?’ Fox said aloud.

Sandoval raised an eyebrow. ‘On a Tuesday? In the middle of an investigation?’

‘Right. We’re staying here tonight. MarTech have a suite we can use. Terri was insistent.’

He was smirking when he said, ‘Oh well, if she was insistent…’

~~~

‘I think I could get used to this kind of police work,’ Sandoval said as he looked around the large lounge of the MarTech corporate suite.

Fox had to admit that it did look pretty swish. It was supposed to be used by MarTech employees on corporate retreat so there was little in the way of physical decoration, but the viron was set up to a fairly subtle design, nothing garish and no subliminal attempts at brainwashing you into corporate loyalty. Not that she had expected the latter: Jackson preferred his employees to be loyal because they felt they should be or because he paid them well, but there were a few companies who would have dropped a few memetic hints into the scenery.

The lounge had a huge picture window overlooking the lake which could be repurposed into a display. A table behind the seating was circular and large enough for six people, and there was a kitchenette at the back. Off to the sides were the three bedrooms, one of those a little larger than the other two and equipped with an en-suite bathroom. Through a door at the side of the kitchen was a short corridor, with another bathroom off it, leading to the pool room, which had a reasonably sized pool and Jacuzzi in it.

‘Well, don’t get used to it,’ Fox told him. ‘I don’t make a habit of staying the night in over-priced health resorts when working. And we’re leaving first thing. I want to be heading out of here at six.’

‘You need to learn to relax. Unless the DNA search finds something, we are no closer than we were this morning and rushing back to New York is not going to change that.’

‘Thank you for reminding me.’

He flashed her a bright grin and then his eyes narrowed, appraising. ‘Why so driven, Fox? Why so determined to push this forward as fast as you can? Sometimes you just have to wait for the answers to reveal themselves.’

She narrowed her eyes back and then went to the refrigerator in the kitchen. There was going to be a bottle of wine in there, she knew it. She suspected Terri had made sure there was a bottle of wine there. She was not disappointed. ‘Why so driven?’ she replied as she poured two glasses: he was fairly unlikely to say no if asked. ‘My parents.’

‘Pushy parents?’

‘Yes and no. They wanted me to succeed, to make my mark on the world, to do what I wanted to do. But they never did a damn thing, and when I decided to join the Army they didn’t like it at all. So they pushed me to do things, and set me an example of exactly how not to go about doing that.’ She handed over one of the glasses and settled onto the sofa to look out at the darkened lake.

Sandoval settled down beside her, not too close but close enough to be companionable. ‘My dad was in the Army. Died in Syria when I was four so I hardly knew him. Mom always wanted me to go into media, but she encouraged me in anything I felt like doing.’

‘Lucky you. As for why I want this particular case hammered out… There’s something wrong about this. The killer is… too random and too good. He’s hit two people associated with the Murder on My Mind show, but the second victim was nothing to do with it. All three were involved with the same online club, but not the same virons within it. And Ross was killed too soon after Adamshi. Even if this were a serial and he’s escalating, it’s too fast. There’s something wrong and I want him nailed.’

‘Not fond of mysteries?’

‘Not fond of waiting for answers. Yes, we have to. Sometimes the information can’t be rushed. Doesn’t mean I have to like it. Doesn’t mean I can’t want to know the answer sooner. Knowing things too late can get a lot of people killed.’

‘Somehow I don’t think you’re talking about this case there.’

‘You heard about the Dallas hostage incident, right? Dillan said you were down that way before joining NAPA.’

‘She did? Huh. I know about Dallas, sure. You were pretty famous for a while.’

‘I still get recognised. I could do without it. There were things going on around that op that I didn’t know about.’

Sandoval gave a grunt. ‘Corporate secrets. Big corporations are–’

‘Jackson told me everything I needed to know as soon as I got there. No, someone pushed to get Marshall put in as leader of the insertion team. Someone told the terrorists we were coming, what we would have, where we would insert. Someone wanted that mission to fail.’

‘I assume you told your superiors this when you got out?’ He was frowning, concerned, and she almost smiled at his naiveté.

‘Marshall was put in place by the UNTPP brass, even if someone pushed them to do it. They knew what was going on and they let themselves be suckered into almost blowing the whole thing. I saved their collective butts by getting Terri Martins out of there alive and they told me they were considering disciplinary action over the destruction of the facility.’

‘Huh?’

‘They wanted a lever to keep my mouth shut about Marshall. I saved them the trouble and quit. They didn’t like that much either, but Jackson was doing his best to make sure nothing happened to me. I saved his daughter and protected something he did not want getting into UA’s hands.’

‘By blowing it up.’

‘Oh yeah. It and what was left of the UA cell.’

‘None of them survived?’

Fox paused and sipped her wine. ‘They never recovered all the bodies. Between the explosion, the fire, and the fallen masonry… They never found everyone, but they were fairly sure that no one could have escaped. I almost didn’t make it out.’

‘Can’t be easy to live with.’

‘I did what needed to be done. I only get nightmares once or twice a month.’

There was a second or two of silence and then, ‘Right, well that was kind of depressing. And my fault. Let’s see if that kitchen’s worth a damn.’

Fox let out a bark of laughter as he got to his feet. ‘You cook, Sandoval?’

He flashed her a grin. ‘Don’t let this suave, attractive, man-who-wouldn’t-know-a-saucepan-if-it-bit-him exterior fool you. I happen to be an excellent cook. Many a girl, surprised at the mere suggestion of my culinary skill, has fallen to the taste of my carbonara.’

‘Okay then, surprise me.’

~~~

Fox watched as Sandoval took the plates and cutlery to the kitchen for recycling. The meal had, indeed, been quite good. Not a carbonara but something pasta-based with a creamy sauce and a hint of something a little spicy in with the meat. Cayenne? Whatever, it had added a little touch of heat which had been nice.

‘I need to make a call up to New York,’ he said, closing the hatch on the recycler.

Fox drained her wine glass. ‘Fine.’ Maybe the spice had been hotter than she had thought. Getting to her feet, she slipped her jacket off, dropping it onto the back of the chair, and then wandered off to the pool room to give him some privacy.

And, she realised as she saw the water, to take a swim. Not something she had planned, but it would be nice. A little light exercise after the meal would not kill her and she had been neglecting her fitness for a couple of days. Sitting down on a lounger, she began stripping off her jeans and shoes. No costume… She glanced at the doorway to the lounge where Sandoval was busy with his call. Well… he could just deal with it. A few seconds later she was diving, naked, into the small pool and setting off for the other side at a brisk pace.

As she came back for her twelfth turn, she switched strokes, catching the side, swinging her legs up, and pushing off on her back. As she had more or less expected, Sandoval was standing at the side of the pool watching her. He did not avert his gaze for the change of view and… The heat was still there, but it was focusing. She wanted him to look. The thought that this was just a little outside her normal behaviour hit her and was pushed aside: it had been a long time since she had indulged herself that way and, thinking about it, he had been looking at her as though he wanted to eat her for half the meal.

Coming to a stop as her hand hit the far wall, she turned and pulled herself out of the water. His eyes followed her as she walked around the pool and then to the door. Nothing was said, but he followed her. She could feel him behind her, masculine heat slowly closing the distance as she walked down the corridor and into the lounge. She stopped in the doorway, hands on the frame on either side of her chest, knowing he was right there, right at her back, and the heat was becoming unbearable. His hands slid over her hips, she felt his chest, no shirt, against her back, and her breathing turned ragged. Fingers slid over wet skin, gliding over her taut stomach, brushing over the undersides of her breasts. She let out a soft moan and then a gasp as he caught her nipples.

‘Here or the bedroom?’ His voice was rough, eager. He was as needful as she was and she really needed him.

She pushed forward and his hands slipped off her, but she dropped to her knees on the plush carpet and he seemed to pick up on her answer quickly enough. On all fours, she arched her back and waited what seemed like an eternity and then he was sinking himself into her. She groaned and pushed back, and his fingers dug into the flesh of her hips and held her there as he began thrusting into her, controlling the pace and making the motion deep and just slower than what she wanted. Her body was burning; a core of white heat was building between her thighs as he drove into her. There was screaming and she thought, perhaps, she might have come, but she knew that was not the climax: not even close.

His hands shifted, climbing her body to clasp her breasts. The little orgasm had hit him too, her muscles pulsing around him. She had him now, and they both knew he was close as he began to drive harder. His fingers pinched her nipples, wringing a cry from her throat, and she thrust back at him, heard his breath catch, felt him filling her and the white-hot flow of release flooding out through her body from where they joined…

28th January.

Fox opened her eyes, wondering for a second where she was. Then the memories flowed back in, all of them, including what she had spent the latter part of the evening doing with the man lying in bed with her. She knew he was there, could feel him taking up space in her vicinity, but he was not lying close to her. She slipped from the bed without disturbing him and went to the shower in the bathroom.

The water hit her face, washing away the weird feeling of unease that was sitting in her stomach. She had a feeling that it was something to do with Sandoval and their night of rampant, and it had been rampant, sex, but she could not quite work out what was wrong. It had been good sex and she had no conscious regrets…

Kit’s image appeared in-vision, a still indicating an incoming call. She connected it as she picked up the soap. ‘Were you monitoring me to see when I woke up?’

‘Yes, Fox,’ the AI replied and the urgent tone in her voice suggested there was a reason. ‘Forensics passed on the sampled DNA from the Ross crime scene and I ran the genomes against known suspects. I got one hit, Nathan Shark. Maglev transport records have him travelling to Boston on the twenty-third, arriving at nineteen-hundred. He was on a returning train at fifteen-hundred on the twenty-fifth.’

Fox frowned at the wall. ‘How does that match up with time of death?’

‘Precise time is difficult to estimate given the delay in discovery. It is just possible that he could have killed her and left, but Mister Shark does not fit the physical profile of the killer.’

‘No, he doesn’t. I’m a little out of touch here, but has the news of Elaine Ross’s death reached New York?’

‘There were reports on a number of IB channels last night.’

‘Right. Have HQ find out where Shark is. I want uniforms ready to arrest him if he tries to leave New York, but they are to remain unobserved otherwise. I’ll talk to him myself. I’ll be back in town in… ninety minutes.’

‘Of course. Fox, your biomonitoring systems are detecting some unusual neurochemical factors, including heightened dopamine levels.’

‘Huh. Must be from having real sex for a change. Be back soon.’

New York Metro.

Nathan Shark lived in one of four apartment blocks on the west shore of Little Neck Bay, sandwiched between the water and the BQ-line maglev track. Not bad for transportation services, even if he had to change for the LI-line which went into Lexington Tower. It was a good-quality, mid-range block, like Fox’s, but with a better view. Pretty much where Fox expected to see an upwardly mobile media executive.

Shark’s apartment’s biomonitor records indicated that he had not left the building since the previous evening. Fox put a message through to him at eight a.m. requesting an interview, and then she and Sandoval waited in the building’s main lobby for a response. It took ten minutes before she got a reply, and that was an acknowledgement.

‘You stay quiet,’ Fox said as they rode the elevator up to Shark’s floor. ‘Your first meeting with him did not exactly go off well and, if he isn’t our killer, then he just lost someone he had a personal relationship with.’

‘I do know what tact is,’ Sandoval replied, ‘but I’ll leave the talking to you.’ There was a small shrug. ‘He’s probably more likely to open up to you anyway.’

Shark opened the door, peered at Fox and then back at Sandoval, grunted, and then backed up to let them in. He had definitely looked better. He was dressed and looked as though he was going into work, but Fox could see the heavy make-up under his eyes to disguise the bags and darkening of the skin. He had slept badly. His shoulders were slumped as he trudged back to the little breakfast nook on one side of the room to get coffee.

‘I assume you know why we’re here, Mister Shark?’ Fox asked.

‘You figured out I was Elaine’s mystery lover,’ the producer replied. ‘So now you figure you can accuse me of killing–’

‘You’re not a suspect in her murder.’ The flat statement made him look up, frowning. ‘I need to know why you were keeping it secret, exactly when you left, what you know of Miss Ross’s plans after you left… Anything you can think of which might help us find her killer.’

‘I’m not a suspect?’

‘You don’t fit the physical profile we have and we’ve been through your financial records already so we know you haven’t been hiring killers.’

‘Oh. I… Would you like some coffee?’

‘Thank you, no. I’m a little hyper this morning for some reason. When did you leave the resort, Mister Shark?’

‘Uh, it was about two in the afternoon on Sunday. I took an autocab. You can trace that, right? I paid by credit transfer.’

Fox passed the request for verification off to her VA. ‘We can. Do you know what Miss Ross was planning for the rest of the afternoon?’

‘There was a beautician appointment at four-thirty. She liked to relax, meditate for a while, after I’d gone, but she generally made sure she went for a bit of a tune-up before leaving Wolfeboro.’ He paused for a second and then added, ‘I’d have thought the reason for the secrecy was obvious.’

‘Rival productions, rival channels.’

He nodded. ‘We met before she got the part, but we were living in different cities. She used the Retreat and thought we could go out there at the weekend without the gossip columns getting hold of her new relationship. Then she got the Tasker part… Neither of us wanted to give up what we had together. Neither of us could afford to drop our careers. So we hid it, even though we wanted more. And now… This suggests it’s someone at IB-Nineteen, doesn’t it? Mystery and Mayhem have lost the scriptwriter and star of their lead show.’

Fox gave a shrug. ‘Honestly, Mister Shark, this just confuses things more. I think someone wants me to think that this is related to IB-Nineteen, but there’s too much that doesn’t make sense. Someone seems quite determined to implicate you in this as well. If you can think of anything else which might help, contact me immediately. And I think you should take the day off.’

‘Can’t,’ Shark replied. ‘There’s a big meeting at the office about how best to handle Elaine’s death. Not sure how I’m going to get through it, but I don’t have any choice about being there.’

‘He didn’t seem terribly broken up about it,’ Sandoval commented once they were back outside and headed down.

‘He didn’t sleep last night and he wasn’t kidding about the meeting. You need to get your eyes checked. Didn’t you see the make-up under his eyes? Not that that’ll fool half the people he’s wearing it for.’ She caught herself clenching her fists and willing the elevator car to go faster. ‘Damn, but I’m wired for some reason. Go back to HQ and start reviewing everything we have on IB-Nineteen.’

‘Sure, but you said yourself it’s probably nothing to do with them.’

‘Yes, but prioritise anyone who might wish to do both channels harm.’

‘Okay. What are you doing?’

‘I said I’d stop off and thank Jackson and Terri for letting me borrow the vertol, and then I forgot. And I have another case related to them I need to check up on.’

~~~

‘Your pupils are dilated,’ Terri commented as Fox stepped off the elevator.

Fox pushed an eyebrow up. ‘Well, I had sex last night.’

Terri smirked. ‘Must be it. Flight said you came in an hour ago. I thought you’d stop off on the way through, not come back for a visit.’ She turned and started through into the solarium and Fox followed.

‘Something came up in the homicide case I’m on and I needed to rush. And that kind of pushed dropping in here out of my mind. But I did need to drop in and check up on the Hunt case anyway so I figured I’d take the excuse to come back and leave the drudge work to my assistant.’

‘Kit?’

‘No, my human assistant. I’m not giving boring crap like that to Kit.’ Terri giggled at that, and Fox was reminded of something else she had meant to ask. ‘There’s nothing actually stopping Kit from engaging in… interpersonal relationships of an intimate nature, is there?’

‘You having feelings for your agent I should know about? Because if you are, good, my chances are going up.’

‘I am not. She met someone online, helping me with the casework, and he’s clearly interested in her, and she’s clearly interested in finding out where that might lead. I said I’d check there were no blocks on her behaviour.’

Terri glanced back as she turned for her father’s office. ‘She’s developing quite nicely, but keep an eye on her. If there are any possibilities of instability in her program, I’d like to know so we can patch it. And, no, there are no blocks on sexual behaviour in her programming. I’ll send her a couple of modular skill packages that might help. Actually, there are a couple of others which could be useful to you. I’ll send her a set. She won’t be able to run them all at once, but she shouldn’t need to.’

‘Thanks.’

‘And if you keep acting skittish and these little memory lapses continue, check with a doctor.’

‘Yes, Mom.’

‘You’re older than I am. Poppa, tell Fox she’s being mean to me.’

Jackson Martins lowered his head from where he had been absently staring at the ceiling and looked around. ‘Play nice, children, or it’s straight to bed with no supper.’

Fox grinned at him but waited for the office door to close behind her before speaking. ‘I came to ask about the Hunt case. And thank you for the vertol loan. That was really useful and good fun.’

‘My pleasure. MarTech is always ready to assist law enforcement in the pursuit of their duty and all that good PR bullshit. I’m expecting something from the Palladium people on Luna tomorrow. I’ll send something to Kit when I do. If it’s nothing much I’ll send the report, but I got the impression they found some things which might be better discussed in private.’

Fox’s brow wrinkled. ‘Oh… great. That’s not ominous at all.’

‘Just trying to keep your life interesting, Fox.’

‘Thanks, I could do without.’

~~~

‘I have received a package of skill modules from Miss Martins,’ Kit said as Fox undressed.

‘She said she was going to send something over. Something to help with Vali.’

The kitsune’s cheeks coloured. ‘There was a package designed for use in erotic simulations, yes, but she also sent some modules on psychology, sociometry, and a few other things which should be useful when assisting you in your work.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Fox flashed her agent’s image a grin. ‘And you’ll learn these skills yourself by using the modules?’

‘I will, eventually, be able to dispense with the assistance if I am able to employ the techniques in the packages successfully. You seem to be dressing for exercise.’

Fox finished pulling on a pair of shorts and reached for a T-shirt. ‘I’ve been feeling… twitchy all day. I’m going up to take a run along the Esplanade and see if I can burn this off.’

‘Your dopamine levels are fluctuating oddly. They are now somewhat lowered, which can result in issues with concentration.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. When I noticed the increased levels this morning, I devoted a few cycles to determining possible effects. I did note that dopamine can have an effect on libido, so perhaps it was the sex. Detective Sandoval, I assume?’

‘Yeah. It just kind of happened.’

‘You have been saying that the real thing is better than virtual sex.’

Fox nodded and tightened the laces on her shoes before getting up and starting for the door. ‘Yeah. I did say that, didn’t I? Weird thing is I’m not entirely sure whether it was or not.’

29th January.

Fox looked up at the image on the wall of Jackson’s office. ‘That,’ Jackson said, ‘is Daniel Caravel. He was a NIX analyst in twenty-fifty-five, and then he dropped off the map early in fifty-six.’

‘Okay,’ Fox replied, peering at the image. She could not remember ever having seen the man before. He was attractive, fairly compact. Thick, black hair capped off a pale-skinned face with sharp, blue eyes and a small nose. He looked like a fit desk jockey.

‘Last year he was put on a NAPA security watch bulletin. It’s believed Mister Caravel is now using the nom de plume “Spook” and is highly active in UA circles. The Palladium people I had looking managed to find evidence that Hunt had met with Caravel in Luna City.’

‘Ah, okay. You could have started with that part.’ Fox’s brow furrowed. ‘But is he working for NIX, or UA, or both?’

‘That was not something my people were able to work out.’ Jackson’s attention shifted from the screen to Fox. ‘Palladium was created to handle internal security after Dallas. My business people told me that it was a marketable concept and we would be stupid not to hire out our personnel and equipment to others. I listen to them, as you know, because I hate business.’

She flashed him a grin. ‘I’m aware of your preference for staying out of the boardroom.’

‘Indeed. We’ve made modest inroads into the facilities management and site security arenas. Wayden, in particular, have suffered from our expansion into coverage of the protectorate regions. All MarTech facilities are now handled by Palladium personnel. We give the best training and equipment.’

‘But?’

‘But we hire for management and security skills which we enhance. We don’t have investigators, aside from a few people who happen to have a little talent for it.’

‘I seem to recall you trying to hire me into Palladium before I joined NAPA.’

‘Your memory is not faulty.’

Fox sighed. ‘I’m not sure I want to be part of the corporate world, Jackson. Maybe it’s my parents, but I think that’s going too far. I got into the military to fight people like this guy, and they shunted me off to the UNTPP but that seemed like a good move. NAPA is still in the public domain, taking down criminals. Palladium Security Solutions… it feels like I’m selling out.’

He nodded a reply. ‘I respect your principles, Fox. Always have. Won’t stop me keeping the position open though.’

~~~

‘Daniel Caravel is noted in NAPA records,’ Kit said into Fox’s head as the latter rode the maglev back toward HQ. ‘As indicated, he has UA associations in the form of three people known to have quite firm UA ties. Andrew Paul Prentice, aka Spinner, was thought to be one of the people responsible for running the MarTech Dallas operation.’

‘I recall the name being mentioned afterwards. Wasn’t he supposed to have been shot?’

‘NIX reported him killed in a drone attack on a UA safe house in Houston two months after the hostage incident. However, there have been indications on the internet that he survived that attack.’

‘Can’t trust NIX to do anything right. Any more associates?’

‘Chelsea Remen, aka Hash, and Mark Killian, aka Marksman. The latter is not especially active on the UA forums and it’s believed his primary interest in the movement is Remen. He is never found far from her. He is also the connection between Donovan Bucksbridge and United Anarchy.’

‘Interesting. I doubt there’s actually a connection between the cases though. I mean, Bucksbridge was just a name that came up.’

‘That is true, Fox. I will continue searching for information on these people. Currently their whereabouts are not known, but I have obtained images of all of them. I will lodge these in your facial recognition database. If any of them cross your path, you will be aware of it.’ There was a short pause and then, ‘Fox, why do so many seem to fall victim to this meme? Why would the concept of anarchy be so popular? Do people not realise that order brings safety?’

Fox smiled, which probably made her fellow passengers wonder what she was up to, but who cared what they thought. ‘You’d probably be better off asking a political science major or a memetics expert. I think the concept of freedom is a strong meme. On the internet, the concept of information freedom has been a rallying call for decades. Getting people to pay for content was a real pain back when internet media was taking off. Some people considered it their duty to crack content protection. It was hitting big business where it hurts and giving the power back to the little guy! Of course, the reality was that the little guy couldn’t make a cent off producing anything because it was stolen as soon as they tried. The freedom nuts and survivalists wanted reduced government and personal voting, so we got liquid democracy and minimalised government… which was basically handing everything over to those with money: the corporations and the top one per cent.’

‘Then shouldn’t the anarchists realise that their desires have driven the world away from how they want it?’

‘Religion and politics, Kit. The two things that never stop trying to force themselves on other people, no matter how obvious it is that they’re wrong. Can’t stop the anarchy meme any more than you can stop liberals or conservatives, or Christians, or Muslims, or people who believe we’re going to find life on Mars. You can’t disprove a belief because there’s nothing there to disprove.’

‘I believe I will stick to facts,’ the AI replied, her image smiling in its window.

‘Good plan,’ Fox replied. ‘I just wish I had a few more of them available at the moment.’

Part Six: Keep Your Friends Close

New York Metro, 30th January 2060.

27Lex was just as Fox remembered it: warm, sweaty, bathed in hormones, and swimming in barely perceptible sexual imagery. It was Friday night and Sam had insisted on dragging her out for at least a couple of hours. Fox had a vague feeling that things were not going to go as well as her friend hoped. It was just one of those nagging, niggling irritations at the back of her skull, the feeling you got when you were just waiting for something bad to happen…

‘You look like you were forced here at gunpoint,’ Sam commented as he handed her a glass of wine.

‘Sorry. I’m not really expecting to get through the weekend without another body turning up.’

‘Good, positive attitude. I like it.’

‘It’s difficult to develop a positive attitude when someone’s going around blowing women’s brains out on an alarmingly regular basis. This is why I have friends to take me out of my funk and encourage me to go to clubs where I can be bombarded with phallic imagery.’

Sam’s mouth twisted. ‘It is a little heavy on the cock tonight. I seem to remember more lip last time.’

‘Uh-huh. Full, very red, pursed lips. Maybe they’re hoping to appeal to a wider crowd. Is cock doing more for you than lips?’

‘Oral can be fun, but I’ve never been that fond of anal.’ He gave a dismissive shrug. ‘Honestly, the men who hire me for sex are usually playing at it. If they want penetration, I can usually steer them into letting me be on top. It’s how I prefer it when I have a relationship that doesn’t involve money.’ He flicked a glance at her. ‘Is it doing much for you?’

‘No. Cock-selfies went out forty years ago. The peeled banana subliminal is funny, I admit. Anyway, I got some of the real thing recently.’

‘Oh? I haven’t dragged you out when you could be banging hips with someone, have I?’

Fox felt her brow furrow and forced it to relax. ‘No. It was… something that happened. Not saying it won’t again, but I’m not sure it meant anything to either of us aside from releasing some tension.’

‘He’s a cop.’ Sam was making a statement, not asking a question.

‘Yeah. I’m working these homicides with him. He got dumped on me by Canard, but he’s… not terrible.’

‘High praise indeed.’

‘Ex-private security, political appointment as much as skill and talent, but there does seem to be some talent there.’

‘I’m assuming you’re talking about his skills as a policeman rather than his talent in bed?’

Fox smirked. ‘Actually we started out on the lounge carpet. Took us a good forty-five minutes to get to the bed.’

‘This sounds entertaining at least. Come on, more detail. Call it professional interest.’

‘Oh yeah, professional, sure.’

~~~

‘It sounds like the guy’s had some training,’ Sam commented. ‘I mean, without going to bed with him it’s hard to know, but he’s employing a few techniques I was taught.’

‘Huh. Not the kind of thing I’d expect Wayden to be teaching their staff, but you never know, I guess.’

He gave a shrug in reply. ‘Doesn’t sound like you, though. You’re usually more controlled.’ He peered at her, his lips twitching. ‘You’ve never tried to hit on me and I’m gorgeous.’

She returned his grin. ‘You are not nearly as charming as you think you are, Mister Clarion.’

‘I am, and you know it. Not the point. You’re not impulsive. I know you like your men blonde, but it takes more than a cooked meal to get into your pants.’

‘Maybe, but I think it was just–’ She stopped as she saw an emergency interrupt message popping up in-vision. ‘Shit! Need to take this.’

‘Identity verified by implant,’ the monotonous voice stated. ‘Inspector Meridian, immediate attendance required at the Red Night Club in Clayton Tower. Precinct eighteen officers on site. Probable homicide matching your cases. Building lockdown in progress.’

They had locked the building down? Did that mean they might have the killer still at the site? ‘Notify Detective Sandoval, seize all video recordings for the building and transit stations nearby, and get extra backup in from precinct eighteen. I want that tower isolated until we’ve checked everyone that’s in there. ETA fifteen minutes.’

‘Confirmed.’

Sam saw her attention return to him and frowned. ‘Your body turned up?’

‘Yeah,’ Fox replied, pulling a SoberUp from the pocket of her shorts, ‘but we might have the bastard trapped.’

~~~

The senior officer on the door at Clayton Tower had his helmet open which meant that Fox saw his eyebrow going up as she marched toward him in her clubbing outfit. She ignored the look and accessed the local police tactical net before speaking.

‘Senior Officer Pullman, situation report, if you would.’

Pullman pulled himself up straight. ‘Reports of gunfire at twenty-two-sixteen. That resulted in the immediate lockdown of the tower’s exterior access points.’

‘Gunfire? More than one shot?’

‘We’ve determined only a single shot from video coverage of the club. Officers were on site at twenty-two-twenty-one.’

‘That’s a very fast response.’

‘Clayton’s all commercial. The lower ten floors are all entertainment so we run a couple of officers on each floor through the high-traffic leisure periods.’

Fox nodded. Precinct 18 contained most of the Manhattan Conservation District and the band of entertainment facilities and shops to the north of it which the rich MCD inhabitants patronised. Making sure those wealthy citizens, many of them politically well placed, were well treated was the job of every NAPA officer in the precinct. ‘Yeah. Go on.’

‘First responders located the body and did an on-the-scene assessment. Victim is one Paulette Avery, licensed for public performance and prostitution, resident in precinct twenty-three.’ His tone fell when he mentioned the 23rd precinct, which was north of 18 and had a lot of Sprawl: somewhere had to house the people who worked for the rich folks. Fox suppressed the urge to punch the man in the nose just for his tone. ‘The cause of death suggested it might be part of your case. We got the VIPs out and called you.’

Fox checked the time. ‘Yes, in that order. You did take note of which of your VIPs required extrication, of course?’

Pullman’s expression hardened. ‘We know who was here. None of them would–’

‘Better hope so, Senior Officer, or I’ll personally serve the notice for your arrest on obstruction of justice. I want everyone checked as they’re let out. Full screening, identities verified before they go.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Pullman growled.

‘Now someone can take me up to the crime scene.’

The Red Night Club was, as Fox had expected, a high-end sex venue. Stripping and, later at night, live sex on the main stage, and a number of private rooms off the main floor which could be used for whatever service the clients wanted to pay for. Legally there were limits, but Fox tended to have a low opinion of the people who frequented that kind of place, especially when a lot of them had the money to indulge themselves at home. She had no doubt that the legal limits were stretched past breaking point for the right amount of money, but she doubted the club’s owners went so far as to allow their employees to die no matter what sum was offered.

Paulette Avery had put up more of a fight than the other victims. The room she had died in was a mess: one broken chair, another overturned, a bottle which looked like it had an expensive label lay smashed against a wall. Avery’s body was on the bed, but she had not died there. Blood spatter on the wall beside the door suggested she had been there when she had been shot, but the killer had taken the time to pose her on the bed. Even knowing that the shot had been heard and the cops would be on their way, he had taken that time.

Running the forensics sweep seemed almost like an abuse of public funds. Fox knew she would get nothing from the room. Like Hunt’s cabin on the shuttle, this place would be an absolute gold mine of useless clues. Tracking down the depositor of every bit of DNA evidence here would likely take years and result in more political heat than a supernova. The eighteenth precinct people had brought up a crime scene unit so she had started the microbots off on the body as soon as she had the basic room scans down, but going further seemed pointless. Instead, she connected through to the club’s surveillance system and pulled up the records for access to the room.

The accounting system, which tracked customers requesting private rooms, had logged ‘George Marsh’ entering with Avery at twenty-two-eleven. She put a request through her VA to have the man’s identity checked and then pulled up the camera data for the hallway outside at that time. And found herself looking at video of an empty corridor.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Sandoval said, appearing beside her in a crime scene suit. ‘Got here as fast as I could. Pullman on the door said they were screening everyone before letting them out. You think he’s still in the building?’

‘Not sure,’ Fox replied. ‘Someone’s screwed with the surveillance cameras… Look, you take over the forensics sweep. Just the body and the blood on the wall here by the door. The room’s going to be a bomb site as far as trace evidence is concerned and we’d be talking to half the city if we ran it.’

‘Okay. What are you going to be doing?’

‘Finding out where the security system is controlled from.’

~~~

Everything in the tower funnelled, eventually, into a core control and data suite at the bottom of the building. There were a number of potential access points to the fibres along the route to the control rooms, but most of those were designed to be accessed by small, arachnoform maintenance robots like a more specialised, smaller version of Fox’s house robot. The junction boxes were human-accessible, but Fox could check those visually as she worked down and there were no signs of tampering.

Security was handled by a single man and a collection of class 2 AIs. The latter did the majority of the work, watching for potential problems and then contacting the human operator when something caught their attention. The man on duty tonight was looking nervous, distinctly nervous. His skin was pasty and there was sweat on his brow. He looked young, genuinely young rather than the result of cosmetic alteration, so the nervousness was likely down to the probability that he would be blamed for the current situation and fired.

‘The building schematics suggest that all the fibres from the security network feed to a primary junction under this room,’ Fox said as the young man sweated in front of her.

‘Uh, yeah. There’s a branch in there which feeds all the data to a hard storage bank and the main computer. The main computer feed is scanned by the AIs and they pass anything suspicious to me for verification. They’ve given me nothing all night.’

‘All night?’

‘Nothing since… ten-sixteen, uh, twenty-two-sixteen.’

‘Uh-huh. It’s Friday night in a leisure complex with drink and sex, and nothing odd’s happened since quarter past ten?’ She quietly put a request through her VA to have the building’s security AIs checked for viruses. ‘The data gets fed into a hardwired storage unit?’ She could see his cheeks colouring as he realised his mistake.

‘Yeah.’ Standing, he walked over to what looked like a standard bank of computing equipment across the room and tapped at a keyboard. A screen lit up and he began to type. ‘It’s isolated. Data can only be accessed through this console. The feeds from the cameras are one-way. No one can get in and delete the data without the operator–’ He came to a grinding halt, staring at the display. ‘Th-there’s nothing here after about ten-thirty. That’s not possible. You can’t delete it from outside. You can’t–’

‘No need if it was never recorded. Can we access the hub?’

He pointed at the floor where the outline of a hatch was visible. ‘I need to unlock it from the console.’

Fox slipped her pistol from behind her back. ‘You do that, and then I want you to stay out of the way, preferably out of sight.’

Looking at her as though she had just grown horns, he moved back to his console and tapped a sequence into a keyboard. There was a solid clunk from below as the locks on the hatch disengaged and then a section of the floor was levering up. Lights flickered on in the space below and Fox could see a short ladder leading down. There was maybe a metre and a half of headroom down there. Leaning down, she poked her pistol into the hole and scanned the sights around, watching in-vision as it showed her bundles of cable and huge junction boxes. No sign of anything alive, even on infrared. She dropped down into the hole.

The space was bigger than she had expected: to the right it narrowed a little but extended out to run under the main operational control suite five metres away across a corridor. Neither eyes nor gun sight indicated the presence of anyone else down there, but she kept her pistol pointed down the tunnel as she scanned around the cabling beneath the security room. It took her only a few seconds to locate the patches which had been looped into the video feeds. The designers had made it fairly simple: by the time the camera feeds reached this level, all the signals were multiplexed into only five cables going on to the two destinations. Still, it looked to Fox as though someone had built specific hacking tools to do the patching in each case.

Frowning, she put a request through her VA for a forensics tech to be dispatched to go over the room and then slipped down the narrow conduit to the other end where the room opened out again. The cabling here carried control data rather than camera feeds and security data, but it looked more or less the same. Except that there was a hole in one wall which had once been covered by a grill. The grill was on the floor and the crawlspace beyond was just about large enough for a human to get through if they were small. The building schematic indicated that the conduit led to a machinery room twenty metres away where the municipal power and data cables entered the building. Like many slightly older blocks, Clayton Tower had solar cells on the roof, but supplemented that with external power, and there was a need for a fairly thick pipe to the district’s data network because of the businesses on the upper floors.

‘And someone managed to get into the building through the access tunnels,’ Fox mused aloud. ‘They built gadgets specifically to block off the camera feeds and make sure we would get nothing from those, and they slipped in here to plant them…’ She peered at the conduit opening in the wall of the chamber. ‘And I’ll be damned if I could get my shoulders through there. No way is someone with artificial limbs doing it.’

Turning, she started back for the security room with a frown on her face. There were a number of ways the killer could have pulled this off, but the simplest was that he had an accomplice.

31st January.

‘You think this is some sort of conspiracy?’ Canard said. He was actually on the other side of his desk, peering across at Fox and Sandoval suspiciously. ‘You’re serious about this?’

‘Occam’s razor, Captain,’ Fox replied. ‘This guy is a genius hacker with special ops training, cybernetic limbs, and the ability to manipulate remote robotic drones while infiltrating a building intent on murder, or he’s a rogue AI with a military cyberframe body no one has noticed, or he’s got one or more accomplices.’

Canard grunted. ‘Sandoval?’

Fox kept the scowl off her face and turned to look at her partner. Yeah, let’s ask the new hire from private security about this, because he’s bound to have a more reasonable outlook. Or… Oh yes, he has contacts in Wayden Executive Services…

‘I have to agree with Inspector Meridian,’ Sandoval said, surprising both Fox and Canard. She hid it better.

‘Explain,’ Canard grumbled.

‘It’s just too much for one person. It’s not just that they infiltrated the building once, but they had to have done it at least twice to find out, before last night, what kind of cabling the tower’s security system had. Schematics are one thing, but there’s no indication of the kinds of connectors used in the wiring anywhere. And the uniforms went through everyone in that building and couldn’t tag our man. He got in and out without being seen by security cameras from the lobby in. They had that place locked down within minutes of the gunshot. He didn’t have time to get out, but somehow he got out.’

‘Because he went through the machine room and down into the municipal utility tunnels,’ Fox supplied. ‘He knows the city like the back of his hand, or has access to exceptionally good navigation software. Frankly, whoever is doing this has near-military levels of software and training. The Army would have a unit doing an op like this, not a single person.’

‘You’re suggesting this is some form of terrorist operation?’ Canard asked.

‘Sounds like it to me,’ Sandoval replied. ‘Maybe one of the Islamic militant groups. You’ve got women in high-profile or, some would say, questionable jobs. The deaths are violent and extreme, blowing their brains out, wiping them from existence. It spreads terror.’

‘That it does,’ Canard agreed. ‘Have either of you seen the news channels this morning?’

‘Kit gave me a summary before I came in,’ Fox said, her tone sour. ‘Someone leaked the circumstances of Avery’s death and suggested that this was the latest in a line of similar homicides.’

‘And I have a number of advocates dropping me a lot of messages requesting a rapid clean-up.’

Fox sighed. ‘I shouldn’t worry about that too much.’ Canard’s glare was fiery, but Fox was expecting it. ‘This’ll be resolved one way or another soon.’

‘And what evidence do you have for that assertion?’

‘This last death, it was sloppy. They’ve never let us find evidence of how they masked the killer’s entry and exit before. They wanted us to figure out there’s more than one person involved. There’s only one reason to start showing off your hand like this, and that’s because you’re about to go all in. Whatever this bunch are up to, they’re in their end game.’

~~~

‘Fox?’ Kit waited for Fox to walk back into the apartment before speaking to her. The AI had been largely silent for most of the morning, saying only that she was continuing to analyse the crime scene data.

‘Kit,’ Fox responded. The kitsune’s virtual image was showing signs of disquiet, maybe even alarm: she was even shuffling her feet. ‘Got something for me?’

‘I have… I don’t have facts, exactly, Fox. I have a number of disturbing coincidences that lead me to inferences which I find–’

‘Maybe you should just tell me what you found and see what I make of it all,’ Fox suggested, pouring coffee for herself.

‘That sounds like a most logical way to proceed. I received your comments on the meeting with Captain Canard and Detective Sandoval. I do not believe that these crimes follow the pattern of any known Islamic terrorist groups.’

‘Okay. Reasons?’

Kit watched as Fox walked around the sofa and sat down, her eyes on the window, which Kit had darkened and was presumably about to use as a display. ‘You do not consider the theory valid either,’ the AI asserted.

‘I am asking for your reasoning.’

‘My reasoning is the coincidental alignment of skill sets,’ Kit replied, her brow knitting. ‘The organisation of this recent homicide and what it suggests regarding the previous ones, the creation of devices to bypass cameras and their application, and the logistical requirements, these are all skills which Daniel Caravel and his associates possess.’

‘But they’re part of the Hunt investigation, Kit.’

‘I know.’ The AI’s tone was plaintive. ‘I see a pattern in the data I am processing. I have attempted to discover a flaw in that pattern, but the only flaw I can find is that it connects two streams of data which have no reason to be connected. These people, who have come to my attention via an unconnected matter, are capable of all of the tasks required to commit the homicides, aside from the actual executions. No known member of the group has cybernetic limbs.’

‘It’s better than my “it doesn’t feel like religious terrorists” feeling, and you’re forgetting that we already had a connection between the two cases via Bucksbridge.’

‘I had not forgotten about Mister Bucksbridge. His involvement does add an extra level of credence to my theory, but I actually believe that connection is coincidence.’

Fox raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

‘His message to Miss Adamshi occurred some time ago and was, I believe, an entirely genuine assertion of his political views. Mister Bucksbridge sent a message to a musician he was a fan of. Perhaps, when the group was looking for a victim, he made the suggestion of Miss Adamshi to get revenge for her “traitorous behaviour” when she took up her contract with ATW, but I believe the message was sent long before any consideration of her murder.’

‘Oh… Oh yes.’ Fox’s eyes widened. ‘I think you’re right. In fact, I’m betting the cell didn’t know about it. Killian was the only other native New Yorker in that group, right? He was the connection to Bucksbridge.’

‘That is correct. Mister Killian has not been sighted in this metro for over two years, however.’

‘So they needed someone local to handle logistics and Killian knew Bucksbridge. Not an ideal choice. Buckyball was small-time. The meme had him fairly firmly, but he was nothing much in UA. Not even that big on the ideology or someone would’ve locked him up by now. I’m betting he never did much more than sending nasty mail to people he considered sell-outs.’

‘His NAPA profile suggests that that is the case.’

‘So he screws up. He sees his chance to make a bit more of a mark and suggests Adamshi as a victim. She’s a good target from his viewpoint. She sold out to ATW. She ignored his mail. He’s not bright enough to think we’d track his message down and then him. He doesn’t tell the others. Caravel would certainly have selected a different target.’ Fox looked up from her musing. ‘You didn’t connect Killian to Bucksbridge until Killian’s name came up.’

‘Mister Bucksbridge’s profile does not contain a list of known associates. Mister Killian’s does.’

‘Yeah… That’s what I expected. When you uncovered Bucksbridge’s mail, the cell had to cut him off, sacrificed him, but they also had to tidy up and make sure he couldn’t be connected to any of them. Get into NAPA records and sanitise his records… Not easy unless… Yeah… This is starting to come together. Not that I’m liking the way they’re converging.’

‘There is another coincidence I found which I do not like.’

‘Oh?’ Turning, Kit looked up at the screen and a list of the murder victims appeared there, one above the other, surnames first. ‘Oh,’ Fox said flatly, ‘when you look at it like that…’

~~~

‘I’ve put a couple of feelers out,’ Sandoval said as he watched Fox in the kitchen area of her apartment. ‘I have a few contacts back at Wayden who watch the terrorist groups. They may know if a cell has been setting up in this area.’

Fox flashed him a smile and went back to following the instructions a cooking program was displaying for her. ‘Wayden are moving into the metros big time at the moment, right?’

‘Had to. After MarTech cut their contracts to go internal, a lot of the other companies out in the protectorates either cut back on Wayden contracts or on non-metro-based sites. More people in the protectorates are using their option to supplement NAPA policing with their own, but a lot of them do that with local people, not contracted security. I’m well out of it anyway. I could see the way the tide was turning after… Well, you know.’

‘Yeah. Dallas changed a lot of things for a lot of people.’

‘Yeah. Anyway, I still have friends who might be able to get me leads around here. They’re developing a pretty good intelligence network in the northern metro regions.’

‘That’s great. I pretty much blew my bridges to scrap when I quit the UniFeds. They don’t like talking to me much. This is just about ready. There’s a bottle of wine cooling. Want to pour a couple of glasses?’

He got to his feet and started for the cooler. ‘Are you sure that’s safe? Weren’t you at a club when Avery was hit?’

‘Uh-huh, but I don’t think they’ll move again quite this fast. Besides, I have SoberUp in the medicine cabinet.’

‘Hate that stuff. Always makes me feel like I’ve wasted good alcohol.’

‘Better than trying to work a crime scene while drunk, or never drinking.’

‘Well, yeah… there is that.’

1st February.

Fox opened her eyes and looked at the empty space in the bed beside her. The heat had crawled up from between her legs almost before she had finished eating. The scent of sex which hung about her still caused it to reignite and she let out a groan as the desire to have him fill her again reached up and tried to assert itself. Pushing it aside, she went to the shower, programmed it for cold, and stood under it for as long as she could before shutting it off.

Her head was more or less in the game when she stepped out into the lounge wearing a light wrap. The sight of him made her inner muscles ripple, but she controlled herself. ‘You’re up early,’ she said.

He looked up and smiled. ‘I wanted to clear the dishes away before you got up. I’d have done it last night, but you didn’t give me time.’

She smiled back and poured herself a mug of coffee. ‘Thanks.’

‘Don’t thank me. Your ever-efficient agent was out taking care of it with the house robot while we were… in bed.’

Kit was nowhere to be seen, which was a little odd, but the AI had been keeping herself out of things while Fox indulged her hormones. ‘Anything planned for today?’

‘I got a message through from one of my contacts. I need to meet with him.’

‘Want me to tag along?’ As she said it, she noticed her VA flagging up a meeting with Jackson Martins which Kit had to have arranged for her. That was in less than an hour. She was about to say something, but Sandoval beat her to it.

‘Better I meet him alone. He’s touchy. If he’s got anything useful, I’ll contact you.’

‘Okay. That sounds like a plan. Uh… even if you don’t get anything, drop me a message or call. We could… do a club or something.’ The gnawing want between her legs was overriding her better judgement, and she knew it, but she had other reasons for wanting him close too. It was not just the sex…

‘Sure.’ His lips curled. ‘I know a couple of places with private rooms…’

Fox turned and headed for the bedroom. ‘Sounds perfect.’

~~~

‘I am not liking this, Terri,’ Fox said, her brow deeply furrowed as she glared at her friend. ‘Under the circumstances, I am not liking this at all.’

‘I know, but someone has to go up to Luna and Poppa’s busy.’

Fox flicked a glance at Jackson, noting the colour in his cheeks. ‘You mean your father gets sick in microgravity and hates spaceflight.’

‘Also that. There’s no need for him to make the trip, but someone has to. We have serious issues to take care of at Jenner, and I’m qualified to handle it. End of story.’

Fox turned to Jackson. ‘Can’t this be handled remotely? Jackson, someone is after your nanotech research, again. I’d rather your daughter was not in a position to be used as a bargaining chip. Again.’

‘I concur,’ Jackson replied, ‘but it can’t be handled by telepresence due to the lag, and messaging will not cut it. I’d prefer to go myself, but Teresa is being adamant.’

‘Pig-headed, you mean.’

‘Adamant. I’ve arranged security, and the transport is one of our fast-courier ships, quick, private, and armed.’

‘I’m going, Fox,’ Terri said, her tone quite firm. ‘People died to keep this secret and to make it work. I’m not going to let them die in vain. The best thing you can do is to sort out your problems here. You have some big problems to sort out.’

Fox’s scowl just got deeper. ‘Of this I am quite aware.’

~~~

Fox stepped out of the autocab that had brought her down to the area Sandoval had said to meet her from the NW-line which ran along the old New Jersey Turnpike at that point. The coordinates Sandoval had given were within an old, apparently disused, industrial park, which probably meant the place was being used by sprawlers. Sandoval had said to keep things quiet and discreet, no sirens, no flashing lights. No backup if things went wrong, at least not a rapid response. Fox remote checked her pistol and set off into the dark park.

Sprawlers fell into two categories. Fox did not like putting them in categories, because it tended to make you overlook details, but she had to admit that there were two basic behaviour modes for those who lived in the Sprawl: predators and fungi. The fungi were content to live at the bottom, in the dark amid the shit. They kept themselves to themselves, worked when they could for extra cash or to pay off debts in the majority of cases, and got on with being society’s forgotten minority. The only time anyone cared about them was when they were searching for untapped sources of citizen votes. The predators did not always want out, but they wanted better, and they did not care who they had to eat to get it. Predators were a danger to people wandering blindly into the Sprawl, unaware of how easily a wealthy arcology resident could become a homicide case. Fox watched the people in the shadows around her with an eye to which type she was seeing.

Not that the predators were that much of a danger to her. Predators the world over, human or animal, knew that there was always easier prey to be had than another predator. Some animals would challenge one of their own kind over mating rights or territory, that was true. Human predators were generally more inclined to stupidity in that regard, but Fox represented neither a threat to anyone’s mates nor to their territory. She saw more than one man sizing her up as she moved through the streets to the building Sandoval had indicated. They saw the way she moved and the way she looked back at them, and none of them followed her.

The building was, according to the schematic plan Kit had located, an office structure designed to handle deliveries and dispatches. The ground floor was open, a warehouse level with a loading dock. Above it were two floors of offices, but the entire thing had been declared unsafe for use twenty years earlier and had been abandoned for thirty. Even now, looking over the outside of the structure, it was difficult to believe anyone was occupying it. Maybe on the ground floor? There was some chance there was enough solid structure above to keep the rain out, but there were better places to hide yourself in the area.

Well, Sandoval had said this was where he would meet her and that this was where his contact had indicated the terrorist cell might be located. Maybe they liked the view: the building was near the shore of Arthur Kill, and across that was the walled-off Staten Media Complex in what had once been the correctional facility. Islamic terrorists might like the irony of being right in the line of sight of the filthy imperialist media.

Sandoval had said to meet her there, but there was no sign of him. There was a low-bandwidth wireless network available, probably from a nearby municipal hub. There was nothing with enough power showing to suggest the park still had a functioning network. She sent out a ping message and waited a couple of minutes, but there was no reply. Okay, so it looked like he had gone in ahead of her and… What? The terrorists had got him and disabled his comms? Well, it was a workable story and she needed to find out what was going on so she would work with it. She found the unlocked fire exit, pulled her pistol from behind her back, and slipped into the building, wondering when the trap would be sprung.

Because the truth was that Detective Sandoval was troubling her, and that was even without what Kit and Jackson had found in her wine from the night before. No, someone had told the UA cell that she was after Bucksbridge. It could, technically, have been any number of people, all of them cops, but Occam was rearing his head again and tiny things were starting to add up. Like the little fact, easily missed or rationalised away, that Sandoval had known Adamshi was a singer before being told. Sandoval had killed Bucksbridge, supposedly after the little weasel had shot Dillan using a chemical that might have killed her but was sure to wipe her memory of exactly what had happened. That was… convenient.

The open lower floor gave little in the way of cover, but it was dark. Fox pulled an infrared visor from her pocket and slipped it on. A second later she was seeing shapes, none of them hot enough to be human. The concrete platform the upper floors were on was a grey mass in the darkness, too thick to let heat pass through it, but the ground floor was empty: Sandoval was not here. Tactical assessment: this area was too open. Yes, Fox was exposed, but anyone else down here would be just as easy a target and they knew she was ex-military. The building was not helping: the heavy concrete structure was doing a good job of blocking any and all radio signals from outside. Knowing she should back out and get help, and also knowing she would not be doing that, Fox pressed on to the back of the room where the only interior door suggested that was the way up.

The structure on the upper floors was lighter: a metal framework held up lighter concrete rafts and plasterboard walls. From the stairwell, Fox could make out two heat signatures. The one on the second floor was large, easily a match for Sandoval. If it was him, he was seated, arms behind his back. The posture was meant to make him look as though he was tied down and, given that she had suspicions but no definite proof, maybe he was. But the other body was on the top floor and seemed a little too small to have taken down the muscled detective. There was likely some attenuation from the concrete, but even so, the other person in the building seemed almost like a child. Of course, she had to assume that they knew she was there…

If Sandoval had been captured but was on his own, then he was in no immediate danger. If he was working with the bad guys, then they were expecting her to go rescue him, so the best course of action was not to. Either way, going up and hitting the smaller figure was the best tactical plan. She darted up the next flight of stairs, watching her target as she did so. There was no movement and the image cleared a little as Fox climbed. The shape was feminine, still quite small but large enough to be an adult. Hash Remen, the cell’s technical specialist and infiltration expert. She was the one who had wormed her way through the conduits into Clayton Tower’s security hub. She had built and deployed the boxes which had diverted the video feeds. Why would they have her here? For that matter, where were the others?

Not the current issue. Fox moved in, slipping through the door and finding herself in an open-plan office area. There were closed-off rooms along the far wall, but Remen was not in one of those. She was set up in a cubicle about ten metres away across the open floor, obscured by partitions. Fox noticed the problem with the situation almost immediately as a pair of infrared sighting beams narrowed in on her position. Without the visor, she would not have noticed at all. With it, she had a second to take in one of the turrets mounted on poles midway down the room before she had to dive for cover.

Bullets ploughed through the partitions and thudded into lightweight desks which had seen better days, and Fox scampered as fast as she could ahead of the hail of ammunition. It sounded like the turrets were mounted with Gatling carbines, nasty weapons with high fire rates and big magazines, but they fired low-calibre bullets and it was fairly clear that Remen was not a skilled user. Five seconds of flying wood splinters and frantic scrambling, and then there was just the whirring of electric motors as the magazines were exhausted.

‘Out of ammo, Remen,’ Fox shouted as she skirted the desks and narrowed in on her prey. ‘Give up and we’ll call it quits. I’ll just lock you up for a few decades and decide not to take this personally.’

‘Oh, but this is personal, Lensman bitch.’ A pair of objects, trailing vapour, sailed over the partition walls in Fox’s direction and she pulled in a breath of air and held it. ‘We’re going to see you dead for what you did in Dallas.’

Fox could see the UA girl circling back, keeping her distance until the gas did its job. She would be wearing a mask now which would restrict her vision a little. Fox moved in, making it look good, and Remen backed away. The way her arms were positioned suggested a rifle or shotgun of some sort, but then Fox had no intention of letting her use that. Deciding that thirty seconds of cat-and-mouse was enough, Fox started for the door, let herself get ten metres from it, and then dropped.

Remen was cautious, but not too cautious. She left it another fifteen seconds, then moved in slowly. Fox would have shot the prone form as soon as she had line of sight, but this was someone who was there for personal reasons. She wanted this to be personal, or maybe she wanted Fox alive for the rest of the group. Either way, Remen made her last mistake as she walked over to Fox and turned her over with a booted foot.

Fox raised the pistol which had been lying under her torso, sighted through the in-vision camera display, and fired. Thin metal needles zipped from the muzzle of the little machine pistol, six of them punching through the tactical vest the terrorist was using before the rest peppered the ceiling. A look of shock passed over the face behind the filter mask and then Fox had to roll out of the way as Remen collapsed forward. She was still breathing and she had a pulse; Fox pulled her mask off and headed for the stairwell. Hopefully the gas was non-lethal…

She drew in another breath at the bottom of the stairs before going through the door onto the middle floor. The gas had probably not got down there, but she was pleased to note that nothing seemed to be affecting her. And this floor was more enclosed: corridors and properly partitioned offices. Sandoval’s heat signature was just past midway down the middle of three corridors. Fox closed on the location wondering whether she was being paranoid… Then again, if she was right, was Sandoval going to try the same trick again?

Only one way to find out. She stopped outside the office with the heat signature in it. He was sitting some way from the door, which was a bad sign. Fox took her visor off; if she was right about Sandoval, then the visor was about to become a liability. Checking her position with her pistol’s sight, she aimed her foot at the door, kicked it hard, and then threw herself backwards. There was a bright flare of light and a sharp bang, and all Fox’s in-vision displays vanished as her implanted computer crashed.

‘Damn clever of you, Fox.’ Sandoval’s voice came through the open door. ‘Figured it out, didn’t you?’

Fox shuffled around into a crouch, aiming her pistol at the doorway and praying that she would see him in the near-darkness if he came through. ‘Most of it. Remen was involved in the Dallas op. She’s doing this for revenge, but she can’t be the only one, and you were never with UA.’

‘No. No way. How did you get past her gas?’

‘Damn, you guys need to do better research. Standard Army biomods–’

‘Shit! Enhanced muscles, boosted reflexes, and enhanced blood.’

‘Uh-huh. They re-engineer our bone marrow to produce more effective immune system cells and blood that’s more efficient at carrying and storing oxygen. Hurts like fuck when they introduce the viral agents, but now I can hold my breath for ten minutes, even in combat. Oh, and the only people who know those details are military, or NIX.’ She heard something, one careful step. He was moving. Would he be stupid enough to speak again and give his position away? ‘There’s that crap you put in my wine last night too. Jackson wasn’t able to identify if, but it’s a lot like a date-rape drug the sprawlers call “Cupie.”’

‘The lab boys have a fancy name for it. Increases the libido and suppresses inhibitions, critical thinking, and memory uptake. Makes it way easier to get someone in bed. I wanted you sympathetic, obviously, but mostly I just wanted to fuck you.’

Fox leaned to her right, bringing her gun around the doorframe. ‘Hope you enjoyed it.’ She pulled the trigger, not sure exactly where he was, but spreading her fire across an arc which covered the near part of the room. Without waiting to see whether she had hit him, she moved on past the door, hitting the magazine eject on her pistol as she went.

She heard him round the corner into the corridor as she continued down, pulling a fresh magazine from her pocket. Three loud bangs slammed into her ears as he fired into the dark space randomly, and she barely heard his voice for the ringing. ‘Clever, but you’re out, right?’ A pencil beam of light stabbed out into the darkness. ‘You’re out and I’ve–’

Fox pushed back against the door behind her, almost falling into the room and then rolling sideways. Three more rounds blasted out in the direction of the sound. Plaster exploded and rained down. Fox slammed the magazine into her gun and watched as an ammo counter appeared in-vision, followed by a sighting camera: her implant was back up. Sandoval stepped into the doorway, his torch beam scanning rapidly to locate her. Fox raised her gun and fired. She had time to watch the blood splattering the wall behind him, a spray of heat in the infrared display from her sight. The torch and then the pistol fell from his hands, clattering to the floor, followed by the thud of his body.

She checked: there was no pulse, but if the EMTs managed to get to the place fast enough… Frowning, she headed for the stairs. If she got to a network and managed to connect, and could get a message through with an urgent tag, and the response was first rate… Chances were the bastard would still be dead, or alive and severely brain-damaged. Canard was going to throw a fit, and she had very limited evidence to prove that Sandoval had been after her. There was the drugged wine, but chain-of-evidence was gone on that. Canard might argue the drug was ‘just’ sexual, which would be just the kind of thing to muddy the waters. This was going to get nasty.

And then she got a connection to the network and things just got worse. Kit’s image was not animated due to the low bandwidth, but her voice certainly was. ‘Fox. I am glad you are back online. Miss Martins’ vertol transport to the spaceport fell off the flight control radar five minutes ago and is not responding to communications.’

Fox closed her eyes and took in one, long breath. When she let it out, she used it to express her exact feelings on the current situation. ‘Fuck!’

Part Seven: Striking Out

New York Metro, 2nd February 2060.

‘You left a UA terrorist alive and a good cop dead.’ The words stung, even if they were being spoken by Canard and were balls. They had been at it for hours, him accusing Fox of murdering Sandoval and colluding with United Anarchy, and Fox repeating the same story over and over again.

‘She was wearing body armour or she’d be dead too, and he wasn’t a good cop. He may have been a good agent, but he wasn’t a good cop. He was probably a traitor and definitely a rapist.’

‘So you say.’

Fox looked across the interview room table at him, anger rising. ‘Yes. I do say that. I’ve been saying that for several hours while a friend of mine is in the hands of UA kidnappers. You’ve got the video from my pistol. You know he was hunting me. You’ve got the rather convenient coincidence of EMP bombs being used in this and the Bucksbridge killing. Which, by the way, you reviewed and agreed with Sandoval after a thirty-minute interview.’

Canard’s eyes narrowed. ‘How did you–’

‘When I found out Sandoval was drugging my drink, I had Kit run over all the records NAPA holds on him. That included the investigation into his shooting of Bucksbridge, which I had access to because it was on one of my cases. By the way, Bucksbridge’s fingerprints weren’t found on the gun and there was no evidence of propellant residue on him, and you ignored that too.’

‘I’m not the one who shot a cop.’

‘No, you’re the one who investigated the cop I shot. Do you want me to specifically go on record and say I find your investigation suspect?’

Canard’s mouth opened and Fox watched emotions flicker over his face. He knew he had screwed up, and he knew the accusation was there now, on the interview recording, even if she had not made it official. If she did, how would the investigation go? What would the review team find? How would the simple accusation affect his voting delegations? She almost smiled: there was every probability that the last question was the one which was causing him the most grief.

‘Interview suspended, zero-nine-two-three. Stop recording.’ He gave it a beat before adding, ‘Go home and get some rest. You’re off both cases until this is resolved. I suggest you consider exactly where your loyalties, and future, lie, Inspector.’

‘Yeah,’ Fox replied, getting up from her chair and heading for the door. ‘I’m going to do that.’

~~~

‘Mister Martins has left several messages for you,’ Kit said as Fox stumbled around the kitchen pouring herself coffee.

‘Yeah, I’d imagine he has. Send him a message, please. I just got out of interview. I’ve been suspended while Canard is investigating Sandoval’s death. And I need some sleep or I’ll be no use to anyone.’

‘Message dispatched. Fox, what are we going to do? If you’re suspended, you can’t investigate either case. How will we find Miss Martins?’

Fox managed a smile. ‘I’m glad you’re invested in this too. Right now, we can’t. And I really do need some sleep.’

‘Then, perhaps, the coffee was not a good idea.’

Fox put the mug of coffee down on the nearest surface and headed for the bedroom. ‘For someone who’s only a few months old, you’re a surprisingly wise girl.’

Kit smirked at Fox’s retreating back. Age was something of a relative consideration for an AI, and it was also rather nice that Fox was treating her as a person rather than a thing… And then, because she was an AI and not a human, she became aware of some data records in her internal memory which she had not placed there. The existence of those records, which appeared to be data from video sources, troubled Kit considerably and she decided to run a full internal diagnostic before talking to Fox about them. Besides, Fox needed to sleep, and if the metadata on those records was correct, she was going to need all the sleep she could get.

~~~

‘I got their demands at midday,’ Jackson said. His voice was calm, steady, but Fox had only ever seen him look the same way in Dallas when he had been there for the briefing the last time his daughter had been taken captive. ‘They want all the data on the research being done at Jenner, and they want you to deliver it.’

‘Have you told NAPA about this?’ Fox asked, knowing what his answer was going to be. She had managed to get a couple of hours’ sleep before her VA had awoken her, quite urgently, at Kit’s insistence. The AI had explained that Jackson needed to see her, and also stated that there was new evidence which could wait until Fox was securely situated in Jackson’s office.

‘I haven’t. After I got your message earlier, I did some checking on the situation regarding NAPA and Canard. He was… less than helpful. He made it quite clear that you were not available for work on this case, but that NAPA was busy locating Teresa and the situation would be resolved quickly and efficiently.’ Jackson frowned at her. ‘Has your captain always been an asshole?’

‘He’s heavily into law and order politics. I think he’s hoping to push into a full-time advocacy role at some point, but he’ll be pressing for divisional captain and commander before then.’

‘No sights on the directorship?’

‘Too difficult to get up there. You just about have to assassinate the incumbent, and Canard’s too much of a wimp to go there.’

‘But perfectly capable of keeping you tied up while Teresa–’ His ashen colouring had reddened as the anger began to rise, but he forced it back down, gritting his teeth until he could speak again. ‘Kit has… obtained some interesting information. She requested external verification of her memory, security, and storage after she found this, and–’

‘Hold up. Why would she do that?’

‘Because,’ Kit said appearing beside them, ‘I do not know how the data arrived in my system. Someone apparently bypassed my security and was able to implant data records, large ones, without me being aware of it.’

‘I’ve checked her entire system. I can’t find any viruses or Trojans. There is just the anomalous data, and that has been validated against the sources the metadata points to. Someone has located camera feed data which NAPA has apparently not found, and they have given that data to Kit, anonymously.’

‘You’re both being obscure and I’m tired,’ Fox pointed out. There was a nagging pain in her head, between her eyes and clamping down around her skull. She was running on too little sleep and not enough coffee, and she was going to need a stimulant to keep her going if everyone kept avoiding the point.

Kit clearly recognised that. Turning, the AI looked at the large wall screen behind her and maybe a dozen video loops began playing on it. One showed a vertol landing, people rushing toward it. Fox saw Terri being rushed off the transport and out of sight, but a second feed picked her up being hustled into a ground vehicle.

‘Do we have the identification plate on that car?’

‘I scraped it from the video,’ Kit replied, ‘but the vehicle is not in any official records. However, one of these feeds shows it entering the Perth Amboy area.’

‘That’s… interestingly coincidental.’

‘It gets more interesting.’

Several of the other feeds showed Bucksbridge meeting with Killian and Caravel. It seemed like he had been kept away from the other UA members, but having found them it seemed it had been easy enough to locate the others. Remen was there with Killian, there were shots of Caravel, Remen, and Prentice, and Caravel had met with Sandoval, which was even more interesting. There was another man seen with Caravel and Sandoval, and in the footage taken from the kidnapping. Fox frowned at the unknown. There was something about him…

‘Do we know who the big guy is?’ Fox asked. He was big, heavily muscled and tall, his shape somewhat masked by the heavy coat he wore in every shot. He had long, dark hair with a white fringe which helped to hide his face, but there was something familiar about him.

‘We never get any really good views of his face,’ Jackson said, ‘but I ran a composite match on the best angles from a couple of frames. The system came up with this.’

The image changed to a still of a man Fox did recognise. The picture was from a UNTPP personnel file and the hair was different, shorter and without the white fringe. Her memory flashed over the man she had known and compared it to the images she was seeing on the screen. ‘It can’t be him, Jackson. He was big, but that bulk around the shoulders–’

‘Could be the result of cybernetic replacement.’

‘I watched him take half a dozen rounds to the chest. Gavin Marshall died in the bunker in Dallas. I blew the damn bunker up before I got out!’

‘Which may well be an explanation for the cybernetics. We know Prentice and Caravel were handling that operation for UA. We know a number of bodies were never found in the wreckage. Marshall’s body was one of those. I checked. One possibility concerning his actions on that day was a deliberate desire to sabotage the rescue.’

Fox frowned, biting her lips closed and staring at the floor. ‘So, Caravel was NIX, and he was working with Sandoval. Both were down around Dallas when the UA incident happened. Maybe they were there to push the UA cell into acting. Maybe they formed the cell. It wouldn’t be the first time an intelligence agency has set up what seems like a terrorist group to accomplish its aims.’

‘The nanotech research.’

‘Uh-huh. What better way to get it while the world thinks it was some terrorist grouping?’

‘It makes sense. Sandoval was with Wayden, yes? I used them for site security at Dallas back then, but they had no access to the research. Sandoval would likely be able to find out what we were researching, but he had no way to get into that research.’

‘Okay, so you flatly refuse to hand over the data. They can’t get past the security. I’m going to be sent in so NIX arrange for one of their people in the UNTPP to be placed in charge. Despite that, I get Terri out and blow the place, as you wanted. NIX cuts Caravel off and he’s forced to go to ground with Prentice, who has managed to get Marshall out somehow.’

‘And when Sandoval or his bosses discover I’ve restarted the research, they bring Caravel and his team in to get the new data. Hunt was the first attempt. You were supposed to connect his death to UA; they were going to be the fall guys again.’

‘But the data they got was incomplete.’

Jackson nodded. ‘And anything I give them now will be similarly incomplete. That’s why Teresa was going up there. And there’s the matter of the other murders.’

‘Oh, that’s revenge,’ Fox said bitterly.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘If you take all the surnames of the victims, the initial letters spell out “TARA.” If you want to continue that, their next victim is Teresa Martins. M for Meridian. And they picked their first victim to be sure I’d be called in as primary on the case. They’ve been stringing me along with false leads, had me chasing shadows, and Sandoval has been in there to make sure some of those leads got chased when I’d have ignored them. They wanted me running around after that and not paying as much attention to the Hunt case, and they wanted me following Sandoval into a trap last night. Now they want me to deliver the data because they want me dead. Revenge for Dallas, pure and simple.’

‘Do you think my daughter is still alive, Fox?’ Jackson was looking even greyer now. Terri was all he had left of his wife, but she was also a constant source of pride for him and a loving, happy daughter too. Losing her would, probably, break him.

‘I think they’ll keep her alive until they get their data. They want that data and she’s about the only tool they think they have to get it. Alive, she’s a bargaining chip. When do they want the data delivered?’

‘You’re to go to a dead drop in Queens tonight at eight.’

‘Uh-huh. Run me around for a few hours and then get me somewhere they can kill me and take the data.’ Fox looked up at the screen and the videos still playing on it. ‘I’m going to lose my job again, Jackson.’

‘I did say I have a position open at Palladium.’

She laughed. ‘Canard has my pistol.’

‘Thank you for reminding me. Your techs should have finished recovering whatever data they need. That weapon is the commercially sensitive property of MarTech Group. I’ll send some lawyers around to retrieve it.’

‘You can do that?’

‘I can, and have, and they’ll be ensuring that no technical schematics have been recorded in NAPA files, which should annoy your captain.’

‘Okay. But I’m going to need some additional equipment if I’m going to pull this off.’

Jackson smiled. ‘I believe I can adequately supply you with the necessary tools.’

~~~

Canard looked up as Fox walked into his office. His expression was as sour as Fox had expected it to be and it was about to get worse. ‘What is it, Inspector?’ Canard snapped at her. He did not offer her a seat, but then she did not want to sit down.

‘Did I ever tell you why I quit the UNTPP?’ Fox asked in reply.

‘It was a question we asked at your interview, so yes, you did.’

‘Do you remember what my answer was?’ He scowled. She knew he was trying to remember, probably checking to see whether he had it filed away in an archive. She decided to put him out of his misery. ‘I found myself unable to work under a command structure which I could not trust to back me in the face of political pressure.’ She sent him the file she was holding ready; a gesture seemed to be necessary so she flicked her wrist as though tossing an envelope onto his desk, and the virtual interface obliged by popping up a virtual message indicator which appeared on his desk’s surface.

‘What’s this?’ he asked. Fox felt that it was a distinctly stupid question.

‘I can’t prove you knew Sandoval was a NIX agent, but the fact you’ve been doing everything you can to keep me out of the way since he died suggests that someone’s leaning on you. I find myself unable to work under a command structure which I cannot trust to back me in the face of political pressure. Also, you’re an asshole.’

Canard’s face turned red as she turned on her heel and started for the door. ‘I’ll see to it that you never work–’

‘A naive, stupid asshole,’ Fox said. The door opened in front of her and she wondered whether Canard would try to get another jibe in before it closed, but there was nothing and she connected to Kit on the way to the station. ‘Kit, situation report.’

‘Mister Martins has dispatched sixteen drones into the area indicated by the video captures. I am monitoring.’

‘Can you operate sixteen drones at once?’

‘They are autonomous. Their AIs are not complex, but quite sufficient for the task at hand. I am merely directing their activities and monitoring the video where they believe they have found something.’

‘Right. Anything positive?’

‘One possible. A disused factory building which is showing infrared activity of approximately the correct magnitude. I have one of the drones stationed over that building constantly to watch for one of the targets.’

Fox allowed herself a small smile. ‘Very tactical.’

‘I am running tactical and intelligence analysis packages.’

‘Uh-huh. Anything more on where those video clips came from?’

There was a short pause and then, ‘I found only one thing in all of the records which appears to serve no real purpose. This is a metadata tag, “thought and memory.” I believe this has been placed as a clue to the source of the data.’

‘Thought and memory? That’s it?’

‘Yes, Fox. I am attempting to decipher this now. If it is not a clue to the sender, I believe we must wait for that person to make themselves known.’

‘Okay. I’m on my way back. Keep me updated if you find anything new.’

~~~

Fox stopped off on the way to her apartment, requesting access to Sam’s apartment as she rode the elevator up. It was usually wise to check with him before you arrived: not many of his clients came to his apartment, but the ones who did were actually ones he liked and they tended to stay longer.

He was alone and shirtless at two in the afternoon, and he took one look at her and went to his kitchen area to pour coffee. ‘You are not looking like your day is going well.’

‘I just quit NAPA. Terri’s been kidnapped by UA terrorists who want me to deliver data to them so they can kill me. Oh, and the entire thing was set up by NIX to get the data out of MarTech without anyone knowing it was them.’

Sam handed her the coffee and peered at her. ‘You’re sharing more than usual.’

‘You busy tonight?’

‘I wasn’t…’

‘Good, because I need a backup I can trust. I don’t want you going in, just being there to get Terri to safety once I’ve got her free of the place. I cleared it with Jackson; he’ll pay your standard fee and danger bonus.’

‘You know I’ll do it without. I like Terri. I don’t like the idea that you’re going in alone. You are going in alone, right?’

Fox gave him a smile. ‘Yes and no.’

~~~

‘We have target verification. Height is twelve hundred metres. Wind speed is thirty-five knots to five hundred and then dropping. Holding position, but flight control are going to get iffy about this pretty soon.’ The pilot was the same man who had flown her up to Boston. Fox had asked for him, knowing he had experience and could handle the job. From the way he had reacted, it seemed like he was rather pleased with the assignment.

‘Okay,’ Fox replied over their link, ‘you give me fifteen minutes once I’m on the ground and then you swing this thing in for the recovery. Sam? You know what to do?’

Sam looked across the rear bay of the vertol at her, his face hidden behind a helmet. He looked distinctly sexy in the full-body combat suit Jackson had supplied. Like Fox’s, Sam’s could take hits from small-calibre weapons with no trouble, but she was determined that he should not need to test that. ‘I’m ready,’ he told her. ‘Just make sure you get out of there with her.’

‘I intend to. Hit the rear hatch.’ The last order was to the pilot and, behind her, the big rear hatch of the military-model vertol began to open up like a huge jaw. The wind whipped at them, not too strong, but still buffeting at their bodies. The helmet Fox was wearing protected her from most of it, and the slim, dark red suit kept the rest off even though it was only a couple of millimetres thick. ‘Deploy transport drone.’ A large, torpedo-like pod which was resting on rails beside her slipped silently backwards and then dropped over the edge. Fox glanced at Sam. ‘See you soon,’ and then she was running down the ramp and out into the night air above Perth Amboy.

She let herself drop for six hundred metres or so, forming her body into an arrow as she chased the pod, which had already deployed fins to steer it toward its target. Satisfied with her progress, Fox opened her legs and stretched out her arms, and the web of fabric between her limbs gave her lift and steering as she turned and circled, getting her bearings via GPS. There were few street lights below; the buildings were mostly dark. Telemetry from the pod was telling her that nothing as complex as radar or ladar was watching the sky from down there. There was no moon to speak of and some low cloud. Fox and the pod were dark shapes in the night, falling through the air, unseen by those below.

At three hundred metres, she angled out in the direction of the shoreline and then pulled her chute at a hundred. The sudden slamming tension over her torso bit into her hard as she decelerated, steering herself around to a landing on a stretch of road just outside the industrial complex which was her target. A thought hauled the chute in to form a mass on her back. It was no use for jumping with in that state, but it was easier to carry. She unstrapped the harness and started in the direction of the pod.

‘Zorra to Skyhook. On the ground. Start the clock.’

Now all she had to do was get in, save the girl, and get out alive. No problem.

~~~

‘How long before she’s due at the first checkpoint?’

Prentice frowned at Killian. The younger man had been acting like a kid in the back seat of the family transport for the last hour. The ‘are we there yet’ questions were getting annoying, but Prentice did understand the problem: Killian had not been in on the revenge angle of his companions until now, but Remen’s capture had changed that. ‘Thirty-five minutes,’ Prentice told him.

‘I want her to pay,’ Killian added, his grip tightening on the rifle he had been carrying for most of the day.

‘You’ll get your shot at her,’ Caravel told him. ‘Sit down.’

‘I can’t sit down. I’m–’

‘Sit the fuck down,’ Marshall growled, ‘or I’ll break your fucking legs.’ The big man was sitting with his eyes fixed on the chair to which they had tied Terri. He sat there in a wife-beater T-shirt which showed off the bulk of his cybernetic arms and watched her with a degree of malice she found more frightening than all the guns and those powerful arms. She knew a bit about cybernetics and she could tell that the arms were over-engineered, grafted to a frame which could not support the power available. From the look of it, his spine had been reinforced, or maybe replaced, but his lower body was natural and his legs would probably collapse if he tried to use the full power of his arms. He was a big man with a powerful physique, but it was his mind that was frightening.

Terri had recognised Marshall from photographs more or less immediately. She had never met any of this bunch, but from what she had heard, she knew that they were UA and that they were connected to the Dallas attack somehow. The fact that Marshall was now working with UA people was not a great surprise. The fact that any of them were here and trying to pull the same stunt again…

‘Everyone, calm down,’ Prentice said. ‘We give Meridian some fog to chase for an hour, lead her to the ambush site, and then you can shoot her knees out, Marksman. When she’s down, the colonel here will have a nice chat with her and take the data off her body. Then we can see about springing Hash.’

Killian nodded from his new position on a chair. ‘And this one?’

‘We hold her until we’ve confirmed the data.’

‘And then you kill me, right?’ Terri asked, though she knew the answer.

‘And we send your dismembered body parts back to your father,’ Prentice said, smiling at her as he did so.

‘Fox is going to pull your guts out on hooks.’

‘Fox,’ Caravel said to her, ‘is so busy worrying over Marshall’s handiwork and your kidnapping that she can’t think straight. She hasn’t a clue where we are and–’ He stopped as a computer display on the desk beside him changed what it was displaying and chimed for attention. ‘We’ve got an intruder. Section three, the loading dock.’

‘You were saying?’ Terri said, smiling sweetly.

‘Got her. Lone female in cop armour. She’s got a rifle with her.’

Marshall sat up and looked across the office at Killian. ‘You’ve got armour-piercing rounds in that thing?’

‘Yeah, but how did she find–’

‘First, we don’t even know it’s her. Could be some random patrol officer doing a sweep of the building. Second, if it is her, she’s alone and you’re going to shoot her in the legs, and then we’ll find out how she found us.’ The big man’s attention turned to Prentice. ‘Might be wise to get ready to leave.’

‘She’s heading this way,’ Caravel said. ‘I’m guessing she’s got infrared or something. Radio jamming is up. Make sure your implant is using the right frequencies. She hasn’t found the holes or she isn’t trying.’

‘A patrol cop would be backing out and calling for backup,’ Prentice said.

‘Maybe,’ Marshall replied. ‘Maybe they’re thinking the building structure is interfering. Network signals are weak out here anyway. Killian, get out to the core stairwell and take her legs out as she comes up the stairs.’

‘Marksman,’ Killian mumbled as he set off out of the door.

Marshall ignored him, taking a ball gag from a bag at his feet and reaching for Terri. ‘And you aren’t going to be giving her any warnings.’

‘I don’t need to,’ Terri replied, opening her mouth wide to allow him to gag her.

~~~

The building had been designed as an automated factory floor back when ‘automated’ had meant a lot of dumb robots in cages working on carefully placed objects moving along a conveyer belt. The ground floor was all machinery with walkways between the belts aside from a loading bay at one end, a workers’ refuge at the other, and a gantry staircase which rose up from the middle to an office and control structure mounted over the main floor. The idea was that this allowed the supervisory staff to watch all the machines below as well as keep an eye on the humans who made sure the machines kept working. There had probably been more supervisory staff than maintenance staff back then. Now there was no one aside from the terrorists and the armoured figure walking up the stairs.

Killian settled himself in the doorway of the main control suite. Here, there were screens which had been used to monitor the robotics, half of them now cracked or pulled down. Outside was a balcony-like structure from which the supervisors could look down upon their minions. Killian had never been a really enthusiastic anarchist, his primary reason for being there at all was Chelsea Remen, but even he viewed this obvious expression of worker/management class structure as mildly offensive. It did make life easy though: just sit here and wait for Meridian to walk up the stairs and then shoot her.

He lined up his sight on the top of the stairs, infrared imaging making the structure obvious in the darkness, and waited. And waited. And…

‘Where the fuck is she?’

‘She stopped on the stairs,’ Caravel’s voice stated. ‘Spinner went out the back down that rope we rigged and she stopped. Must’ve seen him, even through the structure. Colonel’s gone down after Spinner to come up behind her.’

‘So what do I do?’

‘Colonel’s at the bottom. Move in to the top of the staircase now. Keep it quiet. If she moves up, shoot her. If not, she gets hit from below.’

‘Right,’ Killian replied sourly, but he began edging across the balcony’s metal floor, trying to keep the sound to a minimum. It was dark and he had no visor, so his vision was limited to what was displaying through his implant from his rifle sight, but that gave him effective, if limited, vision. As he reached the top of the staircase and tilted his rifle down, scanning for a humanoid heat signature, he saw… Something was moving very fast and directly at him, and he just had time to lift his head a little to try to see it better without the rifle in the way when it smashed into his face like a sledgehammer.

~~~

Marshall was not the quietest of individuals, but he could move with some degree of stealth when he had to. He had always relied on physical power when working. Even before his back was broken and his arms and ribs badly crushed in the collapse of the Dallas bunker, he had preferred to physically beat his opponents into the ground when he had the chance, and those ‘opponents’ had often been subordinates rather than actual enemies. Now he had the added capabilities a pair of reinforced, cybernetic arms afforded. He wanted to smash Meridian’s face in with his bare hands… but he was going to shoot her in the back with a shotgun.

He frowned as he located her heat signature on the staircase above him. There had to be something in the suit distorting her body heat because it looked wrong. Whatever, he moved up, circling closer.

‘Colonel, can you see Marksman?’ Caravel’s voice sounded concerned.

‘Not now, Spook. Almost on her.’

‘But–’

Marshall took another couple of steps, turned, and saw the armoured figure turning to face him. He lifted the heavy, automatic shotgun he was carrying and pulled the trigger, emptying the magazine of armour-piercing, high-explosive slugs into his target. The noise was deafening and the figure on the stairs staggered back as its torso was ripped open by three internal explosions. And then she was falling backwards over the railing.

‘Got her!’ Marshall cried out aloud. ‘Spook, I got her. Spook?’

~~~

Caravel frowned at the displays from the cameras Remen had set up around the building. She was a good tech and they really needed to get her out of prison when this was over, but that assumed that they got out of this and the ex-NIX spy was having a bad feeling about that.

Losing Sandoval had been a big enough problem. Sandoval had been the contact with NIX, portrayed to the others, even Marshall, as a disaffected NAPA detective who wanted to help. With the MarTech data in hand, Sandoval had been ready and able to bring Caravel back in from the cold. With Sandoval dead… Well, get the data and see where that got him.

But they had to get the data. How the Hell had Meridian found them? There was no way anyone could have located them. Unless they had access to Overwatch… That was impossible. NIX would have had to… No, that was impossible.

Caravel spotted Marshall on one of the camera feeds, climbing the stairs to where the armoured figure was waiting. ‘Colonel, can you see Marksman?’ The kid had gone far too quiet.

‘Not now, Spook,’ Marshall’s voice responded. ‘Almost on her.’

‘But–’ He stopped as something, a shape of some sort, moved in the corner of his vision and he turned toward the door. He saw the pistol rising, apparently held by nothing until you looked closely and saw the camouflaged, female shape behind it. He knew his chances were slim, but he went for the gun sitting beside his computer anyway. There was a sound a little louder than the crack of a starting pistol and a slim metal needle blasted through Caravel’s skull.

~~~

There were loud explosions outside, but Terri was more than pleased with what she was seeing as Fox disengaged the active camouflage on her suit and fired a few rounds into the computer Caravel had been using.

‘I think we should have radio coverage,’ Fox said, her voice distorted a little by the helmet speakers. She was already closing on Terri and pulling a knife from a sheath on her thigh. ‘I need you to connect up to the mobile node you should be seeing. It’ll guide you to Sam who will be outside and ready to get you clear.’

With her arms freed of the tape Marshall had used to bind them, Terri got the gag out of her mouth, spat into a corner, and said, ‘Sam Clarion?’

‘Uh-huh. I needed someone who can handle bodyguard work, and I didn’t think you’d mind a pretty face rescuing you.’

‘Two pretty faces. What were those explosions?’

‘I think Marshall’s shot the gynoid I used as a decoy. Even with the jamming down, I can’t contact it. We need to get moving.’

‘He’s going to be on the stairs.’

Fox nodded. ‘So I’m going to take care of him and you are going to head for Sam. You don’t worry about me. You keep moving. Clear?’

‘That’s what you told me the last time, Fox, and you barely got out before the place collapsed on you. You don’t get to be that lucky twice.’

‘Fortune favours the bold, Terri. Now stay behind me.’ Turning, Fox started out of the supervisor’s office and led the way down a short corridor to the control room. She turned into the room and stopped, her visor showing the problem immediately: Marshall was at the top of the stairs, checking Killian’s unconscious body. ‘Stay low,’ Fox hissed to Terri, ‘and get to the other side of the room. When he comes at me, you go out through the window and down the stairs.’

Terri flashed her a glare of annoyance, but she dropped into a crouch and scuttled to the other side of the room. Marshall turned, not immediately seeing the dark shape in the control room until Fox fired, shattering the window between her and him. With a roar of anger, he raised his shotgun and fired, blasting a hole in the wall behind where Fox had been standing, but she had already ducked back into the corridor so he charged through the door after her, hesitating as Terri vaulted through the shattered window and started off across the balcony.

His indecision cost him his gun as Fox kicked the weapon out of his hands. Her pistol swung out to line up on his head, but he caught her arm in one, thick, metal hand, lifting it up. She swung her left arm at him, but he blocked that and gripped her throat in his right hand. The grin on his face was malicious.

‘Looks like you struck out, Meridian. Nice suit,’ Marshall said as his grip tightened on her right arm. ‘One of MarTech’s combat suits, I figure. They’re good, but they’re not so hot on resisting crushing. You get to find out what it was like for me.’

‘You betrayed me and everyone on that op,’ Fox said through gritted teeth as pain shot through her arm.

‘I was following orders. I followed them right through until NIX dropped me, and that was your fault.’

‘How do you figure that one? Your UA buddies shot you.’

‘Because you succeeded, bitch. You got the Martins girl out and you destroyed the research. They couldn’t even salvage any data from the wreckage. And I was supposed to be dead. When I went looking for my contacts, everything had been cleared out. I was forgotten, left in the cold, just like Caravel. Your fault.’

‘You’re demented,’ Fox told him, but her statement ended in a scream as his hand closed, crushing the bones in her arm. She heard her pistol clattering on the metal floor, her vision turned red as pain battered at her senses and Marshall’s hand began closing on her throat, and all she could see was the bastard’s grinning face…

His hands were occupied and he had wanted her close while he crushed the life out of her. He was nowhere near fast enough to push her away as her left thumb slammed into his eye. Her fingernails dug into his skin and she pressed, hard. Letting out a shriek, he threw her back against the nearest wall. ‘Bitch!’ She had not broken the orb, but the pain was incandescent and he could barely see. He saw her on her knees, scrabbling for purchase on the metal floor with only one working arm. He lunged as she turned onto her back, reaching for her throat with both hands, and that was when she jammed her pistol’s barrel into the underside of his jaw and pulled the trigger.

The pain in her arm was incredible and Fox now had a hulking, almost headless, body lying on top of her, and the desire to just lie there and not move was considerable. ‘Kit? You with me? Marshall’s down.’

‘Miss Martins has rendezvoused with Mister Clarion,’ Kit’s voice said into Fox’s head. ‘Your implant is indicating severe limb trauma, shock, and increasing blood loss. Are you able to get out of the building, Fox?’

‘Where’s Prentice?’ Fox said, not answering the question.

‘Mister Prentice has just decided to vacate the area using a personal land vehicle. It is manual drive, but I have instructed one of the drones to track it.’

‘Right. Armed drone?’

‘The drone is equipped with four fifteen-millimetre, light armour-piercing missiles.’

Fox was about to speak when she heard Terri’s voice cutting in. ‘Kit, instruct the drone to attack. Fox, stay put, we’re coming in to get you.’

‘Terri…’

‘No fucking excuses! Let me rescue you for once. Your vitals are all over the place. What the Hell did he do to you?’

‘Uh… Let’s just say that I may never play the piano again.’

~~~

Prentice checked his rear-view screen and set the navigation system. There was no sign of any of the others, the jamming was gone, no one was responding to his queries, and the place was likely to be swarming with cops any minute. He pulled the truck away, heading for the rear, inland gate of the complex.

Meridian was going to have to die for this. He would back out, find a professional who was good with a rifle, and have her brains blown out from a distance. All this humiliation and meaningful revenge crap was… well, it was crap. Marshall was an idiot for trying to string the job out, but he had found out that Meridian had been assigned to the Hunt case and he had used that as an excuse to make life hard for her. Prentice was fairly sure Marshall just had a taste for killing too.

Well, not again. Quick, clean, efficient. The stupid cop would never know what hit her. He looked ahead at the half-open gate and slowed for the slalom he would have to perform to get the van through.

And that was when a small, sleek shape supported on twin propellers dropped into view ahead of him, glossy, black plastic glinting in the headlights. He barely had time to wonder what the drone was doing there when he saw four shapes detach from it, the trails from the rocket engines showing a fraction of a second later as the micromissiles powered toward his windscreen.

‘Oh shit,’ Prentice said, just before the front of his vehicle exploded.

3rd February.

Fox opened her eyes and looked up at the blank, white ceiling of the medical bay Jackson and Terri had had her delivered to the night before. There had been medication and sleep almost immediately which, given the pain, Fox had not been unhappy about. Someone had removed her suit and encased her arm in heavy plastic to keep it immobile while she was out, but the pain was still there, diminished maybe, but still there.

‘You’re awake.’ Fox turned her head to see Terri sitting beside the bed. ‘I was starting to think they’d given you too much sedative.’

‘I’m awake. How are you?’

Terri’s lips twitched. ‘I was checked out. No injuries aside from some bruising and a scraped knee. To answer your next question, Killian’s been handed over to NAPA and the rest of them are dead. Canard wants to talk to you, or have detectives talk to you, but you’re under medical supervision until we say otherwise so we told him to piss off.’

Fox managed to bark out a laugh. ‘Okay, and the third question?’

Terri sighed. ‘Your arm’s fucked. He really messed the bones up, and there’s nerve and muscle damage. It’s going to take months to fix it all and you’ll never have full functionality.’

‘At least he didn’t do the same to my neck.’

‘I didn’t take you for that much of an optimist. Poppa’s got a solution if you’re happy to take the surgery.’

‘Cybernetics?’

‘Uh-huh. Not like Marshall’s. Proper job with synthetic skin. You’ll barely be able to tell the difference.’

‘Yeah, but this is Jackson Martins we’re talking about…’

Terri giggled. ‘He did say he had a few plans for some “useful additional features,” but I don’t think he’s going too over the top.’

‘Okay then, do it. Sooner the better and then I can get on with having my butt chewed off by Canard and the rest of NAPA.’

‘Day after tomorrow. You’re on anti-inflammatory drugs and some tissue rebuilders. They can’t operate until some of the swelling has gone down or they won’t get a good connection between the artificial skin and the real stuff. As for NAPA… I shouldn’t worry too much about them.’

‘Jackson’s set his lawyers on them?’

‘Worse, the political analysts.’

Fox grimaced. For a brief second she almost felt sorry for Canard.

4th February.

Dillan was looking a little hesitant as she walked into the room in her usual biker leathers. The hint of Asian features just seemed to add to the slightly submissive attitude, as though she was a geisha caught without the proper make-up or something.

‘I’m, uh, not here in any official capacity,’ Dillan said as Fox smiled at her.

‘They’d never have let you up from the lobby if you were. Nice of you to drop by.’

‘Well, you came to see me. And it looks like you got it worse than I did.’

‘Not sure. Maybe. You did get poisoned.’

‘And your arm is–’

‘Getting replaced tomorrow, assuming the doctors are happy with it. They tell me I won’t know the difference once it’s fully functional.’

‘Cool. Um… So it was Sandoval who shot me?’

‘I can’t prove it, but I’m fairly sure it was him.’

Dillan nodded. ‘He relieved Watlins on the stairs and then snuck up to kill Bucksbridge. When we went up together, he got ahead of me, planted the mine, waited for me to open the door, and then shot me when I was stunned from the detonation.’

‘And the EMP took care of the digital evidence while the Lethe-L made sure you wouldn’t remember what happened, assuming you survived.’

‘Damn spook prick. Thanks for nailing him. I kind of wish he was alive so I could put him away, but…’

‘But he was NIX and if he’d lived, he would have vanished off into Fort Meade and come back in a couple of years with a new identity.’ Fox’s brow furrowed. ‘I’d have preferred to keep him alive, to be honest, but this way is cleaner.’

‘Huh. Canard is running around like the end of the world is nigh. He’s been in the office all day two days in a row taking secure calls and being unavailable. Word is he wants your head mounted on his wall as a trophy. The fact you resigned already is not helping his mood because he can’t threaten to sack you.’

‘I think he could do more than threaten–’

Dillan’s smirk stopped her. ‘Not been checking the news feeds? “Tara Meridian of NAPA in another daring rescue of MarTech heiress.” Oh and, “Inspector Meridian stops maniac terrorists’ killing spree.” That was the news line on IB-Nineteen. Someone’s been leaking a lot of details to the press. You’re a hero, again. Canard’s going to have some explaining to do when people find out you quit.’

Fox frowned, biting her lip. ‘I… I’m really starting to worry now. I am actually beginning to feel a slight hint of pity for the man.’

‘I’ll get one of the doctors,’ Dillan replied.

6th February.

The silence and the lack of additional visual information was the first thing that Fox noticed as she surfaced from sleep. Her neural interface and implant computer were offline. Jackson had mentioned that they were going to need to do some work in that area, integrating the new hardware. Nothing major, and her interface would be back up in a couple of days, but she was going to need to use a visor until then if she wanted to access anything. Well, Kit was handling her affairs and the thought of being offline for a short time actually sounded pretty good.

Though there was the rather weird sensation in her right hand. It was kind of like an itch. The doctors had indicated that she might even feel some pain until the nanofibres fully integrated with her nervous system. Until then, there might be some misfires along severed nerves.

She looked down at the arm and hand lying beside her in the bed. There was a support framework locked around it currently, stopping her from bending her arm and keeping the lack of mobility from damaging her hand. Just below the elbow she could see reddened skin which showed where the natural flesh joined with the synthetic. The bioplastic would mesh in fully in a day or two, but there was some inflammation there at the moment which she figured they were probably treating.

Before they had taken her into surgery, she had been told not to touch the skin near the join. The surgeon had grinned at her and said that natural curiosity was going to win out, no matter what he said, but she should keep away from her elbow if she wanted to poke at her new appendage. Her palm, he had said, would be fine. Fox reached out, a little tentatively, and poked her real index finger through the framework to touch the palm of her artificial hand.

‘And the verdict is?’ It was Jackson speaking, but Terri and Sam were walking in with him.

‘Well…’ Fox frowned, trying to make a decision. ‘I think the fact that I can’t feel anything from that hand is affecting my views. But I guess it feels like what I expect skin to feel like.’

‘Spend a lot of time examining it and you’ll notice a difference,’ Terri supplied. ‘That’s one of our best-quality imitations, though, so you’ll really have to want to notice it’s different.’

‘Of course,’ Jackson said, ‘if you cut it, you’ll notice a difference pretty quickly.’

Sam had walked around the bed to look down at her new limb. He reached out and then looked up at her. ‘May I?’

‘Go ahead. I’m sure the doctors have prodded it enough while I was out. Just stick to the hand, away from the join.’

Nodding, he reached down and slid his fingers over her palm and the ball of her thumb, where he could get to the skin there anyway. Fox watched, irrationally annoyed that she could not feel him touching her. She knew it was going to happen when the nerves bedded in properly, but for now it was very much as if the arm was not there.

‘That,’ Sam said after a second or two, ‘is some very fine work. I have a couple of clients with prosthetics and the skin they have is not as good as that.’

‘We’ve made a number of advances in production over the past couple of years,’ Jackson said. ‘I think you’ll really notice it when the skin has meshed in properly. Older variants tend to give more of an obvious join. This should look quite natural. It’s the one place where variations in texture are more obvious, however. That’s where you’ll really be able to tell.’

‘Someone would have to be paying a lot of attention to your arm though,’ Terri pointed out, grinning. ‘And if they’re paying that much attention to you, I’d expect them to be paying it to other areas of your body.’

‘Teresa…’ Jackson grumbled, his cheeks colouring.

Terri giggled. ‘We want her happy with it, not worrying over people spotting it’s artificial.’

‘How long before my implant computer is working again?’ Fox asked, mostly to save Jackson from further blushes.

‘Two, maybe three days,’ Jackson replied. ‘We took the opportunity to make some modifications, however. We shifted the main processing capability into larger processors in your new arm. There’s still some smaller units in your skull and those will come online sooner than the ones in your arm. You’ll have telepresence in a couple of days.’

Fox looked at him, deciding not to ask what he was up to just yet. ‘That’s cool. I’m actually rather looking forward to a couple of days of not being connected.’

Sam chuckled beside her and patted her shoulder. It came as an irrational surprise that she could feel that. ‘I give her twelve hours before she’s demanding a headset.’

Terri looked across at him, narrowing her eyes. ‘Twenty-four,’ she said in a tone that was part musing and part challenging.

‘I’ll start a sweepstake,’ Jackson said, smiling broadly.

9th February.

Fox stepped off the maglev at her station and started for the slideway which would take her to her apartment block. The air was fresh and cool, and it felt good in her lungs. Her right arm was settled in a harness over her chest, but she was starting to get feeling in it and some motor function. She had confounded everyone by not even starting up her implant comms until she was walking out of the MarTech hospital wing, and that was just to let Kit know she was on her way. Everything could wait until she was home.

With her implant running only minimal software and her VA still offline, she almost missed the pair of cops hanging around the lobby of her building. She recognised one of them, Cant, an inspector who had got there by making sure his nose was firmly glued to Canard’s behind, and that was the only reason she tagged them for NAPA. She doubted they were standing around in an entrance lobby for no reason, and she doubted they had been waiting there for the last few days, which probably meant Canard had put her ident on the watch list so that he would know when she left the MarTech building. That was getting close to pointless harassment.

‘Meridian,’ Cant said having closed the distance as she crossed the lobby.

‘Inspector Cant,’ Fox replied, pausing and giving him a smile. ‘What brings you to this corner of Manhattan?’

‘Captain Canard would like a word.’

Fox’s smile remained in place. ‘I’m still on medical leave. Captain Canard knows this. I can be contacted via telepresence if required once I’m in my apartment. Unless you plan to arrest me and take me in, obviously. Do you plan on arresting me, Inspector Cant?’

The delay as Cant glared at her was just long enough to make Fox suspect that he was conferring with Canard. ‘We’ll be in touch regarding a suitable date for you to attend HQ for an interview. IA will be–’

‘Oh, excellent!’ Fox interrupted him, her smile brightening. ‘I’d love to get the opportunity to talk to IA.’

Anger flared in Cant’s eyes, but he just said, ‘We’ll be in touch,’ and then he started off with his slightly baffled-looking partner in tow.

‘Jackass,’ Fox muttered and headed for the elevators.

Kit was beaming at her when she finally got into her apartment. ‘It is so good to have you back!’ The kitsune’s tail was flicking back and forth and she was bouncing a little with her hands clasped before her. Fox could certainly tell she was happy. ‘I have a lot to tell you, but I thought you might like coffee first.’

Fox looked down to see the little house robot holding up a mug of coffee with one of its slim limbs. ‘Thank you, Kit, and thank you, robot.’ She took the coffee in her left hand and, sipping from the mug, started across to the sofa. ‘Did you know about the cops in the lobby?’

‘I identified them when I saw them approaching you. I had not thought to watch the area until I noted you entering the building. My apologies.’

‘Not a problem. If I’d had my VA up and running… Well, that’ll all be sorted out soon.’

‘Yes,’ Kit replied, somehow managing to sound quite excited about it in a single word, ‘and the police are one of the things I need to talk to you about.’

‘Canard’s been attempting to contact me?’

The window screen began scrolling a message log, all of the entries tagged as from someone at NAPA and quite a few of them directly from Canard. ‘That is a very concise summary of the facts. Some might say it was something of an understatement.’

Fox grunted and sat down. ‘Someone should have mentioned they were getting this annoying about it.’

A second window appeared beside the log, which was still scrolling, and Fox peered at it, trying to make out what she was seeing. ‘I received this yesterday,’ Kit said. ‘It appears to be a quite genuine message taken from a conversation chain between Captain Canard and Detective Sandoval.’

‘When’s it dated?’

‘January fifteenth. The conversation may be longer.’

‘This indicates that Canard knew Sandoval was a NIX plant. That was back when I was still in space, and they were talking about the Hunt case.’

‘Yes. This clearly indicates NIX involvement in your assignment to the case. NIX involvement in internal intelligence is not illegal, however, and it is not unreasonable for Detective Sandoval to make his status known to Captain Canard if this furthered his mission.’

‘Agreed,’ Fox replied, ‘but it sheds an entirely different light on Canard’s behaviour following Sandoval’s death, and it’ll open up the suggestion that Canard was involved in illegal attempts to obtain commercial secrets from MarTech. Commercial espionage is something NIX are not allowed to do. This could even suggest Canard was complicit in the UA plan to kill me and the four homicides, though we’d be damn lucky to see that one stick.’

‘Of course, I was sent this anonymously and I have been unable to trace the source.’

‘Thought and memory again?’

‘That metadata tag has been added, yes. This is not admissible evidence, however.’

‘Nope, but if I give it to IA, they would dig into the NAPA message logs, find the original, and eat Canard alive. And just having IA on his back, even if they cleared him of any wrongdoing, would crash his reputation. He’ll lose delegated votes like rats on a sinking ship.’

‘Then… um, our mysterious benefactor sent this to us as blackmail material?’

Fox narrowed her eyes at Kit. ‘Kit? Have you figured out who this guy is?’

‘No. I have no proof, only conjecture. I was going to bring it up.’ Fox continued frowning at her. ‘The only reference I could find to “thought and memory” in the same phrase outside of scholarly articles on the brain was to Huginn and Muninn, two ravens said to belong to the god Odin in Norse mythology. Their names mean “thought” and “memory.”’

‘Okay…’

‘Also in Norse mythology, Vali is the son of Odin and a giantess, Rindr, born to kill Hodr in revenge for the death of Baldr.’

‘Oh. You think Vali might be responsible for these… Let’s call them “leaks” for now and you think your boyfriend is responsible.’

‘He’s not my– Are you making fun of me?’

‘A little bit. You think it’s him?’

‘I have a trail of evidence which would not convince anyone if they simply looked at the facts. I find it hard to believe that someone, even a programmer of his obvious skill, could obtain this information alone. The video evidence was obtained from a vast array of sources very quickly, and the message was clipped from the NAPA internal servers. Could a single person achieve that? I also believe that he is helping us.’

‘Well, we can both agree on that last one. Unless we find out he’s doing things we think are… less helpful, we’ll keep quiet on the source. I think he’s earned that much.’

‘Thank you, Fox. I was hoping you would say that.’

‘You were worried I’d want to arrest him or something?’

‘The thought had crossed my mind.’

‘Maybe I should,’ Fox said, ‘but the evidence is hugely circumstantial and I already quit NAPA.’ She looked up at the AI’s image and smirked. ‘And I couldn’t bring myself to lock up your boyfriend.’

11th February.

It was as Fox rolled around to slip her legs out of bed that she noticed that her arm was responding normally for the first time. She paused, lifting her arm and looking at it as she flexed her fingers, watching them respond as she would have expected them to. Stroking a finger over her palm gave the sensation she expected, and she realised that she had felt the sheet under her hand when she sat up.

‘My hand’s working,’ she said aloud.

Kit appeared beside the bed almost instantly. ‘There is still a little inflammation around the joint, but integration is almost fully complete. The processors in your arm are functional. Wait a second… There!’

Fox blinked as a second copy of Kit appeared beside her, also looking at her arm. ‘Uh…’

‘Running full diagnostics,’ the second Kit said.

‘Kit…?’

First Kit smiled. ‘Your arm contains a pair of quantum processors. The cooling required for those is not compatible with implantation in a body, but works well enough with prosthetics. One of those is powerful enough to run a slightly downgraded copy of me as your VA.’

‘That’s me,’ second Kit added. ‘I’m not quite as bright as she is, but I should be quite capable of handling your needs. Your arm is essentially fully functional. You should rest for at least another day before using it normally, but light exercise is suggested. You should try out the blade.’

‘Oh…’ Fox said, lifting her hand again and peering at the skin between her two middle knuckles. You could not really see it, but there was a slit in the skin there. Closing her hand into a fist popped up an in-vision control, which was more or less there to point out that the weapon mounted in her hand was there. A thought popped ten centimetres of ultrafine-edged ceramic blade out from between her knuckles. It was not long, but it was sharp and, in an emergency, a nasty thing to have available. ‘That’s… got a fair bit of punch even without me swinging it.’ Another thought pulled it back and there was a brief instant where she could see the skin closing behind it, then it was more or less impossible to see again. ‘Seems to work. So, you’ll be able to come with me everywhere I go now?’

‘Yes,’ the second Kit said. ‘I’ll handle your personal requirements, synchronising with my other self when required. We will be an exceptionally effective personal agent for you.’

‘We promise,’ first Kit added.

‘Okay,’ Fox said, looking between them, ‘but try to keep it to one avatar at a time in the house. This stereo thing is confusing.’

‘We will,’ they chorused, and then they started giggling. Fox shook her head and started for the shower.

~~~

‘I’m going up to Jenner on Monday,’ Terri said from her position leaning against the wall of the room where Fox was being checked by her surgeon. ‘I was thinking maybe we could go out Friday night, or Saturday?’

‘Let me consult my physician,’ Fox said, looking at the man who was going over the skin on her arm with a multispectral visor.

‘As long as you don’t stress this too much, that should be fine,’ the man replied without looking up. ‘Limit your alcohol, and if you’re going to engage in intercourse, be a little careful. This is meshing in very nicely, but it has a little more to do before it’s completed.’

‘All the function seems to be there. Kit says the internal diagnostics are good.’

‘They are,’ Kit supplied. ‘I checked them this morning when I was able to load myself onto one of her internal processors.’

‘That sounded so wrong,’ Terri said, grinning. ‘How’s her calendar looking, Kit?’

‘We have agreed to a meeting with Captain Canard on Friday morning.’

‘Better make it Saturday night,’ Fox said. ‘Always the possibility that he’ll lock me up for the night.’

‘No,’ Terri said. ‘He might lock you up, but he’s not going to keep you there longer than five minutes.’

13th February.

Fox had taken her jacket off when she walked into the interview room and was busy examining the skin on her forearm when Canard and Cant walked in. She did not look up as the two men took seats across from her.

‘Captain Grant J. Canard and Inspector Johnson P. Cant initiating interview with Tara Meridian,’ Canard intoned.

‘Inspector Tara Meridian,’ Fox stated. ‘My resignation isn’t final yet, unless you’ve rushed it through.’

Canard glared at her. ‘Inspector Tara Meridian. You are aware of your rights, Inspector?’

‘I am, Captain. Do I need to be? Are you detaining me?’

‘Not at this time, but–’

Fox smiled. ‘That’s okay then, please continue. I have nothing to hide so I don’t believe I require an attorney at this point.’

Canard pulled in a slow breath and let it out. ‘You’ve been asked to attend here today regarding the death of Detective Joshua Sandoval. You don’t deny shooting him and we have the record of your weapon’s sighting camera indicating that you fired on him.’

‘Correct.’

‘I’d like you to explain, in your own words, why you did that.’

‘You have my report on the shooting, Captain. He was trying to kill me. You also have video evidence of him meeting with known UA terrorists.’

‘How did you get that evidence?’ Canard snapped out, his eyes narrowing.

‘Anonymously. It doesn’t matter, does it? The video timestamps and metadata allowed you to pull the feeds from the city video logs. MarTech’s lawyers requested and obtained it. The video is genuine. That makes Sandoval dirty, right?’

‘Sandoval was not dirty,’ Canard growled. ‘He was–’

‘A NIX agent embedded in Wayden Executive Services who moved on to covering NAPA. Yes, I was aware of that. However, given that his task here was to obtain information on new processes being researched by MarTech Technologies, he was engaging in industrial espionage. That would be illegal for NIX to undertake, so they aren’t going to acknowledge that he was doing it under their orders, even if they acknowledge he was one of theirs. You can write him up as a dirty cop, but NIX won’t let you hang this on them.’

There was silence as Canard glared at her, and she got the distinct feeling that he had already figured that one out or been told it by NIX. ‘You went in to get Teresa Martins on your own rather than getting official backup and a proper NAPA antiterrorist team–’

‘NAPA’s antiterrorist and special action units aren’t that good. Jackson Martins was within his rights to take action himself to free his daughter, and he asked me to assist because he knows I have experience in hostage rescue and counterterrorism. The operation was successful.’

‘Internal Affairs are very interested in your relationship with Martins,’ Cant said, his face forming into a rather malicious grin.

‘They can investigate all they like. They won’t find anything improper.’ Fox fixed her gaze on Canard and affected a slightly unhappy expression. ‘If they do wish to investigate fully, however, they’ll find some additional evidence I was sent regarding Sandoval which I have, to date, kept private. I’ll be required to disclose certain emails between Captain Canard and Detective Sandoval.’

‘What?’ Canard asked.

‘Discussions on my assignment to the Hunt case which make it clear that you knew he was NIX and that he wanted me on it.’ She let her eyes widen. ‘Oops. I do hope IA won’t be listening to this.’ Canard’s face was turning scarlet, but Cant put a hand on his shoulder which seemed to pull him back. Fox shook her head. ‘I’m not sure why you’re pushing this, Captain. I shot Sandoval, sure, but he was trying to kill me and you’ve got enough evidence to put him down as a bad cop. The Martins kidnapping is resolved, favourably. I’ve resigned so I’m out of your designer-cut hair. Unless you think my resignation makes you look bad and you want to make it look like I’m having to resign. That it? Are you trying to save face?’

‘I’m trying… Officer-involved shootings need to be handled carefully and–’

He stopped as her eyes narrowed, the words choking in his throat. ‘That would be why you dismissed Sandoval’s recent entirely unrecorded shooting of Donovan Bucksbridge after a couple of hours of interviewing then. That would be something else you wouldn’t want IA looking at, I’d imagine. They might conclude that you were colluding with him in the cover-up of one murder and one attempted murder, the latter of a NAPA detective. You really have more to lose by continuing this harassment, Canard. Just let me finish up my time and move on. I thought knowing which battles to fight was one of the main skills of a politician.’

Apparently he did, if you pointed it out to him. ‘Interview terminated,’ Canard said. ‘I’ll put through a recommendation that you be released from your contract on medical grounds following the damage to your arm.’

Fox’s smile was more or less genuine. ‘Thank you, Captain. I’ll stop off and clear out my office before I leave.’

14th February.

Kit could only really see things which Fox looked at. She could pick up all the v-tag signals in the area, which meant she could construct a full image of the viron of 27Lex, but she only got to match that with a visual image of the real world when Fox’s eyes looked in a given direction. It was not stopping her from standing there, visible only to Fox, Terri, and Sam, and peering around as though the club was the most fascinating thing she had ever seen.

‘She’s been in Niflhel,’ Fox commented. ‘She’s seen clubs before.’

‘I have mostly been to Vali’s farm,’ Kit pointed out.

‘You came in with me and had a little tour of a few places on Thursday night.’

‘And they were interesting, but this is a physical club with real people. People are interesting and a little strange at times. That man there appears to be attempting to see through your shirt despite it being opaque.’

Fox bit her lips to avoid laughing and Sam said, ‘Imagine what they’d be doing if they could actually see our little fox-girl.’

Terri giggled. ‘I don’t think Kit’s ready for that much attention yet.’

‘And what would her boyfriend say?’ Fox added.

Kit’s cheeks flamed. ‘I do not have a boyfriend, except in the sense of having a friend who happens to be a boy.’

‘I think I need to meet this Vali,’ Terri said, ignoring her creation. ‘If he’s wooing my Kit, I think he needs to be vetted.’

‘I did already ask him about his intentions,’ Fox told her.

‘You didn’t!’ Kit squeaked, clutching her hands to her cheeks.

‘He said they were honourable, but–’

‘He did?!’

‘–I don’t believe him.’

‘Stop embarrassing the poor girl,’ Sam said, all ‘voice of reasonableness.’

‘That would be nice,’ Kit said meekly.

Sam grinned at her. ‘My pleasure, Kit. So, Fox, what’s next? You’re out of NAPA. Are you taking the job at Palladium?’

Fox shrugged. ‘I’ve been working for one form of governmental agency or another since I left home. Time to strike out, I guess. Try something new. It’s either go private or go corporate.’

‘And we have all the best toys,’ Terri pointed out, grinning.

Fox lifted her hand, curling her fingers as she looked over the skin of her arm which was now all a uniform, very natural colour. ‘Yeah… you sure do. But do me a favour, would you, Terri?’

‘Uh, if I can, sure. What?’

‘Try to avoid getting kidnapped for the next five years or so. It’s getting to be a habit.’

###

About the Author

I was born in the vicinity of Hadrian's Wall so perhaps a bit of history rubbed off. Ancient history obviously, and border history, right on the edge of the Empire. I always preferred the Dark Ages anyway; there’s so much more room for imagination when people aren’t writing down every last detail. So my idea of a good fantasy novel involved dirt and leather, not shining plate armour and Hollywood-medieval manners. The same applies to my sci-fi, really; I prefer gritty over shiny.

Oddly, then, one of the first fantasy novels I remember reading was The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper (later made into a terrible juvenile movie). These days we would call Cooper’s series Young Adult Contemporary Fantasy and looking back on it, it influenced me a lot. It has that mix of modern day life, hidden history, and magic which failed to hit popular culture until the early days of Buffy and Anne Rice. Of course, Cooper’s characters spend their time around places I could actually visit in Cornwall, and South East England, and mid-Wales. In fact, when I went to university in Aberystwyth, it was partially because some of Cooper’s books were set a few miles to the north around Tywyn.

I got into writing through roleplaying, however, so my early work was related to the kind of roleplaying game I was interested in. I wrote science fiction when I was playing Traveller. I wrote “high fantasy” when I was playing Dungeons & Dragons. I wrote a lot of superhero fiction when I was playing City of Heroes. I still love the idea of a modern world with magic in it and I’ve been trying to write a novel based on this for a long time. As with any form of expression, practice is the key and I can look back on all the aborted attempts at books, and the more successful short stories, as steps along the path to the Thaumatology Series.

Recently I took the big step of quitting my day job and taking up full-time writing. My favourite authors are Terry Pratchett, Susan Cooper, J.D. Robb, and Kim Harrison. Kim’s Hollows books were what finally spurred me to publish something, even if the trail to here came by way of Susan, back in school, several decades ago.

For More Information

Take a look at the Witches and Ray-guns blog: http://witchesandrayguns.wordpress.com

Other Books by this Author

Amazon US: http://amazon.com/author/niallteasdale

Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B006J6II9O

The Thaumatology Series

Thaumatology 101

Demon’s Moon

Legacy

Dragon’s Blood

Disturbia

Hammer of Witches

Eagle’s Shadow

Ancient

Dragonfall

The Other Side of Hell

For Whom the Wedding Bells Toll

Vengeance

Anthologies in the Thaumatology Universe

Tales from High Towers’ Study

Tales from the Dubh Linn

The Aneka Jansen Books

Steel Beneath The Skin

The Cold Steel Mind

Steel Heart

The Winter War

The Greatest Heights of Honour

The Lowest Depths of Shame

Hope

The Ultrahuman Books

Ugly

Shadows

The Unobtainium Books

Kate on a Hot Tin Roof

The Reality Hack Books

Reality Hack

The Fox Meridian Books

Fox Hunt

Inescapable – November 2015

DeathWeb – January 2015

Table of Contents

Part One: Earthlight Becomes You

Part Two: Lunar Transit Blues

Part Three: Murder Is My Business

Part Four: Music to Get the Blood Pumping

Part Five: The Anarchy Meme

Part Six: Keep Your Friends Close

Part Seven: Striking Out