Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 –> 

If he would bother to take the main lift up to the obs platform on a daily basis, Ray could see the shimmering orb that was New Holyoke expanding like an explosion of blue at which Paraclete aimed as though it was a gnarled and criminally un-aerodynamic spear.  Under significant magnification, at this distance, he could just now pick out the floating platform of the docking port station in geosynchronous orbit over Blackheath Grange, planetary capital and relatively ancient human foothold, the St. Augustine of a true New World.  He could study seas and mountain ranges, fascinate himself with topographical investigations of wide deserts and teeming jungles, make an acquaintance with flora and fauna that would astound him, and dazzle himself with the immensity of it all and the knowledge that most of it was still unnamed, unclassified, unsullied by human touch, human footprint, human presence. 

            He has looked, of course, back when New Holyoke was just a blurry fist to the naked eye, with Emma bouncing beside him, bubbling joy and impatience like a fountain.  They squinted forward through the plastisheen dome, their breath leaving mist on the glass, condensed by the frigid night of space.  It had been early in the morning, something like four o’clock Greenwich, when their position relative to New Holyoke would create a sort of eclipse, blocking out the system’s sun.  Otherwise they wouldn’t have seen anything at all; the plastisheen would have been polarized to a dull, intensely opaque leaden gray to shield them from unadulterated solar radiation.

            The fact is that he doesn’t need these sensory reminders to know they’re getting close.  He can feel their approach in rumble of the reverse thrust tubes shuddering up through the deckplate, firing ever more frequently now.  By tomorrow noon, the ship will be engaged in full docking protocol, a constant press of decelerating thrust that even through the pressure baffles and damping fields projected across the hull will make basic movements feel slowed, difficult, like you’re moving through syrup.  Passengers will be advised to strap themselves into gel-filled impact couches just to minimize the strain on bodies suddenly cast into a parallel universe where none of the silly old rules of gravity and physics seem to apply with anything like regularity.  Most of them know this already. 

            Inevitably, hard deceleration reminds Ray of combat–that sense like you’re working too hard for little progress, that everything happens in slow motion, that the world is both strikingly clear and vibrant, while at the same time fuzzy about the edges.  When he’s not concentrating, he feels dislocated, unmoored, what Kilgore laughingly calls a g-zombie.  Philosophers have said that so much of being human is an evolutionary response to the body and its needs and its relationship to the physical environment.  If this is true, Ray’s body is telling him that deep space flight is a screwed up way in which to conduct himself.  Truly and honestly, it would be happy if he would just take it into the bedroom and let it lie down until the docking procedure was done with and things were back to normal.  It’s telling him, in fact, that the docking platform that is the soul of Ray-ness, which should be in geosynchronous orbit around his flesh is badly in need of a course correction lest his consciousness go spinning off, unrecoverable, into astral space.

Ray is not at all happy about this.

Standing beside him, palpably amused by Ray’s discomfort, Becker slaps a pair of small, white tablets onto the table next to his keypad.  He screws the lid back on the top of the vial they came from and shoves it deep into his pocket.

“For the nausea,” he says.

Ray swallows them dry.  “Pharmaceuticals are the pinnacle of human creativity.  The older I get, the more I am convinced that this is fact.”

His guts have been churning off and on for days, and only recently did it occur to him that the crisis-level heaving of his stomach tended to coincide with the regular ignition of deceleration thrust.  He thought he was just being a wuss, and he had looked forward to the constant pressure of the docking protocol with something akin to sublime dread.

“Just make sure you get to the dispensary and pick up you own script before tomorrow,” Becker points out.  “You’re absolutely no good to me if you’re in the head chucking up your intestines for the last two days of the flight.”

This is apparently not a well-guarded secret, this magical anti-nausea bullet.  Becker keeps a whole bottle in his pocket, which means that there have probably been announcements and reminders and memos and other sorts of shipwide reminders available to all and sundry who happen to read such things.  Which is also exactly why Ray doesn’t know anything about it.  Thus, not so much a wuss as an idiot, which he thinks is probably a step up on the ladder of human consciousness.

He would like to wait for the pills to kick in, to settle the fierce pitch and yaw of his stomach, but Becker in impatient.  The Security Chief would really like to have something resembling a suspect for Micah’s murder before they reach New Holyoke.

“Tell me how much you admire my investigative acumen and stunning intellect,” Ray says.

Becker lifts an eyebrow.  “I did not come down here to give you a pep talk.”

“You’re right.  You came down so I could hand you a murder suspect.”

The eyebrow inches higher.  “Go ahead.”

Ray punches in a few keystrokes to access his secure data files.  After a moment, the terminal screen flips to a series of jaggedly edited and meticulously timestamped video clips.  There is no sound, because it became monotonously obvious that it was just a waste of bandwidth.  Instead, Ray explains.  “Over the past week, I’ve hacked into the data repository for the drone network, searching for images that might correspond with the night of the murder.  Originally, I’d hoped that we might get lucky and have drones operating on Omicron around the time the body was dumped.  Then I thought we might come up with data related to the actual commission of the crime–lift logs, movement tracking in the area, an immense amount of data given that even late at night we’ve got something like two thousand people up and rumbling around at any given time.  I came up empty on both counts.”

“That doesn’t sound helpful,” Becker grumbles.

“Then I started sorting the images by our short list of suspects, to see if we could account for their activities during the hours in question.”

Becker makes a face.  “Our short list of suspects being Frederick Whiston.”

“Exactly.  It took some time to isolate the key structure by which the drones had tagged his pheromone signature, mostly because I didn’t feel comfortable wandering up to him and asking for a sample, you understand.  I had to employ roundabout methods to get a rat in the vicinity of the Whiston suite in full analysis mode, then dig through the chunks of information until I achieved a reasonable match.  I tested that out until I felt like I’d established a legitimate chain of evidence that could be plugged back into the data repository to search for hits.”

“And that’s meant as an explanation for why you’ve spent so much time recently in the presence of Miss Whiston rather than slaving away over the circuit boards.  You were just gathering evidence.”

Ray shrugs.  “As far as the official record is concerned.”

“Go on.”

“Once I’d isolated Freddy’s sig, I was able to code a fairly comprehensive and flexible search of the surveillance net into the regular drone routine.  With that in mind, I’ve also redirected the net to track his movements for the last four days.”  Ray waves at the screen and its cascade of jerky frame-by-frame animation.  “What I’ve got is fairly conclusive footage of his movements before the estimated time of death, and footage reflecting his activities a few hours after.  And a big gaping hole in the middle.”

“Aw, hell,” Becker rumbles.

“What I’ve also got is days and days of general tracking footage.  This is where he was before and after–where, in fact, you’re likely to find him at almost any time of the day, every day, except for the nightly batch transmission, when he lines up in the queue like all the other sturdy and respectable businessmen.  The franchise is a place called Iranoi.  It’s on Epsilon.  High class, high price, exclusive tastes.  The lap dances in the back room are cheaper than the drinks. It’s also right off the main lift, giving its customers easy access to just about anywhere on the ship they might want to go at a moment’s notice.”

“I know all about Iranoi,” Becker assures him tensely.  “Half of the office corps knows about Iranoi.  Intimately, I mean.”

“I cut the footage of Freddy’s less liquid adventures since it didn’t exactly qualify as family friendly viewing and I didn’t know at what sorts of venues we might eventually be playing the stream.  Suffice it to say that he’s a man well acquainted with his libido and his perversions, and he can pay handsomely for satisfaction and confidentiality.  The problem is that he doesn’t have a reputation for being violent.  Nothing in his passenger pre-screen indicates any psychological issues, no legal history, nothing that would profile him as a potential incident perpetrator.”

Except where his sister is concerned.

Just thinking about this makes Becker grimace.  “But the bottom line is that you’ve got no definitive proof.  Just evidence of absence during the critical hours.”

 “I’ve got pattern. That’s the start of a decent circumstantial case.”

“Explain.”  For Becker, it isn’t enough.  Not even to bring the suspect in for questioning, at least not someone as powerful in this corner of human space as a Whiston.

“Okay, here’s Freddy over at Iranoi, right?  He’s there every day from right around noon until closing–about three in the morning–except for the hour or so he spends in the queue.  Most of that time, he’s fabulously drunk, though not annoyingly so.  He doesn’t get rowdy, doesn’t call attention to himself, though he does seem more than willing to be friendly with anyone who cares to strike up a conversation with him.  This is, of course, not the behavior one would expect from a child murderer, just from a career alcoholic.”

Ray taps in a series of commands and a new stream of images appear.  These are date stamped from the day of Micah’s death.

“Except here we can see, if we watch long enough, that he isn’t drunk in this instance, on this day.  In fact, he nurses the same drink for something like three hours.  He doesn’t talk to anyone, doesn’t raise any sort of ruckus.”  The footage accelerates, tearing through a few hours of surveillance.  “And then here, late afternoon, he abruptly stands up, leaves.  And he’s off the net for a few hours.  By nine or ten o’clock, he’s back.  Except you’ll notice that this time he is drinking.  He gets so roaring drunk that he has to be carried back to Iota-D.  Does that strike you as suspicious enough?”

Becker scrubs at his forehead.  “Sure it’s suspicious.  But I need more.”

Ray freezes the stream, then pulls up a nearly identical frozen image from earlier in the day.  “He’s wearing different clothes.”

“Maybe he found some willing partner for an afternoon romp.  I can practically guarantee you that someone fitting that description will vouch for him.  A shower and fresh clothes are not unheard of after that sort of thing.  At least so I hear.  It’s been too long ago to remember.”

Ray doesn’t surrender the point.  “It’s enough to lean on him.”

“It’s enough to get my ass nailed to the bulkhead.”  Becker sighs, clearly displeased.

“Nomar and I have also been analyzing the trace tissue samples taken from the body of Micah Uytedehaage.  I reported initially that those results seemed to have hit a dead end, if you remember.”

“I do.”

“I was mistaken in that conclusion.”

Becker perks up immediately.  “You got a hit?”

“No, but I did get something close to it.”  Ray spins back to the terminal and pulls up a graphic display window that overlays the vid record.  In it is a graph, a series of jagged pastel lines and arches, a tabulation of DNA profile data in standard bio-match blot matrix.  “Do you know what this is?”

“It’s a DNA id matrix,” Becker says slowly, studying the graph.  “But you’ve only got matches on two loci.”

“Exactly.”

“That’s useless.  You’ve narrowed the suspect pool down from hundreds of billions to tens of billions.”

“Which is why we weren’t getting any definitive hits against the standard databases.”  Ray brings up another image, a still shot of a false color cell structure, grainy and bulbous, limned in unnatural neons.  “This is a captured image some of the actual physical data obtained at the crime scene.  I want you to notice this little structure here, the gold one that looks like a parenthesis.  And over here, the trapezoidal object in front of the nucleus.  Those aren’t what I would term naturally occurring shapes.”

Becker leans in close, peering.  “What is the magnification here?”

“It’s in the micron range.”

“Micron range.”

“Yes.”

The Chief rolls his tongue around the inside of his mouth.  “Nanomech id masking.”

“Our complete tissue pool was contaminated with them, except for the tissues taken from the victim himself.  That’s why we couldn’t track any of them in the databases.”

“This is not the news I wanted to hear.”

“Come on, Rich.  Those are verifiable nanomech drones.  You can count on one hand the people on this ship who would have the connections and the cred to access that kind of hardware.  Colineate that with Freddy’s absence and the opportunity to commit the crime, and that’s as close as you can get without actual vid capture of the event.”

But Becker just shakes his head.  “And the court that tries him is going to be on New Holyoke.  Convincing people with a vested interest in not rocking the Whiston boat or impeding the Whiston cash flow is going to demand a higher level of proof than circumstantial evidence.  What have your pair of flunkies turned up in terms of actual human intelligence?” 

“Nothing other than the general profile of Freddy Whiston as a guy who seems nice enough, but isn’t particularly plugged in to shipboard life.  Not that they haven’t tried for more, as the shipscred account will attest.  There’s only so much you can do without just coming right out and asking people if they think Freddy killed him, which is exactly what you didn’t want us to do.  So they’ve been approaching things generally, gathering gossip, spotting for trouble.  But what happened to this kid wasn’t even a ping on the average passenger’s systems.  Kilgore and Rodriguez had to stop asking people even about their impressions of the murder itself because all it did was upset them–this idea that that there had been a terrible killing on board and no one had bothered to publicize it.”

Becker rolls his eyes.  “That will certainly be good for my career.  Nothing like the perception of incompetency to move you up the corporate ladder.”

The Chief falls silent for a time.  A long time.  Ray lets it drag out, because he has to.  This is not his call. 

“You can document the presence of nanomech masking in all your physical samples?”

“Yes.”

“Can you identify the design of the mechs that were used?”

“I can narrow it down to three or four possible models, two possible manufacturers–or I should say, two possible design patent holders.”

“If you can nail down the model, we might be able to track the transfer back to the distribution point.  That would take some time and some serious resources, but it’s a lead.”  Becker frowns, sighs.  “It’s thin, but what do you think?”

“I think Frederick Whiston killed that kid.”

“See, that’s what I’d expect you to think.  That’s what his attorney would expect you to think, or at least expect you to argue, given that we’ve already got some tension documented between the two of you.”

“I’ve done an admirable job of staying out of his way of late.”

“Which does not at all change the fact that you did, at one time, knock him on his ass.  That, of course, being completely beside the fact of the general perception is that you’re trying to bone his sister and he isn’t very happy about it.”

“You can leave me out of the questioning phase.  If you break him…”

“If I break him, I still have to provide evidence that shows why we questioned him in the first place, and the chain of that evidence goes through you.  That’s problematic.”

“You should have thought of that before you assigned me to this case.  I wasn’t exactly volunteering to be led to the slaughter here.”

“And you were supposed to clear him, not drop more suspicion on him.”  Becker stomps around the room for a few minutes, cursing and muttering, blowing off steam like a whale taking on air.  He’s still shaking his head when he returns.  “We can’t just ignore what we’ve got.  But we can’t flat out arrest him on suspicion of murder, either.  Let’s bring him in and see what he has to say under a little pressure.”

Ray stands up.  “I’ll contact my guys and–”

But Becker stops him with a hand on his shoulder.  “No way.  Security will retrieve him to avoid the impression of you nipping after his heels like a jilted puppy.  And we’re most surely not going to do it right now.  Morning will be soon enough.  It’s not like he’s a flight risk.  There’s nowhere he can go.”

It’s reasonable.  It makes sense.  By tomorrow, most of the passengers will be strapped in, hung over, out of the corridors.  They can avoid creating a sensation. 

Not that Ray cares much about that, but it would make a tidy argument for a defense attorney at trial if they hyped the scandal angle.

And then there’s the whole matter of resentment.  Emma would most certainly not be pleased with any link between Ray and barging stormtrooper tactics upsetting her domestic tranquility.  He was going to have enough to explain to her when this was all over as it was.

Ray drops back into his seat, acquiescent.  “Tomorrow, then.”

Becker snorts, rubs his eyes, looks like a man who’s about to fall over from the weight of his responsibilities.  “So assume for a moment that he is guilty.  Close the loop for me.  What does it mean in the larger context.  You know, given the parallels, the circumstances.”

Ray has been thinking about these things himself, trying to make sense of them.  He’s not entirely pleased with his conclusions.   “It’s not a matter of him being just kooky homicidal.  The man who committed this crime didn’t talk about it, didn’t brag, doesn’t have a public reputation for mentally aberrant behavior–which would indicate he is sane enough either to hide his disorder or to know murder isn’t the type of thing you bring up in polite conversation.  So we can rule general madness out.  We can also rule in the fact that he has approached a most gruesome task with a clear degree of professionalism and an impressive display of will.  He took all the precautions necessary to avoid being caught, went to an incredible expense to do so.  Sane people don’t do crazy things without a compelling reason.  He knew what he was doing, did it with purpose, on purpose and is aware of the consequences of his actions.  So, whatever was driving him is perceived as more important than the potential criminal ramifications if he gets caught.”

“So he wants to summon a shed.  Why?”

Ray doesn’t have an answer for that.  “To prevent me from digging.”

“Digging?  You’re trying to link him with the Lilaiken separatists.”  Becker doesn’t like the idea, not at all.  It’s somehow worse than the mere fact of murder, of mutilation.  “Politics as a compelling reason.”

Ray can’t avoid it, not after the incident with Fortitude and the missing shed ring.

“We have intelligence indicating that the Lilaikens are aware of the shed, that they’ve actually made attempts to procure one.  We can assume they have knowledge of how to control it, but I don’t know how someone like Freddy Whiston would have access to it without being involved in the movement itself.  On the other hand, I can’t think of any way he could be linked to the Lilaikens without CIU having some knowledge of it.  Honestly, Rich, I just don’t know.  The pieces fit; they seem to be part of the same puzzle, but I’m not sure how they go together.  Nothing short of Whiston collusion in the movement, at least.  The family would stand to gain a great deal from New Holyokan independence, not the least of which is unrestricted, untaxed trade with other rim worlds.”

Becker drags a chair from the neighboring workstation and drops into it.  He flicks his attention back to the screen occasionally, where the loop of a sodden Frederick Whiston cycles on interminably.  He has that look on his face that says he’s done; he’s tired of all the speculation.

“Part of me had hoped that it meant something other than guilt that nobody from the Whiston clan was yanking my chain about not finding this guy.  Even if the alternative was just that Mr. Whiston is more enamored of the bottle than the kids he’s supposed to be caring for.”  He makes a disgusted noise in his throat and looks away; it’s an impulse he obviously understands with more clarity than he’d like.  “Tell me why it is that ‘rich’ is so often just a synonym for ‘dysfunctional’?  Do they just not care, Ray?  Did this kid’s life mean nothing to them?” 

Ray doesn’t know if he can suppress the urge to be defensive, at least on Emma’s behalf, so he says nothing.  But the way Becker lumps her and Frederick together turns his stomach.

Becker leans back in the chair, stares at the ceiling as if he can’t bear to look at the images scrolling across Ray’s terminal screen any longer.  “Send me the file with your evidence in it.  I’m going to need it for the log, and assuming we actually get something out of this guy, I’m going to have to find someone on New H that I can pass this to who’s going to run with it.  I don’t have the authority to prosecute the case planetside, so I’m going to need an able body down there who knows the facts and is willing to take on a deal that is going to be extremely publicly volatile.”

He’s about as subtle as a meteor shower, and Ray laughs.  “I already know you’ve heard from Jack Holcomb.   You don’t need to make up an excuse to assign me to the planet.”

“It wasn’t meant to be an excuse,” the Chief says, scowling.  “I want you to nail this guy.  It’s a matter of professional pride.”

 “If there’s a way, Becker, I’ll get him.”

“When you say ‘get’, I’ll assume you mean ‘hand him over to the appropriate legal entity for the application of fair and impartial justice’.”

“Him, maybe.  The potential ‘them’ is still up for grabs.  I haven’t had any training in how to handle custody and prosecution and everything that goes along with it.  With my luck, I’d make some huge rights violation gaffe and end up getting them off on a technicality.  So I’ll just stick to what I do know how to handle properly.”

Becker makes a show of clapping his hands over his ears.  “I’m not hearing you say that.”

Ray frowns, serious.  “Is it always this hard?  To catch them, I mean.”

It’s a question that’s been nagging him for days.  He wonders if he’s been missing something, if he’s been too focused on Emma and whatever it is between them and made the murder just a footnote in his personal history.  How did we meet?  Oh, I was under deep cover trying to interdict a ring of political insurgents and managed to get tied up in a murder investigation.  I busted her brother, whacked his psycho political cronies.  One thing led to another, and here we are?  Funny how life works, huh?

“Catching them is usually the easy part,” Becker says.  “It’s trying to understand what they thought was so important that it was worth taking someone else’s life that’s hard.  But I guess you know something about that, don’t you?  How a person rationalizes killing.”

Ray looks at him, blinking, uncertain about what he might mean.  He has the feeling he’s supposed to say something like Wow, I never thought about it that way before, but it seems like too much effort.  He simply lets it pass.

If he meant it as some sort of vague indictment, Becker doesn’t press the point.  He says, “It’s all right, Ray.  You won.  You pulled out a legitimate suspect.  Adapting the drone network was a brilliant move.  None of my guys would have been able to do that.  And without it, I would have faced a ton of pressure to arrest Whiston just for seeming to not care about what was going on–and when I didn’t do it, because of the politics involved and because it would be a stupid reason to arrest anybody, I would have spent the rest of my life wondering if I’d made a mistake.”

 “It’s quite the sunny profession you’ve got, Becker.”

“Why do you think I left the force in Detroit and joined the EED?  At least shipboard, it’s still a big deal when somebody gets whacked.  And you don’t have to worry about your perpetrator being a bunch of kids with nothing else to do but look for trouble.”

“That’s encouraging.”

“No.  No, it isn’t.”  There’s a weight of misery behind his words, long nights of grappling with the nature of humanity by a man used to seeing only its seamy side. 

“Ray,” Becker says after awhile, sounding thoughtful.  “Why would Whiston be trying to summon a shed on this ship?”

“I don’t know.  I’m hoping you can make him tell us.”

“I can’t help but be aware of a distinct lack of shed related violence on the shift logs.  You said we’d notice if the effort had been successful, right?”

“The whole ship would notice.  It’s not the type of thing you can keep secret for very long.”

Becker chews his lip for several moments, on the verge of saying something that obviously distresses him.  “Has it occurred to you that maybe he or they didn’t try to summon the shed on purpose?  Not that they failed, but that they weren’t even trying.  That maybe the whole point is to set in motion a chain of events that would get you off the ship and down to New Holyoke.  Not a message at all, but a catalyst.”

Except that Ray knows that Jack Holcomb had him on the way the New Holyoke in the first place, before the whole business of murder came up, this would have been a logical conclusion to draw.  He’s impressed that Becker made the connection.  “It could be.  Are you telling me to be careful, Chief?”

“Like I care about what happens to some CIU hotshot.”

“You never have saluted me.”

“And I probably never will.”

Ray smiles wearily.  “Okay, then.”

Becker climbs out of the chair and pushes it back against the workstation.  “All I’m saying is that this is a strange set of coincidences.  Your background, you here, them aware of your background, them here.  It’s not like we’re the only ship that makes the New Holyoke run.  The bad guys seem to have access to entirely too much classified intelligence, and that smells funny to me, smells a whole lot like manipulation, in fact.”

“I’ve given the Lilaikens plenty of reasons to want me out of the way, Rich.”

“I believe you have, Marlowe.  And if somehow you’re able to come out of this with documentation that proves Whiston financial backing of the Lilaiken movement, I suspect someone will either give you a very impressive medal for your dress uniform or hang your career out to dry–I’m not certain exactly which is more likely.  But it was good work all the same.”

That seems to be all Becker has to say on the subject.  He shrugs noncommittally, as if suggesting it’s just another thing for Ray to think about, then turns and makes his way out the door.

***

            In the evening, Kilgore and Rodriguez return just before dinner to change clothes, report their lack of progress and head out again.  Ray has spent the time since Becker left sifting through the network data pool one more time.  He started from scratch, from Nomar’s Iota-D information, isolating once again the tags in Nomar’s datacore, performing search/match permutations to make sure it really was Frederick’s chemical sig pattern he was using as the main search criteria and not someone else’s who just happened to frequent Iranoi, that the missing several hours weren’t lurking out there on the net somewhere.  Not that he expected to be wrong, or even if he was wrong, that he expected it to change the facts.  Evidence of absence was not absence of evidence.  He had all the digital proof that he needed.   

            He just needed to be doing something that seemed productive.

            Because he was supposed to be getting ready for a last shipboard tryst with Emma, dinner and the theatre, then a run up to the obs platform for a truly breathtaking glimpse of New Holyoke (at least, the flier circulated by the entertainment director said it was breathtaking.  Maybe that was really a clever joke and he planned to get a chunk of the passengers up there beneath the naked starfield and puncture the plastisheen dome.  That would be literally breathtaking, wouldn’t it?  Vacuum humor.  It was how you knew you’d been shipboard for too long.)

Ray is just being morbid.  Emma called him late in the morning to cancel the date, sounding distinctly unhappy, almost tearful.  The last night before hard deceleration on an interstellar run is inevitably a raucous event, Frederick had said.  People became wild, drunken, frenzied–a final gust of hedonism before being strapped to impact couches, numbed by vid streams, waiting for the docking clamps and the mass exodus to the shuttles.  A crass and demeaning scene, he indicated to her.  Unbearably common, definitely something that would raise eyebrows in all the wrong places should a Whiston become involved in such an obscenely medieval bacchanal.  She shouldn’t be mixed up in such an orgy, he’d said, and forbidden her to leave.

And Frederick was certainly one to know plenty about orgies, Ray thinks.  Much easier to protect little sister’s virtue when you know exactly what you’re protecting it from.

He’s attempting, with only limited success, not to feel childish about the whole thing.  It isn’t like he won’t see her on the ground, that she hasn’t promised to tour Blackheath Grange with him.  Like he won’t be on New Holyoke for freaking months–possibly years if the EED doesn’t get a handle on the Lilaikens–and get to play with her whenever he wants.

It is some consolation that there would be awkward explanations due in the near future if he actually did take her out on the evening before her brother’s imminent arrest for the murder of Micah Uytedehaage.  Meant to tell you, baby, but it slipped my mind.

Um, nope.

Instead of Emma, he’s looking forward to a long evening of nausea and Nomar.  He gets the sense that Nomar isn’t particularly thrilled with the prospect, either.

Kilgore emerges from the short hallway leading back to the bedroom, half dressed and walking the buttons of his shirt up from his stomach.  He’s reverted to Marine-on-shore-leave attire–a loud shirt and tough khaki cargo pants.   “The party’s in full swing already,” he declares happily.  “You coming out tonight, boss?  You and Miss Whiston?”

Kilgore steadfastly refuses to call her anything else, always Miss Whiston, always a little snide.  He finds endless amusement in Ray’s quote-unquote surveillance.

“Not tonight,” Ray says, shrugging.  He focuses hard on the data streaming across his terminal.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!  Ray, the women on Zeta Deck are already drunk and half naked.  You’ll never forgive yourself if you miss this.”

Rodriguez steps into the room from the same hallway, shakes his head.  “Emma will never forgive him if he doesn’t.  Leave him alone.”

Kilgore jerks his thumb at Rodriguez.  “Listen to him.  The voice of moral restraint.  If I wanted to control my normal human urges, I wouldn’t have let myself be born so beautiful.  God would strike me down–no, God should fry me with a lightning bolt if I didn’t show my gratitude by sharing myself with the world, buddy.  That’s in the Good Book.  Parable of the Talents.  Too whom much booty is given, much booty is required.”

“Are you going to make me call your mother, Sergeant?”

“Are you gonna make me kick your ass, Corporal?”

Ray waves them away, smiling. He should tell them about his meeting with Becker, about tomorrow, and about the fact that they’re going to be left out of the actual suspect apprehension.  He doesn’t.  It would just ruin their evening, and they deserve to celebrate.

 “Get out of here.  Have a good time, gentlemen.  I mean that.  Punch out for the night, file your time card, raise some hell.  There’s not much left for us to accomplish.”

Somewhere out on the Garden, a high-decibel sound system kicks in.  The walls start to vibrate with a shuddering, staccato rhythm and throbbing bass line that makes Ray’s stomach squirm.  “Go on.  Sounds like they’re starting without you.”

Kilgore, instead of wandering directly out the door, crosses the room and rummages through the desk drawer beneath his workstation.  After a few moments he produces a pair of secure comm devices, small units that plug into the ear with discreet vocal pickups–standard military issue.  He tosses one device to Rodriguez and waves the other for Ray. 

“We’ll be on Channel 12.  Call if you need us, but you’ll probably have to shout, okay?”  Kilgore is already shouting, just to be heard over the sound of the music emanating from the concourse.  He straps the antenna package to his belt where it will be hidden under his shirt and rolls his collar high up over the pickups so the unit is effectively invisible.  “Test.  Test.  Can you hear me, Rodriguez?”

“I’m four meters away.  Of course I can hear you.”

“Then go stand in the damned bedroom, moron.”

Not until they’re certain the equipment works do they shuffle out the door.  Ray goes back to work.

***

            By midnight, the music and the chatter of voices outside the door has, if anything, actually gotten louder.  Much louder.  Ray is certain that he’s gone decibel deaf.  Around ten, he scrounged a pair of ear plugs from Kilgore’s kit, but noticed almost immediately that they didn’t seem to help.  Even the act of putting together coherent thoughts seemed like shouting inside his own skull.  Everything was shouting and noise and that loose bowel feeling from reverberated percussion.  It’s almost enough to make him glad Emma cancelled their evening.

            Now he’s resorted to wearing the tac helmet again, taking advantage of its noise suppression capabilities.  Since he’s got it on, he’s also been playing with his dialogue utility, refining some of the bits that Nomar has so generously termed ham handed.  The rat is stretched out on the kitchen counter, plugged into the diagnostic server array, enduring Ray’s inevitable tweaks with a distinct lack of good humor.

            “So what’s up with you and the female user designated Emma Whiston?”  Nomar asks.

            “You’re asking me about my love life?”

            “It’s called dynamic data apprehension and analysis, Ray.  I’m designed to be curious.”

            “And here I thought you were just designed to be annoying and sarcastic and to eat garbage.”

            “That would make two of us.”  Nomar seems to think about what he’s just said.  “Except the part about eating garbage.  So what is going on there?  She has a very excited pheromone signature when you’re around.  Of course, yours isn’t exactly what I would call subdued in her presence.”

            “I’m not going to talk about this with you,” Ray says.

            “Of course not.  Why would you discuss it with me when you haven’t even made the effort to mention your obvious interest to her?”

            “That is a factually incorrect statement, Nomar.  I don’t take you with me everywhere, you know.  And what makes you so bloody certain I’m attracted to her in the first place?”

            “Cross analysis among other human sample sets in comparable states of excitation suggests a high state of sexual arousal.  I’d just like to confirm this impression.  For my files, you understand.”

            Ray flashes Nomar a moderately obscene gesture.  “You can put that in your files, Nomar.”

            “I mean my discrete files.  Not the ones that go on the general drone network.”   

            “Shut up!”

            “Okay.  I’m just asking.  If it bothers you so much, I’ll reach my own conclusions from available data.”  A very brief pause.  “Ray?”

            “What?”

            “Available data suggests that you and Emma Whiston have a pronounced and mutual sexual attraction.”

            “Thanks.”  He wonders if this passes as humor for the drone AI.  Ray says, “When I speak to you normally, outside this interface and outside the normal command vocabulary–like I’m talking to you now–do you understand what I’m saying?”

            “No.  This new code you’ve input, like Lawrence’s old code, is a verbal-to-binary translator.  I don’t have authority to access translation programs on my own.”

            “In other words, it only works when I initiate the dialogue utility.”

“Exactly.”

“Then how do you know what I want you to do?”

            “Because you modulate your vocal patterns to a higher volume, as though I’m deaf, which tells me you want me to do something specific.  The rest is inspired guesswork based on hand signals and vocal commands that have been hardcoded into my response logic tree.”

            “Inspired guesswork?”

            “Lawrence’s shorthand terminology for the sub-optimal input cue behavior expectation analysis and trigger mechanisms.”

            “But you could turn it on…”

            “If you give me access to that segment of my data core.”

            Ray thinks about it for a moment.  His understanding of the drone data core environment is less than profound.  “What would be the ramifications if I did that?”

            “The dialogue transform capability as Lawrence designed it is deeply imbedded in the dynamic apprehension logic.  Dynamic apprehension is, in turn, related to parameter driven task streams–what you might think of as personal initiative and individualized goal setting constructs.  You might see shifts in my behavior.  I might become a bit contentious when your commands conflicted with my own perception of mission value and/or risk acceptability.  There are other issues, but I’ll need some processing time to give you a detailed report.  Too many variables.”

            What can it hurt?

            Ray pops back into the tac helmet’s display and with Nomar’s expert knowledge of his own file structures manages to track down and eliminate the communication barriers.  He declines the opportunity to make the output functions also translation capable.  He doesn’t even want to imagination the trouble Nomar could spawn if allowed to talk back to people.  He doesn’t want to think about the types of things he might say to Emma.

            So, did you realize that human user Ray, who has been observed conducting highly secure transmissions with officers of the Criminal Investigations Unit of the EED, this same Ray develops a shift in blood flow patterns suggesting tumescence when in spatial proximity to human user designated Emma Whiston?

            That is to say, he frequently has erections when you’re around.  How does that make you feel?

            Nope.  Not a good idea.

            As a substitute, Ray and Nomar work out a clever and highly detailed system of visual response signals:  nodding the head means yes; shaking the head means no.  Ray removes his helmet and they test the communication pathways and response vectors in some detail, until he’s satisfied that Nomar actually understands most of what he hears.  Then Ray dons the gear again.

            “So you can really tell that Emma and I are…interested in one another.”

            “Two items of interest, Ray:  First, humans exhibiting signals indicative of sexual attraction display a fairly uniform set of behaviors and chemical emissions.  Correlating species applicable data and applying it to specific subsets is not a tremendous intuitive leap.  You could do this yourself if you applied even a modicum of logic to your encounters.  Second, it would be remiss of me to fail to mention that in early iterations of the project, Stabien Lawrence used to apply drone technology to his own sexual interest conundrums.  Seems he had trouble determining exactly what constituted female flirtation, short of actual nudity, you understand.  As a result, we are highly adept at reading and matching sexually oriented indicators.  Much of that original code remains intact.”

            “That’s not exactly playing by the rules.”

            “I’m not exactly constrained by ethical systems which require me to play by human social rules.”

            “It’s still sneaky.”  Which doesn’t make it any less clever, but Ray doesn’t say so.  The last thing Nomar seems to need is encouragement.

            Across the room, Nomar’s eyelids dilate, giving him a look of distinct concentration.  In Ray’s ear, he says, “You’ve got an encrypted comm coming in.”

            “What?”

            The next moment, the light on the comm unit begins to flash.  Ray stares at Nomar.  “How did you know that?”

            “There’s a faint electrical signal that precedes the message as network encryption codes link with the  remote units.”

            Unbelievable.

            Ray sheds the tac helmet and peers at the LCD on the comm.  He doesn’t recognize the sender’s id, and it’s just a jumble of digits like a general use machine.  For an instant, his heart leaps.  Emma!  Somehow she’s managed to elude her quasi-jailers and wants to meet him somewhere.

            By the way, about your brother…

            But more than likely it’s just Kilgore and Rodriguez checking in, feeling sorry for him, inviting him to the party one last time.

            Ray backs out of the applications he’s in and accesses the decryption software.  He punches in his key and is informed by the giddy, canned southerner that she doesn’t know who the comm is coming from (i.e. that it’s a general use comm as he’s already surmised) but that the encryption is light, barely above commercial level.

            When the connection is made, all he hears is breathing.  Rapid, shallow, with a tremble in the inhalations.

            “This is Marlowe,” he says sharply, straight into the unit’s pinpoint microphone.  Screw the secure headset.

            For another second or two, there’s only more breathing.  And Ray recognizes the sound–fear, tension.  Pre-dawn combat prep noise, he thinks.  The type of sound a nineteen year old private makes just before he hurtles over the dunes into the firing line of the enemy for the first time.  Ray snaps his head up, presses toward the comm as if he can hear better by leaning into it.

            He’s about to repeat himself, debating whether or not to toss in his rank this time, when the person on the other end speaks.  “Mr. Marlowe?  It’s Bobby Diggs.”

            His first reaction is to slump, relax.  It isn’t Emma.  The fear is not hers.  She’s okay.

            But on the heels of that is the recognition that it is Bobby Diggs, and it’s his breath that shudders across the line, his fear spreading into the room like ink poured into clear water.  If anything, that’s worse.

            “Is there a problem, Bobby?”

            A pause, and the sound of Diggs’ breathing becomes fainter, suggesting he’s stepped away from the comm.  But he’s back almost at once.  “Yes, sir.  There’s most definitely a problem.  Down here on Omicron.  You said I should call.”

            “What’s going on?”

            “I think you should come down here, sir.  Now.”

            “Bobby–”

            Diggs cuts him off.  “Now.  I don’t have time to talk to you like this.  I’m stuck in this miserable office where I can’t see.  I need to see, sir.  I have to know what they’ve done with the others.”

            “Who’s there?”  Ray demands.

            Another pause, and the screech of a chair pushed hurriedly across the deckplate, like someone standing up suddenly.  From a distance, Diggs says, “I don’t know what it is.  But they’re dead.  I think all of them are dead.  I’ve got to see if I can help.”

            A door, squealing open, then clicking shut.  Ray realizes after several seconds that he’s holding an empty line.  Diggs has gone.

            I think all of them are dead.

            Ray springs to his feet.  From the drawer of his desk, he pulls his remote comm, like the one Kilgore and Rodriguez are wearing, and his pistol.  It’s almost impossible to pop the magazine to assure himself it’s loaded and dial in the comm channel at the same time, but he manages it somehow.  He jams the speaker into his ear, pickups against his throat, stuffs the pistol in his waistband so he can transmit.  What he hears on the open channel is the throbbing, staccato wail of technopunk music and a tangled cacophony of voices while the signal modulates to suppress ambient sound.

            Kilgore:  “Yo!”

            Followed by Rodriguez, “I’m here.”

            Ray says, “Scramble on Code Bravo.”  It’s a message for both the recipients and their comm units.  As soon as he says it, the antenna package in his hand begins to vibrate as its internal microcomputer phases in its voice encryption.  This is a military comm, with military codes and descrambling protocols.  Dead air fills the transmission, and Ray barks out the standard series of Code Bravo authorization digits.  Every Marine knows them, which makes the scramble almost childishly simple, but it’s better than a straight open line where anyone who happened to be tuned to their broadcast channel could overhear.  At least this way, only other Marines might listen in.

            Kilgore and Rodriguez re-enter the stream with a double click as their units accept their code sequences.  There’s not as much background noise, which means they’ve moved to a less public area. 

            “What’s going on, boss?”  Kilgore is alert, his voice as tight as newly strung barbed wire.

            “Where are you?”

            “We’re on Zeta, amidships.  Right off Section Six-Three-Fiver.”

            They’re closer than he is.  “Look, proceed to Omicron.  Bobby Diggs has called in a situation.  Are you armed?”

            That stuns Kilgore.  He doesn’t seem to know what to say. 

            Rodriguez:  “We can be, sir.  Kilgore can access the dump on Omicron.”

            “Good.  The one nearest the lift, gentlemen.  I’ll meet you there.”  Ray thinks about telling them to be careful, but that would be silly.  They already know.  “Keep this line open until we rendezvous.”

            “Roger that,” Kilgore fires back.

            Then they’re running, and Ray can hear them as they shove through a crowd, eliciting curses and sharp cries. 

            Ray looks at Nomar.  “Go get Becker.  Get him down to Omicron.”

            Nomar nods.  He detaches the data cable from his output port and vaults from counter to floor.  A moment later, they’re through the door, on the concourse crowded with party-light shadows and the dim form of revelers, sprinting in opposite directions.

<– Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 –>

Filed under: A Vessel for Offering