Counting Heads (35 page)

“House, is there anyone at home?”

No, there isn’t, officer
.

“Who resides there?”

“No one.”

The scouts, meanwhile, linked up to create a forensics carpet that skittered across the floor and wall surfaces, testing, tasting, sounding, collecting. Pictures and data began streaming to the GOV as the scouts methodically mapped and inspected each room, crawling into cupboards and drawers, behind and under furniture. Tagged samples of fibers, soil, and other debris were relayed back to the cart for detailed analysis.

The scouts found incinerated bits of flying mechs that drew the officers’ attention, as did ample confirmation of a recent firefight. The unknown warbeitor in the main room had the good sense to remain perfectly still during the bug frisk. Fred studied the mech from all scout angles. It was a piece of work: four multijointed legs—like wide-diameter intake hose—attached to a powerful-looking trunk. About the size of a Great Dane dog, but without a head or tail. Its trunk and legs were covered with laser-absorbing velvet.

Costa studied it over Fred’s shoulder. “None of the other Cabinets was so well guarded,” she said.

The rectangular object near the warbeitor turned out to be a procedure cart of the sort used in laboratories and medical facilities. It was locked, and the scouts couldn’t look inside.

Fred said, “SFR 2131 Line Drive, I am placing you under arrest.”

Acknowledged
, said the house.
On what charge?

“A weapon zone violation. You will immediately send the weapon that’s in your main ground-floor room outside to stand on the porch.”

To Fred’s surprise, the warbeitor ambled out of the parlor and through the hall to the front door. It was more cat than doglike in its movements. The forensics carpet opened a path for it. It stepped around the scout cart and stopped on the porch.

“Unidentified mech on the SFR 2131 Line Drive porch,” Fred said, “ID yourself.”

Libby said,
It’s talking directly to Nameless One. It says it recognizes our authority over its actions
.

“Good,” Fred said. “Order it to stand down.”

The quadrupedal thing on the porch seemed to slump. Fred and Costa exchanged a glance. That easy? Fred said, “Now order it to
lock
itself down, and forward me the only reactivation key.”

This took longer to accomplish. While they waited, Costa studied the forensics summaries coming from the scout cart. But Fred looked at news digests about the Starke assassination until Marcus asked him if he needed a confidential huddle.

No, Marcus, thank you
, he said.

“Hello?” Costa said, pointing to a line of text on an inventory report. The scouts had found a taggant in the digester dross. “And look here,” she said to Fred, “zoo flakes.”

“Zoo flakes?”

“Well, kinda like zoo flakes. We’re not sure what they are yet, but they have DNA sequencers for a human genome. What do you suppose they do at this Sitrun Foundation?”

Libby said,
Commander, you may accept the key
. Fred swiped the console, and Libby continued.
Subject warbeitor is verified in lockdown mode. You possess the only reactivation key
.

Fred scrutinized his open palm dubiously and then the motionless mech on the porch.

“Well, Londenstane,” Costa said, “shall we pick up our rogue?”

Fred shook his head and signaled for a private suit-to-suit link. Costa gave him a doubtful look but swiveled a little in her seat to touch his leg with her knee.
Yes? Something on your mind?

I thought you’d want to know there’s no Cabinet rogue in there
.

She pressed his leg a little harder.
Say again?

We were brought here under false pretenses, Inspector. Your zoo flakes will most likely check out as containing sequencers for Starke’s DNA. It’s meant to be a big red
“
X marks the spot
.”

I don’t understand, Londenstane. Explain
.

Cabinet, or someone, has lured us here to retrieve the Starke daughter’s head
.

Costa’s knee broke contact for a moment, then returned.
How do you know this?

Two and two
, he replied.

You’re joking, right? Russes have a sense of humor
. When he didn’t say anything, she asked,
Why are you telling me all this in private?

Because there’s a rat in the game somewhere
.
A big rat
.

She gave him a big, mystified look.

Nicholas, the Applied People mentar, who had managed to keep its peace throughout the operation thus far, finally spoke up,
Commander, is there a problem?

Fred and Costa broke contact. “No, Nick, no problem,” Fred said. “Libby, call back your scouts except for eyes and ears. And Michaelmas,” he said, craning around to see the jerry, “I want you to wrap that scary fecker on the porch with packing foam. The sooner it’s crated and on its way to the barn, the better.”

“Yessir,” the jerry said. He was standing at the carbine cabinet and handing Costa a Messers 25/750 over-and-under assault weapon.

Fred accepted one from him as well, though after weighing it in his hand, he said, “You know what, Michaelmas? I changed my mind. I want you to stay here and cover us with the megawatter. If that thing on the porch so much as shivers, you blast it. Understood?”

“Yessir,” the jerry said and took Fred’s place at the controls. The car’s large forward cannon started to hum, and Fred turned to Costa. She seemed preoccupied, for once unsure of herself.

“Coming or staying?” he asked her matter-of-factly. She gave him a pained look, then made up her mind. She grabbed an extra canister of packing foam and her carbine and exited the GOV with Fred.

Up close, the scary fecker on the porch was even scarier. It was a leggy thing, almost to Fred’s chest. Even motionless, it seemed to bristle with bad intent. There were weapons ports all up and down its outer legs. Otherwise, its appendages and ports were concealed by its shaggy coat of plasfoil velvet.
To my brothers cloned
, he told himself,
when mentars and mechs get married, they make baby warbeitors
.

While Michaelmas covered him with the GOV’s big gun, Fred and Costa sprayed the warbeitor with the foam. It went on like green whipped cream and set up fast. When it cured, it would have a tensile strength of many tons, and the warbeitor would be completely immobilized, even if it decided it wasn’t locked down after all.

The cart, meanwhile, finished reloading the scouts, and Costa sent it back to its tender. She followed Fred to the door. “Hey, Tuggers,” Fred said, “how do things look to you guys?”

Nothing moving in there, Commander
, Veronica replied from the van.

Fred and Costa raised their carbines and braced themselves to go in. From her expression it was clear that the inspector had a lot on her mind. She frowned at Fred and said, “A day’s payfer says you’re wrong.”

Alert! was the perfect drug. It was fast-acting and brought one to a peak of total mental acuity without side effects like tremors or logorrhea. It came in precise doses, from four to twelve hours, and when it wore off, it did so all at once, without a hangover.

Samson washed down the Alert! with a sip of ’Lyte and continued his tale.

MELINA POST’S “ACCIDENT” occurred during an Around the Coyote theater performance that she attended with her husband, Darwin. Midway through delivering a comic soliloquy, one of the actors stopped and clutched his stomach. His waistline swelled ominously, but the audience took it as part of the act, at least until the actor shrieked. Then his bulging abdomen ruptured, and there was a mad rush for the exits. Too late, the building was already surrounded by bloomjumpers.

The Posts, along with audience, cast, and crew, were hauled off to Provo, Utah, and interred in the quarantine block of the Homeland Command holding facility, the same place I had visited several years earlier. Most guests never left quarantine alive, but since my own release, new detainees were given an option. You could stay and live a relatively comfortable life of protective quarantine, or you could leave—after being seared.

Melina and Darwin were permitted to occupy the same cell suite, and it looked as though they were settling in for the long haul—or until their sleepers woke up and expressed themselves. But after a few months of confinement, Melina lapsed into a state of profound depression, and after much brooding and prayer, she opted to be seared and released. Darwin chose to remain. They parted amicably.

Melina’s first couple of years adjusting to the life of a stinker were typically wretched. But then, three years into her new life, she met a dashing man who professed to love her so much he didn’t care about her infelicitous fetor. Naturally, she didn’t believe him because he was poor. But that wasn’t going to prevent her from having a good time. So they traveled together and stayed at posh hotels and tony resorts and took in shows and tours and the whole nine yards. She paid for everything, plus the surcharge stinkers always paid. She didn’t care. She had a beautiful man on her arm who composed sonnets to her.

She awoke one morning, and Mr. Sonnet was gone. She had known his departure was inevitable, but she’d thought he’d make a classier getaway. None of his things seemed to be missing from their St. Croix hotel room, but she could tell he’d flown. All in all, it had been an enjoyable fling.

Next to the bathroom sink he had left the tiny, perfect, scalloped, pink shell she had found on the beach and given to him to remember her by. The fact that he hadn’t taken it upset her more than his departure.

A little while later, when she ordered down for breakfast, the hotel manager asked if he could come up. There were urgent matters to discuss. As though reading from a bad script, he told her that her account was overdrawn. She knew that that wasn’t possible, and while he waited in her room, she called her broker at the Reed Sisters Wealth Management Services in New York, who handled the lion’s share of her and Darwin’s assets. Her broker hemmed and hawed but finally admitted that Melina’s many accounts had been tampered with the day before. Upset but not yet panicked, Melina placed calls to her other banks and brokerages. Little by little, the picture became clear. Mr. Sonnet had taken advantage of his physical proximity to her valet. He’d been very thorough; she was cleaned out. She and Darwin were broke.

Upon hearing this, the manager of the Five Palms Hotel let her know that he’d only tolerated her in his establishment because of his generous nature. He loudly bemoaned his suite, which was ruined by her unchristian odor, and he threatened to call the police.

Melina had to borrow credit from friends to tube back home. The Homeland Command confiscated her valet to assess its role in the theft. What small assets she still had were tied up in the investigation. She had to borrow in order to live modestly for a while in a rented apartment in an unfashionable RT. She started a number of lawsuits against the Reed Sisters and her other financial managers, but the courts ruled that the financial institutions be held harmless. The generosity of her friends had limits and strings. The authorities turned up no leads on Mr. Sonnet or her former wealth. They returned her valet in a hundred pieces. She considered selling it for recycling credits, but some intuition told her to hang on to it.

Melina’s slide into poverty took only weeks. She lost her apartment and was forced to move into a city-subsidized women’s dormitory.

In the three years since her and Darwin’s accident, she had fallen from a penthouse to a barracks, where she could claim only a cot, a chair, and a locker. When she thought she could fall no further, she learned otherwise. The other women in the dormitory reviled her for her odor and petitioned the management to evict her. In an uneasy compromise, management moved her into a supply closet and ruled that her door must be kept shut.

YOU ARE RIGHT, Justine. This is far more than Melina Post could have told me in five minutes. We had more time than that, for her gentleman caller was late in arriving. As we stood at my door, we made way for the arbeitors to ferry the baked shark past us, its mouth agape with butter squash, to her apartment. And we made way again when my arbeitors returned with empty servos. But as the minutes accumulated, and her special guest still hadn’t come or called, she was sure it was business that kept him. She didn’t call him, she said, because she didn’t want to bother him. She tried to mask her growing anxiety by continuing her story. I invited her back in, to sit down and have something to drink, but she was content to stand outside my door. I must say, her story was stirring my own pot of memories. The way she was treated enraged me, and I wished I could have been present to help her in her time of need. If only she had knocked on my door back then instead of waiting so many years.

So, there she was, my mistreated friend, lying on her dormitory cot next to shelves of cleaning solvents, drifting into the type of despair I knew only too well, when an extraordinary event occurred.

Across the Atlantic, Wanda Wieczorek, our Saint Wanda, who you may have heard of, had her little run-in with the furniture floor manager at Daud’s in London. She’d only wanted for her mum to sit on the silk couch; she didn’t intend to sit on it herself, until the floor manager showed up with his attitude and his troop of uniformed jerrys. She sent her mum down to the food court to wait for her, then drew her simcaster from her purse. This is a ten-thousand-euro item of furniture, the manager told her. We simply cannot permit you to ruin it with your unfortunate malodorous condition.

Fine, Wanda said, I’ll take it with me.

She took the whole floor, actually, if you include the smoke and water damage. Her suicide made international headlines. Suddenly, hundreds of seared men and women were bursting into flame everywhere. On buses, in theaters, on rush-hour pedways, in offices of big transnationals—wherever they could scare up a crowd. The greasy, roasted-pork smell of charred human flesh pervaded our cities and awoke the public conscience to our plight.

The Homeland Command had performed searing in the name of public security, and the public had condoned its policy in silence. Now the public started asking questions. Why were we punishing the
victims
of NASTIE attacks? Why did we have to
mutilate
them? The civil authorities, meanwhile, were wondering what could have possessed the HomCom to create so many walking firebombs.

Melina Post started receiving a procession of smelly visitors to her supply closet. She was known as a former aff who still owned memberships at exclusive spas and clubs and other places where the seared dearly wanted to stage their wiener roasts. But Melina, always the good citizen, refused to participate (though she admitted to entertaining some middle-of-the-night fantasies of incinerating the bitches in her dormitory while they slept).

The protests went on without her and eventually shamed the UD Parliament to declare a ban on human searing. New, nonmutilating methods of cell-sifting were introduced. The doors to the isolation cells in Utah and elsewhere were flung open, and the quarantined were safely douched and released to rejoin society (alas, too late for Darwin Post who had recently expressed into a cloud of monarch butterflies).

With the searing ban in force, the protests abruptly ceased. But soon a startling fact was uncovered. There was solid evidence that the HomCom’s “new” nonmutilating cell-sifting methods were not so new after all. They had been available to the Command for years, even in 2092 when I made my own excursion to the Utah cop shop.

The revelation that the HomCom had been searing people for years while more humane methods were available was too much to bear, and the remaining seared redoubled their demonstrations. Even Melina Post was angry, if only for the suffering of her dear Darwin. Alone in her cot, she drew up a list of all the people who deserved to broil by her hand. At the top of her list was Mr. Sonnet, if only she could locate him. Trailing close behind was that damned hotel manager in St. Croix. She thought she would tube down there and sit in one of his big rattan chairs in the lobby until he strolled by. But the winner of Melina’s vengeance lottery turned out to be her wealth managers, the Reed Sisters.

The Reed Sisters in whose trust she had placed her fortune. Their offices were only a pedway away.

Melina tried to contact a number of the seared who had recently contacted her, but they were all already toasted, except for one woman. Melina met her in a coffee shop and the woman confided that she planned to take her life on a shopping arcade over Broadway and asked Melina to join her. Melina told her she had a better idea. She had made an appointment with her former broker on the 350th level of the OXO Tower.

The following day, the two women prepared themselves in the dormitory bathroom. They applied three coats of skin mastic, donned business clothes, and soaked themselves with cologne.

Because of newly minted accommodation laws, and because Melina had an appointment, the OXO Tower security admitted them. Since they couldn’t go through the scanway, they were thoroughly frisked and sniffed. The search turned up a laser penknife and pocket simcaster, but since citizens had a constitutional right to such items, they were not confiscated. However, security
did
inform the Reed Sisters office of their arrival, and when the two coconspirators got off on the 350th level, the brokerage doors were locked against them, and two uniformed jerrys were waiting to escort them back down to the lobby.

Frustrated, the two women rode down in the elevator, bracketed by the jerrys. Melina was trying to take their failure in stride, but her friend wasn’t handling it so well. The woman was rabid. She huffed and puffed. To make matters worse, the jerrys failed to convert the elevator to express status, so it stopped every few floors to take on or let off passengers. At one stop, two brash young men got on, and one of them pinched his nose and said to the other, “Pee-yoo!”

It was a costly remark, for it caused Melina’s friend to snap. She straightened up and, staring Melina in the eye, bellowed, “Right here! Right now!” Melina swallowed hard. In her mind she was already booking fare to the Five Palms in St. Croix. So she was relieved when she reached into her handbag for the simcaster, and found a jerry hand in there already confiscating it.

Her friend was a little quicker on the draw. She had her laser penknife out and lit. She tried cutting her own throat with it, but the other jerry grabbed her arm. She kicked and clawed like a madwoman. She lashed out with her tiny weapon and would have cut the jerry but for his armored suit. She turned it on herself, but only managed to burn superficial gashes in her arm before he removed it from her.

This didn’t stop the woman. By now the other passengers were pressed against the door. The woman swung her cut arm at them, attempting to anoint them with her sizzling blood. Melina’s own jerry cuffed Melina’s hands behind her with plastic shackles. She was too intimidated even to think of resisting. Finally, the elevator stopped, the doors opened, and the passengers piled out. In a sudden move, Melina’s friend squirmed out of her captor’s hold and tried to flee the elevator. In trying to catch her, the jerry clumsily shoved her against the elevator wall where she struck her forehead.

The blow was enough to stun her. She stood quietly while the jerry cuffed her, but when he turned her around, it was apparent to Melina that mortal damage had been done. The woman’s forehead was swollen with a thick, steamy bulge the size of an egg. The jerry, calling for medical assistance, carried her from the elevator. She fought all the way, viciously banging her own head against the wall, against the door frame, against the jerry’s armored chest. The lump grew to the size of an orange. Still she struggled, and the other jerry let go of Melina in order to help.

Melina stood alone, numb, in the elevator, not sure what to do. The circulation in her wrists was cut off. When she noticed her simcaster on the floor next to her feet, she knelt down to retrieve it. She managed to get ahold of the simcaster, but there was no way she could raise it to her head. So she pressed it against her buttocks and said—without much conviction—“Right here, right now.”

Her finger resting lightly on the button, she watched her friend’s lingering suicide in the corridor. The lump had swollen until the skin could no longer contain it, and it burst in a gout of flames. The fire foggers went off, filling the corridor with a cloud of fire suppressant. But suppressant couldn’t quench seared flesh, and Melina heard the woman’s skin crackling as the fire spread across her scalp and down her throat. It was the worst kind of self-immolation. The seared always tried to kill themselves quickly, as Saint Wanda had, from the brain outward. But this poor soul was burning from the outside in, as her incendiary cells killed those underlying them in a chain reaction from skin to muscle to viscera.

Melina lowered her simcaster. Irradiating her own buttocks would have a similar effect, killing her from the bottom up and providing her plenty of time to regret what she had done. So, she left the car and tried to help her friend. She found her in the fog propped up against the wall. The jerrys had foolishly wrapped the woman in a fire blanket, which only increased her core temperature like an oven. It should have killed her, but only stoked her agony.