Inquisitor (2 page)

Light flickered for an instant in the darkness, illuminating the dust-filled air; then a crackle of noise burst across the room. Behind Angel, the wall exploded with a terrible tearing sound, spraying her with fragments of plascrete.

A roaring filled her ears, and she scrambled away, shards digging into her hands.

Where was it?

Searing pain exploded in her side, and she was spun around, as if hit by a sledgehammer. Her hand-cannon dropped from suddenly numb fingers. She collapsed face first into the dust and debris as her legs folded under her.

A strong grip grasped her and threw her onto her back. A red-haired woman sat on her hips and clamped one hand around her throat. Angel clawed and pried, nails digging into skin, but it was no use.

The Genevolve discard punched her in the side, and agony shot through Angel. Warmth oozed down and soaked her shirt. She’d been shot, she realized. That was what had spun her around.

The woman looked calm, serene even. She shifted her weight and brought her knee close to Angel’s shoulder. Then, with irresistible force, she extended Angel’s arm and jerked it down across her leg.

Angel screamed as her elbow snapped. Her breath was shallow, rapid.

Her arm dropped, flaccid and lifeless, and fresh waves of agony rolled through her. A muzzle appeared in front of her.

Angel looked into the woman’s dead eyes, then closed her own.

There was a shot, and the pressure on her throat eased. Then another crack. A ragged thump sounded next to her.

She opened her eyes to see the woman lying next to her; half of her head was missing. She could see bits of it sprayed across the dust-covered floor.

Angel half laughed, half snorted. She could feel darkness closing in. Footsteps clumped, getting louder. A shadow came toward her.

“Mikal?” Angel said.

“No, it’s Viktor.”

Angel swallowed. “What took you so long?”

Chapter 1

Six months later

Persephone had been settled two hundred years ago, a few years after a haphazard series of terraforming projects finally brought the planet’s atmosphere to approximately breathable, and the venture capitalist company’s sampling team confirmed there were no nasty biological organisms hazardous to humans. Cargo vessels had delivered a few million tons of equipment and raw materials into a low orbit—packed into disposable drop ships, which then tracked a blazing descent to the planet’s surface. Not long after, the first human colonists arrived.

Angel Xia hunched her shoulders against the biting wind, hands stuffed in her jacket pockets. She stood on the grassy bank of a river, and below her, in the mud close to the water’s edge, was the pale corpse of a headless, handless, and footless man. Three Inquisitors leaned over the body.

Viktor, in a long gray coat that stretched to his ankles, gestured to the man next to him and uttered a few words, but they were snatched away by the wind before they reached Angel’s ears. The forensics investigator shook his head, and his young assistant backed away a few steps, turned, and vomited up his breakfast. The other two laughed at the poor man then went back to discussing the corpse. Angel brought up the assistant’s file and saw it was only his fourth call out. They didn’t see many murders on Persephone.

On this planet, as with most others, homicide was almost unheard of.

Almost.

She glanced around then shifted position a few meters down the bank, taking care to examine the grass at her feet and her surroundings for any evidence that might have been missed. As Inquisitors, they were only allowed to scrutinize the body after the evidence team and the medical team had done their work. They must have taken the man’s head for processing already. She sniffed the air; it was clean and fresh, as it had been since they’d arrived. The water lapped at the mud, noticeably closer to the corpse than when she had arrived. In another hour the tidal forces from the planet’s oversized moon would ensure the body was submerged.

Either side of her stood two Law Enforcement Proxies, their metal-bright bodies and air of inhumanity enough to keep the population passing by on their way to work, and thus from contaminating the crime scene. Indeed, she noted people averting their eyes and scurrying along, picking up their pace. They weren’t too comfortable around LEPs, and ever since they’d been rolled out, the proxies had been referred to as “lepers”. Unless she missed her guess, these were Civilian Protectors ™ Model 45/B, Intellect Quotient 0.64, which made them about as intelligent as the average eight-year-old. The two-meter-tall proxies were commonplace, walking around on four legs, armaments hidden under metal skin, their advanced intelligence only too eager to assist a citizen in trouble. Not quite a person, but almost as good, as the corporate advertising told the docile citizens.

She ran a process through her implants, accessing the open case file. There, logged into evidence three minutes ago, a head, neatly sliced and cauterized. She would have liked to have seen its position before it was removed, but the virtual scan of the crime scene would have to do.

She touched her hand-cannon for reassurance and scratched behind her ear. Something wasn’t quite right. Pressure built behind her eyes, familiar yet unwelcome.

The gun attracted attention when she was out in public, but not enough to make her change to a shoulder holster like the other Inquisitors. They thought looking as innocuous as possible helped them with their work, while she was of the minority opinion that actually being good at your job was more of an advantage. Let them have their theories; they all knew who had the best record.

She looked out over the green water as Viktor squelched his way across the mud toward her. He bounded up the slope, breathing lightly.

“What are we going to call this one, Angel?” he asked. “The Case of the Armless Man?” He laughed softly at his own wit as Angel grimaced and shook her head.

“He has arms,” she said. “At least above the wrists.”

“Thanks for pointing that out. Could come in handy.”

She ignored him. “The case hasn’t been assigned a code yet.” Angel shook her head and brushed a stray strand of hair out of her face as a particularly strong gust blew around them. “What does… er…”

“Andrews?” offered Viktor.

“Yes, what does Andrews say? Can he give us anything yet?”

“All this time working with him, and you still can’t remember his name.”

“Not enough room to remember everything. I’ve got to save space for the important stuff.”

“Can’t argue with that, though names are kind of important.”

“Well, if he turns up as a murder victim, I promise you I’ll remember his name.”

Viktor avoided her eyes, busying himself with his notes.

Angel waited patiently, saying nothing. He still wasn’t used to her. It would be a shame if that became a problem. The man had the makings of a good Inquisitor. Not great, but good. First in his class, excellent scores in all aptitude tests, but especially with conceptual reasoning, which she considered worth all the others put together. He’d graduated fresh out of the academy and straight into murders, not unheard of but certainly uncommon. She would have bet someone had pulled strings for him. Maybe in another year or two he would settle down.

“Ah, not much,” began Viktor after realizing she wasn’t going to speak. “Body dumped here at around 3:00 a.m. Killed between 2:00 and 2:30 a.m. Hands and feet removed prior to death. Looks like another corporate killing. He was a scientist of some sort, according to planetary records.”

Corporate murders were usually to blame for the bodies that turned up, and usually espionage related. It was a cutthroat universe—as more than one turncoat had found out. Literally.

“Of what sort?”

“The sort that works in a lab.” He paused as he took in her expression, then rolled his eyes. “I’ll get right on it.” He shifted his feet. “Anything else we need to do here? I don’t suppose you want to examine the body?” He looked at the muddy footprints he had left on the grass.

“Not particularly. Meet you back at the office. And when I get there, I want to know everything about him. Everything. Have it ready, please.”

With a nod, Viktor turned and waved at Andrews, who was showing his assistant something to do with a bruise on one of the handless arms. Andrews waved back and started gathering his equipment.

“I can’t wait to close this case so we can get the hell off this planet,” Viktor said.

Angel looked around at the new homes, suburbs, and gardens carved from the scrub. Hopeful families, immigrant entrepreneurs, criminals, all looking for a fresh start. Rows of saplings lined the road behind them, then across the river to the opposite bank. On the other side, sparkling apartment buildings followed the water’s edge, no doubt filled with employees of the corporation that owned most of this world, and filled with the many luxuries civilization had to offer.

She knew what Viktor saw when he looked around: corporate influence. While she saw opportunity.

“Some people would like it here,” Angel replied curtly. Her, for one. The conditions in the city were a far cry from her childhood, for the better. Once, many years ago, she’d had plans to settle down in a city not unlike this one. Her thoughts turned to all she’d lost, all she’d left behind. And the memory of Mikal’s voice sliced through her:
We can’t always get what we want.

I wanted children and couldn’t ha—
Angel clamped down hard on this thought.

“They can have it, then.” Viktor sniffed the clean air and made a show of wrinkling his nose at an imaginary bad odor. “Too sterile for me. How come you didn’t settle down somewhere nice like this, then, with all your connections and your social status? You’ve recovered from your injuries now. You could retire on a pension—”

“I’m an idiot,” Angel replied. And she’d severed her House connections in all but name.

Viktor snorted with amusement. “Far from it. Anyway, nothing happens on planets like these.”

“Five murders in six weeks is nothing happening?”

Viktor shrugged. “You know what I mean. Corporate murders. Bribery. Greed. Corruption. Killing people for a few credits so they can imagine they’re ahead of others on the corporate ladder.” He snorted his contempt.

They had arrived four weeks ago, knowing nothing about Persephone except what their implants pulled on the trip. Good information, but still… not the same as being there, feeling the planet, the people, the hum.

“People murder for more than credits, especially the corporates. Anyway…” She pulled her gaze away from the apartments across the river and met his eye. “We’ll be here as long as it takes, and then somewhere else as long as it takes. They should have called us in earlier, amateurs.”

“Yeah, well.” He cleared his throat. “This guy’s much the same as the others. No useful evidence found so far.”

“Apart from the hands and feet.”

“Er, yeah. Very organized. Methodical. Neither the man’s clothes nor his body showed signs of a struggle. The bruise is days old. Again, there really isn’t much to go on.” He looked at Angel expectantly.

“Not much we can do until everything’s analyzed, then. Get to the office and collate information on the victim. Though it does look like another corporate retirement.”

Viktor strode briskly away toward the nearest metro station, shoes trailing globs of mud.

Angel had her implants bring up details of the other death in their system today. Another corporate type: a man. Harry Smith, electrocuted in his kitchen by his food dispenser, by all the evidence. The death tugged at her awareness. She could sense it was different—something was off with it. Of course, the dispenser’s circuits had been tampered with—there was no other explanation. But her superiors already had it tagged as a domestic accident. The file was marked as closed, barely hours after the man’s body had been discovered by his wife.

Someone wanted it out of the way as quickly as possible. A neat little accidental death, wrapped up nice and tidy. Nothing to see here.

And that worried her.

Angel waited until the forensics investigator had packed his kit and left, also heading toward the metro, before she walked up and down the grass along the bank. The assistant was still standing next to the body. Apparently, the punishment for being lowest in the hierarchy was waiting with the corpse until the second evidence team came to pick it up.

The other four murders had all occurred at least ten klicks from here. She called up a map and plotted their locations. Four red dots blinked rapidly, loosely congregated in a circle two klicks across. This murder, though it appeared similar, was definitely outside the pattern. And that could mean any number of things.

She walked fifty meters either side of the body and back again. Shading her eyes from the rising sun, she peered into the water. It was shallow ten meters out into the river, and she could still see the bottom. The mud under the water was smooth: no footprints, no drag marks.

The corpse had been dropped from the air.

She tasked her implants to catalogue air traffic over the entire night, and in moments she had a list. Not a single vehicle had flown over the corpse’s location. She’d wager the records had been tampered with. Which meant someone inside law enforcement was involved.

“Damn it,” she exclaimed under her breath. Not more bloody corruption, as if there wasn’t enough trouble to deal with…

Chapter 2

Angel sat at her low desk, sipping on something that was supposed to be tea but definitely wasn’t. Still, it was hot and sweet and good. A half-eaten purple nut-filled pastry sat on a plate, a locally grown delicacy. She took another bite and licked her fingers.

The walls of her office were covered in screens. They all displayed information related to the case Viktor still referred to as “The Handyman Case”, much to her annoyance. It had only been a few hours since he’d coined the name, but it grated on her.

She reviewed the files on the past four murders, three men and one woman, each with their hands removed. She sat back in her chair, booted feet on the desk, relaying directives to her implants, which displayed the information she was after on the screens in front of her. In the background, she had subroutines searching for patterns, as well as anything out of the ordinary. But this looked to be another corporate murder, one Viktor could take the lead on.