The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (197 page)

Detective Sergeant Marhol and probationary detective Lucius Lee were waiting for them by the processing desk.

“Quite an ordeal,” Jim said to Lucius as the five of them took the elevator up to the fifteenth floor where the detectives had their offices.

“I told him the stakeout was good experience.” Marhol laughed callously, and gave Lucius a hard slap between his shoulder blades. He was overweight, with a belly that rolled over his belt. His clothes were expensive.

A brief expression of contempt flickered over the probationary detective’s face as he rocked forward under the impact. “Your man was good,” he said. “I checked with Mercedes about the FX 3000p. They refused to believe the security system could be broken so quickly. They said it must be an insurance scam by the owner.”

“Did you check with Ford about battery safety on the Feisha?” Marhol laughed again.

Gwyneth imagined she would get very tired of that laugh very quickly.

The precinct detective teams shared identical offices along a central corridor, like glass boxes lined up in a row. It was the end of the day shift, with everyone wrapping up. Quite a few detectives were lingering in the corridor, taking a look at the big-shot navy team as they went down to one of the secure conference rooms at the far end. A couple of people greeted “car-shock Lucius” with grins and cheers. The young probationary detective stood up to it with tight smiles.

“So what exactly have you got for us?” Tarlo asked once they were settled in the conference room. Its tall window blinds were closed and shielded, which Gwyneth resented; she’d never seen night on Illuminatus before.

“The Merc snatcher, he fits your man perfectly,” Marhol said.

A holographic portal projected an image of the man in the underground parking garage. It was taken from Lucius’s retinal inserts, showing Beard as he approached the Ford Feisha. Various file comparisons flipped up beside it.

“Looks like him,” Gwyneth conceded.

“Anybody local capable of pulling this kind of stunt?” Tarlo asked.

“One or two,” Marhol said. “Maybe. As Lucius says, the Mercedes would be hard to crack.”

“None of the local mechanics match the physical profile,” Lucius said.

“That’s your man, all right.”

“Thank you. From now on this is a priority navy case.” Tarlo gave the conference room’s array the file on Beard’s truck. “Please load this into your city traffic management arrays. I want any vehicle even approximating this on your roads to be pulled over and searched by patrol officers.”

“Wow, big overtime,” Marhol said with a smirk. “The navy gonna pay us for this?”

Tarlo grinned. “The navy will have anyone who screws up on this placed into suspension for a hundred years. You want to smartmouth me again, or do you want to survive the next twenty-four hours?”

“Hey, fuck you, hotshot. We cracked this case for you, the least you can do is show a little gratitude around here.”

“I am showing a very small amount of gratitude. We gave you this alert for Robin Beard weeks ago, and you sent out one rookie on a stakeout that matched his operation profile perfectly? And by the way, like the suit. Cost a lot, did it? Had your taxes audited lately, have you? It can be a real bitch when central treasury pulls your file. Happened to an old friend of mine, went on for years when those accountant programs started tapeworming his finance records. He went into early rejuvenation from the stress.”

“You think threatening me is gonna get things done around here?”

“I’m not threatening you, pal, I’m asking for your cooperation. So far I’ve been asking nicely.”

“What exactly are you asking for?” Lucius asked.

“This informant of yours. I want to speak to him now.”

“He doesn’t keep office hours, you know,” Marhol said. “It takes a while to set up a meeting.”

“It used to,” Gwyneth said. “Today, it becomes quick. We either tag his unisphere address with a location fix and send an armed arrest team in to wherever the bleep comes from, or we raid his home with even more firepower, or we meet up in the bar of his choice.”

“We can round up as many Stuhawks as we can find,” Jim Nwan suggested. “Shove them into neurolock interrogation, maybe a memory read, and extract Beard’s whereabouts that way.”

Tarlo nodded appreciatively. “I like that one. That’s got a high probability of success.”

“You can’t lift an entire fucking gang,” Marhol protested.

“Why not?” Tarlo inquired artlessly.

“Every other gang in the city would declare war on the police,” Lucius said. “Right now, with everyone all het up over the navy ships and Hell’s Gateway, we don’t need any more unrest.”

Gwyneth shrugged. “Not our problem.”

“Okay okay,” Marhol said grudgingly. “My guy, he likes to drink at the Illucid bar on Northgate.”

“Thank you.” Tarlo stood up. “Let’s go. I want to be talking to Robin Beard within twenty-four hours.”

Mellanie had rented a tiny apartment in a monolith forty-story block on Royal Avenue, not a kilometer from the Logrosan embankment. It was a lot darker than the one she’d left behind on Venice Beach; her one window looked away from the river and into the city, but the air-conditioning worked, which clinched the deal as far as she was concerned. The humidity in Tridelta was unbelievable.

As the sun went down she had the wall screen access the Michelangelo show while she got ready for the evening. He had Senators Valetta Halgarth and Oliver Tam in the studio, asking them what had happened to the attack on Hell’s Gateway. Even used to dealing with the expert evasiveness of professional politicians, Mellanie was impressed by the varied and inventive ways the senators didn’t answer the question.

She showered to rinse away the clamminess of a day spent out on Tridelta’s streets. Once she’d toweled down she put on a simple white cotton halter, over which she wore a sleeveless micro-sweater of fluffy white wool in a loose cobweb weave that was only slightly bigger than the halter so she could show off lean lines of abdominal muscle and the ruby-spark stud in her navel. She wriggled into a white miniskirt; no tights—she’d spent half an hour massaging oil into her legs, giving her skin an arresting sheen. None of the clothes had a designer label; there wasn’t even a copy of anything fashionable, which was about all Tridelta’s stores sold in their voracious quest for the tourist credit tattoo. All she had bought in town were some long costume jewelry necklaces of wooden beads and lavender-tinted crystalline shells that she looped around her neck.

“But why would the navy embargo any information on the Hell’s Gateway strike?” Michelangelo asked reasonably. “I’m sure the Prime aliens know if we’ve attacked them or not. Surely the only logical conclusion is that our ships have failed and the Executive is trying to avoid a panic.”

Mellanie half turned for the answer.

“Our intelligence-gathering capability must remain veiled for obvious reasons,” Oliver Tam replied smoothly. “I’m sure we do have the ability to see if their wormholes at the Lost23 are open or not. If so, that gives us a distinct military advantage. The navy cannot be expected to expose our assets simply to make the media happy. We will all know beyond any doubt just as soon as the starships fly into communications range. Is it possible, Michelangelo, that you simply cannot stand not knowing? Has the media become too arrogant in its assumption that all secrets must be violated to satisfy your lust for ratings, no matter what cost to us as a species?”

“Was that a joke?” Michelangelo asked; he seemed mortally offended by the insult. Anger in someone so large and powerful was imposing. Oliver Tam did his best to show no fear.

Mellanie grinned at the ludicrous posturing back in the studio, and checked the mirror. Her hair was now raven-black, and alive with short waves that made it frizz out around her head. She pinned it back on both sides with cheap orange and yellow cloth bands. After some thought she applied the darkest purple lipstick she could find. Thanks to a dermal genoprotein her face was now covered in freckles; they made her look so cutesy she wanted to hurl. Instead she threw her arms around her head, and blew herself a flouncy kiss.

Perfect persona.

The face in the mirror certainly wasn’t that of Mellanie Rescorai, ace investigative reporter for the top-rated unisphere news shows, the face that everybody in the civilized galaxy knew. This was some first-life teen ingenue, fresh and keen to be part of the exciting city party scene—yet not quite knowing how. There would be enough volunteers to show her. Men liked that inquisitive youthfulness, and the older and more jaded they were, the more they liked it. She’d known that even before Morty.

The air outside was already noticeably cooler when Mellanie left the apartment, with a modest breeze drifting in from over the water. It had a narcotic effect on the bustling pedestrians, who all shared the same high-spirited verve as they started to search out what the bars and clubs had to offer. Mellanie headed west along the broad avenue, heading for the river. She couldn’t help the happy smile on her face. The streets here were intent on gaudy photonic mimicry of the elegance that resided beyond the water. For the first ten meters above the enzyme-bonded concrete pavements, the buildings were walled in glowing intense neon, sparkly holographics, and the steady burn of polyphoto lighting. Above that, city regulations allowed no light pollution. Looking straight up gave Mellanie an eerie view; it was as if the street had been given a stealth-black ceiling. The brighter stars twinkled directly overhead, when they weren’t shrouded by remnants of the day’s clouds, but the canyon walls of skyscrapers along the city grid were invisible, their glass windows prohibited from transmitting any light from the inside and thus spoiling the view of others.

She could see only one blemish, the brilliantly lit observation deck of an airship as it cast off from its skyscraper mooring. It angled upward to slide into the clear air above Tridelta’s towers, and set out across the river to begin its night-long flight over the jungle.

Mellanie reached the intersection and walked down to the Logrosan south high quay where the ferries docked. The last short avenue leading to the embankment slowly opened out, its buildings reducing in size. There was a large flow of people heading down to the ferries, bustling along together in a carnival atmosphere. Her pace began to slow as she saw what was ahead. Just about all the first-night tourists in the crowd around her had stopped to stare.

In front of her the Logrosan was a kilometer wide, a sheet of black ripples gurgling with quiet power as it raced along the edge of the city. On the other side, the jungle cloaked the undulating mountains. Every tree gleamed with opalescent splendor.

Unlike terrestrial plants that competed to produce bigger and more colorful flowers to attract insects, vegetation on Illuminatus had evolved bioluminescence to vie for the attention of local insects. The dark leaves that had spent the day soaking up sunlight now radiated the energy away in a soft lambent glow. With each tree in the forest cloaked in its own cold nimbus of iridescence the jungle was bright enough to rival the sleepy light of a dawn sun.

An entranced Mellanie hurried forward to the quay with its long row of angled jetties. Her ferry was the
Goldhawk,
a big old metal-hull craft that chugged over the water once every hour, night and day. On board, she jostled with the other two hundred fifty passengers for a view near the bow as it headed over to the Crossquay. Three more massive airships passed high overhead during the short trip. Mellanie waved foolishly at them, laughing at herself for doing so, but she was in that kind of mood.

Looking at the shimmering jungle ahead of her allowed her to relax. She’d spent the last forty-eight hours on a nervous high as she performed her reconnaissance of the Saffron Clinic. Michelangelo had been right, it was discreet. In the morning she moved between the pavement cafés on Allwyn Street so that the Greenford Tower was always in view. It was a kilometer-high cone of burnished steel and purple glass that housed stores, factories, offices, hotels, bars, spas, and apartments. The top floor was an airship dock, which had one of the big dark ovoids floating passively on the end of its gantry. Set back from the street in its own plaza, the Greenford’s base was made up of tall arching windows that rose to the fifth floor. Each one was an entrance to a different section. Given her purpose, she could hardly walk around them all trying to find which one belonged to the clinic. So she drank herbal teas and mineral water under the café awnings as her programs and inserts slowly infiltrated the Greenford Tower’s internal network.

With her software milking data from the management arrays on each floor, she soon found the Saffron Clinic, spread out over seven floors, starting thirty-eight stories up. When the information came in, she tilted her head back to see the actual windows, her virtual vision designating the blank panes with a slender neon-green outline. It was as near as she could get, visually or electronically. Access to the clinic’s own arrays was securely guarded. She didn’t have the skill to hack them.

A review of the Tower’s registered structural plans showed her the clinic had its own garage in the third level of the big fifteen-level underground garage. There was also an entrance through one of the tall archways on the west side, which led to a private lobby and lift. Mellanie moved to a bar in a side alley just off Allwyn Street that gave her a narrow view of the entrance. That was where she found the one weakness in the clinic’s electronic protection; the Tower’s own security software identified and cleared all authorized personnel going through the outside door to the Saffron’s lobby before they reached the clinic’s modern internal security systems.