The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (67 page)

“You’re not inside yet.”

“Just go. We’re secure.”

Space around him flared yellow as the chemical rockets ignited.

Oscar had hurried back into the bridge compartment. Wilson acknowledged him with a quick wave as he claimed his console. He was waiting for the shuttle, willing it across the gap. Both Jean Douvoir and the shuttle pilot did a superb job, rendezvousing thirty kilometers from the Watchtower. A small screen showed the little craft settle onto its cradle, which sank back into the hangar.

Wilson kept clenching his fist, which was disrupting his contact with the console interface pad. “Any contact?” he asked for the tenth time.

“No,” Oscar said. “I think Mac was right, they’re in trouble.”

“What the hell kind of trouble? It was dead over there. Cold and dead.”

“I don’t know.”

“Missile detonation,” Anna said. “Ho boy, here we go. Multiple blasts. High megatonnage. They’re using diverted energy pulsers, very heavy e-band emission, gamma and X-ray activity. Plenty of electronic warfare.”

“Where were they?”

“Ship three. Attacking and defending barrage. The ship’s still intact. Changing trajectory slightly.”

Wilson glanced at the forward portal that was tracking the twenty-four missiles powering toward them. Their velocity alone was terrifying.

“We should go,” Oscar said quietly.

“Right.” The second shuttle was on its cradle, a volunteer pilot ready to launch the second there was any signal from Verbeke or Bose.

“More missile launches,” Anna announced. “And we’re about to get another round of explosions. There’s an attack cluster almost in range of ship five.”

“Any reply to our signal?” Wilson asked.

Sandy shook her head.

“Detonations,” Anna sang out. “Shit, it’s like the warm-up for Armageddon out there.”

“Wilson,” Oscar urged. “It’s time.”

Captain Wilson Kime took a final look at the tracking display. The missiles were close now, and their true offensive capability remained unknown. He was coming perilously close to endangering his ship and crew. The bridge crew were all watching him, their expressions of defeat and regret, and yes, even guilt, were the same as his own.

“Hyperspace,” Wilson ordered. “Take us home.”

FIFTEEN

The lift doors opened smoothly, and police captain Hoshe Finn stepped into the familiar vestibule. For once he didn’t have to call ahead, the double doors into Morton’s penthouse were wide open. Several large flatbed trolleys had rolled through into the big split-level living room, delivering large plastic packing crates that were stacked against the walls. The process of loading the plush furniture into them had already begun, along with smaller household items all wrapped in sheets of foam. But after only three crates had been filled, the clearing-up process had come to a complete halt. All the GPbots that had been doing the work were motionless; some were still holding the objects they’d been carrying at the time of the reported incident with the harmonic-blade carving knife. Two junior managers from the Darklake National Bank, the court-appointed debt-receiver, were waiting somewhat nervously by the remaining settee in the conversation area. The supervisor from the removal company was sitting on the stone hearth in front of the fireplace, drinking tea from his thermos cup and smiling slyly.

“Where is she?” Hoshe asked. It said something for the power of unisphere publicity that he didn’t have to use his new police captain’s identity certificate. They all knew who he was.

“In there.” One of the bank suits pointed to the kitchen. “I want the bitch arrested.”

Hoshe raised an eyebrow while managing to look bored at the same time—something he’d seen Paula Myo do to great effect on several occasions.

Rather pleasingly, the suit flinched. “She threatened us,” he blustered. “And she’s damaged one of the GPbots. We’ll be requiring compensation for that.”

“Badly damaged?” Hoshe asked.

The supervisor glanced up from his tea. “Dunno. I’m not going in there. Psychos aren’t part of my job.” He sounded amused, though his face was carefully sober in front of the suits.

“Don’t blame you,” Hoshe said. The door into the kitchen was partly open. “Mellanie? It’s Hoshe Finn. Do you remember me? I need to talk to you.”

“Go away!” the girl yelled. “All of you, just piss off.”

“Come on, Mellanie, you know I can’t do that. We have to talk. It’s just going to be you and me. No constables, or anything, you have my word.”

“No. I won’t. There’s nothing to talk about.”

Her voice had almost cracked. Hoshe sighed, and moved right up to the kitchen door. “You could at least offer me a drink. I always used to be offered something when we came here. Where’s the butler?”

There was a long silence followed by what sounded like a sniffle. “Gone,” she said quietly. “They all left, all of them.”

“Okay, I’ll make my own drink. I’m coming in now.” Hoshe edged around the door, still cautious, not that he thought there was any real danger.

Like the rest of the penthouse, the kitchen was huge and elaborate. Every worktop had been carved out of pink and gray marble, with the cupboard doors below them made from burnished brentwood. The cabinets above the worktop all had transparent doors, showing off the expensive sets of crockery and glasses. He had to walk around the pool-table-sized central workbench to find Mellanie. She was sitting on the floor in a corner, hunched up tight as if she were trying to push herself through the wall. A harmonic-blade carving knife lay on the terracotta floor tiles just in front of her.

Hoshe wanted to squat down beside her, illustrating support and friendship just like the training scenarios emphasized, but he hadn’t quite lost enough weight to do that comfortably. Instead he lounged back, resting his buttocks on the marble worktop. “You should be careful of those harmonic blades,” he said casually. “They can be quite dangerous in the wrong hands. Lots of junior debt-receivers can get bits chopped off if your aim’s good enough.”

Mellanie looked up. Her auburn hair was in complete disarray. She’d been crying badly; sticky trails down her cheeks. Even so, she remained gorgeous. Perhaps even more so in this state: a classic damsel in distress. “What?”

He grinned ruefully. “Never mind. You do know why those people are here, don’t you?”

She nodded, and lowered her head again.

“The penthouse belongs to the bank now, Mellanie. You have to find somewhere else to stay.”

“This is my home,” she wailed.

“I’m really sorry. Would you like me to drive you back to your parents’ house?”

“I was going to wait for him here. Then when he comes back, everything will be just the same again.”

That shocked Hoshe more than anything else in the whole case. “Mellanie, the judge gave him a hundred and twenty years.”

“I don’t care. I’ll wait. I love him.”

“He doesn’t deserve you,” Hoshe said sincerely.

She looked up again, her face troubled as if she didn’t know who she was talking to.

“If you want to wait, that’s your decision, and I respect that,” he said. “Though I’d love to try and talk you out of it. But you really can’t do it here. I know it must be horrible for you seeing the bank walk in and take everything like this. But busting up a bot isn’t going to help get rid of them. In any case, the idiots outside are just doing their job. Annoying them just means people like me have to turn up and do their dirty work for them.”

“You’re a very strange policeman. You care. Not like that—” Her lips tightened.

“Paula Myo’s gone. She left after the trial. You won’t ever see her again.”

“Good!” Mellanie looked at the carving knife, and extended a leg, pushing it away with her toes. “Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “But everything nice I ever had happen in my life happened here, and they just barged in and started … They were really nasty.”

“Small people always are. You going to be okay, now?”

She sniffed loudly. “Yes. I think so. I’m sorry they bothered you.”

“Not a problem, believe me; any excuse to get out of the office is welcome. So, why don’t I help you pack a couple of suitcases, then I’ll take you home? Humm, how about that?”

“I can’t.” She stared straight ahead. “I will not go back to my parents. I can’t do that. Please.”

“All right, that’s okay. How about a hotel?”

“I don’t have any money,” she whispered. “I’ve been eating the packets in the freezer since the trial. They’re almost gone. That’s why all the staff left. I couldn’t pay them. Morty’s company won’t help. None of the directors will even see me now. God! Those bastards. They loved me before, you know. I stayed at their houses, played with their children. And the parties we had. Have you ever been rich, Detective?”

“That’s Hoshe, and no, I’ve never been rich.”

“They really don’t live by the same rules as anyone else. Whatever they want to do, they just do it. I found that exciting. It was so wonderful being a part of that, not having limits, living so free. Now look at me. I’m nothing.”

“Don’t be silly. Someone like you can achieve whatever they want to. You’re just young, that’s all. Changes this big are frightening at your age. You’ll pull through. We all do in the end, somehow.”

“You’re very sweet, Hoshe. I don’t deserve that.” She wiped some of the moisture from her cheeks. “Are you going to arrest me?”

“No. But we do need to find you somewhere to stay for tonight. How about a friend?”

“Ha.” Her smile was bitter. “I don’t have any. Before the trial I had hundreds. Now, there isn’t one of them who’ll talk to me. I saw Jilly Yen the other week. She actually left the shop so she didn’t have to say hello.”

“Okay, look, I know the manageress of a B&B not far from here. Have a couple of nights there on me while you get yourself sorted out. You could maybe get a job waitressing or something, there are enough bars in this town. And the colleges will start enrolling in another three weeks. You must have had some thoughts on a career before all this happened.”

“Oh no, no. I can’t take money off you.” Mellanie pushed herself to her feet, combing at her snarled hair in embarrassment. “I don’t want charity.”

“It’s not charity. I’m doing all right now as it happens, I got a decent raise as part of my promotion.”

“You got promoted?” Her brief smile died as she realized why. “Oh.”

“You have to go somewhere. And, believe me, this B&B is cheap.”

Mellanie bowed her head. “One night. That’s all. Just one.”

“Sure. Let’s go and pack a bag.”

She peered at the door. “They said I couldn’t take anything that was mine. They said Morty paid for it all, so it belonged to the bank now. That’s why I … Well, you know.”

“Sure. I’ll sort it out.” He guided Mellanie out into the living room. “The young lady is packing a bag of clothes and leaving,” he told the suits.

“We cannot allow any bank property—”

“I’ve just told you what’s happening,” Hoshe said. “You want to make an issue of it? You want to call me a liar?”

They looked at each other. “No, Officer.”

“Thank you.”

Hoshe had to laugh when they went into the master bedroom. Not at the cliché playboy decor of circular bed and black sheets, complete with mirror portal behind the pillows. It was the poor GPbot, lying on the floor with a sharp dint in its bodywork where someone had kicked it; two of its electromuscle limbs were severed clean at the base, and the remaining three knotted together around its legs. It took a lot of strength to do that to electromuscle.

Mellanie took a modest shoulder bag from one of the walk-in closets.

“I can’t really let you take any jewelry,” Hoshe said. “And I suppose some of the dresses cost a lot.” He was looking past her shoulder at the rack that had every slot taken by some garment; it was moving slowly, rotating the rest of the selection from a hidden storage space behind the closet. There must have been hundreds of clothes there altogether. When he checked, the other closet had as many suits and jackets, and nearly the same number of shoes and boots.

“Don’t worry,” Mellanie said. “One thing I did learn was that expensive doesn’t equal practical.” She was folding a pair of jeans into the bag. The pile on the bed was mostly T-shirts.

“I was thinking,” he said. “It’s kind of a last resort as far as earning money goes, but your life has been interesting to say the least, although it’s for all the wrong reasons. There are media companies who would pay for that story.”

“I know. There’s hundreds of them stored in my e-butler’s hold file. I stopped accessing them, then my cybersphere account was closed.”

“Why is your account closed?”

“I told you. I don’t have any money. I wasn’t joking.” She held up a trim, dark handheld array, giving him a questioning look.

“Sure.” He’d never heard of an account being closed before,
everyone
had access to the cybersphere.

The array was put in the bag’s side pocket. She sat on the side of the bed, and started lacing up some sports shoes.

“I’ll have the account reactivated,” he said. “Just data and messages for a month. Not an entertainment feed. It’ll only cost me a couple of dollars.”

Mellanie gave him a curious look. “Do you want to sleep with me, Hoshe?”

“No! Er, I mean, no, that’s not … I don’t … That’s not what this is about.”

“People always want to sleep with me. I know that. I’m beautiful and first-life young. And I adore sex. Morty was a very experienced teacher; he encouraged me to experiment. What I can do with my body isn’t shameful, Hoshe. Pleasure is never a sin. And I wouldn’t mind you enjoying me.”

Hoshe just knew his face was turning hot red. Having her talk about it so clinically was like enduring his father’s one attempt to explain the birds and bees. “I’m married. Thank you.” Which was about as lame as you could get.

“I don’t understand. If it’s not to have sex with me, why are you doing this?”

“He killed two people, ruined two lives,” Hoshe said quietly. “I don’t want him to claim a third victim. Not now.”

She picked up a brush from the dressing table and began working it through her hair. “Morty didn’t kill anybody. You and Paula Myo were wrong about that.”

“I don’t think so.”

“The criminal gang could have gone through her memories and found out what was hers, that or tortured it out of her. It wasn’t Morty.”

There were no signs of torture in the pathologist’s report, she was in the bath, and her memorycell was ruined.
But all he said was: “We’ll just have to agree to disagree on that.”

“You’re far too nice to be a police officer, do you know that?”

Hoshe waited until she’d cleaned herself up, then took her to the B&B. He paid for a week in advance, and drove off, managing to avoid her attempt to kiss him good-bye. He wasn’t sure he was strong enough to resist actual physical contact.

Five days later, a taxi dropped Mellanie outside a big warehouselike building in Darklake’s Thurnby district, a shabby and badly run-down old industrial precinct. Every plot was protected by high fencing, although half of the factories and retail depots were abandoned. Rubbish had blown up along the wire-mesh fences, forming little dunes of paper and plastic; standing high above them were realtor signs proclaiming various sites available for redevelopment. The single track railway that ran alongside the main road had tall weeds growing from the shingle between the sleepers and its rails were rusting over.

Mellanie glanced around nervously. Not that there was anywhere for muggers to hide. A purple plaque on the door in front of her read: Wayside Productions. She took a breath and walked through.

True to his word, Hoshe Finn had got her cybersphere account activated again. The number of noncommercial messages in her e-butler’s hold file was over seventy thousand. She’d wiped them all and changed her personal interface code. Then she called Rishon, a reporter she’d known from her time with Morton. He’d been very pleased to hear from her, and immediately arranged a meeting. Her story was enormously valuable, he assured her, and people would access the drama from all over the Commonwealth. That was when she hit him with her real big idea, that she should play herself. To her surprise, he’d been delighted by the suggestion, claiming it would bring in even more money.

She sat with him for two days, pouring her heart out, telling him everything about those golden days, from the moment they met at a sponsorship gala dinner, what it had been like, the wonder and thrill of the love affair, her parents’ hostility, the parties, the luxurious hedonistic life, the members of Oaktier’s high society with whom she mingled freely, then the terrible trial with its tragic wrong verdict. Rishon recorded it all, and transformed it into a spectacular script for an eight-part drama that would play for days. He’d sold it within twenty-four hours.