The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (24 page)

“It is certainly registered to him. And according to several of the residents it was used by a man answering Mr Singleton’s description. Tall and blond, in his twenties, possibly English. His friend was heavyset, with long black hair, tattoos, and an American accent. Also in his twenties. That sounds like your other missing coder, Everett Hughes, yes? Although they signed the register as Mr Gates and Mr Jobs.”

“Geek humour.”

“I wondered if it was supposed to be funny. You posted an APB for both men. May I ask why?”

“I believe they stole Elder Culture technology from their employer.”

“That would be Meyer Lansky.”

“You work fast, Detective Zacarias.”

“Out of necessity, Inspector. We had two hundred and forty-one straight-up murders in this city last year, not to mention a significant number of suspicious deaths, fatal accidents, and kidnaps. We put down just 33 per cent of those murders. The municipal council and the police commissioner want us to improve our success rate, we already have ninety-eight names on the board, and it’s only April. If I don’t close this in a day or two, it will be pushed aside by a fresh case. So, these boys stole something from their employer and hid out here while they looked for a buyer, is that it?”

“We’re being frank with each other, Detective.”

“I hope so.”

“Frankly, I want you to stay away from Meyer Lansky. He’s important to us.”

“I don’t suppose you can tell me why.”

“I’m afraid not. Has the car been searched yet?”

“We didn’t find anything in it. We are waiting for a tow truck. The crime scene people will examine it back at the police garage, under sterile conditions. Unless you want to take charge of it.”

“We don’t have the facilities. But someone will observe and advise your crime scene techs while they work on it. Did you find a computer or a phone in the room?”

“Not yet. Things are very much melted together.”

“Or something like a fat thermos flask?”

“You are welcome to examine the crime scene, Inspector. I’ll even let you pat down the bodies before the ME takes them away.”

I ignored his impertinence. “I want your people to maintain a perimeter until my people arrive. Until they do, nothing should be touched. The bodies will remain where they are. I will need you to turn over all witness statements. And please, don’t say a word to the TV people, or anyone else.”

“Those bodies are cooked all the way through, and something fried every electrical device in the immediate vicinity. What they stole, was it some kind of Elder Culture energy weapon?”

“Everett Hughes owns a motorcycle. A 125cc Honda. I don’t see it.”

“Then it’s probably not here,” August Zacarias said. He was smiling, enjoying our little to and fro. Having fun. “Perhaps the killer took it. Or perhaps these two young men tried to sell whatever it was they stole, the deal went wrong, and they killed the would-be buyers and fled. Or perhaps we’re looking at a case of spontaneous combustion, and in the confusion one of the residents in the motel stole Mr Hughes’s motorcycle.”

“Anything is possible.”

“You do not care to speculate. Or you know more than I.”

“I don’t know enough to speculate.”

August Zacarias liked that answer. “How long have you been watching Meyer Lansky?”

“Long enough.”

“And now the roof has fallen in on you.”

“We rarely choose where to fight our battles, Detective. If we are finished here, I have some phone calls to make. And you could help me by maintaining the perimeter until my people arrive.”

“My boss will be pleased that we can hand over the responsibility for these deaths to you. It means that we have two fewer cases to investigate, a microscopic improvement to our statistics. Myself, I do not think that numbers are so very important. I don’t care about stolen alien ju-ju either. What is important for me is that the dead are given a voice. That someone speaks for them, makes sure that they are not forgotten, and that whoever is responsible for what happened to them is brought to justice.”

August Zacarias looked straight at me when he said this, and I could see that he meant it. Perhaps he was in someone’s pocket, perhaps not, but he took his work seriously.

“I’ll do my best by them,” I said. “If there’s anything that I need to know, now is the time to tell me.”

“I can tell you that this is a good place to hide,” August Zacarias said. “When the city was very young, VIPs stayed here. The freeway wasn’t built then, or very little else, for that matter. There were splendid views across fern forests to the bay. Now, half the rooms are rented by the hour, with the kind of traffic that implies. Most of the others are occupied by semi-permanent residents who can’t afford anywhere else. An old Chinese woman who keeps chickens and will put curses on people, or remove them, for a small fee. A Ukranian poet who is drinking himself to death. A small gang of Indonesians who work as day labourers on various construction sites. They trap the giant lizards that live in the brush and roast them over fires in the empty swimming pool. Last year, two of them fought with parangs in the parking lot. One lost most of an arm, and bled to death before his friends could get him to hospital. I worked the case. The winner of that little set-to went away for two years, manslaughter.”

“You know the place.”

August Zacarias smiled and made a sweeping gesture. “Welcome to my world, Ms Davies.”

“Luckily, I’m just visiting.”

“That’s what Everett Hughes and Jason Singleton thought. And look what happened to them.”

I phoned Varneek Sehra and told him to bring his crew to the scene as soon as possible. Then I phoned my boss, Marc Godin, and told him what had happened. Marc wasn’t happy about being called late at night, and he wasn’t happy about the mess the double murder might cause, but he was already ahead of me when it came to discussing what to do next.

“We can’t contain the story. The local TV news is already onto it. And if the Koreans aren’t already involved, they soon will be. Pak Young-Min will want to have some hard words with his man Lansky.”

“Words will be the least of it, sir.”

“In any case, if he has not already done so, Lansky may try to scrub his records of incriminating evidence. I’ll draw up stop and seizure papers and we’ll visit Judge Provenzano and get them made official. Then you can visit Mr Lansky and ask him to come in and talk to us.”

“I already have papers drawn up,” I said, and told him where to find them.

“Always prepared, Emma.”

“I must have had a premonition.”

“Meet me at the office in . . . how long will it take, out there?”

“I’m just waiting for Varneek to take over,” I said.

“A shame about those two kids,” Marc said. “But perhaps this will give us something to use against Monsieurs Lansky and Pak.”

“Yes, we should always look on bright side,” I said.

Let me speak about the dead for a moment. Let me do the right thing by them, as Detective August Zacarias would say.

Like most people who won the emigration lottery and didn’t sell their prize to one of the big corporations or to a redistribution agency, or give it away to a relative who either deserved it or wanted it more than they did, or have it stolen by a jealous neighbour, a spouse or a child or a random stranger (UN statistics show that more than 4 per cent of emigration lottery winners are murdered or disappeared), or simply put it away for a day that never came and meanwhile got on with their lives in the ruins of Earth (and it was still possible to live a life more or less ordinary after the economic collapses, wars, radical climate events, and all the other mess and madness: even after the Jackaroo pitched up and gave us access to a wormhole network linking some fifteen M-class red dwarf stars in exchange for rights to the outer planets of the Solar System, for the most part, for most people, life went on as it always did, the ordinary little human joys and tragedies, people falling in love or out of love, marrying, having children, burying their parents, worrying about being passed over for promotion, or losing their job, or the lump in their breast, or the blood in the toilet bowl) – like everyone, in other words, who won the emigration lottery and believed that it was their chance to get out from under whatever muddle or plight they were in and start over (more UN statistics: 36 per cent of married lottery winners divorce within two months), Jason Singleton and Everett Hughes wanted to change their lives for the better. They wanted more than the same old same old, although that’s what most people get. People think that by relocating themselves to another planet, the ultimate in exoticism, they can radically change their lives, but they always forget that they bring their lives with them. Accountants ship out dreaming of adventure and find work as accountants; police become police, or bodyguards to high-end businesspeople or wealthy gangsters; farmers settle down on some patch of land on a coastal plain west of Port of Plenty or on one of the thousands of worldlets in the various reefs that orbit various stars in the network, and so on, and so forth. But Everett Hughes and Jason Singleton were both in their early twenties, and as far as they were concerned anything was possible. They wanted to get rich. They wanted to be famous. Why not? They’d already been touched by stupendous good fortune when they’d won tickets to new and better lives amongst the stars. After that, anything seemed possible.

They met aboard the shuttle that took them out of Low Earth Orbit to the wormhole throat anchored at the L5 point between the Earth and the Moon, and plunged through the wormhole and crossed more than five thousand light years in the blink of an eye and emerged at the leading Lagrangian point of a Mars-sized moon of a blue-green methane gas giant that orbited an undistinguished M0 red dwarf star, and travelled inward to the planet of First Foot and landfall at the spaceport outside the city of Port of Plenty.

It was a journey I had made twenty-two years ago, after I’d divorced my first husband and two weeks later won a place on the emigration lottery. At the time, it had seemed like a message from fate’s hotline: pack up what was left of my life, travel to a new world, start afresh. When I arrived on First Foot, Port of Plenty had been a shanty town amongst alien ruins. I worked for the PPPD for three years, then signed up with the UN Security Agency, working in the spaceport to begin with, then joining what was then the brand-new Technology Control Unit. A year after that I met my second husband and we married and it all went wrong very quickly, but that’s another story and besides, the man is dead.

And all this time Port of Plenty was growing around me, extending along the shoreline of Discovery Bay, climbing through the semi-arid hills that circled it, spreading into the outer margins of the Great Central desert. It’s a sprawling megalopolis now, a nascent Los Angeles or Mexico City. A whole generation has grown up on First Foot, they’re having children of their own, and still the shuttles keep coming, loaded with lottery winners and those who can afford to buy the tickets of winners and those who have had their ticket bought for them by corporations, or by the city authority, or by the UN or some other sponsor. Our original settlement, an ugly unplanned patchwork of favelas and shantytowns, has grown into a clean, modern city. Big office blocks in the centre where the corporations and private finance companies work. A marina, and parks, and restaurants and shopping malls. Suburbs. Oh, we’ve made ourselves at home, all right. But it isn’t our home. It’s an alien world with a deep history. And settlers have spread out through the worm-hole network, discovering Sargassos of ancient ships and refurbishing them, making homes on moons and reefs of worldlets previously settled by countless other races of sentient beings, Elder Cultures who died out or moved on, leaving behind ruins and all kinds of artifacts, some of them functional.

That’s where the UN Technology Control Unit, aka the geek police, comes in. Some Elder Culture technology, like the room-temperature superconductors and paired virtual particles that enabled us to develop q-phones, hypercomputers, and much else, is useful. Some of it, like grasers and other particle and beam weapons, is both useful and dangerous. And some of it is simply dangerous. Stuff that could give an individual the power to hold worlds to ransom. Stuff that could change the human race so radically that it would either die out or become something other than human. That’s why the UN created a legislative apparatus to clamp down on illegal trading of Elder Culture technology, to make sure that new technologies developed by legitimate companies can’t be licensed until they have passed strict tests, and so on and so forth.

The Technology Control Unit is at the sharp end of this legislation. I believed then and still believe now, despite everything, that it is important work. At any time, someone could stumble over something that could change the way we live, how we think of ourselves, how we think. In the end, that’s what the UN is trying to protect. The right to continue to be human. We have been given a great gift by the Jackaroo. A chance to start over after a terrible war and two centuries of uncontrolled industrialisation and population growth almost ruined our home planet. It is up to us to make the best of that, and make sure that we don’t destroy ourselves by greedy or foolish appropriation of technologies so advanced they are, as the old saying goes, indistinguishable from magic.

Fortunately, anyone who wants to make any kind of money from a functional and potentially useful scrap of Elder Culture technology has to come to First Foot, and the city of Port of Plenty. Port of Plenty has a research and manufacturing base that can spin product from Elder Culture artifacts, and it also regulates traffic between the fifteen systems and Earth – and Earth is still the biggest and best market, the only place where real fortunes can be made. But there are also people who want to exploit dangerous Elder Culture artifacts and technologies regardless of the consequences. Some are genuine explorers and scientists; some, like Niles Sarkka, belong to the tinfoil hat brigade. Crackpot theorists. Green ink merchants. Monomaniacs. And some, like Meyer Lansky, are crooks, plain and simple.