Slab City Blues: The Collected Stories

  “So you think he’s a sociopath?”

  “Doesn’t really fit. Sociopaths, especially those prone to violence, tend not to have any real belief system. They are their own god. Plus they’re usually convinced of their own genius but turn out pretty average when you test them.” I nodded at the 2D of Lasalle. “This Jed really is a genius.”

  “And a troubled young man. MEC insisted he went for counselling when his behaviour started to deteriorate. The records are sealed but from what he told McKinnon it seems his delusions were getting progressively worse. He told her once there was a demon living inside him. She thought his interest in paganism was an attempt to purge it, cleanse his soul somehow.”

  “Did he have a band of his own?”

  “McKinnon let him take one the day he left. Leaving present, I guess.”

  “Has she heard from him since he got canned?”

  “This is the interesting bit. She had a smart-ping from him a few days later. He’d read about some ancient Native American ritual, a key to releasing bad spirits, or so he said. Seems he went Downside to find it.”

  “Where?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

  Janet’s smile was small but just a little bit smug. “New Mexico.”

  *

  “So, what can I do fer you fine folks?”

  “Sheriff Halbertson?”

  “That’s m’name, fella. An’ who might you be?”

  “Detective Inspector Alex McLeod, sir. Lorenzo City PD. Thanks for taking our call.”

  “Inter-agency co-operation is the key to effective police work, least ways it says so in my contract.”

  Sheriff Halbertson had a broad sun-seasoned face, craggy with age and outdoor living. He stood in front of a vista of scrub desert and sky, complete with stetson and a six-pointed star gleaming on his chest armour. The vastness of the backdrop made me a little queasy. Agoraphobia is a common trait amongst those born in orbit.

  “It’s concerning the Rickard case,” I said. We were back on Yang One in the local PD office, away from the prying eyes of MEC security. I’d placed an inter-agency call via the Lawnet terminal. It had taken about an hour to locate the Sheriff who was apparently tracking some cattle rustlers on his quad-bike (yes, actual cattle rustlers).

  “The musician?” Halbertson squinted at me in puzzlement. “That was over a year ago. And done. As open and shut as I ever saw.”

  “I know sir, but we’re tracking an individual who may be linked to the case.” I sent him the 2D of Lasalle. “Do you recognise this man?”

  Halbertson’s expression became sombre. “Yeah. I knew him alright. Fox Runner.”

  “That’s what he called himself?”

  “Yep. There’s a local tribe of pagan weirdo types live in a commune out near Coruco, part of that whole Mythos Movement dumbassery. They give themselves what they think are Native American names. The Pueblos think they’re funny as hell and sell them dream-catchers ‘n beads by the truckload.”

  “Fox Runner lived with them?”

  “Fer a time, till they kicked him out. Seems they didn’t like what he had to say. Always rantin’ about demons and such. That don’t sit too well among the paganites. Guess he was something of a heretic. After that he rented a place in town, never seemed to be shy of cash. Did some background checks on him but they all came back clean. He wasn’t really a bad kid, just had a bad case a’ religion. And not the good kind.”

  “And the girls who were convicted of Rickard’s murder. Did he know them?”

  “Not so far as I knew. Anyways that all happened a good six weeks after he died.”

  Janet let out a sigh of annoyance.

  Shit. Dead end. “He died?” I asked.

  “Yessir. Hiked out to Walker’s Canyon. There’re some caves where Pueblo legend says braves used to go for their vision quests. Found him myself a few weeks later, sitting cross-legged in a cave, all dried out and dead as a stump. Coroner said dehydration and malnutrition.”

  “Did he have any friends in town? Other newcomers, maybe?”

  “Not so much. Got a few complaints from the townsfolk about his preaching an’ all. Being too vocal about religion doesn’t go round here since the Rapture Wars.”

  I called up the image of the immersion band. “When you found his body, did he have this with him?”

  “Naw, can’t say as he did. Just his clothes and an empty backpack. May’ve been in the stuff he left at his place, but that all got donated to the local med-centre.”

  “The girls who killed Rickard, did they ever attend the same centre?”

  Halbertson grunted a laugh. “Those girls? Hell yeah, iffin it wasn’t an STD it was the mornin’ after pill, or a cut from a cat-fight needed stitching.”

  “They were trouble?”

  “Troubled more like. Came from pretty terrible backgrounds. There was a strong meth-cooking scene out here before I took over. Those three girls grew up amongst it. Their folks were old-time cookers, migrated from some Appalachian jerkwater after the wars. Been at it for decades, more a clan than a gang. Three generations of hard-core scum. I was recruited outta Houston by the Territorial Authority to clean them out. Things got ugly fer a while, real old school range war shit. Pardon m’French, ma’am.”

  Janet smothered a laugh as he actually tipped his hat.

  “Anyways,” the sheriff went on, “when it was done the girls and the other kids were pretty much left on their own with the few half-wit grown-ups that weren’t dead or in jail. They’d been through a lot; poverty, abuse, sexual and violent. Didn’t make for a productive adulthood. We tried to get them some help, the County even hired in a specialist with some new-fangled immersion therapy. Worked on some but not the girls. If anything they got worse. The thing with the Rickard kid though, that was way beyond their usual misbehavin’.”

  “The therapist. Do you have their name?”

  “Be in the case file somewhere.” Halbertson reached forward to hit some icons on his smart screen. “Pretty little thing as I recall. From up your way too, come to think on it. Here we go.”

  “Oh crap,” Janet breathed.

  The young woman who stared out from the screen was blonde, petite and had been sitting opposite me at the dinner table the night before.

  I was already fumbling for my smart. Sherry’s ID came back as unavailable. I called the office and got Red Wing.

  “She hasn’t been in all day. Assumed she was working the case with you.”

  “Has anyone heard from her today?”

  Red Wing did a quick canvas of the squad room and came back with a negative.

  “Put out a city-wide alert,” I told him, fighting the burning dread clutching at my guts. “Highest priority. Possible officer abduction.” If we’re lucky. “Suspect name Samantha Jane Neaves. Considered extremely dangerous. I’m sending you the ID specs now. We’ll need a full spectrum search of all systems, financial and security. Tell Ricci to meet me at Sherry’s place.”

  For once Red Wing didn’t want to get into a pissing contest and got straight on it.

  “You folks OK?” Sheriff Halbertson was asking from the holo as I barrelled through the door.

  *

  Ricci was already at the apartment block entrance when we got there. I ran overrides on the doors and went in Sig first, scanning for targets. Nothing. Everything neat and well ordered. Same with the other rooms.

  “Full work up, quick as you can,” I told Ricci.

  “I’m aware of the urgency.” He broke out his spectrometer and got to work on the hard surfaces.

  “She said she’d never used one,” Janet said. “An immersion band.”

  “I’m going to go with my police intuition that she was lying.” My eyes pored over every detail in the room. There has to be something.

  “So Lasalle goes Downside to purge his demon,” Janet went on. “Vision-quests himself to death in the desert and his band, if he still had it, ends up in a box at the local med-centre where Sam happens to be working
.”

  I picked up the thread. “She works with immersion tech, maybe she knows what it is, tries it on. A few weeks later she’s treating three girls who later turn into vicious murderers. She returns to the Slab and whaddya know? People start getting viciously murdered.”

  “There’s absolutely nothing in her bio to indicate a violent past, or even a pre-disposition to violence.”

  “Forget her past. This isn’t about who she was, it’s about what she is. What she was made.”

  “By a malfunctioning immersion device?”

  “I don’t know yet. I do know that what ever came back from New Mexico, it wasn’t the girl that left. Making friends with Joe, latching on to Sherry. All very useful if you need a fix on potential future interference from law enforcement. Classic deep cover operative stuff.”

  “Why act now?”

  “Sherry must have told Sam about her suspended detective friend unofficially working a seriously odd case with a vampire classicist. She - it, decides to covertly eliminate the threat. Another standard deep cover move. It sets the trap with Mrs Devant, sits down to dinner with us knowing we’re going to be dead in a few hours. We tell it about DeMarco. It knew we’d figure out that him jumping from the Pipe and going to the slaughterhouse was connected to the band. That leads us to MEC which leads us to Lasalle. When its ploy with the Devants didn’t work…” I gestured at the empty apartment. “I’m guessing it’s bringing its plans forward.”

  Ricci called from the bedroom. I rushed through to find him holding the spectrometer to a small-size t-shirt. “Barely more than a trace amount,” he said. “But it’s an eighty-six percent match. Need a lab test to confirm.”

  “Eighty-six percent of what?”

  “DeMarco’s DNA.”

  “Well, there’s the clincher. Must’ve picked it up when she retrieved the band. That’s all you’ve got? Nothing that’ll lead us to Sherry?”

  “Left my crystal ball at home, Alex.” The strain was evident in his voice and I realised I’d been shouting.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Keep at it. Draft in as many techs as you need.” I made my way outside with Janet in tow.

  “So what now?” she asked.

  “The clinic where she worked. If that’s a bust, we’ll go Yin-side and talk to her family.”

  My smart buzzed as we neared the Pipe: Red Wing. “Tell me you have something.”

  “Cam footage. Red Line, Axis bound, ten minutes ago.” He fed it through, the image clear enough to flood me with relief. Sherry sitting on the Pipe, alone and breathing. My relief faded fast when I noticed the thin band of metal shining out from the red mass of her hair and the vacant unseeing expression on her face. There was also some kind of interference on the feed, a spasming rash of pixels to her left.

  “What’s that?” I asked Red Wing.

  “It’s kinda weird. The techs don’t know. The image is high-res and uncompressed so there shouldn’t be any artifacts.”

  I looked closer at the patch of dislocated pixels. Adjusting for perspective it was just about the same height as a five foot nothing young woman. It can mask itself.

  “Where are they now?”

  “Cams show her exiting the Pipe at Axis Terminus.”

  “Flash to local units. Proceed with extreme caution. I’m on my way.”

  Why the Axis? It came to me as we sprinted onto the Pipe carriage and I punched in the emergency override codes. Freak. It’s going to visit family.

  *

  We were two levels short of Axis Terminus when my smart buzzed with an unfamiliar caller ID. “What?”

  “Inspector McLeod? Ryan Van Pelt. You said to call if anything else came to light.”

  “Can it wait? Kinda in the middle of something.”

  “Sure, it’s just I remembered our first phase of human trials.”

  “First phase?”

  “Oh yeah. We went through six separate trials before the band was cleared for initial marketing. Anyway, I thought I’d better double check for any long-term adverse effects. I ran the names through a standard open source cross-check and one came up as a recent homicide victim.”

  “Which one?”

  “Karnikhov, Ygor. Axis resident. We often use veterans for human trials. Disciplined test subjects are hard to find. Plus they can always use the money.”

  “He had a band?”

  “Well, not officially.”

  “I really don’t have time for this shit, Van Pelt! Did he have a band?”

  “OK, OK. I checked with the testing crew. Seems he made a big impression on one of the female techs.”

  “She let him take one home.”

  “Along with her. On the condition he kept it quiet. Hugely unprofessional. Naturally, we just terminated her contract.”

  Karnikhov, servo-bot retrieval and repair specialist. Logging a lot of extra hours recently. He was killed by a bot alright; he programmed it himself. After he’d made some power-company replicas to take care of Mr and Mrs Devant. How many more did he have access to?

  I sounded off and called Joe. Screw chain of command. “I need to speak to him.”

  “He’s kinda tied up, Alex. It’s the quarterly budget meeting.”

  “Sherry’s been taken, OK? If you want to see her alive again, you’ll get me the chief.”

  A short pause, faint sounds of argument, Joe’s difficult-to-ignore assertiveness coming through. “I’m afraid I must insist, sir!”

  The chief came on, breathless with anger. “You and this gorilla can both say goodbye to your jobs, McLeod!”

  “You need to order the immediate shut down of every bot owned by the Exocore Mining Company.”

  “What the fuck are you–?”

  “Alex!” Janet cut in, wide eyed gaze fixed on the news feed to her smart. “Something’s happening at the Axis.”

  I looked at her screen. The announcer was speaking rapidly, stumbling over auto-cued phrases like “major disturbance… details are still coming in… reports of explosions…”

  “We’re too late,” I told the Chief. “Turn on the news.”

  I ended the call and tuned my smart to the live feed from the police net, hearing an instant chorus of panic. “…what the fuck are they do-… security is down, shit there’re pieces everywhere… -dreds of bots, they’re swarming around the Axis, killing everything… we have multiple casualties, repeat multiple cas-zzzzt!”

  Red Wing came on. “You hearing this?”

  “Yeah. Any visuals?”

  “Coming through now. Hold on.”

  The smart screen flickered then lit up with a static shot of the Axis interior. A second’s confusion before my brain made sense of it, spinning detritus, an off-screen orange glow signifying something was burning, smoke coalescing and flowing like water the way it does in micro-grav, then a figure, a man wielding what looked like a power wrench, desperately trying to fend off a servo-bot as it sought to latch onto him with its grab arm, a welding torch burning bright in one of its other limbs. Suffice to say, he didn’t win.

  “Valhalla,” Janet said in a thick rasp.

  “Viking heaven?”

  “Warriors who died with sword in hand rewarded with eternal battle and glory.”

  The flaming corpse drifted out of view and Red Wing came back on. “From what we can piece together a mass of bots came swarming out of every maintenance hatch in the Axis right about the time Sherry arrived at the Terminus. The guards on the entrance were the first to go. We’re counting twenty-plus bodies on the cams. Picking up gunfire from the admin tier, so someone’s still putting up a fight.”

  Admin tier. Colonel Riviere. He always kept his service weapon close by.

  “I’m five levels away with all the SWAT guys we could gather at short notice,” Red Wing went on. “We’ll meet you at the entrance.”

  “I’m not waiting,” I said.

  “You can’t go in there alone, Alex…”

  I terminated the call and turned to Janet. “Is there any point asking
you to wait for the SWAT team?”

  She took my hand, leaned in close and planted a kiss on my cheek. “Don’t be silly.”

  Chapter 9

  We ran to the LCPD office on the main terminus concourse so I could raid the armoury. The place was empty, everyone no doubt fully occupied at the Axis. I pulled on a flex-armour suit and made Janet do the same, stuck my Sig to the mag-strip on my right hip and a spare to the one on my left, then hefted a Steyr G80 assault carbine from the weapons rack. It was micro-grav adapted with adjustable recoil absorption and a bulbous spherical stock. I slammed in a mag of 5mm caseless and loaded a standard hi-ex into the grenade launcher under the barrel.

  “Ever fire a gun in micro-grav?” I asked Janet, offering her a Sig.

  “I’ve never fired a gun.” She held up her hands, flexing slender fingers. “Besides, I’m already armed.”

  We ran for the Axis entrance, me struggling to keep up with Janet’s deceptively fast, loping strides. The ramp to the entrance tube-way was a confusion of milling uniforms, all shouting into their smarts for guidance or information.

  “Entrance is sealed, Inspector,” the senior sergeant on the scene told me as I forced my way through. “And we’ve got orders to hold in place till SWAT gets here.”

  “Good. You do that.” I pushed past and made for the tube-way. The travelling grab-rail needed to overcome the last tug of centrifugal force before entering the micro-grav zone was offline, so we were obliged to clamber along for five agonising minutes, my imagination treating me to all manner of horrors being visited on Sherry and every other human soul on the other side of the entrance.

  We went into free-fall about a hundred yards along, then propelled forward, looking for the manual override. It wasn’t necessary, the huge circular entrance irised open when we got within twenty feet and a new audio feed came through my earpiece, the voice distorted but recognisable - Sam, strident, emphatic and nutty as squirrel shit: “…I bring you honour, father. I bring you tribute. Brunhilde lies before you for judgement…”

  Freak’s unmistakable androgynous tones, sorrowful, pleading: “Please, stop this.”