Slab City Blues: The Collected Stories

  “Oh, fuck you, Alex! I’ve cleared twice the homicides you ever did.”

  “You had four times as many open and shuts, so I’d say your score is actually pretty low.”

  “Enough!” Sherry broke in as Red Wing bridled. We were in her office, Janet on the other side of the glass partition. She’d laid it all out then Sherry had politely asked her to wait outside so Red Wing and me could shout at each other.

  “This is all pretty farfetched,” Sherry said. “I mean, I see the similarities but it doesn’t all scan. This Rickard kid for a start, they had a bullseye on the killers within hours.”

  “Mistakes happen,” I said. “And we’ve still got zip on DeMarco, and, I’m guessing,” I winked at Red Wing, “nothing on Karnikhov either.”

  “We always agreed DeMarco must’ve been some kind of overly inventive hit. A Shuriken showing off.”

  “That was your theory.”

  “Which you agreed with, as I recall.”

  “And now I’ve got a better one.”

  “Who says I’ve got no leads on Karnikhov?” Red Wing put in.

  “Oh, OK.” I sat back, hands splayed. “Thrill me hotshot.”

  He flushed a little but ploughed on. “Karnikhov was a vet. Quadruple amputee and Axis resident, one of the details we held back. His war record is sealed. Whoever killed him is in there, and I’ll prove it when CAOS Defence unseals it.”

  “Have fun in your dotage when that happens. Doesn’t mean shit anyway, my war record is sealed.”

  Sherry gave an amused snort. “And there’s no-one on the Slab who wants you dead, right Alex?”

  She had a point, as did Red Wing. Karnikhov’s war service was where I’d’ve been looking. But for one thing.

  “It’s not just me,” I told Sherry, taking out my smart. I called up the message I’d received the night before and placed it in front of her.

  “There’s no sender details,” she said.

  “No, and the ID was instantly wiped when I opened it.”

  “That’s impossible,” Red Wing said.

  “Wait outside,” Sherry told him in a tone that didn’t invite argument.

  Red Wing gave me a clench-jawed stare of anger and went out into the squadroom, visibly restraining himself from slamming the door and ignoring Janet’s polite greeting. She raised her eyebrows at me through the glass and gave a comic pout which drew an involuntary chuckle.

  “You spoken to it yet?” Sherry asked.

  I turned back, catching the smart as she tossed it over the desk. “My next port of call. Providing you put me back on the clock.”

  “Your disciplinary board is five days away. I reinstate you before that, I’ll be facing one myself.”

  “Can’t work this as a neutered Demon.”

  “Then don’t. I’ll put someone else on it.”

  The question in her gaze was plain: How bad do you want back in?

  “Call me a private contractor if you want,” I said, hoping the desperation didn’t colour my voice too much. “I won’t even bill you.”

  “Suspended LCPD officers are barred from employment in the commercial law enforcement sector.” Sherry got up to tap the glass, beckoning Janet into the room. “Dr Vaughan, do you have any criminal convictions?”

  Janet gave me an uncertain glance. “No, erm…”

  “Do you regularly associate with criminals, drug addicts or gang members?”

  “Only on weekends.” She laughed. Sherry didn’t. “Uh, no,” Janet said quietly. “No I don’t.”

  “Are you confident your personal history and finances would pass a standard grade security check?”

  “I suppose. Not sure what that is though.”

  “Good.” Sherry held out her smart. “Thumb-print please.”

  Janet looked at me again. “It’s OK,” I said. “My boss-cum-friend has found a way to simultaneously squeeze my nuts and let us work this case.”

  Janet hesitated some more then held her thumb to the screen. “Try not to blink.” Sherry held up her smart to take a cap of Janet’s left eye. She went back to her desk, fingers dancing on the holo-interface. A short wait then Janet’s smart gave a loud, official sounding beep.

  “Special Investigator?” she said, reading the screen, brows furrowed.

  “Provisional pending security clearance,” Sherry said. “Welcome to the Department, Dr Vaughan.”

  “Did you just make me a Demon?”

  “More like a helper-Demon. The Department has leeway to employ civilian specialists on an ad hoc basis.”

  “Do I have to carry a gun?”

  “No.”

  “Do I get paid?”

  “Expenses only, I’m afraid. However, you may, as a civilian, use the services of any clerical staff you happen to employ independently.” She gave me her best boss-smile, all ‘take one for the team’ fake sincerity. “I can recommend a candidate if you like.”

  I said, “I want my gun back.”

  “And I look forward to handing it over in five days.” She turned to Janet. “Excuse my ignorance, Doctor, but do you have any special dietary requirements? I’ve never cooked for a vampire before.”

  “Cooked?”

  “Yes. Tonight, my birthday shindig. Alex insisted I invite you.”

  I stood and went to the door. “We’ll call when we have something.” I pulled it open and walked out, hearing Janet tell Sherry a rare steak would be fine.

  *

  “So what happens in five days?”

  We were on the Pipe, heading for the Axis. As usual the lights were fritzed and the nauseating zoetrope flicker had me dry-swallowing my third painkiller of the day. “A disciplinary board will decide if I get to stay a Demon or not,” I replied.

  “Did you… do something bad?”

  I rubbed my temples. How long had it been since I’d had a drink? “Bad is a relative concept.”

  “Don’t want to talk about it,” she said softly. “Sorry. I’ll shut up.”

  I glanced at her flawless profile in the shimmering fluorescence. Did they make her this way? Feed in the specs for the perfect vampire babe and out she pops nine months later. Yet instead of sitting around brooding on one of their private orbitals, as they were apt to do, she was a working academic on the shittiest hab in orbit.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “We’ll go one for one. I get an answer to my question, you get an answer to yours.”

  “I don’t eat people,” she said. “Animal derived blood products only.”

  “Not that.” I nodded at the pale blemish on her wrist. “What was it?”

  Her fingers played over the former tattoo for a second. “An eye.” Her voice, for once, was devoid of humour.

  “What kind of eye?”

  “Eye of Horus. And that’s two questions. Your turn.”

  “I’m accused of trying to throw a suspect out of an airlock.”

  “Did you?”

  “Oh yeah. Sherry stopped me though, got there just in time.”

  “She reported you?”

  “Didn’t have much choice since I did it in full view of about fifty dock workers.”

  “Why?”

  I grinned at her. “That’s four questions. Why don’t you ask about my face? People always want to know about that.”

  “Your original face was lost in the Langley Raid at the end of the war. Your scars, which for some reason you haven’t had removed, were obtained in an exchange of gunfire with several armed criminals, all of whom died in the incident which has become known as the Heavenly Garden Massacre.” She returned my grin. “Research is what I do.”

  *

  “I heard you got fired,” Colonel Riviere said, bio-mech fingers steepled as he floated behind his desk. Having an office in a micro-grav environment made a desk a redundant feature but my former father-in-law was nothing if not a traditionalist.

  “Suspended,” I said. “Try not to be too cut up about it, Dad.”

  “Don’t call me that.” His replacement son
ar-eyes shifted from me to Janet. “Never seen a vampire Demon before.”

  She smiled back, bright and cheerful. I wondered if she’d intuited that he’d hate that. “Just a helper-Demon, apparently.”

  Colonel Riviere’s gaze did some more shifting between us and I discerned a certain calculation in it, despite the metallic blankness in his sockets. “Most of your kind sat out the war, as I recall. Stayed on their habs. Didn’t lift a finger when UNOIF plasma-shriked their neighbours.”

  Janet stared back, saying nothing. Whatever she may have done in the war, she wasn’t interested in sharing it.

  “Not here for a history lesson,” I said. “Ygor Karnikhov. Did you know him?”

  “A little. We have over a thousand residents now. Hard to keep track of everybody.”

  “Anything could be useful.”

  Riviere shrugged. “War vet, like all of us. Worked in asteroid mining, like most of us these days. Well adapted to micro-grav, interchangeable limbs. Smarter, faster and cheaper than bot labour. We’re a real boon to the CAOS economy.” His tone was absent of anything which might signify pleasure at this development. Riviere was still an ardent campaigner for disabled veterans’ rights, the meagre pension being a major point of complaint. Officialdom was less than sympathetic to claims of persistent impairment in an age when medical science could repair a severed spine, restore burnt tissue or replace your limbs with something that had an even greater range of motion, not to say tensile strength. It didn’t help that the mining industry was such a keen employer and most maimed vets lived rent free in the only micro-grav zone on the Slab.

  “Any enemies you know of?” I asked. “Some grudge left over from the war maybe?”

  “Didn’t serve with him,” the Colonel replied. “Heard he was Special Ops. Maybe you knew him.”

  “It was a big circus. We need to see his hab.”

  “Blue Tier, number seventeen. You’ll have to find your own way.”

  “Sure.” I pitched towards the exit and paused. “I’ll be calling on Freak while I’m here. Just so you know.”

  “She won’t see you.”

  Freak was always female to Riviere, which was weird as Consuela always thought of the big splice-blob as male.

  “Sure about that?” I asked. “How long since you spoke?”

  From his tense wave of dismissal I divined Freak was maintaining the policy of isolation which had been in place since what had become known as the ‘immolation incident.’

  “I’ll pass on your compliments, Dad,” I said, hauling myself outside.

  *

  It seemed athleticism was another aspect of Janet’s genetic feature-set from the way she propelled herself towards the Axis hab tiers, zipping from hand-hold to hand-hold with a natural grace that put my efficient but workmanlike shoves to shame.

  “Keep up!” she called with a giggle, tucking her legs in to tumble to a perfect landing on the grab-way leading to the cluster of blue, bulb-shaped habs.

  “Done this before?” I asked as I caught up.

  “That’s five questions.” She grinned and took off again. I found her waiting at the door to Karnikhov’s hab.

  “Show your smart to the lock,” I said. “You should already be cleared for access.”

  “Oh.” She waved her smart at the lock-pad which slid open without delay. “Neato.” She started to enter but I waved her back. This wouldn’t be the first time I’d opened a door to find a killer rifling through a victim’s belongings. The absence of the Sig was a fiery itch in my hand as I peered round the door jamb. Nothing in the living room. I went inside, finding the sleep chamber and washroom both empty.

  “OK,” I said.

  “I can protect myself, y’know,” Janet said, her tone carrying a small note of reproach.

  “Indulge me. I’ve got an archetype to live up to.” I waved a hand at the empty hab. “Tell me what you see.”

  Her eyes tracked round the room, features taking on that feline, predatory set I’d seen at her apartment. “He was neat,” she said. “But ex-military people usually are, I guess.” She plucked the remote from a stick-pad on the wall and accessed the entertainment hub, scrolling through the most recent items. “Liked his sports, and his docs, twentieth-century history by the looks of it. Fair amount of porn but that’s hardly unusual for a single man. Or any man, eh?”

  “What else?”

  She called up the comms display. “Plenty of friends. Flurry of calls after his disappearance so he was missed pretty quickly.” She went further back. “Message of thanks from the Lorenzo City Educational Forum, seems he did a charity EVA endurance event for them in December. Fits with what we know about him.”

  “Run a search,” I said. “Key-phrase ‘Grey Wolf’.”

  She gave me a quizzical look.

  “Please.”

  “No hits,” she reported after the search completed. “Anything I should know about?”

  “Not really.” Grey Wolf was the alert code flashed to former Spec-Ops types when their one-time masters had something to tell them, such as ‘the friend / lover / brother or whatever of the target you assassinated ten years ago knows where you are.’ Whoever killed him, he didn’t see them coming.

  I checked for the most likely place. Where would I hide it? My gaze alighted on the join between the far wall and the main support beam; central location, easy to get to in a hurry or the dark. I floated over and felt around the base of the support, detecting a slight texture change in the paint, a patch about ten inches square. Red Wing missed it. Fucking idiot.

  “What are..?” Janet began then stopped when I delivered a full force punch to the wall. The patch gave way like rice paper and my hand closed on something hard and familiar.

  “Well look at you,” I said, pulling the hand-gun free. It was a modified Colt Python repro: .357 magnum six-shooter, six inch barrel, porcelain and graphene composite body and cylinder; no metal to set off the scanners. No serial numbers either. I cracked open the cylinder finding it fully loaded. Plastic jacketed epoxy slugs with a phosphorus core. An untraceable close-quarters kill weapon, and an old friend.

  “Got a thing for guns, huh?” Janet asked. For the first time there was something like disapproval in her voice and she eyed the Python with obvious distaste.

  “Just securing evidence. I’ll hand it in later.” I pocketed the Python along with the two speed-loaders in the hidey-hole. “Jed like him, way too well prepared for a surprise at home.”

  Janet held up her smart, the holo displaying the official case file. “Last seen going on shift at the ore processing plant, 2200 hours, seems he was on lates this month. Didn’t check out at the expected time, 0600. Found six hours later chained to an unprocessed asteroid with a salvage-bot chewing on his liver. Exocore employment file has him down as part of the Helium 3 extraction division.”

  Helium 3, primary fuel for the fusion generators that ran the Slab plus every hab in the Confederation of Autonomous Orbiting States. Something began to click in my head but Janet was already there.

  “An elemental fuel source,” she murmured.

  “Or fire from the gods,” I said, the last vestiges of any doubt fading fast. If you’re an obsessed nutbag who thinks ancient myths are real, that is. “What was his specialty?”

  “EVA servo-bot retrieval and repair. Basically, he’d fly around collecting any bots that’d stopped working. The mining companies tend to work their bots to destruction so there’s a pretty high failure rate. Looks like he’d been logging a lot of extra hours recently. Exocore paid a bonus if he exceeded his monthly quota.”

  I gave the hab a final once over, finding only the traces of a man who had coped with permanent disability and trauma with an enviable energy and lack of self-pity.

  “Pain meds are all prescription,” I said, closing the washroom cabinet. “Not a drop of booze in the place either.”

  “What does that tell you?” Janet asked.

  “Tells me he deserved a better end.” I pushed
myself towards the door. “Recheck his comms data for any links to that Mythos mumbo jumbo. I’ll meet you at the Pipe in an hour.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “As befits the nature of our investigation, I’m going to talk to a god.”

  *

  Freak’s hab had grown, as had the collection of the uber bonsai that were one of the visual signatures of life in the Axis. Shorn of gravitational constraints the miniature trees grew in size and complexity, branches reaching for the various UV globes in an arboreal web of brown and green that made Freak’s home resemble a spherical forest. I had to search for the entrance, eventually finding an opening by virtue of the blinking red eye of a servo-bot, no doubt sent to guide me in. The fresh sawdust on its blades confirmed Freak hadn’t been receiving callers for some time now. Inside the bonsai web the air was chilled in shadow, here and there I heard the faint whirr of an unseen servo-bot, presumably shaping the globe tree to Freak’s design. It took a few minutes of cramped struggle to get to the entrance, the servo-bot moving aside as it irised open. Inside I discovered why Freak needed an expanded hab: once roughly man-sized, if not man-shaped, Freak had grown big in the years since Riviere’s raid on the corporate orbital s/he’d once called home. But what had once been big was now monstrous, easily occupying a third of the available space, tentacles reaching into every corner and tech-cluster. The colour was different too, the red-green patchwork now more predominantly crimson, with an occasional rainbow pulse snaking over the dermis. As I entered, a section of Freak’s skin changed to a pale pink, darker patches appearing to form the semblance of a smile.

  “Alex.” The voice from the speakers was unchanged, a soft, androgynous intonation that reminded you that, appearances aside, what lived here was in fact a human being.

  “Freak,” I said. “Got your message. Anything you want to tell me?”

  “No pleasantries first? Not even an enquiry as to my general well-being?”

  “Assumed you weren’t into small-talk anymore, since the whole crazy girl setting herself on fire thing.” It had happened little under a year ago. There had been a semi-permanent gathering of devotees camped out on the Axis Terminus concourse, mostly splices, seeking communion with a being they had come to regard as a living god. Their requests for an audience were continually refused so they hung around shouting their prayers into the security cams, knowing Freak could hear them if s/he so chose. S/he didn’t. Somehow a sixteen year-old elf-splice, complete with vermilion hair and pointy ears, made it past Axis Security and all the way to Freak’s hab. When her plaintive cries for recognition went unanswered, she sprayed herself with petroleum vapour and lit a sparkler. The medics managed to save her, despite burns over eighty percent of her body. After that the worshippers had been banned from Axis Terminus and Freak let the bonsai forest grow ever thicker.