Originator (29 page)

Station traffic was light at midmorning, and the board showed five minutes until the next train. They'd have known that already if they'd been using AR glasses, giving kids a similar but much simpler capability than adults had with uplinks. But now, they were all dumb and blind. Normally in any emergency, Sandy would have called immediately and given word about Kiril. They'd had no communication on Droze either, but their little patch of Droze had been Rimtown and its immediate neighbourhood, and they'd known where everything was and had arranged many rendezvous points in case something went wrong. Without coms, Tanusha seemed impossibly vast, a jungle of people and randomness.

Poole, Danya noticed as they waited against the wall farthest from the platform edge, was calmly scanning one way then the other. Mostly working people on the platform, a more predictable crowd than the exuberant Tanushan evenings. A number of young mothers with strollers going about their baby-centred day. Some older folks. A train arrived on the other platform, a gentle whoosh that defied its gleaming size.

“Can you see them?” Danya murmured to Poole. “Their body temperature?” Human-made GIs had lower body temperature that could give them away. But not always, beneath clothes.

“Maybe,” said Poole. What was Cai's body temperature, Danya wondered? Had anyone thought to check?

“Danya, I don't like this,” Svetlana said quietly at his side. “We should hide.”

“We have to get to Sandy,” Danya replied. “That's the only way to be safe.”

“We're too exposed.”

“Well, we can't take a cruiser, Cai could track anything on the grid.”

“And you don't think he could track trains?” Svetlana retorted.

“Maybe. But he can't track people walking to the station. Just keep an eye out.”

“Gee,
duhh!
” said Svetlana. Her eyes hadn't stopped tracking even as they talked.

The opposing train left, and their own arrived. It was barely a quarter full, most passengers finding seats against the curving tube sides. With so few interior partitions, the whole length of the maglev was visible from within, and everyone in it. Danya realised Svetlana was probably right.

“Svet,” he said as they took seats, “why don't you . . .” But she was already gone, wandering up the train as the doors closed and platform fell away almost soundlessly, building to a steady rush of speed. She swung on the support poles, like any eleven-year-old girl on a day off. Most passengers barely noticed her. A little boy on his mother's lap stared, and Svetlana waved, continuing on.

By the next station she was back, plonking herself nonchalantly down beside Danya, with an attitude that said “nothing up that way.” She was good at spotting odd things in crowds, and being a kid, she could do things that would be suspicious in an adult. She blew a bubble on some gum and put some sunglasses on her face. Not
her
sunglasses, Danya noted.

“Fucking hell Svet,” he muttered.

“Oh blow it out your ear,” she said calmly, looking the other way down the train through her new shades. It was something Sandy said from time to time.

“Poole?” said Danya. “That woman by the door two carriages down? She's in the sunlight, but she's got no shades on. And she's not squinting.”

The train accelerated once more, now holding another seventy or so people. Poole said nothing until the train began to slow again, several minutes later. “Let's go,” he said.

It wasn't their stop. Danya's heart beat faster as they walked to the door, waiting behind several others. The maglev was so smooth they barely needed a handhold, and just leaned. Poole put his own AR glasses on and clipped the connector cord to the insert at the back of his head. It looked like a blocker, Danya thought—the kind of thing that prevented any direct transmission to or from uplinks.

The train stopped, and they got off with the rest. Svetlana “dropped” a candy wrapper from her pocket, turned back to pick it up, then scampered to rejoin Danya and Poole. “That woman's following us,” she said in a low voice. Frightened, and ready to run.

“Not yet,” said Danya, still walking, eyeing roof columns on the platform and chairs and information boards, anything that might make temporary cover. His heart was pounding fit to burst. If these were GIs of any description, let alone Talee-made GIs, he had no idea how they could get away. Though surely, with all these people about . . .

“Fuck,” said Poole, and staggered. Went down on his haunches, a fist down for balance, as though trying to focus. Danya and Svetlana stared. Poole's jaw was tight, teeth clenched, as though in pain. “Run,” he said. “Use the crowd.”

He went for his pistol and stopped abruptly, his whole body in seizure, contorting. Danya stared back up the platform. The woman he'd spotted was coming, dark, nondescript, normal. She wore jeans and carried a handbag and was coming straight toward them.

Danya grabbed Svetlana's arm and turned to run. Blocking their way was a man, middle-sized, Caucasian, wearing a suit. Normal. But staring straight at them.

“Help us!” Svetlana screamed at the passing passengers. “Help us, they're going to kill us!” No one even looked. It wasn't cowardly indifference. They just kept walking, not seeing, not hearing. Danya realised that it was over, these GIs could do anything to them, in full view of everyone, and no one would notice a thing. Not even the security cameras. Nor the people watching them.

A third person walked up, passing outgoing passengers to join the man in the suit. Chinese features, round-faced, handsome. Cai. He, and the man in the suit, and the woman with the handbag were the only people on the platform who seemed to see them. Danya stood behind Svetlana and put his arms around her. She trembled. Cai pulled a pistol. His companion in the suit glanced at him, as though wondering why he'd done that.

Cai shot him in the head.

Danya flung Svetlana to the platform and fell on her, as more shots erupted, rapid like firecrackers. Then nothing. Danya raised his head, gasping for air against the adrenaline overload. The woman with the handbag was down too, pistol in her own hand. Cai checked her, picked up the pistol, and pulled several extra mags from her bag. Then back to the man in the suit, who'd only been shot once and was still moving. Shot him repeatedly in the skull, point-blank, then recovered weapon and mags as well.

And finally stood before Danya and Svetlana, both half-crouched and watching, wary like frightened cats. About them on the platform, people continued to talk, laugh, wander, and wait. But several babies were crying. They'd heard the noise, Danya realised. Their uplinked mothers were puzzled, wondering what had triggered the sudden screams. There were no other kids on the platform; they were all at school. Just adults, trapped even now in the Talee net.

“So,” said Cai quite calmly. “I think you'd better come with me.”

“I'm sorry, Chief,” Raylee insisted, as ahead her cruiser's nav comp plotted her toward a high-security “event” she'd normally not be allowed into. “They won't say when I'm released.”

“
Ray
,” her precinct chief replied with frustration, “
I can't run a precinct if my officers keep running off for days on end. You're going to have to decide whether you're a cop or not
.”

“Well, sir, it's not entirely up to me, FSA have the authority to put police on secondment at any time, and . . .”

“
That's bullshit, Ray, and you know it. If you're gonna spend all your damn time with them, take the offer they've had on your table for months, and at least get paid like a damn spook
.”

He disconnected. “He has a point,” Rhian offered from the passenger seat. “It is more money, for basically the same job.”

“You're okay with this?” Raylee changed the subject.

“If it gets me on site, I'm okay with it,” said Rhian. Raylee found her difficult to read. Found most GIs difficult to read, in fact. Lean and pretty, Rhian deadpanned much of the time, but not like some clichéd automaton. More like . . . well, Ari, she supposed. It was personality, of the mild, quirk-less variety that high-designation GIs did.

Nav comp brought the cruiser down, field gens whining, over haphazard rows of beachfront houses, through the ocean haze of an onshore wind. The scene below drove the frustrations of work from Raylee's mind—the streets were swarmed with vehicles, mostly aerial, lights flashing, forensics lugging gear, suits talking and gesticulating amidst the roadside sand and scrub. The beach was cordoned, uniformed cops getting the grunt work again, manning a line to keep gathered onlookers from encroaching, and interviewing anyone who claimed to be a witness.

All were centred by a beachfront house atop a short, sandy cliff. Several small anti-aircraft mounts were visible, hidden defences used by an alarming number of Tanushan high-security zones these days. The one at the rear appeared to have been fired directly into the house. Raylee didn't see that the terrible damage could have happened any other way—much of the rear wall was gone, the roof caving in with little to support it. The opposite walls, at the front of the house, were studded with high-velocity holes from rounds that had gone straight through. The neighbouring house, across a patch of unoccupied scrub, had also been hit, from an angle that seemed to line up with that rear gun mount.

She selected a landing zone and was rejected by the onsite net construct. She selected another, closest to the barrier now placed across the road, and it rejected that one too. Maybe Chief was right, she thought drily—time to get a promotion. She selected a new LZ on the beach instead.

“Don't do that,” Rhian advised her, and suddenly her LZ had changed back to the street.

Raylee frowned. “You hacked the system?”

“No, I used my FSA clearance,” said Rhian. “I'm not walking from the beach.”

“Aren't GIs supposed to be without ego?” Raylee suggested.

“Ego doesn't have anything to do with it,” Rhian said mildly. “But I'm not walking from the beach.”

“Right,” said Raylee, field gens throbbing as she followed the landing path down to the crowded, sandy street. “Let's just hope they don't ask to see my FSA ID.”

“You worry too much about rules,” said Rhian.

“You do understand what police officers do, in Tanusha?”

“Patronise thirty-nine-series GIs, apparently.” Raylee blinked. She'd probably deserved that—Rhian was technically a lower designation than Kresnov, or Togales, or any of the other GIs she'd met at the top of the FSA chain, but she was a long way from stupid.

Raylee always felt nervous flashing her police badge at a scene that was clearly beyond what police usually handled. But the badge ID, followed on uplink, led to FSA encryption that various suited spies and agents let pass without so much as a raised eyebrow, and Rhian followed after her.

The main room was a mess, floors covered in glass, fractured plaster,
and blood. Everywhere were high-velocity holes from the rear emplacement, drilling through walls, and sprayed with red like wine on Swiss cheese. Agents had set up various scanners and forensics posts, the show run by CSA Investigations, Raylee guessed. FSA didn't really have any crime-solvers of its own, were truly just an administrative body with a special-forces wing, on this planet. Thus this resort to outsourcing, CSA most of the time, and TPD when they were truly desperate.

Ari was here, and Commander Rice, standing to one side where they couldn't contaminate the scene and looking concerned. Rice was in full armour; no doubt the rest of her team were around somewhere, providing security. They seemed to be in uplinked conversation, no doubt something to do with the FedInt spies on the other side of the room. Raylee could tell they were spies because their suits were old Earth style, two buttons, rich weave. And the haircuts of the men, again traditional, none of the shaved undercuts and little trims of Tanushan men. Sometimes police work was hard, but other times the little, ridiculous things people and institutions did made it easy.

“Hey, Rhi,” said Rice as they came over. “Raylee. What brings you here?” We didn't ask for you, that meant.

“She's with me,” Raylee explained, not taking her eyes off the scene. “I attached her.”

“And who attached you?” Rice asked cautiously. Vanessa Rice was not yet her “friend,” as such. She was Kresnov's friend. Who was Ari's friend. Who was staying suspiciously quiet.

“I attached me.”

“You can do that?”

“Apparently. FSA gave me clearance on homicides connected to terrorist operations in Tanusha. I'd guess this qualifies.”

“We're not actually sure it does,” said Rice. And no more, with a glance at silent Rhian, wondering how much a homicide cop on secondment was supposed to know.

“It's Talee,” Raylee told her. “Or Talee-created GIs.”

“How'd you learn that?” Rice wondered, with a glance first at Ari, then at Rhian. Raylee knew that Ari had seen some strange stuff on his last trip to Pantala. The one he wasn't supposed to tell her about, but had, because
she knew too much elsewhere for lying to be credible. But he hadn't told her about the alien-origin synthetics.

“I have sources,” Raylee said blandly. “That's Takewashi over there, right? So it was a debrief. Which means Shin was here, and Kresnov. But Kresnov's alive, of course. . . . How about Shin?”

“We don't know,” Ari said cautiously. As the spec-ops commander gave him a questioning look. “Ray, this isn't exactly a homicide investigation, we kinda know who did it.”

“That's what you think.” She strolled to the scene, stepping carefully around debris on the floor, boots only where her trained eye told her was safe.

“Rhi?” the Commander asked her for an explanation.

“Rhian, with me, please,” said Raylee. And Rhian came, similarly careful, and still silent. To the astonishment of her friends. Raylee attempted to make a connection. . . . It was always hard, the sudden disorientation of netspace, the graphical balance shift, the little icons she was meant to indicate. . . . Rhian came to her rescue and made the connection with a profound click in her inner ear.