Two days later, I was out of the security business. More precisely, the company I was working for was fired by the production company. My employers had screened the guys working for them. They were thorough, but they couldn’t account for every human urge, weakness or proclivity.
One of the mid-shift guys played rock and roll roadie, and decided to tap and trade some groupie in exchange for letting her in to see the Horse. She and the Horse got along great, she rode reverse cowgirl like a pro. Then the little psycho pulled a laser scalpel, went “all in” and chopped off his career at the moment he should have been enjoying himself most.
She was laughing when they dragged her away, screaming about how she was going to be famous because she was the last one he would ever screw. I heard they had to knock her out and use a pair of pliers to recover the “evidence”.
At that point, I was a few hundred light years from earth, unemployed and feeling like I needed to reconsider my career path. I had a one-way ticket back to the blue marble. I pocketed it and went to see Kinky.
“I am out of work and don’t want to leave you hanging, doll. I have no idea what a private dick makes, but I want to get your problem solved.”
“Two hundred creds a day plus expenses,” she said. “I looked it up when I heard about Johnny and Little Miss Crazy Crotch.”
“Johnny—?”
“The Horse,” she replied.
“Right. So, you hiring me?” I asked.
“Yep. And I’ll give ya five grand as a bonus if ya can get this taken care of before I head back to Earth.”
”I love a challenge. Give me Mikey’s comm and we’ll get this done,” I said. I felt like a cop again. Almost.
Mikey and I were staking out a workers housing section over the Glinstrom mining facility, sitting in a rickshaw being pulled by a creature that looked like a cross between an armadillo and a six foot tall kangaroo. We had circled the outside of a scummy low rent walk-up for an hour. We were waiting on one of the players.
Well, not a player, so much as a rapist. The Denubian from the vid. Unlike Mikey or Kinky, I had connections. I took a snippet of the overhead video and sent it to my old partner. He ran the Denubian through metrics and pulled a name. The two humans came up bank. They had on bio-metric distorting disguises.
Perrisnt Moatssywr. That was the Denube’s name. A sad case. His family had money and he had a trust fund, but the money was tied up in probate. There was the possibility of a remote connection for the family wealth being tied to the chocolate trade. Until that was resolved, he couldn’t touch it. That probably made him mad. Especially at humans. Given the chance, he probably decided to make some real money and Kinky just happened to be the one who walked through his door.
He was why we were on the Antares Reclamation Station floating 500 miles above the mine.
Mikey was sweating. And bitching. And restless. And pretty Godamn irritating. It was his most endearing quality and he had it in spades.
“How much longer we got to wait? I’m hungry.”
“As long as it takes,” I replied.
“Yeah, well, it’s been six hours and he hasn’t showed. Maybe he moved. Or he spotted us and took off.”
“How would he know we were looking for him? And it’s only been two hours.”
“Dude, we are the only two humans out in this part of the station. Everyone else has the common sense to stay in the Safezone. We kinda stick out.”
The giant armadil-aroo snorted and turned its ears toward us. I think it passed gas as well, because something akin to rotten eggs and week old fish guts wafted over us.
Mikey leaned to the side and heaved.
That’s when I spotted our boy.
“Mikey, you head back to the Safezone. I’ll be along in a little while.”
“Okay, I don’t feel so good,” he said, as I stepped out of the rickshaw and made for the front door of Mr. Moatssywrr’s building.
“Be ready to bolt when I get the goods,” I said, over my shoulder.
“Sure thing. I am always ready to go, man,” Mikey replied.
The Denubian wasn’t being cautious. It was a dive tenement and the hallways had a lot of riff raff milling about. All kinds of business was being conducted from doorways and stairwells. I trailed behind him a good forty feet, until he stopped at a door and thumbed the lock. I rushed forward, lowered my shoulder and shoved him through the door, putting him on the floor and slamming it shut behind me.
“What up wid? M’gon kick you—“ he stopped talking when he realized it was a human standing on his neck.
”M’ya in deep shitz, Pinky toy. M’gon beat bad. Ya in M’a part town,” he rambled on in Near English. “M’gon be dead pinky toy. M’gon comm M’boyz, They gon slice good you.”
“Shut the hell up, Per-shit for brains,” I said, stepping down hard. He gasped and wheezed. I pulled a small pad from my coat and tapped it, then slid it in front of him.
“Remember her? And what you did? Well, what you did gets you sent away for a long time. The fact that you kept the vid means I gotta start breaking things until you give it up.”
The Denubian re-formed his head and bulged his eyes out to get a better look at the pad. He grinned. He actually grinned about what he saw.
“M’gon stay put, not gon any place. Whatfa ya doin this? She gave ma invite. Wave ma in to do all the fun. Pinky toy gave up it all. She like Denubian man.”
“You’re an Idiot. You know she was neurolized. You made a porn with a knocked out human puppet. That’s rape and illegal.”
“What talk bout Pinky toy? You out mind,” Perrisnt protested, his luminescence started flashing, yellow and red. He was suddenly very scared. “She want bangun with Denubian. M’give it good to her. Her man say she like it ever which way. Like the Blue boy. She wan vid ta her collect. M’not rapin’ no human. M’not dumb, Pinky Toy.”
“She what?” I asked, then stopped. “You didn’t set up the shoot? Those aren’t your guys filming?”
“M’gon say ‘gin,” he replied, rotating his eyes to look at me. “M’never Pinky toys met befo. Show up, saw girl, had fun. Left. Just like her man said would hap’n.”
“Her man said? What man?”
“Pimp-movie man. Tall man. He one set up. Mi—“
“-key,” I finished for him. It made sense. Mikey that hits like a girl had set her up. She was leaving his stable and he gets some black market neural controller. He films the entire career ending vid and sits on it until she builds up some cash. He planned on taking her cash and then he would sell the vid to some Denubian. He probably spent the last few years lining a buyer up. Perrisnt was just the stupid blue meat he used. That’s why Mikey took off for our hotel. Blue boy would have recognized him.
“You’re coming with me. We are going to the Farkan substation and you are going on the record with your side of the story. Play it right and I’ll see that you don’t do time. Screw with me and I will get the girl to swear out a complaint that is so vivid you will never see the light of day again.”
“Sure, sure, M’co-op. M’not go jail. Tell it all.”
He didn’t get the chance.
When we walked outside the hotel, I had my hand on his back and was guiding him in front of me, looking for a rickshaw.
His head exploded.
Then my shoulder snapped back and my arm went numb. I hit the ground and blacked out.
The young GISI was leaning forward in his chair. I stopped talking about how Kinky and I met. The pain in my chest had come back. It was like remembering the moment of impact from being shot all of those years before reminded my body that it was very hurt, right then, as well. Of course, being shot seemed trivial when compared to being blown out of a building.
“Seriously? They killed the Denubian?” the young GISI officer asked. He sat back in his chair and took a drink of coffee. Cops everywhere lived on sugar and caffeine. At least that wasn’t going to change anytime soon. I adjusted my hospital bed and tapped my pain med feed.
“Easy does it, Mr. MacDonald, the Farkan liaison is going to want you coherent for the debrief on Syemour and the Saviors of Mars.”
“Don’t worry kid, this isn’t my first time on a drip.”
“We still have some time. So, what happened to this Mikey?”
“He was gone. When I woke up, I was in the safe zone med center.”
My underarmor had stopped the round from tearing my shoulder off, but there was extensive bruising and tissue compression. I asked to go back to my room, but they said there was no point. It looked like someone had gone through it with a chainsaw.
Mikey had the cred card with Kinky’s life savings on it.
And he had the vid.
And he had a head start.
This was not shaping up to be a successful first case.
“Detect—Mr. MacDonald, you may leave whenever you are ready,” the Farkan station chief said. They had as much info as I could give them about what had happened to the Denubian. I also gave a brief on why I was there and Mikey’s possible role. I didn’t mention the actual overhead vid feed, just the Dream Catcher. They would take it from there. They had a bolo out on Mikey, but in that part of the galaxy, and that close to Denubian space, he was going to be hard to run down.
I went back to my room and packed up the things that had not been shredded. Even though I had put the cred card in the room safe, Mikey had broken in. Probably with the aid of one of the techno turds that helped with the vid and neural remote.
I had commed Kinky to let her know the bad news and told her I would see her in a couple of days. I went to the transit terminal right away. I hopped the line at booking and got on the next passenger cruiser heading in the direction of Hades. Now that was ironic.
The passenger mix was mostly business types and immigrant workers. Only about 10% were human, so we were in the forward part of the ship. We even had our own dining hall. I had nothing better to do, so I sat at the dining hall bar and tossed a few, watching sports replays.
Once a GISI, always a GISI. And even more to the point, once a cop, always a cop. We know when something is up. It’s on a subconscious level. Sometimes it has to bubble to the top. We notice almost everything and our brain chews on all of that input while we are talking, sleeping or doing other everyday shit.
I had just tossed down my third Jack and Amaretto and was getting up to leave, when the general alarm went off. We dropped out of hyper and the lights went out.
People were calm and I heard the usual speculation about what the problem might be.
Then the gravity went. I jammed my foot between the bar and the foot rail. My chair went careening off into the dark. There was a thud and somebody screamed.
That’s when everybody panicked. Emergency lights came on and the automated warning started giving instructions in every language. The fourth or fifth one was in Near English. They had lost main drive power, there was not any reason to panic. Comms were down, but the rescue beacon was up. It might take a couple of days for a Farkan rescue/repair boat to arrive. They said the hull was tight and no other systems were down.
That didn’t set right. How do you have that “safe” of an accident? When something lets go on these interstellar boats, someone invariably gets injured, equipment blows up or some nasty chemical gets released in the closed environment. It’s sad, but true. Two unrelated systems don’t just stop working nice and clean.
I spotted a crewman using an emergency personal propellant stick. I launched for him and grabbed him before he went by. He was startled, growled and showed his fangs. I smiled. He was Belrusian. Tall and skinny with beige fur.
“Hi, can I help?” I asked.
“Help? Who you?” he spoke a little Near English.
I flashed my GISI issue gun and my retiree ID. He relaxed somewhat and asked if I would help him gather the other humans near lifebay 46. He handed me an emergency light attached to a looped synthetic strap and a handful of propellant sticks. I hung the light around my neck and I followed him. My priority was to help him, but I was also trying to spot something. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I would know it when I found it.
We had knocked on all of the doors and accounted for all of the passengers on his list. He was towing the last ten back to the lifebay, I was at the rear, when the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I wasn’t sure why, but the back of my brain had put something together that the front of my brain wasn’t quite ready to see.
Back at the bay, the humans were pink-skinned pinwheels, getting into their safety suits in zero-g and every motion sending them careening into someone or something else. The suits were the cheap ones that fit like crap but keep you alive. I slid into mine easily, my old GISI spacewalk training coming in handy.
People were helping other people and the Belrusian was double-checking that the suits were on correctly. He was floating in front of a blonde fellow, whose back was to me, helping him reseat his helmet. I noticed two other guys watching the interaction with keen interest.
The blonde pushed off and thanked the Belrusian. He then guided himself out of the way. The two “we’re not watching, but we are watching” clowns sidled over by the blonde. They didn’t speak, but out of the corner of my eye, I watched them slip away.
“Hey, I think we lost a couple,” I said to the crewman. “I’ll go get them back. You stay here.” I took off after the three men, but doused my light and launched from handhold to handhold, not using my stick. I could see them ahead of me. They were using an handheld illuminator. They went up one level and cut back to a location almost exactly over the other lifebay. They were now in lifebay 36. It was unoccupied.
I paused and waited just around the corner.
I noticed one of them had a plain brown carry pack, the kind that can be converted to a backpack. That one pulled a small comm from the pack and started talking into it quietly. After a few moments, he turned to the other two.
“They will be here in twenty minutes. We need to be in the bay and decompressed before we open the door for the grab. Otherwise we shoot into space. They don’t want to dock. The locking clamps might not let them go.” The other two grunted in reply.
The blonde man went to work on the door panel, using a decoder box and mini powerpack to run the door system. It started cycling and then stopped. He was trying to manipulate the box and the panel, but his breathing had fogged the clear plasteel helmet. He started tapping it and the other men got the hint. They removed his helmet and shined the light over his shoulder so he could see the panel better. His blonde hair reflected the light and gave him an artificial halo.
Cloverleaf.
There it was. The face was wrong. The hair was wrong, the height was pretty close, but the cloverleaf shaped wound on his neck?
Hello, Mikey that hits like a girl.
Only problem was that my gun was inside my suit.
And there were three of them.
And there was no gravity.
The hatch opened the rest of the way and the three of them floated apart. The two accomplices bounced to a panel and started to use a tool to pop the fasteners. There was maybe twenty feet between them and the hatch. Mikey, that hits like a girl, went handle to handle and moved the power pack inside the airlock, disappearing from sight.
“Yo, Mike, heads up,” one of them said and a brown pack went floating by.
“Careful, dipshit, do you know how much that pack is worth?”
“Twelve creds,” one of them answered. “But the shit inside is worth four-hundred grand.” They all laughed.
I like a good joke as much as the next guy. I like busting criminals better.
I fired off my thruster stick on with the slider all the way forward.
I would like to tell you I was graceful and heroic as I flew through space. Focused and precise in my movements.
Again, I am a terrible liar.
I was spinning, bouncing and generally careening in the opposite direction of the full throttled thruster, which is not as easy to direct as you would think. Plus I was using only one hand. The other hand was extended. I needed to grab the emergency handle for the hatchway.
It seemed like I was flying along forever. The other two guys had seen me and both launched to intercept, but they aimed for the path they believed I was on. I was on a path being dictated by my inability to properly control the stick, so they both missed. By a lot.
“It’s hooked, get in here,” was the last thing I heard before grabbing the handle, yanking it as I passed it and continuing through the hatch. It closed and locked with a very firm clunk.
Mikey that hits like a girl looked surprised to see me.
“What the? You are a dead fu—,“ he began. He didn’t finish. At least not that I could hear. I swung around in an arc. The strap from my lamp was held firmly in the now closed hatch and as it finished paying out, I used it to guide me in a beautiful arc, right into Mikey. I knocked the crap out of him. He bounced off the wall and floated back toward me, sorta stunned. I spun him away from me and stabbed him.
With the other thruster stick.
Like I said, the suits are cheap. Just thick enough to keep you alive, but not made to do any heavy lifting. The stick went through the fabric and I goosed the ignition button. Mikey shot around the chamber in a twirling pattern of stomach heaving randomness, bouncing off every wall. When he moved to grab a handhold, his motion changed the angle of the stick and he shot off in a new direction. I got a hand on the pack as he flew by and held onto it tight. It jerked him to its maximum length the strap would go and then carried him in an arc. He hit the wall at maximum thrust and then went limp. I pulled him in and untangled him from the pack, letting his limp body go. He continued bouncing around the chamber, unconscious.
I looked at the two faces in the viewport and held up the bag.
“We can decompress the airlock and send you both out there. Our friends will pick you off,” dipshit number one said, the other one holding up the comm. I looked at the power pack by the door.
“Not unless you have another one of those,” I nodded toward the pack. They looked at each other and started talking in a rapid conversation. Mikey groaned.
I kicked off and grabbed him. I locked my legs around him and twisted the helmet off. Reaching around him, I grabbed the stick and used it to maneuver us to the hatch with its last dying sputters.
“Open the hatch and he dies,” I said.
“Like we care,” dipshit number two said, as they both laughed. “Either way, we get the goods.”
Remember when your mom used to tell you to quit while you’re ahead? That silence was golden? That you didn’t have to say every stupid thing that popped into your head?
Yeah, well, these two didn’t.
I reached into the pack and dug out the Dream Catcher. It was wrapped in stealth cloth. Probably flew right through security and they had a crewman stash it in the panel while they boarded.
“Those things are indestructible. Go ahead, kick it, hit it. Toss it out the lock. We’ll still find it.”
These guys didn’t know who they were dealing with. I was going to end this. I popped my helmet and held the Dream Catcher up to my face. It snapped on and started showing me the ground view video of Kinky. She stared back with a blank look. It made me angry.
They laughed and pointed.
“He’s a perv,” dipshit number two said.
“Hey Mikey,” I said, as I grabbed his hair. “Look at this.”
I pulled his face next to mine.
“Hey look, Mikey likes it!” I said.
“Mother fuc—,” was all one of the dipshits got out before the Dream Catcher beeped. Four sets of eyes. Sharing a dream was not allowed. The playback stopped. It whirred. The projection went blank. It beeped again and the only thing showing was a message in Draconan. “Used memory: 0.00%, ready to load first Dream.”
I smiled at them.
“You are a dead man. You just cost us a bundle.”
See there, I lied. Did you catch it? I wasn’t smiling at them. I was smiling at the Belarusian crewman that had floated up behind them. There were two expressions of surprise and shock as their heads bounced off the viewport. I waved at the crewman and he waved back.
I spent the next 12 hours in the airlock until minimal power was restored.
The next time I saw Kinky was at the space depot on Mars. I had not been able to recover her money. Mikey had converted the card and sent it along to whatever “no-questions asked” banking hole he had found. He had also lawyered up and wasn’t talking.
It took some doing, but I had convinced Kinky to turn the topside vid over to the Farkan liaison, under seal. Her career was over, but the two dipshits and Mikey were going away for a long time. If I know the Farkans, they were going to find out where that neural control module came from and they would not take “I forget” for an answer.
When we left the Farkan Embassy, she was holding my arm.
“So, Mr. Macd—Redge, what ya gonna do now?”
“I don’t know. Security is boring and I was only ever good at one thing,” I replied.
“Yeah, you are pretty good at that one-thing, Thanks, ” Kinky replied. “Look, ya mook, the way I figure it, I owe ya about ten grand. “
I was going to stop her, but she continued. “So, what ya do is take that money and open a detective office. Right here on Mars. I’m guessing ya stink at office work, more of a field guy, so I will be your office manager.”
“You want to be my secretary?”
“Office manager,” she corrected. “And ya pay me when we start making some money. Until then I’ve got some savings stashed. One more thing, I handle the negotiations for payment, ‘cause you suck at that.”
I am usually not at a loss for words and was going to crack wise before letting her down easy, but when I looked down, she was smiling up at me.
“Sure, Kinky, that sounds like a great idea. I’m in.”
“Good. Now, I need some accounting firmware. And I want to get this Holo-porn firmware out of my freakin’ head. I was thinking about an upgrade. Something fun, less girly and most likely illegal. I know a guy right here on Mars.”
“Wow. She is THAT Kinky, huh?” the young GISI asked.
“Was,” I replied.
“Yeah, I know, She is retired, but still, she is a Goddess.”
“Look, kid, I understand your appreciation of her, but let’s not speak of her like that. It’s disrespectful of those that have passed.”
“Passed what?”
Was he this dense?
“Passed away.”
“But she isn’t dead, Sure, she is still in the tank, but she is gonna make it.”
“Alive? How—,“ my throat choked up and I tried to get my thoughts in line. “How is she alive. I saw her. Not breathing. Dead. Broken on the pavement.”
“Doc says it was her firmware upgrade. Had a helluva time getting it to release control so they could get her right. It went full military survival mode and put her in a safe state to reduce blood loss and damage. She was breathing, just really shallow. She’ll be fine.”
I won’t say that I cried, but I will say…well, it’s none of your damned business anyway.
“Hey, kid, you’re gonna need to erase all of that. Everything I said. If Kinky knew— well, we both might not stay breathing.”
“I don’t think procedure let’s me—“
“Big picture kid. Big picture. Do you want an unhappy Ex-Holo-porn star with enough high end firmware to dodge an explosion looking for you or do you want a happy Holo-porn star that might sign a couple of commemorative editions and a personalized Holo poster for an understanding young officer?”
“Probably the latter, sir. But I am supposed to ask how you turned back on your Testimony firmware. We are going to use it, but there is a question.”
“Well, kid, you are gonna need to learn to live with being disappointed.”
I was an ex-officer in the Galactic Intelligence Special Investigations Service, more commonly called GISI’s, part of the intra-species crime division, but that career is long gone. No regrets. Well, not many.
And today, I got to take one back.
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