Man-Kzin Wars IX Read online

  I didn't charge him, I bought him a ticket to Wunderland. There were thousands of miles of wilderness down there, where Machine Technician could become Trail Stalker or Chaser-of-Gagrumphs with all the space he wanted and his own kzinrett if he could find one. Slave-of-Kdapt and dishonour would be forgotten. Pity for criminals is something a cop can't afford. Those feelings are reserved for the victims, but Machine Technician was as much a victim as Miranda. He'd been set up to take the fall, and he would have played his part to the hilt and to the death if Hunter-of-Outlaws' thorough . . . interrogation . . . hadn't allowed the truth to come out.

  Or, come to think of it, the interrogation I had planned for him with UN Intelligence. Their methods are much gentler, but they're a lot less pleasant on balance. Machine Technician was lucky he'd been caught by one of his own.

  He left, thanking me with embarrassing profusion. The one thing worse than an arrogant, dominant kzin is a pathetically humble one.

  When he was gone, I went over the data and summed up.

  Item: A male Wunderlander had left the Inferno with Miranda—if our only two witnesses were to be believed.

  Item: A male Belter had sold her skin to Machine Technician, someone who knew him well enough to know he was vulnerable to this particular frame-up, but not so well that the kzin had recognized him.

  Item: Machine Technician's admittedly inadequate description of the suspect was at considerable odds with the couple's.

  So if there were two people involved, that pointed to a conspiracy and away from a schitz. If not, it pointed back at Jayce and Tanya. I still lacked too many pieces of the puzzle. I didn't even have a motive.

  Tammy stuck her head in the door. "I hear you got a Kdaptist confession."

  "Sort of. What we didn't get was a culprit."

  "I heard that too. What's up?"

  "Hunter tracked down this kzin who claimed he'd killed Miranda. It turns out all he really did was buy her skin from a human and try to claim credit."

  "So he's an accessory after the fact. Why did you send him to Wunderland?"

  "You hear a lot."

  She grinned. "I keep my ears open."

  "He was set up and framed, pure and simple. Now that his honour is compromised he's an outcast up here. I thought I'd give him another chance."

  "What about using him as a witness?"

  "Wunderland is still the safest place for him. How long would he have on Tiamat?"

  She winced. "Good point. Well, I have to say I'm glad to hear it wasn't a Kdaptist after all."

  I cocked my head. "Why is that?"

  She held up her beltcomp. "Here's all the data I've tracked down on the Kdapt cult and current Kzin intelligence operations." She held her other hand up, thumb and forefinger forming an empty circle. "Zero."

  "Sorry for the goose chase."

  She smiled. "Don't be." She waved the beltcomp. "I've got a new contact and some leverage for a couple more out of it anyway. So where are we now?"

  "We know there are at least two people involved. They must have planned to frame Machine Technician in advance of the killing—that's not the sort of detail you work out while you're hiding in a transport tunnel with a corpse. So Miranda wasn't chosen at random. That puts us back to Vorden and Koffman the love-birds, unless someone—some group—wanted her dead for a specific reason."

  "It can't be the couple." She waved at the composite holo on the screen. "This is a male."

  "We only have their testimony to say there's a second male. Anyway, I think it would be pretty easy to fool Machine Technician on that aspect. Loose clothing would be all it would take."

  "Visually, yah, but he could smell the difference. But you're right about the testimony."

  "Suppose it's a group for the sake of argument. They must have had a specific reason they wanted her dead."

  "So what's the reason?"

  "That's what we need to know. Something she knew or something she'd done. She just wasn't up here long enough to have become involved in anything serious. Trist Materials doesn't handle anything worth killing for and if they did the target wouldn't be their brand-new exchange student."

  "So it must have been something she was already involved with down on Wunderland."

  "Right. Especially since a Wunderlander is a major suspect."

  "What groups operate both groundside and in the Belt?"

  I considered. "Anyone could send up an assassin. Any of the crime rings, the Isolationists, Kzin intelligence, collabo underground, collabo hunters. Even a few branches of the Provisional Government if she crossed the wrong people."

  She shook her head. "We know it's not the tabbies at least. The killers are human."

  "But they could be working for the kzinti."

  "Get serious. They tried to frame a kzin for the crime and ruined his honour in the process. If they were working for the kzinti, their bosses would eat them when they found out. Alive."

  "Good point."

  "We've got a lead, though. If she was killed by Wunderland assassins, they must have come up between her arrival and her death. That's a narrow window. Cross-check the Inferno's attendance list with the passenger manifests for every ship that arrived during that time period."

  I entered the search request and we watched the screen while it collected the data and compared it. It came up NO MATCHES.

  "Maybe they knew she was coming. Try the previous six weeks."

  I tapped in the query. It took a little longer this time because there was more data to retrieve and sort. The result was the same. NO MATCHES.

  "Damn!" I cleared the screen.

  "Not damn. Now we know the killer was already here. That means we've got to be dealing with an organization that's already in the Swarm. Smugglers for one of the crime rings probably."

  "We'll have to get the Provopolizei involved. Get them to dig out a contact list for us."

  "Attack it from both sides. Run a movement trace on every person who went through the Inferno that night too."

  "I already thought of that. It'll take hours to run and weeks to analyze."

  "So what have you got to lose? Run it overnight and we'll start the Goldskins on it in the morning. If we get a match, we'll refocus. At least you won't be totally reliant on the Provos."

  She was right, of course. I wrote a cable to the ARM on Wunderland instead of the Provopolizei. It was adding another bureaucratic step, since they'd have to go to the Provos anyway, but I knew people I could trust in the ARM—people who could smell an evolving coverup. Then I set up my board to run the trace and let it go. Somewhere in the mass of data that it would generate would be the critical clue. I'd just had to find it—if the murderer was in fact the man she left with and if he didn't have a false ident. It would be hours before the trace was done. I screened Suze and made a date for dinner.

  * * *

  We met at the same Earth cuisine restaurant as before. Why not? The atmosphere was intimate and the menu inviting. Suze was already waiting when I got there. She greeted me with a kiss and asked, "How's the case going?"

  "Well, we got a kzin who confessed to the crime."

  "So you're done?"

  "Well, not exactly. It seems he was confessing because he thought he'd gain status by it. He didn't actually do it."

  "I don't understand."

  "I don't think he understood himself."

  "So where do you go from here?"

  "Good question. Right now I'm running a movement trace on everyone who went through the Inferno that night. The murderer has got to be in there somewhere, unless he used a false ID."

  "How do you know the man she left with is the killer?"

  "Miranda wasn't just a random victim; someone wanted her dead for a reason. They watched her, figured out her movements and set her up."

  "She was just a kid! Why would anyone want to kill her?" Her eyes showed worry.

  "We don't know yet. Someone she was involved with on Wunderland, a criminal group."

  "Do you know
which group?"

  "I haven't got a clue right now."

  "I think that's your problem alright." The concern went away and her smile developed those mischievous dimples.

  I missed the joke and riposted with a brilliant, "What?"

  "You haven't got a clue."

  I threw a miniature shrimp from my stir fry at her. I didn't throw it hard but I grossly misjudged the gravity field and the morsel went flying past her on a high, slow trajectory that eventually intersected the back of a balding patron's head. He looked around in irritated surprise while I tried to look oblivious and Suze suppressed giggles with difficulty.

  It became a game after that. We took turns picking targets and launching shrimp at them. The low light level helped conceal our nefarious intent but the fifth time the maitre d' caught us and we were asked firmly to leave. Suze asked him if he'd call the ARM if we refused at which we both collapsed into gales of laughter. He turned red and looked ready to burst but she got ahold of herself and apologized, then smoothed over his feelings by insisting on being allowed to buy two liters of their crumbleberry cream pudding before going because it was so incomparably good. On the way down to the tube station she poked me in the ribs.

  "Maybe you shouldn't have picked the maitre d' as a target."

  "You're the one who threw the shrimp while he was looking."

  "I had to. He was already watching us to see if we were the ones doing the throwing."

  "No need to confirm his suspicions."

  "He wasn't suspicious, he knew. He was just waiting to catch us."

  "All the more reason not to hit him with a shrimp."

  "He was a witness. I couldn't let him live," she said with mock ferocity.

  "The shrimp or the maitre d'?" I asked innocently.

  She laughed and poked me again. I caught her around the waist and held her and we walked arm in arm to the tube car, giggling and kissing. It wasn't in the best traditions of the ARM for Tiamat Station's Chief of Investigation to go around in public acting like a giddy teenager. Well, hopefully nobody knew who I was. Anyway, I felt better than I had since I'd arrived at Alpha Centauri and if anyone did notice me I didn't care.

  Back at her apt she called, "Dessert!", opened the pudding container and sampled some with her fingers, then gave me a crumbleberry-flavored kiss. In the process some of the pudding spilled on her jumpsuit. That was an invitation if I ever saw one so I unsealed it and spilled some more pudding, then kissed it off. We fell to the floor into a sticky tangle of clothes and pudding, and passion. That led to the shower and steam and more passion which in turn led to the bed, cuddling, contentment and . . . love?

  Maybe love.

  I fell asleep with her in my arms, serene for the first time since I'd left Earth.

  * * *

  I was late again the next morning. Tammy winked at Hunter, who rippled his ears and double twitched his tail in a manner I could only assume was meant to be suggestive. I glared at them both and got another tail twitch from Hunter and a look of "Who? Me?" innocence from Tammy. Tracker snarled something at Hunter, then rippled his own ears as he was let in on the joke.

  I was feeling too good to let it bother me. If my lovelife boosted morale I'd just chalk it up to my doubtless outstanding leadership skills. In the meantime, I gathered what was left of my dignity and went into my office.

  On my desk display the exhaustive movement trace was done and waiting for attention. I went over my mail first. There was a message from Wunderland and I screened it, expecting a response to my ARM query. It was from a Provo named Loreli Novostet. She was working to penetrate a smuggling operation that supplied UN weapons to the Isolationists. An informant had given her a tranship code that had turned out to belong to a twenty-meter cargo container arriving from Tiamat. The cargo carrier's crew knew nothing, of course, and both the shipping and receiving companies were fronts. Perhaps I had some information that might help?

  She'd attached the crew's idents and an inventory of what they'd seized. I called up the idents and dumped the dossiers for hardcopy, then scanned the inventory list. My eyebrows went up as I read—cases of pulse rifles with ammunition and battery packs, hiveloc launchers, sniper sights, infantry battle armor, combat drugs, hundreds of kilos of Tridex, boosters, a field hospital's worth of medical equipment, flash grenades, surveillance gear and more than enough comps and comms to run a regiment.

  And something bizarre. A nitrogen freezer jam packed with somebody's limbs and organs. She'd attached the DNA pattern.

  My hands flew over the keyboard. I knew the scans would match even before the computer screened Miranda Holtzman's gene record.

  Organlegger. The word felt strange. A long time ago failure of a vital organ meant death. Transplant technology changed that. With a little luck you could live as long as your central nervous system lasted—as long as you could find donors to keep you going. Everybody wants to live forever but the organ banks couldn't always supply what you needed when you needed it. Organleggers took up the slack through kidnap and murder. It wasn't a nice profession but it was very lucrative.

  Nowadays medical technology is more advanced. Autocloning has eliminated the need to scavenge for donors. Organlegging is yesterday's crime, like cattle rustling.

  But medtech is in short supply around Alpha Centauri and the UN forces have first call. People were dying because they couldn't get treatment. The Isolationists had bigger medical problems. A suspected terrorist can't just show up at a hospital with blast trauma or laser burns and get treatment. Organlegging was a natural for them. They already had an effective and ruthless organization in place. It would take only a few donors to meet their own needs and what they didn't use themselves they could sell on the black market to finance their operations. Once news of their new sideline broke, they'd probably start using it as a terror weapon. For some reason, people dread being broken down for parts much more than simple death. A few prominent kidnappings would apply a lot of fear in high places.

  Not a pleasant scenario but it gave me an edge. Miranda hadn't been chosen at random. Somewhere out there a terrorist was in need of spare parts. His tissue rejection profile would match hers. I called up Dr. Morrow. Rejection profiles weren't part of a person's file anymore, could he derive one from Miranda's gene scan? He could. While I waited I started a report to send down to the Provopolizei.

  He was back on the screen an hour later. Miranda Holtzman was a rare universal donor. There were only a few thousand in system who couldn't accept her tissues.

  I cursed myself. Of course she'd been chosen for exactly that reason. Another blind alley. I shelved the report and ran a trace on the container's tranship code. The shipping and receiving companies were fake but the container itself was real. Maybe its movements would give me a clue.

  Container 19C01FD4 had arrived aboard the freighter Achilles at the up-axis docking hub, customs' sealed and coded for transport from MUN42104K to TMU19J234C. The manifest said "Machine Tools." I called up the operations manual for the cargo system and figured out the codes. "TMU" is the up-axis hub's destination code. "19" indicates the nineteenth of the asteroid's thirty-two axial transport tunnels. "J2" is the second container bay in the tenth two-kilometer section of the twenty-five that make up the length of the transport tunnels. "34C" is the third level of the thirty-fourth container rack in that bay. Once unloaded from Achilles, the automated routing system would have sent the container down tunnel nineteen to its destination and the receiver would have been notified of its arrival and shown up in due course to sign off with the Port Authority and take charge of its contents.

  So far so good, but nobody had signed it off as received. The computer didn't even log it as arriving at 19J2. The next time there was a record was thirty-seven hours later as the container was being loaded aboard the freighter Canexco Wayfarer at the down-axis hub, still customs' sealed and manifested as "Machine Tools." Point of origin TMU19J234C, destination MUN42104K—Munchen Spaceport, Wunderland.

  A
neat trick. The container had been shipped from Wunderland and arrived on Tiamat, traveled straight through the core of the asteroid, come neatly out the other end and gone back where it came from. Somewhere along the line whatever was inside it had been taken out and Miranda Holtzman and an arsenal of UN weapons had been put in. So far as the computer was concerned nobody had touched the container so there was no way to trace the smugglers through it. The chips containing the tranship codes are crypted and self-verifying to prevent containers from being electronically hijacked en route. You need a Port Authority ident to originate or receive a shipment and of course that gets logged in the shipping control net. Somehow the smugglers had managed to swap origin and destination without the ident.

  The trick got neater when I called up the information on container bay 19J2. It didn't exist. Somewhere in tunnel nineteen a 2000 cubic meter tranship box had disappeared for thirty-seven hours. I screened the history file for container 19C01FD4. It had traveled from MUN42104K to TMU19J234C and back twelve times. The tranship net had never logged it as delivered to anyone anywhere since it entered the system three years ago.

  A picture was coming together and it wasn't nice. The Isolationists needed medical support and had decided to get into organlegging. They'd made a list of universal donors and Miranda was on it. Her departure for Tiamat put only a minor crimp in their plans. They already had a sophisticated smuggling operation set up in the Swarm to ship stolen UN weapons to Wunderland. She'd been targeted, abducted and packed into a freezer to ship down to Wunderland in a weapons consignment already set to go. The freezer wasn't big enough for all of her so they'd left her torso in the tranship tunnel and sold her skin to the Kdaptist Machine Technician to blur the trail.

  I would rather have found a schitz. This was carefully calculated murder for profit. The people responsible for it couldn't be treated for some neurochemical imbalance. They were cold-blooded killers, plain and simple.

  The most frightening thing was the organization. The killers had some major resources behind them. They were probably already long gone. Even if I caught them it wouldn't stop more innocents from being snatched and killed to fill the Isolationist organ banks. I could only pray they confined themselves to organlegging. If they decided to escalate, things would get a lot worse—and I would be one of their first targets.