Future Artifacts, page 2
“You drunk?” Abijah asked, pulling off her coat and hanging it next to the warm stone oven-stove that connected her apartment to the pub below, heating both.
“Not yet,” Pats said. “You?” She was riveted by a game show streaming on the primary viewing screen.
“Still hungover.” Abijah flopped onto the divan next to Pats. “You get the data I sent you on the case? About that communicator fob? Wondering what we can get off it.”
“Yeah, I don’t do alien tech.” Pats laughed at some quip on the screen, then tilted her head at Abijah. “You didn’t say one of the kids was here.”
“Sorry, bit of a surprise to me too. She just showed up yesterday. Put her in the spare room. She here?”
“Went out for fucking and drinking. Thought your exes had all the kids? All those big schools on the continent.”
“Oldest is of age, can come and go when she wants.”
“Fuck, time keeps on ticking. How the fuck old is she?”
“She passed exams. Fifteen? Sixteen? Something like that.” Abijah rubbed her eyes.
“What’s this one called?” Pats said. “I get them all confused. You have like a billion of them.”
“I have four kids, Pats.”
“A billion.”
The door rattled, and a tall, lanky young woman walked in, shrouded in a stylish long coat with an asymmetrical cut that was all the rage on the continent. Abijah had gotten an earful about the coat already when she made a passing comment about the fashion of colonizers.
“This is Marjani, Pats,” Abijah said. “You remember Pats, Maj?”
“No one calls me Maj anymore.” Marjani shrugged out of her coat. Her hair, too, was cut in an asymmetric style that made her head look like a pencil.
“Right,” Abijah said. She got up and went to the cold box to get a vodka soda.
“And yes,” Marjani said, crossing the living area to the spare bedroom, “I remember your drunk, dishonorably discharged, war criminal friend Pats.”
“You say the sweetest things,” Pats said. “You mother Savida must have added the war criminal part. Maurille, the other one, she always liked me. How drunk are you?”
“I only drink tea.”
“Sure.”
Marjani shut the door to the spare bedroom behind her with a great thump.
Abijah cracked open her vodka soda and took a long drink, chugging half of it before coming up for air. What a fucking day. “Hey, Pats. If you can’t help with the tech—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Pats said, pushing up from the divan. “You have anything else for me?”
“Maybe later. Gonna try Popsy for the tech.”
“Don’t you owe her money?”
“Probably.”
Pats stuffed the rest of the crisps into her coat pocket and clomped to the door, spilling caked mud across the floor with each step. “Good to see you, Majori,” Pats yelled.
Marjani opened the door a slit. “Marjani,” Marjani said.
“Marjani, Petti, Luk, Dalani, you’re all the same, you continent girls.” Pats rolled her eyes and hummed a little tune—the game show theme song—as she made her way down the outer stairway.
Abijah closed and locked the door behind her. Checked the locking mechanism for the hundredth time. How Pats was still able to get in no matter how many times Abijah changed the locking type was one of Pats’ many hidden talents.
Marjani peered out from the bedroom and frowned. “I thought you weren’t working with Pats anymore? Didn’t she steal from you? Run your cycle into the river one time?”
“She’s an independent contractor, not a partner. You have fun out there?”
“What do you care?”
“Did you eat anything?
“Did you?”
“Goodnight, then,” Abijah said, crossing back to the divan and finishing the vodka soda. The nattering heads of a game show on the main projection screen made her head hurt. Or maybe that was just her daughter.
“You are bad at everything,” Marjani said.
Abijah accessed the house interface and blinked to change the projection to a soothing white mountain scape. “I’m visiting the medical examiner tomorrow,” Abijah said, “to go over a case. Anything you need from the shops?”
“I have my own ration card and allowance now,” Marjani said.
“Want to watch a program? Whatever you want? Want a vodka soda?”
“I only drink tea!” Marjani slammed the door again.
Abijah sank gratefully into the divan. She would never understand children. Especially not her own. At fifteen, Abijah had already been through twelve weeks of military training. At fifteen, she had already killed at least forty people. Looking back, it would have been a lot nicer to be fifteen and drinking tea in a nice coat. Even if it was as a student of the fucking enemy.
She closed her eyes.
Pats met her outside the medical examiner’s office the next day. It was still dark and would be until nearly midday. She carried a small box of pastries. Her hair hung loose and greasy; Abijah wondered when she’d last washed it.
“How’d you know I’d be here?” Abijah said, pulling a fist-sized croissant from the box.
“You’re predictable.”
They entered the dingy foyer together. Signed in with their biometric data at the front desk.
“Scene doesn’t add up for me,” Abijah said as they made their way down the echoing hall. “No accident, for sure, but it wasn’t an onboard bomb. I’ve seen those enough. This was an airstrike, I bet.”
“From down here?” Pats said. She whistled, low. “Boys with access to bombs is my idea of a good time, but not everybody’s.”
“I suppose one of their ships could have fired on it, but we’d have registered discharge from up there. Those shuttles are all monitored. This client wants me to dig into a lot of dirty planetside business that I don’t think I want in on.”
“So, say no? Why don’t you ever say no?”
“I gotta eat.”
“You have a pension. That’s enough to eat. And maybe get laid.”
“I have four kids, Pats.”
“Billions!”
Abijah opened the door into the morgue and grimaced at the smell of death, and at the yeasty stink of the bacterial compounds meant to irradiate that smell. Two stone slabs bore lumps of flesh that had been arranged like a series of puzzle pieces, each nearly approximating half of a body. Abijah found boys disconcerting at the best of times; bodies like corpses soaked in brine, moist and bloodless. Their ears and noses seemed comically large, and while the youngest could pass for girls of some other phenotype, as they aged, they hardly grew—up or out. Their voices all sounded wrong. And they did not last many years planetside. The work, the gravity, the radiation—who knew? But they were not particularly hardy. Perhaps that was why their people kept sending them planetside. They were too useless up in the colony ships. Expendable. These sad remains were made sadder still, knowing the flesh would likely be ground up and turned into fish food, making them marginally more useful in death than they had been in life.
The medical examiner turned from where she stood at the great stone sink, and Abijah caught her breath. “Bataya?”
Wiry little Bataya made her way to the table, her fringe swept back away from her face, slender fingers neatly manicured as if picking up an electric scalpel all day were the sort of bloodless work performed by an office mail carrier.
Abijah removed her hat and clutched it with both hands, instinctually.
“Pastry?” Pats said, extending the box to Bataya.
Bataya surveyed the contents and shook her head. “No, thank you.”
“I … wasn’t expecting you,” Abijah said. “Where’s Jules?”
“We heard you got marrrrriiiiiiiiied,” Pats said. “Years ago, right, Abijah? Two years ago.” She leaned toward Bataya. “Not that Abijah has been counting.”
“I called it off,” Bataya said, not meeting either of their looks. “I’ve been practicing on the continent.”
“Ah, the continent,” Abijah said. “Of course.” The fucking continent.
“Jules was kind enough to step in.” Bataya rested both hands on the stone slab. “I see you are paying for the public query on this incident, Abijah. That seems unusually kind, so I assume it is for a client.”
“It is,” Abijah said.
Pats sat down in a chair near the door, resting the box of pastries on her crossed knee. “This old soldier here was real kind once,” she said, jabbing her three left fingers at Abijah. “This one time we were cut off from our squad, up in those mountains in the northern continent, six continental units all ringing us in, and Jeezmo here gives me her last can of accelerant so I didn’t have to eat cold snake. Real team player.”
“Why don’t you meet me back in the pub?” Abijah said. “I’m seeing Popsy next. Put a drink on my tab.”
“Say no more,” Pats said, and left them, licking her fingers each in turn and giving Abijah a wink as the door closed.
“So, what do you need to know?” Bataya said.
“You ever get that certificate in combat yoga?”
Bataya’s narrow mouth turned up at the corners, just a hint, but enough. “I did. And advanced reiki.”
“Congratulations,” Abijah said. She nodded to the body pieces. “I’d like your professional opinion, based on the evidence, about whether this shuttle was blown up by an onboard bomb or an airstrike.”
Bataya knit her brows and frowned over the corpses. “Well, I can make inferences, but nothing that would hold up if you were to pursue criminal—”
“You know I won’t. Nobody will, for aliens. Boys at that.”
“Then, based on the way these bodies have been impacted… I’d have to say it was most likely a force acting on them from outside.”
“No bad re-entry?”
“Not enough char for that. There would have been even less to examine here.”
“An onboard bomb …?”
“Similar issue. You would see overpressure damage to the lungs, ears, the gut, and fragmentation injuries—caused by shrapnel and other flying debris penetrating the body. And again, many thermal injuries to skin, lungs, and the like. But a burst, an external projectile …” She nodded to a slab piled with bits of wreckage. “That creates unique capture marks on wreckage, and on pieces embedded in the wreckage. I’m not a forensic tech anthropologist, but you could conduct a trace analysis on the physical wreckage that will show residues related to whatever impacted the shuttle.”
“So, I need to hire a forensic tech anthropologist?”
“If you—your client—had the funds, or the desire to know for certain. But I pulled wreckage out of these bodies. I’ve seen the marks. If you asked my certainty on an external projectile, I’d say, eighty percent probability. To you, but not under oath.”
“Understood. Thanks, Bataya.” Abijah pulled her hat back on and turned to go, hesitated. “I know maybe I’ve—”
“Don’t,” Bataya said. “Some other time. Not … now.”
“All right.” Abijah left her in the morgue, her palms still sweaty, and put in a call to Zoya to catch her up on the latest.
“It was most likely a strike from the ground,” Abijah said. Zoya’s face filled her left eye. Zoya sat beside a small pond that rippled softly. Occasionally, the great gaping maws of fish as long as Abijah’s arm appeared in the mop of plant matter that rippled on the surface like an antique rug. A yellow bloom from a frond in the water seemed to be emitting a steady stream of mayflies, their wings shimmering in the low light. “I did find a communicator nearby,” Abijah continued. “I’m having a contact look at it. Maybe we can figure out who he was contacting down here and get more information from them.”
“Good, Inspector. Thank you,” Zoya said, and Abijah prepared herself because whenever a founding family member thanked her for some job she’d gone above and beyond on, they asked another impossible task of her. “These boys were bound for one of my factories.”
Abijah grimaced. Of course, they were. “That would have been good to know.”
“I didn’t think it was relevant. But if this truly was a strike, as you can see, it was, again, most certainly against me and my interests.”
“Which factory?”
Zoya gave her the address.
“Let me see what I can do,” Abijah said. “I want to follow up on this tech lead first.”
“Inspector?”
Fuck, what now? Abijah thought, but merely waited, brows raised.
“My factory manufactures chemical bursts, you understand? Projectiles meant to keep us safe. From aliens in space.”
“Of course it does,” Abijah said, and ended the call.
Abijah had lunch at a nearby café catering to the afternoon drink crowd coming out from the adjacent government buildings. She never could keep regular meal hours; it was a wonder she ate once a day, let alone the four or five meals that seemed to clutter up everyone else’s social calendar. From the cold metal seat under an awning that kept off a spate of hail, she spotted two continental peace officers strolling languidly down the opposite side of the street, their long coats touching the heels of their stout boots, their uniform shaved heads and shoulder pads giving them all the appearance of one body, many faces. She had shot, punched in, or cracked open many a face like theirs during the war. To see them on the streets now still turned her stomach.
She finished her cold toast and tuna and caught a trolley back to the pub.
Pats was already inside and had shed her coat; the oven-stove kept the place piping hot. The pub owner, Maliki, wore suspenders over a sleeveless undershirt, showing off her brawny, tattooed arms.
“Look at you,” Maliki said. “When Pats said you’d pay for her drink, I knew you’d be in here asking for a favor.”
“Not from you,” Abijah said. “Need to see Popsy.”
“You think she just sits around waiting for jobs?”
“Yes,” Abijah said.
Maliki rolled her eyes. “Go on back then, but I want pay for the drink now. No IOUs!”
“Sure, give me a minute,” Abijah said, pulling off her hat as she went into the backroom where Popsy’s workshop lay. Popsy, Maliki’s kid, bore a huge monocle over one eye, surgically implanted. She stood over a veritable loom of disembodied interfaces that spurted green organic vistas and shimmering red torture chambers. She glanced back at Abijah with her big, magnified brown eye, and squinted. Her hair was bright purple, swept back from her brow into a great, shocking fan soldered into place with glue or gel or saints knew what.
“Hey, Popsy. I have some alien tech I need you to decode.”
“Great. Up to date on your bar tab?”
“Sure. I’ve gotten better at that. And I gave you that favor I owed you, too, that girl with the flaming hair? How’d that go?”
“None of your business. Give it here.” Popsy didn’t offer her wrist but her open hand. Popsy knew six different kinds of alien specs.
Abijah dropped the communicator fob into her palm.
Popsy examined it with her massive surgically implanted lens. “Boy stuff, huh? Pretty primitive. What you want out of it?”
“Need to know who he contacted here.”
“Tomorrow work?”
“Could really use it today.”
“I could use a new hoverboard today. Ain’t going to happen.”
“How about I owe you a hoverboard?”
“Your IOUs sit for months. I can get one myself by then.”
“Then I’ll owe you another favor.
Popsy heaved a sigh. “Go have a drink. Give me thirty minutes.”
“Thanks, Pops.”
Popsy waved her away.
Abijah sat with Pats and bided her time over a bartered drink. Maliki softened when Abijah paid half her tab through her interface with some of the funds Zoya had fronted her.
When Popsy called them back, Pats came with Abijah.
“We have two calls that came in back-to-back,” Popsy said, “after three days of nothing. These last two.” Popsy pointed at a map projection of the city. “The first was to this factory, here. A munitions company owned by Zoya—”
“Yeah, I know that one,” Abijah said. “You get a recording?”
“Sorry, only the pattern he called. This dead tech is really primitive, like I said.”
“And the other?” Abijah asked.
“Here,” Popsy said, pointing to a blank spot past the city center, deep into swampland. “Immediately after ending the first, too fast to dial a pattern, so I think—”
“What, he paging dino-crocs?” Pats said.
“If it has a communicator, yeah,” Popsy said. “That’s where the signal came from. That was the second, and final, call. I believe it.”
“Why a second call?” Abijah said. “Let’s say the first is to tell someone he’s coming. Is the second … What?”
Popsy put her hands on her hips. “Would you stop blathering and listen? It’s possible it was a rerun.”
“What the hell is that?” Pats said.
“It’s like a tracking or recording program. Every call made from the fob is recorded and then rebroadcast once ended, to a second fob. You wouldn’t know it was happening unless you opened up the guts of the fob and went through the physical call history. And I doubt your carrier was a spy or some shit.”
“If I know it went to someone in the factory, great,” Abijah said, “but how do I narrow that down?”
Popsy steepled her fingers. “You find somebody else with a communicator like this one. C’mon, I’m no inspector, but that’s pretty obvi.”
“That whole factory is teeming with boys,” Abijah said. “They’ll all have one.”
“Sounds like a tough job,” Popsy said, turning off the aerial map. She offered her wrist. “Data download?”
Abijah accepted the data transfer.
“I mean,” Popsy said, “you’re an inspector. Inspect, right?”
