“I look forward to it.”
“Godspeed, Captain.”
Jean Douvoir fired the small thrusters around the rear of the central cylindrical section. Second Chance started to slide away from the gateway. Acceleration was so tiny Wilson couldn’t even feel it affect the low-gravity bridge. The dazzling turquoise flames of the thrusters shrank away and vanished.
“We’re now at five meters per second,” Douvoir reported. There was a lot of amusement in his voice.
“Thank you, Pilot,” Wilson said. “Hyperdrive, please bring the wormhole up to flight level.”
“Aye, sir.” Tu Lee couldn’t help the strong twang of excitement in her voice. She began to shunt instructions into the ship’s RI that would handle the enormously complex energy manipulation functions.
Nigel instructed his e-butler to shift down his virtual vision intensity, and took his hands off the console i-spots. One hologram portal showed the assembly platform slowly shrinking behind them. The second had a small circular turquoise nebular glowing in the center. It began to expand, growing more indistinct, although no stars were visible through it.
“Course laid in?” Wilson asked.
“Want to consult our expert navigator on that?” Anna muttered under her breath. She still hadn’t warmed up to Bose.
Wilson ignored her, wondering if the rest of the bridge crew had overheard.
“As agreed,” Oscar said. He had his hands pressed firmly on his console i-spot, his eyes flicking quickly between virtual icons. “First exit point, twenty-five light-years from Dyson Alpha.”
“Wormhole opening stable, Captain,” Tu Lee reported.
“Inject us,” Wilson told her.
The blue haze folded around Second Chance like petals closing for the night. Their datalink to the assembly platform and the unisphere ended. Both portals showed the starship bathing in the wormhole’s pale moonlight radiance of low-level radiation.
Oscar canceled the camera feeds. The bridge portals switched to displaying the gravitonic spectrum, sensors around the ship detecting faint echoes resonating within the wormhole. It was a crude version of radar that allowed them to locate stars and planets to a reasonable degree, but that was all. For truly accurate sensor work they needed to drop out into real space.
Wilson upped his virtual vision again, taking another sweep of the starship’s primary systems. Everything was humming along sweetly. He came out and checked around the bridge. The engineers were all still heavily integrated with the ship’s RI, monitoring the performance of their respective fields, but everyone else was already relaxing. Wilson glanced inquisitively at Oscar, who put on a contented expression as he sat back. There wasn’t much left for them to do. Not for another hundred thirty days.
THIRTEEN
Hoshe waited at the side of the street for her to arrive. It wasn’t midmorning yet, but already a small crowd of curious locals had gathered along the sidewalk. Two police cruisers had parked nearby, their constables directing the copbots as they set up temporary barriers around the thirty-story condo building. As he watched, yet another big police technical support van pulled up and slowly nosed its way down into the underground garage. His e-butler told him the precinct commander was on his way, and the city commissioner had asked for the Ice Department case files.
“Great,” Hoshe muttered. It was going to turn into one big jurisdictional free-for-all, he was sure of that. Now all the real work had been done, every other department in Darklake would be after a slice of the credit.
An unmarked police car drew up beside him. Paula stepped out. She was wearing a simple pale blue dress with a fawn jacket, her raven hair tied back neatly. Hoshe thought her skin was a shade darker than the last time he’d seen her, but then Treloar, Anshun’s capital, was in the tropics. She actually gave him a smile as he said hello.
“Good to see you again,” he said.
“And you, Hoshe. Sorry I left you carrying the ball on this one.”
“That’s okay,” he lied.
“But I appreciate the way you carried on, and for calling me today. That’s very professional.”
He gestured her toward the entrance to the garage. “You might yet regret coming, a lot of senior city police officers are on their way.”
“That I’m used to. You know, right now I’d actually welcome some of the old problems again.”
“Tough case?”
“You wouldn’t think so by the number of arrests we’ve made.” She shrugged. “But yes. My opponent is an elusive man.”
“Holmes and Moriarty, yes?”
“Hoshe, I had no idea you read the classics.”
“It was some time ago, but I used to really enjoy that kind of thing.”
“Holmes never knew how easy he had it,” she said as they reached the bottom of the ramp. “So what have you got for me?”
Two white forensics department vans were parked at the far end of the garage. Various sensor patches the size of paving slabs had been stuck to the floor around the walls and thick cables snaked around everywhere, winding back to the open access panels on both vans. Several GeneralPurposebots were moving the sensors around, clustering them in one corner while three forensics officers supervised.
“We found them first thing this morning,” Hoshe said as they climbed into the back of the squad leader’s van. The inside was cramped, a narrow corridor between two equipment benches, the air hot from all the humming electrical circuits. He was more than familiar with all the units. The additional forensics teams Myo had promised from the Serious Crime Directorate had never materialized. In view of what amounted to her withdrawal from the case, Hoshe’s commander had reluctantly agreed to allocate him two of the city’s forensics squads. Hoshe himself had undergone the appropriate skill memory implementation so he could operate the equipment and interpret the results, helping his pitifully small team throughout all the dreary months that had followed. They had worked through the list of sites where construction work had been going on forty years ago, a laborious and terribly tedious task. Sick days and short hours among the team members had been on a steady upward curve from the first week onward. There had been times, especially in the last few weeks, when only the GPbots had turned up at the start of the day’s shift.
Hoshe had been receiving an increasing amount of pressure from both the team and his commander to wrap things up. But he’d kept doggedly to the list, examining the sites one after the other while soothing and cajoling the team and pleading for just a little more time from the police department. Reflective deep scanning had revealed a great many interesting things buried beneath the city, but no bodies. Until this morning.
Paula peered closely at the small high-rez holographic portal with its 3D grid of gentle pink luminescence; right at the center were swirls of darker red, like knots in wood.
“Even allowing for decomposition you can see the shapes quite clearly,” Hoshe said, his finger tracing around denser swirls. “This is a head here, look, and these are arms and legs. Both bodies are inside some kind of box-shape container; there’s a distinct air cavity around each of them.”
“I’ll take your word for it. This looks like a Rorschach test to me.”
Hoshe avoided a smile. “One is slightly smaller than the other; which corresponds to a male/female pairing. But that’s the end of the good news. They’re deep; ten meters down below this level. The developer didn’t cut corners when this condo was built, unfortunately; all the foundations correspond to City Hall regulations.”
“Thank you, Hoshe.”
“We don’t know it’s them yet. We’ll get a slightly better resolution when the sensors have been realigned, but that’s not going to give us a positive ID. Only DNA will do that.”
“It’s them. You know it is.”
“Yeah, well. It’s going to be a bitch to get them out. We’ll have to excavate all the way around, probably need force fields to reinforce the foundation when we chop the block out. The residents will need to be moved out while we do that. Then we’ll need to break the concrete up very carefully.”
“Don’t worry, the Directorate has experienced extraction teams. I’ll have them here before lunch.”
“You said that about the forensics teams.”
She shifted around in the cramped space, and gave him an unnerving look of appraisal. “I know, and I apologize again. I’ve never quite let anybody down like that before. It won’t happen again.”
Hoshe knew he was blushing. Her apology was like some intimate confession. He tapped a knuckle on the portal to distract her. “Are you sure this will get a conviction? I’ll bet you a whole Earth dollar their memorycell inserts have been destroyed; there’ll be no memory of the killer we can ever access.”
“Trust me, Hoshe. We can nail him now. All I need is a judge to issue a warrant.”
It was a hell of a row that broke out in the living room. Loud enough for Morton to hear it from his bedroom, which made him stop what he was doing, which pissed him off no end. His e-butler told him who was invading his penthouse, so he was tying the belt on his dressing gown as he strode out.