From Darkest Skies, page 5
Magenta had woken up to the news and breathed a collective sigh of relief that it had been an automated freight train. A few hours later and it would have been the overnight sleeper and the worst accident in Magenta’s history. It took a couple of days before anyone realised there had been stowaways. Four, according to the people who saw them, some guy at the freight terminus and a woman who was going to go with them but changed her mind. That was all we had to go on because there wasn’t anything left in the tunnel but ash. The bomber claimed he hadn’t meant to kill anyone. Maybe I even believed him. But I’m still not sorry that someone shanked him.
‘I’m really sorry, man. Totally gutted.’ The pod was taking us to where the Tesseract thought Jannos Threwer was going to be. Bureau records had him registered as a private investigator, which explained the anonymous Servant thing. When a Servant talks to a Servant they exchange codes. The codes tie them to whoever owns them, so you always know who sourced any contact. Privacy laws mean you can go anonymous if you want, but security laws mean there’s a second code that people like me and the Tesseract can get to, so that even if you thought you were hidden, you’re not. People who want to get round that generally go the easy way – create a false identity and then link Servants to fictional people who don’t physically exist. That’s illegal and I get to arrest you for it. Killing the hidden code isn’t, but it takes knowing a cracksman who can hack a Servant and then trusting him not to do anything else while he’s in there – believe me on this, you do not want someone else taking control of your Servant. But I can’t arrest anyone for not having a hidden code, so that’s the way types like Threwer like to go.
‘You know this guy?’ I asked.
‘Kind of.’ Rangesh hadn’t stopped clutching his head and tearing at his hair since we got back into the pod. ‘Oh, man, I’m such an idiot. It was, like, right there in front of me. I knew when I saw your name that I’d heard it before.’ He stopped for a moment and looked at me like he was trying to read the answer off my face. ‘Keon. That’s, like, from the South Pacific or something, right?’
‘Hawaii.’ I think.
‘Cool. Yeah, the moment the Flem sent out the word, I was, like, I totally know that name, but I never looked it up because, you know, stuff and reasons … I think it’s uncool to go picking through some guy’s past and finding out everything about him before you meet him, because if you do that, when you do meet you have all these preconceptions and assumptions and you think he’s going to be a certain way and then he’s not and it’s all, like, disorientating and makes the wrong, you know … impressions and stuff. I don’t know, man. It’s just better to see another human being for what they really are, right there in front of you, don’t you think?’
I was starting to wonder if Rangesh had an off switch. ‘Threwer. You knew it was him all along, right?’
‘No, I just did the same thing you did. Only, like, quicker … Look, man, I don’t really know him, but I know his face. He’s clean enough.’
Clean or not, I pulled his records. Mostly I wanted to know who he’d been talking to that night. Turned out to be not so easy with his Servant set up the way it was.
‘I remember it, man. When the news came. I remember waking up the morning after and there it was.’ Rangesh was actually still for a moment. ‘I knew it. I knew straight away there were going to be people dead. There were always stowaways on the overnight freights. I’d kind of known for years but I didn’t see the harm, you know? And Temo was a solid dude. So yeah … But I could have stopped it, that was the thing. Had to walk away and not look. Just had to. And then it came out. One of our own. I’m really sorry, man. You guys were married, right?’
I had the records of every Servant interaction coming out from the Squats around the time Threwer put Shyla in her pod. It was just a case of binning everything that definitely wasn’t him and then trying to track back in time and space until I caught an incoming call. Pig of a job. Took a lot of concentrating. Which was fine. Tuning Rangesh out wasn’t a problem for me at all.
Liss would have aced this sort of thing.
‘But what was she doing on the train, man? I mean, it was, like, part of some case, right? Had to be. I mean, I don’t want to pry or anything but—’
‘Then don’t.’ Why had Alysha been on that train? I’d asked myself the same question for five years. ‘You ever find out, you let me know. Until then take a look at this.’ I pinged Rangesh the track I’d made of Threwer’s anonymous Servant, laid over a map of Firstfall. ‘Look at the way he’s moving. He’s going straight for her. Who’s Temo?’
‘Temo Kadavu, man. The guy who smuggled them onto the train. Worked at the Firstfall freight terminus. Thought you’d know.’
‘I know squat. I wasn’t part of the investigation and I wasn’t allowed to see their work. By the time they closed it, I was on Earth. What they sent me was … It wasn’t much.’ Laughable is what it was, and it grated with me even now that they’d never let me see more. Personal involvement, standard protocol to keep me out of the loop, but they could at least have sent me what they’d found when they were done. I’d followed the news reports, but that was all I ever got to see. Temo Kadavu. Now I had a name. A place to start.
We were in a busier part of the Squats, dim-lit tunnels around a nocturnal highway of clubs and bars and cheap fast automated restaurants serving a hundred and one different variations of lichen, seaweed, mushroom and pig.
‘He was tracking her, man.’ Rangesh pinged me a sequence of Servant records. Enki Betleshah had called Jannos Threwer fifteen minutes before Threwer reached Shyla. The track started right after the call, from Jannos’s apartment.
‘So Threwer was at home. Betleshah calls him and he goes straight out looking for Thiekis.’ I shrugged. We’d find out the why soon enough.
We left the Squats, heading into Earthtown. Gaudy neon flashed by as I flipped through Channel Six’s gleeful coverage from Mercy.
… speculation abounds as to whether this is the result of yet more overcharged and over-the-top escapades last night at the mansion residence of Enki Betleshah, Channel Nine’s infamous political commentator and frequent occupant of Firstfall libel courts, or whether Shyla’s admission is related to recent revelations of an affair with Betleshah’s Channel Nine boss Rashid Mangat. Whatever it is, the thoughts of everyone here at Channel Six are with you, Shy …
Right. I flipped to Channel Six’s social feed.
… Long-time partner of maverick journalist Enki Betleshah and daughter of Channel Nine chairman Eddie Thiekis, Shyla Thiekis is no stranger to Mercy Hospital’s rehabilitation centre. Thiekis senior has yet to comment, but tensions at Channel Nine between the autocratic station owner and his out-of-control star journalist have long run high. Is this the end for the maverick Shah? Is this what finally pushes Eddie over the edge?
The core newscast was full of interactive links to older reports: Thiekis’s many flirtations with rehabilitation, their subsequent failures, other times the police had come to Betleshah’s mansion, him being led away for questioning, a public outburst from Eddie Thiekis after some other time his daughter ended up in Mercy, Betleshah in court being sued for defamation, an old sweepstake on how long they’d last as a couple, which one of them would implode first, who was going to die and when. A new sweepstake had sprung up on whether she was going to last the night. A woman had died and somewhere out there someone was already making money from it. That was Channel Six for you.
Is this what finally pushes Eddie over the edge? I tried to put myself in Eddie Thiekis’s shoes, hearing about the loss of his daughter and then seeing all of this. It didn’t take long to figure out that, yes, it just might do the trick, if by pushing him over the edge you meant having him cluster-bomb his rival station.
‘Anyone tell Eddie that his daughter is dead yet?’ I asked.
‘Mercy are still trying to reach him.’
‘Get the Tesseract to do it.’
Our pod hummed to a stop outside a cave mouth. A bright neon sign declared this to be the entrance to the Cavern Bar. If the Tesseract had it right, this was where we’d find Jannos Threwer. The roadside hawkers – the human ones – took one look at our bureau Servant identities and shuffled purposefully away. The shells and the vending bots didn’t know any better and came clustering around the pod as soon as we got out, offering cigarettes, kale smoothies, low-grade legal gens and plenty of porn. A deluge of electronic spam hit my Servant, trying everything right up to the edge of legal and a little beyond to project their sales pitches onto my lenses. I could have laughed. Compared to places I’d been on Earth, the hawker shells and the bots of the Squats were like a cluster of old ladies politely inviting me to tea.
We found Threwer propping up the counter in the Cavern Bar. He looked ragged and drunk and not surprised to see us.
‘Bix Rangesh?’ He looked Rangesh up and down. ‘I’ve heard of you.’
‘I guess you know why I’m here then.’ Rangesh grimaced. ‘Look, man … Jannos … it’s been a pretty heavy night. Me and the Shyster and the Shah, we all go back a way, and I guess you and Shah go back a way too, right? And so you don’t much want to say anything that’s going to get anyone into any trouble. But tonight you need to talk to me, man. It hasn’t broken yet, but the Shyster’s dead.’
Threwer didn’t look too surprised. I told him so. He shrugged.
‘Wasn’t hard to see she was in a bad way.’ He pushed a glass at me. ‘Have a drink, agent.’
I passed. Rangesh should have passed too, but he sat with Threwer and sipped seaweed spirit and got tipsy as he coaxed the story out. Mostly I let myself fade into the background, taking in the Cavern. I’d been down to the Squats often enough over the years, but never to this place. It was close to empty, the host and hostess shells clustered around the bar waiting for something to do. It was one of those dark holes where people come to get drunk alone. I used to wonder why anyone would do that. Why not stay at home? But I know now that there are times when home is worse, when that’s what you’re running from. Yeah, I reckoned I’d learned a thing or two about that these last few years.
The painkillers were taking hold. The aches in my back had turned to a gentle tingle and a mildly pleasant buzz behind my eyes.
‘You bundled her into a pod and left her, man!’
‘What was I supposed to do? Go with her?’
‘She was dying!’
‘What difference would it have made?’
The Cavern was like a sea of darkness around us. Rangesh and Threwer became an island, me sitting on the shore with my toes in the surf. Threwer’s anguish sounded real enough. The way he told it he’d worked for Betleshah on and off for years, freelancing, rooting around for whatever dirt he could get hold of, one of maybe half a dozen stringers Channel Nine kept on retainer. He and Betleshah got on OK but nothing special, their relationship cordial and professional and nothing more. I didn’t quite buy it. He was taking Shyla Thiekis’s death too hard for it not to mean something.
Or maybe he just thought it was going to come back to him somehow. Hard to tell.
Close up like this, I could get into his Servant records, anonymous or not. I had a good look at his history while he was talking. First thought was to see whether he and Thiekis had any connection he wasn’t remembering to share. Thought I’d found one too, but it was the name that fooled me. Thiekis, yes, but not Shyla. Eddie. Betleshah’s boss. I rummaged around while he and Rangesh talked on but didn’t find much else. Betleshah had invited him to parties now and then. Threwer had refused. His Servant backed him up on that, and it backed him on his story for the night too: that the first he’d known anything was wrong was when he’d taken a call from Betleshah asking him to find Shyla. Betleshah had sounded wasted but scared too and said it was urgent. So Threwer had gone to pick her up, expecting to take her home and for that to be that but when he’d found her bleeding and hardly able to stand he’d put her in a pod and sent her to Mercy as a medical emergency instead. Done the right thing. Couldn’t really fault him.
When he was finished, I leaned in close.
‘What’s with you and Eddie Thiekis, Jannos?’
Threwer gave me a bitter look. ‘Eddie wanted to know what the Shah was up to. He came to most of us, I think. Anyone the Shah trusted.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘What did I tell Eddie about last night? Nothing yet. He doesn’t know.’ Threwer sized me up. ‘Look … Agent Rause, is it? We had an agreement. Me and the others Eddie came to. We made sure he knew what he was going to see about his daughter on Channel Six before it broke. That was all. It was enough.’
I didn’t see how whatever he might have been up to behind Betleshah’s back had anything to do with Shyla Thiekis being dead in Mercy so I let it lie. ‘Don’t tell him she’s dead. Don’t tell anyone. Leave that to us.’
Rangesh rambled on some more and then we left. Turned out we’d been in the Cavern longer than I thought. The lights in the tunnels were starting to come up. On the surface somewhere above, dawn was coming.
‘I don’t see him as a poisoner,’ I said as we climbed back into our pod. ‘Tell me about Betleshah. You know him too?’
Rangesh shook his head. ‘I knew the Shyster years back.’ The pod pulled away. ‘Disappointment University. Same classes, you know. She was crazy wild. Never changed. And she was awesome, man. There used to be, like, parties that went on for days. She had money and she didn’t care. We all left in the end and went our different ways, you know, but she held these reunions now and then, and the old crowd would all show up – everyone – because we all knew what was coming. You couldn’t say no, dude. One year she turned up with the Shah. No one had heard of him back then but he was as wild as they come. Put the rest of us to shame.’ He laughed. ‘So I know the Shah, but I don’t know him, yeah? People say he got where he is because of her, because of her money, because Eddie ran the channel, but it wasn’t like that. The Shah earned it, you know? Got his … Ah, man! That’s not good!’ He didn’t wait for me to ask before he pinged me a link to Channel Six. It was out that Shyla was dead. ‘Dude, did you tell the Tesseract to go public?’
I shook my head. ‘Threwer,’ I said.
‘No, he wouldn’t.’ Rangesh punched his palm. ‘Got to have been someone at Mercy. Man! I don’t know if Eddie even knows yet.’
Rangesh putting a lid on it had bought us a couple of hours. We’d blown them with Threwer. I tried to imagine how I’d have felt if the first I’d heard of Alysha’s death had been through a Channel Six newsflash. I would have felt like murdering someone.
‘Alysha used to follow Channel Six,’ I said. ‘She used to watch them now and then and take their newscasts.’ I never saw the point. Just people. The rich, the famous, the ugly, the clever, the stupid, the desperate, the stand-outs. If you wanted to know who was having sex with whom and how, you went to Channel Six for the answer. Some agents used it for exactly that. Alysha had maintained contacts there, but I couldn’t be doing with them. There was something sordid about Channel Six which infected everything they touched. Then again, I watched the reality shows. I guess if you poke hard enough, none of us makes much sense. ‘I’ll bet Eddie Thiekis watches them too.’
‘Has to, man. He hates them.’
‘So he’s going to know, right? You told the Tesseract to tell him, yes?’
The pod emerged from the tunnels of the Squats into the pre-dawn of Firstfall central. There were people on the streets now – not many, but a handful. Most were shells. The late shift going back to recharge, the morning security and reception shells starting up before the flesh-and-bone people got out of bed. The rain had stopped but not the wind, surly and erratic, scudding iron-grey shreds of cloud low overhead. We shot through empty streets, switched onto an arterial road and picked up speed fast, heading out of town.
‘Laws isn’t answering but I got through to Esh.’ Rangesh swore as a squall of rain battered us, there and gone in a few seconds. The suburbs of Firstfall flashed by, a blur of shapes and shades of grey outside the pod window. The blur crept inside my head. ‘Esh is on her way to Channel Nine. Eddie already knows, but she’s going anyway. Personal touch, you know? You meet Esh, you’re going to think she’s the last to do this sort of thing, but trust me, she has more skills than she seems. She knows what it’s like.’
Esh. Agent Esharaq Zohreya. Now I got it. I was too slow for this, lack of sleep and too much gravity making me miss things. ‘We already met.’
‘Could be Eddie’s not even in system, you know.’ Rangesh shrugged.
‘We need to know what poisoned Shyla,’ I said. ‘Where and when and how so we can know if anyone else is at risk. I’ll have Mercy send us an alert if anything similar comes in.’
‘It’s not the gens, man. Gens don’t do that.’
‘Could be something they’re cut with.’
You learn early on as an agent never to jump to a conclusion. I didn’t know for sure that Shyla Thiekis had been dying when Jannos Threwer put her in that pod, and I wouldn’t until the Tesseract came back with some forensic chemistry; but my gut told me she was. It wasn’t hard to track her last hours. She’d left Betleshah’s mansion before midnight, taken a pod to the Squats, got out and then walked for a while until Threwer found her. I had nothing else. No calls, no contacts, no interactions. Nothing to suggest that anyone had stopped her or spoken to her in the five minutes between getting out of her pod and Threwer finding her. Whatever was in her system, I was pretty sure she’d carried it with her from Betleshah’s party.
The pod shuddered as another squall hit us with a wall of wind. Sunrise cracked the horizon behind us, violet dawn light oozing over the cityscape, casting everything into impassioned shadow, stark black and white.
