Authors: Steve Perry
"Stay here, Ruul," Taz said. She glanced at Bork. "Go!"
Taz shoved her door open and rolled out onto the road. The cacophony from the warblers thumped her ears. She came up in a kneeling stance, her spring pistol in both hands. She was distantly aware of Saval moving to her right, more dimly aware that the nearest khaki uniforms were still thirty meters behind them.
She heard Saval's spetsdod go off and she squeezed the trigger on her own weapon. The driver was about eighteen meters away; she held on his chest.
He fired the carbine, one-handed, but his aim was bad and he dug small craters in the roadway to her left.
Her dart took him and he spun away, trying to run.
The woman was already crumpling as Taz swung her pistol over to shoot.
The man slapped at the middle of his back with one hand as he fell and hit on his knees, then toppled forward face down.
Taz shot the woman, but she was almost prone by then and she guessed her dart missed. Didn't matter.
They were both down.
Saval moved right, circling the truck.
Taz got up, crouched and edged left, gun covering the truck. Nobody else got out.
The uniforms started arriving. A loudcast voice boomed out: "YOU IN THE TRUCK, DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND COME OUT!"
Nobody did.
Taz moved so that she could see the open cab was empty.
Somebody shut off the warblers in her flitter. It got real quiet.
One of the uniforms accessed the loading ramp. The door slid up, the ramp extruded.
Except for a thick slab of gunmetal-blue about two meters tall, the cargo area was also empty.
Taz raised from her combat crouch. Holstered her pistol. Looked at the block in the truck. She'd seen something like this before. Where . . . ?
Ah. At the Zonn Ruins. This was a piece of a wall.
Damn. She thought they'd had the assassins. Instead, it looked like all they'd done was collect a couple of antiquity thieves. Damn.
Bork hung back while Taz went to talk to her fellow cools. Ruul moved up to stand next to him.
"I hate this," Ruul said. He nodded at Taz. "She could have been shot. Hurt or killed."
"She's a very good cool," Bork said.
"Yeah, I know. Doesn't make it any easier." He looked up at Bork. "I love her, you know."
"I know."
"She tell you what our problem is?"
"She might have mentioned something about it."
Ruul shook his head. "I don't understand women. I love her. She says she loves me. All I want to do is have her around, all the time. I want to do things for her, take care of her. Cook her meals. Sleep with her. I want her to live with me for the rest of our lives. She doesn't want that."
Bork said nothing. Funny. That's exactly what she does want.
"I don't understand. You married?"
"Yeah. Got a baby son."
"Ah."
Bork said. "Being contracted doesn't help. I don't understand women either. Seems like the older I get, the less I know."
"Fuck if that ain't right," Ruul said.
It wasn't really his place, but Bork felt for Ruul. He liked the guy. "It'll work out," he said.
"You think so?"
"Well. No guarantees. Taz has got some old recordings to deal with, it might take some time. Family stuff."
Ruul sighed. "I'll wait as long as it takes."
Bork nodded, didn't speak. He thought maybe Ruul just might. The two of them watched Taz direct the uniformed officers.
Chapter NINETEEN
A TRAUMA TEAM hauled the two unconscious prisoners to the medical unit. The thieves should be fine once they recovered from the effects of Taz and Saval's darts.
But as Taz stood watching the lab workers go over the truck, several things didn't make sense. Most heisters didn't fool around with guns, so potting at the traffic cool was unusual enough. Could be they were repeaters and a fall for this would be a hard one; still, it felt wrong.
Then there was the hunk of Zonn wall in the cargo area. The closest place they could have gotten it was way the hell and gone out the Snake Road-there weren't any ports in this direction, space or sea, no mag-rails, nothing. Where were they going with it? Planning on driving into the interior on a main flatway?
That was pretty stupid; they had to know even a routine stop-and-look would trip them up. Okay, maybe they had a private boxcar stashed in the woods somewhere, but Orbital Control would spot it soon as it hit the grid and the Coast Guard would go calling. Lot of risk for an antique with no value except to a collector.
Plus there was the fact that nothing had been reported stolen from the ruins. There were full-time guards there; it wasn't a matter of sticking the thing in a back pocket and strolling off with it: this artifact had to weigh twelve, maybe fifteen hundred kilos. That meant machinery to lift and transport it to the truck.
And a call to the guards had come up blank. Either they were asleep out there or the slab came from somewhere else. And if that were the case, where had it come from?
Yeah, something was off here.
"Anything on the victim we were going to see?" Saval asked.
"No. It's quiet there."
They both looked at the truck. "I think maybe these two might be involved," Taz said. "I thought so at first, changed my mind when I saw they'd swiped that"-she pointed at the chunk of Zonn material-"but now I think maybe my first hit was on the mark."
Ruul said, "Why? Were they going to drop it on somebody? Seems like a pretty inefficient killing device, you ask me."
Taz started to snap at him-Nobody asked you, Ruul-but he had a point. There wasn't anything logical about it, it was just a feeling.
Saval said, "I hear you, Taz. It could be just a coincidence. But maybe not."
"Chief?" came a voice from her com.
"Go."
"This is Biltless, in the wagon. The IDs on the two perps are phony."
"What a surprise," she said.
"We're running retinal scans. Should have something in a minute . . . uh-oh."
"What?" Taz said.
There came background shouts, medical types spouting jargon:
'-class four convulsions, watch his hand-!"
"-Christo, she's arresting-!"
'-What the hell is going on-?"
"Biltless!"
"Chief, the perps are going bugfuck here!"
More background walla:
"-damn, damn, he's shut down, no pulse here!"
" -she's puking and aspirating the vomitus-!"
There was a long pause after that. Taz called Biltless, got no answer.
Then: "Chief, Biltless."
"What's going on?"
"The perps, ah, they're dead, Chief."
"Dead?"
"Yeah. Some kind of reaction to the stingers or the 'dod darts the medics think, maybe."
Taz and Saval exchanged glances. Saval shook his head.
"What?" Ruul said. "What?"
"Just like on Muto Kato," Taz said. "The guy who shot at me there, he died when they tried to question him. Some kind of mental tsunami, a block. These guys are connected to it."
"Were connected," Saval said.
"Damn," Taz said.
"Now what?" Ruul said.
"We got two bodies, a truck and a stolen artifact," Taz said. "That's more than we had an hour ago. We start to run them all down. Records will find out everything we know about the truck. We've tapped into the GALAX crime net for reports on missing Zonn stuff. If the two dead guys have ever been eyeprinted in this system, we'll get some kind of ID on them. Then we put it all together."
"How long will it take?"
"However long it takes," Taz said. "Meanwhile, it seems as if the assassinations have stopped. We still have to eat. Let's drop by the Owl and see what looks good."
"You are so damned calm about all this," Ruul said. "I don't understand how you can do that."
"Part of the job, right, Saval?"
"Right," Bork said.
At the Owl they managed to get all the way to a table before Pickle showed up. "Ah," the woman said, "I see you two are keeping company again."
"In a manner of speaking," Taz said. "Everything okay here?"
Pickle made a rude sound. "All this killing business is so awful. What stupid people they must be. Irritating in the extreme."
Ruul said, "You sound upset. You didn't get threatened, did you?"
Before Pickle could speak, Taz cut in. "No. And that's why she's upset, isn't it, sweetie? Didn't make somebody's list?"
You could have slain a room full of diabetics with Pickle's smile. "You know, for a fat and torpid cool you do manage a lucky shot now and then, Tazzi. Dear."
Pickle turned away and stopped a waiter with her icy stare. "This table eats for free tonight," she said.
"Later, loves." She spotted somebody near the door. "Oh, Temano! How good to see you again!" She hurried away.
"You got her, but you'll be sorry," Ruul said.
"I know. Her claws will be so sharp next time I won't even notice I'm cut until I see the blood."
Saval shook his head.
They were halfway through the meal, which was an excellent melange of game hen, fingerling crab and deepwater seaweed all cooked in sweet and hot sauce, when Taz's com came to life.
"Yes?"
"Chief, we got an ID on one of the dead guys in the truck. The woman. Work name was Refu koo Mkunga. Local girl, grew up down in Kiyoga. She lists as a licensed trull, but her last renewal and medical was almost five years ago, nothing on her since. We got primary ed records, address of a biological sister, goes by Mgongo tundu Ndizi, lives in the roach's belly, also an LT. Um, that's about it, Chief. No criminal record."
Taz shook her head. "Jesu. Okay, upload the sister's address. I'll check it out. Any more activity on the assassin?"
"Negative."
"Keep me current. Discom."
Taz looked at her food. She wasn't hungry any more. This could be a good lead.
Saval raised an eyebrow.
She said, "The dead woman was a whore, but dropped off the rolls a few years ago. Maybe her sister can tell us something. She works in Mende." She shook her head again.
Ruul chuckled.
"Something funny?"
She looked at Ruul.
He turned to her brother. "The names. Roach Town whores are not the most subtle of creatures. The dead one's name means, more or less, 'Deep throats your eel.' The sister's working came translates as, ah,
'Banana in the back hole.' A banana is a yellow tropical fruit, it's shaped rather like, ah, a large-2'
"I know what a banana is," Saval said.
"Well, finish your food," Taz said. "And let's go see if M. Ndizi can tell us anything more than how she got her colorful professional name."
Bork had seen worse places, but not all that many. Mende Town was one of those old inner-city capsules you could find on a lot of frontier worlds. Built when land was cheap and regulations were lax, such neighborhoods tended to blossom haphazardly in all directions, outward and upward, and there was seldom any kind of uniformity as to construction methods or materials. Housing sat next to industrial areas, streets were crooked and narrow, little more than alleys in many places, and topography tended to dictate the shape of civilization. If there were rivers, streets ran next to them and followed the meander.
Mountains and lakes or swamps usually ended the sprawl, until it became cost effective to blast or build over them. Generally by the time that happened, the early buildings would be falling into disrepair, a hard-core urban complex that people left for newer pastures as soon as they could afford the move. It was a cycle repeated over and over on new planets where men and mues had gone to escape the more regimented worlds of straight roads and communities planned down to the specific kinds of grass allowed for ornamental lawns.
And as the old urban sprawl decayed, those left behind were usually the ones too poor to leave, too set in their ways, or too venal. Hard pubs sold the legal drugs and then some; sex and gambling and other pleasures frowned upon in more polite and upscale areas would always find takers in Mende Town. Like the roach it was named for, somehow a place like this always managed to find a way to survive.
They passed a ruined groundcar parked on the side of the road. The car's wheels had been stolen, the windows smashed or pried out, the interior stripped of seats and servos and controls. The heavy plastic body had been chipped and cracked, graffiti sprayed or burned into it. Apparently the car had become home to a nest of small animals. Something that looked like a cross between a donkey and a squirrel and about the size of a tabby perched on the rear deck, and another smaller version of it peered through the side window at them when they fanned by.
"Punda dogs," Taz said. "They eat rats, so nobody bothers 'em."
Taz dropped the flitter to its rollers and slowed the vehicle considerably. "Gets a little tight in here," she said. "No point in banging it up any more than it already is."
Bork nodded. The carbonex windshield still held the slugs the truck driver had fired at them, coppery-gray blobs that seemed to float in the air in front of the flitter.
The street narrowed. Here and there people stood or leaned against dirty everlast walls, sometimes in pairs, now and then in small groups, never more than four or five. They watched the flitter go past, and Bork was reminded of a zoo he'd been in once, when the keepers had come to feed the predators. The keepers had been armed with shockstiks, and the animals had kept their distance; the lupes, vulps, big cats and even the snow lizards had learned to stay clear of those nasty and painful electrical rods. That's how the people here looked: ready to leap upon them, but made wary by the police insignia on the flitter.
Ahead, a rat ran across the road. Right behind it, one of the things like those Bork had seen nested in the trashed car. The rat was fast, but the punda dog was faster. It leaped, came down in front of the rat, rocked up on its forelegs and kicked with both hind legs. The back feet snapped out so fast and hard Bork didn't actually see them hit, but the rat snapped into the air like an acrobat and did most of a back flip, landing on its head. It quivered, but didn't move otherwise. The punda dog came down, turned, picked the dying rat up with its teeth, and padded away, managing to hold its prey up high enough to keep it from dragging on the dirty plastcrete. By the time the flitter came level with it, the punda dog had already ducked into a dark and narrow alley behind a large barrel-shaped dump cannister.