Brother Death Page 14

  Bork watched the meeting between his sister and her lover. The space between them was so full of energy you could almost hear it crackle. They both tried to pretend it wasn’t there, but to walk between them would be to risk being knocked flat by the flow. Whatever else was going on, this was going to be interesting.

  “Come on,” Taz said. “We’ve got to get moving. Two more bombs have gone off. We have people gearing up for a full-blown panic.”

  Bork admired his sister’s attempt at professionalism. He didn’t think it was fooling anybody, but she got points for trying.

  The three of them left in her flitter.

  Taz found she was breathing too fast and forced herself to slow her respiration. Damn, she didn’t need this. Whoever was responsible for this shit was really in trouble now, forcing her into this situation. No, she didn’t have to watch over Ruul personally. Then again, if anything happened to him and she hadn’t done everything she could to keep it from happening, she wouldn’t be able to look at herself in a mirror ever again. Dammit!

  “Where,” Saval said, “are we going?”

  “Next guy on the list is only a few klicks from here. We want to get there before the killer does.”

  Saval glanced at Ruul, then back at her.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” she said. “Still, better with us than not.”

  Ruul grinned. Taz knew he understood the semi-fugue she and Saval had just played. They were taking him into the jaws of the beast. And Saval’s lips twitched with a little grin of his own as he saw Ruul get it.

  God, she hated this!

  As they approached the neighborhood where one of the would-be victims lived, they were overtaken and nearly run off the road by a hovertruck.

  “Man in a big hurry,” Ruul observed.

  Taz watched the truck speed away ahead of them. Thing was pumping a lot of air through its fans and, even so, was still riding awful low. Must be hauling something real heavy.

  Yeah, so? That’s what trucks do, haul things. Big deal.

  There wasn’t anything she could put a precise name to, but the truck bothered her. Her car wore a PO designation, flasher and glowbars. For a driver to go whipping around a cool’s flitter like that was not real bright. Why was the guy willing to risk a traffic infraction that way? What was so important?

  She reached for her com space, double-waved it on. “This is Assistant Chief Bork,” she said. “I had a roegg just blast past in an MT van that’s dusting the surface with its skirts. He’s heading north on Silhouette Lane, cross street Sheen. Somebody pull him over and find out where the fire is.”

  A TC unit three blocks ahead acknowledged her call. “Copy, Chief. I got ‘im.”

  “People getting blown in and you’re worried about a speeding truck?” Ruul said. “Ah, you cools.”

  “I don’t tell you how to deliver jokes, you don’t tell me how to deliver the peace.” There was a sharp edge in her voice.

  “Ouch,” Ruul said. “Excuse the blood here.”

  Don’t do this, Ruul

  “We got a runner here,” came a bored and cynical voice over the com. “The Chief’s truck is ignoring my flashers and blowing faster.” Then the voice changed: “Fuck! He’s shooting at me! This is TC nine-three, I’m calling a code four-one-six. I got me a shooter here, looks like an automatic shotgun, shit-!”

  Taz didn’t believe in coincidences when they involved guns. This truck was connected to the assassinations. “Nine-three, stay with him. I’m right behind you.”

  Two other TC units added their voices to the com, then cleared the opchan. Nine-three started a running monologue.

  “-there is a passenger, he’s doing the gunwork. Looks like two of ‘em, don’t see any more. We’re turning onto Bracken Avenue, moving west. I’m casting police override now … Nope, no good, he’d not slowing, must be running with an illegal coil-damn! My windshield just took a load of shot, looks like number four buck. Low-powered, bet it’s air, didn’t penetrate more than a millimeter or so. Look out!

  Stupid son-of-a-shit just wiped out a parked flitter, man, just ate the goddamned side right off it …”

  Taz rounded the corner, saw the TC unit’s glowbar and flashers a block ahead. She opened the throttle and her flitter sped up.

  “On your tail, Nine-three.”

  “We got a block set up here,” somebody said. “Corner of Bracken and La Kuhara. We’ve laid goo, Po’children, watch your fans.”

  Ruul said, “Goo?”

  “Anything using ground effect will be pulling in air for the fans,” Taz said. “Goo is a memory-slick plastic fiber. Looks like baby powder when you lay it down. It gets sucked up by the GE intakes, buckyballs right through the particle filters. When the fans chew it, it clumps and reverts to its original casting, which is basically string.”

  “There he is,” somebody said over the com. “Come to daddy, dickhole.”

  Saval picked it up. “The fans will shut down automatically as the goo jams them. Takes about ten seconds. Even if the guy’s got full-flight repellors, he’s in a forced-landing situation, and even if he could override the safeties, his fans won’t give him enough push to maneuver or drive his rollers. End of chase.”

  “Nice stuff to leave lying on the road for the citizens to fly over,” Ruul said.

  “That’s the beauty of it,” Saval said. “Goo biodegrades about twenty minutes after you expose it to the air. Turns into harmless dust.”

  “Gotcha!” somebody yelled.

  Taz throttled her own fans down, dropped the flitter on its rollers, then killed the engine. Her vehicle slowed immediately but still had enough momentum to coast a considerable way. She saw the traffic units ahead of her, saw the hovertruck skid as it fell onto its rollers. The truck slewed, smashed into one of the traffic flitters, eliciting a “Fuck!” from her com. The driver straightened the larger vehicle and continued on for another two hundred meters, slowing to a stop.

  Taz rolled through the block and since she wasn’t under power, had no problem. The remains of the powdered goo blew up around her flitter in a haze of psychedelic-orange dust. Then they were through and coasting toward the stopped truck. Half a dozen uniforms ran along the road, guns drawn.

  The two men in the truck-no, the passenger was a woman-came out shooting. The driver had some kind of carbine, the passenger a shotgun. The driver snapped the carbine up and fired a burst on full auto. The solid slugs hit Taz’s windshield, stitched a half dozen dark splotches across it in a descending line from left to right.

  “Shit!” Ruul lunged forward and put an arm in front of her.

  The windshield was centimeter-thick clear carbonex and it flattened the jacketed metal bullets and stopped them easily.

  Taz thought that the weight of Ruul’s arm across her chest was quite the nicest thing she had ever felt.

  He didn’t know that her windshield was proof against ordinary gunfire. His first reaction was not to flinch away from the bullets, but to try and protect her. It made her want to cry. Why couldn’t he have some goddamn flaws? She made a joke of it: “Damn, I just had the scratches polished out last week.”

  Ruul apparently realized his arm wasn’t going to do her much good and pulled it away. He clamped his hands onto the back of her headrest.

  “They don’t want us to get the truck,” Bork said. “They aren’t trying to get away.”

  Taz braked the still-moving flitter to a stop twenty meters from the shooters. Bullets spanged off her flitter’s front armor. “I’ll give ‘em something else to worry about,” she said. With that, she dialed the warblers and flashers up to full. The noise dampers in the flitter cut the roar of sound, but the vibrations of it still came through, thrumming deep in her chest. The flashing lights strobed the two gunplayers with eye-smiting beams. They apparently weren’t wearing polarizing droptacs, for both tried to block the flashing lights with upraised hands.

  “Stay here, Ruul,” Taz said. She glanced at Bork. “Go!”

  Taz shov
ed 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 l
ooks 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.