Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel (6 page)

The coroner’s cheerful voice kept talking, my mind freaking out as I accidentally took a far-too-deep breath through my nose and smelled a scent I hoped to never smell again—a more concentrated, alcoholed version of the decay I’d experienced at the crime scene. In triplicate. I took a step back and fought down bile.

Cherabino put her hand on my shoulder—I was shielding too hard to read her—but I remembered suddenly I was here to hear what the coroner had to say. I started to pay attention again.

“This one like the others?” Cherabino asked.

“Yes. A few defensive wounds.” The coroner pointed to scrapes on the man’s knuckles, bruises on his forearms. “The scrapes are clotted well enough I’m putting them several hours before death. He didn’t fight right before, unless the bruises on his back are from more than falling down on concrete. Same damage to the brain, but something new…” She pulled the man’s head to the side slightly, displaying a discolored stripe
with more insect damage I had to look away from. “Bleeding from the ears.”

“What’s the cut on the neck?” Cherabino leaned forward, clearly a lot more comfortable in this situation than I was. I didn’t look.

“That? Oh, that’s the incision for me to take out the artificial organ—a thyroid gland, in this case. I made it right over the old scar.”

“Didn’t we identify the last few bodies from AOs?” Cherabino asked.

“They’re more common than transplants now and most of them are traceable, especially the glands to administer drugs. It’s usually the easiest way to identify someone,” the coroner said. “Sometimes a person will request his name be kept out of the database. But usually it’s straightforward, and they send me a new version every year, so it’s not too far out of date. I’d say half of the bodies I get these days are identified through that database.”

“That many?” Cherabino asked. “What happened to dental records?”

The coroner laughed. “With the insurance companies pushing the new glands over med regimens? We’ll all have AOs before the decade is up. Dental records are going the way of the dinosaurs.”

Artificial organs were old news to me, since they had to be tuned to the body’s neural net by a telepath to ensure compatibility. So I changed the subject, back to what had bothered me earlier.

“Do you have a picture of the brain damage?” I asked, interrupting their conversation and not caring. The coroner was grinning merrily, which disturbed me to no end.

“Let me show you the tissue—”

“No, a picture. An HD MRI or something?” I asked a little desperately.

She shrugged and pulled a few films from the bottom of the clipboard. “Couple of cross sections on the scanner, nothing fancy.” Turning on the light on a board on the wall, she clipped the film up. “What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know, exactly.” As I walked closer, I put my hand up to touch the bottom of the third film, the tacky texture of the biofiber sticking to my fingers. I didn’t know what I was doing; I was a software guy, not wetware—not the brain tissue itself. But I’d had to study structure in depth as part of my deconstruction training, not just the mind, but the brain. So I did know what I was looking at.

The first slide showed some damage to the hindbrain centered around the pons, likely what had killed him in the end. Intermittent damage across the temporal lobe. But on the third slide a burned-out section as big as my thumb in the lower parietal lobe. I put my thumb over it, thinking.

“It’s very odd. That section shouldn’t do anything. There’s no reason for it to be burned out in every victim,” the coroner put in.

I peeled my thumb off the film and backed up, then asked a question about the kind of cross section it was, just to be sure. Then I sighed. “No, it’s not. That’s a major center for processing Mindspace signals, if the rest of the brain is set up to receive them.” I didn’t have the right cross section to see if this guy had Ability—though a few extra folds in certain spots weren’t guaranteed in even the stronger telepaths. Brain waves were a better indication. But the fact he had damage in that spot really, really wasn’t a good sign.

“What does that mean?” the coroner asked.

I sighed, not knowing how much I could safely explain. “It means we have a problem.”

As we walked back, Cherabino pestered me until I told her, “Look, I’m not a wetware guy. I could be wrong. But if I have it right, and the damage is—well, somebody’s overloading their brains. Through Mindspace.” If that didn’t point to the Guild, I didn’t know what did.

West College Avenue was, if anything, even hotter, with almost no one around. You could fry an egg on the pavement, and I had no idea why we were walking. Even the wilted brown grass was trying to get out of the sun. I was already sweating, already miserable.

Part of me wanted to do a little jig here in the middle of the street, celebrate the Guild screwing up. Get the newspaper to print a huge front-page story: guild screws up, me proved right. Start the media sensation of the century over exactly how and why, rub their noses in it. But the rest of me—well, that athletic guy hadn’t asked to be dead. Shouldn’t be dead, bug damage or no.

Cherabino pursed her lips. “So?”

I avoided looking her in the eye, but kept my voice even. “I’m only going to say this once, so listen up. I’m in over my head. I need a lot more information and some more resources. Maybe another telepath, a Battle Ops guy. We need to call the Guild.”

She stopped walking and stared. “Call the Guild? Seriously? It’s our freaking case! And you…”

“I’ll admit they’re not my favorite people,” I said. “I’m not talking about Enforcement. I don’t want to deal with them right now. I’m talking about help. About information. About getting this guy off the street faster—a couple phone calls and some begging.”

“I don’t beg,” Cherabino said.

I gritted my teeth. “Asking nicely, then. I’ll do that much. With this getting so much press, even they have to know they can’t drop off the radar at this point. A little help, a few diplomatic channels, that’s all I’m asking, Cherabino.”

She strode on down the street, her legs stretching at a painfully fast walk. Her annoyance drifted off her in waves. “You were there when the brass decided not to consult the Guild. You can’t just go off on your own, you know. The decision’s been made. If you have new information, great, but right now the only thing we even have that points to the Guild is your say-so—”

She was cut off by the distinctive whine of a whipcord-thin humblade beginning to vibrate behind us. We turned. Cherabino fell into a defensive crouch and went for her gun.

A light-skinned man so thin his cheeks were gaunt held the highly illegal humblade, brandishing the thin hilt and vibrating cord that would slice through concrete like butter. The bruises along his arms underscored the desperation in his face. A junkie.

“Give me your money,” he said, in a voice frighteningly committed.

Cherabino shifted her grip on the gun. “You have
got
to be kidding. We’re within sight of the police station. You’re holding up a
cop
right next to the
police station
. How stupid can you get?”

Please don’t antagonize the junkie with the humblade, I thought as the man tensed to move. His mind was on the sharp edge, coming down off a high. I needed to disable him….

He sprang at me. I snatched at his wrist—not the blade, his wrist—and missed. I dodged to the
side—the edge of the blade hummed far, far, too close to my face. The junkie caught his balance again.

Cherabino kicked him, a sweeping roundhouse kick—connected with the wrist I’d missed, her gun somehow now in its holster. I danced back, back, away from the flying humblade, which whooshed past.

The blade embedded itself in the concrete sidewalk two feet behind me. As it vibrated, the hole it made widened with small cracks. A flash of decision from the junkie, and I was moving away again. He swung at me wildly—he had to have the money, he had to have the drug. At any cost he had to have it. I understood, but not now—he couldn’t steal from us.

He hit Cherabino and she fell, sweeping his legs out on the way down. I jumped in, trying to pull him off her. He had the strength of the insane, laying blows left and right and hitting my face. I saw stars.

I opened up, my mental training coming into play as I held him desperately with my hands, wrestled him down. His mind was erratic, spotty, hard to hold; whatever he was on changed the shape of it. I paused, trying to find a hold—

Cherabino got the grip she needed and flipped him facedown on the concrete, his arm wrenched behind him. She muttered under her breath about stupid unarmed perps, “Give me an excuse to shoot you, just give me one.”

The perp pushed up against her, tried to get away, only hurting himself worse in the process. His high was starting to wear off, his strength gone.

I disengaged. Sat back, panting. She had him. I didn’t need to disable him—I didn’t have to find a grip on that slippery mind.

Cherabino pulled out her cuffs and forced his other
arm behind him. The alloy strongcuffs
snipped
as they engaged.

The strength slipped out of the junkie, and he collapsed. I got a grip on his mind, but it wasn’t a ploy. He was beginning the slide into withdrawal. I held him down, my right knee in his back. I hated everything he stood for, everything I used to be and hoped I wasn’t still. I understood his desperation all too well. Impotent anger pushed at me, but I held on. I could do this. I would do this.

“You have the right to remain silent,” Cherabino began, continuing to recite his Mirandas. Then straight into the Paglinos, one phrase flowing naturally into the next.

Abruptly, my precognition kicked in. I got a flash, Cherabino putting a hand out to catch her balance, a hand that landed on the still-active humblade. Blood everywhere, pain, pain. Then, a jarring shift, and I was back in the now.

Cherabino shifted in her crouch to keep the man down, but she was losing her balance….

I grabbed the back of her shirt and
yanked
her in my direction.

We both fell, on top of the suspect, who
oofed
and started whining.

“What in the hell was that for?” Cherabino punched me and pushed up. A long, bloody scrape marred one of her cheeks.

I yanked her to the side suddenly, away from where she was stepping. “Humblade.”

Understanding hit her like a freight train as she looked over to where she would have put her hand, where she could have stepped. She bent over to turn the blade off. Added the safety.

She met my eyes as she straightened, tucking the now-harmless handle and floppy cord into a pocket.

“Let’s go,” she said. Fear and anger roiled off her. I hurried to keep up, my own heart beating far too fast.

That had been far too close.

We dragged our prisoner
into Booking with full ceremony. Dirty, pissed, and with a loudly mumbling burden, we made quite a sight. Two bored cops followed us in our little parade through the department—it was day shift and lunchtime on a slow day, so any distraction was welcome. We probably weren’t as gentle as we could have been with the suspect.

The booking officer looked up. “What’d he do?” she asked, actually interested.

“Tried to mug us within sight of the police station,” I said flatly, before Cherabino had a chance to get into it. Judging by her expression—and her treatment of the suspect—she’d happily get into a diatribe if I let her.

The two trailing cops laughed, loudly. The booking officer tried hard, but she also snickered.

“And you ended up looking like
that
?”

The cop behind me guffawed. “Must have been quite a fight!”

“Well,” I said with full dignity and no small frustration, “it was.”

As soon as Cherabino got the guy booked in, I pushed her back to her cubicle to cool down, telling her I’d finish the paperwork. She left with noises of cleaning up
in the ladies’ room. The cut on her cheek was still seeping blood, and she looked pissed.

The booking officer scanned in the paper forms as soon as I could fill them out, but we still had to have the original hard copies filed away. It was stupid, mindless work, and exactly what I needed to calm back down. The junkie’s face, his desperation, was sticking with me all too clearly.

I focused instead on the stupid hard-copy forms, line after line, box after box filled out in pencil in block caps so the secretaries could read them. Hard copy, for all it was dumb, was necessary. Nobody remembered losing all their records in the Tech Wars the way the cops did. Electronic quarantine and antivirus, separation and security—they were all good to have and the cops were fanatical about them. More important was keeping data and transmissions separate, checking every byte of new data, every new program as if it was the new End of the World. Because once it had been.

No one remembered the war like the government, like the cops, who told one another the stories over and over again. Bombs had split the sky, and worse, the superviruses split our minds from the inside, until the toll of death made people look at computer technology like the Black Plague. Even now, more than a half century later when small computer chips were let out on a leash—small ones barely powerful enough to run an oven timer, and still frightening to the diehards—the real Tech, the sentient computers and the implants and anything
powerful
, was outlawed with terrible penalties.

People were afraid. Still. Terrified of the computers, the data, even the smallest transmission of information over unsecured lines. So if it took three days to
send an e-mail through all the layers of Quarantine, if the small Web was regarded with the same respect/fear as a pit viper, if even Cherabino had to have a thorough background check and be monitored constantly in the Electronic Crimes works for fear she’d come across something truly dangerous, well, a lot of people had died in the Tech Wars. A lot of data had been erased beyond retrieval; a lot of holes had been made in the history books. A lot of loss, period. Hard copy? Hard copy was safe. Hard copy was forever. And if India and Mars and Brazil made fun of the West for our caution, well, they hadn’t taken the brunt of the Tech Wars, had they? They hadn’t died in the millions and rotted on the street and watched while their neighbors died, trapped in their houses while a madman held them captive through their Tech. Never, never again would that be possible, we had sworn. Never.