Reality 36 (18 page)

"Just hold on," said Richards.

  A minute passed. Otto concentrated on the horizon where blue-black sky met truly black sea in an uncertain line. Then Richards' sheath relaxed, a change of poise as his attention returned from the dicopter.

  "OK. That's got it. I lodged it up in the rigging. We can go home now, watch this from the comfort of the office, unless you want to duck out? I'm happy to do this myself. You took a big old beating yesterday. You should take it easy."

  "I am fine," said Otto. "Do we still have the Lagavulin?" Otto and Richards shared a taste for good whisky.

  "Yep."

  "I will come then. I have no other business tonight. I need a drink."

  "Tell you what" – he patted Otto's arm – "you get some sleep for an hour. Let me do a preliminary sweep, OK? I can do it faster that way anyway. I can put it on the files, then you can read them and catch up."

  Otto considered the offer. His sleep had not been as restful as it should have been recently. "OK."

  They got into their car on the port side landing pad of the cruiser and took off, red and blues flashing. They had no reason to make the crew of the
Aurora Viva
think they were anything other than another cop aircar, said Richards.

Four hours later, Otto sat rubbing his eyes in the briefing room of Richards & Klein, Inc, Security Consultants. While Otto had slept, Richards had changed his outfit; for a machine he was picky about what he wore. The current number was an expensive polychromatic weave from Ryuko Cigliani, colours keyed into his pseudo-emotional state. In the dimly lit office, illuminated by the flicker of the holo files, the suit was a swirling blue, peaks of the creases in the cloth picked out in maroon.

  "You could read the files once in a while," said Richards. "I go to a lot of trouble to keep them up to date."

  "I could," said Otto, "and you could just tell me what is going on." He yawned.

  Richards shook his head. "OK, fine. This guy's Thornton Quaid," Richards gestured up to the holo hanging over the table, an awkward angle bent wide by the dicopter's wraparound eyes. At its centre sat a man on an expensive sofa built into the curve of the yacht's hull; real leather. Quaid was corn-fed pornstar pretty. His skin was overly taut and had an orange tan, he had teeth so white they were blue, and his hair was buoyant with unnatural waves.

  "The boat's owner," said Richards. Quaid, made huge by the dicopter's fish-eye cameras, gestured wildly, arguing with a uniformed cop. The cop was all placating hand motions, while Quaid was angry, but the sound was muted, at least for Otto. Richards had several parts of himself examining every statement and hand wave as they spoke.

  "Eugene?"

  "You can tell?" Richards said wryly.

  "Nobody but a eugene would name their children Thornton, or make them tan orange." said Otto.

  "He's a second generation, his parents were among the first. Ignore the Fanta glow and the gene bling. His IQ's off the chart, as you'd expect. This is an important guy."

  "Angry too," said Otto.

  "Yeah, they go for all that alpha male aggression bullshit to make their kids more competitive. It worked for Quaid. He made his first fortune in the North American rewilding, hasn't stopped since. He's still got a large stake in the Buffalo Commons."

  "The big money there was done thirty years ago," said Otto.

  "He was in on it nearly from the start. He's sixty-eight. He's worth trillions now."

  Otto made a disapproving noise. Quaid looked about thirty. "Right."

  "Right as much as you like Otto, that guy's one of the preeminent restorative ecologists on the planet. This is the guy," he pointed, "behind the North American neo-mammoth, the whole hairy elephant ecology, from grasses up. That's serious brainpower."

  "Fine. So if I go to Wyoming for my holidays and I get dragged out of my bed in the middle of the night by a lion, I know who to sue. His motive for the murder?"

  "None yet."

  They watched as the cop left. Thornton went to rage in the face of a short South Asian man.

  "Maybe he just lost his temper," said Otto.

  "He's unhappy right now," agreed Richards. "This boat is a pleasure enterprise for him. The fee he charges his passengers is nominal, at least as far as he's concerned – his psych profile suggests he does not like giving anything away for free, you can blame his parents again for that. He gets his guests on for their entertainment value."

  "So what does he care? If he is innocent, he can wait all this out."

  "He's got a big meeting with the People's Dynasty government next Tuesday," explained Richards. "He's in on their Yellow River rebirth project, it's worth billions to him, but Hughie's not going to let him go anywhere until this is done, and by the book, though he'd do that to piss the Chinese off more than anything, knowing Hughie, which I do."

  The screen tilted vertiginously as the dicopter buzzed away from Quaid, then back towards him and over his head, on past the Asian man who was backing slowly into a corner as he tried to appease his boss. "Our other suspects then: Rambriksh Mistry, ship's steward and our man Quaid's confidant." The walls of the yacht's narrow corridors blurred as the dicopter flew jerkily on, out up the corridor to the deck, where a leggy beauty with vacant eyes stood smoking a cigarette. "Next: Jolanda Garcia, Andorran/Belgian heiress and the only other passenger. And then the crew." Five Twos in faceless, bandy-legged sheaths ornately tooled from brass loomed out of the night one after the other, attending to tasks nautical. "Finally we have three cook staff, all human." The dicopter zipped into an open hatch, up plushly carpeted corridors, then down a ventilation pipe and out into the ship's galley, where a fat-faced white man waved at it irritably with a teatowel. "Zbigniew Lodziak, Armand Fleur and Tora Hakim," said Richards as it passed them one at a time.

  Otto leant forward and cupped his glass. "This is very interesting."

  "There was a murder here, Otto, pay attention."

  "I was not being sarcastic, it is interesting. It is like something from your Agatha Christie."

  "She's not 'mine', Otto. Learn English."

  Otto shrugged and took a drink.

  The dicopter banked, flew out the kitchen and up plain steel stairs, then made its way back into the guest accommodation, between two heavy gun drones that filled the passage and through the red EuPol flatribbon guarding Qifang's cabin. Blood covered everything, great sprays across the tastefully decorated walls in brown arcs. Text up the side of the holo showed a match to Qifang, but Richards wasn't concerned with that.

  The fake insect buzzed circuits round the cabin. Richards' face was intent. "Aha, there it is!" Richards looked over his shoulder at Otto, dour-faced at the other end of the conference table, nursing his whisky like it might escape. "I thought I'd lost it for a moment there. Now this is interesting." The dicopter alighted on the ceiling, the 270-degree view its eyes gave inverted. Feet brushed over its face as the sophisticated machine brought samples up to its analysis unit from the surface it stood on. A string of chemical formulae ran up the side of the holo. "There," he said triumphantly. "Traces of burning silicon lubricant and carbon plastics."

  "Meaning?"

  Richards rolled his eyes. "There's been an android in here, and someone damaged it severely. I thought you were built to fight machines?"

  "I'm made to kill them, not perform forensic investigations on them. So you suspect one of the crew has been suborned?"

  "I've discounted that. Even if we can factor in an assassin programme clever enough to turn one of Quaid's carriages to its own end and not to get caught, this here is cranial suspension fluid, and underneath the hopeless attempts to clean it up there's a lot of it. Quaid's manifest says his crew are all working just fine. You crack an android that hard, it becomes very obvious it's been damaged."

  "How so?"

  "Well, like when it starts walking into the wall repeatedly and talking to the furniture." He waved a finger. "This stuff keeps 'droid brains from cooking themselves. You get a leak that big it'll pitch forward and smoke will pour out of its ears after about five minutes."

  Otto leaned back and sipped his whisky. "I suppose that would also discount an emulant among the guests?"

  "Maybe, this coolant does not come from any of the people that we're looking at here."

  "And Qifang's body?"

  "No idea. They're searching the seabed now. Whoever killed him pitched him overboard, the blood trails show that." Supplementary video popped up a bubble next to Richards' dicopter feed displaying a smear of blood, vermilion in the boat's harsh lighting, on the deck that terminated at the port side of the bow. "Thing is, how's a 127-year-old going to crack an android hard enough to make it leak fluid like that? There's another problem."

  The interior of the boat moved off to one side. Holographic footage of a man moving erratically down a busy street replaced it.

  "That must be Morden," said Otto.

  "Yep. And this is Qifang." The video froze, zoomed in.

  "I recognise him. Everyone knows his face."

  "Yeah, but when this was shot, he was also aboard the Au
rora Viva."

  "That's impossible."

  "I'm as sure as sure can be," said Richards. "Gridsigs, witnesses, tickets, video footage. The lot," said Richards.

  "He's being followed," said Otto, uncurling a finger from his glass and pointing at the holo.

  "He is." The outlines of four men highlighted themselves on the picture. "All black, not a legit form of ID among them, damper masks on their faces to fox the IR. They all go down this alleyway here, and then they don't come out."

  "The footage could have been doctored."

  "The footage is the only thing about this scenario that's not dodgy," said Richards. "I've checked it pixel by pixel. I've had the alleyway checked out – it had been molecularly washed. There were still a few nanites twitching when EuPol got there. Now, either Qifang has unlocked the secret of large-mass teleportation, or he was in two places at once."

  "The Qifang on the boat, perhaps then he was an android."

  "Maybe. Insufficient data, as they used to say," said Richards. "Maybe he was, maybe the one in the alleyway is. It strikes me as the most likely eventuality, but there's no evidence of that, no sign of any outside control coming in via beam in either place. A human grade simulation needs as much bandwidth for a sensing presence as a Class Five and up, and that's hard to hide. The worrying thing is that both pan out as human, in every way: vessel patterning, scent, DNA, the works."

  "They have sensors in Morden to pick that stuff up now?"

  "Hughie's hell-bent on gentrifying the place."

  "Clones then?"

  "With a ninety-nine percent mental failure rate? Maybe, but only if someone convinced the clones to play ball, and gave them acting lessons," said Richards. "What's really funny is that his system log has his Gridsig in both places at once, without tripping any alarms. There's something really peculiar going on here."

  "So we start with the boat, because the murderer is still on board," said Otto.

  "Bingo, Otto, we'll make a detective out of you yet. That's what we're going to find out."

  "You don't know."

  Richards span his hat around on the glass table top, his softgel face quirked into a smile. Above the collar of his coat exposed plastic vertebrae glinted with the colours cast out by the holo. "Aside from the blood and coolant, there are no chemical traces at all, no signs of other AI on board, no signs of outside influences. No one and nothing has been on or off the boat, but the body. Quaid's got security that can detect a prawn swimming under his keel. The murder weapon is missing, probably overboard. It's a bit of an enigma."

  "So you don't know."

  "I didn't say that. I have an idea, but I'm not sure yet."

  "The crime scene will be ruined," said Otto.

  "Actually, it's fresh. Hughie kept things to a minimum. There's the couple of gun drones and the uniform you saw to keep an eye on things, that's all. They checked the boat for infiltration, but the murder room is a clean scene. We've got free rein. The yacht's in quarantine. This whole area is under lockdown, for the time being, at any rate."

  "What about the VIA?" said Otto.

  "Hughie's done a good job keeping this on the QT. If the VIA know, they're not letting on," said Richards.

  "And the other Qifang?" asked Otto.

  "EuPol are looking for him now, dead or alive. Hughie says dead."

  "This is going to be dangerous."

  "Yep, that's why you're coming. Get your coat, Otto." Richards strode abruptly for the door. "Middle of the night, Otto, middle of the night!" shouted out Richards. "No better time than that to quiz a suspect, get them off guard."

  "Elementary, my dear Otto," muttered the German. He refused to be hurried. He drank his whisky deliberately, savouring the smoky flavour of it, and set the glass down with a click before following Richards out into the arcade where his sheath impatiently waited.

The eugene had an accent native to a non-existent land lying somewhere east of Boston and slightly westwards of Atlantis, all hooting nasal glides and flattened rhotics. A massive affectation that had infected an entire subgroup of wealthy Americans, it was so artificial Otto found himself hating the man as soon as he opened his mouth, but then he didn't like Americans much anyway.

  "I said I don't know," Quaid said, "five times! Are all you Brits morons or what?"

  Richards smiled an unnerving robotic smile. "Technically, Mr Quaid, neither of us are British. I am a free roaming AI, Otto is German."

  "Whatever," said Quaid. Up close he was even more grotesque than on the holo-feed, a great slab of orange, gengineered meat. He sprawled on the curved sofa of his dayroom, arms flung out on its back, legs open. Quaid had had everything money could buy and more, he was not a man to feel uncomfortable in any circumstance. "Qifang was lousy company," he drawled. "He got confused real easy, looked dazed a lot, and I swear he kept forgetting where he was. He went on saying he was ill, wouldn't eat much, kept himself to himself in his cabin for most of the voyage."