Kangaroo Too Read online

  “Unfortunately, no,” Punjabi says. “Surveillance footage from that time appears to have been lost. Which is very unusual, since we back up that data all the time.”

  “I will check on that,” Oliver says in my ear. “And the fingerprints.”

  “Well,” I say, “accidents happen. I presume you’re already canvassing the area? Circulating a composite sketch or something like that?”

  “Human witnesses are unreliable,” Punjabi says. “That’s why we prefer to get vid if we can. We would also prefer it if your client was more willing to talk about her other friend.”

  I return his hard stare. “I can’t discuss that at the moment.”

  “Suit yourself.” Punjabi sweeps the evidence bag away and stands. I stand so I don’t have to look up at him. “Any other questions for me?”

  “Not at this time, Marshal,” I say. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Can’t wait.” He opens the door and walks out into the hallway, then waits for Gladys and me to leave.

  “This is very odd,” Oliver says in my ear as Gladys and I head for the lobby. “I’m seeing an agency order to scrub Lunar surveillance in the Apennines from last night. And the name on the order is Jessica Chu. I’m still trying to track down who authorized it at the higher level.”

  “Shit,” I mutter as we leave the outpost.

  “News from the office?” Gladys asks.

  “Surveillance footage is gone,” I say.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Suit yourself.” She turns her wheelchair and heads away from the transit tube entrance.

  “Hey, where are you going? Our train’s over here.”

  “Not if we want to go to the Terraces,” Gladys says, coming to rest at another platform.

  I frown at her. “How come you’re suddenly interested in playing sleuth? I thought you didn’t care about this.”

  “I didn’t know the dead man was Jeremiah Burgess.”

  “You know him?”

  Gladys shrugs. “We’ve crossed paths.”

  I’m starting to get a very different picture of this little old lady than my initial impression. “You didn’t move here to retire, did you, Gladys?”

  “Oh, I’m retired,” she says. “I just have a lot of hobbies.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Moon—nearside—Apennine Mountains

  20 minutes after I became 50 percent more suspicious of Clementine

  Gladys knows exactly where she’s going as she leads me into the Terraces. We exit the lift from the tube station and she turns and rolls along the “street”—actually a wide ledge between a belowground cliff face and an empty chasm.

  The Apennine Terraces are a shopping district bordering the Apennine Mountains in the northern part of nearside. Most Lunar guidebooks tell visitors to avoid it. It’s one of the older established districts on the Moon, and as such, isn’t as glitzy as some of the newer tourist spots. The eponymous terraces are actually below ground level, carved out of the sides of a chasm. It is literally a hole in the ground, covered with a thick transparent plexi sheet that offers a mediocre view of the mountains. If you actually want to see the Apennines, any number of tour companies in the Terraces will sell you a ticket on a vehicle that rises above the Lunar surface.

  I wouldn’t exactly call it a ghetto, but it’s not the suburbs, either—as much as either place has an analog on the Moon, where nobody resides for more than a year and a half at a time. I wonder what’s going to happen if we discover that the elderly in Silver Circle start living much longer because of low-gravity effects. Will all of Luna turn into an old folks’ home?

  Gladys seems to be leading me toward a dead end. “The café’s back that way,” I say, pointing to where the map showed Jessica met Burgess and the mystery woman.

  “We’re not going to the café,” Gladys says.

  I follow her to the dead end and see the crack of a small alley in the side of the cliff. There’s a young man leaning against the wall at the corner, his face in shadow.

  “Ay, Nans!” he calls as Gladys approaches, and steps out of the shadow. He can’t be much older than a teenager. His clothes are colorful and shiny. As soon as I get a clear image of his face, I fire up my agency data link to do a lookup. “Not seen you here in an age, what.”

  “Been relaxing,” Gladys says. “You catch the game this week?”

  “Indeed,” the teen says. “Righteous goal at the end, wannit? Seconds to spare!” He mimes throwing some kind of object. A ball, I suspect. They’re probably talking about sports. I’ve never been big on athletics, since those are the guys who liked to administer regular beatings to me when I was younger.

  “As you say,” Gladys says.

  The young man waves at me. “So. You the man, then?”

  It’s been a while since I heard that street slang. I refrain from responding in an uncharacteristic way. “I suppose I am.”

  Gladys nods. “This here’s my friend, Edwin.”

  “Oi.” The teen makes a high-sign with one hand. I wave back at him in the most boring way I can. Everything about this kid reminds me too much of my own early teenage years.

  “Edwin, this is Yodey. He can hook us up with what we need.”

  “Yodey?” I repeat.

  “Right on,” Yodey says. “Nice repeat. Most people can’t nearly get the pro-no right.”

  “Okay,” I say. My face-reco search results come back from the warehouse: Dayton Hughes, small-time criminal offspring of tour-company executive parents. Probably glad to get away from the family business right now, during the height of the niner invasion.

  His record indicates he’s pretty well connected. I’m a little surprised that street kids are still using the same kinds of nicknames I remember—“Yodey” is a contraction of “Yo, Dayton.” Confusing to old fogies, but easy enough to decipher if you know the lingo.

  “So what you need?” Yodey asks, ducking back into the alley and motioning us forward. “Some get you up, some get you down?”

  “Not today,” Gladys says, rolling her wheelchair forward. I follow them into the shade—and, presumably, out of view of the vid cams mounted on the cliff wall. “We need information.”

  Yodey nods. “See what I can do. Specs?”

  “Last night, at the Cup and Saucer Café down the street,” Gladys says.

  “I know the place.”

  “Edwin?” Gladys looks at me.

  “A friend of ours was out here last night,” I say. “She met with two other people, a man and a woman. The man turned up dead this morning. We’re looking for the woman.”

  “Toughs,” Yodey says. “Might be we get the vids from street cams. I’ll ask.”

  “We’ve already talked to the U.S. marshals,” I say.

  Yodey takes a step back. “What you say?”

  “It’s cool,” Gladys says. “He’s a lawyer. Defense attorney, representing his friend in the case. The marshals said their vid footage was deleted.”

  Yodey looks us both over and folds his arms. “Curious. Security cams airtight in the zone. Copies, yeah, but po-po don’t lose data. You sure?”

  “They wouldn’t lie to us,” I say. “They’re looking for the woman too.”

  “So let them do their job,” Yodey says. “Why I got to get involved?”

  “I don’t trust the police,” Gladys says.

  Yodey laughs. “Tell me more news, Nans.”

  “I think they’re covering something up,” Gladys says. “Isn’t that right, Edwin?”

  Well, this day just got very interesting. “You said it yourself, Yodey. Law enforcement normally protect their data very well. So if something got deleted, what’s more likely? That someone hacked into their system from the outside, or that someone on the inside did it to hide something they don’t want a criminal defense lawyer to know about?”

  Yodey considers this for a moment. “Don’t you fear getting disbarred or what? Legal misconduct an
d such? Whatever I get you, not going to be admissible in court or how you say.”

  “The defendant is a personal friend,” I say. “I’m her friend first and a lawyer second. I just want to get to the bottom of this and help her however I can.”

  “A friend in need,” Yodey says, nodding. “All right, Nans and Eddie.”

  “Edwin,” I say.

  Yodey inclines his head. “Apology. Edwin. Give me some time, see what I dig up.”

  “How do I get in touch with you?” I ask.

  “You don’t. I call you. Got digits?”

  I give him the burner contact that Oliver set up for me. It’ll ring through a secure agency relay to my shoulder-phone, and Yodey will never know.

  “Be seeing you,” Yodey says, then disappears down the alley.

  “Well,” I say to Gladys, “better get you back in time for your afternoon nap, ‘Nans.’”

  “Not until I get paid, son.”

  * * *

  The Moon’s tube transit system is shockingly efficient. I guess that’s one of the advantages of having a limited number of places that you know people will want to go, and being able to plan for that as you build out your colony. The underground high-speed rail cars travel at five hundred kilometers per hour, so it doesn’t take more than a day to get across the entire nearside of the Moon, even though it’s as far across as the North American continent back on Earth.

  It’s a very quick trip from the Apennine Terraces, which are on the east side of the mountain range, to the nearest Barclays branch. The agency maintains a safe deposit box in at least one big bank in every major city in the Solar System—it’s an easy way to store something private. And it’s a perfect place for me to go when I need to pretend to retrieve something that I’m actually taking out of the pocket.

  I pull the rest of the gold bars, put them into a carrying case, and also pull our mission computer so I can verify Gladys’s data after she gives me the password. After leaving the private room the bank maintains for safe deposit clients, I meet Gladys in a handicapped restroom down the hall.

  “Well, that is pretty,” she says when I open the case of gold for her to inspect.

  “Password?” I ask, shutting the case when she reaches for it.

  She gives me a dirty look, then rattles off a string of letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols. I open the computer, insert the memory card, and type in the password. After a few seconds, a whole mess of files appears on screen. I open up a few documents, do a quick search to verify that the customer database contains three specific records we know should be in there, then close the computer and slide the case over to Gladys.

  “Pleasure doing business with you,” I say, standing to walk out of the restroom.

  “Don’t be a stranger.”

  I find a different restroom, hide inside a stall with the computer, decrypt all of Gladys’s data, and transmit it to Oliver. Then I dig into it myself.

  I was an analyst before Paul put me in the field. I know how to go through records looking for signal. But I’m not prepared for the scale of the SKR database. It’s arranged in some proprietary structure that doesn’t immediately make sense; I find the serial number of the spider that killed my shuttle pretty quickly, but it takes a lot longer to link that manufacturing information to the sales invoice.

  I don’t recognize the company name—Niemann/Abadia—but I find it in the agency data warehouse using my shoulder-phone. “N/A” is a shell company that our Intel division uses to purchase equipment. SKR sold this particular robot to N/A a few years ago, while Sakraida was still D.Int. Agency records indicate the bot went missing from inventory last April, four whole months before Sakraida and his inner circle escaped. I suspect they stole a lot of office supplies during that time.

  I put away the computer and shut down my eye. This is good. It’s unlikely that our bad actors would have taken just one robot, and if they’re still using the others in the belt, that will make it even easier to pinpoint their location. Now it’s just up to Oliver and the other techies back at the office. They’ll be able to make full use of all this data.

  And speaking of data, since I’m waiting for Yodey to get back to me, there is one other batch of information that I can go collect. To satisfy my own curiosity.

  * * *

  The Apollo 15 landing site on Mount Hadley is ringed by a series of transparent tunnels. I fight through crowds of tourists to argue with the uniformed security guard standing at the entrance to the Fallen Astronauts Memorial section.

  “I don’t care who you are,” the guard says. “Nobody goes out there until after the marshals say they’re finished with it.”

  “And when will that be, exactly?” I ask.

  “You may have noticed we’re a little busy around here.” The guard points at the tourists shuffling past behind me. “I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

  “I’d like to remind you that I am defense counsel for the accused in this matter,” I say, “and I’m entitled to examine the crime scene.” I don’t actually know if that’s true, but I’m guessing this guy doesn’t either.

  “Obstruction of justice,” Oliver says in my ear. “Make a threat.”

  I repeat the phrase, and the guard grimaces at me. “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you go out there.”

  “I don’t need to go outside,” I say. “I just want to see it for myself.” I can use my eye to get a pretty good scan through the tunnel wall, as long as I have a clear line of sight and some time to calibrate the sensors. “Let me into the nearest maintenance tunnel. You can allow that, can’t you?”

  The guard sighs. “Wait just a minute.”

  After a brief radio conversation, a maintenance worker shows up, grumbles at the guard, then waves for me to follow him. He leads me into a narrow, empty section of tunnel, with brightly colored safety markings printed on the inside of the transparent panels. They’re not electronic displays, so it can’t be TDC. I ask him about the material, pretending to be concerned about radiation but actually needing to know how to calibrate my eye scanners.

  “Thermocoated plexi,” the worker replies. “Don’t worry. Your little guys are safe.” He points at my crotch. “Just don’t walk around naked in here.”

  We get to the end of the tunnel, a small airlock module, and the worker stops and points out the side at a fissure in the ground. The dust at the near edge of the rille has been disturbed, showing lots of footprints and tracks. A black-and-yellow striped CRIME SCENE dome has been set up to cover the area where Burgess’s body was found.

  “Found the body right on the edge there, just outside the range of our security cameras,” the worker says. “No spacesuit or nothing. Frozen solid, though, so whoever killed him must have done it in the dark.”

  I’m half listening to him and half paying attention to Oliver, who’s giving me instructions for adjusting my eye scanners. I operate my implanted controls to look for more details than unaided human vision can see—zooming in, trying different scan modes, and so on.

  “There it is,” Oliver says. He’s monitoring the live feed from my eye, and at first I don’t see what he’s talking about. I’ve zoomed in to the center of the crime scene and adjusted my eye scanners to see through the evidence dome. There’s an irregular pool of frozen blood still there, mixed in with the Lunar regolith. I add radar to my eye overlay, and then I see it.

  There’s a hole punched into the ground right near the middle of the sheet of blood-ice, like someone perforated the Lunar surface with a tool. I look closer and see that the hole is triangular—a three-sided shaft, coming to a point at the bottom.

  Just like the leg of an asteroid mining robot spider.

  What does this mean? Was Jessica’s mystery date mixed up with Sakraida in some way? And if that’s the case, does that mean—was Jessica—could she have been involved? Could she have been compromised?

  No. I can’t believe that. Because if that’s true—

  One thing at a time, Kangaroo. />
  “Do you use robots at this site?” I ask the worker.

  “What? No. It’s all human labor. We don’t have enough repetitive tasks we can automate.” The worker squints out at the rille. “You think the killer used a bot to dump the body here?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, blinking off my eye scanners. “I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation.”

  The worker grunts. “You seen enough?”

  “Yeah.” Oliver now has all the raw footage to analyze, in any case.

  “Okay. Let’s get back before my boss starts looking for me.”

  * * *

  I don’t have anywhere better to go while waiting for Oliver to finish his analysis of my crime scene vid, and there are a lot of freaking tourists around here, so I get on the tube and head back to the hotel.

  It’s midday now, so the tube isn’t very crowded. Like most urban transit systems, I imagine there are well-defined rush hours when the majority of their riding population are going to work or coming home, and that’s when eighty to ninety percent of their traffic occurs. Right now it’s just me, a woman who struggled aboard with seven different bulging shopping bags but refused my help when I offered, and a young man bundled up in what appear to be winter clothes, nodding his head to whatever music he’s hearing through his shoulder-phone. They don’t look like tourists, but I remind myself that there are plenty of people who are on the Moon for work, and since it’s daytime for a month at a time, many of them work odd hours.

  Like Jeremiah Burgess, the now-deceased power company supervisor who met with Jessica last night. Jessica and another woman. Who was she? What is Jessica hiding? Why didn’t she tell me where she was going last night?

  I shake my head to clear it. Regardless of what Jessica was doing with Burgess, it sure looks like he was killed by a robot. Which means that whatever Jessica’s hiding, it’s connected in some way to the attack on my shuttle. Are the bad guys trying to kill her, too? Is it possible that she made other enemies during her time in the belt? Or did she have other questionable “friends”—like Gladys—who are now blackmailing her to do—what?

  Until I heard what had happened aboard the Virginia Apgar, I would never have doubted Jessica’s integrity as a medical professional. But now I know she’s willing to bend the rules, and risk doing some harm, if she feels there’s a greater good. That’s worrying, to say the least. If I can’t trust my own doctor—I’ve been there before, and it’s a bad place to be.