THOUGH THE PREVIOUS DAY had been hot and muggy, the morning mist spreading about the city of Jakarta promised a cooler day than the one before. Even in the pre-dawn morning, spaceships and sky ships came in and out of the city. Sleeping on a lumpy mattress in a cheap hotel room, Winnow Unpo woke up to the sound of engines passing over his room.
He turned over in his bed, tangling the sheets about his legs. He slid one elbow underneath his pillow, trying to find a comfortable position for his neck. He wanted to go back to sleep after the long night he'd had. He had spent several hours in a dirty, disused room at the Jakarta airport studying a corpse after a disgruntled man with light brown skin gave him the case.
Winnow had not wanted the case. He had wanted to reunite with Jinna, Odro and Sixen, the three other Black Brigade members who had accompanied him on the Yesterday in an attempt to capture the enemy of humanity, Unquill Hester.
The enemy of humanity had become a normal citizen once more, as normal as anyone could be who was displaced from their home and their line of work. As a result, Winnow was put on standby and then ordered to look into a murder case. He might not get to see his compatriots for a while, not with the investigation going on. He was able to confirm many of the disgruntled man's suspicions yet a few of his own still remained.
He mumbled to himself, still half-asleep. The ghost of a dream faded away from his consciousness. Though he hadn't felt it when he fell asleep, the bumps in the mattress made themselves known in painful, uncomfortable ways.
Winnow opened his eyes and looked at the clock. It blinked 1:45 AM. While he slept, there was a power outage. That thought awakened him from his sleep.
A power outage in Jakarta would be the rarest of events.
The city had backup systems designed to take over so that the central computer would not go offline. A loss of power in the middle of the night could only mean that several power stations had been taken offline all at once.
Winnow sat up yawning. Just as he did, he noticed the faintest flicker of light from behind the curtain he had pulled in front of the hotel window before he retired. He looked over to the clock. The clock's red numbers disappeared, leaving only a blank space in their place.
Winnow frowned. He began to think there might be a bigger problem at hand than just the murder. A dead body had shown up in an airport, beside it a powerful weapon that did not kill it but obviously was used to destroy the tiles on the floor around it. Why was it used that way? The man died of a heart attack, according to the autopsy. That in itself was unusual enough.
Now, in a city where the generation of power was placed at the highest premium, the power had gone out not once, but twice.
Winnow threw the wrinkled gray blanket onto the floor as he got out of bed. He'd left his uniform hanging over the back of a chair. Now, as he pulled on his pants, he felt glad that he had grown accustomed to not sleeping for very long. He always woke up at strange hours to do this task or that. With the city dark all around him, he suspected his presence would be needed now more than ever.
He strode out of his room, down three flights of stairs and into the hotel lobby. His loud, purposeful steps caught the attention of a man who had been sleeping on the lobby couch. The man withered under Winnow's gaze, as though he wanted to make himself disappear. Winnow said nothing. In other circumstances, he might have at least passed on a word of warning to keep clear of the local police.
Tonight, however, he sensed peril stretching its hand over the city. He had no time to spare talking to transients who happen to enter an unlocked door of an unattended hotel. Winnow stepped out into the street, exiting the building.
To his surprise, he didn't find the panicked atmosphere of a city descending into chaos. The city operated as it always did, always doing business twenty-four hours a day. Green taxis passed by together with white, black and red cars. A person of indeterminate gender leaned against a darkened street lamp, untroubled by the lack of light everywhere in the city. Before he went to bed, the lights coming from office windows had been so ubiquitous that Winnow had not needed street lamps to find his way.
With both lamps and office building lights gone, Winnow had only the passing headlights of vehicles to guide his way. Where pedestrians had once appeared as full, complete persons; they now resembled half-materialized shades. He looked up to the buildings stretching around him in every direction while he continued walking. He expected to see lights to turn back on, to flicker at least once.
The windows remained dark.
Winnow sighed as he prepared himself to work at a police station without any power. He had eight blocks to walk until he reached his destination-eight blocks in which his mind generated all manner of theories, not the least of which was a connection between yesterday's murder and the power disruption.
Winnow hadn't looked too closely into the identity of Olon Daniel. He thought that, in light of what was going on, that might be a good place to start.
THE DISTRICT SIXTEEN police station of Jakarta was still manned by the graveyard shift. It acted no differently than Winnow would have expected on a normal day. He had been in the morgue for most of the previous day. He hadn't bothered to ask about current events in the city, as they hadn't seemed important to his investigation.
Now, he could see by the policemen's attitude that they knew something he didn't know.
Moreover, the officers in the station worked by candlelight. Working in the sky for as many years as he had, he had all but forgotten that candles existed. The long, slender, burning white objects stood everywhere in the station. Orange points of light glowed all about, illuminating the interior enough so that the officers could work. Men and women wrote filled-out paper reports or read documents in large file folders.
A thin, lanky man reclined in his chair in front of a blank computer screen. He'd placed both hands behind his head and his feet upon his neat, nearly empty desk. The man wore his blue police hat crookedly upon his head. His white uniform clung to his body as though it longed to be on someone else. While Winnow had observed that the police officers of Jakarta polished their shoes, this officer did not.
Winnow pulled the man's chair back. The officer, startled, sat up straight, spluttering incoherent apologies. Winnow observed the man with a sardonic smile on his face. He said, "Perhaps you can tell me what's going on around here?"
The man stood up. He said, "Yes sir, my name is Jonnan Ester." He paused, looking about. "Well sir, I suppose you'd say all's quiet. All the procedures the president wanted us to implement for the blackouts are in place. Mind you, I didn't think much of the short notice we all got. All of the sudden, telling us to go out and buy a case full of candles. Lucky thing we have a chandler in town with his own warehouse. We might have been out of luck otherwise, I can tell you."
Winnow stretched out his left arm to one side. "Why did the president tell you to get candles?" he asked.
Jonnan's face lit up as a smile beamed across his face. "Why ain't you heard, sir? They're finally going to fix the central computer. I'm told that some tiny people arrived yesterday. One of them, just as it happens, knew what was wrong with the computer. Leastways, with nobody knowing a fool thing about it anyhow, they decided to try. So here we are with candles in the station, on account of power stations being shut down all across the city. Not sure if I know how many people were told what was going on, though. Might be some folks are quite worried by now."
Winnow, who shared those worries said, "What are your standing orders until then?"
Jonnan laughed. "Why, to sit on my arse and pass the time, what else? I'm the computer coordinator for the overnight shift. They told me not to bother coming in to work the last few days as there was nothing for me to do. But today, oh today when the computer might be turned back on, I got to wait by my post. Not that I mind in particular collecting a check for lounging about."
Winnow looked past the man towards the hallway with the room where the body had been transported, an empty locker room with unused gray metal lockers. He said, "Officer Ester, I'm working on the Daniel case. Do you know of it?"
Jonnan's smile diminished. His tone of voice became considerably more serious. He said, "I do know of it. What shall I help you with?"
"I need to find out who Olon Daniel was."
Jonnan looked back over his shoulder to the blank computer screen. He said, "If that thing were on, I could tell you in a flash. Otherwise, I can't say for sure how we might find that out."
Winnow had put a lot of thought into the problem while walking from the hotel to the station. "Let's start by asking around the office. Am I correct in assuming that when the power comes back on for good, the computer will be fixed?"
Jonnan nodded.
"Then, as long as you're in the station, you won't be leaving your post. Let's try doing this the old-fashioned way. Let's try going from person to person, see if anybody knows anything about Olon Daniel. The next shift is scheduled to start in..." Winnow trailed off, trying to get a sense of what time it might be. Without working electronic clocks, he couldn't tell.
Jonnan said, "Maybe an hour, I should say. We worked it all out yesterday. The next shift is to come in at sunrise. That means I'll be here a half hour longer than usual."
Winnow looked around the area of cubicles and people working at their desks. He said, "I'd like you to stay around so we can ask the next shift as well."
"I can do that right enough. Only, if anyone on the force knows about Daniel, why haven't they come forward with information about him?"
Winnow's mind jumped to the worst possible conclusion at once: because they are in on it. Instead, he said, "Many of the officers may not even be aware of the case, or if they are, they may not know the name of the decedent. In the process of asking around, I want you also to ask any officer about their sources in the city. See if you can't get me the name of someone with their ear close to the ground."
Jonnan's smile returned. He said, "And when I'm doing all that, if the power should come back on, what should I do?"
Winnow grimaced. He didn't have an answer to that question-not one that he felt comfortable saying out loud. He said, "We'll figure it out when we get there."
Jonnan gave a light-hearted, silly salute. "Yes, sir, let's begin the investigation!"
Winnow couldn't bring himself to feel as energetic of the project as Jonnan felt. To the contrary, he felt that this case, among all the other jobs he'd been asked to do for the Council of Thirds, might prove to be the most dangerous, including in his list of jobs the incident where he had almost fired a fusion bomb at a light-shielded base housing the most wanted man on the planet.
And to his dismay, it felt like he was just beginning to fill out that list.