THE BODY IN THE ZERO GEE BROTHEL

 

Meet Ptolemy Jovan Lane, a unique peacemaker.

Laws are hard to hold, out in the fringes of known space, but Ptolemy Lane is charged with maintaining peace under the dome of Georgina’s Town, among humans, the docile emre and more.

When a body is discovered in a zero gee suite in the local casino’s brothel wing, Lane is reluctant to get involved. The casino is off limits to his style of law keeping. Only, the body is the casino’s owner, Guisy Oakmint, and Doc Lowry is insisting Lane investigate. Lane soon learns why…

The Body in the Zero Gee Brothel is the first Ptolemy Lane tale in the science fiction series Ptolemy Lane Tales. It was first published as a single title on October 7, 2021.

 

 

A STRANGER WAS SITTING BEHIND Ninety-Eight’s desk when I strolled into the station on the morning of my 25,000th day on Abbatangelo. He was a nervous fellow with fine brown hair, big eyes and long fingers. I should have taken his appearance as a portent, but I just flat didn’t care.

The nervous one gulped when he saw me. “Mr. Lane. Sir. I mean…do I call you Sherriff?”

“Not if you want me to answer.” I was tempted to brush by but said, instead, “Who are you?”

“I…um…Hyland. Emily didn’t tell you?”

All I wanted was to get to my desk and check messages, so I could call the day done and go home. A quart of Martian brandy, a gift from a client, was calling my name. Instead of that, I swore and studied Nervous. “She quit on me?”

“She didn’t tell you…” He picked at the controls on the smart desk. The film on the top was coming loose, which meant the desk wasn’t as smart as it should be.

“That was the deal,” I said. “She can quit whenever she wants, as long as she finds and trains a replacement. That’s the deal with you, as well. Got it?”

“You’ve said that more than once before, haven’t you?” Then he pressed his fingers to his lips as if he was more shocked than me by what he had said.

“Okay, listen, Ninety-Nine, we’ll get along much better if—” I didn’t get to finish, because his smart desk lit up.

He stared at it. I didn’t think it was possible for his eyes to get bigger, but they did.

“That’s your cue,” I told him.

He prodded experimentally.

I reached over and tapped the connect button. The holograph formed over the top. I knew the man’s face. His nose demanding remembering.

Ninety-Nine managed to stutter, “Ptolemy Lane’s office.”

The face frowned. “Lemme speak to Lane.”

Ninety-Nine could see me through the hologram, so I shook my head.

“Mr. Lane says he’s not here.”

I sighed. Reached through the head to spin the display to face me. “I’m here. Who are you?”

“Kumar. I’m the manager at the Desiderata—”

“No.”

He caught back his breath. “You don’t know what I was going to say.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re a casino and brothel. That’s out of my service area.”

“You have a service area?” He sounded puzzled rather than offended. “I thought you covered all of Georgina’s Town?”

“Except the casino and brothel. I told Guisy Oakmint so when he said he was going into business. I’m just one man and your joint is a crime magnet. Oakmint knows to clean up his own messes.” And for eleven years, he had.

Kumar shook his head. “That’s just it. It’s Mr. Oakmint. He’s dead.”

I paused. Took in a breath or two. I knew Guisy enough to share a drink here and there, although the last serious conversation we’d had was when he told me about his new joint venture. “Sorry, kid,” I told the manager. “But it’s still not my concern. Call in Doc Lowry. He deals with bodies.”

“Doc Lowry said you would be interested,” Kumar said quickly, as I reached for the kill switch.

Damn it.

I pulled back my hand. “Doc said that? Why?”

Kumar glanced over his shoulder, then said, “Mr. Oakmint was murdered and we’re pretty sure an undocumented human did it.”

I rubbed the back of my neck to hide my reaction as something fizzed and flared in my gut. “I’ll be there in fifteen,” I told Kumar.

●

I HAD TO CALM NINETY-NINE down before I left. He was jumping out of his skin.

“I waited five years for a license to move here,” he wailed. “My first week and there’s a murder!”

“Crime happens, kid,” I told him. “That’s why I have a job.” I didn’t say anything else, but I did wonder what the hell he had been thinking, taking up work with the town’s only law enforcement authority.

“They said you keep the peace,” Ninety-Nine muttered.

“I do. This is me keeping it.” I put on my coat and took the five-minute walk along Main Street to the casino at the edge of the town limits.

Said that way, it makes Georgina’s Town sound small, but it only looks small on flat schematics. I was at street level where actual sunlight filtered through the dome far overhead, but there was another ten levels beneath my feet. And a building on the central section of Main Street that didn’t reach up at least twenty floors didn’t exist.

Things were crammed under the dome because nearly thirty thousand people squeezed in here, with twice more begging for permission to reside. Mayor Carpos didn’t charge taxes. He didn’t need to. Resident tickets brought in all the revenue the town needed, and their price rose every season.

I looked balefully up at the blue sun as I moved along Main Street. The sunlight flickered and glinted as personal pods zipped across the dome. Most of my work took place at night, when idiots thought they could get away with whatever they were up to. It wasn’t just the Martian brandy I was missing right then. I badly needed sleep. I’d been patrolling most of the night and I’d only stopped at the office to check messages because I was passing it. Now I wish I’d gone straight home, polarized the windows and passed out as I had wanted to.

The Desiderata was the shortest building on Main Street, only because the dome itself limited vertical expansion. On Earth, the outskirts of town were the undesirable areas. Here in Georgina’s Town, the outskirts were the expensive lots, because they had unique views of the land beyond the dome. I suppose it was a view worth paying for, if you liked frozen tundra. I liked the view from my mid-dome windows just fine.

I moved up the steps and through the door into the main casino. It was like stepping into a different world, one that always brought me to a halt when I did walk through those doors. There was no hint, outside, of the exotic environment in here. Oakmint had arranged it deliberately, I think, to avoid ruffling the hides of Georgina’s Town residents.

We liked our peace. Everyone with a legitimate license to live here had paid well for the privilege and waited patiently to be given the okay to even apply for residency. Then came screenings and interviews and the final exchange of money.

As Georgina’s Town was a domed city and the lock to enter it was tightly controlled, you only got in here if you had a temporary visa or a residence’s license. And the residences didn’t want neon razzle and flash from casinos and their standard customers ruining the peace of their town.

Kumar had told me to meet him at the main bar, so I re-hinged my jaw and moved across the plush flooring, heading for the wider corridor between all the tables. It was frantically busy here despite the morning hour, and everyone wore evening attire—or was still wearing it from last night. Lots of glitter and flesh on display, which I ignored.

The aliens were harder to ignore. The emre were easy to pick out because they stood thirty centimeters taller than humans on average, and they had no visible body hair. They were bi-pedal, with heads on top of upright figures, but their skin was more hide-like in consistency, with blue highlights over the bald dome and eyes, and orange-red everywhere else. Their lips were blue, but the skin around the thick, very wide mouth faded from orange to a pale yellow.

A ridge ran from under their eye, around the back of their head, to stop under their other eye. There was no equivalent to a nose. Scientists had guessed that they breathed through their mouths, but no one had ever confirmed that.

No one knew what an emra wore on their home planet, because in their usual obsequious way, emre instantly adopted the habits and customs of those around them, to avoid offense. They wore human clothes, which fit, more or less. They were not a gendered species and I hadn’t figured out how they decided to wear men’s or women’s clothes. Maybe they switched up, depending on the season. I didn’t know any emre well enough to ask.

I likely never would, either. I didn’t much like them. Their fawning lack of spine irritated me. Still, they had managed to infiltrate the fringes deep enough to reach Abbatangelo, and they behaved themselves while they were here.

Some in the fringes argued we owed the emre. The emre had warned humans about the Vind. I was still trying to decide if the emre had done us any favors on that one. We’d managed to stay out of the emre-Vind war, which had raged for a thousand years, but I wasn’t sure the cost was worth it.

It was too early in the morning to think about a far distant war, even though I knew exactly why my thoughts had roamed there, and it wasn’t just the sight of the emre at the tables, jumping about and clicking loudly in their native tongue when they got too excited to use Standard. I stepped around and between gamblers, feeling dusty and down-dressed in my black coat, which served me well out on the streets.

I moved over to the bar. An extra-long emra was passed out, their head in a puddle of green liquid. I hoped it was booze and nothing else. I moved up a seat or two away from them and said to the barman’s back. “Looking for Kum—never mind,” I finished as the barman turned toward me. “You said you were the manager,” I added as the man I’d spoken to seventeen minutes ago came over to where I was standing.

“I am,” Kumar said. “I also tend bar when its needed. I’ve got a hysterical barman breathing oxygen out the back. Everyone liked Mr. Oakmint.”

I looked around the casino floor, at the intense expressions of concentration, the glum losers, the few winners. “Clearly.”

“The staff liked him,” Kumar amended.

“Yeah-huh. Where’s the body?”

Kumar blinked. “Well…”

“You haven’t moved it?” I said sharply.

“Doc Lowry said not to, only…”

I frowned, anticipating some objection to the body interfering with business. This was another reason I had refused to service Oakmint’s place. The heavy emphasis on business above all else didn’t sit well with me, even though I had no objections to money, per se. But dealing with the casino folk—both the paying suckers and the threadbare staff—always left me longing for a hint of human empathy.

“It’s moving by itself, see,” Kumar said.

I stared at him, puzzlement warring with impatience.

“You’d better come with me,” Kumar added.

●

THE BODY WAS IN THE brothel. Not only was it in the brothel, it had been discovered in one of the zero-gee suites, and the zero-gee field was still switched on. I stood on the patch of one-gee just inside the door and stared up at the former Guisy Oakmint as he drifted, turning slowly, his gaze just ahead of his nose.

He was naked, but I could’ve determined cause of death even if he had been wearing his purple suit, for someone had slashed his throat open. That was going to make for a messy clean up, because they’d have to cut the zee-gee to get the body, which meant all the globules of blood and other matter floating around the room would all hit the floor and splash against the walls. As the floor and walls were all padded to stop customers from scraping their naked hides against them when they floated too close, it probably meant all the padding would have to be stripped out and replaced.

Expensive and time consuming.

There were dots of blood on the one-gee pad where I stood, and I watched another droplet reach the edge of the zee-gee field and drop to the floor. I moved my boot out of the way.

Kumar stood behind me, in the corridor. Further along the corridor I could hear the sounds of copulation oozing through the walls, along with the murmurs of the prostitutes gathered at that end, clutching each other with worried expressions. Most of them were naked—their working uniform.

“Guisy sampled the wares often?” I asked Kumar. I didn’t bother lowering my voice.

“Never.”

If he didn’t, then figuring out how he had ended up here naked would be the first step.

Solid steps, heavy male ones, made me glance back out the door. Doc Lowry came up to the doorway. “Good morning, Jovan,” he said courteously. “I apologize for keeping you out of your bed.”

I shook my head. “I’m here now. What makes you think an undocumented did this?”

Lowry was a spare man with grey brows and white hair, and the face of a thirty-year-old. He lifted one of the brows. “You don’t want to learn how he got here, first?”

“Nope.”

Lowry looked at Kumar.

Kumar cleared his throat and moved away from the door. Clearly, the view was bothering him.

So I shut the door and turned to face him and waited.

Kumar glanced to either side, then lowered his voice. “Last night, Mr. Oakmint closed the tab on three drunks—they were out of money for the tables, and they’d hit the deposit on their tab—”

“Guisy has all his customers deposit against their tabs?” I asked.

“Those that are new to town, or new to the casino and can’t give references.” Kumar shrugged. “People like to drink.”

Too much. I nodded. “So he shut them down…?”

“And one of them got stroppy. Took a swing at Mr. Oakmint. Mr. Oakmint ducked it, but the fella came right back around again. His face was all red.”

I just stared at him. “So?”

Lowry watched me, not Kumar.

Kumar did that sideways glance thing again and dropped his voice even lower. “They was undocumented. None of the scans worked.”

My middle jumped again. I hated myself for that. I held my face stiff and said, “You’ve got it wrong, Kumar. Undocs don’t fight. They haven’t the guts for it.” They were, in fact, more placid than the hand-wringing emre.

Kumar straightened. I’d challenged him. “I tell you, they was. I can show you the camera feeds, the time logs, the second they passed the passive scans. The scans don’t register a damn thing.”

A nodoc, fighting? I tamped down the flare of silvery bright emotion, hiding it. “Prove it,” I said flatly.

•

IT WASN’T A HUGE SHOCK to me that the casino and brothel documented everyone who stepped in the door. The scanners were everywhere, tracking everyone’s movements. The data from the scanners was cross-indexed with the security feeds, which meant everyone’s head on the screen carried their ID as a little flag, floating about their head.

Except for the three caught in mid-step, coming through the archway from the dining room into the casino proper. The space around them was empty of flags.

I stared at the screen, my heart thudding. “Which one tried to poke Guisy?”

Kumar pointed at the smallest of the three. Male. Dark hair, receding. Average everything, including looks.

I turned to Kumar. “You ever had the cross-index hiccup? Make a mistake?”

“Well, in the beginning, sure, but…”

I shook my head. “It hiccupped again,” I told him, my voice harsh.

“The last mistake was ten years ago,” Kumar said flatly, his jaw flexing.

I could feel my face going red. The man was relentless. “You don’t get how impossible this is,” I told him, trying to keep my tone civil. “A nodoc wouldn’t dare confront anyone, especially someone in authority, like the owner of the casino they’re in. They just wouldn’t do it.”

“This one did,” Kumar said flatly.

Lowry said softly, “Maybe dig a little deeper, Jovan?”

I’d forgotten he was there. I shoved my hand through my hair and nodded. “What are their room numbers?” I said to Kumar. “Give me a pass key and I’ll check them out.” Not that I expected anything to come of it. The scanners were wrong. These three were normal, serialized people, which meant taking a run at Guisy Oakmint for shutting off their fun was normal, too. It meant less than nothing in a joint that saw a dozen fights every night, most of them ending bloody. The casino was a microcosm of life in the fringes…which is why I avoided the joint as a rule.

Kumar shook his head. “They weren’t staying here.”

I sighed and pulled out my pad and sent a message to Ninety-Nine to reach out to the two half-way houses in the city and find out which one the three were staying at. I gave a rough description, then put the pad away in its armored pocket in my coat.

Lowry dug an elbow in my ribs, and I felt Kumar jump to attention. I looked around. Coming up behind us was a woman who reminded me of too many things I’d left in the fog of time. Perfume. Pliant flesh. Warmth. Throaty laughter. Soft lips.

She wore a fire-red dress which defied description and made the most of serious curvage, but it was half-hidden under a shapeless coat.

“Missus Oakmint, you don’t need to be here,” Kumar said, and Lowry murmured something equally as dismissive.

Her gaze took in the three of us. Her green eyes settled on me.

“Mrs. Oakmint,” I said, hiding my surprise. Guisy had actually married the woman? I’d heard rumors that someone had invented a way to marry people, somewhere Out There. Or maybe it was a courtesy title. The thing I tripped over was that anyone had the urge to marry another. Sex, sure. Sex was a fine activity. But matrimony? Domestication? Given the nature of most people in the fringes, I’d give any marriage a week before it shattered, probably violently.

Studying Mrs. Oakmint’s visual charms, I could maybe see why Guisy thought it would be a quaint idea to marry her. Even romantic. Her eyes were depthless pools of pretty green.

“You are Ptolemy Lane, then?” she asked. Her voice had the same effect that sipping an aged brandy did. I shivered. Yeah, Guisy had clearly fallen hard.

“My manners!” Lowry said. “Forgive me, Mrs. Oakmint. May I present to you Ptolemy Jovan Lane, Georgina’s Town law enforcement and investigator.”

“The peacemaker,” she breathed.

“And this is Mrs. Laura Oakmint,” Lowry added unnecessarily.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Oakmint,” I said, my voice dry.

Her chin actually wobbled. Damn. Her eyes seemed to grow even more crystalline. Then she drew in a breath and said, “May I speak with you a moment, Mr. Lane?”

“I would like that very much,” I allowed and moved three steps away from the banks of monitors, to the other side of the security squad room. Guards looked us over, then snapped their gazes back to their monitors, before the boss’s wife caught them ogling her.

Laura Oakmint followed me over. She wrapped the coat around her middle and held her arms over it, to keep it closed, as if she was cold. She stared up at me. “It is true you are three hundred years old?”

I sighed. “Not quite. How can I help you?”

She chewed her full lip, weighing something. “They say you came from Earth, originally.”

“We all do,” I pointed out patiently.

“You chose to leave, though.”

I reminded myself that she was a new widow and quite possibly grieving, in her own way, so I indulged her by answering. “It wasn’t really a choice.”

“But you remember the old ways.”

“Too clearly.”

She reached inside her coat and withdrew an actual document and held it out to me. “This is Guisy’s…will, he called it. He told me he was going to make one, when we first married. I found it just now in our apartment. I don’t know what to do with it. I thought you might.”

I stared at the folded document, my brain whizzing fast. “A will…” I repeated, sounding stupid.

“Read it,” she urged me. “Perhaps you can suggest how I go about making sure what Guisy wanted is done?” She laid her other hand on my arm. “I’m afraid I’m very upset and can’t think properly.”

•

“A GODDAM FUCKING WILL!” I repeated as Lowry and I walked down Main, heading for the halfway house. “First, he figures out a way to marry her, then this!”

“I hear they’re marrying each other like crazy, Out There.” Doc Lowry’s voice was calm. It usually was.

“It’s weird.”

“Why?” His tone was reasonable. That was usual, too. Once, it hadn’t been. “The will says that everything he owns is now hers. He was looking out for her, even after he died. It’s straightforward.”

“No one has wills out here,” I pointed out. “Undocs have wills and estates, but people in the fringes…someone dies, their friends split their stuff up between them, over a drink or two. A will says what he wants done with stuff that isn’t his anymore. It means he had a sense of possession. Property. That’s a nodoc thing.”

“I see your point.” Lowry considered further. “Maybe he has friends he didn’t want to have his stuff.”

I stopped walking and stared at him.

“What did I say?” Lowry looked worried.

“Everything,” I assured him. “Look, there’s the halfway house. Let’s get this over with, then get back to the will business.” I was impatient to prove the three drunks were serialized, then get back to the casino.

Serials showing a sense of property. Commitment to another. It was something other than aggressive self-centeredness. I’d been too busy with my own affairs to look up and assess how the rest of the universe was fairing, lately. I’d missed things. Was Guisy a fair sample of the fringes philosophy now? He’d always been a bit smarter than most. I’d have to find out.

I knew the owner of the halfway house. Lada Loke had been troubled by Ninety-Nine’s call and confronted me with her hands on her hips. “Those three jokers left somewhere in the middle of the night. Their room is a mess! It’ll take me a day to clean it properly.”

“They paid for just the night?” I asked, surprised.

“I don’t take anyone for less than a month. This is a halfway house, not a hotel,” she said firmly. “People stay here to adapt to life in Georgina’s Town. Skipping out after a few nights…what is going on, Mr. Lane?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. If they left without notice, after paying for the month, did they take everything with them?”

“Everything except the mess.”

“Let me see the room, hmm? See what I can see.”

Lowry’s gaze caught mine, but he kept his mouth shut.

Lada dropped her arms. “Well, if you want to, I suppose it would be alright, but why?”

“It might be connected with something I’m looking into,” I told her. “I don’t want to upset you with the details.”

Her face grew blank. Stiff. “I appreciate your thoughtfulness, Mr. Lane,” she said smoothly, “knowing the nature of your work—which I and everyone in this town appreciates. This way, then.”

Lada’s house took up three floors of the tower it was in, with no access to the bounce shafts. We climbed stairs, instead. The room was on the top of the three floors, of course. Her staff had started the process of picking up and cleaning.

“Can they leave for a moment?” I asked Lada.

She requested her staff leave and they happily filed out the room. One or two nodded at me. I knew their faces, too. Newbies to the town were often repeat offenders, until I got them settled into the way of living here.

“You, too, please, Lada,” Lowry told her.

Her mouth opened. Then she nodded and left. She didn’t shut the door.

I moved around the room, running my fingers over surfaces, looking in crannies, but Lowry found the hair and held it up, grinning.

“You’re getting the hang of it,” I told him, taking the hair.

He moved to the door and glanced out in a way that looked casual, then nodded at me.

I bit off the root end of the hair and sampled it. Then I let my thoughts glaze over and watched the inside of my eyelids.

Null results.

I sat heavily on the bed.

Lowry came over. “Jovan?”

I shook my head. “Nothing. No results.” I blew out my breath. “At least one of them is a nodoc.”

Lowry sat next to me, just as heavily. After a moment, he said, “So what does this mean?”

I shook myself. “That’s for later. The will is the thing, Doc.”

“Glad you think so, boy, because you’re about the only one who can do anything about it.”

“So Laura Oakmint believes.” I paused, rubbed my jaw and said reflectively, “Yeah…that’s what she thinks.”

•

LAURA OAKMINT WAS A GRACIOUS hostess. She invited us to step inside the penthouse apartment she and Guisy lived in and made sure we had drinks and weren’t hungry, before settling on the sofa opposite us. “I don’t understand what you mean by which law the will falls under,” she said, her voice strumming through my middle like the notes from a lovingly played cello.

I sipped the barely adequate brandy to be polite and put it aside. “Wills are legal documents back on Earth, but out here in the fringes, those laws don’t apply.”

“Why not?” Her tone was puzzled, not confrontational.

“Who would apply them?” I asked her. “It requires courts of law, police and law-abiding citizens for common law and codified law to be upheld. A long time ago, there were hundreds of sets of laws, one for each country on Earth. Then there were international laws and space laws…but all those were enforced by a system that everyone agreed to live by.”

“It sounds very…constricting.” Laura frowned. “But wait, doesn’t everyone in Georgina’s Town agree to follow your laws, Mr. Lane?”

Lowry chuckled. “That they do, Mrs. Oakmint.”

I glared at him, even though he had said exactly what I wanted him to say. “I’m paid by the town to hold the peace,” I said apologetically to Laura. “That’s all.”

Laura puzzled her way through that. “How do you know when the peace has been broken?”

“Blood, noise, damage.” Lowry shrugged.

Laura shook her head. “What if there is none of that? What if it was a brand-new way of disturbing the peace? What if, for example, you decided that not being polite was a form of peace-breaking? Do you just…start arresting people?”

“I don’t arrest people,” I said gently.

“You don’t?” She looked embarrassed. “I’m afraid I have little experience with laws and their…upholding, did you call it?”

I let that go. “Anyone who disturbs the peace in Georgina’s town is tossed out the airlock and their residence license revoked for life.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh!… I had no idea…”

“It has a way of making sure people behave themselves,” Lowry explained.

“You do that to everyone who misbehaves?” she demanded of me.

“Just the stubborn ones,” I assured her. “Most people straighten up and sort themselves out pretty quickly. I help them along with that, if they need it.”

Laura sipped her drink, thinking. “Then, Mr. Lane, you do make the laws yourself, yes?”

I hid my true reaction and painted a thoughtful expression on my face. “I suppose I do—just for Georgina’s Town. Mayor Carpos and the aldermen pay me, so in a way, they’re paying me to make the laws and uphold them, and they trust me to do it right.”

“You must be a very talented and thoughtful man,” Laura Oakmint concluded.

“Just an old one,” I replied.

She frowned again. I waited, for I knew what would come next.

Laura Oakmint said slowly, as if she was sorting it out as she went along; “If you make the laws in Georgina’s Town, Mr. Lane, then couldn’t you make a new law that…that upholds wills?”

“I believe that might be something that falls within my purview,” I told her truthfully. “But I will have to discuss it with the town council, first.” I stood. “Thank you for your hospitality, Mrs. Oakmint.”

Lowry knocked back the scotch she had given him, winced, scrambled to his feet and murmured his thanks, too.

At the door, I turned back and said off-handedly, “I can’t quite remember who Mr. Oakmint’s partners in the Desiderata were…?”

Laura looked surprised. “Oh dear, I can barely remember them myself. They’re something Guisy called…yes, sleeping partners.” She dimpled. “I don’t think it means what it seems to.”

I nodded and waited.

She pursed her lips, which made them pout. “Mr. Vidya Houtman and Mr. Adran Yap, I believe.”

Lowry quivered with surprise, but his expression was bland as he stepped out of the apartment. Then he turned to me and blew out his breath. “Aldermen!”

“Shush,” I said softly and pushed him along the corridor. “I know where those two live. We need to pay them a call.”

“Not me,” Lowry said. “Sorry. I have to deal with Guisy. He’s still hanging there.”

“Right.” I had forgotten. “Will you restore him, you reckon?”

Doc sucked his teeth, looking hesitant. “Don’t rightly know. It’s a bind, really. Guisy is one of the old basic models—advanced for their time, but still with limited potential.”

“For a limited model, he did pretty damn well.”

“Exceptionally well. Who knew he had that much potential?” Lowry shook his head. “The more years I put in on this trade, the more strange things I see. There was an old doctor I knew—a real medical doctor, who said that life was one tough son of a bitch that has a funny way of making up its own mind. I remember him on days like this.”

“So you’ll bring Guisy back, then?”

“If I do, he might not ever reach the same heights and that would be a shame.”

I nodded, glad that it wasn’t up to me. Doc was the bio-mechanic. I was just the peacemaker.

•

I HAD NINETY-NINE MEET me at Vidya Houtman’s apartment door. He arrived breathless and scurrying.

“Did you bring the stuff?” I demanded and pressed the announcement button on Houtman’s door. “Trip key, please.”

Ninety-Nine dug in his sack, pulled out the trip key and handed it to me.

We waited a full five minutes, while I pressed and used my knuckles against the faux wood. Finally, my heart sinking, I used the trip key to by-pass the lock. The door wavered open and we stepped in.

It looked as though an emergency venting had ripped through the place. All the cupboard doors hung open, all the drawers sagged open, too. The bits and pieces Houtman had left behind were on the floor or half-hanging out of the cupboards.

“Two off-planet shuttles have left since Guisy died,” I murmured more to myself than to Ninety-Nine.

Ninety-Nine glanced at me. “He knew you were coming, then?”

“Not me,” I said grimly. “Yap’s apartment is the next building over.” We still had to go down and come back up again, because Yap lived above ground, too. The sub-levels were all interconnected, which made getting around a lot more convenient, down there.

I didn’t have to use the trip key here. The door was ajar. “The other thing I asked you to bring,” I said, holding out my hand.

Ninety-Nine fumbled with the sack and held out the heavy box. I flipped the lid and took out the widowmaker and checked the charge.

Ninety-Nine’s eyes got really big. “I didn’t know that was what I was bringing!”

I pushed the door open with the muzzle, a centimeter at a time, until I saw the body. I let the gun hang from my hand. “Damn.”

Ninety-Nine clapped his hand over his mouth when he saw the blood.

“Houtman must have caught wind of this and put it together with Guisy. He was smart. He didn’t wait to see if there really was a connection. Saved his neck, most like.”

“Two in one day?” Ninety-Nine cried.

“Kid, you’re in the wrong trade if you think peacekeeping doesn’t involve getting your hands dirty.” I tucked the widowmaker into the pocket tailored for it, inside my coat. “One more stop,” I said grimly. “Then this ends.”

•

THE WIDOW OAKMINT SAILED GRACEFULLY into the apartment shortly after sunset, carrying striped boxes in which the fashion store in the Royal Gilbert Tower mall packed their heart-attack-priced garments.

I thumbed the switch on the widowmaker, and it gave the soft winding up notes as it flipped to ready. At the same time, I turned on the lamp beside me.

Laura Oakmint screamed. The boxes dropped.

She pushed her knuckles against her mouth, gibbering. “Wha-what are you doing?” She gave another secondary start when she spotted Ninety-Nine sitting bolt upright on her sofa, his face white.

“I’m here to arrest you,” I told her.

She lowered her hands. “You don’t arrest people.”

“My version of arrest,” I amended. “You are probably the smartest multiple murderer I’ve ever come across, Laura. I’ll hand you that. And you had a plan. That’s….” I shook my head admiringly. “It was a good plan. Misdirection everywhere. Even a couple of undocs thrown in to distract me. You did your homework. You knew exactly how to pull my strings and make me look in the wrong direction.”

She didn’t twitch. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You killed Guisy, so you could get your hands on the Desiderata now, because Guisy could have lived for hundreds of years yet. Then you went after Adran Yap and Vidya Houtman, to get the other two partners out of the way, so you could have all of it. If you had just stopped at Guisy, I might have given you the benefit of the doubt, but you had to push it.” I shook my head.

Laura sank onto the sofa, studying me with her beautiful green eyes. Ninety-Nine slid to the other end as if he’d been shoved there, shuddering at her nearness. She ignored him.

“How old are you?” I asked her. “Really.”

“Seventy-nine.”

“You’re a baby,” I told her. “Live as long as me, and you get tired of life in the fringes. Georgina Ashby was four hundred and ten years old when she established this town. She was sick of the aggression and the violence …but she could never go home, so she came here. And a few years later, she found me and asked me to bring peace…so I did. You’re disturbing that peace, Laura Oakman.”

She put her hands together. “Guisy died inside the Desiderata. That is outside your territory.”

Ninety-Nine jumped and stared at her.

I nodded. “Of course you would know that. But Adran Yap died in my territory which makes it my business. Even if he hadn’t, I would make an exception for you. You played Guisy. You talked him into sex in the zero-gee room and when he was relaxed, you did the deed, then got yourself dressed and out of there without anyone noticing…have you worked on ships, I wonder?”

“Thirty-three years on a freighter,” she replied. “Crew doxy,” she added, her mouth pulling down.

Ninety-Nine’s eyes were growing larger.

“Tough life,” I told her. “Then you met Guisy, I guess.”

“Something like that.” She stared at the widowmaker. “May I ask a question?”

I wasn’t inclined to indulge her, but Ninety-Nine needed time, yet, to adjust to the ugly truth. “Go ahead.”

“What is it about undocumented humans that jerks you around so much?” she asked. “Lowry got too drunk too quickly and passed out before he properly explained it.”

“That’s how you found out. I’ll have to warn him about beautiful women wanting to buy him drinks. He still thinks he’s handsome.”

She smiled. “They all do.”

I thought that might be the first true smile I’d seen from her. “Let me tell you a story. A short one,” I added, as she stirred. “We have unfinished business, but I don’t have my brandy, which would take the edge off it, so I have to wind myself up to it.”

She nodded graciously.

“Six hundred years ago,” I started, “when humans first came across the emre, the emre told us about the Vind and the centuries long war they had been fighting against them. Then nearly a hundred years after that, the first Vind ship hove into human territory, figuring they had easy pickings, because no one in the galaxy is as war-like and ruthless as them. Guess what happened?”

Laura shook her head.

“Humans tore them limb from limb and sent the ship back to their fleet waiting just outside the quadrant. And they did that with every ship that tried to land on human-held worlds, for the next three years. So the Vind retreated.”

“They said they would come back,” Laura said.

“They lied,” I assured her. “They found someone tougher and angrier and more violent than they. Only, they had to save face, so they threatened to return. As long as humans hold the fringes, they won’t venture here. The fringes surround Earth, which means the Vind will never reach our home world, which is a good thing.”

Laura looked bored, but Ninety-Nine’s attention had been caught. His eyes narrowed.

“The Vind and the emre consider humans to be the trash of the galaxy. Human territories are lawless lands not worth fighting for. We’re left alone while the poor emre fight for their lives because they’re just tough enough to make the Vind feel powerful when they take another world from them.”

I shook my head. “The irony is that humans tried to contain their natural aggression with education, punishment and laws, then they gave up and bred the aggression out of the species. Gene manipulation, artificial insemination and breeding programs did in ten generations what thousands of years of cultural effort had failed to do. So when humans learned about the Vind from the emre, they knew they didn’t have the nerve to fight them. Instead, they designed a breed that could fight their wars for them.”

Ninety-Nine gasped. “Serials!”

I nodded. “Human bodies bred in tanks, fitted over biomechanical skeletons, with advanced AI programming for brains. The first models were meant to fill the military ranks that humans could not, but they miscalculated—or perhaps they thought they needed the vicious killers they built. When the serials broke out of their containment and overran the natural humans, they were kicked off Earth, packed into ships and sent out here, where they could kill themselves off without danger to humans. When the Vind got here seventy years later, they found the fringes filled with what they thought were savage humans, who tore them apart and sent them packing.”

“It was all a bluff?” Ninety-Nine breathed.

“It was an accident. Natural, undocumented humans, those without serial numbers, they don’t have the courage to attempt a bluff of such magnitude. They couldn’t bring themselves to destroy the serials even when they were out of control. Instead, humans gave them ships and told them to go.

“It worked in everyone’s favor and now the fringes are a buffer against the Vind and anyone else who thinks they can take on humans and win.”

Laura looked bored.

“Humans have been quietly breeding for nearly three hundred years, back on Earth,” I added.

Ninety-Nine clutched the sack to his chest, squeezing it. “Breeding courage back into the race.” His eyes were shining.

I nodded. “I have been waiting for signs that they have succeeded, for nearly three hundred years. Today, I thought that time had come. I thought a nodoc had punched Guisy. There was a nodoc with them, but the one who swung at Guisy was a serial.” I looked at Laura. “You doctored the footage, to distract me and dump a suspect in my way.”

She smiled. “The security chief on the freighter liked to teach me things, in between rounds.”

I got to my feet, keeping the widowmaker trained on her. “I keep hoping that undocs will learn to fend for themselves. I watch people like Guisy outstrip their potential and a whole town of serials fight their natural inclinations and stay civilized and think there is hope for us, too. Then I run across someone like you. I should stop disappointing myself.”

Laura rose to her feet, too. “Can I pack a bag before you kick me out of town?”

“Don’t bother,” I told her and fired three times.

At the first shot, Ninety-Nine cried out. He just flinched for the last two. When it was done he looked down at the smoking remains, then looked up at me. “You shouldn’t give up hope, Mr. Lane,” he said.

“Oh?”

“I’m a nodoc,” he told me, and held the box out for me to drop the widowmaker into it.