THIRTY-ONE

 

 

MARIGOLD JACOBS’ PARANOIA had infected Nyquist. He took the chip Jacobs had given him back to his makeshift office in the middle of the restaurant. He didn’t want to touch anything, suddenly afraid he would die as quickly and horribly as Arek Soseki.

Nyquist had nearly died during that Bixian assassins’ attack. That attack had probably taken minutes at the most, but it had seemed to last forever. And it had seemed to take even longer for someone to find him, although given what he knew about human anatomy, they had found him in record time. It only took minutes to bleed out, and he had been on his way.

But if you had asked him, from his own perspective, how long all of that had taken, he would have said it had taken hours, maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe even years. He still had nightmares about it, waking up in a cold sweat, slashing at the damn things. And those nightmares would trigger memories, yet another detail he had noticed and had somehow forgotten in the trauma.

It made him realize how much the human brain resembled Tyr’s cameras—catching everything, but understanding nothing.

So the very thought that Soseki’s death which—according to Tyr’s cameras—had taken seconds might have seemed like a lifetime to Soseki. A slow and painful lifetime, in which he gradually realized that he had no hope of survival.

Nyquist shook off the thought. That had been his own experience, lying on the floor of that apartment, slowly (or not so slowly) bleeding to death. No hope of survival. He really had thought he was going to die. He had even started to make lists of the people he wished he had talked to, things he had wished he had done.

The ironic thing was that he hadn’t done any of that when he recovered, and the thought of some of it made him cringe.

He leaned back in the chair—a chair he had swabbed with some cleanser guaranteed to get rid of everything hazardous. The cleanser itself was probably hazardous, and he didn’t want to think about that.

He had had enough presence of mind to double-check that the crime scene techs had gone over this area—he didn’t want to destroy anything with high-level cleanser—and when he got the okay, he cleaned up and sat down.

Then stared at the little chip Jacobs had given him.

The screen Nyquist had here was networked to the Armstrong Police Department, the very department that Jacobs didn’t want to have the information on the stuff that had killed Soseki.

So Nyquist had to jury-rig a way for that chip to connect to his private links, and then he had to separate the information on that chip from everything else. Initially, Nyquist had hoped the chip would have a simple formula on it, but the chemical compound Nyquist was dealing with wasn’t simple at all.

And he was no scientist. He had no idea how to memorize the information on that chip. Comparing it to other compounds without the help of a computer or some kind of fast-moving network would be difficult as well. It would probably take him hours, which he didn’t have.

The investigation seemed to be going on apace. He had pretty much lost track. Groups of people came in and out of the restaurant, talking to Tyr, talking to Romey. Romey often excused herself, went toward the kitchen as if that area gave her privacy, and put a hand next to her ear, like so many people did when they spoke privately on their links.

Nyquist rarely did it. He wasn’t sure what caused the impulse except maybe that so many linked messages came through as audio files. It seemed like someone was talking next to the person receiving, when really the information was going directly to the person’s brain, activating synapses instead of vibrating through the ear drum.

He didn’t understand the science of it—he didn’t understand the science of most things—but he had been curious enough about it all to learn why people put their hands to their ears, making what should have been a private conversation just a little bit more public.

Jacobs had left quite a while ago. He’d been working at his makeshift desk since he spoke to her. For a man who didn’t understand a lot about science, he did understand one thing: He knew that the solution to this case wasn’t to get one of the suspects in custody—people rarely broke, except at the hands of a very skilled interrogator, and then they only broke when the interrogator got lucky.

No. This case would break when the unusual weapon got traced to its source, whatever that source was. An unusual weapon was the break in this case—the only break so far. Not the matching killers, nor the ostentatious attacks.

Whoever had planned these coordinated attacks had planned for an investigation of the killers and had planned for an investigation of the public nature of the crimes.

However, the person—or persons or creatures (God, he hoped it wasn’t a nonhuman attacker; that would have diplomatic consequences he didn’t ever want to think about)—who planned this attack probably hadn’t thought of the weapon as a way to trace the crime. The weapon was a means to an end, something that could get smuggled into a public place, something that would act quickly. It was, most likely, an afterthought.

For everyone except Nyquist.

He put the chemical compound aside and went through the list of possible substances that Romey had given him, looking at the symptoms caused when those substances made contact with a human. If he found anything that matched, he would then compare it chemically to the compound that Jacobs had given him.

If he couldn’t do that work quickly or easily, he would have Jacobs do it. He knew for a fact that her lab was not accessible to everyone in the department. She had to approve anyone who wanted contact with her network, which kept it pretty inviolate.

If this was a regular investigation, he would let Jacobs do all of this. But it wasn’t a regular investigation. The faster he worked, the faster they caught the mastermind. And if they caught the mastermind, they would stop this—or at least be on the road to stopping this.

Because Nyquist believed this was just the opening volley in a war he didn’t yet understand.

Romey’s list wasn’t short, but it was easy to sort through. Somewhere in the middle of doing so, he realized the list had come directly from DeRicci’s office, which was why everything was in such neat order. He could sort by symptom, but that turned out to be more complicated than he thought. Each symptom seemed like one of those if-then problems he had hated so much when he was in school.

If the temperature was below freezing, then the first symptom to appear would be…

He finally sorted by rapidity of symptom onset, and that was where he hit his jackpot.

Only one substance worked as quickly as the thing that got Soseki, moved from point of impact across a victim’s body, and turned the victim various shades of gray. Banned by the Earth Alliance as one of the most toxic substances ever developed, the substance’s scientific name was so hard to pronounce Nyquist didn’t even try. Instead, he used the substance’s nickname: zoodeh.

A long-defunct corporation named Giitel developed zoodeh as a quick drying, sturdy building material for colonists and travelers planning to build temporary housing in new places. Soon Giitel realized that zoodeh wasn’t stable enough to work with. Researchers got ill and died within a few minutes of touching the material. At times, the deaths seemed inexplicable because the researcher had used all proper precautions—gloves, suits, masks. Finally, someone realized that all it took was a single touch against skin before zoodeh entered the human body and completely transformed it, destroying the interior, using the skin and bones as a foundation, and then solidifying as if the human being was actually a wall of a house.

Research on zoodeh stopped until Giitel got sold, its patents sold with it. Someone found zoodeh and realized it would be a fantastic weapon. The Earth Alliance banned the substance after assassins used it to target heads of state (that sounded familiar, Nyquist noted), and the zoodeh moved to some of the unaffiliated countries and planets at the edge of the known universe. Because zoodeh was hard to transport and easy to detect, it hadn’t come back into the Alliance.

Until now.

The question was: how did zoodeh get so deep into the Earth Alliance? How did it end up all over the Moon? Zoodeh should have been flagged as it came into any port.

Nyquist slipped into Space Traffic’s database, looking to see how recently ships got flagged for carrying zoodeh.

He found nothing recent—not within this year, last, or even the past ten. Half a dozen ships had come in carrying zoodeh in trace amounts, but all of those ships had come in thirty, forty, fifty years before.

And gotten quarantined.

Quarantined. He tapped a finger against his lips, thinking. He had dealt with quarantined ships on more than one investigation. Quarantined vessels usually went to Terminal 81 where the Traffic Squad Quarantine Unit or robotic units dealt with the ships. Most of the ships got destroyed.

Then he stopped tapping his lips and moved his finger sideways, touching his too-smooth cheek. In the investigation that nearly killed him, he learned about ships that were quarantined which had never made it to Terminal 81. Some of the ships’ owners paid off port authorities. Sometimes the ships landed and then the toxic substances were discovered.

Sometimes the quarantine was a ruse to keep the owner from the ship itself.

Nyquist had revealed this to DeRicci and she had been appalled. The responsibility for the quarantined ships had initially resided with Space Traffic Control. It still did for the ships that went to Terminal 81. Every once in a while, Space Traffic contacted DeRicci’s Security Office to have the office deal with whatever had tried to come into the City of Armstrong.

But the ships that had made it to Armstrong’s port but did not land in Terminal 81 now fell under the United Domes of the Moon Security Department.

And a special administrator had gotten hired to take care of the ships one by one. To investigate them, to determine the reason for the quarantine, and then to either make the ship go away, destroy it, or to release it from quarantine.

Nyquist looked up the name of the administrator, and then smiled. He had gotten his second break in this case. He wouldn’t have to go through piles of rules and regulations to talk to some bureaucrat. He knew the bureaucrat.

He had saved her life once.

It was Ursula Palmette.