Division Zero (30 page)

Unloading three pairs of shoes, a few small cases, and a stack of empty underwear wrappers, she pulled at the cord. The entire base came out, revealing a hidden compartment, inside which she found a NetMini and a one-way ticket to Mars tucked into a bright red sleeve. She held up the clear plastic film printed with numbers and barcodes and noted the Redlink company logo. Albert had booked a flight to Mars with a departure date three days after his death.

She scowled at the locked NetMini. Whatever secrets it held would need to be unearthed by the tech geeks. She glared at the black device, wondering what answers it might yield. It turned on without warning and opened to the main screen.

What the hell? I didn’t do that!

“You’re welcome.” Dorian bowed. “Don’t forget, I have a way with gadgets.”

She grinned like a kid that just got away with something forbidden. Her fingers flew over the screen as she sifted through the various files and apps installed on it.
Score!
A chain of vid mail proved a company on Mars had been courting Albert for employment. They offered him greater influence on the product line than he had with Intera as well as a higher salary.

The string of messages hinted at some manner of breakthrough called Cerberus, but offered no details. Kirsten shivered.

Intera Corporation already proved willing to kill to keep it a secret.

irsten leaned back in her seat, momentarily lost in the scent of her new uniform top. She ran her hand over the material, happy to be rid of the reminder of the attempt on her life. Harsh overhead lights glared off the sides of a hexagonal storage drawer, made brighter by the pure white storage room. Its keypad chirped as she entered a code. When it popped open, she pulled a number of items onto the table.

She turned a mini holo-bar over in her fingers, smiling at the image of the older couple it projected. The photo of a far-off beach with white sand and an ocean of crystalline blue glimmered in three dimensions behind two smiling, sienna faces. Kirsten set it off to the right. The next one projected an image of a boy about eighteen years old, with dark hair and skin. His excited bragging to his older brother about his acceptance to the Mars Academy of Engineering in Arcadia repeated in a twenty-second loop.

He would be almost Kirsten’s age now, perhaps even graduated.

Items likely to be found on a desk moved to the left from the plastisteel drawer to the open side of the table. She examined them one by one, her fingers handling each object with reverence. Kirsten held up the black case of a police ID, staring at the Division 0 emblem on the cover. Her thumb traced over the metal emboss in the faux leather twice before she set it aside with a sigh, unopened. Glossy black sergeant insignia pins lingered in her hand for a moment, followed by a pair of valor commendations.

The last thing she found turned out to be a datapad with a complete report. Mercenaries hired or influenced by a psionic suggestive, Rene Bollard, riddled an arriving patrol craft with military grade laser rifles that tore clean through the armored windscreen. She seldom thought about the patrol craft windows as armor plates, the illusion created by pass-through cameras and high resolution displays made it easy to believe they were made of glass. As far as those rifles were concerned, they offered about the same level of protection as if they had been. The driver never knew what happened, the partner barely lived, and they got away without a trace. She did not watch the video from the car’s recorder.

“Is everything alright?”

She had not heard the door slide open, or Captain Eze approach.

The datapad went dark at a flick of her thumb. “I’m okay.”

He put a hand on her shoulder. “Someone you knew?”

“He died before I met him.”

“Are you sure you’re not an empath, Kirsten?” He squeezed. “You seem pretty broken up over a man you never knew.”

She began the slow process of returning the awards and certificates of merit to the case, followed by the desk collection. “One miscalculation, one little stupid mistake, and poof.”

“Oh, I see.” Eze let his hand slip away. “He never married. Still worried you will wind up like that?”

She stood, carrying the case in a formal march past a floor-to-ceiling shelf of similar hexagonal drawers, each stenciled with a name just below the keypad. She stopped at the empty slot, turned on her heel, and slid the three-foot long container back into place until it clicked. After taking one precise military step backwards, she saluted it.

“I said he died before I met him, not that I don’t know him.”

Kirsten closed her eyes, shedding a few silent tears as her fingertips traced below the keypad over a name.

Sgt. D. Marsh.

he held the steering control, keeping the patrol craft steady as they hung in midair. Streams of passing bots filled the interior of the car with colored light of every shade and a crescendo of advert jingles. At the approach of a lumbering giant bearing two full-size billboard screens, she nudged the car to the left to allow it to pass.

Thoughts of her last conversation with Dorian mixed with her feelings about the current situation. Not a day went by where she did not think about her mother. The concept that she had been so passionate about her beliefs she could torture her own child grated upon her soul.

He does kind of have a point.

What if she just drowned in self-pity? Could her loathing of religion be just a projection of her feelings about her mother? Kirsten’s opinion that the silver light was something other than God felt as strong as some people’s conviction to the contrary. Did it make her any less a zealot than the people for whom she held so much contempt?

Kirsten sighed, closing her eyes. It felt as if she had been cheated in some kind of metaphysical game. Despite being able to see the other side, she no more understood it than people who could not.

The car rocked with the unexpected passage of another large ad-bot, straining to change its course to avoid them. A quick tug at the stick spun the car around to face the departing billboard; Kirsten glared at it. The near miss could have been a warning from a higher power, an accident, or Intera trying to use hackers to kill her. It could also have been nothing more than her being distracted.

None of the above, it’s my dumb ass that parked at this height.

She brought the car up a few hundred meters to airspace safe from bots.

“Dorian? Ghosts have attachments, don’t they?”

He shrugged. “Well, I suppose some do.”

She looked at her seat, and back to him. “Come on, Dorian… You can’t get more than two hundred yards away from this car without having a panic attack. Maybe if I find Albert’s I’ll be able to ambush him when he returns to it.”

Dorian looked out his window. “Assuming this whole attachment thing is true; wouldn’t that tend to require a strong emotional bond to some object? Some reason for it?”

She concentrated, and held his hand. “The reason is often associated with the object of their attachment, like dying in a car.”

He looked pained. “Albert doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy that had many emotional fixations. His apartment was bereft of anything purposeless. Everything in the place had a function in some way. No art, no decorative kitsch, nothing.”

“So someone has to collect crap to have an emotional attachment?”

Dorian laughed. “No. What I mean is that this guy is a stereotypical lab rat, left-brained to the extreme, all logic and no emotion. I almost doubt he would have an emotional reaction to his own death.”

“Ghosts linger only when they have unresolved issues.” Kirsten squeezed his hand. “Maybe he was pissed off his research got interrupted. Those guys can get really wound up about their work. Maybe Intera dolls are his attachment?”

“Well, since you buy into this whole attachment theory―wouldn’t it need to be one specific doll if that were the case?” Dorian rubbed his chin. “Maybe one he was developing at the lab?”

Kirsten shook her head. “No, then his activity would be focused at the company building, not on random dolls. Nothing we’ve seen indicates anything paranormal has occurred at the Intera Complex at all. What about his remains?”

“They recovered the body; the killer couldn’t dispose of it after shooting him in the head from six hundred yards.”