Division Zero: Lex De Mortuis (39 page)

“Are you busy?” She leaned over his shoulder to look at his chest. “Tech Chang?”

“Sam,” he blurted. Amid his confusion, his right hand flipped like a drunken moth between offering a handshake and a salute. “It’s actually Samuel, but people I work with call me Sammy. Only my parents call me Samuel, but only when they’re upset. Usually it’s just Sam. Technical Lieutenant Saunders calls me Chang.”

Dorian turned, snickering.

“Hi, Sam.” She returned his clumsy salute, and pulled over a chair. “I need a little help with a case.”

He grinned; a little color appeared in his cheeks as his roundish face glowed. “What do you need, Agent?”

“I’m trying to find a dead man. He used to be a deck cowboy, and I need to find his ghost before something horrible happens. I was hoping you could use this IPv12 address and maybe come up with a list of places he used to log in from so I have some kind of idea where to start looking.”

The thin guy, having expected some idiotic stupid-user question, guffawed at the mention of ghost, and went back to his terminals. Dorian wandered over, concentrated, and typed “boo” on his command line. He swatted the holographic keyboard to delete it. Dorian retyped it.

“Okay, you are quite unamusing whoever you are,” he announced, beginning to go through different screens with feverish determination. “I will find you.”

Thirty seconds later, Kirsten finished giving Sam all the data about Vikram’s deck and the angry tech two desks over stared ashen at his screen. Kirsten sat with her chin in her hand and elbow on her knee, huddled close to Sam, staring at the same monitor.

“I’m standing right behind you” appeared on the command line.

The thin tech stormed over to Kirsten, halting with a heavy stomp and a finger pointed back at the screen. “Are you doing things to my head or my computer?”

She did not look up. “No, that’s my partner, Dorian, messing with you. He’s a ghost.”

“You don’t honestly―”

The simmering tirade ended as Dorian tapped him on the shoulder. Stiff as a toy soldier, he pivoted in place and marched out of the room.

“I’m gonna get yelled at, you know,” said Kirsten, shaking her head.

“You can’t tell me it wasn’t funny.” Dorian laughed at the abandoned workstation. “Oh, he forgot to lock his station. That’s a violation of security protocols.”

All six screens went dark. After hearing Kirsten claim a ghost present, the sudden shutdown of an abandoned workstation sent everyone but Sam ducking behind desk partitions.

Text flashed by on one of Sam’s terminals, images appeared one after the next on the panel above it. Citycam stills of various points where logins occurred. Sam turned to say something, noticing she was close enough to be touching shoulders with him. He froze, gob smacked.

She let her head swivel to the right, a stone perched in her palm. “What? Did you find something?”

All he seemed able to do was muster a dopey smile.

“Sam?”

He blinked. “Uhh, yeah. I, umm.” Blushing, he sat up straight and sent an indicative wave at the screen of text. “Got a few hits on the IPv12, physical locations where your guy logged in. The log files tell me this deck signature is associated with the net-handle Dvandva93.”

“Only five places. Well, that shouldn’t be too bad to check.”

Sam fell into staring at her eyes again. She straightened; he tracked her face as it rose from the palm of her hand. An amused curl settled into the corner of her mouth.

“Thank you, Sam. It’s nice to get real help for a change. Whenever I come here I feel like the psionic exhibit at the zoo.”

He took her right arm in both hands, precipitating an awkward fumble from two-handed grip around her wrist to a normal handshake, only it continued for well past the standard customary duration.

Beep
.

Sam froze for an instant and dropped her hand as if it burned him, sensing his rudeness. A third terminal screen lit up with a citycam view of a coastal warehouse, drifting patches of fog, and broken windows. Just below it, a flashing line went between red text and block highlight.

“What’s that?” She leaned in for a closer look.

He turned toward her, finding her cheek less than twelve inches away from his face. His breath made her eyelids flutter, and her gaze flicked from the screen to him.

“Sam?”

“Sorry.” He turned as red as a stimpak. “Someone must have taken the deck, or maybe spoofed the IPv12. It is showing as active right now.” He pointed at the image of the decaying warehouse. “Someone in this building is using it as we speak.”

“Sector 1405.” She frowned. “Grey zone.”

The chill presence of Dorian’s hands landed on her shoulders as if trying to give her a reassuring rub. “After 187, this should be a walk in the park.”

“Think Carter will help out this time?”

“Chasing ghosts? Doubtful.”

“Who’s Carter?” Sam tilted his head. “Are you talking to me?”

“Div 9, and no. Ghost, remember?”

“Anything thing else I can do for you?” Samuel Chang flashed a hopeful grin.

Kirsten stood, shaking his hand again. “I’m not sure, to be honest. I’ll know more after I check out the warehouse. My best chance is to get over there before they log out.”

“No problem.” He deflated onto his desk.

On the elevator back to the roof, she caved in to Dorian’s unceasing glare. “What? Why have you been staring at me like that?”

Dorian folded his arms, breaking eye contact. “If you need me to point it out, then maybe I shouldn’t bother.”

“Oh, Sam?” She shrugged. “He’s just, I dunno… It’s just a techie crush on a female who actually spoke to him.”

“Not up to your standards?” Dorian lifted an eyebrow. “He’s not exactly a cover model for a trashy romance.”

It was Kirsten’s turn to become red in the face. “No… I want sincerity. He’s just enamored. Any girl that gives him more than two seconds of conversation probably gets the same reaction.”

Dorian tapped the side of his head. “Did you peek?”

“No.” Kirsten emerged from the elevator into a brisk, cold wind howling among the parked hovercars on the roof. A gust almost stole her hair clip.

“So you don’t know what was on his mind.”

Distant orange warning lights came on at the end of the southwest wing, flashing around an elevated landing pad intended for larger VTOL craft. Off in the smog, the sound of engines got louder.

“I can guess what was on his mind.” She pulled the patrol craft door up. “I can’t think about this now; Vikram might be possessing his old deck.”

“Bet that’s his focus,” said Dorian.

“Makes sense.” She fell into the seat and pulled the door closed.

ive blue boxes at the center of a black terminal screen cycled through various shades from cyan to indigo, creating an effect of a rightward moving pulse. Kirsten tapped her fingers on the control sticks, waiting. After ten passes, it stopped, and Nicole’s face appeared in a 2D panel.

“Hi, whoever you are,” she chirped. “It’s Friday and I’m burning vacation days. By the time you hear this message I’m going to be exploring the historic First Colony on Mars with Edd―”

Kirsten killed the comm, and tapped a few more buttons.

“What about Morelli?”

She grumbled. “Sarcasm much? He’ll make up an excuse. Even if he
does
fail to talk his way out of helping me, he’d be neurotic and useless. To him, I’m just a lesser shade of Commander Ashford, and now that you scared his pants brown…”

“You could request a Division 1 escort?”

“To chase a ghost?” She blew air through her teeth, flipping her NetMini over in her hand. “They’d never go for it.”

“Are you sure everything’s okay? It’s odd watching you look for help to do anything.” He winked.

Templeton’s contact info appeared on the little screen.

“Oh, now I understand.” He watched ad-bots sail by on the right. “You’re just trying to turn it into a date.”

“No, that’s not it at all. I’m… I don’t want to get killed now that I have Evan to look after.”

“Even if you do, you could still watch him. He
can
see ghosts.”

The car picked up another forty miles per hour. “That’s not even funny.” Kirsten slipped the device back into her pocket and paid full attention to the hover lane. “You’re right, he wouldn’t even be interested. Got ten years on me and… probably looks at me as if I’m a little girl playing dress-up as a cop.”

“More like kid sister. I think.” Dorian winked and made the NavMap scroll to the area in question. “He did seem to throw off an older brother feeling. Besides, Sector 1405 isn’t too bad as those places go.”

Kirsten fished the mini out of her pocket. “I want to live the daydream or kill it; I can’t take it anymore.”

Beep
.

Threads of light wound about in the air above the slab of technology, stretching into a three-inch bust of a man with broad shoulders and a large mass of hair bundled in two-inch-thick ropes. Kirsten bit her lip as the shape of a carved-from-rock jaw and broad, thick lips appeared. He still had on the same olive drab coat. In the absence of a dark alley, his face shimmered bronze. Like the bulk of the population, his ancestry was far from obvious.

“Hi, Templeton?”

“Oh, yeah, Officer Wren. How are you?”

Agent.
She swallowed the correction. “Fine, thanks. I was um, wondering if, um.”
Can you sound less like an awkward schoolgirl please?
“I have to go into Sector 1405 and I need some backup and…”

“The department is letting you go alone?” Even over the tiny speaker in her palm, the deep timbre of his voice thrummed through her.

“I’m trying to find a ghost. Officer Logan is on Mars and it would take too long to talk anyone else into it.”

“And she wants to see you.” Dorian leaned over.

Kirsten went red in an instant, slapping her hand down and crushing the holographic bounty hunter into the NetMini before she glowered at Dorian.

“Relax, only you heard that.” He chuckled. “Of course, now you’ll have to explain why you’re the color of a fire suppression bot.”

“Hello?”

“Uhh.” She slid her hand to the side, allowing Templeton’s visage to fade into view from right to left. “Sorry, thought there was a bug on the screen.”
That was original.