“Why should you care?” Toth asked. Somehow, he was the one ill at ease. Fiyle wasn’t acting like a man caught in the act and looking at a world of trouble.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m in this for the money. But I still like seeing someone getting away once in a while. Even if it is just a bunch of robots.” Fiyle grinned at Toth and winked, just to lay the sarcasm on a bit thicker.
“I think that’s just about enough lip out of you, Settler,” Toth said.
“And why is that enough?” Fiyle asked, losing nothing of his easy manner.
“Take a look around yourself. You’re in a Spacer jail and I’ve got you dead to rights on a very serious charge.”
“True enough,” Fiyle said. “Or at least true as far as it goes. Because you’re just about to trade up, Ranger Resato.”
“Trade up to what?”
“No, no, trade up for what. We talk about that first. We talk about the deal first. I’m going to give you a name, a name that you are going to love to have, and hate to have. And you are going to give me a ticket home, off this Spacer rathole and back to a decent life.”
Toth looked carefully at his prisoner. The man was serious—and somehow he knew that Fiyle was not the sort of man who made an offer he could not back up.
“It’s got to be a hell of a big name to rate that kind of deal,” Toth said. “Someone higher up?”
“Higher up, yes. But that’s not why you’ll want to know who it is. This name belongs to you. And it belongs to someone way deep into ’backing.”
Suddenly Toth felt a little unsteady. He understood. A Ranger. A Ranger involved in rustbacking. He pressed a button on his desk. “Gerald Four,” he said.
A somewhat mechanical voice answered, corning from the comm panel. “Yes, sir?”
“Bring me two blank witness boxes.”
“One moment.”
There was silence in the room, and Toth found himself staring straight into Fiyle’s eyes. All the bantering humor had drained out of the Settler, and now Toth could see the tenseness, the intensity that the surface jocularity had hidden.
Gerald Four stepped into the room, carrying two small sealed containers. Toth took the boxes from the robot, undid the seals, and opened them up. Inside each container was a small black cube, about three centimeters on a side. Each had a single button on it. Press the button and the box would record for one hour, with no way to stop it or rewind it or erase the recording. Whenever the button was pressed thereafter, the recording would play back, with no way to stop it or modify it.
Toth took the boxes from their containers. He held one of the witness boxes in his hand, looked at them for a moment, and then set both of them down on his desk. He pressed the buttons and looked back at Fiyle. “This is Ranger Toth Resato,” he said. “The Settler Norlan Fiyle is my prisoner, arrested this night in connection with various charges of rustbacking. He has offered to provide the name of a Governor’s Ranger substantially involved in the rustbacking trade, in exchange for the dropping of all charges against him and transport to his home planet. I hereby agree to this bargain, contingent on confirmation of his information.” Toth handed the witness boxes to the robot. “Give them to him,” he said.
Gerald Four carried the boxes to the cell and handed them through the bars.
“You keep one cube, and I get the other back,” Toth said. “We each get a guarantee. Now talk.”
Fiyle held one cube in each hand and looked up toward Toth. The Settler swallowed hard, and Toth could see a sheen of sweat that had suddenly appeared on the man’s brow. The games were over now. This was for real—
“There is a Ranger,” he said. “A Ranger that’s doing a lot of looking the wrong way when the rustbackers are working. He tips the ’backers off whenever there’s a raid.”
Moving carefully, Fiyle set the witness boxes down on the table inside his cell. He walked around the table and sat down on his cot, facing Toth. “There is a Ranger,” he said again. “And his name is Sergeant Emoch Huthwitz.”
6
COLD. COLD. COLD. Ottley Bissal struggled to keep the aircar flying but he could not stop shaking. He was chilled to the bone, drenched by the pouring rain, but there was more to it than that. Fear, terror, reaction, whatever the demons might be called, they were with him, inside him, freezing his blood, making his teeth chatter.
Keep steady, he told himself. Concentrate. Focus on your flying. He was well inside the Limbo City traffic pattern now. By now he should be safe—but Bissal had never been the best of pilots, and he had just been through flying conditions to challenge the most skillful of fliers. He was spent, exhausted.
Huthwitz. Huthwitz had been a mistake. They had found the body, and he had had far too close a call.
At least now the worst was over, but there had been plenty of worst. The nightmare of mistakes and improvisation at the Residence, the close call in evading the police, the long walk through the drenching rain to the hidden aircar, the struggle to find it and get it open, the flight back to the city at low, detection-dodging altitudes—there was none of it he would ever want to go through again. But he had made it now. All he had to do was ditch the car and get to the safehouse. No problem. It was over. Everything was going to be all right.
But he still could not stop shaking.
Fredda Leving came in out of the rain and stepped into the Grand Hall of the Governor’s Residence. Alvar Kresh was there to meet her, Donald at his side.
Fredda took one look at the Sheriff and knew, knew that it had nothing to do with Prospero. There was nothing angry, or accusatory, in his expression. It was nothing to do with her—and yet she instantly found herself wishing that it were. For there was a great deal more to read in Kresh’s expression. Something much, much worse than robotic misbehavior.
“Grieg is dead,” Kresh said. “A blaster shot through the chest.”
Fredda blinked, shook her head, stared at Kresh. “What?”
“Dead. Murdered. Assassinated,” Kresh said.
Fredda could find nothing to say. She wanted to deny it, to say no, it couldn’t have happened, but one look at Kresh’s face told her that it had. Finally words, some sort of words, came to her. “Sweet burning hell. How could that happen?”
“I don’t know,” Kresh replied, his voice flat and hard. “Come in.” He turned and led her down the hallway to a small room that had been pressed into service as a command post. The place was swarming with robots and Sheriff’s Department deputies, working, conferring, talking into comm units, faces tight and grim. “Sit down,” Kresh said, and Fredda obeyed, setting herself down in an absurdly festive-looking couch with an overdone floral pattern.
Somehow everything seemed extra real, excessively solid, every meaningless detail suddenly vitally bright and hard. Sitting there, at that moment, Fredda knew that every moment of this night would be with her forever, burned into her memory and her soul for all time. “How did it—did it—”
“We don’t know,” Kresh said. “But I need you to help me find out, and I have very little time. Grieg’s security robots should have protected him—but they didn’t. I need to know if someone tampered with them. You have to find that out for me, now, tonight. But—”
“But what?” Fredda demanded. And yet, somehow, she already knew the answer.
“But we haven’t been able to move him yet,” Kresh said. “My robots and technical people are still examining the crime scene. It’s not pretty.”
Fredda nodded, feeling nothing more than numb. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t expect it would be.”
Fredda had never seen a dead man before, let alone a murdered one. That much she had in common with mainstream Spacer society. Death was too distasteful to be permitted to intrude on one’s life. But even if she had seen a roomful of corpses, it would not have prepared her for the sight of Chanto Grieg slumped over, murdered in his bed. His body—his ruined corpse—was all the more ghastly a sight for the sheer normalcy of it all. A tired man at the end of a long party goes to his rest, sits up in bed to read for a time before turning out the lights.