“That’s half a world away!” said a boy, awed.
“Yes, sir,” Foxy agreed, “That it is. You know a lot about the hotel do you, son?”
“You have soft fur,” his little sister said, leaning through the rails. “Can I touch it?”
Foxy turned and put her brush up against the rail. “Only because you asked so nicely.”
“Minnie!” A horrified mother’s voice. “I’m so sorry, ma’am. Minnie, we do not touch the little people. They are not toys.”
Minnie was very polite with the tail, as Foxy had known she would be. She didn’t mind. She’d got a track of this kid’s stay and she was as nice as they came, clean, tidy, caring. She assigned each child a special access pass to a ‘secret’ grotto where you could dive in powersuits along the most beautiful of the ocean reefs and later wear symbiote mertails and sport in a private lagoon. As the presents arrived at the family feed, the parents cooed and calmed down, which is what she’d been going for. Even as part of the police force at the String of Pearls Magnificent Hotel, keeping guests happy was her favourite part of the job.
“Drowned off Voodoo Beach,” Tiggs said, returning from her tour of the thorn trees. “No identification on him and reception says he’s come in on a false ID. Quite a good one. They’re promoting the DNA search out of house.”
Foxy recovered her brush with a flourish and bade the tour guide farewell as the cleaner crew’s glossy white and red cross rig appeared, floating down from orbit carefully to avoid disrupting the vulture tower. “Let’s sign him off to them and get ourselves over there then.” She took a walk over to the body and looked down at him together with Tiggs.
A young male human, well built, with some sunburn on his shoulders and nose. He had short dark hair, some body hair, although not enough to really call it hair in her opinion. Maybe he had been handsome before the bloating and the bruising set in. She wasn’t sure about that. They had some in-house footage of him coming in from Kyluria Point by shuttle, and he looked like every other tourist to her, stepping out of the door into the soft, warm light of Caribae with that combination of hopeful and weary that characterised people on their second hundred years. His clothing was made by the AI house Turbulent and fit him perfectly, its mixture of clean colours and distressed cloths a popular affectation of the intergalactically wealthy. His combination showed no particular imagination. He was every inch the potential corporate spy.
“We’ll assume he was dropped here so the body could be eaten,” she said, straightening and hopping up the long length of Tiggs’ leg to her position on the soft saddle that was part of Tiggs’ uniform harness.
Tiggs grunted. The lions in question were a part of their regular work in Safari World, where they spent most of their time patrolling the vast expanses without trouble other than the odd bit of animal vetting, light fraud and a robbery or two. It was just luck that a murder investigation had kicked off in their area, but Tiggs’ grunt signalled her lack of agreement on the ‘luck’ interpretation that Foxy had placed on it.
“Now we have to follow the whole thing through to the end, right?” Tiggs said, waiting for Foxy to settle down and get her hind paws in the bucket stirrups.
“All the way,” Foxy confirmed.
“Can’t hand it over to Pirate Baywatch?”
“No way. Come on, Tiggsy, this is what we’re made for! We’ve never had our own murder before. To the Bay!”
Tiggs grumbled at the idea of flying and the idea of being on someone else’s turf, the sound coming out as a growl as she set off at a run through the bush, weaving easily away from the scene and circling once at the landing site to signal the clean-up pod that it was safe for them to land—no wildlife of note around. Then she was doing what they both loved best: speeding through the hip-high grass of the plains, her feet almost silent as they struck, the wind blowing free through Foxy’s whiskers, following game trails, on patrol all the way to the distant lift-off point where the orbital shuttles rose and fell twice a day.
Hotel Main Ops sent them first class private through to the Bay. They said it was so the guests didn’t get disturbed, but Foxy knew they could have sent them cargo class for that. The luxury of first class was something that the Hotel itself was doing as a way of caring for them. The Hotel was its staff, just as much as its planets and its vehicles, its buildings and its life. The Hotel was all of them but bigger than them. Foxy and Tiggs had never heard the Hotel directly, but they felt it and, on occasions like this, they felt it a bit extra, a deep, lasting hug in their bones. It was good to be part of a Hotel. Foxy actually pitied the tourists who were always coming, looking, searching, leaving, combing things for every last mote of XP they could get before they had to move on.
They tried out all the luxury treatments they had time for. Foxy had a deep tissue massage. Tiggs went for a complete nanomask deep-clean of her skin and feathers and, to amuse herself, got one of her teeth gold-plated. ‘Now do I look like a pirate?’ she asked as they made ready to disembark, flashing the fang.
“Aye!” Foxy said and pulled down her eyepatch, which she had requisitioned with the notion it might not be a bad idea. The sunlight at the Bay was intense and there were many dark interiors at the buildings that ringed the beaches. She might need a good eye for each venue. “What about me?”
“Arrrrr,” said Tiggs, making the most frightening kind of noise that Foxy expected anyone had ever heard, particularly when paired with the sight of her teeth. It was good they were in a soundproofed cabin.
“You might want to ease up on that a bit,” she said as the door opened.
Their itinerary opened, hotel-style, before them, soft colours showing the ways they had to go, but instead of cocktails and sun loungers, they were headed to the last recorded places that their mystery guy had been seen.
Out at the front it was morning, and the boardwalk that ran the length of Voodoo Bay was already busy. The Bay was a very broad curl that ended with a spit of land sticking out into the ocean, pointing like a finger. On maximum zoom Foxy could see people at the tip diving into the deep water from the rocks, the glitter of drones taking their pictures like dots of light. Down the other end of things was a tall cliff into which one of the hotel guest houses was hollowed out in a series of caves. Some of these ran directly in from the sea, accessed by boat and fin; others were high above the waterline, serviced by interior lifts and private jet or glide packs. Behind them the majority of the bay was lined with shanty huts of low level and apparently no tech. There was no land side exit; you had to take a shuttle or a powerhaul to the adjoining coastal zone. She and Tiggs took a walk down to the hire shop where watercraft were loaned out, studying their inner maps of the new place as they went.
“I got a ping from the lab,” Tiggs said as they walked along the sand, aware of being watched, so unusual and out of place. She returned various waves and signals from the local tritons who hosted the beach and pinged ahead for someone to talk to at the store. “They say the john is a fabricant from a shop out in the Bosphoric Chain, and not a particularly high quality one.”
“Ooh, Chain stock,” Foxy said. “That’s slumming it, even for a spy avatar.”
“They’re washing him for trip data—radiation sigs, all that—to see if they can match him to a factory.”
The sun on the water glittered but the breeze onshore was cool. The bay water was shallow, a pale turquoise that slowly melded into deep sapphire blue at the bay’s edge.
“It was old though, for an avatar. Someone on the run?”
Tiggs nodded as they arrived at the Float Shack. “If you’re stuck in an avvie that long and you get killed in one, do you, you know, do you die? For real?”