Final Inquiries Read online

  And the marchers were humans. Hundreds of humans. Shouting, waving signs, kicking up a cloud of red dust, tussling with each other. "Where the hell did they come from?" Hannah asked. "And how did they show up, right on cue, when we arrive?"

  Brox muttered something under his breath in his own language. "You met one of their leaders already. Our noble friend Zamprohna. Our Vixan hosts invited observer groups from both human and Kendari organizations. They are housed in temporary accommodations, in empty former embassies nearby. And somehow, they knew we were coming." He gestured toward another cloud of dust on the far side of the two compounds. "As did some of my compatriots."

  A somewhat larger group of Kendari was coming down the road paralleling the one being used by the humans, moving along in quiet, orderly ranks, without any show or shouting or bluster. Somehow, that was even more unnerving than the shouts of the human mob. Hannah didn't understand why the two groups didn't try to get at each other, until she spotted the barriers that had been set up in all the cross streets between the two roads--and the Vixa with what appeared to be riot-control weapons who had suddenly appeared behind those barriers.

  "This is as choreographed as a ballet," Hannah said flatly. "It's a setup. A riot--or at least a near riot--staged for our benefit."

  "What are they in favor of?" Jamie asked. "Or what are they against?"

  "I don't know," said Brox. "I left here--oh, in your measure, something like fourteen hours ago. There was no sign, no inkling, of anything like this. My guess is that it is not much more sophisticated than each species demanding that its own side win, and the other side lose, in the broadest and most general sense. As to how and why they are allowed to do this, I have no more information than you do," said Brox, "but I agree. Our hosts have all off-worlders, especially us Younger Races, under very tight control. At the very least, this could not possibly happen without the host government's tacit permission. I would regard it as much more likely that the Vixa in some way actively cooperated in the arrangements, or even organized the affair."

  Jamie looked from the human mob to the Kendari marchers--then at the Vixan security forces separating them. "Okay," he said, "we get the message,"

  "We do?" said Hannah. "What is the message? Who is telling us what?"

  "I didn't mean to say we understood the message," said Jamie. "Just that we had received it. So far, I don't understand anything because I don't know anything."

  "And it is time for you to learn more," said Brox. "Time for you to learn everything that I know." He spoke in a louder voice. "Take us in for a landing now, SubPilot Greveltra. In the Kendari compound, near the entrance to the joint operations building, if you please. As per the authority delegated to me by our Diplomatic Xenologist Flexdal 2092, I hereby grant permission for you to enter Kendari-embassy airspace, and land in the compound."

  The aircar immediately moved sideways until it was directly over an empty spot of land in the Kendari compound, then translated straight down. Hannah could see a set of spindly-looking landing legs sprouting from the bottom of the craft. They set down almost before the legs were locked in place.

  Then came the odd, shimmery sense of vibration as the command sphere's acceleration compensators shut down. Almost at the same moment, the humanoid and Kendarian sims, the two half-forgotten rag dolls, suddenly came back to life, straightening up and looking around alertly. It was instantly obvious that the humanoid sim's movements had become smoother and much more human-like than they had been only a few hours ago. And it didn't just look like a generic humanoid doll anymore. He--and Hannah decided she might as well think of the simulant as a "he" instead of an "it"--he now bore a noticeable, if sketchy, resemblance to Jamie.

  "We are animated and ready for duty at our primary duty station," the two of them said in unison.

  "Gee, we're glad to hear that," muttered Jamie. "That's what we're most worried about right now." His eyes were on the hatch, and Hannah spotted his hand twitching just a trifle, reaching for where his sidearm would be if he were carrying one. She couldn't blame him. She was just as jumpy herself.

  The hatch opened, a ramp extruded, and they walked down to the ground. "Don't worry about your bags," said Brox. "The cargo floaters will follow with your luggage and equipment in a moment."

  Hannah could hear the shouting and chanting from the demonstrators outside the walls, and even see the clouds of dust that both sides had kicked up. A volley of rocks came over the wall from the side where the humans were. The simulants didn't react, but Brox and the humans did, ducking, flinching, and shielding their heads with their hands. However, all of the rocks fell far short of the platform and landed harmlessly within a few meters of the wall.

  "Nice welcoming committee," said Hannah.

  Brox stepped away from the ramp, with Hannah, Jamie, and the simulants right behind him. "Come," said Brox. "This way."

  Jamie started to follow, but Hannah didn't move and held up her hand, signaling Jamie to wait. "No," said Hannah. "We have to do this right. If we're headed to a crime scene, we need our crime scene kits first. We have to get them out of the gear on the cargo floaters."

  Brox blinked in surprise. "My apologies. You are quite right. I will not say I am eager to get to the crime scene, but I am so anxious to do so that I am not thinking clearly." He turned to the simulants. "Request Greveltra to send down all the cargo and equipment the humans brought on board immediately."

  "It has been done," both simulants said in unison.

  Almost instantly, the cargo floaters emerged from the hatch and eased themselves to the ground--to the accompaniment of another badly aimed volley of rocks.

  "What about all our other gear and supplies?" Jamie asked as he pulled out one of the two bright orange duffel bags that held the field-forensics kits.

  "Leave them here, for the time being, I suppose," said Hannah.

  "Right," said Jamie. He looked to Brox, slung the strap of the forensics kit over his shoulder, and patted it. "This kit should have everything we need to perform a two-agent examination of a crime scene. The other one is a spare. We won't need it. I hope. But I'd just as soon get it and ourselves out of this dust--and away from our rock-throwing friends--before we unpack and set up. Can we do that inside without disturbing the crime scene?"

  "Yes," Brox replied. "There is a sort of anteroom just inside here where you can make your preparations without the dangers of dust or rocks, while not disturbing the scene of the crime itself."

  "And what about you?" Hannah asked. "Do have the forensics gear you'll need?"

  Brox gestured toward the entrance of the joint operations center. "I placed my equipment in the anteroom I just mentioned immediately before I sealed the building," he said.

  "So you sealed this building--or at least this side of it--before you took off with Greveltra to come get us?" Hannah asked.

  "Correct. I also placed tamper indicators on the Kendari-side exterior entrances of the building. If anyone tried to open or pass through those doors, it would be impossible for them to do so without leaving obvious traces and telltales."

  "Good," said Jamie. "Next question--what goes on in this building? What sort of joint operations?"

  Brox looked surprised once again. "How foolish of me. I have been so very careful not to tell you anything at all, and yet I am assuming that you are aware of all the local common knowledge. Joint security operations, conducted by Inquirists of the Kendari Inquiries Service and agents of the human Bureau of Special Investigations. Pooling information, coordinating travel routes and times for journeys back and forth to the negotiation site, monitoring troublemaking groups on both sides, that sort of thing. The prime mission of the operation was to prevent--well, exactly the sort of unrest that is going on right now, just outside the compound walls. I have no idea if it is by chance or by design that this disturbance is taking place immediately after the operations center was shut down."

  "You're implying some sort of conspiracy there," said Hannah.

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bsp; "So I am--and I should not be doing that. I have no information on that point at all, and I should not speculate about anything--especially before you have viewed the crime scene. I do not wish to prejudice you in any way."

  Except you just did, thought Hannah. Was that accidental, an unintended hint at Brox's view of the case--or was he deliberately planting an idea, even as he denied having any such intent? "We'll do our best to remain uninfluenced," said Hannah, not even sure herself if she were being sarcastic.

  "Excellent. Then let me get the door open." It was a sliding door, a big heavy slab of what looked like steel plating that rolled back and forth on a track. Someone with a powerful energy weapon, or a good-sized amount of heavy explosive, might be able to get through it, or blow it off its track, but it looked to be secure against anything less than a full-scale military assault. Brox examined some strips of elaborately patterned bright purple adhesive material that had been slapped over the door and the doorframe. "I call upon you both to witness and confirm that these tamper-indicator seals appear to be undisturbed."

  Hannah got the distinct impression that Brox was speaking for the benefit of some sort of recording system. She couldn't see any sign of microphones or cameras, but that didn't mean they weren't there. She stepped forward and examined the seals, and tested one by pulling on it. It instantly turned from purple to orange, and the outline of her fingers, showing where she had touched it and pulled on it, appeared in screaming-bright green.

  "We so witness and confirm," said Jamie.

  Brox gave them the Kendari equivalent of a nod, and then pulled off the rest of the seals. Each of them turned a different garishly bright color as he removed it. Brox did not attempt to explain the lock system, and they did not inquire. Whatever he did caused a panel next to the door to throb blue for a minute, which seemed to satisfy Brox. He grabbed at a handle set into the door a bit lower than would be comfortable for a human and pulled it hard to the left.

  The blast door rumbled back along its track, and Hannah was not the least surprised to see another door, identical to the first one, but hung so it rolled open from the opposite side. The space between the inner and outer doors formed an antechamber about two meters wide.

  Brox gestured for them to step through, and they did so, the two simulants right behind them. He immediately pulled the outer door shut and locked it from the outside. Hannah tried not to think too hard about the fact that Brox knew how to get out, but they didn't. Either they trusted him, or they didn't--and they were in so deep that, if he decided to betray them, it wouldn't much matter what side of the door they were on.

  Brox went immediately to a container that sat in the middle of the chamber, opened it, and began pulling out Kendari forensics equipment.

  It was obvious that Brox was extremely anxious to get on with the job at hand. The endless delays, the long hours, the incredibly long round-trip that had been required of him--all of that must have been far more of a strain than he had admitted. Now, just a few meters and a few moments from the end of all that, he was allowing himself the luxury of letting the mask slip, just a little.

  But even so, Hannah observed, he did not let himself rush. His preparations were deliberate, organized, carefully thought-out in advance. He opened the container, laid out his equipment, extracted his isolation suit, stepped into it, and sealed it up without a single wasted motion, and even got the suit's awkward hood over his head and ears, and the breathing filter slid down over his muzzle, with something approaching grace.

  Hannah felt herself catching Brox's mood as she made her own preparations, unpacked her own iso-suit, laid out her own gear. She was the bullfighter dressing for the ring, the duelist making sure that everything was just as it should be so that the deadly event would be carried out properly, the knight girding himself for battle. What was usually done by habit and rote motion somehow became ritualized, a ceremony of preparation. She half expected to hear stirring background music rising to a climax as she strapped on the last recorder and clipped on the final measuring device, then pulled the absurd little booties on over her shoes and slithered the surgical gloves onto her hands.

  The iso-suits, the gloves, the booties, the face masks were meant to keep a bit of dried skin, a bit of hair from Jamie or Hannah, a bit of body felt from Brox, a droplet of spittle transported by a cough or a sneeze, from contaminating the crime scene, destroying or masking some vital bit of evidence.

  Brox drew on his gloves just as Hannah finished, with Jamie done just a little ahead of them both. Hannah felt a completely irrational flash of annoyance that they didn't all finish in unison.

  Finally they were ready.

  Brox stripped the tamper indicators off the inner door, released the lock, and pulled it open. He did not step through the door, but instead gestured for the two humans to go first. One last effort to keep us unbiased, Hannah told herself. Or was it just that Brox wanted it to appear that way? This could all be stage management to prime them for some bit of manipulation yet to come.

  If so, it was too deep a scheme for Hannah to perceive. She and Jamie collected their gear and stepped through the door. Whatever they had been summoned to see, whatever had set off this interstellar, interspecies furor, whatever had caused two embassies to lock down altogether and summoned two mobs, was just inside. Hannah felt her gut tighten.

  They stepped into a large central room that took up much of the structure's interior. The lights were off, and the only illumination came dimly through a large overhead skylight. The room was stuffy, the air stale, with a faint musty scent overlaid with a hint of an unpleasant sickly-sweet odor, a smell that every police investigator knew to link with death. The two simulants followed the humans and Brox inside, but they made no effort to move forward, or to participate. Brox seemed barely aware of their presence as he pulled the inner door shut and locked it down. "Give me just a brief moment," he said. "Part of the agreement was that all power be cut until our arrival."

  Jamie stood by Hannah as she waited and looked the place over. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Brox working at some sort of control panel. They were in what was plainly a room divided in two, with the furniture and equipment in the half they were in designed for Kendari use, while the other side was equipped with human-style desks and chairs.

  There was a row of three Kendari workstalls--basically low desks with sling arrangements instead of chairs--facing a row of three banged-up government-issue-style human desks. The space between the workstalls and the desks was very obviously a neutral zone, a border, between the two sides. Indeed, the border between the two compounds was very clearly visible: the Kendari side of the floor was covered with a bright orange carpet, while the human side was slate-grey government-issue linoleum. Hannah had not the slightest doubt that the precise border between the two compounds ran right along the line where carpet met flooring tile.

  All that she saw in a single glance. Then Brox got the environmental systems going. The room turned dazzling bright and the ventilation system whisked away the worst of the sickly-sweet scent of decay. Hannah's attention was utterly and instantly focused on what they had plainly come to see.

  "I told you I was performing Final Inquiries," said Brox, standing in the far corner. "In other words, a death investigation. We Kendari tend to use overly polite, unemotional, perhaps even clinical terms for anything we find upsetting. What humans call 'dying in the line of duty,' we call 'performing one's final duty,' as if the death itself were the duty to be fulfilled--instead of being the disaster that prevents completion and fulfillment."

  Brox walked toward the center of the room, and paused a few paces away from the motionless form that lay there, collapsed directly over the dividing line between human territory and Kendari.

  The body lay on its side, the neck, the spine, and the long tail all arced inward, the four walking legs rigid and extended, the arms stretched out forward, the hands clenched in fists. The muzzle was frozen in a grimace, the lips drawn back from the tee
th. The eyes were shut, almost peaceful, but the expression frozen on the face was one of fear and pain. There was what looked to be burn marks on the skin around the back of the mouth, and the gum tissue visible inside the mouth was badly inflamed. There was some sign of discharge and irritation around the visible eye and ear, and around the nose as well.

  Hannah flashed back to the training photo they had shown her on the opening day of the mandatory xenoforensics class every trainee agent sat through. It was almost a textbook case of caffeine poisoning. Any human who came in contact with Kendari was warned endlessly not to use any caffeine product near them. This was why. On the floor, not twenty centimeters from the dead Kendari's clenched fists, was a human-style white-china coffee mug, the twin of one Hannah kept on her desk back at the Bullpen--down to the BSI logo emblazoned boldly on its side. It was slightly cracked, and a chip off the rim, a sharp, curved triangle of ceramic material about two centimeters on a side, lay on the floor next to it. There was a dried whitish residue on the linoleum around it. There were a few whitish spots on the Kendari carpet, and a wider, fainter pool of similar residue around the dead xeno's head, roughly centered around the jawline.

  Jamie came around to the other side and stepped forward, gingerly, carefully, respectfully, kneeling down by the head, not coming close to touching anything. "Who is this, Brox?" he asked in a quiet voice, almost a whisper.

  Brox hung back from the corpse, standing well to the rear of Hannah. He gestured vaguely toward the body, knotted his fingers together, and shifted back and forth on his walking limbs as his tail twitched, ever so slightly. "There is a tradition--a common way of doing things among Kendari of my age and social class. Some of your cultures have arranged marriages. We have a similar but not identical procedure--proposed marriages. Families will seek out eligible and suitable partners for their adult offspring. It would be arranged for the potential partners to spend time together, work together. If the two work in the same profession, that is all to the good."