Final Inquiries Read online

  "None of the other mugs we compared to it were even remotely similar. They contained all sorts of things--many of which I had to help Remdex identify, as Kendari just don't ever deal with them. Esters and sugars and suspended milk solids, saliva residue, bits of tea leaf, tiny bits of ground coffee--the list goes on.

  "But there's more. Extrapolating from the residue, the crime scene mug originally contained, at a minimum, ninety times as much caffeine as the next strongest sample. The contents of that cup would likely be a sufficient dose to kill a human, if taken all at once."

  "Caffeine can kill a human?" asked Xenologist Flexdal.

  "Enough of practically anything can kill you," Jamie said. "You can die from drinking too much water."

  "And it gets better. Also at the suggestion of Agents Wolfson and Mendez, we did a quick-and-dirty measure of the ratio of isotopes of carbon 14, carbon 13, and carbon 12. I'll skip a lot of details, but due to variation in how the parent stars form, the local intensity of gamma rays, and a bunch of other factors, the ratio of isotopes of a given element vary by star system, or sometimes by planet. Take the carbon from anything on Earth, and do a ratio check, and the result will be different from the ratio found on Center, or Reqwar, or Kendal, and so on.

  "The basic fact is this: The results from the crime scene sample are totally different from all the other samples--and all the other samples we ran break down into three groups. One group matches the isotope ratio for Earth. Another matches Center. Another matches Cinder. And we're talking precise, three-decimal-place precision. As individual as fingerprints. It just so happens that those are the three planets where coffee and tea are grown for export."

  Zhen Chi paused, and looked around the room. "However, the crime scene mug's caffeine sample has carbon-isotope ratios that precisely match those of standard samples taken on Tifinda. The caffeine had to have come from Tifinda, and not from any supply brought in from Earth, or any other human-or Kendari-inhabited world."

  "You realize what you're saying?" Stabmacher asked.

  "Yes, sir," said Zhen Chi. "Suddenly the Vixa are the prime suspects in the case."

  Brox pounded both his fists into the table. They could hear his feet stamping against the floor and his tail lashed wildly. "The Vixa did it?" he demanded. "They engineered all this?"

  "Yes, Inquirist Brox. A Vixan committed this crime."

  Jamie grunted and reached for his investigative notebook. "That reminds me of something. I jotted it down after I heard it, because it really struck me. Where is it?" He flipped back several pages. "Here we go. It's something the Grand Vixa Zeeraum said during our first little get-together. 'Strange idea, crime. Only for individual-centered species. Vixa have no crime. We have no problems.'" Jamie looked again at his notes, and frowned at them, as if he had seen something else, something that worried him.

  "Zeeraum was right," said Zhen Chi. "If you define crime as an act by one or more individuals against the state, then you need to have individuals. They don't. They rule by the consensus of the hierarchy. Everyone down below does what they're told to do by those up above. Everything is done by the group as a whole."

  "In other words, there is no crime in the Vixan state," said Stabmacher, "but the Vixan state can commit crimes against others. And it has. The Vixa, collectively, committed this crime."

  "Yes," said Zhen Chi. "Unless you can tell me why a human or a Kendari would go get chemically pure caffeine from a Vixan chemical lab, then use it as planted evidence by pouring it in a human coffee mug, we must conclude that a Vixan--check that, a Vixan being ultimately acting on behalf of the Preeminent Director--did this thing."

  "But--why?" Remdex asked. "What could they hope to gain by killing one of our people?"

  Brox spoke, visibly struggling to regain control, act calmly, professionally. "The simplest explanation is that the Vixa have been trying from the first day to instigate a war between humans and Kendari--let us wipe each other out, and the Elder Races wouldn't have to bother with us anymore. I don't know Elder Race law well, but I believe that, with the official recognized claimants out of the way--in other words, if humans and Kendari exterminated each other in a war--there wouldn't be anything to prevent the Vixa claiming the Pentam System. That's quite a fine motive. A star system with two habitable worlds would be a prize for us. Why shouldn't it be one for them?"

  "And so, one fine day not so long ago," said Jamie, "one Vixan looked at another and asked, what do you have to do to start a war between the damned Younger Races? Kill someone? And they liked that idea. They had learned through the simulants that humans--at least most of the humans at this embassy, anyway--were walking caffeine sponges. They learned caffeine could kill Kendari. The plan for causing trouble was obvious. But then they didn't sweat the details of how to stage the murder, or how to administer the caffeine, or how to conceal it or what it should look like. Why bother? The Younger Races are primitive, unadvanced, their cultures far less developed, far more chaotic than Vixan civilization. The Vixa got sloppy--and they still nearly got away with it."

  "So they killed Emelza, then were ready and willing to 'assist' the investigation in any way," said Brox. "They were probably delighted when we requested a human investigator. They assumed a human would refuse to blame a human for the murder, and that we Kendari would be sure it was a human."

  "One diplomatic incident is not enough to start a war," Stabmacher objected.

  "But it was a part of the whole--and a big part," said Brox. "Plus the huge effort they made to be 'helpful' after the murder was a way of showing the other Elder Races how reasonable, how generous they were being. But my guess is that the whole intent of the Pentam negotiations was to get us fighting. Who was actually granted the use of the star system was incidental to them. What would it matter, when they expected both species to be extinct in a few decades at most--and perhaps much sooner? The Vixa could just engineer the start of the war, sit back, and watch us destroy ourselves--while perhaps arranging some sort of covert support for whatever side was losing at any given time. The longer they kept the fight going, the more even the match was, the weaker both sides would become."

  "And it would be a mistake to look only to the Pentam negotiations, or only to the Vixa, for evidence that many of the Elder Races have no great desire to see us get along," said Flexdal.

  "That's bordering on pure paranoia," Zhen Chi objected.

  "Doesn't mean they're not out to get us," said Jamie.

  "Let us stay focused!" said Stabmacher. "Technist Remdex, Zhen Chi--how certain of your data are you? How solid is the evidence?"

  Zhen Chi gestured for Remdex to speak first. Is she deferring to his expertise, or letting him stick his neck out first? Hannah wondered.

  "It definitive," he said. "It certain as anything can be. Crime scene mug contained pure caffeine in solution, not caffeine-based drink from humans. Caffeine in question chemically pure, and from on this planet."

  "I concur," said Zhen Chi, and left it at that.

  Stabmacher turned to Hannah. "Are these the results you expected, or were hoping for, when you had the medical personnel do the tests?"

  "Simply put, yes."

  "What made you think of it? What pointed at the Vixa?"

  Hannah gestured toward the door of the conference room and the crime scene area out in the main ops room. "The spills on the carpet and the floor around the cup were whitish, and not dark brown or black."

  "And that's it?" Stabmacher said.

  "Every human at this embassy knows what a coffee spill looks like--and I'll bet that every Kendari in their embassy has been trained to recognize drinks with caffeine, and their residue."

  "Oh yes," said Remdex. "They get training. Every sixty-four days. They no enjoy it, but they get it."

  "So neither a human nor a Kendari was likely to make that mistake of leaving a whitish residue. And that only left the Vixa."

  "A very slender reed, Special Agent Wolfson."

  "Yes, sir. I agree. That's
why I collected that boxful of cups and mugs and asked them to run the tests. But I did have something else. Not much, but something. I noticed that the writing on the bottom of the crime scene mug was faded. I wanted to know how that might happen. I took five fresh BSI coffee mugs, and wrote MILK on the bottom of each one, and numbered them for future reference, using the same type of marker Milkowski said that he had used.

  "I washed all of them five times in the Snack Shack's auto dishwasher. Then I pulled one of them and washed the rest five times, and so on, until I got up to twenty washes on the last cup. None of the lettering on any of the cups was even slightly faded, and the finish on the mugs was identical to ones fresh out of the box."

  "Very thorough tests, and I hope Senor Vargas doesn't mind so much about your abusing his equipment, now that it must be abandoned. But what of it?"

  "The word MILK on the crime scene mug was badly faded and partially worn away--and the exterior of the mug looked slightly abraded, almost as if it had been sanded or scoured. What all that told me was that the mug had been exposed to some very strong acids or solvents. We'd seen Zeeraum having a bite to eat, so we knew what the Vixa digestive cavity was like. We'd noticed the slight, odd, potbelly on the human simulants--and it was hard to miss that Brox's simulant had a little bit of a hump on its back. But I think what Jamie put together was the key."

  "And what was that?" Stabmacher asked, turning to Jamie.

  "We got to be pretty sure that the simulants--at least the one that imitated humans--were actually highly modified variants of the escort Sixes. When I blew what I thought was the head off one back at the government dome, when I thought they were trying to grab at us, I saw something else that didn't really register until I thought about it later. Something sharp peeking from the sleeve of a simulant's arm when it was trying to grab for me.

  "And I remembered that Zamprohna just folded up and passed out seconds after another of the simulants got their hands on him. He hit his head on the deck, and I thought that accounted for it. But that was pretty dumb of me. No one outside of old movies gets knocked out cold from a little bump on the head like that. And when he woke up, he was very groggy, disoriented. Almost like he was drunk. When I searched him, the back of his head wasn't sensitive to touch at all--but the ankle that the simulant grabbed at was red and inflamed."

  The room was silent as everyone worked out the implications of that. "Those simulants, the human simulants, have stingers," Jamie said. "Stingers that were envenomed with some sort of fast-acting stuff formulated to knock humans out. They were coming after us to knock us out and drag us back. One of them managed to sting Zamprohna. That's why the simulants were chasing us and not the regular guard Vixa that had, after all, threatened the ambassador. Their stings would have killed us, and they weren't quite ready to risk that. And then I read the transcript of Hannah's interview with Milkowski. He described a small bruise or bump at the back of Emelza's neck. A little red mark less than a centimeter across."

  "And if the human simulants had stingers, why not my Kendari simulant?" asked Brox.

  "Exactly," said Hannah.

  "But Emelza wasn't stung to death," Remdex objected.

  "Most species on Earth that hunt for food with stingers don't actually use their venom to kill," said Zhen Chi. "They use it to paralyze their prey. Special Agents Mendez and Wolfson witnessed Zeeraum doing just that on their first day here--though they weren't aware of it at the time."

  "I see it--or nearly see it," said Stabmacher. "Walk me through it."

  "Brox's simulant," said Hannah. "That's who--or more accurately what--was used to do it. But Brox's simulant was either being directly controlled in real time, or executing a set of preprogrammed instructions. The simulant itself was the weapon, not the killer. The simulants have slightly more independent thought and free will, volition, than this table," Hannah said, patting its steel surface, "but not by much."

  "Go on," said Flexdal.

  "It would have been dead easy for Brox's simulant to get access to the joint operations center. It either goes in tagging along behind someone, or uses some sort of Vixan hardware to defeat the door security--the simulants apparently jammed some of our systems just by being present. They could easily have some means of manipulating them. Most likely the sim just keys in a combination it has seen already. It comes up behind Emelza. Maybe it relies on its resemblance to Brox in order to let it get close--or maybe Emelza was so used to the simulant by then that she recognized it for what it was but didn't pay it any attention.

  "It stings her with a paralyzing agent that disperses so quickly that it didn't show up in the postmortem toxicology. Then it pulls the coffee mug and a container of dissolved caffeine from where it had concealed them, in its digestive chamber. Possibly it has been carrying them around for several hours, or even days, waiting for its chance. It would have been absurdly easy for one of the human simulants--probably Milkowski's--to steal Milkowski's mug and pass it to Brox's simulant. Brox's simulant pours some of the caffeine into the cup, forces it into Emelza's mouth, then drops the cup to the floor, either breaking it accidentally, or deliberately trying to do so. In any event, that drop spills the contents and breaks the cup. And the deed is done."

  "The only really surprising thing is that Milkowski's mug survived at all in a Vixan digestive chamber," said Jamie.

  "The chamber isn't always filled with digestive fluid," said Zhen Chi. "Probably it wasn't there for long, or with the chamber full. Besides, ceramics are very resistant to most acids and solvents."

  "So even that isn't surprising," said Jamie. "And then, of course, the ever-helpful Vixa dispatched Brox to Center--accompanied by my unimprinted simulant--and Brox's simulant. The killer rode all the way to the Center System and back with the Kendari Inquirist tasked with finding the killer. I'll bet that appealed to the Vixan sense of humor."

  Hannah turned, and looked at Brox. His tail was lashing furiously, the finger-claws on both hands were extended--but his face was calm, unreadable. Even as she watched, he got himself more fully back under control. But that did not mean the rage was gone. She was feeling a pretty fair share of that rage herself.

  She looked around the room and suddenly realized that something was happening. Something important, that all of them were too busy to notice. The meeting had turned into a council of war, a consultation between allies--or at least, temporary cobelligerents of convenience. Whatever else the Vixa had accomplished, they had managed to get the Kendari and the humans on the same side in the fight that neither Younger Race had even known was going on until the Vixa got careless.

  "That's all theory," Stabmacher said. "It is convincing. It holds together. But do you have any proof? Any evidence?"

  "There is the abrasion to the coffee mug," said Hannah. "And, of course, the sting injury sustained by Emelza. It was so faint, and the body so altered by the time we examined it, that all of us missed it--but a close examination ought to reveal it. Remdex wasn't searching for neurotoxin residue in the samples he took from Emelza's body. I very much would suggest that he do so now. And we should be able to do the same sort of carbon isotope match on the caffeine residue taken from the scene, and from the victim's body."

  "That's still not much," said Stabmacher.

  "We're not going into a court of law, sir," said Jamie.

  "Agreed. We're dealing with something much bigger than that--our relations with one of the most powerful Elder Races--and with all the other Elder Races as well. If we make an accusation against the Vixa, it must be convincing. Convincing enough that it will stand up against Vixan denials. It must be utterly solid, indisputable."

  "We have the evidence we have, sir," said Hannah. "Considering the situation, I'd have to say we've done pretty well."

  "Agreed. No question at all about that--but that doesn't solve my problem."

  "One thing might," said Zhen Chi. "Having a little chat with Brox's simulant. It's not all that smart, all on its own. If we could cut it off from it
s links to its base, isolate it somehow, and keep it from dropping into rag-doll mode, maybe we could question it, get something out of it."

  "I'm afraid that is no longer possible," said Brox. It was the first time he had spoken in a while, and his voice was not altogether steady.

  "Why not?" Flexdal asked.

  "Because," he said, "I destroyed my simulant earlier today, as soon as we returned from the government dome."

  TWENTY-TWO

  DISSECTION

  "Back at the conference dome, we saw your simulants quite literally turning on you," said Brox. "They chased you out of the inner conference dome. We could see them continuing to pursue you. Our driver witnessed their pursuit as you made your way to your aircar, and described it to us. We even overflew the bodies of the two simulants Special Agents Mendez and Wolfson destroyed. Kragshmal started threatening us, as well--and as we have observed, the simulants don't act on their own. I recommended to Xenologist Flexdal that I destroy my simulant at once before it could be turned on us."

  "And I concurred, very strongly," said Flexdal. "Perhaps I would have done otherwise if I had known the simulant was the, ah, weapon used in the attack, but perhaps not. I couldn't leave the thing running around loose where it could attack my people."

  "I must admit that I am quite pleased to have destroyed it," said Brox, "but I am also glad I destroyed it before hearing what we all just heard. I can know, and all of you can know, that I acted out of duty, not for personal reasons."

  "But it is--unfortunate--that we have lost a potential source of evidence," said Stabmacher.