Sunday @ction - 2/2 (Original; ~12k words; 15+)
[ Full Headers and Art | Part One | Part Two | Read on DW ]
She was hot, thirsty, and lying on sand and definitely getting a pain-killing brain implant just as soon as she got back to civilisation. Forcing her eyes open, Sunday discovered she was lying under the escape ramp from the shuttle, which was providing much needed shade from the sun. The heat coming off the shuttle was doing neither her nor the bottles of water they'd left in easy reach much good. Still, warm and stale was better than dead of dehydration, so she muttered thanks to whoever had had the idea, and helped herself to some welcome refreshment.
They'd left a note. It was in very nice handwriting and. Sunday couldn't help noticing, in the exact ink colour of her (she quickly checked) notably missing pen. It read:
Dear Sunday,
There's food, water, and other supplies in the shuttle, enough to keep you safe for at least a week. Of course, we should reach Saritris on the emergency skimmer in a half-day at the very, very latest, and will send someone back to rescue you immediately, so you'll hardly need to keep anything like that long. Please don't wander off into the desert and die. It's real easy to lose your direction out here, and we took the shuttle's compass with us, sorry.
Respectfully yours,
Baby
"Screw that," said Sunday.
Even if they did get back in a half-day, bureaucracy would delay sending a rescue mission for her at least another day after that, if they came at all. Besides, they'd probably just arrest her. No, she was fit and healthy, give or take being knocked out twice in the same day. The shuttle had been flying in an approximately straight line, which meant she knew which way to go. Just keep the sun behind her (or in front, depending on the time of day, obviously) and she'd be there in no time. Easy-peasy.
The first problem was carrying supplies, because her bag in the hold had, it turned out, been destroyed. The crates continued to be annoyingly solid. (Maybe they were just importing solid boxes.) She tried the cockpit to see if there was anything of interest, edging gingerly around the exposed wiring of the android pilot; there wasn't, but, coming back out, she stumbled across an emergency chute. Dumping it out gave her a workable rucksack. She filled it with as much water and food as she could carry, set her back to the shuttle, and began walking.
"Civilisation and another award-winning scoop, here I come."
Five miles of sliding down dunes later, she realised, first, that this had been a very stupid idea and, second, that she'd had the perfect opportunity to search Brent Clifford's body and missed it. Stopping to rig herself a makeshift parasol and have a bit of water, she considered going back. Skimmers were slow, but they were definitely faster than walking on sand; it would take her a day of constant walking to get to Saritris. On the other hand, her reasons for walking hadn't changed at all.
She walked. It was hard to keep a straight line. Slopes kept getting in the way. The rockier places just meant pebbles in her boots instead of sand. For a couple of miles everywhere she tried to stop for a rest turned out to be full of vicious looking scorpions or hungry looking lizards. It kept getting hotter, and hotter, and hotter. Even the breeze was warm. It sucked the sweat from her skin and the water from her mouth in an instant.
Her steps got slower and slower as her pack grew heavier and heavier, the shade of the parasol smaller and smaller, the sun hotter and hotter, brighter and brighter. Desert birds wheeled far above her, tiny screeching dots against the bright blue of the sky.
"Cheap cliché," Sunday muttered, forcing herself on.
The headache came back, but she couldn't risk drinking more of her water than she had been. Rationing would get her through. One foot in front of other. One foot more. One foot more. Just like writing a particularly stubborn report under a deadline. Keep forcing it until it works. One more word. One more step. One more.
Sand slipped; she went down with it, tumbling over and over. As the world spun, she thought she saw something glinting, something metallic, and then the old familiar darkness rushed over.
~
"Déjà vu sucks," Sunday said, not opening her eyes.
There was hard ground below her. It wasn't cool, exactly, but it was much less warmer than it had been. Night? Something clanked mechanically nearby, and she heard a giggle, too high-pitched for an adult. Night and she was hallucinating from heat stroke. Could you still get heat stroke if it was nighttime? Was that a very stupid question?
Sunday considered this for a bit and then, deciding that yes, yes it was, cracked her eyes open. There was a cave roof above her, or, anyway, something that looked like rock that matched the stuff that felt like rock that she was lying on.
"Why is there a cave in the desert?" she asked.
"So's I have somewhere to sleep, innit?"
Sunday considered this. "Fair enough," she decided, and made herself sit up. The cave swung alarmingly around her. A hand was in front of her face, dark skinned and grubby, holding a can of Spice. It wasn't her quasi-legal restorative of choice, but it would do, and she took it gratefully. A few long, shuddering swallows later, she felt warmth and energy rush through her, pushing aches temporarily aside. She'd pay for it later, of course. Actually, she was paying for it now. Damn but that tasted foul.
The kid laughed at her. He was short, maybe twelve at most, with lively black eyes under a huge mass of thick black curls, held back by a hefty pair of goggles currently shoved up his forehead. The desert fatigues he was wearing looked like they've been borrowed from half a dozen people, none of them his exact size. His smile stretched ear to ear. "Your face, like! Oughta see yourself!"
(His thick accent made it sound more like "otter see yehself.")
He pulled an exaggerated disgusted face and burst out laughing again. The clanking came again. Looking past the boy to the cave entrance, Sunday found herself face to face with a massive, cream-ceramic-armoured, vaguely-humanoid robot. It was large enough that she could have been carried around in its hands easily, which explained how she wasn't still out in the desert, but little else.
"That's Sister," he said. "People call me Kid."
"They put a lot of thought into that, I can tell," Sunday said before she could stop herself, but it just made Kid grin as he bounced to his feet.
"Got you some water, see? Take the taste away."
He kicked at the large bottles, five-gallon containers at least, by way of demonstration while he dug a cup out. Sunday accepted it with thanks, blinking at the bottles until they came into proper focus and she could see the picture etched into her sides.
"Hang on," she said. "That's the TerraMax logo."
"Yeah?" Kid said, in an uninterested tone.
Sunday clambered to her feet and made her way unsteadily over to check her eyes weren't deceiving her. The light faded as Sister stood up in the entrance, so Sunday looked at her instead. As the robot turned away, the light caught her chest, so that Sunday could see the TerraMax logo was there too, above the letters SSTR.
"Semi-autonomous Special Terraforming Robot."
"Sister," Kid agreed. "I made her go, right? So she's mine now. Finders keepers, losers weepers. It's, like, wossname. Right of salvage."
"Salvage," Sunday repeated, interested. "You salvaged her? And the water?"
"Oh, yeah," Kid said, nodding, curls bouncing. "There's a right load of stuff, if'n you know where to look, like."
"Lying around for the taking?"
Kid shrugged as if to say, 'if they didn't want me to take it, they should have had better security'.
Sunday considered this, sipping her water. "Can you show me where?"
To her amazement, his grin managed to get wider.
~
Sunday did not share Kid's enjoyment of riding across the desert on the shoulders of a giant robot. That he had those goggles and a bandanna to keep the sand out of his eyes and mouth might have had something to do with it; the constant bumping and permanent threat of a swift fall and a quick crushing had a lot more. Still, they made a fair pace, and it was barely any time at all before Kid was pointing and yelling, "There it is!"
The it in question was a loose bunch of small, non-descript buildings.
"Not much to look at it," she yelled back.
"Most of it is underground, innit," he called. "Like worms or something."
Blue light splashed out of nowhere against Sister's chest, reading her ident code. Thin pylons, a sonic fence so well blended into the background that Sunday only noticed them when they started to move, slid into the ground to allow them through unmolested. Kid called a halt and, eventually, after a bit of coaxing, Sister came to a sliding halt in the middle of the buildings. Kid dismounted with an annoyingly acrobatic athleticism while Sunday could only clamber carefully down. She caught up to him at the door as he hot-wired the electronic lock.
"Go look," he said, waving her ahead of him. "I'm gonna boost some more cells while I'm here; I'll holler when we're outie, 'kay?"
"Okay," Sunday nodded, mostly at empty air because he'd already somehow bounded out of view.
The complex proved to be a maze of twisty corridors and staircases that all looked exactly alike. Rooms cut across them at, as far as Sunday could tell, random, as if someone had wandered down them going, "oh, yeah, I need an office, and a big store room, and a giant bay full of interesting yet questionable terraforming equipment" and just built them then and there.
The terraforming equipment was interesting though: everything you might want to turn protected desert land into low-quality farmland for zero-pay migrant workers. Well, everything except the bits of paper that would make it legal, which Sunday would certainly know about. She'd gone through the companies sneaky filings enough times. Soooo, carefully hidden underground illegal terraforming base: what's that all about?
Money, probably. Which was a boring answer. She'd use profiteering in the article; that always sounded more impressive.
The equipment bay led, eventually, to a security office. As with the bay, pretty much all of the equipment was off and locked down. Since the lights and the security systems outside still worked, there was clearly electricity; Sunday nosed around until she could find a working terminal with security access. A quick bit of hacking later -- really, the internal security in these places was terrible -- she managed to get in.
Opening the access logs to erase herself, she discovered that Brent Clifford was the last person to log in. Which was a neat trick for a dead man.
"Well, well, well," she muttered, poking at the file system. "Brent Clifford, you have been a busy boy."
His name was over everything. Ridiculously over, as if he'd been running the entire base himself, despite its size. Even more interesting, someone had done a transparent and crap attempt to hide the data in the system.
"No one is that bad at covering their tracks," Sunday sneered at the screen. "I smell a conspiracy."
And actually a pretty good one, the more she thought about it. DeShelby takes a big PR hit from Sunday's article, he sends Brent Clifford out into the field, has him killed in the expectation that the shuttle crash will hide the evidence, pins illegal projects on him, and blames him for the company's turn the dark side, escaping squeaky clean himself. Very clever.
"But not clever enough," she crowed, and then quickly glanced around to make sure no one was listening.
In doing so, Sunday couldn't help noticing the light flashing on the security video archive. Probably Kid's comings and goings; well, she could easily erase those, give the kid a break. Heh. The kid, Kid.
Sunday brought up the video, expecting to see Sister's giant frame. Instead, she found herself looking down into one of the corridors, at a slim ivory-skinned military-cut platinum-blonde woman walking up to a door. She lifted a hand, and her nails -- no, her whole fingers extended, becoming long, thin blades, which she inserted into the door-lock. The woman glanced back just as she entered the room, and Sunday gasped in recognition.
Despite the change in hair colour and cut, and the different eyes, it was quite clearly Baby.
~
"So what you're saying is, right," Kid said thoughtfully, "is there's totes a broke ship out inna desert, what no-one is going to be coming for?"
"That wasn't really the point of the story," Sunday complained.
"But it's there, innit?" Kid insisted. "That's what we saw come down a bit before we ran into you, right?"
"Yes, fine!" Sunday threw her hands up in surrender. "You can go and ransack the ship."
"Salvage," Kid corrected pompously, grinning.
"Salvage the ship," Sunday agreed. "Can we get back to the major worldwide conspiracy to cover up crimes--"
"You said you already reported them," Kid pointed out.
"--to divert attention from crimes and blame them on someone else," Sunday corrected, "through killing employees and -- and this, I feel, is the important part -- trying to blow me up!"
Kid shrugged. "People try to kill me all the time."
"Well, you do keep trying to salvage all their stuff," Sunday pointed out. "Why are you living in the desert with a giant robot anyway?"
Kid shrugged again. "Beats living by myself, don't it?" Sunday couldn't see anything to argue with so just nodded. There was a sudden gleam in Kid's eyes. "Wanna write me story? What with you being a hot-shot reporter chick and all?"
"Is it interesting?"
"Do I get paid?"
"Probably not."
Kid pulled a face at her, disappointed. "Ain't none of yours, then."
"Ordinarily, your cunning reverse psychology would have worked," Sunday admitted, "but I have a giant conspiracy to deceive the public to thwart."
"Revenge," said Kid nodding sagely.
"Civil duty," Sunday lied.
"Mostly I goes back later and rips them off," Kid said cheerfully. "Want some?" He offered the lizard-on-a-stick to her.
"No, thanks."
He shrugged again, cooking the lizard over Sister's flame jets some more. Sunday tried not to think about how she had been carried around in giant hands that had flame jets in them.
"Can you take me to Saritris?" she asked.
"Sure?" He tore a leg off the lizard and took a bite out of the thigh, mumbling around it. "Whatcha gonna do?"
That was actually a good question. "Stop them?"
"Gonna arrest them, like?" he asked. "You the po-po too?"
"No," said Sunday. "And, seriously, 'po-po'?"
Kid just ate more lizard, juices running down his chin. Sunday's stomach rumbled and Kid laughed at her.
"Fine," she sighed. "Gimme a leg."
He did grinning. She tried it, gingerly, but it didn't really taste of anything. Chicken of the desert. It needed a sauce. She needed a plan. These two things weren't particularly related, but still.
"Okay," she said. "Here is the plan."
Kid waited patiently, absently wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.
"The plan is," said Sunday slowly, "obviously, to go to Saritris."
"Obviously," Kid echoed mockingly.
"Shut it, shorty."
Sunday considered her options. "I'll just have to find Baby, confront her with what little evidence I have, overpower her defences with my insight and logic, record a confession, edit it into a coherent narrative, and broadcast it immediately to counter the damage limitation effect. Simple!"
"How are you gonna do that, then?" Kid asked with interest.
"Look, you can't worry about the details with this sort of thing. It's like writing; you get the structure in place and then everything else just hangs off it as it comes. Trust me; once I get to Saritris, everything else will slot into place."
~
Saritris was a scrubland town, a nervous huddle of blocky concrete buildings. At some point, decades earlier, someone had given them what was no doubt thought of as a cheery coat of paint, but which now just made the place look like a sad, abandoned pile of giant, dirty children's toys. Antennae bristled across the town like ants on an overturned lunchbox. They circled around on Sister to avoid the shuttle point, the only visibly busy part of town, which allowed Kid to drop Sunday off at the outskirts of what passed for a commercial district: a bunch of apparently randomly arranged stalls under a wide awning that had clearly seen better days.
"I'm gonna do some trading while I'm here," Kid said. "Need me to hang around, bust you outta the big house?"
"I'm not going to get arrested," Sunday said. He looked sceptical. "I'm not!"
He shrugged. "If'n you says so."
"I do say so," Sunday said. "Watch the news feeds, you'll see." She frowned. "Well, you live in a cave in a desert, so you probably won't, but--"
"Oh, Sister has a built in wossname," Kid said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the robot not so inconspicuously crouched behind him. "I loves me some Angry Monkey Ninja." He did vaguely kung-fu looking moves. "Hi-yah!"
"Just you watch then."
"'kay." He grinned, throwing her a sloppy salute as he bounded off towards the stalls. "See you!"
The maze consumed him. Sunday followed after at a more sedate speed, looking for an infonet access point or a broadcast terminal or, failing that, someone who could sell her a transceiver so she could rig her own. All three proved impossible to get hold of, partly because she was in the middle of nowhere but mostly because no one had bioscanners and all her cards and physical money -- seriously, who still used those?! -- had been in her bag, in the shuttle, and were now just junk. Or future salvage.
"Not a problem," said Sunday. "The shuttle station terminal place thing will have one."
"Are you talking to me?" asked the woman behind the nearest stall.
"No," said Sunday.
"Statues of Freddy Utopia," the woman offered gamely. "Only fifty rom."
"Also no."
"We call it a port," the woman said. Sunday looked confused. "The shuttle station terminal place thing? We call it a port."
"I've had a very long day," Sunday complained.
"The statues also sing soothing songs and dance in time in a very relaxing sort of way," the woman offered.
"I don't actually have any money on me," Sunday admitted. "Sorry. Which way is the port again?"
The woman pointed. Sunday thanked her and headed in the indicated direction, quickly finding the port. She approached it carefully from an off side. Sneaking in with the luggage handlers would be easy. All she had to do was--
"Hold it right there, Ms Jones!"
--not be seen by the port security drones.
"I can explain everything," she said, raising her hands.
"I'm sure you can," the drone said, and hit her with a stun pulse.
~
The world slowly resolved itself out of the throbbing darkness.
"What is this, a theme?" Sunday moaned.
She tried to roll over onto her side, which just made her fall off the chairs she'd been laid out on.
"Oh, very clever, Sunday, well done," she muttered.
"Do you talk to yourself a lot?"
"Usually I'm recording," Sunday said, pushing herself up onto her knees and blinking around, trying to bring the voice into focus. "Force of habit. Oh, look. A reunion."
She was in what looked like a large, rather bland departure lounge: lots of empty seats and the occasional coffee table. There was a pile of knitting on one, which wasn't a surprise since Evelyn was sitting behind it, Belle next to her.
"I had the strangest dream," Sunday said, using a chair to pull herself the rest of the way up, wobbling a bit until her legs caught on. "You were in it, and you, Mister Stone; Mister Zheng; Mister Kim; Artisan Caffrey; and--"
"And me," Baby said, with mocking amusement. She'd found time to do her hair up and to slip into a deliciously strapless gold split-leg dress. She had very long, very shapely legs. It was quite distracting.
"Sorry," said Sunday. "Did you say something?"
Baby sighed. "Only that you're under arrest for murder. Nothing remotely important."
"I think you will find that it is you who is the murderer," Sunday said, waving an accusing finger at her.
Baby ignored this, turning to the others. "Once all your statements have been notarised, you'll be free to go. We apologise for the convenience."
Caffrey sniffed derisively.
"Don't worry about us, dear," said Evelyn, knitting away comfortably.
"I have proof," Sunday said. "Proof of a conspiracy to shift blame for TerraMax's illegal business practices onto an unwitting and now deceased employee."
"Which is why you killed Brent Clifford," Baby agreed. "Confessing is good; I'm sure they'll accept your plea bargain."
"I'm not confessing," Sunday complained, "I'm accusing. Don't think you can twist these people to your side, vixen!"
"Vixen?" Baby repeated, looking pleased for a moment and then quite clearly trying to look annoyed.
"In the desert, there is a TerraMax facility," Sunday started.
"An illegal terraforming project," Baby agreed. "I know all about it."
"Yes! Yes, you do!" Sunday frowned. "Okay, you just ruined my whole scene there. I have proof, though, that you were there; here's a video I copied from the facilities security logs." She pulled her phone out, thumbing to the media menu, and hitting play, holding it out. The assembled audience leaned forward, squinting at the tiny screen, and Sunday sighed, handing the phone to Kim, who was closest. "Pass it around. You'll see."
"That's her," Kim agreed.
Baby leaned over to check out the screen. "I missed a camera? How remiss of me." She smiled sweetly at Sunday. "You do realise this is a video of me breaking in, yes?"
"...why would you breaking in to your own facility?" Sunday asked, a sinking feeling in her stomach long before Baby pulled out the badge.
"UniPol," she said brightly.
"She's got you there," said Belle. "You can't argue with a badge."
Both Stone and Caffrey made derisive noises. Belle gave them a little, hurt look.
"Okay, okay," Sunday said, "but that doesn't mean she's not the murderer. I'm sure TerraMax could buy off a cop. Especially one who's secretly genetically engineered for combat."
"It's not a secret," Baby said. "Look, it's on my badge."
"You can turn your fingers into long, thin knives, which you stabbed into the ear of Brent Clifford," Sunday said, deliberately ignoring this. "You tried to set it up like suicide, but I interrupted you."
"You stabbed him to death with your pen," Baby corrected, "and then I interrupted you. You planted the bomb to cover your tracks, knowing the records wouldn't show you as ever being on board."
"You planted the bomb to cover your tracks," Sunday insisted, "to make it seem like Brent Clifford died in the crash."
"You had the means to do it, the opportunity--"
"What about motive?" Sunday asked. "What about that, huh?"
"Killing Brent Clifford would not only get Leon DeShelby off your back, it would also allow you to run the scoop," Baby said. "Plausible enough for you?"
Sunday frowned. That was actually pretty plausible. "Except for the part where I wouldn't actually kill a man for a story. Probably."
"Then we come to the part where Brent Clifford was alive when the shuttle took off, and dead when it crashed. No one other than those here were on the shuttle, nor did anyone else follow us back out of the desert -- how did you manage that, by the way? I haven't even managed to get authorisation for a rescue sweep yet."
"Pfft. 'Yet'," Sunday scoffed. "You were never going to send anyone back for me."
"Of course I was," Baby said, affronted.
"You were just going to leave me behind to die, so you could pin everything on me after your plans were ruined by the premature discovery of the body. And I'd like my pen back, by the way." Sunday considered. "Unless you covered it in blood so it would appear to be the murder weapon, then not so much. Did she let anyone else look at it?"
The audience all shook their heads. Sunday looked smugly at Baby.
"My point," Baby said, clearly trying for calm but still coming across as annoyed, "is that the murderer had to have been one of the passengers. Everyone else was accounted for."
"You weren't! You were sneaking around."
"I'm a cop! You were sneaking around!"
"I'm a journalist!" Sunday complained. "I don't sneak. I research unobtrusively!"
"Fine," Baby said. "Suppose for a moment that you aren't the killer."
"I'm not," Sunday agreed.
"I think she did it," Belle said. The others all nodded.
"Oh, thanks."
"Suppose she isn't," Baby said, "who else could it be?"
"You," said Sunday, promptly.
Baby sighed, pinching the brow of her nose. "Aside from me."
"You were both there when I found the body," Belle said. "Technically, it could have been you."
Sunday frowned. "You did find the body, didn't you? And before, Brent Clifford talked to you. You knew he was going to the bathroom."
"Well, so did everybody," Belle said, looking confused. "It's a very small shuttle."
Baby looked thoughtful. "You would have had access to the locked room."
"You weren't in the staff compartment when I walked through," Sunday remembered.
"You did? That's against regulations!" Belle complained. Sunday just looked pointedly at her. She shrugged a little. "I was probably talking to the captain."
"She had a pen," Kim put in, and Zheng nodded. "She marked our names off on the clipboard with it."
"That's what pens are for," Belle said, looking increasingly bewildered. "You can't think I have anything to do with this!"
"You didn't seem to care that the captain was dead," Caffrey said. "I thought that was peculiar at the time."
"And it was your idea to leave Sunday behind," Baby mused.
Sunday frowned at that. Something nagged at the back of her head.
"You said she was a killer," Belle wailed, leaping to her feet, bumping Evelyn on the way, and sending the knitting flying. "Of course I wanted her left behind!"
Stone, Caffrey, Kim and Zheng all moved away from her. Evelyn calmly bent down to retrieve her knitting.
"It was you!" Sunday realised.
"I didn't, I swear!" Belle wailed.
"Not you," Sunday said. "You, you!"
And she pointed an accusing finger at Evelyn as the woman sat up, startled, long, sharp knitting needle gleaming viciously in her hand.
~
"Uncomfortable, aren't they?" Evelyn said, faking sympathy.
The reporter frowned. "Cardigans?"
"The seats, my dear!" Evelyn laughed on the inside. She'd known the woman shouldn't have been on the shuttle; it had been easy enough to entice her over and learn her name. Now she would be the perfect alibi and scapegoat all in one.
"Oh, yes," Sunday said. "Perhaps I'll just stretch my legs for a bit."
"Good idea," Evelyn said. She leaned over, pulling a needle out of her bag out of Sunday's sight, pushing the button that activated it. "Good for the circulation!" She slipped the needle into the nearby ventilation grill. It whooshed away in a soft clatter of metal. "My doctor always says -- oh, dear, where did I put it?"
When she looked up again, the reporter had taken the bait and slipped away. Evelyn grinned to herself, going back to her 'knitting'; thus directed remotely, the killer needle swooped around the inside of the ship, burst out of the grille in the bathroom, and buried itself in Brent Clifford's ear, killing him instantly.
"Then it simply slid back into the ventilation system, leaving the scratches I saw on the grille," Sunday finished. "Once the shuttle crashed, you directed everyone's suspicions towards me in the desert by mentioning my phone."
"You don't really have much to go on," Baby said dubiously.
"Aren't you wondering why she didn't seem all that surprised when everyone else learned Brent Clifford was murdered?" Sunday asked. "Or perturbed when we accused Belle just now?"
"I'm old, dear," Evelyn said. "Nothing really surprises or bothers me any more. It's the peril of age."
"So you deny killing Brent Clifford?" Baby asked.
"I'm afraid so, my dear." Evelyn clucked sympathetically. "Perhaps you were both mistaken and he really did kill himself after all. It's probably very stressful going around making illegal desert projects or whatever it was you were talking about."
"She does have a point," Kim said, and Zheng nodded agreement.
"You have no real evidence," Stone agreed. "Of anyone's guilt." Caffrey, who was comforting a sobbing Belle, glared at them.
"There is one thing we could do," Sunday said. "We could take all of Evelyn's needles. Cleaning them wouldn't remove all the microscopic traces of blood, and even if she's already dumped the actual murder weapon itself, she had to carry them together for a while, contaminating each other."
"Yes," said Baby. "Why don't you hand over the knitting needles, Ms King. We'll soon sort this out."
Sunday and Baby both held out their hands. Evelyn didn't move. There was a long, tense moment.
"Well," said Evelyn, her voice gone suddenly cool and arrogant. "It seems I underestimated you both. How unfortunate for you all. Mister DeShelby will be most aggrieved if I leave living witnesses. I'd hate to lose my kill bonus; framing Brent Clifford was worth a major fortune!"
Her hands lashed out, sending glowing needles flying at them. The others screamed, diving away, Caffrey pulling Belle down.
The needles twisted in the air to follow them. Baby flicked out her hands, fingers lengthening into spikes with which she knocked needles aside, only for them to regroup and come back. Evelyn chuckled evilly.
"So long, Sunday!"
Sunday just grinned, activating her necklace. The needles stopped, hovering uncertainly, trying to find their targets.
"Scan scrambler," Sunday said. "Don't leave home without it."
"Evelyn King, you're under arrest for the murder of Brent Clifford and the attempted murder of--"
"Their names really aren't important," Evelyn said, plucking needles out of the air and coming at them, slashing and stabbing.
Sunday fell back, and Baby jumped in, finger-blades against needles, sending sparks flying. Sunday searched around her for a weapon; she tried to grab a needle, but it turned on her immediately she touched it, and only a fluke of instinct left it buried in the floor instead of her.
Evelyn and Baby went back and forth with such speed and grace that seemed more as if they were dancing than fighting. Baby pushed back against the attacks but, every time she got close to Evelyn, the other women quickly directed a blow at one of the other passengers, forcing Baby to dodge around the defend them, losing the advantage.
Sunday looked desperately for a weapon. The chairs were no good, all fixed together. The coffee table? It moved when she grabbed it.
Kim closed in on Evelyn, trying the jab that had knocked Sunday out in the desert, but Evelyn dodged it, stabbing him in the shoulder. As he fell back, he grabbed the needle, ripping it from her hand. Baby leaped into the gap, striking, cutting deep gashes across Evelyn's arm. Evelyn simply span with the blow, snatching up another needle on the turn and kicking out, knocking Baby back.
With a grunt of effort, Sunday wrenched the coffee table up into the air and charged Evelyn, swinging it like a bat. Baby lunged in from the other side, pouncing like a cat, blades outstretched. With impossible grace, Evelyn simply twisted out of their path; Baby's blades punched through Sunday's table and, locked together, they went crashing to the floor.
"I must say, this has been the absolute worst assignment I have ever taken," Evelyn complained. "I mean, really, one comes to expect a certain level of unplanned obstacles in this line of work, but you two really take the biscuit. And that bomb! I mean, really, it comes to something when you can't assassinate a man without the police blowing your transport up."
"What are you talking about?" Baby asked, trying to use her feet to free her hands from the table.
Sunday grabbed it to help even as she said to Evelyn, "I thought you set the bomb to cover up the death."
"Why would I blow up a ship while I was still on it?" Evelyn said, fiddling with her needle. "Don't be ridiculous; I can still taste sand."
She flung the needle at them like a dart. All the other needles followed it. Sunday and Baby pushed each other away, both falling back and rolling as the needles reduced the broken table to smithereens between them.
Strong and Caffrey had moved Belle back to the door, and Stone, Kim and Zheng had retreated to the windows, leaving Evelyn with only one clear exit. Jumping up onto the chairs with the sprightliness of a woman a quarter of her age, she leaped across the room, caught the balcony and swung herself up to the next level.
Baby had stopped to check Sunday was okay, but Sunday waved her off. "Go!"
She went, jumping up at the nearest pillar and kicking off in a somersault that let her catch one of the lights, swing on it, flip again and land neatly in front of Evelyn. While Sunday raced for the steps, Evelyn doubled back, throwing herself onto the grav-lift. Sunday raced up the stairs, not stopping on the next floor, going up. Evelyn got the lift going, rising slowly on the shimmering platform. Baby didn't hesitate, just kept going, leaping into the shaft; her blades punched through the wall, stopping her falling.
Alarms began to blare. The lift sparked and wobbled, slowing down even further. Evelyn swore and jumped for the next floor level. Just as she'd finished pulling herself up, Sunday burst out of the stairwell in a breathless, panting rush. They fell back onto the lift platform, which promptly fizzled out, dropping them down into the shaft. They hit the climbing Baby, and all three dropped together, crashing back to the lower floor.
Sunday moaned, trying to get up. Everything hurt. They were back in front of the window, but she couldn't focus outside. Lights were moving, or perhaps it was all in her head. A stunned Baby was lying across her legs. Sunday tried to push her away and yelped when her hands encountered Baby's blades. She started to roll away and then a new weight hit her shoulders, knocking her back flat again. She coughed, blinking, and Evelyn's face swam into focus above her.
"I think you should know," Evelyn said, "that I am really, really going to enjoy this."
Something was clanking nearby. Hopefully it wasn't the lift; being crushed to death while someone was trying to kill you was probably the height of bad manners. Evelyn chuckled, and Sunday realised she'd said at least some of that aloud.
"Wait," she managed.
"No," Evelyn said, and raised her hands above her head, needle clenched in her fists. With a bloodthirsty scream, she brought them down--
A giant metal hand smashed through the window, into Evelyn, and then into the wall beyond with a thick, wet, crunching thud.
Sunday stared at it, turned her head to follow the arm up to where it joined the giant robot staring placidly down at her.
"Oh, shite!" Kid yelled, sticking a panicked head into view. "Are you okay? I was only trying to get the window open to get to you, like!"
Sister's hand withdrew, taking Evelyn's body with it, dropping it outside. Kid, sliding down to join them, looked queasy. Sunday didn't blame him.
"Sister ain't real smart," he said, swallowing.
"High quality AI is incredibly expensive," Sunday agreed, pulling herself to her feet. She patted his shoulder. "Sister just saved everyone and stopped the murderer. Don't beat yourself up."
"She did?" said Baby, sitting up, dazed. "Oh, good."
The other passengers slowly came over while Sunday was helping Baby up, standing around awkwardly.
"Um," said Belle. "Now what?"
"This is going to be a bugger to report," Baby said.
"We have to report it," Sunday said, "or DeShelby will get away with everything."
"Report what?" Baby asked. "Evelyn's dead. There's no way we'll find DNA proof on her needles now, even if we could have before, which, frankly, I doubt -- nice bluff, though."
"Thanks. You're right," Sunday sighed. "I can't print this. I'd be sued for libel before the first word was down. We have no proof. Bugger!"
Caffrey sighed. "I'm an Artisan. I live Art. I'm not wearing all this circuitry simply because it looks good. It's also functional, creating a constant, up to the minute record of everything I do, say, see or hear." She produced a handful of data crystals. "One saved confession."
"Genius," breathed Sunday, taking them. "Thank you. Quick, who's got my phone?"
They quickly found it, and she slid the crystals in, one after each other, grabbing useful clips from each. "I can definitely work with this. Of course, that means I also have to speak to Shrimmer again, but you can't have everything."
She dialled his direct line.
While they were waiting for it to connect, Baby said, "One thing still bothers me. If Evelyn didn't plant the bomb that took out the shuttle's drive systems, who did?"
The phone connected. Shrimmer's eyes went huge when he saw who was there. "Suh-suh-Sunday?!"
"Yeah, yeah; I've got a scoop," she said. "Get me direct newsfeeds; this one has to go out fast." He was still staring at her. "Did you hear--"
Her braids clacked, thought Sunday suddenly, remembering the girl in the street before she'd left Metrolan. What sort of pickpocket has noisy hair and lets her shadow be seen? The sort that wants to be caught, that's what.
"My bag was undone," she said. Baby looked confused. "My bag was undone! Picking my pocket was just a distraction; she wasn't trying to take something out, she was putting the bomb in. Which wouldn't have been picked up because I turn my scrambler on so I can keep my phone with me while I fly and, you bastard," she raged at the phone. "You greasy obese asshole! You tried to have me killed!"
"Ahhh," said Baby, nodding sagely.
"Maybe I did," Shrimmer sneered. "Maybe I didn't. You'll never know. Now, what's this scoop?" He grinned nastily. "You know I'm the only game in town, Sunday. Publish or perish, that's how it goes. And you're like a cockroach. You always come back. You can't help yourself."
Sunday hung up on him.
"Shit," she said. "He's right."
"Why?" Kid asked. "Can't you just broadcast it yourself, like?"
"Sure," Sunday sneered. "If I had a major league transceiver and priority access to the data-net." She dialled the @ction offices again. "Got one lying around?"
Kid pointed at Sister. "I said, didn't I? Gets me cartoons on it and everything!"
"UniPol have emergency broadcast privileges," Baby said.
Sunday stared. Baby grinned.
"What are you talking about?" Shrimmer demanded from the phone. "Give me my damn report, woman!"
"Turn your feeds on," said Sunday. "This one is going free to air." She tossed the phone away, ignoring the tinny screams and insults coming from it, and beamed at them all. "Let's make some news!"
~
--coming to you live with details of a murderous conspiracy by the TerraMax Corporation in a vain attempt to cover up the misdeeds reported by yours truly. Our story starts with a body, that of Brent Clifford, but it begins much earlier with a secret, illegal facility hidden under the desert--
~
"You know," said Sunday, sitting back from the broadcast console in the hollow of Sister's chest, "I think I'll take a proper vacation now."
"Case closed," Baby said, leaning against the entrance to the small space. "I think I'll take mine too. Any suggestions?"
"Actiba apparently glows in the dark," Sunday remembered.
"I could go for some Faux-Pho," Baby mused.
"Good salvage on the waste reefs," Kid said, leaning down from the top hatch above them. "If'n you want a lift and all."
He said it casually enough, but Sunday could tell by his eyes that he wanted a yes. "Alright," she said. "Why not? Baby can travel in here with me."
Kid blinked at them as Baby grinned and climbed up. "Are you sure, like? It's pretty small in there, 'specially when you're moving."
"We'll be fine," Baby said, sliding in next to Sunday, the two of them having to press together to close the door properly.
"Cramped, innit?" Kid said, grinning at them.
"Don't worry," Sunday said, grinning back. "I'm sure we'll think of something to pass the time."
With Baby giggling in the background, she calmly closed the hatch. With Kid on her shoulder, Sister turned towards the horizon and lumbered up to speed and, as the miles fell away under them, they passed the time quite pleasantly indeed.
[ Full Headers and Art | Part One | Part Two | Read on DW ]
She was hot, thirsty, and lying on sand and definitely getting a pain-killing brain implant just as soon as she got back to civilisation. Forcing her eyes open, Sunday discovered she was lying under the escape ramp from the shuttle, which was providing much needed shade from the sun. The heat coming off the shuttle was doing neither her nor the bottles of water they'd left in easy reach much good. Still, warm and stale was better than dead of dehydration, so she muttered thanks to whoever had had the idea, and helped herself to some welcome refreshment.
They'd left a note. It was in very nice handwriting and. Sunday couldn't help noticing, in the exact ink colour of her (she quickly checked) notably missing pen. It read:
Dear Sunday,
There's food, water, and other supplies in the shuttle, enough to keep you safe for at least a week. Of course, we should reach Saritris on the emergency skimmer in a half-day at the very, very latest, and will send someone back to rescue you immediately, so you'll hardly need to keep anything like that long. Please don't wander off into the desert and die. It's real easy to lose your direction out here, and we took the shuttle's compass with us, sorry.
Respectfully yours,
Baby
"Screw that," said Sunday.
Even if they did get back in a half-day, bureaucracy would delay sending a rescue mission for her at least another day after that, if they came at all. Besides, they'd probably just arrest her. No, she was fit and healthy, give or take being knocked out twice in the same day. The shuttle had been flying in an approximately straight line, which meant she knew which way to go. Just keep the sun behind her (or in front, depending on the time of day, obviously) and she'd be there in no time. Easy-peasy.
The first problem was carrying supplies, because her bag in the hold had, it turned out, been destroyed. The crates continued to be annoyingly solid. (Maybe they were just importing solid boxes.) She tried the cockpit to see if there was anything of interest, edging gingerly around the exposed wiring of the android pilot; there wasn't, but, coming back out, she stumbled across an emergency chute. Dumping it out gave her a workable rucksack. She filled it with as much water and food as she could carry, set her back to the shuttle, and began walking.
"Civilisation and another award-winning scoop, here I come."
Five miles of sliding down dunes later, she realised, first, that this had been a very stupid idea and, second, that she'd had the perfect opportunity to search Brent Clifford's body and missed it. Stopping to rig herself a makeshift parasol and have a bit of water, she considered going back. Skimmers were slow, but they were definitely faster than walking on sand; it would take her a day of constant walking to get to Saritris. On the other hand, her reasons for walking hadn't changed at all.
She walked. It was hard to keep a straight line. Slopes kept getting in the way. The rockier places just meant pebbles in her boots instead of sand. For a couple of miles everywhere she tried to stop for a rest turned out to be full of vicious looking scorpions or hungry looking lizards. It kept getting hotter, and hotter, and hotter. Even the breeze was warm. It sucked the sweat from her skin and the water from her mouth in an instant.
Her steps got slower and slower as her pack grew heavier and heavier, the shade of the parasol smaller and smaller, the sun hotter and hotter, brighter and brighter. Desert birds wheeled far above her, tiny screeching dots against the bright blue of the sky.
"Cheap cliché," Sunday muttered, forcing herself on.
The headache came back, but she couldn't risk drinking more of her water than she had been. Rationing would get her through. One foot in front of other. One foot more. One foot more. Just like writing a particularly stubborn report under a deadline. Keep forcing it until it works. One more word. One more step. One more.
Sand slipped; she went down with it, tumbling over and over. As the world spun, she thought she saw something glinting, something metallic, and then the old familiar darkness rushed over.
~
"Déjà vu sucks," Sunday said, not opening her eyes.
There was hard ground below her. It wasn't cool, exactly, but it was much less warmer than it had been. Night? Something clanked mechanically nearby, and she heard a giggle, too high-pitched for an adult. Night and she was hallucinating from heat stroke. Could you still get heat stroke if it was nighttime? Was that a very stupid question?
Sunday considered this for a bit and then, deciding that yes, yes it was, cracked her eyes open. There was a cave roof above her, or, anyway, something that looked like rock that matched the stuff that felt like rock that she was lying on.
"Why is there a cave in the desert?" she asked.
"So's I have somewhere to sleep, innit?"
Sunday considered this. "Fair enough," she decided, and made herself sit up. The cave swung alarmingly around her. A hand was in front of her face, dark skinned and grubby, holding a can of Spice. It wasn't her quasi-legal restorative of choice, but it would do, and she took it gratefully. A few long, shuddering swallows later, she felt warmth and energy rush through her, pushing aches temporarily aside. She'd pay for it later, of course. Actually, she was paying for it now. Damn but that tasted foul.
The kid laughed at her. He was short, maybe twelve at most, with lively black eyes under a huge mass of thick black curls, held back by a hefty pair of goggles currently shoved up his forehead. The desert fatigues he was wearing looked like they've been borrowed from half a dozen people, none of them his exact size. His smile stretched ear to ear. "Your face, like! Oughta see yourself!"
(His thick accent made it sound more like "otter see yehself.")
He pulled an exaggerated disgusted face and burst out laughing again. The clanking came again. Looking past the boy to the cave entrance, Sunday found herself face to face with a massive, cream-ceramic-armoured, vaguely-humanoid robot. It was large enough that she could have been carried around in its hands easily, which explained how she wasn't still out in the desert, but little else.
"That's Sister," he said. "People call me Kid."
"They put a lot of thought into that, I can tell," Sunday said before she could stop herself, but it just made Kid grin as he bounced to his feet.
"Got you some water, see? Take the taste away."
He kicked at the large bottles, five-gallon containers at least, by way of demonstration while he dug a cup out. Sunday accepted it with thanks, blinking at the bottles until they came into proper focus and she could see the picture etched into her sides.
"Hang on," she said. "That's the TerraMax logo."
"Yeah?" Kid said, in an uninterested tone.
Sunday clambered to her feet and made her way unsteadily over to check her eyes weren't deceiving her. The light faded as Sister stood up in the entrance, so Sunday looked at her instead. As the robot turned away, the light caught her chest, so that Sunday could see the TerraMax logo was there too, above the letters SSTR.
"Semi-autonomous Special Terraforming Robot."
"Sister," Kid agreed. "I made her go, right? So she's mine now. Finders keepers, losers weepers. It's, like, wossname. Right of salvage."
"Salvage," Sunday repeated, interested. "You salvaged her? And the water?"
"Oh, yeah," Kid said, nodding, curls bouncing. "There's a right load of stuff, if'n you know where to look, like."
"Lying around for the taking?"
Kid shrugged as if to say, 'if they didn't want me to take it, they should have had better security'.
Sunday considered this, sipping her water. "Can you show me where?"
To her amazement, his grin managed to get wider.
~
Sunday did not share Kid's enjoyment of riding across the desert on the shoulders of a giant robot. That he had those goggles and a bandanna to keep the sand out of his eyes and mouth might have had something to do with it; the constant bumping and permanent threat of a swift fall and a quick crushing had a lot more. Still, they made a fair pace, and it was barely any time at all before Kid was pointing and yelling, "There it is!"
The it in question was a loose bunch of small, non-descript buildings.
"Not much to look at it," she yelled back.
"Most of it is underground, innit," he called. "Like worms or something."
Blue light splashed out of nowhere against Sister's chest, reading her ident code. Thin pylons, a sonic fence so well blended into the background that Sunday only noticed them when they started to move, slid into the ground to allow them through unmolested. Kid called a halt and, eventually, after a bit of coaxing, Sister came to a sliding halt in the middle of the buildings. Kid dismounted with an annoyingly acrobatic athleticism while Sunday could only clamber carefully down. She caught up to him at the door as he hot-wired the electronic lock.
"Go look," he said, waving her ahead of him. "I'm gonna boost some more cells while I'm here; I'll holler when we're outie, 'kay?"
"Okay," Sunday nodded, mostly at empty air because he'd already somehow bounded out of view.
The complex proved to be a maze of twisty corridors and staircases that all looked exactly alike. Rooms cut across them at, as far as Sunday could tell, random, as if someone had wandered down them going, "oh, yeah, I need an office, and a big store room, and a giant bay full of interesting yet questionable terraforming equipment" and just built them then and there.
The terraforming equipment was interesting though: everything you might want to turn protected desert land into low-quality farmland for zero-pay migrant workers. Well, everything except the bits of paper that would make it legal, which Sunday would certainly know about. She'd gone through the companies sneaky filings enough times. Soooo, carefully hidden underground illegal terraforming base: what's that all about?
Money, probably. Which was a boring answer. She'd use profiteering in the article; that always sounded more impressive.
The equipment bay led, eventually, to a security office. As with the bay, pretty much all of the equipment was off and locked down. Since the lights and the security systems outside still worked, there was clearly electricity; Sunday nosed around until she could find a working terminal with security access. A quick bit of hacking later -- really, the internal security in these places was terrible -- she managed to get in.
Opening the access logs to erase herself, she discovered that Brent Clifford was the last person to log in. Which was a neat trick for a dead man.
"Well, well, well," she muttered, poking at the file system. "Brent Clifford, you have been a busy boy."
His name was over everything. Ridiculously over, as if he'd been running the entire base himself, despite its size. Even more interesting, someone had done a transparent and crap attempt to hide the data in the system.
"No one is that bad at covering their tracks," Sunday sneered at the screen. "I smell a conspiracy."
And actually a pretty good one, the more she thought about it. DeShelby takes a big PR hit from Sunday's article, he sends Brent Clifford out into the field, has him killed in the expectation that the shuttle crash will hide the evidence, pins illegal projects on him, and blames him for the company's turn the dark side, escaping squeaky clean himself. Very clever.
"But not clever enough," she crowed, and then quickly glanced around to make sure no one was listening.
In doing so, Sunday couldn't help noticing the light flashing on the security video archive. Probably Kid's comings and goings; well, she could easily erase those, give the kid a break. Heh. The kid, Kid.
Sunday brought up the video, expecting to see Sister's giant frame. Instead, she found herself looking down into one of the corridors, at a slim ivory-skinned military-cut platinum-blonde woman walking up to a door. She lifted a hand, and her nails -- no, her whole fingers extended, becoming long, thin blades, which she inserted into the door-lock. The woman glanced back just as she entered the room, and Sunday gasped in recognition.
Despite the change in hair colour and cut, and the different eyes, it was quite clearly Baby.
~
"So what you're saying is, right," Kid said thoughtfully, "is there's totes a broke ship out inna desert, what no-one is going to be coming for?"
"That wasn't really the point of the story," Sunday complained.
"But it's there, innit?" Kid insisted. "That's what we saw come down a bit before we ran into you, right?"
"Yes, fine!" Sunday threw her hands up in surrender. "You can go and ransack the ship."
"Salvage," Kid corrected pompously, grinning.
"Salvage the ship," Sunday agreed. "Can we get back to the major worldwide conspiracy to cover up crimes--"
"You said you already reported them," Kid pointed out.
"--to divert attention from crimes and blame them on someone else," Sunday corrected, "through killing employees and -- and this, I feel, is the important part -- trying to blow me up!"
Kid shrugged. "People try to kill me all the time."
"Well, you do keep trying to salvage all their stuff," Sunday pointed out. "Why are you living in the desert with a giant robot anyway?"
Kid shrugged again. "Beats living by myself, don't it?" Sunday couldn't see anything to argue with so just nodded. There was a sudden gleam in Kid's eyes. "Wanna write me story? What with you being a hot-shot reporter chick and all?"
"Is it interesting?"
"Do I get paid?"
"Probably not."
Kid pulled a face at her, disappointed. "Ain't none of yours, then."
"Ordinarily, your cunning reverse psychology would have worked," Sunday admitted, "but I have a giant conspiracy to deceive the public to thwart."
"Revenge," said Kid nodding sagely.
"Civil duty," Sunday lied.
"Mostly I goes back later and rips them off," Kid said cheerfully. "Want some?" He offered the lizard-on-a-stick to her.
"No, thanks."
He shrugged again, cooking the lizard over Sister's flame jets some more. Sunday tried not to think about how she had been carried around in giant hands that had flame jets in them.
"Can you take me to Saritris?" she asked.
"Sure?" He tore a leg off the lizard and took a bite out of the thigh, mumbling around it. "Whatcha gonna do?"
That was actually a good question. "Stop them?"
"Gonna arrest them, like?" he asked. "You the po-po too?"
"No," said Sunday. "And, seriously, 'po-po'?"
Kid just ate more lizard, juices running down his chin. Sunday's stomach rumbled and Kid laughed at her.
"Fine," she sighed. "Gimme a leg."
He did grinning. She tried it, gingerly, but it didn't really taste of anything. Chicken of the desert. It needed a sauce. She needed a plan. These two things weren't particularly related, but still.
"Okay," she said. "Here is the plan."
Kid waited patiently, absently wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.
"The plan is," said Sunday slowly, "obviously, to go to Saritris."
"Obviously," Kid echoed mockingly.
"Shut it, shorty."
Sunday considered her options. "I'll just have to find Baby, confront her with what little evidence I have, overpower her defences with my insight and logic, record a confession, edit it into a coherent narrative, and broadcast it immediately to counter the damage limitation effect. Simple!"
"How are you gonna do that, then?" Kid asked with interest.
"Look, you can't worry about the details with this sort of thing. It's like writing; you get the structure in place and then everything else just hangs off it as it comes. Trust me; once I get to Saritris, everything else will slot into place."
~
Saritris was a scrubland town, a nervous huddle of blocky concrete buildings. At some point, decades earlier, someone had given them what was no doubt thought of as a cheery coat of paint, but which now just made the place look like a sad, abandoned pile of giant, dirty children's toys. Antennae bristled across the town like ants on an overturned lunchbox. They circled around on Sister to avoid the shuttle point, the only visibly busy part of town, which allowed Kid to drop Sunday off at the outskirts of what passed for a commercial district: a bunch of apparently randomly arranged stalls under a wide awning that had clearly seen better days.
"I'm gonna do some trading while I'm here," Kid said. "Need me to hang around, bust you outta the big house?"
"I'm not going to get arrested," Sunday said. He looked sceptical. "I'm not!"
He shrugged. "If'n you says so."
"I do say so," Sunday said. "Watch the news feeds, you'll see." She frowned. "Well, you live in a cave in a desert, so you probably won't, but--"
"Oh, Sister has a built in wossname," Kid said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the robot not so inconspicuously crouched behind him. "I loves me some Angry Monkey Ninja." He did vaguely kung-fu looking moves. "Hi-yah!"
"Just you watch then."
"'kay." He grinned, throwing her a sloppy salute as he bounded off towards the stalls. "See you!"
The maze consumed him. Sunday followed after at a more sedate speed, looking for an infonet access point or a broadcast terminal or, failing that, someone who could sell her a transceiver so she could rig her own. All three proved impossible to get hold of, partly because she was in the middle of nowhere but mostly because no one had bioscanners and all her cards and physical money -- seriously, who still used those?! -- had been in her bag, in the shuttle, and were now just junk. Or future salvage.
"Not a problem," said Sunday. "The shuttle station terminal place thing will have one."
"Are you talking to me?" asked the woman behind the nearest stall.
"No," said Sunday.
"Statues of Freddy Utopia," the woman offered gamely. "Only fifty rom."
"Also no."
"We call it a port," the woman said. Sunday looked confused. "The shuttle station terminal place thing? We call it a port."
"I've had a very long day," Sunday complained.
"The statues also sing soothing songs and dance in time in a very relaxing sort of way," the woman offered.
"I don't actually have any money on me," Sunday admitted. "Sorry. Which way is the port again?"
The woman pointed. Sunday thanked her and headed in the indicated direction, quickly finding the port. She approached it carefully from an off side. Sneaking in with the luggage handlers would be easy. All she had to do was--
"Hold it right there, Ms Jones!"
--not be seen by the port security drones.
"I can explain everything," she said, raising her hands.
"I'm sure you can," the drone said, and hit her with a stun pulse.
~
The world slowly resolved itself out of the throbbing darkness.
"What is this, a theme?" Sunday moaned.
She tried to roll over onto her side, which just made her fall off the chairs she'd been laid out on.
"Oh, very clever, Sunday, well done," she muttered.
"Do you talk to yourself a lot?"
"Usually I'm recording," Sunday said, pushing herself up onto her knees and blinking around, trying to bring the voice into focus. "Force of habit. Oh, look. A reunion."
She was in what looked like a large, rather bland departure lounge: lots of empty seats and the occasional coffee table. There was a pile of knitting on one, which wasn't a surprise since Evelyn was sitting behind it, Belle next to her.
"I had the strangest dream," Sunday said, using a chair to pull herself the rest of the way up, wobbling a bit until her legs caught on. "You were in it, and you, Mister Stone; Mister Zheng; Mister Kim; Artisan Caffrey; and--"
"And me," Baby said, with mocking amusement. She'd found time to do her hair up and to slip into a deliciously strapless gold split-leg dress. She had very long, very shapely legs. It was quite distracting.
"Sorry," said Sunday. "Did you say something?"
Baby sighed. "Only that you're under arrest for murder. Nothing remotely important."
"I think you will find that it is you who is the murderer," Sunday said, waving an accusing finger at her.
Baby ignored this, turning to the others. "Once all your statements have been notarised, you'll be free to go. We apologise for the convenience."
Caffrey sniffed derisively.
"Don't worry about us, dear," said Evelyn, knitting away comfortably.
"I have proof," Sunday said. "Proof of a conspiracy to shift blame for TerraMax's illegal business practices onto an unwitting and now deceased employee."
"Which is why you killed Brent Clifford," Baby agreed. "Confessing is good; I'm sure they'll accept your plea bargain."
"I'm not confessing," Sunday complained, "I'm accusing. Don't think you can twist these people to your side, vixen!"
"Vixen?" Baby repeated, looking pleased for a moment and then quite clearly trying to look annoyed.
"In the desert, there is a TerraMax facility," Sunday started.
"An illegal terraforming project," Baby agreed. "I know all about it."
"Yes! Yes, you do!" Sunday frowned. "Okay, you just ruined my whole scene there. I have proof, though, that you were there; here's a video I copied from the facilities security logs." She pulled her phone out, thumbing to the media menu, and hitting play, holding it out. The assembled audience leaned forward, squinting at the tiny screen, and Sunday sighed, handing the phone to Kim, who was closest. "Pass it around. You'll see."
"That's her," Kim agreed.
Baby leaned over to check out the screen. "I missed a camera? How remiss of me." She smiled sweetly at Sunday. "You do realise this is a video of me breaking in, yes?"
"...why would you breaking in to your own facility?" Sunday asked, a sinking feeling in her stomach long before Baby pulled out the badge.
"UniPol," she said brightly.
"She's got you there," said Belle. "You can't argue with a badge."
Both Stone and Caffrey made derisive noises. Belle gave them a little, hurt look.
"Okay, okay," Sunday said, "but that doesn't mean she's not the murderer. I'm sure TerraMax could buy off a cop. Especially one who's secretly genetically engineered for combat."
"It's not a secret," Baby said. "Look, it's on my badge."
"You can turn your fingers into long, thin knives, which you stabbed into the ear of Brent Clifford," Sunday said, deliberately ignoring this. "You tried to set it up like suicide, but I interrupted you."
"You stabbed him to death with your pen," Baby corrected, "and then I interrupted you. You planted the bomb to cover your tracks, knowing the records wouldn't show you as ever being on board."
"You planted the bomb to cover your tracks," Sunday insisted, "to make it seem like Brent Clifford died in the crash."
"You had the means to do it, the opportunity--"
"What about motive?" Sunday asked. "What about that, huh?"
"Killing Brent Clifford would not only get Leon DeShelby off your back, it would also allow you to run the scoop," Baby said. "Plausible enough for you?"
Sunday frowned. That was actually pretty plausible. "Except for the part where I wouldn't actually kill a man for a story. Probably."
"Then we come to the part where Brent Clifford was alive when the shuttle took off, and dead when it crashed. No one other than those here were on the shuttle, nor did anyone else follow us back out of the desert -- how did you manage that, by the way? I haven't even managed to get authorisation for a rescue sweep yet."
"Pfft. 'Yet'," Sunday scoffed. "You were never going to send anyone back for me."
"Of course I was," Baby said, affronted.
"You were just going to leave me behind to die, so you could pin everything on me after your plans were ruined by the premature discovery of the body. And I'd like my pen back, by the way." Sunday considered. "Unless you covered it in blood so it would appear to be the murder weapon, then not so much. Did she let anyone else look at it?"
The audience all shook their heads. Sunday looked smugly at Baby.
"My point," Baby said, clearly trying for calm but still coming across as annoyed, "is that the murderer had to have been one of the passengers. Everyone else was accounted for."
"You weren't! You were sneaking around."
"I'm a cop! You were sneaking around!"
"I'm a journalist!" Sunday complained. "I don't sneak. I research unobtrusively!"
"Fine," Baby said. "Suppose for a moment that you aren't the killer."
"I'm not," Sunday agreed.
"I think she did it," Belle said. The others all nodded.
"Oh, thanks."
"Suppose she isn't," Baby said, "who else could it be?"
"You," said Sunday, promptly.
Baby sighed, pinching the brow of her nose. "Aside from me."
"You were both there when I found the body," Belle said. "Technically, it could have been you."
Sunday frowned. "You did find the body, didn't you? And before, Brent Clifford talked to you. You knew he was going to the bathroom."
"Well, so did everybody," Belle said, looking confused. "It's a very small shuttle."
Baby looked thoughtful. "You would have had access to the locked room."
"You weren't in the staff compartment when I walked through," Sunday remembered.
"You did? That's against regulations!" Belle complained. Sunday just looked pointedly at her. She shrugged a little. "I was probably talking to the captain."
"She had a pen," Kim put in, and Zheng nodded. "She marked our names off on the clipboard with it."
"That's what pens are for," Belle said, looking increasingly bewildered. "You can't think I have anything to do with this!"
"You didn't seem to care that the captain was dead," Caffrey said. "I thought that was peculiar at the time."
"And it was your idea to leave Sunday behind," Baby mused.
Sunday frowned at that. Something nagged at the back of her head.
"You said she was a killer," Belle wailed, leaping to her feet, bumping Evelyn on the way, and sending the knitting flying. "Of course I wanted her left behind!"
Stone, Caffrey, Kim and Zheng all moved away from her. Evelyn calmly bent down to retrieve her knitting.
"It was you!" Sunday realised.
"I didn't, I swear!" Belle wailed.
"Not you," Sunday said. "You, you!"
And she pointed an accusing finger at Evelyn as the woman sat up, startled, long, sharp knitting needle gleaming viciously in her hand.
~
"Uncomfortable, aren't they?" Evelyn said, faking sympathy.
The reporter frowned. "Cardigans?"
"The seats, my dear!" Evelyn laughed on the inside. She'd known the woman shouldn't have been on the shuttle; it had been easy enough to entice her over and learn her name. Now she would be the perfect alibi and scapegoat all in one.
"Oh, yes," Sunday said. "Perhaps I'll just stretch my legs for a bit."
"Good idea," Evelyn said. She leaned over, pulling a needle out of her bag out of Sunday's sight, pushing the button that activated it. "Good for the circulation!" She slipped the needle into the nearby ventilation grill. It whooshed away in a soft clatter of metal. "My doctor always says -- oh, dear, where did I put it?"
When she looked up again, the reporter had taken the bait and slipped away. Evelyn grinned to herself, going back to her 'knitting'; thus directed remotely, the killer needle swooped around the inside of the ship, burst out of the grille in the bathroom, and buried itself in Brent Clifford's ear, killing him instantly.
"Then it simply slid back into the ventilation system, leaving the scratches I saw on the grille," Sunday finished. "Once the shuttle crashed, you directed everyone's suspicions towards me in the desert by mentioning my phone."
"You don't really have much to go on," Baby said dubiously.
"Aren't you wondering why she didn't seem all that surprised when everyone else learned Brent Clifford was murdered?" Sunday asked. "Or perturbed when we accused Belle just now?"
"I'm old, dear," Evelyn said. "Nothing really surprises or bothers me any more. It's the peril of age."
"So you deny killing Brent Clifford?" Baby asked.
"I'm afraid so, my dear." Evelyn clucked sympathetically. "Perhaps you were both mistaken and he really did kill himself after all. It's probably very stressful going around making illegal desert projects or whatever it was you were talking about."
"She does have a point," Kim said, and Zheng nodded agreement.
"You have no real evidence," Stone agreed. "Of anyone's guilt." Caffrey, who was comforting a sobbing Belle, glared at them.
"There is one thing we could do," Sunday said. "We could take all of Evelyn's needles. Cleaning them wouldn't remove all the microscopic traces of blood, and even if she's already dumped the actual murder weapon itself, she had to carry them together for a while, contaminating each other."
"Yes," said Baby. "Why don't you hand over the knitting needles, Ms King. We'll soon sort this out."
Sunday and Baby both held out their hands. Evelyn didn't move. There was a long, tense moment.
"Well," said Evelyn, her voice gone suddenly cool and arrogant. "It seems I underestimated you both. How unfortunate for you all. Mister DeShelby will be most aggrieved if I leave living witnesses. I'd hate to lose my kill bonus; framing Brent Clifford was worth a major fortune!"
Her hands lashed out, sending glowing needles flying at them. The others screamed, diving away, Caffrey pulling Belle down.
The needles twisted in the air to follow them. Baby flicked out her hands, fingers lengthening into spikes with which she knocked needles aside, only for them to regroup and come back. Evelyn chuckled evilly.
"So long, Sunday!"
Sunday just grinned, activating her necklace. The needles stopped, hovering uncertainly, trying to find their targets.
"Scan scrambler," Sunday said. "Don't leave home without it."
"Evelyn King, you're under arrest for the murder of Brent Clifford and the attempted murder of--"
"Their names really aren't important," Evelyn said, plucking needles out of the air and coming at them, slashing and stabbing.
Sunday fell back, and Baby jumped in, finger-blades against needles, sending sparks flying. Sunday searched around her for a weapon; she tried to grab a needle, but it turned on her immediately she touched it, and only a fluke of instinct left it buried in the floor instead of her.
Evelyn and Baby went back and forth with such speed and grace that seemed more as if they were dancing than fighting. Baby pushed back against the attacks but, every time she got close to Evelyn, the other women quickly directed a blow at one of the other passengers, forcing Baby to dodge around the defend them, losing the advantage.
Sunday looked desperately for a weapon. The chairs were no good, all fixed together. The coffee table? It moved when she grabbed it.
Kim closed in on Evelyn, trying the jab that had knocked Sunday out in the desert, but Evelyn dodged it, stabbing him in the shoulder. As he fell back, he grabbed the needle, ripping it from her hand. Baby leaped into the gap, striking, cutting deep gashes across Evelyn's arm. Evelyn simply span with the blow, snatching up another needle on the turn and kicking out, knocking Baby back.
With a grunt of effort, Sunday wrenched the coffee table up into the air and charged Evelyn, swinging it like a bat. Baby lunged in from the other side, pouncing like a cat, blades outstretched. With impossible grace, Evelyn simply twisted out of their path; Baby's blades punched through Sunday's table and, locked together, they went crashing to the floor.
"I must say, this has been the absolute worst assignment I have ever taken," Evelyn complained. "I mean, really, one comes to expect a certain level of unplanned obstacles in this line of work, but you two really take the biscuit. And that bomb! I mean, really, it comes to something when you can't assassinate a man without the police blowing your transport up."
"What are you talking about?" Baby asked, trying to use her feet to free her hands from the table.
Sunday grabbed it to help even as she said to Evelyn, "I thought you set the bomb to cover up the death."
"Why would I blow up a ship while I was still on it?" Evelyn said, fiddling with her needle. "Don't be ridiculous; I can still taste sand."
She flung the needle at them like a dart. All the other needles followed it. Sunday and Baby pushed each other away, both falling back and rolling as the needles reduced the broken table to smithereens between them.
Strong and Caffrey had moved Belle back to the door, and Stone, Kim and Zheng had retreated to the windows, leaving Evelyn with only one clear exit. Jumping up onto the chairs with the sprightliness of a woman a quarter of her age, she leaped across the room, caught the balcony and swung herself up to the next level.
Baby had stopped to check Sunday was okay, but Sunday waved her off. "Go!"
She went, jumping up at the nearest pillar and kicking off in a somersault that let her catch one of the lights, swing on it, flip again and land neatly in front of Evelyn. While Sunday raced for the steps, Evelyn doubled back, throwing herself onto the grav-lift. Sunday raced up the stairs, not stopping on the next floor, going up. Evelyn got the lift going, rising slowly on the shimmering platform. Baby didn't hesitate, just kept going, leaping into the shaft; her blades punched through the wall, stopping her falling.
Alarms began to blare. The lift sparked and wobbled, slowing down even further. Evelyn swore and jumped for the next floor level. Just as she'd finished pulling herself up, Sunday burst out of the stairwell in a breathless, panting rush. They fell back onto the lift platform, which promptly fizzled out, dropping them down into the shaft. They hit the climbing Baby, and all three dropped together, crashing back to the lower floor.
Sunday moaned, trying to get up. Everything hurt. They were back in front of the window, but she couldn't focus outside. Lights were moving, or perhaps it was all in her head. A stunned Baby was lying across her legs. Sunday tried to push her away and yelped when her hands encountered Baby's blades. She started to roll away and then a new weight hit her shoulders, knocking her back flat again. She coughed, blinking, and Evelyn's face swam into focus above her.
"I think you should know," Evelyn said, "that I am really, really going to enjoy this."
Something was clanking nearby. Hopefully it wasn't the lift; being crushed to death while someone was trying to kill you was probably the height of bad manners. Evelyn chuckled, and Sunday realised she'd said at least some of that aloud.
"Wait," she managed.
"No," Evelyn said, and raised her hands above her head, needle clenched in her fists. With a bloodthirsty scream, she brought them down--
A giant metal hand smashed through the window, into Evelyn, and then into the wall beyond with a thick, wet, crunching thud.
Sunday stared at it, turned her head to follow the arm up to where it joined the giant robot staring placidly down at her.
"Oh, shite!" Kid yelled, sticking a panicked head into view. "Are you okay? I was only trying to get the window open to get to you, like!"
Sister's hand withdrew, taking Evelyn's body with it, dropping it outside. Kid, sliding down to join them, looked queasy. Sunday didn't blame him.
"Sister ain't real smart," he said, swallowing.
"High quality AI is incredibly expensive," Sunday agreed, pulling herself to her feet. She patted his shoulder. "Sister just saved everyone and stopped the murderer. Don't beat yourself up."
"She did?" said Baby, sitting up, dazed. "Oh, good."
The other passengers slowly came over while Sunday was helping Baby up, standing around awkwardly.
"Um," said Belle. "Now what?"
"This is going to be a bugger to report," Baby said.
"We have to report it," Sunday said, "or DeShelby will get away with everything."
"Report what?" Baby asked. "Evelyn's dead. There's no way we'll find DNA proof on her needles now, even if we could have before, which, frankly, I doubt -- nice bluff, though."
"Thanks. You're right," Sunday sighed. "I can't print this. I'd be sued for libel before the first word was down. We have no proof. Bugger!"
Caffrey sighed. "I'm an Artisan. I live Art. I'm not wearing all this circuitry simply because it looks good. It's also functional, creating a constant, up to the minute record of everything I do, say, see or hear." She produced a handful of data crystals. "One saved confession."
"Genius," breathed Sunday, taking them. "Thank you. Quick, who's got my phone?"
They quickly found it, and she slid the crystals in, one after each other, grabbing useful clips from each. "I can definitely work with this. Of course, that means I also have to speak to Shrimmer again, but you can't have everything."
She dialled his direct line.
While they were waiting for it to connect, Baby said, "One thing still bothers me. If Evelyn didn't plant the bomb that took out the shuttle's drive systems, who did?"
The phone connected. Shrimmer's eyes went huge when he saw who was there. "Suh-suh-Sunday?!"
"Yeah, yeah; I've got a scoop," she said. "Get me direct newsfeeds; this one has to go out fast." He was still staring at her. "Did you hear--"
Her braids clacked, thought Sunday suddenly, remembering the girl in the street before she'd left Metrolan. What sort of pickpocket has noisy hair and lets her shadow be seen? The sort that wants to be caught, that's what.
"My bag was undone," she said. Baby looked confused. "My bag was undone! Picking my pocket was just a distraction; she wasn't trying to take something out, she was putting the bomb in. Which wouldn't have been picked up because I turn my scrambler on so I can keep my phone with me while I fly and, you bastard," she raged at the phone. "You greasy obese asshole! You tried to have me killed!"
"Ahhh," said Baby, nodding sagely.
"Maybe I did," Shrimmer sneered. "Maybe I didn't. You'll never know. Now, what's this scoop?" He grinned nastily. "You know I'm the only game in town, Sunday. Publish or perish, that's how it goes. And you're like a cockroach. You always come back. You can't help yourself."
Sunday hung up on him.
"Shit," she said. "He's right."
"Why?" Kid asked. "Can't you just broadcast it yourself, like?"
"Sure," Sunday sneered. "If I had a major league transceiver and priority access to the data-net." She dialled the @ction offices again. "Got one lying around?"
Kid pointed at Sister. "I said, didn't I? Gets me cartoons on it and everything!"
"UniPol have emergency broadcast privileges," Baby said.
Sunday stared. Baby grinned.
"What are you talking about?" Shrimmer demanded from the phone. "Give me my damn report, woman!"
"Turn your feeds on," said Sunday. "This one is going free to air." She tossed the phone away, ignoring the tinny screams and insults coming from it, and beamed at them all. "Let's make some news!"
~
--coming to you live with details of a murderous conspiracy by the TerraMax Corporation in a vain attempt to cover up the misdeeds reported by yours truly. Our story starts with a body, that of Brent Clifford, but it begins much earlier with a secret, illegal facility hidden under the desert--
~
"You know," said Sunday, sitting back from the broadcast console in the hollow of Sister's chest, "I think I'll take a proper vacation now."
"Case closed," Baby said, leaning against the entrance to the small space. "I think I'll take mine too. Any suggestions?"
"Actiba apparently glows in the dark," Sunday remembered.
"I could go for some Faux-Pho," Baby mused.
"Good salvage on the waste reefs," Kid said, leaning down from the top hatch above them. "If'n you want a lift and all."
He said it casually enough, but Sunday could tell by his eyes that he wanted a yes. "Alright," she said. "Why not? Baby can travel in here with me."
Kid blinked at them as Baby grinned and climbed up. "Are you sure, like? It's pretty small in there, 'specially when you're moving."
"We'll be fine," Baby said, sliding in next to Sunday, the two of them having to press together to close the door properly.
"Cramped, innit?" Kid said, grinning at them.
"Don't worry," Sunday said, grinning back. "I'm sure we'll think of something to pass the time."
With Baby giggling in the background, she calmly closed the hatch. With Kid on her shoulder, Sister turned towards the horizon and lumbered up to speed and, as the miles fell away under them, they passed the time quite pleasantly indeed.
[ Full Headers and Art | Part One | Part Two | Read on DW ]