Maze-Born Trouble Read online

  Maze-Born Trouble

  Ginn Hale

  Published by:

  Blind Eye Books

  1141 Grant Street

  Bellingham WA 98225

  blindeyebooks.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.

  Edited by Nicole Kimberling and Anne Scott

  Cover by Dawn Kimberling

  This book is a work of fiction and as such all characters and situations are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual people, places or events is coincidental.

  Copyright© 2016 Ginn Hale

  Maze-Born Trouble

  1.

  Lake Harmaa listened as the office vents coughed out a last breath of warm, clean air before falling quiet. The high-pitched hum of the lights continued for five seconds before dulling to a dim buzz. Utility bills went perpetually late and unpaid all across the old sectors. So no real surprise that the most recent nobody put in charge of Power & Life Support had decided to stage a shakedown. Though it gave away how little this new boy knew about the old sectors if he thought a couple of power-downs would scare anyone. Still, Lake couldn’t fault the first-timer for trying. He’d learn soon enough.

  Although now that he considered it, two power-downs in two days struck Lake as odd. Too much paperwork and too many explanations to far-flung superiors to merit shaking loose such small change.

  Maybe there was something more to this. A security test? Or maybe someone had put the new boy up to it.

  None of it was Lake’s business—not unless someone paid him to make it his.

  He leaned back in his chair pondering what remained of his office hours. Slim chance anybody would make anything his business during a power-down.

  Out in the waiting room, the incessant murmur of the satellite scanner choked to silence. Lake’s office manager, Willow Jänis, swore at the scanner in that fond tone of hers—the same way she called her husband “worthless” like it was a rare attribute. Then she raised her voice to carry through the walls and over the wheeze of the emergency-floor lights. “You want me to stay on the clock or can I start drinking?”

  The question both surprised and relieved Lake. Normally Jänis wanted all the hours she could get. Supporting an idealistic physician from one of Yuanxi’s biospheres didn’t come cheap. She’d just leased a new high-grav surgical suite for him. Lake gave her as much work as he could afford, but he wasn’t running a charity—not like Jänis’s man.

  “Give it ten minutes,” Lake replied. “Then bottoms up.”

  On other stations—particularly the sleek Yuanxi biospheres that orbited Jag-eun sin’s A-class synthetic star like a strings of pearls—power-downs incited panic. But here aboard Sisu Station, darkness and stale air didn’t alarm most of the populace any more than the roaches or milk spiders skittering through the ducts. At least not the people living in the Maze or Arc sections—the old sectors. Up on the immense ribbons of the Drift, people expected better. Most likely, Power & Life Support’s comm lines already scorched with complaints delivered automatically from state-of-the-art homes and corporate office buildings.

  Lake heard the soft gulp of liquid pouring from a bottle.

  “That was a fast ten minutes,” he called, teasing.

  “Nah, it’s a slow drink. I won’t be to the bottom too soon,” Jänis replied. “I need to get started before the cold creeps in too deep, don’t I?”

  “That’s what the doctor orders, is it?”

  “My worthless man? Sure he does. He hands out little gin bottles with all those charity inoculations he gives the Maze babies—” Jänis cut herself off as a loud knock sounded from the outer door. “Damn it,” she muttered.

  Lake picked out the creak of manual hinges scraping open under the weight of dead hydraulics as Jänis pried the door open.

  “He’s in,” Jänis said, then she called back to Lake, “And I’m heading out. I got a doctor’s appointment.”

  “Sure. You gotta keep warm somehow.” Lake might have said more—pretended offense at her bothering to ask if she should stay when she never intended to—but the man coming through his door put a lid on his amusement.

  Lake recognized the smell of him first. Strong and dry like old-world cedar and a couple of shots of vodka. It was the antiseptic scent of the police morgue. Lake listened to the man stride across the small office and heard the chair across from his desk creak as the man dropped his long frame onto the cheap seat. Fine variations in the gravity field rippled across Lake’s skin, caressing him with the other man’s unique mass signature.

  Lake basked very briefly in the solid feel of DI Mateo Espina-Aguilar before recalling his manners and switching on his optics. A gentle tug on the lobe of his right ear and the dark shadow of the room resolved into sharp gray forms. At the same time Lake’s steady heartbeat quickened to feed the demand of the hungry silver implants.

  Glinting details like the shine on Aguilar’s cheap suit, the tousled lines of his black hair, and the gleam of his dark, narrow eyes flitted through Lake’s awareness like chimes sounding in a storm. But the bulk of visual information came in big dull blocks. A closed security door, run-down room with recycled rubber nubs for a carpet, bare walls, a squat desk and a drink cabinet, which supported a fat little potted cactus.

  And directly in front of Lake, a muscular man in his late thirties wearing a grim expression.

  Smiling, Aguilar’s hard face could turn sort of charming. His heavy brows lifted, and the long scar that ran from his cheek to his chin, clipping through the left side of his mouth didn’t seem so deep or wide. But he wasn’t smiling today. Aguilar drew an old-fashioned quick-pad from his breast pocket and flicked it open to record.

  An official visit, then. Lake didn’t let himself get disappointed about it.

  “Four months back you were hunting for a runaway named Holly Ryan,” Aguilar stated in a flat official tone. “Eighteen-year-old female. 1.85 meters, well-fed, brown hair, green eyes and all natural teeth.”

  “Yeah,” Lake agreed. He didn’t mind spilling the details of his private investigation to Aguilar. But that quick-pad meant Police Chief Cullen was likely to hear what he had to say, so Lake decided to keep his answers simple.

  “How’d that work out?” Aguilar asked, then he gave Lake a knowing nod. “You found her, right?”

  “She wasn’t doing much to hide,” Lake replied. “She’d changed her identity to H. Ryan, planted herself up on the Drift, and gotten straight to burning through her mommy’s credit. Her other hobby was making real bad choices for her new best friends.”

  “Any names you recall in particular?” Aguilar asked.

  “Not off the top of my head,” Lake lied. “I’ll have to go back through my notes when the power’s back up.”

  “Sure,” Aguilar agreed. “But she was alive and well when you last saw her?”

  Now there was a telling question.

  Lake kept from cracking any jokes that might have landed his ass in the middle of a possible homicide investigation.

  “Yeah, she was,” he said. “That would have been months back—January, just after New Years—at Nam Yune’s place. The Ryan kid was sucking down noodles and losing a heap on the fighting beetles. I introduced myself and told her that her father was worried about her. She threw her tea at me while it was still in the pot. I didn’t bother to hang around for the cream and sugar.”

  Aguilar cracked a quick smile then asked, “Did you hear from or see her again after that?”

  “No.” Lake shrugged. “I left my contact-chip on her table, but I don’t think she took it. She never messaged me, and I closed out the job with her dad the first of February. Like
I said, I’ll forward my notes as soon as the power’s back up.”

  “Alright. That sounds good for now. I might have more questions later.” Aguilar snapped the quick-pad shut and took the extra precaution of powering it completely off before he tucked it away in his pocket.

  “One of Nam Yune’s servers says you gave the Ryan girl a good shake and advised her to go home before she got herself killed.” Now that the recording was over, amusement crept into Aguilar’s voice, lending it familiar warmth.

  “I may have,” Lake admitted. The teakettle rocketing through the air, spitting scalding water across the crowded room had roused a bit of indignation in him. Though that alone hadn’t inspired him to pull the girl out of her booth seat. There’d been a sneering quality about Holly Ryan’s posture and tone that begged for a hard knock. She’d angered him and worried him at once because Sisu Station wasn’t a place to tromp around in high-priced heels crushing other people’s toes.

  Just the precariousness of the station itself lent a kind of hardness to the people who called it home. Sisu Station whipped around the edge of an artificial black hole—a failed first attempt at igniting a synthetic star like Yuanxi. The citizens of all three sectors: the Maze, the Arc and the Drift shared a history of oppression, warfare and famine. Many people had endured hard times and survived in ways that didn’t bear scrutiny. Most didn’t want more trouble, but they’d hit hard if they felt disrespected.

  Lake had wanted Holly Ryan to understand that, if she meant to stay. He supposed the advice hadn’t taken.

  “You thirsty?” Lake asked.

  “Always,” Aguilar replied. With the chill of space steadily creeping in, his breath plumed like smoke from his lips.

  Lake rose and walked the few steps to his drinks cabinet. The cut-crystal facets ringing the lowball glasses felt like chips of ice. Aguilar took his liquor neat, Lake remembered. So he poured out two hard, dry tots.

  He handed off one of the glasses to Aguilar and returned to his own chair. Aguilar took a sip and a soft low sigh of satisfaction escaped him.

  “I don’t suppose the Ryan kid OD’d?” Lake asked.

  “Lab says she was well on the way but didn’t get the chance.” Aguilar took another drink. “Yesterday someone popped her security door, put a bolt gun to the back of her head and dropped her. Her place was turned over but it didn’t look like much was taken. Aside from her eyes. Those the killer cut out and left in her hands.”

  “Same as the Loviatars did to the Feds?” Lake asked.

  “Looks that way.”

  Lake took a deep gulp of his gin. It felt like ice water and gasoline going down his throat.

  Lake had been a eight years old when Federal forces rediscovered Sisu Station and the population that had grown up there after two centuries of isolation. Then the forgotten outpost had consisted only of the primary phase of construction: the fused asteroids and mass generator that comprised the Maze. It had been a dark, humid labyrinth filled with insects, boiling chemical pools and an overworked populace ruled by a cult leader.

  Less than a month after contact, Federal forces had descended into the tunnels, intent upon liberating the common people from their Loviatar overlord. Federalists had anticipated a brief conflict fought remotely via synthetic drones. But the dark, magnetically charged tunnels that made up the Maze had disrupted Federalist equipment and communications. The intense gravity rendered projectile weapons useless. Soon fighting degenerated to a brutal hand-to-hand combat that stretched on for three years. In the end the Federalists had recruited Maze-born insurgents—Lake among them—to break the Loviatar stronghold.

  Nowadays minor malcontents in the Maze sometimes fronted themselves as New Loviatars. But their current political actions amounted to little more than a couple of smashed surveillance recorders and a few terrible folk songs—one of which even mentioned Lake and his ultimate treason by name.

  But mutilating bodies? That was a little antiquated even for the few surviving devotees.

  “Could the mutilation have been a coincidence?” Lake asked.

  “No.” Aguilar shook his head. “The slits in the palms were exact. They could have been from a forensic recording of the war.”

  Lake and he both drank in silence for a moment.

  “She had your contact-chip in her bedroom,” Aguilar went on. “That combined with the Loviatar angle…”

  Lake scowled. The last thing he needed was to get dragged back into the same old Loviatar bullshit. Just being brought up in the cult had already cost him more than one job despite the fact that he’d fought for the Federalists.

  “I’m surprised Chief Cullen hasn’t arrested me already,” Lake muttered.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Aguilar replied. “Turns out Cullen was a friend of the girl’s family. He knew her when she was a kid.”

  “Shit. He’s going to try and nail me for this, isn’t he?”

  “He wanted to, believe me.” Aguilar grimaced. “But you have an alibi.”

  “Yeah?” Lake asked because that was news to him.

  “You dropped by my place around seven, we played cards and drank beer until midnight. You slept on my couch,” Aguilar supplied.

  Lake considered how bad his position with Cullen must have been for Aguilar to cover up for him.

  “Are public-corridor records going to back you up?” Lake asked.

  “The power-down didn’t provide enough light for any recording,” Aguilar reminded him. “Which works out nicely for you and me, but also means there is no record of who came or went through the corridors leading to Holly Ryan’s suite either.”

  Lake pondered his drink, weighing how clearheaded he needed to be. With reluctance he set his glass aside.

  “That seems like a very convenient power-down,” Lake thought aloud.

  “Could be,” Aguilar agreed. “Or it could have been someone seizing on an opportunity.”

  “But to do that the killer would still need to know when the power-down would occur and for how long.” Lake frowned up at the dim haze of the security light in his ceiling. He’d been informed that it glowed a dirty yellow, but to him it radiated a faint gray halo into deeper gray shadows. When he thought of yellow as a thing—a color—the soft hum of security lights filled his mind. Red screamed from a siren and filled the air with the sharp tang of smoke. Blue was the muted drum of Federalist boots in a corridor and the hiss of burn-rounds powering up in a weapon.

  Just now, something in the outer corridor sounded a little too blue. Lake closed his eyes and felt the faint ripples of the station’s gravity washing up from the Maze and rolling over him. Through the familiar distortions of wall studs, wiring and cheap furniture, he picked out two—maybe three—big masses. Could have been drunks or a maid with her cart—except for the deadly whisper of those burn-rounds.

  “The heavies in the hallway aren’t with you, are they?” Lake asked as he pulled his automatic from his shoulder holster.

  “No.” Aguilar set his drink on Lake’s desk, stood and drew his own weapon. “How do you want to do this?”

  Lake didn’t want to do it at all. But the whispers of weapons out in the hall and the groan of the waiting-room door assured Lake he didn’t have another option.

  He moved to Aguilar’s side and leaned in to whisper in his ear.

  “There are two, maybe three. They don’t sound clumsy, so I’m thinking they’ve got night-vision goggles or enhanced optics—”

  “Flash burn ’em?” Aguilar asked.

  Trust Aguilar to know exactly where he’d been going and to get there before him. That’s what came of working together for five years. Lake smiled and nodded.

  He heard the waiting-room door creak open. Heavy boots took dainty, careful steps across the crisp polycrete flooring.

  “I’ll get behind the door,” Aguilar whispered. He took his position with his automatic ready and his eyes closed.

  Lake knelt and switched on the blaze alarm for his office door. Then h
e pressed a finger to the curve below his earlobe and shut down his optics. The gray world around him blinked out of existence, and the sounds and sensations drifting through the air bloomed through his awareness. Free of the strain of maintaining the optics, his heartbeat eased.

  Both he and Aguilar remained perfectly still.

  Out in Jänis’s office, the heavies took their time, stopping to search through the communications desk as well as the shelves and liquor cabinet. They didn’t speak aloud, but Lake felt the air crackle with Morse comms passing between them. Just two of them, Lake felt certain now.

  They reached his office and didn’t hesitate. The first heavy threw the door open and swung in. His gun crackled with the burn-rounds. He fired into Lake’s empty chair, blasting it into shards of hot plastic and ragged steel. In the same instant, the blaze alarm over the door ignited with blinding light. Lake felt the radiance against the bare skin of his hands and face like a solar flare. The gunman in the doorway howled in agony as the alarm burned into his light-enhancing goggles. The man behind him screamed like he’d taken a face full of battery acid.

  “Police! Drop your weapons!” Aguilar shouted.

  The heavy in back stumbled away, and Lake heard him making for the corridor. Lake started up after him, but the gunman in the doorway fired blindly. Lake dropped to the floor as Aguilar shot through the flimsy door. The gunman swore and staggered but didn’t fall. Aguilar fired again but went wide, shooting blind—his eyes clenched closed against the raging flare.

  From the floor, Lake drew in a deep breath and centered his aim on the gunman’s furious howl. He fired. The gunman made a choking sound then hit the floor in a thud. The iron tang of blood washed through the odor of Lake’s smoldering chair.

  “Kill the light!” Aguilar shouted.

  Lake tapped two shorts and one long against the wristband of his sure-watch, and the alarm switched off, returning the office to a dark chill. Lake rolled to his feet and holstered his automatic. He didn’t need to look or listen to know that Aguilar knelt beside the gunman.