Something Coming Through

16. Just Another Alien

Mangala | 25 July

The parking garage at the Hilton Hotel, where the Landing Day Ball had been held, had a valet service. The supervisor checked the registration numbers of vehicles owned by Danny Drury and his company against her spreadsheet for that evening, told Vic Gayle and Skip Williams that his car had been dropped off at seven-thirty and picked up around midnight, and pulled up footage from a camera that watched the entrance. Drury wasn’t driving the car, a shiny black Mercedes M Class, but there he was, getting out of it with a spectacular blonde woman at 7:34 p.m., and there he was again, his stupid ponytail brushing the collar of a white dinner jacket, stooping into the back of the Mercedes at a quarter past midnight.

‘There are plenty of ways of getting out of this place,’ Skip said. ‘He could have sneaked out at any time in between.’

Vic agreed. ‘You might want to check if his company owns any white vans.’

‘We should have asked him. McBride too.’

‘It shouldn’t be hard to find out. If they do, you can come back at them, see if they lie. Let’s see if McBride’s alibi holds water.’

The restaurant where McBride claimed to have been eating that night was at the other end of the Strip, a glitzy cave off the lobby of the Petra Carlton, a six-star hotel used by business people, diplomats and UN top brass when they were visiting from Earth. James Cameron had stayed there just after it had opened, when he’d been scouting locations for a film that had never been made.

According to the restaurant’s maitre d’, McBride had booked the table for eight p.m., square in the middle of the estimated time of death for Redway, but the maitre d’ couldn’t confirm if McBride had been late or if he had been at his table all evening. All he knew was that the bill had been signed at around one a.m.

‘I believe I spoke to Mr McBride, but we were very busy. We served a special Landing Day tasting menu, more than three hundred covers. And many of our customers socialised in the cocktail bar before and afterwards.’

Skip asked who had been at the table with McBride. The maitre d’ said reluctantly, as if revealing a family secret, ‘I believe he was accompanied by Ms Winkler. They eat here regularly.’

It turned out that Cal McBride had moved into a suite in the hotel just after he had been released from jail. The maitre d’ found one of the waiters who’d worked McBride’s table on Landing Day; the woman thought that Mr McBride was at the table most of the time, but said it was hard to be sure.

‘A lot of the guests were table-hopping. It was like one big party.’

None of the staff on the front desk remembered seeing McBride leave, and there weren’t any security cameras in the lobby. ‘We respect the privacy of our guests,’ the manager said.

Skip said to Vic, ‘I guess we could talk to this girlfriend, see what she has to say…’

‘If we do it now she’ll probably say she was with McBride all night.’

‘Yeah,’ Skip said, as if he’d already thought of that.

‘Better to wait, see if we have anything on McBride first. Then we can use that as leverage, threaten her with a perjury charge if she doesn’t tell the truth.’

They were sitting in the car, reviewing what they’d learned.

Skip said, ‘What it comes down to, it could be either of them. They were both in crowded places, lots of people coming and going, plenty of opportunities to slip out for an hour or so without being missed.’

‘Or it could be someone else. Someone who stole the ray gun after McBride went to jail.’

‘Can we get warrants to search McBride’s hotel suite and Drury’s house?’

‘Not with what we have so far. Even if we did, we don’t know what the thing looks like, and it might be anywhere. At home, at a place of business, in a safety-deposit box…But we do know it was at the murder scene,’ Vic said. ‘So our best bet is to find someone who was there. Someone who saw McBride or Drury or whoever else with the ray gun in their hand.’

‘We’re back to looking for David Parsons.’

‘There you go. You’ve put him on the watch list, but you should get out there and do the rounds yourself. Motels, rooming houses, hot-sheet crash pads. Maybe he rented or bought an RV from some Junktown dealer. We can work up a list of likely places and make a start tomorrow. As my grandma used to say, morning makes the world new, every time.’

‘Actually,’ Skip said, ‘I already have a list of motels. I pulled them out of the directory while I was phoning around hotels.’

‘And I suppose you want to check them out now.’

‘Strike while the iron’s hot and all that,’ Skip said.

They drove back to the UN building so that Vic could pick up a pool car and they split the list between them, Vic taking places on the west side of the city, Skip taking the east. Vic wasn’t keen on the footwork, but what the hell. Drury’s arrogance had got under his skin; he’d like nothing better, right now, than to find something that would put the son-of-a-bitch down. And it was kind of enjoyable to be doing some actual good old-fashioned police work. Driving from place to place, showing the photo of David Parsons to receptionists and desk clerks.

A clerk in a motel near the ring road, a young white guy with long hair, bad acne and a strong Newcastle accent, asked Vic if he remembered him; apparently Vic had arrested him six years ago for dealing shine.

‘But I’m straight now, Mr Gayle. Working hard.’

The guy had tremors and a pinned-back gaze. If he wasn’t doing shine, he was on something else. First rule of the murder police: everyone lies, all the time…

Vic checked out the big truck stop on the Idunn’s Valley road — no luck there, either — then drove a little way further out to one of his favourite restaurants. It was up on a ridge overlooking the playa and the road arrowing westward towards a distant prospect of hills. A Quonset hut housed the kitchen; there were tables under a canvas awning, a terraced vegetable garden stepping down the slope. A string of Boxbuilder ruins ran off along the top of the ridge, glowing in the soft sunlight.

There were Boxbuilder ruins on every one of the fifteen worlds, but no one knew anything about the species that had built them. Their appearance, their culture, where they had come from, where they had gone. It wasn’t even clear how old the ruins were: the cells were constructed from thin sheets of a grainy self-repairing polymer salted with nanotech. Best estimates suggested that the Boxbuilders had occupied the fifteen worlds between eighteen and twenty-two thousand years ago. And twenty thousand years before the Boxbuilders, another Elder Culture had left vast stretches of tombs. Cities of the dead. Some were occupied by eidolons coded in little stones embedded in the walls; some contained artefacts that had kick-started new technologies, including q-phones and computers as small as pinheads. Other Elder Cultures had constructed the so-called factories that sprawled across the forests and coastal waters of Yanos, reshaped mountains and seas, built huge edifices and labyrinths of tunnels, or left nothing more than traces of complex organics and polymers in geological layers.

All had been contacted by the Jackaroo, had accepted their gift of habitable worlds orbiting red dwarf stars scattered across the Milky Way, and had lived on those worlds for varying amounts of time and altered them in various ways before disappearing. No one knew what had happened to them. There were dozens of theories, and each was as valid as any other because none were supported by actual evidence and the Jackaroo refused to answer direct questions about their previous clients.

‘We are here to help,’ they liked to say.

And, ‘Each client finds its own path.’

They sometimes hinted that the Elder Cultures had transcended. That they had discovered something that had enabled them to evolve beyond the understanding of the Jackaroo. That the fifteen worlds were arenas that tested the suitability of intelligent species for inclusion in a Galactic Club so advanced that its activities weren’t detectable by those who were not yet fit for membership. Ideas that might have been lifted, like so many of the Jackaroo’s hints and teases, from science fiction and pre-First Contact speculations about extraterrestrial civilisations. It was just as likely, according to so-called experts, that previous occupants of the fifteen worlds had suffered culture shock and dwindled away, or had destroyed themselves by misusing technologies left by previous tenants, or had been assimilated by the Jackaroo, as the!Cha might have been. The!Cha said that they had never been clients of the Jackaroo, but as someone once said, quoting a line from a famous old scandal, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Perhaps that was the best humanity could hope for: to devolve into pets or hitchhiking commensals.

In Vic’s opinion, there was as yet no sign that humanity was going to change any time soon. People had come up and out, built cities, and begun to spread across the empty lands and explore the ruins, and they’d also brought all their old shit with them. A few had managed to reinvent themselves, but most hadn’t been able to escape what they already were. Accountants were accountants; estate agents were estate agents; drug dealers were drug dealers. Vic had been a raw constable in Birmingham when he’d won the emigration lottery, and here he was thirteen years later, a murder police unable to maintain any kind of long-term relationship. (‘Let’s face it,’ his ex had said when they’d met for a drink on the day their divorce papers went through, ‘neither of us are cut out for marriage.’ She had been trying to be kind, but it had still stung.) But even though he had long ago learned that reality fell far short of the ideal of justice, at least he still loved the job. On his good days, anyway. He wasn’t yet burned out. He still wanted to make things right by his dead, was still curious about people and this strange, old, vast and mostly empty planet.

The owner of the restaurant, Aarav Sreesanth, a fellow Brummie, hadn’t seen David Parsons, either. Aarav had come up on the eighth shuttle, was married with six kids, ran a small fleet of carts that sold partha and curry in the city, and in this little restaurant served the best damn food on the planet. He and his family had roofed over most of the cells of the adjacent Boxbuilder ruins, lived in one half and rented rooms in the other.

Vic worked his way through a plate of thalassery biriyani, chappatis, sambar, and deep-fried banana chips, watched a plainswalker stump past the long tumble of rocks where the ridge ran out. It was a big one, car-sized, the sail turbines that crested its shell flashing in the level sunlight as it headed into the playa. Just another alien in a dry red world like Mars of the old sci-fi imaginings — which was why it had been given one of Mars’s old names.

Mangala huddled so close to its small cool star that it should have become tidally locked, like Earth’s moon. One half facing the star, permanently lit and scorching hot; the other permanently dark and frozen solid. But an age ago, five million years according to magnetic traces frozen in rocks, back in the Pliocene on Earth, before Homo sapiens had turned up on the scene, someone or something had spun up the world. An unimaginable and vast engineering project. Now it rotated in 3:2 resonance, so that a theoretical observer on the surface of its star would see it turn once every two orbital revolutions. One 31-day year in light; the next in darkness. And in the five million years since it had been spun up, dozens of Elder Cultures had lived here and died out or transcended or whatever. Layer upon layer of habitation. Mystery upon mystery.

Vic flicked through his notes about the murder on his phone. The case was exactly twenty-four hours old. They knew who the victim was, who he’d come here with and where they’d been staying. But the dead guy’s friend was in the wind, and why they’d come to Mangala, who had sent them, who they’d gone to meet near the shuttle terminal, all of that was still unknown. He was pretty sure that both Danny Drury and Cal McBride were trying to hide something, but he couldn’t put either of them at the scene with the ray gun in their hands, he couldn’t figure out why they would be there, why they’d killed Redway and tried to kill, or maybe had killed, Parsons.

Most cases were either cracked quickly or went cold, their files growing fatter without yielding fresh revelations until at last they were copied into the vault, and the boxes of bloody clothing and DNA samples and all the rest were removed to the central store. Sometimes an old case was revived when new evidence turned up, or when a suspect in another case said something pertinent. Once, a woman had come into the squad room and asked to speak to a detective and confessed to the murder of a man who’d raped her five years before. But that was rare. Vic knew that if he and Skip didn’t turn up something soon, John Redway would die all over again, become no more than a number and name in the cold-case index.

He called the boy detective. Skip hadn’t had any luck either. ‘You know what really bugs me about this thing?’ he said. ‘We have two suspects, but we don’t have the first idea why Redway was killed.’

‘You probably heard that there are all kinds of questions you need to ask about a murder,’ Vic said. ‘Who did it? How did they do it? Why? What was the victim’s background and who did he know? Because most victims are killed by people they know. Man, there’s no end to it when you get started. But the most important question, the one you need to focus on, is the first. Who did it? Everything else can be used by the prosecutor to make the case, but the first thing you have to do is find the doer. And then get them in the interrogation room, and break them down.’

‘I do have a feeling about Drury,’ Skip said.

‘Arrogant son of a bitch, isn’t he? But not as tough as he likes to think he is. McBride, on the other hand, is old school all the way. You bring guys like him in, you hand them a photo of them standing over the corpse with a smoking gun in their hand, you ask them if they did it—’

‘And they deny it,’ Skip said.

‘And they say, “Get me my lawyer.” Drury, though, isn’t a street guy. And he definitely thinks he’s smarter than us. You can usually get guys like him to talk. They love to hear the sound of their own voice.’

‘He was happy to aim us at McBride, wasn’t he?’

‘There’s definitely no love lost between those two,’ Vic said.

‘It could be,’ Skip said, ‘that Drury killed Redway with a weapon McBride is known to have used because he wants to put the murder on McBride. He wants McBride out of the way, he can’t kill him because he works for McBride’s family, so he frames him. Then again, McBride has a beef against Drury, because of losing his business and house and all that.’

‘Like I said, there’s no end to speculation about the why and the wherefore. Best to stick to what you know, Investigator Williams.’

But Vic thought that Skip might be on to something. Both Drury and McBride were in the frame, but only one of them had that ray gun…

Skip said that he was going to check out the last few places on his list, then head back to the UN building and write up the interviews with Drury and McBride. ‘Will I see you there?’

‘Don’t wait up,’ Vic said. ‘I have one more call to make myself.’