Final Days

FIVE

Copernicus City Medical Centre, Luna, 20 January 2235

Saul had been gazing out at the distant cliff walls of Copernicus Crater, when he heard someone enter the observation room from behind him. The Earth hung low above the horizon, the lights of the city blotting out all but the brightest of stars, so that the planet seemed to float in a lightless void.

He reached down and gripped the right-hand wheel of his wheelchair, pushing back on it so that he turned just in time to see one of two men he didn’t recognize close the door, shutting out the constant bustle of the hospital corridor beyond.

Saul cleared his throat. ‘Can I help you?’

The shorter of the two had unkempt, sandy hair, while his companion was thin as a rail, his expression morose. The shorter one stepped up next to Saul and peered out through the window, while his companion eased one buttock on to a side table next to the door, and folded his arms. Both wore dark, conservative suits, while their UPs merely identified them as employees of the ASI.

The shorter man turned back from the window and glanced down at Saul with a smile. ‘Alec Donohue,’ he said, introducing himself. ‘And my friend here is Joshua Sanders,’ he added, nodding towards his companion.

‘Let me guess,’ Saul grunted. ‘Internal Affairs?’

‘We prefer ‘Public Standards Unit,’ Donohue corrected.

After four days in the hospital, Saul had begun to hope against the odds that Public Standards had somehow forgotten about him. He should have known better.

‘So,’ he asked with forced levity, ‘exactly how much trouble am I in?’p>

‘That depends,’ Donohue replied, and nodded towards Saul’s hands, folded in his lap. ‘How’re the grafts working out?’

‘Fine.’ Saul glanced down at the thick swathes of bandage covering his hands. ‘Had some cosmetic work, but they should be back to normal in the next couple of days.’

‘And the shoulder wound?’

Saul shrugged, and felt a sympathetic twinge in the upper part of his back. ‘Didn’t hit anything vital.’

‘Nice.’ Donohue nodded. ‘And, in response to your question, you’re in a shitload of trouble, my friend. One colleague of yours dead, a major undercover operation seriously compromised, not to mention a running gun battle in an economic development zone under foreign jurisdiction. That’s not even to mention the pharmaceutical horn of plenty we found in both yours and Jacob Maks’ bloodstreams. The pair of you practically had the contents of a fucking pharmacy chugging through your veins.’ Donohue leaned back against the window and shook his head, as if in sorrow. ‘All in all, one royal humdinger of a fuck-up.’

Saul stared at him with a venomous expression. ‘How about I throw you a stick, you run and fetch it?’

‘Easy,’ said Sanders from over by the door.

‘First up,’ said Saul, ‘the ice-pharm was out in the middle of a fucking ocean, well outside of anybody’s official jurisdiction.’ He realized with a mounting sense of doom that they must have found some way to recover Jacob’s body from the pharm, otherwise how could they possibly have known so much?

Donohue regarded him with an amused expression. ‘The standard rules of jurisdiction cease to apply when enough people start shooting at each other, at which point the corporations and government interests controlling the legal pharms seek to protect their interests. Coalition peacekeepers were called in to help keep the peace.’

‘I’m sure they were,’ Saul muttered.

‘There’s something I want you to take a look at,’ said Donohue, gesturing to the other agent. Sanders stood up and pulled a folder from inside his jacket, before stepping over. He handed it to Saul, who found it contained nothing more than a single sheet of charged paper.

‘What is this?’ Saul took the sheet out of the folder and regarded it with suspicion.

Sanders leaned down and tapped one corner of the sheet. Dense lines of single-spaced text materialized on its crisp white surface, and Saul recognized it as the incident report he had fled the day after waking up in a Copernican hospital ward.

‘Skip to the end,’ Donohue advised, as Sanders stepped back and out of the way. ‘There’s some additional material you might find of interest.’

Saul found a detailed analysis was tagged on to the end of his own report. It described a covert raid on the ice-pharm, following his escape. There were orbital satellite photos showing it as a misshapen white lump standing stark against the black of Kepler’s largest ocean. Video footage, recorded at extreme magnification, replayed his dash to the helicopter.

‘You were tailing me the whole way,’ Saul muttered, dropping the sheet back into his lap.

‘There were questions about Jacob Maks,’ said Sanders, from beside him, ‘and about the nature of his relationship with Lee Hsingyun. We had reckoned for a while that he might be on the take. Kepler’s black pharms are enormously lucrative, after all, and the Tian Di Hui finances a significant portion of their activities from the proceeds of the pharms they control. Maks wouldn’t be the first to decide that working for them was a better bet than holding out for an ASI pension.’

‘So you think he cut a deal with Hsingyun?’ Saul asked.

Donohue shrugged. ‘That’s what we thought at first. He was spending a lot more money than any field agent might be expected to have, so naturally that raised an immediate flag. You know how the ASI can’t afford to take chances when it comes to compromising our investigations.’

‘So you put him under surveillance.’

‘Both him and you, as a matter of fact. It wasn’t the first time you’d worked together.’

Saul glared at him. ‘And that was reason enough to spy on me, too?’

‘The whole thing was a debacle, Saul. It was a five-year investigation with Shih Hsiu-Chuan as the prize, except you let him get away. At the very least, that makes an internal investigation near-as-damn inevitable. And once that investigation shows how you went into the field with a fair proportion of the narcotics coming out of the ice-pharms stuffed back up your nose, it’s going to be the easiest thing in the world to make you a scapegoat for everything that’s gone wrong. If you’re very, very lucky, you’ll only lose your job.’

‘And it’s not like you’ve had an exemplary record before, either,’ Sanders cut in. ‘At least, not after Galileo. You were nearly kicked out.’

‘I had a breakdown. That’s hardly a secret,’ Saul replied through gritted teeth. ‘I pulled myself together.’

‘Except you haven’t been promoted since,’ Donohue pointed out. ‘You’re still stuck doing the same kind of shitty undercover work, ten years on. However, what the peacekeeper task force found when they got to the ice-pharm raises other, more serious questions.’

Saul caught sight of his own reflection superimposed over the lifeless lunar landscape, and realized how scared he looked. ‘Like?’

‘Jacob Maks was killed by a single shot from a pykrete gun,’ said Sanders, his grin bright and feral. ‘We took prints from that pistol, Saul. Your prints. Your DNA.’

Saul licked suddenly dry lips. ‘It’s more complicated than you think it is.’

‘I’ll bet,’ said Donohue. ‘Did you kill him, Saul?’

Saul felt a sudden flush of rage and waited until it passed. He fantasized about slamming Donohue’s head repeatedly against the floor, but he was so full of painkillers that his body felt like a sack of cotton hanging off his skeleton, leaving him far from capable of giving anyone a beating.

‘I had a gun to my head,’ he replied instead, his voice rasping. ‘They told me if I wanted to prove I really was who I said I was, I was going to have to kill him to prove it.’

‘You killed him to save yourself?’ asked Donohue.

‘No!’ Saul slammed the side of his wheelchair with one hand. ‘They were on to us. It was obvious Tanner wasn’t going to let either of us walk out alive. And Hsingyun . . . something about him bothered me from the moment I met him. He and Jacob acted like they were old friends, but I think Hsingyun had been on to him from the start.’

‘Go on,’ said Donohue.

‘The arbitration unit was bait for Hsiu-Chuan, but it was highly lucrative bait. There’s plenty of motivation, right there, for Hsingyun to string Jacob along until I turned up with the goods. That way he doesn’t just get hold of the arbitration unit, he gets himself closer to Hsiu-Chuan and the financiers behind the pharms. Maybe he thought he could get his own pharming operation out of it.’

‘Nice theory,’ said Sanders, ‘but you still haven’t answered the question. Did you kill Jacob?’

Saul let out a groan. ‘I was convinced the gun wasn’t loaded. I took a gamble they were trying to test us, that there weren’t any bullets in the damn thing. But they already knew exactly who we both were.’

Donohue shook his head. ‘The fact remains, all the evidence says you pulled the trigger, and that’s all any internal investigation would care about. In fact,’ he added, barely repressing a smirk, ‘it might actually have been a lot better for your career if you’d refused, and let them shoot you. No dishonourable discharge, and no possibility of a long jail sentence – and a funeral paid for by the ASI.’

Saul fought back tears of frustration. ‘Fuck you. If you’re going to hang me out to dry, then damn well get on with it.’

‘That isn’t why we’re here,’ said Donohue. ‘And that’ – he waved at the charged sheet still sitting on Sau’s lap – ‘is the only copy of your field report still in existence. All other copies have been deleted.’

Saul stared at him. ‘What exactly is going on?’

Donohue brushed invisible lint off his jacket. ‘Normally, as I say, there’d be an internal tribunal. A proper hearing. There might still be – but not if you don’t want it to.’

Saul thought hard. ‘Are you telling me you want to cover this up?’

Donohue’s smug expression once again made Saul want to drive a fist into his face. Public Standards seemed to attract individuals of such a reptilian nature that it was easier to imagine them lying on sun-baked stones, catching flies with their tongues, than engaging in any kind of normal human interaction.

‘If we open this up to a tribunal, the whole case goes on official records,’ said Donohue. ‘But if we make it look like none of it ever happened, we’ll want you to do something in return.’

Saul imagined Donohue’s mouth opening wide to reveal long rows of glistening fangs. ‘Go on.’

‘Your fuck-up gave us an excuse to send in that task force, and naturally we took an interest in any records we happened to come across.’

‘You found something?’

‘Something even better than Hsiu-Chuan,’ interrupted Sanders, picking up the thread. ‘We said earlier that we were watching Maks because we thought he might be selling information to the Tian Di Hui. Well, it looks like maybe he wasn’t the only one. So, in return for making this whole mess disappear, we want you to accept a temporary reassignment to another ASI task force.’

Saul settled back in his seat. ‘Why?’

‘Because someone in that task force is playing the same game. Public Standards can’t infiltrate the task force, because someone there will recognize who we are, and that means we need someone else who they’re much more likely to know and trust.’

Saul regarded them both with undisguised loathing. ‘So you want me to spy on them? And if I refuse?’

Donohue regarded him unpleasantly. ‘Think about how much you have to lose, Saul. The Galileo link will be re-established in just a couple of month’s time. Do you really want to be stuck inside a cell on charges, just when you have the chance to finally find out if your wife and kid are still alive?’

The man was right, of course, but it didn’t make Saul hate him any less.

‘All right,’ Saul slowly forced the words out, ‘what exactly is it you want me to do?’

‘The task force is by a man named Constantin Hanover. You know him?’

‘Of course.’ Saul nodded. ‘He ran the investigation into the collapse of the Copernicus–Galileo gate.’

Donohue’s eyes gleamed in the dim light of the observation room. ‘There’s a lot we can’t tell you, but you need to be aware that you’re on your own if the mole in Hanover’s team figures out you’re looking for him. There’s only so far we can protect you.’

Saul’s eyes drifted back towards the lunar landscape outside. ‘You’re asking me to make a hard choice, whatever the consequences.’

‘There’s something else you should know,’ said Donohue. ‘We found evidence that could link Hsiu-Chuan not only to the Tian Di Hui, but to the people directly responsible for sabotaging the Galileo gate. And if Hsiu-Chuan is involved, then you can bet the Sphere governments are in deep, as well.’

Saul glanced back at him, startled. ‘We can prove that?’

‘Not quite,’ said Donohue. ‘We need to talk to whoever it is on Hanover’s team that’s been dealing with Hsiu-Chuan, in order to make a solid case, but the point is this could be your chance to find out who’s responsible for Galileo. That’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?’

Saul nodded slowly. ‘What exactly did you find there on the pharm?’

‘A couple of days ago, a shipment came through the Florida Array from off-world, and got hijacked in broad daylight on its way to an airfield,’ said Sanders. ‘The hijackers managed to get so deep inside the Array’s security zone that they could only have done it with the help of someone on the inside. What we found suggests that the whole operation was planned by Hsiu-Chuan’s people, and that means the whole operation was done with Sphere backing.’

‘What kind of shipment?’

‘Does it matter?’ said Sanders. ‘Take a look at these.’

Saul’s contacts flashed him an alert that Sanders had sent him information. He reached out and touched an icon visible only to himself, then watched as the air rippled, a series of half a dozen photographs materializing around him.

‘It doesn’t look like much,’ he said, after studying them for a moment. ‘Just a big metal box with wheels. How did you swing my secondment with Hanover?’

‘One of his task force’s members got killed in the line of duty,’ Sanders replied. ‘A man named Mitchell Stone, to be exact.’

Saul opened and closed his mouth. ‘You’re shitting me. Mitchell?’

‘I know he was a friend of yours,rsquo; said the agent. ‘I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you.’

Saul had a sudden mental flash of the last time he’d seen Mitchell, years before. They’d been in a bar far up north, near Inuvik, close by the Jupiter platform’s CTC gate. They’d both moved on since then – Saul to police work, Mitchell to off-world security – but they had a shared history that bonded them. He remembered Mitchell, sober and drawn, at his brother’s funeral; then, months later, grinning in a field under a brilliant Arizona sun, tugging off his wing-suit and laughing as Saul clung to the soil as if it were a lover.

‘He was killed serving under Hanover?’

Sanders glanced at Donohue, who replied. ‘He was just coming to the end of a long-term secondment to a high-security research programme when he died, so, strictly speaking, no. He was due to rejoin Hanover’s task force in a couple of weeks. His death makes it easy enough to put you in his place as a temporary replacement. Frankly, the timing couldn’t be better. Hanover’s going to be taking his task force out to follow up the hijack, and we’re going to make sure you go with them. We’re betting that if someone on his team was involved in the snatch, they’re going to show themselves.’

‘Show themselves how?’

‘Put yourself in their shoes, what would you do?’

Saul thought about it. ‘Find any evidence of my involvement and do what I could to destroy it.’

Sanders stepped up close to him. ‘Find our mole, then, Saul,’ he said, ‘and there’s a chance we can figure out who’s responsible for losing Galileo.’