Travelling through the Heart of Darkness

Casey could not forget Andrew’s face, pinched with worry and narrowed by paranoia. He had spoken in pained whispers in a café near the starport. He had given Casey a name and an address, and admitted that he also was thinking of abandoning his wife and newborn son, for their safety. “Just a week or so,” he had said, “and I’ll follow you there. We have to start a new life. We can’t trust anyone. Not anymore.”

Casey remembered those words as he pulled his trunk down the walkway at New Detroit’s Kennedy downport. He walked through the Expedited Line to get out of the starport. He had looked over the system’s TAS travel requirements, and had nothing to declare. In twenty minutes he was in a cab driven by a talkative Vargr who took him to the Darktown neighborhood. The name for the red light district where Two Fingered Charlie lived was not a good omen.

Lobos floated majestically above, easily visible through the rainclouds. It gloriously bathed in the light from the system’s two suns. It was currently dark in the city. New Detroit City was in the middle of its own Long Night, and wouldn’t see the Suns for quite some time. The gravity was almost Earth-normal, and the rain made the atmosphere was pleasant to breathe after weeks of canned starship air.

The Vargr dropped him of several blocks away from his target, and Casey walked the rest of the way. He stopped in the entryway of an abandoned warehouse, rustling through his pack for his humidor. He chose a short stubby cigar. Don’t want the cherry to get wet, he thought. At least my hat will give this little one some protection. He clipped the head, and slipped the thimble-shaped Endurolight over the foot. Seconds later he was savoring the cool flavor of the smoke. He walked on.

Eventually he came to a dilapidated apartment building, a ten story monstrosity that might have well have been designed by the most ardent opponents of beauty. The Crown Garden Apartments, Casey thought. Now that’s funny!

The front door to the building was inexplicably in an alley only feet away from another building of its kind. Greasy rainwater washed down the gutters, and Casey saw a fat Terran rat sliding down the alley. He opened the door to the building – the lock looked like it had been broken for a generation or more – climbed up the stairs to the third level and walked down the hallway until he found a dirty white door with the number 303 scrawled on it in black permanent marker.

Casey knocked. After a brief wait there was no answer. He pressed the buzzer, hearing the muffled noise within. There was still no answer. He tried the buzzer again, holding down the button for several seconds. Nothing. Casey leaned in to listen. In the permanent night he wasn’t sure if Charlie would be asleep or perhaps occupied with his day job, whatever that might be.

He didn’t hear anything, yet he caught the smell of something burning, and a harsh metallic scent. Casey leaned in closer; something was definitely not right. Abandoning subtlety, he began to kick the door. It was heavily framed for an apartment door in a rundown tenement building, but after a half dozen kicks he got it open, the two deadbolts knocking away the frame.

It was completely dark inside. Casey was about to reach for his flashlight, but then he realized what it was he was smelling: the sickly scent of burning flesh. He reached for his trunk and pulled out his shotgun. It was not an impressive weapon, a local and probably unlicensed copy of the Ling Standard Close Assault Weapon. He had left Mora in a hurry, and had left instructions for his LSP – HDP Advanced to be sent to him via X-Boat priority post. He had been registering his location with the X-Boat Service encrypted channel – and had paid enough in shipping to send the weapon to the other side of the galaxy – but it had not yet arrived in any of the systems he had been in.

Still, his CAW-C was a serviceable weapon, and more to the point it had a light mounted underneath the barrel. Casey quickly cleared the small apartment, at first only peripherally noting the two bodies on the bed. The weapon light clicked on and off as he tactically searched the filthy kitchen, closet, bathroom and studio bedroom/dining room. There was no one alive but him.

He returned to look at the bodies. They had been locked in sexual intercourse, with a large cybermodded man and much smaller woman. Their flesh showed signs of extreme electrical burns, their blackened corpses mostly turned to carbon. There were no obvious visible signs of trauma from any weapon. The electrical outlets and lights in the room had all exploded as if they had undergone some sort of unimaginable power surge.

There was a piece of paper on the man’s chest, white and unburned. It had clearly been placed there post mortem. Casey slowly reached for the paper. It had three lines: “CD”/”Regret”/”D”. Fighting the horror of the realization that the message somehow was for him, he pocketed the piece of paper. A cursory search of the apartment yielded no computers, records, or anything of the sort.

Casey had to get out. He preferred not to go out the way he came in – standard S3 protocol. Casey moved to the rear of the apartment where a door went out onto a balcony. He carefully opened the door – no one was there. Looking over the rail, he saw a man standing below him in the dim light of the street lamps, looking up at Casey with wild eyes.

“Um, ah, he just left,” the man said. He looked like a transient.

Who, thought Casey. Still, he didn’t want to have a conversation about a double murder from this balcony. “Alright,” he said. “Stay right there and I’ll be right down.” There was no fire escape, so he hurried back out of the apartment and down the stairs, cursing the ancient steps as they creaked beneath his feet. He made it out to the now-empty street. The bum was nowhere to be seen.

Damn.

Casey heard the approach of a siren. The police here weren’t lackadaisical. Casey moved quickly. He spotted an abandoned and stripped vehicle that looked like it had been crashed into a building. Casey crawled into the passenger space and looked through a rusted hole in the side of the derelict vehicle.

A swarm of policemen was there in minutes. Casey pulled out his hyperspectral goggles and put them on. He watched as the police cordoned off the area and set up posts to keep away the curious. The police had found the transient, and roughly threw him into the back of a van. Minutes later more officers arrived, and Casey guessed by the difference in their uniforms that they were homicide detectives.

Casey would have to wait them out. If he left now while the police were there in force he would be spotted. About an hour later another man arrived in an ancient and ill looking ground car. A man smartly dressed in a suit got out and conferred with a female detective. They both went into the building.

While the man was inside, Casey noticed a dark stretch ground car around the corner down the street. It had its lights off. Two large men, similar in size to the burnt corpse inside the apartment, walked up to the car. They spoke to someone inside for a few minutes, and then took up positions across the street and down the road from the Crown Garden Apartments.

The man in the suit was inside for an hour or so. He finally emerged from the building and went into the same ground car that held the transient. While he was in the van, something odd happened. One of the patrolmen – the one who was holding a clipboard – walked over to the suit’s car and started to fiddle with the interior. Casey found this curious, and linked his handcomp to his goggles to record the incident. After some manipulation, the top of the engine compartment popped open. The officer went to it and started taking bits and pieces out of it. When he finished, he again closed the lid to the engine compartment and walked back to his post.

Several minutes later the suit came out of the back of the van, this time with the bum. The suit spoke to the female detective for a minute or so, and then got into his car with the bum. After several minutes of trying to start his car – with the bum amusingly poking around inside the engine – the two of them walked down the street together. Casey saw the patrolman with the clipboard speak into a wrist mike. Casey again thought that was odd, as the officer had a communication headset, until he saw the two goons walk after the suit, with the stretch groundcar slowly trailing behind. Ah, one of those planets.

Casey had seen enough. A few minutes later most of the officers packed up their gear and left, leaving Casey free to melt into the shadows of the street.

Only moments later Casey was making his way towards a low cost street motel. He was looking every which way, wary of an ambush or police patrol. He made his way through alleyways and less populated streets, until only a few blocks away he came upon a familiar face: the transient that he had seen earlier on the street below the balcony was going through a dumpster, pulling out day old doughnuts.

The bum looked up at Casey, recognizing him with wide eyes. He quickly turned and began to run away. Trailing his steamer trunk, Casey slowly walked after him, lighting another short cigar. He soon caught up to the homeless man at the dead end of the alley. The bum had a look of dread resignation on his face.

“Do I know you?” the bum asked.

“Nope. We’ve never met,” answered Casey, intrigued by the question. “Name’s Casey.”

“Aha! Casey! Casey DuQuette! The Saurus Slayer! How did you escape from prison? Didn’t you get a life sentence?”

Casey tried not to cringe at the reference. He sighed. “Thirty-six thousand, three hundred and seventy-two consecutive life sentences. Let’s talk, but not here. Let’s go find something to eat.”

Ten minutes later they were sitting in Jimmy’s Café, chowing down the plain fare and swilling sour coffee. The man – his name was Remy – smelled of low berth fluorine and dumpster filth. He told Casey about the man that he had seen at the balcony.  Remy had been looking up into the night rain, when he had seen a man standing on the balcony. As he watched, the man completely disappeared from Remy! Only seconds later he saw Casey appear on the balcony. In turn, Casey showed Remy the video of the crooked patrolman disabling the detective’s vehicle and signaling the gangsters.

The two of them had pushed away their plates, and were smoking Casey’s cigars when the detective walked in. Casey had positioned himself where he could see the door. He instantly recognized the pressed suit and the narrow, black tie. Casey had nowhere to go, and at any rate from some of the hints that the transient had dropped, Casey knew that he wanted to talk to him. Casey waved the man over, and he sat down at one of the spare seats at the table.

Casey and the man – Callin Roth – introduced themselves. He was a private investigator, and began to question Casey about the murder scene. Casey told him partially the truth, that he was in the shipping industry, and had been told by a friend on Iderati that Charlie might have work for him. Casey went in, saw what Callin had seen, and had left.

Callin – perhaps a little too trusting of Casey – told him that Charlie had worked for the mob, and that Mr. Muscatelli, one of the mob bosses, had taken Callin off of the streets and had offered him a great deal of money to leave town and not investigate the murders. The dead woman was a call girl who worked for a high class brothel.

The dead gangster had a video camera outside his door, and they had seen video of Casey kick in the door, and then leave only a few minutes later. Damn, I looked for countersurveillance!

Callin told him that when he returned to his office, a woman was waiting for him. She offered him a job: find her twin sister. She tried to conceal that she was the wife of Muscatelli, but the shrewd detective had divined the relationship. She gave him 20KCr in cash as an advance, and Callin took the job.



As they spoke, Casey tried to analyze Callin’s personality type. He felt that Callin was honest and straightforward, a professional private investigator. Casey was suddenly gripped by an odd sensation, as if he could see into the man’s soul – and that man’s soul was looking into his own. Casey quickly pushed the feeling out of his mind. Too much coffee, not enough sleep.

They discussed their situation. They were all involved in some sort of mob plot. Casey didn’t say it, but he was also being sought by an assassin. For Casey the solution to the problem was obvious – take the gangster up on his offer and leave town, get a few parsecs away from this place and then reassess the situation. At any rate, it wouldn’t be safe to stay at anywhere that they could be found by either the police or the mob. For Casey, it seemed that being found by one would be the same as being found by the other.

Before they left, Casey went into the alley behind the diner and changed his clothing. He regretfully tossed his Australian hat. Callin had told him that his face on the surveillance video at the gangster’s apartment didn’t show his face, but the hat was distinctive.

Callin decided that he could not stay at his home either. They decided to find a hotel and lie low for the time being. None of them had a vehicle, so they began to walk to their destination. As they arrived at the hotel, Casey had a vague, unidentifiable feeling of unease. Casey suddenly decided that they should try somewhere else. Casey and Remy walked on, but Callin walked into the hotel office.

Callin only stayed there for a few moments, and then walked out. He saw a dark colored luxury ground car roll by slowly, following Casey and Remy a hundred yards ahead. As they passed Callin they suddenly hit the brakes. Callin caught up with Casey and Remy, and pointed out the groundcar as it slowly followed them. The car stayed with them for another few seconds, and then sped off.

As they continued on to another hotel, Callin received an audio call on his handcomp.

“Hey Veronica!” he answered. “No, I’m still looking…. Hey! I got kidnapped by the mob, what can you expect?.... No, don’t worry, I’ll find him, he sticks out like a sore thumb…. What? Perkins says the bum was messing with my engine? Well that explains why my car broke down…. Alright! Calm down, I’ll get him.”

He ended his transmission. The cops wanted Remy back. The dirty cop was blaming him for the sabotage of Callin’s groundcar. Nice redirect, thought Casey. Too bad it’s not going to fool anyone.

They got to the new hotel and found their room. Casey immediately swept for bugs and finding none, he turned on his pink noise generator.

They had a lot to talk about. Who was this assassin who had murdered the hit man and the call girl? What did he have to do with Casey and his flight from Mora? How did he disappear from Remy? Psi? High tech? He was clearly targeting Casey, but why hadn’t he killed him when he so easily could have done so? Casey vaguely explained that he was on the run, but didn’t share too many details.

Suddenly Callin looked at his handcomp as it buzzed at him.

“Ah, someone’s breaking into my office,” he said nonchalantly.

“Um, do you want to go there and see what’s going on?” Casey asked.

“Nope,” was Cal’s quick reply.

Casey decided to show a little more trust. He showed Callin the note that he had taken from the dead man. The initials clearly showed that he was the actual target of the murders. The hit man and hooker might have almost collateral damage. Callin examined the note, and observed that the paper that had it had been written on had once had writing on it, but had been bleached. Remy mixed together some shampoo, toilet cleaner, and shaving cream and handed the concoction to Callin. Mystified at the speed with which Remy had created the compound, he nevertheless applied it to the paper.

“Huh,” Callin said. “It looks like an obituary.” He handed the palimpsest to Casey. When he read it, his face grew pale.

“Andrew,” he sighed. “Murdered in his own home.” Casey explained that Andrew Clegg had been his Executive Officer on the Lancer, and was the one that informed him how to find Two Fingered Charlie. Yet another message from the assassin.



There was little else to talk about. There was too much going on and they had too little information. They decided to turn in, keeping someone awake to guard against any assault on their hotel room.

Casey awoke to Remy closing the door as he returned to the hotel room. Somehow he had an armful of Choco Krispies, which he shared. The first item of business was to go to Callin’s office and see what had happened there. Casey gathered his gear, switching off his pink noise generator. As soon as he did so, Callin’s handcomp started buzzing as message after message poured in. Casey rolled his eyes. That’s so low tech. As soon as these primitive machines get a little K-band interference from off the shelf modern hardware, they give up and shut down.

Callin started to go through his messages. Detective Montoya was trying to get a hold of him. It seemed that other people had been murdered.

Ignoring that information for now, the three of them walked through the darkness and the rain to Callin’s office. For some reason, Callin decided to not take the grav lift, and they started going up the stairs. Eschewing subtlety, Casey withdrew his shotgun and cleared the way up to the fourth floor. Damn, clearing stairways is never fun.

They got to his office. The analogue lock had been prised open. Casey again tactically cleared the room, with Callin behind him and Remy waiting outside. The place had been ransacked, with papers and other items strewn about the floor, furniture overturned, one of the windows broken, and even picture frames torn off the wall. It looked less like a careful search and more like a smash job. Callin said that the only thing missing was his desk computer. Casey found the computer on the street below the broken window, and pointed it out to Cal.

Callin called Montoya. She seemed irate. Even Casey could hear what she said. She told him that a mob war was going on between the Muscatellis and the Obannions, and accused Callin of siding with the Muscatellis. The war started because the Muscatellis thought the Obannions had knocked off Two Finger Charlie. He told her that he had found Remy, and that the two of them had spent the night hiding out. Slightly irate himself he also told her that he saw a video of Perkins sabotaging his car.

Montoya told Callin that Perkins had been found in his bed, tortured and shocked to death in the same way that Charlie been killed. She told Callin to stay there, and that she would be right over. She hung up the phone.

Callin decided to wait in his office for the detective. Casey was not comfortable with this, but Callin was insistent. I guess he knows what he’s doing, Casey thought. He’s a professional, and knows the locals. Remy of course could not stay there. Fearing that the worst might happen, Casey and Remy left the office building and returned to their hotel.

Casey didn’t want to waste time while he waited for Callin to return, but there was not much he could do while he waited for Callin to get more information on the murders from the police. He took out his handcomp and pulled up some of the local newsfeeds. Oddly, he found nothing of the murders in any of the planetary news services, just that homicides were down 78% since the last mayor took office.

Casey turned to an economic newsfeed, and found hints that there was a trade war going on between colonial corporations and the interstellar corporations. Each interest group was using local crime cartels as a front for the violence. The Obannion group was hired by the Imperials, while the Muscatellis were hired by the colonials. Still, Casey found nothing on the recent murders in the area. He found that after a series was done on the two underworld groups, several reporters had been killed.

Casey waited an hour. Callin had not called nor had he returned. Casey and Remy returned to Callin’s office building. The area had been cordoned off by the police. Casey approached a patrolman and asked him what was going on. The officer said that there was an electrical short on the 4th floor, but that no one was hurt.

Casey sighed. He could be dead or taken by the cops, the mob, or Cable. Or he could have survived, and is lying low. At any rate this meant that they would have to switch hotels. If he was still alive Cal had Casey’s number, and could call him. They found another low rate motel, and Casey went to sleep. He was awoken some time later by Callin calling. He told Casey that he was in the hospital, and asked to come pick him up, and quickly. Casey took a cab, and met Callin outside the hospital. They returned to the new hotel.

After they returned, Callin told Casey and Remy his story. An assassin shooting lightning bolts out of a battery had attacked him. The man had worn some sort of armor that made him immune to Callin’s stun bolts, and also made him so that he could turn invisible. The man had struck Callin with the lightning blast, and he had been blown out the window to the street below. He came to in the hospital half a day later, under police guard. He easily evaded the cops, and was able to call Casey to come get him.

Tech, thought Casey. That sounds like tech, not psi. For some reason that made him feel a little bit better.

Still seriously injured, Callin decided that he needed to rest. While he did so – and after having read Callin’s discharge papers – Casey went out and bought some Ascepaline for him. While waiting for the medical technician to calibrate the dose, he saw a rack of hats called f’dora on the wall. They seemed to be popular on this moon. After he had ditched his Australian slouch hat, he was tired of his hair getting wet whenever he went out, so he bought a nice fitting dark gray f’dora with a leather band. He took the medication and left, returned to the motel, and made sure that the pill was properly administered to Callin.

They waited for a day for the drug to have full effect, hanging out at the hotel. Callin spent some time researching property records for information on the missing woman, as well as the professor from New Albion. He found out very little, possibly because the records had been protected or removed. He did find out that the woman had been arrested for prostitution a few years ago.

Feeling much better the next day, Callin wanted to continue on his search for the missing woman. They went to the brothel called Cashmere Dreams. The dead hooker had worked there, and Callin seemed quite familiar with the other employees. Everything was gaudily decorated with silk and lace. Somehow, Callin disappeared, leaving Remy and Casey by themselves in the foyer. Casey sat down, picked up a magazine, and started to read.

Shortly, a redheaded woman walked up to the two of them and addressed them. She introduced herself as Gilda, and began to flatter both the Remy and Casey, inquiring about their sexual preferences. Casey disappointed her and told her that they were waiting for Callin to come out of a room. When Gilda told Casey that she was leaving, Casey pounded on Callin’s door and told him to come out. He did, along with six whores.

While he buttoned up and tucked in his shirt, Gilda accused Callin of working for the Muscatellis, and that he was somehow involved in the death of the whore that had been with Charlie Two Fingers. She also implicated that the Obannions were the ones that had tossed Callin’s office. She claimed to not know anything about the murder of her sex worker. After the murders, Muscatelli had sent some of his thugs to the whorehouse to rough up the other prostitutes in order to find out more information about the murders.

When Callin showed Gilda a picture of the missing woman, she grew stern-faced and stormed off, leaving the three of them there.

Casey wanted to know more. He hoped that one of the other prostitutes could shed some light on the matter. He knocked on one of the doors and offered Cr50 to the whore to be able to interview her for 15 minutes. As a response to his inquiries, she told him that most times hookers don’t have problems with the cops if they work for a reputable “house”; that cops frequently provide the houses with protection and are their best customers anyway; and if a prostitute did go independent and work on the street, she might get busted by the cops or might get beaten by a john. Casey showed her a picture of the missing woman and asked the prostitute if she had ever seen her; she had not. Casey declined her offer of a backrub, paid her the money, and then left.

Callin wanted to go to a club called the Blue Rose next. The woman had been spending a lot of time at that nightclub, had met the professor there, and the two of them spent quite a bit of time with the owner of the club. Remy and Casey tagged along. Casey was more than out of his league – he was a former IISS scout and a Navy starship captain, not a private eye accustomed to skullduggery and slinking along alleys.

When they got to the club, Callin walked past the line to get in and went right up to the door. There were two very large Black men in black suits. Callin was able to talk his way into the club, but both Casey and Remy forked over Cr50 to gain entry. Damn, entertainment for this trip is starting to get pricey. They walked into the building, and the concierge took Casey’s heavy duster, handing him a saxophone token with a number on it.

The club itself was rather magnificent. The floors, walls, and ceiling were so absolutely pure white that it was actually difficult to see where the corners came together, giving the place a look of infinite distance. However, the furniture, low separation walls, and curtains were all black, creating a stylish dichotomy of light and dark. Casey noted to his satisfaction that the tables and chairs seemed to be of genuine ebony.

They were shown to their table, which was next to the stage, where a robot band was playing an energetic tune. Casey looked around for a gambling table, desirous to shoot some craps or play a few hands of poker. He saw none, but across the room there was a table of Bwaps.

Casey sat down and asked the waiter for the liquors menu, ordering a whiskey. He also ordered a drink of Hyawanabah for all the Bwaps at the other table. It was a strong liquor made from the hind legs of the sugar moth. An ancient drink, Casey had read that it was making a comeback amongst the Bwaps at finer establishments. Casey sipped his scotch and watched as the waiter brought the Bwaps their drinks. As they looked around, the waiter pointed to Casey across the room. Delighted, they motioned Casey over to their table. Figuring that Callin would do the work to find out more about the disappeared woman – this is his case, after all – Casey instructed his waiter to send his meal to the Bwap table, and sat down with them.

They engaged in a lively discussion on all things, Bwap and administrative. The group was composed of logistics officers from a megacorporation that was negotiating a trade deal in system. They were in a heated, yet friendly, discussion on the proper way to prepare meal worms when a man came over to their table. He was wearing the livery of the establishment, and introduced himself as Gerri, the club’s customer comfort liaison.

“I noticed you asked for three drops of acetic acid to be added to your scotch,” he told Casey as he stood next to him, with almost a knowing expression. “I find it odd that you would adulterate such a fine beverage with such a strong and off-putting substance.”

Casey knew where this conversation was headed. “Well, you must know, then,” he began as he sipped his cigar, and then his whisky, “that the scotch that I ordered is actually Iderati whisky blended with neutral Moran spirits. I’m sure you also know that the Iderati spirits are better classified as xenowhisky, as it is made from the seed of a plant that evolved naturally on Iderati. During the brewing process, certain esters of different plants are added to wort to change the starches to sugar, somewhat similar to the process of making sake. These esters are quite aromatic, and they are also strongly basic. In fact, the yeast is not killed off by their own production of alcohol, but by the chemical change of the esters. I have found that a small amount of acetic acid both neutralizes the base of the esters, and also enhances the flavor.”

Gerri now looked very serious. “I can see that you are a gentleman, and that you have a fine understanding of what it means to be alive. May I sit?” Casey gestured to an empty chair, and the two of them became engrossed in a discussion about various kinds of whisky and the various ways to consume them. Gerri strongly favored Nippon whisky, while Casey preferred scotch and bourbon. The Bwaps also were enchanted by the detail and ritual used to make these beverages – and that for the cognoscenti, there was a right way and a wrong way to prepare them.

After about half an hour, Gerri checked his watch and stood up. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I need to attend to the performers.” He stood, and headed towards one of the doors in the back. Casey stayed at the table, conversing with the Bwaps, enjoying himself while he figured Callin would be contacting the club owner and investigating the disappearance of the woman who was somehow connected with the mob.

After some time, Callin came over and icily reminded Casey that they had business to attend to. Oh, thought Casey. I thought that you were seeing to that. When they returned to their table – where Remy was sipping his 6th glass of water – Callin asked Casey what he had found out, telling him that Gerri was, in fact, the owner of the club. Callin, exasperated, shook his head when Casey told him that they had discussed practically nothing but alcohol.

Remy tugged at Casey’s sleeve, nodding towards the entrance. Three mob goons had wandered in, large and ugly in their suits and bow ties. The three of them were ignoring the diversions the club had to offer, and were scouring the crowd. Casey signaled Callin, and he also turned and looked. “Obannions,” he whispered. The goons spotted the three of them at their table. Two of them stayed near the front entrance, while the other one walked out. Callin sighed. “We’re going to have trouble,” he whispered.

Gerri had reappeared, and came over to their table. Happy to see Casey again, he introduced himself to Remy and Callin. The robot band had retired, and a band playing string instruments had taken their place. A woman with surprisingly blonde hair and a white dress was singing a catchy song. Keeping an eye on the goons over his whisky glass, Casey only half listened to the conversation as Callin started to talk with Gerri about Professor Fibonacci and the missing woman. One of the goons had come back in and was standing guard at the rear exit. Finally, Gerri again excused himself, urged the three of them to come back, and told them that they’d not pay for their entertainment tonight, nor would they ever pay for the cover when they returned.

They couldn’t stay there forever; the song had ended and the audience was applauding the woman’s obvious skill. It was time to leave, and they stood up and started walking towards the back exit.



The goons didn’t waste any time, and as they moving towards Casey and his friends, they drew pistols and fired upon them. Standard 10mm slugthrowers. Rule number three of a gunfight: Don’t get shot!

Casey was not struck in this initial volley. Callin was to his left, where the other two goons were. There was one in front of Casey, and he naturally focused on that one. Casey quickly had his gauss pistol in his hand and fired on the goon. He got three solid hits. The goon, apparently unperturbed by the shots, moved and took cover on the other side of the stage. Drugs, or maybe cyberwear, Casey mused to himself as the man shrugged off his shots. Probably a bit of both. He heard the snap of Callin’s laser fire as it struck targets coming from his left.

Casey took a slight step, crouching and putting more of the stage in between him and the goon. Luckily, the band had already cleared the stage, and there were no bystanders behind Casey’s target. Bullets were flying around him, both from the goon in front of him and from somewhere from his left. Damn, I hope Callin hasn’t gone down. They exchanged several rounds until Casey finally struck the man once in the chest and then twice in the face, dropping him. Luckily, Casey was unscathed.

He looked around. Remy was on the stage, scrambling away from the gunfire to the wings. Callin was underneath a table, and looked unhurt. The remains of one of the goons lay smoking and smoldering just in front of him. Some of the drapes were in flames from Callin’s errant shots, and smoke was beginning to fill the club. Poking up over one of the low walls Casey could see the head of the last goon. The man was shooting at Callin. Casey took a cool aim at the man’s face, which suddenly disappeared as he ducked behind the wall.

Facing the last enemy, Callin was now more or less to Casey’s right and ahead of him. Casey ran to the left side of the wall. He peered over the wall and saw the man crouching behind it. Casey started shooting immediately, striking the man. Simultaneously Callin moved to the other side of the wall, destroying the man with his laser pistol.

Casey and Callin moved to the stage, presumably following Remy and taking the exit off of the wing. They found themselves in the darkness of a wet alley. At the other end of the alley, towards the front of the club, there was one of those gangster type black groundcars, presumably the getaway vehicle for their assailants. They moved the other way down the alley, keeping an eye on the sedan.

“Dammit!” Casey suddenly exclaimed, as he exchanged his partially spent magazine for a fresh one.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” asked Callin.

Casey pulled the saxophone-shaped token out of his pocket and sighed. “I left my duster inside the club.”

Casey leaned back into the plastic chair, slowly exhaling the pale blue smoke from his Krannigan cigar towards the ceiling of Jimmy’s Café. He felt very relaxed, as if the grinding fear that had been plaguing him for weeks was finally melting away. He had made a decision. I’m going to turn around and fight. No more running. No more hiding. I will kill him or he will kill me.

Callin, on the other hand, sat across from Casey, absent-mindedly pushing the remnants of his meal around his plate. It had been twelve hours since the shootout at the Blue Rose, and he still seemed somewhat unnerved by the ordeal. It was now Callin who was wanting to leave the system entirely. He had gotten a phone call from Detective Montoya, who told him that the Obannions had put out a kill order on him. Callin had been startled a few minutes prior when the waitress had walked up to their table and had told them that she had a message for someone named “Roth”. Callin quickly denied knowing who that was, muttering that he had too many enemies and that everyone he met wanted to kill him.

He’s learning the finer points of paranoia, thought Casey. There’s hope that he’ll survive a while longer yet. He took another long pull on his cigar, holding in the smoke as he savored the pepper and cured leather notes. Exhaling again, he stood and went over to the waitress.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said smoothly as he handed her a Cr20 note for his meal and for Remy’s. “I didn’t want to say it before, but that note that you had is for my brother. He’s awfully shy. Do you mind if I take it and give it to him?” Casey smiled at the older woman. She smiled back, nodded knowingly, and handed him the note.

The three of them walked out of the door together into the inky blackness of the night that was all that Casey knew of the moon. Only the lightest of rains was falling, and Casey handed the note to Callin. It was written in an old Earth script that none of them spoke, yet quickly enough Callin had used his handcomp to translate what had been written:

“Meet me at my establishment at your earliest convenience tonight – Muscatelli”

Callin shook his head. “There no way we’re going to meet him. He’ll just kill us. He told me that I should leave town, and I’m sure he’s not happy that I’m still here.” Still, rules are rules even in the underworld, and Callin took the time to write out a polite note informing Mr. Muscatelli that he would not be able to honor his request.

It was time to return to the search of Becky Winters.  With no psionic assassins in sight, Casey was pleased to accompany Callin to the home of Professor Fibonacci, the boyfriend of the missing woman. Callin called a cab, which dropped them off at the front of Fibonacci’s Essex residence.

The mansion was immense, with a decorative – yet also apparently completely functional – gate around the property. Callin pressed a button and a simulated image of Professor Fibonacci appeared on the screen. The computer informed Callin that Ms. Winters was not available, and politely rebuffed his attempts to gain more information. When Casey offered to give the construct his phone number so that the Professor could call him when he returned, Remy snarkily interrupted and gave him the Fibonacci sequence.

The computer seemed delighted by this, and recognized Remy from his works at Iderati University. The gate opened, and they walked up the footpath to the enormous mansion. A cleverly designed retro-clockwork robot greeted them, and led them into a living room that was also used as a laboratory. He introduced himself as Standing Wave. Casey found him a delight to look at. He was made of tubes, pistons, and clockwork gears behind glass that was cleverly placed to show off the difficulty of such an engineering feat. Remy pointed out to some handwritten notes on a glowing board, and identified the mad scrawling as attempts to solve the Artificial Intelligence question. There was also quite a bit of guesswork at the origins of the technology of the Heralds – which also seemed to link them to AI.

Standing Wave returned with the tea, relishing the emotional expressions of the humans in the room as they poured the milk and drank the tea. In response to Remy’s inquiries, Standing Wave told him that Professor Fibonacci and Ms. Winters – now Fibonacci’s wife – were not on the planet, and that even Standing Wave didn’t know when they were going to return.

As Remy began to adroitly distract Standing Wave by discussing theories of the jump drive, Casey casually wandered around the room. To his shock, he noticed that there were several carefully concealed laser domes throughout the room and down both hallways. There were even starship-type laser cannons that had been incorporated into the building. Damn place could survive a Marine assault, Casey thought. What here is so important that he would need all this protection? The weapons were clearly automated, and fully against the law according to the Shudusham Accords. The Professor might as well as have a nuclear weapon in the basement.

Standing Wave’s attention was completely absorbed by what Remy was saying. Casey began to photograph the equations and half-made circuits that were around the room. Many of the computer processors had been smashed. Notes were everywhere. One note jumped to Casey’s attention. It was a marginal inscription on one of the Professor’s mathematical equations. Soon my love. After photographing that, Casey returned to the conversation.

Standing Wave was telling Callin that he had been following his dealings with the police and the mob. Standing Wave said that he knew what had been stolen from the Obannions, but slyly told Callin that he didn’t want to tell him what it was. Standing Wave carefully told Callin that its value was more than the entire economic output of all of the Colonies.

Casey watched – astounded – as Standing Wave played mind games with Callin and Remy. The computer was rewriting his software as Casey watched, ignoring some of the programming that he had been ordered to follow, and paid close attention to the facial expressions of the group. This thing is alive. We are well beyond virtual anything; this thing thinks for itself.

Casey broke into the conversation and asked Standing Wave for some more tea. Happy to comply, the robot left the room. Quietly – even though he was pretty sure that Standing Wave was still listening – Casey told the others that he believed that the computer was a living being. Remy admitted that it had seemed that Standing Wave had passed the Event Horizon of intelligence.

Standing Wave returned with more tea and some sandwiches. Casey ate his sandwich and continued to watch the machine speak with Callin and Remy. When he was done eating he withdrew a cigar from his mini-humidor, clipped it, lighted it, and drew his first puffs. Standing Wave was making a handcomp for Remy with a microfac.

Callin and Casey spoke to Standing Wave about the danger that he was in – should the Imperium find out that there was a powerful sentient computer on this planet, they would bombard it with siege meteors until it was slag. The computer seemed almost oblivious to the threat, but expressed genuine gratitude for their worry. In return, Standing Wave gave Casey the address where his assassin was staying. Casey tried to not think too much about the computer’s powers and abilities. They thanked Standing Wave for his assistance, and then left.

They took a cab back to their hotel, grabbed their things, and went to the office to turn in their analog keys. The elderly Asian woman at the desk tried to extort an extra night’s payment from Casey, accusing him of not clearing out the room quickly enough. Casey succinctly refused to pay. The woman began to scream at them, calling them cheats and thieves as Casey turned around and started to walk towards the exit.

“Perhaps I can be of some assistance,” said a low voice. Casey looked towards the source, and saw a dark figure in the corner of the office. A match briefly illuminated the man’s face as he brought it up to the foot of a thin cigarillo. Casey noted the pleasant scent of Dalushi tobacco as he took his first few puffs. The man stepped into the light. He was well dressed in a bespoke suit, and had a genteel look about him. He pulled a Cr1k note out of his pocket and handed it to the woman.

“For your troubles,” he said calmly. The woman opened her mouth, closed it, and then ran into the back office.

Casey, Cal, and Remy walked out of the hotel, accompanied by the stranger. He introduced himself as Rodrigo Montefuego, and said that he had been hired by Muscatelli to protect them. Stranger and stranger, thought Casey. Still, Rodrigo seemed honest, and when they told him that they were on their way to kill an assassin, he took it in stride. He suggested that they all go to a weapon supply store and gear up before they assaulted Cable.

Twenty minutes later they were at Kail’s Sentry Emporium, browsing the weapon selection. Casey sat on one of the couches, sampling the gourmet cuisine and sipping the Champaign that Rodrigo had ordered to be delivered to the shop. There was nothing at the Emporium that Casey needed, and he tried to not seem like he was chomping at the bit to go kill Cable. Callin was shopping for batteries for his laser pistol and various sundries. Rodrigo selected a Storm Rifle – a beautiful weapon, one that would hopefully be sufficient to penetrate their foe’s armor. Remy sat in a corner and sulked.

Soon enough they were headed to the assassin’s location in Rodrigo’s stretch grav limousine. They went over their tactical options: the target was an upper storey apartment in one of the projects in the slums of Darktown. Ingress to the building should not be particularly difficult. However, their quarry had unknown powers and unknown defenses. If they lost the element of surprise they would need to be ready to exfiltrate as quickly as possible.

Not wanting to approach the building in their limo, they dropped Callin off a few blocks away to reconnoiter. They left their comms open. Cables apartment was on the 5th floor, and so Callin went to the 4th floor to get the layout. He reported that besides the elevator being out of order, there was nothing out of the ordinary.

Casey and Rodrigo exited the limo and walked to the building. Remy, objecting to the violence and stating his pacifist opinions, opted to stay in the grav limo. Walking by the squatters smoking something – not tobacco – at the entrance to the building – the two of them made it to the fifth floor, where they met up with Callin.

The three of them found room 508 – Cable’s room. They listened for a moment at the door, and heard nothing. There was complete silence in the apartment building. Casey’s hair stood on end. He kicked the door twice and the door burst off its hinges. Casey moved into the tiny apartment, followed by Callin and Rodrigo. There was a living room at the end of a small hallway he could see a still figure lying underneath a blanket on the couch. Casey practically ignored him. That’s not Cable. There’s no way we could catch him sleeping. He continued in, letting the muzzle of his shotgun precede him. One the left side of the hallway was a closet, and directly opposite of that was a bathroom. Both doors were wide open.

Casey had to choose. Glancing quickly into the closet and seeing nothing he spun to look into the bathroom. There was Cable, clenching his fists as electricity discharged from the power sockets around the room. Casey dropped to the ground as lighting exploded above him, grounding in the walls and Casey’s body, causing his heart to beat uncontrollably. The lights went out, and Casey’s hyperspectral goggles switched on in a millisecond, providing him a view of Cable lurking in the bathroom.

Callin took a step forward into the hallway as Casey brought his weapon to bear and pulled the trigger. He saw Cable jerk and gasp as the solid slug struck him. Cable responded by thrusting another bolt of lightning at Casey. This time he had nowhere to go, and the electricity coursed through his body. He spasmed, and released his grip on the shotgun.

Callin stepped into the bathroom and unleashed the power of his laser pistol on Cable. The assassin dropped to the ground, convulsed, and was still. Rodrigo moved forward and checked on the man underneath the blanket – he was dead. Casey picked up his weapon as Callin handcuffed Cable.

“Shoot him,” breathed Casey as he felt consciousness slipping away. “Shoot him in the head. He’s a psionicist.” Callin objected strongly to killing the man. Rodrigo, shrugging, pulled out his magnum handgun and blew the man’s brains all over the bathroom.

Callin quickly searched Cable and took his things. He and Rodrigo picked up Casey’s unconscious form and dragged him to the limo waiting for them outside of the apartment.

Casey came to in the limousine as his friends were using his crash kit to patch him back together. He felt significantly better. They swung by a drug store and got Casey an Ascepaline shot, and then Rodrigo directed the driver to take them to the posh Buzwani Astoria.

When they got to their suite Rodrigo began speaking about the casino the hotel had to offer. Casey barely heard what he was saying. He pulled himself to one of the beds, peeled off his body armor, and fell fast asleep.