The Archaeologist's Mistress Ch. 01

"What do you want?"

"This guy came in here, maybe half an hour ago," I said, blowing up Xu's face on the flimsy and holding it up. "He still here?"

Murado looked at the picture, but he didn't say anything.

"Look, pal," I said, settling my elbows down on the desk so he could get a good look at my cleavage if he wanted. "We can either do this the easy way where we make nice-nice, or we can do this the hard way, where I call up a few of my old buddies on the force and they come down here and comb over the place. Are you guys plugged in to the net here, or are your chairs running closed circuits?"

Murado rubbed his neck. "Closed circuits."

"That's what I thought." Your classier neuro den, such as Juan's Neuro Solutions here, disconnected their chairs from the Universal Wide Web so their clients couldn't be traced if their created realities tended into a certain level of depravity not permitted by the government. They wiped the chairs on random cycles to further hide their tracks. But if a police raid caught them by surprise, well, both the client and the proprietor could go to Deimos on long charges of illicit sexual material and aiding and abetting, respectively.

"Then why don't you make nice?" I asked. "Is this guy here?"

"He's here," said Murado.

"Show me."

Murado led the way into the darkened hallway beyond the bead curtain, and I kept Mari's handcannon trained on him in my jacket pocket, just in case he did decide to try anything. The intent broadcaster would let me know well before he did, but I didn't want to risk anything. He paused at a door marked Room 8.

"After you," he said.

I took out Mari's handcannon.

"Don't try anything," I told him, and carefully turned the handle, opening the door to Room 8. Murado waved me in.

Hary Xu was in there, all right, but he wasn't in any particular state to talk. In netstate, a person's eyes are closed, and they're tranquil and relaxed. Hary Xu's eyes were wide open and his face was a mask of shocked pain. His hands were frozen, clawing at his neuroshunt, which was smoking. The man was dead as a doornail. And naked to boot.

"Hey, did you know -" I began, but as I spoke, Murado slammed the door shut. I tried to stop him, but he was quick. I saw the keypad on the wall turn green as the code was entered, then flash red indicating the lock was engaged. I briefly tried slamming the door open, but it was a solid metal block with reinforced hinges. I was trapped.

The room was a shithole, as the whole place had proven itself to be. A solid concrete floor they'd initially tried to put faux-wooden tile over, but that had worn away over the years. The place smelled like the one-sided sex it was generally used for. A single solitary window, the glass frosted opaque, sat on a side of the room that was clearly not getting any sun. They'd used cheap LEDs for the lighting, so that it was far too bright, like being in a bathroom.

I looked back at Hary Xu's corpse. In addition to the wires which tethered his neuroshunt to the chair, a couple more ran out to a little device with a dish on the floor. A transmitter. The clever bastard had turned the chair into an outside line. This was probably how he met his mistress. He came to Juan's, a known closed circuit den, then used the transmitter to beat the chair, and reach out to the girlfriend, so they could rendezvous in netstate. Pretty good, as long as you didn't mind stripping naked and sitting in a chair with a jack in your neck, rather than getting real cock and real pussy. Or, in Hary's case, fried. Now all I needed to figure out was where he'd been fried: my end or the girl's end. In a private meeting like that, it would be hard to have a 3rd party eavesdropper. But an invited guest could throw an overload virus back to Hary, if they'd wanted. Or Murado could've come in here and just stuck a screwdriver in his shunt, which also would've done it.

There was a knock at the door.

"About time," I called. "I don't know what kind of shit you were pulling, but -"

"Open up!" came a gruff male voice. "This is the System Police. We have a report of a homicide."

The doorknob jiggled a little, but of course it stayed locked. The door clanged against what was obviously a shouldered being lowered into it. Someone swore on the other side and then said, "get the ram."

When I'd been part of the SPD, we'd never in our life been this fast to the scene of a homicide. If Xu had been killed on this side, then only Murado could've known. This was a seedy neuro den in a seedy part of town. Its patrons had a vested interest in keeping their noses out of other patrons' business lest they get noses back. Which meant the SPD had already been on their way when I'd entered the room.

Someone had set me up to take the fall for a murder, and all signs were currently pointing to Murado. If he wasn't the actual killer, then he probably knew who was. But to get to him at the moment, I'd have to shoot my way through the SPD SWAT team currently trying to bash in the door. That wasn't an option. But there was only one other way out.

I aimed the handcannon at the window, where the two sashes came together, and pulled the trigger. The plasma arc cut a perfectly round hole through them, and then both sashes came tumbling down, the glass shattering as they collapsed on the pane, spilling shards into the room and the alley below.

As the warm air of New Canaveral came rushing into the room, I went hurtling out the window.