Inferno

“What-what are you saying?” Beddle asked. Suddenly his skin felt very cold.

“I am saying that the Governorship is yours for the taking. You own the Governor’s office. ” The smile came back to his face, but there was nothing friendly about it now. “ As for myself,” he said, “it would seem that I own you.”

14

THEY POPPED THE LOCK and pulled open the door to the warehouse. The moment they did, the smell told them they had found who-or at least what-they had been looking for. Deputy Jantu Ferrar knew it, and a glance at Ranger Shah’s face confirmed it. Cops still knew what a rotting body smelled like, even on the oversanitized world of Inferno.

Now they knew how Bissal had managed to stay hidden for so long. It was easy to keep out of sight when you were dead. The Ranger, the deputy, and the robot stepped into the cool, cloying darkness. Shah pulled out a handlight and shone it around the interior of the building. “Rustbackers, all right,” she said. Jantu nodded. She recognized the gear. A dozen restrictors stacked up neatly in a corner. Hyperwave communications gear. A robot work rack. Yes indeed. A major rustbacking center. And they had just walked right into it. Jantu pulled out her blaster and held it at the ready. Shah glanced in Jantu’s direction, and then pulled out her own weapon. Jantu moved forward, to the corner of a rack full of hardware. She signaled for Shah to cover her, and Jantu went around the corner.

And there he was. Sitting at a table, a simple meal set out before him, his eyes dull, staring blindly down, his mouth a bit open, with the bite he had been eating still in it, his head slumped forward a bit. Almost exactly the same position they had found the Governor in. And every bit as dead. Jantu did not realize she had raised her weapon and aimed it at the corpse until she lowered it.

“That him? That him?” Shah asked, her voice a trifle high and excited.

“Yeah,” Jantu said. Strange how a corpse never quite looked the same as the living man. There was something slack and swollen about him. As well there should have been, after two or three days dead aboveground.

“How did he die?” Shah asked, corning closer.

“Look at his plate,” Jantu said. There was a solid mass of flies on the remains of his food. A solid mass of dead, unmoving flies. Poison. The same that had killed Bissal. One that hit him before he had a chance to swallow.

“Burning hells,” Shah said. “They set him up. Sent him to do their dirty work, and set up this safe house to kill him. ”

Jantu found herself staring at the corpse, her eyes struggling to find some movement in its impossible stillness. She made the mistake of breathing in through her nose, and the stench of the place was like a punch in the gut. She felt queasy and nervous. “Come on,” she said. “We found him,” she said. “Let’s get back out to the aircar and call it in.”

Shah nodded, her face ashen, and a wild sort of look in her eyes. Maybe this was the first corpse she had ever seen. “Yeah; yeah,” she said. “Let’s go.”

They both holstered their weapons and made their way back out to the street, Gerald 1324 hanging back to watch their retreat, just in case someone was waiting until now to jump them.

The two humans were nearly to the aircar when it happened, Jantu glancing over her shoulder back at the building.

The blast caught Gerald 1324 square in the doorway. The wall over the door collapsed on top of him, burying him in debris. Jantu got up off the ground without being aware of being knocked down in the first place. Her blast-deafened ears were ringing and the towering wall of flame that had been the warehouse burning in silence. And Shah. She turned to see what had happened to Shah.

Shah was down, motionless, on the ground. And suddenly the difference between Ranger and deputy didn’t mean a damn thing. Nothing much of anything mattered once a five-kilo lump of stresscrete caught you square between the eyes.

Alvar Kresh watched as the fire brigade brought the blaze under control. “Playing with us, Donald. Playing with us. They let us find him dead, let us see he’d never tell us anything-and then rigged the damn place to blow up when our people left, before we could learn anything else.”

“Yes, sir,” Donald agreed. “I doubt we will find much of anything after such an intense blaze.”

Kresh did not say anything more, but watched as a warehouse full of evidence went up in smoke. What sort of mind would think that sort of thing up?

“Afternoon, Governor, “ said a woman’s voice. Kresh did not respond at once. “Governor?”

“Hmmm? Oh!” He turned to see Cinta Melloy at his side. It would be a while before he got used to people using his new title. “Hello, Cinta.”

“You’ve got one hell of a mess on your hands, Governor Kresh.”

And this is just the part that shows, Kresh thought. “Look, Cinta, forget the Governor part just now. Cop to cop. I’m here as the Sheriff. ” The Sheriff watching his case collapse, he thought. Where the hell am I going to turn now?

“I thought I’d come, even if I wasn’t invited, seeing how it is my jurisdiction,” Cinta Melloy said, staring at the smoldering wreckage. “You should have asked for my help, Governor-ah, Sheriff You could have used it. Now it’s gotten out of hand. It’s too late.”

“I couldn’t trust you, Cinta,” Kresh replied. Suddenly he was too tired to play the games of pretend anymore. Keeping track of the truth was hard enough. Somehow, it was easier to talk about, once those first words were out in the open. “How could I trust you, when the SSS kept showing up where it didn’t belong?”

Kresh looked to her, waiting for her to strike back, waiting for the outburst of temper. But it did not come.

“Yes, we did keep doing that,” she said, staring straight at the fire, clearly unwilling to look him in the eye as she made what amounted to a confession. “Some of it was legitimate, just good cops pushing a little harder than they should have. Some of it-some of it was the dirt that gets on your hands in this business, no matter how hard you try. We deal with criminals, Kresh. You know that. Touch them and sometimes the grime rubs off. ”

“I know that, Cinta. I know. But this was more than a little dirt on the hands.”

At last Cinta looked at Kresh, squinting as a bit of smoke blew into her face. “You’re right,” she said. “More than just a little dirt. Some of it was dirty cops. My dirty cops. I am all but certain those were real, off-duty, on-the-take SSS agents that got Blare and Deam out of the reception. I don’t have them yet-but I will. Blare and Deam too. It’d make the SSS look bad-very bad-if it comes out the wrong way. I wanted-I want-to track them down myself.”

“And Huthwitz?” Kresh asked, pressing just a bit. A good interrogator always knows when to press a bit more, when the subject is cooperative. “ A dead cop on the take and you knew his name when his own commander didn’t.”

“Yeah, I was afraid you’d notice that,” Cinta said. “We’d been watching him. The SSS was the original source of the tip that got to that Ranger out at the East Crack. I didn’t want to say anything more in front of Devray or you-not when my people were so close to rolling up the whole operation. I couldn’t trust you, either.”

“And did you roll up the whole operation?”

“No,” Cinta said, her voice hard and flat as the word. “They all went to ground when Huthwitz died. We lost them.”

“Did Bissal kill Huthwitz?”

“Almost certainly. ” She nodded at the smoldering ruin of the warehouse. “We may never know after this mess. They knew each other, I can tell you that much for sure. Brothers in rustbacking, except they didn’t get on so good.”

“That much we knew. Did you know the shooter was Bissal before we did?” Kresh asked.

“We had a file on him,” Cinta admitted. “Everybody did. It was just that ours was crosslinked into Huthwitz’s rustbacking operation. Bissal’s name popped up as one of twenty or so possibilities. That’s all. I wouldn’t even say we considered him a full-fledged suspect before your team found him, identified him.”