Reunited: A Cybil Lewis SF Mystery Read online

  Through him I recalled my days with the District’s infantry, I understood his horror and his hell with amazing clarity.

  “You seeing the District’s shrinks and AI evals?” I asked, eyeing him hard, trying to pin him with my gaze. He wouldn’t meet it. His eyes jittered all over the place. My office décor didn’t deserve so much attention.

  “Uh, well, no, ma’am.”

  “You takin’ the happy pills they give you for transitioning back to the planet?” I asked, not caring that my voice sounded harsh and unforgiving. He needed a rough verbal lashing. Hell, he needed a punch in the face for failing to follow his commander’s direct orders to go see the AI to get his head shrunk.

  “No ma’am.”

  That wasn’t good.

  Benjamin Satou.

  Soldier. Husband. Cyborg.

  A shudder raced through me at that last. I hated robots, because you couldn’t trust them. They lacked the ability to care and when they misfired, people got hurt. The jury was still out on how I felt about people and robotic parts being combined. Theories abound about creating cyborgs, but to my knowledge there hadn’t been any real progress on legislation or success on that front, at least not in the D.C. territory.

  “I’m a cyborg,” he explained with a casual wave of indifference, as if his hand could simply swipe away the mechanical ticking emitting from his person. “Sort of. I’m nearly 50% robotics and nanos, and about 49% organic. Char is the doctor assigned to maintaining me.” His eyes still glowed azure, but clear.

  “How?” I stopped myself from launching onto my verbal soapbox regarding robotics.

  “A few months after I arrived with my platoon to the front lines, I got blasted in an ambush. Whole chunks of me were blown off or damaged, according to the physicians. When I woke up, they’d fixed me with titanium-based parts and other pieces.”

  Not liking it, but forcing confidence I didn’t feel, I said, “Why waste the parts and technology on an infantry man? You’re expendable. Why not input them into an elite squad of super cyborg soldiers? What you got that they didn’t?”

  He gave me a snarky grin.

  “Doesn’t matter. Your payment, please,” I said, gritting my teeth to keep my curiosity at bay. “That’s not counting expenses.”

  “Agreed.” He extended hand higher, demanding via body language I shake it.

  So I did.

  Anything to get him out of my office quick.

  “You don’t like me,” Satou had accused, but without whining. Just a statement of fact. “I’m a man, Ms. Lewis. Being a soldier is a job. Different than yours, yes, but beneath the vague label, I’m a human despite the parts.”

  That’s debatable. One of which had the District’s council deadlocked with creating regulations. Should robots have human parts? Does it get human rights? The arguing continued to grind on at the courthouse.

  Instead I said, “To me, Private Satou, you’re a client. The rest is immaterial.”

  The base of my neck pulsated with annoyance and mounting stress.

  “Regulator Tom said her last emailed message hailed from the moon. Any ideas why she’d email you there? She also keeps misspelling my name.”

  Regulator Daniel Tom, an old army pal, had given me the background on Benjamin’s missing spouse. It was during one of our chinwags and she was his missing person’s case. Some things you can’t hear secondhand. You had to get it straight from the source. In this business of private investigations, you take referrals when you can get them. But that didn’t mean I had to fall for anything—or anyone.

  I saw what Daniel probably did when he looked at the young private. Us. Years ago, two scarred kids, emotions juiced on a steady diet of flight or fight exercises, and blood and bones and death. Our psyches had been ripped to strips held together by the thinnest of sanity.

  Benjamin could’ve been me, Daniel, or scores of other warweary people punched about by violence. Yeah, Private Satou needed help. As a former soldier, I saw it because I went through it too. Luckily, when I came home from the line, I had Stephen, my old boyfriend, to piece me back together.

  Benjamin had no one.

  “Dunno,” he replied. “None of it makes sense. That’s why I’m paying you.”

  He removed one of his gloves. With a quick lick of his thumb, Benjamin paid without prompting from me. His DNA matched his currency account and authorized it to transfer the funds from his account to mine.

  “I’ll get started soon.”

  “Thank you. Good luck finding my wife.” He stalked out.

  Was that a threat or a confession?

  I stared after him with my gut churning in anxious warning.

  Three

  I shook my head, throwing off the memory of Satou and the eeriness it conjured.

  The automated day launcher gave the dark side of the moon some semblance of time, but Jane nailed it when she said it didn’t flow here. It lumbered and chugged along. The weird watery light cast more shadows than it illuminated in certain sections of the compound. It stood high in the air, suspended by metal poles. Some of the lighting contained mirrors to reflect the sun’s light. How many days since Benjamin’s visit? Even I couldn’t be entirely sure and I wore my digital watch. According to that, I’d been on the moon’s surface for about a day and a half. Outside the EuroRepublic’s barracks and dome shaped camps, I avoided the spray of spotlights that illuminated the inkiness. Making my way to the pits and cargo stations, I thought about what I’d found out.

  The burning question that continued to rotate around my head wouldn’t cease.

  What was Charlotte Satou doing on the moon after her husband had been scheduled to return to earth? Who was she anyway? Was she ever here at all?

  It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Benjamin had murdered his wife and hired me merely to provide cover. He hadn’t taken his treatment to return to a normal state since coming back on leave from the war. He continued to plow along daily in half-cocked battle mode. There’s no telling what he’d done with her or to her. With most of his body switched over to robotic automation, he might have had a short and accidentally done the deed. Hell, he might not even remember.

  Nothing surprised me in this business anymore.

  Not one thing.

  That didn’t feel right. Cyborg or not, Benjamin felt something resembling loss for Charlotte. His sentiment rang true, so it had to be something else gnawing at the edge of my consciousness. The smear of time and the manufactured gravity made me sluggish mentally and physically. I was missing something important.

  But what?

  A shadow glided out from the others and just as swiftly vanished.

  I spun around and searched the bleakness.

  Had there been someone there?

  I couldn’t be sure.

  A faint whirring swept through the air. I hastened my steps, not running, but moving with a purpose. I switched off my internal dialogue and focused on the bastard following me. Along this stretch of darkness, only the moonlight sphere attached to my jacket cast a long solitary illuminated line through the inky black.

  I started again for the pits but kept my senses on alert.

  Footfalls fell silent as I kept walking. Still, the hairs on the back of my neck wiggled in warning. Someone followed behind me. And I couldn’t catch him.

  I slowed and tried to catch the person off guard. I increased my speed to lose him.

  Both times I got nothing.

  Still, the shadows swayed and played with my vision. Sluggish and tired, I couldn’t be sure someone trailed behind me at all. Icy shudders shot down my back, aggravating the pit in my stomach.

  Who would be following me on the moon?

  No one knew I’d even come here, except Moto.

  There, again!

  The faint sound reached my ears.

  Someone was following me!

  I took off running and dipped into the edge of blackness creeping along this pathway. I canceled my artificial light source and waited for the stalker to come running on by. Counting to a thousand, I waited.

  My eyes adjusted to the growing dark, but not enough for me to see anyone.

  I had banked on hearing them instead.

  I waited.

  No one came.

  Either I lost them, or I had a serious case of moon madness.

  You can guess which one I liked better.

  Four

  The pits’ odor reached me long before the view became marred by bodies. Crumpled and broken, piled and plastered together in decaying mounds of flesh and fluids, the deceased spoke volumes in gasses, odor and mass. Flitting across these humongous mounds like flies at a garbage chute, people dressed in one-piece suits and ventilation masks scavenged for anything worth selling.

  The odor lodged in my throat and I coughed to expel it.

  Nothing doing.

  I reached into my satchel and removed a portable ventilation mask. It hooked over my ears and molded to my face, suctioning to the area around my mouth and nose. It filtered clean air through and took CO2 out, while at the same time stripping the air of all but oxygen. My mouth tasted like I’d been chewing on plastic, but better that than inhaling the air.

  I walked by one of the hundreds of cargo crafts overflowing with the dead. Who were these people? Did their families know of their demise? Stumbling over a discarded boot, I cleared the strange crafts and stepped into what appeared to be a series of pits, some natural, others created. How best to find her?

  Ask.

  The navy-clad body snatcher rummaged through the corpses like a person in the produce section of a grocer. He jumped as my voice reached his ears, so intent on plundering whatever he sought.

  “Excuse me,” I said, missing my gun as much as my apartment right then. The
moon didn’t allow the entry of outside weapons. “I’m looking for a woman.”

  The jumpsuit and hood sort of hid his gender, but I could tell from its tight fit, the person in front of me was a man. He turned visor-clad eyes to me and even with his mask on, I could see him frown.

  Don’t make this hard. I don’t want to add your ass to the cargo craft’s collection.

  “Ain’t everybody,” he snorted in a dialect that rang of the Eurorepublic’s conglomerate. “This one’s mine so move on.”

  “Listen, I’m looking for someone who’s fresh, alive,” I added, pulling out my currency card. “She got dropped by the SE’s twilight sweep a few days ago.”

  I detected his snarl through the mask’s heavy ventilation, and I pushed on, folding the card back into my pants pocket. My satchel was strapped across my torso with its opening in the front. No sooner had I cleared his cargo craft, did the impish body snatcher plow into his pile, forgetting I’d even come by.

  Someone on this rock had to have seen her. I’d been clawing my way around the outer arc of the pit cluster for more than a few hours. And I hadn’t been alone.

  Snatchers and poachers, raiders and rebels and I had spent quality time shuffling through the muck. Surely someone who worked this hell saw Charlotte Satou. Alive. Please let her be alive. I didn’t like Benjamin Satou. Robots and I don’t mesh. Couldn’t fully trust robotics. And it wasn’t like it was just me. I had grounds. The hourly news blogs at home streamed scores of murders, accidental deaths and the like at the hands of some so-called friendly robot. Sure, friendly fire and fun funerals. Oxymorons.

  Yeah, only morons trusted robots.

  Coupled with human organic parts didn’t temper that revulsion inside me. Lying had become a natural habit, but one thing I didn’t do was lie to myself. Deception is best dealt from the deck and on to other game players, never to oneself.

  “Pssst...” hissed a shadow seeping from out of a nearby pit. Covered in fluids, the person waved me over. Hands rested on narrowed hip and a bosom heaved.

  I waited, feeling my heart increase its thump-one, thump-two routine. Darn it, I missed my weapon. Without it I felt like I was running around nude. Confidence notwithstanding, I inched closer, putting my hand into the satchel as if I had something dangerous.

  “What?” I barked.

  “You ain’t a raider, so whatcha doin’ here?” The voice had to be female, because the body obviously was. “Been watching you the last couple hours slink from one to the other.”

  “I’m looking for someone,” I said, simple and to the point. A bit peeved that I stood out so well, I sighed. Could be that I didn’t sport the jumpsuits or the ragtag clothing of the other scavengers.

  “Everybody around here is dead. You can’t see that?” she scoffed and crossed her arms over her chest. She had a satchel like mine on the ground at her feet. Items caused the bottom to bulge. “Good luck trying to find anything valuable in this. Dig for the older ones, they’re easier to break.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” I wished I could wipe out the visual in my head her comments conjured. The soft whirling of a drive saving data gave me pause. “Ah, where are the latest ones anyway? The new stuff.”

  I’m referring to people as stuff. I need to get back home and be held.

  “Why you want them? Harder. Rigor makes them rigid.”

  Tick.

  I tried again to inquire where the latest batch of bodies resided.

  “Pit or pile?” I swept my arm outward.

  The face behind the mask screwed up in thought.

  Tick.

  “Can’t be sure, but the one cargo craft got new updates yesterday.” She pointed to the west. “Now, see there’s no one over by them, ‘cuz no one but raiders grab the goodies. So, careful.”

  Tick.

  “You’re not a raider?” I asked, a bit surprised. Something about the woman rubbed my skin the wrong way. The strange ticking after each statement reminded me of Benjamin.

  Satou.

  Her head shook so vehemently I thought it would zip off and land into one of the pits.

  “Nuh uh,” she scowled. “I’m a medical student at the Southwest Territories Academy for Medicine. I’m here doing research.”

  Tick.

  Body snatcher.

  Still a med student might prove more useful than say the raiders.

  “About a week ago, the SE twilight sweep dropped off a ton of people, some not quite dead,” I explained, inching closer, all of my suspicions blaring out a warning. “The woman I’m looking for might be in that group.”

  “A woman?” the med student scoffed, the scorn so heavy it escaped the sharp stripping of her mask.

  Tick.

  “Yeah,” I laughed and shrugged, playing into the act we both were performing. “It seems there are a lot of women here, but it shouldn’t be too hard to remember her. She was alive when she got here.”

  “What she look like?” She wiped her hands on well-stained pants .

  Tick.

  I took out my handheld and called up the jpeg of Charlotte Satou. With a few more steps forward, I held it up for the woman. Take a look and see what I got for you.

  “Her husband is sick with worry,” I said, hoping the background would jostle something in the thin woman’s memory or force her to confront that from which she had fled. She seemed very coherent considering she spent her time, a lot of it in this graveyard. “The soldier is a District infantryman home on leave.”

  “I have not seen her before,” the woman turned away, voice falling flat. She got down on her knees and prepared to climb back down into the pit. “Leave.”

  “Sure?” I asked because all the body language confirmed the opposite. The change in voice cadence and tone sent a strange quiver through me. “Her husband needs her. Only love can help mend the horror of what he’s seen and been through. A man needs his wife during a time like this.”

  “I do not remember her,” the woman replied. Tick. “Leave.” Tick.

  “Charlotte,” I said as the puzzle piece buzzing through my brain found a home. The soft ticking sound emitted from her. “Benjamin needs you.”

  She froze, hazel eyes burning like wheat on fire.

  “What the hell are you doing here anyway?” I asked, not waiting for her confirmation. “Just spit it out. Tell me.”

  There. From beneath a fall of dripping and dirty braids, those eyes glowed with unrestrained fury spiraling outward so fast I felt it brush against me a second before she leapt from the ladder, sending it crashing to the ground. She lunged at me, hands at my throat. I saw it unfold in slow motion. Coldness filtered down my head to my feet like a glacier.

  “Benjamin sent me to search for you,” I said, fists in punching position.

  With her hands inches from my throat, she froze. Eyes wide with disbelief and perhaps a touch of curiosity, she let out a nervous giggle.

  That’s when something Benjamin said clicked home. He said that Charlotte kept misspelling his name and each email sounded like a different person. I understood now why that happened. She wasn’t a human, either. His name must be a glitch in her programming.

  Charlotte dropped her arms and heaved her satchel onto her shoulder. With a wave to come on, she marched off without a word. She stopped and waited while I caught up with her.

  “Follow me.”

  Not speaking all the way to the EuroRepublic’s barracks and bubble biomes, she flashed a badge and we drifted through the compound without issues.

  My rabid curiosity was about to be fed.

  But did I still want it?

  Five

  Charlotte Satou’s sliver of living space took up a tiny six feet by five feet square. On the floor a mauve sleeping bag had been rolled up and shoved beneath the desk. A collapsed canvas chair rested against the soft bubble foam. A round bubble—talk about an oxymoron.

  Like Charlotte Satou.

  She stepped onto a patch of dark gray and as she did so, it warmed to a harsh scarlet. She unzipped the suit and it began to dissolve, melting the suit into the rectangular beneath her booted feet. Naked beneath the suit, she folded her arms across her chest. All the while, she avoided my direct gaze.

  Modest?

  I doubted it.

  “You bring me here for a reason? I can’t tell what time it is up here, but I’m sure at some point I should sleep.”