Drakon (7 page)

"Oh, wonderful." The scientist bent over it, pulling on surgical gloves, and clicked on a recorder.

"Specimen is—"

Scary as hell,
she thought, as the other woman kept on talking into the little machine.
Scary as
hell.
And not just because it was so weird. There were
implants
in it. Something in the bone like embedded fibers, fibers that dulled her best bone saw; they'd had to use a metal-cutting saw, and change to a new blade every few seconds.

She waited until the preliminary examination was complete. "The next step would be genetic analysis, I'd say."

"Oh, certainly, Dr. Chen," the professor agreed. "With a comparative analysis, we can pinpoint the evolutionary divergence." She shook her head. "
Where
could a species like this have hidden itself? It must be quite large—" she stepped back and considered "—I'd say in the four- to five-hundred-pound range.

Even a relict population in some out-of-the-way area . . . fascinating! Where did you say you acquired it?"

"I didn't," Chen said.

Very out of the way,
she thought.
Wherever it comes from, twenty people died when it
arrived.
She remembered the warehouse, its floor awash with blood. Mary Chen had never limited her training in observation and deduction strictly to her work. What followed was obvious. Something had come from somewhere, along with this arm. Something with human-sized heels, that used a knife sharper than a laser scalpel.
And if one can . . . come . . . here, then others can.

The primatologist was speaking into her hand-held recorder again. Chen wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.

***

Carmaggio shifted his feet to the corner of his desk and looked with displeasure at the pound or so of skin hanging over his belt under the shirt.
I don't enjoy looking at that, either,
he thought, cradling the receiver, the cinnamon danish and the coffee mug simultaneously. Sure, he was past the middle forties, but that didn't mean he had to let everything go. On the other hand, regular hours were a joke in police work; and the number of donuts and greasy deli sandwiches he'd shoveled into his face made him queasy when he thought about it. He prodded at the roll with a finger.
Not too bad.
And he'd stopped smoking, after all. He tried to convince himself he'd done it for his health, and failed. It was just too much of a hassle, with all the nonsmoking areas.

I ought to spend more time in the gym.
God knew it could scarcely cut into his social life.

"All right, break my heart," he said. "Start with the arm."

A long moment of silence. "I didn't have the facilities for that, so I called in a favor over at NYU."

"What do they say?"

"They don't say anything; they run in circles and throw their hands in the air and shout." Flatly:

"Okay, basically it is a baboon. Only it's not." Unwillingly: "The DNA is congruent with Gelada baboons—mostly. Ethiopian mountain baboon, fairly rare. About fifty percent matchup. The remainder's . .

. mixed. Leopard. Canine. And, ah . . . human."

Carmaggio took his feet down from the desk and sighed, rubbing his forehead and dredging up things he'd seen on nature documentaries and old copies of
Popular Science.
"Something escaped from a lab?"

"You've been watching too many bad movies. Putting a firefly gene in a tomato or correcting cystic fibrosis is one thing. Playing Frankenstein is something else. We'll do things like . . . that . . . someday, but not for a long time. Hell, the human genome project isn't finished yet."

"What about the arm, then?"

"I don't know. I just don't know."

He'd always wanted to have Chen-the-omniscient admit that. Somehow it wasn't very satisfying.

"All right, let's look at this from a cop point of view. The fucking arm is academic, we'll leave it with the academic types. We're cops, let's do the cop things."

"Nothing mysterious about cause-of-death for most of the Jamaicans. It's all in the autopsy stuff I'm sending up. Loss of blood from radical wounding, consistent with a knife about eighteen inches long. Or blunt injury trauma; in plain English, crushed skulls, frontal bone driven into the brain, two cases of massive perforation of the heart and lungs by rib fragments. Several injured postmortem by a very powerful kick to back of the head—more crushed skulls, and crushed and severed upper spinals. Whoever did it was making extremely sure."

"Good work."

"That's the basics. You want to hear my opinion?"

He waited. Chen continued. "The tissue damage from the knife is as weird as the rest of it. It was
sharp.
Razor sharp, scalpel sharp. There are
cut hairs
on those bodies; it didn't haggle or chop, it just sliced through hair and skin and clothing, plus the odd gold chain. And it
stayed
that sharp while it went slamming through major bones, sharp and completely rigid. A thin blade, Henry, not a tanto knife or a machete. From the marks on the bones, about as wide as a fingernail at maximum."

"Hmmm." A real knife-fighter didn't put a razor edge on his weapon. That made it too likely to turn on bone or even gristle. Really thin blades were too whippy for use. "Keep it coming."

"The blunt injuries? It's impossible, but whoever did that stuff did it barehanded. Kicking and punching and . . . slapping. They slapped people on the side of the head and knocked their skulls in. A couple of those dreadlockers shot each other, but they didn't hit whoever was doing them enough to slow him down. We're not talking Kung Foolishness here. What with the arm, I checked up. A gorilla's about fifteen times as strong as a human being. Whoever did this is about halfway to that level. Freak strong."

Henry made an affirmative noise and nodded, taking another bite of the danish. The posses were about as bad as they thought they were. If somebody, or even a dozen somebodies, had killed twenty of them, he didn't want to meet the ones who'd done it. Not without a lot of backup.

"The one with his head blown off?"

"That's got me completely baffled. The entry wound in the forehead is cauterized, as if someone had burned through with a welding torch. Then the brain was cooked—flash cooked, the explosion was steam. There's a bit of very finely divided metallic copper there too, God knows why."

Chen paused. "Now, what about the skin from under Marley Man's nails?" she asked. A forensics question; police business, not the Medical Examiners.

"We sent it over to Quantico." The FBI lab there did favors for local police departments. "They ran a microsatellite DNA analysis. Caucasian—Northwest European—and female. The hair's natural dark red.

No DNA matches in any of the databases, but that just means she hasn't served in the armed forces or been sent to jail since the early nineties."

Carmaggio sighed. It had been the first honest—well, honestly bizarre—evidence to turn up so far.

Except.

"Except?"

"They did a full comparative DNA run. It—I quote:
'Nonhuman. About a ninety-four percent
correspondence. That's less like us than a chimp. A mammal, a primate, but not human, strictly
speaking. Whatever it was, it couldn't interbreed with us; gross differences in the number of
chromosomes.

"Different? Different how?"

"I asked. They told me that we don't know what most of our
own
genes do." After a moment:

"Then they told me not to send them any more practical jokes. I think the Fed was scared, Chen."

"What's going in the report?"

He took a deep breath. "We're going to tell our esteemed Chief of Detectives that a drug deal went sour and all Marley Man's posse got wasted, knife and club and gunshot wounds. Some animal remains were found at the site. We've got the DNA make on a person who might or might not have been at the crime site at the time of the murders. We're questioning all the usual suspects; if you lined up all the people who wanted Marley Man dead, it'd stretch to Jersey. Send me your stuff, I'll edit it that way, and attach it to my report."

"You're going to hush this up?"

"No, I'm going to keep my credibility and yours," he said. "Hell, it's an official report, not the Bible."

Back in Nam once, he'd been on a patrol that went into some bad bush right after an artillery fire mission. A lot of craters, a lot of busted-up trees, and one arm—still in its black pajamas—by the side of the trail. The loot had reported it in as a stepped-on kill, confirmed, and three probables. Which was fair enough, since Charlie did try to carry away as many of his dead as he could. Only he'd learned from a radioman back at the firebase that about six more patrols had reported the same arm; so that one unfortunate Vietcong had turned into about a platoon's worth of casualties. And the sucker might not have died in the first place.

Ever since then, he'd thought of definite-sounding official reports as being sort of elastic. Not necessarily completely divorced from reality, but not necessarily having any close relationship to it, either.

"Henry, we
can't
hush this up. Think of what it
means.
There could be—"

"Look, shut up, will you? The problem with unbelievable evidence is that nobody will believe it. And if we push it on people, they won't believe
us
about anything. That's twenty years of experience talking, and you
will
listen. I'm betting that whoever . . . hell, whatever . . . did this number on Marley Man's boys is going to do something else. And
I'm going to find them.
"

***

The fountain.
It was old, Renaissance work. Much older than the plantation in the hills of Tuscany.

It played in a little courtyard flagged with black and white stones, surrounded by arches borne on pillars.

The central part of it was a statue of a maiden pouring the water from an amphora over one shoulder, all in age-green bronze. It fell into a round bowl of stone, the edge carved with a time-worn design of vines.

I remember.

The sun warm on her bare skin, and the slick surface of the marble under her left hand. Her right—a three-year-old's hand, still slightly chubby—dived into the cool water. The fingers flicked, a touch of scales, and a goldfish soared into the air. Gwen giggled and moved her hand. Flick, flick; more goldfish soared upwards. The fish tumbled back into the water with little plashing sounds, darting away to the other side of the pool.

"Missy Gwen, stop that."

That was her tantie-ma, Marya. Gwen turned toward her and ran, leaping up to wrap arms and legs around her. Marya braced herself against the solid impact and hugged her back. The child nestled against her, taking in the familiar comforting scent.

"Here, punkin," her mother said.

Marya handed her down, and she cuddled against the sleek warmth of her mother's side in the recliner, yawning and shifting until she was comfortable and drifted into sleep . . .

Maybe that's why I remember,
Gwen thought.
The scents.
Her mother Yolande had smelled human—had
been
human, the last generation of human Draka.

That scent was heavy all about her, in Stephen Fischers little apartment. A flash of memory: Yolande older, in uniform, the high-collared black tunic of ceremony. Standing at the top of a stairway under a dome on Mars . . .

She shook her head.
Back to work.
She frowned and made another note on the pad. It wasn't strictly necessary, of course; she had eidetic memory, and the transducer for backup. Just an old, old habit to help her see the
shape
of a sequential problem. Perhaps that was why she'd gone into reverie. Her mother had done that too, made notes.

She wrote:

1:
Identity.

She'd need, let's see, a
birth certificate,
and then documentation from there. False documents could probably be arranged with stolen money. She made a sub-heading:
American or other?

2: Base of operations.

She looked around Stephen Fischer's cramped little apartment. It was much cleaner and better furnished than the one she'd used in her first flight from the warehouse, but not all that much bigger.

Something better than this.
Fischer had evidently made a fairly high salary, but equally evidently it didn't go far here. Like most Draka, she could put up with cramped quarters at need, but didn't like it.

3:
Legitimize the money.

That ought to be reasonably easy. Even in her own history, the Americans had been sloppy-careless about security matters right up to the end—otherwise they might not have lost the Final War. These Americans hadn't had the long struggle with the Domination to keep them on their toes, and to judge from what she'd read, they had a crime problem like nothing her world had ever seen in any major country. With a huge criminal class, there
had
to be ways of transferring profits to noncriminal organizations.

In a way, if this had to happen to someone, it was as well it was her. She could remember what a market economy with a non-notional currency was like; the Domination had had something like that back before the War, and she'd studied the American version in know-the-enemy lectures. Very long ago, but the data was still there. The freewheeling anarchy outside wasn't all that
much
like what she remembered from either case, but there were useful hints. The younger generation knew valuata as something exchanged over the Web, and rather theoretical in any case.

Legate Tamirindus, for example, would have been completely lost for a good long while.

4: Establish organization.

She chewed meditatively on a carrot. Obviously, if she was ever going to contact home again she'd need huge resources; here, that meant money. She had a lot to sell, four and a half centuries' worth of technology, only the simplest of which would be applicable at all. The problem would be to do it without attracting too much attention. That meant disguising it as commercial activity.