Children of a Dead Earth Book One Read online

  “Make sure that’s all she pays ‘close attention’ to.”

  Benson reeled back. “Really? You’re picking a time like this to be jealous?”

  “Who’s being jealous?”

  Benson leaned down and kissed Theresa on the cheek. “Don’t worry, lieutenant. You are the sexiest thing on this boat. And the scariest.”

  “Don’t give me a reason to give you another reminder of the latter.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.” He stood up and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the Mustang game,” Benson called back, as the doors slid closed behind him. “There are appearances to maintain.”

  “Bryan, wait!” Theresa shouted after him. Benson stopped in his tracks and thrust a hand back into the doors to stop them.

  “Just…” she sighed. “Keep your stun-stick handy.”

  Benson patted his pocket where the pen-sized device had spent the last ten years. “You too.”

  The lights above darkened as he walked to the lift.

  * * *

  Against all odds, and to the jubilation of the Mustang faithful, Sahni got the better of Lau’s fliers early with a rather brilliant unorthodox formation. Really, it was a complete lack of formation that finally punched a hole in the Great Wall. From the first push-off, Sahni’s fliers came at the Yaoguai without any apparent coordination or plan whatsoever. It was like fighting an angry drunk; pure chaos with no tactics to adapt to.

  By the time Lau made the necessary adjustments, the Mustangs were already down to twenty-three points. The spread was too much for the Yaoguai to close. Game Six would happen after all.

  The Mustang fans were a little rowdier than normal, so Benson stuck around the stadium to help his constables clear the crowd. By the time the last stragglers were packed into the lifts for the walk of shame back to their apartments, it was nearly 02.00 Avalon Time.

  Exhaustion threatened to overtake him as he said goodnight to his men. The lift doors opened onto an empty car, leaving him alone with his thoughts. All in all, it had been a fairly shitty day. Nearly dying, uncovering a conspiracy, and being politely threatened by the most powerful woman alive all competed for the honor of being the worst part of it. Thank goodness the Mustangs had pulled out a win, or Benson may have just thrown in the towel and called it a life.

  As the lift car descended to the deck, the artificial gravity began to pile onto Benson’s eyelids, pulling them down with the inevitability of the setting sun. He fought against it, jerking awake twice as his knees nearly buckled under the growing weight of his body. By the time he reached the bottom, Benson staggered out of the lift like a shambling horror from the movies, but instead of brains, he craved only the warmth of his soft bed.

  He’d spend the night alone, as Theresa had pulled the third shift supervisor slot for the evening, not that he had enough energy left to make the time worthwhile for either of them. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a little guilty about her late night. Usually, Theresa would have slept through the day to be rested for the graveyard shift, but instead, she’d been waiting for Benson to recover from the pod crash. It wasn’t exactly his fault, but she–

  The bushes on the path ahead to his left moved unnaturally, which, considering they were bushes, meant moving at all. The light breeze running around the habitat wasn’t enough to push around the thin, tightly trimmed juniper leaves. The tremor was so slight Benson almost didn’t catch it, but years chasing down a fast moving ball while trying not to get smeared by defenders had made his eyes keen to movement. Benson assumed he was dealing with an overindulgent Mustang fan either relieving themselves behind the shrubbery, or excavating their stomach contents. Strangely, his plant wasn’t feeding him an ID.

  “Hey, buddy. You OK?” he asked.

  Instead of an answering groan, the bush exploded in a shower of leaves as a dark figure leaped out from hiding. Benson braced his stocky frame for the impact, but at the last moment his eyes caught the glint of a knife.

  The equation changed dramatically. With no time to think, Benson acted on reflex alone, pushing off from the ground exactly as he would to avoid an incoming flier. The artificial gravity quickly brought him back down to the deck again, but it had been enough to throw off the attacker’s aim. Instead of Benson’s heart, the blade found only a tail of his jacket. Sloppy, but it worked.

  Benson heard fabric tear as he spun around and clamped a meaty hand down on the back of the assailant’s neck. Whoever it was wasn’t very big. Benson thought for a horrible moment that his assailant might be a teen.

  A quick spin, followed by a deep slice against his forearm purged any blossoming guilt he may have felt about beating up a belligerent adolescent. His coat sleeve took the brunt of the cut, but the assailant pulled their arm back and reset for a decisive stab against Benson’s vital organs.

  Panicked, Benson again fell back on instinct and kicked the figure in the chest, not to inflict damage, but to put distance between them. It was something he’d done a thousand times playing Zero. In Avalon’s gravity, however, it sent them both flailing off-balance. Being smaller, his assailant took the brunt of the force, exactly as Newton would predict, but his assailant found their feet again even as Benson fell flat on his backside.

  Standing against the background of Avalon’s night, the figure flipped the knife into an icepick grip and came at him again. Benson crab-walked backwards while he dug through his jacket pocket in a desperate search for his stun-stick. His fingertips fixed on the small cylinder and pointed it, still in his pocket, and pushed the button.

  Nothing happened.

  Benson found himself tempted to push the button again, but a more immediate concern presented itself in the form of the fifteen centimeter length of steel coming for his heart. Benson put up his legs in a defensive posture that had been beaten into him during the best three weeks of law enforcement training available. The attacker tried to get inside for a mortal strike, but Benson kicked him back several times, getting slashed on his shins twice for his trouble.

  With adrenaline surging through his veins, Benson landed a heel squarely at the base of the assailant’s jaw, snapping it shut with a painful click. The blow knocked them back far enough that Benson could retreat out of range.

  Clearly dazed from the kick, the assailant turned and staggered back into the shadows.

  Burning with testosterone and rising fury, Benson jumped to his feet. Knife be damned, no one was going to get away with attempted murder of a constable on Benson’s watch. Especially when he was the officer in question. Exhaustion forgotten, Benson ran straight after the retreating footsteps. He opened a link through his plant.

  Benson barely cleared a hedge while he waited. The suspect was quick, and he lost sight of him twice while he waited for the ID.

 

 

 

  He lost sight of the suspect again. Even the sounds of their footsteps were starting to fade.

 

  Benson tried to get a bearing on the footsteps, but echoes off nearby buildings and the forward bulkhead itself made it an impossible task.

 

  Benson said incredulously.

 

 

  Benson tuned out the man’s excuses. A mad-hatter, he thought. But he’d seen the knife, how would an aluminum-foil hat escape his attention?

  Benson said.

  ast nightfall.>

  Benson’s patience was at an end.

  It took a few seconds, but far above him, the axle that ran through the center of Avalon started to glow. Several minutes would pass before the bulbs would reach their full brightness, but already enough light reached Benson, giving him pause.

  The surge of adrenaline had masked the pain, but the streaks of angry crimson along his forearm and lower legs told the story. Benson had been cut, and cut deep. He was losing quite a lot of blood, especially from his arm..

  Gingerly, Benson flexed his hand to make sure all of his fingers still worked. Fortunately, the assailant had failed to slice through the tendons, but the damage was enough. Benson clamped his left hand down hard on the wound to slow the bleeding, then bent over to get a look at his legs. Unlike the thick fibers of his jacket and shirt, the thin fabric of his pants had done little to slow the blade. The two slashes to his shins had cut straight to the bone.

  Still fuming, it took an act of will to convince his enraged lizard brain that he was too tired and wounded to continue. Benson abandoned the pursuit and instead used the growing light to try and trace the suspect’s steps. He managed to follow a short trail of disturbed grass, but the footprints quickly ran back to the walking path, leaving no further trace.

  All around him, confused citizens started leaning out of windows and opening doors to look up at the unexpected light. Frustrated, Benson sat down in the middle of the path where no one could sneak up on him and waited for backup to arrive.

  Chapter Ten

  The rest of Benson’s night passed in a blur of statements, a quick jaunt off to Sickbay to get his wounds stitched up, a bucketful of admonishment from Dr Jeanine for forcing her out of bed to attend to his wounds, and again from Theresa for winding up in Sickbay twice in one day.

  Despite fighting for his life, Benson gained almost nothing from the encounter. He had no useful description, other than average height and weight. He didn’t even know the suspect’s gender! At least his wounds proved that he hadn’t hallucinated the whole encounter.

  It was well past five in the morning Avalon Time before his head finally met his pillow. It was barely two hours before his alarm went off. But, being a plant alarm, he couldn’t just smash it and throw it out the nearest window.

  “Not cool!” he shouted as the chimes gently, but firmly, continued to ring through his brain. He couldn’t turn it off. The alarm knew if he was still in bed or not, based on his locator. It couldn’t be tricked, and it was relentless. It was, in the opinion of many, the single most inhumanly evil piece of software ever written.

  Benson had once tried simply rolling out of bed and lying on the floor, but apparently the soulless coder responsible for the abomination had anticipated the move and the alarm resumed several seconds later when it realized he was still prone.

  Instead of fighting it, he simply got up and moved to the shower. He didn’t need to disrobe. Benson slept naked, never grasping the point of wearing pajamas to bed when the only people who might see him were the ones he intended to get naked with anyway. It was one less thing to buy, and one less thing to wash.

  He stepped into the stand-up shower, his aching muscles and joints longing for the luxury of hot water. But instead, the dressings on his injuries meant he had to settle for ultrasonic pulses and a burst of UV.

  “Just like the good old days,” Benson lamented.

  The sound waves were well above the threshold of his hearing, but it never failed to make his skin crawl as though he was swimming in one of the fingerling tanks. A fog of dirt and dead skin cells floated off his body before getting sucked away by the shower’s air circulation system. In minutes, it would be carried through a series of collection ducts and deposited in a cistern of waste water, urine, feces, and inedible organics leftover from food processing. Next, an insatiable army of trillions of bacteria specially bred for the task would break the revolting mix down into a soupy slurry. Then, the slurry’s components would be separated out through a series of centrifuges, chemical strippers, magnetic eddy currents, and filter screens. Finally, vital ingredients like iron and salt would be purified back into raw material, while the rest processed into fertilizer for the farms.

  Nothing went to waste on the Ark. Except maybe Benson’s time.

  Someone was fixed on keeping him from solving the Laraby case. He’d been ambushed, plain and simple. Punishment for pressing on with the murder investigation, even if he hadn’t announced it yet. His attacker had been no random Zero hooligan. The only thing that saved Benson’s life was spotting the slight rustling in the bushes. If his attacker had snuck up from behind, it would have been a small matter to slash his throat and watch him bleed out before any help could arrive.

  For the dozenth time, Benson struggled to remember anything useful about the attacker. Average height and build for a male from the habitats, although he wasn’t about to discount a stocky female, either. Several girls in the Zero league were a match in size and strength for any of the boys they played against. Benson never forgot the lesson Madison Atwood had taught him in the 221 PE season opener. He missed four games after that hit dislocated his shoulder. She worked for Chief Bahadur as a constable in Shangri-La now.

  Still, he could safely cross floaters off the list of suspects. Whoever had attacked him had been quick, agile, and strong. Not as strong as Benson himself, but certainly a beat faster. That sort of conditioning wasn’t something one developed in microgravity sixteen hours a day, while sleeping the other eight.

  Why the hell hadn’t his stun-stick worked? And why hadn’t Command been able to track their plant? And how had someone even known he was pressing ahead with the investigation in the first place? On Theresa’s suggestion, he’d held off on any public announcements of his intention to slap the murder label on the investigation before the autopsy was done. No one should even know.

  Theresa.

  For a terrible moment, Benson weighed her prospects as a suspect. She was the only one who knew his intentions for the case. She knew nearly everything about him: his schedule, routines, everything. If anyone was in a position to plan an ambush for him, it was her. And she was the obvious choice to replace him as chief should anything happen.

  Benson shook off the thought as he cooked in the UV. The ultraviolet light was intense enough to kill off nearly every last bacterium clinging to his skin, but brief enough to keep ambitious cancer cells in his dermis from getting any funny ideas.

  Theresa was many things, but indirect was not one of them. If she wanted him dead, she’d do it herself. He’d certainly given her cause to over the last year. Unsanctioned as it was, their relationship was stuck in its adolescence. They couldn’t come clean with their friends, couldn’t move in together, and couldn’t even think about starting a family. And that unfortunate situation had no chance of changing unless one of them switched jobs and got out of the other’s chain of command. Something neither of them had expressed any interest in doing.

  Besides, either his attacker had found a new way to block their plant signal, or someone else was jamming it for them. Both possibilities were beyond anything he or Theresa were capable of. It smacked of more interference from someone in the crew.

  The lights timed out and Benson got out of the shower, taking a moment to towel off the thin, powdery layer of detritus that the fans hadn’t managed to dislodge. He rubbed down with a squirt of moisturizer, then used mouth rinse. His teeth didn’t need brushing. A colony of genetically-tailored bacteria lived inside his mouth, breaking up plaque and eating the acid that would have caused cavities and tooth decay in centuries past. The rinse was filled with the little buggers, along with special nutrients to supplement their unique diet.

  It also tasted like burnt spaghetti sauce and stale peppermint, but for a life lived without dentists, most people chose not to nitpick.

  Benson threw on some clothes and toasted a bagel, then spread a generous layer of peanut butter once it was
good and hot. Hans at the bakery wouldn’t like that. “I already baked it once,” his wounded voice would say. Being one of only three rabbis left in existence, Hans was a traditionalist. He insisted on running a kosher kitchen, which, considering the Ark’s limited supply of ingredients, must have presented interesting challenges.

  Cleaned, fed, and clothed, Benson stood favoring his right leg, taking care not to put too much strain on his stitches. He was met at the door by the tall, uncertain back of Constable Korolev.

  “Jeez, Pavel,” Benson said with a start. “You surprised me. What are you doing here?”

  “Standing watch, sir.”

  “Over my apartment?”

  “Yes sir. Lieutenant Alexopoulos asked me to guard you against further attacks.”

  “Of course she did,” Benson said. “Thank you, job well done. You may go now.”

  Korolev shuffled his feet nervously. “I would sir, it’s just that–”

  “That Alexopoulos told you to follow me around like a lost puppy for the rest of the day.”

  “Not in so many words, chief.”

  “Ugh! You do understand I outrank her, yes?”

  “Yes, but if I listen to her, you’re mad at me. However, if I listen to you, she’s mad at both of us.”

  Benson nearly ordered him away, but the math made an odd sort of sense. “Do you always approach the chain of command so pragmatically, constable?”

  “I’m Russian, sir.”

  Benson couldn’t help but snort at that. “Come along, comrade. We have errands to run.”

  Twenty minutes later, the two of them floated down the central corridor towards the bio-lab module. The microgravity took all of the strain off his injured legs. It felt good.

  Korolev drifted just behind him, silent as a tomb. Benson looked back at the younger man. “Never been outside of the habitats, have you, constable?”

  “First time, chief.”

  “Well, don’t be nervous. Crewmembers are people just like the rest of us.”

  “I’m not nervous, sir.”