Blood Orbit Read online

  Published 2018 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books

  Blood Orbit: A Gattis File Novel. Copyright © 2018 by K. R. Richardson. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Cover illustration © Maurizio Manzieri

  Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke

  Cover design © Prometheus Books

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Richardson, K. R., 1964- author.

  Title: Blood orbit : a Gattis file novel / by K. R. Richardson.

  Description: Amherst, NY : Pyr, an imprint of Prometheus Books, 2018. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017050513 (print) | LCCN 2017060906 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633884403 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633884397 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Police—Fiction. | Cyborgs—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / High Tech. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Police Procedural. | GSAFD: Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3618.I344694 (ebook) | LCC PS3618.I344694 B56 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050513

  Printed in the United States of America

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  Day 1: Wednesday,

  Dreihleat Angra Dastrelas—0221

  “Matheson! Get here now!” Santos, his training officer, sounded panicked.

  Matheson snatched the mobile data device out of its two horizontal loops on his shirt. “Where are you?”

  “At the—At Paz. Y’know, the jasso on the alley. Fuck . . . somethin’s wrong. Door’s locked. The door should be open—it’s always open!”

  Matheson turned back the way he’d come and started running for the alley. He knew they shouldn’t have split, not even to finish rounds on time. He raced through wisps of rising fog, the multi-colored glow from OLED vines woven to form pictographic signs above every shopfront scattering copies of his tall, thin shadow along the walls. His boot steps were loud in the twisty, filthy streets, and the tropical humidity made his breath rasp in his throat and his hair cling around his face in straight, black strands.

  Everything legal in the ethnic ghetto was closed now, and most of the tourists had gone back to their clean, safe hotels near the quay. If there was anyone else around aside from drunks dozing in alleys between the squat low-rise buildings of carved blue stone, they slipped out of sight as Matheson approached. Only a handful of jassos—illegal gambling clubs, fight pits, and the more genteel variety of drug dens—were still operating at this hour. They were inescapable features of the city’s tourist-based economy, and not the priority of rookie patch-pounders like Matheson—so Santos had told him.

  Santos whipped around as Matheson rushed into the narrow passage. The older, shorter ofiçe was halfway across the alley as if he’d been pacing and his sudden turn made his injured knee wobble. He caught his balance by grabbing at the club’s massive entryway pillars. A discreet lamp barely illuminated the door within the deep shadow cast by an overhanging second story. No other light shone from around the doorframe.

  Santos pointed toward the door with a shaking hand. “Check it.”

  Matheson hesitated. Santos was trembling more than his weakened knee should have caused and his brown eyes showed too much white. “Didn’t you do that already?”

  “Yeah. But—This door ain’t never locked before 0500 on a festival night and if there’s somethin’ wrong, I don’t want nobody sayin’ we didn’t do this right. You check it.”

  Warily, Matheson pulled the Sun Spot off his belt—why wasn’t Santos using his?—and shined it on the door as he edged up to it. He stayed well clear of a dark shadow on the ground as he reached to try the handle. “It’s locked. As you said. Did you try your override?”

  “Not that kinda lock, kid. That’s a bolt-and-key—old school.”

  “But there’s a lock pad—”

  “Don’t you tell me what there is and isn’t, Fishbait. Override won’t do shit—you try it.”

  Matheson ran his ID badge through the lock and entered his access code, pressing his shoulder to the door so it would spring free.

  The door lurched a little under his weight, but remained closed.

  Santos moved up beside him and drew his baton from his belt as Matheson tried again.

  Nothing changed.

  Matheson pounded on the door. “GISA ofiçe! Open up!”

  Silence. Then a metallic slide and rattle as Santos flicked his baton out to full extension. “Break it,” the older man said. “Break it down.” His voice was rough and Matheson could smell him sweating.

  “Why? Maybe they closed up early.”

  “It’s an after-hours club for the locals! They should be open by now on a festival night and Loni or someone should be in there, but they’re not sayin’ nothin’. Break the fuckin’ door!”

  Santos’s nerves convinced him. Matheson stowed his light and badge, and used his own baton to break the handle. Then he stepped back and drove his heel hard against the latch plate.

  The door groaned and splintered around the lock. Matheson’s second kick popped it open and he reached for his Sun Spot again as Santos lurched into the darkened room beyond.

  The stink hit at the same time the light cast harsh illumination inside. The thin green and white carpet and gold-trimmed walls were splashed crimson around four human figures that lay like broken dolls on the bar room floor. Merry fucking hell. Matheson gagged and turned his head and the light to the right, but there was no relief there. More bodies lay in a loose arc across the floor of the gaming room. His spotlight’s beam gleamed white on an eye that had been blown from its socket, and sparked a rainbow glitter from a woman’s jeweled shoe and stocking. The smell of bloody death clotted in his nose and, for an instant, it seemed lik
e there were a hundred corpses—a thousand brown-and-yellow bodies—sinking into darkness that swelled from the unlit corners.

  Santos let out a choking sound as Matheson wrenched away from the scene.

  Santos’s leg folded under as he twisted away, and he fell forward, slamming his head and shoulder into the pillar. He collapsed against the wall and down to the ground as Matheson bolted past him and vomited in the alley.

  When the heaves stopped, the shivers started. Matheson put all his weight against the nearest wall and keyed his mobile. But he couldn’t remember the codes or what to say. He managed to give his identification but the rest was still out of his grasp. “We need assistance. My partner—my TO—is down. He’s injured . . . And we have a murder. No. Ten . . . at least ten bodies here . . .”

  “I’ll get the Investigation Officer of the Day for you and dispatch assistance to your location.”

  How can she be so calm? Matheson thought.

  “Stay put and keep your comms open.”

  He gulped and nodded before he remembered to speak. “O-okay.”

  Santos didn’t move as Matheson slid down the wall to sit shivering and tasting the bile in his mouth as he waited.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Day 1: Hospital—Pre-dawn

  Merry hell, what a nightmare. Matheson had escorted Santos to Public Health, but he wasn’t allowed to leave, yet, because it took three Gattis Corporation regional directors arguing for hours to decide if a mass murder in an ethnic ghetto was worth investigating, how it would be paid for, and who would get stuck with it.

  Sit tight, they’d ordered, and then accompany the CIFO to the site. Without his TO to whisper in his ear, the Assistant Regional Director had had to remind Matheson: “Chief Investigating Forensic Ofiçe—not ‘Officer.’ You’re employees of Gattis Corporation, not officers of the law.” It wasn’t what he’d learned at the academy, but if they didn’t want a real policeman, he didn’t know why he’d been sent to Gattis. He felt he was barely treading water in the sea of everything he didn’t know.

  Callista said I wouldn’t last three days as a cop. She was wrong, but . . . did I really know what I was getting into? Or was I just being contrary? He was five months and six days out of the academy, galaxies removed from Central System, and so horrified and tired he could barely stand.

  Matheson had lost track of how many hours he had been awake and his eyes itched from lack of sleep, but he kept them open as he rested his forehead against the window, watching the changing illumination of the city below. The hospital had been gouged into the cliff at the beginning of the terraform, so long ago now that no one noticed it had a view billionaires would vie for. The upper half of the Angra Dastrelas—the Cove of Stars for which the city was named—was framed in the waning night sky by the Pillars of Archon. The two megaliths guarded a hole in the stone scarp that circled the crater and pinched the throat of the shallow inlet forming the actual cove. The nighttime water reflected and multiplied innumerable stars, while the landscape and a quirk of the tropical atmosphere made it look like they swirled from the bay and flooded upward into space. Beautiful. But now dawn crept in, and Gattis’s planetary capital seemed to ooze from the bottom of the cove and across the floor of Trant’s Crater like a stain.

  Behind him the endless news feed and its chatter about upcoming festival schedules, politics, unrest in the agricamps, and which impossibly pretty celebrity was visiting town for Spring Moon poured through Matheson’s ears as an irritant. That and the cool, dry air of the building on the back of his neck were all that kept him from falling asleep on the spot. He fought the urge by recalling his first view from the jumpway: Gattis, its single thin ring and solitary moon above a slowly spinning ball of vibrant deep-water blue with two vast continents—Ariel and Agria—and the jeweled scatter of the Verdan Archipelago between them. Then the long flight down from jumpway to orbital, and the planetward fall until Ariel filled every view and the planetary capital seemed to rise out of the tropical jungle cut clean by the crater’s edge. Now he concentrated on trying to pick the Angra Dastrelas spaceport out of the riot of city lights and emerging shapes. He spotted the tidy squares of the pad lights at last, far across the crater floor, remembered the instantly sticky heat, and the stink of fish and fuel that had wrapped him as he’d stepped out of Worker Intake—

  “Ofiçe!”

  Startled, he turned toward the shout. The lab-coated woman glaring at him was a hard, compact package of restrained fury under a shock of brush-cut, light-colored hair that was going gray. Early fifties, a little under average height, her complexion would have been a bland shade of Central System light brown if she hadn’t been slightly ruddy with anger. Her face was far from beautiful and her expression was sharp enough to cut ice.

  “Just what sort of rear-echelon idiocy is this?” she demanded, brandishing the digital data pad she was holding. “I have an order to release my patient to you. He’s supposed to have six weeks recovery and evaluation after surgery and he’s only had two. This is a delicate experiment and the system isn’t fully integrated yet.”

  Matheson blinked and frowned at her, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Doctor. It’s not up to me. I was just told to fetch him.”

  “I don’t care what you were told to do. If you take him and anything goes wrong he could die, and I won’t be set back to square one on this project because Director Pritchet can’t hold his water.”

  Matheson glared back. “This is not my doing. And I have no other orders but to wait for his release. If you expect me to do anything other than stand here until you give way or I get redirected, you’re going to be very disappointed.”

  She glowered at him a moment longer. “You always do what you’re told?”

  I am too tired for this. “No, but in this case, I don’t have a choice.”

  She growled as she thought about it, and then her mouth set into a sour quirk. “You break him and I’ll hold you responsible.”

  “It’s not my—”

  “Hah! Oh, yes it is. He’s not ready to go into the field. The surgery breached the blood/brain barrier and if the site gets infected, things will go very wrong very fast. So until he’s back in my hands for reevaluation, you are not to let him wander around unattended. The instant—and I do mean the instant he seems to be in distress, you will return him to me. Got it?”

  Probably hunt me down and flay me alive if I don’t. He didn’t relish being a nanny, but it beat explaining to Regional Director Pritchet why he hadn’t done as ordered. “Fine,” he snapped.

  “Right answer.” She slapped the digital pad flat against his chest. “Sign this—and what the hell’s your name, anyway?”

  “Matheson,” he replied, laying his ID on the pad and verifying it with his official hashmark. “Who are you?”

  She took the pad back. “Doctor Andreus. The Forensic Integration Project is my baby, which makes Inspector Dillal my special concern.” She gave him a shrewd look. “Here’s what you need to know, in a nutshell: The system I’ve installed is part on-the-fly forensic sampling and analysis, and part communication and data integration, which makes him the link between Forensic Tech and Investigation. Theoretically, he can sample and analyze a simple crime scene on the spot, but I haven’t been able to test him. He’s functionally and physiologically unique. He’s also a pigheaded pain in the ass.” She paused and studied Matheson again. “You’ll be two of a kind.”

  Matheson might have taken exception if he’d had the energy, but he only cared about getting it over with.

  “Against my better judgment, I’m letting you take him.” Dr. Andreus turned and pointed deeper into the facility. “It’s the room at the end of the green slideway.” She turned back and gave him a hard look. “Don’t fuck me over.”

  Matheson let his eyes close a moment. “Thank you.” His eyelids were so gritty and heavy that they seemed to scratch his eyeballs raw. He tugged at his wrinkled uniform and headed for the slideway, happy to leave the doctor behind.
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  His head was spinning with fatigue by the time he reached the room at the end of the sliding walkway. The door stood open, so he entered. The room was gloomy and it had an odd smell, like industrial solvent and copper. Better than the jasso . . .

  A small, bright light snapped on over the bed and he took a step back, dazzled for a moment. A soft rustling sound, then nothing. He peered toward the glare.

  “Dillal?” He stumbled over the pronunciation a little and moved deeper into the room. “I’m SO Eric Matheson. I’m looking for Inspector J. P. Dillal.”

  The figure in the bed moved, and the room lights came up.

  Even after what he had already seen that day, Matheson flinched away from the half-human visage that stared up into his own face. What did Andreus do? The left side of the patient’s skull had been shaved from the temple down all the way to the back. Cinnamon-red hair hadn’t grown out enough yet to hide the inorganic shape of something inserted beneath the flesh and bone. The orbit of the left eye had been redefined by an unnatural, hard edge and a livid incision, patched all around forehead and cheek with brown and olive spray skin that didn’t match the patient’s muddy amber complexion. The eye itself was too large and open to match the one on the right, and the iris was not the same brown, but a transparent gold color through which light reflected red.

  Matheson tried to catalog the person lying in the bed. Male, thirty to thirty-five, under average height . . . but there he stumbled. The man was too distinctly colored for most of Central System, yet didn’t fit any of the planet’s ethnic groups, either. Too short for Dreihle, too slight for Ohba, and he certainly wasn’t Gattian, with their skin and hair tinged the same vivid blue as the planet’s pervasive sand. Judging by the size of his remaining pupil and the way he clenched his jaw, the patient was in some pain, but if he was drugged, it wasn’t much. That jarred Matheson back to his duty.

  He swallowed and asked, “Are you Inspector Dillal? Did I say that right?”

  The man in the bed shrugged one shoulder and tilted his head. Only the brown eye blinked. “Close enough.” His voice was soft and tired.