Emergence (Fox Meridian Book 5) Read online

  Emergence

  A Fox Meridian Novel

  By Niall Teasdale

  Copyright 2016 Niall Teasdale

  Amazon Kindle Edition

  Contents

  Part One: Festivities

  Part Two: In the Big Top

  Part Three: Insult, Meet Injury

  Part Four: Rising Sun

  Part Five: Death and Birth

  Part One: Festivities

  Toronto, République Française du Québec, 24th December 2060.

  Jason Deveraux smiled, his eyes on the woman in the back of an autocab with him. ‘There’s no need to be nervous,’ he said; his French accent seemed to be stronger just for being north of the border.

  ‘I’m not nervous,’ Fox Meridian replied.

  ‘Non?’

  ‘Non, I’m terrified.’

  ‘You’ve faced murderers. You’ve escaped an underground bunker swarming with terrorists. You’re terrified of meeting my parents and sister?’

  ‘Am I allowed to shoot your parents or your sister?’

  Jason’s smile did not shift a millimetre. ‘Obviously, I would prefer that you did not.’

  ‘Well then. An entirely invalid comparison, isn’t it? Terrorists are not a minefield of potential social disasters. In fact, they rarely even bother talking to me. We just get right down to the shooting.’

  ‘My father will find you fascinating. And as for my sister, all we have to do is summon up Kit and seat them in a corner.’

  Fox managed a laugh. ‘It’s not that easy. Kit only sees and hears what I do. But, okay, so it’s just your mother I need to worry about.’

  ‘My mother will be too busy wondering how any woman has managed to take my attention for long enough to come to Christmas dinner to dislike you. Unless you shoot her, obviously. That might sour relations.’

  ‘Right. So, to clarify, talk cop to your father, let Kit talk to your sister, and don’t shoot your mother?’

  ‘That should cover it.’

  ‘I should be able to manage that.’

  ‘There will be some French floating around. Don’t be insulted.’

  ‘I get subtitles. Kit’s loaded up language programs for both kinds of French. I wasn’t sure if your father might use French French rather than–’

  ‘He’s got used to the Quebecois version. He does slip occasionally, but it’s rare. I must remember to thank Jackson Martins for the transport.’

  Fox waved that away. ‘We just hopped a flight they were running anyway. Last-minute thing for staff heading back to Toronto. MarTech pampers its employees a bit, but that’s why people like working for the company.’

  ‘Almost makes one consider a new career.’

  ‘Don’t. I prefer not to date subordinates.’ Fox had, and Jason knew she had. He could likely make an assumption about her reasons for not doing it again too.

  ‘I’ll stick with international law enforcement then.’

  Fox turned her attention to the window of the cab. The suburbs of Toronto had not changed too much with the influx of population from France. North of the expressway there were arcologies and vertical farming units: MarTech had its local offices there, and that was where they were driving down from. York and the core of the city were still much as they had been at the start of the century. Around them now, the houses looked large, set to the sides of broad roads with fully grown trees in the gardens. It was a relatively affluent area and affluence frequently meant private security.

  ‘You know,’ Fox said, ‘Palladium has a few contracts around here. Mostly supplemental patrols, but some of them include private investigation if required.’

  ‘So you enforce international law too?’

  ‘Investigate. We’re usually not allowed to do the enforcing part.’

  Jason nodded. ‘It is a strange new world we live in. And we’re here.’

  The cab was pulling to a stop in front of a two-level house built of pale, sandy-coloured brick with a slate roof and surrounded by large trees. There was no car on the drive, but it had a garage: Fox had read that there was more personal vehicle usage here compared to New York. The windows had shutters set beside them, though Fox thought they might be fake. The windows themselves looked like they had been replaced: wooden frames replaced with energy-efficient double glazing. A path led around from the drive to the side of the house and, given there seemed to be no door at the front, Fox figured that was where you entered.

  Jason looked like he was going to be a gentleman and carry both their cases from the cab. Fox stood on the sidewalk and stared at him until he handed hers over. It was far lighter than his anyway since she was travelling back on the twenty-sixth and he was staying until New Year, but it was the principle of the thing. Jason was bigger and stronger than Fox was – it was one of the things she liked about him – but she was far from frail with muscles enhanced by the Army. He had told her that that was one of the things he liked about her: Jason had a thing for strong women.

  The door, set into a small porch, opened before they got to it and a tall, grey-haired man emerged. He was smiling, and he spoke in French, and Fox read the subtitles which scrolled across her vision: You don’t carry a bag for your lady, son?

  ‘I insisted, Mister Deveraux,’ Fox said before Jason could reply. ‘Ex-Army, ex-cop, not that much of a lady.’

  ‘Ha! You speak French?’

  ‘Understand it. I’m not going to embarrass myself or insult you by trying to speak it.’

  Deveraux Senior nodded. ‘Come in and we’ll do the introductions once, yes? Well, Gabrielle is running late. Her train was delayed, so we’ll have to do it again when she arrives, but twice is better than thrice.’ There was a French accent there, stronger than Jason’s, but the English was perfect.

  The Deveraux family kept a tidy, well-maintained house. Fox figured the paint on the walls of the hall was no more than a year or two old. There was no sign of dust anywhere, despite there being various pictures on the walls which would have trapped it. They went straight through to the back of the house and into a large kitchen with a dark-green range and fittings which looked like genuine wood. It had a lived-in look that suggested it was one of the most-used rooms in the house. It also had Jason’s mother in it, sitting at the table in the middle of the floor with a mug of coffee in front of her.

  ‘Now that we’re here,’ Jason’s father said, ‘I’m Pascal, not “Mister Deveraux,” and this is my wife, Monique.’

  As best Fox could tell, Jason was a case study in genetics. He had clearly got his build from his father: Pascal had probably lost some muscle tone since leaving the police, but he was, at sixty-eight, still a powerfully built and good-looking man. But he was dark, brown hair and eyes, and his wife was blonde and blue-eyed. Pascal had lent his son rugged features, but Monique had softened them a little. She was petite and pretty, and there was no grey in her hair or sag in her body to betray her years, but Fox could see no sign of cosmetic work.

  ‘Bonjour, Tara,’ Monique said, getting to her feet and stepping around the table to offer her hand.

  ‘Fox,’ Fox said, taking the hand.

  Monique’s eyebrows raised. ‘Ah! The hair?’

  Fox grinned and nodded: her mop of red hair shaded to near-white at the tips. ‘Childhood nickname that stuck. My friends call me Fox.’

  ‘A good start. I have two questions for you.’

  Fox’s smile turned quizzical. ‘Okay…’

  ‘I hope you’re okay with sleeping with your boyfriend under his parents’ roof? If you aren’t, we’re short on rooms.’

  ‘Oh, I’m pretty shameless. If Jason has problems, he can sleep on the floor.’

  ‘Oh, I think I’m going to like
this one, Jason,’ Pascal said, smirking. Jason just smiled.

  ‘I agree,’ Monique went on. ‘How did you manage to get him out from behind his desk, Fox? We were beginning to worry about him.’

  Fox figured she was safe enough with something close to the truth: Monique had brought up sex, or at least the sharing of beds, already. ‘We met through work, so… sex and murder, basically. I kept turning up at his office with juicy murders and then enticed him out with a short skirt.’

  ‘And a corset and thigh-high boots,’ Jason added. ‘It was… a distinctly interesting first date.’ He turned to his father. ‘And she does bring me very interesting murders. She keeps uncovering serial killers with an international victim list.’

  ‘We’ll talk later,’ Pascal said with a glint in his eye.

  Monique nodded. ‘Save it for when Gabrielle gets here. Coffee?’

  ‘Oh, yes please,’ Fox said. ‘I’ve had nothing to do for a month but read contract documents and I’m still having trouble keeping my eyes open. Pascal said Gabrielle’s train was delayed?’

  ‘Oui. Snow is affecting the east. We may even get some here before tomorrow.’

  ‘I hope so. Jason promised me a white Christmas.’

  Pascal laughed. ‘It will be the first in five years.’

  Jason shrugged. ‘Well, it was more of a suggestion…’

  ~~~

  There was thin, icy snow falling by the time Gabrielle turned up. It was not really sticking to the ground yet, and what was had become a grey, dirty scum coating the sidewalk, but the temperature was dropping and the flakes were getting larger.

  Gabrielle rushed into the kitchen to stand in front of the range, rubbing her hands together. ‘It’s getting cold out there,’ she muttered in French. ‘We might actually have snow tomorrow.’ Then she looked around, spotted Fox sitting beside her mother with a photograph album, and switched effortlessly into English with just a hint of French accent. ‘Oh God, sorry. You must be Tara. I’m Gabrielle, Gaby, which you probably already guessed.’

  Fox smiled and got up to walk around the table. ‘It’s getting filthy out there, never mind cold. I don’t blame you for wanting the heat. And it’s Fox. Has he really been calling me Tara when he mentions me all this time?’

  ‘Actually, it was more of a mix. He’d slip between the two when he got excited. And I didn’t want to presume…’ Gaby was a pretty girl who, again, seemed to have something from both her parents. She appeared to get at least some of her height from her father, though she was a couple of inches shorter than Fox. Her figure, however, was her mother’s: slim, almost willowy, but an ample bust filled out the red, turtle-necked sweater dress she was wearing. Her face was a sort of narrow heart shape with a straight nose and quite a pointed chin. Her blue eyes had a hint of green in them, and her hair had obviously come from someone else entirely since it was coppery-red and she wore it in ringlets down to her neck. Her skin was pale, which went with her hair and the wintery weather.

  ‘You’re allowed to presume,’ Fox told her. ‘Oh, I’m supposed to introduce you to Kit.’

  ‘Kit?’

  Kit appeared beside Fox: a fox-girl with large green eyes, hair which formed ears over her head, and a thick white brush. As usual, she was smiling. ‘I am pleased to meet you, Miss Deveraux,’ Kit said. ‘I am Kit, Fox’s personal assistant.’

  ‘Who’s Kit?’ Pascal asked, frowning with one brow raised.

  ‘Glasses, Pascal,’ Monique said as she took her own glasses from a pocket and propped them in place. ‘Oh! Now aren’t you the sweetest thing?’

  Kit waited until Pascal had found and placed his own wireless-enabled specs, and then she smiled at them both. ‘Good afternoon, Mister and Mrs Deveraux.’

  ‘Huh, well,’ Pascal said. ‘You’re one of those infomorphs?’

  ‘She’s a class four AI,’ Fox said. ‘My PA, currently executing on a processor in my arm.’ Fox looked around the collected expressions of surprise and added, ‘My right arm is artificial below the elbow, and that’s a story for later. However, it means they could put a quantum processor in there, which lets me carry Kit around with me, which is very useful.’

  ‘Jason and I manage with a VA,’ Gaby said, tapping her head, ‘up here. Mom and Dad are happy with the wearables. But I guess being on the executive board at Palladium Security Solutions requires a bit more… capability.’

  ‘I guess, but Kit’s more than a PA. She’s turning into quite the detective. She’s the queen of bulk data analysis and mining data off the internet.’

  Kit’s cheeks coloured. ‘I do my best.’

  ‘Oh…’ Gaby breathed. ‘She’s really a class four. I’ve never really had a chance to talk to one…’

  Fox glanced at Jason, who was sitting at the table with a mug of coffee and wearing an amused ‘I told you so’ expression. ‘We’re here until Sunday,’ Fox said. ‘Plenty of time.’

  ‘Not nearly enough,’ Gaby sighed.

  ~~~

  ‘I basically do the same job as Kit,’ Gaby said. They had gravitated to the lounge after eating around the kitchen table in the evening. The house had a dining room which was, apparently, used when the Moon was blue and almost obscured by flying pigs, but would be used for Christmas dinner. The lounge was an evening place with a couple of huge sofas soft enough to sink into and a chair which Pascal occupied. A fake fire blazed, pumping out heat which was welcome because the outside temperature had dropped quite alarmingly and the snow was falling properly now.

  ‘I do e-profiling,’ Gaby went on, ‘and other data collection stuff. I’ve told them we’ll eventually get replaced by AIs, and I’ve started learning to handle more investigative work. Electronic crime is big business, and it’s a far harder job training an infomorph to handle that than it is to get them data mining for personal details.’

  ‘I agree,’ Kit said. She was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, at Fox’s feet, a white-clad vulpine pixie. ‘I am learning to do criminology, and I have a natural predisposition for psychological profiling, but it is hard work. I prefer to let Fox do what she does best while I concentrate on providing her with the information she needs.’

  ‘And she’s good at it,’ Fox said, ‘but she sells herself short on the investigative aspects. Hell, she turned a cold case into a hunt for a current serial killer.’

  ‘Oh?’ Pascal said. It was a hint to tell the story: there was a sparkle in the elder Deveraux’s eyes.

  ‘It’s not exactly pleasant subject matter for an evening with my boyfriend’s parents.’

  ‘Pfft!’ Monique said, waving a hand dismissively. ‘Cop house. I’m used to hearing horrible things and this time I know there’s a happy ending.’

  Fox gave a little shrug. ‘I wouldn’t exactly call it happy, but it was satisfying. Um, I’d closed one case, but we had a difficult culprit. Rich, connected, and there was every possibility that he could skate, or keep the trial blocked long enough that he died before coming to trial. He made me an offer. His granddaughter had been murdered, tortured to death, and if I agreed to look at the case, he agreed not to put undue obstacles in the way of his trial.’

  ‘I don’t like making deals with criminals,’ Pascal said.

  ‘Neither do I, but… Harper August is a complicated one. Heart in the right place, but methods went through questionable and out the other side. And then I saw what had been done to his granddaughter… Seriously, even if it hadn’t been maybe the only way to clear the decks, I’d have wanted to look into the case. So, we got the case files from NAPA and I set Kit loose on them. Basic stuff. Profile the victim and those who were around her at the time of her death. Two days later, Kit had found two more murders with suspiciously similar MOs. I told her to keep going. We ended up with six bodies in New York, two in Cape Town, and another three in Berlin.’

  ‘Which was where I came in,’ Jason said. ‘We were expecting another victim in Germany, but the killer had returned to New York.’

  ‘This is the LifeFit c
ase!’ Gaby said. ‘It was all over the news. Wasn’t the killer eventually apprehended in Jamaica?’

  ‘Actually, he was apprehended in mid-Atlantic,’ Fox said. ‘He’d done a runner, after kidnapping his ex-business partner. I caught up with the yacht–’

  ‘By jumping an aqua-sled onto the back of it during a hurricane,’ Jason put in.

  ‘Tropical storm,’ Fox corrected. ‘Took him down, went on to Jamaica, and Jason flew out himself to handle the extradition.’

  ‘And found her lying on the forward deck of the yacht in a swimsuit made mostly of string, sunbathing.’

  Gaby and her mother were giggling. Pascal was looking bemused. ‘You jumped a sled onto the aft deck of a moving yacht?’

  ‘Jason wasn’t especially impressed,’ Fox said, ‘but I managed it. I’m kind of lucky at doing really stupid things that shouldn’t work.’

  ‘I thought dropping out of Pythia’s vertol hurt more, actually,’ Kit said. ‘We couldn’t land, so we had to be dropped out of the rear door from above the waves.’

  ‘Tell that to my elbows. But the point here is, Kit found those links by dredging through LifeWeb, finding mentions on memorial pages, friends of friends of friends who thought the similarity was odd. Without her, I’d never have tracked the guy down. That was the second time she’s figured something out that I doubt anyone else could have found. I just can’t talk about the first time. It’s got some… sensitivities.’

  Jason nodded. ‘It has. But you remember that mall rampage in February? That was part of the pattern.’

  ‘I had help with that,’ Kit said. ‘A friend provided me with some information which pointed me the right way.’

  Fox smirked. ‘Her boyfriend.’ Kit’s cheeks coloured.

  Gaby beamed. ‘You’re so human, Kit. The infomorphs I generally work with are a bit… stiff. You… You get embarrassed!’

  ‘You will be used to class threes,’ Kit said. ‘They can show emotion, but they don’t really understand it. Often they learn to simply avoid it so as not to give offence. The problem is compounded since they don’t always realise they’ve upset someone. I have the same emotional capacity as a human. And I have an owner who is happy to allow me to express those emotions and allow me to develop them. I’m barely a year old and my creator is very happy with my emotional development.’