Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1) Read online

  Kriel eyed her. ‘Open it.’

  Fox smiled and raised her weapon. ‘No.’

  Kriel looked down at the pistol Fox was holding. The ERU team were carrying standard-issue, light weapon pods, devices which mounted to the user’s arm housing an automatic rifle and a micromissile launcher. Fox was holding what looked like a compact machine pistol. It was not a familiar design; in fact, there was exactly one of them anywhere in the solar system, and it belonged to Fox. To a man in space combat armour it did not look that threatening, but she held it raised, aimed at his head. ‘Open the lock or we’ll find out how bulletproof your friend’s armour is.’ Kriel said, his voice level.

  ‘No. If you kill Pierce there, I’m going to set off the mine we planted in the airlock. Three people in hard armour locked in a pressurised container with a bomb. To be honest, I’m not sure what’s going to happen there, but I’d imagine we’ll have to spoon them out of their suits.’

  ‘You didn’t–’

  ‘I just armed it,’ Fox told him, arming the remote firing system as she said so. ‘Ask them if they see it.’

  There was a slight pause and then, ‘First Lieutenant Fox Meridian. I remember you. Always the one with the clever plan. Always the one who thought it through.’

  ‘It’s Inspector Meridian now, Kriel. I’m with NAPA. You just caught some bad luck that I was teaching these guys how to beat scum like you when you pulled this op.’

  ‘Should’ve taught them better. Open the door or the girl dies.’

  Fox’s smile broadened. ‘I think I’ll just blow your friends to crap instead.’ Her gun remained level, but her eyes dipped away from him as though looking down at something only she could see. Kriel’s arm moved, swinging out and away from Pierce, and Fox’s gun fired. Magnetic coils accelerated a metal needle, throwing it out with a sharp crack as it exceeded the speed of sound. It punched through the faceplate on Kriel’s helmet and then through his right eye. Fox was moving forward and grabbing his weapon pod, forcing it up and back even as Kriel was dropping Pierce to the deck. A second later they were both holding him down, but it was wasted effort.

  ‘I think he’s dead,’ Pierce said, looking in through the faceplate, which was badly cracked but already covered in blood.

  ‘Yeah…’ Fox agreed, frowning. ‘Hepburn? You with us?’

  ‘Fifty-fifty,’ the team’s leader replied, sitting up. ‘I think he hit me with a pile driver.’

  ‘And now you know why battles in close confines should be avoided. Want to see if the others want to be disarmed or detonated?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m on it, but you know there’s someone else in on this? He thought someone gave him up to take all of the loot.’

  ‘I noticed. I think that’s one for your investigative division, but…’

  ‘I heard him too,’ Driscoll said. ‘If you’ve got any thoughts on how to catch this outside man… Well, let’s just say the ERU could use an extra credit after the mess in the vault here.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ Fox replied.

  Luna City, 13th January.

  The reception level of New Moon Data Security’s offices was still a mess. Fire had managed to get up through the elevator shaft from the floor below before the emergency teams could control it. It was crazy really; they were on the Moon, surrounded by a considerable amount of vacuum, which was very, very good at smothering fires, but it was not possible to use it without endangering the whole quadrant of the city.

  The small cyberframe hidden away in one of the reception room’s ventilation ducts had gone unnoticed because everyone had been far too busy making sure the fire was out and starting the operation to clear the elevator shafts. With everything stable for now, the area had been cleared until morning and the little robot was free to emerge when it received the signal it had been waiting for. It scuttled out of the trashed room on six little legs and had just made it to the door when a voice broke the silence.

  ‘It’s a clever plan, Seeforth. I have to admit that I didn’t tag you for it.’

  Eyes wide, Seeforth spun on the spot. The tick-like shell scuttled about his feet like a slightly disgusting puppy. Fox ignored it, watching the cop as he tried to work out how he was going to get out of this.

  ‘Meridian? What are you doing here? I was just–’

  ‘Picking up the data Kriel’s people dug out of the offline storage downstairs. None of them are talking, because that’s how idiots like that are. It’s professional integrity, despite the fact that they’ll get screwed over while you walk away rich. It’s the helium-three mining allocations, right? You get the details on which areas are going to be opened up for mining, sell them to the right people, you make millions, they make billions. Let me guess. You need the money for pulling in voting delegations. You want your political career to shift into high gear and you either need charisma or money.’ Fox saw the moment when he worked out that she was standing there alone, not holding a gun, not immediately arresting him. She knew what was coming.

  Seeforth pulled a snub-nosed automatic from behind his back and aimed it at her. ‘Both is a lot better. What do you want? A few hundred thousand?’

  ‘No, I really don’t need the money. Technically I can’t arrest you here because I’m not a cop. Otherwise I’d be pointing a gun at you. I could defend myself now, of course. I don’t think you’d die as fast as Kriel. I’d have to hip-shoot and you’d catch a burst in the gut.’

  ‘Are you insane? I’ve got the drop on you. I’m… I’m going to have to kill you.’

  Fox shook her head. ‘I think they might take exception to that.’

  ‘They? No one’s going to–’

  He stopped as the entire ERU moved out of cover around the lobby area, all of them with raised weapons, aside from Driscoll who stepped up beside Fox with a pair of handcuffs in his hands. ‘Drop the gun,’ Driscoll ordered, ‘or there won’t be enough of you left to identify.’ There was a clatter as the pistol hit the ground. Fox winced. ‘Want to put the cuffs on him?’ Driscoll asked. ‘You figured out the way they were making the drop.’

  ‘Your collar. Pierce and Barnes located the bot. Besides, I don’t think I want to dirty my hands by touching the prick. I hate political cops.’

  Part Two: Lunar Transit Blues

  Lunar Transit Shuttle, 14th January 2060.

  They did not bother putting windows of any sort in the economy cabins on lunar transit shuttles which only tended to add to the somewhat claustrophobic feel of them. There were good reasons for it, to do with radiation and the dangers of microimpacts, but it did not lessen the fact that a sterile, white, rectangular cupboard with little in it aside from a single bunk bed was not exactly the most exciting place to spend the two days of a typical Earth–Moon transit flight.

  In Fox’s case, lying in the spartan room was just making her feel like repainting the place in blood. You could, if you wished, activate a virtual environment system and give the place more colour, but she generally found that made it more claustrophobic. They said that long-term spaceflight was more likely to result in suicide than any other form of transport, and she could well believe it. At least there were some vaguely entertaining sensies in the ship’s library. She was enjoying the rush of a high-speed buggy ride across the plains of the Arcadia region of Mars when a message pop-up alerted her to someone requesting access to her cubicle.

  Mars dissolved into white walls and she shook her head to clear it of the false motion before rolling into a sitting position and selecting the lock release the virtual assistant on her implant was offering her. The door slid open and two men looked in at her. She was not entirely sure whether they were embarrassed or nervous, but she recognised both of them and they had no reason to be either. Just in case she had not remembered their names, her VA inserted them into her vision field for reference and she pushed the tags aside with a thought. ‘Captain Morris, Lieutenant Parsons… What can I do for you?’ She would have invited them in, but there really was little to the room a
side from the bed and a small space to stand.

  ‘Inspector Meridian,’ Morris said, ‘you were checked aboard with a weapon?’

  ‘Your colleague checked it in and made sure it was correctly stowed, Captain.’

  ‘We need to check it again.’

  Shrugging, but suspecting that this was going to turn into a problem of some sort, Fox reached up to the small overhead stowage box above her bunk and pulled out a slim, metal briefcase. It required her thumb and a coded signal from her implant to unlock it. She cracked the latches with the case sitting beside her and then turned it so that Parsons could open it up. The security and comms officer had seen her pistol before, but she noticed Morris frowning at it. Parsons took a handheld diagnostic tool from his belt and began interrogating the weapon’s on-board computer.

  ‘I don’t recognise the design,’ Morris commented.

  ‘You wouldn’t. MarTech aren’t marketing them yet, though I hear the rifle versions are going out to specialist military units in the next few months. What’s this about, Captain?’

  Rather than answering, Morris looked at his security officer. ‘Like I said,’ Parsons said as he straightened up, ‘there’s no way it was her. It was last fired two days ago. You were in on that business in the crater, right?’

  ‘Yeah. I shot a mercenary in the eye with it.’

  ‘In which case, Inspector,’ Morris said, his shoulders sagging a little, ‘I’d like to ask for your help.’ He lowered his voice, just in case not everyone in the cubicle block was plugged into a sensie, but she knew what he was going to say before he said it. ‘One of our passengers appears to have been murdered.’

  ~~~

  ‘So this is how the other half lives,’ Fox said as she took in the scene in the largest of the ship’s cabins. If you wanted to shell out for the space, or you were travelling with someone, you could get a cabin instead of a bunk. The smaller ones were not exactly spacious, but you got two bunks and space to sit down. This one was the first-class cabin, with a double bed, a desk, and a couple of comfy chairs, and even a shower cubicle. ‘Or dies anyway.’ The victim had paid for his own first-class cabin and had died slumped over the desk. ‘He hasn’t been moved?’

  ‘We were going to radio Detroit for instructions,’ Morris said, ‘and then Mark remembered you were on board…’

  ‘You need to notify them anyway. Tell them you’ve got a dead passenger and a detective on site, and that I’ll forward an initial assessment as soon as possible.’ Her eyes scanned the room, software in her implant adding detail and sharpening the image as she did so. ‘Not that I’m going to be able to do much. I don’t have the right equipment.’

  ‘I’m more concerned that we might have a murderer on the ship.’

  ‘It’s not likely that someone’s going to wig out and kill everyone. To be honest, this looks like a hit. Who was he?’

  ‘Sanderson Hunt,’ Parsons replied. ‘He was a sales rep for MarTech, according to the documentation I have on him.’

  Fox took a step into the room. ‘Travelling alone? Anyone else from the company aboard?’ The corpse had an obvious puncture wound in the back, just left of the spine, maybe through the heart. It looked like a large-calibre bullet, but there was something a little odd about it.

  ‘Yes and not that I know of.’

  ‘He was shot in the back. If someone had opened the door, he would have turned around to see who it was, so they had to be in here already, and he was happy enough to be facing away from them…’

  ‘That just makes things weirder. The ship’s systems detected a problem because his biomonitor indicated a flat-line condition. There was an attendant here inside of a minute and no sign of anyone around this area. The door had to be opened from the bridge. The other two cabins are empty and locked so the killer couldn’t have slipped into one of those.’

  ‘You’ve checked them? Visually, I mean.’

  ‘Right after I drew a zapper from the locker.’

  Fox gave a nod. ‘I’m going to look around. Rooms like this are a bitch for collecting evidence anyway. I doubt we’d have got anything conclusive. Have you got a bag we can put him in for storage until we get to solid ground? And I’ll probably need to contact NAPA.’

  ‘I’ll make sure you have the communications authorisation,’ Morris said. ‘We’ll move you into cabin two, give you some room to work. Call it an in-flight upgrade. Company policy is that we can upgrade a passenger if we have reason, and right now I can’t think of a better one.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Fox said, flashing him a smile. ‘I’m not going to say no. Those cubicles depress the Hell out of me.’

  The captain shrugged. ‘Long term, you either get used to them or you walk out of an airlock one day and don’t come back.’

  ~~~

  Fox stood up and stretched, pushing up onto the balls of her feet and reaching up until her palms flattened against the ceiling. She could have managed another few centimetres with no trouble, but pushing between the two surfaces stressed her muscles a little and felt good. You could not do this in the cubicles. In the cubicles her head almost touched the ceiling, and if you were over six feet tall you had to stoop.

  ‘Subject appears to have been shot with a high-calibre weapon,’ she said, mostly for the benefit of her own ears: the transcript of her words was being typed out by the word-processing software on her implant. ‘Ten or fifteen millimetre with an explosive warhead, judging from the observed entry wound and apparent internal damage. The probability of recovering usable fragments is low.’

  There was, unfortunately, no shower in the smaller cabins. Flight times on the transfer shuttles were not exactly short, but they were also not long enough that you needed all the modern conveniences of planetary living. It was a shame: after dealing with Hunt’s body, a shower would have been nice. There was a small washbasin in the toilet cubicle, however. She had not bothered putting extra clothing on to go to the scene, so she just had to strip off her plazkin bodysuit to wash. The garment was thin, slightly translucent, and purple. Fox had a thing for purple. The print design she currently favoured was long-sleeved, high-collared, string-backed, with enough structure that it acted as a bra. Morris and Parsons had not said anything, but they seemed to appreciate it. She briefly considered the idea that she should have thrown some jeans on earlier, but she was not, technically, on the clock.

  ‘The ship does not run surveillance on the corridors as standard,’ she went on as she dried her face. ‘However, there are no indications that any of the other passengers were out of their cubicles around the time of death. That leaves crew, but the captain is pretty sure of their positions around that time and doesn’t think any of them were near the scene.’

  She wiped splashes from her breasts and stomach, glancing down at the pale skin and the muscles bunching beneath it. ‘A month in one-sixth gravity and you’re getting flabby, girl.’ The processor package did not record her words for posterity, which was probably good given that she was lying to herself to make sure she went to the gym when she got back. She had a good figure, no sense in denying it. She was fit, strong, long in the legs, and with a reasonably full bust. Her hips, she thought, could have been wider, but they were solid and her waist was neither excessively narrow nor too wide. The Army had helped her physique a little with muscle enhancements, but they only really showed when she put effort into something.

  Someone had told her once that she had hard features. Her jaw was firm and she had wide cheekbones over sunken cheeks, but her nose had a nice curve to it and her lips were full. Her eyes could be a little icy, but there was a slightly green tint to the blue, which she thought took the edge off. Quite why the comment had bothered her she was not sure since she took pride in being as tough as anyone she worked with, male or female, but it had stung a little…

  Oh, and there was her hair. Her hair was why people called her Fox. Orange-red at the crown, it was an untidy mess which refused to stay properly combed, but it feathered out as it descende
d around her face turning to a paler, near-white as it went. When she was a child, someone had told her she looked like she had a fox on her head, and she had broken their nose and split their lip. Her parents had grounded her for a month and told her that violence was never the answer, but it had made her feel better. The nickname had still stuck and she had grown to like it.

  ‘The body has been sealed in a bag for return to Earth and placed in the medical bay,’ she said, resuming the transcript process. ‘I suggest a full autopsy, though I doubt we’ll get any useful details out of it. This seems too well planned for a random kill, and no serial is going to risk trapping themselves in an environment like this… Well, unless they’re escalating in the hope of being stopped, but I don’t have any data on a killer with this kind of MO. That leaves a hit, but why would someone want to hit a salesman for MarTech?’ Jackson might know, but she was not going to bother him unless she was really assigned to the case, and this pretty clearly fell under UNTPP’s jurisdiction. ‘Personal effects have been placed in secure storage by the ship’s security officer and can be retrieved when required. The only noteworthy item was an unidentified data stick found plugged into the console. The contents remain unverified.’

  Closing the file, she signed and encrypted it, dropped it into a transmission envelope, and had her implant pass it off to the ship’s comms system for immediate transmission to NAPA. Then she flicked open the internal comms access and put a call through to Morris.

  ‘Inspector Meridian? I see we’re transmitting an encrypted message for you.’ Morris’s voice came through the room’s speakers, sounding slightly irked.