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  I cursed myself when I, once again, saw the clues laid out in my mind:

  Criminal record check of the deceased.

  Criminal record check of all relatives of the deceased.

  Criminal record check of all officers assigned to the case.

  Criminal record check of the Mayor and all members of his administration.

  Cross-reference all criminal allegations made against the Mayor with all police reports issued on behalf of the murder victims and their relatives over the last ten years.

  Call up original file on Fliss Hooper rape. It contained no mention of Mayor Abraham Naurion. But I decided to play a hunch, and initiated a command to my database to ignore all amendments to original file.

  The file was now rewritten in my mind; the new report concluded that the main suspect for the rape is Mayor Abraham Naurion. But the case was dismissed due to errors in the data-filing processes, hence the re-drafting.

  It took ten minutes to read and process all the data, but then I could see the story unfurl:

  Jaynie Hooper, two arrests for binge-drinking excess, one reported incident of drug use prior to a school examination, expelled for having sex with a teacher in school hours, thrown out of her home, began sleeping rough, then in hostels, then acquired a luxury apartment in the Third Canton despite having no declared income. Hypothesis: she was working as a prostitute.

  Her sister Fliss, I sermonised to himself, was working 12-hour days at the hospital, saving lives. But Jaynie simply coasted through her life, making easy choices and easier money.

  I continued laying out the data in summary form:

  Abraham Naurion, Mayor of Lawless City, accused of lewd behaviour as a student at Bompasso University, with a datatrail proving he had been downloading amputee porn via a University site. But no charges brought. And, indeed, all the allegations were expunged from the official record, and were only found when I began a deep search.

  Add that together with:

  Jaynie and Abraham Naurion sighted in a Dark Side restaurant, on Tuesday 14th May.

  The following day Jaynie is admitted to hospital suffering from multiple limb severings. Rape allegations are recorded by Officers Williby and Glass. Her statement includes a reference to the assailant as “Abe.” Forensic examination reveals micro-traces of DNA in her vagina from the condom which had been used by her rapist; the DNA was a hundred-per-cent match for the DNA of Abraham Naurion.

  Hypothesis: Naurion was a sexual fetishist who paid Jaynie for sex then severed her limbs for his own sexual gratification, and then raped her, for his further sexual gratification.

  I accessed film footage of Jaynie Hooper, and was shocked at how sweet and young she looked. I could see the resemblance, too, to her dead sister Fliss.

  Who could do such a thing, to a girl like this? What kind of warped moral universe were these humans living in?

  Despite all this, I did not, I feel, have enough evidence to convict Naurion in court: just the various datatrails, the reported rumours passed on by Sergeant Jones, the DNA evidence (easily dismissed, since the rapist could have sprayed Naurion’s DNA on the condom) and a hypothesis built on all these circumstantial connections.

  However, I was confident that once I arrested the Mayor, more incriminating evidence would emerge as a consequence of my diligent investigations into the accused, his friends, associates and other victims (for criminal-profile statistics persuaded me that this rape was unlikely to be an isolated offence).

  I therefore resolved to arrest the Mayor.

  At this point, however, it occurred to me that I was faced with four interconnected mysteries.

  1) What kind of weapon could have perpetrated the massacre of the three doctors and the two paramedics? My subroutine had drawn a blank on this: some form of banned technology had been used, but it wasn’t clear what.

  2) What made Naurion think he was immune from the law?

  3) Who else was complicit in Naurion’s tampering with the police computer record?

  4) And how could I have missed all this?

  And it was Mystery 4) that worried me the most. For the clues had been there. The data had been in my head all along. All I’d needed to do was to ask the right questions.

  But I hadn’t asked the right questions. I’d been sidetracked into pursuing a private vendetta against the gang bosses.

  What the hell, I queried of myself, was wrong with me?

  “I should arrest you,” I told Sergeant Aretha Jones, “for committing grievous bodily harm on a Galactic Police Officer.”

  “Oh my goodness? Did you fall and hurt yourself? I thought we were done, you see,” said Aretha sweetly, “and that you were planning to fly home.”

  “I could have been damaged!”

  “You self-heal don’t you?”

  “Well, yes,” I said, grudgingly.

  “I was right, wasn’t I? About Fliss and the Mayor?”

  “It seems so.”

  “Get the bastard.”

  “Oh I will.”

  “What he did – to that girl. Just fucking nail him.”

  “You’ve been,” I conceded, “of some significant use to the investigation.”

  “Fuck off, tin man. Just do your job. That’s all I ask.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why—” I struggled with an unfamiliar emotion: Embarrassment. “Why drop me out of the cruiser like that?”

  “I did it,” said Aretha, deadpan, “to see if you’d bounce.”

  I wanted to experience Rage, but somehow, could not.

  For reasons that eluded me, I seemed to actually like this woman.

  “Hello Jaynie.”

  She was smiling at me. She was young and she was pretty, and she reminded me of Fliss.

  “Are you here about my sister?” Jaynie asked.

  “Yes.”

  The hospital room was decorated in pastel colours which, I knew, were designed to have a calming psychological effect. I consulted my database: apparently this never worked. I wondered if—

  “You know who did it, don’t you?”

  Jaynie’s words interrupted my idle wondering. I wondered why I had been idly wondering. That was unusual behaviour for me.

  I looked at Jaynie again and thought, once more, that she looked so very young.

  “I believe I do,” I told her brusquely.

  “All my fault.” She didn’t cry; her face was taut. She was beyond crying.

  “I think there is no basis for that opinion. It was not your fault.”

  “I pushed it. I always had to push it.”

  Jaynie had received her arm and leg transplants after a wait of only nine months, thanks to heavy pressure from the Courtesans’ Guild. Even so, it was going to take her the best part of ten years to pay for her new limbs. And until then, she would in effect be enslaved to the Guild, and would have to whore for them until her debts were cleared.

  Jaynie sat in the chair, very still. She was, I observed, still in the process of getting used to her new body. She didn’t gesticulate with her new hands at all, though when she had to reach for a water glass it was clear she had full motor coordination. But she looked – I searched for the metaphor – hemmed in by her own limbs. They weren’t part of her; they were like alien creatures clinging on to her torso.

  “How old are you Jaynie?”

  “I’m seventeen, sir.”

  “It’s human nature,” I said, in sombre but reassuring tones. “When you’re that age. To experiment. Drugs. Sex. Other –” I searched for the correct idiom, and failed to find it in my rather academically biased dictionary database – “ ‘stuff’.”

  “I was a whore.”

  “Receiving money for sex is not a crime, and nor is it a sin. But a modern and liberal consensus would be: there are easier and less demeaning ways to make money. And you owe it to yourself to explore such options.”

  Jaynie winced at my words; and I wondered if she was experiencing a twinge of p
hantom pain in her limbs.

  “It wasn’t about the money,” Jaynie whispered.

  “I know.”

  “My parents have lots of money. Legitimate money. They’re solid citizens. They built the City Bank, you know. They took on the loan sharks and won.”

  “Did they?” I asked. Though I knew that they did. I knew everything about Jaynie; it was all in my database. But I needed to hear it from her, in her own words. My eye cameras filmed every moment: everything she said would be admissible as evidence in court.

  “I wanted to rebel.”

  “I was the same, when I was your age,” I said, and wondered why I’d said that, and whether it might even be true.

  “You were human once?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “What kind of rebel were you, huh?”

  “I guess I may have worn my hair longer than the other guys,” I said, busking it now.

  “I took drugs, yeah, right? Heavy ones. Reality-altering drugs. Mood drugs. Accelerants. I had group sex when I was sixteen. Well, why not? It’s not like, you know, you can get pregnant, or get a disease. Not now, not like in the old days.”

  “I know that you like to read extensively. Therefore, that explains how you know what it was like, in ‘the old days’.”

  “Yeah, I do. I read a lot. I love novels. I read – what? – three novels a week. More sometimes. More now. I read a novel a day now, every day.”

  “I’m sure that’s extremely sound occupational therapy. Which novels?”

  “You read novels too?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But I have them all on my database. Every novel ever written. Every poem ever written too. In addition, I have every—”

  “I get the gist. You’re a walking encyclopaedia. But do you actually read these things?”

  “I know all the knowledge that is in them. If you name a novel, I will know the story, and the characters, and can recite every word.”

  “Do you take bookings?”

  “No I do not take bookings,” I explained.

  Jaynie made a barking sound, somewhere between a laugh and a vomit. She grinned, and shook her head.

  I theorised this was a sign Jaynie was becoming more cheerful. Perhaps my educative discourse was helping to lift her mood?

  “Jane Austen,” said Jaynie. “I love Jane Austen. I’m what they call a Janeite. Mark Forester too, I love his historical sagas. But I mainly read the classics, pre-twenty-first century. Tolstoy. Dickens. Collins. And Edith Wharton. Do you know Edith Wharton?”

  I accessed my data on all the books by all the authors she mentioned, and “read” them all.

  “All fine books,” I observed, “though the English syntax in several of them strikes me as a little strange.”

  “It’s an ancient form of English. They used semicolons then. But this is what I wanted to say. There’s one book, by Edith Wharton, about a young girl who is ‘ruined’. Do you know what that means?”

  “I have read the book,” I explained, “Just a moment ago. And yes of course, I know what ‘ruined’ means.”

  “In this context?”

  I accessed my dictionary database, and was baffled. “An interesting concept, though I don’t entirely see why her ruination incurred such social opprobrium,” I conceded.

  “It was the way they thought then. Social mores. She was ruined, and hence, disgraced. Not fit to be part of society. We don’t have that concept any more, not really. Drugs aren’t illegal. You can stab someone in the eye, and no one even minds. Kids my age, we all have sex, all the time. I know girls who—”

  “I don’t need to know that datum.”

  “No. You’re right. You don’t. No taboos in our society. Except, parents don’t get that. They overprotect. You have to shake them up a bit. I shook ’em up. I was a ‘bad girl’. A whore.” Jaynie brushed her cheek with her finger, as if sweeping away tears. But there were no tears, and the arm wasn’t hers. “I was just kidding around. I really was. I’d applied to medical school. I wanted to be like my big sister. I did. I loved Fliss. She always looked after me. Then that bastard tied me down and cut off my arms, and sawed off my legs, and he did, well you know the rest. It’s in the police report.”

  “I know the rest.”

  “I’m young, I’ve never had rejuve. Transplants are easy for me. New legs, new arms. I was raped, but after all the other taboos I’ve broken, does that really matter? I mean, really, does it matter?”

  I understood her logic, and her agonised irony.

  “It matters,” I told her calmly.

  “He used me like meat,” she said. “I was nothing. He didn’t kill me, but he destroyed me. I’ll never be good for anything ever again. No matter how long I live. I’ll never fall in love, I’ll never have kids. I’m not being melodramatic, it’s how I feel. I’m seventeen, and I’m rotting meat, and the rest of my life won’t be worth living. And Fliss knew all that,” Jaynie concluded, bitterly. “That’s why she threatened Mayor Abraham Naurion. That’s why he killed her.”

  “You don’t know for certain that he killed her.”

  “Of course he fucking killed her.”

  “I think so too,” I said. “I have to warn you that everything you say is being filmed and recorded in my database and will be used as evidence in court. If you fail to confirm anything you say in this filmed interview you can be charged with perjury and sentenced to incarceration and loss of human privileges. Everything you say must be the truth, the whole truth insofar as you know it, and must be stated without prejudice and malice exactly as the events occurred. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you solemnly swear to give a true and honest statement of the facts?”

  “I so swear.”

  “Then let me hear your testimony.”

  Jaynie told her story. The rape had taken place in the Mayor’s apartment. There were two witnesses, who also participated; she identified both of them, a man and a woman, from holograms which I projected in the air. They were Martha McCall, Mayor’s Secretary, and Thomas Crystal, the head of the City Transport Department.

  At the end of the witness statement I stood up.

  I switched to my beaconband channel.

  And, with all the authority invested in me by the Government of the Solar Neighbourhood, I called for the protection of a robot posse to protect me and my witness.

  “Urgent,” I screamed at the heavens, “assistance requested now.”

  The heavens darkened as a swarm of robot battleships loomed in the sky above the City Square. A whirring sound filled the air, as the forcefield generators of the battleships whined in resonance.

  The crowds in the square stared up at the sky, as the Day of Judgement dawned upon their lawless planet.

  Each robot battleship had its own powerful forcefield, based on technology superior to anything available on the planet of Belladonna. Anti-matter rays and disruptor pulses could destroy the armour of any missile or weapon possessed by the Belladonnan army and navy. As a matter of strict, rigidly enforceable policy, all the Exodus Universe planets were forced to survive on outdated technology, and any attempts to invent more modern forms of warfare were punishable by the severest sanctions.

  In such fashion, I mused, the Government of the Solar Neighbourhood exerted the mildest of dictatorial grips on the settler planets. Freedom and autonomy were granted to each planet; each was allowed its own legal system; each was allowed to be as corrupt, and immoral, as its citizens desired. The law specifically gave these settlers the freedom to go to hell.

  But certain offences still came under the jurisdiction of Solar Neighbourhood law, and could lead to the dispatch of a Galactic Cop such as myself, with the authority to investigate and prosecute.

  And to enforce the law – provided we had just cause – we were able to summon an armada of robot battleships, remotely controlled from Earth.

  These were the Doppelganger Deputies, and their power was awesome.

&n
bsp; I strode towards the hovering battleships, until I was standing in their shadow. Their hulls sparkled in the bright noonday sun. Jaynie flew by my side in her motorised wheelchair, and my forcefield subsumed both of us. A landing craft descended from one of the robot ships.

  Close by, Sergeant Aretha Jones pulled up on her flybike. She shucked back her helmet, and gave a thumbs-up sign to me. Justice was going to be done.

  I gave her a hand-salute, acknowledging her role of assisting me in bringing the case to a successful conclusion.

  Jaynie looked up at me, fear etched on her face.

  “You’ll be safe with these guys,” I said to Jaynie kindly. “They’ll keep you in space; no one can harm you. No missile can reach you.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’m going to find and arrest Mayor Abraham Naurion, and charge him with your rape and the murder of your sister and her friends.”

  “Be careful,” whispered Jaynie, and never had she looked so young.

  I actually grinned. “Nothing can—” I began to say.

  And then night fell, and the shadows struck.

  The transition was shocking. I felt as if my mind had suddenly malfunctioned. Blazing sunshine was replaced by blackest night. Stars now blazed bright in the sky, and the twelve moons of Belladonna loomed low, like rocks perched on an invisible wall. The robot spaceships vanished from sight for almost three seconds, then their searchlights kicked in and the ships reappeared. I looked at Jaynie who looked back at me, her expression a blend of curiosity and wonder.

  “Get—” I said, and then a shadow coalesced into a human form. A black-clad warrior with hands raised. I drew my two plasma pistols in less time than a blink and I fired, but the warrior had vanished and hot clammy hands touched my head, and I rolled to the ground and turned my forcefield on to random pulse and started hurling flash grenades. Jaynie screamed and grabbed her ears, then her head was ripped off her body and a fountain of blood shot into the sky.

  “Fire!” I roared subvocally, even though my cybernetic mind was already sending a beaconsignal to the robot battleships and all six of them laced the ground with disruptor pulses. A quantum computer controlled the trajectory of each burst and the men and women standing on the ground saw death rays rain down all around them but miraculously never hitting any innocent person. There were a dozen shadows now, and they were fast, but they weren’t airborne, and these robot gunners were skilful enough to shoot the wing off a butterfly travelling at lightspeed.