Inescapable (35 page)
‘Uh… Thank you,
sir.’ Marie’s eyes were bulging a little. Fox sipped her coffee and
smirked.
‘It’s Jackson,
young lady. I
will
be visiting the place you live in at some
point soon. I can’t wait to see Yliaster working on something
real.’
‘Speaking of
which,’ Jarvis said, ‘we had those two frames emerge from the ducts
last night. We nailed both with bindwire missiles and they’re being
shipped over to New York for analysis.’
‘Last night?’
Fox asked. ‘Sounds like they were waiting on Terri coming
back.’
‘Seems like the
plan was to get in and tap the main computer system. Probably a
variant of the same virus they used in East Africa.’
‘What have I
got myself into?’ Marie muttered.
Fox gave her a
smile. ‘You’ll get used to it. For now, it looks like we can go
ahead with the plans for the house. When can we start on that?’
Vaughn stirred.
‘We’re projecting a start to the work on Monday, May thirty-first.
We would like to move Marie out the weekend before so we’ll need to
arrange somewhere for her to stay.’
‘Oh, she can
stay here,’ Fox said. ‘It’s convenient for her coaching and it’ll
be a chance to get to know her better. I’m going to be living in a
house with her soon.’
‘If that’s okay
with you, Marie?’ Vaughn asked, and she seemed to be trying quite
hard to keep the smirk off her face.
Marie was
turning scarlet. ‘I think that would be… great. Yeah. I’m sure
that’ll be… efficient.’
Fox smiled.
‘Uh-huh. It’s always nice when things run efficiently. Keeping
things simple, I’m all for that.’
New York Metro, 27
th
May
2060.
Fox opened her eyes in
the latest of the virtual murder rooms Kit had created. Thankfully,
this was the only active one, and it was for a cold case, but it
was looking a little different from the way it had a couple of days
earlier. ‘Kit… What happened? This was just one dead body.’
The picture of
Patricia Anne Randall still held pride of place in the central
display area, and around it stretched the web of her life which Kit
had spent the last two days constructing. They had got the file
fairly quickly thanks to August’s name being on the request and
there being no major political issues with it. Fox had given it a
quick once-over and then handed it off to Kit to build a background
for the woman. But now there were two more pictures which seemed to
have no direct connections to Patricia Randall.
‘Hunting down
data on Miss Randall required a lot of searching,’ Kit said. She
was looking a little hesitant, as though she was not sure whether
what she had to say was right, or good news. ‘She died almost four
years ago and I was tracing friends and associates using all sorts
of sources. A lot of memorials, but there were a number of photo
and video links through other people’s LifeWeb streams.’
‘Uh-huh. Looks
like you’ve done quite a good job, but what about these two?’
‘While hunting
through Miss Randall’s associates, I came across some other
references to persons who died in… alarmingly similar
circumstances.’
Fox turned,
looking at the other pictures. One man, one woman, neither
especially old, both attractive even if that meant little these
days. She pulled out the reported details and found that both had
been kidnapped while out running, vanishing for several days before
their bodies were discovered. The man’s injuries, or some of them,
had leaked to the media: he had been badly beaten, sexually abused,
and then killed. Fox flicked back to the Randall case where she now
had full details of the autopsy. She winced.
‘Shit. That’s…
excessive. Okay, so you’re thinking that Randall may be one of a
series?’
‘I believe that
Miss Randall may be the
first
of a series, Fox.’ The AI
frowned. ‘The evidence is
very
circumstantial.’
‘Because you’re
just looking at media feeds and you haven’t even gone that deep.
You think there’s a link?’
‘Yes…’
‘Then trust
your… I’m not sure an AI has instincts, exactly, but that’s what
you’d be trusting if you were human. Trust your instincts, put the
requests through for these case files, and say they may present a
link to the Randall case.’
‘I will. I… I
suppose I just wanted to hear you say I was not being stupid.’
‘Kit, the
stupid thing here would be to decide to drop it. If there’s a
serial killer with this kind of MO in the metro, we need to nail
him.’
###
I was born in the vicinity of Hadrian's Wall so
perhaps a bit of history rubbed off. Ancient history obviously, and
border history, right on the edge of the Empire. I always preferred
the Dark Ages anyway; there’s so much more room for imagination
when people aren’t writing down every last detail. So my idea of a
good fantasy novel involved dirt and leather, not shining plate
armour and Hollywood-medieval manners. The same applies to my
sci-fi, really; I prefer gritty over shiny.
Oddly, then,
one of the first fantasy novels I remember reading was The Dark Is
Rising, by Susan Cooper (later made into a terrible juvenile
movie). These days we would call Cooper’s series Young Adult
Contemporary Fantasy and looking back on it, it influenced me a
lot. It has that mix of modern day life, hidden history, and magic
which failed to hit popular culture until the early days of Buffy
and Anne Rice. Of course, Cooper’s characters spend their time
around places I could actually visit in Cornwall, and South East
England, and mid-Wales. In fact, when I went to university in
Aberystwyth, it was partially because some of Cooper’s books were
set a few miles to the north around Tywyn.
I got into
writing through roleplaying, however, so my early work was related
to the kind of roleplaying game I was interested in. I wrote
science fiction when I was playing
Traveller.
I wrote “high
fantasy” when I was playing
Dungeons & Dragons
. I wrote
a lot of superhero fiction when I was playing
City of
Heroes
. I still love the idea of a modern world with magic in
it and I’ve been trying to write a novel based on this for a long
time. As with any form of expression, practice is the key and I can
look back on all the aborted attempts at books, and the more
successful short stories, as steps along the path to the
Thaumatology Series.
Recently I took
the big step of quitting my day job and taking up full-time
writing. My favourite authors are Terry Pratchett, Susan Cooper,
J.D. Robb, and Kim Harrison. Kim’s Hollows books were what finally
spurred me to publish something, even if the trail to here came by
way of Susan, back in school, several decades ago.
For More
Information
Take a look at the
Witches and Ray-guns blog:
http://witchesandrayguns.wordpress.com
Other Books by this
Author
See them all here:
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/Thaumatologist
The
Thaumatology
Series
Thaumatology 101
Demon’s Moon
Legacy
Dragon’s Blood
Disturbia
Hammer of Witches
Eagle’s Shadow
Ancient
Dragonfall
The Other Side of
Hell
For Whom the Wedding
Bells Toll
Vengeance
Anthologies in the
Thaumatology
Universe
Tales from High Towers’
Study
Tales from the Dubh
Linn
The
Aneka Jansen
Books
Steel Beneath The
Skin
The Cold Steel Mind
Steel Heart
The Winter War
The Greatest Heights of
Honour
The Lowest Depths of
Shame
Hope
The
Ultrahuman
Books
Ugly
Shadows
The
Unobtainium
Books
Kate on a Hot Tin
Roof
The
Reality Hack
Books
Reality Hack
The
Fox Meridian
Books
Fox Hunt
Inescapable
DeathWeb – January
2016