Shakedown Read online

  Which gave rise to Megerra’s other industry – tourism. The businessmen on the Planetary Council ran Megerra as one big open city. The freewheeling entertainment facilities, originally designed for the miners and engineers, appealed to others as well. Word spread that Megacity was the place for a wild time with very few questions asked. Tourists flocked in from more primitive, or more respectable, planets.

  In Megacity, everyone was on the make.

  Roz had to bribe the hotel-clerk to honour their reservations, bribe her way from a room over the noisy main drag to a quiet one at the back. Everything for a price, she thought sourly.

  She looked up as a handsome blond-haired blue-eyed giant made his way over to her table. Normally, Chris Cwej, her fellow ex-Adjudicator and current companion, professionally speaking only, whatever he might hope, looked offensively happy and healthy, especially first thing in the morning. Today, Roz noted with malicious satisfaction, there were black rings under his blue eyes and the fair skin had an undoubtedly greenish tinge.

  Chris nodded carefully, and sat down beside her. The chair, like most chairs, was too small for him.

  It had taken Roz ten minutes of scowling, snarling and table-thumping to attract the attention of the long-legged, short-skirted, big-haired, big-bosomed topless waitress, but suddenly here she was at Chris’s side, leaning over his table and threatening to poke his blurred blue eyes out.

  ‘Full breakfast, sir?’ she purred. ‘A man your size needs to keep his strength up.’

  ‘Try the mixed sea-food platter,’ suggested Roz callously. ‘Baby sand-lizards, squid, honey-covered sea-slugs and deep-fried eels.’

  Chris shuddered and shook his head. Looking up at the waitress, then hurriedly raising his eyes to her face, he said desperately, ‘Just tea. Do you have any herb tea?’

  ‘I’ll bring you some materra,’ cooed the waitress seductively. ‘Specially imported from Rigel IV. They say it has aphrodisiac properties.’

  ‘Don’t waste your time, sister,’ said Roz. ‘To do him, or you, any good it’d need to have corpse-raising properties.’ The waitress gave her a murderous smile and flounced away. Roz sat back and surveyed her unhappy partner.

  ‘Now, what do we do during our first few days on a strange planet?’ she said in schoolmarmish tones. ‘We have our shots, we swallow our pills, we eat bland foods till our system settles down and acclimatizes.’

  ‘Give me a break,’ said Chris feebly.

  Remorselessly Roz went on, ‘We do not make our way to the only remaining ethnic restaurant in town and blow ourselves out on Fugora-fish stew.’

  ‘It’s the planet’s speciality,’ pleaded Chris. ‘You can only get it here on Megerra. Since the original population became extinct, hardly anyone knows how to make it.’

  ‘Fugora-fish stew is probably why the original population became extinct. You look pretty extinct yourself.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ insisted Chris. ‘The pills are working.’

  The waitress brought him a tall glass of herb tea and a dazzling smile. Cautiously, Chris sipped the straw-coloured liquid.

  ‘I don’t know what’s going to do you in first,’ said Roz wearily. ‘Alien cuisine or the Doctor’s mad schemes.’ She sighed. ‘I suppose we’d better hit the streets again. Though what good it will do...’

  They had already spent several days checking the mean streets of Megacity for traces of their quarry. It was, thought Roz, an almost impossible task. Good police work was essentially local. You had to know the turf, the snitches, the players and the patterns of crime. A new city was bad enough, but a new city covering most of a new planet was almost impossible.

  ‘Never despair,’ said Chris. ‘I think I’ve got a lead. Picked it up on the morning newscast.’

  ‘Already? Doesn’t waste any time killing again, does he?’

  Chris shrugged. ‘By now he needs cash, a new identity, a place to stay. He only knows one way of getting them. I guess that’s why the Doctor wants us to catch him.’

  ‘The Doctor wants us to find him,’ corrected Roz. ‘Find him and follow him, without upsetting his delicate sensibilities. We’re not doing too well, are we?’

  ‘We nearly had him on Formalhaute Four.’

  ‘We nearly had him on lots of planets. But we always end up following a trail of corpses.’

  ‘We’ll get him this time,’ said Chris confidently.

  Ah, youth! thought Roz. She threw a small fortune on the table and stood up. ‘Well, let’s get started.’

  Chris drained his tea, and looked across the room at the waitress. ‘I think this stuff’s beginning to work,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The aphrodisiac bit, I mean.’

  Roz grabbed his ear and pulled him to his feet. ‘Out!’

  As they headed for the door, the waitress put a hand on Chris’s arm to detain him, and stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear. Roz waited impatiently by the door.

  Chris broke away with some difficulty and came to join her. ‘What was all that about?’ snapped Roz.

  ‘First she told me she’d been on duty all night and was off-shift in ten minutes. So I said she must be very tired and I hoped she had a nice rest.’

  Roz suppressed a grin. ‘And then?’

  Chris gave her a baffled look. ‘She said she was sorry if she’d got the wrong idea, and would I like to meet her brother?’

  ‘Come on,’ said Roz. ‘Let’s hit the street.’

  Megacity was a planet of perpetual night – or rather, of perpetual artificial day. The planetary sun was feeble enough to begin with and the smog layer never let you see it anyway. All over the city the shop-windows, the ever-changing light-ads and the bar and casino signs blazed brightly all around the clock. The miners worked ever-changing shift-systems, and they needed to be able to eat, drink and play at any hour of the day and night.

  Roz and Chris stood looking up and down the busy street. Rickety twin walkways on either side of the road carried a variety of pedestrians. The road between them was rutted and potholed. Civic maintenance seemed to be a low priority in Megacity. Most of the miners were humanoid, with a marked tendency towards the squat and powerful. With their broad shoulders, bow-legs and pitted faces, they looked, thought Roz, like dwarves or trolls.

  There were quite a few non-humans mingling with the miners. Roz saw Arcturans, Alpha Centaurians, Falardi and Foamasi. There were also surprising numbers of a barrel-chested Ursine species resembling teddy-bears with a bad attitude.

  She nudged Chris in the ribs as one of them shouldered his way towards them. ‘You spent a fortune trying to look like that!’

  Chris nodded sadly, regretting his vanished fur. The result of an expensive body-bepple, it had literally gone up in smoke.

  The Ursine seemed to resent their interest. It lurched to a halt in front of them. ‘Something funny about the way I look?’

  ‘No indeed, sir,’ said Chris politely. ‘We were just admiring the splendour of your appearance.’

  Enviously he stroked a thick-furred arm.

  The Ursine snatched it away and brandished a massive claw under Chris’s nose. ‘Don’t get funny with me,’ it growled.

  Suddenly another Ursine appeared. In what was clearly a practised move, the two backed Roz and Chris into a recess beside the hotel doorway.

  ‘What’s going on?’ growled the second. Its fur was black, and it looked even bigger and meaner than the first.

  ‘Lousy tourists insulted me,’ snarled the first one. It jerked a paw at Chris. ‘This one even made a pass at me.’

  ‘Please, sir,’ said Chris, ‘I assure you, I had no such thing in mind. You simply misinterpreted a friendly gesture.’

  The Ursine ignored him. ‘Goddam off-world pervies, coming here insulting honest citizens. We oughta rip ‘em up.’

  ‘Maybe we could just fine them,’ suggested the second. It glared menacingly at Roz and Chris, who had been listening to this well-rehearsed routine with calm professional interest.

  The Ursine w
aved a massive paw under their noses. ‘Well, what’s it gonna be? Your credits or your hide? Pay or bleed?’

  Chris looked at Roz. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘You handle it. I didn’t get much sleep.’

  Chris stepped forward and hit the astonished Ursine beneath the breastbone. It was a beautiful punch, a low left hook, delivered with Chris’s considerable body weight, and a spiralling motion that drove his fist deep into the Ursine’s thick-set body.

  The Ursine said ‘Oof!’ and sat down hard on the pavement. It breathed, or tried to breathe, in a series of deep choking coughs.

  The black-furred Ursine lunged forward – and stopped when it felt something cold and hard jammed up one flaring nostril.

  It was the nozzle of the pocket blaster in Roz’s hand.

  The attacker stood very still, paws raised. ‘Sorry, lady, just trying to raise a few credits for a drink.’

  Chris looked at Roz. ‘Should I call the police?’

  ‘No, please, not the police,’ begged the black-haired Ursine. ‘I’d sooner you blasted us down right now.’

  ‘I don’t think we can spare the time to fill out police reports,’ said Roz. She pulled back her blaster, and wiped the nozzle on the Ursine’s chest fur. ‘Beat it!’ She pointed to its still-whooping companion on the pavement. ‘Take your friend with you. And pass the word. If anyone else bothers us, we may have to be unpleasant about it.’

  They watched as one Ursine dragged the other away. None of the passers-by took the slightest notice.

  Chris rubbed his fist. ‘Trouble with non-humans, you never know where to aim for. Solar plexus is usually best – if they’ve got a solar plexus. I broke my hand on an Androgum’s chin.’

  Roz put away her blaster. ‘You’d better do something about your hormones. Take more cold showers or something.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘A topless waitress and a bear, and it’s still only morning!’

  Chris blushed. ‘We’d better get a cab.’

  They shoved their way to the kerb and tried to hail a hovercab. After three drivers had sped past them with a sneer, Chris stopped the next by the simple expedient of stepping in front of it, arms outspread, so it had to stop or run him down. The rodent driver, who looked like a giant rat in a leather jerkin, decided to stop – but only at the last possible second.

  Chris yanked open the door, handed Roz inside, climbed in himself and said, ‘2003 Spaceport Boulevard.’

  ‘You like tour of Megacity, hit all the high-spots?’ squeaked the driver. ‘You want vraxoin, crackerjack, jekkarta weed?’

  He continued offering them strange sights, illicit substances and opportunities to indulge in a variety of exotic perversions, until Chris reached forward and clamped a hand on his skinny neck, squeezing hard enough to produce an anguished squeal.

  ‘2003 Spaceport Boulevard, please,’ said Chris politely. ‘Nowhere else, nothing else, and take the most direct route. I know the city well.’

  The last bit was bluff, but he reckoned it was worth a try.

  Spaceport Boulevard, as its name implied, ringed Megacity’s main spaceport. It was lined with tourist shops, fast-food joints, night – or rather day-and-night – clubs, casinos and bars, for the benefit of impatient tourists who couldn’t wait to get downtown to be swindled and robbed. Money-changing bureaux were everywhere offering to turn any currency in the galaxy into the mandatory Megacity credits at exorbitant rates of exchange.

  The hovercab sighed to a halt outside Number 2003 and dropped to the ground with a bone-jarring thud. The driver-rat demanded triple fare, and pulled a vibroknife when Chris refused.

  Chris took it away from him and threatened to return it somewhere he wouldn’t like. They compromised on double fare and the driver went away happy, after pressing a plastic ident-disc into Chris’s hand. ‘You need cab, you call me,’ he squeaked. ‘I show you good time!’

  ‘Here,’ said Chris. ‘You want your vibroknife back?’

  ‘Keep it!’ said the driver, with a sharp-toothed grin. ‘Come in useful.’ He produced another, larger knife. ‘I got plenty more!’ The cab lurched into the air and sped away.

  2003 was a long thin room, its front open to the street. It was lined with booths, all fronted with blast-proof glass except for a thin slit at the bottom. Through the gaps, clerks were accepting bundles of exotic currency and returning thin sheaves of Megacity credits. Computerized credit wasn’t much used in Megacity. After suffering a number of highly ingenious hi-tech swindles, most honest merchants preferred old-fashioned cash in hand. The dishonest ones insisted on it.

  Ignoring the change-booths, Roz and Chris strode down the room to an unmarked door at the end. Roz hammered on it authoritatively. ‘Open up!’

  An eye-level hatch slid back, revealing a long, sharp nose and two watery suspicious eyes. A reedy voice said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘A few more questions about the murder,’ said Roz gruffly. ‘Do you open up, or do we kick it down?’

  The door opened to reveal a tall skinny humanoid in dusty high-collared black robes. He had a long thin face and a high-domed skull with a few strands of greying hair plastered across. He led them into a bare and shabby office. It held a desk, an ancient computer terminal and an enormous safe, now open and empty.

  ‘Real hi-tech set-up,’ grunted Roz. ‘You the boss now?’

  The skinny man went and sat behind the desk. ‘I suppose so. I’m Relk, the chief clerk. Some syndicate runs the exchange bureau. I’m just keeping things going till I hear from them.’

  Roz leaned over the desk, staring into his eyes. ‘Knock the old guy off to get the job, did you? Pocket full of cash and a nice promotion?’

  The clerk recoiled from her dark, angry face. ‘No! All I did was find the body.’

  She grabbed him by the collar and heaved him across the desk.

  ‘Come on, confess, save us all some time.’

  Chris reached out and grabbed her shoulder. ‘Give the poor guy a break, boss. At least let him tell us what happened.’

  Roz shoved the flustered clerk back into his chair. ‘Right, let’s go through it all again. From the beginning.’

  ‘But I’ve already made a statement.’

  ‘Make it again. Don’t miss anything out, or you’ll be sorry.’

  Relk gave her a terrified look, too frightened to speak. Chris patted him reassuringly on a bony shoulder. ‘Just take your time. All we want are the facts.’

  In a trembling voice, Relk told his story.

  ‘A customer came in yesterday night...He had a bundle of cash, mixed currencies, wanted to change the lot into Megacity credits. The amount was way over the booth limit, so I sent him in to see Mr Sakis, the boss.’

  ‘This customer,’ snapped Roz. ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Shortish, fattish, black hair. Expensive clothes, looked very prosperous. Might have been a banker, something like that.’

  Roz and Chris exchanged glances. The description matched the mutilated body they’d seen on Lorelei.

  Hanno Seth had indeed been a banker. Soon after he’d been found dead in his office, a duplicate Seth had taken passage on a passenger-shuttle to Megerra – with Roz and Chris, as usual, one jump behind.

  ‘Go on,’ said Chris encouragingly.

  ‘They were in there quite a while. Then Mr Sakis came out, carrying this big plastic sack. Said he’d got to go out somewhere on important business, I was to look after things till he got back.’

  ‘How did he look, when he was talking to you?’ asked Roz.

  ‘Weird. He didn’t look at me and his voice was sort of flat.’

  Roz nodded. The clerk went on with his story.

  ‘Anyway, off he went and after a while I realized I hadn’t seen the customer leave. There’s only one way out of the office, and it wasn’t like the boss to leave anyone alone in there. So I thought I’d better check. He’d locked the door but I’ve got a code-card for emergencies, so I opened it and went in...�
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  He broke down, his voice quivering.

  ‘Take it slowly,’ said Chris gently.

  ‘Sakis was lying in the middle of the floor,’ said Relk. ‘Even though I’d just seen him go out. His body was all cut up...’

  ‘You mean stabbed? Slashed and hacked about?’

  Relk shook his head. ‘It was neater than that – tidier. Bits of his insides were – arranged beside the body.’

  Roz looked across at Chris. ‘Could just be an organ-legger. We don’t want to waste our time.’ She turned back to the clerk. ‘Any bits missing? Heart, lungs, liver?’

  ‘How the hell would I know?’ said Relk, showing sudden signs of spirit. ‘I’m an accountant not a medic. I didn’t take an inventory of his guts. I don’t know what’s supposed to be in there in the first place!’

  ‘All right,’ said Chris soothingly. ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then I called the police, of course,’ said Relk. ‘They turned up in their own good time, made me tell the story ten times over, took the body away and told me not to leave town.’

  ‘I take it the safe was emptied as well?’ asked Roz.

  Relk nodded. ‘Two days’ takings – nearly fifty thousand credits.’

  ‘Was it broken into?’

  ‘No, just opened. He must have made the boss do it before...

  Chris looked meaningfully at Roz. Hanno Seth’s vault had been opened and emptied too.

  ‘It’s him,’ said Chris quietly.

  Roz nodded. ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘You mean something like this has happened before?’ asked Relk excitedly. ‘The guy’s a serial killer, right? Is there a reward? I could identify him!’

  ‘I’d keep quiet about that if I were you,’ warned Roz. ‘He might come back and rearrange your innards too. What did your boss look like?’

  ‘What do you care, he’s dead. Why don’t you go down to the city morgue and take a good look if you’re so interested?’

  Roz reached out and grabbed him by the collar, her knuckles digging into his skinny neck. ‘Just answer the question!’

  The clerk croaked something indistinguishable, and Roz squeezed harder. ‘Speak up!’

  Gently Chris moved her hands away. ‘He can’t talk while you’re choking him.’ He turned to Relk who was massaging his neck and gasping for breath. ‘Please answer the question, sir. I assure you that it’s in your own best interests to assist us with our enquiries.’