"Yeah, what?"
"The girl. Jacintha. What about Jacintha?"
"What about her?"
"Three of Z-B's finest tried to rape her."
"But they didn't rape her, did they? Thanks to the hero of the hour. She had a nasty shock, which is never going to be repeated, because we're never coming back. She can get on with her lotus-eating life again. Six months' time, we'll just be a bad memory fading away."
"That's it? She doesn't count?"
"This is politics, man. Her stake in this isn't as big as ours. So what's your decision?"
Lawrence grinned, even though the bruise on his lip hurt when he did it. At least the sarge was being diplomatic, pretending he even had a choice. He knew damn well if he carried this through and screwed Lyaute and the other sergeants he'd be the one who wound up shitlisted.
That was the way the companies worked. The way they'd always worked. The way they always would work.
He drank some more of his cold tea. "I guess I must have got these bruises falling downstairs last night."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The court-martial was held in the banqueting suite of the Barnsdale Hotel, which was barracks to eight of Z-B's platoons and half of the industrial technology corps. There was a dais at one end of the long room, normally used by a band. Today it had a single table with three chairs for the presiding officers, of which Ebrey Zhang was president of the court. Arranged below them, on the dance floor, were another two tables. One was occupied by the prosecution team, led by the Z-B attorney, who was being supported by the Memu Bay police magistrate, Heather Fernandes, and two more high-powered legal assistants. The defense table had two chairs, where Hal sat with Lieutenant Bralow.
Behind them, fifty plastic chairs had been arranged in rows to seat Z-B personnel, selected members of the public and a few media representatives. The first row was reserved for the mayor and whoever he chose to have with him—a couple of old friends, Margret Reece and Detective Galliani. Ten Skins were standing guard around the room, being pointedly ignored by the civilian audience. For once, the power supply was uninterrupted, allowing the lightcones to shine at full intensity.
When Lawrence arrived, escorting Hal, he was disgusted by the weighting. The kid had taken one look at the layout and virtually cringed.
"It's a fucking show trial," Lawrence growled at Bralow while Hal was distracted. The lieutenant answered with a slightly guilty shrug.
Lawrence took a chair from the audience section and brought it up to the defense table. He sat on it and gave Hal a solid, reassuring pat on the knee. The kid responded with a pathetically grateful smile.
Nobody remonstrated with Lawrence. He was wearing his full dress uniform, displaying more decorations than most of the officers in the room. If he wanted to stand by a squaddie under his command, none of the NCOs helping with the court arrangements were going to stop him. Bryant saw where he was and glared before sitting with the other officers.
The sergeant major called for silence. The presiding officers marched in and took their seats on the dais.
Lawrence couldn't fault the procedure. Prosecution made its case well. The details of the case were explained to the court. Selective sections of various police interviews with Hal were also played. Twenty minutes in, and already it looked bad.
Detective Galliani was called to the stand and told the court about Hal's alibi, which the kid had stuck to the whole time.
"Did you manage to trace the taxi that the defendant claims he took?" prosecution asked.
"No, sir," Galliani answered. "The traffic regulator AS has no log of any taxi being used on that street at that time of night. And Mr. Grabowski was most insistent on the time he left the barracks. In fact, we pulled the logs for every taxi in Memu Bay that day. None of them were unaccounted for at either of the times when Mr. Grabowski said he was traveling to and from the alleged brothel."
"Ah yes," prosecution said smugly. "The brothel the defendant says he visited. Does it exist, Detective?"
"No, sir. Mr. Grabowski himself identified Minster Avenue as the street where this alleged brothel was situated. We investigated every house. They are all private residences."
Lawrence had visited Minster Avenue himself two days ago. Not in Skin, he wore civilian clothes, a shirt with a high collar to cover his valves. Before he went, he trawled images of the street from the town hall planning department and showed them to Hal, who'd pointed unhesitatingly to number eighteen.
Standing outside the house Lawrence took his time looking around. There was the neat little front garden with its wrought-iron fence, just as Hal described. It guarded a squat white stone facade, with big windows, the paintwork clean and bright. Like all the others along the street, a home for the upper-middle classes. Lawrence activated his bracelet pearl and called up his Prime. A complex indigo image slid across his optronic membranes as the quasi-sentient program decompressed from its storage block. Perhaps it was his imagination, but it seemed brighter than the bracelet pearl's standard icons.
He opened a link into Memu Bay's datapool and told the Prime to trawl the household AS and the local traffic logs. Information began to scroll up almost at once. Whatever software the KillBoy resistance group used to cover their tracks, it was excellent, which strengthened his suspicions that they had compromised e-alpha.
Number eighteen's household AS told him nothing, because it had been inactive for over a week. The system was still waiting repair. Smaller independent sections of the house's network were functioning on autonomous backup mode, but they didn't have memory logs. Strangest of all, the security system was also offline; its sensors weren't even drawing power.
Minster Avenue's road traffic logs confirmed there had been very few vehicles driving along the street during the night Hal claimed he'd visited. Certainly no taxi had pulled up outside number eighteen. But the Prime dug deeper into the local transport network. Between 1:48 and 2:10 the network dataflow had increased by a small percentage.
After Hal had left.
There was nothing in the logs to account for the increase.
"Shutting up shop," Lawrence muttered to himself. The minute data abnormality wouldn't convince a court that had Hal's DNA sample taken off the girl. He wasn't even sure if it would be admissible in court. But it was good enough for him: an electronic graffiti roughly equivalent to spraying KillBoy was here across the front of the house.
Lawrence walked over the road and rang the brass bell. It took a minute before the black front door swung open. A woman in an apron stood in the hallway, giving him a suspicious stare. "Yes?"
"Elena Melchett?"
"Yes? Who are you?"
"Lawrence Newton. I'm covering the alien rape case."