Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,46

going to be making any quick getaways. And I hadn’t come all this way to be stopped by a trigger-happy assassin and a corpse. I nodded, trying to make the gesture reassuring. “Wipe those cameras… and see if you can find anything that might help us in Copeland’s systems.”

She gave me a lopsided grin. “Bit’s already doing that. We’re cloning anything with storage capabilities. We can go through it all later… assuming we’re not stuck in a jail cell somewhere.”

I nodded and turned back to the body. The killer had taken his core, but we’d clearly interrupted him. In his shoes, I would have gone after the core first, so there was still a chance that something had been missed. I gritted my teeth and started to pat down the coil, looking for anything that might give us a clue as to what the hell was going on.

“HabSec just pulled up outside,” Chan said. “We’ve got maybe two minutes.”

“Shit,” I muttered under my breath, but I kept searching. At the hem of Copeland’s shirt I felt a small bump, barely the size of a grain of rice. I pulled the arm to me, examining the sleeve. It looked seamless—as well it should. Just like my suit was already in the process of repairing itself, most clothing had nanites to perform the same function, sewing up any rips or tears as if they’d never been. They would, of course, sew up any intentional cuts as well.

I opened one of my pouches and grabbed a simple folding knife, whose design had remained largely unchanged for hundreds of years. I flicked the blade open and made a quick cut, slicing the hem.

“Cops are getting out of the elevator,” Chan said urgently.

I shoved the knife back into the pouch with one hand, probing feverishly with the other. There. There was something. It was small enough that I could barely grasp it between my two fingers, but I managed, somehow. I dipped it into a pocket on the VaccTech.

“At the door,” Chan hissed.

Unpleasant as it was, I placed my hands over the bullet holes in Copeland’s chest and pushed down, applying pressure. The door to the room flew open and a pair of HabSec—or rather, police officers—burst in, weapons drawn and sweeping the room. In a heartbeat, one of those weapons was trained on Chan, who stood off to the side, arms raised. The other remained steady on me.

“Help!” I called. It wasn’t difficult to feign the panic in my voice. Life had been a fairly perpetual state of panic these past weeks. “He’s been shot!”

“Hands!” one of the officers barked. “Hands where I can see them.”

If Copeland really had been dying, taking pressure off the wounds would have been a pretty bad idea, but I couldn’t really blame the cop. I slowly lifted them, bloodstained palms toward the officer. My left arm wasn’t working quite right, and I had trouble lifting it beyond shoulder level, but no new bullets were flying in my direction, so I guessed it was good enough.

“He needs help,” Chan said, and there was real concern in her voice.

“He’s clearly dead, sir,” the officer covering Chan replied. “In any event, medtechs are on their way.” I could hear the minimal interest in the officer’s voice. After all, so far as they knew, Copeland would only be dead until a new coil could be found.

“Not him,” Chan snapped, ignoring the “sir.” “My friend has been shot, too, trying to save this man.”

Two more police officers burst into the room, followed by what had to be a sergeant or lieutenant or something. Then came a pair of paramedics. A sort of organized chaos took hold, and within moments, Chan and I were both cuffed and shuffled off into the care of the paramedics, though still under the watchful eye of one of the policemen. They confirmed the bullet wounds, but I turned down immediate evacuation to a med center in favor of staying behind with Chan to answer the police questions. I couldn’t very well leave her to face that alone.

And so we found ourselves, still cuffed, though at least with our hands in front of us, seated at the deceased’s dining table, across from one Detective Sanderson, while the police and crime scene people went about their business.

“What happened?”

It was a complicated question, but I kept my answer short and simple. “We were coming to see Mr. Copeland about an accident that happened to our branches.” The Persephone’s loss would be