Yuri let out a dismissive grunt but didn’t actually challenge her. “That whole case certainly justified Ainsley’s suspicion about the Olyix,” he said.
“How?” Alik said. “They helped you.”
“That they did. They gave me all the information I asked for about using Kcells for a brain transplant, and how the whole concept remains pure science fiction. All very diplomatic and cooperative. But Hai-3 also said: man.”
“I don’t get it,” Eldlund said.
“The exact words it said to me were: I will pray for your success in recovering the unfortunate man who has been abducted.”
“You didn’t say who you were looking for,” Alik said, clicking his fingers. “Male, female, or omnia.”
“Right,” Yuri confirmed. “Ainsley never quite believed the Olyix being so saintly. And this proves it. They’ve taken on the aspects of our greed and run with it to an extreme, because they see that as a normal human trait. Unchecked, it’s a bad attitude. And it is unchecked, because they don’t really understand us, they just mimic us. No moral filter, remember? They just don’t have it. That’s why we keep a very special watch on them now.”
He glanced at me, and I nodded confirmation for everyone to see. But I understood now where his prejudice came from; it was quite reasonable given the circumstances. Yuri wasn’t an agent for alien disinformation; Hai-3 had been stupid. Its mistake there in the embassy had strengthened Yuri’s paranoia, and in turn he’d gone on and convinced Ainsley Zangari to suspect the Olyix of limitless intrigue in the pursuit of money. Subsequently, every crime committed in the Sol system, from jaywalking to political manipulation, Ainsley blamed on the Olyix.
Okay, so eliminating Yuri as a suspect was a step forward, but I still didn’t understand where the whole Kcell-enabled brain transplant myth originally came from. Because that is now embedded so deeply in popular culture, it’s never going away. I’d been hoping for a clue in Yuri’s tale, but he was clearly as puzzled by that as I was.
“You think the Olyix fired the hellbuster missile at you?” Alik asked.
“Not directly,” Jessika said. “That was Cancer.”
Alik’s reaction was interesting. He sat bolt upright. “You’re shitting me!”
“No.”
“Je-zus. Can you back that up?”
“Not in a court of law. But our G7Turings went through a lot of data. We composed a digital simulation of Bronkal for the three days prior to Yuri and I arriving, and extending two days after. She turned up with two associates when we were in the middle of interviewing Joaquin Beron. We backtracked her through the hubs to Tokyo. Before that, we have no idea. The Japanese criminal intelligence agency was unaware she was in their country.”
“And the hellbuster missile? Don’t tell me she came through your hubs carrying it?”
“No,” Yuri said. “We have deep sensors on every trans-stellar hub. You can’t carry weapons between star systems.”
“Because you don’t need to,” Jessika said. “We had a little more luck with the hellbuster. It was a custom fabrication in Yarra, Althaea’s capital. Someone called Korrie Chau brought it in through the Bronkal commercial transport hub in a taxez about four minutes before Yuri shut the hub down. The taxez was registered as a public vehicle, but that was a false flag; it belonged to him. He used to move a lot of illegal fabrications around in it.”
“You did some good work there, tracing him,” Alik said.
“We lost seven of the tactical team members in that explosion,” Yuri said in a dangerously level voice. “And Christ knows what Baptiste’s people did to poor old Lucius as well. Ainsley made sure we had whatever resources we needed afterwards.”
“The hellbuster part wasn’t difficult,” Jessika said. “We found Korrie Chau and his taxez ten hours later, in a parking lot less than two kilometers from the docks. Cancer had slit his throat.”
“Yeah, she doesn’t leave loose ends,” Alik said.
“Forensics tore Chau’s place apart. We shipped entire rooms back to our crime labs for analysis. Forensic accounting tracked his payments, but they were all from one-shot finance houses based on independent asteroid settlements. Most of them don’t even have a human population; they’re just a bunch of G5 and G6Turing rock squatters.”
“So you don’t know who paid him?”
“No.”
“But you think it’s the Olyix?”
“Not directly, but their actions, their acceptance of what they see as our normality, were ultimately what started this,” Yuri said. “I told you, there are consequences to what they have been doing. We know Baptiste Devroy went on the run as soon as Jessika and I turned up at Horatio’s flat. So he’d obviously got some kind of monitor there. And Hai-3 knew who I was trying to find when I showed up at their Geneva embassy. Whatever people are getting snatched for, the Olyix are at least aware of it.”
“Why, though?” Kandara asked. “What’s their motive?”