Chapter 4: Family Business

I'm thinking about the intricate, spider-webbing constellations of airship traffic visible from Rutherford Harland's observatory and wondering where I am, right now, in that marvelous view. And I wonder if at this very moment those brown, red-rimmed eyes are watching me.

The cab driver is cursing the congested boulevards of the skies in a sharp foreign tongue. Based on his accent and the twanging, quick-stepping music he's got playing in here, I'd say he's fresh off the boat from the Ul'ru Colonies up north. I'm in the back seat, thumbing through a wad of cash every bit as handsome as Rutherford Harland promised, and thinking.

Despite Harland's distrust of cops, he must still have some sort of pull within the Amber City PD. He's made arrangements for me to visit the scene of the crime: 105th Street in East Amber. But before that, I've decided to make a quick stop of my own. It's little early to stray off the beaten path, I know. But I like to do things my way.

Detective work is, after all, in my blood. Dad worked Amber PD Homicide Division, just like his father before him. I made it there, too-after a slight detour. When I enlisted with the Jannix Interstellar Navy at seventeen, it was mostly out of wanderlust. I knew what awaited me here. I had seen it in my father's face every morning, when I was just getting out of bed and he was just dragging himself home from work.

I wanted to spend a couple of years seeing the star system before settling down into that life. Given my family history and Dad's good standing in the department, I knew there would be a job waiting for me when I came home. Things might have even gone the way I planned, if not for the insurrections on Antioch. A year after I enlisted, I was called up into the Democratic Trade Coalition's Allied Military Forces and sent half a solar system away as a part of the initiative to ensure interplanetary peace-which, it turned out, meant making war.

I made a name for myself in battle. When I demonstrated a knack for tactics, I was made a combat controller. A few years passed, and I was made an officer. And a few years passed after that. Funny, how time goes by.

I saw a lot of death in that war. Caused a fair share of it, too. Too many good men are still buried in those gray sands.

The war went on long enough for a few more promotions. The enemy was never really defeated, but eventually, the worst of the fighting stopped. I came home to Jannix a retired Second Lieutenant. By then, Dad had passed away, but I still wanted to make him proud. I joined the Amber PD. My war-hero status and family legacy got me a spot in the Homicide Division, and I quickly made detective.

One of the first things you learn working homicide is that time is the enemy. The first twenty-four hours after a murder are a precious, precious thing. The trail goes cold along with the body. You've got to use wisely what little time you have. You learn how to survive on nothing but black coffee, bad sandwiches, and a little booze to take the edge off. Even in the war, I never understood what had made my dad such a bitter, hateful old drunk. But the nice thing about war: the blood and brutality serve a purpose. When you see it firsthand in battle, well, you can sigh and regret the war and lament what terrible things it pushes humans to do.

Homicide, though. That's a different story. When you see travesties and perversions committed on an hourly basis, amid the day-to-day existence of this city, where there is no war, no possible justification... Well, the human condition is what you lament. And you start to hate the kind of world where people do these things to one another.

There are many reasons I wish Dad had still been alive when I made detective. But mostly, it's because only after I started doing his job, started seeing the things he used to see... Only then was I finally able to understand my father as a person. As a man. All too late.

It's like Rutherford Harland said. All a matter of perspective.

I sit in the back seat of the taxi cab, watching the lights of the city fly by. Two years from sixty is too old for the average Joe to still be doing this kind of work, especially alone. But I'm not your average Joe. I have no family. I have few friends. I have only one thing: a case, from a long time ago, that still needs solving. A case for which I must be prepared-in mind and muscle.

I work these private jobs to stay sharp. I spend my free time honing my body. I burn up my money on nutrition, supplements, and genetic enhancements to stave off the effects of age and keep me strong. Because when the day finally comes, I can't afford to be too old or too weak to get the job done. I live hell-bent toward a singular purpose. One that I understand on a certain level will probably never be fulfilled.

It's a bad life I'm living. But it's mine, and it's now, and it's all I got left.

The cabbie's jubilant, foreign-tongued exclamation snaps me back to reality. The traffic is clearing up.

With a hum of antigravity engines, the taxi hovers along, slipping down beneath the city lights visible from Rutherford Harland's observatory, and into the shadows they cast.