Alien: Cult E-Book

Gavin G. Smith

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 436

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

An FBI agent on the trail of a brutal serial killer gets caught in the web of a Xenomorph-worshipping religion in this thrilling murder mystery twist on the Alien universe, for fans of Scott Sigler's Aliens: Phalanx and Alex White's Cold Forge. In the affluent, technocratic Alexandria Colony, people are disappearing. And witnesses are dying in grisly, mysterious ways—it all reeks of Xenomorphs. At a loss, the Hume City police call in Special Agent Tyler Matterton to solve what they can't. Tyler is a rising star in the FBI's Esoteric Crime Unit, investigating crimes involving exotic tech or first contact situations—the weird murders. With the local police department baffled, Tyler and his synthetic partner Serena are set on the case, tracking the killer through the underbelly of Hume City only to find themselves in the middle of something much larger and more horrifying than they possibly imagined. There is a cult at the heart of the Alexandria Colony, and it will stop at nothing to serve its Goddess. In this latest original novel, discover the world of Alien as you've never seen it before. Veteran sci-fi author Gavin G. Smith's deliciously twisted crime thriller is a terrifying thrill ride sure to hook readers from the first page to the last.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Part I

1

2

3

4

5

Part II

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

Part III

16

17

18

19

20

Acknowledgements

About the Author

THE COMPLETE ALIEN™ LIBRARY FROM TITAN BOOKS

The Official Movie Novelizations

by Alan Dean Foster

Alien, Aliens™, Alien 3, Alien: Covenant, Alien: Covenant Origins

Alien: Resurrectionby A.C. Crispin

Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplayby William Gibson & Pat Cadigan

Alien

Out of the Shadowsby Tim Lebbon

Sea of Sorrowsby James A. Moore

River of Painby Christopher Golden

The Cold Forgeby Alex White

Isolationby Keith R.A. DeCandido

Prototypeby Tim Waggoner

Into Charybdisby Alex White

Colony Warby David Barnett

Inferno’s Fallby Philippa Ballantine

Enemy of My Enemyby Mary SanGiovanni

Uncivil Warby Brendan Deneen

Seventh Circleby Philippa Ballantine and Clara Carija

Perfect Organismsby Shaun Hamill

Cultby Gavin G. Smith

The Complete Alien Collection

The Shadow Archive

Symphony of Death

The Rage War

by Tim Lebbon

Predator™: Incursion, Alien: Invasion

Alien vs. Predator™: Armageddon

Aliens

Bug Huntedited by Jonathan Maberry

Phalanxby Scott Sigler

Infiltratorby Weston Ochse

Vasquezby V. Castro

Bishopby T. R. Napper

The Complete Aliens Collection

Living Nightmares

The Complete Aliens Omnibus

Volumes 1–7

Predator

If It Bleedsedited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

The Predatorby Christopher Golden & Mark Morris

The Predator: Hunters and Huntedby James A. Moore

Stalking Shadowsby James A. Moore & Mark Morris

Eyes of the Demonedited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

The Complete Predator Omnibusby Nathan Archer & Sandy Scofield

Non-Fiction

AVP: Alien vs. Predatorby Alec Gillis & Tom Woodruff, Jr.

Aliens vs. Predator Requiem: Inside The Monster Shopby Alec Gillis & Tom Woodruff, Jr.

Alien: The Illustrated Storyby Archie Goodwin & Walter Simonson

The Art of Alien: Isolationby Andy McVittie

Alien: The Archive

Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Reportby S.D. Perry

Aliens: The Set Photographyby Simon Ward

Alien: The Coloring Book

The Art and Making of Alien: Covenantby Simon Ward

Alien Covenant: David’s Drawingsby Dane Hallett & Matt Hatton

The Predator: The Art and Making of the Filmby James Nolan

The Making of Alienby J.W. Rinzler

Alien: The Blueprintsby Graham Langridge

Alien: 40 Years 40 Artists

Alien: The Official Cookbookby Chris-Rachael Oseland

Aliens: Artbookby Printed In Blood

Aliens vs. Predators

Ultimate Preyedited by Jonathan Maberry & Bryan Thomas Schmidt

Rift Warby Weston Ochse & Yvonne Navarro

The Complete Aliens vs. Predator Omnibusby Steve Perry & S.D. Perry

A NOVEL BY GAVIN G. SMITH

TITAN BOOKS

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ALIEN™: CULT

Print edition ISBN: 9781785651960

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785651984

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: November 2025

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

™ & © 2025 20th Century Studios.

Gavin G. Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

EU RP (for authorities only)eucomply OÜ, Pärnu mnt. 139b-14, 11317 Tallinn, [email protected], [phone]

To Andrew, Ceri, Kiera,Trev and Yvonne, for reasons.

PART I

1

Tyler felt the swamp water seep into his boots. He tightened his grip on his service weapon, his sidearm slick from the thick humid air and his own sweat. The night vision element of the tactical lenses clipped to his glasses had turned the wooded Missouri swamp land into a ghost world of twisted and gnarled hickory trees, wearing Spanish moss like a funerary veil. The bare bones of the rewilded military base were still just about visible, lumps of concrete encrusted with lichen and cracked by tree roots. The old motor pool was a largely intact concrete bunker rising out of the swamp water, a low hill covered in the fecund plant life but with oddly angular sides and leaking man made light and sound.

Ahead of him Tyler could make out the back of one of the Bureau’s elite Hostage Rescue Team members. She wore servo-assisted armor, the words FBI stenciled across her back, pulse carbine at the ready. Despite her bulk she was somehow moving quietly. Tyler didn’t feel stealthy. His ownbreath was deafening in his ears and he seemed to slip or stumble every other step. He didn’t need to look behind him to know that Serena was following him, nearly silently.

The music was grating on him. It sounded like a looped nursery rhyme over a discordant industrial beat, with an incongruously light and fast bassline woven into the track. He could feel his heart trying to match the drumbeat. His excitement came with a thrill of guilt. He knew that there would be no hostages for HRT to rescue. Credence Greco had worked too hard to remain off grid, leaving such a small footprint that even AI-augmented analytics and surveillance had been little help in tracking him. Tyler knew that the families of those that had been taken were living in false hope.

Tyler had been searching for Greco for months. The break had finally come when speaking to the survivor of an earlier attempted abduction. She had been able to describe the old base. Finding the survivor had taken the time but Greco had messed up. It must have been early in his career as a monster. He had struck too close to his lair.

A flickering strobe light then a staccato thunder, and Tyler felt things passing him at velocity. Serena pulled him down from behind. It took him a moment for his brain to unpack what was happening. They were taking fire. The HRT agent ahead of them staggered, but then her pulse carbine was at her shoulder. A different frequency of strobic light: flickering lightning accompanied by the screaming of pulse-accelerated bullets. Tyler couldn’t see what she was firing at, but whatever was firing at them stopped. He wondered if Greco was already dead.

“Sentry weapons…” someone said over comms. It meant Greco could still be alive.

“Red Actual to Blue and Red teams, breach, breach, breach.” This over the comms from the HRT’s Special Agent in Charge.

The HRT agent in front of Tyler increased her pace. All attempts at stealth now abandoned, Tyler staggered after her as fast as he could, trying not to faceplant in one of the many pools of stagnant water.

He caught a glimpse of the sentry weapon as he ran past it. It was a scratchbuilt job, a civilian rifle designed for hunters modified for full auto with an extended magazine, mounted on a mechanized tripod and augmented with a motion detector. It was just so much scrap now. Not for the first time Tyler wondered at the Venn diagram overlap between serial killers and DIY enthusiasts.

Tyler scrambled and slipped up the moss-covered concrete slope to the bunker’s side door, following the HRT agent. Serena was little more than a fleeting shape in the darkness, always just behind him, ready to assist.

Tyler held back as three more members of HRT’s Blue team materialized out of the dark undergrowth. Tyler felt entirely ineffectual standing there with only his sidearm: but then, HRT had only allowed him and Serena along as a courtesy. Serena, unarmed, was at his side now.

More fire and thunder. An underslung breaching shotgun hit one of the hinges with a solid lockbuster slug, then the other hinge and finally the door’s lock. Metal screamed as apower-assisted boot kicked the door in and Blue team filed in. As Tyler moved after them, he heard multiple breaching charges go off at the main doors as Red team effected an explosive entry. Like Tyler, nobody here had any illusions as to whether Greco’s victims were still alive.

He clambered over the metal door, near bent in two, into the bunker and put his back against the wall. He was trying to catch his breath, breathing harder than even his current level of exertion warranted. Serena stood by him, scanning the area around them.

Tyler heard more gunfire: strobic light animated the shadows. He was standing at the end of rows of shelves filled with years of accumulated junk, all of it coated in moss and mold.

Movement to his left. He swung round, bringing his sidearm up. The flashlight mounted under the weapon illuminated the figure in his night vision. He almost squeezed the trigger. Then Serena was next to him, pushing the weapon down. For a moment he thought that he had almost made a terrible mistake. One of Greco’s victims was alive. Then he saw the wires sprouting from the man’s head, the crudely implanted servos on his joints, the only partially successful embalming. Tyler slumped against the wall and forced himself to look away, but he could still see the crudely animated body.

Somebody was shouting to cease fire over the comms, panic in their voice. It was his voice. Then the HRT agents realized what was happening, the source of the movement all around them.

*   *   *

An agent was curled up in his armor, hugging his knees, sobbing, another one comforting him. A third spitting vomit from her mouth.

Serena led Tyler through the old, overgrown motor pool. The HRT agents glared at him as if it were his fault, as though he had brought them here, and he had. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t really feel anything.

Greco was small, dirty and unkempt. Two of the armored agents pushed him onto his knees between them. Tyler stood over him. Greco’s tear-filled, wide eyes looked somehow innocent.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I was lonely.”

Tyler thought of the expanding web of grief growing exponentially out from this inadequate man’s fantasies.

Serena, always Serena, pulled the sidearm from Tyler’s fingers and stopped him from doing something really stupid.

*   *   *

Tyler woke up in the hypersleep chamber screaming and clawing at the glass. The hatch slid open and Serena was standing over him.

*   *   *

The city’s starscrapers were a field of glass spikes reaching up to a washed-out night sky. The passenger shuttle’s torch was just about bright enough that it could be picked out against the indeterminate glow of the light pollution. The southern polar city grasped the shuttle’s bulk as it sank between the spires towards the aerospace port. A patina of executive comfort grew like a fungus over the port’s vast, labyrinthian industrial superstructure. Engines on a heavy burn made their last few directional adjustments as the passenger shuttle was engulfed in a bath of its own exhaust. Flames licked out from the raised shuttle port’s exhaust venting. The landing pad sank on vast shock-absorbing coils as the shuttle touched down.

Thick umbilicals snaked through the smoke, plugging into the ship to provide fuel, oxygen and other essentials while sucking out waste. Moments later the passenger bridge concertinaed out to mate with the shuttle and the hierarchical disembarkation process began.

*   *   *

Tyler had been awake, in theory, for the better part of twelve hours. He was, however, nursing his lag, his hypersleep hangover. He half welcomed the numbness that came with it. It left him with a definite sense of dislocation, awake but asleep, as though he were haunting himself. He was aware that he had dreamed the entire month he had been in hypersleep and that those dreams had been unpleasant. He had a strong suspicion as to the content of the dreams. With an entire month to sleep since they had left Gateway Station, it was inevitable that sooner or later his subconscious was going to cycle back to that swamp in Missouri. He was thankful that he couldn’t remember the actual dreams. That he remembered the sensation but not the content only heightened his feeling of dislocation, however.

“Special Agent Matterton?”

Tyler looked around the luggage reclamation area, a huge concrete hall with a vaulted ceiling, as though seeing it for the first time. He located the source of the voice: Serena. His partner. She was white, dark-haired, and her medium build belied her speed and power. Serena had been designed, apparently, to look professional but unassuming, unthreatening but not unpleasant to look at. In terms of unassuming the designers had outright failed. In terms of being not unpleasant to look at, they had underestimated the aesthetics of professional competence. That she was a packaged product, made Tyler all the more uncomfortable. He did his best to forget it. Maybe that was the problem.

“Serena, we’re off duty. Can you please call me Tyler?” he asked again.

“Protocol,” she said by way of explanation. “I believe our luggage has found us and our liaison is waiting beyond customs.”

Somewhere else he would have perhaps asked if the local authorities could fast-track them, but here on Alexandria Colony everything had a cost. Even professional courtesy.

Their autonomous luggage caught up with them. Tyler watched Serena walk away from him. He was in too much of a twilight state to sort through his thoughts, so he just followed her. It was easier. She was never not going to know the correct thing to do, after all.

*   *   *

The pickup area was mostly full of liveried drivers. The Buchanan-Memorial aerospace port was close to the city’s financial district. It was a place for commercial rather than tourist travelers. Tyler tried looking for Jean in the crowd but things weren’t entirely making sense yet.

“There,” Serena said, pointing to a figure in a rumpled temperature-regulated business suit, leaning against a pillar in such a way as to cause ripples in the holographic advertising.

Detective Second Class Jean Hoyle didn’t look much different to how she had looked when they had attended the academy back on Earth together. It was in and around her eyes that he did see a change, however. Even through his fugue he could make out all the new lines. They had both been pushed hard as cadets at Quantico but even at their most sleep-deprived, he had never seen her look so weary. Jean had quit the Bureau for the lure of significant money with Hume City Serious Crimes back when the Core Systems, particularly Alexandria Colony, had been aggressively headhunting from some of Earth’s more prestigious law enforcement agencies.

“You look like shit,” Jean told him.

Tyler managed a smile.

“Hey Jean, this is my partner, Serena.”

Jean turned to look at Serena.

“Hey,” she finally said.

“Detective Hoyle.” Serena nodded.

Jean turned from Serena as though dismissing her.

“Tired?” she asked.

“I’ve just slept for a month,” Tyler said.

“That’s what I thought. Want to get a beer? I’ll take you to your hotel later.”

Tyler didn’t want a beer. He didn’t particularly like drinking. He was, however, aware of its importance in forming and furthering productive relationships with fellow law enforcement professionals. Besides, he wanted to catch up with an old friend.

“Sure,” he said.

*   *   *

Tyler was impressed with the gyrocar despite himself. They lifted off from the top level of the AS port’s parking structure. Lines projected on the screen offered flight paths that would keep them well away from the port’s airspace and the exhaust venting from shuttles landing and taking off. Around them all was steel and mirrored glass. Tyler felt the same way about Hume City’s financial district as he felt about almost every financial district he’d ever visited: the glass and steel towers were clearly supposed to inspire awe, but it was always a sterile awe.

“Yours?” he asked, nodding at the gyrocar. It looked more than a little worn around the edges. On the other hand, it was an gyrocar.

“Came with the job,” she told him, concentrating on pressing buttons, adjusting controls with one hand, the other working the steering wheel-like yoke. She flew the gyrocar over the edge of the parking structure. Tyler could make out the aerospace port’s ground traffic on the raised roadways that grew from the huge structure. He saw bridges for the high-speed passenger maglev lines and the heavier, slower cargo-carrying ground trains. Between the port and the surrounding glass and steel was a chasm where the light from the surrounding buildings and roads faded into darkness. There wasn’t much in the way of air traffic moving in the chasm, though as Tyler’s eyes adjusted, he was pretty sure that he could make out light further down in the murk.

“The port’s one of the old atmosphere processors, isn’t it?” he said, then frowned. He was surprised that the gyrocar was sinking down into the chasm.

“Yeah, WY realized in the sixties that if they were going to spend so much on the processors it made sense that they should be repurposed. I’ve seen super malls, entertainment complexes, and giant apartment blocks, but they’re good as aerospace ports because they’re solid enough to take the load and most of them already had a few heavy lift platforms.”

Having drifted past the main passenger concourse level, the light grew dimmer and dimmer. The lower levels of the aerospace port’s surrounding towers were caked in a thick layer of grime. Past the raised roadways and rail bridges that fed the cargo port, the only thing to see was blinking collision lighting on the superstructure.

“Where are we going for a beer?” Tyler asked. “Hades?”

Jean laughed without humor. She hadn’t switched on the gyrocar’s running lights but now, through the grimy steel supports of the superstructure, Tyler could see other lights far below. Garish neon, flashing in greens, pinks, blues, and a lot of red. The gyrocar was slowly spiraling down between the supports as Jean relied heavily on the collision sensors to pilot the vehicle. Tyler could make out the neighborhood now. It looked like a mixture of stage one colony pre-fabs, some stacked eight or more stories high, and more permanent, poured concrete, stage two type buildings. It could have been some kind of living history exhibition except everything was caked in soot from the aerospace port’s exhaust discharge: on every building was a grimy, garish, blinking neon sign collectively offering everything from gambling to cheap booze to pit fighting—some even openly advertising narcotics.

Tyler glanced back at Serena, her face illuminated by the neon as she looked around.

Jean switched the gyrocar’s running lights back on and took the vehicle over the crawling ground traffic of the main drag. Tyler could see drug dealers, barkers for the clubs, what he suspected were gang members, sex workers of every gender, and their pimps, all working their grift on the crowded sidewalks. The rest of the people on the street had to be the clientele, the marks, the victims and johns. Even from the vantage point of the gyrocar the visitors to this place, this neon Hades, had the look of people from better neighborhoods, slumming for illicit pleasures. All of them, natives and vice tourists alike, stepping over the omnipresent homeless.

Tyler wasn’t sure what most people thought when they saw a place like this. Some sympathy, others disgust, some were perhaps intrigued or even fascinated, some angry; any combination of those feelings was possible. What Tyler thought, however, was that this place was a prime hunting ground for a predator. He was starting to develop an inkling of why Jean had brought him here.

As they flew over the street a Hume City PD cruiser crawled by underneath, going in the other direction. Nobody on the street paid the police any notice. A few faces looked up at the gyrocar but nobody showed them untoward attention. The steel blue light of the gyrocar’s headlights picked out the hydrocarbon rain from another shuttle landing.

“Put this on,” Jean told him, handing him a filter mask. He affixed it over his mouth and nose. Jean was doing the same thing even as she steered the gyrocar over a four-story poured concrete tenement building. She took the gyrocar down between a stacked container motel and the tenement. Green and blinking red neon leaked into the alley, illuminating the filth.

The gyrocar’s gullwing door slid up as the vehicle slipped down between the two buildings. Tyler saw more than he wanted through the ‘motel’s’ windows. Then he felt the atmosphere seep into the gyrocar. The air had a physical presence: gritty, thick and membranous. It had an unpleasantly warm and humid quality, formed of something more toxic than mere moisture.

Tyler felt the gyrocar touch down.

“Welcome to the Exhaust Town Strip,” Jean told him as her own door slid up and she climbed out.

Jean had parked the gyrocar with its rear facing the main street, which Tyler guessed was the Strip. She opened the trunk. There were a number of beers in a cooler. Then she extruded a straw from the top of a bottle and fed it into an aperture in her mask.

Tyler reached into the smoking moisture of the cooler and retrieved a beer for himself to show good form. He went to extrude the beer’s straw and then stopped.

“We’re standing in a crime scene, aren’t we?” he said.

“The whole of the Strip is one big crime scene,” she told him. He couldn’t quite make out her demeanor here. She seemed bitter. Tyler wasn’t sure if it was aimed at him or not.

“A murder scene?”

“It’s certainly statistically likely. Your synth going to stay in the car?”

“She’s not ‘my’ anything. Her name’s Serena and I’d rather you used the term artificial person.”

Jean didn’t say anything. She just looked at him. Was it obvious? Had he made too much of defending Serena?

“I live there,” Jean said pointing at the tenement and then sucked some beer through the lid-straw. “On the top floor, but it’s still Exhaust Town. I have to pay one of the local gangs to protect the car.” She patted the gyrocar.

Tyler frowned. It didn’t really make any sense.

“I thought you came here for the money.”

“The key phrase is on-target-earnings.”

“And you’ve not been meeting the targets?” he asked.

Jean just took another sip of the beer. Tyler did the same and tried not to grimace. He still didn’t like the taste, and the atmosphere of Exhaust Town just made it worse.

“To earn you need to make high-profile cases but all the cherry cases go to those with the rank. They’ll throw you scraps if you do their legwork for them but that’s about it. Rank, and the profile of the case, dictate access to forensics, analytics, manpower and every other resource. You can pay for it out of your own pocket but who has the money?” She didn’t look at him as she said it. Perhaps she was fearing an ‘I-told-you-so’ from him. It wasn’t really how he worked: besides, Tyler wasn’t sure that HCPD had done anything other than formalise what were practically unwritten laws back in the United Americas. He’d heard colleagues say that people got the law enforcement that they paid for more than once.

“So, what am I doing here?” he said instead.

“A lot of the people who live down here, particularly off the Strip, aren’t criminals. They’re just working stiffs, mainly for the AS port, but they’re poor and have no safety net. On the Strip, however, people go missing all the time. The gangs kill each other, others get trafficked up-town, junkies OD or kill each other over drugs, or they lose their place in the food chain, and sometimes people just get in the wrong car. Nobody gives a fuck.” Jean paused. Tyler just waited. Jean’s mask covered much of her face: with her head down, her hair covered the rest. Once again, he reminded himself that he didn’t like beer by taking a sip. “I’ve been hearing things for the last few months. People are going missing in greater than usual numbers and the street bosses don’t know who’s doing it.” She pointed down the alley. “A woman used to sleep in this alley. Her name was Maggie. A bottom feeder—her words—homeless, substance abuse issues with no real way to feed them, twenty-five and looked twice that, used up. We get to talking. She imparts some wisdom occasionally. She’s telling me about the disappearances, but I’ve also had it confirmed from a couple of other sources. Then nine days ago she’s nowhere, gone. I look. I talk to people. Nothing.”

“Homelessness is a high-risk situation.”

Both of them turned to look at Serena who was standing in the particulate rain that glittered in the neon.

“She’s right,” Jean admitted. “Except the people I’m speaking to are spooked.”

“You think she found something out and whomever is behind the disappearances took her out?” Tyler asked.

Jean gave this some thought.

“No, I just think she rolled double-one on increasingly loaded dice. Like your syn… like Serena said, it’s high risk. I just think her snake eyes came in the shape of whomever is responsible for these disappearances.”

“And nobody in the PD is taking an interest?” Tyler asked, already knowing the answer.

“There’s no financial impetus to investigate something like this. Nobody wants to take too close a look at where people who disappear from the Strip end up. It all ultimately heads uptown.” She gestured all around her. “The Strip is just one big pool of victims. The majority of their predators are probably untouchable. There’s the occasional sweep when someone of sufficient influence gets rolled, or they catch an STD off a partner who’s stepped out, and that’s about it.”

It was grim but Tyler had heard similar stories. It was what happened when you didn’t regulate areas like this, when you don’t enforce the law: drugs, trafficking, slavery, murder. He found himself glancing back at Serena, still perfectly still.

“What do you think is happening, detective?” Serena asked.

Jean looked surprised that Serena had addressed her.

“Some predator is taking them and using them to live out whatever fantasy he’s running in his misfiring mind,” she finally said. “It’s the only thing that the street couldn’t account for.”

“What’s your interest?” Serena asked.

Jean turned her head, sharply, to glare at Serena, whose expression remained completely passive.

“She means—“ Tyler started.

“I know what she means,” Jean snapped. “You get that people are going missing? That a crime is being committed? That there’s probably a predator preying on these people?”

“I understand that,” Serena said, “though I am unable to empathize with the victims as you might. I also understand that you are incentivized, financially and in terms of prestige and status, for bringing in big cases.”

“You want to know if I’m doing it for the good or the glory?” Jean asked. Serena nodded. Jean looked away from her. “A little of column A and a little of column B.”

Serena nodded again as though satisfied that she had learned everything she needed to know.

“Look,” Jean said. She was looking straight at Tyler now. “I’m compromised. I went for the cash and it didn’t work out the way I’d hoped. I get that.” She inclined her head towards the main strip. “But people end up here because of poor decisions, bad luck and sometimes just circumstances completely out of their control. Someone has to speak for them.”

It sounded as though she was trying to convince herself.

“So, we will have no remit. No access to forensics and no resources,” Serena confirmed.

“We?” Tyler asked, trying to focus again.

“This is within our remit for inter-agency cooperation. It is perhaps stretching parameters a little, but as long as we are only advising…” Serena explained.

“It’s worse than that,” Jean said. “Nobody’s doing any kind of organized AV monitoring or recording down here and nobody will talk to us.”

“We’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way then,” Tyler said.

2

“I’m afraid I have to ask you a personal question about Detective Hoyle.”

It was not something that Tyler had expected to hear from Serena as she did his tie for him. He knew how to put a tie on. He did so every day, but it always looked better when Serena did it and his big presentation to HCPD on the Greco case was today.

“It’s unusual for you to take an interest in my personal life.” Not that he particularly had one, Tyler thought. They were stood in the center of their comfortably appointed hotel room. One wall was a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out over the city’s spires, under the pale sky, to the temperate desert of the polar cap. Jean had been impressed by the room, understandable having seen the area that she lived in. That said the, the room was easily the size of Tyler’s own apartment back in Virginia. Jean had told him that how well guests were treated by HCPD was based on algorithmic predictions of their future usefulness. It appeared that HCPD felt he had great things in his future.

“It may have bearing on the case if we are to work with Detective Hoyle and may have to be logged in terms of human resources guidelines,” Serena told him as she slid the tie up and checked her handiwork.

“You want to know if we were ever involved?” Tyler asked, wondering why this conversation was so awkward. Serena simply nodded. “We were friends. We had similar backgrounds. The academy was very challenging. Our friendship came with certain… benefits but we were never in a relationship. We found…” Words abandoned him as he watched Serena’s face, looking for some response from her, some reaction, seeing nothing. Expectation and judgement were almost conspicuous by their absence in her expression.

“Solace?” Serena suggested.

He opened his mouth to tell her that it was nothing so intense but the door chimed. He turned to get it at the same time she did but then stopped. Instead, he just watched the economy of Serena’s movement as she went to the door and let Jean in.

Tyler realized that Jean had asked him a question.

“I’m sorry, what?” he said, broken from his reverie.

Jean looked between him and Serena.

“I said, are you ready?”

*   *   *

They were riding the hotel elevator up to the conference center in the hotel’s upper levels. Tyler looked down the vast open central well to the lobby. An artificial stepped waterfall took up the opposite wall, cascading into the hotel’s leisure pool far below.

“Where does she sleep?” Jean asked him. Her tone was neutral but there was just the trace of a smile at the corner of her mouth.

“She can hear you,” Tyler said. Jean was stood on one side of him, Serena the other.

“But there’s only one bed,” Jean persisted.

“I do not require sleep. I can recharge in almost any position. Last night I sat in an armchair and caught up with some work while Special Agent Matterton slept,” Serena told Jean.

Tyler found himself feeling more and more uncomfortable. Neither Serena’s helpful matter-of-fact tone nor the smirk on Jean’s face were doing anything to alleviate that feeling.

“Watching you sleep, isn’t that a bit creepy?” Jean asked.

Tyler turned to face her.

“Je… Detective Hoyle, you work with artificial people in HCPD as well. Is there a particular reason why you’re pursuing this line of questioning?”

The smirk had gone.

“Detective Hoyle?” Jean asked.

“Cut it out, Jean,” Tyler warned.

She leaned to one side to look at Serena directly.

“Did I offend you?”

“I think your questions were a passive-aggressive bid to elicit a response by implying impropriety,” Serena replied.

“Wow,” Jean said turning around to face the door as they arrived at their floor. “Nobody has a sense of humor anymore.”

*   *   *

Tyler gave the presentation in one of the hotel’s many luxuriously appointed conference rooms. The attendees, mostly high-ranking officers in HCPD’s Serious Crimes division, helped themselves to the complimentary breakfast and champagne, while Tyler talked them through the investigation of thirty-five abductions, all of which had resulted in the victims being murdered.

His presentation was accompanied by holographic material, mostly stills taken after HRT’s raid. The three-dimensional images were a haunting entity in his periphery that he dared not look at directly. Tyler made it through the questions, though Serena fielded a number of them. The niceties, the so-called networking, was always the most difficult part. His one consolation was that he had clearly not made a good enough impression for them to try and head-hunt him on the spot. So far.

He saw Jean heading towards him across the light and airy conference area, which had an even better panoramic view of the polar cap than Tyler’s hotel room. The conference area had seemed like such an incongruous place for him to give this presentation. Jean was accompanied by a solidly built blond man, who could have been anything from thirty to fifty years old. He wore a tailored suit that Tyler suspected cost more than his car back on Earth.

“Special Agent Matterton, this is my boss, Lieutenant Havern,” Jean told him.

“Jeff, please,” the lieutenant said offering his hand.

“Tyler.” He took the proffered hand. It was exactly the kind of grip that Tyler had come to expect. At a guess, ‘Jeff, Please’ had read somewhere that it was designed to project dominance.

“Interesting case. Must have been harrowing work,” Jeff Please said. Tyler opened his mouth to say something but the HCPD lieutenant ploughed on. “I was impressed with Detective Hoyle’s initiative in suggesting that we invite you here.” The backhanded compliment was clear. Tyler could almost hear Jean grind her teeth. “There’s something you left out of your presentation.”

“What’s that?” Tyler asked.

“What were your thoughts on how to monetize the case?”

Tyler stared at him for moment or two.

“Excuse me?” he finally managed.

Someone was flicking through the images on the holo-projector.

“I mean it seems that the case was ripe for merch. I mean, animatronic action figures of the victims alone.”

In the air above the center of the conference table was an image of Greco’s workshop. Half-filled body bags arranged in neat rows on the filthy concrete.

“No, I mean excuse me,” Tyler said. He turned and strode to the door of the conference room. He waited until the doors had closed behind him and then bolted for the closest bathroom.

*   *   *

Jean found him sat on the floor of the cubicle practically wrapped around the bowl. Tyler had heard the door to the bathroom open. Heard her heels on the tile floor and had unlocked the cubicle before she even knocked. She handed him a handful of paper towels.

“I have some breath mints as well,” she told him.

He just nodded his thanks.

“How many times have you given that presentation?”

He held up four fingers as he spat bile into the bowl.

“Every time?”

He just nodded.

“I helped process the crime scene, we ran the Bloodhound PUPS, recorded everything. I even helped talk Technical Support through shutting down the… remote control OS. I mean they were losing it. I can do these things, step back, intellectualize, disassociate enough to get the job done,” Tyler told her. He left out that he had only been able to help process the scene with the help of Bureau-approved amphetamines. He also left out that after he had made it back to his room in the Kansas City field office, he had broken down on the floor in a crying jag that had lasted until he’d crashed and finally passed out.

“We can all do it until we can’t,” Jean said. “It’s gotta leak out somewhere.”

Tyler wiped his mouth with one of the towels and looked around at the gleaming white tiles. It may have been one of the cleanest bathrooms he’d ever been in.

“What sort of question was that?” He still couldn’t quite believe he’d heard it right.

“Welcome to the ICSC,” she said, meaning the Independent Core System Colonies. She offered him some gum. He didn’t immediately take it, though he wasn’t enjoying the aftertaste of bile.

“What was that about this morning, in the lift?” he asked.

“I was just messing with you, Tyler. You used to have a sense of humor,” Jean said.

“Did I?’ he asked, more than a little surprised.

Jean laughed.

“Maybe not,” she conceded.

“I think you were the only one having fun.”

Jean straightened up, still leaning against the cubicle’s partition.

“Girl’s gotta get her kicks. I don’t think your synth minded.”

“Jean!” Tyler warned.

“For fuck’s sake, artificial person then.”

“I prefer partner.”

Jean just looked at him.

“Where is she?” Tyler asked.

Jean laughed without humor.

“Oh, she’s still back there talking up a storm. The brass loved her.”

It was difficult for Tyler to imagine Serena ‘talking up a storm’. He took the proffered gum and pushed himself to his feet.

“You good?” Jean asked.

He shook his head.

“Want to go get lunch?”

“No.”

“Want to go and work a case with no resources or backup?”

“Sure,” he said.

*   *   *

Tyler was thankful that Jean was using the gyrocar’s running lights this time as they descended back into chasm beneath the Buchanan Memorial aerospace port. Now able to get a better look at it, he could see that the framework of the old atmosphere processor that the aerospace port was built on formed a kind of skeletal tent over Exhaust Town. The Strip had presumably been operating since the early days of the colony, before its independence and the formation of the ICSC. Tyler guessed that it was still allowed to exist because nobody really wanted the land and because it was deemed to serve a purpose: entertainment, dumping zone, hunting ground.

“Can we set up our own surveillance?” Serena asked from the backseat.

“We do it every time there’s a sweep. The gangs and the other more organized criminals run countermeasures. It might be worth a try but I suspect it’ll be found and it’ll just make it more difficult to get them to cooperate,” Jean told them both.

“What’s our in?” Tyler asked. His nose was practically pressed against the hardened plastic of the passenger-seat window. In the surrounding gloom, Exhaust Town’s neon and holographic signage reminded him of deep-sea bioluminescence.

“The main thing we’ve got going for us is that what we’re trying to do works in their favor: a predator in their midst is ultimately bad for business. They don’t like us and certainly can’t be seen to cooperate, but it’s in the best interests of their bottom line to help us.” Jean looked at the feed from the gyrocar’s undercarriage cameras as she brought it to land curbside on the strip.

Helping drug dealers, thieves, pimps and traffickers because someone was predating on their people, on their customer base, didn’t sit well with Tyler. It wasn’t just their best hope; however, it was probably their only hope.

“Have we considered that it’s more than one person doing this?” Serena asked.

“I’ve not ruled anything out,” Jean said.

Tyler had considered this as well but something about it felt like a solo predator. Where this feeling came from, he couldn’t say. He guarded against these hunches: they knew so little about the situation. Intuition to try and connect disparate information was one thing but this was just guessing, building erroneous preconceptions.

“What’s first?”

*   *   *

Jean engaged the gyrocar’s wheels and it became a ground car. They were now very much cruising the Strip in all its degrading filth and splendor.

He watched people from uptown buy drugs and engage with the sex workers. Some couldn’t make eye contact with the dealers, others were all fake bonhomie, bravado and still others took what Tyler thought of as an emotionless retail approach. In their nice suits and designer P-Dats, he wondered if the Strip’s customers thought of themselves as ‘good’ people? Did they see the people who served their appetites as scum? Where they heedless to the fact that the Strip was supply and demand in action? That it existed because of them. He watched as a pickpocket ‘dipped’ a P-Dat from some executive’s purse.

There was something hungry about the visitors to the Strip, the clientele of the unregulated bars and clubs, the audiences at the pit-fight clubs and strip joints, an eel-like quality to their eyes. Everything here was transactional in the meanest sense and every small piece of disciplinary violence he witnessed made him flinch. He could understand a functionalist justification for the existence of a place to purchase drugs and engage in other vices but this wasn’t it. This served no-one but the violent parasites. This was a suppurating wound.

Jean pulled up to the mouth of an alleyway between a pit-fighting emporium and a ‘restaurant’ called The Mystery Meat. A lean-to shack had grown between the two buildings like a cyst. There was something odd about its construction: something that Tyler couldn’t quite put his finger on.

Tyler and Jean masked up and the three of them climbed out of the gyrocar and into the carbon rain. Jean led the way, pushing the lean-to’s surprisingly sturdy door open. Tyler followed, pausing only long enough to let a kid, who couldn’t have been older than ten, sprint past him and disappear into the sidewalk’s throngs. He guessed the kid had been disturbed by Jean’s presence as a representative of the HCPD.

Inside Tyler found himself looking around at ribs of a metal cage that formed the lean-to’s hidden skeleton.

“It’s a Faraday cage,” Serena said, “though I don’t think it’s a very good one.”

“It’s good enough,” said the woman behind the chunk of salvaged plastic that passed for a counter. She looked to be in her mid-twenties, but could’ve been younger. Exhaust Town aged people. She wore a shapeless overall, tools in the various pockets, over a filthy gray T-shirt.

“This is Cinders,” Jean said leaning on the counter. It seemed a cruel nickname given the burn scars on the woman’s face.

“And what does Cinders do?” Tyler asked, still looking around the lean-to.

“I run a lost and found service,” Cinders told him, her expression the kind of wary neutral that many criminals adopted when talking to law enforcement.

Tyler nodded.

“What she means is that she runs a gang of pickpockets who steal P-Dats and deliver them to her. She advertises them as ‘found’, for a finder’s fee—”

“Hey, this is the ICSC, everything has a cost—” Cinders interjected.

“But not before she cracks the P-Dats, extracts all the data, and sells it on the open-market. Anything particularly juicy she sells onto pro-blackmailers. When she does return the P-Dats to their rightful owners, they’re full of intrusion malware,” Jean continued. Now the Faraday cage made sense. It would block signals from the stolen P-Dats to the various ‘find-my-device’ services.

“Scurrilous slander,” Cinders protested.

“But, the absolute best thing about Cinders is that she hates doing prison time so much that she will cooperate with community policing efforts.”

Cinders was glaring at Jean, her eyes little more than slits.

“You’re going to get me killed,” she hissed.

“I’m here to do you a favor,” Jean told her. “Have you seen Maggie?”

Cinders shook her head.

“Cinders, Maggie was good to you, looked out for you when you were coming up,” Jean said.

Now Cinders glared at the detective.

“Don’t tell me who Maggie was,” she said with some force.

“What happens if you speak to us?” Tyler asked.

Cinders just stared at him like he was a moron.

“I don’t care what she said,” Cinders nodded towards Jean. “We don’t talk to cops down here.”

“We’re not police,” Tyler said gesturing between him and Serena.

“Bullshit,” Cinders said.

“They’re off-world,” Jean said. “No jurisdiction here.”

“Like that helps me.”

“We know someone is taking people,” Serena said. “That puts you at risk and it’s bad for business.”

Cinders just laughed once, utterly devoid of humor. She pointed through the door they had entered by.

“Think anyone out there cares about that? If there’s a killer preying on us that’s just part of the excitement, the spice of their slum tourism. If anything, business is booming.”

This didn’t surprise Tyler. It was another mark against his faith in humanity but it didn’t surprise him.

“Maggie was my friend as well,” Jean said quietly. Tyler wasn’t sure if it was true or Jean was just trying to manipulate the data thief. He hoped the former.

Cinder pulled her lips back, showing brownish-yellow teeth, but then shook her head.

“You used her, like you’re trying to use me. How do I know it wasn’t something that she told you that got her killed?”

“Who do you think is taking people?” Serena asked, taking Tyler by surprise.

Cinders gave the question some thought, clearly also surprised to be asked her opinion about anything.

“I think it’s someone who maybe thinks they’re cleaning up the streets, maybe getting rid of all us lowlifes.”

“A vigilante?” Tyler asked. Cinders nodded. “Any particular reason you think this?” he added.

Cinders shrugged.

“Maybe they got into trouble coming down here, or just can’t cope with their own desires? I think when rich people hate themselves, they take it out on others,” she said.

Tyler guessed that by ‘rich’ she meant anyone who didn’t have to live in Exhaust Town. It was insightful but it didn’t feel right to Tyler. If it was a vigilante they would be looking to make a statement. Bodies would’ve been found by now. If they were taking people, it was more likely it was because they were using their victims to live out their fantasies.

“Found anything on the P-Dats?” Jean asked. The data thief shook her head. “Cinders?”

“If I’d found anything it would’ve been dealt with already,” she snapped.

“Because people are looking for whoever’s doing this?” Tyler asked.

Cinders didn’t answer. He guessed this was the kind of thing that she could get killed for.

“Who’s he taking?” Jean asked.

“Anyone with an asphalt bed, people fucked up on drugs or blind drunk on vat hootch, hookers, and at least one of Big Malky’s fighters.”

“This fighter—was he in a bad way?” Tyler asked. “Like punch drunk?”

Now Jean was looking his way, still leaning on the counter.

“He was fucked up. I heard that he’d had one too many fights that day and then bit off more than he could chew by getting in the pit with some jarhead on furlough.”

“They were all vulnerable,” Jean said.

Tyler nodded. Their predator was batting a hundred because they knew the area and picked their targets carefully. They were an opportunist, but it was opportunism backed by knowledge and presumably enough prep to be able to capitalize on such an opportunity.

“And nobody cares about them,” Cinders said quietly. “Nobody who matters anyway.”

“How many?” Jean asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Cinders,” Jean warned.

“Really! I don’t fucking know!”

Tyler glanced at Serena. Reading micro-expressions to gain insight into interrogees wasn’t an exact science, but it could certainly provide some useful information.

“But you know something,” Serena said.

Cinder looked down, refusing to meet anyone’s eyes.

“Is somebody keeping count?” Jean asked. Cinders didn’t look up, didn’t say anything. “Cinders,” Jean said, more quietly this time. “Is The Bish keeping count?”

Now she looked up.

“Please.” She sounded close to tears. “I need you to go now.”

Tyler opened his mouth to ask something else but Jean caught his eye and shook her head.

*   *   *

Jean used the car’s siren and lights to clear a space before coming in to land next to a battered boardwalk built from construction scaffolding. They were in front of a club that Tyler suspected was supposed to be reminiscent of a saloon from America’s nineteenth century. It was built out of a stacked network of truly ancient shipping containers. The containers were covered in electrostatically adhered grime. The particulate pollution was shaped and formed to accentuate the retro look. The neon sign announced that the establishment was called Jack It All In; the advertising hologram was an obscene rendering of the name.

The three of them got out of the car and climbed the steps through a forest of glares emanating from those working the boardwalk.

The door to Jack It All In was an airlock painted up to look like old saloon swing-doors. The décor was so on-the-nose that Tyler half expected the victim of a barroom brawl to come flying out of the red-lit window. There were two security personnel on the door. A man and a woman, their supplement-enhanced bulks clad in paramilitary black chic and civilian body armor. The male had an oversized P-Dat slate, the female a shotgun. Jean stopped in front of them and looked at them expectantly. Tyler sighed. He knew where this was going.

“Yes?” the male doorman asked through his mask.

“You new?” Jean asked. She used her P-Dat, clipped to her belt, to project a hologram of her badge.

“So?” he asked.

“Tell The Bish that Detective Hoyle needs to speak to him,” Jean said. She spoke clearly and slowly as if talking to a moron. Tyler couldn’t see what getting the doorman’s back up would accomplish.

“No,” the doorman told her.

“You get that I’m police, right?” Jean said.

“I get that you live down here. We,” he used his thumb to point between himself and the other guard, “don’t even live down here. You’ve got no juice, you’re a bottom feeder.”

Hologrammatic drops rained down about them. Tyler didn’t want to think too much about what they were supposed to represent. The doorman’s words were harsh. Tyler only just caught the incremental slump of Jean’s shoulders. Then she straightened up and opened her mouth, an angry retort on her lips.

“Tell The Bish we know he’s keeping count,” Serena said.

Both Jean and Tyler turned to look at her.

The doorman looked momentarily unsure.

“Please,” Serena added.

The doorman took a moment and then turned away from them. Tyler noticed the other guard shift her grip on the shotgun. Jean turned to look at her. The doorman had his head cocked as though listening to someone, frowning, not liking what he was hearing.

Something made Tyler turn and look around him. As he did, the lounging gang-members, the corner boys and girls, the pros and the casual pedestrians all averted their eyes. They had all been enjoying watching this micro-street drama unfolding.

Tyler looked out into the sluggish worm of traffic making its way down the Strip, wondering if the predator they were looking for was watching them right there and then. Finally, he turned back towards the door, tuning back into the conversation.

“—hand in your weapon,” the doorman finished.

“An HCPD detective never—”

“Detective,” Tyler said.

Jean turned towards him and he just looked at her. Finally, she nodded. The airlock door swung open. All three of them stepped in. The door closed behind them and the scrubbers started cycling in fresher bottled air.

Jean turned on him.

“Don’t ever undermine my authority again!” she snapped at him. “I have to live down here with these street creatures. One slip and I’m carrion.”

Tyler nodded. He could see her point: this constant,