Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 by Gardner Dozois Read Free Book Online Page B

it.
    “I guess I was lucky after all,” he said. “It wouldn’t have done you any good to have to explain a pair of corpses outside your room.” He looked up at Stephanie, who was pacing back and forth in the narrow lane between the bed and the wall, and looking as if she badly needed a cigarette. “I’m sorry about your passport. Where were you going to go, anyway?”
    “It doesn’t so much matter if I go,” she said. She gave Terzian a quick, nervous glance. “You can fly it out, right?”
    “It?” He stared at her. “What do you mean, it?”
    “The biotech.” Stephanie stopped her pacing and stared at him with those startling green eyes. “Adrian gave it to me. Just before they killed him.” Terzian’s gaze followed hers to the black bag with the Nike swoosh, the bag that sat at the foot of Terzian’s bed.
    Terzian’s impulse to laugh faded. Unregulated, illegal, stolen biotech, he thought. Right in his own hotel room. Along with a stolen gun and a woman who was probably out of her mind.
    Fuck.

    The dead man was identified by news files as Adrian Cristea, a citizen of Ukraine and a researcher. He had been stabbed once in the right kidney and bled to death without identifying his assailants. Witnesses reported two or maybe three men leaving the scene immediately after Cristea’s death. Michelle set more search spiders to work.
    For a moment, she considered calling Davout and letting him know that Terzian had probably been a witness to a murder, but decided to wait until she had some more evidence one way or another.
    For the next few hours, she did her real work, analyzing the samples she’d taken from Zigzag Lake’s sulphide-tainted deeps. It wasn’t very physical, and Michelle figured it was only worth a few hundred calories.
    A wind floated through the treetops, bringing the scent of night flowers and swaying Michelle’s perch beneath her as she peered into her biochemical reader, and she remembered the gentle pressure of Darton against her back, rocking with her as he looked over her shoulder at her results. Suddenly she could remember, with a near-perfect clarity, the taste of his skin on her tongue.
    She rose from her woven seat and paced along the bough. Damn it, she thought, I watched you die.
    Michelle returned to her deck and discovered that her spiders had located the police file on Cristea’s death. A translation program handled the antique French without trouble, even producing modern equivalents of forensic jargon. Cristea was of Romanian descent, had been born in the old USSR, and had acquired Ukranian citizenship on the breakup of the Soviet Union. The French files themselves had translations of Cristea’s Ukranian travel documents, which included receipts showing that he had paid personal insurance, environmental insurance, and departure taxes from Transnistria, a place of which she’d never heard, as well as similar documents from Moldova, which at least was a province, or country, that sounded familiar.
    What kind of places were these, where you had to buy insurance at the border? And what was environmental insurance anyway?
    There were copies of emails between French and Ukranian authorities, in which the Ukranians politely declined any knowledge of their citizen beyond the fact that he was a citizen. They had no addresses for him.
    Cristea apparently lived in Transnistria, but the authorities there echoed the Ukranians in saying they knew nothing of him.
    Cristea’s tickets and vouchers showed that he had apparently taken a train to Bucharest, and there he’d got on an airline that took him to Prague, and thence to Paris. He had been in the city less than a day before he was killed. Found in Cristea’s hotel room was a curious document certifying that Cristea was carrying medical supplies, specifically a vaccine against hepatitis A. Michelle wondered why he would be carrying a hepatitis vaccine from Transnistria to France. France presumably had all the hepatitis vaccine