“What?”

“An ice case on Oaktier. Possible deliberate bodykill and associated memory loss.”

Paula couldn’t help her interest. “How long ago?”

“Uncertain, but it could be forty years.”

“Hum.” Paula crinkled her nose. It wasn’t that long ago. “Can’t the local police deal with it?”

“They tried, the results were inconclusive. That’s why we got the request for assistance. One of the possible victims, a Tara Jennifer Shaheef, has an important family on Oaktier, who have connections. You know how it works. Her family want positive results, one way or the other; so naturally I want you to have it.”

“You said one of the victims?”

“Yes. If it happened, there were two of them—that the police know of so far.”

“Okay, now I’m interested.”

“Thank you.” Glancing around the spartan office, he saw the small bag that was kept permanently packed, ready for any off-Earth assignment. It was one of three personal items she permitted herself in the plain room. On the windowsill was a rabbakas plant, a black corm sprouting a single marbled pink flower with petals that looked like feathers, which she’d been given by a Silfen on Silvergalde. And on the desk was a quartz cube containing a hologram of the couple who’d brought her up on Marindra, some summer day picnic scene with Paula and her stepsister, both girls aged about five. Mel Rees always tried to avoid looking at the hologram; every time it gave him an uncomfortably powerful reminder of just how strange the Chief Investigator was. “Do you want to shift any of your casework while you’re away? Renne and Tarlo haven’t got much on right now.”

She looked at him as if he had spoken some incomprehensible language. “I can keep up-to-date on everything from Oaktier, thank you. It is part of the unisphere.”

“Sure. Right.” He started to back out of the office. “Anything you need, just let me know.”

Paula waited until he had gone, then permitted herself a small smile. Actually, Rees wasn’t a bad deputy director—he kept his teams happy and made sure the department received a healthy budget—but she always made sure he knew his place. After a while she pulled her chair back to the desk and asked her e-butler to retrieve the Tara Jennifer Shaheef case files.

The Clayden Clinic was set amid twenty acres of its own grounds in one of the eastern suburbs of Darklake City. As rejuvenation facilities went, it was among the best on the planet. Paula had read through the Directorate’s green-code background file on the company, a typical medium-sized corporate operation, with clinics on five worlds in this sector of space.

What she could see as the police car pulled in through the gates seemed to reflect what she’d read. A long, three-story pearl and bamboo building standing on a slope above a small lake. One wing ended in a lattice of scaffolding, with constructionbots riding along the rails as they locked new prefab sections together.

Her office suit gave no protection from the humid early afternoon air as she hurried from the car to the reception. Detective Hoshe Finn was a couple of paces behind her the whole way, puffing with discontent at the heat. He was from the local ice-crime division, and had been assigned to assist her for the duration of the case—a duty he accepted cheerily, which was something she found refreshing. For once, someone was enjoying working with her and was actively helpful right from the start. She was sure he was mostly interested in seeing if her reputation matched up to the actual person, but she didn’t mind that. Whatever got results. Part of his acceptance no doubt came from the fact he was eighteen years on from his second rejuvenation. Older people tended to have a more phlegmatic approach.

Hoshe Finn’s last rejuvenation had given him a thin face. He wore his black hair drawn up into a neat single curl at the back, held in place with an elaborate silver ring clip. Just about the first thing he said to her was an admission he was overweight, though his shiny green silk suit was cut to deemphasize his waist and stomach.

“This way,” Hoshe Finn said once they were indoors. He led off down one of the long corridors leading away from reception. They passed several recent rejuvees being helped along by staff.

“Have you handled many ice cases?” Paula asked.

“Three.” He shrugged. “Including this one. My success rate is not high. Most of the time I work for the main criminal investigation department. This kind of allegation doesn’t occur very often.”

“Don’t worry, there aren’t many ice crimes which get solved.”

“Yeah. Even with our data storage capacity, digging up the past is difficult.”

“It’s not that, exactly.” She paused. “The information you gather from the past has to be related to human behavior. It’s a holistic picture we’re looking for. Law enforcement today relies too much on digital evidence.”

“And that’s where you come in.” He smiled at the suspicious look she gave him. “A true detective.”

“I do what I can.”

They had to put on clean coveralls to enter Wyobie Cotal’s room through its small decontamination lock. The light was low and pink inside, so it didn’t place undue strain on his eyes. Paula steeled herself behind her face filter mask as the second set of doors slid open. Something about emergency re-life cases always left her feeling queasy. Even though Cotal’s new clone had been out of the womb tank for five weeks now, she found the body unpleasant to look at.

The clone had been initiated two years ago, after Cotal’s insurance company array had conducted a legally required attempt to contact him through the unisphere. Subsequently, a more detailed search involving human researchers had also failed to locate any trace of him since he left Oaktier forty years earlier. At that time sixty-five years had elapsed since his birth, and he should have booked in to the clinic for his first rejuvenation in accordance with the policy that his reasonably wealthy parents had taken out at conception. As he didn’t appear, the courts granted the insurance company a body-death certificate on the grounds that he had either been illegally killed or had been involved in some freak accident that had gone unreported. The re-life procedure was activated a week later.

Although not too common, the operation was relatively straightforward for a facility as well equipped as the Clayden Clinic. Cotal’s DNA was subtly modified to produce accelerated growth, and the fetus kept in the womb-tank for just over twenty-three months. During the last five months, the clinic had inserted a neural link, and started to download Cotal’s stored memories into his new brain. There weren’t many; although he had regularly updated his secure store every couple of months, he’d stopped when he allegedly left Oaktier, aged twenty-five.

Lying on his bed bathed in mock-twilight, he looked like a fourteen-year-old famine victim. His body was dreadfully thin, with skin stretched tight over ribs and limbs. Some kind of gel had been applied to prevent excessive flaking, though several large areas were raw and crusting beneath the glistening substance. There was almost no muscle on his arms and legs, leaving his knees and elbows as knobbly protrusions. It meant he had to wear an electromuscle mobility suit to move, which looked as if he was imprisoned in a wire exoskeleton cage. But it was his head that was the most ungainly aspect. It was almost adult size, leaving it far too big for his spindly neck to support without the mobility suit.

Wyobie Cotal’s large sunken eyes followed them as they came into the room. He made no attempt to move his head. Every now and then he would open his lips a fraction, and a nipple would deploy from the side of the suit, pushing into his mouth so he could suck on it. Paula refused to look at the tubes around his waist, and the arrangement for connecting them to his penis and anus.