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  Praise for QUANTUM MORTIS

  “What are we going to do when artificial intelligence becomes self-aware, self-willed, and maybe stark raving mad? The question matters because that day is coming…fast. With approximately as many twists and turns as China's Tianmen Mountain Road, QUANTUM MORTIS starts fast and then accelerates, leading to a conclusion both shattering…and more than a little heart warming.”

  —TOM KRATMAN, author of A Desert Called Peace

  QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted by Steve Rzasa and Vox Day

  Published by Marcher Lord Hinterlands

  A division of Marcher Lord Press

  8345 Pepperridge Drive

  Colorado Springs, CO 80920

  www.marcherlordpress.com

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

  MARCHER LORD PRESS and the MARCHER LORD PRESS logo are trademarks of Marcher Lord Press. MARCHER LORD HINTERLANDS is an imprint of Marcher Lord Press. Absence ofTMin connection with marks of MarcherLord Press or other parties does not indicate an absence of trademark protection of those marks.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Vox Day

  All rights reserved

  Cover Designer: Kirk DouPonce

  Editor: Jeff Gerke

  Version 002

  International Standard Book Number: 978-1-940163-12-3

  For Carrie, my partner without a badge.

  And for Spacebunny, who is still the coolest chick on the planet.

  CHAPTER ONE

  First terraformed and settled in 2810, Rhysalan quickly developed into an important planet in the Kantillon subsector on the periphery of the Greater Terran Ascendancy. Due to its strategic locale, the planet was a major target of military interest and changed hands several times before eventually establishing itself as an independent planet in 2935 under Fleet Admiral Beze Davenant of the Ascendancy’s 21st Fleet, the first Duke of Rhysalan. Following the God-Machine Rebellion of 2999 that resulted in the birth of the Unity, Rhysalan became a primary destination for defeated national and planetary governments. Realizing the widespread interplanetary conflict offered an unending supply of wealthy refugees, the fourth Duke was the first to institute the practice of providing formal Sanctuary.

  —from “A History of the Dukes of Rhysalan” by Thucidean Marcel

  Graven Tower was flying a routine patrol on Skyway 775 nearly a thousand meters above Trans Paradis when the call came in.

  “Tower, we have a report of an apparent homicide at One Nine Eight Three Eight Ten North Balustrade,” a voice breathed sensuously in his left ear. It sounded sensuous, anyway, although the breathing wasn’t real. In truth, he was alone in the aerovar, with only his augment and the music blaring from the onboard speakers to keep him company.

  “Thanks, Baby. Any word on who, what or why?” He wasn’t a civilian cop, and homicides were not his concern unless they were committed on base, by military personnel, or by one of the tens of thousands of xenos whose planetary residence permits were supervised by the Imperial Duchy of Rhysalan’s armed forces.

  “Nada, nothing, and niente, caro,” she informed him with a breathy accent. He sighed. Things tended to be considerably more complicated on days she went into her sex kitten mode. “But I have no doubt you’re going to want in on this one.”

  “Xeno?”

  “What part of ‘nada’ did you fail to understand?” There was a slight pause, then Baby dropped the accent in favor of a faint, but definite note of disapproval in her voice. “It would appear you forgot that you instructed me to alert you whenever Detector Hildreth is responding in the vicinity.”

  “This is one of Hildy’s stiffs?” Tower sat up and smiled broadly. He had been attempting to work up the courage to contact the pretty blond policewoman for the last three months, ever since meeting her on a joint emergency response training exercise. This homicide, assuming it was, in fact, a homicide, could make for a golden opportunity to resume their acquaintance. “Then we had better see what we can do for the city’s finest! Log it as case number one one five one one zero.”

  “Affirmative.” The augment’s clipped syllables made it perfectly clear that she was not happy with him. “Timestamp 16:67 hours, datestamp 3404.186.”

  “Don’t pout. What does it say in that one regulation? You know, about the doing assistance thing?”

  “If I am correct in assuming you refer to Part Four, Chapter 10, Section 10-4 of FM 3-19.42, Military Police and Civil Affairs, field officers are to render all due assistance to civilian police in criminal matters upon request or observation of apparent need, insofar as said assistance will not directly interfere with their standing orders.”

  “Right, exactly. So tell the CO I’m on my way to the scene.”

  “Tower, may I remind you that you have received no request from Detector Hildreth or TPPD?”

  “Yeah, so I’m anticipating a potential need for military support.” He glanced at the flashing section of the map that overlaid the view of the city below him. “It’s not the safest part of town and Hildy won’t be carrying more than a pop gun and a stinger.”

  There was no response except for the momentary silence that Tower had learned passed for an augment’s sigh. Then she passed on the message from base. “All right, they bought it. You have clearance to terminate your patrol and proceed to the scene of the crime.”

  “Right by the book! See, I’m a reformed man, Baby. Is she there already?”

  “No, I have her ETA as point seven three eight kilosecs. TPPD appears to be heavily occupied today with a large-scale protest march near the Unity embassy complex.”

  “They should take the day off and let the crowd string those bastards up by their intestines.” Tower didn’t like any aliens on principle, but despite being more or less human standard under their augments, the Unity was nearly as bad as the very worst of the xenos. “All right, let’s get there first! Tunes off, signals on.” The music cut off at once. Blue and red flashes lit up the outside of his armored var, projected from both sides of the vehicle and rebounding from the sides of the buildings on either side of him.

  “Manual override. I’ll drive.”

  “Roger, boss.” Her voice was clipped and businesslike now. “However, I should inform you that we would arrive in two point seven seven hectasecs if I retain control of the vehicle.” The control surfaces extruded from the dashboard displays that showed velocity, air pressure, fuel, altitude, and location, in addition to more than a dozen other bits of information about which Tower could not care less.

  “Nah, you drive like an old lady.” His seat slid forward. Tower reached for the control column. It was the first time he’d touched the controls since he entered the var, so the surface immediately softened to his touch, then hardened again in the pre-programmed shape he preferred when driving.

  He promptly dove one hundred and fifty meters and cut sharply across two air lanes of traffic. Emergency lights from the civilian vehicles above, below, and on both sides exploded in alarm, flashing their yellow protests as if he were in the midst of a lightning storm. Their outraged augments shrieked and shouted at Baby, or so she claimed. Tower grinned, unconcerned. He couldn’t hear the complaints, and anyway, he didn’t cut it that close. The ion engines thrummed
and vibrated the military var’s body as he accelerated and zoomed past the civvy machines. He could feel the speed resonating all the way up through the column into his arms.

  It felt good. A military policeman’s job didn’t offer many perks, but the chance to occasionally drive without regard for speed limits or air lanes was one of them.

  Baby grumbled. Tower only laughed.

  Once past the traffic, he settled the aero into the northbound route on Balustrade. It was by far the widest avenue in the city and allowed him to open up the throttle all the way without further scaring any civilians. Huge holographic billboards showcased various advertisements for burn-free depilatories, women’s lingerie, and Mechatecnica neuron destructor mines designed for home defense. The buildings here shot four hundred stories high into the sky, the shining silver and glass spires silently boasting the wealth of their inhabitants. As he drove further north, the buildings became gradually shorter, considerably less shiny, and featured heavier, more ornate architecture that was centuries out of fashion.

  Late afternoon sun and shadow flickered across the cockpit as he pushed the var to its maximum velocity. Light, dark, light, dark. The effect of the sunlight filtering sporadically through the towers was dangerously distracting. Tower blinked, long, short, short, short, long, and dimmed his contact lenses. The darkened lenses eased the strobe effect from the buildings a little.

  “Show me the scene, Baby.” A zoomed-in holographic map of the Balustrade sprang from the dashboard and hovered over the passenger seat. Baby marked the var as a red light zipping between rows of buildings, an ant darting through tall blades of grass.

  Now that was a strange thought, Tower reflected. He had never seen an actual ant, not outside of the screens.

  “All the way down, Tower.” Baby was showing him a flashing yellow X at the bottom of a building. “The vic is outside, on the ground level.”

  “Seriously? Streetside? What, did someone throw him out a window?”

  “If so, there won’t be much left of him. There are three DNA kits behind the passenger seat.”

  “Maybe he was a jumper.” In this part of town, there weren’t many windows with anti-suicide gravnets installed. “Well, nothing like getting down in the swamps. What’s the status? Anyone else there?”

  “Quarpods have secured the scene and Detector Hildreth is on her way, although it appears she is caught up in crosstown traffic in the Gihon District.”

  Tower smiled, pleased that he was the only one on the scene, and signaled his descent with exterior lights. To them, Baby added an override message that went out to all the other vehicles within a 100-meter radius. Light dimmed from late afternoon into full evening as the military var slashed downward through the newly created gap in the air lanes. Finally, at twenty stories, the traffic trickled off into nothing.

  “There is a space to land thirteen meters ahead, between the passenger skimmer and the delivery cam. Would you like me to re-engage the drive assist?”

  “No, I would not. Don’t you trust my skills, Baby?”

  “It is at moments such as these that I am grateful I have backup copies residing in the source, Tower.”

  Tower grinned. “Must be nice. So, who called it in?”

  “A civvy ped.” A picture flashed up before his eyes of a short alien with light blue fur covering its face and large, lidless eyes. “He’s being held at the scene.”

  “It would have to be a xeno, wouldn’t it.” He paused, curious despite his distaste for the alien. “How can you tell it’s a him and not a her?”

  “I have the ID scan from the autonomous motiles, Tower.” A residence ID flashed up on his screen, with a green circle around a letter M under the word Sex. At the top were two long pairs of letters with far too many consonants and punctuation marks to be pronounceable by humans. Name and species, though if they weren’t labeled, Tower wouldn’t have had any idea which was which.

  Bloody xenos. Rhysalan was full of them, and Trans Paradis seemed to serve as a magnet for all of those that were too poor, too savage, or simply too alien to make it in the planetary capital. He shrugged. At least this furry little guy looked alien. The worst were the kind that looked human and were anything but inside.

  He was thinking that even this deep in the city’s shadows it was remarkably dark when he remembered his contacts. Long, short-short-short, long. That was better. He glanced at the mirror and ran his hands through his hair, wishing he’d remembered to shave this morning. But at least his uniform was in order; his brass-and-silver badge gleamed in stark contrast to the black fabric of his laser-resistant tactical jacket. He might not be at his best, but it wasn’t too bad for such short notice, although it was a pity he hadn’t managed a shower earlier. If he’d known he would be running into Hildy today, he would have made time for one.

  Tower looked down and checked the charge on the Sphinx CPB-18 strapped to his right leg. It was fully charged, giving him eighteen beams of charged particle hell that could do everything from momentarily scramble a human nervous system to blowing a brain-sized hole in a human body. The cobalt night sights glowed softly blue in the shadowed cockpit, although the ability to tap into Baby’s targeting correction rendered them almost irrelevant. There were four more power packs stashed in various jacket pockets, plus a 10-pack of CP-HE that was digitally locked. Authorization was required for its use on planet, which wasn’t unreasonable considering that a single pack would very nearly suffice to bring down a skytower. There was more weaponry in the trunk, but the neighborhood was neither so grim nor hostile as to require pulse grenades or the egregiously understated Benelli-Mossberg ASE-5K, with which a substantial portion of the neighborhood could be depopulated in a matter of minutes.

  ASE officially stood for Area Suppression Expediter. The other MCID MPs joked that the acronym actually meant Already Slaughtered Everyone, and not without cause. Tower never joined them in joking about it, however. Unlike the other men in his unit, he had fired one. Just once, but once was enough to render it a non-joking matter.

  Deciding that he was ready for any prospective trouble, he set the var down in the spot Baby was indicating. The blue and red lights flashed off the windows of a street side bar. A large group of gawking patrons crowded the door and the windows, their tattoos and implants merging with the police lights to decorate their faces like animated war paint.

  “Now they’re watching,” Tower muttered bitterly to himself. He could hardly blame them for their curiosity, but he found their morbid spectating to be annoyingly ghoulish. The canopy popped open automatically, the side door descended and became a ramp, enabling him to simply turn and step down to exit the aero. This far below the skyline, the air was cold, damp, and rich with smells both pleasing and unpleasant. Yowzers, but the cumulative effect was strong. Waste. Animals. People. Lots and lots of people. Too many people. Moisture was already beading along the fuselage of his var, clear drops gathered on the curved, maroon-and-grey body.

  The crime scene was easily located. A trio of TPPD quarpods were skittering about a pale, charred space in the middle of the street about ten meters ahead, their cams extruded as they streamed the evidence to the central brains. The quarpods were tiny, four-footed robots about the size of his hand; they had autonomous AI but could be overriden at will by the bigger, smarter intelligences downtown. Little blue and red lights were blinking from their backs in synchronized alarm, alerting the civvies to the fact that this was a crime scene and warning any hypothetical intruders to keep back. They went about their job with robotic precision despite the fact that the street was empty except for the blue alien. Tower scanned the area as he walked toward the little machines.

  “Show me what we got, Baby. There isn’t much there, but it sure doesn’t look like a jumper, not even an involuntary one.”

  “No, there is a distinct lack of blood and other liquid elements.”

  The absence of a body not only ruled out suicide, but most lethal weapons as well, and the absence of a large
pile of ashes ruled out a burner. That didn’t leave a whole lot of alternatives, which made Tower wonder if this case might actually turn out to be something that fell under military jurisdiction after all.

  “No line of sight from the bar to the remains, Tower, although it is stretching the concept to call them that.” She synced to his contacts and bright blue lines lit up the vision in his right eye. It illuminated the remains, the vehicles, and any other objects near the street for half a block. A red line traced from the bar ran smack into the delivery van. “City records indicate this is the only establishment open within this half-block. The rest are officially vacant for the lower five stories.”

  “Officially.”

  A burst of green, human-shaped images, overlaid upon the view of the buildings, suddenly shot into being before his eyes. “I count three thousand eight hundred and twenty-two people in the twenty nearest vacant stories. The building intelligences tell me this is a district that has become trendy in the last five years, mostly due to the nanolax music that was first produced here.”

  “What is nanolax?”

  A burst of fast, heavily percussive music combined with very high pitched squeaks assaulted his eardrums.

  “Turn it off. Turn it off! Bloody hell, tell, don’t show, Baby!”

  “Sorry, Tower,” she said in an unrepentant tone. And there it was, the payback he’d been anticipating ever since the CO gave them permission to respond.

  He shrugged. Could have been worse. He looked around the crime scene. Baby’s scan notwithstanding, the non-vacant levels looked lifeless. The filthy windows were optically shaded, blocking any view inside them, and he understood the flashing lights of his descent had scared all the illegal residents into hiding, like cockroaches scurrying into the walls when a room is lit.