QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted Read online

  “No wonder the addicts and xenos have moved in. It’s not exactly prime real estate. And there’s our fine upstanding non-citizen.”

  A fourth quarpod sat still before a squat, little alien with cat-like ears and blue shaggy fur that made it look as if it had been tarred and carpeted. The xeno was muttering at the small robot, gesticulating to punctuate whatever point it was making. The machine listened patiently, casting a pale white light upon the witness as it recorded its statements. The xeno wore tattered canvas coveralls and multicolored boots that had been patched and re-patched so many times Tower doubted there was much of the original material left. Its inhumanly high voice improbably managed to rise in pitch when it saw Tower approaching.

  “…ndeleng apa-apa! Aku pitutur marang kowe kaping sepuluh wis! Pulisi wong, sing ngomong iki sikil papat aku ora weruh apa-apa!”

  “You get that, Baby?”

  “Translating… he is saying that he didn’t see anything and he’s told the quarpod as much. Repeatedly.”

  Tower tapped his badge. A green hologram sprang to life a half meter from his chest, displaying his credentials, service summary, photograph—which was woefully out of date—the whole works. The image was at least seven years old. He really needed to have a newer snap taken. Of course, he thought that every time he identified himself and then promptly forgot whenever he actually had the opportunity to do something about it. The xeno didn’t seem to care, though, it simply glanced at the ID and went back to gabbling at the quarpod.

  Fine, I really didn’t want to talk to you either, Tower thought.

  The other quarpods were more interested in him and acknowledged his arrival with a series of alert-sounding beeps. Three of them skittered off to the sidewalk. They hunkered down, shut off their lights, and waited. The one interviewing the witness also registered Tower’s presence with a respectful bloop, but continued with its recording.

  “Graven Tower, Chief Warrant Officer, His Grace’s Armed Forces.” Tower shook his head at the little xeno. “I’m with MCID, I’m not a city cop. I don’t give a flying rat’s ass about your residence status. Now, you’re the witness, right?”

  He waited impatiently as Baby broadcast a translation.

  “Aku karo MCID, aku ora pulisi kutha lan aku ora menehi peduli karo bab status panggonan. Saiki, sampeyan lagi ing kang sumerep, tengen?”

  “Ya, ya, ya,” was all he understood as the blue creature launched into another stream of perfectly unintelligible gibberish. He felt very happy that interviewing the witness was not his responsibility. But the alien was pointing at something, so Tower looked in that direction.

  As he’d already seen, there was no body there. There may have been a body once, but it wasn’t there now. What remained was little more than a blackened smear on the pavement that indicated an extraordinarily violent discharge of energy. Although if you squinted and knew what you were looking for, you could almost see the shape of a human body stretched out upon the ground.

  Disintegrated. He whistled softly. There were very, very few legal ways to disintegrate a human body, and virtually none of them were easily transportable.

  “The witness is entirely unaugmented,” Baby informed him. “Even the circuitry on the devices he is carrying about his person is unpowered.”

  Tower sighed and rubbed at his unshaven chin. “Well, isn’t that just great!” It was too much to have hoped it would have an eye-cam streaming live to a server, but even a live phone mike in the little xeno’s pocket might have picked up something useful. “Anything else?”

  “Yes, what the witness observed is consistent with a military-grade disruptor. And, depending upon the estimated range of the attack, perhaps some sort of cloaking device as well.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because the witness said the flash seemed to come out of nowhere.”

  Tower nodded. “I don’t suppose there is any chance of this being a freak lightning strike?”

  “Sorry, boss. In the last six hectasecs, there have been 1,963 lightning strikes recorded by the global climate control center. The closest one was 21.6 kilometers from here.”

  Bloody hell on wheels. Disruptors didn’t come cheap, not on a tech 17 world like Rhysalan. Neither did cloaking devices. Put the two together and that spelled money. A lot of money. And on a world presently giving refuge to approximately one thousand, four hundred and sixty two governments-in-exile, to say nothing of the two hundred and twenty six legitimate planetary embassies, that kind of money was nothing more than another way to say “political assassination”.

  “God, I hate politicals,” Tower commented to no one in particular as he stared at the smear on the pavement that had once been a living, breathing, human being.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Murder is the unlawful killing of a sentient corporeal being rated higher than 9 on the Takeno-Turing scale, with malice aforethought. Every murder perpetrated by radiation, genetic manipulation, or any other kind of willful, deliberate, malicious, and premeditated killing; or committed in the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate, any revolution, assassination, murder, kidnapping, treason, espionage, sabotage; or perpetrated as part of a pattern or practice of assault or torture, is murder in the first degree and is strictly prohibited without the written consent of an appropriate authority. Any other murder is murder in the second degree.

  —09 RCJ § 1111: Murder

  “Chief Tower? Chief Graven Tower? Is that you?”

  He could hear the incredulity in the detector’s voice as she addressed him and grinned to himself as he stood up from where he’d been attempting to examine some of the possible sight lines that Baby was displaying for him.

  “None other.” He pretended not to know who it was. “Wait, I know that voice. Hildy, is that you?”

  “None other. Now get your grubby mitts off my murder scene! I’m right over you.”

  Tower craned his head upward. Sure enough, a black-and-white TPPD aerovar was descending slowly with its nose pointing north, having come from the opposite direction. “You got your zoom on if you can see my hands from up there.”

  “Your augment sent me the uplink through Victor when I asked why there was a soldier boy crashing the scene.”

  “So the kids are playing well together? Isn’t that nice. Get on down here and join the party. I think you’re going to like this one.”

  “Not a jumper?”

  “Not a jumper,” he confirmed. “Definitely not a jumper.”

  “Well, where is the body? I don’t see a body. You didn’t do anything with my body, did you, Chief?”

  Tower shook his head, and with some difficulty, managed to stifle the first three responses that sprang into his mind. Was she flirting with him? He was tempted to respond in kind, and he knew how unlikely it was that anyone downtown or at base was listening in, but regardless, they were being recorded and it was only two months since the last base-wide series of sexual harassment lectures.

  He shuddered involuntarily. No woman, not even the lovely Detector Hildreth, was worth the interminable weeks of re-education that would follow an on-duty comment deemed improper by Bio Resources. The suspicious bureaucrats of BR were always on the alert, they liked nothing better than to get their hands on an officer, and they could always be relied upon to put the worst possible interpretation on even the most innocent remark.

  “Not guilty, Detector.” He cursed himself for his cowardice and glanced into a window that was just clean enough to let him see his reflection. Thanks to the tac-jacket, he looked dangerous, maybe even dashing. Digging into his pocket, he found a breath-enhancement pill and popped it into his mouth. “Tower out.”

  The signal clicked off. Tower swore it was an actual sound, but the techs told him he was over-imaginative. A moment later, the whine of the grav-plates on Detector Hildreth’s aerovar increased in pitch as she, or more likely, her augment parked it on the street, nose to nose with Tower’s own vehicle. Lacking the armor, the anti-personnel rockets, the Meteo
r air-to-air missiles, the 15mm gun ports under the stub-wing slots on either side, and the pair of Degroet Tactical M165-20 cannons in the nose, her black-and-white vehicle looked sleek and stylishly feminine in comparison with his more heavily armed, dark-grey machine.

  “Well, Chief Tower, it seems we meet again. What brings MCID to this humble civilian crime scene?” Derin Hildreth, Hildy to her friends, colleagues, and one-time professional role-play team members, was a little shorter than Tower. She was pretty, slender, and athletic, and wore a thicker, sleeveless version of his tactical jacket. A standard department GHK slug-thrower rested in a brown leather holster that was slung low over her grey pants, and a yellow-triggered shocker that looked like a toy was attached to her belt on her right hip. Underneath the tactical vest she was wearing a white collared shirt. She had a small black satchel slung over one shoulder, and was using both hands to twist her medium-length blond hair back into a looped ponytail as she walked toward him.

  “Would you believe an inter-subsector war looms on the horizon and solving this crime may help us stop it and save tens of millions of lives?”

  “Not even a little bit,” she said with a grin. Then the amusement vanished from her face as she stared at the dark smear on the ground. “Oh, no. That’s from a military grade disintegrator. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it! Don’t tell me you guys have something that can pick up the discharge!”

  Wow, she was quick. She was wrong, but she was quick.

  “If we did, you know I can’t tell you.” Tower spread his hands. “And, just so you know, we usually refer to them as disruptors.”

  She narrowed her eyes, which he couldn’t help notice were an attractively bright shade of green and glanced at his armored var. “Do you have it in there? Chief, if you have evidence that would help me ID the weapon, I would truly appreciate it. I really would.”

  “She’s just shameless, isn’t she?” Baby practically hissed as Hildy patted his arm and started to slide past him. “What are you doing, Tower? Change the subject!”

  She was right. He had to distract the detector and fast. Hildy was already making her way toward the driver-side door and he couldn’t remember if he’d locked it or not. Then she froze and cocked her head to one side. She was listening to her augment, he realized. Then she turned around to face him.

  “Victor says there is a ninety-seven percent possibility that the vic was killed by a disintegrator given the chemical composition of the latent energy particles. Or rather, a disruptor, I should say.”

  Tower tried to nod in a knowing manner, hoping that Hildy wouldn’t press him further about his nonexistent device.

  Did you do that? he subvocalized, knowing that Baby could hear him.

  “Yeah, I cycled it through the TPPD comm-int; her Victor has no idea where it came from. Those civilian intelligences are cretins.”

  That’s my girl.

  He glanced up and realized that Hildy had her hands on her hips and was asking him something.

  “Did I smell anything when we got here? No, I didn’t, but I’ve seen that sort of thing before.” He indicated the crude body-shaped smear. “The Keleboshi had a few vehicle-mounted disruptors. They burned through too much energy to be relied upon in a firefight, and their power sources were too big to carry around without a gravsuit, but for a one-shot kill, a micro-disruptor is hard to beat if you can get close enough to your target.”

  “You’re a combat vet?” She looked up at him with a speculative look on her face.

  “I saw a bit of drama here and there. Among other things, I was with the security detail on Basattria.”

  “Wow,” she said. Eleven years later, even civilians still remembered what went down at the consulate on that godforsaken planet. “Talk about being at the wrong place at the wrong time! I didn’t know there were any survivors.”

  “A few of us got out. Not enough.” He shrugged and firmly kept his thoughts away from the one individual in particular who hadn’t. “The point is, we know what the weapon was, probably, but we don’t know why or even who, yet. And Baby tells me that based on what the witness says he didn’t see, the killer may have been cloaked.”

  “Cloaked? That doesn’t sound like a run-of-the-mill mugger. Neither does a disruptor.” She took him by surprise when she raised her eyebrows and grinned hopefully. “I thought I heard a ‘we’ in there, Chief Tower. Would MCID be willing to assist on this one instead of taking over the investigation?”

  “Oh, for the love of Our Father, Tower, are you really going to hold her hand on this one?”

  Shut up, Baby. We could be dealing with pros here, maybe even spec-ops. It’s legitimate, you know TPPD isn’t equipped to handle spooks or soldiers. Just make the request.

  He shrugged and feigned indifference. “We’ll see about that. Let’s find out who our vic was first.”

  “Think there is enough residue left to gather identifiable DNA?” Hildy looked disappointed, but she didn’t argue as she returned her attention to where the body had been.

  “I couldn’t say. Only one way to find out. Do you have a scanner in your bag? I’ve got one in the var.”

  “No, I’ve got it right here,” Hildy said, slipping the back off her shoulder and removing a long, cylindrical object in a black hardcase. She kneeled down and flipped the case open, exposing a mat-scanner that looked at least two generations newer than anything Tower had ever seen. MCID was always generous with weaponry and augment technology, not so much with anything else. “CSI will eventually get here in their own sweet time, but they won’t mind if we scan so long as we don’t actually disturb anything.”

  “Never seen that brand before.” Tower edged closer to the discolored pavement. Something caught his eye about where the vic’s knee would have been. It was an odd color, a different shade than the rest of the discoloration. It looked as if it might be a small piece of material had somehow survived the disrupter blast. “You see that, Baby?”

  “I do. Highlight?”

  “Please. And zoom twenty X.”

  The small object suddenly seemed to hurl itself toward him, cycling rapidly through the magnification levels, although only in Tower’s right eye. It seemed to have a pattern to it, he could see that it was artificial. He tapped Hildy on the shoulder as she was passing the scanner over the remains and murmuring to her augment. “Run that over that bit of color there, by the knee, if you don’t mind.”

  “Mm-hmm.” As she did so, red crosshairs pinpointed the object and framed it in pulsing red light. A readout of information scrolled underneath, most of it entirely meaningless to Tower. Her augment was relaying the results to Baby as they came in.

  “Preliminary analysis consistent with fabric. Victor says more lab work is required for a conclusive ID.”

  Fabric?” Tower crouched down and zoomed down to a five X zoom.

  “What is it?” Hildy was right next to him when he stood up again. He smelled flowers of some kind. Lilac? As if he knew a lilac from a lily pad. The flowery smell was mixed in with the scent of gun oil, a combination he found extremely appealing.

  “I think it’s a fragment of what he was wearing.”

  “Really? That's all that's left of him?” Her green eyes unfocused for a moment and he waited as she nodded and made confirmation noises. Then she blinked and the slackness disappeared from her face. The sight was a little alarming, and he wondered if he looked similarly lifeless when he was conversing with Baby. “CSI says male, early twenties.”

  “All right. Anything else?”

  “It’s running the DNA through the brains downtown. Should have an ID in a sec. Hold on… Yeah, it was his clothes. High-end, expensive manufacture. Probably designer wear of one sort or another.”

  Tower looked around the area. It was dirty, half-abandoned, and most of the residents were probably illegal squatters and transients. Even the denizens of the bar, most of whom had lost interest, didn’t look like they had much in the way of worldly wealth. “Doesn’t sound like he be
longed around here. What do you think, tourist got himself lost or a rich kid keeping it real?”

  “More likely the latter.” She grinned at him. “My family isn’t rich, but before I joined the force, my boyfriend was a wavespinner. I’ve been to a rave or two in places a lot worse than this.”

  “Still, designer clothes down here? This isn’t the place to go walking around flashing your money unless you’re armored or surrounded by armed bodyguards.”

  “I’m just telling you what the scanner says. Hold on.” Her eyes unfocused again, and when she blinked, a hologram appeared in the space between them. A young man’s head appeared, rotating slowly counterclockwise. He was handsome, with a stern expression that belied his youth and dark, deep-set eyes. His hair was wavy and blond, and a silver band with three sapphires mounted at center encircled his head.

  “Not a bad-looking boy.” Hildy grimaced and shook her head. “What’s up with that headband? Oh, drat, it looks like this is one of yours, Chief.”

  “‘Tower’ will do,” he told her. “One of mine?”

  “He’s a xeno, and not just any xeno either. Victor says that’s Arpad Vladislaus Jagaelleon, who just happens to be the crown prince of Morchard.”

  “Morchard?”

  “Morchard is a Class Four, Tech 15 civilized world on the periphery of House Trajan space. There was a revolution there four years ago and corporatist rebels supported by Unity naval forces successfully displaced the ruling monarchy. The King of Morchard and one of his four sons were captured and executed. His heir, then-crown prince Pons-Zoltan, was a pilot who died leading the fighter wing that broke through the Unity’s blockade. As a result of his actions, Prince Arpad, Prince Janos, and their mother the queen, were successfully evacuated and granted asylum here on Rhysalan along with 2,134 members of their armed forces and household staff on 3400.268.”

  “Sounds like Fortune had it in for this guy.” Tower shook his head. To travel so far, to fall from such heights, just to end up a smear on one of the uglier streets of Trans Paradis.