Inferno

Raindrops splattered on the corpse, the scene lit in the harsh, shadowless glare of high-power portable beam lights. The dead man’s hands clutched at his neck, as if he were still struggling to pull the cruel, hard wire from around his throat. The corpse was in a small depression in the ground, tangled up in scruffy bramble, surrounded by a scrubby, anemic forest of small, elderly trees.

Lightning flashed and thunder blared, and Alvar Kresh stood over the corpse in the driving rain. The Crime Scene robots were already at work. Not that they would do any good. The CS robots could measure and sense and detect all they wanted, but there were no answers here. They could go back to their labs and come up with a time of death, perhaps, but that was going to be about it.

Alvar Kresh looked down at the dead man and sighed. He had been in this business for a while, and experience taught you things. There were times when you knew enough to know you weren’t going to know any more. Sometimes the scene of a crime spoke volumes. Other times-right now, for example-it was plain to see that prodding at the corpse was useless. What had once been a man was now a meaningless bit of grotesquerie, as impersonal, as anonymous as a crumpled-up food wrapper.

But you went through the ritual all the same, because it was part of your job, because there was the faint chance that your instincts just might be wrong, because it was expected of you, because it was standard procedure. But you knew that there was no real point.

It was clear, to Kresh’s eye, that whoever did this job had not done it with the simple goal of killing. He or she had taken on the job of killing undetected. It was a careful, professional job. A garrote, for example, was not going to show any fingerprints. A rainy night would insure that a lot of clues would be washed away. Besides, anyone who could slip through a perimeter of Governor’s Rangers, kill one of their number, and get away undetected was not going to be stupid enough to leave a calling card behind.

Sometimes-like right now-when it was obvious there was nothing to be learned, crime scenes devolved into little more than macabre social occasions. Kresh didn’t get to see his opposite numbers in the SSS and the Rangers all that often. But tonight it was old home week. Devray of the Rangers and Melloy of the SSS were both here.

That in itself was interesting. Neither service was in the habit of dispatching its highest-ranking officers to a murder scene. It was clear to Kresh that neither side wanted to concede a centimeter of ground in the endless turf war between the two services. Kresh was glad he had nothing at stake in this one. Let the two of them duke it out.

Kresh didn’t have much faith in the SSS or the Rangers. The Settler force was nothing more than a bunch of bullyboys, a goon squad given official sanction. Cinta Melloy’s SSS was little more than a band of hired thugs.

The Rangers were a decent enough group, and good at what they did. Kresh was more than willing to grant that. The only trouble was that security was not what they did. Their usual line of work ran toward guarding trees, not people. Their primary jobs were search and rescue, wildlife management, ecological maintenance. Their tasks had been seen as dull, plebeian, low-status jobs in the past. These days such work was all-important, high-profile stuff. The needs of the day had vaulted the Rangers out of their previous obscurity.

And yet, here they were, guarding the Governor for no better reason than that their charter said it was their job. Never mind that the charter-writers had been talking about ceremonial guards. Back in those days, no one had ever dreamed that the Governor would require actual protection against real threats, let alone that humans would be expected to do the job.

Kresh could make the case that their inexperience in such matters meant that having the Rangers on the job actually endangered the Governor. But the Rangers were insisting on the prerogative of their service even though Kresh’s deputies--or perhaps even the SSS-could do a better job of it.

The Rangers had not been trained for security work. They had spent their lives being protected from all harm by robots. At the end of the day, they were Spacers, and Spacers tended to assume that a situation was safe until they learned otherwise. A good security officer had to do just the opposite.

Commander Justen Devray of the Rangers crouched down over the corpse next to Kresh, peering at it intently in the rain, as if he would be able to spot some clue the Crime Scene robots had missed. Devray was a tall, muscular man, with tousled blond hair and blue eyes, his skin ta

“Have you picked up anyone?” Kresh asked of Melloy.

She just shook her head. She made no move to squat down and examine the body, or even show much interest in it. She knew there was nothing here. “We’ve done every kind of sweep we can think of. No unauthorized perso

“I suppose not,” Devray agreed in his slow, careful voice. “But I couldn’t know that until I got a look at him.”

Devray stood up and turned toward Melloy. “Do you see much of anything?”

“I see Ranger Sergeant Emoch Huthwitz dead,” Melloy replied, a bit curtly. “Killed by someone who knew where he was and how to get at him without making a sound.”

Security Captain Cinta Melloy of the Settler Security Service ought to have been of more use at a murder than a tree surgeon. She had served in trouble spots throughout the Settler worlds. But not to put too fine a point on it, Kresh didn’t trust Melloy. There was something about the woman didn’t sit right with him. Even now, there was a tiny alarm bell ringing somewhere in the back of his mind.

“I see a bit more than that,” Kresh said. “This man was on the Governor’s security detail, on duty, with the Governor not two hundred meters away. I don’t think we can start out assuming that it was-ah-”

“Huthwitz,” Donald said, quietly prompting Kresh.

Damnation! He hated when that happened. Made it look as if he didn’t know what he was doing. “I don’t think we can start out assuming it was Huthwitz who was the primary target.”

“But the Governor survived,” Melloy objected.

How do you know that? Kresh wondered. The Governor didn’t even know anything had happened. No, that was too paranoid. Melloy probably checked in with the security robots. “The security plans were changed, beefed up, at the last moment,” Kresh answered. “Maybe an assassin got this far, but no further.”

“Possibly,” Melloy said, not sounding very convinced. “But why kill Huthwitz if you were after the Governor? It could do nothing but increase the risk of detection. The Rangers weren’t using any sort of detection grid, just Rangers lined up around the perimeter of the Winter Residence, on watch. Why go up against a Ranger when it would have to be easier to sneak between two Rangers in the line?”

“Maybe the killer tried to sneak between Rangers and came upon Huthwitz by accident,” Kresh said.

Melloy pointed to a toppled-over camp stool by the body. “Maybe Huthwitz was bending a reg or two by sitting at his post, but you can see by the way the stool was positioned he was looking out, toward the exterior of his perimeter, the way he was supposed to. Whoever it was who killed him had to get inside the perimeter, then head back out toward him. Besides, there aren’t any signs of a struggle. Even after three hours of rain like this, we ought to be able to see something.”