Inferno

“Grieg is dead,” Kresh said. “A blaster shot through the chest.”

Fredda blinked, shook her head, stared at Kresh. “What?”

“Dead. Murdered. Assassinated,” Kresh said.

Fredda could find nothing to say. She wanted to deny it, to say no, it couldn’t have happened, but one look at Kresh’s face told her that it had. Finally words, some sort of words, came to her. “Sweet burning hell. How could that happen?”

“I don’t know,” Kresh replied, his voice flat and hard. “Come in. ” He turned and led her down the hallway to a small room that had been pressed into service as a command post. The place was swarming with robots and Sheriff s Department deputies, working, conferring, talking into comm units, faces tight and grim. “Sit down,” Kresh said, and Fredda obeyed, setting herself down in an absurdly festive-looking couch with an overdone floral pattern.

Somehow everything seemed extra real, excessively solid, every meaningless detail suddenly vitally bright and hard. sitting there, at that moment, Fredda knew that every moment of this night would be with her forever, burned into her memory and her soul for all time. “How did it-did it-”

“We don’t know,” Kresh said. “But I need you to help me find out, and I have very little time. Grieg’s security robots should have protected him-but they didn’t. I need to know if someone tampered with them. You have to find that out for me, now, tonight. But-”

“But what?” Fredda demanded. And yet, somehow, she already knew the answer.

“But we haven’t been able to move him yet,” Kresh said. “My robots and technical people are still examining the crime scene. It’s not pretty.”

Fredda nodded, feeling nothing more than numb. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t expect it would be.”

Fredda had never seen a dead man before, let alone a murdered one. That much she had in common with mainstream Spacer society. Death was too distasteful to be permitted to intrude on one’s life. But even if she had seen a roomful of corpses, it would not have prepared her for the sight of Chanto Grieg slumped over, murdered in his bed. His body-his ruined corpse-was all the more ghastly a sight for the sheer normalcy of it all. A tired man at the end of a long party goes to his rest, sits up in bed to read for a time before turning out the lights.

And someone puts a blaster bolt through him. There he lay, in his pajamas, in his bed. A private, almost intimate setting. She felt like an intruder, an interloper. She did not belong here. She had no right to see this. No one did. She felt a strange impulse to chase them all out, the deputies, the Crime Scene robots, Kresh and Donald. She wanted to chase them all out, leave herself, and let the man have his death in private.

“Let him rest in peace,” she said, the words a half whisper.

“I beg your pardon, Dr. Leving?” Donald asked. “What did you say?”

“Peace,” she said. “Why can’t you let him rest in peace?” She shut her eyes, tried to blot out the sight. She wanted to turn her back on him, let him be-but she could not help herself. She opened her eyes and looked again.

Chanto Grieg was-had been-her friend, her sponsor, her patron. But all that was as nothing. What matter who or what this man was to her when the time and ma

“All right,” Fredda said, though nothing at all was right. “All right. Let me look at the robots. ”

“Over here, Doctor,” Donald said. There was something gentle, careful about his voice. Fredda felt the slightest of pressure on her arm as he turned her around and she saw the ruined security robots, still in their wall niches. She saw instantly what had bothered Kresh. None of them had moved before they were shot.

“That can’t be,” she said. “No one should have been able to get past one SPR, let alone three. Sappers are too fast. ”

“That’s what I thought,” Kresh said. “And it’s worse than that. Every single one of the upper-floor SPRs was destroyed by blaster fire. ”

“But the whole idea of Sappers is that they keep in continuous contact with each other,” Fredda said. “Almost like a linked mind. If one of them saw something, all of the others would know about it. There’s no way anyone could have shot one unit in an SPR team without the other SPRs being instantly aware of it-and calling for help. So why didn’t that happen?”

Kresh gestured toward the blasted robots. “There they are, Doctor. You tell me.”

“Is it all right for me touch them?” Fredda asked. “What about fingerprints and so on?”

“The Crime Scene robots have already done a full exterior scan, “ Donald replied. “I think if you wear surgical gloves, and have a Crime Scene robot do an interior scan of any compartments you open, that should suffice. You are quite right to be concerned about fingerprints. With a bit of luck, whoever tampered with the machines left a fingerprint or two somewhere on one of the robots’ interior surfaces. ”

“Good. Good,” Fredda said, a bit distractedly. She wasn’t really listening all that hard. There was a puzzle for her to solve, and it was already absorbing her attention. Which was fine with her if it got her mind off the dead man in bed on the other side of the room. “Then let’s get to it.”

Fredda made no move toward the robots. Something was missing, something she wasn’t seeing. And then she got it. The robots had been shot through the chest, the same as Grieg. Even to Fredda’s unpracticed eye, they were obviously aimed shots, precise enough so that it could not be mere chance the robots were all shot in the same place.

But chest shots didn’t make sense. The best way, the only sure way to kill a robot, was with a shot to the head, where you would be certain to destroy the positronic brain. There was no particular reason why a shot to the chest would kill. There were no equivalent structures to the heart or lungs whose destruction would insure instant death.

If you did enough damage, cut enough circuits, yes, that would do it. But you could not be absolutely sure to the degree you wanted to be with a trio of fast-moving, aggressive security robots corning at you.

Unless, of course, you knew everything there was to know about this particular model of security robot, knew exactly how powerful a blaster shot it would take for a chest shot to kill-and if you knew they were not about to come at you.

Well, all right, that would at least explain why the shooter didn’t need a head shot. But that didn’t explain why the shooter did need a chest shot.

Unless-unless there were something in the chest the killer wanted to conceal. And if that were so, vaporizing that something would certainly serve to hide it. There was a way to test that idea.

“I don’t need to examine these robots just now,” Fredda said. “Maybe later. First I want to see one of the other Sappers that was shot. ”

“Of course, Doctor,” Donald said. “Come this way.”

Donald led Kresh and Fredda out into the hallway and toward a slumped-over heap on the floor. Fredda knelt down beside it and looked it over.

“This one at least looks like it was in motion, heading toward the scene, when it went down,” Kresh said.

“No,” Fredda said. “I don’t know much about blasters, but I do know how paint reacts to heat on robot bodies. Welding, laser cutting, that sort of thing. Maybe you were meant to think this robot was moving when it was shot, but it was as inert as the others when the blaster got it. ”