The Gun Golems (Approaching Infinity Book 2) Read online

  “Yantz was in much the same condition as Alsef, but hadn’t been dead for as long. We think that Yantz and Ianosko died three to five days ago; Alsef we’re estimating at thirteen. Ianosko’s case is interesting and has given us some insight into how the other two were killed.”

  “So there’s no question that Alsef and Yantz were murdered?” Jav said.

  “No,” Ren said simply. “The room was torn apart and it looks like Ianosko was largely responsible for that.”

  Standing away from the rest, and responding to a cue, Esparza worked some controls at a panel upon the wall. The lights dimmed and a holographic screen appeared displaying the dead finalists with their respective postmortem details.

  “We found a one-centimeter in diameter hole in Ianosko’s forehead.” As Ren spoke, data danced upon the screen to illustrate his description. “The wound went to a depth of five centimeters and appears to have been the cause of death. No external injuries were discovered on Alsef or Yantz, but their autopsies revealed cavities in both their brains, each eight centimeters long and one centimeter in diameter.”

  “Cavities?” Vays said. “You’re saying there were no entry wounds?”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Ren said. “No sign of whatever left the holes, either.”

  “It’s not so surprising considering everything else that’s gone on, Forbis,” Brin spoke up for the first time. She looked tired, beaten, perhaps resolved to eventual failure.

  Vays gave her a look that could have signified any number of sentiments. To Ren he said, “Did Yantz have his sword with him?”

  Ren briefly studied the interaction between Vays and Brin and decided that he didn’t care. “Yes. It was still in its scabbard with the safety lock in place.

  “I can’t explain the lack of entry wounds for Alsef and Yantz, but knowing what we do about Ianosko’s martial art, it seems possible that whatever the implement was, it did require momentum to enter the victim’s brain. Perhaps seeing what happened to Yantz, Ianosko initiated her Golden Armor and it provided some protection. Many F-Gene fighters unconsciously invest their techniques with the equivalent of psychic power.” Ren shrugged, saying, “It’s just a theory.” He looked at Vays again, who seemed on the verge of saying something. He steeled himself for an insult unnecessarily.

  “Why the finalists?” Vays said. “What could anyone have to gain by killing them? Professor Cranden makes more sense. Even if he was retired, he was still a Shade. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  For the first time in their acquaintance, for a moment at least, Ren didn’t despise Vays. “No, it doesn’t.

  “For the time being, each of the remaining finalists has an officer assigned to her. I won’t insult anyone by suggesting that these officers can provide protection to the finalists, but they can potentially alert us to anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Let me also offer the services of the Squad,” Kalkin said. “There are five of us and five of them. Miss Karvasti, I know you’ve started working with Public Relations and Standards, but you also have some time under my command every day. You’ll be with Edren Rol. Jav, you’re already with Karza, so nothing will change there. Elza, I’d like you to look after Lara Bester. Vays, you’re with Saya Lostrom. I’ll take Nanda Oslet. We’ll work up a duty schedule first thing tomorrow morning. I don’t want to take away from what Director Fauer proposes, I simply want to reinforce his efforts with our own.”

  Ren smiled. “Your help is greatly appreciated.”

  Kalkin nodded, “This is the first indication of a pattern we’ve encountered. Even if it proves to be an exercise in misdirection, it would be irresponsible to ignore it.”

  Though it had brightened significantly, Ren’s face darkened once again. “There’s more to tell. We. . .” he hesitated. “We received some startling news from Scanlan’s department. It looks as though the Grans were destroyed using Gun Golem steel.”

  Brin dropped her head, sighing hopelessly.

  “You have got to be kidding,” Elza said.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Vays was laughing as if at a ridiculous, nonsensical joke, one that just kept going. “First of all, there are no Gun Golems left. Right? They’re gone. That was Scanlan’s plan. How can he be telling us that—” He stopped short of a sputter, shook his head and changed the subject. “The damage done to the Grans wasn’t consistent with Gun Golem weapons anyway.”

  “He’s right,” Elza said. “And besides, how could one or any of them have gotten through the Prisma Shield? Or even if we had stowaways inside the Shield, the Gun Golems weren’t really known for their subtlety or individual thinking. How and why would they choose to strike when they did instead of just running rampant against the presence of the Emperor from the very beginning?”

  “The beginning. . .” Kalkin repeated. “Which would have been when?”

  “What do you mean?” Elza said, confused.

  Kalkin stared at her with a patient smile and Jav remembered that despite his youthful appearance, Kalkin was in fact not young and had been an on-again-off-again professor at Locsard. He spoke now in a didactic tone, “We don’t know anything except what the Director has told us. We collected every bit of slag that resulted from our short little war and stored it right here in the Root Palace. Who knows what’s become of it?”

  Ren clicked his tongue, cast his eyes down, and sighed.

  “What is it?” Kalkin asked.

  Ren took a deep breath before speaking, “Who indeed knows what’s become of it? It’s gone.”

  Vays perked up, “Gone? What’s gone? What do you mean?”

  “The Gun Golem metal,” Ren said. “All of it’s gone.”

  Brin slumped down into a chair, groaning.

  “And no sign of who took it, how it was taken, or where it might be,” Kalkin said. “Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  19. ANOTHER MURDER

  10,688.315.2130

  Her head cleanly severed and her body ravaged by a pierced Artifact, Elza Steinz was dead.

  “What happened?” Brin said coldly, a strange, enhanced quality threading her voice.

  “I told you,” Lara whimpered, looking back and forth from Brin to Ren. “We were walking down the corridor. We were just talking, you know?”

  “Where was the officer, Lara?” Ren said softly.

  “You will answer his questions as if they were my own,” Brin said, that altered tone of her voice unmistakable now and her power clearly in effect.

  Lara swallowed hard. “He was behind us a ways. I don’t know how far. He was being polite, allowing two girls their privacy. I don’t know when it happened,” she said, shaking her head. “I remember I asked Elza to tell me what I was thinking. She laughed and said she couldn’t for about the millionth time—it was our little joke. And then. . . And then. . .”

  “And then what?” Brin said sharply.

  But Lara shook her head, fresh tears streaking her face, in particular leaving a hot trail over the bruise on her left cheek. She looked at Ren pleadingly. “I don’t know. Look at me. I never saw who or what it was. I never had a chance to fight back.”

  “And why do you think you’re still alive while the other two you were with are dead?” Brin said without emotion.

  Indignation seized and halted Lara’s hitching breaths. Lara stared at Brin in disgust. She turned away, and when she raised her red, tear-stained eyes again they fell on Ren.

  Her eyes were twin worlds of sadness, but in that sadness Ren felt needle sharp barbs backed the crushing weight of unspoken, and perhaps unintended, accusation. It was his job to answer Brin’s question. Hadn’t he promised Lara, just days before, that he would protect her? Ren blinked, stanching tears of his own, and had to force his breath back to normal. They were done for now. He owed her that much at least.

  “Okay, Lara,” he said, unable to mask his concern for her. He took both of her hands and led her out of the small office.

  Brin waited a few moments for
Ren to return. She fidgeted impatiently, speaking almost immediately. “I think you’re being too easy on her.”

  Ren dropped back into his chair heavily. With a curled lip, he raised his eyes to her.

  “First,” he said, “yes, I know I asked you to be in on her questioning, and I appreciate your cooperation. But she passed your scrutiny, and she obviously wasn’t using this,” Ren said, carelessly flipping the two halves of Lara’s broken psi blocker onto his desk. “Second, it’s not impossible that we’re seeing an escalation in target choice. Maybe the finalists are no longer in danger. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. Third, Lara has no techniques—that we know of—that could accomplish what we’ve seen.”

  “Don’t you think it’s suspicious?”

  “Of course, I do. Contrary to what you might think, I’m not a fool, Brin.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “I think you’re taking this personally,” Ren said.

  “Me? Aren’t you getting us confused?”

  Ren shook his head, “No. Obviously I have a personal stake in this, but your attitude towards my relationship with her has been negative from the beginning.”

  “What do I care what you do?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “I still think you’re being too easy on her.”

  “Okay, Brin. How’s this: You, me, and some poor maintenance slob go into a room, but only you and I walk out. The maintenance man has been cut to ribbons by something that might be described as a riot of knives. Neither one of us is talking, so who’s the murderer?”

  “You are,” she said impatiently, her arms stiffly folded across her chest.

  “The end? That simple? I thought you Locsard types were supposed to be smarter than that.” He looked at her for a moment, giving her a chance to amend her answer before continuing himself. “Why did I kill him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said sharply, sneering and shaking her head.

  He waited her out and finally she sighed, cocking her head in exasperation. “All right. I suppose,” she said twisting the word as she rolled her eyes again, “that if you weren’t wearing a psi blocker, I could have compelled you to kill the man.”

  Ren nodded. “That’s better. But why did you want to kill him? You assumed rather quickly that it had to be one of us. Based on what we’ve seen recently, do you really believe that the murderer would have to be limited to you or to me, either in fact or in intent?”

  “Fine. You don’t think she did it. You don’t think she knows anything. I don’t think you’d want to know if she did. I’ll let you get back to playing house with her, though. I’ve got work with Public Relations and Standards to get to.” She was already waving a dismissive hand and on her way out.

  Ren sat at his desk, toying with the halves of the psi blocker. He reviewed the arguments he’d given for Lara in his mind again. Under normal circumstances, Brin’s power would have made the first argument sufficient to cast away all doubt, but Cranden’s death and the manner in which it must have been achieved changed that. Nothing was certain anymore. Ren recalled the sadness in Lara’s eyes. He believed her. He thought he would have believed her even if the two of them hadn’t become close, but he was going in circles now. There would be no solution to this or any other problem tonight, and the fact remained that Elza was dead.

  He tried to clear his mind, focusing on the incredibly clean line that had bisected the psi blocker. He wondered idly if the killer needed to make physical contact to do the things he—or she—had done. This psi blocker was obviously useless except for what one of the object readers might be able to retrieve from it, but so far object reading had been a dead end. All of the victims had been found either by the killer’s design or once concealment of the bodies no longer mattered. This second possibility was supported by the evidence—useful or not—left behind at the Yantz-Ianosuko site.

  He looked at his own psi blocker now. Through the course of his investigation, maybe even his daily life, there was a high probability that he, or someone else wearing a psi blocker, had come into direct contact with the killer. While no alarm had ever been raised, something about that thought began to niggle him.

  “Computer,” he said, calling to life a holographic screen before his desk, “show psi blocker history. Subject: Fauer, Ren. Time frame: initialization to present.”

  10,688.316.0700

  His arms spread across his desk and a small cord of drool hanging from his lower lip, Ren met the next day with a start. At 0700 an all-channel announcement forced its way onto the holographic screen before him and onto every other similar device within the Root Palace. He wiped the drool from his mouth, but didn’t bother to look. He knew the chime that identified Public Relations and Standards announcements. Beyond that, he knew the voice of the speaker quite well and had already guessed what was coming.

  “People of Viscain,” Brin Karvasti’s voice came, “please do not misconstrue the current state of affairs.”

  Even without the psi blocker’s piercing bleat and flashing red light, he had come to recognize the sound of Brin’s power.

  “There are many rumors extant,” Brin’s voice continued. “Do not confuse the facts. Do not believe the rumors. Murder has not been committed here in the Root Palace. There have been a number of accidents, it’s true, but these are to be expected whenever the Root Palace is in transit.”

  Unable to listen further, Ren added to the discordant wail of the psi blocker, laughing, laughing, laughing.

  20. STRANGE BEHAVIOR

  10,688.317.1930

  Brin was exhausted. She had been asked to exert her power again, twice in two days this time, through the broadcasting network of the Root Palace. To catch everyone possible, the first announcement had finished with a compulsion for all viewers to urge everyone they knew to watch the second, which she had just completed. She knew that her power had not yet been field-tested, not on a wide-scale anyway, but simulations where she could rely on visual cues and chaining her power through minds in close proximity to one another while actually quite far away from her had been much less tiring. Besides herself now, only Tia Winn and the kindly old man who headed the Public Relations & Standards Division knew that to work the Palace’s network, one had to plumb its depths and its farthest reaches, saturating all the channels, nooks, and loops with power before making use of it in any real way. It wasn’t late, but all she wanted was to go home and sleep.

  She joined the traffic in the corridor, heading towards the jump deck. Even with a line, she didn’t have to wait long. She stepped onto the deck with three other people, but couldn’t be bothered to look at their faces. She keyed her destination reflexively and waited for it to come up on the circuit. She closed her eyes for what she intended to be a moment, but found her eyelids impossibly heavy and slow to respond. When she did open her eyes she was startled to find herself alone on the deck at her stop. The light above flickered, stabbing flashbulb bright in the otherwise dim light. She checked the panel again, confirmed that she’d reached her stop, and stepped down from the deck into the semi-dark corridor.

  What time was it again? It was only 1930, wasn’t it? It seemed so late for some reason. It must have been because she was so tired. Still, besides being dark, the corridor was empty. She shook her head and made towards her quarters.

  She knew she was tired, not so tired that she couldn’t find her own room, but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. She walked the route she had walked at least twice every day—going and coming—since she had become a Shade. She didn’t get lost, but now she found that she in fact was. She stood in the dark corridor, which was lit only by pale gray service lights spaced at intervals, and tried to get her bearings. She was awake now, despite the lullaby hum of the Root Palace Stitch Drive, particularly noticeable here, and wondered how she managed to get to this level of the Palace. She was as far away from her room as she possibly could be and would likely find no one up here. Only occasional maintenance crews came
this far up. By the sound of it, the Drive was only a few levels above. She shuddered, thinking about the infinite explosive growth that was required to propel the Palace at the rate they were traveling.

  She resolved to find her way back to the jump deck and as she retraced her steps, rounding one corner, she came across an unexpected sight. Up ahead, leaning against the left wall and with her arms folded haughtily, was Lara Bester.

  “What are you doing here?” Brin said.

  Lara shrugged, pushing off the wall with her right leg to stand straight. She faced Brin, her arms still folded. “I can be anywhere I want, can’t I?”

  Though her senses had cleared, Brin was still tired and not in the mood to get into a conversation with her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend who also happened to be a murder suspect. “I guess,” she said noncommittally, trying to move past Lara.

  Lara moved subtly, almost imperceptibly, and Brin was confused and annoyed to find her way barred. Lara nodded and said sarcastically, “You guess? You get a kick out of authority, don’t you?” It wasn’t a question.

  “Perhaps it slipped your notice, but I am a Shade,” Brin said.

  Lara snorted.

  Brin was running out of her already thin-worn patience. “What do you want, Miss Bester?”

  “What do you want, Miss Karvasti? By all accounts, it isn’t Ren Fauer. And yet you appear to disapprove of him being in the company of another. Or is it just me that you find objectionable?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Brin said, shaking her head. “You and Ren can play house and make lots of little babies, genes willing, if that’s what you want to do. All I want is to go back to my room and sleep.” Brin tried once again to pass Lara. Lara placed a hand upon Brin’s shoulder and held her in place with an arm like a steel strut.