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 manner of his death was a catastrophe for the planet? This was history, a moment she would be called upon to remember for the researchers and the archivists for the rest of her life. She would be remembered for being here, tonight. And Chanto Grieg would be remembered, not as the man who saved Inferno—or at least tried to save it—he would be remembered as the Governor somebody killed. His place, his rightful place, in history had been warped and distorted for all time. And that felt like the worst intrusion of all—
“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.”
“How can you be so sure?” Kresh asked.
Fredda pointed to the blaster shots. “Look at the chest shot. Virtually identical to the shots on the bedroom robots. That was the one that killed it.”
“So?” Kresh said.
“So look at the paint-melts. The melts from the two smaller shots overlap the death shot. The killer blasted the robot in the chest from close up, then he or she got artistic. Either the robot fell over or the killer knocked it over and then backed off to do the other shots from a greater distance after the robot was already down.”
“You’re right,” Kresh said. “I should have spotted that.”
“Well, your weapons analysis people would have seen it sooner or later. I only saw it because I was looking for it.”
“Looking for it?” Kresh asked. “Why?”
“Because these robots were not shot because the killer needed them dead,” Fredda said. “They were shot because that was the fastest way to destroy the evidence of tampering. My guess is that there was some sort of gadget attached to the circuitry in the center of the chest, right under the central access panel.”
Fredda realized she was still staring down at the dead robot. A shot just like the one that killed the other robots. Just like the one that killed Grieg. Grieg dead. Sweet stars in the sky, Chanto Grieg was dead. She shut her eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to pull herself together. This was not the time to grieve. Not when the whole planet was about to fall apart.
“Sir, Doctor, if I might interject?”
“Yes, yes, Donald,” Fredda said, collecting herself. “What—what is it?”
“The Crime Scene robots have just posted some initial results to the hyperwave datanet. It concerns weapons analysis that might have some bearing on all this.”
“What sort of results?” Kresh asked.
“Range, power, and sequence estimates, sir.”
