looking for. She could see the tiny scratches left behind when some sort of device had been removed from the robots—two tiny marks in the main power bus. Fredda was all but certain that those marks were the traces of some sort of cutoff device, some way of deactivating the robots by remote control. But guesses and being all but certain were not enough. So far, whoever had removed them had been as thorough removing them as she had been in checking.
But maybe that was not going to hold. After all, she had all the time in the world, and the fact that daylight was coming on did not concern her. She had no fear of sudden detection or something going wrong with the plan. But whoever had done this the night before—with the corpse of the Governor upstairs, the rain lashing down, with the clock running and all the lights off, that person might well make a mistake.
Fredda wanted to get on to the next robot, and skip the scan. She resisted the temptation, knowing that the scans were important. The robot could detect any number of things that might be hidden from human view. A bit of dust or a smear of dried sweat or a flaked-off bit of skin or a piece of torn thread that might reveal something about the person who left it behind. Perhaps even a fingerprint. Perhaps something unexpected.
So far nothing. The opposition had been very careful. But if they had made just one mistake—and Fredda found that one mistake—that would be all it would take.
At last the scan was done and the observer robot moved back out of the way. Fredda closed the robot’s inner and outer access panels and moved on to the next unit.
It was disconcerting to stare up into those dead, designed-to-intimidate eyes and then reach down and open the robot up. Not so long ago, the average Spacer would not, could not, have imagined being afraid of a robot. But Fredda knew times had changed. She herself was the one who had let the genie out of the bottle. She had made dangerous robots with her own two hands. There was no longer any technical barrier to making a robot without any Laws at all. And nothing to stop someone from dressing a killer robot up to look like, for example, an SPR unit. After all, she had established to her own satisfaction that these SPRs had been tampered with. Someone could install a No-Law gravitonic brain in one of them and then—and then—
No. It did not bear thinking about. Fredda was so tired she could hardly see straight, let alone think straight. Concentrate. Concentrate. Open the outer panel. Let the observer hover in and sniff around. Try and keep your eyes open. Pop the inner panel and—
—And swear to yourself in a low monotone. Fredda didn’t need any observer scan to tell herself she had found something. The opposition had made a mistake, all right.
A big one.
Simcor Beddle, leader of the Ironheads, stood in front of his comm unit in his fine silken pajamas, a soothing cup of tea in his hand. He watched as his robots operated the comm unit—though, at the moment at least, he had no interest in calling anyone. He was far more interested in who other people were calling. He had ways—not all of them strictly legal—of finding out.
His comm unit was highly sophisticated, capable of pulling in all sorts of signals not generally available to the general public. Right now it was tracking encrypted police traffic, and Beddle’s staff had not managed to crack those particular encryption routines. But still, one could learn a lot by listening, even if one did not know the language. The robots operating the system were pulling in the signals, analyzing message traffic density patterns, getting triangulations to find signal sources.
It was one of Simcor Beddle’s basic beliefs that there was no such thing as a secret. True, if a matter was of no importance, it could be kept quiet—but then what did it matter? A secret was only a secret when people wanted to know it. But when the people in the know cared about some supposedly hidden news or event, they would act on what they knew. By so doing, they would reveal at least some part of the secret to anyone who cared to pay attention.
The Ironheads always paid attention. Beddle saw to that. Their transition from a mob of bullyboys to a legitimate political force was far from complete, and they needed every possible advantage. The right bit of information at the right time could be of the most vital importance—and so Beddle’s household staff robots had awakened him the moment police-band hyperwave message traffic had started to build. It didn’t matter that the messages themselves were encrypted—that police band activity had taken off exponentially was in itself a rather loud and clear message.
So too was the command to turn back all outgoing air traffic from the island. That certainly could not be kept quiet for any length of time—but no explanation had been offered for it. Even so, Beddle could see the aircraft being turned back on his extremely illegal repeater displays of Purgatory Traffic Control. Beddle could likewise see the stream of vehicles with Sheriff’s Department designation codes, corning straight from Hades for the Governor’s Residence. The latest development was the stream of Ranger vehicles converging on the Residence. It was not lost on Beddle that the SSS was yet to stir.
What the devil was going on? It was plainly obvious that the Governor’s Residence was the focal point of it all, but what did it mean?
In plain point of fact, Beddle had a theory or two about what had happened. Simcor Beddle was a man willing to set loose cannons in motion, if the potential benefit outweighed the danger. But the days when Beddle or the mainstream Ironheads could tolerate being directly linked to violence were over. Covert links were another question, of course.
Beddle thought for a moment. No. There was no one who could be traced back to him. Unless one of the old plots from the old days had come alive again, unexpectedly. There were one or two old operatives who had simply disappeared. If it were one of them who had come to the surface again—
No. No. That could not be. The odds against it were too long.
But never mind the question of who. The question of what was far more important. And if he was right about what the police were reacting to with such energy, it was time to move, and move fast. This turn of events could be a tremendous opportunity, assuming one moved with a certain degree of care.
But suppose he was guessing wrong? Reacting to news that had not happened might put him in a rather awkward position, to put it mildly.
Simcor frowned, displeased by the conundrum. But then his face cleared and he smiled as he handed his teacup to his attendant robot. There was no need to worry. It was impossible to keep a secret. All would be known within a few hours, and that would be soon enough for the sort of actions Simcor had in mind. There was no hurry at all.
He smiled to himself and gestured for his attendant robot to lead him back to bed. He walked behind the robot, his rolling gait stately, dignified, calm. All was going well.
7
JUSTEN DEVRAY WATCHED as the death-black coroner’s Office robots carried Governor Chanto Grieg away. “Burning stars,” he said. “I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it.” He turned and looked toward the Governor’s bed—the deathbed—where the Crime Scene team was still at work, doing a painstaking scan for any evidence that might have been hidden by the body itself. Corpses didn’t tend to bleed much, but there was still enough blood, and the burn and scorch marks on the wall and the bedding were still horrifying enough, even if they weren’t particularly extensive. “When you called to tell me, I didn’t think of all this,” he said to Alvar Kresh. “I didn’t think about death, or about what all this is going to mean. I thought about turf wars, and that you were trying to win one.”
“Well, I was trying to win a turf war,” Kresh said. “But not because I wanted this for myself,” he said. “There were other reasons.”
“Huthwitz,” Devray said. It was not a question.
“Huthwitz,” Kresh agreed. “It didn’t seem much like chance to me. That wasn’t someone blundering into him in the dark. It was too neat. Somebody knew exactly when and where a Ranger would be, exactly how to stalk him.”
“Except if they knew exactly where my Rangers would be, why go out of their way to kill one? Why not just slip between the Rangers?”
“That occurred to me as well,” Kresh said, his voice a bit too flat and even for it to be utterly natural. “Would there be any other reason to kill a Ranger? Maybe a reason to kill Huthwitz in particular?”
