Trigger sat down on a couch beside Gaya to watch. She'd been told that
the momentary view of the little demon-shape in the cabin had been
deleted from Security's copy of their own sequence and wasn't to be
mentioned.
Otherwise there really was not too much to see. What the attacking
creature had used to blur the restructure wasn't clear, except that it
wasn't a standard scrambler. Amplified to the limits of clarity and
stepped down in time to the limit of immobility, all that emerged was a
shifting haze of energy, which very faintly hinted at a dwarfish human
shape in outline. A rather unusually small and heavy catassin, the
Security chief pointed out, would present such an outline. That
something quite material was finally undergoing devastating structural
disorganization on the gravity mine was unpleasantly obvious, but it
produced no further information. The sequence ended with the short blaze
of heat which had set off the extinguishers.
Then they ran the restructure of the preceding double killing. Trigger
watched, gulping a little, till it came to the point where the haze
shape actually was about to touch its victims. Then she studied the
carpet carefully until Gaya nudged her to indicate the business was
over. Catassins almost invariably used their natural equipment in the
kill; it was a swift process, of course, but shockingly brutal, and
Trigger didn't care to remember what the results looked like in a human
being. Both men had been killed in that manner; and the purpose
obviously was to conceal the fact that the killer was not a catassin,
but something even more efficient along those lines.
It didn't occur to the Security chief to question Trigger. A temporal
restructure of a recent event was a far more reliable witness than any
set of human senses and memory mechanisms. He left presently, reassured
that the catassin incident was concluded. It startled Trigger to realize
that Security did not seem to be considering seriously the possibility
of discovering the human agent behind the murders.
Quillan shrugged. "Whoever did it is covered three ways in every
direction. The chief knows it. He can't psych four thousand people on
general suspicions, and he'd hit mind-blocks in every twentieth
passenger presently on board if he did. Anyway he knows we're on it, and
that we have a great deal better chance of nailing the responsible
characters eventually."
"More information for the computers, eh?" Trigger said.
"Uh-huh."
"You got this little chunk the hard way, I feel," she observed.
"True," Quillan admitted, "But we have to get it any way we can till we
get enough to move on. Then we move." He looked at her, with an air of
regarding a new idea. "You know," he said, "you don't do badly for an
amateur!"
"She doesn't do badly," Gaya's voice said behind Trigger, "for anybody.
How do you people feel about a drink? I thought I could use one myself
after looking at the chief's restructure."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account