Звезда Пандоры

A large black leather couch had been placed on the left side of the door, so it would remain unseen by anyone who entered the office until they were well inside the room. He had of course sensed the human male sitting on it. The man, presumably Roberto, who was now lifting his seven-foot-high frame onto his very large feet.

He brought his left arm up and fired an ion pulse straight through the door at the big human’s head.

Roberto, as a good bodyguard, was wearing a light armor frame below his expensive hand-tailored suit, which wrapped him in a deflector field. The ion bolt sizzled loudly as it bounced off into the brickwork. Carbonized clay puffed out of the strike point. Roberto slammed both hands into the door, which ripped off its hinges.

He barely noticed the impact as the door crashed against him. His arm sliced around hard, smashing three-inch-thick hardwood into splinter shrapnel.

Roberto grunted in surprise, and went for the weapon in his shoulder holster in a slick high-speed motion only available to those with a nervous system wetwired for accelerated response time. The bulky mag-a pistol that he pulled out fired two depleted-uranium rounds at the intruder, whose sparkling force field halted both of them. That was the only chance Roberto got.

He launched himself straight at the big man, right leg swinging up and around to kick the ribs. Roberto shrieked as the blow punched clean through the armor frame. Three ribs broke and pushed inward, puncturing his lungs.

The bodyguard ignored the pain and countered with a left twist, his right arm coming around flat, aimed for the intruder’s neck, armor frame’s e-dump function on and eager to wreck the other’s force field. Energy flared from the impact like a fusion bloom, the blinding discharge flinging off slivers of static that clawed at both figures as they grounded out. But the e-dump never got anywhere near overloading the force field. A fist like the front end of an express train crashed into Roberto’s side, sending him flying backward through the air to smack into the curving brickwork. Trailers of blood smeared the white paint as he slithered down limply to the polished wooden floorboards.

He leaped gracefully across the intervening distance, one heel coming down on Roberto’s leg. The knee joint snapped with a sickening crunch under his heel. Roberto threw up as hands grasped the lapels on his ruined suit, hauling him to his feet. It was difficult for Roberto to focus through the daze of pain, but he just managed to squint at the intruder’s frighteningly emotionless features. Then the head butt caved in the front of Roberto’s face, pushing several splintered fragments of bone from the fractured skull directly into his brain.

He dropped the dead bodyguard, and turned to face the terrified man behind the desk. “You are Valtare Rigin?”

“Yes.” Rigin crossed himself, his eyes watering as he waited to die.

“I do not have time to torture information from you. If you do not cooperate, I will destroy your memorycell insert when I kill your body; then we will infiltrate your re-life clinic and erase your secure store. You will be genuinely dead. We do have the capability to do this. Do you believe me?” Rigin nodded frantically. “Holy Mother of God, who are you?” His eyes flicked to the broken corpse of his bodyguard. “How did you… ?”

“The location of the equipment you are buying for Adam Elvin?”

“I… That wasn’t the name he gave me, but everything for the deal I’m putting together right now is in the second storeroom at the end of the hallway. All of it, I swear.”

“Give me the file containing the list of components and the methods of payment to your encrypted bank accounts. I also want the export route.” He ordered his e-butler to open a channel to the terrified arms merchant. Information flowed into his cache. The ion bolt blew a wide hole through Rigin’s chest. He hurried over to the corpse and bent down. A single slender harmonic blade slid out from underneath his right index finger, and he quickly cut through the neck to pull out a bloody glob of flesh and bone that contained all of Rigin’s inserts.

With the arms merchant’s memorycell safe in his pocket, he walked down the hallway to the second storeroom. A single kick shattered the reinforced polytanium door. There were three crates in the windowless room, all unsealed, with packaging foam scattered around them. He went over to the first, checked to see that it did contain high-technology items, then dropped a superthermal demolition charge in.