Звезда Пандоры

Kazimir closed his eyes and saw the darkness of the tent after night had fallen on Mount Herculaneum. Starlight showed the dusky outline of the angel’s face as she rose above him. She smiled, proud of him, and excited by him, by the things she confessed in low whispers that she wanted him to do.

Nothing in his life had ever come close to the wonder of that time. No girl had—could—ever match her, in any respect. He’d gone on with his life, accepted that nothing would ever be that good again, knowing he could put it all behind him because he would never see her again. She was on Earth, and he was on Far Away, a safe four hundred light-years distant. And so it would remain. Forever.

“Goddamnit,” he shouted to the room. He lurched up, and came close to slapping himself. Instead, he took a breath, perched on the end of the bed, and told his e-butler to open a link to the planetary cybersphere.

“I want an identity check on an Earth citizen,” he told his e-butler. “See if there’s any reference available on Justine Burnelli.”

…

I ought to be getting used to this, Paula thought. She wasn’t, though. And that was far more painful than any irony.

For once she’d gone to Mel Rees’s office. It was a political thing. This was her mess, her responsibility. Once again.

Not that it was any comfort, but Mel Rees seemed to be just as unhappy about the meeting. His office was only marginally bigger than the one she occupied, although his view of the Eiffel Tower was a lot better. The door closed behind her, and he sat behind a big old walnut desk that was devoid of any clutter.

“So what happened?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“For Christ’s sake, Paula. Some psycho takes out a half block of Venice Coast, kills nineteen people in the process, and you don’t know? This is not a good start for the Agency. Columbia is demanding results, and he’s not using nice language to ask.”

“I am aware of the Agency’s situation. What happened out there concerns me a lot more.”

“I understand how concerned you are.” He hesitated, winding himself up, like a doctor preparing to break bad news. “You’ve been on this case a long time. Maybe…”

“No,” she said flatly. “It is not time for me to move on and hand over to someone else.”

Rees didn’t argue. He seemed to shrink a little further behind his desk. “All right. But be warned, Paula, there are questions being raised about your suitability. Things are different here now, and they’re going to change even more. If the order comes down to move you on, it isn’t one that I’ll be able to shield you from. If it wasn’t for your record outside the Guardians case—”

“I am aware of how my reputation protects me. And you know none of your other Investigators would be able to run Johansson down.”

“Yeah.” The thought was visibly worrying him. “So what can you tell me about Venice Coast?”

“I’ve been supervising the forensics operation, trying to reconstruct the sequence of events. It added very little to what we already know.” She told her e-butler to run a file on the deputy director’s wall-mounted portal. It produced an image from one of the observation team’s sensors, showing the man poised in Rigin’s shattered office window the moment before he dived into the canal. “The face is unknown to any database, so we assume it’s a cellular reprofiling. There’s no visual sensor image of him arriving or leaving Anacona at the CST station.”

“A native, then?”

“Unlikely, but we haven’t ruled out the possibility. As far as we can determine, his weapon systems were all wetwired, with the exception of a simple arm dispenser. We recovered the receptionist’s memorycell, and read the last ten minutes. I acquired it myself.” The memory was now as clear as any of her own. She could recall the man walking into the gallery. She’d sat up a little straighter behind the reception desk, smiling when she noticed his youth and looks. Then his arm was raised, something moving below the jacket sleeve—

There was nothing else, no time for her to feel pain, or horror, or fear. Death had been instantaneous. “We were lucky to get that,” she said. “The way the gallery was built meant the ground floor had a degree of protection from the plasma surge after the blast. There were other bodies down there, but they were ninety percent vaporized. And the bodyguard, Roberto, he was fortunate, too. His armor frame wasn’t exactly designed with a superthermal charge in mind, but its deflector field did provide some shielding. The frame’s processors contained some interesting records. Just before the blast it had managed to ward off an ion pulse, then the armor received some terrible physical impacts. Someone used poor Roberto as a punching bag. Our intruder was one sophisticated boy. I asked our new colleagues in the Enforcement Directorate what it would take to build someone up to that standard. They actually had trouble working out the specs for me. Wetwired force fields are cutting edge.”