Fenaday
tilted his head back and let the sunshine fall on his face with its gentle
warmth.
The breeze from the ocean
brought a fresh, clean scent to them, cooling the air and stirring the
evergreen-like trees, making their white flowers bob almost cheerfully.
The lush growth of the interior had thinned
out in the windswept coastal area.
Leaves and plants appeared darker and more subdued, less dazzling to
human sensibilities.
The grass they trod
on looked similar to Terran fescue, though shaded a darker green and with
metallic hint to it.
The
spacers started up the crushed rock path toward the door.
Duna, Mmok, and Telisan walked beside
Fenaday.
Rainhell and her trouble team
guarded their right.
Rigg and a fire
team of ASATs paced them on the left.
They walked at an easy pace, looking over the beautiful grounds.
“My
home,” Duna said simply.
Magenta
and Cobalt moved at a distance from them, patrolling further out on the
flanks.
The crab robots and the HCRs
Verdigris and Vermilion circled the shuttles with their firepower.
A
sudden movement from the forest’s edge caught Shasti’s eye.
“Down,” she yelled.
The spacers threw themselves flat.
Magenta flashed into sight, firing a
tri-auto.
In the background came cries
and yells.
The shuttle’s engines coughed
into restart.
Fenaday
rolled upright, his laser pistol clearing the holster.
No less quickly, Shasti dropped into a firing
position with her tri-auto rifle.
Magenta stood triumphantly over the smoking remains of the menace; a
late model garden robot.
It lay on its
side, sparking fitfully.
Its hedge
trimmers and clippers seemed comical compared with the deadly efficiency of the
HCR.
Fenaday looked around with more
attention.
He was chagrined.
The erratically clipped grass should have told
him something.
The solar-powered
mechanism must have operated irregularly, soldiering on whenever the weather
allowed it sufficient charge to go about its work.
“Captain,”
Angelica Fury shouted into his headset, “what’s happening?
Do you need support?”
“Negative,”
replied Fenaday drolly, standing and holstering his laser.
“Mr. Mmok just made our first bag of the
voyage.
A three thousand credit garden
robot, by the look of it.”
Laughter
barked out over the net and Fenaday saw quick, nervous grins on the faces of the
spacers near him.
Mmok ignored all of
them, his throat moving as he subvocalized.
Fenaday wondered if he was chewing Magenta out or adjusting her
programming.
In the background the
shuttle engines wound down again.
Duna
picked himself up, dusting off his ship uniform.
He headed for a small tree to the right of
the house as if nothing had happened.
As
they neared it, a small headstone became visible.
Everyone held back as Duna spent a few
moments at his wife’s graveside.
He
leaned forward to embrace the stone.
Fenaday looked up at the house, fighting to keep his vision from
blurring.
He knew what it felt like to
mourn a lost wife.
Finally, Duna stood
and walked, very deliberately, back to the house.
Fenaday
realized that the little Enshari might find the bodies of friends or family on
the other side of the door.
He signaled
Shasti to stop Duna and waved to Telisan.
“Does
he have anyone in there?” he whispered.
Telisan
looked at him for a second, then smiled.
“You are very considerate for a pirate.”
Fenaday
wasn’t sure why the comment warmed him, but for the first time that day he
managed a smile.
“I don’t want the old
scholar to go through any more than he has to.
He may have gotten us into this mess, but I’ve grown kind of used to
him.”
Telisan
looked up at the big, cream-colored house.
“Medu passed away long before I met him.
He has many children, some survived off-world.
Of the ones who died on Enshar, I do not
think any lived here.
They were all
grown.
He had many friends, but I doubt they
would have been at the house while he was away.”
“Yeah.
Well, I think we’ll go in first anyway,”
Fenaday said.
They
walked up to the door.
“Shasti,
Mmok, Morgan, Li, Connery and Rigg, you’re with us.
Gunnar, you stay with Duna.
Send the HCRs around the back,” Fenaday
ordered.
He
keyed his mike.
“Fury, come in.”
“Fury
here.”
“Send
a squad to secure the area between the shuttles and the house.
We got sloppy, not noticing the mowed
grass.
It didn’t cost us.
Let’s not get sloppy again.”
Fenaday
drew his laser in a fluid move, aiming for the door lock.
Duna
made an apologetic noise.
Fenaday looked
down.
The little Enshar offered him a
sonic key.
Telisan and Mmok grinned.
Shasti pretended to study a cloud
formation.
Fenaday sighed, took the
sonic key, and unlocked the door.
It
swung open easily.
He reached in,
bending low, to find the light switches. About half of them came on.
Some flickered.
He noted panels in the ceiling.
These glowed softly as he opened the
door.
“Bioluminescent
fungus,” Duna said, catching his glance.
“We developed it to a high art.
Enshari do not require darkness to sleep.
There will be light in every room.
The panels require no maintenance and get all
they need from the air.”
“Good
to know,” said Fenaday.
“Less shooting
at shadows.”
He
stepped into the room.
The ceilings were
low, a little over two meters.
Shasti
did not actually have to stoop, but she was clearly unhappy about it.
She stood at eye level with a ceiling fan.
Duna’s
home ran off solar power, with a backup generator.
Surprisingly, the house was in good order
even the air-conditioning still worked.
The spacers split into teams of four to search the house.
They found water damage in the kitchen from a
burst pipe; otherwise everything seemed intact and in good condition.
Li
and Telisan called Fenaday and Shasti up to the study.
They found the Landing Force Troops standing
in front of a locked door that the sonic key would not open.
Fenaday burned through the lock as the others
covered him.
He kicked the door open,
but Shasti cut in front of him, leading with her tri-auto.
The room they entered was particularly cold,
and in the middle of it, lying on the floor, they found the body of an Enshari,
nearly buried under a mountain of books, tapes, disks and data crystals.
Fenaday and the others looked around the
room.
All the windows were sealed from
the inside.
On the far side, a connecting
door led to the computer room they had come so far to investigate.
Fenaday leaned in; there was no other exit
from the computer room.
With
reluctance Fenaday turned to Telisan.
“Duna should see this body.
He
may have known the person.”
The
Denlenn nodded.
“I’ll prepare him for
it.”
Telisan
returned with Duna in tow.
Duna
approached the body and looked at it.
Fenaday held his breath.
The Enshari made a few small hand gestures
while speaking in a low voice.
It
reminded Fenaday of Father Lux saying last rites over his father.
Duna
stood and turned to look at Fenaday.
“I
do not recognize the body, though it appears from the uniform that she was on
the staff here.”
He waved a hand at
Telisan.
“Come my friend; the data banks
are back here.”
Duna
and Telisan disappeared in the back room and began working on the
equipment.
Fenaday and the others
returned to the body.
Fenaday had no
idea of the corpse’s age.
Enshari looked
much the same for most of their long lives.
The corpse had been mummified by the cold, dry, air-conditioning.
Shasti and Fenaday exchanged puzzled looks.
“Great,”
he said, “a locked room murder mystery.”
“She
came in here,” Shasti mused, “locked the door, sealed the windows from the
inside and then buried herself under books and junk?”
“Doesn’t
make any damn sense,” he replied.
This
time Fenaday leaned over the body and searched it.
He pressed his lips firmly together and tried
not to think.
He found a wallet in the
overalls.
He pulled it out, breathing
hard and did not protest when Shasti took it from his hand to briskly empty the
contents.
She pulled out a hand comp
from her harness-pack, running it over the cards she extracted from the
wallet.
It interrogated the chips in the
cards and yielded the details of an ordinary life—as collected by bureaucrats
galaxy-wide.
The little speaker on the
hand comp converted the Enshari language into toneless Terran.
“Barsta
Ucout, 169-3 Beltway Street, in Hardin Town, Deieppen Province.
A married female; age, one hundred and
twenty-seven Terran standard years, two children, employed as a domestic.”
It added phone numbers and other such
details, a pitiful summation of a life.
“Apparently,
she was the housekeeper,” said Shasti.
She turned to Gunnar, “Show this to Duna.
He may have known her.”
The
big man nodded and disappeared into the other room.
“Fenaday
to Fury.”
“Fury
here.”
“Send
Dr. Mourner’s team up under escort.
Tell
her we found a body in a sealed, air-conditioned room.
It’s in good condition.
I want her to check it out.”
“We
copy, sir.
They’re on their way.”
Johan
Gunnar returned.
“He said it was a
cleaning service, no one he knows.”
Doctor
Mourner arrived with N’deba and the rest of her team.
Fenaday sent most of the trouble team outside
to keep the perimeter.
Mourner and her
techs set up a bewildering array of instruments delivered by one of the crab
utility robots.
The small cargo carrier
looked a lot like its namesake.
Fenaday,
who did not like bugs or shellfish, ordered it out of the room after it
unloaded.
It lumbered out on its six
sturdy legs, unoffended, followed by Gunnar.
Mourner
set about her medical butchery with an unsettling clinical efficiency.
Shasti watched with her usual detachment,
doubtless memorizing how Enshari came apart in case she ever needed to kill
one.
Fenaday looked out the window at
the ocean.
Telisan
appeared from the other room.
“The
equipment looks intact,” he said excitedly.
“It was all off-line at the time of the disaster, for some reason.
It may be that when the main power failed, no
one reinitialized the system.
I need a
power generator from the shuttle.
The
house system is not generating enough reliable power.”
“Order
it,” said Fenaday.
This
time, it was Fenaday’s tech people who showed up with the crab robot and a
small portable generator.
They dropped
it off in the study and headed back to the shuttles.
Dr.
Mourner came over to Fenaday, snapping off her gloves.
Her team packed up and moved downstairs.
There were more bodies to check in the
outbuildings.
“I
figured you would like a preliminary report,” she said.
“Yes,
Doctor.”
“The
subject is a young Enshar female, overall premorbid health appeared
good
, prima gravida two—”
“Please,
Doctor,” said Fenaday, exasperated.
Mourner
smiled.
“Sorry.
The short version is death by multiple,
severe, blunt trauma.
I believe the
trauma was inflicted by the objects covering the body.
I base that on the force with which blood and
hair is driven into the material of the books, tapes and disks used.”