Diego Two’s civil security forces were baffled. Each of the invaded bases had been wired with surveillance devices, perimeter alarms, and code-protected blast doors. Yet these had proved no barrier to whoever had scrubbed the bases of soldiers and staff. At every crime scene, the White Arrow forces had only fired a few shots before being overwhelmed. But the greatest puzzle lay in the killings themselves, for every crime scene displayed a different method of murder. Coroners had concluded that in different cases the killings had been done with plasma rifles, slug guns, blunt objects, and in one especially baffling case, apparently Baskar claws.
The elevator ground to a halt. Engel steeled himself as the doors slid open, then let his breath go at the short white corridor that greeted them. Closed doors flanked it on either side. There was an arched, gold-trimmed door at the end of the hall.
Gomambwe was hovering by the elevator door as Engel emerged.
“The Church rents this entire floor.” Gomambwe’s tone was hushed. Engel made to head for the door at the far end, but the grand minister didn’t move. Instead, he waved vaguely at the hall of doors. “There’s a recruitment office, barracks, media relations office, chapel of course . . .”
“Enkidu.” Engel laid a hand on his colleague’s white-robed shoulder. “You’re stalling,” he said, not unkindly.
“They struck the reception room this time,” said Gomambwe, his voice small. He led the way to the gold-rimmed door. Standing before it, the faintest whiff of something rank and metallic reached Engel. Gomambwe opened the door.
Engel stood on the threshold for long moments, staring into the room beyond as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. He had been prepared for a scene of carnage, but what greeted his eyes was a white cube stretching to the walls and rising halfway to the domed ceiling. Arrow soldiers and technicians were circulating into and out of the cube through flaps in its walls; he distantly registered “sirs” and salutes from them as they passed. The room was permeated with the undeniable stench of spilled blood he had detected in the hallway, but he couldn’t make sense of where it was coming from.
Then the walls of the white cube rippled as a tech passed by them, and he realized it was a prefab tent, erected to hide the majority of the room from view.
The reception room would have been well appointed under different circumstances. The room was capped by a golden dome ten meters high, representing one half of a sphere, the most perfect shape in the universe. Seams in the sloping walls hinted at automated panels that could be slid back, turning the reception room into a gallery looking out on the towers of the city rising around it. From an opening in the tent’s roof rose a miniature model of the Universal Church’s Aival headquarters. The scintillating ivory spike must have been eight meters high judging from the portion visible above the tent; it would have served as an engaging conversation piece for visitors to the base.
An Arrow soldier emerged from the tent and strode toward them, his white armor marked with the iron-gray edging of a sergeant. He flipped up his tinted visor, revealing a lined, tanned face and small blue eyes.
“I’m Staff Sergeant William Brinkley. It’s an honor to have you with us, Father.” Brinkley thrust out a gauntleted hand.
When Engel took it, the sergeant’s handshake was surprisingly light.
“Thank you,” Engel replied. He’s overcompensating for the armor. If he shook with his usual pressure, the servos in the glove would crush my hand. He smiled at Brinkley, comforted by the raw power the armored man represented.
“So . . . what have you found?” Engel asked.
“Better that I show you, sir,” Brinkley waved over his shoulder. “Please follow me, Father, Grand Minister.”
A muscle twitched in Gomambwe’s throat as he looked up at the white cube. Engel gave Gomambwe’s shoulder a squeeze. “I think Brinkley can guide me from here, if you need a break. I’ll need you later, but not yet.”
Gratitude flooded Gomambwe’s dark brown eyes. He gave a jerky nod. “I . . . I should make a call, let Jamal know I’ll be late.” He left the reception room. Engel waited till the door was closed again before following Brinkley into the crime scene tent. Harsh fluorescent lights lit the cube’s interior, turning the bloodstains black. And there was a lot of blood: dried streaks smeared the carpet and the ripped couches of the reception area, and larger puddles of it surrounded the individual dead who lay sprawled about, thankfully mostly hidden under blankets. A ghastly congealed pool of it spread out from the base of the miniature Arrow in the room’s center. And as for the Arrow statue itself . . .
It had been turned into a tombstone.
Bodies lay against the model tower’s snowy flanks, their slack flesh crusted with blood from hideous wounds. While the few bodies scattered around the room seemed to have died where they’d fallen, the bodies around the tower had been dumped there, in an appalling jumble of limbs and heads that made it difficult to tell where one body ended and the next began.
Acid burned his stomach and pushed up his throat. Engel turned away from the awful sight, breathing shallowly in an attempt to keep the hot metallic stench at bay. He’d seen holophotos of butchery from the earlier raids, but seeing it in person, smelling it, was so much worse.
Brinkley spoke quietly behind him. “Sir? If you need a moment, I can . . .”
“No.” Engel forced himself to face the tower with its grisly pile of bodies. “No, I came to see this. So show me.”
With a curt nod, Brinkley said, “Follow me. Stick to the paths.” Looking down, Engel saw what he meant: gray rolls of some absorbent material had been laid down in pathways around the reception hall, so that the soldiers would not have to tread in the blood of their comrades. There was a defense force of about twenty in the room with them, documenting this latest round of carnage with camera and vid recorder, collecting potential evidence in opaque bags. Or maybe just mementos to remember their slaughtered friends by.
Engel followed Brinkley on a path that made a wide circuit of the miniature Arrow. The sergeant knelt next to a slain man sprawled on his stomach. As he carefully pulled back the blanket covering the body, Engel saw with a lurch that the man’s uniform robe was black, not the white and gold of high office or the gold of the middle ranks. A novice.
“They killed recruits?” he asked.
Brinkley turned the young man—almost a boy, really—onto his back with solemn care. A blossom of blood stained his stomach, almost invisible against the black robe.
“He was impaled,” Brinkley said. “All the bodies have either puncture or cutting wounds. No blunt force trauma. That means the assailants used knives or even long blades to do this.”
“Different than before,” Engel said. Despite their similar remorselessness, each pogrom had been distinct in its approach.
“Deliberately so?” Though he inflected it as a question, Engel had no doubt the different methods were a smokescreen of some kind . . . but the question was, obscuring what?
“There’s no doubt in my mind one group is responsible for all five attacks,” Brinkley said. He covered the body and continued their circuit of the room. “There’s commonalities if you look. All the bases were hit at night. Their security systems were disarmed and defenses neutralized within the first few minutes of the strike. That suggests a professional team with combat experience. And another thing.” He stopped and waved at the walls. “They didn’t steal anything.”
Engel realized Brinkley was right. The tables that hadn’t been smashed to kindling displayed objets d’art from a dozen worlds. Hanging tapestries of geometric crystals, woven by buckyballs in the rolling ice fields of their system, caught the light. A few meters above his head, a gigantic fossil arthropod from Neraeus hung on steel cords. Its armored plates and long limbs arched as though it still swam through the oceans of that world.
And anchored to the far wall, half-hidden by the charnel spire of the Arrow model, Engle spied a bundle of dull gray and brown rags. It had been carefully wrapped an
d pressed into a cylinder three meters long. Four sticklike limbs hung from it, attached to the body by sails of dun cloth. The small lumpy head also sagged in defeat.
Engel recognized it as an effigy of the Challa’iti Despised God, easily over a hundred years old. It had been that long since the Church bothered to send missionaries to that species. The effigy’s age and rarity, if nothing else, made it an extremely valuable piece.
Except where the struggle had upset a table or pressed fighting, dying soldiers to the walls, none of the decorations had been disturbed. If Brinkley’s team took inventory, they would probably find nothing missing.
“You’re right,” Engel said. “But what does that mean?”
“There’s a lot of groups hostile to the Church who’d love to strip this place bare,” Brinkley said. “But looting doesn’t seem to be the motive of whoever’s responsible for this.”
“Then what was?” Engel asked.
With a wave, Brinkley led him to the miniature Arrow with its grisly garnish. Engel followed him around to the side that had been hidden from the door of the tent, doing his best not to look at the slumped figures in black and gold robes as he followed the path. His shoes were real leather; it wouldn’t do to get blood on them.
He spotted the white and gold robe of a base director before he quite registered the body of the woman beneath it.
She had been propped up on the bodies below with her back against the spire and her head lolling forward, dark wavy hair obscuring her face. The front of her robe was crusted with dried blood.
Crouching down, Brinkley reached under the dead woman’s chin. “Be warned, sir, this isn’t pretty.”
Engel inhaled deeply, trying to calm the fluttering in his chest. “Perhaps not, but it’s what I came to see.”
With a curt nod, Brinkley tilted the woman’s head up.
At first it looked like her neck was bending in the middle, as though on a hinge—then Engel saw the slash wound where her throat had been cut almost to the spine. The wound yawned like a red second mouth below her own.
The edges of the room darkened and it seemed to spin. He felt himself sway and quickly bent over, steadying himself with his hands on his thighs. Instantly, Brinkley was crouching beside him. “Are you all right, sir?”
“F-fine.” Blindly, Engel fished in his breast pocket for his handkerchief and wiped the sweat that had sprung up on his brow. “I’m fine,” he said again more firmly, tucking the kerchief away.
He forced himself to look at the dead woman. With his shift in position, her face was visible. Although blood loss had turned her olive-toned skin yellow, he recognized her, though he couldn’t bring her name to mind. “Who was she?”
“Jennifer Sanchez, thirty-five years old,” Brinkley recited off a small holofoil embedded in his vambrace. “Been director of the Poldska District branch for seven years.”
Brinkley squatted near her slumped form again. “She was hacked to death, like the others. But this is what I wanted to draw your attention to.” He pointed at the deep throat wound, mercifully hidden again by her chin. “This was rage. It takes a lot of force to cut someone’s throat like that. It’s almost a decapitation. Now most of the killings are efficient, but some, especially the higher ranks, are like Jennifer here.”
He met Engel’s eyes. “Whoever these killers are, they’re angry.”
Engel turned away from the tower to collect his thoughts.
He found it easier to do without having to look at the butchered director. Her face looked so much like Dania’s. Dear Dania, if only you were here to see this. Then again, if you were here, none of this would have happened at all.
He turned back to Brinkley. “Angry enough to make a stupid mistake?”
The other man shrugged. “That’s what we’ve been combing the evidence for. So far all we’ve got is a lot of loose ends that almost meet.”
“You’ve coordinated clean-up for all five crime scenes, is that right?”
Brinkley nodded.
“I’ve called a conference for seven-thirty this evening at the Arrow,” Engel said. “I’d like you to be at it. We could use your perspective.”
Brinkley rose and saluted. “I’ll be there, sir.”
The staff conference room in the Arrow was a polished, windowless gray cylinder, one of five sunk into the huge building’s basement levels. What it lacked in charm it made up for in defenses: Two meters of nanocarbon-reinforced concrete encased the conference room, near impervious to blasts and an effective shield against radiation. Beyond that was a shell of reflective nanomaterial that could shrug off even the discharge of a plasma rifle. It was a bunker in all but name, a refuge for hunted men.
Rand Mizrah, the director of the White Arrow forces in Diego Two, certainly looked the part. Though this was a formal meeting, he’d foregone his heavy robe of office for a light cotton button-front with the sleeves rolled up. Even so, he was sweating in the chilly underground room; Engel could see dark patches forming under the arms of Mizrah’s shirt as the Arrow director paced before a set of holofoil screens at the front of the table.
On the screens was all the physical evidence Brinkley’s clean-up teams had recovered from the five massacred bases, along with forensic analyses. Some of them, particularly the wound diagrams, Engel understood at a glance; other findings, particularly the chemical analyses, were opaque to him. Mizrah had spent the last half hour bringing him up to speed on the corpus of evidence, while Gomambwe and Brinkley looked on from their seats and made the occasional interjection when Mizrah forgot something.
“The lack of DNA evidence is of a piece with the other crime scenes,” Mizrah was saying. “Unfortunately, it means we have little to go on beyond the attack profiles. And those are all different.”
Engel looked at Brinkley. “You said you were certain all five attacks were carried out by the same people; how can we reconcile the different methods with that?”
“The variety of methods may be a clue in themselves,” Brinkley said. He waved at Mizrah. “Rand’s right, none of the attacks left behind any DNA evidence. Nothing captured on surveillance. No witnesses. Their only calling card was the murders themselves. Each was a precise replication of a known combat style.”
He rose and approached the holofoil display, tilting his head toward it as if to ask, May I? Mizrah gave a quick nod and took his seat.
Spreading his pinched fingers and thumb, Brinkley opened a window. It was a series of diagrams of the wounds inflicted on victims across all five massacres. Brinkley pointed to the earliest-dated diagram.
“In the first attack, the plasma burns and claw marks on the bodies supported a clear link to Baskar combat techniques used on Rreluush-Tren. Now compare that to the latest attack.”
He switched to the last diagram in the series. “This time, victims suffered cuts and puncture wounds from a straight edge rather than a curved edge. The wounds this time look similar to, well . . .”
“Osk blades,” Gomambwe said. The words fell to the floor like stones. He glanced at Engel and Mizrah, then quickly continued. “I thought your team didn’t find any calcium residues in the wounds.”
“We didn’t,” Brinkley said. “And that’s a good point to bring up. When a sharp edge cuts, it leaves some of its substance behind. For Osk blades, that should be calcium and keratin, and we didn’t find any.” He minimized the diagrams and brought up a chart. Engel’s eyes threatened to cross at the chemical formulas scrolling down it.
“Instead we found metallic compounds,” Brinkley said. “Both here and at the first crime scene. The one designed to look like a Baskar attack.”
“Are you saying . . .” Mizrah shook his head. He glared down at the table as though he were furious with it. “No, that’s ridiculous.”
“What is it, Rand?” Engel asked softly. “I want to hear what you’re thinking.”
Mizrah rubbed his face in both hands. His eyes were red-rimmed as he raised them to the screens. “Are you saying they used pros
thetics to kill my people?”
Brinkley shrugged. “If not prosthetics, then hand weapons that leave wounds a lot like what you’d expect to see from Baskar or Osk. But they weren’t able to leave a convincing chemical profile, which is probably why they mostly stuck to projectile weapons. Another interesting thing.” He brought up the report of the fourth attack. “We were able to trace projectiles used in this attack to an old Urd model slug-gun, but no one at this base died from claw or talon wounds.”
He leaned on the table, his gaze panning between the three other men. “If you know Urd, you’ll know that kind of restraint is unusual. They like killing with tooth and claw, and the wounds they inflict leave a poisonous residue.”
“But whoever did this couldn’t mimic those wounds realistically,” Mizrah supplied.
Brinkley cocked a finger at him. “Bingo.”
“But this doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know,” Gomambwe said. “So an unknown group is hiding behind the signatures of different species. That still doesn’t tell us who they are or what they want. They don’t seem to want anything. ” A muted slap resonated through the table as Gomambwe struck it. “Most terrorists follow up with demands, claims of responsibility. But here—silence.”
Brinkley and Mizrah were nodding in agreement. Engel was not nodding. He was working around what Gomambwe had just said: Most terrorists follow up with demands. He traced the thinnest thread of intuition back to the corpse of the director, Jennifer Sanchez. Her neck cut almost in two. How she’d looked so much like Dania. He remembered Brinkley’s words: This was rage. And something, some warp and weft, wove itself together in a far corner of his mind.
“Maybe they have told us who they are.” Before he finished speaking, Engel found himself pinned by the gazes of three men. Their eyes followed him as he went to the tabletop console and navigated to an archive folder. Though Engel was facing away from the holofoil screens, he knew the forensic files would have disappeared, replaced by the Church’s database of records. Every event of note that had happened to the Church in the past three hundred years was stored in these records: lines of ministerial succession, missions to every known sentient-inhabited world, dates of the establishment of dioceses on a dozen worlds stretching back to the first one on Rosetta. All their successes, and all their failures.
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