Author: VD

An excerpt from QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted. Issue #1 of the comic will be available in print soon.

City homicides this year will total slightly more than 700, marking the third year in succession of a declining murder rate, Lord Mayor Mondereth Platen said today. Trans Paradis had 702 killings as of this morning, according to Nikal Vorgna, a city spokesman for the Lord Mayor’s office. The continued reduction in crime was attributed to the new data analysis augments acquired by the Trans Paradis Police Department two years ago. The record low was 571 in 3385; the record high was 18,477 in 3299, according to police statistics.
—from “Homicides fall for third year in a row,” the Trans Paradis Times, 3403.380

They hurtled through the official airlines of the city with sirens blaring, lights flaring, and Baby’s emergency override sending bureaucrats and private citizens sufficiently well-connected to acquire public transponders spilling left, right, and downward out of their way. Tower was driving on manual, listening as Baby and Hildy took turns sharing information that was being divulged from the civilian and military nerve centers. According to the red light that kept blinking on his controls, his speed was “dangerously excessive” but Baby had overridden the override.

“The fatality is the assassin. I repeat, the fatality is the assassin,” Hildy said as if she was simply repeating whatever Victor was telling her. “ID indicates Xeno—”

“ID X3042ML018493061,” Baby interrupted. “Male Valatestan citizen by the name of Giuseppe Andrea Milazzo. Ex-military. Eight years in the Valatestan Deep Space Marines. Unmarried, no children. Two years on-planet serving as bodyguard to various visiting dignitaries. Employment nominally private, in reality front corporation owned in full by the Valatestan Embassy in Rhysalan.”

“Looks like you get your case back, Tower.” Hildy frowned and wrinkled her lip.

“What case? The targets nailed the hitter and I have no doubt the sponsoring embassy will very convincingly deny all knowledge of his actions and disavow any responsibility for them. If we lean on them hard enough, maybe they’ll send a junior deputy undersecretary to the ambassador’s chief food taster home and blame him after the fact, all the while vowing to never again do what they swear they didn’t. A few weeks later, rinse and repeat with a new hitter, a new embassy, and a new target.”

“Sounds like you know the drill.”

“Not my first xeno,” Tower said, a little bitterly. “You know what they say, embassy is just another way to spell invasion beachhead.”

“Sounds frustrating.” Hildy commented, looking slightly mollified. She wasn’t the only one feeling disappointed. Sooner than he’d wanted or expected, he would have to fish or cut bait. It felt too soon to ask her out on a genuine date, and yet, Tower knew that if he didn’t do it before the case came to a complete close, he would probably never find the courage.

The creaky old building in which the Morchardese embassy was installed came within sight. Tower slowed and began angling the car down toward the ground. The traffic parted, as before, and he eased the var onto the ground gracefully enough to merit a nod from Hildy. The vehicle had barely stopped before he and the detector were leaping out of cockpit and rushing toward the group of people, mostly Morchardese judging by their military stances, openly displayed weaponry, and similar attire, standing around the scene of the near-crime. He didn’t see any sign of Prince Janos or the queen; if they’d been the targets, no doubt they’d already been hustled back inside to a secure location.

Paramedics were working on one man who was sitting up, looking rather dazed, amidst a pile of shattered glass and placrete that appeared to have come from the gaping hole in the building above them. That would have been the disruptor shot, Tower observed as he realized the man, whose arm was being bound, had been struck by the debris and was likely no more than an unlucky passerby. The dead Valatestan was about sixty meters away, to his right, lying in a sprawled heap on his side, the body warded by a pair of skittering quarpods who beeped and whirred and meaningfully focused their camera eyes on anyone who stepped too close to them. There was a scorch mark on the building behind the dead man about 150 centimeters off the ground, as well as two tell-tale bore holes of a charged particle beam.

“That was some nice shooting,” Tower mused aloud as he mentally calculated the distance between the body and the entrance to the embassy building.

“What’s that?” Hildy had been mumbling to herself, or rather, to Victor.

“Seven shots fired, six by the good guys, right? The assassin has just enough time to get one shot off and it didn’t come within 30 meters of anyone in the Morchardese party. They fire six shots back, from at least fifty meters away, and get three hits. That’s not bad.”

“Two hits, Tower. The third shot explains why the Valatestan only fired once. He couldn’t shoot again. Look at the disruptor.”

His right contact zoomed abruptly and focused on the area between the trigger guard and the charge pack. The disruptor, which he now saw was a Mosin-Nyarla Upsilon 32, a mid-tech military model known more for its rugged construction and heavy power suck than its accuracy, was ruined. It was very nearly blown in two. A section of the chunky, oversized bullpup design was simply missing, as if the designer had made a strange decision to narrow the section between the guard and the action on an otherwise solid weapon.

Laser or PPG?

“PPG. The edges are smooth, but they’re cut, not melted.”

An excerpt from John C. Wright’s masterpiece of pulp madness, SUPERLUMINARY: The Lords of Creation.

Aeneas Tell of House of Tell, the youngest of the Lords of Creation, was twenty-one when he was assassinated for the first time.

His secondary brain came awake while his primary brain was still foggy with strange dreams. Alert to danger, the secondary brain stopped the nerve pulses from the primary brain which otherwise would have let him groan and open his eyes, which would have precipitated the nervous killer’s attack.

But his primary brain had been in the delta brainwave stage of sleep, a deep and dreamless slumber. There was no sound, no light, no disturbance. What had broken his sleep? A memory, like an echo, of terrible multiple toothaches left a metallic taste in his mouth.

He had been dreaming about his insane grandfather, the Emperor. The old man had been telling him about the secrets of the universe… then a stinging pain in his teeth had jarred him awake. But how could Aeneas remember a dream when he had not been in the desynchronous brainwave state in which dreaming was possible?

Aeneas, eyes still closed, not daring to move, increased the firing rate of his auditory nerves. He was laying on the nongravity cushion of his opulent four-poster bed. The neverending whisper of the high-altitude winds of Mount Everest beyond the bubble of weather-controlled air was now loud to him.

On these upper peaks his family had erected the proud imperial palace-city of Ultrapolis, whose towers and domes were impregnable behind concentric force-shells and thought-screens. None of the artificial or bio-modified races of the nine worlds, fifty worldlets, and one hundred eighty moons of the Solar System could bring any realistic threat to bear on these defenses, not while the twelve ranking members of the House of Tell, the so-called Lords of Creation, retained control of the stratonic supertechnology known only to them.

But betrayal from within was another matter.

The quiet hiss of the protective screen that the bedposts projected around the bed was gone. He could not hear the heartbeats of his two bodyguards posted in the anteroom of his apartments. Instead he heard the heartbeat, louder and faster than was possible for an unmodified human being, of the assassin.

As the youngest member of the Family, Aeneas had been stuffed into the oldest wing of the oldest palace, and no other guards were within shouting distance.

There was no sound of footsteps on the nightingale wood floor of his bedchamber, and so for a moment Aeneas had a false sense of hope. But the sound of the racing heart was close at hand.

The killer was in the chamber with him.

Then he felt a waft of intense cold radiating from the cells of the man’s body. The assassin was near the bed, coming closer, bending over him.

Aeneas reflexively focused a thought to his signet ring, asking alarms silently to ring and the armaments hidden in the walls to slay the intruder. But there was no response. The electrotelepathic circuit was blocked.

The nanoscopic thought-broadcast cells his mother had implanted in the bones of his skull likewise were blocked when he tried to send needle-thin neuropsionic signals to receivers hidden in the ceiling.

A sharp, stabbing pain reappeared in his lower left molar, and then vanished. And then an upper incisor throbbed with a pain that vanished, and then a bicuspid. It was an basic proprioception code. It read: Intruder in dis-inertia armor… negative-vitality field integument… contortion node detected…

Of course. The killer was wearing armor that contorted the fabric of space a few inches in each direction around himself and lowered his inertia. It would prevent ordinary weapons, bullets or monomolecular blades, from imparting kinetic energy to him to do damage. Hence he could glide across the floor without imparting any pressure to the special floorboards biogineered to sound off when they felt an unfamiliar footstep.

The contortion node was a teleportation path for the assassin’s escape.

Modified electroneural ganglia beneath the killer’s skin—impossible for normal antiweapon sensors to detect—had erected a life-energy absorption cocoon. Hence the killer had silently drained Aeneas’ two bodyguards of their life and added it to his own, increasing his neural speed and muscle pressure. It was a vampire field, a modification illegal to all but the highest ranking and most trusted servants of the Lords. And a normal man would be killed at a touch.

Aeneas was no normal man. From hidden retaining cells in his bone marrow he released stored life-energy charges into his body, increasing his nerve-muscle potential beyond what a vampire energized with only two men’s vitality could match.

Faster than a striking snake and stronger than a rhino, Aeneas flung up the bedsheet and drove his fist into the man’s chest.