Necropath Read Online Free PDF Page B

our language."
He had been dodging the issue. He’d found Vaughan’s
bitterness so disturbing and difficult to understand that he often
refused to be baited, and instead sidetracked the argument or ignored
Vaughan altogether.
    Perhaps, of course, he feared that Vaughan was
right, that humankind was evil and self-seeking. Perhaps he feared
that Vaughan’s ability had given him an insight that he,
Chandra, could not possess.
    His handset chimed.
    "Chandra." Commander Sinton peered up
from Chandra’s wrist-screen, his ruddy Caucasian features and
oiled silver hair bright in the gloom. "Get yourself on to the
flier lot right away. Take Lieutenant Vishwanath with you."
    "What is it?"
    "A respected citizen was reported dead less
than twenty minutes ago. Tread carefully, understand? Extend my
sympathies to his widow."
    "Murdered?"
    Sinton glared at him. "No, he passed away
peacefully in his sleep. What the hell do you think, Chandra? Of
course he was murdered. I want a report in my files by dawn."
    Sinton cut the connection.
    Chandra downloaded the relevant files on Weiss
into his handset and left the basement room.
    ***
    As Vishwanath climbed into the flier beside him,
Chandra went through the familiar process of readying himself for
what was likely to be a gruesome business. He cleared his mind and
slowed his breathing as the flier rose, banked, and burned away from
the Station, inserting itself into a red fast-lane. He told himself
that the deceased was no longer suffering, had passed on to another
existence, and that the corpse that would greet him at the scene of
the crime, no matter how bloody, was merely the exhausted remains of
an incarnation that had reached the end of its tenure in the here and
now.
    The preparation helped, he knew. But, no matter
how well prepared intellectually, he could not prevent his body’s
visceral reaction to what he was about to experience.
    "Details, Vishi."
    The young lieutenant relayed the facts from a
screader, his face washed crimson from the light of the fast-lane.
"Victim is Rabindranath Bhindra, aged seventy-five, resident of
the Sapphire complex, Wellington district, mid-eastside."
    "Exclusive." Chandra whistled. "Sinton
said he was a VIP."
    Vishi looked up from the screader, glanced across
at him. "You’ve never heard of Bhindra?"
    "I must work too hard. No time to spend
noting celebrities. Screen star?"
    Vishi shook his head, smiling. "Politician.
But that’s not what he was famous for. He was one of the first
voidship explorers, fifty years ago."
    "Ah, that Bhindra. Didn’t he write a book about his days in space?"
    "It was made into a film, theatre drama,
virtual-tape, holo-movie."
    "I’ll remember it the next time I play
charades. What was its title?"
    "Pass. Had ‘stars’ in there
somewhere, I recall."
    Chandra nodded. He gazed down at the lights of the
Station’s upper-deck as they streamed by below. "How was
he killed?"
    "Shot through the head with a high velocity
projectile."
    "Oh, lovely, Vishi. I hope you haven’t
just eaten."
    "No, sir," Vishi said. "Bhindra was
in his apartment at the time. One theory is that the assassin was in
a flier."
    "So someone just flew by, sighted him, and
blew him away?"
    "Something like that, sir."
    They came to the eastward edge of the Station and
Chandra exited the fast-lane, slipped into a blue slow-lane, and
turned the flier in a tight, downward loop. The façades of the
upper-deck buildings flashed by. The open-ended third level came into
view: a spacious, floodlit plaza surrounded by multi-level gardens
and pyramidal apartment buildings. Chandra brought them past the
Sapphire complex, reducing airspeed.
    "The killer probably came in this close,"
Vishi said. "All the assassin had to do was lean out of the
window, aim and fire." He pointed to the lighted square of a
French window, open to a trim lawn on the shoulder of the pyramid.
The room was full of officials going