Out of the Black Read Online Free PDF

men?" Ping held desperately to his straight face- he thought it was still working.
    "Ninja hit..." The tech broke off, exasperated, "At this point I can't rule out psychotic cartoons, imaginary friends, or little green men. Am I not impressing you with this stuff?"
    Yep, the straight face had held. Ping let it go and laughed, "Sorry, it's just been a very 'impressive' day."
    "Now that I understand." The tech turned back toward his partner.
    "One more thing." Ping called after him.
    "Yeah?" the tech said over his shoulder.
    "What's the likely origin on the shot that hit the driver?"
    "That one's hard. He was definitely hit while the car was still moving, but I can't be sure where the car was, so I can't trace the shot back- not until we finish the area scan anyway. My best guess says you've got the uniforms looking in the right area."
    "Thanks." he turned away to check on the uniformed officers' progress.
    Half an hour later, Ping climbed the hill and approached his car. He'd left the forensics team to finish their tedious work- now he had his own tedious work to do. His tablet was full of data to slog through. He had the raw reports from Malloy and Rodriguez, as well as the area scans. Then there was his raw report, and the data held in the tablets of the victims.
    None of the bodies outside the car had a Uni or other easily recognizable equipment, though it would take the lab some time to assemble the list of their possessions from the remaining bits f metal, ceramic and plastic mixed in with all the meat.
    Without a working Uni or DNA tests, the bodies would not be identifiable. He had the forensics team's incident key, which he used to program his tablet to notify him when the test results became available.
    He swiped his finger over the lock plate on the driver's side door and heard the click as the lock disengaged. He pulled the door open and dropped into the seat. He closed the door and was dropped like a smooth stone into a pool of absolute silence. Outside, the nighttime city hadn't been noisy, even with the nearby hiss of highway's traffic, but the difference between that quiet and the car's insulated silence was still striking. He paused to let it soak into him. As the seconds passed, new sounds emerged from the quiet: first his regular and slowing breathing, then the calm beating of his heart. Of all the things that Ping had learned from his father, by far the most frequently used was effective meditation.
    He leaned forward, reached behind him and unholstered his tablet. He extended it to full size and propped it against the steering wheel. Where to start? Sometimes there were too many questions to approach systematically. He had poked at mysteries long enough to know that it mattered where he started poking. Each line of inquiry had its own set of built-in assumptions that could color the investigation. At times like this, he liked to start purely from inspiration- let fate, chance, intuition, or God guide his first steps. If evidence (or further inspiration) led him in another direction later, it would be easier to let go of his initial assumptions since he hadn't invested heavily in them.
    Eyes closed, he let his mind wander back through his experiences at the underpass, hoping something would jump out at him. He saw the Otu weeds, Malloy's strained face, the leech-flesh arm, blood and glass. He remembered scanning into the bridge wall to get holos of the shells buried inside, the plastic bags filled with the victims' possessions, almost going down when he slipped on a small patch of eviscerata near the car- not a proud moment.
    Concentration broken by the memory of his brush with blood and gravity, he resolved to start with the victims' personal effects. He grabbed his tablet's stylus and brought the machine out of standby. With a few taps, he forged the data-link to the professor's tablet that still lay in the unopened evidence bag on the passenger seat. The data in its solid-state drive was encrypted of