Mark Tiedemann: Chimera

The couch above her held a child, its eyes staring blindly.

He made his way around the apparatus, stepping carefully over the tubes running from its base, up the railings, and into the couches.

Coffee's hands were frozen on a control panel. Coren bent over to see what the robot was touching. DISENGAGE. Coren glared at the robot. He felt his hands curl instantly into fists.

"You piece of-"

"Coren."

He looked up at Sipha. She still stood at the entrance. She pointed up.

Coren looked.

Dangling from the ceiling of the bin was another body. Hanging, suspended, it shifted ever-so-slightly right to left and back in the movement of air coming from the bay. It was a woman, her head angled sharply to the left. Her eyes were wide, tongue extruded between her lips.

Nyom. The tea in his cup had gone cold as Coren watched Sipha's people remove the bodies. The air in the office cubicle was a few degrees too cool. He stared fixedly through the window at the forensic dance around the crime scene.

Nyom would be brought out last, he knew, because her condition was so different.

Sipha entered the office and sat down heavily behind the small desk.

"Fifty-two bodies," she said. "We don't have the facilities to store them in our morgue. I'm having stasis units moved into an equipment locker nearby. Best we can do till we know how to handle this."

Coren looked up. "Fifty-two? There were fifty-one baleys."

"We've got fifty-two now."

"All human?"

Sipha nodded. "Maybe one was already in the bin. Who knows?"

"What about the other robot?" Coren asked.

"No second robot. Just the one. Sorry."

"I saw it enter the bin with them. You 're telling me it got out?"

"You saw it get in at the warehouse dock. After that, who knows? Once on board its shuttle, it could have left. Or it might not have even gotten on the shuttle." She grunted. "We could ask the one we do have, but it's collapsed."

"How convenient," he said. "What ship was this bin scheduled for?"

"It's not even in dock yet, won't be for another three days. A Settler cargo hauler, slated for a direct run to an orbital facility owned by a company called the Hunter Group. "

"Three days…" Coren shook his head.

"So," Sipha said after a time, "what do you think happened?"

Coren shuddered briefly and set the cup aside. He folded his hands in his lap. "The other robot. It must've glitched or malfunctioned or…something. It killed Nyom, then suffocated the others by switching off the rebreather unit."

"What about Nyom's robot? Why would it have allowed that to happen?"

"They must've been in it together. "

Sipha said nothing. Coren turned his chair to face her. She wore a skeptical expression.

"That's what you want to believe," she said.

Coren nodded. "Trouble is, I don't have a viable alternative. Do you?"

"No. But I'm not sure I can accept that one robot could kill. You want me to accept that two of them were cooperating in a mass murder. "

Coren grunted. "Since when have you gone Spacer?"

She frowned. "Since when have you lost the ability to think?"

Coren glared at her.

"We partnered for two years in Special Service," she said. "I thought you were more reasonable than that. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe working for Rega Looms has loosened your grip on objective reality. What do you think?"

Coren worked himself back from anger and tried to think it through. Sipha had come into the Service directly from the military, a different path than his more direct route of applying to the Academy for Civic Defense, Forensics, and Criminal Interdiction. Despite their divergent backgrounds, Coren had come to trust her. He still did. It had surprised him when, after he had left the Service, she had taken this position as head of security for Kopernik Station.

But it put her in almost daily contact with Spacers and Settlers, both factions of whom had embassy branches on the station.

Nevertheless, he trusted her. That, he recognized, had not changed.

"All right," he said slowly. "Tell me your reasoning."

"That robot is collapsed. Positronic nervous breakdown. Something happened to cause it, and if it could break down like that then it could not have harmed any of those people. If it were still walking around, calmly trying to do its business, then I might agree with you." She sat back. "I've been up here five years, Coren. I've learned a little bit about robots. Have to, when you deal with Spacers who won't leave home without them. I had to learn to discount my own prejudices a long time ago if I wanted any chance of running my department efficiently and doing my job honestly. It wasn't easy-I still don't like them-but I know their limitations. It wasn't the robot. Not that one, anyway. And I doubt it was this other one-there's no in-built compunction that prevents a robot from harming another robot, especially in the defense of humans. As far as we've been able to tell, that second robot wasn't even on board when this happened." She gestured toward the bay. "Besides, what motive? Suicide? Bringing along a robot would have been the best way to fail to commit suicide. They're programmed to save our lives for us, whether we want them to or not."

Coren nodded. "All right, that's all logical. As far as it goes. Sorry about the remark. "

"Forget it. So-how do you want to proceed?"

"Why do I get a say? Isn't this official now?"

Sipha pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Maybe." She seemed to consider carefully. "See, this bay is Settler. When you contacted me about this little favor you wanted, I called in a few favors of my own. Right now, this whole business exists in an official vacuum. No one knows but you, me, and my immediate staff. " She stabbed a finger in the direction of the cargo bin. "And whoever killed all those people."

"You'll have to make it official sooner or later."

"True. But maybe by then we can figure this out."

Coren studied her for a moment. Something in her expression teased at him.

"There's something else," he stated.

Sipha still pondered, then nodded. "I agreed to do this for you because I need you. "

"I'm flattered. But I'm also private now."

"Oh, I think we can change that if we need to. But…I have a problem I can't take to my superiors. I'm not even sure who among my own people I can trust with it. I need outside help. I didn't know how I was going to get it till you called."

"Is it related?"

"I wouldn't be surprised. Probably. It has to do with baleys, at least. Dead ones, too, though this is the first load of corpses to show up on my station. "

Coren raised an eyebrow in amusement. "'Your' station?"

Sipha smiled wolfishly. "Oh, yes, old partner mine. Never doubt it. My station. It has trouble and I want it fixed." She gazed past him, into the bay. "As I say, this is the first load of corpses. The occasional body has been turning up from time to time. The sorts of people who easily get crushed when they learn the wrong thing, or know too much, or who just show up where they shouldn't. Most of them have been thoroughly professional kills…till about three months ago."

Coren waited. She seemed to come to a decision and activated the datum on the desk. The paper-thin screen extruded and winked on. She worked intently for a couple of minutes, then crooked a finger at him to have a look.

"We found this in one of our detention cells," she said.

On the screen Coren saw a body, laid out on a morgue table. It had been a woman-the basic shape was still intact-but he had never seen a body so thoroughly bruised: blue, green, and sickly yellow marks ran from the scalp to the toes. Faint red laceration marks interrupted the mottling here and there.

"What was it? Explosive decompression? Something fall on her?"