Starhammer by Christopher Rowley Read Free Book Online Page B

stopped off for a breakfast special. While he ate he checked the news updates. Arnei Oh hadn't been the only bad craziness of Wintergame night. Someone had thrown a fragmentation bomb into an office party on Octagon Two. Nine good citizens had been scraped together afterward for the morticians and another twenty-four were in the hospital. The perpetrator had escaped with barely a witness to the act.
    Finishing up his muffin and bacofreef, he passed his card over the table function box and set out for the temporary office.
    The Mass Murder Squad was not a big, well-accredited department of the Hyperion Grandee Police Department. Mass Murder, in fact, didn't operate out of police headquarters in Octagon Three. Instead, it moved constantly from one nondescript little office to another. Wherever it went, though, the office was always the same, jammed with computer equipment, screen to screen, wall to wall. Operatives shared desks, assistants crowded the hallways.
    In fact, the police department preferred to keep Mass Murder at arm's length. It was messy, nasty stuff, politically dangerous. The whole business of the Kill Kults sent a political contradiction right down the middle of the public mind. Random mass killings, the taking of grisly trophies, the defiant posturing of captured suspects, all these made the public demand harsh, effective measures, essentially "shoot on sight," to stamp out the killers. Unfortunately, that led to the occasional slaughter of the innocent, and that was media poison of the worst kind.
    Currently, the squad was working out of a run-down office suite on a ground floor in Octagon Five. It was gray and grim and looked like some elderly gas haulage agency with long-term contracts since the year dot. It was also ringed by invisible security teams.
    Jon took the ramp to the main plaza and then moved onto the blue corridor past Zeppo Uniti, who worked the coffeeshop on the corner. Zeppo checked everyone who went by.
    Up the corridor was a scuffed gray door marked "Fabulous Bioengineering." Jon rapped three times and then slipped inside.
    It was bedlam. The security team nodded him through into the labyrinth of computer screens. Telephone babble filled the air along with fumes of instacaf and syntabac. He shouldered through to the desk he shared with Operative Elvis Kee Hoi Apollo and checked his messages. Most were routine. He paused over one from Melissa Baltitude, in the Downtown Emergency Hospital. It was warm and flip and thankful. He smiled and punched it to phototron oblivion and called up the next.
    He frowned. Commander Petrie, Chief Executive of the Nocanicus Military Corporation, wasn't the kind who normally would be in his office at eight in the morning. Nor did he normally call on the services of the killer trackers of the Mass Murder Squad when he had the Military Intelligence Unit already to hand. The message meant trouble. And it had to be laowon business.
    With a certain amount of foreboding, he walked over to the Military Intelligence building through the midmorning crowds. Everywhere he looked people jammed the corridors, flowing over the ramps like waves, a veritable sea of faces, hopes, and dreams. And among them lurked how many random killers? A grim thought, but one that had to be faced: Arnei Oh, king of Kali Dragons, had turned out to be somebody called Danuel Mitshi, who worked as a lighting designer for one of the big ad agencies of Octagon Eight. The kults were pervasive and hard to crack.
    The MI offices were in a slim, gray, windowless tower situated close to the octagon station. Security was tight. His weapon was tagged and removed, retina and fingerprint checks were run before he was shown to an elevator protected by steel blast shields.
    "Ah, Jon, do come in." In a civilian-cut gray suit, Petrie welcomed him out of the elevator. A slim man of medium height, a scion of a very famous family, the commander was in medium extended age, around eighty-five. Iehard's practiced eye