Warrior by Angela Knight Read Free Book Online Page A

the night’s events, and he needed to pin down a few more details.
    A moment later, his heart sank. Seven Hells, it was worse than he’d thought.
    He stalked into the main briefing hall with five minutes to spare. After ordering a cup of stimchai from the wall vendser, Galar dropped into one of the seats mounted on curving risers surrounding the central stage. The dark blue cushions shifted around his body, adjusting to his height and weight until the chair cradled him comfortably. He sipped his stimchai and brooded.
    Fifty Enforcers of various ranks filled the seats around him. Most were either human or close enough to the root stock to fake it. A few, like Frieka, could pass themselves off as Terran animals. To work undercover as a time traveler on old Earth, you couldn’t appear visibly alien.
    â€œI did it! I finally got the murderous son of a bitch!”
    Galar looked up as Enforcer Jiri Cadell half-danced up the aisle and threw herself into the seat next to him, a broad grin on her long, elegant face. Senior Enforcer Ando Cadell, looking tolerant, dropped beside her.
    â€œIt took me six hours of interrogation, but Usko Vappu finally admitted he killed all those women. The prick.” An expression of catlike satisfaction lit her tilted green eyes.
    â€œShe’s going to be insufferable for at least a month.” Cadell rolled his eyes, but there was love in the smile he sent his wife. He was a big, broad-shouldered cyborg, a patient investigator who was painstaking rather than brilliant. Gray salted his brush-cut cobalt hair, though at seventy he was just barely middle aged.
    â€œNah.” Jiri folded her arms behind her head. “I figure this is worth a good two months of insufferability. At least.” She was fifteen years younger than her husband, fit and strongly muscled. There was no gray at all in her own long sable braid.
    â€œAll right, folks, quiet down.” Chief Enforcer Dyami stepped up to the massive transparent podium. “I want to get this briefing on the road.” He couldn’t have had much more sleep than Galar, but he looked as fresh and bright-eyed as a recruiting trid.
    Dyami ticked through the agenda with his usual efficiency. The Outpost mainframe spent its considerable computing power chewing over reams of data on historical crimes to determine which ones were likely to have been committed by time travelers. Each week it generated a list for Dyami’s consideration. He, in turn, used the daily briefing to assign the most likely of those cases to various Enforcers, who would investigate further to determine whether some morally challenged Jumper had indeed been responsible. If not, it was up to officials of that particular time period to catch the perpetrator.
    Next came the reports on confirmed temporal crimes. Jiri stood up to brief the group on her Jumpkiller investigation. Galar couldn’t blame her for the obvious triumph in her voice. She’d worked the case for over a year before finally tracking Vappu down.
    The Itaran, who made historical documentaries, had confessed to killing fifty-two women during Jumps spanning four centuries and three continents. Jiri curled a disgusted lip as she recounted the sick bastard’s smug description of his crimes.
    â€œThe Galactic Union Temporal Prosecutor tells me Vappu’ll spend the rest of his life on the Gorgon penal colony,” she finished with grim satisfaction. “May he rot there.”
    As Jiri seated herself, her husband rose to recount his own progress. Ando was working a string of fires he believed had been set to cover up jewel heists. “I’ve found traces of twenty-third-century accelerants at each scene,” the Senior Enforcer said with a grim smile of satisfaction. “When I finally catch the dickhole, I should have no problem getting a conviction.”
    Enforcer Clar Vanda was next, describing the murders of fifteen temporal tourists who’d gone to