He had a lot of experience with not thinking about things.
NATION WITHOUT WALLS
The blast echoed much farther and faster than the sound waves alone could have.
* * *
Level 17 was to State Standard Floorplan, a sixty-meter circle crammed with almost five hundred desks. The computer was guided by psychiatric profiles and performance analyses to the same instant decision a human director would have made by gut reaction: Lacey’s mastoid implant rang him to alert.
This one was too big to be dropped.
“Ready,” Lacey said by reflex, swinging away the counterweighted scanner helmet under which he had been hunched at his desk. He was a squat man and as grim as a wolf, dark except for a jagged scar from his right ear to his collarbone. His expression was that of a hunter who had seen much of the world and found little humor in it. Over his net jumpsuit he wore a jacket, opaque and slightly unfashionable; it pouted to hide the needle stunner holstered high on his right hip.
“Bomb explosion in the Follard Tower,” said the voice behind Lacey’s jawbone. “A car and driver are assigned to you. There are currently three dead.” After a pause that would have been meaningful in a human, the computer added, “One of the dead has been identified as Loysius Follard.”
Lacey was already moving in a quick shuffle that took him around other U-shaped desks and their occupants, men and women sexless under their enveloping scanner helmets or staring blank-eyed beyond the circular confines of the room. A few chatted low-voiced with their neighbors. Few took notice of Lacey’s haste: to these investigators, “private” business was no more interesting than naked skin to a Turkish bath attendant.
Over the door to the pad a light panel was flashing the number of the car assigned to Lacey. He ignored the six-digit display, knowing that on a priority run the car would already be swinging toward the doorway to pick him up.
It was, lift fans shrieking as it hopped a row of stationary vehicles to get to him. The driver was a blob of orange in a crash suit, loose fabric that would inflate at a 10-g impact, and a polarized face shield. The passenger compartment behind him was an open box with low bulkheads, a bench, and a scanner helmet for the occupant. The vehicle’s own single camera was on a meter-high pole above the nose, a vantage that caught both driver and passenger and was legally adequate so long as they faced it except when grounded and thus in the field of other scanners.
Lacey leaped aboard, slapping the driver on the shoulder as he hit the seat. The car’s quick acceleration urged the agent back as, helmet already settled over him, he willed an upward twitch of his ring finger. The nerve had been cut and rerouted to trigger his implant for his commands to the Crime Service data net.
“Explosion site,” Lacey directed. In his helmet screen smoke eddied in what had been a ten-meter cubicle before the explosion had blown out the two partitions separating it from the greater office of which it had been one corner. Two of the dead were victims of a wall fragment which had cartwheeled through the banks of desks in the main office. The third corpse lay across the cubicle’s own gleaming console of polished mahogany. Incredibly, the dead man had been the only occupant of the smaller room despite the fact that it had the full complement of three scanning cameras and the heavy tax burden that went with them. Lacey realized why the computer had singled out the third man. “Loysius Follard,” he told his implant, “Economic highlights.”
Instead of an immediate answer, the link made a faint clicking noise like lock tumblers clearing and asked, “Access code, please.”
“Access code” from the computer because Lacey had just requested information proscribed even to Crime Service personnel unless they had a particular need. The data were available in a special bank, probably that of the Security Police, to which outside access was rigidly controlled. And the computer had added “Please” because it is easier to program in politeness than it is to defend its absence to people of the stature that sometimes queried the Sepo net.