The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [1]
Lisa immediately pulled her bare right arm out from beneath the duvet, reaching for the handset suspended beside the screen. She thought she was moving fairly swiftly, but the intruder’s beam had already caught the movement of her arm. Even as her hand made contact, she saw the silhouette of the gun barrel that had been raised to catch the light.
“Don’t touch it!” The voice that spoke was filtered through some kind of distorter that made it sound robotic.
Lisa snatched her hand back, and immediately felt ashamed of her obedience.
“Shit,” said a second voice, sounding from the hallway.
“Shh!” said the first intruder, who was now well into the room, holding the gun no more than a meter from Lisa’s face. “Get on with it. She won’t make any trouble.”
Lisa had been in the police force for more than forty years, but she had never had a gun pointed at her. She didn’t know how she was supposed to feel, but she was fairly certain that she wasn’t afraid—puzzled and annoyed, but not afraid.
I ought to be able to identify the weapon, she thought. It was absurdly irritating that the only thing she could see in the beam of the light was an unrecognizable gun. It looked heavy and old—not exactly an antique, but not the sort of dart gun that had recently become fashionable among the young. It could easily have dated back to the turn of the century, maybe even to the period before the handgun ban that had preceded her recruitment to the police force. She knew that she would have to give Mike Grundy an exact account of what was happening, and that Judith Kenna would read her statement with utter contempt if there were nothing she could say for sure except that she had been threatened with a gun whose make she could not name.
As the other intruder moved inquisitively around the room, a second slender guide light briefly picked out the head of the one who was threatening Lisa, outlining an almost-featureless oval helmet. Lisa knew that the two must be dressed in matte black, probably in one-piece smartsuits whose unbreakable tissue-repellent fibers would leave no clues for forensic analysis. In order to be a successful burglar in the age of scientific detection, you had to be extremely careful to leave no traces. That wasn’t the purpose of smart textiles, but it was a happy side effect as far as the criminal classes were concerned.
“What are you looking for?” Lisa asked. Because it was such a clich, the question seemed far more foolish than it was. She had nothing worth stealing—nothing, at any rate, that justified the kind of risk the burglars were taking or the kind of expertise they must have employed to hack her unhackable locks.
“I think you know exactly what we want, Dr. Friemann,” the distorted voice replied. The bedroom walls had neither eyes nor ears, but the other room was fully fitted and the bedroom door was still open. The speaker obviously didn’t care about the possibility that the pickups in the other room would record the voice for analysis by Lisa’s colleagues in Sight & Sound. Presumably, therefore, the voice distorter was no mere frequency modulator.
Do I know what they want? Lisa wondered. If they’re professionals, it must be work, but I don’t bring work home, Anyway, I don’t have anything to do with AV Defence, or even with industrial espionage. Even if there is a war on, I’m a noncombatant. Her eyes tracked the movements of the second intruder, whose attention was now concentrated on the desk fitted into the corner to the left of the window. That was her main homestation. Her flat had only two rooms, apart from the kitchenette and the bathroom, and contemporary fashion dictated that if there wasn’t an already allocated space, the best site for the main homestation was in the bedroom, not the “reception room.” Having been brought up before the turn of the millennium, Lisa—who had little need for a room in which to receive visitors—always thought of her other room as the “living room,” although the siting of the homestation ensured that she spent far more time in the