“Creed?”
“Sir?”
“I’m sorry as hell, my friend.”
Steiger grimaced and nodded curtly. “Thank you, sir.”
As he left, Delaney said, “I think I’d like another drink, sir.”
Forrester nodded. “Get me one, too,” he said.
“What killed him, sir?” asked Andre.
Forrester hesitated. “Laser rifles,” he said, softly. “Miniature laser rifles.”
Chapter 2
It was Sandy. There was no question of it, though there was not much left of him to recognize. His body looked as if a dozen psychopathic surgeons had been at work on it with laser scalpels. Sandy had fought before he died. He had fought hard, but it hadn’t helped him any. Steiger turned away, struggling to control his emotions. Sandy had been all the family he had left. The white-coated pathologist slid the long drawer holding Sandy’s body back into the freezer.
Steiger blamed himself. When they were children. Sandy had always been the weaker one, smaller and more delicate. He was much more sensitive to things and much less aggressive. He had always been more naturally empathic and more thoughtful than his older brother. His strengths, Creed knew, lay in different areas than his own, but unfortunately, that was something that their father
never understood. Victor Steiger had been a lumbering ox of a man, with all the inner sensitivity of a tree trunk. He had valued Creed’s obvious gifts over Sandy’s more subtle ones. Consequently, Creed was always held up as a model to his younger brother and Sandy was often mercilessly taunted by their father for not being able to match Creed’s athletic abilities. Privately, Creed always sought to reassure his younger brother, trying to minimize the harm caused by their father’s scorn of him, but the damage had been irrevocable. Sandy had always felt, deep down inside, that he simply didn’t measure up.
Creed had been against his entering the service. Not because he didn’t think that Sandy would make a good soldier, but because he knew that making a soldier out of Sandy would be like trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. A scientist, perhaps, or better still, an artist; some sort of creative profession would have suited Sandy perfectly and given him more joy, but Sandy had insisted on following in his older brother’s footsteps. It was as if the shade of their dead father still loomed over them and Sandy felt he had to prove that he could measure up. And now he was dead.
Steiger shut his eyes and struggled to get his emotions back under control. If only he could travel back through time and change things, save his brother’s life or get to him even earlier, when he was still only a small boy, and explain to him that those things which their father saw as weaknesses were not weaknesses at all, but simply different strengths their father couldn’t recognize for what they were. If only be had known then what he knew now, he could have done ever so much more than merely reassure his younger brother each time he failed to live up to their father’s expectations.
And the hardest part of it all was knowing that he had the ability to do just that—he had the ability to travel back in time. But he would not. He could not. Something like that was against all regulations and for damned good reasons. It was far too dangerous. There was no telling what could happen if you went back into the past and confronted your own relatives or even yourself when you were younger. To do that meant to risk creating a temporal paradox, one that might not be severe enough to split the timeline, but one that could create profound changes in your own life, changes that would be completely unpredictable, changes that could set off a chain of circumstances that would lead to even greater temporal contamination. .
“Come on,” Steiger said to his security escort, two armed M.P.’s who had been waiting at a respectful distance while he viewed his brother’s remains. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
As the M.P.‘s turned to go out through the doors, Steiger beard several sharp, rapid, chuffing sounds and something whizzed past his left ear. The bullet took one of the M.P.‘s in the back of the head and exited through his forehead, splattering brains, blood and bone fragments all over the door. As Steiger threw himself to one side and clawed for his sidearm, he felt the second bullet graze the lower part of his lat muscle on the left side. The second M.P. went down before his weapon had a chance to clear its holster. Steiger rolled and fired. The low intensity plasma charge struck the pathologist in the chest, burned a fist-sized hole right through him and dissipated on the wall behind him in a brief, incandescent burst of flame and smoke.
Steiger slowly got to his feet and winced with pain. He was bleeding from the side. He ripped open his shirt and checked the wound. Luckily, it was only superficial. The amount of blood always made a flesh wound look much worse than it really was. The M.P.‘s, unfortunately, hadn’t been so lucky. Both of them were dead.
“Damn!” Steiger swore through clenched teeth.
A young doctor dressed in surgical greens came through the door abruptly. Steiger, his nerves ragged, almost shot him.
“What the hell …” the doctor’s eyes grew wide at the sight of Steiger’s plasma pistol, then he saw the dead bodies on the floor. “Oh, my God!”
“Who’re you?” said Steiger.
“What happened here?”
“Answer my damn question!”
“I … I’m Dr. Philip Torvalt, pathology resident.”
“You know that man?” Steiger asked the young doctor, indicating the dead assailant in the lab coat. “He one of your people?”
Torvalt glanced again at the slain M.P.’s, then approached the assassin’s corpse, glanced down at him, swallowed hard and shook his head. “No. No, I’ve never seen this man before.” He looked back up at Steiger. “What the hell happened here? I was … Colonel, you’re wounded!”
“It’s only a scratch.” Steiger glanced down at the two dead M.P.‘s, his lips compressed onto a thin line. “They got the worst of it.”
“You’re bleeding profusely,” Torvalt said, frowning. “You’d better let me see that. It could be serious. I’ve never seen a laser wound that didn’t cauterize.”
“It wasn’t a laser,” Steiger said. “Bring me that man’s weapon.”