‘Open viewing panel,’ she instructed.
In the surface of the case a rectangular section faded from shiny chrome to transparency, revealing that the case indeed served a purpose similar to a coffin. There had been no paintings here.
‘Well, I did get all of your features right,’ said Tay, gazing down at David Grenant. She then, with a stab of her fingers, initiated a touch-console beside the window and began studying the readouts. The feeding system was still being utilized and Intertox levels were being maintained — like this he could last almost indefinitely. She touched in a sequence she had not used in a little while, then waited. After a minute, Grenant’s face twitched — then, he opened his eyes. For a second he appeared utterly confused, then he started to jerk and shake and whip his head from side to side. She’d previously noticed how it always took him a little while to remember precisely what his fate was. Now she stared at him calmly as his silent screams frosted the underside of the viewing window. Grenant’s entombment had been one of the more imaginatively horrifying of Francis Cojan’s punishments, and Tay saw no reason to change that: it was history after all. She then reversed the touch sequence and he slowed to immobility and finally closed his eyes.
Glancing across at the other, empty, coffin-case, she contemplated the fortuitous workings of fate. When, if her plan evolved over many years came to fruition and she got to open her museum on Earth, this one exhibit would be the making of her fortune. Perhaps an additional exhibit would ensure this success. She smiled to herself, then sniffed at the air. First she had to get out of here, before the air — no longer renewed by the house computer — turned bad.
Tay pushed herself upright and limped over to the control panel she had used to close the door. There she paused. She had no way of knowing what might lie on the other side of the door. Frisk could be waiting for her, even though a few hours had already passed. Tay hesitated, and in that moment the opening light on the panel flickered, and she listened to the clicking as the lock mechanism disengaged. No, surely she hadn’t touched it. Frisk! Tay turned and stared in horror at the door, as it swung open. She would not now be able to close it again until it had reached its fully open position.
Grenant! She limped over to his coffin-case and slapped her hand down on the palm lock.
‘Open!’
Black lines quartered the lid of the coffin-case and those quarters began slowly to spin aside. Inside the case, Grenant was fully dressed, his fingers clawed above his chest, where he had been scraping at the lid. At his hip was an empty holster. Damn! She’d forgotten that she’d previously moved his weapon to the model she had constructed of him in the museum, mainly to prevent him trying to draw it and use it on himself here — the little projectile weapon would not have been sufficient to drill a hole in his coffin. She hardly dared look up now as the door clunked into its fully open position.
‘I thought you were advised to get away from here,’ spoke an irritated voice.
Tay stared out into the ruin Frisk and her Batians had made of her home, then focused on the object visible in the doorway. Here hovered an iron-coloured cockle, half a metre across.
It opened its bivalve shells to expose glimmers of greenish light as it spoke again. ‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ it said. Then, ‘Who’s your friend?’
‘Who are you?’ Tay asked, slapping her hand on the coffin’s locking mechanism.
‘I’m SM Twelve, the one they usually send to clear up other people’s messes,’ it informed her. ‘Now, I can see there’s quite a mess here. Perhaps, through me, you’d like to tell the Warden all about it?’
‘Close,’ Tay instructed the coffin-case, then watched it do so before moving away. As she walked to the door of the safe, the drone retreated into the room beyond and hovered in midair. With a touch, Tay had the safe door closing behind her, and then she stood surveying the wreckage. It was vandalism, plain and simple, like someone had gone berserk with a gas-system pulse-gun. The furniture was burnt, even the floor, ceiling and walls were distinctively scored, cabinets smashed. Books, some burnt and some still burning, were strewn all about, and the computer console was a hollowed-by-fire ruin.
‘It seems they had some sort of grudge against you.’
The voice that now issued from the mollusc drone was no longer its own, Tay realized instantly, but that is what it wanted her to know. Picking her way through the debris, she moved to the entrance hall — the drone trailing along behind her.
‘A grudge?’ she asked.
‘The Batian mercenaries that came here — presumably in search of Sable Keech,’ replied the Warden.
‘Oh, I don’t think they had a grudge,’ Tay replied, stepping out into soft green light.
‘There does seem an excessive amount of damage here.’
‘Not done by them, I should think. It’s not part of their remit. That lot,’ Tay gestured over her shoulder with her thumb, ‘was probably done by their employer, once she realized she couldn’t get at me. She has a long history of throwing spectacular tantrums. And now, of course, she’s quite mad.’
There was a long silence from the drone as Tay headed for her museum. Shortly before she reached the structure, the drone hummed ahead of her and zipped inside. Following it in she was pleasantly surprised to see no damage here at all. The drone was now hovering above the head of the Skinner, and together they presented a sinister apparition.
Tay stared up at it. ‘No explosives? No booby-traps?’ she asked.
‘None,’ now replied the voice of SM12 again.
‘I thought not. Her arrogance and self-regard would not allow her to destroy this, though her love of inflicting pain and terror would have let her destroy me — though she would have labelled it an act of self-preservation.’
‘Who is this employer you refer to?’ asked the voice of the Warden, quickly returning.
‘You haven’t worked that out?’
‘I have some idea, but I would like to hear the answer from you.’
‘Rebecca Frisk,’ said Tay, swinging her gaze down to the model of that very person. ‘She must have cored herself and swapped into another human body. It must have taken some deep re-programming to have whoever she put into her own previous body play the part of Frisk herself, but then she would have had access to Prador thrall technology, and without any compunction or moral restraint. She would have dearly relished breaking another’s mind and turning it to her own ends.’
‘The woman we thought was Frisk, and who was mind-wiped on Earth, was innocent, then’ said the Warden.