June 14th 2013, 2:43 PM
“Fascinating.”
Steelmind had spoken with his real voice, but he was seeing through the eyes of one of his Paladin robots. Stretched out on the floor of a cheap motel was the body of Count Fear.
The room was… not quite perfectly empty. Bed, dresser, TV set; nothing unusual, yet. And the body - Fear dead on the ground with a hole in his head; a scan by his robots’ enhanced senses showed a scorch mark on one wall where the laser bolt had hit after penetrating. There was an empty crate by the wall - aha. The crate had the royal armory mark; Serum #24, empty.
The body had been looted. He didn’t have real forensics equipment - for a moment he enjoyed the irony that he, the King of Novapest, would be calling the police to report a crime - but he did have X-ray vision installed on some of his Paladins, so he scanned the body and observed that, yes, it had been looted. The clothes hadn’t been stripped, but the pockets had been emptied. So had the crate, if it had held anything, and anything else he’d brought had been taken...
By whom, though? If it had been one of his own people, they would have told him, probably expecting a reward. That suggested either a falling-out among the conspirators, which he could exploit, or a third party. The most likely option would have been an ordinary mugging if Count Fear hadn’t had Survivor powers that could reduce any mugger he noticed to a quivering heap of flesh.
So it had been a surprise attack, or possibly an attack by someone with a remote-controlled robot drone, but few criminals could afford those. The surprise attack, then. Fear had met with someone whom he saw as an ally, and this person had killed him to… steal his money? No, to silence him and to steal all the weapons he had, whatever Lizzy had given him from the royal armory that he didn’t want to share.
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He sighed. If that theory was true, he might have to have a word with Jay. It might have been one of her knights who’d escaped, but the knights as a whole had no leadership; Were, who was their only officer, had been found comatose in Lizzy’s hospital, his body only just alive. And James had talked about personal business. The pardon was for actions committed before he took power...
... Or the more terrifying possibility. Lizzy might not have been his only enemy; the ex-countess Zero was still leading Ilderia’s faction abroad, and they might have agents here. And - another thought - when he called the investigators, he’d want them to check if all the Steelstorm Industries weapons Jacobin had stolen had turned up, since he might have done this (if he still had a laser pistol) to refresh his stock. Or there might be more enemies, hidden, plotting against him.
Not for the first time, Steelmind wished for the power to know. There were six counts alive and innumerable minor powers, and any of them might be plotting against him - Prudence angry about her daughter, Heavyhand under Jay’s influence, Greenrose who had already betrayed and murdered one patron, and the other three were at least honest about their ambitions. His father would have known what to do to control them, but for him the future was a fog of possibilities, millions of theories and no obvious way to test any of them. He could see himself in the future as a corpse as dead as Fear, a discarded pawn of cleverer manipulators. Or he could see himself as a clockwork guillotine, hidden forever, so terrified of plotters that he launched purge after purge, killing the innocent as well as the guilty, until the only difference between him and his sister was that he wasn’t enjoying himself. What was the middle way?
He shook his head. He just had to keep on doing the best he could. That meant reasonable security precautions, that meant caution, and that meant finding them an enemy the state could be united against as soon as possible.