Division Zero: Thrall Read Free Page B

settled on a cargo trailer-sized shipping bot. The lumbering machine was bedecked with flashing lights that colored the nearby rain red and green. “Now we bask in it and no one notices.”
    The car compensated for the slow-moving transport, gliding down and left. Kirsten held on to her coffee as the wind knocked them around. The boxy flying robot streaked past the right side, slow to the point of seeming to hang in place.
    “I guess. It just… I dunno, I remember reading about it in school and fuming. Mother got better treatment in jail than I got at home. Her judgment came at the hands of other inmates, not the government. They would have fed her and kept her safe until they let her out. I’d have been safer in jail than living with my own damn mother. How twisted is that?”
    “What happens when a Div 1 cop does a half-assed summary execution on the wrong guy?”
    “Now you’re talking about an entirely different thing.” She took over active flight control as the nav point drew close, guiding the patrol craft out of the clouds in a paced descent. “Summaries have a lot of checkboxes to go through. Even when it’s warranted, half the time it doesn’t happen.”
    “Good thing, that.” As they dove out of the storm, Dorian smiled at the orange gleam of the mid-afternoon sun on the city a half-mile below. “Officers who do too many of them usually wind up on the wrong end of one sooner or later. They don’t like to let that kind of information get out to the public. Bang. Oops, he was an innocent man. Now you’re guilty of murder.” He was silent for several minutes as they sank among the towering monoliths of northern West City. “I don’t think I could have been able to do it without
knowing
they were guilty.”
    “You mean without reading their minds?” She looked at him for two seconds. “Isn’t that about the same as telling someone to confess truth? It’s not like I added more to it or made him lie.”
    “Div 1 officers don’t have the luxury to
know
when someone is lying. They perform summaries based on evidence they can see. Only in those cases, the lawyers don’t get involved in time to make a difference.”
    “I knew he did it. Even with his blurted utterance to the arresting officers, a good enough lawyer can worm out of it.” She bled off speed, reaching the level of the fifth story at a hair over eighty miles per hour. “Weren’t lawyers once supposed to just make sure the law is applied fairly, as opposed to looking for any little technicality to let their client get away with crime?”
    Dorian grinned. “You have to be reincarnated. You are way too jaded for your age.”
    A line of Division 1 cars formed a perimeter in the center of a pentagonal courtyard between five corporate towers. The ground between them and the building lay scattered with bits of plant material and broken terra cotta. Small arms fire emanating from the lobby had destroyed at least six flowerpots large enough to bathe in, as evidenced by shot-out glass along the front.
    Kirsten set down behind the row of blue and whites, turning her attention to the screen at the middle of the console. Ancora Medical leased office space from a management company that owned the entire five-building complex. A query for disgruntled employees and reports of violence in the building came back suspiciously blank.
    “Either this is the one corporation in the world not run by greedy bastards, or someone’s been tinkering in the network.”
    “Yeah,” said Dorian. “I wonder which it is.”
    She grasped the door handle, but froze as bullets bounced off the ground in front of the car. A handful hit the hood and windscreen, but the armor plating reduced it to a dull clatter. Kirsten poked the comm.
    “Ops, what the hell is going on in there?”
    One of the Division 1 officers put his back to his car so he could face her, and waved. “Afternoon, Agent.” His voice came out of her dashboard, words spread out beneath his hologram