Macavity's Not There

Svensson jogged idly from foot to foot.

"They were five of our best men,"he said.

Four men and a woman actually. Although they constituted Medico Security, they were often used for fringe activities like this. Or rather, had been used. For all their training, they were simply not of the same calibre as the major forces on the street, like the larger criminal gangs, most other corporations and, of course, the GSSA. The man next to Svensson, Lieutenant Morris, kneeled to look at the nearest body. He took a bullet from where it had stuck in the dead man's unnaturally toughened skull.

"Depleted uranium spinner," Morris explained. "You can't get hold of these for love and money over here. They're only issued to metamorphs working for either CalcuttaCorp, or one of the criminal gangs associated with it. See how the corkscrew shape is designed to bore through metamorph skin? He's either working for CalcuttaCorp or involved with someone closely related to them."

Some paramedics were already loading the dead into an ambulance. Svensson swallowed.

"We tried to keep it from the GSSA; thought we could handle it ourselves, but after this fiasco we decided to come clean."

"What exactly did he steal?"

"His own revised plans for the CICI. He got a 15 per cent increase in speed over our next best model. Then when he got fired, he activated a virus in our computers. Wiped out all records save his own."

"How did he manage that? Surely you have measures in place."

"It was bi-partite. One part was in the schematics themselves, the other in the reader software. Whenever we tried to read a copy, or duplicate one, it erased itself immediately, then tried to erase all other existing copies. By the time we realised what was happening it was too late."

"Backups?"

"We have them on file; but they're likewise infected with half of the virus. We're having to rewrite the viewer software from scratch to getat it."

"He was good," Morris judged, "but we're better. The GSSA will pull him down. This Shadbolt's days are numbered. He's almost as good as our troops, but fortunately not quite."

Svensson said nothing. Two months ago Shadbolt has been almost as good as the Medico Security men.

Ben Wright, 10/10/00

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