Read Ghost Legion for Free Online

fine."
    The cyborg stopped, took another twist from his pocket, but he didn't
light it. He stared at it, switched the stare to Dixter. "And
then we found proof. You want it from the beginning?"
    Dixter sighed, rubbed his forehead, nodded.
    Xris continued. "Front gate security saw, registered nothing.
Same with the entrance—all the entrances. Nothing. Nada. Zip.
The first we know we're being invaded, the motion detectors inside
the house start registering movement. Like you see there."
    "But how can you be sure? There's no corroboration from the
other monitors, is there?"
    "Nothing on visual, nothing on audio."
    "What confirms it?"
    "A drop in barometric pressure—in certain areas only—and
a corresponding movement of the air in places where no air should be
moving."
    "The drop in pressure accompanies the disturbance," Dixter
observed, studying the report. "So do the air currents."
    "That's what convinced us we weren't crazy. We fed all this
stuff into the computer, had it chart the results. Take a look at
that. Look at the path it makes."
    Dixter examined another document, transmitted by the cyborg—a
diagram of Snaga Ohme's vast estate. A line had been drawn in red, a
line that followed the movement detected by the various sensors.
Dixter stared at it; his jaw went slack.
    "Ghosts, you said, boss," Xris commented.
    The path started at an outside wall, went through a
nullgrav-steel-lined marble wall into the house, and traveled through
room after room, moving straight through walls, ceilings, floors. It
never deviated from its chosen course; no obstruction stopped it. It
headed straight in one direction: the vault.
    "As you see, to even reach the house itself, this thing had to
pass through the force field that surrounds the estate, had to go
through the garden, where life expectancy is thirty seconds if you're
lucky. Motion detectors sensed movement in the garden, but they
didn't get any corroborating evidence from other detectors, and so
they didn't react, other than to register it.
    "That's why it didn't trip any of the thousand or so booby
traps, not that they would have done any damage. Couldn't. The thing
moved too damn fast. It made it safely to the house, slid right
through a fortified exterior wall that could withstand a direct hit
from a lascannon and not buckle. Nothing stopped it. Nothing even
fazed it apparently."
    "Was the vault on the layout Raoul passed on?"
    "Sure. No reason not to. A lot of people already know about it.
Snaga Ohme was proud of the contraption. He used to take special
clients to see it. According to the Loti, Ohme once claimed he could
detonate an atomic bomb next to it and the blast wouldn't so much as
put a dent in the walls. He was exaggerating, of course, but probably
not by much. What we didn't put on there was the security
surrounding it, not to mention the vault's own internal security
systems."'"
    "And you say this . . . whatever it was . . . got past all that
and inside the vault. What did it do once it was inside? Did it take the bomb?"
    "Maybe it took it. Maybe it vaporized it. Maybe it ate it. We
got the thing on vid. All I know is that one minute the damn bomb's
there and the next it isn't."
    "And this . . . thing . . . was responsible. Damn it, how do we
know for sure?"
    "Maybe we don't. We got two firm indications, boss: First, we
registered an increase in the radiation level around the vault. Not
much. But enough to make us suspicious, especially tracing the path
the thing took. We examined the vault's superstructure. There'd been
an alteration in the metal itself, a chemical change, enough to
generate radioactivity. And only in that one place, directly in line
with the path."
    "That's the first. What was the second?"
    Xris looked grim. "The bomb was moved."
    "Moved?"
    "Jostled, handled. Not far—a fraction of a fraction of a
centimeter before it vanished. But enough to set off the alarm. That
was the only alarm this thing did set off, by the way.