The Octagonal Raven by L. E. Modesitt Page A

stood there, a short and slender man and a taller but more blocky blonde woman, both in their off-white and gray singlesuits, both with the streamlined equipment belts and the impact helmets, but with the visors up. Two gliders rested on the grass outside the hangar door, and a third blockier glider hovered next to the stone wall nearly three hundred meters along the side of the hill, the wall that separated my grounds from those of Rokley Barres.
    “Ser…” That was the woman.
    “I’m Daryn Alwyn, as you probably know from the call. Someone used what seemed to be a laseflash on me as I was leaving the glider hangar a little while ago.” I paused.
    “Yes, ser,” she replied. “We checked the skytors on the way.” Her voice and the emotions beneath revealed a certain disgust/dislike.
    Why? Because I lived on the lower Hill? Because I was a pre-select?
    “Why don’t you come on in?” I motioned for them to enter, and then walked into the front sitting room, where I sat in the straight chair.
    The two followed me, the second closing the door. After a moment, they sat in the matching armchairs opposite me, but they sat on the forward edges.
    “What did you discover?” I asked.
    “There was a single-burst laser set up on the top of your neighbor’s wall. It was set in a plastic. The plastic was the same shade as the stone. According to the skytors, the burst was for four hundred microseconds,” the woman CA replied.
    I winced.
    “You’re augmented, aren’t you, ser?”
    Theoretically, that was none of the CA’s business, but it didn’t matter, and I really didn’t want to give her more reasons to dislike me. “Yes.”
    She nodded somberly. “If you weren’t augmented, under that much intensity, you’d be blind and in the medcenter right now.”
    But not dead, not from the laseflash.
    “I assume it melted down.”
    “Mostly, ser.”
    “What about past records? When was it placed?” I asked.
    The two exchanged glances. The shorter male CA finally answered. “We don’t know. The skytors’ records are on a three week loop. We had the whole loop downloaded and scanned once the energy spiked. It set off the skytors’ alarm. The duty tech thought it might be a fire at first.”
    “So no one came near that part of the wall in the past three weeks?”
    “No, ser. Except for the gardeners, and they didn’t get that close,” answered the man.
    “And there were no remote signals to the unit?”
    “It could have been set off locally…but the tech says it looks like it was coded to recognize you and your glider, and to discharge.” He paused before adding, “There was no high-power signal, and there were only three people within a klick, and all of them were…modified.”
    Norms hated the term brain-damped, but if the skytors, with their resolutions and scans, had only been able to pick up three people, and all were brain-damped, or modified, those three hadn’t been the ones. The CA wasn’t lying. He was a norm, and my systems could read him well enough to be sure of that.
    I blinked. My eyes still watered. “Thank you very much.”
    “Do you have any idea who might have done this, ser?” asked the female CA.
    “I have no idea. No idea at all.” That was certainly the truth.
    “Have you done anything…that might have upset people?” she pursued.
    “I’m an edartist…that’s always possible, but I haven’t received any messages or anything to indicate that might be the reason.” That was also true, so far as it went.
    “No one has sent you any strange VRs or other…communications?”
    “Not anything out of the ordinary,” I admitted.
    The questioning seemed to last for hours, but my system told me it was closer to thirty minutes before they both stood and bowed ever so slightly.
    I followed them to the door.
    “We’ll let you know if we find out more. Ser…if you find out anything we should know…you will inform us, will you not?” asked the woman. Underlying her even tone of