Starblood

summer night. The craft's interior lights were off, as were its headlamps and its fore and aft warning beacons. It was nothing more than a shadow among other shadows, and its power plant had been insulated against emitting noise so that the illusion of ethereal unreality could be maintained; it was a ghost searching the night, nothing more.
    In the forest below, small animals scattered for cover into burrows and holes in rotted trees, somehow aware of the machine's presence. But the rest of the world knew nothing of it.
    Farther up the cliffside, an ultra-modern house jutted from the forest, perched precariously on thrusting fingers of rock. Despite its advanced design, it seemed an integral part of the natural forces around it. The driver of the grav-car had required several minutes, at first, to make out the lines of it. Now, as he drew closer, his admiration for its architecture increased, even though he would soon take steps to destroy it utterly.
    He held the car steady as it drew level with the house, and when he was certain it was deserted but for its owner and single occupant, he took his craft up again. When the car was above the roof of the house, with the entire grounds of the mansion visible below it, the driver put his machine on hold, opened his door, and released the package he had been sent to deliver.
    The package was a cylinder three feet long, tapered to a round bullet snout at both ends, with a central diameter of twenty inches. It was featureless, its burnished coppery metal husk shimmering in the moonlight. It was quite heavy, though it did not drop any faster than a bit of dandelion fluff might have. It slid level with the house, changed from vertical to horizontal progression, and passed by the long windows of the cliffside patio. It was noiseless and efficient-looking. And though its design gave no indication of its purpose, it had an air of deadliness about it.
    Overhead, the grav-car moved cautiously along the side of the mountain, hugging the dark, jagged shapes of the trees, and slipped swiftly into the envelope of the night. Only when it was a mile away did the driver flick on the lights. And even then he phased them in slowly to avoid drawing the attention of another craft or someone on the ground. Five minutes later, fully illuminated, he picked up speed and returned to the garage from which his mission had begun.
    And all the while, the Selective Assassination Module he had left behind him was cutting an entrance portal in the glass patio doors. A jointed arm extended from the anterior end, tipped with a diamond cutting edge. As it worked, a fine glass powder fell to the flagstones. When the work was near completion and all but a perfectly circumscribed entrance had been cut, a second arm appeared, spidery but agile, and attached itself by a suction cup to the glass that would be removed. When the final cut was made, this new arm removed the circle of glass from the door, lowered it onto the patio floor, and released it.
    It moved forward and into the darkened living-room. Timothy's house had been breached once again, but with a far greater degree of subtlety than Klaus Margle had employed some two weeks ago…
    Though some moonlight found its way between the heavy velveteen drapes, the interior of the mansion was much darker than the night world beyond its confines. The SAM opened the receptivity of its visual scanners; two points on its anterior and two on its posterior, all the size of quarters, changed color from the fire-flecked coppery hue to yellow, emitting a slightly fuzzy amber radiance.
    The thin spindles of the tool arms had been retracted and left no trace of their exit and entry in the smooth hull Other devices, as yet unused, could also be called forth and put away without trace. Such dexterity and heavy armament were possible through extreme microminiaturization; and the machine's power source was not contained within its housing. It gained operational energy from a broadcasting generator some miles away. It was an expensive means of murder. Weapons Psionic, its makers, charged whatever the traffic would bear, limiting its clientele but clearing excellent profits on those devices it did construct. And, though expensive, it was foolproof. Weapons Psionic had no known headquarters, files, or staff. Though massive efforts had often been launched to discover the whereabouts of the company, both federal and United Nations police had failed miserably to uncover even a trace