Read Online Tales of the Red Panda: The Android Assassins by Gregg Taylor - Free Book Online

It was Mother Hen's line, and that usually
didn't mean anything good.
    He lifted the receiver. “Report,” was all he said.
    Kit watched him closely. His face could be an impassive mask
when he willed it to be, impossible to read, but she was certain that she saw
him turn pale at what he heard. He listened for a full minute without speaking.
“Understood,” he said at last and hung up the receiver.
    “What is it?” she asked. “What's happened?”
    “I know now what these monsters were driving people
towards,” he said, crossing the room and pulling out a map of the area in which
the battle had raged tonight. He pointed a finger towards a dead-end alley on
the map. “Here,” he said, then moved his finger to two more such secluded
spots, blocks away from the first, and each other. “Here, and here. In each of
these locations, police and clean-up crews found
dozens of bodies, riddled with machine-gun fire.”
    “What?” she gasped. “I didn't see any robots with guns!”
    “No,” he said quietly. “Nor did I. But it
happened, and right under our noses. These monsters attacked and drove
innocent people before them like cattle. And when they had them where they
wanted them, there was a slaughter. Sixty-two dead in all.”
    “Boss,” she whispered, her hands trembling a little in rage,
“it… it doesn't make any sense! There was nothing of value there! No profit to
be made! And even if there was, what could possibly be worth that kind of
mass-murder?”
    “I don't know,” he said, turning for the door. “I'm heading
to the morgue to see if there's anything more we can learn tonight. You should
sleep.”
    “You get the strangest ideas sometimes,” she said, pushing
her mass of wet hair back into her cowl and racing along beside him.

Eight

 
    There were only three other news-hawks crowded around the
barricades when Jack Peters arrived, and they all looked like they wanted to be
somewhere else. Peters knew just how they felt. It had only been a day and a
half since what the papers had dubbed the Midnight Massacre in spite of the
fact that it had happened around nine o'clock in the evening. Scores of
innocent people dead or missing, countless more wounded, some seriously, a
neighborhood in ruins, and here he was. A newsman has to make hay while the sun
shines, and an accident down at the Harrison Proving Grounds was not going to
win the jousting contest for column inches today.
    Jack unfolded his long legs out the door of his old jalopy,
picked up the camera that Editor Pearly had insisted he lug along and loped off
to join the thin crowd at the barricades. He could see Bailey from the Sentinel , chewing on a toothpick and
leaning heavily on the wooden sawhorse that was intended to keep back the
throng of reporters that had failed utterly to materialize.
    Peters nodded. “ Paulie ,” he said.
    “ Petey ,” Bailey said, not removing
the toothpick or looking directly at Jack.
    “Been here long?” Peters asked, knowing full well what the
answer was.
    “Long enough,” Bailey drawled. “How'd you draw a crummy
story like this?”
    Peters shrugged. “I assume I'm being punished for
something,” he said. “It's true often enough as makes no odds. You?”
    Bailey grinned and said nothing, which Peters assumed meant
that his fellow reporter had been sniffing around the hen-house again. Bailey had a reputation for taking a lap around the typing pool every so
often, and that didn't play well at the conservative Sentinel . “Forget I asked,” Jack said with a wave of his hand. “If
it's in the doghouse, it's probably a dog.” The two men chuckled ruefully.
    There was a derisive snort from Bailey's left. It was some
kid neither of them had ever seen, with a shiny new press pass from the Telegraph in the band of his hat.
    “Yes?” Bailey said scornfully.
    “It sounds like a crackerjack story to me,” the kid said.
    Bailey looked at Jack and mouthed, “Crackerjack,” and both
men snorted.
    The kid