Galactic Empires by Gardner Dozois

in. They thought that if they were imprisoned, they could use their powers. A very misplaced notion, I suspect. In this case, geometry isn’t important. I simply had to have a large receiving element. Your thoughts are big, after all. But I managed to catch them. Not all of them, just the right ones. Those that were relevant to the crime.”
    “My thoughts?” The icons expanded abruptly, wiping out my sight. Then faces emerged through the blue mist. Four of them in some kind of dilapidated room. Faces I knew. Svein. I remembered him. I remembered… being him.
    I was the one standing in the desert outside Ridgeview while the rest of me lived our life. It was hot out there. Bloody unpleasant, actually. The sun burned my arms and face. I took a leak against some local plant. That way if the forensic team were any good, they’d find it and confirm the Fiech body’s DNA.
    Then the air traffic control data playing in my virtual vision showed me that the plane was taxiing to the runway. I took a breath and got the missile ready. A simple thing, really, three of me had built it in the engineering center under the Lake Hill house. Most of the components were off-the-shelf, and the custom ones were easy enough for the bots to manufacture. We built quite a few.
    The finished product was a simple blue-gray launch tube over a meter long, with a shoulder saddle and a handle. It was heavy when I rested it on my shoulder; I squatted down on the stony sand to make the weight easier. I could see the big old Siddeley-Lockheed lift into the sky, with its engine rumble faint in the hot desert air. It took what seemed like an age to climb up to its cruise altitude, curving around the city in a wide arc. The passenger list said it was just about full, over a hundred and thirty people. It would be quick. Death in such a fashion always is. And the passenger list confirmed the Dynasty scum were on board. The missile’s sensors locked on. There wasn’t anything else in the sky to confuse them.
    I fired the missile. The bloody launch tube slammed into my shoulder. If I hadn’t been bracing myself, it would have knocked me down. The roar of the solid rocket booster was obscenely loud. For a couple of seconds, I was overwhelmed. It was like being hit on the side of the head. Smoke was seething all around me. I crouched, staggered about. Then I recovered enough to stand still and look up into the wide open sky. The hyperram had kicked in, which made the missile just about impossible to see.
    I expected the explosion to be bigger. This was just a white pinpoint flash, no fireball. But behind the blaze, the plane started to disintegrate, tumbling out of the sky, dark fragments twirling away from the main body.
    There was no way I could move. Actually, my whole nest of bodies froze up as I watched the spectacle. There was something obscenely beautiful about the sight, and better still was the knowledge that I had created it. If I could do this, I could do anything! I’d be able to force through Merioneth’s Isolation now. I had the courage and determination.
    The first fragments hadn’t even reached the ground when I turned and hurried down to the shore where the boat was anchored. This point was critical. The whole area would be swarming with people. The Unisphere was already flinging out alarms. Rescue crews and police would be dispatched within minutes. And any local citizens nearby would no doubt rush to help. My Volkep body released the warning message into the Unisphere as I reached the shoreline.
    After that, it was a quick trip across the sea to Ridgeview. I waited on the station platform for my train back to Earth. It was an eerie experience. Everyone around me was accessing the Unisphere reports of the plane crash. Nobody said anything; they were all too shocked at the disaster just outside town.
    When I got back to Sydney, I took a cab straight to the apartment. The rest of me were a pleasant sensation of reassurance as I took the memory