Justice by S.J. Bryant Page A

ground
around her erupted.
    Small vines,
the width of her fingers shot out of a nearby shrub and wrapped
themselves around Geron’s arms and remaining leg. The vines twirled
around until they had him in a tight knot and dragged him across
the dirt towards the shrub.
    “ Oh no, you don’t,” Nova said.
    She pulled the
gun back over her shoulder and took aim. Geron’s leg was already
covered by the leaves. A few more moments and the rest of him would
disappear.
    She fired.
    The red blast
set the shrub on fire and very nearly burnt the President’s body to
a crisp. She darted in and grabbed hold of his arm. She pulled with
full force, her teeth clenched as she heaved. His body came out
from under the shrub as the vines recoiled from the flames and
slunk back into the undergrowth.
    “ What the—” Nova said as she stepped over Geron’s ruined
body.
    Something
glinted under the nearby shrubs. On a planet populated completely
by plants, something glinting was something worth paying attention
to.
    She leaned in
closer and with a cautious hand brushed aside the leaves; her white
gloves shielding her from any poisonous barbs. She held her breath,
afraid that she would find another body tucked beneath the leaves.
What would that mean to the investigation?
    When the
foliage parted she did find another body. Rather than a human
corpse, she was faced with the silver sheen of a robot.
    “ Cal, do you get any recognition on this one?” she
asked.
    “ That is the only robot of that type registered in the dome;
otherwise we would have sent them to find the President. It’s a
manual labourbot patented to Terraform Incorporated.”
    “ Why the hell is it out here with the President’s
body?”
    “ Unknown,” Cal replied.
    Nova rolled
her eyes and grabbed hold of the robot’s head. No lights came to
life on the robot’s body, nor were there any noise from its
processors. For whatever reason, it had powered down. She pulled it
out of the trees so that it lay next to the President. The two of
them looked almost at peace, or at least they would if half of the
President’s body wasn’t missing and his face wasn’t twisted in
agony.
    She knelt down
by the robot and pried open the front panel to reveal the circuitry
beneath. The fuel gauge hovered at zero, practically impossible for
a modern robot that could run on almost anything, including
sunlight.
    She turned the
robot over and pulled off the back panel to the fuel storage cells.
Where the solar panel should have been, lay a collection of broken
wires. Someone had ripped the solar panel straight off.
    Lower down
where the liquid fuel was stored pooled a sticky mess. Something
had punctured the fuel canister and created a hole through which
all the fuel had drained. It was a wonder the robot had made it
this far from the complex on the backup fuel supplies.
    “ Someone sabotaged it,” Nova said.
    “ It looks like the circuits have been fried too,” Cal
said.
    He was right.
Some of the inner circuitry was burnt away.
    “ What would it do?” Nova asked. She could have sat there and
analysed the inner workings of the robot herself but the last thing
she wanted to do was spend extra time in the dark jungle surrounded
by killer plants.
    “ It’s mostly the command circuitry. My guess is that whoever
did it, made it so they could point the robot in a direction, tell
it to walk, and it would keep going until it ran out of power. Its
higher intelligence has been removed as well as its survival
instincts. It’s basically been returned to the state of last
century’s machines.”
    “ So they kill the President, give him to the robot, and send
the robot on its way into the jungle?”
    “ Yes, it explains why the footprints were in the storage bay
so quickly. The perpetrator would only have had to go outside for a
few minutes to put the robot on its way. On the outside there are
no return footprints to follow because the robot that made the
prints is still out there.”
    “