Varken Rise by Tracy Cooper-Posey

understand, distressed them.
    Brant had taken more than a few lives at the point of a gun as an Ammonite, when he had been working for what he thought was the greater good—the progress of mankind.
    Catherine, however, knew there was a darker side to humanity that all the indoctrination in the world did not remove. While the death of Kemp distressed her, the fact that he had been murdered did not. She was not mentally stumbling, trying to encompass that someone would be capable of such an act. She knew in her bones that any human, given the right motives, would kill.
    She dressed quickly. “Computer, locate Bedivere, please.”
    “Bedivere is not in the complex,” the computer replied.
    Catherine glanced at Brant and Lilly and saw her surprise mirrored on their faces. She looked over at the screen and said, “Show me the top deck, please.”
    The image on the screen shifted from Kemp’s room to the grassed over deck at the top of the complex, where the landing pads were. Only one zipper sat there.
    She pressed her lips together, stopping herself from speaking. There wasn’t enough information yet to even begin to speculate on what was happening. Bedivere’s departure may be completely unrelated to Kemp’s demise.
    That didn’t stop her heart from beating harder.
    Because the AI was in witness mode, the screen moved back to Kemp’s room. The still body was partially hidden by the bed. The blood was not.
    Catherine deliberately moved to a spot in the room where she could not see the screen easily.
    “We should call someone,” Brant said. “The gendarmes….”
    “We will, just not now.”
    “Why not?” Lilly asked, her voice sharp.
    “He was murdered, Catherine. Someone deliberately took his life. And now Bedivere is not here….” Brant added.
    Catherine met Brant’s gaze. “Do you really think Bedivere killed him? Bedivere ?”
    Brant’s gaze flickered away from her. After a long moment, he said, “It doesn’t seem likely.”
    “That means you think it’s possible.” She wondered why she was pressing the point. Did she really want to hear this answer? She already knew what Brant was thinking, because she was asking herself the same questions.
    Brant sighed. “Bedivere has been on edge lately with Jo’s death and I know that you and he argued last night. Something about Kemp.” His discomfort was acute. Yet he was making himself say it anyway.
    “Arguments don’t generally make people kill someone. It usually takes long-term resentment, or severe trauma for that to happen. Up until yesterday, none of us had seen Kemp since we first met him. Let’s not draw any conclusions until we know much more than we do now. Lilly, we can’t move the body, not until formalities have been completed,” and she glanced at Brant, “and we will get to those formalities, including calling the gendarmes, eventually. For now, we should find Kemp’s personal data cache.”
    “You won’t be able to start the regeneration process without a death certificate,” Lilly said.
    “I know. I want everything ready to go as soon as that certificate is in hand. I really want to talk to Kemp.”
    “If he followed standard procedure,” Brant said, “he will have backed up daily. There’s a good chance he will be missing the last day, maybe two. He certainly will not remember how he died.”
    Catherine moved past them and down the corridor to her office. Brant and Lilly followed her. “I know he won’t be able to tell us who killed him. He will be able to tell us why he was here, though. We can start from there.”
    “He couldn’t get back to Soward,” Lilly said. “That’s why he was here.”
    “Really? Are you sure of that?” Catherine asked. She moved over to the desk and switched everything on.
    “You think he had a hidden agenda?” Brant asked.
    “I’m trying not to think at all right now,” she said honestly. “Have a seat. Both of you. Computer, display the tracking logs for Kemp Rodagh, starting