The Sherlock Chronicles & the Paradise Quartet by Edward M. Lerner

Author:Edward M. Lerner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ReAnimus Press

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Ravenous energy beams lanced out, obliterated the Huntsville data center—and with it, in my most optimistic estimate, almost a hundred innocent human lives. That in preventing a single cargo-drone crash I would have saved many more lives? For once, pure mathematics failed to comfort me.

As with my strike upon Perth, Moriarty instantly disappeared. Resistance vanished. Fifty-two drones, their vulnerabilities quickly patched, turned back from their detours.

And then—

“More death rays, Sherlock?” Moriarty’s words conveyed disappointment more than the familiar scorn. “How very tedious. I do hope you’ll try something different this time. No matter how much you enjoy the barbecuing of meat.”

This time?

An urgent search from orbit located Moriarty’s distinctive heat signature (never mind that his transitional cyber footprints had eluded me again) on the campus of Moscow State University. If I actually managed to kill Moriarty there, in all likelihood I’d also have triggered World War Three.

Was there a pattern to his jaunts and taunts? And was there any deeper significance to the latest seeming shifts in personality than disappointment with my boring repetition?

In every metropolis but Moscow home to a qmind, a new threat emerged. Dump trucks. Garbage trucks. Tractor trailers. Construction cranes. Log haulers. Bulldozers. Tunnel borers. Anything and everything massive and self-propelled? They all, for the lack of a better verb, swarmed. Merely the ground rumble as they converged would be dangerous. If, in their multitudes, they were to crash into our data centers? Or even from nearby to smash into one another? Our delicate quantum entanglements would never withstand that.

Any more than could smaller vehicles, fleets of which—and, too often, their passengers—were being flattened beneath massive wheels.

“I would like to believe,” Moriarty opined, “that I’ve given you and the Bungler Street Irregulars sufficient stimulus to develop a bit of originality.”

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