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“What are the chances of someone surviving?” McManus asked, arching an eyebrow.
“Well, the air here on B-4 is pretty thin,” said one of the emergency medical technicians, a middle-aged man with long, but well-groomed, white hair. “The artificial atmo in the dome would have rushed out pretty quick with the top blown like that. So you’ve got a pretty good chance of immediate asphyxiation for anyone who didn’t get a lungful of air when it happened. Then there’s the drop in pressure, so we might see some decompression sickness – you know, the bends – and maybe some embolism.” He looked at each of the blank faces of the ModPol officers. “You know, pressure drops … boiling point drops … body fluids start to bubble,” he said, pushing down on an invisible scale with his hands. “The bubbles can block off arteries and keep oxygen from getting to the brain.”
“Yeah, not to mention stuff flyin’ around like a fuckin’ tornado,” chimed in one of the Life Support operators, the last word dissolving into a cavernous yawn. Runstom tried to give the cluster of operators an inconspicuous once-over look. They all looked tired and they huddled together in an almost defensive formation, like a pack of wild animals. They whispered to each other and snickered quietly in between yawns and grumblings.
“Yeah, there’s that,” one of the other med techs said, a skinny woman who looked too young to be attending a crime scene. “We’ll probably see a lot of lacerations, blunt force trauma, that kind of thing.”
“People inside housing units probably had a better chance,” the first med tech said. “Especially if they were in a small, closed room. Anyone who is alive, we gotta get to pretty quick, in case they’re suffering from hypoxia.”
McManus leaned into Horowitz. “Do I wanna know what that means?” he asked in a low voice. She didn’t look at him, just shook her head slowly. “Hey, pal,” he said loudly, addressing the pale-skinned Officer Jenkins. “What’s the layout of this place?”
“Well, let me show you,” Jenkins said with an unnerving smile. He took a step toward one of the monitors on the wall and pointed. The screen was mostly black, save a few thick, green lines forming a tic-tac-toe grid. Inside each of the squares were lighter lines, grids within the grid. “Block 23-D is a typical sub-dome block.” He pointed at one of the smaller squares inside the bottom, left-most square of the main grid. “Four small residential units form a square, their backyards coming together, separated by fences.” He traced a couple of the light-green lines and said, “Around each side of these squares is a narrow avenue.”
Jenkins leaned back from the monitor and made broad motions with his finger, saying, “Nine of these squares themselves form the block, three rows of three. In the middle square, there’s a supply store and a little community garden.”
“Bing. Block 23-D,” said an extremely calm, disembodied female voice. “Pressure stable. Oxygen level stable.” A bunch of the indicator lights that Runstom was pretending to look at turned a welcoming green.
“Ah, there we go,” Jenkins said. “We’ve got atmo. The other systems like the vital-scanners are still off-line. But it’s safe for you folks to go in.”
Runstom was still thinking about the operators. “These guys all just woke up. Where’s the LifSupOp on duty for this block?”
McManus glared at him, but Horowitz said, “Hey yeah. That’s a good question.”
“Ah, uh.” Jenkins pointed a finger in no particular direction. “Your uh, detective. Detective Brute?”
“Detective Brutus,” McManus said.
“Right, Brutus. He told us to take the Op on duty over to the BHPD station and put him in holding until someone can interrogate him.”
“You mean question,” Horowitz said. She turned to dip her head slightly and look Officer Nate Jenkins in his gray eyes. “You took him in for questioning.”
“Oh, no.” Officer Jenkins smiled broadly. “We arrested him.”
“He’s a suspect,” one of the other Blue Haven officers said with a touch of pride in his voice. He went back to doing an impersonation of a statue.
“That’s right,” Jenkins confirmed, cheerfully. “Our only suspect.” He nodded once, as if the book were closed on this case and looked around at everyone for a moment, then at the wall with all the green lights on it. “Well, as I said – you folks are all set to go into 23-D now. We’ll be here if you need anything.”
Horowitz smirked at him. “Thanks for your help,” she said overly cheerfully, beaming an obnoxious smile and wide eyes at the B-fourean. Jenkins, apparently unaccustomed to sarcasm, or more likely, unwilling to acknowledge it, simply nodded and smiled.
Runstom was about to ask the B-foureans another question when McManus suddenly slapped him on the back and shoved a CamCap into his gut. “Stanley. You get to be Porter.”
Runstom clutched the headgear. “It’s Stanford,” he muttered, and carefully placed the unwieldy helmet with the camera attachment on his head. A jacket accompanied the CamCap, coiled wires connecting the camera to bulky sonic and magnetic sensors, a transmission antenna, and multiple battery packs. Runstom shrugged into the jacket and felt twenty kilos heavier.
It was customary for ModPol detectives to attend an initial crime-scene investigation remotely. Runstom was pretty low in the pecking order in his precinct and seemed to get stuck wearing the Remote Detective Unit more often than anyone else, except for maybe Halsey. He was generally pretty annoyed by it, but this time he couldn’t help but to feel even more annoyed that Brutus and Porter weren’t present in the flesh. This was a goddamn mass homicide, not vandalism or petty theft.
Once they got inside, it was a real mess. Debris lay strewn everywhere. Little single- and double-seated hover-cars hung about at awkward angles, their frames split or badly bent. Shards of unidentifiable plastic and metal stuck out of the artificial turf of the yards like crooked, multicolored fangs. A tree-like air scrubber lay precariously across two rooftops, the surface of its metallic branches gleaming dully in the low light, its plastic root system splaying out into the sky over the avenue. The ModPol officers congregated in the Southeast corner of the block, near the maintenance access door, med techs in tow.
Horowitz was staring back at the entrance. “Those motherfuckers are useless, you know that?” she said to no one in particular.
“B-4 cops act like their job is public relations,” McManus agreed immediately. “Like criminal justice’s got nothing to do with it.”
“They act more like fucking waiters than cops,” Horowitz said.
Runstom kept his mouth shut, but he had to agree. The pale-skinned B-fourean officers were trained to be the face of the dome government. The crime rate was so low, particularly in the sub-domes, that the cops really were there for PR more than anything else. Smile and make people feel welcome and protected, that’s what they were good at. Runstom wondered if he was feeling thankful for the local force’s incompetence. The truth of it was, if domer cops were any good at doing actual police-work, he’d always be stuck back at the outpost, perpetually orbiting a slow circle around Barnard’s Star, watching HV and reading about other people’s cases. He kept his somewhat inappropriate glass-half-full optimism to himself.
“Alright, listen up.” Detective Brutus’s voice came crackling out of the Remote Detective Unit that was wrapped around Halsey, who looked as uncomfortable in his gear as Runstom felt. “Everyone pair up with a med tech and take a quadrant. We’ll take this one. McManus, you take the Southwest. Horowitz, you take the Northeast. Runstom. Take a stroll through the garden and see if you can find any – Halsey! Check your CamCap. I can’t see anything.”
“Uh, okay, boss,” Halsey said, looking over his connections with clumsy motions.
McManus turned back toward the maintenance door. “Hey!” he shouted. “Can you guys switch it to daytime?”
The murmur of voices emanated from the other side of the doorway. After a minute or two, one of the operators croaked out of a hidden speaker. “Okay, here comes morning.”
The night sky started to lighten, and as it came into view, the dome seemed to flex and ripple like water. After another minute it was a brilliant, light blue-green hue, radiating light and illuminating the avenue and revealing dents and scratches on the residential units on the corner.
“What color clouds do ya want?”
“We don’t need any clouds!” McManus shouted. “Just leave it like this, that’s fine.” He looked at Halsey. “That better, Detective?”
“Huh?” Halsey blinked.
“Yeah, much better,” Detective Brutus’s voice crackled out of Halsey’s jacket. “Runstom!”
“Yes, sir?” Runstom turned to face Halsey.
“Go to the garden and check it out. I doubt you’ll find any survivors there, but make note of any bodies. Then go up to the Northwest quadrant.”
“Yes, sir,” Runstom said. Halsey seemed to be interested in something sticking out of a nearby yard and turned the CamCap away. “Um. Excuse me, sir. Detective.”
“What is it, Officer? Halsey, turn back around so I can see Runstom!”
Runstom motioned to the CamCap on his own head. “Detective Porter? He hasn’t connected yet.”
“What?” the speaker crackled before erupting into a sudden burst of static. “—wah—drant and look for bodies. Remember, warm or cold, make sure the med tech gets a full scan. Let’s move, people.”
Runstom looked at McManus and then Horowitz, hoping one of them would offer guidance without his asking for it. McManus ignored him, motioning to one of the med techs and then marching off. Horowitz slapped him on the shoulder. “Have a nice walk in the sweat-suit, Runny. You,” she said, pointing to a med tech. “Let’s go.”
Halsey was taking one of the other med techs into the nearby unit on the corner. Runstom looked at the remaining med tech; the one he thought was too young to be at a crime scene. She was a scrawny, pale girl with large beady eyes and thin, fidgeting fingers, and would have been a few inches taller than Runstom if not for her slouch. “Hi,” she said, sticking a cold hand into his. “I’m Roxeen.”
He shook her hand in one up-and-down motion and then pulled away. “Officer Stanford Runstom.” He shifted the weight of the jacket around, but it only seemed to make it worse. She peered at him as if he were a specimen under a microscope. “Alright, let’s go, Roxeen.”
The garden was a shambles. Ex-garden, really. All the plants had been sucked out of the ground. Half the irrigation system lay in a tangle of pipes in the middle of a nearby avenue. Somewhere in the center of the once-garden-muck was a yellowish blob.
“That’s a body,” Roxeen said, pointing to what Runstom was already looking at. “Let’s go scan it.”
He nodded, still looking at the body. They began trudging through the slimy mixture of dirt and vegetable pulp. The broken stalks and vines and mashed fruits gave off an odor that to Runstom just smelled like food, and it started to make him hungry. As they got closer to the body, his appetite vanished. The corpse was bloated and bruised. Purple and yellow flesh was only partially covered by the tatters of what was once clothing, maybe some kind of jumpsuit, uniformly gray in color.
“Looks like they got the worst of the decompression,” she said, her scanner already in hand. She stalked toward the corpse with morbid fascination.
Runstom took a step and suddenly found himself with one foot submerged in the muck. “Ah, goddammit,” he said, trying to pull his foot free. The weight of his jacket shifted and his other leg dropped, the mud reaching his knee. “Oh, come on.”
“Oh my,” Roxeen said, coming over to help him. She took his hand and pulled weakly, making no headway.
“Help me get this jacket off,” he said, struggling with one of the sleeves of his burden. “Porter’s not even here and I’m lugging this goddamn thing all over the place.”
“What’s Porter?” she asked as she helped him pull out of the sleeve.
“Detective Porter. The guy who is supposed to be watching through this goddamn camera on my head. The reason I’m dragging around an extra twenty kilos of weight here.”
They succeeded in getting the jacket off him, Roxeen pulling on it by one sleeve and falling backwards, dragging the equipment through the mud. After a few more minutes of fighting to get his feet out of the muck and fighting off her attempts to help, Runstom managed to curse and pull himself free.
A few minutes later, they were standing over the amorphous and splotched corpse. Patches of the yellowed skin were marked by uniform squares of red. Roxeen bent forward to run her scanner up and down the length of the body. “Yep,” she said with an unnecessary air of authority. “This one got the worst of it.”
She rattled off all the conditions already speculated by the lead med tech, and then some. Runstom looked up while she talked. He saw only blue-green sky. Despite the chaos surrounding them, the block was eerily calm. “The main venting doors are probably right above us somewhere. Why didn’t this guy just get sucked out onto the planet’s surface?”
“Oh yeah,” the med tech said thoughtfully as she stood up. “I think there are some kind of protective grates or something between the inner and outer doors.”
“That would explain the checkerboard effect,” he mumbled, giving the body one last look and then turning away.
“What’s a checkerboard?”
Runstom glared at the med tech. Her white face and large gray eyes were innocent and quizzical. “Forget it,” he mumbled. He’d only had his thirty-seventh birthday two months ago, but Roxeen’s alarming youth was making him feel old. Though it wasn’t entirely youth, he supposed. He tried not to let it get to him and instead looked back at the rest of the garden. “Let’s get out of this mud pit. I don’t see any more bodies.”
After slipping and sliding their way back out of the sludge, he set the jacket down on the avenue and made a meager attempt to clean it off. She wandered up and down the street looking for more residents while he cleaned. She didn’t find any, and once he got the jacket back on they set out to go house to house.
“So,” Roxeen said as they walked, pausing in that way when someone wants to broach a subject they’re not sure they should. “Where are you from, Officer Runstom?”
Runstom sighed wearily. “Do we really have to do the small talk thing right now? I’m not good at small talk.”
“Well, I was just …”
“I know you were just.” Runstom stopped and turned to face her. “It’s the green skin. Right?”
“Well,” she started, then frowned, dropping her gaze. “I’m sorry.”
“Look, you’ve got medical training, right? Don’t you understand? It’s the filters and stuff.” Runstom hated trying to explain why he was born with green skin. It was really more of a brownish-olive color, but compared to the stark white of a B-fourean like Roxeen, he was a green man. He didn’t really understand the science behind it either, and he was always trying to forget how much different it made him look from most others.
“Yes, the filters,” Roxeen said meekly. “The atmosphere combined with the radiation filters where we grow up make our skin favor different pigmentation during development.”
“Right, something like that,” Runstom mumbled, and he turned away and started walking again. “I’m space-born. You want to know where I’m from?” Roxeen didn’t answer. “Nowhere, that’s where. Born on a transport shuttle, somewhere between one ModPol outpost and another.” He trudged down the avenue and motioned her to follow him as he opened the door to the house on the corner. She stood there for a moment, clearly not content with the condensed version of his life story. She gave him a look he couldn’t quite read and then walked past him through the doorway.
He stood alone and scowled at nothing. She was just a kid, asking questions a kid would ask. Not only was she young, she was a B-fourean – a domer – living a sheltered life. He decided he’d better go easy on her and he took a deep breath.
Runstom looked up and down the avenue before following Roxeen into the residence. The whole block was a crime scene. It had to be the biggest crime scene in ModPol history, excepting incidents where entire spaceships had been destroyed, of course. He’d certainly never read about anything this big in the outpost’s library.
The first four houses shared similar scenes. Debris trailed out of the windows and doorways. Dishes, books, records, artwork, clothing, smaller pieces of furniture, and lots of unidentifiable bits of previously loved possessions. Each unit had a body, all of them dead. They all had managed to keep themselves from being sucked out of their houses, and didn’t have nearly as much of the bloat as the corpse in the garden had. The residents in those four units either died due to injury from flying debris or survived the windstorm long enough to suffocate. Only Roxeen’s scanner could tell the difference. She dutifully examined them with a morbid curiosity that made Runstom increasingly uncomfortable.
The fifth house was different. The damage inside the house seemed off somehow, but Runstom couldn’t put his finger on why. They didn’t find a body, just lots of broken glass, ceramics, and plastic. They dug around for a few minutes, just to be sure they didn’t overlook a corpse.
“What was that?” Roxeen said with a start as Runstom flipped over half a lounge chair.
“Huh? I dunno, just a chair, I guess.”
“No, shh!” She stood still for a moment, and he turned to give her an annoyed glare. “I heard something,” she whispered. Her eyes were wide with alarm.
“What?” he said in a hushed voice. He tried not to move for a moment as he listened.
“In the lavatory, I think.”
He looked at the bathroom door and stared in silence, straining to hear. He looked back at her, and shifted his weight around. He suddenly remembered that he was still wearing that damned, bulky jacket and Detective Porter had yet to remote in. He disconnected the CamCap from the port in the jacket and shrugged off the latter. He was about to take the helmet off too, but then had a sudden image of Porter trying to call in right at that moment. The last thing he wanted was a demerit, so he plugged the CamCap cable into the regulation Personal Mobile Device in the inside pocket of his ModPol uniform. The PMD had a weak transmitter on it that didn’t work well for a long distance up-link, but if Porter tried calling in, Runstom would at least know it and could just plug the CamCap back into the jacket real quick.
“I think there’s someone in there,” Roxeen said. She inched closer to the bathroom while Runstom messed around with his equipment.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “Don’t move.” He took a step toward the bathroom door, unclipping his holster and touching the butt of his gun. It suddenly occurred to him that if anyone were alive in there, he had no reason to suspect they were dangerous. He kept one finger on the gun anyway, and crept forward. Something about this house was ringing alarm bells in his head.
He got to the door and punched the release handle, but the door stuck firmly closed. Locked from the inside. Someone was definitely in there; whether they were still alive or not, he wasn’t sure. He broke the silence with a knock on the door.
“Anyone in there?” It was quiet for a moment, then he heard a distinct, thin cough from the other side. “Hello?” Runstom said, loudly now. “If you can hear me, can you hit the door lock?”
He heard no other sound. “Shit,” he muttered, pulling a multi-tool off his belt. He jammed the tool into the side of the door-handle mechanism, popping the safety latch. The panel fell away revealing the manual handle. He grabbed it and yanked the door sideways.
“Shit,” he repeated, unsure of how to react to the scene before his eyes. “I think we’ve got a live one here.”
The bathroom floor was red and wet with blood. Sitting on the floor, against the far wall, was a tall, red-skinned, red-haired man. His eyes lolled back in his head, but his chest moved ever so slightly, in and out, in and out. The slow motion mesmerized Runstom for a fraction of a second, and he pictured each corpse they’d examined, each a thing, an object to be scanned, but each of them had been more than that only a few hours ago. Each one had once been alive.
“Oh, my!” Roxeen breathed as she came up to the bathroom door. “He’s … he’s covered in blood!”
Runstom took a step forward as her words sunk in. He swallowed a few curses before finding the right response. “You don’t get outta the sub-domes much, do ya?” He looked at her, and she turned away from the body on the floor long enough to give Runstom a blank look. “He’s an off-worlder. Probably from Poligart, that big moon in the Sirius system. Or maybe Betelgeuse-3. That’s red skin,” he said, pointing to the man. “That’s blood,” he added, pointing to the floor.
Roxeen’s mouth moved a little, but she didn’t say anything. “Well, get over here!” he barked at her. “He’s still breathing, but I don’t know for how much longer.”
She stutter-stepped toward the red man on the floor, fumbling with her scanner. She knelt gingerly in the gooey, half-dry, red-brown plasma that covered the tiled floor, planting herself a few feet away from the resident as she stretched the scanning unit toward him. It began blinking and chirping all kinds of warnings and alarms. Runstom couldn’t use a med-scanner to save his life, but the device practically quivered with fear as it chattered on about fading vitals.
Liquid oozed out of the right side of the man’s mid-section, and Runstom and Roxeen both stared at the open wound dumbly. Runstom’s mind clumsily sifted through all the crime-scene procedures he’d been re-memorizing on the flight to B-4 as though there would be some rule or policy on how to handle the situation, something to tell him what to do. A gurgled cough came from the dying man, causing Runstom to throw aside the mental handbook and focus on the life slipping away from them in that moment. He lunged forward and put his hands on the open wound, applying pressure. He felt the goo of a QuikStik bandage. An open med-kit lay on the floor underneath the nearby counter. This guy had managed to partially close his wound, but not completely. The ragged way he was breathing and the agitation of the med-scanner led Runstom to guess there was probably a lot of damage somewhere on the inside.
“Can you do anything for him?” Runstom said, craning his neck to watch the red man’s face while keeping his hands on the wound. When the med tech didn’t reply, he looked at her. She stared through him with those big gray eyes. “Roxeen!” he shouted.
“They said they would all be dead,” she said softly. “They said there wouldn’t be anyone alive.”
“Yeah, well they were fucking wrong, Roxeen! This guy is breathing!”
The dying man coughed several times in succession. “Uhhhnnn.”
“Hey. Hey!” Runstom tried to look into the eyes rolling around in the red man’s head. “Hey, look at me! Help is here, you’re going to be okay.”
“Uhhhhnnn,” the man groaned. “Eh,” he coughed a strange sound like he was trying to speak. “Eh. Eh.”
“That’s it, talk to me.” Without taking his eyes off the man, Runstom spoke out of the side of his mouth at Roxeen. “Get another QuikStik, so we can close this wound. And we need some syn-plasma. He’s lost a lot of blood. Hey buddy – talk to me. Where are you from?”
