“It’s been used as a dump since the mid — twentieth century,” said Dome. “Used to be on the northern-most boundary of the city... along some kind of ancient highway — G.T. Road, they used to call it, stands for Grand Trunk — and a bog or a lake called Bhalswa...”
While the modern Continuum had developed southwards, the northern dump had become a lawless, cancerous wasteland. Its residents were declared illegal squatters but were too numerous to be moved out by force. Rather than risk the disapproval of their international business partners, the government had chosen the alternative of maintaining the dump as a ZZ: a Zero Zone. They suppressed all information going in or coming out of the area while leaving the inhabitants severely isloated. In an operational sense, the sector did not exist.
“That’s the flare,” said Hem, pointing toward a flash of pink light that fountained up above the murk.
“Yes,” said Dome, “set me down there.”
He, like Hem, wore full-body protective armor. It was designed to protect the wearer against all foreseeable threats, mechanical or chemical. Hem positioned the transport above the locator flare as the mission commander descended from the transport on a steel cable attached to his suit.
The air had the consistency of thin gruel, stirred by the gale from the transport’s whirring rotor. Dome wondered, as the murk enfolded him, if his helmet’s air filter would be overwhelmed. It was equipped to process and neutralize gas attacks but not such dense concentrations of airborne particulate. He was trained to suppress all emotions and reactions, yet his nerves were twitching and a bead of sweat trickled down his forehead. He hated to acknowledge these signs of weakness, minor though they were.
Then his feet touched down and he went into a defensive crouch, automatically scanning and processing information.
On the ground, a taser.
Beside it, a body.
The taser’s handgrip glowed cherry-red in the heat scanner Dome wore as a monocle clipped to his visor, over his left eye. The red glow meant that the weapon had been handled very recently. Yet its muzzle appeared blue and cold in the heat scanner: Whatever the cause of death, it hadn’t come from this small weapon.
Visibility was low. Air unbreathable. Operational area flat, open, a circular clearing forty feet in diameter and — Ah.
There was someone else present. A man.
Dome straightened up, his movements slow and deliberate. Civilians were known to be nervous in the presence of the tall crisis-response officers in their gleaming body suits.
From the man’s string-vest, loose khaki shorts, and bare feet, Dome guessed that he was a resident of the Acres. Dress codes elsewhere in the city were as strict and formal as the building regulations, with low tolerance for bare skin. The man was short, wide, and wiry, his black hair close-cropped and his eyes set deep beneath a jutting brow. He was clearly unarmed and did not appear to be offering any threat.
He stared expressionlessly at Dome for a few seconds before shifting his gaze downwards, toward the body.
The space the two men were standing in was bounded by compacted mesas of garbage that rose steeply, perhaps three stories high. Every visible surface was the same mottled silvery-gray freckled with cerulean blue: thirty years’ worth of plastic bags, fused and solidified. Blue was the only color that did not fade. From the open area, pathways radiated between the mounds in five directions. Languid streamers of lime-green vapor seeped continuously from the ground, gradually merging into the mauve haze overhead.
The body looked flat and curiously two-dimensional, like something out of a police training demo, a corpse-icon painted onto the floor. It lay at 2 o’clock to the north pathway, its right arm angled over its head, left leg bent outward. The whole body was a uniform cola-brown in color, glittering slightly.
The shifting vapors made it difficult for Dome to see details. For instance, there appeared to be no obvious variations to suggest clothing, skin, or hair. Dome frowned and turned off the heat scanner to look again, but could not make sense of what he saw. From his belt he now unclipped the slender telescoping lance known in police circles as a “whisker.” Its tip was sensitive enough to provide chemical analyses of anything it was poked into. He pointed it toward the inert body, not yet touching it.
Dome tightened the focusing ring on his monocle. With the heat scanner turned off, he now saw that the figure was covered in a layer of some substance from head to foot. Still not making sense of what lay before him, the police agent extended the tip of his whisker toward the corpse’s right calf and tapped it.
Immediately, the glittering mantle that covered the body parted and drew back, as if alive.
It was alive.
Dome’s arm jerked back reflexively, the whisker twanging upwards.
The other man’s lips stretched wide, exposing his crooked teeth in a sly grin.
“Roaches,” he smirked. Clearly, he was amused to witness the agent’s discomfort. “The insects found him before anyone else.” He spoke in a mixture of dialects built upon a base of Hindi and Punjabi, instead of the mandatory Hinglish of urban dwellers across the nation.
Dome clenched his teeth and swallowed hard as a wave of nausea caught him unawares. A glimpse of raw red flesh had winked on and off for the instant that the blanket of insect bodies had parted. Not only was vomiting into a face mask physically dangerous to its wearer, but to show weakness in the presence of a mere civilian could result in the loss of one month’s pay: Police agents had to maintain their dignity under all circumstances.
“And it’s been here how long?” he asked finally, when he had control over his voice again. “The body, I mean.”
“Early morning,” said the other man. “Or anyway, that’s when it was noticed.”
Dome nodded, just as his body armor registered a movement behind him — He had no time to react.
Two, maybe three bodies hurled themselves at him, pinning him down. There were a couple of sharp grunts from the attackers as the suit attempted to repel them with shocks. But they wouldn’t be shaken off. Then, as quickly as it had started, the assault was over and Dome was soaring up and away, suspended from his umbilical cable, returning to the transport overhead.
He struggled briefly against the blackout that inevitably attended the conflict of pressures his body was subjected to as it rose. Then the void overtook him and he knew no more.
Three hours had passed since Dome and Hem had returned to the station. A detailed debriefing had been ordered.
“It was planned,” Dome insisted. “It must have been. I didn’t see any of the others — never got a chance. And the witness gave no indication whatsoever.”
He had already described the corpse. Obviously, it had just been a pretext to get him in place. In retrospect, the presence of only one resident in that open space, the relative silence in that teeming, congested colony, the staged presentation of the body — all of these had been transparent indications that a trap had been set up.
But for what?
Dome claimed that his attackers had made no effort to cut the cable that connected him to his transport. They had merely pinned him down for a few moments and then withdrawn. “They weren’t really trying. I can’t be sure but my impression was that they let me go — they fell away as soon as the copter began pulling up.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense.”
He’d returned to consciousness once Hem had reined him into the cockpit and secured him in his seat. Meanwhile, back at the station, a full alert had been sounded. Dome was rushed into quarantine and given a thorough physical examination during which he was anesthetized. Then he was coated in a thin layer of antibiotics and brought to a secure room for the debriefing, sealed into a clear plastic recovery bubble with its own air supply. He was told it was for his own protection.