People were jabbering into phones, taking photos, putting on spex. Someone was stupidly calling for a doctor. Someone else was shouting about death to aliens, long live the Human Resistance. It was the assassin, raving at the cameras aimed towards him as the security guards dragged him away. Chloe saw Daniel Rosenblaum hunched over in his seat, one finger in his ear as he talked urgently into his phone, saw Ram Varma snapping on a pair of vinyl gloves, saw him kneel by the collapsed tracksuit and unscrew the cap from a bottle of mineral water and scoop something from the floor.
8. Actual Ray Gun
Mangala | 25 July
The next morning, the start of their shift, Vic met Skip Williams at the city morgue in the main hospital. Skip had already put David Parsons on the watch list and distributed his description and photo to the day briefings, applied for a trace on transactions involving his company account credit card, and phoned around the city’s hotels. No luck so far: either Parsons had gone to ground or he was in a shallow grave somewhere out in the playa. And now they had to wait for John Redway’s body to take its turn on the table. Three mutilated bodies had been found in an empty house at the edge of Junktown, a slaughter related to an ongoing turf war between rival gangs over control of marijuana growups. And because the Mayor had made control of drugs a major plank in his re-election campaign, the case took precedence over everything else.
In the opinion of Alain Bodin, the investigator who’d caught the triple, things were going to hell.
‘I can’t work out if it’s because we have let the bad guys get away with it, or if there is something in the magnetic field of this goddamned planet.’
‘If there was, you and me would have gone crazy long ago,’ Vic said.
They were standing on the morgue’s loading dock, drinking coffee out of cardboard cups while Alain and his partner, Maria Espinosa, waited for the three bodies to be prepped.
‘Maybe we did.’ Alain, a stocky man with close-cropped iron-grey hair and a blunt, belligerent manner, was a veteran like Vic, come up on the fourth shuttle flight. ‘But immigrants these days, they’re definitely crazier. Mad and bad in a way they weren’t, back in the beginning.’
‘When did we start calling them immigrants?’ Maria said.
Alain ignored her, telling Vic, ‘That case last year, the guy who killed women and kept them in his basement. He’d been here, what, a year? You come out to a new world, you have a chance at a new life, to make yourself over, and you do that. Tell me it isn’t the definition of a new kind of crazy.’
‘Well, we didn’t have basements back then,’ Vic said.
‘That’s right,’ Alain said, very serious. ‘We had to make everything we needed. Now you can just buy it. Or steal it. Kids come up with just the clothes on their backs, tattoos, rings in their ears and noses and who knows where else. What are they going to do here? Strike out for the territories? No, they do what they were doing back on Earth. They do drugs and steal to maintain their habit, or they sell drugs and kill each other over territory.’
‘They’re different, no doubt,’ Vic said, beginning to tire of the conversation, aware that Skip was watching the to-and-fro as if it was a tennis match.
But Alain wouldn’t let it go. ‘Back then, we were too busy growing the city. Now things are pretty much like they are on Earth, so we get the same kind of problems as any city back home. You ask me, they should think about restricting the lottery. Screening out people with a criminal record — there’s something that would ease our troubles.’
‘But if you start doing that,’ Skip said, ‘where would you stop? Next thing you know, governments would only let people who voted for them come up.’
Alain said to Vic, ‘You see what I mean about the quality of immigrants these days?’
Skip stood his ground. ‘Or let’s turn your idea around. Suppose they decided to send only criminals?’
Alain spat over the rail of the dock. ‘As far as I’m concerned it wouldn’t make much difference.’
‘Alain misses the frontier life,’ Maria said. ‘When men were men, women knew their place, and the bad guys wore black hats for ease of identification.’
‘Just thirteen years ago,’ Alain Bodin said. ‘How did we go so wrong so fast?’
Maria turned the conversation to the dust storm, saying to Vic, ‘You were here for the Big Blow. They say this one could be bigger.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Vic said. ‘But I guess it has room to grow.’
The storm was rolling eastward around the northern hemisphere. Forecasters reckoned that it would sweep across Idunn’s Valley in five or six days; a few days later, it would reach Petra. The news channels were showing video clips shot by a survey plane. A tawny cliff rearing kilometres into the sky, with tawny clouds rolling at its feet. Dust devils whirling across stony plains like crazed ballroom dancers, leaving black tracks scribbled on red ground, red dunes. Flickers of dry lightning. Portents.
‘They cleared out the courtroom jail yesterday,’ Alain said. ‘Put bunk beds in the cells for when we go to emergency duty. Man, if I can’t get home, I sleep at my desk.’
‘I have an air mattress,’ Maria said.
‘We should get in food,’ Alain said. ‘Wine too. Get it before the supermarkets are stripped.’
Skip said, ‘There are already big queues everywhere.’
Alain nodded. ‘We go straight from Landing Day into crisis mode. One thing, we will make good money on the overtime.’
‘We tried to buy some plastic sheeting,’ Skip said. ‘All gone. Hardboard too.’
‘I suppose you’ve never seen a storm before,’ Maria said.
‘A little one, in the Valley,’ Skip said. ‘Everyone has been saying we’re overdue a monster. I guess this is it.’
‘Seal the edges of every window that opens with mastic. Every door too, but one. You have a chimney? If you cannot cap it,’ Alain said, ‘put a balloon up it.’
‘There was a fist fight in the supermarket yesterday,’ Skip said. ‘I had to wade into the middle of it. Two guys duking it out over the last bags of rice.’
‘Get canned food,’ Alain said. ‘Dry food needs too much water. And if the power goes, you can heat cans over a camping stove. Or eat it cold.’
Vic listened to them talk, remembering the Big Blow. Two years after the first shuttle flight had arrived on Mangala. He remembered having to wear a respirator and hooded coveralls to go outside, remembered the dim light, the fog of dust thickening in every direction. Remembered navigating the rudimentary streets of the city by using lines strung between buildings. More than a hundred people had managed to get lost and die before they could find their way back to shelter. There had been a rash of suicides. He remembered the devil’s itch of dust in every crevice of his body, the iron taste of it, the grit between his teeth in every mouthful of food. None of the buildings had been completely sealed. If you left a glass of water out for ten minutes a faint scum would bloom on its meniscus. Every surface coated in red powder.
The Big Blow hadn’t been a local dust storm, like the one coming in: it had blanketed the entire planet for two sidereal years, a shade over sixty-two days. One day-year, one night-year. Polytunnels and greenhouses had collapsed under the weight of settled dust; eighty per cent of the crops had been lost. There’d been rationing, several murders over hoarding, a rumour about cannibalism in a stranded road crew. Everyone in the new colony had relied on food supplied by the shuttle, which had not been affected by the storm, arriving and leaving on schedule, as indifferent as God to the works of nature and man.