This storm was nothing compared with that monster. According to the weather people it would envelop Petra for no more than two or three weeks before it blew past. But the Mayor had already made an appeal for calm, and the news channels were showing queues for food and dry goods, interviewing people who’d fled from outlying settlements in Idunn’s Valley, and fielding pundits who questioned the city’s resilience.
‘The only good thing,’ Marie said, ‘it will lock down everyone. Civilians and bad guys. And afterwards people will be too busy digging themselves out to get into any serious mischief.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ Alain said.
‘The last big storm we had, crime went down more than twenty per cent,’ Maria said.
‘And before it hits?’ Alain said. ‘We get an uptick in killings because gangs are out in force, supplying addicts and fighting each other over territory. Also in low-level crime, as addicts scramble for quick cash. Because while civilians are stocking up on canned goods and bottled water, shiners and meqheads are stocking up too. I tell you this, my friends: when the storm comes, we’ll be glad of the holiday.’
After Alain Bodin and Maria Espinosa were called into the autopsy suite, Vic and Skip waited in the hospital canteen for their turn, and caught up on paperwork. Vic had a court appearance in a couple of days, and went over his contemporaneous notes because the damn defence always liked to compare your version of the story with the perp’s. Skip took a phone call from one of the crime-scene techs: no useful traces on the victim’s clothes or skin; nylon and polyester-cotton fibres from two common brands of outdoor clothing caught in the wiregrass; a cast of tyre tracks that would be useful in identifying the van if it was ever found. He had also received a reply to the request he’d sent by q-phone to Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France. They were little miracles that fused human and Elder Culture technology, q-phones: paired handsets that shared entangled electrons whose quantum superposition enabled instantaneous transmission of information anywhere in the universe. The first q-phones had been as expensive as communication satellites, and using them to send an image had been like emptying a swimming pool through a straw; the second generation were no more costly than a villa in Bel Air and worked pretty much like regular phones. Skip had sent the images and passport details of John Redway and David Parsons, asking for further information. Now he told Vic that their passports appeared to be bogus, and there weren’t any records for Cybermat Technologies Inc at Companies House in London, or in the European Business Register.
‘Do you think these guys could be spooks? From MI5 or whatever?’
‘If they are, it would be MI6, the extraterrestrial section,’ Vic said. ‘And I hope to God they aren’t, because it would drop us in a world of shit.’
At last Skip was bleeped and they rode the freight elevator down to the basement. Outside the cutting room, the pathologist, Heather Ngu, told them that the deceased was a white European male who had been in good health when he died, with no tattoos, mods, or other identifying marks.
‘He broke his left wrist some years ago. There’s also an old healed fracture of his left tibia. Bloodwork showed no alcohol, no drugs. He wasn’t any kind of smoker. And the ratio of stable isotopes indicates that he had been eating food from Earth, rather than local stuff.’
‘We already know he and his mate just arrived on the shuttle,’ Skip said. ‘I checked with immigration.’
Vic said to Heather, ‘Was he circumcised?’
‘After we sewed him up we put him back in the freezer. But if you want to look, investigator, we can wheel him out for you.’
Heather Ngu was a brisk capable woman dressed in a blue smock, black hair pinned up under a blue cap. She and Vic had had a brief thing ten years back. Vic remembered that she’d liked to shower together before and drink brandy afterwards, lazy as a cat in what she called the afterglow. Oh man. Good times. Now she was married with two kids, and Vic was freshly divorced and living in an efficiency in one of the municipal apartment buildings.
She said, ‘I can reveal that his last meal was a hamburger.’
Skip asked what kind.
‘A cheeseburger, with fries.’
‘I mean was it a Big Mac or what?’
‘We’re good, but we can’t yet tell the difference between a half-digested Big Mac and a Whopper,’ Heather said.
‘What about the cause of death?’ Skip said.
‘There was some superficial bruising to the face and trunk, but no significant tissue damage. No fractures to the skull, no broken bones, no sign of blunt force trauma to the liver or other internal organs. No gunshot or knife wounds. But I did find something significant,’ Heather said, and paused.
She liked to build up to the big reveal. When she and Vic had had their thing, she’d been writing a novel, said that it would be the first novel about the early days of settling and exploring Mangala. Last he’d heard, she was still working on it.
Skip took the bait. ‘What kind of significant something?’
‘A burn at the base of the skull, just here,’ Heather said, touching the back of her neck. ‘A charred spot three millimetres in diameter. Small enough to miss, if you don’t know what you’re looking for.’
‘Like a cigarette burn?’
‘Not exactly. There was no entry wound, but there was a line of cauterisation extending through the brain. As if someone had rammed a thin and very hot wire through it. It pierced the hypothalamus and the right cerebral lobe. Death would have been instantaneous.’
She was looking at Vic, as if expecting him to respond.
It took him a few moments to make the connection. ‘The ray gun.’
Skip said, ‘You mean like an actual ray gun, or some kind of laser?’
Vic said, ‘We’re on a planet littered with Elder Culture shit. Why should you be surprised that someone found themselves a ray gun?’
Heather said, ‘There have been other victims with similar injuries. The weapon has not yet been identified. Something that fires a tightly focused high-energy beam. Like a very powerful laser, or a plasma or particle-beam weapon.’
Skip had a blank look, not understanding that he’d lucked out.
‘Four other victims,’ Vic said. ‘Redway is the fifth.’
Skip still didn’t see it.
Vic said, ‘What we should do now is find Alain Bodin, tell him the news.’
Skip said, ‘And why should we do that?’
‘Because he took the call on the first ray-gun murder,’ Vic said. ‘Which means all the others are his. Including Redway’s.’
9. Carbon-Based Life Form
London | 6 July
The police released Chloe after three hours, told her that they would escort her home. It was the kind of offer she couldn’t refuse, but after a brief argument she persuaded them to take her to Disruption Theory’s office instead of to her flat.
They gave her a ride in a police launch, banging up the centre of the river past embankments of construction coral and rakes of pontoon apartments and clusters of houseboats. She called Daniel and told him she was okay.
‘How were the police? Did they treat you all right?’
‘They interviewed me and let me go. Right now they’re bringing me back to the office. In, guess what, a police launch.’
She was hunched over her phone on the bench seat behind the helmsman and a policewoman, earbuds plugged in, speaking close to the screen. Her hands trembling ever so slightly. Spray gusting over her as the launch passed under Blackfriars Bridge.