Something Coming Through

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.

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.’