He stared at the blank HV for a moment, as though if he looked pitiful enough the device would give him a break and put the game back on. It wasn’t long before his devotion to the Poligart Pioneers waned as the possibility of a new case edged its way into his thoughts. He reached over the side of the cot and pulled his boots on. It was easy to get sucked into a championship light-years away when there was nothing to do for weeks at a time, but a win for his favorite bombball team wasn’t worth a damn compared to a chance to work on a crime scene.
He sat alone in Briefing Bay 6 until the other three officers arrived and signed on to the mission computer. They grunted groggy greetings at each other and sat at the table in the center of the room, away from Runstom. The four of them were part of a crew of officers stationed at a remote base in the Barnard system. They were always on call, but rarely had much to do. Runstom looked at each of them briefly, but they seemed to avoid eye contact, instead involving themselves in some minor preoccupation. Susan Horowitz, her dark hair disheveled, sat there flipping through a magazine and was wearing loose, casual clothing meant for a workout, though she looked too relaxed to have come from the gym. Jared McManus was jittery as always, and his wiry, toned muscles twitched as he looked around the room with narrowed eyes, not focusing on anything in particular. George Halsey had at least bothered to put part of his uniform on, but he looked like he’d just gotten out of bed. The lanky, yellow-haired man stared into space, eyes and mouth both half open as if he were frozen at some point in the middle of a yawn.
It was warm in the briefing room and Runstom felt the urge to unbutton his vest, but he resisted it. He was determined not to feel even slightly embarrassed about being the only one of the four so eager to get to work that he put on the full standard-issue uniform. Instead, he took off his hat and set it on the table, letting the stubble on his head get some air.
After a few minutes of silence, Captain Inmont’s floating head appeared on the holo-vision unit at the front of the room.
“Officers”, crackled the holo-vid speakers. Inmont’s head wavered, interference causing her face to flex unnaturally and a little unnervingly. “We have a very serious incident on Barnard-4, in Gretel. That’s a sub-dome of the dome-city Blue Haven. Possible mass-homicide.”
“Captain,” Horowitz interrupted as she pulled her straight, black hair back into a pony tail. “Doesn’t Blue Haven have a local police force?”
“Yes, that’s correct. The Blue Haven police technically have jurisdiction over the sub-domes there, but they do not have the numbers to spare for an investigation outside the city proper. The ModPol contract with the Barnard-4 Planetary Defense Coalition puts this one in our jurisdiction.”
“Right-o,” Horowitz said, tipping back in her chair and scratching her belly with one hand.
“You will be assisting detectives Brutus and Porter on this one,” continued the virtual head of Captain Inmont. “We’ll need a strict—”
“Uh,” McManus interrupted, raising a hand. “Did you say ‘mass homicide’?”
“Yes, that’s right,” the head replied patiently. “And that’s another reason we’re being called in. The local PD never deals with this level of crime. Life Support failure on a complete block. That’s thirty-two residences. Four empty, twenty-one singles and seven couples. Five of those with a child. Forty people in total. We don’t know the actual body count yet, but since the incident happened at nocturnal block hours, it’s a possibility that we’re looking at forty victims.”
“Life Support failure?” McManus parroted, letting his hand drop, but only halfway. “Sounds like a job for engineers. Why are we looking at homicide?”
The captain sighed. Disdain wasn’t easy to transmit over a blurry remote visual, but somehow she managed. “LifSup engineers are already investigating, remotely,” she said slowly and deliberately. “They reported to us that the system log says someone executed a series of commands that simultaneously opened up the top-side inner and outer doors, overriding the airlock safety. Vented the atmosphere of the whole block in a matter of seconds.” She paused for a moment, as if waiting for another interruption. When none came, she finished. “The commands were executed from an operator console.”
The room stayed quiet for a few seconds, then Halsey piped up for the first time, as if the silence had woken him up. “So lemme get this straight,” he slurred sleepily. “Someone intentionally suffocated forty people?”
“Not just suffocated.” Stanford Runstom spoke before the captain could respond. “There must have been explosive decompression, too.”
“That’s right, Officer,” Inmont said. “Have you ever seen this kind of thing before?”
Despite the long periods of inactivity, Runstom had worked a few interesting cases here and there. Vandalism. Theft. And one time, a few years back, even a murder. But he easily spent more time in the outpost’s library poring over old cases than he did working on real, live cases. The library pastime was meant to be study, but it involved a fair bit of daydreaming as well. What would he have done on each case? Would he have caught the offenders? Would he have brought them to justice?
Runstom sat quietly for a moment. Forty potential murder victims. He was definitely going to miss the rest of the Sirius Series. “No,” he admitted in a low voice. “But there’s a first time for everything.”
They took a short-range cruiser from their precinct, located in the asteroid belt between Barnard-4 and Barnard-5, down to the surface of Barnard-4. The third and fourth planets of Barnard’s Star were the only rocks in the system deemed suitable for dome construction; which is to say, they lacked hospitable atmosphere, but they had gravities somewhere in the vicinity of ten meters per second squared, give or take, as well as minimal natural magnetic fields. Since B-4 was the primary client for their precinct, their station was in an orbit that paralleled the planet’s orbit pretty closely and they were coming out of subwarp to make their approach within a few hours.
The planet wasn’t much to look at. Runstom watched the surface scroll by on one of the tracking monitors as they descended through a landing trajectory. It was gray and lifeless, pock-marked with craters and nothing else, until the first city came into view. The habitable structures weren’t the first thing he saw, of course, but rather the massive atmospheric processors that protruded tube-like into the sky. He knew nothing of how they worked, other than by extracting minerals and liquids from deep under the surface, turning them into oxygen, water, and other useful things, and expelling byproducts into the airless vacuum that surrounded the complex. A kind of temporary atmosphere was created in that immediate space, a mix of toxic clouds and precipitation that boiled off in the lack of air pressure as it dissipated across the planet’s surface. It was this mess that began to haze into the monitors as the cruiser drew closer to its destination, and Runstom could only just make out the lights of the city below as they approached.
Mass murder. Murder of any kind was rare enough in the domes. Even other violent crimes such as assault, rape, destruction of property, and so on were lower than they’d ever been. He leaned away from the hazy lights of the screen and scratched the back of his neck, glancing around at the other officers as he did. They joked and bullshitted like they were going on an outing, but he could detect the tension behind their banter. None of them were prepared to deal with something like this. Runstom included himself in that thought, but somehow he imagined it may be worse for him because he couldn’t help but take it so seriously, more so than any of them. The others spent their lives floating from one day to the next, waiting for the next vacation, waiting for eventual retirement, but Runstom had always wanted more. He’d spent his whole life waiting for a case this big. And now that it was here, all he could think about was how terrible it was that so many lives were snuffed out