“They act more like fucking waiters than cops,” Horowitz said.
Runstom kept his mouth shut, but he had to agree. The pale-skinned B-fourean officers were trained to be the face of the dome government. The crime rate was so low, particularly in the sub-domes, that the cops really were there for PR more than anything else. Smile and make people feel welcome and protected, that’s what they were good at. Runstom wondered if he was feeling thankful for the local force’s incompetence. The truth of it was, if domer cops were any good at doing actual police-work, he’d always be stuck back at the outpost, perpetually orbiting a slow circle around Barnard’s Star, watching HV and reading about other people’s cases. He kept his somewhat inappropriate glass-half-full optimism to himself.
“Alright, listen up.” Detective Brutus’s voice came crackling out of the Remote Detective Unit that was wrapped around Halsey, who looked as uncomfortable in his gear as Runstom felt. “Everyone pair up with a med tech and take a quadrant. We’ll take this one. McManus, you take the Southwest. Horowitz, you take the Northeast. Runstom. Take a stroll through the garden and see if you can find any – Halsey! Check your CamCap. I can’t see anything.”
“Uh, okay, boss,” Halsey said, looking over his connections with clumsy motions.
McManus turned back toward the maintenance door. “Hey!” he shouted. “Can you guys switch it to daytime?”
The murmur of voices emanated from the other side of the doorway. After a minute or two, one of the operators croaked out of a hidden speaker. “Okay, here comes morning.”
The night sky started to lighten, and as it came into view, the dome seemed to flex and ripple like water. After another minute it was a brilliant, light blue-green hue, radiating light and illuminating the avenue and revealing dents and scratches on the residential units on the corner.
“What color clouds do ya want?”
“We don’t need any clouds!” McManus shouted. “Just leave it like this, that’s fine.” He looked at Halsey. “That better, Detective?”
“Huh?” Halsey blinked.
“Yeah, much better,” Detective Brutus’s voice crackled out of Halsey’s jacket. “Runstom!”
“Yes, sir?” Runstom turned to face Halsey.
“Go to the garden and check it out. I doubt you’ll find any survivors there, but make note of any bodies. Then go up to the Northwest quadrant.”
“Yes, sir,” Runstom said. Halsey seemed to be interested in something sticking out of a nearby yard and turned the CamCap away. “Um. Excuse me, sir. Detective.”
“What is it, Officer? Halsey, turn back around so I can see Runstom!”
Runstom motioned to the CamCap on his own head. “Detective Porter? He hasn’t connected yet.”
“What?” the speaker crackled before erupting into a sudden burst of static. “—wah—drant and look for bodies. Remember, warm or cold, make sure the med tech gets a full scan. Let’s move, people.”
Runstom looked at McManus and then Horowitz, hoping one of them would offer guidance without his asking for it. McManus ignored him, motioning to one of the med techs and then marching off. Horowitz slapped him on the shoulder. “Have a nice walk in the sweat-suit, Runny. You,” she said, pointing to a med tech. “Let’s go.”
Halsey was taking one of the other med techs into the nearby unit on the corner. Runstom looked at the remaining med tech; the one he thought was too young to be at a crime scene. She was a scrawny, pale girl with large beady eyes and thin, fidgeting fingers, and would have been a few inches taller than Runstom if not for her slouch. “Hi,” she said, sticking a cold hand into his. “I’m Roxeen.”
He shook her hand in one up-and-down motion and then pulled away. “Officer Stanford Runstom.” He shifted the weight of the jacket around, but it only seemed to make it worse. She peered at him as if he were a specimen under a microscope. “Alright, let’s go, Roxeen.”
The garden was a shambles. Ex-garden, really. All the plants had been sucked out of the ground. Half the irrigation system lay in a tangle of pipes in the middle of a nearby avenue. Somewhere in the center of the once-garden-muck was a yellowish blob.
“That’s a body,” Roxeen said, pointing to what Runstom was already looking at. “Let’s go scan it.”
He nodded, still looking at the body. They began trudging through the slimy mixture of dirt and vegetable pulp. The broken stalks and vines and mashed fruits gave off an odor that to Runstom just smelled like food, and it started to make him hungry. As they got closer to the body, his appetite vanished. The corpse was bloated and bruised. Purple and yellow flesh was only partially covered by the tatters of what was once clothing, maybe some kind of jumpsuit, uniformly gray in color.
“Looks like they got the worst of the decompression,” she said, her scanner already in hand. She stalked toward the corpse with morbid fascination.
Runstom took a step and suddenly found himself with one foot submerged in the muck. “Ah, goddammit,” he said, trying to pull his foot free. The weight of his jacket shifted and his other leg dropped, the mud reaching his knee. “Oh, come on.”
“Oh my,” Roxeen said, coming over to help him. She took his hand and pulled weakly, making no headway.
“Help me get this jacket off,” he said, struggling with one of the sleeves of his burden. “Porter’s not even here and I’m lugging this goddamn thing all over the place.”
“What’s Porter?” she asked as she helped him pull out of the sleeve.
“Detective Porter. The guy who is supposed to be watching through this goddamn camera on my head. The reason I’m dragging around an extra twenty kilos of weight here.”
They succeeded in getting the jacket off him, Roxeen pulling on it by one sleeve and falling backwards, dragging the equipment through the mud. After a few more minutes of fighting to get his feet out of the muck and fighting off her attempts to help, Runstom managed to curse and pull himself free.
A few minutes later, they were standing over the amorphous and splotched corpse. Patches of the yellowed skin were marked by uniform squares of red. Roxeen bent forward to run her scanner up and down the length of the body. “Yep,” she said with an unnecessary air of authority. “This one got the worst of it.”
She rattled off all the conditions already speculated by the lead med tech, and then some. Runstom looked up while she talked. He saw only blue-green sky. Despite the chaos surrounding them, the block was eerily calm. “The main venting doors are probably right above us somewhere. Why didn’t this guy just get sucked out onto the planet’s surface?”
“Oh yeah,” the med tech said thoughtfully as she stood up. “I think there are some kind of protective grates or something between the inner and outer doors.”
“That would explain the checkerboard effect,” he mumbled, giving the body one last look and then turning away.
“What’s a checkerboard?”
Runstom glared at the med tech. Her white face and large gray eyes were innocent and quizzical. “Forget it,” he mumbled. He’d only had his thirty-seventh birthday two months ago, but Roxeen’s alarming youth was making him feel old. Though it wasn’t entirely youth, he supposed. He tried not to let it get to him and instead looked back at the rest of the garden. “Let’s get out of this mud pit. I don’t see any more bodies.”
After slipping and sliding their way back out of the sludge, he set the jacket down on the avenue and made a meager attempt to clean it off. She wandered up and down the street looking for more residents while he cleaned. She didn’t find any, and once he got the jacket back on they set out to go house to