Salvation полностью

That indistinct fog lingering on the victim’s chest was the cloud of filament. Alik knew that if he’d stuck his hand in it, his flesh would have been diced like gourmet burger meat. He couldn’t help glancing around nervously. If there were any breakaway strands drifting through the air—not unknown—inhaling one meant a slow, excruciating, and unstoppable death.

He let Shango capture the image through his tarsus lenses and stepped away quickly. Then he gave the dome a proper look as Shango pulled the dome’s specs and splashed them for him. The transparent dome itself was made from multiple layers. The two inner shells were artificial sapphire, followed by a meter of carbon-rich glass to absorb radiation, another sapphire layer, then a smaller radiation barrier, two layers of photon filters to make sure raw sunlight was kept at bay during the unremitting two-week-long lunar day, and a thermal layer to keep the heat in during the equally long night. Finally there was the outer abrasion layer of sapphire that takes all the hits from sand-grain-sized micrometeorites. If anything bigger came along—say pebble-sized—the inner layers would soak up the kinetic energy. They’d been known to leave a nasty streak that would need repairing, but anyone inside the dome could carry on sitting in the Jacuzzi in perfect safety. In fact, he’d seen statistics that put standing on one of Earth’s tropical beaches during the day more likely to kill you: sunstroke, long-term melanomas, tsunami, satellite falling on your head…

“Only one buzz shot fired,” Salovitz said. “So the killer was either remarkably cool, or very proficient. Our victim managed to get off two shots.”

Alik looked where the corpse was facing. There were two yellow tags glowing on the sapphire shell, which showed a broad spider web of impact cracks. “Je-zus, not even these bulled-up shotguns can puncture the dome?”

“No, the developers like to make sure their clients are safe.”

Alik focused on the victim again. “Anyone with a buzz gun tends to know what they’re doing,” he said thoughtfully. “So Mr. Shotgun here takes down the New York Broad, gets nasty on her head, then runs in here—”

“Chased by Buzz Gun Man,” Salovitz concluded. “That’s how we read it.”

“Okay, what’s next?”

“Next is where it gets interesting.”

Next was Mars, the western edge of the Olympus Mons caldera, roughly twenty-two kilometers above the lowland plains, where geology had spent the last hundred million years quietly rusting the world to its barren death. The room was one of hundreds in a fifty-story structure of identical rooms. Its glass wall was facing north. To the west was the endless gentle slope of the solar system’s largest volcano, spread out to the crystal-sharp horizon like an infinity plateau. You couldn’t actually see the Martian plains; they were too far away behind the flat, pale sky. But Alik knew the kind of status-whores who owned a room here didn’t care squat about that. They simply wanted The Summit.

Not that the rest of the view was too shabby. Two hundred meters away, the massive cliffs of the caldera wall gave a heroically vertiginous view out across the crater base—though that view was now partially blocked by the wide splash of solidified metal foam that had been sprayed over the big hole in the diamond molecule reinforced glass. Two mechez, like a mechanical spider-octopus hybrid, clung to the surface, their nozzles alert for any further outbreak of cracks.

Most of the furniture was missing, sucked through the rent before it was sealed. A tide line of mashed-up debris lay along the base of the window.

Keeping a wary eye on the foam metal, Alik edged up to the window and looked down. Fifty meters below, the ancient God of War’s ginger sands showed a smear-plume of fragments that had once been Lorenzo’s elegant antique Chinese ornaments. And a body.