Alik shuddered as best as his stiff flesh would allow as his mind ran through the sequence of what had happened. It was all so different from a faller on Earth. If you dropped a body off a fifty-meter-high balcony in standard gravity, all the coroner crew would be left with was mopping up the splat puddle. Impact would shatter every bone and split the skin open, leaving a gush of gore and shit to soak the sidewalk. On Mars, with its one-third Earth-standard gravity, the impact was different. The fall probably didn’t kill whoever had gone through the window. On a pain level, the landing would have been like taking a Saturday night mob beating, but he would still have been alive. In agony. And up on the summit, atmospheric pressure was seventy pascals, which to a human body was indistinguishable from zero. That had pulled the air right out of his lungs, leaving the exposed capillaries to rupture. The blood that vomited out in a boiling pink spume would also be sucked away, to spray in a slow-motion arc across the ground in front of his face before freezing in the minus fifty-five degrees centigrade climate, along with the rest of the victim’s body.
He had to give NYPD credit; there were already space-suited figures down there, recording the scene. They had a trollez with them. He just hoped they didn’t drop the corpse when they were loading it on. It would shatter like a drunk’s beer glass.
“It’s never the fall that kills you,” Alik murmured.
“It’s always the landing,” Salovitz finished.
Alik touched an uneasy finger on the foam metal, praying it wouldn’t give. “So what the fuck punched through this? Another buzz shot?”
“Armor-piercing round. Probably two or three. This diamond-reinforced glass is a tough mother. You got the dough to buy a room like this for your portalhome, and you get ball-backed guarantees that nothing can go wrong. Forensics picked up the chemical residue. Faint, because most of it got sucked out along with our guy down there, but the trace is positive.”
“And it is a guy?”
“Yeah. These two combatants exchanged a few shots in another room first, then ran in here. The one with the armor-piercing rounds must have hung back in the doorway and just aimed at the window. He didn’t need accuracy.”
“Which room was he in?”
“The dining room. It’s on Ganymede.”
The Ganymede room was a similar setup to the lunar one: a fifteen-meter dome, fully radiation proof, with a sunken stone table in the middle, and twenty black leather chairs around it, their backs reclined so you could always see the king of the gods a million kilometers above you.
Alik stood above the edge of the table pit and stared at Jupiter. It didn’t dominate the sky, it
He instinctively kissed a knuckle, which immediately made him angry with himself.
Salovitz was pointing at the lambent yellow tags sticking to the chairs and table. “Ordinary nine-millimeter rounds. The pattern indicates our guy on Mars was in the doorway, shooting in.” He turned and pointed to the red marker glowing low on the dome wall. It was sitting on an oval of foamed metal. The explosive-tipped round hadn’t penetrated all the layers that made up this dome, but the emergency systems clearly weren’t taking any chances. Three mechez were there on the side of the dome, ready in case the cracks started to multiply.
“The guy in here must have gotten cautious after that first shot. He didn’t fire any more,” Salovitz said.
“So cold Martian guy gets scared when the armor-piercing round gets fired in here,” Alik said, working the events through. “And ducks into Mars.”
“Pretty much.”
“Dumb thing to do. Are there internal security sensors?”
“No. People like the Lorenzos don’t like the idea of anyone being able to see what goes on inside their house. Someone hacks in, NYPD gets a warrant—all sorts of ways their privacy winds up as i-fodder. The block’s entrance down on Central Park West has more security than the pants on a goomah. Then there’s equally heavy security on the front door into the hubhall. It’s tough for anyone who ain’t on the list to get in. But once you’re inside, you’re totally private.”
“Okay.” He shifted his feet; the blob of foam metal was making him antsy. “Next?”