Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Salovitz glanced back out again. Then, “Holy crap!”

  The footprints, which Alik had shown him, started at the stone balustrade and came toward the glass. One-way traffic.

  “They came in from next door,” Alik said. “Pulled some pretty fine techno-acrobat shit to zipwire across from the neighboring balcony.”

  “Okay,” Salovitz said. “I’ll get the precinct’s G7Turing to run checks on next door, ownership and access.”

  “Good. Have forensics prioritize the balcony. Those prints are filling with snow, and Christ knows how it screws residual traces.”

  “Sure.”

  He went out to find his partner, Detective Bietzk. Alik turned to Nikolai Kristjánsson, a member of the forensics team, who was busy directing a line of microdrones that resembled snails. A dozen of them were sliding slowly over the carpet around the corpse, their molecular sensors mapping the particles they encountered.

  Alik told his altme, Shango, to open a secure link to Kristjánsson. “Have you analyzed the bust yet?”

  The way Kristjánsson’s gaze slid away from him reminded Alik of ancient high school jock/nerd confrontations—all very secret agent tradecraft, which Kristjánsson probably got off on. “Not yet. They’ve got me scooping residuals to see who was here.”

  “I’m no expert, but maybe someone with a fuck-off shotgun? Get that equipment back to your lab and give me a report.”

  “It’s not easy—”

  “Do it.” Even from an angle, Alik could see Kristjánsson scowl. His official job was with the mayor’s Manhattan Forensic Agency, but friends of Alik’s Washington friends also had him on a retainer, which was why he’d been assigned to the case. Those same people had made it very clear to Alik that the attempted digital mischief was of immense importance. To them, the murders were an irrelevance. Glancing down at the blonde again, as the sheet was drawn back over her, Alik wasn’t so sure.

  The apartment was a portalhome, owned by Kravis Lorenzo, a named partner in Anaka, Devial, Mortalo & Lorenzo (that original Lorenzo was Kravis’s father), a very high-end New York legal firm. So high-end it was cleared for ultra-one Pentagon contracts, which was what drew Washington’s attention. Earlier that night someone had tried using the portalhome’s secure link to the legal firm’s office to try to bust extremely secure Defense Department files.

  Alik went out of the park view room through an ordinary door into the hubhall. It was a long oak-paneled cloister with nine portals, which were actually inside the Central Park West block apartment. Some of the doors simply led into old rooms like the kitchen, games nest, and utilities where the servicez are stored, as well as the New York entrance. The rest of the Lorenzo family house was widespread—on a whole solar system scale.

  Another pair of forensic agents were working the hubhall with a squadron of sensor-heavy drones, along with three ordinary cops. Salovitz was talking to his partner, Detective Bietzk. He turned back to Alik. “Okay, the precinct G7Turing went into City Hall records. The neighbor is Chen-tao Borrego. We called him, and he’s away in a Saskatchewan clinic undergoing telomere treatment. Been there ten days, due to remain for another two weeks. We’re getting confirmation from the clinic, but it seems legit.”

  “So his place is unoccupied?” Alik asked.

  “Yeah. A team’s going in now.”

  “Okay. What’s next?”

  The detective pointed at one of the portals. “The Moon.”

  Alik always found it weird stepping directly into a lower gravity field. His body tensed up the way it did when he screwed up a pass at some babe at the end of a too-long night spent partying. It was the wrong thing to do. That involuntary reflex pushed his toes down hard on the black parquet floor, and forward momentum left him gliding farther into the room.

  Lorenzo’s lunar room was a fifteen-meter dome in the Alphonsus Crater. Off to one side of him was a large, luxurious Jacuzzi, its bubbles fizzing away with low-gravity leisure. Various ficus plants were growing in Greek-style clay pots, their glossy leaves strangely bloated yet also elongated.

  Alik looked up, and there was Earth’s crescent directly overhead, shining with blue-white splendor. It was utterly captivating. Crazy, too, that it was 384,000 kilometers or one footstep away. He always thought some little part of the human brain rebelled against quantum spatial entanglement. People needed to have distance in their lives; 200,000 years of evolutionary instinct couldn’t be junked overnight.

  When he finally lowered his gaze, he saw dozens of identical domes scattered across the crater floor, just far enough apart so the interiors couldn’t be made out without magnification lenses. Half the resort facilities on the Moon were supposedly used for sex. Once Connexion started opening up the solar system, people soon found out that the so-called wonders of zero-gee sex, which overromantic futurology writers used to rave about, was a myth. They didn’t call the aircraft that early astronauts used for free-fall training flights the Vomit Comet for nothing. Low gee, however—that was a different matter.

  Lorenzo had certainly installed some very wide couches in his dome. One of them had red laser warning tape around it, glowing bright red. The cop who’d pulled the lunar duty gave Alik a respectful nod and said: “Stay at least two meters from the body, sir. The hazard disposal team is due in twenty minutes.”

  First guess on the corpse gave Alik an Italian American, or at least some kind of Mediterranean family heritage. His face was perfectly intact, as were his legs and hips. The chest was fuzzed by what appeared to be a thin gray mist. Underneath that, his torso was just a pile of so much red pulp. The blood pool on and around the couch was impressively big and congealing nicely. His arms were interesting; the buzz shot had taken them clean off his torso at the shoulder. One was on the couch, holding a custom-made stub-barrel auto-pump-action shotgun—which, judging from the eight-centimeter barrel diameter, Alik took to be the one used to take out the woman in the Central Park West room. A reasonable assumption, because this victim’s second arm was lying on the floor, a scalp still gripped in its fingers, the blond hair sponging up blood.

  “Buzz gun,” Alik said. The gun itself was nothing special, just an electromagnetic barrel to ensure the projectile accelerated smoothly. But the buzz rounds it fired were mildly unstable. They were made from incredibly tightly wound coils of monomolecule filament, which expanded outward on impact, so the target got to experience what it was like being sliced apart by ten thousand razor blades all traveling in different directions.

  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.

  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.

  That is truly a bitch of a way to die, Alik thought. Whoever blew a hole in the window clearly had no love for the victim he could see on the ground below him.

  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 was the sky. There were other moons and stars out there; they just didn’t register in the same way.

  He instinctively kissed a knuckle, which immediately made him angry with himself. You can take the boy out of Paris, Kentucky, without breaking sweat, but try taking the Southern Baptist out of the boy.

  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?”

  The master bedroom was in San Francisco, somewhere on Presidio Heights, looking down on the Golden Gate Bridge in the far distance. San Francisco was three hours behind New York, so the streetlights of that fine town were blazing bright into the night while the citizens headed for the Marina and Mission districts to start their revels. Looking at the bed, Alik started to appreciate Kravis and Rose Lorenzo’s privacy dogma. It was a broad circle with a black leather base, the gelfoam mattress covered in a sheet of royal-purple silk. The four posts were also leather clad, with several insect-eye cameras clustered around them like crystal tumors erupting through the padding. The ceiling above had a circular screen practically the same size as the mattress—that is, before a shotgun blast had reduced it to a rosette of glass daggers and a snow of shattered crystal across the sheets—and the wall behind the headboard (also black leather) sported a broad screen.

  Both the duty cops had opened the nightstand drawers to smirk at the pharmacological and electrical aids the Lorenzos took to their marital bed. When Alik and Salovitz came in, they quickly s
tood upright and studiously ignored the kinky treasure.

  Salovitz gestured, and the coroner’s sheet was pulled back. Body number four was another male, African, who had been hacked to death; the coup de grâce was a horizontal blow to the mouth, leaving the jaw hanging by a thin strip of skin. Judging from the size and depth of the wounds, Alik reckoned it was done by an axe rather than a machete, like a Viking on the rampage. There was another of the big shotguns beside him, identical to the one on the Moon.

  “So Hacked Off here was in the same crew as Mr. Shotgun,” Alik said. “And the boss is badging his guys with these bulled-up shotguns. Anyone like that operating out of New York?” Even as he asked, Shango was searching the FBI database for gangs who had adopted the model. Plenty of crews used them, but it wasn’t standard issue, more a symbol that you were no longer a foot soldier. The higher up the shitheap you crawled, the bigger your gun.

  “No,” Salovitz said.

  “But you’ve got to have a decent fabricator to produce one of these,” Alik continued. “For a start, the barrel will need forty-one, fifty ordnance steel at least.”

  “I know where you’re going,” Salovitz said. “And you can stop right there. New York doesn’t have fabrication substance permits outside of hazardous or toxic compounds.”

  Alik exhaled a martyred sigh. “The Twenty-Eighth?”

  “Yeah. It’s coming, and we’re ready for it like the progressives we truly are.”

  Like every FBI agent, Alik hated the Twenty-Eighth Amendment: the right for all US citizens to fabricate for themselves whatever they wish unless it endangers the life or liberty of others, or they seek to use it to overthrow the government. It hadn’t been fully ratified, but that was just a matter of time now. In his opinion, the AFA (American Fabrication Alliance) made the NRA look like a bunch of pussies when it came to strong-arming Washington. The outcome of Twenty-Eight was that any upright citizen could buy and use weapons-grade material as long as they did not utilize said material to fabricate a weapon. So Alliance members were free to sell whatever raw materials in whatever quantities they wanted. Individual states were already starting to incorporate Twenty-Eight into their legislation in anticipation. The result being in New York, you don’t need a permit for pretty much anything outside of uranium or nerve gas. Which made life an order of magnitude tougher for law enforcement. In Alik’s opinion, Twenty-Eight was storing up serious trouble for the near future, and all because midlevel politicians were money junkies in it for every wattdollar they could be bribed with.