The body was thick and powerful, the low, sloping brow topped by a tangle of lank white blond hair. His complexion was very dark, though the features were not negroid. The blunt features held an expression of dull ferocity, fleshy lips peeled back over stumpy, discolored teeth, black glassy eyes wide and staring. He wore a one-piece coverall garment, a drab olive green in color where it was not black with blood.
Brigid shifted her light down to his feet. They were bare, small, callused an inch thick on the soles with nine long, under-curving toes on each one. The tenth toe was exceptionally long, nearly the length of the foot itself, projecting out at a forty-five-degree angle near the heel. It looked like a double-jointed thumb, topped by a yellow horny nail, caked with dirt to the cuticle.
Kane moved first, tentatively dropping to one knee beside the body, avoiding the blood. He gave the body a swift visual inspection. “Shot to death,” he said, unconsciously lowering his voice. “Nine millimeter, two rounds. One in the upper right thorax, the other straight through the pump.”
He dipped the tip of one gloved finger into the pool of dark scarlet. “Still wet. He didn’t die all that long ago.”
Picking up the corpse’s right arm by the sleeve, he waggled it, testing the elbow joint. It moved, though stiffly. “Rigor is just now setting in.”
Brigid inhaled a breath through her nostrils, then wished she hadn’t. The coppery tang of blood and the sulfur-ammonia stink of evacuated bowels and bladder made her stomach lurch.
“What do you estimate his time of death?” she asked, imitating Kane’s low tone. “Twelve, fourteen hours ago?”
He dropped the arm, and it landed in the blood with a splat. “A little more, maybe sixteen.”
Standing up, he performed a motion-detector circuit of the area beyond the doorway. No readings registered, so he stepped out in the corridor. Brigid followed him, fanning her microlight around. Small brass objects on the floor reflected the amber beam. Kane plucked one up, revolving it between thumb and forefinger.
“Shell casings,” he said with a note of grim surprise in his voice. “They’re 248 grain. Standard Magistrate Division issue.”
Brigid frowned. “Are you saying Magistrates chilled that… troll?”
Kane smiled crookedly. “Troll?”
She returned his smile, though wanly. “That’s what he reminds me of.”
Tilting his head back, Kane examined the upper walls and ceilings. He pointed to several small, flattened dark blobs, adhering to the vanadium alloy. “See the slugs? If Mags were the blastermen, their firing pattern was pretty damn wild.”
He silently counted the bullets impressed into the walls and ceiling. “At least two blasters, maybe three.”
Brigid stepped back, directing the beam of her light along and around the door frame, seeing the scars of ricochets. “Mags aren’t known for firing wild, are they?”
“Generally speaking,” admitted Kane, “no.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t Mags.”
“Think of how those Roamers were armed, with one-shot muzzle loaders. That kind of primitive fire-power is about the best anybody without a pipeline into a ville armory can manage. No, whoever hosed these bullets around used top-of-the line autoblasters.”
Brigid took another backward step. “Still”
Something squashed under her left foot, as if she had stepped in mud. Blurting wordlessly, she skipped forward, pulling her boot free with a slight sucking sound. Pointing her microlight down, she saw a viscous, two-inch layer of what appeared to be semiliquid obsidian. “What the hell is this?”
At the startled timbre of her voice, Kane took two long steps and gazed with mystified eyes at the gelatinous mass extending eight feet across the floor toward a bend in the wall. Lumps of the substance clung to the walls.
With a repellently moist, slithery sound, the black matter slowly re-formed around the impression Brigid’s boot had made.
“What is this shit?” Kane demanded, thrusting his head forward and sniffing the air. “Looks almost like tar, but it doesn’t smell.”
Brigid studied the protoplasm and felt the hair at the nape of her neck stir. With a detached sense of horror, she recognized rough human contours, elongated and very nearly liquefied.
Stretching out her arm full-length, she splashed the amber beam down the corridor and her breath caught in her throat. A body lay slumped on the floor, directly beneath a thick smear of the black substance. She whispered, “Look.”