“What caused them?” Fuchs asked.
“Maybe when he fell down, inside his suit”
Fuchs scowled at her. “I’ve fallen down in a spacesuit. That doesn’t cause bruising.”
Cardenas nodded. “I know. I thought maybe he died of a cardiac infarction, a heart attack. That’s when I went for the scan,” she explained. “But the coronary arteries look clean and there’s no visible damage to the heart itself.”
Fuchs squinted at the image. A human body, he thought. One instant it’s alive, the next it’s dead. What happened to you, Ripley?
Amanda echoed his thoughts. “So what happened to him?”
Cardenas’s expression grew even tighter. “The next thing I looked for was a stroke. That’s still the number one killer, even back on Earth.”
“And?”
“Look at his brain.”
Fuchs peered at the wallscreen, but he didn’t know what was normal in these false-color images and what was not. He could make out the white outline of the skull and, within it, the pinkish mass of the man’s brain. Tangles of what he took to be blood vessels wrapped around the brain and into it, like a mass of tiny snakes writhing inside the skull.
“Do you see it?” Cardenas asked, her voice as sharp as a bayonet.
“No, I don’t see . . . wait a minute!” Fuchs noticed that while most of the brain was a light pink color, there was an area of deeper hue, almost a burnt orange, that ran straight through the brain mass, from front to back.
“That orange color?” he said, not certain of himself.
“That orange color,” Cardenas repeated, hard as ice.
“What is it?” Amanda asked.
“It’s what killed him,” said Cardenas. “Ruptured neurons and glial cells from the front of his skull to the back. It did as much damage as a bullet would, but it didn’t break the skin.”
“A micrometeor?” Fuchs blurted, knowing it was stupid even as his mouth said it.
Amanda objected, “But his suit wasn’t ruptured.”
“Whatever it was,” said Cardenas, “it went through the transparent plastic of his helmet, through his skin without damaging it, through the cranial bone, and pulped his brain cells.”
“Mein gott,” Fuchs muttered.
“I have two more bits of evidence,” Cardenas said, sounding more and more like a police investigator.
The wallscreen image changed to show Ripley’s dead face. Fuchs felt Amanda shudder beside him and reached out to hold her hand. Ripley’s eyes were open, his mouth agape, his milk-chocolate skin somehow paler than Fuchs remembered it. This is the face of death, he said silently. He almost shuddered himself.
Cardenas tapped her keyboard again and the image zoomed in on the area just above the bridge of Ripley’s nose.
“See that faint discoloration?” Cardenas asked.
Fuchs saw nothing unusual, but Amanda said, “Yes, just a tiny little circle. It looks . . . almost as if it had been charred a little.”
Cardenas nodded grimly. “One more piece of the puzzle.” She reached into her desk drawer.
Fuchs saw her pull out a thin strip of tape, not even ten centimeters long.
“This was stuck on Ripley’s right glove when he was found,” Cardenas said, handing the tape to Fuchs.
He stared at it. Hand-lettered on the tape in indelible ink was
BUCHANAN.
Coldly, mercilessly, Cardenas said, “Buchanan is a mechanic for Humphries Space Systems. He has access to tools such as hand lasers.”
“A hand laser?” Fuchs asked. “You think a hand laser killed Ripley?”
Cardenas said, “I got one from the HSS warehouse and tried it on my soysteak dinner. One picosecond blast ruptures the cells pretty much the way Ripley’s brain cells were destroyed.”
“Do you mean that this man Buchanan deliberately murdered Ripley?” Amanda asked, her voice faint with shock.
“That’s exactly what I mean,” said Cardenas, as hard and implacable as death itself.
CHAPTER 14
By the time he and Amanda got back to their own quarters, Fuchs was blazing with rage. He went straight to the closet by the minikitchen and started rummaging furiously through it.
“Lars, what are you going to do?”
“Murderers!” Fuchs snarled, pawing through the tools and gadgets stored on the closet shelves. “That’s what he’s brought here. Hired killers!”