The detective inspector brought the police craft to a sharp halt on a small street. He'd taken them way down the far end of town, passed the spaceport, down where the main Strip was no longer a boulevard but an ordinary road leading through an ordinary industrial district.
The girls couldn't help noticing how the worn billboards and lack of eye-catching neon signs stood out in sharp contrast to the retina-slamming playground just a few miles back.
Cisterns loomed in the distance. Not far off the scattered prongs of an electric substation reached for the sky. Beyond all that, mountains. Then desert presumably, forever. The girls got out. The cruiser shut down and settled on the ground. A sudden rumble startled them. A freighter ship thundered past at low altitude.
"You guys nervous or something?" The detective made an impatient gesture.
"Just taking in the scenery," Zana said.
"Welcome to the business end of Toss Vague-Ass. Pretty different, huh? Consider yourself privileged." He headed for a set of doors.
"Not the vacation spot of choice," said Rivqua. "But oddly reassuring none the same."
They followed him into the low non-descript building. An old robot looked up from behind the desk. He, or she, hard to tell, that's how old it was, greeted them without a smile, for lack of servo strength it looked like.
"Identification of the body, Inspector?"
The detective nodded and leaned against the counter. The robot looked back down.
"What's that smell?" Zana asked.
"A whole concoction of carcass-prepping substances," replied the detective. "That and assorted lunches."
"Smells like baked beans."
One of the inspector's two heads chuckled. "You wouldn't believe what dead bodies are capable of in the first thirty-six hours, alien ones in particular."
A door slid open and the inspector led the way in.
"Wish you hadn't said that, Zana," Rivqua said, following him.
Tiled surfaces all around. Except the ceiling, which was a maze of ducts and pipes and tracks. An upside down robot hung from there, arms at the ready and a cold, narrow face, at the moment suspended over a long mound on a steel table.
"Getting a bit nervous now," Rivqua admitted, glancing at the detective.
"Okay, let's see him," he said to the robot, who whirred into action and lifted the sheet off the face. And there he was, Luffy Bing, face up, with a third eye on his forehead, his head resting in a patch of caked dark-green fluid.
No comments:
Post a Comment