“She’s definitely good at that,” I agreed. “Wait a second—I want to check out the camera.”
“An effective bit of sabotage, was it not?” Emikai asked, pointing up at the monitor camera still angled toward the top of the dome. “I have only had a moment to study it, and insufficient time for a full examination.”
“We’ll want to find a ladder and do that sometime,” I said, craning my neck. “Any idea what was used to push it?”
“I do not see any obvious marks that would indicate the method,” Emikai said. “But from the stress lines on the metal gimbals, I believe it was done in a single, solid thrust instead of via several smaller ones.”
“That would make sense,” I said. “Standing here nudging the thing would be a little obvious.” I turned around to look at the far side of the dome and the corridor that led toward my quarters. “What about the other one?”
“It was removed completely,” Emikai said.
“That much I know,” I said. “I meant, why it was removed instead of simply pushed up like this one?”
Emikai shook his head. “That I cannot say. Though it surely would have been more difficult to remove than simply push out of line.”
“Unless the plan was to remove both of them, only some of their equipment failed,” I said. “And no one up in the security nexus monitor room noticed any of this?”
“As you must have noticed last night, the images on the displays rotate among many cameras and status boards,” Emikai said. “The patroller on duty would have first had to notice that the dome camera was misaligned.”
“Which he obviously didn’t.”
“Or he noticed and was unable to fix it,” Emikai went on. “It is likely the twisted gimbals would not permit a remote adjustment. In that case, a repair order would automatically be logged.”
“As I assume would also be the case with the camera that was suddenly missing,” I said, eyeing the remaining camera closely. “How soon after the orders were logged would there have been someone on the scene?”
“Normally within thirty minutes,” Emikai said. “In this case, of course, the murder of Tech Yleli intervened.”
I looked across the dome at Building Eight. “And now that the whole place has become a crime scene, I assume they’ll be left just the way they are. Conveniently leaving the whole dome unwatched.”
“Hardly that,” Emikai said. “I am told there have been extra patrollers assigned to the area.”
“Really?” I made a show of looking around. “Where?”
“I presume they are stationed inside the buildings,” Emikai said. But he was looking around, too, and he didn’t sound so sure anymore.
“I didn’t see any hanging around Building Eight,” I pointed out.
“Nor did I,” he conceded. “Perhaps I should call the security nexus and inquire.”
“That’ll only help if it’s an honest oversight,” I said. “Otherwise, all you’ll get will be more empty promises.”
“Let us see which,” he said, pulling out his comm.
I listened with half an ear while Emikai spoke to the controller, studying the twisted camera mount as I did so. A single, solid punch, Emikai and I had both concluded. But as Emikai had said, there was no sign of denting in any part of the mounting hardware. Whatever the tool was that our mystery man had used, he’d made sure its business end was well padded.
I looked back as Emikai put his comm away. “The controller agrees that the assigned patrollers have not taken their posts,” he said. “Other security matters took priority.”
“What other security matters?” I asked.
“He did not list them,” Emikai said. “But he has promised they will be here as quickly as possible.”
“Of course they will,” I growled.
Emikai eyed me closely. “We could examine the cameras and mounts now,” he suggested. “By the time we finish, the patrollers might be ready to return to their posts. Regardless, we could then allow the maintainers to replace the cameras and thus restore monitor service to the area.
“And Tech Yleli’s acquaintances?” I asked.
“We would speak with them after that.”
I chewed at my lip. I would definitely feel safer with Bayta in the middle of a milling group of genetically engineered Filly cops. But we also had a murder to investigate, and the sand was rapidly running out of our 24/24 hourglass. “No,” I said, coming abruptly to a decision. “Our first priority is to nail down the victim’s movements as quickly as we can, before anyone’s memory starts to fog up. Let’s go.”
Besides, I reminded myself firmly as we left the dome and headed down the corridor, the Shonkla-raa wanted Terese’s baby alive and unharmed. They wouldn’t try anything against Bayta here.
Surely they wouldn’t.
* * *
The foot traffic in the area around our quarters and Terese’s medical dome had always been rather on the sparse side. Not so elsewhere in the station. As Emikai and I took the elevator to the bullet train deck and headed outward, we found ourselves traveling amid Manhattan-level crowds of Fillies. Most of them gave us a quick glance as we passed, apparently impressed by the novelty of having a Human aboard Proteus, while other no doubt more cosmopolitan residents ignored us completely. In contrast, there was one couple aboard the bullet train who stared at me the entire time, whispering back and forth to each other. I felt more than a little relieved when we left the train and they went off in one direction while Emikai and I headed off the other.
Twenty decks down, we finally reached the late Tech Yleli’s neighborhood.
Up to now all my time on Proteus had been spent in the official and medical sections of the station, which also turned out to be the areas that had been photographed for the professionally prepared pamphlets and brochures I’d seen. Nowhere in any of those publications had I seen pictures of what the staff and worker residence areas looked like.
As we walked into Yleli’s community-center dome, I finally understood why.
It wasn’t that the center was squalid, or unkempt, or even unphotogenic. It was that it was so utterly alien.
For a long moment I just stood there at the archway leading into the dome, my mind spinning as I tried to take it all in. The curved dome surface caught my eye first: patterned with odd splotches of subtle color and an asymmetric pattern of clinging vines that climbed nearly to the top. Birds of some sort perched on the vines, and small creatures, half caterpillar and half slug, crawled slowly along both the vine network and the dome surface itself. Where Terese’s medical dome featured a calmness of blue sky and white clouds, the top of this dome was done in brilliant reds, yellows, and oranges, an image of flaming death that could have been either a representation of a volcanic explosion about to rain down on the landscape below or else a Filly interpretation of Dante’s hell.
The stores and parkland lying beneath the frozen waves of fire were no better. Buildings were buildings, I’d always assumed, with form following function and all that. But even given that purely practical basis, there was still something about the shops, community buildings, and meeting clusters that took me a long moment to wrap my mind around. The angles, textures, and perspective seemed to be at war with one another, leaving the sort of feeling I always got looking at an optical illusion and watching it go from a pair of faces to a vase and back again. Above the buildings were probably thirty helium-filled balloons of various sizes, shapes, and colors, arranged in three separate vertical levels as they circled the dome slowly in the air currents. Arranged on the ground outside their three-level circle was a ring of blazing torches, whose updrafts were apparently designed to keep the balloons contained within their proper flight area.
And then, as my brain finally got all the rest of it more or less sorted out, I focused for the first time on the Fillies themselves.