Down These Mean Streets

by Larry Correia, Kacey Ezell

Genres: Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections; Fantasy Anthologies & Collections

Synopsis

NEW FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION STORIES WITH A HARDBOILED NOIR TWIST—FOCUSING ON THE MEAN STREETS OF THE CITY

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” —Raymond Chandler

Humans have always been fascinated by darkness. Especially the darkness of a city at night, when the black sky is made ever more inky by the pools of illumination dropped under streetlights. We harken to the sound of streetcars in the distance. We are drawn to the garish flash of club signs and marquees. We love the danger of shadowed alleyways, of wealth and poverty living side by side.

We love the city. It’s a part of us.

Whether the mean streets be in an alternate past charmed with dark magic or the dirty alleyways of futuristic crowded space stations, the city—and its darkened streets—will always fascinate us. Here then, an anthology of all new stories of science fiction and fantasy with a hardboiled noir twist that acknowledge that the city is a living, breathing entity…and it isn’t always on our side.

Stories by: Laurell K. Hamilton, Larry Correia, Kacey Ezell, Mike Massa, Steve Diamond, Robert E. Hampson, Chris Kennedy, Marisa Wolf, Griffin Barber, Robert Buettner, Hinkley Correia, Casey Moores, Patrick M. Tracy, and Dan Willis.

Release date: January 2, 2024

Publisher: Baen

Print pages: 400

Sample

Ophir Chasma

Kacey Ezell

 

On my way home from work, a dead girl beckoned to me.

The partially dried red-brown stains all over the once-white sheet wrapped around her made it clear: she was dead. Carved up like the expensive real meat roasts they served over on Olympus Mons. Dumped in an alley in the light-poor slums of Ophir, with only one white hand falling free, fingers gracefully curving in a grotesque “come hither” gesture frozen in time.

Gods and Science, I can be morose sometimes.

Anyway, I was on my way home from a long sol in the security office. It was late enough that I seriously considered pretending I hadn’t seen her there . . . but there are kids that live in my neighborhood, trashy as it has become.

So I blinked open my HUD with a sigh and made the call back to work.

“Ares Group Security Ophir . . . Deselle, what in Terra’s name—? You’re off duty! I just watched your sorry ass walk out of here.”

“Checking me out, Brinz?” I asked the desk sergeant. Brinz was a good guy, if a bit more garrulous than I’d like.

“If you’re looking for a booty call, sorry, man. You’re not my type.”

“Likewise. Nope. Found a body. Female, young adult from what I can tell. Looks like it was dumped here.”

“Why you calling me? Call Sanitation. They’ll have someone come pick her up in a sol or two. Ain’t that some static? Two stinking sols! Them crews are overwhelmed with the damn refugees—”

“Brinz, this one’s a homicide.”

Brinz got real quiet, the tired annoyance in his eyes sharpening to something approaching interest. “You sure?”

“Pretty sure. She’s wrapped up in a sheet, but that amount of blood don’t get outside the body without some help, if you know what I mean. Can you put in a call to Dr. Kabeya?”

“Yeah, sure. You want a team?”

“Don’t think so. I’ll hang out here till Doc’s drones show, though. I don’t know how long she’s been out here, but at least I can keep anyone else from messing with her.”

“Take some pictures.”

“Got it.” Irritation bubbled up within me. I did know the protocol. I was a detective, after all.

“All right, Deselle. You sure you’re good?”

“Yep. Call the doc.” I cut the connection with a shake of my head before Brinz could get any further up my ass about how to do my job. Then I glanced around at the empty street and stepped into the shadows between the buildings.

✧ ✧ ✧

She’d been dumped most of the way in the alley, wedged between an ancient recycler that hadn’t worked in years and the pile of trash and debris that had accumulated next to it. I’d noticed her hand, because it had fallen out of the twisted sheet and into the rectangular slash of light shining down from the vehicle separation system out in the middle of the street. If not for that, she would have looked like just another piece of garbage.

Anger sparked deep in my gut at that thought. I shoved it away and squatted down to look closer.

Nothing remarkable about the sheet upon first glance, though I blinked several times to viewcap what I saw. The tiny blue file icon that appeared in my HUD told me that Brinz had quit worrying about my job long enough to do his, and opened a report. My neural transmitter would automatically send the viewcaps to the file stored in Security’s hardened evidence servers.

Other than whatever had soaked into and through the sheet, there wasn’t much blood. Not killed here then. I leaned closer to peer at the frayed edge

of the sheet, even clicking my index fingernail to illuminate the potent, tiny LED embedded there. I also pulled my knife out of my boot and flipped it open. I liked my knife. It had a monomolecular blade that would cut through just about anything, given enough time. It had a perpetually sharp edge, and it worked well for touching things I didn’t want to contaminate. I used it to lift a corner of the sheet into my fingerlight’s glow.

It looked like a standard-issue bedding sheet. Corporate gave out thousands of these to the Terran refugees lucky enough to be assigned quarters here on Mars.

A refugee from Earth, then? Maybe. Too bad that didn’t narrow it down much. Refugees were everywhere in the Valles Marineris complex. Corporate discarded them here so they didn’t have to worry about them cluttering up the ritzier enclosures on the northern plains or on Olympus Mons.

A slow ache behind my ears built to a high, buzzing whine. I looked up to see a squad of retrieval drones winging down from the faintly shimmering barrier of the enclosure toward me. I straightened up from my crouch and looked at the lead drone, letting it scan my retina and use that to home in on my location. A flash in my HUD indicated an incoming call.

“Hey, Doc,” I said, pushing away the tiny thrill that always ran through me when Dr. Alisa Kabeya’s face appeared in my vision.

“Gav,” she said, her voice smoky and rough with sleep. “What have you got?”

“Female vic, age indeterminate, but at a glance I’d say younger than fifteen—thirty Terran. She’s wrapped up tight in a blood-soaked sheet. Standard corporate issue, by the way. Don’t know how much of the blood is hers, but there isn’t much on the ground around her.”

“Dumped?”

“Most likely. Maybe a domestic that got out of hand, something like that.”

“Hmmm.” Alisa didn’t look convinced, her eyes narrowing slightly. “Are you ready to turn over custody?”

“Yep,” I said, stepping to the side to allow her drones to fly over the body and position themselves to retrieve her. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen this procedure done, but it never ceased to amaze me how the drones would encase the body in a thick, impervious shell, and then use their magnetic tractors to lift the shell up past all of the inhabited parts of the enclosure and enter one of the three airlock levels above our heads. Once in airlock, they’d fly the body to the location of Alisa’s lab, and then reenter the enclosure at the nearest access point.

That was why the morgue was one of the top level-structures within the chasma . . . up there with the regional corporate headquarters, the executive living suites, and the odd luxury goods distribution center. It always struck me as funny that the morgue had one of the best views in the chasma, but there you have it. 

“Thanks, Gav,” Alisa said, her eyes already looking down at something in front of her.

“Wait!” I said, not really sure why. “Before you go . . . keep me updated, will you?”

“Why?” Her eyebrows furrowed in puzzlement, but I refused to think about how cute that made her look. She was a brilliant woman, a selfless doctor who took care of a huge chunk of the chasma’s population with her intense competence. “Cute” didn’t do her justice.

“Because . . . well, I guess it’s my case. I called it in. I took viewcaps.” Gods and Science, I sounded like a moron.

“If it’s your case, you’ll have my report solmorrow or the next sol,” Alisa said. I couldn’t read anything into her tone. She sounded perfectly neutral. As usual.

“Yeah, well, thanks.”

“Get some rest, Gav,” she said, and cut the connection.

“Thanks,” I said again, speaking to my now empty HUD. With a sigh, I turned and started walking back along the street toward my quarters.

✧ ✧ ✧

I don’t remember most of the rest of the walk back home. My feet trod the red-veined streets by rote memory and climbed the narrow metal staircase to my door while my mind went back through the details of the dump scene. I almost went so far as to call up my viewcaps and study them, but I didn’t want to run smack into someone coming the other way just because I was staring at images of a dead girl.

“Hey, Deselle!”

My neighbor’s soft, cheery greeting pulled me from my reverie. I blinked away my HUD and turned to nod in her direction. Timea Vang lived with her adolescent son next door, even though she couldn’t have been much older than thirteen. Or in her mid-twenties, by the old Terran reckoning, since she was born there. I think her son—a Mars native, like me—was around six or so. Right in that sullen time of life when neighborhood kids either started getting in trouble, or started figuring out how to get out of the neighborhood. So far as I could tell, Dane seemed like a good kid, but it was an uphill road. Especially when your mom was a Joygirl.

“Hi, Timea,”

I said, as soon as I recognized the beginnings of worry in her wide-set, green eyes. “Sorry, I’m a little out of it tonight. What’s going on?” I reached for the print-plate on my door, but then paused as a thought swept through me like a red dust storm.

Had the vic been a Joygirl?

I don’t know why I thought of it, but in my head, it fit. Joygirls and Joyboys were an accepted, almost ubiquitous part of life here in Ophir. They existed on every level of society, even gracing the arms of the corporate oligarchs who pulled the strings that bound our daily lives. Lots of refugees went that route, too. It was honest work, insofar as it went, though the licensing fees and annual exams were exorbitant. For poorer Joygirls like Timea, it meant they either found a rich patron, or they joined a pimp’s stable. I’d never yet met a pimp who treated their Joygirls or -boys well. But I suppose there could be one out there.

Somewhere.

“Headed out to an appointment?” I asked, keeping my voice casual. Timea, who had started to turn away to head toward the stairs, turned back and gave me a puzzled-looking smile.

“Not exactly. I mean, I don’t have anything on the books, but . . . ” She waved a hand, tilting her blonde head to the side as she studied me. I could almost hear her wondering if I wanted to engage her services. I wondered if she wanted me to.

“Dane inside?” I asked, jerking my head at her door. She nodded, and took a tentative step toward me.

“We could go to your place,” she said softly.

“Why don’t you just take the night off?”

“Excuse me?” She stepped toward me, letting her hips sway as she reached her hands for my chest. I had to give it to her, she was good. I’d bet if she didn’t have Dane to worry about, Timea could have been one of the big-time Joygirls with some fat-cat patron paying her way. But she was a good mom, and devoted to her son’s welfare and education. No client would ever come before Dane’s needs, and so Timea toiled away down here in the gutter with the less-skilled and more chemically altered segment of her colleagues.

I caught her hands and pulled them down, holding them between us as a barrier so she couldn’t press up against me.

“I’ll pay you for the night. I got a little cash. Just take the night off and hang out with Dane, willya? It would make me happy.”

She shook her head, smiling a little, as if she didn’t understand.

“I don’t— I’m not asking—”

“I know you’re not,” I said, my voice going a bit rough. The image of the dead girl’s hand, white in the light from the street, floated behind my eyes. “But if I’m the client, I get what I want, right? I want to know that you’re safe at home with your son tonight. Got it?”

Timea swallowed, and dropped her hands.

“All right.” She took one tentative step back away from me, and then another. I stood there, watching, until she held her hand over her print-plate and the door to her quarters slid open.

“Check your balance when you get inside,” I said. I blinked my HUD back into existence and started the process of transferring the appropriate amount of currency over. “You’ll get half now, half in the morning if you haven’t left. Goodnight, Timea.”

“Goodnight, Deselle.” Her voice got faint as her door slid shut.

I let out a sigh and waved my hand over my own print-plate, then walked into my excruciatingly empty apartment and let the door close behind me.

✧ ✧ ✧

For a few sols, I tried to forget about the dead girl and go on about my job.

Leadership assigned the case to someone else, which disappointed, but didn’t really surprise me. Our corporate overlords had metrics and algorithms and other such red dust they used to “maximize efficiency of output”. Theoretically, Ophir Security leadership used these “tools” to calculate the security officer with the best experience and least current workload for the job. In reality, assignments dropped completely randomly, with no rhyme or reason I could figure.

So when I didn’t hear anything more about it the next sol, I shrugged and went on about my business—which mostly consisted of shaking down pimps who were late on their licensing fees and tracking down unsanctioned pharma sellers. I was able to keep my head down and my nose firmly in my own lane until I overheard one of the other security officers say something about getting a report back from the morgue.

“Is that the Jane Doe from four sols ago?” I asked, unable to keep my head from snapping up in interest. My colleague—Dexlin Vomero, good detective, if a little short on people skills—stopped in her tracks and frowned at me.

“What’s it to ya, Gav?” she asked, jutting her chin upward as if to compensate for her lack of height. She’d been born on Terra, and Corporate had moved her family here when she was an adolescent. So she was shorter and denser than most of us natives.

“I called her in. Did Doc Kabeya come back with a report?”

“On a Jane Doe? How the fuck should I know? I’m working the thing with Security over in Melas. A former executive who went on the lam was spotted and killed, and Melas requested help tracking down his contacts.”

“Ah. Corporate cleanup, got it.”

“Better than stalking some dead Jane Doe. Why’s it interest you?”

“I found the body.”

“So?”

I shrugged. Truth was, I couldn’t really explain it myself. But something about seeing her dumped that way had unsettled me and triggered the part of my brain that always wanted to know more.

Dexlin returned my shrug. “Well,” she said as she started walking again. “Good luck, I guess.”

“You too.”

I turned my attention back to my terminal and tried to focus on the licensing records I was currently cross-referencing . . . but I couldn’t settle. With a blink, I called up one of my locally saved viewcaps

of the dump scene and studied it, just as I had for the last several nights. I don’t know what I thought I’d find, but I couldn’t seem to help myself.

“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath, and tapped out a command on my terminal. It had been a few sols. Surely Doc had finished her autopsy report by now. It should’ve been linked to the preliminary report I’d filed. As the initiating officer, I probably still had access . . . 

No File Found.

Wait. That wasn’t right. I typed in the query again, making sure to correctly input the time and date stamp, as well as my identification key as the initiating officer.

No File Found.

I sat back in my chair, eyes locked on the terminal readout. I tried again to access the information through my HUD, but with no better results.

The report I’d filed was gone. I wasn’t just locked out of it because it had been assigned elsewhere . . . it didn’t exist.

“Deselle!”

My supervisor’s voice echoed through the narrow gallery that was our office. I pushed myself up to my feet as Vega approached, his long-fingered hands smoothing his sandy hair back into its perfectly coiffed place. Vega Rubilard was the son of a corporate executive and therefore one of the young darlings of the Security Service. He’d been a detective junior to me a year ago, and now supervised our whole department. In another year or two, he’d be gone, moving up to the district level or taking on some other higher-level post and some other hotshot kid with the right pedigree would be sitting in his place.

I just hoped that next hotshot had less of a tendency to whine than Vega did.

“Vega,” I said, deliberately not using his surname or title.

He stopped and frowned. “Desellle,” he said, and sure enough, he drew the word out like a toddler protesting the removal of their favorite toy. “You know you shouldn’t use my first name anymooore!”

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just hard when we were such good buddies.” We weren’t, but that was Vega’s weak spot. He desperately wanted to be liked and accepted by the rank-and-file.

“I know,” he said, reaching out to pat my shoulder. His fingers felt warm and sweaty, even through the fabric of my shirt. “But rules are rules, hey? Just try to remember. Now listen, I’ve got a pile of license enforcements for you, with more where those came from if you don’t start working on your own cases and quit sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

I didn’t even pretend not to know what he was talking about.

“Sure,” I said. “I know, it’s not my case. I was just following up out of curiosity. But Vega, something is weird. The file is gone, my report and everything. Like it never existed.”

“The Jane Doe you found was handed over to another detective who closed the case,” Vega said, his voice climbing an octave and going from whiny to pleading. “We don’t leave closed cases lying around. They

 clutter up the databases.”

“But there should at least be a closure summary—”

“Deselle. I am your boss. I am telling you to drop it. She was just another dead whore.”

He wasn’t telling me, he was begging me to drop it. I swear I could see tears pooling in his eyes.

I took a deep breath and glanced over at my terminal, where the details of scores of pending license enforcement actions had begun to scroll across the readout.

“Sure, boss,” I said, and reached over to cut the power to my terminal display. “Consider it dropped.”

Sweaty-fingers Vega patted my shoulder again and smiled like a man granted a stay of execution. “Good man,” he said. “I’ll see if I can’t get you some help on those enforcements, okay?”

“You do that,” I said. “I’m taking lunch.”

✧ ✧ ✧

I did grab lunch—a fried street taco made with the best simbeef available in Ophir. Daniela and her mother Iriva sold them out of a cart dressed up to look like an old Terran land vehicle. They made good currency from us security guys, but we didn’t mind. A properly spiced taco was worth it. If I ever won a huge corporate bonus for saving some exec’s life or something, I would probably spend it on a real beef taco. I had to wonder if it would be as good as one of Daniela’s, though.

I blinked the appropriate amount of currency over to Daniela and walked away, basking in the warmth of her smile and the heat of the spicy simbeef as I bit into the taco. Iriva’s pepper sauce lit my palate up like an orbital landing pad, and I’m pretty sure I groaned in pleasure.

But even a sublime taco experience wasn’t enough to settle my brain. The minute I swallowed the last of the crunchy fried tortilla and licked my fingers clean of the juices, I heard Vega’s words echoing through my memory.

One more dead whore.

Maybe so, I conceded. I’d had the thought earlier that the Jane Doe might have been a refugee from the endless civil war on Terra. Her wrist and hand had looked compact and dense like those of a Terran-born woman.

I thought of Dane, and of Timea. Did Jane Doe have any family? Parents, a kid, a partner who mourned her?

“Fucking chaos,” I muttered, kicking at the red dust that littered the sidewalk of the plaza where I’d stopped to eat. I glanced up, and then up some more. I wish I could say I was surprised that my lunchtime wanderings had brought me to this particular plaza in the

heart of Ophir’s enclosure, but I wasn’t. Soaring buildings stretched above me, their tops hazy in the dim sunlight. I could see delivery drones dropping here and there, and off to my left, a personal flyer took off from one balcony and spiraled out and away to the south.

Ahead of me, one particular building gleamed black and red as the sun struck it just right. It was one of those whose highest levels were lost in the haze. It didn’t matter, though. I knew what was up there.

With a sigh and another kick at the dust, I lowered my gaze, rubbed my neck, and walked forward toward the base of the tower that held Doctor Alisa Kabeya’s morgue.

✧ ✧ ✧

I’d always thought it weird that the morgue was such a light, airy place.

It shouldn’t have surprised me, given its primo location. As Arean-enclosed cities go, Ophir wasn’t bad. Time was, a fair number of corporate execs had kept apartments here, to use when they worked late doing whatever soul-sucking red-tapework they did. Ophir wasn’t as large as some of the other chasmas in the Valles Marineris, but it was one of the first enclosure settlements, and so it still hosted several important corporate functions—including human resources and immigration.

Which was why, when the Terran Civil War kicked off a generation ago, Ophir was the first place to get slammed with refugees. After a year or two of that, many of the corporate execs had seen the writing on the wall and fled Ophir for more exclusive locales, but their bureaucratic functions remained in place. So, they either worked remotely or built higher and higher levels, in order to rise above the unwashed rabble below . . . literally.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

I blinked as Alisa’s smoky, irritated voice pulled me from my unseeing stare out of her wide, carbonglass window. I turned and smiled at her.

“I thought you might have missed me,” I said, turning up the wattage on my smile. I knew it didn’t quite reach my eyes, but I did my best.

Alisa snorted. “How can I miss you when you’re always coming around?” She arched her eyebrows at me and folded her arms over her chest. “You’re like an endemic virus. I can’t get rid of you no matter what I try.”

“Ouch, Doc. You wound me.”

“And here I thought you were a tough guy. What do you need, Deselle? I’m busy.”

I swallowed hard and felt my smile drop away.

“You know that homicide I called in?” I said it softly, lest we be overheard. By whom, I had no idea, since the only other humans around were corpses . . . but I suppose nanodrones with microphones existed, even if I wasn’t sure why someone would want to bug the morgue.

Of course, I also wasn’t sure why someone would want to bury the murder of a Joygirl.

“Yeah, what about

it?”

“Has anyone followed up?”

Alisa narrowed her eyes at me. “You mean other than you? Right now? No.”

“Would you mind giving me a rundown?”

“Didn’t you get my report?”

I fought not to shuffle my feet. Much as I loved sparring with her, I dropped her gaze. Alisa’s dark, vaguely almond-shaped eyes always saw too much.

“No.”

“Because you’re not the assigned officer, am I right?”

I said nothing. Alisa let out a gusty sigh. I glanced up at her to see her shoving one delicate-fingered hand through her hair, pushing it back from her face.

“Gav,” she said, her voice low. “You know I can’t—”

“They closed the case, Alisa. Without even investigating it. They didn’t just lock me out, they closed it. And Vega threatened me when I asked about it. Someone wants this girl erased. I just—what if she had a family, or someone who cared about her?”

Alisa pressed her lips together in a thin white line. Like most doctors I’d met, Alisa was almost as good as a cop at giving a blank face, but I could see that something was bothering her. She let out another sigh and turned, beckoning over her shoulder for me to follow.

She wound her way through the neat, ordered rows of the dead. One or two of the bodies had semi-sheer curtains pulled closed around their biers, and I could hear the whirring sound of Alisa’s med drones doing the grunt work of autopsy and examination coming from within. She led me to the back of the morgue, away from the huge picture windows, toward a tiny room with a heavy door that opened with a mechanical latch.

“We can talk in here,” she said, gesturing for me to go in. I shrugged and did so, suppressing a shiver as I crossed the threshold. My breath puffed out in front of my face like a cloud.

“The body cooler?” I asked, turning to face her as she closed the heavy outer door with a deep thunk.

“The drones don’t work so well in the cold,” she said with a half-smile. “It’s why I have to load each of the bodies in here myself. It’s a pain, but sometimes it’s worth it.”

“Why are you worried about the drones? Don’t you run their programming?”

“I’ll get to that,” she said. She let out another sigh that fogged the air between us, and I could see the deep fatigue in her face as she leaned against the nearest row of closed body drawers. “First, let me answer your questions. There was more in my report, but I’ll summarize. The vic you found was named Nicola Mariahn. Approximately ten local years old, or just under twenty by Terran reckoning. She was born on Terra, and had an active sex worker license. No family on register, no next of kin.”

“A Joygirl,” I said. “Like I thought. Vega confirmed it, too. Was this a domestic, you think?”

“If it was, it was particularly violent,” she said. “There wasn’t much left for

me to autopsy. She’d been disemboweled, her uterus and ovaries partially removed, as well as her breasts and several of her other internal organs.”

My eyebrows went up. “A robbery, then? Organ harvesting?”

She shook her head. “Doesn’t fit. You’re the expert, of course, but Nicola came in with cash still in her boot and the latest high-end aural enhancer buds. A robber wouldn’t have left those, even if they were after her organs.”

I looked closely at Alisa. She was doing her best to give me a blank face, but I could still see that troubled shadow in her eyes.

“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked quietly.

She looked at me for a long moment, then opened her mouth to speak. But before she could say anything, a chime sounded through the frigid room, and Alisa spun away.

“Body incoming,” she said as she hauled on the heavy latch to open the cooler door. “I told you what you wanted to know. Now please get the hell out of my morgue and let me get on with my job.”

✧ ✧ ✧

I should have done what she asked. I’m sure Alisa would agree with that. But what can I say, I’m a detective. Being nosy is my job.

So I followed Alisa out of the cooler and over to the northernmost of her picture windows. Sure enough, a squad of four drones hovered there, carrying one of those impervious body cocoons suspended between them. Alisa hit a button and the window slid open. I grimaced and squinted as a frigid, dust-laden wind swirled in with the drones.

I hung back at first, and then slowly followed her over to an unoccupied bier. The drones flew ahead, hovering with their burden over the bier until Alisa arrived and spoke a low, verbal command I didn’t catch. As one, the drones lowered the cocoon with a soft bump, and then retracted their tethers and rose up to fly one by one out of the slowly closing window.

I watched them leave, and then turned back to see Alisa starting to pull the curtain closed around the bier. She stopped when she got to me, and scowled up into my face. I gave her my most charming lopsided smile and shrugged one shoulder. She rolled her eyes, shook her head, but she dragged the curtain around me, including me in the space within.

“Want a mask?” she asked as she returned back to the head of the cocoon. “It can help with the nausea.”

“Not my first corpse, Doc.”

“Suit yourself.”

With a shrug, she tapped out a command on the terminal beside the bier, and a drone descended out of the ceiling fixture above us. It hovered over the cocoon and extended a rotating saw blade from its belly. Alisa spoke another command—a word I didn’t recognize, did the drones have their own programming language?—and the drone lowered the saw to cut into the surface of the cocoon.

“I thought they were impermeable,” I said, pitching my voice to be heard over the racket of the saw.

“They are to most things.” Alisa didn’t look up as she spoke; her eyes stayed locked on the developing seam in the cocoon until the drone finished its cut. Then she met my eyes one more time. She looked like she was about to say something, but shook her head instead and tapped in another command on the console.

Arms came up out of the bier and pulled the cocoon apart. The remaining halves sank down into slots that I hadn’t noticed before on either side of the bier, leaving the body lying fully exposed.

My brain stuttered for a moment, trying to make sense of what I saw. I heard Alisa draw in a sharp breath. I looked up at her and something that was either fury or pain or both flickered across her features.

“What—” I started to say, but she snapped her gaze up to me and violently shook her head in the negative. The intensity in her eyes almost had me stepping back before I caught myself. I pressed my lips together and nodded, then flicked my gaze back toward the body cooler. She nodded slowly as well, and then set to work.

Honestly, it didn’t look like there was much left for her to do.

Ragged cuts ran from just under the sternum to the groin. At initial glance, it didn’t look like the edges had been cauterized at all, which meant that the cutting tool hadn’t been a modern laser scalpel. At some point, someone had opened the resulting wounds wide, so that the interior cavity of the body lay exposed.

Truth be told, it was a red, shredded mess, and I couldn’t make out much of anything.

“Unidentified female; approximate age: early teens in local years, possibly mid-twenties by Terran reckoning. Size and skeleto-musculature suggests Terran-born and initial development in Terran gravity. Longitudinal wounds . . . ”

I tore my eyes from the corpse and looked up at Alisa’s face as she continued making her report. ...