Read Online Dead Man on the Moon by Steven Harper - Free Book Online Page A

clothes stood out crisp and sharp. His spacious office was absolutely spotless. Not a datapad or stylus was out of place. Off-white walls stood guard over beige carpet. A neatly made cot waited to one side. Small pieces of abstract sculpture stood guard in the corners, and a holographic window showed blue waves lapping at a Mexican beach. A trio of grad students chattered over a terminal that occupied most of one wall. Code zipped across the display faster than Linus could read.
    Hector stepped around his desk with a grin and a hearty handshake. He was three or four years older than Linus and was another of the few people who didn't have to take a secondary job. "What can I do for the Chief of Security?" Hector asked.
    "Get what you can off this." Linus handed him the closed container containing the victim's onboard. "It was taken from a murder victim who spent an unknown amount of time outside."
    The grad students stopped talking to stare. Hector looked down at the container as if it might explode. "A dead person's obie?"
    "Yeah. Don't worry—it's safe. Karen checked it for nasty microbes. Not very many can survive out there, anyway."
    Hector regained his composure and shot the grad students a quick glare. They returned to their work, though their chatter was considerably muted. "I don't know how much I can get, but I'll try. Anything in particular you want to know?"
    "Who it belonged to," Linus said. "We haven't been able to identify the victim. We're also having a hard time fixing the time of death, so any clues in that arena would be helpful, too."
    Hector held the container up to the light. "Obies are partly organic, you know. Exposure to vacuum isn't good for them."
    "Whatever you can get will be a help," Linus said. "How long will it take?"
    "No idea. At a guess—two days? Three? It'll depend on how much damage was done. Check back with me tomorrow and I can be more specific."
    "You're the best, Hector," Linus said, already moving for the door.
    "I want dinner when it's over," Hector shot back. "Those home-made crepes you do."
    "Done."
    Linus was just heading for home when Karen phoned to let him know she had a cause of death. He all but ran back down to the morgue.
    "What do you have, K?" he asked a little breathlessly.
    "Take a look," she said. The holographic imagers hummed to life, and Karen zoomed in on the lower half of the corpse's face. She magnified several thousand times, but the dry little blobs that appeared on the table in three dimensions meant little to Linus.
    "What am I looking at?"
    "Pulmonary material," she told him. "One of the worst things you can do when exposed to vacuum is try to hold your breath, though almost everyone does it. The air in your lungs bursts outward in all directions, shredding them inside your chest as effectively as a shrapnel grenade. Pulmonary material bubbles out of the mouth and nose in a terrible mess, but the liquid part of it evaporates, so it's hard to detect without a microscope. These are desiccated pulmonary cells, and their presence tells me the victim was alive and kicking when he was exposed to vacuum."
    "Oh?" Linus leaned over the table despite himself.
    "When you die, the muscles of your chest settle, forcing most of the air out of your lungs," Karen explained. "Eventually the space inside the thorax equalizes with the outside pressure. As a result, exposure to vacuum doesn't cause dead lungs to rupture. Unconscious or dead people don't try to hold their breath, you see, and the air rushes out the mouth and nose with minimal damage—beyond the eventual effects of vacuum, anyway. So young Noah's theory was correct. Our victim was alive and fighting when he died, and it was definitely exposure to vacuum—explosive decompression—that killed him."
    "Great work, K," Linus said.
    "Thank you, good sir," she replied cheekily. Was that a hint of blush on her face? Linus wasn't sure. "But we still don't know who he is."
    Linus thought a moment, then went to the