Read Online Starbase Human by Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Free Book Online

He couldn’t make jokes like that to anyone. Everyone—including his colleagues—thought his sense of humor was inappropriate.
    Even his friends shied away from his comments most of the time. And women—he was considered a player in the department because he dated so many, but that wasn’t because he was a love-’em-and-leave-’em kinda guy. It was because around date three he’d relax and make a joke, and he’d get one of those what-the-hell? looks. Too many humorous comments and he wouldn’t be able to reach the woman on her links.
    So he’d try again.
    Even with his reputation, he’d never dated a woman as beautiful as Sonja Mycenae. He had placed her on the autopsy table, carefully positioning her before beginning work, and he’d been startled at how well proportioned she was.
    Most people had obvious flaws, at least when a coroner was looking at them. One arm a little too long, a roll of fat under the chin, a misshapen ankle.
    He hadn’t removed her clothing yet, but as far as he could tell from the work he’d done with her already, nothing was unusual.
    Which made her unusual all by herself.
    He also couldn’t see any obvious cause of death. He had noted, however, that full rigor mortis had already set in. Which was odd, since the decomposition, according to the exam his nanobots had already started, seemed to have progressed at a rate that put her death at least five hours earlier.
    By now, under the conditions she’d been stored in, she should have still been pliable—at least her limbs. Rigor began in the eyes, jaw, and neck, then spread to the face and through the chest before getting to the limbs. The fingers and toes were always the last to stiffen up.
    That made him suspicious, particularly since livor mortis also seemed off.
    He would have thought, given how long she had been curled inside that crate, that the blood would have pooled in the side of her body resting on top of the compost heap. But no blood had pooled at all.
    He decided to have bots move the autopsy table into one of the more advanced autopsy theaters. He wanted every single device he could find to do the work.
    He suspected she’d been killed with some kind of hardening poison. They had become truly popular with assassins in the last two decades, and had just recently been banned from the Moon. Hardening poisons killed quickly by absorbing all the liquid in the body and/or by baking it into place.
    It was a quick death, but a painful one, and usually the victim’s muscles froze in place, so she couldn’t even express that pain as it occurred.
    He’d have to put on a high-grade environmental suit in an excess of caution. Some of the hardening poisons leaked out of the pores and then infected anyone who touched them.
    What he had to determine was if Sonja Mycenae had died of one of those, and if her body had been placed in a waste crate not just to hide the corpse, but to infect the food supply in Armstrong.
    Because the Growing Pits inspections looked at the growing materials—the soil, the water, the light, the atmosphere, and the seeds. The inspectors would also look at the fertilizer, but if it came from a certified organization like Ansel Management, then there would only be a cursory search of materials.
    Hardening poisons could thread their way into the DNA of a plant—just a little bit, so that, say, an apple wouldn’t be quite as juicy. A little hardening poison wouldn’t really hurt the fruit of a tree (although that tree might eventually die of what a botanist would consider a wasting disease), but a trace of hardening poison in the human system would have an impact over time. And if the human continued to eat things with hardening poisons in them, the poisons would build up until the body couldn’t take it anymore.
    A person poisoned in that way wouldn’t die like Sonja Mycenae had; instead, the poison would overwhelm the standard nanohealers that everyone had, that person would get sick, and organs would