Tilted Axis

by David Ryker

  The coroner had cut along the rib cage under her arms and removed it as one plate, exposing the organs and innards in perfect situ. Ward could see it on the next slab over, the sternum and intercostals glistening red in the harsh light.

  Some of the organs had already been removed and cataloged, and the stomach was pinned open with clamps. What was left was shredded like minced beef. Her face looked serene and calm, but pale, her fingers spread against the cold steel of the table, her blood pooling in the trough around her feet.

  “Not squeamish, are you?” the coroner asked hopefully. It would have pleased him to see Ward squirm.

  He shook his head, inspecting Sadler minutely. “No. I’m not. You mind?” he asked, not waiting for an answer before he went over to the box of latex gloves on the counter behind him and pulled two out.

  The hum of the refrigerated body-drawers on the wall filled the silence, his rubber soles squeaking as he moved, punctuating the din like dull reports of a silenced pistol in the distance.

  The coroner scoffed a little. “I’ve already conducted a thorough external examination, but go right ahead,” he muttered balefully. “I’m sure I’ve missed something. It’s not like this is my job or anything.”

  Ward ran his fingers over Sadler’s forehead and hairline and then held them to his nose. “You washed her down?” he mused aloud.

  The coroner shook his head. “No. What do you take me for?”

  Ward shrugged, noting the smell of disinfectant alcohol shampoo lingering there. It was laced with something else though, a faint lingering odor that never quite came off. He knew the smell. He knew he did — something familiar he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He was sure it would come back to him eventually.

  He moved on, pulling down the lids of her eyes.

  “I already checked that,” the coroner said, his voice hardening. He had his arms folded, and was taking umbrage to Ward’s presence. “You can just look at my report rather than manhandling her. It’s all in there.”

  Ward stood and locked eyes with him. The coroner shrank a little under Ward’s gaze, falling silent.

  “Maybe you should go get a coffee,” Ward said lightly. “Let me conduct my own examination. We can compare notes afterward if you’d like.”

  “Fine. If you want to waste your time, be my guest. It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve been thrown out of my own lab.” He threw his arms in the air emphatically and then strutted away, muttering something about Humans as he did.

  Ward let the image of him getting socked in the teeth flood his mind and when he went back to Sadler, he was content again.

  Her eyes were closed and he pulled them open gently, the rigor mortis having set in a few hours prior. They were pale, the whites bloodshot and mottled a little at the edges. Some of the capillaries had burst, but they were healing. It was synonymous with increased blood pressure — maybe from a high degree of centrifugal force. Possibly from a launch? Or maybe from cryogenic stasis. Could be a bunch of things. The left was as expected and he pushed the lids closed slowly. He was about to move on to the right when he noticed something, just the tiniest glimmer of refracted light through her lashes.

  He leaned down to inspect it more closely, seeing it dance with the entire color spectrum, prismatic almost. He opened it again and stayed there for a few seconds, looking at the preter-naturality of it. It wasn’t her eye. Well, it was, but not totally. She’d had work done.

  Ocular augmentation required a steady hand. And a fat stack of credits. It looked fresh, too, the edges of the iris feathered minutely with blood. She’d had a pupil stretch, lens replacement, and by the look of it a macular upgrade. Ward fished around on the counters until he found an illuminating magnifier and went back to check more closely. The macular was about twice the size it should have been and the area where the cones were clustered was red and raw, swollen even with the addition of another set.

  Ward tossed the magnifier aside and let the information set in. The augmentation was fresh. Fresher than the burst capillaries. He had no timeline, but maybe no more than a few days old for the former. Since she was on Mars, probably. But why? If she’d had it done, it was to improve her distance sight, the detail she was perceiving in her right eye, her color differentiation. He closed his left eye and rested his chin against his shoulder, letting his hands come up, assuming her identity for a few seconds. The fingers on his left hand closed around the body of a rifle, his right adjusting the dials on a high-powered scope just above his eye line.

  Where Sadler had been found there was a long drag going out of Xaraniah Square in the direction she’d been shot. About two kilometers, at which point a wall of tall apartment blocks spanned in either direction. It would have been a hell of a shot, but it would have been made easier with extra cones and a dialed-up macular. Still, if she had the operation, then she should have been the one shooting, surely?

  He let his eyes open and his hands drop. Not enough data to extrapolate yet. Keep going. He wondered as he went back to Sadler whether the coroner had found her eyes too, and what he’d made of them. Ward really was serious about comparing notes, but doing so before he’d done his inspection would give him a bias as he looked. He wanted to go in fresh, see what he could see, and then read the other report. It would either reaffirm his observations or undermine them, and both were equally valuable.

  There was no sign of another interruption from the coroner so far, thankfully, so he carried on without disturbance, his breath quiet and his focus narrow. He could take all the time he needed, and he felt like there was a lot more to learn. Her body was an intricate canvas painted with the experiences of the last four and a half years and he was an art critic with an eye for detail and a wealth of knowledge on the subject. The only reason the SB had agreed to take him in the first place was because he was so goddamn good at what he did. That and they’d invested a lot of money in him rebuilding his right side. They’d mastered modern medicine, that much was for sure. Ward would have been crippled if they’d sent him back to Earth for treatment. He supposed he was just lucky that a Martian colony was closest and he’d been in such critical condition that they didn’t have time to go elsewhere. That and that the Thessaly Treaty had come into effect the year before. He wondered what would have happened if it hadn’t. Whether the Martians would have refused the AIA entry into the colony. Whether they would have just let him die instead. He let out a long sigh, rolled his right shoulder over his head a couple of times to get rid of the building ache in it, and got back to work.

  He took a deep breath, got in close and peeled back her lips. Her gums were pale, anemic even. Her teeth were a little yellowed. She hadn’t been taking care of them and definitely wasn’t getting enough nutrients. Ward stood and remembered what she’d looked like on Ganymede six years earlier. She’d had great teeth then. He wondered why she’d stopped brushing so meticulously. He could see her in his mind, sitting across the table at night in the little hab pod they’d shared during the op, him with a beer in front of him, watching a basketball game that had started and ended two days earlier on Earth on a tablet, and her with a length of floss, cleaning bad mining colony take-out off her teeth.

  He checked her ears next. Pierced a few more times than they had been before. On her neck, the faint marks of fading bruises lingered under the skin. The sort you get from someone sinking their teeth into your skin, taking it between their lips in the throes of sex, and biting down.

  Ward pulled back and looked at her. She was attractive, that was for sure. Or at least she had been when she was alive. He’d always thought so.

  He felt strange envisaging her like that — he couldn’t place the other person in that situation. They had no face, no gender. Just teeth in the dark biting down on her neck. He wondered he she’d cared for that person, or if it was just an angle she’d been working. He couldn’t say. He didn’t know her anymore. Not like he had.

  Her body was opened like a can of soup. There wouldn’t be much to
see if he laid her skin back over the incision. Too much interference. No way to tell what was Sadler and what was the coroner.

  He walked around the table slowly, surveying her body, trying to remember what it was like on Ganymede. There’d been a lot of cold nights. He knew it well. He could picture it clearly. And what were once warm memories that would flicker nostalgically in his mind when he felt lonely on the mesa were now clinical snapshots held up against the real-life visage. Old evidence against new.

  He went to her right side and checked her hands. Her nails were filed short, her hands callused.

  He went around to the right and pinched the patch of flesh between her finger and thumb. It was hard and stiff.

  Ward knew that developing a hardening there only came from firing lots of big rifles a lot.

  He was about to pull away when something caught his eye. He reached down and lifted her arm, turning it out.

  “Gang tattoo.” A voice from behind him turned his attention from Sadler, but Ward didn’t let it go.

  The coroner had re-entered the room, holding a cup of coffee. He didn’t offer Ward one, despite having brewed a fresh pot. He could hear it dripping into the jug in the other room, the smell of the stewing grounds cutting through the stink of bleach and formaldehyde that hung heavy in the air.

  “Hmm?” Ward asked, looking up. He wanted to know what else the coroner thought of it.

  “Gang tattoo,” the coroner repeated, nodding toward Sadler. “We see them sometimes on the bodies that come in.” He sighed. “We do what we can to keep the riff-raff out, but like water through a leaky roof they seep in.” He shrugged. “It’s an identifier, but they have to earn them. Killers, one and all. Bad news.” He slurped some of his coffee. “Bad, bad news.”

  Ward nodded slowly. “I’ve seen it before.”

  “They’re pretty widespread. It’s a language all of its own in those circles.”

  Ward turned back to Sadler. “No, I’ve seen this one before.”

  “Hmm?” The coroner stepped forward, the smell of the coffee invading Ward’s senses. “They vary gang to gang, faction to faction, but they’re all similar—”

  Ward arched an eyebrow. “Got a blacklight?”

  “Why?” The coroner was at his shoulder now, blowing sour coffee breath over him.

  Ward just stared at him and after a second the coroner tutted and went in search of one. He rummaged on the opposite counter as Ward inspected the tattoo, tracing its tribal lines and subtle curves. The skin was still a little raised. It couldn’t have been more than a week or two old.

  The coroner came back and handed the tube off, muttering about how he was being ordered around his own lab.

  Ward took it and felt for the switch with his thumb, still holding Sadler's arm with the tattoo facing up.

  The coroner hung over him, eyes following Ward’s hand as he held the blacklight to her skin and flicked it on.

  The braided pattern of ink that twisted down her forearm like entwined snakes glowed scarlet in the UV. But it wasn’t the design that Ward was looking for. It was what was hidden beneath.

  Small and thin, but clear in the UV, one in each turn of the snakes was a series of numbers. They were inked right into the tattoo, invisible to the naked eye.

  There were eight of them: one, seven, eight, three, one, two, one, eight.

  The coroner swore under his breath in Martian and put his coffee cup down with a clink, circling Ward and taking Saddler’s arm in his hands to look for himself.

  Ward was right. He had seen that tattoo before. That exact tattoo. The coroner was right in that there were variances all across the OCA — so many variances that no two were the same. Not exactly. And yet, this one was, which meant that it was intentionally so. Sadler had been inked like this on purpose.

  The first time Ward had seen it was on Ganymede, with her. They’d managed to get hold of one of Dharwan’s mercs terrorizing the mining colony. It’d taken a while but he’d broken eventually, told them what he knew. He wasn’t anyone of note, just a thug-for-hire. But what he’d said was that there was a code in his tattoo, that it was how they kept information safe, passed things that couldn’t be trusted by word of mouth. They’d checked that he wasn’t lying, of course. He and Sadler had spent a long time looking at that tattoo that night. Long enough it seemed so that Sadler could have it perfectly reproduced. And if she’d gone to the trouble of having it reproduced, then she’d probably have done so for one reason and one reason only.

  Ward let the coroner take the blacklight from him and pulled out his glass communicator, holding it up to the numbers. He snapped the image through the screen and saved it. As far as he could see there was no discernable pattern to the numbers, but he was sure with some thought and analysis he’d find something. Still, he wasn’t going to do that with the coroner breathing down his neck — literally. If he found anything here, the coroner would put it in the file and inform the SB. And, when they figured it out they’d be crawling all over wherever it led like ants. Ward liked space to work. Liked the silence and solitude of his own company.

  “How did you…?” The coroner looked carefully at him, a mixture of wonder and derision on his face.

  Ward shrugged. “Lucky guess,” he said, pushing the communicator back into his jeans pocket and rubbing his eyes. It was almost eleven and his stomach was starting to growl, tiredness gnawing at the corners of his mouth, pulling them into a wide downward curve. He could feel the initial surge of adrenaline wearing off, the slow wind down to a restless sleep beginning.

  “I never would have thought to…”

  Ward let himself smile. “Well, then I guess it’s good that I was here. Sometimes all you need is a fifth pair of eyes. Now, where’s that pathology report?”

  5

  Ward stepped into the cool air of the city and let the breeze take the stink of antiseptic off his skin and out of his nose.

  He looked at his communicator and flicked through the coroner’s report with his thumb. He settled on the file entitled ‘Gunshot Wound’. He tapped on it and the coroner’s domed pate appeared above it, projected off the screen.

  Ward rotated his thumb and scrubbed through the recording, letting off as he got to the meat of it. The coroner was speaking in his native Martian, but Ward’s communicator had a built-in auto-translate function. The coroner’s voice was drowned out by a near-mechanical English voiceover as the communicator did its work.

  “ — single gunshot to the chest is likely to be the cause of death. The entry wound indicates a high caliber weapon. Bruising around the wound suggests that the entry was made at high speed, which is congruent with my original assumption.”

  Ward rolled his eyes. Even dictating to himself this guy was up his own ass. He let him continue.

  “ — the angle of entry is approximately eleven degrees. Downward trajectory entry wounds like this are synonymous with long-range shots, as the bullet drop must be taken into account when firing. Close range shots are apparent with much flatter angles. However, it is not the caliber of the rifle, nor the distance from which the shot was fired which is interesting. While trying to recover the slug, I discovered that there was no slug to recover — at least, not one that was intact. The round fragmented on impact, exploding into the chest cavity in shards. External examination revealed nothing out of the ordinary, but when conducting an internal examination, the damage was extensive. I extracted seventeen fragments, and believe there are more to be found. The bullet was designed to disintegrate on impact for maximum effect. Shards severed the carotid artery, aortic arch, subclavian artery, and vertebral arteries, as well as spreading through the chest, damaging the heart itself and the spinal column. Even if there were surgeons on scene at the time of impact, nothing could have been done. There is no doubt in my mind that there was unquestionable intent to kill in this instance — the reassurance of using such an apparatus would make no sense, otherwise.”

  The recording ended and the coroner’s face
froze and stuttered before fizzling out and disappearing.

  Ward stowed it and looked up, suddenly feeling eyes on him. A weight tugging at his back and neck. The weight of someone’s gaze.

  The street was quiet and dark and nothing moved. The offices opposite were all closed down and silent. The feeling faded after a second and his hackles receded.

  His stomach grumbled again and dragged him out of his paranoia. He took off toward Old Town, following the smell of street food.

  The straight-laced office folks of Downtown might have cleared out and headed home, but the night owls in Old Town, the place where the Martians went to let their silver hair down, would still be hooting. The uneven streets would be bustling with bodies. Bars would be packed with patrons. Street food vendors would be slinging food wares from all over the OCA. And of course, the cyber-docs would be burning the midnight oil.

  Body mods, both aesthetic and functional, were forever popular in the Axis. But, as Ward walked, he thought that there probably weren’t that many docs able to do the sort of work that Sadler had. And there were even fewer who were willing to do it on someone who was on Mars illegally. There could have been no exchange of credits going on — that was all electronically done, and impossible to hide. So, it meant that it was either paid for with commodity, or not at all. The question was whether it was done at gunpoint, or whether the doc was sympathetic to Sadler’s cause.

  Cootes said she’d fallen in with some terrorist cell and disappeared. She was presumed made and killed, but by the looks of things now, she’d gone native.

  Ward hummed and then grumbled to himself, mounting his cycle and taking off with more speed than was necessary. There still wasn’t enough information to make any guesses. No way to tell who was on the gameboard.