Dreams of a Red Horizon

1 - Jon

The boots of my atmospheric suit sank into the crimson dust without a sound. To my left a long range of mountains jutted up from the ground, ship-ports carved into a long cliffside where craft with blinking running lights idled. But to my right, the surface was a crimson expanse that blended into a starry sky filled with dust swept up by winds. It was an alien place, as if there were nothing that separated my boots from drifting off the ground towards the beckoning stars above.

"Jon, come look at these," my partner Sonja's voice echoed in the cramped space of my helmet.

I sighed and turned back from the view, cursing the fact that the reason for my first and only visit to the surface of the planet I called home was a homicide. The body lay in a shallow grave before me, my partner awkwardly crouched to the side in a atmospheric suit two sizes too large. On her opposite sat the huge earth mover that had dug up the grave, as well as the vehicles that had transported us from the shaft below. Forensic drones darted through the air around the crime scene, scanning the area for evidence.

I walked to the shallow grave to look at what Sonja was pointing at. The victim would have been handsome if it weren't for the gunshot-wound in his forehead and other signs of death. He was young, in his late twenties, and far too skinny. Caucasian with sharp features and short blonde hair. There was nothing extraordinary about his appearance, but his final resting place and cause of death were anything but mundane.

And then there were the scars that covered his body. I hadn't seen them in years, not since I transferred from organized crime. Sonja pointed at them again and finished her thought: "What do you make of these marks? I don't think I've seen anything like them before. They look like burns, but not just that. There's lacerations underneath."

"I've seen them before," I said. "There's a gang on the second level that tortures its victims this way. They cut the victim and then cauterize the wound with a hot iron. It doesn't make sense though... how does one of their victims..."

"End all the way up here?" She finished my thought for me. "Good question. And how long do you think he's been here?"

"No idea." I said. If we had found the body below, where there was plenty of atmosphere or bacteria that would normally decompose the body rapidly, I would have said that the corpse before me had been dead less than a day. And then there was the cold, and how deep the victim had been buried. "A week? A month?"

"The medical examiner will be able to tell us more," she said. "Once he performs the autopsy. Maybe we can even get an ID?"

"You didn't check his prints? DNA?"

She gestured incredulously to the forensic drone hovering over the body. "None of the samples came up with a match. Maybe being up here is messing with their connectivity to the system."

"It just doesn't make any sense," I said shaking my head. Except for a few dozen workers who came up here to maintain the elaborate venting system that let off excess heat and air pollution from the metropolis below, none had tread on this surface for at least fifty years. Not since the Fall. In theory, it was the perfect place to dump a body. Getting past the safety measures to keep people below was supposed to be impossible. Not that many would want to, more than fifteen minutes on the surface without specialized atmospheric suits was suicide. It was a miracle that the body had been accidently dug up in the first place. But how did it end up here in the first place?

"How did the driver of the earth mover even find him?" I asked her. She had interviewed him while I had been admiring the view.

"He had no idea. He was on his way back from clearing dust that had covered up a vent and he said the machine started acting erratically. Before he knew it he was staring at a dead body. That's when he called us?"