'No sir, I will not!' snapped Carpel.
'Excellent/
Carpel tossed a gold solar-form badge to me. It was heavy and old, mounted on a pad of black leather.
This will give you authority. My authority. Conduct your work thoroughly and quickly. I ask two things in return/
'And they are?'
You report all findings to me. And you allow the chastener to accompany you/
'I work my own way-'
'Fischig can open doors and voiceboxes here in the Sun-dome that even that badge may not. Consider him a local guide/
And your ears and eyes, I thought. But I knew he was under immense pressure from the nobility to produce results, so I said: 'I will be grateful for his assistance/
'Where first?' Fischig asked, down to business at once, a hungry look on his face. They want blood, I realised. They want someone to punish for the deaths, someone they can say they caught, or at least helped to catch. They want to share in whatever successes I have so that they can look good when the rest of their population wakes up to this disaster in a few months' time.
I couldn't blame them.
'First/1 said, 'the mortuary/
Eyclone looked as if he was asleep. His head had been wrapped in an almost comical plastic bonnet to contain the wound I had dealt him. Framed in the plastic, his face was tranquil, with just a slight bruising around the lips.
He lay on a stone plinth in the chill of the morgue below Arbites Mortuary One. His brethren lay on numbered plinths around him, those that had been recovered more or less intact. There were labelled bins of mostly liquescent material against the back wall, the remains of those that Betan-core had slaughtered with the cutter's cannons.
The air in the underground vault was lit cold blue, and frost covered circulators pumped in sub-zero air direcdy from the ice-desert outside the Sun-dome. Fischig had provided us all with heat gowns for the visit.
I was impressed by what I saw: both the dutiful care and attention that had been used to sequester and store the bodies and by the fact that no one had touched them, according to my instructions. It seems a simple command to give, but I have lost count of the times that over-eager death-priests or surgeons have begun autopsies before I arrived.
The mortician superintendent was a haggard woman in her sixties called Tutrone. She attended us in red plastic scrubs worn over an old and threadbare heat-gown. Mortress Tutrone had a bionic implant in one eye socket, and blades and bonesaw manipulators of gleaming surgical steel built into her right hand.