Cautiously, they started scanning the sheer cliffs of glass and concrete on either side, hunting for the open window from which the body had come. There wasn’t one.
“The roof?” Appleton asked nervously. His carbine was swinging about in a wide arc as he tried to cover half the arcology.
The precinct station duty officers were already accessing the Westminster Dome’s sensor grid, looking down from the geodesic structure to see the two officers crouched down beside their car. Nobody was on the roofs of the buildings flanking the road.
“Is he dead?” Moyles yelled.
Appleton licked his lips as he weighed up the risks of leaving the cover of the door to dash over to the body. “I think so.” Assessing severely battered and bloody flesh it was an old bloke, really old. There was no movement, no breathing. His enhanced senses couldn’t detect a heartbeat, either. Then he saw the deep scorch marks branding the corpse’s chest. “Oh bloody hell!”
The civil engineering crew had repaired the hole in the Westminster Dome with commendable speed. A small fleet of crawler pods had traversed the vast crystal edifice, winching a replacement segment along with them. Removing the old hexagon and sealing the new segment into place had taken twelve hours. Molecular bonding generator tests were initiated, making sure it was now firmly integrated with the rest of the dome’s powered weather defences.
Checking the superstrength carbon lattice girders and beefing up suspect strands of the geodesic structure was still going on as darkness fell; work continued under the pods’ floodlights.
Far below them, the clearing up of Parsonage Heights tower was an altogether messier affair. Fire service mechanoids had extinguished the flames in the shattered stub of the octagonal tower. Paramedic crews hauled the injured out of the remaining seven towers of the development project that had been bombarded with a blizzard of shattered glass and lethal debris. Smaller fires had broken out on the two skyscrapers next to the one hit by the SD strike. Council surveyors had spent most of the day examining the damaged buildings to see if they could be salvaged.
There was no doubt that the remnants of the tower struck by the X-ray laser would have to be demolished. The remaining eight floors were dangerously weak; metal reinforcement rods had melted to run out of the carbon-concrete slabs like jam from a doughnut. It was the local coroner’s staff who went in there after the fire mechanoids were pulled back and the walls had cooled down. The bodies they recovered were completely baked by the X-ray blast.
It was London’s biggest spectator event, drawing huge crowds which spilled over into the open market and surrounding streets. Civilians mingled with rover reporters, gawping at the destruction and the knot of activity on the dome high above. It was the crawler pods which proved that some kind of SD weapon had been used, despite the original denials of the local police chief. By early morning a grudging admission had come from the mayor’s office that the police had suspected a possessed to be holed up in the Parsonage Heights tower. When pressed how a possessed had infiltrated London, the aide pointed out that a sect chapel was established in the warehouse below the tower. The acolytes, she assured reporters, were now all under arrest. Those that had survived.
Londoners grew jittery as more facts were prised out of various Govcentral offices over the long morning and afternoon, a lot of the information contradictory. Several lawyers acting for relatives of the tower’s vaporized residents lodged writs against the police for the use of extremely excessive force and accused the Police Commissioner of negligence in not attempting an evacuation first. Absenteeism all over the arcology grew steadily worse during the day. Productivity and retail sales hit an all-time low, with the exception of food stores. Managers reported people were stocking up on sachets and frozen meat bricks.
All the while, images of the broken tower with its blackened, distended, mildly radioactive fangs of carbon-concrete were pushed out by the news companies. Bodybags being carried over the rubble remained the grim background for everybody’s day, talked over by new anchors and their specialist comment guests.
A police forensic team was sent in with the coroner’s staff. Their orders weren’t terribly precise, just to search for anomalies. They were backed up by three experts from the local GISD office, who managed to remain anonymous amid everyone else poking round the restricted area.
The crowd went home before nightfall, leaving just a simple police cordon, patrolled by officers who fervently wished they’d drawn a different duty that evening.
A preliminary forensic report was compiled before midnight by the GISD experts, who had been following their police colleagues’ tests and analyses. It contained nothing of the remotest relevance to Banneth or Quinn Dexter.
“One was just going through the motions anyway,” Western Europe told Halo and North America after he’d accessed the report. “Although I’d dearly like to know how Dexter pulled that invisibility stunt.”
“I think we should just count ourselves fortunate that none of the other possessed seem capable of it,” Halo said.
“That SD strike has caused quite a stir,” North America said. “The honourable senators are demanding to know who gave SD command the authority to fire on Earth. Trouble is, this time the President’s office is screaming for the same answer. They may try to launch a commission of inquiry. If the executive and the representatives both want it, we might have trouble blocking them.”
“Then don’t,” Western Europe said. “I’m sure we can appoint someone appropriate to chair it. Come on, I shouldn’t have to explain basic cover-your-arses procedure. That strike request is logged from the Mayor’s civil defence bureau to SD command. It was a legitimate request. Senior Govcentral officers have the right to call for back up from Earth’s military forces in emergency. It’s in the constitution.”
“SD Command should have requested fire authority from the President,” Halo said bluntly. “The fact they can actually fire on Earth without the appropriate political authorization has raised a few eyebrows.”
“South Pacific isn’t stirring this, is she?” Western Europe asked sharply.
“No. Frankly, she has as much to lose as the rest of us. The current Presidential defence advisor is hers; he’s doing a good job in damage limitation.”
“Let’s hope it’s sufficient. I’d hate to pull the plug on the President right now. People are looking for leadership stability to get them through this.”
“We’ll ensure the news agencies will mute the story however loud the senators shout,” Halo said. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Jolly good,” Western Europe said. “That just leaves us with the problem of the ordinary possessed.”
“New York’s a mess,” North America admitted glumly. “The remaining non-possessed citizens are defending themselves, but I expect they’ll lose eventually.”
“We’ll have to call another full B7 meeting,” Western Europe concluded without enthusiasm. “Decide what we’re going to do in that eventuality. I for one have no intention of being carried off to this realm where the other planets have vanished to.”
“I’m not sure we’ll get a full turnout,” Halo said. “South Pacific and her allies are pretty pissed with you.”
“They’ll come round,” Western Europe said confidently.
He never did get a chance to find out if he was right. London’s deputy Police Commissioner datavised him at quarter past two with the news of the body in Victoria Street.
“There’s was no identification on the old boy,” the deputy commissioner reported. “So the constables took a DNA sample. According to our files, it’s Paul Jerrold.”