‘Welcome back,’ Nava said as Melissa rose up to meet her. ‘What are that lot up to?’
Melissa looked in the direction Nava was pointing. ‘Oh, that’s the novice freestyle aerobatics team. Or, that’s the group who want to be the team.’
‘You don’t want to do something like that?’
Melissa giggled. ‘Me? Can you imagine me entering a competition like that? I’d freeze and fall out of the air ten seconds in. That’s assuming I could get myself together enough to take off. I also don’t think I’m quite good enough, though…’
‘Though?’
‘Well, two of them were really struggling before the holiday. There’s a big competition coming up the week of the next break and, frankly, I didn’t think they were going to be ready. They’ve come on leaps and bounds in the last couple of… Nava? Why are you looking like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Well… Okay, so your expression hasn’t actually changed, but it’s like you’re putting out negative energy all of a sudden.’
‘Sudden improvement in talent,’ Nava said, her tone flat.
‘Yeah, like I said. The holiday must’ve really done them some– Oh! No! You can’t think–’
‘I think you can point out which of them has shown this sudden improvement and we’ll keep an eye on them. It’s late. They won’t take more of it today. Next Sunday, we’re going to see what happens.’
235/3/33.
Courtney put her thumb to the sensor pad on her ketcom and then waved the device over a lock. Presented with an override code which SSF officers had available for just this kind of purpose, the lock instructed the door beside it to open and Courtney stepped into one of the many capsule apartments on campus.
This particular one belonged to Brynn Hermanson Bishop, a third year on the support stream. No one had seen her the day before and she had not turned up for lessons today. Her homeroom teacher had reported her missing at the end of the day after receiving no notification that she was ill. Courtney could have done without having to deal with a missing student just now, but it was part of the SSF’s job to handle cases like this along with the school’s medical practitioners. Generally, the medical practitioners involved were psychologists, but Courtney had brought Tanzi Royce Sonkei, one of the school’s nurses, along this time, just in case.
The smell which assaulted Courtney’s nose as the door opened told her that Tanzi was going to be useful for exactly one thing: officially determining that death had taken place. ‘Shit,’ Courtney said under her breath. Louder, she said, ‘I believe we have an unattended death. Everyone wait a second before we go in.’ She activated the recording function on her ketcom and then took one step into the apartment, scanning her device around to take in the scene.
Brynn Hermanson was lying on the floor beside her dining table. She looked like she had just dropped there. Possibly, she had fallen off the bench seat. The smell of decomposing meat in the air – which the air-conditioning system was desperately trying to remove from the sound of the fans – suggested that checking for signs of life was largely academic, but there was little visible indication of decay. The capsule apartments were basically hermetically sealed once the door was shut. Insects – what few of them there were on Shinden – rarely got to a corpse in a building like this, so it was all down to the microbes already in Brynn’s body to get decomposition going.
Courtney had dealt with death on more than one occasion at the school. Mostly, however, those deaths were in an arena and the body was gone before it could think about decaying. She had attended only a couple of unattended deaths and they were all bad. Every last one of them had been ugly and most had been unnecessary. From the relaxed look of the body, Courtney immediately estimated time of death as more than thirty-six hours ago. She had died on Saturday night, alone.
‘Tanzi Royce,’ Courtney said. ‘I’d appreciate it if you could confirm that she’s dead for the record. Uh, could I borrow a pair of those gloves too?’
Tanzi was pulling on a pair of thin latex gloves. She held out the box for Courtney. The box had come from a little cart Tanzi had brought along with her, though most of what was in the cart was designed for helping living people and it was going to be mostly useless. ‘I could do that from here,’ the nurse said, ‘but I suppose we have to be official about it.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Not your fault.’ Tanzi was a moderately tall woman, a little shorter than Courtney but by no means small. She was also slim aside from a substantial bust which was currently squeezed into a one-piece, white body suit, there to protect her from whatever she might come up against when on duty. It was armour for meditechs. Add a helmet and better gloves and it would keep even the nastiest of pathogens out. Tanzi was pretty, like most people from a good family. She had short, dark-brown hair, tanned skin, and hazel eyes. She was, in fact, the eldest sister of Marie, the treasurer for the student council. She was also a competent medical technician and sorceress. Checking someone’s pulse was a little beneath her really. She still did it. ‘No pulse, no sign of respiration…’ She focused for a second. ‘Time of death was twenty-two forty-eight on Saturday night.’
Well, ‘more than thirty-six hours’ had been right. Courtney nodded. ‘Ties in with the statements from her friends. I know this is asking a
