Not that the rest of the view was too shabby. Two hundred meters away, the massive cliffs of the caldera wall gave a heroically vertiginous view out across the crater base—though that view was now partially blocked by the wide splash of solidified metal foam that had been sprayed over the big hole in the diamond molecule reinforced glass. Two mechez, like a mechanical spider-octopus hybrid, clung to the surface, their nozzles alert for any further outbreak of cracks.

Most of the furniture was missing, sucked through the rent before it was sealed. A tide line of mashed-up debris lay along the base of the window.

Keeping a wary eye on the foam metal, Alik edged up to the window and looked down. Fifty meters below, the ancient God of War’s ginger sands showed a smear-plume of fragments that had once been Lorenzo’s elegant antique Chinese ornaments. And a body.

Alik shuddered as best as his stiff flesh would allow as his mind ran through the sequence of what had happened. It was all so different from a faller on Earth. If you dropped a body off a fifty-meter-high balcony in standard gravity, all the coroner crew would be left with was mopping up the splat puddle. Impact would shatter every bone and split the skin open, leaving a gush of gore and shit to soak the sidewalk. On Mars, with its one-third Earth-standard gravity, the impact was different. The fall probably didn’t kill whoever had gone through the window. On a pain level, the landing would have been like taking a Saturday night mob beating, but he would still have been alive. In agony. And up on the summit, atmospheric pressure was seventy pascals, which to a human body was indistinguishable from zero. That had pulled the air right out of his lungs, leaving the exposed capillaries to rupture. The blood that vomited out in a boiling pink spume would also be sucked away, to spray in a slow-motion arc across the ground in front of his face before freezing in the minus fifty-five degrees centigrade climate, along with the rest of the victim’s body.

That is truly a bitch of a way to die, Alik thought. Whoever blew a hole in the window clearly had no love for the victim he could see on the ground below him.

He had to give NYPD credit; there were already space-suited figures down there, recording the scene. They had a trollez with them. He just hoped they didn’t drop the corpse when they were loading it on. It would shatter like a drunk’s beer glass.

“It’s never the fall that kills you,” Alik murmured.

“It’s always the landing,” Salovitz finished.

Alik touched an uneasy finger on the foam metal, praying it wouldn’t give. “So what the fuck punched through this? Another buzz shot?”