The Sad Rains of Mars

Ynsum—1893
ILUTHU DAR, an Ynsum peacekeeper, paused just inside the open door of the flat to study the scene before her. A small lounge was thick with humans and tobacco smoke. One man lay shot dead, his face pale against a wash of blood across the hardwood floor imported from Earth.
        Around the body stood three more men: a stout uniformed constable of the Metropolitan Police Service, a tall pipe-smoking man in tweed waistcoat and jacket, and a disheveled man in shirt sleeves and braces, a cigar clenched between his teeth. The man in braces, whose mutton chops were grayer than the rest of the hair on his head, spoke in sharp tones about the violent natives of Mars—which the British insisted was the time-honored name of Ynsum.
       The constable noticed her lingering near the threshold. “What are you gawping at?”
       She looked him up and down. His dark-blue uniform, rather unkempt—a sturdy silver chain dangled pointlessly from a button—contrasted with tawny lumari-skin shoes, at which she frowned.
       As the two other men turned to see who the constable was talking to, she forced a neutral expression on her face and ran a three-fingered hand over her hairless head, her smooth copper skin beaded with water.
       Iluthu had been on foot patrol in an evening downpour when she’d heard the sirens wailing. She’d chased the police steamwagons as they lurched along the tangled streets of Chalymenth—which the humans called New London—for twenty minutes before finding herself standing in front of the Kensington. The block of flats was a looming giant in her eyes, stretching four stories into the air. Ynsum buildings tended to extend further beneath the ground than above, though she understood it was modest by old London standards, where some buildings soared up to a dozen stories.
       “Move along.” The constable waved his right arm, pointing in the general direction of the Kensington’s lobby. “This is police business.”
       She took a step closer to the men and raised her hand to display the rank tattoo on her palm. “Investigator Iluthu Dar of the Chalymenth Peacekeepers.” Her voice was naturally soft but carried an edge of authority. The English words came to her easily after a life under the Empire: Iluthu had never known her home without the mark of humans. Years before she was born the Empire’s first bullet ships, dangling from their landing balloons, had fallen through the thin sky onto the red sands of Ynsum, the space travelers claiming the so-called Far Colonies in Queen Victoria’s name. . . .