Makeshift detective

The body floated face down, its bloated wrists swelling against the buttoned sleeves of the blue maintenance jumpsuit.
Or at least, it had once been blue. Long immersion had leeched much of the cheap dye into the water.
And it was not the only body. Orikan could see at least five others floating on the lapping waters of the cistern, its surface rippling as the midnight rains trickled more fluid into the lightless cavern of the world’s water supply.
It had taken them three local days to get this far down.
‘Turn it over,’ said Orikan.
‘You turn it over,’ Trazyn shot back.
‘I thought the mysteries of the human form were but old prophecies to you? Surely you cannot tell me you refuse to–’
‘Yes, yes. Very well.’ Trazyn waded waist-deep into the water, hooked a finger on the jumpsuit and rolled the corpse over. ‘Hmm. This damage is… quite extensive.’
‘You’re saying humans don’t normally look like this?’ Orikan jabbed.
Trazyn ran a spectromantic analysis, raising a hand and bombarding the body with reflective lasers. ‘Normally I would say this was post-mortem damage from some scavenger. The avian-lizards in the sewer can grow to be quite large and aggressive. The bloating makes things difficult, of course. But I doubt even the largest could cause such a dramatic fracture to the right ocular orbital – look, it runs straight through to the upper palate. What flesh remains appears to have been gouged with some metal weapon or tool.’
‘A claw.’
‘Bit of a leap, dear astromancer,’ said Trazyn, not looking up from his examination. ‘This trauma in the chest cavity is quite extensive, however. If the rib fractures did not give it away as perimortem injury, I would, as I have said, thought it to be the work of a large scavenger. As it is, it may be some kind of tool. Indeed, on the left side only the false ribs remain. It almost appears as if the attacker grabbed the sternum and tore ribs one through eight out, separating the right side of the costal cartilage with a slash and yanked the ribs from the ligament connections to the vertebrae.’
‘I know it appears that way, but…’ Trazyn turned. ‘Ah, I see.’
Orikan hovered a hand’s breadth above the water’s surface, legs crossed, his inbuilt repulsor drives making little rippling dimples in the surface of the cistern. His ocular was shut tight, head back. Before him, his dexterous hands danced in precise movements, as though he were unfurling a scroll before him.
‘It did not happen here. Death came in the tunnels above. He did not see what killed him. It came from the side, out of the dark, avoiding his torch beam.’
‘You see this?’
‘Imperfectly,’ said Orikan. ‘I can only reconstruct based on evidence. Not a true vision, but a forensic-projection extrapolated from his injuries and the lingering trauma patterns burned in his neural pathways.’
‘And what do you see?’
‘Claws.’ Orikan opened his ocular. ‘Long claws. A predator’s weapon. It hit him from the side, the attacker’s hard cranium – head down like a ram – causing the incapacitating skull trauma.’ He pointed. ‘Minor defensive wounds on the arms. He was stunned on his back. The pelvic bone – you missed that, dear colleague – gained a hairline fracture when it knelt on him. And then, it tore into the chest with its claws and teeth.’
‘And teeth?’
Orikan waved a hand, bringing up a chrysoprase model of one of the remaining ribs, spun it so he could see. ‘Dentition marks of pointed teeth. And more important, dental scoring. Meaning–’
‘Meaning he was still alive when it ate him,’ said Trazyn, and paused.

The Infinite and the Divine