“Got a new case for you,” said my boss, Raymond Chen. “Homicide.”

My heart started pounding. Mendelia habitat is supposed to be a utopia. Murder is almost unheard of here.

Chen was fat — never exercised, loved rich foods. He knew his lifestyle would take decades off his life, but, hey, that was his choice. “Somebody offed a soothsayer, over in Wheel Four,” he said, wheezing slightly. “Baranski’s on the scene now.”

My eyebrows went up. A dead soothsayer? This could be very interesting indeed.

I took my pocket forensic scanner and exited The Cop Shop. That was its real name — no taxes in Mendelia, after all. You needed a cop, you hired one. In this case, Chen had said, we were being paid by the Soothsayers’ Guild. That meant we could run up as big a bill as necessary — the SG was stinking rich. One of the few laws in Mendelia was that everyone had to use soothsayers.

Mendelia consisted of five modules, each looking like a wagon wheel with spokes leading in to a central hub. The hubs were all joined together by a long axle, and separate travel tubes connected the outer edges of the wheels. The whole thing spun to simulate gravity out at the rims, and the travel tubes saved you having to go down to the zero-g of the axle to move from one wheel to the next.

The Cop Shop was in Wheel Two. All the wheel rims were hollow, with buildings growing up toward the axle from the outer interior wall. Plenty of open spaces in Mendelia — it wouldn’t be much of a utopia without those. But our sky was a hologram, projected on the convex inner wall of the rim, above our heads. The Cop Shop’s entrance was right by Wheel Two’s transit loop, a series of maglev tracks along which robocabs ran. I hailed one, flashed my debit card at an unblinking eye, and the cab headed out. The Carling family, who owned the taxi concession, was one of the oldest and richest families in Mendelia.