The Space Opera Megapack

by John W. Campbell

  Of course, that ship had to be the Presidio.

  If the fire hadn’t happened, if the ship hadn’t had to stop here, Richard would’ve quit when they reached the Commons Station. He would have cited the killings as a hostile work environment and no one would have had second thoughts about his departure.

  He couldn’t leave here, now. There was no reason to stay on this station, since ships rarely stopped here, and he did need to keep moving. But he really didn’t want to get back on that ship, provided the people in maintenance could actually fix the thing.

  He let himself out of the “resort,” through the double doors, past the restaurant. The smell of simmering beef—or was it lamb?—made his stomach growl. He wasn’t sure when he last had a real meal.

  Although he wasn’t sure how anyone could serve real food here, either. He doubted supply ships made a huge profit coming in and out of Vaadum. But they probably got paid well to stop.

  He hurried down the corridor toward the maintenance area. Clearly, the maintenance area had once been the entire station. The corridor proved it. The corridor was grafted on, little more than a tube with an environmental system, leading to the second part of the station, the resort, which someone had built on at least a century ago—and not from the best materials.

  This part of the station felt very fragile. He could almost feel the corridor bounce with each of his footsteps, even though he knew that the thing wasn’t built that way. It was his very active imagination, something he had failed to shut off for years now.

  Finally, he got out of the corridor and into the maintenance area. It seemed huge, although it wasn’t. He knew the sense of vastness was an optical illusion caused by the emptiness. The maintenance area was the oldest part of Vaadum, built two centuries ago to house at least six large ships in various states of disrepair.

  Apparently, the station’s owners throughout the years hadn’t wanted to chop up the area, imagining, probably, that there might come a time when all seven repair bays were being used.

  The Presidio had the center bay. It looked odd in here, since the ship wasn’t built to be inside any kind of bay. Once it had been assembled, it remained outside buildings. But the station’s tiny ring made it impossible to repair ships docked to it.

  Richard was glad he hadn’t been onboard when the captain had had to maneuver the Presidio in here. That must’ve taken some white-knuckle flying, particularly since the ship was so damaged.

  Richard could see the damage from the entry. The fire had burned its way through one entire wing of the ship. The wing had remained intact, but here someone had knocked the exterior off. Through the hole—large enough to hold at least five men—he could see the scorch marked interior.

  He shuddered.

  He’d been afraid on ships before, starting with that cruise with his father, when the assassin had stood up, a laser rifle in his hands. He’d aimed it at Richard, and Richard hadn’t cringed. He’d been twelve, too young to understand—too sheltered to understand—that the man who aimed the laser rifle at him meant to kill him.

  Only the assassin hadn’t meant to kill him. He’d left Richard—who was then known as Misha—alive, as a warning to Richard’s mother, who had worked as some kind of double agent. Richard had never tried to understand the politics of it. All he ever knew was that his father and so many others had died because one government hired an assassin to warn his mother away from some job.

  He wasn’t even sure she had felt guilty about it, although she had been angry. And angrier at him when he had gotten his revenge on the assassin. She had wanted the assassin alive—for what reason Richard never knew.

  He never tried to understand his mother. But her life, her decisions, had caused him to be here now, decades later, on the run for half a dozen killings, all of them he could say—he would have once said—justified.

  Especially that first one.

  “Help you?”

  One of the maintenance guys came over. He was holding some fancy tools that Richard had never seen before. The maintenance guy was the first person that Richard had seen on this station who looked like he belonged. Whip thin, angular, sharp dark eyes and hair cropped close to the skull. He had a smudge along one cheek.

  “I work on the Presidio,” Richard said. “I was wondering if you’d found a cause for the fire yet.”

  “Why?” the maintenance guy asked.

  Richard studied him for a moment. The maintenance guy seemed solid enough, although Richard wasn’t the kind of man who trusted easily. Hell, Richard wasn’t the kind of man who trusted at all.

  But the maintenance guy had been on this station for a long time, and he would have had no involvement in the fire or the deaths. Not even Agatha Kantswinkle’s death.

  “I want to know if it was deliberately set,” Richard said.

  “What’s it to you?” the maintenance guy asked.

  Richard blinked at him, and nearly snapped, What’s it to me? If this outpost hadn’t been nearby, I would have died on that ship. Murdered, if the fire was set. No one would have survived.

  “Three passengers were murdered on that ship,” Richard said, “and another just died here.”

  The maintenance guy started. He hadn’t heard about Kantswinkle then.

  “So I want to know if that fire was a coincidence or deliberately set. Because I’m not getting back on that ship with someone who sets fires in space.”

  “But you’d get back on the ship if it had design flaws that made it catch fire?” the maintenance guy asked.

  Richard almost smiled. He hadn’t thought of that. Which showed that he was someone who didn’t know much about ship mechanics, and knew too much about killers.

  “Does it have design flaws?” Richard asked.

  “All ships have design flaws,” the maintenance guy said. “Some are deadlier than others.”

  “And this ship?” Richard asked, beginning to feel annoyed.

  “This ship had some weaknesses that were easy to exploit,” the maintenance guy said. “If you asked me to prove that someone deliberately set a fire, I can’t. At least, not right now. If you asked me to guess how the fire started, I’d say that someone encouraged it. And I’d say you all were damn lucky to survive.”

  Richard felt a shiver run down his back. Two lucky survivals. If he were superstitious, he’d think that there was a third in his future.

  “Can the ship be repaired?”

  “It’ll take us a few days,” the maintenance guy said. “We have to rebuild a few things, replace even more, and then make sure that it’s strong enough to handle space again. When we’re done, it should be better than new.”

  He sounded confident. He actually sounded excited about the prospect of reviving the ship, of making it worthy to fly again. He probably didn’t get challenges like this one often.

  Or maybe he did. Maybe his job was all about cobbling ships together so that they would survive to the next port.

  “Can you make it tamperproof?” Richard asked.

  The maintenance guy gave him a sad look. “No ship is tamperproof,” he said. “Especially not a ship as old as this one.”

  Richard must’ve looked unsettled, because the maintenance guy added, “We’ll make it better than it was. If you have a problem out there, it won’t be because of the ship.”

  “Yeah,” Richard said, “I’m beginning to figure that out.”

  * * * *

  Anne Marie Devlin still smelled of beer. Hunsaker wrinkled his nose as he stood inside Kantswinkle’s room. Anne Marie had crouched over the body for only a moment, and then she started walking the parameter of the room as if the room were big enough to have a perimeter. She inspected every little thing. The walls, the chair, the bed, the floor.

  Everything except Kantswinkle.

  Finally, Hunsaker couldn’t take it any longer. “What are you doing?”

  Anne Marie didn’t answer him. She stood on her toes, and peered at the small control panel he’d installed for the
guests. The control panel didn’t give them much control over anything, just the illusion of control.

  You let them operate the heating and cooling in their tiny space, and they thought they had charge of the universe.

  “Anne Marie,” he snapped. “I asked you a question.”

  “You did, didn’t you,” she said, her back to him. He had never met such an aggravating woman. She’d be a marvel if she didn’t drink.

  “What. Are. You. Doing.” He enunciated each word so that she would know just how annoyed he was.

  “I. Am. Investigating,” she said, mimicking his tone exactly.

  His cheeks heated. Did he really sound that obnoxious? Not to his own ears, certainly. “Investigating what?”

  Anne Marie turned. She looked at the door first, and then at him. He pulled the door again to make sure it was pulled tight.

  “Don’t do that,” she said.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  She walked to the door and cracked it open just a little. “It’s better this way.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re getting claustrophobic now,” he said. He’d heard about her other ailments. The alcoholism she refused to treat aggravated the depression she refused to acknowledge which was caused by something in her past she refused to talk about.

  All in all, the most infuriating woman he had ever met. And one of the most brilliant.

  “I have a hunch I’ll always be claustrophobic in this room from now on.” She peered through the crack in the door as she clearly checked the hallway, then pushed the door open just a bit wider. “We’re alone.”

  He had to check on that himself. Not that he didn’t trust her, but he really didn’t trust her.

  “What’s going on?” he said when he was satisfied no one lurked in the hall or the stairwell.

  “This poor dear woman,” Anne Marie said, thereby proving she had never met Agatha Kantswinkle, “suffocated.”

  He glanced at Agatha Kantswinkle’s neck. No mottled marks, no sign of a struggle. If this woman had suffocated, she had done so without hands around her neck or something pressed against her nose and mouth.

  He swallowed hard. “Even if the environmental system had shut down,” he said, “she wouldn’t have died this quickly.”

  “Yes, I know,” Anne Marie said. “The problem is the environmental system hadn’t shut down.”

  “Then how did she die?” he asked.

  “I told you,” Anne Marie said. “She suffocated.”

  “You can tell that from eyeballing her?” he asked.

  Anne Marie smiled just a little. “I’ll confirm with an autopsy,” she said. “But I will confirm.”

  “No one touched her,” he said. “And if it wasn’t the environmental system, then what was it?”

  “Oh, it was the environmental system,” Anne Marie said. “That’s why your other guest fainted. The door opened, she saw the body, she screamed, took in what she thought was a lungful of air to continue her scream, and passed out. Lucky girl. Had she been closer to the door inside the room, she would have died too.”

  Hunsaker was feeling dizzy. He realized he wasn’t breathing either. He made himself take a breath, but it felt odd. He hadn’t thought of breathing before. Maybe, like Anne Marie, he wouldn’t want to be in this room alone with the door closed either.

  “What did she breathe?” he asked.

  “It wasn’t pure carbon dioxide,” Anne Marie said, “or her skin would be bright red. More likely a cocktail of gases, something that created the faint bitter odor that was in the room when we arrived.”

  He had been here earlier. The smell had been stronger. He didn’t tell her that.

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  She held up one of her portable scanners. “I’ve been taking readings from various areas of the room. I’m getting a mixture of things that should never be in a residential area of a space station. I have the behavior of both women. I have the smell. And then there’s the controls themselves.”

  She swept a hand toward them.

  He walked past her and peered at them.

  Someone had hit the override. The damn thing was blinking, asking for a manual code to confirm the oxygen mix, which was purer than it should have been.

  Not only had someone tampered with the controls, but someone had tampered with them twice—once when Agatha Kantswinkle entered the room, and then again after she died.

  “I would assume that these systems keep track of who touches them when?” Anne Marie asked.

  He had no idea. The last time he’d used an override had been a decade ago. Since then, he’d replaced most of the guest room environmental controls, going to a simpler system—one that gave the guests two options—hotter or colder. Nothing as fancy as this little box, which even allowed the guests—with the override code—to mix their oxygen from thin to thick.

  “I don’t know,” he said, feeling absolutely helpless.

  “Well.” Anne Marie smiled, clearly liking his discomfort. “I guess you’d better find out.”

  * * * *

  Pounding, pounding, pounding.

  Susan sat up, filled with adrenaline. She’d been dreaming. Not dreaming so much as trapped in a memory.

  The slight banging noise, rhythmic, feet against the thin wall.

  Her mouth tasted of bile. She got off the bed, rubbed her hand over her face, and went to her door.

  Janet Potsworth stood outside. She looked more disheveled than Susan had ever seen her.

  “Oh, you’re all right then,” Janet said with obvious relief.

  Susan frowned. “Of course I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Because you didn’t come for dinner,” Janet said.

  Susan rolled her eyes. She had asked the chef—if that man could be called a chef—to give her a meal for her room. He had obliged, serving her some kind of stew that wasn’t on the menu.

  The staff will eat this, he said. You will like it better.

  She had carried it upstairs herself, and she had liked it. She ate alone for the first time in a week. No angst, no speculation, no fear.

  Just a quiet meal in her quiet room. Then she let her exhaustion take her, and she had fallen into a blissful sleep.

  Until she dreamed of Remy’s death. The man had hanged himself in his room—which had taken some doing. The sheet wrapped around his neck, dangling off some fixture. She hadn’t seen it, but she had heard his feet, banging, banging, banging, which she hadn’t thought odd until later.

  He wasn’t bumping against the wall when they found him. She must have been hearing him die.

  In fact, no one thought he had done anything except kill himself. He was the first, after all. They’d said some words over him, looked at his traveler’s contract, saw that his body didn’t have to be returned to anyone, and slipped him into the darkness of space, along with a few of his possessions.

  An act they all regretted when the second body turned up. By then, it had become clear that Remy hadn’t killed himself and that banging she had heard was his attempt to get her attention. Or to kick his way free. Or to find purchase for his feet. Or to get to his killer.

  She hated thinking about it, but she did think about it.

  Often.

  As did everyone else, it seemed. Including the killer. Who had to be laughing at them all.

  She wasn’t getting back on that ship. Not now, not ever. And she shouldn’t have opened her door to Janet either. Janet was one of those obnoxious women who thought every man was a conquest and every woman was competition.

  So there had to be another reason she was here.

  “I’m fine,” Susan said, and started to close the door.

  “You can understand why we were concerned,” Janet said, “considering what happened to poor Agatha.”

  Susan sighed. She was now supposed to ask, What happened to Agatha?…as if she cared. Agatha was the most obnoxious woman she had ever met. And that was saying something.

  She didn’t
want to know what happened to Agatha. And if she took the verbal bait, she’d be regaled with some horrifying story of someone’s rudeness to the most obnoxious woman she had ever met.

  “Yes, I can understand,” Susan lied. “Thank you for thinking of me.”

  And then she pushed the door closed.

  * * * *

  “It started in this panel,” said the maintenance guy. His name was Larry and he had been on the station for more than a decade. Larry loved his work. Out here, he said when Richard asked, my job is a real challenge. You gotta be creative, you know? And you gotta be right. We’ve never lost any ship that’s left here, and we’ve never gotten any complaints about our work later on. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.

  Richard somehow found that enthusiasm reassuring. Reassuring enough to join Larry inside the burned out section of the Presidio. It smelled of smoke and melted plastic. His nose itched with a constant urge to sneeze. He breathed shallowly through his mouth because he had a hunch if he started sneezing, he wouldn’t stop.

  “See right here,” Larry said, pointing at a mass of blackened something-or-other, “there’s one of those design flaws I mentioned. Nothing that would trigger on its own, but something that could be taken advantage of.”

  He explained it in rather technical language that Richard was surprised he understood. It sounded so simple, and yet he wouldn’t have been able to do it.

  “But this thing had been burning for hours when we found it,” Richard said. “All the warning systems had been shut down.”

  “And the environmental system tampered with,” Larry said. “The oxygen mix had to have been low here. There wasn’t a lot of fuel for this fire, and there should have been. Also, this ship has a built-in system for putting out fires. It would have vented the atmosphere, and isolated the area. It did none of those things.”

  “Is that easy to tamper with?” Richard asked.

  “For me, sure,” Larry said. “For you, not so much.”