The Space Opera Megapack

by John W. Campbell

  The captain’s gaze met Richard’s. For the first time, the captain seemed sober. His expression was very serious. Richard had the sense that the captain knew more about him than Richard thought.

  Richard had waited too long to pretend shock at the question. And he couldn’t just wave it off, not considering the look the captain just gave him.

  “If I kill you, what do I get out of it?” Richard asked.

  The captain grinned and his head bobbled, that moment of clarity seemingly gone. “My eternal gratitude, my friend,” he said, just before he finished the third drink. “My eternal gratitude.”

  * * * *

  Hunsaker sat behind the desk and dug through the files. He had his back to the wall and, out of the corner of his eye, he watched the entrances and the stairway. He didn’t want anyone to surprise him for any reason.

  He had a pad propped up on his thighs. His personal screen, not the one tied into the resort proper. He had upgraded the pad dozens of times, sometimes illegally. More than once, he’d stolen programs from his guests, and from one—a well connected gambler who liked the odds (and the breasts) in the casino—he had stolen an entire database of shady characters throughout the sector.

  He didn’t expect to see any familiar names in that database, but he found one.

  Richard Ilykova, aka Yuri Flynn Doyle, Edward Michael Adams, and Misha Yurivich Orlinskaya, Mercenary and Assassin for Hire, believed to be responsible for more than two dozen deaths system wide.

  Hunsaker shivered. He had known that Richard Ilykova hadn’t been a common worker on a passenger ship. The man was too competent for that—not too mechanically competent, but too competent in the ways of death. He hadn’t flinched when he had seen Kantswinkle’s body, nor had he seemed too upset by his whole ordeal.

  Yet all those deaths—the three on the ship and the fourth here, seemed awfully sloppy for a man who made his living killing people.

  Hunsaker sighed softly and exited the illegal database. He felt dirty just thinking about Ilykova’s job. About the man himself, actually. Ilykova hadn’t seemed harmless—Hunsaker wasn’t that naïve—but he had seemed…more efficient than deadly.

  A movement caught his eye. Ilykova approached the desk. Hunsaker hadn’t even seen him enter the room.

  Hunsaker let out a little squeak. Ilykova raised an eyebrow in amusement. He’d clearly caught Hunsaker’s moment of fear. Ilykova smiled—one of those knowing smiles—and then proceeded as if he had seen nothing out of the ordinary.

  “Looking up the guests, are we?” he asked.

  “So?” Hunsaker asked, then realized that probably wasn’t the smartest response. Neither, he supposed, would be What’s it to you? Or Get the hell away from me.

  “So, does anyone have a history with lack of oxygen?”

  “What?” Hunsaker asked, mostly because he hadn’t been expecting that question.

  “I realized when I was talking with the captain that all of our victims suffocated in one way or another. The fire would have caused the rest of us to suffocate as well. I was just wondering if we have some sort of revenge scenario going on here.” Ilykova put his elbows on the desk.

  “You tell me,” Hunsaker said, his voice wobbling a little.

  Ilykova frowned. “I don’t have access to a deep database. You do.”

  Then his eyes widened just a little.

  “Oh,” he said. “You decided to research me first.”

  Hunsaker’s heart was pounding. He had nothing to lose here—if Ilykova was going to kill him, it would happen here, now. So he called up the earlier screen, with Ilykova’s history and pushed it across the desk at him.

  “These things are so poorly done,” Ilykova said. “It doesn’t tell you much, does it?”

  He looked up, his pale blue eyes twinkling. How could a man laugh about murder?

  It made Hunsaker think of Carmichael: Murder really shouldn’t be the subject of casual conversation, now should it?

  Nor should it be something to smile about.

  Apparently, Hunsaker’s silence caught Ilykova’s attention.

  “We all have a past, Grissan,” Ilykova said. “Yours involves embezzlement from every single resort you worked for. Quite creative embezzlement, I might add, the kind that would’ve made you very, very rich if you had kept to your original plan.”

  Hunsaker felt a warmth rise in his cheeks. No one knew about this. No one. How did Ilykova find it?

  “The problem was, in your profession, that the younger, less experienced members moved from resort to resort, while the older ones got a well-deserved sinecure. That’s the word, right? Sinecure?”

  “Sinecure implies a job with little work. That’s not true. To rise to the top of my profession, you must be willing to work at all times.” Hunsaker’s words were curt, showing his annoyance. He felt his face grow even warmer. He had let Ilykova irritate him.

  Ilykova smiled slightly. “My mistake. I simply meant that you hit the top of your profession and remained in one place, a resort that became ‘yours,’ even if you didn’t own it. You became the eyes and ears of the place, the face that everyone recognized. The person they associated with the resort. Which was why they bought you this place instead of prosecuting you. Did you know what a dive they got for you? It was the perfect revenge on their part, wasn’t it? An effective banishment away from the populated areas of the sector. Did it embarrass you?”

  Embarrassed, humiliated, angered. Hunsaker didn’t say anything, though, although he expected all of the emotions ran across his face.

  “Still,” Ilykova said, “you got to keep the money you stole from the other resorts. You could’ve vanished. You just chose not to.”

  Too ashamed to leave. Hunsaker simply couldn’t face any of his old colleagues ever again. Ever, ever, ever again.

  “We all have a bit of history,” Ilykova said. “I’m sure you had a reason for your sticky fingers. I have a reason for my history as well. My mother was Halina Layla Orlinskaya. Look her up in your little database.”

  Hunsaker took the pad back, his fingers shaking, dammit all to hell. He wasn’t as practiced at controlling his physical reactions to his emotions, not like he used to be.

  He looked up Halina Layla Orlinskaya. She had half a dozen aliases as well. A high level spy, who defected with some devastating knowledge that changed the course of one of the border wars, she survived her last few years by hiring herself out as a mercenary to various governments.

  “What it doesn’t say there, I’m sure,” Ilykova said, “is that she hired me out as well, as an assassin. She thought I had the personality for it.”

  “Did you?” Hunsaker wished he could take the words back.

  But Ilykova didn’t seem to notice. “Not really. I think one should feel passionate about his work. An assassin’s job requires no passion at all. Don’t you think that one should put his heart and soul into his job?”

  “I used to,” Hunsaker said.

  “And I’ll bet you miss that emotion,” Ilykova said. “I did. I wanted to do something with my life. Ah, to do something. Of course, now I’m broke and hiring onto ships as a lower level employee just to get across the sector.”

  He leaned across the desk. Hunsaker couldn’t lean away. His back was already pressed against the wall.

  “So you see, I had no reason to kill those people,” Ilykova said. “I didn’t know them. And I’m certainly smart enough not to set a fire on a spaceship far from the nearest port.”

  “But,” Hunsaker said, his voice smaller than he wanted it to be, “you knew Agatha Kantswinkle.”

  Ilykova smiled, a real smile, genuinely amused. “Didn’t like her either, huh? No one did, so far as I can tell. But I didn’t have to kill her. She would’ve gotten off the ship at Ansary. And here, on Vaadum, she was your problem, not mine.”

  Hunsaker swallowed. “So you’re saying you didn’t do it.”

  “That’s right,” Ilykova said. “Why would I?”

  “Someone
paid you?” Hunsaker asked.

  Ilykova shook his head. “If someone paid me, I would’ve been a passenger. I wouldn’t have signed on for work.”

  It sounded logical. It all sounded very logical. Hunsaker just didn’t know if he should believe it.

  “So what’s this about suffocation?” he asked.

  “Oh, just a theory,” Ilykova said. “Everyone suffocated in one way or another. So if you think of these crimes as related, then maybe the manner of death came as a form of revenge for a death by suffocation…?”

  “I wouldn’t even know how to look for that,” Hunsaker said.

  “I would,” Ilykova said, and took the pad away from Hunsaker.

  * * * *

  Richard was finding a whole lot of nothing as he dug through Hunsaker’s database. The database wasn’t that good. It was old, for one thing, and the updates hadn’t been meshed into the system all that well. They had been grafted on and not efficiently, certainly not efficiently enough for a proper search.

  He would have to get onto the Presidio. It had a good database and he might be able to find what he was looking for there.

  Because, in this cursory exploration, he couldn’t find anyone with any links to any suffocation deaths, murdered, accidental, or even natural.

  He was about to hand the pad back to Hunsaker, when someone screamed.

  “Oh, not again,” Hunsaker muttered.

  Richard tossed him the pad and ran up the steps, half expecting to hear a thump. He didn’t though. But he did hear another scream and, he realized, these screams were male.

  They weren’t frightened screams or startled screams (except maybe the first one), more likely horrified screams, end-of-the-world screams, the kind you emit when everything was hopeless and all was lost.

  Another scream, and then another. Doors slammed as people left their rooms. He was joining quite a crowd as he ran up the stairs.

  The screams came from the top floor.

  He arrived, along with three other passengers from the ship (Janet Powell, Lysa Lamphere, and William Bunting) to find a man he’d never seen before on his knees, hands over his face, screaming like a stuck alarm.

  Another body lay on the floor, this one a woman, also someone he’d never seen before either. Her eyes were open and glassy, her tongue protruding slightly.

  She was clearly dead.

  Someone sighed behind him.

  Richard turned slightly. Hunsaker stood near his shoulder, and stared at the woman on the floor.

  “Now what the hell am I going to do?” Hunsaker said with great annoyance. “I mean, really.”

  * * * *

  Judging from the look on Ilykova’s face, Hunsaker had spoken out loud. He felt that warmth returning to his cheeks. He kept his head down, so that he didn’t have to look Ilykova in the eyes, and moved into the room.

  He put his hand on Fergus’s shoulders. Fergus had worked for Hunsaker since Hunsaker came to the resort. Fergus and his wife, Dillith, who now doubled as a corpse. Not that she was ever much livelier than a corpse. But for what Dillith lacked in energy, she made up for in precision.

  She could find a speck of dust the robotic cleaners left behind. She could turn bed sheet corners perfectly. She was slow, but she was anal.

  And in Hunsaker’s “resort,” precision mattered more than speed.

  Fergus stopped screaming when Hunsaker touched him. Fergus looked up, eyes sunken into his face, and said, “What am I going to do?”

  His use of the sentence was plaintive. Hunsaker’s had been self-involved. He had jumped from corpse/murder/crisis to who the hell was going to work for me in this godforsaken place? in less than a minute. He wasn’t proud of that, but he really wasn’t a man who developed much affection for his employees.

  In fact, he believed affection got in the way of work. He didn’t know much about Dillith and Fergus besides their names, their work methods, and the fact that they both preferred late hours rather than getting up early.

  “Stand up,” Hunsaker said with as much sympathy as he could muster, which probably wasn’t enough. “We’ll figure something out.”

  Fergus stood. He was a slight man, and he fell into Hunsaker’s arms, much to Hunsaker’s chagrin. He hadn’t invited the man to hug him. He certainly didn’t want the man to touch him. But Fergus was beyond noticing subtleties. He was sobbing. Hunsaker could already feel his shirt getting wet.

  He patted Fergus on the back and maneuvered him out of the room. Then he looked at Ilykova who was watching him with that look of amusement again.

  “Do me a favor,” Hunsaker said to Ilykova. “Get Anne Marie Devlin, would you?”

  “Who?” Ilykova said.

  “The base doctor,” Hunsaker said.

  “I think this woman is beyond a doctor—”

  “Just do it,” Hunsaker said, resisting the urge to move Fergus toward Ilykova. That would show him passion, all right.

  Ilykova nodded, then hurried down the stairs. Three passengers from the ship stood around as if this were a theatrical event.

  “Go back to your rooms,” Hunsaker said. “There’s nothing to see.”

  As if a woman wasn’t already dead on the floor. There was plenty to see. He just didn’t want them gawking at it.

  They, of course, didn’t move. He glared at them and tried to look tough, which was hard to do when you had a member of the staff sobbing in your arms.

  “Go,” he said, and that seemed to work. Maybe it was his tone, his clear disgust at everyone around him.

  The three left slowly. He watched them go down the stairs, patting Fergus on the back the entire time as if he were a baby who needed to be burped.

  Then Hunsaker peered at the room. It didn’t look that much different than it had two hours ago.

  When he’d helped Susan Carmichael move out of it.

  * * * *

  She heard the screaming, of course. How could she have missed it? And she resisted her first instinct, which was to burrow deep under the covers of this new room, and pretend like she couldn’t hear anything.

  But Susan Carmichael wasn’t a hider. She wasn’t the kind of person who ran to the scene of a crime either, although she couldn’t be entirely certain what she heard was a crime.

  But someone didn’t scream with that level of grief—and that was grief, wasn’t it?—without a precipitating event, and considering Agatha’s murder, the best assumption—the only assumption, really—was that a crime had occurred.

  Again.

  Which meant she had to get the hell off this station.

  Somehow.

  She changed clothes, slowly and deliberately, putting on the ivory blouse over the black pants. She slipped on her shoes, smoothed her hair, grabbed her personal information, and left this room as well.

  The screaming had stopped, but she could hear faint voices in the distance. She glanced at the stairs, to ensure that no one was on them, and then she quietly made her way down.

  It was time she stopped all of this. She gave up. She had been fleeing her family, but really, life out here was much, much worse than life with them could ever be.

  Besides, her father had the capability of getting a ship here within twenty-four hours. He had ships all over the sector. One of them had to be nearby.

  She just had to contact him.

  She made her way down the stairs toward the main desk. Surely, there was some kind of interstellar communications node. Or maybe just a sector-wide node.

  Or worse case—which was a case she’d put up with, after all—she would simply contact the nearest ship and have them contact her father.

  And then she would wait.

  Although she probably needed some kind of guard.

  There wasn’t a lot of choice. Everyone from the ship was a possible murderer, and there weren’t a lot of people on the station.

  But all of the murders she knew of took place while the victim was alone.

  So the next key was to be with someone at all times.


  Except right now.

  Right now, she needed to contact Daddy.

  After that, she find a companion—and find a way to stay awake until help arrived.

  * * * *

  Anne Marie Devlin was no longer drunk. She wasn’t even under-the-surface drugged-sober drunk. She was so far past drunk that she felt giddy.

  Actually, the excitement made her feel giddy. She felt useful for the first time in months.

  If she didn’t know herself better—and she knew herself quite well, thank you—she would say she had become a drunk because she was bored.

  But she had been a drunk long before life ceased to be a challenge. She knew that excitement was just a temporary high, while alcohol numbed the senses, which was usually what she preferred.

  Right now, however, she needed all the senses that she had. She was inside yet another room—this one a favorite of hers—standing over yet another corpse that had been murdered by yet another tampered environmental system.

  The question was, how had it been tampered with? And why?

  She was peering at the system itself, noting something off, when she realized one of the ship’s passengers was also in the room. A tallish white-blond man with pale blue eyes.

  The man who had fetched her. Richard Something-Or-Other.

  “I prefer to work alone,” she said.

  “So do I,” he said.

  They stared at each other for a moment. Hunsaker, who also preferred to work alone (she knew that because he had told her half a dozen times) stood near the doorway, his shirt soaked with Fergus’s tears. She’d managed to get Fergus out of the room and down to the kitchen where the chef could watch him. Fergus was quite pliable most of the time. Right now, he was damn near catatonic.

  Perhaps anyone would be after crying that much.

  She turned toward Hunsaker. “What the hell were you thinking? Sending those two to work in these rooms with a murderer on the loose?”

  “Who knew that the killer would come after one of us?” he said.

  “I don’t think the killer did,” Richard Something-Or-Other said. “If you’ll allow me.”