The Space Opera Megapack

by John W. Campbell

  He shoved—shoved!—Anne Marie out of the way, and peered at the control panel himself.

  “You do realize if this man is the killer, he now has access to the evidence,” she said to Hunsaker.

  “You do realize if this man is the killer,” Hunsaker said, mimicking her tone, “then you just gave him a reason to kill us.”

  They glared at each other again.

  “I’m not the killer,” Richard Something-Or-Other said, “but whoever is has some serious engineering skills.”

  She couldn’t resist: she peered into the controls as well. These older models had digital readouts and mechanisms attached to mechanisms. She had just looked at the one in the room where Agatha Kantswinkle died—and that control did not have a secondary digital readout. This one did.

  She looked at Richard Something-Or-Other. He raised his eyebrows at her, as if he were surprised as well. Then he touched the whole thing with a single fingernail. The second readout was loose, but had been attached into the control’s mechanism. She peered at the mix. When Dillith had been in here, the atmosphere’s mix had been the same as it had been with Agatha Kantswinkle died.

  Anne Marie frowned. She glanced over her shoulder at the door. Hunsaker was still leaning on the jam, glaring at her. He seemed to disapprove of what she was doing.

  Or maybe he disapproved of Richard Something-Or-Other.

  Or maybe he always disapproved of everything.

  She sighed and walked to the door.

  “Move,” she said.

  Hunsaker didn’t.

  “I mean it. Move. I need to see something.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “It’s easier to look than it is to explain,” she said pushing him aside. Then she peered inside the locking mechanism. Another small digital readout had been attached.

  “This door was closed when Fergus got here, wasn’t it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Hunsaker said. “I didn’t ask.”

  “You didn’t bother to tell them to keep the doors open?”

  Hunsaker’s glare changed to something filled with a kind of fury. “Of course I did. It’s part of the general instructions, anyway. The door should always be open with the staff is inside, even if no one else is.”

  “Hmm,” she said.

  “What?” Richard Something-Or-Other asked from his position near the environmental controls.

  “This is a timer,” she said. “It closes the door.”

  “And this timer,” he said, “changes the environmental mix.”

  “It couldn’t have been put in here when Dillith was here,” Anne Marie said.

  “Someone set it up earlier than that,” Richard Something-Or-Other said.

  “Which means that the killer wasn’t after Dillith,” Anne Marie said.

  “He was after Susan Carmichael.” Hunsaker said that last, breathed it in fact. Anne Marie could hear the shock in his voice. “If I’d gotten her just a little too late, then—”

  “You would’ve died too,” Anne Marie said. “We have to brace this door open.”

  “I doubt the room will kill again,” Richard Something-Or-Other said.

  “But the other rooms might,” Anne Marie said.

  “I moved everyone out of the older rooms,” Hunsaker said.

  “Let’s hope that’s enough,” Anne Marie said. She actually felt a little chill. She liked the chill. Excitement—she had missed it so much. “Maybe he’ll start coming after the rest of us too.”

  “Oh, don’t get your hopes up,” Hunsaker snapped and left the room.

  Richard Something-Or-Other raised his eyebrows again. “What was that all about?”

  Anne Marie shrugged. “I guess he’s upset by all of this.”

  Richard nodded. “I think it would be surprising if he were not.”

  * * * *

  Hunsaker stomped down the stairs. Now he didn’t know what to do. Did he warn Carmichael? Did he put all the guests in the same room and let them duke it out until a ship arrived and got them out of his resort?

  He stopped halfway down the stairs and leaned his head against the wall. All of his training, all of his long and fancy education, all of his experience good and bad did not train him for any of this. He could just imagine the lecture titled How to Handle a Murderer Loose in Your Resort.

  Simple: Call the local authorities.

  And if there were none?

  He banged his head against the metal just once. If he rounded them up, where would he take them? The restaurant? The casino?

  The casino at least covered a big area. It would be hard to tamper with the environmental system.

  Maybe he should just force them all back to their ship, and if they killed each other, so be it. Hell, if they died from smoke inhalation, so be it. It wasn’t his concern.

  While they were here, they bothered him.

  While they were on their ship, they had nothing to do with him.

  That’s what he’d do. He’d get the maintenance guys and make them act as security guards. Even the chef and the blackjack dealer could work security (so long as she put her shirt on). They’d round up these horrible people and put them back on their own ship and if they died, they died.

  His stomach turned.

  Maybe if they all died, he could just jettison the ship into deepest darkest space. He’d set it on autopilot and get it the hell out of here.

  For a moment, his spirits rose.

  Then he remembered he’d already charged their accounts. There was a record he couldn’t tamper with of them being on his station.

  Dammit.

  He had no idea what to do.

  * * * *

  Richard helped Anne Marie get the corpse down to the medical wing. He’d had enough of carrying bodies. By his count, this was the fifth this trip, and the only one he hadn’t met while she was still alive.

  The medical wing was in the farthest part of the station, and certainly didn’t deserve the appellation “wing.” It was a medical suite at best, a smallish group of rooms set up as an afterthought.

  Agatha Kantswinkle lay on one table, naked—which was an image he’d never get out of his mind again—and, to his surprise, the other two bodies from the ship in clear refrigeration units, looking no worse for being dead the last few days.

  He set Dillith on the closest table, and stretched his muscles with relief.

  “Thank you,” the doctor said in that tone all professionals used which actually meant you’re done, now get the hell out.

  Which he did.

  And as he stepped into the corridor, he realized he’d been going about this investigation all wrong. He’d been looking for common ties, for suffocation deaths, for motive, and he, of all people, should know that motive mattered a lot less than the entertainments said it did.

  His motive for most of his early killings had been because his mother had hired him out to do the job. The later killings had been because he could make money at it. Only the first killing had had a real motive: the man had murdered his father and ruined Richard’s life.

  Richard didn’t need to look at motive.

  He needed to look for experience. Technical experience.

  With environmental systems.

  He scurried back to the hotel’s main entrance, and hoped that Hunsaker’s horrible aging database had at least enough information to solve all of this.

  * * * *

  She wasn’t hysterical. Hunsaker could’ve dealt with her if she had been hysterical. He had training in hysterical. High-end hotel guests often got hysterical about nothing. And here, which was decidedly not high-end, people got hysterical because…well, because they were here.

  Susan G. Carmichael had every reason to be hysterical. She could’ve died in her room had he not taken her out of it. But she had already figured out that she might die and she was calmer than he was.

  She had even found a way to contact her father, who was such a famous Vice Admiral that Hunsaker had even heard of him, and
he was sending a ship that would be here in 18 hours sharp, along with some kind of back-up that would take care of the problem.

  Whatever that meant.

  But she wasn’t returning to her room.

  To any room, really.

  She wanted to remain with Hunsaker, thinking that somehow, Hunsaker would be safe.

  He sat on his chair with his back against the wall, no longer sure what safe was. She was sitting on the edge of his desk, surveying the area as if she ran it instead of him.

  He was still debating whether to get everyone else out of their rooms when Ilykova burst through the doors.

  “I need your database,” he said.

  “Whatever happened to please and thank you?” Hunsaker muttered, knowing he was being a complete ass, as he handed over the pad.

  Ilykova ignored that, although he did glance at Carmichael. He didn’t seem that surprised to see her. Then he leaned against the desk and started trolling the database, his fingers moving faster than Hunsaker’s ever could.

  The three of them didn’t say a word as Ilykova worked. Carmichael watched him. Hunsaker kept an eye on the doors and the stairs, not that it had made any difference in the past.

  Then Ilykova looked over at Carmichael. “Were you and Agatha Kantswinkle ever alone?”

  “Here?” she asked.

  “On the ship,” he said.

  She looked down. “I talked to her once. After that incident—you know. I felt so sorry for her that—”

  “What incident?” Hunsaker interrupted. It wouldn’t have been his business had everything happened on the ship, but the ship’s problems had spilled into his little resort, and he felt he had a right to know.

  She looked at him. “We had a dinner hour on the ship. We all got fed at the same time, and the room wasn’t that big. We got to know each other better than you usually got to know people on passenger ships, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.”

  Ilykova nodded, although he kept his head down, still searching the database as he listened.

  “Anyway, just after Professor Grove died , we were all on edge, and Agatha started into how we needed someone to take charge, to make sure things wouldn’t get worse, and Mr. Bunting had enough. He told her she was a nosy snobbish old woman who would know how to treat other human beings even if she had special training, and she certainly couldn’t be in charge of anything, and he didn’t believe anything she said about herself and—.” Carmichael shook her head. “I was agreeing with him at first, she was an unpleasant woman, and I would’ve given anything to avoid her as much as possible, but he didn’t stop, and by the end, she looked just devastated.”

  Ilykova was looking up now. Hunsaker was surprised as well. He couldn’t quite imagine Kantswinkle looking devastated.

  “I waited until everyone left,” Carmichael said, “and told her that we were all on edge and that he had no right to lay into her like that, and she started to cry, which made me very uncomfortable. I walked her to her room, and told her to get some rest, that it would all seem better in the morning, and then I left.”

  “Then what?” Hunsaker asked, expecting more to the story.

  “Then we found Trista’s body and the fire and we barely made it here,” Carmichael said.

  “I got the distinct impression you wanted nothing to do with Ms. Kantswinkle,” Hunsaker said.

  Carmichael looked at him in surprise. “I thought I hid that.”

  “You avoided her in the lobby, checking in,” Hunsaker said.

  Carmichael looked down, sighed. “She was clingy. Halfway through our discussion, I realized she was bombastic because she was lonely and needy and I’d made a huge mistake trying to comfort her. If this had been some kind of normal flight, I wouldn’t have been able to shake her for the rest of the trip.”

  “If it had been a normal flight,” Ilykova said, “you wouldn’t have spoken to her in the first place.”

  “True enough,” Carmichael said. Then she frowned at him. “Why did you ask about us?”

  “I have a theory,” he said.

  But he didn’t say any more. And he continued to tap on the pad, which annoyed Hunsaker.

  “Are you going to share the theory?” Hunsaker asked.

  “I think someone thinks you saw something,” Ilykova said. “Did you?”

  Carmichael shrugged and shook her head.

  “It would’ve been when you two were alone together.”

  She shook her head again. “Nothing.”

  He grunted as if he didn’t believe her. He continued to work.

  After a long moment, he said softly, “Well, I think I found something.”

  * * * *

  “What did you find?” Hunsaker asked. Carmichael crowded close. Richard didn’t answer right away. First he made certain no one else could hear. He checked the doors, and looked up the stairwell.

  When he came back to the desk, he spoke as softly as he could. He explained his idea—that he search for expertise, not motive. He didn’t discuss how he feared the database would be limited (it was, but it didn’t matter, he’d found enough).

  “When I searched for expertise in environmental systems, I got two names. I expected at least one from the crew, but that was wrong.”

  “Which names?” Carmichael sounded panicked for the first time since he saw her down here.

  “William Bunting and Lysa Lamphere.”

  “Bunting,” Hunsaker said. “He was the one who yelled at Agatha Kantswinkle, you said.”

  Carmichael nodded.

  “But,” Richard said, “whoever killed Agatha and went after you, Susan, had a short window to do so. You had your room assignments already. Did you let anyone in your room?”

  “Janet Powell,” Carmichael said. “But I never left her alone and she never went near the controls.”

  “Anyone else?”

  She shook her head.

  “Where were you after we found Agatha’s body?”

  “I didn’t leave the room,” Carmichael said.

  “Except to buy clothing,” Hunsaker said.

  “Yes,” Carmichael said. “I bought clothing. But Bunting couldn’t’ve done it then. He was in the boutique with me.”

  She used the word boutique with a touch of sarcasm. Richard frowned for a moment. Bunting had yelled at Agatha Kantswinkle, and made her cry. She wouldn’t have let him near her. But another woman…?

  “Did she have any troubles with Lysa?” Richard asked.

  Carmichael shrugged. “I have no idea. I’m not even sure they spoke.”

  He didn’t want to push her too hard. “Did you see either William Bunting or Lysa Lamphere that night you were alone with Agatha?”

  “Lysa,” Carmichael said. “But it was no big deal. She had forgotten something in the dining area. She went past us, looking a bit concerned. It wasn’t important.”

  “Past you from where?” he asked.

  “I assume she came from her room,” Carmichael said.

  “But you were walking Agatha to her room.”

  “Yes,” Carmichael said.

  “From the dining area.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which was nowhere near Lysa’s room.”

  Carmichael looked at him.

  “Her room was in a whole different area of the ship.”

  “And the fire started not too far from Agatha’s room,” Carmichael said.

  Richard nodded. He felt certain they knew who the killer was now. Lysa Lamphere had killed Agatha and gone after Carmichael because they could tie her to the entire event.

  “It all sounds so nice and pretty,” Hunsaker said, “until you remember that Lysa nearly died from inhaling the same toxic air that Agatha died from.”

  “Did she?” Richard asked. “She went into the room, made the switch with the environmental controls, maybe even watched Agatha die, and then switched them back. She waited until everything cleared a bit, and then went through her charade. I have a hunch if we search her room, we’ll fin
d some small breathing equipment, something she hid before going back to ‘discover’ Agatha.”

  “Why would she do that?” Carmichael asked.

  They were all so naïve. Or maybe he wasn’t naïve enough. It seemed obvious to him. Once he had Lysa’s name, he understood how everything happened. And a little bit of why.

  “So that no one would ever suspect her. You ruled her out even after I discovered her expertise because she had suffered as well.”

  He almost added, any good professional would’ve done that. But he didn’t. Still, he saw the way Hunsaker looked at him. Hunsaker knew that.

  “May I have the pad?” Hunsaker asked.

  Richard handed him the pad, bracing for the next question, which came with predictable swiftness.

  “I don’t suppose you have expertise in environmental systems?” Hunsaker asked.

  Richard resisted the urge to smile. “No, I don’t.”

  “I will check,” Hunsaker said.

  “Do,” Richard said. “But remember what I told you before. I wouldn’t have started the fire. If you want to scuttle a ship, there are better and quicker ways to do it. She didn’t want us all to die. She knew we were close.”

  “But why kill five people?” Carmichael asked.

  “That’s what I mean to find out,” Richard said.

  * * * *

  It took a bit of work. Buried deep in all the information was one single tie. To the mathematician. His new job was a promotion, one she didn’t feel he deserved. She had studied under him, and he had refused to grant her a degree, saying she was sloppy. She moved to engineering, and graduated, although not with honors, and not in a way that gave her any currency in any job. She would’ve needed more education for that.

  She had boarded that ship with a plan to follow him to Ansary, maybe destroy his career there. Or maybe kill him. But she didn’t.

  Trista died because she had seen the murder, and she planned to do something about it. Lysa had never planned for Trista’s body to be discovered. She probably thought the fire would’ve been found sooner. By the time someone had found it, the entire ship went into a panic. Which, if Richard thought about it, meant that her calculations had been off.

  Professor Grove, the mathematician had been right about her after all. Her math skills hadn’t been up to the task.