The Last Dance

by Martin L Shoemaker

  “But deep underneath all that, he’s human,” Carver continued. “He cares about his crew and his friends, perhaps as deeply as anyone I know. Oh, he’s absolutely lousy at showing it. He really doesn’t understand how normal people relate, so he has his own way of acting on it. He can seem cruel, but it’s more complicated than that.”

  I tried to understand. “He cares, so he’s cruel?”

  Carver rubbed his chin. “I can see that I haven’t explained it well. Like I said, it’s complicated. But . . .” He started walking again, and I moved to keep up. “Well, let me tell you about the investigation of the Azevedo mission. Maybe an example will help you understand.”

  8. MURDER ON THE ALDRIN EXPRESS

  OFF-THE-RECORD ACCOUNT OF CHIEF ANSON CARVER, CHIEF OFFICER OF THE IPV ALDRIN

  COVERING EVENTS OF 27 APRIL 2074

  I looked up from the view screen. “Are you sure about this, Riggs?”

  Ensign Riggs nodded. “The micrographs don’t lie, Chief Carver. There are nanos all over that cable.”

  I scratched my neck under my stiff gray uniform collar. It was hard to keep my uniform clean with the water rations on the ship. Besides an inescapable slight stink—inescapable because the whole ship had the same stink of bodies confined for months—I was developing a bit of a rash. “But are you sure? We’re going to have to take this to Captain Aames.”

  I saw the young British astronaut turn pale, almost as pale as his close-cropped blond hair, and I managed to conceal my amusement. Riggs was new to the Aldrin, but already he lived in fear of Nick.

  Riggs was understandably nervous: being challenged by the chief officer was bad enough, and bringing bad news to Nick would be even worse. But the ensign hesitated only briefly before he swallowed and answered, “Yes, sir. Take a look.”

  I pulled Riggs’s report onto my comp. I wasn’t an expert in nanomachines any more than Riggs was, but I could read the computer analysis easily enough. The frayed S3 cables were infested with dormant nanobots.

  Well, I had been hoping for a distraction so I could stop thinking about Tracy. I had managed to avoid her even in the close confines of the Mars cycler, but I couldn’t avoid the memory of her without some distraction. This would certainly fit the bill. “All right, then. No sense in delay. Let’s go see the captain.” As we headed out of my office, I noticed that Riggs still moved with exaggerated care. Eventually, he would adjust—if Nick didn’t break him first.

  Probably Riggs would break, but I hoped not. He was a good kid, endearingly eager to be in space even if only as crew of a Mars cycler. Most in the Corps saw cycler service as pretty low duty for an astronaut, tantamount to punishment. And working under Nick didn’t make that duty any more popular, which added to our attrition rate. I couldn’t guess whether Riggs would last or not. Nick couldn’t, either, which was why he insisted on testing people until he found out. Nick hated not knowing.

  We walked through the ship as I ruminated, passing through one brownish-gray passageway after another. Eventually we arrived at Nick’s outer office—empty, since I was the one who usually manned the desk there—and passed through to the command office. The door opened as I approached. I ushered Riggs in, and we stood before the display desk.

  A chair was behind the desk, its high back facing us, and it didn’t budge as we entered and the door closed behind us. Nick was staring at the stars and probably ignoring us, but it was possible he hadn’t heard us. As usual, the office was filled with mellow Brazilian music playing from the beat-up old e-reader, which was the only item on his massive desk. Many of us in the Corps had trained in Brazil and picked up a little Portuguese, but Nick had thoroughly adopted the country and its culture. I recognized “Brigas Nunca Mais,” one of Nick’s favorites. I always found some irony in that: the title translated roughly as “Never Fight Again,” and Nick was a tenacious fighter.

  The chair back swayed slightly. Despite the music, I was sure Nick knew we were there. He was just ignoring us. Fine. I would wait him out.

  Finally the song ended, and Nick’s voice came from behind the chair. “Are you going to stand there all day, Chief Carver?”

  “How did you know it was me?” Did he analyze the sound of my walk? I couldn’t see how over the music.

  “Elementary, my dear Carver. After Margo Azevedo’s breakdown at last month’s maudlin dinner, I would rather avoid any unnecessary contact with our passengers. That door is currently programmed to open for only one other person on this ship besides myself; and that one other person is you, Chief.”

  “Someone could have broken your lock program and entered that way.”

  “True. But there’s only one person on this ship whose programming skills are up to that task. And that person is also you. Ergo, if someone intrudes on my solitude, it could only be you. Oh, and Mr. Riggs, of course.”

  I saw Riggs flinch when Nick said his name. He looked at me and mouthed the word “How?” but I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to give Nick the satisfaction. Besides, he likely had a camera hidden in his office, so it wasn’t any big mystery.

  Over the years I had learned the value of having more patience than Nick. It’s not easy, but I’ve done it. He has nearly zero patience when he wants something from you, but nearly infinite when he’s avoiding someone. So I just stood silently and waited him out. At last he spoke again. “So what is it, Chief Carver? More of the incessant mourning? Have our passengers decided they want to regale us with yet more stories of the late, great professor and his botched expedition?”

  “No, sir, but it does involve the expedition. Riggs has found evidence that Professor Azevedo’s S3 cable was sabotaged.”

  It’s rare that I get to surprise Nick, even with bad news; so I took a secret, perverse delight in the way he spun the chair around and slapped the old e-reader on the desktop. Instead of his usual casual slouch, he leaned intently forward. When he got like this, his energy seemed likely to burst out in a random direction on the smallest provocation. Again Riggs flinched, as if Nick might leap at him or throw something at him; and I had to admit, it had happened to others in the crew.

  Nick fixed Riggs with his best contemptuous stare. “Mr. Riggs, synthetic spider silk breaks. It is incredibly strong, but it also breaks when not properly maintained over time. And Paolo Azevedo was notoriously sloppy—exactly as I warned his backers before the expedition, not that anyone listened to me. Half of his maintenance reports never got filed. So I have no doubt he fell behind on S3 inspections, and the cable broke as a result. Why would you suggest otherwise?”

  Riggs straightened to attention under Nick’s stare, and he stood his ground. I could really get to like the kid. He had spunk. “Captain, I was performing the quarantine inventory, as per Chief Carver’s orders.” We were less than two days away from Earth orbit, so it was standard practice to scan all transported gear for contaminants—including nanos—since many Earth jurisdictions have pretty strict laws about unlicensed nanomachines. “I inspected Professor Azevedo’s S3 cable, and I found a small colony of scavenger nanos. If I may, sir?”

  Nick nodded, and Riggs swiped his finger across the comp on his sleeve, pushing his report to Nick’s display desk. Nick gestured us closer as he leaned over the electron micrograph, an image of several parallel gray tubules dotted with miniscule magenta specks. Riggs tapped his comp, and several circles zoomed out of the image for more detail. The tubules began to show as a fine matrix; and the specks became a number of small structures, false colored in shades of magenta to stand out against the gray background. “There they are, sir. Scanner says they conform 99.993 percent to the structure of standard scavenger nanos, one of the same lines that the expedition took along for scavenging raw materials. This particular line scavenges salt ions and fixes them to a substrate, manufacturing salts and salt-based compounds. And these”—Riggs tapped the comp again, and small flecks were highlighted in yellow—“are salt ions trapped in the glycine matrix.”

  Nick sneered at Riggs. �
�And why are you wasting my time over a bunch of salt ions?” But I knew that sneer from long experience: it meant that Nick was testing Riggs. Nick already knew the answer, and he suspected that just maybe Riggs wasn’t a complete incompetent. If Riggs could just keep his cool and make a thorough professional report, he might actually impress Nick. And I knew as well as anyone how difficult it is to impress Nick.

  Riggs held up under the sneer and continued his report: “Captain, the salt ions depolymerize the glycine, reverting it from a fibrous state to more of a gel. The silk becomes liquid again, Captain, and it stretches like taffy. It pulls thinner and thinner until it just wisps away. If the captain is done with this micrograph?” Nick waved his hand dismissively, and Riggs brought up the next image. “This is the same zone, zoomed out by a factor of ten.” There were a number of gray strands, too small now to see the magenta specks; but the strands became progressively more yellow as they approached the upper right corner. They also narrowed dramatically. When the strands had diminished to roughly half their width, they started to bend and warp. And suddenly, almost in the corner of the image, they became a knotted yellow tangle, and they reached no further.

  Nick turned one wide eye up at Riggs. “So, Mr. Riggs, you’re telling me that although Azevedo was an utter fool who had no business leading that expedition, he wasn’t at fault in his own death? You’re telling me that I was wrong?”

  Riggs swallowed before he spoke. “Yes, Captain.”

  “Good!” Nick looked back down at the desk. You would have to know him as well as I did to see the slight edge of a smile at the corner of his mouth. Riggs had impressed him. “Riggs, it is my job to be right. This ship and all aboard depend on that. It is your job to tell me when I’m not doing my job. I will tear you into small bloody bits when you do, because I’m never wrong; and I expect you to do so anyways, because sometimes I am wrong, and I will not tolerate that. If you can accept that, you might have a future on this ship. Can you?”

  Riggs didn’t hesitate again. “I don’t know, Captain. We’ll find out.”

  This time Nick even let his smile show, though awkwardly, like he was out of practice. “Honesty. Another mark in your favor. Don’t ever lie to me, Riggs, and we’ll get along fine. So I trust you did research on these nanos. You know how they’re activated.”

  “Concentrated UV light, Captain, of specific frequencies. The light excites certain outer electrons in the structure, ionizing the nanos and initiating a chain reaction that starts them in motion. I’m afraid chemistry isn’t my best subject, Captain, so I can explain how to activate them but not the details. The frequency and intensity required are such that they don’t occur naturally in the solar spectrum.”

  “So they can’t activate by accident. Someone has to use an emitter.” Riggs nodded. “And that’s why you believe the break must have been sabotage.”

  I decided Riggs had had enough of Nick’s attention, and it was time to draw some fire of my own. “Yes, Captain, and that’s why we had to bring this straight to you. It’s your responsibility to investigate, Captain. Secure the evidence, prepare a report for the authorities on Earth, and make sure whoever is behind this isn’t a danger to our passengers and crew.”

  “My responsibility?” Nick turned one glaring eye upon me.

  “Yes, sir. And I guess this changes at least one thing.”

  “Oh?”

  “You were wrong about the expedition. The failure wasn’t their fault.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Well, clearly, it was deliberate. It wasn’t an accident.”

  “Oh, really? And what does that change?”

  “Well . . . everything.” Nick exasperated me. As usual. I think exasperating people was one of his primary joys in life. Defying expectations and challenging beliefs was one of his many ways of testing people.

  “Does it change the fact that they didn’t plan for adequate backup water? Does it change the fact that they didn’t plan for the possible temperature extremes? Does it change the fact that they were completely unprepared for a category 5 dust storm? Does it change the fact that they had no plan for what would happen if they lost their orbital platform like we lost ours?”

  “Nnnnno.” I had intended to needle Nick, but I hadn’t expected him to react so strongly. Riggs was squirming. The crew didn’t usually see Nick and me duel like this.

  “Then I wasn’t wrong. They had a poorly planned mission from start to finish. Though I grant you there’s one failure even I overlooked: they didn’t plan for a criminal on board.”

  I saw my opening. “And that’s another reason why only you can investigate this murder. You understand their expedition, and you know what to look for.”

  Nick sighed, and I knew I had him. “Very well, then, Chief Carver. I guess I must end my exile here and deal with the members of the expedition. Interview them and find out who might have a motive for this crime.”

  “So should I bring them in, sir?”

  “Oh, not all at once, one at a time. That’s all I want to deal with. I think we’ll start with Ms. Wells.”

  Tracy! I tried to stall. “Nick, surely you don’t think she had anything to do with this.”

  “What I think is none of your concern. Has she already messed up your head so much that you’ve forgotten how to follow orders?”

  Damn it, Nick, get out of my head. “No, Captain, if that’s your order, I shall carry it out, sir.”

  “That’s good, man, because I need to know if you’re going to have a problem with this. I need to know if you’re thinking with your brain, or somewhere lower.”

  I had manipulated Nick into taking charge of the investigation, and he was going to make me suffer for that; but I wasn’t going to let that impair my performance of my duties. “Sir, I shall carry out my responsibilities exactly as expected.”

  I left, Riggs in tow, and the door closed behind us. Facing off with Nick must have emboldened Riggs. Normally I wouldn’t expect personal questions from such a junior crewman, so his next question hit me by surprise. “Is there a problem with Ms. Wells, sir?”

  “No, we just have a history. I’ve been avoiding her. Too many uncomfortable memories.”

  “He knows this? And he’s putting you in this bind deliberately? He’s a right bastard, isn’t he?”

  “That he is, Mr. Riggs. That he is.” We reached the tube to the berthing ring, and I turned off while Riggs continued back to his post. Under my breath, I echoed Riggs: “A right bastard he is.”

  I had dreaded that encounter, but I couldn’t put it off. Three months ago I had looked up the cabin number where Tracy bunked with Arla Simms, another member of the Azevedo expedition. I had managed to stop myself from going there, but the number was lodged firmly in my brain.

  And now I stood before 32A and held my finger on the door buzzer. Nearly four years. Too soon, and far too long. I pressed the buzzer.

  Arla opened the door: a trim young woman in a simple blue jumpsuit from the expedition, her blonde curls cut functionally short. We had met several times during the voyage, but never for very long. I had avoided prolonged contact with the passengers almost as thoroughly as Nick had. Arla seemed surprised to have a visitor. “Yes, Chief Carver?”

  I straightened to attention, hiding behind formality as best I could. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but the captain has sent me. He has asked me to fetch Ms. Wells”—I managed not to stammer at her name—“so that he may ask some questions about the expedition.”

  “The expedition? Is there something wrong?”

  “Nothing I can speak of, ma’am. The captain is just thorough.” It wasn’t precisely a lie. Not that I would hesitate to lie to keep the investigation low-key, but I would stick as close to the truth as I could.

  “Well, come in, Chief. Tracy’s in here.” Damn. I had been afraid she would invite me in, and I hadn’t figured out a polite excuse to refuse. Arla stepped aside, and I entered the cabin.

  Instantly my eyes were pulled to
Tracy where she sat on her bunk, a desk folded out from the cabin wall. She was editing expedition videos, and she paused them as I came in. Tracy wore a blue jumpsuit like Arla’s, but she had altered the legs to thigh-length shorts. She had always liked her legs free, and I had never minded the chance to see them. She looked just as I had glimpsed her in random moments since the expedition came aboard: a little older than when we had parted, and a little thinner from the tight rations on Mars, and somehow that made her even more beautiful than the day we had met. Her face was the same cocoa shade that I remembered. Her hair was the same black that I knew so well, but pulled back in a bun. The auburn highlights that fascinated me so were only visible when she let her hair flow free, so I was safe from them for the moment. Her deep-brown eyes looked up at mine, and I looked just a bit away.

  And her scent. It wasn’t possible, but the cabin smelled of lilacs. After months on Mars and more months on the trip there and back, she couldn’t possibly still have any of the lilac water she liked so much. I concentrated, and the odor faded away. It had been only a memory.

  Tracy still knew all of my tricks too. She shifted her head to meet my eyes. “What is it, Anson?” My pulse leaped. Practically no one called me by my first name, and no one at all since Tracy and I had broken up.

  I couldn’t look away. I didn’t want to. I had to—but I couldn’t. “The captain is conducting an investigation of the accident, and he has asked me to escort you to his office so that he may ask some questions.” There. I had gotten out a whole sentence.

  “Certainly, Anson. Anything I can do to help.” Tracy folded up the desk and stood from her bunk. I managed not to analyze how her body moved in the low gravity. “If you’ll lead the way. I have no idea how to find the captain’s office.”