by Tom Kratman
Larry came into the room. I went outside to speak to him. He’d sped up the lab tests on the vodka. They’d found methanol in one of the bottles. Per unit of booze, it was a lethal dose. I walked back into the room and sat, quietly, facing Angel. She stared back at me.
“Did you tamper with the equipment in MedLab?” I asked.
“The equipment failed. I told you. We asked local IT to assist.”
“There’s footage of you near the equipment.”
“Yes, I’m a doctor.”
“We’re asking local IT to investigate.”
She blinked at me. It was the first sign that I’d fazed her.
“Did you tamper with the equipment?”
“I may have been near the equipment. I did not kill Besma al Damer. Certainly not over a cabin.”
I stared into her face. She stared back without blinking. I try to keep it professional with people . . . we meet a lot of very nasty people on the job, but I couldn’t deal with someone like her. Someone acting so cold.
“You know that . . . you must know, being a doctor, that young couple could have been saved with the right tests.”
She stared at me. “I said I wasn’t talking to you without counsel.”
“Isn’t that against your Hippocratic Oath?”
“I said I wasn’t talking to you . . . ”
I turned off the audio-visual feed and went outside. I got the lukewarm powdery water that passes for coffee in these parts, and stood for a time in the B Deck corridor . . . thinking. This was outside my years of experience as a cop in southeast London. A bit more like Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage than Peckham Gone Bad on a Saturday night. And, as I thought it, I wasn’t sure if there was a murder. There are the usual tragic cock ups that define us humans. Not what you’d think of as the best story, but—at the same time—they happen.
I finished my coffee and went back into the interview room. Angel stared at me, defiantly.
“You knew all about your boyfriend’s bootlegging operation, didn’t you?”
Silence.
“Let me run something past you.”
“If you insist.”
“Maybe your boyfriend made a mistake. He’s not a legal distiller. Maybe some methanol got into the mix. Maybe a pregnant lass and her boyfriend got ill, and ended up in MedLab. You suspected what was going on . . . ”
Her left eyelid twitched.
“Maybe you thought he’d get spaced . . . so you tried covering up for him?”
“No, certainly not. Now, if you will leave me to await counsel,” she said, in the same stiff voice. And then she put her hands across her face and began to sob.
I left her. There was nothing else I could say.
The last thing I went to do before I got off-shift was see the baby. Bigger than I remembered her, although I might have been imagining things. She was squirming around in her bag. While I watched, she opened and closed one little fist.
Lizzie put her hand on my shoulder.
“How’s she doing?” I asked.
“She’s doing really well. She’s just a bit small,” she said proudly. “We definitely think she’s going to make it.”
“She’s got a name yet?”
Lizzie smiled. “Oh yes, we’ve named her . . . We’ve named her Hope.”
The most frustrating part of being a copper back in London was probably the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
Or, as we liked to call them, the “Couldn’t Prosecute for Shit.”
What you’ve got to realize is that the British police only do arrests and interviews. It’s up to the CPS, a government department, to decide whether to bring a case to court. The experience of cops like me is that they’re risk averse in the extreme and disorganized to boot. Even if they decide to prosecute, they’re going to have lost the (paper) file by the time you get to court.
It’s very frustrating. You get a watertight case, or so you think . . . and then, oh sorry, we can’t prosecute. Or their solicitor doesn’t have the file, the case gets postponed to another court date, and your criminal (who’s got no fixed abode) goes AWOL. Then you’ve got to tell the victim who blames you and hates your guts.
Same pattern, as it turns out, on the Cheng Ho.
The next morning, I had the pleasure of going down to the shipboard summit to present my evidence. I was trying to get them to understand that this was outer space. We weren’t equipped for murders. There were no experienced detectives aboard and it took sixteen hours to get advice from Earth—which was, broadly speaking, “do whatever you’re doing and don’t scare the horses.”
We had the methanol test results, the audio-visual footage from MedLab, and all the forensics and interviews. It all pointed to my theory—Ryan had accidentally poisoned Besma and Hans, and his girlfriend had tried to cover it up.
“On balance,” I said. “Given you’re not likely to space them, I’d lock them both up. It’s not like they’ve got anywhere to run.”
There was a bit of oohing and ahhing about that. Then the Chief Liaison for the European Colony Council raised his hand. He was in his mid-fifties, plumpish, with a drinker’s nose and gray hair. A bureaucrat from Liechtenstein who had an annoying habit of talking down to me and using my “Mr.” title to rub in his two Ph.D.s.
“Do you actually have any evidence beyond the circumstantial, Mr. Martin?” he asked me.
“Look, we’ve . . .” I began.
“It seems to me,” he added. “That the unfortunate deaths of this couple could be due to anyone or—indeed—almost anything onboard the ship. Have you fully investigated the possibility that they drank methanol deliberately, in a suicide pact?”
“Yes, we have. And no, that’s not the way to bet . . .” I said.
We spent another hour going back through the evidence. They didn’t want to “incarcerate anyone needlessly,” but they did want “a speedy arrest to improve morale.” They thought we could fingerprint everyone. Or use trackers. Or some high-tech forensics they’d seen once on an American cop show.
Crazy.
An hour later, Marjorie Billings-Rajamana, another European Colony Council bureaucrat and—to my shame—a fellow Brit said, “I think you should carry on questioning Dr. al Damer. Maybe he will crack under pressure.”
They all agreed to that. So no one got charged. That afternoon, Simon and I went back to Dr. al Damer’s quarters to arrest him again. Rashid was there, hanging about in the corridor with a couple of mates. He responded about as you’d expect.
“You promised me you’d find who’d killed my sister,” he said.
And then he told me to fuck off.
We were four and a half billion miles from Earth.
And I may as well have been back in southeast London . . .
A few years back, a mate of mine was investigated for police brutality. He and a colleague attended a reported break-in at a warehouse. A well-known crook called Liam was handing canisters of freeze-dried coffee to his mate Wayne through a broken window.
As my mate tells it, his colleague nicked Wayne while my mate wriggled in through the window to chase Liam, who tried to leg it. I say, tried, because—as my mate puts it—Liam was a lard-arse. Big gut hanging out of his T-shirt, flabby pockmarked face, and prematurely bald on top of it.
Not one for the ladies, our Liam.
My mate called for backup, and then jumped on him, and they started rolling around on the floor together. Liam was going mad, thrashing and shouting, and throwing his weight around. By the time he got outside, he was huffing and wheezing. They called an ambulance for him.
As my mate said, he was a heart attack waiting to happen.
A week later, someone leaked the CCTV footage from the warehouse. It was trial by media. A grandfather of five with a dodgy heart and lung cancer, brutalized by the police. No mention that he was a career criminal, or that he was resisting arrest.
The complaint was dismissed in the end. But the way he was treated . . . no smoke without fir
e. He never got promoted beyond sergeant, despite twelve years in the force with an exemplary record.
It’s no joke that a handful of complaints can end your career.
And that’s why I came out in a cold sweat when, a couple of weeks after the shipboard summit, Jamal and I got called into the office of Dominic-Rubin Frick. Neither Jamal nor I had any idea what the complaint was about. So we compared notes while we sat outside the office like naughty school kids.
“Sadly, I think it is the case of Besma again,” said Jamal.
That put a dampener on things.
As it turned out, it was the case of Besma again. One of Rashid’s mates, a British bloke called Mohammed Khan, had taken the trouble to film the riot on B Deck on his mobile phone . . . (yes, you’re probably asking the same questions I am). He sent the footage back to Earth with a voiceover about Islamophobic cops.
Unbeknownst to us, our UN-approved arrests had caused riots in countries worldwide—Muslim kids burning flags, cursing the UN and America’s space policy.
“This is a major interplanetary incident,” Rubin-Frick said, glaring at us. “I have spent this entire cycle discussing with Earth, at the highest levels, how this incident could have been . . . ”
“With due respect, sir, the crew and colonists were in danger,” I said.
“Nevertheless, this situation required sensitive handling, which you and your team failed to display . . . ”
“They were textbook arrests, sir,” I said.
He snorted. “Textbook, indeed.”
“We used UN-approved techniques for riot control and restraint. We reviewed the AV footage with the Master at Arms, as part of the post-incident briefing.”
He leaned forward. “Regardless, you gave these young men cause to believe you were hostile towards them, thereby eroding racial and religious relations aboard ship.”
I said nothing. If you’ve arrested an angry drunk, you know it’s hard enough to get them to comply without either injuring them, or getting injured—without having to acting ‘non-hostile’ as well.
Rubin-Frick flicked off the AV. “I’m extremely disappointed with the performance of the security team throughout this investigation.” He pressed a button and the door opened behind us. “With this in mind, I have authorization from Earth to take over the handling of this case.”
And, with that, the bureaucrats took over.
You can imagine how well that went.
15 months later . . .
Britain’s biggest export is bureaucracy. That’s what I say to Jamal, anyway. That, and our national sport is queuing. So, if you’re a British copper, you’re well-versed in being subject to petty bureaucrats who see government initiatives as the practical alternative to catching real crooks.
So I had every confidence in Dominic-Rubin Frick . . . Every confidence he’d achieve nothing.
I was wrong.
He achieved worse than nothing . . .
The man lying in the mortuary drawer was wearing frayed jeans and a pair of Birkenstocks. His head was covered with a white sheet.
“Do you recognize him?” asked Lizzie, pulling back the cloth over his face.
“Yeah, it’s Ryan . . . the bootlegger,” I said.
Lizzie bit her lip, nodding.
“Methanol poisoning?”
Lizzie nodded.
“Who brought him in?”
“A friend . . . a French botanist,” she swallowed. Tears glistened in her eyes. Can’t say I was too upset myself. To be brutally honest, he probably deserved everything he’d got.
I covered his face again. “What about the others?”
Lizzie led me into the adjoining ward in silence. The six beds were occupied by naked bodies swarming with wires and breathing masks. I recognized some of them by sight—they were kids who I’d caught boozing in the hydroponics bay. The only sound was the steady beep-beep of machinery.
“Are they going to make it?” I asked.
She nodded slowly. “Ach, I’m crossing myself for them.”
“Any of them spoken to you?”
She shook her head. “Only with symptoms.”
I followed her through the ward into the duty doctor’s office. A nurse came into the office, picked up a mediscanner, and walked out onto the ward.
“Angel off duty?” I asked.
Lizzie shook her head quickly. “She’s never been on duty.” She quickly corrected herself. “Not since they came in, anyway.”
I stared off down the ward. The nurse was bending over the beds, checking vital signs with the mediscanner. Angel had carried on working as a doctor after I arrested her for being an accessory to manslaughter.
Rubin Frick said there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest anyone. He’d dropped the whole case after six months of questioning.
Now Angel’s ex was dead. And six kids were fighting for their lives.
I felt my stomach constrict with righteous fury.
I tried not to let it show.
Angel wasn’t in her cabin on C Deck. I called her communicator, but it was off. I rode the lift back up to A Deck and dropped into OpSec, where I found Simon and Jamal booking a big Polish cook who’d gone for his co-worker with a meat cleaver. I asked Simon to find Angel on the shipboard surveillance system, and talked Jamal into helping me catch the French bootlegger.
At 9:00hrs, I took the lift back to MedLab and spoke to the nurse on the ward. The kids had brought themselves in. They were dizzy, sick with blurred vision—same as Besma and Hans. The duty doctor was treating with alcohol, which still sounded crazy to me (but I’m no clinician).
She hadn’t seen Angel since the previous cycle.
I went back to OpSec where, in the brig, the big Polish guy was headbanging the wall and shouting. Jamal had tracked the French bootlegger down to C Deck so we took the lift down to the labs to interview him. He denied everything. We found six litres of vodka stashed in a storage compartment and nicked him anyway.
At 11:50hrs, I left Jamal with the bootlegger and walked to the Annan canteen in what had become the ‘European Catholic’ quarter, and an altogether pleasanter task. I was providing security for Hope’s first birthday party. You wouldn’t think a baby’s birthday would need a bouncer, but both granddads—and their family—wanted custody. The dispute had got so vicious, the shipboard summit had given her to Lizzie.
Not sure what to make of that—all things considered—but my job, such as it was, was to stand outside the canteen door to make sure Hans’ dad, Immanuel Schwerz, didn’t gatecrash.
After an initial rush of guests, mostly pregnant ladies from Lizzie’s antenatal class, nothing happened . . . which was bliss.
At around 12:30hrs, a petite Kuwaiti lady brought me a cup of tea, and a slice of freeze-dried lemon cake with “Welcome to Terra Nova!” iced into the top.
I washed the dry cake down with the tea and wandered up and down the corridor.
On my third trip, I noticed a dripping symbol of green paint on the dirty bulkhead. It was smeared into the shape of a tree with arrows at the top.
Underneath, they’d written Protect. Defend. Phalange.
Typical . . . Graffiti.
I hoped someone else would do the door-to-door. Catching kids vandalizing walls is the kind of policing you don’t want to do. It’s like catching swans on the M25: there’s a lot of running and spitting, but it’s all a bit pointless, and you’ve got better things to do.
I knocked on a couple of doors, anyhow.
Then I left a message for the colonists on clean-up duty.
No one had seen anything.
They never do.
At around 14:30hrs, I walked back to the canteen. The party was breaking up. Lizzie had Hope clinging to her hip. She was talking with a Spanish colonist with a baby swaddled in a torn-up blanket. As I arrived, the colonist excused herself and hurried away.
Hope watched me with her mother’s large dark eyes.
“What’s Phalange?” I asked.
Lizzi
e shrugged. “Never heard of it.”
We spoke for a while—or, rather, she spoke and I nodded along. Hope was starting to walk, but Lizzie was worried about her muscle mass. Terra Nova had gravity similar to Earth, but Hope had been born in low-G.
And it wasn’t just Hope.
The ship now had six children to worry about, and there were ten more babies on the way.
After she’d left, I walked back through B Deck. Every door I passed had the official name plaque crossed out. With couples marrying and children being born, the colonists were playing musical cabins, and housing was struggling to cope.
People marrying people like them—who thought like them, shared their culture and values.
Business as usual for humanity, I guess.
We had a few suicides on the job. Back on Earth I’d one guy put a hosepipe through the window of a vintage Prius. Must have taken him an age to die. I felt sorry for him, to be honest. He’d lost his job a week before and his wife had gone to her mother’s. She found him a week later, slumped in the front seat.
The wife told me he’d felt guilty.
At 17:00hrs, I got a call from OpSec. “Can you attend an unauthorized opening of E Deck Escape Hatch 2?”
I sighed at that. The escape hatches were standard airlocks. Two doors—one into the depressurization chamber. Another out into space. We’d had a few suicidal people opening the escape hatch on A Deck. It was usually a cry for help. Thankfully, someone usually spotted them. That’s why they chose the residential decks.
E Deck was a new one on me.
“Can you see who it is?” I asked.
Simon’s voice cut onto the call. “It’s Angel.”
I ran, or—rather—I bounced through the low grav. Two elevators down to the lowest gravity deck and then I kicked my way through engineering like a big hairy frog. Can’t say I didn’t want her to space herself, but we needed to chat under oath about her dead boyfriend.
I knew as soon as I floated to the outer door. The airlock was a round metal disc, like a big manhole cover, with a thick glass window in the top. Angel was tumbling around in the compartment behind, her limbs blue and horribly swollen. But the thing that stuck in my mind most was the red light flashing on the airlock controls. She’d climbed in and manually depressurized the compartment.