by Simon Petrie
It was not as though One-Ton O’Meara had exactly become one of his friends, though Gordon could not now think of who else might fit this category. He’d had drinks with O’Meara at one of the Skytop Plaza’s sushi-and-Guinness bars more than a month back, just a few days after the sumo wrestler had saved his life. They talked about wrestling. Gordon confessed he was turned off by the live-action cartoon violence of professional wrestling, had heard it described as the only sport to have suffered during the recent scriptwriter’s strike. One-Ton had told him sumo wasn’t like that, there was art to it, grace, a genuine spontaneity. He’d gifted Gordon tickets to his next bout. Gordon had intended to go, he really had, but hadn’t realised the match clashed with his schedule: Skyward 270 would be on descent then. He’d failed to see O’Meara in action. Now, he never would.
“Gordon?” Belle dragged him back to the moment.
“Here. Look, send Sue up. And ask her to grab something useful from the galley, just by way of protection.”
* * *
He felt conflicted about imposing on Sue Sheff, Skyward 270’s chief cook, for backup. She was a new recruit, whereas Belle and he had logged up dozens of 270’s ascent/descent cycles as a team. But Belle’s excellent people skills were best employed in ensuring the hotel guests didn’t succumb to panic. And with a total staff of three, himself included, there wasn’t another option. So Sue now guarded the obs deck, armed with a turkey baster—it wouldn’t have been Gordon’s first choice of weapon—while he contorted his way through an access hatch that really, you’d have to say, could have been made larger than child-labour-sized. How had the murderer managed this?
In as far as his waist, Gordon turned awkwardly to check out the vent shaft. The motion, and an unsettlement in his stomach, confirmed his suspicion. The vent system wasn’t subject to the comforting artificial gravity of the hotel’s public spaces, instead manifesting only the fey descent-inverted microgravity of the lift module’s powered fall through subgeostationary space.
In contrast to the hatchway, the ventilation duct was capacious, a good two metres wide. A solid plasticrete bulkhead capped the shaft above the hatchway. Below Gordon, the duct ran downwards for what seemed the full thirty-metre height of the lift module, branching horizontally at intervals.
Gordon wasn’t good with heights. Ironic; but, enclosed within the hotel module, however-many-thousand kilometres above Earth, he could usually ignore vertigo’s overtures. Here, faced with a thirty-metre drop and stuck halfway through the hatch—with stomach and inner ears telling him he had nothing to fear while his legs and eyes conspired to insist the drop was lethal—he could feel his innards turning to jelly. And the ladderway’s plastichrome rungs on the duct’s opposite wall were still beyond his reach. He wriggled through to mid-calf level (with which his hips were happier; now it was his mind all a-quiver), and managed to grab the nearest rung. He finished pulling himself through into the shaft, slapped a miniature patch-cam to the bulkhead above, and began descending.
At the five-metre mark, he inspected the horizontal ducts radiating off in three directions. Each duct was straight and bulkhead-terminated. He affixed more patch-cams to the main shaft’s side, aligned so the cameras could survey each offshoot while he searched for any irregularity.
Fifteen minutes later, he’d drawn a blank at this level. None of the patch-cams had displayed any movement save that of the Mamon hindquarters (the horizontal ducts were too narrow to turn within). There were no obstacles visible, the rangefinding checked out correctly, and (according to his trusty handheld) none of the top-tier suites’ vents had been opened in several months, since their last maintenance check.
* * *
Later, back in the obs lounge’s unequivocal gravity, he relieved Sue from guard duty and called Belle.
“You there?”
“Yes, Gordon. Where are you? Been trying to reach you for the past hour.”
“I’m fine, just had my handheld in forensics mode, hadn’t noticed the call light. Listen, can you send Skytop HQ these fingerprint images, to pass on to the police? That’s all I’ve found from checking the vent system. Looks like our perp went in, but didn’t come out—and he’s not there now.”
“OK, got them. Wait a second. Ah, here we go. Looks like they’re all Skyward maintenance staff.”
“Huh? You’ve got their fingerprints logged locally? I thought you’d at least have to go off-station—”
“Just thumbprints. Biometric locks on the broom cupboard. But Gord, the Skytop police—I’ve been trying to reach you. They’ve been going frantic, trying to contact us.”
“Us? You mean me?”
“No, us. There’s some problem with our broadcast cable: it’s receiving but not transmitting. I’ve heard everything they’ve sent us, but there’s no way of letting Skytop know we’ve heard.”
“When did this start?”
“Before the murder. They don’t even know about that yet.”
“So why’ve they been calling?”
“An all-modules alert, dangerous fugitive. Gunther Haier, noted hit-man. Number three on the league table. Anyway—”
“They have a league table for assassins?”
“Yeah, helps to humanise the job. Or so claims their official-spokesperson-in-hiding. Anyway, police believe Haier has very recently been lying low on Skytop, working in one of the engineering shops, but now he’s nowhere to be found. They’re concerned he’s taken a lift down to the surface.”
“You got a mugshot?”
“Sending it now, Gord.”
“OK. Yeah. Nasty. No, doesn’t look like any guests, what I saw of them anyway.”
“No. And there’s a dozen other modules he might’ve taken, if he left Skytop within the last few hours like they reckon. Assuming he didn’t ship out of the system entirely on a spaceliner. But it’s still a bit of a coincidence, you’d have to say.”
“Yeah. I was just thinking the same. A murder, a missing killer. You’d have to think they’re connected. Did O’Meara see something he wasn’t supposed to?”
“You tell me. You’re the detective.”
It wasn’t an assignation he’d ever felt comfortable with.
* * *
Gordon’s office was a cramped cubicle, alcoved off the main lobby and decorated only with desk, two chairs, and some wall-mounted newspaper cuttings reporting the cases he’d previously solved. (The one with the photo of himself and O’Meara was particularly prized, though he could strangle the subeditor who’d vetted the wording ‘chief suspect Grodon Mammal’ in the caption. But at least the write-up had been better than that piece in the inflight magazine.)
“No, Mr. Bai, I’m not bothered over which channel you were watching, or what the actresses’ names were. Or even what they were doing. I’m merely ascertaining your whereabouts at the time of the, um, incident.”
“You mean the murder?”
“Incident. Let’s not jump to conclusions here.”
Perhaps he could have worded that better.
Anyway, he didn’t think Mr. Bai knew anything. About O’Meara’s murder, or much of anything else. It had been the same with the other three guests. He didn’t make any of them to be the criminal mastermind type.
Dismissing Bai, he attempted to re-fold the paperclip he’d been straightening, while he watched the sequence once more on his handheld’s display. The vent grille came off, falling to the obs lounge floor. The spacesuited figure emerged from the duct (recalling his own struggles with the hatchway, Gordon could only bristle with envy at the ease with which the killer had negotiated that bottleneck), pulled itself smoothly to its feet, and walked out of the tile-cam’s field of view. Five seconds later, the depressurisation lights on the wall began to flash. Beyond the camera’s scope, O’Meara, most of the panoramic windowpane’s plastiglass, and the bulk of the obs deck’s air had all suddenly left the building. Then the incapacitating flash of the laser pistol.
The playback was silent, but that solid plast
itanium grille had to have made a significant noise when it fell. Clattered. And he defied anyone, anyone, to walk noiselessly in one of Skyward’s cheap plastimetal spacesuits. All up, there had to have been a good ten-second warning for O’Meara that something strange was happening behind him. Gordon knew One-Ton O’Meara’s hearing was good, even if he hadn’t seen anything reflected in the glass or through his peripheral vision. And the wrestler’s training would surely have been to check out any possible disturbances around him. So why hadn’t O’Meara turned to face his foe? Gordon had gone all through the other tile-cams’ footage, the man had not even tensed as the fatal impulse was applied to his so-broad back. He’d just gone quietly to a horrible death.
It made no sense.
Yes, there were clues; but Gordon preferred his clues to be neatly numbered, and divided into ‘across’ and ‘down’. Puzzles that you could solve through a thesaurus, or a scrabble dictionary, without fear of deadly hazard. Crossword clues never led to anyone dying by violence, except maybe sometimes at the highest, most competitive levels.
A burst of laughter from the lobby disrupted his concentration. He emerged to investigate. The four guests, still excluded from their own rooms, were playing charades. The laughter had been initiated by Ali Bai’s attempt at an Elvis Presley imitation. Gordon shook his head, mired in frustration.
Impersonation. Something clicked. He went to find Belle.
* * *
“What d’you mean, offline? Is this the same fault that took out our comms link?”
“Don’t think so,” Belle replied. “The security scanner’s topside, at Skytop Embarkation. The comms fault’s local, and Sue thinks she’s just about got that sorted.”
“Huh? So Sue’s chief cook and radio operator now?”
“Yep. Her promotion came through last week.”
Gordon grinned, wondering how long it would take Sue to discover that the company ‘promotions’ didn’t actually equate to an increase in income, just in responsibilities. “But—they just let passengers board anyway?”
“They still checked them. Visual, biometrics, random pat-down body searches, sniffers for drugs and weaponry. Just no X-ray or subdermal radar imagery. They haven’t reported any problems.”
No, thought Gordon. Just an escaped killer and a mystery death. But it was all starting to make sense. “So, this affected our module?”
“Sure. It went offline two hours before we decoupled. You think there’s a connection?”
“Belle, I’m sure. This is Haier’s doing.”
“Haier? But how? There’s been no-one of remotely his description passing through Embarkation at all today. The police sound clear on that, it’s one aspect of his disappearance they’re totally puzzled over.”
“I’m not surprised. They wouldn’t have recognised him in his spacesuit.”
“But Gord, the spacesuit’s one of ours. And it hasn’t been off-station. Ever.” Belle stared at him, as if to find the answers in his face. “And if it’s Haier, where is he?”
“That,” replied Gordon with the theatrical affectation he knew so annoyed others around him, “is a matter of some gravity.” And he went off for another look at the obs deck vent shaft.
* * *
The murder, including O’Meara’s counterintuitive lack of response to perceived danger, now made complete sense. But the problem of the space-suit’s vanished occupant remained. Gordon stared through the hatchway, baffled by the empty duct’s featurelessness. He’d checked all the patch-cams’ playbacks. Nothing.
Where had it gone?
Slowly, it occurred to him that all might not be as it seemed. A false panel somewhere in the ducts might mask another exit. He’d checked the shaft’s dimensions by laser rangefinding, but a carefully-placed solid panel, where a grille should exist, might well have escaped his attention. He asked his handheld to load a VR tour of the shaft system, as per the lift module specs, and mentally prepared himself to squeeze through that bloody opening one more time, to play spot-the-difference.
He didn’t need to resort to contortions. The difference was staring him in the face.
Cunning. Ingenious, even.
Just as in any crossword, there was one vital clue from which everything else would cascade.
This was it. He extracted a large evidence bag from his pocket, and started pulling rungs off the shaft wall.
* * *
“Belle?”
“Yes? Where are you?”
“Cargo deck. Listen, I’ve gotta go out.”
“Out?”
“Yeah. Pod. Sue’s been helping me on something, but she’s staying behind. And I really need you to help her get the comms link working. We’ll need the cops down from topside.”
“Police? Gord, d’you have a problem down there?”
“Not a problem. A solution. But Belle, I gotta go.”
“But what about Haier? Remember? The guy who pushed O’Meara out the window?”
“That’s who I’m after,” Gordon replied. “The ladder did it.”
“Gord—”
“Sorry, Belle, no time to fill you in. Look, I’ve downloaded some trajectory calcs to the mainframe. Just get through to topside. Please?”
“Trajectory?”
“Sorry. Gotta go.” Gordon closed the call, and turned to thank Sue for her help. Then, grabbing up the spacesuit and the evidence bag, he jogged across the cargo bay’s radiation-proof plastilead flooring to the escape pod.
He hoped the pod could move faster than it looked. It looked like nothing other than a Henry Moore snail sculpture.
* * *
The escape pod’s responses, to every attitude-jet impulse, felt exaggerated, hypersensitive. In reality, it was simply that the pod was tiny, and rather flimsy; and Gordon was no pilot. Still, as long as the space-nav directions from his handheld were reliable, he’d get to where he needed to be.
Walls lined with plastihemp matting, two benches with rough plastigel padding, a simple control panel mounted below a small screen. The pod’s cockpit was spartan, befitting a craft not intended for frequent or extended occupation, nor by those concerned overmuch with immediate comfort. Still, it could be worse. Gordon wondered how Haier was finding his current quarters.
Not for the first time, he wondered at the wisdom of this lone-wolf approach. Gordon nurtured his lack of physical bravery, it was part of who he was. But he couldn’t have brought Belle, or Sue, into danger with him: quite aside from his concern for their safety, there were the lift-module’s minimal-staffing regulations of which to be mindful. And he couldn’t leave Haier to escape, and kill again another day.
The search volume, several hours after O’Meara’s fall through the window, was uncomfortably large: too many uncertainties in the trajectory. Large, too, was the brooding crescent Earth below Gordon’s feet; then above his head; then below his feet again. Larger still was Gordon’s frustration at his inability to stop the pod’s infernal tumbling. Largest of all, or so it felt, was the lump in Gordon’s throat at the thought of the approaching danger.
The O’Meara-shaped figure seemed, in the end, almost small when Gordon finally sighted the lifeless form drifting open-mouthed through space. He wrestled again with the attitude controls, and finally struck on a lucky combination of thrusts that quenched the pod’s chaotic rotation. Then he dialled the docking camera’s magnification up to the max, and inspected the stridently leisure-suited, sumo-shaped husk while the pod nudged closer.
O’Meara looked odd. Where the wrestler’s shod feet should have been— had been, according to the hotel’s tilecam footage—there were clusters of small rocket nozzles. Elsewhere, on the vacuum-exposed face of the ‘corpse’, there was no sign of the expected tracery of burst capillaries and bloodily bugshot eyes. Instead, the eyes had a persistently glassy quality, as though they might be camera lenses. Or viewing windows.
Whatever Haier’s faults, he obviously wasn’t a claustrophobe.
The pod edged closer. Time for G
ordon’s spacewalk.
O’Meara performed a leisurely quarter-roll, expertly twisting and then stopping to face the pod. The wrestler’s arm reached into its jacket pocket.
Gordon’s approach had apparently not gone unnoticed. He was expected by the occupant of the O’Meara-suit.
The reluctant detective flicked a switch, opening the outer hatch of the pod’s cramped airlock. The suited figure squeezed out clumsily. Earth was a huge curve of brilliant blue and white, hanging off to the side of the pod, deceptively distant.
But no time to sightsee. This was time to meet and greet.
“Haier,” he called out through the suit’s short-range radio, hoping O’Meara’s occupant was tuned to the correct frequency.
* * *
The gun, Gordon judged, was a Magnum 3.14159, one of the deadliest bits of weaponry either side of the exosphere. ‘O’Meara’ held it in his right hand, his face unreadable as any mannequin. The gun pointed straight at Gordon’s mirrored visor as the pair faced off, perhaps ten paces apart.
Gordon fumbled his suit’s verniers, straining with the double necessity of arresting a slow tumble and of keeping his suit interposed between ‘O’Meara’ and the pod. (The gun didn’t help. Signals of cold dread trickled down Gordon’s spine. He wished he’d thought to bring the laser pistol with him.)
A voice crackled through the radio speaker, cold, devoid of charm: “Any messages for your next of kin?”
“Haier?” Gordon responded.
“Who do I got the pleasure of addressing?” Haier asked. Snide.
Gordon introduced himself.
“They might at least have sent me a professional.” For the first time, a degree of emotion crept into Haier’s tone. Disgust.
Gordon swallowed. That gun looked big. “Give up, Haier, the game’s over.”
“I don’t read that, Marmot.”
“Mamon.”
“Whatever. Where’s your backup?”