by Natalie Grey
“Force of habit.” Barnabas managed a small smile as she walked jerkily towards him.
“Seriously, how do you do this?” Shinigami asked, sounding annoyed. “Only one set of eyes? Can’t see behind you? Navigating is insane. And you’re supposed to watch where you’re walking and watch where you’re putting your feet? How do you do it?”
“Proprioception, mainly.” Barnabas pretended to study the wall so that she wouldn’t feel self-conscious. “We don’t need to look at our bodies as they move because we develop an idea of where they are in space. It’s why toddlers look at their hands and feet while they move and adults don’t. As you get better at this, you’ll acquire the same sense.”
“Hmph.”
“Part of why you’re struggling is that we haven’t done this before, you know.” Barnabas looked at her now. She had almost reached him. “You could write some of the programming so that when other AIs receive bodies, they’ll know how to use them better.”
“Nuh-uh. If I must suffer, so must they.”
“That is not the spirit in which this ship and crew operate.”
She stuck her tongue out at him in response. “So, Captain Kelnamon. Tell me your theory. Distract me.”
“Well, he’s incredibly well-placed to have done it,” Barnabas began. “He has the codes for each room, could override security footage, and could get an assassin on-board—and then off.”
Shinigami stopped suddenly. “You think the ship we encountered when we first got here...”
“Was the assassin?” Barnabas shrugged. “You tell me. It makes sense, though, doesn’t it?”
Shinigami whistled—or, more accurately, tried to whistle. She pursed her lips…and very clearly whistled from one of the speakers on the wall. Barnabas gave a laugh he hastily turned into a cough.
“Just use your internal speaker.”
“I couldn’t find the— Not important.” She folded her arms. “Keep walking, funny man. Explain the distress signal to me. Because it seems to me that someone who was careful enough to sneak on board and plan an assassination was probably observant enough to see you arrive, speak with Kelnamon, and then go speak with Ferqar. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out why you were there.”
“That’s a weak part of the theory,” Barnabas admitted. “Both of those things. In terms of the distress signal, I don’t see why he had to observe protocol on that. I don’t know how commonly known it is that Brakalon law requires him to stop. Even if it is common knowledge, would any of his Brakalon passengers mind if, instead of trapping them in the middle of nowhere with a murderer, he kept going to port and just pretended he would speak to authorities there? Would the authorities care?”
Shinigami considered this. “You’re growing as a person, you know. There was a time when it wouldn’t even have occurred to you to ask whether the law was commonly followed.”
Barnabas gave a small smile, but he couldn’t really enjoy the humor of the moment. None of the pieces of this fit together in his head. He was used to knowing who his enemy was. In this case, he knew almost nothing. The people best placed to pull this off, it seemed, had not been involved.
“Anyway,” Shinigami continued, “if we’re going down the rabbit hole, the law might not even be what he said it is.”
Barnabas stopped dead. “Then why stop and broadcast a signal?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged, although she didn’t expend the energy to turn around and shrug at him. Instead, she continued walking grimly, determined to make it to the end of the hallway.
He could understand her determination. Practicing a new skill wasn’t always pleasant. “You’re right; we are going down the rabbit hole.” He considered. “If you can get us video from the bridge and confirm that Kelnamon was the one who turned the distress signal on and that he did it without prompting from the rest of the crew or passengers, we can eliminate that as a… Wait, why aren’t you just looking up Brakalon legal codes?”
“I tried, and they’re unreadable. I swear the whole thing is a metaphor. I’m still trying to parse whether this one section is referring to improvised explosives or jaywalking. What’s that expression on your face?”
“Trying to imagine what possible language could encompass both of those things.”
Shinigami snickered. “I’ll research Kelnamon’s movements. I have to say, though, I don’t think the captain is behind this. He had no motive.”
“That you know of.”
“I suppose.” Barnabas rubbed the back of his head again. “Damn, they hit me hard.”
“You’re still healing from that?” She sounded genuinely concerned.
“A little bit. Mostly cleanup from the bruise. That’s a process. The cracked bones are easier to fix.”
“All right, that does it, if they managed to crack your thick skull, there’s something shady going on here. I have to go research something.” Shinigami hobbled over to a doorway and de-animated the body so that it slumped face-first into the alcove.
“Shinigami?”
“Yes?”
“Was that an insult or a statement of fact?”
“Yes.”
Barnabas rolled his eyes and went off to get a glass of juice.
In the kitchen, he found Tafa eating a bowl of something that looked like sawdust. She had gone off with Gar at their last stop to resupply and had told everyone that she finally had the ingredients to make one of her favorite dishes. Barnabas now found himself hoping she wouldn’t offer him any of it.
“So, what’s going on with the murder case?” she asked around a mouthful of food.
Barnabas hid a grimace. He was a stickler for table manners, but both Tabitha and Shinigami had informed him that he was not allowed to mention people’s manners to them since it was insufferably pretentious—or in Tabitha’s somewhat more flowery language, “douche-canoe-y.”
He distracted himself by pouring a glass of juice. “I interviewed Captain Huword’s traveling companion—briefly—then got attacked, so, unfortunately, I have more questions now than I started with, not less.”
“You were attacked?” Tafa sounded surprised. “Then how is this still a case? The person who attacked you must be the murderer, right?”
“It’s likely, but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to apprehend her.” Barnabas did allow himself a grimace at that. He steeled himself and joined Tafa at the table.
“What? She beat you?” She looked genuinely flabbergasted.
“It happens, you know,” Barnabas snapped tetchily.
“Not often. Gar said you once took on hundreds of mercenaries.”
“The stories are somewhat overblown, and overwhelming numbers do not help in the case of… Not important.”
“No, seriously, I wanna see the fight.” Tafa looked around. “Shinigami, did you holo it?”
“Yes,” Shinigami’s voice announced.
Barnabas dropped his face into his hands. “Do we have to do this?”
“Yes,” they said in unison.
“Hey,” Gar said, entering the kitchen.
“Oh, good. Let’s have everyone see it.” Barnabas drained his glass in one bitter gulp. “Why don’t we invite Captain Kelnamon as well?”
“Eh?” Gar looked at Tafa.
“Don’t listen to him.” She waved her spoon, having gotten past the phase of being awed by Barnabas. “He fought the murderer, and he lost. We’re watching the video for clues.”
“Oh, for clues?” Barnabas looked up. “That’s less embarrassing.”
Everyone scooched their chairs over to a nearby holoscreen and watched the fight unfold. Barnabas emerged from the door of Captain Ferqar’s quarters, only to be hit in the back of the head by the masked opponent.
The fight, such as it was, seemed even quicker than it had at the time. Barnabas sighed and settled back in his chair, although he winced when he saw himself drop from the ceiling.
“What happened there?” Tafa asked Barnabas.
“She smashed the
ceiling panel down on the tips of my fingers.” Barnabas curled his hands into protective fists, burying his nails in his palms. “It crushed the bones.”
Tafa and Gar gaped at him.
“Very unpleasant,” Barnabas said shortly. “Although…very effective.”
Gar looked back at the screen with a queasy expression. He was still watching, along with Barnabas, when Tafa said loudly, “Ha!”
Gar jumped. “Er, yes?”
“She’s not biological,” Tafa announced.
“What?” Barnabas demanded at the same time as Shinigami said, “How did you know that?”
“Whoa, wait, back up.” Barnabas stood up and looked accusingly at the speakers. “You knew?”
“Yes. Well, I suspected it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was trying to confirm it before I said anything!” Shinigami flickered into being in full armor, perched on top of a cabinet by the holoscreen. She tilted her head curiously at Tafa. “How did you know, though?”
“Something about the movements.” Tafa shrugged. “And the head is a weird shape, so there’s that. What are the odds that some random new kind of alien showed up just to commit murder on a civilian ship?”
Barnabas nodded, bemused.
“And something about the way the joints function just doesn’t seem right,” Tafa added. She pointed at the screen. “But the kicker is, look at the way it jumps up into the ceiling there.”
Shinigami obligingly slowed the video down.
“There’s no real muscle engagement,” Tafa pointed out. “In any other bipedal species, we’d see the tension in the torso. There’s none here. It’s subtle, but it’s definitely different.”
Barnabas frowned at the screen. “Shinigami? What gave it away to you?”
“The fact that she—well, if it’s a she—hit you hard enough to dent your skull,” Shinigami said. “I was surprised she’d slammed the panel down so hard, too, but that first hit was what sealed the deal. There was no weapon, but she hit you incredibly hard at an angle that would be difficult to generate the power for using an organic muscle structure. So I started looking, and I realized that the pocket of space above that panel was pretty small. So not only did she generate an extraordinary amount of force on that one panel dropping down, but she also got away without any place for a roughly human-sized alien to fit. Which means...” She gave Barnabas a meaningful look.
“She’s still there!” He was on his feet. “Gar, come on.”
“No, no, no.” Shinigami’s voice stopped him. She sighed. “She disassembled herself.”
Barnabas froze and looked slowly over his shoulder. “You are kidding me.”
“I’m not. Furthermore, I think she was the person trying to get in here before, and I saw her greet someone in the hallway as they passed, which suggests she bought passage. There’s an explanation that starts to link up with some of the rest of what we know, too.”
“Which is?” Barnabas frowned up at her.
Shinigami took her time before answering, and when she did, she sounded exceedingly pleased with herself.
“It’s a Jotun.”
Chapter Seven
“We have to do this logically,” Barnabas said. He was pacing around the armory dressed in his armor. “She’s easily capable of fighting me, and I have a ship full of civilians to protect. Ideas?”
“The first thing is to make sure she doesn’t have any allies,” Shinigami suggested reasonably. She was in her artificial body, swinging her arms in an approximation of Barnabas’ warmup exercises. “You suspected Kelnamon and Ferqar.”
“I think we can now expand that to include any other Jotun on the ship,” Barnabas said.
“The only other registered one is Ferqar,” Shinigami said. “And clearly it wasn’t him.”
“Are you sure? A Jotun naval captain can pilot an entire ship. Why couldn’t they pilot a suit remotely?”
“Well, for one thing, that mechanism is biomechanical. None of it is ever done remotely.”
Barnabas chewed his lip. “Hrmph.”
“Which isn’t to say that it couldn’t work that way,” Shinigami continued, “but I am almost one hundred percent certain that she was the one who came to look at the airlock door the other day, which means I got a scan then, and there was definitely Jotun biomatter in a sufficient amounts for this to be another Jotun.”
“Okay.” Barnabas rubbed his face. “So we can’t tell Kelnamon just to get all the Jotun passengers in one place. He has to be in on it, doesn’t he?”
“Not necessarily,” Tafa opined. She was sitting on a stack of mats at one side of the room, swinging her legs. Her blue skin glowed faintly in the dim lights. “With this many berths on the ship, he probably doesn’t see everyone who gets one, and it’s not a ship that’s going to make the passengers go through a bioscanner to board.”
“Interplanetary security sounds like a nightmare,” Barnabas muttered.
“It is, actually.” Gar looked over from where he, too, was putting on his armor. “The measures taken on Devon—I’m sorry, High Tortuga—aren’t available to most planetary governments. That means they can’t really stop someone from setting down on their planet. There will always be enough of a gap in the air defenses for something to slip through. Meanwhile, there are so many pilots ready to make a quick buck, and so many who don’t even care, that a person can usually get wherever they want to without having anyone bother them. If they have money, of course, and this one clearly does.”
Barnabas sighed heavily.
“How do you know she’s rich?” Tafa challenged Gar.
“Easy. They have a custom biosuit that works extremely well in hand-to-hand combat, and a very good ship and accomplice.”
“The other Jotun,” Barnabas said neutrally.
“Well, yeah.” Gar looked at him, bemused. “They were working together, right?”
“How do you know that?”
“I mean, I— Well, I just do. I mean, I don’t. It makes sense, though, right?” He scratched his head. “Shinigami, back me up.”
“I’m afraid I can’t.” Shinigami’s voice was regretful although her face was blank. “With technology like this, I see no reason the pilot of that ship couldn’t have gotten the assassin off the Srisa pretty much immediately if they were working together. If they didn’t collaborate to do that, therefore, it means—well, either they weren’t working together, or the two of them were waiting for someone specific. Which was almost certainly not us.”
Barnabas nodded slowly. His sense of self-preservation had flared up as soon as Shinigami said, “Someone specific,” but he knew the assassin could not have predicted that he’d be the one to get there.
“You’re sure someone was piloting the ship that blew up,” he said.
“Yes. I did scan it. I wasn’t able to get specific readings since I couldn’t hook into their systems, but I know there was someone there.”
“None of this makes sense!” Barnabas waved his arms for emphasis.
“At least we agree on something,” Gar said helpfully. “If they were working together and waiting for someone—that makes sense, Shinigami, thank you—then it was probably the Jotun government, right?”
Barnabas stopped, a chill going through him. “You might be onto something,” he said slowly.
Everyone looked at him.
“Jeltor said he wondered if this was retaliation for what happened with the Yennai fleet,” Barnabas explained. “Now, Ferqar may not have been involved, but Jeltor seemed to think Huword was. So the question is, was this a Jotun government assassination?”
“The level of sophistication would make sense in that case,” Shinigami said after a moment. “Both in the ship and the assassin’s biosuit. It’s stuff we haven’t seen before. Where better for it to come from than some deep dark government lab?”
“Says the government lab project.”
“Listen here—”
“Yeah, yeah.” Barnabas
waved a hand. “What’s weird to me, in that case, is that the assassin, who has the capabilities to overpower most other aliens, and has extremely good tech backup, wouldn’t just disable a distress signal. Is the ship wired that well?”
“No,” Shinigami said promptly. “They wouldn’t even have had to go to the bridge to disable both that and outbound communications beyond repair.”
“Ugh.” Gar sounded glum now. “So it doesn’t make sense that they’re working together. I do not get this.”
“Okay, so they’re not working together.” Barnabas snapped his fingers. “This assassin took out Huword, and the person on the ship was trying to keep everyone else away until…someone specific could get there to apprehend them?”
Gar was clutching his head. “This keeps going around in circles.”
“But we’re getting closer,” Barnabas said. He gave a somewhat manic grin.
“Unless you’re going in exactly the opposite direction,” Shinigami pointed out.
“That’s enough from you. Look at what you’re doing to poor Gar. Tafa, any observations?”
“Nope.” Tafa shook her head. “I’m all out. My whole contribution was noticing the biosuit.”
“Still helpful.” Barnabas nodded decisively. “All right, here’s my plan. We assume Kelnamon isn’t involved. It’s in the best interests of the assassin to make sure no one notices, right? No, we can’t even assume that. Fuck. I got nothin’. Shinigami, do you have any idea where the Jotun is right now?”
“No.”
“Can you lock down the ship so that people are at least held in small groups?”
“Yes.”
“Do that, then.” Barnabas looked at Gar. “Looks like you and I are going door to door until we find this thing. Hopefully, it’s not still in the damned walls.”
“I’m coming with you,” Shinigami announced. Her body appeared in the doorway. “And before you say no, remember that I have scanners built into this body. If the Jotun is in the walls, I’m the best chance you have of finding them.”
Barnabas sighed. “I can also sense their minds, you know. Did you remember that?”