The Space Opera Megapack: 20 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Tales

by John W. Campbell

  “I doubt it,” Bunting said before Richard got a chance to reply. “I mean, she screamed first.”

  Richard closed his eyes for just a second. A brief indulgence, a moment to himself before it all started up again. He’d hoped for an interlude, a bit of quiet, a chance to rest, but it clearly wasn’t going to happen.

  He stood, eyes open now, and looked at the door.

  It didn’t look latched.

  “Is this her room?” he asked, already suspecting the answer.

  “Oh, no,” Hunsaker said. “Miss Lamphere is rooming upstairs with—”

  “Me,” said one of the women behind Richard. He turned slightly. A slender woman with buck teeth stared back at him. He remembered her, because she had propositioned him one late night back on the ship. She’d been drunk, and in her drunkenness she assumed that the ship’s promotion line, which said that the crew was there to serve her every need, apparently understood “every need” to mean every need.

  Her dark eyes met his and a spot of color appeared on her cheeks. She remembered the encounter too.

  “Miss Potsworth,” he said, not using her first name—Janet—because he didn’t want her to get the wrong impression, even now. “I take it Lysa was not in her room?”

  “She’d just left a few minutes ago,” Janet said. “We’d just been told there was going to be dinner and she was famished.”

  Famished. That was a word he hadn’t heard in a very long time.

  “So what was she doing here?” he asked, more to himself than to anyone else. The room was all by itself on this level, and it was a bit out of the way of the stairs.

  “Oh, probably letting Miss Kantswinkle know about the meal,” Janet Potsworth said. “Lysa was the only person—I think—”

  And she looked around for confirmation. A few others nodded, as if she already know what Janet was going to say.

  “—who still liked Miss Kantswinkle. Although I would say that ‘liked’ is probably too strong a word. She felt that Miss Kantswinkle deserved our respect, given all her work with the children—”

  “Right,” Richard said, having heard Agatha Kantswinkle’s long diatribe about her years of service with orphaned children a dozen too many times. “Miss Kantswinkle is in this room?”

  “Yes.” This from Hunsaker who was doing his best to revive Lysa.

  “Then why isn’t she out here?” Richard asked. After all, she was the nosiest women he had ever met.

  He stepped over Lysa’s arm, and rapped on the door with a half-closed fist. The sound echoed through the stairwell, rather like her scream had. No one answered, but the door swung open slowly.

  Richard peered inside, but did not go in. A slightly metallic smell greeted him. The room was tiny, the bed pushed against one wall. There were no windows. A chair and a tiny desk pushed against the other wall.

  And in the center of the room, on the floor, lay Agatha Kantswinkle, black shoes pointing toward the door, frumpy skirt slightly askew, meaty thighs pressed together.

  She had not fallen decorously, like Lysa had. Agatha Kantswinkle had toppled like a tree. He half expected to see a dent in the floor. He wondered why no one had heard the fall from below, then wondered if there was a room below. He tried to remember the layout, and couldn’t.

  He could feel someone else peering over his shoulder, but he effectively blocked the door so no one else could see inside. Then he pulled the door closed and stood in front of it

  “She’s not there, huh?” Bunting asked.

  “You could say that,” Richard said, his gaze meeting Hunsaker’s. Hunsaker was still crouched over Lysa. He didn’t seem sure how to revive her.

  Richard knew a few tricks—none of which used technology—but he didn’t want to try them in front of the small group. Instead, he said to Hunsaker, “Let’s take her back to her room.”

  Hunsaker looked relieved at the suggestion.

  They enlisted the help of Bunting who was one of the strongest men that Richard had ever met. Unfortunately, Richard knew this because he’d had Bunting’s help carrying dead weight before. Only that weight had been really and truly dead, not unconscious like Lysa.

  Richard helped Bunting get her upright, then Bunting scooped her in his arms as if she were no more than a pile of clothes.

  “Which way?” he asked.

  “I’ll show you,” Janet said, and Richard bit his tongue. Better to remain silent than to warn the man she might show him more than her room.

  Together they went up the stairs. Richard followed, mostly because he didn’t want to be alone with the small group on the landing—and he really didn’t want to talk to Hunsaker. At least not right away.

  Instead, Richard would supervise the two in Janet’s room and probably help Bunting make his escape.

  Or Bunting would help him.

  Richard frowned. This damn nightmare trip wasn’t over yet.

  Hunsaker looked at the medical equipment, then moved his gaze toward the closed door. The look that crewman, Richard Ilykova, had given him had sent a chill through him. As had his response when asked if Agatha Kantswinkle was inside her room.

  Ilykova was one of those men Hunsaker had seen hundreds of times over the years on Vaadum. Working some kind spaceship, going from one place to another because the previous place didn’t suit.

  After he’d checked in, on the company’s money (unlike the passengers), he had moved away from the desk, so that he didn’t see Hunsaker move all his information to the handheld pad. Hunsaker usually did that with crew, because so many of them traveled under false names, with very thin personal identification documentation.

  Ilykova’s was better than most. In fact, that was what caught Hunsaker’s attention. Hunsaker had expected a tissue-thin biography, something that showed Ilykova wasn’t who he seemed and seemed to ask the technological question Really, this man is so unimportant. Who cares?

  But the identification looked real at first, so real that it nearly fooled Hunsaker. In fact, it would have fooled Hunsaker if it weren’t for the fact that Hunsaker expected crew to be a bit dodgy.

  So he’d looked a little deeper, saw a ripple in one bit of biography and followed it, finding another layer of biography under yet another name. Usually that meant someone was traveling on some government mission, and while he couldn’t rule that out, he also couldn’t rule out the fact that Ilykova was dodgier than most.

  “Well,” Hunsaker said to the people around him to get rid of them. “There’s nothing we can do now. Did Miss Carmichael let you know that we’re serving dinner?”

  “She did,” one of the women said.

  “Then perhaps you’d best move along. My chef, while excellent, doesn’t like an empty restaurant and will close if no one shows up.”

  “I’m not really hungry,” the other woman said. “But I suppose I could eat.”

  “You never know when you’ll get another chance,” the first woman said to her.

  Hunsaker watched through a slat in the railing as the women made their way to the bottom of the stairs. He waited until they were out of sight before he moved. Then he peered up the stairwell to make sure no one was coming down.

  No one was. He was alone, for which he was quite relieved. Although that sense of relief didn’t last long. His heart was pounding and his palms had grown damp.

  He hated this part of the job. Back when he was training, they had called it “crisis management,” but really, it was more like surprise roulette. Which bad thing would happen today?

  He wiped his hands on his pants, then stepped toward the door. He pushed hard with his shoulder, knowing that the latch didn’t work, knowing that he would regret that in the hours, days, maybe weeks to come.

  The door creaked open. He made himself look down.

  There she was, just as he expected, Agatha Kantswinkle, dead on the floor. In a room without a functioning lock or any kind of portal or any other way out.

  She had placed her small bag of items on the bed—and he ho
ped it was that bag that gave off the slightly metallic smell that was now filtering out of the room. Because he could only think of two other things that could cause such an odor. One was a surplus of blood. The other—

  He sighed.

  He would check the other after he made certain the woman was dead.

  He made himself walk into the room, hoping he wasn’t stepping on anything important. He crouched beside her like he had done with Lysa, but with Agatha Kantswinkle, he didn’t touch her.

  There was no need. She was dead. He didn’t need a doctor or any kind of expert to tell him that. Truth be told, he was probably the expert on the outpost, given how many dead bodies he’d dealt with in the past few decades. Really, it was one of his pet peeves—one of his major pet peeves—one of his major pet peeves that he could never admit to anyone—the habit that people had of dying away from home.

  He’d known when that woman cut to the front of the line that she would be trouble, and here she was, being trouble.

  He bit his lip so that he wouldn’t curse her. He was just superstitious enough to think that might be bad luck. Instead, he sighed. Now he was going to have to call the base doctor and have her preside over this mess, even though he really didn’t want to.

  Not because he didn’t want a doctor overseeing a corpse, but because he didn’t want this doctor overseeing a corpse.

  He left the room and pulled the door closed, hoping no one else would try to get in, since it was so damn easy. This time, he did curse, but he cursed himself. And shook his head.

  And headed to the bar to fetch Anne Marie Devlin before she got too drunk to walk.

  “A body,” said Anne Marie Devlin with great relish. She hadn’t had a body to deal with in at least six months, maybe even a year. She slapped her hands on the bar and slid out of the bar stool, hoping that Hunsaker didn’t know how much she needed the leverage just to move.

  She was drunk, but not as drunk as she got by the end of the day. She would remember this, even if she didn’t sober up, which she might have to, considering.

  She grabbed her bar napkin—some lowly piece of cloth that Hunsaker believed necessary for cleanliness—and wiped the beer foam off her chin. She didn’t know if she had beer foam on her chin, but she always thought it was better to wipe off the imaginary beer foam than leave the real stuff to cake.

  Then she grinned to herself. Oh, sober, she probably wouldn’t think that funny but it was funny as hell at the moment.

  “How much have you had to drink?” Hunsaker asked in that precise snotty tone of his, the one that showed all of his expensive education and his breeding and his superiority. Of course, her education had cost twice as much as his, and she probably came from a better family, and she should’ve felt superior, but she’d left that behind, along with her dignity.

  She just wished Hunsaker would remember that. No, better. She wished he would honor it. He remembered it and snotted down to her each and every time he saw her.

  “Natural causes?” she asked, blinking hard. The bar felt smoky, even though it wasn’t. The fog was just in her eyes.

  “Isn’t it your job to figure that out?” he snapped, and that got her attention. Usually—if you could cite a usually, considering they’d only had three deaths together (and didn’t that sound romantic? Only three deaths)—Hunsaker told her what the cause of death was, when it happened, and how she should fill out the death certificate. Usually, she got irritated that he told her how to do her job, and even more irritated when it turned out that he was right.

  The fact that he was unwilling to say how the guest died was a revelation in and of itself.

  “Excuse me,” Anne Marie muttered and headed to the side of the bar. This place was ridiculously small, considering it was the outpost’s only bar. People could drink in the restaurant and the casino, but they couldn’t drink comfortably in either place.

  She leaned against the bar and looked around. A few of the guests from that damaged spaceship had gone into the restaurant for dinner. She could smell roast pheasant or whatever the hell tonight’s meal was called. It was always the same, some dish made of parts from unidentified meat or maybe synthetic meat or maybe even (oh, don’t go there, but of course she did) corpses, mixed with some kind of gravy or sauce, and actual vegetables grown on the only really nice part of the station, the hydroponic garden.

  She’d become a vegetarian a long time ago, mostly in self defense. She didn’t want to think about the source of the meaty protein, so she didn’t. Except when she dealt with corpses or illnesses or both.

  Her stomach lurched. Served her right for drinking beer on an empty stomach. Beer made with real hops because she had insisted long ago. Sometimes she drank the whiskey brought in by ships or the wine imported from various faraway places, but at least she knew how the beer was made.

  She had been hired to make it.

  She had been the station’s bartender, way back when. Before they realized that by the end of the evening she was too drunk to serve drinks. Before Hunsaker, even, because he felt that an automatic drink mixer was better than a human one any day.

  Hunsaker had ferreted out her secret, that she actually had a medical license and she kept it current. She had to. She didn’t want to be sued by some passenger that she had to save because really, underneath the alcohol, she was the noble sort and felt that the Hippocratic oath had nothing to do with hypocrisy and everything to do with nobility.

  Not that she could be hypocritical or noble with a corpse. She grabbed the breathalyzer and took a hit from it, feeling it clear her alcohol haze like a slap to the face. She hated this thing, not just because it cleared the buzz and made her sober in an instant, but because it would give her one motherfucker of a headache in 24 hours, and she wouldn’t be able to do anything about that.

  Except drink, of course.

  She took a second hit for good measure, then turned to Hunsaker. He stood at attention, shoulders back, hands folded before him, mouth in a very thin line.

  “Ready?” he asked in that damned tone.

  She was thirsty, her eyes ached, and she could feel the depression that always lurked ready to crash down on her.

  “As I’ll ever be,” she said, and let him lead her out of the bar.

  Richard managed to escape Janet Potsworth’s room just as Lysa woke up from what Janet was calling Lysa’s faint. It wasn’t a faint, because Lysa had enough time to scream before passing out, but she had slipped into unconsciousness very quickly, and he had a few ideas as to why.

  But he wanted to think about them first, and that required him to get away from the conversation, and from Janet Potsworth who had grabbed his ass when he bent over to make sure Lysa was comfortable. Potsworth was a menace, and he would be glad to get rid of her—although he wasn’t sure when that would happen, especially now that Agatha Kantswinkle was dead.

  He hadn’t expected her to die, probably because she had always been the first person on the scene of the other deaths aboard the Presidio. He’d come to see her as a stout little angel of death, and had found himself wondering more than once if she hadn’t done something to cause them.

  He still hadn’t ruled that out even though she had clearly been murdered herself. Maybe her death was in retaliation for one of the others…?

  He sighed. He had no idea. And he was going to need one, because it was clear—at least to him—that a murderer lurked on this station.

  He tread lightly as he hurried down the stairs—he didn’t want to call any more attention to himself than he already had. He’d shown a bit more expertise in these matters than he wanted to, and someone had noticed.

  That someone was the hotelier, Hunsaker. Hunsaker was refined and organized, not the kind of man you’d normally find in this shabby place at the edge of nowhere. Usually the proprietors of places like this were down-on-their luck drunks who couldn’t be bothered to wait on a customer even if the customer offered five times the normal room rate. Or the proprietors were well-meaning
spouses of someone on staff in maintenance, some handy person with cooking skills and an ability to take the drabbest room and make it just a tad gaudy.

  Hunsaker seemed like he had training in hotel management. He certainly took his time checking everyone in, which meant that he looked up their identification as well as debiting their accounts.

  He’d noticed Richard and he’d understood what Richard had said when Richard had closed the door on Agatha Kantswinkle’s corpse. Often Richard made those snide little comments for his own edification, knowing that no one else would catch his meaning. But Hunsaker had and Hunsaker had looked momentarily put out. Not panicked. Put out. Like any good hotelier.

  Richard passed the landing where Lysa had passed out. The door to Agatha Kantswinkle’s room was closed and no one stood outside of it. He wondered if anyone was inside, and if Hunsaker had dealt with the corpse yet.

  He almost stopped—he had a few suspicions he wanted to confirm—but he didn’t. He was afraid that if the old lady’s body hadn’t been removed, then he would make himself even more of a suspect than he already was.

  And he knew he was a suspect. Everyone from the Presidio was.

  The first death had occurred two days out, when they were in the deepest of deep space—an area the captain had called no man’s land because there were no settlements within landing range and no outposts. The trip from the Dyo System through the Commons System was dicey no matter what, but there was a section that was just plain empty. Humans weren’t welcome at any of the stops for two full days of the trip. The captain had warned the crew—all three of them—that the first part of the run had nowhere safe to stop until Vaadum Station, and even then he liked to avoid the place because it was so small and so rundown. He preferred the extra day to Commons Space Station, where everyone could get off the ship and relax in style.

  Richard braced himself for the extended run on a relatively small ship. He was particularly susceptible to cabin fever because he’d been the only survivor of a murderous rampage on a cruise ship as a boy. He’d been taking a trip with his father, who had died right in front of him. Everyone on that ship had died except Richard and the shooter, who had left in an escape pod before the ship docked at one of the many Starbase Alphas, this one nicknamed the NetherRealm