Murder on the Orion Express

by Nate Streeper

  There was only one such innately human-habitable planet per cluster—except out here on the Edge. The Edgeworlds had no crown jewel. With a little help from environmental engineering, Fillion harbored a bearable atmosphere, but some days were better than others. I coughed a couple times before rolling up my face mask. The mask helped, I just hated wearing it. Having to put it on reminded me of what I’d lost.

  Three alleyways and a sewer bridge later, I caught up to a red bandana panting on a park bench near an old lady taking a pre-dawn stroll with her damp, six-legged grubber—Fillion’s house pet of choice. He didn’t recognize me from the club, so I simply walked over to the bench and joined him.

  “Crappy weather,” I said as I sat down. “Hard to breath without a mask tonight.”

  He nodded and kept panting, his lungs still trying to catch up with his heart. He wasn’t much to look at—kind of scrappy, kind of sad. He took off his bandana and tried to sop up the sweat coating his face, but the cloth was already so moist that it only smeared the sweat around. I waited for him to recover, giving him an opportunity for a fair fight. When he calmed down enough, I played my card.

  “I can understand the rope,” I said. “But what the hell’s with the bucket of lard?”

  He stopped breathing entirely, shot up, and started to run again. “Fuck me, man!”

  I tackled him from behind and grabbed his legs, causing him to tumble forward onto the wet grass. Even through my mask, I could smell that “freshly cut lawn” smell so many people like, but only causes me to sneeze. As he tried to worm his way out from my grip, my mask began to slip off, and my face smeared into the ground. A few blades of green lodged themselves up my nose.

  “Stop squirming,” I said.

  “Get off me!”

  “Stop squirming!”

  Listic jetted over to my ear and bounced around. “Back left pocket!” she yelled.

  “What?”

  “Back left pocket! Back left pocket!”

  Eyes tearing up, nose hairs tickling, confusion getting the best of me, I reached around to my back left pocket and felt for my wallet. The skinny John used the opportunity to slip from my grasp. “Listic, what the hell? It’s just my wallet.”

  The guy turned around, pulled out a pair of vibroknuckles, and decked me before I could fully stand. I went flying—further than the giant bouncer back at the club—and smacked into a tree. My trajectory landed me next to the old woman and her grubber. The grubber yelped, the woman screamed, and I sneezed. The guy in the bandana ran off.

  Listic hovered over to me. “His back left pocket, Alan. His.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not yours.”

  I sneezed again. “I misunderstood.”

  She shook her eye slowly in front of my face. “I thought you were encoded with an intuition program.”

  I let the woman and her grubber wander off and sat by the tree, feeling as though my warranty had expired. I didn’t feel like chasing that guy anymore. There had to be a better way to pay the rent.

  I leaned back against the tree and rubbed my neck. With the action sequence at a close, my mind drifted back to unfinished business. The doll in the red dress.

  As so often the case when I left a thought on my back burner, my subconscious eventually rose to the surface. I realized what was so unusual about her: It wasn’t that she caught my eye. It was that she looked away. Sexdolls never did that. Once they snagged your eye, they locked onto it like a snare tether. But this one looked away. As though she’d been caught noticing me.

  Well, that, and... I don’t know, perhaps I’d been living on Fillion too long—long enough for sexdolls to start appealing to me. But I’d swear, at the moment our eyes connected, I’d noticed something unprecedented.

  Her eyes held a soul.

  2

  Unfinished Business

  I woke up in my apartment the next morning to the ringing of my subphone, feeling like a complete wreck. At first, I thought I was hung over. But then I remembered that I hadn’t had a beer for years, and it was probably the vibroknuckle to the jaw and the tree to the forehead that really did me over.

  The subphone sounded like a klaxon purposed for evacuating an entire planet, but all it caused me to do was burrow further into my pillows. “Listic, get the subphone.” Nothing. The phone kept ringing, and I realized I’d probably forgotten to charge Listic in her cradle last night.

  Crap.

  I had my subphone set up to switch to voicemail after two rings. My apartment was so small that if I didn’t get to it by then, it simply wasn’t going to happen. My phone rang six times. Seven times. Whoever wanted to talk to me wasn’t willing to leave a message—they hung up and called back repeatedly to keep the klaxon blowing. I rolled slowly out of bed, massaging my head as I walked across the room toward the subphone, a feat of epic proportion despite my studio’s tiny footprint. The thing must have rung a dozen times by now. Somebody was desperate to get a hold of me. Unless it was the Fillion Lottery, there’d be hell to pay.

  I pushed some cardboard containers of half-eaten Klokigon food aside and pressed the big red pulsing button to put an end to my misery.

  “Hello?”

  “Alan? Alan, it’s me. What took you so long to answer? Have you been drinking again?”

  Oh, good. My ex-wife.

  “Margo... Listen, Margo. I had a rough night...”

  “Yeah, you usually do. Alan, I don’t know how much time we have on this stream. I think the subgate will be closing on my end in a few minutes, I have no idea about yours. Fillion’s subgate schedule is all out of sync. That’s the reason I called. Well, related, anyway...”

  My headache had shifted from a jackhammer to a dull throb, but I was anxious to lay back down. “Margo, what is it? Just say it.”

  I listened to dead subspace for a moment. Finally, “I need you to pick Alice up.”

  “What? Pick who up?”

  “Alice.” She sighed with frustration. “You remember. My sister? She’s on Fillion right now, at the spaceport.”

  “Why?” I was thoroughly confused. “What’s she doing on my planet?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Alan. She just graduated from that orbital college in Quartermast and she’s going to stay with me until she moves on to law school. Fillion’s her layover point. She was only supposed to be there for an hour, but her flight from Fillion to New Gaia just got cancelled. Because of the recent space pirate capture. I’m sure you heard, it was a ship that departed from there.”

  Right. The Herculean Parrot.

  I got serious. Alice and Margo actually had a legitimate reason to be overly concerned about space pirates. For them, the incident hit home.

  “Is she okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah. A little freaked out I think, but she’s okay. You know how it is whenever there’s a space pirate encounter. All the spacelines overreact. The odds of another cruiser being captured in the same spot are astronomical, but most of the flights are cancelled due to temporary paranoia. There’s only one ship still willing to fly out of Fillion, but it doesn’t depart until tomorrow. That’s why I need you to pick her up and let her sleep at your place tonight.”

  I let the information sink in. My head was finally beginning to clear.

  Alice had lived with their parents in Dargone, a sister system to New Gaia in the Orion Cluster, until their parents, both lawyers of interstellar fame, went missing five years ago along with the Titanic IV, never to return from a holiday cruise.

  The details of the incident came back to me. Ironically, the only lifepod jettisoned from the Titanic IV happened to land on Fillion—two years after the cruiser’s launch date. When authorities discovered it lodged beneath a rock a few miles north of Fillport, the pod was empty. The lifepod’s quantum odometer had fritzed out during the journey, making it impossible to det
ermine its point of origin. Everyone assumed the occupant went space mad, trapped for two dozen months sans cryogen in a tiny capsule with nothing but recycled water and Mighty Mike’s Super Dense Nutrition Bars, and simply ejected him or herself from the pod.

  Solitary confinement in the void of space. Not a good thing.

  After that tragedy, Alice came to stay with Margo and me on New Gaia before graduating high school and departing for college. Nearly twenty years younger than Margo, she was an angsty teenager at the time who wasn’t about to let her older sister take over parenting duties.

  Those were a long few months.

  I let out a short groan. I found Alice to be exasperating.

  “Margo, I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

  “Alan, it’s going to happen. There’s no fucking way I’m letting my little sister spend a night on Fillion in some slut hotel, surrounded by pimps and whores.”

  “There are regular hotels here, too.”

  “Alan. Do this for me. Pick her up. Feed her. Drop her off. I’ve deposited some funds in your account for the inconvenience. Ten thousand goola.”

  Ten thousand goola? The disparity was disheartening. For Margo the lawyer, it was a drop in the bucket; for Alan the detective, it was a windfall. It would more than cover my rent this month, with a few dinners at Dan’s Genetically Modified Steak House to spare.

  I sighed. “Okay, okay. I’ll pick her up at the port.”

  “Thanks, Alan. I owe you.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “No problem.”

  “And no drink—”

  The stream died, cutting her last words off. And that, unfortunately, was how most conversations ended with Margo: accusatory and incomplete.

  I walked over to my nightstand and discovered Listic resting next to, rather than in, her cradle. I placed her in it. She hummed. “Ah... Sweet, glorious electricity. My friend.”

  “You’ve got fifteen minutes to charge. I’m gonna take a shower.”

  “No shaving, today?”

  I walked slowly to my bathroom, accidentally kicking over a precariously stacked tower of ancient DVDs that Margo always gave me such a hard time about collecting. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai tumbled under my dilapidated easy chair.

  I reached down and scooped the mess into a pile of colorful boxes at the base of my media cabinet, which was bursting with yet more DVDs. And Blu-rays. And laserdiscs. I collected physical data units, or PDUs, like Margo collected shoes. I even had a VHS and Beta collection. I’m sure I was the primary proprietor of Remy’s Gizmos & Gadgets Galore on the far side of town. If I ever hopped off this rock, Remy would go out of business.

  Nobody cared about old movies, anymore. Let alone PDUs. One had to travel to the Core Cluster and syphon the hypernet to stream them, but even there no one bothered. Everyone took to the holovids, acting out starring roles in various productions, essentially living in other universes. I never saw the point of any of that. Holovids never led to closure. They never had an end. They just went on and on, like a melodramatic soap opera with a bottomless surplus of hooks and cliffhangers. I much preferred actual stories with actual endings. Good stories were capable of tapping into the very meaning of life. People didn’t understand that, anymore. Artistic appreciation was lost centuries ago in a tide of techno-narcissism.

  I turned on the water and let it flow freely into the basin. As it heated, I looked in the mirror. Forty-two and going slightly grey, wrinkles beginning to gather at the edges of my eyes. How old would Alice be, now? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? Margo said she just finished her last year at the university...

  Maybe I should shave. I rubbed my jaw to test its scruff, but was met with a sharp pain, reminding me of vibroknuckles. I opened my medicine cabinet and shook my bottle of fixers. Sounded like two, maybe three left. Better save them for something that mattered. Like a gunshot wound.

  “No shaving today,” I finally answered. “Besides, what kind of a hard-boiled detective would I be if I shaved every day?”

  “Atta’ boy!” Listic said. “My handsome man.”

  There was a sudden pounding at the door. “Alan! Alan, I know you’re in there!”

  Landlady Marple.

  “That’s because I live here, Ms. Marple,” I said loudly.

  “You won’t live here any longer if you don’t pay your rent!”

  “Oh, for crying out loud, this lady,” Listic said in a low voice.

  “Listen, I’ll have your goola,” I answered. “I just need my account to accept a deposit. This afternoon.”

  “Yeah, yeah, check’s in the mail,” she said. “I’m not waiting ‘till this afternoon. You need to pay me now!”

  “This afternoon, Ms. Marple. I will have the goola this afternoon.” I walked to the door, opened it a foot, and poked my head out. “Yes, I’m usually late, but I always come through. You know that. Right now, I need to take a shower.”

  She grunted and huffed back down the stairs.

  The water was just warm enough. I got in the shower, my best thinking spot, and pondered. Even though the ten thousand goola Margo forwarded me would cover my rent for a while, I couldn’t afford the long-term repercussions of letting Bone down. I needed to keep my contacts intact, or I’d be no good as a private dick to anyone. I needed to follow through with the guy in the red bandana.

  “Jesus!” My water suddenly went ice cold. I cussed as many words as I knew, wrestling with the shower curtain as I fought my way out.

  Landlady Marple.

  ∙ • ∙

  I had the perp, still sporting his red bandana, bound to a chair in the corner of his black-out-curtained bedroom. There was plenty of rope lying about his place. I’d been counting on it.

  He was still asleep when I showed up and didn’t put up much of a struggle. He seemed as groggy as I felt when Margo called.

  “Looks like neither of us slept very well,” I said.

  “How’d you get in?”

  “You left your door unlocked. It was easy enough to go back to the park and have Listic pick up your trail again. I can’t believe you didn’t take any anti-tracking precautions. I mean, sure, I was a little out of it, myself. Forgot to cradle my ORB—”

  “You know, I’m glad you brought that up—” Listic interrupted.

  I waved my hand at her. “But, come on. You could have put in a little effort.”

  “Yeah, well most people who get decked with a set of vibroknuckles don’t keep coming.”

  I nodded. “That’s true. But I’m not most people.” I walked over to the foot of his bed and sat down across from him. “Okay, listen. This feels a bit low, even for me. Desperate times, and all that. I don’t normally play the role of collector, but I needed a paying gig, and this amounts to follow-through.”

  He looked down at the ground and unloaded. “My girlfriend had just broken up with me, hitched a flight with some hardass further into the Edge. I was feeling inadequate.” He looked back up at me. “How much does he say I owe?”

  “He wants five hundred goola.”

  “Five hundred! What the hell? Five hundred?”

  “Well, he said you originally owed him four hundred. But he’s making it five, on account of you reneging on your end of the agreement.”

  The guy shook his head, began tearing up. “I am so fucked. I am so fucked...”

  I was beginning to feel sorry for him. I leaned over and put a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, buddy. It’s okay. We’re gonna get through this.” I rose up and paced the floor a few times while he whimpered. Ah, forget it. I’m no tough guy.

  “Okay, how much can you afford to pay?”

  He swallowed hard and got a hold of himself. “Three hundred. That’s what I’d expected to pay when I went in. Only, things got a little crazy in the bedroom, and I found myself asking for a fourth girl so that she could—
”

  “No need for details.”

  “Right. Anyway, after we were, you know, ‘done,’ I realized I couldn’t afford it, so I got scared and booked it.”

  “Okay. How about you pay three fifty. Can you afford three fifty? I imagine that would mean you just eat crappy food for a month to compensate. No sirloin imported from Core. Nothing but noodles. That ought to compensate.”

  His eyes lit up. “Yeah, I can do that. I can afford three-fifty. Goola’s in my wallet. Over there, on the dresser. No, on the shelf. Yeah, that one.” He quickly shifted his expression from hopeful to concerned. “Aren’t they going to want the rest of it?”

  I thought about the ten thousand goola Margo had just deposited via subspace stream. “I’ll cover the remaining one-fifty for you. But you owe me.” I walked over to his wallet and removed some bills.

  “Whatever you want, man.”

  “You like steak?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He looked confused. “Yeah, sure. Who doesn’t like steak?”

  “Meet me at Dan’s Genetically Modified Steak House. Ten times over the next ten months. Wednesdays are good. You free Wednesdays?”

  “I work late. Filldays would work better.”

  I hated Filldays. We didn’t have them back on New Gaia, so to me they felt like an aberration. New Gaia, in spite of its 23-hour day cycle, was otherwise Core Standard with regard to days in a week. Out here on Fillion, we had crappy 26-hour days and 8-day weeks. I never really got used to it. Perhaps eating a nice steak would help me cope with the Fillion time-slip.

  “Filldays work,” I said. “Third Fillday each month. I’ll meet you at Dan’s”

  “Deal.”

  I was about to leave, then turned back. “Oh, that’s a slip knot I’ve got you bound with. All you have to do is pull on that piece of rope dangling from your left arm to get loose.”