Murder on the Orion Express

by Nate Streeper

  “I know. I do this all the time.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me. “Well, why didn’t you just untie it and try to take me down this whole time?”

  He looked up at me with an embarrassed expression. “I kind of like it.”

  I swallowed. “Oh.”

  “I don’t tie sexdolls up. I have them tie me up.”

  “I see.” I cleared my throat. “Well, then. I, ah... I have to get going, now. Gotta pick up my ex-wife’s sister. You know how it is...”

  “Sure, sure. Anyway, I think I’ll just stay like this for a while.”

  “Okay, buddy. Okay.” Silence. “Well... I’m off.”

  “Alrighty.”

  I closed the door behind me and walked out to my hoverbike. Listic floated over near my ear. “Even I thought that was awkward,” she said in a hushed tone.

  “Indeed,” I said. “Listic, Off.” She dropped into my palm. I pocketed her, ignited my bike’s engine, and headed for the spaceport.

  3

  Little Tart

  Fillion Spaceport, or Fillport, as we locals called it, was five miles out from the city. Fillport was accessible via tuberoads that were perpetually fed the terraformed atmosphere, though at a slightly less aggressive rate than the primary domes, which meant they smelled bad. We referred to the network as the habitrail.

  The port itself was one of the nicest structures on Fillion. For those whose sole experience on our Edgeworld was a brief layover, they’d come and go under the impression that we actually had our shit together. Holoboards decorated the corridors, prominently displaying arrivals and departures in greens and reds and blues. Ritzy vendors representing cross-cluster franchises pocketed the corridors, allowing weary travelers to grab their Sunbucks Emporium lattes no matter where their comings and goings took them. Every third harbored was a massive, 3D-imbedded image screen, giving the appearance of windows to other worlds. Just when you felt comfortable with the image and managed to convince yourself you were, say, in a tower staring out at New Rome on Venus II, it would shimmer into an image of Solaria on Alexander, or perhaps New York on Earth, and turn your own world upside down. I found it kind of nauseating, to be honest. But I suppose it was good for tourism.

  I parked my hoverbike in a maintenance auxiliary lot and entered the main vestibule, throwing myself into the melee. A hologram filled the domed ceiling above—a free floating image of the the Herculean Parrot. The ship that was captured by space pirates. The names of the captured or dead drifted down to the crowd like commemorative snowflakes, lost among the living.

  Due to the trade agreement that allowed goods to pass from Quartermast to Orion through our cluster with a lower tariff, the port had become a hive of activity. Tonight it was absolute chaos. The space pirate fiasco had completely fucked with interstellar traffic. The stranded clotted into groups along the margins of the departure gates and shouted at each other over fares.

  Still, these were the fortunate ones. The unfortunate were being herded off a ship somewhere at musket point by space pirates, either for slaughter or captivity, yet these folks in Fillport acted like they were the ones inconvenienced. It reminded me of how upset people got when skyways were backed up due to a traffic accident. Sure, they’d be a little late to the office that day. Meanwhile, some poor sap, sideswiped by a by careless pilot, was suddenly paralyzed from the waist down and in dire need of a cyber-op. I was just as guilty of selfish thought patterns as the next person. It was important to stop and reassess every now and again.

  I tossed Listic into the air and had her light up. “Alice” flashed above my head among the falling snowflakes, not to mention the other names posted by everyone else’s ORBs. We blended together, nobody’s name billboard any more obvious than another’s. It was like telling someone to spot you by the balloon you were holding when you were in a crowd of people holding balloons.

  Listic caught on to this too, her intuition chip kicking in for a change. She shot higher than the others, practically reaching the holographic Parrot, and instead of simply flashing the name “Alice,” projected a feed from an old Disney animated movie made before holovids—a scene where this young blond girl in a blue and white dress chases a rabbit down a hole—and rained a storm of black spades and red hearts straight down on my location. Less than a minute later, Alice found me in the crowd.

  “Hi, Alan,” she said. “Still a weirdo, I see.”

  Her curly, royal blue hair bounced around as much as the rest of her. Alice had grown up. Her blindingly white, skin-tight body suit contrasted sharply against her dark skin and left little to the imagination. I felt like I should avert my eyes.

  “Alice,” I said. I took a deep breath and tried to be sociable. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Too long,” she said. She dropped her bag and gave me a quick hug.

  “So. Welcome to Fillion. I’ll, ah... I’ll take your bag.”

  “You sound like a flight attendant. A bad one. Like, one who would go home after his shift and ask, ‘How did I end up a flight attendant?’”

  “Yes, this should be fun.”

  She picked up her bag and handed it over to me, a light silver and grey duffel bag that screamed wealth, perfectly in sync with her outfit. Her parents had always spoiled both her and Margo, even after they went missing. They’d left Alice with enough goola to buy a small asteroid. She’d stick out like a prime target on Fillion once we hit the streets. Then again, as I looked around at the current crowd of rerouted refugees, I realized a lot of them seemed better dressed than our usual tourists. Most were probably on their way to one of the wealthier systems in the Orion Cluster, a straight shot within their own cultural climate, this being an unexpected layover in the Edgeworlds.

  “My bike’s out front,” I said, turning toward the main exit. Listic dropped and expected accolades. I pat her softly before I turned her off and tucked her in my pocket.

  Alice followed. “You have a bike?” she asked.

  “Yeah. A Honda.”

  “Cool.”

  We made it the rest of the way in silence. When we got to my hoverbike, I opened the left saddlebag, took out the spare helmet, and handed it to her. Then I tried squeezing her duffel bag into the same saddlebag. It wouldn’t fit.

  “Um, I can’t get this whole thing in here if it’s this full. Can you empty some of it out for me, put it in the opposite side?”

  “Sure.”

  I handed it to her. She unzipped it and took out some clothes. A string of black, lacy lingerie with red trim and bows erupted into view. She glanced at me and blushed, then crammed them deep into the saddlebag. I looked away, suddenly very interested in reading the No Parking sign that I’d parked my bike next to. No Parking. No Parking.

  I heard her zip her bag back up.

  “Will it fit, now?” she asked. I reached over, took the duffel bag from her, and tried squeezing it in again. She placed her hands on mine and helped me push. “Tight squeeze,” she said, then blushed again.

  I cleared my throat. “You mind riding on the back?” I asked as we put our helmets on.

  “Not this time. Maybe next time we can swap.”

  “You know how to ride a hoverbike?”

  “Sure.” We straddled the seat. “I know how to ride a lot of things.” She grabbed me around the waist. I kicked on the engine, and we rode back to the city.

  This was going to be a long twenty-four hours.

  ∙ • ∙

  We stopped on the corner of Pink and Chrome for a couple of crackdogs. The vendor, Ernie, always gave me extra relish, which I appreciated, since his dogs tasted like crap.

  “Is this how you always eat?” Alice asked as I handed her one.

  “Not always,” I said, taking a bite. Then, over a mouthful of bun, “Sometimes I eat two.”

  She sniffed it. “So I just...”

 
“Eat. It.”

  She took a bite, then suddenly scrunched up her nose as she chewed. Ernie laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” she managed to ask, barely swallowing her first bite.

  “Offworlders,” Ernie said, then laughed again.

  Alice took another bite, looked at him defiantly, and chewed with increased determination. Ernie stopped laughing and cocked his eyebrows as a sign of sudden respect. “Oh, very good. Very good, Alan. She is now accustomed to our ways. A quick learner.”

  “She’s in college.”

  Alice shrugged as she worked on another bite, then held the remaining half out to him. “Gwaduated. Mo’ relish.”

  Ernie chuckled as he spread some more on. “A very quick learner.”

  I gave him some goola and walked Alice back toward my bike, kicking used paper cups and vacu-pacs out of our path. “Okay, so my place is right there, just two blocks down. It’s in that apartment complex with the red neon rooster on it. I’ll drop you off, but then I have to run a few errands.”

  She mocked a pouty lip. “You’re abandoning me?”

  “Only for an hour or so. I have to follow through on a case.”

  “Jealous housewife?”

  “Nothing like that.” We got on the bike again. “Okay, exactly like that.”

  She laughed. “I should be a detective.”

  I thought about it for a moment. It would piss her sister off, royally. Their parents always wanted both of them to be lawyers.

  “Sounds like a good idea, to me.”

  We pulled up a minute later. I let her gather her belongings while my engine ran, making sure not to observe her intimates as she repacked her duffel, then handed her my house key. “Apartment G. Sorry it’s a mess. I didn’t have much time to prepare.”

  “That’s cool. So long as you’ve hid all your porno.”

  “I don’t have any— Listen, the bed is yours, I’ll sleep in the easy chair. Feel free to eat anything you can find. I think there’s some milk in the fridge, or something.”

  She turned halfway around to leave, but then turned back and punched through her defensive sarcasm with an honest blow. “Hey. Thanks, Alan. Sorry about all this. I know it’s an inconvenience.”

  I felt like an ass. “It’s not. Really, it’s not. I’m here for you, kid.”

  “You know, I’m not a kid, anymore.”

  “No.” I cleared my throat. “No, you’re certainly not.”

  But you’re half my age, I remembered.

  She headed up the stairs. My downstairs neighbor, a burly terraform mechanic named Rickshaw with a fashion passion for wife beaters, was smoking an amphetarette on his front porch. He noticed her ass and followed it halfway up the steps before he tapped his ego and demanded she drop by for a beer.

  “Fuck off,” she said without even looking at him. He slumped in his chair and took a drag.

  Looked like Alice would do just fine on Fillion.

  ∙ • ∙

  “He was there on business,” I told the lady.

  She was angrily washing a pot, trying to scrub off a stain that looked like it may have actually been part of its design pattern. “I bet he’s been there on business,” she said. “That’s why I hired you.”

  “No, no... Not ‘business.’ I mean business. Actual business.”

  She stopped scrubbing for a moment and looked up in thought, squeezing the sponge into a barren desert. “You mean... You mean he’s been trading women? Real women? Selling them to the whorehouse?”

  I was never very good at this. “No, Dejah. No. What I’m trying to tell you is that your husband is not sleeping with sexdolls. He’s not selling women. He’s not doing anything of the sort, okay?”

  She was about to throw her sponge across her kitchen, then stopped and looked at me in relief. “He’s not?”

  “He’s not.”

  “Oh.” She dropped her sponge in the bucket, ending her eternal feud with the stain. “So what the hell do you mean he’s there on business?”

  “He works for a law firm, right? Hamill & Ford?”

  “Yeah...”

  I needed her to sit down. To calm down. I looked around her kitchen, but there were no chairs. “Perhaps we could continue this conversation in another room?”

  She invited me to her living room, where we sat on a worn leather couch. I had Listic project the holographs Bone yielded me, taken from his primary security ORB—apparently, Rob had remembered to turn it on that day—and described the scene that now floated in her cramped living room above the cluttered coffee table and knitting baskets.

  “Okay, so here we are at The Boneyard. We’re in the hallway on the fifth floor, outside Playroom 502. You’re husband’s there, along with two people from his law firm. One of them’s actually a primary partner, Hamill. He’s the one standing by the—”

  “I know who Hamill is. Don’t you think I know who Hamill is? I know my husband’s coworkers.”

  I nodded acquiescence. “I’m sure you do, ma’am.”

  “I know them, and they’re assholes.”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m sure they are.”

  She nodded. “Well, go on.”

  “So here’s your husband, and here’s Hamill, and here’s a third guy, an associate at the firm.” I stopped a moment and looked more carefully at the third guy. He was dressed in a ritzy business suit and had long white hair pulled back into a pony tail.

  “What is it?”

  “That third guy. Goes by Harper. I feel like I’ve seen him before. You know anything about him?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Well, I just thought... You know, I mean, like you said, you know who Hamill is, so I thought...” Dejah looked at me like I was an idiot. “Never mind. Anyway, in this shot, all three of them are in the hallway outside the playroom.” I paused and cleared my throat. “Um, a playroom is—”

  “I know what a playroom is,” she said, annoyed.

  “Right. Okay, moving on. Listic, show the next shot.”

  She transitioned to the next image in the form of a painfully slow vertical wipe, like a Star Wars scene change, for dramatic effect. Dejah and I both rolled our eyes.

  “Sorry, my ORB’s on the fritz. Manic Virus. Anyway, as you can see, only Hamill and his associate went into the playroom. Your husband waited outside the whole time. His boss drug him there, but he was a good boy and didn’t touch anything. He waited outside for an hour.” I nodded at Listic. She began a very slow fade into the next image, probably trying to get back at me for hard commanding her speech off for this encounter. “Listic, just show the damn picture!” The image suddenly resolved itself, a crisp hi-def of Dejah’s husband, sitting bored and restless on an ornate padded bench in the hallway. The image was timestamped one hour later.

  “So Hamill paid for my husband’s robot whores?”

  “No! Dejah, that’s not what I’m saying, here. You’re husband never did anything with anyone.” I had Listic slide to the final image, which, having screwed with me enough, she did instantly. It depicted Hamill and Harper exiting the room together, while her husband remained sitting on the bench. “I have the entire sequence filed as a video feed, but I didn’t want to make you watch it for an hour and a half. Those four pics are how the event played out. He was outside the room the whole time. He’s a good man.”

  She let out a huge sigh. “Oh, thank goodness,” she said. “My husband’s a good man.”

  “He is.” I turned Listic off and pocketed her. “I’ve checked the entire transactional history of The Boneyard against his alphanumeric ID. He’s never actually taken part in anything illicit, there. Most sinful thing he ever did was buy a beer.”

  Which was true. And rare, these days. Most husbands I’d tracked did in fact cheat on their spouses with sexdolls, rationalizing their misdeeds as perfectly acceptab
le on account of the dolls not being real people. Their spouses obviously felt otherwise. The act had less to do with another woman being involved than it had to do with their man seeking out a supplemental source of satisfaction.

  Dejah was ecstatic. She shot up. “Oh, thank goodness! Mr. Nice Detective Man, sit down, sit down, sit down.”

  I looked at the leather couch. “I’m already sitting.”

  “I mean over there. At the dinner table. I still have some stew left.”

  I stood up to leave and wandered toward her dinner table, which also happened to be near her front door. “Oh no, ma’am. I couldn’t. I actually have to get going. My ex-wife’s sister—”

  “Sit your ass down,” she commanded.

  “Thank you,” I said, sitting down at the table. She went back into the kitchen and scooped some slop from a cauldron into a small bowl. “Um, I hate to bring it up, but... My fee for this gig is three hundred goola.”

  She put the stew down in front of me. “Oh, I’ll pay you the three-hundred. But it’s three-hundred and stew. Take a moment. Eat.” She went back into her living room, presumably to gather payment.

  As I ate, I reflected on my current state of affairs. Things seemed to have taken a turn for the better. I’d set myself square with Bone, and followed through with a gig. Not only was I actually getting paid for this one, but the babysitting goola Margo had deposited in my account had already manifested. I’d be able to fend off Landlady Marple, for a while. These were, sadly, my new standards for living the good life.

  Despite that, something was eating at me. Something regarding this latest gig. I didn’t bother mentioning it to Dejah, since it didn’t really pertain to her, but... The transaction, in the room that her husband sat outside of. It didn’t involve a sexdoll. In fact, it didn’t appear to involve anything beyond the transfer of a few cargo manifests, and even that was an inferred probability gleaned from metadata analysis. No fees were exchanged, no one’s alphanumerics were listed. If it weren’t for the images captured by The Yard’s ORB, no one would even know the incident ever happened. Rather impossible, these days. If you looked hard enough, everything left a trace. Even goola chips were marked, their transactions accounted for in the Intercluster Financial Database. Gathering the data was simply a matter of search warrants. Or favors owed. As a Galacticop, I’d relied on the former. As a private detective, strictly on the latter. And in the case of the latter, I was at the mercy of the informant. Bone was holding out on me.