Murder on the Orion Express

by Nate Streeper

  “What’s with this ‘we’ business?” the lady said flatly. I had trouble imagining her as an actress.

  “Oh, come on, Donna. You know we’re the dynamic duo.”

  She grunted. “There’s nothing duo about us.”

  Or dynamic, I thought.

  The lanky guy feigned offense. “Touché, my lovely! Touché.” He transferred his nitrostick to his left hand and reached out to shake mine. “Bertle,” he said. “And this fine specimen goes by the stage name Donna.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I replied, shaking his hand. “I’m Alan. This is Alice.” Alice nodded her head and smiled as she chewed her noodles. “So. Bertle. Is that a stage name, as well?”

  “Wouldn’t you know it,” he replied. “You know how we actors are. Identity issues.” He rotated a dial that protruded a bit beyond his skull, but was otherwise hidden behind his right ear. His facial structure cybernetically shifted into another form, jawbone squaring and forehead shortening. He flicked a button behind his left ear, and his hair went from white to circus red.

  I’d never seen profile augmentation implants so refined. He was unrecognizable—were it not for his eyes. They maintained a familiarity. His eyes still belonged to him.

  “Far out!” Alice blurted through noodles.

  “No better way to get into character.” Bertle flicked another button, returning his face to its factory reset. “The upgrades cost a small fortune, but it’s worth it when you’re in my line of work.”

  “I d-don’t say, are you two registered to vote?” The short man with the shirt badge appeared suddenly, startling the crap out of us with his nervous, nasally voice.

  “I’m sorry?” I asked, turning around to look at him.

  “Are you registered to vote? In the upcoming Parsec 17 election? It’s only a few days away...”

  “Um...” was all I had to offer.

  “I am,” Alice said, engaged for some reason. “I already did, actually. Absentee ballot. I was residing in Quartermast for school, but I’m an Orioner, and Orion incorporates Parsec 17.”

  The small gentleman looked pleased. “Ah, an expat en route to her homeland. Very good, miss. Very good.” He adjusted his stance and cleared his throat. “And who, may I ask, did you vote for regarding that Parsec’s Representative?”

  She looked at his “Vote for Mannigan” badge, blushed, and stirred her fork around in her bowl.

  “Just curious,” he added. “What’s done is done, after all.”

  “I’d rather not say, if that’s alright. I mean, it’s kind of a personal thing...”

  “I understand, miss. I do. But not Mannigan, correct? Probably one of the Big Two.”

  She put her fork down with conviction. “Well, sure. I mean, everyone knows that Fragart or Bass are the only candidates who have a chance at winning. Voting for an independent is like throwing your vote away! Might as well vote for the lesser of two evils.” She finished her noodles and put the lid back on her container.

  “I just don’t vote, period,” Bertle said. “It never does any good. All the candidates are bought out, anyway. The only reason I know any of their names are because of the commercials they play relentlessly during my favorite holovids. I hate to tell you, but I don’t even know who this Mannigan fellow is.”

  The tall, distinguished looking man who remained at the middle table cleared his throat. “I’m Mannigan.” The way he said it sounded like he was in on some kind of shared joke, almost as though he knew Bertle was merely taunting him. Did these two already know each other? What was this weird dynamic I picked up in the room?

  Bertle unnaturally changed his expression to that of surprise—I swear, it was unnatural—then backpedaled. “Oh. Oh, well that’s not to say... I mean...”

  Mannigan stood up and walked over to us. “No, it is to say. You are perfectly correct. All of you are perfectly correct. Voting for me is pointless. All I’m running for is to get people to talk about a few issues that would otherwise go ignored.”

  “What issues?” Alice asked.

  “Well, primarily the very issue that prevents you from feeling like you can vote for me. Campaign finance reform. I’m trying to establish limits.”

  “Campaign finance reform?”

  “Yes. That, and redistricting the parsecs. I wish to secede Parsec 17 from Orion and reincorporate it into the Edgeworlds. The Edgeworlds need a strong center of government. I believe that Parsec 17 itself is misallocated. It would do more good for the smaller cluster. You see, a rising tide lifts all ships, and all that, so—”

  Before he could blabber on, the man in the black trenchcoat shot up, thoroughly annoyed. I caught a glimpse of his egoPad, which appeared to display an astromap of sorts. This was a little odd, since looking at an astromap while submerged in subspace was about as useful as using a French dictionary to look up a Klokigon word. At first I figured the guy simply didn’t like listening to a discussion about politics. Then I recalled that Dave gave the cafeteria to this guy as his “room” while in flight, and felt a little bad for interrupting his—well, his whatever he was doing—with our inane conversation. He caught me noticing the egoPad and shut it off suddenly, then headed out the door.

  “I shit you not, that guy freaks me the heck out,” Bertle said.

  We all agreed whole-heartedly—even Donna—then went on arguing politics.

  The red dress never showed up.

  ∙ • ∙

  “She never showed up,” Alice said as soon as we’d gotten back to our room and closed the door behind us.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Whatever.” She went over to her bed and took off her shoes. I squeezed around her to my bed, took off my own, then laid down and stared at the ceiling to gather my thoughts. She stood back up and grabbed the curtain at the top, then looked at me steadfast, as though forming a resolution. “Well, then. Goodnight, Alan.” She pulled the curtain all the way across, dividing the tiny room in two.

  “Goodnight,” I answered. I turned to face the wall, then turned back toward her to keep light conversation going for some inexplicable reason. “By the way, ah... we’re probably going to be docking with the Orion Express in about an hour. So if you hear any loud noises, don’t freak out. It isn’t sound proof in the freighters like it is in the fancy passenger shuttles...” Alice’s silhouette danced behind the curtain.

  “Sure.” She peeled out of her jumpsuit.

  “And, uh... Then we’ll probably pass through the subgate and submerge into subspace about an hour after we dock, so if you’re asleep, you may have some pretty weird dreams...”

  “Uh huh.” She grabbed her duffel bag from the foot of her bed and rummaged through it. I was fresh out of stupid things to say, so I just looked at the curtain, remembering the black lingerie.

  She pulled something out of her bag, threw it on over her head, and transformed her body into an amorphous blob. An oversized nightshirt.

  I stopped imagining.

  Alice got beneath her blankets and shut off the light. Immediately after that, the space heater clunked out.

  “I thought you said it would be an hour before we docked?” she asked.

  “That wasn’t us docking. That was our space heater failing.”

  She let out a sigh and turned toward me. “I’m gonna freeze in here.”

  “You’re not going to freeze.”

  “Alan? Alan, I promise. We won’t do anything.”

  I turned away from her, toward the wall.

  “J-just let me sleep next to you. B-body heat.”

  “Goodnight, Alice.”

  She sighed, again, then turned away from me in a huff. I heard her pull the blankets over her head. “Whatever,” she said in a muffled voice. “Can’t blame a girl for trying.”

  ∙ • ∙

  I’m not sure how long I was asleep before
being jarred awake from a loud thud at the door. Long enough to wake up with an erection. A sex dream having something to do with a threesome in a circus tent evaporated about five seconds after I opened my eyes. Was that a manic juggler watching us from the corner of the ring? Was he giggling while he tossed around his rubber chickens?

  Dreams are fucked. Dreams while diving into subspace when you’re horny are even more fucked.

  I nearly convinced myself I imagined the thud and guiltily closed my eyes again, when there was another one. It didn’t sound like a knock. More like a tumble. Like an accident.

  Alice shot up in bed. “What the hell was that?”

  “Shhh...”

  “Was that the docking noise you were talking about? It didn’t sound like a docking noise.”

  “It wasn’t a docking noise,” I hissed. A subtle green hue tinted everything, signifying we had already entered subspace. “We slept through the docking noise. That was something else.”

  I turned on my lamp, quietly lifted the blanket away from me, and reached for my pants at the foot of my bed. Priorities. The curtain was still pulled tight between Alice and I, obscuring the door and its little round window from my sight. I looked around for something to wield as a weapon. The best I could find was my boot, so I didn’t even bother.

  Alice pulled aside the curtain from the head of her bed and pointed at the nightstand between us where Listic was charging. “Use your ORB,” she mouthed. I glanced at it, then back at her, and shook my head. Listic was great for recon, but not if it involved discretion. I snuck past the curtain and crept toward the door. I leaned up against the wall, took a deep breath, and peeked out the window.

  Nothing.

  I opened the door and jumped back, put my dukes up, and prepared for a fight. Dave was sitting with his back against the door and fell into the room. Blood pooled beneath him.

  “Dave!” I grabbed him by the scruff of his heatsuit and drug him into our room, leaned him up against the side of Alice’s bed. I shot my head back out into the corridor and glanced both directions. Nobody was there. I quickly shut the door and fit a metal pin through some aligned holes that made for a sliding lock.

  “Oh my god,” Alice said. She grabbed the collar of her nightshirt and pulled it up over her mouth. “What the hell?”

  Dave was trying to say something, but I couldn’t hear him through his heatsuit’s helmet. He didn’t have much strength, so he was essentially whispering. I unfastened the helmet from around his neck and took it off. “First aid kit. Mess hall...”

  I grabbed the pillow from Alice’s bed and took its pillowcase off, folded the latter over a few times and held it against a wound on his lower waist. It looked like someone had stabbed him from behind. The pillowcase was turning red too quickly. I looked over to Alice and pointed at my own pillow. “Take that one off, too. Fold it over and hold it here, on top of this one. Press firmly.” She did all of this in a matter of seconds, without hesitation. “I’m going to the mess hall.”

  She looked up at me, concerned. “Be careful, Alan.”

  “Lock the door behind me. I’ll knock three times when I get back.”

  She nodded. “But I can’t hold him and reach up to lock the door at the same time.”

  “Then I’ll hurry.” I threw on my boots, grabbed my shirt, sped out the door, and closed it behind me. Still no one in the corridor. Whoever stabbed Dave could be anywhere by now. Anywhere on board the Century Pigeon, that is. I doubted that the stabber had boarded our freighter from the Orion Express—protocol kept the connecting airlock shut throughout an entire voyage. He or she was most likely in here along with the rest of us. Only the pilots themselves had access to the airlock override.

  I figured I could backtrack to the place of incident by following the trail of blood around the corridor to the right, but I needed to focus the task at hand: saving Dave. I ran toward the mess hall. When I finally got there, I discovered the creepy guy in the trenchcoat was back at his table, mesmerized by that fancy egoPad of his. He glanced up at me and then went back to his map or his game or whatever, mumbling something about having to catch them all, apparently not at all interested in the blood on my hands nor my frantic escapades to find the first aid kit. I finally noticed it on the back wall, its red cross a well-worn beacon of hope. All I probably needed from it was a med-patch and a couple of fixer pills to quick-heal Dave’s open wound, but I grabbed the entire kit to play it safe and sped back out while Trenchcoat pressed a few buttons on his egoPad. He looked as stressed out as I felt. I didn’t even think for a moment to ask him for help. For all I knew, he was the guy who stabbed Dave.

  I got back to find Dave’s head leaning to the side at an unnatural angle. Alice sat slumped on the floor next to him, blood on her hands and thighs, crying softly. “I’m sorry, Alan. I’m so sorry. He just kept bleeding...”

  I closed the door behind me, slid the pin in, and put the first aid kit down next to a body that used to belong to Dave. I felt for his pulse, laid him flat on the ground, and started to pump his chest. I stopped immediately. His ribs were broken. Shattered, even. If he wasn’t dead already, the CPR would have killed him. I’m sure a rib or two would have punctured his heart or his lungs.

  Dave was gone.

  I slowly stood up and grabbed one of our towels from the shower nook, sprayed some water onto it, and handed it to Alice so she could clean up a bit. She reached for it, tears still sliding down her cheeks, but in control of her actions.

  “Thank you.”

  I nodded. Then I grabbed the second towel, and cleaned up, myself.

  “This is what’s it’s like, right? Being a GalactiCop?”

  “It’s part of it, alright.”

  She wiped her tears away and shook her head to clear her mind. She cleaned off what blood she could and tossed the towel aside.

  “You okay?” I remembered my first encounter with a dead body. It belonged to an office janitor who worked the night shift. Since I was new to the force and without any clout, I also worked the night shift. That mutually shared but otherwise trivial commonality established a kinship that brought me to tears. When you encounter the dead, you can’t help but personalize it.

  “Sure.” She grabbed her white jumpsuit from her duffel bag, went to the corner bathroom nook and pulled the quarter circle curtain closed.

  I sat down on her bed. “He say anything else beforehand?”

  “Barely. Said he didn’t see who stabbed him, that all he heard was a noise, like a kind of hum, before he could turn around. Said he made his way here because you were the only one he could... Well, he didn’t finish that sentence, but I assume he was going to say, ‘trust.’ And then he made me promise to tell you he was sorry.” The long zipper on her one-piece thwipped closed. “Alan, what’s going on? Who would kill this guy? And why would he apologize about it?”

  I shook my head while I looked at my old friend. A “hum” usually accompanied a set of vibroknuckles, or in this case, a vibroblade. That was our weapon. All I’d have to do is follow the blood to find our scene. But motive? Who did this?

  It would be over three days before we reemerged into normal space. Until then, we were on our own. No way to communicate with the surface universe, no way to reach GalactiCop. Interlock Security represented law and order on board freighters during subspace flights, and our law and order was dead. I rubbed my face up and down quickly, applying friction to get the blood flowing. It was up to me to figure this mess out.

  I went over to Dave and leaned him back against the wall and reached into the chest pocket of his heatsuit, where I’d seen him stash his little red notebook. There were more pockets to check, but I wanted this item right away.

  “What’s that?” Alice asked.

  I thumbed it open to the last page, discovering the list of passengers for this flight.

  “This,” I said, turning it around f
or her to see, “is our list of suspects.”

  7

  Superfluous Interlude

  Good detective work in any era often rested on finding secret ledgers or notebooks. Some things never changed. Dave’s little red notebook took me back eight years to a black one of the same design. Another list of suspects. Only that one wasn’t composed of passengers. It was composed of lovers.

  Gina and I had received a call. A murder in a mansion, without a Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, or Miss Scarlett in sight. We’d been partners on New Gaia for over two years by then, and our beat had moved up the roster from urban crime to suburban intrigue. Investigating the misanthropic lifestyles of the rich and famous was no longer new for us, and this particular case was no less of an abomination. But it made a particular impression on me.

  The crime was committed at Plateau Peak, a wealthy neighborhood that consisted of elaborate mansions and landscapes laid out on a spliced, inverted, floating mountaintop ten miles in diameter. The feat of geographical, technological, and gravitational management served no real purpose other than to elicit and aahs. If you could afford the land tax, simply living there placed you among the elite. Margo’s sights were set on residency. I had other ambitions, but was willing to play along. Looking back at it now, such a discrepancy should have elicited a marital red flag.

  In order to reach the plateau, you needed a hovercar powerful enough to elevate four thousand feet. Most people couldn’t afford such a thing, which only served to further distance the wealthy from the less fortunate below. We had to borrow the burliest hovercar from the GalactiCop transport department to make the climb.

  We got out of our vehicle and wound our way across the giant parking circle out front, through the double doors and the foyer, then up the spiral staircase to the master bedroom above. A sixty-something-year-old business tycoon, who’d incorporated enough ME-ART to maintain the physical appearance of a thirty-year-old, sat on the plush, absorbent carpet. His body leaned against an ornate white dresser freshly stained with crimson. An eight-inch dagger with a diamond-laden hilt fastened the black notebook to his heart the way a toothpick held a tall sandwich together. As though the scene wasn’t gruesome enough, the killer had taken time to finger paint an epitaph on a large mirror above the dresser with the victim’s blood.