Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space

by Stephen Euin Cobb

  Tina paused from her work just long enough to look Gideon in the eye as she smiled and touched him on the wrist. “Thank you,” she said in a sincere and sensual tone.

  Mike’s eyebrows—already raised due to Tina spontaneously volunteering for work—strained to rise even higher. To his knowledge this was a tone she had never used with Gideon. After a few seconds reflection, however, he understood. It’s just part of her game. She’ll use the sexy voice and show a little cleavage and before Gideon knows what’s going on she’ll have charmed him into doing all the work she just volunteered to do herself.

  But again she surprised him. While Mike and Kim played cards, Tina gathered just as many bags of supplies as Gideon and carried just as many to the door of the vertical hallway. The same vertical hallway they’d all used to move everything to decks ten, eleven, twelve, and nine; the one with no grease on its rungs and no dead body lying unreachable at its end.

  “I bet two hundred dollars,” Kim said as she placed two squares of toilet paper on the ceiling in front of Mike.

  Mike craned his neck to watch Tina thread a rope over a rung in preparation for lowering the bags to deck seven. When he turned back to the game, Kim she was glaring at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Will you quit looking at her?”

  “I can’t help it. She’s actually working!”

  “Are you sure that’s why you’re looking? What happened to all that stuff you said about you and me being in love?”

  “We are! Really!”

  Kim stared into Mike’s eyes. She tilted her head to one side. Her expression remained cold, questioning.

  “If we’re not, then why are you mad that I looked at her?”

  “So, you admit you looked at her.”

  “And you’re jealous!”

  “I am not jealous!”

  Mike shook his head in exasperation. “God, I wish you’d remember.” He sighed deeply. “I miss the way things were.”

  With the exception of that first encounter, Kim hadn’t let Mike touch her since she’d returned from the dead. She wouldn’t horseplay or even arm-wrestle.

  Thinking it might prove to her that they were in love, he’d shown her the picture on his pocketsize of them kissing. Unimpressed, she’d pointed out that those can be faked. He’d tried showing her the hundred or so pictures that people—Larry Palmer and Gideon mostly—had taken of them together, but she still wasn’t swayed.

  Telling her anecdotes of their few months together hadn’t helped, and trying to tell her what he knew of her life before they met didn’t work either: a fact he found doubly depressing. Not only did she not remember her love for him but when everything was said and done he didn’t really know her very well. So why do I miss someone I hardly know? And why does missing her hurt so much?

  “I said, ‘I bet two hundred dollars,’” Kim repeated.

  Mike counted out five squares of toilet paper and dropped them in front of her. “I’ll see your two hundred and raise you three.” The room seemed oddly quiet so he glanced over his shoulder to the vertical hallway. Gideon and Tina were gone. “Where’d they go?”

  “Tina climbed down to deck seven. Gideon tied all three bags of supplies to the end of the rope and lowered them to her, then climbed down to join her. By now, I’d guess he’s helping her carry them through deck seven to the hangar.”

  Mike’s face lit up. He leaned forward and looked closely into Kim’s eyes. In an eagerly hopeful voice he whispered, “You remember deck seven’s floor plan?”

  Kim shook her head. “No, I just figured a vertical hallway’s door probably doesn’t open directly into a hangar.”

  Slouching, all the hope fell from Mike’s face.

  Tina stepped out of a vertical hallway door. Her movements were light and bouncy and possessed a level of energy generally associated only with happy children at play. “The gravity is very strong down there,” she said cheerfully, “but the air smells and feels much better.”

  “Did you have any trouble getting through the airlock and into the hangar containing the pod?” Mike asked.

  “No, Gideon seems familiar with such things. He’s being very helpful.” She smiled even brighter. “He’s really a sweet man once you get to know him.”

  Mike was struck by her mood change. She’d spent most of the last five days either complaining about hardships or jumping at shadows. Now all of a sudden she looked happy. She saw the pod! That’s it. She plans to beguile her way into sitting in one of the pod’s two comfortably padded seats, breathing the pod’s freshly scrubbed air, being protected from the scary shifting shadows by the pod’s stainless steel hull. Well, if that’s all it’ll take to get her to stop whining, fine, good, great! She can have my seat.

  “I’m going right back,” she said. “We haven’t finished moving the supplies into the hangar. I just came up to get another flashlight.”

  Wait a minute. She can’t be planning to sit in the pod. It’s hanging upside-down. Even in a power outage its docking grapples will keep it secured to the hangar floor. She must think I intend to open the grapples and let the thing drop to the ceiling. He smiled. Sure! Like that’s gonna’ happen!

  Tina walked behind Kim and knelt to pick up a flashlight that had been standing upright in a roll of toilet paper. Stretching open the waistband of her white shorts, she tucked the flashlight half-in and half-out just to the left of her navel like some kind of handle-less pistol. Mike caught a long glimpse of her dainty white panties before forcing his eyes back to Kim. “Are you going to see my bet?” he said.

  Kim said, “You’re bluffing.”

  Walking to the vertical hallway, Tina grabbed a couple of rungs and started climbing down. Ignoring her just as hard as he could, Mike said, “You’ll have to match me to find out.”

  Kim looked deeply into Mike’s green eyes.

  He returned her stare with as emotionless a facial expression as he could muster. Trying to read through my poker face?

  This staring contest ran for thirty seconds, ending only when Kim slapped her cards on the ceiling. “I fold.”

  “Ha! Never mess with—”

  A scream rose from the vertical hallway that stood every hair on Mike’s body on end. He winced at the sensation.

  Both players jumped to their feet but Mike, who’d been sitting closer to it, reached the vertical hallway first. He grabbed a rung and began easing himself downward. In the thickening darkness, his hands and the rungs they grasped disappeared from view. He had a flashlight in his thigh pocket but didn’t want to stop long enough to fish it out and turn it on.

  The gee force increased as he descended.

  One of the doors below was half-open. A dim light shone through it into the vertical hallway. When he reached it, he pushed it open farther and stepped off a rung into deck seven.

  He stood in a hallway, but this one was horizontal: its walls bore no series of rungs extending from one end to the other, just a few widely spaced handholds.

  Near his feet, someone had left a flashlight lying on its side. The beam shone upon a white wall and the half-circle of its illumination filled this portion of the hallway with a soft glow.

  The scream had weakened and become an unsteady whimpering. Its volume rose and fell like the sunbeams in the cargo decks, though with less regularity.

  Mike stepped over the discarded flashlight without disturbing it. Kim was still in the vertical hallway and would need it to climb safely into this deck.

  He pulled his flashlight out, turned it on and started down the hall following the whimpers. After twenty feet the hall made a ninety degree turn to the left and twenty feet after that he came to the door to the hangar control booth, on his right. It was open.

  The door’s lintel formed a little wall two feet high. Swinging a leg over it, he stepped sideways into the small triangular room. In the process he bumped into Tina’s back with his shoulder and was rewarded with another scream, which she spun around to deliver straight into
his face.

  He grabbed her shoulders. “Tina, it’s me!”

  “He’s dead! He’s dead! He’s dead! My God, he’s dead!” She grabbed Mike in a bear hug and squeezed so hard he felt his ribs creak. Though her breasts were pressed tightly against his stomach he was too distracted to notice: partly because the woman was shaking like a paint mixing machine and rocking as if trying to comfort a crying baby, but mostly because the top of his head was banging against the unpadded back of the control booth’s swivel chair which was bolted to the floor directly above him, and it was doing this banging in prefect synchrony with her shaking.

  Kim jumped over the lintel and into the room. “What’s going on here?”

  “He’s dead!” Tina screamed, “Gideon’s dead!” and immediately abandoned Mike to grab Kim in the same bear hug. She proceeded to give Kim the same treatment she’d given Mike, except of course that Kim was not tall enough to bang her head on the chair.

  This freed Mike long enough to yell, “Where?”

  Without looking, Tina pointed at one of the two large windows—the control booth had one for each of the ship’s twin hangars.

  Taking the three short steps to the window, Mike directed his flashlight out into hangar number two: a large room with stainless steel walls, big enough to contain two terrestrial school buses parked side-by-side. At the center of the hangar’s floor, Mike saw a pod suspended upside-down—from his viewpoint—by its docking grapples.

  The pod was approximately level with the window. But looking downward slightly, since the hangar had a ceiling fourteen feet high, Mike saw the reason for the screams. Six or seven feet below the pod’s round white hull, lying next to a pile of black plastic bags, Gideon was face-down in a puddle of blood.

  Still looking out the window, Mike asked, “Did you see anyone?” By anyone he meant Nikita: the only person still at large.

  Tina had become silent. Mike turned to look at her. She had her face buried in the junction of Kim’s shoulder and neck; the shaking had stopped but the rocking continued. Kim seemed to be trying to comfort her. A muffled answer came out: “No.”

  “Did you hear anyone?”

  The muffled voice rose in pitch. “No.”

  Kim frowned and shook her head at Mike.

  Mike nodded back. She’s going to start whimpering again. Better wait before asking more questions. He turned back to the window. We’re running out of decks. We’re running out of time. He looked at Gideon. And we’re running out of people.

  He felt a strange urge to punch the window. It wouldn’t break; it was designed to hold tons of air pressure inside the control booth whenever the hangar was in vacuum. Still, punching it would be every bit as stupid as it would be futile. Where are you hiding, Nikita?

  Hoping for clues, he let his eyes wander around in the hangar. They stumbled across red smears on the— No, not smears.

  On the ceiling on the far side of Gideon’s body, words had been painted. A poem? He couldn’t see them well enough to tell. Gideon’s torso hid some, and those he could see he couldn’t read from this angle. He turned to Kim. “I think I see a poem in there. I’m going in.”

  “It’s not safe. She might still be in there.”

  “I’ve got to.” He glanced around the little control booth. Storage lockers covered the wall on both sides of the door to the horizontal hallway. Rummaging through them, he found a twelve ounce ball-peen hammer. He swung it through the air a few times. This feels like a weapon.

  After closing and locking the door to the hallway—in case Nikita was out in the hall—he gave Kim the traditional grim but determined look. She returned it.

  Pulling open the inner door on hangar two’s airlock, he stepped inside, then closed and bolted the door behind him. There was no difference in air pressure between the hangar and the control booth at the moment so there was no need to run the airlock through its pumping cycles—a good thing since, without electricity, the airlock’s controls, indicator lights and pumps were all dead. Mike unbolted the outer door, swung it open, leaned out and looked down.

  Someone, Gideon most likely, had dragged two storage cabinets—one large and one small—into place under the airlock door for use as a crude staircase. Crude was the key word. The steps were terribly oversized, averaging two feet in height, but were far better than nothing. Without them there would be a six foot drop from the airlock door to the hangar ceiling below.

  Could it have been an accident? Could the words just be smears of blood? Mike looked at Gideon. No. He’s too far away to have died by stumbling down these stairs.

  Stepping out of the airlock door, Mike eased his weight onto the taller of the two cabinets. It swayed under him, but not alarmingly so. He stepped onto the smaller cabinet. It didn’t sway at all. Stepping onto the ceiling, he glanced nervously around the large room as he approached the body and the poem.

  There isn’t any place for a killer to hide in here, except in a storage locker. He looked up. Or inside the pod. The craft’s little round hatch was closed. I’d probably hear if it swung open.

  He paused to look at Gideon before moving on to the poem. From the puddle beneath Gideon’s head two parallel lines of blood flowed toward the hangar’s large exterior door: one line was thin and flowed slowly, the other was wider and flowed faster. Gideon’s skull had been crushed. There were at least three wounds clustered together on the back of the man’s head just behind his right ear. Must have snuck up behind him and hit him with something heavy. Mike looked at the hammer in his hand. Something like this.

  He glanced up at the pod’s hatch again, then looked once around the hangar before reading the poem. It read:

  Apollo is over

  and Richard long dead.

  Hair was my weapon,

  still not enough said?

  Hair was my weapon. Mike’s shoulders drooped as he sighed. I guess there’s no room left for doubt: it’s one of the Apollo Smugglers. And that can mean only one thing: they’re here to kill me; just me. Anyone else who dies will die only because they’re in the way.

  Mike didn’t like the tone of his thoughts. Once again it sounded as though he were giving up; admitting defeat in advance. He stood taller and looked around the room in defiance. So it was you who killed Richard; and now you’ve come for me. Well, maybe I’m not ready to die. Maybe I’m going to be ready for you. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be the one writing the next poem.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Stalking Shadows

  Mike woke from a restless sleep filled with dreams that ended inside a blazing fire. That he and the others were all going to die during solar passage and that there was no way to prevent it or avoid it or escape it was finally beginning to worm its way in through his thick skull.

  He climbed to his feet but slouched rather than straightening to his full height to avoid bumping his head on the pod suspended upside-down directly above him. His caution was unnecessary. The pod did not hang down low enough to be a danger. It missed him by three inches.

  A day and a half of living in the nearly two gees of deck seven, rather than exhausting Mike, seemed to have invigorated him, though he felt slightly faint each time he stood up too quickly.

  Opening his pocketsize, he whispered—to avoid waking the two women sleeping in the pod—as he described a new simulation he’d just thought of. As this simulation ran, he stared intently at the little display surface and paced, but only within a very limited area of the hangar’s ceiling. He was confined within a tent of black plastic garbage bags which he and Kim had painstakingly taped together with gray duct tape.

  Lopsided and irregular, the tent resembled a gigantic cobweb. When viewed from outside, it appeared to be trying to swallow the pod since one of its edges was taped in a large circle all the way around the pod’s rear entry hatch. The rest of its edges were secured to the hangar’s ceiling, floor and one wall.

  Mike didn’t care how ugly it looked. It kept the pod’s tiny lifesupport system from having to scrub c
arbon dioxide from all the air in the great cavernous hangar. If the lifesupport machinery were to become overworked enough to break down… Well, maybe even that didn’t matter. Not with solar passage less than twenty-four hours away.

  The flashlight Gideon no longer needed was now a floor lamp near Mike’s feet. Its glow inside the tent was soft, almost shadow-less. Most of its beam shone on the pod’s white hull above Mike’s head; the rest traveled up past the pod’s rear hatch and hit the very topmost portion of the tent: a few square feet of bare hangar floor.

  As Mike paced the short distance back and forth, the makeshift tent’s thin plastic walls bulged and waved slowly in response to the shifting air currents surrounding his body. “Damn!” He stopped walking suddenly. “That won’t work either.”

  “Just as I told you,” his pocketsize said softly.

  “Okay, Okay.” He started pacing again. “How about if we all get in the pod, launch it out of the ship and use the pod’s mechanical arms to hold a section of Corvus’s mirrored surface as a shield against the sunlight?”

  This proposal the pocketsize didn’t even dignify with a simulation. “Assuming the mirror would reflect enough of the sun’s light to provide meaningful protection—which it won’t—the pod’s mechanical hands, which would be holding the edges of the mirrored section, would be unprotected. The hands would absorb heat until they melted, and once melted the mirror would be free to drift away or turn edgeways exposing the pod to the full heat of the sun.”

  “Damn.” Mike rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. “What I need is a better shield! Maybe one that could melt and still provide—” He stopped pacing, even stopped breathing. He became so immobile he could feel his heart beating in his chest, it was the only motion within him, and it was accelerating.

  Of course! How could I have been so stupid? He made a fist with his free hand. But will it work? Will it really, really work? He squinted and turned his head as though examining something with his mind’s most critical eye. Then, already watching the simulation run inside his own head, he whispered mechanically, “Pocketsize, I have a new simulation for you.”