Starbase Human

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “When the numbers didn’t show anything non-organic causing the extra weight,” he said, “they had the system scan for a large piece. Sometimes, when crates come in from the dome, someone dumps something directly into the crate without paying attention to weight and size restrictions.”

  Those were hard to ignore. DeRicci vividly remembered the first time she had tried to dump something of the wrong size into a recycling crate. She had dumped a rotted roast she had never managed to cook (back in the days when she actually believed she could cook). She’d put it into the crate behind her then-apartment building. The damn crate beeped at her, and when she didn’t remove the roast fast enough for the stupid thing, it actually started to yell at her, telling her that she wasn’t following the rules.

  There was a way to turn off the alarms, but she and her building superintendent hadn’t known it. Clearly, someone else did.

  “So,” DeRicci said, “the system scanned, and…?”

  “Registered something larger,” he said somewhat primly. “That’s when my people switched the information feed to visual, and got the surprise of their lives.”

  She would wager. She wondered if they thought the woman was sleeping. She wasn’t going to ask him that question; she’d save it for the person who actually found the body.

  “When did they call you?” DeRicci asked.

  “After they visually confirmed the body,” Ansel said.

  “Meaning what?” she asked. “They saw it on the feed or they actually lifted the lid?”

  “On the feed,” he said.

  “Where was this?” she asked.

  He pointed to a small booth that hovered over the floor. The booth clearly operated on the same tech that the aircars in Armstrong used. The booth was smaller than the average car, however, and was clear on all four sides. Only the bottom appeared to have some kind of structure, probably to hide all the mechanics.

  “Is someone in the booth?” she asked.

  “We always have someone monitoring the floor,” he said, “but I just put someone new up in the booth, so that the team that discovered the body can talk to you.”

  DeRicci supposed he had put the entire team in one room, together, so that they could align their stories. But she didn’t say anything like that. No sense antagonizing Ansel. He seemed to be trying to help her.

  “We’re going to need to shut down this part of your line,” DeRicci said. “Everything in this part of the warehouse will need to be examined.”

  To her surprise, he didn’t protest. Of course, if he had protested, she would have had him shut down the entire warehouse.

  Maybe he had dealt with the police before.

  “So,” she said, “who actually opened the lid on this container?”

  “I did,” he said quietly.

  She hadn’t expected that. “Tell me about it.”

  “The staff contacted me after they saw the body.”

  “On your links?” she asked. She would wager that the entire communication system inside Ansel Management was on its own dedicated link.

  “Yes,” he said. “The staff contacted me on my company link.”

  “I’d like to have copies of that contact,” she said.

  “Sure.” He wasn’t acting like someone who had anything to hide. In fact, he was acting like someone who had been through this before.

  “What did your staff tell you?” she asked.

  His lips turned upward. Someone might have called that expression a smile, but it wasn’t. It was rueful.

  “They told me that there was a woman in crate A1865.”

  DeRicci made a mental note about the number. Before this investigation was over, she’d learn everything about this operation, from the crate numbering system to the way that the conveyer operated to the actual mulching process.

  “That’s what they said?” she asked. “A woman in the crate?”

  “Crate A1865,” he repeated, as if he wanted that detail to be exactly right.

  “What did you think when you heard that?” DeRicci asked.

  He shook his head, then sighed. “I—we’ve had this happen before, Detective. Not for more than a year, but we’ve found bodies. Usually homeless people in the crates near the port, people who came into Armstrong and can’t get out. Sometimes we get an alien or two sleeping in the crates. The Oranjanie view rotting produce as a luxury, and they look human from some angles.”

  Member species of the Earth Alliance had to stop at the Port of Armstrong first before traveling to Earth. Some travelers never made it into Earth’s protected zone, and got stuck on the Moon itself.

  Right now, however, she had no reason to suspect alien involvement in this crime. She preferred working human-on-human crime. It made the investigation so much easier.

  “You’ve found human bodies in your crates before,” she clarified.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “And the police have investigated?”

  “All of the bodies, alien and human,” he said. “Different precincts, usually, and different time periods. My grandmother started this business over one hundred years ago. She found bodies even way back then.”

  DeRicci guessed it would make sense to hide a body in one of the crates. Or someone would think it made sense.

  “Do you think that bodies have gotten through the mulching process?” It took her a lot of strength not to look at the conveyer belt as she asked that question.

  “I don’t think a lot got through,” Ansel said. “I know some did. Back in my grandmother’s day. She’s the one who set up the safeguards. We might have had a few glitches after the safeguards were in place, before we knew how well they worked, but I can guarantee nothing has gone through since I started managing this company twenty-five years ago.”

  DeRicci tried not to shudder as she thought about human flesh serving as compost at the Growing Pits. She hated Moon-grown food, and she had a hunch she was going to hate it more after this case.

  But she had to keep asking questions.

  “You said you can guarantee it,” she repeated.

  He nodded.

  “What if someone cut up the body?” she asked.

  He grimaced. “The pieces would have to be small to get past our weight and size restrictions. Forgive me for being graphic, but no full arms or legs or torsos or heads. Maybe fingers and toes. We have nanoprobes on these things, looking for human DNA. But the probes are coating the lining of the crates. If someone buried a finger in the middle of some rotting lettuce, we might miss it.”

  She forced herself to swallow back some bile and wished she had some savings. She wanted to go home and purge her refrigerator of anything grown on the Moon and buy expensive, Earth-grown produce.

  But she couldn’t afford that, not on a detective’s salary.

  “Fair enough,” she said, surprised she could sound so calm when she was so thoroughly grossed out. “No full bodies have gone through in at least twenty-five years. But you’ve seen quite a few. How many?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’d have to check the records.”

  That surprised her. It meant that enough had gone through to make it hard to keep track. “Any place where they show up the most often?”

  “The port,” he said. “There’s a lot of homeless in that neighborhood.”

  Technically, they weren’t homeless. They were people who lived on the city’s charity. A lot of small, cubicle-sized rooms existed on the port blocks, and anyone who couldn’t afford their own home or ended up stranded and unemployable in the city could stay in one of the cubicles for six months, no questions asked.

  After six months, they needed to move to long-term city services, which were housed elsewhere. DeRicci wanted to ask if anyone had turned up dead in those neighborhoods, but she’d do that after she looked at his records.

  “I’m confused,” she said. “Do these people crawl into the crates and die?”

  The crate didn’t look like it was sealed so tightly that the person
couldn’t get oxygen.

  “Some of them,” he said. “They’re usually high or drunk.”

  “And the rest?” she asked.

  “Obviously someone has put them there,” he said.

  “A different someone each time, I assume,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I let the police investigate. I don’t ask questions.”

  “You don’t ask questions about dead people in your crates?”

  His face flushed. She had finally gotten to him.

  “Believe it or not, Detective,” Ansel snapped, “I don’t like to think about it. I’m very proud of this business. We provide a service that enables the cities on the Moon to not only have food, but to have great food. Sometimes our system gets fouled up by crazy people, and I hate that. We’ve gone to great lengths to prevent it. That’s why you’re here. Because our systems work.”

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” she lied. “This is all new to me, so I’m going to ask some very ignorant questions at times.”

  He looked annoyed, but he nodded.

  “What part of town did this crate come from?” she asked.

  “The port,” he said tiredly.

  She should have expected that after he had mentioned the port a few times.

  “Was the body in the crate when it was picked up at the port?” she asked.

  “The weight was the same from port to here,” he said. “Weight gets recorded at pick-up but flagged near the conveyer. The entire system is automated until the crates get to the warehouse. Besides, we don’t have the ability to investigate anything inside Armstrong. There are a lot of regulations on things that are considered garbage inside the dome. If we violate those, we’ll get black marks against our license, and if we get too many black marks in a year, we could lose that license.”

  More stuff she didn’t know. City stuff, regulatory stuff. The kinds of things she always ignored.

  And things she would probably have to investigate now.

  “Do you know her?” DeRicci asked, hoping to catch him off balance.

  “Her?” Ansel looked confused for a moment. Then he looked at the crate, and his flush grew deeper. “You mean, her?”

  “Yes.” Just from his reaction, DeRicci knew his response. He didn’t know the woman. And the idea that she was inside one of his crates upset him more than he wanted to say.

  Which was probably why he was the person talking to DeRicci now.

  “No,” Ansel said. “I don’t know her, and I don’t recognize her. We didn’t run any recognition programs on her either. We figured you all would do that.”

  “No one touched her? No one checked her for identification chips?”

  “I’m the one who opened the crate,” he said. “I saw her, I saw that her eyes were open, and then I closed the lid. I leave the identifying to you all.”

  “Do you know all your employees, Mr. Ansel?”

  “By name,” he said.

  “By look,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I have nearly three hundred employees in Armstrong alone.”

  “But you just said you know their names. You know all three hundred employees by name?”

  He smiled absently, which seemed like a rote response. He’d responded to this kind of thing before.

  “I have an eidetic memory,” he said. “If I’ve seen a name, then I remember it.”

  “An eidetic memory for names, but not faces? I’ve never heard of that,” DeRicci said.

  “I haven’t met all of my employees,” he said. “But I go over the pay amounts every week before they get sent to the employees’ accounts. I see the names. I rarely see the faces.”

  “So you wouldn’t know if she worked here,” DeRicci said.

  “Here?” he asked. “Here I would know. I come here every day. If she worked in one of the other warehouses or in transport or in sales, I wouldn’t know that.”

  “Did this crate go somewhere else before coming to this warehouse?” DeRicci asked.

  “No,” Ansel said. “Each crate is assigned a number. That number puts it in a location, and then when the crate fills, it gets swapped out with another. The crate comes to the same warehouse each time, without deviation. And since that system is automated, as I mentioned, I know that it doesn’t go awry.”

  “Can someone stop the crate in transit and add a body?”

  “No,” he said. “I can show you if you want.”

  She shook her head. That would be a good job for her partner, Rayvon Lake. Rayvon still hadn’t arrived, the bastard. DeRicci would have to report him pretty soon. He had gotten very lax about crime scenes, leaving them to her. He left most everything to her, and she hated it.

  He was a lazy detective—twenty years in the position—and he saw her as an upstart who needed to be put in her place.

  She wouldn’t have minded his attitude if he did his job. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. She would have minded. She hated people who disliked her. But she wouldn’t be considering filing a report on him if he actually did the work he was supposed to do.

  She would get Lake to handle the transport information by telling him she wasn’t smart enough to understand it. It would mean that she’d have to suffer through an explanation later in the case, but maybe by then, she’d either have this thing solved or she’d have a new partner.

  A woman could hope, after all.

  “One of the other detectives will look into the transport process,” DeRicci said. “I’m just trying to cover the basics here, so we start looking in the right place. Can outsiders come into this warehouse?”

  “And get into one of our crates?” Ansel asked. “No. Look.”

  He touched the edge of the lid, and she heard a loud snap.

  “It’s sealed shut now,” he said.

  She didn’t like the sound of that snap.

  “If I were in there,” she asked, “could I breathe through that seal?”

  “Yes,” Ansel said. “For about two days, if need be. But it doesn’t seal shut like that until it leaves the transport and crosses the threshold here at the warehouse. So there’s no way anyone could crawl in here at the warehouse.”

  “All right,” DeRicci said. “So, let me be sure I understand you. The only place that someone could either place a body into a crate or crawl into it on their own is on site.”

  “Yes,” Ansel said. “We try to encourage composting, so we allow bypassers to stuff something into a crate. We search for non-organic material at the site, and flag the crates with non-organic material so they can be cleaned.”

  “Clothing is organic?” DeRicci asked.

  “Much of it, yes,” Ansel said. “Synthetics aren’t good hosts for nanoproducts, so most people wear clothing made from recycled organic material.”

  DeRicci’s skin literally crawled. She hadn’t known that. She wasn’t an organic kind of woman. She preferred fake stuff, much to the dismay of her friends, what few of them she had.

  “All right,” she said. “I’m going to talk with your people in a minute. I’ll want to know what they know. And I’ll need to see your records on previous incidents.”

  She didn’t check to see if he had sent her anything on her links. She didn’t want downloads to confuse her sense of the crime scene. She liked to make her own opinions, and she did that by being thorough.

  Detectives like Rayvon Lake gathered as much information as possible, multitasking as they walked through a crime scene. DeRicci believed they missed most of the important details while doing that, and that led to a lot of side roads and wasted time.

  And, if she could prove it, a lot of false convictions. She had caught Lake twice trying to close a case by accusing an innocent person who was convenient, rather than doing the hard leg work required of a good investigator.

  Ansel fluttered near her for a moment. DeRicci inclined her head toward the room where the staff had gathered, knowing she was inviting him to contaminate her witnesses even more, but she had a hunch none of them were going to b
e useful to the investigation anyway.

  “Before you go,” she said, just in case he didn’t take the hint, “could you unseal this crate for me?”

  “Oh, yes, sorry,” he said, and ran his fingers along the side again. It snapped one more time, then popped up slightly.

  DeRicci thanked him and pulled back the lid. The crate was tall—up to DeRicci’s ribs—and filled with unidentifiable bits of rotting food. The woman lay on top of them, hands cradled under her cheek, feet tucked together.

  DeRicci couldn’t imagine anyone just curling up here, even at the bidding of someone else. But people did strange things for strange reasons, and she wasn’t going to rule it out.

  She put the lid down and then looked at the warehouse again. She would need the numbers, but she suspected thousands of crates went through Ansel’s facilities around the Moon daily.

  Done properly, it would be a perfect way to dispose of bodies and all kinds of other things that no one wanted to see. She wondered how many others knew about this facility and how it worked.

  She suspected she would have to find out.

  FOUR

  GETTING THE CRIME SCENE UNIT to a warehouse outside of the dome took more work than Ethan Brodeur liked to do. Fortunately, he was a deputy coroner, which meant he couldn’t control the crime scene unit. Someone with more seniority had to handle requisitioning the right vehicle from the police department yards outside the dome, and making certain the team had the right equipment.

  Brodeur came to the warehouse via train. The ride was only five minutes long, but it made him nervous.

  He had been born inside the dome, and he hated leaving it for any reason at all, especially for a reason involving work. So much of his work had to do with temperature and conditions, and if the body had been in an airless environment at all, it had an impact on every aspect of his job.

  He was relieved when he arrived at the warehouse and learned that the body had never gone outside of an Earth Normal environment. However, he was annoyed to see that he would be working with Noelle DeRicci.

  She was notoriously difficult and demanding, and often asked coroners to redo something or double-check their findings. She’d caught him in several mistakes, which he found embarrassing.