Though virtually indestructible, the monstrous creatures of underspace were thinking beings, even if those thoughts were concerned only with their endless appetites and boundless rages. And since they thought, the creatures were susceptible to the talents of a sender. Like all the ships of the Crosstime Line, the Express numbered a sender among its crew as defender, on hand to project negative thoughts into the alien minds of the underspace dwellers, driving them away.
A quarter of an hour after the attack began the klaxons sounded the all clear, and the passengers and crew returned to their beds.
The next morning at breakfast, Starkweather overheard the ship’s steward chatting with the pair of Hindu princesses at the next table over. The steward related that he had heard the ship’s defender say that, while she was in the process of repelling the attack, she had sensed someone else assisting in the defense. At that hour, though, the second defender, who was her normal backup in such circumstances, was below decks and insensate with drink, and in no position to conjure thoughts within his own mind, much less project them into someone else’s.
As he passed by her table, Starkweather asked the steward to fetch her a fresh cup of coffee, complaining that the one from which she’d been drinking had gone cold. And if the steward noticed the tightly folded piece of paper which Starkweather had tucked between the cup and saucer she handed him, he gave no indication.
Under normal circumstances, the Crosstime Express made no stops between the terminus on the one end and Helium on the other. On this journey, though, an off-route stop had been announced in advance, to retrieve the security detachment’s sovereign. It seemed that, having only recently made contact with other worlds, having just mastered the principle of translocation and the rudiments of the talents, this new alternative’s application for admittance to the League of Worlds had been accepted, and the sovereign would now be journeying to the headquarters of the League to sign the charter. It was something of a signal honor, since only delegates from member worlds and their personal security retinues were allowed within the walls of League headquarters itself.
The stop was scheduled for later in the afternoon on the second day of the voyage. At midmorning, the passengers lingered over coffee at table while breakfast was cleared away. The only first-class passenger not present was the member of the security detachment with the piercing blue eyes, who appeared to have slept late, and joined his two companions at the table looking bleary-eyed and squinting. A few moments after the blue-eyed man sat down, the ship’s steward Patrick entered the room, and then in full view of the passengers collapsed to the deck with a pained expression.
While Patrick was being helped to the medical bay for examination and treatment by the Berber scholars, a klaxon began to sound on the ship, which most of the passengers mistakenly took to signal another incursion by underspace denizens. Starkweather and a few of the others quickly pointed out that the sequence of notes was all wrong, and that it signaled another danger instead. Fire.
There was, in the end, only one fatality, though several more of the crew were injured in the blaze. The fire had broken out in the cargo hold, and since the hatches had all been closed and secured, only a single compartment was affected. A crewman had been caught in the blaze, and not discovered until after the fire had been completely extinguished. And while he was badly burned, all of his clothing and body hair scorched off, he was quickly identified as one of the relief crew who had boarded at the terminus, shortly before the passengers. He had been a solitary figure, with a bushy beard, who kept to himself with his eyes down and his mouth shut. None in the crew could remember exchanging more than a dozen words with him, and those only related to his work.
The fire appeared to have been the result of a dropped match, a careless mistake that had set alight a bolt of inflammable material, part of a shipment of dry goods bound for Helium. What the crewman had been doing in the cargo hold was unclear, but it was assumed that he had sneaked off from his supervisors to smoke some illicit substance or other, the use of intoxicants being not unknown among ship’s crew, though most such substances were contraband throughout League worlds.
A second death, following so closely on the heels of the navigator’s murder, was unsettling to some onboard, but it wasn’t until the dead man’s effects were examined that any connection between the two was suspected. However, when a thin-bladed knife, still darkened with the navigator’s blood, was found in the dead man’s trunk, along with a handwritten letter apparently in the navigator’s own hand, rebuffing the crewman’s crude and unwanted advances, an apparent narrative began to emerge.
The crewman, it would seem, had been a spurned lover, who in a fit of jealous rage had stabbed the navigator to death, when she refused to return his affections. When he had in short order been caught in an unexpected conflagration, it has been simply a matter of just desserts.
The captain considered it a fait accompli, and the case closed, as he explained once he’d gathered all of the passengers into the drawing room.
But not everyone was convinced.
“I’m sorry, captain,” Vivian Starkweather said, setting her reticule down on a chair and stepping forward, “but the second death does not solve the mystery of the first. It only compounds it.”
The captain cocked an eyebrow, intrigued, but Engel, under some stress over the impending arrival of his sovereign, was somewhat more agitated.
“And just who, madam, do you think you are?” he asked, red-faced.
With a smile, Starkweather reached into the pocket of her jacket, and produced a badge on which was embossed a stylized human eye and the motto “We Never Sleep.”
Engel looked at the badge uncomprehendingly, but the other passengers whispered to one another in hushed tones, muttering the word “Pinkerton.”
Starkweather flipped the leather wallet shut over the badge and slipped it back into her pocket. “What I am, as of now, is the law around these parts.”
“What business has a Pinkerton on my boat?” Captain N’Diklam asked, unsmiling.
“My outfit has been contracted by the Crosstime Line to ferret out a smuggling ring that seems to be using the Express as one of its principal conduits.” She paused and then almost distractedly added, “You might want to find a third for your little drum group, captain. You should likely go ahead and take the bosun into custody, along with those two.” She pointed at the pair of Russian monks. “The three of them are the main players in the smuggling ring, though there may be one or two others onboard that we haven’t identified yet.”
The captain didn’t bother to question her, but snapped his fingers and ordered two of his crewmen to take the Russians into custody, and ordered them to locate the bosun and take him in hand, as well. The Russians, objecting loudly if unconvincingly, were dragged from the room.
“And you say that this smuggling ring is responsible for killing my navigator and crewman?” N’Diklam asked, puzzled.
“Nope.” Starkweather shook her head, then stuck a cigarillo between her teeth and struck a match on the edge of a table. “The smuggling ring’s a coincidence, I figure. The killings are unconnected.” She held the lit match before her face, her long nose and strong jaw in stark relief in the flickering light, giving her otherwise ruggedly handsome features a somewhat demonic aspect. “But we’ll get to your killer soon enough. The way I figure it, the killer is one of the people in this room.” “
“This is outrageous!” shouted Engel.
“You reckon?” Starkweather smiled, and leaned over to pick up her handbag from the chair beside her, the cigarillo still clenched between her teeth. “Think maybe it’s you?”
Engel opened his mouth to object, then slammed his teeth shut again, eyes wide and bulging. “I won’t stand for this!” He motioned for his two companions to follow, and then turned to the left to leave. Before he’d gone two steps, though, he collided with the man with the piercing blue eyes, who had turned right instead of left and blundered right into him.<
br />
“There it is,” Starkweather said with a smile. Snapping her reticule open, she reached in and pulled out a heavy Colt Navy revolver, which she cocked and pointed at the head of the man with the piercing blue eyes. “I’d ask you not to make a move, friend, not so much as a twitch, or I’m liable to pull this here trigger.”
Engel turned to look at his companion, evidently expecting to see the same outrage and annoyance he himself felt at this poor treatment, but was surprised instead to find the man staring calmly at Starkweather, piercing blue eyes narrowed and lip curled in a sneer. “Barclay, what’s this all about?”
The man ignored the other, but continued to stare at Starkweather. “If you know what I am, you know I could drop you before you even noticed a twinge.”
“That’s as maybe,” Starkweather said with a shrug, “but you can only think so many thoughts at once. Drop me and my partner’ll finish you off before you take another breath.”
From the door to the drawing room came the sound of a revolver being cocked, and the passengers as one turned to see the ship’s steward in the open doorway, a Webley revolver in hand, pointed at the man’s head.
“Patrick Lightfoot Carmody,” the steward said, flashing a badge like the one Starkweather had produced. “Pinkerton.”
The blue-eyed man sneered, but remained motionless. After a long silence, he said, in an unfamiliar accent, “How did you know?”
“Wrong place, wrong time, friend.” Starkweather slid onto the chair, crossing her legs but keeping her pistol aimed at his head. “We were after other fish entirely and you just fell into our lap. And if not for the knife, we might not have guessed a thing.” She paused, thoughtfully. “What was it? Were you worried that a stopped heart might not be assumed to be natural causes, but that someone might suspect there was a sending assassin onboard? So you make it look like a mundane murder, instead, which has benefits of its own.”
“So he killed the navigator?” the captain said, jerking a thumb at the man. “But why?”
“The navigator was incidental,” Starkweather explained. “He planned to kill someone else, and the navigator being such a strong seer meant that she had a good chance of picking up on the crime. So she was eliminated to clear the way for another murder.”
“The crewman,” the captain said, nodding.
“But why would Barclay want to kill your crewman?” Engel demanded to know.
“No reason at all,” Starkweather said. “The question to ask, rather, is why would that crewman want to kill your man?”
Engel looked at her, confusion evident, while the blue-eyed man beside him stiffened.
“See, that isn’t Barclay,” Starkweather went on. “Or at least, not the one you know. I think you’ll find, if you were to quiz him, that he won’t be quite so up on trivia about your home alternative as the man you knew.”
Engel turned from her to the man beside him, and edged away, cautiously. “B-Barclay?” he said, disbelievingly. “Is... it is true?”
The blue-eyed man didn’t bother answering Engel, but continued . to glare at Starkweather.
“Thing is,” she went on, “your Barclay wasn’t really the point of all this, either, but just another incidental means to an end. See, once your sovereign comes onboard, the next stop is Helium, and the headquarters of the League of Worlds. And nobody, but nobody, can get into the headquarters itself unless they’re a representative of a member world. Unless...” She paused, significantly.
“Unless they’re part of the diplomat’s security retinue,” the captain finished.
“Got it in one,” Starkweather answered. “So the point of all of this was just to get someone in a position to walk through those golden doors uncontested, right into the midst of the League’s ruling council. And if that someone had the ability to plant powerful suggestions in the minds of others, powerful enough even to help ward off underspace monsters when he thought his ship might get eaten en route, then I imagine implanting enough suggestions to stop the hearts of the entire ruling council wouldn’t be beyond his abilities, and that he could do a considerable amount of damage before anyone managed to stop them.”
“So who is this?” the captain asked, narrowing his gaze at the blue-eyed man.
“I imagine he answers to the name Barclay, just like Engel’s late friend did,” she said. “They’re dead ringers and are both senders, after all. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this version knew the Tenth Imperium national anthem back to front, and was no fan of the League of Worlds’ notion of noninterference.”
The blue-eyed man drew his lips into a tight line. “I admit to nothing.”
“Figured you wouldn’t. But I reckon the League has a seer somewhere that can get past those shields of yours.”
“Shields?” N’Diklam repeated.
“I can explain that,” said the ship’s former steward, the young man who’d identified himself as Patrick Lightfoot Carmody. “I’m something of a seer myself, though I can’t manage much more than a surface scan of someone’s thoughts. This morning Viv slipped me a note, telling me about her encounter with Doctor Ortiz and asking me to scan the crew and passengers. I waited until everybody had sat down to breakfast, but as soon as I tried to see, I ran smack into someone’s mental defenses. You don’t get that kind of mental discipline just by accident. I knew then that the killer had to be someone in that room.”
“When the supposed crewman was found dead, we were able to work out the motive, and narrow the suspects down to Mr. Engel and his friends. But we couldn’t be sure which of the three it was.” Starkweather took a final drag of her cigarillo and then ground it out under the heel of her dinosaur-skin boot. “We just had to keep an eye out, and wait for one of you to trip up.” She smiled, and then to the blue-eyed man said, “Literally, in your case.”
The Express was anchored at Engel’s backwater alternative, which had only just discovered the secret of translocation. The suspected murderer had been rendered unconscious by a serum provided by Doctor Ortiz, and strapped securely to a gurney for good measure, and would be handed over to the authorities when the ship reached Helium the next morning. At the moment, though, the ship hung like a balloon over a muddy field, while a small brass band played a fanfare for an old woman dressed in lace-trimmed black.
Intercontinua craft always reentered space-time at the same coordinates that they left, so having entered underspace from one Texico, they had translocated to another. This one was part of a larger Louisiana, and subject to a British Crown that ruled more than half of the Earth. This Louisiana, though, was as much a backwater to this Britannic Empire as the alternative itself was to the Myriad, it seemed, if the expressions of the sovereign and her retinue were any indication of their feelings for finding themselves here in the muck and the mud, so far from Buckingham Palace.
Carmody and Starkweather stood at the landing, watching the old woman mounting the gangplank. She was evidently used to more pomp than the Crosstime Express offered, and was clearly displeased to be treated so much like a regular passenger.
“I feel almost like I should bow,” Patrick said, smiling around his Turkish cigarette. The young man was clearly relieved to be a passenger himself for a change, and not a member of the crew, but Starkweather had merely said that the experience had likely done him some good, forcing him to actually work for a change. And besides, as a steward he’d had an easier time pitching woo at the Indian princesses who had caught his fancy, as he seemed to have lost something of his allure now that they didn’t see him as a mere menial.
“Why the devil would you do a thing like that?” Starkweather said, and took a sip of whiskey from her flask.
“Well,” Carmody answered, looking somewhat sheepish, “this alternative is more like my home than most, and when last I saw my England there was a duplicate of her on the throne there, as well.”
“I don’t know, Pat, I just don’t much get on with kings and queens. In my alternative, we Texicans never had ‘em, and the Brits g
ot rid of them back in the days of Cartwright and Paine, back even before the Anglo-American Confederation got started.”
Carmody nodded. “Well, people back home had all sorts of strange notions. They figured that white skin was better than dark, that Britain was where the best white skin could be found, and that Queen Victoria was the best of the whole lot.”
“Victoria?” Starkweather said, and cast an appraising eye at the woman. At that moment, the woman slipped at the foot of the gangplank, and fell sprawling into the mud. “I don’t know, Pat, doesn’t look much like victory to me.”
About the Editor
The version of Lou Anders who resides on Earth Prime has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Chesley Award, all for work done in his capacity as the editorial director of Prometheus Books’ science fiction and fantasy imprint Pyr (www.pyrsf.com). He is also the editor of several critically acclaimed anthologies--Outside the Box (Wildside Press, 2001), Live without a Net (Roc, 2003), Projections: Science Fiction in Literature & Film (MonkeyBrain, 2004), FutureShocks (Roc, 2006), Fast Forward 1 (Pyr, 2007), and the forthcoming Fast Forward 2 (Pyr, 2008). In 2000, he served as the Executive Editor of Bookface.com, and before that he worked as the Los Angeles Liaison for Titan Publishing Group. He is the author of The Making of Star Trek: First Contact (Titan Books, 1996), and has published over 500 articles in such magazines as The Believer, Publishers Weekly, Dreamwatch, Star Trek Monthly, Star Wars Monthly, Babylon 5 Magazine, Sci Fi Universe, Doctor Who Magazine, and Manga Max. His articles and stories have been translated into Danish, Greek, German, Italian, and French, and have appeared online at SFSite.com, RevolutionSF.com and InfinityPlus.co.uk. Visit him online at www.louanders.com
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