Cursed Command (Angel in the Whirlwind Book 3)

by Christopher Nuttall

  He caught Henderson’s hand as another dance came to an end. “I know somewhere where we can get cheap and clean women,” he said with a leer. “Shall we go?”

  Henderson laughed, emptying his latest mug of beer. “You always know the best places to go.”

  Joel smirked as Henderson rose to his feet, his legs wobbling dangerously. The booze might be cheap, but Henderson had drunk enough to put a serious dent in his wallet. Joel followed him out the door and onto the darkened street, ignoring the handful of women waiting outside. None of the local prostitutes looked very good, at least not to him. But he rather doubted Henderson would care.

  “Just like home,” Henderson said as they stumbled down the street. “Where is this brothel?”

  “Follow me,” Joel said.

  He covertly checked their surroundings as they walked, glancing around to make sure no one was paying attention to them. The street was lined with bars, brothels, and a handful of stores designed to separate the spacers from their pay. The crowds of drunken spacers making their way back to the spaceport didn’t seem to notice their presence. Joel spotted a couple of young women pickpocketing drunken spacers while clinging to their arms, luring them into alleyways for quick trysts. Such acts wouldn’t be tolerated outside the wire, he suspected, but that hardly mattered. Spaceports had always been a law unto themselves . . .

  . . . and besides, spacers spending cash freely was good for the local economy.

  “Shouldn’t walk too far,” Henderson said. He giggled, as if he were too drunk to laugh properly. “I have a baseball bat in my pants.”

  “You’ll be doing some battering in the future,” Joel said, mimicking his tone. “The girls will love you.”

  He kept his face impassive with an effort. Henderson simply didn’t have any common sense, did he? A few more drinks and he’d probably be bragging about their plan—or as much as he knew of it—to the next pretty girl who crossed their path.

  “Of course they will,” Henderson said. He hiccupped loudly. “I’m rich.”

  Not as rich as you were, Joel thought. How many drinks did you buy?

  He smiled darkly as he pulled Henderson into a dark, shadowy alleyway that was a shortcut to the next set of brothels according to the map he’d downloaded from the local processor. A handful of cats scurried out of waste bins as they passed; he glanced around, half expecting to see a dozen prostitutes servicing their clients in the darkness. But the smell was probably enough to drive them away. No one wanted to lower their pants when the air smelled worse than a pirate ship.

  “I saw a pussy,” Henderson said. He snickered as he glanced around. “But it’s the wrong kind of pussy.”

  “Very funny,” Joel said.

  He allowed Henderson to slip ahead of him, then slipped the improvised cosh out of his pocket and cracked it into the back of Henderson’s neck. The big man crumbled to the ground. Joel slipped on a pair of gloves before searching his body, carefully removing his wallet and anything else a thief might take. As soon as he was sure he’d taken everything, Joel hefted up the body and dumped it into a giant trashcan half-filled with foul-smelling liquid. If he was lucky, the body would never be found; the trashcan would be shipped out of the spaceport and its contents fed into a processor long before someone realized that Henderson was missing. But even if they did find the body, they’d probably think it was a mugging gone bad. There was enough alcohol in Henderson’s bloodstream to prove he’d been drunk when he’d died.

  Idiot, he thought. Henderson had been committed even if he hadn’t realized it. A good commanding officer made no difference. Plotting a mutiny was one thing, particularly if they never went through with it, but murdering their former commanding officer was quite another story. Sooner or later, someone would have put the pieces together. And now he’s dead.

  He hurried to the edge of the alleyway, wondering just how long it would take for someone to move the trashcan. If someone thought to look inside before sending it out of the spaceport . . . he dismissed the thought as he stripped off his gloves, dumping them and the cosh into a plastic bag. There were ways to dispose of almost anything within a spaceport; he knew from long experience. No one would think twice about a spacer dumping a bag in the recycler.

  And even if they did, he thought, they would have no way to connect it to Henderson’s death.

  Shaking his head, he slipped back onto the main road and hurried down toward the nearest brothel. Joel had been careful to make sure that he and Henderson had been some distance from the rest of the crew—spotting Crenshaw had worried him, although he suspected that Crenshaw didn’t know him from Adam—and no one knew the two had been together. If anyone asked, Joel could swear blind that he’d been in one of the brothels. He certainly had enough money to pay for several hours of frolicking with a couple of girls.

  He sighed as he joined the line of spacers outside the building. Killing Henderson was a risk, even though an accident on Vangelis would be far more convincing than anything on the ship. But he’d had no choice. Henderson had been wavering to the point where he might have started to doubt the goal. And a single word from him would have been more than enough to tear the whole plan wide open.

  Good riddance, Joel thought. Rot in hell.

  Janet, at William’s request, had cleared his cabin of Captain Abraham’s possessions, but William still preferred to sleep on an uncomfortable sofa in his Ready Room so that he remained closer to the bridge. If nothing else, he’d told himself, he could respond quickly to any problems before they managed to get out of hand.

  He was half-asleep when his wristcom buzzed. “Captain, this is Richmond,” Janet’s voice said. “We have a missing crewman.”

  William sat upright, rubbing his eyes. “Details?”

  “Crewman Roth Henderson was due to report back to the ship thirty minutes ago,” Janet reported. “He didn’t return to the shuttle for uplift. I tried to contact his wristcom, but apparently he didn’t take it with him.”

  Fuck, William thought. Regulations were clear. Spacers on short-term shore leave were to carry their wristcoms with them at all times. There was no way to know when they might need to be recalled to the ship. A deserter . . . or something worse?

  He sat upright. He’d stayed up late reading the reports and only had a little sleep before Janet had woken him. He was used to getting by on very little sleep, but he had the nasty feeling that age was slowly catching up with him. His body didn’t have the genetic enhancements that Kat Falcone and her family took for granted, merely a handful of improvements spliced into his DNA over the years. He felt old.

  “Contact the local authorities,” he ordered as he stood. He’d take a quick shower and shave while waiting for updates. “Ask them to put out an alert for him, then make inquiries among the crewmen who went down with him. See if they can tell you where he was last seen.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Janet said.

  “Alert Major Lupine too,” William added. “His men might be needed for the search.”

  He closed the channel, then stumbled into the small washroom for a shower. It was possible, he had to admit, that Crewman Henderson might have merely managed to forget when he had to return to the ship. He’d hardly be the first crewman to lose track of time while enjoying himself with local women. There had been times, before the war, when William had had to speak quite sharply to a number of spacers who hadn’t taken the matter quite as seriously as they should. And a couple of them had ended up on report . . .

  But there were other possibilities. Henderson could have deserted, or he could have been kidnapped. Vangelis wasn’t exactly a pro-Commonwealth world. Someone could have seen Henderson and decided to use him as a bargaining chip. William had no idea why they’d take the risk, but he had to admit it was a possibility. Or he could have picked a fight with someone bigger than him and wound up in the hospital. There was no way to know.

  He washed quickly while considering the possibilities. Vangelis was hardly an under-populated
world. If Henderson had decided to desert, he would have no trouble hiding within the mass of immigrants and finding work somewhere on the surface. Politicians might cheerfully talk of searching entire planets, but anyone with a gram of sense would know that searching even a single city was a nightmare. Even if the local authorities cooperated, finding Henderson would be tricky. And if they refused to help, William knew that matters would get sticky.

  His wristcom buzzed as he stepped out of the shower. “Captain,” Major Lupine said, “I checked with the spaceport sickbay. None of our crew have been admitted. I asked them to run a check against the DNA and biometric records and nothing showed up.”

  William nodded, unsurprised. Henderson might have left his wristcom behind, but he wouldn’t have forgotten his ID card, which served as a bank card as well as a number of other things. And even if that had been stolen, the sickbay would have logged his DNA as a matter of course. There was no chance he’d been admitted as a John Doe patient. And if he’d been killed, the local sickbay would have had first look at the body.

  “Check with security,” he ordered. “See if he made his way through the wire.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Lupine said. “They might not have logged his passage, though.”

  “Check anyway,” William said.

  He sighed. By long custom and interstellar agreements, spaceports and their surrounding red light districts were not behind a customs and immigration barrier. Spacers could go for shore leave without having to pass through any security checks. But leaving the spaceport for a visit to the planet beyond was a very different matter. In theory, no one could leave the spaceport without passing through the security gates.

  But if he found someone willing to help him, he thought, they might have been able to get him through without being checked.

  There was a pause. “There’s no record of his passage,” Lupine reported. “But they don’t sound very worried.”

  “They probably wouldn’t be.” William sighed. “Ask them to keep an eye out for him.”

  He sighed again as he closed the connection. A single missing spacer, a foreign spacer at that, was hardly an emergency. The locals would be more concerned about asserting their independence from the Commonwealth than finding a missing man. But it was a problem for him. They were due to depart in three days. If Henderson didn’t show up by then, he’d have to leave the matter with the local authorities and hope for the best.

  And if he has deserted, he thought sourly, he will have made a clean getaway.

  William ordered coffee, then sat down at his desk and skimmed through Henderson’s file. There wasn’t anything special, as far as he could tell; Henderson had been born on Epsilon Cool, joined the Royal Navy as a crewman at twenty, and served for nearly nine years before his assignment to Uncanny. There were no major red flags in his file, but his superiors had noted several times that Henderson had a nasty habit of drinking himself into a stupor. That was probably why he’d been assigned to Uncanny, William decided. There wasn’t enough cause to arrange for a dismissal, particularly when the Navy was desperate for manpower, but too much to allow him to serve on a ship that might actually go to war.

  And he’s not from Tyre, William thought. That’s not going to look good.

  Janet buzzed him a moment later. “Captain, the local authorities have put out an alert for our man,” she said. “They seem confident they’ll find him.”

  “They probably are,” William said. “But keep checking with the rest of the crew anyway.”

  He keyed his terminal, then wrote out a brief report for Kat. There was no need to declare a full-scale emergency, not yet, but she might have to contact President Thorne if the local authorities started stonewalling. And William had to admit that they might well stonewall, particularly if Henderson wasn’t located quickly, wanting to keep their reputation as pristine as possible.

  The cat’s already out of the bag, he thought, morbidly. And if Henderson has been kidnapped . . .

  He paced his Ready Room, too distracted to concentrate on reading reports or intelligence bulletins from the planetary government. He’d seen crewmen die before, but this was the first time he was in command. He was the master of his ship, the person with sole responsibility for his crew . . . if one had gone missing, the responsibility lay with him. And even if Henderson turned up alive and well, there would still be trouble . . .

  His wristcom bleeped. “Captain,” Janet said. She sounded shaken and crestfallen. “They found a body.”

  William cursed. “Henderson?”

  “It looks like it, sir,” Janet said. “The DNA definitely matches. They’re inviting us to send a party down to the surface to join the investigation.”

  And if the DNA matches, it is him, William thought, dryly. In theory, one could force-grow a full-body clone to serve as a decoy, but he’d never heard of that being done outside bad police procedurals. It struck him as a great deal of effort to hide one lowly deserter. Shit.

  He cleared his throat. “I’ll go down to the surface myself,” he said. “Ask Doctor Prosser and Major Lupine to join me in the shuttlebay.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Janet said. “Should we cancel the remaining shore leaves?”

  William scowled. The crew wouldn’t like it. They’d been cooped up on Uncanny for over five weeks, but better safe than sorry.

  “Yes,” he said. “And make sure Lightning is updated too.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Captain McElney,” a man said as William was shown into the spaceport’s sickbay. “I’m Doctor Rogers, Senior Medical Officer, and this is Commander Garial, Planetary Police.”

  William nodded, glancing from one to the other. Rogers looked young and reassuringly competent, wearing a white doctor’s overcoat rather than a uniform, while Garial wore a black uniform and looked nervous. William couldn’t help feeling a flicker of sympathy for the young woman despite the seriousness of the situation. Normally, a case with interstellar implications would be handled by a far more senior officer. Her superiors probably intended to blame any diplomatic issues on her if necessary.

  “Thank you for inviting us,” he said. He looked directly at Garial. “Where and how did you find the body?”

  “We put out an alert as soon as your crewman was reported missing,” Garial said. “The usual haunts were checked at once, of course; we found nothing. It wasn’t until the garbage men arrived to remove the trashcans that the body was discovered. Someone dumped it into a trashcan by the edge of the spaceport zone.”

  “I see,” William said. He caught himself before he could begin to berate the younger woman for ignorance. The investigation had barely begun. “Please show us the body.”

  Rogers nodded and beckoned them through a solid metal hatch. William shivered, despite the heating elements in his uniform, as they entered the morgue. He’d seen too many dead bodies in his life. Crewman Henderson lay facedown on a table, a nasty wound clearly visible on the back of his head. William was no expert, but he was fairly sure that there was no hope of reviving the corpse. Even modern medical technology had its limits.

  He wrinkled his nose at the stench. The body had clearly been suspended in liquid—he didn’t want to think about what had been in the liquid—and the uniform was completely ruined. He checked, as best as he could, but he didn’t see any other wounds. As far as he could tell, there had only been one blow. But it had been enough to kill Henderson . . .

  “That was inflicted by a cosh, or I’m a fool,” Lupine muttered. “And whoever wielded it knew precisely what they were doing.”

  “We took a brief look at the body,” Garial confirmed. “That was the cause of death.”

  William forced himself to breathe through his mouth as Doctor Prosser went to work on the corpse. “Did you recover any of his possessions?”

  “No, Captain,” Garial said. “He was stripped of everything save for his ID card. That’s bagged up on the table over there.”

  “It would be useless to a thief,” W
illiam agreed. There were ways to fool a spaceport cash machine, but they required expensive implants. Anyone capable of purchasing them wouldn’t need to wallop spacers on the head to steal their money. “I assume the murderer stole his cash. Can you trace it?”

  Garial looked as though she had bitten into a lemon. “I don’t think so, Captain,” she said. “If your man was using paper and metal currency, it’s largely untraceable. We might get lucky, but I doubt it.”

  William quickly considered it. Purely electronic currencies had never really caught on, certainly not outside the most advanced worlds. No one really wanted to be traced, even when they were merely going to brothels instead of engaging in criminal activity. Henderson could have used his ID card to purchase something—it would have to be checked—but he doubted it. There was no way to know where Henderson had gone between leaving the shuttle and dying in an alleyway.

  “See what you can do,” he said gently. “Do you have any preliminary conclusions?”

  “It looks like a mugging,” Garial said. “We can carry out a full autopsy if you wish, but there’s no reason to assume anything worse. The killer may not even have intended to kill his victim. There’s no way to know.”

  Lupine turned to look at her. “You can’t check the cameras?”

  “There are very few cameras in this part of the spaceport,” Garial said. “Our guests demand privacy.”

  “They would,” William observed. “Doctor?”

  Sarah looked up. “I can confirm the cause of death,” she said. “Blood alcohol levels are quite high. I’d say he was well beyond tipsy, definitely drunk. I wouldn’t expect him to be able to find his way back to the shuttle without help.”

  “He might just have wandered down the alleyway and gotten mugged,” Lupine put in. “Are there traces of any other pieces of DNA?”

  “Not that I can find,” Sarah said. “I can take the body back to the ship and run through a proper autopsy, but I suspect there won’t be any. Dumping the body into stagnant water alone will have blurred the trail.”