Severance

by Chris Bucholz

  At some point Hogg had pissed someone off, though he still wasn’t sure how, or where, or even who. He had suspected it for a while, had seen evidence of his career sputtering for the last couple of rotations. The most recent such hint had occurred only two days earlier, when he had been transferred to command the community policing center in the northern end of the ship. Remote, under–equipped, staffed with incompetents, it was, on paper, a promotion. And, in reality, an extended middle finger.

  “Do you know who Ron’s friends were? Who he spent time with?” Hogg asked, trying a different tack. Mrs. Gabelman became somewhat more intelligible, and he dutifully recorded everything she said, though none of it sounded very useful. He was still pretty confident this was a murder of opportunity. Big nasty knife wound, drugs, scuzzy part of the ship. 45th and Fir was certainly a rough neighborhood on the first level, a likely enough place for a drug deal to go bad. On the other hand, Gabelman simply didn’t have the look of a user. Hogg definitely knew what those looked like, having swept them in and out of the drunk tank for much of his career. He supposed it was possible Gabelman was simply a high–functioning user who happened to mouth off to the wrong person.

  The search of his apartment had turned up exactly nothing. Gabelman had apparently been a single, slightly messy, slightly dorky guy, with an interest in electro funk and pornographic images. No cache of suicide letters or severed doll heads or, interestingly, drug paraphernalia. Not that there would be much for a guru user.

  And there was certainly nothing anywhere to indicate the guy had any enemies who wished him harm. Although his work colleagues were interesting people — Hogg had run background checks on them while riding the trolley over to Mrs. Gabelman’s. His supervisor, the Stein woman, had an extremely interesting past. A canned baby — those were rare enough, especially one that hadn’t self–imploded — she had then managed the even more impressive feat of getting a job. It had been a close thing though — during her youth she’d run afoul of the law more than once. But she had managed to settle down by the time she’d finished her schooling, and landed a spot in the engineering department. She still seemed to roll with a pretty shifty crowd, many of them connected to the Breeder groups that were cropping up around that time. Nothing had ever been tied directly back to her though. The author of the background summary seemed surprised by that.

  Still, it was nothing to link Ron Gabelman directly with anyone shady. If there was anything in Gabelman’s life to suggest he had stab–happy enemies, it would be on his terminal. Hogg had already sent that to IT to unlock. An easy job for them, Hogg was confident it would still probably take them several days to get around to. But he wasn’t the type to complain, and he still had a few other avenues, however unfruitful they appeared.

  He looked at the current unfruitful avenue blubbering in front of him and suppressed a sigh. Time to stop badgering this poor woman. Stowing his terminal, Hogg began the process of extricating himself from Mrs. Gabelman’s tedious sadness, giving himself a couple of minutes before he’d stop even pretending to be nice. He wondered if a plastic security badge would speed the healing process any.

  §

  “Wouldn’t be the first young guy to get mixed up with drugs,” Bruce said. “They are, after all, incredible.” He had his feet up on the desk in the supervisor’s office while he worked on his sandwich.

  “If so, he kept it pretty quiet. I certainly never saw him high. You?” Stein asked.

  Bruce shrugged. “I never paid a lot of attention. You know me and people.” He munched on his sandwich for a bit. “Did the cop say who they think did it?”

  “Nope. And I didn’t think to ask. Kind of a rough part of the ship though. Were I to guess, I’d say he was rolled for the guru. That seemed to be the vibe the cop was putting out.”

  They sat in silence for a few seconds. “Pretty shitty,” Bruce finally said.

  “Pretty shitty,” Stein echoed. More silence. “It’s weird though. I mean, I feel bad that the kid died, but I also don’t feel too bad. You know? Like I’m almost more concerned with how this will impact my workload. Does that sound sick?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it. It probably just means you’re a monster.”

  Stein snorted. “Thanks.” She poked lamely at her lunch with a spork. “Actually, check this: Curts might be even more of a monster than me.” Stein related Curts’ request after the security officers had left.

  Bruce chewed on a thumbnail as he listened. “Well, it sounds like he had a little more time to react than you. And he didn’t really know the kid, did he? I can see why he’d be more worried about the ship. Not like you, you fucking monstrosity.”

  Stein considered that for a moment while working on her salad. “Okay, sure. I can see a chief caring more for the ship than his staff. That’s almost a requirement of the job. And I can see him not caring about drug users on staff because, I kid you not, he looked like he was coming down off something himself.”

  Bruce started chuckling to himself. She narrowed her gaze, wondering what he was so amused about, before deciding she would probably prefer not knowing.

  “But asking about conflicting complaints? What the hell? We get a couple of those a day. They’re no big deal.”

  “Simple diagnosis: he’s getting anal retentive.”

  “I guess.”

  Bruce burped. “Oof. That felt good.” He shifted in his chair. “Wanna hear what I was up to last night?”

  “Is this that thing where you watch women go to the bathroom? Because, no, I don’t want to hear about that.”

  Bruce shook his head. “Better than that.”

  “I am at a loss to think of what you could think is better than that. Surely something pretty foul. A violation of deep, universal principles.”

  “Ha.” Bruce recounted the story of his aerial work at Charlotte Redelso’s apartment. Stein listened, wincing and inhaling sharply when Bruce got to the stupid parts. She had known about Bruce’s insane climbing apparatus, and even seen it in use once, but the thought of the contraption still terrified her.

  “Hang on just a second,” Stein said when the story had concluded. “To dig up information on what could potentially be in a room that is quite easy to break into, you performed a ridiculously daring stunt to raid the apartment of someone tangentially related to what you’re actually interested in?”

  “At first, I was just going to ask her. But then I saw all the nice stuff she had and revised my plans.”

  Stein shook her head. “And did you find anything interesting?”

  Bruce tapped something on his terminal. “Dear Charlotte has been keeping copies of personnel correspondence on a dummy. Love letters mostly, shockingly tame ones I’m sorry to report. But alongside those I found several pieces of communication from one Mr. Maurice Melson.”

  “Which said?”

  “It looks like this Melson had been pressuring Charlotte to sell that studio for several years. The first messages I saw refer to earlier correspondence. By the time Charlotte began recording their talks offline it looked like Melson was getting creative.”

  “How so?”

  “She’s an artist. Melson evidently had contacts in the mayor’s office. He promised he could get some of her work placed visibly in public areas — even in the Bridge, apparently.”

  “If she agreed to sell the studio to him?” Seeing Bruce nod, she frowned. “So, a guy with a dead man’s name has access to some big–shit mandarins, and uses that leverage to buy a shitty little apartment, and then hide something in it.”

  “That appears to be what happened, yes. I couldn’t find anything else about the guy on there — no pictures or anything like that.”

  The two occasional thieves sat alone with their thoughts.

  “So, what next?” Bruce asked. “Can I go set off some more booby–traps now?”

  “Have you ever asked my permission to do that before?”

  Bruce’s jaw jutted out, eyes to the ceiling, making a big sho
w of thinking about that. “Good point. I retract my request, and will proceed as per normal, i.e. recklessly. I’ll let you know what I find later tonight.”

  Stein stared at her friend. “Are you kidding? Weren’t you up all night hanging from lampposts? You stopped sleeping again?”

  Bruce grinned. “Gabelman’s not the only one who knew how to party.”

  Stein sagged in her chair. No one seemed to take the kid’s death seriously, but Bruce’s ability to brush it off grated at her for some reason. The multiple layers of irony he wore at all times was a familiar act, and usually a welcome one. He’d been that way ever since she first met him in school, and she’d learned from his example. Kids were jerks, and the walls he had helped her raise had proven very useful. Though she was never as good at it as he was, and sometimes wondered if that was a good thing. Maybe his walls were just a bit too thick.

  Seeming to sense the shift in mood — see, he was more sensitive than he let on, dammit! — Bruce clammed up and resumed work on his lunch. Eventually he asked between bites, “This Curts thing with the conflicting jobs. What were they again?”

  Stein blinked a couple of times, shifting gears. “One hot, one cold, right next door to each other,” she replied. “The cold one Ron apparently fixed. Air balancing thing. The hot one was a non–issue. Ron said it was a mistaken call.” Out of curiosity, Stein tapped on her terminal, pulling up a schematic of that part of the ship. Numbers appeared on the map, indicating the current temperature and humidity in various areas. “Looks fine now,” she said, tapping on the two rooms as she shoved the terminal over to Bruce.

  Bruce looked at it. “All snug as a bug,” he agreed. He dragged his finger around the screen. “What’s that?”

  Stein looked at what Bruce was pointing at. Another room, a series of rooms in fact, registering temperatures well below normal. The terminal indicated it was occupied office space.

  “Says it’s occupied. Should be a complaint logged I’d imagine,” Stein said. She tapped at her desk display. “Nothing,” she said after scanning through the list of active complaints.

  “The occupancy database is never right,” Bruce pointed out. “That’s probably a storage area now. No one but boxes to complain.”

  “Yeah, probably,” Stein said, nodding. She looked at the map, trying to identify the occupant of the space. Part of the Logistics branch. More government workers, and boring ones at that. She frowned. This part of the ship was often called ‘The Annex,’ being the former storage space that had been reallocated for government use a few years into the ship’s flight. The speed with which the civilian government had outgrown its original space was the basis for some of the oldest, creakiest jokes on the Argos, the punch line to most being “More People Doing Less Work.”

  Bruce was a couple steps ahead of Stein, frowning at a map on his terminal. “Nah, that room’s occupied. I was by there a couple weeks ago. Definitely not storage.”

  “Well, then, what the fuck? They all wearing sweaters or something?” Stein’s gaze flipped back and forth between her terminal and desk. “Oh,” she said, figuring it out. “Dummy.”

  “Busted t–stat,” Bruce finished her thought for her. “Well, add it to the list. I’ll get to it sometime in the next six years.”

  Stein leaned back in her chair, staring up at the box of spare thermostats she kept on the shelf. A room with a perfectly acceptable temperature that was indicating it was too cold was about as far down the priority list of repairs as was possible. There were literally dozens of better things she could do with her time. But something about figuring a problem out like that would eat away at her if it wasn’t fixed. And there was still something weird about it which bothered her. She hated weird things on her ship.

  “I think I’ll go handle this one now,” she said, standing up. The only weird thing she did tolerate, now happily munching away on his second sandwich, looked up at her. She scooped up her terminal and strapped on the tool webbing she had hung on the back of her chair. “Even us management types can get our hands dirty sometimes.”

  Bruce rolled his eyes. “Yeah, boss. You go replace your busted ’stat. Let me know if you get in over your head.”

  §

  When Stein arrived, she found that the thermostat was perfectly fine. The office in question was freezing.

  “Where the hell have you been?” a woman demanded when Stein and her bright orange uniform entered the Logistics office. “We called you hours ago!”

  Stein blinked, surprised, half ready to pick a fight with the woman with her fur on end. But after a deep breath, she slid into customer relations mode and deployed a thin smile. She had handled angry customers before — many days had handled nothing but. After the first few months on the job and the near–fistfights from just such encounters, she’d learned to play these a little more softly. In particular, people who had made a mistake when filling in their service requests were always the touchiest. After long practice, Stein had learned it was easiest to fix the problem first, and then give them the tutorial on how to use the service request system. Starting a conversation with “Here’s why you’re an idiot,” was Bruce’s manner.

  “Sorry,” she said, feigning an exasperated expression. “It’s been a hectic day. Let’s see if I can’t get it a bit warmer in here.”

  Although still clearly annoyed, the woman didn’t say anything else, which Stein took to be a good omen. Digging out her terminal, she set to work.

  In fairly short order, Stein found the problem. This office was downstream of the air distribution network in one of the rooms Gabelman had visited. Gabelman had messed up the settings on the dampers, directing the majority of the hot air into a single office. A stupid mistake, and proof enough that he was on drugs as far as Stein was concerned. “Rest in peace, buddy,” she added quietly. After retrieving a ladder from a tool closet a half block away, she opened the panel outside that gave her access to physically manipulate the damper’s actuators and adjust the air balancing, carefully setting it to correct the current problem without interfering with anyone else’s comfort.

  After replacing the panel, Stein returned the ladder to its closet. As she was hanging the ladder up, an idea popped into her head. “While I’m in the neighborhood…”

  §

  “Hi, is, uh…” Stein hesitated as she read the name from her terminal, “Greg Watson here?”

  The receptionist left the front desk, retreating into the back of the office to fetch Greg. While she was gone, Stein looked at the terminal again. Something about the name on this service request was funny. This was the office that Gabelman had visited, with the mistaken too–hot service request. If anyone asked, she would say this was to ensure Gabelman’s adjustment of the air balancing hadn’t thrown anything else out of whack. The office was occupied by the ship’s licensing department. “Licensing,” she said aloud, feeling a headache coming on, unable to think of a single activity on the Argos which required a license.

  Greg Watson appeared from a smaller office at the back and walked towards the reception desk with a gait that suggested he thought he was important, and a look of dismay at the sight of Stein’s orange uniform. “Can I help you?”

  “Yes, I’m just following up on a service request that was submitted the other day. You complained that it was too hot in here?”

  Watson’s gaze narrowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s perfectly fine here.”

  Stein frowned, biting the inside of her cheek. “Two days ago we got a service request saying it was too hot here. We sent a technician around to check on it.”

  “Don’t know what to tell you. But I didn’t see any technician.” He looked her up and down, his nose elevating fractionally. “It’s actually been a little chilly around here lately to be honest. Better today, though.”

  “Huh,” Stein said. “Okay. Glad to hear it.” Smiling, she backed out the door and returned down the hall to the Logistics office, to see if things had improved there.
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br />   “Getting warmer in here?” she asked when she entered, not needing a response. The sensors on her webbing told her as much, as did those on the surface of her skin.

  “Yes, thank you,” the woman replied, a lingering note of annoyance still in her voice.

  “How long was it cold like that?” Stein asked.

  “It was bad yesterday, and worse this morning,” she replied. “That’s when I put in the service request.”

  Stein swallowed, as she prepared to gently explain to the woman how she was mistaken. There was a simple approach to take when handling cases like these. She forced a frown on her face. “Hmmm. Can you show me the service request on your screen?”

  “Sure.” The woman tapped at the screen on her desk. “Right here. See? ‘It’s too cold! Please help!’ That’s me. Oh. That can’t be right.” She pointed at the timestamp on the request, which said 5:15 p.m.

  Stein frowned, genuinely this time. That was two hours in the future. Which was probably why the request hadn’t shown up on the Big Board. She checked her own terminal, looking at the queue of active service requests. Not there either. “That’s weird,” she said to the woman. You’re not an idiot at all. Or you may be, but not because of this. At minimum we’re lacking enough information to make a determination one way or another. Stein carefully noted down the ID number of the request on her terminal, offered another apology, and quickly left the office, her mind racing.

  §

  Hogg trudged down 8th Avenue, avoiding eye contact with everyone who crossed his path. He was chasing up the third and last of Gabelman’s friends from the list Mrs. Gabelman had provided. The first two interviews each followed an entirely predictable arc. No, they didn’t know Gabelman used drugs. No, that didn’t sound like him at all. No, they didn’t know if he had any enemies. They offered helpful suggestions for how the investigation should proceed. The general thrust of these suggestions — “Stop looking for dirt on the poor boy” — Hogg was beginning to agree with.