Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space (15 page)

Chapter Eleven

Returning to the fringes of consciousness, Kim groaned.

She tried to raise her hands to her temples but they
traveled not at all before meeting solid resistance. Trying harder moved them
about an inch, and slid her nose and one cheek across something rough and hard
and flat.

Opening her eyes, she discovered a well-lit gray metal
surface pressed against her face. Lifting her head from this surface, she felt
the curved foam padding of a vacuum suit’s helmet press against the back of her
head.
How can I have a helmet behind me but not in front?
Pondering this
curiosity helped spur her memory.

Again lifting her head, she tried to focus on the
surface immediately in front of her. Tiny particles sparkled in the light from
her helmet.
Glass. Must have broken my faceplate when I fell.

Stiffness had accumulated in her muscles and joints as
if she’d been laying on this hard surface for a long time.
How long have I
been unconscious?
She rolled painfully onto her side and checked her suit
watch.
Twelve hours?
I couldn’t have been out that long.

She squinted as she remembered dreaming of a mysterious
man with cool soothing eyes as green as her own. His muscular body had towered
over hers. She’d studied with great interest his dark brown hair and the
stubborn cowlick above his right eye as well as the gentle curve of his cute
little butt.

Must have passed from unconsciousness into ordinary
sleep. I was pretty tired; still, I didn’t know you could do that.

The room’s illumination oscillated as thin beams of
sunlight swung upward on one side of the room and then downward on the other.
Sun
is still running around in circles.

Her suit’s backpack prohibited rolling flat onto her
back, so she rolled until she was leaning against it—a position just beyond
laying on her side. She removed her gloves, then unsnapped her helmet’s
fasteners and slipped the helmet off—carefully, since chips of broken glass
remained in the faceplate’s frame. Her blonde ponytail raked across this broken
glass and once free of the helmet, swung down and up and very nearly slapped
her gently in the face. Only by jerking her head to one side did she avoid
getting its tiny flakes of glass in her eyes.

After removing her tool pack, she disconnected the suit’s
waist ring, wriggled out of and pushed away the suit’s bottom half, and then
wriggled out of the upper half. While performing this last bit of wriggling,
she discovered a number of bruises on her chest that corresponded to the
largest attachments mounted on the front of her vacuum suit.
Must have
gotten those when I fell.

Her sky-blue flight uniform was now wrinkled and sweaty
and stank to the highest heaven. Climbing to her feet, she discovered bruises
on her knees and hands as well. She decided to ignore these problems and
concentrate on more important matters.

That she was standing on the ceiling of a cargo deck,
was clear enough, but she remained at a loss about this ship’s name and nature
and was not at all sure if she’d ever been aboard it before.

With all the scattered glass and nothing on her feet
but white cotton socks, she tip-toed most of the distance to the nearest
vertical hallway door. She pulled the door open, stuck her head inside and
looked down and then up. From one end of the ship to the other, the hallway was
pitch black.

She leaned into the hallway and directed her voice
downward. “Hello?” She waited, but there was no response. Directing her voice
upward, she asked louder, “Can anybody hear me?”

Still nothing.

Stepping back out of the hall, she checked both sides
of the door frame and found the ship’s upside-down intercom. Pressing the
speak
button, she said, “Hello? Is anyone there?”

Again, she waited. But again, she heard nothing.

“Ship?” she said. “Ship, are you… Can you hear me?”

There was no answer.

Well, what do I do now?
She looked around the
cargo deck.
Staying here isn’t going to do me any good. If I’m gonna get any
help from the crew, it looks like I’m gonna have to go find them.
She
glanced at the vertical hallway’s open door.
And it looks like I’m gonna
have to provide my own light.

Her helmet was ridiculously bulky for a flashlight but
it would have to do. Leaning down to pick it up gave her such an awful
throbbing pain in the side of her head that she closed both fists and rose
without it. Stubbornly ignoring the pain, she bent down again and snatched it
up.

Gently, she explored the most painfully sensitive area
of her head with her fingertips. Its matted hairs felt as if splashed with
cheap paint: rough, course and flaking badly. Some of the flakes lodged under
her fingernails. She examined them by helmet light.
Dried blood. Must have
fallen harder than I thought.

She swung the helmet’s trio of light beams across her
discarded suit and gear. Amongst the glittering bits of glass she saw a tight
cluster of small puddles of blood. She ran her fingertips over her face. More
dried blood—crusting and flaking—adorned her nose and cheek and forehead.

As soon as I find a crewmember, I’ll need to get
some medical attention. But first I’ve got to find the crew.

She entered the vertical hallway and climbed down to
the next deck. It was just as empty as the first and the centrifugal gravity
was stronger; much stronger—almost a full gee.

If this deck is experiencing one gee then the decks
closer to the bridge must be under four or even more—further evidence this
ship’s spin isn’t by design. And if it’s spinning out of control, that might
explain why it has no electric power and why no one answers me. Everyone may
have abandoned ship. On the other hand a ship this size has got to be awfully
expensive. Nobody’s going to abandon it without a fight.

Walking to the other vertical hallway, the one she had
not yet used or examined, she directed her helmet lights into it as she looked
up and down. Something seemed to be down at the far end: down on deck one.
Adjusting the focus of her helmet lights to narrow beams, she pointed them at
it again.

It was a body—a dead and badly beaten body. Blood had
pooled generously around it, especially around the head. Based on the clothing
style, she guessed it to be a male civilian.
Civilian? Am I military?
Whoever
it had once been now lay on his back with his arms and legs twisted into
positions they could not possibly have achieved in normal life.

Must have fallen. Damn. What a terrible way to die.

A growing queasiness manifested itself high in her
stomach.
No, I don’t think I’m military at all.
She could sense that she
was not accustomed to dead things, especially if they were people. Still, it
seemed her duty to try to memorize the individual’s appearance for later
description, so she strained to make out his features, but the distance, poor
lighting and random smears of blood on his face prevented this.

She turned to continue her search for the crew with the
newly added burden of informing whoever she met first that one of their people
had suffered a fatal accident. As she turned toward the other vertical hallway,
her narrowly focused lights flashed across something bright and cylindrical
near one of the cargo doors. Pausing, she shone the lights on it again. It was
a grease gun.

What could anyone possibly grease in an empty cargo
deck?

The grease cartridge must have been new; its wrapper
lay crumpled next to the gun. The gun’s plunger was half-way in. Half of the grease
had been applied to something.

The many layers of tension that had accumulated in her:
tension concerning her survival, her missing memory, the compound mysteries of
this derelict ship, and finding a dead body, had become too much for her mind
to handle. Though unaware of it, she was very close to a nervous breakdown,
which was why she now started laughing stupidly. And why, though it made her
feel guilty for disrespecting the dead, she found that she could not stop.

Her eyes fell on the crumpled wrapper. She recognized
its color and design. This grease was the highest priced of the three
outrageously expensive types manufactured specifically to lubricate bearings
that operate in vacuum. This grease was just as clear and colorless as
distilled water.

As abruptly as she’d started laughing, she stopped.
Stepping to the door of the hall with the body in it, she knelt. The position
made her head pound again, but she ignored it. She played her helmet lights
over the rungs. All those within reach were bumpy and uneven. She touched one.
It was covered with grease. A grisly shudder passed through her body. Someone
had set a trap and the man at the bottom of the hallway had fallen into it. It
wasn’t an accident. It was murder.

_____

Two hours ago Mike and Gideon had carried Zahid’s
lifeless body to the far side of deck ten, laid it out behind a vertical
hallway shaft where it could not be seen from their little improvised
encampment and covered it from head to toe with a blanket.

They then preformed a short-lived and fruitless search
for Akio and Nikita. Fruitless because neither had been found, and short-lived
because the pair of bold searchers slowly developed a growing paranoia that one
of their missing comrades might leap out and kill them. They did not, however,
have to admit this fear to one another as the farther they roamed from Tina—who
apparently never considered helping them search—the more insistent she became
that they return and protect her.

And so they did.

Since then none of the three remaining group members
slept, or even tried. Tina, sitting on her ventilation duct, insisted she would
not sleep again for the rest of the flight.

Mike and Gideon sat on the ceiling and leaned back
against Tina’s ventilation duct as they debated the relative merits of the
various ways by which they might survive the heat of solar passage.

To conserve batteries, the three sat in the fluctuating
dark.

It occurred to Mike that the light provided by the
sweeping sunbeams gave the cargo deck the same cheerless glow as did the cheap
flashing neon signs outside the rundown hotel room windows in all those old
black-and-white two-dimensional cliché-ridden detective movies.

Tina whispered, “What’s that noise?”

Gideon asked, “What noise?”

“Shhh.” She cocked her head. “Listen.”

Mike heard the chiming of a lone and distant church
bell.

“Yes, I hear it now,” Gideon said. “Where’s it coming
from?”

Mike stood and turned on his flashlight. “It’s my
pocketsize. It wants to speak to me privately.” He shone his beam down in front
of his feet to light a path toward the closer of the two vertical hallways.
“Excuse me.”

Crossing the room, he expected to hear objections to
his leaving, or at the very least questions about why his pocketsize couldn’t
say whatever it was in front them. He could imagine Gideon saying, ‘Are you
keeping secrets from us, Mike? I thought we were all in this together?’ But
they said nothing, and Mike entered the hallway and began climbing up.

When he stepped into deck eleven—a cargo deck just as
empty as the one he’d left—he noticed the centrifugal force felt weaker here.
It also felt somewhat bizarre, like a kind of carnival ride. He could feel the
gees strongest at his feet and weaker in his hands, but the weirdest was his
head. His head was in zero-g.

But he hadn’t come here for amusement.

Closing the door, he scanned the room with his
flashlight to verify that he was alone, then he walked around each vertical
hallway shaft to make sure no one could be hiding there. Satisfied, he sat down
on a ventilation duct’s blue foam insulation, pulled out his computer and
opened it.

“Don’t show me—” He paused for a moment then changed
his mind. “Show it.”

The photograph of Kim and him French-kissing while
holding water-balloons above each other’s head appeared on its display surface.
He felt a familiar tightness in his throat. He closed his eyes firmly as though
the pressure might seal his tear ducts.

“I’m alone. Tell me what you’ve learned.”

But the pocketsize said nothing. The only sounds were
the echoed creakings of the huge slightly-stretched spaceship. Mike opened his
eyes. The picture was gone. In its place was text. Mike read it silently.

The text said, “I’ve been working on building a list of
candidates for our murderer/saboteur. Then, having built this list, I’ve been
trying to eliminate as many names as possible. The list started with ten
names—those of all the smugglers and their accomplices. I eliminated four
immediately because they are dead: Paulette Dozier was sentenced to fifteen
years and died in prison of mysterious causes. William (Bull) Dozier died in
prison from a fight with another inmate. Martin Dowd was paroled after serving
seven of his ten years; he died last year of natural causes at the age of
seventy-two. Monica Porter never made it to prison or even to trial; she was
shot to death when she fired on the lunar police who tried to arrest her.”

Mike slid his thumb along the edge of the little
computer, instructing it to scroll the text.

“Three more people can be eliminated for miscellaneous
reasons. Anthony Hull served his time, was released, then got caught smuggling
cocaine in Florida and is now in prison again. Jonathan Yowell has a similar
story involving heroin in California. And Peter Massey studied law while
serving his time and is now working as an attorney in New York.

“Three people, however, cannot be eliminated. These
people remain as the most likely saboteur candidates: Victor Moss, Rebecca
Dozier and Tony Fukuyama.