The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (69 page)

“Some of nature’s most successful creatures totally lack it,” he pointed out. “Just think of the cockroach.”

So, waking, sleeping, working, bickering, Jesús and I bonded, all the more so because we were doing basically the same job and saw each other during the day as well as afterward. We discussed our problems, our ambitions, our hopes and dreams, and we formed an alliance against threatening outsiders, notably the General. Quite soon after boarding the
Zhukov
, we began to discuss ways of killing him.

This wasn’t just a matter of revenge, though we both wanted that. We’d gotten to like and respect the pilot, Colonel Delatour. She seemed to be brave and rational and certainly less disruptive to the mission than Schlacht was. The problem was how to rid ourselves of our seven-star nutcase in some way that would look like an accident. After our talk with Cos, we started skipping dinner with the cadre whenever possible, worried that the dwarf might pick up on our thoughts. Although, as Morales pointed out, by this time there was so much ill-feeling against Schlacht that even the general’s little extrasensory snitch might find it difficult to decide where all the death wishes were coming from.

Then, one night when we were lying on our bunks – Morales had the upper, I had the lower –conspiring against our leader in low voices, there emerged from the Bitch Ball, not his stentorian tones, but the cultured accents of Colonel Delatour.

“Lieutenant Kohn? Lieutenant Morales? Could I ask you to come to the bridge, please? It’s rather urgent.”

Morales leaned over the edge of his bunk and stared at me. I stared back. Since the politest words that had ever come from the gadget previously had been “
DROP YOUR COCKS AND GRAB YOUR SOCKS
!!” we knew, without being told, that something important must have happened.

On the bridge the whole cadre except for Schlacht had assembled, rubbing sleep from their eyes. Clothing was random and disordered, uniform coats over PJs, that kind of thing. A low background thrumming from the dark-energy generator meant that we were getting ready to enter that empty bubble universe we’ve all heard about, the place where good starships go when they exceed light speed.

At first I thought some kind of exotic technical foul-up must have occurred. But Colonel Delatour had a much more welcome and exciting message to deliver. In cool, bell-like tones, she greeted us with the words, “Good evening, gentlemen. General Schlacht has been murdered.”

Morales and I stared at each other with, as a poet once put it, wild surmise. Each of us thinking, You crazy bastard, did you do it without telling me?

We were still standing there with mouths open when Delatour added, “I don’t imagine that his loss will be much regretted, but the fact that we have a killer aboard has to be a matter of concern for all of us. Lieutenant Kohn, we need an acting security officer – will you please take on the job? Lieutenant Morales will assume command of your platoon as well as his own. Lieutenant Kohn, your first task will be to investigate General Schlacht’s death.”

You will notice that she didn’t wait for me to agree to my new title and duties. When it comes to the military essentials, such as not giving a damn what your subordinates want so long as they do what you tell them, there is no difference between the Space Service and Security.

As for me, I took a deep breath, tried desperately to remember what I’d learned in the two or three criminal investigation courses I’d taken, and said in what I hoped was a calm, self-confident tone of voice, “Show me the body.”

She led a parade into a crooked corridor that ended at the command suite. The corpus delicti was lying face down, fully uniformed, a few meters from its former stateroom door. Cos, like the faithful dog in sentimental stories, hunched over the body looking helpless and alone.

I tapped him on the shoulder and he moved dumbly aside. Our ex-leader appeared undamaged except for a vast pool of blood that had gushed from his nose and mouth. Ribbons of clotting had already appeared, so the corpse was not perfectly fresh. I tugged at one arm and it was supple, but the rictus on his face when it came partly into view suggested that incipient rigor had already begun. The time line was dubious, because different bodies act differently, and the interior of the ship was kept cool at ten degrees.

I called Morales and together we turned him over. His wide bemedalled front was sopping red. The surgeon – a doc named Gannett – peeled back his shirt, did some swabbing with a handful of paper towels, and revealed a neat little hole drilled through his breastbone.

The General had been shot by a small-caliber impact weapon, say a 3.8-mm – not a military size. The bullet hadn’t been powerful enough to go completely through him, which explained why the usual gaping exit wound was absent. It had exploded inside, probably trashing a bunch of crucial organs plus the aorta. After he fell, a tsunami of blood had poured out through the largest available vents, squirting up the esophagus and windpipe.

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to do a P.M.,” said Gannett, a large, glum man. “Although the cause of death is pretty obvious.” He sighed, perhaps yearning for a more interesting corpse to do his Y-incision on.

Meanwhile I started asking questions. Politely – everybody except Cos was either Sir or Ma’am to me. Who’d found the body? Cos, naturally. He’d been asleep in his cubicle near the General’s palatial quarters when a terrible scream woke him up. Since nobody else had heard anything, I figured the dwarf s talented subconscious had chosen this way to alert him that something was extremely wrong.

Attired only in his underpants, Cos stumbled into the corridor and fell over the body. Instead of calling for help, he went a bit berserk, wringing his hands and moaning and running up and down like a chicken with its head off, leaving tiny bloody bare footprints all over the deck. After a while he came back, hoping for some signs of life, but the General was still dead.

Then Cos sensed the Stowaway approaching. Scared now for his own hide, he ran back to his cubicle and hid under the bunk. Only when his private alarm system went quiet did he venture out again and wake the surgeon and lead him back to the body. More fooling around ensued, with the surgeon sending him for the pilot, the pilot sending him for the navigator, and then the rest of the senior officers being awakened in order of rank. Sounded just like the arrangement at the dinner table. Of course Morales and I had been the last to know. Meanwhile, Cos – suddenly realizing that he was thinly clad and bloody – washed his feet and got dressed.

Summing up the situation with the quiet courtesy for which I am famous, I told the cadre, “You people are the biggest bunch of silver-plated, anatomical assholes I’ve come across in some time.”

No, I didn’t actually say that. Only thought it. Instead, I expressed regret that things had been so inefficiently handled, and asked the surgeon to take charge of the body and do any forensic tests that might still be possible, given the lapse of time and the corruption of the crime scene by all the people who ought to have known better than to tromp around in it. I sent Morales to bring O’Rourke, our oldest and nastiest sergeant, and have him and six armed guards of his choosing secure the area and start searching for the weapon – not that I expected to find it.

By this time everybody was looking relieved. They were rid of Schlacht, Delatour was in command, and the Space Service was where it belonged, running the expedition. As for us two grayback shavetails, we were now doing the only thing the Security Service was good for, investigating a crime. So they all felt better, erroneously believing that somebody trained for the job (me) had taken charge of the dirty work. Besides, the Zhukov was going into the Bubble within twelve hours, and they had work to do.

Everybody dispersed, some to bed and some to the bridge. Meantime I took Cos into the command suite, sat him down in one of the general’s comfortable chairs, and asked him quietly to tell me who’d done the killing. I mean, you got a telepath around, why not use him?

The guy was emotionally almost terminal, so before I could learn anything I had to find Schlacht’s supply of brandy – quite a supply, about 200 liters packed away in closets and cupboards, giving me a new insight into his peculiar behavior – and get Cos to swallow a finger or two of five-star in the bottom of a tumbler. He coughed and choked and I patted him on the back.

“Now come on, buddy,” I said, “tell me who killed the General.”

I would have been perfectly unsurprised if he’d named anybody on board, including me – after all, I’d had murder in my heart, and he knew it. Instead he gave me an anguished look and said, “Isn’t it obvious?”

Well, I couldn’t bash a little guy only about as long as my leg. So, restraining myself, I said, “Not to me.”

“I mean, look,” he said querulously. “The blood was still pouring out of the General when I found him. So he’d just been shot. I had to get the others up, and I saw them all waking up, and they were really waking up, I’ll swear to that. I could sense their conscious selves coming out of the fog of sleep. So they weren’t involved. But when I was hiding from the Stowaway, I picked up his thoughts. Great Tao, they were scary! No words, just emotions – waves of rage and joy, a kind of ferocious ecstasy, like a predator that’s just taken down its kill.”

“So the Stowaway did it.”

“Yes.”

“The Stowaway we can’t find.”

“Yes.”

“Did you get a look at him? I mean, clairvoyantly.”

“No. If there was an exterior image, it was overwhelmed by the stuff coming from inside him. All I could sense was what he was feeling.”

I suppose he was still too upset to read my mind, because if he had he would’ve heard me thinking along these lines: There isn’t any Stowaway. I know because I’ve looked for him. On the other hand, Cos found the body. Handling a three-point-eight is well within his physical capability, and he had time to hide the weapon because he took forever to rouse the ship. And when he was describing the Stowaway’s mood after the killing, wasn’t it so vivid because those emotions were really his own?

True, motive was a problem. I couldn’t think offhand of any reason for him to kill Schlacht. But who knew what kind of insults he’d had to endure – or for that matter, what kind of physical abuse? I didn’t have enough on him to justify an arrest, but I had enough to make me very suspicious.

I’d learned in criminal investigation classes to be real, real nice to anybody I had my eye on – disarms them, you know? So I patted Cos on the shoulder, told him to visit the dispensary and get some tranquilizers, and tentatively put him at the top of my list of suspects. Further down the list was everyone else on board, except Jesús and me. I excluded myself only because I knew I hadn’t done it, and Morales only because he occupied the upper bunk and couldn’t have left our stateroom without my hearing it.

That left nineteen officers and seventy enlisted. Any one of them might have acted alone, and almost any combination of them might have acted together. I was brooding about that when Sergeant O’Rourke hove into view. He was a thick-bodied man, so top-heavy he leaned forward when he walked, and his little gray eyes were gleaming with intelligence and ill-will toward Cos, whom he’d often described as “that *#%& Schlacht’s *#%& house pet.”

“Thought you’d be innerested in this, Lootenant,” he growled. “Found it in the Pygmy’s quarters, stuck with wax to a leg of his bunk.”

He extended a ham-sized fist whose back was covered with reddish fur and dropped into my palm a small crystal sphere containing a model of the DNA molecule.

We looked at each other, then at the icon. Then back at each other. This was the first time I’d thought of the possibility that a Ladderite might have maneuvered himself aboard the Zhukov to help rescue the other disciples in space, and it gave me, as the French say, furiously to think.

I was just beginning to toy with the idea of true believer(s) on the ship, when a robot’s cool tones instructed everybody aboard except the pilot and celestial navigator to return to their staterooms and strap themselves down. I handed the icon back to the sergeant.

“You know what to do with this?” I asked. He gave me a gold-toothed grin and said, “You go get buckled in, sir.”

He ducked back into Cos’s cabin to put the little crystal sphere back where he’d found it. No sense alarming my number one suspect unnecessarily.

This was my first time going into the Bubble, and frankly, it was kind of scary. I was already belted down to my bunk when Morales arrived, looking breathless, and climbed past me onto his own rack.

As we lay there waiting, he started to complain. “This is exactly why I didn’t join the Space Service, even though they get all the gravy and Security gets all the crap. I didn’t want to leave my old familiar universe, you know? One universe is enough for anybody.”

“I’m with you, pal. Oops, here we go.”

It felt exactly like going over the top on the hundred-meter slider ramp at an amusement park, except I didn’t have a bunch of hysterical people screaming in my ears. There was the same feeling that my internal organs had been left behind and might never catch up with the rest of me, and that the air formerly in my lungs had chased off somewhere in pursuit of my most recent meal.

The light from the ceiling fixture fractured as if a prism had passed in front of it. I had the bizarre sensation of seeing my surroundings somehow simultaneously red, green, blue, yellow, and a variety of colors I’d never seen before – greens that were also red, purples that were also black. Then everything steadied, my guts slid back into my abdominal cavity, air re-entered my lungs, and colors returned to more or less normal wavelengths. At the same time, everything stopped dead.

Absolute, total silence. The engines had shut off. The dark-energy generator which had given us that extra push was silent. We’d literally gone ballistic, moving on pure inertia – not a vibration anywhere in that whole huge ship. We were traveling at some fantastic velocity relative to our own universe through a kind of space where velocity doesn’t exist, because you can only move relative to something else, and in the Bubble there is nothing else. To sum up, we were standing still while moving at maybe a thousand times the speed of light.