by Simon Petrie
“I’ve heard enough!” Flange growled, lifting his head from the control panel. His hand hovered above an innocuous-looking pink button. “Edie, prep him for the big sleep. DO IT, or I’ll vent the antimatter, and you know what that means!”
McPhaillia looked from the engineer to Gordon, then back again. “But—but he’s a non-believer, he doesn’t belong on the voyage ……”
“Do you think,” replied Flange in a dangerously measured tone, “that I give a fuck whether he believes in the Blessed Echidna, or the Deceitful Porcupine, or whatever other ridiculous animals you people worship? I didn’t even say I wanted to take him along for the ride—or not all of it, at any rate. I want him ICED, and I DON’T want to have to ask again!”
Sixteen minutes.
“Go ahead, Flange,” Gordon replied, starting to sweat, because he wasn’t totally sure himself, not 100 percent. It felt right, and nothing else made sense. But if he was wrong about this … “Go for it, vent it. See where it gets you.”
“Are you mad?” asked Gramacek.
“D’you people know how an antimatter drive works?” Gordon asked. “Flange, I know you do, but I’m directing this to McPhaillia and Gramacek.”
“It’s annihilation, isn’t it, I think they call it?” said McPhaillia.
“Mutual destruction, matter and antimatter, total conversion into energy. And after that, if you ignore the energy, it’s almost as if they never existed. Negation, you might say. Never existed …”
Fifteen minutes.
“Get on with it,” Flange growled, though it was no longer clear who he was speaking to.
“The thing is, though the Church didn’t itself know how to build an antimatter-drive spaceship, it did know how much it cost. At least, that’s what I’m guessing. The cost of antimatter for a one-way trip was merely prohibitive; but the cost for a return trip, that was impossible. So Flange only budgeted for a one-way trip.”
“But you said he was planning a return trip,” McPhaillia protested.
“Yes, I reckon he was. Thing is, he only budgeted for a one-way trip’s worth of antimatter, ’cause he knew that’s all the Church could afford—but he didn’t purchase any antimatter. My guess is, if you open up those external tanks, you’ll just find conventional rocket fuel, for in-system manoeuvring; and somewhere, hidden amongst those, there’ll be a standard hyperspace drive. Much, much less expensive.”
“Hyperspace? But our souls—” Gramacek turned accusingly to Flange, but McPhaillia held him back.
“What makes you so sure,” Flange asked, finger hovering above the button, “there isn’t any antimatter?”
“You put the tanks around the outside,” Gordon replied. “An old reference book my handheld found for me explained it, why you never put anti-tanks on an STL spaceship’s periphery. Because all it takes is one interstellar dust grain, travelling at a few percent of lightspeed relative to you, to pierce that tank, and it’s all over. No containment. No spaceship. You put the tanks on the outside, you’ll hit plenty of dust grains on a three-hundred-year voyage. But if the tanks are towards the centre of the ship, those dust grains will only impact on the living quarters, and they’re much better able to cope with pinhole breaches, a standard patch will fix it. You weren’t bothered with such details, because you knew the ship wasn’t spending any significant length of time in transit.”
“Rusty. Is this true?” McPhaillia asked, as ostensibly horrified as though she’d just found him naked in the chapel with a blow-up dolphin and a bucket of jellied eels.
Twelve minutes.
“Close,” Flange confessed. “I only sourced a kilo of the stuff, so there’d be enough to show up on ship’s diagnostics.” His finger stayed poised against the pink button, and nobody moved to pull him away.
A kilogram of antimatter was still more than adequate to obliterate the Dart of Harkness, the Skytop Plaza and its other attendant spacecraft, and a great deal of the tethering space elevator.
“You’re bluffing,” Gordon said, voice quavering.
“Try me,” said Flange. “Edie. Skip. If one of you doesn’t agree to ice that bastard by the time I count ten, I’m pressing this! Don’t think I won’t! The antimatter’s set to blow, anyway, if we don’t launch on schedule.” He began counting off.
“You’re bluffing,” Gordon repeated.
McPhaillia stared at Gordon, then at Gramacek, then at Flange.
“Stop,” pleaded Gordon, on eight. “I’ll go. You win.”
“I’ll do him,” McPhaillia said. “But Rusty, for heaven’s sakes …”
“You too, Gramacek. Don’t want him giving us the slip, do we? Do him, then ice yourselves. Better move it, you’ve only got nine minutes!”
* * *
They paced the corridor towards the clinic. Gordon’s mind raced ahead. “You realise, he won’t let any of us live? He’ll space our caskets, first chance. With us out of the way, his secret still holds, at least aboard the ship.” The others didn’t answer.
How long did it take to get a police cruiser out here? The shuttle trip had been fifteen minutes, and a cruiser could certainly halve that. It’d been almost thirty minutes, now, since he’d transmitted to HQ. They should be here by now. But they weren’t, so far as he could tell. How much longer? Five minutes? Were they even coming?
Maybe not.
He had to escape, before they reached the clinic. “Even if he lets you two live, what about your souls? The moment you go through hyperspace …” He was babbling now, clutching at straws.
“Been having me some doubts about that,” grumbled Gramacek, strengthening his hold on Gordon’s forearm.
Great. Agnosticism, at a time like this. “Sister McPhaillia? Edie? Are you just going to let him get away with this?”
“Souls are one thing, lives are another. We can probably find some pathway to purify ourselves, if we’re given long enough.”
“He’s not going to let you live,” Gordon argued.
“What choice do we—”
The corridor jolted, the lights died. After a couple of seconds, the dim pink emergency lighting flickered on.
The corridor was still intact.
“That weren’t an antimatter blast,” said Gramacek. “But what …?”
Gordon shook free, and started running back down the corridor. “Hey,” complained McPhaillia. “We’re supposed to …” She set off in pursuit. Gramacek chased them both.
* * *
Flange was doubled up in agony, rolling on the cramped floor of the control cabin and swearing like a plumber’s mate. Gordon thought he could see what had happened. The engineer had caught his wrist a nasty knock on the edge of the control panel.
Which wouldn’t have been so bad, except for the event which had immediately preceded it. Cassie’s sudden fillip of thrust had knocked the melon/dewar off its precarious balance, copiously tipping liquid nitrogen over the controls … and over Flange’s outstretched hand and wrist.
McPhaillia yelled for Gramacek to bring the nearest first-aid kit, while she tended to the shattered, snap-frozen stump of Flange’s forearm. It was cold-cauterised for now, but that wouldn’t last. And Gordon could only imagine the pain of it …
“Cassie?” Gordon asked, trying not to look at the dispersed fragments of Flange’s hand, nor to listen to the engineer’s incoherent, anguished moans as McPhaillia administered a sedative. The medic had the situation under control: he backed out of the control room, into the corridor. “Cassie?” he repeated. “Status?”
“Antimatter secure, no immediate danger. I’ve recircuited the controls so it’s completely isolated—in fact I did that several days ago, as soon as it was transferred onboard,” she replied, from somewhere off to his side. “I suppose you’re wondering, though, why I went along with it?”
“Yes. I have my suspicions, but …”
“I hoped not to disappoint the passengers. Three thousand people with a lot of expectation, a lot of hope for this voyage, I didn’t want to je
opardise that. First Law. Even with the Captain dead, it seemed best to go ahead with it. And that’s why I didn’t assist you: it wasn’t so much to avoid punishment for Flange, it was so the voyage could still go ahead, because that seemed best for the passengers. A fairly complicated calculation in combinatorial emotiometrics, but I won’t bore you with the details. But then the equation changed, and I had to act.”
“Was it my imminent death that tipped the scales?” Gordon asked. “Or McPhaillia’s? Gramacek’s?”
“None of those. Greatest good for the greatest number; I couldn’t be sure any of those deaths would actually occur. There was potential, but it still came out balanced, and there was the likelihood pain would need to be inflicted on Flange to stop him. But no, what shifted the fulcrum, in the end, was the souls.”
“Souls? Cassie, are you a believer?”
“No, not at all, Mr. Mamon. But you don’t get to spend all those years around these people without something rubbing off on you. Call it a sort of electronic empathy, I suppose. I am, after all, programmed to act in accordance with the Church’s teachings, when those are not inconsistent with logically-directed outcomes. Like for instance, d’you know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? I can show you my working on that one …”
“Another time, maybe.”
“Mr. Mamon,” Cassie continued, “what’s going to happen to me?”
Gordon was saved from answering by Gramacek’s return. “Need a hand?” he asked, moving through to the control room.
* * *
Fairdig’s wasn’t noted for its breakfasts; but it would have to do, thought Gordon, decanting himself from the Pixie Bust back into the welcome familiarity of shuttle bay 2B. In a few hours, he was due to clock on for Skyward 270’s descent-ascent cycle: there’d just be time for breakfast, and a too-short nap, before he turned up for duty again. His dinner reservation would have to be rescheduled for when he was next topside, in four days’ time. He put in a quick call to Judy Sargent, the desk officer at Hotel Policing, to check that his report had arrived satisfactorily, and to ask whether the force had any other debilitating social evenings planned for the foreseeable future. He hoped not to be topside the next time …
He hated crime work; the type of detection he preferred involved the rearrangement and elucidation of words, to fit within carefully-ordered racks of small square spaces. Nonetheless, he felt secretly pleased at the investigation’s outcome, from a number of perspectives. Not only had he apprehended a murderous, amoral embezzler—the Blessed Echidnans would likely require quite some time to track down the hiding places that Flange had arranged for his ill-gotten gains—but he’d also ensured a temporary inrush of hotel guests, three thousand or so in total, in sharp contrast to the customary slow business which the hotel would now normally be experiencing. Some of the Echidnans would likely stay on for a month or more, while they sought to arrange slower-than-light travel to Shangvanatopia. Already there were rumours of a developing bidding war between TransGalactic Freight, Andromeda Spaceways, and Chastity Cosmic, all courting the Echidnans’ lucrative STL flight business. It would be interesting, Gordon thought, to see who offered the best, or the slowest, deal …
He felt no unease at Flange’s fate. Gordon didn’t like murderers, any more than he liked people who thought orange and purple went together, and Flange deserved everything the Church, and the police, could throw at him. No, the one he almost felt sorry for was Cassie, stripped of her command and archived while the authorities tried to decide what to do with her. True, she’d obstructed him, had actively misled him, and had sought to derail a criminal investigation; but at the end she’d stopped Flange, when nobody else had found a way.
Plus, she’d got Gordon’s name right; and that counted for something, in his book.
The Fall Guy
(first published in Masques, ed. Gillian Polack & Scott Hopkins, CSFG, 2010)
Gordon Mamon strained to make sense of the tile-cam footage of the murder. But several aspects refused to tally, even after five viewings. The assailant purposefully approached his (or her) victim. O’Meara, engrossed in the vista, showed no acknowledgement of the intruder behind him. Then the mystery perp pushed the victim—no minor feat, all considered—with enough force to send him through the full-length plastiglass viewing window, to his death. The tile’s playback ended in a wash of pixellated whiteout as the killer turned his laser pistol on the camera.
Gordon downloaded the footage to his handheld and switched the tile off. Telemetry from the observation deck’s other four tile-cams had been identical except for viewing angle, and for the time elapsing before laser-induced overload.
Gordon moved his scrutiny to the massive hole in the plastiglass wall. He hoped the transparent emergency shielding was genuinely airtight. He had no wish to follow O’Meara.
There was, he mused, your regular, common or garden defenestration; and there was the over-the-top, all-stops-out, no-expense-spared variety. What you might call ‘defenestration with extreme prejudice’. Gordon Mamon (overworked lift operator, first-aid officer, janitor, dishwasher, room service attendant and part-time hotel detective of the Skyward Suites 270) strongly suspected he was investigating an example of the latter classification of window-mediated murder.
He was starting to feel like the doorman of some sick Mile-High Club for vicious killers. But even putting aside his misgivings at having come into close proximity with death by violence for the third time in three months, Gordon had to wonder about the assailant’s mentality. To push someone out a window to their death was distasteful enough. But when the window was effectively several million storeys up, on the top floor of a descending space elevator/hotel module, it was something else again.
There were two particularly upsetting aspects to the murder. First, Gordon knew the victim personally. Second, due to the complexities of near-geostationary orbital mechanics, he had no notion whatsoever of the direction in which he should be seeking the corpse. One hour and counting, and the feasible volume of space was growing disconcertingly large.
As any detective can confirm, solving a murder usually pivots around discovery of a corpse. It looks bad to claim a homicide without the provision of the victim’s body, or at least some corporeal remains. A severed head, say, a mangled torso, or, in extremis, a majority shareholding in some vital internal organ. In the present case, there should by rights have been more than the usual quantum of corporeality—the last time Gordon had seen One Ton O’Meara alive, he’d thought the famed Mexican-Irish sumo wrestler looked like five Elvises jammed into the one human frame—but of identifiable remains there were none. Explosive depressurisation had expelled O’Meara’s body. Also absent were the window’s plastiglass fragments, most of the observation deck’s original air supply and (with two notable exceptions) all items of material evidence.
The murderer’s vacuum-suit was crumpled, empty, on the obs deck floor. A laser pistol lay alongside. A nearby ventilation duct’s access panel hung open, askew. Gordon had already ordered the guests’ suite doors to be maximum-security locked, with the guests corralled into the ground floor beyond the reach of this set of ducts. But even believing that the assailant was nominally confined, Gordon felt monumentally uneasy. He’d been a Skyward’s employee too long to have faith in the elevator-hotel’s structural robustness. The cars were vacuum-resistant, but internal divisions were flimsy (notoriously so, in the case of the honeymoon suite). Thin plastiminium wall, floor, and ceiling panels conferred the illusion of privacy; they wouldn’t obstruct a determined murderer.
And the crime didn’t feel right. Not that murder ever felt right, unless you were fighting in self-defence, or had just come face-to-face with the soulless reprobate who’d for the past year been deluging your handheld with seventy misspelled messages a day offering their 150%-guaranteed-effective masculinity-enhancing surgical prowess. Lately with illustrations, and once with a let’s-leave-absolutely-nothing-to-the-imagination auto-playing vid clip. In 3
D. Gordon shuddered, returning to the present with a grimace. Why the window-push?
The attributes—the murder, the cameras’ obliteration, the killer’s subsequent tidy disappearance—spoke of premeditation. But why destroy the detectors after the murder, rather than before? Why choose such a physically demanding and dangerous method of killing, when the laser pistol could have discharged death as effortlessly as it had dispatched the tile-cam CCDs? How had the perp smuggled the laser through the hotel’s security cordon?
And why O’Meara? The man wouldn’t hurt a fly, wouldn’t intentionally hurt anyone who wasn’t at least one hundred and fifty kilos and clad only in a sweaty white bedsheet origami’d into an oversized nappy. (And the vac-suit was much too small to have encased an aggrieved sumo victim. So. Not revenge, then.)
His handheld beeped. Belle.
“Gordon here. Any news?”
“Just that we’re all gathered in the lobby, as you instructed.” The voice of Belle Hopp (Skyward 270’s receptionist, concierge, counsellor and childcare attendant) betrayed the strain she was under, striving for composure in the face of nebulous danger. “Uh—Gord—you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Sure as I ever am,” he replied. “I need to check out the ventilation shafts, looks like the escape route. Think we’ve got him—or her—cornered.”
“That’s a good idea?”
“No,” he admitted. “But we’ve got to keep the guests safe.” With a seventh-wave surge, it struck him that he’d lost O’Meara, had let the big man down. For the second time now, a murderer had tarnished Skyward 270, his module, and this time had claimed the life of someone Gordon had to say was more than just a guest.
