Hearts Akilter

by Catherine E. McLean

  “Yeah, it does, but why do you want a spacer?”

  “If it’s a match, I can put it in the explosive and make it look like the bomb is still alive.”

  “Why do that?”

  “Didn’t you say you didn’t want the person who planted the bomb to know you found it?”

  “Right. I did. She mustn’t find out.”

  “She?”

  Marlee’s cheeks flushed crimson.

  Well, well, well. Marlee hadn’t meant to reveal that, had she? So, could he guilt trip her into revealing the woman’s name?

  “Look, Marlene,” he said, “we don’t need any bomber wreaking havoc on the station or creating a panic, now do we?”

  “No.”

  “You can trust me. Tell me, who planted the bomb?”

  Marlee raked both hands through her hair, pushing wisps and bangs over her ears, muttering, “Skom, skom, skom.” She suddenly stilled and made eye contact with him. “Look, Major, I’m pretty sure she might have done it, but I’m not absolutely positive. What if I’m wrong?”

  She was right. False accusations could do more damage than a bomb. “Okay, point taken. Still—”

  “Did that Yokovnin, the bomb guy, use robots to deliver his bombs?”

  “No. He never used a robot.”

  “Then why Henry? It doesn’t make sense to me why anyone would plant a bomb in a med-bot, one who is based solely in sickbay.”

  That simple logic hit home.

  “You’re right. The placement and amount of the explosive makes it as effective as a hand grenade. There would be a lot of shrapnel at close range, but it wouldn’t do more than a room’s worth of damage.”

  Is that what his killer had in mind with the demo that had gone off prematurely? Send him to sickbay, then detonate Henry?

  No, wait a minute. There had been plenty of opportunities to detonate Henry and kill him. So, if he weren’t the target, who was? And—“Marlene, even if someone important ended up in sickbay, reprogramming Henry to deliver an overdose of something is a better way to kill them, not a bomb.”

  “Then why the bomb?”

  Deacon shook his head. “I don’t know.” Another wave of queasiness sloshed about his gut followed by the walls of the incinerator pot waffling.

  Was he about to faint? He better sit down, put his head between his knees. He took two steps and plopped onto the task chair’s seat.

  “Major?” Marlee said. “You look kinda pale. Are you okay?”

  Everything swirled before him, a dizzying funnel of streaked images which soon became a blackness that smothered him.

  ****

  The light came on, followed by a vibrating hum alerting Marlee that Major Black had sat up and set off one of the interior sensors she’d stuck to the wall next to him.

  A couple of blinks and she focused on the digital clock she’d built into the closet door. Seeing the 06:00:38, she stifled a groan. Skom. What was he doing waking so early?

  She touched the control for the door to open and the lights to come up. As the door slid aside, a surge of cold air from her quarters and the odor of gel paint smacked her in the face. She ignored the cold and hit the autozipper on her sleepsack, which allowed her to slip her feet out and over the closet shelf’s edge. Once her bootied feet hit the deck, she took a step back. Peering down, she found the major sitting with his back against the front wall.

  His gaze started at her feet and rose to stop at her breasts.

  What had she been thinking when she donned the pink, fuzzy sleepsuit? Oh, right. Warm knit. Never mind said knit hugged every curve she had and effectively outlined her modest breasts.

  Not to panic. The major was just a man, and men were hardwired to ogle women’s breasts. But enough.

  She grabbed her sleepsack and bundled the silken, quilted fabric about herself to keep warm.

  He smiled up at her. “Hi, Marlene.”

  “You were supposed to be out for the count until this afternoon.”

  His smile vanished. “Really? What time is it?”

  “0600 and counting.”

  A smile curled at the corner of his lips. “Strange, I don’t feel tired.”

  He sounded much too cheery and very wide awake.

  The short list of questions Henry said to ask the major when he woke roused her to more wakefulness. “How are you feeling? Any dizziness? Do you feel like puking?”

  A frown etched his forehead, as if he were doing a check of his body.

  She yawned and waited.

  He met her gaze with a smile and a friendly tone of voice. “I feel fine. So, where am I? Why am I on a skiff down here, on the decking?” He momentarily looked above his head. “Is that a bulkhead?”

  “You’re inside my closet.” She readjusted the sleepsack and sat on the floor. A second later, she fought back a yawn.

  “You look tired,” he said.

  “I’m exhausted. I’ve had double shifts for the past week, and Henry’s bomb to deal with. Plus I had to traipse about to four beer joints last night to find you.” She shook her head trying to dispel the fatigue. “Henry was positive you would sleep until late this afternoon, but no, you’re wide awake!”

  He smiled anew. “My apologies, sweetheart.”

  He didn’t sound apologetic.

  “I’m not your sweetheart.”

  His smile spread into a grin. “Okay.”

  She growled in her throat, trying to shove aside her ire. “Look, life has been trying of late.”

  The grin faded. “I’m sorry to add to your strife.”

  That sounded sincere.

  She yawned, this time loudly, and closed her eyes. Oh, per chance to drift back to the silence of sleep.

  “Marlene, why is it freezing in here?”

  “They’re upgrading the heat-feeder lines on this deck so everything’s off. The work should be done in a week or so. FYI, sixty degrees is not freezing.”

  “Is this another of your hideouts where you keep kidnapped bomb experts?”

  She opened her eyes and tried to glare at him. She could make the implant’s lenses do that. But the effect was obviously lost on the major. “No, these are my quarters.”

  He glanced about the now well-lit room behind her with its bare peach colored walls. His nostrils flared, and she heard his short intakes of air.

  “Sniffing? Really, Major? How uncouth and impolite.”

  “I can’t ID the perfume.”

  “It’s not perfume, you jackass. The place has been repainted, re-floored.”

  “You’re redecorating your quarters?”

  “They wouldn’t assign me new ones.”

  “Why would you want new quarters?”

  Because she and Roger had sex just about everywhere in her quarters except the closet. And before she could stop herself, the words spilled out, along with the bitterness. “So I don’t have to be constantly reminded of my stupidity!”

  He cocked his head, studying her. Quietly he entreated, “What did you do?”

  Skom, her brain was addled. “Never mind.”

  “People botch jobs all the time. Mistakes happen.”

  He thought she’d done something wrong on the job! “No, it wasn’t like that. Oh, skom, what the hell. You’ll hear the gossip sooner or later about my torrid affair with the widower.”

  He sat up a little straighter, no expression on his face. No condemnation. No pitiful shake of his head.

  “Look, Roger wanted sex, not a real relationship, and certainly nothing permanent.” She heaved a sigh, letting go the bitterness. What she wouldn’t give for a man who could love and understand her.

  “So, you feel duped by the guy?”

  “No, I feel stupid, and I hate people laughing at my stupidity and snickering behind my back. Especially my boss.”

  “Shit happens.” He grinned. “Peach is a nice color.”

  So, he was changing the subject, was he? “Henry chose it.”

  “Marlene, why am I here, on the floor, in y
our closet?”

  “It seemed like a safe place.”

  “Why do you sleep in the closet?”

  “It’s comfy. Warm. Quiet.”

  Something flashed in the depths of his eyes. “Just how long have you been sleeping in your closet?”

  “Awhile.”

  “Com’on, give, how long?”

  She felt heat seep across her cheeks. “Maybe four or five months.”

  “And you’re just now getting around to redecorating?”

  “Sort of. It took some time to get over Roger and get rid of everything that reminded me of him.”

  “Okay, that makes sense, but what doesn’t make sense is why I’m here.”

  “You passed out.”

  Again a frown, this time a very deep-furrowed one of concentration that pulled his eyebrows almost to the bridge of his nose. “I—I recall removing a detonator…a bomb inside Henry.” The frown vanished. “I felt queasy. DW never did that to me before.”

  “The whiskey didn’t. Brace yourself and don’t panic.”

  One eyebrow quirked up. “I’m braced, and I don’t panic.”

  “You were poisoned.”

  He blinked, his complexion ebbing to an ash-gray. “What are you talking about?”

  “You passed out because you were poisoned.”

  “From the liquor I drank in combination with the meds I’m on?”

  “No. Look, when you passed out, Henry thoroughly scanned your vitals. He took and analyzed both a sweat and a blood sample. That’s how he found the poison.”

  “How was I poisoned?”

  She pointed to his injured forearm. “The poison was mixed with the meds in the atomizer, the one that sprays the wound-coating over your burns. The poison is absorbed through the skin.”

  His face paled. He eyed his injured arm and the cylinder encasing it. “Are you sure?”

  “Henry is positive about the poison. He figured out the highest concentration was on your wound. It seemed prudent to remove the casing. When I magnified the med vial, I found a pinprick hole.” She raised her hand and stopped him from interrupting. “Yes, the vials get filled by injection, but there’s another seal put on after filling it, so nothing leaks back.”

  “You’re saying the capping seal was pierced?”

  She nodded. “I thought maybe it was a reused cap, they do reuse them. To be sure, I ran one of my fine-wire tester points into the hole.”

  “And it went all the way through?”

  She nodded again. “If it’s any consolation, Henry said you might not have passed out so soon if you hadn’t been drinking. But he was more certain it was the adrenalin rush you got from working on the bomb that really accelerated the poison’s affect.”

  “Why didn’t you rush me to sickbay?”

  She scowled her best at him. “Idiot. Henry and you are in the same boat.”

  “I’m not an idiot, and what do you mean by me and Henry being in the same boat?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Someone is trying to kill both of you!” She took in a ragged breath, the cold air invigorating.

  He stared at his arm and watched the atomizer coat his burns. “Please tell me Henry got rid of the poison in this thing?”

  “Yes and no.”

  He glared at her, his voice quietly demanding, “What does that mean?”

  “We couldn’t risk taking you to sickbay for fear the person poisoning you would find out. And we didn’t want the bomber to get wind that we knew you and suspect we’d discovered the bomb. We couldn’t even go to your quarters to fetch one of your atomizer refills—which Henry said you had—because if we put in a query for your residence, that would be a matter of record and traced back to me.” She took in a replenishing breath. “Then Henry deduced that if someone wanted to poison you, they would taint all your vials. And neither of us wanted to report that to the CMO because he was regulation bound to report it to security.”

  He nodded. “So where did this refill come from?”

  “Me. That’s one of mine. A couple months ago, my calf got singed by a berserk welder bot. Henry said my vial will do you for a day and a half. Plenty of time.”

  “For what?”

  “Oh, how easily they forget.”

  He scowled at her.

  “Henry still has the explosive inside him, minus the detonator disk you took out of him.”

  “Oh, that. Right. So, what did you do with the disk?”

  “It’s at the other end of the closet, surrounded by fifteen centimeters of leaded plastisteel. I hope that’s enough to contain it if it blows.”

  “It’s more than enough.”

  She yawned. “You know you were right.”

  “About what?”

  “TS4 disks. On my way back from returning your gear, I stopped at my shop and picked up a few. I even put the disk-detonator under my scopes and two different scanner units. Found the thing’s power unit is a VL47X, one anyone can buy. They abound in kid’s mechatronic toys.”

  “I don’t suppose you have a VL47X lying about?”

  “I have a couple dozen. And before you go asking, I pulled everything I figured matched or could be used as the detonator’s innards so you can create a nice fake.”

  “You took the housing apart?”

  “No! I figured there might be some kind of tampering device that would blow the thing up in my face. Once burned, twice shy.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She heaved a sigh. Better he heard it from her than scuttlebutt. “Another case of my stupidity.”

  “Marlee, I don’t think you’re stupid.”

  She shrugged. “Out of curiosity, I took a supposedly defunct power unit apart. The thing had some power left and corroded failsafes. The unit exploded. The shrapnel cost me both eyes.”

  His facial expression softened as did the tone of his voice. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Yeah. Well, back to business. You’re the expert. You need to examine that detonator, not me. I’ve provided you with enough material. You can use my personal tool box, which is in the closet. Once you create the fake detonator, you can put it in Henry.”

  “Speaking of Henry, where is the little guy?”

  “On duty in ER. He’ll be back this afternoon.”

  “Is that wise?”

  She scowled her best at him. “Don’t you think it would look a little odd if he didn’t show up for work?”

  A pink hue wafted over his cheekbones. “Sorry. What if—”

  “The bomber pushes the button and no bomb goes off?”

  He nodded, and smiled. “You’ve covered that aspect, haven’t you?”

  “Henry and I talked things over. We agreed he should eavesdrop on conversations and be alert for anything that might help identify who or what the bomb is meant for.”

  “By the time he makes such a deduction, it may be too late.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I told him if anything seemed panic-worthy, he should conveniently have a mechanical problem.”

  “You rigged something in him to fail?”

  “More than one, and I assure you the CMO or the Chief Nurse will send Henry down to me.”

  “And not GSSU?”

  “Can’t have him going there.”

  “Why not? He comes under their domain.”

  “For software, not hardware, and…”

  A look of realization raced over his face. “The woman you think planted the bomb works for GSSU.”

  She’d said way too much. Then again, he’d keep badgering her for a name. Could she trust him? Tell him?

  What if it wasn’t Woodridge?

  “Marlee, you can’t let her get away with this.”

  That was for sure. “Look, I can’t be positive. If I accuse her without solid proof, I’ll be the stupid fool.”

  “Okay, understood, but can you tell me why you suspect her and not someone else in GSSU?”

  “It’s a deduction based on the timetable of updates and repairs to Henry, and in
particular, the onset of his heart attacks.”

  “Look, Marlee—”

  “Oh, skom, and to hell with it. You’re right. Too much is at stake, and it’s not like I won’t ever be laughed at again.” Marlee took a fortifying breath. “I think it’s Woodridge.”

  The shocked look on his face said he’d been punched in the gut. “JJ?”

  “Oh, gawd. You know her?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  The way he said yes had Marlee blurting out, “Please tell me you’re not sleeping with her?”

  He didn’t reply, but his cheeks flushed as crimson as a fireball.

  “Skom, skom, skom. You are sleeping with her!”

  “No. Years ago. Not here. It’s not what you think.”

  “And what am I thinking?”

  “That I’m like most men who think with their pecker instead of their brain.”

  “Especially if a svelte blond as beautiful as Woodridge is around.”

  His voice held a warning. “I’m not Roger.”

  “Let’s leave Roger out of this.”

  “All right.” His voice became calm and even. “JJ and I met in Guardian boot camp. We had a relationship for a while. Yes, we met a couple times after I arrived on Kifel, but she’s always been career oriented. She’s planning to become the next Chief of Operations here at Kifel. We are now only friends.”

  “Maybe she wants her rivals dead.”

  “No, not JJ. No way. She’s not a killer. She’s smart and savvy, a tech through and through.”

  Marlee crossed her arms over her chest, half hugging herself, half trying to look unfazed by his praise of Woodridge.

  The sleepsack began sliding off her shoulders.

  So much for unfazed.

  She reset the sleepsack.

  “Look, Marlee—”

  “No. You look. Have you forgotten someone put a bomb in Henry? That someone tried to poison you? What if they’re the same person? What if it is Woodridge?”

  “Not possible.”

  “Are you blinded by your feelings for her?”

  “No. Let’s look at this rationally. When did Henry first have his so-called heart attack?”

  “He said they began twelve days ago.”

  “Not five days ago?”

  “No, why?”

  “Because five days ago my arm was fried. I’ve been to sickbay numerous times, and Henry never blew up. So, I’m not likely the bomb’s target, but…”