Enigma

by C. F. Bentley

“On my way. Don’t go anywhere without an escort. You or the girls.”

  “My information will wait if you’re busy.”

  “I’m on my way back anyway. I’ve got to change clothes.” Shouts in the background nearly drowned out his words. “Get all that evidence to Harmony Military. They’ve got a forensics expert and lab facilities,” he called into the distance. “Yeah, I know they’re paranoid. In this case I’m glad of it.”

  Sissy did not like the sound of that. “I’m in your office, Jake,” she said, wondering if she truly should let him get on with his work.

  “I guessed as much for you to come through on this channel. Mara’s the only other one authorized to use it.”

  She basked a moment in the quiet intimacy of his tone.

  “I’ll be there as soon as the trams allow. Don’t go anywhere. I’m locking the doors to all but my key.”

  She paced, more than a little afraid at his tone and the questions he left unanswered.

  And then he was there, in the same room with her, with a special smile he reserved just for her.

  She grew warm all over.

  Then she saw the blood on his uniform.

  “Now what is so important you could not wait until this evening, or trust over the comm lines?” he asked, touching her shoulder as he perched on the edge of his desk, arms folded, long legs stretched out in front of him.

  “I . . .” Was discussing the vast loneliness of the Squids so very important? She ducked her head blushing, seeking desperately for something else to talk about. “I spoke with Adrial this morning. Right after we left the new crew.” Before she’d read the loving intimacy of two aliens, the last of their kind, who had loved each other completely for many, many decades. She wanted that same level of closeness with Jake. Ached to have him at her side, sharing her thoughts and dreams as well as her body.

  She blushed, remembering how fulfilled she’d felt during her waking dream of a Maril on Harmony with new babies that completed a sacred breeding ritual.

  “And?”

  “Today Adrial seemed almost coherent. At least I think she parted with a few facts beyond her wandering thoughts about Gods and visions and angels.”

  “Really? Did you know that on ancient Earth she’d have been honored as a mad prophet?”

  “Mad is the operative word here. I gather that she has been so mistreated that her only solace is in this quest for spirituality. But she keeps making the search more important than finding any stillness within her to allow the Gods to speak to her.” She shuddered at her own waking dream. That was almost too much information from the Gods.

  Her mind flashed to a stone ledge, candles and incense, a small fire behind which priests stood while a man made careful and gentle love with her. A part of her had been there with the Maril couple who had probably died at human hands five centuries before.

  “Hmmm. Do you suppose that if Adrial ever allowed herself to be still, the memories are too painful to face?” Jake mused.

  He didn’t know how Sissy’s thoughts had wandered, and she didn’t want him to know. Yet.

  “I believe so,” she replied, yanking her thoughts back to the spoken topic.

  “What did she tell you?”

  Sissy recounted her last interview with Adrial.

  “I’ll set up a remote monitor while she sleeps, see if we can catch this phantom.” Jake made a note on his desktop screen. “He seems our most likely suspect in the death of Labby, but . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Mr. Labyrinthe is dead?” Blood rushed away from Sissy’s head. So that was why Jake’s uniform was so badly stained.

  “Doc Halliday tells me Labby was dead several hours when your girls, backed up by Penelope’s girls, found Mac staring at his dead body,” he said sternly.

  Sissy gasped in dismay, her hand covering her mouth as she choked away the need to retch. “They’ll have nightmares.”

  “What I can’t understand is why would Mac be standing in front of the body, acting shocked, if he was the murderer?” Jake moved about restlessly, tugging at the front buttons of his uniform blouse.

  “If Mac risked himself to save Adrial, I do not think him capable of cold-blooded murder,” Sissy mused.

  Jake paused in stripping off his shirt and moved into a smaller room next to the office, leaving the door open. “Good point. I’ll show you the recording of when he turned her over to the medics.”

  He emerged a moment later in a clean black uniform, still stuffing tools and weapons into the pockets. “Here, watch this.” He touched an icon on his desk.

  Flat images came to life in the polished surface. Sissy watched for several moments.

  “Jake, can you repeat this?”

  “Sure. I’ve looked at it several times because Mara thought it important. Something is wrong. I just can’t figure it out.”

  Once more Sissy watched as the armed men confronted the alien being called Mac. They exchanged words. The guards threatened Mac. Adrial whispered something. Mac placed her on the gurney.

  “There. Stop it there.” Sissy pointed at the scene.

  Jake reached around from behind her and hastily touched another icon. The images froze in place.

  “Back it up a bit.”

  Jake obeyed.

  “Stop.” The images froze again.

  “What am I looking at?” Jake asked peering over her shoulder, close enough that his body heat covered her entire back.

  “Do you see how tenderly he carries her? How gently he puts her down? He almost kisses her forehead. That is not a murderous creature.”

  “Some of the worst mass murderers in our history have loved their mothers just as tenderly.”

  “Adrial is not his mother. She is a virtual stranger.”

  “You’re right. I wonder if the forensics tech has found anything. Surface evidence gathering gave us precious little. Whoever murdered Labby left no DNA, no fingerprints, no trace at all. My gut instinct tells me that Mac wanted to humiliate his half brother, not murder him. We have to wait while the techs process what little information they found.”

  “I hope it is not too long. I shall prepare a Grief Blessing for him.”

  “I doubt he will have any mourners. Not even Mac will show up. Did you know that their mother had twenty-six children, each by a different father from a different species?”

  Sissy shook her head, appalled and horribly fascinated by such a bizarre concept. Then she remembered the waking dream. During her dream of the Maril on Harmony, she’d felt completely fulfilled by the concept of a public breeding ritual. The Maril who had come to Harmony before the humans were not all mystics and priests. The ones who came for a short time and left were couples ready to have children.

  She blushed and was glad Jake stood behind her and could not see her embarrassment.

  “Labby told me that the Labyrinthe race was on the verge of extinction, couldn’t breed among themselves anymore,” Jake continued. “So they began taking spouses among other species. After a couple dozen generations it looks as though they can start breeding back with their own kind again. The workers are part of that experiment. A lot of them have subnormal intelligence.” He mused a bit more on the information gleaned from Labyrinthe Seven while he paced the office restlessly. Most of the science of DNA breakdown and blending with other species to find a stable continuation of a people and culture went over Sissy’s head.

  And yet a few of the phrases rang a chord. Something about how easily she fit into a Maril body in the visions Harmony sent her made her wonder. She knew that the Maril had considered Harmony a spiritual outpost when humans first arrived. A place where conception of a child was a sacred ritual. Sissy’s ancestors had murdered them one and all out of fear or loathing. She needed to think about it for a while.

  The Squid People had suffered extinction. She needed to think about the whys of that before sharing her thoughts as well.

  “You said before that Adrial comes from Amity? Where the hell is that?” Jake sho
ok his head in puzzlement. Then he moved behind her again and brought up new screens on his computer. He set it to searching.

  “I have never heard of such a place,” Sissy admitted. “But then, until I came here, I’d never heard of nine tenths of the worlds inhabited by humans.” She relinquished the chair to him and stepped behind him, peering over his shoulder. His fingers moved across the screens, highlighting this, discarding that.

  “I need help with this.” Jake leaned back in his chair, putting his face very near her arm.

  She held her breath, not daring to hope he’d lean that extra inch to the right and rest against her.

  With a deep inhale, he resumed his work on the screen, touching a comm button on the desktop, repeatedly. Finally he spoke. “Pammy, I’m shooting you some data. Will you run it through your search engines for me? Please.” The last came as an afterthought. “She’s not answering. Who knows when she’ll listen to her messages.”

  “I’ll leave you to your work,” Sissy said reluctantly. Her feet remained firmly in place. “You might also send the information to Doc Halliday. She seems to have access to a lot of strange files.”

  “Do you have to go? I don’t want you wandering about alone until we find the murderer, whether it’s Mac or some unknown.”

  “I should go to my girls. They will be traumatized at finding a dead body.”

  “They seemed fine to me when we came to investigate. They all bounded away, more excited than troubled.”

  “In that case, I can stay for a while yet.” She smiled, not caring if he was reluctant to let her go because he feared for her or because he was reluctant to let her go. Or just needed a respite from his duties.

  “Good. I haven’t eaten all day, barely had time for a piece of toast on the fly for breakfast. Join me. Please.” He wandered toward his private sitting room adjacent to the office and conference room.

  “I ate with the girls, before . . . before they went off exploring and found . . .” She swallowed her horror at Mr. Labyrinthe’s death. Execution. “I should go to them.”

  “Penelope is with them all. So is Gil. They’re dealing with it. Stay. Please. I . . . I need someone to distract me from all this unpleasantness.”

  “I’ll have a cup of tea while you eat. Then I must get back to my girls.”

  “You can have coffee if you want.” He flashed her a conspiratorial grin.

  “Harmony’s founders had reasons for leaving that addictive drug behind on Earth.” She’d tried the bitter brew once at Jake’s insistence and spat it out. Then he’d added cream and sugar, and she’d been lost, craving the rush of energy and good feelings as well as the rich taste at every turn.

  “They left coffee behind as well as chocolate because they wanted complete control over the minds of their subjects, instead of allowing the lower castes to daydream about their next fix,” Jake chuckled.

  “When you put it that way, perhaps I owe it to the eventual breakup of the caste system to have coffee with you. Or better yet, some hot chocolate?” She looked up at him hopefully.

  “Your wish is my command.” He bowed formally, grinning widely. “While I eat, I’ll tell you about our intercept of the latest pirate newscast out of Harmony City. Did you know that Laud Gregor was booed the last time he made a public appearance?”

  “No,” she gasped, appalled at such a display of disrespect for the office of High Priest, even if Laud Gregor’s shortsighted view of the best path for the Harmonite Empire had earned him the dislike and distrust of the people.

  “When was that?” she asked cautiously. Perhaps Laud Gregor’s heart attack had been triggered by the unwelcome reception, and he languished in Medbay as a way to avoid going home.

  “Three or four weeks ago. No one has seen him outside the Crystal Temple since. I also have it on good authority that Laudae Penelope has opened the first integrated school of Professional and Worker Children,” Jake said.

  “Now that is good news.” Sissy had heard the same, from Penelope herself.

  She settled in comfortably, eager for more news from home. The ache in her heart for those she’d lost and the Gods that had severed their connection to her only dimmed her delight a little. As long as she had these brief times to share with Jake, she could briefly forget about Adrial’s wandering, the Squids’ extinction, Mac’s isolation from friends and family, the trauma to her girls at finding a dead body. Murder! Was there truly a murderer aboard? Who would be the next victim?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Jake?” Mary whispered through the comm.

  He stopped the tram with a password override. “What’s up, Mary?” he replied, forcing calm. Please, don’t let the girls have found another dead body! Two more Labyrinthians had turned up strangled in other HG levels of the same wing as Labby’s body.

  The placard “Murderer” hung around Labby’s neck—and the two other Control techs—had been written in plain block letters in CSS standard, the same language used on Harmony, but they tended to produce more florid script.

  Serial killers were usually smart enough to hide their trail. If this one chased anyone responsible for the death of the Harmony Workers, they’d go after any Temple or Noble. On Harmony, the top two castes had the power to execute anyone of a lesser caste without trial or justification. They were also responsible for keeping the other castes undereducated and ill-informed.

  “Where are you?” Mary asked anxiously.

  He didn’t like her half-frightened, half-excited tone. “In the tram. Where are you?”

  “Can you meet me at E9?”

  “Engineering?” One of the wings in the same cluster as Control and the empty one where they’d found Labby. An identical engineering unit inhabited a wing grouped with Labby’s penthouse at the other end of the station. Redundancy to avoid sabotage. Except E5 held the propulsion unit that “pulled” the station forward and currently consumed more fuel than it should. The opposite unit “pushed” and ran as it should. The two together should keep the station in a stable orbit around the baby planet below them. If one went haywire, the orbit destabilized.

  Higher fuel consumption. More speed. Slowly but surely the station was expanding its orbit and would eventually break free of the planet’s gravitational attraction. They’d drift off into infinity until all the fuel was spent.

  His heart beat double time, close to panic.

  “Hurry.”

  He keyed in a new override, reversed direction at max speed.

  The tram jockeyed over to a special lane. Immediate acceleration slammed him against the floor of the cubicle. He held onto one railing and hooked a foot into another. Just in time. The stops flew by faster than he could read the designations in the holo on the door. Then the car jerked to an abrupt halt that could have sent him through the ceiling as Zero G reasserted itself.

  Mary awaited him on the transfer platform beside the top of the lift. Her lavender overalls and print blouse, the uniform the girls had adopted, looked a little rumpled and grimy. As the door slid open, she remote kissed Harmony and beckoned him forward with one hand, a finger from the other hand on her lips to indicate silence.

  Jake’s whole body stuttered. Why was Mary alone? The girls always traveled together. Lately they roamed with Penelope’s older pink-clad acolytes. Safety in numbers.

  He didn’t want the girls out and about in less than a full complement of six.

  He waited until they were on the lift before raising his eyebrows in silent question. She shook her head. “Saboteur listening,” she mouthed.

  Discord! He suddenly wondered if the two anonymous workers and Labby might have known something about fixing the propulsion system. If so, then the saboteur would stop at nothing to destroy the station.

  Jake began making notes on an evacuation plan. He figured at the current rate they’d need to start removing civilians in about three weeks. Sissy and her girls would be on the first ship out, no matter how much they protested.

  As gravity increased on
the lift, he felt as though his head was sinking into his gut.

  They passed level after level of various and sundry engines and maintenance personnel quarters. One entire level was filled with maintenance bots, large and small for different purposes, in various stages of readiness. The mechanics working on them barely noted his passage on the lift.

  Eventually they reached the level below the last docking bay—three levels combined. Seven drums equally spaced, each six meters tall and six meters in diameter filled the level. A gentle unison hum vibrated along the deck and up the bulkheads.

  Five girls waited for them, their overalls and faces streaked with grease. They all looked more frightened than they had the night the Squid ship crashed into their home.

  More frightened than when they faced horrible death by fire back on Harmony.

  “What did you find?” he asked gently, so that he didn’t scare them any more.

  “Someone is listening,” Mary whispered, pointing to one of the inevitable security cameras.

  Jake found an abandoned, and mostly empty tool chest and rolled it beneath the camera. A boost, a reach, and the camera came off the bulkhead into his stretched hands. “It’s a dummy. Nonoperational. Which means Control is being fed false coverage of this area from somewhere else. We’re alone and unobserved.”

  Evidence that Mac was the saboteur? No one else on station had those kinds of skills.

  Pammy does, his hind brain reminded him. She hired the dregs of the galaxy to work the station. Jake totted up in his head the number of men and women on the payroll with criminal records or obviously bleached records.

  If the spymaster was behind the sabotage and murders, he’d take her down personally, and with grim pleasure.

  Martha loosed a long breath. Then she visibly gathered her composure and motioned Jake to follow her up a ramp and around the sealed drum of one of the propulsion engines. From the top of the incline he had a clear view of the top of the machine. No seams. No visible rivets. No entry to the guts of the thing.

  He knew that. He’d checked it himself when the fuel consumption was first noted.