The Eyes of the Huntress

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Food goes through many hands. Waitress! Yes! Amalis. Amalis Laric. She complains about customers. She says they treat her bad. Dvoda much bad. Other less bad. Low family. Not be trusted.’

  Shil raised an eyebrow. The man’s body language was all over the place. He was lying, she was sure of that, but with the string of accusations and excuses coming out of him, it was hard to tell what he was lying about.

  Araven frowned. He did not look happy, but Krotna had suggested a possible suspect and it needed to be checked out. ‘Krotna, you’ll stay in this room. If you move, I’ll have you arrested for obstructing a StarCorps investigation.’ He looked around at Shil. ‘Can you take the forensic kit and search her room? I’ll take her locker.’

  Shil nodded. ‘I don’t trust him,’ she said in Luris.

  ‘Neither do I, but we need to do this anyway. She did serve both of the victims. It’s possible…’

  ‘Possible. Just not very likely.’

  ~~~

  The staff quarters were nothing like the luxurious guest suites. Even comparing Amalis Laric’s rooms to Araven’s somewhat less plush suite, well, there was no comparison really. Laric had her own room, which had a bed and an easy chair in it, along with a bookshelf and a small chest of drawers. Most of the clothing in that was either underwear or copies of the short black dress the staff wore; it seemed as though Laric’s life revolved around this room. There was an attached shower room, but the kitchen facilities were shared with four other rooms.

  It was not going to take a lot of time to go through the place – with the waitress standing in the doorway, wringing her hands – but it took even less time for Araven to turn up, looking weary and carrying a couple of evidence bags. Without saying anything, he tossed one to Shil. Shil peered in through the plastic and saw a small bundle of dark-green leaves. She frowned. ‘Where?’ she asked in Luris.

  ‘Her locker.’

  ‘Damn. What’s the other one?’

  ‘A bottle with some sort of oily residue. It needs to be identified properly, but the scent is memorable.’

  ‘Damn,’ Shil said again.

  ‘I know, but I have to.’

  ‘I know.’

  Araven turned to Laric, his expression solemn. ‘Amalis Laric, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Yanoshki–’

  ‘No!’ Laric shrieked. ‘I didn’t! I wouldn’t!’

  ‘Yanoshki Dvoda and Tulin Querin. You will be held here until morning. StarCorps officers will be here to collect you for trial at that time.’

  Laric turned toward Shil. ‘You can’t believe I did this,’ she said in Rolletic.

  Shil looked back and the girl’s eyes widened: Shil’s eyes were doing the fire thing again. ‘I don’t think you did, but there’s nothing I can do about it right now. You’ll just have to… trust me. Justice will be served, Amalis.’

  ~~~

  ‘It wasn’t her,’ Shil said, her voice soft. She was lying in Araven’s arms, her head on his shoulder. It was something of a novel experience since neither T’ney nor Narad had been much for cuddling, and Brian had been shorter than she was when he had been the kind to cuddle. ‘She was horrified when she saw Querin on the ground.’

  Araven sighed. ‘Just to play prosecution advocate… She could have been horrified that Querin died, expecting it to be someone else.’

  ‘Can you think of any connection between a scothian StarCorps ambassador and an armil spaceship designer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then for it to be her, the victims would have to be selected at random. A random killer isn’t horrified by the wrong person dying. They want the kill, not the specific target. And if she was selecting according to how badly they treated her, and Querin did treat her badly, which I never saw evidence of, then what’s to worry about?’

  ‘We have the physical evidence. We have the murder weapons, found in her locker.’

  ‘And the bottle was clean. No fingerprints.’

  ‘She wore gloves.’

  ‘How? She’d have had to pick up Dvoda’s food, stop somewhere, put on gloves, poison the food, get rid of the gloves, and then take the food out to the table. Someone would have seen her. Someone would have noticed her taking too long taking the food to the table. It doesn’t work, Araven.’

  His hand drifted over the skin of her upper arm, sending a little thrill through her. They had already made love tonight, but there would be more. Lots more if she had anything to say about it. ‘A case could be made, but… I tend to agree. We have the evidence that she did it, but the evidence does not really make sense.’

  ‘Plus, I think Krotna is guilty. Too quick to point the finger at a fellow scothian too.’

  ‘Another factor. The problem is that we have a culprit. It’ll be hard to keep this going when I’ve arrested someone. The manager wanted the lockdown lifted tonight. I’ve told him it stays in place until Laric is safely in StarCorps custody.’

  ‘That gives us some time. I’ll sleep on it.’

  Araven let out a chuckle. ‘If you sleep. I swear you are some form of demon temptress sent to kill me through sexual excess.’

  Shil grinned. ‘Nice. I’ve never been called a succubus before.’ Shifting, she pushed herself up and straddled his hips. ‘I wonder if I can…’

  20.3.632.

  Shil was standing in the multi-jet shower in her suite when the call came through from Cantarvey. There was no chance that Araven would be joining her in the shower, since he had gone off to check on the prisoner, so Shil accepted the call, but she kept it to inside her head since her mouth was under a deluge.

  ‘Cantarvey, what’s up?’

  ‘I have scanned every available media source on the planet for a connection between Chef Krotna and Ambassador Dvoda,’ the ship announced. ‘I found nothing.’

  ‘Oh, so–’

  ‘So,’ Cantarvey went on brightly, ‘I went to external sources, via the planetary archives of extraplanetary news sources.’

  ‘And–’

  ‘But there was nothing there either, so I sent a request through the extrastellar network link service to Scoth, received the return data, and scanned the last ten years of data related to both men.’

  ‘And you found nothing?’

  ‘Oh no. That was when I discovered how Ambassador Dvoda ruined Chef Krotna’s reputation on their home planet.’

  ‘He what?!’

  Cantarvey was sounding far too pleased with herself. ‘Ambassador Dvoda visited the restaurant Chef Krotna had started. It was doing quite well, and the chef was building quite a reputation for fine cuisine. Apparently, the ambassador either did not like the food or took offence in some manner, because he posted an online review which decimated the restaurant’s reputation and said some rather insensitive things about the chef. Chef Krotna was bankrupted and found himself unable to find work anywhere else. He left the system and ended up here after a number of less prestigious jobs on other worlds.’

  ‘So Krotna did know Dvoda.’

  ‘Possibly not. One of the ambassador’s complaints was that the chef never came out to greet an important customer. It’s quite possible that the chef never actually met the ambassador, but he certainly had reason to wish him harm.’

  ‘And two people are dead because of that. I need to talk to Araven. You know, you could have just told me what you found.’

  ‘But then you would not have known how much effort I went to to find the information.’

  ‘Right… Oh, hang on. I’ve a call coming in from Araven. Stay connected.’ Shil switched channels. ‘Araven? Something wrong?’

  ‘You could say that,’ Araven replied. He sounded tired, and it probably was not due to her keeping him up – in multiple senses of the word – too late. ‘Our chief suspect is dead. As far as I can tell, she committed suicide sometime last night.’

  ~~~

  Shil scanned over the room in which Amalis Laric had died. She was still there, lying on the floor, her lips blue and flecked with fragmen
ts of green leaf. There was no disturbance about the room. Laric had died without a fuss, it seemed, but Shil was not buying it.

  ‘I went through this room pretty thoroughly. There was no Cattlebane here, so where did she get it?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Araven stated flatly.

  ‘You’re not buying this either?’

  ‘I’m… wary. I’ve held the lockdown in place for another day. I think she was murdered. Given the means, I suspect it’s the same killer, but I can see no evidence of anyone else having been in here.’

  ‘Leave that to me.’ Shil headed for the door to bring in the forensic kit. ‘Meanwhile, I need to tell you something my ship’s AI uncovered. It casts an interesting light on the relationship between Krotna and Dvoda.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yeah. You remember Krotna said he’d never met the ambassador? Well, that might only have technically been true…’

  ~~~

  ‘Got him,’ Shil said, examining the output of a fingerprint analysis program on the forensics computer. The unit was highly specialised, and you had to know what to give it and ask it, but it was very good at what it did.

  ‘Krotna?’ Araven asked.

  ‘Uh-huh. He left a fingerprint behind. A fairly fresh one from the protein analysis. A few hours at most.’

  ‘I thought you said the door handles had been wiped.’

  ‘They have, which is a strong suggestion of foul play in itself. Even if Laric decided on some guilt-induced cleaning, the door was locked, so how could she clean the handle on the outside? No, Krotna wiped down what he thought he’d touched, but he got nervous while he was here and he used the toilet.’

  Araven grinned. ‘Latent print on the toilet seat?’ Shil nodded, grinning back. ‘Classic. But how did he get in through a locked door?’

  ‘A security card was used to unlock the door a couple of hours before dawn. I suspect we’re going to find that the person who owns that card has lost it. Krotna, it turns out, is a rags-to-riches story. He grew up on the streets. That’s probably one of the reasons Dvoda came down on him so hard with his review, and why Krotna took it so hard, but it does mean he probably has a few skills you don’t see in your average posh chef. Like pickpocketing, for example.’

  ‘We can check on the card thing later. That fingerprint’s enough to arrest him and grill him.’

  Shil nodded. ‘I’ll finish up here. There might be something else we can use as leverage. You go put him in a cage. Or something as cage-like as this place has available. I’ll join you when I’ve finished.’

  ~~~

  ‘Krotna’s vanished,’ Araven said over the commlink and into Shil’s head.

  ‘Define vanished,’ Shil replied, her eyes on the chemical analysis the forensics unit was running.

  ‘He’s not in his rooms. One of the security personnel reports that he went to the staff teleport room this morning. He wanted to go shopping for some rare spices and was annoyed when he heard I still had the island locked down. They’ve searched the resort with no sign of him, but I’m organising something more thorough. He can’t have got off the island, but we don’t know where he is.’

  ‘Check the resort’s computer. See if he made any calls off the island this morning. StarCorps would notice if air transport tried to land out here, I’d imagine.’

  ‘Yes, no aircraft or spacecraft can get here without us noticing.’

  ‘What about a small boat?’

  ‘That’s… possible. Something small and mostly non-metallic might get lost in the clutter from the ocean surface.’

  ‘And I bet a good chef like Krotna knows a few local fishermen.’ Shil checked the forensics unit, nodding absently. ‘I’m finished here. You get that search organised and meet me at Krotna’s rooms.’

  ‘You think there’s something there we can use to find him?’

  ‘I know there is. It’s just not something we can use conventionally. Make sure you’ve got your walking boots on, Araven, you’re about to find out why I’m called Shil the Huntress.’

  ~~~

  ‘Okay, but what about your boots?’ Araven asked as they walked out of the resort to the northeast through one of the exits in the fence. It had taken about thirty minutes for Shil to pick up Krotna’s scent, but she was sure he had come this way.

  Shil looked down at her thigh-highs. ‘I don’t have a problem with balance, and these heels make a nasty weapon when used properly.’

  ‘I… am going to take your word for that. In other news, you can track by scent?’

  ‘Shil the Huntress. It’s right there in the name. I’m using other things too, like that broken twig on the bush there. He wasn’t exactly trying to make this hard. See there where he twisted that pebble under his foot and marked the rock under it?’

  ‘That could have been anyone.’

  ‘True, the smell helps there. Nervous, sweating scothian. Be happy in your relatively undeveloped olfactory capabilities.’

  ‘He probably has an hour or more on us.’

  ‘Yes, but he called someone about the boat not that long ago. It takes time to get a fishing boat out here. The island is relatively isolated. He’ll be hoping he can hole up somewhere to wait for his transport, though how he thinks he’s getting off the planet is another matter. Maybe not thinking that far ahead. Maybe he has smuggling contacts. You can get pretty much anything you want on this planet, so long as you’re willing to pay.’

  Araven nodded. ‘Unfortunately true. The corporations running Karvonay tend to look the other way for their richer clients and those supplying them. We only get involved when there’s a serious violation of StarCorps ordinances.’

  ‘Uh-huh. That’s an issue with StarCorps.’ She flashed him a grin. ‘Oh, I’m not criticising. I did political science, remember? You’re in an… interesting position. You need the cooperation of member worlds for it all to work, so you can’t be too heavy-handed without a really good reason. Equally, you can’t let standards slip too far, because everyone relies on you to ensure a level playing field for commerce. Except that half your signatories think “level playing field” only applies to other people and if you enforce the rules too hard, you’d end up kicking half of them out, which would reduce your influence and make a ready market between all the outlawed worlds. I understand, but I don’t have to like it.’

  ‘No, we don’t have to like it either, but we’re not the veda.’

  ‘Nope. They had an extra string to their bow. They had technology everyone wanted. Also, a much larger military force. If they kicked someone out of the Commonwealth, that world was basically restricted to their home system, and they lost all the vedan tech they loved so much.’ Shil paused, checking around them and then dropping to one knee to sniff at the ground. She got to her feet and started off again. ‘He went this way.’

  ‘I suspect that your average human can’t do this.’

  ‘Good guess. Humans have pretty good vision, but everything else is mediocre. Their sense of smell is fairly poor. Comparatively, of course. We train dogs to track by scent. Like most sentient species, we’re adaptable. We make tools, or train animals, to make up for what we lack.’

  ‘This… gift you were given changed you significantly. That kind of technology is…’

  ‘I’d appreciate it if you left that thought unsaid. Especially back at your HQ. I help StarCorps do what they’re supposed to do, and let’s just keep it at that. I don’t need your people trying to hunt me down to find out what makes me tick. Or force me into a permanent job. You don’t need me treating corpsmen as enemies.’

  ‘You’re risking a lot working this closely with a corpsman, Shil.’

  ‘I trust you. Might be because I haven’t had this much fun in bed for a long time, but I trust you.’

  ‘Huh.’ Araven cast his eyes around. ‘Where is he hoping to get to? There’s nothing out here but the ruins.’

  ‘There’s a small beach on the northeast side of the island with some high cliffs around it, but you
can get down to the sand easily enough. It would be perfect for landing a small boat, and there may be caves in the cliffs. If he only needs to hide out until dark, say, he could manage there without too much trouble. It’s not like the island has any predators on it.’

  Araven smiled. ‘Except for you.’

  ‘Yeah. Except for me.’

  ~~~

  The beach was, like the southern one, black, volcanic sand. The southern one had been engineered, the sand grains processed to be smooth during the terraforming process, which was why the resort was down there. Here, the sand was sharper and you tended to crunch through it as you walked.

  As Shil had suggested, the beach was also surrounded by high cliffs. Perhaps a hundred metres on average, the basalt bulwarks made an impressive barrier to anyone trying to get onto the island from the beach. Unless you knew about a small gully on the eastern side which had a passable gradient down from the headland onto the sand. Krotna clearly did, because his scent was still quite strong in the narrow cleft. There was no sign of the chef on the sand, so Shil led the way along the cliff edge, which seemed to be the way Krotna had taken because there were a few footprints visible.

  And there were holes in the cliff which suggested caves. A number of them were barely big enough for an animal, or maybe a child, to get into, but there were a couple of larger ones. Shil stopped at the mouth of each and sniffed at the air before moving on. About three quarters of the way around the arc of cliffs, she came to a stop in quite a large opening, narrowed her eyes, and double-checked what she was smelling.

  ‘This one. Now I’m getting wet, nervous, sweaty scothian.’ She tapped the toe of one boot in a small stream which was flowing out of the cave mouth. ‘It’s damp in here and the entrance narrows up ahead. Looks to be a tight squeeze for him, but we should be okay. Rock’s wet though.’

  ‘You’re wearing plastic anyway. I’m the one who’s going to end up in a wet T-shirt.’

  Shil smirked. ‘Mmm, nice. But we should keep the bedroom talk for later.’ She reached over her shoulder and lifted her sword free. ‘Let’s go get the man.’

  ‘We want him alive.’

  ‘I’m not going to kill him. Unless he’s got something in there more lethal than I’m expecting.’ She frowned. ‘What kind of weapons do the security people at the resort have? Stun blasters?’