Masters of the Galaxy

by Mike Resnick (ed)

  “Okay, it was an idea,” I said. “Have any of these executives got names?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Are they an official secret?”

  “I thought I would wait to introduce you, and that way you could associate the name with the being.”

  “Max, we’re going to be stuck on this ship for six more hours. If you haven’t got six hours of details to give me, let me have their names.”

  “The Thrale is Toblinda, the human is Malcolm Shea, the three Gaborian vice presidents are Kchang, Ktee, and Kmorn, and the new chairman is Ktamborit.”

  “She’s got extra syllables,” I noted.

  “I gather she just added them,” replied Max. “She was Ktam, but her new position allowed her to add to her name.”

  “Strange custom,” I said, ignoring our own custom of sharing surnames after marriage. “How about the victim?”

  “It gets confusing,” said Max. “He was Kdineka, but now that he’s dead and no longer in a position of power he’s once again Kdin.”

  “And that’s everyone who’s on the planet?”

  “No, there’s also Kdin’s physician.”

  “Another Gaborian, I presume?”

  “Yes. His name is Bdale.”

  “With a B, not a K?” I asked.

  “He’s a doctor,” said Max, as if that explained it.

  “All right,” I said. “So we’ve got seven suspects.”

  “I thought we had five.”

  “You think a doctor has never committed a murder?”

  “Doctors save people,” said Max sincerely.

  “Doctors are subject to the same greed and fear and lust and out-and-out stupidity that affects non-doctors.”

  “I see,” said Max, who sounded like he didn’t see at all. “But surely Ktamborit is not a suspect.”

  “She was there. He was killed. She’s a suspect.”

  I’d never seen a beachball shrug before. “Well, that’s why we hired you. We know nothing about murder and the motivations that would lead someone to such a heinous crime.”

  “Of course you do,” I said. “You just haven’t been asked to apply what you know.”

  Another shrug. “Probably you are right.”

  “Now tell me about the crime scene. Have you cordoned it off?”

  “The crime scene?” he repeated in puzzled tones.

  “The place where Kdin was killed.”

  “It will be of no use to you, Jake,” said Max.

  I grimaced. “You’ve walked all over it.”

  “Certainly not. But he collapsed and died almost six hundred meters beyond the dome. Visibility on Graydawn is extremely limited and the winds whip across the surface at an average of 40 kilometers per hour, often double that at night. And he has been dead for almost three days. There will be nothing to discover there, Jake,” he concluded apologetically.

  “All right,” I said. “There’s a second crime scene.”

  “There is?” he asked, surprised.

  “If we can’t learn anything from where Kdin died, maybe we can learn something from where his protective suit was tampered with—or at least, at the most likely place for it to have been tampered with.”

  “Ah! The area where they keep the protective suits!”

  “Why are you smiling?” I asked.

  “I left a team of Order Keepers on Graydawn, and I instructed one of them to guard the suits and let no one near them. I did something right!”

  “I’m sure you’ve done a lot of things right,” I said. “Keeping the muscle in orbit was probably the most important of them.”

  “Really?” Max’s alien smile got bigger.

  “One of these seven is a killer. Six of the seven employ armed bodyguards whose loyalty is more likely to be to them than the law. We don’t need them bucking for promotion once we make an arrest.”

  “I knew it was a reasonable thing to do!” said Max, looking as proud of himself as an animated beachball can look.

  “You’re not stupid, you’re just inexperienced,” I said.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “I acknowledge the truth of that.”

  “Sometimes the quickest way to solve a crime is with a pair of fresh eyes that don’t know what to look for, that bring a new perspective to the problem,” I said. “Any time you have an idea, don’t be afraid to come to me with it. I can use all the help I can get.”

  “I will, Jake.” He extended his hand, and this time when I took it it wasn’t trembling. “I’ve never had a partner before. This is going to be most exciting.”

  “If we both live through it,” I said.

  The trembling started again.

  We emerged from the wormhole and reached Graydawn an hour after that. The whole planet was shrouded in a chlorine fog that looked more green than gray. I didn’t want to chance an instrument landing with no spaceport helping us out with coordinates, so I radioed the retreat and told them to send up the shuttle.

  While we were waiting for it, our sensors spotted the other ships in orbit, and a thought occurred to me.

  “Max,” I said, “there aren’t too many places a legitimate executive is going to find his muscle. Check and see if any of them ever worked homicide or forensics.”

  “I thought you’d contacted your forensic expert,” he said.

  “I did. But he’ll be another day, and he won’t show up here first anyway. I sent him to your world, where they’ve stashed the body and the suit. Who knows? There might be something here your people have missed. The sooner we look for it, the better.”

  “I’ll get right on it,” said the rotund alien.

  He began contacting the ships, while I had the computer transfer all the information we had on the Cartel and its veeps to a small glowing cube that I put in a pocket. I had it make a second one, and handed it to Max. He looked up after a few minutes. “There are three former police officers,” he announced. “But none of them ever worked homicide.”

  “Any telepaths?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “We could have used a mind-reader.”

  “I suppose we could send for one,” offered Max.

  I considered it, then shook my head. “No. There are only a handful of telepathic races in the galaxy, and everyone knows what they look like.”

  “What difference does that make?” asked Max. “I mean, if I was a telepath, I would be able to read your thoughts whether you knew what I was or not.”

  I couldn’t repress a smile. “I can tell you haven’t had much crime on your world.”

  “I don’t understand, Jake.”

  “Unless we can get a telepath who works for the cops, whose loyalty is unquestioned, he could look into the killer’s mind and see a silent offer of five million credits to finger someone else—after all, five million is probably just pin money to these six. Or he could see an image of himself being dismembered by the killer’s muscle the second he leaves the planet if he tells what he knows.” I shook my head. “No, if his integrity isn’t already established, we can’t take the chance.”

  “I think I chose the right person to head the investigation,” said Max admiringly. “You don’t trust anyone, do you?”

  “That’s probably why I’ve lived so long in this goddamned business.” I lit a smokeless cigarette. It tasted sour—the first few drags always do—and looked around the ship. “Is there anything else we have to do before the shuttle arrives?”

  Max uttered the code for the armory in his native tongue. The door irised and he reached in, found a pair of burners and a pair of screechers. They were made for alien hands, but I decided I could use them, and I took one of each, while he appropriated the other two.

  “How about a pulse gun?” I asked.

  He looked. “There aren’t any.”

  “Five’ll get you ten they were sold on the black market by an underpaid civil servant.”

  “No member of my race would do that,” he assured me.

  “You’d be surpri
sed what members of any race will do when they get the chance,” I said.

  “I don’t imagine we’ll need all this firepower anyway,” said Max. “I ordered my assistants to confiscate all the weapons in the retreat.”

  I just stared at him.

  “All right,” he said uneasily. “What did I miss, Jake?”

  “This didn’t start out as a murder investigation,” I explained. “Everyone but the killer thought it was a heart attack or something similar. Your people took the body away for a quick autopsy and kept the six execs on Graydawn just as simple routine. No one knew until a couple of hours later that it was murder.”

  “Of course!” he said suddenly. “The killer knew what the medical examination would show, and he had plenty of time to hide a weapon!”

  I nodded approvingly. “You’re learning.”

  What passed for his chest puffed out until I thought he might explode. “Thank you, Jake.” He stared at me thoughtfully. “Is there any way to codify the basic rules of your trade, some list I can refer to?”

  “There’s nothing official, but I’ll give you some rules, and if you always keep them in mind, you should do okay.”

  “Fine!” he said eagerly. “What are they?”

  “Rule Number One is that everyone lies; guilty or innocent makes no difference. Rule Number Two is that nothing is ever as simple as it seems. And Rule Number Three is that the odds are always against the killer.”

  “Why?”

  “Most killers are new to murder. They’ve never done it before, and they tend to make beginner’s mistakes. Homicide cops deal with murder every day of the year. It’s old hat to them. They’ve seen it all, and they know how to spot those mistakes.”

  “But I don’t.”

  “You’ll learn,” I said. “In the meantime, that’s why you’ve got me along.”

  Max stared at me with a typically inscrutable alien expression. Finally he said, “Did anyone ever take a shot at you, Jake?”

  “From time to time.”

  “No one ever shot at me,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do if someone did.”

  “Relax,” I said. “It’ll probably never happen.”

  “But it’s happened to you,” he said nervously.

  “It goes with the territory when you’re private,” I explained, trying to ease his fears. “No one cares if you kill a private eye, but kill a cop and they’ll turn the galaxy inside out hunting you down. People think twice before they shoot a cop.”

  Max sighed, and little blue puffs of vapor shot out of his nostrils. “When I listen to you, I feel so overmatched.”

  “If I didn’t think you’d pull your weight, I’d leave you on the ship,” I said.

  “Thank you, Jake,” he replied. “You just told me that everyone lies, but it is a lie that I appreciate.”

  I was about to reply when the shuttle arrived, reached a long arm out to our hatch, and gave us a protected walkway so we didn’t have to get into our spacesuits.

  “Wow!” I exclaimed as we entered the shuttle. “Kdin knew how to treat his guests, didn’t he?”

  “It’s quite impressive,” said Max, surveying the chairs that could change shape to accommodate almost any race, the plush carpet, and the gleaming bar.

  “I’ll bet you he’s got gold fixtures in the head,” I said. “This is some shuttle. I’ve had apartments that were smaller, and I’ve seen five-star hotel lobbies that weren’t as well appointed.”

  “Smooth, too,” added Max. “You can barely feel the G’s as it enters the stratosphere.”

  “I’ll bet it’s got so much protection that its nose doesn’t even glow when we hit the atmosphere,” I said.

  “Excuse me,” said a mechanical voice. “May I offer you a drink?”

  “Not for me,” I said. I hate drinking when a ship is decelerating. “How about you, Max?”

  “What have you got?” Max asked the ship.

  “I cannot identify your race,” replied the ship. “Therefore, I do not know what to offer you. What is your planet of origin?”

  “Bramanos,” answered Max.

  “I have no such planet listed in my data bank.”

  “Official name, Alpha Gillespie III,” responded Max.

  “I have no record of a sentient race in the Alpha Gillespie system,” said the ship.

  “Some programming!” snorted Max contemptuously. “You’re in the Alpha Gillespie system right now! You ply your trade here.”

  “May I have a blood or saliva sample, please? That will help me to classify you.”

  “Forget it,” said Max disgustedly.

  “Bad choice of words,” I said in amusement.

  He gave me a puzzled look.

  “You just ordered it to forget that there’s a sentient race in the system.”

  “Let the next member of my race worry about it.”

  The shuttle offered us a series of holographic entertainments, and by the time we’d said No to each of its offerings we had touched down.

  “Please wait,” announced the shuttle. “I am making sure my bond with the dome’s airlock is fully sealed.” A pause. “It is now safe to leave me and enter the retreat.”

  “Thanks,” I said, walking to the hatch.

  Max fell into step behind me, and a moment later we entered the dome, walked past a trio of small outbuildings, and came to imposing structure that made the governor’s mansion on Odysseus look like a cave.

  “Isn’t it impressive?” asked Max, surveying our surroundings as we entered the building.

  “I don’t even like art, and I’m impressed.”

  “You don’t like art?” he asked, as if no one had ever said that before.

  “Well, except for naked women,” I qualified.

  We were standing in a long corridor with high ceilings. It was lined with exquisitely-framed paintings and holos, any one of which probably cost ten times more than I’ll make in a lifetime. The plush carpet seemed to be in motion, anticipating our steps and thickening itself before we put our feet down. And somehow you knew that no germ would dare to show its face (or whatever it is germs show) anywhere inside the retreat or any of the outbuildings inside the dome.

  “So where are they?” I asked.

  “I told my agents to have them all assembled in one of the main rooms,” said Max. “I know you’ll want to question each one individually, but I thought you might like to meet them all first, put names with faces, see if anything about any of them strikes you as strange.”

  “Good thinking, Max,” I said, mostly to encourage him. “I assume there’s a private room where I can question each of them?”

  “There are 73 rooms,” he answered. “Most of them will suit your needs.” He shuffled his feet nervously, which made it look like he was about to fall over. “Could I…may I observe while you question the suspects?”

  “You’re paying for it,” I said. “You can do whatever you want.”

  “Thank you,” he said gratefully. “I’m sure there is much I can learn from an experienced interrogator like yourself.”

  “Hell, we might even do a little good cop-bad cop,” I added.

  “That is not a term with which I am familiar,” said Max.

  I explained it to him, and if a beachball can look shocked, then that’s what Max looked.

  “Jake,” he said, “we cannot intimidate the suspects. We are bound by ethical considerations and I am personally constrained by the tenets of my religion.”

  “What was the killer bound by?” I asked.

  “We cannot pattern our behavior on that of a killer.”

  “You know why I quit the force and went private?” I said. “It’s because I hated regulations and I hated regular hours and I hated having to salute my superiors, but mostly I quit because I hated treating criminals better than they treated their victims. If I have a credo, it’s that showing any sympathy to a killer is an insult to his victim.”

  “Jake, five of the six people we will be questioning
are not killers. We must treat them all with courtesy.”

  “You’re making it harder to nail the Bad Guy,” I said.

  He was shaking like a leaf, but he wasn’t going to back down. “Nevertheless,” he said adamantly.

  “Okay, it’s your party,” I said.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “No,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I envy you.”

  “You do?” said Max, surprised. “Why?”

  “You haven’t seen enough crimes to hate the criminals. Probably you never will.” I figured I might as well be totally honest. “I also admire you.”

  It was unnerving to see a beachball do a double-take. “What for?”

  “Because you’re afraid of me, but even so you stick to your guns.”

  “My guns?”

  “Figure of speech. Your principles. I admire that. Not many beings of any race are willing to meet their fears head-on and stare them down.” I gave him a pat on what passed for his shoulder. “We’re going to get along fine, Max.”

  He didn’t say anything, but he positively glowed with pride. I got the distinct impression that either he’d never heard a compliment before, or else that his race was so damned polite that he heard them all the time and didn’t believe any of them.

  We soon reached the end of the corridor and found ourselves in a room that was probably smaller than a murderball field and may have had a few less windows than the Church of the Nine Worlds on Jefferson II. There was more artwork, of course; a stone fireplace wall some sixty feet wide that was a work of art in itself; furniture that read your race and size and instantly adjusted if you got within ten feet of it; and a dozen other luxuries that were beyond the experience of private eyes or almost anyone else. Five Gaborians, a Man and a Thrale were sitting in various chairs and couches. A dozen gleaming metallic robots were posted around the room, and I was sure there were robot chefs, robot maids, robot valets, and maybe even a robot bedmate or two; I assume that, like the ones I could see, they were all shaped like Gaborians.

  Four members of Max’s race, all armed, stood at the four corner of the room, probably at attention though with beachballs it’s difficult to tell. A fifth approached us, held out a hand, palm up, Max waved his fist over it. I took it to be their equivalent of a salute, or maybe even a handshake.