Masters of the Galaxy

by Mike Resnick (ed)

  “That’s better,” said Toblinda when he finally sat down. I noticed he was using a t-pack, though most Thrales spoke Terran. In fact, the Thrale Coalition had been part of the Democracy before it became independent, and Terran is the Democracy’s official language. I guessed it was his way of showing me that no trace of the Democracy remained to stain his person.

  “I have some questions to ask you,” I said.

  “And if I choose not to answer them?”

  “That’s your privilege,” I said. “Of course, I’ll have to arrest you and incarcerate you until you decide to honor me with your answers, but as far as I’m concerned, I’ll be just as happy if you take twenty years to get around to it.”

  He grinned an alien grin. “I’ll bet you would, too.”

  “You’d win,” I answered, returning his grin.

  “All right, Mr. Masters,” he said. “Ask away.”

  “Damn!” I said. “And here I’d gotten my hopes up.”

  He laughed, a throaty, guttural alien laugh. “I like you, Masters. It is a shame we’re on opposite sides.”

  “Not in this instance, Toblinda,” I said. “I want the crime solved and you want it solved.”

  “Why should I care?” he said. “We both know it wasn’t committed by Shea or myself.”

  “We both think it’s highly probable that it wasn’t either of you,” I agreed. “But the sooner we can solve it, the sooner the lot of you can go back to work, and the less chance there is that word will get out that your executives are killing each other. I don’t think any of the financial markets would respond favorably to that.”

  “You have a point,” he admitted. “We shall set our enmity aside until the killer is apprehended. Ask your questions. I will answer them completely and truthfully.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I saw the spot where Kdin collapsed. What indication did you have that he was in distress?”

  “Almost none,” answered the Thrale. “He clutched at his neck, or maybe it was the tubes leading from his oxygen tank to his facemask. I think he tried to say something, but nothing came out. Then he fell to the ground. My guess is that he was dead less than a second after he hit it.”

  “That pretty much agrees with what the others said. Who was the first one to suit up before you all went out?”

  He frowned, which didn’t look quite as menacing as I’d thought it would. “I can’t remember,” he said. “I think we all changed into our protective gear at the same time.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No, I could be mistaken,” he said. “Why don’t you just check the security system?” Suddenly he grinned again. “It was disabled, wasn’t it?”

  “You’re quick on the uptake, I’ll give you that,” I acknowledged. I was getting the feeling that this was one sharp sonuvabitch, maybe the only one who could have given Ktamborit a run for her money if he hadn’t had the misfortune to be born a non-Gaborian. “Let me try another one. Who got to Graydawn first?”

  “That’s easy. Ktamborit was invited a few days earlier, so Kdin could acquaint her with the subtleties of her new position. He probably also gave her some highly classified information, so secret that even the vice presidents were not allowed to share it.”

  “Okay, so Kdin and Ktamborit were waiting for the five vice presidents. Who was the first to land?”

  “Kchang.”

  “How do you know?”

  He smiled again. “Because I was the second, and Kchang was already here. Malcolm Shea showed up next, and then the other two Gaborians.”

  “I gather you were all here for two full days, and then Kdin took you outside the dome on the morning of the third day.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “If his suit wasn’t tampered with on the day of the murder, it had to be tampered with earlier. Did you notice anyone’s absence during those two days?”

  “That’s a silly question, Mr. Masters,” he said. “Gaborians, humans and Thrales all require some personal privacy. It’s a huge house; we were often out of each other’s sight. And of course, different executives retired at different times.”

  “You’re right, Toblinda,” I acknowledged. “It was a silly question. But I had to ask it anyway. Did anyone go outside the dome before that third morning?”

  “No.”

  “So no one had a reason or an excuse to be in the building that holds the suits?”

  “No.”

  “That figures,” I said, as much to myself as to him. “We’re not dealing with a stupid killer. It’s obvious that no one was going to become chairman after Ktamborit was elevated to that position, so the killer probably had what he thought were sufficient reasons to murder Kdin even with no possibility that it would lead to the chairmanship. You know all of them. Who had a reason?”

  He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I know business relationships, and we both agree they’re probably meaningless in this case. You want information on personal relationships, and of these—except for my own, of course—I know nothing.”

  “All right,” I said. “Tell me about your own.”

  “I met Kdin—it still feels strange not to call him Kdineka, the name by which we all knew him—exactly four times. Until I came here I had probably spent less than six hours in his presence. To the best of my recollection, we were never alone together, and while we may have disagreed about certain aspects of company policy—who doesn’t?—it was never acrimonious, and in fact he usually gave in to me.”

  I stared at him, trying to think of what to ask next, and finally decided the interrogation was over. “That’s it,” I said. “Thank you for your help. I’ll probably want to speak to you again.”

  “I’d enjoy that,” he said. “I could probably be arrested for saying this in the wrong venue, but I like you.”

  “I like you too,” I said. “It’s a dumb war.”

  “But even a dumb war does wonders for the economy,” he said with a final smile. Then he was on his feet and out the door.

  Max showed up about fifteen minutes later. “Dinner will be in half an hour,” he announced. “Do you want to join the others in the dining room or have it brought to you here?”

  “Here,” I said. There was no sense letting the suspects know how little progress I’d made. “What about the doctor?”

  “Bdale was Kdin’s personal physician, and was paid from Kdin’s personal account.”

  “Do Gaborians make wills, and is he in it?”

  “They have extremely rigid inheritance customs. I have not spoken about it to a Gaborian lawyer, but from what I was able to glean from a brief search with my computer, the likelihood is that Bdale will not inherit a thing.”

  “Not even any severance pay?”

  “I don’t think so, but I’ll still have to check and make certain.”

  “I assume Ktamborit has her own physician?”

  He looked blank. “I have no idea.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to find out.”

  “I will, Jake.”

  “Has my forensics guy checked in yet?”

  “Not personally, but one of my Order Keepers got a message from his office that he’ll arrive at Bramanos sometime tomorrow morning, and then come here when he’s done.”

  “Pity he’s not going to find a goddamned thing,” I said.

  “Explain, please?” said Max.

  “You saw the spot where Kdin died,” I said. “Even if the killer left a clue, it’s blown halfway around the world by now. And it didn’t have to. If it blew thirty yards away, that’d be enough. We’d never find it.”

  “But perhaps in the building that houses the protective suits…” he suggested hopefully.

  I shook my head. “The killer had enough brains to deactivate the security system, Max. He’s got to be smart enough not to leave anything behind.” I stopped and just stared ahead.

  “What is it, Jake?” asked Max after a moment.

  I sighed deeply. “I don’t know. Something was on t
he edge of my mind, knocking to get in, but…” I shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “Shall I contact the forensics expert and cancel his visit?” asked Max.

  “No,” I said. “We might as well let him go through the motions. Maybe God will drop everything else and leave us a clue. But I’d bet everything you’re paying me that my man doesn’t turn anything up.”

  “Is there anything else we can do while we’re waiting for him?”

  “Yeah, I suppose so,” I said. “It’s a zillion-to-one shot, but at least it’ll keep your agents busy. When everyone’s having dinner, have a couple of them search every room in the retreat.”

  “What are they looking for?” asked Max.

  “Someone with a grudge against Kdin who thought if he killed him this week we’d be up to our ears in suspects and never look past the obvious ones.”

  “You think someone might be hiding in an unused room?” asked Max excitedly.

  “No. I just believe in being thorough. You might run a quick test or two on the robots and make sure they haven’t been programmed to lie, and then…” I stopped to consider. “Then find out if they saw anyone sneak out to the suit building, or if they know of anyone who’s been inside the dome the past few days besides Bdale, Ktamborit and the veeps.”

  “That sounds promising, Jake,” said Max.

  “It’s busywork, Max. It’ll stop us from getting too bored, but it’s not going to turn up a killer.”

  “If this won’t, and your expert won’t, then…” he began.

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Are you saying that we’ve been here just a few hours and you’ve decided we can’t solve it?” he persisted.

  “No. I’m just saying we’re not going to solve it by the usual methods. But we might as well try them all, just so we can say we did.” I paused. “Maybe you’d better get back down to the main level, so you can give your agents their instructions.”

  “All right, Jake.” He walked to the door, then turned to me. “Don’t get discouraged. I have faith in you.”

  “I can’t tell you how comforting that is,” I said. He never spotted the sardonic tone, and walked away with a happy smile on his face.

  A robot showed up with my dinner a few minutes later. It looked and smelled exactly like a steak with mashed potatoes in gravy, but while the galley robots could make soya products look and smell like real food, they still tasted like soya products. Still, I hadn’t eaten in maybe twenty hours, and it sure as hell wasn’t the first soya meal I’d had—or the hundredth, or the thousandth, for that matter—and I decided I’d had worse. Plenty of them.

  I spent the next hour going over all the interviews I’d conducted. There were some discrepancies—one said Kdin collapsed like a stone, one said he banged his hand on his facemask, one said he tugged at the hoses leading to his helmet—but that was absolutely standard. No two people ever saw or remembered an incident exactly the same. If one of them had said he collapsed and another had said he’d run fifty feet first, that would be worth another pair of interrogations, but that wasn’t the case.

  I suppose the biggest problem was that I just couldn’t come up with a motive. Ktamborit had been publicly anointed as the new chairman. If someone had killed her I’d have something I could get my teeth into; but there just wasn’t any sense killing Kdin once he’d named his successor. He was just a civilian again; why risk all the power and money each of them controlled to kill someone who was no longer a player?

  Could the killer have thought he could talk Kdin into changing his mind about his successor? Out of the question. It was too late; Ktamborit was already the chairman. Could the killer have been promised the chairmanship, and killed Kdin for breaking his word? There were three problems with that. First, it wasn’t worth the risk. Second, he couldn’t know that Kdin was going to take them out on the surface. (Or could he? I made a mental note to find out.) Third, there were five Gaborians. How could he be sure he was rigging the right protective suit?

  I thought about that last point for a minute, and started getting excited. If the killer didn’t know which suit was Kdin’s, could he have been trying to kill Ktamborit? Now, that would be a murder with an obvious motive.

  But if he couldn’t tell one suit from another, he had to figure the odds were four-to-one he’ll kill the wrong Gaborian. And if he was a Gaborian, as seemed likely, he also had a one in five chance of donning the rigged suit himself.

  Well, there was an easy way to find out. I walked to the door and ordered the nearest robot to tell Bdale I wanted to speak to him right away.

  The doctor entered the room a minute later and treated me to another curtsy.

  “You sent for me?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It won’t take long. What was your first reaction when they brought the body into the dome?”

  “That Kdin’s heart had finally given out.”

  “You were summoned from the retreat, right, and they were coming in through the hatch that was closest to the rock structure?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So when you saw them you were, what, maybe forty meters away?”

  “Thirty or forty.”

  “Could you see his face from that distance?”

  “No, not the way they were carrying him.”

  “Okay, doctor, here’s my question: how did you know it was Kdin?”

  “The gold suit.”

  “Gold suit?” I repeated.

  “He’d had his suit and helmet colored gold, so it would be easier for me or a guest to follow him in the low visibility of the planet’s surface. I don’t know if it actually worked, but he thought it did, and who would contradict him over such a trivial matter?”

  “Thank you, doctor,” I said.

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  Suddenly he smiled. “You thought maybe the killer tampered with the wrong suit.”

  “It was a possibility.” I grimaced. “It isn’t any more.”

  He seemed about to say something else, changed his mind, curtsied, and left.

  Well, I told myself, no one ever said it was going to be open and shut. Forensics labs identified killers in the early hours of a case. It took detectives a lot longer.

  I was still pondering the situation when Max entered the room maybe an hour later.

  “Well?” I said.

  “It was as you predicted,” he reported. “We went through the house with state of the art sensors and couldn’t detect any life forms. I had one of my Order Keepers test all the robots, and they cannot lie. And finally, none of the robots saw anyone enter the building that holds the suits.”

  “Does your agent know enough about robotics to tell if they have been given false information without knowing it?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Can your agent tell if the robot saw someone enter the suit house and was later programmed to forget it, so when he says he never saw anything he checks out as being truthful?”

  “That’s very complex, Jake. I think we’ll need a robotics expert for that.”

  “It’s a longshot anyway,” I said. “What are the odds that anyone in the retreat could pull off that kind of tampering? Still, if we’re not making any progress in a few days, we’ll call in a robotics expert. I assume your supply of money is endless?”

  “We will spend whatever it takes to bring the killer to justice,” he assured me.

  “It may take awhile,” I said.

  “What makes this case so unusual?” he asked. “The lack of clues?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “What else?” he asked. “I’m not trying to by pushy, Jake,” he added apologetically. “I’m trying to learn.”

  “Okay, Max, no offense taken,” I said. “The traditional way of solving a murder is to examine Motive, Means and Opportunity. That’s where the problems begin. I can’t find a motive for killing Kdin. A year ago, absolutely. But once he’d stepped down and named his succe
ssor, no. As for means and opportunity, everyone had the same: they all are capable of tampering with the suit, and they all had the same two days at the same location in which to do it.”

  “That’s not exactly true, Jake,” said Max. “Ktamborit was here for a few days before the others arrived.”

  “Yeah, but the security system was working then. If she’d tampered with the suit before the system was deactivated, we’d know it.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” he agreed.

  “So I keep returning to motive, and I may never be able to come up with one.”

  “Surely you’re not suggesting that it was a motiveless murder,” said Max.

  “No, of course not. But the only thing all the suspects have in common is that they work for a cartel that functions in a capitalistic system, so I keep assuming that money or power are the motives, because they would be the motives in my society. But except for Shea, these are aliens, and while they’ve been interacting with Men for years and know how to comport themselves, I don’t know what makes them tick.”

  “I am an alien in your eyes, too,” he said gently.

  “Damn it, Max,” I said irritably, “every last one of them is more alien to you than to me. At least I come from a world where murders get committed; you come from one where no one kills anyone no matter how many valid motives they have. If I can’t understand them, neither can you.”

  “But we do understand them,” he persisted. “I was there when you interrogated them. Their answers all made sense.”

  “Because I asked what I know about, Max,” I said. “I see that they’re all executives in the same company, so I think that must have something to do with it. But for all I know, Kdin didn’t laugh at one of Kchang’s jokes thirty years ago, and to a Gaborian that’s a perfect justification for murder. Maybe he accidentally brushed against Toblinda’s uncle during a visit to his Thrale headquarters, and Toblinda thinks that’s a killing offense. Maybe he didn’t kill and eat a pet that Ktee gave him for his birthday. I could be ten lifetimes just figuring out what the Gaborians and Thrales think is a killing offense.”

  “Then are we defeated already?”

  “No. We just have to be a little more creative than usual.”