Murder on the Orion Express

by Nate Streeper

  “As a matter of fact, I am.” Alice looked over at me with a hint of mischief. Everyone else fell uncomfortably silent.

  Finally, Loche piped up. “Oh.”

  “A private detective,” Mannigan said. “Well, I hate to tell you this, but no one’s exactly hired you to solve this case. It’s not like you’re an official Galacticop, or anything. Anyone who rents an office and lights up a sign over their door can call themselves a private detective. No offense.”

  Right. Why would anyone be offended by that?

  “Well, I hate to tell you this, but seeing as how we’re trapped in subspace, and the only Interlock employee on board the Pigeon is dead, we really have no alternative but to figure this out for ourselves,” I said. “Unless everyone’s comfortable with the idea of being the next potential victim.”

  They all looked around at each other suspiciously. Donna’s beady eyes darted from face to face, but she was otherwise immobile. Bertle shrunk back against the wall and began chewing his nails in earnest. Loche raised his eyebrows, then shuffled around and tried not to make eye contact with anyone.

  Mannigan cleared his throat. “Well, when you put it that way...”

  “Listen, I’m trying to assess where everyone was at the time of the murder. Establish alibis. So. One at a time. Bertle, where were you an hour ago? And from that point, bring us up to the moment and tell us how exactly you ended up in this room.”

  Bertle cleared his throat. “An hour ago. Let’s see... Okay, an hour ago, Donna and I were practicing a scene from her ‘play.’ She kept telling me I wasn’t reading the part the way it was meant to be read. Eventually, I got upset and told her it was because the play wasn’t written very well.” He stopped for a moment and cocked his head toward her. “Sorry, Donna.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Anyway, we got into a quarrel. I stormed out—that’s when you saw me in the hall and told me Dave had been murdered. I freaked out and stopped at this door rather my own, since it was closer, and asked them to let me in. Donna heard me from further down the hall, poked her head out and asked me what was wrong. Right before Loche let me in, I yelled out to her to close the door and lock herself in.” He interrupted himself to ask her: “Why didn’t you?”

  “I couldn’t hear what you were saying,” she said in monotone.

  “Donna?” I asked. “What’s your story.”

  “Same as he said. About our argument. Then when I heard him yelling in the hallway, it sounded like a different kind of yelling than the kind when we were arguing, so I got worried. I wanted to check on him. And to... apologize.”

  Bertle blinked hard and looked over at her with moist eyes. “You wanted to apologize to me? Why did you feel like you needed to apologize to me?”

  “You were right. I’m an actor, not a playwright. It’s a bad play.”

  Bertle was shaking his head compassionately. “No, it’s a good play. I’m a bad actor. It was a good play. I’m so sorry, Donna. I’m so sorry.”

  They hugged, making me feel as though I should replace “detective” with “counselor” on my holocards.

  “Loche?” I asked, looking at him. “The past hour.”

  He looked even more jittery than usual. Of everyone in the room, it seemed like he was hiding something. Either that, or he just drank too much of his own coffee. “I’ve been in here the entire time,” he said. “Ever since we saw you in the mess hall. Isn’t that right, Mr. Mannigan?”

  Mannigan nodded his head adamantly. “Absolutely. We’ve been in here the entire time.”

  “Doing what?” I pressed, hoping for them to simultaneously offer conflicting stories. But only Mannigan replied.

  “Strategizing,” he said, looking away. “For the campaign, of course.”

  I let the sentence hang for a moment. “Of course,” I said. I stood up. “Okay, I guess that’s all I need to know, right now. Alice, you and I are going to pay a visit to the others. You four, stay here. We’ll come back to check on you.”

  They all offered an affirmation in some form or another. I grabbed Alice by the wrist and led her toward the door. “Really? But—” she started.

  “Come on.”

  When we got out into the hall, she continued. “I can’t believe you’re letting me come with you, this time. See? You consider me a valuable intern.”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “Something’s off about their collective behavior. I think you’re safer out here than you were in there. That had the makings of a locked room mystery, and it wasn’t a room I wanted to be in, much longer. It could be nothing, but...”

  “What?”

  I let go of her wrist as we kept walking down the aisle between the cargo boxes. We’d check on Bliss and John Smith, next. “That whole time in there, not one of them asked us... Not one of them asked us where we were at the time of the murder. But they should have been just as suspicious of us as we were of them.”

  She looked at me a little confused, then let it sink in. Sure, it was possible that I simply commanded the conversation in the room, that they felt compelled to answer all of my questions rather than ask any of their own. But in a room full of actors and politicians, the odds of me being the most compelling person in the room were slim. None of them thought to accuse either of us of outright killing Dave. Why not? I wasn’t about to leave Alice alone in there with any of them.

  Rule #3 of being a private detective: Don’t trust anybody.

  9

  Tied Up

  According to Dave’s sketch, Bliss and John Smith’s room was past the mess hall—closer to mine and Alice’s than either Bertle’s or Mannigan’s, but on the opposite side of the cargo bay. We approached cautiously. Alice was getting good at shadowing me. I went up against the wall, right next to the door—my modus operandi for entering any room on this bass ackwards ship—and slid Dave’s vibroknuckles onto my left hand. Here’s to hoping their door was unlocked.

  I flung around and swung the door to the side. What I saw was either an intense interrogation session or bondage sex play. And quite honestly, at this point, I had no fucking idea.

  Bliss was tied up and sitting on the toilet in the bathroom nook in the corner. Her red dress was torn in a few places. Her body slumped forward, but she was otherwise held up by a rope that tied her arms to the shower pipe behind her. Black mascara ran down her cheek, mingling with the silver face tattoo that decorated her left jawline. It took me a moment to assess that she was unconscious. It took me another moment to remember that she was a sexdoll, so unconscious was probably an inappropriate term. Someone had ejected her ORB from her right eye socket. She was effectively offline.

  I poked my head further through the door and glanced left and right. Nobody. I walked in, signaled Alice to follow me.

  “Smells in here,” she said, waving her hand in front of her face. “Wait, what the...” she noticed the doll and blushed, but couldn’t take her eyes off her. “So that John Smith guy’s a kinky shit.”

  I walked up to Bliss, removed my vibroknuckles and put them on the game table, took my ORB out of my pocket and tossed her in the air. “Listic, On.”

  She hung there and lit up. “What’s up, boss?” She did a 360 to take in the scene, and noticed Bliss. “Whoa! Alan! Hold the subphone, you found your lady love!” She paused for a moment, looked Bliss up and down, realizing her prone state. “And you’ve been... busy?”

  “Listic, run a diagnostic. How long ago did this happen? Can you tell from any bruises or prints who may have done this?”

  She matched her eye to mine. “You mean... you didn’t do this?”

  “No.”

  “I assumed you did this.”

  “No.” Her intuition chip was acting up again. “Listic, I didn’t do this. Do a diagnostic, tell me who did.”

  She turned back toward Bliss and scanned her. “You’re right,
you’re right, you’re right. I shouldn’t have assumed. It was wrong of me to assume.”

  “I mean, I know it’s just a doll,” Alice said as she sat down on the far bed, “but seriously, this is kinda whacked.” She stared at Bliss while Listic zipped about the doll, acquiring data. “I mean, don’t you think this is kind of whacked?”

  “If I learned anything while I was in GalactiCop, it’s that everybody’s kind of whacked. As long as no one’s getting hurt, or being forced to do something they don’t want to do, I try not to judge.” I massaged my head. It was still a little sore, despite the tribuprofin. “Thing about sexdolls that always bothered me, though... You’d think since they’ve managed to replicate the human form so thoroughly, people would respond to them like humans. With respect, I mean. But just knowing they’re not, well... For some people, that’s all the psychological rationalization they need to let the beast out.”

  “The beast?”

  “The beast. The one most of us manage to keep in check, aside from the occasional fit of rage. Thanatos. Flip side of Eros, but two sides of the same coin. The constant struggle. Good, evil. All that stuff.”

  “Psych 101 shit.”

  “Psych 101 shit.” I nodded. “I remember reading an article about twenty years ago, around the time sexdolls were going mainstream. Cheaper to manufacture, not just in vogue with the wealthy, anymore. They were saying—they being psychologists and criminologists, people like them—they were saying that this would be a good thing. The androids would give sickos an outlet for sadism. Better to mess with robots than real people. Only, it didn’t pan out that way. Turned out... Sure, generally good people would take out their day-to-day aggressions on the things—kick the robot since they couldn’t kick the boss, release their sexual tension in unusual ways. But the sickos? Still sick. There’s no thrill for them in killing a machine. A machine’s eyes don’t suffer, don’t beg to live. Sickos can tell the difference.” I reflected on my own general lack of interest in being intimate with a machine. “Hell, we all can.”

  Listic floated next to me. “Alan, that was both fascinating and insightful,” she said seriously. “You should be an ethics professor.”

  Alice and I looked at each other. Suddenly, as if on cue, we busted up laughing.

  “Did I say something funny?” Listic asked.

  Alice was holding her gut. Eventually, she managed to squeeze out a few words. “Listic, you’re such a brat.”

  “She’s so damn—” it was hard for me to talk “—patronizing, sometimes.”

  “I am not patronizing.” She acted as though her feelings were hurt.

  I patted Listic on her top. “You have no idea.”

  Alice sat up straight, managing to regain her composure before I did. “Hey, seriously... Do you smell something? Like, spoiled meat?” I sniffed, smelled something familiar. She looked around, took another deep breath. “Actually, it smells kind of like... like...”

  Like the dead pilot we discovered in the crew section. Or any of the other dead bodies I’d tagged as a GalactiCop. The faint smell of fruit.

  Something fleshy fell from the ceiling. It landed on Alice’s chest with a moist thud, then tumbled down her white jumpsuit and onto her lap, leaving a clotted, red trail of blood. It looked like one of those freakish, leaping, baby creatures from the movie Alien—the creature that gripped that poor guy’s face and implanted his esophagus with its seed.

  It turned out to be a severed hand. Which was somehow even freakier than those freakish Alien things.

  I know, I have a problem with comparing everything to movie scenes. I’m working on it.

  “What the fuck!” Alice yelled. “Alan, get it off me! Get it off me!”

  I ran over, glancing up mid-stride to notice a red handprint on the ceiling. “Um...” I grabbed the fleshy, bloody, severed hand from her crotch and tossed it to the floor.

  Alice looked at the hand, then at me. She started to say something, but her eyes rolled up into the back of her head.

  Her turn to pass out.

  Listic floated down to the severed hand, her own eye oscillating back and forth between it and my face.

  “Huh,” she said. “That was weird.”

  ∙ • ∙

  I closed the door of this fucked up room and sat down on the unoccupied bed. I Alice sleep it off while I asked Listic to scan the lifeless hand and give me a report on both it and Bliss.

  “The hand belongs—or should I say, ‘belonged,’” she said with ridiculous emphasis, “to a middle-aged man. It was torn off his arm by a clean, linear explosion rather than by a blade of any kind.”

  Linear explosions were often the result of concussive waves that expanded from Saturn grenades. Their thin, planer outpouring could slice a starship in two if it was powerful enough. Most weren’t. Based on the lack of a hairline fracture bisecting the room we were in, or the lack of a bisected John Smith, for that matter, I imagined the grenade in question must have been rather small. And easily concealable.

  I remembered the gene-cuff attached from John Smith’s arm to his briefcase. This was most certainly his hand, and he was quite possibly still running around on the ship without it. And, most likely, without his precious briefcase.

  “Was this the hand responsible for tying Bliss up?” I asked.

  “Who?” Listic asked, perplexed.

  I hadn’t told Listic her name yet. “Bliss. The sexdoll.”

  “Oh,” she replied, dripping jealousy. “She has a name, now, does she?”

  “Listic...”

  “Bliss the Beautiful. And I’m just a floating eyeball. What I wouldn’t give...”

  “Listic!”

  “Hard to say. She may have been tied up by a woman. A woman with some very meaty hands. Manly hands.” She just floated there for a moment, her eye glowing and dimming, glowing and dimming. “Then again... I suppose it could have been a man with womanly hands. You pose a tough question, boss.”

  This was ridiculous. I might as well ask her to read me my horoscope for the day. Tarot cards would prove more enlightening. I was about to turn her off, when it occurred to me... Someone had removed Bliss’ ORB. And I had one floating right in front of me.

  “Listic, hang on. I’m going to have you access Bliss’ flash memory. I imagine whatever she saw last is still burned in there.” I grabbed Listic from the air and walked her over to Bliss.

  “You mean I get to interface?” she asked excitedly. “Why, I haven’t interfaced since that sexy mainframe back on Fillion! I’ve had to interface by myself since then, and it’s just not the same—you know, without another mainframe in the room to make you feel special. To caress your circuits, hum along your transistors...”

  “Yeah,” I said. I lifted Bliss’ head back and jacked Listic into her eye socket, getting a smudge of mascara on my fingers.

  The doll sat straight up—operational, but blank. A few seconds later, Listic took over and began talking with the doll’s lips. Her voice sounded less tinny when filtered through an android. “I’m in, Alan, I’m in! Well, sort of. Something’s a little off...”

  “Project the last few images from her flash memory. You don’t have to holovid it, just throw it on the far wall like a movie.”

  “Sure, Alan. Sure. Only...” she stared at the wall. Squinted. I’d never jacked Listic into an android, before. It was eerie watching her squirm around in a humanoid body and express herself with the set of mannerisms that I’d always imagined her to possess. “Only, I can’t.”

  Great. “Why not?”

  “Because there’s no flash memory. There are no android components to connect to. No drivers. Alan, this is strange. I feel like I’m floating in here.”

  This didn’t make any sense. All sexdolls had standard flash interfaces. It was basic tech. “What do you mean, floating?”

  “These aren’t android
components, okay? They’re cybernetic. Bliss isn’t a sexdoll. There’s someone else in here, already. There’s someone partitioning me from—”

  “ORB, Off,” the cyborg said in her own voice, organic and sultry. It was a voice I recognized.

  She slowly turned her head and looked at me with those eyes I’d noticed back at The Boneyard. Even though one of them was Listic’s pale blue while the other remained her native green, I could see something beyond them, now. They were not eyes that belonged to a sexdoll set to generic, nor those belonging to an anthropomorphic rendition of Listic. They were more than that.

  Her eyes held a soul.

  “Hi, Alan,” she said.

  Enough people had already passed out or fallen dead on this flight, and having reached my own quota right alongside the rest of them, I managed to exempt myself this round. Rather than falling flat on my sore ass, I reached back for the bed that Alice was sprawled out on and slowly sat down on its edge.

  I knew this woman. Somehow, behind the layer of mussed make up, minor facial reconstruction, and curvy cybernetics, I knew her. The last time I’d seen her was on New Gaia. Before my life began to sink.

  “Hello, Gina.”

  10

  Big Picture

  Gina smiled. “Been awhile. What... Two years?”

  “Three,” I answered. “But who’s counting?”

  She looked around the room. “Did you take her down?”

  I had no idea who or what she was talking about. “Take who down?”

  “Guess not.” She struggled to stand up. Couldn’t. “Untie me, okay?”

  “Sure.” I stood back up and tucked myself behind the partially closed shower curtain—this one had daisies on it. I squeezed up against the shower wall and began working out the knot around her wrists. This was going to take awhile—not only was I in an awkward position, but this wasn’t a slipknot like the one I’d used on Red Bandana. This was some kind of professional knot, like one that was only taught to elite Star Scouts. It was going to take me awhile. I looked around for a knife.