Murder on the Orion Express

by Nate Streeper

  In all the tens of billions of cerebral hominids populating this sector of the galaxy, my arch nemesis happened to be running around on this very spaceship. What were the odds? I felt some thoughts begin to coalesce, some connections being made, similar to my capillaries mending after swallowing a fixer, but with regard to subconscious deduction. I was nearing a conclusion when Listic blurted out “How rude!”, which caused my insight to dissipate like a dream upon waking. I tried to ignore her, tried to get back in touch with my thoughts, but they just kept floating away.

  “Who’s rude?” Alice asked.

  Great. She was feeding the peanut gallery. So much for my epiphany. “Hold on a second,” I said. “I’m trying to think about something.”

  “Gina, that’s who. I was just trying to engage in some girl talk when she forced me out of her cybercom.”

  “You two were talking this whole time?” Alice asked. “I never heard anything.”

  Listic floated over to Alice, directly in front of her face. “It was a private conversation.”

  So much for a dude and his thoughts.

  We reached Gina’s room. I opened the door while Alice hung back. I was met with a surplus of rope, but an absence of Silos.

  “Figures,” I said.

  “There’s no way she could have untied those, herself,” Alice surmised. “Someone had to help her.”

  We finished searching our half of the cargo hold and wound up at the giant airlock on the floor, without confrontation or encounter of any kind. Gina rounded a corner opposite us and shook her head. “Bertle’s disappeared,” she said. “I checked Mannigan’s room and Bertle’s room on the way here. Silo?”

  “Nope,” I answered. “And no sign of Stenson. We’re the only ones still on the Pigeon. Or at least, the only ones still alive.”

  We looked down at the airlock. At present, it wasn’t following through with the “lock” part of its namesake. A slight gap could be seen bordering half its circumference. Someone had indeed taken advantage of the cockpit’s OVERRIDE control, and followed through by opening the damn thing.

  Crap.

  “Gina was right,” Alice said. “About the blinking red light.”

  Listic piped in. “That can’t be good.”

  “You know what this means,” I said.

  Gina scrutinized the hatch. “A case of premature evacuation.”

  14

  Retroactive Engineering

  After a disorienting gravitational shift, the airlock dumped us into an enormous hallway that lined the inner wall of the Orion Express. It extended about a hundred yards in either direction before tapering off in line with the curvature of the ship’s hull. Given the cruiser was about a mile long, we were looking down only a fraction of the hallway. Unlike the Pigeon, it was well lit and warm, but otherwise grey and white and bland.

  “I feel like we’re in a hospital wing,” Alice said.

  “Or an insane asylum,” Gina added.

  I nodded. “Pigeon would have latched onto the back half of the cruise ship—can’t have its ugly mug mucking up the view for someone who happens to look out a space port. This whole rear section’s for freight and engineering, so no need for aesthetically pleasing corridors.” I looked around to find my ORB still floating behind us. I decided to put her to use and shot her a hard command. “Listic, Patrol. Fly that direction, report back every two-hundred yards. Let us know if there is anything we should be concerned about.”

  “But I wanted to finish my cybercom conversation with Gina.”

  “Yes,” Gina said dryly. “It’s been fascinating.”

  “About the mascara and the bunny rabbits. Did you know that in the late twentieth century—”

  “Listic!”

  “Aye-aye, Captain!” she replied, bobbing up and down before zipping forward.

  I looked at Gina and Alice. “Alright, let’s go.”

  We walked silently down the hall for quite some time. The further we went, the more nervous we became. It was like a game of hot potato: The longer we went without incident, the more likely an incident was to transpire.

  Even I was nervous. Ever since Stenson’s hand fell on Alice, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were trapped in the movie Alien. This freakish corridor didn’t help. I needed to think more in terms of Die Hard. I tried to put myself in the role of John McClane. That helped. Only problem was, I needed a gun.

  There were no doors along the inside of the corridor, but every so often there was another airlock lining the outer wall—another passage to another freighter riding piggyback. A quick look at each lock’s control panel showed no sign of tampering or override—the passengers and crews of those ships were most likely blissfully ignorant of the killing rampage we were privy to. If we made it to the main engineering station, we could have an Orion Express crew member use the overcom to warn everyone on board those freighters, as well as the cruise ship itself, of the impending threat. No sense in only the three of us fighting the good fight.

  Being along the rim of the ship also provided small, infrequent portals to outer space. I glanced out one of them—at the tangle of subdued, swirling colors subspace presented itself as. It was like looking through a darkly filtered spyglass at a rainbow that was being strangled to death. I wish I could be more romantic about it, but I can’t. It wasn’t really much in the way of spectacle—there were no streaks of stars gone supernova, no undercurrents of the undead pleading with you as your ship passed them by. It was just a fuckin’ mess out there. It made a lot of people nauseous. It made me nauseous.

  I pulled my head away from the portal and swallowed a burp.

  Listic came zipping back after her first recon. “Boss! You’re not going to believe this.”

  Gina flung her blade out and took a defensive stance, looking down the hall. “Stay behind me,” she said. Alice nervously braced herself against the wall.

  I grabbed my vibroknuckles. “What did you find?”

  “Alan, there are exactly seven windows lining the hall between here and two-hundred yards from here.”

  I kept looking at her, waiting for her to finish. “...And?”

  “Seven windows! Can you believe it?”

  Gina retracted her blade and looked at me, finally out of patience. Alice closed her eyes and put her hand on her forehead.

  “Seven!” Listic went on. “You know that’s my favorite number. It’s a prime, and its value is highly regarded in mysticism.” I looked at the ladies and shrugged an apology. We continued walking down the hallway again, allowing Listic to float alongside of us and jabber on.

  “Back on the planet of your people’s origin, a Gregorian calendar week was divided into seven days. And the bestselling book series before the Great Fall of Books, a series entitled Harry Potter by author J. K. Rowling, was in fact seven books long. Such a great series! I’ve read the entire thing 32,148 times. It almost made me want to start my own publishing company. Would that be too meta? Never mind. So, the first book was called The Philosopher’s Stone. At least, that’s what it was called in England. In America, they re-titled it The Sorcerer’s Stone. America, by the way, was this weird collection of forty-nine obnoxious states, plus California, that was created by a group of migrant misfits who slaughtered the natives and enslaved Africans to pull cotton before they became the world police and told everyone else to behave themselves. Anyway, they landed on the moon first, so that’s cool. But seven windows, Alan! Seven!”

  We let a few moments of silence pass before she added, “Um, do you still want me to, you know, patrol ahead?”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “Alrighty, then.”

  Gina turned around suddenly. “Seriously, Alan. She keeps jabbering in my cybercom. Where the hell did you get that thing?”

  “Like I said, she picked up the Manic Virus. Wasn’t always like this.”


  “What I’ve been wondering, is why you call her ‘Listic,’” Alice said. “What kind of name is Listic?”

  “She chose it herself. After she got MV. Said it’s short for a word she’d pulled from the Cybermnemonic Archives, from an old movie she thinks I’d enjoy. She’s actually a joy to watch movies with,” I said, feeling a bit defensive. “Very enthusiastic.”

  “My full name is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

  “That’s right.” I nodded. “What she said.”

  “I actually prefer people to use my full name,” she went on. “But Alan thinks that’s too much to ask. I was considering Princess Buttercup instead, but—”

  “What did your name used to be?” Gina asked. “Before the virus?”

  “Bob,” I said. “Her name used to be Bob.”

  “Bob!” Gina stifled a laugh. “Alice, her name used to be Bob.”

  Alice snickered. I turned Listic off and let her drop into my hand, a little wounded. Didn’t they know it wasn’t polite to laugh at another man’s ORB?

  We walked another few hundred yards, their laughter ebbing as it gave way to what I hoped was self-conscious embarrassment, before we came to a fork in the hall. A sign on the dividing bulkhead read both “Cargo” and “Engineering,” with arrows pointing left and right, respectively. To the left, a door was sealed shut. To the right, a door was already open. The girls looked at me. I nodded to the right.

  The passage opened up into a glamorous shared residence, like a community room in a senior living facility. There were collections of sofas and easy chairs around low coffee tables, a piano along the right wall, and a wet bar on the left. A smokeless flame glowed in a fire pit in the middle of the room. Trees and shrubs of the jungle variety were scattered everywhere, soaking in nutrients from UV lights above them. Apparently, the engineering chief liked the Tiki Island motif. I was surprised there wasn’t an animatronic monkey swinging among the trees.

  “Nice,” Alice said. She headed over to an easy chair and flopped into it. “I could get used to this.”

  Such amenities were requisite in select pockets of the cruise ships. The engineering crew members tended to spend the majority of their time on board, with the exception of shore leave while the ship refueled at prime planets. Not providing an area for some semblance of normalcy proved psychologically damaging. People needed a place where they could relax and shoot the breeze.

  Or each other. Upon reaching the bar, I leaned over it to grab a cold soda. Instead, I found a dead body. One of the engineers, in a blue jump suit dotted with red. Death by bullets.

  At least it wasn’t by vibroblade this time. Our killer was getting creative.

  Alice saw my expression, got up, and wandered over. “Okay, now what?” She rounded the bar. “Jesus! Another one? This is ridiculous!” She nabbed a bottle of scotch and unscrewed the lid, sat on a stool and took a swig. No soda in sight, I was tempted to join her. I refrained and examined the body instead. Whatever the bullets had shot forth from was vicious—more like a rail gun than a pistol, the bartender more shredded than punctured. A dozen or so glass bottles were shattered on the shelves, the floor drenched in more liquors than a Long Island Iced Tea.

  Gina had gone on to the engineering control room and came back with the information I feared. “They’re all dead,” she said. “Looks like whoever came through here went ballistic. Literally. There’s eight of them in there, probably the entire engineering crew, blood splattered on all the walls. It’s like a pig exploded in a microwave. Whoever did this shot up half the control panels in the effort, put a few holes in the primary monitor. Everything’s fried. It’s a good thing the ship’s trajectory doesn’t need any assistance while in subspace. But once it emerges, getting it to do a one-eighty will be impossible.”

  “What about the—”

  “The overcom’s fried here, too,” she interrupted, reading my mind.

  I thought about it for a moment. We’d need to get onto the passenger section of the ship in order to warn anybody, at this point. “Isn’t there some kind of auxiliary control room?”

  “You got me. I tried jacking into its mainframe, but I got nothing. I couldn’t even get a read on the ship’s layout. The thing’s a floating hunk of trash right now, at the mercy of subspace.”

  As well as the mercy of space pirates, I thought. I leaned the dead engineer who apparently moonlighted as their bartender against a shelf of bourbon. “We’ll need this,” I said, grabbing his access card. “Should give us access to the rest of the cruise ship. We need to get to the bridge. Probably need to cut through the cargo area...” I stood up and followed Gina, who was already heading back out toward the hallway. “Come on, Alice.”

  She sighed and almost put down the scotch, then thought better of it and tucked it into the pocket of her white jumpsuit. She caught up with us where the hall forked.

  Five people were potentially waiting for us somewhere beyond the cargo hold door: Mannigan, Bertle, Ken, Silo, and Stenson. One of them was Denreiker. At least one of them was a killer. At least one of them had a vibroblade. At least one of them had a gun.

  Yippee ki-yay.

  ∙ • ∙

  In line with the rest of this labyrinthine space voyage, getting directly from Point A to Point B proved a ridiculous notion.

  On our way to the bridge, we encountered a door that lead directly to an upper level of the main cargo hold. While there was nothing unusual about that, the fact that it remained open seemed suspicious. And if there was anything we detectives couldn’t pass up, it was an opportunity to investigate something suspicious.

  “Hold up,” I said. Gina gave me the understanding eye. Worth the detour.

  The three of us gripped a waist-level rail at the end of a pier that jutted out over a vast, cavernous expanse. The main cargo hold of the Orion Express was enormous, stretching over five hundred yards in any direction. Aside from the subspace engine, the hold practically claimed the rear half of the ship. Looking out across it was dizzying. Although the pier we were standing on was gravitized, the hold itself was not. A number of the Orion Express’ own freighters were anchored along the hold’s inner walls—unlike the Pigeon, which was stuck outside with the other independent freighters. Giant metal megacrates floated below us, forming a breathing, patchwork metal quilt. Each megacrate was tethered to its neighbor by high-density bungee cords, yet they were cushioned from each other by magnetic fields.

  It was enough to make someone seasick.

  Alice leaned forward and threw up over the rail. Her vomit bubble floated into the void, changing its shape like an amoeba composed of brown noodle mush.

  “Lovely,” Gina said. She reached into Alice’s pocket and pulled out the bottle of scotch. “I don’t think you’ll be wanting anymore of this.” Alice shook her head slowly, and Gina gently tossed the bottle into horizontal free fall. It spun slowly toward the far wall with a perpetual, mesmerizing motion.

  We were about to pull away from the bile trip when I realized one of the nearest megacrates, about a hundred yards away, sported a violated round hatch on its roof. I looked back and discovered six jetpack mounts on the wall next to the door we had entered. Only one of the mounts still had a jetpack on it. Five missing jetpacks and five missing people. Finally, something added up.

  “You two wait here,” I said, putting the remaining pack on. “I’m going to check that crate out.”

  “Alan, I should go,” Gina responded. “I’m the cyborg, here.”

  “Stay with Alice.”

  “Really, Alan. Let me check it out. I can—”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be back.” I jumped over the railing and hurled myself toward the megacrate, then lit the jet.

  “Dammit, Alan!”

  I hit the top of the megacrate a bit too hard, but skipped it out to try and make it look intentional. I knew I had an audience, and seein
g as how I claimed the jetpack, I didn’t want to look like a complete idiot with it. I couldn’t help but turn back and look at them. They shook their heads disapprovingly.

  Oh, sure. Like they’d be any better at this. Like they’re a couple of jet pack whizzes.

  I clicked a button on the pack’s belt, and the device shot a polarity through me that lightly magnetized my feet to the top of the megacrate. I walked over to the hatch and climbed into it. There was a ladder leading “down.” Even though the ship’s hold wasn’t gravitized, the inside of the megacrates themselves were. It wouldn’t do any good to have people’s stuff knocking about in zero-g. Somebody’s doily might get torn.

  The megacrate had the same dim lighting as the Pigeon. And it was equally as cold. The similarity should come as no surprise, since the portion of the Pigeon that we stowed away in was essentially a large, permanently affixed megacrate. In fact, it felt a bit like déjà vu, which for some reason, reminded me of Dejah’s stew. And then it felt like I was having déjà vu about a time when I felt déjà vu... After shaking the feeling off, I left the jetpack in the corner next to a giant bipedal hydraulic forklift and shrouded it beneath a conveniently nearby tarp.

  When I turned around, I found Silo standing behind me, holding Bertle’s nail clippers out in front of her.

  “Alan,” she said. “Time to end this.”

  Her face was purple and swollen from the wallop Gina had so willingly offered earlier. She looked both haggard and pissed.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “About what?”

  “Well, about the nail clippers, for starters.” I placed my left hand on my hip, trying to make it look like a natural pose while my intent was to edge my hand closer to the vibroknuckles in my back pocket. “I mean, I’ve heard assassins can kill a person with a spoon. But nail clippers?”

  “They’re not just nail clippers.”