Cosmic Cabaret

by SFR Shooting Stars

  “Agreed.” Sutcliffe sighed and stepped back. “Where’s the kid? Her son? Bulky kid with dumb-bells for arms.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Veronika Elias walked back into the conversation with ease. “I saw Li’l Bo and tried to stop him. But he took off. I was trying to get him into my office.”

  Sutcliffe nodded to Le Mouche’s manager.

  Veronika Elias continued. “I sent a few of the burlesque girls to look for him. They always seem to know where he’s gone—or at least he knows where they are. Growing boy.”

  “That’s what they’re calling it now.” Sutcliffe shifted uncomfortably as he looked at the diminutive redhead, dwarfed by his own size. Just about everyone at the cabaret knew that Clive Sutcliffe and Veronika Elias were smitten, and nothing had come of it. The burly detective had briefly dated Char when he’d arrived a year earlier and popular belief was that Veronika was none too pleased with being second in line.

  “I’ll go check on him,” Veronika said. Le Mouche’s safety tech steered her away, holding her steady. Normally, the woman was a rock, standing three inches taller on her stiletto heels. Not today. Zane watched them go before he turned to Sutcliffe.

  “I need samples, everything.”

  “Got it,” Sutcliffe replied.

  “We need to comb this place to find every last filament of fiber. Every last skin cell should be documented. Freaking Blue Star line will need it. Their legal department is going to have a gas giant explosion when they hear.”

  “We’re hanging onto the comet’s ass, as my old grandma would say,” Sutcliffe agreed.

  “Your grandmother?”

  “Swore like a sailor,” Sutcliffe said. The upturn of his lip was the only sign of humor before it disappeared under his handlebar mustache. “We did the big cleanup before this last group of passengers came aboard. Remember? Total ion sweep. Standard operation after we hop a few times around in jumpspace.”

  “One bit of good news," Zane said and looked around the spiegeltent. “That should make gathering forensic evidence easier.”

  “Yeah, security wise, an external sweep is a logistics nightmare. Shuffling crew and passengers to safe zones,” Sutcliffe groused.

  “An ion sweep would have killed every last bit of bacteria on the agora deck. Health code requirements and all.”

  “No, this was for a standard jumpgrid cleanup. I think it has more to do with the thin layer of mesh that encases the ship? I’m not an engineer,” Sutcliffe said. He gave a ‘that’s what they tell me’ shrug.

  “Oh?” The scientist that dwelled in Zane’s mind awoke. “Why?”

  “Well,” Sutcliffe warmed up to the explanation. “As I understand it, the mesh allows Quantum to traverse from site-to-site in a bubble through negative space. But after a few jumps, the negative space leaves residue, and it prevents the ship from creating the bubble that lets us travel. This way we don’t end up someplace we weren’t expecting.” Sutcliffe said.

  That was more conversation with the security chief than Zane had ever had since meeting the chief. And though Sutcliffe dismissed the science of jumpspace as beyond his ken, it seemed the chief was a lot nerdier than he wanted others to think. “So, what happens if we don’t do the sweep?” Zane asked.

  “We end up in a world of hurt. Like, stay in negative space forever and all end up skeletons,” Sutcliffe said.

  “Well, that’s a pleasant thought,” Zane sighed, grateful for the momentary distraction from the death at his feet. “Let’s get the squints and their equipment in here,” Zane said.

  “Agreed. That, at least, my department can handle.” Sutcliffe said and put his Personal Information Tech, PIT for short, to his face, murmuring the order to his staff. “In the meantime, I’ll go find Veronika and Li'l Bo.”

  When Astra tried to enter the main spiegeltent, two large security officers stood in her way. They were not the bouncers assigned to the spiegeltent security. She knew those guys. No, these were officially official guys from Blue Star, the kind with small eyes and thick necks. They wore fancy uniforms with the sparkly blue star and everything, and they reeked of corporate.

  Astra didn’t even look them in the eye. She balled her fists and pushed through. In seconds she was off the ground, her feet pedaling and arms pinioned.

  “Let me go. Let me see. Is it true? Is she dead?” Hysteria shattering her plea, “Char! She can’t be! She just can’t be gone.” Her body heaved another sob. “This has to be a joke,” she said.

  “I’m so sorry, Astra.” Zane pulled away the spiegeltent’s back stage curtain. He nodded to the two security officers. “I’ll take it from here.”

  Commander Sutcliffe appeared at his side, his bulked out arms nearly popping out from his short-sleeved uniform tunic top.

  “As long as you’re here, we’d like to interview you. I know it’s a bad time, but no time is good,” Sutcliffe said. “And often, the sooner we can conduct the interview, the more information a witness might have.” Though everyone knew Sutcliffe had all the social graces of a Sorvelian simian, at least he didn’t fling poo. His timing still sucked.

  Astra eyed him, stiffening. Tears welled up in her eyes. Sorrow filling her. “So it’s true? She’s dead?”

  Sutcliffe’s nod was a solemn pronouncement.

  Astra’s head fell forward, shaking it side to side. “I’ll answer whatever you need.” She bit back a sob and stifled trembling lips. “Whatever helps.”

  A low ranking security officer set a chair down near her, Sutcliffe waved for her to take it, then sat across from her, crouching a bit. He seemed less intimidating that way.

  Astra drew her fingers through wispy locks, untangling the front tendrils. She tried to calm herself, fixating on her hair.

  Sutcliffe sat patiently. “Take your time, Astra.”

  “She’s really and truly dead?” She asked again.

  “Yes.” Sutcliffe repeated.

  A tear trickled down her cheek, absently she wiped it away and drew a long shuddering breath. “It’s not possible. Char’s unbreakable. She never fell, never made a mistake.” Astra rubbed her cheek and covered her mouth. A sob pushed from her broken heart, through the lump in her throat. It came out as a strangled cry.

  Sutcliffe handed her a dry handkerchief. She took it and tried to utter a word of thanks but words became a blubbering of gibberish. She used the handkerchief to blot the free flowing tears from her cheeks and wipe her nose. “Thank you,” she managed to choke out as she handed him back the cloth.

  “Keep it,” he said. “What can you tell me about yesterday?” Sutcliffe began. “Tell me everything you did, from the time you woke, until you went to bed.”

  It helped to think about the details, the weight on her chest lessened. She described backstage, the performance, and then afterwards. Astra looked up, catching Jones’ eye. He nodded, urging her to continue.

  She kept her description cold and clinical in an attempt to hold it together, but she kept stopping to wipe the tears from her eyes. Halfway through her description, a member of the kitchen staff handed her a cup of tea. She took one sip of the tea but it only made her nauseated. She handed the mug back, shaking her head. The staffer gave her a knowing, sympathetic squeeze on her shoulder and scurried away.

  “You were saying?” Sutcliffe reminded her. “You never saw her that night, then?”

  Astra shook her head.

  “And then what?” Sutcliffe made his notes on his PIT while his assistant recorded her inquiry.

  She looked up again from the handkerchief, cast a glance at the medico, Zane nodded for her to go on. “I had a late night frozen custard and pie with Doctor Jones.” She did her best to look prim. “Then, he accompanied me back to my room where my roommate was. She was already asleep. I turned on the light, she woke up, got cranky, then pulled her covers over her head while I got ready for bed. I got in bed, exhausted, and fell right to sleep. I got up for the morning breakfast call and practice. That’s when I heard, s
o I came here.”

  Astra looked up at Sutcliffe and wondered aloud, “How could she have died? The safeties never fail.” Astra frowned and stared down at her feet and her well-worn practice slippers. She pushed back the jagged lump in her throat. “Char never practiced alone.”

  Four

  “Char never practiced alone,” the beautiful tear-stained face explained. Jones heart went out to her. Astra’s mentor was dead, and this had to be traumatic. He wanted to go to her, hold her, but he couldn’t. He hadn’t had time of death confirmed other than the scan. But he couldn’t believe for one second that Astra would ever hurt anyone.

  “Going back to practice. What did she say to you? After practice? There was a discussion, you said?” Sutcliffe was going back over his notes. Zane watched helplessly and stood between Astra and Sutcliffe, encouraging her with glances.

  “You said she hugged you?” Sutcliffe asked.

  “She always hugged me. And she said she was leaving… because she was pregnant.” The sobbing started again.

  The chief sat back and whistled low.

  Jones gave Sutcliffe a “go fall in a crack in space” look. He watched helplessly as she sobbed into Sutcliffe’s handkerchief. Zane was on the other side of the investigation. He couldn’t blur the lines. Not now. Still, his body longed to hold Astra, to pull her into his arms, to smooth her hair and kiss the tears from her cheeks.

  Luckily, Veronika came back at that moment. “Found him,” she announced. Char’s son, Li’l Bo was there with her, head in his hands, hiding his face. He shifted his gaze away from Astra and to his hands. She was having none of it. She stood and went to the boy.

  “Hey.” She placed a hand on his shoulder and turned the muscular teen around with an elegant strength. “Don’t hide yourself from me.” Her voice was a gentle coax.

  “Come here.” She held out her arms, and he melted into them like a five-year-old.

  Sutcliffe pulled back, and on cue, so did Jones. They left the three and walked back into the stage, to the main floor.

  The performance area wasn’t an actual spiegeltent. It was meant to look like the ancient form of circus tent. The circling walls of the venue were beautiful dark woods, inlaid with deep rich tones of varying red and golden woods. Booths lined the outer circle of the round theatre. A railing separated the main floor seating from the outer circle seating.

  In the center of the faux tent, the ceiling went straight up thirty feet or more. And from that height, directly above the audience seated at central dining tables, the aerial artists performed. The other acts performed below, on the main stage and in the aisles around the arena.

  “Let’s head down to main security and review the visual logs,” Sutcliffe said.

  “I’ll meet you there. I want to accompany Char’s body to the lab,” said Zane. When Sutcliffe stopped with a questioning tilt of his head, Zane added “Chain of custody?”

  Sutcliffe gave him a tiny nod that was colored with respect. Zane turned. Instead of a spiegeltent in front of him, the memories of a battlefield hospital shoved its way into his vision. Time dilated. Zane walked to the body on the floor. The distant clamor of voices rang in his head, ranging from moaning to his own steady orders for triage tagging.

  No, not now. Stop.

  The beating of his heart thudded like a starfighter taking off. When he closed his eyes, Zane recolored the picture, repainting the terrifying vestigial memory with that of a beautiful girl dancing on aerial silks. Astra.

  The medtechs arrived on the scene as Sutcliffe took his leave. They stopped in front of Zane as he raised a hand and stepped forward. Zane bent forward and smoothed the cloth over Char’s body with the reverence of his vocation. There was question in the eyes of the medtech as Zane glanced up. “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “Morgue.”

  A little while later, Sutcliffe sat across from Jones in the main security offices. “Are you ex-military?” He asked Zane.

  “How did you guess?”

  “You walk like a military man. Surgeon? Forensics?”

  “Both. I had to know what was maiming soldiers, if you must know. Once I got out, it was easier to deal with the dead.” Zane’s body went stiff. Numb. Icy cold seeped into his fingers.

  If Sutcliffe probed further, he’d end up on a road that Zane had sworn an oath never to reveal — the Freedom Road. It’s why he was in this cushy job. Correction. What was a cushy job until a murder got thrown in his lap. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, glaring back at Sutcliffe with a look that warned him to back off.

  “I don’t want to push you, Doc, but I need you on this. I have a Blue Star priority investigation that just shot to the top of my list. I can’t be the one to connect the dots on Char Melana’s death. You’re the medical man. You’ve done it before?”

  “I’ve done some investigation, sure. But here on Quantum that boiled down to a passenger eating bad splotnik or dropping dead during sex.” Zane realized his arms were crossed, his words were brusque. He was shutting down every fragment of emotion. Using old tools, objectifying, distancing so he could get from one moment to the next.

  “I liked Char.” He unfolded his arms as he spoke, trying to brush off the stiffness in his voice. “She deserves the best investigation that we can provide.”

  “The job is to find the truth,” Sutcliffe said.

  “But I’m not the guy for that job,” Zane countered and sat back with a vain hope in his heart that that would end it.

  Sutcliffe only smiled and shook his head. His big walrus mustache quivered. “I could order you to do it.”

  “I can refuse.”

  “Technically, you can’t.” The smile disappeared from Sutcliffe’s face as quickly as it had come, like a cloud passing over the sun. “As the medical examiner, it’s your job. You’re the only one who has the forensics qualifications. You have the security clearances. This is yours to oversee.”

  When Zane looked down at his hands, the knuckles on were white. He loosened his grip on the chair. “Alright. But I need to commandeer some help.”

  “Absolutely. I can give you whatever you need. Doc, whoever did this was a clod of an assassin. They barely tried to make it look like an accident.”

  “Exactly,” Zane picked up one of the tech reports, “Prelim tech report says nobody messed with the safeties,” Zane said.

  “I’ve ordered a technology forensics crew to go over all engineering reports to rule out any hanky-panky redirects. That may take a while,” Sutcliffe said. “Especially with this all-hands security breach dirt I’m having to deal with from head office. I can’t believe they won’t let me override it and let someone else do the monkey work.”

  “So, that’s why you need me?” Zane said.

  “Yeah, that’s why I need you.”

  “I’m the medico monkey,” Zane said with disgust.

  “Come with me, Doc,” Sutcliffe stood and waggled a finger. Sutcliffe took him to a section of the security offices where he normally performed autopsies. They passed his autopsy lab and continued for another bit before Sutcliffe stopped at a door. “This is yours.”

  The Chief coded in the key to a wall lock. His fingers drew across the square inset. As the final glyph was drawn, the archway opened, allowing the men access to a sparse office area. Two constables, in Blue Star security uniforms, sat at two identical desks situated across from each other. They looked up and over at Zane in unison as if they were somehow synced.

  “Detective Constables Dodge and Citrelpl.” He pronounced the latter with a guttural growl.

  “Dodge.” Zane nodded to the blonde female behind the far desk, and then to the bald pink-orange skinned Citrelpl. “Dorset region?”

  The humanoid nodded but his head wobbled like a bobble head toy.

  “Citrelpl.” Zane mangled the vowels and made the ‘p’ come out flat rather than plosive. “I’m sorry. I probably butchered the pronunciation. No guarantee I will get it
right the next time, either.” Jones forced a smile. The Dorsetian looked at him and gave a languid nod. The image of a bovine came to mind.

  The Chief of Security pointed to a portion of the wall that appeared to be a picture. “You have a separate office behind the window there.” Sutcliffe pointed. “Quantum’s captain wants this sewn up before the end of this cruise. We have four days left before minimum jump ends. It could be five or six. You know jumpspace. But that’s at least four days that nobody’s going anywhere.

  “Four days for us to uncover what happened.” Zane said.

  “Join me in your office?” Zane followed Sutcliffe into the adjoining office. As the door closed behind them, Sutcliffe asked, “You got this, Doc?”

  “I got this,” Zane sighed.

  “Ok then, I gave you one of my best teams. Dodge and Citrelpl are the most efficient pair of detective constables I have, and they work like they have one brain; it’s uncanny.”

  “It’s the Dorsetian, his empathy is one big sinkhole of emotional absorption. Are they romantic —”

  “That’s not my business, or yours.” Sutcliffe nodded at Dorsetian on the other side the window. “And he’s a big one, so I wouldn’t ask.”

  Citrelpl’s bald head had three pinky nail sized consecutive knots from the middle of his forehead at the bridge of his nose to the top of his brow line. “Those fore-knots, that’s a some kind of Dorsetian distinction in his culture, most males only have one or two.”

  “One day, maybe, he’ll tell you his story.” Sutcliffe grinned. “Suffice to say, he’s a big deal back where he comes from, and he’s happy here, so let’s just treat him as he wants. The dude is smart.”

  “Got it.” Zane sunk down into the rough woven covered chair. “The forensics team?

  “I got you some lab techs,” Sutcliffe answered.

  “Thanks,” Zane forced diplomacy into his words, but he knew they were stiff from the moment they left his lips. “I’ll do my best, for Char.”

  “And I want you to clear me first, so I can help.”