The Disappeared

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “The bodies,” said the first cop. The name above his pocket read McMullen. “I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  Flint glanced at Raifey. McMullen’s words were a cue for the more experienced partner to comment on the younger partner’s naïveté. But Raifey didn’t. He didn’t say anything at all.

  “What about the bodies?” Flint asked.

  “How anyone could do that—” McMullen started, but Raifey held up his hand.

  “Regulations,” he said, more to his partner than Flint. “Let the detective make his own determination.”

  Technically, Raifey was right, but often space cops told detectives what to see, what to find.

  “Murder?” Flint said.

  McMullen made a choking sound and turned away. Raifey’s mouth curved in a slight smile. “Why else would they call you?”

  There were a thousand reasons. Theft, illegal cargo, damage to the ship, sign of illegals in an abandoned vessel. But Flint chose to ignore the belligerence.

  “What else?” He continued to look at Raifey, not McMullen. Flint wanted to prove to the older cop that they could work together if they had to.

  Raifey met his gaze for a long moment, as if measuring him. Behind him, Flint heard DeRicci’s boot heels clicking on the metal floor.

  Raifey’s gaze flicked over Flint’s shoulder, obviously taking in DeRicci’s approach. Then Raifey leaned forward and lowered his voice.

  “The bodies weren’t that unusual,” he said. “You’ll recognize it. It was the autopilot. Someone set that yacht on a collision course with the Moon. They should have left the thing to float in space. I would have. But instead, they wanted it here.”

  Flint nodded. That was unusual. Bodies were found in abandoned vessels all the time, and some of those bodies were murder victims. But usually, they were victims of a failed life support system, inoperative engines, or a lack of fuel. In all of those cases, the ship continued on its regular course or floated when the fuel was gone.

  He’d never heard of anyone setting autopilot for a collision course with the Moon itself. Such a course was guaranteed to draw Traffic’s attention.

  Flint said, “Were they—?”

  “HazMat is nearly done.” DeRicci had come up behind him, talking over him deliberately. She glared at both space cops, who looked away, their expressions neutral once more.

  Flint suppressed a sigh and peered down the tunnel. Sure enough, the HazMat team was coming off the yacht, carrying their gear as they walked. As they moved through the tunnel walls, the orange warning lights turned yellow.

  No hazardous materials on board. No lethal biological agents. Normally that meant that the Port crews could process the vessel. But the yellow lights meant that a police investigation was underway. No one could go through that tunnel without the proper authorization.

  The space cops stood back as the first members of the HazMat team came out of the tunnel. Their protective gear made them all look like something alien, even though they were all clearly human. It covered them from head to foot like a second skin, obscuring their facial features. The gear provided its own environment. The thick webbing allowed nothing to pass through to the people inside—at least nothing that HazMat had encountered so far.

  The team’s leader touched a spot on the gear’s neck and the facial protection fell away, revealing a middle-aged woman with delicate features. Her gaze met DeRicci’s.

  “You’ve got a hell of a mess in there.”

  “Any ideas?” DeRicci asked.

  “I’ve got plenty of ideas,” the HazMat team leader said. “We’ll talk when you’re done if you want, but I think it’s pretty self-explanatory.”

  DeRicci nodded. “Okay, Miles,” she said. “Looks like it’s just you and me and three dead—”

  “Anything we should watch out for?” Flint asked the team leader, deliberately ignoring DeRicci.

  That was the question she should have asked. Sometimes HazMat ruled unidentifiable objects as potentially hazardous, should they be touched in the wrong way or accidentally opened. Technically, HazMat was supposed to warn any team going in of such things, but sometimes—particularly in cases of gruesome death—they focused so strongly on the corpses that they sometimes forgot to warn about the other problems.

  The team leader glanced at DeRicci. DeRicci’s skin had flushed a deep red. She wasn’t used to being overridden by Flint. He’d been courteous to her from the day they’d started working together, suffering her insults and her derision.

  But he wasn’t about to go on a yacht with three dead bodies on board without asking the proper questions.

  “There’s nothing suspicious,” the team leader said after a moment. “At least as far as we’re concerned.”

  Flint nodded. Then he glanced at DeRicci. She raised her eyebrows at him, both mocking him and telling him to go first. He stepped into the tunnel.

  All Port tunnels smelled the same: the cool metallic scent of consistently recycled air, the faint stench of sewage from overflowing ship systems, and the industrial deodorizer that attempted to mask all of those smells. He felt his shoulders relax. He was used to this place.

  The tunnel was short. Most of it was permanent, but the shipside end could be extended or retracted depending on need. He stepped past the warning lights and took the small door on the side instead of going straight into the ship. He wanted to examine the exterior first.

  As he stepped down, he saw DeRicci sigh heavily. She was only a few meters behind him. She glanced at the ship’s closed airlock door, then at him, apparently deciding she didn’t want to enter the yacht alone.

  She came down the steps backwards, holding the railing as if she were coming down a ladder. That confirmed it for him; DeRicci rarely handled the Port. They had gotten this assignment because of his experience, not hers.

  She reached the main level and looked around. He tried to imagine the dock from her perspective. The dome was metallic, without a view of space the way Armstrong had. The artificial lighting was on the lowest regulation setting, so dim that shadows and darkness predominated.

  “Lights full,” Flint said, adding the command code. The lights rose.

  The dock had been built for vessels one hundred times the size of the yacht. The yacht seemed small inside the enclosed area—more like a robotic repair vehicle than a spacefaring one.

  Flint walked toward it, noting that the name—normally painted in large letters on the side—had been taken off. The lack of a name was a violation of most interstellar regulations. He suspected they would find more violations before they were done.

  “You recording this?” DeRicci asked.

  Flint started. He hadn’t even thought to make a video record. “I figured HazMat did.”

  “We need our own.” DeRicci approached the hull as Flint pressed one of the chips on his uniform sleeve. He would record everything from now on.

  She was looking at a scorch mark that ran along the side, but she didn’t touch it.

  “Weapons fire?” she asked, and she was checking with him. She hadn’t done that before either.

  He nodded. He moved closer. The yacht had an expensive blast coating, but not enough to protect it from whatever had shot at it.

  “Looks like only a few shots,” he said. “Powerful, but I’d guess they were meant as warning shots.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Fresh enough.” Flint touched the hull. It was smooth against his fingers. “It looks like the blast coating got reapplied regularly. This hull should be pitted from space debris—happens to all ships over time, no matter how well shielded they are—and this one isn’t.”

  “No name either,” DeRicci said.

  Flint nodded. He’d worked his way to the back of the ship. “And no registration. All the required parts codes have been removed as well.”

  Parts codes were placed on all pieces of material for ships made on Earth or to be used at human-run ports. There were a thousand ways to identify a ship a
side from its own registration, and judging by the cursory examination, this ship had gotten rid of all of them.

  “Someone spent a lot of money to keep this ship in working order and its identity secret,” DeRicci said.

  “Looks like it didn’t work,” Flint said.

  “You can’t be sure that whoever killed the people inside this ship knew who they were,” DeRicci said.

  As he rounded the side of the ship, he stopped. “Noelle,” he said, calling her over. He usually didn’t use her first name. She came quickly, just like he expected her to.

  She frowned at the ship. “What is it?”

  “The escape pods are gone. The hatches are still open.”

  “So someone escaped,” DeRicci said.

  Flint nodded. “And no one inside the ship closed the hatch doors. If I were under attack, I’d make sure those hatches closed quickly. One good shot in them could do serious damage to the ship.”

  “Why wouldn’t they close automatically?” DeRicci asked.

  “Redundant technology,” Flint said. “This ship is a medium-level yacht, not high end. The logic is that if you have to abandon ship, the ship is lost. No need to protect it or its cargo any longer.”

  “Two pods for a ship this size?”

  “Regulation. If you had the suggested-size crew and passengers, everyone should be able to fit into the pods. It would be a tight squeeze, and you’d better pray someone would find you pretty fast, but you’d be all right for a few days.”

  “So we should be looking for some pods.”

  “We’ll put Traffic on it. We also should ask anyone who comes into the docks in the next two days if they’ve seen or picked up pods.”

  DeRicci nodded. “That’s a break then.”

  “Maybe.” Flint glanced at her. “If our killers used the pods, they might have had another ship waiting nearby.”

  “If they had another ship, why would they use the pods?” DeRicci asked.

  “Good point.” Flint scanned the rest of the hull and found nothing except a few more blast marks.

  “You ready to go in?” DeRicci asked.

  “You coming with me?” Flint asked.

  DeRicci nodded. “I worry when HazMat says we have a mess. They usually concentrate on their job, not ours.”

  That had been Flint’s sense of it too. He took the stairs two at a time and stepped back into the tunnel. The tunnel’s mouth attached to the yacht’s main entrance. Before he pressed open the outer door, he paused.

  “What?” DeRicci asked. She had stopped right beside him.

  She was actually letting him take the lead instead of trying to intimidate him or browbeat him. She really had to feel out of her depth here.

  “This ship was attached to something else, and just recently.” He pointed to the scrape marks beside the door. “Something which isn’t regulation, and couldn’t latch onto the ship properly.”

  “Are you saying they were at a different port?”

  He shook his head. “If I had to guess, I’d say they were boarded.”

  DeRicci’s mouth formed a thin line. “In that case, jurisdiction—”

  “Is ours. The bodies ended up here.”

  She nodded. “Make sure you get that on the recording.”

  He already had. He palmed open the outside door. The HazMat team had left the interior door closed, just the way the airlock would have been in space.

  “Damn HazMat,” DeRicci said, looking down. “God knows how much evidence they trampled here.”

  He hadn’t even thought of that. He still had a lot to learn as a detective. As a former space cop, he saw HazMat as a godsend, not a potential problem. “We should have bagged their boots.”

  “We’ll get them if we need them.”

  Flint moved his arm, making sure he got everything in the tiny airlock recorded. There was so much about investigation that he didn’t know.

  “What’re you waiting for?” DeRicci asked, and he realized she expected him to open the door.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed the main door open.

  The smell hit him first. Urine, blood, feces, and the beginnings of decomposition. In all his years, he hadn’t smelt anything that foul.

  “They turned off the environmental systems,” he said, through the hand he’d put over his face.

  “HazMat?”

  “No, whoever was here last. Maybe the folks who left on the escape pods.” He got a small swatch of Protectocloth from his pocket, and stretched the cloth to fit over his nose and mouth. The cloth was just like HazMat gear, only smaller and for emergencies. He considered this stench an emergency.

  “Not all of the systems are off,” DeRicci said. “I recognize that smell. That’s decomposing flesh, which can only happen in an oxygen-rich environment.”

  “But the system should have scrubbed this smell out of everything,” he said, “and it’s still here.”

  “Even if the bodies are here?”

  “On a yacht like this, bad smells get engineered away. Even if the bodies are still here.”

  DeRicci had put a Protectocloth over her face too. “Let’s stick together.”

  They stepped into the crew work area. A control panel flashed to Flint’s left. Just beyond it, the door to the cockpit stood open. A small galley faced him, and beyond it, a corridor. To his right was another door, and it was closed. It probably led to the passenger section.

  The cockpit would hold the answers, but DeRicci had opened the passenger door.

  “Flint,” she said.

  He stepped beside her. Blood bathed this compartment, rising up along the walls, spattering the ceiling and the floor. The gravity had been on when the killings occurred and it stayed on throughout the entire flight.

  The bodies were staked side by side, the yacht seats moved to accommodate the sprawl. One of the bodies was female, the other male, both on their backs, both spread-eagled. They had been eviscerated—probably while they were alive, judging by the blood—and their intestines looped into a familiar oval pattern.

  “A Disty vengeance killing,” DeRicci said.

  Even Flint recognized that, although he’d never seen such bodies in person before. Only in class, as one of the many things he had to learn about alien killings.

  “Only I’ve never seen one done in space before.” She frowned, crouched. “Everything else is textbook.”

  “Doesn’t that make it suspicious?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “The Disty are precise about this sort of thing. They have to be.”

  He shuddered. Disty vengeance killings were rare on the Moon. They happened most often on Mars, which the Disty more or less ran. If this was a Disty vengeance killing, there would be nothing he could do. Under hundreds of interstellar laws, under even more multicultural agreements between the member species, cultural practices like vengeance killings were allowed.

  Although Flint was a new detective, he knew how this case would run. He and DeRicci would check the victims’ DNA to see if they had outstanding Disty warrants against them, and if they did, then the case would be closed. According to the various agreements, no crime would have been committed.

  Even sending the yacht to the Moon made sense in this instance. The bodies had to be accounted for. The Disty used vengeance killings as a deterrent. They would want everyone to know that these people, whoever they had been, had died because they had done something wrong.

  The problem would come if the Disty hadn’t targeted these victims. If this was, in fact, a real crime made to look like a Disty killing.

  But if that were the case, why send the yacht toward the Moon?

  “The third body has to be somewhere else,” DeRicci said.

  “I vote for the cockpit,” Flint said. “We have to go there anyway. I want to find out when those pods were ejected.”

  DeRicci glanced at him. “The pods don’t fit, do they?”

  “Not with a Disty vengeance killing. Unless we find the pods later, with the occ
upants either gone or dead in just this way.” Flint stepped over blood spatter and through the main doors back into the crew area. No blood here. But if a Disty ship had boarded the yacht in flight and the Disty had committed the killings, it would be logical to find some trace in this room

  The control panel still blinked as he went past. He paused to look at it. Someone had bypassed the controls to open this door, and the system was still complaining about it—weakly. There should have been a vocal component to the complaint, which should have continued no matter how long ago the breach had occurred.

  He made a mental note of the override, then headed into the cockpit—and stopped. The third body faced him. It was not spread-eagled like the others. It had been strapped to the command chair. The evisceration was the same, but the rest of it—the rest of it was much worse.

  Flint turned away, and found DeRicci watching him.

  “She was the one they wanted.” DeRicci’s voice was flat. “The others, they were merely warnings, something that happened to the helpers. She was the one they blamed the most.”

  “If this was the Disty.”

  She nodded. “If.”

  But she sounded convinced. Maybe he was too. He wasn’t certain.

  “I was going to check the logs, the databases. I was going to—”

  “You can’t,” DeRicci said, stating the obvious. No one could get into that room without disturbing the body—or what the body had become. “We have to wait for the forensics team. The bodies have to be removed now. Then you can check the logs.”

  Flint took a deep breath. He had been thinking like a space cop again. Check the logs, find out what happened, let the team on the ground worry about the next step.

  Only now he was the team on the ground—and, with a mess like this, he doubted that the two space cops who’d found this ship had even tried to download the logs.

  “If we’re lucky,” DeRicci said, “the DNA will come back positive and you won’t have to go in there at all.”