Seasons of Murder: In the Shadow of This Red Rock

by John Wiltshire

  “There’s no need. I trust you.” He focused on each of his team in turn. “I trust you all.” This wasn’t strictly true, however it wasn’t the time to divide his crew with internal suspicion but to unite them. He despised Holliday, but, equally, he didn’t believe him capable of three deranged murders.

  Hunter was staring at him. Cal was tempted to ask Zero what the other man was thinking, but it seemed…wrong. Was rape ever justified? Was torture? He was beginning to lose his perspective.

  The 2IC took a deep breath, nodded to himself, and asked, “How’s this gonna work, Boss? We’ve got two hundred souls on board.”

  Cal glanced at Fuller. “We’re gonna have the first women-only crew in space, for a start.”

  She grinned, clearly getting it immediately. “Thirty-four of us, sir. That’ll leave one hundred and sixteen male crew at the party, including the seven of you and the captain.”

  Cal nodded. “How many of the passengers are men?”

  “Including teenagers?”

  Cal flicked his gaze to Zero, but Zero was studying his hands beneath the table and was apparently being as much use as the lump of plastic it was made from.

  Cal nodded to Fuller’s question—teens included. “Twenty-six. Was twenty-eight, of course.”

  “Okay. One hundred and thirty-six men to test.”

  Fuller raised her brow. “Thirty-five, sir.”

  Cal gave one more despairing look at Zero’s lowered head. “Captain Kirk’s not excluded.”

  Suddenly, Hunter said, “How long you known his head thingy wasn’t working, Boss? We could have lined them all up and just had him touch people days ago.”

  Cal ran his fingers through his hair. “I know. But I can’t afford for anyone outside this room to find out he’s not…restrained. He’s got to live until he can get to Titan—get it fixed.”

  Hunter’s expression twitched uneasily. “Well, hell, they’ll see him at the party holding hands with them! Going to be a bit of a big fu—A big clue, isn’t it?”

  Suddenly, Cal’s mind was flooded with a bright white light of excitement, and Zero cried out loud, “Oh! I get it! I’m going to get to wear a costume.”

  For his only contribution to the entire meeting, Cal had to admit that Zero always focused on the important issues.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “You’re a fool, Cal.”

  Cal didn’t have the heart to pick his 2IC up for insubordination. He just nodded. He was.

  “You should have let him touch us all. Good fucking leadership tactic but fuck-all use to ensure we’re all what we say we are.”

  Cal frowned. “I thought you meant about trusting the Minder.”

  Hunter mirrored his expression. “Well, that, too. Obviously. He could be one step ahead of us the whole time. Bloody hell. I’m pretty sure I touched his hand the other day.”

  Cal twitched his nose. “I’ve touched a lot more of him than that.”

  Hunter stopped in the middle of the corridor and flung his hands out theatrically. “Too much information, maybe?” Then he grinned and mock-punched Cal’s arm. They continued walking, heading for Cal’s cabin where he was meeting Zero.

  “I’ll blame you if he murders us all.”

  Cal smirked. “I’ll blame myself in my report before I die.”

  “Mind you, it would save us having to do Christmas décor.”

  Cal shuddered theatrically. “Fake snow.”

  “Five-course, turkey-substitute meal.”

  “It’s phoney meat? Next, you’ll be telling me the maple syrup’s synthetic.”

  Hunter laughed.

  Cal looked slyly at him. “We good?”

  They bumped knuckles, and Hunter veered off toward his own cabin.

  Cal carried on to his, the plan circulating endlessly through his mind.

  §§§

  Zero wrinkled his nose. “I’m not wearing that.”

  Cal’s jaw dropped a little. “What’s wrong with it? I wear it every year.”

  “It’s…boring.”

  “Boring? Boring! Do you know who this is? Seriously, do you not know who the Judge is?”

  “Who? No. It’s…not sparkly. I thought it would be something…glittery.”

  Cal clenched his teeth. “Three hundred years, and you couldn’t have taken the time to find out about good Earth culture?”

  Zero hunched in on himself. “I read books. So…show me…”

  Cal hesitated then let memories flood his mind: Judge Dredd in all his dubious glory.

  Zero chuckled. “Okay. Cool. Let me try it.”

  Cal settled the all-important helmet over Z’s head, entirely obscuring his features. “If you say something it comes out through the synthesiser in his tone of voice.”

  Zero tried it, the ‘I am the law’ impressively chilling in the small cabin.

  Zero wouldn’t let him take the helmet off, so Cal had to endure a conversation with the Judge for a while. Then Zero sobered and removed the mask. “You should have let me touch them all, Cal. That was dumb. This guy is able to walk in plain sight amongst us. It could have been any one of them—except Fuller, I suppose.”

  Cal sighed. “Not you too.” He sat down on the edge of his bunk, twirling the helmet in his hands.

  Zero perched next to him. “Stop it.”

  Cal frowned. “Stop what?”

  “You’re worrying about me. You just pictured me being beheaded—my head rolling away with that thing still on it.”

  Cal gave him a pained look. “Yeah, well. You weren’t the one who researched deaths of saints. You have no idea.” He returned to studying the costume. “You don’t get it, Z. This is the calm before the storm. The guys are setting up the party. Fuller’s arranging the crew swaps. Doc’s doing the autopsy on that poor woman. It’s all coming together—tonight. And it’s you, right in the middle of it all. Like there’s a fucking great big target on your back. Read my mind now! See what I’m thinking now!”

  Zero shook his head. He put his hand wonderingly to Cal’s face. “This is so novel for me. I want to be able to,” he stroked one finger over Cal’s cheekbone, “understand that expression just by studying it.” He smiled and trailed down to Cal’s lips. “Hear a catch in your voice; learn to listen for what you don’t say; know when I do this,” he leant in for a kiss and breathed with parted, eager lips, “that it’s wanted…”

  Cal began to respond, twisting around, knee up on the bunk, pressing Zero back.

  “…and to make you want me inside you another way.”

  Cal pulled away, his eyes lowered. “No, I—”

  Zero surged forward, closing the tiny gap between them, his hands stroking and seeking. It wasn’t easy with the uniform and a lot of zips and buckles had to be fought. Cal hung suspended between want and fear and the indecision paralysed him to inaction. He became entirely passive, allowing Zero all the freedoms he wanted.

  Zero finally had what he sought. He eased Cal out to join his own cock, holding them both in a tight squeeze.

  He began a jerky, urgent frottage as he kissed Cal once more, breathing seductively, “I’ll be inside your flesh, Calan. More joined even than when I’m in your thoughts.”

  He forced Cal onto his back, ripping the black pants lower.

  Zero’s efforts on Cal’s cock decided the issue for him. He was entirely incapable of resisting further.

  When Zero pushed aside one of Cal’s thighs for better access, his thumbs pressing, fingers now dancing teasingly up and down his aching shaft, Cal willingly opened wider.

  An eager finger probed inside him, and Cal arched off the bed, gasping.

  Zero closed his mouth over the incipient cry of pain, recollection, and shame, and swallowed the hurt. Then his tongue found Cal’s tongue as he eased himself in below.

  Cal was entirely taken, his body overwhelmed by sensations, but his mind left inviolate and free to protest and remember and deny, and then to wonder and want.

  When the want hit him, Cal r
ose into the fucking, stretching his legs wider, surging into the thrusts, his tongue now doing the exploring and demanding. He could feel Zero’s fingers still working their magic on his cock, keeping him at simmering point when all he wanted was to boil over and spill.

  Zero suddenly broke off the delicious stroking to seize Cal’s hips and lift him higher, then the ramming became primal, and they were both grunting to the pressure and still there was only silence in Cal’s head, leaving him at liberty to conjure his own wild fantasies.

  He was so, so close. The incredible pleasure firing off all over was beginning to coalesce in his balls. They tightened, and the need to release was beyond urgent. He cried out, grabbed Zero’s head and dragged his mouth back to his. “Now! I’m coming.”

  Z fastened his grip tight to Cal and fisted him as his own lean form shuddered a last few heaving thrusts deep inside, and then the Minder hung suspended, just twisting his palm gently around the soft fleshy tip as Cal’s pulsing cock wetted them both.

  They were sweating profusely. A drip from Zero’s brow landed on Cal’s upturned face, and he brushed at it idly then tasted it. Zero smirked and lay heavily on top on him, the drumbeats of their hearts resonating between them.

  It was only as Cal was lying in the warmth and deep reassurance of the strength of Zero’s presence that he realised he’d shouted that last urgent thought in his mind. There had been no one else in there with him, and yet Zero had immediately switched up the fucking—brought him off and come himself, timing his thrusts as if they were in synch. He moaned in appreciation and ran sticky fingers through Zero’s hair, spiking it up a little.

  “You’re good.”

  Zero huffed but Cal knew he was secretly pleased.

  Who needed to be a mind reader to know what his lover needed?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  By the thirtieth time of saying ‘I am the law’ it was wearing very thin for Zero—and Cal, who, disguised in a white lab coat of the doc’s, his face wrapped in bandages, was monitoring him closely from the shadows. Mummy was all they could come up with at short notice for a costume—space travel didn’t allow for extraneous baggage. There were no spares. Fuller had mentioned the two dead men…no one blamed Cal when he’d refused the suggestion.

  They had issued a free drink pass to everyone at the party. Zero’s job was to control the chits—scanning them and then stamping the owner’s hand with ink to prove they’d redeemed their freebie. The stamping enabled him to hold hands for a moment as he dutifully intoned the Judge’s infamous line.

  He did it once more as one of the colonists held out his pass.

  Mina was sulking in his head. She was missing out on her first Halloween party. He’d reasoned that she didn’t have a costume.

  She’d replied she’d come as a freak wearing a metal disc on her head.

  He’d told her he’d filch all the leftover booze and they could drink it together.

  She’d told him she could still read him, despite her inhibitor, and that it was okay to be scared.

  He’d cut her off at that point. No one needed their baby sister telling them the bleeding obvious.

  He was terrified. Not so much of the killer, because he was pretty sure he’d be able to detect him easily in this room, and unless the guy was planning on them all being martyred in some huge, suicidal explosion, he was reasonably certain that he was safe. He could see Cal. Fuller was dressed as a small and surprisingly edible pumpkin. The doctor had come as someone called Doctor Heiter, which the doc seemed to find funny, even if no one else did. Holliday was lingering by the bar, made up as a zombie, and Sloane and Manning were even more identical than Zero usually found them: they were both robots. They’d corrected his guess to sex bots, but Zero had declined their offers to demonstrate the differences.

  So it wasn’t being beheaded or burnt alive or buried in a pit and stoned to death—all Saints’ martyrdoms he’d caught from Cal’s panicked mind earlier—that was frightening him, it was fear of being taken to wherever the killer resided: to the dark places in the man’s mind.

  Zero had seen a glimpse of utter insanity. He’d teetered on the edge of something he couldn’t explain and didn’t want to encounter any closer. But that was hard to explain to anyone, so he’d kept his worries to himself and reassured Cal that he could do this.

  All the crew were accounted for in the large hanger.

  All the colonists were there.

  He had many hands yet to stamp. Somewhere in the shadows was an unmarked hand that belonged to a killer.

  “Boss said to bring this to you.”

  Zero nodded gratefully to Holliday and took the drink off the little tray. It was incredibly hot in the costume, despite the frosty temperature in the hanger.

  It was an ideal space to hold a party, particularly one whose theme was horror. Even without the strange hangings, which Cal had told him were supposed to be cobwebs, and the lowered-to-almost-nothing lighting, it was an unpleasant place. Cavernous, utilitarian, bleak, it was full of dark corners and gantries with hidden alcoves, cargo under strapping, which turned innocent containers into looming, menacing monsters of the imagination. But it had not passed Zero by that many of the partygoers had come dressed as Minders. Monsters of the imagination took on a whole new meaning when you were public enemy number one. He’d taken the hand of one man, dressed in the black and green striped POW jumpsuits his ancestors had been forced to wear to mark them forever as different and dangerous, and had wanted to flood into his mind, show him a different way of thinking. It had actually amused him for a while imagining the panic he could create. “Sender! They’re real! There’s a Sender loose! And he’s being nice to me!”

  But who said he had to be nice all the time? He might just help the Halloween atmosphere along a little. Join the décor party. Why have fake mummies and monsters when you could be encouraged to see them for real?

  Stamping the captain’s hand had been a little…fraught. Thinking he was Cal, the older man had asked him a lot of questions about the autopsy of the latest victim. Zero had winged it, with a little help from Cal in the shadows. It had sounded okay, he thought, especially through the monotone, robotic voice synthesiser.

  He finished the drink—it was disappointingly small—and peered into the bottom of the glass. Holliday chuckled. “Another?”

  Zero nodded and watched the retreating back, something disturbing flitting across the edge of his mind.

  Fuller brushed past him, her bulky, orange squishiness surprisingly tempting to squeeze. Zero resisted. He could still sense Cal monitoring the situation from the shadows and didn’t want to give him the impression he was suddenly into pumpkins.

  “You okay?”

  Zero nodded. “Did you change the gravity for this party?”

  She appeared a bit taken aback. “Change the…gravity, sir?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And how would we…oh, you mean the captain’s party trick? We slow the speed of the rotate when we want to wind things up and everyone just floats away…” Before he could respond, she gave him a look, that, even orange as she was, he could interpret.

  “Oh. Joke.” He frowned. Something was distinctly off though. He put it down to the costumes. It was disorientating for someone who’d never seen one before.

  He reached gratefully for the second drink when it arrived and went back to being the law, as required.

  It wasn’t as interesting as he’d hoped, being able to read so many new minds. He’d not mentioned this to Cal, for obvious reasons, but he couldn’t deny it had been part of his motivation for coming up with his original idea—the opportunity to read everyone, if only for a brief moment. It was better than porn. And he decided not to reveal that to Cal either.

  He’d anticipated secrets: sex, salacious gossip about people he might know—all allowed in the name of duty. Being immoral for a good cause.

  It almost amused him and annoyed him in equal measure that not one member of their little war committee h
ad opposed the plan for him to read everyone’s mind. As soon as they saw a way to find the killer they sought, and have it done so clinically and easily, there hadn’t been a single murmur of opposition. Typical! Three hundred years of cultural myth destroyed with a huh, good plan.

  “I am the law.” Yep, it was really getting old.

  He swiped yet another pass and stamped a hand and then his little scanner machine started beeping at him. He studied it helplessly until he sensed Fuller at his side once more. “You okay, sir?”

  He straightened. “It’s beeping.”

  She took it from him, giving him a curious look, then consulted the screen. “Fuck.”

  “What?”

  She was squinting around despairingly. “That’s everyone.”

  “What?”

  Cal came over to join them, apparently summoned by something he could read in the attitude of their little huddle. Fuller held out the monitor.

  “He’s here and I didn’t sense him!”

  Cal didn’t give any indication that he’d registered him. Zero was beginning to feel dizzy from the heat and wanted to rip off the helmet. He tried again. “Listen! I failed!”

  Cal and Fuller were staring at each other. She closed her eyes. Zero glanced from one to the other and said out loud, “What?”

  Cal swallowed. “It’s one of us. It must be.”

  A cold trickle of fear ran down Zero’s back and he couldn’t decide if it was from him or Cal.

  They stood back to back, the three of them, scanning the vast room.

  “Doc’s over with the captain.”

  “I can see the two Sex Bots—talking to those women by the elevator.”

  “Where’s Hunter?”

  “Where’s Holliday?”

  Zero broke away and shoved his way through the crowd to the bar. He didn’t even apologise for the interruption, but placed a hand onto the doctor’s arm. They considered each other for a moment until the doctor said quietly, “Oh. No. Not…?”

  Zero nodded and finished, “One of us.”

  “Lieutenant, what’s—?”

  Zero ignored Laskar and continued to barge through the throng of increasingly loud partygoers. He reached the robots, picked the one closest and ripped off a glove, holding the hot hand for a moment before repeating the exercise with the other. By this time, Cal and Fuller had caught him up.