by Mur Lafferty
She took the box to the table and showed it to him. “We were killed with the chef’s knife, right?”
“Yeah, we didn’t find any other weapons,” he said grimly. Three knives were missing from their spots in the box.
“We know where the chef’s knife is, but the boning knife and cleaver are gone.”
“The good news just keeps on coming,” he said, not smiling. “Something else to tell the captain, I suppose.”
Maria sent a ping to Katrina on her tablet.
“Report,” Katrina said.
“We found my box of knives, Captain, and it’s missing three. One of them is the chef’s knife, which we’ve already found in the cloning bay, but the other two are still missing.”
“Did you find any of them buried in a body?”
“Well, no, not yet—”
“Then get back to fixing the printer. Call me when you find clues, not the absence of clues.”
The tablet beeped as she severed the connection.
“Dang, she’s cranky,” Hiro said.
“You’re one to talk,” Maria said.
He bobbed his head, avoiding eye contact. “I really think the person who wrote this hated people and wanted to laugh as they starved to death,” he said.
“Think it’s another case of sabotage?” Maria asked, only half joking.
“No, I think it’s a case of an asshole tech writer. But you do have to wonder about the missing instruction book.”
He stood up and looked at the items Maria had laid out, and then back at the tablet. “Got it,” he mumbled and started telling her what to do with each thing. They worked together for the next hour, Maria biting back irritation when he made jokes or a translation didn’t work very well. She got shocked twice trying to set up the computer to interface with IAN, despite IAN’s guidance.
“There it is. I can see it,” IAN said. “Well done, Ms. Arena.”
“I need to get my backups,” she said.
“No need,” IAN said. “This food printer is fully capable of analyzing a person’s tastes via saliva sample.”
Maria stepped back and surveyed the printer with new respect. “That’s some impressive computing,” she said. “It’s still a behemoth, though.”
Hiro took the mugs to the sink. “Behemoth. I like that name. We’ll call it Bebe for short. If you don’t need me anymore, I’ll go check on the drive. You’ve still got some knives left—and Bebe!—to protect you in the meantime.” Then he was gone.
“Now it’s just you and me, Behemoth,” she said. “I’m not afraid of you.”
Honestly, there were a lot of things she was afraid of on the ship, but at least Bebe wasn’t one of them.
The captain had not returned to the medbay since leaving last night. Joanna was relieved, but had slept in the other hospital bed for sure. Unfortunately the dead bodies were making it a somewhat unpleasant room to stay in. Not to mention unsanitary.
The clone’s life-support systems still worked diligently, showing that the older captain was not quite dead yet.
Joanna stretched in her chair. She needed a shower. And really needed food.
She maneuvered her chair to her lab in the corner of the medbay, but before she could get started on her screening, someone was knocking on the door. She opened it remotely with her tablet.
Hiro walked in, still maddeningly chipper. “Hello, Dr. Glass. Mind if I take a look at myself?”
“I’m not sure that’s the healthiest thing in the world, Hiro,” Joanna said, laying the latest testing samples out on her counter.
“Well, no, the healthiest thing would be for me to have a hearty breakfast and go for a run on the treadmill,” Hiro said. “Also not have the stress of being on board with a killer. But I can’t do those things. The printer is nearly ready to go, speaking of breakfast. Maria has already named it and is challenging it for dominance. I can get you tickets to the bout, if you like. Now, you tell me the wisdom of fighting with a machine, with a killer loose on the ship.” His voice had a conversational tone that sounded like he really was talking about sports instead of their lives.
“Remember what I said about keeping your coping mechanism away from my earshot?” she asked. She waved at the five bagged bodies in the corner. “Go ahead. Yours is the one in the middle.”
The ship had no morgue because each body was supposed to be recycled after death. Another oversight. She would need to remove them before they broke down any more. She was done examining, but she had to hold on to them for Wolfgang’s curiosity. And if the crew wanted to look at their bodies, they might find a clue that could help them solve this.
At least Hiro looking at his dead clone worried her far less than the captain’s obsessive study of her own did, although that could be because his body was already dead.
He walked over to it and unzipped it, staring at his naked self.
“I’m just trying to figure out why I did it,” Hiro said, looking closely at his clone’s neck.
“Someone else could have hanged you, Hiro. Although there are no defensive wounds. Wolfgang and I are working on the time line today,” Joanna said, turning on her scanner. “But don’t worry, we’ll figure it out eventually.”
“Where is that ray of sunshine?” Hiro asked. “I thought he was helping you with these poison hunts.”
“He dropped the food printer in here and left. I think he is checking on Paul and the captain. I need to talk to him soon, though. Why do you need him?” she asked.
“I definitely don’t,” Hiro said. “Just curious where everyone was. We’re supposed to keep track, right?”
“In theory. Does this mean you left Maria alone?”
“Nah, she’s with the printer. That thing looks like it could protect any of us in a fight, provided Maria can get it on our side. Which is questionable right now, honestly,” he said.
Joanna glared at him.
He dropped his pleasant demeanor. “Fine. I had to go check on the nav system. I figured I would drop by to say hello to myself. I’ll head back to check on her.”
“How is the nav system?” she asked as he turned to go.
“The same,” he said. “Still slowing down. Still turning starboard.”
“That means nothing in space.”
“Fine, back toward Earth. I didn’t want to bore you with astronavigation numbers but if you really want…” He let his voice hang there, probably expecting her rapid refusal.
“I promise if I figure anything out about your death, I’ll let you know,” she said, motioning him out the door.
“Thanks, Doc.”
She watched him go, smiling slightly. She was glad they had Hiro on board. Irreverent and disrespectful at times, but he was a breath of fresh air they needed.
Her scanner beeped, indicating it had finally warmed up. She started feeding it samples, noting the numbers of each sample on her tablet.
“Hello, Dr. Glass,” IAN said, making her jump. “I’m sorry, did I startle you?”
“A bit. It’s going to take some getting used to. What do you need, IAN?”
“I wanted to know how you were doing, and if you needed anything.”
“I need my medical logs, IAN. Aside from that, things seem to be working fine.”
“I don’t have your medical logs but I can make backups of what you are recording now.”
Joanna considered saying no, but nodded. She was still keeping physical notes just in case of another data loss. “Thank you.”
She pinged the kitchen, and Maria answered, sounding annoyed. “It’s not done yet, Doctor.”
“I wasn’t calling you about that. You’ll be glad to know that the food printer is completely broken.”
“Why would that make me happy?”
“Because that means you haven’t been wasting your time with the new one. How is that going, anyway?”
Maria sighed loudly. “Nearly there. I have to run several test dishes before we can eat. But we’re close. I will have IAN tell everyone when I can finally
print.”
“Are you going to your rooms to get those backups you said you had?”
“I guess I should do that. Instructions say I don’t need to do that, but I like redundant systems.”
“I want to make sure there’s no more poison traces in your room,” Joanna said. “Let me know as soon as you are free.” She was about to sever the connection, but remembered something. “So is Hiro there with you yet?”
“No, he left here a little bit ago to go check on the helm,” Maria said.
“Hell,” Joanna said. “Keep an eye out for him. He came by here, and now he’s supposed to be heading your way.”
“Sure, okay,” Maria said, more distracted than before, and the com switched off.
Joanna sighed. She’d had worries about the wisdom of a six-person crew. It had seemed efficient, but when a catastrophe of this level happened, they were in real trouble. They needed more people.
Or fewer, depending on how many of those people could be trusted completely.
Hemlock. Maria was right, that was a strange poison. She looked up information on her tablet, and read up on the deadly plant. Its leaves were deadly in small doses and could be disguised as other herbs.
She needed more tea. Prepared to brave the wrath of Hurricane Maria, she headed to the kitchen.
“Captain, where did you see action?” Joanna asked.
She and Katrina sat at the table farthest away from where Maria was testing the food printer. Hiro sat on the counter, keeping her company while trying to stay out of her way. The captain had come in to take a break, looking hopefully at the printer.
“I was in the Mexican army, the first clone in the world to make general,” she said, spinning her own empty mug on its edge. “I saw action in the American water wars, mainly. Lost a leg during a laser strike to our camp.”
Joanna had been in Washington, DC, during the water wars, remembering how it had split the West, how the new civil war (no one called it that, but everyone knew that’s what it was when Nevada Governor Andrew Teal took command of the Nevada Army Reserve and sent them, all too willing, to invade California to fight for the dwindling water supply) had caused a lot of strife in the capital.
“I remember the wars,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t last much longer, so I got better with the next life. Benefits of cloning, you know,” Katrina said.
Joanna pinged Wolfgang. “What is it, Doctor?” he answered.
“We need to get back on the job. Let’s finish that time line so I can have my clean medbay back.”
“All right. We should eat first. Is the printer online?”
Maria swore loudly from the kitchen.
“Not yet. Katrina and I are in the kitchen now.”
“Good. Can you let me know about those tox screens?” he asked, sounding like he was already walking.
“Food printer is lousy with hemlock, we can’t trust it. Luckily we have the new one.”
“All right.” And the connection went dead.
“Takes it in stride, that’s my second in command,” Katrina said.
Joanna and the captain waited in silence until Wolfgang arrived. He came in, took one look at Maria with her struggles, and joined them without a word.
“There is something I didn’t mention about the hemlock,” Joanna said quietly. They were far from Maria, who was making a lot of noise behind the printer, but she still kept her voice low. Katrina and Wolfgang leaned in to hear her.
“We all ingested it, only a lot less than Maria did,” Joanna said. “I want to know why Maria wouldn’t notice her printer had been sabotaged.”
“There are many ways to slip something in someone’s food,” Wolfgang said. “It’s also possible Maria didn’t cook every single meal for twenty-five years.”
“Her knife. Her kitchen. Could she have poisoned herself, then killed us all, then died?” Katrina said. “Someone tried to kill her with the knife before she erased all the logs?”
Joanna shook her head. “Self-poisoning with hemlock? That’s not the way I’d choose to go. Besides, I still think she hit the resurrection switch. It’s safe to say she was killed. With just the hemlock, sure, she could have done it herself. But the knife? No one can stab themselves in the spine.”
“Perhaps she wasn’t working alone,” Wolfgang said.
“I think we’re getting away from Occam’s razor here,” Joanna said. “Let’s stay simple while we can.”
“We need to dust that knife for prints,” Wolfgang said.
Joanna stared at him. She held up her hand and began ticking off her fingers. “Wolfgang, we don’t have a crime lab. There was no reason to put a forensics lab on this ship. I only have the tech that I have because it’s used to diagnose live clones. We don’t have anything that would resemble a good clear way to lift prints off the knife. With proper technology we could grab partial prints and identify them, but we don’t have that.”
His blue eyes were stony. “It’s evidence,” he said.
She lifted her hands in an I give up motion. “You’re absolutely right. We should talk to Maria about who she thinks she would have let use her knives.”
“How would she know who she’s bonded with on this ship in twenty-five years?” Katrina said.
“It’ll be evidence,” Joanna repeated, smiling.
“She doesn’t seem to like the food printer,” IAN said. “So they didn’t bond.”
“Neither printer is an AI, IAN,” the captain said. She paused. “Is it?”
“No. I just like this one a lot. Its name is Bebe. Cute, isn’t it? And I’m up to fifty-three percent and feeling better!”
It’s Always Five O’Clock in Space
Maria needed alone time with the Behemoth, and she wasn’t getting any.
She was so distracted by running the printer through its paces that she hadn’t realized most of the crew had raided the liquor stores. Hiro, Katrina, Wolfgang, and Joanna all sat at a table with a bottle of whiskey between them.
“Really? Whiskey at nine in the morning?” She paused and then realized the thing she was truly angry about. “Without me?”
“It’s always five o’clock in space,” Hiro said, raising his little shot glass to toast her.
“Whatever. We’re so far outside the realm of social norms anyway,” Maria said, shrugging.
“I don’t recommend drinking with new clone bodies on an empty stomach,” IAN said.
“Now ask us how much we care,” Hiro said.
Joanna hadn’t touched her shot glass. She looked at them all in disgust, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea. “You know we all have time-sensitive work to do, right?”
“I’m useless until I get some food. And whiskey will help the waiting,” said Katrina. “Just a sip.”
Joanna looked at Wolfgang. He shrugged. She rolled her eyes.
“If you get drunk and rowdy while I’m trying to fix this thing, then floating bloody in the cloning bay will be the least of your problems,” Maria said.
“Understood,” Wolfgang said, smiling slightly.
She refocused on Bebe, wishing there were a door between her and the tables.
“Where is Paul?” Hiro asked.
“He was working on the servers when I left him,” Wolfgang said. “I told him to come here by nine.”
“It’s five after,” Hiro said.
Wolfgang pulled his tablet out and paged Paul.
“Here,” Paul said, his voice sounding stronger than yesterday. “Is it breakfast yet?”
“Not quite yet,” Wolfgang said. “We’re all in the kitchen, though. Join us.”
“I should work more on these servers,” he said doubtfully.
“I’ll let him know when it’s time,” IAN said.
“Hey, IAN, do you watch us in our rooms?” Hiro asked suddenly.
“In the interest of full security, I have to,” IAN said. “When the cameras are all functioning, that is.”
“Well. That’s interesting
,” Hiro said, going slightly pink.
“All your cameras aren’t functioning yet?” Katrina asked.
“Not yet. I’m taking time to run the various commands you’ve given me, as well as repair my internal issues. I’m getting more and more eyes and ears all over the shop.”
“Let me know when you’re fully operational,” Katrina said.
“You’re right, I could use a break,” Paul said over the link. “I’ll come down.”
“All right, everyone,” Maria said. “I need to go back to my quarters for a backup disk that has all of your tastes in a program. But in the meantime I want you to give saliva samples to Bebe because apparently it can determine your tastes by just that little bit of DNA. Hiro can show you how.”
“Why do you need the disk, then?” Wolfgang asked, narrowing his eyes.
“I want to compare the two. If it makes a wrong decision, then we’ll have the backup.”
“I’ll come with you,” Joanna said.
As they headed down the hall, they passed Paul hurrying to the kitchen. “Food yet?” he asked, his red face hopeful.
“Yes, in the last minute we went from nothing to a full meal,” Maria snapped.
Joanna put her hand on Maria’s arm. “We’ll get breakfast soon,” she said. “Wolfgang is waiting for you, Paul.”
“I’d rather have breakfast,” Paul said. They continued on their ways.
“He seems to be returning to us,” Maria said. “Any idea what was wrong with him yesterday?”
“Some people get uptight about the cloning process, some people don’t like when routines get damaged, some maybe don’t like waking up to floating gore. It could be anything,” Joanna said.
“Or he could be responsible for it,” Maria said in a low voice.
“If we were to damn people based on acting oddly after waking up the way we did yesterday, I could point fingers at any one of us.”
“It’s not helping that we’re all dealing with low blood sugar,” Maria said, thinking out loud. “Which is why I need to get everything worked out.”
“I’d like to test-check your toiletries as well,” Joanna said. “You may have some more poison traces on your toothbrush or lip balm or something.”
