by Eric Flint
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CRAWLSPACE
Act I, Scene I: Enter rats, scampering through the darkness
In the narrow tunnels deep inside a nineteen by five mile asteroid, long pipes snaked endlessly into the blackness. At the tunnel junction a naked globe hung, plainly jury-rigged into the cable tacked to the low roof. A woman's body lay there, sprawled, a little blood leaking from the retroussé nose. In the shadows, the light reflected off two sets of ferally red eyes, looking at the corpse.
"Well? What do we do with it?" asked Snout, not moving forward with her little barrow.
"It's solid waste,” said Mercutio. 'Tis what we do. Remove it."
She always asked those sort of questions of him. Well: Just because one could think didn’t always mean one wanted to.
Snout sniffed critically. "Well, not that solid. Parts of her look positively malnourished. Especially around the waist."
Mercutio shrugged. The Siamese-cat sized, long-nosed, rattish creature, stepped forward and prodded the dead woman's waistline. "Humans like to be like that. Anyway, ‘tis corsetry, Snout."
"Of course 'tis," nodded the other cyber-uplifted elephant shrew. "Not natural to be that thin around the middle." She stalked forward while her companion methodically rifled the pockets in the blouse top and then investigated the dead woman's purse. He was about to tuck what he found there into a pouch of his own when his companion hissed at him. He split the bundle of notes, roughly. She tucked her share of it into her own waist pouch.
"Wonder why she was killed, and yet they left the loot?" he asked, professionally.
"Probably done in because she's not a very pretty sight. Short little nose," Snout patted her own magnificent protuberance. "And no tail, poor thing. I don't care what humans say, this," she prodded the corpse's well-rounded derriere, "Is not a tail."
A thought plainly crossed Snout's mind. Mercutio pretended not to see her hasty glance at him. It would avoid a fight. She felt inside the corpse's low neckline, brought out something that made a plastic crinkling sound to his carefully listening ear, and hastily tucked it into her bag. She kept talking, obviously in the hope that he wouldn’t notice. "What was she doing here?”
"Dying, I would guess," said Mercutio, searching the lip of the corpse’s stockings to no avail.
"Do we tell someone?" Snout removed a sliver filigree butterfly shaped hair-grip and tucked it next to her ear. "One of the humans. She is a human, so they might want to know."
Mercutio snorted. "Oh yes. And you know what they'd say: 'Why did you rats do it?' And then they'd put us into durance vile."
"But we are in durance, at least while the siege holds. It is fairly vile. And you usually did do it, Mercutio," she said, with that impeccable if twisted logic that comes from adding cybernetic memory and processing to an organic brain that hadn't gone a long way beyond thinking of its next meal or mating.
Mercutio was uplifted far enough to know that it was irritating, even if he did it himself. "That's not...”
Snout froze. "Hist," she said in a sibilant whisper. "Something this way comes."
Both rats ghosted away into the darkness as someone came climbing down the metal staples.
Act I, Scene II. A sparsely furnished rock-hewn chamber, somewhere on the same large asteroid in the Olmert system.
Captain Rebecca Wuollet, HAR Marine Corps, was making a very credible effort to not tear off the head of Colonel De Darcy. First, because he was a superior officer and secondly because...
Well, technically he was right. You could see his point. If you walked around with blinkers on.
She made another attempt to use persuasion instead of violence, tempting though it was. That temptation was made easier to resist by the fact that the colonel was a combat vet himself. "Look Sir. I'm a combat demolitions specialist. I've been in the Corps for the whole of my adult life. I don't do... civilians. Sir."
De Darcy gave her the benefit of his famous crooked smile, complete with his famous crooked teeth. "I'm not a civilian liaison officer either, Captain. And this isn't about liaison. This is about the fact that we have fifteen thousand humans, mostly civs, God knows how many rats, about three hundred bats, and some fifteen other liberated races on this rock, which is under military control for the duration of the siege. We need some sort of security, and you're hard-assed enough to do it. Besides if I don't give you something to do, you'll lose that shiny new pip on your shoulder faster than you put it there."
He raised his eyebrows and shifted the famous crooked smile to its normal nastiness. "Look on the bright side. I could have put you in charge of the militia. I could still change my mind and shift Major Gahamey off the job and give him security.”
"Um. Maybe security isn't so bad, sir." On this vast asteroid they only had a thousand seven hundred and thirty marines, who had been caught up in the mess when the attack on Epsilon Theta had gone ass-haywire. Stuck here with twenty times their number of civ refugees, and a bloody big rock to defend, they needed a militia. But the population of rock-rats, fortune-hunters, whores and sharp-dealing traders they had to draw from, was going to drive Scotty Gahamey over the deep end. Well, maybe not. He was a real bastard and half over the deep end anyway. But it would certainly drive her there PDQ.
"I thought you might see it my way, Captain. Congratulations. You are now the chief of police for the duration, or until I decide otherwise. Not that I intended you to have any choice in the matter."
The colonel emitted an evil chuckle. "You do realize that you're only going to get the sick, lame and lazy from me to help you to do the job? You'll need to draw in civs to run patrols, and keep fights and petty crime to a minimum, especially between soldiers and civs. We're thin enough stretched just running a defense perimeter. But with all the trouble that's cropped up, the civilian’s council sent a delegation to ask me to appoint someone to deal with the situation."
Rebecca felt the short hairs on her neck rise. "What situation, sir?"
"Someone is killing the joy-girls from the Last Chance. The locals suspect that it's one of us," he said dryly.
“And is it, sir?” she asked, equally dryly.
The colonel tugged his moustache. "That’s for you to find out. It could be true. If it is, you're going to have to stop it quietly and hard. Or the Korozhet won't have to take this lump of rock by force. Oh, and there are some hard drugs circulating. Civs do what they please out here. It's a long way from the law Earthside or on HAR. But I can't afford addicts in the Corps. You're as much law as this rock has. Stop the hard stuff."
She gritted her teeth. "Anything else I ought to know, sir?"
He thrust his hands into his pockets. "A lot. But you're going to have to find it out for yourself, Captain." His expression softened slightly. "You're a pain in the ass at times, Captain. But I chose you for this because you get results. I need them. I know that I can rely on you."
"Sir." It might be a lousy job, but De Darcy was always sparing with praise. She stood a little straighter.
He turned back to his desk and scooped up a datacube that he held out to her. "That's what I've got from them. There is also a list of personnel available to you in a file marked 'security personnel. They're not all useless."
She took the cube, warily, as if it could just turn and bite her. He gestured at the door. "Get to it, Captain.”
Rebecca saluted and turned.
As she did, De Darcy said, "One last thing, Captain. Try to use some of that tact you're famous for not having."
Act I, Scene III: In a large Korozhet command ship among the myriad asteroids that make up the Olmert system
"Considering these reports it would seem that it is indeed essential that we recapture it. Although why the scientists could not have told us before the system was abandoned, I do not know. It would appear that laxity has taken place. That or resistance." The deep purple reclined further into his saline bath.
"It may be that they were deceived by the scale of the object and its exterior, High Spine," sa
id the maroon.
"I trust they have been eaten," said the purple
"Difficult. They are the experts and training new ones takes time."
The deep purple acknowledged the sad truth of this with a clack of his anterior spines. "Well, they must be suitably punished."
"I believe this has occurred, High Spine."
The Korozhet bent its eye-spines to peer at the report-screens. The data was not encouraging.
"The best option still appears to be a siege and our traditional means. And of course probing attacks, to take advantage of what we can. We have plenty of expendables."
"Less than we used to have," said another of the purple, humping up off her last meal.
"We may have to resort to more care in slave-handling, but things have not reached that point yet,” said the purple in charge of alien resources. “They still breed and we have taken steps to prevent their subversion ever happening again."
"Maybe we need to see if we can insert some into the artifact," said the maroon, risking an opinion in this high council of his elders.
It was a sign of just how worried the Korozhet were that he was not disciplined for this breach of hierarchy. "It would be difficult,” said one of the purple. “There may however be implanted escapees that could be turned to our purposes."
"Investigate the possibilities."
"It will be done, High Spine."
Act I, Scene IV: In the tunnels and cavernous tavern and house of ill repute
"Sergeant Holmes."
The mountain of flesh saluted. So, despite appearances, it was human and alive. "Captain," he said in a carefully neutral voice.
This just had to be De Darcy's sense of humor, thought Rebecca sourly. He probably didn't find anyone called "Watson" among the enlisted men. Well, the one thing going for this man was his size. He could intimidate just by being there.
"Did you volunteer for this billet, Sergeant?" she asked suspiciously.
"With my name, the study of the criminal mind has always been my interest, Captain," said Sergeant Holmes calmly.
"Oh, and how do you do that?" She rocked on the balls of her feet, her hands clasped behind her.
Holmes lifted a meaty hand. "I knock it out of their ears and then look at it, Ma'am. It seems more effective than all this magnifying glass stuff I've read about."
"I'm beginning to revise my initial opinions about you, Sergeant. I think you could be an asset to the criminal investigation section. Which is, as of now... you. Assisted by me if it goes as far as murder. I have your first case awaiting you, just as soon as I finish with the patrol briefing."
"Maybe I should have chosen to go to brig after all, Captain," said Holmes amiably, confirming her suspicions about the able-bodied men she'd been given. Well, set a thief to catch a thief, and a drunk, disorderly and assaulting-the-guard Marine to catch others of the same kind. If you could stop them joining them, that is.
***
Twenty minutes later, after the patrols made up of one civ volunteer and a Marine apiece having been dispatched, they set out. Her first ever criminal investigation, she thought, led straight to the Last Chance Saloon Bar. Anyway, it would be a good opportunity to see how many of her patrols ended up in the place. She had half an hour before her meeting with the civic authorities, whoever they might be, among this rabble of refugees.
The Last Chance was an eloquent testimony to the ingenuity of rockrats. They'd created a visual masterpiece to get blind drunk in. The murals painted and projected around the room made it an almost believable walled garden, visible through French doors. There was even an ivy hung garden door, and distant green vistas over the top of the painted mossy stone wall. By the time you’d had three of the overpriced drinks it probably would fool you. There was of course a full length polished stone bar on the other wall, and a number of stone tables and benches that probably defied the strongest drunk’s effort to use them for combat weapons.
The furniture was large. The proprietor was not. He was a tiny, soft-looking man.
“Honest Laguna at your service,” he said obsequiously, bobbing and rubbing his plump hands.
“I’m the new head of internal security for the rock,” explained the captain, absorbing the unlikely name.
Laguna his shook his head. “Big job. Make that huge and impossible job, Captain.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Well, the thing about this rock that most people just don't get is just how big it is. When the first prospectors came into the system just after the Crotchets’ pull-back, they thought this place must be what the Crotchets and their bugs had been mining. Took a while, and a lot of boys getting lost in these here tunnels, to figure out that the diggings might even be older than the Crotchets. Who knows? Anyway, it's a regular warren. I been here from the very beginning, taking advantage of that. Not mining, of course. It's dug out of easy ores, even if there are still some heavy metals in the rock. There's plenty more heavy-metal rocks out in the asteroid belt, some even bigger than this one. But this is the only mined-out one we've found. Still, it is a good place for the rock-rats to come and breathe something other than their own gas, and find out that easy ores ain’t always cheap."
He gurgled like a drain at his own joke. "Before the Korozhet counter-attack there were maybe five hundred permanent residents on the rock. Some weird ones. Aliens. We kept getting them wandering in from deeper down for weeks after we set up here. The Crochets left in a hurry, you bet."
This was news to Rebecca. Not that it had anything to do with murdered hookers. But she'd always thought that the Korozhet slaves had been all liberated at once... not showing up like a trickle of lost souls, hungry, thirsty and confused. She'd bet they'd not received the milk of human kindness from of this little son-of-a-bitch with his false smile and laugh.
"What the hell did they live on?" asked Holmes, showing that thought processes did happen inside that huge form.
"Hell, boy, I don't speak Crotchet and they didn't speak human. They could mop floors and wash dishes okay, which is all I cared about. Now, you two wanted to talk to me about those two dead girls. I reckon that it's one of your boys has got himself a twisted hate of the women. Like her."
He pointed out of the windows—what the hell you needed windows for in a damn cave puzzled her—at the fluttering protestor outside. You could tell that the bat was a protestor by the sign she was carrying with her feet.
Pro life-choice!
End female subjugation now!
It seemed to be a one-bat protest. "You could start improving security by getting rid of her." He scowled. "She's always coming around and pestering the girls."
It was unusual to see a civ bat. No bandoliers, no insignia... just a poster. The bats had taken the war against the Korozhet as a holy crusade, and joined almost to the last bat. The uplifted rats were a different matter. They were deadly fighters, if they wanted to be. But they were not soldiers by nature, and most of the time it took the prospect of lots of loot to inspire them at all. But the bats...
If Rebecca had learned anything in the military it was not to get involved in dealing with a single-minded bat. She'd seen better officers than her try it. She ignored the bat, and turned to Laguna. "I have been told that two women aged between twenty and thirty Terran years, who had been working here, were found dead in the tunnels."
"And another one is missing,” said Laguna, lugubriously, wiping an eye. “Cindy-Jane."
Sergeant Holmes cracked his knuckles. Looked at the captain. Looked at Laguna. "I think I'd better examine his mind,” he said. “Even if he is a bit on the small side."
"Sergeant," said Rebecca. The huge bar was relatively empty at this time of day. But “relative” only to what it could hold. There must be fifty miners in here, even now. The Marines were tough, but these rockrats, even the human ones, were almost certainly bar fight veterans. "As head of the serious crimes unit... Stick with asking questions for now, before you use your magnifying glass technique. Besides, th
ink of what happened to the victims. It would take a fairly strong man."
The girls had been raped, robbed, and then been beaten to death, and dropped up a shaft. Things were backwards here. You got dropped up a shaft not down one, because of the centrifugal spin. It was a pity the murders weren't backwards, but this little shrimp would probably not be able to beat up a granny in a wheelchair, let alone a healthy young woman. He also would certainly never need to resort to rape. And robbery was something he was doing in the open here, on a grand scale, judging by his prices. It probably wouldn’t be worth his while to go in for petty larceny, let alone kill one of his sources of income.
Holmes blinked. And then nodded, and set to his new technique of questioning verbally. "Who saw them last?" he asked Laguna.
"Oh, they were good girls. Only ever slept with two clients."
"Who?" asked Holmes, skeptically.
"The Marines and the rock-rats." Laguna cackled and slapped his own thighs. "Boy, this isn't the hick town you come from. This is the wild frontier, or it was until the Korozhet put the place under siege. These girls came here for one reason, and it wasn't to powder their noses. You ain't gonna trace their last movements, nohow. I can tell you it was probably up and down, though."
Act II, Scene I amid drunks, hookers, cutpurses and thieves and other municipal officials. In the presence of death and disorder.
The civic authorities, Rebecca discovered, included the bat she'd seen protesting outside the Last Chance. The council weren't going to cut it in any big mayoral parades in more civilized parts. The mayor, dressed in patched holey coveralls and a vast beard, which covered more of him than the coveralls, looked like a rock-rat. It was what he had been until about two weeks ago, and would almost certainly be again as soon as the siege lifted. Still, after the initial chaos this unlikely group had put together some kind of election and got a roughly working civil system up and running. Good enough to at least see to a sewage system and get water and food rationing implemented. There were plenty of gold chained mayors who would have done worse.
