by Edward Lee
“But the fact that they all look the same just makes it easier to replicate genetically,” Esther asserted.
“If you’re trying to make a point,” Luke said to her, “then make it.”
Esther had a scalpel in her hand. “The technology’s existed for years. Blood supply and nerve-conduction can easily be grown into an exterior skin graft. But there’s only one way to find out for sure.”
“Proceed,” Luke granted.
Esther rolled down an ultraviolet scanning screen over the cadaver’s chest. “There, see? Those microsutures are the dead giveaway.” She scowled at Simon. “If the autopsy had been performed properly, these tiny blood- and nerve-connections would’ve been detected without any need for a tomograph.” Next, she carefully applied her scalpel, beginning to cut.
Sharon and Brigid took a step back, cringing.
“Good God,” Brigid muttered.
A trace, wet sound could be heard. Within a minute, Esther had peeled much of the scarlet skin off the cadaver’s chest.
Revealing perfectly normal skin underneath.
“It’s almost like the new skin was painted on,” Sharon observed.
“Not painted,” Esther replied. “Grown.”
The General-Vicar was pinching his cleft chin. “Well, I suppose this is proof-positive of a Federate Intel sabotage attempt. Forged autopsy and DNA results, an easily detectable bomb that goes undetected, and now this. Our friends at Federate Intel have gone to exorbitant measures to stop this mission and blame it on the Red Sect. But I can’t think of any logical reason.”
“And it also means that they killed Major-Rector Matthew,” Sharon suggested, “if, in fact, he’s dead.”
“He’s dead, all right,” echoed a voice behind them all.
Tom stood in the unit’s entrance. He looked morose.
“We just found his body stuffed up into one of the service conduits,” he said.
(II)
When the securitechs brought the body of Major-Rector Matthew into the morgue unit, Sharon felt all the blood drain out of her face. Another exam platform was lowered, and the autopsy began, care of Dr. Esther and Simon, while everyone else looked queasily on. The cranial vault had been ruptured within an effluxion sack.
“Sir?” Sharon asked. “You said that no one else knows about the details of the mission?”
Luke was clearly saddened by this latest atrocity. “Yes. Me, and me alone. Matthew knew nothing about it. He did make some comments, though, which clearly indicated that he was beginning to have some suspicions that this might not actually be a typical resupply flight. As Security Corp commander, he noticed the irregularities in some of the processing points, the random analysis transmissions coming in, things like that.”
“Where are those transmissions coming from?” Tom was bold enough to ask.
“You’ll find out in due time. Nonetheless, it appears that Matthew was killed due to his suspicions. The murderer didn’t want him to get the chance to discover more of the mission’s classified objectives.”
Simon glanced up from the tomograph assembly. “At this point, sir, don’t we all have a right to know those objectives?”
“No, you do not. You have no rights at all,” Luke reminded, “just the privilege to proceed with God’s work under the criteria of New Vatican’s orders.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But isn’t it possible that the Major’s murderer is still on board?” Sharon continued.
“I don’t regard it as likely. You’ve all been polygraphed to the highest levels of Federate scrutiny, and the statistics demonstrate that our latest lie-detection programs can’t be defeated.”
Tom sputtered something under his breath.
“You have something to say, Private? Feel free to enlighten us with your obviously exclusive wisdom.”
“Nothing to say, sir.”
“Good.”
But Sharon couldn’t let it go. “All right, let’s just say it’s not any of us.” She pointed to the other dead body in the unit, whose genetically implanted skin graft now hung off his chest like a sheet of wallpaper. “That man stowed away. He successfully infiltrated the ship. If he did it—”
“Someone else could, too,” Luke conceded. “Your point is well taken, Specialist.”
Brigid spoke up next. “You mean there could be someone else on the ship as we speak. Hiding.”
“We have to consider the possibility,” the General- Vicar confirmed, “which is why our ever-vigilant Private Thomas is going to lead the search detachment and won’t stop until every square inch of this vessel has been physically inspected. You hear me, Private?”
“Yes, sir,” Tom replied with a smirk.
“Then don’t let the pressure door hit you in the ass on the way out.”
Tom exited the suite, taking the rest of the securitechs with him.
Sharon and Brigid left a few moments later, hands to bellies, when Dr. Esther removed the effluxion sack from Major Matthew’s head. A dark-red stew spilled out of the bag, slopping the floor.
“God, that was gross,” Brigid said after she and Sharon had left.
“The poor man. He was a faithful servant of God.”
“Yeah, and now he’s a faithful dead servant of God, which is what we all could be real soon.”
“You heard the General. The boarding polygraphs prove that none of us could be spies or infiltrators, and if there’s another stowaway, Tom’s team will find him.”
“There’s no damn stowaway,” Brigid insisted. “I’ve RV’d all over this ship. If there was someone hiding out, I’d sense it, and my vision would take me there. You think I saw Matthew’s dead body by accident? No way.”
Sharon couldn’t very well argue; Brigid’s gift was as specialized as it was arcane. “I saw you too,” Brigid said in a lower tone. “You and Tom.”
“What?”
“On the ob-deck.” A wink. “Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me.”
Sharon’s face flushed with embarrassment; she was speechless.
Brigid began to walk away. “You should’ve done it, Sharon. I’ve got some bad vibes about this special ‘mission.’ You should’ve gone all the way when you had the chance.”
“How-how can you say that?” Sharon fumbled the words.
“My gut’s telling me we’re all going to die.”
(III)
The opteostatic mentometer housing that sat to the side of Sharon’s work mod reminded her oddly of some kind of mechanized head—with horns.
And such a shape—with horns—could only remind her of demons.
The demon’s face…Surkulik. Sharon hoped that it was merely the power of suggestion, but the pigmented red stain on the dead man’s chest—genetically grafted or not—did look like a face when one stared at it long enough. A hideous face.
The image in the memory seemed to drift toward her, as if to kiss her, as the wide sheet of skin was peeled off the killer’s chest…
She blinked the memory away, struggling to concentrate. Pay attention! she yelled at herself. Do your job! Her job was to survey the navigational status monitors for potential abort displays. Simple. So do it!
On the other hand, her difficulty in focusing on her task was understandable due to the most recent events. A restricted mission. A possible stowaway. A murder. It was Federate Intelligence—not Red Sect—who’d tried to sabotage the ship. What could account for this? And then she considered something else.
What could account for Brigid—a civilian remote-viewer—being included on the personnel manifest for a classified military mission?
(IV)
The cove stood muted in tinsled dark. The blinking lights on the relay panels behind him seemed to cut out his silhouette in stark black, haloed by furious kaleidoscopy.
“Yours is a privileged role,” the General-Vicar said. “The first to be close enough to see.”
Brigid didn’t understand, but she was used to that. It came with the parameters of her job:
to do, not ask. True, she’d been born with her “gift”; she never really wanted it. “God gave it to you,” the Abbot Superior had told her at Meade Cathedral, “and you have an obligation to use it—for Him.”
But to be honest, in the most secret moments to herself, Brigid didn’t know if she even believed in God.
General-Vicar Luke had asked her to meet him in the Lab Station. It was just a typical diagnostic lab save for one additional ante-cove: the sensory-dep cell. I’ll bet I’ve spent half of my life in these things, she thought. Such cells were known to attenuate the psychic limits of a trained remote-viewer, amplifying mental reception, vastly extending range. Hours ago, now, the Edessa had jumped to nuclear-drag, accelerating at over 75 billion miles per solar cycle. Brigid wondered what they were soaring to.
Luke sealed the pressure door after she’d entered, and keyed in a delock password. No one was coming in without his expressed permission.
“It’s time,’’ he said.
The cell before her, with its hatch hinged open, reminded her of the old-style coffins they’d used to encase the dead, back before the Federate Cremation Act had been passed into public law. The inside shimmered in the dark: its bath of distilled glycerin heated precisely to human body temperature.
“I’m ready,” she said and unhesitantly began to strip.
The General-Vicar seemed to flinch. “Oh, I didn’t realize. I’ve precious little experience with remote-viewers.”
She shouldered out of the jumpsuit, her large breasts bared. “It works best if you’re nude.”
A chuckle that didn’t quite work. “Don’t be distressed. I’ve been chemically celibate for decades. I’ll show you my implant certification if you like.”
“That’s all right.” She didn’t care. She liked exposing herself—another sin. A tingle lit in the furrow of her sex when she stepped out of the rest of her uniform. But most of the thrill was lost in front of a man with no sex drive. Younger men, men without libidinal tempering—she loved to nonchalantly reveal her body to them, knowing they’d take the image with them, to some dark unmonitored place.
Sin, more sin.
“Give me a moment to hook up.”
She stepped into the cell, lay down in the slippery bath. At once she felt caressed by a hundred hot hands; they smoothed over her skin, over her breasts and back and forth over the insides of her thighs. Awash in the dense liquid, she stuck a pair of sensor-cups to either side of her throat, then a chargecup over her heart.
She was floating now.
Nude, totally vulnerable. Locked away behind an unopenable door.
The most grotesque thoughts assailed her. Who was the General-Vicar really? She didn’t know him; she’d never even heard of him.
He could be insane for all I know.
HE could be the spy. HE could be Major Matthew’s killer.
Perhaps.
She imagined herself being raped in the cell…
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she answered, snapping out of the nightmare. But it was just more sin. The awful vision only stoked her desires further. She’d nearly climaxed.
“Close the hatch now,” she said. “Then use the intercom.”
The cell’s hatch geared shut, sealing her in hermetically. Total darkness now. Soundless. She was floating on nothing.
The digistats processed her exact body temperature down to a thousandth of a degree, then adjusted the fluid temp. Pure oxygen hissed in at exactly one hundred kilopascals.
“Can you hear me, sir?”
Trace static crackled over the intercom. “Yes,” Luke said.
“I’m going to self-induce a theta-wave trance. But before I do that, I need you to give me a focus-word.”
“Understood.”
She was already sliding away. “Give me the focus-word now.”
There was a long dead pause.
Then General-Vicar Luke said—
(V)
“This is a crock of fuckin’ bullshit that can suck my dick,” Tom said. He lounged lazily on the grav-chair across from Sharon’s mod, arms crossed, and boots propped up.
Sharon, as usual, shirked at his language.
“There’s no fuckin’ infiltrator on board. There’s no stowaway spy.”
“How do you know?” Sharon asked.
“We searched every inch of this goddamn space-canoe, with IR, parabolic heartbeat sensors, carbon dioxide detectors—every fuckin’ thing. Christ, we even used a methane probe.”
“Methane?”
“It’s right out of the tactical search manual. They figure if someone’s hiding out on a ship or plat, he’s eventually gonna have to take a shit somewhere. Well, guess what? We didn’t find a single pile of shit.”
Sharon sighed in useless disgust. “And your point would be?”
“Whoever killed Matthew is someone on the personnel manifest.”
“Maybe the killer debarked at the Solon Station.”
“What, come all this way just to leave before the real mission starts? Not likely.”
Sharon asked outright. “So who do you think it is? There are only eleven of us.”
“Could be anyone. That creepy chick with the big tits, or that airhead bitch doctor. Then we’ve got Simon, a known flake to begin with, plus there’ve always been rumors that he infiltrated Security Corp to spy for Federate Intel. Next, we’ve got that old hard-on Luke, who’s not telling us a damn thing about what we’re doing out here. And after all that we’ve got five circle-jerkin’ bohunker securitechs, none of whom I know from fuckin’ Adam in a hole in the ground.”
“So you don’t trust anyone?”
“Hell, no.”
“What about me?” Sharon toyed. “Couldn’t I be the killer?”
“Yeah, and I could be the next Pope.” He laughed out loud. “Right, a teenager plugging a Security Corp commander in the head with a de-jam gun and stuffing his body up a service conduit. Happens every day.”
Sharon bristled. “I’m not a teenager,” she re-reminded him. “And what about you? You have the worst reputation and record of anyone onboard. Shouldn’t the rest of us be suspecting you?”
“Sure, if you’ve all got dog shit for brains.”
Sharon shook her head. “There’s absolutely no point in continuing this avenue of discussion. So why don’t you just leave? I’m sick of listening to you use impious language, and I’ve got work to do.”
Tom’s brow arched. “Yesterday you were trying to suck my tongue out of my mouth in the ob-cove, and now you want me to leave?”
The comment incensed her. First came the flood of embarrassment, then a harder flood of rage. “Just get out!” she yelled.
“Jeez, I was only kidding. You teenagers need to lighten up.”
“Get the f—”
“Gotcha,” he said, pointing at her. “Almost made you use impious language.” He stood up, meandered over to her mod. He looked at her holoscreens. “What are you working on, anyway?”
“I’m monitoring the nav systems for abort displays,” she huffed back. “Now leave me alone.”
“I thought you liked me.”
“I don’t. You’re a horrible person. You say things on purpose just to make me angry or hurt my feelings.”
“No I don’t. I’m just funnin’ around. Can’t you take a joke?” He looked at her tertiary holoscreen. “What’s this one on for?”
“Just some research.” She tried to ignore him. “None of your business.”
He snooped forward, put a hand on her shoulder as he squinted at the screen. The screen read:
:LOOP SEARCH/ NAM ALLOCATION:
under heaven lay umbra, hiding the chosen
—AND—
red sect
—AND—
surkulik
“Red Sect stuff, huh? But you already tried that at the Library Unit,” he said.
“I’m trying it again.” However unconscious the gesture, his hand on her shoulder distracted her. “It’s a
multiple data-bank search. Any hit in one bank loops the trinaries back into a quarantined directory. It pieces together fractals and holds them in the national access memory.”
“Ah, I knew that. Every data-bank on the ship, huh?”
“Yes, unless it’s an encrypted bank, but typically the only encrypted banks are reserved for operational specs and intelligence grids. Not historical information.”
“But the other day, when you were searching those appendices, didn’t it say that the original text had been deleted?”
Sharon struggled to rein her exasperation with him. “Yes, it did! Running this kind of search could locate the surface space when the information was deleted! I might be able to retrieve the deletion!”
He paid no mind to her raised voice. “Right, technical stuff. I do technical stuff too, you know. Dig ditches, paint walls, clean out the insides of deep-space garbage hoppers.”
This time she almost smiled.
“Oh, I meant to ask you. Any idea what this is?”
He placed a tiny piece of thermal plastic on her mod. She picked it up, only had to look at it for a moment to realize what it was. “Where did you get this?”
“I found it on Major-Rector Matthew’s body,” Tom replied. “It was sticking out of the bottom of his dress cross. Looks like some kind of a circuit or computer chip.”
“It is a computer chip,” Sharon acknowledged. “It’s a biochip. You better turn it in to the General-Vicar.”
“Why? What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is that the only place in the world that legally makes these is the Federate Science and Research Facility. The specs are secret.” She held the chip up. “See? If this was legitimate, it would have a Federate seal on it. But this one doesn’t, which means it had to have been made by hackers. All Federate intelligence systems use biochips to protect their passwords from being broken. They use self-sustaining biogens to serve as the power source. This one looks pretty old, but you should definitely report it.”
