The Gordon Mamon Casebook (4 page)

“Yes, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t even manage to anticipate it. Look, the Captain’s dead, and that is something deeply, deeply troubling to my emotion-simulation programming, but I can’t change the fact of it. The murderer, however, still has rights, and I believe those rights would be infringed if I revealed his—or her—identity. Nonetheless, since there is clearly a requirement that the crime not go unsolved if possible, I will cooperate fully with your investigation, short of providing any meaningful assistance.”

“Uh, thanks,” said Gordon, remembering just why he disliked robotics so much. “But isn’t it against your programming, somehow, to allow a murderer to go free? What if he, or she, strikes again? You’d be culpable, surely.”

“No, I’d still be acting within the constraints of my programming. Hypothetically, if there was another murder, I’d be devastated—”

“No you wouldn’t, you’d just simulate distress,” Gordon retorted.

“Yes, if you wish. But I don’t anticipate that happening. I don’t see any motive for the murderer to attack anyone else on the ship—although, in your case, obviously you should watch your back …”

Gordon turned around; but wherever Cassie was, it wasn’t there.

“You
did
say you had a 100 percent success rate?” Cassie asked, behind him once more.

* * *

“Captain Kurtz. She’s dead,” the crewman explained. It was a redundant observation. Gordon, with his vastly limited knowledge of detection and homicide, could have deduced that aspect of Kurtz’s condition entirely unassisted. But as long as he didn’t look too closely at her neck, he probably wouldn’t vomit …

Gordon selected the ‘crime scene’ function on his handheld, and swept it through the air like a mime artist marking out an imaginary glass cubicle. The handheld helpfully announced that there were traces of blood on the room’s surfaces.

There were more than traces. He found it difficult to imagine how such a quantity of blood had been contained within Kurtz’s small frame. There was blood spattered on the walls and the spartan plastiwood furniture of the Captain’s quarters; blood soaked into the cheap fabric tiles on the floor; blood splashed over the Captain herself; and a considerable quantity of blood on the hands and clothing of the
Harkness
’s troubled chief engineer, Rusty Flange. He was a pale, greying middle-aged jockey of a man in once-white overalls, who shook as though from cold. His voice shook also. Flange, Gordon judged, was understandably in distress.

The engineer, who’d been in an adjoining corridor, told how he’d heard a commotion, and had rushed to Kurtz’s quarters to find her sprawled on the floor, blood pulsing from an ugly gash across her throat. He’d raised the alarm, and made a futile attempt to quell the bleeding with a haemoseal bandage from the cabin’s first-aid kit. The bandage, a sodden wreck of salve-impregnated cloth, lay discarded on the floor beside Kurtz. Using the stylus from his handheld, Gordon picked the bandage up carefully—Kurtz wouldn’t be needing it again—scanned it, and dropped it into an evidence bag.

“Any sign of a weapon?”

Flange started, staring first at the dead captain, then at Gordon. “W-weapon? No. Nothing.”

Something
had to slice through her throat. Gordon switched the handheld to ‘autopsy / forensics’ and held it, close as he dared, above that awful gash.

“You see anyone leave her cabin?” Gordon asked, trying to avert his gaze from the magnetic pull of the Captain’s death-scar. This was much worse than the last time. The other time. This was what murder victims were
supposed
to look like.

“No, I didn’t see nobody, but there must’ve been someone here. Think I probably just missed them again.”

“What d’you mean,
again
? Have there been
other
attacks?”

“Nothing like this. But, last couple of days, I’ve been thinking there’s someone doesn’t belong on the ship, not on the list or anything. Never quite seen them, but I’ve been hearing things, and glimpses in my eye. That’s what I mean it was like, this time, just before I found the Captain. I could hear the tail end of an argument—dunno what about—and then that scream …”

That should be long enough to get a forensics reading, Gordon thought. He pulled the handheld back towards him, still not looking directly. Nothing yet. “Have you moved anything in here?”

“No, that would be presum—shit, sorry, that’s not what I meant, it’s just I
was
2-in-C, so now—uh, no, haven’t moved anything. Haven’t been out of the room yet, since.”

“And this was, what, two hours ago?” The handheld had at least come up with an estimated Time Of Death, and a diagnosis: ‘
damaged, irreparable, suggest request replacement
’.

“About two and a half, now. Eighteen fifty-five, plus or minus five. Am I a suspect, Mr.—?”

“Mamon. You’re present at a crime scene. Naturally I must ask sufficient questions to establish your involvement, or otherwise, but I’ll need to speak to anyone else who could have been here.” Gordon wondered if the resolution of the handheld’s scanner was high enough to get decent fingerprints off the furniture in here, or footprints from the blood-trampled floor. He’d need to chase up Cassie for details on the current crew—as long as she didn’t regard that as information likely to assist him. Better not count on it.

Bloody computers.

“Seen anyone else while you’ve been in here?”

“Just McPhaillia and Gramacek, they’re the only ones supposed to be awake still I think.”

“What d’you mean? On a passenger ship this big?”

“What do you know about the
Dart of Harkness
, Mr Memo?”

“Mamon,” Gordon growled. “The name is
Mamon
. And as for the ship … suppose you tell me what I need to know?”

* * *

The Church of the Blessed Echidna, at least, Gordon
had
heard of. Secretive, incredibly wealthy, but apparently past the heyday of its popularity. The CBE, said Flange, had been working towards independent starflight for the past twenty years, but was hampered by the strictures of its faith, which maintained that all this modern mucking about with hyperspace, wormholes, teleportation, warp drives, tachyonic propulsion and the like was the work of the Great Deceiver, and thus untenable in the eyes of the faithful. Nonetheless, keen to establish a ‘bastion of purity and truth’ in a neglected pocket of the Galaxy, far from the interference of nonbelievers, the CBE had commissioned the construction of its own vessel, the Dart of Harkness. The Harkness contained some three thousand souls, almost all already deep in the centuries-long cryosleep that would sustain them while the antimatter-fueled ship crawled across the scant half-dozen parsecs to the asteroidal rubble encircling the nearest unclaimed brown dwarf.

“Did you say
antimatter
?” Gordon asked. He hadn’t realised anyone was still using the stuff. Hyperspatial travel was faster, cheaper, safer, and vastly more popular. A hyperspace vessel could cover the twenty-light-year distance within a day.

Rusty Flange bristled. “There’s scientific proof that the soul doesn’t survive FTL travel,” he countered. “Within those constraints, matter-antimatter annihilation’s the best propulsion system money can buy.”

“Sure, but—” Gordon strove to refocus on the task at hand. The thought of voluntarily submitting to an unimaginably long span of frozen sleep, only waking on arrival to some dimly-lit astronomical rock garden in which one would spend the rest of one’s days … people were strange, sometimes. Too often, in fact, and by and large there was no point in arguing with them, particularly on matters of faith. He asked Flange a few more questions, concluded the interview, and went off down the spiralling corridor in search of the
Harkness
’ other as-yet-unfrozen inhabitants.

Was it just his imagination, or was it cold in here?

* * *

“What can you tell me of your movements over the past five hours?” Gordon asked. He was stationed in the ship’s clinic, conducting his second interview. Sister Edie McPhaillia, the ship’s physician, was a dark-robed mocha-skinned brunette, late thirties, with asymmetric eyebrows and the short skinny physique almost universally preferred by spaceline employment interview panels. (Gordon reflected that on a reaction-drive starship, where every kilogram added to the cost, such a physique was probably even more highly favoured.)

“I don’t see what possible relev—oh, see what you mean, now. Been in here, mostly,” replied Sister McPhaillia. Gordon surmised that she had either been weeping copiously, or was surprisingly maladroit in the application of mascara. “Only time I went out was for dinner, about four hours ago—we’re not supposed to eat before the cryosleep, but I couldn’t bear the thought of three hundred years on a hungry stomach. Like the Parable of the Jaguar Running on Empty.”

“Dinner? Where?”

“Ship’s cafeteria. Left, up, then aft about a hundred metres from here, I can show you if you’d like—and then I went to collect Skip—Mr. Gramacek for his cryotreatment.” (Gordon checked his notes. Yes, Gramacek, the ship’s communications officer, was the other name down for interview after McPhaillia.) “He’s been nervous, poor dear, doesn’t want to go under, so we talked it through—I’m medic / counsellor / chaplain, so I approached it from all angles. And then after we’d talked I, um, ministered to him … and then the alarm went off, and we found Rusty bent over the Captain, holding that bandage to her neck. Horrible, horrible thing. Those bandages aren’t designed for such massive blood loss, but Rusty wasn’t to know that, I suppose. A bit like the Parable of the Town Mouse and the Country Computer. Anyway, once I saw there was no help I could offer, I came back here to finish prepping the last four cryobooths.”

Gordon could see the waiting cryobooths, parked in a neat row against the wall of the clinic like so many tech-heaven caskets. Beside them stood an immense, fog-breathing stainless-steel canister labelled ‘LN2’.

“Poor Rusty,” McPhaillia added.

“Why d’you say that?”

“He was very attracted to the Captain. Look, Mr. Mutton,” (Gordon grimaced), “we’ve been working towards this for the past fifteen years, us four crewmembers I mean, Rusty most of all. Did you know he oversaw this starship’s construction himself? They don’t make antimatter drives any more, so he had to track down old blueprints, and even though it’s obsolete by today’s standards it’s still proscribed tech, so the construction’s been very hush-hush. It’s taken a lot out of him. Plus it’s taken a long time for the Church to raise money for this vessel, and relationships develop over that time. Like me and Skip. Rusty and Captain Kurtz hadn’t gotten quite that far—it had only been fifteen years, no sense in rushing things—but there was definitely some spark between them, you could see it. Like the Parable of the Electric Eel and the Battery Hen, you know? The Captain always wanted to know what he’d been up to, and Rusty always wanted to know where she was—just longed for each other’s company, I guess. And now—” She dabbed at the corner of her eye with a sterilised dressing. “—he’s going to spend the next
three hundred years
grieving …” McPhaillia blew her nose noisily into a thick wad of surgical cotton, which she placed absently back on the gurney beside her.

“Yes, but he’ll be in
cryosleep
all that time,” observed Gordon. “That’ll only seem like a day or so. I shouldn’t imagine he’ll take
that
long to heal afterwards.”

“You think that matters, Mr. Marram? Three hundred years is three hundred years.”

* * *

The Gramacek interview, in the latter’s quarters, was a painfully tense affair. Gordon’s handheld had decided, two minutes before interview’s commencement, to provide an update on its analysis of the autopsy results. Frustratingly, there was no information on the nature of the knife used to slash Captain Kurtz’s neck: no detectable residue of any metal, plastic, glass or other feasible knife-blade material, but traces of food particles suggested the incision had been deep enough to sever the gullet as well as the jugular. The handheld also revealed to Gordon the results of the wide-spectrum police database name-search he’d instigated several minutes earlier. Flange and McPhaillia had come up clear, but Gramacek’s past history was bizarre. At least it explained his fear of cryosleep …

“Mr. Gramacek? Can you account for your whereabouts over the past six hours?” Gordon strove to keep his voice neutral. After all, he had no proof. Yet.

“I’m talkin’ to you now, ain’t I?” Skip Gramacek was a balding, angry sparrow of a man, with a permanent scowl set in a face like a sunbleached relief map.

“Yes, but
before
this …”

“Lessee … Edie, that’s Sister McPhaillia to you, dropped by my quarters about four, five hours ago, I was trying to pick an outfit for the big sleep.”

“Big sleep?”

“Yeah, you know, napsicle time.” Gramacek shivered. “While we waits out the trip to Shangvanatopia. Anyways, me and Edie went back to the clinic, we—well, that’s not important—then we gets the alarm call from Cassie, we dropped by Kurtz’s quarters, she were
dead as,
so I come back here. Been here since.”

No remorse. That wasn’t going to make this any easier. He lifted his handheld to head height, scanning Gramacek for weaponry in the same way he’d done for Flange and McPhaillia. Clean, just like the others.

“Mr. Gramacek. Why did the state subject you to a failed lethal injection twenty-eight years ago?”

“Cause they couldn’t get a decent medical executioner. Bloody cowboy, I still gets these dizzy spells, all these years later—”

Gordon tried again. “No, I mean what were you sentenced for?”

“Knife attacks. They found a couple, maybe three, dames, slashed in the jugular, the cops put me in the frame and then decided they liked the way that looked. I got a lawyer as useless as wings on a coconut, thinks if he can’t show I didn’t do it, then I must of done it, next thing I knows they’re strapping me into a Terminal Care stretcher and squirting me full of Dr. Death’s midnight cocktail, only some shitbrained dropkick intern forgot to add the eleventh secret herb and spice, so it don’t work like we’re all expecting it will, and they commutes it to life without parole. Then I found God, or He found me—we’re still arguing about that, the two of us—meantime, some journo turns up enough clues to indicate that, whoever done those poor chicks, and they still don’t know who, whoever, it couldn’t of been me. So they just had to release me, got me a pardon and everything. Plus these dizzy spells, like I mentioned.”