The Gordon Mamon Casebook (6 page)

“Please, let’s not get size-ist,” Gordon replied. “Thing is, it all depends on what you want to use the starship for. These much smaller tanks are perfectly adequate, if all you’re seeking is a one-way mission to Shangvanatopia or whatever you people call it.”

“But we
are
on a one-way mission,” said McPhaillia.

“Flange wasn’t.”

Twenty-three minutes, and the engineer was visibly agitated.

“
What?
” McPhaillia and Gramacek asked, in near-unison, as each turned to stare at Flange. “Is this true?” asked McPhaillia.

“Ask him why he designed the ship so that the living module could be jettisoned from the drive frame. No, don’t bother, he’s finding it difficult to talk right now, since he knows what’s at stake. But I’d guess he was going to get you set up and started at Shangvanatopia—he’s not a mass murderer—then return here, or head elsewhere, to start a new life, ostensibly six hundred years on, for all you knew. Ostensibly. Am I right, Flange?”

Twenty-two minutes.

Twenty-one minutes.

Flange broke. “Me and—me and—me and the Captain, we we both we were going to come back, because the Church … we’re not really, we’re not, we don’t we didn’t believe, not really in the Church. And then, but then the Captain she, I guess it got to her, she started attending, she was wondering and there was something I hadn’t told her, she found out, and she was going to end it, all of it I mean. And I couldn’t—and now she’s—now she’s …” The engineer slumped forward on the control panel, sobbing inconsolably.

Twenty minutes.

“But I’ll get back to motive in a minute,” Gordon announced, picking up the fresh haemoseal bandage he’d brought in. He peeled off the sterile wrapping, exposing the soft, wet-rubbery skin of the bandage. “What I’d like to explore now is the method, which had me puzzled for quite some time. I mean, how do you find a knife that doesn’t exist? Captain Kurtz had her throat cut, but there was never any sign of the weapon responsible.
Because it had already been found and dismissed.
” He bent down and picked up the melon.

“She were killed with a
melon
?” Gramacek asked, incredulous.

“No,” Gordon replied. He turned the melon over, revealing it as hollow, then balanced it on its flattest side upon the control panel, lifting up a large thermos of liquid fog.

“Careful,” warned Cassie. “Don’t damage the electronics.”

“I honestly don’t think that will be a problem,” said Gordon, cautiously tipping liquid nitrogen into the hollowed melon. Instantly the bench became shrouded in thick fog; as more liquid poured in, the fog abated and a fizzing reservoir of something deceptively watery, though radiating intense cold, remained within the melon shell. “See? The melon is, what d’you call those things? A dewar. My guess is he filled it up in the clinic, carried it along the corridor until he was just outside her room. Once he’d used it, he could have just dropped it, the nitrogen would just evaporate in a couple of minutes, and who’s going to suspect a melon as the murder weapon? Particularly because the melon, itself,
wasn’t
the murder weapon.”

“Then what—?” Gramacek asked. Eighteen minutes.

“She was stabbed with a bandage,” Gordon replied, repeatedly folding his bandage until it took on a sharp-nosed shape similar to a paper plane. Then he shoved it, nose-first, into the melon-dewar. More fog erupted with bubbles of stingingly cold nitrogen, while the bandage’s liquid dressing froze into a form giving it substantial rigidity. Gordon pressed the bandage’s pointed end down onto the panel; the bandage shattered.
That
hadn’t been part of his planned demonstration. “Uh—I probably need to practise that a bit more. But on the other hand, I’m not trying to kill anyone, and this plastigranite control panel is presumably a bit tougher to pierce than the Captain’s neck. And hopefully I’ve explained why the murder weapon couldn’t be identified when I searched the room—
because it was in a completely different shape by then
.”

“I’ve heard
enough
!” Flange growled, lifting his head from the control panel. His hand hovered above an innocuous-looking pink button. “Edie, prep him for the big sleep. DO IT, or I’ll vent the antimatter, and you know what
that
means!”

McPhaillia looked from the engineer to Gordon, then back again. “But—but he’s a non-believer, he doesn’t
belong
on the voyage ……”

“Do you think,” replied Flange in a dangerously measured tone, “that I give a
fuck
whether he believes in the Blessed Echidna, or the Deceitful Porcupine, or whatever other ri
dic
ulous animals you people worship? I didn’t even say I wanted to take him along for the ride—or not all of it, at any rate. I want him ICED, and I DON’T want to have to ask again!”

Sixteen minutes.

“Go ahead, Flange,” Gordon replied, starting to sweat, because he wasn’t totally sure himself, not 100 percent. It
felt
right, and nothing else made sense. But if he was
wrong
about this … “Go for it, vent it. See where it gets you.”

“Are you
mad
?” asked Gramacek.

“D’you people know how an antimatter drive works?” Gordon asked. “Flange, I know
you
do, but I’m directing this to McPhaillia and Gramacek.”

“It’s annihilation, isn’t it, I think they call it?” said McPhaillia.

“Mutual destruction, matter and antimatter, total conversion into energy. And after that, if you ignore the energy, it’s almost as if they never existed. Negation, you might say. Never existed …”

Fifteen minutes.

“Get
on
with it,” Flange growled, though it was no longer clear who he was speaking to.

“The thing is, though the Church didn’t itself know how to build an antimatter-drive spaceship, it
did
know how much it cost. At least, that’s what I’m guessing. The cost of antimatter for a one-way trip was merely prohibitive; but the cost for a return trip, that was impossible. So Flange only budgeted for a one-way trip.”

“But you said he was planning a return trip,” McPhaillia protested.

“Yes, I reckon he was. Thing is, he only budgeted for a one-way trip’s worth of antimatter, ’cause he knew that’s all the Church could afford—but
he didn’t purchase any antimatter.
My guess is, if you open up those external tanks, you’ll just find conventional rocket fuel, for in-system manoeuvring; and somewhere, hidden amongst those, there’ll be a standard hyperspace drive. Much, much less expensive.”

“Hyperspace? But our
souls
—” Gramacek turned accusingly to Flange, but McPhaillia held him back.

“What makes you so sure,” Flange asked, finger hovering above the button, “there isn’t any antimatter?”

“You put the tanks around the outside,” Gordon replied. “An old reference book my handheld found for me explained it, why you never put anti-tanks on an STL spaceship’s periphery. Because all it takes is one interstellar dust grain, travelling at a few percent of lightspeed relative to you, to pierce that tank, and it’s all over. No containment. No spaceship. You put the tanks on the outside, you’ll hit plenty of dust grains on a three-hundred-year voyage. But if the tanks are towards the centre of the ship, those dust grains will only impact on the living quarters, and they’re much better able to cope with pinhole breaches, a standard patch will fix it. You weren’t bothered with such details, because you knew the ship wasn’t spending any significant length of time in transit.”

“Rusty. Is this
true
?” McPhaillia asked, as ostensibly horrified as though she’d just found him naked in the chapel with a blow-up dolphin and a bucket of jellied eels.

Twelve minutes.

“Close,” Flange confessed. “I only sourced a kilo of the stuff, so there’d be enough to show up on ship’s diagnostics.” His finger stayed poised against the pink button, and nobody moved to pull him away.

A kilogram of antimatter was still more than adequate to obliterate the
Dart of Harkness
, the Skytop Plaza and its other attendant spacecraft, and a great deal of the tethering space elevator.

“You’re bluffing,” Gordon said, voice quavering.

“Try me,” said Flange. “Edie. Skip. If
one of you
doesn’t agree to ice that bastard by the time I count ten, I’m pressing this! Don’t think I won’t! The antimatter’s set to blow, anyway, if we don’t launch on schedule.” He began counting off.

“You’re bluffing,” Gordon repeated.

McPhaillia stared at Gordon, then at Gramacek, then at Flange.

“Stop,” pleaded Gordon, on eight. “I’ll go. You win.”

“I’ll do him,” McPhaillia said. “But Rusty, for heaven’s sakes …”

“You too, Gramacek. Don’t want him giving us the slip, do we? Do him, then ice yourselves. Better
move it
, you’ve only got nine minutes!”

* * *

They paced the corridor towards the clinic. Gordon’s mind raced ahead. “You realise, he won’t let any of us live? He’ll space our caskets, first chance. With us out of the way, his secret still holds, at least aboard the ship.” The others didn’t answer.

How long did it take to get a police cruiser out here? The shuttle trip had been fifteen minutes, and a cruiser could certainly halve that. It’d been almost thirty minutes, now, since he’d transmitted to HQ. They
should be here by now
. But they weren’t, so far as he could tell. How much longer? Five minutes? Were they even coming?

Maybe not.

He had to escape, before they reached the clinic. “Even if he lets you two live, what about your souls? The moment you go through hyperspace …” He was babbling now, clutching at straws.

“Been having me some doubts about that,” grumbled Gramacek, strengthening his hold on Gordon’s forearm.

Great
. Agnosticism, at a time like this. “Sister McPhaillia? Edie? Are you just going to let him get away with this?”

“Souls are one thing, lives are another. We can probably find some pathway to purify ourselves, if we’re given long enough.”

“He’s
not going to let you live
,” Gordon argued.

“What choice do we—”

The corridor jolted, the lights died. After a couple of seconds, the dim pink emergency lighting flickered on.

The corridor was still intact.

“
That
weren’t an antimatter blast,” said Gramacek. “But what …?”

Gordon shook free, and started running back down the corridor. “Hey,” complained McPhaillia. “We’re supposed to …” She set off in pursuit. Gramacek chased them both.

* * *

Flange was doubled up in agony, rolling on the cramped floor of the control cabin and swearing like a plumber’s mate. Gordon thought he could see what had happened. The engineer had caught his wrist a nasty knock on the edge of the control panel.

Which wouldn’t have been so bad, except for the event which had immediately preceded it. Cassie’s sudden fillip of thrust had knocked the melon/dewar off its precarious balance, copiously tipping liquid nitrogen over the controls … and over Flange’s outstretched hand and wrist.

McPhaillia yelled for Gramacek to bring the nearest first-aid kit, while she tended to the shattered, snap-frozen stump of Flange’s forearm. It was cold-cauterised for now, but
that
wouldn’t last. And Gordon could only imagine the pain of it …

“Cassie?” Gordon asked, trying not to look at the dispersed fragments of Flange’s hand, nor to listen to the engineer’s incoherent, anguished moans as McPhaillia administered a sedative. The medic had the situation under control: he backed out of the control room, into the corridor. “Cassie?” he repeated. “Status?”

“Antimatter secure, no immediate danger. I’ve recircuited the controls so it’s completely isolated—in fact I did that several days ago, as soon as it was transferred onboard,” she replied, from somewhere off to his side. “I suppose you’re wondering, though, why I went along with it?”

“Yes. I have my suspicions, but …”

“I hoped not to disappoint the passengers. Three thousand people with a lot of expectation, a lot of hope for this voyage, I didn’t want to jeopardise that. First Law. Even with the Captain dead, it seemed best to go ahead with it. And that’s why I didn’t assist you: it wasn’t so much to avoid punishment for Flange, it was so the voyage could still go ahead, because that seemed best for the passengers. A fairly complicated calculation in combinatorial emotiometrics, but I won’t bore you with the details. But then the equation changed, and I had to act.”

“Was it my imminent death that tipped the scales?” Gordon asked. “Or McPhaillia’s? Gramacek’s?”

“None of those. Greatest good for the greatest number; I couldn’t be
sure
any of those deaths would actually occur. There was potential, but it still came out balanced, and there was the likelihood pain would need to be inflicted on Flange to stop him. But no, what shifted the fulcrum, in the end, was the souls.”

“Souls? Cassie, are you a believer?”

“No, not at all, Mr. Mamon. But you don’t get to spend all those years around these people without something rubbing off on you. Call it a sort of electronic empathy, I suppose. I am, after all, programmed to act in accordance with the Church’s teachings, when those are not inconsistent with logically-directed outcomes. Like for instance, d’you know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? I can show you my working on that one …”

“Another time, maybe.”

“Mr. Mamon,” Cassie continued, “what’s going to happen to me?”

Gordon was saved from answering by Gramacek’s return. “Need a hand?” he asked, moving through to the control room.

* * *

Fairdig’s wasn’t noted for its breakfasts; but it would have to do, thought Gordon, decanting himself from the
Pixie Bust
back into the welcome familiarity of shuttle bay 2B. In a few hours, he was due to clock on for Skyward 270’s descent-ascent cycle: there’d just be time for breakfast, and a too-short nap, before he turned up for duty again. His dinner reservation would have to be rescheduled for when he was next topside, in four days’ time. He put in a quick call to Judy Sargent, the desk officer at Hotel Policing, to check that his report had arrived satisfactorily, and to ask whether the force had any other debilitating social evenings planned for the foreseeable future. He hoped not to be topside the next time …