Story Excerpt
Murder on The Orion Express
by Peter Wood
Year of the Murder
Technically the colonists should have called it year fifty of the one-hundred-and-twenty-five-year voyage to Orion. Ava Martin, the only cop not in stasis, found such designations less than useless. She just referred to this awake time as the Year of the Murder. The first murder on the starship since leaving Earth.
And it had happened on her damned watch.
She stopped the holo tape of probably the last few minutes of the life of Dennis Rockford, the missing and almost certainly murdered Frontier candidate for captain of the star ship. Marie Curie. The assembled colonists—those not in suspended animation—didn’t give a damn what the tape showed. They’d already made up their minds.
The nine members of the Explorer Party in the cafeteria thought the tape had been faked. The opposition Frontier Party wanted Jim Becker, the Explorer candidate and number one suspect, hog-tied and jettisoned out the nearest airlock.
It didn’t help Becker that he lacked an alibi. In a ship built for ten thousand, the twenty still awake tended to be alone a lot.
“Do we have to watch this again?” Chapman, the chief aide to the missing Rockford, demanded. In the three months Ava had known her, Chapman had not proven to be a patient or friendly woman.
“Due process,” Ava said. “We have to wait for everybody else to wake up for the election.” She could have arrested Becker, but she wanted to get another cop to take over the investigation. She could have awakened some backup, but she didn’t want to violate the unwritten rule that the cop on call better damned well take every possible measure before dragging anyone else into what the cop on duty should have been able to handle by herself. She’d never live it down if she had to call for help. That poor schmuck who’d awakened two or three officers to help with a routine arrest years ago had to quit the force because he couldn’t take the criticism.
She could handle it by herself for now. In a few days the place would be teeming with law enforcement, the first wave of wakeups.
When the general population emerged from stasis, she feared a riot. The best she could do would be to delay thawing them out for another day or two while the cops tried to get things under control. She couldn’t postpone an election. Nobody had that authority.
“Due process,” Chapman snorted. “Becker isn’t even here for the evidence.”
“It’s not like he can leave the ship,” Ava said.
Ava didn’t think much of Becker or Rockford. Odysseus had to thread the needle between Charybdis and Scylla. But what if he had to choose one of the two sea monsters?
“Lock Becker up,” Chapman said. The other Frontiers joined in. Loud grumbling ensued and escalated to yelling as the two sides tried to drown each other out.
“Please!” Ava shouted. “Please!” With the twenty people out of stasis evenly divided between the two parties, things had been tense the first three months of her six-month shift. It didn’t help that both sides accused her, the political neutral cop, as supporting the other side. She couldn’t wait to get back to sleep and let another score of colonists take their turns as glorified night watchmen.
The yelling on both sides grew louder. Nobody paid her any attention.
Not one of the assembled had even touched the ten pizzas she’d made for the meeting. Ava didn’t especially care about hospitality. Making pizza had been the only thing the past few months that she half enjoyed.
She tripped the fire alarm.
Shrieking sirens echoed down the ship’s deserted hallways. The fire droids bobbed and wheeled into the cafeteria ready to put out a blaze. The machines puttered and whirled in circles and then stopped by the door, lights beeping. If droids could get irritated, if droids could talk, they’d give Ava an earful.
After five well-calculated minutes she punched in her override code on the holo pad, and the sirens fizzled to an eventual stop.
The droids slunk out of the room, ready for the next fire alarm.
Everybody glared at Ava. A rare show of solidarity. Both sides agreed she was not doing a good job.
Ava didn’t care what they thought. She just wanted to go back to sleep. She was sick of the sterile sameness of the ship. Grey halls and bulkheads. Little in the way of wall decorations. What was the point? On a one-hundred-twenty-five-year voyage, artwork would fall down or fade away, and most people were asleep anyway. She prayed that the structures on Orion—named in a roundabout way because Marie Curie passed through Orion’s Belt to get to the colony (eventually)—had some color, some personality.
“I can’t lock up the captain,” she said. “We don’t have a brig.”
“Build one,” Chapman snapped. She pulled a small flask from her jacket and poured something into her coffee. She took a sip and folded her arms.
Ava turned the tape back on.
Rockford’s election opponent, Becker, slammed the overweight Rockford into the starboard bulkhead, fired a photon ray gun—supposedly all locked away in munitions—at the easy target. Becker made sure Rockford’s body was nice and charred and then shoved him into the airlock and shot the corpse into space.
But officially Rockford was still missing. His DNA was all over the bulkhead. Blood. Tissue samples. Bits of goddamned burnt bone, for God’s sake. Oh yeah, and the DNA of the suspected murderer slathered all over the crime scene like mayonnaise on a BLT.
* * *
Thirty Years Previously. Year of the Mutiny
Ava awoke with the mother of all headaches. She looked at the readout on her sleeping pod. Year twenty, day 76. Way too early to be awakened. She didn’t have her six-month shift for thirty more years.
A siren wailed. Shouting in the distance. Fire droids idled and beeped. If they had thumbs, they would have twiddled them.
She needed to find some cops. Get instructions. “What’s going on?” she called out.
“Mutiny,” a familiar voice said. Lieutenant Davenport stood in front of Ava’s pod. As always, the lieutenant seemed annoyed. She frowned at Ava as if she were a schoolteacher dealing with a tardy student who had overslept. She brandished two photon guns. “I’m really going to need you to get up and get to work.”
Ava knew Davenport didn’t want any whining about needing more time to adjust after years in stasis. Davenport never wanted to hear any excuses about anything. Ava reached out, and Davenport placed a weapon in her hands.
She heard photon blasts from somewhere.
Ava listened carefully to Davenport’s briefing on the mutiny. You didn’t ask the lieutenant to elaborate or repeat anything.
The details of the mutiny turned out to be pretty uncomplicated. Some of the skeleton crew got ideas to take over the ship. Started waking up sleepers to get numbers. The opposition got wise and woke up their side, too.
Ava wondered if everybody had been awakened. Certain V.I.P.s had been excluded from six-month caretaking duties. Had they been yanked out of stasis as well?
Ava looked around the room for Mildred, her fiancée.
Ignoring the shooting pains all over her body, Ava eased herself onto the cold metal floor.
* * *
Year of the Murder
You couldn’t reason with Becker.
Captain Becker might be about fifty. He wore a smallish shirt that accentuated his biceps. He worked out a couple of hours a day at the gym. Not like there was much else to do to pass the time.
He poured himself a third cup of coffee from the massive urn in the cafeteria. He’d only agreed to meet without any Frontiers present. If the tape of the murder had affected him, he didn’t show it. He sprinkled in lumps of dry creamer and stirred his coffee. He sat down across from Ava at the bolted-down steel table and took a long slow sip.
Nobody savored ship coffee. You drank the nasty stuff to stay awake. Get it over with. Self-destructive types wanted a second cup.
“The tape’s faked,” Becker said.
Ava didn’t trust night owls like Becker, those who willingly gave up stasis to spend more time awake. She suspected they were up to something, and maybe the divide between the Explorers and Frontiers was just a ruse to cover up the real chasm between the night owls and the sleepers. Trouble was you couldn’t tell who the night owls might be—with the exception of the captain—unless you happened to be a night owl yourself. Everybody else on your mandatory six-month shift might just be lying when they claimed to be awake for the only time on the voyage.
“Sir,” Ava said, careful to be respectful. The suspect still maintained his rank until the election. Or a criminal conviction. “It’s not just the tape. Your DNA is there. We found bits and pieces of Mr. Rockford’s body. Bone. Skin. Mr. Rockford is missing.”
She wondered if it was worth it to be elected captain. Sure, rank had its privileges—like an honest-to-God two-bedroom apartment instead of a sleeping cube—but you had to spend a hell of a lot of time awake. One month during every half-year skeleton crew session at a minimum. Between every-fifteen-year elections, the captain, the only mandatory night owl, aged at least two and a half years. Enough terms and you’d arrive at Orion ready for retirement.
“You’ve checked the armory, Detective, and none of the photon weapons have been removed in years,” Becker said. “So how did I get my hands on a photon gun?”
“I don’t know. We’ll have forensic experts awake soon enough,” Ava said.
“I suppose you’re a Frontier,” Becker said.
“I’m a cop. I’m neutral.”
Becker set the coffee cup on the table. “Are you a Frontier or not?”
On the far side of the dining area, the ship had a rare porthole. Ava had looked outside a few times when she first awoke. She, like everybody else, soon stopped peering into the emptiness. She felt plenty insignificant these days without a cold slap in the face from the Universe. There wasn’t much to see, just black with disorienting nausea-inducing streaks of light every so often. If she stared too long, she felt existential panic.
Just too damned big out there.
Better to focus on the small everyday events of the ship. She could comprehend coffee or pizza better than the enormity of the cosmos. Or how her fiancée had broken up with her and left her alone light-years from Earth.
“I’m an independent,” Ava said. She tried to stay away from politics in her personal and professional life
“Independent. Right.” Becker let out a dry little laugh. “I suppose you believe in the rift?”
He’d jumped right to the main issue of the campaign for captain. Frontiers said they believed in the rift, a hole in space. The Curie would supposedly hit it in a matter of years if the ship didn’t change course. The Explorers claimed the rift was fantasy, a divisive campaign wedge issue.
The Frontiers said if the ship didn’t change course, they’d all go straight into the heart of the rift and get ripped apart or maybe just blinked out of existence.
The Explorers countered that the Frontiers just wanted to extend the trip by twenty or thirty years with a long detour. The better to consolidate power and destroy the opposition by the time the colonists reached Orion.
“I haven’t made my mind up,” Ava lied. She did not believe in the rift, but sharing that information wouldn’t help out the interrogation.
Just a few more days until more cops came out of stasis. Ava lacked the energy to arrest Becker, no matter how overwhelming the evidence. She didn’t want to incite a skirmish between the two parties. Better to let it be somebody else’s problem.
“Science still hasn’t proven the rift exists. They’ve had fifteen years,” Becker said. “Excess Sokolovians? You need to do better than that. Sokolovians are everywhere. The drive kicks out trillions of Sokolovians in its exhaust every damned day.”
“I’m not here to talk about Sokolovians.” All Ava knew about the subatomic particles was that Sokolov had discovered the particle that helped form a quark, and for her trouble they named the damned thing after her.
Becker blinked. “Why not? You look over the engine readouts, supposedly.”
The cop out of stasis had to review all the engine data and systems readouts every day. The numbers all seemed perfectly random to Ava. Some days Sokolovian output spiked to massive levels for no apparent reason. Ava had no idea what to look for. She didn’t even know the full scientific name of the particle.
Only a couple of dozen passengers really understood how the engine worked. They slept in separate stasis bays in case some accident happened. The top expert on the engine had left strict instructions not to be awakened except for an emergency. Dr. Sandra Narduzi, a hey-you-kids-get-off-my-lawn curmudgeon, had been a department head at M.I.T. She remained the ship’s ace in the hole.
Ava sighed. “Yes, I look at the readouts, but—”
Becker talked over her. “Have you ever seen how much the drive fluctuates? Life support functions and speed are constant, but the Sokolovian numbers spike almost exponentially at times. That’s the sort of thing that feeds this myth about the rift. You take those spikes that have never made any sense in the first place and assume there is an external cause instead of an internal one. It’s just the drive.”
“Sir, the rift doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter? Does thirty years of your life matter?”
“I’ll be in stasis.”
“Thirty years of draining the ship’s resources. Thirty extra years where the ship could break down. Thirty—”
He was giving a campaign speech. Ava had no time for speeches. “It doesn’t matter for purposes of this murder investigation. We—”
Becker tapped the table. “Missing person investigation, Detective. We haven’t found a body, have we?”
* * *
Year of the Mutiny
Ava opened the door to the sleeping cube she shared with Mildred. She pushed aside a couple of coffee cups and her holopad and set the steaming pizza on the tiny plastic desk. Pepperoni, sausage, and mushroom. Mildred’s favorite. Ava had stood in line for three hours. She could have gotten whatever the cafeteria dished out, but the three-hour wait had been worth it.
And waiting for pizza beat cooling her heels in the cube waiting for orders from Lieutenant Davenport.
The ship had split right down the middle the past week. Explorers on starboard. Frontiers—the ones who had started the standoff—on port. Frontiers controlled engineering. Explorers controlled life support.
And the only pizzeria on the ship.
The Frontiers had thawed out the V.I.P.s on their side of the ship. Davenport instructed the Explorers to let the V.I.P.s sleep. No point in bringing somebody into the fight who didn’t want to be there.
By a stroke of luck, Dr. Narduzi, the former M.I.T. chair, the top expert on the FTL drive, slept safely in Explorer territory. Nobody wanted to wake her up and face her wrath and possible defection to the Frontiers. But she made a hell of a bargaining chip if negotiations broke down.
Ava said the obvious. “I got pizza.”
Mildred sat cross-legged on the bed playing one of her video games. Ava didn’t know how she could stand the stuff. Mildred waved her hand over the screen, and the colorful three-dimensional graphics vanished.
Mildred got right to the point. Again. “We’re going to starve unless we do something. The food supplies are based on almost everybody being in stasis for most of the trip.”
“We have orders. We can’t just act on our own.” Ava didn’t see the situation as quite so dire. She didn’t understand Mildred’s rookie-like impatience. She’d been a patrol cop in Raleigh for ten years and never seemed to get it. That’s why Ava had passed her by and become a detective back in North Carolina. What Mildred had never understood was that police work was often nothing but drudgery. Mind-numbing hours conducting surveillance or looking over report after report or just waiting. Mildred craved action. She wanted the job to be fun.
Mildred rolled her eyes. “Orders.”
Ava pointed to the pizza. “Speaking of starving.” She didn’t want to get into a debate about police procedure. You had to be careful and not rush things in law enforcement. She worried Mildred might try something reckless to break the standoff.
Mildred picked up a slice, studied it, and inserted it back in the pie. She reassembled the pizza so it looked like nobody had touched it.
“Are you going to eat?” Ava asked.
Mildred reached under the bed for her boots. “I got a better idea.”
Ava stared at her fiancée. Not even a thank you after she’d spent half the evening getting dinner. “What?”
Mildred picked up the pie. “Shuttle diplomacy.”
“Huh?”
“I’m going to talk to the other side.”
Ava tried not to express her anger. She couldn’t let Mildred make the same mistake that had stalled her career on Earth. “We have orders; Lieutenant Davenport wants us to stay here for now. Negotiating takes time. Leave it to the experts.”
Mildred flashed that smile that had made Ava fall for her the first time she spotted her in that dive bar in Carolina Beach years ago. The smile that allowed her to get away with so much. “Who says I’m negotiating?” She scurried out the door.
Soon only the faint aroma of garlic and tomato sauce lingered.
* * *
Year of the Mutiny
No gunshots in days.
“I need a drink,” Mildred said to Ava after returning from another long session with the Frontiers. Not only had Mildred convinced the Frontiers to talk to her, they actually seemed to like her. A far cry from other colonists that often ended up with unholstered photon weapons.
Ava put her holopad on the bed. She could return to Pride and Prejudice later. “We don’t have anything to drink. You know the rules about alcohol.”
Mildred stared at her. “Yeah, because nobody ever breaks the rules. Cops never see that happen. I’m sure not one blessed colonist smuggled any liquor on board. Everybody does everything by the book.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to look.”
Mildred shook her head. “You won’t even try. That’s what’s pissing me off. You just decide something can’t be done, and you stop there.”
Ava changed the subject. “What do you talk about with the Frontiers?”
“What do you do all day, Ava?”
“Nothing really. A lot of reading. I guess like everybody else I’m just hoping for this to blow over. I can’t do much when I don’t have orders.”
“By the—” Mildred took off her boots and dropped them on the floor. “goddamned book.” She rubbed her feet.
Ava got it. Sometimes you had to think outside the box—a talent she didn’t really have. But Mildred went too far. She considered rule followers suckers.
Ava dodged a discussion she did not want to have. “I can massage your feet,” she said.
“No, thanks.”
Ava reached down anyway, and Mildred brushed her away.
The buzzer on the door went off. Mildred leaned over and pressed the release button. Davenport stood in the cramped hallway in her wrinkled uniform. She looked like she hadn’t slept in a couple of days.
Ava stood up. “Lieutenant, how can we help you?” She hoped Davenport had something for her to do.
“Relax, Detective. I’m not here for you,” Davenport said. “We’ve had a request from the other side to meet with your roommate.”
Mildred slipped on her boots and sprang off the bed. “Let’s get going.”
“They want you and a couple of officials of the party,” Davenport said. “And four pepperoni and mushroom with extra cheese.”
“Sure.” Mildred paused a second. “Could you get me a drink?”
“You bet.” Davenport flashed a rare smile.
* * *
Year of the Murder
Ava liked it in the catacombs, the long tunnels that held the food for the ship. Giant industrial-sized canned and frozen goods. Nobody bothered her down here.
Thank God. She couldn’t take another question about the investigation. Or another party hack telling her what had actually happened, even if inconvenient evidence didn’t back up that version.
She came to the cleared spot in the middle, a hundred yards in, where the two parties during the mutiny had divided the food stores in half. A dangling wire from the ceiling provided the only evidence of the long dormant ionic forcefield.
She wondered what the ship would have done if one half had run out of food all those years ago. Would they have shared?
She pulled her parka tighter and watched her breath hang in the air. Zero degrees did not exactly feel comfortable, but it kept out the riffraff. A small price to pay for the solitude. If she kept moving, she didn’t feel too bad.
Two hours until the first colonists began to thaw. She better get to one of the stasis bays to help the initial wave—law enforcement and medical personnel—awaken.
She’d suggest to Davenport that they delay waking up the rest of the colonists for a couple of days. There’d be a two-day cushion for two hundred cops and medical personnel to try and stabilize things. When everybody thawed out, there’d be no place on the ship for some elbow room. Not even in the arctic air of the food storage tunnels.
* * *
Year of the Mutiny
Pizza diplomacy worked.
Mildred had done it, even if she’d gone rogue. At the “summits” she didn’t talk about the issues that divided the two sides. No, she discussed food. Both sides liked to open up about cooking and grilling out and baking and endless chef hacks. She never discussed politics, whatever the hell constituted politics, but she got them to talk. And when they talked and laughed and listened, they started to maybe see the other side as people. The alcohol helped.
Mildred may have also had a leg up, because her side had the smartest engineer on ice. The Frontier party had to know that if the Explorers ever thawed out Dr. Narduzi, the Explorers would have a huge advantage.
Or it could have been all Mildred.
Ava didn’t witness any of this. She overheard details from the other colonists when she ate in the cafeteria by herself. She spent most of her time in the cube catching up on her reading—she’d finally waded through all the novels of Pynchon—and awaiting orders. Lieutenant Davenport had nothing for Ava to do.
So they had an election. The Explorers won. Barely. The colonists would get to vote every fifteen years.
And both sides agreed that the twenty colonists who didn’t go into stasis would be divided evenly between the two parties. With one neutral cop in case of trouble.
The last few days had been hectic and stressful. Ava sat in the cube and tried to decipher Catcher in the Rye.
At one a.m. the door slid open. Mildred staggered inside. She’d had a little bit too much to drink.
“Plenty of alcohol on this ship. Told you,” Mildred slurred. She plopped on the edge of the bed. She did not take off her boots. “You didn’t even try, Ava. You never even try. You just sulk.”
“I don’t sulk.”
“Jesus Christ, you—” Mildred let out a loud belch. “Sure, you don’t sulk. I have no idea what I’m talking about.”
Ava sat down beside her and put her arm around Mildred. “I’m really proud of you.”
Mildred said nothing. She didn’t look at Ava. She just sat stiffly and stared at the wall.
“Everything okay?” Ava asked.
“I’m not going into stasis tomorrow,” she said.
Ava blinked. “Why?”
“You’re too passive, Ava. You just wait for things to happen. You’re on a fucking interstellar ship and part of me thinks you just like the idea of sleeping the years away.”
“I want to get to the colony.”
She stared at Ava. “And do what, Ava? Name one thing.”
“Start over.”
“Jesus Christ. What are you? A brochure for the ship company? What are you going to do?”
Ava tried to think of something profound. Nothing came to mind.
After a few moments Mildred stood up. “Exactly.”
“We’re getting married, right?” Ava asked. “The captain could marry us today.”
“I don’t want to get married.” Mildred took a step to the door. “I’ll be sleeping in the lounge tonight. I’m really sorry, Ava. I’ll get my stuff out of here when you’re in stasis.”
* * *
Year of the Murder
Ava stood over Mildred’s stasis pod and waited for her ex-fiancée to wake up. Three months since they’d last seen each other. Or thirty years. Mildred had skipped the second election and stayed in stasis.
It had been a long morning overseeing the awakening of the medical staff needed to thaw out the rest of the colonists. Ava knew how much waking up from stasis sucked. She’d done it three times already. Take your most crippling hangover and make it exponentially worse.
The ship had not had a casualty of stasis yet. Ava feared they were pushing it too far with this election nonsense. The voyage had been planned with just two interruptions—one for the six-month caregiving shift and one when the ten thousand passengers reached the colony.
Ava wondered if the body could stand the strain of going to sleep and awakening so many extra times to accommodate the elections. Nobody seemed to know the answer. Maybe the V.I.P.s, like Dr. Narduzi, had a good reason for not wanting to be awakened until they reached Orion.
The timer on the pod said 59 seconds. Ava counted silently to herself.
The counter reached zero, and the shield slid back revealing Mildred’s face. God, she was beautiful. Twenty-eight years old. Long black hair. Ava wanted to kiss her.
Maybe they had just had a fight. Couples fought, right?
The vitals quickened according to the holo read.
Then she noticed the hints of gray in Mildred’s hair. Wrinkles around the eyes. Had something gone wrong?
She wanted to cry out for a doctor, but did gray hair constitute a medical emergency?
Mildred had aged. She should only be a few months older, not ten or fifteen years.
What would Ava say to her?
Mildred blinked. She coughed, her eyes unfocused.
Ava patted her on the shoulder. “Welcome back, Honey.”
Mildred frowned. “We’re not getting back together.”
“I’m just doing my job,” Ava said. “Waking up law enforcement and medical personnel before the main wave.”
“All the gin joints in all the world, she walks into mine.”
Ava stared at her. “What?”
“Never mind. I forgot. You don’t like movies.” Mildred sat up and held her head. “God. Waking up is a bitch.”
Ava handed her a cup of water.
Mildred held the cup with both hands and took a tentative sip. She soon finished and returned the empty cup to Ava. “Where’s Lieutenant Davenport?”
“I don’t know,” Ava said.
The noise level in the bay had risen as more and more people awoke. There must be several dozen in this bay alone.
“I need to see Davenport,” Mildred said.
“You’ve been asleep for a long time,” Ava said. “Let me worry about Davenport.”
“I haven’t been asleep as long as you think,” Ava said. She brushed her hair away from her eyes. “Can’t you tell?”
Ava stared at her maybe-still fiancée. “What are you getting at?”
“I’ve been awake about ten years off and on since we called off the wedding. I’m a lot older. I’m thirty-eight.” She laughed. “You’re younger than me.”
Ava could think of nothing to say for several moments. Finally she managed an anemic “Why?”
Mildred closed her eyes and massaged her temples. “Because some people don’t want to sleep all the time.” She groaned. “Jesus. This never gets any easier.”
Looking like she had awakened in an alley after binge drinking all night, Lieutenant Davenport staggered over. “Ava, we need to talk.”
“I’ve uncovered—”
“Not here,” Davenport snapped. “Somewhere private. We’ll go to my sleeping cube.”
“That’d be fine,” Ava said.
Mildred eased herself off the pod. “I’m on it.”
“We’ll be back in a few minutes,” Ava said.
“I’m coming with you, Junior Detective,” Mildred said.
Ava’s back bristled. It was bad enough to be dealing with her probable ex-fiancée, but did Mildred have to act so officious? And, hell, she was still ignoring protocol. Patrol officers didn’t get to tag along on debriefs.
“Mildred, you can’t come,” Ava said. “This is above your pay grade.”
“She’s coming with us,” Davenport said. “She’s your superior. She’s been promoted.” She made no effort to sugarcoat the news. Davenport didn’t care about such niceties.
“Excuse me? Could y’all fill me in?” Ava asked. She wanted to yell at Mildred but kept her anger in check.
“We don’t have time for this,” Davenport said. “Ava, she’s a superior officer now, senior detective. She’s older than you. She’s been a cop for five more years than you.”
“You promoted her?”
“It wasn’t just my decision. She did good work on her many six-month tours. She kept the two parties happy. Nothing bad happened on her watch.” Davenport glared at Ava. “Now, enough chitchat. I really want to hear your explanation for the unprecedented events of the past three months.”
Ava followed the two superior officers down the ever more crowded hallway to Davenport’s sleeping cube.
* * *
Davenport had been furious that Ava hadn’t arrested Becker on the spot. Mildred, apparently the expert on relations between the two parties, supported Ava’s decision, and Davenport took it back down a couple of notches. A couple of stiff drinks from the sizable liquor cabinet Davenport had somehow crammed under her bed helped ease the lieutenant’s mood.
Ava just answered questions from the lieutenant and the senior detective. Mildred didn’t gloat in her new role. Of course, she wasn’t a kid any longer. Maybe she’d grown up.
The Spartan sleeping quarters had no real décor except for a banner for Boston University. Ava wondered if it would survive the trip.
After an hour Davenport took another sip of scotch. “God, one good thing about stasis is I wake up to aged scotch I couldn’t afford on Earth.” She smacked her lips. “Perfect.”
“Should I talk to the rest of the force?” Ava asked.
“Don’t talk to anyone about this. I’ll do the briefing. Most of them are going to be on extended patrol. We don’t need another mutiny.” Another sip of scotch. “What’s your read on this, Ava?”
“Becker killed Rockford,” Ava said.
“Have you investigated the Explorers’ theory?” Mildred asked.
“No, I have not. Nobody faked a murder. It’s a conspiracy theory,” Ava said. “It’s not worth my time.”
“How’d Captain Becker remove a photon gun from the armory without that showing up in any of the systems?” Mildred asked.
“I don’t know. We do have a tape showing the murder, you know.”
“What are you getting at, Mildred?” Davenport asked.
“We have to keep both sides happy. I always managed that,” Mildred said.
Ava kept her mouth shut. Responding to Mildred’s dig would accomplish nothing. Mildred had to know that the murder could have occurred on anyone’s six-month stint.
“Good point,” Davenport said.
“That’s why I didn’t arrest Becker,” Ava said.
“Obviously,” Mildred said.
“Okay,” Davenport said. “I want you both to interview the Frontiers.”
“I’ve done that already,” Ava said.
“Do it again,” Davenport snapped.
* * *
Who the hell smirked? You read about that in mediocre fiction. Dime store detective novels. People had a million subtle facial expressions, and smirking seldom made an appearance.
Yet Chapman, the chief aide to the missing Rockford, had an honest-to-god smirk on her face. She sat, arms crossed, on the other side of the table in the teeny-tiny break room in Engineering. The Frontiers liked to spend their time down here during the six-month stints.
They could have the engine room. Ava knew two things about faster than light drives. One, faster than light still wasn’t even close to fast enough for the sort of voyage their ship had taken. Two, the physics was over her head. When anyone started waxing eloquent about dimensional windows, unexpected time travel, and wormholes, Ava couldn’t grasp what they were talking about. Only experts like Professor Narduzi understood how FTL drives worked.
Ava focused on her immediate surroundings. Like the witness right in front of her.
“We didn’t kill our own leader,” Chapman said to Ava and Mildred. “The man you’re looking for is Becker.”
“He’s a suspect,” Ava said. “Trust me.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you’re fast-tracking his case.” Chapman opened a small fridge. She pulled out a beer. She did not offer one to the two cops.
“You still brewing that amber stout?” Mildred asked.
Chapman’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah?”
Mildred pointed to a door marked Maintenance. “Brewing beer in there was my idea.”
Chapman blinked. “Yeah, I guess it was.”
“I probably spent ten years helping y’all brew beer. Hops are a bastard.”
The door to the main hallway opened. A deer-in-the-headlights rookie entered.
“Could you deal with him, Ava?” Mildred asked.
Great. She hadn’t gotten to ask a single question and Mildred was talking about beer. Why was Ava even here?
The low-level cop had gotten separated from his search team. Ava gave him directions to the still-shuttered level three cafeteria. Davenport had decided to appease the Explorer leaders by conducting a massive sweep of the ship for Rockford before the bulk of the colonists awoke.
Back in the break room, Chapman and Mildred were laughing and chatting like old friends. Goddamned laughing. Ava had dealt with Chapman too many times and never shared a laugh once or even seen the grouch smile.
Ava sat back down. “Did I miss something?”
“Swapping brewing stories,” Mildred said.
The conversation was flowing way too easily for an interrogation. Chapman and Mildred seemed too comfortable around each other. Maybe they were friends.
“Do y’all know each other?” Ava asked.
Chapman shrugged. “We’ve done a couple of tours together.”
“You see some familiar faces,” Mildred said.
Ava imagined the same people doing the six-month tours over and over. They’d develop some pretty tight relationships after a while. When the ship reached the colony, the ones who had spent more time awake might be in a better position to get stuff done. They’d have the connections, the friends, the networking.
And the naïve colonists who’d been asleep the entire trip would arrive clueless and out of sorts. A step behind.
Ava suppressed her anger at the night owls, conspiring while the ship slept. She just sat and listened. She could conduct an interrogation with the best of them, but had never quite been able to master pleasant superficial conversation.
“You know, I’ve learned how to make pizza,” Ava said.
“Damned good pizza,” Chapman said.
Her compliment surprised Ava. “Um, thanks,” she managed. Anything to add escaped her.
Ava didn’t say another word for half an hour while Chapman and Mildred discussed food and brewing beer and people Ava had never met.
Ava finally got in a few words when the conversation shifted back to pizza. Mildred and Chapman asked her about her cooking technique. Then Ava found herself, during a police investigation, explaining the subtle differences between ham, bacon, prosciutto, and Canadian bacon—all of which could be found in storage on the Curie if one knew where to look.
Ava had finished her second beer when Chapman asked if the interview was over.
“Sure,” Mildred said, even though she had not even started the investigation. She waited until Chapman rose from the table before asking her first question about the murder. She pointed to the door leading to Engineering. A prominent Danger: Radiation sign had been posted. “Oh, one more thing. That area’s shielded, right?” she asked.
Chapman looked puzzled. “Yeah, a leak would be catastrophic.”
“Shielded from the ship’s scans, too, right?”
Chapman scratched her forearm. “Maybe. Not exactly. It’s not that simple.”
“So, in a search for somebody, the ship’s sensors wouldn’t pick anything up?”
“That’s not how it works.” Chapman frowned. “What are you saying? You think Rockford’s back there?”
Mildred gave a reassuring smile. “I’m sorry, Ms. Chapman. I’m not trying to imply anything. Just my superiors want me to ask certain things. I don’t like doing this.”
Chapman didn’t exactly look convinced as she exited, but she didn’t argue about it either. She probably couldn’t figure out if Mildred was her friend or not.
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Copyright © 2024. Murder on The Orion Express by Peter Wood