It Was Murder Read online

“And who would that be?” Marshal Harry demanded as she walked backwards into the elevator car. Emgeenie followed. He was flustered; I could smell attraction, sexual arousal, a whiff of fear, and a bit of anger. How do humans squeeze all those emotions out of one brain?

  I waited until he was in and walked around the walls twice. Elevators are not designed to hold four-metre-long invertebrates, and it was a tight squeeze.

  Marshal Harry called: “Floor twenty-eight, please.”

  The elevator rose.

  “Well?” She turned to Emgeenie.

  “The director is called Ootro Letsin. I was not involved in anything underhand, I promise you.”

  The marshal shook her head. “You must know something, or why put you here?”

  “Why put you here? Maybe we’re here accidentally, like this Chunkly character turning up in the baggage compartment,” he said, giving me a nudge with his shoe. I accidentally-on-purpose stepped on his toes with a claw. “Ouch.”

  “Is there anything special about the AI you installed?” Marshal Harry asked. “Anything different?”

  “Oddly enough—”

  The lights went out and the elevator clunked to a stop. We were back in darkness.

  “They might come back on?” Emgeenie said. He didn’t sound too sure. I shoved my jaws into the crack in the doors and levered them open. The car was trapped between two floors.

  “You were saying?” Marshal Harry said, grabbing Emgeenie in the dark and pulling him towards her. “You were saying something was odd?”

  “Well, I did hear that Big Bill Faa chap bragging one night,” Emgeenie said, “that the new system was the latest, fastest computer in the Steyrn system.”

  “So?” Marshal Harry asked. “He liked to brag, we knew that.”

  “But it’s not,” Emgeenie bleated. “I refurbished a deep learning system they’d got from the Greppis Colony. I thought he was lying to sound important.”

  “Or maybe Faa didn’t know?”

  “I can see two corridors and they are both in darkness,” I reported.

  “But the lights were on earlier. We looked out on several floors,” Emgeenie said in my direction then pressed nose to nose with the marshal. “I only did what they paid me to do.”

  “Someone is trying to stop us getting to floor twenty-eight,” the marshal stated. “Which proves a theory I had that the killer is still onboard. It doesn’t matter to me what you did. What I need to know is, does Ootro Letsin inherit the casino moon with Faa out of the way?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Emgeenie said. “And I wouldn’t expect you to care what I did. I mean, we’ve only just met.”

  “So what now?” I asked.

  “Lead us into a corridor and we’ll find another way to floor twenty-eight,” the marshal ordered.

  “You’ve never been in the service areas of a spaceship before, have you?” I asked.

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “To minimise casualties in the event of a hull breach, these elevators are the only way between decks,” I said. “You pick up a lot of stuff when you travel baggage class.”

  “We might be trapped here until the ship crashes?” Emgeenie asked.

  “Was there a maintenance hatch in the ceiling?” Marshal Harry asked. “Did anyone notice?”

  “I only tend to notice things that are moving,” I pointed out. “Hold still a minute.”

  I let the doors go and they slid shut. I aimed my cybernetics at the ceiling and scanned.

  “There is something there, but I’ve no idea if I can open it.”

  “Try,” Marshal Harry said. I walked my front half up the wall until my antennae touched the ceiling.

  “I hate the dark,” Emgeenie said. “Not helped by a giant centipede knocking me about.”

  “In that case, you should have brought a torch and a stepladder.” There was a small lock but when I pushed with my head, the hatch splintered and burst open. I crawled into the lift shaft and looked around. There were dusty bits of machinery on the elevator roof and the walls of the shaft were smooth.

  “You’re still a suspect in the kidnapping of a detective marshal,” Marshal Harry was saying to Emgeenie. “I wish I knew if I could trust you.”

  “I can’t climb the shaft,” I called down. “There’s nothing to hold on to.”

  “No ladders?” Emgeenie asked after a hoarse cough.

  “I class ladders as something to hold on to,” I pointed out.

  My claws fit easily around the cable holding the car in place.

  “There must be a way out,” Marshal Harry called while staring in Emgeenie’s direction.

  “I might be able to climb a cable.”

  “Good, that’ll do,” she said.

  “Will it?” I asked. “How are you two getting out of there? I don’t think your hands will grip this thing.”

  “Can’t you carry us?” the marshal asked.

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.” For a moment, I considered returning to the kitchens and denying all knowledge of the two mammals. I looked down with my infrared at Marshal Harry standing in that little room, so small and brave and trusting.

  “Reach up with both hands and I’ll put a claw between them,” I said. She grabbed hold and I pulled.

  “Ow, ow- you are banging my head off the ceiling,” Marshal Harry said. I experimented until I got her head through the hole and she climbed the rest of the way herself.

  “Thanks, Chunglie. We’d never have found that hatch on our own,” she said.

  I heard Emgeenie call. “You don’t trust him,” I whispered. “I don’t trust him. Can we leave him here?”

  “No, we don’t leave people behind.”

  “We could pick him up on the way back?”

  “Look, whatever’s on the twenty-eighth floor, we’ll need his technical knowledge to understand it. Probably.”

  I can’t sigh, I don’t have lungs, but I really wanted to.

  “Reach up,” I said as I waved a claw through the hatch.

  “The only mammals on my home world are these tiny little burrowing things with huge teeth,” I said, “who gnaw through your carapace while you’re hibernating and eat you from the inside out.”

  I had the marshal’s arms wrapped around my neck and Emgeenie’s wrapped around my fourth segment.

  “And you’re telling us this why?” Marshal Harry asked.

  “Because having two mammals hanging off me as I climb this cable is giving me the heebie-jeebies.” I climbed five floors before my muscles tired and I had to stop. I ordered more oxygen from my cybernetic implants.

  “Can you climb faster?” Emgeenie asked. “My grip is starting to slip.”

  “My species evolved to scurry and hide,” I said. “Then scurry some more and hide again. We can’t do long distances.”

  I climbed another ten decks before my oxygen supply hit the red.

  “My oxygen store has hit zero,” I said.

  “What does that mean?” Marshal Harry asked.

  Emgeenie slipped to my fifth segment. He was doing that sweating thing where mammals make their skin wet and his hands were slippery. Damn foolish time to be doing that, in my humble opinion.

  “It means I’m a large invertebrate used to an atmosphere with a higher oxygen content, about to run out of breath while hanging hundreds of metres up a lift shaft. You can work out the rest for yourself.”

  “Oh that’s just wonderful,” Emgeenie fell, grabbed my sixth segment, and hooked a leg over one of my limbs. I got in a nip with a claw.

  “Aw, that was totally uncalled for,” he complained.

  “It totally was called for,” I said. “You’ve gone all wet and that could get us killed.”

  “I’m sweating because we are hanging from a giant bug hundreds of metres above certain death, in the pitch dark.”

  “Well, if you fall,” I said, “And you see my tush brush and you think you can just grasp it before you plummet to your death...”

  “Yes?�
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  “Leave it. You’ll yank it right out of my body and I’ll bleed out.”

  “Oh.”

  I felt my strength return and began climbing. Emgeenie finally said something useful. “Can’t we get out here and take a breather?”

  “I’d prefer not to,” the marshal decided after a minute of silence. “The killer has proven he has access to the ship’s computers, so we need to get back to the kitchen ASAP and warn everyone.”

  “Great idea, lets head back,” I said, loosening[MVN4] my grip enough to slide down the wire.

  “No!” the marshal shouted. “No, no. First we find out what’s on floor twenty-eight. We must be nearly there.”

  I stopped sliding and pointed my infrared up the shaft and then back down to the elevator.

  “We are more than two-thirds of the way there,” I admitted. “I’m going to get an app for my voice box that makes sighs.”

  I climbed again.

  Around floor twenty-six, Emgeenie fell and grabbed my last leg as he passed. It hurt, but I grabbed hold of him with the claw.

  “If you pull that leg off,” I warned, “you’re on your own.”

  I planned ahead, so at floor twenty-eight I kept going up to the next deck, leaned backwards, and placed my head on the frame of the doors.

  “Okay, I’ve bent over backwards to get you here,” I told the marshal. “You have to manage this bit on your own.”

  First Marshal Harry climbed down my body and pulled Emgeenie to safety. They crawled along my tummy, which felt weird.

  “What’s taking so long?” I asked.

  “Don’t hassle me,” Marshal Harry said. “I’m trying to get my fingers in the crack of the door, but it’s heavy.”

  “I opened the door at the bottom with my palps,” I pointed out.

  “Helluva time to chalk up points to the arthropods,” Marshal Harry muttered.

  Finally, she got the doors open a crack and muscled them open. They crawled out and lay on the floor with the marshal’s foot keeping the doors open while I dragged myself out of the lift shaft.

  7.

  The Long Goodbye

  I lay, short on oxygen and strength, while little stars buzzed around the dark corridor.

  “You go on,” I said. “I’ll wait here.”

  “We stay together,” Marshal Harry said. “Besides, I may need my tin dog.”

  “Your what?”

  “Pop reference,” Marshal Harry admitted. “Means I’m finding you very useful.”

  I ignored that remark, because I didn’t understand it, and lay watching the oxygen level indicator. My bolt on pumps and filters pushed the reserve out of the red, so when Marshal Harry said: “We better move on. I wanted to get back to the kitchens as soon as possible.” I could squirm upright and scurry along at her side.

  “The smells here are weeks old,” I said. “Which is odd because ships are cleaned before each flight.”

  “So you have travelled in the passenger area?” Emgeenie said.

  “You are minding that Chunglie will have to carry us back down that cable?” Marshal Harry pointed out.

  The original odd thing on floor twenty-eight was suddenly obvious. Dazzling, coloured lights came from a large round hole in the bulkhead. Emgeenie cried in delight and climbed in. White light flooded from the hole, turning the corridor black.

  “This is a lifepod,” he said. “And it’s powered up and ready to launch.”

  “Then why hasn’t someone used it?” the marshal asked. I stuck my head through the hatch. There was one padded chair, a dashboard of green indicator lights with a keyboard, and a harness to hold you in. Just enough room for one human.

  “I did some work for the company who build these,” Emgeenie said as he worked at the keyboard. “They’re top of the line. It has gravity manipulator engines for a soft landing, but you have to be within the gravity well of a planet for them to work.”

  The marshal gasped. That’s another thing I can’t do.

  “You know what this means?” she said.

  “One of us is saved, and by one I mean me.” I reckoned I could just coil myself into the space.

  “This explains why the killer is still onboard. He plans to escape in this,” Marshal Harry said.

  “In that case, let’s kill the bastard and then save me,” I said.

  “Or we could save everyone?” Emgeenie said.

  “You what?” I asked.

  “This panel is logged into the ship’s nav computer,” Emgeenie said.

  “And that means?” Marshal Harry asked.

  “It means I don’t need the passwords anymore. I’m no navigator, but I can flip the ship one-o-eight degrees.”

  “Eighty, it’s one-eighty for a half turn,” the marshal corrected.

  “Well, I said I’m no navigator.” Emgeenie grinned. We lurched convincingly as the attitude thrusters fired and turned the ship around. “Now, to fire up the main engines.”

  Nothing happened. Emgeenie climbed out of the lifepod, still grinning.

  “Well?” the marshal asked.

  “It’ll take the main engines thirty-five minutes to warm up and fire. I’ve programmed them to burn until the fuel runs out. That should stop us dead in space. There must be someone who can rescue us from orbit.”

  “Let’s hope so.” Marshal Harry looked around the corridor. “I’d like to search some of these rooms, but it’s too dark to do any good.

  “Ah, sorry, I was focussed on the not crashing,” Emgeenie said. He leaned back into the escape pod and the lights came on in the corridor. “The elevators should work too.”

  Marshal Harry kicked the nearest door and it bounced off the wall.

  “You enjoyed that,” I noted.

  “Yes I did.”

  Someone had stripped the room. They’d removed the carpets and even taken the usual mass-produced prints from the walls. In the bathroom, Marshal Harry tried the taps and pressed the toilet flush, but there was no water.

  “I think this is a twofer,” Marshal Harry said. “Crashing the ship gets rid of us and they claim the insurance money.”

  “Frugal and ruthless. I am impressed,” I said.

  “Marshal Harry,” Emgeenie called from the corridor. “There is something in the storage compartment, here.”

  Marshal Harry slapped her face. “I didn’t think to search the lifepod.”

  “Well, you’ve had a busy day.”

  “Are you being kind?” the marshal asked.

  “I’m a tough arthropod-for-hire. Kind? I don’t know the meaning of the word.”

  We returned to the lifepod. Emgeenie hauled a sealed bag from behind the seat and dropped it at the marshal’s feet.

  “That’s not standard equipment for this lifepod,” he said. “And it’s waterproof. Ideal luggage if you are planning a sea landing.”

  “Hm, good way to hide the lifepod,” Marshal Harry said. She unsealed the bag and pulled out a thick, warm top, trousers, and boots. “These could be women’s boots.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked.

  “They’re a bit small for a man. Can you give me a physical description of Ootro Letsin?”

  “He’s a great tall fellow,” Emgeenie raised a hand above his head, “with a wonderful singing voice.”

  “I’ll certainly spot him in a crowd from that description,” Marshal Harry said, looking at the shoes.

  “Sorry, I’ve never had to describe someone before.”

  “These are not his clothes then,” the marshal said thoughtfully. “They’re definitely too small for a man that size.”

  I looked at the clothes and boots and smelled them, which told me they were not edible. Then I realised the obvious.

  “And it’s something only humans wear,” I pointed out.

  “Pretty much, yes,” the marshal admitted. “There’s a communicator here.”

  She opened it, checked the call log and phonebook. “Never been used and there’s no signal.”

  “Right, I
’m finished here,” Emgeenie announced.

  “You are?” the marshal asked. “What about controlling the burn and getting in touch with Port Authority?”

  “I can do that from the bridge, now I’ve unlocked the controls.”

  “So you don’t need the lifepod?”

  “Nope, I was just enjoying the comfortable seat.”

  “Out you pop,” the marshal ordered, and helped Emgeenie climb out.

  Marshal Harry closed the hatch. “There’s a big red button under this flap. What does it do?”

  “Manual launch,” Emgeenie explained. ”In case the passenger is incapacitated. They thought of everything when they designed this thing.”

  The marshal lifted the flap and hit the button. There was a thud as the lifepod left the ship’s hull.

  “Hey,” I said. “I wanted that.”

  “But the killer might have gotten to it,” Marshal Harry explained. “And escaped. Now if we die, she dies.”

  “I like the way you think,” I admitted grudgingly.

  We returned to the elevator bank, called a car, and headed down. The car stopped and the lights died.

  “What now?” Emgeenie wailed. “I changed the passwords, precisely so this couldn’t happen!”

  “Someone is really trying my patience,” Marshal Harry said. “Over to you, Chunglie.”

  I climbed out through the roof hatch and pulled the other two out.

  “When we find the killer, I bagsy first bite.”

  “The law does not bite people, Chunglie,” Marshal Harry said. I used my claws to break our slide until we were level with the kitchen deck.

  “Does that communicator have a torch? Shine it down there, will you?” I asked the marshal.

  “Why?” she asked. A tiny spotlight from the communicator showed ancient gravity generators.

  “Ship designers these days,” I explained, “put grav plating in the floor of the elevator, which would have meant we were in zero gravity once we left the car.”

  “I see what you mean,” the marshal said. “It would have been easier drifting up the shaft in zero gee.”

  “When we find this guy,” Emgeenie said in a tired voice, “I bagsy first bite.”

  “I don’t know who designed this ship,” I said with feeling. Every limb ached from the climb and one back leg was twisted at an odd angle. “But I have a collection of skills gathered over many years. I don’t know where he is, but I will look for him, I will find him, and I will kill him.”