Читать книгу The Space Opera MEGAPACK ® - Jay Lake - Страница 7

KILLER ADVICE, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Sixteen minutes. Sixteen minutes was simply not enough time to prepare for an onslot. One would think with the recent breakthroughs in interstellar communication that a simple heads-up would be in order. Yet no one thought to contact Hunsaker.

Of course, the communications problem wasn’t with the Presidio, who barely got off a single we need help; we’re docking soon communiqué before their entire communications array went down. No, the problem was with Repair and Maintenance. Some idiot there forgot to inform Hunsaker that his resort would soon be full.

Not that the Vaadum Resort and Casino was much of a resort. It was more of a Hail Mary Pass. If you were passing through the Commons System (which was what most people did in the Commons System—pass through) and for some reason you needed to exit your luxurious spaceship for some downtime and you couldn’t wait the extra day to go to Commons Starship Resorts—which were real resorts, by the way, on full size space stations—then you ended up at Vaadum Resort and Casino.

Hunsaker liked to think of Vaadum as a bit of a surprise. Vaadum was on the Vaadum Outpost, which predated the Commons Space Station by nearly two hundred years and looked it. Small, cramped quarters, a docking ring that couldn’t accommodate most modern ships, a repair shop that was catch as catch can, a resupply warehouse that sometimes needed resupplying itself, and of course, the Resort.

Which, when Hunsaker bought it, was a seedy little rundown motel, operated by the repair crew, who learned (accidentally or so the histories said) that ships in distress often couldn’t house their passengers. Better to place those passengers in a paying room than having them bunk on top of tables in the cafeteria.

Hunsaker was manning the front desk because sixteen minutes didn’t make up for the six months during which he had neglected to upgrade the automatic check-in system. He hadn’t cleaned the rooms in six months either—or at least, not all of them, nor had he checked the environmental systems.

He sent his entire staff—all two of them—off to dust, change linens, and ensure that each room had both oxygen and some sort of livable temperature while he scoured the entry, trying to make it somewhat presentable.

The Repair and Maintenance crew told him that the Presidio had twelve passengers and four crew members, so he would need a minimum of eight rooms, but it would be better to have sixteen.

It would be better to have all thirty rooms cleaned and livable, but really, where was the percentage in that? He had three functioning rooms at all times, and two of those were rarely full. The regulars that came through—and there were regulars, although not always the best of regulars—came for the casino, which had the only living breathing human dealer in the Commons System.

She was fifty percent fake. He didn’t test the fifty percent theory or which part about her parts was rumor—although he did know that her breasts literally sparkled because she often dealt topless (hence the repeat audience).

She was bit too vulgar for him. Vaadum Resort and Casinos was a bit vulgar for him, and quite low scale, and if someone asked him, he would have admitted that the entire enterprise had irritated him when he arrived, but didn’t bother him so much now.

His standards had lowered, not because of the place, but because he didn’t really deserve better.

He was just coming to terms with that.

The entry was the largest room in the Resort, not counting the restaurant or the casino. The entry had bench seats, no-die, regrow plants that he’d bought early in his tenure here and regretted ever since, and a large faux marble floor that, when he bothered to faux polish it, shined like a million bright stars.

He managed to clean the dust off the benches, prune the regrow plants so that their branches no longer took up most of the stairwell, and set up a make-shift computer system to handle the new guests, all in fifteen of his sixteen minutes. But he hadn’t tried to clean the floor and he was grateful for that as the passengers of the Presidio pushed and shoved their way through the double doors.

All human (thank God for small blessings) and all sizes, the twelve passengers from the Presidio smelled—not so faintly—of burnt plastic. A few had smoke lines across their faces, and another few wore tattered clothing.

They also stank of sweat and fear and had that wild-eyed look of people Who Had Been Through It All And Weren’t Yet Sure They had Lived To Tell About It.

He had seen so many people like that over the years, and they were always distraught, always needy, and always demanding. He loathed demanding customers, even though his high-end education had prepared him for them. Once upon a time, he was the best at dealing with the most difficult of guests, back when he actually worked in a real resort that catered to the very wealthy, who, at least, were predictable in their very disagreeability.

He peered at the sea of humanity before him—well, all twelve of them anyway, which felt like a veritable sea to him, considering he probably hadn’t seen twelve people all in one place since the last ship disaster nearly a year before. These people, with their untended hair and their air of complete panic, stared back at him as if he were their only savior.

He smiled unctuously—and he hadn’t managed that expression in nearly a decade—and nodded his head to the first person in line.

She was a stout elderly woman, wearing a black business suit (now decorated with several rips to the right side) and matching sensible shoes. She even had a little hat perched on top of her graying curls. That hat looked like it was an afterthought—one of those things she had grabbed automatically as she fled the ship just to make herself presentable.

“Agatha Kantswinkle,” she said with one of those operatic voices (complete with vibrato) that certain older persons cultivated. “I should like a single room.”

She did not say please, nor did he expect her to. In fact, she raised her chin after she spoke to him.

She, at least, was a type he could handle.

“We only have a few rooms, madam,” he said in his best toady voice. “You’d be more comfortable if you shared a double.”

“I would not,” she said. “I shall not ever room with any of these despicable people.”

She leaned forward and whispered—as best an operatic voice could whisper, which was to say not at all—and confided, “There are murderers among them.”

A middle-aged man in the middle, face covered with soot, rolled his eyes. A younger woman toward the back raised her gaze heavenward—if there were a heaven in space, which there was not. Still, Hunsaker didn’t miss the gesture. Or the grimaces of dislike on the faces of the other passengers.

“Surely, it wasn’t as bad as all that, madam,” he said as he opened the file on the old-fashioned built-in screen on his desk. The comment was somewhat reflexive. He hated histrionics. But it was also geared toward the other passengers upon whom, he was becoming certain, he would have to rely to keep Agatha Kantswinkle under some kind of control.

“Not as bad as all that?” she repeated, slapping a palm on the desk, making his computer screen hiccup and nearly blip out. “Are you mad, man? When we left the Dyo System, we had fifteen. Do you think they stepped off the ship mid-flight? I think not.”

Hunsaker raised his eyebrows and looked over her shoulder at the other passengers. The man with the soot-covered face shook his head slightly. The young woman had closed her eyes. A few others were looking away as if Agatha Kantswinkle’s behavior embarrassed them.

He decided to ignore the woman, which meant getting her away from his desk as quickly as possible. “We have a single room, madam,” he said, “but it’s tiny. The entertainment system needs upgrading and the bed—”

“I’ll take it,” she said, handing him a card with her information coded into it, a method as old-fashioned as she was.

He charged her twice the room’s usual rate and felt not a qualm about it. First (he reasoned to himself), the Presidio’s parent company would probably pay for the extra stop. Secondly, the woman had already shown herself to be an annoyance, and he’d been a hotelier long enough (even at a disreputable place like this one) to know that customers often showed their true colors from the moment they walked in the door.

He was simply adding a surcharge for the difficulties ahead.

He finished adding her information to his file, resisted the urge to wipe his hands on the constantly sanitized towel he kept beneath the desk, and gave her his best fake smile.

“Your room, madam,” he said with a nod, “is up those stairs to the left. It is the only room off the first landing.”

Because it used to be a maid’s room, back when the resort had actual dreams of grandeur, in the days just after its first construction, long before he was born.

She did not thank him and mercifully did not ask him how she would unlock the door. He handed her the door’s code, but it was a mere formality. The lock had broken long ago.

As she made her way toward the stairs, he processed four other passengers—real, sane, sensible people. They had all of their information coded into their fingertips like proper human beings, and they were solvent, which was good, since he debited their accounts immediately, although he didn’t overcharge them (too badly) like he had Agatha Kantswinkle. People who were in a hurry to get to their rooms, relax and try to forget whatever it was that brought them to this godforsaken place.

Hunsaker was beginning to think that the rest of the check-ins would go well, when the soot-faced man approached the desk. He was taller than Hunsaker, but bent slightly, as if embarrassed by his height—which Hunsaker could well understand, since so many distance ships were not built for the egregiously tall.

“Sorry for the old lady,” the man said as he extended his index finger, the only clean one on his hand. “We’re really not that bad a bunch.”

The finger, touching the screen, identified him as William F. Bunting, Bill for short, who began his journey in the Dyo system just like Agatha Kantswinkle. His occupation listed varied, which usually meant unemployed and searching for work, but he had nearly two dozen stellar (no pun intended) recommendations, so perhaps his occupation truly was varied and he had traveled from job to job as he traveled farther and farther from home.

“Sounds like you’ve had a difficult trip,” Hunsaker said, offering the platitude the way another man would grunt with disinterest.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Bunting said. “If you had any other ship docked here, I’d request a transfer.”

“Perhaps one will arrive while yours is being repaired,” Hunsaker said, debiting Bunting’s account, which looked full enough—especially for a man who had listed “varied” as his occupation.

“Please God,” Bunting said, and sounded serious, which caught Hunsaker’s attention.

For a moment, their gaze met. Then Bunting said, “I know you don’t have a lot of single rooms, but you probably should give me one.” He swept his hands toward his shirt. “These are the only clothes I have, and even I can smell the smoke on them. In a closed space, I’m not going to be someone people want to be around.”

Even now, in a not-quite-so closed space, Hunsaker could smell him. Hunsaker had figured the stench was the accumulated odor of all of the passengers, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was Bunting all by his egregiously tall self.

“We have a boutique,” Hunsaker said, as if the little room stocked with clothes others had left behind really qualified as a fancy store. “I’ll open it in two hours. I’m sure you’ll find something to accommodate you there.”

He made a note to go to that little room and run the clothing through the automatic cleaning equipment yet again. He had no idea when someone had last picked through the material. At least he’d figured out that he should display it all, and that no one would know that it had been previously worn.

“Thank you,” Bunting said, and pulled forward a slightly pudgy balding man. “In that case, we’ll share a room.”

The slightly pudgy balding man didn’t seem disconcerted by this. He looked grateful, in fact. Hunsaker took his information, also stored properly on his index finger—Rutherford J. Nasten—and sent both men to the best ventilated room in the entire wing.

Hunsaker kept processing until he got to the young woman in the back, who, luck would have it, got a single room simply because Agatha Kantswinkle had demanded a single room and there were only twelve passengers.

“All I have is a room we call the Crow’s Nest,” Hunsaker said. “It’s small, but it’s at the top of this part of the station and it has portals on all four walls.”

“That sounds good,” the woman said tiredly.

“Sounds like the trip from hell so far,” he said, actually interested for once, partly because she was so reticent and partly because she had been so expressive earlier.

“You don’t know the half of it,” the woman said, touching his screen with her left thumb. She was security conscious, then, not willing to follow the norms on how to behave.

It took a moment for the screen to display her information, almost as if it were tired of doing all the hard work, and for a moment everything blurred. Or maybe that was his eyes. He was unaccustomed to dealing with people any more, and even less accustomed to the level of tension he had felt since the passengers had arrived.

“Breakdowns can be stressful,” he said, as he monitored the information in front of him. The light above hit her face just right so that it reflected into the screen, making it seem like her information had come up superimposed over her image.

Susan G. Carmichael, daughter of Vice Admiral Willis Carmichael of the Dyo system. Hunsaker tried not to raise his eyebrows at her pedigree. A woman like this should have been upset at the meager nature of his resort, yet she didn’t make a single complaint. Maybe she would make up for Agatha Kantswinkle.

“The breakdown was terrifying,” Susan G. Carmichael said, her voice soft. “There was actually a fire.”

That caught his attention. Ships had come here that had suffered melting in the systems, ships that had filled with smoke in an instant, ships that had lost power, but none had suffered from a fire. Fires were relatively easy to kill. All it would take was a momentary shutdown of the environmental system. No oxygen, no fuel; no fuel, no fire.

“A bad one?” he asked.

Her gaze met his. Her eyes were a shade of goldish brown that he hadn’t seen before. He wasn’t sure if it was natural.

“They didn’t catch it right away,” she said.

He stopped processing her information. “How could they miss that?”

“Apparently systems were already malfunctioning.” She swallowed visibly. She was clearly still terrified and covering it up by pretending to be calm. “We were lucky that you were so close.”

He hadn’t realized—well, how could he have realized anyway, when he only had sixteen minutes to take a nearly empty (neglected) resort and turn it into a place where people could sleep somewhat comfortably.

“Do they know what caused the fire?” he asked.

“I’m not sure they know anything about anything,” she said as she squared her shoulders. “What do I need to get into my room?”

Finally, someone asked the logical question. Perhaps the others had been too traumatized to think of it, or to overwhelmed to care.

“Just touch the door,” he said. “I keyed it to your fingerprint.”

Not that it mattered. He really did have to get the locks fixed first.

“Thank you.” She slipped away from the desk, then stopped. “I heard you mention a boutique…?”

He shrugged, feeling honest for the first time that day (maybe the first time that year). “It’s more of a whatnot shop. But we do have clothing.”

“Anything is better than what I have,” she said, and gifted him with a small smile before heading up to her room.

He stayed in the reception area for another few minutes, staring up the stairs. The hotel felt different with people in it. He’d often thought of the hotel as a chameleon, coloring itself with the attitude of its guests.

Which meant that the hotel was shaken, terrified, and a little bit relieved. He made himself take a deep breath. The air down here still smelled acrid. He set the environmental controls on scrub, not wanting to smell smoke and sweat for the next week.

Then he tallied up his single day’s intake. More than he’d made in the last three months. If the repairs took another two days, which was the average time for repairs on this station, he would make most of his year’s operating expenses. If the repairs took longer (and it sounded like they might), he might make a significant profit for the first time in nearly a decade.

But he would have to endure the mood, and he would have to stay one step ahead of these people. He had to get the clothes ready, open the boutique (such as it was), roust his one remaining chef to work the restaurant, and get the staff to clean a few more rooms just in case the living arrangements didn’t quite work out.

Not to mention the fact that the ship’s crew had yet to arrive and take their rooms.

He sighed. He had become even more cantankerous than he had been during the last big shipping disaster nearly three years before. It wasn’t good for him to be so isolated.

Or maybe it was. Imagine how cantankerous he’d be if he had to deal with these types of personalities each and every day.

The thought made him smile. Then he continued planning his evening, realizing that to do things properly, he would get very little sleep.

* * * *

The boutique wasn’t a boutique, any more than this resort was a resort. It was barely a hotel, although it did have private rooms, which was good enough.

Or so Susan Carmichael figured. She had hung back after Agatha Kantswinkle had shoved her way to the front of the line, after repeatedly announcing her intentions to have a room of her own as the group fled the ship for the safety of this little bitty place.

Susan hadn’t been on an outpost this small in years, and certainly not one this old. She was relieved to hear that it had maintenance facilities, but worried that they wouldn’t be up to the task. The Presidio was nearly ruined. It had suffered a catastrophic failure of most of its systems, and that fire had destroyed an section of the ship.

Destroyed was probably too grand a word. Made that section of the ship unusable, maybe for the rest of the trip.

Which she would not think about, at least for the next twenty-four hours.

She had waited the two hours the prissy little man at the front desk had told Bunting to wait for the boutique to open. She knew as well as anyone that the boutique wasn’t a regular store, stocked with purchased merchandise, but a shop stocked with castoffs, leftovers and discards from hotel guests.

She didn’t care. She had left her own wardrobe on board the ship, and she had instructed the crew to discard most items, even the most personal ones. Although “instructed” wasn’t truly accurate. One of the crewmen—Richard Ilykova—had stopped her in the somewhat disorderly exit off the ship (hell, everyone was pushing, shoving, jostling, trying to get out), and told her that her cabin had been closest to the fire.

We won’t be able to save your stuff, he said, clearly worried that she’d be angry. But you might find a way to clean it on the station. You want me to set it aside?

No, she’d said curtly and continued jostling her own way out of the ship.

She should probably have been more polite. Ilykova hadn’t needed to say that to her. He hadn’t needed to say anything. He’d kept a protective eye on her the entire time she’d been on the ship, and she wasn’t sure if he was attracted or if he thought she was the one who had sabotaged the ship. She had found him attractive if a bit bland—one of those pale blue-eyed blonds who could vanish into the walls because he seemed so colorless. When she’d seen him watching her, she’d decided to keep an eye on him. Maybe he saw that as flirting, or maybe he had just been doing his job. She wasn’t sure, and she wasn’t sure she cared.

All she knew was that now, she needed new everything, from undergarments to blouses. She didn’t like the idea of wearing someone’s cast-off underclothes, but she didn’t see much of a choice. She would have to ask about guest laundry facilities here, although she doubted there would be any.

The prissy little man from the front desk had done the best he could to make this small room seem like a store. Some of the clothes hung on racks, with others stacked on shelves along the walls. There were old entertainment pads, some with their contents listed on the back like a directory, and blankets, which surprised her. The blankets looked inviting, even though she was warm, which told her just how tired she was.

The prissy little man was hovering near the door, checking a portable pad as he kept an eye on her. He had already helped Bunting. Bunting had gone in and out in the time it had taken Susan to look for a single shirt.

At first, she’d thought the prissy little man a mere employee. He gave off that appearance, a man beaten down by his supervisors, afraid to make decisions on his own.

But once she got into her room, she’d accessed the resort’s information logs and discovered that the prissy man actually owned the place. He had the kind of pedigree that upscale resorts usually paid excessive amounts to hire—degrees from prestigious business schools and exclusive resort management programs.

The fact that he was here, and he owned the place, suggested some kind of problem, probably personal. He seemed unimaginative enough to remain in the same business, and not quite bright enough to realize that a resort this far away from habitable planets wasn’t really a resort at all.

Or maybe he did realize it and fled here on purpose.

She glanced at him. Dapper, small, furtive, the kind of man (like Ilykova) who could blend into the walls if necessary. Only the prissy little man had another trait—the ability to outsnob anyone in the room. That powerful ability to judge was as important to running a real resort as it was to governance. It made the weak cower.

It just didn’t bother her.

She went to the rack holding women’s clothes. She found black pants with no obvious problems, blue pants that needed just a bit of care, a fawn-colored skirt, and a very old white blouse that appeared to have real lace trim. She added four other tops and found undergarments on a back shelf.

She piled all the items on a nearby table, and beckoned the prissy little man.

“I know you have a corner on the market,” she said in her most polite voice, “but this trip is turning out to be inadvertently expensive, and so I was wondering if I could get some kind of volume discount…?”

He didn’t even look up. “The ship’s parent company should reimburse you.”

Meaning they’ll deal with the much too-high prices. They might not even notice.

She thought of bargaining more, then decided against it. She wasn’t going to charge the ship for the disaster, but she would take money if the parent company decided to offer it.

She clutched the clothing, which smelled strongly of some kind of cleaner, and headed toward the door. He said, almost as an afterthought, “The restaurant will be open shortly. Spread the word, would you?”

As if she wanted to see the other passengers. As if she were responsible for them.

But she was hungry, and she knew they were too, and all of their rooms were on her way back to the accurately named Crow’s Nest.

“Sure,” she said, “if you give me something to carry these clothes in.”

He sighed and reached under a pile of men’s shirts. As she walked back to him, he pulled out a cloth sack—something that looked like a cleaning bag, a low-rent version of a laundry bag that offered to do the cleaning all by itself.

She was long past caring what it actually was. She put the clothes in the sack, wrapped its drawstrings around her hand, and carried the entire thing to the stairs.

Dinner, restaurant, the damn passengers. Calling attention to herself all over again.

She wasn’t entirely sure she cared. But one thing she did know.

She wasn’t going to knock on Agatha Kantswinkle’s door.

Agatha would want Susan to keep her company.

Susan wasn’t ever going to do that, again.

* * * *

The scream echoed through the stairwell. A woman’s scream, sharp, high-pitched, startled. Cut off in the middle.

For a moment, Richard Ilykova bowed his head. The last thing he wanted to do was deal with another crisis. He stood in the lobby of the hotel, which was cleaner than some he’d seen on makeshift starbases. The owner, Grissan Hunsaker, looked up from the work he was doing behind the desk, his features contorted with fear.

No help from that quarter.

Richard sighed, then bounded up the stairs, feeling his exhaustion in every step.

The scream didn’t sound again, but he heard footsteps other than his own. Doors squealed open, slammed shut, and voices started.

He found a group of people clustered on one of the landings—the B Team, he privately called them. The people who had paid lower fares, filling out the ship’s rooms, people who wouldn’t even have gotten on the ship had the owners managed to sell all the tickets.

In the middle of them, a woman—Lysa Lamphere—lay prostrate on the floor.

He remembered her only because she was so pretty. Easily the prettiest woman on the ship this trip. But she didn’t have the brains or the personality to match her beauty, which disappointed him.

Not that anyone who booked passage on the Presidio would look at him. They were all too important for that. Except Ms. Carmichael. She had smiled at him, which surprised him.

She had noticed him watching her, which had surprised him even more.

The group stepped back as he approached. Even though they weren’t on a ship any longer, they seemed to think he was in charge.

Maybe he was.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Dunno,” someone said.

One of the men—Bunting? Richard almost didn’t recognize in him the new set of clothes he wore—added, “I was in my room when I heard the screaming. Sounded pretty awful, so I came directly here.”

Richard had no reason to doubt it. Bunting had the unfortunate ability to arrive first in any crisis. Unfortunate only because he didn’t have the compatible ability to know the right thing to do once he had arrived.

Richard was of the private opinion that Bunting had made the fire on the ship worse by trying to fan it out rather than hit the controls for the room’s environmental system. But Richard was number four man on the crew, the lowest of the low, and he didn’t dare criticize anyone.

He crouched beside Lysa. She was sprawled on her back, her arms up as if they had been near her face when she had fallen. Her hands were clenched into tight fists, and her legs were twisted sideways.

He touched her face. The skin was soft, silky, the way that skin should be, the way that enhanced skin often wasn’t. Her beauty was natural, then, and even more pronounced when that mousy personality wasn’t front and center.

She had no fever, and she didn’t look injured.

Richard glanced up, saw Hunsaker lurking near the stairs, said, “Do you have a doctor?”

“More or less,” Hunsaker said.

“What is it?” Richard snapped. “More? Less?”

“More if she’s sober,” Hunsaker said.

Richard cursed. “I assume you have basic medical equipment.”

“Yes,” Hunsaker said.

“Then get it,” Richard snapped.

Hunsaker fled.

The group remained, staring down. These were the people who irritated him. The ones who had wanted the lighting in their room changed and didn’t know how to do it themselves, the ones who woke him from a sound sleep to ask how to work the automatic cafeteria, the ones who thought he was at their beck and call even though, technically, he wasn’t.

Right now, they were content to let him see if the woman was all right.

Hunsaker came back with a handheld medical scanner and a tray of medical pens, each with some kind of magical function. Magical because Richard didn’t know much about medicine, at least this kind. He had some knowledge, but on the other end—how to turn the body against itself, not how to make it function again.

Hunsaker crouched near him and ran the scanner over her, clearly not trusting Richard with the device, which suited him just fine.

“I think she simply fainted,” Hunsaker said with surprise.

“And hit her head?” Richard asked.

“Oh, she’ll be bruised, but there doesn’t appear to be much else wrong with her,” Hunsaker said.

Then his gaze met Richard’s, and Richard could tell what the other man was thinking. They both worked service in not-the-best conditions. They both knew that people rarely fainted without a reason.

“You think, perhaps, she’s finally having a reaction to the trauma on the ship?” There was a hopeful note in Hunsaker’s voice, a note that said, Please, don’t make this my problem.

“I doubt it,” Bunting said before Richard got a chance to reply. “I mean, she screamed first.”

Richard closed his eyes for just a second. A brief indulgence, a moment to himself before it all started up again. He’d hoped for an interlude, a bit of quiet, a chance to rest, but it clearly wasn’t going to happen.

He stood, eyes open now, and looked at the door.

It didn’t look latched.

“Is this her room?” he asked, already suspecting the answer.

“Oh, no,” Hunsaker said. “Miss Lamphere is rooming upstairs with—”

“Me,” said one of the women behind Richard. He turned slightly. A slender woman with buck teeth stared back at him. He remembered her, because she had propositioned him one late night back on the ship. She’d been drunk, and in her drunkenness she assumed that the ship’s promotion line, which said that the crew was there to serve her every need, apparently understood “every need” to mean every need.

Her dark eyes met his and a spot of color appeared on her cheeks. She remembered the encounter too.

“Miss Potsworth,” he said, not using her first name—Janet—because he didn’t want her to get the wrong impression, even now. “I take it Lysa was not in her room?”

“She’d just left a few minutes ago,” Janet said. “We’d just been told there was going to be dinner and she was famished.”

Famished. That was a word he hadn’t heard in a very long time.

“So what was she doing here?” he asked, more to himself than to anyone else. The room was all by itself on this level, and it was a bit out of the way of the stairs.

“Oh, probably letting Miss Kantswinkle know about the meal,” Janet Potsworth said. “Lysa was the only person—I think—”

And she looked around for confirmation. A few others nodded, as if she already know what Janet was going to say.

“—who still liked Miss Kantswinkle. Although I would say that ‘liked’ is probably too strong a word. She felt that Miss Kantswinkle deserved our respect, given all her work with the children—”

“Right,” Richard said, having heard Agatha Kantswinkle’s long diatribe about her years of service with orphaned children a dozen too many times. “Miss Kantswinkle is in this room?”

“Yes.” This from Hunsaker who was doing his best to revive Lysa.

“Then why isn’t she out here?” Richard asked. After all, she was the nosiest women he had ever met.

He stepped over Lysa’s arm, and rapped on the door with a half-closed fist. The sound echoed through the stairwell, rather like her scream had. No one answered, but the door swung open slowly.

Richard peered inside, but did not go in. A slightly metallic smell greeted him. The room was tiny, the bed pushed against one wall. There were no windows. A chair and a tiny desk pushed against the other wall.

And in the center of the room, on the floor, lay Agatha Kantswinkle, black shoes pointing toward the door, frumpy skirt slightly askew, meaty thighs pressed together.

She had not fallen decorously, like Lysa had. Agatha Kantswinkle had toppled like a tree. He half expected to see a dent in the floor. He wondered why no one had heard the fall from below, then wondered if there was a room below. He tried to remember the layout, and couldn’t.

He could feel someone else peering over his shoulder, but he effectively blocked the door so no one else could see inside. Then he pulled the door closed and stood in front of it

“She’s not there, huh?” Bunting asked.

“You could say that,” Richard said, his gaze meeting Hunsaker’s. Hunsaker was still crouched over Lysa. He didn’t seem sure how to revive her.

Richard knew a few tricks—none of which used technology—but he didn’t want to try them in front of the small group. Instead, he said to Hunsaker, “Let’s take her back to her room.”

Hunsaker looked relieved at the suggestion.

They enlisted the help of Bunting who was one of the strongest men that Richard had ever met. Unfortunately, Richard knew this because he’d had Bunting’s help carrying dead weight before. Only that weight had been really and truly dead, not unconscious like Lysa.

Richard helped Bunting get her upright, then Bunting scooped her in his arms as if she were no more than a pile of clothes.

“Which way?” he asked.

“I’ll show you,” Janet said, and Richard bit his tongue. Better to remain silent than to warn the man she might show him more than her room.

Together they went up the stairs. Richard followed, mostly because he didn’t want to be alone with the small group on the landing—and he really didn’t want to talk to Hunsaker. At least not right away.

Instead, Richard would supervise the two in Janet’s room and probably help Bunting make his escape.

Or Bunting would help him.

Richard frowned. This damn nightmare trip wasn’t over yet.

* * * *

Hunsaker looked at the medical equipment, then moved his gaze toward the closed door. The look that crewman, Richard Ilykova, had given him had sent a chill through him. As had his response when asked if Agatha Kantswinkle was inside her room.

Ilykova was one of those men Hunsaker had seen hundreds of times over the years on Vaadum. Working some kind spaceship, going from one place to another because the previous place didn’t suit.

After he’d checked in, on the company’s money (unlike the passengers), he had moved away from the desk, so that he didn’t see Hunsaker move all his information to the handheld pad. Hunsaker usually did that with crew, because so many of them traveled under false names, with very thin personal identification documentation.

Ilykova’s was better than most. In fact, that was what caught Hunsaker’s attention. Hunsaker had expected a tissue-thin biography, something that showed Ilykova wasn’t who he seemed and seemed to ask the technological question Really, this man is so unimportant. Who cares?

But the identification looked real at first, so real that it nearly fooled Hunsaker. In fact, it would have fooled Hunsaker if it weren’t for the fact that Hunsaker expected crew to be a bit dodgy.

So he’d looked a little deeper, saw a ripple in one bit of biography and followed it, finding another layer of biography under yet another name. Usually that meant someone was traveling on some government mission, and while he couldn’t rule that out, he also couldn’t rule out the fact that Ilykova was dodgier than most.

“Well,” Hunsaker said to the people around him to get rid of them. “There’s nothing we can do now. Did Miss Carmichael let you know that we’re serving dinner?”

“She did,” one of the women said.

“Then perhaps you’d best move along. My chef, while excellent, doesn’t like an empty restaurant and will close if no one shows up.”

“I’m not really hungry,” the other woman said. “But I suppose I could eat.”

“You never know when you’ll get another chance,” the first woman said to her.

Hunsaker watched through a slat in the railing as the women made their way to the bottom of the stairs. He waited until they were out of sight before he moved. Then he peered up the stairwell to make sure no one was coming down.

No one was. He was alone, for which he was quite relieved. Although that sense of relief didn’t last long. His heart was pounding and his palms had grown damp.

He hated this part of the job. Back when he was training, they had called it “crisis management,” but really, it was more like surprise roulette. Which bad thing would happen today?

He wiped his hands on his pants, then stepped toward the door. He pushed hard with his shoulder, knowing that the latch didn’t work, knowing that he would regret that in the hours, days, maybe weeks to come.

The door creaked open. He made himself look down.

There she was, just as he expected, Agatha Kantswinkle, dead on the floor. In a room without a functioning lock or any kind of portal or any other way out.

She had placed her small bag of items on the bed—and he hoped it was that bag that gave off the slightly metallic smell that was now filtering out of the room. Because he could only think of two other things that could cause such an odor. One was a surplus of blood. The other—

He sighed.

He would check the other after he made certain the woman was dead.

He made himself walk into the room, hoping he wasn’t stepping on anything important. He crouched beside her like he had done with Lysa, but with Agatha Kantswinkle, he didn’t touch her.

There was no need. She was dead. He didn’t need a doctor or any kind of expert to tell him that. Truth be told, he was probably the expert on the outpost, given how many dead bodies he’d dealt with in the past few decades. Really, it was one of his pet peeves—one of his major pet peeves—one of his major pet peeves that he could never admit to anyone—the habit that people had of dying away from home.

He’d known when that woman cut to the front of the line that she would be trouble, and here she was, being trouble.

He bit his lip so that he wouldn’t curse her. He was just superstitious enough to think that might be bad luck. Instead, he sighed. Now he was going to have to call the base doctor and have her preside over this mess, even though he really didn’t want to.

Not because he didn’t want a doctor overseeing a corpse, but because he didn’t want this doctor overseeing a corpse.

He left the room and pulled the door closed, hoping no one else would try to get in, since it was so damn easy. This time, he did curse, but he cursed himself. And shook his head.

And headed to the bar to fetch Anne Marie Devlin before she got too drunk to walk.

* * * *

“A body,” said Anne Marie Devlin with great relish. She hadn’t had a body to deal with in at least six months, maybe even a year. She slapped her hands on the bar and slid out of the bar stool, hoping that Hunsaker didn’t know how much she needed the leverage just to move.

She was drunk, but not as drunk as she got by the end of the day. She would remember this, even if she didn’t sober up, which she might have to, considering.

She grabbed her bar napkin—some lowly piece of cloth that Hunsaker believed necessary for cleanliness—and wiped the beer foam off her chin. She didn’t know if she had beer foam on her chin, but she always thought it was better to wipe off the imaginary beer foam than leave the real stuff to cake.

Then she grinned to herself. Oh, sober, she probably wouldn’t think that funny but it was funny as hell at the moment.

“How much have you had to drink?” Hunsaker asked in that precise snotty tone of his, the one that showed all of his expensive education and his breeding and his superiority. Of course, her education had cost twice as much as his, and she probably came from a better family, and she should’ve felt superior, but she’d left that behind, along with her dignity.

She just wished Hunsaker would remember that. No, better. She wished he would honor it. He remembered it and snotted down to her each and every time he saw her.

“Natural causes?” she asked, blinking hard. The bar felt smoky, even though it wasn’t. The fog was just in her eyes.

“Isn’t it your job to figure that out?” he snapped, and that got her attention. Usually—if you could cite a usually, considering they’d only had three deaths together (and didn’t that sound romantic? Only three deaths)—Hunsaker told her what the cause of death was, when it happened, and how she should fill out the death certificate. Usually, she got irritated that he told her how to do her job, and even more irritated when it turned out that he was right.

The fact that he was unwilling to say how the guest died was a revelation in and of itself.

“Excuse me,” Anne Marie muttered and headed to the side of the bar. This place was ridiculously small, considering it was the outpost’s only bar. People could drink in the restaurant and the casino, but they couldn’t drink comfortably in either place.

She leaned against the bar and looked around. A few of the guests from that damaged spaceship had gone into the restaurant for dinner. She could smell roast pheasant or whatever the hell tonight’s meal was called. It was always the same, some dish made of parts from unidentified meat or maybe synthetic meat or maybe even (oh, don’t go there, but of course she did) corpses, mixed with some kind of gravy or sauce, and actual vegetables grown on the only really nice part of the station, the hydroponic garden.

She’d become a vegetarian a long time ago, mostly in self defense. She didn’t want to think about the source of the meaty protein, so she didn’t. Except when she dealt with corpses or illnesses or both.

Her stomach lurched. Served her right for drinking beer on an empty stomach. Beer made with real hops because she had insisted long ago. Sometimes she drank the whiskey brought in by ships or the wine imported from various faraway places, but at least she knew how the beer was made.

She had been hired to make it.

She had been the station’s bartender, way back when. Before they realized that by the end of the evening she was too drunk to serve drinks. Before Hunsaker, even, because he felt that an automatic drink mixer was better than a human one any day.

Hunsaker had ferreted out her secret, that she actually had a medical license and she kept it current. She had to. She didn’t want to be sued by some passenger that she had to save because really, underneath the alcohol, she was the noble sort and felt that the Hippocratic oath had nothing to do with hypocrisy and everything to do with nobility.

Not that she could be hypocritical or noble with a corpse. She grabbed the breathalyzer and took a hit from it, feeling it clear her alcohol haze like a slap to the face. She hated this thing, not just because it cleared the buzz and made her sober in an instant, but because it would give her one motherfucker of a headache in 24 hours, and she wouldn’t be able to do anything about that.

Except drink, of course.

She took a second hit for good measure, then turned to Hunsaker. He stood at attention, shoulders back, hands folded before him, mouth in a very thin line.

“Ready?” he asked in that damned tone.

She was thirsty, her eyes ached, and she could feel the depression that always lurked ready to crash down on her.

“As I’ll ever be,” she said, and let him lead her out of the bar.

* * * *

Richard managed to escape Janet Potsworth’s room just as Lysa woke up from what Janet was calling Lysa’s faint. It wasn’t a faint, because Lysa had enough time to scream before passing out, but she had slipped into unconsciousness very quickly, and he had a few ideas as to why.

But he wanted to think about them first, and that required him to get away from the conversation, and from Janet Potsworth who had grabbed his ass when he bent over to make sure Lysa was comfortable. Potsworth was a menace, and he would be glad to get rid of her—although he wasn’t sure when that would happen, especially now that Agatha Kantswinkle was dead.

He hadn’t expected her to die, probably because she had always been the first person on the scene of the other deaths aboard the Presidio. He’d come to see her as a stout little angel of death, and had found himself wondering more than once if she hadn’t done something to cause them.

He still hadn’t ruled that out even though she had clearly been murdered herself. Maybe her death was in retaliation for one of the others…?

He sighed. He had no idea. And he was going to need one, because it was clear—at least to him—that a murderer lurked on this station.

He tread lightly as he hurried down the stairs—he didn’t want to call any more attention to himself than he already had. He’d shown a bit more expertise in these matters than he wanted to, and someone had noticed.

That someone was the hotelier, Hunsaker. Hunsaker was refined and organized, not the kind of man you’d normally find in this shabby place at the edge of nowhere. Usually the proprietors of places like this were down-on-their luck drunks who couldn’t be bothered to wait on a customer even if the customer offered five times the normal room rate. Or the proprietors were well-meaning spouses of someone on staff in maintenance, some handy person with cooking skills and an ability to take the drabbest room and make it just a tad gaudy.

Hunsaker seemed like he had training in hotel management. He certainly took his time checking everyone in, which meant that he looked up their identification as well as debiting their accounts.

He’d noticed Richard and he’d understood what Richard had said when Richard had closed the door on Agatha Kantswinkle’s corpse. Often Richard made those snide little comments for his own edification, knowing that no one else would catch his meaning. But Hunsaker had and Hunsaker had looked momentarily put out. Not panicked. Put out. Like any good hotelier.

Richard passed the landing where Lysa had passed out. The door to Agatha Kantswinkle’s room was closed and no one stood outside of it. He wondered if anyone was inside, and if Hunsaker had dealt with the corpse yet.

He almost stopped—he had a few suspicions he wanted to confirm—but he didn’t. He was afraid that if the old lady’s body hadn’t been removed, then he would make himself even more of a suspect than he already was.

And he knew he was a suspect. Everyone from the Presidio was.

The first death had occurred two days out, when they were in the deepest of deep space—an area the captain had called no man’s land because there were no settlements within landing range and no outposts. The trip from the Dyo System through the Commons System was dicey no matter what, but there was a section that was just plain empty. Humans weren’t welcome at any of the stops for two full days of the trip. The captain had warned the crew—all three of them—that the first part of the run had nowhere safe to stop until Vaadum Station, and even then he liked to avoid the place because it was so small and so rundown. He preferred the extra day to Commons Space Station, where everyone could get off the ship and relax in style.

Richard braced himself for the extended run on a relatively small ship. He was particularly susceptible to cabin fever because he’d been the only survivor of a murderous rampage on a cruise ship as a boy. He’d been taking a trip with his father, who had died right in front of him. Everyone on that ship had died except Richard and the shooter, who had left in an escape pod before the ship docked at one of the many Starbase Alphas, this one nicknamed the NetherRealm

And that had just been the beginning, of course. He’d seen a lot of death on small ships. Just never in quite such an odd manner as the three deaths on the Presidio.

He had argued that the Presidio shouldn’t stop until it got to Commons Space Station, which had a security team and was in a sector with a real government, one that would actually look into the killings. There was no government here, even though technically, Vaadum was in the same sector as Commons. Vaadum was too far off the beaten path and too small to have so much as a leader, let alone some kind of official who would report back to the various governments presiding over the Commons System.

The captain had listened too, even though the three murders had terrified him—nothing like that had ever happened to the man, and of course Richard hadn’t confessed his own history. Richard was only working the Presidio to gain passage across the sector. He was out of money and out of options, something that hadn’t happened to him before. So he took one of his identities and used it to get work on the first ship that would take him.

Of course, that ship had to be the Presidio.

If the fire hadn’t happened, if the ship hadn’t had to stop here, Richard would’ve quit when they reached the Commons Station. He would have cited the killings as a hostile work environment and no one would have had second thoughts about his departure.

He couldn’t leave here, now. There was no reason to stay on this station, since ships rarely stopped here, and he did need to keep moving. But he really didn’t want to get back on that ship, provided the people in maintenance could actually fix the thing.

He let himself out of the “resort,” through the double doors, past the restaurant. The smell of simmering beef—or was it lamb?—made his stomach growl. He wasn’t sure when he last had a real meal.

Although he wasn’t sure how anyone could serve real food here, either. He doubted supply ships made a huge profit coming in and out of Vaadum. But they probably got paid well to stop.

He hurried down the corridor toward the maintenance area. Clearly, the maintenance area had once been the entire station. The corridor proved it. The corridor was grafted on, little more than a tube with an environmental system, leading to the second part of the station, the resort, which someone had built on at least a century ago—and not from the best materials.

This part of the station felt very fragile. He could almost feel the corridor bounce with each of his footsteps, even though he knew that the thing wasn’t built that way. It was his very active imagination, something he had failed to shut off for years now.

Finally, he got out of the corridor and into the maintenance area. It seemed huge, although it wasn’t. He knew the sense of vastness was an optical illusion caused by the emptiness. The maintenance area was the oldest part of Vaadum, built two centuries ago to house at least six large ships in various states of disrepair.

Apparently, the station’s owners throughout the years hadn’t wanted to chop up the area, imagining, probably, that there might come a time when all seven repair bays were being used.

The Presidio had the center bay. It looked odd in here, since the ship wasn’t built to be inside any kind of bay. Once it had been assembled, it remained outside buildings. But the station’s tiny ring made it impossible to repair ships docked to it.

Richard was glad he hadn’t been onboard when the captain had had to maneuver the Presidio in here. That must’ve taken some white-knuckle flying, particularly since the ship was so damaged.

Richard could see the damage from the entry. The fire had burned its way through one entire wing of the ship. The wing had remained intact, but here someone had knocked the exterior off. Through the hole—large enough to hold at least five men—he could see the scorch marked interior.

He shuddered.

He’d been afraid on ships before, starting with that cruise with his father, when the assassin had stood up, a laser rifle in his hands. He’d aimed it at Richard, and Richard hadn’t cringed. He’d been twelve, too young to understand—too sheltered to understand—that the man who aimed the laser rifle at him meant to kill him.

Only the assassin hadn’t meant to kill him. He’d left Richard—who was then known as Misha—alive, as a warning to Richard’s mother, who had worked as some kind of double agent. Richard had never tried to understand the politics of it. All he ever knew was that his father and so many others had died because one government hired an assassin to warn his mother away from some job.

He wasn’t even sure she had felt guilty about it, although she had been angry. And angrier at him when he had gotten his revenge on the assassin. She had wanted the assassin alive—for what reason Richard never knew.

He never tried to understand his mother. But her life, her decisions, had caused him to be here now, decades later, on the run for half a dozen killings, all of them he could say—he would have once said—justified.

Especially that first one.

“Help you?”

One of the maintenance guys came over. He was holding some fancy tools that Richard had never seen before. The maintenance guy was the first person that Richard had seen on this station who looked like he belonged. Whip thin, angular, sharp dark eyes and hair cropped close to the skull. He had a smudge along one cheek.

“I work on the Presidio,” Richard said. “I was wondering if you’d found a cause for the fire yet.”

“Why?” the maintenance guy asked.

Richard studied him for a moment. The maintenance guy seemed solid enough, although Richard wasn’t the kind of man who trusted easily. Hell, Richard wasn’t the kind of man who trusted at all.

But the maintenance guy had been on this station for a long time, and he would have had no involvement in the fire or the deaths. Not even Agatha Kantswinkle’s death.

“I want to know if it was deliberately set,” Richard said.

“What’s it to you?” the maintenance guy asked.

Richard blinked at him, and nearly snapped, What’s it to me? If this outpost hadn’t been nearby, I would have died on that ship. Murdered, if the fire was set. No one would have survived.

“Three passengers were murdered on that ship,” Richard said, “and another just died here.”

The maintenance guy started. He hadn’t heard about Kantswinkle then.

“So I want to know if that fire was a coincidence or deliberately set. Because I’m not getting back on that ship with someone who sets fires in space.”

“But you’d get back on the ship if it had design flaws that made it catch fire?” the maintenance guy asked.

Richard almost smiled. He hadn’t thought of that. Which showed that he was someone who didn’t know much about ship mechanics, and knew too much about killers.

“Does it have design flaws?” Richard asked.

“All ships have design flaws,” the maintenance guy said. “Some are deadlier than others.”

“And this ship?” Richard asked, beginning to feel annoyed.

“This ship had some weaknesses that were easy to exploit,” the maintenance guy said. “If you asked me to prove that someone deliberately set a fire, I can’t. At least, not right now. If you asked me to guess how the fire started, I’d say that someone encouraged it. And I’d say you all were damn lucky to survive.”

Richard felt a shiver run down his back. Two lucky survivals. If he were superstitious, he’d think that there was a third in his future.

“Can the ship be repaired?”

“It’ll take us a few days,” the maintenance guy said. “We have to rebuild a few things, replace even more, and then make sure that it’s strong enough to handle space again. When we’re done, it should be better than new.”

He sounded confident. He actually sounded excited about the prospect of reviving the ship, of making it worthy to fly again. He probably didn’t get challenges like this one often.

Or maybe he did. Maybe his job was all about cobbling ships together so that they would survive to the next port.

“Can you make it tamperproof?” Richard asked.

The maintenance guy gave him a sad look. “No ship is tamperproof,” he said. “Especially not a ship as old as this one.”

Richard must’ve looked unsettled, because the maintenance guy added, “We’ll make it better than it was. If you have a problem out there, it won’t be because of the ship.”

“Yeah,” Richard said, “I’m beginning to figure that out.”

* * * *

Anne Marie Devlin still smelled of beer. Hunsaker wrinkled his nose as he stood inside Kantswinkle’s room. Anne Marie had crouched over the body for only a moment, and then she started walking the parameter of the room as if the room were big enough to have a perimeter. She inspected every little thing. The walls, the chair, the bed, the floor.

Everything except Kantswinkle.

Finally, Hunsaker couldn’t take it any longer. “What are you doing?”

Anne Marie didn’t answer him. She stood on her toes, and peered at the small control panel he’d installed for the guests. The control panel didn’t give them much control over anything, just the illusion of control.

You let them operate the heating and cooling in their tiny space, and they thought they had charge of the universe.

“Anne Marie,” he snapped. “I asked you a question.”

“You did, didn’t you,” she said, her back to him. He had never met such an aggravating woman. She’d be a marvel if she didn’t drink.

“What. Are. You. Doing.” He enunciated each word so that she would know just how annoyed he was.

“I. Am. Investigating,” she said, mimicking his tone exactly.

His cheeks heated. Did he really sound that obnoxious? Not to his own ears, certainly. “Investigating what?”

Anne Marie turned. She looked at the door first, and then at him. He pulled the door again to make sure it was pulled tight.

“Don’t do that,” she said.

“Why not?” he asked.

She walked to the door and cracked it open just a little. “It’s better this way.”

“Don’t tell me you’re getting claustrophobic now,” he said. He’d heard about her other ailments. The alcoholism she refused to treat aggravated the depression she refused to acknowledge which was caused by something in her past she refused to talk about.

All in all, the most infuriating woman he had ever met. And one of the most brilliant.

“I have a hunch I’ll always be claustrophobic in this room from now on.” She peered through the crack in the door as she clearly checked the hallway, then pushed the door open just a bit wider. “We’re alone.”

He had to check on that himself. Not that he didn’t trust her, but he really didn’t trust her.

“What’s going on?” he said when he was satisfied no one lurked in the hall or the stairwell.

“This poor dear woman,” Anne Marie said, thereby proving she had never met Agatha Kantswinkle, “suffocated.”

He glanced at Agatha Kantswinkle’s neck. No mottled marks, no sign of a struggle. If this woman had suffocated, she had done so without hands around her neck or something pressed against her nose and mouth.

He swallowed hard. “Even if the environmental system had shut down,” he said, “she wouldn’t have died this quickly.”

“Yes, I know,” Anne Marie said. “The problem is the environmental system hadn’t shut down.”

“Then how did she die?” he asked.

“I told you,” Anne Marie said. “She suffocated.”

“You can tell that from eyeballing her?” he asked.

Anne Marie smiled just a little. “I’ll confirm with an autopsy,” she said. “But I will confirm.”

“No one touched her,” he said. “And if it wasn’t the environmental system, then what was it?”

“Oh, it was the environmental system,” Anne Marie said. “That’s why your other guest fainted. The door opened, she saw the body, she screamed, took in what she thought was a lungful of air to continue her scream, and passed out. Lucky girl. Had she been closer to the door inside the room, she would have died too.”

Hunsaker was feeling dizzy. He realized he wasn’t breathing either. He made himself take a breath, but it felt odd. He hadn’t thought of breathing before. Maybe, like Anne Marie, he wouldn’t want to be in this room alone with the door closed either.

“What did she breathe?” he asked.

“It wasn’t pure carbon dioxide,” Anne Marie said, “or her skin would be bright red. More likely a cocktail of gases, something that created the faint bitter odor that was in the room when we arrived.”

He had been here earlier. The smell had been stronger. He didn’t tell her that.

“How do you know?” he asked.

She held up one of her portable scanners. “I’ve been taking readings from various areas of the room. I’m getting a mixture of things that should never be in a residential area of a space station. I have the behavior of both women. I have the smell. And then there’s the controls themselves.”

She swept a hand toward them.

He walked past her and peered at them.

Someone had hit the override. The damn thing was blinking, asking for a manual code to confirm the oxygen mix, which was purer than it should have been.

Not only had someone tampered with the controls, but someone had tampered with them twice—once when Agatha Kantswinkle entered the room, and then again after she died.

“I would assume that these systems keep track of who touches them when?” Anne Marie asked.

He had no idea. The last time he’d used an override had been a decade ago. Since then, he’d replaced most of the guest room environmental controls, going to a simpler system—one that gave the guests two options—hotter or colder. Nothing as fancy as this little box, which even allowed the guests—with the override code—to mix their oxygen from thin to thick.

“I don’t know,” he said, feeling absolutely helpless.

“Well.” Anne Marie smiled, clearly liking his discomfort. “I guess you’d better find out.”

* * * *

Pounding, pounding, pounding.

Susan sat up, filled with adrenaline. She’d been dreaming. Not dreaming so much as trapped in a memory.

The slight banging noise, rhythmic, feet against the thin wall.

Her mouth tasted of bile. She got off the bed, rubbed her hand over her face, and went to her door.

Janet Potsworth stood outside. She looked more disheveled than Susan had ever seen her.

“Oh, you’re all right then,” Janet said with obvious relief.

Susan frowned. “Of course I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because you didn’t come for dinner,” Janet said.

Susan rolled her eyes. She had asked the chef—if that man could be called a chef—to give her a meal for her room. He had obliged, serving her some kind of stew that wasn’t on the menu.

The staff will eat this, he said. You will like it better.

She had carried it upstairs herself, and she had liked it. She ate alone for the first time in a week. No angst, no speculation, no fear.

Just a quiet meal in her quiet room. Then she let her exhaustion take her, and she had fallen into a blissful sleep.

Until she dreamed of Remy’s death. The man had hanged himself in his room—which had taken some doing. The sheet wrapped around his neck, dangling off some fixture. She hadn’t seen it, but she had heard his feet, banging, banging, banging, which she hadn’t thought odd until later.

He wasn’t bumping against the wall when they found him. She must have been hearing him die.

In fact, no one thought he had done anything except kill himself. He was the first, after all. They’d said some words over him, looked at his traveler’s contract, saw that his body didn’t have to be returned to anyone, and slipped him into the darkness of space, along with a few of his possessions.

An act they all regretted when the second body turned up. By then, it had become clear that Remy hadn’t killed himself and that banging she had heard was his attempt to get her attention. Or to kick his way free. Or to find purchase for his feet. Or to get to his killer.

She hated thinking about it, but she did think about it.

Often.

As did everyone else, it seemed. Including the killer. Who had to be laughing at them all.

She wasn’t getting back on that ship. Not now, not ever. And she shouldn’t have opened her door to Janet either. Janet was one of those obnoxious women who thought every man was a conquest and every woman was competition.

So there had to be another reason she was here.

“I’m fine,” Susan said, and started to close the door.

“You can understand why we were concerned,” Janet said, “considering what happened to poor Agatha.”

Susan sighed. She was now supposed to ask, What happened to Agatha?…as if she cared. Agatha was the most obnoxious woman she had ever met. And that was saying something.

She didn’t want to know what happened to Agatha. And if she took the verbal bait, she’d be regaled with some horrifying story of someone’s rudeness to the most obnoxious woman she had ever met.

“Yes, I can understand,” Susan lied. “Thank you for thinking of me.”

And then she pushed the door closed.

* * * *

“It started in this panel,” said the maintenance guy. His name was Larry and he had been on the station for more than a decade. Larry loved his work. Out here, he said when Richard asked, my job is a real challenge. You gotta be creative, you know? And you gotta be right. We’ve never lost any ship that’s left here, and we’ve never gotten any complaints about our work later on. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.

Richard somehow found that enthusiasm reassuring. Reassuring enough to join Larry inside the burned out section of the Presidio. It smelled of smoke and melted plastic. His nose itched with a constant urge to sneeze. He breathed shallowly through his mouth because he had a hunch if he started sneezing, he wouldn’t stop.

“See right here,” Larry said, pointing at a mass of blackened something-or-other, “there’s one of those design flaws I mentioned. Nothing that would trigger on its own, but something that could be taken advantage of.”

He explained it in rather technical language that Richard was surprised he understood. It sounded so simple, and yet he wouldn’t have been able to do it.

“But this thing had been burning for hours when we found it,” Richard said. “All the warning systems had been shut down.”

“And the environmental system tampered with,” Larry said. “The oxygen mix had to have been low here. There wasn’t a lot of fuel for this fire, and there should have been. Also, this ship has a built-in system for putting out fires. It would have vented the atmosphere, and isolated the area. It did none of those things.”

“Is that easy to tamper with?” Richard asked.

“For me, sure,” Larry said. “For you, not so much.”

“So someone who knew the ship’s systems,” Richard said.

“Most ships’ systems,” Larry said. “You have to know what’s standard, what’s unusual, what’s expected, and what’s normal.”

“So someone who worked on the ship,” Richard said.

Larry smiled. “Probably not. You guys were a week out, right?”

Richard nodded.

“That’s plenty of time for someone to study the specs and figure out how this ship worked. Provided that he already had a base of knowledge on how ships in general worked.”

“Could they time it?” Richard asked.

“Meaning what?”

“So that we were close to Vaadum when it happened?”

“Sure,” Larry said. “That was the only smart way to do it. Unless your saboteur wanted to die along with everybody else. Or planned to take an escape pod. Of course, no one did. They’re all here. I assume all your passengers are accounted for too.”

“Yeah,” Richard said. “They’re all here. On the station. With us.”

* * * *

Nothing like murder to make a man stop procrastinating. After Hunsaker watched Anne Marie Devlin use one of the robotic carts to take Kantswinkle’s body to the infirmary, he got his tools and finally fixed the lock on Kantswinkle’s room. He couldn’t shake the feeling that if he had done this before Kantswinkle had arrived, he would have prevented her death.

Then he would have had to deal with her the next two days while the Presidio was being prepared. That thought made him shudder—and made him feel guilty. It wasn’t her fault that she was dead…

Except that no one seemed to like her, she was difficult to deal with, and if he had to pick someone to murder in this small group of stranded passengers, he would have chosen her.

Which made him shudder even more.

Had she died because of who she was?

Or because of how she acted?

Or because of the room he assigned her?

That last thought got him to find his staff (all two of them) and have them clean some of the other rooms, the ones with the limited environmental controls. Then he moved five of the passengers—Bunting and his roommate, Janet Potsworth and Lysa Lamphere, and Susan Carmichael.

The first four had left their rooms willingly. Then he had gone to see Carmichael.

He knocked, and she didn’t answer. So he knocked again, harder. The door flew open, and Carmichael stood there, looking bleary.

She had struck him as the kind of woman whose hair was never out of place, and yet all the strands stood at odd angles with some kind of violent looking red mark on the side of her face. It took him a moment to realize that she had a pillow impression on her cheek, and her hair was mussed from the blankets. Clearly, Susan G. Carmichael was a messy sleeper, even if she never was messy awake.

She didn’t want to be moved. She nearly slammed the door in his face, but he stopped her, and told her that if she stayed here, there was a good chance she’d end up like Agatha Kantswinkle.

Then Carmichael frowned.

“What happened to Agatha?” she asked.

He peered at her. She really and truly did not know.

“She’s dead,” he said.

Carmichael closed her eyes for a minute, sighed, and leaned against the door jamb. “I suppose she was murdered,” she said tiredly.

“Yes,” he said.

Carmichael opened her eyes. They were a vivid blue. “I suppose it was too much to ask the murderer to stop killing once we got off that damn ship.”

“I suppose,” Hunsaker said, not knowing quite how to respond.

“He’s going to run out of victims, and that will call attention to him,” she said. She sounded angry, as if it personally affronted her that the murderer kept killing even though she didn’t think it wise.

“I don’t think he minds the attention,” Hunsaker said. “Can I help you get your things?”

“There’s not much,” she said, indicating the purchases she had made earlier sitting on top of the chair. “I can get them.”

Still, he took a pair of shoes and a blanket, just because he suddenly felt that he needed to be useful. Not that he hadn’t been useful. He’d been more useful today than he had been in weeks, maybe months. He’d repaired locks on four doors, including Agatha Kantswinkle’s (and then he sealed off that damn room, maybe forever), he’d gotten a whole bunch of rooms cleaned, he’d gotten the kitchen staff up and running again, and he actually had people in his hotel.

Until they murdered each other off, of course.

He left the door to her room open, since someone on his staff would be up here shortly to clean, fix this lock, and close off this room. No one was going to be in the older rooms, not while there were murderers on board.

“Did she suffer?” Carmichael asked as he led her down a flight of stairs, through a corridor, and into the newer—and, once upon a time, more hopeful—wing of his hotel.

He looked at her. She actually seemed concerned. No one had asked this question before. He hadn’t even asked it when he’d been talking with Anne Marie, and he probably should have.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly—or as honestly as he dared. It took time to suffocate. If the death was merciful, she would have passed out like Lysa and then stopped breathing, but if it wasn’t, she would have been gasping for air—

Although, he realized, had she had trouble breathing, all she had to do was step into the corridor and get far enough away from her door. She would have been able to clear her lungs, and maybe even get help.

“I suspect she didn’t suffer at all,” he added, now that he’d thought about it.

Carmichael grunted, which surprised him. He would have expected a “thank heavens” or some other kind of reassuring remark. Instead, she sounded almost displeased.

“Did you know her well?” he asked.

“No one knew her well,” Carmichael said. “No one wanted to.”

“Oh.” He would have suspected as much. “What about the other people who died? Were they unpopular too?”

“What’s it to you?” she asked.

He flushed. He usually wasn’t that nosy.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to pry. I was just wondering.”

“Murder really shouldn’t be the subject of casual conversation, now should it?” Carmichael asked.

“I guess not,” he said, refraining from pointing out that right now, the conversation wasn’t as casual as she seemed to think. After all, three people had died on the ship, there was a fire, and now another person had died. Not that casual a conversation. Maybe even relevant.

They stopped at Carmichael’s new room. He unlocked it for her and went in first, feeling a slight surge of adrenaline as he took his first breath. Would he always feel that now in his guest rooms? Would he always be afraid that a single breath could kill him?

“Well,” Carmichael said following him in, “it’s not quite as pretty as the other room, but it does look newer.”

He hadn’t thought of the other room as pretty, although it had personality which this one lacked. This one was like all the other rooms in this wing, big enough for a large bed, a table and two chairs, as well as an entire wall dedicated to in-room entertainment, if someone wanted to pay a premium price.

He didn’t ask Carmichael what she wanted. He figured she could charge it to her bill if she decided she needed entertaining. He didn’t want to be near her any longer.

He set her shoes and blanket on the floor, then backed out of the room. She didn’t seem to notice. She was putting her clothing on top of the table as he left, as oblivious to his presence as a rich woman was to a robotic cleaner.

He hurried down the steps and back to the front desk, feeling unsettled. This group of people was beginning to frighten him. He had no idea when he’d be rid of them either. The ship had to be repaired or some other ship had to come here and get them out of his hotel.

For the first time in a very long time, he missed having some kind of security on the station. Someone other than the burliest member of his staff threatening the guests with increased fees—which was usually enough to calm them down, since Hunsaker already had control of their accounts.

But he didn’t want to threaten anyone here, because who knew how they would react?

He didn’t want to think about it—any of it. Instead, he focused on a cleaning schedule for the vacated rooms. A cleaning schedule and a repair schedule. Time to make sure all the locks worked properly and all the equipment was tamper-proof.

Time he started doing his job.

Again.

* * * *

Hideous man. Odious, actually. Who did he think he was to discuss other people’s deaths as if they were entertainments?

Susan Carmichael sat on the bed in her new room, wide awake now, wondering if she would ever sleep again.

Agatha dead, here and not on the ship. That had shaken Susan as much as figuring out that Remy’s death hadn’t been suicide. Not that the thought of a suicide in the room next to her hadn’t disturbed her too. Any death would have bothered her.

But the murders, the fire—somehow she had gotten it into her head as they fled onto Vaadum that they would be safe here, that their long nightmare was over.

She propped her pillows against the headboard and leaned her head back. She could feel the muscles in her back, so tight that any movement hurt.

She didn’t like this room. The other one had the illusion of safety. She had gotten that room when she still believed that the outpost would be much better than the ship.

Now she knew it was no different. A limited group of people trapped in a limited amount of space.

There was nowhere to run, no way to escape. The ship was incapacitated, and—so far as she could tell—the Presidio was the only ship on the station.

Did the locals (what should she call them? Station rats?)—did they have a way to leave? She wasn’t sure about that either, but she should probably find out.

She had been under the impression that Vaadum was one of the only safe stops between here and Commons Space Station.

But she didn’t even know how far Commons Space Station was from here. Maybe she could convince someone to take her there. Or to hire a ship and have it arrive, getting her out of here.

Of course, some of the others would want to come, and that wouldn’t work, because one of those others might be the killer.

She needed a way to defend herself. She didn’t have one, at least not yet. And now she wouldn’t be able to sleep again. She needed to stay awake, stay vigilant, should anyone try anything.

Susan pulled her knees to her chest. She needed a plan.

She just wasn’t sure where to begin.

* * * *

The captain had found a spot in the bar, toward the back under the dim lights. Richard had to cross most of the room—which smelled of beer and sweat and spilled whiskey—to realize that the captain had five empty glasses in front of him.

Richard sighed.

The captain was a small man, former military—but with which army in what war, Richard had never asked (it was none of his business—and he’d learned, through his mother, politics was the most deadly business in the entire sector). The captain had run his ship on a tight schedule. He and the other two pilots had separate eight-hour shifts in the cockpit.

Richard had been hired on to do the menial work that had nothing to with flying the ship—keeping the passengers happy, making sure that the lower decks were spotless, maintaining the robotic cleaners and cooks. The food on the ship wasn’t spectacular, but it hadn’t been advertised that way. There were ships that made this run that were all about food, food every few hours, food from every culture in the sector, food as rich and varied as the passengers themselves.

But this ship hadn’t been a cruise so much as a passenger vehicle. It took people from here to there in a modicum of comfort, with as little fuss as necessary.

Until the first death, Richard had mostly dealt with trivial complaints—broken entertainment sectors, malfunctioning avatars in the gaming area, the occasional sudden (and he thought humorous) switch to zero-g in a toilet. Agatha Kantswinkle had tried his patience—her bed was too soft, the equipment near her room too loud, the cooking smell from the galley too strong—but he’d had the leeway to move her twice, and her final cabin seemed to suit her more than the others, which had cut the complaints to about half of what they had been.

He’d settled in for a flight filled with irritations and hard work, but he knew once he got to Ansary, he’d be done with real work and he’d have money for the first time in months.

He had vowed not to get that low on funds ever again.

Now, here he was, unpaid and trapped on a space station that had at least one killer on board.

He peered at the captain. The man was staring blearily into his glass, as if he could read information written on the bottom of it. The captain was the one man Richard knew wasn’t behind any of this, for two reasons.

The first was circumstantial—the captain had been with Richard during the first two killings. If the captain had been involved he would have had to had a collaborator, and the captain never consulted with anyone.

The second reason was more practical—the captain owned his ship. It was part of a franchise operation, and he got paid per passenger for the entire trip. If the ship was full, he made a hefty profit. Half full, he made some money. Empty, and he’d go bankrupt or have to get out of the business.

Richard could understand someone who wanted out so badly that he would destroy his own ship. But he couldn’t understand doing it while paying customers were on board, nor could he imagine doing it with fire. There were so many other, much simpler ways.

Richard sat down across from the captain, jiggling the tabletop. The glasses clanked together, but it still took a moment for the captain to notice him.

Or at least to acknowledge him.

“Care to toast the end of my career?” the captain asked, lifting a glass.

“It’s not as bad as all that,” Richard lied.

“Ship’s not reparable,” the captain said.

“Yes, it is,” Richard said. “I talked to them.”

The captain shook his head. “Not flying that thing anywhere. Half the lower deck’d be unusable, it’d smell, and the environmental systems are whacked. Not safe. Least not by our standards.”

By that, he meant the standards of the company he worked for.

“So are they sending a replacement ship?”

“Two weeks,” the captain said. “Maybe. Or we can hire onto someone else’s ship. Have to ask the passengers. What’s left of them.”

“Two weeks?” Richard asked.

“Coming from Ansary We’d go back to the Dyo System. We’d be back where we started. Not that it matters. I get to have a hearing. Like it’s my fault they let some murderous nutcase onto my ship.”

“You didn’t check the manifest?” Richard asked.

The captain glared at him. Or tried to. It wasn’t that effective a look, considering how wobbly his head was and how bloodshot his eyes were.

“What’m I supposed to? Turn away paying customers with spotless records? Of course, I checked. Not an idiot. Or didn’t think I was.”

The captain sighed.

“Someone’s trying to destroy me,” he muttered.

Which was a distinct possibility, one Richard hadn’t thought of.

“Does someone hate you that much?” Richard asked.

“You mean besides me?” the captain asked. “Oh, hell, I don’t know.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Richard said.

“Sent that first body into space,” the captain said. “Didn’t turn around then and there. Shoulda brought everyone back.”

“We thought it was a suicide,” Richard said. “And when the other two deaths happened, we were closer to Commons Space Station than to the Dyo System. It would’ve taken a week to go back to Ynchyn.”

This nightmare trip started in Ynchyn.

“Seems logical, doesn’t it? They don’t train you for this kinda thing, you know. Maybe I shoulda confined everyone to quarters.”

Richard nodded. After all, that had been his initial suggestion—or at least, his suggestion after the second murder. Ignatius Grove, a professor, heading to a new job at some prestigious university in the largest city on Ansary. The man taught mathematics of all things, and he had died when the skin in his throat had a growth spurt, shutting off both sides.

Everyone would’ve thought that a freak death as well, particularly since Ignatius Grove and Agatha Kantswinkle spent each meal complaining about their various food allergies, if Richard hadn’t seen that particular form of murder before. He knew that there were little nanosomethings that could activate the growth mechanism in the skin. If swallowed, the nanosomethings invaded the throat. No one had ever done studies to see if any of them made it to the stomach or if that would’ve made a difference if the throat hadn’t closed first.

Ignatius Grove had died a particularly hideous death. So had Remy Demaupin, the first victim. In fact, all three victims had died terribly. The third, Trista Jordan, had died when someone had sealed her mouth and nose with some kind of bonding adhesive. Richard wasn’t sure what was used—some kind of liquid glue. She should’ve been able to use her call button to ask for help—and she probably would have, if she hadn’t also been glued to the chair in her room.

The killer hadn’t tried to hide that death, not that it would’ve mattered. There was no time to investigate it, because shortly after they found Trista, the fire had started.

Or at least had been discovered.

“Confining people to quarters,” Richard said, “probably wouldn’t have helped. We had a pretty determined killer on board. Still do, actually. Have any ideas who it is?”

“I’d’ve shot the bastard if I knew.” The captain picked up one of the other glasses and downed its contents. “Hell, maybe I should shoot everyone now. That’d take care of the problem. What do you think?”

“It’s one solution,” Richard said.

“It’s as good as any,” the captain said, and picked up the remaining full glass. “If I could just get my butt outta this chair. Which I’m not going to do. If someone wants to kill me, so be it. They might be doing me a favor. You want to kill me, Richard?”

The captain’s gaze met Richard’s. For the first time, the captain seemed sober. His expression was very serious. Richard had the sense that the captain knew more about him than Richard thought.

Richard had waited too long to pretend shock at the question. And he couldn’t just wave it off, not considering the look the captain just gave him.

“If I kill you, what do I get out of it?” Richard asked.

The captain grinned and his head bobbled, that moment of clarity seemingly gone. “My eternal gratitude, my friend,” he said, just before he finished the third drink. “My eternal gratitude.”

* * * *

Hunsaker sat behind the desk and dug through the files. He had his back to the wall and, out of the corner of his eye, he watched the entrances and the stairway. He didn’t want anyone to surprise him for any reason.

He had a pad propped up on his thighs. His personal screen, not the one tied into the resort proper. He had upgraded the pad dozens of times, sometimes illegally. More than once, he’d stolen programs from his guests, and from one—a well connected gambler who liked the odds (and the breasts) in the casino—he had stolen an entire database of shady characters throughout the sector.

He didn’t expect to see any familiar names in that database, but he found one.

Richard Ilykova, aka Yuri Flynn Doyle, Edward Michael Adams, and Misha Yurivich Orlinskaya, Mercenary and Assassin for Hire, believed to be responsible for more than two dozen deaths system wide.

Hunsaker shivered. He had known that Richard Ilykova hadn’t been a common worker on a passenger ship. The man was too competent for that—not too mechanically competent, but too competent in the ways of death. He hadn’t flinched when he had seen Kantswinkle’s body, nor had he seemed too upset by his whole ordeal.

Yet all those deaths—the three on the ship and the fourth here, seemed awfully sloppy for a man who made his living killing people.

Hunsaker sighed softly and exited the illegal database. He felt dirty just thinking about Ilykova’s job. About the man himself, actually. Ilykova hadn’t seemed harmless—Hunsaker wasn’t that naïve—but he had seemed…more efficient than deadly.

A movement caught his eye. Ilykova approached the desk. Hunsaker hadn’t even seen him enter the room.

Hunsaker let out a little squeak. Ilykova raised an eyebrow in amusement. He’d clearly caught Hunsaker’s moment of fear. Ilykova smiled—one of those knowing smiles—and then proceeded as if he had seen nothing out of the ordinary.

“Looking up the guests, are we?” he asked.

“So?” Hunsaker asked, then realized that probably wasn’t the smartest response. Neither, he supposed, would be What’s it to you? Or Get the hell away from me.

“So, does anyone have a history with lack of oxygen?”

“What?” Hunsaker asked, mostly because he hadn’t been expecting that question.

“I realized when I was talking with the captain that all of our victims suffocated in one way or another. The fire would have caused the rest of us to suffocate as well. I was just wondering if we have some sort of revenge scenario going on here.” Ilykova put his elbows on the desk.

“You tell me,” Hunsaker said, his voice wobbling a little.

Ilykova frowned. “I don’t have access to a deep database. You do.”

Then his eyes widened just a little.

“Oh,” he said. “You decided to research me first.”

Hunsaker’s heart was pounding. He had nothing to lose here—if Ilykova was going to kill him, it would happen here, now. So he called up the earlier screen, with Ilykova’s history and pushed it across the desk at him.

“These things are so poorly done,” Ilykova said. “It doesn’t tell you much, does it?”

He looked up, his pale blue eyes twinkling. How could a man laugh about murder?

It made Hunsaker think of Carmichael: Murder really shouldn’t be the subject of casual conversation, now should it?

Nor should it be something to smile about.

Apparently, Hunsaker’s silence caught Ilykova’s attention.

“We all have a past, Grissan,” Ilykova said. “Yours involves embezzlement from every single resort you worked for. Quite creative embezzlement, I might add, the kind that would’ve made you very, very rich if you had kept to your original plan.”

Hunsaker felt a warmth rise in his cheeks. No one knew about this. No one. How did Ilykova find it?

“The problem was, in your profession, that the younger, less experienced members moved from resort to resort, while the older ones got a well-deserved sinecure. That’s the word, right? Sinecure?”

“Sinecure implies a job with little work. That’s not true. To rise to the top of my profession, you must be willing to work at all times.” Hunsaker’s words were curt, showing his annoyance. He felt his face grow even warmer. He had let Ilykova irritate him.

Ilykova smiled slightly. “My mistake. I simply meant that you hit the top of your profession and remained in one place, a resort that became ‘yours,’ even if you didn’t own it. You became the eyes and ears of the place, the face that everyone recognized. The person they associated with the resort. Which was why they bought you this place instead of prosecuting you. Did you know what a dive they got for you? It was the perfect revenge on their part, wasn’t it? An effective banishment away from the populated areas of the sector. Did it embarrass you?”

Embarrassed, humiliated, angered. Hunsaker didn’t say anything, though, although he expected all of the emotions ran across his face.

“Still,” Ilykova said, “you got to keep the money you stole from the other resorts. You could’ve vanished. You just chose not to.”

Too ashamed to leave. Hunsaker simply couldn’t face any of his old colleagues ever again. Ever, ever, ever again.

“We all have a bit of history,” Ilykova said. “I’m sure you had a reason for your sticky fingers. I have a reason for my history as well. My mother was Halina Layla Orlinskaya. Look her up in your little database.”

Hunsaker took the pad back, his fingers shaking, dammit all to hell. He wasn’t as practiced at controlling his physical reactions to his emotions, not like he used to be.

He looked up Halina Layla Orlinskaya. She had half a dozen aliases as well. A high level spy, who defected with some devastating knowledge that changed the course of one of the border wars, she survived her last few years by hiring herself out as a mercenary to various governments.

“What it doesn’t say there, I’m sure,” Ilykova said, “is that she hired me out as well, as an assassin. She thought I had the personality for it.”

“Did you?” Hunsaker wished he could take the words back.

But Ilykova didn’t seem to notice. “Not really. I think one should feel passionate about his work. An assassin’s job requires no passion at all. Don’t you think that one should put his heart and soul into his job?”

“I used to,” Hunsaker said.

“And I’ll bet you miss that emotion,” Ilykova said. “I did. I wanted to do something with my life. Ah, to do something. Of course, now I’m broke and hiring onto ships as a lower level employee just to get across the sector.”

He leaned across the desk. Hunsaker couldn’t lean away. His back was already pressed against the wall.

“So you see, I had no reason to kill those people,” Ilykova said. “I didn’t know them. And I’m certainly smart enough not to set a fire on a spaceship far from the nearest port.”

“But,” Hunsaker said, his voice smaller than he wanted it to be, “you knew Agatha Kantswinkle.”

Ilykova smiled, a real smile, genuinely amused. “Didn’t like her either, huh? No one did, so far as I can tell. But I didn’t have to kill her. She would’ve gotten off the ship at Ansary. And here, on Vaadum, she was your problem, not mine.”

Hunsaker swallowed. “So you’re saying you didn’t do it.”

“That’s right,” Ilykova said. “Why would I?”

“Someone paid you?” Hunsaker asked.

Ilykova shook his head. “If someone paid me, I would’ve been a passenger. I wouldn’t have signed on for work.”

It sounded logical. It all sounded very logical. Hunsaker just didn’t know if he should believe it.

“So what’s this about suffocation?” he asked.

“Oh, just a theory,” Ilykova said. “Everyone suffocated in one way or another. So if you think of these crimes as related, then maybe the manner of death came as a form of revenge for a death by suffocation…?”

“I wouldn’t even know how to look for that,” Hunsaker said.

“I would,” Ilykova said, and took the pad away from Hunsaker.

* * * *

Richard was finding a whole lot of nothing as he dug through Hunsaker’s database. The database wasn’t that good. It was old, for one thing, and the updates hadn’t been meshed into the system all that well. They had been grafted on and not efficiently, certainly not efficiently enough for a proper search.

He would have to get onto the Presidio. It had a good database and he might be able to find what he was looking for there.

Because, in this cursory exploration, he couldn’t find anyone with any links to any suffocation deaths, murdered, accidental, or even natural.

He was about to hand the pad back to Hunsaker, when someone screamed.

“Oh, not again,” Hunsaker muttered.

Richard tossed him the pad and ran up the steps, half expecting to hear a thump. He didn’t though. But he did hear another scream and, he realized, these screams were male.

They weren’t frightened screams or startled screams (except maybe the first one), more likely horrified screams, end-of-the-world screams, the kind you emit when everything was hopeless and all was lost.

Another scream, and then another. Doors slammed as people left their rooms. He was joining quite a crowd as he ran up the stairs.

The screams came from the top floor.

He arrived, along with three other passengers from the ship (Janet Powell, Lysa Lamphere, and William Bunting) to find a man he’d never seen before on his knees, hands over his face, screaming like a stuck alarm.

Another body lay on the floor, this one a woman, also someone he’d never seen before either. Her eyes were open and glassy, her tongue protruding slightly.

She was clearly dead.

Someone sighed behind him.

Richard turned slightly. Hunsaker stood near his shoulder, and stared at the woman on the floor.

“Now what the hell am I going to do?” Hunsaker said with great annoyance. “I mean, really.”

* * * *

Judging from the look on Ilykova’s face, Hunsaker had spoken out loud. He felt that warmth returning to his cheeks. He kept his head down, so that he didn’t have to look Ilykova in the eyes, and moved into the room.

He put his hand on Fergus’s shoulders. Fergus had worked for Hunsaker since Hunsaker came to the resort. Fergus and his wife, Dillith, who now doubled as a corpse. Not that she was ever much livelier than a corpse. But for what Dillith lacked in energy, she made up for in precision.

She could find a speck of dust the robotic cleaners left behind. She could turn bed sheet corners perfectly. She was slow, but she was anal.

And in Hunsaker’s “resort,” precision mattered more than speed.

Fergus stopped screaming when Hunsaker touched him. Fergus looked up, eyes sunken into his face, and said, “What am I going to do?”

His use of the sentence was plaintive. Hunsaker’s had been self-involved. He had jumped from corpse/murder/crisis to who the hell was going to work for me in this godforsaken place? in less than a minute. He wasn’t proud of that, but he really wasn’t a man who developed much affection for his employees.

In fact, he believed affection got in the way of work. He didn’t know much about Dillith and Fergus besides their names, their work methods, and the fact that they both preferred late hours rather than getting up early.

“Stand up,” Hunsaker said with as much sympathy as he could muster, which probably wasn’t enough. “We’ll figure something out.”

Fergus stood. He was a slight man, and he fell into Hunsaker’s arms, much to Hunsaker’s chagrin. He hadn’t invited the man to hug him. He certainly didn’t want the man to touch him. But Fergus was beyond noticing subtleties. He was sobbing. Hunsaker could already feel his shirt getting wet.

He patted Fergus on the back and maneuvered him out of the room. Then he looked at Ilykova who was watching him with that look of amusement again.

“Do me a favor,” Hunsaker said to Ilykova. “Get Anne Marie Devlin, would you?”

“Who?” Ilykova said.

“The base doctor,” Hunsaker said.

“I think this woman is beyond a doctor—”

“Just do it,” Hunsaker said, resisting the urge to move Fergus toward Ilykova. That would show him passion, all right.

Ilykova nodded, then hurried down the stairs. Three passengers from the ship stood around as if this were a theatrical event.

“Go back to your rooms,” Hunsaker said. “There’s nothing to see.”

As if a woman wasn’t already dead on the floor. There was plenty to see. He just didn’t want them gawking at it.

They, of course, didn’t move. He glared at them and tried to look tough, which was hard to do when you had a member of the staff sobbing in your arms.

“Go,” he said, and that seemed to work. Maybe it was his tone, his clear disgust at everyone around him.

The three left slowly. He watched them go down the stairs, patting Fergus on the back the entire time as if he were a baby who needed to be burped.

Then Hunsaker peered at the room. It didn’t look that much different than it had two hours ago.

When he’d helped Susan Carmichael move out of it.

* * * *

She heard the screaming, of course. How could she have missed it? And she resisted her first instinct, which was to burrow deep under the covers of this new room, and pretend like she couldn’t hear anything.

But Susan Carmichael wasn’t a hider. She wasn’t the kind of person who ran to the scene of a crime either, although she couldn’t be entirely certain what she heard was a crime.

But someone didn’t scream with that level of grief—and that was grief, wasn’t it?—without a precipitating event, and considering Agatha’s murder, the best assumption—the only assumption, really—was that a crime had occurred.

Again.

Which meant she had to get the hell off this station.

Somehow.

She changed clothes, slowly and deliberately, putting on the ivory blouse over the black pants. She slipped on her shoes, smoothed her hair, grabbed her personal information, and left this room as well.

The screaming had stopped, but she could hear faint voices in the distance. She glanced at the stairs, to ensure that no one was on them, and then she quietly made her way down.

It was time she stopped all of this. She gave up. She had been fleeing her family, but really, life out here was much, much worse than life with them could ever be.

Besides, her father had the capability of getting a ship here within twenty-four hours. He had ships all over the sector. One of them had to be nearby.

She just had to contact him.

She made her way down the stairs toward the main desk. Surely, there was some kind of interstellar communications node. Or maybe just a sector-wide node.

Or worse case—which was a case she’d put up with, after all—she would simply contact the nearest ship and have them contact her father.

And then she would wait.

Although she probably needed some kind of guard.

There wasn’t a lot of choice. Everyone from the ship was a possible murderer, and there weren’t a lot of people on the station.

But all of the murders she knew of took place while the victim was alone.

So the next key was to be with someone at all times.

Except right now.

Right now, she needed to contact Daddy.

After that, she find a companion—and find a way to stay awake until help arrived.

* * * *

Anne Marie Devlin was no longer drunk. She wasn’t even under-the-surface drugged-sober drunk. She was so far past drunk that she felt giddy.

Actually, the excitement made her feel giddy. She felt useful for the first time in months.

If she didn’t know herself better—and she knew herself quite well, thank you—she would say she had become a drunk because she was bored.

But she had been a drunk long before life ceased to be a challenge. She knew that excitement was just a temporary high, while alcohol numbed the senses, which was usually what she preferred.

Right now, however, she needed all the senses that she had. She was inside yet another room—this one a favorite of hers—standing over yet another corpse that had been murdered by yet another tampered environmental system.

The question was, how had it been tampered with? And why?

She was peering at the system itself, noting something off, when she realized one of the ship’s passengers was also in the room. A tallish white-blond man with pale blue eyes.

The man who had fetched her. Richard Something-Or-Other.

“I prefer to work alone,” she said.

“So do I,” he said.

They stared at each other for a moment. Hunsaker, who also preferred to work alone (she knew that because he had told her half a dozen times) stood near the doorway, his shirt soaked with Fergus’s tears. She’d managed to get Fergus out of the room and down to the kitchen where the chef could watch him. Fergus was quite pliable most of the time. Right now, he was damn near catatonic.

Perhaps anyone would be after crying that much.

She turned toward Hunsaker. “What the hell were you thinking? Sending those two to work in these rooms with a murderer on the loose?”

“Who knew that the killer would come after one of us?” he said.

“I don’t think the killer did,” Richard Something-Or-Other said. “If you’ll allow me.”

He shoved—shoved!—Anne Marie out of the way, and peered at the control panel himself.

“You do realize if this man is the killer, he now has access to the evidence,” she said to Hunsaker.

“You do realize if this man is the killer,” Hunsaker said, mimicking her tone, “then you just gave him a reason to kill us.”

They glared at each other again.

“I’m not the killer,” Richard Something-Or-Other said, “but whoever is has some serious engineering skills.”

She couldn’t resist: she peered into the controls as well. These older models had digital readouts and mechanisms attached to mechanisms. She had just looked at the one in the room where Agatha Kantswinkle died—and that control did not have a secondary digital readout. This one did.

She looked at Richard Something-Or-Other. He raised his eyebrows at her, as if he were surprised as well. Then he touched the whole thing with a single fingernail. The second readout was loose, but had been attached into the control’s mechanism. She peered at the mix. When Dillith had been in here, the atmosphere’s mix had been the same as it had been with Agatha Kantswinkle died.

Anne Marie frowned. She glanced over her shoulder at the door. Hunsaker was still leaning on the jam, glaring at her. He seemed to disapprove of what she was doing.

Or maybe he disapproved of Richard Something-Or-Other.

Or maybe he always disapproved of everything.

She sighed and walked to the door.

“Move,” she said.

Hunsaker didn’t.

“I mean it. Move. I need to see something.”

“What?” he asked.

“It’s easier to look than it is to explain,” she said pushing him aside. Then she peered inside the locking mechanism. Another small digital readout had been attached.

“This door was closed when Fergus got here, wasn’t it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Hunsaker said. “I didn’t ask.”

“You didn’t bother to tell them to keep the doors open?”

Hunsaker’s glare changed to something filled with a kind of fury. “Of course I did. It’s part of the general instructions, anyway. The door should always be open with the staff is inside, even if no one else is.”

“Hmm,” she said.

“What?” Richard Something-Or-Other asked from his position near the environmental controls.

“This is a timer,” she said. “It closes the door.”

“And this timer,” he said, “changes the environmental mix.”

“It couldn’t have been put in here when Dillith was here,” Anne Marie said.

“Someone set it up earlier than that,” Richard Something-Or-Other said.

“Which means that the killer wasn’t after Dillith,” Anne Marie said.

“He was after Susan Carmichael.” Hunsaker said that last, breathed it in fact. Anne Marie could hear the shock in his voice. “If I’d gotten her just a little too late, then—”

“You would’ve died too,” Anne Marie said. “We have to brace this door open.”

“I doubt the room will kill again,” Richard Something-Or-Other said.

“But the other rooms might,” Anne Marie said.

“I moved everyone out of the older rooms,” Hunsaker said.

“Let’s hope that’s enough,” Anne Marie said. She actually felt a little chill. She liked the chill. Excitement—she had missed it so much. “Maybe he’ll start coming after the rest of us too.”

“Oh, don’t get your hopes up,” Hunsaker snapped and left the room.

Richard Something-Or-Other raised his eyebrows again. “What was that all about?”

Anne Marie shrugged. “I guess he’s upset by all of this.”

Richard nodded. “I think it would be surprising if he were not.”

* * * *

Hunsaker stomped down the stairs. Now he didn’t know what to do. Did he warn Carmichael? Did he put all the guests in the same room and let them duke it out until a ship arrived and got them out of his resort?

He stopped halfway down the stairs and leaned his head against the wall. All of his training, all of his long and fancy education, all of his experience good and bad did not train him for any of this. He could just imagine the lecture titled How to Handle a Murderer Loose in Your Resort.

Simple: Call the local authorities.

And if there were none?

He banged his head against the metal just once. If he rounded them up, where would he take them? The restaurant? The casino?

The casino at least covered a big area. It would be hard to tamper with the environmental system.

Maybe he should just force them all back to their ship, and if they killed each other, so be it. Hell, if they died from smoke inhalation, so be it. It wasn’t his concern.

While they were here, they bothered him.

While they were on their ship, they had nothing to do with him.

That’s what he’d do. He’d get the maintenance guys and make them act as security guards. Even the chef and the blackjack dealer could work security (so long as she put her shirt on). They’d round up these horrible people and put them back on their own ship and if they died, they died.

His stomach turned.

Maybe if they all died, he could just jettison the ship into deepest darkest space. He’d set it on autopilot and get it the hell out of here.

For a moment, his spirits rose.

Then he remembered he’d already charged their accounts. There was a record he couldn’t tamper with of them being on his station.

Dammit.

He had no idea what to do.

* * * *

Richard helped Anne Marie get the corpse down to the medical wing. He’d had enough of carrying bodies. By his count, this was the fifth this trip, and the only one he hadn’t met while she was still alive.

The medical wing was in the farthest part of the station, and certainly didn’t deserve the appellation “wing.” It was a medical suite at best, a smallish group of rooms set up as an afterthought.

Agatha Kantswinkle lay on one table, naked—which was an image he’d never get out of his mind again—and, to his surprise, the other two bodies from the ship in clear refrigeration units, looking no worse for being dead the last few days.

He set Dillith on the closest table, and stretched his muscles with relief.

“Thank you,” the doctor said in that tone all professionals used which actually meant you’re done, now get the hell out.

Which he did.

And as he stepped into the corridor, he realized he’d been going about this investigation all wrong. He’d been looking for common ties, for suffocation deaths, for motive, and he, of all people, should know that motive mattered a lot less than the entertainments said it did.

His motive for most of his early killings had been because his mother had hired him out to do the job. The later killings had been because he could make money at it. Only the first killing had had a real motive: the man had murdered his father and ruined Richard’s life.

Richard didn’t need to look at motive.

He needed to look for experience. Technical experience.

With environmental systems.

He scurried back to the hotel’s main entrance, and hoped that Hunsaker’s horrible aging database had at least enough information to solve all of this.

* * * *

She wasn’t hysterical. Hunsaker could’ve dealt with her if she had been hysterical. He had training in hysterical. High-end hotel guests often got hysterical about nothing. And here, which was decidedly not high-end, people got hysterical because…well, because they were here.

Susan G. Carmichael had every reason to be hysterical. She could’ve died in her room had he not taken her out of it. But she had already figured out that she might die and she was calmer than he was.

She had even found a way to contact her father, who was such a famous Vice Admiral that Hunsaker had even heard of him, and he was sending a ship that would be here in 18 hours sharp, along with some kind of back-up that would take care of the problem.

Whatever that meant.

But she wasn’t returning to her room.

To any room, really.

She wanted to remain with Hunsaker, thinking that somehow, Hunsaker would be safe.

He sat on his chair with his back against the wall, no longer sure what safe was. She was sitting on the edge of his desk, surveying the area as if she ran it instead of him.

He was still debating whether to get everyone else out of their rooms when Ilykova burst through the doors.

“I need your database,” he said.

“Whatever happened to please and thank you?” Hunsaker muttered, knowing he was being a complete ass, as he handed over the pad.

Ilykova ignored that, although he did glance at Carmichael. He didn’t seem that surprised to see her. Then he leaned against the desk and started trolling the database, his fingers moving faster than Hunsaker’s ever could.

The three of them didn’t say a word as Ilykova worked. Carmichael watched him. Hunsaker kept an eye on the doors and the stairs, not that it had made any difference in the past.

Then Ilykova looked over at Carmichael. “Were you and Agatha Kantswinkle ever alone?”

“Here?” she asked.

“On the ship,” he said.

She looked down. “I talked to her once. After that incident—you know. I felt so sorry for her that—”

“What incident?” Hunsaker interrupted. It wouldn’t have been his business had everything happened on the ship, but the ship’s problems had spilled into his little resort, and he felt he had a right to know.

She looked at him. “We had a dinner hour on the ship. We all got fed at the same time, and the room wasn’t that big. We got to know each other better than you usually got to know people on passenger ships, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.”

Ilykova nodded, although he kept his head down, still searching the database as he listened.

“Anyway, just after Professor Grove died , we were all on edge, and Agatha started into how we needed someone to take charge, to make sure things wouldn’t get worse, and Mr. Bunting had enough. He told her she was a nosy snobbish old woman who would know how to treat other human beings even if she had special training, and she certainly couldn’t be in charge of anything, and he didn’t believe anything she said about herself and—.” Carmichael shook her head. “I was agreeing with him at first, she was an unpleasant woman, and I would’ve given anything to avoid her as much as possible, but he didn’t stop, and by the end, she looked just devastated.”

Ilykova was looking up now. Hunsaker was surprised as well. He couldn’t quite imagine Kantswinkle looking devastated.

“I waited until everyone left,” Carmichael said, “and told her that we were all on edge and that he had no right to lay into her like that, and she started to cry, which made me very uncomfortable. I walked her to her room, and told her to get some rest, that it would all seem better in the morning, and then I left.”

“Then what?” Hunsaker asked, expecting more to the story.

“Then we found Trista’s body and the fire and we barely made it here,” Carmichael said.

“I got the distinct impression you wanted nothing to do with Ms. Kantswinkle,” Hunsaker said.

Carmichael looked at him in surprise. “I thought I hid that.”

“You avoided her in the lobby, checking in,” Hunsaker said.

Carmichael looked down, sighed. “She was clingy. Halfway through our discussion, I realized she was bombastic because she was lonely and needy and I’d made a huge mistake trying to comfort her. If this had been some kind of normal flight, I wouldn’t have been able to shake her for the rest of the trip.”

“If it had been a normal flight,” Ilykova said, “you wouldn’t have spoken to her in the first place.”

“True enough,” Carmichael said. Then she frowned at him. “Why did you ask about us?”

“I have a theory,” he said.

But he didn’t say any more. And he continued to tap on the pad, which annoyed Hunsaker.

“Are you going to share the theory?” Hunsaker asked.

“I think someone thinks you saw something,” Ilykova said. “Did you?”

Carmichael shrugged and shook her head.

“It would’ve been when you two were alone together.”

She shook her head again. “Nothing.”

He grunted as if he didn’t believe her. He continued to work.

After a long moment, he said softly, “Well, I think I found something.”

* * * *

“What did you find?” Hunsaker asked. Carmichael crowded close. Richard didn’t answer right away. First he made certain no one else could hear. He checked the doors, and looked up the stairwell.

When he came back to the desk, he spoke as softly as he could. He explained his idea—that he search for expertise, not motive. He didn’t discuss how he feared the database would be limited (it was, but it didn’t matter, he’d found enough).

“When I searched for expertise in environmental systems, I got two names. I expected at least one from the crew, but that was wrong.”

“Which names?” Carmichael sounded panicked for the first time since he saw her down here.

“William Bunting and Lysa Lamphere.”

“Bunting,” Hunsaker said. “He was the one who yelled at Agatha Kantswinkle, you said.”

Carmichael nodded.

“But,” Richard said, “whoever killed Agatha and went after you, Susan, had a short window to do so. You had your room assignments already. Did you let anyone in your room?”

“Janet Powell,” Carmichael said. “But I never left her alone and she never went near the controls.”

“Anyone else?”

She shook her head.

“Where were you after we found Agatha’s body?”

“I didn’t leave the room,” Carmichael said.

“Except to buy clothing,” Hunsaker said.

“Yes,” Carmichael said. “I bought clothing. But Bunting couldn’t’ve done it then. He was in the boutique with me.”

She used the word boutique with a touch of sarcasm. Richard frowned for a moment. Bunting had yelled at Agatha Kantswinkle, and made her cry. She wouldn’t have let him near her. But another woman…?

“Did she have any troubles with Lysa?” Richard asked.

Carmichael shrugged. “I have no idea. I’m not even sure they spoke.”

He didn’t want to push her too hard. “Did you see either William Bunting or Lysa Lamphere that night you were alone with Agatha?”

“Lysa,” Carmichael said. “But it was no big deal. She had forgotten something in the dining area. She went past us, looking a bit concerned. It wasn’t important.”

“Past you from where?” he asked.

“I assume she came from her room,” Carmichael said.

“But you were walking Agatha to her room.”

“Yes,” Carmichael said.

“From the dining area.”

“Yes.”

“Which was nowhere near Lysa’s room.”

Carmichael looked at him.

“Her room was in a whole different area of the ship.”

“And the fire started not too far from Agatha’s room,” Carmichael said.

Richard nodded. He felt certain they knew who the killer was now. Lysa Lamphere had killed Agatha and gone after Carmichael because they could tie her to the entire event.

“It all sounds so nice and pretty,” Hunsaker said, “until you remember that Lysa nearly died from inhaling the same toxic air that Agatha died from.”

“Did she?” Richard asked. “She went into the room, made the switch with the environmental controls, maybe even watched Agatha die, and then switched them back. She waited until everything cleared a bit, and then went through her charade. I have a hunch if we search her room, we’ll find some small breathing equipment, something she hid before going back to ‘discover’ Agatha.”

“Why would she do that?” Carmichael asked.

They were all so naïve. Or maybe he wasn’t naïve enough. It seemed obvious to him. Once he had Lysa’s name, he understood how everything happened. And a little bit of why.

“So that no one would ever suspect her. You ruled her out even after I discovered her expertise because she had suffered as well.”

He almost added, any good professional would’ve done that. But he didn’t. Still, he saw the way Hunsaker looked at him. Hunsaker knew that.

“May I have the pad?” Hunsaker asked.

Richard handed him the pad, bracing for the next question, which came with predictable swiftness.

“I don’t suppose you have expertise in environmental systems?” Hunsaker asked.

Richard resisted the urge to smile. “No, I don’t.”

“I will check,” Hunsaker said.

“Do,” Richard said. “But remember what I told you before. I wouldn’t have started the fire. If you want to scuttle a ship, there are better and quicker ways to do it. She didn’t want us all to die. She knew we were close.”

“But why kill five people?” Carmichael asked.

“That’s what I mean to find out,” Richard said.

* * * *

It took a bit of work. Buried deep in all the information was one single tie. To the mathematician. His new job was a promotion, one she didn’t feel he deserved. She had studied under him, and he had refused to grant her a degree, saying she was sloppy. She moved to engineering, and graduated, although not with honors, and not in a way that gave her any currency in any job. She would’ve needed more education for that.

She had boarded that ship with a plan to follow him to Ansary, maybe destroy his career there. Or maybe kill him. But she didn’t.

Trista died because she had seen the murder, and she planned to do something about it. Lysa had never planned for Trista’s body to be discovered. She probably thought the fire would’ve been found sooner. By the time someone had found it, the entire ship went into a panic. Which, if Richard thought about it, meant that her calculations had been off.

Professor Grove, the mathematician had been right about her after all. Her math skills hadn’t been up to the task.

Then Agatha Kantswinkle and Susan Carmichael had seen Lysa in that area, and if there were an investigation, they might’ve mentioned her. She didn’t want to risk it. So she planned the last two murders, and might’ve gotten away with all of it, if Hunsaker hadn’t moved Carmichael out of her room.

What Richard couldn’t figure out was why she killed Remy Demaupin.

“I didn’t,” Lysa snarled. They had tied her up and moved her to the bar, along with all the other passengers. No one wanted to be alone any longer. They all worried that Richard and Hunsaker and Carmichael had caught the wrong person, even though Lysa had made it pretty clear from the moment she got tied up that they hadn’t.

“What do you mean you didn’t kill Remy,” Carmichael said. “We know you did.”

Lysa shook her head. “He killed himself,” she said. “In fact, he inspired me. I figured everyone would look for a connection between him and Professor Grove. Then we would have the emergency and everyone would forget and…”

She lowered her head. Richard watched her, realized he’d met her type before. The type that imagined what they’d do, then did it, and wondered why nothing quite worked the way they’d planned.

“You should’ve just shoved him out of an airlock,” Richard said.

Everyone looked at him. He realized he’d said too much.

He shrugged, pretending a nonchalance he didn’t entirely feel.

“What I mean is that had you done something simple, no one would’ve thought twice about it. All this elaborate stuff was your downfall.”

That still sounded bad. He sounded like one killer giving advice to another. Which, in fact, he was.

Hunsaker crossed his arms, watching Richard, a slight frown on his face. Anne Marie stood in the back of the room, listening. The captain was still at his table, drowning himself in drink. Carmichael kept checking the time, hoping that her father’s ship would get here soon.

Everyone else sat very far away from Lysa, as if her particular brand of insanity was catching.

Richard didn’t stay that far away though. For all her brand of insanity, her elaborate kills, and her mistakes, she was what a murderer should be.

Someone who had a reason to do what she did—not a bloodless reason. A personal reason. An important reason. Something that was, to her, life and death. So she acted, in a life-or-death manner.

And he found that both inspirational and appropriate.

He didn’t ask her any more. Carmichael’s father could take them all in his various ships. Somewhere Lysa would get prosecuted for what she had done. Not that this was a happy ending for anyone.

The captain would probably lose his job. Carmichael was going back to a situation that she clearly didn’t want to be in.

And Richard would have no way to get to Ansary.

Not to mention all the people who had died. Their families would never be the same.

He walked back to Anne Marie Devlin. Pretty woman. Or she would’ve been if she weren’t a depressive and a drunk. She was sober right now, but he could see the tendencies. She was the kind who didn’t want to change because she saw no point in it.

Besides, change was hard. That was becoming clearer to him, each and every day.

* * * *

The ships arrived in fifteen hours, not eighteen, and they took everyone away. Once Hunsaker realized who Carmichael’s father was—he truly was a mucky-muck of high muck who had a lot of mucking money—he made noises about the damage to his resort and how embarrassing it would be if it ever came out that his daughter had been a target.

When that hadn’t moved her father, Hunsaker added that it would also be embarrassing for people to know that his daughter had been fleeing from him when all of this occurred.

Hunsaker got a tidy payout, enough to renovate the entire resort if he felt like it. And he felt like it. He wanted this place as tamper proof as possible. He didn’t ever want to be in this situation again.

Ilykova hadn’t left with the rest. He wasn’t going to testify either, no matter how much everyone pleaded with him. He sat in the bar these days and watched Anne Marie drink, which was a sight to behold. He didn’t seem miserable, but he didn’t seem happy either.

He was waiting for the next ship, for a way out. Although he clearly didn’t know where he was going.

And Hunsaker had been thinking about it. The station was a world unto itself. Technically, anything that happened here was prosecuted in the Commons System, but no prosecution had ever happened.

Hunsaker wasn’t sure what he would’ve done if Ilykova hadn’t been here. Ilykova wasn’t big or burly and he didn’t seem tough. But he had experience.

And he had no qualms about doing what it took to keep the peace.

You should’ve just shoved him out of an airlock.

Hunsaker couldn’t’ve done that to anyone. Ever. But he could pay someone to do it while he looked the other way.

That wouldn’t’ve worked in this circumstance, of course. But it might in future circumstances.

And if Hunsaker had learned anything from this experience, he had learned it was better to be prepared.

If he had been prepared, none of this would’ve happened.

The doors would’ve locked properly, the environmental controls would’ve been up-to-date, and all the rooms would’ve been cleaned.

Woulda coulda shoulda

He wasn’t going to have any regrets. He was going to move forward.

He squared his shoulders and walked to the bar. He paused for a brief jealous moment when he saw how close Ilykova was sitting to Anne Marie. Then he saw the look of disgust on Ilykova’s face, and realized that the man would never be interested in her.

So Hunsaker sat down at their table, and offered Ilykova a job.

No one was surprised when Ilykova said yes.