Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space (16 page)

“Victor Moss served twelve of his twenty years, got out
for good behavior and is last known living in Chicago. Rebecca Dozier served
her complete sentence of fifteen years and was released. She was considered a
problem inmate, a vicious person: twice she nearly killed other inmates in
fights. Tony Fukuyama—the lunar smuggling ring-leader—was extradited to Japan,
sentenced to twenty-five years and is still serving his time.”

Mike whispered to the silent computer. “How can Tony
Fukuyama be a candidate if he’s in prison?”

The answer appeared on the screen as text. “I’ve found
extensive evidence that he’s managed to resurrect his lunar drug smuggling
operation from his prison cell. His reach may stretch all the way to Huygens
colony. The man is powerful and unscrupulous. Believe me, if he wants someone
to die they generally turn-up dead.”

Mike said, “I don’t know much about that Dozier woman
but I remember Victor Moss. A big noisy man with short bushy red hair. I saw
him in some of the prospector saloons. He was a mean one: always ready to start
a fight over nothing. Everybody knew he was dealing drugs. He used to brag
about it.”

New text scrolled onto the screen. “Any of these three
could be our saboteur, though Rebecca Dozier may have the strongest motivation.
Four Dozier siblings were involved in the Apollo Smuggling and all are dead
except her.”

Mike frowned. “There were only three Doziers.”

“No,” the answer scrolled. “Monica Porter’s maiden name
was Dozier.”

“Tell me about Rebecca.”

“I don’t have a recent picture but this is what she
looked like at the trial and here’s a picture taken back in ‘31.” The two
images appeared side-by-side on the computer’s screen. The first showed a thin
and rather ordinary-looking woman with long dark hair sitting at a defendant’s
table in a courtroom. The second showed essentially the same woman but with
even longer slightly graying hair dressed in a prison uniform standing at an
artist’s easel painting a picture.

Mike rubbed his chin with his fingertips. “She does
look familiar.” He recalled bits and pieces of several minor incidents
involving a pesky dark-haired girl who seemed to follow him everywhere for over
a month.
Was that before the smuggling incident, or after?
“Where did
you get the second image?”

“It’s from a magazine article published in October of
2031. It was the tenth anniversary of the Apollo Smuggling so they did a
whatever-happened-to-them photo spread. She looks peaceful here, almost serene.
Six days after this picture was taken she beat her cell-mate into a coma.”

Mike grimaced slightly. “She sounds like a bad one.”

“The woman is remorseless and vicious. That’s why she
served her entire sentence: she kept getting denied parole.”

“If you were to rank these three as to which is the
most likely saboteur what would you get?”

“Moss would be the least likely. He hasn’t been able to
succeed at much of anything in the last few years and the sabotage of this ship
seems to have been done with a great deal of care and planning. In my opinion,
this is beyond him. Fukuyama would be second. He has the resources and the
competence, and might even have the motivation: not so much to ensure his
current situation as to fulfill some kind of revenge fantasy. But that brings
up the problem with him as saboteur—he has never been the kind of man given to
fantasies; he’s too pragmatic. So the best candidate—” The screen went blank,
then displayed, “I am detecting a coded radio trans—” But that was all.

Mike’s mouth dropped open and his eyes grew wide as he
heard the small soft sound of an explosion muffled by distance and many walls.
Vigorously, he shook the little computer in his hand. “No! Not yet! I’ve still
got questions! Damn, I’ve got lots of questions!”

_____

Inside a vertical hallway, Kim climbed upward. Her
progress was slow, partly because she checked every wrung for the slightest
sign of grease and partly because her helmet lights had faded almost to
nothing—their batteries were going dead.

For an extra margin of safety, she climbed with both
hands which required she carry her helmet by wearing it on her head. Its broken
faceplate was a blessing in that it did not reduce her vision, but was also a
source of endless worry. She was petrified a splinter of glass would fall into
her eye.

Soon she was in total blackness. She climbed on,
checking the safety of each wrung by touch alone. She considered taking the
helmet off and dropping it, but it being so bulky she was not certain she could
remove it with only one hand while hanging on with the other.

Then she heard,
Voices!
, and stopped to listen.

Muffled with distance, she couldn’t make out what they
said, only that there seemed to be several different speakers, at least one of
each sex and that they were somewhere above her.
Must be the crew. Finally,
somebody that can help me!

She started climbing again. The voices grew louder and
clearer. Reaching their deck, she felt around in the dark for a door handle and
eased the door open cautiously.

Aside from the now familiar sunbeams sweeping up and
down through this cargo deck, Kim first noticed a large partially sorted pile
of supplies and then three people: a short fat man, a tall strong man and a
blonde woman dressed in a ridiculously impractical outfit of white shorts and
blouse. All three sat on the ceiling leaning back against a ventilation duct.

Stepping silently out of the vertical hallway, Kim felt
eager to make contact yet suddenly hesitant to announce herself. She didn’t
have to.

The woman spotted her and began screaming as though
someone were stabbing her with a knife, not once but over and over and over
again. The screaming brought the two men scrambling to their feet and startled
Kim so badly she nearly fell backward through the vertical hallway’s open door.

The tall man yelled, “Kim!” and rushed toward her.

Kim reached back and swung the door shut.
No need to
risk a fall
, she thought,
be it accidental or intentional.
Then,
just to be sure, she took two steps toward him and away from the door.

The man grabbed her in a bear hug and squeezed her so
hard she suddenly remembered the exact location of every bruise on her chest
and upper arms, so hard that her feet came up off the ceiling.

“You’re alive!” He kissed her face six times in rapid
succession: cheek, forehead, chin, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera: every kiss
moistening a new spot.

“Yes. Yes, I am,” she said, puzzled. Suspended in his
embrace, she remained passive with shock at his behavior. For some reason she
was not afraid of him. Perhaps because he reminded her a little of the
mysterious man in her romantic dream. “But how do you know my name?”

“What?”

“I said, ‘How do you know my name?’ Have we met?”

“What are you talking about?” He smiled. “Kim, it’s
me.”

She gave him a deeply confused look and tried not to
stare at the cowlick above his right eye.

His smile disappeared. “It’s me! It’s me, Mike!”

“Do I know you?”

“Are you kidding?” But he didn’t sound like he thought
she was kidding; he sounded scared. He eased his hold on her enough that her
feet returned to the ceiling then he reached up and examined the bump on her
forehead. “You’re hurt! Come, sit down. Gideon, help her!”

These people had her sit and treated her injuries as
best they could and offered her cold food. It became clear that, to varying
degrees, all three thought they knew her.

“Are you the ship’s crew?” she asked.

“Well, sort of,” the tall man said. “At this point
we’re all the crew the ship has left.”

“Then I must tell you there’s been a crime,” Kim said.
“A murder.”

“What?” barked the woman.

“I saw a man lying dead at the end of the other
vertical hallway.” She hiked a thumb at the one she had not stepped out of. “I
don’t know who he was, but—”

The woman broke into tears.

“Poor boy,” the fat man said and shook his head slowly.

“Must have been Akio,” said the tall one, nodding.

“Who?” asked Kim.

“Akio Yamaguchi: a computer engineer. Did you see him
fall?”

“No, but I’m sure it was no accident. I found clear
grease smeared across the ladder rungs a few decks down from here. I think it
was a trap. Somebody wanted to kill him. Or at least they wanted to kill
somebody.”

Again, these people surprised Kim. In this case by not
questioning in the least her extraordinary claim that the man’s death was
murder. Instead, they just exchanged frightened glances.

Kim broke the growing silence. “What’s wrong with you
people? What’s going on around here?”

Chapter Twelve

Five days later the little group of four was still
together and still alive. No additional group members had been murdered—in
their sleep or otherwise—and no one had seen any sign of Nikita: not so much as
a strand of red hair.

During those five days, however, the group had, by the
simple act of continuous breathing, corrupted the air inside decks ten, eleven,
twelve and nine—in that order. And they had now been breathing the air in deck
eight for almost twenty-four hours.

Not that the air in their previous decks was unbreathable.
The oxygen content had not been reduced to zero, more like to one-third or
one-fourth. And while the carbon dioxide content was far higher than normal,
its partial pressure had not reached levels sufficient to induce death or even
anesthesia. The corrupted air’s principal drawback was that it had become
aggravating to breathe. Being low on oxygen, one had to inhale either deeply or
rapidly to get the usual amount of benefit, and—even though breathing
heavily—one felt constantly on the verge of being winded. By far, however, the
biggest drawback was that the air smelled so awful that it tasted nasty too.

Deck eight was more or less identical to decks ten,
eleven, twelve and nine. The two most obvious differences were that the
centrifugal force here was stronger, well over one gee, and now that Corvus was
farther along in its flight-path the sunbeams had become nearly ten times
brighter. Instead of alternating between complete darkness and a dim gloom, the
illumination now alternated between complete darkness and being bright enough
to count the hairs on the back of one’s hand.

Four days ago the group had performed a brief memorial
service for Zahid and the captain. Mike had officiated. Little had happened
since, and it now felt as though that memorial had occurred a very long time
ago. Time seemed to have altered itself, to stretch itself out, to run at
glacial speeds. Days felt like weeks. Monotony reined.

“I’ll take two,” Mike said as he dropped two cards
face-down. He and Kim sat cross-legged on the ceiling facing each other playing
poker. The game had to be poker: all they had was a deck of cards and after
five days of play they’d discovered that she couldn’t beat him at cribbage and
he couldn’t beat her at gin.

The game helped take their minds off the impending
doom, but more importantly formed a needed break in the otherwise endless
sessions of running simulations on Mike’s pocketsize.

Gideon sat on the ceiling leaning back against one of
the foam-covered ventilation ducts with his legs stretched out in front of him
crossed at the ankles. He held Mike’s pocketsize in his lap and stared intently
at its surface which displayed the text of a novel.

A large section of soft blue foam insulation was
missing from one of the ventilation ducts, exposing its hard white structural
plastic underneath. The missing foam had been torn into four roughly
equal-sized pieces and could be found under four differently-sized derrieres.

Sleep was now done in strict shifts of six hours per
person. One slept while three remained awake. It was currently Tina’s turn to
sleep but she seemed restless.

She sat beside Gideon with her pea-green travel case
and a small pile of food envelopes forming a barrier between her and him. For
the last few minutes she’d had her knees up and her feet flat on the ceiling
while hugging her bare legs securely to her chest. This squeezed her breasts,
forcing them to bulge round and full at her sides.

She fanned her face with both hands—a useless gesture.
“Is it just me,” she asked, “or is the air in here getting stuffy and hard to
breathe?”

“It’s not just you,” Gideon said without looking up
from his novel. “But we’re starting to run out of decks with comfortable air
that don’t also have a high gee force.”

As sunlight swept through the room, Mike examined the
two cards Kim slid across the ceiling toward him. They were worthless. “In a
few hours,” he said, “we’ll move our remaining supplies down to the hangar in
deck seven.”

“What are the gees down there?” Tina asked.

“Almost two.”

“Wouldn’t the gees be lower in deck thirteen? We
haven’t been there yet.”

“Yes,” Mike said, “but there’s one more pod in the
hangar and it still has electric power and that means it still has life
support.”

“So?” Tina shrugged. “It’s too small. It only seats
two.”

“We can rig a tent to keep the good air in and the bad
air out. It won’t be a perfect barrier but it should work all right. Besides,
there are oxygen tanks in the hanger’s storage lockers; enough oxygen to last
days, maybe weeks.” He waited for someone to point out that solar passage was
only three days away.

“If that’s the case,” Tina said, pushing herself up to
her feet, “then I think we should move now.”

“There’s no rush,” Mike said calmly. “I’ve been timing
our stay on this deck. The air in here will last us a few more hours with no
problem.”

“But if we can breathe better air down there I don’t
see why we should wait.”

“Well, if you really want to,” Mike said, smiling at
his cards, “you can start moving stuff.” He held back a small laugh, knowing
there was no way Tina was going to move anything by herself. During all the
previous moves, she’d barely lifted a finger.

“OK,” she said, and started gathering unopened food
envelopes into a large black plastic bag.

Gideon closed the pocketsize. “If you’re going to begin
moving us the least I can do is help.”

Tina paused from her work just long enough to look
Gideon in the eye as she smiled and touched him on the wrist. “Thank you,” she
said in a sincere and sensual tone.

Mike’s eyebrows—already raised due to Tina spontaneously
volunteering for work—strained to rise even higher. To his knowledge this was a
tone she had never used with Gideon. After a few seconds reflection, however,
he understood.
It’s just part of her game. She’ll use the sexy voice and
show a little cleavage and before Gideon knows what’s going on she’ll have
charmed him into doing all the work she just volunteered to do herself.

But again she surprised him. While Mike and Kim played
cards, Tina gathered just as many bags of supplies as Gideon and carried just
as many to the door of the vertical hallway. The same vertical hallway they’d
all used to move everything to decks ten, eleven, twelve, and nine; the one
with no grease on its rungs and no dead body lying unreachable at its end.

“I bet two hundred dollars,” Kim said as she placed two
squares of toilet paper on the ceiling in front of Mike.

Mike craned his neck to watch Tina thread a rope over a
rung in preparation for lowering the bags to deck seven. When he turned back to
the game, Kim she was glaring at him.

“What?” he asked.

“Will you quit looking at her?”

“I can’t help it. She’s actually working!”

“Are you sure that’s why you’re looking? What happened
to all that stuff you said about you and me being in love?”

“We are! Really!”

Kim stared into Mike’s eyes. She tilted her head to one
side. Her expression remained cold, questioning.

“If we’re not, then why are you mad that I looked at
her?”

“So, you admit you looked at her.”

“And you’re jealous!”

“I am not jealous!”

Mike shook his head in exasperation. “God, I wish you’d
remember.” He sighed deeply. “I miss the way things were.”

With the exception of that first encounter, Kim hadn’t
let Mike touch her since she’d returned from the dead. She wouldn’t horseplay
or even arm-wrestle.

Thinking it might prove to her that they were in love,
he’d shown her the picture on his pocketsize of them kissing. Unimpressed,
she’d pointed out that those can be faked. He’d tried showing her the hundred
or so pictures that people—Larry Palmer and Gideon mostly—had taken of them
together, but she still wasn’t swayed.

Telling her anecdotes of their few months together
hadn’t helped, and trying to tell her what he knew of her life before they met
didn’t work either: a fact he found doubly depressing. Not only did she not
remember her love for him but when everything was said and done he didn’t
really know her very well.
So why do I miss someone I hardly know? And why
does missing her hurt so much?

“I said, ‘I bet two hundred dollars,’” Kim repeated.

Mike counted out five squares of toilet paper and
dropped them in front of her. “I’ll see your two hundred and raise you three.”
The room seemed oddly quiet so he glanced over his shoulder to the vertical
hallway. Gideon and Tina were gone. “Where’d they go?”

“Tina climbed down to deck seven. Gideon tied all three
bags of supplies to the end of the rope and lowered them to her, then climbed
down to join her. By now, I’d guess he’s helping her carry them through deck
seven to the hangar.”

Mike’s face lit up. He leaned forward and looked closely
into Kim’s eyes. In an eagerly hopeful voice he whispered, “You remember deck
seven’s floor plan?”

Kim shook her head. “No, I just figured a vertical
hallway’s door probably doesn’t open directly into a hangar.”

Slouching, all the hope fell from Mike’s face.

Tina stepped out of a vertical hallway door. Her
movements were light and bouncy and possessed a level of energy generally
associated only with happy children at play. “The gravity is very strong down
there,” she said cheerfully, “but the air smells and feels much better.”

“Did you have any trouble getting through the airlock
and into the hangar containing the pod?” Mike asked.

“No, Gideon seems familiar with such things. He’s being
very helpful.” She smiled even brighter. “He’s really a sweet man once you get
to know him.”

Mike was struck by her mood change. She’d spent most of
the last five days either complaining about hardships or jumping at shadows.
Now all of a sudden she looked happy.
She saw the pod! That’s it. She plans
to beguile her way into sitting in one of the pod’s two comfortably padded
seats, breathing the pod’s freshly scrubbed air, being protected from the scary
shifting shadows by the pod’s stainless steel hull. Well, if that’s all it’ll
take to get her to stop whining, fine, good, great! She can have my seat.

“I’m going right back,” she said. “We haven’t finished
moving the supplies into the hangar. I just came up to get another flashlight.”

Wait a minute. She can’t be planning to sit in the
pod. It’s hanging upside-down. Even in a power outage its docking grapples will
keep it secured to the hangar floor. She must think I intend to open the
grapples and let the thing drop to the ceiling.
He smiled.
Sure! Like
that’s gonna’ happen!

Tina walked behind Kim and knelt to pick up a flashlight
that had been standing upright in a roll of toilet paper. Stretching open the
waistband of her white shorts, she tucked the flashlight half-in and half-out
just to the left of her navel like some kind of handle-less pistol. Mike caught
a long glimpse of her dainty white panties before forcing his eyes back to Kim.
“Are you going to see my bet?” he said.

Kim said, “You’re bluffing.”

Walking to the vertical hallway, Tina grabbed a couple
of rungs and started climbing down. Ignoring her just as hard as he could, Mike
said, “You’ll have to match me to find out.”

Kim looked deeply into Mike’s green eyes.

He returned her stare with as emotionless a facial
expression as he could muster.
Trying to read through my poker face?

This staring contest ran for thirty seconds, ending
only when Kim slapped her cards on the ceiling. “I fold.”

“Ha! Never mess with—”

A scream rose from the vertical hallway that stood
every hair on Mike’s body on end. He winced at the sensation.

Both players jumped to their feet but Mike, who’d been
sitting closer to it, reached the vertical hallway first. He grabbed a rung and
began easing himself downward. In the thickening darkness, his hands and the
rungs they grasped disappeared from view. He had a flashlight in his thigh
pocket but didn’t want to stop long enough to fish it out and turn it on.

The gee force increased as he descended.

One of the doors below was half-open. A dim light shone
through it into the vertical hallway. When he reached it, he pushed it open
farther and stepped off a rung into deck seven.

He stood in a hallway, but this one was horizontal: its
walls bore no series of rungs extending from one end to the other, just a few
widely spaced handholds.

Near his feet, someone had left a flashlight lying on
its side. The beam shone upon a white wall and the half-circle of its
illumination filled this portion of the hallway with a soft glow.

The scream had weakened and become an unsteady
whimpering. Its volume rose and fell like the sunbeams in the cargo decks,
though with less regularity.

Mike stepped over the discarded flashlight without
disturbing it. Kim was still in the vertical hallway and would need it to climb
safely into this deck.

He pulled his flashlight out, turned it on and started
down the hall following the whimpers. After twenty feet the hall made a ninety
degree turn to the left and twenty feet after that he came to the door to the
hangar control booth, on his right. It was open.

The door’s lintel formed a little wall two feet high.
Swinging a leg over it, he stepped sideways into the small triangular room. In
the process he bumped into Tina’s back with his shoulder and was rewarded with
another scream, which she spun around to deliver straight into his face.

He grabbed her shoulders. “Tina, it’s me!”

“He’s dead! He’s dead! He’s dead! My God, he’s dead!”
She grabbed Mike in a bear hug and squeezed so hard he felt his ribs creak.
Though her breasts were pressed tightly against his stomach he was too
distracted to notice: partly because the woman was shaking like a paint mixing
machine and rocking as if trying to comfort a crying baby, but mostly because
the top of his head was banging against the unpadded back of the control
booth’s swivel chair which was bolted to the floor directly above him, and it
was doing this banging in prefect synchrony with her shaking.