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The station commander’s pasty forehead is beading sweat, with dark patches under his arms staining his grey uniform, and his eyes are bulging like he’s been in partial vacuum. Edwin’s first impression, as he blinks away the airlock alert flare, is that he looks like something out of the black and white horror movies his mom used to call up from the university archives to watch with him as a kid. The fact that the first thing Cupp says is, “I hear you have a conservatory with non-artificial avian pollinators,” doesn’t help with the bulging thing.
“Detective Cupp,” Edwin says. “This is Station Commander van Osch. I’m Agent Park.” The guy stares at him. “We spoke on the comm,” Edwin adds.
There is a long, unnecessarily awkward pause. “Thank you for coming,” van Osch says finally. He has a weird, wispy voice, which matches his weird, wispy hair. Edwin glances sidelong at Cordelia and catches her very slightly raised eyebrow.
“I hear you have a dead body.”
“Two dead bodies,” Edwin corrects.
She glares at him. “Parhelion symbiotes identify as a single entity.”
“A single entity with two bodies. Which are dead.”
“Agent Park. Detective Cupp. My adjutant will convey you to our chief security officer’s personal quarters.” One of the commander’s bulgy eyes is twitching.
The adjutant is a seven-feet-tall augmented construct with silvery skin and an eyepiece that flickers and rolls independently of the human eye to its right. It seems intentionally upsetting.
“This way,” the adjutant says hollowly. The adjutant walks out of the arrival bay so fast that Edwin would have had to jog to keep up. Cupp doesn’t jog, so neither does Edwin. The adjutant looks back over zir shoulder a few times. Then ze slows down.
“I’m Agent Park,” Edwin says to the adjutant’s back.
“Tell me about the ship,” Cupp says. “What rooms are we passing?”
Edwin’s internal comm pings, and a notification flickers in his top left field of vision that he’s received a data dump flagged urgent. He opens it up automatically. It’s a simple, three-layered map of the station, the kind you’d give to tourists.
He checks the address field. It’s from the adjutant. Cupp isn’t even cc’d. Sure, she’s visibly unaugmented, but, rude.
“Wow,” Edwin says out loud. “Really?”
“What?” says Cupp.
Edwin sighs, and orients himself on the map. “We just passed the visitor’s center. That’s the communal bathhouse. Gym. We’re entering the residential quarter.”
“What’s that?” Cupp nods towards an unmarked door.
“It's not on the map,” Edwin says.
“What map?”
The adjutant stops in zir tracks, and Edwin nearly steps on the back of Cupp’s shoes. Ze turns on them slowly, and gestures at the door. “Maintenance. Irrelevant.”
“We’ll be the judge of that,” Edwin says. Cupp looks at him. “She’ll be the judge of that.”
“Suicide,” says the adjutant. Ze gazes down at them, expressionless, zir optical implant whizzing wildly. When ze doesn’t get a response, ze turns heavily and keeps walking.
“If a Parhelion symbiote commits suicide, is it a murder-suicide or a double suicide?” Edwin mutters, mostly to himself.
“... or neither,” he says, thirty seconds later, when they’re faced with the tableau of two identical humanoids in the most embarrassingly incompetent staged suicide he’s ever seen. The two humanoids are both tall and heavyset, in identical uniforms, with identical face wounds. They’re lying facing each other, one slumped on a couch, the other on the carpet, their faces identically defaced by two high-volume blaster shots at close range. There’s a lot of pink fluid splashed around, mostly in the wrong places. The blasters have been laid neatly next to the right hands of both humanoids. Both weapons are shiny and clean of the spatter that covers every other surface. One of the bodies has its leg out at such a weird angle that it had to have been moved, probably from the couch to the floor.
“Good, you’re here.”
A muscular, stressed-looking woman with hair slicked back in a regulation bun squeezes past the adjutant, shooting an irritated glance at zir when ze doesn’t get out of the way. The room is a respectable size – probably the next biggest on the ship after the captain’s and the diplomatic suite, Edwin would guess – but it feels crowded with the three of them in there, plus the two corpses.
The woman glances quickly between them, and holds out her hand to Cupp. Edwin gives her a point for instinct, and deducts a point for being wrong about who will shake her hand. “Lieutenant Dolan Garrett, deputy chief security officer.” Cupp, who is staring at the undersides of the victim’s shoes, ignores her, and she pivots round to offer her hand to Edwin. He shakes it, mostly out of pity.
“Agent Park. Detective Cupp. Thank you for coming.”
“Who has access to this room?”
Garrett doesn’t miss a beat, Edwin will give her that. “Captain Parry, obviously; both of their entities had an access card, but nobody else had clearance to their personal suite. There’s a master access card to all the suites kept in the security office, I have access to that, as do all the sector supervisors.”
“I’ll need the entry log.”
She opens her mouth, obviously about to protest, then snaps it closed again. “I’ll have it sent to you.”
Cupp waves at Edwin without looking up. “Have it sent to him. I don’t have the implants.”
Edwin looks blandly at Garrett. “We’ll also need the footage from any surveillance devices on this corridor, and any inside the suite.”
“You can wait outside,” Cordelia adds. She’s now investigating the splatter marks on the viz-screen.
“Agent Park,” Garrett grits out. “I am now the acting security chief of this station. My boss has been found dead under suspicious circumstances. I would appreciate if you would extend the courtesy of including me in your investigation.”
“You’re in the Federal Orbital Zone,” Edwin begins, but Cupp raises a hand.
“Ze said it was suicide.”
Garrett looks with such open disgust at the adjutant that Edwin is kind of surprised zir uniform doesn’t catch fire. The adjutant turns wordlessly around and lumbers off.
“You don’t think it was suicide?”
“Give me a break,” Garrett scoffs. “I know you planetsiders think a lot of yourselves, but I can tell a staged suicide when I see one. They weren’t even both right-handed. They were center-aligned.” She points at the body on the couch, “They were left-dominant on that side.”
“How do you tell them apart?” Edwin says, interested.
“Scar,” Cupp says absently. “Left temple of the couch corpse. Who found the body?”
“Computer performed a wellness check when they didn’t respond to their shift alarm,” Garrett says. “It notified me and the commander, and I was the first on the scene.”
“You move anything? Touch anything?”
“I examined the goddamn scene, which is my job, before van Osch called in the fucking Feds. No offense.”
“Some offense,” Edwin says. She shrugs. “If you don’t mind me saying,” he adds, “You don’t seem upset. Or surprised.”
Garrett snorts. “I’d be surprised if they’d killed themselves. The Parry I knew would have taken half the station with him out of spite.” Edwin feels his eyebrows rise, and he pauses in case Cordelia wants to jump in. She doesn’t, so he carries on with his own line.
“Would Computer have a record of who keyed into his room last night?”
“It should,” Garrett says, prickly. Cordelia looks up at last from Couch Corpse’s fingernails, frowning.
“Computer,” Edwin says. “Agent Edwin Park, Federal Orbital System Bureau of Investigation, Access Registry Clearance 482957 dash 003. Can you send me the access records to this room for the last twenty-four -” Cupp shakes her head slightly, “Forty-eight hours, please?”
“Access request declined,” the computer blares. Edwin jumps. Garrett smirks slightly.
“Why is your computer so loud?” Cordelia says. “Jesus.”
“Computer, who has access to surveillance data for this room?” Edwin says.
“Access to all surveillance data for Captain Parry’s personal quarters is restricted to Captain Parry’s personal ocular signature.”
“Huh,” says Cordelia.
“I’ll call someone to override that,” Edwin says, pulling up his interface. “It’ll take time.”
A notification pings on Garrett’s gauntlet. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to go run this station,” she says. “I’ll send someone to take you around the ship. Just tell Computer who you want to talk to.”
“One second,” Cordelia says. She gestures them over to Carpet Corpse, and points to just behind the left ear, a few inches from the ruined mess that Edwin doesn't really want to look at. Garrett doesn't flinch. There are two pinpoint red marks just below the hairline. They look blistered, like burns.
“I have no idea,” says Garrett.
“Last question,” says Cordelia. “Did he like rocks?”
“Rocks?”
Cordelia holds up what looks like a small, black piece of volcanic rock, so rough and matted that the light sinks into it.
“I don’t have time for this,” Garrett says. The door swooshes closed behind her.
“Well,” Cordelia says, “This is weird.”
*
The Amsterdam is a small-ish but wealthy station, with around three hundred residents, mostly in geology and management consulting. It has a school, a daycare, eleven places of worship, four cafeterias, four lounges, two executive lounges, a soft play center, a healthcare center including a dentist, morgue, and maternity ward, a small higher education facility that offers degrees in geological surveying and management consulting, and a rock museum. It also has the aforementioned hydroponics facility and conservatory with natural avian pollinators.
Its security force has around twenty full- and part-time staff, mostly ex-military, all of whom, apparently, hated Captain Parry. After three hours of interviews, Edwin has a number of key terms developing little branched clusters in his autotranscriber, two chunky nodes of which include monster-sadist-bully and reckless-uncaring-malicious. There is also a general consensus that things weren’t this bad a year ago, that Parry had gotten more unpredictable and drank heavily, and that the station commander couldn’t see what was going on under his nose. Several express mild surprise that Parry is a victim rather than a suspect. Several have heard of Cordelia Cupp. None have heard of Edwin.
“Do we even care who murdered this guy?” Edwin says, after the last on-shift officer has left their makeshift interview room. Cordelia is drawing something in one of her analogue notebooks. It is, Edwin notes with satisfaction, the one he gave her for Lunar Yuletide, with the thick, cream, real wood-fiber paper and the green felted cover. She looks at her drawing and frowns at it. It’s a sketch of the position of Carpet Corpse, the one with the leg at a weird angle. The bodies are in the morgue now, awaiting autopsy, in case the guy was poisoned before having his faces blown off, Edwin guesses.
“Ask Dr Chaudhury if those burns could be post-mortem,” Cupp says. She bites her lip in dissatisfaction. Edwin puts in the request with a few twitches of his finger.
“You want to talk to the adjutant again?”
“Why?”
“Ze seemed pretty sure it was suicide.”
Cordelia stares at her drawing. She adds a couple of pen strokes to the splatter marks.
“Fish time?” Edwin says.
She closes her notebook with a snap. “Fish time.”
*
The smell clears a small radius around them, as per usual. They get a few curious glances, but they can talk.
“So, what do you think?”
“I don’t think anything.”
“You always say that.”
“And I always mean it.”
“It’s murder, right?”
“Maybe.”
It’s fourteen hundred station time, and the cafeteria is mostly empty. There’s a couple of guys having coffee a few tables down, each rocking a stroller with one hand; one or two people eating a late lunch, tapping at laptops or scrolling on tablets; a few folks queuing to get food to go.
Cordelia scrapes the inside of the tin to get the last little flakes of sardine. She puts her feet up on an adjoining chair and sighs. Edwin sips his coffee, holding in a smile.
“Give me the run down.”
Edwin already has the notes cued up. “Parry had a quiet day. They spent the day filling out requisition forms in their office. They met with a resident about some graffiti. They were last seen at nineteen hundred station time, when they finished a shift and went to their quarters by way of the mail room. They were seen by the three security officers and Dolan Garrett leaving the security office. At approximately nineteen ten they were seen by the mail room duty officer, where one entity collected a small package that had an intersystem freight stamp and the other stood by the door. The duty officer said,” he checks his notes for the exact words, “‘they seemed preoccupied.’ They were seen by one maintenance worker on the way to their corridor. The people in the adjoining quarters claim they didn't hear or see anything. The AI that runs the surveillance system didn't flag any unusual activity, but we don’t have the actual data because the AI is owned by a third party security company.” Cordelia makes a disgusted noise with which Edwin heartily concurs. “The door logs were keyed exclusively to Parry’s optical implants, which were conveniently destroyed by blaster shot. Or,” he hesitates, “the blaster shots were to mask the destruction or removal of the implants.”
Cordelia flicks an eyebrow at him, which he’ll assume means, I am continually amazed at your acumen, Agent Park.
“There is no evidence that Parry left the room again, and we won’t have a time of death until the autopsy. The ship computer performed a wellness check at oh six-hundred, and then contacted Lieutenant Garrett. Nobody reports having a motive to kill them, but everybody is happy they’re dead. The blasters were theirs, they appear to have been wiped down before his right hands were pressed on them - which in one entity’s case was the wrong hand - and one corpse had been dragged into position.”
He takes a sip of cooling coffee. Cordelia looks expectantly at him. “And there was a weird rock on the floor.”
“And there was a weird rock on the floor,” Edwin concludes, with an inward sigh. If he had his way, they’d be looking into the family. There’s an ex-wife and kid on Mars. But he’s willing to bet Cupp is going to fixate on the rock. She’s got that look.
“So,” Cordelia says. “Where next? The ex-wife on Mars?”
“Really?” Edwin says, startled.
“No.” The corners of Cordelia’s eyes are crinkled, but otherwise, you’d never know she was laughing. “You know we’re going to the rock museum.”
*
“It isn’t actually a museum,” says the young person at the front desk. He has a bald, shaved head, a large beard with beads braided into it, several tattoos peeking out from under his work overall sleeves, and an embroidered patch on his chest which says Hello, Call Me Peregrime (he/they/she). It’s a look. She also has several heavy-duty augments, probably for working in non-atmospheric environments. “It’s a display space of weird shit that various folks working mining stations and surveys have donated over the years.”
“Looks like rocks,” Edwin comments.
“It is mostly rocks, yeah,” he says, a little apologetically.
“Is your name actually Peregrime, or is that a typo?” says Cordelia. She pronounces it like Pe - re - grim.
“It’s Peregrime, like the dirt!” they say brightly. Edwin feels himself lose a few years off his life. “So you’re investigating that security guy’s death, right? Man, that’s so sad.”
“You're the only person who's said that," Cordelia says. “Did you know them?”
“I saw them around, you know, symbiotes are kind of noticeable? And I know they were kind of, um, unpopular. But they were chill about us using the executive lounge after hours for our RPG group.”
“They ever come in here?”
“No, never, at least not while I’ve been working here, which is like, two years? Wow, has it been that long? Yeah, two years.” Peregrime rubs the back of her head. “So do you guys want the tour?”
Edwin is braced to be walked around geological weird shit for the next hour, but Cordelia is uncharacteristically restrained. “Actually, I wondered if you could look at this for me.” She produces the rock from her pocket, pitted and glittering with specks of mica. “Have you ever seen this before?”
“That exact rock, or one like it?”
Edwin considers just lying down on the floor.
"Either."
“It looks like Martian basalt? It’s not rare or valuable, which is mostly what people want to know, but I guess you want to know other stuff, um. It’s pretty common there, people think Mars is all red rock but there’s a lot of this stuff everywhere, anybody working in the mines would be showering this stuff off at the end of the day. I mean, not pieces this big, obviously, but I used to live in New Singapore and you’d be surprised how much of it winds up in drains and stuff. Actually, you know, that’s funny, my friend who works in maintenance said that yesterday he found a whole bunch of this stuff in waste disposal, it basically destroyed the compaction unit.”
Edwin likes to think he’s a pretty graceful and humble guy, and so he’s only annoyed that she’s right about the goddamn rock for as long as it takes them to track down Peregrime’s friend Dragon in maintenance and confirm that, yes, Parry’s unit could have been the source of the compactor-destroying rock load, and yes, the pile of beaten-up rocks - each nearly identical to the one in Cordelia’s pocket - is about the right size and weight to have been the contents of the parcel that Parry picked up from the mail room the previous evening. Edwin puts in an authorized request to the mail distribution server for the package details; the mail officer thinks it had a DHL orbital mail sticker on it, which doesn’t mean much.
“Okay,” Edwin says, annoyed. “So, someone sent Parry a package of rocks. Maybe they liked rocks.”
“Peregrime said they were boring rocks.”
“Maybe they wanted them for…” Edwin racks his brain, but he genuinely can’t think of anything. “A sex thing.”
Cordelia doesn’t even dignify that with a response, for which he’s frankly grateful. He decides to change tack. “I told you we should go and see the ex-wife.”
She huffs. “Yeah, okay. Let’s go to Mars.”
Edwin doesn’t even complain when it turns out she means, right now.
*
The Agency puts Edwin up in a hotel near the New Singapore docks. It has a viewscreen but the sheets aren’t that nice. He’s seen worse. Cupp could stay there on the Agency’s dime but as usual she disappears basically the second they arrive, saying something about a friend and a tomato habitat. Edwin pings his old college roommate on the off-chance that he’s in town, and they have burgers on the fourteenth floor of the new Honda building, watching the streaks of red as the sun sets behind the mining facility, winking on the little hoppers as they land and take off. Edwin has friends too.
Edwin gets up at the totally normal time of six a.m., and over terrible coffee and terrible muffins he finds four messages in his inbox.
5:05 Are you up? Going to get bfast
5:58 Wife says yes to 0900 meeting at her place.
6:07 Change of plans. You go meet wife. Will meet for return shuttle at 1230. Ask about rocks you want a tomato?
The last message has no text, it’s just a photo of fourteen cans of sardines with Cupp’s hand in shot doing a thumbs-up. Edwin puzzles over this and the tomato and eventually decides that she’s found her favorite brand of sardines in a store, and he doesn’t care about the tomato. He goes to meet the wife.
*
The woman who comes to the door of the multi-person shared habitat is two women, and even though he’d spent the previous evening reading her records and the Wikipedia page on Parhelion symbiotes, it still takes him a second. Their skin is a dusty greyish pink, and their eyes look tired. Both of their entities have the same close-cropped hair and are wearing identical metal studs in each ear. “Come in,” they say. It sounds like two voices, but only one of them opens their mouth. “I’m just finishing the dishes, is that okay?”
“Sure, of course,” Edwin says, and one of the entities peels off as they walk down the corridor and turns into what he guesses must be the kitchen. He can hear them doing the dishes from the next room as they talk. Wikipedia says that if one entity within a Parhelion symbiosis is killed, the other typically dies of heart failure within the hour. He wonders how that kind of connection translates to doing dishes.
“Ro is at school,” they say. “I don’t want you bothering them. They haven’t seen Parry in years.”
“Have you told them yet?”
They look down. “No. I’ll tell them this evening. I was hoping I’d be able to tell them what happened. Can you tell me?”
“We don’t know yet.”
They sigh, the kind of big sigh that looks like the end of something. “Okay, what do you want to know?”
It’s all basically confirmatory - exactly what’s in Parry’s record - until they get to the rocks. The entity looks up sharply, and Edwin hears the dish-washing in the other room come to a full stop.
“What kind of rocks?” they say.
*
“It was a death threat,” Edwin says, the second he sees Cordelia at the terminal.
“An execution message,” she agrees, which means she somehow got the same information he did. Damn it. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a tomato. “Here, you’d better eat this before we go through security.”
“Uh,” Edwin says. “Thanks?”
She watches him expectantly. After a moment of wondering whether he can wash the tomato, he gives up, and sinks his teeth into it. It’s tastes like Earth, like sunshine and clean water and real grass under his toes. He has to take a moment with it. She watches him suck the last of the tart, yellowish jellied seeds off his fingers, her eyes soft.
“Thanks, Cordelia.” He’s oddly touched. “That was a really great tomato.”
She smiles. “You’re welcome, Edwin. Hey. Do you want a hug?”
“No,” he says. “Yes.”
She gives him a quick hug. It’s nice.
*
The initial autopsy report comes in while they’re in transit, and Edwin doesn’t have much to do but read it while he picks tomato skin out of his teeth and feels homesick, so that’s what he does.
“That’s weird,” he says out loud, when he comes to the part about the ocular implants.
Cordelia doesn’t say anything, because she hates shuttles and is wearing her eyemask and earplugs, either asleep or trying to be. There are two other passengers, both watching movies on their tablets. Edwin sighs, highlights the relevant sentences, and forwards the document to Cordelia’s tablet. Then he pulls out his laptop and opens the second draft of chapter three. He’s writing a novel. He has interests.
*
“So someone blew off Parry’s second entity's face after that entity had already died of heart failure,” Cordelia says.
“Destroying the ocular implants.”
“And cutting off access to the records of who keyed into his room that night.” Cordelia is pacing around Conference Room D, which the adjutant had walked them to straight from the shuttle bay. There are some bottles of water and a plate of cookies there, which was thoughtful. At least, Edwin assumes they’re for them. He’s been eating them.
Spread out in front of them are printouts of the autopsy report and Parry’s on-ship credit sheet for the past year. It shows repeated, large payments to a Martian gambling syndicate, and irregular, even larger payments in cash, deposited by Parry at various credit points throughout the station, entirely separate from their salary. They’re not gambling winnings; Parry had a regulatory implant, which they'd taken voluntarily five years earlier as part of the plea bargain that kept him out of prison.
“Payoffs?” Edwin says around a cookie, inadvertedly spraying crumbs. Cordelia gives him a look.
“From roleplaying groups wanting to use the executive lounge?”
Edwin rolls his eyes, but he does make sure he’s completely finished his cookie before he opens his mouth. “I don’t know, maybe someone was paying them to look the other way while they smuggled drugs through the station, or something.”
“No, you’d expect regular payments for that.” Cordelia taps her lower lip. She reaches into her pocket.
“No fish in here,” Edwin says automatically.
“I’m hungry!” She starts to lever open the tin, and produces a fork in a ziplock bag.
“It’s a conference room! Other people have to work here after us!”
“They obviously allow food in here, Cookie Monster. You get your food, I get my food.”
“Your food stinks.”
“That’s a matter of opinion.” She gives him a smug look, and forks some fish into her mouth. “So,” she says around a mouthful. “B’a’ail?”
“Bail?” Edwin repeats, incredulous.
She swallows, and glares at him. “Blackmail.”
“Oh. Yeah. Probably.” Dammit. Edwin hates blackmail cases.
*
They do a cursory search of Parry’s office, but since it’s a shared office - he was always sharing it with Garrett, and she hasn’t wasted any time in moving her workstation onto the bigger desk - they don’t expect to find anything, and they don’t. The silent adjutant keys them in to Parry’s quarters, and they split the room between them. Fifteen minutes later, Edwin has found a stash of pornographic flimsies beside the mattress that he doesn’t want to touch which don’t seem to be for anything but jerking off, and Cordelia has found a small amount of weed in a drawer, and an analogue diary in a concealed panel under the floor.
Cordelia keeps an analogue diary, but Cordelia is unaugmented and likes pens. In Edwin’s humble opinion, keeping an analogue diary when you’re as augmented as Parry is the act of a paranoid fuck, probably the same paranoid fuck who used their privileges as security admin to lock their corridor’s data to their ocular implants. Flipping through the diary, it seems immediately clear that this was how they kept track of their side-hustle in secrets. Unfortunately, the notes are all in Hhelisi. Edwin has a simple transliteration program which can deal with the alphabet, which would help in theory except that Parry seems to have assigned all their victims codenames. The last page has one note on it, in a messier scrawl than the rest: the date - the date of his death - and the time “20:00.” Then a word in Hhelisi.
“I can download a translation program for this,” Edwin says. “It’ll take a little time.”
“Okay,” says Cordelia. “You do that. I’m going for a walk.”
*
He finds her in the station’s conservatory. Obviously. The hot, moist air, maintained with a double airlock, has him sweating uncomfortably in his suit before he even spots her. Predictably, she’s staring at one of the ship’s pollinators, and doesn’t acknowledge him until he taps her on the shoulder.
“Hey.”
She swings around violently. “Jesus!”
“Hey, hey!” he raises his hands in automatic defense, ducking back even though she definitely doesn’t have a station-wide weapons permit and probably wouldn’t punch him.
“What the fuck, Edwin!”
“I made plenty of noise walking over here!”
She snorts, and goes back to staring at the pollinator, which doesn’t seem to have been disturbed. It’s tiny and jewel-like, darting from flower to flower, its wings a blur. As ever, Edwin can’t see the fascination.
“It’s a white-necked jacobin,” she murmurs.
“It has a white belly, not a white neck.”
“It isn’t a socialist radical either. Probably.” The bird hovers in the air for a second, looking at them, its black, beady eyes quizzical and totally alien. A shiver runs through Edwin. He never gets used to these things. Give him hydrobees any day. At least they’re cute.
Cordelia is still watching the bird. He gives her a couple of minutes.
“So, the word was crabstick,” Edwin says.
“Huh. That's surprisingly unhelpful.”
“The good news is, Dr Chaudhury found a data storage unit in his arm.” It had taken a while to go through the files, but there was a lot, and cross-referenced with the dates and payment records in the notebook, it was even more. Someone lied on their CV; someone cheated on their husband; someone was hiding debt from their wife; someone had taken a whole bunch of selfies with some kind of root vegetable in their ass. "He was blackmailing a bunch of people. Fourteen or fifteen at least."
"Any name for Crabstick?"
"They're not mentioned anywhere else in the notebook."
“Hm. Anyone else we know?”
“Garrett.”
In Parry’s sickeningly well-organized data storage had been a copy of a Lunar police service internal affairs report. Garrett had been caught taking bribes and dismissed after suspension. Edwin wondered how she’d managed to keep that from whoever the Amsterdam hired to do their employment security checks. Bribed them, most likely.
“Okay,” said Cordelia. “Let's talk to her."
*
Garrett listens to them quietly, then presses a button on her desk, and the window between her office and the main office frosts over.
“Listen,” she says. “I know what this looks like.”
“It looks like you shot your boss,” Cordelia says. Edwin winces internally. He wishes she wouldn’t spring shit like that on armed officers, but Garrett takes it like a champ.
“I didn’t,” Garrett says through her teeth. “He was a total shithead. Just, the worst. But I didn’t kill him, and I don’t know who did. I just paid him. I paid, and I paid, and when he asked for more I told him to give me a fucking raise. He didn’t live any better than the rest of us, you know? I’d have thought he had a mistress, except I don’t know what woman could stand him. I know he wasn’t sending it to his ex.”
“He owed some bad people a lot of money,” says Cordelia.
“Ah.” She nods. “Yeah. That’d do it.”
“Do you know who else he was blackmailing?”
She looks up sharply. “It wasn’t just me?” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Shit.” If she’s acting, she’s good. “No. I didn’t know that. I’d guess - if I had to guess - shit, did he have something on the commander? That would explain how he got this job. I did most of his fucking work.”
Edwin stays totally impassive, like he didn’t just see fifteen photos of Commander van Osch with a weird-shaped potato in his butt.
“I’m guessing you’re going to share what you found with the commander,” Garrett says, looking at her hands.
“The data retrieved from Captain Parry’s implant is currently part of an active investigation,” Edwin says.
Garrett stands up. “Well then. Agent Park. Detective Cupp. The Commander can fire me if and when he likes. But until then, I actually am going to do my fucking job, now that asshole isn’t here to get in my way. Unless you’re going to arrest me?” She looks between them. Edwin shrugs. “If you don’t mind, then, maybe you could get out of my office?”
They almost walk slap into the adjutant. “He’s ready to see us?” says Cordelia. The adjutant rolls his eyes, and turns without a word. Cordelia and Edwin share a look. It’s a look that says, is everyone on this station an asshole? They follow the adjutant.
*
Commander van Osch’s office has an actual antechamber with nice couches and an external viewport, which takes the sting off being made to wait fifteen minutes after being marched over here by the adjutant. Edwin would be madder about it if he didn’t know van Osch must be sweating about those photos. The raw data from the third party security company comes in while they’re waiting. It confirms that Parry keyed someone into his quarters just after twenty-two-hundred ship time. That person left again about thirty minutes later. “Autopsy suggested his time of death was earlier than that,” Edwin adds, when Cordelia doesn’t react to his big news.
Cordelia is looking out of the viewport. In the distance, you can just about see Deimos.
“Dr Chaudhury said, between eight and ten,” Cordelia says absently. “It’s within the window.”
“Maybe the murderer met Parry on his way back from the mail room, came back to their quarters, killed him, and let in their accomplice at twenty-two-hundred. They stage the suicide. Then they leave together.”
Cordelia grunts. Edwin thinks it’s a pretty good theory.
“Did you know that hummingbirds can fly upside down?”
Edwin reflects on this. “Is that relevant to this investigation?”
“No,” Cordelia says. “It’s just cool.”
*
Commander van Osch’s eyes are bigger and sadder now that he knows that Edwin has seen his weird sex photos.
“I was in a terrible position,” he says. Edwin bites the inside of his cheek. “I was helpless.”
“There’s nothing illegal in those photos,” Cordelia says. “Everyone puts things up their butts. You let a blackmailer run loose on your station. He was blackmailing at least fourteen people.”
He puts his head in his hands. “I know. I know. It was a poison.”
“Did you kill him?”
His head snaps up. “I did not.” He hesitates, and for a second looks almost dignified. "In a way, I wish I had had the courage."
*
“Everyone puts things up their butts?” Edwin mutters in the elevator. Cordelia raises an eyebrow as if to say, You disagree? While Edwin does not himself put things up his butt, his sister works in urgent care, and unfortunately he has heard too many stories over dinner at New Year to argue.
He changes the subject. “Van Osch has given us an interview room. I figured we’d start with the blackmail victims, the ones we can identify who were on the station that night. We’re starting with,” he checks his notes, “Ensign Wel Kavikian.”
Cordelia looks resentful. "Jesus, I hate blackmail.”
*
“Am I going to get fired?” says Ensign Wel Kavikian. She’s obviously been crying.
“Captain Parry’s datachip is currently impounded as evidence in a murder investigation,” Edwin repeats, for the fifth time. It’s been a long afternoon. “What happens to the data is outside of our immediate jurisdiction.”
“What happened after you saw Captain Parry leave the security office that evening?” Cordelia says abruptly.
“Uh,” says Ensign Kavikian. She gathers herself with visible effort. “They signed over the shift to Acting Captain Garrett. I mean, she wasn’t Acting Captain Garrett then. Lieutenant Garrett.”
“Right.”
“I was in the office, but, um, I was standing at the side.”
“Trying not to be noticed?” Cordelia says, sounding sympathetic. Wel Kavikian looks at her shoes.
“Yeah. I mostly tried to stay out of their way. But they saw me, and, um.” Her voice disappears for a moment, and her hand steals to a pendant around her neck, which she rubs over and over. Cordelia hands her the kleenex box wordlessly, but Kavikian recovers. “They told me to come with them to the mail room. I walked with them down the corridor and they asked me how my sister was.”
“Was it a friendly question?”
Kavikian laughs hollowly. “They wanted to remind me that I’d said I would borrow money from her so I could pay them. Like I could forget.”
“Did they make an appointment with you?”
She looks up quickly. “No. They just told me to remember that my payment was due on Friday. I said I knew that. Then they said I could go.”
“Where were you then?”
“At the elevator. They got in. I pretended I was going back to the security office but when the doors had closed I waited for the next one.”
“Where did you go then?"
“Back to my quarters,” she mutters, clutching her pendant. They give her a moment. She spent the evening in a study group that didn't get out until midnight, and crying in her quarters isn't a crime.
“Did you know that he had other victims?” Cordelia says at last.
Kavikian shrugs. “I figured he did. It can’t have been just me.”
“Did you ever see or hear anything that made you suspect that he might be blackmailing anyone in particular?”
Edwin glances at Cordelia, but doesn’t cut her off. Kavikian worries at her pendant with her thumbnail. “Um. I don’t know. I don’t think so. Like, a lot of people didn’t get along with him. But he was just kind of mean.”
“Who didn’t get along with him?”
“Lieutenant Ricky, Lieutenant Garrett, Ensign Petal, Freddie - he’s the human resources manager for the security force - I mean honestly it’s more difficult to think of people he did get along with.”
“Who did get along with him?”
“Oh,” she says, caught off guard. “Uh. I think, like, he used to go to the gym with someone in engineering. And once or twice I saw him talking with that rude construct, the commander’s adjutant? But honestly I don’t know. I heard he had an ex-wife.”
Edwin sighs, and checks another off the list.
*
”You probably know that I threatened to kill them,” says Freddie. “I’ll just come right out and say that.”
“Uh, no,” Cordelia says, “We didn’t know that.”
“Well, shit,” says Freddie, and he roars with laughter. He’s a short, fat guy with a five o’clock shadow and a bald patch, whose customer records from a Lunar bordello Parry was obviously threatening to send to his wife. Cordelia blinks at him. “I didn’t do it, but I’d shake the guy - or gal - who did by the hand, and I don’t care who knows it.”
“When did you threaten to kill them?”
“They were real twitchy lately. A few weeks ago, they told me they were raising their rates, and I told them they could go to hell. I was at the end of my rope, and the kids need money for college. I told Miriam about the club and the girls that night. She said I was a goddamn idiot. We’re going to couples therapy. I told Parry the next day we were through. They asked me how I’d feel if they sent the stuff to my older daughter - she’s twenty - and I told them if they ever sent anything to my kids I’d kill them.” He shrugged. “I think a couple of people heard me. But I was through with that goddamn crabstick. Anyhow, I didn’t kill them. I called my wife at seven thirty, we talked for about an hour, we did a crossword together, I watched some of the game, I went to sleep.”
“Good for you,” Cordelia says. “You called them a crabstick?”
“Oh,” Freddie shrugs. “Yeah. I used to call them that. Because they were pink and full of shit. I guess it’s offensive. So sue me.”
“Did anyone else call them that?”
He looks a little sheepish. “It was something my nana used to call Parhelions, but honestly, I never heard it anywhere else. My daughter’s always telling me to cut that shit out.”
“Yeah,” says Cordelia, “You probably should. When was the last time you talked to them?”
For the first time, Freddie looks troubled. “I hadn’t seen them in a couple of weeks. But - and I’m telling you this because you’ll find out anyway, and I’ve learned my lesson, okay? - I got a new policy of total transparency. They emailed me a couple of days before they kicked it. Wednesday. Which was weird, because they never emailed. They said they wanted to talk to me about “that matter”.” Freddie makes air quotes, rolling his eyes. “They said to come to their quarters at eight on Friday. It seemed off. I told Miriam about it. She convinced me not to go. I never replied to the email, and I didn’t go out that night. You can check my keycard records.” He beams, good mood restored. “Lucky for me, huh?”
“Yeah,” Cordelia says. She sits back in her chair in silence, and stares into the distance.
“You can go,” Edwin says, after they’ve both waited for her to speak for a full minute.
“Great,” Freddie says, hauling himself up. “No offense, but I hope you don’t catch them. World’s better without them in it.”
*
“Well, I guess fishstick was a dead end,” Edwin scowls, scrolling through his notes. They’re looking back through the blackmail materials in case there’s anything they’ve missed, and it’s giving him a stomachache. Freddie’s card records check out; unless he somehow altered the Computer’s records, he didn’t leave his room that evening, and his room comm records show the call with his wife. Garrett still seems the best prospect to him, but increasingly he just does not care. He leaves Cordelia flicking through the files on his tablet, and goes to find a bathroom.
When he comes back into the room, he sees what’s on the tablet and immediately recoils. “Jesus, Cupp, could you not?”
She ignores him. “Come and look at this.”
“I don’t want to!”
“Don’t be such a prude. It’s just a butthole.”
“I super don’t want to.”
But he does go closer, grimacing. She points to a greyish blur in the corner of the photograph.
“Look at this one.” She swipes back to the previous photo. “That’s a mirror, right? Above the nightstand?”
Edwin sighs. “Sure, that’s a mirror.”
She swipes right. “Now look at this one.”
“Oh, okay,” Edwin says slowly, as he sees what she’s getting at. With the angle of this photo, the mirror should be reflecting the person taking the photo. The grey blur is the photographer. Probably a shoulder, or an arm. Maybe part of a face.
“Enhance,” Cordelia says loudly.
“I have told you so many times that doesn’t work,” Edwin mutters, pulling up the image on his visor. He runs it through his own low-grade image resolution program a couple of times, on different settings. He took a course. “Okay, try this one.”
They stare at it together. It’s a lower torso and belt. Given the height of the mirror in the previous photograph, the person wearing it would have to be standing on a chair. Or over seven feet tall. “Well, shit,” says Edwin.
*
“This unit has nothing to say,” the adjutant says heavily, zir right eye whizzing. “This unit knows nothing of these photographs.” Edwin notices zir voice for the first time. It’s artificially generated, obviously, but it’s been given a sort of grinding metallic sound that grates on his mind almost as much as the ocular implant. He wonders if the adjutant chose it zirself.
“Photographing your boss’s asshole with his consent isn’t a crime,” Cordelia says. “Murder most definitely is.”
“This unit did not kill Captain Parry,” says the adjutant. “Zir programming prohibits harming humans. Ze is a secretarial model.”
“Did Parry ask you to take those photos?”
“This unit is not required to answer these questions.” The adjutant sits back. The chair is so low that zir legs splay outward like a spider’s. Cordelia looks at zir for a moment.
“Have you ever seen an adjutant crane?” Cordelia says. “They have featherless necks and heads. They eat garbage.”
“This unit uses the name, “Buffer,”” the construct says suddenly.
“Buffer,” Cordelia inclines her head. “How did Parry get these photos?”
Buffer’s ocular implant stills, and slowly revolves to focus on Cordelia. It’s almost more unnerving than when it’s moving. “The commander’s tripod had failed,” ze says. “This unit is not a tripod. And yet, ze was ordered to function as one.”
“That sucks,” says Cordelia. “Your commander’s a creep. Where’d Parry get those photos?”
“This unit gave the photos to Captain Parry,” Buffer says. “This unit does not eat garbage.”
The sheer hatred radiating off the adjutant takes them both aback for a second. Cordelia, as always, recovers fast. “When we first came here, you said it was suicide. Why did you say that?”
Edwin suddenly becomes aware of a notification in his vision field. It’s another email from the adjutant, no text, just an attachment. It takes him a moment to understand what he’s looking at. It’s a copy of a life insurance policy, signed by Parry, with Buffer and Commander van Osch witnessing. It’s dated two weeks ago. Two hundred thousand Martian dollars, with his ex-wife as the beneficiary.
“I don’t get it,” Edwin says aloud. He transfers it to his tablet, and hands it to Cordelia. She stares at it, and puffs out her cheeks.
“Thank you,” she says to Buffer. Buffer nods solemnly, levers zirself up, and shambles out of the room.
*
“I’m beginning to think this station is a toxic working environment,” Edwin says, slightly out of breath.
“No shit,” says Cordelia. She’s set off at a near jog; after a couple of twists and turns, he realizes they’re headed for the security office. Garrett is at the big desk; it looks as though a couple of the ensigns have moved on to the smaller one that used to be hers. She frowns up at them.
“What?”
Cordelia hands over the tablet with the life insurance document on it. Garrett looks at it, and her eyes widen, then her face goes like stone. She nods at the ensigns. “Out.” She looks at Cordelia and Edwin. “What do you want to know?”
“Miriam called you, didn’t she?”
Garrett rubs her hand over her face. “Yeah. She told me what Parry said to Freddie.”
“She was worried Freddie might do something stupid.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Garrett sighed. “I swear, I went to Parry’s quarters just to check on him. Miriam’s had a hard life, she doesn’t deserve this. Neither of them do. Computer opened the door for me when I chimed. Parry must have left a command.”
“Freddie thought something was off.”
She nods. “Parry was dead.
“You thought Freddie had killed them.”
Garrett nods wearily. “Look, I fucking panicked. At first I thought, maybe I could clean this up. I knew Parry had an internal datachip. I started looking for it, then I realized I was in the middle of a crime scene fucking with a corpse, and I started to use my head.”
“So you altered the scene,” Cordelia says slowly.
“I knew they had a ledger,” Garrett said. “I didn’t find it, but I found Freddie’s ID card. It was in Parry’s hand. I put it back in his locker; I don’t think he even missed it. One of the sidearms was already wiped down and in the corpse’s hand. I moved the other body and discharged the blaster into its face. That was messy, but it was already pretty messy in there.
“What did the scene look like before you altered it?”
“One of the entities was hiding under the bed. There were signs of a struggle. It looked like someone had come in, knocked some shit over, shot Parry, and run.”
“And what do you think now?” Cordelia’s voice is quiet and hard.
“It was them, wasn’t it,” Garrett spits out. “That fucker killed themselves and tried to frame Freddie.”
"Wait," says Edwin. "What?"
*
“Fourteen people had a motive to murder Parry,” Cordelia says, as they watch the hummingbird flit from flower to flower. “The life insurance gave Parry a motive to be murdered. It wouldn’t pay out for a suicide.”
“The wife and kid on Mars,” Edwin says, the pieces clicking together slowly in his head.
“The syndicate was leaning on them. The black rocks were the end of the line, but Parry had known for weeks that they were running out of options. They took out that life insurance policy and stole Freddie's ID card. They thought they could get a payout for their family and screw over Freddie at the same time. Maybe they set up that appointment thinking Freddie might make good on his threat, but they had a backup plan. One of the entities had a few minutes after they shot the other before their heart gave out; just enough time to set things up the way they wanted.”
“They could have run,” Edwin says. The hummingbird accelerates backward out of a flower at speed and zips upward.
Cordelia shrugs. “And start over again somewhere else? The syndicate would probably have caught up with them. Parry knew that. Sometimes people get tired of running. Even shitty people.”
“Speaking of running,” Edwin says. Cordelia stands without a word; they have a shuttle to catch.
Later, in the food court of the Mars spaceport on their three-hour layover, Cordelia finishes her fish while Edwin picks at the last of his fries.
“What will the agency do with the blackmail material?” Cordelia asks.
Edwin shrugs. “Technically, some of the files contain evidence of criminal activity, and they would go to the nearest planetary DA’s office. Everything else would sit on the storage unit in the evidence locker until the statute of limitations expires, then it would be incinerated.”
Cordelia looks at him. “That was a lot of subjunctives.”
“Dr Chaudhury accidentally erased the chip.” Edwin looks out of the window.
"Huh." Cordelia looks pleased. After a moment, she leans over and punches him in the shoulder. "You're okay, Edwin." He smiles at her. "How's the novel going?"
Edwin scowls. "I'm really stuck. I think Princess Arithmea needs a friend, like a familiar or something? The agent said it needs more 'whimsy'." Cordelia opens her mouth. "You're going to say a bird. Don't say a bird."
"But it could be a bird."
"Her kingdom is underwater."
"I thought you said it was in a dome."
He sighs. "I changed it. It's just water now. She has gills."
"So she's a mermaid? Cool."
Edwin brightens. "You really think it's cool?"
"I think you're a giant dork, but mermaids are cool. How about a dolphin? That's classic."
"A dolphin could work," Edwin muses. He pulls up the file. "It's probably too big. It needs to be able to carry messages to Princess Rhodeshna through the bars of her cell."
"How about a seahorse?"
"What the hell is a seahorse?"
Cordelia tells Edwin about seahorses. He takes notes. They watch the interplanetary craft take off and land. It isn't a bad way to spend the evening.