094: IDENTITY

I wake up in my own bed, and for a moment it seems blatantly obvious that the recent confusing events were a strange nightmare.

Then I look down, and realise I’m still in my clothes. There are little aches all over my body, and when I move, pain wells up in my right hip, bringing with it the vivid memory of being slammed into the metal frame of a hospital bed by Heli. I don’t even have to look to know how deeply bruised it must be.

The most persistent ache is a particularly sharp pain on my right forearm. I take a look – the flesh has been neatly sliced open and professionally glued shut. It’s not a large incision. A surgery, not an injury.

It’s in the exact spot where my ID chip was injected into my bone.

Okay. Um. Not a dream. I’m in my bed in Habitation Ring 2, injuries treated; the convicts are in charge and it’s logical to assume that they locked us up in our habitation ring. And they took my ID chip out, for… some reason.

That’s… really ominous, actually. I can’t think of any positive reasons to remove someone’s ID chip. I stare at my arm, no more sure of what’s going on than I was before, except this time instead of my friends being at the mercy of someone trying to kill them, I’m at the mercy of said friends who probably think I tried to kill them.

It’s tempting to just stare at the ceiling of my little room until whatever’s going on settles down into a sensible scenario, but I summon the willpower to drag myself out of bed, grit my teeth at the dozen new surprise aches that come with the movement, and head out. Captain Sands – Keldin, I suppose he isn’t the captain any more – sits on an empty flower pot next to an unoccupied room. He has a black eye, and his face is littered with little plasters where Sunset’s nails scratched particularly deep. He eyes me warily.

“Hey,” I say, for lack of anything better to say.

“Hello, Aspen.”

“Are you alright?”

“Do you care?”

“Not particularly. But I don’t think fighting is going to help either of us right now.” I sit on a flowerpot of my own.

Keldin heaves a sigh. “Well, we both appear to be alive. For now.”

“They’re not going to kill us.”

“Your faith in these people is baffling.”

“I’m sorry, but you’re the one who just tried to – ” I cut myself off. Fighting with this vindictive piece of shit isn’t useful right now. “Look. They had us unconscious, right? Long enough to treat our injuries, and perform surgery.” I tap my forearm. “If they wanted us dead, we’d already be dead.”

Keldin nods and gets up. “We should do a head count. Make sure everyone’s here.”

Sunset comes around the corner. Her hand is in a brace; I wonder if she rebroke those fingers attacking Keldin. Whatever happened, if the damage was too messy for bone cement alone, that’s not good news. “Oh,” she says. “There you two are.” She calls over her shoulder. “They’re both here! They look fine!”

“So everyone is here, then?” Keldin asks.

Sunset glares at him a moment, and addresses me instead. “All six of us are here. What do you think they’ll do to us?”

I open my mouth to respond, but we’re interrupted by the sound of an airlock opening. We rush over to see Tinera. She’s still wielding a power tool like a gun, but she’s not pointing it at anybody this time, so. Improvement.

She looks us all over impassively. “Aspen. Come with me, please.”

I go with her.

She leads me into the next ring, Storage Ring 2. As soon as we’re through the airlock and alone, she asks, “Are you alright? Did they hurt you?”

“I’m fine,” I say. “Just bruised up a bit. Never mind me; he tried to kill you! Are you all alright? How did you survive? What’s going on?”

“We were rather hoping that you could tell us what’s going on,” Adin says, walking into view from behind a large crate. Tal strolls behind him. “We didn’t want to leave you in there with them like that, but with no idea who was involved in trying to kill us and what exactly is going on, we just thought it best to grab everyone and try to sort this out after.”

“It was just Keldin,” I say. “By the time the rest of us realised what he was doing, he’d password-locked the door locks and atmospheric command, and there was nothing we could do. We tried to force him physically, but Heli protected him.”

“Makes sense that she’d want us dead,” Adin growls.

I shake my head. “I think she’s just really mercenary. She knew that none of us would ever forgive her crimes, but seemed to think that if she supported Keldin, he’d find her useful and forgive her. Which is stupid, but I guess she was desperate. He was going to lock us up and build a new crew of loyal colonists. Or at least try to. I have no idea how he thought he could pull that off, but he’s always been an overconfident, stubborn fucker. Without him in charge, I don’t think Heli’s a danger to any of you.” I glance at Tinera. “So, I suppose congratulations on your promotion are in order, Captain Li Null?”

“Me?” Tinera laughs. “Are you kidding? I’d drive this ship directly into a star within a week.”

“We’re not within a week’s journey of any stars,” Tal points out.

“Whatever. We voted on a new captain, and I sure as shit didn’t win.”

“Then who…?”

She gestures to Adin, who gives me a shy smile.

“Ah. Captain Klees.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“Too bad, it’s protocol. I don’t suppose any of you guys know what the fuck happened here? A custom alarm went off, and then Keldin’s suddenly trying to kill everyone out of nowhere?”

“Ah, yeah.” Tal grins. “The Heartbreak Screamers. Genius, right?”

“No, they’re terrible. What was that alarm even for?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” He taps his chest. “Heartbreak Screamers? Alarms for kill switches in our hearts? Come on.”

“That alarm went off,” Captain Klees explains, “because somebody tried to send the kill codes to the Public Universal Friend’s heart.”

Well, at least this is proof positive that we had indeed managed to deactivate the kill switches. “Keldin wanted to murder the Friend? Why?”

“Probably because it knew about the murders,” the captain shrugs. “My guess is, he thought he could discreetly kill it while it was on its way to our habitation ring and make it look like its heart had failed as a result of its mysterious medical condition. But when that didn’t work and the alarm went off, he panicked. The Friend ran straight to us, and it was a couple of rings away by that point, it’s not like he could’ve stopped it. So he went into damage control mode. Would be my guess. Locked it in with us and decided to wipe the slate clean. Probably planned to pass it off as a deadly computer glitch, but you guys caught him and he had to scramble for an excuse.”

I frown. Trying to kill one person for frivolous cover-up reasons, triggering an alarm, then trying to cover up that crime by killing a whole bunch of people you can make a justifiable excuse for? That’s fucked up. “What information could our Friend have that could possibly make him try to kill it? If you tell me that Keldin was somehow the mastermind behind stabbing Renn and the other Friend then I – ”

“Oh, no! Keldin hasn’t tried to hurt anyone up until this thing, so far as I know. The one who killed Renn is the Public Universal Friend.”

“That… can’t be right. The Friend didn’t even know that the victims were drugged, how – ?”

“Not that Friend,” Tinera says. “The dead one.”

“The… what?”

“Apparently,” Tinera says, “our Public Universal Friend, the living one, was approached by the new Friend, the dead one, who requested a fatal dose of something that could kill quietly. Now, I’d think that when someone comes up to you like ‘hey give me a suicidal dose of poison’, a responsible doctor would refer the patient to a psychologist, but you know what Friends are like. Our Friend apparently thought that this was a reasonable request and just handed over its favourite killing drug.” She wrinkles her nose. “See, this is why giving yourself brain damage to alter your own behaviour is a terrible idea. Anyway, our Friend clearly thought that the dead Friend intended to commit suicide. There’s no way it would’ve supplied the drugs to kill someone else. And the other Friend apparently wasn’t aware that a ‘fatal dose’ for a teeny tiny person is quite different to a ‘fatal dose’ for someone really tall like Renn. So…”

“The Friend tried to kill Renn by poisoning his wine while helping him do the translations,” I say quietly, putting the pieces together. “But the drugs that could kill the Friend aren’t enough to kill Renn. And Renn must’ve been a better psychologist than the Friend was an actor, because at some point he caught on and slipped the Friend the poison, too. Probably mixed together the wine in their glasses or something, I don’t know. The Friend finished the job with a knife, but as it fled the scene, Renn must’ve grabbed the knife and…”

“He was dying,” Captain Klees says. “They say that in moments of desperation, people sometimes show surprising strength. It was an astoundingly lucky shot, or unlucky shot, you might say; had he missed the heart by just a little, the Friend probably would have lived. Knife plugging the wound and all that. But heart muscles, of course, move, it bled into its lungs, and collapsed just before reaching the airlock. The collapse jarred the knife, and…” he shrugs.

“So no blood trail,” I muse. “It was stabbed at Renn’s computer terminal, not near the door. And Keldin was staking everything on finding this murderer. He’d locked all of you up and justified so many rash decisions with the investigation, and everyone was unhappy with it, and he just needed to be able to prove that Lina did it and execute her. So when the Friend told him, and then headed off to tell all of you…”

“Using the kill codes to let it die of a ‘heart attack’ due to its mysterious illness made sense,” Captain Klees finishes, nodding. “Get that out of the way with no reason to suspect it was murder, convict and execute Lina with everyone else probably believing she was guilty, pull things back to normal. Until the Friend didn’t die, and Tal’s alarm went off, and the Friend reached our ring, and from that point Tal and everyone in our ring would know that he’d just tried to kill two people to frame one of them for murder.”

“So he panicked,” I say quietly. “and apparently decided that the best way to try to save his own skin was mass murder under the guise of justice. What a rot. I can’t believe any of use ever trusted him in any capacity.” I look down at my own hands. My gaze catches on the glued skin on my forearm. “Why take our ID chips out, though?”

“Oh, that was my idea,” Tal chimes in. “It’s just to lock the doors so none of you guys can get out of HR1 without us. Sands’ door locking method was stupid; he had me show him how to make the airlocks lock if Tinera gets too close to them, to keep her in HR2, right? Then just copied the same thing for the rest of us. But you know how the AI determines where you are?” He taps a small bandage on his forearm, then winces.

“You fooled the lock by removing your ID chips,” I say.

“Yep,” Tinera says. “We had some repair tools in there from fixing things up while everyone was getting ready to change rings. When it was clear that Keldin was trying to kill us, the doctors just cut our chips out and we walked out.”

“Obviously,” Tal says, “we weren’t going to let Sands fool the locks so easily, so we did the opposite. We put our chips back in and coded the HR1 locks the other way, so they’re locked by default and only open if one of us is nearby. It means that in theory someone could go through the door by taking one of us hostage, but other than that it – ” Ke stops talking, staring at my arm.

“What?” I ask. “What’s wrong?”

Ke glances at kes own arm, then back to mine. “N-nothing. I just… wow. I think I’m very stupid. Can it really be that easy?”