091: DURESS

“Heli has been disciplined,” Captain Sands informs Adin in our makeshift interrogation room. “And after we’ve solved this murder, I’ll be able to deal with her more thoroughly.”

“What do you want, Keldin?”

“Just to clear up some final details. Heli Graf provided you with neurostimulators, yes?”

“Yes, you already know that.”

“But she did not provide you with sedatives to kill Renn and the Friend?”

“Of course not! What’s the point of this conversation?”

“Just clearing up some details. Now, when was the first time that Heli – ?”

“Okay, we’re done here.” Adin stands up and goes for the door. Captain Sands (unwisely, in my opinion) stands in front of it.

“Please, Mr Klees, just a few more questions.”

“No. We’re done with this. Do you really think I’m capable of killing two crewmates with a knife? Go ahead, then. Hold whatever joke of a fucking trial you intend to drag me through and do whatever you want. I’m done playing along with your stupid, blind, ‘everyone do what I say while I root out the Big Bad Criminal’ ego game.”

“We know you didn’t do it, Adin,” I say gently, earning a venomous glare from Captain Sands. “What?” I continue. “We do know that. Did you expect me to lie to him?”

“Then what’s the point of this?” Adin snaps.

“The point of this, Mr Klees,” Captain Sands says, “is that two of your crewmates have been murdered. You didn’t see the bodies, so perhaps you don’t have the full impact of what happened here. One of the people in this ring took your favourite kitchen knife and slaughtered two other people with it, people we are supposed to be working closely with for the next five years in order to safely get our nearly four-thousand-strong colony to their destination, and so far as we can surmise it seemed to have been done over an asinine political disagreement. There was blood everywhere, Adin; we couldn’t… just stepping around the… anyway. Someone in this ring did that, do you understand? And they might do it again. They might do it to you, or me, or anyone else on this crew, and the point of this, Mr Klees, is that it’s my job to keep everyone on this crew and in those chronostasis rings as safe as I possibly can. And there is simply no way that you lot have spent days together in this high-stress aftermath and don’t know more than you’re saying. Who are you protecting? I understand that these people are your friends, but the gravity of this crime – ”

“I’m not protecting anyone! I don’t know who did it; I know a lot less than you do!”

I look between the two, trying to decide whether I should speak up. What’s going on? We’re near-certain who must have done it, and it’s not Adin; why antagonise Adin like this? Why make it look like we have no suspects?

Adin makes for the door, and Captain Sands steps out of his way. But as he’s about to open it, Captain Sands asks, “Is the murderer bribing you?”

Adin pauses. “What?”

“To conceal their identity. I understand that your addiction makes you easy to buy; Heli – ”

Adin wheels to face Captain Sands, and I shake off my own stunned stupor at the captain’s fucking audacity in time to step between them. Not to protect Sands (because what the fuck, Captain?), but because I know he’ll defend himself if Adin hits him, and I’m pretty sure that Adin would lose that fight. The last thing we need right now is two more people in the medbay.

But what the fuck, Captain?

But Adin doesn’t try to hit Captain Sands. He just glares up at him, fists balled tightly at his sides. “You really are fucking insufferable, you know that? Has it ever occurred to you, Almighty Captain, that perhaps your narrow, sanitised, perfect little Tarandran life might not encompass the totality of human experience, and that maybe other people might sometimes make the best choices they can in their situation, and those choices may, from your little life, look distasteful to you?”

Captain Sands crosses his arms. “Please, elaborate on the good choices you made that left you a drug addict with a life sentence in a penal colony light years further away from Earth than humankind has ever gone before.”

“God, you’re worse than Tinera. What kind of person do you think gets addicted to neurostimulators, Keldin? Do you think some street rat just wakes up one morning and says, ‘I’m going to make a bad life choice today’? They don’t. Some people, you might not know from your perfect fucking life, are homeless. And Texan summers get very hot and Texan winters get very cold, and people will literally freeze or cook to death on the streets every damned year. And do you know what class of drugs offers moderate protection against the effects of extreme weather? Neurostimulators! And some people aren’t homeless, but they’re going to be if they don’t make rent in their illegal slum that’s four times the legal rent limit and technically unfit for human habitation by Texan building codes but nobody dares report it because then it’ll be shut down and they’ll have nowhere to live at all, and their pay at the local factory just went down and they have a sick mother who’d die on the streets so the only thing they can do is pick up seventeen-hour straight work shifts every day. The human body can’t tolerate seventeen hours of labour a day, Keldin! But do you know what can make it tolerate seventeen hours a day without passing out for months, even a couple of years if necessary, to get through a rough spot? Neurostimulators! And they’re certainly a lot cheaper than the hours of work that’d be lost without them! And some people, my dear wise and all-knowing captain, aren’t homeless or in danger of homelessness yet, but they are seventeen years old and there are no local jobs and their family is living paycheck to paycheck and they have no savings to move anywhere else, and their only way to a life that isn’t a slow grind down to poverty is to excel academically and get a scholarship to somewhere good, but they go to school full time and then work four hours each night to help pay the family bills, so there’s no time or energy to actually study, but do you know what can help such a person study and try for that scholarship? You’ll never guess! And some people, you smug elitist prick, are mentally ill, and lack the fixed address or the citizenship or the money or simply the time to go through the mental health system for a proper diagnosis and prescription, or they did go through and got rejected because their doctor was a fucking idiot, and neurostimulators are really bad for the schitzophrenic brain long-term but sometimes you just need to quell the symptoms for one fucking night, and then a second fucking night, and your options are limited. Or sometimes – ”

“And what good choice leads to a distributor becoming addicted?”

“Oh, I don’t know! Such a fucking mystery! Maybe, if said distributor is also the manufacturer, and neurostim manufacturing as a labour-intensive process, and he’s trying to survive on razor-thin margins on top of mountains of bribable lawmen and local gangs who’ll throw him in jail or the gutter the moment he slows down and can’t afford them, and he has a client list ten kilometres long of desperate people taking his product to fucking survive, he might need to work absurdly long days just to survive! And do you know what makes doing that possible? Oh, you’ll never fucking guess! Now, I have a question for you, Mr High and Mighty, oh-so-pure-of-body, but happy enough to run off into the depths of space to help run a fucking penal colony. What do you think the legitimate medical uses of neurostimulators are?”

“If you’re going to try to convince me that your occupation was some kind of medical – ”

“Not the point I’m making. What are the legitimate medical uses?”

“In this day and age? None. There’s no reason for your drug of choice to exist except to treat the symptoms of its own abuse. Everything else it can do can be done better and more responsibly by proper prescription drugs. The entire world would be better off without it, and without people making it.”

“Fascinating answer! Leads to another very interesting question, though, doesn’t it? How was our Friend able to prescribe it to me for my nerve issues?”

“Because said Friend is a soft touch who apparently prefers addicted crewmates to – ”

“I didn’t ask why. I asked how. Neurostimulators are a lot cheaper and easier to produce than the modern drugs that treat the same medical conditions, but as you said, those modern drugs are safer and less addictive. So why did the medical stores even have neurostimulators to give me? I looked it up, and we have a frankly absurd stock of neurostimulators on board! Enough to treat all four thousand convicts if they all had neurostimulator-based nerve damage, and they certainly don’t! Even if we all did, I doubt anyone would be interested in treating it – they certainly didn’t care to in prison! So why stock neurostimulators on the ship?” Adin glances at my bloodless face. “Oh, I think your second-in-command has figured it out, captain.”

I nod. There’s only one reason to stock a whole bunch of neurostimulators instead of proper medical treatments: if you weren’t intending to use them for medical treatment. “It’s probably because setting up the colony on Hylara will require a lot of hard physical labour,” I say quietly. “And this is a convict ship.”

“Exactly! The prize goes to Doctor Greaves!”

Captain Sands shakes his head. “They… they wouldn’t…”

“They put kill switches in our hearts, captain! They came into our cells and they coerced us to ‘volunteer’ for this fucking ship, and they put implants in our hearts to kill us if we got out of line. I had seven years left on my sentence, did you know that? Seven years. Already a long-overblown sentence, but I could do it, I was going to survive and get out and see my fucking daughter again, until I was subtly but very clearly informed that I certainly wouldn’t be making it to the end of my sentence so hey, maybe I should sign their stupid papers and make my own life a whole lot longer than seven years and serve humanity doing it. And you think they’d shy away from using performance-enhancing drugs? Really? You are so fucking naive. Next time you want to come at me all high and mighty, maybe reflect on this system that you decided to be a part of. If you think my addiction is such a problem, maybe you should reflect on on what they plan to do, presumably nonconsentually, to eighty per cent of the colonists that you like to pretend to care about.”

He storms off. Captain Sands and I stare at the door for a while.

“What,” I eventually say, “the fuck was that?”

“He did get rather agita – ”

“Not him! You! Did you just drag Adin in here to, what, bully him? We know he’s innocent, we know Lina’s guilty, so why play dumb? And that stuff about Heli? Really?”

“That may have been going too far,” Captain Sands concedes.

“Oh, you think? Implying that what happened was his fault, letting her buy him off, because he’s a drug addict? You think that might’ve been going a bit too far? I know you don’t believe that, I know  you know that Heli’s actions were fucking evil here. So why make him think otherwise?”

Captain Sands shrugs. “Well, it was effective.”

“Effective at what? Making him hate you? You do realise that you have to work with these people for years yet, right?”

“He’ll forgive me.”

“No, he won’t. I fucking wouldn’t.”

“Adin’s a good person. It’s very easy to crawl back into the good graces of a good person.” His rock solid confidence shakes me for a second, and I can’t help but remember that Tarandra is a very political sort of nation, and that Captain Sands is unusually charismatic even for a Tarandran, and that whoever these people worried about Antarctica’s mysterious project are, they specifically approached him and paid him a lot of money to act as their secret agent. I wonder if he’s been entirely honest about his past.

Still, there are limits to the power of charisma. “You’re not half as smart as you think you are,” I tell him.

He shrugs again. “My job isn’t to be smart. It’s to keep this ship running. And I’m not burning any bridges that can’t be repaired once we’ve dealt with the all-important task of the murderer on our ship murdering crew members. Why am I the only person who seems to think this is important?”

“Should I go get Lina, then?”

“Not yet. Adin said I’m ‘worse than Tinera’ – is there friction there?”

I shrug. “They used to fight about their past crimes sometimes.”

“And yet she’s the one who hit Heli on his behalf. So she’s protective of him?”

“I think everyone is, a bit. Why?”

“Alright. Could you get me… let’s go with Denish. We’ll let Adin calm down before we talk to Tinera.”

“He wouldn’t be riled up in the first place if you didn’t – oh. Was that the point of all this? You really were just bullying him?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes you fucking do. You’re trying to turn them against each other, somehow. I don’t see how making him pissed at you would… ah. You’re trying to turn them against Lina, and you’re happy to use yourself as fuel for that. This is why you won’t release Tinera even though she can’t be guilty, isn’t it? You’re hoping that if you make this investigation awful enough, they’ll turn Lina in. You’re hoping that between them, their testimonies will be strong enough to convince the rest of the crew if you can stir them up into ganging up on the guilty one.”

“We certainly can’t have them continue to protect her. And I don’t buy that they don’t know anything.”

“And if they really don’t know anything?”

“Oh, I’m sure by the end of today they’ll know something.”

I narrow my eyes. “You’re trying to encourage them to lie about what they know. Falsify evidence.”

“I’m trying to encourage them to give me information. I have no way of verifying that information, but we already agreed on this: Lina is guilty. And it’s not safe to proceed without enough evidence to convince everyone else of that, too.”

“And making Adin hate you is going to turn him on Lina how, exactly?”

“Not him. He was in the wrong ring at the time of the murder; his testimony isn’t nearly as valuable as Tinera and Denish’s, both of whom want to protect him. Go and get Denish for me, please.”

“No.” I cross my arms. “No, I’m not getting involved in this bullshit.”

“That’s fair. Then fetch Sam for me. I’ll continue the interrogations with them.”

I bark a laugh. “If you think for one moment that Sam would stand for – ”

The door opens. Celi peeks kes head around it. “Um. Am I interrupting something?”

“Nothing important,” Captain Sands says. “What can we do for you?”

“I’ve just successfully revived the Friend. It wants to talk to you, Captain. Alone. It says that it has critical information about the murders.”