089: TRUMPS

Lina, Denish and I gather at a small table that had been set up near the laundry room for Arborean Trumps. Denish makes the obligatory joke about me having a natural advantage by being Arborean, Lina deals us twelve cards each while explaining that they have a ‘no murder talk’ rule at the game table, and I sit keenly aware that I’m right between the two biggest suspects for committing the actual knife murder and yet I feel safer than I have since this whole thing began.

“How are you holding up, Aspen?” Denish asks, playing a Ten of Trees that puts me on the back foot right at the start of the game.

“Me? I’m fine. How are you guys holding up?”

“Oh, great!” Denish grins. “We all needed a big, relaxing holiday! No work to do, just sit around and relax and play games, and Sunset brought us extra beer. I bet it’s very busy out there, yes? With so few people doing all the work?”

“We’ve run the ship on less people,” I shrug. “But… yeah, not much work is getting done. Captain Sands has us all focused on forensics.”

“No murder talk,” Lina reminds me.

“Very little else is going on,” I point out.

“What about the Friend? Is it going to be okay?”

“Uh, yeah. I think Celi’s waking it up later. It looks like whatever was happening, the infection or allergic reaction or whatever it was, has cleared up. We don’t know what caused it, so it may or may not come back.”

“Just what this ship needs,’ Denish says. “More medical mysteries.”

“Oh, are we playing Arborean Trumps?” Tinera asks, appearing out of nowhere and plonking herself down between Lina and Denish. “Surely the Arborean has a natural advantage.”

“The Arborean is losing badly,” I grumble, laying down a three, four and five of mushrooms before Lina steals the whole set with a six of beasts.

“Draw better cards,” Lina advises me.

“You dealt them!”

Tinera draws a hand of twelve and steals Lina’s claim with a seven and eight of crystals. “Draw better cards,” she advises Lina.

“You guys aren’t going stir crazy in here or anything?” I ask. “It’s a pretty confined space.”

The three exchange vaguely amused glances.

“You ever go to a Texan prison cell, Aspen?” Denish asks.

“Ah. No.”

“Is much smaller.”

“Texas is better than Luna,” Tinera says.

“At least in Luna you get to go to different – ”

“Have you ever had an oxygen ration, Denish?”

“Oh. That sounds bad.”

“It’s light decades away now. Maybe their government has collapsed since we left.”

“Oh, hey, are we playing Arborean trumps?” Tal asks, wandering over. Ke takes a seat between me and Denish and starts drawing a hand.

“Should we play to second place, then?” Lina asks. “Since Tal will win.”

“Ke might not. Ke came in two rounds late; ke’s at a massive disadvantage.”

“No, I’ll win,” Tal says. “Aspen, did you make Adin cry?”

“No! I mean, I don’t think so? Maybe?”

“Keldin Sands was there,” Tinera says darkly.

“Oh. I’m sure it was his fault, then.”

“We should’ve left that arsehole in chronostasis,” Tinera says darkly.

“We would’ve overheated or asphyxiated by now if we had, probably,” I point out.

“Well we should’ve woken him up and not made him captain. He had no problem giving my job to you; we should’ve done it to him first.”

“I’m really sorry about – ”

“I don’t care about not being the Logistics Officer. Nobody except our glorious Captain and our dear dead psychologist care about the ranking system here. But it’s reasons like this that I don’t trust that guy, and it’s not going to get better. After we find this murderer – ”

“No murder talk!”

“ – after this current vague and nondescript situation resolves, what’s next? He’s been riding our arses since he woke up. What happens when we get to the planet? We’ve got a shipful of convicts to think about, and I don’t think he’s making any plans for their welfare.”

“To be fair,” Tal says, “neither did we. I mean, when we wake everyone up, the guys on top will control everyone with those kill switches and make whatever society they want and we never really came up with a plan to stop that either. Unless you want to murder a bunch of sleeping colonists with the kill codes, or find some way to disable every single convict’s heart implant and stage a bloody and unstable revolution that’ll probably doom the colony through sheer chaos and resource consumption…”

“We’ll think of something. He won’t even try. He sees a convict colony controlled by kill switches as the ideal outcome.”

I open my mouth to reply, although I have no idea what I’m going to say, then close it again as I spot Adin approaching. His eyes are red and his face glum as he flops down next to Lina and silently draws cards. Denish shoots him a look of concern. “Are you – ?”

“I’m fine,” Adin snaps. “Just sick of being interrogated by a self-important Tarandran whose favourite activities are looking down on people and pissing them off. How much longer is this stupid investigation going to take?”

“It’s only been two days,” Tinera points out. “Mine on Luna took weeks.”

“Does nobody respect the no murdertalk rule?” Lina sighs.

“It will be over soon,” Denish says. “Captain Sands will want very much to find who is guilty so he can put the rest of us back to work. His poor soft little Tarandran hands must be aching after having to do so much actual work while we are in here.”

“Less murdertalk, more cards,” Tal says. “It’s your turn. I can’t believe the captain disabled the computer terminal in here so we have to play paper games like barbarians.”

“He disabled it so you wouldn’t be able to single-handedly take over the ship with it or something.”

“Why would I do that? If I wanted to take over the ship, I would’ve done it over a year ago.”

“Well, yeah, but if you’re guilty of this murder, he probably thinks you might defend yourself by –“

“I’m not, though. That sounds like a problem for the murderer. Who isn’t me, so I should be able to play computer games.”

I glance around our little group, playing cards together in this ring that was my home with them for so long. There’s some sort of sharp pain in my heart, or maybe my stomach, and I blink back tears. Apart from the Public Universal Friend being in hospital, this is so much like the old days, when things – well, they weren’t simple; the ship had been falling apart around us and we’d been buried in mysteries we hadn’t understood. But it had been so much simpler than the ship we were on now. And at least one of these people is a murderer, and the rest are suffering for it, and there is no way back to the past any more.

I stand up quickly, dropping a couple of cards. Everyone looks up at me.

“I, uh. I have to.” I have to what? Go? No. I have to do something that’s probably very, very stupid. “I have to tell you guys something.”

They all just look at me, saying nothing. I consider asking them to keep this from the captain, but I have no right to make such demands of them.

“It’s my fault you’re all in here,” I admit. “You, you all know that I was the one to find the bodies, right? Well. This is all my fault.”

That gets a reaction. “What?!” Tinera cries, leaping to her feet, while Denish frowns and asks, “You are the murderer?”

“What? No! No, I didn’t… I’d never… I wouldn’t even be capable of it! No, I just…” I swallow. “I wiped the prints.”

They stare some more.

“You what?” Tinera asks.

“The, the fingerprints. On the murder weapon. I just… I just wanted to protect you all.”

“You wanted to protect the guilty party?” Lina asks, confused.

“I don’t know! I just. I walked in and saw two dead bodies, two crewmates, people we knew and worked with, not dead from failed chronostasis revival or anything but actively slaughtered with a knife and I just, I just knew that none of you could have done it. Even though I knew that one of you absolutely must have. And I just… I just couldn’t help but think that Tarandra has an uncontroversial death penalty and the captain already doesn’t trust or value any of you nearly enough and my friend’s prints were on that knife and they were in danger and I just… it seemed to make sense at the time, okay? But all it’s done is made it really hard to find the murderer, and trapped the rest of you in here with them, and made everything wore for everybody. And now we might never find out who’s guilty, and all of you are stuck in here and… I’m sorry.” I turn to leave, but Tinera lays her bad hand on my arm.

“It probably wouldn’t have made a difference,” she says.

“What do you mean, it wouldn’t have made a difference? If we had’ve had those fingerprints – ”

“Do you know how rare it is to get clean prints off a knife like that, that’s been jostled around and used? They didn’t get prints off the one I was convicted for using. And, it’s pretty likely that the perpetrator would’ve deliberately avoided leaving such evidence. If they’d left prints on the knife, they were sloppy enough to leave other easily found evidence, and they clearly weren’t that sloppy or this investigation would be over already. Anyway, some preparation time for the inevitable fallout is useful. We still don’t know what our dear captain intends to actually do with the guilty parties.”

“He wouldn’t kill anyone,” I mumble. I don’t manage to convince even myself.

“I hope you’re right.”

I glance back at the group. I expected somebody to yell at me for what I did. To be upset that I’d condemned them to being locked up with a murderer and interrogated. They all just look at me blandly. Why aren’t they angry?

“I spied on you,” I tell Lina. “When you and the Friend did the liver transplant. There’s a secret camera in that medbay.”

“I know,” she says.

“You know?”

“Medbays take a lot of cleaning, which is a doctor’s responsibility on a ship like this. We found it right away. It seemed unnecessarily confrontational to bring it up.”

“Captain Sands is spying on us?” Denish asks, furious. “Why?”

I frown. “I only said I was – ”

He waves this away. “You are in charge for a full year and never spy on us. This was Sands’ idea, yes?”

“Yeah. He… was worried that Lina might try something, somehow? Kill Celi during the operation or something?”

“Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know. He said something about your past… I’m not sure why he thinks you’d want to kill a crew member on the operating table, honestly.”

“Because he thinks we’re just a bunch of murderous lunatics,” Adin growls.

“To be fair, at least one of us did commit some murders on this ship,” Tinera says.

“That was after this camera thing,” Adin says. “Doesn’t count.”

I glance between my crewmates. I can’t fathom why they don’t seem to be mad at me. I’d be mad at me.

I head for the medbay to check in on the Public Universal Friend. It should still be asleep, but I want to see with my own eyes that it’s okay.

Celi and Sunset are in the medbay, Celi inspecting Sunset’s hand. “You’re here to see the Friend?” Celi asks, not looking up from ke’s work. “In that bed over there.”

The Friend is covered in a frankly alarming amount of monitoring equipment, but breathing deeply and peacefully. “Is it, um… okay?” I ask.

“Should be. I was about to wake it up, but that process should have my full attention and I got interrupted by this. All that stuff is just so I know immediately if something goes wrong again. Things absolutely should not have gotten to the point of brain swelling last time, and I won’t be letting that happen again. Sunset, I’m just going to confirm on the X-ray before we get started.”

“What happened to you?” I ask Sunset.

“I broke three fingernails!”

“And two fingers,” Celi points out.

“You can fix the fingers. Do you know how long it’ll take the nails to grow back? Glued-on nails just aren’t the same.”

“Your fault for being born with fragile, non-engineered fingernails,” Celi shrugs. “Get better genetics.”

“You get your hand caught in something?” I ask.

“Yeah. The edge of a cabinet.”

“Why did you hit the edge of a cabinet hard enough to break two fingers?”

“I was aiming for Heli. She’s faster at ducking than I thought she would be.”

“You should be careful with that,” Celi says drily. “Captain Busybody might lock you up for instigating violence.”

“Where? The murder suspects are locked in our only extra habitat ring. It’s not like the ship has a brig.”

“Alright, the bones are properly lined up. I’m going to cement them now. You might want to close your eyes.”

The middle of a bone cementing seems like a bad time to dig for details, so I head off to my habitation ring and walk in on an argument.

“She can’t get away with this,” Sam is telling the captain, pacing back and forth as he watches her with arms crossed. “You have to do something.”

“I’m not sure what you expect me to do that I’m not already doing,” Captain Sands responds. “She’s confined for the time being. She’ll keep until after we’ve dealt with the murder investigation, and then I’ll find a way to discipline her.”

“How? How do you deal with something like this? Punishment detail? For this?”

“If you have a better idea, Sam, I would absolutely love to hear it. I am one hundred per cent open to ideas, any ideas, about what to do with Heli Graf – after we’ve dealt with this little murder issue. But for the moment, we’ve got enough on our plates, so she’s just going to have to wait in Rec and Med 1.”

“Is that really the best place – ”

“It’s the only place we have! There are four rings on this ship with basic living facilities like running water – two Habitation rings and two rec and med rings. Medbay 2 is in use by our surviving Friend, so that’s out. We’re all in Habitation Ring 1. So unless you’re suggesting I lock her up with her victim – ”

“You can let Adin out!”

“One of the chief suspects? I know you want him to be innocent, I get that, but we need proof before we can let any of them out. Anyway, I’m not locking Heli up with anybody else, especially not any of the convict crew. People like her go for easy targets, and there’s no guarantee she won’t get her hands all over someone else in there.”

I lose track of the conversation, because I seem to have forgotten how to breathe. It all makes a frightening amount of sense though. I’d been on the lookout for my convict crewmates, keenly aware that they were more vulnerable to violence and exploitation than the rest of us, but somehow the idea that they might be vulnerable to sexual violence had never occurred to me.

I should have. Wherever power imbalances exist, the threat of sexual violence breeds like neorhizomia in an ageing root cluster. All it takes is one arsehole and a situation where they might get away with it, and bam!

Like an opportunistic scientist woken up on a confined spaceship with a gentle, nonconfrontational drug addict who’s currently undergoing severe withdrawal. Bribery with some stolen drugs, some threats and blackmail… no wonder Adin was so pissed. No wonder Tinera and Sunset had hit her. I was a fucking idiot! I’d seen them together, in that storage room; seen Heli putting her filthy hands all over him where they thought they wouldn’t be seen. I’d seen them, and I’d.

I’d waved.

And I’d gone about my business.

Did Adin think I’d known? No wonder he hates me! I can’t believe I –

“Aspen? Are you alright?”

I blink at the captain. He’s watching me with some concern. I put a pause on the self-flagellation and remind myself to hate myself again later.

“Uh, yeah. Fine. I was just thinking, we can actually release the clearly innocent people, right? I mean, the use of drugs means that this was planned, so it can’t possibly have been Tinera who did the stabbing, since she couldn’t have possibly known she wouldn’t be locked up at the time.”

“Good point,” Sam says. “You should release Tal, too. I think we all know that ke couldn’t kill two people like that.”

“You could say the same thing about any of them. Tal is the only one who, by kes own admission, was actually at the scene of the crime.”

“Right,” I say, “but Tinera is definitely – ”

“Tinera is completely fine,” Captain Sands snaps. “I think we can say with full confidence that everyone is safe with the current arrangements, and once we unravel this murder plot then we can address the Heli situation with more options. Now, I believe I am the captain of this vessel, so if everyone is finished second-guessing my decisions…”

“Starting to think the role priority system fucked up with that decision,” Sam mutters, not quite too quiet to hear. The captain looks them up and down, a dangerous look in his eye, and I realise that while Captain Sands’ idolisation of my books might buy me a lot of leeway with him, this isn’t true of the rest of the crew, convict or not.

I step forward to deflect. What’s the worst he can do, make good on his threat to lock me up with my friends? How terrible.

“With the way the prioritisation system is divided up into the four groups, it’s kind of difficult to know what the real numbers even are,” I shrug. “We know he’s higher priority than the other members of the leadership group, but for most of us…”

Captain Sands rounds on me, and Sam takes the opportunity to leave. I brace myself for a dressing-down, but beneath his anger, he looks… confused?

“What four groups?” he asks. “What in the pits are you talking about?”

Did we… not explain Tinera’s theory about the prison roles and the priority system for captaincy? It must have come up, right? I’m sure it’s come up. Maybe we didn’t explain properly?

“Let’s find a computer terminal,” I tell him, “and I’ll show you what I mean.”