086: CONFESSION

We head for our temporary interrogation room. The Friend collapses onto the bed and puts its head in its hands.

“I’m going to be up-front with you, Friend,” Sands says. “You don’t look to be in a physical state to have killed anyone. Were you working alone?”

“Yes.”

“So you killed two people and don’t have a physical mark on you, but you can barely walk.”

“It was a surge of adrenaline. It happens.”

“Hmm. Alright, walk us through it, then.”

“This Friend had a psychologist appointment with Dr Renn Sunn earlier in the day. From casual conversation, it knew that he’d be skipping Movie Night to work more on the translations. It figured he’d be alone. So it waited until Celi did kes final checks before Movie Night, then stole an adrenaline shot and a kitchen knife and waited. When it figured it was about time, this Friend dosed itself with adrenaline to compensate for this nerve problem and headed out to the unused Network and Engineering ring, where it figured he’d be. It was right, but he had company.”

“Then what?”

“Well, it was hopped up on adrenaline at the time, and it wasn’t going to get a better shot. The other Friend left, and this Friend leapt into action… but the other Friend returned before it had finished. The other Friend attacked, and this Friend had no choice but to defend itself. It was easier than expected; the other Friend was so small. The adrenaline wore off and this Friend had just about collapsed, so it returned to the medbay with the intention of confessing when it woke up.”

Captain Sands and I exchange a glance.

“And at what point,” Sands says, “did you drug Dr Sunn with antidrenomate?”

I’m looking for it, and I see it. The expression of utter confusion that flashes across the Friend’s face.

“R-right. Yes, sorry, this Friend forgot that part.” It rubs its temples. “It drugged him in advance, to make the kill easier. It drugged his food.”

“And that’s all you have to say?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting. So when did you drug the other Friend?”

“Um. Well…”

“Why drug the other Friend, if it wasn’t supposed to be there? And while we’re on the topic, why not fatally poison Dr Sunn? It is your usual method of operation, isn’t it? A knife fight seems unnecessarily risky for you. Especially since you claim the other Friend attacked you, but I don’t see any bruises or scratches, despite your current lack of physical coordination.”

The Friend doesn’t react. I don’t think it’s listening. It’s staring at the wall, apparently deep in thought.

“Friend?” Sands asks.

“How much antidrenamate?”

“Celi says it was enough to make them sleepy but not enough to kill. Why?”

“Captain, what would you say if someone you trust – argh!” the Friend doubled over, clutching at its skull, its breathing ragged.

“Friend?” I ask, stepping closer. I put a hand on its shoulder. It doesn’t respond. “Friend?”

The captain pulls one of its eyelids back and shines a light into its eye. No response.

“Get Celi,” he tells me, and I run off.

Celi’s not far away, and getting the barely-conscious Friend back to the medbay is a simple affair. We watch Celi and Heli wheel the stretcher away.

“That was the most pathetic attempt at a false confession I’ve ever seen,” Captain Sands remarks.

“Have you seen many?”

“Well, you know. In movies.”

“Those are scripted. The Friend’s sick and working on limited information. It was doing its best with what it had.”

“Why falsely confess, though? I understand that it’d rather put itself in danger than somebody else, but surely it understands that letting a murderer run around undiscovered is far more dangerous to humanity than having them brought to justice.”

“I suppose that depends on your definition of justice,” I say neutrally. “I wonder what it wanted to tell us about antidrenamate.”

“It was probably wondering why the murderer used a knife at all if they could access the drug,” the captain shrugs. “We can find out when it wakes up. Let’s interview Lina so we can all go to bed.”

Lina doesn’t have anything interesting to add to the case. I don’t expect her to; she’s one of the least likely suspects. And then I go to bed.

A couple of hours later, I wake up in a cold sweat, trying to remember what I’d been dreaming about. I’d been leaning over a body, carefully wiping the fingerprints off the knife in its back, which was hard to do with the hand in the way, still holding it. Whose hand had it been? The Public Universal Friend’s, I think, the living one, who’d once been so upset with me for sacrificing other lives to save Denish for the feeble reason that he was a crewmate, someone who would soon become a friend. Friends don’t have friends; they’re incapable of such weakness, and would have no problem killing each other or the ship’s psychologist if they deemed it necessary. How sick was the Friend, really? Could its confession have been a double bluff?

No. It wasn’t that good an actor, and it certainly wouldn’t let a crewmate take the fall for its crimes. I don’t think the hand in my dream was the Friend’s, anyway; it was much darker. It might’ve been Tinera’s. Tinera, who regretted nothing and was sharp as a blackberry thorn, someone who could kill and lie about it without betraying a hint of guilt, because she made it a policy to never feel any. She’d been locked in the ring for all she knew, but one thing that Tinera was exceptionally good at was coordinating teams, and this had probably been an operation of two or more people, anyway. Tal would definitely be able to bypass the locks for her. Tal, who had been in the ring at the right time… maybe it had been kes hand on the knife in my dream? Ke might have done the deed kesself, or been there to confirm that the targets were there and unlock the doors for Tinera… either way, ke had been present, and had just coincidentally run into the exact person who was most suspicious, and thrown him under the bus.

Although, Adin was a very, very strong suspect. The strongest. Between his presence outside the ring, his knife being used, and dosing up on neurostimulants… if he was already breaking into the medicines for neurostims, maybe he grabbed the anaesthetic at the same time. He’d fetched wine for his friends, maybe he’d fetched wine for Renn and the Friend too, and poisoned it then. It could have been his hand on the knife, in my dream?

I think the hand was bigger, though, with a strong, firm grip. Like Denish. Anyone else involved would be complicated; Denish was simple. He was strong enough to put the knife through the Friend’s heart, strong enough to easily take on both the Friend and Renn without getting injured, especially if they were drugged. If he was heading out to commit murder, he could’ve avoided running into Adin or Tal by using airlocks that we didn’t tend to use, moving along the less used side of the rings. Denish, the gentle giant who’d once grinned at me and said, relieved, that he was so happy the crew wouldn’t have to kill or dismember me in self defence. Looking at the whole setup of this colony, with the convict labour and the kill switches in their hearts, it was clear who would be at risk if Lyson projects took off. Self defence is self defence.

But would Denish bother with drugs, though? Perhaps the hand on the knife in my dream was Lina’s. I still don’t know what crimes Lina committed on Earth, but Captain Sands seems to think they were bad. Lina, a doctor, would be more likely to sneak someone an anaesthetic than Denish would. If the Friend had done such a thing, it would probably have just killed them with the drug like it apparently did to its Earthly victims, but Lina had no such history and might not think that way.

I try to remember what the fingers had looked like as I desperately tried to get under them to clean their prints from the knife. Long? Short? Thick? Thin? Pale? Dark? Whose hand had it been?

Wait. No. Now I remember. I’d been wondering this in the dream, too, scrubbing away. It had seemed to keep shifting under my eyes, until I finally recognised the hand.

It had been mine.

It was the body on the floor that was hard to identify. It might’ve been Lina, or Denish, or Adin or Tal, or Tinera, or our doctor Friend. I hadn’t been able to tell, before waking up. All I knew for sure was that I was stabbing a friend in the back. Stabbing a crewmate in the back. Stabbing…

I rub the sleep from my eyes and get up. I don’t think I’ll be sleeping any more tonight.

I totter out of my room to make myself a cup of horrible ancient coffee, and find Sunset wandering around, admiring the painted flowers, sipping from her own cup. “Hi, Aspen. Can’t sleep?”

“Yeah, seeing the dead bodies of our crewmates will do that,” I say.

“This sucks. This whole thing sucks. But I guess it sucks extra hard for you.” She gives me a commiserating smile.

“Why for me? They’re all your crewmates, too.” I expect to get ‘I told you soed’ by Captain Sands at some point, but if everyone’s going to rub my trust in my face…

“Yeah, but… you spent a whole year as their captain while the rest of us were still asleep. And right now, we all have friends among the suspects, obviously, but no one’s friends with all the suspects. I can sit here and think, well, whoever it was, Tal and Lina are definitely innocent, but they’re all your friends, right? So, no matter who it was…”

“Maybe it is Tal or Lina. Maybe both.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“Then I’m wrong. But at least then I can feel properly betrayed when we know for sure. Whereas you know right now that you’ve definitely been betrayed, but you don’t know by whom. Which has to suck. I’m sorry.”

I don’t need people feeling sorry for me. “Your friends are the ones currently having to share residence with one or more murderers,” I point out. “Feel sorry for them.”

“Yeah, that’s true.” She sips her coffee. “You don’t think they’re in danger, do you?”

“If any of them were going to hurt or kill each other, they wouldn’t wait this long,” I point out. “Besides, if you’re worried about that, we could be in the same boat.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that this is really looking like a group project. It’s possible that one person stole the anaesthetic, poisoned their victims, and then came back to kill them, but it’s more likely to be a group effort. Denish is strong enough to wield the knife, but I don’t think he’d think to poison the victims first. Adin might’ve done it while on neurostimulators, but if he wanted both Lyson project proponents then his timing was too good to be just a blind guess – somebody probably tipped him off that they were both in NAER 2. And even if we do accept that either of them might be capable of something like this, which I’m still having trouble believing by the way, then neither strike me as the kind of person who’d decide to do it on their own. It seems like someone else might rope them into it. And Captain Sands thinks it might not be about the Lyson project thing at all, that it might be about Captain Kinoshita’s notes and some weird conspiracy that stretches back to Earth.”

Sunset frowns. “What conspiracy?”

“It’s really complicated and kind of nonsensical. My point is, it’s extremely likely that more people were involved in this than just the knife wielder. A drug supplier, for one. A mastermind, possibly. Depending on how everything was put together.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is, the reason that everyone in that habitation ring is a suspect is because the rest of us were all within eyesight of each other when the attack occurred. So we know for certain that one of them was holding the knife. But no other part of this necessitates being in that ring when the murders happened. In fact, when it comes to getting the timing correct, if you wanted to make sure that your targets were together and none of the rest of this habitation ring was going to interrupt you, you’d ideally want a coordinator up here, playing computer games with everyone else, and letting you know when to proceed.

“We know for sure that at least one of them were guilty. But we have nothing at all to prove that we’re all innocent.”