083: SCENE

The six of us – Heli, Sunset, Sam, Celi, the captain and I – stare at the scene in Network and Engineering Ring 2. It’s exactly as I’d left it – the Friend (the non-doctor one) sprawled face-first in a pool of blood almost in the doorway, kitchen knife in its back. Renn, throat sliced open, collapsed against a desk and surrounded by shards of glass.

Celi looks at the captain, a silent question. The captain gives kem a nod, and ke pulls on a pair of clean gloves and kneels to inspect the Friend. I have a brief flash of irrational panic that ke’s going to be able to tell I wiped the knife, somehow.

“We all know this had to be the warpig, right?” Heli asks. “I mean.”

“We don’t know anything until we’ve reviewed all the evidence,” Captain Sands says.

“Anyway, it couldn’t have been Tinera,” Sunset says. “She was locked in Habitation Ring 2 the whole time.”

Reluctantly, I shake my head. “Technically, she wasn’t. The captain unlocked the doors for her already. But he hasn’t told her that, so she wouldn’t have known she could leave anyway. It amounts to the same thing.”

“Or,” Captain Sands says as he makes for a computer terminal far away from Renn’s corpse, “it means that if she’d tried an airlock or happened to be in proximity when someone else used one, and found that it didn’t lock, she would have assumed that I’d made a mistake locking her in. Which would give her the perfect alibi to commit a serious crime, since so far as she knows, we’d all assume she was locked in.”

“You think this was opportunistic?” I ask, following him. “That Tinera just happened to let herself out by accident and decided to go commit a crime and just happened to run into the Lyson project guy before any of us? You really think that many coincidences is likely?”

“I don’t think anything, until we’ve gathered all of the evidence.” He types away at the terminal. “Does anybody here have a history in forensics?”

Nobody does.

“Alright then. Celi, as our doctor, you’re the closest thing we have to a forensics expert. You’re in charge of investigating this scene. Aspen, Heli, assist Celi. Sam, with me; according to the computer, our remaining Friend is still in the medbay and the others are in their habitation ring, and I’ve just locked them all in. We’re going to head there and conduct a thorough search. Sunset, swing by the medbay and confirm the Friend’s location, then come and join us.”

Sands’ team leaves the ring, and Heli and I look to Celi for orders.

“Um,” ke says, “Heli, can you do anything with DNA?”

“I can sample and run whatever you want me to. But I’m not sure how much it’ll tell us. The whole crew uses this ring all the time; everything’s going to be contaminated with everyone’s DNA. Maybe a forensics expert would know what specifically to check to get answers, but unless we run across a puddle of the assailant’s blood or a severed finger or something, I don’t know how much DNA analysis is going to help.”

“In the stories, they always find the murderer’s skin under the victim’s fingernails,” I suggest.

“I can run what’s under their fingernails, but if either of them got a good scratch in, the captain’s team will find the scratch on the murderer before the DNA results get back.”

That’s a good point. Captain Sands will probably order a full medical inspection of all the convicts, looking for injuries sustained in the attack. It’s unlikely that whoever did this managed to get both Renn and the Friend without getting injured at all.

While the others discuss DNA sampling. I head over to get a better look at Renn. He’s exactly where I left him, slumped over a broken computer terminal, throat slit open, covered in (presumably) his own blood. It’s difficult to see what other injuries he might have, aside from the throat. His left arm is half inside the shattered terminal screen, skin lacerated (that would be impossible with a proper modern device, but like most things on the ship, the screens are bulky enough to be opened up and repaired). Apart from the shower of glass, everything looks to still be firmly bolted to the table, which makes sense; if my messing about with the ship’s “gravity” after I woke up didn’t dislodge anything, then a skinny dying psychologist slumping on it wouldn’t.

The blood is everywhere; flecked on the partitions around the terminal, smeared on the floor. I’m afraid to touch anything, lest I contaminate something important. (A weird thing to worry about after deliberately cleaning the knife handle, I know, but I… I don’t really know what to feel right now.) The partition walls contain the scene, so as long as I don’t enter his little area I can’t touch anything import –

Wait. No they don’t. There’s blood on the outside of one of the partitions, too; a smear near the edge at about shoulder-height. Like somebody gripped the partition with a bloody hand to keep their balance. The murderer, stumbling out? Maybe. Or it might be the Friend, trying to flee before it gets stabbed in the back… no. Too high. That Friend is tiny. I reach my own hand as high as the smear, careful not to touch it. It’s a little too high for me to be comfortable, I think, if I were stumbling along a trying to keep balance; whoever did this was probably a fair bit taller than me. That removes half our suspects right away. Denish, probably, or possibly Adin, or…

Or Renn. Renn was pretty tall. But if he’d been killed at this terminal, then he wouldn’t have been out here grabbing stuff while bleeding.

I look around a bit more. Another smear of blood, a petition that’s been knocked askew… oh! A terminal that’s on! I peer at the screen – Captain Kinoshita’s partially translated notes. This must be the terminal where Renn was attacked; then he attempted to leave the ring, probably holding his throat closed with his hands, and collapsed into the other terminal further along. I look around, but the attacker didn’t thoughtfully sign their name anywhere. There’s just a few flecks of blood and… oh. A half-empty bottle of Tinera’s wine.

And two glasses. Either Renn was meeting with the killer and the friend walked in at the wrong time, or the Friend and Renn were meeting, and the killer decided to take on both of them.

“Guys,” I call. “I found something.”

They come over to look.

“Okay, yeah,” Heli says, “this DNA will be useful.”

“Can you do fingerprints as well?” Celi asks.

“Shouldn’t be a problem. Everyone’s prints are on file. I’m gonna go get some sterile sample bags; nobody touch anything.”

“This suggests that more than one person might’ve been involved,” Celi murmurs.

I nod. If Renn and the Friend were already together, here at this terminal, then it was unlikely that they were attacked by one person. Even if they were drunk, two against one is bad odds. “Do Friends even drink?’ I ask. “That seems… contradictory. To their whole philosophy.”

Celi shrugs. “We still have one. We can ask it. And I suppose Heli will be able to tell us if the Friend or the murderer was drinking here.”

I nod again. I’m not sure what result I’m hoping for. A quick, easy way to catch the killer is best for everyone involved, of course, but... I still can’t quite believe that one of my friends would do this. And I still don’t know what the captain is going to do to them.

I shake the feeling off. This isn’t the time for sitting around hoping that things don’t get worse. At least one of old crew did do this, and I owe it to the rest to catch them before they put the others at risk.

There’s a little wine in the bottom of each glass still; Heli carefully pours it into separate, labelled collection tubes, then swabs the rims of the glasses and sticks the swabs in separate collection tubes, then wipes the remaining wine out of each glass with sterile cloths and sticks the glasses themselves in separate bags. We may not really know what we’re doing but we’re going to be careful about it.

“I still think Tinera might’ve taken them both on alone,” Heli says.

“She’s not stupid,” I say. “Anyway, if she did, she’s definitely injured – she’s tiny and it was two against one. So we’ll know soon enough.”

“I can almost guarantee that Tinera didn’t do this,” Celi says. “Or at the very least, didn’t do this alone.”

“… You can?”

Celi leads us away from the terminals, back to the Friend, and points. “That’s a vegetable knife, not a dagger. It’s not made for stabbing. And it’s buried to the handle between those ribs. That takes a huge amount of strength, and Tinera’s tiny. Surprisingly strong for her size, but not that strong.”

“So she couldn’t have killed the Friend,” I conclude.

“Almost definitely not.”

“Almost definitely?”

“Well, it’s always a little hard to be precise when it comes to human capabilities. In extraordinary circumstances, people have demonstrated brief, seemingly impossible bursts of strength, so I’m reluctant to say that anyone couldn’t do this. But it’d be very, very unlikely.”

“My Aunt had one of those,” Heli remarks. “My cousin was about to be hit by some flying debris and she grabbed a cable and yanked it off course. Should’ve been impossible. Spent a month and a half in hospital with her shoulder torn all to shit.”

“Yes, injury is really common after such events.”

“But not universal?” I ask.

“Not universal.”

So even with this evidence, if the captain’s team doesn’t find any injured suspects, it doesn’t definitively rule anybody out. Still, it does say a lot about the likelihood of certain perpetrators. “Who do you think would have the strength to do this under normal circumstances?”

“Denish,” Celi says, instantly. “Possibly Tal, if only because kes physical abilities aren’t all that easy to judge. I’d be very surprised indeed if the Friend or Lina could do this, even without being in hospital. Tinera and Adin, I’d say, definitely not.”

I bite my lip thoughtfully. Tal does seem to have a strange sort of monkey strength, but I suspect that’s not so much being stronger as simply not noticing when ke’s reached a physical limit and should stop. I don’t think kes upper limit would be any higher than Adin or Tinera, especially since ke spends most of kes time sitting at computer terminals. Denish is the obvious suspect, of course – the only one strong enough to kill the Friend in this way, and dating Tinera, who specifically told Renn that she’d cut the throat of anyone doing Lyson experiments on the ship. Renn and the Friend advocated for Lyson experiments, and now look, that very throat was cut, and the Friend killed in a way that only her boyfriend would manage. If Renn and the Friend had already been together, if it was safe to assume that this wasn’t a lone operation, then Tinera and Denish were a likely pair.

Except for the part where Tinera thought she was locked up, so couldn’t plan something like this, and the idea that she coincidentally realised she wouldn’t right when her two targets were alone still seemed unlikely to me.

Oh, yeah… and except for the idea that Denish would never do this. I mean, come on! Denish? The definition of a gentle giant? That man had once accidentally stood on a bee in one of the greenhouse rings and had actually cried about it. Denish, stab a fleeing crewmate in the heart with a knife? Absolutely no way.

None of them would do this. But at least one of them had.

“Well,” Heli says, “if that much physical strength is required, Dr Noodle-Arms Sociologist here is removed as a suspect, too.”

“Hey,” I protest, rubbing my arms.

“Aspen was never a suspect,” Celi says. “I’m no forensic investigator but I know blood. This blood isn’t nearly fresh enough for Aspen to have had time to kill them; when these two died, Aspen was still losing very badly at computer games.”

“Hey!”

We do some general investigating and gathering of random stuff that might be clues until the captain returns. He confers briefly with Celi to learn what we’ve learned so far, then looks to me. “Aspen, with me. We’re about to start interviewing suspects.”

“And you want me to assist? Why?” There’s simply no way that Captain Sands still trusts my judgement of character. Not after this.

“Our psychologist is dead, and you’re the closest thing we have. Also, all the suspects like and trust you. They hate me right now, so we need that. Come on.” He heads for the airlock. “Let’s catch ourselves a murderer.”