I: Awakening

When Special Agent Ciro Brass awoke from hibernation, the first face he saw was that of Captain Gunlivvy Smit. Much like the first moments of consciousness on a regular morning, coming out of hibernation was disorienting. Brass blinked his eyes, took agency over his extremities and attempted to hold onto the last dream he’d been dreaming before it slipped away. It had been nice, but consciousness is invasive.

“Brass,” she said. He blinked. The blurring in his field of vision came into focus. At once, his mind registered two truths: his body felt better than he would have expected, and the captain would not be waking people individually were the spaceport of Elizabeth, New Jersey the next, and imminent, stop.

Life flooded back into Brass. His lips were parched; the backs of his calves were on the verge of cramping; the insides of his nostrils itched. He blinked again, and then again. Gunlivvy Smit ran the ship, but if shit went sideways on the Lorax, he would be expected to apply the fix.

“Good morning,” he said, pushing himself to his seat. “What’s up?”

***

Smit led Brass down the C-corridor, past the gate to the bridge, and onto a freight-zone decontamination room. He did well to keep up, since she was moving at a brisk clip and had yet to give him much information. He’d gleaned that the Lorax, a bio-freighter under the flag of the Seychelles and the control of the LE Spears holding company out of the corporate district of New Palz on Rodant, had seventy-two days remaining in the haul back to Earth. Moving at roughly a quarter the speed of light, the Lorax would be somewhere around a quarter trillion miles from Elizabeth. At first, it almost felt quaint, but his flight plan had him waking a day prior to the hard reverse, somewhere off to the left of Jupiter. An early wake-up, and thinking on the reasoning behind it, had prickled the hibernation-growth hairs on the back of his neck.

Smit tapped in a passcode and they entered D-corridor, a part of the ship Brass had never seen.

Before the Lorax had accelerated toward the stars, Brass had himself a fine dinner with an executive VP from LE Spears. Expense account, oysters, caviar, elite champagne, dry-aged Fiorentina-thick porterhouse, a couple fingers of sixty-year old single malt from an island off Scotland–Brass had never seen the like. Guys like this were throwbacks to the Dutch East India executives of old: salaries larger than the GDP of your average Balkan state. This type of wealth had virtually disappeared from the world, before mankind rediscovered uncharted worlds ripe for plunder. The dinner was a not-so-subtle reminder to Brass that the rules matter, but the cargo matters more. When the VP toasted brass with their final glass of impossibly smooth port, he gave the wink and the nod that meant, bring the Lorax back in one piece, and there will be more of this port in your future.

This passed through his head as they strode along D-corridor. They were in the service unit of the Lorax, where engineering failures would be handled and techs could suit up for spacewalks. Brass could hear the gravity engine whirring and the air-circulation pistons pounding in perfect symmetry. Smit led him to the first layer in a de-pressure exit, pushed a button to open the initial door, and guided him in.

The air in the felt stale and still. Nothing offensive about the smell: more of an absence of odor and a metallic tingle on the skin.

Smit closed the initial door, and turned to him. She looked him hard in the face. Brass returned the stare. He’d long since come to understand she needed him for a bit of investigative work. Nothing profound about this realization, as he was the highest ranking member of the ship’s investigative service and, by regulation, would need to play point for any investigation, no matter his flight plan. What struck him odd was the cadence of Smit’s walk and the silence she’d afforded him. Or, more likely, afforded herself. Typically he’d chat, get things loose, see if he could prompt her into some sing-song about, say, what’s been going on among the awake, but a base level of instinct told him to keep quiet. That same prickling had him on edge. It was a feeling he didn’t quite recognize. So he waited.

She had her hair clipped into a bun, and wore civilian attire. The muscles around her neck almost twitched. Brass knew Smit, but she was captain of a large ship and didn’t slow down to ask about the weather too often. He looked at her, she at him, then she stepped toward the sealant door and tapped on the triple-paned porthole into the escape hatch.

“The external door is closed and sealed,” she said. Brass waited still. It was akin to saying, Space, today, remains rather cold. He could have grinned. She tapped the glass again. “The console is on the fritz.”

“How did we get in here, Captain Smit?” The prickles were spreading from Brass’s neck across his upper shoulders and down his spine. It was the clothes. The crew don’t walk around in civilian attire, because access was controlled through biometric chips in their non-pressure suits. He should have seen it when she tapped the passcode for D-corridor, but figured to blame the cobwebs of hibernation for the slip. Brass could have used his own code just as easily, and pushed the access button to get them into the service area where he typically would not be allowed. “You aren’t in your suit.”

Smit tapped on the glass a third time, and said: “Call me Livvy, for fuck’s sake. Spears will decommission me in… what’d I say? About seventy-two day’s time. I’ll enjoy the ‘captains’ when we wake the rest of the ship, and then I’ll enjoy a forced retirement.” She tapped on the glass. “You need to look in here.”

He did. What he saw was initially unremarkable. Through the porthole he could see the hatch door that opened to the great, black beyond. He saw a hanging row of what the jockeys called jumpsuits, since they were a last resort and figured to be used only under the worst of circumstances, and on the opposite wall he saw the elaborate mechanism of a grappling hook with high-tensity cable.

As he opened his mouth to say as much, he spotted it. The bulge of one of the suits; the third foot, in discordant footwear, sticking out between the expected two; the inconsistency in the line of suits. There was an extra body-shaped object on the line. He didn’t need any experience to know what he was seeing. Brass looked down to the side of the sealant door. There were two consoles, but only one was jammed.

“Who is it?” he said.

“Lt. Simon Prideaux. He was discovered when–

“Save the story, if you would. I’ll need it all in due time. Can we get in there, Captain?” He swallowed it too late, but she wasn’t ready to chastise him again.

“Yes, look,” she said. “Here is the console to enter the exit hatch. You or I or any ol’ Joe can pop it open right now.” She waited for Brass to act, but he held still. “For obvious reasons, the hatch into escape is controlled by a different set of rules, and a different console. There’s nothing stopping anyone from opening any access on this ship, at the moment, except for the externals. The readout, for any jammed consoles, is the same across the Lorax.” She tapped her finger on the digital readout of the second console. Brass leaned in close to confirm the red lettering and soft pulsing of the words: FAULT 459.

***

He bid Smit wait while he went to his quarters. Coming out of hibernation, he was in a comfortable cotton suit, but that was all he had. He needed his camera. Without much thought, he fetched the pouch off his desk and returned to Smit.

On his way, he jammed the lenses into his eyes. Typically Brass would have been more careful about this process: using a mirror, applying lubrication, testing each for central precision. In this case he hoped the lenses would settle properly and that his eyes wouldn’t turn the color of the fault signals flashing along the corridors to his right and his left. Once in place, he spoke quietly, as if to himself. Zoom in. His focus leapt ahead. Zoom out. Back to normalcy. The digital zoom, though advanced from previous generations, still left room for improvement. Were he on a joy-seaking trip across the cosmos, Brass would have had his prized Leica M8 on hand. For crime, however, the lenses did the trick.

Smit was waiting outside the hatch when Brass returned, and she tapped in her passcode override to gain them access to the escape hatch.

“What do I need to know? Has the body been touched?”

“I pulled the jumpsuit out of the way to confirm the identity. Otherwise, it’s unmolested,” she said.

“You knew the identity.”

“I said confirm.”

Brass said Snap. Zoom out. Snap. He softly pulled the top jumpsuit away from the body underneath. Snap. Snap. Snap. Zoom in. Snap. He blinked. “Jesus Christ.”

Prideaux showed no signs of struggle: no lesions on the exposed face, neck or arms. He wore his biometric pants, but only a white t-shirt without any insignia. His skin was the color of aged meat, puffed to taught and bulging at the edges of the shirt. The swelling was unnatural, even in the putrefying state. His eyes looked ready to explode out of their sockets. Prideaux’s face, locked in rictus and eternally uncomfortable, might have been the skin mask of a year-old cadaver.

“What happened to him?” Smit asked. She was still, eyes cast elsewhere. Brass understood: no reason to look twice. Snap, snap.

“Poison. That may explain the color and the swelling. How is he lodged?”

“There’s a strap across his waist.”

Brass looked down. He’d missed it initially, thinking it a belt. “Fine. What do you take him for? Six feet even? The bloating exaggerates his weight.”

“He was lean,” Smit said. “Hundred sixty after a long shower.”

“Confirm that for me, Livvy. This voyage required strict entry protocol, is that right?”

“Yes. LE Spears made sure of it. Multiple layers.”

“Right,” Brass said. “I’m remembering.” LE Spears used an outfit, the Schelling Group, run by an ex-Mossad gal expatriated in Monaco. Her team left nothing to chance: he’d been asked to strip naked, CT-scanned, irradiated and psychologically evaluated. His clothes were provided on ship, as were his camera lenses, his reading material and his bottle of Lagavulin 16, per request, which he’d planned to open on waking prior to return to Earth. His companion arrived a week before, so they could get acquainted. Brass had been allowed to bring his service revolver, after a quick scan, which he found odd, considering. When he asked the tech running his processing why they were so blasé about the gun, she said: “The only thing you can do with that is shoot someone.”

“How would one bring poison onto the ship?” Brass asked.

“Based on my recollection of boarding,” Smit said, “it would have had to be in your DNA.”

“Fine,” Brass said. “We’re in agreement on that. Leave him as he is, I have what I need for now.” He replaced the jumpsuit in front of Prideaux and took a long breath.

He tried to smell the aged port, taste the caramelized fat of the steak, feel the caviar popping in his mouth. But much like his dream, the sense faded too quickly. A murder on this ship would be trouble, no doubt about it. If he pulled the thread, and found a crime of passion, he could wrap the case and possibly sneak back into hibernation to get himself to New Jersey.

The voice of the Schelling Group tech rang in his ears: all you can do is shoot someone. His masters and commanders cared not for the life of a middling lieutenant–they cared about their cargo. With eight people awake on the skeleton, why did one of them kill another? Crimes of passion happen, but most don’t involve smuggling a computer virus on board a galactic cruiser, a virus with the ability to take down the most advanced shipping software in human history. The realization crept up his spine: he was outmatched.