Crimes of the Grey Detective

Chapter Two

“Charlie,” she said, dropping her arms and crossing the room in long strides.

Though she was a whole head shorter than him (and five stones heavier), she swallowed him up in a bear hug that let him know she hadn’t been slacking in her combat training. After the initial shock, he settled into the hug, pleasantly aware of how much he’d missed his ward and uncomfortably aware of the nub of the disabler pressing against his ribs.

Sera was laughing against his shoulder. “You look like hell.”

“I’ve only been here a month, you know.”

“I never said that month changed ya’’, did I?”

Dickens laughed as she pulled away and looked him up and down. “Come to think of it, you’ve actually lost a little fat in the ears and the jaw. Hell, should have left you to marinade in here for another month or two.”

“Steady.”

She laughed again, bouncing vitality off the dead walls.

Dickens rubbed his mouth as a smile cut across it. “Looks ah… Looks like you’ve been busy on the outside while I’ve been thinning in here.”

Sera touched her wrists self-consciously. “The Guild approached me after your trial.”

“And?”

“And I’ll tell you all about it in the mini shuttle, once we’re private company.” She c****d her chin over his shoulder.

“Oh, shite.” Dickens turned around and faced the Warden, who was eyeing Sera as if she’d dragged a plague into his facility. Dickens extended a hand. “Be seein’ ya’’, Warden. I mean, I’d rather not. All the same.”

The Warden nodded, his thumbs tapping his belt. “Dickens. Ma’am.”

With a fluid turn of his metallic heel, the Warden disappeared back into Collections, the hydraulic double doors hissing closed behind him. Dickens let his hand fall to his side as he turned back to Sera. He offered her a more nervous smile than the first time, one that somewhat fell away when he eyed her new gear and the tattoos on her wrists.

“Where do I even begin to ask?”

Sera shrugged, her smile bubbling up again in that way that was equally charming and frightening. She held up her wrists. “Either with the Guild tats and badge, the Supreme Court pardon, or the murder investigation I’ve got lined up for us. We can chew the fat in the shuttle. Come on.”

“Ah, about that. Where’s the shuttle taking us?”

“To the murder scene. Where else? We’re on a bit of a time crunch here, Charlie, you mind two-stepping a bit?”

“How’d you get a murder case? You were kicked off the Force too.”

Sera rolled her eyes, tapping her badge as she did so. “Guild’s independent. They take all the cases people don’t want the Force looking into. Force don’t mind because usually the Guild just hands them over a closed case file once it’s all settled. Guild gets paid, Force keeps the best – although also the only – solved case rate in the Galaxy.”

“That explains the badge and the murder…”

“…and the pardon was something our client cooked up,” Sera finished. “He wants us on the case.”

“Let me guess, he was at the trial too.”

“Something like that.” Sera pursed her lips. “He knows the transcripts back to front and he wants us because the murder we’re to investigate needs a certain level of discretion and…” She waved a hand impatiently.

“Creative investigation?”

“Ass-kicking, yeah. Details in the shuttle. Now, you coming or can I piss Warden Boyle off further by throwing you back in there?”

Dickens surprised both of them by shrugging. He didn’t realise how much he’d missed the outside world until he was in it. “Let’s go.”

“Oh.” Sera spun with some exaggeration on her heel. “Finally.”

“Oh, one more thing, Ser’.”

The look she gave him could have cracked a glacier. “Yeah?”

“Can I bring a friend?”

***

The mini shuttle and the system it operated on was a testament to the forethought and the nostalgia of the Trillionaires who owned it (and just about every piece of functional metal in the galaxy). Third Orbital’s inter-station transit system functioned like that on Fourth and Fifth, which functioned much the same way Earth’s Metrorail had before they were taken down in favour of walkways in neo-Amazonian forests.

Maxi shuttles built to carry three hundred people (though rarely transporting more than thirty at a time), floated on laser-guided systems and synchronised schedules to each major platform, namely the council buildings, the giant metal platforms of the quadrant hospital, and the gathering ports where the lower class waiting to be collected and dropped off. They cost ten credits. From each of these points, there were mini shuttles built to hold fifty that travelled to the smaller clusters of public buildings that orbited the major landmarks. These shuttles worked on propulsion systems that streamed blue hydrogen in their wake like trapped comets. They cost five. If Sera hadn’t been around to pick him up, Dickens would have had to take a mini to the council building sharing a quadrant with the prison, then a maxi to a gathering port, and then another maxi to… well, his home had been taken away from him.

Dickens settled back into the plush fibres of the mini shuttle’s backseat. “Huh.”

Sera looked up from the pin she had been using to clean her nail. She sat on the plush bench opposite and facing him, her bun bobbing on her head, the lose frays of hair spread out in a zero-gravity halo. “What?”

“I just realised I might have become the first galactic hobo if you hadn’t shown up.”

“Nah,” Daniels said from the opposite end of the backseat. Though he was smiling a little, he sat hunched forward, hugging the plain black nylon bag on his lap. “You ain’t the first prisoner let out of prison. Normally they’d just hold you and then pop you in the next mining shuttle headed back to Earth. Then you’d probably just be a regular Earth hobo.”

“Ugh, don’t feed him ideas of being regular,” Sera said. “He’s wanted nothing more since the day he discovered that no two thumbprints are the same.”

“Some are,” Dickens countered.

Sera rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. “See?”

“I take your point, Ma’am Sera,” Daniels said, his own thin old lips twitching.

Somehow, Sera had taken to Daniels even quicker than Dickens had. Part of it might have been that, unlike Dickens, Daniels hadn’t asked an awful lot of questions about where they were going and why. The old man’s crimes would have warranted a shuttle back to Earth, but Dickens now suspected that his old boss might have paid a little extra to have him released on his own reconnaissance. There had been another private mini shuttle in the port bay when they’d been leaving and Daniels had taken care to keep Dickens’ significantly larger frame between himself and whoever was behind its reflective screens.

“Ma’am. Huh.” Sera tapped her sharp chin with a gloved finger. “I like that.”

They were all in pressure suits now that they’d left a station large enough to have a private gravitational field involved. That made transitioning a bit difficult for both man and machine. Part of the reason that shuttles were so expensive was that they were largely manned by retired astronauts looking to pay rent in the Second Orbital. Anyone could drive a shuttle; very few people had the skill to park one.

“So, Daniels.” Sera stuck her tongue out as if she’d just tasted something bitter. “Daniels, Dickens. Dickens, Daniels. One of you needs to change names.”

“I’m happy with just calling Dickens Charlie like you do. Seems easier on everyone.”

“Mighty f*****g fine to be so considerate,” Dickens Charles muttered. They had a small chuckle about it, the three of them.

Sera crossed one heavy boot over another and made a relatively considerable effort at keeping her heels on the floor. She was looking out of the port window at something. “Right, Gentlemen, to the business at hand. Murder.”

“Before that,” Dickens interrupted. “How the hell did you become an apprentice of the Guild?”

Sera shrugged, a wisp of hair floating across her freckled brow. “It’s like I said; they were at the trial. We got further into the O’Malley case than anyone else, in a fraction of the time. What hurt us was pushing too hard at the wrong moment. But as far as the Guild was concerned, it was a hell of a lot cheaper and more time-efficient to take on a great detective that needed the edges smoothed out than wait a whole two years for the next shuttle to send up a few suitable recruits.”

Most of those recruits will have either acclimatised or been born into the neo-hippie era where car parks had been turned into communal gardens and buckles, computers, and cars were traded for patches of paleo land. Dickens had been the last of a dying breed that remembered cafes, hardware stores, and pistols. A day didn’t go by where he didn’t miss two out of three.

“You know,” said Dickens, who was irritably trying to mould his identity around his last name, “I always wondered why the Orbital Court had been kind enough to appoint us its most decorated defence attorney.”

“Guild wanted us out clean so they could have us to themselves. In the end, even their considerable pull was only able to get one of us out. Orbital had to make an example out of the other, so they told me.”

Dickens shrugged in the same manner Sera was inclined to. It was hard to tell which one of the two had given the habit to the other. “Makes sense why it’d be you. You’re younger by fifteen years so they’d likely get more years out of you.”

“And I’m not afraid of zero-gravity. That was in your file too.”

Dickens frowned. “Splendid.”

“Oi, it was all in there by the time I was allowed to see it. The pardon was a windfall that quite literally fell into my lap – you have our client to thank for that – but I managed to sweeten the deal with my own superiors.”

And there it is. “This case is my trial run for the Guild of Inspectors, isn’t it?”

Sera’s smile widened by a pair of white teeth. “All goes well and I’ll be the one with the new ward.”

Daniels snorted as if choking back a fit of laughter.

Dickens smiled darkly. “I can’t say I’ve been on the receiving end of a kinder gesture.”

Sera held up a gloved middle finger. “Now you can. Call it paying it forward.”

“Pretty sure it’s back,” Daniels chimed in.

“Nothing good in looking back,” Dickens and Sera said together, meeting one another’s eyes with no small amount of surprise.

Daniels shook his head. “What the hell have I gotten myself into?”

“You know your way around the Second Orbital,” Dickens said.

“And you never know when you might need a bit of evidence stolen for later inspection,” Sera added.

Dickens rubbed absentmindedly at his ribs. “Always helps to have a meat shield too.”

“Well,” said Daniels. “Fuck.”

Sera’s gaze was back out of the port window again. “Right gentleman, pleasantries are done. We’ve a murder on our hands, one that’s a real big dirty bomb if it gets out. So all discretion.”

“Who bit the bullet?” Dickens asked, slipping into his former role as easily as slipping into the warm, old boots he owned not two months ago.

“The wife of a Supreme Judge; the one whose signature is on your pardon, actually.”

Daniels’ mouth opened then closed silently. Dickens loaned him a response with a solitary, “Shite.”

If Dickens hadn’t been strapped into his chair at the waist, he would have slowly risen to his feet, if only to give the blood whirl pooling in his gut extra room to circulate. “A Supreme Court Justice wants us to solve the case of his dead wife?”

“Oh, no,” Sera said, her focus still pinned on the tiny window. “He thinks his wife is still visiting friends in the Second Orbital. She recorded a string of messages scheduled to be sent to him at random intervals from a tower in B Quadrant, but she was actually in D Quadrant on Third Orbital, sleeping with the Quadrant Councilman. The messages run out in two days. We have a window of one.”

“Shite,” Dickens said again. Despite himself, there was an odd excitement climbing its way out of his stomach. It came to lounge on his lips and stretched. “Nothing sours an affair like a murder.”

“And here’s the tricky bit,” Sera said, pointing at the window. Dickens leaned forward and saw a station roughly a fifth the size of the prison – a Quadrant Council Hall. They were approaching the private port of the only manor on the station. “The Councilman is the one that pulled the strings to get you your pardon, begged for it right from the Supreme teeth of an unknowing cuck. He needs us to find the real murderer and absolve him or the Five Orbitals might just get a taste of its first taste of real nasty s**t on the fan. Oh, look, there he is on the lawn.”

***

To his eternal credit, the mini shuttle’s pilot managed to dock them in the bay with almost enough finesse to keep Dickens from throwing up a little in his mouth. The transition from zero-gravity to the council building’s personal gravity field felt like a pair of fists bunched up his organs then yanked down at once. Sera passed him a leaf of raw cocoa and he sucked it gratefully while the guiding lights of the dock herded them to the deepest part of the sheltered bay.

“The bay’s pressurised,” Sera said as Dickens was reaching for his helmet. “No need for that, but keep it around in case you need to throw up.”

Dickens exchanged a look with Daniels.

The shuttle’s door unclicked then slid to the side of its own volition. Had the bay not been pressurised, no pair of hands would have been able to work it open, no matter the engineering expertise. The great irony was that it just worked on one big damn lock and the manual override was in the closed off cockpit.

Dickens stepped out after Sera. Despite only being without gravity for two hours, the return to weight was like spending six hours treading water in a pool, only to crawl out and try going on a five mile run right afterwards. Twenty years of dealing with the transition had thankfully given him the wherewithal to keep on his feet despite the weighed-down somersaults his liver was attempting on the mush of his intestines.

“So, where to?” Daniels asked as he stepped out of the shuttle. The transition seemed to hit him harder. He might not have tasted zero-gravity in a good while.

“Most of the station’s been sectioned off under… mild quarantine,” Sera said, slapping stick-on badges on the other two men’s pressure suits. “So, as far as the rest of the folk on here are concerned, there’s a strange bacterial growth in the east wing of the manor and we’re here to sort it out. We meet the Councilman through the service entrance.”

Dickens eyed the well-illuminated escalator to the right of the bay and the simple elevator masked in shadow to the right. “Great.”

They wove through half a dozen parked mini shuttles on their way to the service elevator, Sera rolling a steel-lined case with an identical logo to their badges on the side, Dickens and Daniels toting their personal belongings in a bid to look somewhat professional. Dickens was suddenly aware of the obnoxious shade of yellow of his nylon bag.

“I never got around to asking,” Daniels said as they approached the elevator. “What ever happened to that O’Malley case of yours?”

“Ended ugly,” Dickens said.

“Real ugly,” added Sera. “But it’s behind us now. Future’s important, not the past. Space Exploration Age and all that.”

Dickens adjusted his shoulder strap as Sera pressed the up button on the elevator. “Two Irishman and an Aussie walk into an elevator in space, about to investigate a murder that could potentially shatter the world’s first space colony before it even reaches half a century.”

Sera chuckled. “’Hold my beer, eh, says the Aussie.”

Daniels smirked. “’You call that beer?’ Say the Irishmen.”

The elevator dinged open. “And what does the American say?”

The Councilman stood alone inside the elevator, near as tall as Dickens but not half as wide at the shoulders. His moustache and goatee might have been properly trimmed three days ago, but the stubble that now grew around it was oddly reminiscent of the wild grass that had started sprouting in the demolished streets of Dublin. His business suit – it still amazed Dickens which customs people had hauled out of Earth’s atmosphere with them – was well-tailored but distractedly put on. The dimple in his tie was a mite too long; the knot a little to the left, likewise his belt’s buckle. And the knots of his weighted brogues seemed irreparably tight. All this formed the image of a man who was an otherwise impeccably engineered chronograph set just a couple of seconds out of sync with Orbital time.

“The American can say whatever he likes,” Sera said, extending a hand. “He’s paying a mighty sum, after all.”

The Councilman shook her hand in the semi-casual manner of people who’d been interacting a great deal lately. Dickens was proud that he’d caught that, despite knowing that Sera was running point on the investigation.

“I am paying for your discretion,” the Councilman said, “including in the humour you choose to partake in, Madam Agent.”

Dickens smiled at his tiny pang of jealousy. Members of the Guild of Inspectors were always referred to as Sir and Madam Agent in formal context, even though their identities were public record. It seemed the more advanced, the more dangerous, the more ambitious human beings became, the more their ancestral need for the safety of hierarchy and defined roles kicked in.

The Councilman turned to Dickens with a stiffer hand extended. “Mr. Charles, a pleasure at last. August Graves.”

Graves or Groves? His Orbital accent was a wet fish across the jaw.

Dickens smiled and took his hand. “Pardon the jests, and uh… thanks for the pardon. Dickens.”

“Glad.” Councilman August then eyed Daniels. “I don’t believe I’ve been briefed on you.”

“Daniels,” Sera said, “my second assistant. He has some specialist skills that’ll come in handy during the investigation. He’s been briefed on your specific needs for privacy.”

That didn’t seem to please August much, but he extended a hand all the same. Daniels took it, but Dickens suspected the old man knew what he did. As soon as the Councilman was alone, he’d draw up his file and pore over it until every detail was in that almost-primly groomed head of his. There was no doubt he wouldn’t be impressed with what he found but if a Guild member vouched for him, chances were better than most that there was no one better for the job.

“Follow me,” August said, stepping back into the elevator.

Sera went in second. Dickens and Daniels squeezed through together, the older man’s smaller frame leaving just enough room for Dickens’ heavy shoulders to squeeze through. He was still sucking on the cocoa leaf as the doors closed. The taste was awfully bitter but it sucked some of the nausea out of his mouth, even as his legs were acclimatising to bearing 90% of his mass again.

Being a service elevator, it had ample room for whatever equipment might need to be transported up to the main house. August made use of the extra room by stepping to the front of the elevator and facing the three “Bacterial Management Crew” workers crowded in the back.

A man used to drawing eyes on him, Dickens thought. There was still something else about the Councilman that didn’t quite slip neatly into what Dickens was meant to think of him. The dark rings under his blue eyes only added to the image of a man enduring prolonged bouts of extreme stress, but that was understandable. It was the least suspicious thing about him. Whatever it was that Dickens couldn’t quite pin down, it was making his ribs itch.

“If you’ve been briefed on the case,” Councilman August said, “then you’ll know that time stands equal to secrecy in the resolution of this matter. I am here to co-operate as best as I can, but I need you to remember one thing: I did not do this. No one has entered or exited the station since the murder. I am holding all my staff under the pretence of quarantine – a façade the Guild of Inspectors alone is keeping relatively plausible. But it still stands that one of my staff murdered… murdered the wife of a Supreme Judge.”

Who you slept with.

“Only three members of staff were inside the manor when the incident happened,” the Councilman continued. “They are being held in the West Wing for questioning. Madam Agent tells me that that is your specialty, Mr. Charles.”

Dickens, or Sir Agent would do, maybe. “Somewhat, though in the interest of full disclosure, Councilman, I rarely trust the first person at the crime scene to shout ‘I didn’t do it.’”

The Councilman nodded. “And that’s fair, all things considered. But this brings us to the crux of the case.”

“I was investigating another matter for the Councilman the day of the murder,” Sera said. “Some light Guild work – checking for illegal surveillance around his premises. I was sitting with the Councilman in his office when we heard the scream. The Supreme Judge’s wife – Mrs. Langard – was in a locked room two doors down. He couldn’t have done it.”

Dickens raised an eyebrow. “But?”

The elevator came to a halt and dinged.

“Best you come and see,” Augustus said.

The elevator opened into a bare room roughly the size of a modest lower wage house in Fourth Orbit. The Councilman led the way, with Dickens and Daniels walking on either side of Sera.

Dickens held up a fist, and then extended his index finger and eventually all five. How messy is the crime scene? The signal went.

Sera pointed to herself then held up a single finger. One. She pointed to Dickens and held up just her thumb. Six.

Ma’s Christ.

“Did you say something?” Sera asked.

“I believe he said ‘Ma’s Christ,’” Daniels offered unhelpfully.

August led them through the room into a wide, warmly lit hallway with thick carpets and wooden panels the colour of smoked brandy. The soft golden hydro lights overhead cast the whole thing in an amber glow that seemed to undo the knot of muscles over Dickens’ kidneys. Having endured a month of the blues and greys of Third Orbital Light Correctional, the hallway was a sight that wasn’t entirely unwelcome, though with his heavy boots and industrial pressure suit, Dickens felt something akin to a man treading mud on semi-sacred soil.

“This way,” the Councilman said, leading them down a second empty hallway.

Though Third Orbital Light Correctional had had less than a hundred prisoners, there had been a perpetual murmur of conversation between its residences. Perhaps it was to drive back the encroaching noise of empty cells; the wide, deep silence of the rest of the prison that was in some way a little brother to that of the bottomless vacuum that watched them from behind the thin veil of protective glass. It was the noise of men and women pushing back against the natural sound of emptiness. The silence of the hall was a different matter.

There was an air of abandonment about it, a touch of flight rather than fight – one that made Dickens keenly aware of the soft fibres he crushed beneath his weighted boots and the grain of the wooden panels that hushed him whenever his nylon back brushed against them.

“It’s too fuckin’ quiet,” Daniels muttered.

Dickens nodded, his focus drifting again to the back of the Councilman’s neck. There was a stiffness about him, a little skip of uncertainty in his step that took Dickens a moment to pinpoint. It was the posture of a man who wasn’t quite in control of his situation, who had to place the wellbeing of his singular experience in hands that were not his own. In contrast, Sera seemed the only person perfectly comfortable here. Being a Guild member came with a certain level of control, after all.

“My office is down this way,” Councilman August said, leading them down a third hallway.

“How many corridors does one man need?” Daniels asked, shifting his bag to his other shoulder.

Somehow, the third hallway was even wider than the other two. The carpet here wasn’t as clean and there the wooden panels weren’t as bright. The previous two might not have been used much, but this one hadn’t been cleaned in a few days and it showed, albeit barely. Dickens acknowledged the pang of guilt he felt.

Only three staff members, and they have to keep this whole shebang clean at all times? At least the prison had had the decency to make its residences pick up a mop or two. Then again, they hadn’t had much say in the matter.

There was also a slightly sweet smell in the air, one that the cooling vents blowing cool, purified air couldn’t mask. It had a bitter edge to the sweetness, like medicine that was more a suggestion of mint-flavour than the actual thing. Artificial fresheners.

August led them past his office to the second door on its left, where the smell was strongest. Holding his tie to his nose, he ran his thumb across the print-lock and pushed the door open once the magnetic strip released it. A gust of overly-minty air boiled over into the hallway, completely swallowing up Dickens’ senses of smell and taste. He held the collar of his pressure suit over his nose at the same time Daniels did.

Golden hydro lights activated automatically as the Councilman stepped into the room. Sera followed, then Daniels, who gasped at something. Dickens followed last, turning his shoulders a little so he could get through the door frame. He bumped into Daniels, who’d stopped dead in his tracks, and followed his gaze upward. And there she was.

Ma and Da’s Christ, Dickens swore.

His nylon bag hit the carpet with a soft thud.