10
MALLORY’S FIRST OFFICIAL CASE
WHEN WORKING “WITH” the police and the North Carolina SBI, Mallory had encountered hatred, mistrust, and invasive personal investigation. Law enforcement had also reluctantly, grudgingly, asked for her cooperation in solving the case, realizing they couldn’t do it without her. But every time they acted like it was a one-time thing.
Despite conveying his ultimate disgust at all things Mallory and hating to ask her personal health questions more than his colonoscopy (he had told her this fact), SBI agent Donald Draughn had been the one person who was entirely against her leaving Earth. He had even admitted he might—might—allow her to get a private investigative license if she would stay.
Mallory had laughed at him. “Too little, too late.”
Needless to say, despite how much she ended up helping and how much she appreciated the rare recognition she received after a case was solved, every experience with law enforcement had been bad. She didn’t know what to expect from alien law enforcement.
Changed into more comfortable jeans and a sweatshirt (and shoes that fit), she found Ferdinand in the medbay.
“Has anyone told security about the shuttle yet?” she asked. “They should probably know we have survivors and that there are a bunch of dead humans just sitting in Infinity’s hold.”
“Why should they know? They have much more to worry about with the station in distress and the shuttle bays getting crowded. They can worry about a handful of live humans, or they can worry about the thousands of other people, not to mention the station itself, they need to keep alive,” Ferdinand said. “The dead will stay dead, unless—I don’t understand human bodies, actually, but they don’t come back from the dead, right?”
“Only in a few recorded cases,” she said, chewing her bottom lip. “I don’t think other species approach crime the way humans do,” Mallory muttered.
The exterior room of the medbay had the typical Eternity steel wall structure, with a white floor and a white partition bisecting the space. It was pretty clear their side was for waiting, with plastic chairs of various sizes, most of them too big for humans. The other half had a lot of screens on the wall depicting human anatomy, cell structure, and some incomprehensible scientific things. Gurudevs and a small swarm of Sundry studied the data and conferred with each other.
Set into the wall by the waiting room door was a communications portal, what Mallory had begun to privately call the alien Internet. And inscrutable, with all the symbols she still didn’t know by heart.
Xan appeared from an interior door, looking decidedly angry and uncomfortable. He pulled the black leather jacket around him like a blanket as he approached Mallory.
“I am never letting an alien touch me again,” he snapped when Mallory raised an eyebrow.
“Just keep in mind that you’re helping those injured folks now that they understand male body parts,” she said, and returned her focus to the portal.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
She glanced at him and then back at the complicated panel, trying to remember what icons to push to make a call. “Security needs to know about the Earth shuttle.” Her finger hovered over a button marked with five dots forming a circle, like a pentagram that someone started to map out but didn’t finish.
Xan leaned past her and pointed to an icon that looked like a neatly stacked pile of sticks. “That’s the one you want.”
She poked the button, then looked over her shoulder. “Thank you.”
It took security a full twenty seconds to answer the call. “Station security, make it fast. We have a situation.” Mallory recognized the voice of Station Security Captain Devanshi, the Phantasmagore who had been kind to her when she got on the station. She winced as alarms blared through the comm.
The ground shook under Mallory again. “This is Mallory, the human, remember?” she said awkwardly. “I wanted you to know there was a shuttle accident and there are several humans dead or injured. I’m not sure about the crew’s status, but they were Gurudev.”
“Are the survivors in the medical bay?” Devanshi asked.
“Yeah, the Gneiss helped us out and got them out. We docked the shuttle—”
The sharp voice interrupted. “Then why are you telling me?”
“Because I thought security should know about a shuttle accident! There are dead VIPs from Earth. This is a diplomatic incident. Earth is going to want a lot of answers.”
Devanshi’s voice became strained. “We are dealing with a panicked gargantuan being that is responsible for the lives of thousands. If we don’t fix this, your dead VIPs will matter about as much as oxygen vented into space.”
“I think the accident is tied to Ren’s murder,” Mallory ventured.
“And how do you know about Ren?” Devanshi demanded.
“The grapevine,” she said, hoping the translation bug would figure out what that meant. “Also, I figured the station wouldn’t be so upset if it had its host. Do you need help finding out who killed Ren?”
“What?” Devanshi sounded confused. “No, that’s not the problem at all. The station needs a host so we can communicate with her. If she doesn’t calm down and find a proper symbiont, then more will die. Including you and me, your humans in the medical bay, my eggs in my quarters—everyone. If we find the murderer and still die in space, that’s not a victory.”
Mallory cleared her dry throat. “Understood. So do you—”
“If you care so much, figure it out yourself. If we survive this, you can tell me who to arrest,” Devanshi said, and cut the call short.
The lights illuminating her face so Devanshi could see her faded, and Mallory remained at the portal for a moment, trying to push past her shock. No one had ever told her to figure out a murder on her own. Usually, they yelled at her not to get involved and then asked for her help the next day, but they never left her alone to solve a case.
Xan had returned to Ferdinand to talk. They stopped when Mallory approached them.
“How did it go?” Xan asked, his words carrying a tired dread.
“Well, they reacted about how Ferdinand said they would,” she said, shrugging. “She said I could solve Ren’s murder because they can’t be bothered right now.”
“You’d think they would worry another murder is going to happen,” Xan said.
“Unless their job is done.” Mallory faced him square on. “I have to ask—”
“I know,” he said, interrupting her. “And Stephanie didn’t murder Ren.”
“That wasn’t what I was going to ask,” she said, irritated. “I would like to know how you have all this information. She knew he was in the ossuary and wasn’t concerned. You didn’t seem surprised either. This is tearing apart the station, and you’re both just chill.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about Gneiss,” Ferdinand said.
Mallory didn’t miss Xan’s grateful glance at the Gneiss for changing the subject.
“Some things are sacred to our people,” Ferdinand said. “Some things you don’t know just because you haven’t been among us long. As we told you, the ossuary is merely a place for us to sleep. Everyone there, from pebble to gunship, is very much alive, just dreaming. And Gneiss aren’t like other intelligent species with their symbionts of other species. We connect with each other. Nearly all of us, on some level or another. Family connections are the deepest. If you have relatives in the ossuary, you will know what goes on there. Especially since nearly nothing happens there. The dumping of a body becomes a hot topic.”
“So her grandmother or cousin got on the family group chat and told Stephanie that someone dumped a body near them?” Mallory asked.
“That’s how I found out, yes,” he said. “I assume the same for Stephanie.”
Mallory shook her head, noting his evasion. “Do these family members know who dumped the body and who killed Ren?”
Ferdinand didn’t look at her. “No.”
God, she wished she could read alien body language. It was like trying to interrogate the statue of David.
The interior laboratory had soothing muted slate-colored walls with computer panels set within. The opposite wall featured multiple video screens and holographic projectors. Mallory recognized a red blood cell spinning slowly on one screen, and two Gurudev doctors were looking at it and discussing in low voices. Most of the other screens showed various enlarged images of other body parts or organs that Mallory didn’t recognize. One screen closer to the door cycled through some of the survivors’ faces.
She turned to Xan to try to get more out of him, but four Sundry approached, hovering in front of her.
“Thank you for bringing the male human to study,” they said. “Enlightening. Different. Thankful. We need to inject the patients with the bacterium, and we wanted to make sure the human body could take it,” they said. “Healing. Strengthening. Communicating.”
“Bacteria? That doesn’t sound safe,” Mallory said, frowning.
“As we understand, it’s a common bacterium among carbon-based life-forms. Universal. Beneficial. Digestive. But ours is modified and evolved so that it has more than just digestive properties. Powerful. Healing. Mysterious.”
She nodded weakly. “When can I see the injured?” she asked the Sundry.
“A few hours still,” they said. “Healing. Patience. Safe.”
“I guess it’s good you’re saying ‘healing’ a lot lately,” she said. “But do we even have hours until the station breaks apart? Because I have no idea how to move twelve injured humans off the station if things go south.”
As if in answer, the sound of groaning metal echoed around her. Mallory and Xan looked up in alarm, but the aliens didn’t react.
A Gurudev stepped back from where they’d been peering at the screen that showed a magnified cell. “You can go to the balcony and wait for the humans,” she said.
If she hadn’t been so upset and exhausted by the spacewalk, the rescue of the shuttle, and the panic of Ren’s death, she would have been more interested in the layout of the interior of the medbay. Its design was like that of an old surgery theater. A balcony lined the four walls, having soft chairs arranged every few meters. Below they could see twelve transparent horizontal pods laid out in two rows, each about nine feet long and looking like they could hold a Gneiss with plenty of room left over. The humans were encased within, with readouts on a small screen on the right side of the pod.
“Looks like it’s not going to be hours,” Xan said, joining her at the railing, eyes on the floor below. Doctors had entered the room holding tablets and began checking the readouts on each pod.
One of the pods’ interior lights turned off, while the other eleven remained illuminated. “That’s not good,” he said.
“Which part?” she asked. “Ren murdered? The station attacking the shuttle? All the dead? All the injured? Or the fact that Adrian is still out there planning on kicking us out of the station?”
There was a movement behind them, and Xan whirled around. Mallory was too tired to be scared and just looked over her shoulder.
“Jesus, don’t sneak up on people,” Xan snapped, taking a step backward toward the railing.
They had been joined by two Phantasmagore from station security. One was Devanshi, but Mallory hadn’t met the second one.
“Osric and I weren’t sneaking,” Devanshi said, and her color shimmered briefly and then settled on brown, her usual skin color.
The Phantasmagore didn’t wear clothing, but Devanshi and Osric did have small pieces of metal grafted to the shiny skin of their chests and armbands like those the medical team wore, only theirs depicted a red square lined in a heavy black outline. Mallory had once attempted to understand what each glittering square on their chests meant. Near as she could tell, they indicated Eternity’s law enforcement, but Devanshi hadn’t explained very clearly why they needed the armbands and the metal pieces. The metal was the only thing that didn’t change when the Phantasmagore and their symbionts used their camouflage to blend in with the walls around them. Which seemed to make grafted metal a liability, but that was just one of the many things Mallory didn’t understand about other species.
“We have come to ask about the Earth shuttle,” Devanshi said. “Report what you know.”
Mallory narrowed her eyes. “I thought you said our shuttle problems were our own.”
“We changed our minds,” Osric said. The red vine symbiont that curled around his leg and up his back pulsed slightly.
“The Gurudev crew are all dead,” Xan said. “Ten humans are dead. Twelve are injured. We’re not sure how badly. That’s what we know.”
Osric glared at Mallory and Xan as if they were the cause of all of today’s chaos. Which we might be, Mallory supposed.
“So many humans, mostly VIPs and diplomats, dead,” Osric repeated as if he didn’t believe them. “From the ship’s information, most of the ones who survived were insignificant members of society. You couldn’t rescue the important ones?”
Beside her, Xan stiffened. “Are you kidding? We didn’t make any decisions; we just saved the live ones and grabbed the rest, well frozen, by the way, from space. And the survivors aren’t insignificant. If you were so worried about the VIPs dying, maybe you should have done the space rescue instead of leaving it to humans.”
“You can’t talk to us—” Osric began, but Devanshi stepped in front of him.
“Shut it, Osric,” Devanshi said. “We also wanted to tell you that our immediate problem has been solved. We’ve found a host for the station, and Eternity is calming down.”
“That’s great,” Mallory said. “Now are you going to look for who killed Ren?”
“We will be asking some questions about it,” Devanshi said. “In the meantime, we’re placing you in charge to investigate what went wrong with the humans’ shuttle.”
“You—you are?” Mallory asked, flummoxed.
“Hey, why isn’t the ambassador involved?” Xan asked. “Shouldn’t he be worried about all the dead VIPs?”
“He is otherwise occupied with diplomatic responsibilities,” Osric said.
“Diplomatic responsibilities,” Xan repeated thoughtfully.
“We will have him message you when he can,” Devanshi said.
“Don’t bother,” Xan said. “We just wondered if you could tell us what was up with him.” He looked at Mallory. “Mal, are you taking the job?”
His expression told her he expected her to refuse, or even run away. She set her jaw and nodded. “I’ll look into what happened on the shuttle when the people wake up. I may need to talk to Gurudev shuttle experts or the families of the dead crew.”
“I don’t think they will accept that,” Osric said. “They don’t look kindly on sharing information with humans.”
“Wha—they were just about to bring a bunch of humans to the station! They lost their own people on that shuttle!” Mallory said.
“I will interview them,” Osric said coldly.
“No, you’re helping me,” Devanshi said. “I’ll tell them to talk to you if you need them. But I recommend doing other methods of investigating first.”
“You do realize it looks really, really bad to hide information from investigators, right?” Mallory asked.
“Might as well just accuse them of sabotage and cut out the middleman,” Xan suggested, but Mallory glared at him.
“I won’t go that far. But you’re keeping one really big piece of the puzzle from me, and I don’t appreciate that.”
“We have much, much bigger things to do than seek your appreciation,” Osric said. “Stay out of our way and investigate the shuttle damage while we figure out the more pressing problems of the station.”
“Contact us with what you find out,” Devanshi said, good, polite cop to Osric’s bad, rude cop.
“Fine,” Mallory said. “But I don’t want any other roadblocks. If you want me to investigate, you have to let me actually do it.”
“I’ll get shuttle schematics to you,” Devanshi said.
“Why? They can’t read it,” Osric sneered.
“We’ll read it just fine,” Xan said, surprising Mallory.
“We will?” she whispered.
“We have to go now. Thanks for your help here,” Devanshi said, as if they’d had a pleasant conversation completely free of insults. Both Phantasmagore faded to blend in with the wall, and the only thing that indicated their movement was the glint of the metal plates they wore and slight shimmering that looked like heat haze on an empty summer parking lot.
“Yeah, my pleasure, I guess,” Mallory said, still wondering why they were putting such trust in her. They don’t think it’s relevant.
When they were gone, she shook her head slowly. “That Osric is such a dick. And I still think the station attacked the shuttle and people died.”
“But why did she do it?” Xan asked, looking down at the bodies in their pods. “Wouldn’t it be connected to stress regarding Ren’s death? And that connects the two cases.”
“That’s a good point,” she said. “And I’m not sure we’re going to find out from our unconscious people. We can’t ask the dead what they know. But you’re right; the real issue here is Ren’s murder. That clearly set off the chain of events.”
“But was the attack on the shuttle just an accident, like knocking a glass off a table, or was it directed at the shuttle?”
Mallory thought, remembering her own arrival at the station. “What if, when she reached out to connect with the people on the shuttle, she found something or someone she didn’t like?”
“That’s true,” he said thoughtfully. “But she let our ambassador come on, and that means the bar is pretty low as to who she’ll let aboard.”
“Xan,” she said, facing him. He was still looking down at the pods below them. She waited until he lifted his gaze to her. “You need to be honest with me. Give me something that makes me trust you. There’s too much at stake, and I know you’re hiding more than one thing from me.”
He turned back to the people below. After a moment of thought, he adjusted the huge jacket. “You said there would be connections with the passengers? Either to each other or to people here on the station.”
She nodded. “Usually both. We’ll find them out when they wake up.” She wanted to ask more, but really she wanted him to volunteer the information.
“I’ll tell you one of the connections,” he said reluctantly.
She waited, silent.
He sighed. “My brother’s down there.”
MALLORY LEFT XAN in the medbay to wait for the humans to wake. She was hesitant to do so—she appreciated the information about his brother but knew there was more he was keeping from her.
Still, she had only asked for one piece of info, and that’s what he gave her.
Xan assured her he didn’t know why his brother was here and said they hadn’t spoken in a few years. There was not much else to go on, and she needed to stretch her legs until the doctors agreed to release more information. I need that passenger list, she thought again, dreading it even as she knew she needed it.
She was remembering her way around the station better today and only took one wrong turn on the way to the Heart of the Station. If Eternity really had a new host, then that’s where they would be. She didn’t know what was involved with merging with a new host, but Eternity had to know there was considerable panic and death aboard. Maybe a new host took days to settle in, but she didn’t care; she needed answers. The station should know who’d killed her host, right?
The hallway to the Heart, lit before with a warm yellow light, was now pulsing red light in a way she hadn’t seen before. A few Sundry crawled on the ceiling above her.
“I don’t suppose you gals saw what happened?” she asked. The Sundry didn’t answer.
Halfway down the hall, she found a fleshy membrane covering the entire hall, from wall to floor to ceiling. It pulsed as well, looking as if it were part of a much larger organ that Mallory was seeing only a sliver of.
Swallowing her sudden nausea, she walked up to it slowly and stretched her hand toward the membrane. Nausea flared again, and she withdrew her hand. This was living, pulsating flesh; that much was clear. Eternity had grown a fleshy barrier around her Heart and her new host. Was this a good sign? Mallory guessed not.
She stepped back and cleared her throat. “Eternity! Is anyone in there? I need to talk to you!” she shouted.
There was no answer.
“What are you doing?” Devanshi demanded, materializing out of the wall behind her.
Mallory jumped. “Gah! Don’t do that.”
Devanshi waited patiently. Mallory looked at the membrane and took another step away from it. “I was coming to talk to Eternity to find out why she attacked the shuttle. Or if she knew who killed her host. I just wanted to talk.”
“You think attempting to communicate with Eternity wasn’t our first action?” Osric said coolly, appearing on the other wall, making Mallory jump again. “We have Eternity’s situation under control.”
Mallory pointed to the membrane, which looked less transparent now, as if more layers were growing in front of them. “Does that look under control? Is that normal?”
They didn’t answer her. “You need to leave the area,” Osric said.
She stood her ground. “No one will tell me what’s happening, and we know the station did attack the shuttle, so she’s on my list to talk to. But what”—she touched the membrane with a knuckle and immediately regretted it—“the hell is this?”
“The station has closed herself off for safety,” Devanshi said. “She wants none of us in there while she communes with the new host.”
“Fine. How long will that take? I can wait. It’s either wait for her or wait for the humans to wake up. Or I could go and find my ambassador. As useless as he is, he probably needs to know about all this. You sounded like you knew where he was . . .” Mallory trailed off, leaving it open for either of them to answer.
Devanshi’s shiny black eyes moved from Mallory to Osric.
“Your ambassador is otherwise occupied,” Osric said, as if reading from a cue card.
“But what diplomatic duties . . .” Realization settled on Mallory’s shoulders like a weighted blanket. She looked back at the wall of flesh that protected the new host from all eyes. “Oh. That diplomatic duty.”
“HOW IS THAT possible?” Mallory raged at Xan after she returned to the medbay. “How can humans even connect with the station? We can’t have symbionts. Isn’t that why they treat us like ignorant rubes half the time?”
“It could be possible,” Xan said calmly. “Humanity just hasn’t had the opportunity.”
Mallory held her head with both hands, trying to contain the outrage. “Did the station, God forbid, choose him? Him?”
“She may not have had a choice,” he said. “Any port in a storm and all that. Maybe it was a choice of killing all of us or connecting with him.”
“You know what this means,” she said, starting to pace behind him on the walkway.
“That we’re more likely to get kicked off the station? Yeah, I thought of that,” he said grimly.
Mallory paced back and forth, wondering how they could get off the station before Adrian could get rid of them.
“You’re thinking ‘run’ again, aren’t you?” he asked.
“If I am, can you blame me?” she said.
He sighed and hung his head briefly, then turned to face her. “No. But I can’t consider that. I can’t do that. Not anymore.” Even though he looked at her, his body still leaned toward the railing, angled to the lower floor, as if it had a gravitational hold on him.
“Your brother. Right,” she said. “How are they doing?”
“No report yet,” he said, but movement on the floor caught their attention.
One of the pods was open now, with two alien physicians leaning over it. Mallory could tell the person inside was a young Black woman. Her eyes were closed, and a laceration split her right cheek and trailed over her forehead. When one of the Gneiss moved aside, Mallory caught sight of a heavily bandaged left hand. Had she come here with that? The doctors didn’t have any gauze wrappings with them; bandaging was probably a barbaric way of dealing with things in their point of view. They pointed at the bandage and conferred quietly; then one reached out and slit through it with a small laser. They examined the hand, noting the missing pinky finger, and then put it gently back on her stomach and closed the pod.
The humans weren’t close to waking up yet. That much was clear. Mallory turned to face the wall to which the catwalk was tethered. Beside one of the massive chairs sat a table where a tablet glowed. Mallory climbed into the chair and sat cross-legged, feeling like a child.
“Whose tablet is that?” she asked, pointing.
“The medbay’s,” he said, his attention going back to the floor. “Ship manifest.”
“How do you know? Can you read alien script too?”
“I know a little, but the manifest is a human file. It’s in English,” he said mildly.
She picked up the tablet, her thoughts returning to the situation at hand, as confusing as it was.
“The station doesn’t attack sentients,” Mallory said aloud. “What made her go for the human shuttle before it even docked?”
“You told Eternity you expected a murder, right?” he asked.
“Of course I did. She shouldn’t have been too surprised if someone got violent on the shuttle or something.”
“So all we can do is wait.”
She didn’t realize how lonely she had felt in trying to tackle this by herself until Xan said “we.” She felt anxious muscles between her shoulders unclench. “That is all we can do,” she repeated softly, and powered on the tablet to read the list of survivors. None of them rang any bells until the last one.
Oh, shit. She’s here.
She replaced the tablet, her heart hammering. Her biggest problem was no longer wondering if Adrian would use the station to exile her and Xan.
Adrian’s the new host, and now this.
Is it too late to run?