The Space Opera MEGAPACK ®. Jay Lake

grabbed her bar napkin—some lowly piece of cloth that Hunsaker believed necessary for cleanliness—and wiped the beer foam off her chin. She didn’t know if she had beer foam on her chin, but she always thought it was better to wipe off the imaginary beer foam than leave the real stuff to cake.

      Then she grinned to herself. Oh, sober, she probably wouldn’t think that funny but it was funny as hell at the moment.

      “How much have you had to drink?” Hunsaker asked in that precise snotty tone of his, the one that showed all of his expensive education and his breeding and his superiority. Of course, her education had cost twice as much as his, and she probably came from a better family, and she should’ve felt superior, but she’d left that behind, along with her dignity.

      She just wished Hunsaker would remember that. No, better. She wished he would honor it. He remembered it and snotted down to her each and every time he saw her.

      “Natural causes?” she asked, blinking hard. The bar felt smoky, even though it wasn’t. The fog was just in her eyes.

      “Isn’t it your job to figure that out?” he snapped, and that got her attention. Usually—if you could cite a usually, considering they’d only had three deaths together (and didn’t that sound romantic? Only three deaths)—Hunsaker told her what the cause of death was, when it happened, and how she should fill out the death certificate. Usually, she got irritated that he told her how to do her job, and even more irritated when it turned out that he was right.

      The fact that he was unwilling to say how the guest died was a revelation in and of itself.

      “Excuse me,” Anne Marie muttered and headed to the side of the bar. This place was ridiculously small, considering it was the outpost’s only bar. People could drink in the restaurant and the casino, but they couldn’t drink comfortably in either place.

      She leaned against the bar and looked around. A few of the guests from that damaged spaceship had gone into the restaurant for dinner. She could smell roast pheasant or whatever the hell tonight’s meal was called. It was always the same, some dish made of parts from unidentified meat or maybe synthetic meat or maybe even (oh, don’t go there, but of course she did) corpses, mixed with some kind of gravy or sauce, and actual vegetables grown on the only really nice part of the station, the hydroponic garden.

      She’d become a vegetarian a long time ago, mostly in self defense. She didn’t want to think about the source of the meaty protein, so she didn’t. Except when she dealt with corpses or illnesses or both.

      Her stomach lurched. Served her right for drinking beer on an empty stomach. Beer made with real hops because she had insisted long ago. Sometimes she drank the whiskey brought in by ships or the wine imported from various faraway places, but at least she knew how the beer was made.

      She had been hired to make it.

      She had been the station’s bartender, way back when. Before they realized that by the end of the evening she was too drunk to serve drinks. Before Hunsaker, even, because he felt that an automatic drink mixer was better than a human one any day.

      Hunsaker had ferreted out her secret, that she actually had a medical license and she kept it current. She had to. She didn’t want to be sued by some passenger that she had to save because really, underneath the alcohol, she was the noble sort and felt that the Hippocratic oath had nothing to do with hypocrisy and everything to do with nobility.

      Not that she could be hypocritical or noble with a corpse. She grabbed the breathalyzer and took a hit from it, feeling it clear her alcohol haze like a slap to the face. She hated this thing, not just because it cleared the buzz and made her sober in an instant, but because it would give her one motherfucker of a headache in 24 hours, and she wouldn’t be able to do anything about that.

      Except drink, of course.

      She took a second hit for good measure, then turned to Hunsaker. He stood at attention, shoulders back, hands folded before him, mouth in a very thin line.

      “Ready?” he asked in that damned tone.

      She was thirsty, her eyes ached, and she could feel the depression that always lurked ready to crash down on her.

      “As I’ll ever be,” she said, and let him lead her out of the bar.

      * * * *

      Richard managed to escape Janet Potsworth’s room just as Lysa woke up from what Janet was calling Lysa’s faint. It wasn’t a faint, because Lysa had enough time to scream before passing out, but she had slipped into unconsciousness very quickly, and he had a few ideas as to why.

      But he wanted to think about them first, and that required him to get away from the conversation, and from Janet Potsworth who had grabbed his ass when he bent over to make sure Lysa was comfortable. Potsworth was a menace, and he would be glad to get rid of her—although he wasn’t sure when that would happen, especially now that Agatha Kantswinkle was dead.

      He hadn’t expected her to die, probably because she had always been the first person on the scene of the other deaths aboard the Presidio. He’d come to see her as a stout little angel of death, and had found himself wondering more than once if she hadn’t done something to cause them.

      He still hadn’t ruled that out even though she had clearly been murdered herself. Maybe her death was in retaliation for one of the others…?

      He sighed. He had no idea. And he was going to need one, because it was clear—at least to him—that a murderer lurked on this station.

      He tread lightly as he hurried down the stairs—he didn’t want to call any more attention to himself than he already had. He’d shown a bit more expertise in these matters than he wanted to, and someone had noticed.

      That someone was the hotelier, Hunsaker. Hunsaker was refined and organized, not the kind of man you’d normally find in this shabby place at the edge of nowhere. Usually the proprietors of places like this were down-on-their luck drunks who couldn’t be bothered to wait on a customer even if the customer offered five times the normal room rate. Or the proprietors were well-meaning spouses of someone on staff in maintenance, some handy person with cooking skills and an ability to take the drabbest room and make it just a tad gaudy.

      Hunsaker seemed like he had training in hotel management. He certainly took his time checking everyone in, which meant that he looked up their identification as well as debiting their accounts.

      He’d noticed Richard and he’d understood what Richard had said when Richard had closed the door on Agatha Kantswinkle’s corpse. Often Richard made those snide little comments for his own edification, knowing that no one else would catch his meaning. But Hunsaker had and Hunsaker had looked momentarily put out. Not panicked. Put out. Like any good hotelier.

      Richard passed the landing where Lysa had passed out. The door to Agatha Kantswinkle’s room was closed and no one stood outside of it. He wondered if anyone was inside, and if Hunsaker had dealt with the corpse yet.

      He almost stopped—he had a few suspicions he wanted to confirm—but he didn’t. He was afraid that if the old lady’s body hadn’t been removed, then he would make himself even more of a suspect than he already was.

      And he knew he was a suspect. Everyone from the Presidio was.

      The first death had occurred two days out, when they were in the deepest of deep space—an area the captain had called no man’s land because there were no settlements within landing range and no outposts. The trip from the Dyo System through the Commons System was dicey no matter what, but there was a section that was just plain empty. Humans weren’t welcome at any of the stops for two full days of the trip. The captain had warned the crew—all three of them—that the first part of the run had nowhere safe to stop until Vaadum Station, and even then he liked to avoid the place because it was so small and so rundown. He preferred the extra day to Commons Space Station, where everyone could get off the ship and relax in style.

      Richard braced himself for the extended run on a relatively small ship. He was particularly susceptible to cabin fever because