The Space Opera MEGAPACK ®. Jay Lake

his head. “If someone paid me, I would’ve been a passenger. I wouldn’t have signed on for work.”

      It sounded logical. It all sounded very logical. Hunsaker just didn’t know if he should believe it.

      “So what’s this about suffocation?” he asked.

      “Oh, just a theory,” Ilykova said. “Everyone suffocated in one way or another. So if you think of these crimes as related, then maybe the manner of death came as a form of revenge for a death by suffocation…?”

      “I wouldn’t even know how to look for that,” Hunsaker said.

      “I would,” Ilykova said, and took the pad away from Hunsaker.

      * * * *

      Richard was finding a whole lot of nothing as he dug through Hunsaker’s database. The database wasn’t that good. It was old, for one thing, and the updates hadn’t been meshed into the system all that well. They had been grafted on and not efficiently, certainly not efficiently enough for a proper search.

      He would have to get onto the Presidio. It had a good database and he might be able to find what he was looking for there.

      Because, in this cursory exploration, he couldn’t find anyone with any links to any suffocation deaths, murdered, accidental, or even natural.

      He was about to hand the pad back to Hunsaker, when someone screamed.

      “Oh, not again,” Hunsaker muttered.

      Richard tossed him the pad and ran up the steps, half expecting to hear a thump. He didn’t though. But he did hear another scream and, he realized, these screams were male.

      They weren’t frightened screams or startled screams (except maybe the first one), more likely horrified screams, end-of-the-world screams, the kind you emit when everything was hopeless and all was lost.

      Another scream, and then another. Doors slammed as people left their rooms. He was joining quite a crowd as he ran up the stairs.

      The screams came from the top floor.

      He arrived, along with three other passengers from the ship (Janet Powell, Lysa Lamphere, and William Bunting) to find a man he’d never seen before on his knees, hands over his face, screaming like a stuck alarm.

      Another body lay on the floor, this one a woman, also someone he’d never seen before either. Her eyes were open and glassy, her tongue protruding slightly.

      She was clearly dead.

      Someone sighed behind him.

      Richard turned slightly. Hunsaker stood near his shoulder, and stared at the woman on the floor.

      “Now what the hell am I going to do?” Hunsaker said with great annoyance. “I mean, really.”

      * * * *

      Judging from the look on Ilykova’s face, Hunsaker had spoken out loud. He felt that warmth returning to his cheeks. He kept his head down, so that he didn’t have to look Ilykova in the eyes, and moved into the room.

      He put his hand on Fergus’s shoulders. Fergus had worked for Hunsaker since Hunsaker came to the resort. Fergus and his wife, Dillith, who now doubled as a corpse. Not that she was ever much livelier than a corpse. But for what Dillith lacked in energy, she made up for in precision.

      She could find a speck of dust the robotic cleaners left behind. She could turn bed sheet corners perfectly. She was slow, but she was anal.

      And in Hunsaker’s “resort,” precision mattered more than speed.

      Fergus stopped screaming when Hunsaker touched him. Fergus looked up, eyes sunken into his face, and said, “What am I going to do?”

      His use of the sentence was plaintive. Hunsaker’s had been self-involved. He had jumped from corpse/murder/crisis to who the hell was going to work for me in this godforsaken place? in less than a minute. He wasn’t proud of that, but he really wasn’t a man who developed much affection for his employees.

      In fact, he believed affection got in the way of work. He didn’t know much about Dillith and Fergus besides their names, their work methods, and the fact that they both preferred late hours rather than getting up early.

      “Stand up,” Hunsaker said with as much sympathy as he could muster, which probably wasn’t enough. “We’ll figure something out.”

      Fergus stood. He was a slight man, and he fell into Hunsaker’s arms, much to Hunsaker’s chagrin. He hadn’t invited the man to hug him. He certainly didn’t want the man to touch him. But Fergus was beyond noticing subtleties. He was sobbing. Hunsaker could already feel his shirt getting wet.

      He patted Fergus on the back and maneuvered him out of the room. Then he looked at Ilykova who was watching him with that look of amusement again.

      “Do me a favor,” Hunsaker said to Ilykova. “Get Anne Marie Devlin, would you?”

      “Who?” Ilykova said.

      “The base doctor,” Hunsaker said.

      “I think this woman is beyond a doctor—”

      “Just do it,” Hunsaker said, resisting the urge to move Fergus toward Ilykova. That would show him passion, all right.

      Ilykova nodded, then hurried down the stairs. Three passengers from the ship stood around as if this were a theatrical event.

      “Go back to your rooms,” Hunsaker said. “There’s nothing to see.”

      As if a woman wasn’t already dead on the floor. There was plenty to see. He just didn’t want them gawking at it.

      They, of course, didn’t move. He glared at them and tried to look tough, which was hard to do when you had a member of the staff sobbing in your arms.

      “Go,” he said, and that seemed to work. Maybe it was his tone, his clear disgust at everyone around him.

      The three left slowly. He watched them go down the stairs, patting Fergus on the back the entire time as if he were a baby who needed to be burped.

      Then Hunsaker peered at the room. It didn’t look that much different than it had two hours ago.

      When he’d helped Susan Carmichael move out of it.

      * * * *

      She heard the screaming, of course. How could she have missed it? And she resisted her first instinct, which was to burrow deep under the covers of this new room, and pretend like she couldn’t hear anything.

      But Susan Carmichael wasn’t a hider. She wasn’t the kind of person who ran to the scene of a crime either, although she couldn’t be entirely certain what she heard was a crime.

      But someone didn’t scream with that level of grief—and that was grief, wasn’t it?—without a precipitating event, and considering Agatha’s murder, the best assumption—the only assumption, really—was that a crime had occurred.

      Again.

      Which meant she had to get the hell off this station.

      Somehow.

      She changed clothes, slowly and deliberately, putting on the ivory blouse over the black pants. She slipped on her shoes, smoothed her hair, grabbed her personal information, and left this room as well.

      The screaming had stopped, but she could hear faint voices in the distance. She glanced at the stairs, to ensure that no one was on them, and then she quietly made her way down.

      It was time she stopped all of this. She gave up. She had been fleeing her family, but really, life out here was much, much worse than life with them could ever be.

      Besides, her father had the capability of getting a ship here within twenty-four hours. He had ships all over the sector. One of them had to be nearby.

      She just had to contact him.

      She