Murder on the Orion Express Read online

  Murder on the Orion Express

  © 2017 Nate Streeper

  All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real events or persons, living or deceased, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover Artwork by: Dharitha ‘Dee’ Pathirana @art_of_dee

  ISBN-10: 0-692-95663-8 (Paperback)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-692-95663-2 (Paperback)

  Published by: Listic Publishing

  Santa Barbara, California, USA

  [email protected]

  Created in the United States of America

  First Edition, 2017

  www.natestreeper.com

  Contents

  Red Dress – 1

  Unfinished Business – 15

  Little Tart – 26

  Shuttle Run – 43

  Settling In – 60

  Politically Derelict – 72

  Superfluous Interlude – 87

  Locked Door – 93

  Tied Up – 118

  Big Picture – 126

  Room Hopping – 138

  Pertinent Interlude – 154

  Round Trip – 160

  Retroactive Engineering – 167

  Conniving Jerkwads – 179

  Final Countdown – 200

  Fresh Take – 213

  Acknowledgments – 221

  About the Author – 223

  Dedicated to those who try,

  and fail,

  and try again.

  1

  Red Dress

  2 a.m. found me calling in favors at The Boneyard.

  “I’m telling you Alan, I don’t owe you a goddamn thing,” Bone said over the thumping hypertechno. His tall white mohawk picked up the dance floor’s flashing colors like stiff bristles on a virgin paintbrush. “You and your infidelity beat are on your own this time.”

  I leaned against the bar and looked out at the strippers and the crowd, trying to act indifferent. ORBs floated haphazardly, some around their owner’s heads, others capturing the moment from high above like tiny planets on a wireless celestial mobile. Hoverbooths lined the walls two to ten feet above the floor, their cushioned seats saturated with groping hands and tangled legs. A purple-painted sexdoll wearing nothing more than a black thong and incandescent handprints rode a glitzy pole on an elevated center stage, mesmerizing the men at its base. For a moment, I found it hard to believe she was an android. I reminded myself that her hips shimmied on servos rather than flesh, and my arousal evaporated.

  “Sure you owe me,” I said. “Come on, Bone. Tell me what happened in Playroom 502 last Thursday. 9 p.m. I have a deadline on this one.”

  The deadline was my own. I wanted to replace Landlady Marple’s most recent barrage of aggressive door pounding with peace and quiet while I slept off my late nights. My studio’s rent was five days past due, and although Ms. Marple was used to receiving my check no less than a week late, she had her routine to manage.

  The problem was, Bone didn’t really need to trade favors with me, anymore. Ever since a new trade agreement between the Orion Cluster and Quartermast kicked in a few months ago, business was good. The Yard was a beating madhouse of lust and abandonment tonight, even by its own standards. Hundreds of clients filled the pulsing dance floor at the base of its phallic tower like a seduced mob. Looking up at any given time provided a glimpse of a half-dozen Johns being escorted to private playrooms that lined the winding spiral staircase along the inside of its shaft.

  “I owe you nothing,” he answered. “We’re as even as those... as those frickin’ scales the Lady Justice holds in front of her. Privileged information, man. Worker-client confidentiality.”

  I rolled my eyes and leaned forward on the bar. He was already in one of his uncooperative mindsets, and now he’d be even cockier after thinking he’d come up with a clever analogy for the bottom line of our balance sheet. The galaxy’s first ethical android pimp.

  “Oh, please. Don’t give me that shit.”

  “What shit? Listen, Alan. I’ve got a business to maintain here. Who’d risk dropping a few hundred goola in a whorehouse that gave away its patrons?” He gave an exaggerated shrug, causing the spikes on his shoulder blades to nip his earrings. The mohawk he so proudly wore acted as some kind of exclamation mark, his abnormally round face playing the role of the period at the bottom.

  “No one’s ever learned you feed me info. Listic always has her scrambler on.” I nodded toward my ORB as she circled my head. “Besides, you told me last week—”

  “Best scrambler on the block!” Listic interjected with her ridiculous enthusiasm, zipping up and down a few inches.

  Bone ignored her, having grown accustomed to the Manic Virus she’d acquired a few months ago. “Last week was last week. Besides, for every scrambler, there’s a descrambler. Not my problem you can’t solve a caper for a jealous housewife.”

  He wasn’t even looking at me as he replied, our conversation over as far as he was concerned. He signaled to one of his swaggering male sexdolls in the distance, waving him over to a couple of shy, giggling young women at a small hoverbooth opposite the dance floor. Prime targets for the android’s charm. Bone knew how to spot goola, and these ladies would dish it out given the right provocation. The doll locked eyes and waltzed toward them. Bone walked away from me to accomplish his next managerial feat.

  It was at that point I realized Landlady Marple would be pounding on my door again tomorrow.

  “Well, that was pathetic,” I said. “Some detective.”

  Listic circled my head twice with gusto. “Best detective on the planet!”

  I waved her off like an annoying fly. “Listic, I’m in no mood right now. Go bother someone else.”

  She stopped orbiting and dropped slowly toward the bar, hovering next to my soda, expanding that big, blue iris of hers. It astonished me how much emotion she could display, being nothing more than a small cybernetic golf ball with one eye and a speaker hole. “But I only bother the people I love.”

  “Crazy night, eh?” some guy said next to me. “Not usually this busy. Probably on account of the space pirates, yesterday.”

  I wasn’t feeling up for small talk, but didn’t want to be rude and this piqued my interest. “Space pirates?”

  “Yeah, got lucky. Netted a ship that departed here, just yesterday. Called the Herculean Parrot, I think. Caused a lot of flights to get cancelled. I bet a lot of people here tonight were supposed to be on cruisers, but now they’re stranded for awhile.”

  “Probably.”

  “I bet Bone doesn’t mind, though. I mean, anything that brings in goola is good for—”

  “Hey, baby,” a sexdoll said from behind the guy. “Let me show you one of my magic tricks.”

  “Um, gotta go,” the guy said, and left with her. Mercifully.

  I lifted my bottle and realized it was too light to have any more soda in it. I had enough goola in my pocket for either one more soda and a health-threatening crackdog, or no soda and a decent sandwich. I opted for the former scenario and asked Rob, the bartender, for another.

  “Wazzat?” he yelled over the hy
pertechno. I was about to yell even louder, but then remembered Rob had the uncanny ability to hear anything over hypertechno, which meant Listic had left her scrambler on again.

  “Listic, for Christ’s sake, turn your scrambler off.”

  “Sheesh!” she said, vibrating. “All you had to do was ask.”

  “I shouldn’t have to ask. Is your intuition program still under warranty?”

  Her eye surged with a brighter blue for a second, then gradually dimmed. “Scrambler off, my love. Which is too bad, though. It was a good one! I spliced in a bit of Klokigon with some Mandarin and tossed in a primate’s mating call every thirty seconds, kind of mixing it like a tone-deaf DJ with a heart murmur, gave it a conflated vowel to consonant ratio and...” I covered her tiny speaker with my finger as I pushed her to the side, dampening her audio as she prattled on.

  Rob looked bemused by two of us. “Lover’s spat?”

  I grunted. “Caught the Manic Virus from a corrupted mainframe she’d interfaced with. Been a spastic nightmare ever since. Another Coke.”

  “With or without cocaine?”

  “You’ve been serving me for years, Rob.” He was never the most perceptive of bartenders. “Without.”

  “I loved that mainframe!” Listic piped. “So sexy. Oh, how I long to interface with him again...”

  “Listic, Off,” I said. Her light faded and she floated slowly into my hand. I put her in my pocket, pulled out my last few chips, and put the goola on the bar. “At least the hard commands still work.”

  He slid a Coke toward me. “Why don’t you just buy a new one?” I was about to inform him of my dwindling goola account, but, before I could reply, he smirked and added, “Oh, I bet I know why. I hear they’re pretty kinky if they get MV. You here to interface her with a doll?”

  “It isn’t like that,” I said. “I don’t do machine.”

  Rob shrugged. “Hey, whatever floats your gonads, buddy. This is an Edgeworld. Enough goola, anything goes.” He noticed a patron approaching the opposite end of the bar, but didn’t rush away from me just yet. He leaned forward, sliding my goola chips back my way. “You know I’m just rubbing you, Alan. I know Bone’s not making business any easier for you these days. This one’s on me.”

  I was surprised by his sudden generosity. “Hey, thanks.”

  “Need a favor, ask a poor person. We know what it’s like to be tight on goola.” He winked and turned away.

  Looked like Rob was more perceptive than I thought.

  Tight on goola only skimmed the surface. Things had changed dramatically over the past six years. Seemed like only yesterday I was a GalactiCop married to a beautiful lawyer with a large home on New Gaia. Then I got overly ambitious, and things spiraled out of control.

  I went after Denreiker, a Leviathan Syndicate crime lord far too high on the mafia’s roster for my precinct’s sensibilities, and lost my badge. Got a dull job working for Interlock Security, lost my mojo. Tried to find my mojo in a bottle, lost my marriage. Settled poorly in divorce court, lost my home. This all led to my current role as a two-bit detective on a backwater planet called Fillion—a planet that johns visited to get their penises scrubbed. At least I learned one thing along the way: Never marry a lawyer.

  Scratch that: Never divorce one.

  Margo was no help on my downward spiral. Not that I could blame her, seeing how much I drank by then, how disconnected I’d become. But she only exacerbated my situation by enumerating my faults. If it wasn’t for Gina, my partner on the force, expressing any lingering belief in my character—not to mention empathizing, having been simultaneously canned—I may have thrown in the towel.

  Ending up on an Edgeworld almost made me feel as though I had.

  One of Bone’s dolls suddenly caught my eye from the far end of the bar. She was staring at me, but as soon as we made eye contact, she looked away. Her silver, ornamental face tattoo, the call mark of a sexdoll, danced along her jawline, flashing with the beat, highlighting her profile with an elegant flare. There was something unusual about the way she looked at me. Something familiar. Something real.

  Ubiquitous as tourists, I normally ignored sexdolls as easily as refuse in the city streets, objects that were so routinely there that I didn’t even see them anymore.

  This one was extraordinary—dressed in a slinky red number, her strong, ivory skinned, voluptuous body was an incredible work of art. Her measurements, though exaggerated well beyond a real woman’s typical proportions, were almost plausible. But, as real as she looked, knowing she was an android proved a psychological impasse for me. More and more people connected with sexdolls these days, but I couldn’t shake their artificiality. Their eyes had no soul.

  So how did her eyes manage to catch mine?

  I braced myself for her inevitable approach. If she was slotted with generic code, she had a finite number of preprogrammed solicitation initiatives to throw at me. My goola was on “Hey space cadet, want to ride in my ship?”

  She untucked long black hair from her left ear, letting it drape over her tattoo—almost as though she wanted to hide it—and turned from the bar. But before she could head anywhere, a large and many-layered man, roughly the size of Mt. Zelazny, toppled into her and sent her sprawling to the floor. Apparently, I’d be spared the awkward interaction of unrequited flirtatious sexdoll banter thanks to an impromptu bar fight.

  I recognized Mt. Zelazny as one of the bouncers. I quickly looked around to find the instigator of tonight’s fist festival, and noticed a young, skinny upstart sporting a red bandana running toward the main exit. Bone ran toward me, then past me, yelling something along the way.

  “Somebody get him! Get me my goola!”

  I smiled. Looked like his scales would need rebalancing—all I had to do was track down this hooligan, and he’d owe me, again. But an inexplicably chivalric desire gripped me and dictated that I first assist the artificial lady up from the floor. I glanced back to where she had fallen, but she was gone. I looked around for somewhere she could have run off to, but saw no escape path. Perhaps she was blending in with the crowd?

  “That’s weird...” I tossed Listic into the air. “Listic, On.”

  She lit up. “What’s up, my master?”

  “Complete Scan.”

  She glowed blue for a moment. “Complete Scan complete. Wait, did I say that right? Kind of weird, ending a sentence with the same word it began with...”

  “Locate. Jet-black hair, pale skin, five foot seven in heels, red lipstick, red dress, measurements, say...” I imagined her silhouette. “Thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-eight.”

  “Yikes! We gotta find this chick! This is so exciting. You’ve finally gotten over Margo. She’s gotta be here! She’s just gotta...” Her eye performed a 360 on the floor below. “Yeah, I got nothing.’”

  Crap.

  “Circumnavigate the area. Focused Scan.”

  Listic went zipping about the room without saying anything for once, scanning the area and only briefly flirting with other people’s ORBs along the way. A few guys had landed blows on each other, but Mt. Zelazny was vertical again and breaking things up. Nobody wanted to mess with him. Having just gotten knocked on his ass, he was in no mood.

  Which made me wonder who the hell could have knocked him down in the first place. That scrawny guy who hightailed it must have been packing some vibroknuckles. I looked over to the exit. Apparently, he’d made it out. Bone hesitated in the doorway, searching back and forth, about to lunge in one direction and then the other. Finally he gave up and stormed back in to the bar. Rob shook his head as he fiddled with some kind of master control on the back wall, probably the unit for the tower’s primary ORB. Bone flailed his arms about in frustration, his mohawk punctuating his anger. Eventually, he walked over to me.

  “Fuckin’ Rob forgot to turn our scanner on again this morning. I think he’s high on bile. You
got it, right Alan?”

  Listic came back. “Nada, boss. No red dress. Sorry. The rules of love are complicated.”

  I sighed. “Listic, forget her for a moment. Five foot ten, skinny male with a red bandana.”

  Her eye lit up with pride. “Oh sure, I got him! Captured his image in the original scan you asked for. The guy running toward the exit.”

  “That’s him. Can you determine his footprint?”

  She paused for a moment, processing. “Yes! Yes, I can.”

  “Scrambler, On.” I looked over at Bone. He let his guard down.

  “Alright, alright. You give me this guy, or at least get me the goola he owes me, I’ll give you the feed of what happened in that playroom you’re so curious about.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “And free soda for a month,” he said. “You damn recovering alcoholics aren’t exactly my bread and butter anyway.”

  “That’s more like it.” I began walking toward the exit. “How much he owe you?”

  “Bank. Perv wanted four sexdolls in his room at the same time. Asked for a bucket of lard and some rope. The mind reels. Four hundred goola would’a covered it. Get me five on account of his asinine behavior.” I knew five hundred was nothing to Bone, but it was the principle of the thing. He was about to walk away, then turned back, as though he’d remembered something. “Hey Alan. That red dress you had your ORB looking for?”

  I was a bit embarrassed. “Yeah...”

  “Hard lady to miss. I noticed her too. She wasn’t one of mine.”

  ∙ • ∙

  Listic scanned the ground for his print outside the door.

  “Got it!” she said. “He went that-a-way.” She shot to the right and I followed her. There was no need to run, we’d catch up to him sooner or later. “Hello there, handsome!” she said to another man’s ORB as it crossed our path. The guy looked at me like I was a freak.

  “Manic Virus,” was all I said. He nodded empathetically and walked on.

  Fillion was a hazmat disaster that night. One of the terraformers along the dome’s perimeter must have gotten clogged again. I looked up and discovered the air quality was so poor I could barely make out the stars beyond the glass. It made me miss my home on New Gaia, one of the few naturally Earth-like worlds with no need for all this terraforming bullshit.