The entire crew had fetched some rebreather masks from the ship before proceeding. They had powerful filters that helped remove some of the smell, but there was still something inescapably rotten about the air itself. A disemboweled corpse being left to sit for several days had created a powerful miasma in the room.

“Okay, we’d better just get this over with,” Kamak said. “Farsus, not to put you on corpse duty, but you’re the only person who knows how to analyze this kind of shit. Mind searching for clues?”

There were no cops in this system to pass the buck to, and given the gruesome nature of the crime scene, few people were jumping to investigate it. Kamak and his crew did not have the luxury of ignoring the crime. A corpse crucified to their old ship was a message that could not be ignored. Farsus bit down the disgust he felt at the gruesome display and examined the corpse, from a distance, at first.

“At the very least it is not quite so horrific as the last incident,” Farsus said.

“This is the ‘nice’ version?” Tooley said, sounding appropriately horrified.

“Indeed. The disemboweling was likely a far quicker death than what Loback Loben suffered,” Farsus said. “However…”

Farsus stepped closer and turned the bloated wrists of the corpse slightly, and examined the metal bands that held him onto the nose of Hard Luck Hermit.

“There are burns and cuts on his wrist that indicate a struggle,” Farsus said. “He was alive when he was attached to the ship.”

“Disturbing, but not necessarily helpful,” Kamak said. “I’m looking for messages, iconography, symbolism, that kind of thing.”

He gestured to the pile of guts and the coagulated blood surrounding them.

“Nobody does shit like this unless they want to send a message,” Kamak said. “I want to know what the message is.”

“Are we not assuming the message is ‘I want to kill you’?” Tooley said. “That seems pretty clear.”

“Yeah, I got that too,” Kamak said. “But it’s just the ‘what’, we’re missing the why. Is this just some random psycho, is it a Structuralist trying to fuck with you, is it one of my old bounties trying to fuck with me? I want to narrow my options here.”

“I lack the forensic tools necessary to do a full examination, but in so far as I can tell, this corpse has not been manipulated in any way other than the obvious,” Farsus said. He took a big step away from the pile of guts. “This particular style of execution has no symbolic meaning that I am aware of, but it may be connected to a culture I have not studied.”

“Corvash, you’ve been looking at it funny, any suspicions?”

“It’s a disemboweled corpse, of course I’ve been looking at it funny,” Corey said. He did shrug and hold his arms out for a second, mimicking the corpse’s crucified pose. “On Earth there are definitely some religious connotations to a guy being hung up like this, but I’m pretty sure it’s just a coincidence. Only so many ways to weld a guy to a starship and cut him open.”

He lowered his arms and pointed out the window at the barren planet beyond.

“And no way in hell a human or any human cultural touchstones made it out this far,” Corey said.

“So we can rule out a human culprit,” Kamak said. “Great. Only four-hundred something sapient species to go.”

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“Give me a minute,” Corey said. He wandered over to the door. “Hey, Ranrit.”

“Yes?”

Citing the fact that his duties were completely unrelated to crimes or corpses, Ranrit was standing outside the door rather than in the room with them. Corey couldn’t exactly blame him.

“Do you monitor who comes and goes off this planet at all?”

“Only in the loosest sense of the word,” Ranrit said. “We’re only here for the orbital stations, the corpse over there owned the place. He let us know when he was expecting a visitor, just so nobody got antsy, but we didn’t stop and monitor anyone the way we did you.”

“Did he have a visitor before he was murdered?”

“Yeah, someone he invited, apparently,” Ranrit said. “They landed, stayed for about a drop, took off. Ten drops or so later, an automated alert went out, and we found him like this.”

“Nobody else on or off planet in that time?”

“Not that we know of,” Ranrit said. “But like I said, we weren’t really monitoring the place. We’re kitted for salvage, not security.”

“Not a lot to go on, then,” Corey said. “Thanks anyway, Ranrit.”

He returned to the crew, who had regrouped to do their thinking further away from the ship and the corpse, near a battle-scarred old tank. The distance made the smell a little more tolerable too.

“I don’t think we’re going to get much useful info here,” Corey said. “Seems like nobody was paying attention to anything, and by the time any actual investigators get here, that body’s going to be too rotten to be useful.”

“We’re not completely done here,” Farsus said. “Not yet, at least.”

“Please tell me we don’t have to touch the body at all,” Tooley groaned.

“No, Tooley,” Farsus said. “We simply have not gone inside the ship yet.”

“Oh,” Tooley said. “I don’t suppose you kept your DNA key, Kamak?”

“Nah, but it should be open. Turka had to strip out a lot of the parts that made her spaceworthy before he could legally sell it as memorabilia.”

The Hard Luck Hermit had already been in borderline catastrophic condition when Kamak had given it up, so his mechanic had been forced to either repair it or render it fully nonfunctional before selling it, for safety reasons. With the Hermit already falling apart at the seams, making it nonfunctional had been the obvious choice, and that included stripping out the seals that usually held the cargo bay closed. Doprel managed to pry the hangar open, and the crew stared into the interior of the ship that had been their home once again.

“They buffed out the blaster marks,” Kamak scoffed. “What’s the point in buying war memorabilia if you scrub off the war parts?”

“Those marks weren’t from the war, they were from Hakma shooting at you,” Doprel said. Many of Kamak’s former crew had parted with him on less-than-friendly terms.

“Well I doubt he knew that,” Kamak said. He kept scoffing as he stepped further into the ship he had owned for decades, calling out refurbished couches, replaced panels, rewired lighting, and every other minute change he could spot.

Corey noticed all the same changes, but he kept his mouth shut. He had spent less time on the Hermit than any other member of the crew, but coming back was still deeply nostalgic. He could see somber retrospection on the faces of all his friends. Even Kamak was only complaining to try and stifle the melancholic feeling of returning home.

“Okay, enough bitching,” Kamak said. “Fan out. Look for anything suspicious. Messages written in blood, body parts in the fridge, that kind of thing.”

Search as they might, no one found any blood, bones, or body parts. Just empty drawers and hollow rooms that used to be home. As her last stop, Tooley checked the cockpit. She could see nothing but a small smear of blood from the corpse pinned to the ship’s nose. She tried to ignore that and sat down in her old pilot’s seat. Acting on instinct, she pressed a few buttons to activate the navigation systems. The console remained dead and dark -everything had been disconnected.

“Nothing, huh,” Corey grunted, as he wandered his way into the cockpit.

“Nothing.”

Corey sat down in his old seat with a heavy sigh, and Kamak was only moments behind. The new owner’s refurbishing had left Doprel’s extra-large seat intact, and soon he was sitting in it. Farsus came in last of all, and sat down at his old favorite perch near the now-deactivated weapons console.

“No messages, huh,” Kamak said, as he idly tilted from side to side in his old seat.

“The murder says enough, it seems,” Farsus sighed. “But what is the message?”

Kamak stared out the cockpit window. All he saw was a dusty gray wall with a starfighter wing hanging off it. He was sitting in one relic, staring at another, both equally useless.

“The message is that we’re about to have a real bad time.”