It was near the end of Harry’s shift when he got the call about the body. It was way down in the lower levels of the station, what the locals there called the Works. Grumbling, Harry took the spine tram down there, wondering what he was walking into.
His new partner, Maddox, was already on the scene keeping everyone at bay, his slate in evidence collection mode. He looked determined but frustrated, and his gaze softened when he saw Harry getting off the tram.
Blake Maddox looked young enough to do the job effectively but old enough to have been jaded by it. He wore his brown hair in a sharp-edged crew cut. His features were as boxy as his hair: a square lump of a nose jutted from a square head, what Harry imagined the ancient Egyptian Sphinx back on Earth would look back in the days when it still had a nose. Gray, deep-set eyes peeking out from a square, jutting face. A wide, lantern jaw. All of which sat atop a short, square-shouldered form that could only have come from life down a gravity well. It was if his entire body had been cast in an extrusion mold like one of those high-end security golems the immortals used as bodyguards.
“About time,” he said.
“What have we got?” Harry said, ignoring the jibe.
“Female, mid-twenties, crammed halfway into an industrial reclamator.” Maddox walked Harry to the crime scene, where a partly mangled corpse was indeed stuffed part of the way into a reclamator.
“Thing wouldn’t seal, so the recycling goop didn’t get to her. I guess our perp thought this was a clever way to get rid of the body. Maybe he heard someone and hauled ass before he could finish the job.”
“He thought wrong,” Harry said. “Cause of death?”
“Looks like blunt force trauma to the head. Girl got her skull caved in pretty good by something.” Maddox leaned in to examine the wound once more. “Hey. Wait a minute. Holy shit. Do you know who this is?”
He moved so Harry could get a good look. The realization of the girl’s identity chilled his blood. He did indeed know who the victim was. Everyone on the station with feed access knew who she was.
“Honey Gomez,” Harry said, his mouth suddenly dry.
Maddox nodded slowly, reverently. “Holy shit.”
This certainly put a new wrinkle in things. Honey Gomez was the closest thing that Valhalla Station had to a celebrity. She was featured in every advertisement and starred in almost every entertainment feed, especially the adult ones. She could be seen, in various stages of undress, all over corporation space.
“What the hell is going on here, Harry?” Maddox asked. He was the new guy, only transferred to Valhalla a few months ago. Harry doubted he had ever handled anything worse than an armed robbery. As for Harry himself, he had seen his fair share of death. People didn’t stop being awful to each other when they moved up out of a gravity well. But this was his first murder on Valhalla. He had seen plenty of rape, aggravated assault, and lots of accidental deaths and dismemberment. Space was a dangerous place. But few if any murders. Let alone the murder of someone whom everyone aboard new and loved.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“I don’t know, Blake,” said Harry after a long moment. “But we need to keep a tight lid on this for as long as we can, which won’t be for very long.”
Maddox nodded, eying the small crowd of onlookers that had formed about ten feet away, mostly workers expecting to have started their shifts by now.
“The late hour and the location will help with that,” he said. “Not a lot of gawkers down here, especially during third shift.”
Harry nodded. “Everyone will find out come morning. That’s when the shit will hit the fan.”
Maddox arched an eyebrow. “How so?”
Harry studied him. He was new here, didn’t understand the politics of this place. A space station was just like any ship or city down a well. It had its own vibe. It was like a living, collective organism, bigger than the sum of its parts.
“I’ll explain it later. Right now we need to get this crime scene secure and get some techs down here. And tell those folks back there to piss off.”
“I’m on it,” said Maddox, already tapping on his slate. “I’ll get some uniforms down here, get it closed off. Then the crime techs can go to work.”
“Make sure she’s sealed tight in a body bag,” said Harry, pointing to Honey Gomez’s half-mangled corpse. “I don’t want anyone seeing her like this, getting the news out early. And put up an electromagnetic net to keep out the news gnats.”
“Got it.”
Maddox took one last look around, his slate vibrating in his pocket. He pulled it out. It was flashing red from all the alerts and communiques flowing through the group assigned to this investigation. Most of it was redundant; Maddox would take care of it. The rest could wait until morning.
He stuffed the slate back in his pocket. He eyed the crowd. Something about the time and place bothered him. “Say,” he said, turning to Maddox. “How’d you get here so fast?”
Maddox gave a noncommittal shrug. “I was in the neighborhood.”
Harry gave him a short nod. “Right.”
Ten minutes later a pair of med techs arrived with a stretcher, along with a small army of crime scene scrubbers with scanners and DNA collectors and chemical sniffers and other tools of their dark trade. Harry got out of their way, returning to the tram and taking it back up the spine to the residential levels. It was late, and he had to start his next shift in a few hours. He wanted to get some sleep before the world dropped out from beneath him.
Instead he returned to his tiny compartment and turned on his entertainment system. It was on a news feed replaying events from earlier in the day, some planetary political shenanigans that had nothing to do with him and didn’t affect Valhalla at all. He switched it to one of the adult entertainment channels, where Honey was doing her thing in a little softcore piece produced on the station. He had seen it at least half a dozen times, but this time it felt different. Like watching her ghost.
Harry grabbed a beer bulb from the small fridge. It was contraband, confiscated from an illegal brewery they had to shut down up on level fifteen. He popped the tab and took a testing sip, wincing. It was more yeast than beer, but it was all he was going to get at this late hour. He sat and watched Honey do her thing with a woman who had come to fix her apartment’s air handler, wondering what his world was going to be like tomorrow now that she was gone.