Honey’s death had a profound effect on Valhalla Station, one that Maddox, being an outsider, had underestimated. There were holos on display of her everywhere. Every wall screen and floating display, usually reserved for adverts, were now devoted to memorializing her. Images of her more tasteful, all-audience work ran on continuous loop, along with a caption containing her name and life dates. Entertainment talking heads from the voyeur nets talked about her endlessly as tributes came in from all over human-inhabited space. Her music videos from early in her career replaced reruns of Harry’s favorite police procedural Titan PD. The chyrons of newsfeeds displayed ominous updates like HONEY’S KILLER STILL AT LARGE and NO SUSPECTS IN GOMEZ MURDER.
Beyond that were the sad, drawn faces of everyone on the station, the memorial services being held on every level, and the looks of suspicion everyone gave to each other. Harry had learned from years of service on various vessels, stations, orbital platforms, and asteroid colonies that deep space habitats were closed systems where everyone and everything relied on everyone and everything else for its very survival. Valhalla was a living, breathing organism, a complex machine greater than the sum of its parts. And Honey Gomez had been an integral part of that machine, perhaps even a linchpin that held everything together. With her gone something had broken, something central to proper functioning. It seemed small at first, but it could cause a cascade failure that took out everything, like if the solar array was smashed in a meteor storm, or all the oxygen-producing plants died. But over time little things would become big things, and Harry hoped he would have Honey’s murder solved before then. Before things got really bad.
Everyone was sad and taking it out on themselves and each other. Harry saw it in the way everyone looked at one another and how they lashed out at every trivial argument, every imagined slight. If they didn’t find a healthier release valve soon, things would escalate until people started getting their heads bashed in.
Harry saw the first stirrings of this as he and Maddox stepped out of the lift to a group of shoving, shouting people. Apparently someone had cut in front of someone else in line at one of the shops, and then things turned ugly.
Harry and his partner entered the fray, and flashing their badges was enough to calm everyone down. But Harry knew this was just the beginning.
Maddox couldn’t believe it. He had never dealt with a murder, let alone that of an actual celebrity. Harry wished it would all go away. It was extra attention and bad press Cerberus didn’t need. If he didn’t solve this case it could mean his job. He’d be reassigned, probably to some long-range rock hopper, or dismissed outright and sent packing. Without his security expertise he lacked the marketable skills to remain on Valhalla, not that he particularly enjoyed his assignment there to begin with. The only thing that made it halfway bearable was Honey, and she was gone. He supposed, in a way, that he missed her most of all, and he was grieving her loss along with everyone else, whether they knew her or not.
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Honey had been everywhere. She sang. She modeled clothes. She rented her sparkling green eyes and beautiful smile to sell everything from carbonated beverages to condoms without once seeming like a sellout. She somehow remained pure even while selling intimate glimpses of her body on the voyeur nets, or starring in an increasingly racy line of adult videos.
Harry returned to his small apartment on the contractor level, unlocking the door with his thumb print and stepping inside. He woke up his entertainment system and logged into the password-and-biometric-protected partition. Harry kept a wafer drive loaded with hundreds of hours of Honey’s greatest hits, contraband he’d confiscated after busting an illegal downloading operation a few years ago. It was the only time he’d ever violated his oath as a security officer, but he doubted Cerberus’s Internal Affairs Division would come down on him too hard about it. He loaded it now and leaned back in the chair behind his desk to watch.
Honey appeared, looking very young and so very not dead, and it made Harry smile like few things did. She was beautiful. Tan skin. Pixie face. Green eyes a man could—and often did—get lost in. Lustrous brown hair. The total package, as many a critic had called her. Harry watched her undulate for the camera, lost in thought.
His slate beeped, jarring him from his Honey-induced hypnosis, and he glanced at it, scowling. Apparently there were no known criminals with violent priors or records as hitmen for hire currently aboard Valhalla, nor had there been any coming or going for the last standard week. Harry sighed. So much for the hired thug theory. That left old boyfriends, and Harry suspected Honey had a list of those as long as the station.
His slate bleeped at him again. It was an incoming vid call from Maddox. Harry paused the video and answered.
“Hey,” said his partner. “No go on our hired thug theory.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Maddox nodded. “So I started checking out old boyfriends. She’s got a lot of those. Most of them with priors and quite a few delusional ones who only thought they were her boyfriends. Stalking charges and restraining orders all over the place going back more than a decade.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“So I checked more recent beaus. Seems our Honey had a soft spot for the radical labor movement aboard.”
Harry’s left eyebrow curved. “Do tell.”
“Yeah. Ever heard of a guy named Grayson Steen? He’s a vacuum welder turned troublemaker and mouthpiece for this Workers United outfit. I ran into some of them on a long haul passenger vessel I worked a few years ago. Rough bunch if you piss them off. Anywho, I got his address if you wanna go shake him down.”
“Not tonight,” said Harry. “First thing tomorrow though. Better if we catch this guy in public, on his way to work, than when he’s dug in for the night on his own turf.”
Maddox rubbed his chin in thought. “Good call. OK, then. See you tomorrow.”
He killed the vid feed on his end, Harry’s slate going dark. “Yeah. See you tomorrow.”
Harry thought about restarting the vid feed, then asked his slate to give him everything in station records on Grayson Steen and threw the data stream onto his wall screen. The personnel photo showed a grim, sallow-faced man with dark, angry eyes and a graying buzz cut. A jagged scar marred his round chin, either the result of a workplace accident or some long ago bar fight.
Harry leaned in, reading Steen’s entire personnel file, the old video of Honey Gomez doing her thing all but forgotten.