This asteroid didn’t so much orbit *Io* as it did *Jupiter* in the vague vicinity of said moon, but it belonged to the Io Mining Conglomerate, followed their charter and flew their flag.

The habitat was built on the cheap without such glories as xeno artificial gravity; all we had was rotational velocity and centripetal force, powered by transuranic fusion tokamaks. Where the xenos would just manufacture something the size they wanted, us primitive humans couldn’t do more than catch a rock, dig a hole in it, drop a nuke or three, collect the ore and foam-crete the walls. Lather, rinse, repeat until your mining operation has dug out everything useful, and if it doesn’t collapse, you get to rent it out to desperate squatters who want a piece of the greater galactic frontier. Soon enough, you have an in-situ population that you can then tax to do your work for you, and you get paid twice.

Up-market habs may have been miniature paradise oases for those rich enough to afford them, but this hole was decidedly not. Here, not even the air and water was free. This hab was a warren of wide-open caverns connected by smaller, yet still huge, tunnels. Cave-like warehouses and smaller cubbies dotted both, whilst more traditional buildings spired inwards to the zero-G centre. With no real up or down, people of all species crawled on the walls and ceiling of the central plaza like so many ants. That was me, just another ant, trying to avoid being squashed underfoot.

‘Art’s Hardware’, the sign said. I couldn’t tell if the sign — apparently hand painted on a slab of foam-crete — was deliberately worn or legitimately well-aged. It was a pawn-broker, stocked with everything from bootleg nano-fabs to knockoff cred-chips. One of many. A shady hole-in-the-wall with more stories than it had unwanted tchotchke, and nobody willing to tell them. The inside was deliberately pokey; no room to move, no room to get creative. Everything a man could want was locked up behind transparent aluminium walls and speaking-grates.

“I’m here for some hardware,” I said noncommittally. A fat waste of oxygen in a wife-beater analogue and a dirty pair of what looked like jeans snorted in my direction. She raised her head, but didn’t get up. I was surprised to see she was a dorarizin. The fact her getup was decidedly *human* was a bit disconcerting, but out here you roll with the punches.

“[You see it, you want it? Pay up, it’s yours.]”

“I *don’t* see what I want, but I think *you* can see what *you* want,” I retort, waving a roll of bills. Fugly Bob finally gets up from her lazy boy, waddles her way to the grill before fixing me with her alien gaze. I’ve never seen xeno metabolism quit like that, but she was still nine foot tall. I had to work a bit to not flinch.

“[You a cop?]” she asks, her tone flat. The police likely wouldn’t bother her for anything less than an actual body count, but it still made sense to ask.

I swear under my breath. “Would I fucking tell you if I was?”

We stare at each other silently for almost a minute, before her toothy grin and advanced halitosis is sent my way once more. “[Gotta ask. You gotta tell me if y’are, ya know.]”

“Well I ain’t. You got something I can use for, ah, personal safety? It’s a dangerous world out there, man’s gotta keep his vitals on the inside.”

Fugly Bob scratched herself, probably finding fleas. “[Can’t help you. I don’t do firearms,]” she grunts. “[You want to murder yourself by explosive decompression? Do us all a favour, just jump out an airlock.]” She closed her eyes for a second, thinking and then talking carefully. “[I don’t sell guns of any sort, that’s illegal. I handle totally legal and above board items, like used fabbers, power cores and microwaves. I can give you a Nakamura mark three, a Shinwei cold-buster and a Remington Apalooza if you’re having trouble with your household utilities, but your personal protection’s your own problem. Unless you wanna pack up?]” Her muzzle falls open in an alien grin as she pops her teeth in a chuckle.

I nodded, slowly, then shook my head. “I’m a lone wolf, babe, you know how it is. Sorry to ask for something you don’t have, I don’t want to cause any trouble. However, I *could* do with some spares in case the ones I have break. Do they work?” If you’re pretty good with a soldering iron, everyday household items can be put to more than their standard uses. If you boost the emitters, tune the field coils and pulse your maser-beam through the waveguide...

“[Of course I’m not selling broken units. You don’t get no guarantee though. They’re for heating your shit, printing your clothes and powering them both and nothing more. Got me?]”

“And a soldering iron,” I grunt, unrolling bills. I keep unrolling until Fugly grunts and slides a tray through the safety desk-slot. Three trips through the double-sided safety vault later and I’ve got a trumped up microwave, an allegedly factory-locked nano-fabber and a small cold-fusion battery powerful enough to keep both going for a month.

“[If that shit breaks because of unauthorized modifications, you get to keep all the parts,]” Fugly Bob says. “[Don’t come round here again. ‘Preciate the business.]”

“Figured, sweet-cheeks” I reply amiably, wandering back out.

----------------------------------------

Back at the hole known as ‘Sweet-Heart Heights’, I tried to avoid breathing toxic fumes as I carefully desoldered various component boards from each device and re-soldered them back together.

I’d briefly toyed with the idea of a laser gun, but they don’t work, despite what you may think. Unless you have the power for it, they’re designed to pump out a constant stream of coherent light that will burn, certainly, but it’s far from deadly unless you have a *really steady hand* and a few seconds to spare. The wound self-cauterizes and your target will likely not really notice — or at least not stop — until they’ve already got more than close enough to throttle the life out of you. Beams powerful enough to instantly vaporize or dissect are hard to make discreet, and produce quite a lot of waste heat besides. What I was building was a lot nastier and more effective; a plasma accelerator. The downside was a long reload cycle and the tendency to explode if *not* fired once charged.

After some work, I had a portable plasma gun that was at least mostly likely not to explode until *after* what I was shooting at was no longer screaming in pain on account of having its head melted. Highly illegal, highly effective.

Pocketing it, I decided it was time to go out for a snoop despite how tired I was feeling; strike whilst the iron is still somewhat warm and all that. Ordinary people would’ve gone to bed, I decided to jerry-rig the fabber to make Cake. I side-loaded yet another package to the room’s fabber, re-triggered the exploit to override the certificate verification and then set the device in motion. A few minutes later, a circular puck of yellowish crystalline matter was ejected from the preparation chamber. There was a reason it was called ‘cake’, and it had nothing to do with icing or candles.

I crumbled some of the dubious mixture up, heated it with a lighter and then rubbed the resulting sludgy mess on my gums, seeing sparks. I tasted blue for a brief moment before coming back down enough to see straight. I’d have one hell of a headache the next day, but I’d already drunk enough whiskey to be assured of a hangover, so... in for a penny, in for a pound.

Standing up and stretching my jaw, I looked down at my makeshift weapon. Through vision that couldn’t decide whether to see in black and white, normal colour or some sort of psychedelic spectrum, I collected enough wits to put the damn thing away inside the heating vents before I headed out the door. I’d need it soon enough, but if I took it with me wired like this, I was liable to kill myself with it.

----------------------------------------

Veins fizzing with Cake I stumbled downtown, wired seven ways to Sunday. I’m jumpy, irritable, muttering to myself. I fit right in down here, the storm-drain for the gutter of Io. I sorely felt the missing weight inside my jacket, but I was tough, and I had a few tricks up my sleeves if it came to it.

Out here near the Skin, space as such isn’t the luxury, a view is — not that the poor could afford space. The building he had lived in was nothing more than a gargantuan box filled with little holes to shove people in, most of them didn’t even feature such niceties as worked stone flooring, instead leaving bare rock.

If I’d not been so tilted, I never would have forced my way into his shoebox, at least not so openly, and I would have been out quicker. I popped the lock and forced the door, the security in this area not worth shit. The flimsy cardboard edifice was the only entrance to Gordon’s shoebox apartment. Instead of a media wall, it featured a relatively spartan flatpanel that was pay per access to the local ‘net. His bed was held up by tin cans and duct tape, and his dresser was a packing crate for the livestock he used to carve up. His blood was still on the walls and floor. A tape outline of where they’d found his body completed the tableau.

I sat down on the bed, in a corner that was mostly blood-free, and tried to think straight, galaxies still boiling in my peripheral vision. It wasn’t that Gordon had had something somebody had wanted, because the guy had had next to nothing. He could afford three meals a day and a roof over his head, but then most of us could, not that the nutrition bars tasted all that good, but not much else. So, maybe it was something he *hadn’t* done? I threw the bed covers off, examining the mattress; it may have been a cliche, but I soon found a slit cut into the underside where I found a small bag of yellow crystals and another bag of pink pills. Pulling out one of the latter and getting a picture of it, I snorted. They were prescription blood pressure meds, or at least a good approximation. I had no doubt they were what I thought they were, not with fabbers in the mix, nobody bothered making illicit drugs look legit. So, he most likely had paid for whatever his vices were, otherwise whoever had iced the guy would’ve reclaimed their product, not that drug dealing took a large scale effort or attracted that many heavies any more, not with fabbers that easy to crack. No, this was a worst-case scenario. It was something Gordon *had done* that had gotten him killed.

“Oi! What the fuck you fink you’re doin’ ‘ere?”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I looked up at a local militia member — it was hard to call him ‘police’ because that implies some sort of training or standards — and blinked away the fizzing taste of orange. “Uhh, hi,” I managed, brain still overtaxed from my sleuthing, coming down from the edge it’d gotten from the drugs.

“Come back to the scene of the crime, ‘ave ya?”

“N-no, I’m… wait, I’ve got a chit here—” I began dumbly.

“‘E’s resistin’!” said the first, a look of delight regurgitating itself onto his face as he reached for a baton.

“‘E’s got a weapon!” said another, as I reached for a pocket. Three more ‘officers’ forced their way into a room barely big enough for one to protect the first.

“N-” I began, but then night fell like a jack boot of darkness.

----------------------------------------

It would be an understatement to say my head ached. I wasn’t sure if the buzzing was in my skull or the poorly-maintained light strip in the cell across from mine, where an officer of the peace sat snoring lightly. I groaned, sitting up and rubbing my temples as I tried to blink away the double vision.

I pulled myself to my feet and stumbled over to the decidedly retro iron bars and rattled them. I winced to myself at the noise they made. “Hey! Hey! I want my phone call! I want my lawyer! I want my mandatory breakfast and restroom visit! I know my rights and they include singing as an expression of my religious beliefs! *Ohhhhh* nobody knowwwwwwwwssssss, the trouble *ahhhhhh’ve* seeeeenn…”

“Alright, alright, can it, before somebody has an accident,” grunted the ex-sleeping officer, groaning as he eased his bulk to his feet. He was a human, probably about my age, and he looked very disinterested in my being there. “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t put on a real good pair of headphones whilst I fetch a few of the less… well behaving prisoners for a conjugal visit?”

“Yeah, yeah, just get me outta here and you’ll never see me again. I’m a private eye, got a license and everything. Let me do my job and I’ll—” I made a *poof* motion with my hands “—be out of your hair in a few days, a week tops. Alternatively, book me, I’ll be here as long as it takes you to process my bail and then my arraignment. That could take *years*.”

He fixed me with a piggy stare. “I know who you are, you were ID’d the moment you were booked in. There could’ve been an accident, very sad, an innocent man in the wrong place.”

For a moment, my blood ran cold. “If that were so, it would’ve already happened.” I finger-gunned him, grinning disarmingly. “Look, all I want is access to the stiff to confirm the records and some peace and quiet. I know I should’ve *asked* for access to the scene, that’s on me. What can I say, travel fatigue. You let me off with a warning, I promise never to do it again, and then you don’t have to put up with me as a permanent guest for the next three years whilst some fat bastards several light minutes away decide whether to unburden your good self or not, eh?”

He eyed my fingers. “That’s another thing, you got a licence for them fingers? Our scans don’t like the way they look.”

I snatched them back from their pointing. “I lost the originals a few years ago, one of those ‘accidents’ you were talking about.”

“They’re *powered*,” he grunts. “I could seize them for safe keeping.”

“You’d keep my fingers?” I whistled softly. “It’s only batteries for the prosthetics you’re picking up. I mean, I’d be pretty put out, might have to open a lawsuit, could take *years* for all the emotional pain to be dealt with. I’d have to stay here, of course, to make sure my property wasn’t damaged, and I’d be all over this place *constantly* making sure—”

Piggy closed his eyes. “You’re a wise-guy, huh? Yeah, yeah, I get it. I’m just joshing. Sarge said you’d be trouble. Looked you up, he did, said to let you sleep it off, get a nice polite chat in when you woke up about *boundaries* and good behaviour.”

“If he did, he should’ve also told you I have nothing but respect for our fine friends in blue, or… well, whatever shade you guys prefer to wear out here. I can understand your guys were just doing their best to keep the peace, no hard feelings. I’ll be out of your hair in a week.”

“Twenty four hours.”

“Five?”

“Seventy two hours.”

“...Deal,” I said, nodding, “providing I have full access to what I need. I get obstructions, I do it off the clock.”

“I can assure you,” said Piggy as he unlocked my cell with a heavy iron key and handed me my freedom and my personal effects, “that you’ll get all the help you need to get off the station, one way or another.”

----------------------------------------

A short time later, reinvigorated with some coffee and a protein bar, I headed to the morgue. With the hours ticking away, I took the land-train rather than make my own way. The trip was short, for some reason the police racked up dead bodies so it was close to the station, and I swiftly found myself entering into a nondescript building the same light brown as everything else in the neighbourhood.

I shivered as the temperature dropped, drawing my coat closer around my shoulders. My footsteps echoed in the empty, sterile halls as more fluorescent tube lights hummed merrily in the background.

The double doors to the morgue itself swung open unopposed, the only people in the building had ignored me. Bad sign or good, I wasn’t sure. In a colder-still room, lit by yet more buzzing fluorescent light tubes, was a stark black-and-white Jornissian, banded like a viper or some kind of diamond-back. He, and I was sure it was a he from the sheer girth of him, seemed to fill half the room, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if I’d been told he was a whole twenty foot from nose to tail-tip. His hood was massive, it flared wide as I entered, though when retracted it was almost invisible, just sleek lines behind his head along his muscular jawline that I was sure could not only snap all my bones in one go but unhinge to swallow me whole, that’s if the teeth left anything to swallow.

Jet black eyes, both sets like opals with flecks of lights whirling inside them, studied me intently as his tongue flicked out in a disturbingly earth-snake-like manner. He leaned back on his bulky body, crossing his arms before speaking, looking down at his chest. “[Ah, you are the human detective on this case, I assume?]” His native voice was deep and toneful, almost musical, like an off-key woodwind.

“That’s me, Dick Bates, pleased to meet you. Where’s the stiff?”

The Jorny susurrated to himself gently. “[So you are [Dick Bates]. I am intrigued why you came all this way, but I admit that is none of my business. I am [Sussusprussess], at your service.]”

I nodded, once, as the Jorny’s unblinking eyes fastened on me again, seemingly seeing into my soul as deeply as any Karnakian could. “Why am I here? I got paid to be here. Why are *you* here, Sassy?” I asked, trusting my translator to render his name correctly. “Isn’t it a bit… chilly for you? No offence.”

The Jornissian laughed, a snorting hissing fit that sounded like a leaky set of bellows. “[I am not offended. I am indeed as [cold-blooded] as the rest of my brethren, but I’m one of the, ah, lucky ones. What you would call… [arctic] adaptation?]”

“You’re a cold-weather Jorny?”

“[Indeed!]” I heard him hissing-laughing and repeating a word that translated to [Jorny] before he continued. “[I have some augments to help maintain body temperature, though I fare quite well without them. What’s the point of being an advanced, space-faring species if we are unable to improve ourselves? I get to see daily reasons why we *should* go beyond the baseline].” Again came the wheezing bellows.

“A lot of folks out here die of, ah, exposure?”

“[I believe you would say that a lot of people here die from [lead poisoning], is that the euphemism? None of them *actually* die of lead, of course, nobody out here uses lead. Blunt force trauma, hemorrhaging, sudden decompression, malnutrition…]” Sussusprussess grew silent for a moment, his unblinking eyes staring at something lightyears away. “[It is quite sad, quite sad. Still, there is need for a Jornissian like me to do this job. Karnakians and dead human bodies are still a touchy subject. The Dorarizin could not do it; for all their effectiveness at pack control, they do not take the death of humans well. I do not believe any dorarizin could deal with a dead human, not one in their right mind. They cry, did you know? They cry when they bring in the bodies, when they think nobody can see them, every one of them.]”

They cry, huh? Maybe the goons I met were different, maybe there was a line they wouldn’t cross with us humans, maybe, maybe, maybe. I tried hard not to scoff, but I filed the info away for later.

Sussusprussess led me to a wall of heavy metal doors. A layer of frost coated the blackened surface. “[Careful, human, this is heavy equipment. Not to mention cold.]”

The Jornissian scanned the rows of metal doors, selected one and then opened it. He then smoothly slid the contents out onto an empty nearby operating table. The huge serpent-like creature had his meaty coils placed about the room to brace his frame, and his arms were thick as tree-trunks. His body was, now that I saw him move, incredibly muscular. I gave him the space he demanded until it was safe to approach.

The body was… well there wasn’t much left. I could tell where a certain amount of cleanup had been done, neat tags dotted the corpse at certain points of interest, but I’d never seen anything quite like it. Great chunks had been torn from the victim’s midriff, his bottom jaw was *missing* as were a number of bones — I was no osteologist, but I knew humans had *more than that* — and a good deal of… well, meat. I’d seen a lot of stiffs in my time, but never one in this bad of a shape, at least outside of some serious industrial accidents or explosive decompression. I had to fight hard to keep my breakfast down.

“[I have already performed an autopsy, I will make my notes available to you, but I expect you want a closer look. Take your time.]”

“Tell me what I’m looking at, Doc,” I managed, once I felt I had my voice and stomach under control.

“[You do not wish to make up your own mind?]” asked Sassy, surprised.

“I know what I *think*, but I want to know what somebody with more experience *knows*. I’m easy to fool, you’re not.”

More hissing and susurrations emanated from the Jornissian as he circled the dead body, musing to himself. “[I have considered carefully my words in my report, but perhaps I could offer more… direct quotes to you? Off the record, of course. I make observations, not conclusions.]”

“That’s what I’m here for, Sassy. What am I looking at, besides a damn great mess?”

“[These wounds, for example here and here, they are ragged, he was not *cut* open so much as *torn* open. The… weapons; they were large, imprecise and wielded with great strength. Multiple blades on each one, articulated. A heavy, multi-bladed weapon was also used with brute force, breaking most bones. The body was not recovered intact. Or whole.]”

There was a pregnant silence as I digested those observations. “I see,” I said. “Go on.”

“As you can see, a good deal of the cadaver is… missing. Officially, it has been disposed of separately. Unofficially, it was indeed disposed of, but prior to the autopsy.”

I nodded, taking a deep breath. “I can see why nobody really wants me here. What’s the official story, then?”

“[He was stabbed to death in an altercation, suspected stolen goods. Brutalized by his attackers after the fact to disguise their crime and throw off suspicion.]”

“Hah,” I said, muttering to myself. “So that’s how it is, huh?”

“[You do not believe the official story?]” It was hard to get the measure of his translated ‘voice’. Our comm-beads didn’t always transmit nuance and inflection, and I was no expert at reading Jornissian body language. Dorarizin I was pretty sure were, if not an open book, then at least an available one. Karnakians were harder, something in their avian-style heritage made them hard to read, but their attitude to humanity was still somewhere around ‘oh god I am so sorry’, at least outside of gangsters like Squawky, in my experience.

“Do you?” I asked. “The official story is that our stiff here was murdered for… something he stole, didn’t pay for, whatever, by some… presumably humans wielding weapons designed to look like… ah, what? Teeth and claws?”

The Jornissian fixed his unblinking eyes on me, his body unmoving, steady. “[That is correct.]”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, and waved at the body. “I’ve seen enough, Sassy. Thank you.” I wouldn’t need pictures, I’d never forget *that* in a hurry.

“[I shall store the body. It will be disposed of according to regulations shortly, now that you have had your chance to observe it. Is it true he has no next of kin?]”

“Not as such, no.”

“[Then his body will be freeze-dried, mulched, and returned to the soil of this station, such that new life may grow where death has passed. He shall shed this mortal skin for another, that will live on within the universe, in all of us.]”

I nodded, looking away, deep in thought as the ritualistic almost-prayers from the good alien doctor hissed their way into and out of my ears. Out here, they didn’t burn anything they didn’t need to, didn’t waste anything they could recycle. The dead, at least the poor and unwanted, were neither wasted nor burned, finally becoming a useful part of society, by way of the hydroponics.

My life should have gotten simpler at this point, instead it had gotten a lot harder. The official story was a fabrication built to prevent another Atlanta and *nobody* would want to hear the alternative, as Humans wanted to placate the xenos and xenos wanted dearly to save face.

So, I guessed I had a very simple question to ask myself, hopefully also to satisfactorily answer: I knew what had killed him, was that enough? I sighed, long and low. No, no it wasn’t enough. I was tenacious, which was probably why the Jornissian hottie had hired me. Sure, I could return with news of what was going on, but it would be nothing but a footnote. At best it would be a salacious headline on a few tabloids, scoffed at and derided from all sides. At worst, it would be straight up ignored as not politically expedient. No, I had to dig deeper, find the culprit and drag them kicking and screaming into the light.

Nobody cared about the dregs of humanity, nobody cared if they lived or died. Nobody but me.

I was going to get to the truth of it if it killed me.