Just a quiet meal in her quiet room. Then she let her exhaustion take her, and she had fallen into a blissful sleep.
Until she dreamed of Remy’s death. The man had hanged himself in his room—which had taken some doing. The sheet wrapped around his neck, dangling off some fixture. She hadn’t seen it, but she had heard his feet, banging, banging, banging, which she hadn’t thought odd until later.
He wasn’t bumping against the wall when they found him. She must have been hearing him die.
In fact, no one thought he had done anything except kill himself. He was the first, after all. They’d said some words over him, looked at his traveler’s contract, saw that his body didn’t have to be returned to anyone, and slipped him into the darkness of space, along with a few of his possessions.
An act they all regretted when the second body turned up. By then, it had become clear that Remy hadn’t killed himself and that banging she had heard was his attempt to get her attention. Or to kick his way free. Or to find purchase for his feet. Or to get to his killer.
She hated thinking about it, but she did think about it.
Often.
As did everyone else, it seemed. Including the killer. Who had to be laughing at them all.
She wasn’t getting back on that ship. Not now, not ever. And she shouldn’t have opened her door to Janet either. Janet was one of those obnoxious women who thought every man was a conquest and every woman was competition.
So there had to be another reason she was here.
“I’m fine,” Susan said, and started to close the door.
“You can understand why we were concerned,” Janet said, “considering what happened to poor Agatha.”
Susan sighed. She was now supposed to ask, What happened to Agatha?…as if she cared. Agatha was the most obnoxious woman she had ever met. And that was saying something.
She didn’t want to know what happened to Agatha. And if she took the verbal bait, she’d be regaled with some horrifying story of someone’s rudeness to the most obnoxious woman she had ever met.
“Yes, I can understand,” Susan lied. “Thank you for thinking of me.”
And then she pushed the door closed.
* * * *
“It started in this panel,” said the maintenance guy. His name was Larry and he had been on the station for more than a decade. Larry loved his work. Out here, he said when Richard asked, my job is a real challenge. You gotta be creative, you know? And you gotta be right. We’ve never lost any ship that’s left here, and we’ve never gotten any complaints about our work later on. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.
Richard somehow found that enthusiasm reassuring. Reassuring enough to join Larry inside the burned out section of the Presidio. It smelled of smoke and melted plastic. His nose itched with a constant urge to sneeze. He breathed shallowly through his mouth because he had a hunch if he started sneezing, he wouldn’t stop.
“See right here,” Larry said, pointing at a mass of blackened something-or-other, “there’s one of those design flaws I mentioned. Nothing that would trigger on its own, but something that could be taken advantage of.”
He explained it in rather technical language that Richard was surprised he understood. It sounded so simple, and yet he wouldn’t have been able to do it.
“But this thing had been burning for hours when we found it,” Richard said. “All the warning systems had been shut down.”
“And the environmental system tampered with,” Larry said. “The oxygen mix had to have been low here. There wasn’t a lot of fuel for this fire, and there should have been. Also, this ship has a built-in system for putting out fires. It would have vented the atmosphere, and isolated the area. It did none of those things.”
“Is that easy to tamper with?” Richard asked.
“For me, sure,” Larry said. “For you, not so much.”
“So someone who knew the ship’s systems,” Richard said.
“Most ships’ systems,” Larry said. “You have to know what’s standard, what’s unusual, what’s expected, and what’s normal.”
“So someone who worked on the ship,” Richard said.
Larry smiled. “Probably not. You guys were a week out, right?”
Richard nodded.
“That’s plenty of time for someone to study the specs and figure out how this ship worked. Provided that he already had a base of knowledge on how ships in general worked.”
“Could they time it?” Richard asked.
“Meaning what?”
“So that we were close to Vaadum when it happened?”
“Sure,” Larry said. “That was the only smart way to do it. Unless your saboteur wanted to die along with everybody else. Or planned to take an escape pod. Of course, no one did. They’re all here. I assume all your passengers are accounted for too.”
“Yeah,” Richard said. “They’re all here. On the station. With us.”
* * * *
Nothing like murder to make a man stop procrastinating. After Hunsaker watched Anne Marie Devlin use one of the robotic carts to take Kantswinkle’s body to the infirmary, he got his tools and finally fixed the lock on Kantswinkle’s room. He couldn’t shake the feeling that if he had done this before Kantswinkle had arrived, he would have prevented her death.
Then he would have had to deal with her the next two days while the Presidio was being prepared. That thought made him shudder—and made him feel guilty. It wasn’t her fault that she was dead…
Except that no one seemed to like her, she was difficult to deal with, and if he had to pick someone to murder in this small group of stranded passengers, he would have chosen her.
Which made him shudder even more.
Had she died because of who she was?
Or because of how she acted?
Or because of the room he assigned her?
That last thought got him to find his staff (all two of them) and have them clean some of the other rooms, the ones with the limited environmental controls. Then he moved five of the passengers—Bunting and his roommate, Janet Potsworth and Lysa Lamphere, and Susan Carmichael.
The first four had left their rooms willingly. Then he had gone to see Carmichael.
He knocked, and she didn’t answer. So he knocked again, harder. The door flew open, and Carmichael stood there, looking bleary.
She had struck him as the kind of woman whose hair was never out of place, and yet all the strands stood at odd angles with some kind of violent looking red mark on the side of her face. It took him a moment to realize that she had a pillow impression on her cheek, and her hair was mussed from the blankets. Clearly, Susan G. Carmichael was a messy sleeper, even if she never was messy awake.
She didn’t want to be moved. She nearly slammed the door in his face, but he stopped her, and told her that if she stayed here, there was a good chance she’d end up like Agatha Kantswinkle.
Then Carmichael frowned.
“What happened to Agatha?” she asked.
He peered at her. She really and truly did not know.
“She’s dead,” he said.
Carmichael closed her eyes for a minute, sighed, and leaned against the door jamb. “I suppose she was murdered,” she said tiredly.
“Yes,”