Severance (9 page)

“Yeah, I noticed that at the time. Thought it was just
people being bitchy. Guess that’s why Ron flagged one of them as a mistake.”
She frowned. “You want me to go follow up on it?”

Curts shook his head and waved her back. “Don’t bother. I
might go check it out myself, actually. If I need you I’ll c–c–call, but for
now don’t worry about it. Just let me know if something like that shows up again.”

“No problem, boss.”

Curts nodded, his eyes unfocused, head slumping forward. He
blinked, looked around, seemed startled to find out where he was, then smiled
weakly and left the maintenance office. Stein squinted at the retreating orange
buffoon.
Strange service calls
? Curts didn’t seem the slightest bit
concerned by the news that one of his technicians had been decapitated.

She was looking up at the Big Board and the day ahead of
her, when she realized she wasn’t that concerned about it either.

§

“Do you know if your son had any enemies?” Hogg asked,
straining to sound gentle. A blubbering stream of nonsense greeted him in
response. The sympathy he had forced himself to muster for Gabelman’s mother
was beginning to subside. He was growing annoyed, though not with the poor woman
crying in front of him. Just his colleagues. The whole security apparatus in
fact. It had been hours; someone really should have told her that her son had
been found dead before Hogg got there. He watched the woman sobbing and felt the
annoyance grow. Because, however unfortunate this whole murder business apparently
was for Gableman’s mother, it was really quite a lucky break for him, and one
that couldn’t have come at a better time, career–wise.

At some point Hogg had pissed someone off, though he still
wasn’t sure how, or where, or even who. He had suspected it for a while, had seen
evidence of his career sputtering for the last couple of rotations. The most
recent such hint had occurred only two days earlier, when he had been
transferred to command the community policing center in the northern end of the
ship. Remote, under–equipped, staffed with incompetents, it was, on paper, a
promotion. And, in reality, an extended middle finger.

“Do you know who Ron’s friends were? Who he spent time with?”
Hogg asked, trying a different tack. Mrs. Gabelman became somewhat more
intelligible, and he dutifully recorded everything she said, though none of it
sounded very useful. He was still pretty confident this was a murder of
opportunity. Big nasty knife wound, drugs, scuzzy part of the ship. 45
^th
and Fir was certainly a rough neighborhood on the first level, a likely enough
place for a drug deal to go bad. On the other hand, Gabelman simply didn’t have
the look of a user. Hogg definitely knew what those looked like, having swept
them in and out of the drunk tank for much of his career. He supposed it was
possible Gabelman was simply a high–functioning user who happened to mouth off to
the wrong person.

The search of his apartment had turned up exactly nothing.
Gabelman had apparently been a single, slightly messy, slightly dorky guy, with
an interest in electro funk and pornographic images. No cache of suicide
letters or severed doll heads or, interestingly, drug paraphernalia. Not that
there would be much for a guru user.

And there was certainly nothing anywhere to indicate the guy
had any enemies who wished him harm. Although his work colleagues were
interesting people — Hogg had run background checks on them while riding the
trolley over to Mrs. Gabelman’s. His supervisor, the Stein woman, had an
extremely interesting past. A canned baby — those were rare enough, especially
one that hadn’t self–imploded — she had then managed the even more impressive
feat of getting a job. It had been a close thing though — during her youth she’d
run afoul of the law more than once. But she had managed to settle down by the
time she’d finished her schooling, and landed a spot in the engineering
department. She still seemed to roll with a pretty shifty crowd, many of them
connected to the Breeder groups that were cropping up around that time. Nothing
had ever been tied directly back to her though. The author of the background
summary seemed surprised by that.

Still, it was nothing to link Ron Gabelman directly with
anyone shady. If there was anything in Gabelman’s life to suggest he had stab–happy
enemies, it would be on his terminal. Hogg had already sent that to IT to
unlock. An easy job for them, Hogg was confident it would still probably take
them several days to get around to. But he wasn’t the type to complain, and he
still had a few other avenues, however unfruitful they appeared.

He looked at the current unfruitful avenue blubbering in
front of him and suppressed a sigh. Time to stop badgering this poor woman.
Stowing his terminal, Hogg began the process of extricating himself from Mrs.
Gabelman’s tedious sadness, giving himself a couple of minutes before he’d stop
even pretending to be nice. He wondered if a plastic security badge would speed
the healing process any.

§

“Wouldn’t be the first young guy to get mixed up with drugs,”
Bruce said. “They are, after all, incredible.” He had his feet up on the desk
in the supervisor’s office while he worked on his sandwich.

“If so, he kept it pretty quiet. I certainly never saw him
high. You?” Stein asked.

Bruce shrugged. “I never paid a lot of attention. You know
me and people.” He munched on his sandwich for a bit. “Did the cop say who they
think did it?”

“Nope. And I didn’t think to ask. Kind of a rough part of
the ship though. Were I to guess, I’d say he was rolled for the guru. That
seemed to be the vibe the cop was putting out.”

They sat in silence for a few seconds. “Pretty shitty,”
Bruce finally said.

“Pretty shitty,” Stein echoed. More silence. “It’s weird
though. I mean, I feel bad that the kid died, but I also don’t feel too bad.
You know? Like I’m almost more concerned with how this will impact my workload.
Does that sound sick?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. It probably just means you’re a
monster.”

Stein snorted. “Thanks.” She poked lamely at her lunch with
a spork. “Actually, check this: Curts might be even more of a monster than me.”
Stein related Curts’ request after the security officers had left.

Bruce chewed on a thumbnail as he listened. “Well, it sounds
like he had a little more time to react than you. And he didn’t really know the
kid, did he? I can see why he’d be more worried about the ship. Not like you,
you fucking monstrosity.”

Stein considered that for a moment while working on her salad.
“Okay, sure. I can see a chief caring more for the ship than his staff. That’s
almost a requirement of the job. And I can see him not caring about drug users
on staff because, I kid you not, he looked like he was coming down off
something himself.”

Bruce started chuckling to himself. She narrowed her gaze, wondering
what he was so amused about, before deciding she would probably prefer not
knowing.

“But asking about conflicting complaints? What the hell? We
get a couple of those a day. They’re no big deal.”

“Simple diagnosis: he’s getting anal retentive.”

“I guess.”

Bruce burped. “Oof. That felt good.” He shifted in his
chair. “Wanna hear what I was up to last night?”

“Is this that thing where you watch women go to the
bathroom? Because, no, I don’t want to hear about that.”

Bruce shook his head. “Better than that.”

“I am at a loss to think of what you could think is better
than that. Surely something pretty foul. A violation of deep, universal
principles.”

“Ha.” Bruce recounted the story of his aerial work at
Charlotte Redelso’s apartment. Stein listened, wincing and inhaling sharply
when Bruce got to the stupid parts. She had known about Bruce’s insane climbing
apparatus, and even seen it in use once, but the thought of the contraption
still terrified her.

“Hang on just a second,” Stein said when the story had
concluded. “To dig up information on what could potentially be in a room that
is quite easy to break into, you performed a ridiculously daring stunt to raid
the apartment of someone tangentially related to what you’re actually
interested in?”

“At first, I was just going to ask her. But then I saw all
the nice stuff she had and revised my plans.”

Stein shook her head. “And did you find anything
interesting?”

Bruce tapped something on his terminal. “Dear Charlotte has
been keeping copies of personnel correspondence on a dummy. Love letters
mostly, shockingly tame ones I’m sorry to report. But alongside those I found
several pieces of communication from one Mr. Maurice Melson.”

“Which said?”

“It looks like this Melson had been pressuring Charlotte to
sell that studio for several years. The first messages I saw refer to earlier
correspondence. By the time Charlotte began recording their talks offline it
looked like Melson was getting creative.”

“How so?”

“She’s an artist. Melson evidently had contacts in the mayor’s
office. He promised he could get some of her work placed visibly in public
areas — even in the Bridge, apparently.”

“If she agreed to sell the studio to him?” Seeing Bruce nod,
she frowned. “So, a guy with a dead man’s name has access to some big–shit
mandarins, and uses that leverage to buy a shitty little apartment, and then
hide something in it.”

“That appears to be what happened, yes. I couldn’t find
anything else about the guy on there — no pictures or anything like that.”

The two occasional thieves sat alone with their thoughts.

“So, what next?” Bruce asked. “Can I go set off some more
booby–traps now?”

“Have you ever asked my permission to do that before?”

Bruce’s jaw jutted out, eyes to the ceiling, making a big
show of thinking about that. “Good point. I retract my request, and will
proceed as per normal, i.e. recklessly. I’ll let you know what I find later
tonight.”

Stein stared at her friend. “Are you kidding? Weren’t you up
all night hanging from lampposts? You stopped sleeping again?”

Bruce grinned. “Gabelman’s not the only one who knew how to
party.”

Stein sagged in her chair. No one seemed to take the kid’s
death seriously, but Bruce’s ability to brush it off grated at her for some
reason. The multiple layers of irony he wore at all times was a familiar act,
and usually a welcome one. He’d been that way ever since she first met him in
school, and she’d learned from his example. Kids were jerks, and the walls he had
helped her raise had proven very useful. Though she was never as good at it as
he was, and sometimes wondered if that was a good thing. Maybe his walls were
just a bit too thick.

Seeming to sense the shift in mood —
see, he was more
sensitive than he let on, dammit!
— Bruce clammed up and resumed work on
his lunch. Eventually he asked between bites, “This Curts thing with the
conflicting jobs. What were they again?”

Stein blinked a couple of times, shifting gears. “One hot,
one cold, right next door to each other,” she replied. “The cold one Ron
apparently fixed. Air balancing thing. The hot one was a non–issue. Ron said it
was a mistaken call.” Out of curiosity, Stein tapped on her terminal, pulling
up a schematic of that part of the ship. Numbers appeared on the map, indicating
the current temperature and humidity in various areas. “Looks fine now,” she
said, tapping on the two rooms as she shoved the terminal over to Bruce.

Bruce looked at it. “All snug as a bug,” he agreed. He
dragged his finger around the screen. “What’s that?”

Stein looked at what Bruce was pointing at. Another room, a
series of rooms in fact, registering temperatures well below normal. The terminal
indicated it was occupied office space.

“Says it’s occupied. Should be a complaint logged I’d
imagine,” Stein said. She tapped at her desk display. “Nothing,” she said after
scanning through the list of active complaints.

“The occupancy database is never right,” Bruce pointed out. “That’s
probably a storage area now. No one but boxes to complain.”

“Yeah, probably,” Stein said, nodding. She looked at the
map, trying to identify the occupant of the space. Part of the Logistics
branch. More government workers, and boring ones at that. She frowned. This
part of the ship was often called ‘The Annex,’ being the former storage space
that had been reallocated for government use a few years into the ship’s
flight. The speed with which the civilian government had outgrown its original
space was the basis for some of the oldest, creakiest jokes on the Argos, the
punch line to most being “More People Doing Less Work.”

Bruce was a couple steps ahead of Stein, frowning at a map
on his terminal. “Nah, that room’s occupied. I was by there a couple weeks ago.
Definitely not storage.”

“Well, then, what the fuck? They all wearing sweaters or
something?” Stein’s gaze flipped back and forth between her terminal and desk. “Oh,”
she said, figuring it out. “Dummy.”

“Busted t–stat,” Bruce finished her thought for her. “Well,
add it to the list. I’ll get to it sometime in the next six years.”

Stein leaned back in her chair, staring up at the box of
spare thermostats she kept on the shelf. A room with a perfectly acceptable
temperature that was indicating it was too cold was about as far down the
priority list of repairs as was possible. There were literally dozens of better
things she could do with her time. But something about figuring a problem out
like that would eat away at her if it wasn’t fixed. And there was still
something weird about it which bothered her. She hated weird things on her
ship.

“I think I’ll go handle this one now,” she said, standing
up. The only weird thing she did tolerate, now happily munching away on his
second sandwich, looked up at her. She scooped up her terminal and strapped on the
tool webbing she had hung on the back of her chair. “Even us management types
can get our hands dirty sometimes.”