Below is a Sample Chapter from Void, the Keystone Novel in the Expansion Era
Two color tones and a bulging ridgeline encircling the moon competed to define Iapetus. A red the color of rich clay dominated the face leaning into its direction of orbit. White ice covered the trailing edge of the planet. Across its face, unbroken mountains defined the equator nearly perfectly separating the two colors. A massive impact crater peered out of the surface like an unartfully-drawn eyeball. The craters and pock-marks spread along the surface highlighted the exotic texture of the satellite. Depending on perspective, the entire planet look crudely concocted, like ill-fitting scraps of other planets cobbled together.
In spite of its significant size, a lack of meaningful resources kept humankind’s footprint on the moon isolated to a geological research facility and a hydroponics plant. The Mako’s computer identified less than a hundred occupants of the facility, an asterisk compared to the millions occupying its relative Titan. The postage-stamp of a colony received few visitors and rarely attracted the attention of the Thirty-Twos. Having both a cargo ship and a rare Marlin in orbit around the moon was unusual, the cargo ship more so than the Marlin. Lind easily imagined paying outrageously high fees for a high-speed courier in the absence of regular ship traffic.
Lind wanted desperately to take a few moments to enjoy the view. Painkillers, coffee, and energy packets numbed his suffering slightly, but the isolation clung to him as it never had in his youth. The first time he laid eyes on Iapetus, against the tapestry of Saturn, Lind continued to fight the hangover that resulted from a day of drinking alone in his bunk. Several times, with his eyes closed, drifting between consciousness and sleep, listening to the sounds of the ship’s power around him, he caught himself speaking to Kay, whom his distorted senses perceived as not yet dead. If he played his cards right, he could finish his inspection and be back at Norse station by the next day, where he could find enough alcohol to keep him properly sedated until all of his senses were on the same blurry page.
But for the moment, circumstances required that he ignore the view of the planet and focus the ships orbiting above it. Contrasted against the light side of the surface, mimicking its composition of dirt-covered gloss, a Flounder orbited. The windows of the cockpit broke the lines, appearing as black blotches on the capsule suspended under the expansive delta wing. The chipping paint of the Sadko Transportation logo took up much hull surface, proclaiming the vessel’s corporate affiliation even at a great distance. Juxtaposed with it nearly nose to nose, was the Marlin, with its long, low dorsal fin and tiny wings tucked beneath a pair of over-sized engines, all crafted without sharp corners or edges. Its logos shone clean and proud on the fuselage tiny enough to cram a second person only as a last resort. Lind fought the urge to speak to himself out loud. Instead of making snide comments for his own amusement about where Sadko chose to put its money, Lind made contact.
Distance and a poor connection garbled the heavy Russian words until he barely understood the response to his call. Unwilling to use his still recovering brain-power to translate detailed instructions, Lind had his computer transmit a plan to the other ship. Docking all three ships required a lot of coordination, especially with the smallest ship completely disabled. After thirty minutes, Lind turned the vessels into a congealed metal raft. Lind stood at the Mako’s lower level airlock, relieved he changed into something slightly more official than the threadbare jeans and wrinkled shirt he woke up with.
The door clamored open and the ubiquitous and stereotypical Sadko captain stepped aboard his ship. Lind barely paid attention to his looks, the dark red uniform sporting the company logo in no better relief than the faded image on the side of his ship, and name spelled in Cyrillic provided all the information he needed for the nearly pointless exercise. He looked just like all the other Sadko captains, anyway, burly for a man who spent his whole life in the reduced gravity of space, bearded, and red-faced from years of heavy drinking among the stars. The pilot stuck out his hand, and Lind shook it.
“Gavaritiye pa-Angliski?” Lind asked it terribly pronounced Russian. They gave him enough language skills in training to ask whether someone spoke English in Russian, Bengali, French, and a smattering of other dialects often encountered at the various stations, factories, and refineries found throughout the system. He paid attention to none of it. Kay had taken it more seriously but he was a better investigator and person, anyway.
“Yes, of course.” The man said, raising his eyebrows in annoyance. Lind had not developed a plan in case the man spoke no English, but the probability of a ship’s captain not being at least conversational was low. The Sadko employee needed some way to communicate at each of the stations he visited along his route.
“Walk me through what happened.” Lind said, skipping straight to the point. Now that orders yanked him away from Norse Station, maybe he didn’t have to return there. Sure, he paid for the room and left a small bag of toiletries behind, but Titan’s excellent bars could help him forget about micrometeorites. He just needed to get through the interview and then get on the ship.
The Sadko captain continued a story already in progress. He must have started while Lind was thinking about anything else. “… We saw it was a Marlin, so of course we took a closer look.”
“Right, because, who gives a shit about a Flounder floating out there?”
“I know my ship is very common. But Sadko helps any ship in distress. And who wouldn’t want a closer look at a Marlin?”
“Look, I get it.” Lind answered, holding up his hands in an unnecessary calming gesture. “Recovering an expensive ship like a Marlin brings a bonus.”
“And one of us will fly it, no?” Lind thought he might take up the opportunity to fly the fastest little ship out there himself, but also realized his present apathy tempered the excitement of it. “We looked through the window and saw the body and blood. We called Thirty-Twos and stayed put.”
Lind led the Russian upstairs towards the main air lock connecting the Flounder to the Marlin. “Most guys would keep to their schedule.” He said.
“If I killed myself, I wouldn’t want to float in space forever. I hope someone would take me and my ship home.”
“You think it was a suicide?” Lind asked. He knew his own boss did, and he was happy to adopt it as a starting point since it meant little work.
“I have flown in space for ten years. I know about suicides.” It was the part of space life no one spoke about. A much higher percentage of the space-faring ended up taking their own life. Often, they succumbed to the long hauls, or the close quarters, or the crushing emptiness outside the hull Lind had fought since Kay died. Lind suicide investigations outnumbered his homicide investigations. They jumped out an airlock if they were idiots or, if they were smart, they’d take a sleeping pill and lower the oxygen level. Most of them were idiots.
“Most suicides do float in space forever.” Lind commented, putting on the disposable paper suit and mask that kept the crime scene clean. He kept talking, but he didn’t know why. The presence of another, other than his late partner, was the first such experience since the last time his partner took a breath in the room a few meters away. “The soloers like to set a course, like, to the sun or outside the system before they do it. We keep track of them but rarely catch up to retrieve the body.”
With a push of a button, the airlock chamber extended from the ship, reaching out to touch the other orbiting feet away containing nothing but a body. The Russian made a move to follow Lind into the chamber, unadorned with any protective equipment. Lind realized no one else occupied his ship, and he preferred not to leave some stranger unaccompanied. So, he motioned for the captain to step into the airlock and shut the inner door. “Don’t step out of the airlock.”
Marlins sacrificed much for their speed and power, including gravity. Turning off the gravity within the bridge between the ships mitigated the chances that the force might manipulate the precise state of the crime scene. He braced himself against the bulkhead as his feet floated free. He neglected to mention it to his companion, who let out a curse as he lost his equilibrium. The second step of the process froze the murder scene for posterity. A press of a button released one small machine through the other ship’s airlock. The drone made its way through the ship, spraying laser and sonar signals to map every detail twice. A small ship like a Marlin only took three minutes to map, during which Lind stood in uncomfortable proximity to the Russian. The drone returned, and Lind stepped through the airlock, leaving the other Captain stuck in the gap between the vessels.
The interior was a macabre snow-globe of gore. Blood droplets, bits of skull, and brain matter free fell in place, suspended throughout the cabin. The small camera in Lind’s mask captured every sanguine reflection of the sunlight streaming through the front window. The claustrophobic interior focused all of his attention on the cockpit and the body. He was surprised at the damage to the head. This pilot hadn’t stabbed himself or slit his wrists like a normal person; he had shot himself in the head. As much as Lind wanted to skip to the end and examine the body more closely, he scanned the entire interior, the cot carved into the port bulkhead, the empty cargo shelves carved into the starboard, and the few inches of personal space. Lind wondered why the man with half of his head blown off would jump through all the hoops necessary to become special missions pilot and spend the rest of their life stuck in a ridiculously cramped cell in a vast prison. Then, Lind stopped wondering about why someone would choose suicide.
That thought broke through Lind’s dehydrated brain. Suppressing the urge to dismiss this incident as quickly as possible, he thought about what it would take for the pilot to take his own life; but not the psychology involved. Those dark thoughts were not as alien as people would like to believe. Instead, Lind considered the mechanics of the pistol being brought onto the ship. Every item taken off of Earth made its way through a waypoint called simply “the Hub.”
The theory was more than theory, it was fact, enforced by the physics of getting a ship out of the home planet’s thick atmosphere. Ships with the aerodynamics and power to make it out of Earth’s atmosphere didn’t do well on long distance cruises in space, so they all stopped at the Hub where people and cargo transferred to more space worthy ships.
The engineering tightly controlled every ship leaving Earth, and thus controlled everything making its way into the solar system. Weapons, in particular, faced severe limitations. Lind maintained a database with all two hundred and thirty eight firearms permitted off the planet. Sure, special missions pilots flying Marlins occasionally, very occasionally, carried one, but that only created further doubt in his mind. Sadko firmly gripped near absolute controls on those jobs and the people who held them. Someone would have to work hard to slip through all the failsafes.
As Lind crept towards the body, and his list of questions exponentially increased. Through the plastic shield in front of the face, and his flashlight fighting through the flotsam, Lind banished all consideration of suicide the instant he saw the entry hole in the back of the head. Careful to photograph every detail first, Lind twisted the body, hanging nearly upside down under the top panel of the cockpit, to face him. The small hole in the back, covered by swaths of curly black hair, proved a pinprick compared to the destruction the bullet brought upon the man’s face. The left eyeball burst in its socket, barely recognizable amongst the twisted bone, skin, and cartilage erupting where the brow and nose joined. Flecks of gray, caught on jagged skull fragments, waved gently at the motion bringing the body around. The windscreen clung to enough biological shrapnel to make viewing of the outside nearly impossible.
Lind had to brace himself against one of the handholds along the bulkhead to pull the body back from the cockpit. It drifted back towards the airlock, bouncing along the walls. His jacket still draped over the back of the lone pilot’s chair. Each secured pocket running down the front of the flight suit required inspection. The dead man’s wallet, typically alive with kitschy animations rotating through personal photos or displaying his license, sat dead and blank. Not that the victims wallet had nothing; the wallet was as dead as its owner. Every other screen in the ship, now that he looked at them closely, showed the same nothingness. Silence dominated the Marlin, utter stillness alien to the machinery of space travel. Nothing functioned.
Paper functioned, and, in a stroke of luck rare to the investigator, an identification card, secured in a flimsy plastic sheath secured within the right breast pocket of his shirt provided him a name. Piotr Rykov. The rest of the ship proved strangely sterile, not that its cramped design left room for any personalization. The same design characteristic meant Lind needed more room to continue along his path.
The outer door opened to the airlock, and Lind pulled the dripping body towards his own ship and a horrified Russian. “There’s a body bag in that compartment by your foot, can you get it for me, please?” Trying to evict any amusement from his voice while making the request proved difficult. The other captain, reluctantly but with relief took his eyes off of the corpse to devote his attention to the task at hand. The black bag came out, and with the assistance of weightlessness, Lind stuffed Piotr Rykov into it. Compressing all three bodies between the two heavy doors, and sinking under the increasing weight generated by the plates on his own ship, Lind watched the Russian captain sweat. The perverse joy, no doubt, stemmed from listening to so much excitement over an expensive piece of transportation hardware.
His feet firmly on the deck, the cold, heavy plastic containing the body pressing against him, Lind discarded thoughts of trying to move another lifeless body only days before. This time, the facial remnants were unknown to him and available help stood so close he felt the rough movement of the man’s breath. “Give me a hand with him, would ya?”
The Russian stumbled back into the lab as the hatch opened, weakly holding the edge of the bag, uncertain. Lind pushed past him, dragging the dead pilot towards the small morgue into which he could never place Kay. “Well, it wasn’t a suicide. This dude got popped in the back of the head.”
“Popped?” The Russian asked, still giving only perfunctory assistance.
Lind made a gun gesture with a hand freed by letting the other arm bear the body’s weight. “You know, shot.”
“Who could shoot him on a Marlin? There’s no room for a passenger.”
A good question. Lind began to obsess over the same thing the moment he saw the burst eyeball. “When you showed up,” he asked, fighting with the latch to the refrigerated slab. “The ship was right where it is now?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Of course.” Lind repeated to himself, breaking the metal drawer free from whatever kept it in place. It scraped along its slides with a shriek. “Do you have all the sensor data?”
“Again, of course,” the other repeated, watching as Lind braced himself to lift the bag and its contents.
“And he was dead? He wasn’t adrift, and you decided to finish him off and take the salvage?”
At this, his guest held up his hands. “No sir! You can check our ship’s logs!”
“I will. Thanks.” He struggled with the body for another moment. “Grab the feet, would you?” With himself supporting the torso and what remained of the head, and his visitor grabbing the feet, they lifted the carcass up to waist level and rolled it over the edge of the drawer onto the slab without the slightest hint of dignity or respect. “Could you have someone send them to me please?”
“Send what?”
“The logs.”
“Yes. Sure.” The Russian gasped. Lind deduced the man did not take physical care of himself if such little exertion made him fight for air.
“Well?”
For a few seconds, the Russian did not understand Lind’s prompt. He realized, with a start, the investigator’s direction and called back to his own ship, giving brusque instructions in Russian Lind’s rudimentary understanding of the language barely let him follow. The process lasted only long enough for him to store Piotr Rykov in the freezer and take a moment for himself. A speaker dinged in the cockpit, the Russian nodded, and Lind knew he had the information required. Guiding the other captain down the stairs towards the lower airlock subtlety, holding a hand just inches away from the man’s elbow, he spoke with a false calmness designed to underwhelm and dismiss.
“Unfortunately, I have bad news for you.” He began, allowing the other to go before him down the steep metal stairs. “You are not going to be able to fly the Marlin back. Its electronics are fried, and, frankly, the place is a mess.” The other turned to inquire further as Lind herded him towards the Sadko freighter. “We appreciate your bringing this to our attention and helping me with, well everything. Things would have been hard for me if it was just, you know, me.”
They paused at the bridge to the ship docked below. The captain’s eyes alternated between wide and narrow, tensing to Lind’s presence. “But . . .“</p>
“I have your information, and I will certainly pass that on in my report to Sadko.“ Lind, without physicality, threw him out the door back to his own ship. Satisfied that the door secured, he returned to the cockpit.
Forcing work and basic human interaction through the melancholy of his hangover had distracted him, but the distraction abandoned him the moment he dropped into the pilot’s chair. Again, he rubbed his temples and, again, he closed his eyes hoping that everything would go away. Operating on autopilot, he had to admit, the familiarity of his job kept him functional. He hardly missed Kay, who, had he been alive, would have stayed behind to “supervise” while Lind searched the Marlin.
His eyes opened when the freighter attached to the Mako’s belly released itself, long enough after the captain’s departure for Lind to guess the heated conversation occurring on the other bridge before it resumed its route. He watched the flat form accelerate and, listing to the left, disappear from his field of vision.
Two messages disappeared into space shortly thereafter. The first, a message to headquarters providing an update and declaring his intent to tow the ship to a repair yard for further examination. The second went to Sadko, asking for everything they had on Piotr Rykov and the courier mission that ended with him circling Iapetus. Lind also included the reason they should not expect this Marlin home any time soon, but, lacking either the memory or the desire to check his records, omitted any identification of the Flounder captain.
Still wearing the over garment that kept his contamination out of the crime scene, Lind faced more work aboard the Marlin. Returning meant more struggles with his throbbing head and acidic stomach. Returning also meant more focus on something other than the empty and damaged chair next to him. Pushing himself up took effort he nearly regretted expending. Leaving the ship unattended gave him pause, much more than he would have imagined. Sure, the freighter pilot had remained in the airlock, but at least another living soul occupied the several hundred million square miles around the murder scene. Hesitating before stepping through, Lind rationalized that there would be many more times where, without a partner, his home and workspace would have to be left unattended.
He carried the burdensome mass of forensic equipment his second time through the red mist still hanging in the Marlin’s cabin. He’d carved a three-dimensional canyon through the blood when he pulled the body back through. Droplets of blood covered his suit, and now his equipment. But, a dead ship told no tales. Lind believed he could give it a second life. Shoving two pieces of equipment into the console started the process. One recorded every input he made. The second stole every byte of information in the ship’s computer. Or, at least, it tried to. The machine gave out a warning tone Lind had heard before but long forgotten its meaning. The underside of the console, smooth save the few ports now occupied by his forensic tools, popped off with the flip of a latch. Wires criss-crossing themselves in a Gordian knot nearly alien to Lind. He directed his attention to a large, empty slot, accented by indentations and scratches recently left by departing screws. The ship lost its hard drive. The ship lost every piece of data, every electrical impulse that made such a sexy, impressive vehicle more than a collection of metal surfaces.
Lind pursed his lips. “Well, fuck.” The killer had removed the hard drive on his or her way out. The central repository for the ship’s information set him back, to be sure, but he could find cracks and crevices amongst the ships systems where data may have hid. Reaching into his tool kit, he found a device and plugged it in to the empty port. It took a few moments, too few, making Lind pessimistic, for the device to squeeze the last drops of data. Hovering in the weightlessness a few inches off of the deck, Lind replaced the compartment cover for reasons he barely understood. It was not like there was anything inside worth protecting. One hand holding himself in place with the other pressing the metal case flush with the console, he focused on the task so completely he nearly missed his flashlight reflecting off of a red-yellow surface. The flash occurred so far on the edge of his peripheral vision he could easily have dismissed it. Turning his head to the left, he found the remnants of the bullet floating a hand span away from his nose.
From the pocket of his suit came a small clear plastic bag, which scooped up the fragment. In better light under the console, Lind deduced several facts. First, the round was ten millimeters in caliber. Ten millimeters reduced the number of weapons that could have produced the projectile. The vast majority of weapons permitted off-Earth had less power for fear of Newton’s Third Law in micro gravity. Second, the destruction of most of the round told him the shooter maintained a certain level of safety. So-called “vacuum rounds” held the distinguishing feature of disintegrating nearly completely once they contacted anything harder than the human skull so as not to puncture a hull. Unlike the caliber, they made up the vast majority of ammunition in Lind’s world. To find a spent round with any measure of fidelity to its original shape was a small miracle. Piotr Rykov’s brain must have absorbed enough of the energy to keep the bullet from destroying itself when it glanced off of a metal surface. Finally, the bullet’s presence meant that the shooter believed it lost. The killer covered his or her tracks extremely well, but missed this one fragment. Lind possessed information the perpetrator did not believe existed, which gave him some modicum of hope he might find some other neglected detail.
The lack of hard drive left Lind with little else to do on the Marlin. It would take hours at least for the Mako to sift through the bits of trace data evidence he had scraped together. He started the process, then arranged to have the Marlin towed by drone to Titan Orbital Station. It wasn’t as close as he would like, but the facility would have the repair facilities to perform a thorough inspection (and cleaning) of the ship in his absence. Lind sealed the Marlin’s external door with a magnetic lock, citing Article 32 of The Contract and prepared to transmit a broadband alert call should anyone claim the tempting derelict.
Excited at the stimulus of a murder case, Lind set aside the general malaise still plaguing him and placed the bullet fragment on a tray and let his lab computer do its work. Scanning the round, sending the data back to Earth, and checking all available databases took nearly an hour and ran automatically while he went about other work.
A message waited for him, a reply from Sadko on his inquiry:
Special Agent Michaels,
Thank you for your prompt investigation into this tragedy. We are happy to assist you in any way we can. The ship Marlin Eleven, piloted by Piotr Rykov, departed Iapetus Station yesterday destined for the Ephemeris manufacturing plant on Io on a contract arranged by Ephemeris three days ago.
We understand you are busy dealing with the terrible death of Piotr Rykov, but if you could please contact us at your convenience to discuss the disposition of Marlin Eleven . . .
Lind cut off the message without concern for Sadko’s loss of equipment. The ship was now evidence, no matter the cost to the company. He daydreamed about a Sadko freighter attempting to retrieve Marlin Eleven and the levying of huge fines.
At least one Sadko employee cooperated, albeit because of Lind’s manipulation. The data provided by the Founder captain included everything. It looked like he had dumped twenty-four hours’ worth of sensor recordings and logs into Lind’s computer. Lind appreciated the gesture.
Reading such volumes of data, displayed in a myriad of graphics and raw numbers, required obsession in the face of tedium. Each investigator used a different approach, most of which proved valid and tailored to both the reader and the context. Engine logs, power use curves, and crew status reports held little interest from Lind. Someone better would have gone through those files, piece by piece, knowing they contained little of value, in the interest of a complete and thorough report. Lind cut those corners, picking out sensor data and communications registers from the hundreds of files now on his computer. Hours of tagging seemingly random numbers or lines of code painted a picture of the discovery of Marlin Eleven.
Almost as soon as it began its approach to the two-toned moon, the Flounder received a Request for Assistance, or RFA, a transmission generated, transmitted, and replied to automatically that detailed a problem short of an emergency.
RFA VAIL REPORT
VESSEL DESIGNATION: MARLIN 11
ASSISTANCE REQUESTED: MECHANICAL REPAIR
INCIDENT: FAILURE OF COOLANT PUMP NO 3 ENGINE
LOCATION: SATURN/IAPETUS/HIGH ORBIT
Three minutes later, the Flounder received a confirmation from Marlin Eleven.
RFA CONFIRMATION
MARLIN 11 CONFIRMS RECEIPT OF ASSISTANCE
The logs did not register who replied to Marlin Eleven’s call for help, only noted that the Sadko Flounder undertook no further action and continued on course.
Fourteen more minutes passed before the freighter identified Marlin Eleven, less than seventy-five thousand miles out. The data explained why the Marlin only became visible that close. Rykov’s ship, orbiting on the northern hemisphere, emanated no power. It appeared to have held its orbit then, which begged the question why the freighter only involved itself on its second pass. The information flowed past Lind’s screen, point after aleatory point, noise unfiltered by software. Lind’s eyes teased out information too small to be caught by any computer’s filter, finding truth in the numbers that no ship’s navigator would notice.
Another ship left Rykov’s Marlin Eleven. A trail of heat, barely above the ambient temperature near absolute zero, faded between the ship and the other side of the moon. The cooling speed, in the few seconds the freighter detected it, told its own story, streaks of rubber on pavement whose measurements feed into another calculus. Lind plugged the information into an equation and determined the extreme speed with which the other ship fled Marlin Eleven. Someone had floored it, so fast, Lind determined, it must have been in another Mako.
The pool of suspects shrank. Only Thirty-Twos and Sadko operated Mako’s, and only twenty-five of the manned engines shot special missions pilots from one side of the system to the other. The ships not used for investigation became luxury VIP transports. Pausing the flow of information, Lind sent a message to Sadko, requesting the location of each of its Makos. Then, he returned to the tedious process of data review, although with the benefit of knowing what to look for.
Sure enough, the signs pulled out of the scrolling numbers. Vectors, the microscopic particles left behind by an over-stressed engine, and the marking of two perfectly matched docking told the narrative of another ship responding to the distress call, one matching the rough capabilities and signatures of another interstellar speed demon. The foreign Mako docked long enough to paint a barely recognizable pattern at the stern of the disabled vessel before accelerating out of sight before the Russian ship could properly respond.
As he stared into the monitor, deciding that only another Mako could have caught up to the adrift Marlin and disappeared so quickly, the light on his dashboard flashed. He had a response.
Sadko, to its credit, had responded promptly to his inquiry. The only Mako in the system of moons revolving around Jupiter had been receiving fuel at a station on the other side of the planet until an hour ago. All other ships had similar alibis. He eliminated the impossible, leaving him only with the improbable: somehow, there was more than an off-the-books firearm, someone flew an off-the-books ship.
If you’d like to read more about the adventures of Lind Michaels, you can find Void on Amazon.