Bubbles from Beneath
by Sylvie Althoff
Lieutenant Elizabeth Webb’s eyes shot open, but it was still pitch black. The air was cold and dry, and her ears were filled with the thundering of her heart beneath an insistent, high-pitched beeping.
Breathe, soldier, she told herself, clenching her fingers into fists. She forced away images of snow, of a turtle, a monster awakening beneath a sheet of ice. You’re needed. Leave the dream behind. Webb sucked in a gulp of recycled air and remembered.
Tearing off her sleep mask and blinking at the perpetual daylight of the transport ship Pinckney’s shared sleeping quarters, she peered at the screen positioned by the head of her coffin-sized berth. It took her longer than it should to decode the nature of the unfamiliar alert—a medical emergency in the main passenger compartment—and even longer to unstrap herself and push her way through the air to the ship’s central corridor.
Her limbs groaned at the effort of navigating down the corridor, of the long glides and infinite momentum and sudden stops required to travel in a zero-g environment. For a stomach-flipping instant she felt sure she was plummeting down a vast metal well headfirst, and she swallowed bile as she forced herself to keep steady. She blinked hard, her mind still a tangled mess of dream and memory. She could still see the frozen pond on Aunt Barb’s farm, see the turtle crashing through the ice, jaws like daggers rushing toward her face.
You’re getting soft, Webb thought, gritting her teeth and following the flashing red line running along the wall. Between swings of her arm against the metal handles that lined the corridor, she used one hand to stuff her ash-brown braid back down her collar, to straighten the lapels of her uniform, the same one she’d worn for thirty-six hours. It was a futile gesture, she knew—she’d never achieve the regulation-perfect appearance that she always strove for on Earth. Even the artificial gravity aboard USSF vessels, while occasionally unreliable, was better than the perpetual zero-g on this civilian vessel.
She shivered as she neared the end of the corridor, wishing she’d taken time to pull a hoodie over her uniform. This damned rattletrap was as cold as it was deathly boring.
Cold and boring. No wonder I’m dreaming about Missouri.
Webb heard two voices before she reached the juncture between the central corridor and the passenger compartment. Their tone was unlike any she’d heard in her eight long months as an unwelcome observer among the Pinckney’s crew—there had been plenty of grumbling, gossiping, picking, even shouting. But never anything with this kind of deadly urgency.
“—got here! I hit the alert as soon as I noticed!”
“Meaning it didn’t go off automatically?”
“I swear, the readouts looked stable, nothing changed since B shift!”
“Tell us something good, Oleg.”
“Nothing,” said a third voice just as Webb swung herself into the room.
The Hotel, as the crew of the Pinckney called the passenger compartment, was a long, quiet room that always felt dark to Webb despite the same glaring lights that adorned every wall in every paste-white room on the ship. With the two rows of thirty-six identical person-sized pods stretching down to the ass end of the spacecraft, the room felt like a morgue.
Three figures stood around Pod A3, feet fastened to the floor by their magnetized boots. Rudenko and Park were focused on the pod while Rubin wrung her hands and looked on in that helpless way that Webb couldn’t stand.
“Sitrep?” Webb asked in a clipped voice as she glided over to the center of activity.
Supervisor Park looked sidelong in her direction for half a moment. “Pull the connection to the SEV system, Oleg,” he snapped.
“Already done,” Rudenko answered.
“Whatever’s going on, we can’t have it affect the other pods.”
“I did it, I said. Christ.”
Even in an emergency, no discipline, no respect, even for one another, Webb thought with a shake of her head. It killed her to see how poorly this vessel was run in the absence of proper protocol. If her position as military attaché aboard the Ellipse Corporation vessel had come with any power over the day-to-day, she would have whipped these shitbags into a proper crew ages ago. At least that would have been better than sitting around and trying not to look as useless as she felt.
Webb engaged her boots and struggled her way to the side of the pod, looking over Rubin’s shoulder. The display was lit up with a constellation of warnings and alerts surrounding a silhouette of a human body pulsating red. It had been a long few years since her first aid training in Basic, but this looked bad.
“He’s dying,” Rubin said in a quiet voice. Webb turned to look at the woman, staring blankly at the pod. “By the time I saw something was wrong, it was already too late.”
Webb eyed the men standing over the pod, sizing up the situation and instantly sorting through potential courses of action. This could be the moment she’d been waiting for. She could take control of the situation, maybe even save some lives.
Stand down, soldier, she told herself, breathing slowly. Until this is a full-blown crisis, Supervisor Park is still in command here, however ineffectual he may be. Don’t blow your wad just because you’re bored of sitting around. Just because they don’t respect the chain of command doesn’t mean you can haul off and play cowboy. Those lessons she’d been taught in the Force had been hard ones; she wasn’t about to let herself forget them.
Rudenko stepped back from the pod with a huff and wiped his brow with a handkerchief.
“What are you doing?” Park snapped as his outstretched fingers clenched into a fist. “Save him!”
Rudenko shot him an unimpressed look. His eyes were red and bleary, hands shaky, mouth twisted in a stomach-acid frown. Fairly normal for Rudenko, really. “You want him saved? Bring a saint. Or at least real doctor, not just a medic. Ellipse doesn’t pay me to resurrect the dead.”
Park gave a wordless grunt of frustration and began tapping frantically on the panel.
“What happened, Mister Rudenko?” asked Webb.
The Ukrainian shook his head. “Not paid to do autopsies, either.”
“Best guess?”
He sniffed. “Embolism. Oxygen bubble in his brain. Was dead before I got here.”
“No way,” Park muttered. “It can’t be. Not possible.”
Park began a lengthy lamentation of the grand unfairness of his situation while Webb sidled up to the pod for a closer look at the display. Most of the passengers’ biographical information was locked, but her USSF login let her in without a problem. She scrolled through the available data, trying to take in as much as she could for as little as she understood. “Passenger A3, Leonid Toropov,” Webb read aloud.
That name stopped Park midmonologue. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Rudenko shift his bulk almost imperceptibly.
“Fantastic,” Park was now grumbling. “Just great. First time a pod’s been lost on an Ellipse craft, and not only is it on my watch, it’s Leonid Toropov. Wonderful.”
“Toropov?” asked Rubin. “The . . . . . . . . . the business guy?”
“‘The business guy.’ As if he—” Park snarled, then stopped, breath catching before he said something else. After a beat he continued in a scolding tone, “With an attitude like that you’re going to be stuck wiping down manifolds forever. The man bankrolled half the infrastructure advancements in Europe over the last ten years. Autonomous vehicles, space navigation, universities . . .”
Rubin cursed under her breath. “Some kinda big deal.” She paused. “What’s a guy like that doing heading out to the middle of nowhere? I didn’t think Ulysses Station was bringing in anybody but engineers and drone mechanics.”
Webb went on scanning her way through the menus on the pod’s screen, half listening to the conversation. As soon as she accessed the activity log, she felt a familiar tickle in her stomach. There was a series of soft ch-kunks as Webb unlatched the cover of the pod and its environmental locks disengaged, preparing to swing open.
“What the hell are you doing?” Park yelped. “In case you haven’t been paying attention, the Ellipse manual makes it very clear that the pods remain cl—”
“‘Pods remain closed for the comfort and health of the guests as well as to conserve oxygen and other resources for the duration of a long space flight,’” Webb quoted, keeping her tone even. “I remember, sir. But I don’t think any of those are concerns for Mister Toropov any longer.”
The hinges glided open, revealing a slight man in his late fifties, dressed in a crisp gray jumpsuit and lying on a sterile white bed. Despite his small frame he was the picture of terrestrial health, boasting a tan and a lean, muscular physique. Other than the stillness of his chest, he looked like he could just be asleep, or still in the chemical stasis that he’d enjoyed for the last eight months.
“So that’s him, huh?” asked Rubin in a small voice.
A smoky voice from the doorway called, “Wait, don’t tell me something actually happened for once?”
“I’m sorry, Sophie, was there something confusing about ‘All Hands Alert’?” Park snapped at the newcomer. Webb glanced over her shoulder to see Sophie McMillan in a tank top, a sweaty towel tucked into her waistband.
“Figured Keller just leaned on the instruments again. I wanted to finish my workout before starting my shift.” The tall woman leaned in to get a look at the opened pod. “Whoa, that’s not Leonid Toropov, is it?”
“Yes,” Rubin answered. McMillan snapped her head in Rubin’s direction, and the two shared a look.
“Talk to me, Oleg,” Park sighed as he rubbed his eyes. “How could this have happened? How does an oxygen bubble make it into the SEV system?”
Rudenko took a sip of water from a bottle. “Technical malfunction.”
“But how? The synchronized environmental system’s got fail-safes to prevent that, and fail-safes in place if those fail-safes fail!”
He shrugged. “Those failed, too, then.”
Webb straightened, her eyes roving over each of the room’s occupants. The math clicked into place—this situation demanded leadership, and for once she was empowered to deliver it.
Cowboy time.
“Is there any chance this wasn’t just a glitch, Mister Rudenko?” Webb asked in a steady voice. “That someone or something intentionally put that oxygen bubble into Toropov’s bloodstream?”
As expected, the questions threw the room into chaos. Park threw up his hands and began a new, elaborate objection; Rubin’s muscles slackened, the zero-gravity environment gently pulling her limp form away from the floor; McMillan said something under her breath as she stepped closer to Rubin. Webb only paid attention to Rudenko’s nonchalant answer.
“Possible, yes. Mechanical, manual, electronic—many ways to do it, for someone who wants Mister Toropov dead discreetly.”
McMillan snorted. “You seriously think somebody killed this asshole?”
Rudenko waved his hands dismissively. “Not for sure. I only said: maybe natural, maybe not.”
“But who would even—” Rubin blinked, the implication hitting home. “Wait. You think one of us did it?”
“Jesus, Liz, you can’t just throw around—”
“Without examination by licensed physician you can’t—”
“All right, that’s it!” Park snapped, hitting his palm against the bulkhead with a low metallic thump. “Everybody back to your duty rotations immediately. Oleg, seal up that pod and keep it that way until we pull into Ulysses. All of you—no more breaks, no more slack. When you’re not working or exercising, you’re alone in your berth. No fraternizing, no talking even a word of this until I figure out what’s going on here.”
“Oh, sure,” McMillan said with a sneer. “One of you assholes is a murderer and you want us to just pretend like nothing’s going on. Right away, Chief, you got it.”
Park thrust a finger in her direction. “This is not the time for your attitude. You don’t have to like it; you just have to do what you’re told.”
“And just who made you king of this boat?”
“I’m the manager on duty, Sophie, in case you’ve forgotten.”
Webb felt her shoulders rise. The man has no idea how to give orders. Even if nobody else dies, he’s going to have a mutiny on his hands if he starts cracking down now, when everyone’s panicked and paranoid.
Park and McMillan were brow to brow, and Webb saw no awareness in Park’s eyes that the taller woman’s fingers were clenched into a massive fist. “Maybe you need another reprimand on your record to refresh your memory, huh?” the supervisor barked.
“That won’t be necessary, Supervisor Park.” Webb stepped in front of the man, her back to McMillan. “I’ll be taking charge of this investigation.”
“Excuse me?” said Park. “What gives you the right?”
Webb tapped her rank insignia. “Sir, I’m empowered to take charge according to the same regulation that brought me to this vessel in the first place. USSF guardians are charged with taking jurisdiction in the event of any military, criminal, or disaster situation occurring in neutral space on spacecraft with U.S. registrations. This incident qualifies.”
McMillan scoffed. “Sure, that’s just what we needed. A tool of state violence, here to save us all.”
“We’re civilians,” Rubin pointed out. “Why should we have to follow orders from the military?”
“You’re only a lieutenant,” Rudenko muttered.
“I am the only Space Force guardian in the vicinity, which puts me in charge.” Webb straightened, keeping her face serious though she could feel a smile blossoming inside her. “As far as the operations of this ship are concerned, I’m captain of this vessel and commander in chief of the whole fleet. I’ll be in touch with my superiors about everything related to this incident, up to and including how cooperative the Pinckney’s crew have been with my investigation. Is that understood?”
Four heads nodded. None of them looked happy about it.
Webb steadied herself with a breath. “Good. I’ll be interviewing each of you and Mister Keller in the next few hours, right after I file my initial report. For the time being, I’m ordering you all to follow Supervisor Park’s directions and clear out of here. Until I determine otherwise, this is a crime scene.”
Maybe I really can be of some use on this assignment, Webb thought with a proud lift of her chin as the crew unhitched their boots and floated their way out. Maybe my career isn’t dead in the water after all.
Then her eyes fell upon the corpse, and that pride shattered like an icicle.
Webb bumped gently into the ceiling of her office, frowning as she pushed herself away with her index finger and continued floating aimlessly around the room. It wasn’t really an office; just a cramped cubicle between storage compartments that she’d commandeered for her work aboard the Pinckney. Such as it was.
Her eyes flitted to her screen, but it still only displayed the thinking animation over the icon for SF HQ in Huntsville.
Wiping her palms on her uniform, she looked down at her notes once again, not seeing the handwriting she’d reviewed a dozen times already. She had the evidence necessary to make her arrest and close the investigation. All she needed was her superior’s authorization to formally place a civilian under arrest. Then all would be well—her job would be done, and she could stop looking over her shoulder at every suspicious noise. She swallowed a mouthful of stomach acid.
Webb stared at the blank gray bulkhead, picturing the infinite stars just beyond arm’s reach. Her mind went to the one unanswerable question she was sure she’d be asked: Why did the killer wait until now, eight months into a nine-month journey? Why not kill him the day after lift-off? Or why not wait a little longer? Another few weeks and they could’ve disguised it as an accident during end-flight procedures, maybe even gotten themselves lost in the shuffle at Ulysses Station. What was the hurry?
Her stomach growled, and she started to trace how long it had been since she’d eaten anything when her screen lit up and a tone sounded in her earpiece. Even in zero-g, Webb’s salute to the camera was crisp and professional. “Major.”
She held her salute, waiting for her order to be at ease. After a few moments the still image of her commanding officer’s rank on the screen still hadn’t winked into Major Forman’s craggy face. Then, barely perceptible in between scrambled syllables: “—able video feed, Sear—peat, t—ff your—”
Webb broke her salute and hurriedly tapped at her screen to try to improve their connection. “Piece of shit,” she muttered under her breath, then stopped with a flare of embarrassment as she remembered her audio feed was enabled.
“—atch that, Lieutenant, please repeat?”
“Sir, I asked if you can hear me clearly now that I’ve disabled my video feed?” Get it together, soldier. Don’t let this crew rub off on you.
“Clear enough, at least.” The voice cutting through the static was Forman’s, terse and sleepless as Webb remembered. “We’ve received your initial report, Lieutenant. What progress has been made in your investigation?”
“Sir. Since my initial report I’ve conducted interviews with all five crewmen and cross-referenced with ship’s logs.” Webb glanced down at her notes and grimaced. “With all candor, sir, it’s a cluster up here. All five had the opportunity to inject something time-released into the EV system of Mister Toropov’s pod, and the available civilian data uncovered potential motives for everyone but Mister Keller, the pilot.”
She paused to invite a reply from Forman. The silence stuck in her throat, and she couldn’t help but picture the major glowering at his screen, that same glower that she’d run into headfirst a dozen times since her assignment to his wing.
Webb sucked in a breath and decided to take the silence as an invitation to continue. “Crewman McMillan has numerous ties to radical antigovernment and anticorporate movements, and her disciplinary record with Ellipse documents both threats and actual physical violence. Crewman Rubin was attending DePaul University at the time of its purchase by one of Mister Toropov’s organizations and subsequent closure, and she encountered considerable personal turmoil in the aftermath. Similarly, Crewman Rudenko’s home state in Ukraine has been mostly bought up by a Toropov property with an eye toward aggressive, large-scale mineral extraction starting next year. And Supervisor Park had a family member killed in a crash involving a malfunction of autonomous vehicles produced by—”
A burst of warped language broke into her report. “—nection is poor and failing, Webb. I read your rep—concur with your findings. Has an a— been made?”
She swallowed. “N . . . . . . . . . no, sir. I haven’t made an arrest yet, no. The activity log confirms which crewman was responsible. I was only waiting for confirmation of—”
“Stop w— care of it, Webb, immediately, and r— only when you’ve done your job.” Forman’s heavy, disappointed sigh came through with perfect clarity. “Eyes are on how we’ll –dle this. Don’t screw this up, Webb.”
“No, sir.”
“Since you’ve been —ssion there’s already —een talk of pulling our men off civilian ships in the absence of another Sino-Russian Alliance attack,” he growled. “Keep anything from getting worse on th— and we may be able to get the support we need. Drop the ball and the legislature’s liable to c— altogether.”
“I understand, sir. You can count on me.”
Webb didn’t know if she heard or imagined the snort that came into her earpiece. “I’d rest a lot easier if you weren’t on your own out there and we had a real o—”
Another chirp in her ear, a minor-key tone announcing that the link had collapsed.
A real officer on the job, she finished for him. Instead of you.
Webb felt her muscles slacken as the screen shimmered into idleness. She put a hand to her eyes and rubbed, feeling every ounce of the weakness and exhaustion put into her by eight months of space travel.
“On your feet, soldier,” she said under her breath. The words felt faraway, hollow as an empty turtle shell. “Come on, time to do your job. You heard the man.”
Webb’s body moved her into the central corridor as her mind swam with conflicting emotions about the arrest she was about to make. After seeing how Ellipse treated its employees, especially its women, Webb couldn’t help but feel guilty for what she was going to do, even under the circumstances. Space wasn’t a kind place, in the Force or anywhere else.
All those feelings were shut out easily enough as Webb floated down to the aft cargo bay, her mind retreating to a cold and familiar distance. The background context didn’t make a difference; not when she had her evidence. Her superiors were counting on her to close this promptly. That was all that mattered.
The Pinckney’s vast cargo bays were stuffed to the gills with huge plastic crates containing a staggering array of banal industrial components and consumer goods. Webb had spent much of her second month aboard checking the contents and condition of the cargo against the ship’s manifest, mostly just for something to do. It was mind-numbing make-work, and after a few weeks she gave up even pretending the task was necessary.
Her brow furrowed at the memory, plunged back into her anger at being shipped off on this assignment. Forman had barely tried to keep the smile from his face when he’d given Webb her orders—he finally had an opportunity to get his biggest problem guardian out of his hair, something that her perfect service record had made extremely difficult up to that point. This cargo bay still felt like a jail cell to her, even all these months later.
“Crewman Rubin?” Webb called into the cavernous room.
A head peeked out from behind one of the massive plastic crates. Even at this distance she could see the fear in Rubin’s eyes, felt the same midwinter fear gnaw at her insides.
“Would you come with me, please?” Webb asked in a steady voice. “And I’ll ask you to keep your hands where I can see them.”
“This is bullshit and you know it!”
McMillan was across the crew lounge and within arm’s reach before Webb could look up from her tube of dinner. Lightning danced through her muscles, but she kept her head and refused to flinch as the other woman stopped half a yard away from Webb’s face, her boots sealing neatly to the ground just before they made contact.
“Is there something you’d like to say to me, Crewman McMillan?” Webb kept herself perfectly still as a vein throbbed in McMillan’s red-tinted temple.
“Nothing you don’t already know,” McMillan snarled.
Webb’s nose wrinkled, the woman’s breath stale and hot against her face. She glanced over to Rudenko, who wordlessly tucked his tablet under his arm and floated his way out into the corridor, leaving the two of them alone.
She took a breath. “I’ll tell you what, crewman . . .” she said stiffly, pushing herself gently backward to put some distance between herself and McMillan. “. . . instead of guessing what I do and don’t know, why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind? Better use of both of our time, don’t you think?”
“Alicia didn’t kill Toropov and it’s asinine to pretend that she did,” McMillan snarled.
Webb clocked the woman’s lean, ropey legs flexing through her shapeless gray Ellipse jumpsuit. Subtly, she put out a hand to alter the trajectory of her movement. Don’t let her get your back up on the wall, Webb thought. It’s probably not more than the usual bluster, but...
“Crewman Rubin is only being detained in her berth until we arrive at Ulysses Station,” Webb said coolly. “At which point she will be remanded to the next arriving USSF vessel for a civilian trial.”
“Sure. We all know how much fascists love a good show trial. Especially of an innocent woman.”
“The evidence shows—” Webb started to explain, stopping as McMillan spat a clear globule into existence between them. She tried not to let her disgust show.
“That’s what I say to your evidence. If you’d bothered to actually get to know Alicia, you’d know she could never hurt anybody, not ever. If you only knew what she’s been through.” Webb didn’t have to look closely to see the blush on McMillan’s cheeks beneath the righteous indignation. “Her mom getting sick, losing out on her degree, the things her monster of an ex-husband put her through . . . . . . . . . Goddammit, are you really going to take even this last little crumb of life from her too?”
Webb folded her arms, eyes quickly scanning over the lounge for anything she might use to defend herself if McMillan fully lost it. “I’m not about to talk about an ongoing investigation with you, Crewman.”
“I’m not here to listen to you anyway. I’m here to tell you you’re an idiot.” McMillan’s eyes glittered with anger. “Are you really going to have her put away because her access code was used right before Toropov ate it? Anyone with half a brain could spoof her code, and that includes most of us here.”
“I think you should return to your post,” Webb growled. “Park was right—you don’t need another black mark on your record. Don’t throw your career away over a crush.”
Webb’s muscles were iron bars waiting for the response to that, but McMillan didn’t lash out at her. Instead Webb watched as McMillan’s anger curdled into cruelty, and her eye ran up and down Webb’s frame in an all too familiar way.
“You know, Liz,” McMillan said as she reclined against empty air, stretching out her limbs with the strength of a lioness. “I’ve seen some pretty ugly stuff in my day. But I don’t think there’s anything uglier than the sight of someone like us helping the system grind helpless people into the dirt. Not a good look, girl.”
Webb felt her heart pounding in her teeth. Keep it together, Guardian. God, why couldn’t she have just tried to hit me instead? “Okay,” she managed at last, craning her head to see if she could squeeze past McMillan out into the corridor.
“You can french that boot all you want,” McMillan sneered, positioning herself to block the doorway. “Push comes to shove, you’re expendable to them. Same as me, same as every working-class person out there, even the cis ones. Your bosses and mine—same oppressors with a different coat of paint. All the fancy government hormones in the world won’t convince them that you’re any different than the rest of us. You’ll never be a real woman to them.”
There it is. “I think we’re done here,” said Webb as she launched herself toward the door into the spaceship’s central corridor.
McMillan didn’t move, though, and Webb bumped roughly into her. “Civilians have to wait for years in the med queue to get access to hormones. Always the same excuses: supply-chain interruptions, clearance issues, problems with sourcing. We’re not a priority. Nobody’s a priority if they’re not rich or well connected.”
“It sucks, Sophie. I never said it doesn’t. But that doesn’t—”
McMillan didn’t budge, didn’t wait for her to finish speaking. “How long did you have to wait to get your first dose, Liz? Your first surgery? Did they just give it to you right away as a reward for drone-striking a daycare or hospital? Only the best for their pet tra—”
A fist clenched, reached out. Webb held it together in time and sealed her boots to the floor to stare McMillan in the eye. “I enjoy a certain degree of privilege, I know. That includes medical care, yes. But that privilege isn’t something I was just given. I earn that privilege every single day with my service in the Force.”
“I know girls who’ve died in that queue, Liz.” McMillan had tears in her eyes though she was still wearing a cruel smile. “Girls who couldn’t afford to do anything but wait until they couldn’t wait any longer. How can you live with yourself, knowing that you live and other girls just like you don’t? That only you get the care you need to stay alive?”
“If they’re Americans, they can enlist too. It’s not easy, but it’s better than waiting, and it’s sure better than dying.”
McMillan barked out an angry laugh. “How many innocent people are you going to get killed before you understand that it’s the bosses versus everyone? That you’re just a tool they use to keep all of us down, and they’re going to throw you away when you’re no longer useful?”
“Have you seen me killing anybody?”
“I see you trying your best to get Alicia killed, yeah.”
A headache rampaged behind Webb’s eyes. She took a slow breath. “Rubin isn’t going to get killed over this. Certainly not if she’s innocent. When we get to Ulysses the autopsy will uncover DNA or other forensic evidence that proves her guilt. Or it won’t, and she’ll go free with my apologies.”
McMillan’s lip curled. “Traitor.”
“That’s enough. Get out of my way.”
McMillan opened her mouth to spew something else, but Webb wasn’t waiting around to hear it. With fluid motions Webb sideswiped McMillan into a lazy spin into the middle of the lounge while kicking herself into the recycled air and sailing out into the corridor. Curses sputtered out after her as McMillan struggled to orient her feet to the floor.
“You can’t set her up for this, you asshole! She didn’t do it!” Webb heard just before floating out of earshot around the bend.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Ten more before you rest. Come on, you slacker.
With her lack of any real duties, it hadn’t taken Webb long to polish off all the available reading material on the Pinckney’s intranet—those had only consisted of a Bible, a couple of Tony Robbins books, and a fawning biography of somebody named Elon Musk.
Eventually she got desperate enough to dig a little deeper and found the Ellipse Corporation’s recruitment materials, the ones the company used to sucker poor souls like McMillan and Keller and the rest into these interminable interplanetary babysitting gigs. The glossy digital ads boasted “comfortable accommodations including a full suite of modern entertainment and gym equipment.”
Webb snorted; if the Pinckney had anything approaching “entertainment” apart from Keller’s five-string banjo, she hadn’t seen it.
At least the gym equipment hadn’t been a lie. It might not have been the cleanest she’d worked out on, but it was in good working order, and she was usually able to get in an uninterrupted hour or two before A shift started. Considering how much exercise the human body needed not to break down in a zero-g environment, it would have been a human rights violation if the Pinckney hadn’t come stocked with gym equipment . . . . . . . . . not that that necessarily meant much to Ellipse.
“Fifty,” Webb grunted. She let go of the handles of the rowing machine and grabbed her sweaty towel from where it floated just above her head. She wiped her forehead and checked the time readout on the gym’s screen. The seconds ticked into an incomprehensible blur, her thoughts flying off to the same dead end where they’d lingered for the last week.
You’re a good guardian, Webb, no matter what the men said to Forman. But you’re no detective. You followed a lead to a logical conclusion—is that really enough to confirm Rubin as the killer?
Since making the arrest she’d spent most of her time keeping an eye on Rubin. Supervisor Park had made it clear that the rest of the crew was going to have to work around the clock to cover Rubin’s duties, so these days Webb hardly even saw anyone else.
For her part, Rubin didn’t have much to say. She protested her innocence, but clammed up under any probing about her motive. More damningly, she didn’t even try to offer an explanation for how, from all the digital footprints Webb could find, entering her code was what had prompted the release of those deadly bubbles in Toropov’s pod.
It doesn’t matter if it adds up or not, Webb thought, turning back to the rowing machine for another set. Murder doesn’t make sense.
She’d torn through every scrap of data on the ship, from the tech specs that gave her a daylong headache to the protected passenger information. From the available info, the thirty-one sleeping individuals taking this barge to the outskirts of humanity were all just working stiffs, none of them much higher up the food chain than the Pinckney’s crew. Some of them had some marginally shady business behind them, and at least one was traveling under a hilarious assumed name, but none of them had any obvious ties to Toropov. Not that it mattered, anyway; they had all been kept in stasis for months. The ship’s visual records confirmed that every pod was loaded onto the ship sealed, and no pods had been opened until she cracked open Toropov’s.
Webb shook her head with a grimace. McMillan’s paranoia aside, there was no other answer to this riddle, which meant her conclusion was the only correct one. Process of elimination. Onboard cameras confirmed everyone else’s alibis. Rudenko was sleeping, McMillan was working out, Keller was piloting, Park was eating in the lounge. That left Rubin, like it or not. She was stationed in the Hotel for routine maintenance at the time—that’s opportunity, to go with her motive and means.
She grunted, straining at the pull bars as she felt her arms cry out. The sight of her triceps straining brought her mind back to McMillan, filling her with something between resentment and guilt. Sorry about your shitty life, Sophie. Wish you hadn’t fallen for a murderer like Rubin.
Then there was a muffled explosive sound and the world shifted around her. Webb reached out a hand to catch herself from falling, but lost the horizon again as the ground tumbled back the other way.
Training kicking to life, Webb engaged her boots and fixed her vision on a point on the far wall. A red light was flashing along the edge of the screen. She pushed herself over to it.
“Sitrep!” Webb barked into the comm, zipping up her uniform.
She was answered by a dissonant jangle of metal strings as the cockpit speaker kicked to life. “Say again, Liz?”
“What happened, Mister Keller?”
Another voice cut in. “I’m showing a loss of pressure out our stern. Keller, what’s going on?”
“Um . . . . . . . . . good question, boss. Hold on a sec.”
Webb tapped open the cockpit camera and looked at the greasy yellow hair of Garrick Keller. The man’s perpetual blinding-white smile was gone as he assessed every instrument panel he could get his hands on. Webb opened the ship’s electronic activity log without waiting for Keller’s answer. Her heart fell at the sight of the most recent incident listed.
Rubin’s code. I thought Park deactivated that when she was detained. How the hell could she have...?
She swallowed, the answer hitting her with a thump.
“Supervisor Park, something’s off in the Hotel,” Webb said in a clipped tone, tapping her way through the digital guts of the ship. “Someone entered a command string I don’t recognize associated with Pod A3.”
“Uh, roger that, boss,” said Keller. “Looks like somebody ordered up a pod ejection. That would explain the pressure loss as well as the proximity alert off our port side.”
“What?” Park squeaked. “Sophie, you’re stationed in the aft, aren’t you? What can you see?”
“Seems contained enough, anyway, but that pod’s moving at a pretty good clip.” Keller peered at one of the displays, then whistled. “Not for long, though. Looks lined up to cross paths with something big and rocky a few thousand klicks to our left.”
“How long before impact?” Webb asked. “And can you catch up with it before that?”
“Absolutely not, Lieutenant. You’re not about to take—” said Park.
Webb didn’t let him finish. “I’d think you would be more concerned about your passengers’ remains, Supervisor Park. To say nothing of Ellipse corporate property. How long, Mister Keller?”
Another whistle. “Fifteen minutes, maybe? I dunno about catching it. I can get us close, but at that speed you’d need—”
“Get us close. That’s an order.”
Park’s outraged reply mingled with the questions in her head, receding into background noise. Training gave purpose to Webb’s movements and propelled her out of the gym. In thirty seconds she was at the airlock. In ninety seconds she was suited up, more or less.
No spacewalks without a partner, she remembered, engaging her helmet’s seal and reaching to pull the Hybrid Maneuvering Unit from its cubby. The boat-shaped conveyance was little, but powerful enough to allow her to stop the pod in its tracks and bring it back home . . . . . . . . . at least, that was the idea.
No spacewalks without triple-checking oxygen levels, fuel levels, radio, surrounding environment, she heard her drill instructor say. Absolutely no spacewalks in a hurry.
“We’re caught up, Lieutenant, but not for long,” Keller’s voice chirped in her ear.
“Roger that.” Webb’s hand clutched the handle of the HMU as she stepped into the airlock.
No spacewalks without a partner, without triple-checking, in a hurry.
The door hissed open, and all sound was swallowed into an endless field of stars.
Webb swung her head around, deafened by the noise of her own breathing. It didn’t take her long to spot the silvery-white egg shape. The impossible parallax of it all made it feel like she was stuck in a dream. The pod, the same one she had opened, was right there, barely out of arm’s reach. The rocky asteroid was close, small enough to pop into her mouth like a Milk Dud. She reached out her arm toward Toropov’s distant pod and she could barely tell if she was moving.
“Don’t go anywhere, Mister Keller,” Webb said into her helmet speaker. “I’ll be right back.”
She didn’t hear an answer. No spacewalks without triple-checking radio.
Webb attached her tether, frail as a piece of yarn, to the clip next to the exterior door of the airlock, then oriented the HMU’s jet propulsion system toward the runaway pod. She gritted her teeth, prayed to a god she’d never believed in, and fired the engine. The force of the jolt nearly ripped the HMU out of her grasp, but she held on with every muscle in her body, and slowly, she saw that silver-white egg grow larger before her. She cranked the jets to the red line, her arms feeling like they were going to rip out of their sockets. Her tether spooled out behind her, or at least she hoped that was what she was feeling.
Come on. Come on, you son of a bitch.
Something red flashed in her peripheral vision, pulling her attention away from the pod. She blinked, hoping she was misreading the display beneath her chin, that her suit wasn’t perilously low on oxygen, that there was some mistake. The shaky, unsatisfying breath she pulled in through her nose confirmed it, though—she didn’t have more than a few minutes, by the smell of it.
Doesn’t matter. One thing at a time, Guardian. Get the pod back first, then you can worry about breathing.
But by now the arc of physics was unquestionable, even to a tiny human speck in the void. The pod juked and twisted, its momentum distorting with the gravity of the rocky body in front of her. At this point even gunning the HMU past the breaking point wouldn’t do anything more than drag her along into its cold, dead grave.
“Shit.”
Toropov was gone. Consigned to his crypt among the stars, carrying with it any evidence that would identify the killer. And the last scrap of hope for a career for Elizabeth Webb.
Not now, she thought, blinking. First you worry about breathing. Then worry about living.
The HMU was a miracle of military engineering, but it cornered like a parade float. By the time Webb had reoriented it back along the taut white path of her tether to the ship, her O2 levels were past orange and red and into exciting new colors entirely. She pictured the ghost of her breath leaving her lungs, and for a second she could plainly see the paper-white winter landscape of Aunt Barb’s farm in Missouri, as real and cold and airless as when she visited it in her dreams.
Not going to make it.
“This is Webb,” she spoke into her speaker, suddenly realizing she hadn’t heard the slightest peep of ship’s chatter since stepping outside. She swallowed sand. “Returning to Pinckney without the pod. Approaching port airlock.”
The Pinckney was an even uglier ship from the outside than from within, all odd angles and nonsensical bulges. Webb let go of the HMU and let her momentum carry her the final fatal drop to the hull, then used the wee little thrusters on her suit to slow her descent.
“Open port airlock,” she said, hearing the fear in her voice.
The airlock was still closed as Webb smacked into the side of the ship. There was a panicked dance of limbs against the cold metal and colder void, but somehow she affixed herself to the hull next to the still-motionless door. Stars zipped across her vision, continuing even after she blinked frantically.
“This is Lieutenant Webb,” she croaked. “Webb to Keller. Open the door, Mister Keller. Oxygen dangerously low.”
Webb closed her eyes as her head sank forward, helmet clinking against the frictionless skin of the hull. She forced herself to take shallow, even breaths, trying not to gulp the precious little air she had in her tank.
“Webb to Keller,” she squeaked through a quickly closing throat. “Webb to Park. Can you hear me? Please respond.”
They can’t hear me. They have to hear me. Oh God, they can’t hear me. Is my suit’s comm system broken? Did they lock me out on purpose?
Blackness closed around her. She forced breath into her lungs, opening her eyes wide. In and out. Breathe. Come on, soldier. You’re not allowed to lose it. Not now.
Her head swam between the steady counts of inhale and exhale. She was a little boy again in her dream, just like when she’d really been there when she was nine years old.
In and out. Breathe.
The Missouri cold cut through her padded red jacket, but the LED-bright glow of the winter sun through the clouds had made her smile. She tramped down to the pond and found it was frozen over with a sheet of ice.
Breathe.
“Webb to all hands,” she said into the comm, squeezing the manual broadcast button in her glove hard enough to leave a bruise. “Airlock is sealed. Won’t open. Request im . . . . . . . . . immediate assistance. Priority . . . . . . . . . top priority.”
Not really knowing why, in her dream and her memory she chucked a fist-sized rock into the pond and watched the explosion of ice crystals pirouette through the air. She tossed another, and another, savoring the violent movement of her muscles as much as the watery dance that followed every impact.
“Repeat.”
She located an old chunk of concrete as big as her head and grunted as she lifted it up over her head. Another wave of ripples disturbed the pond’s surface, something bubbling up before she could launch the missile.
In. Out. In.
Something was making the bubbles under the water. She knew what it was, what was about to happen, but she couldn’t move her cold, wet feet from that spot by the pond.
“Open . . . . . . . . . please. Open the door.”
Only static in her earpiece. Her thumb slipped off the broadcast switch and refused to move back on, muscles frozen and sleepy.
A shiny dark shape the size of a car jumped from the water right at her, sharp jaws snapping, ice spraying from the pond and pelting her face. She fell backward onto the snow and screamed.
A metallic thump, dim, hollow. Another.
The enormous alligator snapping turtle lunged toward her, beak clacking as it sought bloody vengeance on what had interrupted its frigid hibernation. She would later learn that the turtles of Missouri didn’t truly hibernate, but rested motionless beneath the frozen pond, awake and as conscious as turtles could be. She never knew that in her dream.
Bubbles.
Light poured through her eyelids. Webb raised a hand to shield her eyes from the glare, and fingers wrapped around hers. She fell down—or forward, she thought, her stomach flopping unhelpfully. There was another metal crunch, a sucking sound, and then it was quiet and cold as death.
She opened her eyes to teeth as big and white as God’s.
“Ope. Sorry to leave you hangin’ there, Liz.” Keller released her from his grasp with a sudden blush. “We couldn’t hear you out there, dunno if it was the comm system or—”
He stopped talking as Webb gasped in a breath and switched on her boots, standing straight against the beautifully solid metal floor.
“I know how they did it. How they killed Toropov,” she announced.
The Hotel was crowded with every member of the Pinckney’s crew present. The looks everyone was shooting in Rubin’s direction filled the long room, and Park’s tirade rattled against every polished surface.
“—knew she was too lenient, just leaving you in your berth! She should’ve tied you up and left you in the cargo bay,” Park spat, finger shaking in Rubin’s direction. “I don’t know how you did it after I disabled your access codes, but now on top of murder you’re going to be tried for covering up your crime, disposing of Ellipse property, de . . . . . . . . . defiling human remains—”
“I told you I didn’t do it, Park.” There was a bitter, ashy anger smoldering in Rubin’s eyes now, and she looked directly at the supervisor as she answered him even if her posture was still one of defeat.
“Yeah, Jesus,” growled McMillan, though her eyes were bleary with tears.
Webb frowned as she clomped into the Hotel, all eyes flying to her as she entered. I told Park I wanted him and Rubin here in ninety minutes, he brings the whole damn ship when he feels like it.
“Lieutenant Webb,” Park called over to her. “If you clearly can’t do the job of keeping an eye on the prisoner, you at least owe us an explanation.”
There was something fierce in Rubin’s eyes, but she kept as silent as Rudenko. McMillan wouldn’t even look at her.
Keller smiled that Keller smile. “Good to see you’re still on your feet, Liz. Still think you should take a breather.”
Webb noticed all of their reactions but didn’t speak, moving right past the cluster of humanity at the front of the room to the center of the second row of pods. She stopped at her goal, her finger brushing against the odd corner of plastic she’d found an hour before on the port underneath the pod. It was still there. She nodded with satisfaction.
“What the hell is this about?” snapped Park as he strode over to her, trailed by everyone but McMillan. “If you don’t mean to take action against Rubin for ejecting Toropov’s pod, then I will, regulations be damned!”
“Stand down, Supervisor Park,” Webb said calmly. “Rubin didn’t touch that pod.”
Park snorted with derision. “And just how do you know that?”
Webb pointedly avoided looking at McMillan, felt her do the same from across the room. “We can come back to that. What’s more important is that we arrest Toropov’s killer.”
Straight-faced, Rudenko gestured in Rubin’s direction. Webb shook her head as she leaned on the pod, fingers tapping on the polished plastic.
“It wasn’t Rubin. I know that for sure now.”
A wordless expression of relief burst out of Rubin. McMillan took a step toward the others but stayed where she was, tears now running freely from her eyes as Keller reached out and punched Rubin’s shoulder amiably.
“If Rubin didn’t kill Toropov, who did?” asked Park.
Webb smiled as she stopped drumming her fingers against the glossy surface of Pod B8. Seeing the confusion on the crew’s faces, she entered her code and brought up the display of the occupant’s biographical data.
“Passenger B8. Johan Galt,” Park read aloud. “I don’t get it.”
“Oh, ugh,” McMillan grunted, stepping over to the side of the pod.
“What does this guest have to do with Toropov?” asked Park.
Another few taps on the screen and the pod’s cover shimmered away, its surface made transparent. Lying in the pod was a man who appeared far less peaceful than Passenger A3, and far less comfortable. A doughy man, his eyes roved madly as if stuck in a bad dream, his face red and twitchy.
“Oh my god!” Rubin exclaimed. “Jayden?”
Webb nodded. “Jayden Engelbrecht. Your ex-husband.”
“But what the hell is he doing here? How did . . . . . . . . . I didn’t know. I didn’t . . . . . . . . . oh god.” McMillan’s arms were around Rubin now, and she leaned into the taller woman’s frame helplessly, tears streaming from her fearful eyes.
“We won’t know for sure until we reach Ulysses in a week and we place him under arrest,” said Webb, “but my theory is that he planned to frame you for Toropov’s murder, then catch the next ship out of Ulysses to one of the colonies on Titan.”
“And what’s your evidence?” Park snorted. “So he was traveling under an assumed name. Not a lot to hang an arrest on, Lieutenant.”
“He has been in stasis,” Rudenko spoke up softly. “How could he kill Toropov?”
“Hey, yeah,” said Keller.
Reaching down, Webb tapped her finger against the stray bit of plastic sticking out of one of the pod’s dozens of ports. Park leaned down to peer at it. “I wouldn’t pull it now if I were you—no way to know if that’ll spike his vitals or wake him up right away. But if Mister Rudenko will confirm my assessment of these readings, our passenger here hasn’t been as sound a sleeper as his peers.”
The Ukrainian pushed Park to one side and examined the details on the screen. His scowl deepened ever so slightly, and then he knelt down to examine the plug.
“Nothing dangerous, wouldn’t have tripped the alarm,” Rudenko said at last. “But yes, brain activity suggests he may be conscious.”
“This sick SOB spent eight months in a coffin just to frame his ex for murder?” Keller asked, scratching his head.
McMillan piped up, “And what, he injected an air bubble from inside his pod? Is that even possible?”
“Can’t know without examining his program,” Rudenko uttered. “But if this plug was connected to the SEV, very possible. Easy.”
“This is all pretty farfetched, Webb. What kind of man does something like this?” asked Park.
“I believe it,” Rubin said in a stiff, faraway voice. “Jayden would go to any length to hurt me. He was so convinced he was so much smarter than everybody else—not only smarter, more deserving of rights, more human. I’m sure he expected he’d get away with this.”
The air in the Hotel felt lighter only by an ounce, but that was enough to dissipate the fog that had settled over the ship for the previous weeks. Webb let Park give the order to leave Engelbrecht to stew in his pod until they arrived at Ulysses Station next week—they’d have station security in the room when they delivered his wake-up call. Keller and Rudenko returned to their shifts while Park muttered a nonapology to Webb in between threats to report her to the DOD. McMillan and Rubin went on hugging for a few moments longer.
“Thank you, Liz,” Rubin said in an exhausted voice. She blinked up her brilliant green eyes, looking as though she wanted to say something else, then walked out of the Hotel wordlessly.
Webb reached out and grabbed McMillan’s arm before she could follow. McMillan looked up in surprise, fear, rage.
“You didn’t know I’d go after the pod,” Webb said under her breath. “You just wanted to make sure there wouldn’t be enough evidence to convict Rubin . . . . . . . . . Alicia. You didn’t lock me out there, didn’t know the suits weren’t being maintained properly.”
She stared at McMillan, swallowed. Right?
McMillan looked into Webb’s eyes—what she saw there Webb couldn’t begin to guess. Then she pulled away her arm and stomped out of the room, the metal of her boots ticking quietly away into nothing.
This won’t look good for her in my report to Forman. Webb breathed out a sigh and retreated to her office to start writing. If I decide to tell.
***
Sylvie Althoff is a writer, editor, and elementary teacher. She has ghostwritten eight period romance novels and helped bring to life dozens of novels, short stories, memoirs, and children’s books. This is her first publication under her own name. She lives in Kansas with her wife, Jenn.