The smell of wolf filled his nostrils, gamey and primitive. Jaws snapped close to Zack’s flailing hands. A shot pierced the cold winter air.

  The wolves scattered, the whelp dropping Browne. Zack picked him up. The dog still shrieked like something human. Gail ran from the lodge, her nine millimeter in her hand.

  “What the fuck!” she shouted, and to Zack it sounded like a prayer.

  * * *

  In the animal-hospital waiting room, after Gail had driven her jeep down the mountain like she or it was possessed, they finally spoke. The vet had rushed Browne into surgery. Gail looked at Zack and said, “What did you do to your hand?”

  “Broke the thumb.” After a silence he added, “Boxing with a tree.”

  “Huh,” Gail said.

  “Why were you there at the lodge?”

  “The same reason I always come—to check on you for Anne. I didn’t tell her I’d located you, because she would have wanted to come and I thought you might refuse to talk to her, or be even crazier than you are, or be dead.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t that hard. I know people, still.” And after another long silence she said, “Did Anne ever tell you how we met?”

  What? Zack didn’t care how Gail and Anne had met. He cared about Browne, and about nothing else except being so tired. Why was he so tired? It was only morning.

  Gail said, “I had a shitty life. I know you think you did, too, with your parents and all, but you aren’t nearly the bad-ass you think you are. Weird, yes, but not a genuine bad-ass. I was on crack, and in jail, and turning tricks to survive. Then I O.D.ed. Anne was my nurse in the hospital and all I wanted was for her to leave me alone so I could get back out on the street and do more crack. But then I assaulted a cop, never a good idea, and so I was back in the can. And Anne came to see me. Once, twice, a lot. It didn’t happen all at once. Or maybe it did, but I didn’t want to see it. Committing to Anne, to a drug-free life, to normalcy—it was a long way for me to fall. Into trust. I had to fall into trust, and into needing somebody, and it felt like such a long way to fall.”

  “I’m not interested in your lame story,” Zack said coldly.

  “Sure you are. You just don’t know it yet.”

  Zack said nothing, staring at his boots. They had on them snow, dead leaves, muck, blood.

  Gail said, “I’m going home now. I’m not telling Anne about this, although I will tell her you’re all right even if you’re cruel enough to not return her calls. You got your credit card? Good. You can get a cab back up the mountain, if you want to spend more of your undeserved fortune, or to someplace down here, I don’t care which. Where’s your phone?”

  “Six feet underground.”

  Gail didn’t even blink. She stood and stretched leisurely, and Zack saw the bulge of the nine millimeter at her waist. She walked away. Over her shoulder she said, “Jazzy’s husband left her. He was no good in the first place. She and the baby are at her mother’s.”

  Zack sat there another hour. He didn’t touch the cell phone that Gail had left on her plastic seat. Eventually the vet emerged, dressed in scrubs and a paper hat, just like a doctor for people.

  “Your dog will be fine, Mr. Murphy. He needs to stay here a few days. The receptionist will tell you when you can take him home, and she’ll give you discharge instructions when you do. What happened to your hand?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s not nothing. You should go to an ER and have that looked at.”

  “Okay,” Zack lied.

  His hand hurt, but not much. The vet had not recognized him. Neither had the receptionist, nor the old lady holding a cat, nor the child and its mother with a rabbit restless in a red carrier. There was a whole world of people who didn’t know what Zack had been able to do—any of the things he’d been able to do—and didn’t care. Normal people, in a normal world.

  Trust, Gail had said.

  Zack picked up her phone and took it out to the parking lot. It was winter here, too, but not the snowy freezing winter of the mountains. Rain spat at him from an overcast sky. He stood between the animal hospital and a Dodge Caravan, and keyed in a number. With his left thumb broken and his right hand bloody, it was awkward. It should have been Anne first, Zack knew that; Anne had earned the right to be first. But that wasn’t the way it worked, because about one thing at least, Gail had been wrong.

  You didn’t fall a long way. Falling wasn’t enough. You had to leap.

  He waited through the ringing, the answer, the normal voice saying “Hello?”

  “Jazzy,” he said. “Please don’t hang up. It’s me, just me. It’s Zack.”

  Murder on the Aldrin Express

  MARTIN L. SHOEMAKER

  In the clever story that follows we’re treated to a murder mystery set on a spaceship, one which focuses strongly on believable future technology and which gives us an ingenious and classically satisfying mystery to unravel, one peopled with vivid characters who are convincing as real people, with all their varying strengths, weaknesses, and foibles.

  Martin L. Shoemaker is a writer with a lucrative programming habit. He always expected to be a writer, right up to the day when his algebra teacher said, “This is a computer. This is a program. Why don’t you write one?” He has programmed computers professionally for thirty years and has also written articles and two books on software design. He has recently returned to his fiction-writing roots. His works have appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Galaxy’s Edge, the Digital Science Fiction Anthology series, The Glass Parachute anthology, and The Gruff Variations: Writing for Charity Anthology, Volume 1.

  “Are you sure about this, Riggs?”

  Midshipman Riggs nodded. “The micrographs don’t lie, Chief Carver. There are nanos all over that cable.”

  I scratched my neck under my stiff white uniform collar. It was hard to keep my uniform clean within the water rations on the ship. Besides an inescapable slight stink—inescapable because the whole ship had the same stink of bodies confined for months—I was developing a bit of a rash. “But are you sure? We’re going to have to take this to Captain Aames.”

  I saw the young British astronaut turn pale, almost as pale as his close-cropped blonde hair, and I managed to conceal my amusement. Riggs was new to the Aldrin, but already he lived in fear of Nick. Half the crew did the same, while the other half would never dare go to space without Nick in command. Some days I wasn’t sure which half I was in.

  Riggs was understandably nervous: being challenged by the Chief Officer was bad enough, and bringing bad news to Nick would be even worse. But the midshipman hesitated only briefly before he swallowed and answered. “Yes, sir. Take a look. The micrographs don’t lie.”

  I did take a look, pulling Riggs’s report onto my comp. I wasn’t an expert in nanomachines any more than Riggs was, but I could read the computer analysis easily enough. The frayed S3 cables were infested with dormant nanobots.

  Well, I had been hoping for a distraction so I could stop thinking about Tracy. I had managed to avoid her even in the close confines of the Mars cycler, but I couldn’t avoid the memory of her without some distraction. This would certainly fit the bill. “All right, then. No sense in delay. Let’s go see the Captain.” I stood from my desk chair, automatically correcting to avoid rising too fast in the ship’s quarter gravity. As we headed out of my office, I noticed that Riggs still moved with exaggerated care. Eventually he would adjust—if Nick didn’t break him first.

  Nick had broken more men than any three other commanders in the Corps. He loves to push a crew in drill: “Again. Again. Do it again, and get it right this time.” Sometimes that seems like the only word he knows: “Again”. Again and again until you break; but those he doesn’t break, we know our stuff. We have to. Being the best is the only way to get Nick to shut the hell up.

  Probably Riggs would break, but I hoped not. He was a good kid, endearingly eager to be in space even if only as crew of a Mars cycler. We would never make planetfall, just follow a complex pseudo-cometary Solar orbit that took us back and forth between Earth and Mars every eleven months. We orbited the Sun; but as we got close to Earth, she grabbed us, swung as around a couple of times, and then tossed us back toward Mars; and then Mars grabbed us and tossed us back in a complicated dance that took only trivial amounts of fuel for occasional course corrections. It was a mathematically elegant and efficient way to travel; but it was about as exciting and eventful as driving a subway train. Most in the Corps saw cycler service as pretty low duty for an astronaut, tantamount to punishment. And working under Nick didn’t make that duty any more popular, which added to our attrition rate. I couldn’t guess whether Riggs would last or not. Nick couldn’t, either, which was why he insisted on testing people until he found out. Nick hated not knowing.

  We walked through the ship as I ruminated, passing through one brownish-gray corridor after another. I had seen pictures of the ship when she was new, all orange-yellow (“ochre” the designers called it) and with the Holmes Interplanetary logo prominently displayed in most rooms. It had been a bit ostentatious, but it had looked polished. Then Holmes had gone out of business and Mission Control had scooped up their assets and repurposed them for government missions. One of the first things they had done was to paint over the ochre with government-issue gray; but because they had skimped on the gray, the result had a brownish tinge that looked grimy even when we cleaned it as best we could. We got used to the grimy look eventually, but we prized any little bit of color that broke up the dullness.

  Eventually we arrived at Nick’s outer office—empty, since I was the one who usually manned the desk there—and passed through to the command office. The door opened as I approached. I ushered Riggs in and we stood before the display desk. Where most of the ship was brownish-gray, Nick had had his office painted in darker tones, mostly black. He also kept the lights low, except for the glow from his computer desk. He liked the room dark, with one giant window behind the desk showing the star field outside.

  A chair was behind the desk, its high back facing us, and it didn’t budge as we entered and the door closed behind us. Nick was staring at the stars and probably ignoring us, but it was possible he hadn’t heard us. As usual, the office was filled with mellow Brazilian music. Many of us in the Corps have trained in Brazil and picked up a little Portuguese; but Nick had thoroughly adopted the country and its culture. I recognized “Brigas Nunca Mais,” one of Nick’s favorites. I always found some irony in that: the title translated roughly as “Never Fight Again,” and Nick was a tenacious fighter.

  The chair back swayed slightly. Despite the music, I was sure Nick knew we were there. He was just ignoring us. Fine. I would wait him out.

  Finally the song ended, and Nick’s voice came from behind the chair. “Are you going to stand there all day, Chief Carver? I know you didn’t leave.”

  “How did you know it was me?” Did he analyze the sound of my walk? I couldn’t see how over the music.

  “Elementary, my dear Carver. After Margo Azevedo’s breakdown at last month’s maudlin dinner, I would rather avoid any unnecessary contact with our passengers. That door is currently programmed to open for only one other person on this ship besides myself; and that one other person is you, Chief.”

  “Someone could have broken your lock program and entered that way.”

  “True. But there’s only one person on this ship whose programming skills are up to that task. And that person is also you. Ergo, if someone intrudes on my solitude, it could only be you. Oh, and Mr. Riggs, of course.” I saw Riggs flinch when Nick said his name. He looked at me and mouthed the word “how,” but I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to give Nick the satisfaction. Besides, he likely had a camera hidden in his office, so it wasn’t any big mystery.

  Over the years I had learned the value of having more patience than Nick. It’s not easy, but I’ve done it. He has nearly zero patience when he wants something from you, but nearly infinite when he’s avoiding someone. So I just stood silently and waited him out. At last he spoke again. “So what is it, Chief Carver? More of the incessant mourning? Have our passengers decided they want to regale us with yet more stories of the late, great Professor and his botched expedition?”

  “No, sir, but it does involve the expedition. Riggs has found evidence that Professor Azevedo’s S3 cable was sabotaged.”

  It’s rare that I get to surprise Nick, even with bad news; so I took a secret, perverse delight in the way he spun the chair around. Instead of his usual casual slouch, he leaned intently forward: a medium-short man, fit and wiry with bushy red-gray hair and short beard. When he got like this, his energy seemed likely to burst out in a random direction on the smallest provocation. Again Riggs flinched as if Nick might leap at him or throw something at him; and I had to admit, it had happened to others in the crew.

  Nick fixed Riggs with his best contemptuous stare. “Mr. Riggs, Synthetic Spider Silk breaks. It is incredibly strong, but it also breaks when not properly maintained over time. And Paolo Azevedo was notoriously sloppy—exactly as I warned his backers before the expedition, not that anyone listened to me. Half of his maintenance reports never got filed. So I have no doubt he fell behind on S3 inspections, and the cable broke as a result. Why would you suggest otherwise?”

  Riggs straightened to attention under Nick’s stare, and he stood his ground. I could really get to like the kid. He had spunk. “Captain, I was performing the quarantine inventory, as per Chief Officer Carver’s orders.” We were less than two days away from Earth orbit, so it was standard practice to scan all transported gear for contaminants—including nanos, since many Earth jurisdictions have pretty strict laws about unlicensed nanomachines. “I inspected Professor Azevedo’s S3 cable, and I found a small colony of scavenger nanos. If I may, sir?”

  Nick nodded, and Riggs swiped his finger across the comp in his sleeve, pushing his report to Nick’s display desk. Nick gestured us closer as he leaned over the electron micrograph, an image of several parallel gray tubules dotted with miniscule magenta specks. Riggs tapped his comp, and several circles zoomed out of the image for more detail. The tubules began to show as a fine matrix; and the specks became a number of small structures, false colored in shades of magenta to stand out against the gray background. “There they are, sir. Scanner says they conform 99.993% to the structure of standard scavenger nanos, one of the same lines that the expedition took along for scavenging raw materials. This particular line scavenges salt ions and fixes them to a substrate, manufacturing salts and salt-based compounds. And these—” Riggs tapped the comp again, and small flecks were highlighted in yellow. “—are salt ions trapped in the glycine matrix.”

  Nick sneered at Riggs. “And why are you wasting my time over a bunch of salt ions?” But I knew that sneer from long experience: it meant that Nick was testing Riggs. Nick already knew the answer, and he suspected that just maybe Riggs wasn’t a complete incompetent. If Riggs could just keep his cool and make a thorough, professional report, he might actually impress Nick. And I knew as well as anyone how difficult it is to impress Nick.

  Riggs held up under the sneer and continued his report. “Captain, the salt ions depolymerize the glycine, reverting it from a fibrous state to more of a gel. The silk becomes liquid again, Captain, and it stretches like taffy. It pulls thinner and thinner until it just wisps away. If the Captain is done with this micrograph?” Nick waved his hand dismissively, and Riggs brought up the next image. “This is the same zone, zoomed out by a factor of ten.” There were a number of gray strands, too small now to see the magenta specks; but the strands became progressively more yellow as they approached the upper right corner. They also narrowed dramatically. When the strands had diminished to roughly half their width, they started to bend and warp. And suddenly, almost in the corner of the image, they became a knotted yellow tangle, and they reached no further.

  Nick turned one wide eye up at Riggs. “So, Mr. Riggs, you’re telling me that although Azevedo was an utter fool who had no business leading that expedition, he wasn’t at fault in his own death? You’re telling me that I was wrong?”

  Riggs swallowed before he spoke. “Yes, Captain.”

  “Good!” Nick looked back down at the desk. You would have to know him as well as I did to see the slight edge of a smile at the corner of his mouth. Riggs had impressed him. “Riggs, it is my job to be right. This ship and all aboard depend on that. It is your job to tell me when I’m not doing my job. I will tear you into small bloody bits when you do, because I’m never wrong; and I expect you to do so anyways, because sometimes I am wrong, and I will not tolerate that. If you can accept that, you might have a future on this ship. Can you?”

  Riggs didn’t hesitate again. “I don’t know, Captain. We’ll find out.”

  This time Nick even let his smile show. “Honesty. Another mark in your favor. Don’t ever lie to me, Riggs, and we’ll get along fine. So I trust you did research on these nanos. You know how they’re activated.”

  “Concentrated UV light, Captain, of specific frequencies. The light excites certain outer electrons in the structure, ionizing the nanos and initiating a chain reaction that starts them in motion. I’m afraid chemistry isn’t my best subject, Captain, so I can explain how to activate them but not the details. The frequency and intensity required are such that they don’t occur naturally in the solar spectrum.”

  “So they can’t activate by accident. Someone has to use an emitter.” Riggs nodded. “And that’s why you believe the break must have been sabotage.”

  I decided Riggs had had enough of Nick’s attention, and it was time to draw some fire of my own. “Yes, Captain, and that’s why we had to bring this straight to you. Until we reach Earth’s gravipause, you are the highest legal authority aboard this ship.”