087: ACCOMPLICE

Sunset’s eyes widen, and I regret my words immediately. They’re correct,  but the immediate aftermath of a murder in a confined space probably isn’t the time to be reminding people not to trust their neighbours. If anyone in Habitation Ring 1 is involved, the truth will come out when we prove that Adin – or someone else, if it was someone else – actually held the knife. There’s no sense in creating further chaos in the meantime.

Ah well. Most people would’ve figured this out already anyway, and it would’ve occurred to Sunset soon enough.

I guess we’re not the only ones having trouble sleeping, as all of Habitation Ring 1 is up really early for breakfast. Celi, eyes bloodshot with fatigue, reports yesterday’s findings as we all eat toast and argue about whose job it should be to make bread while Adin’s locked up.

“First things first,” Celi says, forcing us to table the bread discussion for the moment, “our living Public Universal Friend looks like it will recover just fine. This nerve problem seems to have caused some minor inflammation in the brain, but we seem to have caught it before any permanent damage. I’ve got it under sedation right now and on a drug cocktail that seems to be working. I expect it to make a full recovery, but I guess we’ll have to find out.”

“Do we know what caused this problem?” Captain Sands asks.

“There are a couple of possibilities. I ran bloodwork, and it might be an infection.”

“Contagious? Dangerous?”

“Unknown. Nothing’s showing up in any of the common assays, so if it’s a pathogen, it’s a really rare one. Much more likely, however, is that our Friend has developed an autoimmune disorder.”

“Is that better or worse than a pathogen?” I ask.

Celi shrugs. “Better for the crew, since it wouldn’t be contagious. Worse for our Friend, since it’s much harder to treat. I ran a breath screen and I can confirm that if it is a pathogen, it’s not airborne,  so we should be fine if we avoid fluid exchange with our infected Friend. In fact I’d recommend avoiding fluid exchange in general, since without knowing what this is I can’t estimate an incubation time or the chances that anyone else might already be an asymptomatic carrier.”

“Well,” Captain Sands says, “we’re already supposed to be avoiding fluid exchange due to the genetically engineering immune systems some of the crew have, so everyone… keep doing that. And report to the medbay immediately if you start experiencing any of the Friend’s symptoms. What about the other health screens you ran yesterday? Anything to report?”

“A few pertinent things, yes. First, Adin Klees did indeed have neurostimulators in his bloodstream.”

“Had he taken them recently enough to have the enhanced strength at the time of the murder?”

“That… depends on his individual metabolism. I have no way of knowing how quickly he metabolises neurostimulators, so I can’t draw a dosage and side effect timeline. I’ve looked up the Friend’s previous dosage schedule for him and tried to estimate but a lot of it also depends on how much he chose to give himself after stealing them. I’d say, based on what I found in his blood, that it would be fairly unlikely for him to have had enhanced strength at the time, but it’s not impossible. However, it’s worth noting that Adin’s arms and hands are completely free of any sign of fractures, pulled muscles, bruising, or the like.”

“None at all?”

“Completely clear.”

“Is that important?” Sam asks.

“It means he probably didn’t use superstrength to stab someone in the heart,” I explain. “Neurostimulators temporarily increase strength in the same way that they increase speed and acuity; one of their effects is to make the body unable to feel the normal signals that slow it down or moderate force. Someone on fresh neurostims might be able to lift three times their own weight, but they’ll tear muscles and crack bones doing it.”

“It’s still possible for Adin to have committed the murders,” Sands points out. “He’d just have to be pretty lucky not to hurt himself doing it.”

“Lina Chisolm, meanwhile,” Celi continues, “has two broken bones in her right hand, significant bruising on her right arm, and deep scratches on her head, hidden by her hair.”

We all stare.

“Lina?” Heli asks. “Really?”

Celi shrugs. “She claims that she fell over last night and didn’t notice the broken bones because she was extremely drunk. And she was, indeed, extremely drunk when I took her blood.”

“Drunk before or after the murders?” Captain Sands asks. “had she been drinking all night, or did she kill two people and then drink a lot right after?”

“Impossible to tell. Interviewing the others might answer that question, if you can trust them to tell the truth.”

“Or to remember,” I point out. “They were all somewhat drunk except Tal, who wasn’t there most of the night.”

“Celi, do the blood tests confirm that impression?” Captain Sands asks.

“Well, yeah. They all had varying amounts of alcohol in their system, including Tal. And including our two victims, of course – I ran a screen on the wine found at the scene and discovered that both glasses contained antidrenamate.”

“DNA tests confirm that the two victims drank from the two glasses as well,” Heli adds. “If anyone was wondering.”

“Fingerprints?” Captain Sands asks. “Did our murderer touch the glasses or the bottle?”

Heli shrugs. “It’s surprisingly hard to get good fingerprints from a glass that’s been handled a lot. We didn’t find any prints that couldn’t have been from the two victims, though.”

“Interesting to note,” Celi adds, “the wine in the glasses was poisoned. The wine in the bottle was not.”

“Wait,” I say, “the killer poisoned the glasses directly? Not the bottle? Why? And how? Slipping them a poisoned bottle, I can see, but there’d have to be wine already in the glasses to slip the poison in, so how…?” I stop talking, realising the answer before I even finish the question. Why poison two glasses and not the bottle? If someone you didn’t want to poison was drinking from the bottle. Perhaps there had been a third, unpoisoned glass; it was the only explanation. How would you poison the glasses and not the bottle? If you were there with them, while they were drinking. Drinking from a third glass.

And so far as we knew, one person had been present shortly before the murder.

“You said Tal had a little alcohol in kes system?” Sam asks, reluctantly.

“Tal wouldn’t do that,” Sunset says immediately.

“There’s no way it could be anyone else,” Heli says.

“Tal’s not very observant when ke’s concentrating on something,” I point out. “Ke said that ke didn’t see Renn and the Friend, just heard them. If a third person wasn’t talking much, or if they left while Tal was still absorbed in kes work…” but I can’t make myself believe it. It’s too complicated, too chancy. The best way to convince someone to drink is to drink with them, so if you wanted to be absolutely sure you could drug them in time for the killer to show up…

“Did Tal show any suspicious injuries?” Captain Sands asks.

“No.”

That’s not surprising – ke doesn’t have to have wielded the knife in order to drug them. Although if Tal is guilty, then Adin probably isn’t – the pair were too eager to dob each other in to be working together. Throwing your co-conspirator under the bus like that is a great way to get caught. If Tal did the drugging, then either Denish or Lina probably wielded the knife. But where did Tal get the drugs if Adin had been the one breaking into the medical supplies? Maybe Adin hadn’t been breaking in. I’d assumed he’d illegitimately acquired his neurostims, but I wouldn’t put it past our medical Friend to have simply kept supplying him against the captain’s orders. Once it wakes up, it can clear that up for us.

“Any other pertinent information?” Captain Sands asks.

Celi shakes kes head. “I’ll get you the full reports for everyone, captain, but nothing else I saw seemed relevant.”

“Thank you,” Captain Sands says. “Anyone else have anything pertinent to report?”

Nobody does. The meeting concludes quickly, and I eat my remaining toast way too quickly and get out of there.

Because something’s just occurred to me. Why poison the glasses, and not the bottle? Well, if you’re Tal, then sure, you might do that to share the wine with your targets without poisoning yourself, but I don’t think Tal’s a good enough liar to be guilty. Maybe it was another person in there drinking with them, that Tal didn’t notice. Or maybe there was no third drinker; maybe the glasses were somehow poisoned by someone for a different reason.

Another reason that you might poison the glasses instead of the bottle is to control the dosage. If you were trying to sedate two people and you didn’t know how much they were each likely to drink, you couldn’t just deliver a drugged bottle; one might drug themselves into unconsciousness while the other was still very alert. You’d have to drug them separately; thus, the glasses. Would Tal miss a third drinker being present the whole time? Probably not. But would ke miss someone slipping in with some alcohol for the two researchers, filling some glasses for them and leaving them the bottle? Maybe.

But that raises another question – or really, brings an existing question into sharp relief. If you’re going to drug two people and stab them, why not just drug them to death and save yourself the stabbing? Anyone poisoning the individual glasses to be careful about dosage would have to be someone who knew enough about medicine to know the correct dosage (Lina, probably). So why not just overdose them? Why would Lina drug them, let it work, and then come back to kill them with a kitchen knife?

What are our options here? Adin, Lina, or Denish were most likely to have wielded the knife. Either Tal drugged the pair, kept an eye on them until the drugs started to take effect and went to get the killer, or somebody else slipped them the glasses of drugged wine while Tal didn’t notice. That ‘someone else’ could’ve been anyone except Tinera (whose presence would definitely be questioned by Renn and the Friend) or our living Friend (who had clearly been unaware of the drugs during its false confession), but… probably wasn’t Lina, come to think of it, because Lina wouldn’t have had to break a lock to get the antidrenomate. Oh, and while either Tal or Adin could be involved, they were very unlikely to be working together, or they wouldn’t have dobbed each other in so quickly when we first started questioning them. If I can get one certain thing, one solid bit of evidence that isn’t possibly just luck or possibly unrelated, one solid fact that pins someone to this, I’m sure I can unravel the rest. I bite my lip, and try not to think about wiping the fingerprints off the murder weapon.

There must be something else, though, besides the weapon. Knowing who took the antidrenomate would be a solid start. Unfortunately, there’s unlikely to be any physical evidence to that crime any more, and we don’t even know specifically when it happened, and it’s not like I can just look back in time and –

Wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

I head for NAER 1 and settle down at a terminal. Poking through my own computer history, I’m able to locate the feed to a camera I previously accessed. Come on, come on… yes! It still works! It’s still on! I open it up and have a view of the medbay where Celi’s liver transplant took place. It seems that the captain forgot to take the spy camera back down.

It’s not a good view of the medbay, just the corner that the operation had taken place in. But it does show the very edge of the medicine cabinet that had been broken into. Now, the big question; can I get the AI to show me past footage? It’s always a bit evasive with old information, but we’ve had no problem accessing footage from space suit cameras and such. I think it’s just its own native systems that it thinks to protect, so this little spycam is probably easy.

It is! The AI gives me access to old footage without a fight. Now, I just need to check the footage between the time that Renn made his stupid opinion about Lyson projects known, and the time that Celi told me of the broken lock.

Problem: I don’t remember when specifically either of those things happened.

I do remember that the broken lock conversation had happened right before Tinera had been confined to Habitation Ring 2, so I ask a few people until I get that date, then come back. Then it’s just a matter of very monotonously skipping back through the footage in search of something suspicious. Most of the time, the camera shows just empty space, although I do occasionally have to skip past someone’s medical exam that I really don’t have the right to be spying on.

I have to go back a surprisingly long way. Shortly after the whole genetically-engineered-crewmates discovery, I see one of my crewmates enter the view of the camera without a doctor. They look around, pull a small piece of metal from their pocket, then lean out of view over the cabinet. After about fifteen seconds, they withdraw with a large medicine bottle in hand, and hurry out of frame.

It’s Heli Graf.