This story originally appeared in Alien Dimensions #12
Explosions, riots and bickering arguments, the news never changed. Darren tapped an icon and the wall screen returned to a sweeping view of the stars outside. After a hundred years of exploring and colonizing the star systems surrounding Sol system, you would’ve expected mankind to have matured at least a little. Darren bit his bottom lip and wondered if he had made the right choice by staying on the Magellan Space Habitat, but his work here as a private investigator was familiar and the very idea of losing the ability to grab a cold beer or some Chinese takeout was cringe worthy. What would he do on a colony, grow potatoes?
Darren sighed when he saw the man he was waiting for on his computer screen turn down the corridor and approach his door. He glanced at the floor under his desk and waited for his visitor to press the call button a second time before tapping the open-door icon on his desk. A man wearing blue coveralls stepped through the doorway and extended a hand.
“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Dupree.”
Darren gripped his client’s hand for a quick shake and said, “Call me Darren,” and then waved to a chair. “Please have a seat. What can I do for you, Mr…”
“Everyone calls me Mike.”
“Okay, Mike, how can I help?”
Mike glanced over Darren’s shoulder, swallowed the lump in his throat, and spoke in a rush. “I think my wife is cheating on me. I need to know if it’s true and I need you to find proof that will stand up in court.”
Darren’s lips thinned and he nodded his head sympathetically. “Your eyes tell me that you hope that this isn’t true.”
“Of course, I hope it isn’t true. It’s just the suspicion is gnawing a hole in my gut. I can’t keep living like this; I have to know one way or the other.”
“Has she been unfaithful in the past?”
Mike’s eyes dropped a moment. “Yes, a few years ago. We moved to the Magellan Habitat to get a fresh start.”
Darren sighed. “Then more than likely she’s having an affair. You might as well prepare yourself for it.”
“But we…”
Darren held up a hand. “I’ve been doing this too long to have any faith in humanity. If your gut says she’s messing around again… Well, let’s just say I’ve learned to trust my gut.” He studied his client’s face a second before continuing. “For example, my gut tells me that the proof you want will never be used in court.”
Mike’s eyebrows furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“I think you want the evidence to confront her, with the hopes that she will stop.” Darren watched his client’s face redden with a mixture of anger and embarrassment.
“What I do with the proof is my business. Do you want the job or not?”
“Oh, I’ll still do the job. I’m just trying to determine exactly what kind of proof you need. If you just want to confront her with it, I can get what you need a little cheaper, but if you need it to stand up to the scrutiny of the legal system, I’ll have to follow protocol.”
“What difference does it make?”
“I’m not saying that I’d gather anything illegally or anything like that, but the privacy laws here are taken seriously and the courts require documentation to prove that all the evidence was gathered properly. It’s a real pain in the ass to fill out the required paperwork and often there are a few extra fees involved.”
Mike looked away while he considered his financial situation. “How about you find out if my fears are justified, and then I’ll let you know if I need the evidence for court.”
Darren leaned back in his chair and nodded once. “I can do that.”
“Good. My wife’s name is Cassie Peck and her ID number is W9342312. She works second shift in hydroponics.”
Darren wrote down the information and checked the time. “Ah, that’s why you wanted a late appointment; her shift started an hour ago.” When Mike stood up preparing to leave, Darren grimaced and stood up as well. “You do realize that you’ll never be able to shame her into staying faithful, don’t you?”
Mike’s eyes flashed as his temper flared. “Excuse me?”
Darren held up a forestalling hand. “I just wanted to point out that this is the 23rd century. The concept of a monogamous marriage is practically a thing of the past.” Darren shrugged. “As the old saying says if you can’t beat them join them. There are many established hedonistic communities even out here on the habitats.”
“I’m paying you to find out the truth not for relationship advice,” Mike said through gritted teeth before turning on his heel and walking out the door.
As the door closed, Darren shook his head and said, “It was just a suggestion.”
Darren cracked his knuckles and wiggled his fingers over the keyboard imprinted on top of his desk. With a few quick taps, he logged into the habitat’s security database and checked the box affirming that any information gathered would be kept in confidence and only shared with his client or authorities. He ground his teeth together when he thought about bureaucratic hoops he had been forced to jump through and the costs involved in obtaining one simple login.
He entered Cassie’s ID number and three holo projections containing various lists of data appeared above his desk. According to the records, Mike and Cassie had been on the habitat for a year and a half, and he let out a long sigh when he glanced at the page Talley under each holo. How one person could accumulate so many financial transactions, location tags, and encrypted messages in such a short period of time was baffling, but he knew that it was normal for the younger generation.
Darren touched the bottom of a holo and lifted his finger into the air to scroll through the data. When he found something noteworthy, he’d run his finger across the text and highlight it in red. After twenty years of investigative work, comparing dates, times, and locations had become second nature, and it didn’t take him long to recognize Cassie’s daily and weekly patterns.
When Darren noticed anything that appeared to be a break in the patterns, he highlighted the text with a different color, tagging it for follow up. He grunted when he reached the last lines of data and quickly scrolled back through all three holos while he worked his jaw as if he was chewing something distasteful.
After scanning over the information twice more, he growled to himself, “Only four deviations from her weekly pattern in a year. No one is that consistent; I must be missing something.”
He sat up straighter and leaned closer to holos above his desk. With his right hand, he touched the holo listing Cassie’s financial history, and when he moved his hand, the holo followed. He left the financial holo beside the location history and began to comparing locations and transactions. The corners of his mouth turned up slightly when he marked his first anomaly, and he muttered to himself, “Isn’t that interesting.”
He leaned back when he reached the end of the data and stared at the transactions he had flagged. Ten purchases were made during Cassie’s normal working hours at the bar called Vega 2 which was decks away from hydroponics. All ten charges were for the same amount, which didn’t bother him, but the fact that they were all made while habitat’s computers listed her location as hydroponics told him exactly where he needed to be later that night.
#
Darren casually looked around the bar and adjusted the collar of his jacket as the doors closed behind him. He chose a stool at the bar in the center of the room that gave him a view of most of the room. The floor of the bar was made to look like the surface of Venus, greenish black in color and rough looking although it was perfectly smooth. The walls and ceiling emitted a yellow glow simulating the sky. A replica of the Vega 2 space probe hung above the bar, and he stared at it until the bartender cleared his throat and raised his voice.
“What can I get you?”
“Just a draft.”
The bartender placed a chilled mug on the bar in front of Darren and then walked away to tend to other customers. Darren took a sip of beer before pulling up his sleeve a few inches. He tapped a small screen strapped to his wrist and activated the hidden camera built into the back of his collar. He adjusted the view of the camera until he could watch the entrance, took another drink, and braced himself for what he felt was the worst part of his job, waiting.
Two and a half beers later, Cassie walked into the room and Darren smiled. She was not alone as he suspected. The man was at least a foot taller than her, and he had an awkward step to his walk, as if he weren’t used to gravity or in the case of the Magellan Habitat, centrifugal force. Darren shook his head and wondered why a woman as good looking as Cassie would be interested in such a lanky man.
The facial recognition software looked up Cassie’s companion and a stream of data began to roll across the screen.
Subject: Marty E. Hutchins, age 32, is currently Hydroponics Supervisor on the Magellan Space Habitat. All other information is classified.
After another tap on the screen, the camera locked on to the couple and followed them to their table. Darren zoomed in and activated the lip-reading program that would send their conversation to his ear piece while wondering why this man’s entire past would be listed as classified. At least he knew now why the computers still listed Cassie in the hydroponics area. Clearly, her boytoy here was altering the logs to cover up their affair. Darren forced himself to concentrate on their conversation.
“How much longer are we going to do this, Cassie?”
“Do what?”
“Keep everything a secret; you know how I feel.”
Cassie softened her voice, but the surveillance system built into Darren’s jacket boosted the volume so that he could hear. “Look, Marty, I’ve made a commitment, and I’m not just going to walk away from it.”
A droid delivered drinks to the table, and Cassie held her hand over a sensor for a moment to confirm the purchase. Darren manually zoomed closer and the video quality became grainy, so he sighed and returned the settings to auto and squinted in an attempt to study their facial expressions. Marty looked annoyed.
Marty grimaced and nodded once. “Fine, but I have to leave tomorrow. My time here is up.”
“They’ve completed repairs on your ship then.”
“We got the word this morning. I think you’ll like my replacement; she’s nice.”
Cassie moaned and took a long drink. “I hate working for women. They just never seem to understand me.”
Darren sighed and mumbled, “You mean they won’t keep you on the clock and sneak out to bars with you.”
“Did you need something?”
Concealing the vid screen strapped to his wrist, Darren slowly looked up, met the bartender’s eyes and said flatly, “No, I’m fine.”
The bartender blinked twice and shook his head. “There is a two-drink minimum after nineteen hundred. We’ll be full in a few minutes; second shift maintenance just got off work. I’ll need you to either order another or give up your seat for paying customers.”
“So, the two I ordered before nineteen hundred don’t count.”
“Nope.”
Darren glanced around the room, and to his surprise, he saw that most of the chairs were full. He had been so focused on watching Cassie and Marty that he hadn’t noticed them enter the room. With a grunt of annoyance, Darren rested his palm on a nearby transaction pad to confirm the purchase of another drink and went back to studying his miniature surveillance screen.
Cassie was carefully applying a fresh layer of lipstick, so Darren quickly backed up the video to make sure he didn’t miss any incriminating activities. He sighed and shook his head after reviewing what he had missed. He saw nothing: not a brush of the lips, not a single clasping of hands to give him the proof he needed.
Cassie put her lipstick into a small hand bag. “Will you be returning to sector twenty-seven?”
“You know I can’t tell you that, but you could go see for yourself.”
The tone of Cassie’s voice became more assertive. “How many times do I have to turn you down?”
“You can’t blame me for…”
An explosion shook the entire habitat, and the lights went out. Many of the people in the room were using battery powered devices that kept the room from complete darkness. The screams of those too frightened to do anything else replaced the music that had been playing in the background. When the power returned, Cassie and Marty ran for the door as if they knew something no one else did, so Darren jogged after them and stayed close enough to keep them in sight.
Darren caught a glimpse of a vid screen news report in the corridor and overheard an interview with the Environmental and Safety Chief of Operations. The Chief was trying to reassure everyone that the habitat was not damaged and that the explosion was simply an engine malfunction on a docked spacecraft. Darren slowed just enough to hear a sentence or two and then sprinted to catch up.
They ran past an airlock with a display that read: Shuttle Flight STS-143 – Space Station Lipizzan. Marty entered a code at the next airlock, and the doors slid open. Darren glanced at the display beside the airlock and grunted when he read the name Lipizzan Industries. The words were wrapped around a white horse which was apparently their corporate logo. He pushed himself to run faster to avoid being locked out and slipped between the doors as they closed.
Focused on the doors ahead of them, neither Marty nor Cassie noticed Darren, and he managed to follow them onto the ship. Alarms wailed inside the ship and emergency strobes flashed between ear-splitting screeches. As the ship’s doors closed, Marty turned and noticed Darren.
“Who the hell are you? You’re not authorized to be on this ship!”
Darren held up open hands. “I’m just here to…” His voice trailed off as a seven-foot-tall bipedal creature with one large eye and four fingers on each hand staggered into view. “What the hell is that?”
Marty glanced over his shoulder and sighed. “Well shit. Now you’ll have to stay.”
As the creature collapsed to the floor, Marty and Cassie ran toward it. Darren swallowed hard and slapped his hand against the emergency release by the door. Nothing happened. He was about to try the emergency release again when Cassie shouted at him while kneeling by the creature’s side.
“You can’t leave without a code, so you might as well help! Come on! He won’t hurt you. They can’t breathe our air long before they pass out.” She motioned for Darren to come closer, and he cautiously complied. “We have to get him back to his enclosure. We’ve got his arms; you get his feet.”
“How about you tell me what’s going on?”
Cassie nodded toward the creature’s feet, and said, “We’ll explain,” the alarms fell silent leaving her last words spoken too loudly, “as we walk!”
Darren lifted the creature’s legs and followed. The strobes continued to flash, leaving spots in his vision. Every so often small animals rushed by them while hugging the corridor walls as if they were afraid someone would grab them. Darren watched a three-legged creature turn in circles as it sprinted by, and he almost dropped his end of the strange creature.
Marty glanced back every so often as they walked to make sure he had Darren’s attention. “We were sent to sector twenty-seven to investigate a previously unnoticed asteroid. When we arrived, we soon discovered that it was an alien ship or their version of a space habitat.”
Chills ran down Darren’s spine as what he thought was a long leafy vine suddenly slithered between his feet causing him to jump. “AHH! Do they bite?”
“They haven’t yet.”
“Are they intelligent?”
“We’re still not sure.”
Darren readjusted his grip with a grunt. “How can you not be sure?”
“We have several theories, but I’m starting to believe that we’re dealing with some kind of collective intelligence.”
They stopped by a large cargo bay door, and Marty typed in a code on the access pad. Darren sucked in a sharp breath as the door opened. The inside of the cargo bay had been transformed into an alien jungle. They stepped through a weak force field that apparently held in the atmosphere, as they entered the cargo bay and placed the alien gently on the ground. Other people came into the cargo bay, dropped off a limp alien lifeform, and then jogged back out to look for others.
Marty arched his back to stretch a strained muscle. “We took a few plants and animals and set up this habitat so that they could be studied closer to home. Despite our best efforts to keep them alive, they were clearly dying, so Lipizzan made arrangements for me to take a supervisory position here giving me access to the smartest biologist the human race has to offer.” He nodded toward Cassie. “Cassie here figured out that we had a distribution problem concerning the nutrients that these creatures need to survive.”
Cassie blushed. “It was really a team effort.”
A red-faced man stepped through the doorway, looked around the habitat as if he was looking for something to bite, and locked eyes with Marty. “Damn it, Marty! Can’t you keep these animals contained? They got into the reaction drive again! Luckily, no one was killed this time.”
Marty nodded once. “Sorry, Commander. I’ll review the videos immediately and figure it out.”
“You do that!” The commander turned to face Darren. “Who the hell are you, and why are you on my ship?”
Darren waved a hand Marty and Cassie’s general direction and tossed out the first excuse that came to mind. “I followed them aboard, hoping to help.”
The commander’s eyes never softened and narrowed slightly. “You will follow me. I have a thousand pages of paperwork for you to read and sign if you ever hope to go back home.”
A chill ran through Darren’s veins. “Paperwork?”
“The lifeforms on this ship are corporate secrets. So, unless you’d like for us to press charges of corporate espionage and slap you with a gag order that will require you to wear an audio-visual monitor for the rest of your life, you won’t give me any problems.”
Darren grimaced at the thought of going through Lipizzan’s non-disclosure agreement. He knew that the commander was not exaggerating. With a resigned sigh, he took consolation in a hopeful thought. I’ve never had good news to give a client. Cassie would be bound by the same non-disclosure agreement; she wouldn’t even be able to tell her husband about her extra assignment. They never so much as touched hands or gave me any other reason to suspect a physical relationship.
The commander huffed, “Come on. Let’s get this over with,” and led the way out.
Darren nodded and turned to say farewell to Marty and Cassie, and his jaw dropped open. Apparently, as soon as the commander was out of sight, Marty had stepped up behind Cassie, and she had laid back her head for a kiss. The rocks took their familiar place in Darren’s stomach. He swallowed what he was going to say and followed the commander.
#
Darren glanced at the title of the book Mike was carrying, Modern Studio Design, as he took the seat across from Darren’s desk. “Studio design?”
Mike shrugged. “It’s just a hobby. What do you have for me?”
Darren studied a screen on his desk a moment before answering. “If you check your account, you will see that I’ve returned your deposit. I ran into some unexpected circumstances during the investigation, and I’ll be unable to continue due to other obligations.”
“I was under the impression that you were good at this; that’s why I came to you.”
Darren grunted. “I really wish I could have help you, Mr. Peck, but there truly is nothing else I can do.” He slid a plastic card across his desk. “Please take this”
Mike cocked his mouth to one side a moment and then read the card aloud. “Good for one drink at the Vega 2.” He sighed. “Isn’t that at tourist bar near the docking ports?”
“Yeah, I visited there recently and found it rather interesting. I suggest you go tomorrow night around nineteen hundred, just before it gets busy. Oh, and be forewarned, there is a two-drink minimum, so you’ll have to buy the second round yourself.” Darren winked and offered a half smile. “Your wife should be at work, so you shouldn’t have any problems getting away.”
Mike sighed, pocketed the plastic card, and stood to leave. “Fine. Do you have any recommendations for someone to take your place?”
“Sorry, as far as I know, I’m the only private investigator on the habitat.”
Darren watched Mike walk out of his office, and as the doors closed, he said to himself, “Sorry Kid. But it’s like I told you when you hired me. People are all lying bags of crap.”