The Dogs of God Read online

  Take one giant leap for mankind. Strike it rich among the stars.

  The theme for every ad.

  Tony knows what he’s doing.

  During the quiet, near-teenless week since we’d left Earth, I’d enjoyed catching up on my reading, for a day or two anyway. It’s what I do on a job to pass the time, while I’m learning a mark’s habits. I read books. That’s how I got my nickname, Stacks, actually—a reference to my second-favorite pastime. The girl’s name had worked on my subconscious, I guess, so I fed my Poe fetish. All those great ghostly gal stories—“Eleonora,” “Berenice,” and, of course, “Ligeia.” But after a couple of days, even the Master of the Grotesque and Arabesque got old. There’s bliss, and there’s boredom. I was getting antsy.

  Sometimes I irritate myself that way. This was the best I could hope for on a job, wasn’t it? Lots of time to complain about hangovers. No need to reload, not even once. Take the win, Fischer.

  “I’ve researched you.”

  I damn near jumped through the window! I’d been distracted by the stars and my own idle thoughts of being idle. That’s always a setup for Mother Universe to tap me on the shoulder with a fist.

  Paleface Ligeia appeared like a ghost in the window. Her eyes could have been two more silver stars among the thousands. She’d removed the warpaint.

  I turned to find her standing behind me at a safe distance, mimicking my stance: hands behind her back, posture relaxed. She didn’t seem to be mocking me, but her smile felt artificial.

  “Well, look what the cat dragged out,” I said. “What are you doing out of bed so late?”

  I’d never felt older than when those words left my mouth. Me, sounding like a father? May the starshine spare us from such ludicrous notions in the future.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” she said simply.

  “Where’s your brother?”

  “Lucius?”

  No, your other brother. The normal one without the attitude up his ass.

  “Yeah, Lucius.”

  “He’s back in our room,” Ligeia sighed, “trying to fall asleep; I got bored.”

  Finally, something I could relate to. She stood next to me and gazed at the starshine glory outside the ship. You never lose the awe of it, do you? For me it’s a feeling like I’m the dust shaken off the bottom of some higher being’s celestial shoe, shaped into something better.

  “What do you mean you researched me?”

  “I looked you up.” Ligeia’s eyes narrowed, like she’d found a star among the thousands worthy of closer inspection. “You’re hard to find.”

  “That’s by design, kid.”

  “But not impossible, if you know where to look. Old people like you are usually easier to find.”

  The way she said it—with a flourish of insider knowledge at the end—reminded me so much of Tony. He had an actor’s ability to bend conversation to his will. A slight pause in his speech; a dropped tone that made a sunny word announce a coming storm. She’d inherited that particular Taulke gene for sure.

  “Old?” I asked. My existential angst was genuinely offended. Irately, I informed her, “I’m thirty-five!”

  She didn’t respond. Just kept staring at the stars.

  “What’d you find out?” I prompted, curious.

  Ligeia touched the transparent plastisteel of the Dream’s window with the tip of her index finger and closed one eye. Sizing up a distant star, maybe?

  “Interesting things,” she said, using her secret tone again. “How much longer?”

  “What?”

  “Until we reach Titan.”

  Huh. Someone was avoiding a question.

  “Two days.”

  Ligeia pulled her finger from the window.

  “What’s it like to kill someone?”

  I looked down into her eyes. Pinpoint black pupils inside the shining silver inside the white. The difference between the twins struck me then. Lucius had a big mouth, but it was his eyes that were cold. Ligeia’s weren’t warm, but it was her voice, not her eyes, that could freeze deep space. That haunted tenor in her tone was unnatural in a teenaged girl. My limited experience with said sub-species is that they turn every room into a drama stage. Sexual frustration looking for an outlet, that. But Ligeia Taulke had dropped into existence sans diva module.

  I don’t think they installed anything else in its place, either.

  “It gets easier, kid,” I said honestly. “After the third or fourth time.”

  She regarded the stars again.

  “So it’s like everything else, then.”

  Cold, boy-o.

  “Before we left Earth,” she said, “why did you strike Lucius?”

  The non-sequiturs were giving me whiplash.

  “Because he needed it.” I followed her gaze starward. Cassiopeia shone bright against the black curtain. Enticing.

  “No one has ever done that before,” Ligeia said.

  “I could tell.” I felt her eyes boring into the side of my head, then. Studying me. I was more fascinating than the stars, apparently. “Your brother needs to learn that life won’t cater to his whims,” I said. “No matter how many manservants Tony pays to do just that.”

  “You use violence as a teacher, then,” Ligeia said, like a scientist positing a theory aloud to hear how it sounds. “You were protecting him, in a way. Showing him where the limits are.”

  “Sometimes violence can be useful, yeah.”

  She rolled that around in her head for a bit. “Evil’s a funny thing, isn’t it.” Not a question. Or maybe rhetorical. “I mean, take my brother.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at her.

  “I’m speaking of Tony,” Ligeia said.

  “Okay.”

  “Does anyone ever really think they’re evil? I mean, we’re all just doing what we have to do, right? Following our natures.”

  “Like your brother?”

  She cocked an eyebrow at me.

  “I’m speaking of Lucius,” I said.

  “Lucius is a scared little boy,” she said, contemplating the cosmos again. “He doesn’t think before he acts. And he acts out of fear. Or lust.” That’s a weird word coming from the mouth of a girl hardly old enough to date. “You struck Lucius—”

  “—to avoid a worse confrontation later,” I said. “The slap was a tactic. Not done out of fear.”

  “Some would call it cruel,” Ligeia said. It wasn’t judgmental. It felt like a hook on the end of a fishing line.

  “They have that luxury. I have a job to do.”

  “Titan’s cold.” She’d switched topics again. “More than twice as cold as the coldest place on Earth.”

  It took a second to shift gears with her. “I’ve never been there, so—”

  “That’s good,” she said. “It’s good that it’s cold.”

  The ship’s klaxons screamed. The ambient lighting turned emergency red.

  Seven days. And I’d had to go and flick my middle finger at fate’s forehead by relaxing.

  “Stay here,” I said to Ligeia. “Don’t move.”

  Her artificial smile returned. She clasped her hands behind her back again. “Yes, Mr. Fischer.”

  I quick-stepped to the wall panel and engaged comms. “Merida, report. What’s happening?”

  He didn’t respond at first. I kept my eyes on Ligeia, who stared, contented, out the viewport. Expression fixed, hands loosely holding one another. The screeching alarm grating my spine didn’t faze her one bit.

  “Fischer, Merida. Barstow’s been murdered.”

  “The old man?” I yelled over the Klaxon.

  Someone had the good sense to mute it. The red lighting stayed.

  “Do you know anyone else named Barstow?” Merida half-shouted back, then adjusted to the sudden lack of noise.

  “Funny,” I said.

  “We’ve secured the boy. Have you seen—”

  “I’ve got Ligeia with me.”

  Merida sighed his relief. I could only imagine how Tony would demote
him—likely permanently, from life—if Ligeia or her brother followed their butler to the Great Worm Banquet of the Beyond. He’d probably assign me to do the demoting, for that matter.

  “Take her to the brig,” Merida said.

  “The brig? Why?”

  “It’s the most secure section of the ship,” he explained. “Just temporarily, ‘til we clear…and clean up…the scene.”

  Fair enough.

  “I’ll meet you in the brig, then,” I said. “Fischer, out.”

  “I’ll bet it’s cold there, too,” Ligeia said. “In the brig.”

  She was standing right next to me.

  “Jails usually are, kid,” I said, doing my best to keep the creeped-out from my voice. I hadn’t heard her move from the window. “That’s kinda the point.”

  Pulling my .38, I guided Ligeia from the lounge just as the lights changed to situation-nominal white again. The alert signals over the doors continued flashing, though. In case anyone had forgotten an old man was dead.

  * * * * *

  The Scene

  “—no fucking retirement,” a man in a fading white uniform said. There were worn epaulettes on his shoulders. “I’ll be lucky if they even let me sail again after this.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was talking to himself or the soldiers guarding the entrance to the killing floor.

  “And you are?” I said.

  When he turned, I saw his employer’s logo dominated by SynCorp’s five-pointed star over his left breast.

  “Captain Hathaway, Transworld Cruise Lines,” he said. I shook his clammy palm. It fit with the worried lines on his face. “The bonus for this charter was supposed to fast-track my retirement. It was supposed to be my last—”

  “Slow down, Cap,” I said, wiping my greeting hand on my trousers.

  He took a minute to compose himself. Good military man—once. Casting an eye at the door between the two guards, he blanched. “I really don’t want to go in there.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “I have to. I’m supposed to.” The handwringer pushed the dignified officer aside again. “This kind of thing doesn’t happen on my ship. We just carry folks from the inner to the outer system! We make dreams come true!”

  Well, I thought, maybe. Once. But after this, the captain might just be right about missing the boat for a happy retirement.

  “I knew this’d be a shitshow as soon as Tony Taulke chartered the Dream,” Hathaway muttered. “Trouble with a capital-fucking-T. One more voyage! That’s all I needed!”

  Between the flop sweat and darting eyes, I saw an opportunity. Almost-retired Captain Hathaway didn’t want anywhere near this situation. And I needed to be right in the middle of it—to protect the twins and Tony’s public profile.

  My only other rival for head bull moose on the ship was Merida, but I’d already troubleshot that. I pulled rank as Tony’s proxy and made him stay in the brig to watch over the kids. It wasn’t a dick-measuring thing. After seven days as bar buddies, I’d decide my first impression was right: he was a competent military type, and the only person on the ship other than myself I trusted their safety to. And he did as he was told, like a good soldier.

  By contrast, I didn’t know Hathaway from Adam. But for all his nervous nellyness, he likely deserved better than having his ship and rank stripped from him on the eve of sailing off into the sunset.

  “Captain Hathaway,” I said in my best tweren’t-nuthin’-ma’am voice, “I’m gonna do you a favor.”

  * * *

  Hathaway was only too glad for me to classify the murder top secret Company business. No official reporting to his bosses, then. His cruise into the sunset was secure.

  Dean Barstow was a little more than dead. His innards painted the room. Like someone had put him in a man-sized blender and turned it on purée but forgot to put the lid on. Once I took that in, my eyes went straight to Barstow’s ghastly expression. It was like someone had shown him Mother Universe’s darkest perversion, and it’d driven him mad.

  I’ve been at this job a while. It’s sometimes messy, but most times not—unless you want to send a message by making it messy. Someone was screaming in the middle of the town square with what they’d done to Barstow. Everywhere you looked were bits and pieces, red reminders of how fragile the human body is in its healthy state. Palm-wide swaths of blood still dried on the walls. Undigested whatever-it-is-butlers-eat was streaked across the plastisteel window. Entrails adorned the curtain rods like loopy decorations. The splendor of space beyond I’d just been admiring in the lounge? A little muted at the moment.

  Skrivanek, the ship’s surgeon, stood in the middle of the room. He looked a little green around the gills. It was like he didn’t know where to start.

  “The chair, Doc,” I said helpfully. “Start with the…majority of the body.”

  He moved to examine the corpse. The air processors kicked on, stirring up the stench usually held inside the various organs of the human body. One of the younger med-techs took an unscheduled break and lost her last meal.

  “Need any help?” a voice asked from the doorway.

  I turned.

  “Sergeant Trask,” he reminded me.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Tony’s man.” I’d pushed my way past at the door without even noticing him. Maybe he was under the mistaken assumption his provenance would impress me. It didn’t. “I’m good, thanks.”

  I surveyed the room, perusing past the gore. We were in the in-between—a lounge connecting the two biggest suites on the ship. If the Stargazer’s Dream had been a high-rise, these three rooms would be the penthouse, affordable only by the elite. The lounge connected the kids’ suite and the servants’ suite—it was a kind of neutral ground between the haves and have-nots.

  “What’s the diagnosis, Doc?” I asked.

  “I’m pretty sure he’s dead,” Skrivanek said.

  Everyone’s a comedian, I thought, stepping over the med-tech’s vomit.

  Barstow was tied to the chair. Hands behind his back. Ankles secured. Looked like the killer had a sense of humor, too. Barstow’s cummerbund was stuffed in his mouth and tied around the back of his head—probably to stifle the screaming while his insides were aired out. He’d been dissected like a frog in biology class. His white butler’s shirt was a burgundy-stained Rorschach test.

  “Cause?” I asked.

  “I’m going with blood loss,” Skrivanek deadpanned.

  I grunted approval. It’s important to encourage people in their hobbies.

  Skrivanek made a lazy gesture at Barstow’s open throat. The migrating Rorschach blot had drained—fast at first, then drop by drop—from the neck. The blood was freshest there. The final cut of a thousand cuts.

  Barstow had been alive for most of the fun.

  Cap me in the back of the head or push me out an airlock when it’s my time. At least make it quick.

  “This looks personal,” I said.

  “This looks insane.”

  Skrivanek shook his gray-templed head. How much had he seen in his decades as a doctor? And even he was at a loss. He motioned to the tech, who was still sketchy, and they began 3D scanning the body for later forensic analysis. My curiosity exceeded capacity about the time Skrivanek stuck a temp gauge in what was left of Barstow’s liver.

  But the doc had the diagnosis right, I thought, scanning the lounge again. It was a canvas for crazy. It’s amazing how far a gallon and a half of single-coat human blood will go. There was definite madness in the killer’s method. But crazy doesn’t usually sleep with caution, so maybe Merida’s crew could find DNA that wasn’t Barstow’s. Maybe even an old-fashioned fingerprint.

  Following that tack, I turned to old-fashioned detecting methods.

  Motive? Opportunity?

  I know what you’re thinking. The same thing popped into my head, right off the bat.

  Had Lucius’s angstiness found a shortcut to Crazy Town? Freud slipped in and out of my thoughts, but I didn’t need much help from
Sigmund to make the leap. Then again…The amount of crazy it had taken to redecorate the room in Nouveau Butler Intestines was a lot. And Lucius Taulke, for all his entitled assholery, seemed too sane by half.

  This was more than murder. This was an art piece. An experiment in fury. And maybe had another agenda behind it. Could be he was just the poster boy for a bigger PR campaign. Maybe this was about what he represented. Proximity to power. Like I said, messy killings can send a message. Maybe this was a personal ping to Tony Taulke. See how close I can get to you?

  Or maybe the killer just hated balding men with good manners. Whoever had painted Barstow around the lounge had been more than angry—they’d been out of control.

  Trips to the outer system can get boring, it’s true.

  “Hey, Fischer.”

  I turned from my ruminations to find Trask with two fingers pressed to his ear comms.

  “Yeah?”

  He acknowledged whatever the grunt reported from the other end.

  “Onboard security stamps Ligeia Taulke leaving the suite about thirteen hundred. The ship’s engineering datalog shows the artificial gravity was turned off for about ten minutes. Around fourteen hundred.”

  I absorbed the info, incomplete as it was. It seemed to confirm Ligeia’s insomnia story. Still: “Whatever happened to that vaunted military precision?”

  Trask cleared his throat. “Thirteen-fifteen for Miss Taulke’s departure from the suite. The AG was suspended at fourteen-twenty-two.”

  “Better,” I said.

  So, Ligeia had been long gone before the butcher began the butchery. Then, sixty-seven minutes later, someone had turned off the gravity in the room. That complicated things. Normally, I’d assume the killer, besides being clearly nuts, was male and hearty. It took strength to wrangle a victim, even an old bag-of-bones like Barstow. But monkeying with the gravity made the list longer. Anyone with knowledge of how to operate in zero-g could have knocked Barstow out and trussed him up, mute and helpless, before carving him up like a Thanksgiving turkey. Physical strength was no longer a factor.