Midway: Chapter 3

  Captain Anaru Tynes sat outside the crime scene, keeping watch and waiting until Johannes arrived to investigate with him.  There were no police or security forces aboard the New Horizon; there had never been any need for them.  There had never been any sort of crime on the ship at all; there’d never been any need for that either.  Anaru was the grandson of the original Captain Wiremu Tynes.  At thirty-six years old he looked very much as Wiremu would have in his younger years, before being weathered and worn by a lifetime in space on vessels of questionable merit in the dangerous and unpredictable trade corps.  But back in his younger days the original captain had the same good looks as Anaru did today, with his dark skin, black short cut hair and pronounced square jaw.   Anaru was not as physically imposing as his grandfather was though.  While Wiremu had been broad shouldered, muscular, and a rather physically imposing figure, Anaru was less so.  He was of a healthy size, but he lacked that gladiatorial air about him which his grandfather had had.

    Many of the crew had groomed their children to become their replacements on the ship.  The passing down of a trade from parent to child was a practice as old as humanity itself, but on the ship it was only done if the particular son or daughter showed a genuine interest.  Anaru didn’t remember his grandfather since he’d died soon after he was born, but he was proud of his heritage and since before he could remember he’d had an interest in following in his grandfather’s footsteps in becoming the captain.  Anaru suspected that it was perhaps due to a little guilt on his father’s part over never having any such interest himself, that he encouraged his son in whatever ways he could to pursue the goal.  

  Anaru was sitting on a chair and leaning it back against the corridor wall beside the entrance to the suite.  His arms were folded and he was clearly a little bored waiting for Johannes.  The hallway he was sitting in was the main corridor which extended all the way around the circumference of the ship’s habitat ring which constituted the living area of the vessel, and included a picturesque trail through the ship’s arboretum.  He looked to his left and watched with mild interest as a young couple appeared a ways away.  Anaru saw their feet first, and then as they came closer he saw more and more of them until their heads were fully in view.  

  They politely greeted each other as they passed and the captain was pleased that they didn’t ask him why he was sitting there.  As he watched them disappear in the other direction head first this time, Johannes passed them coming the other way.  When he saw the older man approaching, Anaru put the front feet of his chair back down on the floor and stood up to greet him.  “You’ve studied crime from the old days on Earth, right?” he asked.

  “Well, some… I mean, I’ve studied criminal behaviour as opposed to crime itself.  You know, the… the psychological side as opposed to the actual law enforcement side.”
 “Well I don’t know what to tell you…  I can only imagine that studying is one thing while seeing is another thing entirely.  It’s a pretty brutal scene in there, I don’t mind telling you that it’s been getting to me just sitting out here, just… just knowing what’s in there, if you know what I mean.”

  “I think I do… and coming from you Anaru yes I think that does say something...  I’m assuming you checked the door logs.”

  He nodded, “Yesiree, first thing. But according to the logs, no one has gone either way through these doors in the last three days and before that, only him.”  Anaru stood up, and then as he thought the door open, grimly added: “and I’m pretty sure that he didn’t do this to himself.”

  “If the Brainchip logs have been wiped, then the first thing I’ll have to do is ask Dhika who knows how to-”  Johannes’ stomach immediately turned once Anaru had opened the door.  It was the smell.  He could see the carnage, but it wasn’t the sight which made him vomit on the floor in the corridor before he could even think about entering the room.   Anaru looked down the corridor; he could hear some laughter in the distance and could tell that some people were approaching so despite the state Johannes was in, he ushered him inside and thought the door closed behind them.

  The stench was nauseating.  When he could finally manage to speak again, Johannes asked, “how… how long ago did this happen?” He was still wobbly on his feet and clearly quite woozy.

  “Well,” Anaru answered, “Min says that her best guess is about forty-eight hours, give or take six.”

  Johannes was slowly composing himself.  His normally pale skin had now managed to go almost completely bone white with shock.   When combined with his ponytail of even whiter hair, he looked like some sort of undead apparition, especially in his somewhat advanced age at seventy-two.  Gradually, as he surveyed the scene, the shock began to wear off.   With time his disgust gave way to a morbid curiosity.  The scene was horrific, but it was absolutely unlike any sight he’d ever encountered before, and the sheer novelty of it was enthralling.  The victim was naked and hanging from the ceiling over the dining room table, out in the open in the main area of the suite.  He was suspended by a series of hooks gored through the skin of his back, arms and legs.  He was suspended midair in a bent over position as though he were crawling on his hands and knees on an invisible floor.  There was a metal spike protruding from his rectum, but it was impossible to say without removing it how far into his body it went.  

  Johannes pulled his PANE glasses out of his pocket and put them on.  With his Brainchip he set it up to take continuous video and still images on command.  He moved in to take a closer look at the victim, now that his initial shock was steadily giving way to an ever increasing, absorbingly macabre curiosity.   He was careful not to step in any of the pools of blood on the floor, or to touch any part of the blood soaked bed.   

  “Pretty twisted, hunh?” was all Anaru had to offer.

  “Twisted?  I suppose that’s one word…”  Johannes paused to ponder his first rational impressions of the scene and then continued, “I might instead use the word tortured though.  Imagine the kind of mind required to generate this… this kind of scene.  Think about how much effort and imagination was required to first conceive it, and then to go ahead and orchestrate it…  I suppose twisted works well as any other-  hey wait a minute… where are his genitals?”   They was missing from his groin and upon closer inspection, they appeared to have been cut off, and rather roughly.

  “I could guess.”   Anaru said as he nudged Johannes with his elbow, and pointed to the tape over the victim’s bulging mouth.

  Johannes sighed heavily.  “Well, only one way to find out.”

  “Here.”  Anaru threw him a set of recyclable sterile gloves.   After putting on a pair, Johannes leaned over and carefully removed the tape from the man’s mouth, at which point a flaccid dismembered penis and testicles fell out of his mouth and dropped down onto the blood soaked table with an unceremonious splat.

  “Charming,” Johannes said as he stood up straight again and looked at his partner.  “Well Ana, what do you make of this?”

  “Not much,” Anaru declared with a dark chuckle that had just a hint of nervousness, “you’re the one who’s supposed to be the expert here, old man.”  Johannes only allowed people whom he knew to respect him call him that, and this included Anaru Tynes.

  Upon some quiet reflection, Johannes suggested, “we need to look around Ana, we need to find a motive.  We need to know what motivated someone to do something like this.  When we know why, that will be our first clue to figuring out the who.”  He paused for a moment, and tried to figure out how to articulate his explanation.   “I don’t think a person would put this kind of effort into a murder without a damn good reason.  I mean, if it was just about making the person dead… I would imagine there are far easier ways.  A person, even a sick person might kill for any number of reasons, but to do… to do this,” he waved his hand about to indicate that he meant the entirety of the scene about them, “to put in this much planning and commitment to detail… to do this, I think you really have to hate someone, and for that kind of hate I think there must be a very good reason.”

  “You um… figure he was dead or still alive when this was all done to him?” Anaru hesitantly asked.

  “I would guess, that all of this being done to him, is what killed him,” Johannes grimly answered.

  The two reflected on it for a moment too long.  “Right, anyways…” Anaru looked around the room trying to change the subject and get on with their search.  “So what exactly are we looking for?”

  “Well if I knew that Ana, we wouldn’t have to look for it.  Look everywhere, look at everything, I have a feeling that we’ll only know what we’re looking for when we find it.  Look what was done to this guy; violently sodomized to death and his genitals hacked off and taped into his mouth.   There was obviously some sexual element to the hate that led to this.”

  Anaru snapped his fingers to demonstrate that he understood.  “Got it, I guess I’ll start in the bathroom.”

  “Alright, I’m going to check out the bedroom and then let’s both look around out here after.”   Johannes made his way into the bedroom and started thoroughly and methodically checking the bedside table, pulling out the drawers and looking inside and around them.  He carefully removed and inspected everything he found, making sure that there were no mysteriously large or light panels which might indicate a secret compartment.  

  He then walked over to the dresser and gave it the same treatment, and in the bottom drawer on the left, he found a small digital scroll.  It wasn’t unusual to find personal scrolls in somebody’s suite, but he did find it a slightly odd place to have put one, casually hidden under some folded grey coveralls the way it was.  People had and made ordinary clothes for special occasions, but coveralls colour-coded to different departments (with grey as the general, unspecified colour), was the thoughtless attire usually worn by most of the crew.   The scroll seemed almost half-heartedly hidden under them.  “That’s funny…” he muttered to himself as he pulled the scroll out of the drawer.

   “What was that?” Anaru called out from the bedroom, which he then emerged from.  “What did you say?  I can’t find anything in there that stands out to me...”

  “No, I’m not surprised…” Johannes mused as he rubbed his chin in contemplation.  “Found this in a dresser drawer under some clothes…   Kind of an odd place for it don’t you think?”  He prodded his younger friend.

  “So?  I can think of several reasons why it might be there… it’s not that strange is it?”

  “No… in fact it wouldn’t be suspicious at all if this weren’t a murder scene.  We only need one interesting reason why it might be there Ana…”   He pulled the two posts away from each other and the screen unrolled between them and then went rigid once fully deployed.  “Seriously though, when was the last time you saw a scroll not either docked or in use?” Johannes muttered, more to himself than to Anaru.  Ordinarily after pulling the scroll apart, the fifteen centimeter across screen would have displayed the familiar standard message declining access due to the absence of the assigned PAN being in range, but instead on this scroll a password prompt came up on the screen.  

  “That’s odd,” Anaru commented as he came over and saw the prompt screen.  “They’re usually just encrypted to the owner’s Brainchip.  Why would somebody want to use a simple alpha-numeric password security on it?  It’s so… antiquated.  Isn’t it?”

  Johannes held up the device to inspect it more closely.  “Yes, it is peculiar…  My first guess would be that whatever’s on here, somebody wanted to keep it off the ship’s cloud.  Each time a Brainchip command is used, a record of it is stored in the ship’s server logs.  See?   Here, look at this Ana.”  He pointed out the hardline data port embedded in the top of one of the scroll’s posts.  “This thing has a wired data port.  I’d bet you anything that this unit has had its transceiver unit either removed or destroyed.  It’s a custom job… either it was brought from Earth or it’s been rigged up at some point since the launch.”