The Gordon Mamon Casebook Read Online Free PDF

meant, it’s just I was 2-in-C, so now—uh, no, haven’t moved anything. Haven’t been out of the room yet, since.”
    “And this was, what, two hours ago?” The handheld had at least come up with an estimated Time Of Death, and a diagnosis: ‘ damaged, irreparable, suggest request replacement ’.
    “About two and a half, now. Eighteen fifty-five, plus or minus five. Am I a suspect, Mr.—?”
    “Mamon. You’re present at a crime scene. Naturally I must ask sufficient questions to establish your involvement, or otherwise, but I’ll need to speak to anyone else who could have been here.” Gordon wondered if the resolution of the handheld’s scanner was high enough to get decent fingerprints off the furniture in here, or footprints from the blood-trampled floor. He’d need to chase up Cassie for details on the current crew—as long as she didn’t regard that as information likely to assist him. Better not count on it.
    Bloody computers.
    “Seen anyone else while you’ve been in here?”
    “Just McPhaillia and Gramacek, they’re the only ones supposed to be awake still I think.”
    “What d’you mean? On a passenger ship this big?”
    “What do you know about the Dart of Harkness , Mr Memo?”
    “Mamon,” Gordon growled. “The name is Mamon . And as for the ship … suppose you tell me what I need to know?”
     
    * * *
     
    The Church of the Blessed Echidna, at least, Gordon had heard of. Secretive, incredibly wealthy, but apparently past the heyday of its popularity. The CBE, said Flange, had been working towards independent starflight for the past twenty years, but was hampered by the strictures of its faith, which maintained that all this modern mucking about with hyperspace, wormholes, teleportation, warp drives, tachyonic propulsion and the like was the work of the Great Deceiver, and thus untenable in the eyes of the faithful. Nonetheless, keen to establish a ‘bastion of purity and truth’ in a neglected pocket of the Galaxy, far from the interference of nonbelievers, the CBE had commissioned the construction of its own vessel, the Dart of Harkness. The Harkness contained some three thousand souls, almost all already deep in the centuries-long cryosleep that would sustain them while the antimatter-fueled ship crawled across the scant half-dozen parsecs to the asteroidal rubble encircling the nearest unclaimed brown dwarf.
    “Did you say antimatter ?” Gordon asked. He hadn’t realised anyone was still using the stuff. Hyperspatial travel was faster, cheaper, safer, and vastly more popular. A hyperspace vessel could cover the twenty-light-year distance within a day.
    Rusty Flange bristled. “There’s scientific proof that the soul doesn’t survive FTL travel,” he countered. “Within those constraints, matter-antimatter annihilation’s the best propulsion system money can buy.”
    “Sure, but—” Gordon strove to refocus on the task at hand. The thought of voluntarily submitting to an unimaginably long span of frozen sleep, only waking on arrival to some dimly-lit astronomical rock garden in which one would spend the rest of one’s days … people were strange, sometimes. Too often, in fact, and by and large there was no point in arguing with them, particularly on matters of faith. He asked Flange a few more questions, concluded the interview, and went off down the spiralling corridor in search of the Harkness ’ other as-yet-unfrozen inhabitants.
    Was it just his imagination, or was it cold in here?
     
    * * *
     
    “What can you tell me of your movements over the past five hours?” Gordon asked. He was stationed in the ship’s clinic, conducting his second interview. Sister Edie McPhaillia, the ship’s physician, was a dark-robed mocha-skinned brunette, late thirties, with asymmetric eyebrows and the short skinny physique almost universally preferred by spaceline employment interview panels. (Gordon reflected that on a reaction-drive starship, where every kilogram