Free Starfire by Charles Sheffield

gettin' full sensories," Seth called from over in the corner. "I'll do an override when I think I ought to. Tell me when you're ready."
    "You may proceed."
    "All right. This one is for Lucille DeNorville. Hold your hat."
    Darkness dropped around me like a shroud. The air that filled my nostrils had an unfamiliar smell of machine oil and some kind of disinfectant. I heard a soft, steady pumping, so regular and soothing that after a few moments it began to fade into the background.
    Light bled in slowly, building a scene around me. Ahead lay a long corridor, maybe four meters wide and three high. Occasional branching passages ran off it, and every few meters a white overhead strip provided lighting. I saw a couple of rolfes carrying a curved wall section between them. The little eight-legged machines scuttled along efficiently in the low gravity and were soon out of sight in a side passage. It was the interior of Sky City, as that space habitat had been portrayed a thousand hackneyed times in every visual medium.
    The corridor ahead stood empty for half a minute. At last, from one of the side passages, appeared a woman dressed in yellow. Her hair was held back from her face by a matching yellow headband. She floated more than walked, and when she came to one of the overhead strips I could see that she was not a full-grown woman but a girl in the first bloom of youth. She advanced easily and gracefully, with all the dawning beauty of a thirteen-year-old.
    For the first time in many years I felt the spider's touch inside my head. It was ruined by Seth's voice, hissing in my ear, "That's Lucille DeNorville."
    Did the man think I was an imbecile? "I know who she is. Shut up."
    A second figure had appeared from another side passage. He was holding some kind of long bar and he moved fast, silently closing in on Lucille from behind. She apparently had no idea he was there, even at the final moment when he raised the bar and brought it around with sickening force to the left side of her head. I heard a crunch as the metal smashed the bone of the cranium.
    She fell forward without a sound. Her attacker pulled a black square from inside his coat, opened it up to form a bag, and slid it around her. The metal bar went in next. Then he was lifting her—easy in the light gravity—and hurrying away with the bag in his arms. He did not enter a side passage, but traveled along the corridor until he was finally hidden from sight by its curve. The whole thing, from the appearance of Lucille DeNorville to the vanishing of her attacker, had occupied perhaps thirty seconds.
    "Replay?" Seth asked, and reality came drifting back.
    "Perhaps later. That's it, the whole thing?"
    "That's it, squire. I agree, not much for three million bucks. Think we should ask for our money back?"
    "How much of this was derived from established fact, and how much was conjecture?"
    "We're sure of a few things. How she was dressed, the fact that she died at that particular place. Like her, the weapon was never found. But that's gotta be the way he killed her."
    "Got to be? Why?"
    "Splashes of blood and scraps of brain tissue on the wall. The DNA tests confirm that they came from Lucille DeNorville. And they were splashes, not smears. No blood or body tissue anywhere else in that corridor, and I mean anywhere. The people DeNorville hired went over the corridor with every gadget ever made. The body must have gone into a bag or a box and been carted away."
    "Carried away by the murderer?"
    "I guess so. Are you suggesting that there could have been two of 'em?"
    "No. I merely wish to emphasize the boundary between knowledge and conjecture. Do you assume that she never saw or heard her murderer?"
    Seth stared at me dubiously. He was, perhaps, wondering if his transatlantic journey was worthwhile. "Well, she couldn't have, could she? The brain tissue came from the occipital lobe, they reckon from the left rear of her head. If she'd've heard him, she'd have turned and tried to