Free Starfire by Charles Sheffield Page A

defend herself."
    "That is plausible conjecture, but it is not fact. Suppose that she knew the murderer and was walking with him?" I was perhaps being deliberately perverse, since I could in truth see no reason to disagree with Seth's conclusion.
    He snorted. "What about the others, then? Did he know all of 'em?"
    "That seems improbable."
    "Damn right it does. Even if he did know her, after six deaths wouldn't you think that a young girl would get pretty damn careful who she'd walk with alone on Sky City?"
    That thought had already occurred to me. I nodded, and Seth stared at me intently. "We're up to number seven. Want to hear about the other five, or do you need to take a break?"
    He was observant. He looked as fresh as when we had started, but I doubt that was true of me. Even though I felt no kinship with the murderer, too many sea wraiths had been swirling up from the subterranean ocean of my past.
    "Go ahead," I said. "I am tired, but let us briefly review the other cases. Then I have to rest. I must inform you, however, that to this point I am utterly without ideas."
    It was rather worse than that. I could find no mental point of contact with the murderer, despite the fact that his victims interested me greatly.
    Seth was not at all put out. "Fair enough," he said. "I've worked this for weeks, an' still got nowhere. I'll go quick with number eight. Denise Braidley was twelve and a half years old. We think she was killed March twenty-second; at least that's when she disappeared. But she's another case where the body was never found, an' it's even possible it wasn't a murder at all. Denise had a bit of a screw loose—three or four times in the past she'd grabbed a suit an' took off into space by herself. Once she was gone for three days an' rode way out past Cusp Station. Said when she got back she'd have liked to keep going all the way to Alpha Centauri. Fat chance. She couldn't have gone farther than she did in the suit she had, an' she was lucky one of the big scopes spotted her. If no one had seen her an' stopped her, she'd not have made it home. She'd never bothered to make sure her suit was fully charged or the com unit was workin'. Maybe that's what happened this time, she drifted off an' died in open space."
    I shuddered, for reasons that Seth was unlikely to comprehend. He was continuing. "Number nine is more interesting. Julia Vansittart was killed April third, an' her case is the closest anybody's ever come to gettin' a peek at the murderer. In fact, except for a bit of bad luck we'd have at least a low-definition picture of him. It's pretty certain—I know what you're thinkin': facts, not conjectures—that Julia was murdered outside Sky City, an' we know to within ten minutes when it happened.
    "She an' a bunch of other students had gone off in a science class to take a look at the power-generating equipment, out along the axis beyond the main structure. Routine hop in suits, some class does the same sort of thing every few weeks. There were ten kids in the bunch, an' when they were done at the power-generation plant they were allowed to go back by themselves to a city entry port on level zero. Julia was in her suit when they left the power plant. All the others swear that. A quarter of an hour later, the rest of 'em were inside an' ready to get out of their suits. One of her friends, Walt Christie, noticed that Julia wasn't with 'em, so he popped back outside to see what was keepin' her. He found her body floating in space, communication unit smashed and suit ruptured. Somebody had skewered a line extender right through the suit, through her heart, an' out the other side. Normally, the meteor detection systems would have caught a picture of what happened, but they were out of action for scheduled maintenance. A bit of luck for the killer.
    "We have a reconstruction of what happened, but it come out lousy. I don't think you should bother with it. You'll get a much better idea when you see everythin' for