Free The Gordon Mamon Casebook by Simon Petrie Page A

large evidence bag from his pocket, and started pulling rungs off the shaft wall.
     
    * * *
     
    “Belle?”
    “Yes? Where are you?”
    “Cargo deck. Listen, I’ve gotta go out.”
    “Out?”
    “Yeah. Pod. Sue’s been helping me on something, but she’s staying behind. And I really need you to help her get the comms link working. We’ll need the cops down from topside.”
    “Police? Gord, d’you have a problem down there?”
    “Not a problem. A solution. But Belle, I gotta go.”
    “But what about Haier? Remember? The guy who pushed O’Meara out the window?”
    “That’s who I’m after,” Gordon replied. “The ladder did it.”
    “ Gord —”
    “Sorry, Belle, no time to fill you in. Look, I’ve downloaded some trajectory calcs to the mainframe. Just get through to topside. Please?”
    “Trajectory?”
    “Sorry. Gotta go.” Gordon closed the call, and turned to thank Sue for her help. Then, grabbing up the spacesuit and the evidence bag, he jogged across the cargo bay’s radiation-proof plastilead flooring to the escape pod.
    He hoped the pod could move faster than it looked. It looked like nothing other than a Henry Moore snail sculpture.
     
    * * *
     
    The escape pod’s responses, to every attitude-jet impulse, felt exaggerated, hypersensitive. In reality, it was simply that the pod was tiny, and rather flimsy; and Gordon was no pilot. Still, as long as the space-nav directions from his handheld were reliable, he’d get to where he needed to be.
    Walls lined with plastihemp matting, two benches with rough plastigel padding, a simple control panel mounted below a small screen. The pod’s cockpit was spartan, befitting a craft not intended for frequent or extended occupation, nor by those concerned overmuch with immediate comfort. Still, it could be worse. Gordon wondered how Haier was finding his current quarters.
    Not for the first time, he wondered at the wisdom of this lone-wolf approach. Gordon nurtured his lack of physical bravery, it was part of who he was. But he couldn’t have brought Belle, or Sue, into danger with him: quite aside from his concern for their safety, there were the lift-module’s minimal-staffing regulations of which to be mindful. And he couldn’t leave Haier to escape, and kill again another day.
    The search volume, several hours after O’Meara’s fall through the window, was uncomfortably large: too many uncertainties in the trajectory. Large, too, was the brooding crescent Earth below Gordon’s feet; then above his head; then below his feet again. Larger still was Gordon’s frustration at his inability to stop the pod’s infernal tumbling. Largest of all, or so it felt, was the lump in Gordon’s throat at the thought of the approaching danger.
    The O’Meara-shaped figure seemed, in the end, almost small when Gordon finally sighted the lifeless form drifting open-mouthed through space. He wrestled again with the attitude controls, and finally struck on a lucky combination of thrusts that quenched the pod’s chaotic rotation. Then he dialled the docking camera’s magnification up to the max, and inspected the stridently leisure-suited, sumo-shaped husk while the pod nudged closer.
    O’Meara looked odd. Where the wrestler’s shod feet should have been— had been, according to the hotel’s tilecam footage—there were clusters of small rocket nozzles. Elsewhere, on the vacuum-exposed face of the ‘corpse’, there was no sign of the expected tracery of burst capillaries and bloodily bugshot eyes. Instead, the eyes had a persistently glassy quality, as though they might be camera lenses. Or viewing windows.
    Whatever Haier’s faults, he obviously wasn’t a claustrophobe.
    The pod edged closer. Time for Gordon’s spacewalk.
    O’Meara performed a leisurely quarter-roll, expertly twisting and then stopping to face the pod. The wrestler’s arm reached into its jacket pocket.
    Gordon’s approach had apparently not gone unnoticed. He was expected by