Not on her watch.
She nudged her motors into life, started climbing towards the shallows again. The pressure eased. The temperature stabilised again, and there was just that odd light, trembling on every wall and every floor from cabins to heartroom. Her bots felt sluggish, her body too large to contain her thoughts. Exhaustion was creeping in. It shouldn’t have, but of course she knew why she was so tired. It was fighting her own treacherous memories that did it.
“Problem? Nothing unexpected.” Long Chau knelt by the corpse’s side. Her own bots crawled out of her sleeves, legs clicking on the floor before they connected with frozen flesh. She slipped on thin gloves, snapping them onto her long and elegant fingers in a seamless gesture. Her face set again. Her movements became languid and slow again as she lifted one hand, then the other; and then bent over the mottled, loose skin of the face. With the same slow deliberateness she touched the filaments of shadow skin; gathering them in a dark fistful, she examined them with the attention of a scholar piecing together a lost book.
When Long Chau looked up again, her face was utterly expressionless. “Exactly what I thought. That corpse wasn’t aboard the ship.” It wasn’t a question.
“I’m not sure, but—”
Long Chau stretched, slowly, lazily. “Be sure. Given the state of decomposition, the shadow skin held for at least a few days, providing her corpse with air. More, I think. Five years ago, shadow skins were in their infancy, so this means this particular shadow skin would have been unusually efficient, and expensive.”
That wasn’t the only explanation. “She could have bought that shadow skin herself.”
“A woman with nails this short and this damaged? Not unless she’d recently become wealthy and invested in one. And she could afford travel aboard a mindship. Possible but very unlikely,” Long Chau said. She didn’t look at the corpse again—everything she recited, she obviously did from memory, her tone taking on the sharp cadences of a school master. “She didn’t have rejuv treatments. You can see it on the skin. Rejuved skin clings to bones, even after bloating. She was in manual labour. Her wrists bear the repetitive strain of controlling bots with her hands, which means she couldn’t afford implants, or was in an occupation where hands were more convenient. Mining, or possibly orbital maintenance—the fields there tend to interfere with implant technology. No one in those fields makes money, or remains in them.”
All compelling arguments, but surely there had to be a flaw in them. “She might have been doing this out of passion.”
Long Chau snorted. “Shortening your life for menial, ill-considered and ill-paid work? Possible, but improbable.”
“So what?”
“So she wasn’t on board the ship. I’d say she died a year ago, perhaps? At most. I don’t have enough samples of corpses in deep spaces to compare. That was supposed to be the point of this expedition.” She sounded annoyed again, as if the corpse had personally offended her.
“What did she die of?” The conversation was now flowing effortlessly; and The Shadow’s Child was more curious than she’d have liked to admit.
“I don’t know,” Long Chau said. “It was a long way away from here—the currents of unreality carried her a long way: you can see it in the way the shadow skin got shredded. And I could speculate, but it’s an unhealthy pastime. We need certainty, not smokescreens.”
“How—” The Shadow’s Child started, stopped. “How did you know? She was too far away. You can’t have seen it.”
“She stood out,” Long Chau said. “It was obvious, and would have been to you as well—but you let emotion get in the way of simple observation.”
“Emotion?” The Shadow’s Child breathed, feeling her heartroom constrict around her. She wouldn’t achieve anything if she got angry.
“You felt sorry for the mindship.”
“Don’t cheapen it.”
“I’m not. There is a time and place for everything, and this was neither,” Long Chau said, curtly. A pause, then, in a different tone: “I was right.”
“In general?” The Shadow’s Child didn’t bother to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.
Long Chau shook her head. “You are very good at what you do.” She turned away from the body, as if closing a door in a mental space somewhere. “I can think almost as well as if I were on-habitat.”
Almost better, in fact, if The Shadow’s Child had to guess. Her current activity map, all lit up, was certainly suggestive. “Thank you.” She tried very hard to make it sound sincere, even though she didn’t want to be polite, or kind, to Long Chau—not after what she’d done. “What now? We should contact the magistrate—”
“Of course,” Long Chau said. “I wouldn’t dream of obstructing the Empire’s justice.” Something in the way she moved, in the way she stood, caught The Shadow Child’s attention. Her profile was the lean and sharp one of a tiger on the prowl suddenly sighting prey. “But I’d like to make a few inquiries of my own in parallel.”
“Inquiries?”
“You never did ask me what I did for a living.”
“Because it was hardly relevant!”
She’d expected a quick, amused glance upwards, but Long Chau didn’t even blink. “I’m a consulting detective.”
“A what?”
“An adviser,” Long Chau said. “A solver of people’s problems, especially when such problems involve lawsuits and magistrates.”
A consulting detective. So many thoughts pressed themselves in The Shadow’s Child that she was hard-pressed to pick one. “You really think you can do better than the magistrate to find out how that woman died?”
“I know I can.” It’d have been unbelievably conceited, but Long Chau’s voice was completely emotionless: it was a statement of fact, and not even one she took particular pride in. “Even if I weren’t smarter than the magistrate, the tribunal is overwhelmed and understaffed, and unlikely to expend much energy trying to solve a nameless woman’s death.”
“I don’t understand why you would bother,” The Shadow’s Child said. “No one is going to pay you anything for this.”
This time Long
