So here’s this motherfucker, Bobby Diggs. He’s a wiry, thin-as-a-stick black man with an immense afro and eyes so wide and white they must glow in the dark. Ray keeps looking at him and thinking that there’s no way he can have been a Marine at any time in his life. He doesn’t have the mass for it. His fully loaded, official military issue rucksack would have doubled his body weight. Just attempting to lift his subby–just thinking about attempting to lift his subby–would probably have pulled his arms right out of his sockets. Unbelievable.
Except the way he sits there, his long and lanky limbs slung all over the place, gesticulating with a cigarette whose ashes inevitably end up flung through the air and across the floor, creates a dissonance that is curious. His pupils are like playing a game of Follow the Bouncing Ball the way they roll from Ray to Kilgore to Rodriguez. Everything about him snaps like a sail in a stiff breeze. He conveys the impression that he’s coiled, tense, dangerous in ways Ray can’t put his finger on. Even his slow, languid speech patterns carry the swagger of a long tradition of Marines.
He’s smoking, glaring, shaking his head and saying, “Can you believe this mess, I ask you? I mean, can you comprehend what is going on down here? It’s insane.”
Nomar most certainly cannot believe it, but he’s less fascinated by the content of the man’s speech than the carcinogenic cocktail of his cigarette smoke, which he’s been chasing around the room since they arrived. It doesn’t matter. Nomar is running in full recording mode, taking Diggs’ story with all the precision of a deposition.
Diggs has gone on in this vein for the last ten minutes. The four of them are hanging out in a small, plainly decorated room, seated on stools like the ones that dot bars and taverns all over human space. Just outside the door to this room–what is really just a storage closet that seems to have run out of things to actually store–is the security checkpoint, a wide desk crammed into an alcove just outside the doors to the main Omicron lift. They’re back here in relative privacy because the desk is manned by two other sec-os, one with a sidearm seated behind the desk, another with a full-on rifle, safety off, standing where he has an unobstructed field of fire up and down the gangway. Diggs has already told them that temporary checkpoints have been established at the port and starboard midpoints, one right outside the Marine munitions dump where just yesterday Rodriguez and Kilgore had spent a few hours counting shells.
Diggs finds this arrangement extremely offensive.
He goes on, “For six months, man, it’s just been Bobby Diggs on the deck. That’s it, just me humping the deck twelve hours a day. Me changing lightbulbs and jiggering with the electrical system. Me checking the visitors in, scanning their papers, checking them out. Me supervising the magnetic grid and making sure they were taking only the items they was authorized to take. Then we have us a bit of trouble, and I follow the protocol just like Chief Becker spelled it out, and what do I get out of it?” He gestures vaguely toward the closed door. “These invading motherfuckers who would rather be strolling the Garden trying to tag some rich bitch ‘tang. Come down here with their game faces on and their firearms strapped on their hips like they’re going to do something Bobby Diggs didn’t do. Ain’t nobody heard that bit about the barn door and the runned-off horses? It’s too late.”
He shakes his head, realizes that he’s run his cigarette down to the filter. He digs in his breast pocket and drags out a battered pack of Camels, lights up again, sucking deep like this action is the only thing that keeps him thinking clearly. Nomar picks the used butt right off his fingers and stuffs it greedily into his mouth.
Diggs pokes his finger at Ray. “I saw you last night, ‘cept you wasn’t alone. You had this here rat with you. He followed you like a little dog.”
“And how was that?” Ray asks. He’d made a point of avoiding the main lift.
“I told you, man. I hump the deck. Just because there’s a little excitement amidships don’t mean that I start hugging the desk. I found that boy, Mr. Marlowe. You seen him. That wasn’t no accident, and I didn’t need Chief Becker coming down here with lights and cops and all that screaming to tell me so. I figured there was a chance the sicko that did this was still out there, hiding somewhere, waiting for things to chill before he made his way up. Didn’t find nothing, though. No blood or anything to follow. I guess he must have done it somewhere else and just hauled the boy down here.”
“That was my conclusion, too,” Ray says. “Now here’s what I’m thinking happened: whoever dumped the body–probably the same person who actually committed the murder–did enough scouting in advance to know that you’re the type of deck security who stays mobile. He knew he didn’t have to find a way to drag that body down one of the stairways, that he stood a reasonable chance of not being detected if he just took the lift.”
Diggs shakes his head, a not-so-subtle indication that he thinks Ray must be some kind of stupid.
“Our boy didn’t use no lift,” he says.
“How can you know that?”
“Number one, the non-passenger deck lifts don’t have an express override. He would have been running a chance that anybody who wanted to get on the lift at any point between where he got on and Omicron could just push a button, wait for the doors to open and find him out.”
Rodriguez says, “Unless he was hard enough that he wouldn’t have any qualms killing someone he encountered in an accidental meeting. From what you’ve said, Ray, about the disposition of the corpse, I’d assume this is a guy without qualms.”
Kilgore jerks his thumb at Rodriguez and winks. “Officer material here is forgetting that then the suspect would have two or more bodies to dispose of then, and he’d have a mess to deal with in the elevator. That creates a whole bunch of annoying details to deal with. I’d assume if I was trying to stash a body somewhere that I’d go out of my way to avoid creating extra details.”
“Besides that,” Diggs went on. “I got me a lift sensor that pings my radio whenever the elevator stops on this level. The cargo boys know that they’re supposed to wait for me to come back to them if they need to make a pick up, and they can’t get into any of the bays without my card to admit them, so the system works just fine. I would have known if the suspect had come down on the lift, unless it didn’t happen on my shift. If it happened before I punched in, then the last shift would have found the body–assuming, of course that they even stepped away from the desk in the first place, which is unlikely.”
“So he came down one of the ladders,” Ray agrees. “Gruesome work.”
“But how did he get into the bay in the first place?” Rodriguez asks quietly. “Unless he had a card for the lock. Or unless he knew how to jimmy the lock in a way it wouldn’t be detected.”
“Wouldn’t take no rocket scientist,” Diggs answered. “This ain’t no secure zone, except port and starboard, where the dumps are.”
This is wending in a direction Ray doesn’t want to go. “If our guy has a card, he’s either swiped it–”
“Or he’s a member of the crew,” Kilgore finishes, not liking the conclusion any more than Ray does from the look on his face. “I’ll talk to some of my ladies in equipment and accounting in the morning and see if they’ve had any reports of missing access cards.”
“And if he didn’t have a card,” Ray says, glancing at Rodriguez to get his attention, “there should be something anomalous in the lock’s access log. We’ll need to look into that a little more closely. Talk to Becker or one of his lieutenants tomorrow and see if you can get him to switch out the locks and hand the original over to us for analysis.”
Ray swings back to Bobby Diggs, who has started yet another cigarette. “You’ve already been rather instructive, Bobby, and I’m deeply grateful for your help so far. But I need you to start from the beginning again, from the point at which you came on shift last night and tell it one more time. I know you’ve already filed an official report. I’ve seen that, but sometimes we leave things out in the official reports, you know? Stuff that doesn’t seem important, or things we skip over because we’re trying to economize words and get away from the terminal and clock out. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. I’ve done it hundreds of times myself. What I want now is everything, even the stuff that doesn’t seem important enough to write it down, okay?”
So he talks, and he has a startling memory for details, it seems. Not just individuals who came down to grab supplies, but the franchises they represented, the things they talked about on the way to the bays where their storage was kept, how many cigarettes he smoked on the way. He remembers, it seems, the gangways he traveled in order, the lights that were out, which maintenance closet he pulled the bulbs from and roughly what time it was when it he was doing it.
Bobby says, “Round about ten, I leave the checkpoint. By ten, things get mighty quiet down here. Most of the franchises have stocked for the next day–they get it all out of the way around the same time, as a courtesy to me, you know. They know it’s just Bobby Diggs on the big O. If they’re coming down at odd times, they give me a call and tell me they’re on the way so they don’t have to wait. I always start the round on the hour.” Bobby shakes his head, as though he’s anticipating a criticism. “I know, they teach you in the Marines to stagger your sweeps so’s you keep the enemy guessing. Well, this ain’t the Marines, boys. This is marginally security, but mostly customer service. If I’m predictable, the folk from up Garden way know they can show up at five before or ten before the hour and I’ll be back in just a minute without having to cut short my round. It only looks like a flawed system when something bad happens, like last night.”
Ray understands what Bobby’s telling him and the justification for it, but he makes a mental note anyway. The suspect pool just became necessarily less clever or lucky. All they had to be was observant. “Go ahead.”
“I swept passage four, where there are two bays and a bunch of storage closets for ship materials. Standard procedure is to pop the lock, shine a light in, listen for suspicious sounds, then move on. Maybe a minute per bay. Back up passage three toward the front of the ship, around the concourse against the outer hull, which takes me all the way to starboard, where it intersects with the corridor past the munitions dump, where Rodriguez and Kilgore were. I waved to them through the observation window in the blast door, but they didn’t notice me, and they sure as cathedral bells weren’t going to hear me unless I hit the comm, and that seemed like a little too much bother just for a howdy, you understand. I jogged left to sweep back forward down passage nine, figuring I’d hit ten on the next go. I do try to randomize my sweep patterns, even if I don’t alternate the times I do them.
“So I peeked in 950, which is kitty corner right between passage eight and nine as you’re moving back toward the front of the ship. Sections 949 to 945 are ship storage closets, narrow cubbies running along the outside of the 944 bay, get me? I hit 944 at 10:45 or so, swept my card and opened the door.”
Bobby Diggs pauses, sucks long and hard on the end of his cigarette.
“And you saw the body when you flashed your light,” Ray prompts him.
Diggs tilts his head sideways, considers Ray with one eye, wide, unblinking. “That’s what I put in my report, yes sir.”
Rodriguez nudges him with his knee. “But that isn’t what really happened.”
“Boy gonna think I’m crazy.”
“What happened?” Ray says.
Diggs looks away, stares at his feet, not moving except to piston his cigarette back and forth between lips and thigh, where he rests his arm. “You been in the Mes, Mr. Marlowe? You got that look about you. If not the Mes, you seen action. That’s plain enough.”
Ray nods slowly. “Four years in and around Wadi Wadi.”
“Tent City,” Diggs mumbles, nostalgic. “I did a six month rotation there, but spent most of my time south and east, Wadi Gore, we called it. The main push toward Baghdad, Big B. Some fierce, fierce combat in that zone. Nights sleeping with your chem gear in hand, your bio gear on the floor, your rifle propped against the table by your head. All night long you’re taking mortars; they sound like rumbling thunder the way it used to roll down the mountainside in Georgia, north of Dalton, where I’m from. And you know they’re aiming for the comm shack or the ammo dump or the motor pool, but we’re always moving them around. And we don’t know how good their intel is, but we do know how bad their aim is, and between the two, we know it’s just a matter of time before they drop a shell right in the middle of the tent. That happened, too, an old Russian surplus mortar, must have been twenty, thirty years old. Came through the tent like a stone, with a ripping sound that scared the living bejesus out of me and Krueger and Shireman. Hit the floor with a whump and just sat there, doing nothing. Shireman says, ‘Hey, it’s a dud, man. It’s a dud. Toss it outside.’ And I’m like, ‘You pick it up and toss it outside, motherfucker.’ We argued about who was gonna do it for ten minutes, and here comes Sergeant Buff, who’d slept through the whole dratted thing. He rolls out of his bunk, boy don’t say a word, just gets up, grabs this mortar like it’s a library book and pitches it out the front flap.
“You know how it gets, just like that. When you can grab an unexploded shell and toss it around like it’s just another thing. So much clutter. And you don’t think about calling the specialists to cart it away, because they’se gonna ask questions and ask you file a report, and help them fill sandbags to stack around the damned thing while they disarm it, and the next thing you know it’s morning and you’re on duty and you haven’t got a lick of sleep. So you just take care of it yourself.
“And somewhere in all this mess, if you live long enough, you develop that sense like Sergeant Buff, see? Shireman telling me that it was a dud, and the two of us knowing between us that it was a dud because we was still talking about it, wasn’t the same as believing it. We was too scared. We didn’t have the faculties to think clearly, to sense when everything was all right and when it wasn’t, not then. But we got to that place, we came to know, to tell, to taste an ambush in the air or feel in our bones when something big was going down before we even got the word to gear up or to know from the texture of the darkness when we were alone and when there was some Kurd sapper right outside the wire with a homemade popper strapped to his chest. You learn to use them senses God gave us all, but most men don’t even know are there. Sixth sense, seventh, whatever, right? You just know.
“When I opened the door to 944, Mr. Marlowe, I just knew. It was like the breath of the devil up against my cheek, just like in the Mes. There was something, and I couldn’t tell what. I didn’t have no sidearm, just a flashlight and my churning guts, and I went in there anyway.” Diggs utters an explosive laugh, harsh and castigating. “I must’ve looked like those old movie reels, like Buckwheat. I think my ‘fro was standing straight up, half a meter off my head in all directions. And I’m thinking my eyes must be so big and so white they’ve got to be shinin’ bright as kliegs. And on top of that, I’ve got this flashlight telling anybody with a gun and the ability to hit a barn door right where I’m standing.”
Diggs swings around, his face naked with a sort of supplication. “After I found that boy, I looked for the man that done it. Armed or not, I pounded the aisles–all of them. Shaking like a lost kitten in a snowstorm, too. ‘Cause I could hear him, I thought. I could hear him breathing. I could hear him shuffling his feet, like a rasp against the deckplate, but distant, you know? Like I was hearing it from outside the bay or through the wall. But I couldn’t ever get no closer to him, and after a few minutes I remember that I left the bay door open and provided him a nice, tidy exit. That’s when I went for Kilgore and Rodriguez and set the whole circus in motion. I thought it might give us a chance to catch him, even if it was a slim one. But I guess he was gone by then.”
Ray swallows hard, kicking back the lump that’s tried to creep up his throat and suffocate him. “Bobby, did you touch the body? Even just to check for a pulse?”
He’s thinking about Nomar’s ongoing process of the samples obtained from Micah Uytedehaage’s corpse.
“Didn’t need to. I could see he was dead. And if he weren’t dead, sir, he wouldn’t have been thanking me sincerely for saving him at that point.”
“That’s okay,” Ray says, trying to smile. “I didn’t touch the body either.”
Kilgore shivers violently. “That’s creepy. You really think he was still there? I mean, the killer, right there in the room with you? A guy who could do that to a kid? That creeps me out. I would have just had a freaking heart attack right there on the spot. The big stiffy, I’m telling you, swear to God.”
“I don’t think nothing,” Diggs retorts quietly. “It could have just been my imagination after seeing that kid all tore up. I ain’t the first guy to have seen something like that and had flashbacks to combat. That’s why I left that out of my report. Security don’t want to read about what’s going on in my gut. They want evidence. A footprint, a handcuffed suspect, some spit they can pull the DNA out of. I didn’t have none of those.”
“We understand,” Ray says. And they do, each one of them, the way the brain leaps into overdrive and sensory input becomes confused with memories, with specters dredged up from the past. “You did everything that was expected of you.”
Diggs snorts, expelling a jet of smoke from his nostrils. “Yeah. Tell that to the boys in blue out there manning my desk, walking my rounds two by two, all but strip searching the cargo yuks down from the franchises. They look at me with those grim faces that say Bobby Diggs screwed up. Bobby Diggs got himself the cushiest gig on the whole ship and he messed it up. If this duty was so soft, how come nobody else wanted it? How come it got dumped on me because I don’t got as much ship time as some of the others? Well, these rent-a-flatfoot pricks can have it as far as I’m concerned. I’ll go play on the Garden for a couple of weeks, sip me some espresso and eye rich bitch titties.”
Ray sorts through his pocket and pulls out a scrap of paper and a pen. He quickly scrawls their room number and comm id and hands it to Bobby Diggs. “Chief Becker hasn’t said anything about transferring you off this duty. If it means anything, I don’t think he’s disappointed with your performance. This is just a political gesture–to show the passengers that things are still under control.” He points at the paper in Bobby’s hand. “And since you’re going to be here, that’s our contact information. You see or hear anything strange, or you remember something you haven’t told us, you give me ring, okay? Day or night, one of us will be around to take the call.”
Kilgore winks, smiling. “Can you dig it, Diggsy?”
“Man, don’t make me bust you up.” Then, to Ray, “I’ll keep you in mind, Mr. Marlowe. You’re gonna catch this guy, right?”
“I’m going to do my best.”
But Diggs isn’t happy with that answer. His gaze bores into Ray’s eyes, his jaws set firmly. “I ain’t no officer, sir. I do what I’m told–always have. But I keep my eyes open and pay attention to the lie of the land so to speak. There’s something that’s not right about this. It gives me the heebs; I ain’t ashamed to admit that.”
A nod, that’s all Ray gives him, just enough to show the warning was heard. “You’re not the only one.”
“You watch your back, Mr. Marlowe.”
With that, Ray whistles for Nomar, and they leave Bobby Diggs to walk the deck.
***
They arrive back on the Garden a little after midnight. Kilgore makes some noises about it being too late for proper carousing, like it’s a duty he’s itching to perform, but shuts himself up when they find a sec-o waiting outside their door. The man sees them coming and snaps to attention.
“Commander Marlowe?”
Ray suppresses a groan. Is there anybody Becker hasn’t told about his unexpected rank inflation? But that’s only a small part of the sudden stab of dread that pierces his chest. Most of it is a sense of what now? Where’s the body this time?
He waves the guy off before he can do something silly like salute. “What is it?” he demands.
“Chief Becker asked me to deliver a package to you.” The sec-o produces a rectangular lump wrapped in plain brown paper, tied off with packing twine. Ray’s name, sans rank, is printed on the top in a dark, blocky hand. “He said you would know what to do with it.”
Without knowing its contents, Ray suspects that he will. The handwriting is familiar to him, though he hasn’t seen it in years. It’s Jack Holcomb’s. R’s that look like n’s. Once upon a time, it had driven him nearly out of his mind.
He takes the package quickly, without comment. When he moves, its contents clink, like the sound of stone on stone, like the muddy chatter of a shale hillside collapsing on itself.
Old Jack thinks of everything. Ray doesn’t know whether to be heartened or annoyed by this. Until he receives further instructions, though, he thinks he’s going to opt for annoyed.
Ray dismisses the sec-o with a wave and lets them into the their quarters. Nomar bounds past him and springs up onto the counter. He begins pacing back and forth in front of the diagnostic terminal like he can’t wait to upload his newly gathered cigarette data, courtesy of Bobby Diggs. Ray wonders briefly if it’s possible to get a mechanized rat hooked on nicotine. That would be just his luck, to have a chemically addicted drone on his hands.
“So what’s in the box, boss,” Kilgore asks.
Ray tosses the package onto the closest table, where it slides a short distance, then settles with a mind jarring tinkle of its contents.
“Emergency supplies.”
“An answer that tells me nothing. You catch onto this officer routine quick.” Kilgore drops into a chair at the table and grabs the box. He shakes it a few times, holding it up to his ear like a Christmas present. “Sounds breakable. Okay, sounds already broken.”
To Rodriguez: “Make me some coffee, Corporal. You want some coffee, Ray?”
“I’ll make it.” But first, he settles Nomar down, attaches the output cable and readies the server to dump the latest audio and nicotine tinged files in their own directory.
“Oh, Rodriguez will do it. You probably wouldn’t wash your hands first.”
Nomar chitters something back that no one understands, but it sounds vaguely insulting.
Kilgore continues, “I’m going to open this up.”
“Be my guest, but don’t expect it to be a very illuminating experience.”
“You’re so sexy when you’re cryptic, Commander.”
Ray gets Nomar squared away and ventures back across the room. He settles into a chair across the table from Kilgore. Rodriguez empties a jug of purified water into the coffee maker in the kitchen. He joins them around the package a few moments later, just as Kilgore is flicking his pocket knife through the packing twine. Beneath the wrapping paper is a flimsy cardboard container. Kilgore pops the seal on one side, tilts it up and spills a dozen or more stone rings onto the table top. They’re dark, a sort of metallic blue, vaguely iridescent. The illusion of iridescence comes, in fact, from the imbedded Arabic script, etched in silver, Ray guesses, both inside and out.
“Look,” Kilgore says, snorting. “Ray has a secret admirer.”
Ray picks up the ring that has rolled closest to him, holds it between thumb and forefinger and examines it against the overhead light. Meteoric stone, he supposes. Inscribed with incantations. He shakes his head and jams the thin, cool band onto his right hand.
Kilgore continues to shake the box, but nothing else falls out. For good measure, he turns it over so he can peer inside. “But she didn’t leave a note. That’s pretty rude.”
Rodriguez rolls one of the rings around in his palm, examining it from various angles, obviously intrigued.
“Put it on,” Ray says. “Both of you. Pick one and put it on.”
Kilgore shuffles through the pile, finding one that looks wide enough to fit his stubby fingers. “I guess it’s more interesting than a unit patch.”
Ray scoops up the ones that remain and shovels them into his pocket.
“What are they for?” Rodriguez asks.
“For protection.”
Before Kilgore can come up with a witty rejoinder: “From what?”
From having your bones liquefied by a pissed off demigod, Ray almost says. For an instant, he flashes back to Ba’dai, to Whitfield and the others collapsing like discarded garments, puddles of vacated flesh. Maybe Holcomb wasn’t a complete asshole. Maybe he’d learned a lesson or two in the desert after all. Not that this gesture mitigated in any way Ray’s desire to punch him in the skull.
“What’s all this sand jockey mumbo-jumbo mean?” Kilgore, subtle as a hand grenade. “I mean, I know sand jockey mumbo-jumbo when I see it.”
Ray just shrugs.
But Rodriguez continues to turn the ring over on his finger, tracing the words, his lips moving. He glances up. “’For the terror that comes by night.’”
Silence. Kilgore purses his lips. “That’s a little weird.”
But Rodriguez looks only at Ray, says once again, “Protection from what?”
Ray is exhausted, suddenly buried under the weight of day, under the weight of his entire life. A bubbling cauldron of questions roils inside him, lots of issues he doesn’t seem to glimpse clearly. Holcomb who doesn’t seem surprised by recent events. So unsurprised that he has given Sorensen or Becker this little time bomb package well in advance, its ticking little mindjob clock winding down from the moment they launched. The fact that he’s on a ship bound for New Holyoke–the exact same New Holyoke where an ancient Terran artifact was just transported. All of the non-coincidence around dead Micah Uytedehaage. Was the CIU getting him away from the desert at all, or just setting him up in another place and another time?
And on top of that, he still doesn’t know what to do about Emma. And there’s Ziggy to contend with, who about now is probably pissing acid because he thinks Ray has gone AWOL, which means that Nina knows, and Nina is probably out of her mind with worry given the grapevine of rumor that informs the ship of bizarre happenings like murders in the sub-decks. Now Rodriguez and Kilgore who deserve to know something about the mess he has enlisted them in, but all he’s got to give them is half-baked theories and mystical crap piles and crackpot reminiscences they’re not going to believe anyway. Too many loose ends. Too many unanswered questions, and he doesn’t seem to have the time to deal with any of them in a proper way.
He wonders if this is what it’s like to be an officer all the time. If so, is it too late to turn down his commission?
Ray lets his shoulders sag. “Ask me tomorrow, Rodriguez.”
Which is a surrender of sorts. Which is completely unfair to them, and possibly dangerous as well. He’s already lost men because they weren’t handed the knowledge and tools with which to defend themselves from the unknown.
Kilgore pushes against Rodriguez’s shoulder. “The coffee’s ready. Go get it.”
Rodriguez stares at him for a moment, dumbfounded, then springs away. He creates a thundershower of crockery in the kitchen.
Kilgore levels a disgusted glare at Ray. “All due respect, sir, but I don’t give a shit if you don’t want to talk about it. I don’t give a shit about your need-to-know ideas or emergency contingencies. You need to tell us what’s going on before I say to hell with this reassignment. We can’t help you unless you give us something to work with.”
This is the type of thing Marine sergeants have been doing with officers for five hundred years. Ray can’t help but blink at him, dumbfounded himself. So this is what it feels like to be on the receiving end of an officer-sergeant ass reaming. He chuckles lightly in spite of himself, realizes that ‘chuckling’ is way too macho a description for it. By God, he’s giggling. Giggling like he’s losing his mind. Or do you cackle when your mind goes? He doesn’t know.
Rodriguez returns and slides a blistering mug of dark coffee into his hand.
Fucking Marines, Ray thinks. And he tells them. All of it.
Filed under: A Vessel for Offering
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