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Three Questions – Extract

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THREE QUESTIONS

Sandy Mitchell

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I detested Commissar Fossick the minute I first laid eyes on him, but I didn’t exactly warm to the fellow either, an instinctive antipathy that had only deepened with every subsequent encounter. So I can hardly say I was surprised to hear that he’d been found dead in his cabin aboard the troop ship our regiments were sharing, only by the fact that it appeared to have been from natural causes.

‘Positional asphyxia?’ I asked, in faint bemusement, looking down at the cadaver, which appeared remarkably intact compared to the ones I was used to seeing. My late and unlamented colleague could almost have been asleep, apart from the faint bluish hue of his skin, which put me in mind of the t’au we’d so recently left behind on Gravalax.

Doctor Wersun, the chief medical officer of the Onward March, nodded. ‘It can happen,’ he said, in the unmistakable tone of a man determined to minimise the amount of paperwork in his immediate future. ‘Even to people in good health. They get into a position where they’re putting pressure on the chest muscles, or compressing the neck, and their breathing becomes too shallow to provide enough oxygen. Then they suffocate.’

‘Surely he’d have woken up if he was struggling to breathe?’ I said, squatting to examine the body more closely. Not that I gave the proverbial flying one, of course, but I’d been dragged into this by virtue of being the only other commissar on board, and I wanted to look as though my report to the Commissariat back on Coronus was going to be a little less perfunctory than it actually would be. A public show of interest now would deflect any suspicion of box-ticking nicely, and played up to the thoroughly undeserved reputation I’d acquired for taking my duties seriously – which of course I did do, when there was no other alternative. Fossick was lying prone on his bunk, face turned to one side, which meant that he hadn’t been suffocated by his pillow; both nose and mouth were clear of any obstruction.

‘Not if he was soundly asleep,’ Wersun said. ‘And positional asphyxia is more likely in that orientation. The lungs can’t expand quite so much lying face down.’

‘I see,’ I said, straightening up, and letting my eye rove around the small and spartan space.

There was nothing at all to personalise it, apart from a battered copy of The Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer on the bedside table, which proved to be extensively annotated in a cramped and pedantic hand when I riffled through the pages in the vague hope of finding something illicit secreted inside, and an empty drinking glass beside it, which smelled of cheap amasec. The footlocker contained nothing but a change of uniform, and the bottle which must have filled the glass. I lifted it out and shook it, finding it almost empty.

‘And I doubt this would have helped.’

Wersun nodded briskly, clearly satisfied that his job here was done. ‘Precisely. Intoxication can be a significant factor in a case like this.’

I nodded too, prepared to let it go; then a random thought occurred to me. Though our interactions had been as limited as I could contrive – on account of his being a humourless disciplinarian who regarded every comma of the regulations as the Word of the Emperor, and the use of strategy and tactics instead of charging headlong down the gun barrels of the enemy as barely distinguishable from cowardice – Fossick had never struck me as the kind of man to drink himself into oblivion in the privacy of his own quarters. In fact, the glassful or two left in the bottom of the bottle argued precisely the opposite: that he was abstemious enough to be eking the liquor out, whereas a heavy drinker would have polished off the rest of it without a second thought.

‘Nevertheless,’ I said, ‘perhaps it would be prudent to run a blood test, just to be sure?’

‘If you think that’s wise,’ Wersun said, not bothering to add if you really want to waste my time, because his tone did it for him.

‘I do,’ I said, more because I found his attitude irritating than because I expected anything to come of it. Although if I’d had an inkling of the consequences, I’d simply have left well enough alone.

‘Natural causes?’ Colonel Kasteen looked faintly surprised for a moment, before rearranging her face into an appropriately neutral one. ‘No doubt Colonel Greydon will be relieved to hear that.’

‘Far less paperwork,’ I agreed, pretending to miss her thinly veiled insinuation. It hadn’t taken any of us long to realise that the Kastrian 73rd’s morale was so low as to be verging on the subterranean, and Fossick’s presence had contributed far more to that than the mauling they’d taken at the hands of the t’au before Gravalax had been returned safely to the Imperial fold. The best thing he could have done for the regiment was what he had done, in fact, and saving one of his erstwhile comrades-in-arms the bother of arranging a friendly-fire accident quite likely the only favour he’d ever done for anyone.

‘They don’t seem to be missing him much, do they?’ Kasteen remarked, glancing around at the Guardsmen in our immediate vicinity. Since protocol demanded a courtesy call on her opposite number to offer our condolences, she’d elected to accompany me on my own errand to fill Greydon in on my conclusions, and I must admit to appreciating her company. After a bit of a rocky start I was beginning to find my feet with the 597th, and our working relationship was coming along nicely.

‘No, they don’t,’ I agreed. If anything, most of the troopers we’d passed since entering the area occupied by the Kastrians looked positively cheerful, at least until they caught sight of my uniform, whereupon their expressions became wary.

Thus preoccupied, I missed my footing as I stepped over the threshold of a pressure door separating the corridor from the cargo hold beyond, through which I intended taking a shortcut to our destination, and was pleasantly surprised to find a steadying hand on my elbow. The colonel was clearly beginning to think of me as a friend, or at least as much of one as our respective positions allowed.

‘Careful.’ Sure I was stable again, Kasteen released my arm, and matched my pace, glancing around at the parked Chimeras surrounding us. Several had been comprehensively perforated by t’au railguns, and a swarm of russet-robed enginseers were tending to their wounds, or stripping the worst of them down for spare parts, accompanied by twice as many servitors to do the heavy lifting.

‘Thanks,’ I said, regaining my balance. ‘Frakking gravity adjustments.’

‘Better by increments in transit than having to get used to weighing something else when we arrive,’ Kasteen admonished, which was true enough. Apart from the debilitating physical effects of suddenly finding yourself in a noticeably higher or lower gravity field on disembarkation, that sort of thing could play havoc with muscle memory, throwing shots off aim, or leaving strikes and blocks in a melee dangerously uncoordinated. Which was why starships would alter their internal gravity gradually over the course of a voyage to smooth the transition between one world and the next.

‘True,’ I agreed. ‘But it’s still a pain in the fundament.’

I nodded a greeting to one of the Kastrian enginseers, who seemed to be paying more attention to our presence than any of the others, all of whom seemed utterly engrossed in resanctifying the crippled machines around us.

‘Looks like you’ve got your work cut out.’

‘With faith in the Omnissiah all things are possible,’ she rebuked me, an expression of clear antipathy visible on the parts of her face that hadn’t been replaced by metal yet. Which, in turn, meant that she was pretty close to the bottom of the tech-priestly hierarchy.

‘Pavrik.’

A cogboy clearly far more senior, judging by the metal-to-flesh ratio, glanced in her direction, and said something in the chirruping gibberish of their private argot. The meaning was pretty clear, though, as she favoured the colonel and I with a final glare, before going back to ripping sheets of ceramite armour off the hull of a vaguely Chimera-shaped heap of scrap that had obviously been on the wrong end of a t’au plasma bolt.

‘She seemed nice,’ Kasteen said, with a moue of amusement, and I nodded, feeling faintly perplexed. In my experience the acolytes of the Omnissiah accompanying most Imperial Guard units considered themselves there purely to minister to the wargear, having as little to do with the flesh-and-blood troopers who used it as possible. Pavrik, if that was actually her name rather than some cogboy admonishment, shouldn’t even have noticed our presence, let alone responded to it. Then I shrugged, and dismissed the thought. Every regiment has its little quirks, and maybe this was just one of those.

‘Thank you for coming.’

Colonel Greydon probably wasn’t as grateful as all that, but he stood as we entered his office, and stuck out a hand to shake. Kasteen first, I noticed, before turning to me. His grip was firm, but his manner slightly reserved, which I could hardly blame him for if his experience of commissars had largely been confined to Fossick up until now.

‘Not at all,’ Kasteen said, slipping easily into the polite stock phrases which occasions like this seem to demand. ‘We appreciate how awkward losing Commissar Fossick must be for you.’

‘Up to a point,’ Greydon conceded, with a wary glance in my direction. ‘He certainly left a number of administrative matters uncompleted.’

‘No doubt,’ I said, pretending to understand what he was talking about. I generally left the routine paperwork to Jurgen, my indefatigable and malodorous aide, which allowed me to fill my time with more congenial pursuits. At least when nothing was trying to kill me, which happened more often than I was altogether comfortable with. I spread my hands in an accommodating gesture. ‘If there’s anything we can assist you with, of course…’

‘I’ll forward the files to your office,’ Greydon said, with almost indecent haste. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary, but they do need to be signed off by a member of the Commissariat.’

‘Happy to help,’ l lied, although Jurgen would be doing most of the actual work.

After that the conversation stuttered through a handful of routine pleasantries, Kasteen and I wondering how soon we could leave without seeming rude, and Greydon how quickly he could get rid of us, before we were interrupted by a diffident knock on the door.

‘Good. You’re both here.’ Doctor Wersun glanced from Greydon to me, then on to Kasteen with a faint air of surprise, before addressing me directly. ‘I did as you suggested, and carried out a full autopsy on Commissar Fossick.’

‘Commendably thorough of you, doctor,’ I said, masking the sudden sinking of my stomach with the ease of long practice. ‘But I thought I only asked you to confirm that he’d been drinking.’

‘Which he had.’ Wersun nodded. ‘But hardly at all. Certainly not enough to have induced intoxication. So I looked a little more closely at the body. And I found these.’ He brought up a blurry pict on the screen of his data-slate, which looked to me like a patch of fog in a rainstorm.

‘Which are?’ I asked, because it was carrots to crowns the other two were about to say the same thing, and I wanted to get in first.

‘Minute fractures in the ribcage,’ Wersun said, sounding a little puzzled. ‘Not to mention several other bones. And look here.’ The picture changed, to a different indeterminate blur. ‘Some burst capillaries, mainly near the surface of the skin.’

‘Which means what, exactly?’ Greydon asked, an instant before I could.

‘That his death may not have been an accident after all. I don’t see how, but it’s quite possible he might have been murdered.’

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