the slashed neck were the obvious causes of death.
Lee tugged himself lower so he could see the shoulder tabs on the corpse's coveralls. As he suspected, an engineer, who'd probably been baby-sitting the reactor when the hijacking began. Either he had heard calls for help and was hustling forward, or the hijackers had baited him out. Either way, he had been surprised and probably disabled by the crossbow hit. Then his attackers had finished their job up close and personal. And since they had used a knife in zero-gee, it made it quite likely they were not Earth-born. Zero-gee melee was a very exacting skill, possessed only by those who already had a great deal of experience living and working in low or no gravity environments.
Finder leaned over until his helmet's faceplate touched Lee's. Through the glass, he heard the sergeant's voice, hollow and muted. “This was the work of Upsiders, no doubt about it.”
“Yes—this one killing was. But that doesn't mean that all the hijackers are Upsiders.”
Finder raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “True enough, L.T. Now, we're going to leave Lewis a little farther behind, okay?”
“More for us to chat about later on, then.”
Finder shrugged, smiled, turned to Lewis, and made a push-back gesture holding up ten and then five more fingers. Then he tapped Lee on the shoulder and readied to jump. As soon as Lee had postured himself identically, Finder nodded and they pushed off, gliding down the remaining corridor at waist-height.
Lee's jump was a little better this time, partly because he felt there was less reason to stick close to the wall. Reading the unfolding evidence, he doubted that the mutineers felt any need to patrol this part of the ship. Indeed, their absence here suggested that they were confident they had accounted for all the passengers and crew. And that prompted a number of surmises that began to coalesce into a coherent tactical picture.
Firstly, the attackers were clearly willing to kill the crew given little or no cause to do so. There was no sign that the dead engineer had been carrying a weapon. Or that he had been moving to help the other crew or passengers. Or that he had intended to hole up in Engineering, where he could have plagued the attackers with environmental shutdowns, bulkhead lockouts, and a dozen other things that would have made their takeover both dangerous and uncertain. On the contrary, it seemed far more likely that the attack had been so quick and fierce that none of the crew had had the chance to warn him. The unrumpled condition of his clothes and still-combed hair supported the conclusion that the floater had been accosted and bushwhacked by someone he trusted enough to come close to.
Which farther suggested that some of the crew were in on the mutiny, either as the ringleaders, or as accomplices to the attackers who had masqueraded as passengers. And since there was no sign that anything had gone awry with the hijacking, that prompted Lee's last grim conclusion: that the mutineers had not been interested in hostages. They had not made any demands for ransom or concessions in exchange for the hostages. Indeed, the mutineers had not contacted the authorities at all. The only reason Lee had known to investigate was because the Fragrant Blossom's captain had missed a privately arranged check-in call with his friend, Callisto's Chief Administrator for Outbound Operations. By deduction then, it seemed unlikely that there were any passengers or crew left to rescue.
Arriving at the entry to the hab modules, Lee stopped his forward glide with an outthrust left hand. Finder signaled for a huddle; they leaned their helmets together. “Okay,” he said, “what do you want me to do next, L.T.?”
“Not a lot of choice, Sergeant; we go room-to-room. And we go fast. I don't think they've bothered with guards, except in the forward section where they'll be manning the bridge and watching our ship. And waiting for their ride.”
“Huh?” said Burns.
“Their ride,” repeated Lee. “If they meant to take this hull somewhere, they wouldn't just be drifting here. Since coming on site, we've ascertained that they've got control over enough systems to keep the airlock sealed against us, and that their engines are in fine working order. So if it was part of their plan to take this ship somewhere else, they'd already be doing so. Which means that there's company coming.”
Lewis and Burns exchanged wide-eyed looks. Finder merely smiled. “I see we got lucky and drew