Page 122 of Gladiators of the Vagabond Boxset

Thorin

Lying on my bunk in my quarters, I had my leg propped up high on some pillows. The elevation took the pressure off and eased my pain, as did the temperature pack I’d draped over my thigh. Alternating between warm and cold, it stimulated the blood flow.

Even I had to admit that after the debacle in the gym, at least I’d made progress with Camila.

And probably, she’d been right about convincing me to see the Doc.

I’d been fooling myself into thinking the pain in my left leg would just go away, that it was just cramps.

Now the Doc had confirmed it: the repeated breaking of the big bones in just that leg, while experimenting with healing agents…

It had severely damaged some nerves and the integrity of the bone.

My muscles were overworked and sore, unable to keep up with the demands my body was making.

If we didn’t find a way to reverse the damage to the bone cells, the Doc had warned me that the bone might turn necrotic and would have to be removed.

I shuddered at the thought, fiercely angry that Drameil and his sick experiments would come to haunt me even further.

Free, my ass. What was I going to do without my damn leg?

The only thing I was good at nowadays was fighting. If I couldn’t do that, what then?

Exhaling roughly, I tried to remember the things I could do—like solve the murder of Miean aboard this ship, just as Ziame had asked of me. I’d been nothing but a disappointment of late: screwing up our meeting with Camila, getting into trouble with Kitan. Shit, I probably owed the Sune an apology.

At least I knew Camila was now doing something fun, like hanging out with the other humans on the ship and the tiny baby.

As I’d escorted Camila to the mess earlier, after Abby had issued the invitation for her over my com, I’d run into Sunder.

The older male had been so quiet of late that I wondered if he’d just nod and walk off, but the Tarkan had given me a grin and said, “Oh boy, I see all the females are banding together now… That can’t be good news.

” With a gravelly chuckle, he’d waved at the lot of them at the table, nabbed some sliced bread from the kitchen, and left.

I had had the strangest urge to actually join those females, just because I liked seeing how Camila’s dark eyes weren’t so filled with shadows now that she was talking with the women, or how they even lit up when she was allowed to hold Novalee in her arms. I couldn’t fathom holding such a tiny, fragile thing, but she did it with calm confidence.

She’d done that before and was explaining some things to Tori, which made the shy woman look relieved.

She’d seen me in the doorway, looked up, and given me a frown, nodding at my leg and then pointing out the door.

I’d gotten the message, she was telling me to get off my damn leg and leave.

So I’d swallowed my angry initial response, that I was perfectly fine, because we both now knew that I wasn’t. Then I’d headed for my bunk.

At least now I had a lead on what to do to solve this murder, and I could chase it down while lying on my bed.

“Hey, Akri, did Ziame tell you that we had a murder on this ship two weeks ago?” I asked.

The ship was immediate in its response. “He did not; we had much else to discuss. I have pulled up the logs now, and I see the doctor’s autopsy report.

Poison blade. The victim appears to be the previous doctor of this ship. ”

Well, that was quick and promising. If it could dig up that information in a second, it could probably find far more in the logs.

I quickly outlined what we knew of the case so far and what I wished it could do for me.

Soon, it had the lounge logs pulled up and could tell me that Miean himself was the only one who had entered it until Kitan and Chloe found the body a few days later.

“So he had already been stabbed when he got into the lounge, and subsequently died in there by himself,” I surmised. That had been my theory, I felt a rush at discovering I’d gotten that bit right. Maybe I hadn’t forgotten all my old instincts.

I suggested the location of the disturbed smuggling hatch next and was disappointed to discover that that, too, had been Miean, only an hour before he’d gone into the lounge.

The camera feeds Akri had displayed for me on my datapad showed a fit and mobile Miean, clearly still unhindered, which meant that somehow, somewhere in the next hour, he’d gotten stabbed.

Akri was a good research assistant, eagerly offering to help me trace Miean’s footsteps on the camera feeds available to us. We lost him several times because not all corridors had the best angles, something Akri and I decided we needed to fix as soon as possible.

Eventually, I concluded with a curse that there were several very major blindspots, and whoever had stabbed this Elrohirian male had done so in one such spot.

The Doc appeared from a blindspot, suddenly clutching a blood-flecked hand to his abdomen as he made his final, lumbering way to the lounge.

There, we could see that he pretty much just collapsed where Cloe and Kitan had found him, and didn’t move again.

“Okay, can we see all the corridors around that area? In the moments before this happens? Maybe we can see someone else approach that spot?” Akri was flashing through the feeds at a speed I couldn’t follow.

That was fine; I could get used to such a speedy assistant.

Back on Elrohira, we had no such computer assistance, nothing this fast and intuitive, at least. Research had always fallen on me, because, as the rookie detective of the two, my partner had simply ordered me to do it.

After a few minutes, Akri conceded that this line of searching was a bust. It couldn’t locate anyone who seemed to be headed for that blindspot, where they would meet Miean.

So the two of us turned to the far more arduous task of locating and accounting for each and every person aboard the ship, now that we had the nearly exact time of the stabbing—which had occurred in the early hours of the sleep cycle aboard the Vagabond.

Quickly, we’d ruled out Ziame and Abby, who had been in their quarters.

I’d had to cut off the AI with a laugh when it had happily exclaimed that Ziame and his mate were in the clear because they had been copulating at the time.

“Akri, you can’t say such things. That’s the stuff we talk around because it’s private.

You could have just said they were together in their room.

You don’t need to state what they are doing. ”

The ship had taken that in stride, and when he’d next accounted for Jakar, he’d explicitly said, “The Pretorian male is in his room, alone.” Then it made a frustrated, almost sighing sound.

“This is not a complete statement. It bothers me that you would not say, “he is alone masturbating.” Why are you so ashamed of saying these things? They are natural urges for biological beings, are they not?”

I rubbed my palm over my face and wondered how Ziame had dealt with an AI struggling to understand the finer nuances of behavior. Explaining this shit was not my strong suit, so I told the AI that it should let his Captain explain it to him.

It thankfully agreed, and we got on with accounting for everyone.

Tori and Sunder were both in their rooms. Diamed, sadly, was also in her quarters, which meant that, though a traitorous bitch, our previous navigator hadn’t been involved in this.

To my surprise, Fierce turned out to be the only one not where he was supposed to be.

Akri reported that he had been with the Ferai beast in the cell block that had housed us before we’d risen up and secured our freedom.

“What the fuck was he doing there?” I demanded of the ship before I could stop myself.

I shouldn’t have, because besides assuring that everyone’s alibis checked out, I had no right to further invade their privacy.

Akri was quick to respond, and I listened with morbid fascination when it reported that the male had slept every night in those cells.

I felt horrible for feeling better with that knowledge. It indicated that Fierce was struggling to adjust, that he wasn’t coping either. I should feel bad for him, and I did. But I felt instantly less alone in my own struggle, like I wasn’t as much of a failure as I thought I was.

Still, the results of this were baffling and disconcerting.

If everyone on the ship was where they should be, then who the fuck had killed Miean?

Had he fallen on his own knife? I spent most of the rest of that day analyzing the footage I had of Miean crossing the ship, from the smuggling hatch to the lounge.

It worried me that one moment he’d appeared unharmed, and the next he was bleeding from a stomach wound.

And when I noticed that a once-bulging pocket had also gone flat…

“Akri, I think I need to go see that blind spot where the stabbing took place for myself,” I told the ship.

Taking the temperature pack off my leg, I rubbed at the sore muscles in my thigh.

Whatever the Doc had done had eased the pain back down to manageable levels, and the rest had helped further.

When Camila and I had left him, he was carrying his tray of samples and all the scanner results to the labs down the hall to do some deeper research.

His eyes had been shimmering in excitement, so at least I knew he was already at work figuring out how to reverse some of the damage those experiments had done to me.