Severance by Chris Bucholz Page A

at
hand, rotating them around in her mind, trying to piece them together. For the
last month, it appeared that someone was manipulating service requests to keep
her shift away from the aft of the ship.
    She cancelled her IT service request, feeling unsettled.
Something else was going on here, bigger than she understood. If someone had
tampered with the service request pseudo–AI, they’d have to have IT support for
that. Which meant the navy. A wave of paranoia washed over her; she suddenly
got the distinct impression that she should have been a lot more subtle over
the past few hours.
    “Hang on. Fuck that,” she said aloud. “I’m just doing my
job.” Stein looked at the time displayed on her desk. Quitting time. Actual
quitting time even, not even a half hour late. And she wasn’t going to let this
stupid mystery eat into her time. “Unacceptable,” she said, standing up
quickly, knocking over the chair behind her, but not caring. Tired of
mysteries, she left the office, wanting only to go home and do something simple
and obvious.
    §
    “I don’t know if I’ve ever heard you sound so enthusiastic,”
Sergei said. “I’d almost say you were glad to see me.”
    “Oh?” Stein said, smiling. She watched the young security
man rotate his beer on the surface of the bar. They were sitting on stools
pulled up to the bar in the Peregrine, a watering hole on the 3 rd level. “The Ship’s Oldest Pub,” a sign above the bar proudly claimed, although
Stein had heard that it held that record by only a couple of hours. She had
called Sergei as soon as she left the office. “Long day at work, I guess.”
    “I’ll bet. I heard your name mentioned today.”
    Stein’s eyes widened. “About what?”
    “You might be an emotionless monster,” Sergei said, “but
when a person is murdered around here, it’s kind of a big deal.”
    Stein’s shoulders sank. “Oh. That.” She hoped her body
language would communicate how little she wanted to talk about it.
    Sergei didn’t pick up what she was putting down. “I shared a
trolley with Hogg this afternoon.” He took a drink. “Do you think he was using?
The kid I mean. Ron.”
    Stein chose her words carefully. “Nope. And if he did, he
wasn’t using a lot. I never noticed a thing. Not that he was a terribly social
person.”
    Sergei took a long pull from his beer. “Hogg says the same
thing. Wonders if the drugs were planted on him. I think he’s a little
detective–happy to be honest. Don’t know why they haven’t sent someone
competent to take the case off his hands.” Sergei flagged down the bartender
and ordered another beer, Stein matching his pace. “He was on quite the rant.
Apparently had to crawl across half the ship because someone’s address was
wrong in the database.”
    Stein considered relating the similar odd behavior she had
seen in the service call database, but decided against it. Not the right topic
for small talk. Not with a cop anyways.
    It had been a dirty trick, approaching her out of uniform. A
smile, and a pair of big friendly eyes. A damned dirty trick. If she had known
he was a security officer, she wouldn’t have looked twice at him. But with his
charming earnestness, and her fluctuating loneliness waxing on that particular
night, she did look twice, and then several times more. She hadn’t bothered asking
what he did. Didn’t care. Too often the answer to that question was “Nothing,”
which always made her feel awkward. One encounter became four, and by the time
she ran into him on the street, smiling his big goofy smile in his big ugly
security uniform, it was too late. The hook had been set.
    Her childhood antics had caused her to run afoul of
security, but not enough to create any lasting ill–will. She thought they were
jerks, but truthfully, she had thought everyone was a jerk at that stage of her
life. It was later, during the Breeder thing, that it became harder. Peaceful
protesters, wanting child allowances, beaten