The Court of a Thousand Suns by Chris Bunch; Allan Cole

as good as Dr. Knox, well…" And the intern interrupted himself:
    "His room!"
    "Knox had a room?"
    "Of course. All of us do—our shifts are two-day marathons."
    "Where would it be?"
    "I'll get a floor chart."
    "Very private sort, this Knox," Lisa said. "His room card specifies no mechanical or personal cleaning wanted. Maybe we'll get something."
    Sten suspected they would get nothing, and if they got as thorough a nothing as he feared…
    "Four thirteen."
    Lisa took the passcard from the back of the room file.
    "Hang on. And stay back from the door."
    Millimeter by millimeter, Sten checked the jamb around the slide-door's edges. He found it just above the floor—a barely visible gray hair stretched across the doorjamb.
    "We need an evidence team," Sten said. "Your best. But there won't be a bomb inside. I want this room sealed until the evidence team goes through it."
    Lisa started to get angry, then snapped a salute.
    "Yes, sir. Captain, sir. Anything else?"
    "Aw drakh," Sten swore. "Sorry. Didn't mean to sound like, like—"
    "A cop?"
    "A cop." Sten grinned.
    The room was ballooned, then gently opened. Finally, the tech team went in.
    The three spindars—one adult and two adolescents—were not what Sten had thought expert forensic specialists would look like. As soon as the room was unsealed and the adult lumbered into the bedroom, the two adolescents rolled out of its pouch and began scurrying about with doll-size instruments and meters taken from the pack strapped to the adult's pouch.
    The adult spindar was about two meters in any direction and scaled like a pangolin. It surveyed the scuttlings of its two offspring with what might have been mild approval, rebuttoned the instrument pack with a prehensile subarm, scratched its belly thoughtfully, and sat down on its rear legs in the center of the room. The being chuffed three times experimentally, then introduced itself as Technician Bernard Spilsbury. Spindars having names unpronounceable to any being without both primary and secondary voice boxes, they found human names a useful conceit—names selected from within whatever field the spindar worked in.
    "Highly unusual," it chuffed. "Very highly unusual. Recollect only one case like that. My esteemed colleague Halperin handled that one. Most interesting. Would you be interested in hearing about it while my young proteges continue?"
    Sten looked at Haines. She shrugged, and Sten got the idea that once a spindar started, nothing short of high explosives could shut him up.
    "Out on one of the pioneer worlds it was. Disremember at the moment which one. Pair of miners it was.
    Got into some unseemly squabble about claims or stakegrubs or whatever miners bicker about.
    "First miner waited until his mate got into a suit, then shot him in the face. Stuffed the corpus into the drive, suit and all."
    One young spindar held up a minidisplay to his parent. Columns of figures, unintelligible to Sten, reeled past.
    The young one chittered, and the older one rumbled.
    "Even more so," the spindar said. "If you'll excuse me?" His forearm dug larger instruments from the pack, then he waddled to the bed, half stood, and began running a pickup across it. "Curiouser and curiouser."
    "Speaking of curious," Haines said quietly to Sten. "You wondered about that tac squad? I think I'll check on just why they were assigned to that area.
    "I owe you a beer, Captain."
    They smiled at each other.
    Before Sten could say anything, the spindar was back beside him. "That took care of one sort of evidence, of course."
    "You found something?"
    "No, no. I meant the miner. To continue, he then dumped the ship's atmosphere and disposed of all of his mate's belongings and went peaceably on his way.
    "Questioned some months later, said miner maintained that he had shipped solo. Contrary to the ship's lading, no one had been with him. Claimed the other party had never showed at lift-off, and he himself had been too lazy to change the manifest. There was,