New Story in Print!

My first published science fiction story is now out! As has become blog tradition, here’s an excerpt to get you started.

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Diener

By Michele Lee

“Ephibians. I love Ephibians.”

The attending starship security guard made a face but tried to hide it. Max’s grin widened. People had this notion that the dead should be treated with a solemn seriousness. Max wasn’t sure if the guard’s grimace was at the body’s race, the fact that it was a corpse or at Max’s amusement in the face of death. Hidden prejudices were so much fun to play with. But then, actually getting to do his job usually amused him.

“They’re clean dead,” Max continued. He poked at the leatherish hide of the Ephibian’s corpse. “They stand up to the decay better. Us Earthlings leak.”

The security man already looked pale, and carefully avoided touching the body. Superstition abound. Many people still thought other races carried all manner of contagious things and somehow a state of not-living negated every test and scrub the races had to undergo to get a position on a starship in the first place. “Do you need anything else in here?”

Max didn’t know his name. He knew important people’s names, but not the name of the bland faced Earthling security guard. He must not be important.

“Actually, yes. Step out of the room for a moment please.” Max held up a silver pen-shaped device. An all-in-one tool, it took 360 degree video plus air samples for later reconstruction of crime scenes. Unless the guard went on surface missions, which many of them didn’t, he probably didn’t recognize it. Max doubted this was a crime scene. Nothing seemed out of place. The Ephibian had died sitting at his table and there didn’t appear to be any body tissue off the corpse or a single object out of place in the room. All clues about the creature’s death rested with the remains.

The scan completed, signaled by a muted double beep. Some races were rather sensitive to things humans commonly ignored. The security guy stayed just out of range, on purpose, forcing Max to handle the body himself. He rolled it onto the stretcher alone. It wasn’t difficult for someone who knew where to push. Dead the Ephibian looked like a very large, wood-toned raisin. Alive they looked more human. But then everything looked more human when it moved, laughed and spoke, no matter what the language.

“It’s all yours man,” Max said to the man in orange. He gave the man a big grin and a wink. Morgue workers quickly came to terms with their own vices. Playing up the creepy was one of Max’s vices.

“Freak,” he heard the man mutter under his breath.

Max snorted as he carted the body back down to the bowels of the ship. If a race could travel through solar systems, Max thought, they should be able to overcome outdated instincts. Like fear of anything that spoke like them, but didn’t look like them. Or fear of the dead.

A sensor in the door opened the morgue to him as the stretcher approached. The ship’s pathologist couldn’t be bothered to look up as Max rolled in, feet off the floor, body leaning on the stretcher next to the lifeless raisin cadaver. “What do we have now?”

“Dead Ephibian.”

“Run a scan then put it in the cooler,” she said sounding uninterested.

Ship protocol dictated cut-‘em-open autopsies were only for extreme circumstances, due to the unsanitary condition of an open body. In the ship’s mix of species, some people might be allergic to others innards, or susceptible to the natural internal organisms from other planets. Ships kept scanners that assessed a body and determined the most reasonable cause of death. But the machine’s manual admitted it only had an eighty percent accuracy rate in a lab setting. Even the fairly stable environment of a starship wasn’t, by far, a lab setting.

Max hoisted the corpse into the scanner anyway. The sensor section spiraled around the body, spewing stats over a vid screen that meant nothing until the end of the scan. The machine reached the end of its threads and backtracked slowly. Halfway back the screen beeped and the machine displayed its final decision.

“Circulatory failure,” Max said out loud to the quiet room. He checked the time of death, and smiled. Six hours. There was more than one reason why he loved dead Ephibians. It bothered the security, they were less messy, and Ephibians naturally produced a delightful little chemical that threw a human brain into alpha waves. Max liberated a large syringe from its sterile wrapping and added the longest needle in the morgue’s stock to it. He used the chart of the body on the postmortem machine to find the gland, under the lungs and above all the abdominal organs. It was tiny, dark, thick and when Max pierced it dark, bile green liquid surged out to filled the syringe.

The chemical, whatever it was, had a window of potency. Max believed the Ephibian bio-system kept it neutral. But once they died and their body stopped functioning, the chemical stewed. Too long, and it shut the brain down. It only took Max two rats to learn that.

“Hey D., the machine says circulatory failure,” Max messaged through the com system.

“Okay, stick it in the cooler. I’ll contact the family.”

With the cleanliness of a star ship’s morgue the ME found herself spending more time making funeral arrangements than actually being a medical doctor. Max’s boss hated it.

“Since it’s all clear for now I’m going to head on up to my room. Buzz me if you need anything.”

“We’re dead as our customers. I’ll call you if there’s a pandemic or something.”

Max thanked protocol that he got salary and not hourly wages. No way a job as a morgue slave would pay otherwise on a starship. Now a space station… or better yet a base on one of the planets on the border of a territory, those jobs would rock. Max enjoyed his job. Most pathologists he worked for quickly learned not to ask why.

Read the rest, and more, in Aoife’s Kiss September 2009.