Severance by Chris Bucholz

know if we have any more w–w–weird calls like this,”
he finally said. He gestured at the board. “Hot and c–c–old complaints right on
top of each other. That’s weird. I don’t like seeing that.”
    “Yeah, I noticed that at the time. Thought it was just
people being bitchy. Guess that’s why Ron flagged one of them as a mistake.”
She frowned. “You want me to go follow up on it?”
    Curts shook his head and waved her back. “Don’t bother. I
might go check it out myself, actually. If I need you I’ll c–c–call, but for
now don’t worry about it. Just let me know if something like that shows up again.”
    “No problem, boss.”
    Curts nodded, his eyes unfocused, head slumping forward. He
blinked, looked around, seemed startled to find out where he was, then smiled
weakly and left the maintenance office. Stein squinted at the retreating orange
buffoon.
Strange service calls
? Curts didn’t seem the slightest bit
concerned by the news that one of his technicians had been decapitated.
    She was looking up at the Big Board and the day ahead of
her, when she realized she wasn’t that concerned about it either.
    §
    “Do you know if your son had any enemies?” Hogg asked,
straining to sound gentle. A blubbering stream of nonsense greeted him in
response. The sympathy he had forced himself to muster for Gabelman’s mother
was beginning to subside. He was growing annoyed, though not with the poor woman
crying in front of him. Just his colleagues. The whole security apparatus in
fact. It had been hours; someone really should have told her that her son had
been found dead before Hogg got there. He watched the woman sobbing and felt the
annoyance grow. Because, however unfortunate this whole murder business apparently
was for Gableman’s mother, it was really quite a lucky break for him, and one
that couldn’t have come at a better time, career–wise.
    At some point Hogg had pissed someone off, though he still
wasn’t sure how, or where, or even who. He had suspected it for a while, had seen
evidence of his career sputtering for the last couple of rotations. The most
recent such hint had occurred only two days earlier, when he had been
transferred to command the community policing center in the northern end of the
ship. Remote, under–equipped, staffed with incompetents, it was, on paper, a
promotion. And, in reality, an extended middle finger.
    “Do you know who Ron’s friends were? Who he spent time with?”
Hogg asked, trying a different tack. Mrs. Gabelman became somewhat more
intelligible, and he dutifully recorded everything she said, though none of it
sounded very useful. He was still pretty confident this was a murder of
opportunity. Big nasty knife wound, drugs, scuzzy part of the ship. 45 th and Fir was certainly a rough neighborhood on the first level, a likely enough
place for a drug deal to go bad. On the other hand, Gabelman simply didn’t have
the look of a user. Hogg definitely knew what those looked like, having swept
them in and out of the drunk tank for much of his career. He supposed it was
possible Gabelman was simply a high–functioning user who happened to mouth off to
the wrong person.
    The search of his apartment had turned up exactly nothing.
Gabelman had apparently been a single, slightly messy, slightly dorky guy, with
an interest in electro funk and pornographic images. No cache of suicide
letters or severed doll heads or, interestingly, drug paraphernalia. Not that
there would be much for a guru user.
    And there was certainly nothing anywhere to indicate the guy
had any enemies who wished him harm. Although his work colleagues were
interesting people — Hogg had run background checks on them while riding the
trolley over to Mrs. Gabelman’s. His supervisor, the Stein woman, had an
extremely interesting past. A canned baby — those were rare enough, especially
one that hadn’t self–imploded — she had then managed the even more impressive
feat of getting a job. It