Slab City Blues - The Collected Stories: All Five Stories in One Volume by Anthony Ryan Page B

file.”
    She swallowed a small sigh. My scholarly ignorance was starting to grate. “Orpheus,” she said. “Son of Calliope the Muse and Morpheus, God of Dreams, and the greatest musician in all the world. When his beloved Eurydice died, he journeyed into the underworld to reclaim her. Hades, lord of the dead, made him a bargain: ‘I will give you back your bride, she will follow you along the path to the land of the living, but you must keep your eyes on the way ahead and not turn until you reach the world above. If you do, Eurydice will be lost to you forever.’ And so he walked the path, all the time hearing nothing behind him, no footsteps, no sign that his beloved was following, all the time itching to turn, ever more convinced he had been tricked. And then, when the light of the living world was but a short distance away and his journey nearly complete, he could bear it no longer and he turned. She was there. She had been all along, and the last he saw of her was her face disappearing into the black void of the underworld.
    “Heartbroken and sick with grief, Orpheus roamed the land, singing his lament, until the wild women of the Bacchae found him. Perhaps they were angered by the sadness of his song, or simply possessed of the blood-lust for which they were famed. In any case they tore Orpheus to pieces and cast his head into the Hebrus River, where it floated out to sea, still singing his lament.”
    She had something alright. The parallel was just too close. But there were obvious difficulties. “Three women were executed for Rickard’s murder,” I pointed out.
    “Yes.” She made a small grimace of consternation. “Not sure what to make of that. Maybe someone paid them to do it. People take money to do all manner of terrible things.”
    “They had his DNA in their teeth. That’s a pretty big ask, regardless of the fee.”
    She shrugged. “Don’t know what to tell you, Mr McLeod. I’m not a detective, just an academic with a theory.”
    Your’re more than that, I decided. No way she’s spent her whole life lost in books.
    “Karnikhov,” I said.
    “Ah.” She brightened, enthused. “The Prometheus of my theory.”
    Prometheus. This one I knew. Cap Blackmore, spray-painting a tableau on the nose of his ship: muscular hero type with a flaming torch. “The Jed who stole fire from the gods.”
    Dr Janet smiled in surprise. “Quite so. Did they teach you this one in school?”
    “Never went to school. A tug captain told me the story. Renamed his boat when the war started. This was the early days when we were deluded enough to think we could field a battle fleet of our own. A hundred or so converted tugs and cargo haulers, kitted out with whatever weaponry we could lay our hands on. I’d been drafted in to augment the crew numbers. I guess Cap wanted something fierce but classy, inspire the crew or some such. Didn’t do any good. An EMP took out our main bus ten seconds into the first engagement and a plasma-shrike cracked us open like an egg. I spent six hours floating around in an EVA suit, stewing in my own filth before the rescue boat picked me up. After that we stuck firmly to low-intensity warfare.”
    She was staring at me intently and I realised with a start I’d spoken aloud. Even worse, my glass was empty. “Give me a minute.”
    I returned from the bar a few minutes later, hoping the pause had made her forget my inadvertent reverie. “So, the gods killed Prometheus, right? Punishment for giving fire to humanity.”
    “Not quite. Prometheus was a titan and therefore immortal. So Zeus had him chained to a rock where his liver was perpetually devoured by an eagle.”
    I thought of the blurred image of the crime scene. Chained to a rock for sure, mutilated for sure. But an eagle? “Birds are in short supply on the Slab, you may have noticed.”
    “Not an eagle. A salvage-bot, raptor class.”
    “That wasn’t in your file.”
    “Only caught a glimpse before they hustled me