Flying Mermaid Murder

 

The Flying Mermaid was a replica pirate ship that docked at various tourist ports around the Gulf of Mexico. It wasn’t particularly seaworthy at three quarter sized, but it sailed well enough if the conditions were pleasant. It was popular with the college crowds as a kind of destination-party location. A group of students in Tampa, Florida had booked the ship for the first weekend in June.

 

Usually the parties were all night affairs, so the captain was surprised that the kids had asked about sleeping quarters on the ship. Outside of the party season, the ship doubled as a floating hotel, with enough notice, it could be configured back to sleep about two dozen people if a few of them didn’t mind sharing rooms. A number of decorations, cannon balls and blade heavy cutlasses, were put back on the walls, though not as securely as they would be for a full hotel season. The students only expected about fifteen people attending, so most of them would have their own room.

They had their own security for the event and payed a large extra deposit to have the vessel mostly to themselves. Normally the crew doubled as chaperones and bouncers though they were just as happy to have the time off. A few stayed on board to look after any miscellaneous problems that came up.

The captain had stayed on board the first night just to see how things went and despite his initial misgivings, it seemed to be going smoother and quieter than normal. The group in question were a bunch of engineering graduates celebrating their last time together before going off in different directions in the world.

Satisfied that the students were well behaved, the captain spent the next night on shore. He even left his room to the guests when they said they had a few latecomers to the event. Despite being a reasonably authentic pirate ship the doors and locks were decidedly modern and motion detectors guarded the hallways after everyone was locked in their rooms.

During the night, a few rooms were wakened by a loud thud, a clang of metal and a scream from one of the quarters. Unfortunately the door was locked from the inside and it took precious moments for someone to find an extra keycard and get the door open. By then it was too late.

The student staying in the room had bled to death, the cutlass lying next to him in bed, evidently having cut his throat. The initial thought was suicide, but the smart watch they had on registered a deep sleep right up until the sound of the thud. There wasn’t enough time, or presence of mind, to use the sword, get back into bed and tuck himself in.

The motion detectors hadn’t registered anyone outside of the rooms until everyone had come out almost at once, meaning if was murder, they should still have been at the scene of the crime, but it was empty, minus the victim.

The thoughts of the investigators turned to the thud heard shortly before the scream. Nothing else in the room seemed damaged or out of place, even the other half of the pair of cutlasses was still on the wall. In a flash of insight they checked the next room over and noted a large spherical dent on the wall, at the exact height as the sword mount in the adjoining space. There were two people in that room and no quick way to tell who was awake at the time.

The captain arrived on scene, noticed the size of the dent, and mentioned it looked like one of the cannon balls. He said that many of them had been rescued from a room that contained a lot of loose gunpowder. A quick check of the two suspects hands found a telltale residue on one set that had almost been washed off completely.

Emergency Dial

 

 

Jack had very particular habits. He was paranoid that someone was trying to kill him. As such he tried to take precautions that would keep him safe. He travelled around the United States for a while, not spending too much time in any one place. He thought someone might be tracking his movements, which was a little difficult in the years before cell phones became ubiquitous. He only stayed at hotels that were quiet and out of the way, so mostly frequented by locals. Ones where he could pick the room number himself and order his own food from different restaurants every day, under an assumed name.

He recently felt like the killer was getting too close and had just flown into the UK to find a new place to stay.

Antarctic Base

 

 

The cold wind howled as it snaked around the modular Antarctic research base. Fortunately the structure was made for the inclement weather and only a slight creaking in the joiner segments hinted at the weather outside. It was a small thing, but it could eat away at your sanity if you were the only one around. Which Jeff was. He turned up the music, blasting it away in all the adjoining rooms to drown out the sounds of the shuddering complex.

He was alone, but only for another month. Various other programs had been cancelled or relocated and he was there to keep the lights on. Not literally of course, the building’s automation could handle most of the basic tasks, but if anything broke it was easier to fix in person. There were a few telepresence robots looking after most of the experiments. They were great at doing exactly what they were built to do, and nothing outside of that.  Their construction was fairly simple - a tablet for a head and a few cameras mounted on a thin body, with two spindly arms meant for light tasks only.  

A week ago one of the north facing labs broke a window and snow had blown in. The bots in the area could hardly manage driving through the indoor drifts, let alone repairing damage as large as the glass. Apart from that though, everything managed to run itself.

Robot Clue

 

The storm lashed against the house like a kind of angsty teen on a moody day, persistent and noisy but more sound than fury. Still, with the murder, it was enough to set people on edge. The detective strode purposefully around the room, drinking in the scene, while the family fidgeted nervously. Everyone had seen the maid do it, so arresting the suspect seemed like a trivial formality at this point. The head of the house tried to explain that it was a little more difficult than that.

The detective assembled the staff. To her surprise, they were all robots. The maid fully admitted to the murder, as was expected. As a robot, though, she, or it, had no motive to do anything outside of her programming. Not knowing what to, the detective phoned an AI expert in to help ‘interrogate’ the maid.

The AI specialist arrived within the hour, carrying a pile of diagnostic tools that could try to sort through the rat’s nest of goal objectives of the killer robot. His motions were quick and calculated as he connected various wires and readouts, unconsciously mimicking the robots he worked on. It seemed like no-one in the house actually knew any true coding languages and had controlled the robots through third party apps once the original company stopped supporting their first generation cleaning AIs. Each person in the house had their own way of inputting new tasks. They took turns explaining their method while standing as far from the maid as possible, lest they set her off again somehow.

Blackness of Space

The space station was pitch black. Power was out. Backup power was out. What remained was just a residual crackle of electricity that barely lit up a few LEDs on the various panels on the walls. Still if you knew the place as well as this crew did, it was enough to navigate by.

They floated down the quiet corridors listening to the metal ping and pop as the sun heated the outside of the giant tin can they were in. Something had happened to the various wires in the main electrical sections, forcing the station into automatic lock-down. That closed all the windows shades with reinforced slats that protected against micrometeorites. While that seemed to be the safest option in the event of a power outage, it wasn’t the most practical.

Finding the nearest spacesuits they methodically put them on in the disorienting darkness. As another power saving measure, the built in lights on the suits wouldn’t turn on till someone was in them. As the first person finished clicking the last piece in place the room was suddenly flooded with highest intensity light. The automatic calibration of the light was directly proportional to the lack of other illumination in the room. While that might be appropriate mid-mission, it was painfully bright in the small reflective alcove that they were currently in.

Game Day

 

Saturday 5:00am. Time to get out of bed and get ready. The usual flurry of activity and an uneventful trip in the early winter. He looked at his watch in the cramped confines of his mom’s truck -- 6:30 am.

He stepped out of the vehicle, shuffling along with a transport comfortable version of his hockey gear on. There was time to go from street clothes to hockey ready in the locker room, but it meant being on the road that much earlier and sometimes there wasn’t always a spare room in the middle of a tournament. Sometimes hockey meant getting the last of your gear on at the bench, five minutes before game time.

It wasn’t like that today, though the thought wasn’t unfamiliar to him. The coach said the usual things, up-building platitudes about playing and having fun, with the not so subtle hint that winning by pulling together felt really good too. There was a feeling in the locker room that today things would work out this weekend. Not just a vibe, or a streak of wins, but a familiarity that things were already in the bag.

Encounter in a Storm

 

The waves crashed against the side of the wooden frigate, making walking difficult for most of the crew. Captain Horne had seen worse weather, and trusted his men to get their jobs done. He stubbornly refused to turn the vessel into the oncoming waves to lessen their effect despite the complains from the less experienced. It was important to get proper sea-legs and this was nearly the ideal situation.

They were a few minutes from shore and were unlikely to get lost or turned around in the storm. Pirate attacks were down at that time of year as the taxes from the far off colonies were already paid and it was in between harvests of the more valuable crops. The only boats still sailing were balancing out local supplies and ferrying the richer residents around. The HMS Barnacle had just dropped off their last delivery of both of those things and was headed home to San Derocas.

The storm had come up suddenly, but Captain Horne had warned his men just over a half our before. He kept some fairly expensive meteorological equipment on board, and made a habit of checking it fastidiously.

---

The pirate crew plowed bow first into the waves, tacking up the coast and into the worst of the storm. Captain Heele was a greenhorn and the conditions made him feel uneasy and slightly nauseous. He felt brave crashing through the walls of water, despite it being the safest way to get through the storm. The only thing less brave was going into port at the first sign of wind. That was something he wanted to do, but he was too inexperienced to navigate in the chaos of the squall.

The shore was close, almost too close for comfort and his men didn’t know if there were any reefs in the area. Pickings were slim and they were too new to the area to know why. Captain Heele had heard tales of ships laden with gold coins to pay the Kings and Queens of the Old World, but had arrived too late to meet them. Chatter along the coast talked about exotic crops of rare plants, but raids failed to find anything but the small remains of last year’s harvest.

In the crows nest they spotted a ship up ahead that seemed to be floundering in the storm. They headed toward it in reckless abandon, raising the black flag that was the universal symbol for pirates.

---

Captain Horne laughed when he heard the news. A ship of thieving scoundrels was headed directly for them, intent on some nefarious plan he thought. Quickly he checked his instruments and the prevailing winds. Just as quickly he suddenly doubted there was a plan to this undertaking. Only greed and overconfidence would drive anyone to attack during a storm from that direction and angle. He calmly went to the wheel of the ship and instructed half of his crew to prepare the starboard cannons, but to leave the doors closed till the last moment. The other half of the crew was to put on a show of being unprepared for the storm and to stumble around on deck.

---

Captain Heele looked through the spyglass and smiled an evil smile. He was going to capture the ship, which he recognized as the HMS Barnacle from the figurehead, without a fight. He continued to think that right until the ship in question opened up the starboard cannon doors and broadsided them. All eight cannons hit squarely on his ship’s bow, the blast ripping it apart. As the next wave hit the pirate ship it filled their hold with seawater and sank it like a stone.