The Ritchie and Fitz Sci-Fi Murder Mysteries

Chapter 1

Murdina Ritchie felt a strange disconnect between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Everything immediately around her were things she was thoroughly used to. She was pretty sure she"d even been inside this very diner train car on an earlier trip on the intergalactic railway, maybe even the exact same booth.

Certainly, the other cadets in their Oymyakon Foreign Service Academy uniforms were familiar to her, after living in dorms together for over two years now.

Her seat mate in particular, her buddy Antoinette Moreau, was more familiar to Ritchie than even her own family. The bland expression of boredom that never left her face, the topknot of fine whitish-blond hair piled on her head making up a bit for the height she lacked compared to the other cadets, it was all something Ritchie saw every day.

The smells of French fries and flame-grilled meat were so thick in the air Ritchie could feel it starting to coat her hair in oily goodness. The feeling of having just tried to eat her own weight in greasy food, the heavy warmth lingering in her belly, wasn’t something she felt every day, but it wasn’t unfamiliar.

But the view out of the windows? That was entirely new.

It wasn"t what she was acclimated to seeing out a train window, the usual ever present thunderstorms and gray mountainsides of Oymyakon. They had left that behind the day before.

Neither was it the tropical, all ocean and beaches world of Epsilon 20, where she had spent her semester break a year before. She did see a few glittering blue patches of lakes here and there, but nothing big enough for ships.

No, the planet below her was overwhelming covered in green. Trees and meadows, for sure, but mostly elaborately structured gardens, the greenery arranged in patterns that must only be visible from the sky.

And at the heart of every garden, almost as an afterthought, was a cluster of a few buildings, all of creamy marble. Some had blue or pink streaks, others had flecks of black or gold, but most were just a gleaming white that struck a lovely contrast to the greenery crowded all around it.

She was finally seeing Braga, the planet of universities. There were other universities scattered throughout the Union of Free Worlds, of course, but all the important ones were here. Both foreign service branches had their main campus here. So did all the armed forces. There were also schools for fine arts, for business, for science and technology.

It was all completely overwhelming. And Ritchie hadn"t even set foot on it yet.

"We"re too far north to see Guy"s school," Moreau told her. As if that was the only logical reason Ritchie was raptly staring out the window. But then again, very little impressed Moreau. She tended to forget how much of the beautiful side of the universe was still a novelty for Ritchie.

"I know. I"ve checked the maps," Ritchie said, still with her face pressed up close to the window.

"We have a lot of free periods over the last few days here. I"m sure you"ll be able to meet up at least once," Moreau said. Then she laughed. "Guy will make sure of it, anyway."

"I"m sure he will," Ritchie said with a smile. But inside, her heart ached.

She and Guy had spent the entire semester break together, something she hadn"t seen coming. But he had been on the train when she left the academy at the end of the semester, and he had taken her on his family"s private shuttle directly to the Space Station Delta Delta Nu, where she lived in a single room apartment with her mother and grandmother. He had rented an apartment of his own in the swankier part of the station, a huge suite of rooms all under a glass dome that offered panoramic views of space all around the station. She hadn"t even known such places existed on her home station. She had spent nearly every hour of every day there, with Guy.

If he had hoped to spend any time somewhere more interesting than a grungy space station at the edge of the Union, he never said so. In fact, he seemed to genuinely enjoy taking her and her mother and grandmother out to restaurants and theaters and museums, all places that, like his temporary apartment, she had no idea even existed on the station.

But now the break was over, and they had been apart for three weeks already. This hadn"t been hard last year. Keeping in touch by sending messages back and forth had been kind of fun and exciting last year.

But this year? This year she missed being with him, and the messages just made her miss him more.

"Hey," Moreau said. Ritchie was afraid she had let her feelings show on her face and reached up to make sure she hadn"t let a tear slip, but Moreau wasn"t even looking at her. She was on her feet, reaching for her bag. "We"re landing. Didn"t you notice? What are you staring at out that window, anyway?"

"Nothing," Ritchie said, and forced a smile so she wouldn"t have to say more.

The hovering train pulled up to a station platform set high atop a marble structure. When they stepped out of the train cars, they found themselves on an open-air platform, and the smell of the planet washed over Ritchie so intensely she instantly forgot anything else.

It smelled green. That was her first somewhat inarticulate impression. Then she started to pick the aromas apart. Flowers were the strongest scent, almost overwhelming all the others. But then she smelled ripe fruit and freshly mown grass. There was even a hint of something she was sure was honey.

And the sun on her face was so deliciously warm it made her skin tingle. There was a constant breeze, but it was a movement of warm air that stirred her hair but didn"t take away any of that solar warmth.

"I can like this," she said, her eyes closed as she turned her face more directly towards the massive yellow sun.

"I wonder if there"s a way to test out of our last year at Oymyakon and just move here right away," Moreau said wistfully.

"I thought you"d been here before?" Ritchie said, turning away from the sun to look at Moreau.

"Sure, for parties," Moreau said. "I kind of forgot how always perfect the weather is here."

"Cadets, follow me!" they heard the voice of Colonel Hansen calling from the far end of the platform. The two of them hoisted their bags up on their shoulders and followed the others as they marched down the endless back-and-forth stairway to ground level.

Ritchie recognized the building they were in as a transportation terminal. The platform for the intergalactic railway was very far from the main hub, and they walked past terminal after terminal servicing the far more common shuttle traffic. Although it was no where near as massive as the transportation hubs in space, she saw all the things she expected to in such a location: ticketing agents and food vendors and lots of weary, impatient travelers milling about.

But the building itself was like standing in a living museum. The marble looked so cool in contrast to the warmth of the air, and tendrils of greenery grew up the columns to knit across the ceiling high overhead, forming something like a forest canopy. She could hear birds singing and see them darting about. But technically, they were still indoors.

"Is everything here like this?" Ritchie asked, as Moreau had to come back a third time to fetch Ritchie and hurry her to follow the others. Everything kept catching her attention. This time it was a perfectly ripe golden pear hanging just over her head, so close she could reach out and touch it.

"Everything is like this," Moreau said. Then she reached up to pick the pear. She had to hop a little, short as she was, but she caught it, took a deep breath of its sweet aroma, then handed it to Ritchie.

"We can take it?" Ritchie asked, looking around to see if anyone was about to come running to chastise them.

"You can pick anything. It just grows back," Moreau said. "Eat it."

Ritchie took her own deep inhalation of the pear"s smell. Then she bit into flesh still warm from the sun. The skin burst against her teeth and sticky juice filled her mouth.

It was perfection.

"Come on. We have to catch up with the others," Moreau said to her, and Ritchie nodded but kept eating the pear as they walked through a maze of hedges, following cobblestone paths that split, diverged, and rejoined in the sort of knot work patterns she had seen from the train above.

It would be very easy to get lost here. Especially the way sound travelled through all that greenery. It always sounded like they were about to come upon a large group of laughing and chatting cadets, but every corner they rounded they were still alone.

"You know where we"re going?" Ritchie asked Moreau. She had finished her pear and now looked at the core, unsure what she should do with it. It was too sticky to put in her pocket.

"Your implant will guide you if you need it," Moreau said. "But it"s not as complicated as it looks. The patterns repeat a lot. You"ll get the feel for it." Then she took the core from Ritchie and tossed it under a hedge as they turned the next corner. "Compost," she said at Ritchie"s horrified look.

"Implant, right," Ritchie said. Once upon a time, Ritchie had used her implant for everything. She had trusted it implicitly.

But the events of the last few years had destroyed that trust. She had turned off all the things that used to run automatically, so she had to give a mental command to bring up her own guidance system. Now, at every branching point, the correct path to take her to their assigned dormitory lit up in her vision ever so subtly.

They took a few more turns through the hedge maze, then emerged at the back of an open lawn. The grass here had been mown in an overlapping pattern of diamonds, and the smell of the cut grass was still fresh in the air. The other cadets were already across the lawn, gathering on a patio that jutted out of the back of a three-story marble building topped with domes of the same creamy stone.

The two of them jogged across the freshly mown grass to reach the others before their tardiness was noticed.

"Cadets, you already have your room assignments," Colonel Hansen was saying as they climbed the three steps to the patio level. "You have a bit of time to find your beds and unpack, but you must be back down here to this patio for your orientation tour. Don"t be late!"

Ritchie consulted her implant and found the memo with her room and bed assignment, but before she could ask Moreau if she had gotten hers, she got another message. She had a brief moment"s hope that it was from Guy, but that died at once. It was Hansen, asking her to wait on the patio after he dismissed the other cadets.

"I"m supposed to stay here," Ritchie said to Moreau.

"Me too," Moreau said.

"Is this a task force thing?" Ritchie whispered. Only then did she remember that while they had left Kristof Wyss and Tassa Sokolov behind at Oymyakon with the other cadets in the lower three classes, Fitz was meant to be with them on this field trip.

She hadn"t seen him on the train, but that hadn"t been unusual. Once upon a time, they had been best friends. But that had been as little kids. They had started out as close friends again when they had met as cadets, but that hadn"t lasted.

Not that she had any idea why. Something had just... changed.

Nowadays, he avoided her a lot, and she had trained herself to stop feeling hurt by that. Well, the training was an ongoing affair, but it was successful in the sense that she didn"t always notice when he wasn"t there. His absence had become part of her mental familiar column.

familiar"Where"s Fitz?" she asked, looking around.

Moreau sighed what was to Ritchie"s ears an overly dramatic sigh. But then she pointed to the far end of the patio, closest to the back wall of the dormitory building itself, in the shadows from the afternoon sun.

There he was, standing alone, hands in his pockets and his head down as if half-napping. Maybe it was because he was in that gray shadow and not in the bright sun with the other cadets, but he looked pale to her eyes. Too thin, too tired.

But his dark hair was as thick as ever. Especially that one particular lock that always fell over his forehead, even when he wasn"t tipping his head down, as he was just now like he was trying to accentuate it.

Her fingers itched to brush it back, but that wouldn’t go down well. He barely tolerated her talking to him these days.

Still, he looked like he needed a friend. What could"ve happened to make him look so forlorn?

"What"s wrong with him?" Ritchie asked Moreau. Because as much as he had closed himself off to her, he did still sometimes talk with the others.

"I wouldn"t call Shackleton Fitz IV being antisocial "wrong"," Moreau said. "Not in the sense of being unusual."

"Still. Is something going on I should know about?"

Moreau sighed again, but didn"t follow it up with anything for a really long time.

"Moreau," Ritchie said at last.

"If I had to guess, I would say it"s because the Berwegers are here," Moreau said. "Or did you forget?"

"No, I didn"t forget," Ritchie said, although that was only half true. She had known they would be here. They were both first years at the diplomat school. She had been preparing herself for the inevitable encounter with them as much as she could.

But it was almost impossible to prepare to face someone whose uncanny charisma and illegal pheromone enhancements could put anyone in a sort of mindless t****l.

And it was worse when both twins were acting together.

"Shouldn’t Fitz look happier if he’s about to be reunited with Feena?"

"After a mere three weeks?" Moreau countered. Ritchie felt her cheeks heat, and Moreau actually looked embarrassed by her own words. "Also, technically, they broke up," she said.

"What was the story, though?" Ritchie asked. "Amicable mutual decision, I thought. Or that was the plan when Hansen told me."

"That was the plan," Moreau agreed. "And honestly, I don’t know anymore than you do about what was really going on there."

"He was using her to get information about what her family is up to," Ritchie said with more confidence than she felt.

"That was the intent," Moreau said. "But either Fitz is a better actor than I ever suspected, or somewhere along the way, feelings got involved."

Ritchie glanced over at Fitz, who was among the few lingering at Hansen’s command as the others wandered into the dormitory.

She really hoped that Moreau was wrong. She hoped Fitz was putting on a masterpiece of acting even now with all the gloomy moodiness.

Because the alternative was too horrifying to contemplate.