Paul shouldered Wolfgang to the ground and ran out of the gym. Joanna watched him get up, grinning. “He just needed the right incentive to move, apparently.”
“I’m starving,” Wolfgang said, swaying slightly. He caught himself on a wall handle and looked at Joanna. “Lack of food makes people do odd things?”
She laughed. “Do you have to ask?”
Joanna led the way to the kitchen. “You didn’t need to challenge him. Are you so dedicated to making Paul an enemy on day one of the journey?”
“It’s not day one,” Wolfgang said. “And I thought it might make him come out of his shell.”
“By humiliating him?” she asked. “Is this male bonding?”
“You didn’t have to be there. He wouldn’t have been embarrassed if you hadn’t been there.”
She laughed in surprise. “This is my fault? That’s fascinating. Did you really think you could bond by antagonizing him?”
He took a deep breath and visibly relaxed, as if he had to tell himself to do so. “We’re in trouble. You’re right. I just thought it would be good to focus on something else for a change.”
Joanna stopped in the hall and looked up at him. “You also showed yourself to be a bully who could be capable of the violence we saw yesterday,” she said seriously. “You could have lost your temper and pushed us all to perform for you in the gym, and gotten mad and killed us all.”
His icy eyes didn’t flinch from hers. “Even if I somehow did turn into some kind of slave driver, the deaths were too different to be a violent surge of rage. And thanks for assuming I could be capable of that.”
Long, long ago, in her first bout of college, Joanna had dated a man who was in the habit of threatening her when they argued. When she protested, he would twist her fears into How could you think I would do that? manipulations. She ended up feeling guilty after he threatened her, shook her, or once, hit her. Never again, she’d vowed, and had kept the vow for two hundred plus years.
She glared at Wolfgang. “No, you don’t get to act hurt. Of course I can think that of you. And your performance in there didn’t win you any friends on this ship.
“I’m going to get some food,” she added. “Come with me or don’t, but drop the hurt-puppy act. You’re capable of murder. Just like the rest of us.”
As Joanna suspected, she and Wolfgang were both in better mind-sets after eating. Wolfgang even apologized to Paul in front of the others. He didn’t accept, flipping Wolfgang a rude hand gesture that was moon-specific (it was what North American cultures called the okay sign, but the small o indicated that the moon was less important than the Earth; it was also meant to insinuate the small girth of a certain masculine body part), but at least Wolfgang made the effort to apologize.
Joanna hoped that perhaps Paul would lose the low-blood-sugar clone rage and warm to the rest of the crew after food. But he was tearing into his second cheeseburger and not looking up at the rest of them.
“He’s not doing much better, is he?” she whispered to Hiro.
Hiro ducked his head. “No. I apparently made things worse by offering to let him beat me up. I told him he could totally take me in a fight, but he only got more offended.”
Joanna stifled a laugh. “I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t seem open to the idea of beating up a smaller man for his ego.” She stopped and thought about everything she knew about testosterone. “Wait. I can totally see how he would enjoy that. And he didn’t go for it?”
Hiro shrugged and sipped at his tea. “I try to be a giver, I really do.”
A tired-looking Maria put a plate of eggs and bacon in front of Joanna, who looked up in surprise. “I didn’t order this.”
“Everyone has been wanting seconds,” Maria said. “I went with the odds. If you don’t want it, I’m sure we can find someone to take it.”
Joanna’s stomach grumbled, and she realized that she was still hungry. Wolfgang stood and shot her a look. She sighed. “I’d love to, but we need to get back to the tests. Thanks, but you’ll have to pass it on.” She turned to Paul, who still wouldn’t meet anyone’s eye. “Want my breakfast, Paul?”
He didn’t answer, but Hiro reached out a hand and snagged the plate.
Joanna smiled at Maria. “There you go. No waste.”
Maria shrugged. “No matter. It all goes back into the recycler in some way.”
Back in the medbay, the bodies were definitely beginning to smell. Joanna and Wolfgang laid them out side by side. Joanna dictated while Wolfgang took more notes. She recorded everything via video and separate audio, but Wolfgang wanted something visual and immediate, and wanted to see the bodies himself.
“We’ve established the captain was injured two days before the murders. So we can assume that she was not around for the carnage as it played out. Obviously, as she couldn’t have injured herself and then set up her own life support after committing the murders.”
“Which doesn’t absolve her. She could still be involved,” Wolfgang said. “Someone working on her orders, for example.”
Joanna nodded. “Could have been some revenge for her that got way out of hand. So to Hiro.”
Joanna checked Hiro for any wounds again. “It appears he suffered no trauma. We still assume he hanged himself before the carnage because someone other than him must have turned off the grav drive.”
Wolfgang shook his head. “The ship will continue to spin for some time on inertia, so turning off the grav drive would still allow for some gravity. He could have possibly turned it off before he hanged himself.”
“He had to have died close to all the other deaths,” Joanna said. “I’d like to think one of us would have at least cut him down and woken him before everyone else woke up.”
“If we didn’t leave him dead because of suicide,” Wolfgang reminded her. “But regardless, when I did my initial examinations, his body temperature was the same as the others’.”
“So very close.”
Joanna sighed and ran her hands through her curly black hair. “Now the real enigma. Maria. Apparently someone poisoned her with hemlock.” She ground her teeth. “She had to have realized it and, what, gone to the cloning bay to wake us all up? Did she also erase our mindmaps? And the logs?”
IAN spoke up. “Not enough data. Much of it has been purged.”
“Of course it has,” Joanna said. “Someone had to poison her before all this, around an hour, I’d say. Why, and how?”
“The other bodies are pretty self-explanatory,” Wolfgang said, leaning over Paul’s body with the severe bruising on the neck. “Stabbings and a choking. That at least doesn’t have a lot of mystery attached.”
“Besides who did it?” Joanna asked.
“Yes, besides that.”
Joanna wrinkled her nose. “We should do some final scans and recycle the bodies.”