06 - Straight Down the Line
I said I'd kill him for her.
I was stuck with her then. My cruise ship had already left for its next stop, and the next one wouldn't be around for months. Even if I had any second thoughts, there wasn't anywhere for me to run. Outer space is just a series of relay points. Once you're at one, you're trapped there. It's like being on a train. She said that to me once. She said we were in this together now. There was no getting off. Straight down the line. To infinity and beyond.
After we finished fleshing out our plan, she cut off our meetings. She said it wasn't smart for us to be seen together. She told me it was only temporary. It still hurt like hell.
All that was left for me was to roam Europa's resort alone, sipping rye and striking up the odd conversation with the locals.
I kept replaying the plan over and over in my head. It seemed flawless. Sometimes that's how things seem right before disaster.
I would board the ship they were taking to IO as a passenger. Only in the lower decks, of course. I couldn't afford anything else.
On the second night of the return journey, right before his spacewalk scheduled for the time the sun would be inching its way around the colossal mass of Jupiter, she would secretly let me into the upper decks. She said she was able to take care of the usual security protocols. I trusted her on that front. That was computer-stuff, she was a computer.
I would then sneak into his room and kill him while he slept.
We never really got into the details of how I'd kill him. I went through a million different ways in my own head. I never wanted to say them out loud and she didn't ask. Maybe she thought I'd done this before. I might have let on a few times that I was a tough guy with a shady past.
Truth was, I'd never done anything like that. I'd lived a boring life. Judy was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me.
Anyway, after I'd, you know, killed him, we would stuff his body into his space suit and throw him out an airlock at his usual time. She said she could hack his suit to show an oxygen depletion error 5 minutes after that, as well as simulate some vital signs until then.
It was the clones job to maintain and prepare the suit for him. That's where he came into it. She couldn't get him to kill for her, but she could get him to lie for her.
He would take the fall and say he messed up the settings. She would get the massive payout and she'd take me somewhere pretty with it. She promised me it would all work out just like she said. All we had to do was stick together.