Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1) by Niall Teasdale

blinked at herself in the mirror.
    As usual, the imagery was not really staying with her. She had perfectly good, or bad, real memories of the Dallas op without needing the ones her dreaming mind came up with, but there was something which had prodded real memories to the fore. One of the terrorists had been using a micromissile launcher firing infrared-homing projectiles. Those had had armour-piercing warheads, but gyroc micromissiles were specifically designed for specialist warhead delivery. They were not so good at short range, however; being small rockets, they needed space to accelerate and there had been something a little odd about Hunt’s entry wound…
    Grabbing her shiny plastic bodysuit, she pulled it on and sealed it before padding out of her cabin and across to cabin one, otherwise known as ‘the crime scene.’ The door unlocked and opened on her command, though she expected one of the flight crew to ask her what she was up to fairly quickly. In truth she was not really sure, but she had a feeling that the gun used to kill Hunt had never left the room.
    She looked around at the desk. He had been sitting there, on one side of the room. The room was not wide enough for a gyroc to reach full speed, but wide enough to get up to a workable velocity against an unarmoured target. Still, the killer would have wanted as much room as possible… Fox crossed to the opposite wall and began looking around. A small launcher could be hidden fairly easily; micromissiles required little more than a tube and something to signal ignition.
    ‘Inspector?’ The voice came from the room’s speakers and she did not recognise it. A woman this time, one of the relief shift, probably. ‘This is Lieutenant Bright on the bridge. Is something wrong?’
    And that was when Fox saw the flicker of unusual edges highlighted by her visual enhancement software and spotted the short tube poking out of a half-concealed air vent in the cabin’s ceiling. ‘No, Lieutenant, nothing’s wrong. I just found our murder weapon. Could you get one of your engineering staff down here with a screwdriver?’
    ~~~
    The insistent chiming was in Fox’s head and in her ears. Her implant was echoing the room’s communications alert into her sleeping brain and dragging her out of an attempt to get back her lost sleep. A thought banished both sounds and she was sure her voice carried her disapproval of the disturbance when she spoke. ‘Yes? What is it?’
    ‘Inspector? Sorry to disturb you, it’s Parsons. We’re about an hour out of orbital insertion and I have a Captain Canard wanting to talk to you.’
    Canard was calling her very long distance now? Crap. ‘Put him through, please. Uh, audio only?’
    ‘At this distance, video gives you a headache and you’ll notice the delay on the audio. Putting it through.’
    There was a click and Fox said, ‘Captain? It’s Meridian.’ She rolled out of bed and reached for her suit. If they were going to dock soon… Well, maybe ninety minutes anyway… She was not going to get back to sleep anyway.
    ‘What’ve you got yourself into this time, Inspector?’ The question was snapped out and Fox did not need video to see the man fuming at his desk in precinct 19’s HQ. She closed the seams on her suit and reached for her jeans.
    ‘This homicide? They just asked me to look at the body because I was aboard. There’s nothing I can do, really. Don’t have the gear, don’t have the jurisdiction.’
    There really was a noticeable delay. She figured he had started speaking before she got the last word out. ‘Jurisdiction is the problem. Technically it’s the UniFeds’ case, but this guy was a US citizen on a US ship about to come down to US airspace and someone up the chain is pulling strings. UNTPP have agreed to let NAPA handle it so long as they’re kept in the loop and you handle the investigation.’
    ‘Crap,’ Fox stated flatly. If someone was pressing to have the case handled by American rather than