When the video feed became too distorted for her to view, she tucked the slidepad into her bag and rubbed her hands together. She was loose on the station with reasonably high-level access and without the knowledge of the crew. True, she wasn’t sure how she’d get off the ship without being seen, but that was a problem for another time. For now, there was work to do.
“Right. Let’s see what’s been going on around here…”
#
On the other side of the station, two people worked diligently through some of the bureaucratic nonsense that kept an enterprise like this running. There are those who think electromagnetism and gravity are the most powerful forces in the cosmos. From the amount of it necessary for Indra IV Station to operate, you’d think the whole facility ran on record keeping and report writing. While paper was no longer the medium of choice for it, “paperwork” was a constant throughout the galaxy, and throughout time. The only thing that set it apart on the station was the ergonomics. Rather than sitting at desks, hunched over their input devices and squinting at screens, the datapad jockeys on the space station drifted in the air in a side room of the station. They were each tethered to the wall like parked blimps, eyes turned to the scrolling data they were tasked with sifting through.
“Not again…” muttered one worker.
His partner sipped at a plastic pouch of coffee. “What is it now?”
“You know how they’ve been sending up crews from TIS?”
“Yeah.”
“These idiots have been dragging their feet on the identification and certification literature for almost two weeks. It finally came through, and guess what?”
“No photos?”
“No photos,” he said with a nod. “How hard is this? Who even keeps employee files without photos anymore? They’re a load of idiots. All of them. And one of them is Robin Hartnett! We’ve had him on the station before. The fools actually removed his photo from the ID since last time. Same goes for half of the crew coming up. This smacks of some intern hitting the wrong button and not reporting it.”
“So turn them down. Simple as that.”
“It isn’t simple as that, because the stupid ship full of these can’t-follow-procedure idiots is supposed to arrive within the hour.”
“They’re that late on the certs?”
“Yeah. And management is due to check up on us today.”
“So what’re you going to do?”
“It’s damned if I do, damned if I don’t, right? If I reject their credentials, then we’re understaffed during crunch time. If I okay them and it comes up, then they’re going to chew me out something fierce if they find out I broke protocol.” He glanced at his partner. “Hey, you got any of those cheese packets? Toss one over.”
His friend tossed an individually wrapped snack to him. The bureaucrat tugged it open with his teeth and let the contents drift into the air beside him. One by one he plucked them out of the air with his free hand as he mulled over his options.
“It seems like the only thing I ever get to do is damage control… Okay. So they’re on their way here, right?”
“Right.”
“And if I don’t push these through, we’re going to have like twenty extra people crammed into the low-security section of the station until we can work through this stupid stuff. Just breathing our air and eating our food, and occupying our time without contributing, right?”
“Right.”
“If I push them through, then they get here, they get to work, and I use that time to try to dig up the missing info. If it comes in, great, no one’s the wiser. If it doesn’t come in, we wait until the end of the shift, ship these guys back, and deny payment. Cost savings, am I right?”
“You’re not wrong.”
“Of course I am. So let’s see here. … Eighteen workers. Approved for boarding, flagged for credential audit as time allows. Each worker is bringing seventy-five kilos of ‘specialty equipment.’ That’s kind of a lot, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’re bringing in those replacement heater modules for the snack room? I’ve been getting by on tepid coffee for a week and it’s torture.”
“But that’d come up in a supply shipment, not in a crew shuttle from off planet.” He grumbled. “Frickin’ unwanted cargo… Hey, who’s on cargo sweep detail right now?”
His partner tapped at his own datapad. “Uh… someone named Curtis and someone named Slade.”
“Are they TIS guys?”
“A TIS guy and a TIS girl.”
“Hah! Their problem, not mine. Additional cargo approved, flagged for high-security screening,” he said. “I love it when these morons end up screwing each other over with their boneheaded failure to follow simple rules.”
“Two wrongs making a right, am I right?”
“Right.” He snatched the last of the cheese snacks out of the air before it could float out of arm’s reach and scanned down the form he’d been filling out. “I guess that’s everything. … Man, this is a lot of shady stuff on one form.”
“Did you flag it all for additional security checks?”
“I just said I did.”
“And are all of the paperwork mistakes their fault?”
“Yeah.”
“So your ass is covered. Push it through.”
He hesitated for a moment more, then shrugged. “Eh. What’s the worst that can happen?”
He transmitted the completed form. A moment later, the confirmation flashed on his screen.
Additional Crew and Equipment Security Clearance Granted.
#
A few minutes drifting about in the unfinished space station hadn’t been as educational as Michella had hoped. Much of that time had been dedicated to figuring out just how to get around without them realizing she’d never left. Opening and closing doors was no problem. The hatches her stolen access could open were clearly marked. So far, she’d only encountered a handful that wouldn’t open for her. Cameras and other types of surveillance were another issue entirely. She could turn most of them off if she wanted to, but she felt certain that was a surefire way to tip someone off about her presence. Fortunately, on the long list of station features that had not been fully activated was the low-priority surveillance. According to the manifest she’d downloaded, the full complement of workers for the station was fewer than a dozen, though if she’d read it correctly, a fresh shift of workers would take that up to something closer to twenty in a few minutes. Like everything else on the lightly populated planet, this station ran on a skeleton crew. There was very little chance of bumping into another worker, and most of the sections of the station that weren’t currently occupied were on very low-level surveillance. Better yet, behind maintenance hatches scattered through the station were long tubes filled with mostly exposed systems and machinery. They were tight, with just barely room enough for her to slide along through them, but according to the data she had, the only monitoring inside was for the functionality and status of the equipment. She could use them to navigate without fear of notice.
By their very nature, these system conduits ran through the whole ship, but the necessities of safety and utility meant they were less than convenient for travel. They took a circuitous route, for one thing. For another, to prevent a catastrophe if there were a hull breach, they were regularly interrupted by bulkheads that she could manually open and shut. There was no signage indicating where a given junction led. She’d gotten turned around more than once. It would have been lovely if she’d encountered the huge, easily navigable air vents so ubiquitous in action movies, but that was a recipe for disaster in a space station, since one hole in the hull would suck the whole station dry without the bulkheads.
Eventually, she found her way to a maintenance office not unlike the one where the bribed technician worked. The consoles and systems within were powered but inactive. She supposed, once the station was fully operational, this would be the place where one of the limi
ted crew would drearily review and monitor the station’s systems. For now, it was completely forgotten. A perfect hiding place.
Her slidepad with its crew access privilege booted up the console easily enough. Combined with the stolen dongle, she’d logged in quickly. Eager though she was to continue her investigating, she would have to poke her way through the system gently. The system logs would show her unwitting accomplice as the one doing the searching, but if she was too aggressive, there was the possibility he’d notice someone was up to something. Best to keep to the sort of things he would be doing. Fortunately, that included reviewing security cam footage.
“You’d think they’d make these labels more useful,” she muttered.
She flipped through dozens of camera feeds with names like “MNT-001a” and “DKRM-223k.” As she dug through them, she glanced back to the arrival schedule, which was now available in far greater detail on the console screen. Pretty soon that mysterious blank spot in the schedule would be coming along. If there was a meeting on the way and she didn’t figure out where it would be and how to record it, this whole venture would be for naught.
As much as she grumbled about it, her talent with the slow, careful game of connect the dots she was engaged in now was perhaps the only reason she’d achieved any level of success in her investigations. Her superpower, if she had one, wasn’t finding the needle in the haystack. It was finding the one loop in a ball of yarn that, if tugged, would cause it all to neatly unravel before her. She saw connections. And somewhere in this tiresome heap of records and logs was the information she sought.
“Ahh…” she said, her eyes gleaming as she spotted it. “This whole section of the ship has no crew. But the lights are on and the cameras are off at the same time every week. And that time lines up with the blank arrival times. There’s a straight shot from one of the docking bays, and all of those cameras turn off on the same schedule. The meeting they don’t want anyone to know about is going to be taking place right here in… fifteen minutes. I knew it.”
She pulled up the network of conduits and tried to find something resembling a direct path from where she was to where she wanted to be. A lot of work was being done in that section of the station, according to the manifest. Lots of new construction and electrical work, plus some finishing touches like cleaning and sanitizing. No doubt that’s why they were having the meetings there, to oversee the work. As near as she could tell, at least some of those workers would still be working there. That meant not only surveillance but witnesses could cause problems for her if she wasn’t careful. She was going to have to try to make it there without poking her head out of these service conduits at all. It wasn’t going to be pleasant, but the really good dirt took plenty of digging and she knew it.
With the sequence of turns jotted down into her pad for reference, Michella unhooked the service conduit hatch and slid herself inside.
#
One of two automated docking bays gradually lit up. An irising external door only slightly smaller than the behemoth that had allowed the SOB to enter earlier that day dilated. A pair of ships moved sluggishly through. Each paused briefly while the air lock could clear them, then puttered over to the docking ports. The ships were jalopies, pieced together from salvaged pieces of other ships. Any semblance of aestheticism or grace was abandoned in favor of utility. In this case, that meant storage space. When it linked up with the port and started to offload its crew, the sheer volume of personnel coming out of this craft seemed bizarre. For a ship this size, barely larger than a conventional hovervan, one would expect a crew of four. They’d packed nine people into it, and another such ship was maneuvering in behind it, similarly overloaded if the manifest was to be believed.
Each member of the arriving crew lugged heavily loaded duffel bags. They were strangely equipped for a space station crew. Employees of such a facility came in two distinct varieties. There were the jumpsuit-clad day-to-day workers and the space-suit clad exterior workers. This crew looked more like a ground-based construction crew. Their jumpsuits were more rugged, and each wore hard hats and goggles. It gave the whole crew an oddly anonymous look, only the lower half of their faces bare.
The newcomers carried heavy duffel bags with them as they approached a second air lock of sorts, the security checkpoint. It was a ring-shaped scanner, large enough for a single member of the crew with a bit of space to spare for equipment. The scanner was operated by a single crewman with a TIS jumpsuit. He had the oddly distributed pudginess of someone who had been spending a little too much time in orbit. He wore a badge that labeled him Max Crick.
“Okay, lads and ladies,” said the man, floating at the ring-shaped scanner that had been notably absent in the primary docking bay. “You know the drill. Badges out. Crew and equipment through the scanner, one at a time and we’ll get you through.”
The first new arrival, one of the taller of the group, tugged some handrails and darted through the hoop. Red lights flashed and the screens lit up with warnings. The security worker casually silenced them.
“Robin Hartnett. Welcome aboard. Been away awhile, have we?” the security worker said.
“Yeah. I was back at home base. Waiting until the timing was right.”
Another worker passed through, raising another set of warnings that were quickly dismissed. “Heh. You talk to the boss before you left?”
“You think I could avoid talking to the boss before this assignment?” said Hartnett.
Another worker. Another warning. Another “ignore” command. “So what’s what?”
“He says we need to wrap this thing up. There’s big money to be made if this contract goes our way.”
“He sure sent a lot of employees up here. There’s work to be done on the surface too, you know.”
“The surface isn’t a problem. The locals have been playing a lot nicer down there. Shouldn’t be much effort to button things down. Up here, things need that special touch.”
“Yeah. Management’s in the house, you know.”
“Already?”
“Yeah, already. You can set your watch by that one.”
Hartnett raised his goggles and glared at the security crewman. “Is she getting her report?”
“I’ve got to imagine she is.”
“About us?”
“I’ve got to imagine she is,” he repeated irritably.
Hartnett gritted his teeth. “And you don’t think that might be a problem?”
“What? You get to work quick, and there shouldn’t be any problem.”
Hartnett turned to the others. “On the double. If we’re not in place and ready to go by the time the distinguished representative from the Patels reviews her troops, things could get messy.”
The others picked up the pace.
“What are we looking at in terms of Patel Construction crew?”
“Maybe three to one.”
“In favor of us or them?”
“Pff. In favor of us, obviously. Why do you think the quotes for the contract were so low? Hang on a moment.” The security crewman completely disabled the security scan after dismissing a dozen alerts. “If you ask me, if we’d knocked another million credits off the fee, we’d have had this place all to ourselves.”
“Nah. Patel’s an idiot, but he’s not that much of an idiot.”
“Let’s not forget, Patel isn’t the only one making the decisions.” He glanced at the station activity monitors. “The time’s right. Everyone just about ready?”
The crew had entirely passed through the checkpoint.
“Okay then,” said Crick. “Let’s head down to the main power coupling and get to work.”
#
Michella breathlessly squeezed herself through what she hoped was the last bulkhead opening. She was late now, and she knew it. Since she was in a section of the ship never intended for prolonged occupancy, it lacked what few luxuries the rest of the space station included. That meant little in the way
of insulation or ventilation. She was getting awfully warm and stuffy, so close to the equipment humming with power. The conduit also lacked acoustic insulation. Every little whir and rattle of the station’s operation thrummed through the struts around her as if they were tuning forks. She knew the exact moment docking had occurred in this section of the ship, and that had been minutes ago.
She wriggled sweatily into a room that was so like the one she’d left behind that she briefly wondered if she’d somehow done a full lap of the station. The consoles here, however, were inactive. From the looks of them, they’d yet to be powered up once. Stickers and protective film covered the interface points. It would have been nice to take the time to power the console up and check to be sure the station wasn’t somehow buzzing about her discovery, but there was no time. She carefully unlocked the door and eased it open.
The crew corridor was well lit, unlike most of the rest of the station. Nearby, she could hear the echoing murmur of conversation. She glanced about until she spotted a camera node. Just as in the docking bay, the indicator was dark.
I wonder how much money they wasted on the security system, only to leave it off half the time, she thought.
Her zero-gravity skills still weren’t the best, but after spending so long dragging herself through holes barely large enough for her, moving swiftly and silently through tubes that were actually intended to be used for travel felt like child’s play.
When she was near enough for the voices to resolve into recognizable speech, she activated her slidepad’s recorder and boosted its sensitivity as high as she could manage. She listened in on her hands-free.
“… barely on schedule as it is,” said a sharp, business-like voice.
“Preethy…” Michella said to herself, almost gleefully. “I knew it would be you. Just what brings you to the station with all of this cloak-and-dagger intrigue around the visit?”
Indra Station Page 7
