Indra Station

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “I concur with that assessment.”

  Lex tapped the cheater bar in the palm of his hand. “Do we have any idea where that call they made from the ship was directed?”

  “No.”

  “Was the ship Preethy’s ship?”

  “No.”

  He tightened his fist. “I’m not taking any chances. This calls for another visit to Patel.” He hurried inside the garage.

  “We have already established the potential dangers of piloting the tampered-with vehicle,” Ma said.

  “I won’t be taking that one.”

  He bleeped open one of the larger cubicles. This one lacked any tools inside. It was something of a storage area, littered with crates and storage containers. He tapped in a code to the front door of one of the largest. It was the size of an old-fashioned shipping container.

  The door swung aside. Lex grinned.

  “Let Karter know I’m taking his hoversled for a spin.”

  #

  Minutes later, Lex was blasting across the landscape. He’d flown every manner of craft. Starships, hoversleds, hovercars. He’d strapped on jet packs, and even taken spins on wheeled vehicles. Nothing had ever felt as fast as this sled. It wasn’t that it was the fastest vehicle he’d ever ridden. He’d broken light speed by many multiples on a daily basis for much of his life. But that was just sitting in a darkened cockpit watching navigational values change. When the nearest thing to give you an idea of how fast you were going was a hydrogen molecule glancing off your navigational shields, you tended to take speed for granted. But this thing was so low to the ground, and its inertial dampener was so finely calibrated, it felt like he’d been fired out of a cannon from the moment he juiced the thrusters. When he got out onto the open desert and really opened it up, the nose began to glow and spark with the shockfront he was pushing ahead of him.

  “Karter made a hoversled that needs ablative heat shielding!” Lex raved.

  He had to shout to be heard over the rushing wind outside the cockpit, and he did so despite the fact that there was no one but a particularly enthusiastic Squee to share the revelation with. The little creature was as excited as he was, despite the fact that Lex had taken the quite reasonable precaution of strapping her in. If he hadn’t, she would have literally been bouncing off the windows with every turn.

  Lex didn’t bother looking at the velocity on the display. It may as well have been flashing “too fast.” He dared not take it up to this speed near a city, as there was little doubt that he was dragging a sonic boom across the landscape.

  Lex dialed down the speed as he drew closer to Patel’s compound. As before, a voice broke through on his radio without his permission.

  “Hovercar, license number… why don’t you have a license number?” the voice asked.

  “It’s me again,” Lex said.

  “Lex?”

  “Yeah. I need to talk to Nick.”

  “He’s asleep, Lex. Go home.”

  “Wake him up. It’s about Preethy.”

  “I don’t… I’ve never had to wake Mr. Patel up. You should just turn around. Come back in the morning.”

  “Nope.”

  “I’ll rephrase that. Go home. You do not have permission to enter the compound.”

  “Too bad. I’m coming. You can wake him up with a knock on the door or by taking a warning shot, but you’re waking him up.”

  “We don’t do warning shots.”

  Something in the instrument display flashed. Familiar as he was with the operation of such a vehicle, he’d barely glanced over what additional options this Dee Edition hoversled might have. It took him a second or two to notice the flashing indicator that read Small Arms Targeting Detected.

  “Why would Karter think a racing vehicle would need that?” he said quietly.

  A spark of light flashed just ahead of the hoversled. A moment later he heard a resounding clap—the sound of the supersonic rifle that had just been fired at him.

  “I guess for the same reason he gave it defensive shields.” He looked over the controls. “Please don’t tell me he put weapons on this thing. I do not need to be driving an armed vehicle to a mobster’s front door uninvited.”

  “Turn around!” the voice barked.

  “Look, if you think shooting at me is going to change my mind, you don’t know much about my personal history. Heck, I just found out I might have causality armor, so I’m double not worried about getting shot at.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Never mind. The boss must be awake now, right? So trot him out. I need to have a word with him.”

  The voice went silent for nearly a minute. That he’d not been shot at a second time was probably a good sign, though the lack of a verbal confrontation did give Lex enough time to consider the fact that getting shot at by a sniper didn’t even move the needle on his emotional state. It was possible his survival instinct was beginning to atrophy.

  “Into the courtyard, Alexander. And when you get out of your vehicle, both hands where we can see them.”

  “Finally,” Lex said.

  He pulled the sled into the indicated courtyard and came to an abrupt stop. Karter’s hotrod of a hoversled had deceleration that was every bit the match for its acceleration.

  Things were a little different this time compared to his visit earlier in the day. Three heavily armed men who had made a career out of the art of intimidation were waiting for him, and they didn’t bother shouting any instructions. Weapons were raised in his direction, illustrating that organized crime had a very different policy on trigger discipline than the armed services.

  Lex did his best to keep his hands visible as he unstrapped himself. Squee, it turned out, was less interested in such precautions. She pulled free of her own restraints and bounced to the ground.

  “Squee, no!” Lex shouted.

  One of the trigger-happy guards took a shot. The blurring speed and sharp reflexes of the funk meant the shot missed by a meter. But the creature knew a hostile act when she saw it. She looked at the guards sharply. Then spun around and raised her tail.

  “Oh, jeez…” Lex said.

  She let loose one of the more potent natural defenses the animal kingdom had yet devised, as filtered through the mind of a mad engineer. A spritz of funk spray wafted in the direction of the guards, reducing them to a coughing, retching heap.

  And right on cue, Nick Patel stepped out into the cool night air. Gone was the smoking jacket. Now he wore a luxurious robe and a very sour expression. He gave the entire scene a measuring look. A tricked-out hoversled was still sizzling from its supersonic trip. Three of his best men looked like they were suffering through a hangover and a teargas attack simultaneously. And in the middle of it all, Lex.

  “Lex,” he barked. “The whole idea of starting this league is to get away from being woken up by the sound of gunshots.”

  “Yeah. And I was hoping being a racer would mean fewer people strapping explosives to stuff I own. Sorry about the stink by the way. I’ve got a spray for that.”

  “Then you’d better use it, and get your ass in here. I’m not sure a good enough reason exists to make this okay.”

  Several such events had persuaded Lex to treat Squee’s deodorizer spray like a parachute. Most of the time it was useless, but in the rare situation he needed it, he really needed it. Thus, he always had some on hand. He gave Squee and the three unfortunate guards a good spray down, then emptied the rest of the can indiscriminately around the courtyard. There was still the lingering bouquet of stench, but it was the sort of thing that would take a few minutes of stiff breeze to air out rather than a week with a power washer.

  #

  Nick clearly didn’t have the greatest of confidence in Squee’s self-control, as their little meeting ended up taking place in what would probably have been called a mudroom if this planet had had enough water for there to be mud.

  Lex had just gotten through
explaining his run-in with the so-called contractors. He showed the picture of the device, and what he knew about what was going on with the space station—which admittedly wasn’t much. Nick listened quietly and thoughtfully.

  “So I’m thinking this is the kind of thing you would want to look into,” Lex concluded.

  Nick’s expression was stern. He felt his pockets for a slidepad. Failing to find it—since this was his robe—he instead tapped a panel on the wall. “Put me through to the security chief,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. Deploying the emergency beacons now,” the chief replied immediately.

  “Emergency beacons?” Lex said.

  “Drones. We can’t keep them deployed, because the sandstorms knock them out faster than we can replace them. But we can get them up long enough to create temporary mesh networks when the main network is down.”

  “Man. You’re good at this sort of thing.”

  “I’m a contractor on a desert planet. You learn to adapt to the weaknesses of the system.”

  “Beacons up,” the chief said.

  “I want a full security audit of the energy facility, and see if you can get them to ping the station,” Nick said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Nick crossed his arms. “This is your moment of reckoning, Lex. We’re about to find out if this is my problem or your problem. If it’s mine, you’d better believe I’ll be doing something about it. If it’s yours, you’ll understand if I prefer to get a full night’s sleep before looking into it further.”

  The voice came back quickly. “They say everything checks out and they got a ping.”

  Nick glanced at the panel. “So quickly?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who reported this?”

  “One moment. … Security Tech Anand.”

  “Put me through to him.”

  The connection clicked and snapped a bit. When a new voice came, it was distorted by what was presumably an extremely underpowered temporary network.

  “Tech Anand here.”

  “You ran the audit?” Patel said.

  “I did. No unauthorized accesses. All badges accounted for. The computer didn’t detect any tampering with the monitoring software or surveillance.”

  “And the ping to the station?”

  “Came back with no latency. They just haven’t got data or voice up yet.”

  “I see. Well. Thank you for your quick work.” Nick hung up, then tapped the screen again for a new call. “I’m down in the servant’s foyer. Someone bring me a damn datapad.”

  “What’s up?” Lex said.

  “Let’s just say, if my memory serves, something smells fishy.”

  In an alarmingly short amount of time, someone came running in with the beefier cousin of the more ubiquitous slidepad. He tapped across the screen and brought up a spreadsheet.

  “That’s what I thought… Anand isn’t on the night shift. And he’s a low-trust employee. He should never be running things.”

  “Low-trust?”

  “A side effect of the specific nature of my business dealings. You learn to rank your employees by how susceptible they are to persuasion. Anand is the kind who’d look the other way for the right price.”

  “And you employ him in security?”

  “I don’t exactly have the pick of the litter here on Operlo. There are more skilled jobs than skilled workers. When you can’t automate a system, you find ways to use people like that safely. He’s supposed to be supervised.” Patel set the pad down. “Okay. Here’s the situation. Preethy’s visits don’t usually last this long, but a long visit like this isn’t entirely without precedent. And the network outages don’t usually last this long, but there’s precedent there too. Anand shouldn’t be in charge, but shift trading and rule bending could put him there. None of it means anything by itself, but the stack of coincidences is starting to smell like a smoking gun. I’m going to send a ship up to check on things.”

  Lex reached into his pocket. “I can save you some time. The SOB is in the neighborhood already. If you’ll give me your blessing, I can have it check it out.”

  “Do you make a habit of leaving your ship in orbit near private property?”

  “No, but sometimes we end up on the happy side of a coincidence. Do I have your blessing?”

  “… Do it, but I’m sending my own crew up too. And I’m keeping my eye on you.”

  “At this point, you’d be the only one who wasn’t.” Lex tapped a contact.

  “Hello, Lex,” said Ma.

  “Ma, the time for subtlety is done. Get up close and personal. Find Michella and Preethy. I’ve got the boss here, and he’ll be able to call off the troops if they try to stop you. Assuming they’re his troops.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Chapter 11

  “I wish these conduits would pick a temperature and stick with it,” Michella muttered.

  The once frigid conduits were becoming uncomfortably warm again. It didn’t help matters that Michella now had to share the cramped space with Preethy.

  “Are we nearly there? It feels as though we’ve wrapped around the entire station,” Preethy said, her own impressive patience waning.

  “Yeah. These conduits start to wear on you. But if you were right, then the room we need is right ahead.”

  They eased up to what she hoped was the final bulkhead to bypass. Practice made the disconnection a quick procedure. A minute or two later, Preethy and Michella were on either side of a hatch leading back into the part of the ship that was actually intended for humans to traverse. Michella pressed her ear to it.

  “I don’t think there’s anyone on the other side, but there’s someone close. Quietly.”

  They each grasped the wheels and latches holding the hatch in place and eased them gradually into their open position. The hatch came loose, and they barely eased it aside enough for them to look out. They’d made their way all the way back to a corridor not too far from the main dock. Directly across from them was a storage locker labeled Survival Suits.

  “Okay… You’re sure the slidepad controls will still work through those gloves?” Michella whispered.

  “Of course,” Preethy said.

  She took a breath. “Okay, so we get out there, we get into the survival room, and we get suited up. Then we get to an air lock and get out. That’ll get us outside the station, and we should be able to summon the ship.” She gritted her teeth. “I want to go on the record saying I don’t like this plan.”

  “I am not terribly pleased with it myself.”

  “Sure, but they probably still need a code from you. Me, they can kill. Even so, we’re short on options.”

  Michella poked through the nearby cameras. Thanks to Preethy’s access level, there was no locking her out of the surveillance system.

  “The nearest crew looks like it’s only one corridor away. We have to be absolutely silent,” she warned.

  Preethy nodded.

  They let the hatch drift slowly aside. Preethy dragged herself out first, then braced herself and helped Michella slide free. They affixed the hatch again, on the off chance it would drift into something and make a sound. A short, silent dart across the corridor took them to the survival hatch. Like so many bits of emergency apparatus, the door had an alarm, but Preethy felt around for the manual bypass.

  A soft chirp broke the silence like a gong. Since they’d both had to use the slidepad, Michella had deactivated the hands-free. As a result, the voice that followed blared out of the slidepad’s main speakers.

  “Ms. Modane or Ms. Misra, this is Ma. Please respond with your current status.”

  The voices of thugs on both sides rang out. They’d be upon them in seconds. No time to get back into the conduit safely. They’d just be trapping themselves. What they needed now was time. And that meant acting now and thinking later.

  “Scatter!” Michella shouted.

  Preethy hurled herself down the corr
idor in one direction. Michella flung herself down the other.

  “Signal quality is fading. Please remain stationary to maintain contact,” Ma said.

  Michella mashed the screen with her thumb. “We’re under attack! You blew our cover!” she shouted.

  A shot rang out and struck a nearby handrail.

  “These idiots are shooting in a space station!” she raved.

  “Who is threatening you?”

  “Ramses Hatch! He’s taken over the station. Preethy is here. He needs a code from her to control the weather. He wants control to extort Patel!”

  Something in her brain demanded she deliver as much information as she could as quickly as possible. There was no telling how long the connection would last, or even how much longer she would stay alive. The reporter in her needed to report.

  “I am attempting to bridge a connection to the station’s systems through your slidepad to initiate docking procedure,” Ma said. “I advise you to attempt to reach the docking bay.”

  Michella reached an intersection in the corridor and barreled headlong into two thugs coming at her from an adjoining section. The three of them spun and bounced off the walls. She fought and scratched and clawed her way free, kicking her way out of the tangle only to find that the flailing tumble had cost her the slidepad and opened her handbag. She saw the communicator clatter and tumble back the way she’d come, and now the already recovering thugs were between her and it. Now she was down to the pistol and whatever hadn’t gone spilling out of her bag.

  Michella moved on instinct alone. There wasn’t time enough to make any plans beyond getting to the docking bay—one desperate step at a time.

  Her unsteady, unskilled motion through the corridor worked in her favor, as her pursuers weren’t able to track her chaotic motion well enough to take accurate aim.

  The entrance to the docking bay approached so quickly she nearly missed it. A shove off the wall sent her slamming painfully into the doorway, but she scrambled through and pounded the door controls to shut it. Once the door shut, she fired her pistol into the mechanism, hopefully fusing it enough to keep the others from coming through. Not that it mattered much. On a station that was obviously never supposed to have gunplay aboard, she very much doubted the hatch doors were bulletproof.