Void

by Matt Thomas

  As much as he wanted it, sleep never came. The more he lay there, tossing and turning, unsuccessfully running through mental calming techniques hoping something would help him fade away, the more his agitation grew. Random thoughts of stresses outside of his dominion flitted in and out of Lind's head. The loss of Kay, the presence of the Hitchhiker, the relentless Sadko messages asking about the status of their precious Marlin. Lind comingled the separate issues into a single stream, filling every crack and crevice in his consciousness until he only saw failures. Before his mind spiraled out of control, he grasped onto his investigation like a lifeline, forcefully hauling himself out of his depression one intrigue at a time.

  What brought the Marlin to a stand-still so shortly after takeoff? Whatever failure didn't send the ship cruising uncontrolled in some random direction or crashing down on the surface, the two most likely scenarios for a catastrophic system failure. It had been stable in orbit.

  Was the small container he saw on the video the reason Rykov's brains floated around the inside the ship? It was the last stop for Rykov, but nothing other than the ridiculous expense of sending a Marlin showed a remarkable interest in the package.

  What did the contain hold? It had no markings or unusually protective coverings. Only the camera image provided any clue. He wouldn't be able to identify the container in a luggage rack, much less a freighter.

  Lind kicked himself for not doing a better inventory before arranging for someone to tow the ship. Reviewing the video of his inspection could only do so much, and he didn't trust the repair crews to maintain the integrity of the crime scene. A package that small could fit anywhere on the Marlin, and a savvy pilot who believed it was worth killing for could stash it just about anywhere. No, Lind knew he'd been distracted, distant from the investigation he knew he should be conducting and now had to make an inconvenient detour to fix his mistake.

  After an hour and forty minutes of struggle, with his investigation occupying more and more of his thoughts, sleep no longer seemed worth the effort. The urge to urinate forced him downstairs, and he crept, hoping that his passenger would remain asleep and Lind could avoid any social interaction. When he returned to the cockpit, the orange glow of Titan filled what little room the inky storms of Saturn left open in the view screen. They still had another five hours before they docked with the crowded station orbiting the moon. Somehow he doubted his trip to the surface of Iapetus took long enough for any portion of the examination on Rykov's ship to be complete. He'd be lucky if it had made it into the repair yard. Maybe he would have a second chance to examine the untainted crime scene.

  A tone rang through the compartments of the Mako shortly after he took the pilot's chair, a tone that ordinarily would wake him up for the initial approach to the station. It certainly woke up the Hitchhiker downstairs, but the locked stairwell hatch would keep him from interfering. Lind contacted control and secured his place in line for a berth and setting the autopilot for the approach, a process that took a total of three minutes. Then, the investigator returned to work, pulling up the data he had siphoned from the Marlin's barely functioning computer network. Even with the hard drive stolen, his equipment could find fragments of data in the memories of the various systems. He found what he needed cached in the Marlin's engineering processor.

  The limited data points he scavenged told Lind Rykov maintained minimalist records, either from duty or confidentiality or laziness. His company mandated he logged every stop, cargo, fuel consumption, and little else. The pilot did not appear to exceed these standards. No entry ran longer than twenty-five words. Without a high-volume of records to parse, Lind developed a shallow overview of the numbers quickly. He only found an ordinary itinerary for a high-speed messenger. Going any deeper, however, proved nearly impossible. At the time of his death, Rykov in fact only carried one piece of cargo, the box he picked up from Iapetus less than an hour before his ship ceased functioning. It's description appeared in the log:

  PU (IAPETUS): (1) X SMALL SHIPPING BOX, 30CM X 30CM X 20CM, 20KG, LOCKED

  That one line, Lind decided, built his entire case. Somehow, that small yet heavy, innocuous shipping box lead to Rykov's ambush and murder. In the absence of other cargo, it had to.

  Lind recognized he could assume the wrong things. Random robbery was an option, unlikely as it may be. A ship, floating helpless in orbit around a nothing moon, sees a good Samaritan instead of a vulture, lets the wrong people on board. But that meant incredibly, unreasonably, bad luck.

  This scenario demanded certain facts. There had to be predators, which existed but were rare, mostly around major shipping lanes or more lucrative remote outposts in the asteroid belt. That led to the second point of bad luck, they had to be near the lonely station of Iapetus, a research outpost on the way to nowhere. They had to stumble across the disabled Marlin, know it was disabled since a fully functioning ship could outrun them without a second thought. Last, they had to be willing to put forth the effort and accept the risk for a messenger ship that typically carried nothing except for maybe clothes and toothbrushes belonged to anyone other than one of the half-a-dozen major corporations, and none of it was tracked with less than an army of accountants.

  Even if someone could get away with stealing something, there weren't many places to hide. Robbery, especially violent robbery, wasn't worth the effort under the best of circumstances. The randomness of such an attack was as unimaginable as the alternative. That involved someone somehow targeting and disabling the Marlin. Such an operation would be as unimaginably complex as piracy was unimaginably unlucky.

  But Lind never would have imagined that an unregistered, off-the-books Mako cruised the system, either. That line of questioning entered a separate realm he couldn't devote energy to.

  A squawking radio broke Lind's concentration and returned his attention to the mundane task of docking his ship.

  Titan Orbital Station sprawled in orbit without elegance. Some stations, like The Hub around Earth or the asteroid belt stations of Ceres and Vesta, prided themselves on the grace and elegance in their designs. TOS spun around the giant, industrial moon in utilitarian fashion. Branches of docking ports extending for kilometers, interrupted by conglomerate service nodes. Storage facilities piled around the outskirts, and a knot of welded-together facilities comprised the heart of the complex. Small cargo carriers, mostly Flounders but a few other small vessels capable of entering Titan's methane atmosphere emerged from the great orange ball of the moon. They docked with the station, where armies of longshoremen offloaded their cargo before loading the larger, long-haul ships like Skipjacks and Guppies parked on the other side of the docks and destined for elsewhere in the solar system.

  The development of Titan's surface eliminated the need for a more robust station. TOS served as a transit point, a stepping-stone onto the moon, nothing more. Lind hated these industrial stations, avoiding them whenever necessary. He found far more comfort on the surface colonies such stations serviced. The things that made Lind despise such places encouraged the criminal element that regularly required the intervention of Thirty-Twos.

  As much as he disliked TOS, Lind looked forward to spending his time and money in bars and hotels slightly less spartan than those in Norse station, once he fixed his mistake. Lind could still find his escape from his obsessive thinking about the accident. As soon as he cut the Hitchhiker loose, he could drink alone again. Surely, the mechanics weren't done with the Marlin. He could enjoy one night to himself before returning to work. In the morning, sober again and hopefully not too hung-over, he try to resurrect his investigation.

  Then, maybe, the mechanics on TOS could paint the picture how Rykov's Marlin ended up adrift and Rykov ended up dead.

  *****

  Parting couldn't have been easier. The Hitchhiker, bags packed, weighing down his spine like a tree branch under snow, excitedly popped through the airlock, thanked Lind for almost locking him in a cell and ignoring him during their journey, and began his shuffle
down the long corridor to the main station. Lind brushed passed him in the same hallway without a word or look back.

  A call to the maintenance hanger told him they were far ahead of his expected scheduled. They would finish their initial inspection of the Marlin in less than four hours. They ship arrived only two hours before, but they bumped it to the top of the priority list. Lind never had mechanics decide on their own to give him special treatment; he knew the Marlin, not the Thirty-Two, inspired the bump.

  Lind felt no shame in his initial irritation at his inability to drink himself into oblivion immediately, but he quickly dismissed the disappointment. He grabbed a sober lunch and took the opportunity to go to the ship captain's lounge to shower in a real shower and wash a load of laundry. Anxious to get his inspection over with, he headed to the docked Marlin early.

  The maintenance facility capped one of the kilometer-long loading docks stretching out from either side of the station, and it took Lind twenty minutes of walking to arrive, although he enjoyed stretching his legs. As with most repair yards, the facility could have swallowed several city blocks. Ships and shuttles of nearly every size crowded the floor, scaffolding hanging off of them, panels flipped open, spotlights aimed in all the nooks and crannies. TOS, unlike many other small repair facilities around the system, maintained a clean room used for high-precision work on sensitive components damaged by the caustic atmosphere and clouds of particles circling Titan. The clean room also made an excellent environment for searching a portable crime scene, and the Marlin sat nearly pristine on the other side of the sealed door. Lind pounded on the door to the control room and flashed his credentials when challenged. The small portion of their protective white suits not covering their faces showed their irritation at being disturbed so abruptly. The scowls greeting Lind would disappear as soon as he released the ship and they returned to their high-paying clients instead of fulfilling obligatory free terms of a contract.

  They unsealed the door and Lind let himself in. "What have you got?" He asked without small talk.

  "We're not finished the report."

  "Can you tell me what's going to be in it?"

  They wisely skipped the strong-arming step and directed him to get into a clean suit. Once the baggy plastic garment covered any possible dust contamination on his clothes, he followed the foreman into the facility, footsteps echoing against the empty surfaces.

  "First, she's a beautiful ship." The mechanic said. "Even with all the blood and brains all over the windscreen." He led Lind underneath one of the massive engines. It was the first time Lind had really looked at the vessel up close from the outside. Smooth lines flowed along the nacelles, with every micrometeorite impact and scratch repaired and buffed out leaving only slight discolorations in the skin. Rykov must have loved that Marlin to put so much time into it. Lind admitted, for a moment, he bought into the hype over the fastest ship flying.

  "Let me look inside."

  Begrudgingly, the foreman assented, although Lind couldn't figure out the basis for his reluctance. The hatch remained open, with the short ramp hanging down to the deck of the hanger.

  The station's artificial gravity ended the bloody snow-globe he experienced his last visit to the Marlin. Impacts from blood droplets and bits of brain matter peppered nearly every surface from where they fell. Somehow, the clear air mitigated the claustrophobia Lind had previously experienced. The absence of Rykov's floating body helped, too.

  Barely inside the ship, Lind began to develop answers to his questions. Both storage areas were empty, as he expected. The restraining straps dangled uselessly on bare, dented shelves. If Rykov had secured the cargo there, someone had taken it. Lind searched the rest of the interior, hunting for hidden compartments or some other secret location suitable for such a small package. None of the map compartments, food cabinets, supply bins crammed throughout the cramped space concealed anything unexpected. Lind toyed with the idea that the lack of gravity had carried it away only to dismiss it. It would have fallen incongruously when they towed the ship into the hanger.

  "You didn't take anything out of here?" Lind asked.

  The chief mechanic shook his head. "We just went inside for a systems check. Everything we really care about is accessed outside."

  "You haven't found any other cargo areas or anything?"

  "You're kidding, right? It's a Marlin. There's not much room for anything here."

  Confirmation should have made Lind feel better. After all, without the box, he couldn't conceive of a motivation for murder. Whatever that case held justified, at least to someone, Rykov's murder.

  Lind clamored down the ramp, unreasonably despondent for someone who confirming his theory. "Any idea what made this thing break down?"

  The mechanic led him under the ship's wing. Where the port engine met the slender fuselage, two panels hung open, pock-marks on an otherwise flawless skin. "This is what we got." The foreman pointed to the first of the open panels and directed Lind's attention to a circuit board just inside.

  The mechanic pointed to a device, barely worthy of a name or identification, jutting out from the circuit board about the size of a thumb nail. "There's the problem, or part of it. We still don't know what fried all the electronics other than some king of electro-magnetic field."

  Lind stared at the object. "What the hell is it?"

  "It's genius, is what it is. It sits right on the thermostat for the coolant. All it does is heat the line for a few seconds, then it cools the line for a few seconds, and goes back and forth until the pump freaks out and shuts down. If it switches to the back-up, the back-up gets the same readings since it's the thermostat and not the pump."

  "How'd it get there?"

  The foreman reached up with a pair of needle-nose plier and pulled the device off. Sticky gel stretched out between the object and the ship. "Glue." He responded. "All the guy needed to do was slap it on the right line." He wiped the substance off on a cloth and dropped the strip of metal into Lind's hand.

  "Careful."

  As soon as the metal made contact, Lind felt it still alternating hot and cold. The discomfort from the alternating temperature made him dump the item into an evidence bag quickly. It melted through the plastic within seconds and fell to the floor. The mechanic picked it up with his tweezers and dropped it into a foil wrap. "Try this."

  Lind stuck the small bit a foil, almost like gum spit into a wrapper, into an evidence bag.

  "How does it work?"

  The mechanic shrugged. "You've got me."

  Lind borrowed the pliers and picked the device off the ground. "How do we turn it off?"

  "No idea."

  "Do you have any idea how long it's been there?"

  "It's not too worn, but it's not new either. I'd say it's been on there for a week or so at least."

  "But it wasn't active during that time."

  The mechanic shook his head. "It would have freaked out the pump within a few minutes of functioning. I'd say it had to start working somewhere on the surface of Iapetus."

  Lind thought about that information for a moment. "I don't suppose you found a transmitter or something that could turn this thing on."

  The foreman shrugged. "I'd say this device is too small, but it might have something nearby. I didn't think to look."

  Reaching up into the hatch, he felt around. "What's this?" The mechanic asked, more to himself than to Lind. "This wasn't here before."

  Lind leaned over to look. Mounted next to the fuel intake valve, a cylinder jutted out from one of the many hoses. It easily could have fit inside Lind's hand. Or anyone else's.

  The foreman touched the device. With a crack, blinding white flames shot out where the cylinder attached to the hose. Lind grabbed the mechanic to pull him backwards. The explosion that followed did not blow a hole in the side of the station, or even take out a major portion of the ship. Only the fuel left in the lines that close to the port ignited, but the fireball bursting from the underside of the Marlin envelo
ped the mechanic before launching them both backwards. The impact of the burning body knocked Lind backwards, sliding him along the floor away from the burning ship. The foreman, moaning through the charred flesh on his face as his sterile suit melted to his body, pinned Lind's legs and had to be kicked off.

  Alarms rang throughout the sterile hanger. Fire suppression jets emerged from the walls, covering the Marlin and its flames with a smothering blanket of foam. Lind grabbed the mechanic by the arm, and a sheath of skin came off in his hand revealing the muscles and bone beneath. Flicking the amalgamation of tissue and melted suit off of his hand, he reached for the foreman's collar and pulled him towards the control center. The foam only made the already slick deck more difficult to get traction on.

  Within feet of the airlock leading to the command facility, Lind turned back to see the progress of the fire. Most of the flames licking up from the hull of the ship had dissipated. Just as he thought the situation may be under control, the tone of the alarms changed from the whining siren of the fire alarm to a pulsing shriek. Something told the fire sensors that the foam failed to suppress the threat to the station.

  Something Lind couldn't see must have continued to burn amongst the piles of retardant. The change in alarm reflected a change in the automated system's strategy.

  The system prepared to vent the hanger.

  By dumping the oxygen, the fire would have nothing to breathe. Neither would Lind.

  The intervals between alarm shrieks grew shorter, counting down until the moment when the vents evacuated the last of the air. For the second time in only a few days, Lind prepared himself for suffocation.