Junkyard

by Lindsay Buroker

  “This is maple syrup.” He tried to remove the lid on the drum next to it, but that one hadn’t been loosened. “Mahajan.” He waved to the guard with the single gloved hand. “I’m in need of a can opener.”

  “Funny, boss.”

  “I aim to entertain.”

  “I’m not that amused since this is the fiftieth time you’ve said that.”

  “I still find it amusing,” the second guard called from his station.

  Mahajan used his gloved hand to offer a screw-you gesture before gripping the lid with the bare one and tugging it off without apparent effort.

  “Thanks.” Dunham shooed the guard back, then pointed again at the first drum. “Syrup,” he repeated to McCall. Presumably for dramatic flair and not because he thought she was slow. He waved his hand over a far clearer liquid inside the second drum. “This is water.” He spat on the floor and pointed toward several stacks of drums. “All of those were once filled with maple syrup and are now filled with water.”

  “Every drum in the warehouse?” Scipio asked.

  “Not every one, but more than half.”

  McCall stared bleakly at the water, realizing this was why they didn’t know when exactly the theft had occurred. The drums had still been present in the warehouse. And full of liquid.

  “Have you reported the theft to law enforcement?” Scipio asked.

  A back door opened, and two men walked inside and turned into a room at the rear of the warehouse.

  “Yes, but they haven’t sent anyone out yet. They’re all busy sniffing around the spaceport and trying to find Alliance sympathizers. It could be weeks before they bother coming out here.”

  Dunham frowned and tapped an earstar affixed to his helix. “Dunham here… Yes? Just a minute.” He held up a finger toward McCall and walked into one of the offices.

  “Let’s snoop,” McCall whispered to Scipio.

  “Snoop? We have been invited here to perform an investigation. Does the word snoop not have furtive and perhaps illegal connotations?”

  “Fine, let’s investigate.”

  McCall headed toward the room the newcomers had gone into, wanting to see what else was in the warehouse. She glanced at the guards to see if they would object, but they must have believed she was allowed to snoop.

  The back door opened, and another man came in, removing gloves and turning into a different room. McCall glimpsed bare trees outside with trails through dirty gray snow before the door shut.

  One of the rooms was simply a lavatory—she decided not to snoop in there. Another was a break area with the smell of coffee hanging in the air. Three men and a woman sat around one table, warming their hands on steaming mugs. At another table, a slender man with salt-and-pepper hair sat by himself, watching something on a netdisc holodisplay. He glanced at the doorway when McCall peeked in, but looked back at his display without making eye contact. The people at the other table hadn’t noticed her.

  “Get their names and what they do here, will you, Scipio?” She felt guilty foisting grunt work off on him, but he was a personal assistant android and, as far as she could determine, had no aversion to speaking with strangers.

  “Certainly, Captain.”

  “You can call me McCall, you know. It’s just the two of us. You don’t have to be so formal.”

  “Certainly, Captain McCall.”

  “Thank you,” she said dryly.

  He stepped into the breakroom, and she opened the back door. The forest of maple trees started up at the edge of the pavement ten meters away and stretched back as far as the eye could see. Tubes ran around and between some of the trees. Others simply had buckets hanging from tiny spouts that had been inserted into the trunks.

  “Not a high-tech industry indeed,” she murmured, amused by the juxtaposition of the buckets dangling from trees and her spaceship parked out front. A lot on the other side of the sugarhouse held ground vehicles, but they didn’t appear any more high-tech than the tube setup.

  The dog barked, his ringing voice louder with the door open. McCall could see part of the fence of what had to be the junkyard Dunham had mentioned. It was so close to the warehouse, almost touching it on one side, that she wondered if the property had once been owned by the same family.

  “Hate this slagging job,” a man muttered, walking out of the trees, lugging a wobbly hoverboard, its back end dragging in the snow. A huge pile of equipment was stacked atop it, and thanks to its ill-functioning hover engine, the man was responsible for toting all the weight himself.

  He didn’t glance at her or seem to notice her as he headed for a door large enough for the sled to fit inside. He was young with dark skin and hair. Hopefully, Scipio would get his name, and she could look him up.

  “Oh, uhm, excuse me,” someone said behind her.

  McCall stepped aside, holding the door open for a man in a hat and parka to step outside. It was the person who’d been sitting by himself in the breakroom. Had he slipped out before Scipio could question him? Or after?

  She was inclined to let him go without saying anything, but he stopped and looked at her curiously before shifting his gaze past her and to the trees.

  “We need to wait for the temperature to rise two more degrees before the sap will flow,” he said. “There’s little point in sending men out to check the lines this morning.”

  “Just what I was thinking,” McCall said.

  “Are you here to look at the Tercoraosa?”

  He wasn’t looking at her, which made McCall glance around to see if someone else had walked up. No, the grumpy fellow with the hoverboard had disappeared inside.

  “The what?” she asked, feeling stupid. It wasn’t a feeling she liked, so she vowed to look up the word when she got back to the ship.

  “The Tercoraosa fungus. The original colonists were careful not to bring Anthracnose, Verticillium wilt, or Phyllosticta mimima with them from Old Earth, but there were indigenous fungi on this moon that can be problematic for non-native species as well as native vegetation.”

  “I’m here to investigate the theft of the maple syrup.”

  “Oh.” He sounded disappointed, like he had hoped she was some fungus-studying scientist with a passion for trees.

  “Sorry.”

  He shrugged and fell silent.

  And this was why she preferred to let Scipio interact with strangers.

  “What’s your name?” she forced herself to ask.

  “Louis Desmarais.”

  Ah. The “weird” employee Dunham had mentioned.

  “I’m a botanist,” he added, glancing in her direction, but not at her face. “Did you know there were approximately one hundred and twenty-eight species of maple trees on Old Earth? The colonists only brought three with them, and one was irrevocably lost. This species is most prolific in terms of sap production, which we turn into syrup in the sugarhouse.”

  “Desmarais,” Dunham snapped from the hallway. “Break’s over. Stop pestering our guest.”

  “Yes, sir.” Desmarais—Louis—dipped his head and shuffled into the woods.

  A bark came from behind the fence, and a huge furry head appeared in a spot with a missing board. The dog had to be the size of one of those syrup drums. McCall couldn’t tell if it was wagging its tail—the gap wasn’t large enough—but it wasn’t baring its teeth and snarling the way she’d imagined when Dunham had described it. Louis waved at it as he passed the fence, and the dog disappeared from sight.

  “You won’t get anything useful from Desmarais,” Dunham said. “Unless you want to hear about trees. Or flowers. In the spring he regales us with his knowledge of flowers.”

  “We all have our passions,” McCall murmured, feeling an urge to stand up for Louis, even if she’d just met him.

  “Come on. I’ll give you a tour of the sugarhouse.”

  McCall trailed him back toward the other building, reminding herself to get the name of the surly man, though she suspected someone in the middle of becoming extremely wealthy
wouldn’t be grumpy. No, she needed to find the person wandering around elated. Elated but very nervous.

  Part II

  McCall felt much more comfortable back on her ship, sitting in her office with the search algorithms she’d refined over the years spitting out data on the displays floating over her desk. Thank the suns. Her nerves were frayed after the tour of the noisy, cramped, employee-filled sugarhouse, and her nostrils were still protesting the cloying scent of maple syrup that had clogged the air like pollution in Perun Central.

  Analyzing data in her quiet odor-free office soothed her.

  The names and faces of Dunham’s employees hovered in a row in one display. The names and addresses of black marketeers known to handle agricultural products floated in another. None of them had offices on Dasos Moon, so Dunham’s assumption that a thief would have to take the stolen syrup to the spaceport to ship off-world was reasonable.

  The traffic logs from the spaceport, information that wasn’t public but that she knew how to get, currently hovered behind the other displays. She was in the middle of trying to convince the local traffic cameras that she had the right to see the vids from the last two months of comings and goings on this rural street. Skimming through such logs would be stultifying, but she doubted whoever had doctored the warehouse’s security cameras would have been able to diddle the county’s recordings, and if a vehicle large enough to tote away two hundred tons of syrup had arrived, it would be noticeable. She might even get lucky and be able to magnify the image to identify the people, androids, or robots that had loaded the cargo.

  A knock sounded on the closed hatch.

  “Come in, Scipio.”

  He stepped inside and got straight to business, something McCall appreciated about him.

  “I have performed short interviews of all the employees that were at the warehouse and sugarhouse today,” he said. “I have also visited two who reported in sick this morning and were staying in a boarding house up the street. A third sick employee was not in his domicile, nor did he answer his earstar.”

  “That’s a lot of people sick for a staff of twenty.” McCall assumed the three employees had caught wind of an investigation and had reason to feel guilty. Given Scipio’s stolen status, she found she could empathize with those people a lot more than she once might have. But if they’d taken syrup to get rich, she wouldn’t empathize. She’d taken Scipio because his previous owners had treated him so poorly it had broken her heart. An android might not have feelings, but Scipio managed to have a kind of dignity, and it shined through now that he was his own person. Or at least his own mechanical being. “Can you give me their names?” she added.

  “I’ve already transferred the information.” As he said the words, three names and faces enlarged on one of her displays.

  “Good. I’ll prioritize looking up their backgrounds. Thank you.”

  “There is one more matter I must discuss before leaving you to your work.” Scipio lifted his hand in Apologetic Gesture Number Three. He had already learned that when she focused on work, she tended to do so for hours and hours and loathed interruptions. “The local law-enforcement agency commed the ship while we were out.”

  “Oh?” McCall hadn’t gone to NavCom to check messages. “Do they object to our presence in the investigation they haven’t bothered to send anyone out to start yet?”

  “No. They informed us that parking a spaceship outside of the port is grounds for a fine. If the Star Surfer remains here, we will be subject to a thirty-morat-per-night fine.”

  “They can keep track of illegally parked spaceships, but they’re too busy to help Dunham recover millions of morats in syrup?”

  “Traffic control is the responsibility of a different department than theft.”

  “A more efficient one, apparently.”

  “Shall I prepare to move the ship?” Among Scipio’s other talents, he was a pilot. A better one than she, not surprisingly. She didn’t have the best spatial awareness, and she’d had to take her pilot’s exam more than once before passing. It had been worth it to have the freedom to fly herself, to not have to rely on public transport clogged with people who insisted on sitting entirely too close to each other and touching.

  She curled a lip at the thought of riding a ground transport out here each morning during the investigation, complete with a long walk at the end, since nothing would go directly to this rural dead end.

  “Send them the fine, enough for three nights.”

  Scipio tilted his head. “Is there a reason you wish to remain on the premises against the wishes of law enforcement? Do you believe the thieves may make a nocturnal appearance? Shall I send out hover-cams to monitor the facility?”

  All she’d been thinking about was loathsome shoulder-touching with strangers, but the suggestion sounded like a good one, and she wished she’d thought of it.

  “Yes,” she said. “Program them to ping us if there’s any activity in the middle of the night.”

  McCall didn’t expect anyone to return to the scene of the crime, especially with her ship parked out front, but it was always possible.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Scipio?” she said as he turned for the hatch.

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “McCall.”

  “Captain McCall.”

  “I mean, you can call me by my first name instead of adding a rank.” Especially since it was a de facto rank she only held because she’d had the morats to buy her ship.

  “I was programmed to maintain a servant-master relationship with my human owners, and it is against my protocol to be, as you would say, on a first-name basis with people.”

  “That’s disgusting. Can’t you download a patch or something?”

  He stared at her, then, after a long hesitation, issued his rarely used Laugh Number One. It was, in fact, the only version of a laugh she’d heard from him, and it usually came when he was attempting to give the expected response to a joke. She’d been serious, but she smiled in complete understanding. She’d faked a lot of laughs to give the expected response—or cover up that she didn’t understand the joke.

  “But I don’t own you, right?” McCall attempted to clarify. “I just assisted you in leaving your previous owner. So I’m not your master.”

  “I do grasp the concept, Captain, but it is difficult for me to override my inherent protocols. As I admitted to you, I am able to perform numerous types of combat and bodyguard duties because I downloaded new routines, but my need to perform my basic functions will always trump them.”

  “All right, I understand.” She wagered that having him address her as a superior—or dear suns, a master—bothered her more than it did him. “What I wanted to say is thank you for your help. I had some… doubts about whether I’d made the right choice after I assisted you in escaping that facility, especially since your treatment there seemed to bother me a lot more than it bothered you, but I’m glad I did so. And that you refused to leave afterward and wanted a job.”

  She smiled at the memory of her attempt to free Scipio, who had been, at the time, Model DuraSky 3636, serial number 73837-D4. It had been something akin to opening the door of a birdcage and receiving a puzzled chirp from the parakeet inside.

  “I am pleased that my service has satisfied you.” He issued Nod Number Seven. “I do find this work more fulfilling than retrieving beverages and performing sexual acts.”

  “Right. Good.” McCall waved, not wanting to discuss all the demeaning uses that his previous owner had had for him.

  Scipio left, and she perused the files of the “sick” people who hadn’t been at work.

  McCall was still at her desk when a soft chime floated through the ship. She frowned at the interruption. What was that? Not the comm or the exterior hatch buzzer.

  “Scipio’s alarms,” she blurted with realization.

  She glanced at the two clock displays to the side of the desk, one ship’s time and one local time. Going by local time, it wouldn’t be
fully dark out yet, but the warehouse’s work shift had ended two hours earlier. She jogged up to NavCom to see if Scipio was up there monitoring the cameras.

  He was. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back as he observed the Star Surfer’s surroundings, both on NavCom’s wrap-around display of the exterior and on a holodisplay showing the hover-cams he’d set up outside. Bird’s-eye viewpoints showed the warehouse, the sugarhouse, some of the trees out back, and the front and side parking areas. She could also make out some piles of metal scrap, appliances, and rusted vehicles in the near side of the junkyard.

  Two men in dark clothing stood out front of the now-closed rollup door to the warehouse. They pointed at each other, at the warehouse, and also at her ship.

  “This is the first activity since the workday ended and the employees left the warehouse,” Scipio said. “No security guards were left on duty tonight. I have been observing.”

  “We set up the alarms so you wouldn’t have to observe.”

  “I have completed choosing cufflinks to match my new suit, so I am able to devote my ocular receptors to this task.”

  “Cufflinks? Is that what you’re buying with your share of the money if we recover the stolen maple syrup?” McCall slid into the pilot’s seat and swiped her fingers in the air to zoom in on the two men.

  “We will recover the syrup. My current salary is sufficient for the purchase of silver cufflinks. You did not mention shares.”

  “Well, there’ll be a share if we make that much. But I’m glad to hear your tastes aren’t overly extravagant. Given that you were in that drab butler’s uniform when we met, I admit to being surprised by your flair for dress.”

  “I have decided to individualize myself from the other androids in my line by wearing atypical garb, thus making it less likely that I’ll be recognized and scanned by imperial law enforcers.”

  “And cufflinks will accomplish this?”

  “Most assuredly.”

  “That’s the security guard with the bionic hand, right? Mahajan?” McCall pointed at the larger of the two men. She might not be good with faces, but she remembered his lack of a glove, and he still didn’t have his left hand covered. Did he special-order single gloves or donate all of his lefts to the junkyard dog to chew on?