Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  The real trouble was that Arabs and Jews were only the largest of the cultural and religious groups that refused to eat pork. Caterers who were responsible for off-Earth colonies had no margin for error; and only a fool would chance aborting a project because a workman went berserk or a score of them rioted at the deadly insult.

  By definition, any human being off-Earth was under abnormal pressure.

  The luxury trade in pork could have been handled from Downside, but Sky Devon was gearing up for a volume business that would probably never exist because the margins of survival within even a large colony were too narrow. Failure had been dictated by circumstances that should not have intruded on rational planning - but had done so nonetheless.

  Much the same was true of the way Kathleen Spenser's life had progressed.

  The car whisked through a long section of grainfields, stacked from base level to high above the tracks and lighted by a system of reflectors and diffraction gratings. The direct sun was never visible from within Sky Devon, but the huge mirror that hung in space above the hub was only the first of the prisms and reflectors that redirected light onto the agricultural areas.

  The light was too bright, and it did not illuminate the real questions looming before the microbiologist.

  With a glance around, a fierce warning to her fellow passengers rather than an inspection of them, Spenser reopened her briefcase. Though she did not intend to use it at the moment, there was a communications handset inside - she had the salary and perks of a division head, even if Sutcliffe-Bowles chose to summon her in person to deal with a clerical task.

  Why had he done that? Surely the real request for information must have been very different from what the director had given her to test her reactions. . . .

  And yet it was inconceivable that anyone who knew anything about Sutcliffe-Bowles would make him a conspirator in a scheme to entrap her - and even less conceivable that the director would carry out his part in such a scheme. The whole affair was within the director's usual profile, focusing on something trivial because he could not grasp anything more complex.

  If Sutcliffe-Bowles were playing her, for the Afrikaners or the man behind the Afrikaners - there had to be someone else to have escrowed the amount waiting in Spenser's Swiss account - then the implications were terrifying.

  She tapped a paging code into her communications unit without lifting the handset. The car's control system would pass the call on to the next transit stop, from which the habitat's communications system would route it to the unit that had been keyed. There was no message, only the paging note; and that should be sufficient to bring Jan de Kuyper to Spenser's laboratory by the time she reached it herself.

  The other passengers ignored the microbiologist with the special form of good breeding that alone makes mass living possible to sane human beings. Sanity was not necessarily a prerequisite for living in the tightly-controlled community of Sky Devon, but those whose madness caused them to intrude directly on their neighbors were quickly shunted Downside.

  When Spenser closed the briefcase again, her fingers continued to squeeze it so hard that the flesh beneath her nails blanched.

  She did not feel the lack of friends, because she had never had any, only the parents whom she had cared for personally until their deaths freed her to return to her profession - after an absence that made her almost unemployable. In a way, that was a blessing, because she was free to take charge of a magnificent laboratory at Sky Devon when better-established colleagues refused to accept long exile in space.

  An enclosed, recirculating habitat did not dare pump poisons into its system to deal with the insect pests that had inevitably hitchhiked aboard with the breeding stock from Earth. Dr. Kathleen Spenser's section was tasked to develop sharply-specific microorganic controls for insect pests.

  Sometimes it amused her to remember that nerve gas had also been developed by insecticide researchers.

  The car whirred to a halt with a slight roughness suggesting a problem with the drive rail here. Familiarity with the sensation awoke the microbiologist to her surroundings: a housing estate for laborers and technicians in grades three and below; Transit Stop Seventeen.

  She got out of the car with two other passengers and strode to the cubicle beside the transit platform. It held the elevator that led down to her laboratory in the bowels of Sky Devon.

  Spenser could not feel her weight increase as she descended, but by the time the car stopped, there was a perceptible sluggishness in the way her body behaved. Because the “lowest'' levels of the habitat were actually those closest to the rim, they rotated faster than the portions nearer the hub - and the thrust of centrifugal force that counterfeited gravity was correspondingly greater.

  It did not bother Spenser that her laboratory was isolated from other occupied portions of the habitat - most of the lowest level was given over to storage and recycling - nor that in her work area artificial light was not supplemented by the sunbeams which hinted that other work areas looked out over the countryside in springtime.

  Sometimes it did concern her that the designers were naive enough to believe this location - or even the airlock between the section and the rest of the habitat - would prevent disaster if a microorganism got loose in the lab.

  There was an entryway between the base of the elevator and the door of the lab. On it was mounted a call switch rather than a latch plate. Huge, insulated lines, some of them a meter in diameter, ran past her and past the enclosed laboratory, sighing and gurgling to themselves.

  The attendant within should have been warned when the elevator started to move, but Spenser touched the call switch anyway; and when the air lock did not begin to open on a count of three, her hand moved as it always did now at the onset of anger or fear: to the crystal locket beneath her lab smock.

  The door sucked slowly outward.

  There was no interlock on these doors. The receptionist saved his job by opening the inner portal simultaneously with the outer one.

  “Good afternoon, Dr. Spenser,” said the burly receptionist. The sweat that popped out at his hairline demonstrated that he knew he was in trouble.

  “Hoyer,” snapped the microbiologist, “where were you?”

  “Ah,” interrupted the receptionist, “there was an irradiator to be moved in - “

  “You were flirting with Platt, as usual,” Spenser interrupted with a cold distinctness which turned each of her words into a sawtooth ripping through her subordinate's soul.

  “On your own time I don't care if you have sexual congress with the petrie dishes,” she continued. “But when you're on duty at the front desk, that's where you stay unless I tell you otherwise. Is that understood?”

  Hoyer nodded, his face frozen.

  For a moment the tall woman choked on a fury that was directed not at the event but at the implications of which it reminded her. Hoyer would have been ideal for the task she had foreseen as soon as she read the data request in the directors office. He was strong; certainly corruptible; and reliable within reasonable limits.

  Unfortunately his male lover - Technician Three Platt— was only corruptible; and even then he did not have the “honest cop's'' virtue of staying bought. He would certainly learn of anything Spenser asked the receptionist to do outside his normal duties . . . and therefore Spenser had to go for muscle to a resource she would rather not have used.

  “Has the man from Maintenance arrived?” she asked in a tone so similar to the one she had been using that Hoyer did not realize for a moment that the subject had changed.

  When the question penetrated to Hoyer's consciousness, his face smoothed and he said, “Oh! Oh, yes, Doctor, de Kuyper's in your office. Something wrong with your air circulation?”

  Spenser strode past the receptionist without the retort she might have made if she were not concentrating on the discussion to come.

  Several of the laboratory staff murmured greetings which they knew from her face she would ignore. Platt kept out of sight.
Dr. Lawrence, who was part of the conspiracy, watched his division head with frightened eyes. Lawrence knew of de Kuyper's involvement, but he did not know why the Afrikaner maintenance supervisor had arrived this afternoon - and he was too frightened to ask directly.

  The smell of de Kuyper's inhaler seeped around the edges of the office door. Tobacco smoking was almost extinct as a habit in civilized regions Downside, and the high percentage of oxygen in Sky Devon to speed growth made open flames suicidally dangerous besides.

  Cold inhalers were as common as cigarettes had been fifty years earlier, and de Kuyper was typical of many Afrikaners in favoring the odor of strong tobacco laced with other aromatics. When he exhaled, the reek surrounded him; and he was exhaling now as he waited, dour faced, seated in Spenser's chair with his long legs on the desk whose litter he had shoved aside to make room.

  The microbiologist would have slammed the door, but the panel - hollow-core titanium - was not dense enough to bang properly.

  “I told you,” she said in a whisper like a whiplash, “not to use that reeking thing in my office. In my laboratory.''

  The Afrikaner took the inhaler, the shape and size of a black writing stylus with a gold band near the center, out of his mouth and looked at it. He did not move his legs. “And I told you, goodlady,” he replied, “not to call me. Yes?”

  He raised his blue eyes coolly to her . . . but when de Kuyper saw the microbiologist reach toward the pendant on her breast, he scrambled to his feet and slipped the inhaler back into a pocket of his gray coveralls.

  “Well,” he said gruffly, trying to recover his poise without offending the madwoman further. “You called me, I came. What is it that you want?”

  “I think,” said Spenser, “that we may have a problem which you're better placed than I am to deal with.”

  She stepped to the other side of her desk so that she faced the slanted screen, shooing de Kuyper around toward the visitors' chair facing her. The Afrikaner moved, but he did not sit down.

  “Give me all data requests from ...” she said to the dimple on the desktop which covered the microphone. She remembered the project number, but the moment her lips began to form the syllables, caution reasserted itself. She thumbed open the briefcase and checked the hard copy before continuing. “NYU Project number thirty-two slash one-four-nine.”

  The artificial intelligence waited three seconds. Then the screen beeped and threw up the Beaton request that Spenser already held in her hand.

  There was a second beep. END SERIES said the screen.

  The microbiologist sighed and sat down at her desk. Her pose so closely counterfeited relaxation that de Kuyper said, “So it's nothing after all? You brought me here for nothing?”

  Spenser looked at him with an expression that could have frozen water. “I brought you here,” she said, “because someone in UN Headquarters on the Moon seems to be interested in Rodney Beaton.”

  De Kuyper blinked in obvious confusion and sat down in the chair to avoid the necessity of making a comment when he did not understand the subject.

  “The courier, man!” snarled the miocrobiologist when she realized the problem. “My technician! Now do you remember?” And as comprehension dawned on her visitor's face, she added, “And no, it's not because of the accident. They've made up some cock and bull story about it being some sort of ongoing university project, but this is the first time there's been any notice of it here. So much for 'ongoing' - and I don't buy the coincidence.”

  “Not coincidence, no,” the Afrikaner agreed in the slow intonation that always suggested to Spenser that the mind behind the words was slow also.

  De Kuyper fished his inhaler absently from the pocket into which he had stuffed it. The microbiologist ignored the act because it was no longer a challenge, only a nervous tick like the way her own fingers played over the supplementary keypad in the surface of her desk.

  The two of them were not friends, or even allies in the true sense; but just at the moment they needed one another.

  “I will report ...” said the Afrikaner, a beginning that stopped because there did not appear to be anything he was willing to add to those words. An invisible sphere of brandied tobacco expanded from him as he puffed furiously on the inhaler.

  “Will they cancel the project?” asked Spenser with no emotion in her voice or in her eyes.

  De Kuyper took the inhaler from his mouth and studied the gold band with an intensity that called for a jeweler's loupe. When he looked up, it was with a resolute expression that proved he understood perfectly what the woman meant: his folk would not be deterred from the plan by risk of exposure, but those shadows who were funding them were another matter.

  “What else is it that might be done, goodlady?” he said stolidly, overcoming his distaste at treating a woman as, by implication, his superior.

  “The request,” she said, rising and leaning over her desk to hand the document as far as she could toward de Kuyper. He jumped from his seat to take it, but the flimsy spun a few centimeters toward the floor before the Afrikaner snatched it from the air.

  “It asks for information to be sent not to the usual authorities,” Spenser continued as she sat again, “but to a university researcher of some sort. That may be false, there may be no such person - “

  “Yes, I understand that,” said de Kuyper with deep nods as his eyes continued to scan the document. He was reviewing the lines he had already read so that their possible nuances would be clear in a mind that did not normally organize itself in printed words.

  “ - but if there is an Elinor Bradley, Ph.D.,” said Spenser, “and her interest in Beaton is personal, for whatever reason - “

  “A doxie, do you think, goodlady?” offered the Afrikaner, raising his head with his lips pursed in consideration.

  “That seems unlikely,” the woman said . . . but perhaps not so very unlikely after all. Her mind had been predisposed to the thought by considering Hoyer and Platt . . . and no doubt the burly man before her understood those things better than she did.

  Most people understood those things better than Kathleen Spenser did.

  “In any case,” she went on crisply, shutting down an area of regret she was sure was biological, not anything to do with her mind, “ we don't have sufficient information.''

  She paused, meeting de Kuyper's waiting eyes. “If your resources,” Spenser said, “can determine whether or not this anthropologist exists; and if she does exist, what her interest in Beaton may be . . .”

  “And dispose of her, of course,” said de Kuyper, finishing the sentence dangled before him in a way somewhat different from what the microbiologist had intended. “Yes, I understand.”

  He was folding the data request to fit his breast pocket as he stood up.

  “Wait a minute,” said Spenser, rising also and sharply aware that she was about to lose control of the situation. “She mustn't just be killed. If she exists, she'll have information that we must have to be safe.”

  De Kuyper shrugged, very much the man again - very much the old counterterrorist. “Whatever is possible will be done, goodlady,” he said. “Capture and interrogation, that may be possible.”

  He turned, touching the door latch. Before he opened it, however, the Afrikaner looked back over his shoulder. “What I am sure is possible, goodlady,” he said, “is that Elinor Bradley be disposed of.

  “As she will be.”

  Spenser's eyes were on the Afrikaner's back as he left, but her mind was trying to visualize the appearance of a woman she had never met.

  Chapter 1O - HOUSE CALL

  Piet van Zell knew Sleeks and Trimen. The big Afrikaners were construction hogs like himself, and they'd worked together on half a dozen jobs.

  Those were paid jobs, unlike this one.

  Jantze and van Rooyan were not familiar to him, since years ago they'd moved from general construction into the Bureau of Utilities here at UN Headquarters. Van Zell knew they, too, were reliable, because otherwise they woul
dn't have been brought together with him now.

  “When - “ began Sleeks, jumpy with hormones that waiting gave no outlet but nervousness.

  “It's all right;” Jantze said with more snap than solace. The regular utility crewmen were no less nervous than the construction workers in borrowed orange coveralls, but their fears were colored by the possibility that the operation would cost them their regular jobs. “Another shift has been held over fifteen minutes, no more. We can't have them wonder to see us in their work area, not so?”

  The team had been assembled by five different calls, all from out of the colony and each giving only a part of the necessary information. There was a sixth important fact as well: a courier would have been much safer, but the orders had come through ordinary communications channels in order to save time.

  Therefore there was very little time.

  “All right,” said van Rooyan, who was monitoring the ground-conduction unit. All five Afrikaners in the small orange van could hear the chatter, but it was meaningless except to those who knew the jargon and locations being grunted out by various service crews. “They're headed back to the barn. We can - “

  Steeks was driving the van. Its wheel-hub motors could not jerk the heavy load into motion as his instinct desired, but he squeezed the throttle to its stop position in the attempt.

  “ - go now,” van Rooyan completed.

  This could be very bad. If it were not already very bad, they would not have been assembled for a job like this.

  Van Rooyan, in the open front of the vehicle, muttered unnecessary directions to Steeks - and tried to get him to drive more cautiously. The construction worker could handle the vehicle as skillfully as anyone on the Moon, but he was not used to driving among pedestrians. The normal arrogance of a man guiding a machine was increased by Steeks' overriding concern with what he - what they all - had to do in a few minutes.