Planet of Graves

by Marc Everitt

  ***

  Earth

  “We did it! I can’t believe we actually did it!” screamed Wang in sheer joy as the two men ran swiftly away from the apartment, followed by removal hover boxes stuffed to the brim with as much of Eli’s personal possessions as they could carry. The boxes drifted behind the men and looked to any casual observer to be the boxes of a man who was moving house and who had a friend to kelp him. Rodriguez was careful not to attract too much attention as they left the apartment building and called up a travel pod. A pod soon pulled up and they travelled the ten-minute journey to the other side of town in silence, not eager for the automated driving system to record anything they might say and alert the police.

  As they left the pod at Rodriguez’s home, they began to feel they could talk freely once more. “This is a good haul,” exclaimed Wang excitedly, “this guy had some nice gear.”

  Rodriguez was less pleased with the day’s work, “Yeah, but that damn cat got away and that is a problem.”

  Wang started to open the packages to see what they had managed to get away with when he stopped in his tracks. “Not a problem anymore, my friend. Look at this.” He indicated the front door of the grubby hovel Rodriguez called home. Rodriguez looked and had to look again. He couldn’t believe his luck. The robot-cat that they had tried so hard to catch was sitting outside with its back to them. If he had been an intelligent man he would have stopped to wonder how the cat had managed to get all the way across town in such a short space of time and would have been suspicious.

  Instead, he grabbed a hammer off the top of his holovision set and crept up on the cat. One swift blow to the head and the robot cat laid whirring and sparking on the pavement. “Ha, Ha. Must be my lucky day,” he shouted and picked up the remains of the cat. Its body was relatively unscathed but its head was devastated. Rodriguez decided to keep it as a souvenir, and threw it onto the zero gravity armchair in the corner of the room, before helping Wang to open the packing cases and begin etching off the inscribed postcodes on the goods.

  As they worked they talked. “We’ll need a fence to sell this gear to,” said Wang, imagining the money they would be paid for the things they had stolen.

  Rodriguez nodded his agreement. “That’s right, my friend. I need to make a call.”

  “Who are you going to use?”

  “Let’s just say I have been looking for an excuse for some time to use Mr Fixit,” replied Rodriguez dramatically. Wang was impressed. Mr Fixit was the biggest handler of stolen goods in the city, but you had to have good merchandise in order to use him. No one knew his real name or had seen his face, and that was how he liked it. If they were going to use him to shift their stolen goods, then Wang knew they must be breaking into the big time.

  Rodriguez paced over to the wall-mounted vid-com link and keyed a number he had in his possession for some time but never felt he had a good enough reason to use. He was puzzled to see the unit suffering some interference before he was greeted with an audio only message service asking him to leave a message.

  “You know who I am. Leave me a message. Let me know what you need disposing of and a number I can call you back on,” the message read. Carlos Rodriguez was about to leave his message when he noticed that his vid-screen had offered him a suggested message and pseudonym to use. He hadn’t been aware that the com-unit was one of the models with the personal protection packages built in. These were packages of software that recommended you to use different names if calling a number the vid-com didn’t recognise.

  Carlos used the phrase offered by the com-unit. “My name is Depson. Call me back on 366577363/3.” Then he switched the unit off, unaware that he had signed his own death warrant.

  “Is he coming?” asked Wang as he scraped at the front of the codings on the side of a music centre.

  Rodriguez smiled, pleased with his call to an important criminal figure and his clever decision to follow the machine’s advice and use a pseudonym. He had no real need to, but it made him feel important and dangerous. The body of Benny 4 lay on the armchair, inert and still, and seemed to Rodriguez to be a reminder of the best things about the whole day.

  “Damn cat. Teach it to mess with Carlos Rodriguez.”

  ***

  Graves’ World

  The rest of the research team was as surprised by the miraculous return of Taylor West as Eli was, but he had told then a different story as to how he had managed it. He had said that the creature had merely stunned him and he had been able to fight it off and get back. He said nothing about the liquid, the alien being nor the underground research bunker he had escaped from. He thought it better that he keep back that particular information for the time being, at least until he could work out whom he could trust.

  One of these people in front of him had tried to get him killed while he was attempting to save the station team. He looked at them as they all sat in the canteen talking their experiences over. Alan looked as he always did, nervous and out of his depth. He sat near to Eli as if seeking the bigger man’s protection and Taylor noted that Alan tended to follow Eli around quite a lot. Sara sat to one side and appeared to be trying to keep her composure. It seemed to Taylor as if the events of the past few days had left her longing for a return to a more simple scientific existence. He felt sorry for her, she seemed so afraid.

  Chris and Lana Maxwell were keeping themselves and talking together at the other side of the table, with an occasional comment thrown in to Taylor, Eli and Alan’s conversation. Taylor felt annoyed that one of these people had probably tried to kill him earlier that day; they were probably very upset that he had returned and he was looking for signs of this in the team’s behaviour. He was, however, having little success in this as he could see nothing unusual in their mannerisms. He made his excuses and made his way back to his room, keen to study the rock fragment he had found on the plains.

  Once in his room, he put the fragment under the quantum scanner he had borrowed from the reactor engineering room. It was usually used to inspect sheets of reactor casing for minute hairline fractures, but it would serve its purpose in allowing him to have a close look at the fragment. He was looking at it for at least ten minutes when Eli joined him. “What is it? What are you looking at?” he asked curiously.

  Taylor took his eyes away from the viewing port and allowed Eli to have a look for himself. “What am I looking at?” Eli asked as he peered into the viewing port.

  “This, my friend, is the reason why this planet is so popular with the Company and probably why our murderer is at work here,” replied Taylor. On the underside of the fragment were microscopic particles of the liquid that lay under the crust of the planet. Eli couldn’t see anything special about it and said so.

  Taylor laughed, “Trust me. That stuff is the key. It’s all making sense now.” Eli tried to get more out of Taylor but he had said all he was going to say and Eli knew he would have to wait until Taylor was ready to explain what was so special about the rock he was looking at. It hadn’t looked spectacular to him, but he knew well that his friend often saw things differently to other people, himself included. When Taylor then said he was going to go and break into the quarters of the Maxwell’s, Eli knew that he should go to the canteen and keep the Maxwell’s occupied for a while. He returned to the canteen and took a deep breath before sitting down next to the couple and trying to engage them in conversation.

  Meanwhile, Taylor was inserting a small fibreglass probe into the locking mechanism of the Maxwell’s room. Within a couple of seconds he had the door open and slowly entered, he knew what he was looking for but not what he would find. He was very accomplished at breaking and entering, a legacy of his past, and he was careful not to disturb anything that would give away his presence in the room. He opened drawers smoothly and quietly, looked inside storage lockers and under the bed.

  After several minutes, he found what he was looking for. The unit Eli had described Will spotting Chris repairing was lying under a pile of his clothes.
Not desperately well-hidden, but then he didn’t credit Chris with a lot of imagination. He obviously wasn’t concerned if his wife saw it then, Taylor thought, but couldn’t decide whether that meant they were both part of his murderous scheme or, as Taylor thought was more likely, they were part of something else. By all accounts, Chris had received help in escaping from the storeroom the team had locked him in. That was surely from his wife, but that only proved complicity, not necessarily involvement in the murders.

  As he studied the electronic melange that was Chris Maxwell’s homemade bypass unit, he noticed it had several jagged serrations on the rear of it; as if it had been torn off of something it was once connected to. He looked around the room to see if he could locate the receptacle and found nothing. He decided he had learned just about all he could in the room and left it as carefully as he entered it. A wild thought occurred to him, and he took a detour on the way back to his quarters and passed the administrative terminals of the station.

  On outer colonies, the Company still had to get payment to its staff and did it by sending credit through the depths of space the same way it sent transmissions and messages. When the credit arrived at the station is was stored in a machine that acted as a bank for the colonists concerned. It registered a certain amount of credit for each individual and they could use this to order things that would arrive on the next available transport.

  On Graves’ World, this was never done as no transports ever came. But the Company still paid its staff in the same way. Taylor felt sure he would see signs of tampering on the credit register. He was right; as he approached it he could clearly see serration of a type inversely correspondent to the ones on the unit in Maxwell’s room. He smiled and returned to his room. With Chris Maxwell out of the running, he set his mind to working out how to prove the guilt of the person he was sure had done it.

  ***

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Chris bellowed in Taylor’s face. Taylor had just been explaining to the rest of the team that he had found a fragment of the crust of the planet. Alan had been immediately interested, as he realised how important such a find was and rushed with Eli to look straight away. Others in the remains of the team were less interested, with Chris being the most adamant that he would not be looking. Taylor knew that one of the team would be particularly interested in not only looking as the rock fragment but also stopping anyone else looking at it. He felt sure the murderer had some interest in the planet over and above their research, and it seemed likely that interest was related to the research being undertaken at the other station.

  This would, in his opinion, make it likely that the guilty party would be very keen to get their hands on such a valuable sample. He had entertained the idea of keeping the rock fragment to himself, but had decided it represented an opportunity to see if he could flush out the person he suspected. Eli was with Alan as he looked at the fragment and so Taylor was fairly content that the sample was secure. He was willing to bet that the murderer would avoid seeming interested at all and try to obtain it later when the attention of the others was diverted.

  He knew that whatever happened, the real time for the trap to be sprung was later that night when everyone had gone their separate ways and the coast looked clear for the villain to try their luck. He also knew he would be waiting. Returning to the present, he turned his attention to the three people in the control room with him. He could see they were either trying to appear disinterested or were actually not bothered. He felt it best to reserve judgement on which of those was the reality of the situation until later in the night. He certainly had his suspicions but was not about to discount anyone. He knew that the things Will had said about Chris were not involved. It merely meant he had no evidence to prove culpability.

  Lana didn’t even appear to be listening. Sara seemed to be noting what he was saying but seemed to have better things to occupy her attention. Taylor had no way of knowing whether these reactions were genuine or a way of putting him off the scent. The more time he spent with these people the more he was certain that the person he was looking for knew they were being observed and acted accordingly.

  Whoever they were, they were skilled at controlling their reactions. He thought to himself that he would have to find a way of getting them to lower their guard. He knew that, until he found a way to do this, he would get nowhere. The fact was that he was up against a wily opponent, who had no hesitation in killing and seemed to know the rules of engagement that usually existed only on a one way level between detective and detectee.

  This criminal knew how the game was played and seemed to be able to play it well. He decided that he needed to give his prey a bit of breathing space and so felt it would be an idea to see if he could find something else to occupy his time in the control room. With the Major dead, it seemed no one except Sara had any intention of doing any work and the readings and monitor remained unobserved. Taylor made his way over to the Major’s preferred workstation and tried to access the personal logs he assumed the Major must have made.

  Careful not to be observed by anyone else in the room, he got through the main directory and into the personal section of the database. He was not looking for any particular file. In fact he was not looking for an existing file at all. If he knew his foe as well as he thought he did and if they were as cunning as he believed, then they would have deleted any reports the Major had made which made any reference to things they preferred not to be common knowledge.

  Files were, however, not easy to totally erase from a main frame like the one installed in the station. There were several different ways in which he could search for deleted files. He went into the file search though a normal route and found what he had expected. The computer registered three files that had been deleted in the past week from the Major’s personal reports. One of these seemed to have been erased in the past hour.

  While it was possible that the Major had deleted some files in the past week, it was less likely he had deleted files from beyond the grave in the last hour. Taylor felt sure this was a file he needed to see. He came out of the directory he was accessing and, for a moment, had to enter a subsection he was not concerned with as Lana was passing him and taking an interest in what he was doing. Finding nothing interesting she carried on her way and left the room to return to her quarters.

  Taylor hoped that he had not displaced anything in the room that would alert her to his entry. Feeling a little more secure in being unobserved he reopened the personal file access section and tried to get in to the deleted file by the back-up system. If he was as familiar with this system as he thought he was, then a deleted file would be dumped to an ever more remote and inaccessible sections of memory until the system purged its memory banks. This purging meant a cleaning out of all memory which the users had deemed unnecessary and occurred after a certain number of applications had been accessed.

  If he was lucky, then the Major’s terminal had not been used a great deal since the file had been deleted and it would be sitting in another part of the memory core waiting to be purged as and when the time came. He hacked deeper into the system and was beginning to think that he wasn’t going to find anything, when he came across what he was looking for. The file sat in a remote part of the memory, waiting to be purged. It was labelled simply ‘recon’ and the only way that he knew it was something of interest was the note next to it, that told him the time it was marked for deletion.

  He selected the file and had a quick, subtle look around him before opening the document. It was a short report that the Major had written just under four weeks before. It was written in the style which the Major had preferred to make all file notes. He had seemed to like to write as if he were writing a war diary or a journal that he felt would become a firm favourite in years to come with readers of books such as the war diaries of Montgomery, Napoleon, Hitler and Carter.

  As he read, Taylor felt a little more sympathy for the Major then he had when the man had been alive. He may have been a
pompous, military failure but he seemed, from his writing, to merely be living in a dream world. There was little Taylor could find fault with in that. It probably was because the Major found little of interest in his real life. Taylor read on:

  File 2685443q/*2

  I have for some time been of the considered opinion that there exists a need for my station to be more consistent in its military activities. While there is no written regulation to state that reconnaissance of the surrounding area is mandatory, I feel it is my duty to provide for the safety and well-being of my team and my station. To this end I feel compelled to conduct the commencement of sorties outside of the perimeter fence.

  The first one of these will be conducted by Mr Hanley later this afternoon. I have requested him to proceed from the station and overlook the surrounding terrain to an approximate direction of North by Northeast. I expect that he will discover little of consequence, but feel that I would be negligent in my duty if I were to take any course of action other than this. All reports on the findings that Mr Hanley unearths will, of course, be detailed in this very journal.

  Taylor finished the short entry. He could find no further references to the subject, as if the Major had concluded there was little point in any more surveying of the area and had decided to concentrate on other things. Taylor recollected the directions in which the Major had written that he had sent Hanley that day. If he were correct then that would have led Hanley practically directly over the bunker Taylor himself had recently visited. He had no way of telling if Hanley had walked far enough to get to the antennae he himself had been curious about.