Grantville Gazette, Volume 71

by Bjorn Hasseler

  I imagined Baxter had seen what I saw: a clear-walled bottle (ordinary glass, by the way a penlight beam glinted from it) with hints of dust on the bottom; an off-white, claylike glob (plastique, I inferred); a skinny metallic tube jabbed into the glob (if I were right about plastique, the tube was a blasting cap); and an electronics module with a keypad. Behind and sticking above the rest were batteries. Everywhere, wires. The full assemblage, taped into place, all but blocked the duct. The readout chip on that electronics module was decrementing, its least significant digits changing at the same pace as, I confirmed with a quick downward glance, the seconds on my wrist-clock tattoo. It appeared we had five days till the shit hit the fan—and staring at the bottle, I wondered exactly what that shit was. A neurotoxin? A bioagent?

  I asked, "And this is the only bomb?"

  "Believe me, I've looked. When people have been on the surface, I've searched their rooms and lockers. This is the only device I found."

  Five days till boom. Three days, according to Baxter, till a ship was due at the Rock to rotate crews. Two crews alternated here, suggesting the bomb had been planted by someone from the current group. Then again, why deploy the bomb any earlier than, say, a few hours before shift turnover? The longer the bomb sat in the duct, the greater the chances of discovery. As, in fact, it had been discovered . . . .

  I cogitated some more. Maybe the bomb had been deployed just before the other crew had rotated out. It would make a kind of sense, if the bomber wouldn't be coming back and the target were someone in the returning crew. It made yet more sense if the target were the entire remainder of that crew. Had someone recently left that crew, I wondered?

  Explosives and blasting caps were common enough in a mining camp, but not bottles of poison. Surely those didn't get past inspection onto a crew ship. So one thing seemed certain: the bottled stuff had been made onsite. Clearing all traces of the bomb from the station computer records, even for someone with sysadmin privileges, had taken serious smarts. I could have done it. Happily, I'd been elsewhere when Baxter made his discovery, so I could eliminate myself as a suspect.

  Ergo: computer smarts was a clue. It was a place to start, anyway, and I was glad to have one, because about the only other datum I had to go on was a looming deadline. And deadline looked to be literal.

  But what if the time displayed were padded, to lull anyone discovering the device into the false belief they could safely wait for the crew ship rather than attempt to disarm the thing? What if my files about this crew and the incoming crew were disinformation provided by an accomplice at headquarters? What if—?

  Stepping off the crate of emergency rations I had set beneath the duct, I shuddered.

  "You did see it?" Baxter asked anxiously.

  "Afraid so."

  "Silver lining." Baxter managed a faint smile. "I'm not crazy."

  "Silver foil, at best."

  "I suppose." With a sigh, he leaned back against the room's closed hatch. "Okay. You can disarm it, right?"

  "It's likely booby-trapped."

  As if I would know. Still, the blasting cap alone would shatter the glass, or, far more discreetly, the control module might simply open a valve that hadn't been visible to me. What purpose did the explosives serve if not acting as a deterrent? That wasn't a hard question: the plastique would burst walls all around if the device were discovered, and hatch and duct sealed to contain the mystery gas. Bottom line—and bottom lines were sort of thing I was paid to be good with—amateur bomb disposal was a Certified Bad Idea.

  It all seemed carefully calibrated. A bomb large enough to spread the . . . whatever across the station. Bomb placement deep enough underground to not compromise the overall integrity of the station, where a bomb near the airlock would plunge everyone, almost instantly, into hard vacuum. Someone had given this a lot of thought.

  Baxter grimaced. "I was afraid you'd say that."

  "Maybe we can ease it out of the duct, then take it outside before it goes off."

  "Did you see a squat tube, about two centimeters long, mounted on the electronics module? Parts code X27C82?"

  Maybe I'd seen something like that, but I had no idea about part numbers. I stepped back onto the crate. There was such a tube, but the text was far too tiny for me to read. "What is it?"

  "An accelerometer. They're in most of our robots. It's like the part of your pocket comp that knows when you've changed its orientation—only a lot more sensitive."

  Just great. Floor vibrations from climbing on and off my crate apparently weren't enough to trigger the device—I was still here, wasn't I?—but this time I alit, gingerly, on tiptoe.

  "So can you disarm it?" he tried again.

  "No. I wouldn't have a clue where even to start."

  "Well, that's unfortunate." He paused. "Okay, we have four suspects. Where do you want to begin?"

  Uh-uh, I thought. Five suspects from the other crew. And five from this crew, as well, because how better to deflect suspicion than being the person who called in the bomb threat? If appearances were why I had been summoned here, what did that suggest about my odds of getting away alive?

  Bottom line: for all I knew, anyone among those ten might aspire to seize the crew ship, disable the autopilot, and fly away (never mind that I'd never figured out how to do it) with a heap of stolen platinum. Leaving behind lots of dead bodies . . . .

  Holding in another shudder, I said, "Let me get back to you on that."

  ****

  My plan, if an idea this simple could be so dignified, was straightforward enough: run a normal audit. Merely doing my job—as every miner knew and resented—authorized me to snoop and pry. How else was I going to ferret out the identity of the bomber? Once we knew who he, she, or they were, we ought to be able to convince or coerce them into disarming it. Making them stay onto the next shift, with the bomb due to go off, seemed like incentive enough . . . . It wasn't much of a plan, but try as I might, I hadn't come up with anything better.

  Okay, that wasn't exactly true. I could climb back aboard the good ship Bounty, of passenger capacity one, and its autopilot would take me home. It'd be safe and smart, no matter that ("RENDER ALL POSSIBLE ASSISTANCE") fleeing might get me fired. And perhaps futile: Baxter, through the minimal effort of not shifting something on the Rock's surface, could get my ship turned right around. Also, who was to say that whoever had set the known bomb wouldn't—or hadn't already—put another example of his handiwork aboard my ship? All that practicality aside, a part of me knew that to abandon these men and women would be wrong.

  Cutting out could be Plan B. It would wait a few days.

  So: On Day One, I tallied records of ore collected, assayed, and processed; ingots printed; ingots delivered through the one-way valve into the vault; ingots reported stacked and tied down by the robotic arm inside; and an eyeball inspection through the vault's thick Lucite view ports. Just barely within the unofficial bounds of acceptable pilferage, almost a kilo unaccounted for, the data matched. I randomly searched cabinets, bins, equipment consoles, and suchlike for contraband—everywhere but in the air ducts. I spot-checked gear and personal belongings that the departing crew might intend to carry aboard the crew ship. That I saw, no oh-two tanks had, since departing Ceres, magically transmuted from base metals into platinum. Anything that blatant I would have had to deal with. I noticed and ignored some pens and a class ring that were almost surely platinum. Had I cared to check, I doubtless would have found many small items miraculously platinum beneath thin veneers, in everything from jewelry to work-shoe toecaps to jumpsuit zippers. Part of the company's evil genius was letting petty theft succeed. Anyone focused on the penny-ante smuggling had less time to spend, and less inclination to spend it, plotting a grand heist. And I went over security logs. In the process, I spotted the vid loop in digital surveillance feed by which a maintenance cam failed to show the bomb. I didn't immediately find digital fingerprints to reveal how, or by whom, the hack had been pulled off.

  All that a
ctivity was simply me doing a familiar job, laying the groundwork for my Day Two "interviews." That way the coming questioning would seem like the routine/follow-up prying of an auditor. I tried to believe I'd put on a more compelling performance than Baxter's feigned preoccupation with his desktop when I had first arrived.

  Going through the motions while I did nothing to identify our mad bomber was at once exhausting and nerve-racking, and I looked forward to a few hours of unconscious respite. In damned near no gravity, the hardest floor is comfier than the softest mattress on Earth. In theory, I could have slept just fine in the wiring-closet/storeroom I'd been given as temporary quarters.

  So much for theory. My mind never stopped churning, fixated on the bomb in the ceiling of the very next room. I couldn't as much as pace for fear a clumsy footfall would trigger the bomb. But I did come up, at about oh-dark thirty, with an idea that sent me scurrying to the station chief. I rapped impatiently on his hatch.

  "Just a minute." He sounded groggy, as if I'd awakened him. As if dumping the problem on me had lifted all the (nonexistent in this gravity) weight from his shoulders. Must be nice.

  "It won't wait," I said, overriding the lock and letting myself in. Auditors had prerogatives.

  Baxter was with a friend. From Mariana Kwan's file I knew she was thirty-two and Macau-born. Olive-complected, with a loose halo of wavy black hair and only the merest hint of eyefolds, she looked more Portuguese than Chinese. A mining engineer. As the newbie in a crew that had otherwise labored together for eight years or more, she defaulted to being my chief suspect. And seeing these two together? It recalled my instinct that Baxter "finding" the bomb was an obvious way to deflect suspicion.

  Kwan had raised a sheet almost high enough to be not quite decent. She wasn't in the slightest embarrassed by my entrance. I was. And from the way Baxter wouldn't meet my eye, he was. She said, "I'm curious, now. What can't wait?"

  Baxter cleared his throat. "Give us that minute, please?"

  I backed out, closing the hatch behind me.

  Kwan emerged soon after, jumpsuit draped over one arm, wearing nothing but grip slippers and a loosely wrapped sheet. Maybe she made it to 155 centimeters tall, the top of her head scarcely reaching my waist. It wasn't the top of her head that drew my eyes.

  "Done a full enough audit yet?" Head canted, one bare leg thrust forward, she struck a pose. "Or will you be making a closer examination?"

  "I'll get back to you," I mumbled, my face hot. I let myself back into Baxter's quarters.

  He had gotten dressed. "It's not what you think."

  What did Baxter suppose I thought? That his file showed a wife and three teenaged kids. That boinking an employee he supervised was a firing offense under the best of circumstances—which these weren't. I did think all that, and also how I'd been away from hearth, home, and humping—er, honey—for way too fricking long before getting dragged here to save this guy's fornicating bacon. But maybe none of that mattered. Not if the brainstorm I had had paid off . . . .

  "About Mariana." Baxter swallowed, hesitated, then swallowed again. "The thing is—"

  "Skip it." We had bigger fish to fry. And what passed in me for people skills said the bump-and-grind had been at Mariana's instigation. "You and I need to talk ASAP to someone who understands bombs. The comm buoy you visually signaled to get me summoned? It has a long-range radio or, more likely, a high-power laser for the tight beam. Right? Of course, right. You couldn't access that transmitter, because you don't have a ship. But I do. If I can—"

  "You can't—"

  "The hell I can't," I interrupted right back. "I figure the company would've made the buoy physically small and unobtrusive, without any big honking telescope. That means it's got to be fairly close to monitor the exact position of your retroreflector. So: we print some IR sensors, do a sky search."

  And also vid cameras and lidar to bond to the hull of my windowless ship, because the Bounty's own nav sensors—and its nav computer—were inaccessible. (It was much debated among my peers how, before departing Ceres, mission data made their way into that sealed computer. From the mid-flight update that had rerouted me, the process involved the ship's likewise hidden and unreachable radio receiver. If I made it home, that breakthrough should get me a free drink or three.) Try to access the built-in sensors or the computer anywhere but in a company dry dock, and protective circuitry would fry them with a power surge.

  The rumor mill had it that, early in the company's history, a pilot took a can opener to his sealed console—and zap. He was adrift for months (no transmitter aboard but a helmet radio, remember?) before he failed to show up as expected and anyone knew to go looking. The derelict was eventually recovered, still coasting along one of its preprogrammed trajectories—its pilot having long since starved to death. Was that story a company plant, just to discourage clever people like me? If so, it worked.

  Anyway, assuming I could print my own sensors, low-res crap that they'd be, I had yet to decide how best to get their readouts onto the bridge. Not wireless comm: that wouldn't penetrate the metal hull. Most likely, I'd run cables through the closed airlock. I'd stay in a pressure suit, because the cables would keep the hatches from seating properly. Even making liberal use of anti-leak patches, chances are the ship would be losing air.

  None of which factors constituted a selling point.

  Shaking my head, clearing the cobwebs, I continued. "Like any rock, the buoy will soak up sunlight. We spot the buoy by its reradiated IR, work out its orbit. I seat-of-the-pants fly my ship to it"—because, Baxter knew as well as I, autopilot wouldn't do a thing but fly to a company-specified destination—"and then I—"

  "No!" He wrung his hands. "Okay, here's another thing you're not supposed to know. The buoy carries a comm laser, all right. The onboard computer has orbital parameters for the Rock, to track us, and orbital parameters for more distant relay buoys that in turn hold orbital parameters for other buoys, some shadowing other valuable rocks. To safeguard that data, each buoy in the network also carries a bomb and proximity sensors."

  Huh. I'd convinced myself a small buoy would be battery-limited. It couldn't, I had then extrapolated, store enough solar energy for its laser to damage an inbound ship that was bobbing and weaving and spinning. Once again, damn it, the company had me outwitted. An onboard bomb triggered by a magnetometer was simpler and more reliable.

  I said, "If I get close, it blows?"

  He nodded glumly.

  "Hold on," I said, "I have a better idea. I hack a printer, override its blacklist so I can make a transmitter. Under the circumstances, the company can't get too mad. We broadcast"—in every damned direction, since we couldn't see anything to aim at—"on a public emergency channel. We explain our situation and ask for guidance." I thought some more. "My bosses know they sent me here. I'll encrypt with my private key, and they'll be able to decrypt with my public key. No one overhearing will know this is a company asset."

  "You think you're the first person ever to imagine bootlegging a transmitter?" Baxter sighed. "It's been tried. If a printer sees it's being hacked, it fries itself. I've seen it happen. Same thing if you try to print lenses or magnifying mirrors—or IR sensors—anything that might contribute to making an astronomical instrument."

  Surely the hack was an acceptable risk. If we didn't defuse the bomb in the next few days, we'd evacuate on the inbound ship. Suppose every printer in the station were to go pfft. So what? My temporary quarters alone held enough emergency rations to last everyone here for weeks. "For sake of argument, suppose I succeed."

  "Won't matter. Remember that buoy shadowing us? The comm laser?"

  I nodded.

  "A long-range comm laser is a short-range weapon, at least against stationary targets. If the buoy hears us broadcasting, it'll take out any antenna we put up."

  "Well, shit," I said, and let myself out.

  ****

  After a sleepless night contemplating bombs, mystery toxins, and Mariana Kwan's sheet wa
fting to the floor in micro-gee, Dance of the Seven Veils, slo-mo, I followed the scents of coffee, vanilla, and cinnamon toward breakfast. From the direction of the station mess came the sounds of conversation. The zip-zip of my grip slippers and the rumble of a corridor ventilation fan rendered their voices unintelligible, but tone of voice, if I was any kind of judge, suggested argument.

  As I entered, the two miners in the room fell silent. Stony-faced, drink bulbs in hand, they stood between me and the nearest printer.

  "Morning," I offered in passing.

  The woman nodded. The man grunted.

  Plugging a memory stick into another printer, I ordered a large pancake rollup and a larger coffee bulb.

  "Old family recipe," I explained.

  Because I hadn't ordered straight from the printer's menu. Because someone on the Rock had synthed, quite possibly on this very printer, whatever poison the hidden bomb was days from dispersing. I couldn't prove that, of course. What purpose could there have been for logging what people synthed to eat? If I got off the Rock in one piece, I'd recommend changing that policy.

  My unsolicited explanation didn't rate a grunt.

  "Mind if I join you?" I ventured.

  Anisha Chatterjee made a desultory, one-handed motion that I chose to take as yes. She was slender and graceful, with dark skin, jet-black hair, and soulful eyes: a classic Indian beauty. Thirty, her file said. Electrical engineer and robot wrangler. Born in Mumbai, but her family had emigrated to the Moon before she turned six. Twice as smart as everyone, Baxter had told me, and apt to let it be known. Charming enough, also per Baxter, that people seldom took offense.

  I was still waiting for the charm. "Ready to head back to Ceres?" I asked her.

  "Sure." With the uptick of an eyebrow, she silently added, "That's a stupid question."

  I tried again, gesturing with the hand that gripped a rollup. "What's it like, eating flat pancakes? With syrup and butter dripping off the stack? Using a knife and fork?"

  It was her companion who answered. Ramon "Buck" Buranek was a Vestan, as spindly, and about as tall, as me. Pallid like me, too. Life-support engineer and medic. A dragon tattoo twined about his right forearm, the beast's head evidently hiding inside his short sleeve. His HR file offered useless speculation about if or how a buck and a dragon related to one another. Personally, I guessed they didn't, and that no explanation for the ink was necessary beyond too much booze or pot or whatever. He said, "It's too early for small talk."