Grantville Gazette, Volume 71

by Bjorn Hasseler

  "It's too early for anything but." I took a bite of pancake and made a face. The printer could use a recalibration.

  "So much for being subtle." Buck glowered. "A pre-departure audit doesn't make anyone here feel chatty. And maybe you're the genius who decided the strip search when we reach Ceres is inadequate."

  Strip search was a bit of an exaggeration. Noninvasive ultrasound scans more than sufficed. And the scans were kabuki theater, in any event, letting miners—and roving auditors—feel good about sneaking little items through. "I go where the company sends me, same as you."

  This comment didn't merit even a shrug.

  After awhile, Anisha cleared her throat. " ‘Breaking the awkward silence,' she also says with subtlety, ‘pancakes and maple syrup are not Indian cuisine.' "

  True enough, but flapjacks had to be common enough around the UCLA campus where she had gotten her masters. That knowledge was one more item to keep to myself. Her height, or lack of it, showed she was an Earther. Admitting that auditors had access to HR files wouldn't make us any better loved. "Then egg rolls with the mustard sauce on the outside? Vichyssoise that doesn't clot in and clog the nipple of a drink bulb? A French dip sandwich that a person gets to, you know, actually dip?"

  She laughed. "Now you're just teasing me. And yes, I—"

  "Buck," the PA speaker in the ceiling called out. I recognized Baxter's voice. "Can you come to the control room?"

  The control room was next door, apparently too close to bother responding over the intercom. I called out after Buck as he zipped/stalked to the exit, "We'll talk later." Because who was more likely than the crew medic to gin up and handle whatever evil brew lurked in the duct?

  Turning into the hall, maybe he grunted.

  "So," Anisha said, "are you ready to explain why you're actually here?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Please. There's no logic to an audit days before we rotate out, much less scarcely a month after the last auditor passed through. If someone here has come up with anything clever, smuggling-wise, what are the odds you'll spot it before we go? And if we try the usual tricks—of which, of course, I plead complete ignorance—well, those are surely covered by customary inspections when we get home."

  I had to give Baxter credit on the topic of this woman's charm. "Then why do you imagine I'm here?"

  She canted her head thoughtfully. "Maybe you found a way to defeat the system. You and the boss are all buddy-buddy."

  I shook my head. "The system is foolproof."

  "Do you know Robb's law?"

  I shook my head again.

  "For every foolproof system devised, a new and improved fool will arise to overcome it."

  Long, sleepless night notwithstanding, I had yet to find a line of questioning that wouldn't suggest my awareness of the hidden device. I did have plenty of ideas where not to start. Top of my do-not-ask list was: are you, by any chance, the mad bomber?

  I took another bite of pancake rollup, chewing slowly, making it last. "You know, I can't decide. Which of us are you insulting?"

  "You can choose." She deposited her drink bulb in a recycle bin. "It's off to work I go."

  "I came across some interesting anomalies in some of the more obscure system logs." I hadn't, but I wanted to see her reaction. Computer smarts remained the closest I came to having a clue to the bomber.

  "And sleuth that you are, you know I'm the sysadmin here." She smiled. "You also ought to know I'm good at my job. Trust me, if I'd done anything inappropriate, I wouldn't have left tracks for you to find. And I'd have seen anyone else's ‘anomalies' if they existed to be found. Hence: you're fishing. For what, I wonder."

  "Maybe you don't want to see what I'm seeing?"

  "Still fishing," she said, starting for the hatch.

  "So," I said. She stopped and turned. "Are you friends with the other crew?"

  Her eyes narrowed. "Why ask that?"

  Because I wonder if you're planning to kill them off. "Idle curiosity."

  "I don't know about friends. There's some friendly rivalry, sure."

  Because the company pitted crews against each other, basing bonuses on which team brought back the most ingots. Demonstrably the competition was motivational, but—and it was a rare instance of the company being too smart by half—that incentive sometimes led to sabotage. Like the background level of theft, this pattern was inferred more than proven, but—to an auditor, in any event—statistics don't lie. Productivity dipped right before crew changeover, and bumped back up soon after the same crew returned. It was just as if end-of-shift effort were being diverted into hiding the richest ore veins. To obscure that sort of subversion took serious computer legerdemain, too.

  I asked, "And how does that rivalry play out?"

  "Side bets and testosterone displays," she said. "Are we done here?" Once more she headed out.

  "What were you and Buck arguing about?"

  "Worlds affairs," she called over her shoulder. And then she was gone.

  ****

  Cornering Buck near the airlock as he suited up, we had a short chat to which his contributions were monosyllabic. Or nonsyllabic, when I included the scowls, shrugs, and squinty-eyed stares most often elicited by my conversational gambits. As for fresh insight into our present situation, that amounted to squat until my final question. "So, you and Anisha. What were you arguing about?"

  "Sports," he bit out while sealing his helmet. Then, magnetic boots clunking, he stomped into the airlock and started it cycling.

  One of them—at least—was lying. Because they were involved with the bomb? Or garden-variety theft? Maybe I just pissed them off. That last, for sure, could be problematical, because the reason for having humans here in the first place wasn't to do mining. Robots alone did an acceptable job of that, with none of the larceny hazards inherent with any human crew. But absent autonomous missile batteries and military-grade warbots, both thankfully difficult to come by, automation couldn't protect against a failure in the company's secrecy measures—a lesson the company had learned the hard way. Hence, just in case, the onsite armory. Hence, everyone in the crew, petite Mariana Kwan included, was a combat vet. Any one of them was more than capable of snapping me like a twig. (But none of them had had any special training with explosives. I'd checked their files.)

  I set aside for later consideration Buck and Anisha's inconsistent stories, then went looking for another member of the crew. Les Hodges was a biotech/nanotech engineer; in terms of capability for poison-crafting, he was as plausible as anyone here. (The situation was getting as muddled as any Brit cozy mystery, Agatha Christie and such, wherein everyone is a suspect.)

  I found Hodges—his hands inside a glove box, brow furrowed in concentration—in the station's tiny machine shop, reassembling a battered prospecting bot. A few shiny pieces inside the box looked fresh from a printer. (Among those parts I spotted a squat tube. I told myself Baxter said accelerometers were standard in their bots. I told myself a lot of things.) At the least nudge, parts went airborne. He hummed along with something orchestral and baroque-sounding playing softly in the background. With only the briefest of glances away from his work as I entered, he ordered, "Gimme a minute."

  I spent that minute, and the next several, considering the man. He was another Earther, and fairly tall as that breed went. Balding, pale (or was sallow the more accurate term?), with a slot face, cleft chin, and close-set eyes of cloudy blue. Two years a widower; one son at university back on Earth. Maybe it was the stooped shoulders that gave a weary impression of age, or the hang-dog expression, but he struck me as older than the fifty-four years shown in his HR file. I didn't foresee a lot more mining tours in his future—and that might be another reason to suspect him. After awhile, I switched my focus to someone's pet hamster, caroming and somersaulting about its cage. Short of gluing zip strips to the little guy's feet, I guess an exercise wheel was out of the question.

  "Done." With an efficiency doubtless acquired from long practice,
he extracted his hands from the elbow-length gloves, opened the box, and removed the reassembled bot. He turned, finally, to face me. "Whatever it is, I didn't do it. Is there anything else?"

  "Well, as long as you didn't do it." I smiled. "Ready for the crew rotation?"

  "Anyone ever not?"

  "Good point." I tried the tack that had set Anisha on edge. "Do you have friends among the other crew?"

  A long pause and an odd look preceded the one-word answer. "No."

  After a bit more such snappy repartee I wandered off, none the wiser, to speak with the delectable Mariana Kwan. Apart from the flirting, that session, too, proved equally useless. I was out of ideas, even as the clock kept ticking.

  ****

  Like the proverbial drunk hunting for his keys near where the light is best and not where he'd last seen them, I fell back upon routine. Auditing was something to do while—I had to hope—my subconscious exhumed an idea more useful than fleeing like a bat out of hell. Because only a day remained till the crew ship was due, and only three till the bomb released . . . whatever.

  Long story short, someone, and I took Anisha Chatterjee at her word, was good at what she did.

  But so am I, and routine offered an excuse for putting my skills to work.

  No significant piece of software, never mind how extensively tested, is ever one hundred percent bug-free. That's why, every few weeks, vendors distribute updates. Company rocks, being off the net, don't get updates except at crew rotation or when someone like me passes through. And on a mass spectrometer that in every other way seemed copasetic, an update I'd had with me refused to install into the instrument's embedded software.

  Intrusion-detection software and device diagnostics alike compare a stored checksum for any given app against a checksum value newly calculated for the same app. For the mass spec, old and new checksums matched. But the app's update installer made its own check for the integrity of the software it would patch—and that test failed. I'd installed this update on my three planned stops this trip, suggesting the glitch was somehow specific to this particular mass spec.

  And with some digging, I discovered the root cause. Device diagnostics and intrusion-detection software alike examine the memory allocated to each app. The update software made a slightly more expansive check, extending its scope over the unallocated memory the as-yet uninstalled patch would occupy. I found a program in what should have been such unallocated memory. Then, doing a painful, line-by-line comparison, I found the small modification to the app that accessed the unauthorized patch. Ordinarily, overwriting an executable with a jump to patch space alters the calculated checksum. This overwrite included a weird embedded constant that, I proved to myself, hid the change as far as the routine checksum calculations were concerned.

  Still, I didn't yet see how intrusion detection had been bypassed to make the unauthorized changes, or to keep that activity out of the security log. Those were brain teasers best left for another day. Assuming I got one.

  The unauthorized patch itself was simple enough to reverse-engineer. It underreported by a tenth of a percent the concentration of platinum within an ore sample. That didn't sound like much, but doing the math, and depending on when the hack had been made, the inventory discrepancy could reach ten kilos of ultra-refined platinum. In round numbers, a quarter-million Belt bucks.

  Someday, maybe, I'd figure out how the crook(s) expected to sneak that much platinum off the Rock. Right then more important matters held my interest. Someone, and I still assumed Anisha, was damned good at covering her digital tracks. That someone, and anyone working with her, wouldn't be involved with the bomb. Why work this hard at stealing a few kilos when the bomber, I had to believe, had the entire inventory in their sights? Once more dealing in round numbers, the vault presently held ten tonnes of ingots. My second realization—entirely unrelated, apart from any scrap of progress being inspirational—was that, at last, I understood how to proceed.

  ****

  My brilliant idea, with sleuthing having gotten me nowhere, was entrapment. Baxter let it be known that the scheduled crew rotation had been postponed by at least a week—breaking bad news that he, of course, attributed to me. The announcement didn't make me any more popular, but it did give whoever had placed the bomb, now due to go boom in three short days, the motivation to reset the timer. Or so, anyway, I hoped.

  While Baxter kept his crew outside for various tasks, I borrowed a drill from the machine shop to make a peephole in the wall between my quarters and the bomb room. I disconnected power from the actuator of a nearby HVAC damper; the automated controls could no longer reposition the damper and no robot creeping through the duct could get past the damper to the bomb.

  Hours later, in the face of crew hostility, I retired early to my room with a covered dinner tray and waited. And waited. And waited. Thanks to chemical assistance, I waited the entire night shift awake and alert—and no one showed up.

  That's not to say the time had been uneventful.

  The next morning, Anisha was nowhere to be found.

  ****

  Her room looked stirred. For all I knew she liked it that way, but everyone assured me she was a neatnik (indeed, the walls were comparatively free of the ubiquitous dust), and also that several small personal items were missing. Likewise gone, from its locker near the airlock: her pressure suit. No one said this looked exactly like Anisha had sneaked out by dark of night shift. No one had to. And if such stealing away seemed odd, well, neither could I understand why anyone able to arrange for a ship to retrieve her from a clandestine platinum mine would settle for a mere ten-kilo heist.

  Baxter sent Buck, Mariana, and Les outside to scour the surface for any sign of Anisha, while he and I did a more thorough inside sweep. We didn't find her, of course. We fast-forwarded through surveillance vids for the preceding twelve hours. Once people went into their rooms for the night—personal spaces didn't have cameras—we had nada. Well, I'd seen surveillance feeds hacked before.

  The outside search was still underway when the crew ship came within range to flash out the month's authentication code, and Baxter summoned his crewmates back inside.

  ****

  The new crew crowded into the station, likely anticipating the customary changeover festivities. Neither incoming nor outgoing crew can expect to see any new faces for a while; rivalries notwithstanding, rotation was ordinarily the occasion for a party. But not this trip.

  Mustafa Gilfoyle, station chief of the new crew, was the first to shed his vacuum gear and emerge into the Rock's main corridor. He was a second-generation Loonie; an easy-going guy I knew slightly from years ago on another company rock. In seconds he processed the glum faces and the peculiarity of an auditor onsite at shift rotation. "What's the problem here?"

  "Let's wait for the rest of your team," Baxter said. Four more joined us, and he turned to me. "Okay. Your show."

  I caught Mustafa's eye. "Let's you, Baxter, and me go for a walk." I led them into the side corridor that held crew quarters, detouring to the mess to dispense a special recipe into a drink bulb. If either man noticed that this bulb had a misting attachment, what spacers use to water potted plants, he didn't comment. Still, the stopover earned me quizzical looks. We paused outside Anisha's room.

  "I'll ask again," Mustafa said. "What's going on?"

  Baxter cleared his throat. "One of my crew . . . disappeared this morning. She and her pressure suit are gone."

  "More specifically," I corrected, "she was murdered this morning."

  Baxter twitched. "Why would you say that?"

  "To start, the too-clean walls in her room." I raised the drink bulb. "This is luminol."

  Evidently I wasn't the only one here who watched crime vids. Mustafa said, "The forensic stuff. Right?"

  I nodded. "We three will go into the room, shut the hatch, and I'll turn out the lights. Then I'll prove what I already know."

  "It's pretty snug quarters for three," Baxter said.

  "Uh
-huh," I said. "You're welcome to wait out here."

  All "night" I'd expected Baxter to come after me while my attention, or so I'd intended him to believe, remained fixed on the peephole. (I'd delegated that task to my comp, its webcam taped against the opening.) Only nothing had transpired in either room.

  My thinking had been this: Baxter or an accomplice deployed the bomb with its load of mystery toxins to take out Mustafa's crew. Dead station chiefs move no retroreflectors. The ship with Baxter's crew, having just departed the Rock for Ceres, would still be nearby when the failsafe "uh-oh, no one moved the retroreflector" Mayday message was received on Ceres.

  So: the ship would automagically return to the Rock. Baxter (and his cuddly new friend?) would send the unsuspecting, non-accomplice members of his crew into the station for a look-see, at which point the toxin would take them out. He'd have bots dispose of the bodies, leaving behind blood spatters from everyone in both crews—a few cc's of his own blood being a small sacrifice. The conspirators would fly away leaving the company to infer pirates (a) killed Mustafa's crew and then (b) killed Baxter and crew, when they returned, and finally (c) took away the crew ship and its cargo.

  Where did I fit in? Before Baxter pulled the trigger (as it were) on his scheme, he would have needed to confirm what he'd been told about the retroreflector and Mayday signaling. That might have been pure company BS, a tall tale to mollify station chiefs putting up a fuss about their lack of comms. Unless someone—in this case, lucky me—showed up, I figured Baxter would have called off the caper. He likely had been on the verge of aborting when, finally, I did arrive. My eleven-day detour had delivered me to the Rock a mere three days before the scheduled crew rotation. But that long, surely nerve-racking, wait would also have meant very good odds Baxter would be in the closest ship when the next "emergency" was inferred.