Grantville Gazette, Volume 71

by Bjorn Hasseler

  Once someone like me was onsite, Baxter would need to explain the summons. The partial truth, "There's a bomb here," served perfectly well—as long no one else was told—and with everyone a suspect, naturally I hadn't breathed a word. I also couldn't be allowed to warn Mustafa's crew about the bomb and their need to evacuate. Hence, in this twisted conspiracy I had so tortuously concocted, Baxter would come after me during the night. He'd disappear my body and the Bounty. A bot placed aboard could easily be made to boost the Bounty off the Rock, using only attitude jets, the autopilot disengaged. Odds were the ship would never be seen again. His crew would be told I'd slinked away in the night shift, avoiding more of their disdain.

  That was the theory. Instead, after an interminable night spent with my back pressed against the wall beside the hatch, ready to brain Baxter with a wrench when he skulked in . . . he hadn't.

  It had bugged me no end that someone might have found a way to hijack a company ship. I considered myself pretty savvy, and I hadn't figured out a way. Injured pride, to be honest, is why, more than anything, I hadn't—entirely—bought into any of this.

  Had I mentioned two nights without sleep, the second on uppers and in fear for my life?

  "You want me to wait here in the hallway?" With furrowed brow, Baxter studied me. Incredulous, or posing as such? "Because I might have killed Anisha. If anything like that happened, that is."

  "It happened," I assured him. And innocent of setting the bomb—for which, once again, I was without suspects—wasn't nearly the same as innocent.

  Anisha could have been behind the excess pilferage I'd noticed. If so an accomplice, who might be anyone among her crew, could've gotten greedy. But maybe—and part of me wanted dearly to believe this, because, damn it, the woman was charming—she had just been doing her job. She'd seen something amiss, brought her suspicions to someone's attention, and that had gotten her killed. The most likely someone for her to have approached being her boss . . . .

  "Perhaps so," Baxter said, "but I had nothing to do with it."

  Mustafa opened the hatch and stepped into Anisha's room.

  Baxter and I followed. I oriented us toward the cleanest wall, wondering if I smelled chlorine beneath the pervasive used-gunpowder stench, or if that was my imagination. With bulb firmly grasped in one hand, I flicked off the lights. I spritzed the wall, and glowing blotches appeared.

  "Oh, shit," Mustafa said. "Blood spatter."

  I spritzed all around that first, lucky hit. Lots more spatter. When I'd read from the wiki in my pocket comp that the fluorescence lasted only about thirty seconds, it had seemed worrisomely short. Just then, by the damning blue glow, a half minute felt interminable. That turned out to be fortunate, because I almost forgot to take pictures. As darkness finally returned, I flicked on the overhead lights.

  "And the body?" Mustafa asked. "Chucked off-world?"

  In the hunt for Anisha, no one had admitted to hearing the airlock cycle since before dinner. I certainly hadn't, and I'd been keyed up even aside from the amphetamines. (As for the station airlock controls, those gave no indication of having been operated during the recent sleep shift—but I trusted its records about as much as I did the surveillance feeds.) Not to mention it would have taken nerves of steel to tote a dead body through the halls. Sleep shift, and everyone asleep, are quite different concepts. Not to mention that, plastered against the wall for hours, interminably waiting, I'd given considerable thought to how I would dispose of a body.

  I said, "I'm pretty sure not. Come with me, and I'll show you."

  Our next stop was the main printing/recycling room. Digital readouts showed more or less middling levels of everything. Eyeball the physical reservoirs, however, and the picture changed. Metals and plastics—pressure suit (and murder weapon?) materials—had both jumped. Most stood noticeably above the time-stamped inventory I'd printed the day previous. (No foresight or intuition involved: auditors routinely monitor stocks of metal and plastic. Feedstock increases in either category often suggest mundane personal items getting remade in platinum.) At my level of engineering sophistication, nanotech was indistinguishable from magic, but even I knew that disassembling physical objects into chemical feedstock consumed lots of energy. It was more than a little suggestive that the main battery bank—as characterized from a voltmeter measurement, not by its computerized readout—had all but drained overnight. And the stomach-turning clincher: the organics supply was nearly sixty kilos increased from the day before. About what Anisha must have massed.

  "Luminol showed blood spatter in this room, too," I offered to break the silence.

  Mustafa muttered under his breath. Curse? Prayer? It hardly mattered. He turned to Baxter. "Someone in your crew is a murderer."

  "The news gets worse." Baxter gestured toward the hatch. With a quick visit to a certain nearby storeroom he made his case.

  ****

  Shocker: no one admitted to having a disarm code for the bomb.

  That left no options but evacuation. In the best of circumstances, shoehorning two crews onto a one-crew ship would be unpleasant. But with an unidentified murderer aboard? That I wouldn't be along for the ride almost reconciled me to my immediate future. I'd be staying to observe events two days hence, and what, if anything, remained afterward of the station.

  With two crews loudly venting about the situation, I cleared my throat. No one heard, and I resorted to a piercing whistle. "Another thing, people. I'll be collecting everyone's computers. Preserving evidence for the authorities."

  "The hell you will," a newcomer snapped.

  "From Baxter's crew? Damn straight," another said. "One of them is a killer."

  "From everyone," Mustafa said firmly. "We don't know how long the bomb's been here, or if for some reason one of us is the target." Shaken, his crew confronted the possibility of a would-be murderer among their number. "Cough 'em up, people."

  Baxter handed over his pocket comp for me to bag and tag. "Now the rest of you," he told his folks. Most, grumbling, complied. "C'mon, Les. Give it up."

  Hodges's eyes darted about nervously. Everyone had good cause to be agitated, and I didn't read anything into his reticence. Personal comps are personal; experts can glean our most private secrets and embarrassing moments from the devices.

  "Back on Ceres, the cops will need it," Baxter said.

  Still, Les hesitated.

  "It's not a request," Baxter barked. Like a ship's captain, at sea or in space, a station chief's word was law.

  "The authentication and encryption are biometric," I reminded. Of course, forensic accountants, like cops, had ways to crack open locked comps. There was nothing to be gained in volunteering that little detail.

  But maybe Les knew or, at the least, suspected as much. Maybe he was racked with guilt, about the bomb, or Anisha, or both. Maybe he was plain crazy. Whatever his reason, with no more explanation than a soft-spoken "Sorry," he collapsed, convulsing. Seconds later, his mouth giving off the faint smell of bitter almonds, Lester Hodges was dead.

  ****

  Every crew ship arrived carrying an empty modular vault. The departing crew used a crane to hoist the vault they had spent months filling, replace it with the empty, then lift the filled vault aboard the ship. Not even a vault full of platinum had much weight on the Rock—but full or empty, that sucker had plenty of mass and inertia.

  Ticking time bomb notwithstanding, no one even considered abandoning ten tonnes of platinum ingots. I spared a moment from my preparations to watch, channeling a toon from my youth of dancing hippos in tutus. Ponderous vault or lumbering hippo: you wouldn't want either bumping into you.

  Minutes later, with not quite thirty-six hours remaining on the bomb's clock, the ship launched. Who, I wondered, would still be alive when she got to Ceres?

  I glued cameras, chemical sensors, and pressure gauges to walls, floors, ceilings, and air ducts throughout the station. The printer catalog included wireless versions (radiating, of course, at very low power le
vels), any subset within radio range of one another able to self-organize into ad hoc networks. I couldn't begin to guess what havoc an explosion or pressure breach might wreak on cabling or even wireless routers, so fault-tolerant and reconfigurable networking seemed the way to go.

  The hamster I'd seen had been Les's, and no one objected to my claiming it. Mustafa had had to order his people to leave behind their pets, a ferret and a parakeet. I didn't expect to return them. I positioned the animals in their respective cages, with plenty of food and water, in three widely separated rooms.

  I sent a recall to the smaller mining bots, lashed magnets to tentacle tips on some of them, and shuttled two dozen bots inside. I tested and retested the low-wattage primary and backup transmitters, and the fiber-optic cables linking those surface transmitters with the underground station, confirming I had end-to-end connectivity to everything through my helmet radio. Remaining suited up, I took a final pass through the station, harvesting data backups from every automated system capable of dumping its files into portable storage. I printed and then scattered yet more wireless sensors, this time on the surface directly above the underground station, half-expecting the coming shockwave would send them careening clear off this tiny world.

  With not quite seven hours to go, I retreated to my ship—surely I'd be safe there, a quarter klick from the station—setting an alarm for thirty minutes until boom. Apart from popping my helmet, I remained prepped for vacuum.

  Then, for the first time in days, I slept. Fitfully.

  ****

  The explosion came right on time.

  I didn't feel a thing. Monitored from the safety of the Bounty, events were strangely anticlimactic. The duct with the bomb ruptured, of course. The nearby damper I'd positioned to keep out robots impaled itself in a nearby wall, itself buckled. The storeroom hatch came off its hinges, shredding the gasket. A pressure wave propagated back and forth several times through the station, in the process bursting open a few more interior hatches and generally making a mess—but never compromising the integrity of the overall facility. Enough of the ventilation system survived to quickly clear the smoke and dust.

  The parakeet happened to be airborne when the blast wave hit; the poor critter was thrown across its cage and clearly broke something. Ferret and hamster, as best I could tell, came through spitting mad but unscathed.

  An hour later, the animals were still okay; even the bird had somewhat perked up. Had the glass bottle, somehow, not broken?

  The blast had taken out the camera I'd set into the duct. To walk a mining bot up the wall on magneted tentacles took finesse and patience, neither of which I possessed just then, but finally I got a bot to where it could peer into the burst ceiling duct. What little of the bomb's bottle remained had been reduced to grit and slivers. The bottle's content, whatever that might have been, was well and truly dispersed. My sensors hadn't reported anything scary, which likely only meant the catalog for the station's printers hadn't anticipated exotic chemical attacks. Why would it?

  For fifty-five hours straight, apart from nodding off once or twice, I cycled among cameras across the station. I directed robots into remote corners for yet more views. I pored over sensor readouts. I monitored the nearby surface for anything out of the ordinary. Nothing. Except for bots and the three animals in their cages, nothing stirred. I was seriously considering a trip inside for a more personal examination when, inside the hamster cage, the plastic water bottle . . . dissolved.

  ****

  Over the next two days, in more and more of the station, things crumbled. Furniture. The wrappers on emergency rations. Drink bulbs. All manner of everyday items, large and small. Interior hatch seals, and the gaskets inside equipment I hadn't even realized used gaskets. Scariest of all: spare vacuum gear as they hung in their lockers.

  It did my mood no damned good to have only crappy views of this slo-mo nightmare. Company printers just wouldn't make sensors with decent resolution or light sensitivity—I might as well have watched through layers of gauze. The webcams on company-approved comps were no better. This was another of those rare instances when, in hindsight, the genius paranoia was too clever by half.

  While I didn't know what the bomb had dispersed, it was all too clear what that crap did. It attacked things composed of rubber, plastic, or synthetic fibers. As the damage spread, I speculated it had to involve a bacterium or virus or nanite. Something that replicated and spread. Something nasty. I didn't dare go inside for a sample lest the stuff attack my suit. I didn't dare have a robot carry out a sample, for the same fear of contamination.

  Throughout, the station maintained atmosphere. I'd never given much thought to types of airlock hatch seals, but a dive into station schematics revealed an all-metal hatch design. Like springs, properly shaped metal surfaces would press together. That technology, it appeared, was maintaining the station's airtight seal. But many off-Earth facilities—including ships—used rubber gaskets in their hatches. The ship in which I huddled, for one.

  Through it all, the animals were fine. They might stay fine for as long as robots could keep delivering food and water—and while recyclers, printers, and life support still ran. I had no idea how long that might be. And I had the greater good to consider.

  From the presumed (whistling through the graveyard?) safety of the Bounty, I remotely experimented. I doused the station's lights for twenty-four hours. With the lights restored, I could discern little effect upon the pace of destruction. I switched off the heat and let the temperature plummet as low as I dared. I didn't relent for the animals' sake, although I would have regretted their deaths—and, indeed, the parakeet didn't make it. Sustained temperatures below freezing would destroy both hydroponic crops and the bacterial mats in main life support; I had my doubts how accepting the company would have been of that. For what it was worth, lowered temps did slow the . . . whatever, if only by a little.

  Might truly deep and prolonged cold—the interior temperature on Belt rocks averages about -70o C—stop the mystery plague? I had no idea, nor dare I remain, incommunicado, for long enough to find out. There was likely a murderer, or a mad bomber, or both on the crew ship I'd recently seen off, and I held key evidence. And anyway, if I were to undertake such an experiment, how long would I stay? Bacteria have been revived from dormancy after millennia frozen in ice.

  Would vacuum kill the stuff? I saw no way to do that test without spurting contagion right out of the station. The crud might contaminate the surface, or my ship, or even get blown clean off this tiny world to drift to others. So: no. Make that: hell, no.

  I'd been using a mining bot every day to shift the hush-hush retroflector, lest the unseen Mayday buoy signal Ceres to send out another ship. In preparation for leaving, I reprogrammed the bot to continue those moves in my absence. The last thing anyone needed was another ship and its unsuspecting crew diverted here before I got back to Ceres to explain the situation. For good measure, along with a warning note duct-taped to the outer airlock hatch, I stomped skull and crossbones into the dust.

  With that, there was nothing more here for me to do. I untethered the Bounty, then eased her away from the Rock with the gentlest possible puffs from her attitude jets. I did not activate autopilot until we were way too distant for the main drive's exhaust to stir up any contaminated dust.

  ****

  It would've been nice to have an inkling when I'd get back home. How long would I be left obsessing about sabotage, murder, and pressure-suit-chomping bacteria? Days? Weeks? Months? As days ceased to be a possibility, I thought about home and hearth. I listened to my music library, watched vids from that library, read, did what little in the way of exercise was possible in the Bounty's tiny cabin. All the while, trying to ignore the siren song of the bagged personal comps . . . .

  The longer I stewed in my own juices, the more confused I became. Among the miners were a thief, a murderer, and a bomber. Just possibly, someone took on more than one of those roles. The simplest theory now consistent
with what I (thought I) knew: Anisha and a confederate had diverted several kilos of platinum. The confederate killed her, whether from greed or for fear she would confess to me. Someone else made and set the bomb. Les Hodges was guilty of something, but I couldn't decide of what.

  The interminable flight had given me ample time to imagine other scenarios. Maybe Anisha, rather than being a thief, had discovered the thief, tried to blackmail him or her, and gotten killed for her trouble. Maybe Anisha found something suspicious that led to her asking the wrong questions of the bomber, and that got her killed. Maybe—

  Enough navel-gazing! Okay, I'd never seen an elephant, but I understood metaphor. I'd been ignoring the giant pachyderm in the cabin. For any merely vindictive or larcenous purpose, simple explosives would have sufficed. Massive, without-warning decompression would, comparatively speaking, have killed everyone at the station quickly. Setting loose that weird contagion within the station? Trapping everyone inside, and making their rescue perilous at best and impossible at worst? That had to be someone sending a message. The nasty truth I had been loath to confront was this: the Rock had been targeted by terrorists—or nut jobs.

  "Screw it," I declared to untold kiloklicks of vacuum all around. "I know Les was up to something. Let's see what's on his comp."

  ****

  Biometric authentication and encryption algorithms are no more secure than the software that realizes them—or any other software on which those algorithms rely. I had a half-dozen patches for operating-system bugs found after Baxter and his crew set out for the Rock. I had only to connect a comp of mine into the PC I'd taken from Les's pocket and exploit any of the unpatched vulnerabilities. Simple.

  It wasn't.

  I hadn't offered PC updates to anyone on the Rock, and yet, it turned out, Les's comp had all the patches I'd brought. But hadn't Anisha mentioned another auditor had been at the Rock shortly before me? Yes, she had. He must have had with him at least some of the patches I had.