by Sage Walker
Yves rocked back and forth on his heels, surveying walls and doorways and lintels. He tilted his head and looked up at the ceiling. “This place has too many eyes for that. You’re saying he didn’t get on the train,” Yves said.
“Not from here.” Helt’s screen showed Yves the diagrams for the Nav lobby overlaid with dots to mark camera placements. Yves hadn’t missed eyeing a single one when he looked up, but then, he would know where the cameras were supposed to be. “He got from the changing room to Athens tower, and got dead on the way, and no one saw him.”
“Let’s walk it through,” Yves said.
* * *
Lights in the changing room woke when they entered. The glassy eyes of closed suits watched them enter, an array of shed human-shaped carapaces hooked to the wall, slumped like hanged men. At the far end of the room, an airlock led to the shuttle tunnel.
“You have a torch?” Yves asked.
“No.”
“You’d better get one. You’d better get into a coverall, too.” Yves went to a bin and rummaged. “Hate to lose you before you get my colonist status cleared. One-oh-five long, right?”
“Exactly,” Helt said. He took off his windbreaker, pulled on the coverall, and stuffed the windbreaker between its front and his stomach. Yves found a headlamp on a shelf and handed it to him.
There was a trapdoor in the ceiling. Yves reached up and pulled an attic staircase down and stepped on it, jumping once to check that it was stable. “Come on up.”
Think like an architect. The space above the ceiling held ducts and conduit and beams that crossed the floor, supports for the ceiling below. Helt stood up and his head didn’t quite touch the raw rock above.
“There’s headroom,” he said.
“The architects didn’t have to think about building costs. What this much height tells you is that one of them had changed a lightbulb in a hard spot somewhere. Once, anyway.” Yves pulled the staircase back up and the world went dark.
Helt pulled on his headlamp and followed Yves, walking the girders. He felt like he was playing a sidewalk game, except in this one the object was to step on the cracks, not between them. “You could get lost up here.”
“Sure.” Yves moved with the grace of a circus acrobat. “If you don’t have an interface with you. In that case, you find a trapdoor and look down.”
“Have you worked up here before?”
“Nah. This was tunneled out four, five years after the core was hollowed. Long before my time.”
“I wonder if Mena’s thought about spiders in places like this,” Helt said. It was bound to happen, sooner or later. For now, the place looked dust free, almost sterile. But he wasn’t looking at the place in bright light.
“You scared of spiders?” Yves asked.
“No,” Helt said. Step, judge the next secure footing, step.
Yves, four beams ahead because he moved faster, knelt and pushed a staircase open. His chin, lighted from below, looked carved out of rock. Behind the sculptor’s crouched shoulders a wall rose, black stone that went up and vanished in the darkness.
“We’re beside the train tunnel,” Yves said. “Utility closet.” Yves backed down the ladder and Helt followed him down past shelves of cleaning supplies and hand tools. On the floor, cleaner bots snoozed in corners. There were two doors; one marked Navigation and the other, Tunnel. Helt pushed the trapdoor closed and followed Yves out of the closet and into the dark.
The lines of track that ran toward Athens were silver traced on black. Yves turned and the tracks ahead jerked into view, disappeared, reappeared.
“I’m trying to figure a scenario where Ryan and his killers climbed up there and why they would do it,” Helt said.
“You asked how to get from here to Athens and not show on a security camera,” Yves said.
“So it can be done; you’re proving that. I didn’t ask you how probable it was.”
“No, you didn’t. There’s a walkway out here. It’s wider than it looks. Plenty of room on it for repair vehicles.”
“What happens when the train comes?” Helt asked.
“You don’t have to get your back against the wall, but you’ll probably want to. Don’t watch the headlight. Plays hell with your night vision.”
“Right,” Helt said.
“There may not be a train. We didn’t call one.”
“We could just go into the lobby and ride over,” Helt said. He found the distance that would keep him from bumping into Yves and focused on Yves’s left hand as it swung back and forth across the line of lighted track. The right-hand wall of the tunnel was farther away than his arm could reach.
“There’s a cold place or two on the way, maybe.” Yves set a brisk pace. Helt fell into the rhythm; Yves’s stride was a long, swinging near-lope that covered ground quickly. Helt’s hands were getting cold but he wanted his arms beside him for balance in the dark. “Back at The Lab, when you told Birdy you understood. His team lost the next game, right?”
“Yeah. It took Real Madrid five years to recover.”
They walked on. Helt imagined Elena in her office, out of the dark lab where the embryos slept, in the warmth and the light and sitting at her desk; he imagined Susanna sleeping, warm. The chill in tonight’s air would help wake her on her walk to the clinic. Archer would still be in his office, or maybe he’d gone home. Helt wanted to look at them all, look at them in the light from his little screen and watch them, listen to them, but here was dark and cold and the most important thing to see was Yves’s hand swinging back and forth, and to know they were getting somewhere.
If Doughan picked up his interface and powered it off, Helt would hear a beep. If Doughan saw it and left it where it was and went on to wherever he was going tonight, surveillance cameras would tell Helt about it; they were keyed to alert him, their functions set for Doughan’s face, stature, walk.
“I never think about temperature control in the trains,” Helt said.
“Shirtsleeve weather to get to work year-round,” Yves said. “Shirtsleeve weather in this coverall I’m wearing, too. You cold back there?”
“Cool enough,” Helt said. “What’s ambient in here?”
“About two degrees on Level Three but we’ll be picking up some heat from the factories soon. Maybe three or four. Turn on your suit, Helt. The tab’s on your left shirt pocket. “
“Oh.” Helt did that, and in three, no, four steps his shins weren’t cold anymore. He turned on his headlamp, too, and got a good look at the back of Yves’s neck and not much else. He’d been seeing the pool of light from Yves’s lamp and doing fine with that, so he turned his own light off again.
“Who killed Ryan? You know yet?” Yves asked.
“I wish I could say I know for sure. Knowing where he died could tell me a lot about that.”
They walked on. The mineral-scented air was quiet and the grade was uphill; the train climbed from the Nav offices, actually on Level Three. David II’s industrial kingdom was on the real Level Two but the differences weren’t noticeable when you came back and forth on the train.
Helt was aware of the shapes of his kneecaps, the blades of his shins; the chill on his bare hands. This tunnel wasn’t cold enough. Not nearly cold enough. A man could keep walking for hours in this. He wouldn’t be comfortable in civvies, but his core temperature would stay okay as long as he was moving.
“See up there?” Yves’s headlight vanished the track and jerked upward to shine on black nothing. Helt kept his pace and wished Yves would look back down again.
“See what?”
“The section seal.”
“Divides the industrial park right under Athens from Navigation,” Helt said. He’d never paid attention to it on his trips to Navigation offices and back. He’d never looked up from his work, safe in the shirtsleeve weather inside the train and always going from one task to another. “I know there is one, but I don’t see it.”
Yves nodded and the light swooped up and down. “Another five min
utes and we’ll be there.”
“Don’t nod,” Helt said. “Makes me dizzy.”
“Okay.”
They walked on. Yves had never changed his pace, and Helt found the new normal of a view of a line of track and Yves’s swinging hand comforting, in its way.
“Here,” Yves said, and the bulk of the section seal was just ahead, its right-hand pillar marked with a groove of deeper black cut out of the rock, a vertical channel to guide the seal door down. There was a door in the tunnel wall beside it. Yves pulled on the handle, hard. Helt heard a swish of pneumatic seal moving over stone. Another door, and indicator lights in the darkness beyond glowed vivid green in the dark. Motion sensors turned on the lights and Helt winced in the sudden glare.
The space was taller than the tunnel, twice its height at least, and it was big enough to hold sweeper bots and some standing consoles and tool cabinets. Huge cables went up and up the darkness and vanished in the darkness overhead.
“This space is plenty big enough to hide somebody in,” Yves said. He reached out and pushed on one of the cables. It didn’t move at all. “I wouldn’t have done some of these things the way they’re done, but this is so damned primitive I love it. The seal drops if a simple mercury barometer sinks to a critical level even if no one tells it to. It drops if you push a button, or it comes down on remote if somebody signals in one of those drills Navigation likes to call.”
“Doughan likes to call,” Helt said.
“There’s a motor to haul it back up, but look at this.”
Yves put both hands on a long crank attached to a wheel. “Counterweights and pulleys. We have g, and that’s the force that brings the seal down. And if we don’t have g, there’s something gone so wrong that it’s likely we’re all dead anyway. But one strong man could get his feet under these stirrups on the floor, here”—Yves pointed at them—“in micro-g, crank the seal down if he had to, and crank it back up again.”
“It’s beautiful,” Helt said, because it was. “But I think it’s too warm for what we need.”
“Too warm. You’re hard to please.” Yves led the way around and past the cable display and through another pair of sealed doors that opened onto the Athens side of the seal.
“I need minus ten,” Helt said.
“That’s where we’re headed.”
They reached the doorway to the industrial park after a five-minute walk that seemed level. The courtyard around the Athens elevator on Level Two was too bright and too hot after the dark cold of the tunnel. The contrast brought back memories of ski lodges and fireplaces, the feel of windburn on Helt’s face making itself known as he came in from the cold.
Beside the Athens elevator was a doorway marked EXIT. Just where it should be; there were stairways between one level and the next near every elevator. This one was lighted, and it went up to Level One and down into Kybele’s virgin rock. Down, with landings and turns. Helt stopped on one and looked for a camera. There wasn’t one.
“What are you looking for?” Yves asked.
“No cameras,” Helt said.
“This stairwell will be a dead end until it’s time to dig out Level Three. No reason to come down here unless you’re on maintenance duty, and you have lights and cloud access for that.”
Helt called up a blueprint for the Athens elevator and got it. The signal was fine.
He followed Yves on down, and the air got colder again, and colder yet. Eight landings, four stories, two sets of footsteps ringing on metal stairs bolted into rock. The stairwell ended in a cul-de-sac and another door. Yves opened it.
They stepped into darkness again. Yves’s headlamp strobed the walls of a vault. It was long and room-high and it looked like a corridor to nowhere.
Twenty paces, twenty meters more or less, and Yves stopped and held out a cautioning hand. Helt walked up beside him and looked down into a black hole. He turned his headlamp on. The vault opened on a shaft that went deeper yet, the true bottom of the elevator shaft, a place of massive cables and pulleys, its floor about three meters down. There was no safety rail. There was a ladder hooked to the wall of the shaft, on Yves’s side of the vault.
“Think like an architect,” Helt said. His interface measured an ambient temperature of minus eight. Close enough. His face felt the freeze. He rummaged in the pockets of the borrowed coverall for gloves. The soles of his shoes let some of the cold in. “This is where you get to the elevator for maintenance.” There weren’t any gloves.
“The cables get checked now and again. There’s a schedule. Cold enough?” Yves asked. He unzipped the collar of his coverall and pulled a hoodie up, and let its facecover drop into place. His headlamp was bright enough that the translucent fabric didn’t bother it. A hood seemed like a fine idea. Helt fumbled with the collar zipper on his coverall until he found its sweet spot. He pulled his own hood out of his collar.
“Close enough to the Athens elevator, and cold enough. I’ll get the lab techs down here,” Helt said. A stark and terrible place to die, a mausoleum of naked rock. Helt tucked his hands into his armpits. He looked at the walls, the floor, the ceiling, for scuff marks or slime or drops of blood, but if traces of anything were left on walls or floor, they were microscopic, for he saw nothing. Had they left Cash Ryan alive, in the dark? Had he waited with dread for the sleepy feeling, the calm, that people say they feel when they are dying of cold?
“If someone offed Ryan here, they would have to climb those four flights of stairs to carry him back to the elevator.” Yves could haul someone up that far. Elena could, too. It might take her a little longer.
“Not really,” Yves said. “Athens Level Three please,” he asked his pocket. The cables began to move, too close to Helt for any sort of comfort. He had a wild image of catching a sleeve on one and getting hauled down and flattened under the pulleys below. He backed up a step and watched the bottom of the elevator coming down, a black square of functional, mindless bulk.
It slid past the open shaft, its inner doors smooth and polished and unfamiliar, because Helt had never seen them; they were always toggled to outer doors and this vault didn’t have any. The elevator stopped precisely, its floor flush with the floor of the vault.
“Heh,” Helt said. Someone had lured Ryan down here, or followed him down into the cold. Ryan had to have been wearing a coverall, unless he had no choice about it. Handcuffed, maybe, but the autopsy didn’t show any abrasions around his wrists. His crew said he had left the changing room in civvies.
“Where we going?” Yves asked. He checked his interface. “Susanna’s awake.”
They were standing inside the elevator. Helt was in front of the button panel and he hadn’t moved. “Oh. Sorry. Too much to think about. Level One.” The elevator closed its doors and moved, silent and up.
“Yves?”
“What?”
“Thank you. Go see Susanna. Keep her company until she goes on shift. She’ll want to know the gossip from The Lab.”
“I could come back after that,” Yves said.
Helt shook his head. “I think Cash Ryan died here. You nailed the cold place I was looking for, and I thank you. I want to walk a few things through.”
“You’re a worried man,” Yves said. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
“I’ll be okay,” Helt said.
Yves shrugged and stayed in the elevator as its doors closed.
Helt took the train back to Nav. On the way, he looked in on Elena, still in her lab. He didn’t call her. Severo was in his quarters. Doughan was still offline. Helt still didn’t know if Yves was a murderer, but he was almost certain he wasn’t. He hadn’t flinched when Helt told him the techs would be looking for DNA traces down in the vault. Yves could have shown him the wrong place; there could be, had to be, other hidey-holes in the growing warren under the civilized areas of Kybele. But using the vault seemed so handy.
27
Orbital Transfer
Doughan’s interface was still lying on the floor in front of hi
s office door. Helt unlocked the door, walked in, and lighted the panoramas.
“I’ve never been in here,” Elena’s voice said.
“Really?” Helt asked. He turned in a circle and showed her the projections of Earth below and the starscape that filled the rest of the room from floor to ceiling.
“Well done, but theatrical,” Elena said.
“There’s more.” He touched a keypad on Doughan’s desk. The panorama of Earth below parted in the middle as the doors behind the desk slid into the walls. Behind them, six workstations faced a projection wall. The blind eyes of their screens stared at an outsider’s view of Kybele, spinning against a background of stars. “Mission Control for the big burns.”
“I don’t like this,” Elena said. “I feel like someone’s going to come in and chase us out of here.”
“Maybe they will. Our location is live to NSS. I’m surprised the audio alarms haven’t gone off yet. Good evening, Officer Evans.”
“Good evening. What are you two doing in there?”
“Dr. Maury’s in Stonehenge. I’m checking some files. A precaution.” He thought about lying and telling Evans that Doughan was worried about something in here. The hell with that. The Special Investigator was investigating, was the real answer. “Would you watch our backs, please?”
“You got it,” Evans said, and vanished. But she’d be watching, and listening. It was just as well.
“I could come down there,” Elena said.
Helt went to one of the six empty workstations, entered a password, and scrolled through displays of equations and numbers. “No. Please no. Look over my shoulder and help me,” he said. “There’s just a thing or two I’d like to see…”
“And then you’re done for tonight?” Elena asked.
“Yeah … Stay with me. Evans will keep us sequestered from the news feeds. You won’t show up on the morning show.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Evans said. “Helt, I want to thank you for the way you dealt with Akila.”
