Evan looked at the console suspiciously. "Shouldn't you be doing something about that?"
"No, it's all automatic," Joss said. He hadn't pulled
1O SPACE COPS
the control array and yoke over, but he was leaning forward in the seat and watching the readings on the instrument panel with some interest. "I'll keep an eye on it. Meanwhile, we should be able to see something shortly."
Evan peered out the plex, but could see nothing: no spark of light anywhere but the stars, all seeming to swing gently in the same direction. That was another of the odd things about working this far out in space, away from any planet, where there was always something largish to orient by. Out here there was no seeing a body until you were practically on top of it—and, you hoped, not running right into it. Even though the asteroids were nowhere near as close together as popular myth still painted them, there were accidents. Failures of guidance systems, sudden changes of asteroid trajectory or orbit, ephemeris errors, pilot errors.
Though certainly some accidents might be disguised as more innocent ones. That was one possibility they were going to be looking at closely.
"There's their docking system's acknowledgement," Joss said. "Let's see how they do."
"Run in tandem with it, for heaven's sake," Evan said. "I've no desire to be a pancake just yet."
For a good while they both gazed out the plex, but saw nothing. The swinging of the stars stopped, though, and they steadied into one heading. "You were out here at one point, weren't you?" Joss said.
"A couple of years ago, before my desk work on the Moon. But it was the other side of the Belt, over by Highlight station, and the Crux. Bigger settlements, mostly. This was hicktown to those people. No big money, they said."
"Possibly we should be grateful."
"You mean if we're shot at," Evan said, "it'll be for something besides money.''
Joss looked bemused at that, but said nothing for a little while. "There," he said finally. "See it?"
Evan peered out the plex. "No."
SPACE COPS 11
"Sort of the lower left-hand corner."
He peered for a few moments more. "Is that a red light on it?"
"That's it."
"Should be green, shouldn't it? If it's the approach beacon."
Joss pulled over the augments and peered through their oculars. "Looks like the approach beacon is burnt out. The actual docking facility is on the far side."
"Wonderful," Evan said, leaning back and feeling for the restraints. "Do you want to give them a ticket, or shall I?"
"I wouldn't," Joss said, "not till we've had our on-site briefing, anyway." He fumbled around for his own restraints and started fastening them up, the cross-belts first.
Willan Station started to grow larger in the front window, and Evan began to understand why the miners and holders over on the other side of the Belts might not have had a very high opinion of it. The asteroid was big enough to have been dug for cubic—it was about eight kilometers long and five wide, a lumpy potato-shape—but its surface was pocked all over with domes as if with a bad skin condition. And the domes—some clear, some opaque— were the old, unstable ribbed variety rather than die reinforced Fuller design that had supplanted the first kind almost as soon as people had begun settling out this way.
Willans Station was old, from the looks of it—and no one had made any great attempt at modernization.
Possibly understandable: materials were expensive out here, labor hard to find, or to keep—at least, good labor. But in this environment, your life depended on the integrity of your dome.
"They never mined here," Evan said, glancing over at Joss.
"No," Joss said, "there was no point. According to the ephemeris, this asteroid's nothing but conglomerate and stone—worthless. There's a fair amount of nickel iron 12 SPACE COPS
found around here, though. Enough for it to work pretty well as a trading base and credit center."
"Independently owned and operated, I take it," Evan said, looking at the central dome as the station data system spoke to their ship's and brought it around and over toward the docking area. The dome was patched, and not very well. In places, laminate patches overlapped composite plastic patches in a way that caused Evan concern about the level of maintenance of things here.
"It started out as a franchise operation from ConBelt," Joss said, peering through the augments again.
There was an abstracted sound to his voice that Evan had heard before: it meant Joss was getting nervous about something. "It earned out about twenty years later, and the family who were titleholders at that point started running it on their own."
"They broke even, did they?" Evan said, very hopefully, as the attitude thrusters fired again. Well off to one side of the central dome, attached to a smaller dome-opaque, but similarly patched—was a round set of bulkhead doors divided down the middle, the generic opening to a docking bay. There was only one problem: it wasn't open. And Evan watched them starting to get very close to that docking bay, very fast.
Joss looked annoyed and reached out to a toggle.'' Willans control, Willans control," he said, "this is Solar Patrol vessel CDZ 8064 incoming, please check your autoapproach computer, over."
Nothing but the hiss of empty air. Evan looked at him.
"Willans control, Willans control—" Joss looked bemused, did something to the console, said again:
"Willans control, this is Solar Patrol vessel CDZ 8064, reply please."
Nothing.
Joss said something under his breath that Evan didn't catch, yanked the yoke and control array around in front of him, and started hammering on the controls that would do things to the attitude jets, very quickly indeed. Evan
SPACE COPS 13
V
clenched his teeth, then loosened up, remembering that clenching was exactly the wrong thing to do. He would have closed his eyes, but there seemed no point in dying if you didn't know how it had happened.
So he" watched the ugly round slitted bulk of the docking doors swim closer and closer outside the plex, slowing only slightly—
"Oh, come on, dammit," Joss said, "come on, you idiots!" He was practically hammering on the console now. Evan sweated, wondering whether Joss was hollering at the people on the asteroid, or the ship's equipment. In any case, there was nothing he could do to help; flying the ship was Joss's speciality. Those doors were closer, and closer. The soft hiss of firing rockets, all that could be heard of the attitudinals from inside the ship, went on and on—
"If you people make me crash my new ship," Joss was muttering, "you're all meat, that's all. Just hamburger, and I'll feed you to the first dog I see." He locked all the attitude thrusters into one configuration and sat there, gripping the console. There was nothing else he could do, from the looks of him.
" 'Your' ship?" Evan said, watching the docking bay doors draw near, and wondering why his life wasn't flashing before his eyes.
"Good God," Joss said then. "It's working."
"It is?" Evan said, but at that moment he realized that the ship was in fact slowing, slowing a little faster every moment, so that those doors, surely no more than five hundred meters away now, came toward them a little more slowly, a bit more slowly still.
"Are we going to be able to stop?"
"Good question," Joss said. Evan broke right out in a cold sweat.
They slowed, they slowed—and the doors were four hundred meters away, three, two— " 'Our' ship, I should think," Evan said, trying desperately to sound conversational.
14 SPACE COPS
"Sure," said Joss. "Come on, you idiots, come to! Isn't anybody home?"
—and they slowed and slowed, no more than fifteen meters a second now, ten meters a second—Evan watched the passive meter on the console read down, digit by digit. But ten meters per second could still kill you quite dead if your shell breached and the atmosphere got out. Not to mention the simple shock, and the results of hitting, say, a dome, and being in the w
ay of an explosive decompression equivalent to a thousand tons per square inch of released pressure—
Joss was cursing actively now as they came down past five meters per second, and the bay doors were seventy meters away. Four meters, three—the meter hovered there for what seemed like a little lifetime.
Why did deceleration seem to take longer near the end? Evan wondered. Two meters per second, one and a half—
—and the doors were right in front of them, right in front of the plex, and the rounded front of the ship hit the doors, neatly on target. For a horrible fraction of a second everything seemed to stand still while the physics of the situation sorted itself out. Evan visualized several physical laws standing there in that moment, playing scissors-paper-stone with one another, and he listened with all of him for the sound of the groaning hull that in a moment would be a single bang, and then no sound at all—
And then they started going backward at half a meter per second, and accelerating, because of the attitudinals' setting. Joss cursed harder and started hammering on his board again.
"There, how about that?" he nearly shouted. "The doorbell didn't work. Isn't knocking enough? Wake up in there!"
Evan wiped his forehead. In front of them, slowly, the docking bay doors started to open.
It took another five minutes to drop their backward acceleration, and to pull forward again into the bay.
The docking bay proper was little more than a metal box fifty
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meters on a side, fitted inside the dome to cut down on the loss of air. It was a dark box; half its lights were out completely, and the rest seemed to be running at half or one-third power. They were in any case quite dim, and the dimness only served to point up the occasional fractured and welded sideplate. Apparently some of the pilots had not been as careful as Joss at getting into the bay.
While the back doors were closing behind them, and Joss was setting the ship down onto its vectored jets, Evan said,
"If that's typical of what happens when you try to get in here, it's no wonder people leave and don't come back."
Joss nodded, and said, "The question is, was that an accident?''
Evan put his eyebrows up. "Now why would anyone here want us to come to harm?" he said. The question was meant ironically: no matter where you went, there was always somebody who didn't care for sops. "And how would they have been able to react so quickly, if they did?"
"They wouldn't have needed voice transmission to know us," Joss said. "Our black box transponder will have been talking to their radar computer for the past hour and a half, maybe more."
"That would narrow down the list of suspects somewhat," Evan said. "The people in the station radar room. You'd think they would find a better way to off us without attracting attention to themselves."
Joss sighed and said, "We're starting out on our paranoia a little early, aren't we?"
"I hate to get caught in the rush," Evan muttered.
"And we really have to find something to call this ship," Joss said, as the front doors of the bay began to open before them.
" 'Hey, you'?" Evan asked.
Joss very carefully brought the ship up on its bottom jets, but he refused to vector them back until the doors were fully open, showing them a well-lighted circular floor space about two hundred meters in diameter. Lines of 16 SPACE COPS
smaller craft were parked off around the circumference, and there were blister junctions where other smaller domes, probably used for storage, met this one. "No good," Joss said. "It has to be a proper name, so we can swear at it."
"You didn't sound like you needed any help."
"Oh, it's not the same." Joss nudged the ship forward and out into the light. "Really good swearing has to be personal."
"Here comes your chance," Evan said, looking across the hangar dome. There were several people hurrying in from a side dome, two men and a woman, dressed in the insulated skinsuits that were popular in places like this, where central heating couldn't exactly be found in every room and corridor.
"No rush, no rush," Joss said, setting the ship down with what should have been insulting precision in the very middle of the hangar circle. Evan was very glad to feel the slight jar as the skids came down on the floor; and then things in the cabin began to quiet down as Joss killed the final attitude jet and shut down the engines.
"We secure?" Evan said.
"Oh, yes. You want to put your uniform on before we go out?"
"I'll put mine on and be out in a second. I think you have things you want to be looking at," Evan said, as Joss hurried past him toward the airlock.
"Idiots," Joss remarked en passant, and was through the inner door and had it sealed a second later.
Evan smiled to himself.
He headed into his stateroom, reached into the cupboard where his tunic was, and slipped it on.
Fine-looking as the black and silver uniform was, it was not what he would have preferred to go out in, the first time. Evan looked lovingly over at the gunmetal grey shape of his suit in its clamps off to one side of the stateroom. It usually made a most favorable impression the first time an officer wearing a suit strolled into an area he had come to patrol.
SPACE COPS 17
There was no harm in reminding the people you were assigned to protect that here was someone who could see clearly across half a mile of smoke or fog or darkness, or all of them together, using the vision augmentation equipment built into the helm; someone who could pick up a ton unassisted, or walk through a wall, let alone shoot or blast through it.
And as for what the people you were assigned to catch thought of it—why, the more cautious it made them, the better, Evan had always thought. Frightened perpetrators made the best mistakes.
For the moment, though, he merely touched the seams of the tunic closed, made sure his SP shield was on tight, and took down his Winchester beamer. It was a useful thing. Not as useful, perhaps, as the Heckler & Koch beamer he had used in the AED: that could have burned right through the outside airlock in a matter of seconds. And his other favorite, the custom-built Holland and Holland projectile gun that had cost him two months' pay and was well worth all of it, was no good to him here, in a pressure-sensitive environment. But the Winchester looked mean—an advantage for the gun, as for the suit—and was light and dependable. Interior walls wouldn't give it trouble, and as for human beings. ... He smiled slightly and settled it in its holster, then headed for the airlock himself.
As he stepped out of the ship, two of the three people he had seen coming into the dome went past him in what seemed a hurry. The man, in his late thirties, with a badly heat-scarred face, tall and thin, and the woman, in her forties perhaps, slightly overweight, blonde going grey-merely looked at him and didn't stop. "Excuse me," Evan said.
"We don't work here," said the man, and the woman added, "And will you move that thing out of the middle so people can get in and out?" And they hurried past him without another word.
"Hmm," Evan said, and walked around to the front of the ship, where Joss was standing and running his hands over the rounded nose with a very aggrieved expression.
18 SPACE COPS
"Brand new," he was saying. "The mothers! That coating was hours old! Look at this!"
Evan looked and saw a slight dent in the nose, and a wrinkled place where the paint had been cracked away. "It looks to me as if we were lucky not to have smashed like an eggshell," he said. "A little paint won't matter. We'll tell everyone we rammed someone broadside."
Joss snorted, then looked over his shoulder as the third person, a man in his early twenties, very small and slight, went past them after the first two. "Excuse me," Joss said, "but would you please tell us if—"
The young man took one look at them, spat immediately and copiously on the floor, and just kept going.
Joss looked distastefully at the floor, then at Evan.
"Not the welcoming committee, I take it," he said.
"And they say you
should move the ship out of the way," said Evan.
"Like hell," said Joss. But he looked after the young man with a calculating expression. "Then again," he added, "no point in antagonizing the locals."
"Yet," said Evan.
It took a few minutes to get the ship moved. The ship belonging to the three people who had come in started to rise up on its jets as soon as Joss had finished moving. Their ship was typical of many others sitting around in the hangar, and was everything the patrol vessel wasn't: ugly, blocky, scarred, a sort of conglomeration of bolted-together metal boxes with an ancient nonreflective black coating on it. How nonreflective it was at all was in question, since the coating had flaked or been scraped or banged off in who knew what collisions with small asteroids or, for all Evan knew, other craft. The thing had crude jets on it, not vectorable, just fastened on at any angle; and there was what looked like a secondhand ion driver assembly at the rear end, held on with metal straps and probably prayer.
Evan raised his eyebrows as he turned away. He might have been teasing Joss about old grizzled miners with don-SPACE COPS 19
keys, but it struck him that those old men from the vids were probably safer in their environment than these people were—if they were in fact miners. Quite a few people who were not came to live out this way. They might like the freedom of the Belts, the way there was little of the control of the inner worlds.
No one asked you for ID every five seconds; there was no need of the ID itself. People couldn't care less if you had a banking history, or a credit history, or whether it was a good history or not. In fact, there were always people who preferred that the histories of those they dealt with should not be too good. . . .
Joss came back in a few moments, and stood with Evan to look after the ship that was leaving. "I built one like that in the back yard when I was six," he remarked. "But the boxes were cardboard. And it flew better."
"It flew?"
"Oh, yes," Joss said, as they walked off toward the largest of the blisters leading to the next dome over.
"Once we pushed it off the garage roof."
"I take it the pilot survived."
"Sure. But ever since then I've been twitchy about any large object coming at me fast. Like the ground, or a set of landing bay doors."
Kill Station Page 2
