Another dome, the whole thing hardly the size of a decent office back on the Moon? A dome patched inside and out, cramped, piled up with filing modules and printout in great stacks, the situation desk almost lost in the midst of everything? And one young officer, in uniform, looking almost pitifully smart in the midst of it all?
He looked up as they came in, and an expression of shock came over his face. The young man was astonishingly red-haired, and very freckled, perhaps in his mid-twenties. As he leapt up to welcome them, Evan found himself wondering if he himself had looked like this before he got his growth—a bit on the gangly side, but of a frame and build that promised some heft to come.
"Gentlemen, come in, I wasn't expecting anybody, they didn't tell me—" the young officer said, hurrying over to them.
"I don't think they wanted to," Joss said, shaking the young officer's hand. "Joss O'Bannion. My partner, Evan Glyndower."
"Noel Hayden," the young officer said, and Evan was mildly pleased at his grip as they shook hands. If it was anything to go by, this lad would have no trouble in the bars, which was almost certainly why the SP had sent him here to hold down this job all alone.
"Come and sit down," Hayden said, leading them back toward a desk, and starting to unearth several chairs from beneath piles of paper. "I didn't think they were going to
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send anyone so soon. In fact, I wasn't sure they would send anyone at all."
Evan sat down and turned his datapad on to take voice notes. He noted that the message area was flagged. The ship's computer must have picked up something for him from HQ during the night. It could wait, though. "It was your report that set all this off, then," Joss was saying.
Hayden nodded. "I hope so. The disappearances have been going on for a while now, and the place was starting to get nervous."
"More than nervous, I think," Evan said.
Noel smiled gently, a remarkably knowing expression for someone so young. "Yes, you passed your qualifyings last night, I heard. Hasn't been an officer here in twenty years that hasn't happened to. But you got a little more than the usual treatment.''
"I was wondering whether that was quite normal," Joss said.
"Nerves," Noel said, "and there were two of you, and one of you was big."
Evan raised his eyebrows in a resigned look.
"Can I give you something?" Noel said. "Coffee? Tea?"
"I'll pass," Joss said. Evan shook his head.
"Right. Anyway," Neil said, and spent a moment shuffling around on his desk looking for something. It promised to be an interesting search; there was enough paper on the desk alone to cover the whole inside of the dome. Which might not be a bad idea, Evan thought. You wouldn 't have to see the patches then.
"This started about three months ago, as far as I can tell," Noel said. "At least, that's the furthest back I can trace it. Though HQ doesn't find anything statistically suspect in it until about a month after that."
Noel snorted. "They don't take feelings into consideration, but if you've been out here for a few years, you start getting a feeling for real accidents as opposed to contrived ones."
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Joss looked slightly surprised. "How long have you been out here?"
"About eight years now." Noel smiled. "Oh. Don't let my looks fool you. I'm thirty-eight."
Evan smiled. "You have a picture aging in a closet somewhere, then."
"So people say. One of my nicknames here is apparently 'Snookums.' " Noel grinned, an expression that had a hint of satisfaction about it. "Everybody who comes here makes the predictable mistake in a bar—once."
Joss chuckled. Noel kept looking for his piece of paperwork. "Anyway, about four months ago, people started simply disappearing. Now, it's not as if they don't do that anyway. Mining is hardly a safe occupation, no matter how you look at it. Just the basic mechanics of it can get you killed. A cheap pressure suit goes south, your ship has a power failure and your transponder goes out—or doesn't work," he added, "possibly because someone's been fiddling with it. There's a lot of that around here, people killing their own transponders so as not to show where their claims are."
' 'I think we might want to look at the actual method for filing claims," Joss said.
"Surely." Noel kept digging about among the papers on his desk. "The worst of it all, anyway, is that there's no pattern I can find. My first suspicion was claim-jumping, of course. But that tends to be pretty easy to trace. Gossip is everything in this community, and it doesn't take much listening to find out who seems to have hit it big lately and whom they've told about it, if anybody. Or who's jealous, who's had a bad run of luck, and so forth. The result tends to be straightforward death by violence—shooting, or something of the kind. Sabotage happens occasionally, but it's rare. I think the perception is that it's too much trouble, and too easy to get caught. Also, the mechanics here are very careful about their work, since any ship that goes out and doesn't come back immediately brings them 43 SPACE COPS
into disrepute even if plain old backshooting isn't apparent."
Joss nodded. "What's the population breakdown like here?"
"Mixed, of course, but mostly Russians and Japanese. We have a strong Baltic and Central European component, for some reason. I recommend Satra's over in the main dome—they have some pretty good rostyas there."
Joss's eyebrows went up. "There's a restaurant here?"
"Hey, this may be the asteroid belt," Noel said, "but we're not quite the end of the world. Ah!" He came up with a piece of printout, handed it over to Joss. "Here."
Joss scanned down it. "That was the first one I found suspicious," Noel said. "Yuri Brunoy's ship Vastap.
Yuri wasn't the kind to have people trying to claim-jump him in the first place. Nice calm man, only shot people who needed it—"
"How do we determine who needed it?" Evan said softly.
Noel leaned back in his chair and sighed. "YouVe worked out this way before. No murders, though, I guess."
Evan shook his head. "Not from claim-jumping. Drug enforcement, mostly."
"It's kind of a problem," Noel said. "Someone jumps someone else's claim and gets shot for his trouble.
The jumpee comes back with the body, claims self-defense. Short of a body that's been backshot, and sometimes even with one, without witnesses—and there are rarely witnesses out there since the family ships have fallen pretty much out of style—how do you prove that it wasn 't self-defense? If there's even a body left. In zero gee, from the surface of small asteroids, bodies do get lost. And it's understandable when the person who's just been attacked doesn't particularly feel like chasing a tenth of a light-hour after the corpse of the person who just tried to backshoot him. Or if they do, they would have to throw ore out to make mass room for it. It doesn't seem like a good deal
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to a lot of people." Noel sighed. "So habeas corpus is a bit of a problem. And judges frequently refuse to hear these cases simply because they've seen so many of them end in the same way, with hung juries or dismissals. No," Noel added, "you have to manage these by feel, when it comes down to it. There's a certain amount of justice done here by the people themselves. You learn not to interfere too much. But if someone's taking the law into his own hands, he tends to die of that, too. Word travels fast."
Evan nodded. "Anyway," Noel said, "Vastap was a fifty-ton vessel, a small ore processor. We have a few people based here who prefer to crush and slag down their own ore. There's an advantage to it: you don't have to spend the money for reaction mass to haul around what's essentially going to be ninety percent waste rock after someone else processes it. It costs more in energy than just hauling ore back, of course, but if you're steadily turning over enough raw material, you can do a lot better than break even in a few years. Well, Yuri was well past that point. He had actually gotten married a few years back— they had a 'summer house' on Dacha Station around Jupiter—and he would work half the year, then take half the
year off with his wives. Anyway, Yuri had just started his work year, when he went out and didn't come back. He was a careful pilot—"
"Yes," Joss said dryly. "I would think careful pilots would do well here."
Noel grunted. "I heard about your problem last night. Your assailants have already been cited—I did that just after breakfast—but you'll forgive me if I didn't fine them too much. They're fighting with inadequate equipment, like all the rest of us here. And the last thing this place needs is a landing guidance facility that's unfriendly to sops."
"Heavens, no," Joss said, "having seen what benign neglect looks like."
Noel coughed. "Yes. Anyway—Yuri always filed a course plan and he always kept to it. He was no hotdogger.
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He was headed toward an area he had been mining for a while, about thirty thousand kilometers antiorbital from us, and about five thousand plus-zee. Still in the neighborhood, but an area that had plenty for everybody and wasn't in any danger of being mined out—a lot of nickel-iron there, but mostly iron, rather higher grade ore than usual, and more worth his trouble."
"And there was no distress call or anything like it?" Joss said.
"Well, no," Noel said, "but the problem around here, of couse, is that even if there is a distress call, communications lag times being what they are, you're frequently too far away from the source of the distress to do any good by the time you get there. Our average response time here is about six hours, sometimes more if they're really far out there. But a lot of people are careless and don't carry enough emergency air to last them. They consider it a waste of mass and fuel for something that might never happen." Noel shrugged. "In that regard, I suppose you could say that natural selection is still operating."
"It usually finds ways," said Evan.
"There's nothing we can do for those people," Noel said. "But people who haven't had an accident that's an immediate killer can usually be brought back without too much trouble in ten to fourteen hours. I'm on call to do that myself, and we have a couple of volunteers with light haulers, or big engines, who go out if I'm already out on a job."
"Are you happy with your volunteers?" Joss said.
"Oh yes. Dav Myennes and Joan Selvino are heads of two of the big old families here. Probably the only really big families we have left. Since better facilities are available back around Mars, or Jupiter, we have a lot of people moving their families out," Noel sighed. "The place is turning into a bit of a ghost town . . .
mostly singletons. It's a little sad. I miss the children."
Evan began to understand why the place had a dispirited
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feel about it. "Anyway," he said, "our friend just vanished? No transponder trace?''
"None. Normally, when we start looking for a transponder with the high-powered gear, we can find it even if it's right out of the Belts. But there was no sign of Yuri's, which meant that his ship had either been completely destroyed, or the transponder had been shut down. That I find hard to believe. Yuri was very safety conscious—we did a pickup on him long, long ago, an engine failure, not his fault or the mechanic's—and I don't think I ever met anyone who was more against fiddling with your black box."
"So someone blew him completely away."
"Or he went out of range, which I also find hard to believe," Noel said. "He didn't like to roam; he had a good thing going where he was. And also, the converter ships don't have that kind of range; they trade it off for the energy they need to run their smelters. So—"
"But you don't think anyone would have bothered jumping his claim?" said Joss.
' 'Out that way, there would have been no need. See, mostly it happens when someone thinks that someone else is onto a particularly hot claim—an extremely high metal/ore ratio, or something that's not ore. We don't get much of that kind of thing around here. The last time we had a gemstone hit was, hell, six years ago now. Funny, that was Yuri too.
But it was a small find, something like five thousand creds' worth of industrial diamonds. The rest of his load, just pig iron, brought him three times as much.''
Noel did a bit more digging in the spot where he had found the first precis, and came up with several others. "Then came these. Les Bianco's Loner, Giselle Bollen-berg's Half Moon, Dail Fissau's Copernicus, Rail Bevo-cic's Lucie—al gone. Within fifty days of one another— and no coincidence of times, places, anything. To judge by their filed course plans, they were all heading in different directions. One by one they all missed their return or check-in dates."
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"Meaning they weren't planning to be coming back just yet, but they would come in close enough to send a message? Or stop in at another station and send one from there?" Joss asked.
"That's right. We only eventually found one ship, Copernicus, and that was by accident; someone from over at Cambrai Station found it while en route here. Its transponder was running, but there was no sign of Dail, and there was a big hole in the hull—the ship's fuel cell was blown out. It happens." Noel shrugged. "It was one of the older atomic ones: they're capricious at best. I don't know why people still use them, except that they're cheap."
Evan purposely did not look at the ceiling, or at something else he had noticed earlier: the obvious, and obviously used, emergency patching kit off beside one filing module, sitting there in case the passive sealing function of the dome should fail to work. "What about the claims proceedings?" he said.
"Well, we have a registrar, as most places out this far do. No one wants to make a special trip to Mars or Jupiter just to register a claim; you want to be able to lay over and resupply at the same time. The office is up in Main Dome. Claims still have to be filed in person—we're not that automated out here, I'm afraid—and the various station offices exchange records once a month just to make sure there are no mistakes, since asteroids do drift. Or are jarred off course." Noel grinned slightly. "We give a claimant a tag core to sink into the surface of the body in question. Like one of these." He reached down, pulled open one of his desk drawers, rummaged for a moment, and came up with something that looked like a sealed length of steel pipe, about an inch and a half wide and two feet long. "It transmits the claim number and the claimant's name to anyone with the right receiver, which around here is most people. Once in, it's almost impossible to get out without a bomb or a laser drill, and such SPACE COPS 47
removal always leaves signs. They're as tamperproof as we can make them."
"But there have been exceptions, I take it," Joss said dryly.
"Oh yes. What technology can invent, technology can defeat. We've seen some very clever tamperings, even forgeries. But forgeries are easy to trace, since they don't match our records here. And tamperings leave traces. But most people consider it too much trouble to go to for one more hunk of iron, when there's likely to be a much better one fifty thousand meters further on."
"Let's put the disappearances aside for a moment," Joss said. "Have you had any claim jumps recently?"
"A couple, yes." Noel started rummaging again, and this time didn't have to dig too deep. "Sorry about this," he said, paging through a few pieces of paper, "but my data base went down months ago, and we're still waiting for the parts to fix it. I have to keep everything this way, if I want it accessible at all."
"They keep promising us the paper-free office," Evan said. "I begin to wonder when we'll see it."
"Here," said Noel, and handed Evan the sheets. He glanced down them, and passed them to Joss. "That asteroid was pretty promising," Noel said. "Good iron content. Hek Vaweda there staked it out about two months ago. She missed a check-in, and I went looking for her. Found the claim—but no ship, no Hek. No traces of where she had gone, or what had happened." Noel shook his head. "It was a pity. She was a nice lady."
"I'd like to have a look at the spot," Joss said, ruffling through the sheets, "and at the rest of these."
"I'll take you out," Noel said, getting up.
"No rush," Ev
an said. "You probably have things to do first—"
"Unfortunately, yes," Noel said, "but any escape from this is a pleasure. I have considered setting fire to it," he added, getting up, "but I'm the fire chief as well, and it seems a little pointless. Haifa second while I get my suit."
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They made their way back to the hangar dome, and Noel stopped in the middle of it and simply stared at their ship. "I saw one of those once," he said, "in a vid. I didn't think they actually existed."
"Oh, they exist," Joss said, "and the trouble people give you for overrunning your fuel expenditure, you wouldn't want to hear." His voice was unusually dry. Evan glanced over at him questioningly. Joss shrugged at him, the "later" shrug.
"Open up," he said, and obediently the craft cracked its seals and let them into the airlock. Noel looked around admiringly as they stepped in. "It still smells new," he said.
"Not for long," Evan said, and made his way up front to unlock and rig the third seat in the front cabin.
"Wait till my friend here makes his chicken with forty cloves of garlic."
"Forty cloves of—"
"It's very innocent, really," Joss said. "It's most people's first chance to find out that garlic is a vegetable—"
"Indeed yes," said Evan drily. "A vegetable that makes parts of you speak that were better silent."
Noel blinked, and declined to comment. "Look at these cabins," he said, pausing in the door of Evan's.
"Why the hell are you staying at Morrie's?"
After cleaning out the 'fresher head, this was a question that had also occurred to Evan. "Public relations, I guess," he said. "It seems to work better than becoming known as the stuck-up sop who stays in his own ship and won't patronize local business. Even if local business does charge five times the normal rate.''
They got strapped in, and Joss put the engines into short-start mode and turned on the transmitter.
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