Kill Station

by Diane Duane; Peter Morwood

  ''Willans control," he said, "this is SP vessel CDZ 8064. You remember, the one with the ruined paint job." His voice was good-humored as he said it, but Evan, looking at Joss's face, saw a shadow of what Joss must have been

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  like that morning with the radar techs, and smiled slightly to himself.

  "Uh, SP CDZ, that's a roger," said a rather sheepish sounding, middle-aged female voice. "What color was your paint?''

  "New," Joss said, but this time he smiled a little.

  "Sorry about that, SP CDZ. I have some nail polish here that might do the trick."

  Joss laughed. "You're on, ma'am. See me after work if you like, in the Astoria." That was the bar of the night before.

  Evan kept his smile to himself. Joss never missed a chance to butter up the ladies, whether he could see what they looked like or not. He was an equal opportunity flirt, and the fact had caused Evan considerable amusement on more than one occasion.

  There was a chuckle at the other end of the connection. "You're on, CDZ. You going somewhere right now?"

  "Out for a stroll. Noel, you have coordinates for this nice lady?"

  Noel leaned in toward the- pickup. "Cecile, we're headed out past Osasco Point beacon, anti-orbital from the beacon six hundred klicks, and about minus-zee six hundred."

  "Got it, Noel. You have a nice time now. Nobody out that way but old Vlad Marischal and his friends, transponder one point four four three from a.o. fourteen, sixteen klicks, plus-zee one fifty."

  "Confirmed, Cecile," Joss said. "And listen, about this morning—"

  "The limbs will probably grow back, we think. You were in the right. No hard feelings."

  Joss chuckled. "Thanks much."

  "You're welcome, Mister Sop O'Bannion Honey, and good hunting. Bay doors opening. Willans control out."

  Joss closed down the connection for the moment and said to Noel, "Mister Sop O'Bannion Honey'?"

  Noel looked innocent. "I guess word travels fast," he said. "Seems like a lot of people approve of your perfor-SO SPACE COPS

  mance last night. What I heard was that your friend here had to carry you out to keep you from really hurting someone."

  Evan smiled again, harder this time.

  The bay doors opened for them, and Joss stood the ship up on its underjets and eased it into the lock, then out after the rear doors had shut and the lock had been evacuated. As the outer doors opened in front of them, Noel sighed and said, "There goes another hundred credits."

  Evan was astonished. "There can't have been more than twenty credits' worth of air in that lock.

  Twenty-five, tops."

  Noel smiled sourly as Joss took them away from the lock. "Not when it has to be shipped out this far.

  And Willans isn't a water-bearing asteroid: we can't crack out our own oxygen from it. We buy our oxygen as a co-op with a few other stations in this part of the Belts, but the suppliers on Jupiter say they're just passing on the cost of shipping out their processing equipment from Earth ..."

  They headed out into the long night. Evan watched Joss lock in the course he wanted with a smile on his face. He does love this ship, he thought, as Noel showed Joss which frequency to set on the comms board for the claim marker, and then sat back to wait.

  There was no way to describe space travel in this part of the universe as particularly exciting. Joss went off and made coffee, and made Noel have some, and the tea he brought Evan was actually drinkable.

  Beyond drinking their tea and coffee, there was nothing to do but wait.

  Whump! went the iondrivers, and Noel looked up in startlement. "What was that?"

  "Engines," Joss said, sitting down in the right-hand seat again, with a look on his face like a cat that's been given cream to put on its canary. "ETA is about seven minutes."

  Noel's eyes were wide. "What kind of engines have you got on this thing?"

  Joss leaned back and went off into a spate of jargon that

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  threatened to make Evan's eyes cross. It was nothing he hadn't heard before. The day they picked the ship up, Joss had carried on like this with the SP engineer at Androni-cus, going on for almost half an hour about boost ratios and ion spill and "dirty" generation and heaven only knew what else. Evan had had to go off and get a drink. Here, he couldn't even do that.

  "What's this blinking?" he said finally, when he couldn't stand it any more.

  "Where?" Joss said, turning hurriedly back to the console. "Oh, this. That's the comms alert. There's your claim, Noel."

  "So soon? You'd better slow down."

  "No problem."

  Evan peered out the plex, squinting. When he had first come out here, he had thought of the Belts as looking (from the inside) like the enhanced telescopic pictures Earth people usually saw of asteroids, or of the moons of the outer planets, with everything lit in the same stark black-shadows-blinding-white-light as the Moon. Well, the shadows were stark enough, but the light was nowhere near so bright. The level of lighting was about the same as on a dim winter's afternoon in Wales, during the part of the winter when the Sun ran lowest; even on a clear day, its light was attenuated, cool, spare. Here it was the same, when the light had anything to fall on—chill and clear, a very pure white, but somehow thin and stretched. No surprise, considering how far it had come. Nor were the asteroids crowded all around them, easy to bump into, or even hard to avoid. Evan could not think of any part of the other side of the Belts—the denser side, at that—where he could stand on one asteroid, and see another one with the naked eye.

  They were drifting close to a little asteroid, about half a kilometer from one end to the other, shaped rather like a shoe that had been stepped on. There were gaping holes cut in it, blasted with energy weapons, rather than with explosive, judging by the smooth sides. Evan nodded to

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  himself as Joss slowed the ship down and maneuvered it in close. "Are you going to put us down on there?" he said.

  "It's safer," Joss said. "If this thing has been slagged out, its motion may be eccentric. I'd sooner not do any more damage to my paint job, thanks."

  ' 'Your paint job?'' Evan said mildly, and went off to get into his suit.

  It was the first time in some days, and he was glad of the chance. Quickly he stripped down to shorts and singlet and began, piece by piece, to get into the suit; stepping into the boots first, strapping on greaves and thigh-pieces, backing into the backplate and then holding it up from behind to let it seal onto the breastplate. The soft hiss of closing seals was music to his ears. The suit was newly overhauled: fresh neural and feedback sponge padding had been put in, the helm's optics and electronics had been retuned, and the negative-feedback circuitry itself had been reset and restrung, making the suit react with a bit more bounce. This restringing was something that needed to be done a couple of times a year, as a man "worked into" a specific suit and found its mass easier to carry; otherwise the suit would begin to overreact to his movements, and move too easily, too sloppily.

  As Evan slipped into the upper arm and forearm pieces, and sealed them shut, he was glad of the restringing, but he was even happier about the replacement of the feedback foam. It was what translated the movements of your muscles into the much larger, stronger movements of the suit, but it wasn't exactly something you could just send out to the cleaners. And after you had sweated into it for a couple of months, you could scare away perpetrators in interior environments just by the sheer awful stink of you in the neighborhood. There was this to be said for vacuum work: in space, no one could smell you coming.

  He checked the insides and far outsides of the forearms, where the gun ports were faired in, and found everything satisfactory, slipped on the gauntlets and sealed them shut,

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  and then reached for the helm. For a moment he looked at his reflection in the cool grey-silver surface. Some people, he knew, saw nothing but blind menace and the threat of violence in the blank refle
ction of the helm, that usually allowed no face to show, no eyes. Evan didn't mind. It was a weapon, and he used it as consciously as his guns, and with a freer conscience.

  He put it on, touched the seals closed, and stepped out into the hallway. In the front cabin, Joss and Noel were in their own pressure suits, helms under arms, looking toward him. Joss's expression was calm and accustomed, but Noel's face showed shock and astonishment. It was a look Evan had gotten used to over time. "Ready?" he said.

  "All set," Joss said, and put his helmet on. Noel followed suit. Together they all stepped into the airlock, and Joss touched the controls to seal the inner door, evacuate the air, and open the outer.

  There was almost no gravity to deal with here, so they all moved on personal attitude jets, with care, and slowly. Joss bounced ahead a bit, looking at the ground intently. Noel went behind him and pointed off to one side. "That's the biggest hole, I guess," he said. "Want to go down inside?"

  "Absolutely," said Joss.

  Evan paused for a moment at the edge of the huge hole, looking up. He had not seen this particular skyscape for some time, not from the surface of one of these tiny bodies. The light was less bright out here than in Earth orbit, certainly, and cooler, but you could still make out the Belts, and the further bits were more easily seen than the nearer. The biggest asteroids, and the most reflective, made a bright vague chain that you could trace with the eye, far off to one side and to the other, where the reflective sides of them were turned more or less toward you. Here and there a particularly reflective or large asteroid shone like a star, a pale spark embedded in the milky glow of millions of others.

  Nearer the sun, as the asteroids seemed closer together, the band grew brighter, though no 64 SPACE COPS

  more distinct, until finally it was completely washed out in the light of the Sun, which was still much too bright to look at directly with the naked eye. Evan did the jaw clench that brought his visible-light filters down, and looked at the Sun for a moment, long enough to count a few sun-spots and make out the tiny points of some spicules around the edges.

  Quiet Sun weather; no bad solar wind or flares to worry about, at least. That's something.

  He turned his attention downward to the hole itself. Energy weapons, certainly. That by itself was a little strange; explosives were cheaper, when it came to merely slagging out an asteroid. But if someone was claim-jumping, no question that a beam would be faster. Evan bent down to feel the edge of the hole. No crumbling: a fast cut, then, with a high-energy beam. Someone well-equipped had been here, someone who didn't want to wait around, and could afford the energy not to.

  He stepped off the edge of the hole, giving himself a brief hit of jets to push him downward; there was no other way to fall, in such very light gravity. Joss and Noel had their lights on—understandable, since it was dark as the inside of a cat down there—and were already well down into the empty space of the asteroid. Joss was over by one wall, running a gauntlet-covered hand over the surface.

  "Beamer, definitely," he said to Evan. "And fairly high-powered. There's nothing much here in the way of melt marks: it's mostly straightforward downward vaporization."

  Evan nodded, and said, "Noel, who around here^has that kind of equipment?"

  "A few of our people do, but they all have alibis that stand up. Quite a few people in the parts of the belt adjacent have beamers installed in their craft, and use them. Maybe ten or fifteen percent of the total registered mining force. I can get you stats when we get back, if you like."

  "It would help." Evan watched Joss move hand over hand across the wall, pausing here and there to examine the stone. "Anything?" he said.

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  "I'm not sure." The answer came back in a tone of voice that said Joss was sure, but was being polite. "Noel," he said,

  "have you done an assay on this stuff?"

  Noel sounded surprised. "No. There didn't seem to be much point."

  "I'd like to, if you don't mind." From the pack on the back of his pressure suit, Joss came out with a small portable specific gravity and ore assay kit, a little squat tube about six inches wide and a foot long. "Now then," he said, "if I can just keep this thing from spinning me around. It's had some torque problems the past couple of weeks, but I put a new diamond ring in it, that should have it straightened out—"

  There was no sound, of course, but Evan saw that Joss had to brace and rebrace himself against the attempt of the tube to turn while the internal drill was working. Apparently he was in one of his perfectionist moods; he could simply vaporized a sample and tested that, but it seemed he wanted a friability and texture assessment as well. Evan sighed.

  Joss's hobbyist tendencies came out at odd moments, but as long as they didn't slow things down too much, Evan had learned not to protest. Anything that kept that lively mind working at capacity was fine with him.

  "Right," Joss said, and did something to the outside of the tube. Beside him, Noel peered at it curiously. "When does the answer come out?" he said after a few seconds.

  "Takes a while," Joss said, pushing away from the wall and heading for another spot. "Hey, come on, Noel, my name isn't Spock."

  "Who's Spock?" said Noel, mystified.

  "Baby doctor," Evan said. "Something wrong with his ears, too, wasn't there?"

  "Hah," Joss said, in that tone of voice that suggested Evan was going to be made to watch more ancient vids "for his own good and to make up for his terrible lack of cultural education." Evan sighed.

  Joss applied the spee-gee tube to another part of the

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  asteroid's interior. Evan turned to look at the rest of the inside of the asteroid. The surface was much the same all around, brownish-grey rock with here and there a fleck of remaining iron or nickel in metallic form. Where such pieces of metal had been shorn off mostly flat by the vaporization, some were showing the faint scratches of crystalline formation that etching and polishing would have turned into the characteristic Widmanstatten lines that betray true asteroidal metal. There were not many of these bits of metal left, but that made sense; any claim jumper would have scooped out as much of the asteroid as was good, and left the rest. And, indeed, about nine-tenths of the body had been removed as neatly as a melon scooped out of its shell, though through several holes front and back, rather than by splitting the melon and getting at the insides that way.

  Now why didn 't the bugger do that, Evan thought, rather than doing it this way? What was to be gained? It was something he would have to ask Joss. ,

  "There," Joss said, moving to a third spot. "One more for luck.'' He took the sample by plain vaporization this time, which suited Evan. There was something about this site that was making him twitch, and he would have liked to get out and go find someone to bring to book for it. Someone had come here, probably killed the person who was working this claim, and then stripped it bare and run off, secure in the knowledge that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find him or her. Evan hated the idea of that kind of callousness; even more, he hated actually having to hang about in the physical evidence of it.

  "Done," said Joss. "Let's get out of here."

  "What does it say?" said Noel.

  "Still working. Come on, let's get up top. I want to look at something."

  They ascended to the surface and landed on it as best they could, though it was difficult to stay landed in what was effectively zero gee. "Now, here," Joss said, turning the readout end of the tube up into the light, so Evan and SPACE COPS 57

  Noel could both see it. "See that little graph there? That's metal content plotted against stone/waste content. Here are the three readings."

  Evan peered over Joss's shoulder. Three small bars plotted themselves against the graph. Well above the three of them, which varied only slightly from one another, was a red line. "What's that, then?" Evan said.

  Joss looked up at Evan, and even in the indirect lighting, Evan could see his expression of fierce interest "Viability," he
said. "That's the one percent metal-to-waste scenario. There wasn't anything in here worth slagging out."

  Noel stared at him. "But that can't be," he said. "The assay brought to us when this claim was filed was much higher than that. At least five percent. No one would bother jumping an on-one claim!"

  "Yes, that's right, isn't it?" Joss said, sounding illogi-cally pleased with himself. "Let's have a look at the claim core, shall we?"

  There was no finding it visually, but Noel's suit had built into it a transmitter and homer sensitive to the claims frequencies, and he led them to the spot as directly as he could. There were crevasses to overleap on the stony surface. Once past the crevasses, they carefully kangarooed over to one bit of flat ground. Embedded in it, protruding from the surface, only about an inch, was one of the tubular steel claim cores.

  "It hasn't been tampered with," Noel said. "And it's reading just as it did when I checked it out to Hek two months ago.

  Same frequ cy, same code."

  Joss nodded, unslung his spee-gee apparatus again, and tested the ground in one place, then another. "Hmm," he said again. "Evan, would you make me a hole here? About half a meter deep or so?"

  "How wide?" Evan said. "A third of a meter be enough?"

  "Plenty."

  Evan performed the brief pattern of finger touches that activated his own beamer, and pointed his right arm at the 58 SPACE COPS

  ground. "Eyes," he said, scaling down the amount of light his own faceplate would let in. Joss and Noel looked away. He fired a two-second burn.

  When he stopped, there was a slight crystalline snow falling through the vacuum around them, rock vapor frozen back instantly into solid state and drifting very slowly down toward the asteroid's surface. "How's that?" he said.

  "Showoff," said Joss, and bent over to slide the spee-gee reader down into the half-meter-wide, third-of-a-meter deep hole. He took one more sample, then pulled the device out again. "Now, then," he said.

  They looked over his shoulder once more as he brought up the graph readout. Every one of the three sample bars went well over the red line.