Kill Station

by Diane Duane; Peter Morwood

  "Oh, no," Noel said softly. "Bad assay. It's just the surface that's good, not the interior."

  "I'm not so sure," Joss said, with a look at Evan.

  Evan frowned. 'True. Why would someone jump the claim if the assay was bad?And if the jumpers did their own assay—and you'd think they would—why would they go to the trouble of hollowing out a whole asteroid, if the inside was worthless?"

  They all three stood there for a moment, considering this. Then Joss said, "I need to look at something,"

  and kangarooed off across the surface.

  Noel looked at Evan in confusion. Evan shook his head. "You've got me," he said. Together they watched Joss bounce a little way across the surface, then back a little, back a little more, studying the ground closely, then off to one side, and further off, finally starting back toward them. He paused briefly and dropped to his knees, bouncing a bit, running his hands over the surface. "Evan," he said. "How much lifting is your suit rated for? The top range."

  Evan raised his eyebrows. Bemused, "It's rated for nine tons, but I've just been restrung, and it might be a bit less."

  "Hmm," Joss said, and stood up straight again. He began to bounce toward them in a roughly circular path

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  around the core. "Hmm," he said again, pausing to go down on his knees once more and check another piece of ground.

  "It's like being at the damned doctor's," Evan said in good-natured exasperation. "For pity's sake, what're you up to?"

  Joss came back to them. ' 'Think you could do thirty or forty tons in zero gee?"

  Evan did a bit of mental math. "Very likely. 'Give me a place to stand.' "

  "Good. How about—" Joss headed off again, leftward, about five meters from the core proper, toward a smallish crevasse, and pointed downwards. "Right about here?"

  Evan bounced over to him, and looked at the spot. "And lift what?"

  "That," Joss said, pointing at the other side of the crevasse, and indicating the piece of ground that included the claim transmitter.

  "You're daft!" Evan said. "Go trying to pick up pieces of the asteroid? Now, why would I want—" But even as he spoke he was looking more closely at the little crevasse, no more than a foot wide here. He kicked his helmet light on and looked at it more closely still.

  The patterns on the rock on one side of the crevasse did not match the patterns on the other.

  "Jesu Crist on a handbike!" he said.

  He reached down into the crevasse, set his legs wide, bent his knees, took hold of the stone on the transmitter side of the crevasse, and started exerting pull.

  Under his gauntlets, rock crumbled. He felt for another more solid handhold further down, but found none. He chipped through into the rock with his gauntlets to make a better place to brace his fingers, sank a bit more deeply into his kneebend, and heaved again.

  Nothing happened. He could hear the suit creaking and straining around him as the servos tried to cope with what he was trying to get it to do.

  He kept pulling.

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  Nothing happened. He wondered if he was going to ruin his negative-feedback circuitry. That happened, sqme-times, when you tried to move something too large, like a piece of a planet-Override requests and alarms began to flash in front of his eyes, or rather, on the surfaces of his retinas. Evan ignored them and kept pulling. Though nothing was happening.

  Wait a minute. Something was giving under his hands-No, it wasn't. The horizon was changing subtly.

  The claim transmitter was tilting away from him. A piece of the asteroid fifty feet across was tilting up out of the surface, near edge up, far edge down. A big, roughly semicircular chunk, now about a foot higher than the ground he was standing on—a foot and a half—

  "Enough already!" Joss said. Evan let go, but mass in motion doing what it does in zero gee, the plugged-in piece of stone kept tilting up and up for several seconds before inertia set in and stopped it.

  Then it began to settle again, and a brief cloud of dust puffed up as it did.

  "Pity you didn't have the suit on in the bar last night," Joss said. Evan saw Noel's head swivel toward Joss; it was a pity about the bad light, for he would have loved to see the look on Noel's face. "But how about that, then," Joss said smugly.

  Evan was feeling smug too, though he was not sure that his biceps and the muscles of his forearms weren't going to have something to say to him tomorrow. "Someone," he said, "cut the claim transmitter whole and entire out of another asteroid. And cut a matching hole in this one, and dropped one into the other."

  They both looked at Noel. He was flabbergasted. "Then the asteroid Hek claimed on is somewhere else entirely. With a big hole cut in it."

  "Let's go looking," Joss said, and headed back for the ship. "It can't be far. If I was pulling a stunt like this, I'd be betting on never getting caught. I wouldn't bother going more than a few minutes away to find the place where I

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  would dig the hole to stick this plug. Which means that Hek's real asteroid is nearby. Come on." They went after him, fast.

  IT TOOK THEM THREE HOURS TO FIND IT, FOR

  there were about eighteen asteroids in the immediate area, and looking over every one of them was a time-consuming business. Joss swore at the ship for not being maneuver-able enough (which it was) and at his scanning software for not being smart enough (which it was) as they sifted through the area, one rock after another.

  And there it was, the fifteenth one; a small asteroid, very elongated, almost cucumber-shaped. One end of it had a roughly spherical hole cut in it. Joss sat there working with his controls for a moment, then said, "The scan wasn't really built for this kind of thing, but I can tell that this ore pretty closely matches the ore around the claim core."

  Noel looked out at it and bit his lip. "I wish I had this kind of equipment," he said, "and time to use it."

  "No shame to you," Evan said. "You're not exactly underworked as it is." He looked over at Joss and said, "We ought to look this over pretty carefully."

  Joss nodded and started them in a slow spiral around the surface of the asteroid. There was nothing much else to be seen, at least not by strictly visual means. What was plain from visual examination was that this asteroid had been slagged out as well, through several apertures, and with great skill. Joss shook his head ruefully as they came to the end of the spiraling, at the far end of the asteroid.

  "So," he said. "A claim jumper with a nasty turn of mind."

  "Or someone who wants us to think he's claim-jumping," Evan said.

  Joss nodded. "Yes," he said. "I didn't want to mention 62 SPACE COPS

  it. I hate to start being paranoid this early on. But we'll see whether there's any evidence to support it."

  He sat for a moment and thought, then began to work with his control panel again. "Let's see," he said,

  "what else we can dig up around here."

  A moment later he was done. Evan leaned over to look at the data readout screen. Joss had done something to its output; there was nothing on it but a sort of fuzzy glob of light off to one side. "You break that thing again?"

  "No," Joss said, sounding abstracted. "I've got it reading for diffuse proximity. You set the radar so it—oh, never mind. I'll tell you about it later. This may take a while-there's too damn much rock and ore around here to attenuate the signal." He leaned over the screen, peering at it while he made some delicate adjustment to the command console. "And what do you mean again? You broke it last time."

  "I never," Evan said. "You left it set up for radar, it wasn't my fault if the computer—"

  "Ssh!"

  Evan sshed, smiling slightly. There was a slight hiss of jets as Joss moved the ship, edging it away from the asteroid from which the claim core had been cut, and toward another one about twenty thousand meters away. Another burst of jets, and another, one every few seconds for awhile. Then, silence.

  Slowly they drifted close to it, the asteroid body s
welling into visibility on the screen, a spark at first, then a bizarre shape like a batch of lumps welded together. "Mmf," Joss said, sounding annoyed. The fuzzy patch of light on the screen had become larger, and fuzzier around the edges: the light at its center was more concentrated.

  "No good?" Evan said softly.

  "Further along on this line," Joss said, more to himself than to Evan. "Another twenty kilometers or so.

  Let's see."

  More small hisses of jets, more time drifting in silence. They passed the lumpy asteroid and headed on.

  "It can't

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  be far," Joss muttered. "Even with drift, even with the usual traffic, I wouldn't have risked it being much farther than this. Hope that's not just some wreck."

  "We don't have wrecks drifting around out here," Noel said. "It's not like Earth orbit, where there are a lot of better ways to make money. Out here, salvage prices are too good to ignore, and worked metal is worth a lot more than raw.''

  "Good," Joss said, and would say nothing else for some minutes.

  They drifted on. Stars moved in the plex window, but nothing else came into view. Joss sat hunched over and wouldn't take his eyes off the screen. The concentration of light in the middle of the fuzzy glob got stronger and stronger.

  "Has to be," Joss said to himself. "Has to be." He hit the control console, and there was a short, heavy burst of jets, a two-second burn.

  They began to speed up a good deal. The white core of light on the readout got stronger and stronger. "Look at that!"

  Joss said, triumphant.

  "What is it?" said Evan.

  Joss sat back and breathed out. "That is metal under stone. Metal under disturbed stone. Side-looking radar sees half of it. The spectroscopy scanner sees the other half. A significant contrast in density between the surface and the substrate material. It's no good for mining, because the density differences are never this major, ninety percent of the time—the odds are too much against it being useful as a tool. Sorry, Noel. But that—" and he pointed at the screen

  "—that is something made of pure steel or other alloy, underneath a stone surface. That.''

  He pointed at the asteroid they were approaching. It was another lumpy one, a sort of two-potato asteroid, the potatoes welded to one another side by side, the long way. Joss touched the command console again, slowing the ship down, and started to swing it around the asteroid. "Let's see, now," he said.

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  Evan looked with interest at the surface of the asteroid. It was the usual mess—pocked with microasteroid impacts, dusty, rocky, cracked. But there was something else interesting about it. "Joss,"

  he said, "a bit lively, isn't it?"

  Joss nodded. "Yes," he said. "It's tumbling too much, much more than from a simple collision. Someone's been interfering with it. Someone added something to its mass, and not too long ago—and didn't bother to stabilize its orbit afterwards."

  "Not that that would have helped them," Evan said, "with Sherlock Holmes on the job."

  Joss smiled slightly. "People get clumsy out here," he said, making another adjustment to the console.

  "You'd think they'd never heard of physics." He looked out the plex. "There!"

  "There what?"

  Joss was tapping at the console again. "We passed it. Half a second while I slow us down."

  It took more than half a second, but that was the way it was on chemical jets. Evan told himself to be patient, and waited. They came right around the asteroid again, and Joss had them down to the barest crawling drift by the time they passed the point again. "Right there," he said, pointing again. "What does that look like to you?"

  Evan looked down and smiled, an angry smile. There was no mistaking it; he had seen it on the other side of the Belts, as a convenient way to hide drug caches. "I'd say that someone dug a hole, dumped something big over it, raked some rubble in on top, and fused it."

  "Something made of metal," Joss said, looking at one of his instruments, "and massing, oh, about thirty tons— eh, Noel?"

  Noel nodded. "That was Hek's weight of registry, yeah?" he said. "Close enough."

  "Now, then," Joss said, and reached for another part of the console, the part with the capped controls on it. One by one he performed the touch patterns that made the

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  panel swallow the caps, leaving the pads for the ship's weaponry free. ' 'Let's see if we can manage this without damaging the evidence."

  "You sure you don't want me to go down there and just dig it up?" Evan said. He was only half kidding. He was getting angry again, and ripping an asteroid apart would have been oddly satisfying.

  Joss looked at him with an expression that said he was tempted to let Evan try. "Better let me," he said.

  He selected several controls, depressed them, and said, "Medium dispersion. This should take the first three meters off. Three seconds."

  Evan breathed in, breathed out. The next moment, the plex went white with the asteroid-reflected fire of the weapons going off. Dust and vapor blew by the plex shield, and there were rattles and tinkles against the hull as bits of rock and other debris hit the ship and bounced. When the light cut off and the noise died away, Joss looked out the plex and scowled a bit.

  "That's annoying," he said. "They were supposed to be tuned higher than that. Hardly the top meter went off. One more time."

  Once more the blinding light lip up the cabin, and bits or rock rattled and banged against them. Evan saw Noel wince.

  He understood the feeling: Evan had never liked the sound of anything colliding with a ship he was in; you could never tell if it was going to come through.

  "There," Joss said.

  Evan looked out through the dust. There was no gleam of metal, not after heat like that, but a scarred, blackened shape that was definitely not something that occurred naturally in an asteroid. A corner of a cargo module was visible, though the blast of the ship's weaponry had melted it somewhat.

  "That look familiar?" said Joss to Noel.

  Noel looked stricken. He nodded. "That's Hek's ship, all right."

  "We'll want to get it dug out, then," Joss said. "Can 66 SPACE COPS

  you have someone give us a hand with that? It's not smart to try to dig and examine evidence at the same time."

  "Certainly," Noel said. He smiled weakly and added, "They're going to give me hell about my budget, of course."

  "So what else is new?" Joss said. "Budgets were made to be broken. We're also going to want your records about the other claim jumps and missing people. There may be more tampering of this kind; we'll want to see if there's a pattern."

  He turned the ship slowly and carefully away from the asteroid, and touched his console. "Call me suspicious," Joss said, "but I'm going to put one of our little hockey pucks down on the surface."

  "Hockey pucks?" Noel said.

  Evan smiled. "Don't ask him," he said. "It's a motion sensor, with a little camera on it—eh, Joss?"

  There was a slight kick of reaction as something left the ship from near its rear end. "There," Joss said, looking at his instruments. "It dug in its spike nice and hard. Anybody comes here and meddles, we'll know about it. There's no telling who might have followed us out this far, after all. And if anyone has, and comes around here, he'll leave a record." He smiled.

  Noel shook his head. "I wish I could get my hands on technology like this. But they only send us what they think we need."

  Joss kicked in the ship's jets and finished turning it around. "Well, they sent you us," he said. "Maybe we can do you some good. Anyway, let's get back and start sorting things out."

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER, EVAN LEFT JOSS HAP-pily buried in the ship, feeding it data from Noel's files. "You sure you don't want to come out and get something?" Evan said. "It's been hours since you ate."

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  "No, no," Joss said, happily inputting at a keyboard in his stateroom. "Damn." He stopped to correct a misspellin
g, tossed one piece of paper to the floor, and picked up another.

  "Why don't you just read that stuff in?" Evan said.

  Joss shook his head. "This helps me think," he said. "Besides, Tee tried to improve my voice recognition algorithm, and it got messed up somehow—it keeps misspelling for me. Damned if I need a machine to do that. I can do it myself.

  Anyway, you go ahead. I want to get as much of this stuff into the machine as I can. Pity I didn't ask them to put in an optical scanner, but who would have thought we would have to be dealing with paper?"

  "Too right," Evan said. "Well, listen, I'm going out to get a bite. I'll be back in a while."

  "Oh, by the way—" Joss fumbled about in the pile of papers, came up with his pad, and tossed it to Evan. "You didn't read your mail this morning, did you?"

  "I was busy with the plumbing," Evan said, catching the pad. "Damned if I want to stay in that place another night."

  "Possibly we should take turns," Joss said, tapping away. "But look at that."

  Evan keyed the pad on and brought up the mail menu. Oh, hell, he thought, seeing the message waiting from Lucretia.

  He scanned down past the transmittal strings and routing codes and found:

  "ABOUT YOUR FUEL EXPENDITURE: Your computer tells me that yesterday you used almost your entire allocation for altitude jets in a matter of fifteen minutes. I have cautioned you about hotdogging in your craft. You have had two weeks to work out the inevitable high spirits."

  "What??" Evan said. "Why, that small, mean-souled beast, she'd pull a pacifier out of a baby's mouth if she thought it was having too much fun!''

  "Gently," Joss said, tossing another piece of paper to

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  the floor. "Who knows whether she managed to have this thing bugged before we left?"

  "I hope she may have! Lucretia, you're a cheap little bottom-line buggerer!" Evan said pointedly to the ceiling, and tossed the pad back to Joss. "What does she think you were using the fuel for, for pity's sake? We'd only be freeze-dried beef jerky by now, the two of us—"

  Joss laughed. "I merely point it out to you to give you a sense of how this mission is already shaping up," he said. "If you're going for drink, better make it small beer."